Michigan’s Au Sable River has been a fly-fishing destination for a century or so, and Gates Au Sable Lodge was built on the Au Sable in 1970, so it’s a bit more than a half-century old. People go to the Au Sable to fish, or maybe when it starts to get cold they go there to hunt, but I’m not aware that there’s anything else that’s much of a draw. It’s not well-known for spa treatments.
The Lodge is a classic. When Gates Au Sable Lodge opened in 1970, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” was the number one song. The Beatles released Let It Be in 1970, then they broke up the same year. I was a high school freshman. That’s old.
The fish we caught in the Au Sable weren’t big, most were only seven or eight inches, but they were very pretty and both of us caught a few larger rainbows. Ok, Kris caught two larger rainbows and I caught one, but who’s counting? In any case we caught a lot of fish. Michigan guides have to report fish counts to the state, so for once we kept count. Between us we caught 27 trout the first day and 15 the second half-day, more or less. Still, that’s a lot of fish, and on each day we each caught exactly the same number of fish, more or less.
The Au Sable was originally a grayling river, then the grayling died off from over-fishing and logging and were replaced by stocked trout. There’s no longer any stocking in the Au Sable, so even if today’s trout aren’t native, all of the trout are wild. We each caught brook trout, rainbows, and browns, so we each had an Au Sable slam. I guess the size of most of the fish made them more of petite slams than grand.
Our guide, Lance Nelson, guides for Gates Lodge. He had us fish a nymph dropper beneath a surface dry fly with 7x tippet, but we didn’t fish out of Au Sable boats. They’re pirogues adapted for Michigan lumbering by Louisiana lumbermen, and then re-adapted for fly fishing. Instead of being rowed or paddled they’re poled like a pirogue. The guide poles from the back seat, and the anglers sit in the middle and the front. Lance says he owns one, but that they’re not much fun for two anglers. The second angler in the center of the boat is pretty restricted, and sitting in the center makes it hard for that angler to fish.
I’m sure Kris wouldn’t have minded sitting in the center. And that varnished wood is very pretty
We fished out of a standard fiberglass drift boat, with the guide in the center and me in the worst seat regardless of where I was sitting. Kris caught more fish than me, though I’m certain we caught exactly the same number.
The 7x tippet deserves at least a passing glance. The leader goes between the fly line and the fly, and the tippet is the last bit of the leader that ties to the fly. Normally a trout guide would use 4x tippet for nymphs underwater, and 5x for dry flies on the surface. As far as I know, until the Au Sable, I had never fished with 7x tippet. It must have worked, because we caught a lot of fish. We each caught exactly the same number of fish, or maybe I caught a few more.
The leader, including the tippet, is usually about nine feet long. It gets progressively smaller from the fly line to the fly, so where it attaches to the fly line a trout leader might be 20 lb. test, and where the tippet ties to the fly it might be 4 or 5 lbs. For bass and redfish I normally fish about 16 lb. tippet, which is big stuff, but neither bass nor redfish are tippet shy. In very clear slow water trout can be very shy, and 7x tippet, which is about as fine as a fine hair, is intended for the shyest of trout. The 7x fluorocarbon is typically about 2 lb. test.
I don’t own any 7x tippet, and I don’t want to.
Michigan was our 42nd state to fish, so I ought by now to be better at describing things, but every place is different, and I really haven’t been unhappy anywhere. Still, fishing in Michigan made me very happy. Traveling state to state we’ve encountered places that surprised me, and places that were hard. We’ve fished places that met expectations, and places that inspired awe. Michigan wasn’t exactly any of those. We were in the Northwoods on an approachable river with a good guide at a good lodge and we caught fish. The leaves there were beginning to change, and the brookies were beginning to put on their spawning colors. Can something be a memory when you haven’t done it before? It wasn’t déjà vu, but more like Plato and that cave. It was like glimpsing the archetype of what fishing is supposed to be. Quiet, contemplative, friendly, a bit technical but not too technical. There was nothing between us and what God had made.
I could fish that river again and again and be happy.
The best thing ever written about fishing, Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, is set in Michigan. There are two paragraphs at the start of the story that I re-read often. Do high school students still read Big Two-Hearted River, or is it dated, something for old men to remember from when they were young? I loved it 50 years ago in high school, I’ve loved it when I’ve read it since, though when I first read it I suspect I was more interested in how the tarp was pitched than in Nick Adams’s post-war trauma.
