Month: August 2023

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Indiana

It’s August. Houston is ending its second month of record heat with no rain. This morning when I walked the dogs at 6:30 it was 80°, and the high today is projected to be 101°. That’s cooler than yesterday. After the freezes of the last two years the joke is that post-global warming there are two seasons in Houston, Hell and when Hell freezes over.

This morning in Indiana it was 57°. There’s no rain there, either, but the high in Indiana today will only be 91°. That’s a perfectly reasonable August day. We’re going to Indiana to enjoy beautiful summer weather.

Yesterday at a dinner I sat across from a psychoanalyst who grew up in Indiana. She left in 1974, which she said was the height of Indiana’s Rust Belt economic failure. Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, West Virginia . . . That must be the year we started buying Japanese cars, outsourcing carburetors to Mexico, and importing computer chips from China. Ok, maybe the computer chips came later. Indiana’s economy was either manufacturing or farming, and since its peak in the 1950s, American manufacturing in the Rust Belt had declined into collapse. She said that still, it was a wonderful place to grow up, and that where we were going, near Crawfordsville, is lovely. She also said she couldn’t have done what she does in Indiana. I suppose that in the Rust Belt years there wasn’t money for fripperies like mental health.

U.S. Expansion 1790, Perry Castaneda Map Collection, University of Texas.

I think we erred when we stopped calling Ohio and Indiana the Old Northwest. Now it’s the Midwest, lumped together with Kansas and Nebraska, but historically the Old Northwest was the heart of the first westward expansion of the brand new United States, and it’s where we abandoned any pretense of Native American assimilation. That bit of our history deserves pondering, but until now I never have. Indiana Indians refused to transform into European farmers, and even if they’d tried we probably wouldn’t have let them. We certainly didn’t put up with that sort of nonsense with the South’s civilized tribes.

By 1816, when Indiana became the 19th state, there was no remaining Native American opposition to European settlement. Indiana had gone from the 1810 formation of the Tecumsah Federation to unopposed European settlement in six years. Death and removal had become the tools of American expansion, and would remain so.

Kurz & Allison, Battle of Tippecanoe, 1889, Library of Congress, https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/pga.01891/.

William Henry Harrison, the future short-lived President, was appointed Indiana territorial governor in 1801. He was a well-to-do Virginia boy–he was still in his early 20s–and he had two goals; to open the territory for expansion, which he did, and to claim the territory for slavery, which he didn’t.

He failed to expand slavery for the most unexpected of reasons: white Southern settlers. When Indiana’s first constitution was written, the majority of Indiana settlers were Southerners from slave states, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, but they were poor Southerners from slave states, not William Henry Harrison’s slave-owning aristocracy. When they adopted their new statehood constitution, they prohibited slavery. It may have been the right thing to do, but their motive wasn’t humanitarian. They didn’t want to compete with Southern slave owners for land.

They didn’t want to compete with African Americans either. Indiana’s 1851 constitution prohibited black immigrants, and imposed registration requirements for existing black inhabitants.

The Lincoln family was part of the migration of poor Southerners from Kentucky to Indiana, until they finally moved on to Illinois when Abraham was 21. Indiana missed a bet when it let young Honest Abe leave.

St. Mémin, Charles Balthazaqr Julien Fevret de, 1800, William Henry Harrison, 9th President of the United States, engraving, Library of Congress; Tecumseh, between 1860 and 1900, wood engraving, Library of Congress.

Notwithstanding Lincoln, Indiana has a reputation for conservative politics, and its current politics certainly are. It’s the state that gave us Mike Pence, former vice president and before that the Indiana governor. Poor Pence. He is so hated as a sycophantic toady on the left and as a craven coward on the right that he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for stepping up on January 6. Me? I will always be thankful for Pence, though I wouldn’t vote for him. I suspect that history will be kinder to Mike Pence than we are, at least if the nation survives the next score years.

