We floated, paddled, splashed, laughed and fished, seeing no one else, stopping often on sandbars and beaches; lightly stained water skidding under our kayaks and canoes. Five straight full moons swallowed our campfire glow without burping—sheer luck, we caught it waxing, left it waning.

I’d hauled the boys out of prison, er, school a couple days ahead of official spring release time. My friend Dave drove like a madman from Michigan for this. Me, I just blew off income for a couple weeks—what a pleasure. If God expected us to work every day, he would have put us on a boring planet.

The Canoe Outpost people took care of us. We left the car at their take-out point near Gardner, then rode with them up to the town of Zolfo Springs, where we shoved off.

First cast, up against some brush, I caught a 41/2-pound bass which dove into some tree limbs, kicking off a pattern of everybody rescuing everybody else’s catch from fallen debris. Two days after that promising introduction we caught only two medium bluegills and two tiny bass and hooked nothing exciting. Except 11-year-old Ely, who was throwing what they wanted. Twice he got instantly and mysteriously cut off; the dreaded scissors fish? Then he actually hooked something big, Sam and I downriver in the canoe and Dave in Sam’s kayak around the next bend when we heard his yells. There he was, standing in the little red kayak, rod bent double, drag sizzling out, being tugged downstream ahead of the current.

"Alright!" I yelled and then saw the jagged midstream snag waiting for him as sure as death and faxes. By the time I had slogged to it in stomach deep water, the kayak had passed the snag and the fish had married it. After seeing the broad tail wag once in the air, we three desperately needed to know what it was the end of. And then there was only a small yellow and white tube lure stuck on a branch like a note from Captain Hook on your door.

While we weren’t catching a lot, it was simply a great pleasure to be floating down this ever-changing, natural stream. With protestations from my boy Sam. He turned 12 and turned in the fishing pole for a skateboard. Not skateboarding, might as well be in a coma:

"I don’t want to go. I could stand it if it was a couple of days but you’re wasting my whole spring break! I’ll forget how to skate. Billy and Nick’ll be so much better than me when we get back. Fishing’s boring."

Still, I saw him casting occasionally, listlessly.

Well, you keep doing that with an excellent balsa minnow and something might happen, like whamsploosh! Sam had been on the beach tossing into the middle of the cove. When I got to him, he was straining to keep something powerful from invading the branches to the left. After that succeeded, he was similarly employed keeping it away from the branches on the right. This went on for quite some time; the determined boy’s forearm was getting weak and I was having a hard time identifying the boring part.

"Sam, aren’t you bored?" I asked.

"Shut up, Dad."

Finally the fish started seeing things Sam’s way and then I saw through tannic water, in that beautiful little freshwater creek, something like opening the fridge and finding your TV in there; but there it was, the unmistakable lateral line of a snook, a copper-colored beauty.

Suddenly Ely’s travails came into sharp focus. Way inland we were fishing around snook, and, apparently good ones. We might have eaten Sam’s 7-pounder but after that epic battle, he felt inclined to honor its life and release it.

It is amazing how adaptable a whining kid can be. Catchin’ fish, water wrestlin’, kayak jousting, taking flying leaps off high sand bluffs (lots more air than he’d have gotten on his board). He managed to hide his suffering admirably.

With Sam’s snook the fishing picked up considerably; due largely to snook, but also the bass started playing. Not sure if it was location or just a different day, but I suspect location. We were a little closer to the Gulf. We started looking for snook in all the likely places—eddies, wide bends, dropoffs below sandbars. We wound up finding them three evenly spaced times on our 23-mile float. And they were all good size.

Well, Dave never caught anything of decent size, but not for want of losing them. Angling with no leader, he was taking Ely’s path without the reward at the end—a lot of restrained cussing, snapped lines and lost lures. In the unfishiest looking water we’ve ever seen, a wide, shallow stretch through cow pasture, he hooked a monster. He hopped from the kayak too late—it made it through a heaping chaos of branches and stayed on long enough to get us all in there tearing away limbs trying to free it up. I held the line and a really powerful pull slid it through my fingers.

"Yep. It’s big, whatever it is," I said.

Then it was gone.

