Ely and Sam forge upstream, wondering what's next.

To fish, one must be an optimist, but a grasp of reality is also helpful. He looked at me and shrugged, “What the heck?” The big guy squatted at the bottom of a concrete slab, making baby casts downtrickle and calmly reeling back in again. Had the ditch carried a few more flushed toilet’s worth of opaque liquid, I might have imagined three-eyed, ulcerated gargoyles holding by the enticingly decayed Styrofoam ice chest Mark was targeting.

“Who knows?” I conceded. “You might catch the world-record bass.”

I calculated Mark’s chances of catching anything more slippery than a bottle upside the head from a littering motorist at slightly lower than me being crowned Miss America in an ABC retrospective. Angling in your buddy’s urine stream would be the exact equivalent.

My gaze ran along the weeds and cracked plastic bottles to the open under-driveway pipe that was swallowing this alien gurgle. When I looked back at Ponce de Quixote, he was squatting in the same spot wearing a grin equally astonished and smug, shaking with mirth at the bass dangling from his line.

Being from Florida, I’ve caught fish in some silly places but this was truly ridiculous. Mark released the perfect, robust 3-incher and stood up, beaming like a toddler rising from his first use of the potty. In all probability he had just immortalized himself by catching the farthest upstream bass in the Everglades. We could only marvel at how it came to be there and the fascinating downstream journey that must lie in its future.

As he drove south heading for some wider water we both could cast into, Mark turned to me and asked why I was softly singing, “Here he comes, Miss America.”

“We can all dream, can’t we?” I replied simply.

We caught up with Shingle Creek across town at the Millenium Mall. There we could stand by the sizeable canal and gaze awestruck at vast, hollow stacks of air conditioned concrete designed to make humans pilgrimage there by the thousands to offer earnings in exchange for useless items.

“Build it and they will come,” Mark profoundly stated the State Motto of Florida.

The canal was flowing high and fast from recent rains and we got no strikes. Back in the truck, Mark looked at me knowingly and said, “Enough of this stuff. Now for the good part.”

Mark got his buddy Phil, and I brought my kids and we caravaned with two canoes to the intersection of Shingle Creek and the Beeline Highway. Mark practically had the giggles he was so excited, reminding me of Fido when you reach for the food bag. On the verge of presenting the longest love of his life in all her glory, trees and everything, he was fit to bust waiting for us to behold it. It was like he had found pictures of his wife predating the macabre lawn mower-blender accident and he wanted us to see how she used to look and why he fell for her.

We paddled under the bridge and forged upstream into some pretty fishy looking canal water, sure enough, featuring occasional saplings and aquatic grasses. The creek was running high and we caught nothing, but I’d seen what Sir Mark of Rottingham could do in Robinswood, so anything seemed possible.

Eventually we reached an area where the woods had been parted so we could view the Orange County Convention Center, always a bonus when fishing. Mark became angry and railed at yet another insult to his beloved stream. Here water that might have flowed naturally into the creek had been diked off into a milky impoundment, sheet flow that received no circulation, possibly to serve somehow a planned golf course. We disembarked and walked the bank of Mark’s degraded heartthrob. My 9-year-old Ely justified the fishing poles by coming up with nice bluegills and redbreasts on breadballs. Then Phil spotted some small bass and devoted his Beetle Spin to their capture. Where the small spinnerbait failed, squirrel-tail jig succeeded and I got two of the feisty fellows. Then 10-year-old Sam got a fat stumpknocker. Fire ants necessitated occasional hops into the cool water but it was fun. On the return trip, some redbreasts validated Phil’s Beetle Spin.