The beauty of fishing — and the reason I crept out alone to the banks of the River Creuse on most days of summer vacation — was in the waiting. Later in life, I would harness this specific form of waiting that is almost an art and store it as a well of patience. But in my early years of puberty, I was anything but patient.

I was an awkward beanpole, the middle child who was both overdeveloped and underdeveloped compared to my peers. I enjoyed all the wrong things like playing the accordion, tending our country garden, and reading the classic French comedies of Racine and Moliere, and I found most popular activities that kids my age took part in to be very tedious. Most of all, I was impatient all the time. Impatient with my sisters, teachers, and parents, but mostly just impatient with life. I wanted to leave my small town in the middle of France and grace the stages of Paris, tour New York and Los Angeles with a theater troupe, and fulfill all my bohemian fantasies. But my impatience was beginning to take a toll on my actual life.

This is where fishing came in to save me from myself. In retrospect, if I hadn’t found respite in the little rituals of preparing freshwater lures, foraging for the calmest eddies, and casting upstream with in-line jiggers, I would have followed other, more dangerous strategies of distraction. I also wouldn’t have realized how satisfying it was to let my mind’s thoughts float downstream unimpeded, to allow endless imaginary conversations with myself and others unfurl before me in the form of stories. It’s not a coincidence that during the hours when the fish refused to bite, I found myself writing down these self-constructed narratives in notebooks and diaries. I can say with full confidence that fishing in that river made me a writer.