Now it can be told!

Any good reporter learns eventually that some of the best true stories we pick up on the job should not be printed. Not from cowardice, just … because. For instance …

When I was city editor of the Brownsville Herald a generation ago, my favorite fishing and swimming hole was Boca Chica Beach, a 20-some-mile drive from Brownsville to the Gulf of Mexico. Once outta town, there were no turnoffs from Boca Chica Boulevard: just a straight shot to the Gulf, dunes and marshland on either side.

Boca Chica means Little Mouth, for that is where the 1,885-mile-long Rio Grande empties into the Gulf. By the time it gets there, it really is a little mouth, maybe 12 feet across, a couple inches deep.

That brackish water, where the freshwater river enters the saltwater Gulf, was a good place to snag a red snapper.

Lot of little critters to eat there, if you was a snappy fish.

In those days, Boca Chica was one of the few public beaches in the country where you could drive your pickup on the sand. You had to rev it to the max once the road ended, but after you plowed through the little dunes, it was clear sailing, I mean driving, on the beach at the dark, wet tideline.

The border wasn’t even a mile to the right, south, down the beach.

So on weekends when I didn’t pull Saturday shift, I’d drive to Boca Chica Beach early with my kids, set them loose in the waves and fish to my heart’s content. Meaning: throw out a line and stand there looking at the water, doing nothing at all but keeping an index finger on the line and, like any fisherman, thinking I was actually doing something. Being a sportsman.

Well, one morning, three other guys had beat me to my fishing spot. We yukked it up in Spanglish, and it turned out they were all Brownsville cops, in cutoff blue jeans and T-shirts. Good patriotic Mexican-Americans, keeping our country safe. No, for reals.

So, pooty soon, some Mexicans drive up from the South and commence to unload kilo after kilo of marijuana onto a little rubber dinghy, wade north a few strides and unpack it.

Within minutes, they unloaded 200-300 kilos onto our virgin soil, three cops and me looking on, my kids frolicking in the surf.

Relieved of their load, the smugglers teased my kids and played with them.

Then down from the north comes a big pickup truck, and its driver and riders help the smugglers throw kilos of weed into the truck bed, and throw a tarp on it, and tie down the tarp. Me and the cops and all the dopers yukking it up the while.

So the big pickup takes off to the north, the Mexicans head south, and one of the cops goes to his truck and calls in on his police radio the license number and description of the pickup with 200 kilos of pot in it. And there’s just the one road from the beach to Brownsville, bordered on both sides by dunes and bogs for 20 miles.

The cops go back to fishing, and I reel in my line and shout: “Come in, children! It’s time to come in!”

So I collected my kids, got back in the pickup and drove home, fishless, wondering how — and if — I should write this up for the Herald.

I never did.

I just didn’t know how to write that story.

(Courthouse News columnist Robert Kahn sold his book “Angling: The Art of Doing Nothing at All,” to Random House in 1975, for an advance of  $…* . He is still working on it.)*