Nick looked at the burned-out stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log piles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.
He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.
I understood though, even at 16, why fishing the swamp would be left for another day. It’s not a difficult story, it’s simple and direct, but it’s very beautiful.
So because of a short story I’ve saved Michigan until close to the end of our project. In Michigan I want to find a bridge and look down into the river. I want to look for fish holding in the current. If I’m lucky enough to see any trout I want to watch as they feed.
Geographyand Grayling
The lower Michigan peninsula is shaped like a mitten, which everybody knows, but that’s not the amazing thing about Michigan geography. The amazing thing about Michigan geography is that it’s mostly bordered by freshwater, by four of the five great lakes, from left to right, Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie. It has the longest freshwater boundary of any state, and has the highest percentage of area covered by water of all of the states. It is second only to Alaska for total water area.
Waterways and lakes of Michigan, https://gisgeography.com/michigan-lakes-rivers-map/.
The upper Michigan peninsula, the U.P., juts out into Lakes Superior and Michigan from northeast Wisconsin, and is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the narrow strait of Mackinac. If life were fair and rational the U.P. would be part of Wisconsin, but Michigan got it because of its southern border. Do you see that protrusion in the south? Michigan claims that its southern border should have been drawn further south. When Ohio became a state in 1803, Michigan was still a territory with no votes in Congress, and by political fiat Congress gave Toledo to Ohio over Michigan’s objections. Relations got pretty testy between inhabitants of the two states, and to calm things down Congress gave Michigan the Upper Peninsula. Michigan didn’t like it, but, honestly, it got the better deal.
I don’t think Wisconsin got anything, but it still ended up with all the good cheese.
Northern Michigan is heavily forested, and early Michigan fortunes were made in timber. The native fish of Northern Michigan was the grayling, a char that needs cold clean water and can be found now in Canada and Alaska. Logging killed off Michigan’s native grayling. It also damaged the native brook trout populations, which were the trout that Hemingway likely described. Streams were restocked with browns and rainbow trout from Europe and the Pacific Northwest, and with more brook trout. We’ll fish near the City of Grayling, population 1,917, in the center of the Lower Peninsula. In Grayling there are no longer any grayling.
Arctic Grayling, Evermann, Barton W., and Goldsborough, Edmund Lee, The Fishes of Alaska (1907), Washington D.C., Department of Commerce and Labor Bureau of Fisheries.
We’ll fish the Au Sable River. There is a different Au Sable River in New York, which is also a fly fishing river. They are pronounced differently, but according to any random Frenchman, both American pronunciations are wrong. I can’t remember how to pronounce the name of either the Michigan or the New York river, but in French it would be pronounced something like oh Sah-bleh. That’s the only one I’m reasonably sure of.
As logging slowed, Michigan’s south was already selling Fords and Olds and Cadillacs. With mass production of cars, Michigan changed how we do everything, and by the 1920s, Detroit was the center of the automobile universe. It was the fourth largest U.S. city (and home of one of my favorite baseball players, Hank Greenberg). Grayling was visited by the likes of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, but to fish, not to cut timber.
Frank Lyeria, Hank Greenberg, the Hebrew Hammer, 1946, The Sporting News archives.
Michigan geology divides more or less into two parts, the U.P. and the Lower Peninsula. There are the Huron Mountains in the far northwest U.P., the highest peak of which, Mount Arvon, is 1,979 feet. It’s the highest peak in Michigan. Other than the Hurons, Michigan is pretty flat. Actually, even with the Hurons it’s pretty flat.
Both peninsulas are mostly bedrock covered with glacial drift. Apparently there are different ages of bedrock, and the older it gets the better it is for mining, and the oldest and the best mining is in the U.P., so take that, Toledo. The glacial remains have a good bit of variation, but regardless one typically doesn’t go to Michigan to see the rocks. When comparing topography shaped by glaciers and topography shaped by continental plate collisions, go for the collisions every time. That means if you want to look at rocks, go to Utah not Michigan.
