Category: Uncategorized

This is about bugs. Big bugs. Ugly bugs. Bugs that swarm and eat whatever is in their path. These bugs have disgusting bug orgies and threaten human civilization, or at least threatened human civilization that one time.

Mormon crickets are not, strictly speaking, crickets, but that’s a little like saying that brook trout are not, strictly speaking, trout. It’s true enough, but not important. Mormon crickets are a bug, and they look like a big cricket. If you need to be precise they are a katydid, and sometimes in the spring–not necessarily every spring but some springs–they swarm. Their reproductive strategy is orgies.

The swarming males secrete a spermataphore, which is both sperm and nearly a third of a boy’s body mass. That secreted body mass is food for the girls. The spermataphore is called by entomologists–I kid you not–a nuptial gift. The females eat the nuptial gift and are both fed and fertilized. With every nuptial gift the girls have dinner with their date.

The females bury their now-fertilized eggs in the soil and march off to die. It’s a short but romantic life, but Kris wanted to know how the females got pregnant through their digestive tract? All I can say is that Many are the Wonders of Our World, Many are the Mysteries of God’s Plan, and all in all it’s probably a necessary quirk of evolution. These are big ugly girls, and the boys aren’t handsome either. Nobody’s gonna kiss ’em. They gotta take their romance as it comes.

Mormon crickets are more than two inches long. When they swarm they are everywhere you look. They can’t fly, thank goodness, because flying swarms of Mormon crickets would be a real horror, but what they can do is creep through the sage and down to the river, crawl along through the brush and the grass and the pathways, wander bankside from hither to yon, and best of all (and most relevant here) they can fall into the water.

Mormon crickets look a lot like Gulf Coast water bugs, American roaches, but even the roaches aren’t as big as the crickets. The roaches may not even be as hideous, though until now I’d have bet that every year water bugs were going to be the county grand champion of hideous. Oh my goodness Mormon crickets are ugly. Big and ugly. Hideous.

But not to trout. In the water they are to trout a DoorDash of protein, tasty and efficient for any trout big enough to swallow a three inch bug.

And this brings us to the ugly truth about fly fishing for trout: it’s not actually about casting skill, or beautiful rivers, or even stylish fishing clothes from Orvis or Simms . . . It’s first and foremost about what trout eat, and what trout eat, first and foremost, are bugs. If you can make a fly look like the bug that trout are eating, and make it float somewhat naturally, then you will like as not catch feeding trout.

Artificial flies can be pretty enough, but they mostly mimic bugs, and most bugs for most of their lives are just plain damn ugly. Of course ugliness is in the eyes of the beholder, and finding a bunch of big ugly bugs committing mass suicide by throwing themselves into a river screaming help! help! help! is to a trout a beautiful thing. It should also be a beautiful thing to every fly fisher.

That’s why I am so enamored with Mormon crickets. How tasty they are to trout! How beautiful they are to me!

We started fishing early, before the crickets really started moving, and our guide, Eli Koles with Western Rivers Flyfisher Guides, first rigged my rod with an underwater nymph below a surface foam cricket. I caught fish, mostly on the nymph, and they were good fish, biggish browns. Then around lunchtime the crickets got active. Eli parked the drift boat at the bank, and we watched the crickets march along in twos or threes or half-dozens. It made for a queasy lunch. These are some mighty ugly bugs.

After lunch Eli cut off our nymphs and in the afternoon we only fished with big foam cricket imitations. Everything was crickets. All of our fishing was on the surface.

I fished my foam cricket in softer current downriver below the boat. I don’t know what Kris was doing. I was watching my cricket, not Kris, not Eli, not the shoreline . . . it was just me and that cricket floating together down the river. Did Kris catch fish? No idea. Watching that bit of floating brown foam 30 feet below the boat was all I was good for.

And because the flies were so big we weren’t catching mediocre fish. The browns that came up for crickets were, I swear, all north of 18 inches. I caught one rainbow, and it was easily 20″. No no no no. It was easily 21″. It’s getting bigger as we speak.

If you read much about fly fishing–and only baseball can match fly fishing for the ruination of good paper–you will sooner or later read something about the Green River below the Flaming Gorge Dam, and you will read about the three river sections named, imaginatively, A, B, and C.

A is closest to the dam and is about 7 miles long. To float A, you put in close to the dam. B is about eight miles long, and is, believe it or not, immediately downriver from A. We fished B because, after I’d carefully studied the qualities of the river and considered the various alternatives, Eli told us where we were going to fish. We fished B.

C is furthest from the dam and has the fewest fish, but it’s also the least fished. It’s about 11 miles long.

My suspicion is that the A, B, and C designations don’t really have much to do with the peculiarities of the river or the fishing, but everything to do with where somebody some years ago built reasonably spaced boat ramps. The truer designations would be “the part of the river below Boat Ramp One, Two, or Three.” Unless you’re familiar with the river, then once you get out of sight of the dam you won’t know where you are anyway, and as for fishing, I’m convinced that at least when there are Mormon crickets, anywhere on the Green River is everywhere the best fishing in the world.

