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Wisconsin

Saturday and Sunday we fish with Abe Downs in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. I have to be in Chicago, and we’re driving north Friday evening. I’ve seemingly given Wisconsin short-shrift. Oregon and steelhead have taken so much attention that in some ways I have, but I’ll be damned if I’ll read Little House in the Woods.

We’re fishing for muskie, which is probably a mistake. Muskie is the new glamour girl of the fly fishing world. They are big, which is always appealing, and they’re apparently hard to catch–one hears ad nauseam that they are the fish of 10,000 casts. Steelhead, which are ridiculously hard to catch, are only the fish of 1,000 casts. I guess if I’ve given Wisconsin too short of a shrift, and if I don’t catch anything, I’ll get to go back. It’s kismet.

Herbert, Henry William (1851) Frank Forester’s Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provinces of North America, New York, NY: Stringer & Townsend

For a glamour girl muskellunge surely are ugly.  They are ambush predators, lurking and attacking with short bursts. They eat big stuff, and a big muskie will eat fish more than half their length. They also eat ducks and muskrats. Muskie flies are big and expensive, flies on the internet can cost $15 apiece, and apparently 10 weights are the rod of choice, in part for the fish and in part for the flies.  We’ll be using whatever Abe brings. He’s told us to bring waders, and boots without studs, but I think it’s for warmth, not wading.

National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, Hayward, Wisconsin

IGFA records the world record all-tackle muskie, caught in Hayward, Wisconsin, in 1949, at 67 lbs 8 oz, and slightly longer than five feet.  Hayward, Wisconsin (home of the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame and a 143′ long giant muskie) has been banking off that fish ever since.

Muskie average about 30″, and are the largest of the pike family. They remind me of gar or barracuda, which are also sharp-toothed, long-snouted lurkers. The difference, at least for barracuda, is that barracuda are reportedly fun to catch. Muskie apparently give up pretty quick.

Unknown – (1896) First Annual report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests of the State of New York, New York City, NY: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co., Printers

Muskie are North American, but east of the Mississippi have a pretty broad range, from Georgia to southern Canada. They’re concentrated in the upper Midwest, particularly northern Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. In Wisconsin they seem to be the right color of fish. They spawn in the spring in the shallow area of lakes, but don’t nest. Their spawning consists of a hooked-up lakeside stroll distributing milt and roe hither and yon, wherever it may land on sand or rock, but preferably not mud or silt.  The males do a lot of tail-slashing, either to spread the fertilized eggs or because they’re guys. Eggs hatch in about two weeks. Juveniles grow to about a foot their first year.

Muskies otherwise live in slower rivers or river backwaters. They prefer clear-water lakes. For such an ugly fish they are surprisingly sensitive environmentally, particularly to over-fishing.

As for Wisconsin I have been twice before. Once after college I drove late at night from Chicago to Minneapolis on US 90 and 94, and remember huge fiberglass animals, a Holstein and a dinosaur, looming up from roadside attractions. I don’t remember a giant fiberglass muskie, but apparently giant fiberglass animals are quite the thing in Wisconsin.

The second time I drove from Chicago to Milwaukee to see the Astros play the Brewers at Miller Field. It was an uneventful meaningless end-of-the-season baseball game.  The Astros won, there was good beer and sausage, and there were people wearing cheeseheads, not many but some. I think they got their sports confused.

Traditionally Muskie haven’t  been a fly fishing target. There’s even a series of Wisconsin mystery novels, the Loon Lake Mysteries by Victoria Houston, where the heroine fly fishes for trout and the hero fishes gear for Muskie. Now though on YouTube muskellunge are all the rage for fly fishers, mostly by young guys with trucker hats and beards. I didn’t get through enough of the Loon Lake Mysteries to know whether the loss of tension, muskie versus trout, gear fishing versus fly fishing, damaged the novels. Hope not.  They couldn’t take much damage.  

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Oregon Packing List II

I had some random thoughts about Oregon that I didn’t know what to do with, so they’re going with my Oregon playlist.

