After our day of fishing on Spring Creek at Fishermen’s Paradise, we fished two more days near State College with Dom Swentosky guiding; one day on a different part of Spring Creek, and then a day on Penns Creek. For the uninitiated, (1) these are Cricks not Creeks, and (2) Dom Swentosky is a good writer, he plays the guitar, and his sons play little league baseball. I guess as much as anything, those are the reasons we hired him.
A lot of Dom’s writing is the kind of detailed technical nuts and bolts stuff that warms fly fishers’ hearts: after reading one of Dom’s blog posts, I swapped out my elastic wader belt–the kind that sags–with a police utility belt that doesn’t sag. I’ve never regretted it, at least not after I figured out how the safety catch worked and could stop wiggling. Dom also has a blog post on how while wearing waders to stay warm, dry, and pee. It’s not a post that will speak to Kris, but for 50% of the population it’s useful, particularly if you already know about the safety catch.
Dom wade fishes in trout streams. It’s everyone’s mental image of fly fishing; romantic, peaceful, aesthetically pleasing. It may also be the least guided fishing in these late days, what with the rise of drift boats and saltwater angling, and it’s certainly the kind of fishing I do least. Wading in a warmwater bayou just doesn’t have quite the appeal, plus one is likely to lose boots in the muck. It doesn’t matter whether I ever get to do it though. Wading in a trout stream is what fly fishing looks like.
Wading in a trout stream with Dom is also a barrage of information. He had something useful to tell us about everything happening on the stream–as Dom would say, another data point–and the info was compressed into a constant stream of well-honed nutshells. I thought about making a list of the best stuff Dom said, but then I figured I’d probably forgotten most of it, or worse had garbled most of it. I suspect that it’s all in Troutbitten anyway, and Dom says he learned to fish from books by Joe Humphreys and George Daniel, so among the three I wouldn’t be telling anybody anything new. When we got home I started re-reading Daniel’s Dynamic Nymphing, and came across this at the very beginning of the chapter on tight-lining:
The style is . . . physically demanding. You must be able to get close enough to present the patterns in a natural manner without opposing currents creating drag. As a result, a straight up-and-across approach is common to ensure that the line and leader end up in current flowing at the same speed. In large bodies of water, this means having to wade further out to cast directly upstream . . . .
George Daniel, Dynamic Nymphing, p. 48.
I suppose I had read that heartwarming passage before, but to me it only had meaning after I stood in the crick with Dom and he explained that to avoid dragging the fly, I should try to cast straight up from the rod tip and not cross currents. When I first read that passage in Daniel at home, it apparently didn’t register. Standing in a trout stream it made sense.
There are a lot of possible streams near State College, and at the end of our first day Dom named some choices and asked us where we wanted to fish? The first day with Dom we had fished Spring Creek again, just a bit upriver from where we fished with Jim, and I was tempted to fish Spring Creek the third day, to adopt it as my short-term home water. We had seen Penns Creek though, and it was beautiful. It seemed a shame not to fish it. We chose, but I oddly hadn’t wanted the burden of choices. I don’t know why choosing was harder than it should have been.
I got a little obsessed with why it was hard to choose, which led to why do I fish with guides anyway? Which led to why do I fish? These are big existential questions, and I came up with and discarded dozens of answers. No single answer was completely satisfactory. Since I didn’t list what Dom told me, here’s a list of some of the best reasons, replete with bullet-points:
I like to hold fish, if only for a second. At that moment of connection everything is centered.
Traveling with a fly rod is a good excuse. Why did we go to Pennsylvania? We went to Pennsylvania to fish. We could have gone to Pennsylvania to see the Liberty Bell, or to eat scrapple, or to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates. We went to fish.
I like the technical stuff. I don’t pretend I’m much good at it, but I enjoy the mechanical focus that fly-fishing demands.
It’s something my parents gave me, though I’m no longer baifishing for catfish. Still, I’ve always fished.
It’s something Kris likes. She likes golf, and she likes crochet, but I’m not going to play golf or take up crochet. Among the things we share, we share fishing.
