Category: Warmwater

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Michigan and Ohio Packing List

I’m lumping these two states together. It’s hard to do them together, but it’s even harder to do them apart, and they do sit next to each other. So they’re lumped.

Gear

Our guides in both states wanted us to use their rods, which helps them because they can come to the launch with the rods rigged. We didn’t take rods at all. Lance in Michigan fished with 4-weight Winston rods, which meant that I was fishing with slightly lighter versions of what I would have lugged to Michigan anyway. Katie in Ohio fished with 7-weight G Loomis NRX or Sage rods, so I was fishing with different brands of the 7-weight that I would have lugged to Ohio.

In Michigan we used floating lines, same for Ohio except for a wee bit of sinking line fishing. I can’t imagine that anybody actually likes to fish with sinking lines. To cast with floating lines you just have to pick the line up off the top of the water. Now mind, that’s no easy task, and a good line pick-up is the heart of the cast, well, that and about a half-dozen other things that are also the heart of the cast, but with sinking lines you have to get the line to the top of the water before you can even begin to pick it up, and sinking lines are not known for casting easily anyway. The whole process is fraught with peril for everyone standing near me.

We also fished out of boats in both states, so in addition to not packing rods and reels we didn’t pack waders or boots. No waders, no boots, no rods, no reels . . . I did take some flies, and used a couple, but the guides had those too. It was the easiest packing ever.

Detroit

Detroit was a joy. Parts of it are still beat up, but I’ve never been in a town where people were prouder of their city. The first night at dinner at Alpino we asked our waiter if there was something in particular we should see, and he wrote out a page-long list of places for us. He recommended places for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He listed don’t-miss destinations and neighborhoods just to drive through. It was good advice, too. We spent parts of three days in Detroit, and could easily have spent three more, and we didn’t deviate much from our waiter’s advice.

The one place recommended by everyone we asked was the Detroit Institute of Art. We spent three hours there before we left for Grayling, and could have spent another four. We barely got off the third floor, which is the smallest floor. As museums go, it’s about as good as anywhere, and should be on everyone’s list of American art museums. I even fished while I was there.

Greek fish dish, between 340 and 330 BCE; Roman fish mosaic, 4th century A.D.; Detroit Institute of Art.

Detroit has a large Middle Eastern population, with estimates of over 300,000 people. Apparently the growth was a combination of the growth of the auto industry and the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which is pretty serendipitous if you ponder it, and was then spurred by the lifting of restrictions on Arabic and Asian immigration by the Immigration and Nationalization Act of 1965. The signage in Dearborn, for instance, is doubled in Arabic. We went to Dearborn for afternoon baked stuff at Shatila Bakery. No donuts, but a good bakery anyway.

Our Alpino waiter had suggested lunch at the Yemen Cafe, which was a diner in a fairly beat-up neighborhood. The cafe was busy with African Americans from the neighborhood and Yemenis in fairly traditional dress, including one guy wearing a jambiya dagger, the dagger that Peter O’Toole wears in Laurence of Arabia. Open carry.

Our waiter brought us free glasses of Yemeni tea to try. We ordered slabs of hot Yemeni bread, chicken gallaba with hummus, and lamb fasah. We were taking the advice of our Alpino waiter and didn’t know exactly what we were ordering, but sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Detroit was at it’s peak of wealth and industrial might in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Art Deco buildings from its heyday are magnificent. Our Alpino waiter suggested the Guardian Building and the Fisher Building, both of which have been preserved in fine form. It’s kinda like visiting the Sistine Chapel. You don’t so much comprehend it as just stand around and gawk. There were great mosaics in the Fisher Building, though I saw no fish.

Guardian Building, 1929

Fisher Building, 1928

The first morning I went for a run along the Detroit River, and when I tripped on the sidewalk and sprawled, customs officers offered me a bottle of water. The guy running in front of me came back to make sure I was ok. Detroiters are not only proud of their city, they’re friendly.

We took the Detroit Windsor Tunnel to Canada, and no matter what you may have heard I didn’t go there to buy Cuban cigars. Windsor looks like a good place to go if you’re in the market for cannabis, or a tattoo, or Cuban cigars. Cigars are heavily taxed and expensive in Canada, not that I would know.

