Duluth, Minn. ? An old friend from California checked in on Wednesday, three days before Saturday’s opening of steelhead fishing on Wisconsin’s legendary Brule River.

My friend had grown up in Proctor, Minn., and fished the Brule as a youth. He moved to California several years ago, but at this time of year, the Brule is still on his mind.

“I probably lost more trout than I caught, and some weekends we were skunked,” he wrote in his e-mail, “but just being on that river gave me the same spiritual experience that I get now when I’m backpacking on the Sierra crest.

Most anglers don’t talk about the spiritual aspects of fishing the Brule, but few would deny that they are a part of the experience.

It is difficult to say what it is about the Brule  or the Sierra Nevadas or a hundred other wild places  that puts us under such a powerful spell. Silence? Moving water? Old trees? The iridescence of a rainbow trout? We each have to come up with our own answers.

The other part of my friend’s note that I found fascinating is how he came to be a fisher of the Brule.

“When I was 10 years old, I began fishing the Brule after reading an article in the 1966 Outdoor Life magazine called ‘Trophy Browns of the Brule,”‘ he wrote.

It is always remarkable to me how lives have been steered along certain paths because of something we read or experienced at an impressionable age.

Will Steger, the Ely polar adventurer, says his yearning for remote places grew from reading National Geographic magazines as a child.

I know several serious birders whose passion for birding grew from a single avian observation made in their youth.

I’m not sure what it is about those clarion moments in our youth that have such a profound influence on us. Perhaps it’s because at that tender age, we are open to any possibilities. We happen onto something that resonates in our souls, and we see no reason not to pursue the dream.

Steger and his brother took a tiny motorboat down the Mississippi when he was just 15. My friend from California and a couple of his buddies headed for the Brule.

It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of being exposed to new ideas, new places, new experiences at a time in our lives when our horizons are limitless.

My friend is now far from the Brule, but a part of him remains there. He told me about tying spawn bags at his kitchen table the night before those steelhead openers (“cutting up mom’s nylons”), about fishing in near-blizzard conditions, about watching big female rainbows suspended over gravel bars.

“I’ll be thinking about that river on Saturday,” he said.