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In Rhode Island I hooked two good fish.  I didn’t land either one. The first had sharp teeth and bit through my leader at the fly, so maybe it was a bluefish—I say that only because bluefish are in the area and from all reports they have teeth. According to our guide, Taylor Brown, it didn’t really act like a bluefish. It had all the power of a saltwater fish, except that it didn’t show speed. It never ran, which is one of the great joys of saltwater fishing.

I played it long enough to think I would land it, but it never strayed far from the boat. It never surfaced. I was fishing a 9-weight with a cold water intermediate line that ran a foot or so below the water’s surface, with a white baitfish fly that traveled the same depth, and I never saw the fish. Everything fishy happened down below. We could tell the leader didn’t break, not at a knot or in the leader or any of the regular places, but it was cut in the loop of the loop knot, which is hard to describe but is just weird. Just plain weird. Like I said, that fish had sharp teeth. It cut the line and stole the fly.

Kris insists it was a 700 lb tuna. I don’t think she’s right. I think it was an alligator gar.

Sometimes I think my descriptions of our fishing trips are too positive, but then why shouldn’t they be? Kris is good company (as are the guides, usually, and Taylor was a great guy). We’re outside, and I like to fish. It doesn’t really bother me much not to catch fish. Even where I make fun of a place–Kansas comes to mind–I’d go back there to fish tomorrow if offered. As a matter of fact, for Kansas, we went back twice before I finally caught a bluegill, and I didn’t mind at all. I learned a lot from Kansas, and it wasn’t all about John Brown. I did learn a lot about John Brown though.

I’m positive about Rhode Island, too, except I get seasick. It doesn’t happen often, and I can really only remember three times when nausea put me leaning over the gunnel and sharing my inner being. If I anticipate it, for instance if I’m going offshore in the Gulf, I can plan ahead and get a scopolamine patch. With scopolamine, I put the patch behind an ear at the base of my skull, and the pupil on that side of my head dilates, big time. It’s the strangest thing. The other pupil goes about its normal business and stays its usual size, while the scopolamine pupil fills the iris. It’s kinda creepy, or hilarious, or both.

When I do get seasick, I get seasick in swells, the big rolls of water that gently lift the boat and then eases it into the following trough, then gently lift the boat and eases it into the following trough, over and over, and it doesn’t help that I can watch the swells coming, spaced at 30 or 40 feet or farther, chest high, coming and coming and coming, and that’s when hilarity ensues. I don’t get seasick in chop, the battering closely-spaced three-foot waves that are terrifying in our little skiff. I only get worried, and severe–chop brings out the Calvinist in me. Sunday it was very windy and there was lots of hard chop in Naragansett Bay traveling across the unprotected water from Newport. That has its own discomfort, but I can hang on and take the jolts. Swells, on the other hand . . .

Where we fished there were swells. Big swells, but swells that probably nobody but me and my equilibrium paid much never mind, and I could see them coming and coming and coming, and I hadn’t called Dr. White for a patch, and, regrettably, that very morning at Ma’s Donuts I’d eaten a maple-iced donut. I could feel that donut coming and coming and coming (though it never did, thank God, but the aftertaste of that maple icing will live with me for a long, long time).

It may have put me off maple-iced donuts forever. Even the ones with bacon.

We were actually in Newport for the Orvis Northeast Saltwater Fly-Fishing School at The Saltwater Edge in Newport, and the guided half-day was part of the school. The day before, we were in the classroom, which was great, not least because the other students, Carl, Russ, and Brian, and the teacher, Christian Awe, were such good company. As an added bonus, Russ and Brian are both brewers at craft breweries, Russ at Barrel House Z in Massachusetts and Brian at Two Roads Brewing in Connecticut. They brought samples. I may or may not have nodded off in Christian’s final presentation about false albacore. Sorry Christian. Free samples.

In class, Kris finally tied a blood knot. All the items on my bucket list are now checked. Kris didn’t hook anything when we fished the next day, but I suspect that was mostly because she was smart enough to enjoy the day and stay off the front of the boat.