We didn’t get to see the Tigers play because they were on the road, and I’m kinda glad. it gives me an excuse to revisit Detroit.

The first night we picked Alpino for dinner because it was the kind of Germanic high cuisine that we don’t really get in Houston. Alpino serves food from the Alps, which is German tinged with Swiss tinged with Italian, which makes for a nice combination. The food was good, our tour guide/waiter was great.

Our second night in Detroit we ate at Buddy’s Pizza, which first served Detroit-style pizza. Buddy’s was a Detroit bar, a former speakeasy, and it started serving pizza as a bar snack in the 40s. Square pizza is Sicilian, and the first pizzas were baked in liberated drip pans from the plants. I like to think of the pans as liberated anyway, though in truth they were apparently purchased from auto suppliers. Liberated drip pans just has a nice ring to it.

There are now multiple Buddy’s in the Detroit area, and I’m sure they’re all fine, but the original location reeks of authenticity. On the way in we asked an employee standing near the back door which pizza we should get. He told us his favorite was the Detroiter. Well of course it was.

He was a waiter but not our waiter, but before we left he went out of his way to visit our table and make sure we liked the pizza. Like I said, everyone was proud of their city, and who wouldn’t be? We really liked Detroit.

Cincinatti

After a day’s fishing in Ohio we spent two nights in Cincinatti. We went to a Reds game. We visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I ate a hot dog with Skyline Chili and cheese, and we sat on a nice downtown square and listened to a lively band during Cincinnati’s Oktoberfest. We ate dinner at a completely forgettable restaurant, then we ate dinner the next night at another completely forgettable restaurant. We went to Graeter’s Ice Cream, and visited in line with two American Airlines flight attendants flying out of Dallas. It was nice enough, but it suffered in comparison to Detroit.

Skyline Chili, by the way, is actually a Greek ragu sauce usually served on spaghetti. It was dubbed as chili during the nationwide chili craze in the early part of the last century. It is not chili, and for Texans, calling it chili is heresy. It has cinnamon in it, and chocolate. I’ll just note that the Cincinnati Reds in recent years have consistently beaten my Astros, so eating Skyline Chili was debasement in hopes of appeasing the baseball gods. It’s no wonder that I didn’t enjoy Cincinnati as much as Detroit.

Of course Detroit then knocked my Astros out of the wild card round of the playoffs. Did I mention that I hate Detroit?

Hotels

In Detroit we stayed downtown in the Shinola Hotel. The room had lots of Shinola accessories, there was a Shinola watch store, and the downtown location made getting around Detroit easy. We walked to dinner at Alpino, and had the Tigers been in town we could have walked to the stadium.

In Cincinnati we stayed downtown at the 21C Museum Hotel, and were able to walk to the Reds game. There was plenty to do downtown, and we didn’t take the car out until we drove to the airport our last morning.

In Grayling we stayed at the Gates Au Sable Lodge, which sits on the bank of the Au Sable River, has a good fly shop and guide service, and has a good restaurant where we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner for every meal. The Lodge has also collected all of the possible trout fishing bibelots produced in its 50-year history to adorn every available decorative niche, as if it had hired an interior decorator from the classified ads at the back of an old copy of Field and Stream. There were rod racks on the wall above the bed, and wader hangers by the door to each room. There were framed flies and fish prints and mounted fish, and Au Sable boat-shaped light fixtures. I was especially fond of our room’s trout fishing carpet.

Playlists

There are a lot of similarities between my Ohio and Michigan playlists. They seem balanced, as if the two states took turns producing songsters, and they share a kind of rock and roll grit that you just don’t always find in other states. In Ohio there are the Black Keys, in Michigan Jack White. In Ohio there is Josh Ritter, Marc Cohn, and The National, in Detroit there’s MC5 and Fountains of Wayne. Of course it’s hard to top Detroit’s Motown. With Motown you get Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Aretha Franklin, the Spinners, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, the Jackson 5 . . . Ohio does have the O’Jays, the Isley Brothers, and the Ohio Players, but Motown is Motown.

In Detroit there was Motown music playing everywhere. Well of course there was. It was like Hawaiian music in Hawaii. These people love their city.

The Supremes, The Ed Sullivan Show, CBS Television, 1966.

