Used to be that a few shots of Beam, a beer or two, and some Camel straights got me going in the early-morning hours. A way of life or perhaps slowed-down death back in the day. The smart money said I’d never see fifty. My how things have changed. Creeping up on sixty. Weigh less and am in better shape than when I was forty. Admittedly there are times when the “What am I trying to prove” and the “Why bother” blues play a few measures, but the melancholy never lasts for more than a few cerebral circuits, particularly when I think of casting to Fine-spotted Snake River cutthroat as the sun jumps above the eastern horizon in Wyoming; or canoeing the lower Yellowstone and casting a trio of soft hackle patterns—Hare and Starling, Spanish Needle, Greenwell’s Glory—to luminous Goldeye that are rising all over the place, sometimes playing three of the fish at once as the trio is intent on fleeing in diverse directions. In the good old days I never would have bothered with rigging up three flies, let alone launching the canoe and working the river before mid-day. Things do indeed change and to borrow from that venerable journalistic institution, Fox News, “Some may say” for the better. Now if I could only find that bag of datura root.