Then another swipe of the wiper blades to clear my view of the road and I see empty water, cold fingers, numb toes, and the long drive home. The coffee is suddenly too bitter to bother with. Probably because I know neither scenario is more likely than the other: At this time of year I’m as apt to put up the proverbial donut hole as I am to post a dozen-fish day.

However, I don’t mind the uncertainty; if it was a real problem I’d be at home trying to decide between reading The Brothers Karamazov again or watching the latest season of The Sopranos on DVD rather than bearing down on a place where time is seen as its own reward.

Personally, I’ve always equated the late Alaska fall with that one relative every family seems to have and take turns avoiding: the interminable mooch, in and out of jobs like Tony Soprano goes through women, always a threat to show up and stamp a birthday, a wedding, a seasonal holiday with their peculiar brand of zaniness, never a guarantee to leave. It’s not that this black sheep of every family’s flock can’t be a joy—in fact, we’re often talking of a quite Dostoevskian character here, kind of repulsive and pleasant at the same time—it’s that they’re in no way predictable. And we all know which road is paved with good intentions.

So when I finally descend upon the day’s stream of choice I try to leave any definition of angling success that depends on actually catching fish back in the car with the dry flies. Each is right next to worthless this time of year.

For starters, October weather in Alaska can make a full-fledged monsoon seem delightful. But, barring some serious misreading during the planning stage, it’s impossible to not know that beforehand. It might not rain constantly—heck, if you’re really lucky, the sun may even shine for a while—but you can almost bet on the fact that drops will fall at some point. It will be chilly as well, and that’s before you wade thigh-deep into water that’ll be frozen in a month or two. It very well might snow, a lot.

In a way, this is a lot like inviting an uncle of mine to do anything family-related; I just assume that fishing in late fall comes with a certain amount of risk.

Where the risk is stretched to a degree that the more solvent citizens I know start openly questioning the sanity of all involved is in the prospects of finding fish at all. Needless to say, Alaska’s anglers battle this all year, as unlike fish from many of the blue-ribbon waters of the Lower 48, our trout are travelers. Tellingly, some of the very best rainbow water in Alaska is completely free of fish about eleven months out of every year. In the fall, a season of transition anyway, we simply need to be prepared to move with them.

Early on, when the leaves are just beginning to turn and any cheechako with a good pair of socks can handle the weather, things are easy enough—find the spawning salmon, find trout. Fish a bead. If anyone later asks how you managed to catch so many great rainbows, tell them simplicity is the highest form of cunning and then go into a lot of unnecessary detail on the science behind a good bead box, including several oblique references to the inferiority of certain brands of nail polish. It’s what my uncle would do, whether he’d caught anything or not.

The height of the egg feed doesn’t last forever, though. While you can almost always pick up a fish or ten on an egg imitation, by mid-September or so it’s probably time to start thinking about flesh. As I greatly prefer swinging the fly, I’m eager to do so.

Now the fish have spread out some and you won’t necessarily discover a large pod of rainbows behind every concentration of salmon. Water-reading skills again achieve prominence, as a river’s trout will slide into the slots, seams, and tailouts that act as natural conduits for food. Near log jams are always good, for salmon carcasses tend to get held up while the rushing water continues to displace a steady diet.

As the season progresses, the trout are even more likely to be migrating. In the big lake systems, they’ll be on their way out of the river for the winter. In a large river system like the Susitna, most fish will be backing down the tributaries, headed for the main river and their preferred over-wintering habitat. At this time of year, you’ll likely find action in a different place every day, if you find it at all.

But why try? It’s a fair question, one I go through about a dozen times each rain-filled drive to a creek that may or may not hold any leftover fish.

The answer lies in any of a hundred photos I have at home: gray sky, wet clothes, cherry-red cheeks, and big, big rainbows. This is true of the eastside Susitna tributaries that cross the highway leading north from my home; the largest trout in the system are on the move, heading for the mainstem, looking for one last meal before the winter doldrums set in. It’s even truer of the state’s most significant trophy trout fisheries, the Kvichak, the Naknek, the mighty Kenai, where for a few short weeks anglers are afforded a real shot at the behemoths, leg-sized beauties that have been coaxed from their lake lairs by the sheer volume of food rushing downstream.

Plus, there’s hardly ever another angler in sight in all those photos. Most folks, it seems, aren’t willing to endure the weather and the uncertainty that comes with late-fall fishing in Alaska. Most of my family is like that; they’re the same people that have stopped issuing any kind of invitations to my uncle. As a reward, their birthdays and barbecues come off without a hitch.

Fair enough.

None of them have ever caught a thirty-inch rainbow either.