We’re at 16 states, with two more, Hawaii and Wisconsin, where we didn’t catch fish. I thought this would take ten years, but then Louis Cahill wrote that we were doing it in five, and that wormed its way into my head. If ten, we’re way ahead, if five we’ve got some catching up to do.
Going someplace and catching a fish is pretty easy, except for time, money, and effort. There are states that are left, Tennessee, New Mexico, Arkansas, North Carolina, Colorado, California . . . Where I’ve spent enough time in my life that I could probably fly or drive in, catch a fish, and check the state off my list without missing much, but there are also states, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Maine, where spending less than a week just seems wrong.
If we really spend a week in all the places that deserve a week ten years won’t be enough.
In eight days we can do some justice to three states, say Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee, but try to add Georgia into that and it’s just too much for anything but a drive-by. Pennsylvania, for instance, is one of the reasons we’re doing this. Neither of us have ever been to Pennsylvania, and how can we not spend at least a couple of days in Philadelphia, and how can we not see Gettysburg? I could probably spend a week in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile I’ve still got work, and there are our dogs at home who love us, and there is the cost of long trips.
So we’ve been planning for 2020. Earlier this year I had decided Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa as a trip, taking about a week so we could fish the Au Sable, some of the UP, Hayward for Muskie, and then the Driftless in SW Wisconsin/NE Iowa. We had talked about a ten day driving trip north, fishing in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. We booked Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, mostly to fish with the guide and teacher, Dom Swentosky in Pennsylvania; and to see Philadelphia. We talked about a great tailwater trip through New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, but no.
Here’s the first map I came up with. The proposed 2020 states are light blue or pink.
And now that’s all shot to hell. Instead we’ve scheduled Washington in February, which is great fun to tell people, and which I blame on Kris: She didn’t say no. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina are still on for June, and then, because of a chance conversation, we’ll go to North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia in early August. That driving trip to the great Southwestern tailwaters will have to wait, and we won’t be driving straight north to North Dakota.
Here’s how the map looks now. Blue states are pretty settled. We’ll try to pick up some of the pinks as we go along. Maybe we’ll make Arkansas Christmas morning.
I’ve been looking at new cars. Mine is starting to cost real money to hold together, and its reliability worries me. If price and global warming weren’t a problem, I’d go buy a Land Cruiser and be done. I want a Land Cruiser, but the current model is 10 years old, gets a combined mileage of 15 mpg, and costs north of $80,000. Eighty thousand dollars would pay for a lot of fishing. Plus the Land Cruiser is just too big. The 4Runner is cheaper and smaller but just as old and nearly as guzzly, and their sister cars, the Lexus GX and LX, are old and guzzly and expensive and worse, they’re ugly. The best thing about driving a Lexus SUV is that you don’t have to look at that horrific grill. Is there an uglier grill on the road than a Lexus SUV?
I’ve driven a mid-sized Mercedes SUV since 1998, two of them anyway, but the new GLE has four different interfaces to communicate with your car’s electronic brain: voice, touch screen, a rotary controller, and not one but two steering wheel touch-pads. That gives you just all kinds of useless ways to turn on the radio. Meantime newer electronic safety features and adaptive cruise control are all extra added costs, and the dealer tells me hybrids are only available in California. Apparently Texans don’t care about global warming.
I want a car that will tow the skiff, has some off-road capability, has at least AWD for boat ramps. and has a reasonable array of cutting-edge safety stuff. I think I want a hybrid, and I know I want a car that I can drive home when there’s a foot of water on University Boulevard. This is, after all, Houston, and the streets in our neighborhood flood on a whim.
Which is a long way around to the half-day we didn’t fish in Vermont, when we spent a morning driving the Range Rover Sport on an off road course at the Equinox. The Land Rover Off-Road Driving Experience! I am experienced!