Like I said, these were big questions, and of all the answers, the one I came back to most often was sitting bankside for lunch with Kris and Dom while we watched a sulphur mayfly hatch come off the water. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of mayflies, and they were lovely, delicate things, pale yellow and tiny. They drifted off the water like the gentlest act of creation. I napped a bit–I may not be so accomplished of a fly fisher, but I will brag on my streamside napping–and when I woke we still sat and watched the mayflies for a long, long time. There was anticipation, trout feed on rising mayflies and we expected at any moment to see the rings on the water where the fish were starting to rise, but they never rose. It didn’t matter. There was satisfaction in the moment, joy even. It was just enough of everything.
* * *
Before we left State College, we stopped by Flyfisher’s Paradise. There was a tray of sulphur flies on the counter, and the guy tying flies behind the counter joked that it was good to know when he came to work what he was going to do all day –tie sulphurs. For a couple of weeks he would tie sulphur after sulphur after sulphur. We bought some to bring home with us, a couple of spinners, a couple of emergers, and a couple of duns, not that we’re ever likely to use them. It doesn’t matter. Now I have them.
I’m a pretty mediocre fly fisher. There are other things I do well, complex things, enviable things, useful things. I am, I think, a good husband, a good father, and a good lawyer. I’m curious, and reasonably quick on the uptake. If you wanted to elect someone as Benevolent Overlord, I’d be an excellent candidate.
Me, demonstrating one of my higher level fishing skills. I demonstrated similar prowess in Pennsylvania.
Still, my knowledge of trout fishing is weak. I know trout live in rivers (and also lakes), I know they eat bugs (and also fish and freshwater mollusks), and I know that when I catch one it’s more often than not pure happenstance. I’m a greedy man though, and more than most things I want to know how to fish for trout. Fifty years later all those wasted adolescent hours studying Field and Stream have left me ambitious.
Parts of Pennsylvania, along with a few other American places–the Catskills and Yellowstone come to mind–are trout fishing holy ground. Fly fishing lore is loaded with Pennsylvania names; Vince Marinaro, Charlie Fox, and Ed Shenk at Letort Spring Run, Bob Clouser on the Susquehanna, and, at State College, Bob Harvey, Joe Humphries, and most recently George Daniel. I suspect there are several reasons Pennsylvania’s such fertile ground: a lot of great streams spread across the state, an outdoors recreation tradition, just enough leisure and money, and–and this is peculiarly my own invention–a manufacturing industry that encouraged Pennsylvanians to think in a peculiar way. It’s probably nonsense, but I like to think there’s a tie between Pennsylvanian’s aptness with the mechanics of fly fishing and their aptness with the mechanics of industry.
Philadelphia to State College and the Crick
I rarely get messages on this blog, and except for one article*, I’m pretty convinced that nobody ever reads it but Kris and a cadre of hackers from Mainland China. That’s ok, I write it for Kris, and as for the hackers I’m glad for the attention. Last year though Jim Litrum left a message on the blog. He asked if I’d been at Joan Wulf’s school the previous June, and I thought that sounded about right. He volunteers at the schools and said he remembered me. I didn’t think I disrupted class that much.
Jim said that when we came to Pennsylvania, we should go to State College and he’d introduce us to some people. State College, population circa 42,000, is nigh on the state’s center. It’s the home of Penn State**. We were planning, then Covid shut everything down.
As part of our 2020 planning I had booked Dom Swentosky as a guide for two days in May near State College. I admired Dom’s writing, and he coached little league so if nothing else we could talk about baseball. When Kris and I re-planned for May 2021, we had one spare day and Jim said we should fish Spring Creek, State College.
Actually he said Spring Crick. Did you know Pennsylvanians say Crick, not Creek? Apparently in the Mid-Atlantic (including Pennsylvania) and the South (except for Texas), proper pronunciation is crick. Of all Southerners, only us Texans stubbornly say creek, with a long e. We also say buy-you, not buy-yo, so what the hell do we know? We got that wrong too. You can’t rhyme “Goodby Joe/Me gotta go” with buy-you, not even right here in Buy-you City.