Donuts

Baked goods are essential to fly fishing , and fried donuts are baked goods. Portland is famous for its donuts, Voodoo Donuts specifically. We went:  I wouldn’t go back. It is the donut equivalent of birthday cakes, more surface than substance. The counter help is there to move you through the line, the donuts, while highly decorated, aren’t anything special, and I’m sorry, but I don’t really want to contemplate a penis-shaped donut, not early in the morning, not any time. 

Blue Star donuts, on the other hand, is outstanding. It bills itself as adult donuts, and that’s fair. Generally I’m not so much a fan of cake donuts (which their donuts are), but that’s a quibble.  Blueberry bourbon donuts are a flavor to be beholden to, and are delicious.

Lesbians

For most places we’ve gone, there’s been a kind of unanimity of response from Houston folks.  When we said we were going to Annapolis, we were told eat the crab cakes. When we went to New Orleans in August, friends said it’s the best time of year to go: it’s no hotter than Houston and you can get restaurant reservations. For Portland, we were told my girlfriend’s lesbian daughter, or my ex-boyfriend’s lesbian aunt, or our former lesbian law school classmate is there.

It was never our gay nephew (or boyfriend’s gay son) lives there. It was never my girlfriend’s daughter. I’m sure there are plenty of gay guys in Portland, and plenty of straight daughters, but the lesbian response was just inevitable.

When I got back to Houston I found an older Gallup poll, 2015, on LGBT populations in US cities, and Portland ranked second after San Francisco for percentage of overall population. Portland might beat out San Francisco if there were some gay guys.

Fake News

You couldn’t have more confusion about Oregon fish facts if they were reported by Fox News. Ask a simple question, do steelhead feed? You will get many more contradictory answers than steelhead. The best answer seems to be that winter steelhead don’t feed, and that summer steelhead feed, but not a lot.

We heard that jack Chinook, which are undersized male Chinook salmon, are mature small fish that are biologically necessary for low flows, but that kind of begs the question: if low flows are blocking big males, why aren’t they blocking big females?  Why aren’t there lady jack Chinook? We heard that they were confused juveniles who were not sexually mature but were pesky. We heard that they were mature males that just hadn’t gotten big.

The best answer seems to be that they are sexually mature, but precociously mature: they’ve matured too soon.  The number of jacks may be higher among hatchery fish, which genetically doesn’t sound like a good thing.

We constantly heard that Deschutes steelhead are a different fish than Deschutes resident trout. One of the more interesting things I read was that out of any given trout or steelhead population, scientists can’t predict which fish will go to the ocean and which fish will remain resident. Which fish will which has more to do with nurture than nature. If the local environment isn’t optimal, Pacific Coast trout will head for the ocean. It’s the principal reason that trout and resident steelhead are considered the same species. It’s a lifestyle thing.

I could never find fish population numbers. Whatever they are, the future of Pacific Coast trout and Salmon looks pretty grim.

Where We Didn’t Go

I’d spent time in Oregon before. I’d seen the coastline, I’d crossed the Cascades, I’d been to Eugene and Bend.  I’d like to see the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.  I wish we’d had time to fish the Umpqua.

Conservation Groups

I’ve been making contributions to local conservation organizations, and their websites are more often than not the best sources of information about a fishery. You’d think with all that ecological consciousness there would be an obvious conservation organization to join in the Pacific Northwest.  There’s not, not that I could figure out anyway. We found the Deschutes River Alliance, and they make a great video, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they may not be right, and they get as much grief from locals as they get praise. 

Maybe Trout Unlimited is the right organization, but I’m surprised I didn’t find a more localized umbrella group for salmon and steelhead. Maybe the Deschutes River Conservancy would be good.

BattleFish

One of our guides on the Deschutes, Barret Ames, is on a reality show, BattleFish, about commercial albacore tuna fishing. It debuted Friday. The show is kind of brutal to watch, but the fish is delicious. 

Playlist

Dolly Parton wrote a song about Eugene. Jack White and Loretta Lynn recorded a duet about Portland. That right there is reason enough to visit.

