I felt my heart rhythm tick down a beat and let it fall. I was shirtless and in a pair of canvas shorts. My legs long and tan except for the white knurled splotch of scar tissue on my thigh where a tumbling 9mm round had done a nasty work some time back. I closed my eyes to the memory, a place I didn't need to go. I might have dozed off but a subtle change in the sunlight, like a twist of a dimmer switch, caused a shiver in my skin. When I opened my eyes I was staring up at the western sky. An osprey was perched near the top of a dead sabal palm. The bird was staring back with a more focused intent. He may have been trying to figure out the floating fishing line, or, raptor that he is, trying to gauge the unmoving beast in the canoe. A wind shift caught both of our attentions and I turned to see an unusual October rainstorm rolling gray and flat out of the southeast. Summer storms came from the western Glades, sucking up fuel from the thin layer of water that covers thousands of acres of sawgrass. Anvil-shaped clouds then pushed to the coast as the cities and beaches warmed in the sun and the rising heat drew the cooler clouds east. But in the fall the pattern changed, storms came with more reason and threat, and something was swirling in the atmosphere.

A distant rumble of thunder caused me to sit up and start reeling in. Smart boaters and golfers know there is nowhere in the country with as many lightning strikes as Florida. I stowed the reel, picked up my hand-crafted maple paddle and spun the canoe west, heading toward the cavern-like opening in the mangroves and live oak that led into the canopied part of my river. The tarpon had waited me out. I'd have to test him another day.

On the open water I got into a rhythm-digging the paddle into the water, pulling the stroke full through and then feathering a clean kick at the end. Before I'd come here, the only paddling I'd ever done was when a fellow Philadelphia cop took me sculling on the Schuylkill River along boathouse row.