Next week we go to Alaska. This whole exercise–going to each state to catch a fish–is really a desperate ruse to get Kris to Alaska. For a girl who got all the way through law school inside the Houston loop, Kris has a peculiarly well-developed terror of bears. “Kris, do you want to go to Alaska?” I’ve asked that question for nigh on 40 years, and she’s consistently answered no, nope, not on a bet. “There are bears.”

That Werner Herzog movie, Grizzly Man, didn’t help any. I highly recommend it though.

She must be terrified of bears because they infested Poe Elementary and the Rice campus. She must have lost a dozen of her Lamar High School graduating class to grizzlies, and watched horrified as University of Houston law professors were snatched from the lecture hall and dragged to a polar bear’s lair. For a long time I thought it was a joke, and then I thought that maybe it was real but vague, and that she’d get over it. Nope. For as long as I’ve known her she has only been afraid of one thing: bears–Alaskan bears in particular.

Ok, two things. My driving and bears. My driving isn’t horrible, and I swear, outside of the zoo, there are no bears in Houston.

Fishing finally got to her. She fishes, and if you fish, Alaska is the very thing. If I listed places I’d like to fly fish, New Zealand, Scotland, Cuba, Mongolia, Montana, Christmas Island, Norway, Chile, Iceland, the Seychelles, British Columbia, Nebraska, the Amazon . . . Ok, maybe not Nebraska. Anyway, it would be a long list, but Alaska would be at the very top. Unlike the lower 48, there are still good salmon runs in Alaska. There are still large numbers of steelhead. We haven’t yet blown it in Alaska, though that’s not without trying. The trout are not dinky little 14-inchers daintily sipping mayflies from a mountain stream. The trout are 28-inch monsters gorging on the rotting flesh of dying salmon.

There are five species of salmon in Alaska, plus sea-run steelhead trout. To plan our trip, we started from when a species of salmon would be in a river. Ok, we started from restaurant quality and when a species of salmon would be in a river. We picked a river, the Kanektok, where all five salmon species have a summer run from the Bering Sea. First, beginning in June and running through mid-July, are king salmon. King’s are the largest Pacific salmon, weighing up to 40 pounds (though they’re protected in some rivers, and can’t be killed in the Kanektok). Sockeye and chum salmon overlap the king season. Pinks have the shortest run, for a couple of weeks in late July. Silvers begin in August and run through September.

We’ll be on the Kanektok for king season, and also the sockeye and chum. There will also be rainbow trout, arctic char, and dolly varden. Dolly Varden, by the way, are the only fish named after a Dickens character.

When salmon enter the river from the sea they are bright and silver, and then as they move into freshwater their colors change for spawning. They spawn and die, and don’t return to the sea, and they don’t feed as they move upriver. They strike flies out of annoyance, or habit, or maybe curiosity, but not for food. By the time they spawn they are dying, deteriorating, and in the short summer feeding season the trout grow huge on eggs washed out of the spawning gravel and the flesh of decaying salmon. Everything feeds on the salmon, both live salmon and dead. Birds, other fish, bears, Alaskans. . . . There are bears in Alaska, but the usual wisdom is that the bears are too intent on fish to be interested in Texans, even plump, well-fed Texans. That’s the usual wisdom, anyway. I’m kinda counting on it.

The State of Alaska warns of two hazards on the Kanektok River: bears and bugs. Don’t tell Kris about the bears.