  • The Decembrists, The Hazards of Love, Her Majesty, The King is Dead, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World. I love the Decembrists. I thought I was being very au courant, until my daugher (who’s 32) told me that they were her favorite band in high school. I did get that song about the father murdering his children in my head for about three days, and I’d rather not hear it again anytime soon.
  •  Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Pastures Of Plenty. One of the Woody Guthrie Oregon songs.
  • Esparanza Spalding, Chamber Music Society, Radio Music Society. How a short black girl from Portland became a great jazz musician is a story worth contemplating.
  • She & Him. M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel. We had Volume 3, and found ourselves listening to it in high-stress situations, like when I’d tied my wet wading boots to the roof of the car to dry and Kris freaked out.
  • The Shins, Port of Morrow. 
  • The Kingsmen. The Best of the Kingsmen. Louie, Louie never cycled through, but they were just as bad as I remembered. 
  • Paul Revere & The Raiders. Greatest Hits. They were better than I remembered, but there must have been something in the Portland water in the 60s that churned out garage bands.
  • Todd Snider, Songs for the Daily Planet. 80s music. Dated. 
  • Woody Guthrie, Columbia River Collection.
  • Sleater-Kinney, Dig Me Out. I might get Sleater-Kinney in 30 years or so, or die trying.
  • John Fahey, The Portland Cement Factory.
  • Joan Baez, Portland Town. It took me a while to figure out this was Portland, Oregon, not Portland, Maine.
  • Johnny Cash, Lumberjack. They don’t make songs like this any more. It goes well with Sometimes a Great Notion.
  • Dolly Parton, Eugene Oregon. 
  • Carrie Brownstein & Fred Armisen, Dream of the 90s.  We watched a lot of Portlandia.  It’s addicting.
  • Elliott Smith, Alameda. 
  • Sufjan Stevens, Carrie & Lowell.  I’m not sure what this has to do with Oregon, but I liked the song. In 2005, Stevens announced he would record an album for each state, and he released Michigan and Illinois, but later he said it was just a promotional gimmick.  This is a man of my own heart. 
  • Michael Hurley, Portland Water. 
  • Steely Dan, Don’t Take Me Alive. The best driving song of the lot. Well I crossed my old man back in Oregon/Don’t take me alive/Got a case of dynamite/I could hold out here all night
  • Lorretta Lynn (feat. Jack White), Portland, Oregon.  
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Oregon Packing List I

We didn’t take many clothes to Oregon, and that was just about right.  Ok, we may have taken a few too many layers of polypropylene, and I took a pair of shorts I never wore, but here’s the most important thing you need to know about Portland: You can wear your nylon fishing pants into any restaurant in the City and fit right in. If the only clean shirt you have left for that elegant tasting menu restaurant s a mid-weight Patagonia underlayer pullover, it’s ok. It’s stylish. Stylish. One pair of Keene sandals, my running shoes, and a pair of wading boots would take me anyplace in the state unless I needed some other kind of technical sports shoes. Hiking boots, skiing boots, cycling cleats; those I might need. I wouldn’t need a dressier pair of shoes.

Oregon is an outdoorsy milieu. There are as many Subarus in Portland as there are F150s in Houston. There are a lot of Subarus.

Unlike New Orleans, I didn’t take a blazer, and unlike New Orleans I didn’t need one. I did worry that in a Nike town my New Balance running shoes might not be quite the thing, but Portland folk seem pretty tolerant.

The homeless like Portland, at least in the summer, but I don’t think it’s because they don’t need a blazer. Our first morning I took an early-morning run around the river. There were colonies of the young and ragged sleeping in doorways and camped on the riverside. Someone told me that much of Portland homelessness is about heroin, but I also think it’s some about accomodation. Portland has long been particularly tolerant of  the homeless.

When we first got to Portland we went to Portland Fly Shop. Ok, that’s not true. We first went and ate Pacific Coast oysters at Olympia Oyster Bar. For Gulf Coasters, Oysters on the West Coast are high dollar, about $3 each, but happy hour oysters were half price. They didn’t serve Saltines with the oysters, and I’m not sure they understood the value of salt and lemon or a classic mignonette, but the bread was good. The oysters were good.