Eli told us the story of the Miracle of the Crickets, which was that one time that Mormon crickets threatened civilization. Ok, it wasn’t all of civilization, but it was 1848 Mormon civilization in Salt Lake Valley. Mormons came to Salt Lake in 1846. In 1848, along with their second spring’s crops, the Mormon crickets came. Having properly filled out the paper work to qualify as a Biblical plague, the Mormon crickets started eating everything in sight.

The newly-settled Mormons faced starvation. The indigenous occupants of Western Utah, the Goshute, Paiute, and Shoshone, almost certainly included roasted and dried crickets in their diet, and would have seen the cricket invasion exactly like brown trout saw the cricket invasion: a God-send of tasty morsels. To the Mormons though eating crickets was like drinking Coca-Cola, or worse. There are emergencies when drinking Coca-Cola is permissible to Mormons, but none of the Mormons seem to have considered eating the crickets.

Then the miracle happened. California gulls came out of nowhere and gorged on crickets, then regurgitated the indigestible parts and gorged some more. That’s why seagulls are the state bird of Utah.

To be honest I wouldn’t have eaten a cricket either. At least I wouldn’t have eaten a cricket outside of a hip Oaxacan restaurant.

The Green was particularly high when we floated–I think over 4,000 cfs against a normal flow of around 900. The high flow had nothing to do with rain, but was purposefully released to wash invasive smallmouth from their spawning beds. It’s a smart strategy, and Eli didn’t think that the high flow affected fishing. There were other guide boats on the river with us, and sometimes I would watch them across the river, still fishing nymphs under bobbers. What the hell were they doing? Why were they fishing tiny underwater nymphs when there were all these beautiful, giant, edible bugs on the water?

Eli said that Western River Flyfishers emphasized floating flies instead of nymphs when possible, and seeing other anglers still fishing nymphs made me really happy we’d lucked into Eli. Eli and all those beautiful, giant, edible bugs.

At day’s end when Eli rowed us across the river from the far bank to the final take-out, he told us to skate our flies across the current. It was the very last possible fishing of the day, and it was a fishing method that is guaranteed to work only when you read about somebody else doing it. This time it worked for me. My fly got slammed. I set the hook. I played the fish to the boat and then Eli released it. It was a great fish.

Do you see that photo right there? Do you know why that is the greatest fishing photo ever taken? I, of course, am the angler, but that’s not what’s important. I probably could have tucked in my shirt a bit better, and my sun buff doesn’t really match my shoes. My pants are a bit droopy. My rod is bent, but that’s not what’s important, either. What’s important is the guy standing in the water by the drift boat at the take-out. Look at that guy’s face. I have been waiting for that jealous face my entire life.

And that guy, that guy right there, had to watch. Not that I would ever gloat.

Hee hee hee.

Man, I could have kissed those beautiful bugs.

This wasn’t my first trip to Utah. When I was five, my parents spent the night in an old—and even then it was old—hotel in Salt Lake, a place I’ve searched for but which seems to be long gone. We could  see Temple Square lit at night from our hotel room window, and it was beautiful. Then the temple was probably the largest building I’d ever seen, and that was probably the first hotel I’d ever stayed in. It’s no wonder I have a thing for old hotels and their windows, and for Salt Lake.

Since they arrived in 1844, the Latter Day Saints, née Mormons, are so linked to Utah that it’s hard as a gentile not to drive around Utah thinking constantly of religion, speculating whether the pierced and tattooed 22-year old at the next table is LDS, and wondering what the heck were those pioneers thinking?

I could never be a Mormon. They don’t drink iced tea, either sweet or unsweet. They don’t drink coffee. That just wouldn’t work for me.

Driving around Utah (and northern Arizona as well) makes me wonder how any Utah or Arizona kid, LDS or gentile, could ever be anything but a geologist. It is all about the rocks, the movement of rocks, the composition of rocks, the colors of rocks. . . The region includes some of the most magnificent and dramatic geologic formations in the world.  Those mountains and canyons can rival the moon and the stars for grandeur, and for inspiring amazement can even rival homegrown tomatoes. Utah is all about the rocks.

We started from Durango, Colorado, and drove by the Four Corners Monument where we stopped to step into Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. We took a side trip to Utah’s Monument Valley in the Navajo Nation, and then fished in Arizona at Lee’s Ferry. We left Lee’s Ferry and drove west through the rest of Arizona to the southern entrance of Zion National Park at Springdale, Utah. From Springdale we drove northeast through most of Utah to the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. At Flaming Gorge we fished the Green River. 

How far did we drive? A fur piece, more than 1500 miles. We got our money’s worth from our rental Kia. We saw a lot of rocks. I thought about going back to school to become a geologist, because how could any old man driving across Arizona and Utah not identify with old rocks?

