Category: Uncategorized

Tariffs

Massachusetts was not the first state settled by Europeans. The first was Florida, then New Mexico, then Virginia. ¹ When the Mayflower finally arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, Jamestown was already celebrating its 13th anniversary.

Currier & Ives, Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Mass., 1878, Library of Congress.

Massachusetts was, however, the first state to industrialize. Before industrialization, it had some other North American firsts. It had the first college, first newspaper, first witch hunt, first tea party . . . But industrialization was something different. Before the 1830s Massachusetts was pretty homogenous. It was white.² It was English. It was Protestant. There were artisan craftsmen, farmers, merchants, and the extraction of lumber, quarried stone, and fish, but there wasn’t industry. Before the 19th century the principal Massachusetts manufactured good was rum.³

Beginning in the 1820s everything changed in Massachusetts. Wealthy Bostonians figured out that owning the means of production was better than not, and they invested heavily in factories and mills. Massachusetts became the nation’s principal producer of textiles–especially cotton cloth–and shoes, but everything was made there: buttons, rifles, musical instruments, candy, perfume . . . Farm laborers moved off the farm to factory towns like Lawrence and Lowell and Worcester. By 1865 only 13% of the labor force still worked in agriculture. And the jobs offered by industry brought immigrants from Europe and Canada. The Irish, the Italians, French Canadians, and Eastern Europeans, including large numbers of Jewish Eastern Europeans, came for the work.

Irish Immigrants at Constitution Wharf, Boston, Ballous Pictorial, October 31, 1857.

While things may have been worse back home, those manufacturing jobs weren’t the cat’s pajamas either. Pay was low, living conditions were squalid, hours were long. Children worked. If demand slowed–and from time to time demand slowed–workers were fired.

By the 1900s, Massachusetts was no longer principally English Protestant, and more than 100,000 new immigrants arrived each year. At the same time, industries started deserting Massachusetts. Textiles moved South. Shoemakers closed. You think the Great Depression was bad at your house? You shoulda been in Massachusetts. In 1933, the national rate of unemployment was 24.9%. Estimated unemployment in Massachusetts in 1932 was 34.8%.⁴

Later, led by technology, defense, and finance, the Massachusetts economy would revive. At $120,011 per annum, Massachusetts now has the second highest median household income by state. ⁵ Shoemaking, however, never recovered.⁶

Daniel Webster (1851), John C. Calhoun (1845) (portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy).

What has this got to do with tariffs? Beginning in the 1830s Massachusetts pushed tariffs as a means of protecting the state’s manufacturing. Daniel Webster, now largely remembered for his support of the Compromise of 1850,⁷ was also a shill for tariffs, and the first important sectional Constitutional crisis,⁸ the Nullification Crisis of 1832, was brought about because Massachusetts manufacturers were pitted against South Carolina planters. The South Carolinians wanted European goods, and they didn’t want to pay more for them to support factories in the North. Led by John C. Calhoun,⁹ South Carolinians decided that a state legislature had the right to nullify any federal law that they didn’t like, and South Carolinians proceeded to nullify the federally imposed tariffs. The then-President, Andrew Jackson, saved the union with a combination of threats and reduced tariffs.

I’m not certain how the tariffs affected the stock market.

Geography

Massachusetts Geography is simple. Everything west of Worcester is Western Massachusetts. Everything Worcester and east is the town you’re standing in. Nantucket sits out in the ocean, and everything further East is the Atlantic, at least until you get to England.

Now the first of December was covered with snow
So was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
Now the Berkshires seemed dreamlike
On account of that frosting
With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go

James Taylor, Sweet Baby James, 1970.

When I was 14, two things happened. I was raising pigs in Texas in FFA,¹⁰ and James Taylor released Sweet Baby James. These two things may seem unrelated, but in FFA I had to memorize the breeds of pigs–Hampshires, Durocs, Chester Whites, and, of course, Berkshires. Until post-college I thought Taylor was singing about frosted dreamlike pigs, not a hilly region in Western Mass. Since I found out he wasn’t, I’ve sworn off learning any more about Massachusetts geography. I really liked the notion of frosted dreamlike pigs.

