John Caleb Bingham, Trappers Descending the Missouri, 1845, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I know, I know, it’s February, and I haven’t written anything since, I dunno, August of last year? I’ve stalled. It’s past Valentine’s, and I haven’t wished you Happy New Year.
Happy New Year!
We have fished. We’ve fished for Redfish at Port O’Connor, for bonefish on South Andros in the Bahamas, and I caught a 12-pound grass carp at Damon on a six weight Winston trout rod. The carp dragged my canoe around until it finally came to hand. We were both exhausted, but I’m pretty certain that I was the only one happy about it.
I’ve planned fishing trips. In April I’m going with a group from Houston to Cuba, which is these days a hot fly-fishing destination. We’re going for the benefit of the Cuban people, but we’ll also fish. In September Kris and I are going to Maine, so maybe we’ll add at least one state this year.
And we’ve traveled without fishing. In November we went to Spain for our son’s wedding, and that took a lot of physical and mental energy. I had to write a speech for the wedding dinner, and it was the best wedding speech ever. You should have been there.
Gratuitous photo of a barracuda I caught in January in the Bahamas with a spinning rod.
We cleaned out our storage bin, mostly, and I learned Spanish, some. The Astros won the World Series.
So we’ve been stuck at 31 states since last August, and all of my angler’s block stems from our September trip to North Dakota.I had dreaded North Dakota. Even though I grew up in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota is just a wee bit past the middle. There are big lakes in North Dakota, some natural lakes left by glaciers, some man-made, and if you want to fish for walleye with conventional gear, it’s a good place to go. Not so much for fly fishing.
From time to time in recent years I’ve checked the internet for suggestions for fly fishing in North Dakota, and have come across a lot of forum posts that look something like this:
QUERY: I’ve just moved to North Dakota for medical school/to count grasshopers/for the climate. Where is there to fly fish?
REPLY: South Dakota. All the rivers in North Dakota are flat, slow, and muddy.
It’s kinda hard to separate South Dakota and North Dakota, though Congress clearly managed it. The best history of North Dakota, Dakota by Norman Rijsford, is also the best history of South Dakota. The Dakota/Lakota, the Mandan, the Cheyenne, the Crow, the Hidatsa, the Chippewa . . . they all blatantly disregarded the state line. When Lewis and Clark traveled up the wide Missouri, they never mentioned when they crossed from south to north. Congress separated the Dakotas when they entered the Union because the locals couldn’t agree on a location for the state capitol. South Dakota still ended up with Pierre.
There is one difference between the states. There are no native trout in North Dakota, and at least historically there wasn’t much fly fishing anywhere without trout. South Dakota, in and around Badlands National Park, has trout. North Dakota also has a national park, Theodore Roosevelt, but no trout.
After a lot of internet perusing I found a guide in Bismarck, halfway between the state’s eastern and western borders, about 16 hours and 980 miles almost directly north of Vernon, Texas, my hometown. That driving route is roughly on the line of the 100th Meridian, where the wetter east gives way to the drier Great Plains.
From The Great Plains Trail. I don’t know where they stole it from. The dry line may be moving east because of Global Warming. Just another thing to keep you up at night.
We didn’t make that drive though. We flew from Houston to Minneapolis, which would have been a roughly 17 hour and 1,230-mile drive. In Minneapolis we went to a late-season Twins game at Target Field on St. Olaf College night, ate fried walleye, bought some pike flies at a local fly shop, and had a delicious, healthy breakfast at the Minnesota State Fair: Mini donuts shot into a deep frier out of a mini-donut gun, fried cheese curds, deep fried corn on the cob, and a corny dog. I had a corny dog anyway. Kris didn’t really eat her fair share of the cheese curds either.
The guide I found, Kurt Yancy, isn’t a full-time fly fishing guide, but he is a full-time fishing guide who dabbles in fly fishing, and he said we might catch smallmouth, walleye, pike, or carp. On his website there are lots of photos of guys dressed against a north wind holding large walleyes. You can catch walleye on fly rods, but they’re mostly caught deep in lakes, as much as 30 feet, and once you get much beyond ten feet fishing with a fly rod starts getting really stupid. Stupider.
It’s also hard to ice fish with a fly rod, so our potential North Dakota season was short.
Driving from Minneapolis to Bismarck takes about six hours. We ate lunch at the Fisher’s Club on Middle Spunk Lake in Avon, Mn., and the Fisher’s Club is charming and someplace everyone should visit. At the visitor center in Fargo we met North Dakota’s most famous actor. Almost to Bismarck, we drove past miles and miles of ponds that set my heart racing, but Kurt told me later that the ponds were very shallow, only a couple of feet deep, and that they froze solid in winter. Fish couldn’t survive the freeze. A thousand miles further south and those miles of ponds would be a destination, except of course when they dried up in the heat of the summer.
Well, actually, a thousand miles further south they’d be High Plains playa lakes, and those aren’t something you fish either.
At the Fargo visitor’s center, North Dakota’s most famous actor. He was autographed by the Coen brothers.
Ok, that’s enough of a wind up. Here’s the bottom line: we didn’t catch a fish in North Dakota. It was hard to get to, and then it was even harder getting home–it was our first intimation that things are a bit screwed up at Southwest Airlines. Coming home we had a 16-hour day and were routed through New Orleans from Austin to get to Houston. We could have gone to Paris from New York and back to New York again.
And like I said, we didn’t catch a fish. We fished the second day at Nelson Lake and watched carp gulp air into their swim bladders because the outfall from the power plant was heating the lake. It was frustrating. The first day though we fished in the side channels of the Missouri River, and the Missouri, maybe our most famous river after the Mississippi, was magnificent for every reason except fly fishing. You can’t stand on the Missouri without thinking about Lewis and Clark, Teddy Roosevelt, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, western migration, buffalo, migratory birds and antelope and seas of grass, everything the plains are. North Dakota feels as wild as it gets in the lower 48.
Thoreau wrote a series of essays about Maine, and in one, Chesuncook, after a companion gratuitously kills a moose, he is at his best, writing about our relationship to nature and to wildness, and how–and I paraphrase here–our highest use of nature is not to catch a fish, or chop down a tree, or kill a moose–those uses are petty. Our highest use is to discover our shared immortality with the fish, or the pine tree, or the moose. I’m not sure I buy that immortality business, but I get what he’s saying, at least a bit, and he recognizes in 1853, when there was still plenty ‘o wildness, that something was lost if our incidental uses used up the unsullied natural world, or if we only approached the natural world as something only to be fished, or lumbered, or hunted. In North Dakota, there’s still some natural world left to contemplate, and some of the human world too, particularly while standing on the bank of the Missouri River.
But dangit, higher aspirations and Henry David Thoreau aside, I surely would have liked to catch a fish.