Some History

Before Europeans, there were Utes, from whence comes the name Utah. The Utes were also in Colorado, but Colorado was busy naming itself after the Colored Reddish River. The Utes self-designation was Núuchi-u, but the State of Núuchi-u apparently didn’t roll off the tongue, so Utah. After contact with the Spanish, the Utes became a horse culture, and warred with the Mormons and the U.S. from 1853 to 1879. There are only about 5,500 Utes left, primarily on reservations in Utah and Colorado.

New Mexico’s Kit Carson admired the Utes, but apparently disliked the Navajo, though as I recall he adopted a Navajo daughter.

Pagre, Ute, Library of Congress, 1902.

The other pre-European people in Utah were Goshutes, hunter-gatherers who ranged from Western Utah into Nevada; Southern Paiutes, hunter-gatherers who by 1900 were reduced to about 800 people; Western Shoshone, who are closely related culturally to the Paiutes, Goshutes, and Utes, and who have litigated extensive land claims against the U.S.; and the Navajo, latecomers who weren’t related to anybody except the Apache and raided everybody else (including the Spanish) for slaves.

Of the Europeans, Spanish explorers arrived first, but decided all of Utah was uninhabitable desert. The Mormons left Illinois for Mexican Utah in 1847, bringing with them in the first year polygamy and about 2,000 vanguard pioneers. After being violently driven from Missouri and Illinois, the pioneers liked uninhabitable desert because nobody would bother them. Ultimately about 70,000 LDS pioneers made the journey to Utah. About 2,173,000 of Utah’s current 3.3 million inhabitants are Latter Day Saints. That’s a smaller total percentage of the population than it used to be.

Torleif S. Knaphus, Handcart Pioneer Monument, Temple Square, Salt Lake City, 1945, unnatributed photo from Wikipedia.

Along with the rest of the Southwest, the U.S. took Utah from Mexico in 1848 after the Mexican-American War.

Joseph Smith received his revelatory golden plates on a hill in New York in 1823. Religious unorthodoxy had been part of North American culture since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, but Mormons stood out because of their relative success, their reliance on the Book of Mormon and prophetical pronouncements in addition to the orthodox Bible, the perception by the larger public that its founders engaged in more than the usual levels of religious hucksterism, the violence that drove Mormons from Missouri and Illinois (including Smith’s assassination by gentiles in 1844), their autocratic leadership structure, and plural marriage. Don’t forget plural marriage. With the LDS that’s kind of a theme.

C.C.A. Christensen, The Hill Cumorah, 1850. Joseph Smith received the golden plates from the Angel Moroni in 1823.

By the time the U.S. annexed Utah, Mormons were already there. As early as 1847, in anticipation of the U.S. takeover, church leaders had established the proposed State of Deseret, with its own provisional government. Deseret was huge, and included most of Nevada and Utah, significant parts of California and Arizona, and bits of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Deseret did not include any of New Zealand or Argentina, though those are also excellent trout fisheries.

Overlay of the boundaries of the provisional State of Deseret, Wikipedia, 2011.

After annexation there was frequent friction between Washington and Salt Lake City. Outside Utah Mormons weren’t all that popular, particularly after the church’s public avowal of polygamy in 1850. On their side, the LDS taught avoidance of outsiders. In 1857, President James Buchanan sent troops into Utah to squelch Brigham Young’s claims as territorial governor. Young responded by declaring martial law. In the midst of Mormon fear of U.S. invasion, a Mormon militia massacred a group of 120 peaceful gentiles from Arkansas passing through Utah to California. There has long been speculation that the cover up of the massacre was directed by Young. It was a particularly ugly bit of business.

As part of the Compromise of 1850, Congress created the Utah Territory, including most of what is now Nevada and Utah, with a Washington-appointed territorial governor. After the discovery of silver in Nevada, Washington separated Nevada from Utah in 1861, and granted Nevada statehood in 1864. Utah would not gain statehood until 1896, after the LDS disavowed plural marriage in 1890. Prohibition of plural marriage was written into the Utah constitution as a condition for statehood.

Overlay of the Utah Territory, 1850, Wikipedia.

A Study in Scarlet and Riders of the Purple Sage

My mother, who was born in 1917, adored Zane Grey, and except possibly for Ernest Hemingway, he was America’s most famous fly fisher and big game angler before World War II. Even today I fish a Zane Pro 8-weight made by Hardy Brothers of England. Before World War II Grey was certainly America’s most popular novelist, and Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) was his most popular novel. It was also the most popular Western novel of all time, though Owen Wister’s The Virginian is much better. Riders of the Purple Sage was filmed six times, first in 1918, and most recently in 1996. Its title gave its name to a pretty good band.

Grey was also a serial philanderer and dentist, in order of frequency.