So on Jim’s advice we went to State College a day earlier than we had originally planned. We had dinner with Jim, and it was a great dinner, in a good place, and Jim, who I’d only talked to on the phone, is a pretty funny guy, particularly after a martini. Plus I tricked him into agreeing to buy breakfast the next morning. Hah!
The Mayor of Spring Creek.
Jim grew up in Pennsylvania, went to the Merchant Marine Academy and then the Navy, and after the navy spent a career in the chemical industry. He retired to State College to fish (after a stint in the Keys), then for family moved two hours southwest, still in Pennsylvania. On Wednesday we had breakfast with Jim and his friend Chris at the Waffle Shop. Jim paid. Hah!
We followed Chris to Fisherman’s Paradise on Spring Creek. I kid-you-not. Pennsylvanians had the nerve to name the place Fisherman’s Paradise and put it right there on the map.
Jim’s friend Chris is a former army colonel who retired to State College to . . . fish. This is a recurring theme here. Retired. Fish. And Chris fishes. Chris fishes every day, or almost every day. He spends 300+ days a year on the water, mostly on Spring Creek. Jim called him the Mayor of Spring Creek. When we fished with Dom he said that Chris was the best dry fly fisher that Dom knew. Dom said that on those 300+ days that Chris fishes Spring Creek, he always fishes dry flies, and that he catches fish on a dry every month of the year. He said that some months Chris was fishing midges so tiny . . . Well, I can’t come up with a metaphor for so tiny. Really tiny, teensy, too small to see on the water, too small to count most days as more than a smudge, and on Pennsylvania February days when everybody and everything sane (including bugs and fish) are home in front of the heating vent, Chris is fishing Spring Creek, in shorts, watching where his smudge might be–Chris can’t possibly see his fly–watching for the suggestion of a rising fish, and catching fish. That’s crazy. That’s good.
Of course this is all hearsay and imagination, and will remain so. I’m not going fishing in Pennsylvania in February to see if it’s true.
Spring Creek might not be considered much of a place to be mayor of, it’s neither very wide nor very deep, but if you’re mayor of a trout population, it’s a large constituency. According to Jim, where we fished Spring Creek holds about 4000 wild brown trout per river mile. That’s a lot, and the best parts of the Creek are never stocked. There are no rainbows, no brookies (though certainly there once were), just wild brown trout. The trout can run larger than 20 inches, but most we saw–ok, ok, the one that through random dumb luck and Jim’s good advice I actually caught–was probably about 10 inches. I suspect that’s pretty common.
The river is spring fed,*** so flows are reasonably constant, both as to volume and temperature. Jim explained it to me. Beneath us and the topsoil was limestone. Limestone is permeable. Water filters down into the limestone, cools, and leaches mineral deposits. As new water seeps in, old water is pushed up and out. First-in, first-out. My finance lawyer brain can understand that. Spring Creek’s springs are the products of FIFO accounting.
The Spring Creek limestone was formed from invertebrate deposits settling from ancient seas that eons ago covered Central Pennsylvania.**** When the spring water emerges from the limestone, it brings along the leached minerals from the ancient dead things, and the mineral nutrients that once fed the ancient dead things can now do double duty, this time feeding new invertebrates that feed the mayflies and caddises that feed the brown trout. Lots of brown trout. The world’s motherload of brown trout. And Jim and the Mayor and their friends are there to fish those brown trout. 300+ days a year, including February.
Jim and the Mayor and Friends
With Jim’s guidance I caught my trout early. Kris fished with the Mayor and caught one a bit later. I guess it goes without saying that we were fishing dries. Jim and the Mayor fish dries. These days nymph fishing is all the rage among trout anglers, and most of the best new writing about trout fishing is about the unexpected complexities of nymph fishing, but watching a bobber hesitate can’t compare with watching a fish rise. The Mayor and Jim fish dries.
