More so than activity or even location, vacations are about cropping—what is left inside the frame of holidays? For instance:

I once spent a week on the Gulf coast of Florida, in a town where fishing is serious business. The real fishermen—the ones who drive violent, surging boats and rig seven different rods for weakfish and drum—went at dawn to the dock at the river’s mouth, casting their nets along the marshy banks for schools of menhaden. The smallest of those oily baitfish would slip out of the nets and fall to the wooden planks of the dock, slow-cooking as the sun rose till they were flat and metallic. Scattered across the cracked boards, they looked like spare change.

I fished in the Florida surf for six days and caught nothing. On the seventh day, I walked to the dock on the river to cast jigs for red drum. I was followed by a portly little boy who’d been playing in his driveway when I passed. As he trundled along behind me, he asked what bait I would use.

“I figured I’d start with a Johnson Spoon,” I told him, but he shook his head.

“You need real bait if you want to catch real fish,” he told me.

He followed me onto to the dock, and while I cast in vain, he crawled around the wooden planks, picking up all the silver coins of fish. He stood up with two fistfuls of the sun-fried menhaden and offered them to me for whatever money I had on hand—three quarters, as it turned out.

I put the menhaden in a plastic bag and put the bag in my tackle box, confident the bait wouldn’t get any deader, and took them back to my rental unit. That evening I rigged a heavy surf-casting rod with a circle hook and dried out minnows. I flung my line after the falling tide and caught long green ladyfish—violent, un-ladylike creatures with bodies like whips and mouths like buckets. I caught a fish on every cast, pulling them in with the breakers while the sun dropped into the Gulf and the world turned to black silhouette on tangerine sky. A woman with a big, professional looking camera stopped me and asked if she could take my picture—for a magazine, I thought. Just keep fishing, she said, adjusting her aperture and dropping to her haunches to frame the shot.

A few years later, this moment, cropped out of a whole week in Florida, is the sum of my vacation—a perhaps-imaginary photo that I search for at the office of every doctor or dentist or other man in a white coat who makes me wait with his dated magazines. I can go through dozens of magazines while I wait, flipping through in search of travel advertisements—hoping for that photograph where I’m a black shape against neon, perfect silhouette.