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Smallmouth Bass (Micropterus dolomieu)

I’ve caught smallmouth twice, once on the Devil’s River in South Texas and once on the Shenandoah River in Virginia. Neither is in the smallmouth’s native range. The Shenandoah is a bit west of where smallmouth should be, over and down a mountain range, but smallmouth in the Devil’s River is a real stretch. As I recall they were imported to Falcon Reservoir on the Rio Grande and moved up into the Devil’s. The Devil’s is so far out of the way that you don’t go there except on purpose, so however they got there it wasn’t an accident.

That USGS map shows both the smallmouth’s historic range in mustard and (except for Canada–this is a USGS map) the expanded range in brown. Historically smallmouth were south of the Great Lakes, west of the Appalachians, along but mostly east of the Mississippi, and roughly north of a line extending along the southern border of Tennessee. It’s an area well out of my native range. Now they’re in Canada and in every state but Florida. They’re aggressive, adapt easily, mature quickly, and as often as not live long and prosper where people put them.

Their range is generally north of the range of their kin the largemouth, and they thrive in cooler water. They are more heat tolerant than trout, and are expected to expand north with global warming. We haven’t fished for smallmouth in their native range. Illinois will be a first.

Small-Mouth Black Bass (Micropterus dolomieu Lac.), 1910, Annual reports of the Forest, Fish and Game Commissioner of the State of New York for 1907-1908-1909, (13th-15th), Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon Company.

Smallmouth live both in stillwater and rivers, but they tend to grow larger in lakes. The all-tackle record smallmouth, 11 lbs, 15 oz., was caught in 1955 in Dale Hollow Reservoir in East Tennessee, which is not only a smallmouth Mecca but sounds exactly like the kind of place you’d find in East Tennessee.

Smallmouth are commonly 12 to 16 inches, with females generally larger than males. They’re usually olive with vertical bands, but can also be dark or light green. Colors vary depending on habitat. Dark waters, dark fish. Sand bottom, clear water, light fish.

A smallmouth’s jaw extends to a vertical line from the center of its eye, while a largemouth’s will go to the back of the eye. A smallmouth will eat most any protein thrown its way, including fish, insects, frogs, and crawfish. I’ve read that they’re not as partial to topwaters as largemouth, but I suspect that may be more a matter of time of year than disdain. Even largemouth only turn to topwaters when it’s hot.

Especially in colder environments smallmouth move into deeper water in the fall and start moving into shallows in the spring. They don’t really feed in cold, so they’re not an ice fishing target, but neither is anything else as far as I’m concerned. By the time we fished the Wisconsin River in late September the smallmouth had already moved out of the river and into the deeper lake.

Sherman Foote Denton, Watercolor of the smallmouth bass, 1897, Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fish, Game, and Forests of the State of New York.

Smallmouth begin to spawn when they’re three to five years old. Temperatures drive the spawn, and romance blooms in the spring when the water is around 60°. Males build circular nests in sand, gravel, or rock, in depths less than ten feet. In lakes nests are near shore and in streams in areas protected from strong current. Nests may be 2″ to 4″ deep and up to several feet across. From year to year males will typically build their nests within 150 feet of the prior year’s nest.

Males wait for females to come into the shallows, which sounds about right for male behavior generally. Colors are more intense during spawning, and males get into fights with other males, which also sounds about right. Mature females may contain up to 14,000 eggs. The eggs mature over time, and eggs aren’t dropped all at once. To drop some girl stuff the female settles at the bottom of the nest, while the male settles next to her. Hooray! The female drops small batches of eggs, fewer than 50 at a time, in intervals of under 30 seconds, so for 2000 eggs they’re going to be at it for awhile.  It’s all very romantic, with soft lights and music and candles, and the male is required to pay for dinner. 

Smallmouth aren’t particularly faithful, and a male may spawn with several females in the same nest. A female may visit more than one nest, dropping a few thousand eggs at each. Eggs hatch in a few days after fertilization, and males guard the nest for about a month, until the hatched fry begin to disperse. The males do the child-rearing, arranging for pre-schools and driving the carpools, and the females head to deeper water where they lie on the lake bottom to recover. Reproduction is hard work.