And we met the guys. I don’t know what Jim told people, or maybe everybody just shows up at Spring Creek every day, but it seemed that morning everybody started showing up. There was the retired Penn State biology professor, Art the retired Penn State engineering professor, and Luke from the local fly shop, Angler’s Paradise. I apologize that I can’t remember names, or everyone. There was Dan Shields, who literally wrote the book about Spring Creek, and Dan gave me a copy.***** We had to fish in front of these people. These people actually know how to fish.
It was the sulphur mayfly season, so Jim (who’d offered whatever flies I needed, which was helpful since Chris pronounced my 40-years of randomly accumulated dry flies worthless for the sulfur hatch), tied a size 16 sulpher on my line. I fished that all day. I was casting ok, and my drifts were mostly ok, but I probably missed a half-dozen rises. Jim gently–ok maybe not so gently–pointed out that my hook sets were horrible because my line management was horrible, that I left my left hand, my line hand, off the line too often, that I left too much slack line on the water, and that by the time I cleared the enormous line slack the striking fish had sent a couple of texts, called in a dinner reservation, and readjusted the car radio to find the ballgame. Sulfer duns were coming off the water, so the mayflies were cooperating, and I was getting rises. My biggest problem was that the trout didn’t have the courtesy to hook themselves, and apparently I was too polite to do it for them.
Towards the end of the day I was fishing up river from the bridge with Jim and Art, and I watched Art catch fish. His casts were all just a foot or five finer than mine, his drifts were just a bit-to-a-whole-lot cleaner, his hook sets were, well, he set the hook. Mid-afternoon Kris and I left the creek to check into our room, and then Kris had us back at Fisherman’s Paradise for the evening’s spinner fall. In the roughly three hours we were gone Jim caught and named most of the fish in the Creek. That part anyway.
What These Guys Got
Jim said that he and Chris would fish until dark because the best fishing of the day would be the spinner fall–after mayflies emerge from the stream as duns, their lives consist mostly of partying, laying eggs, and falling dead back to the water as spinners. I didn’t fish much that evening, for some reason I couldn’t see my fly and for some reason I didn’t trust my fly or my fishing, so I just watched. Kris was having a fine old time, but I was oddly unsettled. Our companions were so knowledgeable, so practiced, so accustomed to their water, and while I was happy just to watch them, I was also a bit jealous. Ok, more than a bit.
One of the downsides to our gallivanting around to fish is that it’s a great way to travel, but a lousy way to fish. I have learned a lot about visiting places, but not so much about catching fish. These guys stayed put in a place worth staying put and had learned how to fish.
I sat down a night or so later and read parts of Dan Shields Fly Fishing Pennsylvania’s Spring Creek, and I’ve read it off and on since. Dan covers the year at Spring Creek, nymphs and dries, and he covers the miles of the river. There are parts of it that unfortunately I’ll never need:
Fall brings some decent hatches of Trichotera, Tan Caddis in #16-18 and a larger fly in #14 produce interesting fishing.
I say unfortunate because I doubt I’ll be back to Spring Creek in the fall. My loss.
There are also things Dan writes that could be said for most bodies of water:
Improve stormwater detention basins. They should trap, filter, and permit water to seep into the ground instead of pollute streams.
Of course in Houston we need detention basins to keep from drowning, which selfishly encourages detention more than any aversion to our considerable non-point source pollution, but that judgment could be written for any urban area near a body of water.
Entertainment isn’t Dan’s goal either, though at times he’s flat-out amusing, at least in a fly-fishing sort of way:
Spring Creek trout see more different imitations than I do, and I work in a fly shop.
But Dan’s not really writing to amuse. Where Dan shines brightest is in his description of the place, its geological and human history, its biology and ecological fragility, its provenance, if you will. Dan is thorough, careful, and writing from his obvious affection and knowledge. You may from time to time get some information out of me, but I assure you, it’s purely accidental and completely unintended. Dan on the other hand knows Spring Creek, and he willingly shares the considerable stuff he knows. It’s not casual knowledge, either, he’s worked for it. It’s a small book, but it’s a glimpse of love for a place worth loving.