So we went to Portland Fly Shop after the oysters and met Jason Osborn, who had helped me buy my 7 weight Beulah Spey rod long distance. Kris finally committed to a Spey rod, a Beulah Onyx 6 weight, and we bought some sink tips and some leaders. Here, though, is the bizarre thing about steelhead fishing:

To fish for steelhead, you honest-to-God could fish for days with two flies, one wet and one streamer.

If there are no tugs by the end of the swing, one doesn’t agonize about whether the fly is the very thing, you take two more steps downriver and cast again.  Changing flies ain’t in it. “Jason,” we insisted, “sell us some flies.” I’d tied a good two dozen flies getting ready for Oregon: multiple fish tacos in many colors, steelhead coachmen, skaters, black things, brown things, orange things. . . Jason seemed baffled that I wanted more flies. He clearly thought we had plenty flies enough. We insisted. He sold us some, but his heart wasn’t in it.

We only changed flies when the spirit spoke to us, or when the light changed.  In the morning or when it was overcast, we cast wets three-quarters downstream on Skandi lines. When it was full sun we cast streamers 90 degrees straight across the river on Skagit lines.  Then we did the two-step (or the four-step). The idea was to cover water. Maybe people who know what they’re doing change flies, but for us, what’s the point? Within the realm of decent steelhead flies one fly was as good as any other.

I was told that the Clousers I brought weren’t in the realm of decent steelhead flies.  What fish doesn’t like a Clouser?

As to other stuff we didn’t need, we took a bunch of trout rods. When we arrived at Maupin and met Travis Johnson, I said that I was in Oregon to catch one fish. He looked concerned and asked if I’d brought a single-handed trout rod, I think in part because trout are easier to catch than steelhead and in part because he worried that my casting would be even less competent than it was. Because I’d caught a Chinook the first day, I never took my single-handed rods or trout flies out of the suitcase. My fish was caught and everything after was gravy.

I took along a better guitar than usual, a 1973 Kohno, because I would be sitting by the side of a river for a few days and that deserves a better guitar.  The Kohno is a bit beat up, but has a lovely tone. My hands though were a wreck.  They were sore, I guess from the rod, and cracked and bleeding from the dry weather and the water.  I worked a bit on the Sor Variations on a Theme from the Magic Flute. I was playing it early in the hotel the first morning–we were running two hours ahead of everybody else on the West Coast–and the person in the neighboring room banged on the wall.  I’d never had that happen before, but they banged on the wall in the middle of the fast 6th variation, so maybe the song was a bit raucous.  Maybe they just weren’t Sor fans.

We spent a long time in Powell’s Books, which is one of the great bookstores. I bought Tom Robbins for Washington and Seattle, which isn’t scheduled, and replaced my copy of Sometimes a Great Notion. Mostly I was reading Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom, getting ready for Mississippi.

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Fly Fish Oregon Done

Last Sunday we met our guide, Travis Johnson, at 4:30 in the morning, waders on, and got back to the hotel that night at 9:20. It was a long day. Most of our days in Oregon were long days. Up early, fish until lunch, nap for a few hours then fish again until dark. Long days.

We spent the next three nights at a riverside camp on a trip put together by Louis Cahill of Gink & Gasoline, through Jeff Hickman’s Fish the Swing.  I’d signed up for the camp on a whim, because steelhead was the right color of fish for Oregon, and there was a personal invitation, addressed to occupant, in my emails. Kris was a bit startled that I’d signed her up for a group camping trip on a river with a latrine tent and no blow drier, but I swear I told her first. I think I told her first.

The food was great, and the company great. Hickman wasn’t there, but there were two boats of three anglers each and two guides, Barrett Ames and Curtis Ciszek, and Curtis’s good dog, Rowlf. And no one is nicer than Louis Cahill. The weather wasn’t the bitter cold we’d expected north of the Mason-Dixon after Labor Day, though people did make fun of our expedition wear. Who says four layers are too many for 60 degrees? That’s damned cold.

