Category: Northeast

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Set Up. New York City, June 20-21, 2019.

The flight to New York left early, 5:40, and to get to the airport we sat the alarm for 3:30, which ain’t civilized. I called an Uber, and the driver was slow getting to us because of construction. That made us anxious and snappy, mostly at each other, but the driver got us to the airport in plenty of time notwithstanding our contradictory and confusing instructions. He was Nigerian perhaps, or Kenyan, African anyway, and not a talkative guy, but he was patient, and he got us there.

Leaving for ten days I worry about work, but it’s the time in my life when I should worry less about work and I’m trying. There are others who can worry for me.

As much as work I worry about leaving our dogs, the young stray Chihuahua and the old miniature schnauzer. Theoretically they are both Kris’s dogs, my dog having been the big golden who died last year, but the Chihuahua ends up sleeping by me and the schnauzer adores me. Who doesn’t appreciate adoration? I read once that leaving a short-lived dog without you is unkind, that you are its life and that its life is short, and the notion resonated. Our dogs travel with us from time to time, but they’re not fishing dogs, and the relatively yappy small dogs aren’t dogs to leave alone in a hotel while we fish. 

We chose this Northeast swing in part to see the Astros play the Yankees. For a few years we’ve tried to catch an out-of-town game a season, and we hadn’t been to the new Yankee stadium. The Astros are good this year, but there are lots of injuries, Altuve, Springer, Correa, McHugh, and they’re coming off their first four-game losing streak. Everyone’s favorite player, Jose Altuve—who doesn’t like Jose Altuve?—is having a poor season and is just back off the IL, which until this season was the DL, and which I think stands for Injury List. It used to be the Disabled List. Injury List is so much more informative.

The Yankees are good too, and some of the past Astros/Yankees series have been memorable. The plane was amusingly filled with Astros fans, so we figuratively if not literally bumped fists and high-fived and contemplated the fun of a baseball weekend in New York. Had we realized a beer would be $14.25, and worse the selection would be lousy, maybe we’d have been less enthusiastic, but even at $14.25 and lousy it was a beer at a baseball game.

On the plane I was thinking about fish, and specifically about fish in Kansas, and how Kris and I should take the dogs and the skiff and drive north through Oklahoma and Kansas all the way to North Dakota—I reckon it would be the only technical saltwater poling skiff to ever visit North Dakota. I was thinking about when the Astros schedule for 2020 would be released, and how it would be good if they played Minnesota or a Pennsylvania or Ohio team so that we could include them as part of fishing. Kris already has Ohio pegged for April or May fishing and a trip to McGee Marsh to see the spring warblers, and if we could include the Indians or the Reds it would be lagniappe. Then I started worrying about what could go wrong, but the answer in truth is not much. Not much could go wrong except we wouldn’t catch a fish. I bet though that the dogs would like that trip, even if they’re not technical fly-fishing dogs.

Yankee Stadium was largely a bust. The stadium’s nice enough, and the subway ride north from Washington Square is an adventure for out-of-towners, but the Astros lost, 10-6, and the game was worse than the score. It rained, the game was delayed twice, the Astros were getting walloped, and we left after the 5th inning. After last year in Tampa, and this year in New York, I’m thinking my combined fly fishing/baseball vacations may not be the very thing for the Astros won-loss record.

Friday morning we walked to the Donut Project on Bleeker Street. Herman Melville grew up on Bleeker Street. Other residents include James Agee, Robert De Niro, John Belushi, and Alicia Keys. Of the donut shops we’ve been to, the Donut Project ranked maybe a 4 out of 5 on a scale of 5, with the top spots held by the Tatonut in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Blue Star Donuts in Portland, and Shipley’s on North Main or Ella in Houston when the glazed are fresh out of the frier. Four is a very good rating. It was stylish and imaginative, the donuts were very pretty, and then it rained. We had to walk back to our hotel in the rain.

In New York City, we stayed near Washington Square, at the Washington Square Hotel. It’s a small, old hotel, very European and very likeable. it’s only a block or so from the Stonewall Inn, and I got very confused, both as to day and date, and thought we would be leaving Washington Square on the morning of the Pride Parade. It’s the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, and the neighborhood was decked out. There’s nothing I like better than a good Pride Parade, but I figured the neighborhood would be a madhouse and that we would never get out of the City. Fortunately I’d miscalculated by a week. We’ll be in time next Saturday for the Pride Parade in Pittsburg New Hampshire, population 869.

I hadn’t really thought about it, but we will drive 390 miles almost due north from New York City to Pittsburg, N.H. Then we’ll turn around and drive south 169 miles to Manchester N.H. It’s a big swing, and a lot of miles. And none of it’s as frightening as driving out of New York City on a Friday morning. Whatever may happen, and however much a man of good will I may be, I’d rather not try to navigate Greenwich Village on the Saturday of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riot.

