Having never been meant to find the wallet of stretched tarpon leaders or the fifty flies I’ve tied when other, presumably more pressing concerns had beckoned, she’d been tromping around the room like some sort of perpetual-invective machine for more than a little bit, banging the occasional pot or pan or body part on the kitchen counter whenever it looked like there might be a lull. Through all of this, knowing that stationary targets suffered the least, I remained perfectly still. I did not try to help, pretending instead to be face down amongst the

peaty undergrowth of some Pacific jungle, columns of Ko-gun soldiers marching by with Arisaka bayonets at the ready. Silence was not a chore, but more a reward, like shell-shock. Clearly I am not the sort interested in winning medals.

I am, however, interested in fish, and in the many places they can be caught. Some of these places I’ve yet to visit, a fact that starts to gnaw at me at certain, entirely predictable times of year. For this, February is one of the worst months.

As the snow starts to pile up outside and the coats and gloves on various pieces of furniture inside, my days and nights are increasingly interrupted by thoughts of cool water wrapping around my waders, eddies swirling behind a boulder, deep outside bends, lovely little tailouts and long, unbroken riffles chirping at me from the distance. I think about trout mainly, red stripes and speckled sides, but this is hardly ever an exercise in mental monogamy. As one thing naturally leads to another, the next thing you know I’m wondering about the newest synthetics and whether or not they’d make a suitable collar for my Spey flies, and how Alaska’s kings might react to that development, and where runs should be strong in the coming year and why it is I haven’t finagled a week’s stay at one of those locations yet. The fly business, and a prolonged cold snap, will lead to the discovery of an uncanny similarity in the design of effective king and tarpon patterns, and from there I’ll realize that most sockeye flies make for ideal bonefish patterns, and vice versa. Pretty soon it’s to an Internet ticketing hub and some far-off destination, straining several personal relationships along the way.

It’s been in February during years past that I’ve visited places such as Costa Rica, the Bahamas, the Florida Keys, Mexico and Argentine Patagonia. All this, and the fifty tarpon flies my wife is now holding, because I go to sleep many nights thinking of rainbow trout.

But I can explain, I say, the fascination if not the obsession. And this is where I prove wrong all those people who say there’s such a thing as useless information. The USS Trout, a Tambor-class submarine, served in the Pacific from 1941 through 1944, receiving 11 battle stars and three Presidential Unit Citations in that time. Trout delivered ammunition to the besieged American forces on Corregidor in the Philippines, just when it looked as if we might lose our foothold in Southeast Asia. She is credited with sinking 23 enemy ships and damaging six more.

In other words, in planning for the June opener on the Kvichak or dry-fly fishing on American Creek or a fall journey into Katmai, I’m just being patriotic. And it seems reasonable that if I’m going to go to all the hassle of getting out there for the rainbows, I might as well stay sharp during other parts of the year. That means bonefish to work on the cast, tarpon to ensure anything I’d caught wasn’t a fluke and steelhead in the spring, because, well, they’re trout, too. After that it’s kings, sockeye and chum and then, preferably in combination with a day or two of rainbows, the coho. This being Alaska, I’ve already got several new destinations in mind, as well as mulling returns to a few old favorites. When I’m asked to explain myself, the long summer absences or the little pieces of marabou that turn up all over our house during the winter, I’ll casually mention that there was a USS Salmon in World War II as well.

Another Presidential Unit Citation, nine battle stars and hundreds of rivers I still need to see.