Category: Coldwater

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Massachusetts Packing List

Gear

I don’t write reviews of gear. Years ago, I gave Kris a new fly rod, an Orvis Helios 3 five-weight–what else does a girl want for Christmas?–and I wrote a review of the rod. I’ve been embarrassed ever since. I think I said that it cast well. Our Massachusetts guide brought along an Orvis Helios 4 nymphing rod, the new top-of-the-line rods from Orvis, and I was excited about fishing with it, but you won’t get a review from me, except that it looks good and it cast as well as I could cast it.

My opinions about fishing gear aren’t worth much. I tend to fish the same brands over and over, so I don’t really have much basis for comparison. From time to time I catch rod fever, or convince myself that I need a new reel to replace a perfectly good reel that I hardly ever use. Some days you just need to go to the store. But my opinions? You don’t need them.

So be warned: I’m going to share my opinions on fly rods:

  • Most modern rods can outfish me. I have never tested a rod’s limits.
  • If I lose a fish, it’s not the rod.
  • You can’t have too many fly rods in a closet back home.
  • For trout, I fish Winston rods because they’re pretty. Fly rods can always cast better than I do, so they might as well be pretty.
  • I usually decide that I need a new fly rod when I haven’t gone fishing in a while.
  • Someday I’m going to fish that Tenkara rod again. Someday I’m going to fish that Euro nymphing rod again. Someday I’m going to fish that Winston 3-weight again. Someday I’m going to fish that Sage 12-weight.
  • I think I need a new 10-weight. The new Orvis Helios 4s seem really nice. Maybe Kris needs a new 10-weight. Too bad Mother’s Day is past.
  • When I pick a rod for a day’s fishing, I always pick a rod that’s reasonably heavy. It’s like the start of the baseball season: this isn’t a time for pessimism. Picking a heavy rod affirms my certainty that I will catch a bigger, stronger fish than I can otherwise handle. I won’t, and deep in my heart I know I won’t, but there’s plenty enough opportunities in this life for sad outcomes.

We took two 5-weight rods with floating lines to Massachusetts–hers was the Helios 3 I’d gifted those many years ago, and mine was a Winston. I didn’t take the Tenkara, nor the 12-weight.

Palmer, Massachusetts

We’ve been to Massachusetts before, so we fished two days, spent three nights, and then came home. Otherwise, we didn’t do anything but eat. It’s just as well because Palmer is not a tourist Mecca. We ate at an Italian place with huge portions of red sauce, a sushi joint that’s pretty good, and a railroad-themed restaurant in the old train station. I think that if I lived in Palmer, I’d eat at the sushi joint a lot. I think if we’d spent four nights, we’d have eaten at the sushi joint twice.

We stayed at the Trainmasters Inn, a railroad-themed bed-and-breakfast owned by the people who own the railroad-themed restaurant. It was nice, there was hot water, and I liked looking at all the train bric-a-brac. The railroad-themed restaurant gave us free bread pudding because we stayed at the inn. At the bed-and-breakfast, the breakfast was always a berry muffin left by unseen hands on a cake plate in the self-service coffee room. They were good muffins, but by the third morning I would have liked some variety.

There was a railroad hobby shop next to the Italian place, but it was never open. That’s too bad. If my life had taken a slightly different path this could be a blog about toy trains. What guy doesn’t love toy trains?

I didn’t see any running toy trains at the railroad-themed restaurant, which seems to me a real oversight.

Donuts

By statute, the only donuts allowed in Massachusetts are Dunkin’s. Does anyone really like Dunkin’ Donuts? The answer to that is yes, Massachusans. I suspect they eat Dunkin’ Donuts three meals a day, 365 days a year. On Thanksgiving and Christmas they have turkey, but they also have Dunkin’ Donut dressing on the side.

I counted six Dunkin’ Donut shops in the Hartford airport, and if I were the Governor of Connecticut I’d call out the national guard to protect the border from illegal immigration.

