For a short time, my life felt as perfectly balanced as the 11-foot surf rod riding on my shoulder as I clomped along a beach in waders, a converted Army surplus plug bag bouncing on my hip, a piece of pot warp found on the sand serving as a shoulder strap. I could pick up the rod in my sleep, open the bail and uncork a cast that traveled straight and true into the night. I was catching well and was as comfortable in my skin as I’d ever been.

Acclaimed columnist Pete Hamill wrote an ode to tools and the men who use them in an essay in The New York Times titled “Tools to Smooth the Grain of Life”:

Men carried their tools to work in the dark mornings, jammed into leather belts, or slung over shoulders, or gripped in gloved hands against the cold. They carried those tools with a certain pride, like prizefighters with gym bags; they were symbols of work and skill.

I saved the story because it reminded me of the days when my tackle served as my tools and my fish duds as my uniform. For many years, I worked as a reporter during the day and fished at night like a man possessed. That’s when I felt most alive, as did most of my fishing friends. I was a divorced father of two in my mid-30s living paycheck to paycheck. I didn’t give a damn about money or sleep. I just wanted to catch stripers. And while I chased fish harder than I pursued a dollar, I was committed to my work and my children.

We are good at glossing over memories of tough times. To wit: Four of us were squeezed onto the bench seat of my tired Ford F-150, including my two grade-school daughters, one of whom was vomiting into a big kitchen pot. I was dropping the healthy one off at school and then taking my girlfriend — and future spouse — to her part-time job, which she loathed. Her rusty 1978 Plymouth Volare needed a mechanic, but the coffers were empty.

That also was the week I had to borrow the child-support payment from my younger brother. Not days you forget. I was living in a seasonal rental by the water, and the curtains swayed when winter winds blew.

My fishing partner and I were our sharpest from our early 30s through our 50s. We were tuned-in, fishing hard, catching like crazy. Our fishing life was in balance, but our life outside of fishing was out of whack. We lived for tides and fish. We schemed about fishing all the time and eavesdropped on any conversation about bass. I even worried about who was on “my” rock or who might be drifting over “my” rock pile when I wasn’t there. Silly.

Buoyed by a good night’s catch, we could sail through work and tough times as if they were little more than a light chop. The feelings ebbed and flowed with how well we were catching, which meant they were inevitably short-lived. The compulsion to fish another night when we were exhausted and the action was slow was akin to scaling a ladder with a bag of cement on one shoulder. With each step, we felt the full weight of our self-inflicted, very small worlds.

Eventually the wind shifts, and reality invades your secret hidey-holes. Kids, mortgages, college payments and 100 other shards of living fasten you firmly in the traces. Fly-fisherman Jack Gartside lived Hayden’s mantra as truly as anyone I’ve known. “I’m a foot away from the poor house at certain times of the year,” Gartside once told me. “It’s not a terribly secure lifestyle, but that’s not necessarily what I needed. What I needed was an interesting life.”

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The one-time high school teacher and expert fly-tyer always managed to make ends meet. He sometimes drove a cab in Boston. He wrote a few books and gave talks and tying demonstrations at fishing shows and clubs. And he sold flies. “You really do have to feel your way through and be able to balance along a tight wire occasionally,” said Gartside, who died in 2009. “And be happy with edges.” Well-spoken and dressed in a tweed blazer, Gartside reminded me of my college Shakespeare professor.

For Gartside, life was adventure. “The feeling on a flat that you’re right on the edge of infinity,” he said. “That anything could happen. Very often, nothing does, but it’s important to have the feeling that anything could happen. Whenever I go into a poker game, I know that it’s possible to get a royal flush. I know it happens maybe three times in a lifetime. But there’s always the possibility. And I live for possibilities, rather than probabilities.”

If you fish, you understand.