When I say that we’re going to Alaska, people usually ask if we’re taking a cruise. I gather that cruises go from Seattle up through the Inner Passage, hitting some of the coastal towns along the way. In September, I could sail from Seattle to Alaska on the Carnival Spirit for as little as $579, plus taxes and port costs of $279. Is that per day? That’s cheaper than a flight to Anchorage from Houston.
It doesn’t matter. I can’t fly fish off of a cruise ship.
Photo by Ice Cream for Everyone, Sign at Quinhagak Airport, 2011, from Wikipedia.
Tourism employs one in eight Alaskans. About 2 million visitors arrive in Alaska every year, about half on cruise lines, and tourism is crammed into the four months from June to September. Alaska’s tourism mimics Alaska’s natural world: make hay while the sun shines. Far North winter survival depends on the solar energy stored during the long summer day. Everything blooms, grows, breeds, and feeds during summer, and that stored energy is then converted into winter survival. Alaskan tourism is on the same schedule.
Here’s an Alaska travel tip: everything is cheaper in February. In February, a hotel room that’s $400 in July only costs $150. A car that rents for $350 in July only costs $100. Flights are cheaper. Uber rides are cheaper. If you could find a lodge that thought fishing in Alaska in February was a good idea, the lodge would be cheaper.
There are no fishing lodges open in February, so like everybody else, we’re going now. Tomorrow we fly to Anchorage. Actually, because Houston flights to Anchorage are expensive, we’re flying Southwest on points to Seattle, then we’ll switch to Alaskan Air to fly to Anchorage. It makes for a longer day, but with 11-hour flights the day’s shot whatever we do.
It wasn’t obvious to me, but Anchorage isn’t really a destination, it’s a gateway. Visiting Anchorage seems a bit like visiting Fort Worth, or Albuquerque, or Salt Lake City–all nice cities, but after a day or so it’s time to move on. Because of the lack of roads in Alaska, to get out of town and actually see stuff you have to fly into Anchorage and then go elsewhere, as likely as not by train, or boat, or plane, but usually not by car. Not only are there few roads, but that $350-a-day July car rental is pretty steep. And even post-retirement, driving is just too much of a time commitment.
So we fly to Anchorage, and after a short train excursion and another day of piddling, we fly in a 9-passenger charter plane 300 miles west to the coastal Native Alaskan village of Quinhagak, population 776, elevation 38 feet, on the Kuskokwim Bay of the Bering Sea.
I don’t have any clue about how to pronounce this stuff.
Quinhagak sits on a delta, a huge delta, with more in common geologically with the Mississippi Delta than with Glacier Bay or Denali. We’re going to a flat, treeless coastal plain of raggedy fishing villages and countless mosquitos. Maybe that’s why we picked it. It sounds a lot like home.
Google Earth
From Quinhagak, we travel by jet boats up the Kanektok River, to a tent village where we’ll stay for the next six nights. It’s a nice tent village, at least according to the website. According to the website we’re actually going a’glamping. There are showers, there’s a dining hall, and there’s even a drying tent for boots and waders. Because it’s technically within the boundaries of Quinhagak, there’s no alcohol. Quinhagak is dry.
I didn’t know it was possible to fish without a wee dram at the end of the day. We didn’t notice that clause when we booked, and I suspect they keep it in the fine print. Alaska is marijuana friendly, but we’ll skip that as well.
Google Earth
We’re bringing along a lot of baggage, sort of.
For the flight from Anchorage to Quinhagak, we’re each limited to 50 pounds of luggage and a 15 pound carry-on. There are currently three resident gamefish and three salmon runs in the Kanektok; king salmon, sockeye salmon, chum salmon, rainbow trout, arctic char, and Dolly Varden, ranging in size from 50 pounds to a few pounds. I can’t catch a 50-pound fish on the same rod I’d use for a two-pound fish, and it’s no fun catching a two pound fish on the same rod I’d use for a 50-pound fish, so that means a lot of our weight limit is made up of six single-handed rods, three apiece, plus one big game rod for the king salmon, and a dainty 5 weight just because, well, just because. The big king salmon are usually fished on long, 13-foot double-handed rods, spey rods, so that’s two more rods apiece. Then we’re taking another lighter spey rod for backup. It’s a lot of rods.