In 2016, Donald Trump carried Indiana by 56.9% to 37.8% for Hillary Clinton, with 2,734,958 total votes. The Libertarian, Gary Johnson, received 5% of the vote. Four years later Trump carried 57.02% of the vote and Biden 40.96%, with 3,033,118 total votes. The Libertarian, Jo Jorgenson, dropped to 1.95%. It probably should be noted that Trump’s numbers might have been inflated by having native-son Pence as a running mate, but I suspect that in Indiana Trump would have walked away with the elections anyway. Democrats won in areas you’d expect, urban Indianapolis and the college town of Bloomington. Then there are the somewhat unexpected old industrial counties, Lake and St. Joseph in the far northwest, but unexpected to me because I know very little of Indiana. Finally there’s Tippecanoe County, with a population of 186,251. It voted for Trump in 2016, but switched to Biden in 2020. It is the home of Purdue University, and maybe that explains it, though switched majorities are always interesting.

Indiana 2020 election results by county, Wikipedia.

Barrack Obama did squeak by with a win in Indiana in 2008, 50% to 48.9%, but he didn’t repeat in 2012 when he dropped a full 6%. All of the statewide officials in Indiana are Republican, as are both senators and seven of the nine members of Congress. In the state assembly, 40 of the 50 senators and 70 of the 100 representatives are Republican. I reckon Indiana deserves its conservative reputation.

Geographically, in the north Indiana is bordered by Lake Michigan and Michigan, in the east by Ohio, in the south by Kentucky, and in the west by Illinois. The Ohio River separates Indiana and Kentucky, and the Wabash River flows along the lower third of the Illinois-Indiana border–the part where the border is squiggly. It is the 38th state by size, between Virginia and Maine, with 35,870 square miles, but it’s 17th by population with 6,833,037 people as of 2022. Massachusetts is 16th.

Northern and central Indiana were glaciated and tend to be flat to rolling. There’s corn in them there rolls. Corn and soybeans make up about 60% of Indiana’s agriculture production. Unglaciated southern Indiana is apparently more varied, with sedimentary deposits of limestone, shale, sandstone, and dolomite, some of which apparently protrude as bluffs and whatnot. Coal mining in the south is located north across the Ohio River from Kentucky’s northwestern coal region. “Paradise” is on the Green River in Kentucky, not the Wabash, and “Coal Miner’s Daughter” set in Indiana just ain’t quite the thing.

Current Indiana coal permits. The blue circles are surface mines, the purple squares are underground, and the yellow stars are processing facilities. I think. Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

With all that sedimentary rock in south Indiana filtering water, farms growing corn, and proximity to Kentucky, Indiana ought to be an excellent location for bourbon, and apparently there’s excellent bourbon made in southern Indiana. In the interest of science I’ll go out of my way to try some.

In addition to corn and good water, Indiana has a ready supply of white people. Indiana is 77% Anglo, with less than 10% of the population African American, less than 8% Hispanic, and 3% Asian. Indianapolis, the state’s largest city with about 900,000 people, is 88% Anglo. Only in the northwestern industrial corner closest to Chicago are there sizable African American or Hispanic populations, in Lake County 18.9% and 17.7%, respectively.

There are two reasons to go to Indiana to fish. This gets complicated, but in the Newer Northwest, Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, they haven’t quite managed to kill off all their steelhead, and there is still a steelhead fishery there, some of it wild. When we fished in Washington and Oregon, we fished for steelhead, though we only caught a total of one. Steelhead are rainbow trout that join the navy and go to sea, then return to their natal rivers to spawn. Genetically they are exactly like the rainbow trout that never leave the western rivers. Behaviorally they are much closer to Pacific salmon. Feeding in the Pacific they grow large enough to rival some of the Pacific salmon as well.

Sage, Dean, Townsend, C.H., Smith, H.M., Harris, William C., Great Lake Trout, 1924, Salmon and Trout 351, MacMillan Company, New York, New York, Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington. The scientific name is now Salvelinus namaycush.

Meanwhile the Great Lakes were once populated with lake trout, a close cousin of brook trout. Lake trout are the largest of the chars, and are native to the northern US and Canada. I don’t think they were ever particularly popular with fly fishers–they live deep in big waters, plus they are invasive in places like Yellowstone–but in the Great Lakes they were once a popular gamefish for gear fishers and an important commercial fishery. Then they were effectively wiped out of the Great Lakes by pollution, overfishing, and invasive sea lampreys after the Welland Canal connected the Lakes to the Atlantic. I could have bad dreams about invasive sea lampreys.

