Category: Midwest

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Indiana Packing List

I liked Indiana. I liked the friendliness of the people and gentleness of the landscape. I guess in winter it’s probably miserable, but I always wanted to live in a place where I could wear more sweaters. Maybe I’m a Midwesterner at heart.

Walking on a trail through Turkey Run State Park, there were three young African American girls, maybe 16, sitting together on a bench by the river. One of them announced to us and her friends that we were beautiful–I guess she figured that old people walking about was a beautiful thing. I asked her if she always sat by the river and charmed passersby? And I figure that was about right, because she was completely charming. She took our picture, and she did a good job, both at charming and photography.

I liked Indiana.

Gear

We took a rod each, 7 weights, with floating lines and 7 1/2′ 10-pound leaders. The rods would have been too heavy for trout anywhere but Alaska, and were heavy for the smallmouth bass we caught, but they worked, they were fine. Everything in Indiana was fine except the donuts.

We didn’t take waders or boots. We waded in shorts and water shoes.

We fished small poppers and streamers, streamers and poppers. Then we fished more poppers and streamers.

The Turkey Run Inn and Cabins

We decided to fish Sugar Creek because it’s short, small, has a good reputation for smallmouth, and runs through two nearly-adjacent state parks, Shades and Turkey Run. We figured we’d have plenty of river access, and there was the bonus that Turkey Run Inn and Cabins is located at Turkey Run State Park.

With all those running turkeys, I’d have been disappointed if we hadn’t seen some wild turkeys. We did.

Turkey Run is about 70 miles west of Indianapolis, and in the earliest days of cars apparently 70 miles was about as far as you could expect to travel in one day. The Inn was built for early adventuring motorists as an out, overnight and then home. The Indianapolis 500 first ran in 1916, and one of its founders, Arthur Newby, was instrumental in the purchase of the park that same year. Of the $40,000 price tag, The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Association gave $5,000. Newby personally gave another $5,000.

The Inn opened in 1919, and it’s very popular with Hoosiers. The Inn and park together feel like a resort. Outside your bedroom door you have this lovely bit of land in which to go a’wandering, and it’s all very pretty. It’s not as expensive as a resort, and maybe the rooms aren’t quite as big nor the restaurant quite as ambitious, but during the busy times of the year it’s probably harder to get a reservation.

It’s like a lot of Indiana. It’s nice.

Restaurants

We ate at some good places in Indiana. On our first day, on the way from the Indianapolis airport to Turkey Run, we took a side trip to Shapiro’s Deli, founded 1905. It’s classic Jewish deli food, with the addition of rhubarb pie. I’ve decided everything is better with rhubarb pie.

We should have split a reuben. Ordering two was hubris.

The first night at Turkey Creek Inn we ate at the Inn restaurant, The Narrows, and it was fine. The second night we ate at Blue Cactus Tacos and Tequila Bar in Crawfordsville, Indiana, population 16,385. It was in a strip mall. I had the tacos huitlacoche, made with huitlacoche corn fungus and queso fresco on homemade tortillas. I can’t remember ever having a bad taco, but I’ve probably had some uninteresting tacos. These tacos were interesting.

I’d go back to try the chorizo and potato tacos. I’d go back to try the squash blossom tacos and even the cactus tacos. I don’t care that Lyle Lovett said never eat Mexican food north of Dallas (and in my mind the notion that Dallas might have decent Mexican food is really stretching it), but in a small Indiana country town those were some interesting tacos. The margaritas were good too.

Our last night we stayed near the airport in Indianapolis and had dinner with a college friend, Andy, and his wife Lorraine. Andy and I were friends at the University of Texas 40+ years ago, dang close to 50, and I ate my first bagel at one of Andy’s cousin’s home in Memphis. I hadn’t seen him since college.

The bagels were imported from New York, frozen, and I’m getting all nostalgic remembering how once upon a time bagels were exotic anywhere south or west of New York City.

Andy and Lorraine have lived in Indianapolis for a while . . . 30 years maybe? And he said two things that stuck, that he’d lost his Texas accent, and that he’s now from Indianapolis. It was clearly their home, with all the good things that word can hold. He and Lorraine were proud of their city, and it was such good fortune to see Indianapolis through them.

We ate at Bluebeard, in Indianapolis’s little slice of Bohemia. Thank goodness we had to catch a fish in Indiana, because otherwise I’d have missed seeing Andy. And I would have missed eating huitlacoche tacos in a strip mall in Crawfordsville.