Politics
In 2016, with 63% turnout, Donald Trump carried Michigan by about 9,000 votes, 2,279,543 to 2,268,839. In 2020, with 73% turnout, Joe Biden carried Michigan by about 150,000 votes, 2,804,040 to 2,649,852. It’s about 60 days until the 2024 election. According to the New York Times, current polling averages show Kamala Harris leading in Michigan 48% to 47%, and that’s almost certainly well within the margins of error for the underlying polls. If Harris carries Michigan and Wisconsin (where polling is running about the same), she would likely need only one additional marginal state, North Carolina, Georgia, or Pennsylvania, to carry the election. On the flip side, if Trump manages to carry Michigan, then like as not Harris has lost.
It’ll be kinda fun to be out of Texas and into a state where there’s actual electioneering going on.
From Wikipedia, Michigan State Legislature.
I check the polling about every three minutes, so if anything changes I’ll let you know.
Michigan’s governor is Democratic, as are both of its senators, seven of its 13 members of congress, and both houses of its state legislature (in each case by two-vote margins). It’s a tight squeeze for the Democrats. Its governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was considered as a possible running mate for Kamala Harris.
There is also a U.S. Senate race in progress in Michigan, where the incumbent, Democrat Debbie Stabenow, is unexpectedly retiring. According to polling, the Democratic candidate, Elissa Slotkin, leads the Republican Mike Rogers in the polls.
Population
There are 10,077,331 people in Michigan as of the 2020 census. About 18% of population claims German ancestry, 11% English. About 62% of the population is Anglo, 12.4% Black alone, 18.7% Hispanic, and 6% Asian. Ten percent of the population reports as two or more races. The population is heavily concentrated in the south.
Michigan was part of the Ohio Territory and was admitted as a state in 1837. It didn’t grow as early or as quickly as neighboring Ohio, but once it did start adding population, it piled it on. In 1870, the population was 1,184,059. By 1910 it was 2,810,173, so in 40 years its population more than doubled. Between 1910 and 1920, Michigan grew by 30.5%, to 3,668,412, and between 1920 and 1930 it grew another 32%, to 4,842,325. You can almost see the cars pour into America out of Detroit and Flint.
Then Michigan growth slowed. Because of the loss of industrial jobs, Detroit went from the nation’s fourth largest city to a cautionary tale of white flight, high crime, and unemployment. In 1967 there were the Detroit riots. In 1971, there were more than 600 homicides in Detroit. Between 1971 and 1973, there were 84 killings by police. It was the Wild West. When I came to Houston in the 1980s, there was constant patter about the number of Michigan license plates on the streets. It was the age of Robocop and Roger & Me. Detroit was declining. Houston was on a tear.
In the 2010 census Michigan actually lost population.
Phil Cherner, Detroit, Michigan, 1967, www.philcherner.com, by permission. Thanks Phil.
By 2013, Detroit’s population had dropped from 1.8 million in 1950 to 700,000. Detroit was broke, violent, unemployed, bleeding all but its poorest population, and in 2013 it filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history.
As late as 2018 Detroit had the fourth highest murder rate among major cities, but it’s improved in recent years. In 2023 Detroit had its lowest number of homicides since 1966, with 252. Houston had 348. It’s finances seem under control, and it has invested in its central city. Violent crime is still high, with 2,028 violent crimes–murder, rape, robbery, assault–per 100,000 people, compared to a national average in 2023 of 369 per 100,000. Based on its violent crime rate, Detroit remains the second most dangerous city in the U.S., second only to Memphis and ahead of Little Rock, Arkansas.
I’m excited to see Detroit. We’re staying downtown in the new Shinola Hotel. The downtown architecture is terrific, and the Institute of Art is supposed to be among the world’s best museums. Municipal services like street lights and garbage pick-up have been restored, plus the Tigers have always had the classiest uniforms in baseball.
Where We Won’t Go
We won’t see Mackinac Island, or Traverse City. We won’t visit the U.P. , or drive through the U.P. to Wisconsin. We won’t visit Holland, Michigan, where my parents bought my sister a pair of wooden shoes when I was one. The shoes were very uncomfortable, and I learned early that I was not cut out to be Dutch.