Driving around the course I got to tip the Sport down radical inclines and through mud and over humps and through gullies and whatnot, and I got to drive a car that I’d been thinking about test driving, though we were admonished that Land Rover did not consider the Experience! a test drive. Range Rover Sports are expensive, and I worry that they wouldn’t be easily repaired on the Alaska Highway or in the far-off wilds of Nebraska, but the gas mileage is reasonable, and this fall’s new plug-in hybrids would be great for my daily commutes. Plus how the car managed itself safely down a 12-foot bluff was great fun.
And Range Rovers always look good, and they balance really well on three legs.
Leaves
My experience of fall color is pretty limited. Coming down the Connecticut River, Chuck said more than once that we should see this when the leaves change. I wish we had.
Knots
I have tied my own leaders for a long time, especially for salt water. I’m really good at blood knots, which may be one of the strangest accomplishments anyone can lay claim to. “I,” I say with a swagger, “am a master at blood knottery!”
For some reason I had it in my head that a blood knot was the very thing for attaching two dissimilar pieces of leader material, like flouro to nylon, or if you wanted to make a big jump in tippet diameter. After the Joan Wulff school I now understand that I was wrong, which I rarely am and in any case I never like hearing. I guess what I originally heard was that blood knots were better than surgeon’s knots for attaching larger diameter bits of leader, and I translated that into something different. Now I have to learn a new knot, or at least re-learn how to tie surgeons knots. I hate tying them, and I hate how they put a bit of a bend in a leader. I’m sure that fish hate them too.
Books
I skimmed a history of New Hampshire, Morison and Morison’s New Hampshire: A Bicentennial History. New Hampshire’s first commerce was providing 100-foot mast timbers for the British navy. Harvesting and transporting 100-foot timbers was brutal business, but neither Horatio Hornblower nor Jack Aubrey could have captained British warships without New Hampshire.
I listened to Scott Conroy’s Vote First or Die: The New Hampshire Primary: America’s Discerning, Magnificent, and Absurd Road to the White House. I’m a sucker for a good political story, and this is one. I actually ended up oddly happy that the first presidential primary is in New Hampshire. I also started The Hotel New Hampshire but never finished it. I ran out of time. I’ll finish it up next time.
I listened to a bunch of Archer Mayor’s Joe Gunther mystery novels, maybe a half-dozen, enough that I ended up feeling guilty: these are perfectly good entertainment but not the sort of thing one reads for self-improvement. The first novels are set in Battleboro, Vermont, but then they range further afield to greater Vermont. I liked listening to them on my morning runs and commutes. I also read some Robert Frost poems and some Hart Crane poems. I could never decide where exactly Frost was from, but New England I reckon. I failed to re-read Walt Whitman, and I’m sorry for that.
Driving we tried to listen to The Deerslayer, which is set in the area that would be Cooperstown. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Last of the Mohicans, since a high school English teacher pointed out to us that in both Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and Scott’s Ivanhoe the dark-haired girl had to die for her ethnic transgressions, while in each case the blonde girl lives. I think the teacher was pointing out something about the 19th century, and letting us know that part of the authors’ message was that we could empathize with those dark-haired heroines and certainly with Chingachgook, but growing up in the South one never knows. Maybe she was warning us about the inevitable outcome of ethnic transgressions. We never made it all the way through Deerslayer, and I suspect Mark Twain was right. I got mighty weary of Natty Bumppo’s virtues during the long wind ups to some bit of actual business.
I read and listened to Burrows and Wallace’s Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, which is magnificent, both as to size, over 1400 pages, and content. Economics, social mores, riots, battles, politics, sanitation, wampum, slavery, disease, immigration; through the 19th century the book covers New York City history with granular particularity, but even when it overwhelmed me it never bored me. The book weaves New York through the national story and then tells the story of both the city and the nation. It’s a fine history.
Playlist
New York
There’s too much music on my New York playlist. I don’t think I ever got through it all, and I’m still listening to it. Big Picture? There’s New Wave and Punk, Brill Building, Gershwin and Bernstein and Copland. There’s Be-Bop. There’s Tin-Pan Alley. There’s 60s folk music and all those interchangeable current bands that could come from no place but Brooklyn. There’s Bennie Goodman and Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. Was there ever a musician tied more closely to a city than Paul Simon? Ok, maybe Leonard Bernstein? Ok, maybe Duke Ellington?