See that line of cars in the parking lot? That’s the line of cars for the Palmer Dunkin’s takeout window. It was at the back of the building, so that line of car loops around the building.

I made Kris go to Dunkin’ Donuts twice, and in the interest of science I tried several. I thought the Boston creme was the best of the lot, but Kris refused to try it. It did look pretty goopy. The blueberry donuts were ok, and so were the chocolate glazed. I suspect that the plain glazed had never seen hot fat. The donuts were passable, but none of them explained the Massachusetts obsession.

Where We Didn’t Go

We’d been to Fenway a couple of times, and have had good visits to Boston. We’ve been to Nantucket. We didn’t fish there though, and we haven’t fished Martha’s Vineyard or Cape Cod for stripers. Stripers would be an excellent choice for Massachusetts, but from what I can tell April was a bit early in the season.

We didn’t visit the Emily Dickinson house, which was just up the road in Amherst, and we didn’t visit Walden Pond.

Snow

It snowed the second morning we were there, and on the third day it was still snowing when we reached the airport. As far as I know it snows every day in Palmer, and Massachusettians spend their days standing at the plate glass window at the Dunkin’s watching the snow.

Playlist

Massachusetts makes for a good playlist. You could actually do a great playlist of music by Berklee College of Music graduates, though I didn’t. The first song I put on the list was “Dirty Water” by the Standells, which was a favorite song of my childhood. Apparently the band’s sound engineer wrote it after he was mugged visiting Boston, and the Standells were from LA, but Bostonians made it their own.

On my Massachusetts Playlist, there’s James Taylor, Joan Baez, the Cars, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Aerosmith, J. Geils Band, Marky Mark, Donna Summer (did you know that there’s a 17 minute version of “Love to Love You Baby” that includes at least 15 minutes of heavy breathing?), Boston, the Pixies, and the strangest baseball song ever written, Warren Zevon’s “Bill Lee.” None of it is magnificent (except maybe Jonathan Richman), but it’s mostly good, and none of it is unlistenable (at least in short doses–that heavy breathing goes on a bit too long). Most of it is pretty sophisticated stuff. There’s also New Kids on the Block . OK, some of it is pretty unlistenable.

Bill Lee, From Boston Baseball History, https://bostonbaseballhistory.com/new-bill-lee-remembers-1975/

Guitar

I took a guitar to Massachusetts, but I never took it out of the case.

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Rainbows! Brookies! Pickerel! Pickerel? The Wild Swift River, Massachusetts, April 10-11, 2025 (45)

The lower Swift River is a tailwater, so it has some advantages over wild rivers. The upper forks were dammed in the 1930s for Quabbin Reservoir, and the part of the Swift that we fished flows out of the dam below the lake. Flows are reasonably constant and uniformly cold, which encourages lots of healthy trout. Whether it’s the middle of winter or the middle of August, the water temperatures near the dam on the Swift are likely to be somewhere below 60° and above 30°,1 and the flow will be moderate. If you combine that cold water and steady flow with lots of bugs, it’s trout heaven.

Below Quabbin Reservoir the Swift is only 24 miles long.2 It runs down from Winsor Dam to join the Chicopee River, which then joins the Connecticut,3 which then flows to the Atlantic. Quabbin Reservoir provides drinking water supply, not electricity generation, so water releases don’t increase when Boston turns on its lights.

At least theoretically, free-flowing rivers are wilder, more natural, more authentic, but some of my best days fishing were on tailwaters, and when I’m trying to land a fish it’s hard to focus on the difference. In the South and the Southwest, most well-known trout rivers are tailwaters. South of the Mason-Dixon, only tailwaters are usually cold enough for trout. The Green in Utah is a tailwater. The White in Arkansas, the Colorado at Lee’s Ferry,4 the San Juan in New Mexico, and the Holston in Tennessee are all tailwaters. We’ve also fished for trout in tailwaters in Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. Constant cold water, with lots of bugs, that’s the ticket. In all of those places there may be great fishing on free-flowing rivers, but it’s likely not for trout.

