Category: Warmwater

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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.

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Smallmouth Bass, Sugar Creek Indiana, August 27, 2023

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I had to have been to Indiana once before, when my parents drove from Texas to Fremont, Michigan, to see my namesake Uncle Neil. They would have clipped the northwest corner, around South Bend. I was only one, so my memory of the trip is pretty hazy. I’m reasonably certain I wasn’t driving.

Whatever happened on that first trip, my memory from last week is mostly reliable. Indiana is a pretty place, particularly if you like fields of corn offset by fields of soybeans. It is green, and everywhere in August there are cornfields, scattered silos, picturesque barns, and stands of oaks and maples. It’s green. I like green.

Where we fished, Sugar Creek, was just a bit south and an hour or so west of Indianapolis. In the south the landscape starts to vary more than northern Indiana, with more rise and fall. On Sugar Creek there was heavy riverside growth and intermittent limestone bluffs. The water in Sugar Creek was low, but clear and like everything else tinged green. It was lovely.

We found Sugar Creek on the internet, searching best places to fly fish in Indiana. I had first contacted a guide on the Tippecanoe, which is a river further north and east, but more famous than Sugar Creek for its role in presidential politics. “Sugar Creek and Tyler Too!” was never going to be a thing in any election. When we asked the Tippecanoe guide about a Saturday though, he said there were too many inner-tubers on the weekends. We decided to go it on our own. We did take his advice and skipped the weekend.

There were a couple of canoe liveries on Sugar Creek, and we rented a canoe from Clements, who couldn’t have been nicer. I had emailed them about a ten mile trip, but they said because of low water they were only doing five miles. They weren’t kidding. Because of the low water we frequently had to get out of the canoe to drag it through low water riffles. It took much more effort than I would have expected.

I was glad Kris was there to do all the work.

Sometimes the front of the boat with Kris floated fine, and only my fat butt would drag. I could stand and put one leg in the water to push the boat forward, like I was skateboarding the river. It was kinda fun.

It took us roughly five hours to go five miles from the put-in back to the canoe livery, which even allowing time for fishing was pretty slow. At that rate we wouldn’t have finished the ten-mile trip until some time next week. Some of that time was fishing, some of it canoeing, some of it dragging. By the time we were done I had a blister on my little toe from scuffling through river rocks, and I was pretty certain I was going to wake up sore tomorrow. We’d both had enough. We decided that since we’d caught fish, one day’s Indiana fishing was plenty.

We fished on a Monday, and with all the Indiana kids back in school we had the river pretty much to ourselves. There were two gear fishers in another canoe, and we shared the shuttle with them to the put-in and then leapfrogged canoes a good bit of the morning. One of the gear fishers told us that the river was so low because it was already dry, but that an abnormal heat wave the week before had sucked out more water. I don’t know whether he was right or not, but it was such a vivid image that it was hard not to admire the description.

Late in the day we were passed by three kayakers. Then we leapfrogged them for a while. That was it for river traffic.

We caught fish early, we caught fish late. We both caught a rock bass, which I’d never seen before. I thought they were crappie, but Kris did an INaturalist identification. There’s nothing like wilderness internet.

I caught some pretty small smallmouth, and I also caught some mighty small smallmouth. Kris got the best hit of the day from a biggish smallmouth, but it let us go our way without having to land it. That’s a win all around.

Evermann, B.W., Hildebrand, S.F, common white sucker, Notes onf the Fishes of East Tennessee, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Fishes vol. 34, 1914, Washington, D.C., Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

In the river there were hundreds of suckers, lined nose to tail and moving sedately out of our way when the canoe drifted through. Many of them were 20 inches or more, and all of them seemed to be looking for something. Kris couldn’t believe it wasn’t us. It wasn’t. She had to cast to them though because, well, fish.

We fished some from the boat, and some wading, mostly casting towards the shore into the deepest water we could find. We had relatively big rods, 7 weights, which were certainly big for what we actually caught. Still, we could hope. I’m sure that there are big fish in Sugar Creek that aren’t suckers. Everybody says so, and everybody in Indiana is honest.

Small creek, small fish, small flies. It was perfect weather with just enough work to tire us and enough fish and scenery to keep us entertained. If it hadn’t been for the blister, it couldn’t have been a gentler day. I don’t recall ever getting tangled, or casting into a tree, or losing a fly. I fished the same two flies all day, either a stylish blue popper or a variation on a bluegill fly called a BBB. The fish took both.