When we fished, we covered a lot of water, from Fort Adams on Aquidneck Island, around the Point Judith Lighthouse towards Watch Hill, nearly to the New York border. Honestly, I lost track, but it doesn’t matter. I hooked both fish on the ocean side of the Quonochontaug Breachway. The water was often deep, 30 feet, 70 feet, whatever, it wasn’t Galveston Bay, where, if you fall out of the boat, the first thing to do to save yourself is stand up. Much of the Texas water we usually fish is a foot to three feet deep. This was much closer to fishing the Gulf itself than the Gulf’s bays.

And did I mention there were swells?

The loss of the other fish I hooked was totally my fault. Taylor was trying to bring fish up with a teaser, a hookless plug that he skated across the surface on a spinning rod. I cast in behind the teaser and got a hit but failed to set the hook. I do this a lot. I think it’s a combination of basic laziness and bad habits gleaned from too much trust that the fish shares my ultimate goal. Plus I’m not really too concerned when I lose a fish. When something hits hard, I too-often assume it’s well-hooked and don’t bother to strip set. User error. So whatever it was I hooked I played it for a bit and then it was gone. I never should have lost that fish.

Late in the morning we drifted in the midst of a swarm of batfish–Taylor said it was a ball of Atlantic silversides, but a ball of baitfish sounds too much like those rural legends of cowboys and balls of water moccasins for my taste–anyway it was a big to-do of a million zillion very small baitfish that we cast into the midst of hoping for a false albacore take. That was kind of the point of the day. In the fall the false albacore (which is, depending on the internet description you read, either the smallest tuna or the largest mackerel or both) follow the baitfish down the Atlantic coast from Canada to Florida. I don’t even think they have RVs. There were gulls everywhere, which was how we knew we were in the right place, and for a bit I forgot the swells. False albacore are fast, tuna fast, and at least three times I watched the flash of gold-shouldered predator up through the baitfish swarm and then it would be gone. And then they were all gone, baitfish, seagulls, false albacore, all of them, gone.

And I didn’t get another take, so now we get to go back to Rhode Island. Next time I’ll bring scopolamine.

You just can’t show a rough passage in still photos. Dang it.

The Driftless is famous, in an underplayed, Midwestern sort of way. I suspect that only people in the region and geology students ponder it much. It gets some play among fly fishers because of its trout streams, though even then its not first on the list of places to fish. There’s a popular Orvis fly fishing podcast by Tom Rosenbauer, and when from time to time the Driftless gets mentioned, he always says that he really wants to get there soon. Apparently soon time like glacial time is pretty long.

The Driftless is usually referred to as the Wisconsin Driftless, but it’s actually located in parts of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, right where the four states dysfunctionally try to join their borders at the Mississippi River. They don’t quite make a Four Corners, and Illinois is usually ignored anyway. Its portion of the Driftless is small, and it has no trout streams. I’m sure that otherwise it’s the very thing.

Driftless is a great name. There’s an upended, unanchored feel to it, like Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name. In truth though, it’s not glamorous like the Rockies or the West Coast. It’s not the historical epicenter of fly fishing like Pennsylvania or the Catskills. It’s in Wisconsin. It doesn’t wear a poncho or smoke a cigar. It’s in Iowa. Is it heaven? No, it’s Iowa.

Glacial drift is the geologic term of art for all the silt, sand, rocks, and boulders that glaciers put in their pockets when they went for a stroll, and then left behind when they turned for home. The Driftless is just that–it’s without the silt, sand, rocks, and boulders that a glacier deposits.