Currently there’s a backlash against dams. It’s impossible to build a major new dam, and there’s been a rash of much-heralded dam removals in recent years. Dams can cost more to maintain than the value of any electricity produced, they reduce access to historic spawning grounds for Pacific and Atlantic salmon and other less glamorous fish, and water evaporates and impoundments silt up so that reservoirs fail at their task of water storage. Neglected dams are also dangerous for folks down-river.

Non-native fish pose similar emotional qualms as tailwaters, whether the fish were last stocked one week or 100 years ago. In the Swift, there are brook trout, rainbow trout, and brown trout, but only the brook trout are native to New England. One of the reasons for the Swift’s popularity in Massachusetts–and it’s the most popular freshwater fly-fishing water in Massachusetts–is that it produces large native brook trout, and large brook trout are no longer easy to come by in their native range. Most places the brookies have been pushed out by non-native rainbows and browns. The rainbows are descendants of California stocks, the browns were brought over from Europe, and in the Swift both naturally reproduce and are still being stocked.

For me there is a resonance to catching a native brookie in Massachusetts that’s not there with an introduced rainbow, or a native cutthroat in New Mexico versus an introduced rainbow or brown. One supposes that catching a brown in Scotland feels more authentic than catching an Arkansas brown, and if anybody would like to fly me to Scotland I’d like to find out. Are there native browns in Greenland, or only arctic char? Is that why we want to annex Greenland, so that we’ll have someplace American to catch native browns?

I was thinking about this stuff on the Swift because for most knowledgeable fly fishers native fish in free-flowing rivers in wild places is the ideal. Getting ready for Massachusetts, I re-read Walden, in part because it’s an essential Massachusetts book and in part because I was looking for hints as to why the notion of wildness matters.5 The apparent threats to public land by the current Washington administration also had me thinking about wild places, and, weirdly enough, I was contemplating my own human frailty. I likely won’t be able to traipse off into wild places much longer, so to me their value increases as my opportunities decrease.

There are about 111.7 million acres of designated wilderness on American public land. That’s roughly the size of California, and more than half of our wilderness is in Alaska. The 1964 Wilderness Act defines wilderness as land where the earth is “untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor . . .” Bob Marshall, the founder of the Wilderness Society and the namesake of the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana, defined wilderness as a region “which contains no permanent inhabitants, possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means[,] and is sufficiently spacious that a person in crossing it must have the experience of sleeping out.”6

But rivers and saltwater and lakes are a little different than big tracts of wilderness. There are few big rivers that you can’t travel with a jetboat, and a lot of perfectly fishable rivers flow down by the golf course and then under the bridge. They are fishable when suburban and even urban. In rivers, though, you can capture a bit of wildness in the most mundane places. Fishing has taken me to plenty of truly wild places. I have flown into high mountain rivers, boated miles up rivers where there was no other mechanical access, ridden horses to mountain lakes in Argentina, fished in national parks in Cuba and the Everglades, and all of it with the weak and wholly unnecessary excuse that I wanted to catch fish. I have also now parked at an industrial park to walk down the improved running path to look for trout in the Swift River in Massachusetts, and I’ve done similar walks in thousands of other places. Was one experience better than the other? Was one more pure?

Well yeah, probably, but the water on the Swift is clear and clean. The approaches take a bit of effort, at least for an old man. The fish are beautiful, strong, and fat. When I’m playing a fish, I don’t really consider that I’m fishing behind a dam and not hundreds of miles from the nearest pavement.

Marshall wrote that we receive physical and psychological benefits from visiting wilderness: physical health from wilderness travel, mental independence from the challenge, satisfaction of an innate craving for adventure, and an opportunity for contemplation and repose not present in the daily business of busy lives.