We won’t see the Detroit Tigers play, because they’ll be on the road. We will not make it to the Motown Museum because it’s closed on the days we’ll be in Detroit. I do promise, however, to hum “Baby Love” at least once an hour, and largely because of Motown my Michigan music playlist is magnificent.
Chris Butcher, Hitsville USA, 2006, public domain.
We’re going to Ohio and Michigan next week. Of our nine remaining states, I’ve never been to Ohio, Michigan, or South Dakota. Actually, I have been to Michigan, but I was only one. Sentience should matter, even in an election year.
Kris went to Ohio in May to birdwatch, to Magee Marsh. That’s a famous place for birdwatchers because of warblers, which are small, brightly colored, migratory, and hard to see. In a weird distortion of anglers’ obsession with the biggest fish, birders are often obsessed with the smallest birds.
On their way to Canada, Yucatan warblers will land–fall–in Galveston for a few hours after crossing 600 miles over the Gulf of Mexico. During the spring warbler season Kris will drive to Galveston almost daily to see if there’s a warbler fall, and when she doesn’t go to Galveston she’ll likely go to the Rice campus to see if there are birds there. Ohio’s Magee Marsh in the spring is another famous warbler resting spot, and they stage there before crossing Lake Erie to their summer grounds in Canada.
Birders stage there too.
Prothonotary warbler, Magee Marsh.
In the first half of the 19th century, lots of people staged in Ohio. The Old Northwest territory, what we’d now call the upper midwest, was our testing ground. In the Old Northwest we–and that’s the American We–finalized how we would deal with Native Americans, and it was in Ohio that we first forbade slavery in a new state constitution. If I recall correctly, the Ohio constitution also forbade new black immigrants after statehood, and our native American policy became beat ’em up and move ’em out, so we may not have worked things out to everyone’s satisfaction. Still, history is what it is, and our ancestors rarely batted much better than .260.
The one thing without doubt that we got right in Ohio was surveys. Modern grid surveys were developed in Ohio. Before Ohio, surveys were random affairs that followed natural features, and may or may not have overlapped prior surveys. After Ohio, surveys were standardized into grids comprised of townships, sections, and acres. It became the standard survey configuration for western expansion.
1826 Survey Map, Ohio’s Western Reserve.
Gridded Ohio was a settlement magnet. In 1800, three years before statehood, Ohio had 45,365 residents. Ten years later its population had boomed (quintupled?) to 230,760. By 1820 it was over half a million. By 1850 there were nearly 2 million Ohioans. It continued to grow significantly each decade until the 1960s when its population growth flattened. It is still the seventh largest state with 11,785,935 residents.
Ohio was originally settled in three regions, with Southerners from Kentucky and Virginia concentrated along the southern border, and Yankees from New York and Massachusetts in northeast Ohio around what would be Cleveland. Everybody else apparently settled everyplace else.
Agricultural goods from Ohio were originally blocked from Eastern US markets by the Appalachians, but in 1825 the state issued bonds to build the Ohio and Erie Canal. The Canal opened Eastern markets for Ohio farmers through Lake Erie. The construction of the canal spurred both agriculture and industrialization.
The canal was quickly replaced by railroads, and Ohio became a railroad hub. Again, it was agricultural markets that drove the growth, but there was iron and coal available, and in support of railroad construction Ohio became an iron and steel producer. It produced rails and it produced agricultural implements. In early Ohio the two economies always seem to have moved together, farming and industry, in a combination that I guess always exists but rarely so blatantly. Ohioans didn’t just raise cattle, they tanned the hides. If Ohioans had raised cotton, they would have woven cotton cloth.
Canal Boat, Ohio and Erie Canal, 1880, National Park Service.
Booming Ohio produced at least seven major Union generals, Sheridan, Sherman, Custer, Garfield, McClellan, Rosecrans, and, of course, Grant. 313,180 Ohioans served in the Union army in the Civil War, third most after New York and Pennsylvania.
Between 1841 and 1923, Ohio produced eight U.S. Presidents: William Henry Harrison, U.S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Taft, and Warren G. Harding. Two of the presidents, William Henry Harrison and Warren G. Harding, died of illness while in office. Two, Garfield and McKinley, were assassinated. In 1910, Taft was the first president to throw out a first pitch at a major league baseball game.
