Category: Uncategorized

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.

South Dakota and North Dakota could have been just plain Dakota, and this would be Forty-Nine Fly Fish instead of Fifty. If I recall correctly North Dakota insisted on separation because they couldn’t trust South Dakota governors around their dogs. I can’t blame them.

However smart North Dakotans were to separate from the south, North Dakota is not a great fly fishing state. There is plenty of North Dakota fishing, but it’s not fly fishing. If you Google “North Dakota fishing guides,” you’ll find endless photo galleries of happy guides and happy clients displaying heavy stringers of unhappy walleyes. In North Dakota they fish deep, way deep, in big lakes. They fish for meat. It’s a perfectly reasonable way to fish for walleye, but it’s the worst possible way to fly fish. I would have to find a boat. I would have to have deep, deep, deep sinking lines that wouldn’t work well. I wouldn’t be able to feel any takes, or set the hook if by some lucky chance I did feel it. I would have to find a gear-fishing guide who knew the water and who wouldn’t laugh at me.

And I would deserve to be laughed at.

Walleye, North Dakota Game and Fish.

This was our second trip to North Dakota. The first time I didn’t catch a fish. We found a guide and he was just fine, but it was still hit or miss. He caught a small northern pike, and we caught nothing.

This time I decided to fish without a guide. I was certain that whatever I did, guide or no guide, I would not catch a fish, and that I’d have to return to North Dakota still another and another and another time. The only state where I would never catch a fish would ultimately be North Dakota. This whole project would die somewhere in North Dakota.

Not only would I have to keep returning, visiting North Dakota is like visiting Amarillo without all the scenic grandeur. There’s a whole lot of flat. And after one or two more trips there would almost certainly be more interesting places, places other than North Dakota, where I would want to go.

National Park Service, Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Actually that’s not completely fair. We have only been as far west as Bismarck, which is central. The part of North Dakota we’ve seen in the east was glaciated four times over tens of millions of years, so yeah, it’s pretty flat. There’s some rolling terrain as you leave the Red River Valley and start to move west, and that’s kinda pretty, but flat is the predominate motif. Flat and plowed and sown with corn or wheat in summer.

So the eastern part of the state was covered with glaciers and flattened, but 65 million years ago the far west was a giant swamp. This was the period when the Rockies were being formed by colliding tectonic plates, and North Dakota’s giant swamp filled with a combination of mountain erosion from the then-20,000 foot Rockies and volcanic ash from the Rockies’ volcanoes. Wind and water erosion through the hardening sediment created the Dakota Badlands. Like I said, we didn’t get that far west, but it’s supposed to be beautiful. There’s a National Park, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Little Missouri River.

Like the rest of North Dakota though, it’s not a place for fly fishing.

The last time we went to North Dakota, we fished near Bismarck in the Missouri River. The Missouri, like the Rio Grande or the Mississippi or Columbia, defines us. It’s written into our most achingly beautiful folksong, and fishing it, even without catching a fish, was such a privilege.

Anglos went to the Dakotas because of a gold rush (in the Black Hills), the pacification of the Northern Plains tribes, and railroad land schemes. They didn’t go for the fly fishing.

There were indigenous people in the Dakotas for about 14,000 years, and we know as much about them as we know about other early North American inhabitants. We theorize that they crossed from Asia to Alaska and then spread out following the big game. They’re interesting, but it’s really the much later Plains tribes that capture the imagination.

George Catlin, Buffalo Bulls Back Fat, 1832, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

They were the last holdouts against Anglo settlement, in that strip of the American Plains from North Dakota south to West Texas, and we know about them in part because the technology for sharing knowledge had solidified. We had painters like George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, we had photographers like Edward Curtis and William Irwin, and even while we destroyed them we studied the Plains tribes. They fascinated us. They still fascinate us.

When Europeans got to the Dakotas, there were five major tribal groups: the Mandan, the Hidatsa, the Arikari, the Dakota (including the Lakota and the Nakota), and the Cheyenne (who were forced out of Minnesota into North and South Dakota). The Mandan, along with the Hidatsa and Dakota, were part of the Siouan language groups–the Sioux–and lived along the Upper Missouri. They welcomed Lewis and Clark. Before the European encounter, the Mandan population is estimated to have been 10,000 to 15,000 people. By 1838, after smallpox, the Mandan population was estimated to be 125.