The Last Glacial Age lasted about 100,000 years, and ended at 2:30 in the afternoon on a sunny day 14,000 years ago. During the Last Glacial Period, all of Canada was covered with ice, which explains hockey, but parts of Alaska–presumably including the Bering Strait land bridge, Beringia–weren’t, which explains America’s first immigrants (who, I’m reasonably certain, weren’t documented). Sea level at glacial maximum–like drift that’s a term of art–was as much as 400 feet lower than now, and as sea level rises that’s getting lower all the time. Much of the Northern United States was covered with ice, but the Driftless wasn’t. I don’t know why, it just wasn’t. There was ice to its right, to its left, above it and below it, but it remained–Driftless.

All those thousands of feet of ice did at least three things. The glaciers scoured and flattened things out, and they filled in what was left–that’s where the deposited drift went. They also forced water to go in new directions. By missing the Last Glacial Period, the Driftless’s pre-glacial geology was left pretty much alone. It was left with shallow soils–Look ma! No drift!–covering various kinds of rocks: sandstones and limestones and dolomites and whatnots. They’re the kind of rocks that allow a karst topography.

What is a karst topography? Think of it as fractures, pockets, underground streams, and caves in soluble rock, and, in the case of the Driftless, streambeds on the surface carved a bit deeper by the runoff of glaciers and the release of prehistoric great lakes when ice dams fractured. The results produces springs and spring-fed streams. The water gets cold down under, and the trout get cold water up top. In the Driftless, on the surface, there’s a lot of trout habitat. It’s not big, western rivers. It’s small streams through farmland, and no one is ever very far from cheese curds.

The original trout in the Driftless were brook trout, but brown trout and rainbow trout were introduced. All three can be found there now, plus the sterile hybrids of browns and brookies, tiger trout. It is the kind of fishing freshwater fly fishers crave, and since I first read about wild trout in northeast Iowa, I’ve been a wee bit obsessed with going to the Driftless.

I’ve actually been to all of these states before. I’ve been to Minnesota in winter, which is a treat, and a couple of years ago we fished in Wisconsin for Muskie, so no one should be surprised that we didn’t catch anything and now have to go back. I only passed through Iowa a long, long time ago, but it was green and rolling, and I was from a flat brown place and I thought it was beautiful. We stopped in the Amana Colonies just north of Iowa City, and it did look a bit like heaven. It was Iowa.

We fish central Pennsylvania in May. Pennsylvania is one of a clump of states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, that are a mystery to me. I don’t know what the rivers are like. In fact I don’t really know what the interstates are like, or the colleges, or the music, or anything else.  Pennsylvania doesn’t try to be mysterious. It’s part of our national mythology, both patriotic and fishing–its chalk streams are as much a part of fly fishing lore as English chalk streams, but with less tweed. How’s this for peculiar? I’ve been to England to fish chalk streams but never Pennsylvania, and England doesn’t even have a Liberty Bell. Pennsylvania is one of the reasons we set out on our multi-year state fishing binge. Well, Pennsylvania and Alaska. And Maine. And New Hampshire. And all those other states we’ve never been to.

I have a pretty good idea of what Pennsylvania farms look like, and will be deeply disappointed if they don’t.

I also have one personal tie to Pennsylvania. I drank a good bit of Rolling Rock Beer in my 30s. The brewery was later sold to Annheuser-Busch, and it’s supposedly not so good as it once was. In any event it’s no longer brewed in Latrobe in glass-lined vats.

I’ve been reading a history of Pennsylvania, imaginatively named Pennsylvania, A History of the Commonwealth. In the introduction the editors (Messrs. Miller and Pencak) make the following statement: 

Pennsylvania’s history is the history of a people who have long been known for their localism and ethnic persistence. Texans will tell you they are from Texas, but Pennsylvanians will tell you they are from Philadelphia or Pottsville or Pequa or Pittsburgh.

At XXI.

Texas history is really pretty simple, not necessarily pretty but still pretty simple, and ripe for expropriation by whoever comes along. It makes perfect sense for a my-age Asian guy in front of me at the grocery checkout to say “howdy!”, and for me to say howdy back, and for both of us then to laugh for the pure pleasure of it. “We only say that in Texas,” he said. Come to Texas and you’re a Texan. Nobody worth arguing with can dispute your claim–they didn’t get here that long ago either. We have our faults, just look at our state’s politics, but if you put two Texans together, whatever our differences, we’ll like as not say howdy.