We also receive intangible esthetic benefits. There is, he says, “the undisputed beauty of the primeval.” This is a constant theme of American writing, whether it’s about the magnificence of a great white whale or the quietly contemplative beauty of finning trout beneath a bridge. Emerson, a Massachusetts guy, suggests that it is in nature that we can strip away the distractions of our mundane world to fully engage with beauty.7

That other Concord, Massachusettian,8 Henry David Thoreau, does his mentor and friend Emerson proud. At different times I’ve thought that Walden was a mechanic’s discussion of housing costs, a gardener’s discussion on how to grow beans, or a surveyor’s discussion of the depth of a pond, but in his sidling way Thoreau suggests something more subtle, that only if we from time to time reduce to essentials can we we truly engage with what’s important.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Thoreau published Walden in Massachusetts in 1854, and that Charles F. Orvis opened his store in Vermont in 1856. One didn’t lead to the other, as far as I know Charles F. didn’t sell copies of Walden next to the dog beds, but they were, I think, a part of the same impulse. 1850s America was one of our most fractious times, loaded with national disputes verging on violence, not unlike today. Parts of the Northeast and New England were changing fast, from agrarian to industrial, from rural to urban, and both Walden and Orvis evidence a yearning for the natural world that was being lost. Bob Marshall (or John Muir, or Aldo Leopold, or Wendell Berry, or Gary Snyder) was still addressing that yearning for Eden well into the next century. The rest of us are still buying fly rods.

We fished two days on the Swift. It was a quick trip, one day flying to Hartford, Connecticut, then driving 50 miles to Palmer, Massachusetts, two days fishing, and then one day home. We fished with Matt Tempesta of Tempco Flyfishing, an Orvis-endorsed guide, and it was a joy. Matt is former career infantry, and he has that easy, confident, genial bearing that the best of ex-military have. He’s still a very young man, at least as I measure these things. He loves the Swift, and he seemed proud and delighted to show it to us.

The first day we waded and walked, and from the bank Matt would study water looking for fish. In a lot of the upper river the fish were apparently hanging out in places where we weren’t. Much of our first day we walked the upper mile of the river, isolated from development by a wildlife management area, looking for fish more than fishing. It’s a fine way to fish, and a better way to get introduced to water, though I will note that they have ups and downs in Massachusetts that we don’t have on the Southeast Texas Coastal Plain. There were times during the day when it seemed to me that notwithstanding Bob Marshall, some mechanical uphill conveyance would be the very thing.

Kris outfished me again, and on the first day she caught a couple of rainbows at the Y–the famous Y–immediately below the dam.9 I caught nothing. For one reason or another I hadn’t cast a fly rod in months, and my cast, which is usually pretty good, was trash. Matt kept complimenting Kris’s cast and making suggestions for mine. I hate fly rods.

That night it snowed. It was April and it snowed. At home in Houston my tomatoes were well-along to producing fruit.

We fished the next day out of Matt’s raft in the lower river. I fished either a single nymph under an indicator or small streamers, but I never caught anything on a streamer. One of the remarkable things about the Swift is that over its short distance it continually changes, so that the narrow sections near the dam broaden and allow drift fishing. In some sense the Swift is several different rivers held together by the same water. I had better luck fishing from the boat, and on the second day caught a fine native brookie and a rainbow. Kris got the prize though, catching an unexpected pickerel. I had never seen one, and notwithstanding what Mr. Thoreau said,10 it’s an ugly fish, primeval and vicious, the smaller cousin of pike and muskie, a predator.

Matt had brought us a beer to end the day, and we stood by the launch and drank a bit. As I recall the scene, Matt was wearing a tee shirt and shorts, working on his tan. Kris and I were huddled together shivering. After a day in the wind on Massachusetts’ water, we were way out of our comfort zone. It would snow even more that night, and us poor Houstonians weren’t up for more cold. We left the last of the beer in the can, piled into the car, and turned on the heat. Then we turned up the heat. That was plenty enough wilderness for one day.

