At the end of June we go to the Bronx to see the Astros play the Yankees, then we drive north to the Catskills, the home of the Hudson River School, stand-up Jewish comedy, and American dry fly fishing. We’re staying in Sullivan County on the upper Beaverkill. Our inn, the Beaverkill Valley Inn, has a mile of riverside. This is important, because under New York riparian law landowners can post the river, and almost all of the upper Beaverkill is posted. The lower Beaverkill, past Roscoe, is largely open, as are other Catskill rivers, but hopefully we’ll see less of a crowd. Or not.

We’re matriculating for a weekend at the Wulff School of Fly Fishing near Livingston Manor. My reasons for going are confused, it’s the basic trout fishing curriculum, and I like classes, but it may be for beginners, which I am but am not. I’ll learn something. We’ll also fish a day with Pennsylvania casting champion Craig Buckbee, who instructs at the school. I hope it’s legal for him to cast in New York.

After we graduate we drive from Livingston Manor to Manchester, Vermont. There are lots of Manchesters. There’s Manchester, England; Manchester, New Hampshire; California, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, and on and on . . . you get the idea. The big ones, England and New Hampshire, are industrial towns known historically for their grittiness. Now they’re gentrifying. Manchester, Vermont, on the other hand, isn’t known for its grittiness. It’s known for Orvis, which has more of the genteel than the gritty.

We’re staying at the Orvis-endorsed Equinox Resort. As we were settling dates I made a reservation then called to move things around. The reservation clerk at the hotel, we’ll call him Jacques, told me in Québécois French-accented English that I couldn’t move my dates. He told me that my dates were fixed and I would never be allowed to move them, ever, and that my only chance to move them was to call corporate, which is now Marriott, who would not under any circumstance move my dates without charging substantial penalties and inflicting corporal punishment.

I called corporate, stunned and humble, and told them that I was pretty sure that when I made the reservation I had left the dates flexible. They told me I was right, and they didn’t know what Jacques was talking about. They moved the dates around and gave me a better rate. They were nice. They were great. It was great. Everything is great except Jacques, with whom I am still annoyed. I wondered if he was demonstrating New England taciturnity or Gallic bellicosity: whichever or both he was good at it.

Apparently at the end of the Civil War, over the summer of 1863, Mary Todd Lincoln and their sons stayed at the Equinox to get out of the heat of Washington and away from the War. The family planned to return in the summer of 1865, this time with the President. They never did. Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, almost immediately after Appomattox.

I have read that the Equinox has Manchester’s best donuts. Manchester also has the Orvis flagship store, and the American Museum of Fly Fishing.

From southern Vermont we drive north to the Canadian border to Pittsburgh, New Hampshire, to the Lopstick Inn on the headwaters of the Connecticut River. Everybody probably knows this but me, but the Connecticut River separates New Hampshire and Vermont, and otherwise New Hampshire and Vermont would be the same thing, which they pretty much are anyway. We have to return south again, to our second Manchester, New Hampshire this time, but that’s in the Boston orbit and we’re only going there to spend one night before we fly back to Houston.

I’ve been to New York plenty, but I have never been to New Hampshire or Vermont. I have a vague notion that this is classic fly-fishing territory, and I’ve already learned something important: I’ve learned that looking north Vermont is on the left and New Hampshire on the right. I’ll be a New Englander yet.