Okay, so the movie isn’t great art. Rotten Tomatoes gives it only three stars. And I don’t want to quibble about that.

However, the McGuffin (the plot device that drives the story) is so memorable that I find myself using the movie’s title as shorthand for so many watershed events in my own life. I also hear others use it the same way, so I’d say by that measure alone, the movie deserves at least another star or maybe two.

The McGuffin is simple: What if she’d turned left instead of right? But there are a thousand permutations of this. What if I’d come around that corner two seconds later than I did? What if it had rained and I’d stayed home and never met her. What if I’d left the bar a minute earlier? What if, what if, what if.

So, enough of movies and McGuffins. The point of this post is to describe a sliding door moment of many years ago that had a fundamental impact on my life. Here’s the story.

Back in the 90’s I was finishing up several weeks on the road for a book tour promoting one of my early Thorn novels, when I came aboard my final flight, exhausted but homeward bound, and I found I was assigned a seat in a three-across row.  The other two seats were already taken by a young woman and her two children.  A two year old boy in the woman’s lap, a girl around five in the other in the middle seat beside me.  One look and I sensed a turbulent flight. I almost balked and asked to be moved.

Turned out the kids were great.  And after a while the mother and I started playing the Kevin Bacon seven degrees of separation game.  It didn’t take long to discover that we had Key Largo in common.  She’d lived there for years and knew people I was acquainted with.  And somewhere along the way she revealed that her husband was a fishing guide.  A backcountry guide, meaning he specialized in fishing the shallow waters of the Florida Bay and the southern edge of the Everglades. 

I told her that the character in my novels was also a fishing guide who tied flys and specialized in bonefishing on the flats. Same as her husband. She gave me one of his business cards and suggested I give him a call sometime. I put it in my pocket, then when I got home, I put it in a drawer of my desk and forgot about it.

Until one day I was cleaning out my desk, came across the card and said, what the hell. I gave him a call. The guy’s name, by the way, is Geoff Colmes. Here he is at work.

Geoff and I set up a time to fish and we met up at Papa Joe’s restaurant, bar and marina, where Geoff was launching his boat at the time.

All I remember about that first day of fishing with Geoff was that he poled us all around Nine Mile Bank and tracked down numerous bonefish and gave me many clear shots at them, all of which I missed. I scared away a ton of fish that day, but we had a good time and Geoff wasn’t judgmental. I also remember his patience and gentle coaching.

And I have a vivid memory of the flats boat he was using at the time, a Maverick, that could get into water so skinny I could look straight into the eyes of passing rays skimming along the bottom. Back then I had a 20 foot Mako, a center console. A good all round boat that could go many places in the back country of the Keys where the water got pretty shallow and could also go out into the Atlantic on calm days, to dive on the reefs, fish for dolphin (mahi) and also go on extended trips around the state.

For instance, wife Evelyn and I took the Mako from Miami to Marathon by water once for lobster season and another time from Miami to Merritt Island mostly through the intracoastal. (Some great stories there which I’ll share one day.)

Here’s what the Mako looked like:

It wasn’t long before I was itching to buy a flats boat like Geoff’s. Something I could take into water that over 90 percent of other boats couldn’t reach. I did a lot of research and settled on a Hell’s Bay Whipray, a 16 foot boat that weighed around 500 pounds with the motor. As light as a cork. The Hell’s Bay folks made me a great deal on the boat and I was thrilled to bring it back to Key Largo and work my way out to parts of the backcountry I hadn’t penetrated.

That’s my Whipray, only now it belongs to Geoff. I sold it to him when I left the Keys to live again in Miami. We made a good bargain: he gave me some cash and threw in a bunch of free fishing days. I could go out with him on my old boat and he’d lead us to some good fishing holes and pole us right up to the fish. The truth is, I caught a lot more fish on that Whipray when it was Geoff’s boat than when it was mine. He really knows his way around the backcountry. Here’s a link to Geoff’s website where he makes a few gracious comments about me and my books.

Later, Geoff designed and built a shallow draft houseboat with the intention of using it in the Dry Tortugas and the Everglades as a mothership. The idea was simple. He would tow two or three shallow draft boats like the Whipray behind it and anchor up the houseboat on the edge of great fishing grounds and the skiffs would take clients out for a day of spectacular fishing and instead of having to trek all the way back to a dock in civilization, the skiffs would return to the mothership where the guides would prepare great dinners and tell great stories and everyone could sleep in a comfortable bunk and do it all again the next day.

I went on one of these cruises into the Everglades, and sure enough, with the mothership anchored up in fairly deep water, Geoff took us north into the upper reaches of the glades where the GPS said there was no water at all, but only the southernmost dirt of Florida. Geoff knew better. He turned into a small creek and pushed about a half mile of almost impenetrable mangroves which were full of spiders and other critters which coated our hats and clothes as we pushed deeper and deeper down that grown-over creek until voila, we emerged in a virgin lake that very likely had never been visited by human beings before. We were all reverentially silent as we cast out into these sacred waters, presenting bait to fish that probably had never seen artificial lures before.

In quick succession I landed a tarpon, a redfish, and a snook. A backcountry grand slam. At least for me it was a grand slam. Here’s a shot of the tarpon, small but feisty.

I wound up writing a novel, Hell’s Bay, which featured this trip into the Everglades. Thorn was right at home in that isolated region.

I’ve always felt a certain magical connection with that novel because it never fails to remind me of some of the most extraordinary days of my life. Out in a place where few have ever been surrounded by funny, smart, interesting folks and led by Geoff Colmes and his merry band of fellow guides, folks who I would never have met had I not sat in the window seat next to Geoff’s wife, Liza, and her two young children.