Month: August 2024

It took planning, skill, and ruthless cunning to find that fish. What’s more, I didn’t just catch one fish in North Dakota, I caught two fish, which is as high as I can count when I go fishing. I may have them mounted if I can find the wall space.

Because we were fishing without a guide, I had three problems. In North Dakota, there are native walleye, northern pike, sunfish, bass, and catfish. There are invasive carp. There are stocked trout. I was desperate, and would have been happy to catch any of them, but that meant I had to prepare for all of them. I put together my fly box, then showed it to my friend Mark Marmon. I also told him that I was considering a children’s pond at a federal fish hatchery.

Like I said, ruthless cunning.

Mark asked if I had any coffee bean flies for the kid’s pond. Coffee bean flies are a coffee bean glued to a hook then covered with a UV curing resin. They’ve been around since the 30s, and were originally tied to imitate beetles. For hatchery fish they’re also are a good imitation of Purina fish chow, and for Houston bayou carp they also resemble escaped solids from a sewage treatment plant. At one time Mark would have had the fly rod world record for grass carp, except that the IGFA considered the coffee bean fly to be bait.

Me? I think it’s an artificial fly,. Fish don’t drink coffee. It’s not bait. I tied a dozen.

I had to decide what rod to take, and settled on a 7-weight. Rods run in weights from size 1 to 14, depending on the size of fish you’re catching. Trout are typically caught on a 4- or 5-weight, and biggish saltwater fish on an 8- or 9-weight. A 14 is basically an 8-foot 2×4 for marlin. You don’t so much fish with them as use them as clubs.

A 7-weight would be plenty to handle a 7-pound fish, and while I wasn’t likely to see any 7-pound fish in North Dakota it didn’t matter. I wasn’t fooling around. If I caught something big in North Dakota, a pike maybe, I wanted enough rod to handle it. Mark suggested that a 6-weight would be plenty. Deep in my heart of hearts I knew he was right, but I wasn’t taking chances.

Finally there was the question of where to go. The Red River of the North is praised for its excellent catfishing, but that’s kind of a random endeavor for a fly rod, and the photos of the river weren’t very inviting. As I’ve already explained, the big lakes and walleye weren’t an option. We couldn’t fish the Missouri again without a boat, and that hadn’t been successful for us anyway.

I found a list of community ponds stocked by North Dakota Game and Fish. We left the Fargo airport and drove straight to a park pond behind an elementary school in a Fargo subdivision. There was an 11-year old kid there gear fishing, and a younger girl, maybe nine, and her dad loading their cooler with a stringer of fish. They held the stringer up to show me.

Tiny fish. Little bitty fish. The biggest stringer of the smallest fish I’ve ever seen. I supposed they would take them home and fry them up, but they’d be most useful on crackers as hors d’oeuvres. They must have had five pounds of 30 fish that turned canned sardines into monsters.

I moved down the pond bank and tied on an olive wooly bugger, which is a fly you can use anywhere to catch anything, including tiny fish, but all I caught was pond scum. The little girl came over–one side of her head was shaved but she didn’t have any visible tattoos. She offered me a gruesome severed fish tail from one of her tiny fish. She said I’d never catch anything of any size in that pond without a fish tail. I thought about it but declined. Coffee beans are one thing, but I couldn’t convince myself that fish tails weren’t bait.

The girl told me that she and her dad had caught a bunch of bluegill, some bass, some catfish, and a piranha.

To keep out of the weeds I switched out the woolly bugger for a tiny blue surface popper, about as small as bass poppers get. There were dragon flies, and I like small poppers when there are dragon flies. I could see fish slap at my popper in the water, but even the piranhas were too small for the fly. I finally lipped that tiny bluegill–I didn’t actually set the hook, but I was fast enough on the set that the fish came flying out of the water past my ear and into the bankside grass. I didn’t have a stringer, or a cracker, so I released it back into the pond.

I had my North Dakota fish. Kris bird-watched.

The next day we drove west. We drove out of Fargo off the highway to the end of the pavement and down gravel roads. We never found Mirror Pond, even though it was explained to us that the Mirror Pond we wanted (not the one we were heading toward), was back the way we’d come, a left turn at the water plant, about four miles up the road, then another left turn. How could we miss it?

The Sheyenne River at Fort Ransom State Park had steep overgrown banks and it looked like I’d suffer some major damage climbing down to it, and I wasn’t real certain what I’d find if I got there. At the fish hatchery the children’s pond was covered with scum. To top off the day we had a remarkably bad hamburger in Valley City. How does someone make a bad hamburger? We never unpacked our fly rods. What did I care? I had my North Dakota fish.