So telling me that Pennsylvanians don’t mirror our state-level chauvinism is illuminating. Of course while we had cattle and oil and civil rights to deal with, Pennsylvanians had all that plus the industrial revolution. And coal mining. And labor battles. And the Phillies.

Politics

If you follow politics, you’ve considered Pennsylvania over the past five years, since its vote for President Trump in 2016. Since 1900 Pennsylvania has voted Republican as often as it’s voted Democratic, and until FDR and the Great Depression it hadn’t voted Democratic since at least 1900. Since 1990 though the state has voted for a Republican President only once, for Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, Pennsylvania’s 2016 electoral map looked like the map of most other states. Votes were Republican in the rural areas and Democratic in the urban.

I assume that the blue county in the center is Penn State. All bets are off in college towns.

In the wind-up to 2020, Democratic friends told me that driving across Pennsylvania worried them, that the rural areas were awash with Trump signs, but that was true in rural areas everywhere, from Louisiana to Washington State. What is remarkable is the closeness of the 2016 vote. With an estimated 2016 population of 12,784,000, only 44,292 more votes were cast for President Trump than for Hilary Clinton. Of course only 5,897,174 of that 12 million voted, but still, fewer than 1% of the voters gave President Trump a majority. I bet Ms. Clinton is still kicking herself for not having her vaccination mind control in place earlier.

Interestingly, map-wise, things didn’t change all that much in 2020:

Obviously they changed some. The area around Philadelphia is a bit bluer, the mid-state blues are a bit deeper, and Erie went from light pink to light blue. Still, that’s not much change. Numerically though, things were pretty different. The total Pennsylvania vote, 6,835,903 in 2020, increased by almost one million votes over 2016. President Biden won by 80,555 votes, or 50.01% of the votes cast. President Trump received 48.84% of the votes in 2020.

Whichever way you lean, things are close in Pennsylvania.

You get a better sense of the close split between Pennsylvania voters by looking at its modern era governors. The Pennsylvania governorship seems to shift every other election cycle. Since 1951, there have been seven Republican governors for nine 4-year terms, and six Democrats for eight 4-year terms. The current governor, Tom Wolfe, is a Democrat. He’s probably the guy who stole the election from President Trump, so I guess we all owe him a debt of thanks.

Geography Begats History

God didn’t lay out Pennsylvania on a grid, but like a quartered onion, with sweeping arced layers from southwest to northeast.

It’s not so big a state as I would have thought. At 46,015 square miles, it ranks 33rd in total area among all states. I guess it feels bigger because most of the states around it are small, and in the Northeast only New York is larger. Elevations go from sea level on the Delaware River to 3,315 feet at Mount Davis in the Alleghenies. It’s not 14,000 feet, but zero to 3,000 is a pretty good jump.

In the southeast, Philadelphia sits near sea level at 39 feet. The Coastal Plain extends into the Piedmont Upland. It was these areas, Philadelphia and the Piedmont, that were first settled by Europeans, and that begat a German/English/Scots-Irish culture that, along with New England and the Southern cradle states, became the nation’s predominant Euro-American cultural influences. Pennsylvanian settlement didn’t really extend beyond the Piedmont until after the 1750s, both because the ridge-and-valley Appalachians stopped expansion, and because, at least while Penn lived, settlement agreements between Penn’s Quaker colony and Native Americans were largely honored. The agreements didn’t really outlive him.

The French and Indian War began in the 1750s on the left side of the state, along the southern border with Virginia, the British victory in the French and Indian War and subsequent defeat of the Iroquois Confederacy, and the decline of Quaker influence changed the map of westward expansion. Pittsburgh was settled in the west in the late 18th Century, and Pennsylvania’s wealth–agriculture, soft and anthracite coal, iron ores, oil–primed an industrial and extraction boom that lasted well into the 20th century. From the War of 1812 through World War II, the industrial development of Pennsylvania provided the resources that equipped our wars. Pennsylvania was a manufacturing power anyway, but it produced those kinds of things, steel and fuel chief among them, that modern wars demand. For Pennsylvania, our wars were its steroids.

