Jim Duncan's sacred space each Sunday morning is a rushing river in Vermont.
"Trout fishing is my church," says the 42-year-old contractor. "If you can't see God when you're down there with the birds, the wind and the river, you're just not a believer."
On a recent spring morning, with the water a frigid 3 C, the first official day of trout fishing arrived in Vermont - at a spot Duncan likes to keep secret lest a crowd reduce the pleasure of this "wild and nerve-frazzling sport," as Ernest Hemingway described his boyhood passion on Michigan's Lake Walloon.
Each state sets its own date for the opening of legal trout fishing, depending on climate and spawning time. As sure as spring, the annual rite draws anglers to rivers, lakes, creeks and streams across the United States.
In Vermont, the season begins on the second Saturday of April. Duncan's special spot was on the New Haven River near the college town of Middlebury.
The chilly water was murky from melting snow - "like chocolate milk," he said - and the trout were slow coming to the bait.
The next day, he and a handful of other nearby fishermen kept trying for more than six hours before Duncan finally nabbed his first one toward noon - a 30-centimetre brown trout. Soon after, he hooked an 46-centimetre rainbow as it ripped down the rapids; it eventually came to rest in a pool of still water, where he caught it.
"I had to run after him into the whitewater," said Duncan, clad in chest-high waders. "He didn't surrender, but he succumbed." He and others say they throw most of the fish back, to help preserve the river.
Hemingway wrote that the thrill of trout fishing lies partly in the patience it requires: "The odds are in favour of the big trout who tear off thirty or forty yards of line at a rush and then will sulk at the base of a rock and refuse to be stirred into action by the pumping of a stout fly rod."
To some, trout fishing is nothing less than a test of character.
"It's a means of self-exploration and a way of dealing with crisis and pain," said Matt Dickerson, a Middlebury professor who has taught a course on fishing in literature. "It's a way of wondering what the meaning of the universe is, of being aware of something other than yourself and this world of technology."
For others, it can bridge generations. Kirk Poulin, 43, started fishing with his father when he was five. This year, he drove 50 kilometres to the New Haven River from his home in Burlington, Vt., to teach trout fishing to the young son of a friend who had died.
"You come out opening day, rain, shine, snow, whatever it is, freezing cold, and just tough it out," Poulin said.
"I had the best dad ever. This is in memory of him - I just keep passing it on."