A light rain was falling, the wind was out of the east, and the bite for the last few days had been slow. It was late October, and 25-knot gusts were forecast for that night. Did I really want to drag my tired bones off the couch and out into that mess?

Fall is as fleeting as the vestiges of my youth. I knew that in another month, I’d miss all of it — the cold drizzle, the gusty night winds, the fingerless gloves, and the bucking rod when the last migratory striped bass came to hand. When you fish hard, your bittersweet feelings mix with relief as another season circles the drain. You’re tired and nicked up and ready for a breather until spring starts the cycle anew.

As I drove to the beach, I thought of a phrase my 78-year-old friend Pat Ford used recently when I interviewed him about how he summons the energy to fish like someone 20 years younger. “Don’t let the old man in,” Pat said, quoting a line from a song Toby Keith wrote for the Clint Eastwood movie The Mule. Pat is 10 years older than I am and was headed to Churchill, Manitoba, to photograph polar bears. This well-traveled angler’s latest adventure motivated my old soul to pull on damp waders and head out the door and into the night.

“I’m far more interested in the life and mysteries found along a dark beach, where breaking waves echo the inscrutability of the cosmos.”

There was just one truck in the parking lot, and it was plastered with fishing and surfing stickers. Had to belong to a young guy. The sand was soft, the surf heavy, and the sharp swells detonated with thuds. I met a guy in his 20s headed off the beach in a wetsuit. He wore his hood up and his rod on his shoulder while he talked on his cellphone. Sticker man. I didn’t want to interrupt his call, but I was interested in what he’d found. I gave him a thumbs-up and then the thumbs-down.

“Which one?” I asked.

He shook his head no. “It’s dirty,” he said.

Damn. The waves didn’t look that weedy. No matter. I was committed to hiking out to see for myself. I wound up fishing two rocky bowls until it was pitch black, tossing a swim bait into long carpets of white water. Nary a bump.

I retreated and headed for a log that must have been 25 feet long and mostly buried in the sand. Both ends protruded from the beach. The end closest to the water rose 5 feet into the air and had a crook where a branch had broken off. The log had been smoothed by tumbling in the surf and getting sandblasted by onshore winds. I’d used the crook to hold my rod several times during the previous week when I was either tying a knot, regrouping or taking a leak.

I tied on a floating, minnow-shaped swimmer that should have appealed to southbound stripers. With a good swell running, my plan was to work the edges of each peak break, where swaths of foam trailed off into deeper water. It looked fishy, but at this time of year, looks are often misleading. The resident fish are long gone, and migrants move constantly with the bait.

Out of habit and discipline, I felt the hooks and swivels for weed or eel grass after each cast. The water was plenty clean for fish. After an hour, I neared the end of the productive water. In my head, I was starting to set a limit on the number of casts to make before packing it in when, surprise, I got a hit.

I set the hook, and the fish thrashed on the backside of a just-breaking wave. For a moment, I thought the bass was larger than it proved to be. Still, I was grateful for this healthy, young traveler, given the paucity of action. The fish was reason enough to stay another half-hour. “Where are your mates?” I asked out loud.

To the east, flashes of lightning caught my eye. The rain stopped, and the clouds parted for a bit. You couldn’t miss Jupiter amid a faint smattering of stars.

The sky made me think of a recent podcast I’d heard, “The Search for Intelligent Life is About to Get a Lot More Interesting.” The conversation discussed the new ways we are scanning the roughly 100 billion galaxies and the even more unfathomable number of planets for signs of life. I don’t usually expend my imagination ruminating over alien life, intelligent or otherwise. I’m far more interested in the life and mysteries found along a dark beach, where breaking waves echo the inscrutability of the cosmos.

A clear signal came through that night when the one striper shot up the back of a comber and grabbed my plug. A billion galaxies, you say? This world is more than enough for me.