Ulysses Grant at Cold Harbor, 1864, Library of Congress.
U.S. Grant’s father worked in a tannery, as did John Brown’s father. As a young man Grant’s father lived with the Browns for two years, and Ulysses recalled that his father admired the Brown family’s commitment to abolition.
I admire Grant, and his reputation has gone through another revision in recent decades, largely because of Ron Chernow but others as well. I particularly like the Grant biography by Ronald White, American Ulysses. In the decades immediately following the Civil War and his presidency, Grant was ranked in the popular mind with Washington and Lincoln as one of the nation’s saviors, but then stuff happened. Grant came to be seen as a poor president and a second-rate general.
Personally, I think that Grant’s denigration ties back to the nation’s exhaustion at the end of Reconstruction and the conciliatory post-Reconstruction glorification of Robert E. Lee. In the popular mind if Grant was great, then Lee was not great. Lee was suddenly perceived as the better general, the nobler man, and Grant was seen as having done what anybody could have done and a failure as president. He was in the right place at the right time, but it was Grant who figured out how to destroy the Southern armies, and then had the nerve to carry it out. It was Grant who came closest to leading us through Reconstruction, and its failure wasn’t his, it was ours.
He was also a good man.
Julia Dent Grant, 1854.
He was a fine writer, and his autobiography, written at the urging of Mark Twain as Grant was dying of throat cancer, should be required reading. He produced a passel of great quotes, but one of my favorites was recorded by his wife, Julia, who had crossed eyes. She thought that she should have them surgically corrected, but in the 1860s it would have been an experimental and possibly dangerous procedure. She thought though that Grant as a public figure would be ashamed of her defect, and that she should take the risk.
Grant’s response, as recorded by Julia, “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with those same eyes? I like them just as they are . . . I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.”
What a sweet thing to say, and with Grant it is completely in character.
After the Civil War Ohio industry expanded beyond its agriculture roots. Steel was forged in Ohio. Along with Michigan, cars were made in Ohio, and car parts were made in Ohio. Tires came from Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, or General, all of which were Ohio companies. Appliances were made in Ohio, and KitchenAid, Amana, and VitaMix still manufacture in Ohio.
After California and Texas, Ohio remains the third largest manufacturing state economy, but manufacturing growth is flat. During the 70s traditional industrial jobs declined in Ohio (as they did in Michigan and Indiana), and beginning in the 90s it suffered China shock. Tariffs have not increased American manufacturing jobs, and the new jobs that are created tend to favor the college-educated, where Ohioans lag. Traditional manufacturing wages also lag behind inflation. It’s a rough world out there, and the Upper Midwest has suffered.
Geography and Weather
North of Ohio is Lake Erie on the east and Michigan on the west. Due west of Ohio is Indiana. To the southeast is West Virginia, née Virginia, and to the south is Kentucky, both bordered by the Ohio River. Southern settlers from Kentucky and Virginia came early and often–JD Vance’s Kentucky family is nothing new. To the east is Pennsylvania, and settlers from the northeast got to Ohio through Pennsylvania.
There are lots of Ohio rivers and streams, and 15 Ohio rivers are designated scenic or wild and scenic rivers. In the northern third of the state the rivers generally flow north into Lake Erie. The southern rivers generally flow south into the Ohio, and then into the Mississippi.
Ohio has some beaches on Lake Erie, and of course it has Magee Marsh, but mostly Ohio is flat or rolling plains. Ranked by elevation change, Ohio is our ninth flattest state, with a low elevation of 455 feet and a high of 1,548 feet. By elevation change Ohio is flatter than Kansas.
From north to south, east to west, weather varies across the state, but not much, and precipitation stays pretty equally spread from month to month, place to place. There ain’t no annual monsoons. The heaviest average precipitation is in May, three inches in Cleveland and four in Cincinnati. It rains least in January, but in January in Ohio it snows.
In July there’s a pretty good chance of muggy conditions. Average highs in July are in the mid- to low 80s, and lows in January are in the low 20s. It’s cold in Ohio in winter, but at least to this Houstonian it seems to be relatively mild in summer.
Population
From 1810 until 1860, Ohio grew by 913%, from 230,760 to 2,108,751. From 1860 to 1960 it grew by another 314%, to 9,706,397. It continues to grow, if not so fast, and its current population is 11,799,448.