This is going to get down in the weeds, but bear with me. A week before a casting instructor had filmed my cast at a Texas Fly Fishers event. I think he said “damn,” but I suspect it wasn’t in a good way. Mostly my cast was ok, except for the strangest glitch. On a short cast I picked up the line from the water too early, and the early pick-up caused my backcast to go straight up, which isn’t exactly the very thing. It wasn’t the worst thing I ever did, casting or otherwise, but it did create all sorts of short cast problems.

Like I said, way down in the weeds, but every now and then fishing on Sugar Creek I’d think I ought to correct it. Naw. It was too nice a day to think.

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Indiana

It’s August. Houston is ending its second month of record heat with no rain. This morning when I walked the dogs at 6:30 it was 80°, and the high today is projected to be 101°. That’s cooler than yesterday. After the freezes of the last two years the joke is that post-global warming there are two seasons in Houston, Hell and when Hell freezes over.

This morning in Indiana it was 57°. There’s no rain there, either, but the high in Indiana today will only be 91°. That’s a perfectly reasonable August day. We’re going to Indiana to enjoy beautiful summer weather.

Yesterday at a dinner I sat across from a psychoanalyst who grew up in Indiana. She left in 1974, which she said was the height of Indiana’s Rust Belt economic failure. Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, West Virginia . . . That must be the year we started buying Japanese cars, outsourcing carburetors to Mexico, and importing computer chips from China. Ok, maybe the computer chips came later. Indiana’s economy was either manufacturing or farming, and since its peak in the 1950s, American manufacturing in the Rust Belt had declined into collapse. She said that still, it was a wonderful place to grow up, and that where we were going, near Crawfordsville, is lovely. She also said she couldn’t have done what she does in Indiana. I suppose that in the Rust Belt years there wasn’t money for fripperies like mental health.

U.S. Expansion 1790, Perry Castaneda Map Collection, University of Texas.

I think we erred when we stopped calling Ohio and Indiana the Old Northwest. Now it’s the Midwest, lumped together with Kansas and Nebraska, but historically the Old Northwest was the heart of the first westward expansion of the brand new United States, and it’s where we abandoned any pretense of Native American assimilation. That bit of our history deserves pondering, but until now I never have. Indiana Indians refused to transform into European farmers, and even if they’d tried we probably wouldn’t have let them. We certainly didn’t put up with that sort of nonsense with the South’s civilized tribes.

By 1816, when Indiana became the 19th state, there was no remaining Native American opposition to European settlement. Indiana had gone from the 1810 formation of the Tecumsah Federation to unopposed European settlement in six years. Death and removal had become the tools of American expansion, and would remain so.

Kurz & Allison, Battle of Tippecanoe, 1889, Library of Congress, https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/pga.01891/.

William Henry Harrison, the future short-lived President, was appointed Indiana territorial governor in 1801. He was a well-to-do Virginia boy–he was still in his early 20s–and he had two goals; to open the territory for expansion, which he did, and to claim the territory for slavery, which he didn’t.

He failed to expand slavery for the most unexpected of reasons: white Southern settlers. When Indiana’s first constitution was written, the majority of Indiana settlers were Southerners from slave states, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, but they were poor Southerners from slave states, not William Henry Harrison’s slave-owning aristocracy. When they adopted their new statehood constitution, they prohibited slavery. It may have been the right thing to do, but their motive wasn’t humanitarian. They didn’t want to compete with Southern slave owners for land.

They didn’t want to compete with African Americans either. Indiana’s 1851 constitution prohibited black immigrants, and imposed registration requirements for existing black inhabitants.

The Lincoln family was part of the migration of poor Southerners from Kentucky to Indiana, until they finally moved on to Illinois when Abraham was 21. Indiana missed a bet when it let young Honest Abe leave.

St. Mémin, Charles Balthazaqr Julien Fevret de, 1800, William Henry Harrison, 9th President of the United States, engraving, Library of Congress; Tecumseh, between 1860 and 1900, wood engraving, Library of Congress.