They really are good playlists, amazing playlists. Devo, Madonna, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Rare Earth and Grand Funk Railroad. Roy Rogers, Dean Martin, and Nine Inch Nails. Tracy Chapman and Doris Day. The Foo Fighters. They are great lists full of great music, and I won’t report you if you skip Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes. No one has to listen to Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes when they can listen instead to Stevie Wonder. Or Roy Rogers.

I had vowed I’d hum Baby Love every day in Michigan, and I did.

Guitar

I took the Kohno. I worked on Bach.

The Tyler Davidson Fountain, Cincinnati.

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Smallmouth Bass, Tuscarawas River, Ohio, September 20, 2024 (43)

We fished until noon on Michigan’s Au Sable, then drove eight hours south from Grayling, Michigan, population 1,917, to Coshocton, Ohio, population 11,016. Our drive required two hamburgers, two fill-ups, a shopping spree at a Krogers for our next day’s lunch, a shopping spree at a Walgreens for reasons I can’t remember, and finally two more hamburgers. In case you’re curious, at the Krogers we bought cheese, crackers, cookies, and a pear.

The drive started out in the Michigan Northwoods, then moved into flat plains, and finally at dusk we were in some of the prettiest, most bucolic, hilliest farmland I’ve seen. Then it got dark and we drove another hour. The area around Coshocton seemed well-supplied with streams, cornfields, pastures, and handsome two-lane country roads. There were lots of busy small towns and barns. We saw no Haitians, but in Ohio I figure they were immigrating everywhere, just lined up to eat our fish and irk J.D. Vance.

The next day we fished the Tuscarawas River with Katie Johnstone. We had hired Katie through Mad River Outfitters in Columbus, Ohio, after we had decided that we would fish for smallmouth. Smallmouth are a good river fish, they’re native to Ohio, and it’s not a fish we see a lot of in Texas. Also, the Cincinnati Reds were in Cincinnati, so if we fished near Columbus we could drive a bit further and see a baseball game on Saturday. The Reds beat the Pirates. I kept a scorecard.

I also vowed to taste Skyline Chili in Cincinnati. I did. Since I’m a generous spirit, I won’t say more.

Sometime in the recent past, Orvis ads pushed 50/50 on the Water for fly-fishing gender parity. If there was ever an old white guy sport, it’s fly fishing, and most fly-fishing excursions are jam-packed to the gills with old white guys. Orvis’s 50/50 on the Water was intended to expand the universe of fly fishers by tapping into the half of the population who traditionally didn’t. One could cynically wonder if 50/50 wasn’t intended to expand Orvis’s customer base, but I try to ascribe the best motives to people and institutions. I do make exceptions, especially for Skyline Chili, but 50/50 on the Water always seemed to me well-intentioned.

Our guides in Michigan and in Ohio shared a similar biography. Both were closer to 30 than 70, and had become obsessed with fly fishing as young adults. They both started guiding after giving up other jobs–one in photography and one in graphics. They had each guided full time for three years. Both tied flies, fished Midwestern rivers, and were socially skilled enough to act amused when we told stories.

The difference between the guides, of course, was that Lance in Michigan was a big-ish, guy-ish guy with a beard and a Y-chromosome, who guided from a drift boat. Katie was a petite pretty young woman with her hair in a blonde plait. She was good at wrestling her river raft. She was Y-chromosome deficient.

They were both excellent guides.

Fishing with Katie after fishing with Lance made me ponder why more women don’t fly fish. There’s nothing about fly fishing that seems particularly masculine. It’s an elegant sport, and I’ve always fished with women–my mother (and father) fished, though neither fly fished. Kris fly fishes, so I’m almost always 50/50 on the water, and while I wouldn’t admit it, Kris often as not out-fishes me. I cast better, really I do, and I tie better knots. I tie flies. Still, on any given trip she’s apt to catch more fish, not that I would ever admit it. On those trips I will only acknowledge that we caught exactly the same number of fish. On every other trip I catch more fish.

Kris claims she only fishes because I do, but when we went to Portugal, when I vowed we’d return to the States and catch a fish on the fly in every state, it was Kris who kept complaining that we weren’t fishing. I was perfectly happy drinking port and eating endless Pastels de Nata. Of course she probably saved my life. If she hadn’t distracted me with fishing I’d probably weigh 300 pounds and have no liver.