Dreamlike Berkshire pig, from Brett’s Colonists’ Guide, 1883, Auckland, New Zealand.

Dreamlike Berkshire Mountains, from Wikipedia, 2013.

Population

Massachusetts is the 16th most populous state at 7,001,399, which is roughly stable since the 2020 census population of 7,136,171. The non-Hispanic White population is 68.8%, Black is 9.6%, and Asians are 7.9%. Hispanics are 13.5% of the total. Boston is the largest city with a population of 653,833, and nine other cities have populations greater than 100,000.

Massachusetts urbanized early, right along with industrialization and immigration. By the end of the 19th century, more than 76% of its population lived in cities. As of 2024, the Boston-Cambridge-Newton statistical area had a population of 4,919,179, so slightly more than 70% of the Massachusetts population. Providence-Warwick is another 581,841 people, and Worcester 866,866. By population density, Massachusetts ranks third, with 899 people per square mile, but the population density of the Boston-Cambridge-Newton statistical area is 2,075 people per square mile. That’s dense.

Luckily they’ve got all those colleges and universities to keep things elevated. Otherwise they’d likely sink to the center of the earth.

In the first census of 1790, with a population of 378,787, Massachusetts was the fourth most populous state after Virginia (691,937), Pennsylvania (434,373), and North Carolina (393,751). By 1860, with a population of 1,231,066, Massachusetts trailed New York (3,880,735), Pennsylvania (2,906,215), Ohio (2,339,511), Illinois (1,711,951), and Indiana (1,350,428). At 10,554 square miles, it was also substantially smaller than the next smallest state, Indiana–with 36,419 square miles–so there was substantially less area to stack all those people. And states like Ohio were receiving substantial immigrants from Massachusetts.

Spenser

The Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker taught me everything I know about living in Massachusetts, and we re-listened to the first two novels in the series, The Godwulf Manuscript (1973) and God Save the Child (1974), while we were driving around looking for fish. They hold up well.

I was also very fond of The Scarlet Letter and Walden, and the Pequod sails from Nantucket. Massachusetts probably rivals Mississippi for important books per square mile, but The Scarlet Letter and Walden are probably a bit less informative about modern Massachusetts than the Spenser novels. For that matter, they’re probably less informative than Absalom, Absalom! remains about modern Mississippi.

Mary Hallock Foote, Hester Prynne before the stocks, 1878, James R. Osgood & Co., Boston.

Politics

Governors in antebellum Massachusetts were elected from time to time from various parties, including Federalist, Democratic-Republican, and Whig, but after the Whigs fell apart over abolition Massachusetts became predominately Republican and remained Republican from the Civil War until the 1930s. The Democrats made inroads by building coalitions with the Italians and Irish, and the first Irish mayors in Boston were Democrats. Patronage matters.¹¹

Everything changed with Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression. Since the 1930s, Massachusetts has been predominately Democratic. The current governor is Democratic, though Republicans are well-represented among recent governors, including a long period from 1991 to 2007. Even with the diverse governors, Democrats predominated. Currently both U.S. senators and all of the congressional delegation are Democrats. The Massachusetts General Court–their quaint name for their state (quaintly called the commonwealth) legislature (quaintly called the general court)–is overwhelmingly Democratic.

In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris defeated Donald Trump 61.22% to 36.02%. Trump carried no Massachusetts counties.

From Wikipedia.

Fish

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. 

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, The Pond in Winter. 

Planning for Massachusetts, I thought seriously about trying to fish Walden Pond. There are apparently black bass and sunfish, and of course there are pickerel. But to fish Walden I would have needed to have a canoe delivered from Boston. It was complicated, so I gave it up. Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!

We could also have fished the coast. There is famous striped bass fishing in Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and even Boston Harbor, but we’d fished for stripers and blues in Rhode Island, and there’s never a guarantee of me catching coastal fish. I had visited Massachusetts several times before, and I did not want to return just to fish. Over a couple of days, I can usually come up with one trout in decent trout water, and our friend Jim Litrum had emailed that the Swift River in southwest Massachusetts was his favorite place to fish. We followed Jim’s advice and fished the Swift.

