I stood on a windy hill on an early April evening, smelling the rain blowing off the sound as it moved up the river valley, shrouding it in sheets of mist.

At that moment, I made up my mind that, unlike the previous season, I would spend as many days in the field as possible. Not for love, money or work would I miss another stretch of productive spring tides. I knew that if I was to be of any use to anyone, including myself, I had to get back to the edges where land meets the sea. To those nooks and crannies where I have long found fish and a measure of peace.

When I wrote that years ago, it was the truth. It still is. Spring is the season of renewal, but that poses a problem for those of us who fish like mad. Perspective comes later.

To keep fishing as if it were a second job while also working full time and raising a family is a grind. It guarantees that you will run yourself ragged — to catch a tide, to finish writing a story, to pick up a child after school. You try to do it all, but no one is applauding your middling performance, certainly not at home. And maybe not at work, either. Fish refuse to conform to family or work schedules, even a nocturnal species like striped bass. And if you’re compulsive about fishing, you’re liable to spring a few leaks.

Looking back on my notes from that spring, I knew I either returned with decisiveness or risked a slow, spiritual death. You know you’ve crossed the fishing gods when you lose track of the tides and moon phases that you once held firmly in your head. You lie awake at night worrying about tuition money and work, rather than scheming over fish.

You can dull the static for a while, but you can’t kill it without killing yourself. I was overweight and drinking too much. I feared I would lose the drive to chase fish deep into the night from skiff and shore, to lean against a beach log and sleep to the sound of surf.

I sat in an easy chair, anesthetizing myself with top-shelf liquor, pretending that its price tag somehow elevated the act of getting sloshed. I saw shades of myself in an article on high-functioning alcoholics. Is that really what I’d become?

I checked in with a good buddy who has been as dry as the Mojave for more than 30 years. “You ain’t no drunk,” he said. “Believe me, I know a drunk when I see one.”

Semantics?

Looking back is tricky business. We tend to doll-up our failings. I make no apologies for the long stretch when I worked hard and fished hard, even though that meant not being home as often as I would have had I simply worked 9-to-5 and golfed on weekends. Today, I’d be criticized for having a poor “work-life balance” — even without fishing putting its big thumb on my Boga. It becomes a lot easier once your kids have grown and your career starts winding down, but that usually corresponds with a decline in battery life. Who is fishing harder at 70 than they were at 40?

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I tried to keep everyone in my orbit happy. But when the big fish were on the move, there just wasn’t enough time for everyone and everything. That’s when I’d roll over anything that stood between me and the fish. It was then that I felt as if I was moving from one life to another, slipping back into the house before dawn like a creature from the abyss. Wrung out, sometimes satiated, sometimes hungrier. I clearly was not the best version of myself, but even today I have no regrets.

My wife and I have always given each other the time and space to chase our dreams. For Patty, that has meant time in the mountains. For me, it’s been scales and tails. It wasn’t always a smooth road, but we both believed Joseph Campbell’s mantra: “Follow your bliss.”

I still have an enduring fondness for those crummy-looking beach towns in early spring, when they’re still boarded up, the sand has drifted in the parking lots, and the roads are buckled with frost heaves. Those are the places we used to bum around, looking for fish and looking for trouble.

When the season arrives in earnest, I will willingly respond to the sound and smell of the spring surf and the stripers flooding their old haunts — and mine.