No wonder I envied these guys.
Postscript
Before we left, at the end of the evening when we were losing the light, while I was moping about feeling wistful and debating with myself whether I had ever actually seen a spinner, or knew what one was, Kris caught one last trout. Sometimes I envy my fishing partner too.
* For some reason, I have one blog post that gets hits almost every day. It’s about Pyramid Lake ladders, and was published April 1, 2019, which should tell you everything you need to know. I feel sorry for the poor people who stumble across that post looking for information.
**I’m guessing that’s where State College got its name.
***I’m guessing that’s where Spring Creek got its name.
****This may qualify as the worst sentence I’ve ever written, and since I’m a lawyer it’s got considerable competition. I thought about rewriting it, but it was so marvelously bad, I had to let it be. It reads like I stole it from the introductory paragraph to Chapter 4 of your 8th grade earth science textbook.
*****Daniel L. Shields, Fly Fishing Pennsylvania’s Spring Creek, DLS Enterprises, P.O. Box 41, Lemont, Pa 16851. Dan’s book is self-published in the best way, by taking it to a local printer.
Last year I read some about Delaware, and wrote some. A couple of weeks ago I read some more, and wrote some more. I tried to imagine the place, and I mostly got it wrong. In my head I pictured grimy streets and run-down buildings full of sketchy situations, and I’m sure there’s some of that in parts of Wilmington. Where we were though was lovely.
We did make it as far as the center of Wilmington, but for the most part we were in the suburban buffer between Wilmington and Philadelphia. Suburban Wilmington is what mini-mansions aspire to. Graceful houses with some age, screened by trees, bordered by lawns, adorned in the spring with flowering everything. I think if somebody threw a beer can out their car window, in a couple of hours it would flower. It was clean, lush, established, and with just enough unmanicured space.
Terry Peach guides out of his shop, A Marblehead Flyfisher. When we planned this trip pre-Covid, Terry warned me that fishing near Wilmington was urban fishing. I get why Terry said that. Most of us imagine fly fishing in a mountain wilderness. This wasn’t wilderness, so Terry did his job: one expectation managed. For me though “urban” conjured scrambling down the slope of a half-eroded, half-concreted drainage ditch in a sketchy part of town to get a cast to a carp. What Terry told me was that we’d be fishing in an urban park, probably solely to knock notions of wilderness out of my head. All I heard though was urban. When I got to the Brandywine I was surprised that it was a nice park, a lovely park, the park of the morning of the world. Ok, it wasn’t really Eden, it wasn’t Yellowstone, but it was pretty. This wasn’t ditch water.
This park, Brandywine Park, runs along both sides of Brandywine Creek and is populated by joggers, people walking dogs and pushing strollers, rose gardens, anglers (all of whom seemed to know Terry), bank riparian zones, and safe parking. It’s location was apparently blessed by Frederick Law Olmstead, though that was probably before the nation’s eastern-most interstate, I-95, transected it on its way from Miami to the Canadian border. Where we fished, upstream of the interstate overpass, the park is a mix of natural and pampered green growth. If Delaware mangroves could survive the cold, they’d be pretty lush mangroves.
Google Earth
The Brandywine (which is the best name for a body of water ever, and which is also the name of the river in the Shire) flows out of Pennsylvania and into Wilmington where it meets the Christina River and then flows into Delaware Bay. The Christina in Wilmington is tidal, but we were too far upriver, about two miles I think, to be affected by the tides. Terry put us fewer than 10 feet off the right bank, just below the first dam, née the second dam. The former first dam was removed because it was in bad shape, and as a side-benefit the open water encouraged shad migration, and there’s plenty of discussion about removing more dams for the shad. The first dam, née the second dam, is part of the Wilmington freshwater supply system though, so it’s unlikely it will ever be removed. Kris asked why there wasn’t a fish ladder, or elevator, or some such. Terry said ladders were expensive, both to build and maintain, and the local government had other priorities. Shad don’t vote.
