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Recently, I overheard my wife tell a friend as they sallied forth on a shopping spree, abandoning me outside a gift shop to a nap-deprived toddler, not to worry about me. Along with children, marriage brings outrageous presumptions. This time, though, Jennifer was right. A river ran through the strip mall. She knows that when fishing isn't an option, I've been happy enough listening to moving water. This is beyond her, just as shopping without a need for something in particular is beyond me. Herein is the reason for sex. I put my son in the stroller and wheeled him behind the mall, where an asphalt path ran along the river. The water was clear and cold, trickling between jaws of ice. Owen, normally as self-composed as a tyrant can be, started screaming. Back in summer, he'd spooked a bear. Bears are supposed to be more afraid of us than we are of them, but this is only true for Owen. A geriatric mallard stumbled off of the water. Unlike what I would've done at his age, my son didn't pretend to shoot it. Growing up in New Jersey, my brother and I had spent years developing ways to maim each other as well as our friends. During the Cold War, we understood our friends were doing the same, so in order to not fall behind in the arms race, we pursued a policy of mutually assured destruction: acorn guns, canons, fire bombs. Owen didn't even like to hit his sister, much less string one of her dolls above the toilet so that when she opened the bathroom door she'd watch as it fell in. Still, I've stopped worrying about him. This is a new century. We marched down the path until Owen fell asleep, curled like a scud in the stroller. The duck had settled beneath a pedestrian bridge that roached over the river. Cars crossed on the road above the bridge, the two structures shading a rock-studded pool. Fish, like boys, love bridges, albeit for different reasons. The fish just want a place to hide. Knowing that, boys congregate atop bridges to bother them. Back in Jersey, my first forays from home began with a stop for raw chicken and string. I'd tie a knot around a drumstick and chuck it over the side of the bridge near the beach. Nearly every time I raised the string, a crab clung to the chicken. After catching thirty for dinner, I'd peel off my shirt, climb onto the rail, and prepare to jump. Every kid who lives near water knows about the Buick or the shopping carts sunk beneath the bridge. The Buick is the Big Bad Wolf, invoked by parents who don't want us to jump or by brothers who do. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but just in case, one surveys the water carefully. The fly fisherman's careful study is in part an effort to recapture the feeling of standing atop that rail as a boy. Owen tried to burrow deeper into the stroller. I was surprised again to realize I was the parent, the one who now had conjure a bail of barbed wire below. Instead, I saw what looked like a torpedo beneath the pedestrian bridge. Or a sub. But then it sidled, like a feeding fish. No carp lived in the river, and the suckers and whitefish didn't come up that far. The fish rose in the water column, then fell back into shadow. I moved to the downstream rail, over which I saw nothing but a twisted shopping cart. Spinning the stroller, I re-crossed the bridge. Finning before a midge-sipping rainbow was the largest trout I'd ever seen, including hatchery freaks. The old brown was as long as my leg. I gripped the rail, fighting the call to jump. There was a fly shop in the mall. With a demo rod and the tire chain I kept in the van, I thought I might hoist the leviathan onto the bridge. But unlike Ahab, I'm a purist. If I were to catch this fish I was required to make the effort gratuitously difficult, preferably impossible. Contrary to popular belief, all fishermen aren't liars. We don't exaggerate the fish we've caught as much as revel in the ones we couldn't. That's the difference between a dilettante and a purist. Not up to the task, I woke Owen, slipped my polarized lenses over his glasses, and pointed to the fish. "Troll!" he shouted. Like most contemporary couples, inundated before childbirth with classes on how to breathe, eat, and sleep, things we thought we'd been doing for years, Jennifer and I swore our kids would never fall prey to television. Never mind that we like TV, we'd turn it off for the children. This was what adults did: they did things for the children. Well-meaning but sadistic friends had browbeaten us with pathologically upbeat books on "what to expect." Thus fortified, we'd lasted two weeks before propping our newborn before the tube. We weren't complete failures. According to the rules of parenthood, there's a difference between television programs and "videos." The latter, regardless of subject, are okay. Hunting videos teach newborns survival skills. Porn illustrates gendered communication. The same shows on cable are violent smut. So while it took me months of study to barely pass a Spanish proficiency exam, Owen could count to ten in Spanish as well as in English. He couldn't use the toilet, but he could order off the menu. We owed this to videos, his infatuation with Dora the Explorer, a bilingual cartoon character, who, like me, is in need of a Queer Eye makeover. One of Dora's nemeses is a grumpy old troll who lives under the bridge. I know this because in every episode the troll likes to sing, "I'm a grumpy old troll who lives under the bridge." Each Dora is structured after epic quest-for blueberries, say, or baby bluebird's missing mother-and the troll, with his riddles, represents an obstacle in our character's quest. Really, the only thing truly epic in this is my son's ability to watch the same thirty minutes of cartoon for twelve hours, sucking on bottles like they were cigarettes. Now, to sneak in a few casts when fishing's otherwise not an option, I ask my kids if they want to go hunting for trolls, like the one on TV. "We can throw rocks," I say. "Ouch," Owen replies. "If we do find a troll, can we bring him home?" my daughter wonders. "We catch and release," I say, seizing the teaching moment. 
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