In Riders of the Purple Sage, in Southern Utah, evil Mormon polygamists led by evil Bishop Dyer attempt to force the marriage of the beautiful Jane Withersteen–an unprotected heiress–to evil Elder Tull, who already came equipped with two other wives. The hero, the rugged stranger and former Texas Ranger Jim Lassiter (with whom Jane is in love), has a six gun and his own creed. You can guess the rest of the plot from there. It involves a good bit of galloping horses.

Meanwhile, back in England, in 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle had published the first full-length novel featuring Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet. A Study in Scarlet, is also set in part in Utah. Evil Mormon polygamists led by evil president Brigham Young attempt to force the beautiful Lucy Ferrier–an unprotected heiress–to marry either the evil Joseph Strangerson or the evil Enoch Drebber, sons of Mormon leaders. The rugged Jefferson Hope (with whom Lucy is in love), attempts to intervene. Hope and Lucy flee, but Lucy is recaptured and forced to marry Drebber. Lucy dies of heartbreak one month later.

The Bristol Observer, Lucy Ferrier and Jefferson Hope, 1890, Illustration for A Study in Scarlet.

Richard Gutschmidt, Lucy Ferrier and Jefferson Hope, 1902, Illustration for A Study in Scarlet.

For the next 20 years, Jefferson Hope pursues Drebber and Strangerson, finally catching up with them in London and murdering both. The game is afoot, Holmes is the consulting detective, and Hope conveniently dies of an aneurism the night before the commencement of his trial, because really who wants to see him punished for righteous vengeance?

Whatever the fairness of Conan Doyle’s and Grey’s depictions of the LDS (and the depictions are less than fair), these were extremely popular novels that reflected views of their times and reinforced those views. They also got something right: early Mormonism didn’t have the most enlightened views of women. Joseph Smith is thought to have had as many as 49 wives, some as young as 14. Brigham Young had 56 wives, at least one as young as 13. Of course the early Mormon marriage rules are so complicated, it’s hard to say whether they were married, sealed for eternity, sealed for life, or something else I don’t understand. In any case there’s some theocratic me-tooism going on, and it weren’t right, not even in 1850.

One does wonder whether beautiful heiresses are still a dime a dozen in Utah. As far as I know we didn’t meet any. One suspects that if there are any, they now have some tattoos and piercings, and a mountain bike.

Politics

No state is more closely identified with the Republican Party than Utah, largely because of the close identification of the LDS with the Republican Party. That wasn’t always the case. Utah has had, believe it or not, Democratic governors in relatively recent history, from 1925 to 1949, and from 1965 to 1985. It has had a Democratic U.S. Senator as recently as 1977, and from 1933 to 1941, during the Great Depression, both senators were Democratic. I’m pretty sure though that every public official in Utah is now Republican, including the dog catcher.

Before the Great Depression, the Mormon Church evidenced no particular political preference, but that changed with Mormon President Heber Grant and his First Counselor, J. Reuben Clark. Clark had been a federal civil servant and ambassador to Mexico under Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, and Clark and Grant both despised The New Deal as rampant socialism. They actively campaigned against Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt also supported the repeal of the 18th Amendment, the Prohibition Amendment, which Heber Grant could not forgive.

On Roosevelt’s death, Clark said “The Lord gave the people of the United States four elections in order to get rid of him. They failed to do so in these four elections, so He held an election of His own and cast one vote, and then took him away.” Clark and Grant really hated Roosevelt.

Los Angeles Times, Heber Grant and J. Reuben Clark, 1935.

The law school at Brigham Young University is named in honor of J. Reuben Clark.

As an alternative to the New Deal, Clark and Grant felt that the church could provide private aid to Utahns, at least to Mormon Utahns, and Grant instituted a church welfare system in 1936. It is still an important part of the church’s mission, but at least during the Great Depression it wasn’t enough. Most suffering Utahns still largely depended on socialist aid from New Deal agencies. Still, by actively campaigning against Roosevelt, Grant and Clark had set the future tone for church leadership, and subsequent leadership continued the church’s strong ties to the Republican Party.

After John F. Kennedy, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir only sang at the inaugurations of Republican Presidents.

In 2020 Utah delivered for Donald Trump big time, 58.13% to 37.65%. Joe Biden only carried three counties in Utah, Grand, Salt Lake, and Summit. Grand contains the Greenie enclave of Moab, but has fewer than 10,000 residents. Summit also tends Green with Park City, and has about 25,000 residents. Salt Lake is the most urban county in Utah, and consistent with most urban areas nationally Biden carried Salt Lake by about 59,000 votes. In the rest of Utah Biden got trounced. In Duchesne County, population 19,596, Trump received over 87% of the vote. If Duchesne County ever has a treasure hunt, it should include “Find a Democrat” as one of the treasures.

Weather

It’s hot and dry in Utah. Except when it’s cold and dry.