I carried the small travel guitar and played Gershwin transcriptions. When I got back to Houston, a friend pointed out that Gershwin died when he was only 38. I’m still working on the transcriptions, and wishing there were more, at least 40 years more.
George Gershwin, Carl Van Vechten, 1937, Library of Congress.
New Hampshire
Bill Morrisey, Mandy Moore, and Aerosmith. I liked Ray Montagne, who I’d never listened to before.
Vermont.
Vermont’s music comes off better than New Hampshire’s. If nothing else you can always cue up Moonlight in Vermont. l must have downloaded 27 versions, including Billie Holiday and Willie Nelson and Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz. Phish hasn’t recorded it, but I’d never listened to Phish, and I’m glad I did. Apparently jam bands are a thing in Vermont, and I’d take Phish any day over Aerosmith. I also came across a young woman named Caroline Rose on a list of ten Vermont bands I was supposed to listen to now, and decided in fact she was someone I needed to listen to now.
There was also a Bing Crosby/Peggy Lee version of Snow from White Christmas.
Duke Ellington and band members playing baseball in front of their segregated motel (“Astor Motel”) while touring in Florida, Charlotte Brooks, 1955, Library of Congress.
We took five rods, two 9′ five weights, a new Winston Pure and an Orvis Helios 3D; an 8’6″ four weight Orvis T3; a Scott 8′ four weight STS; and a Winston 9′ six weight boron IIIx. We never used the six weight, but being a Winston it looked good in our luggage. the Winston Pure unhappily broke when I slammed a weighted streamer into its tip, but I’ve broken rods before and will break them again. It’s off at Winston getting repaired. I think the repair cost is $75.
The broken Winston Pure is the rod Trout Unlimited sent me for my work as chair of our Houston Mayor’s Commission for Preservation of Bayou Salmonids. Restoring brook trout to Houston’s bayous is a real priority of mine.
Our reels were a mixed lot, all click and pawl, some older Abels and Orvis Battenkills and a newer Hardy. In Vermont on the Waloomsac River the combination of largish trout and current made a disk drag useful, and it’s the only time I’ve ever wanted a disk drag for trout. All of our lines were coldwater floating lines.
For pike we used Chuck DeGray’s eight weights with Orvis Mirage reels and 250 grain Depth Charge lines. I used the Recon and Kris got the Helios 3. Go figure. The Mirages are great, powerful reels, and I’d fish with Recons any day.
We took waders and boots. The hardest thing about air travel with wading boots is that post-wading they’re ten pounds heavier, and it’s usually enough to take our luggage over the weight limit. To dry them I’ve tied them to car roof crossbars, stuffed them with newspaper, perched them on air conditioning vents, and used a motel room hair drier.
By happenstance this trip I found the perfect answer: we didn’t wade the last two days fishing. Where we fished the Connecticut isn’t a wadeable river, so we stayed in the boat. That meant by the time we got to the airport the boots had dried. If I can help it I’ll never wade on the last day of a trip again. And I’ll try to get a rental car with rooftop crossbars just in case.
Chuck had two specialized bits of gear for pike fishing. To land fish he used a cradle net. It seemed harder to manage than a normal landing net, but it worked well for pike. He also used a jaw spreader to keep a pike’s mouth open for hook removal, which reminded me of a tool my dentist might use when I was being uncooperative.
Luggage
For years I’ve had a rolling FishPond rod case. It looks great, long and thin and stylish like a lot of FishPond stuff, with a lot of serious looking pockets and such for reels and fly boxes. It’s big enough for four rods, a vest, waders and boots, plus the other miscellany necessary for a fly fishing trip. The problem is that every time I drag it behind me through an airport it flips, and when I wrestle it back upright it immediately flips again. If I lean it against something, say an airport check-in counter, it immediately slides down onto the floor. It will not stand upright and it will not lean. I put up with it out of a certain earned fondness from familiarity, and it’s problems are no more than an annoyance and its virtues many, but Kris, who is a woman of strong opinions, passionately dislikes that case.
