With an air of competence I manufacture but don’t quite believe, I check the knots of a new leader as I thread line through the guides. In front of me a long, thin gravel bar and the river beyond spread like the view from Clark’s Lookout in August, 1805. At least it feels vaguely expeditionary, this slow walk towards a stretch of untested water, three hundred yards of deep outside corner promising all sorts of possibilities. But as it was for Lewis and Clark and in the Montana of my youth, you can’t find Idaho without first crossing the Rockies and so I point towards the head of the run with fourteen feet of fly rod and a pocket full of flies that had never been wet.

The sound of line being stripped from the reel is pretty pleasing after six months spent indoors. Alternatively, I’m going to rap my knuckles at some point in the day; my shoulder will get sore and I’ll have a nasty line burn on the middle finger of my right hand. My feet are numb already, and it appears a leak has developed in the knees of last season’s waders.

None of the perils of starting over matter now, however, not when the D sets up and the laws of physics and an angler’s timing demand the forward stroke.

The cast isn’t great. My first mend is all sorts of wrong and the drift clearly out of whack. It’s a big ask to fish these distances, further saddled with ten feet of T-14, this early in the year. Upstream there is skinny water, easy to read, to wade and to fish, and I know that it holds piles of hungry grayling, Dollies gearing up for the out-migration and rainbow trout just off the spawn. Down here, in the heavy water that’s asking for the big casts, success has to be measured in another way.

I think I find it simply by casting again. Swing, retrieve, and again. Again.

Whether it takes ten minutes or ten hours, I will hook a fish in this run. Just in from the sea, it will weigh 20-pounds-plus.

This is May in Alaska.