George Catlin, Sha-ko-ka, a Pretty Mandan Girl, 1832, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Aren’t those people stunningly beautiful?

The Hidatsa were closely allied to the Mandan. The Hidatsa also lived along the Missouri River in North Dakota. Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark’s guide, was a Shoshone captured by the Hidatsa. After the smallpox epidemic of the 1830s, the Hidatsa were reduced to about 500 people.

Karl Bodmer, Hidatsa Performing Dog Dance, 1832-34, Print, reprinted Part III of Macimilian, Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832-1834, Vol. XXIV, Cleveland, Ohio, The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906.

There is nothing so final in our history as the defeat of the Plains tribes, from the surrender of the Comanche war chief Quanah Parker at Fort Sill in 1875 to the massacre of the North Plains Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890. The story makes magnificently difficult history with which to reckon. Why, though, should we ever make history easy? We don’t talk about these people except in the most romantic terms: they are the Lords of the Plains, the Empire of the Summer Moon, semi-nomadic or nomadic people who were among the greatest horsemen who ever lived. How do we not admire them? How do we not suffer their tragedy, and for us white folk, feel guilt for our part in it?

But there it is. That’s history. All we can do is try to understand who they were, good and bad, and who we were, good and bad, and parse through to some better world.

Meanwhile, while the North Dakota tribes were being decimated and confined to reservations, the railroads advertised for land purchasers across Northern Europe and Russia. A friend gave me a copy of Rachel Calof’s Story, written by Ms. Calof in the 1930s as a Yiddish memoir for her children. She is a fine writer, vivid, unromantic, and harsh. Rachel was a 16-year old Jewish girl brought to homestead in North Dakota as an impoverished match-made bride from Ukraine in the 1890s.

Here is what you need to imagine about Rachel: the sparsity of food and fuel or any comfort, the long winter retreat by an extended family (including an evil mother-in-law) into crowded, desperately impoverished conditions, and the unending grind of turning the wild grass plains into farms.

Rachel’s story is Jewish, but I suspect it could have been written about any other North Dakota ethnic group: Swedish, German, Russian . . . There was some Jewish migration to North Dakota before World War I, but they didn’t stay. In 1890, with a total North Dakota population of about 191,000, there were about 1700 Jews. In 2024, with a total population of about 780,000 there are about 400 North Dakota Jews.

Rachel Calof’s family moved back east to Chicago. Winter was too cold. The mother-in-law was too mean. There was an established immigrant community in Chicago that they would become a part of. Rachel spent her last years living apart from her match-made husband. Her mail-order marriage was not a romantic triumph.

Later, much later, North Dakota became a shale oil boomtown. From 2008 to 2014, because of fracking, North Dakota had the lowest unemployment rate in the nation. It also had substantial increases in violent crime and environmental damage to the surface estates, whose owners had no control over how the oil companies drilled. Walking by the Fargo street people–why is Fargo’s downtown so full of street people?– I reckoned that they were the remnants of the North Dakota boom.

Politics

Every major elected state official in North Dakota is currently Republican, both senators are Republican, and the single congressman is Republican. Interestingly, North Dakota had a Democratic U.S. senator as recently as 2019. Its last Democratic governor was 1992.

Donald Trump easily carried North Dakota in 2020, by 65.11%. Only two counties, both predominately Native American, voted Democratic.

Demographics

In 1870, the non-native population of North Dakota was 2,405. By 1890, the total population was 190,983. By 1930 it was 646,872, but by 2010 it had only increased to 672,591, and by 2010 the shale boom had started. From 2010 to 2020 the population increased by 15.8% to 779,094, all because of fracking. It will be interesting to see what happens to North Dakota’s population in the next census. Like as not it will have leveled out again below 700,000.

Until 2010, the North Dakota population was 90% Anglo, and about 5% Native American. Fracking decreased the percentage of the white population by about 7%, to 82.9%. not because the number of Anglos decreased, but because of relatively higher increases in African American, Hispanic, and Asian populations. Native Americans remain at about 5%.