I learned two Spey casts, more or less, the double Spey and the snap-T. By the end of the week every 10th cast or so was ok, and every 20th cast I might shoot three or four feet of line.  Spey casting, mastered. I was only frustrated at that point, as opposed to deeply frustrated, or even exasperated.  Kris was pretty much exasperated, but she hung in, and got more casting instruction than is really good for anyone. She might have been happier (and just as effective) if the guides had left her alone to flail away, but she was game, and mostly patient.

The first day with Travis Johnson was upriver, south of Maupin.  Oregon has a split personality, with east of the Cascades dry, and the lush west landscaped by rain and the ocean. Technically on the Deschutes we were in Central Oregon, but it was east enough. When I first saw the east side, mostly treeless, pristine, arid, it looked enough like my childhood home to be familiar. It was comfortable.

As I said, the first day we fished a bit upriver, south of Maupin, which if you let that sink in is all wrong. Like the desert in the east, the Deschutes runs north, the wrong way. Upriver south, downriver north. Forest west, desert east. The lower Deschutes is north. No wonder Oregon has such a peculiar reputation.

Johnson is the reigning world champion Spey-caster, but he may also be the reigning world champion talker. From dark to dark he had a constant stream of great stories and strong opinions ranging from Ireland to Maupin and back again. Johnson somehow managed to weave the Northern Ireland prime minister into instructions on drift. It was almost as spectacular as the scenery.

Oregon has a peculiar history. In the decades after Lewis & Clark, the relatively new United States pushed expansion into Oregon to keep the British out. Britain and the States agreed on a 49th parallel border in 1846, and the Canadian border from Washington to North Dakota is artificially straight, designed by treaty not geography. Settlers came from New England and the old Ohio Territory, and the existing residents, the Yakima and Nez Perce and Umpqua, the lot of them, were killed, pushed out, or confined. Oregon was re-settled by white people. It wasn’t just any white people, either.  It was pretty universally British Isle-descended white people,

Interestingly, Wisconsin was settled at about the same time by the same Yankees, but with the addition of Germans, Norwegians, and other such foreign folk. The conflict in Wisconsin between Catholic beer-drinking Germans and Protestant temperance-pledging Yankees was defining, but I’m pretty sure the beer drinkers won.  Oregon, on the other hand, remained relatively isolated until World War II, the automobile, and television changed everything.  It’s still 87% white though (as is Wisconsin, interestingly enough). Oregon’s greatest novel (and one of our greatest novels), Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, constantly riffs on its characters’ casual racism. They must have brought it with them over the Oregon Trail, because the Oregon population is still only 2 percent African American, less than 2 percent Native American, and less than 5 percent Asian. White people.

Where we camped and fished on the lower Deschutes (that’s the north end of the river; keep up), there had been a 70,000-acre fire in July that had destroyed the grass-cover and most of the river trees.  Without ground cover there was lots of dust when the wind blew, and by midday every day the wind was blowing. If it ever rains hard, there’ll be erosion and dirty water, but big rain doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. It was a prairie fire, and by next year the grass should be back.

Because it’s spring fed, the river flow is apparently pretty constant, season to season, year to year. The river is big, fast, and hard wading, horizontal rock-climbing, and neither of us could have done it without wading staffs and Patagonia river crampons. The river crampons worked, and the one morning we tried without them, with only studs in rubber soles, was scary. Notwithstanding their generally excellent performance and the Patagonia hype, when river crampons get caked with ash and dirt river crampons are not ultralight.

I caught a jack Chinook the first day, and three redsides rainbows over the next couple of days, and finally a steelhead on the third.  The small jack, three pounds maybe, was a bit like a Gulf Coast speckled trout. It was nice to see it, it was nice to get the Oregon fish out of the way, but after a bit of a flurry it seemed resigned to being caught. The redsides were pretty, wild, and genetically pure, and one was about 20 inches which I was told was about as big as they get. They were a bit overpowered by the 7 weight Spey rod though. The final steelhead was a hatchery fish with a clipped adipose fin, but it was big, 24 or 25 inches I’d guess, and it was every bit as hard to land as billed. Not many things are as good as billed.

Kris got a nice redside and some other things, a tiny pikeminnow and a sucker, so all in all it was a fine week. Oregon’s done.