Egg-sucking leech
And the rods aren’t really the heavy part. Every rod has a reel, and a lot of the reels are massive things. Those long spey rods are counterbalanced by heavy big game reels that must weigh a couple of pounds apiece, and each of the single-handed rods has both a floating line on the reel and a sinking line on a spare spool. It’s a lot of metal, and along with our boots and waders, fishing gear takes up a good chunk of that 50 pounds.
Intruder
We can bring home 40 pounds of salmon apiece, though you can’t harvest the kings. If we do bring salmon back, it will be the most expensive sockeye ever eaten.
We’re also taking flies, not that flies weigh much, but I’ve been tying flies for Alaska for months. There are big gaudy flies for the king salmon, and smaller flashy flies for the sockeye. Sockeye are filter feeders, and in the ocean feed mostly on zooplankton, but they may also eat small shrimp. The flashy sockeye flies are tied to mimic tiny bright crustaceans.
Flesh Fly
Or maybe not. Who knows why salmon strike flies?
Anyway, the weirdest flies are the trout flies. In the Lower 48, trout flies are mostly lovely, delicate things with lovely, delicate names like quill gordon, prince nymph, meat wagon . . . ok, forget that latter. They imitate mayflies, or caddis flies, or stoneflies, or perhaps a wind-blown hopper or small baitfish or crayfish.
In Alaska the flesh flies imitate rotting salmon.
Flesh flies, mice, leaches, egg-sucking leaches, sculpin, fish eggs . . . there’s no part of this that sounds lovely and delicate. The lodge lists bass poppers in its fly lists.
At least the forecast is for warm and sunny days in Quinhagak. Just kidding
Rockwell Kent, Mail Service in the Arctic, 1937, oil on canvas, William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building, Washington, D.C., photo by Carol M. Highsmith.
There are so many books about Alaska that there are books about the books about Alaska. This isn’t minor stuff, either. This is some of the best stuff. You could spend a year reading Alaska, and never touch a badly written word. At the end of the year you’d still have plenty left to read.
There’s no great fiction, though everybody knows Call of the Wild. I read it as a child, and then re-read it long enough ago to have forgotten it again. All that stuff about Buck returning to his Wolf Heritage, well, that’s all right I guess, but what I have in my head is that Buck was stolen from a nice vineyard in Sonoma for labor in the Alaskan mines. Sure, maybe Buck liked the wild, but I’m all in for a nice Sonoma vineyard.
Maybe that’s not really how the book goes, but it’s close enough.
The book about the books about Alaska is pretty fine–I’m simplifying here, The Quiet World is more than a book about books, it’s a good if thick book about the Alaskan Wilderness, largely focused on the preservationists who, more often than not, wrote books. It’s written by a neighbor, sort of. The author, Douglas Brinkley, is a Rice Professor, though I think that he actually lives in Austin. We all make mistakes. I live six blocks south of Rice Stadium, so wherever he may actually live, I justly have some neighborly pride.
There is a tension with Americans and Alaska, and like a lot of our modern tensions, it never reconciles. There’s this draw of wild, preserved Alaska, and you have strange odd creatures like Rockwell Kent–who along with N.C. Wyeth was perhaps the most accomplished book illustrator of the first half of the last century. In 1918 Kent and his nine-year-old son over-wintered in a remote cabin in Alaska–one supposes that his stay-at-home wife had better sense than Kent, but then apparently she let her son go. Kent’s journal, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, was popular in its day and is a good read, in a Henry David Thoreau-sort-of-way. It is also immensely strange. Who takes their nine-year old son to over-winter in a remote Alaskan cabin?
Rockwell Kent, Bear Glacier, 1919, Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, Rockwell Kent Gallery. Reproduced under fair use.
Kent had an eye for Alaska though, and you see his eye for wilderness lifelong in his work. His Alaska paintings are at once luminous and gloom-filled. Still, that impulse, that impulse to wander off into the wilderness, magnificent as the result may sometimes be, is the same impulse that roughly 100 years later killed Chris McCandles, when unprepared and plain ol’ stupid he hiked into the Alaskan bush and never came out again. The resulting book, John Krakauer’s Into the Wild is, by its nature, troubling, infuriating, and unhappy. It’s also another of those fine books about Alaska. There is also a movie.