To replace the lake trout fishery, the Old Northwest settled on stocking New Northwest steelhead. Now in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Upstate New York–Steelhead Alley–fly fishing in the dead of winter for steelhead migrating into rivers from the Great Lakes is a thing. In my mind it’s a strange, cold thing, but still a thing. To steelhead anglers in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, the notion that fishing for a stocked freshwater lake fish and calling it steelhead is anathema. It really is quite the etymological dispute.

We are not going to fish for Great Lakes steelhead, or whatever it is they’re called that doesn’t make somebody angry. We are going to fish for smallmouth bass, which are native to Indiana. I’m told that Indiana is the very place for smallmouth bass, mostly by the State of Indiana. I am also told, mostly by the State of Indiana, that the particular place we’re going, Sugar Creek, is among the very best places for Indiana smallmouth. I hope the State of Indiana is at least as honest as its two famously honest sons, Abe Lincoln and Mike Pence.

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California Packing List, Fall River and McCloud

Gear

We took 5-weight rods but never used them. Our guides had rods set up when we got there, and it would have taken some work to get our rods re-rigged. They didn’t seem excited about redoing their effort.

We took waders and boots and used those the day we wade-fished on the McCloud. We also took our Patagonia wading crampons, which were designed to provide increased traction on wet rocks, of which there were plenty on the McCloud. We bought them five years ago for our trip to the Deschutes for steelhead, and that was the last time we used them. They had worked great on that trip, but had otherwise been sitting in a zip-loc bag in my closet for the last five years. I used mine on the McCloud, and they helped. The straps on Kris’s broke, so hers are now useless. They were a good idea, but heavy and klunky. I don’t think Patagonia makes them any more.

Northern California

The Mount Shasta region of Northern California may be the strangest place I’ve ever been. There’s plenty of stuff going on, but it doesn’t necessarily sync well. There’s skiing in the winter, fly fishing, biking, hiking, bird-watching, radical right-wing separatists, libertarian marijuana farmers, and survivalists. The town of Mount Shasta sports something like 30 new-age businesses, a lot of cute old tourist motels, and the only combination liquor store-fly fishing shop I’ve come across.

There are weekend tourists from San Francisco who have strong opinions about wine lists, and State of Jefferson separatists who want the San Franciscans to go back where they came from. The separatists took over the town government of Redding when the City commissioners tried to impose mask regulations during Covid. This is the land for which God made Subarus, and also a land of Trump flags, which just about sums up its schizophrenia. It’s mostly white folk, too, so you’d think that everybody would be driving around in a new BMW calling each other Skipper, just like God intended.

June Yu, Lenticular cloud formation at Mount Shasta, 1918. Cloud formation? Not on your life. This is actually a photo of the Lemurians blasting into outer space.

Mt. Shasta juts up in the middle of things. It’s out of place and a bit out of line with the other West Coast volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire. There is a debunked geological theory from the mid-19th century concerning the lost continent of Lemuria, so named because it explained the distribution of lemurs on the surviving continents and on Madagascar. Madagascar was thought to be a remnant island fragment of the sunken continent.

Here’s most of what you need to know about sunken continents. Because of the relative density of continental crusts, they won’t sink. They may move around some, but sinking ain’t in it. Of course this is likely one of those fake facts expounded by so-called scientists. Now back to Lemuria.

Lemuria was either in the Pacific or Indian Oceans, depending on who you talk to. Disappearing continental crusts have long been the very thing, Atlantis being the most popular, but Lemuria was right up there, or right down there as it were. 

Way down below the ocean
Where I wanna be, she may be
Way down below the ocean
Where I wanna be, she may be
Way down below the ocean
Where I wanna be, she may be

"Atlantis," Donovan Leitch, 1968

Watkins, Carleton E., Mt. Shasta, California, 1870-1880, albumen print, Library of Congress; Denney, Ewen, Aerial photo of Mt. Shasta, 2006, Wikipedia.

Little known fact: humans are descended from the Lemurians, who, realizing their continent was sinking, decamped to Mount Shasta and started a new, self-sustaining civilization inside the mountain. They’re still there. Plenty of locals run into them out in the woods around Mount Shasta–you can always spot a Lemurian because of their height, their long, flowing hair, white robes, and sandals, presumably Birkenstocks. We didn’t happen to spot any Lemurians while we were there, but I reckon we could have bought a crystal that would have helped us communicate. I bet you could too.