She bought an Orvis Safe Passage rolling bag a few year’s back. It’s pretty, but it has it’s peculiarities. It has these two three-quarter inch aluminum tubes inside that seem to go nowhere and do nothing, and for the life of me I can’t figure out their purpose. Still, it’s big enough for waders and boots and vests plus a goodly number of clothes. It’s got one real problem: It’s not big enough for rods.
So for Father’s Day this year Kris bought me a different FishPond bag, the Grand Teton, which rolls without flipping, at least some of the time stands without falling over, and is long enough for rods. In the old bag the hard bottom let me carry rods in Neoprene socks without tubes, which saved both weight and space, but I don’t trust rods in the new bag without tubes. Stuff is piled right on top of them. It does stand upright in an airport, and it doesn’t immediately flip over when I roll it along behind me. So far so good.
Rental Car
We usually rent mid-sized SUVs because we can load rods inside the car without breaking them down, but for some reason the cost of an SUV out of New York City was ridiculous. Instead of the SUV we got a full-sized Chevy Malibu. I guess it’s not really amusing to most people, but driving a Chevy Malibu around America sure amused me. It just seemed so 1960s, like a living television commercial during the Sunday night Bonanza episode.
Manchester, Vermont
We picked our New York hotel because it was close to a National car rental pick-up near Washington Square. There’s a premium paid for picking a car up in NYC, keeping it a week, and then dropping it off in Manchester, NH. I don’t know if we also paid a premium because the car was a Malibu.
Hotels
We had great luck everyplace we stayed, the Washington Square Hotel in NYC, the Beaverkill Valley Inn, the Equinox in Vermont, and the Lopstick Lodge in New Hampshire. I’d stay at any of them again.
Donuts
I’ve already mentioned our New York City donuts, and we didn’t look for bakeries in the Catskills. Manchester, Vermont, however, is a donut rich environment. I had read that the Equinox Resort had the best donuts in town, and the cider donuts are very good, warm, and dusted with sugar. The problem is that donuts are only available in the dining room at breakfast, and two of our three mornings we were gone before the dining room opened.
Mrs. Murphy’s Donuts, Manchester, Vermont.
Our second Manchester morning though we made it to Mrs. Murphy’s donuts. They were already open and full of morning coffee drinkers at six when we got there. The guys at the counter had ceramic mugs, so high marks for Mrs. Murphy.
When we looked for donut shops in New Hampshire all the offerings we found were Dunkin Donuts. This didn’t surprise me. Getting ready for New Hampshire I’d read Scott Conroy’s Vote First or Die, about the 2016 New Hampshire primary. It prepared us for New Hampshire’s fondness for Dunkin Donuts. I don’t have a strong opinion about Dunkin Donuts, it’s a chain that’s not that common in Texas, but years ago when I read the Spencer detective novels Spencer always ate their corn muffins. I buy one whenever I’m in a Dunkin, but as someone who grew up on cornbread I think they could be better. Don’t tell Spencer.
What We Didn’t Do
In New York we didn’t explore the Catskill rivers, other than one small bit of the Beaverkill. There is also river fishing further north, and winter steelheading is a thing in the far New York north. There are a lifetime of rivers there, and I’d love to have seen more.
We’d been to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown before, and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art many times. I’ve heard there’s not much else to do in New York.
In Vermont we didn’t visit Robert Todd Lincoln’s home, or fish the Batten Kill. There are lots of streams we could have explored but didn’t. We did stop at a farmhouse to buy maple syrup, so that’s off our list.
I really wanted to rent one of these tiny boats in New Hampshire. Puttering around the lake in the marine equivalent of a go cart just looked unimaginably fun to me. I had worked out a plan for fishing the lake from one of those boats rigged like we fished Pyramid lake in Nevada, with a balanced leech and a dropper nymph on a long leader under a bobber. I think I could have spent at least a day drifting and watching the bobber, but I never rented the boat.