The Swift is a tailwater, with fairly constant water flows and temperatures. It’s stocked with browns and rainbows, and has a native population of brook trout. To get to the Swift, it’s an easy 50-mile drive from the Hartford-Bradley Airport in Hartford, Connecticut. And of course, I thought, Southwestern Massachusetts should fish warmer in April than fishing for stripers on a boat off the coast. I wanted Massachusetts done, and I also wanted to be reasonably warm.

Pickerel (Lucius reticulus), From a Pond in Massachusetts, First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests of the State of New York, 1896, facing p. 124, Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co., New York, New York, from the University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank.

1. St. Augustine (1565), Jamestown (1607), Santa Fe (1610), These are more or less permanent settlements, so I’m ignoring Taos (the settlement of which seemed to come and go), and also ignoring the abandonment of Santa Fe during the Pueblo Rebellion. This is my footnote, so I get to do what I want. ↩︎
2. This is not completely true. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first English colony in North America to legalize slavery–another first! Enslaved Africans were landed in Jamestown earlier, in 1619, but their status as slaves was not clear, and there were African slaves in St. Augustine even earlier. The Dutch brought slaves to New Netherland by 1626. African slavery was a global trade, and it’s enough to say that Massachusetts played its part, both as owners and particularly as slavers. by the 18th century Massachusetts’ African population was as much as 12% of its total, mostly used in rum production. ↩︎
3. I think that’s right, but I haven’t double-checked. If it’s not right it should be. New England was the rum stop on the triangular trade that ran Molasses from the West Indies, rum from North America, and slaves from Africa. ↩︎
4. Michigan had the highest unemployment in the nation, at 45.9%. Weirdly, in the 1930s there were no unemployment statistics kept by state, and state statistics were estimated much later by the Social Security Administration. ↩︎
5. New Jersey is first at $124,487. Mississippi is last at $70,821. ↩︎
6. Alden and some New Balance shoes are still made in Massachusetts. ↩︎
7. The Compromise of 1850 prescribed how slavery would be decided in the new territories acquired from Mexico, and allowed slavery to spread beyond the existing slave states. It included stringent fugitive slave laws that required the return of fugitive slaves from free states. Webster’s reputation in his home state of Massachusetts was substantially damaged by his support of the Compromise. ↩︎
8. A sectional crisis is a crisis pitting the interests of one section of the nation against another. The Civil War, for instance, was also an important sectional Constitutional crisis. Our current Constitutional crisis is not particularly sectional. ↩︎
9. At the time, Calhoun was vice president, which seems to me like a conflict of interest. Calhoun was a hero of the South, and we keep our skiff in Port O’Connor, Calhoun County, Texas. ↩︎
10. Future Farmers of America. ↩︎
11. Allegedly among the important public jobs created by Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald, maternal grandfather of J.F.K., were watchmen to watch watchmen, tree climbers, and city watering crew inspectors. ↩︎

We’re going to Ohio and Michigan next week. Of our nine remaining states, I’ve never been to Ohio, Michigan, or South Dakota. Actually, I have been to Michigan, but I was only one. Sentience should matter, even in an election year.

Kris went to Ohio in May to birdwatch, to Magee Marsh. That’s a famous place for birdwatchers because of warblers, which are small, brightly colored, migratory, and hard to see. In a weird distortion of anglers’ obsession with the biggest fish, birders are often obsessed with the smallest birds.

On their way to Canada, Yucatan warblers will land–fall–in Galveston for a few hours after crossing 600 miles over the Gulf of Mexico. During the spring warbler season Kris will drive to Galveston almost daily to see if there’s a warbler fall, and when she doesn’t go to Galveston she’ll likely go to the Rice campus to see if there are birds there. Ohio’s Magee Marsh in the spring is another famous warbler resting spot, and they stage there before crossing Lake Erie to their summer grounds in Canada.

Birders stage there too.

Prothonotary warbler, Magee Marsh.

In the first half of the 19th century, lots of people staged in Ohio. The Old Northwest territory, what we’d now call the upper midwest, was our testing ground. In the Old Northwest we–and that’s the American We–finalized how we would deal with Native Americans, and it was in Ohio that we first forbade slavery in a new state constitution. If I recall correctly, the Ohio constitution also forbade new black immigrants after statehood, and our native American policy became beat ’em up and move ’em out, so we may not have worked things out to everyone’s satisfaction. Still, history is what it is, and our ancestors rarely batted much better than .260.

