A pair of young landscapers pulls into a lot in an old, red dump truck filled with brush. Two surf rods are laid across the load. By the looks of things, they are knocking off work a little early. Good for them. They could have been me 40 years ago. It is the last week of October.

The rutted trail to the beach snakes past dozens of milkweed plants heavy with seed pods swollen to bursting. I shake a few-dozen parachute seeds from a pod that’s cracked open and watch them sail away on the strong westerly breeze.

The surf is waist- to chest-high, and the waves build and boom as the afternoon slides toward sunset. When I first wade out, I scan the sky for hawks without success; most of them sailed past earlier in the day. In short order, I land and release two stripers on metal. A father and son watch from the water’s edge. The next time I look to the beach, they’re gone. A half-hour later, they’re back, in waders and with surf rods and moving well to my right on a sandbar that appears on a falling tide.

It’s a slow, steady pick, and I’m happy to have found action. I turn my head at a faint sound and see that the father is shouting in my direction. Even standing downwind, I can’t make out a word. I cup my hands and holler back. It’s clear he can’t hear me, either. We both go back to casting.

Some years back, I’d read an interview that first appeared in Tom Pero’s Wild Steelhead & Salmon magazine with the distinguished poet Ted Hughes, an avid angler and former Poet Laureate of Great Britain. Hughes, who died in 1998, talked about fishing for wild salmon and how, after fishing alone, he sometimes lost his ability to speak when he returned to the world of humans:

“When I’m fishing alone — as I come out of it, if I have to speak to somebody, I find I can’t speak properly,” said Hughes, the husband of the late poet Sylvia Plath. “I can’t form words. The words come out backwards, tumbled. It takes time to readjust, as if I’d been into some part of myself that predates language. It doesn’t happen when I’m fishing with people.”

I mulled the thought that the wind had robbed the stranger and me of our voices, and in place of words, little gusts of wind poured from our mouths whenever we tried to shout.

April through November is a long slog. Your imagination might even play tricks on you. Was fatigue to blame for what I thought I saw at a lighthouse one stormy afternoon in late October?

A group of five men and one woman worked their way around the southwest corner of the point. They were in their late 40s or 50s. I’d never seen them before, and I have been a semiregular at this spot since I spent much of my adolescence chasing bass and blues from these rocks. They wore waders and dark jackets or rain gear. Army surplus greens, blacks and browns.

Their mugs were large, rough-cut flesh with high cheek bones and strong jaws, all sharp angles. One had a misshapen nose, and several others had schnozzes like beaks on birds of prey. Dark eyes. They were unsettling and beautiful in the same glance. I was intrigued. One man wore a watch cap. At least two had hoods pulled tightly so that you saw only their long, misshapen faces. Their appearance, bearing and their skill moving over the slick rocks spoke of competence.

It was warm for late October, and the faces were wet with sweat and mist. They looked like surf vagabonds in a Quentin Tarantino movie. They were a perfect coda to experiencing the primordial forces that define the margins of sea and shore in late fall. Noble in their surf-hardened mien, they came and went like a pod of big fish following a migratory path, just like the rest of us.