  1. The water is cold because it’s released from deep in the lake. The water temperature isn’t affected by air temperature. ↩︎
  2. Or 7. Or 31. Or 25. I’ve never found a consistent number for the length of the Swift below the dam. Somebody surely knows it, but I don’t. It’s short. The first mile below the dam is fly-fishing only. Or maybe it’s the first two miles. ↩︎
  3. 460 miles. For comparison, the Mississippi is 2,340 miles. The longest river that flows through Texas, the Rio Grande, is 1,896 miles. ↩︎
  4. The Glen Canyon Dam at Lee’s Ferry is the largest dam to ever be proposed for removal. It’s a stupid dam that loses about 6% of the Colorado River’s water to evaporation, and has always been controversial. It is great for recreation, and below the dam there’s a fine tailwater fishery. Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang revolves around a plot to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. It’s not going to get taken out any time soon, either through official channels or by The Monkey Wrench Gang, so you’ve still got plenty of time to go fish there. ↩︎
  5. (1854) I feel like I need to say that Walden is by Henry David Thoreau. A few years ago in an adult Spanish class I made a joke about Walden and the Louisianan sitting next to me didn’t know what it was. They do things different in Louisiana, and he clearly had never had Pat Miller for American Literature. He was a very handsome young man, and he was learning Spanish for his trips to bars in Mexico, but I thought he should also spend some time reading Walden. For some reason he was very proud that he’d never read Romeo and Juliet, and never would. ↩︎
  6. Bob Marshall, “The Problem of the Wilderness”, Scientific Monthly 30 (2), February 1930. ↩︎
  7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836). I have read some Emerson, but find him archaic and almost unreadable. He always baffles me, so I may be making this up. ↩︎
  8. Massachusetter? Massachusatonian? ↩︎
  9. Fish stack up at the Y, but so do anglers. We fished there about an hour. We were there early on a Thursday work-day morning, and two people arrived while we fished and two more were arriving when we were leaving. The usual notions of fishing etiquette don’t work at the Y, and the anglers closely line the prime water without the usual regard for distance. That’s ok. I didn’t hook anybody. ↩︎
  10. Thoreau loved to fish, and he loved pickerel. I quoted Thoreau on pickerel before, but it bears repeating:
    “Ah, the pickerel of Walden! . . . They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water.” Walden, The Pond in Winter. I still reckon that they’re kinda ugly, but then I’ve never caught one. ↩︎

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Michigan and Ohio Packing List

I’m lumping these two states together. It’s hard to do them together, but it’s even harder to do them apart, and they do sit next to each other. So they’re lumped.

Gear

Our guides in both states wanted us to use their rods, which helps them because they can come to the launch with the rods rigged. We didn’t take rods at all. Lance in Michigan fished with 4-weight Winston rods, which meant that I was fishing with slightly lighter versions of what I would have lugged to Michigan anyway. Katie in Ohio fished with 7-weight G Loomis NRX or Sage rods, so I was fishing with different brands of the 7-weight that I would have lugged to Ohio.

In Michigan we used floating lines, same for Ohio except for a wee bit of sinking line fishing. I can’t imagine that anybody actually likes to fish with sinking lines. To cast with floating lines you just have to pick the line up off the top of the water. Now mind, that’s no easy task, and a good line pick-up is the heart of the cast, well, that and about a half-dozen other things that are also the heart of the cast, but with sinking lines you have to get the line to the top of the water before you can even begin to pick it up, and sinking lines are not known for casting easily anyway. The whole process is fraught with peril for everyone standing near me.

We also fished out of boats in both states, so in addition to not packing rods and reels we didn’t pack waders or boots. No waders, no boots, no rods, no reels . . . I did take some flies, and used a couple, but the guides had those too. It was the easiest packing ever.

