This story begins like a run-down train rolling into the busted town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, years after the last whale was boiled down into barrels of dollars. When the engine comes to a stop I get off with a flyrod in my hand, a pack on my back, and half a hundred bucks in my pocket. From around the corner of the station house drifts the scent of diesel and dead fish, a stench similar to that found in my favorite harbors, but the harbor here is dark as midnight, even at high noon. Everyone seems to bemoan the loss of the whales, even though they all burned their livelihoods down to the sea floor a hundred years ago.

When I hit the beach at sunset the water shivers with the movements of thousands of tiny, silvery baitfish, preparing in terror for the arrival of the striped bass; black-striped sea monsters which haunt the New England shoreline like the holy ghosts of fishes still roaming the primordial Soup. Without hesitation men cast their lines into the sea, as men have done for ages and ages, reaching back into the dim history of human evolution, straining forward into the abyss.

All is well until one lucky angler feels a bite, then sticks the steel into a striped bass, a little fish, a strapling only two feet long. Suddenly every angler on that grimy beach must cast his deadly lure into the very spot from which that god-forsaken fish was pulled. I hesitate, then I too send my fly out to join the mangle of twisted lines and gang-hooks. When some bearded and burly sailor from the seventeenth century rips my leader apart, I withdraw, pretending to clean my line and fiddle with my reel. My fifty-nine dollar flyline is coated with grit and oil from the ever-present floating scum which drifts endlessly from the wretched harbor.

Later at the hotel I unlock the door to a room of darkness. I ask the desk clerk to help me with the switch, but he tells me they removed all the lights from their rooms years ago. "People here don't want to see each other," he says, but I know the real reason the lights are gone from this town. It's because everyone here is scared to death to catch a glimpse of themselves.