In Ohio, thanks to Katie we caught a lot of smallmouth. Katie rowed the raft, told us where to cast, switched out flies when the fishing slowed, and retrieved hung-up flies from the bankside brush. It was a pretty little river, lined with trees and tinged green. It wasn’t weedy, which is always a good thing, though drought had spurred an incipient algae bloom.

Katie fished streamers differently from the way I fish them. Hers were bigger, and she had us retrieve with short irregular strips and pauses. I would have just chunked and retrieved, chunked and retrieved, chunked and retrieved . . . Her method actually took some concentration, and with irregular strips and pauses I concentrated some. I used her retrieve for largemouth after we got home, and it worked well.

I no longer fish for trout during August in the Lower 48. Pre-global warming, August was an ok month to fish, but the major rivers in trout country are warming, and it seems that in August most rivers will now reach at least 70 degrees by early afternoon. When a river reaches 70 degrees, trout still feed, but they have trouble surviving being caught. Cold water is oxygenated water, and recovering trout need oxygen. Fifty degree water is the optimal temperature for trout fishing, and even then an angler will kill some fish from stress and mishandling. Higher temperatures pretty much guarantee death.

Hence smallmouth. Smallmouth are better suited for hotter water and will survive what trout can’t. Now instead of pushing 50/50 on the Water, companies like Orvis are encouraging anglers to go fish for smallmouth in August. Meanwhile warmer water is allowing smallmouth to push trout out of traditional trout waters. At least smallmouth are fun to catch.

It wasn’t August, but it was a hot September, even in the far northern climes of Ohio, and the Tuscarawas River was pretty, quiet, and thanks to Katie we caught and released a bunch of smallmouth. I’m pretty sure Kris and I each caught exactly the same number of fish. Meanwhile Katie was great at telling us how to fish the river, and the river was a joy to fish. It’s the kind of river I wish I lived next to. At least we got to visit.

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North Dakota Packing List

Gear

I took a rod that was way too big for what I caught. Besides that I tied some 9 foot 3x trout leaders. I tied a lot of flies, including some almost perfect wooly buggers, which only took 30 years to accomplish. I also tied some Clouser minnows that I never used. My fly selection was fine, and really, for what I caught in North Dakota, they don’t make a rod that small.

Hotel

We stayed in downtown Fargo, in the Hotel Donaldson. The Donaldson is small, it only has 16 rooms, but its rooftop is a good place to sit in the evening, and downtown Fargo is a surprisingly lively place. It has a restored movie theater, and some good restaurants and coffee shops. It has stores. Where else can you find a downtown with stores?

There are more street people than one would expect, but it seems reasonably safe. I did have to skirt a couple of bodies on the way past the city library, but I think they were only sleeping.

Because we were downtown we drove a lot to look for fish. Over two days we put 450 miles on the rental car.

Donuts

There are three Sandy’s Donut shops in Fargo, though the one downtown isn’t open on Monday. They were oddly expensive, but they had a wide selection, and when you walked through the door the girl at the counter said “Can I help ya?” in a thick North Dakotan accent. Unlike, say, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, I wouldn’t go back to Fargo just for the donuts, but they made for a healthy pre-fishing breakfast.

Restaurants

Notwithstanding the one awful hamburger in Valley City, food in North Dakota was pretty good. My friend and former law partner Brian said that when he was litigating in North Dakota during the fracking boom he ate walleye at every meal, including breakfast, and that it became his favorite fish. To find walleye on a menu we had to go to East Grand Forks, Minnesota, to the Blue Moose Bar and Grill. It was good, and if I ever go back to North Dakota I’ll get North Dakota restaurant suggestions from Brian. Weirdly, in Minnesota they served the walleye without tartar sauce. Tartar sauce may be too picant for Minnesotans.

Back in Fargo, we went across the river to Moorhead, to the oldest existing Dairy Queen franchise. As a Texan, I was surprised that Dairy Queens exist anyplace but Texas. I was stunned that Dairy Queens actually originated in Minnesota, and that per capita the highest concentration of Dairy Queens is in Minnesota, not Texas. The Moorehead Dairy Queen franchise agreement dates from the 1940s, and they have strange things on the menu that newer agreements don’t allow. They have, for instance, the favorite of my childhood, cherry dip cones.

