In Costa Rica, citizens take to the streets to celebrate on election day, so proud are Ticos of their democracy. Flags are waved, car horns blare incessantly, and the party continues through the night.

Every March 17, the city of Dublin, too, is awash in revelers, the scene so legendary and the merriment so immense that it’s spawned genetic twins from the Australian Outback to Butte, Montana. In like fashion, New Orleans has its Mardi Gras, Paris its Bastille Day, and Munich its Oktoberfest. Each is a tower of celebration, not to be missed.

If Alaska can lay claim to rejoicing of a similar scale, it wouldn’t be marked by the birth of a saint or the punching of ballots, but rather a salmonid’s return from the sea.

Maybe the belles of this ball roamed thousands of miles into the North Pacific or maybe they never left the protected maze of inside waters in Southeast; maybe they’ve been gone for three years, maybe five—but when Alaska’s kings finally fight free from their biologically-imposed exile, the anticipation of an entire state rises like the peaks of the Brooks Range. It’s as if our collective hopes ride upon their backs, carried as lightly as the large, erratically shaped spots of black that set the species apart.

The Chinook salmon is Alaska’s state fish, in both an obvious and official sense. We’ve certainly come to set our lives, if not our clocks, by their return. The first Alaskans did the same, and hopefully, if we leave as good as we got, the next will, too. Personally, as I wander listlessly through Shakespeare’s sweet of the year, perhaps struggling to shake off the lethargy of a winter just overcome, I find the return of the kings an event of regenerative quality. And at the first signs of their coming, with the fondness of an Irishman for his Saint Patrick, I scurry streamside in search of their healing properties. Setting out, it seems a single touch would do, but that’s never the case. Once it has begun, I find a good party hard to leave.

Take last year, for example. My first Chinook outing of the season came early in June on a winding coastal stream that was as much a question mark to me as the south peak of Denali. As it turned out, we lucked into the bulk of the run—eager, bright, terrifically strong kings jammed in the lower river like five o’clock traffic on the Glenn—and we spent the day congratulating ourselves on the genius of our fly-tying. I returned from that trip battered and a little bruised, my knuckles having been rapped more than once by kings traveling with the subtlety of a tugboat. Where was I three days later? On the Kenai, hardly healed, looking for an even bigger king that might be goaded into peeling line from my reel. The following weekend? At the mouth of Little Willow Creek, for once immune to the beauty of the midnight sun, racing against the streaks of burgundy and lilac that painted the western horizon, seeing only the impending close of the weekend-only fishery and knowing there was at least one more compliant king within a good cast’s reach.

Into July, I continued to celebrate. I found myself on the lovely Alagnak River in southwest Alaska at a time of year when a proper angler’s attention was supposed to have turned to other pursuits, summer-feeding rainbows, perhaps, or dime-bright chum salmon taken up top. Instead I chose to lob articulated leeches tied in a heinous shade of pink at the cut banks, shelves, and power-water alleys where a late-running Chinook might hold. Near the end of one evening, having waded right to the edge of being swept away, fishing in current way too strong to hold any hope for bank-landing a king, I was rewarded with a bump in the drift. I lifted my rod and felt the weight of a solid fish and then listened as twenty feet of fly line was lifted from the spool in a second. Having apparently taxied and been cleared for takeoff, the salmon launched into the air, fully leaving the water—and fully separating himself from my leader.

But in that instant the fish was airborne, appearing roughly equivalent in size to a nuclear submarine, both my guide and I felt our hearts surge and our breathing stop. The guide, an unrepentant redneck a little too partial to Texas and a lot too fond of his own wit, was the first to recover the powers of speech.

“Hmm,” he half-muttered, still smiling at the wake the Chinook had left where it reentered the river.

“You were fixin’ to get your ass whipped.”

I was too stunned to respond, but he was right. And how I wished I could have stayed buttoned up long enough to take that beating. For that’s what the great fish are supposed to do. If it never happened, if king salmon came easy to lure and easy to hand, then they wouldn’t be special fish—they wouldn’t be worth celebrating. Thankfully, as every angler heading to Alaska this spring already knows or will soon find out, that’s not the case.