Notwithstanding Lincoln, Indiana has a reputation for conservative politics, and its current politics certainly are. It’s the state that gave us Mike Pence, former vice president and before that the Indiana governor. Poor Pence. He is so hated as a sycophantic toady on the left and as a craven coward on the right that he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for stepping up on January 6. Me? I will always be thankful for Pence, though I wouldn’t vote for him. I suspect that history will be kinder to Mike Pence than we are, at least if the nation survives the next score years.

In 2016, Donald Trump carried Indiana by 56.9% to 37.8% for Hillary Clinton, with 2,734,958 total votes. The Libertarian, Gary Johnson, received 5% of the vote. Four years later Trump carried 57.02% of the vote and Biden 40.96%, with 3,033,118 total votes. The Libertarian, Jo Jorgenson, dropped to 1.95%. It probably should be noted that Trump’s numbers might have been inflated by having native-son Pence as a running mate, but I suspect that in Indiana Trump would have walked away with the elections anyway. Democrats won in areas you’d expect, urban Indianapolis and the college town of Bloomington. Then there are the somewhat unexpected old industrial counties, Lake and St. Joseph in the far northwest, but unexpected to me because I know very little of Indiana. Finally there’s Tippecanoe County, with a population of 186,251. It voted for Trump in 2016, but switched to Biden in 2020. It is the home of Purdue University, and maybe that explains it, though switched majorities are always interesting.

Indiana 2020 election results by county, Wikipedia.

Barrack Obama did squeak by with a win in Indiana in 2008, 50% to 48.9%, but he didn’t repeat in 2012 when he dropped a full 6%. All of the statewide officials in Indiana are Republican, as are both senators and seven of the nine members of Congress. In the state assembly, 40 of the 50 senators and 70 of the 100 representatives are Republican. I reckon Indiana deserves its conservative reputation.

Geographically, in the north Indiana is bordered by Lake Michigan and Michigan, in the east by Ohio, in the south by Kentucky, and in the west by Illinois. The Ohio River separates Indiana and Kentucky, and the Wabash River flows along the lower third of the Illinois-Indiana border–the part where the border is squiggly. It is the 38th state by size, between Virginia and Maine, with 35,870 square miles, but it’s 17th by population with 6,833,037 people as of 2022. Massachusetts is 16th.

Northern and central Indiana were glaciated and tend to be flat to rolling. There’s corn in them there rolls. Corn and soybeans make up about 60% of Indiana’s agriculture production. Unglaciated southern Indiana is apparently more varied, with sedimentary deposits of limestone, shale, sandstone, and dolomite, some of which apparently protrude as bluffs and whatnot. Coal mining in the south is located north across the Ohio River from Kentucky’s northwestern coal region. “Paradise” is on the Green River in Kentucky, not the Wabash, and “Coal Miner’s Daughter” set in Indiana just ain’t quite the thing.

Current Indiana coal permits. The blue circles are surface mines, the purple squares are underground, and the yellow stars are processing facilities. I think. Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

With all that sedimentary rock in south Indiana filtering water, farms growing corn, and proximity to Kentucky, Indiana ought to be an excellent location for bourbon, and apparently there’s excellent bourbon made in southern Indiana. In the interest of science I’ll go out of my way to try some.

In addition to corn and good water, Indiana has a ready supply of white people. Indiana is 77% Anglo, with less than 10% of the population African American, less than 8% Hispanic, and 3% Asian. Indianapolis, the state’s largest city with about 900,000 people, is 88% Anglo. Only in the northwestern industrial corner closest to Chicago are there sizable African American or Hispanic populations, in Lake County 18.9% and 17.7%, respectively.

There are two reasons to go to Indiana to fish. This gets complicated, but in the Newer Northwest, Oregon, Washington, and Northern California, they haven’t quite managed to kill off all their steelhead, and there is still a steelhead fishery there, some of it wild. When we fished in Washington and Oregon, we fished for steelhead, though we only caught a total of one. Steelhead are rainbow trout that join the navy and go to sea, then return to their natal rivers to spawn. Genetically they are exactly like the rainbow trout that never leave the western rivers. Behaviorally they are much closer to Pacific salmon. Feeding in the Pacific they grow large enough to rival some of the Pacific salmon as well.

Sage, Dean, Townsend, C.H., Smith, H.M., Harris, William C., Great Lake Trout, 1924, Salmon and Trout 351, MacMillan Company, New York, New York, Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington. The scientific name is now Salvelinus namaycush.