The next day, our final day, we drove north from Fargo to Turtle River State Park, near Grand Forks. There was a park ranger at the desk, and she showed me on the park map where to fish. She said that in the spring North Dakota stocked the river–it’s not much as a river but it’s a pretty stream–with trout, but by July nothing would be left. They would stock it again in the fall. She said a lot of fly anglers came to the park just to stand in the stream and cast. I said fly anglers were stupid that way.

She agreed. She didn’t have to agree.

When we left Kris remarked about how cute the ranger was. She wasn’t that cute.

We drove to the stream and I went down to the dam to stupidly cast into the river–it’s a tiny dam built in the 30s by the CCC. I was fishing a pheasant tail nymph under a foam hopper imitation. Kris bird-watched.

I caught a fish on the pheasant tail. I hooked it and everything. I didn’t sling it past my ear. I think it was a creek chub, though it could have been a flathead chub, or it could have been a shiner. It was a perfect match to my park pond bluegill, almost too much fish for my 7-weight rod, and I’m going to get it mounted, too. My two North Dakota fish will look stunning together over the fireplace.

South Dakota and North Dakota could have been just plain Dakota, and this would be Forty-Nine Fly Fish instead of Fifty. If I recall correctly North Dakota insisted on separation because they couldn’t trust South Dakota governors around their dogs. I can’t blame them.

However smart North Dakotans were to separate from the south, North Dakota is not a great fly fishing state. There is plenty of North Dakota fishing, but it’s not fly fishing. If you Google “North Dakota fishing guides,” you’ll find endless photo galleries of happy guides and happy clients displaying heavy stringers of unhappy walleyes. In North Dakota they fish deep, way deep, in big lakes. They fish for meat. It’s a perfectly reasonable way to fish for walleye, but it’s the worst possible way to fly fish. I would have to find a boat. I would have to have deep, deep, deep sinking lines that wouldn’t work well. I wouldn’t be able to feel any takes, or set the hook if by some lucky chance I did feel it. I would have to find a gear-fishing guide who knew the water and who wouldn’t laugh at me.

And I would deserve to be laughed at.

Walleye, North Dakota Game and Fish.

This was our second trip to North Dakota. The first time I didn’t catch a fish. We found a guide and he was just fine, but it was still hit or miss. He caught a small northern pike, and we caught nothing.

This time I decided to fish without a guide. I was certain that whatever I did, guide or no guide, I would not catch a fish, and that I’d have to return to North Dakota still another and another and another time. The only state where I would never catch a fish would ultimately be North Dakota. This whole project would die somewhere in North Dakota.

Not only would I have to keep returning, visiting North Dakota is like visiting Amarillo without all the scenic grandeur. There’s a whole lot of flat. And after one or two more trips there would almost certainly be more interesting places, places other than North Dakota, where I would want to go.

National Park Service, Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Actually that’s not completely fair. We have only been as far west as Bismarck, which is central. The part of North Dakota we’ve seen in the east was glaciated four times over tens of millions of years, so yeah, it’s pretty flat. There’s some rolling terrain as you leave the Red River Valley and start to move west, and that’s kinda pretty, but flat is the predominate motif. Flat and plowed and sown with corn or wheat in summer.

So the eastern part of the state was covered with glaciers and flattened, but 65 million years ago the far west was a giant swamp. This was the period when the Rockies were being formed by colliding tectonic plates, and North Dakota’s giant swamp filled with a combination of mountain erosion from the then-20,000 foot Rockies and volcanic ash from the Rockies’ volcanoes. Wind and water erosion through the hardening sediment created the Dakota Badlands. Like I said, we didn’t get that far west, but it’s supposed to be beautiful. There’s a National Park, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Little Missouri River.

Like the rest of North Dakota though, it’s not a place for fly fishing.

The last time we went to North Dakota, we fished near Bismarck in the Missouri River. The Missouri, like the Rio Grande or the Mississippi or Columbia, defines us. It’s written into our most achingly beautiful folksong, and fishing it, even without catching a fish, was such a privilege.

Anglos went to the Dakotas because of a gold rush (in the Black Hills), the pacification of the Northern Plains tribes, and railroad land schemes. They didn’t go for the fly fishing.