There’s no seating inside the Moorehead Dairy Queen, but there’s a big seating area on the patio. My guess is that it gets cold on that patio in winter. I had the cherry-dipped Dilly Bar because (1) cherry dip and (2) the Moorehead Dairy Queen invented the Dilly Bar. Kris had a chocolate dip cone.

Now if I could just find a K&N Root Beer Stand.

When we got to the DQ there was one youngish couple. By the time we left, the patio was packed with old people. I suspect they heard I was there.

I had read something on the internet about Fargo’s best knoephla soup. Knoephla is a German potato/dumpling soup that’s ideal for Fargo winters. According to the internet, the best knoephla was at Wurst Bier Hall, where the menu featured (1) various kinds of wurst, (2) braised cabbage, (3) knoephla soup, (4) spoetzle dumplings, and (5) beer.

There were four kinds of mustard to go with your choice of wurst.

The second placed knoephla was at Luna Fargo, which was high end in a low-key sort of way. It tended more to wine drinking than beer, and there was no knoephla soup on the menu the night we went. There was a pickle appetizer plate which seemed properly North Dakotan, and the pickled watermelon rind was brilliant.

Our last night in Fargo we ate at Mezaluna. We could walk there from our hotel. It’s the kind of place where one orders martinis, and I did. The fish was very good.

Where We Didn’t Go

We didn’t go to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park to see the Badlands. I would go back to North Dakota to see the Park, but not to fish.

Playlist

If Utah is cursed by the Osmonds, North Dakota is cursed by Lawrence Welk. The guy started recording in the 30s, and it’s brutal that he never stopped.

There’s also Peggy Lee, but you can only listen to “Fever” so many times. Kris asked why there was so much Lynne Anderson on the play list. I like Lynne Anderson well enough but I thought it was obvious that there weren’t a lot of other choices.

Famous Actors

We stopped by the Fargo-Moorehead Visitors Center to pick up a highway map and to visit again with North Dakota’s most famous actor. He’s still there, still as handsome as ever, and he’s still autographed by the Coen Bros.

It’s too bad there’s not an Oscar for best portrayal of a wood chipper.

Guitar

I didn’t take one. I felt guilty about not practicing, and I may need to make some money busking before this is over, but it was liberating not having to haul it through the airport.

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Indiana Packing List

I liked Indiana. I liked the friendliness of the people and gentleness of the landscape. I guess in winter it’s probably miserable, but I always wanted to live in a place where I could wear more sweaters. Maybe I’m a Midwesterner at heart.

Walking on a trail through Turkey Run State Park, there were three young African American girls, maybe 16, sitting together on a bench by the river. One of them announced to us and her friends that we were beautiful–I guess she figured that old people walking about was a beautiful thing. I asked her if she always sat by the river and charmed passersby? And I figure that was about right, because she was completely charming. She took our picture, and she did a good job, both at charming and photography.

I liked Indiana.

Gear

We took a rod each, 7 weights, with floating lines and 7 1/2′ 10-pound leaders. The rods would have been too heavy for trout anywhere but Alaska, and were heavy for the smallmouth bass we caught, but they worked, they were fine. Everything in Indiana was fine except the donuts.

We didn’t take waders or boots. We waded in shorts and water shoes.

We fished small poppers and streamers, streamers and poppers. Then we fished more poppers and streamers.

The Turkey Run Inn and Cabins

We decided to fish Sugar Creek because it’s short, small, has a good reputation for smallmouth, and runs through two nearly-adjacent state parks, Shades and Turkey Run. We figured we’d have plenty of river access, and there was the bonus that Turkey Run Inn and Cabins is located at Turkey Run State Park.

With all those running turkeys, I’d have been disappointed if we hadn’t seen some wild turkeys. We did.

Turkey Run is about 70 miles west of Indianapolis, and in the earliest days of cars apparently 70 miles was about as far as you could expect to travel in one day. The Inn was built for early adventuring motorists as an out, overnight and then home. The Indianapolis 500 first ran in 1916, and one of its founders, Arthur Newby, was instrumental in the purchase of the park that same year. Of the $40,000 price tag, The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Association gave $5,000. Newby personally gave another $5,000.