Meanwhile the Great Lakes were once populated with lake trout, a close cousin of brook trout. Lake trout are the largest of the chars, and are native to the northern US and Canada. I don’t think they were ever particularly popular with fly fishers–they live deep in big waters, plus they are invasive in places like Yellowstone–but in the Great Lakes they were once a popular gamefish for gear fishers and an important commercial fishery. Then they were effectively wiped out of the Great Lakes by pollution, overfishing, and invasive sea lampreys after the Welland Canal connected the Lakes to the Atlantic. I could have bad dreams about invasive sea lampreys.

To replace the lake trout fishery, the Old Northwest settled on stocking New Northwest steelhead. Now in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Upstate New York–Steelhead Alley–fly fishing in the dead of winter for steelhead migrating into rivers from the Great Lakes is a thing. In my mind it’s a strange, cold thing, but still a thing. To steelhead anglers in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, the notion that fishing for a stocked freshwater lake fish and calling it steelhead is anathema. It really is quite the etymological dispute.

We are not going to fish for Great Lakes steelhead, or whatever it is they’re called that doesn’t make somebody angry. We are going to fish for smallmouth bass, which are native to Indiana. I’m told that Indiana is the very place for smallmouth bass, mostly by the State of Indiana. I am also told, mostly by the State of Indiana, that the particular place we’re going, Sugar Creek, is among the very best places for Indiana smallmouth. I hope the State of Indiana is at least as honest as its two famously honest sons, Abe Lincoln and Mike Pence.

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Happy New Year! North Dakota!

John Caleb Bingham, Trappers Descending the Missouri, 1845, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I know, I know, it’s February, and I haven’t written anything since, I dunno, August of last year? I’ve stalled. It’s past Valentine’s, and I haven’t wished you Happy New Year.

Happy New Year!

We have fished. We’ve fished for Redfish at Port O’Connor, for bonefish on South Andros in the Bahamas, and I caught a 12-pound grass carp at Damon on a six weight Winston trout rod. The carp dragged my canoe around until it finally came to hand. We were both exhausted, but I’m pretty certain that I was the only one happy about it.

I’ve planned fishing trips. In April I’m going with a group from Houston to Cuba, which is these days a hot fly-fishing destination. We’re going for the benefit of the Cuban people, but we’ll also fish. In September Kris and I are going to Maine, so maybe we’ll add at least one state this year.

And we’ve traveled without fishing. In November we went to Spain for our son’s wedding, and that took a lot of physical and mental energy. I had to write a speech for the wedding dinner, and it was the best wedding speech ever. You should have been there.

gratuitous photo of a barracuda I caught on South Andros with a spinning rod.

Gratuitous photo of a barracuda I caught in January in the Bahamas with a spinning rod.

We cleaned out our storage bin, mostly, and I learned Spanish, some. The Astros won the World Series.

So we’ve been stuck at 31 states since last August, and all of my angler’s block stems from our September trip to North Dakota.I had dreaded North Dakota. Even though I grew up in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota is just a wee bit past the middle. There are big lakes in North Dakota, some natural lakes left by glaciers, some man-made, and if you want to fish for walleye with conventional gear, it’s a good place to go. Not so much for fly fishing.

From time to time in recent years I’ve checked the internet for suggestions for fly fishing in North Dakota, and have come across a lot of forum posts that look something like this:

QUERY: I’ve just moved to North Dakota for medical school/to count grasshopers/for the climate. Where is there to fly fish?

REPLY: South Dakota. All the rivers in North Dakota are flat, slow, and muddy.

It’s kinda hard to separate South Dakota and North Dakota, though Congress clearly managed it. The best history of North Dakota, Dakota by Norman Rijsford, is also the best history of South Dakota. The Dakota/Lakota, the Mandan, the Cheyenne, the Crow, the Hidatsa, the Chippewa . . . they all blatantly disregarded the state line. When Lewis and Clark traveled up the wide Missouri, they never mentioned when they crossed from south to north. Congress separated the Dakotas when they entered the Union because the locals couldn’t agree on a location for the state capitol. South Dakota still ended up with Pierre.

