Missouri Packing List

It’s been a few weeks and a trip to Cuba since we went to Missouri, but there are interesting things to add about Missouri, and by now the tornado is mostly forgotten.

Gear

We fished part of a day at Roaring River State Park. It’s a pretty Ozark mountain river, and it’s easy to wade. It was a bit crowded though. Why do I ever fish on a Saturday? Since Kris and I are both retired we don’t have to anymore, and having a place to ourselves is such a joy. Still, it was a pretty park, and we used typical trout set ups, 9′ 5-weight rods with floating lines. I caught two fish, both rainbow trout. We fished until the park trout permit pinned to my cap blew off and floated downriver.

The river is stocked from a nearby hatchery, and it was a mix of wild and stocked trout. For some folks stocked fish may seem like opportunity, but it’s always less desirable to fish for stocked fish than wild fish. I can’t usually catch much of either one, so I guess it’s not that one’s harder to catch than the other. Wild fish are just better.

I caught both trout on the Roaring River on a mop fly over a hare’s ear nymph, both fished under the surface. Mop flies are tied from one of those fuzzy mops, and are considered by some as a cheap trick. Don’t tell anyone that I used one.

I kinda like mop flies because you can get a lifetime supply of tying materials with a single trip to Walmart.

The next day we fished Crane Creek in Crane, Missouri, which is another pretty Ozark stream, and which is almost but not-quite famous. In the late 1800s, railroad workers dumped California McCloud River rainbow trout off of a railroad bridge into Crane Creek. Cane Creek hasn’t really been stocked much since, and the fish there today are the descendants of those original fish without significant interference. They may be the purest genetic strain of McCloud rainbows in the country, including those in the McCloud River.

Cane Creek

Stocking trout in rivers that support wild trout is controversial. It introduces non-native fish and diseases, and the stocked fish are just enough competition with the natives to hurt. The stockees don’t survive much either. The best-managed states, Montana for instance, have stopped stocking where there are wild trout, and a lot of the nation’s best rivers are never stocked. A creek that hasn’t been stocked, or a creek where stocking was abandoned, is a bit of a gem. That’s why a place like Crane Creek is someplace to look for.

We were there on a Sunday, and Crane Creek was also a little crowded, but I swear they were the nicest people I’ve ever come across on a river. We were at th park in the Town of Crane, population 1,495, and people invited me over to fish next to them. It was unnatural.

Crane Creek fish are small, and I fished with my tiniest rod. This is where I get goofy. Goofier. The truth is I buy fly rods and reels not because they’re better–almost every fly rod and reel is better than I am–but because they’re pretty. If I’m going to buy a reel, I don’t go in thinking that I want this reel because it has the very latest drag system and faster line retrieve, I buy it because I think it looks good. Of all the fly fishing gear I own–and I own a stupid amount of fly fishing gear–this is my prettiest rod and reel:

It’s an 8 1/2 foot Winston Boron IIIx 3-weight rod made in Montana, a rod that is way too lightweight for most of my fishing, and it’s just the loveliest shade of emerald green, with nickel silver fittings and a burled maple reel seat. The reel is a tiny Hardy Marquis 2/3 reel made in England. Are they appreciably better than any other 3-weight rod or reel? No. Could I have found a perfectly decent rod and reel for a third of the price? Absolutely. Are there any rods that look better? Well, maybe some custom classic bamboo. My goodness they’re pretty, and when the fish are small enough it just makes me idiotically happy to use them.

On Crane Creek I caught two small trout on a size 16 hare’s ear nymph under a size 14 royal Wulff, and Kris caught another. I picked the hare’s ear and royal Wulff because, well, they’re classic flies and I thought they matched that rod and reel. I’ve got standards, and I’m not fishing any mop flies with this rod.

Royal Wulff

Branson

I don’t like Branson. Am I being a snob? Of course. I have friends and family who love to go to Branson. I don’t.

There is a Trump Store, and there are shows.

