I remember the first night I ever fly fished for striped bass. It was in late June at Lobsterville Beach in Gay Head, Massachusetts. Anglers paused on the shoreline at dusk, waiting. They talked quietly as they stood at the high tide line, and when the last rays of the setting sun had fallen below the horizon, they turned slowly and faced the water.

As dusk faded to darkness the bass appeared. Swirls on the surface drew quiet cheers from the crowd assembled there; lines were cast, fish hooked were played and landed, or lost. I looked on in awe and amazement until there came to my line a bump. A pull, a strike, a magical sign that some living thing had taken the treacherous fly. Disbelieving, I struck back, and the line came alive with the pull of a strong fish.

A few minutes later I had a striped bass on the beach. The pale moon gleamed silver on the sides of the fish as I carefully removed the hook and slid the fish back into the water. The fish swam strongly away, splashing me in a striped bass baptism of crystal clear water. I picked up my rod, strolled down the beach a few yards, and cast again into the still night. Two casts later, another strike jarred my rod, pulling the line from my grasp. In a few minutes another beautiful fish lay upon the shining sands.

The evening shade had drawn low to midnight while I wandered the strand as in a dream, setting the hook on fish after fish. Most of the other anglers had fallen away, vanished in the twilight. Those remaining were like myself; shadows lost in a world of shadow and cool water. Lack of sleep made me feel like some kind of weird Marine Vampire, destined forevermore to wander the tidelines in darkness, draining the life from fishes with a nine foot rod and one hundred yards of thin backing.

As midnight passed, the sky filled with bright points of starlight, illuminating the sea and making the heavens seem like some grand and populous city. The fish now came faster than before, faster and larger. As I leaned back into the rod to put the leash on another wild, water-breathing dragon, my eyes were uplifted to the Milky Way. Trails of shooting stars raining toward earth burned themselves into my corneas, filling my view like fireworks on Independence Day. I thought I could hear the shriek of rockets, feel the detonation of the charges thudding into my chest, but it was only the sound of the screaming reel and the thump of the rod's cork fighting butt, jammed hard against my sternum.

Hours later, the glow of dawn crept into the eastern sky, banishing the stars. As the world changed again, I hooked a big fish. Men had called them keepers, hawgs, lunkers, but no description fit the beauty of this fish that arced away from me through the clear, cool water of low tide. When the big bass had tired at last, I lifted it from the water and marveled at it, a creature different from myself, yet somehow alike.

I gently carried the great fish to the beach and killed it with a stone. With a rock round like a fist I struck the fish - three deliberate blows. It shivered, and then grew still as life slipped away. I felt cold, and a sadness welled up within me, aching sadness tempered by another feeling, one of joy and triumph. I picked up the fish and strode down the beach as the bright shore stood revealed like a jewel beneath the yellow rays of the new rising sun.

The feelings inside me were strange, powerful, like a warrior newly returned from some great and profitable campaign. I felt another way too, like a child that has broken something precious, afraid that someone will find out about it. It seemed like parts of myself had been exposed by the falling tide and the dawn's clear light.

Now, every year when mild June rolls down the eastern seaboard, I drift once more to the moonlit beaches of Martha's Vineyard, and wonder again what haunting secrets my casts will uncover, lying hidden just beneath the surface of the infinite sea.