Donuts

Disappointing. I can’t recommend Indiana for its donuts. Maybe we never got to the right place.

Columbus, Indiana

We had set aside a second day to fish, but since the water was low and we’d caught fish already we diverted to Columbus, Indiana, population 50,474, home of Cummins Inc. Cummins makes lots and lots and lots of diesel engines.

It’s hard to explain Columbus, Indiana, except that it might have been nothing but another company town. It’s not. Back in the 40s, the future Cummins CEO, J. Irwin Miller, proposed a modern building for his family church, First Christian Church, and Eliel Saarinen was invited to be the architect. Saarinen was reportedly reluctant, but Miller’s mother chaired the building committee, and she wrote to Saarinen that she didn’t want a church that paraded its cost, she wanted a church where the poorest woman in Columbus would feel welcome. Saarinen took the bait. After that first church Columbus went nuts for modern architecture.

Under Miller, the Cummins Foundation paid for the architectural design of public buildings. The town library was designed by I.M. Pei (though not with money from the Cummins Foundation). Outside it’s certainly a welcoming space–it’s even got its own Henry Moore statue–but inside it’s one of the most appealing, user-friendly libraries imaginable. And the list just goes on and on. First Baptist Church was designed by Harry Weese. Mabel McDowell School was designed by John Carl Warnecke. Fire Station no. 4 was designed by Robert Venturi.

There are buildings by Kevin Roche, Cesar Pelli, Myron Goldsmith, and Richard Meir. There are six buildings in Columbus designated as National Historic Landmarks. There must be 40 buildings in Columbus that are worth seeing. I think that even the local Shell gas stations were all designed by Pritzker Prize winners. Listing Columbus’s architects is a little like saying that the statue of the soldier on the courthouse lawn was sculpted by Michelangelo, or maybe Henry Moore.

Here’s a roundup of Columbus’s fire stations.

Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church must be one of the most striking buildings in the world. Not Columbus. Not Indiana. Not the Midwest. The todo del mundo, the whole pie, the world. And it may not even be the best building in Columbus, Indiana. The town takes your breath.

All this architectural splendor might have been a meaningless gimmick, but it binds the city together. You look at those public spaces and think of the hundreds of ways, good or indifferent, that a foundation could have spent its money, that a community could have invested its treasure, and you know that this money and this effort by this town was well spent. Ok, I reckon some of those roofs may leak, and the maintenance costs are probably higher than anybody expected, but you know that Cummins loves its town, and that the residents are proud of their town. I could have spent days in Columbus.

I’d go to that church. I’d use that library.

J. Irwin Miller was also instrumental in founding the National Council of Churches, and was its president from 1960-63. He led its push for passage of the Civil Rights Act. I miss Rockefeller Republicans.

Books

Kurt Vonnegut is from Indianapolis. So it goes.

Playlist

Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 are from Indiana. I remember hearing the Jackson 5’s version of “Rockin’ Robin” as a child and thinking how peculiar, and that’s pretty much my verdict on Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5. I’m not a fan, and my favorite song by Jackson was perhaps “Ben” (1972), possibly because it so embraced the peculiar. I forgot to put it on the play list.

John Mellencamp, David Lee Roth of Van Halen, and John Hiatt are all from Indiana. For our honeymoon (1984) we drove from Houston to New Mexico with cassette tapes of “Swordfishtrombones” by Tom Waits and “Riding with the King” by John Hiatt, both 1983. We must have listened to those two tapes a hundred times. I still love them.

I don’t know how they got our names
But yesterday this letter came
Mr. and Mrs. Permanent Dweller, your lucky number is

You may already be a winner 

John Hyatt, You May Already be a Winner, 1983.

I highly advise a road trip with “Swordfishtrombones” and “Riding with the King“. Based solely on the one experience I also highly recommend honeymoons.

Wes Montgomery, the great jazz guitarist, was from Indiana, and you can’t be any sort of guitarist without marveling at Wes Montgomery. Freddie Hubbard was from Indiana, and I kept looking forward to his version of “Misty” coming up again on the playlist.

Unknown photographer, Cole Porter and Betty Shevlin Smith, c. 1920. Wikimedia Commons.

Cole Porter was from Indiana, and there were thousands of Cole Porter covers to choose from. When I was a senior in high school, our senior play was Anything Goes, and I sang “Let’s Misbehave” in a duet with Julie Johnson. Me? I was terrible, but Julie was great, so I don’t remember it with too much queasiness. It left a soft spot for Cole Porter.