I can’t think of anything worse than going to a show, unless it’s going to a Trump Store. You say the word show to me, and I feel queasy. Las Vegas? Oh lord, don’t make me go. I don’t gamble, and in Las Vegas there are shows. My daughter says the shopping is great in Las Vegas, but how can that be? I don’t think there’s a single fly fishing shop. Las Vegas at least has a minor league baseball team. I don’t think there’s any baseball in Branson.

The last show I went to voluntarily was Cirque de Soleil some 15 years ago, and I know those performers were miraculous, and that there are otherwise rational people who think that Cirque de Soleil is the best thing going. I know in my heart of hearts that that very show I went to was in all ways wonderful, but me? I was bored out of my mind. I’m still bored just thinking about it.

Maybe I need to go to a show with some mostly-naked ladies. At least I’d like the costumes.

In Branson, there are shows a-plenty, and what’s worse they’re all shows that revel in clean living. There’s Dolly Parton’s Stampede Dinner and Show, Hamners’ Unbelievable Magic Variety Show, WhoDunnit Hoedown and Murder Mystery Show, the Grand Jubilee Show, All Hands on Deck Show, Legends in Concert Show, Shepherd of the Hills Outdoor Drama Show . . . The list just won’t stop. You think you’re on a river in the Ozark backcountry away from all the shows, and you come across a flier for the Amazing Acrobats of Shanghai Show.

I’ve got nothing against clean living, and I consider myself a reasonably clean liver. I know and love several devout Baptists, and even some vegetarians, but clean living commodified into a show? I can’t think of a less appealing combination. Branson is one of those rare places where a soupçon of depravity would improve the moral tone.

I guess they do fish with mop flies, and plenty of people consider that depraved.

Donuts

We found two donut shops, though I’m sure there were more.

Parlor Doughnuts was a bit off the beaten path in a strip center. They sold gourmet donuts,((I’ve created a donut shop classification system, and there are four categories. Traditional shops include Houston’s Shipley’s, Krispy Kreme’s, Dunkin’, or the very best donut shop in the world, Ocean Springs, Mississippi’s Tato-Nut Doughnut Shop. Parlor Doughnuts is a chain in the Gourmet Category, and gourmet donuts are a bit more creative, with upscale whatnots coming to the fore. Portland’s Blue Star or Albuquerque’s Rebel come to mind. Experiential donut shops have let creativity run amock, and they are my least favorite kind of donut shop–I’m talking to you, VooDoo. A Cambodian donut shop is a clean, well-lighted place that is almost certainly located in a strip center. Everything is basic but good enough, and the owners are at the counter. Cambodian donutries can have flashes of brilliance–the boudin kolache was invented in a Cambodian donut shop and that deserves a Michelin star, or at least a James Beard nomination. It’s fusion cuisine at its finest.)) and the donuts were a bit elaborate for my taste, but I’d go back. I’d certainly go back if the choice was the other place we tried, Hurts.

Hurts is experiential. It’s next door to the Trump Store on the main drag, and it’s huge for a donut shop. There was a long line for the donuts. There were flavors like cotton candy, and cookie monster, and dirt worms, and every donut seemed created for a 9-year old, which I’m not. When I got to the counter, they were out of plain glazed.

The donuts were cold and forgettable. Kris wanted to chuck them and go back to Parlor.

AirBnB

We stayed in a nice pet-friendly AirBnB on the lake on the edge of town. It was just far enough from Branson’s center to forget where we were, and the owner left us a plate of cookies. They were good home-made cookies, too. There was an old canoe and a beat up bamboo fly rod hung as decorations above the fireplace, and I took that as a good omen. I sat on the enclosed porch and read Huck Finn, and, notwithstanding the No Trespassing signs, took the dogs for walks down to the lake. I’m pretty certain those signs weren’t meant for me.