The one thing without doubt that we got right in Ohio was surveys. Modern grid surveys were developed in Ohio. Before Ohio, surveys were random affairs that followed natural features, and may or may not have overlapped prior surveys. After Ohio, surveys were standardized into grids comprised of townships, sections, and acres. It became the standard survey configuration for western expansion.

1826 Survey Map, Ohio’s Western Reserve.

Gridded Ohio was a settlement magnet. In 1800, three years before statehood, Ohio had 45,365 residents. Ten years later its population had boomed (quintupled?) to 230,760. By 1820 it was over half a million. By 1850 there were nearly 2 million Ohioans. It continued to grow significantly each decade until the 1960s when its population growth flattened. It is still the seventh largest state with 11,785,935 residents.

Ohio was originally settled in three regions, with Southerners from Kentucky and Virginia concentrated along the southern border, and Yankees from New York and Massachusetts in northeast Ohio around what would be Cleveland. Everybody else apparently settled everyplace else.

Agricultural goods from Ohio were originally blocked from Eastern US markets by the Appalachians, but in 1825 the state issued bonds to build the Ohio and Erie Canal. The Canal opened Eastern markets for Ohio farmers through Lake Erie. The construction of the canal spurred both agriculture and industrialization.

The canal was quickly replaced by railroads, and Ohio became a railroad hub. Again, it was agricultural markets that drove the growth, but there was iron and coal available, and in support of railroad construction Ohio became an iron and steel producer. It produced rails and it produced agricultural implements. In early Ohio the two economies always seem to have moved together, farming and industry, in a combination that I guess always exists but rarely so blatantly. Ohioans didn’t just raise cattle, they tanned the hides. If Ohioans had raised cotton, they would have woven cotton cloth.

Canal Boat, Ohio and Erie Canal, 1880, National Park Service.

Booming Ohio produced at least seven major Union generals, Sheridan, Sherman, Custer, Garfield, McClellan, Rosecrans, and, of course, Grant. 313,180 Ohioans served in the Union army in the Civil War, third most after New York and Pennsylvania.

Between 1841 and 1923, Ohio produced eight U.S. Presidents: William Henry Harrison, U.S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Taft, and Warren G. Harding. Two of the presidents, William Henry Harrison and Warren G. Harding, died of illness while in office. Two, Garfield and McKinley, were assassinated. In 1910, Taft was the first president to throw out a first pitch at a major league baseball game.

Ulysses Grant at Cold Harbor, 1864, Library of Congress.

U.S. Grant’s father worked in a tannery, as did John Brown’s father. As a young man Grant’s father lived with the Browns for two years, and Ulysses recalled that his father admired the Brown family’s commitment to abolition.

I admire Grant, and his reputation has gone through another revision in recent decades, largely because of Ron Chernow but others as well. I particularly like the Grant biography by Ronald White, American Ulysses. In the decades immediately following the Civil War and his presidency, Grant was ranked in the popular mind with Washington and Lincoln as one of the nation’s saviors, but then stuff happened. Grant came to be seen as a poor president and a second-rate general.

Personally, I think that Grant’s denigration ties back to the nation’s exhaustion at the end of Reconstruction and the conciliatory post-Reconstruction glorification of Robert E. Lee. In the popular mind if Grant was great, then Lee was not great. Lee was suddenly perceived as the better general, the nobler man, and Grant was seen as having done what anybody could have done and a failure as president. He was in the right place at the right time, but it was Grant who figured out how to destroy the Southern armies, and then had the nerve to carry it out. It was Grant who came closest to leading us through Reconstruction, and its failure wasn’t his, it was ours.

He was also a good man.

Julia Dent Grant, 1854.

He was a fine writer, and his autobiography, written at the urging of Mark Twain as Grant was dying of throat cancer, should be required reading. He produced a passel of great quotes, but one of my favorites was recorded by his wife, Julia, who had crossed eyes. She thought that she should have them surgically corrected, but in the 1860s it would have been an experimental and possibly dangerous procedure. She thought though that Grant as a public figure would be ashamed of her defect, and that she should take the risk.