John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country, 1979, was the first of McPhee’s books I remember reading, and in many ways it remains for me his finest, blending personal experience, data, history, interviews, stories, and natural and social observation. In some ways it’s also one of the more dated books about Alaska, written during the bloom of the oil boom and the opening of the Alaska pipeline, the implementation of 1971’s Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act, and the final back-to-nature impulses of an already disappearing counterculture. Still, McPhee captures the tension between the preservationists’ desire for wild Alaska and the developers’ desire for resource extraction. It’s that tension that drives our Alaska conversation, that’s driven the conversation since Teddy Roosevelt.
In recent years the focus of that conflict has been on opening the 19 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. There was a clause in the Trump tax bill that allowed lease sales, and a lease sale was held in the final days of the Trump administration. President Biden immediately canceled the sales after taking office. I doubt if Biden managed a stake through its heart though.
If you fly fish, oil exploitation of the arctic refuge has taken second fiddle to development of the Pebble Mine, a massive copper-gold-molybdenum mine proposed for the Bristol Bay watershed. Bristol Bay is the richest salmon nursery in the world. If you eat wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, the fish like as not comes from Bristol Bay, and the notion of mine leachate damaging the fishery has set both the sport and commercial fisheries’ collective teeth on edge. For a time I couldn’t open an advertising email from a fly rod company without an accompanying message about opposition to the Pebble Mine. Really, the only thing that comes close to the fly fishing world’s obsession with the Pebble Mine is the restoration of the Everglades.
The Obama administration opposed the mine, and developers waited until the end of the Obama administration to apply for licenses. President Trump’s administration strongly indicated that the licensing would move forward, then the permit application was rejected. Everyone, it seems, from Alaska’s Republican senators to Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, Jr., opposed the mine. It’s likely that the project ultimately died because Trump Jr. liked to fish Bristol Bay. In the words of Senator Murkowski, it was the wrong mine in the wrong place.
The book I’m currently reading, and the book I’ll likely finish on the flight to Alaska, is the 1986 National Book Award winner, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. It differs from the other books, and in many ways is the best of the lot. It’s a natural history set further north than we’re going, above the arboreal tree line that marks the true Arctic. Early in the book Lopez observes that the further north you go, the less species diversity there is, but the more biologic mass is concentrated into those fewer species. Lopez then goes into detailed descriptions of arctic species and their fragility. I’m through the chapters on the musk-ox, the ringed seal, and the polar bear. Humans come into the book marginally, as researchers, as arctic explorers or residents, and as threats. It’s a magnificent piece of writing.
I’m also taking a copy of John Muir’s Travels in Alaska. Muir–and I’m required by law here to note that Muir founded the Sierra Club, and that Muir is a kind of patron saint for wilderness advocates–he may be the first popular writer about Alaska, though he is also established as a glacier expert–a glaciologist. I’ve read Muir before, an autobiography in college, and when we went to fish Florida his book about his 1000 mile walk. Surprisingly (to me at least) he’s an engaging and readable author, a naturalist and a scientist, a fearless mountaineer, and a bit of a mystic, that is if Scots can be mystics. It’ll be a good book to come home on.
Back to Brinkley, perhaps his most surprising inclusion is the in-all-other-ways conservative Walt Disney. I doubt if Disney set out to be a Wilderness Warrior, but there you are–he made a lot of documentaries about Alaska. When Bambi’s mother stepped into that meadow, her death changed a generation’s views about the value of wilderness wildlife. In the 50s and 60s Disney produced a series of documentaries about Alaska for his target audience, American chillens and their parents. People of a certain age–and I include myself in that group–couldn’t escape those documentaries. They’re not really very good as documentaries. In 1958s White Wilderness, for instance, the film crew actually threw lemmings off the cliffs to create the myth of mass lemming suicides. The documentaries personify bears and otters and seals and whatnot to make them charismatic, charming, and relatable.
They’re still fun to watch.