In addition to all that good stuff, Indiana University at Bloomington is our best public university music school. It’s most famous graduate is probably Joshua Bell, so of course he was on the playlist.

Movies

lndiana is the setting of two of my favorite sports movies, Breaking Away (1979) and Hoosiers (1986). Neither is about baseball. Neither is about fly fishing. Everybody I guess has seen Hoosiers, but having now been to Indiana it’s hard to see how it could have been set anywhere else. I guess that name, Hoosiers, is kind of a giveaway.

Breaking Away doesn’t seem much remembered anymore, but it’s such a fine movie. It so resonates to drive Indiana backroads and highways while channelling the movie’s bike rides–I also once owned a Masi Volumetrica with a Campi Record C groupo, and rode that bike thousands of miles all the while imagining my place on the Tour. I included Schubert’s Italian Symphony in the playlist just to get that rush of Indiana bike-riding exhilaration that Breaking Away evokes. If I were going to come up with a 50-state roadtrip playlist, the first movement of the Italian Symphony might be my entry for Indiana. Ok, that or “Riding with the King.” Ok, those or “Let’s Misbehave.”

Guitar

I played the guitar a lot in Indiana. After dinner there wasn’t much to do at the Turkey Run Inn and Cabins but sit outside on the lawn, drink beer, admire people’s dogs, and play the guitar. But then really, who needs better? I was working on the second Alemande movement of the first Bach Cello Suite. I can play it ok, but I can never remember it. Maybe my memory will get better as I age. I already know I can’t get more beautiful.

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Smallmouth Bass, Sugar Creek Indiana, August 27, 2023

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I had to have been to Indiana once before, when my parents drove from Texas to Fremont, Michigan, to see my namesake Uncle Neil. They would have clipped the northwest corner, around South Bend. I was only one, so my memory of the trip is pretty hazy. I’m reasonably certain I wasn’t driving.

Whatever happened on that first trip, my memory from last week is mostly reliable. Indiana is a pretty place, particularly if you like fields of corn offset by fields of soybeans. It is green, and everywhere in August there are cornfields, scattered silos, picturesque barns, and stands of oaks and maples. It’s green. I like green.

Where we fished, Sugar Creek, was just a bit south and an hour or so west of Indianapolis. In the south the landscape starts to vary more than northern Indiana, with more rise and fall. On Sugar Creek there was heavy riverside growth and intermittent limestone bluffs. The water in Sugar Creek was low, but clear and like everything else tinged green. It was lovely.

We found Sugar Creek on the internet, searching best places to fly fish in Indiana. I had first contacted a guide on the Tippecanoe, which is a river further north and east, but more famous than Sugar Creek for its role in presidential politics. “Sugar Creek and Tyler Too!” was never going to be a thing in any election. When we asked the Tippecanoe guide about a Saturday though, he said there were too many inner-tubers on the weekends. We decided to go it on our own. We did take his advice and skipped the weekend.

There were a couple of canoe liveries on Sugar Creek, and we rented a canoe from Clements, who couldn’t have been nicer. I had emailed them about a ten mile trip, but they said because of low water they were only doing five miles. They weren’t kidding. Because of the low water we frequently had to get out of the canoe to drag it through low water riffles. It took much more effort than I would have expected.

I was glad Kris was there to do all the work.

Sometimes the front of the boat with Kris floated fine, and only my fat butt would drag. I could stand and put one leg in the water to push the boat forward, like I was skateboarding the river. It was kinda fun.

It took us roughly five hours to go five miles from the put-in back to the canoe livery, which even allowing time for fishing was pretty slow. At that rate we wouldn’t have finished the ten-mile trip until some time next week. Some of that time was fishing, some of it canoeing, some of it dragging. By the time we were done I had a blister on my little toe from scuffling through river rocks, and I was pretty certain I was going to wake up sore tomorrow. We’d both had enough. We decided that since we’d caught fish, one day’s Indiana fishing was plenty.

We fished on a Monday, and with all the Indiana kids back in school we had the river pretty much to ourselves. There were two gear fishers in another canoe, and we shared the shuttle with them to the put-in and then leapfrogged canoes a good bit of the morning. One of the gear fishers told us that the river was so low because it was already dry, but that an abnormal heat wave the week before had sucked out more water. I don’t know whether he was right or not, but it was such a vivid image that it was hard not to admire the description.

