The Ugly Duckling

I will never forget the first time my dad and I went fishing together in a boat. It was March 1977, I was 7 years old and he had just read a local newspaper article about the spring yellow perch run in the nearby Severn River. The clipping was pinned up on the corkboard by our telephone in the kitchen for weeks.

Dad was amped because a few months earlier, in the dead of winter, he’d driven