Grant’s response, as recorded by Julia, “Did I not see you and fall in love with you with those same eyes? I like them just as they are . . . I might not like you half so well with any other eyes.”

What a sweet thing to say, and with Grant it is completely in character.

After the Civil War Ohio industry expanded beyond its agriculture roots. Steel was forged in Ohio. Along with Michigan, cars were made in Ohio, and car parts were made in Ohio. Tires came from Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, or General, all of which were Ohio companies. Appliances were made in Ohio, and KitchenAid, Amana, and VitaMix still manufacture in Ohio.

After California and Texas, Ohio remains the third largest manufacturing state economy, but manufacturing growth is flat. During the 70s traditional industrial jobs declined in Ohio (as they did in Michigan and Indiana), and beginning in the 90s it suffered China shock. Tariffs have not increased American manufacturing jobs, and the new jobs that are created tend to favor the college-educated, where Ohioans lag. Traditional manufacturing wages also lag behind inflation. It’s a rough world out there, and the Upper Midwest has suffered.

Geography and Weather

North of Ohio is Lake Erie on the east and Michigan on the west. Due west of Ohio is Indiana. To the southeast is West Virginia, née Virginia, and to the south is Kentucky, both bordered by the Ohio River. Southern settlers from Kentucky and Virginia came early and often–JD Vance’s Kentucky family is nothing new. To the east is Pennsylvania, and settlers from the northeast got to Ohio through Pennsylvania.

There are lots of Ohio rivers and streams, and 15 Ohio rivers are designated scenic or wild and scenic rivers. In the northern third of the state the rivers generally flow north into Lake Erie. The southern rivers generally flow south into the Ohio, and then into the Mississippi.

Ohio Lakes and Rivers, GIS Geography.com, https://gisgeography.com/ohio-lakes-rivers-map/.

Ohio has some beaches on Lake Erie, and of course it has Magee Marsh, but mostly Ohio is flat or rolling plains. Ranked by elevation change, Ohio is our ninth flattest state, with a low elevation of 455 feet and a high of 1,548 feet. By elevation change Ohio is flatter than Kansas.

From north to south, east to west, weather varies across the state, but not much, and precipitation stays pretty equally spread from month to month, place to place. There ain’t no annual monsoons. The heaviest average precipitation is in May, three inches in Cleveland and four in Cincinnati. It rains least in January, but in January in Ohio it snows.

In July there’s a pretty good chance of muggy conditions. Average highs in July are in the mid- to low 80s, and lows in January are in the low 20s. It’s cold in Ohio in winter, but at least to this Houstonian it seems to be relatively mild in summer.

Population

From 1810 until 1860, Ohio grew by 913%, from 230,760 to 2,108,751. From 1860 to 1960 it grew by another 314%, to 9,706,397. It continues to grow, if not so fast, and its current population is 11,799,448.

Population is widely distributed, with concentrated urban areas interspersed across the state among relatively rural areas. The urban concentrations make Ohio the 10th densest state, with 282.3 people per square mile.

JimIrwin, 2020 Ohio population density map, Wikimedia Commons.

It’s an ethnically diverse state, with 61% Anglo, 12% black alone, 19% hispanic, and 6% Asian. Ten percent of Ohioans are two or more races.

Politics

Ohioans are politically a wee bit schizoid, though currently they are solidly Republican, and Donald Trump is projected to carry Ohio easily. In the last two presidential elections, Ohioans voted for Donald Trump, in 2020, 53.27% for Trump to 45.24% for Biden, and in 2016, 51.31% for Trump to 43.24% for Hillary Clinton. On the flip side, in both 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama carried Ohio. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the 2020 and 2016 elections in Ohio is the increased turnout: in 2016 turnout was a weary 66.48%, but in 2020 it increased to 74%. As these things go, 74% is massive turnout.

