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In the world of angling it was still possible to be misunderstood because you fished with a flyrod and released most of your trout, and that was fine with those of us under 30 at the time. Remember, this was the end of the '60s, when being misunderstood was a badge of honor.

I can't put my finger on the exact date when flyfishing started to become seriously fashionable, but I was there writing the occasional story about it when it happened. Any fisherman will recognize the circumstances: I was in the right place at the right time and had just enough skill to take advantage of a whole lot of dumb luck. So I ended up with something resembling a career, and in the course of being a fishing writer, I've naturally done a lot of fishing in a lot of places.

Alaska was like a lot of the places I've been. Looking back on it, the fishing was fine, but just being in Alaska seemed more the point of the trip than any of the sockeye salmon, rainbows, grayling, or arctic char I landed. Some of those fish were pretty impressive, but, honestly, the biggest fish I caught in Alaska didn't quite top the biggest fish I've caught more or less in my backyard in Colorado. Then again, I never did get around to king salmon.

It was the enormity of the place that I couldn't get over. You could fly for hours at 300 feet and see nothing from one horizon to the other except trees and water, now and then punctuated by a bull moose swimming across a lake, or a small river running red from bank to bank with salmon.

The grizzly bears were pretty impressive, too, and I saw more of them in my first few days in Alaska than I had in my life up until then. Of course, the last thing you want to do is surprise one of these things, so you always try to make noise. That doesn't come naturally to most of us, but many backcountry Alaskans talk loudly and constantly, at least when they're outside. In civilization that might seem rude, but in bear country it's a survival tactic.

It's always risky to characterize the people of an entire region, but I have to say that most of the Alaskans I met in the bush were competent and helpful, and many were also gruff as hell with a ragged sense of humor. For instance, Bernie at Woods River Lodge on the Agulawok River was a fine bush pilot and you probably couldn't be in better hands, but God help you if you let on that flying makes you a little nervous. There are those who say Alaska is a state populated by misfits, which always sounded like a bum rap to me, but if you mention that to Alaskans, half of them will say, "You're damn right," or words to that effect.

I first heard that in a great bar in the town of King Salmon. (Luckily, I was still drinking then.) It had the obligatory mounted fish on the walls and a big picture window overlooking the Naknik River and the docks where the float planes tied up. I don't remember the name of the place, but there weren't many bars-or much of anything elsein King Salmon, so it wouldn't be hard to find again.

By the second or third day at Snowbird Lake Lodge in the Northwest Territories, most of the sports and all of the guides had decided my friends and I were nuts. The area was known for its big lake trout-a 30-pounder was considered a good one-but we spent most of our time catching 2- to 3-pound grayling on dry flies on the Kazan River. We tried to explain that a 3-pound grayling was world-record class, but no one seemed impressed. Flyfishing had begun to catch on big-time back home, but the craze hadn't yet reached that far north, and guys with wussy tackle chasing little fish amounted to comic relief.

The name notwithstanding, this was a rough but comfortable camp. The "lodge" was a small, uninsulated clapboard building with a kitchen and a sort of bar/mess hall. The "cabins" were canvas tents pitched on wooden platforms. The fish-cleaning shed was situated across a small bay, far from camp because the smell of it sometimes attracted wolves.

It was midsummer, when it never gets quite dark that far north, so we'd fish for 16 to 18 hours a day and then fall into a coma for a little while before doing it all again. As with Alaska, many of my memories are recalled through a haze of sleep deprivation, so they have the quality of hallucinations. I can close my eyes and see a big grayling jumping 2 feet out of the river in bright sun and then seem to hang in midair for a full second. To this day, I swear there was a rosecolored aura around it.

One evening, far down the Kazan at the bottom of some bad rapids, we found the wreckage of a very old and obviously handmade canoe. We asked about it later, but no one knew a story to go with it. It was a mystery, possibly a grim one. There was a complete, handcarved canoe paddle there that I remember thinking would make a nice souvenir, but in the end I just photographed a couple of big grayling we'd killed for lunch next to it and left it where it was. That was 20 years ago and it's probably still there.

