I’ve fished with lots of different people, beginning with my grandfather in the Montana of my youth, where we dabbed mayfly imitations on the surface of the small, burbling creeks that rolled lazily through the mix of Hereford, Angus, and black baldies stationed in the summer pastures. We launched unwieldy hopper patterns towards the undercut banks of the Yellowstone River, battling the legendary Paradise Valley winds, and swung store-bought Buggers through the deeper pools of the stream cutting through the box canyon where I shot my first muley, always finding the time for one more cast into the half-light, long since late for dinner. It was then that I learned big fish are caught on a slack line, that the right fly is hardly ever more important than the right presentation, and that fishing well has nothing to do with the catching of fish.

Later, I fished with my brothers, usually while we were meant to be doing something else, putting up hay, setting water for the lower alfalfa fields, mending a stretch of fence. Soon, in the way both steelhead and Pacific salmon instinctively sniff out their natal streams, I found friends who shared a taste for hackle over homework and a dogged, nearly reflexive distrust for conventional maturity. Trading sixth-period algebra for trout was a no-brainer, and soon nothing was quite so sacred as the spinner-fall. Allowed to proceed unchecked, infatuation with fish begat addiction to fishing begat the kind of unshaven, bleary-eyed degenerate who ends up graduating high school and his parents’ home to take up residence in a van down by the river. Whether or not that symbolic river might stand in for an angler’s Rubicon matters not. For, like Caesar at war, these anglers probably found there was no turning back long before they even thought about crossing.

I still seek out this brand of peripatetic loafer, on the broad bonefish flats of the Bahamas, tucked into the sun-drenched mangroves of the Keys, high-and-dry near the mouth of a southeast Alaska steelhead stream. It’s not for the High Life and an extra helping of red beans and rice at dinner, and certainly not for lessons in responsible citizenship, but because they seem to take from a day on the water the same type of things angling gives to me. None of it can be quantified, thank goodness. Not like, say, the number of fish caught from a frog water pool or the proper casting angle for swinging an unweighted, #4 Muddler in six feet of medium flow. Hence, as the circle of anglers I’ve met and fished with has continued to expand, I’ve been treated to a final lesson: For the most part, it’s the people with us, not the water, the weather, or the fish themselves that determine the pleasure we take from an outing. Just as we can build brilliant memories on a morning when the wind howls, the rain comes down sideways, and the fish are nowhere to be found, the brightest bluebird day, with the water gin-clear and bushels of trout practically leaping into the boat, can be soiled by having to spend much time within earshot of a whiner’s whining, a fretter’s brooding, or a complainer’s complaining. More often than not, the rocket casters and how-to robots and assorted technique freaks can suck the spirituality right out of a day on the river, whether they realize it or not. Needless to say, since I learned that, the hard way, I’ve become much more particular about the people I’m willing to fish alongside.

Unfortunately, I can’t exactly say why. As of yet, I’ve been unable to find words that are capable of articulating precisely the reasons I fish, but I can feel them. I know when it’s right, and I know when I should have stayed home with a book. And like I mentioned, neither has anything to do with the number of fish I may or may not feel tugging on the end of my line.

I’ve battled some truly scary weather, venturing into storms that would have kept the Coast Guard at home, all to catch zip. I’ve also been on some trips where the fishing was everything the Alaska fable promises—and hated it, usually because I found myself floating along with an assortment of fish-counting low-holers, camouflage-clad super-predators quick to brag and even quicker to dispense advice no one needs or desires. It can be frustrating, to say the least. But taken by itself, the ability to cause frustration isn’t something I wholeheartedly avoid, for some of my favorite fishing buddies tend to aggravate and annoy with the same sort of nonchalance most folks reserve for breathing. Late last fall, I spent a week with a pair of walking examples.

Friend number one, Dan Summerville, epitomizes the idea of a technical angler. He’s read all the treatises and devised a few of his own, and he’s equally comfortable discussing the proper water temperature for skating dries to shallow-holding summer steelhead or demonstrating the geometry of a proper roll cast. He peruses his fly boxes with the intensity of a botanist let loose in the Amazon for the first time. He casts to perfection, in all conditions, in about forty different styles, flawless loops never failing to turn over, his chosen pattern settling upon the water’s surface with pronounced elegance. Friend number two, who weirdly insists on being referred to as “Chugach,” proudly proclaims he’s never been able to stay awake through an entire how-to article. He’ll fish just about any fly someone else is willing to give him, and approximately one out of every five casts tends to come apart with the grace of an unfolding lawn chair. If there are five fish in the stream, these two will team up to catch six.

And therein lies the frustration.

In Dan’s case, I must admit, it’s not too bad. His are acts of great skill, and skill can be learned. With enough study, practice, and experience—lots of experience—most anyone will become a capable angler. Knowledge accumulates, and before too long a veteran stands where a novice once did, the double-haul second nature, drifts as dead as the Roman Empire. It is then an angler’s thinking can move towards the sort of intricacy set forth by John Gawesworth in his article “Fish Sense” later in this issue, when how a fish is caught is no longer enough, the why vaulting in importance. Thus, as Dan catches yet another chrome-bright coho from a Kenai run I thought I’d covered a dozen times, I can relax, certain that he’s earned it, and I can tip my hat to expertise. But when Chugach stumbles along moments later and begins to pepper the water in some sort of random shotgun-spray of a casting sequence and accomplishes the same feat, I have a somewhat harder time swallowing. However, just like Dan, he just seems to know where the fish are, and how to catch them, though Dan knows because he has studied and deduced and made a perfect presentation, Chugach because he “feels it.” He’s a magician, not bound by the laws of man or river, a sorcerer conjuring fish—and too often, big fish—at a rate that quite frankly should be made illegal.

Still, neither of them make it about the fish, or really, even the fishing, each taking as much pleasure in watching the other hook a nice fish as they do in landing their own. And that’s refreshing and maybe even admirable now that we’ve sunk so low the terms fly-fishing and competition are slung together as if they were remotely compatible. Frustration aside, I’ll continue to venture out and fish with the two of them, choosing their company over alternatives much more terrifying, cross-training golf pros and tournament bass anglers. Thinking about it now, I guess it won’t be for entirely magnanimous reasons, either, for I’ll be hoping some of what they’ve got rubs off on me. If I have a choice, it’ll be the magic and not the mechanical. I can learn that later.