Fishing for stream trout pushed my pleasure button at an early age. On opening day, I’d hike a mile in spring hailstorms, crawl under barbed-wire fences, and sidestep pasture bulls to be first on a stream. The germinating experience opened the gates to a lifelong addiction to fishing.

Nowadays I’m more likely to wait for the spring runoff to abate before I venture forth with a fly rod in hand. But once that familiar deep-seated compulsion takes hold, there’s no looking back until trout season closes in late fall. I admit it. I am an addict.

As the story goes, my family vacationed twice each year on the central Oregon Coast. All seven of us family members crammed into an aged Mercury station wagon for the mind-numbing eight-hour drive from home. Salty breezes cleared my sinuses, the sight of sea lions basking in the surf entertained, and the constant motion of waves settled my attention-deficit brain.

But what grabbed my attention was the staccato bite of redtail surfperch, the bend in my fiberglass rod following a successful hookset, and the sight of dinner flopping where packed sand met the sea. My angling world opened up to new possibilities. Stage two of addiction?

Steelhead became a habit after I landed my first sea-going rainbow from the Walla Walla River at age 16. The unrelenting pull of steelies followed me to college, where I chased winter-runs on the Alsea River and “half-pounders” on the Rogue River.

As a fisheries technician in the Hanford Reach of the Columbia River, I deployed electroshock gear and gill nets that showed me where migrating summer steelhead traveled. Later adventures took me and my two-handed Spey rod to the Grande Ronde, Clearwater and Deschutes rivers.

About this time every year, steelhead migrate into nearby Blue Mountain streams, where they hold over until spawning time. Lately, Nancy has caught me obsessing on predictions of precipitation and stream flow. This salient information surfaces in my nighttime dreaming, jolts me awake, and guides me to the nearest steelhead stream when conditions are favorable.

Plotting and scheming are signs of a nefarious disorder. Cover-ups also come into play. You might lie to loved ones and friends about where you are going and how long you will be gone. Although I’ve heard said that it’s not lying if your compulsion contains an element of truth.

Perhaps the most telling sign of an addiction is the inability to quit. I could easily argue, why stop when the fishing is good?

Consider my passion for spring-run chinook salmon, a fish that stimulates the brain’s reward system like no other. Angling adventures in the lower Umatilla River began when a pandering friend sketched a map to show me where to cast. Few greater thrills equate to hooking a 12-pound salmon in skinny water.

Deception, cover-up and hyperbole — known symptoms of addiction— accompanied several years of morning combat fishing. Although I take a more casual approach nowadays, my dependency on springers reappears with every successful trip.

The recent resurgence of sockeye salmon runs in the upper Columbia River provides an example of how opportunity led to addictive behavior in my golden years. Each year, once the bloom of daffodil fades, I fixate on daily passage counts of sockeye at McNary Dam. Their attraction is more ruinous than a container of Almond Roca left open on the kitchen counter.

From mid-June to mid-July, you will find me anchored along the Hanford Reach shoreline, sweltering in triple-digit heat for the chance at the slashing strike of a mint-bright sockeye. If I hook one sockeye, I must hook two because the odds are I lost the first one at the net. Dodgers and custom-tied spinners are not stowed away until the run moves upriver and the source of my addiction has been removed.

It’s common to hear a steelhead fly fisher admit, “the tug is the drug.” The sight of a trolling rod bending to the violent strike of a chinook salmon might send a burst of dopamine to the brain of other anglers. The monkey on my back is — and always will be — stream trout and the places they represent.

No matter what fish gets your jollies, temptation lurks in the depths of regional waterways. The challenge is how to reduce the amount of emotional damage incurred during periods of angling withdrawal. Don’t take my word for it, but switching from one species of fish to another can keep the buzz going year-round.

Each year, once the bloom of daffodil fades, I fixate on daily passage counts of sockeye at McNary Dam. Their attraction is more ruinous than a container of Almond Roca left open on the kitchen counter.