There were indigenous people in the Dakotas for about 14,000 years, and we know as much about them as we know about other early North American inhabitants. We theorize that they crossed from Asia to Alaska and then spread out following the big game. They’re interesting, but it’s really the much later Plains tribes that capture the imagination.

George Catlin, Buffalo Bulls Back Fat, 1832, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

They were the last holdouts against Anglo settlement, in that strip of the American Plains from North Dakota south to West Texas, and we know about them in part because the technology for sharing knowledge had solidified. We had painters like George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, we had photographers like Edward Curtis and William Irwin, and even while we destroyed them we studied the Plains tribes. They fascinated us. They still fascinate us.

When Europeans got to the Dakotas, there were five major tribal groups: the Mandan, the Hidatsa, the Arikari, the Dakota (including the Lakota and the Nakota), and the Cheyenne (who were forced out of Minnesota into North and South Dakota). The Mandan, along with the Hidatsa and Dakota, were part of the Siouan language groups–the Sioux–and lived along the Upper Missouri. They welcomed Lewis and Clark. Before the European encounter, the Mandan population is estimated to have been 10,000 to 15,000 people. By 1838, after smallpox, the Mandan population was estimated to be 125.

George Catlin, Sha-ko-ka, a Pretty Mandan Girl, 1832, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Aren’t those people stunningly beautiful?

The Hidatsa were closely allied to the Mandan. The Hidatsa also lived along the Missouri River in North Dakota. Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s guide, was a Shoshone captured by the Hidatsa. After the smallpox epidemic of the 1830s, the Hidatsa were reduced to about 500 people.

Karl Bodmer, Hidatsa Performing Dog Dance, 1832-34, Print, reprinted Part III of Macimilian, Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832-1834, Vol. XXIV, Cleveland, Ohio, The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906.

There is nothing so final in our history as the defeat of the Plains tribes, from the surrender of the Comanche war chief Quanah Parker at Fort Sill in 1875 to the massacre of the North Plains Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890. The story makes magnificently difficult history with which to reckon. Why, though, should we ever make history easy? We don’t talk about these people except in the most romantic terms: they are the Lords of the Plains, the Empire of the Summer Moon, semi-nomadic or nomadic people who were among the greatest horsemen who ever lived. How do we not admire them? How do we not suffer their tragedy, and for us white folk, feel guilt for our part in it?

But there it is. That’s history. All we can do is try to understand who they were, good and bad, and who we were, good and bad, and parse through to some better world.

Meanwhile, while the North Dakota tribes were being decimated and confined to reservations, the railroads advertised for land purchasers across Northern Europe and Russia. A friend gave me a copy of Rachel Calof’s Story, written by Ms. Calof in the 1930s as a Yiddish memoir for her children. She is a fine writer, vivid, unromantic, and harsh. Rachel was a 16-year old Jewish girl brought to homestead in North Dakota as an impoverished match-made bride from Ukraine in the 1890s.

Here is what you need to imagine about Rachel: the sparsity of food and fuel or any comfort, the long winter retreat by an extended family (including an evil mother-in-law) into crowded, desperately impoverished conditions, and the unending grind of turning the wild grass plains into farms.

Rachel’s story is Jewish, but I suspect it could have been written about any other North Dakota ethnic group: Swedish, German, Russian . . . There was some Jewish migration to North Dakota before World War I, but they didn’t stay. In 1890, with a total North Dakota population of about 191,000, there were about 1700 Jews. In 2024, with a total population of about 780,000 there are about 400 North Dakota Jews.

Rachel Calof’s family moved back east to Chicago. Winter was too cold. The mother-in-law was too mean. There was an established immigrant community in Chicago that they would become a part of. Rachel spent her last years living apart from her match-made husband. Her mail-order marriage was not a romantic triumph.

Later, much later, North Dakota became a shale oil boomtown. From 2008 to 2014, because of fracking, North Dakota had the lowest unemployment rate in the nation. It also had substantial increases in violent crime and environmental damage to the surface estates, whose owners had no control over how the oil companies drilled. Walking by the Fargo street people–why is Fargo’s downtown so full of street people?– I reckoned that they were the remnants of the North Dakota boom.

Politics

Every major elected state official in North Dakota is currently Republican, both senators are Republican, and the single congressman is Republican. Interestingly, North Dakota had a Democratic U.S. senator as recently as 2019. Its last Democratic governor was 1992.

Donald Trump easily carried North Dakota in 2020, by 65.11%. Only two counties, both predominately Native American, voted Democratic.

