A few years ago, I bought myself a present: an eight-foot fly rod that broke down into footlong sections. It fit nicely into a briefcase and I carried it with me on business trips and on those family vacations where you aren’t supposed to slip out and go fishing but you wouldn’t want to pass up the chance if one came along.

People who love fly-fishing the way others love, say, wine or opera, get that way about their pastime. It has the feel of art, and puts them in touch with the sublime. It becomes, in short, an obsession. The first time I put the rod to use was to catch peacock bass in the canals that run through the city of Miami. Peacock bass are native to the Amazon River basin but, hey, this is the age of globalization, and the fish are able to make it to another continent. But that experience was more of a stunt; you don’t take up fly-fishing to cruise the canals of South Florida. Your art will take you to far more beguiling spheres.

Begin with trout, which is what people traditionally think of when you say “fly-fishing”: cold moving water, split-cane rods, willow creels and small fl ies made from gaudy feathers to imitate the naturally occurring and ethereal mayflies. In America, the advent of this kind of angling occurred in the Catskill Mountains of New York, on streams like the Beaverkill.

It still prospers there and, also, farther south into the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, and west to the cedar-stained rivers of Michigan, like the Pere Marquette and the Fox, which is, in fact, the place Ernest Hemingway describes in his iconic short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” This is fly-fishing at its most delicate and artful.

At the other extreme is big-game fishing-for bonefish, permit and especially tarpon-in South Florida, chiefly the Keys. It is the same approach, stalk and cast, that the angler takes on the little mountain streams, but the scale of everything is larger. The word for angling on the Beaverkill is “delicate.” Off Key West, it’s “muscular.”

I stuck a trout fly in my ear once by casting badly and simply pinched it out with my fingers. When a buddy in the Keys was casting a little too eagerly and raggedly-the sight of a 130-pound tarpon will do that to you-and hit me in the back of the head with his fl y, I fell to my knees and saw stars.

Between those extremes, there are the bass (largemouth and smallmouth) as well as panfish, salmon, striped bass, redfish and virtually any gamefish that one chooses to go after. In the end, for the angler, it would be impossible to separate the appeal of the setting from the pleasure received from practicing the art. Fly-casting is about timing and rhythm; main force is counterproductive. If you’re stressed and rushed, your timing will be off, and the harder you work, the less line you’ll be able to lay out.

Similarly, if you get lazy, the line will lose needed tension and collapse in a useless pile. But if your mood is right and you have the groove, the line will shoot out in front of you almost without effort, and your fl y will drop daintily on the water, right where you aimed it.

And, if the gods are with you, guile and technique and karma will pay off in the form of a strike. The feedback of satisfaction that results from good casting is like the feeling you get when you swing a golf club properly. It can’t be done too fast or too slow. But when the tempo is right, it feels effortless and the results seem slightly unbelievable. How did I get that much line out (or knock that ball so far)?

With some forms of fly-fishing, on the salmon and steelhead rivers especially, the drill is, famously, to “cast and cast again.” You start with a short cast, then gradually shoot more and more line, until you have covered a pool. Then you do it again. All day, and during the summer, when night comes late, this can mean for 12 or 14 hours. But the rhythm is so seductive that you don’t notice the time or the fact that your back aches and your legs are beginning to cramp. The activity is so physically pleasurable and the surroundings so aesthetically alluring that you become absorbed, totally and blissfully.

I hesitated, at first, about buying my little traveling rod. I already owned a couple of dozen conventionally constructed rods, so it seemed an extravagance. But then I imagined myself stuck inside some dreary motel with an interesting river just down the road. The rod, I thought, would be like a ticket to the Louvre. I spent the money and never regretted it.

Pro Football Hall of Fame GEOFF’S “SUPER SEVEN”

So where in America does veteran angler Geoffrey Norman like to go for that sublime fly-fishing experience? Here are a few of his favorites.

1. Fly-fishing for trout in the United States began in the Catskills, and it’s still wonderful, especially the hauntingly lovely Beaverkill River near Roscoe, New York.
2. The Florida Keys for big game: bonefish, tarpon and, most elusive of all, permit.
3. Block Island Sound, near Montauk, New York, for striped bass on the flats in June and false albacore-arguably the world’s strongest fish, pound for pound-in September.
4. The Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota for smallmouth bass. There are too many lakes here to count, and too few days in a lifetime to fish them all.
5. The Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, Idaho. The six-mile Railroad Ranch section is where all American fly-fishing enthusiasts want to go when they die. Large rainbow trout, prolific insect hatches, epic views.
6. Rogue River, Oregon. It’s a brawler, like the steelhead and salmon you come here to catch.
7. Tenoroc Fish Management Area in Polk County, Florida, is a series of reclaimed phosphate pits where the largemouth bass are both large and abundant.-G.N.