Fly Shops

There are at least a couple of fly shops in Branson, but we only went to one, River Run Outfitters. We were supposed to fish with guides from the shop, but they talked us out of going. It was cold, in the 40s, and all the floodgates on the dam were open. The wind was gusting up to 40 mph. It was dangerous, and what’s worse we weren’t likely to catch anything. They gave us free coffee and good advice on where to fish instead. I bought some mop flies.

Restaurants

Branson is not a restaurant town. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of restaurants, but they all seem to have names like Hungry Hunter or Pickin’ Porch Grill. There are lots of barbecue places, but I’ve made the mistake of eating Missouri barbecue once before, in Kansas City, and I won’t do that again. Those people eat melted cheese on brisket, which should only be done in leftover brisket enchiladas.

The Keeter Center at College of the Ozarks promised farm to table dining, and I guess it was, but mostly everything just seemed big. Big room, big appetizers, big iced tea. . . Big ideology. I don’t know, it just didn’t click.

See that dish right there? That’s the Brussels sprout nachos appetizer, which as i recall was a lot of chopped up Brussels sprouts and feta on a lot of fried wontons. Had they artfully arranged four or five of those on a plate and charged me $12, I would have eaten them and said that’s ok, but that pile of stuff for $12 was too daunting. All I could think was man-oh-man, that’s big.

All of the waiters at Keeter Center are students at College of the Ozarks, and the hostess told us all about it, and then the waiter told us all about it. It’s a free Christian college, well, free in exchange for work. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t have gone there without lots of conversations with a dean.

The next night we played it safe and went to two of Branson’s sushi joints, Mitsu Neko and Wakyoto. They were fine, and there were no Brussels sprouts. There was some kale, but I think it was purely decorative.

Playlist

Missouri has produced some magnificent music, and I’m still listening to that playlist. Josephine Baker was from St. Louis, and maybe I might have enjoyed one of her shows. From Wikipedia:

Her performance in the revue Un vent de folie in 1927 caused a sensation in [Paris]. Her costume, consisting of only a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Now that’s a costume, and there are some fun recordings of her singing jazzy French stuff.

Missouri had great jazz. You wouldn’t think it, would you? But in the 1920s, Prohibition wasn’t really enforced there, and 18th and Vine in Kansas City was as lively as anyplace in the country. The Kansas City Big Bands had their own style, blusier than New York or Chicago, with a frantic quality that makes you drive just a little faster if your foot’s on the peddle. There are great black big bands, Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, Andy Kirk, George E. Lee, Count Basie . . . Two of the great jazz saxophonists, Lester Young and Charlie Parker, both came out of Kansas City.

There’s rock ‘n roll, too. Big Joe Turner is a joy, then there’s Chuck Berry, Ike and Tina Turner, Sheryl Crow, Michael McDonald, and T Bone Burnett. The Beatles went to Kansas City, or at least they were going.

St. Louis Blues has been covered by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Louis Prima, Doc Watson, Herbie Hancock, Eartha Kitt, Art Tatum, and Ella Fitzgerald, and if your name is Louis, you can still meet Judy Garland there.

Ojon Mill, Photograph of Lester Young, 1944, Time Magazine, Volume 17, Number 13, Public Domain.

Guitar

I took my old Kohno classical, and spent some time at night playing. I don’t remember what, but I’ve been working on an arrangement of Gershwin’s Somebody Loves Me. That’s likely.

Bonefish Recipes

This was our second trip to Hawaii. I liked it well enough last time, but I wouldn’t have gone back, except, of course, it’s required. In 2019 I didn’t catch a fish, and I had to catch a fish. Maybe if I surfed I’d be more excited about Hawaii, but I’m not a beach guy, and the thought of me surfing is only amusing to everybody else, not me.

Hawaii is a trek from Houston; of the states only Alaska is further. It’s 14 hours of flights if you include the mandatory LA layover, and planes and airports and Covid travel entirely too well together. The combination brings out my inner compliance officer. When the government tells me to wear a mask at the airport, I’m all in, and the non-compliant lady next to me at the baggage claim makes me irrationally angry. She has an ugly nose, and I don’t want to see it. I really want to tell her that she has an ugly nose, but I worry that her husband with the even uglier nose might punch me, and notwithstanding my righteous wrath he might be justified.