Utah may be consistently Republican, but there’s considerable variance among its temperatures. St. George in Southwest Utah is 120 miles from Las Vegas, Nevada. Its average July high is 102°, while the average low is 76°. In January, the average high is 53° while the low is 32°.

Compare that–really hot and reasonably cold–to Park City. In Park City January highs average 25° and lows 12°, while July averages are 71° and 52°. I’d call that really damn cold in winter and a mild Houston winter in summer. Salt Lake City slots neatly in between, with January averages of 37° and 23°, and July averages of 92° and 65°.

There is no place in Utah where every now and again the temperature won’t hit 0. That’s cold.

St. George gets average annual snowfall of .01″, and rain of 8.1″. Park City has average annual snowfall of 57.4″, and rain of 7.7″. Statewide, average rainfall is less than 15″, though there’s considerable variance from place to place. Whatever the average, there is absolutely no probability of it ever being muggy in Utah. Just think how bad that is for their skin.

We saw some rain in Utah, right yonder on the purple sage.

Geography

I’m going to be stupidly simple, and for further explanation see my description of Arizona. In Eastern Utah there is the Colorado Plateau , drained by the Green, Colorado, and San Juan Rivers, and in western Utah there’s the Basin and Range. The Rocky Mountains run through the center. There’s a lot of different stuff going on, and it’s all magnificent. There’s the Great Salt Lake Desert in the northwest, including the Bonneville Salt Flats where I could have really opened up our rented Kia. There’s the Rocky Mountain Wasatch Range and the Uinta Mountains. There are six national parks, eight national wilderness areas, eight national monuments, six national recreation areas, and the Navajo Nation’s Monument Valley. There are some great state parks. It is a place of unbelievable natural beauty and geologic magnificence.

We drove through Utah with an open copy of The Roadside Geology of Utah, and learned that the major population corridor, up I-15 along the Wasatch Front, from Provo through Orem and Salt Lake to Ogden, is on track for a major geologic upheaval. It could happen at any time. I wouldn’t move there if I were you, but it’s probably ok to visit.

Google Maps.

Where We Planned to Fish

We planned to fish in the far northeast corner of Utah on the Green River, in the Flaming Gorge Recreation area. It’s hard to get to, though Kris and I had been there with our kids once before, almost 30 years ago. I have no idea why we were there unless I wanted to scout the Green River for fishing. I know we were driving from Yellowstone to Salt Lake City, but that’s not a direct route. It doesn’t matter. It was beautiful then and it’s beautiful now.

Gear

We took 9-foot 5 weight rods with floating lines, which is sliced white sandwich bread, or a Toyota Camry, or a Wilson fielder’s glove. It’s so basic it almost doesn’t need to be said. If all I said was that we took fly rods, like as not you’d assume they were 9-foot 5 weight rods with floating lines. 

Rods get heavier than 5 weights, especially in salt water, and lighter, especially because once you’ve bought a 9-foot 5 weight, rod companies depend on you catching rod fever and buying more rods. And buying more rods will almost certainly make you a better angler. Really.

When Kris unpacked her rod the tip was broken. She vaguely remembered breaking it on our trip to California, and vaguely remembered forgetting breaking it. Luckily I’d brought a spare rod—I’m really good about packing a spare—except that I blew it and it wasn’t a spare Winston 5 weight but a Winston 3 weight. I had grabbed the wrong green rod tube. The 3 weight was a bit light, so Kris used the guide’s Orvis 5 weight all week, which was exactly the same model as her broken 5 weight. It’s a good rod.

Back at the lodge, Kris got on the Orvis website and ordered a new tip for her rod. It was waiting at the house when we got home. Kudos to Orvis for great service.

Hotels

In the North Maine Woods we stayed at Libby Camps. Food, lodging, and guides were all included in the trip price we’d paid six months before, so once we got there we only had to pay for alcohol, taxes, and tips. Paying for everything was long forgotten. It felt free!

After we left Libby Camps and the North Woods, we spent two nights on the Atlantic Coast, in Bar Harbor, and one night by the airport in Bangor. Staying in an airport hotel is convenient for early flights, but what can you say? Airport hotels aren’t known for their charm, because, well, universally they have none.

In Bar Harbor we splurged on charm, and stayed in a popular inn a block off of the Main Street, Bass Cottage Inn. We were three flights up with no elevator, but that was ok, or at least once we got our luggage up the three flights it was ok.

The next day while Tropical Storm Lee, née Hurricane Lee, blew through we mostly hung around the inn. This year on fishing trips we’ve survived a tornado in Little Rock and the remnants of a hurricane in Bar Harbor. Travel is so broadening.

Acadia National Park shut down for Hurricane Day, as did a lot of businesses in Bar Harbor. We went for a walk in the rain, and watched the wind and waves in the harbor until we were blown into the nearest place serving lobster and chowder. In the afternoon I played the guitar in our room while the weather reports reminded us it was wet and windy, and later we played cards down in the lobby. It was a nice inn, but by the end of the day even the weather reporters were a little bored.

