The jambalaya recipe came from an old Boy Scout cookbook. Pour a can of condensed onion soup, beef stock, and tomato sauce, along with two cans of water, into a Dutch oven. Add two cups of rice, smoked sausage, shrimp, diced bell pepper and green onions, plus garlic, herbs and spices. Cover the lid with charcoal briquettes. In 90 minutes, it’s done. Easy, right?

If only those trout would have stopped rising.

Growing up on the fringes of the Deep South, in the East Texas piney woods region, there was always a tricky summer ballet we had to perform. It was a careful balance between wandering down to the local pond — where we’d sneak through the woods after carefully climbing through a barbed-wire fence erected to keep us out — to chase bass and bream on sticky summer days and handling the “chores” that came with living on three-quarters of a pine-tree pocked acre.