A ridiculously small number of my days have begun with or even include the possibility of a three-mile hike, and so I guess the sweat and the sore ankle and a generally poor attitude were to be expected. High runoff had pushed us off the mainstem Talkeetna, where we’d planned to fish for the day, though we didn’t find that out until it was too late to attain the proper state of mental preparation, pack sufficiently, or even better, cancel.

At the start, Marcus, who’s currently undergoing some sort of bionic-man conditioning conversion, lamented only the fact that he’d not brought a backpack, snacks or enough water. I was much less confident, my last such excursion being a full eighteen months in the rearview, when—again with Marcus—we were left a few miles into the American Creek braids by a guide, who after mumbling something or another about lunch, shot off like Usain Bolt, heading in a direction that we could only assume might be that of the boat.

Obviously friends are what's important—not the fish, and certainly not the guy who was brought along just to row the boat.

Things were not quite as bleak this time. For one, our guide set a much more reasonable pace, and second, we only had one trail of water to follow, not a dozen labyrinthine channels. Still, it wasn’t very far into the walk before I began questioning the sanity of stomping through all this brush, scaling ridges, sliding back down and occasionally being whacked in the face by a willow branch. In my head, where I can’t pretend a bomb hasn’t gone off in my lungs or that several nooks and crannies weren’t feeling vaguely swampy, things were even more pessimistic.

Once we arrived at an upstream point finally deemed fish-worthy, which, I’ll be honest, felt like a miracle, I promptly made a lounge chair out of the narrow gravel bar and kicked back with a Mountain Dew—the only liquid I’d brought—and a cigarette, as if I needed to put an exclamation point to this frightening exhibit of fitness. Marcus, now just showing off, calmly strung his rod, selected a fly and waded into the small but swollen creek. Within three casts a decent rainbow was providing acrobatics I could barely make out from my reclined position in the rocks.

I fish with Marcus quite a bit, so none of this was surprising. Even when I’m not grappling with a bout of heat exhaustion, he always catches the first fish. Always.

Knowing this has led me to ponder other traits, displayed by other friends, most of which have become indelible to my idea of a day on the water. For instance, just as Marcus is always first to bring a fish to hand, my buddy Greg Thomas—an ardent supporter of split-shot—carries a unique, and frankly, disgusting, ability to stumble upon the largest fish of any given trip. It’s like he’s got some special radar that directs him towards the lunkers, and it pisses most people off. I might be his last friend, in fact.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s John Toker, whom everyone loves. Despite his romance-novel looks and shampoo-commercial hair, Toker is an unrepentant fish bum, and one of the best casters I’ve ever seen. But what really stands out to me after years of fishing with him has nothing to do with the skill and knowledge he routinely displays on the water, but rather the fact that at some point in every trip, whether during a day outing to Montana Creek or a week on South Andros, he’s going to do or say something incredibly Zen-like. And he’ll make it seem organic, even necessary.

Jason Chew, never opting for the highbrow, will inevitably find a way to document, in some amount of uncomfortable detail, the latest in his digestive history. He will also have Rainier on hand, in great quantity, and what sophistication is allowed to creep into our trips is limited to his pronouncing it as a Frenchman might.

Dusan Smetana will tell wonderful stories; he will remain cheery and positive no matter what ideas the weather and the fish have for our trip, and eventually, he will make me feel guilty for ever having the gall to complain about anything.

The connection that any of this holds with fishing may at first seem tenuous, but over the years, for me at least, it’s these details and not the nuts and bolts of actually casting, presenting and retrieving a fly that make the outdoor experience worth remembering. Popular sporting literature will fawn over the virtues of solitude, lionizing the therapeutic aspects of angling above all, though I’ve found that while relaxing, a great deal of my solo outings are forgotten before I’ve even removed my waders. Fishing with a buddy, however, tends to last.

That’s why I’m again looking so forward to the onset of another autumn fishery in Alaska. I do love the rainbows, of course, and the foliage, the crisp air, the deserted riverbanks. I want to catch a great fish, but it’s the memories that are most important. Even when those memories involve an overly long walk.