We will be there in the middle of the 2024 election season, but just like Texas I don’t expect there to be any serious presidential electioneering going on (unlike Michigan, which is an important swing state). There is a US senate race happening, with the Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in a race with the Trump-supported Bernie Moreno. Brown is considered vulnerable, but the current polling shows Brown with a comfortable lead of 4-6%.

Ohio state legislature, 2024, from Wikipedia.

All of the statewide elected officials in Ohio are Republican, and both the state house and senate are heavily Republican. Ohio voters have approved a state constitutional amendment protecting access to abortion, though it’s not clear whether Republican courts will enforce it. Like I said, Ohio is politically a wee bit schizoid.

Fish

Ohio has a lot of rivers and streams, and of course it has Lake Erie. The original gamefish of the Great Lakes was the lake trout, but when canals opened the Great Lakes to the Atlantic a combination of overfishing and invasive sea lamprey wiped out all but remnants of the lake trout populations.

Hudson, Charles B., Lake Trout, Review of the Salmonid Fishes of the Great Lakes, Bulletin of the Bureau of Fisheries, 1911, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, from the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

Like salmon, sea lamprey move into freshwater streams to spawn, and were finally brought under control beginning in 1958 by the application of Lampricide in their natal streams. By the 1980s though merchant ships had dumped zebra and quagga mussels into the lakes with released ballast water. The invasive mussels took over, severely damaging the food chain. Then blue crabs started eating the mussels (as did endangered lake sturgeon). I have no idea where the blue crabs came from, but the mussels are at least now somewhat controlled by natural predators, and there are serious recovery efforts for lake trout throughout the Great Lakes.

Meanwhile fish and game folk discovered Pacific steelhead as a replacement gamefish for the lake trout. I gather that the steelhead populations are not self-reproducing, and that there’s massive stocking every year, but from New York to Illinois the internal clocks of the stocked steelhead decide each winter that it’s time to head out of the Great Lakes and up the local rivers to spawn. Spawning steelhead being a great gamefish, it is a flyfishing bonanza. My inner Puritan however is dubious about fishing for a non-native stocked fish that doesn’t really belong where I’d be fishing.

So out of pure perversity that’s not what we’re doing.

Ohio being in the native range of smallmouth, that’s what we’ll fish for, with a guide from Mad River Outfitters in Columbus. We’ve also fished for smallmouth in Virginia, in the Shenandoah (where smallmouth are not native), in Illinois near Chicago, and in Indiana. I’m always excited to fish for black bass of any kind, but mostly I hope to see no lamprey, sea or otherwise. That’s one hideous animal, and I’m supportive of mass application of Lampricide.

Small-Mouth Black Bass, New York Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests, Fifth Annual Report, 1900, Albany, New York, James B. Lyon, from the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

It took planning, skill, and ruthless cunning to find that fish. What’s more, I didn’t just catch one fish in North Dakota, I caught two fish, which is as high as I can count when I go fishing. I may have them mounted if I can find the wall space.

Because we were fishing without a guide, I had three problems. In North Dakota, there are native walleye, northern pike, sunfish, bass, and catfish. There are invasive carp. There are stocked trout. I was desperate, and would have been happy to catch any of them, but that meant I had to prepare for all of them. I put together my fly box, then showed it to my friend Mark Marmon. I also told him that I was considering a children’s pond at a federal fish hatchery.

Like I said, ruthless cunning.

Mark asked if I had any coffee bean flies for the kid’s pond. Coffee bean flies are a coffee bean glued to a hook then covered with a UV curing resin. They’ve been around since the 30s, and were originally tied to imitate beetles. For hatchery fish they’re also are a good imitation of Purina fish chow, and for Houston bayou carp they also resemble escaped solids from a sewage treatment plant. At one time Mark would have had the fly rod world record for grass carp, except that the IGFA considered the coffee bean fly to be bait.

Me? I think it’s an artificial fly,. Fish don’t drink coffee. It’s not bait. I tied a dozen.

I had to decide what rod to take, and settled on a 7-weight. Rods run in weights from size 1 to 14, depending on the size of fish you’re catching. Trout are typically caught on a 4- or 5-weight, and biggish saltwater fish on an 8- or 9-weight. A 14 is basically an 8-foot 2×4 for marlin. You don’t so much fish with them as use them as clubs.