Without the mandatory LA layover. It’s about 4,000 miles, and it’s a particularly unpleasant drive. From distance.to.

To top it off, except as a Christmas Island stopover, Hawaii isn’t usually considered a fly fishing destination.  I covet catching Christmas Island bonefish as much as I covet catching any saltwater fish, short maybe of Seychelles giant trevally, but the Seychelles (which are off the East Coast of Africa) are even harder to get to than Hawaii, or even Christmas Island. When my shoulder hurt last year, Mark Marmon told me about an orthopedic surgeon who fly fished—which seemed to me a reasonable basis on which to choose a doctor.  It turned out it was my neck, not my shoulder, but in addition to prescribing some stretches and a prescription for an anti-inflammatory, the doctor told me about fishing for giant trevally in the Seychelles. He said that he could only go every three years or so, because by the time he got there and spent a week fishing, the trip cost about $30,000.  I hope that included his flies.

The Seychelles, where the Giant Trevally roam. From Wikipedia.

In the same vein, at my annual check-up my cardiologist showed me pictures of the 28” rainbow he caught on his annual trip to Alaska, and the permit he caught last year in Belize. I didn’t share with either of them the photos of the bluegills I caught last year in Kansas

Relative to the Seychelles, Christmas Island is a bargain. There’s one weekly flight to Christmas Island from Hawaii on Fiji Airlines, not that I’ve looked, not very often anyway. Once you get there you’re stuck for the week, and the only thing to do is drink beer and fish. Sounds awful, doesn’t it? I guess if it’s good enough for Santa, it’s good enough for me.  

Christmas Island has a famous red crab migration, but as far as I know it has no red-nosed reindeer. Map courtesy of Google Earth.

Of course we didn’t go to Christmas Island, but to Molokai and Kauai in Hawaii, with an overnight in Honolulu on Oahu. I cashed in all of our accumulated credit card points so that we could fly first class to Hawaii on Delta. Except for the price, first class isn’t what it used to be—our snack on the flight from Houston to LA consisted of three kinds of pasteurized processed cheese food—designated as cheddar, smoked Gouda, and something called alpine-style, all three of which tasted exactly like Velveeta.  I like Velveeta, though I prefer it melted with a can of Rotel. Delta is missing a bet. If they had served queso and chips I’d be all in for Delta first class, even if the WiFi costs extra and the price of a first class ticket doesn’t get you into the Delta passenger lounge.

The problem with Hawaii as a bonefish destination isn’t the 14-plus hours of travel, it’s that it has the reputation of not having a lot of bonefish, and the fish it has are supposed to be  particularly skittish. Saltwater sport fish are different than freshwater fish. They’re stronger, and bonefish are built to outrun what ails ‘em—particularly sharks. They breed in deep water, but they come into the shallows to eat crabs and shrimp, and that’s where they’re targeted. Even in clear shallow water they’re hard to see, but with a sunny day, a good guide can spot the fish and tell you where to cast. I can see them sometimes, and Kris is better at it than me, but the guys who make a living spotting fish are amazing. All the angler has to do is cast where the guide says without spooking the fish, convince the fish on the retrieve that the fly is something it needs, and on the take remember to set the line—strip-set—not lift the rod. Of course lifting the rod fast and strong is the natural reaction to any take by a fish, and it’s what my momma and daddy taught me when first I caught crappie, so I’ve been doing it for a long time, but fly fishing for bonefish, if you raise the rod tip, you’ll never set the fly. The fish is gone and not coming back. You have to jerk the line straight back to set the hook.

I only raised the rod tip once, I promise. That was one of the nine or so takes where I lost the fish. Ok, maybe twice, but not much more than twice. Certainly not more than three or four times.

