"What should we do today?" my friend asked.

As queries from visitors go, it's common enough, I suppose, but after a summer in Alaska, with relatives and remote acquaintances alike laboring under the delusion that my family and I are running a bed & breakfast, the question can evoke something close to the thrills of appendicitis. With a long, last look at my couch, woefully neglected during these months of summer light, I answered as I almost always do in such occasions.

"Well, we could go fishing, I guess."

Apparently, I said this with little enthusiasm, as it took my friend nearly eleven seconds to pull his waders from the duffel that I'd begun to view as a possibly permanent addition to my living room floor. We were on the road minutes later, and, stopping only for beverages, had cleared Wasilla before I'd even begun to think about a destination. While he pondered various scenarios under which it was acceptable to open a first beer before noon, I tried to remember which flies were stuffed into the single box I'd grabbed on the way out the door, and if any were of the sort that might prove useful in late September.

Vast waters flow within an hour of my home in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, but honestly, I hardly ever give them a thought, unless, like on this day, I find myself already traveling in their direction, and then only when also toting the idea that the deployment of a fly might at some point become necessary, to fight off charges of wholesale irresponsibility if nothing else. It's not that I find these home waters to be without promise or allure, but to loosely analogize, I suspect the inhabitants of northern Luzon look towards the Bunaue terraces with slightly bored, unavoidably utilitarian eyes as well. The situations are entirely different, of course, though there's at least a rice-sized grain of similarity in the notion that the nearest treasures are the hardest to see. In my case, part of the problem lies in the fact that I tend to travel a lot, and nearly always to fish. The week prior, in fact, had seen my friend and I ensconced on the Kenai, fishing dawn to dark. Plus, he'd spent the summer working at a lodge in western Alaska; I'd visited not a month before for some salmon action that can only be described as epic. We'd recently agreed on some dates for a winter bonefishing trip, too, and were throwing around some pretty serious threats about floating the Babine next October. Cataloguing all the trout runs I'd memorized on Willow Creek did little to get my blood pressure up.

So we skipped it, and Sheep, and Montana, and all the other Susitna tributaries I actually know something about. Basing my choice on nothing more than a happy confluence with the road, I instead picked a piece of new water-and it really doesn't matter which, both because the fishing wasn't very good and because that isn't the point-and we chose fly patterns that reflected our respective character flaws. A streamer for me, the idealist, a milky pink bead for my realist friend. On my third cast I hit a rainbow that went about four pounds.

It was the only fish I landed that day, though my friend, notching another victory for pragmatism, did considerably better with his egg. Neither of us seemed to care. What I thought about while driving home-besides the fact that the Great Bear Brewing Company is on the way-concerned the fortuity of my situation more than the sometimes inconvenient demands of living somewhere everyone else wants to visit. We talked about steelhead and the Babine some more and argued about the proper profile for bonefish flies. Then we decided to return to the Parks Highway in the morning and to drive until we found another new stretch of water to fish.
Ten years after moving here I can still say that, which to me, more than anything else, recommends the Mat-Su.