Water was apparently high, and not as clear as it might be with lower flows. To avoid backcasts–which because of bank growth would have caught a lot more trees than fish–we fished Terry’s Sage Z-Axis spey rods. They were shorter than some two-handed rods, 11-foot 7 weights. I’d last cast a spey rod more than a year ago in Washington State, and then only for a day. I broke my rod, but I didn’t mention that to Terry. I learned my lesson, to get the tip down to the water on the snap-T, and anyway some things are better off forgotten.
We fished skagit lines without a sink tip. Terry said some interesting things about lines, that different lines worked differently with different rods, and that some lines made some rods sing–of course you have to be able to cast worth a damn to make that true, and I doubt I’d know the difference. He said though that as a local fly shop owner it was his job to know which lines worked best with which rods.
American shad are mostly filter feeders, plankton is their favorite gamefish, and coming from the salt into freshwater to spawn they’re not eating anyway. They have one thing on their tiny fish brains–par-tee! It’s orgy time, and Terry said they would move fast upriver to spawn until something stopped them and they stacked. That’s where he said we wanted to fish, where they stacked, either to rest in front of an obstacle before their next run or because they couldn’t go any further. Our job was to set up and let the fish come to us. There were natural obstacles that would work, slots where the river changed levels for instance, but we set up below the dam because that was the biggest obstacle of all. The dam stops fish.
There are plenty of theories about why filter-feeding American shad take a fly; anger, curiosity, raging hormones, maybe even that shad don’t just filter feed and they’re taking small fish out of habit. Terry said that because they don’t have fingers, the only way a shad can swat an annoyance is to use its mouth. It sees something in its face, and it’s like swatting a mosquito, but look Ma, no hands!
Because shad aren’t really feeding, the flies don’t really match anything. Shad fishing is extreme attractor fishing; maybe distractor fishing would be more accurate. The flies are various heavyweights of bright stuff. A combination of hot pink and chartreuse isn’t a typical selection of fly colors, even in salt water. The shad flies are meant to hang in the water column in fast water and provoke a response, not to imitate.
We were on river right, so to cast we used a double spey cast over our left downriver shoulder. The casts were across, sometimes even a bit upriver, and at specific targets. They weren’t long, I was at most 10 feet into the running line, which may have been because that’s about as far into the running line as I could cast. Watching Kris, it looked like she was casting much better than me, though I am proud that I didn’t break any rods. She wasn’t shooting any line (I could shoot a magnificent five or six feet), but her loops were tight and consistent. Terry did a great job coaching both of us.
Terry had us cast, mend, try to follow a current line as far as we could, and then let the fly swing. Then wait. Then wait. Then wait some more. The dangle, he called it. Terry said that was where shad most often hit the fly, when it was unnaturally dangling in the current. I told him he ought to come up with a song for people to sing to hold the dangle as long as he wanted. I tried singing “Happy Birthday” because it was all I could really think of, but I got sick of it. Next time I think I’ll memorize the lyrics to “Cool Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers, or maybe Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” There has to be something better than “Happy Birthday,” and singing Al Green is always worthwhile.
Because there will be a next time. One of us didn’t catch a fish. The problem wasn’t us, not completely us anyway, and Kris caught what Terry called a fall fish, which in Delaware is anything that’s not a gamefish. It was some kind of chub. Kris doesn’t have to go back to Delaware, but I do, and I suspect she’ll come along. We really didn’t spend nearly enough time there.
The big problem in the Brandywine was that the water was too cold and the shad weren’t there. It was cold when we got to Delaware, and it never really warmed. Terry said we’d picked the perfect time of year, but that it was freakishly cold, that the water temperature needed to be above 60 or the shad would run back into deeper water in the Christina. I’m afraid we all need to get used to saying that: I didn’t catch a fish because the weather was freakishly [cold][hot][dry][wet][windy][whatever]. It’s our new global warming paradigm for not catching fish.