Population is widely distributed, with concentrated urban areas interspersed across the state among relatively rural areas. The urban concentrations make Ohio the 10th densest state, with 282.3 people per square mile.
JimIrwin, 2020 Ohio population density map, Wikimedia Commons.
It’s an ethnically diverse state, with 61% Anglo, 12% black alone, 19% hispanic, and 6% Asian. Ten percent of Ohioans are two or more races.
Politics
Ohioans are politically a wee bit schizoid, though currently they are solidly Republican, and Donald Trump is projected to carry Ohio easily. In the last two presidential elections, Ohioans voted for Donald Trump, in 2020, 53.27% for Trump to 45.24% for Biden, and in 2016, 51.31% for Trump to 43.24% for Hillary Clinton. On the flip side, in both 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama carried Ohio. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the 2020 and 2016 elections in Ohio is the increased turnout: in 2016 turnout was a weary 66.48%, but in 2020 it increased to 74%. As these things go, 74% is massive turnout.
We will be there in the middle of the 2024 election season, but just like Texas I don’t expect there to be any serious presidential electioneering going on (unlike Michigan, which is an important swing state). There is a US senate race happening, with the Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in a race with the Trump-supported Bernie Moreno. Brown is considered vulnerable, but the current polling shows Brown with a comfortable lead of 4-6%.
Ohio state legislature, 2024, from Wikipedia.
All of the statewide elected officials in Ohio are Republican, and both the state house and senate are heavily Republican. Ohio voters have approved a state constitutional amendment protecting access to abortion, though it’s not clear whether Republican courts will enforce it. Like I said, Ohio is politically a wee bit schizoid.
Fish
Ohio has a lot of rivers and streams, and of course it has Lake Erie. The original gamefish of the Great Lakes was the lake trout, but when canals opened the Great Lakes to the Atlantic a combination of overfishing and invasive sea lamprey wiped out all but remnants of the lake trout populations.
Hudson, Charles B., Lake Trout, Review of the Salmonid Fishes of the Great Lakes, Bulletin of the Bureau of Fisheries, 1911, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, from the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.
Like salmon, sea lamprey move into freshwater streams to spawn, and were finally brought under control beginning in 1958 by the application of Lampricide in their natal streams. By the 1980s though merchant ships had dumped zebra and quagga mussels into the lakes with released ballast water. The invasive mussels took over, severely damaging the food chain. Then blue crabs started eating the mussels (as did endangered lake sturgeon). I have no idea where the blue crabs came from, but the mussels are at least now somewhat controlled by natural predators, and there are serious recovery efforts for lake trout throughout the Great Lakes.
Meanwhile fish and game folk discovered Pacific steelhead as a replacement gamefish for the lake trout. I gather that the steelhead populations are not self-reproducing, and that there’s massive stocking every year, but from New York to Illinois the internal clocks of the stocked steelhead decide each winter that it’s time to head out of the Great Lakes and up the local rivers to spawn. Spawning steelhead being a great gamefish, it is a flyfishing bonanza. My inner Puritan however is dubious about fishing for a non-native stocked fish that doesn’t really belong where I’d be fishing.
So out of pure perversity that’s not what we’re doing.
Ohio being in the native range of smallmouth, that’s what we’ll fish for, with a guide from Mad River Outfitters in Columbus. We’ve also fished for smallmouth in Virginia, in the Shenandoah (where smallmouth are not native), in Illinois near Chicago, and in Indiana. I’m always excited to fish for black bass of any kind, but mostly I hope to see no lamprey, sea or otherwise. That’s one hideous animal, and I’m supportive of mass application of Lampricide.
Small-Mouth Black Bass, New York Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests, Fifth Annual Report, 1900, Albany, New York, James B. Lyon, from the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.
I took a rod that was way too big for what I caught. Besides that I tied some 9 foot 3x trout leaders. I tied a lot of flies, including some almost perfect wooly buggers, which only took 30 years to accomplish. I also tied some Clouser minnows that I never used. My fly selection was fine, and really, for what I caught in North Dakota, they don’t make a rod that small.