There is one difference between the states. There are no native trout in North Dakota, and at least historically there wasn’t much fly fishing anywhere without trout. South Dakota, in and around Badlands National Park, has trout. North Dakota also has a national park, Theodore Roosevelt, but no trout.

After a lot of internet perusing I found a guide in Bismarck, halfway between the state’s eastern and western borders, about 16 hours and 980 miles almost directly north of Vernon, Texas, my hometown. That driving route is roughly on the line of the 100th Meridian, where the wetter east gives way to the drier Great Plains.

From The Great Plains Trail. I don’t know where they stole it from. The dry line may be moving east because of Global Warming. Just another thing to keep you up at night.

We didn’t make that drive though. We flew from Houston to Minneapolis, which would have been a roughly 17 hour and 1,230-mile drive. In Minneapolis we went to a late-season Twins game at Target Field on St. Olaf College night, ate fried walleye, bought some pike flies at a local fly shop, and had a delicious, healthy breakfast at the Minnesota State Fair: Mini donuts shot into a deep frier out of a mini-donut gun, fried cheese curds, deep fried corn on the cob, and a corny dog. I had a corny dog anyway. Kris didn’t really eat her fair share of the cheese curds either.

The guide I found, Kurt Yancy, isn’t a full-time fly fishing guide, but he is a full-time fishing guide who dabbles in fly fishing, and he said we might catch smallmouth, walleye, pike, or carp. On his website there are lots of photos of guys dressed against a north wind holding large walleyes. You can catch walleye on fly rods, but they’re mostly caught deep in lakes, as much as 30 feet, and once you get much beyond ten feet fishing with a fly rod starts getting really stupid. Stupider.

It’s also hard to ice fish with a fly rod, so our potential North Dakota season was short.

Driving from Minneapolis to Bismarck takes about six hours. We ate lunch at the Fisher’s Club on Middle Spunk Lake in Avon, Mn., and the Fisher’s Club is charming and someplace everyone should visit. At the visitor center in Fargo we met North Dakota’s most famous actor. Almost to Bismarck, we drove past miles and miles of ponds that set my heart racing, but Kurt told me later that the ponds were very shallow, only a couple of feet deep, and that they froze solid in winter. Fish couldn’t survive the freeze. A thousand miles further south and those miles of ponds would be a destination, except of course when they dried up in the heat of the summer.

Well, actually, a thousand miles further south they’d be High Plains playa lakes, and those aren’t something you fish either.

At the Fargo visitor’s center, North Dakota’s most famous actor. He was autographed by the Coen brothers.

Ok, that’s enough of a wind up. Here’s the bottom line: we didn’t catch a fish in North Dakota. It was hard to get to, and then it was even harder getting home–it was our first intimation that things are a bit screwed up at Southwest Airlines. Coming home we had a 16-hour day and were routed through New Orleans from Austin to get to Houston. We could have gone to Paris from New York and back to New York again.

And like I said, we didn’t catch a fish. We fished the second day at Nelson Lake and watched carp gulp air into their swim bladders because the outfall from the power plant was heating the lake. It was frustrating. The first day though we fished in the side channels of the Missouri River, and the Missouri, maybe our most famous river after the Mississippi, was magnificent for every reason except fly fishing. You can’t stand on the Missouri without thinking about Lewis and Clark, Teddy Roosevelt, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, western migration, buffalo, migratory birds and antelope and seas of grass, everything the plains are. North Dakota feels as wild as it gets in the lower 48.

Thoreau wrote a series of essays about Maine, and in one, Chesuncook, after a companion gratuitously kills a moose, he is at his best, writing about our relationship to nature and to wildness, and how–and I paraphrase here–our highest use of nature is not to catch a fish, or chop down a tree, or kill a moose–those uses are petty. Our highest use is to discover our shared immortality with the fish, or the pine tree, or the moose. I’m not sure I buy that immortality business, but I get what he’s saying, at least a bit, and he recognizes in 1853, when there was still plenty ‘o wildness, that something was lost if our incidental uses used up the unsullied natural world, or if we only approached the natural world as something only to be fished, or lumbered, or hunted. In North Dakota, there’s still some natural world left to contemplate, and some of the human world too, particularly while standing on the bank of the Missouri River.

But dangit, higher aspirations and Henry David Thoreau aside, I surely would have liked to catch a fish.