It’s also the problem with allowing one day to catch a fish. We’re already burdened with less than stellar skills, we’re fishing in unfamiliar places, and sometimes it’s just not going to happen. That’s ok. I’d like to see more of Delaware.
Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom, oil on canvass, c. 1834, National Gallery of Art.
It’s hard to think about Pennsylvania without thinking about Quakers. Quakers emerged in Britain after 1650, around the time of the end of the English Civil War. Early Quaker doctrine is based principally on the writings and teachings of George Fox, a self-educated weaver’s son. He would preach for hours to thousands, but I’m sure everybody was on their phones.
George Fox, 162401690, print, 1914, Library of Congress.
Quaker was a derogatory term, like Holy Roller, but the Quakers were good with that, and took to the term. What they called themselves varied, but their official self-identification always seems to be some variation of the Religious Society of Friends. It was the American Friends Service Committee and the Friends Service Council that received the 1947 Nobel Prize for Peace on behalf of the Quakers.
By the 1800s, there were about 350,000 Quakers worldwide. In 2021 there are about 350,000 Quakers worldwide. They didn’t do so well on that whole growth thing.
Some central Quaker beliefs haven’t really changed in 370-odd years. They don’t swear oaths, or use hierarchical forms of address. The Queen is not The Queen, but Betty Windsor. They’re pacifists. They accept the spiritual equality of women–well, everybody really. A devout Quaker wears plain clothes out of humility, lives simply, and seeks direct personal religious experience without reliance on ritual. It was one of Fox’s early tenets that each of us can achieve true spiritual conversion without the intercession of clergy.
Early Quakers owned slaves–it is one of the great mysteries to us moderns that Europeans didn’t initially balk at slavery. It was hard times, and even the kindest people were used to common cruelties that would appall us. If you look at crime and death statistics for early Philadelphia, modern Somalia compares favorably. Really.
Their views changed though. By the mid-1700s, the Quakers were early adopters of abolitionism, and emerged among the most influential opponents to slavery, both in America and England. How could anyone own a slave? God’s light shines through us all, and we are all equal because of that inner light.
Howard Pyle, Mary Dyer being led to the gallows in Boston, McClure’s Magazine, 1905.
In 1660, the good people of Massachusetts–early Red Sox fans I reckon–executed four Quaker missionaries in Boston, most infamously Mary Dyer. Quakers were intermittently persecuted in England as well, and both Fox and and his disciple William Penn were imprisoned from time to time. From the outset, that wasn’t the Pennsylvania model. Pennsylvania’s tolerance for Jews and the varieties of Christian sects was certainly a direct result of persecution of Quakers (and a direct precursor of our Constitution’s views towards religious tolerance). Tolerance was such a peculiarly Quaker point of view.
I won’t waste your time with a recitation of how Penn, a Quaker, got hold of Pennsylvania in the 1680s, but some details are interesting. King Charles II named Pennsylvania not after William, but after his father, Admiral Sir William. The younger Penn tried to decline the name out of humility, and the King basically said that’s mighty proud of you. It was one funny dis of a Quaker.
Settlement of Pennsylvania under Penn was not a purely benevolent enterprise, but he spent his inherited fortune on the colony. He intended to recoup costs through land sales, just like any other land developer. Like many another land developer he died land-rich and cash-poor. Always with Penn though, there were other and better motives than mere land sales. Penn took lands from King Charles in settlement of debts, then purchased the same land from the native Lenape because he could not countenance the settlement of Pennsylvania by their exploitation.
William Penn Portrait, aged 22, 1644-1718, Goupin & Co., 1897, Paris, Library of Congress
Under Penn, Pennsylvania became the most democratic of the colonies, with early governance modeled on Quaker meetings. If the spirit moves you, speak up.