Weather

In January, in the north of the state, the average temperature in North Dakota is 2°. In the south it’s a balmy 17° Farenheit. For at least 50 days a year temperatures in the state’s southwest reach below 0°. That doesn’t factor in wind chill.

I’m sorry. I just don’t know how else to say this. I’m not generally a cursing man, and I don’t curse often, but here there’s reason: it’s fucking cold in North Dakota in winter. I would have no clue of how to deal with 50 days of sub-zero temperatures. You can’t ice fish with a fly rod.

Gear

We took 9-foot 5-weight rods. I took a Winston Air and Kris took an Orvis Helios 3, an ancient, outdated technology rod since Orvis came out with the Helios 4 a couple of months ago. I’m surprised it still works.

We had coldwater floating lines to match the rods. I had leaders tied, but the guides all hated my hand-knotted leaders and replaced them with store-bought knotless leaders. One said my knotted leaders would gather weeds in the water, and that was possibly true, so I didn’t mention that I fished a lot in Southern bass ponds. I’m not sure how to fish unless I’m gathering weeds from the water. My leaders would have worked fine, but if the guides wanted theirs, that’s fine, too.

I fished again with the newish Abel reel my sister gave me when I retired. We took waders and boots but never wore them. All the fishing was out of boats.

Playlist

Here’s what you need to know about putting together a Utah playlist. The Osmonds, the brothers, have at least two greatest hits albums. Donnie Osmond has at least four greatest hits albums. Marie Osmond has two greatest hits albums. Donnie & Marie together have a greatest hits album. I suspect that getting caught in your college dorm listening to any of the songs on any of those albums would have ruined whatever pretense of collegiate coolness you’d managed, and with good reason. The Osmonds were never cool, and time hasn’t changed them. And you can’t put together a Utah playlist without including the Osmonds.

Somehow Mormon clean living and rock music just don’t belong together. Even country music needs whiskey and a divorce to really get cranking. It would take a better man than me to listen to the Osmonds singing One Bad Apple again.

I’m not much of a fan of the Utah band Imagine Dragons, either, though I gather they were fairly recently quite the thing, and may still be. They’re a kind of Las Vegas lounge act aspiring to alternative rock. On the plus side, I convinced myself that Green River by Creedence was about Utah’s Green River, and stuck it on the list. That’s always good for a sing-along. And just to prove how much you should discount my opinion, I think the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” may be just about the best thing ever.

Here I raise my Ebenezer,
Here by Thy great help I've come.
And I hope by Thy good pleasure
Safely to arrive at home. 

Robert Robertson, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, 1758.

Otto Eliger, Stone of Ebenezer, engraving.

The Arizona list included Charles Mingus and Linda Ronstadt, and Ronstadt became our go to when all else failed. There was also Marty Robbins singing El Paso, and that one woman from Fleetwood Mac whose voice is like a cheese grater. I never could keep the members of Fleetwood Mac straight, and was surprised when one was from Arizona.

Books and Movies

I’ve already talked about Stagecoach (which is supposed to take place in Arizona, but at some of its best is filmed in Utah’s Monument Valley). I would add that one of the greatest quirky movies ever, The Sandlot, was filmed in Salt Lake City. Who knew?

Arizona also has a penchant for quirky movies: Raising Arizona, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (filmed in Arizona, but set in San Dimas), Little Miss Sunshine, Thelma and Louise . . . All of them are good but peculiar films. 3:10 to Yuma with Glen Ford and Van Heflin is not quirky, but it is terrific. The 1957 version is supposed to be better than the remake.

Glen Ford, 3:10 to Yuma, Columbia Pictures, 1957.

I was curious about the history of the Church of Latter Day Saints, and over the years had collected bits and pieces of its history, but never in an organized way. Before the trip I read American Zion by Benjamin E. Park, which was readable, thorough, and I thought very fair. Park alerts the reader early on that he’s LDS, but his belief doesn’t intrude on good history. Towards the end of the book I got curious about Park, who turned out to be an assistant professor at Sam Houston State, just up the road in Huntsville, Texas. I was very proud, like I’d just discovered the book was written by an old friend.

