How many times have we been down this road filled with our youthful (the unknowing drifting among us say “childish” behind our backs) enthusiasms of hope, excitement, wonder, freedom? The miles of lurching and bouncing are far more than even a quality memory can recall. Always around the next bend according to some bizarre map sketched on a cocktail napkin late one night in a smoky bar, past that eroding pile of sandstone, or just beyond that dry wash that turns out to be the ochre-colored relative of a malarial bog, always there will be crystal pure running water or a still emerald pond filled with millions of trout or smallmouth bass or sunfish that will make anything experienced in the past seem pedestrian dalliance. Usually these liquid beauties of exotic enticement turn out to be fly-ridden alkali seeps, moribund drainage ditches, mud pits holding of lounging Angus cattle, or merely nothing at all—maps to nowhere. Then there are the times, admittedly few in number, when everything falls into place and that little “damn crick up that half-assed service road” leads to a place of perfection, if only in a fly fisher’s eye. Rainbows, browns, crappie of dinner plate dimensions abound. All of the lost mufflers, rock-sliced Toyos, and broken axles are forgotten. For once, right now at least, hard time on planet earth has turned to paradise. If this search for this perfection should ever stop, take me out and shoot me.