The Inn opened in 1919, and it’s very popular with Hoosiers. The Inn and park together feel like a resort. Outside your bedroom door you have this lovely bit of land in which to go a’wandering, and it’s all very pretty. It’s not as expensive as a resort, and maybe the rooms aren’t quite as big nor the restaurant quite as ambitious, but during the busy times of the year it’s probably harder to get a reservation.

It’s like a lot of Indiana. It’s nice.

Restaurants

We ate at some good places in Indiana. On our first day, on the way from the Indianapolis airport to Turkey Run, we took a side trip to Shapiro’s Deli, founded 1905. It’s classic Jewish deli food, with the addition of rhubarb pie. I’ve decided everything is better with rhubarb pie.

We should have split a reuben. Ordering two was hubris.

The first night at Turkey Creek Inn we ate at the Inn restaurant, The Narrows, and it was fine. The second night we ate at Blue Cactus Tacos and Tequila Bar in Crawfordsville, Indiana, population 16,385. It was in a strip mall. I had the tacos huitlacoche, made with huitlacoche corn fungus and queso fresco on homemade tortillas. I can’t remember ever having a bad taco, but I’ve probably had some uninteresting tacos. These tacos were interesting.

I’d go back to try the chorizo and potato tacos. I’d go back to try the squash blossom tacos and even the cactus tacos. I don’t care that Lyle Lovett said never eat Mexican food north of Dallas (and in my mind the notion that Dallas might have decent Mexican food is really stretching it), but in a small Indiana country town those were some interesting tacos. The margaritas were good too.

Our last night we stayed near the airport in Indianapolis and had dinner with a college friend, Andy, and his wife Lorraine. Andy and I were friends at the University of Texas 40+ years ago, dang close to 50, and I ate my first bagel at one of Andy’s cousin’s home in Memphis. I hadn’t seen him since college.

The bagels were imported from New York, frozen, and I’m getting all nostalgic remembering how once upon a time bagels were exotic anywhere south or west of New York City.

Andy and Lorraine have lived in Indianapolis for a while . . . 30 years maybe? And he said two things that stuck, that he’d lost his Texas accent, and that he’s now from Indianapolis. It was clearly their home, with all the good things that word can hold. He and Lorraine were proud of their city, and it was such good fortune to see Indianapolis through them.

We ate at Bluebeard, in Indianapolis’s little slice of Bohemia. Thank goodness we had to catch a fish in Indiana, because otherwise I’d have missed seeing Andy. And I would have missed eating huitlacoche tacos in a strip mall in Crawfordsville.

Donuts

Disappointing. I can’t recommend Indiana for its donuts. Maybe we never got to the right place.

Columbus, Indiana

We had set aside a second day to fish, but since the water was low and we’d caught fish already we diverted to Columbus, Indiana, population 50,474, home of Cummins Inc. Cummins makes lots and lots and lots of diesel engines.

It’s hard to explain Columbus, Indiana, except that it might have been nothing but another company town. It’s not. Back in the 40s, the future Cummins CEO, J. Irwin Miller, proposed a modern building for his family church, First Christian Church, and Eliel Saarinen was invited to be the architect. Saarinen was reportedly reluctant, but Miller’s mother chaired the building committee, and she wrote to Saarinen that she didn’t want a church that paraded its cost, she wanted a church where the poorest woman in Columbus would feel welcome. Saarinen took the bait. After that first church Columbus went nuts for modern architecture.

Under Miller, the Cummins Foundation paid for the architectural design of public buildings. The town library was designed by I.M. Pei (though not with money from the Cummins Foundation). Outside it’s certainly a welcoming space–it’s even got its own Henry Moore statue–but inside it’s one of the most appealing, user-friendly libraries imaginable. And the list just goes on and on. First Baptist Church was designed by Harry Weese. Mabel McDowell School was designed by John Carl Warnecke. Fire Station no. 4 was designed by Robert Venturi.

There are buildings by Kevin Roche, Cesar Pelli, Myron Goldsmith, and Richard Meir. There are six buildings in Columbus designated as National Historic Landmarks. There must be 40 buildings in Columbus that are worth seeing. I think that even the local Shell gas stations were all designed by Pritzker Prize winners. Listing Columbus’s architects is a little like saying that the statue of the soldier on the courthouse lawn was sculpted by Michelangelo, or maybe Henry Moore.

