Skip Stone, my riverside buddy, enjoyed a paradise of adventure on the unending river. At age 11 he had his own fishing boat with a motor... unheard of at that time. Every morning he launched the boat and cruised out toward his favorite fishing areas. To Skip, the backwaters were a combination of the Amazon and Nile rivers. Skip liked to explore all alone. It was his own river and he daily caught his own lunch and cooked the catfish on an open fire. He always started his fire with only one paper match (he kept a couple of match books inside his tackle box). He used only natural fire material. Skip would gather carefully picked dry tinder and many dead limbs to ensure the perfect orange flames that would burn to the coals. His catfish would send a wonderful aroma on across the water, then when ready he would binge eat and move on to another secret fishing spot in order to bring enough catfish to his main camp which was his parents’ house. He then would knock on doors and sell stringers of fish within 30 minutes. Neighbors were his customers who knew they were getting Skip’s fresh fish.     By age 12 he was almost a millionaire according to Skip. Life was good!  Solo adventures and binging on campfire fish daily was very close to heaven!  No wonder he was a happy boy and he was getting rich from fish sales! Then tragedy struck unforeseen and it left a deep wound for decades. It was a perfect Saturday summer afternoon when he was forced to bathe and ordered to get in the backseat of the family car... a 1959 Chevy station wagon about 25 feet long. His older sister was all prettied up sitting on the extreme opposite of that backseat clutching her new transistor radio... all the rage of teenage girls at the time. Skip told me later that summer that “They took me away! Away from my paradise on the river!  They called it a vacation!”