Late in the day we were passed by three kayakers. Then we leapfrogged them for a while. That was it for river traffic.

We caught fish early, we caught fish late. We both caught a rock bass, which I’d never seen before. I thought they were crappie, but Kris did an INaturalist identification. There’s nothing like wilderness internet.

I caught some pretty small smallmouth, and I also caught some mighty small smallmouth. Kris got the best hit of the day from a biggish smallmouth, but it let us go our way without having to land it. That’s a win all around.

Evermann, B.W., Hildebrand, S.F, common white sucker, Notes onf the Fishes of East Tennessee, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Fishes vol. 34, 1914, Washington, D.C., Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

In the river there were hundreds of suckers, lined nose to tail and moving sedately out of our way when the canoe drifted through. Many of them were 20 inches or more, and all of them seemed to be looking for something. Kris couldn’t believe it wasn’t us. It wasn’t. She had to cast to them though because, well, fish.

We fished some from the boat, and some wading, mostly casting towards the shore into the deepest water we could find. We had relatively big rods, 7 weights, which were certainly big for what we actually caught. Still, we could hope. I’m sure that there are big fish in Sugar Creek that aren’t suckers. Everybody says so, and everybody in Indiana is honest.

Small creek, small fish, small flies. It was perfect weather with just enough work to tire us and enough fish and scenery to keep us entertained. If it hadn’t been for the blister, it couldn’t have been a gentler day. I don’t recall ever getting tangled, or casting into a tree, or losing a fly. I fished the same two flies all day, either a stylish blue popper or a variation on a bluegill fly called a BBB. The fish took both.

This is going to get down in the weeds, but bear with me. A week before a casting instructor had filmed my cast at a Texas Fly Fishers event. I think he said “damn,” but I suspect it wasn’t in a good way. Mostly my cast was ok, except for the strangest glitch. On a short cast I picked up the line from the water too early, and the early pick-up caused my backcast to go straight up, which isn’t exactly the very thing. It wasn’t the worst thing I ever did, casting or otherwise, but it did create all sorts of short cast problems.

Like I said, way down in the weeds, but every now and then fishing on Sugar Creek I’d think I ought to correct it. Naw. It was too nice a day to think.

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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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Missouri Packing List

It’s been a few weeks and a trip to Cuba since we went to Missouri, but there are interesting things to add about Missouri, and by now the tornado is mostly forgotten.

Gear

We fished part of a day at Roaring River State Park. It’s a pretty Ozark mountain river, and it’s easy to wade. It was a bit crowded though. Why do I ever fish on a Saturday? Since Kris and I are both retired we don’t have to anymore, and having a place to ourselves is such a joy. Still, it was a pretty park, and we used typical trout set ups, 9′ 5-weight rods with floating lines. I caught two fish, both rainbow trout. We fished until the park trout permit pinned to my cap blew off and floated downriver.

The river is stocked from a nearby hatchery, and it was a mix of wild and stocked trout. For some folks stocked fish may seem like opportunity, but it’s always less desirable to fish for stocked fish than wild fish. I can’t usually catch much of either one, so I guess it’s not that one’s harder to catch than the other. Wild fish are just better.

I caught both trout on the Roaring River on a mop fly over a hare’s ear nymph, both fished under the surface. Mop flies are tied from one of those fuzzy mops, and are considered by some as a cheap trick. Don’t tell anyone that I used one.

I kinda like mop flies because you can get a lifetime supply of tying materials with a single trip to Walmart.

The next day we fished Crane Creek in Crane, Missouri, which is another pretty Ozark stream, and which is almost but not-quite famous. In the late 1800s, railroad workers dumped California McCloud River rainbow trout off of a railroad bridge into Crane Creek. Cane Creek hasn’t really been stocked much since, and the fish there today are the descendants of those original fish without significant interference. They may be the purest genetic strain of McCloud rainbows in the country, including those in the McCloud River.

Cane Creek

Stocking trout in rivers that support wild trout is controversial. It introduces non-native fish and diseases, and the stocked fish are just enough competition with the natives to hurt. The stockees don’t survive much either. The best-managed states, Montana for instance, have stopped stocking where there are wild trout, and a lot of the nation’s best rivers are never stocked. A creek that hasn’t been stocked, or a creek where stocking was abandoned, is a bit of a gem. That’s why a place like Crane Creek is someplace to look for.