I had bought a copy of Roadside Geology of Arizona for the drive through Arizona, but forgot to bring it from Houston. It was sorely missed. We bought a copy of Roadside Geology of Utah on the road, and it was a great investment. There’s a lot of geology to be curious about.

Restaurants and Hotels

The last time I wandered around in Northern Arizona and Southern Utah was nearly 40 years ago, and I’m certain that the only thing we ate for a week were Navajo tacos. Kris still hasn’t recovered but that was ok with me. I love fry bread, and I love tacos, and the combination is excellent.

Something had happened though over the years, and fry bread was harder to find. I finally found fry bread at at a food truck in Colorado near Mesa Verde. The fry bread may have been harder to find, but it was still great.

I hit the Navajo taco jackpot at a wonderful place, Amigo Cafe in Kayenta, Arizona, just after you turn north for Monument Valley. It was midday and there was a wait for a table, and waiting we had a strained interaction with a drunk guy with meth teeth. He told Kris she was beautiful, which is true, but then he told me I was beautiful.

Inside the restaurant though was wonderful, and the food was lovely. There was a gleaming new espresso machine, that looked like in a pinch it could substitute for NASA launch control. It was a fine place, and definitely a step up from the roadside cafes I remember from 40 years before. You should go out of your way to eat at Amigo Cafe next time you’re in Kayenta. I bet breakfast there is spectacular.

A Navajo taco with queso fresco really is the very thing. What a great place.

Near Lees Ferry we stayed two nights at the Cliff Dwellers Lodge and ate both nights at the Cliff Dwellers Restaurant. We also ate breakfast there once, and they made our lunch the day we fished. There weren’t a lot of other places to choose from, but it was perfectly decent food. There was also a fly shop, but it had seen better days and now mostly sold fishing shirts with a Lees Ferry Anglers logo. This was handy though since I had left all of Kris’s fishing shirts hanging in a closet in Durango.

At Dutch John we stayed at the Red Canyon Lodge, which also had a pretty good restaurant. We sat on the deck and shared a bottle of wine with hummingbirds. Hummingbirds are one and all heavy drinkers.

We flew out of Salt Lake City. Who knew that Salt Lake City could have such a ridiculous street layout, such ridiculous street names, and so many street people? The pioneers started from scratch in the middle of the desert, and with active imaginations and a blank golden tablet they should have done better. Most streets are apparently named a number, and there is nothing more baffling than finding yourself at the corner of 4500 East Street and 700 North Street, or some such. We may grossly mispronounce San Felipe here in Houston, but at least the corner of Kirby and San Felipe means something.

Before our flight we had breakfast with our friend Tom, who from time to time has given us excellent restaurant advice, and who moved to Salt Lake from Milwaukee last year with his husband Sal. Tom isn’t a drinking man, but he is radically intense with his coffee, so he is a heathen gay coffee drinker living in the heart of the Mormon world. I think he likes it, but I suspect there is some culture shock. Salt Lake City should welcome its new citizen by putting Tom in charge of renaming the streets.

Where we ate breakfast, Finn’s, there were three lovely young women, significantly tatted, at the next table over. I kept wanting to ask if they were Mormon, but didn’t. Kris should be proud of my restraint.

Fly Fish Food.

We drove a bit out of our way to visit a fly fishing shop in Orem, Utah–Fly Fish Food. While I can find pretty good saltwater tying supplies here in Houston, the tiny stuff used for trout flies can be hit or miss, and I end up buying a lot of stuff by mail order. One of the places I order from is Fly Fish Food.

I have been to a lot of fly fishing shops, from Vermont to California. Some of them are pretty famous among fly tiers. In person some have been disappointing. Fly Fish Food is one of the few shops I’d go out of my way to go back to. They must have a thousand packages of different sized fishhooks, and all the feathers from all the chickens in the world. How strange it is that they’re in what seems to me an out-of-the mainstream place like Orem.

Guitar

I hauled a guitar from Houston to Utah, and played quite a bit, mostly Bach. I would have missed it if it hadn’t come along.