Demographics

In 1870, the non-native population of North Dakota was 2,405. By 1890, the total population was 190,983. By 1930 it was 646,872, but by 2010 it had only increased to 672,591, and by 2010 the shale boom had started. From 2010 to 2020 the population increased by 15.8% to 779,094, all because of fracking. It will be interesting to see what happens to North Dakota’s population in the next census. Like as not it will have leveled out again below 700,000.

Until 2010, the North Dakota population was 90% Anglo, and about 5% Native American. Fracking decreased the percentage of the white population by about 7%, to 82.9%. not because the number of Anglos decreased, but because of relatively higher increases in African American, Hispanic, and Asian populations. Native Americans remain at about 5%.

Weather

In January, in the north of the state, the average temperature in North Dakota is 2°. In the south it’s a balmy 17° Farenheit. For at least 50 days a year temperatures in the state’s southwest reach below 0°. That doesn’t factor in wind chill.

I’m sorry. I just don’t know how else to say this. I’m not generally a cursing man, and I don’t curse often, but here there’s reason: it’s fucking cold in North Dakota in winter. I would have no clue of how to deal with 50 days of sub-zero temperatures. You can’t ice fish with a fly rod.

Gear

We took 9-foot 5-weight rods. I took a Winston Air and Kris took an Orvis Helios 3, an ancient, outdated technology rod since Orvis came out with the Helios 4 a couple of months ago. I’m surprised it still works.

We had coldwater floating lines to match the rods. I had leaders tied, but the guides all hated my hand-knotted leaders and replaced them with store-bought knotless leaders. One said my knotted leaders would gather weeds in the water, and that was possibly true, so I didn’t mention that I fished a lot in Southern bass ponds. I’m not sure how to fish unless I’m gathering weeds from the water. My leaders would have worked fine, but if the guides wanted theirs, that’s fine, too.

I fished again with the newish Abel reel my sister gave me when I retired. We took waders and boots but never wore them. All the fishing was out of boats.

Playlist

Here’s what you need to know about putting together a Utah playlist. The Osmonds, the brothers, have at least two greatest hits albums. Donnie Osmond has at least four greatest hits albums. Marie Osmond has two greatest hits albums. Donnie & Marie together have a greatest hits album. I suspect that getting caught in your college dorm listening to any of the songs on any of those albums would have ruined whatever pretense of collegiate coolness you’d managed, and with good reason. The Osmonds were never cool, and time hasn’t changed them. And you can’t put together a Utah playlist without including the Osmonds.

Somehow Mormon clean living and rock music just don’t belong together. Even country music needs whiskey and a divorce to really get cranking. It would take a better man than me to listen to the Osmonds singing One Bad Apple again.

I’m not much of a fan of the Utah band Imagine Dragons, either, though I gather they were fairly recently quite the thing, and may still be. They’re a kind of Las Vegas lounge act aspiring to alternative rock. On the plus side, I convinced myself that Green River by Creedence was about Utah’s Green River, and stuck it on the list. That’s always good for a sing-along. And just to prove how much you should discount my opinion, I think the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” may be just about the best thing ever.

Here I raise my Ebenezer,
Here by Thy great help I've come.
And I hope by Thy good pleasure
Safely to arrive at home. 

Robert Robertson, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, 1758.

Otto Eliger, Stone of Ebenezer, engraving.

The Arizona list included Charles Mingus and Linda Ronstadt, and Ronstadt became our go to when all else failed. There was also Marty Robbins singing El Paso, and that one woman from Fleetwood Mac whose voice is like a cheese grater. I never could keep the members of Fleetwood Mac straight, and was surprised when one was from Arizona.

Books and Movies

I’ve already talked about Stagecoach (which is supposed to take place in Arizona, but at some of its best is filmed in Utah’s Monument Valley). I would add that one of the greatest quirky movies ever, The Sandlot, was filmed in Salt Lake City. Who knew?

Arizona also has a penchant for quirky movies: Raising Arizona, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (filmed in Arizona, but set in San Dimas), Little Miss Sunshine, Thelma and Louise . . . All of them are good but peculiar films. 3:10 to Yuma with Glen Ford and Van Heflin is not quirky, but it is terrific. The 1957 version is supposed to be better than the remake.

Glen Ford, 3:10 to Yuma, Columbia Pictures, 1957.