But the Peace River feeds obsessions besides fishing. At our first camp Sam found a perfectly preserved sloth’s tooth. And I’m not talking about a molar from some modern beer-swilling, TV-loving couch tomato. This was from a real sloth. We had a fossil ID chart from the Outpost. Well, this discovery slammed Dave onto a gravel deposit near the tents. We all joined in hunting not fish, but the teeth of prehistoric sharks, mastodons and saber-tooth tigers for most of the morning. Dave and Sam found the most and Ely found a beautiful, shiny arrowhead. Me, I’m still looking for my glasses.

It had been kind of overcast and cool so far, the river squirreling away its luster in the dimness of our eyes. But, and I’m sure it happened just this way, a special barrage of sunbeams began an 8-minute invisible journey through spooky outer space; their mission, to keep the hemisphere turned on. Wind blew away the clouds and suddenly brilliance burst all around us. The bushes, the palm trees, the water showed us the light, exploding into colors and vistas and fizz-popping dazzles that seemed to take your brain outside, spread it open and pour the Fourth of July over it.

Yep, this sandy, bendy, sometimes cypress lined trickle made that 93-million-mile trip worth it. The visible world spreads out from the Peace River in a most glorious way and in case you forgot, you’re so dad-blasted happy to be alive and witness to it. And just when you think you’re used to what it looks like, the river throws up limestone walls and a rock bottom around you, like Mom Nature paved the whole place. From sand to that is so darn interesting; and we found lots of bass in those swimming pools.

We were five suns on Cayo Costa Island then straight to this river for five fabulous moons. You don’t recover from something like that. The camping spots were more like estates. We ate as good as any pelican for 10 days, feeling just so healthy, paddling, playing in the garden of life, all of us kayak jousting, baptizing each other frequently. Breathing actual air and trust me—this was our complete world—our thoughts did not stray beyond it. Sam, he sometimes spoke of a fetid land of concrete, wheeled boards and something called vidiot games, but I thought it was just a child’s wild imagination. We saw a cara cara, hawks and one day the sky practically covered up in thermalling buzzards. It looked like them another day but then I realized it was 20 human-made gliders circling at cloud-base. So, I thought, man finally has conquered the air.

Provisions worked out about right. We ran out of little treats like bread and peanuts, we were on our last oranges that we picked on the way to the river and there’s only one day left of spring break to waste. So on river-day five we’re doing some real paddling. At our last snook spot, we pull up on the sandbar and everybody’s casting. Ely’s Beetle Spin and Dave’s big tube finally get snook, small but they’re still snook. And then we paddle on down to the car, about sunset, with one thought on everybody’s mind—hamburgers and milkshakes! Yep, our stomachs are still in the new millenium.

And boy do we ever find the place—Andy’s in Winter Haven. Most exciting menu I ever saw.

Our Path

The Peace River starts up near the Green Swamp, east of Tampa and pours into Charlotte Harbor. We went from Zolfo Springs to Gardner, both towns right on Hwy.17. This is considered the most scenic stretch. Below Gardner the river widens and straightens out. Above Zolfo must be lovely, but when we went, it was considered unnavigable due to hurricane-downed trees.

Food to Bring: Ice chest with yeast-based stomach fillers, fruit, trail mix, fish fixin’s, drinking water, marshmallows. River water can be purified with a portable filtration device or purification tablets, both widely available at camping supply retailers.

Cooking on the Sugar Sand: Do everything thoughtfully and carefully. If you’ve ever had an actual sand-wich, then you know exactly why WHATABURGER doesn’t provide little shakers of sand with the salt and pepper.

Gear to Bring: Raincoats, hats, tents; fillet knife, cookstove if you prefer not to cook on the campfire coals, insect repellent, matches, colanders for straining for prehistoric discoveries.

Fishing: Bass tackle, fly rod, balsa minnows, Beetle Spins, tiny tube lures. Twenty-pound leader an option to keep snook from abrading the line.

Time of Year: As anywhere in Florida, camping is best done in the spring or winter—no bugs, comfortable sleeping. Low water is my favorite, usually lowest toward end of spring dry season. In summer, all the usual plagues would be there—deer flies in day, rain in afternoon, no-see-ums after rain, mosquitoes at twilight and shooting stars in August. Still, with a good tent and rain gear, it could be good.

Contact: Canoe Outpost in Arcadia (800-268-0083; www.canoeoutpost.com) provides canoes, kayaks and car dropoff at downstream pull-out and transport to embarkation point. Stretch we floated down can be covered in an 8-hour paddle—or not. Shorter and longer trips also possible.

For independent floating, public park in Zolfo Springs, public boat ramp near Gardner or pull-out in Arcadia.