I got scolded at the inn for entering the kitchen and putting a dirty cup in a dish tub. A staffer nabbed me on the way out of the kitchen, and made certain I knew that it was a working kitchen and that I didn’t belong. Do I seem annoyed? I was annoyed. It wasn’t like I had pranced into the heart of the kitchen to mingle maple syrup with the lobster. It was a mild scolding, maybe only an admonishment, but still. Kris would tell me I’m overreacting about something petty, but there you are. You take your victim as you find them.

It wasn’t even my cup. It was Kris’s cup.

The morning after the storm we drove through Acadia National Park, about 20 minutes from downtown Bar Harbor. There were lots of cute tourist lodges near the park, far from the Bar Harbor main drag, cute clapboard places that looked like they were built for auto trips in a 1968 Buick LeSabre, and I kept wishing we’d stayed at one of those. It would have been cheaper, and I’m certain no one there would have scolded me, no matter what I did with their damned ol’ cup.

Really. I’m over it.

Restaurants

There are four main food groups in Maine, lobster, blueberries, maple syrup, and chowder. While visiting Maine, we tried to keep our diet properly balanced. Outside of Libby Camp, we ate a lot of lobster, blueberries, maple syrup, and chowder, though not necessarily at the same time.

A few restaurants stood out. In Bar Harbor, we ate at Havana, which is a Cuban-tinged restaurant, and there was a good classical guitarist. He played a lot of things that I play, only better. I vaguely recall eating scallops, which aren’t very Cuban, but which are very Maine. I don’t remember seeing black beans and rice on the menu.

In Bernard at Thurston’s Lobster Pound the guy two tables over had on an Astros cap, and I told him that it was very stylish. He complemented mine right back. We had lobster there, and Thurston’s is now closed for the season.

The most popular restaurant in Bangor is the Timber Kitchen and Bar, located at the Embassy Suites. I’d never been to a restaurant at an Embassy Suites. It had the longest menu ever compiled, and the pizza was good. I could have done without the blueberry compote on the pizza though.((I’m lying. They served it on the side.))

Moxie

Moxie is the state soft drink of Maine. I asked our fishing guide, Jeffrey Labree, about Moxie, and he said it must be the greatest advertising campaign ever, because the stuff is terrible. He brought me one, and because it’s guaranteed to prevent softening of the brain I tried it.

Maybe it wasn’t quite the thing with red wine. A Mainer at the table asked if I’d ever had Dr. Pepper and said it tasted like Dr. Pepper. She was wrong.

Acadia National Park

What a beautiful place. It was closed the day of the storm, so the day we were supposed to go we spent in our hotel room in Bar Harbor playing card games and getting admonished for walking into the kitchen. The next morning we drove the national park loop. What a magnificent place. We didn’t stop at the park’s Jordan Pond House tea room because we didn’t have a reservation, but my sister told me later that they’d make room if you showed up, and that the blueberry popovers really are all that. I forgot to ask if they came with maple syrup.

L.L. Bean

We didn’t spend enough time in Acadia because we wanted to see Maine’s other national treasure, L.L. Bean. We had to drive out of our way, but how could we not visit L.L. Bean? Freeport is a shopping enclave, and everybody and their dog was there, literally, enjoying a beautiful post-storm day in the great outdoors by shopping indoors at L.L. Bean. It is a great place to dog watch and people watch on a sunny day.

There was a Vermont Flannel company store next to L.L. Bean, and I bought a red flannel shirt that promised it was Made in America. It’s so heavy that I’ve already scheduled the one day next February that I’ll get to wear it in Houston. Still. I’m now prepared for my future career as a Maine lumberjack.

Books

While we were driving around Maine, we listened to the new Steven King novel, Holly. Did you know that there is always a new Steven King novel? It’s almost like the plot of a horror novel. I’m guessing that it has to do with the long winters and not the supernatural, but if it turns out that Steven King sold his soul down on the crossroads, I’m not sure I’ll be surprised. Holly was as much mystery as horror, and it’s a good driving novel. I also re-listened to Salem’s Lot, which I first read in college. It holds up pretty well.

We visited Steven King’s house in Bangor, and were told by locals that sometimes he does house tours, and that when It was published he put a red balloon in an upstairs window. That’s mighty classy. It’s a scary neighborhood though: apparently Senator Susan Collins lives directly across the street. I wouldn’t go out at night. I’m certain she’s some kind of shape-shifter.

I’ve already mentioned that before we went to Maine I had read Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, and I was better for it. Because I read Thoreau I knew I needed a red flannel shirt.

There’s a series of Maine mysteries by Paul Doiron, the Mike Bowditch mysteries, about a Maine game warden. The books are great for local color, and a lot of fun to listen to. It was from the Mike Bowditch mysteries that I learned about Moxie.