Industrialization

There were some businesses, U.S. Steel, the Pennsylvania Railroad, Carnegie Steel, Westinghouse, that were massive monopolistic powers. Other Pennsylvanian industries were medium-sized concerns built by local investment and craftsmen, and the number and types of goods were vast: pharmaceuticals, clothing, chocolate, machines, lumber, cloth, glass, furniture, ketchup . . . Kentucky rifles were manufactured in Pennsylvania, as were Zippo lighters, as were Crayola Crayons.

Think of C.F. Martin & Co.. Do you remember the cover of the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album, Deja Vu, with the band goofily dressed up like frontiersman? There’s a guitar in the picture (and one Kentucky rifle), a pre-World War II Martin, and Martins defined the album’s sound. C.F. Martin founded his luthiery in Pennsylvania in the 1830s, and it’s still a going concern. It’s not a big company I reckon, but as much as the monopoly behemoths it’s the kind of company that powered Pennsylvania’s manufacturing growth. Pennsylvania depended on great products built by skilled craftsmen.

It’s too bad the Martin factory is closed to visitors because of the pandemic. I’d trade touring the Liberty Bell for a tour of C.F. Martin. No tours though.

Becoming an economic powerhouse didn’t come easy. If the first age of Pennsylvania was farming, skilled trades, and merchants, the second age was industrial production. By the late 1800s, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest corporation in the world. Without transportation, Pennsylvania didn’t work, and the Pennsylvania Railroad made Pennsylvania work. In 1877, during a nationwide economic depression, Pittsburgh railroad employees went on strike. Two days later the National Guard fired on protesters, 20 people were killed, and Pittsburgh burned. By the end of the riots, an estimated 53 rioters died, and 109 were injured. Damage to railroad property was estimated at $2 million, and to the larger city of $5 million. And that was when a million dollars meant something.

Fifteen years later, the Homestead Steel Strike would be nearly as bloody (and certainly as violent). In all, it’s estimated that there were over 4,000 work stoppages in Pennsylvania in the last half of the 19th Century.

Where We’ll Fish

This is disingenuous. To finish this out I should talk about the decline of American steel and the Rust Belt industries, and the attempted economic transformation of cities like Pittsburgh, but I don’t want to. I don’t understand it, and it worries me. Apparently it was caused by foreign competition for steel production, transportation costs, intransigent unions, and a decline in raw material production near the Pennsylvania mills. It’s depressing to think that all of those jobs have gone away.

I should have talked about Native Americans too, but oddly Pennsylvania sat on the margins of woodland cultures to the east and Ohio cultures to the west, and really wasn’t significantly settled. I’ll stick to where we plan to fish.

We’re actually making our way from Philadelphia to Coburn, near State College, where we’ll fish two days in the area that includes Penn’s Creek. We have one day that isn’t planned, and I’ve thought about Letort Spring Run (which is famous). Kris and I watched some YouTube videos about the Letort, and she thought it looked too difficult to navigate. We’ll see.

We’re getting to Coburn via Gettysburg, but first we’ll go to Delaware to fish for shad. We had planned that trip a year ago, and I wrote then about Delaware and shad. I have a Westerner’s surprise at how close together all these places are. In Rabbit, Run, when Rabbit first leaves Janice, he takes off driving and drives and drives and drives. I figure he drives all the way to New Mexico, the next state to the west from me, a good 560 miles from where I’m sitting. Instead he ends up in Maryland, or Virginia, or someplace probably 70 miles away from where he started. All these places, all these people, all so crammed together. Give me some good urban spread any day, where a man can breathe.

Then we’ll fly out of Pittsburgh. It’s 70 miles from Philadelphia.