It took seeing a permit from the bow of a skiff, from above, for me to realize I’d spooked one the day before while wading solo on a highway-adjacent flat in the Florida Keys. I didn’t get a cast off that day, because the fish saw me at the exact moment I saw it and cleared out posthaste. But the shape of the thing, the wide-set, almost bulging eyes and brick face, was nothing like the carefully posed image of permit that lived in my head. So I’d written it off as just a random flat encounter, nothing to get excited over. I’d never seen one in the wild.

My guide the next day was a wiry guy, deeply tanned, long hair pulled up in a tangled bun at the nape of his neck. Handsome in a mysterious, Orlando Bloom kind of way. His boat was impeccable, the requisite ’cuda rod stowed beneath the gunwales. We smoked cigarettes in his rig on the way to the launch and watched the Homeland Security blimp rise into the sky to look for smugglers and migrants.

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