The documentaries were also popular. His 1948 Seal Island won an Academy Award for best short subject, and the 1953 Alaskan Eskimo won an Academy Award for best short documentary. You can watch Disney’s Alaskan Eskimo on YouTube. White Wilderness was 1958s best feature documentary. Seal Island, probably did more to protect Alaska’s seals from harvest than anything short of Gore-Tex. It’s not great natural history, but just like hunting deer after the death of Bambi’s momma, it’s hard to wear sealskin when you’ve watched momma and baby seals go to church on Sunday. Ok. that’s not true, I’m exaggerating. Some of Disney’s seals were Jewish, and went to synagogue on Saturday. You can watch Seal Island on YouTube too.
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.
Bean, Tarleton H., King Salmon (Oncorhynchus chouicha), 1889, Report on the salmon and salmon rivers of Alaska, with notes on the conditions, methods, and needs of the salmon fisheries, Washington, DC : Government Printing Office, University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank
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.
Milton Love, male sockeye salmon in spawning shape and colors, Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara.
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.
Five Species of Pacific Salmon Showing Relative Size and Appearance, 1921, Pacific Fisherman Year Book 1921, University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank
We fished with Bert Ouellette on the Housatonic River, and mostly we fished with Bert’s stuff. We had rods, but Bert said we’d use our rods, a 5-wt for Kris and 6-wt for me, for dry flies. we never fished dry flies, so we never used our stuff.
Instead we fished Bert’s 6-weights, good Orvis Recon and Orvis Helios 3 rods, with sinking lines for bait-fish streamers and a complex leader at the front of a floating line for deep underwater nymphs. For non fly-fishers, I could go into endless detail about all this but your eyes would glaze and you’d wonder off to the kitchen to see what’s in the icebox. It’s not worth the explanation. Leave it be that they were very good rods, set up in pretty sophisticated ways for fishing the river as well as we could fish it. It all worked.
We were fishing out of a drift boat, and never waded in the river, but it was raining the first day so we wore our waders as rain gear. Because we had studs in our boots–think hob-nailed boots, but with screw heads, not nails–we didn’t wear our boots in Bert’s boat. Since we never got out of the boat, neoprene stocking feet were fine.
I’ll only indulge in one bit of fly fishing arcana. At the end of the second day Bert told me that his dry fly leader–remember, we didn’t get to fish dry flies–was usually 25-feet long. The leader is the (usually) nine feet of monofilament line that attaches to the end of the thick plastic-covered fly line. The fly line is the heavy part of the whole business that actually casts, and the leader connects the fly to the fly line. I’m usually feeling mighty lucky if I can cast 25 feet of the fly line, and Bert was fishing 25 feet before he reached the line. He promised to send me the formula, and when I get it, I’ll look at it and gape. I doubt that I’ll ever be brave enough to fish a 25-foot leader.
Restaurantsand Inns
In northwestern Connecticut, we were in the land of the cute country inn. There was a cute tiny town every 15 miles or so, with some cute restaurants, and some cute shops selling electric bicycles or Shaker furniture, and a pretty covered bridge and then another pretty covered bridge and some charming barns, and all of it with just a whole lot of charm and prettiness and cuteness and smartness.
I keep a running list of places to stay or eat or fish in different states, and the White Hart Inn, Salisbury, Connecticut, was on my list, probably cadged from some magazine article that caught my eye, and it was near enough to the Housatonic for us to stay there.
The original part of the Inn was built as a farmhouse in 1806. Here’s the Inn’s description from its website:
The property features 16 guest rooms, three dining rooms, a taproom with a full-service bar, two outdoor dining patios, a large porch with drink service, a ballroom and café. The artwork of Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Terry Winters, Donald Baechler, Hugo Guinness and Duncan Hannah is displayed throughout the premises.
I have to admit, I’ve got no clue who Terry Winters, Donald Baechler, Hugo Guinness, or Duncan Hannah are, but I’m certain it’s my loss. What’s worse is that I noticed none of the artwork displayed through the premises. I did have two great dinners in the restaurant, and it was a completely cute and smart and charming place. Score.
Fly Shops
There are no fly shops in northwestern Connecticut. Bert said there was one, but then one day it was open and then the next day it was closed. I’m going to use that as an excuse to tell you about the fly shops we visited in New York.