If you or your guide sees a fish, and you do everything else right, then you hang on.  Bonefish are extraordinarily strong, and when hooked they run for the border. They’ll rip out a hundred yards of line before you’ve rightly figured out what’s happened. Think of it this way: if you hook the fish at 40 feet distance, then less than a 30 seconds later the fish will stop running 260 feet away. It’s just amazing. All of you focuses into hanging on and wondering if the fish will ever slow.

Molokai bonefish flat. See the fish? That’s Lanai in the distance, unless I’m confused and it’s Maui. They’re both about seven miles away.

Targeted Hawaiian bonefish, Albula glossodonta, aren’t the same species as targeted Caribbean bonefish, Albula vulpes, which is interesting, and they’re generally bigger, which is good, but Hawaiians eat every bonefish they can drag from the sea, which is complicated. Consumers can buy gill-netted shrink-wrapped bonefish in the markets. To prepare the fish (this is the recipe part) they scrape the meat from the bones, and fry up the mashed meat as bonefish patties. I don’t know if there’s ketchup involved, but I’m pretty certain there’s no cornmeal. This may seem like no big shakes to a non-believer, but for most fly fishers, it’s an article of faith that bonefish are inedible, and killing and eating a bonefish is only slightly more appealing to most of us than eating a puppy. It’s just not done, and I’m so programmed that just the thought makes me kinda queasy.

Flyfishers tend strongly toward not keeping and eating fish anyway. They like to torture the fish and then put it back in the water so that another flyfisher can torture it again later.

In most places where bonefish are fished, the Bahamas and Belize for instance, catch and release is the norm, but Hawaiians, particularly Native Hawaiians, eat bonefish. Couple the island’s taste for bonefish croquettes with its lack of bonefish regulations—Hawaii doesn’t recognize bonefish as a gamefish, and the only restriction on killing and keeping fish seems to be that you can’t keep a fish that’s shorter than 14 inches–and flyfishers blame Hawaiian overfishing on the sparsity of fish inshore on islands like Oahu. Now mind, Hawaii is the bluest of states, and there’s nothing the islands love better than a good regulation. There are, for instance, no free grocery bags in Hawaii. If you go to the grocery without a bag, you’ll have to buy one. Same vein, your mai tai straw will be paper: there are no plastic straws on the islands. For goodness sakes, they restrict the kinds of sunscreen you can wear. Just take a gander at Hawaii’s Covid entry restrictions to get a flavor of the place—they require either a recent test or a vaccination card—but if you want to catch and kill all the bonefish in the sea, get busy.

My wristband evidencing proof of vaccination. I passed!

Killing and eating bonefish is a cultural thing, I get it, and while for me eating a bonefish would be bad form, I’m not squeamish or outraged about other people eating them. Still, if they’re gonna, I’d rather Hawaii had reasonable limits for bonefish takes, and I’m not convinced that using monofilament gill nets to overfish bonefish is an important Hawaiian cultural tradition. Of course then I’m a Texan, and cultural insensitivity is an important Texas cultural tradition.

Texas banned gill nets for redfish 40 years ago and it was a memorable political battle, but for once we got something right. It protects our inshore fishery, and it converted a fish that was once viewed as a slightly trashy food fish into a gamefish—still a food fish, but no longer gill-netted into oblivion. Maybe it helps that redfish are widely farmed, and maybe it’s culturally insensitive to compare the Texas redfish fishery to the Hawaii bonefish fishery.  I just can’t help being a bit chauvinistic, plus I’m selfish. I want all the bonefish left in the sea for me to catch. 

Bonefish flies.

In case you were wondering, the chain restaurant, Bonefish Grill, doesn’t serve bonefish.

Naragansett Bay, Rhode Island, September 19, 2021

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. Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin.

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.

Plate 192, Driftless Area of Wisconsin, from I. Bowman, Forest Physiography, p. 496, 1911, John Wiley & Sons, New York.

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.

Glacial map of the Great Lakes Region, Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly, 1899-1900, Vol. 56. The Driftless is the area with the horizontal lines.

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.

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Trout Streams in Vernon County, Wisconsin.

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.