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Brook Trout

Currier & Ives, Brook Trout, 1868, chromolithograph, Library of Congress.

If you fly fish, sooner or later you hear two things:

  1. You idiot. Brook Trout aren’t a trout.
  2. Brook trout have been driven out of their native range.

The first, that brook trout aren’t a trout, isn’t so much spoken as declaimed. Those aren’t trout! Those are char! What’s actually being said is that brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, are taxonomically closer to members of the genus Salvelinus, commonly called char, than they are to brown trout, Salmo trutta, always called trout. Of course that begs the question of why rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, get a pass on trouthood when they’re taxonomically closer to Pacific salmon than to brown trout. And that begs the question of why Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) are a salmon when they’re taxonomically closer to brown trout than to Pacific salmon.

Worthington Whittredge, Trout Brook in the Catskills, c. 1874, National Gallery of Art, Hudson River School. There’s an angler in that painting, though well hid. He’s above the rock on the left in the small falls. The painting could have just as well been named Brook Trout in the Catskills, but not Char in the Catskills.

These are probably the sorts of existential questions that trout ponder, but for me at least there’s some irrelevance to it. One supposes that all that taxonomic relativity means something scientifically, but common usage is common usage, and it’s brook trout, not brook char. One also supposes that the taxonomic classification of beetles is just as confusing as the various fishes, but likely as not every time you say June bug no one says that’s not John but Paul.

Historic Brook Trout Eastern Range Map, Trout Unlimited.

Questions about brook trout range are much more interesting. There was a time, roughly coinciding with somewheres in the Pleistocene to 1883, when brook trout were the only river trout in eastern North America. They ranged from Georgia to as far west as Michigan and north into Canada. By the 19th Century the Catskills were the destination fishery for New York, like now New Zealand and Iceland and Christmas Island and Kansas are the destination fisheries for modern anglers, and without cars or even trains the Catskills weren’t much easier to get to than Christmas Island. When in 1830 you fished the Catskills for trout you fished for brook trout, and I suspect that no officious busybody butted in to to tell you that’s not a trout it’s a char.

Brook trout first declined in much of their native range because of over-fishing and habitat degradation. Meanwhile innovators were beginning to raise hatchery brown trout, and the browns were adaptive and more heat and environmentally tolerant. Brown trout were first introduced into Michigan, but their introducers quickly took them east. Rainbows from the west coast were also introduced. While being crowded out of the east, brook trout meanwhile were carried west, and, along with their cousin the lake trout, brook trout are now an invasive species in cutthroat habitat. Poor cutthroat. They catch it from everybody.

By the way, lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) are not a trout but a char.

U.S. Geological Survey, Native and Introduced Ranges of Brook Trout, 2013. I have never heard of brook trout introduced in Texas, but I’m sure somebody did. Howdy!

There are efforts by the the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, a coalition of states, local governments, and private entities, to restore brook trout populations and habitat in their native range and to preserve the rivers and lakes where brook trout populations are healthy. the following Joint Venture map is dated, but it indicates where to fish for native brook trout. Maine. Go to Maine. And northern New Hampshire.

Hey! We’re on our way to northern New Hampshire!

From Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, Eastern Brook Trout: Roadmap to Restoration, before 2012. Who doesn’t date data?

Brook trout, which are members of the char family, spawn in the autumn beginning in their second year. I came across this peculiarly lurid description of brook trout spawning on a U.S. Fish and Wildlife website:

Pre-spawning courtship of the brook trout begins with the male attempting to drive a female toward suitable gravel habitat to facilitate spawning. A receptive female chooses a spot and digs a redd. While the female brook trout is digging, the male brook trout continues his courtship activity, darting alongside the female and quivering, swimming over and under her and rubbing the female with his fins.

https://www.fws.gov/fisheries/freshwater-fish-of-america/brook_trout.html.

Dang. These are your government employees at work. Pretty salty stuff.

And speaking of salt, like rainbows brook trout can move into the ocean (in which case they’re called salties). They return to freshwater to spawn.

If there’s a creature that a brook trout can put in their mouth, they’ll eat it. They feed by sight, so they’re daytime feeders. They’re short-lived, commonly living three to four years. Their size varies based on habitat.

50 fish from American Waters, Allen & Winter, Richmond Virginia, 188__. Cigarette cards.

Man they’re pretty. They’re also not a trout, but a char.

Four to eight pound brook trout are trophies. All of the IGFA tippet class records for brook trout are from Canada, and range up to about 10 pounds. The all tackle record is a bit more than 14 pounds. Weirdly all of the women’s records are vacant except for two pound tippet, which is for a 2 lb 8 oz fish. Kris really does need to get busy.

