“What the hell is wrong with you?” I shouted upstream at a good friend of mine, who was trying to fish out a drift with his elbow half-cocked and his arm held close to his side, an odd sort of grimace masking his face.

“Shoulder hurts,” he winced.

“Huh,” I replied, having already leant too much thought to the matter.

My seeming lack of compassion is not without precedent—between anglers and between the two of us especially. This, after all, was a man who a few years ago had calmly attended to the first of several mends while I stumbled into a hulking though submerged boulder, then skid uncontrollably across the pea-gravel bottom, pushed onward by an alarmingly heavy current, until I was finally swept away to explore the look of the water a few hundred yards downriver. I can’t be certain, flailing to stay afloat as I was, but judging by the interval between the moment of first-dunking and sight of the drift boat rounding the bend above the gravel bar where I eventually beached, I’d guess he might have snuck in another cast or two before heeding the tolling bells of rescue.

It’s often memories like these that return with me from an outing, and inexplicably, I still lug them around to this day, wasting much of the precious space I seem to have been allotted on recollections of the absurd or even downright painful when images of 30-inch rainbows tail-walking into the sunset would be perfectly welcome. Alas, as I’m beginning to understand, in much the same way a particularly spunky Lab learns to not chase skunks, none of us gets to choose the memories that stick. Thankfully, a good number of mine begin and end near flowing waters, and no matter how twisted those tales become, I know a person can do a lot worse than that.

“Ugghhh,” my friend grunted, after retrieving his line and attempting to cast again.

“Shoulder?” I asked, maybe a bit enthusiastically.

“Finger.”

I nodded, not in empathy, of course, but simply in acknowledgement—anything to fend off the explanation that would surely evolve into an unending compendium of gripes and whines and generally repulsive hysterics. I knew he had some line cuts on his hands; it was September, after all, and any fingers free of at least a few nicks and burns had spent too much time pounding the keyboard or drumming the fly shop counter and not enough being impaled by chemically-sharpened hooks.

“My shoulder hurts, too,” he very nearly whimpered upon the completion of another cast.

“It’s affecting your stroke,” I said, trying to be helpful.

“And I can’t feel my feet,” he answered, shrugging off the proposition of first-rate casting instruction implicit in my tone. However, regarding his last ailment, I could find nothing witty or even somewhat lucid to offer as a response, as truth be known, I’d lost contact with my own toes some thirty minutes prior to this admission.

Late autumn is the best time of year for trout anglers in Alaska, though the temperature might never shade above the chillier side of balmy. We were fishing on a particularly nasty day—cold, gray skies, bone-chilling rain, wind, icy waters that constantly threatened to drag me downstream—and perhaps one that would have been better spent inside, sipping coffee or whiskey, or both, together, maybe reading a chapter or two of The Magic Mountain to pass the time, wherein an alert, properly caffeinated reader could find this among the many enduring lines: “We come out of the dark and go into the dark again, and in between lie the experiences of our life.” Because of the sentiment behind those words, my friend and I had not allowed for the possibility of a roof and warm fire on a day when there were ten-pound trout available.

And, all outward signs to the contrary, a feeling equal parts awe and grudging respect took root as I watched my friend’s purgative quest unfold. He was clearly past the posturing stage, his aches and pains at battle with an almost masochistic need to dip already numb fingers into arctic waters and feel the pulse of a wild rainbow. Soon, I wasn’t even fishing. Instead, I watched as he grimaced and groaned, prodded his feet to slide another few steps down the stream, and coaxed his shoulder into making another cast. As he moved closer, I saw that a few icicles had formed in the long hairs of his moustache.

Then, just about the time I’d decided to throw in the towel from his corner and thus alleviate or at least suspend his suffering, his rod tip went down and stayed down. The bowed rod gyrated with a certain force and line sailed from the guides with the kind of gusto that said rainbow trout. Big trout, fall trout. The sort that are worth a little pain, the sort that make an experience a memory.

—Troy Letherman, Editor