People don’t care too much about your fishing trips. Your girlfriend might care, she wants you out of the apartment. Your fishing friends say they care, but are usually more interested in the aftermath of a disastrous trip, when they can enjoy the sordid details. All of which is to say: I’m going to the Bahamas next week to try to catch a few bonefish. Nobody may give a damn. But I’m very excited about it. 

Like many people, this past year has been littered with canceled trips and lived in close quarters. We’ve been in a defensive position so long, we’ve forgotten how to extend ourselves. That’s why I’m ready to head South by Southeast. It’s hard to express my love of the Bahamas flats. They’re wide open and vast, the biggest spaces I’ve ever been in. The antidote to the last year. You might compare the flats to the desert, but the desert has a sense of foreboding the flats don’t have. They’re purely elemental—sand, water, salty air. Where I go, in the Outer Islands, we wade barefoot in water up to our knees. 

I’ve written about the pleasures and difficulties of catching a bonefish before, here and here . It’s certainly intimidating for the first-timer. You are trying to cast in the wind to a fish you can barely see. You spend most of your time searching, wading in near silence, looking for a fish to cast to. When it’s cloudy and you can’t see them this feels a little bit like a punishment. In time, you get used to that. To finally have a bonefish on the line is to be connected to something truly wild—it swims away from you on an explosive run, reaching the speed of a cheetah, and your reel fizzes and feels like it might burst into flame. The thrill is real. 

I write about this in The Optimist, when I was in the flats for the first time I felt like I was in a truly wild place, uncontained. It was an escape not just from city life but from the overanalyzed life. As we emerge back into civilization this summer, we will head to beloved cities and seek out our favorite restaurants and museums, books stores and bars, theaters and galleries. That’s to say: culture. We’ve all missed it. Then there is a different sort of escape, where we’re on our own at the edge of the world with nothing but our our own thoughts. That has to be worth something too.