Some folks say that the Lemurians are from outer space, but the better information is that the outer space visitors–and the area around Mount Shasta is chock-full of UFOs–are Lizard People, who also come and go from Mount Shasta. Apparently there’s no problem with Lizard People/Lemurian cohabitation inside Mount Shasta, though that sort of thing is generally frowned upon most places, so don’t be surprised if you see them strolling along together out in the woods, long thin hand in sharp scaly claw.

Google Earth.

Mount Shasta really is the strangest thing. There it is, all 14,179 feet of it, dominating the measly 3,000-foot terrain that surrounds it. It’s so disproportionate to everything around it that you can’t help checking from time to time just to make sure you didn’t imagine it. Wallace Stevens got it wrong. That jar was placed atop a hill in Shasta County, California, not Tennessee, right on top of Mount Shasta.

I don’t know why the State of Jefferson separatists include two XXs in their Great Seal. Maybe that’s how they sign their name.

Hotels and Restaurants

We stayed in the Fall River Hotel in Fall River our first night in California. We split a chicken fried steak at the hotel restaurant, which suggested OklaTex depression origins for Fall River’s high cusine. There’s also a bar, and it’s a good looking bar. In the bar there were locals drinking whiskey or beer or something else manly but making sure I knew it was not Bud Light. I started to order a Bud Light and join them, but we went driving around instead. We saw the falls, we found where we were supposed to meet the guide the next morning, and we stopped at the grocery store and bought a couple of beers. Neither beer was a Bud Light. I’m comfortable with my masculinity so I keep meaning to drink one, but I’m not a light beer drinker and keep forgetting.

Actually, the grocery store, Rays Food Place, was my favorite place in Fall River. We went twice, and it had everything I might have wanted and good conversations to boot. Folk were immensely friendly, both the staff and other customers, and it may offer the town’s best nightlife. The next day our fishing guide brought us sandwiches from there for lunch on the river, and they were outstanding, which is hard to do with a sandwich. For breakfast, however, I’d recommend Annie’s Rendezvous Cafe. I’m not sure I’d recommend its Table of Wisdom, though. That looks like a place you can only aspire to.

Both Annie’s and the Fall River Hotel were for sale. I’m betting they still are. It may not be the liveliest of towns, but it’s still one of the prettiest rivers I’ve ever fished.

The next two nights we stayed in McCloud, 40 miles to the west and much closer to Mount Shasta. It’s not far off of I-5 that runs up the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle, so it gets more of the San Francisco tourist trade than Fall River. We stayed at the McCloud Hotel–McCloud River, Town of McCloud, McCloud Hotel. . . There seems to be a theme here, but the funny thing is that nobody is really certain about who McCloud was. He may have been a Hudson Bay Company trapper named McLeod, but if he was, folks didn’t spell very well.

The hotel was a charming old place, laid out kinda rambling and ramshackle, but it was very well maintained and pretty. I think we got some kind of suite, because we had a couch and a couple of armchairs in the room, and a huge bath tub, more of a hot tub really, right in the middle of the bedroom floor. I’ve seen these kinds of tubs other times in other places, and I figure they’re supposed to have something to do with romance. This one would likely have taken a couple of hours just to fill, which in my mind would have killed the mood. I actually think this one was there just because they had a big empty space that they didn’t know what else to do with.

Both nights we stayed in McCloud we ate at the restaurant in the hotel, the Sage, and it was the kind of ubiquitous new-American cuisine that now seems to be everywhere. I guess it’s the new comfort food. We ate there the second night too because I wanted wine after clambering around the river all day, and I don’t drink and drive. It was very good and easy to get to. Plus I liked the wait staff.

In Sacramento our flight out was at 6:30 the next morning, so we stayed in an airport hotel. It’s something I’ve taken to doing. I book an early flight, turn in the rent car the night before, then use an airport hotel shuttle to get back and forth from the airport. I’m terrified of missing planes, and usually show up the recommended two hours in advance. If nothing else I figure that if I show up really early, there’s less chance of the airline losing my luggage. So far it’s worked. The weird thing about Sacramento airport hotels is that they’re pretty far from the airport, clustered together about nine miles away. It must be one of those California things.