We started the trip at Joan Wulff’s casting school in the Catskills, near Livingston Manor, New York. There are actually two nearby towns, Livingston Manor (which has its annual Trout Parade), and Roscoe (“Trout Town USA“). Look, I’m a relatively unsophisticated trout angler, and always feel that if I catch a trout, the fishing gods for some peculiar reason have smiled on me for my innocence and devotion. The Catskills though are the area where American trout fly fishing developed, and reached a level of sophistication that still defines the sport. The Catskills have had other things going on–Jewish Borscht Belt humor for instance, and Hudson River School painting. In recent years it’s become a destination for Brooklyn hipsters seeking a weekend in the woods. But trout, and fly fishing, have been the area’s mainstay for 150 years.
In Roscoe, New York, there are three fly shops on one street. Roscoe, population 541, has almost as many fly shops as Houston, population 3 million. In Livingston Manor, just up the road from Roscoe, there is Dette Fly Shop (which actually moved to Livingston Manor from Roscoe). Dette opened in 1928, and inside it looks exactly like a fly shop from Diagon Alley. It’s now owned by the third generation of Dettes. I’ve been tying flies for Alaska, and had a list of obscure materials that I couldn’t find in Houston. Dette had it all, and the counter help led us down aisles packed with obscure bits of fluff and feathers to find a dozen different colors of the very thing crammed into a bin stacked underneath another bin.
It was highly entertaining, and going there and looking at the place is a pilgrimage for every fly fisher. It was so packed with stuff that they displayed fly rods on the ceiling because there was otherwise no space. On. The. Ceiling.
Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, and Mark Twain
I ran into Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens–figuratively, not literally–at roughly the same time, in Mrs. Miller’s American Literature class my junior year in high school. She played The Unanswered Question in class for us, and ever since I’ve had a fondness for Ives. I don’t think it’s misplaced, though Kris would disagree. She found the number of Ives pieces I had on my Connecticut playlist annoying.
Charles Ives, 1913
Me on the other hand, I love Ives. I love listening for the Easter eggs in his music, and the complications, and the moments of intense serenity. I read once that Ives is hard for musicians because of the dissonances, rhythmic tumbles, and linear incoherencies. To me that’s the fun of it, but I did download a lot of Ives.
Ives was born and raised in Connecticut, attended Yale, then owned and ran an insurance agency in New York. He is considered the originator of modern estate planning, at least by Wikipedia. He wrote his music in obscurity, but was wealthy enough to be a New York music patron and to fund, from time to time, performances of his music. He wrote music for 20 years, then more or less stopped. He may be the fifty states’ most significant composer. Me, I just find the notion of two marching bands in the town square playing different tunes at the same time completely believable, and delightful.
Stevens, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish. He was born and raised in Connecticut, attended Harvard, then worked as an insurance company lawyer in Hartford. Does this sound familiar? His poetry is obscure and difficult. Does this sound familiar? I had to write an essay about the Emperor of Ice Cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
That essay still embarrasses me. Did Mrs. Miller think that a 15-year old would understand what death has to do with a roller of big cigars from the preceding verse, or concupiscent curds? I didn’t, but I take comfort now in knowing that even though I like the poem, and could probably recite it by memory with a wee bit of preparation, I still have little clue what’s going on.
Stevens was apparently kind of difficult. There is the famous punch-out of Stevens in Key West by Ernest Hemingway, instigated by a probably drunk Stevens, but better still is the famous put-down of Stevens in Key West by Robert Frost, whose poetry is, at least, mostly comprehensible:
“The trouble with you, Robert, is that you’re too academic.”
“The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you’retoo executive.”
“The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about– subjects.”
“The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about– bric-a-brac.”
Bric-a-brac. Was there ever a harder slam? And it was, after all, a sheet on which she embroidered fantails once. If that ain’t bric-a-brac, what is?
Sylvia Salmi, Wallace Stevens, 1948.
Anyway, for 50 years I’ve off and on tried to read Wallace Stevens with some comprehension, appreciation, and intelligence. I’m a failure. Sometimes there are moments of brilliance that make it through to my small brain–“death is the mother of beauty“–sometimes there are moments of sublimity–“for she was the maker of the song she sang./The ever hooded, gesturing sea . . . “–but mostly I’m just stupidly baffled. I should give it up, but I probably won’t.