I was curious about the history of the Church of Latter Day Saints, and over the years had collected bits and pieces of its history, but never in an organized way. Before the trip I read American Zion by Benjamin E. Park, which was readable, thorough, and I thought very fair. Park alerts the reader early on that he’s LDS, but his belief doesn’t intrude on good history. Towards the end of the book I got curious about Park, who turned out to be an assistant professor at Sam Houston State, just up the road in Huntsville, Texas. I was very proud, like I’d just discovered the book was written by an old friend.

I had bought a copy of Roadside Geology of Arizona for the drive through Arizona, but forgot to bring it from Houston. It was sorely missed. We bought a copy of Roadside Geology of Utah on the road, and it was a great investment. There’s a lot of geology to be curious about.

Restaurants and Hotels

The last time I wandered around in Northern Arizona and Southern Utah was nearly 40 years ago, and I’m certain that the only thing we ate for a week were Navajo tacos. Kris still hasn’t recovered but that was ok with me. I love fry bread, and I love tacos, and the combination is excellent.

Something had happened though over the years, and fry bread was harder to find. I finally found fry bread at at a food truck in Colorado near Mesa Verde. The fry bread may have been harder to find, but it was still great.

I hit the Navajo taco jackpot at a wonderful place, Amigo Cafe in Kayenta, Arizona, just after you turn north for Monument Valley. It was midday and there was a wait for a table, and waiting we had a strained interaction with a drunk guy with meth teeth. He told Kris she was beautiful, which is true, but then he told me I was beautiful.

Inside the restaurant though was wonderful, and the food was lovely. There was a gleaming new espresso machine, that looked like in a pinch it could substitute for NASA launch control. It was a fine place, and definitely a step up from the roadside cafes I remember from 40 years before. You should go out of your way to eat at Amigo Cafe next time you’re in Kayenta. I bet breakfast there is spectacular.

A Navajo taco with queso fresco really is the very thing. What a great place.

Near Lees Ferry we stayed two nights at the Cliff Dwellers Lodge and ate both nights at the Cliff Dwellers Restaurant. We also ate breakfast there once, and they made our lunch the day we fished. There weren’t a lot of other places to choose from, but it was perfectly decent food. There was also a fly shop, but it had seen better days and now mostly sold fishing shirts with a Lees Ferry Anglers logo. This was handy though since I had left all of Kris’s fishing shirts hanging in a closet in Durango.

At Dutch John we stayed at the Red Canyon Lodge, which also had a pretty good restaurant. We sat on the deck and shared a bottle of wine with hummingbirds. Hummingbirds are one and all heavy drinkers.

We flew out of Salt Lake City. Who knew that Salt Lake City could have such a ridiculous street layout, such ridiculous street names, and so many street people? The pioneers started from scratch in the middle of the desert, and with active imaginations and a blank golden tablet they should have done better. Most streets are apparently named a number, and there is nothing more baffling than finding yourself at the corner of 4500 East Street and 700 North Street, or some such. We may grossly mispronounce San Felipe here in Houston, but at least the corner of Kirby and San Felipe means something.

Before our flight we had breakfast with our friend Tom, who from time to time has given us excellent restaurant advice, and who moved to Salt Lake from Milwaukee last year with his husband Sal. Tom isn’t a drinking man, but he is radically intense with his coffee, so he is a heathen gay coffee drinker living in the heart of the Mormon world. I think he likes it, but I suspect there is some culture shock. Salt Lake City should welcome its new citizen by putting Tom in charge of renaming the streets.

Where we ate breakfast, Finn’s, there were three lovely young women, significantly tatted, at the next table over. I kept wanting to ask if they were Mormon, but didn’t. Kris should be proud of my restraint.

Fly Fish Food.

We drove a bit out of our way to visit a fly fishing shop in Orem, Utah–Fly Fish Food. While I can find pretty good saltwater tying supplies here in Houston, the tiny stuff used for trout flies can be hit or miss, and I end up buying a lot of stuff by mail order. One of the places I order from is Fly Fish Food.

I have been to a lot of fly fishing shops, from Vermont to California. Some of them are pretty famous among fly tiers. In person some have been disappointing. Fly Fish Food is one of the few shops I’d go out of my way to go back to. They must have a thousand packages of different sized fishhooks, and all the feathers from all the chickens in the world. How strange it is that they’re in what seems to me an out-of-the mainstream place like Orem.

Guitar

I hauled a guitar from Houston to Utah, and played quite a bit, mostly Bach. I would have missed it if it hadn’t come along.