Oops.
Our next trip was going to be late June to New York/Vermont/New Hampshire to fish for trout. Now look what’s happened. I realized we had a Memorial Day Holiday, and that we could spend a long weekend in Wichita, Kansas.
On Southwest there’s one direct flight a day to Wichita, and it’s at 6 am. The other flight has a layover in Phoenix, and would take slightly longer than the three day weekend. There are on the other hand about a thousand flights a day from Houston, an oil town, to Tulsa, an oil town, and Tulsa is only a two hour drive from Wichita. Flying though we won’t have a canoe, so we’re stuck to walking the banks once we get there. I certainly do that often enough, but in a strange place you never know what you’ll find. Snakes, the beginning of mystery novels where the corpse is discovered, but most of all trees and brush and high banks and deep, unfathomable or worse unfishable water.
There are plenty of kinds of fish in Kansas: channel cats, largemouths, stripers, wipers (oh Lord, why couldn’t someone come up with a better name?), bluegill, white bass, northern pike, stocked trout, and that glamour girl of glamour girls, carp. Any of those can be taken with a fly, and at one time or another I’ve caught all but the white stripe hybrids (there, better) and pike. We don’t allow northern pike in Texas. But I have been skunked before, and I’m terrified of not catching a Kansas fish.
I’ve been to Kansas twice before. Once was long ago, and I don’t remember much except for someone saying look, we’re in the Flint Hills. The other was a recent trip to Kansas City to see the Astros play the Royals at Kauffman Stadium. Kauffman is a mid-century modern masterpiece, and one of MLB’s prettiest baseball stadiums. There are other things worth seeing in Kansas City as well: the National WWI Museum, the American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum at 18th and Vine, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the magnificent American, a restaurant in Crown Center. Unfortunately the American is now permanently closed. Too bad, too, because Kansas City barbecue sucks.
But of course everything in Kansas City seems actually to be in Missouri. Even Kansas City, Kansas, actually seems to be in Missouri. So this time we’re going to Wichita, where there’s no danger of stepping over any nearby state line. I guess we’ll get to Kansas and start driving around with a road atlas (that’s a kind of paper Google maps for any younger reader) and Google Earth in hand.
If you look at a map of Kansas, it’s veined with rivers and dotted with reservoirs. There’s a lot of conventional tackle fishing on large Kansas reservoirs–we’re talking tens of thousands of acres of big reservoirs and even natural lakes. Of its 87,000 square miles, 459 squire miles of Kansas is covered with water. But fishing the bigger reservoirs without a boat or even a ladder is hard with a fly rod, as are the bigger rivers–there’s both the Arkansas (which must give Kansans fits pronouncing) and the Missouri, and lots of tributaries to both.
There are lots of smaller waters though: Park lakes, creeks, small rivers, natural ponds and ponds left from mining of coal and sand. I would even bet that Kansas has farm ponds, and that driving down a road you can knock on a door and spend an hour fishing. I can catch fish on a farm ponds, and that really seems the right color of fish for Kansas.
We’ll find something, surely, or we’ll go back to Kansas again. Kauffman Stadium is beautiful, and it couldn’t get better than watching the Astros play the Royals in Kauffman on a spring day, even if I had to eat more Kansas City barbecue.