There are two major poets from Maine, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edna St. Vincent Millay, neither of whom wrote about Moxie. I must have read some Longfellow at some point, but I can’t say I remember any. Weirdly, because of Evangeline, Longfellow is probably as well remembered in Louisiana as Maine.

Millay is mostly remembered these days as a bisexual free spirit and morphine addict, but I always pause when I come across one of her poems. There’s almost always something there to ponder:

And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

Renascence

Music

Patty Griffin. Sorry, that’s almost all I’ve got. Doris Day recorded “That Jane from Maine,” and Rudy Vallee was from Maine. Howie Day seems likable. Apparently the long winters are better for writing horror novels than for making music.

As an aside, the It Girl of popular music right now seems to be a guy from Vermont, Noah Kahan. It’s low-key stuff, with plenty of banjoes and fiddles, very likable, and a New York Times critic noted that one of the reasons for Kahan’s current popularity may be that New Englanders so rarely have a popular music icon to embrace, so they’ve embraced Kahan with a vengeance.

So we listened to Patty Griffin, who, last I heard, was living in Austin. Then we listened to more Patty Griffin. Luckily Steven King was there to take up the driving slack.

Guitar

Between the one day that Kris and I were sick and the day of the storm I played the guitar a lot in Maine. I think with the windshield washers slapping time I managed to play every song that driver knew, or at least most of the songs that I know. Libby Camps gave me a free sticker, and it’s now in a place of honor on my guitar case.

Great place, Libby Camps, and for at least part of the year it’s an excellent place to sit on the front porch of the lodge and play the guitar. I wouldn’t want to try it in winter, even in a red lumberjack shirt.

Gear

We used rods and flies from our guide, Terry Peach.  We took our waders and wading boots, but otherwise we used Terry’s stuff.

On Brandywine Creek we used Terry’s two-handed rods. Casting two-handed rods is a peculiar exercise. I’ve done it some, and I’m not much good at it.  I don’t fish much in the rivers where they’re used, and in most rivers I use single-handed rods. Without practice, I’ll never get better, but if it’s done right you can cast a lot further than with a single-handed rod. It’s also supposed to be less strain on my aging body.

Those are good things, but the big advantage is that there’s no back-cast. To cast in front of you with a Spey rod, you don’t need to stretch the line out behind you first. Without a back-cast, you miss all those excellent opportunities to entangle your line in bank-side trees. Every fly angler has invested considerable time and effort into untangling flies from back-side brush, and if they haven’t they must fish in the desert. Even then I suspect I’d get tangled in the cacti.   

Don’t get me wrong, though.  There are plenty of unique and painful ways to screw up casting double-handed spey rods.  With Spey casting, the technique is to put your left foot out, and then your left foot in, and after you turn yourself about your line magically puddles somewhere. I have seen good Spey casters, and it’s a beautiful thing, but with me even on my best day it ain’t so pretty.

Still. It is really fun, and just getting to Spey cast is reason enough to go to Delaware to fish for shad.

Before we fished the Brandywine with the big rodsTerry took us to a DuPont pond so that he could be sure we caught a fish. We fished single-handed 6-weights on the pond, and with a single-handed rod I can’t plead lack of practice for my screw ups. Kris used a 6-weight rod built by  Waterworks/Lamson. That rod, a Center Axis, incorporated the reel into the reel seat.  Kris loved it.  I tried it and it made me nervous.  I did get Kris out of Terry’s shop without buying a new rod, though it was nip and tuck.

Lamson recently quit making the Center Axis, and I think it almost broke Terry’s heart. I suspect he’s got a lot of the remaining stock stowed somewhere. He really likes that rod, and so did Kris.

We took our own boots and waders. When you fly somewhere to fly fish, carrying wading boots comes right after delayed flights and missed connections as a source of misery.  Even without boots there’s a lot of gear.  There are reels, rods, waders, nets, some more reels and rods, wading staffs, some extra reels and rods, nets, fly boxes, wading packs, and then there are boots.  Here’s the thing about boots. When you pack your boots they weigh about 2 pounds, 5 ounces.  They are the incredible lightness of being. Then you get them wet.

A boot will absorb 72 times its weight in water, and take two months to dry. Wet boots will inevitably boost your luggage above the checked bag limit of your air carrier. When there were still newspapers, you could stuff your boot with newspapers and that would soak up some of the water, but those days are done.  Just try to find a newspaper anymore. There was something very satisfying about stuffing the style section and the news of the day into wet wading boots. It almost felt like performance art. I might like to stuff my boots with Fox News, but it don’t hold water.

In another kind of performance, I’ve driven highways at 70 mph with our boots tied to the rental car roof. It helps, but it makes Kris nervous. I guess it probably isn’t very smart. Sixty-five would be safer, and the boots might make less racket when they flopped around. 