Hotel
We stayed in downtown Fargo, in the Hotel Donaldson. The Donaldson is small, it only has 16 rooms, but its rooftop is a good place to sit in the evening, and downtown Fargo is a surprisingly lively place. It has a restored movie theater, and some good restaurants and coffee shops. It has stores. Where else can you find a downtown with stores?
There are more street people than one would expect, but it seems reasonably safe. I did have to skirt a couple of bodies on the way past the city library, but I think they were only sleeping.
Because we were downtown we drove a lot to look for fish. Over two days we put 450 miles on the rental car.
Donuts
There are three Sandy’s Donut shops in Fargo, though the one downtown isn’t open on Monday. They were oddly expensive, but they had a wide selection, and when you walked through the door the girl at the counter said “Can I help ya?” in a thick North Dakotan accent. Unlike, say, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, I wouldn’t go back to Fargo just for the donuts, but they made for a healthy pre-fishing breakfast.
Restaurants
Notwithstanding the one awful hamburger in Valley City, food in North Dakota was pretty good. My friend and former law partner Brian said that when he was litigating in North Dakota during the fracking boom he ate walleye at every meal, including breakfast, and that it became his favorite fish. To find walleye on a menu we had to go to East Grand Forks, Minnesota, to the Blue Moose Bar and Grill. It was good, and if I ever go back to North Dakota I’ll get North Dakota restaurant suggestions from Brian. Weirdly, in Minnesota they served the walleye without tartar sauce. Tartar sauce may be too picant for Minnesotans.
Back in Fargo, we went across the river to Moorhead, to the oldest existing Dairy Queen franchise. As a Texan, I was surprised that Dairy Queens exist anyplace but Texas. I was stunned that Dairy Queens actually originated in Minnesota, and that per capita the highest concentration of Dairy Queens is in Minnesota, not Texas. The Moorehead Dairy Queen franchise agreement dates from the 1940s, and they have strange things on the menu that newer agreements don’t allow. They have, for instance, the favorite of my childhood, cherry dip cones.
There’s no seating inside the Moorehead Dairy Queen, but there’s a big seating area on the patio. My guess is that it gets cold on that patio in winter. I had the cherry-dipped Dilly Bar because (1) cherry dip and (2) the Moorehead Dairy Queen invented the Dilly Bar. Kris had a chocolate dip cone.
Now if I could just find a K&N Root Beer Stand.
When we got to the DQ there was one youngish couple. By the time we left, the patio was packed with old people. I suspect they heard I was there.
I had read something on the internet about Fargo’s best knoephla soup. Knoephla is a German potato/dumpling soup that’s ideal for Fargo winters. According to the internet, the best knoephla was at Wurst Bier Hall, where the menu featured (1) various kinds of wurst, (2) braised cabbage, (3) knoephla soup, (4) spoetzle dumplings, and (5) beer.
There were four kinds of mustard to go with your choice of wurst.
The second placed knoephla was at Luna Fargo, which was high end in a low-key sort of way. It tended more to wine drinking than beer, and there was no knoephla soup on the menu the night we went. There was a pickle appetizer plate which seemed properly North Dakotan, and the pickled watermelon rind was brilliant.
Our last night in Fargo we ate at Mezaluna. We could walk there from our hotel. It’s the kind of place where one orders martinis, and I did. The fish was very good.
Where We Didn’t Go
We didn’t go to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park to see the Badlands. I would go back to North Dakota to see the Park, but not to fish.
Playlist
If Utah is cursed by the Osmonds, North Dakota is cursed by Lawrence Welk. The guy started recording in the 30s, and it’s brutal that he never stopped.
There’s also Peggy Lee, but you can only listen to “Fever” so many times. Kris asked why there was so much Lynne Anderson on the play list. I like Lynne Anderson well enough but I thought it was obvious that there weren’t a lot of other choices.
Famous Actors
We stopped by the Fargo-Moorehead Visitors Center to pick up a highway map and to visit again with North Dakota’s most famous actor. He’s still there, still as handsome as ever, and he’s still autographed by the Coen Bros.
It’s too bad there’s not an Oscar for best portrayal of a wood chipper.
Guitar
I didn’t take one. I felt guilty about not practicing, and I may need to make some money busking before this is over, but it was liberating not having to haul it through the airport.
