"With your first million, take me to Alaska."
Author James Prosek celebrates his fishing mentor Joe Haines -- their relationship began when game warden Haines caught the 14-year-old Prosek fishing illegally in a drinking-water reservoir. "I learned a lot from Haines," Prosek writes in The New York Times. "How to find edible mushrooms in the woods or four-leaf clovers in the yard; how to catch blue crabs and find razor clams; and how to spear, skin and cook eels."
Their evolving relationship wasn't always tranquil. One conflict: "Haines fished for the frying pan while I liked to release my fish, which he saw as a waste of time." But Prosek relished everything he learned from Haines and one night while the two were fishing for stripers in the surf, he asked Haines how he could ever pay him back.
" 'James, one day, when you make your first million,' Prosek records the reply, 'you can take me to Alaska.' Million or not, I promised that I would."
Fifteen years later, the two were headed for a fly-out camp at Lake Clark on Bristol Bay – a trip that reveals that the older man, at age 70, has lost nothing of his sense of wonder at the outdoors.
Joe and Me: An Education in Fishing and Friendship
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