The indigenous cuisine of Sacramento is sushi. We picked a random strip mall sushi joint close to our hotel but far from the airport, and it was fine.

Our flight back had a connection in Las Vegas. The only place I’ve been in Las Vegas is the airport, when I’ve had a connection to someplace else. The airport makes me glad that I’m not a gambling man.

Ticks

Our guide on the McCloud warned us to check ourselves for ticks, and we did. This is not a euphemism. Fortunately waders are a pretty good tick deterrent.

You can tell this is me and not a Lemurian because I’m not wearing sandals.

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McCloud and Lower Sacramento Rivers, California, Rainbow Trout, July 8-9, 2023

On our second day fishing in California, we fished on the McCloud River near Mount Shasta. I had heard that the Upper Sacramento was fishing really well, but that the McCloud was off-color and too high from late runoff. We had our choice, the Upper Sacramento that was fishing well or the McCloud that wasn’t, so of course we chose the McCloud.

Actually I chose the McCloud without asking Kris. Don’t tell her. We were fishing with Paul Leno from The Fly Shop. I had told Paul about fishing for McCloud River rainbows on Crane Creek in Missouri, and Paul agreed that we needed to see their source. Most of the world’s transplanted rainbows share McCloud River genetics, so not going would be like Christians skipping Bethlehem when they visited the Holy Land. A lot of North American fishing starts on the McCloud.

Google Earth

To get to the river we drove south from the town of McCloud and then turned left onto an unpaved forest road. The forest road descends, and then descends some more, and then descends some more, down into volcanic rubble, ruts, fallen rocks, and dust. I was following Paul’s truck, but if I got too close, say within 50 feet, I couldn’t see the road for the dust. You know those roadside signs, Beware Falling Rock? As a child I thought they meant watch the cliff face and be ready to dodge, but I guess they’re actually warning about the rock that’s already fallen. If you hit that rock hard enough it sure could mess up the rent car.

Anyway, that’s the kinda thing one contemplates on the creep down the forest service road to the McCloud River. That, and wondering if AAA would come get me when I popped a tire. The seven miles took about an hour. I didn’t have much faith that even if they came AAA could ever find us.

When we parked the rental car at the end of the road we still had to hike a mile or so to the Nature Conservancy’s Kerry Landreth Preserve, which lets in ten anglers at a time. There was one other angler already there somewhere, but we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Apparently it’s usually full, but it’s a hard place to get to, and even after we reached the river we had to crawl down the bank through riverside brush and rock to fish.

This was youngster’s fishing. At 16, or 26, or 36, I would have enjoyed the scramble. At 66, perched above the river, trying to get a fly to drift through a 10 foot pocket in a twist of rock garden 10 feet below me, I kind of regretted that I’d traded in my afternoon nap. It was hard, technical nymph fishing, and while it was certainly challenging, I haven’t yet convinced myself that it was fun.

Paul got us to the river, coached us, and at some point corrected the way I was mending my line. Mends are peculiar to fly fishing rivers. The idea is to get the fly to float down the current with no drags or skitters or whatnot that will look unnatural to fish. The problem is that between you and your fly the river has conflicting currents, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, that are put there solely to give the poor angler grief.

To avoid drag you have to mend your line: you force slack into the line between you and the fly, either upstream or downstream depending on the currents, so that the line slack lets the fly drift true. To force slack you lift the line from the water and move an arc of line up or down with the rod tip–down if the current between you and the fly is slower, up if faster. Ideally you move the line without jerking the fly and scaring all the fish for a couple of miles.

I’m pretty good at the theory of mends, but not so good at the application. I long ago gave up on not moving my fly when I mend, and had finally settled on not moving the fly a whole lot. I kinda figured that if I diverted my eyes the fish would be courteous enough to do the same. Paul watched me and said that I was trying to throw the line, and that what I should do is lift the line and set it down as if I was writing the letter C with my rod tip. And it worked.

Dammit, it worked. Here all this time I was content with ignorance, and I found that I didn’t really like being wrong. Worse, it was easy to do it right. Dammit.

I caught two fish (which is about par for my course). With all the creeping and crawling and scrambling involved, and with lunch–never forget lunch–we didn’t actually fish that long, maybe three or four hours. At lunch Paul asked me what I thought about the McCloud.

