My ex was a country girl who loved to fish. She grew up pretty close to the beach in Brunswick County, NC (which always gives those of us on the right side of the Cape Fear River in Wilmington, NC a bit of a shudder -- now those are the real rednecks over there, right?), and one of the first things we did together was to go fishing at Holden Beach. It was fun! We caught a handful of fish and took them back to her Granny, who cleaned and battered and fried them and fed us dinner. We managed to catch a bunch of bluefish once when they were running, and we'd periodically manage to haul in something really delicious. Mostly, though, it was just a fun, relaxing day outside.

Then we made plans to move to Raleigh, in the center of the state, away from the ocean. It was around this time, too, that she decided that tossing a worm into the water and waiting for a fish to bite while doing something actually fun, like reading, was just not quite challenging enough. So she began to investigate fly fishing. After much research, she bought a bunch of gear, and through a quirk of shipping and lost packages and such, we ended up with two fly-fishing rods. "Ah," she must have thought. "I can teach toxicfur to fly fish, and we'll never have to be apart!"

She hadn't figured that I have a lack of coordination, my own internal rhythms that don't match anything in nature, and a distinct inability to recognize where my own body is in space, much less where anything attached to body is. Those are three important skills to have in order to become a reasonably good fly fisher. She gave it a try, though, and I gamely tried to take in her increasingly frantic lessons.

She took me out into an open field at the university, and demonstrated letting the line out into a small pool at her feet, letting it gracefully arc out over her head before snapping back behind her and landing in the circle she'd drawn for herself. She was primarily self-taught, though she'd watched countless videos and had a lesson or two from one of my Boater's World co-workers. She picked it up fast, though, and she rarely had to untangle the bright yellow line.

I confidently took my own rod and began swishing it back and forth over my head, watching with some fascination at the line swirling over my head, somehow catching itself and landing only a couple of feet in front of me. She took my arm and showed me what I was doing wrong. I tuned her out. I always hated the way she coached me. I honestly didn't care whether I could fly-fish or not, but waving the line about was good fun, and I wanted to try it again. I couldn't do that until she let go of me and gave me permission to try again.

Eventually, I managed to get the line to do more or less what she wanted it to do, and I was allowed to actually try my skills in actual bodies of water. By this point, we were living in the Raleigh area, not far from a state park, and a half-mile or so into the park was a smallish pond that was used or had been used at some point in the past as a boy scout camp. There were abandoned and decaying campsites around, covered in pine needles and smelling of that rich forest floor decay that makes me want to breathe in the world. It became one of our favorite places to practice with the fly rods before she deemed that we were ready for the trout streams of the North Carolina mountains. Because the pond had been a place for swimming boys, there was a sort of T-shaped dock or pier or whatever out over the water. The narrow part extended probably 20 feet or so, and then it widened into a largish platform that gave enough room away from the brush and trees on the banks to really get the lines snapping.

I fished off one side of the platform; my ex fished off the other. I, of course, had no idea where my line was in space, in relation to me or to my ex, so I looked back over my shoulder and saw we were in danger of tangling our lines. I took one step to the left to get out of her way -- I could not even begin to imagine the rage she would've had if I'd interrupted the flow of her casting.

And, when I did, I stepped into nothing. Very, very wet nothing. Without thinking, I lunged for the dock to try to keep myself from falling into the murky water and slammed my side against the hard wood. It knocked the breath out of me and I slid into the water, trying not to inhale the water, now roiling with putrid mud.

I bobbed up in the water, spluttering, and I heard her yell at me, "Toxicfur! Get the rod before it sinks!" And so I swam to where the rod was sticking out of the water and dragged it back to the dock. She took the rod carefully from me and muttered about how hard it was going to be to get the reel and the line cleaned. Then she leaned over and grasped me under the armpits to help me onto the dock. I moaned with pain.

"What happened?" she asked, and I told her. I stripped off my shirt and laid it in the sun to dry. I gingerly touched my side, which was already turning purple under the red scrape. She examined it and said only, "What happened to your watch?"

I looked at my wrist, which was also scraped where I'd slid off the dock. "Shit," I said. "It must've come off when I fell. I guess I should go look for it." I felt bad. She'd gotten me the watch as a gift, because she'd hated my old one so much. My old one had been perfect -- it was black and had a large face. It had both analog and digital readouts, and I could set an alarm on it without pushing too many buttons. It rocked. She hated it, and so my current watch -- the lost one -- was a delicate metal-banded watch that was pretty. At least it had a black face, and I'd gotten used to be unable to read it in dim light.

She looked at my side again, and gingerly touched it. It hurt. I said as much. "We can get you another watch. It's okay."

I breathed a shallow sigh of relief.

That wasn't entirely the end of my fly-fishing excursions. In time, my rib (or ribs, possibly -- I never got them x-rayed, but the array of colors from black to green was frankly impressive) healed. After that, from time to time, I'd follow her out to a lake or a river. I put on waders and turned rocks over, looking for crayfish. I once acted as her spotter, as she tried for a bunch of happily hovering trout underneath a fallen log covered in a mating ball of water moccasins. As time went on, I spent less time with a rod in my hand and more time exploring the used book stores near the fishing areas. I would sit on a rock with my latest $1 paperback and enjoy the sun and the sound of the water and the smell of the forest while she'd pull in trouts or talk to other fly fishers about their hand-tied flies or their favorite fishing spots.

I wandered off by myself, and she was content to know that I was, somewhere, within her orbit.