In New Hampshire I also never got to shake the hand of a presidential candidate, or eat at the Buck Rub Tavern. I could have probably crossed both thoseoff my list in one trip to the Buck Rub. I’m pretty sure there’s always at least one presidential candidate shaking hands and busing tables at the Buck Rub.
We didn’t actually drive into Canada. We took our passports, but just couldn’t bring ourselves to put up with the bureaucratic brouhaha of getting over and then immediately turning around and coming back. I kept looking for the wall between us and Canada but couldn’t find it. Build the Wall!
On Saturday we planned to wade fish a half day to finish off New Hampshire, then drive south four hours to Manchester for Sunday’s flight. Our guide, Chuck DeGray, said that instead of wading we should go south, down to Lancaster where the Connecticut starts warming and where instead of trout there are smallmouth and pike. We would fish for pike. He said we might not catch anything, we might not see anything, but that it was worth the try, because to heck with trout Chuck loves to fish for pike! This was the second time on the trip that a guide had said I like this, let’s try it, and the first had worked well. Pike!
Going south put us an hour closer to the airport at the end of fishing. If we didn’t take a long lunch we could fish all day and still get off the river early, and we could fish for something we’d never fished for. This was a really good plan.
When I called the Lopstick originally I’d asked about trips for pike, pike were listed on their website. Maybe it was my imagination but they seemed hesitant to send some Texas bozo after pike, and after our muskie adventure I didn’t push it. I’d already proved I couldn’t catch muskie, and I didn’t need to prove I couldn’t catch pike. But Chuck said pike, and thanks to King George II’s foresight we had already caught our fish in New Hampshire, so Pike!
This far north the Connecticut River isn’t large. It’s the longest river in the Northeast, going south 406 miles to Long Island Sound. As a comparison the Red River, the one that separates Texas and Oklahoma, is 1600 miles long, but even growing up next to it no one ever suggested let’s go fish the Red River. The upper Connecticut where we fished both days isn’t big, and on our two days it was easy to float, but it’s hard to access. It’s lined with bluffs and wooded banks and farmland, and the soft river bottom would make it hard to wade. It’s a long float sort of river.
Most of our floats it averaged maybe 150 feet across, and the day before Kris had often fished the left bank while I made a reasonably credible effort to fish stuff on the right. In normal flows it’s shallow, too, maybe five or six feet towards the center. Like they say in Galveston Bay, if you fall out of the boat the first thing you should do is stand up.
There aren’t any pike in Texas, pike are about as exotic for me as Seychelles giant trevally or Brazilian dorado so I had to study up. They are an ambush predator, which means they’re an all things come to those who wait kind of fish. They sit, they blend, they don’t cruise, and then they attack. They are demon fast from standstill to strike, and I can now attest that the strikes are unforgettable. This is not a fish that sips a fly. This is road rage.
Pike are muskie’s closest kin, and in their waters both are apex predators. Muskie grow larger, but the fish fill the same niche, Apparently they can be hard to tell apart. Pike are native both to North America and Europe, muskie only to North America.
Pike are named after the Middle Ages thrusting weapon which is also called, luckily enough, the pike. The fish look like a pike and they attack like a pike. Until gunpowder came into its own in the 18th century pike were a serious infantry weapon. As late as 1850, when John Brown planned to lead slaves in rebellion from Harper’s Ferry, he had 500 pikes made in Connecticut. Rebelling slaves were going to flock to Harper’s Ferry, be armed with Brown’s pikes and with guns from the armory, and end slavery forever. John Brown made some bad guesses about what would happen at Harper’s Ferry, and it must be the last time that anyone seriously considered using pikes as weapons, but it’s a good name for the fish. There’s something ancient and vicious about them.
In a fishy way pike are foul-tempered, and why wouldn’t they be? Just think how you’d feel if you’d watched your mother eat your little brother for lunch? Especially when you’d been saving him for yourself?
Pike have teeth, both rows of the sharp pointy kind and the Velcro-like fishy plates of teeth on the roof of their mouth. Once in, never out. A full grown pike can have up to 600 teeth. I was glad Chuck was there to take out the hooks because, well, fingers. I like having fingers.
