Gather at the River. David Joy

      I was lucky in that I grew up in a family of fishermen. All my life I had people who took me to water. There’s a picture of me maybe four years old with a mess of catfish bending me sideways. I’m standing in the driveway at the house where I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. I have the weight of the fish balanced on my shoulder, and the channel cats run the stringer from my head to my feet.

      Since the beginning, fishing has been at the heart of everything I am.

      When I was a kid, my family went to the Outer Banks each fall. They’d time the trip for late October or early November, try to catch the runs of redfish and seatrout as the fish pour out of inlets and turn south. I was eleven years old when I finally got to go.

      My grandmother had given me my first saltwater rod that Christmas. Growing up in a family of outdoorsmen, there are moments that mark significant points along the journey—your first pocketknife, the first time you’re handed a rifle. The rod she gave me still stands out as the best present I ever got. When I think about why, it’s because it seemed to mark a sort of acceptance. I wasn’t just some tag-along kid anymore. I was one of them.

      That fall I missed a week of sixth grade for the trip. Even after all these years I remember how cold my hands were as I scaled fish under the rental house, everyone in the family doing a job, all of us smiling and laughing as we cleaned the day’s catch. I can remember the way the playing cards smelled as someone shuffled the deck, a running game of Rummy continuing each night. But more than anything, it’s an image. It’s a late afternoon on the Atlantic with the sun fading, me watching my grandmother catch a fish.

      A cold November wind blew in from the east, shifting sand and pushing the smell of seawater inland. Past the breakers, where the ocean flattened into one continuous line, the sky blended from cobalt to orange along the horizon; higher, flax yellow gradually rising to white. The winter sun dropped behind sprigs of sea oats, slowly sinking into the dunes. A slick pane of wetted sand shone like a sheet of glass.

      My family stood along the shore, each member angling a line into sea green breakers. Their darkened silhouettes grew smaller down the beach, each shadow holding a rod that bowed to incoming tide. The profile farthest away turned hard toward the dunes and the rod doubled over. My grandmother had a fish.

      Everyone along the shore turned and looked at her for a second before concentrating again on the pull of his or her own rod. I stared at my family stretched down the cold shoreline, my grandmother reeling in a spot, the first stars coming into view over the ocean. These are the types of details that have always stayed with me. Times in the woods and on water.

      All I know of beauty I learned with a fishing rod in my hand.

      That fact lies at the heart of why this book exists. Every writer in these pages believes there is no substitute for what can be learned by time on the water. Collectively we wanted this book to benefit the C.A.S.T. For Kids Foundation, a fishing-related nonprofit that operates three programs: C.A.S.T. for Kids, Fishing Kids,