Mark Twain, an adopted Connectician, wasn’t born in Connecticut, and didn’t attend either Harvard or Yale. He did move to Hartford in 1873 and became a director of the Hartford Accident Insurance Company. As a director he gave a brilliant speech on the importance of accident insurance:
Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance line of business–especially accident insurance. Ever since I have been a director in an accident-insurance company I have felt that I am a better man. Life has seemed more precious. Accidents have assumed a kindlier aspect. Distressing special providences have lost half their horror. I look upon a cripple now with affectionate interest–as an advertisement. I do not seem to care for poetry any more. I do not care for politics–even agriculture does not excite me. But to me now there is a charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable.
Mark Twain, Speech on Accident Insurance, 1874.
Unlike that other Hartford insurance man, Wallace Stevens, Mark Twain is mostly comprehensible.
Pizza
New Haven is particularly famous for its pizza. Bert said we had to have the pizza on our way back to LaGuardia, and said that since we wouldn’t go through New Haven we should stop at the Frank Pepe’s in Danbury. Frank Pepe is credited as the originator of New Haven style pizza, The Guardian claims that the original Pepe’s pizza in New Haven is the best in the world, and The New York Times says that even the Pepe’s outlets are consistently good.
We ate at the Danbury outlet. It was the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. Dear Lord, please let me eat that pizza at least once again.
I’d show you a picture of the pizza, but we ate it before we thought about a photo. I did get a picture of the box.
Where We Didn’t Go
I’d like to have visited the Mystic Seaport Museum. Maybe when we go back to Rhode Island we’ll sneak across the border.
Playlist
Charles Ives, of course.
Did you know the Carpenters are from Connecticut? Karen and Richard. My senior year in high school, they had to be the most popular singers in America, and I thought then that if I never heard Close to You Again, my life would be richer for it. I despised them.
The Carpenters and Richard Nixon, 1973, White House Photo.
Look at that hair! The Carpenters’ hair is pretty remarkable too.
I suppose that I’ve mellowed since I was 17, but if I hadn’t gone to Connecticut I would never have heard Close to You again. And I was right. I would have been richer for it.
On the day that you were born the angels got together
And decided to create a dream come true
So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair of gold and starlight in your eyes of blue
Who can say those words with a straight face, or at least a crippling dose of irony. The only thing I can say is that there are worse things on a Connecticut playlist. Michael Bolton is also from Connecticut.
Laura Nyro is from Connecticut, and I love Laura Nyro. Sometimes the only thing better than Laura Nyro is listening to covers of Laura Nyro: And When I Die by Blood Sweat & Tears, Wedding Bell Blues by the 5th Dimension, Stoney End by Linda Ronstadt (ok, ok, and Barbara Streisand), Eli’s Coming by Three Dog Night . . . Such good stuff.
Laura Nyro, circa 1968, from Wikipedia
I came across an interesting Laura Nyro factoid, that after Al Kooper left Blood, Sweat & Tears, but before David Clayton Thomas, the band invited Laura Nyro to be the lead singer. She turned them down. Lordy, Lordy, what might have been.
The jazz pianist Horace Silver is from Connecticut, and there’s a very good big band song, Connecticut, that was recorded by Judy Garland and Bing Crosby, and by Artie Shaw. I liked the song Kylie from Connecticut by Ben Folds a lot.
Willie Deville of Mink Deville is from Connecticut, and after his punk phase he moved to New Orleans and recorded some terrific Americana, including covers of Spanish Harlem and Come a Little Bit Closer. John Mayer is from Connecticut, and is perfectly acceptable.
It was, all told, a pretty good playlist, though Kris got sick of all the Charles Ives.
I remember when Mrs. Miller played The Unanswered Question for us, she left me thinking that the question unanswered was something big, existential, the meaning of life and whatnot . . . When I hear it now I amuse myself by substituting other questions: Would you like to go to prom? What’s for dinner? Where did you fish? I guess those are pretty big questions too, and in my experience as like as not to be unanswered.
Guitar
I took the Kohno and played a good bit, especially on the front porch of the Beaverkill Valley Inn in New York, mostly trying to relearn a transcription of Cadiz by Albeniz. Bert promised that he would send a decal for my guitar case, and I need to follow up.