Detroit

Detroit was a joy. Parts of it are still beat up, but I’ve never been in a town where people were prouder of their city. The first night at dinner at Alpino we asked our waiter if there was something in particular we should see, and he wrote out a page-long list of places for us. He recommended places for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He listed don’t-miss destinations and neighborhoods just to drive through. It was good advice, too. We spent parts of three days in Detroit, and could easily have spent three more, and we didn’t deviate much from our waiter’s advice.

The one place recommended by everyone we asked was the Detroit Institute of Art. We spent three hours there before we left for Grayling, and could have spent another four. We barely got off the third floor, which is the smallest floor. As museums go, it’s about as good as anywhere, and should be on everyone’s list of American art museums. I even fished while I was there.

Greek fish dish, between 340 and 330 BCE; Roman fish mosaic, 4th century A.D.; Detroit Institute of Art.

Detroit has a large Middle Eastern population, with estimates of over 300,000 people. Apparently the growth was a combination of the growth of the auto industry and the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which is pretty serendipitous if you ponder it, and was then spurred by the lifting of restrictions on Arabic and Asian immigration by the Immigration and Nationalization Act of 1965. The signage in Dearborn, for instance, is doubled in Arabic. We went to Dearborn for afternoon baked stuff at Shatila Bakery. No donuts, but a good bakery anyway.

Our Alpino waiter had suggested lunch at the Yemen Cafe, which was a diner in a fairly beat-up neighborhood. The cafe was busy with African Americans from the neighborhood and Yemenis in fairly traditional dress, including one guy wearing a jambiya dagger, the dagger that Peter O’Toole wears in Laurence of Arabia. Open carry.

Our waiter brought us free glasses of Yemeni tea to try. We ordered slabs of hot Yemeni bread, chicken gallaba with hummus, and lamb fasah. We were taking the advice of our Alpino waiter and didn’t know exactly what we were ordering, but sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Detroit was at it’s peak of wealth and industrial might in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Art Deco buildings from its heyday are magnificent. Our Alpino waiter suggested the Guardian Building and the Fisher Building, both of which have been preserved in fine form. It’s kinda like visiting the Sistine Chapel. You don’t so much comprehend it as just stand around and gawk. There were great mosaics in the Fisher Building, though I saw no fish.

Guardian Building, 1929

Fisher Building, 1928

The first morning I went for a run along the Detroit River, and when I tripped on the sidewalk and sprawled, customs officers offered me a bottle of water. The guy running in front of me came back to make sure I was ok. Detroiters are not only proud of their city, they’re friendly.

We took the Detroit Windsor Tunnel to Canada, and no matter what you may have heard I didn’t go there to buy Cuban cigars. Windsor looks like a good place to go if you’re in the market for cannabis, or a tattoo, or Cuban cigars. Cigars are heavily taxed and expensive in Canada, not that I would know.

We didn’t get to see the Tigers play because they were on the road, and I’m kinda glad. it gives me an excuse to revisit Detroit.

The first night we picked Alpino for dinner because it was the kind of Germanic high cuisine that we don’t really get in Houston. Alpino serves food from the Alps, which is German tinged with Swiss tinged with Italian, which makes for a nice combination. The food was good, our tour guide/waiter was great.

Our second night in Detroit we ate at Buddy’s Pizza, which first served Detroit-style pizza. Buddy’s was a Detroit bar, a former speakeasy, and it started serving pizza as a bar snack in the 40s. Square pizza is Sicilian, and the first pizzas were baked in liberated drip pans from the plants. I like to think of the pans as liberated anyway, though in truth they were apparently purchased from auto suppliers. Liberated drip pans just has a nice ring to it.

There are now multiple Buddy’s in the Detroit area, and I’m sure they’re all fine, but the original location reeks of authenticity. On the way in we asked an employee standing near the back door which pizza we should get. He told us his favorite was the Detroiter. Well of course it was.