We were there on a Sunday, and Crane Creek was also a little crowded, but I swear they were the nicest people I’ve ever come across on a river. We were at th park in the Town of Crane, population 1,495, and people invited me over to fish next to them. It was unnatural.

Crane Creek fish are small, and I fished with my tiniest rod. This is where I get goofy. Goofier. The truth is I buy fly rods and reels not because they’re better–almost every fly rod and reel is better than I am–but because they’re pretty. If I’m going to buy a reel, I don’t go in thinking that I want this reel because it has the very latest drag system and faster line retrieve, I buy it because I think it looks good. Of all the fly fishing gear I own–and I own a stupid amount of fly fishing gear–this is my prettiest rod and reel:

It’s an 8 1/2 foot Winston Boron IIIx 3-weight rod made in Montana, a rod that is way too lightweight for most of my fishing, and it’s just the loveliest shade of emerald green, with nickel silver fittings and a burled maple reel seat. The reel is a tiny Hardy Marquis 2/3 reel made in England. Are they appreciably better than any other 3-weight rod or reel? No. Could I have found a perfectly decent rod and reel for a third of the price? Absolutely. Are there any rods that look better? Well, maybe some custom classic bamboo. My goodness they’re pretty, and when the fish are small enough it just makes me idiotically happy to use them.

On Crane Creek I caught two small trout on a size 16 hare’s ear nymph under a size 14 royal Wulff, and Kris caught another. I picked the hare’s ear and royal Wulff because, well, they’re classic flies and I thought they matched that rod and reel. I’ve got standards, and I’m not fishing any mop flies with this rod.

Royal Wulff

Branson

I don’t like Branson. Am I being a snob? Of course. I have friends and family who love to go to Branson. I don’t.

There is a Trump Store, and there are shows.

I can’t think of anything worse than going to a show, unless it’s going to a Trump Store. You say the word show to me, and I feel queasy. Las Vegas? Oh lord, don’t make me go. I don’t gamble, and in Las Vegas there are shows. My daughter says the shopping is great in Las Vegas, but how can that be? I don’t think there’s a single fly fishing shop. Las Vegas at least has a minor league baseball team. I don’t think there’s any baseball in Branson.

The last show I went to voluntarily was Cirque de Soleil some 15 years ago, and I know those performers were miraculous, and that there are otherwise rational people who think that Cirque de Soleil is the best thing going. I know in my heart of hearts that that very show I went to was in all ways wonderful, but me? I was bored out of my mind. I’m still bored just thinking about it.

Maybe I need to go to a show with some mostly-naked ladies. At least I’d like the costumes.

In Branson, there are shows a-plenty, and what’s worse they’re all shows that revel in clean living. There’s Dolly Parton’s Stampede Dinner and Show, Hamners’ Unbelievable Magic Variety Show, WhoDunnit Hoedown and Murder Mystery Show, the Grand Jubilee Show, All Hands on Deck Show, Legends in Concert Show, Shepherd of the Hills Outdoor Drama Show . . . The list just won’t stop. You think you’re on a river in the Ozark backcountry away from all the shows, and you come across a flier for the Amazing Acrobats of Shanghai Show.

I’ve got nothing against clean living, and I consider myself a reasonably clean liver. I know and love several devout Baptists, and even some vegetarians, but clean living commodified into a show? I can’t think of a less appealing combination. Branson is one of those rare places where a soupçon of depravity would improve the moral tone.

I guess they do fish with mop flies, and plenty of people consider that depraved.

Donuts

We found two donut shops, though I’m sure there were more.

Parlor Doughnuts was a bit off the beaten path in a strip center. They sold gourmet donuts,((I’ve created a donut shop classification system, and there are four categories. Traditional shops include Houston’s Shipley’s, Krispy Kreme’s, Dunkin’, or the very best donut shop in the world, Ocean Springs, Mississippi’s Tato-Nut Doughnut Shop. Parlor Doughnuts is a chain in the Gourmet Category, and gourmet donuts are a bit more creative, with upscale whatnots coming to the fore. Portland’s Blue Star or Albuquerque’s Rebel come to mind. Experiential donut shops have let creativity run amock, and they are my least favorite kind of donut shop–I’m talking to you, VooDoo. A Cambodian donut shop is a clean, well-lighted place that is almost certainly located in a strip center. Everything is basic but good enough, and the owners are at the counter. Cambodian donutries can have flashes of brilliance–the boudin kolache was invented in a Cambodian donut shop and that deserves a Michelin star, or at least a James Beard nomination. It’s fusion cuisine at its finest.)) and the donuts were a bit elaborate for my taste, but I’d go back. I’d certainly go back if the choice was the other place we tried, Hurts.

