I grew up in Detroit, a city whose belching smokestacks and clamoring auto plants preach a relentless contempt for mass transportation. Yet when I moved to Washington, D.C., I fell in love with trains—the grand stations and comforting rhythms of the ride hooked me. I eventually ditched my car completely, relying solely on bike, cab and train for transportation.

--Mike Muri

It’s an orgy that would have made caligula jealous. an unusually warm mid-may day filled with frenzied lovemaking, the participants’ bodies locked together coupling with a purpose, oblivious to all that surrounds them. Onlookers are left to gape in wonder as caddisflies in every shape, color, and size procreate with an intoxicating intensity. My riverside campsite, tucked in at the end of a rugged dirt road, provides an unmatched view of the broad Yakima River and surrounding cliffs. A large cottonwood tree in the middle of the site offers blessedly cool shade in the afternoon and a place to hang my waders at night. The tree also serves as a boudoir for the amorous insects that wander anxiously about its new spring leaves. Caddis cover everything within 20 yards of the river—tent, car, cooler, camp chair, legs, arms, head. Many are joined at the abdomen, sometimes in threes and fours, crawling everywhere.

What to do when a fish morphs from gills and guts into something larger—a memory that splashes across three generations of anglers, alternating between dream and reality? Born to my grandfather, this fish swam through my father Charles and landed with me. Even before I hooked her one cool April morning on Georgia’s Soquee River, I dreamt of her—a big rainbow on light line.

by Thomas McGuane

--Jeff Courier

Sitting up in the pilot house, we could see with our own eyes that a serious storm was coming. The Weatherfax hadn't shown a good picture of it the day before, but you could see it on the radar, streaming through above Cuba, across Grand Bahama, and now it was on top of us. Chris went forward to the windlass while Phil laid down another hundred feet of chain between us and the anchor. The slight shifts in the boat's position were revealed in the apparent movement of the sandy bottom under deep, clear, pale-green tropical water. We were on good holding ground. There wasn't really much to worry about though it couldn't help the fishing. And there were the compensations of a tropical squall: the supercharged atmosphere of deep, humid wind, the unpredictable tide slipping through the roots of heaving mangroves. It was interesting weather.