We fished with 8 weights which is probably the weight we fish most often. I’m fairly sure there are New Hampshirite anglers who have never lifted an 8 weight, but for us they felt like home. They were matched to Orvis Mirage reels, big game reels loaded with sinking lines. I fished with an Orvis Recon rod. Coincidentally for Muskie in Wisconsin I’d fished with a ten weight Recon. It’s a fine series of rods, and after fishing with Chuck’s Orvis Access–Orvis’s older model entry-level rod– the day before I suspect that from the top of the line to bottom the Orvis rods are as consistently well designed as any rods on the market. I don’t usually fish them, but I see why Kris trusts them.
These were big flies and big fish, but it was easy enough to fish the 8 instead of a 10. The pike flies weren’t quite as big as the foot-long muskie flies. Most were only about six or seven inches, but still, these were some mighty big flies. Big rods. Big flies. Foul-tempered fish.
Chuck ties flies for part of his living so he has to tie a lot of flies fast. He said that it could take 20 minutes or longer to tie a single pike fly. The flies were gaudy things, with lots of bright colors and tinsel flash and wiggly tails. He said he sold some pike flies, but he tied a lot for himself. I’d figured out earlier that we’d be in Pittsburg, N.H., for the North Woods pride parade, and there we were, with all the feathers and tinsel we could have wanted.
Our leaders were short, four feet of probably 20 pound straight tippet ending in a 50 pound fluorocarbon bite guard of a couple of feet, and then the fly. The bite guard,—remember 600 teeth—was about as thick as kite string, but made out of the strong, abrasion-resistant flourocarbon. Toothy things ain’t leader shy. For comparison, we use a 60-pound fluorocarbon bite guard in Belize fishing, at least in concept, for 100-pound tarpon.
We fished the flies like we would have fished for river bass; cast as close as possible to the bank or structure, retrieve in short, steady strips, and then do it again. And then do it again. And then do it again. We didn’t fish the flies on the bottom of the river. They ran a couple of feet under the surface, though in deeper water I’d let the fly sink three or four feet. There was good water clarity, and I rarely lost sight of the fly.
There were downed trees in the river, and of course Kris was hung up on an underwater log when I cast under a tree and caught the first pike. Kris was snagged, Chuck was trying to net the fish and hold the boat and manage the anchor and telling me to take the rod over his head so the fish would come into his cradle net, and I was trying to keep my line and my rod out of the overhead branches. This was the Three Stooges doing battle, but the pike was caught, and for all the teeth and violence I was surprised at how pretty it was.
The colors were different with each fish caught. They were brighter silver or greener, more yellow or no yellow. The difference was radical from fish to fish. But they are so perfectly put together for what they are. Apex predators. Ambush predators. Beautiful fish.
They also fought hard. I’d read that notwithstanding their size muskie don’t put up much of a fight, not that I would know, but there was plenty to the pike. They even came out of the water to try and shake the hook. I ended up catching three and lost one, but Kris caught one and probably had three more fish come off. They didn’t make long runs, but they thrashed hard and pulled hard.
The fish I remember best was the one I didn’t land, that I never saw. I’d lost sight of the fly and then it stopped, snagged on some underwater debris. I raised my rod to unsnag it and it wasn’t snagged at all. Something big gave a great heave and roll and thrash and bit through the bite guard. It bit through the 50 pound bite guard and it was gone. I often remember fishing failures better than successes, but that was a magnificent failure.
We’ve been planning next year’s trips. I’ve suggested we go back for another shot at south Florida, though I hate to lose my special status as the only person in the world who can’t catch fish in Florida. Kris wants South Carolina. I want to do a Southwest tailwater tour in April, the Green in Utah, Lee’s Ferry in Arizona, and end on the San Juan in one long drive. And I’ve thought about Michigan, fishing the Ausable, and then around through the Upper Penninsula to Hayward, Wisconsin, for another shot at muskie, then down into the Wisconsin and Iowa driftless region for trout. I suspect as things get better sorted we might, just might throw some pike into that last northwoods mix. To heck with trout, pike! Maybe Chuck will sell us some flies.