Hurts is experiential. It’s next door to the Trump Store on the main drag, and it’s huge for a donut shop. There was a long line for the donuts. There were flavors like cotton candy, and cookie monster, and dirt worms, and every donut seemed created for a 9-year old, which I’m not. When I got to the counter, they were out of plain glazed.

The donuts were cold and forgettable. Kris wanted to chuck them and go back to Parlor.

AirBnB

We stayed in a nice pet-friendly AirBnB on the lake on the edge of town. It was just far enough from Branson’s center to forget where we were, and the owner left us a plate of cookies. They were good home-made cookies, too. There was an old canoe and a beat up bamboo fly rod hung as decorations above the fireplace, and I took that as a good omen. I sat on the enclosed porch and read Huck Finn, and, notwithstanding the No Trespassing signs, took the dogs for walks down to the lake. I’m pretty certain those signs weren’t meant for me.

Fly Shops

There are at least a couple of fly shops in Branson, but we only went to one, River Run Outfitters. We were supposed to fish with guides from the shop, but they talked us out of going. It was cold, in the 40s, and all the floodgates on the dam were open. The wind was gusting up to 40 mph. It was dangerous, and what’s worse we weren’t likely to catch anything. They gave us free coffee and good advice on where to fish instead. I bought some mop flies.

Restaurants

Branson is not a restaurant town. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of restaurants, but they all seem to have names like Hungry Hunter or Pickin’ Porch Grill. There are lots of barbecue places, but I’ve made the mistake of eating Missouri barbecue once before, in Kansas City, and I won’t do that again. Those people eat melted cheese on brisket, which should only be done in leftover brisket enchiladas.

The Keeter Center at College of the Ozarks promised farm to table dining, and I guess it was, but mostly everything just seemed big. Big room, big appetizers, big iced tea. . . Big ideology. I don’t know, it just didn’t click.

See that dish right there? That’s the Brussels sprout nachos appetizer, which as i recall was a lot of chopped up Brussels sprouts and feta on a lot of fried wontons. Had they artfully arranged four or five of those on a plate and charged me $12, I would have eaten them and said that’s ok, but that pile of stuff for $12 was too daunting. All I could think was man-oh-man, that’s big.

All of the waiters at Keeter Center are students at College of the Ozarks, and the hostess told us all about it, and then the waiter told us all about it. It’s a free Christian college, well, free in exchange for work. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t have gone there without lots of conversations with a dean.

The next night we played it safe and went to two of Branson’s sushi joints, Mitsu Neko and Wakyoto. They were fine, and there were no Brussels sprouts. There was some kale, but I think it was purely decorative.

Playlist

Missouri has produced some magnificent music, and I’m still listening to that playlist. Josephine Baker was from St. Louis, and maybe I might have enjoyed one of her shows. From Wikipedia:

Her performance in the revue Un vent de folie in 1927 caused a sensation in [Paris]. Her costume, consisting of only a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Now that’s a costume, and there are some fun recordings of her singing jazzy French stuff.

Missouri had great jazz. You wouldn’t think it, would you? But in the 1920s, Prohibition wasn’t really enforced there, and 18th and Vine in Kansas City was as lively as anyplace in the country. The Kansas City Big Bands had their own style, blusier than New York or Chicago, with a frantic quality that makes you drive just a little faster if your foot’s on the peddle. There are great black big bands, Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, Andy Kirk, George E. Lee, Count Basie . . . Two of the great jazz saxophonists, Lester Young and Charlie Parker, both came out of Kansas City.

There’s rock ‘n roll, too. Big Joe Turner is a joy, then there’s Chuck Berry, Ike and Tina Turner, Sheryl Crow, Michael McDonald, and T Bone Burnett. The Beatles went to Kansas City, or at least they were going.

St. Louis Blues has been covered by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Louis Prima, Doc Watson, Herbie Hancock, Eartha Kitt, Art Tatum, and Ella Fitzgerald, and if your name is Louis, you can still meet Judy Garland there.

Ojon Mill, Photograph of Lester Young, 1944, Time Magazine, Volume 17, Number 13, Public Domain.

Guitar

I took my old Kohno classical, and spent some time at night playing. I don’t remember what, but I’ve been working on an arrangement of Gershwin’s Somebody Loves Me. That’s likely.