Dave Zoby
Dave Zoby takes basic Spanish in his hometown of Casper, Wyoming. He and his dog, Henderson, are still looking for a place to live with sandy streets, palapas, and a church bell that rings every morning. Follow them on Instagram: @davidzoby.
Conversations With A Banana Spider
The smell of wild honeysuckle was everywhere, and the mango trees sagged with the weight of their fruit. I’d often hear the ripe ones fall to the street with a heavy, wet thud, or else bang off the metal roofs of outbuildings where homeless wanderers sometimes slept. This abundance of fruit made Loreto seem like an impossible place to starve, yet I saw a few souls who looked like they were trying their best to do just that. Was it legal, I wondered, to simply reach up and pull a ripe mango from someone else’s tree? Being a foreigner with money, I didn’t need to find out.
March 2025Canada Day
The drive from Homer, Alaska, to Casper, Wyoming, is more than three thousand miles, much of it on winding two-lane highways where moose and bears slip from the underbrush and stand in the road. It had already been a rough trip.
July 2024Abandon All Expectations
The fish is now thrashing at the surface. Unlike every other captain I have seen, Cuervo uses a net, not a gaff, to bring it aboard. He has enough experience to know that, by the time a full-grown yellowtail is brought to the boat, it has essentially fought itself to death. Rich lets the captain take over, and Cuervo handles the marvelous creature with a tenderness that has been missing from most of my charter-fishing experiences.
January 2024Fish Poison
Like the other fishermen, I am waiting to have the day’s catch processed and flash-frozen for transport back to the Lower 48. A recent vasectomy makes me stand in line at a cant. I shift my weight to ease the dull throb in my groin.
July 2019Loyalty Rewards
In the fall of 1991 I was the lowest-ranking waiter at a steakhouse in Hampton, Virginia. My sole transportation was a Honda 350 motorcycle — halfway between a street bike and a moped — whose chain slipped at the most inopportune times.
May 2018Foreign Coasts
It’s already sweltering at sunrise on this August Sunday morning in Norfolk, Virginia. My Lebanese grandfather is taking my brother and me fishing for blue crabs on the Elizabeth River. He stands on the dock and drops the oars into the flat-bottomed rowboat.
April 2017Past The Breakers
Part of Charlotte’s mystique was her complete lack of fear. Even during rough-surf warnings and undertow advisories, she swam out past the green breakers, avoiding skates and jellyfish and rafts of seaweed. I’d see her head bobbing or her arms doing a demonstrative backstroke in the jade swells. She had learned to swim while growing up near Boston. “Wheatley isn’t afraid of anything,” my mother would say proudly. I never had the guts to go out that far.
July 2015Speedo
When the dogwoods bloom overnight and the oaks wake one morning with a full complement of leaves, spring has come to the Tidewater section of Virginia. Shad roe, orange and milky, appears on ice in the fish markets, and there are rumors of bluefish running out by the third island of the Chesapeake Bay.
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