He was a waiter but not our waiter, but before we left he went out of his way to visit our table and make sure we liked the pizza. Like I said, everyone was proud of their city, and who wouldn’t be? We really liked Detroit.

Cincinatti

After a day’s fishing in Ohio we spent two nights in Cincinatti. We went to a Reds game. We visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I ate a hot dog with Skyline Chili and cheese, and we sat on a nice downtown square and listened to a lively band during Cincinnati’s Oktoberfest. We ate dinner at a completely forgettable restaurant, then we ate dinner the next night at another completely forgettable restaurant. We went to Graeter’s Ice Cream, and visited in line with two American Airlines flight attendants flying out of Dallas. It was nice enough, but it suffered in comparison to Detroit.

Skyline Chili, by the way, is actually a Greek ragu sauce usually served on spaghetti. It was dubbed as chili during the nationwide chili craze in the early part of the last century. It is not chili, and for Texans, calling it chili is heresy. It has cinnamon in it, and chocolate. I’ll just note that the Cincinnati Reds in recent years have consistently beaten my Astros, so eating Skyline Chili was debasement in hopes of appeasing the baseball gods. It’s no wonder that I didn’t enjoy Cincinnati as much as Detroit.

Of course Detroit then knocked my Astros out of the wild card round of the playoffs. Did I mention that I hate Detroit?

Hotels

In Detroit we stayed downtown in the Shinola Hotel. The room had lots of Shinola accessories, there was a Shinola watch store, and the downtown location made getting around Detroit easy. We walked to dinner at Alpino, and had the Tigers been in town we could have walked to the stadium.

In Cincinnati we stayed downtown at the 21C Museum Hotel, and were able to walk to the Reds game. There was plenty to do downtown, and we didn’t take the car out until we drove to the airport our last morning.

In Grayling we stayed at the Gates Au Sable Lodge, which sits on the bank of the Au Sable River, has a good fly shop and guide service, and has a good restaurant where we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner for every meal. The Lodge has also collected all of the possible trout fishing bibelots produced in its 50-year history to adorn every available decorative niche, as if it had hired an interior decorator from the classified ads at the back of an old copy of Field and Stream. There were rod racks on the wall above the bed, and wader hangers by the door to each room. There were framed flies and fish prints and mounted fish, and Au Sable boat-shaped light fixtures. I was especially fond of our room’s trout fishing carpet.

Playlists

There are a lot of similarities between my Ohio and Michigan playlists. They seem balanced, as if the two states took turns producing songsters, and they share a kind of rock and roll grit that you just don’t always find in other states. In Ohio there are the Black Keys, in Michigan Jack White. In Ohio there is Josh Ritter, Marc Cohn, and The National, in Detroit there’s MC5 and Fountains of Wayne. Of course it’s hard to top Detroit’s Motown. With Motown you get Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Aretha Franklin, the Spinners, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, the Jackson 5 . . . Ohio does have the O’Jays, the Isley Brothers, and the Ohio Players, but Motown is Motown.

In Detroit there was Motown music playing everywhere. Well of course there was. It was like Hawaiian music in Hawaii. These people love their city.

The Supremes, The Ed Sullivan Show, CBS Television, 1966.

They really are good playlists, amazing playlists. Devo, Madonna, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Rare Earth and Grand Funk Railroad. Roy Rogers, Dean Martin, and Nine Inch Nails. Tracy Chapman and Doris Day. The Foo Fighters. They are great lists full of great music, and I won’t report you if you skip Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes. No one has to listen to Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes when they can listen instead to Stevie Wonder. Or Roy Rogers.

I had vowed I’d hum Baby Love every day in Michigan, and I did.

Guitar

I took the Kohno. I worked on Bach.

The Tyler Davidson Fountain, Cincinnati.