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New Hampshire

If you study that postcard map of New Hampshire, you’ll realize pretty quick that there’s something missing: there’s no cute drawing of presidential hopefuls shaking hands or of the citizenry casting ballots. There is, oddly, an elephant down at the bottom of the state, just right of the Cathedral of the Pines–or is that Dimes?–but the fine print indicates it’s a roadside attraction not a political statement. There is also a lobster breathing fire, some bears, a zebra, and a chicken laying eggs. None of those images seem particularly political either, but some may be running for President. This is important, because forget all those notions of pastoral beauty and winter sports and mountains and trout, what New Hampshire does best is hold the first presidential primary every four years. The windup for February 2020 is going on as we speak, and driving through New Hampshire Kris and I will likely face traffic jams of Democratic wannabes vying for the nomination.

That can be both a good and bad thing. It will surely slow traffic, but if we have a flat we’ll likely have two or three senators and Beto O’Rourke available to help us change it. You can’t get that kind of service back home.

It’s true that Iowa comes before New Hampshire, but Iowa’s caucuses are a decidedly quirkier affair, and the results can be a bit off-kilter. Particularly on the Republican side caucusers tend to be both more conservative and more evangelical than the rest of the country. Who can forget that Iowa’s 2016 caucuses chose Ted Cruz as their candidate of choice? Ok, everybody has forgotten that, but really, what kind of state would elect Ted Cruz to anything? You might as well tell me that the Republican Party was going to nominate Donald Trump! What? Oh.

But perverse as it seems in retrospect that New Hampshire got the Trump part right, they did get it right. In 2016 New Hampshire gave Donald Trump more than 35% of the Republican primary vote. Trump’s win in the 2016 presidential primary effectively destroyed the campaigns of John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorino, Ted Cruz, and flat-earther Ben Carson. President Trump really didn’t have any serious challengers after New Hampshire, even though the other candidates hung on. Ted Cruz hung on long enough to win 45% of the primary caucus vote in Texas, but I’m living proof that Texans are crazy.

The Great Stone Face, Franconia Notch, N.H., 1926,  Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 

Back to Iowa, the Democrats there seemed to be a bit more prescient than their Republican neighbors. In 2008 Barrack Obama’s Iowa win proved that he could be a serious candidate, and in 2016 her extremely narrow Iowa victory over Bernie Senders might have warned the Democratic Party that support for Senator Clinton was shallow. It didn’t. At least it’s satisfying now to Monday-morning quarterback. The point of all this is that sure, Iowa has its place, but it’s not New Hampshire.

Likely there are slovenly, lazy, and ignorant New Hampshineers who don’t vote and who can’t snowshoe. In New Hampshire there are likely badly constructed fences that make for bad neighbors, and there are possibly New Hampshters who might trade just a bit of freedom, like obeying speed limits and washing their hands before returning to work, rather than dying. Ok, so they might not be all they’re cracked up to be, but the winnowing of presidential hopefuls has to start someplace, and even for their long list of failures and after validating Trump in 2016 New Hampshire seems both small enough and engaged enough to carry on. You gotta start somewhere, and I’m just as glad it doesn’t start with me. February 2020 here we come.

Edward French, M.D., “Good Fishing,” photograph by Arthur F. Sturtevant, at 284, The Granite Monthly, Concord, New Hampshire, 1895.

Just one other thing about that postcard. There sure are a lot of New Hampshire women who wear bathing suits. Do you think that’s year-round? I’d better warn Kris. She probably wouldn’t think to take a swimsuit.

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Vermont

Robert Frost, New Englander, wintered in Key West, and he went often enough that in the Key West literary tourist travel boom of later years his rented cottage was dubbed the Robert Frost Cottage. Sixteen winters he flew south. He got into an argument there with Wallace Stevens, but I’m not sure whether it was before or after Hemingway knocked Stevens down. Stevens seems to have been a bit of a drinking man, but there wasn’t any internet, so what else did he have to do? As a young man I preferred Stevens as a poet, he was stylish and inscrutable, but I think as an old man I’m growing into Frost.

I can imagine Frost, sitting as far south as the American South can go, and thinking about the New England winter. I wonder if he missed it? I wonder if he felt guilt that he was warm? How can someone named Frost ever be warm?

I first saw Vermont 30 years after Frost spent his time in Florida, 50-odd years ago, not live but on an RCA console color television. Almost all my notions about Vermont I learned from White Christmas, a movie filmed in a California back lot of Paramount Pictures. No. Snow.

But the lodge! It was so beautiful, stone and wood and that great fireplace where Rosemary and Bing talked about liverwurst and other things. It didn’t matter that it was a set in California. It was beautiful! It was Vermont!