Paul really loves the place, and he was asking a deeper question than whether or not I had had a good day fishing. I had fished there for four hours on a difficult day. By July in California’s drought years, the McCloud would have been running hundreds of cfs slower. It would have been clear, and it would have reflected a Caribbean blue. We spent one day on the McCloud in a rare wet year when the water was high and cloudy, and for us old folk it was a very hard day.

Still.

Like a lot of dammed Western rivers, the McCloud pre-dam held migratory runs of salmon. It doesn’t anymore, and in my mind that’s tragic, but it’s the same tragedy shared by a lot of rivers, East and West. The McCloud is special though because it also has that strange history of being the site of the first federal fish hatchery, and its trout, the particular rainbow subspecies of McCloud River redbands, were transported everywhere, to New England and Montana and New Zealand and Argentina and Chile and, well, everywhere, even to Crane Creek in Missouri.

I guess I can’t answer Paul’s question. It was different. It was rugged. The fish that I saw were stunningly beautiful. Would I go back there? I don’t know. I’m still decompressing. Would I think about about the river? All the time. I will never forget it.

𐫱   𐫱  𐫱   𐫱   𐫱  𐫱   𐫱   𐫱 

We planned to fly out of Sacramento early on Monday, and we were only going to fish a half-day Sunday. Paul suggested that we meet in Redding and fish the Lower Sacramento in the city. We’d be fishing on a good-sized river roughly two football fields wide in the middle of a good-sized town of about 100,000 people, but when you float it the river still feels reasonably remote. More important, after our day on the McCloud, it was mighty comfortable. We were fishing from a drift boat. There were donut shops and paved roads. I could have napped if I’d wanted.

Google Earth

We were fishing under bobbers, with deep nymphs drifted alongside the boat. It is, I think, about as lazy as fly fishing gets, especially when someone else is doing all the rowing.

As usual though, I can find some way to screw things up. I could handle the floppy water haul cast we were using, and I don’t hardly remember getting tangled at all. I couldn’t get the hook set right though, and even though I got takes from time to time, Paul said that I was pulling the hook out of the fish’s mouth. I was at the back of the boat, between Paul in the row seat and the motor on the transom. Trout always feed into the upstream current, so they were facing towards us.

Whenever I tried to set the hook, I would unfailingly lift the rod to my right. I don’t know why, I’m far from right-leaning, but the bobber bobbled and I went right.

That was fine as long as I was fishing on the left side of the boat. I’d pull right and the hook would set upstream into the current, into the fish. On the right side though when I’d go right I’d pull away from the fish. It was stupid, and if I had a year or two I might work myself out of it.

Apparently I wasn’t going to work it out that morning. I caught a couple, one a tiny salmon, both on the left side of the boat, but mostly I just missed. That was ok though. I’d learned something, or at least I’d theoretically learned it.

Kris on the other hand was getting plenty of sets but then had trouble landing the fish. Sitting at the back of the boat I got to watch it all. Now mind, I lose about as many fish as I catch, and I always think that if I just had more practice, that if I only hooked more fish, that sooner or later I’d figure it out and get better. Part of the problem is that I’ve heard and read so many contradictory things about playing and landing fish, usually when I’m trying to land the fish, that I don’t really have a very clear picture of what I’m supposed to be doing. Hold the rod tip up, hold the rod tip low at 30 degrees so the backbone’s in the rod, hold the rod to the side to lead the fish and tire it, don’t lead the fish because you’ll wear a hole and the hook will flop out, tighten down the drag, don’t tighten down the drag, horse the fish in as fast as you can, let the fish run, don’t ever bother getting freshwater fish onto the reel . . .

I’ve never fished with a guide as certain or as precise in his directions as Paul. Hold the rod tip up, not back but up, with the butt of the rod in front of your face. Face the fish so that the spine of the rod is fighting the fish. Get the line on the reel so that the fish is fighting the reel, not you. It was a joy to watch him coach Kris, and to watch Kris become a much better angler in the in the time it took to land one fish, . If I had been fighting the fish I’d probably have garbled his directions in all the excitement, but since all I had to do was watch it was easier to ponder, and maybe even absorb. Some of it anyway.

Now if I could just get that hook set right I could practice.