Here’s a roundup of Columbus’s fire stations.

Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church must be one of the most striking buildings in the world. Not Columbus. Not Indiana. Not the Midwest. The todo del mundo, the whole pie, the world. And it may not even be the best building in Columbus, Indiana. The town takes your breath.

All this architectural splendor might have been a meaningless gimmick, but it binds the city together. You look at those public spaces and think of the hundreds of ways, good or indifferent, that a foundation could have spent its money, that a community could have invested its treasure, and you know that this money and this effort by this town was well spent. Ok, I reckon some of those roofs may leak, and the maintenance costs are probably higher than anybody expected, but you know that Cummins loves its town, and that the residents are proud of their town. I could have spent days in Columbus.

I’d go to that church. I’d use that library.

J. Irwin Miller was also instrumental in founding the National Council of Churches, and was its president from 1960-63. He led its push for passage of the Civil Rights Act. I miss Rockefeller Republicans.

Books

Kurt Vonnegut is from Indianapolis. So it goes.

Playlist

Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 are from Indiana. I remember hearing the Jackson 5’s version of “Rockin’ Robin” as a child and thinking how peculiar, and that’s pretty much my verdict on Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5. I’m not a fan, and my favorite song by Jackson was perhaps “Ben” (1972), possibly because it so embraced the peculiar. I forgot to put it on the play list.

John Mellencamp, David Lee Roth of Van Halen, and John Hiatt are all from Indiana. For our honeymoon (1984) we drove from Houston to New Mexico with cassette tapes of “Swordfishtrombones” by Tom Waits and “Riding with the King” by John Hiatt, both 1983. We must have listened to those two tapes a hundred times. I still love them.

I don’t know how they got our names
But yesterday this letter came
Mr. and Mrs. Permanent Dweller, your lucky number is

You may already be a winner 

John Hyatt, You May Already be a Winner, 1983.

I highly advise a road trip with “Swordfishtrombones” and “Riding with the King“. Based solely on the one experience I also highly recommend honeymoons.

Wes Montgomery, the great jazz guitarist, was from Indiana, and you can’t be any sort of guitarist without marveling at Wes Montgomery. Freddie Hubbard was from Indiana, and I kept looking forward to his version of “Misty” coming up again on the playlist.

Unknown photographer, Cole Porter and Betty Shevlin Smith, c. 1920. Wikimedia Commons.

Cole Porter was from Indiana, and there were thousands of Cole Porter covers to choose from. When I was a senior in high school, our senior play was Anything Goes, and I sang “Let’s Misbehave” in a duet with Julie Johnson. Me? I was terrible, but Julie was great, so I don’t remember it with too much queasiness. It left a soft spot for Cole Porter.

In addition to all that good stuff, Indiana University at Bloomington is our best public university music school. It’s most famous graduate is probably Joshua Bell, so of course he was on the playlist.

Movies

lndiana is the setting of two of my favorite sports movies, Breaking Away (1979) and Hoosiers (1986). Neither is about baseball. Neither is about fly fishing. Everybody I guess has seen Hoosiers, but having now been to Indiana it’s hard to see how it could have been set anywhere else. I guess that name, Hoosiers, is kind of a giveaway.

Breaking Away doesn’t seem much remembered anymore, but it’s such a fine movie. It so resonates to drive Indiana backroads and highways while channelling the movie’s bike rides–I also once owned a Masi Volumetrica with a Campi Record C groupo, and rode that bike thousands of miles all the while imagining my place on the Tour. I included Schubert’s Italian Symphony in the playlist just to get that rush of Indiana bike-riding exhilaration that Breaking Away evokes. If I were going to come up with a 50-state roadtrip playlist, the first movement of the Italian Symphony might be my entry for Indiana. Ok, that or “Riding with the King.” Ok, those or “Let’s Misbehave.”

Guitar

I played the guitar a lot in Indiana. After dinner there wasn’t much to do at the Turkey Run Inn and Cabins but sit outside on the lawn, drink beer, admire people’s dogs, and play the guitar. But then really, who needs better? I was working on the second Alemande movement of the first Bach Cello Suite. I can play it ok, but I can never remember it. Maybe my memory will get better as I age. I already know I can’t get more beautiful.