My sister says that Vermont is like a foreign country. I imagine it as rambling lanes and small farms and white clapboard churches. I figure I can’t say it’s as close to a foreign country as the continent offers, since both Mexico and Canada are literally foreign countries, and I suppose New Englanders don’t think they’re foreign at all. But to my sister the Texas girl it might as well be Switzerland. There’s snow, and trees, maple syrup and other cute things. We don’t do cute in Texas.

Vermont was once in fact a foreign country. Not yet having attained Vermonthood, in 1763 the area was ceded to Britain by France after the French and Indian War. It wasn’t clear if the new territory was governed by New Hampshire or New York. Both claimed it, and both granted conflicting land grants to settlers. Tired of its neighbors’ shenanigans, during the American Revolution Vermont formed its own independent republic, the Republic of Vermont. It was not one of the original 13 colonies. It did not join the United States until 1791. The state constitution was the first to ban slavery.

Al Zifan, Vermont Presidential Results 2016, Creative Commons Attribution.

Vermont is forever linked to its mirror-image neighbor, New Hampshire. There are probably other states it could be compared to, Wisconsin and Oregon come to mind, but New Hampshire and Vermont are connected through history and temperament and geography. You can’t read about Vermont without both state mottoes being mentioned, and that Vermont has fewer Walmarts than New Hampshire, and that Vermont has no Dairy Queens. Why the Dairy Queen factoid gets mentioned I don’t know, but it’s part of the litany.

They sprang from different geological forces that produced the soft rolling Green Mountains of Vermont and the rugged, angular White Mountains of New Hampshire. The differences run through their colonial histories and are evident today in their cultures, politics and certainly in their state mottos: Vermont’s feel-good “Freedom and Unity” shrinks before New Hampshire’s stark ultimatum to “Live Free or Die.”

More Than a River Separates Bernie Sanders’s State From Primary’s, Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times, February 7, 2016.

The Spaceman, Bill Lee, lives in Vermont.

Here is the difference between Vermont and New Hampshire: Vermont, population 625,741, voted 55.72% for Hillary Clinton, and only 29.26% for President Trump. Favorite son Bernie Sanders pulled an additional 5.68% as a write-in. New Hampshire, population 1,316,470, also went for Clinton, but it was 48.2% to 46.1%. New Hampshire has greater ethnic diversity, being only about 90% white, while Vermont is more than 95% white. Snow, Snow Snow! Vermont, along with Hawaii, is consistently one of the most progressive states in the country.

Calvin Coolidge Fishing Near Home in Vermont, 1931 From Twitter.

And taxes. You can’t talk about Vermont and New Hampshire without mentioning that Vermont’s tax burden is 4th, New Hampshire’s 46th. I tracked down my old friend Mark who with his husband moved to Vermont after he left Texas. Mark worked for the IRS for a while but left when President Trump was elected, but now he’s moved on to Florida, largely because of . . . wait for it . . . Vermont taxes. The tax burden for the average resident is roughly 10.31%. If I’m going to sneak a new bamboo fly rod into my luggage on this trip, I’ll pay a combined 7% sales tax, though that’s cheaper than Texas.

New Hampshire has no income tax or sales tax, but it does have one of the nation’s highest property tax rates, with a rate of about $2.19 per $100 of value. All of that said, I gather that the Vermonters who stay, who like their state, are for the most part proud of its peculiarities and political stances, and want to be there. Freedom and unity! Ok, it’s not the quirkiness of Live Free or Die!, but it’s at least as good as Friendship. I could be perfectly happy with freedom and unity, at least as long as I don’t have to buy Birkenstocks.

There’s plenty of speculation about why the states are different. Sure, you can chalk it up to New Hampshire’s historic development as a water-powered mill state, a port state, a state with more difficult geography and weather, but my favorite theory is that modern Vermont was the result of an effective advertising campaign. They picked what they would be, a place of ski lodges and cows and Birkenstocks, and they sold it. Cultural immigrants like Bernie Sanders and Bill Lee believed the pitch, and Vermont was its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bringing in maple sap to the sugar house. Frank H. Shurtleff farm, North Bridgewater, Vermont, 1940, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

A colleague suggested that I check to see if New Hampshire and Vermont are ranked by any sort of happiness index. The World Happiness Index is published by the United Nations, and in 2019 the happiest country on the planet is left-leaning, frigid Finland. I don’t pretend to have studied the Index methodology, though it’s based on polling. Finland though would seem to bode well for left-leaning, frigid Vermont. There’s a Gallup poll that’s supposed to measure happiness and health, and left-leaning but decidedly un-frigid Hawaii seems to come out on top most years. Last year Vermont was way down, but this year it was 7th. New Hampshire was 11th. Alabama and Mississippi, those other bookend states on the Southside, are Nos. 44 and 47. West Virginians are still the least happy of our lot.