Catch/Release

I’d decided to indulge myself in a little fishing. The next destination on my itinerary was a campground on the Mad River, some seventy miles north of Covelo. There’s a direct route on the map that I’d never tried, a thin red squiggle in my California atlas-gazetteer unbroken by significant towns and mostly bisecting topographic contour lines—meaning ups and downs, twists and turns, exactly the kind of driving challenge I relish....