Phillies Fans

To get to Wilmington, we flew into Philadelphia, then drove to the Phillies’ stadium and watched part of a day game between the Phillies and the Diamondbacks. I like to visit baseball stadiums. The Phillies stadium, Citizens Bank Park, is relatively new, and because of the open food courts behind center field it’s oddly reminiscent of the Twins stadium. Twins fans though are among the politest people on earth.  Phillies fans are not.

Kory Clemens, Roger Clemens’ son, is the current first baseman for the Phillies.  I am certain that notwithstanding the DWIs he is a fine young man, and of course he’s from Houston, so we paid particular attention to him.  He’s currently got an OPS of .797 or so, which isn’t scorching, but neither is it terrible. That afternoon he had one hit, a single, on four at bats with a walk and a strikeout. When he struck out, a guy behind us screamed–and I do mean screamed–“Clemens, you bum, why don’t you cheat like your old man . . .” 

It was a packed stadium, which surprised Kris, but then she never snuck off from work to go to day games. We didn’t stay for all of it. On the way out we were talking about the peculiarities of the fans (and there were some mighty peculiar peculiarities, not least of which was the guy sitting next to me who kept score and performed voodoo incantations).  Kris said that she was surprised that the Phillies fans let an Arizona fan heckle Kory Clemens without giving him grief.

Oh Kris. You innocent. That was a Phillies fan.  

As a postscript, after the same game (in which the Phillies overcame a 4-run deficit to win), shortstop Trea Turner’s mom left him a note in the clubhouse. “Good game, except for your fourth at-bat. I was booing you.” It must be tough when your mom’s a Phillies fan.

Wilmington, Delaware

Delaware produces two major commodities, corporations—more than 50 percent of publicly-traded corporations are incorporated in Delaware—and corporate bankruptcies.  If you’re a corporation and you’re going to go bankrupt, you file in Delaware.

My understanding is that you can pick up bankruptcy plans of  reorganization at the Wilmington Walmart.

Hotel And Restaurants

We splurged and stayed in downtown Wilmington at the Hotel DuPont.  It’s a beautiful 1913 hotel, nicely restored, and they were the friendliest of people. The place breathes Gilded Age elegance. The bathtub had a special rack just for reading, which seems to me about the peak of Western Civilization.

After we checked in we walked down to the park from our hotel. Driving around the next morning we discovered that had we turned right instead of left we would have made it to the old downtown, with lots of cute shops and many nifty bars and restaurants. It looked mildly Bohemian and very lively.

We ate dinner at Le Cavalier in the hotel. I don’t remember what we ate because I was too busy admiring the dining room.

In the morning we ate at a neighborhood diner, Angelo’s Luncheonette, which may be the best place for breakfast in the entire world. It was tiny and old, in a neighborhood of small old row houses, and everybody but us knew everybody else. A lady from across the street came in and asked if the waitress, Ann, would move the box off her porch to the back stoop when it got delivered. A guy came in from West Virginia and said he was making a special stop at Angelo’s because he had to move his mother out of the neighborhood to West Virginia. Everybody was greeted by name, and all the customers seemed to know each other. I felt like one of the chosen just being there.

We flew out again from Philadelphia, and it was complicated. We left the river late, and our flight to Houston was early the next morning. Philadelphia is at least semi-famous for pizza, so we called ahead to pick up a pizza from Pizzata Pizzaria near UPenn. It was out of the way, and then we had to fill the rental car with gas and get checked in at the airport motel. We managed all of this with only the statutory minimum of marital breakdowns.

I left Kris at the Hampton Inn and dropped off the rental car, took the rental car shuttle to the airport, took the airport shuttle back to the hotel, and devoured more than half of the pizza and a couple of beers. Even cold the pizza was delicious, but I was overeating pizza out of manic energy and nerves and by then it was almost midnight.

I didn’t sleep because of too much pizza and beer and too much muchness. We got up at 4 a.m. to go to the airport.

We had caught our fish in Delaware though.

Playlist

I put together a Delaware playlist almost two years ago, and it was short, George Thorogood and the Destroyers, David Bromberg, and the 70s New Wave band Television. That’s it. My friend Mark Marmon and I discussed it on the way to Port O’Connor a couple of weeks ago, and he said I had to have missed some jazz guy. I had, Clifford Brown.

I knew of Brown. He was born in 1930. He had tremendous tone and creativity, was a fine composer, and was the greatest trumpet talent of his generation. After he moved to New York in the early 50s he was an immediate star and played with everybody. Dizzie Gillespie and Miles Davis were admirers. He was an early member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and he was to be the co-leader of the Max Roach/Clifford Brown Quintet. His reputation today is of a brilliant talent, a hard worker, and an authentically nice guy. He was killed in a car wreck in 1956, before he turned 26.

Guitar

I didn’t take a guitar, which goes against my rule of playing at least one chord every day. The trip was just too fast.