Down on the Minipi River in Labrador, there was a sturdy shack with a wood stove that slept eight anglers and a smaller one that housed four guides and the cook. Up there you didn't catch many brook trout-three or four a day if you were lucky-but a good one could weight 5, 6, or maybe even 7 pounds, and now and then an 8-pounder would turn up. Honest. This outfit had advertised the largest brook trout in the world-which is why my old friend . Best and I went in the first place-and if they're not the largest, I'd sure as hell like to know where they come bigger.

. and I fished there for three years in a row, twice at Ann Marie and once at Minonipi Camp even farther up the drainage. It was beginning to look like an annual trip, but then the fourth year we let it slide, having come to the amazing conclusion that we'd both caught enough 5- to 7-pound brook trout-for now, at least, if not for a lifetime.

Often enough, the heart of a trip isn't what you thought it would be, which is one way to define an adventure. When Ed Engle and I went to Texas to bass fish with Bud Priddy, we eventually ended up down in the southern part of the state catching the big ol' bass we'd come for, but the most interesting part was floating some small rivers in the Hill Country north of San Antonio, paddling canoes, camping on islands, and catching Guadalupe bass.

These are a small fish as bass go-a 16-incher is considered huge-and they're native only to certain rivers in Texas, where they're sometimes called Texas brook trout. In some ways, fishing for them is just like fishing for trout. They live in fast water and nose up into riffles to eat dry flies, but between hatches you can whack them on cork poppers and deer-hair froggies.

They're beautiful fish-golden bronze overall, heavily speckled in green-and most fishermen ignore them in favor of big ol' largemouthes. Over several days of floating rivers like the Llano and the Nueces (pronounced "yah-no" and "new-aces") we saw one other boat, and the people in it weren't even fishing.

Of course, Bud was a good host and a fine teacher who had infinite patience with a couple of Yankee trout fishers. He was also something of a regional legend, which I only came to appreciate later when people would say, "You fished with Bud Priddy? Jeez!"

Bud died not long after that trip, and although I've thought about going back and may change my mind eventually, right now, fishing it without him just wouldn't seem right.

I never really took to saltwater flyfishing, but I had to try it a few times out of curiosity. That was some years ago, and by now, days and even weeks of holding a flyrod and squinting into the hot glare have coalesced into a single dim recollection, but I can still clearly see the 120-some-pound tarpon I hooked one day. It took the fly not 30 feet from the skiff, jumped higher than my head and threw the hook. I was secretly relieved. I was fishing a pretty stout flyrod, but back home we'd hunt something that size with a .30-06.

Then on another trip to the Florida Keys, my friend Pat Leonard and I were wandering around Islamorada, killing time because we'd been blown off the water by a gale, when we ran into a genuine beach bum-a dying breed in that gentrified part of the world. He may have been crazy or just drunk, but he grabbed my beard and yelled, "Bonefish? Hell, I could tie a fly with a piece 'a this and catch a bonefish right now!"

I said, "I believe you, man, but let go of the beard."

I also had a brief flirtation with Atlantic salmon fishing before I realized I couldn't afford it. One trip-the one where I actually caught some fish-was to the Nipisiguit River in New Brunswick, where there was a nice grille run. These fish were fresh from the ocean: bright as chrome bumpers, with the sea lice still on them. As soon as they'd feel the hook, they'd head back for the Atlantic, and some of them apparently made it because that was the last I saw of them.

We stayed in an old, comfortable house on the river. The four or five other guys, all experienced salmon fishers tried their best to help me along. There was a huge blackbear skin on the wall and a sunny porch where we ate breakfast on warm mornings. I'd found an old book on salmon patterns and had meticulously tied some Nipisiguit Grays, the only salmon pattern I could find that originated on that river, but the hot patterns that week were Montreals and Undertakers.

But the trip's most vivid memory is walking down the river alone on a bright, chilly autumn day through a maple forest turned the brightest red I'd ever seen, my footfalls flushing ruffed grouse every 20 feet. I remember carrying a flyrod, so I must have been fishing, but I don't recall where I was going or if I caught anything. But then maybe that's not the part that matters. SA