A 7-weight would be plenty to handle a 7-pound fish, and while I wasn’t likely to see any 7-pound fish in North Dakota it didn’t matter. I wasn’t fooling around. If I caught something big in North Dakota, a pike maybe, I wanted enough rod to handle it. Mark suggested that a 6-weight would be plenty. Deep in my heart of hearts I knew he was right, but I wasn’t taking chances.

Finally there was the question of where to go. The Red River of the North is praised for its excellent catfishing, but that’s kind of a random endeavor for a fly rod, and the photos of the river weren’t very inviting. As I’ve already explained, the big lakes and walleye weren’t an option. We couldn’t fish the Missouri again without a boat, and that hadn’t been successful for us anyway.

I found a list of community ponds stocked by North Dakota Game and Fish. We left the Fargo airport and drove straight to a park pond behind an elementary school in a Fargo subdivision. There was an 11-year old kid there gear fishing, and a younger girl, maybe nine, and her dad loading their cooler with a stringer of fish. They held the stringer up to show me.

Tiny fish. Little bitty fish. The biggest stringer of the smallest fish I’ve ever seen. I supposed they would take them home and fry them up, but they’d be most useful on crackers as hors d’oeuvres. They must have had five pounds of 30 fish that turned canned sardines into monsters.

I moved down the pond bank and tied on an olive wooly bugger, which is a fly you can use anywhere to catch anything, including tiny fish, but all I caught was pond scum. The little girl came over–one side of her head was shaved but she didn’t have any visible tattoos. She offered me a gruesome severed fish tail from one of her tiny fish. She said I’d never catch anything of any size in that pond without a fish tail. I thought about it but declined. Coffee beans are one thing, but I couldn’t convince myself that fish tails weren’t bait.

The girl told me that she and her dad had caught a bunch of bluegill, some bass, some catfish, and a piranha.

To keep out of the weeds I switched out the woolly bugger for a tiny blue surface popper, about as small as bass poppers get. There were dragon flies, and I like small poppers when there are dragon flies. I could see fish slap at my popper in the water, but even the piranhas were too small for the fly. I finally lipped that tiny bluegill–I didn’t actually set the hook, but I was fast enough on the set that the fish came flying out of the water past my ear and into the bankside grass. I didn’t have a stringer, or a cracker, so I released it back into the pond.

I had my North Dakota fish. Kris bird-watched.

The next day we drove west. We drove out of Fargo off the highway to the end of the pavement and down gravel roads. We never found Mirror Pond, even though it was explained to us that the Mirror Pond we wanted (not the one we were heading toward), was back the way we’d come, a left turn at the water plant, about four miles up the road, then another left turn. How could we miss it?

The Sheyenne River at Fort Ransom State Park had steep overgrown banks and it looked like I’d suffer some major damage climbing down to it, and I wasn’t real certain what I’d find if I got there. At the fish hatchery the children’s pond was covered with scum. To top off the day we had a remarkably bad hamburger in Valley City. How does someone make a bad hamburger? We never unpacked our fly rods. What did I care? I had my North Dakota fish.

The next day, our final day, we drove north from Fargo to Turtle River State Park, near Grand Forks. There was a park ranger at the desk, and she showed me on the park map where to fish. She said that in the spring North Dakota stocked the river–it’s not much as a river but it’s a pretty stream–with trout, but by July nothing would be left. They would stock it again in the fall. She said a lot of fly anglers came to the park just to stand in the stream and cast. I said fly anglers were stupid that way.

She agreed. She didn’t have to agree.

When we left Kris remarked about how cute the ranger was. She wasn’t that cute.

We drove to the stream and I went down to the dam to stupidly cast into the river–it’s a tiny dam built in the 30s by the CCC. I was fishing a pheasant tail nymph under a foam hopper imitation. Kris bird-watched.

I caught a fish on the pheasant tail. I hooked it and everything. I didn’t sling it past my ear. I think it was a creek chub, though it could have been a flathead chub, or it could have been a shiner. It was a perfect match to my park pond bluegill, almost too much fish for my 7-weight rod, and I’m going to get it mounted, too. My two North Dakota fish will look stunning together over the fireplace.