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.
It took planning, skill, and ruthless cunning to find that fish. What’s more, I didn’t just catch one fish in North Dakota, I caught two fish, which is as high as I can count when I go fishing. I may have them mounted if I can find the wall space.
Because we were fishing without a guide, I had three problems. In North Dakota, there are native walleye, northern pike, sunfish, bass, and catfish. There are invasive carp. There are stocked trout. I was desperate, and would have been happy to catch any of them, but that meant I had to prepare for all of them. I put together my fly box, then showed it to my friend Mark Marmon. I also told him that I was considering a children’s pond at a federal fish hatchery.
Like I said, ruthless cunning.
Mark asked if I had any coffee bean flies for the kid’s pond. Coffee bean flies are a coffee bean glued to a hook then covered with a UV curing resin. They’ve been around since the 30s, and were originally tied to imitate beetles. For hatchery fish they’re also are a good imitation of Purina fish chow, and for Houston bayou carp they also resemble escaped solids from a sewage treatment plant. At one time Mark would have had the fly rod world record for grass carp, except that the IGFA considered the coffee bean fly to be bait.
Me? I think it’s an artificial fly,. Fish don’t drink coffee. It’s not bait. I tied a dozen.
I had to decide what rod to take, and settled on a 7-weight. Rods run in weights from size 1 to 14, depending on the size of fish you’re catching. Trout are typically caught on a 4- or 5-weight, and biggish saltwater fish on an 8- or 9-weight. A 14 is basically an 8-foot 2×4 for marlin. You don’t so much fish with them as use them as clubs.
A 7-weight would be plenty to handle a 7-pound fish, and while I wasn’t likely to see any 7-pound fish in North Dakota it didn’t matter. I wasn’t fooling around. If I caught something big in North Dakota, a pike maybe, I wanted enough rod to handle it. Mark suggested that a 6-weight would be plenty. Deep in my heart of hearts I knew he was right, but I wasn’t taking chances.
Finally there was the question of where to go. The Red River of the North is praised for its excellent catfishing, but that’s kind of a random endeavor for a fly rod, and the photos of the river weren’t very inviting. As I’ve already explained, the big lakes and walleye weren’t an option. We couldn’t fish the Missouri again without a boat, and that hadn’t been successful for us anyway.
I found a list of community ponds stocked by North Dakota Game and Fish. We left the Fargo airport and drove straight to a park pond behind an elementary school in a Fargo subdivision. There was an 11-year old kid there gear fishing, and a younger girl, maybe nine, and her dad loading their cooler with a stringer of fish. They held the stringer up to show me.
Tiny fish. Little bitty fish. The biggest stringer of the smallest fish I’ve ever seen. I supposed they would take them home and fry them up, but they’d be most useful on crackers as hors d’oeuvres. They must have had five pounds of 30 fish that turned canned sardines into monsters.
I moved down the pond bank and tied on an olive wooly bugger, which is a fly you can use anywhere to catch anything, including tiny fish, but all I caught was pond scum. The little girl came over–one side of her head was shaved but she didn’t have any visible tattoos. She offered me a gruesome severed fish tail from one of her tiny fish. She said I’d never catch anything of any size in that pond without a fish tail. I thought about it but declined. Coffee beans are one thing, but I couldn’t convince myself that fish tails weren’t bait.
The girl told me that she and her dad had caught a bunch of bluegill, some bass, some catfish, and a piranha.
To keep out of the weeds I switched out the woolly bugger for a tiny blue surface popper, about as small as bass poppers get. There were dragon flies, and I like small poppers when there are dragon flies. I could see fish slap at my popper in the water, but even the piranhas were too small for the fly. I finally lipped that tiny bluegill–I didn’t actually set the hook, but I was fast enough on the set that the fish came flying out of the water past my ear and into the bankside grass. I didn’t have a stringer, or a cracker, so I released it back into the pond.
I had my North Dakota fish. Kris bird-watched.
The next day we drove west. We drove out of Fargo off the highway to the end of the pavement and down gravel roads. We never found Mirror Pond, even though it was explained to us that the Mirror Pond we wanted (not the one we were heading toward), was back the way we’d come, a left turn at the water plant, about four miles up the road, then another left turn. How could we miss it?
The Sheyenne River at Fort Ransom State Park had steep overgrown banks and it looked like I’d suffer some major damage climbing down to it, and I wasn’t real certain what I’d find if I got there. At the fish hatchery the children’s pond was covered with scum. To top off the day we had a remarkably bad hamburger in Valley City. How does someone make a bad hamburger? We never unpacked our fly rods. What did I care? I had my North Dakota fish.
The next day, our final day, we drove north from Fargo to Turtle River State Park, near Grand Forks. There was a park ranger at the desk, and she showed me on the park map where to fish. She said that in the spring North Dakota stocked the river–it’s not much as a river but it’s a pretty stream–stocked with trout in the spring, but by July nothing would be left. They would stock it again in the fall. She said a lot of fly anglers came to the park just to stand in the stream and cast. I said fly anglers were stupid that way.
She agreed. She didn’t have to agree.
When we left Kris remarked about how cute the ranger was. She wasn’t that cute.
We drove to the stream and I went down to the dam to stupidly cast into the river–it’s a tiny dam built in the 30s by the CCC. I was fishing a pheasant tail nymph under a foam hopper imitation. Kris bird-watched.
I caught a fish on the pheasant tail. I hooked it and everything. I didn’t sling it past my ear. I think it was a creek chub, though it could have been a flathead chub, or it could have been a shiner. It was a perfect match to my park pond bluegill, almost too much fish for my 7-weight rod, and I’m going to get it mounted, too. My two North Dakota fish will look stunning together over the fireplace.
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.
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.
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.