I have written before that I’m at least nominally Christian. I’m not much good at it. As I’ve said, when Jesus came to me by the Sea of Galilee, I’d like as not have begged off to keep fishing for fish. What appeals to me though about the Quakers is their intellectual consistency. Actually it’s the good results achieved from their intellectual consistency that appeals to me. It’s often the case that the worst Christian stuff seems to arise from our consistent pursuit of trivial–or worse, harmful–doctrinal stances. Don’t believe in the equality of women because of St. Paul? I’m certain there’s a sect for that. Do you believe in the impending Apocalypse because you once tried to read Revelations? There are plenty of sects for that. Infant baptism? Adult baptism? The absence of the filioque in the Apostles Creed? There are sects for all of those.
The Quakers engage in the same intense pursuit of doctrinal purity, but they aren’t often side-tracked by the trivial. They operate on a decidedly different plane. We all share the possibility of religious experience, and our spiritual equality demands social equality. I like the benevolence and humility of that. It’s too bad they don’t share the Methodist Hymnal. I could be as indifferent of a Quaker as I am an indifferent Methodist, but I do like to sing a good hymn.
Petrus Comestor, Bible Historiale, Nebuchadnezer outside of Jerusalem, 1372.
While it’s certainly not the only source, Quaker humility and benevolence seems to lead to many of the elements that are the best things about our democracy. If you think about the Hebrew Bible–the Old Testament for us Christians–in some ways it’s a long discourse on government. If you are a Hebrew, your job is to do what God commands so that, end of the day, your government works and God doesn’t send the Philistines to destroy Shiloh. Sacrifice to Baal, and the Babylonians are a’comin’. Good government is a divine contract with God.
Penn and the Quakers flip that. In governance it’s not the social contract with God but the religious experience of the individual that matters. Maybe it wasn’t conscious, but Penn seems to want his government to reflect the spiritual importance of each individual. As far as I know, it was something new. Penn’s Pennsylvania mostly abolished the death penalty. Penn’s Pennsylvania thought about things like prison reform. Pennsylvania had no common defense until the mid-1700s. Penn’s Pennsylvania gave us a framework for democracy when we finally got around to putting together the Constitution.
In the 1750s, Quakers withdrew from the leadership of the colony. They could not support fighting the French and Indian War, even though the war against Pennsylvania colonists was particularly brutal. They withdrew.
Quaker Oats standing Quaker Man, c. 1900, University of Miami Libraries via Wikipedia
One last observation about the Quakers; Quakers often made great businessmen. Barclay’s Bank, Cadbury Chocolate, Lloyd’s, Bethlehem Steel, all were Quaker enterprises. They brought to their business a reputation of honesty and fair dealing. It was Quaker merchants who first used the price tag, and they were the first not to haggle on price. Quakers set a fair price for goods, let you know what it was, and charged the same price to everyone.
Quaker Oats? Quaker Oats wasn’t Quaker, or wasn’t Quaker any more than Aunt Jemima syrup was a black female-owned enterprise. It was a marketing ploy to trade off the Quaker reputation for honesty and fair-dealing. Their products were pure.
***
Meanwhile Monday I didn’t go into work–get it? get it? Anyway I took a day’s vacation to move our poling skiff two hours down the coast, to Port O’Connor. The further south you go on the Texas Coast, the clearer the water. The clearer the water, the better the sight fishing. Galveston, where we’ve had our boat the past five years, is hard water to fish. Because of the outflow of the Mississippi, the water is rarely clear, and it’s hard to find protected water to fish. We have caught some, but we never caught that much.
Actually, that could describe most of our angling.
One of these boats and one of these motors is ours.
What we did do in Galveston was keep our boat in the easiest place imaginable, in a dry stack. A dry stack is a giant warehouse for boats, serviced by a giant fork lift. If we wanted the boat out of the dry stack, all we did was send them a text. It would miraculously appear in the water, gassed up and with ice in the Yeti.
Now we not only have to gas the boat ourselves, I have to back the boat down a boat ramp on a trailer to get the boat in the water. There is no longer a giant forklift. These trials may turn me into a Quaker, and certainly I will learn about humility. Or maybe there’s a saint specifically for intercession for backing trailers? I kinda like Pope Francis. It’s too bad he won’t do something about adopting the Methodist Hymnal. Modern Catholic music is the worst.