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Lots of Trout, Au Sable River, August 18-19, 2024 (42)

Michigan’s Au Sable River has been a fly-fishing destination for a century or so, and Gates Au Sable Lodge was built on the Au Sable in 1970, so it’s a bit more than a half-century old. People go to the Au Sable to fish, or maybe when it starts to get cold they go there to hunt, but I’m not aware that there’s anything else that’s much of a draw. It’s not well-known for spa treatments.

The Lodge is a classic. When Gates Au Sable Lodge opened in 1970, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” was the number one song. The Beatles released Let It Be in 1970, then they broke up the same year. I was a high school freshman. That’s old.

The fish we caught in the Au Sable weren’t big, most were only seven or eight inches, but they were very pretty and both of us caught a few larger rainbows. Ok, Kris caught two larger rainbows and I caught one, but who’s counting? In any case we caught a lot of fish. Michigan guides have to report fish counts to the state, so for once we kept count. Between us we caught 27 trout the first day and 15 the second half-day, more or less. Still, that’s a lot of fish, and on each day we each caught exactly the same number of fish, more or less.

The Au Sable was originally a grayling river, then the grayling died off from over-fishing and logging and were replaced by stocked trout. There’s no longer any stocking in the Au Sable, so even if today’s trout aren’t native, all of the trout are wild. We each caught brook trout, rainbows, and browns, so we each had an Au Sable slam. I guess the size of most of the fish made them more of petite slams than grand.

Our guide, Lance Nelson, guides for Gates Lodge. He had us fish a nymph dropper beneath a surface dry fly with 7x tippet, but we didn’t fish out of Au Sable boats. They’re pirogues adapted for Michigan lumbering by Louisiana lumbermen, and then re-adapted for fly fishing. Instead of being rowed or paddled they’re poled like a pirogue. The guide poles from the back seat, and the anglers sit in the middle and the front. Lance says he owns one, but that they’re not much fun for two anglers. The second angler in the center of the boat is pretty restricted, and sitting in the center makes it hard for that angler to fish.

I’m sure Kris wouldn’t have minded sitting in the center. And that varnished wood is very pretty

We fished out of a standard fiberglass drift boat, with the guide in the center and me in the worst seat regardless of where I was sitting. Kris caught more fish than me, though I’m certain we caught exactly the same number.

The 7x tippet deserves at least a passing glance. The leader goes between the fly line and the fly, and the tippet is the last bit of the leader that ties to the fly. Normally a trout guide would use 4x tippet for nymphs underwater, and 5x for dry flies on the surface. As far as I know, until the Au Sable, I had never fished with 7x tippet. It must have worked, because we caught a lot of fish. We each caught exactly the same number of fish, or maybe I caught a few more.

The leader, including the tippet, is usually about nine feet long. It gets progressively smaller from the fly line to the fly, so where it attaches to the fly line a trout leader might be 20 lb. test, and where the tippet ties to the fly it might be 4 or 5 lbs. For bass and redfish I normally fish about 16 lb. tippet, which is big stuff, but neither bass nor redfish are tippet shy. In very clear slow water trout can be very shy, and 7x tippet, which is about as fine as a fine hair, is intended for the shyest of trout. The 7x fluorocarbon is typically about 2 lb. test.

I don’t own any 7x tippet, and I don’t want to.

Michigan was our 42nd state to fish, so I ought by now to be better at describing things, but every place is different, and I really haven’t been unhappy anywhere. Still, fishing in Michigan made me very happy. Traveling state to state we’ve encountered places that surprised me, and places that were hard. We’ve fished places that met expectations, and places that inspired awe. Michigan wasn’t exactly any of those. We were in the Northwoods on an approachable river with a good guide at a good lodge and we caught fish. The leaves there were beginning to change, and the brookies were beginning to put on their spawning colors. Can something be a memory when you haven’t done it before? It wasn’t déjà vu, but more like Plato and that cave. It was like glimpsing the archetype of what fishing is supposed to be. Quiet, contemplative, friendly, a bit technical but not too technical. There was nothing between us and what God had made.

I could fish that river again and again and be happy.