When we planned the trip, some eight months out, we had anticipated our timing to be near perfect. If things went as they should, we’d be hitting the water during the ideal week, just as springtime mayfly hatches really started to kick off — rousing the trout from their lingering winter lethargy, sending them in chase of the sort of bounty they hadn’t seen in more than half a year. We’d spend the week casting delicate dry flies to eager browns and rainbows on the region’s spring creeks and lake-fed freestoners.

When I was a kid, my friends and I had the run of four or five hundred acres of timber on the ragged edge of the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River north of St. Louis. It was a marvelous playground with opportunities for diversion, recreation, and moderate to serious injury that were limited only by a kid’s imagination.