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Illinois

Over the Labor Day weekend we’re fishing in Illinois. This year we’ve fished in the Northeast, the South, the West, and Hawaii, and we’re on our way to Idaho, but we’ve made no trips to the Midwest. I have this premonition of us coming down to the last states with Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Indiana the last on the list, so we’re making a special effort to knock Illinois off the list. I’ve been to Illinois plenty, or at least I’ve been to Chicago plenty, but Illinois isn’t a fishing destination, no matter how much I might otherwise like Chicago

And I do like Chicago. Chicago overwhelms the state, but the population in the corporate limits of the city is declining. In 1840, Chicago’s population was 4,470, St. Louis’s 77,860, and New Orleans’ 116,375. Midwestern trade ran down the Mississippi on steamboats from St. Louis and points north to New Orleans. While St. Louis and New Orleans thrived, Chicago was a frontier settlement badly located in a muddy swamp. Trains changed everything. By 1900, six years before one of the great Chicago novels, The Jungle, the population of St. Louis was 575,238 and the population of New Orleans was 287,104. Chicago’s population was 1,698,575.

Chicago won the 19th Century.

McCormick Harvester Company advertisement – Front page of The Abilene reflector, Kansas, May 29, 1884 – scanned by US Library of Congress http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84029385/1884-05-29/ed-1/, from Wikipedia.

Three things built Chicago: meat, grain, and railroads, and Chicago’s rail and Great Lakes access to producers and markets and processing of meat and grain shaped the settlement of the the rest of the Prairies. With a McCormick reaper purchased on the installment plan (and other stuff purchased by catalogue from Sears, Roebuck), Chicago carried the Prairies into a market economy that was something new, something different. In the 18th Century Long Island farms produced grain. In the 19th Century Long Island farms converted to truck farms for produce.

Hog Butcher for the World,
   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
   Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
   Stormy, husky, brawling,
   City of the Big Shoulders:

Carl Sandburg, Chicago, 1914.

Sandburg’s not much in vogue, but explaining the City of the Century in 22 lines was pretty good work.

But still, Chicago is only one city in Illinois. In 1900 the population of Chicago was 1,698,575, the population of Illinois was 4,821,550. In 1950, Chicago’s zenith and three years before Saul Bellow published another of the City’s great novels, The Adventures of Auggie March, the city’s population was 3,620,962. By 2010 the city’s population had declined to 2,695,598.

Augiemarch.jpg

But in the 2010 census Illinois remained the sixth most populous state with 12,830,632 people, behind, in order, California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Chicago proper may have shrunk, but greater Chicago, the municipal statistical area known as Chicagoland, had a population of 9.5 million. There’s Chicago, and then there’s Chicago.

For Democrats, Illinois has been a dependable presidential vote, and Hillary Clinton carried the state in 2016 by 55.83%. There was, however, a decided rural/urban voter split, with Donald Trump carrying the rural counties.

Al Zifan, Illinois Presidential Results 2016, Creative Commons Attribution.

Illinois and Chicago also have a long and distinguished mastery of political corruption and political incompetence. Four of the last seven governors of Illinois, three Democrats, one Republican, served time after leaving office. The most imaginative may have been Rod Blagojevich (D), who tried to sell the appointment for Barrack Obama’s successor in the US Senate. Its most famous congressman, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R), plead guilty to structuring bank withdrawals to avoid reporting requirements, but is perhaps better known for admitting to molesting boys as a high school wrestling coach. Other well known Congressmen included Dan Rostenkowski (D) (mail fraud, 17 months) and Jesse Jackson (D) (mail and wire fraud, 30 months).

There’s also a special level of City of Chicago corruption, best captured in its 50-member Board of Aldermen. Patronage drove Chicago politics at least through the modern age, but even in the modern age the corruption is magnificent: The Economist quotes Dick Simpson of the University of Illinois, who estimates that of the 200 aldermen serving since 1969, 33 have served time for corruption. That’s only about 15%, but one suspects that there’s plenty of undetected malfeasance, and it’s 15%. Think of it being the norm for 15% of your co-workers going to work for fraud. That would be a special kind of office culture.

Of the places we’ve been, only New Orleans and Louisiana can hold a candle to Chicago and Illinois.

Chicago, Illinois. Union stockyards, Delano, Jack, 1943, U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War InformationChicago, Library of Congress.

And the incompetence! Chicago’s pension deficit is $28 billion and there’s no real plan to fix it. And as crippling as that is, it’s a drop in the bucket when stacked up against the estimated $214 billion state pension deficit. Standard & Poor’s rates Illinois’ long-term debt at BBB-minus. Junk. Illinois government is broke and failing.

There’s plenty of good stuff to say about Chicago. The University of Chicago championed the social sciences, there’s the magazine Poetry, a fine symphony and opera, the Art Institute, and Prairie Style architecture and the modern skyscraper. There’s the White Sox. Of course there’s also the Black Sox.

Illinois did give us our greatest statesman, A. Lincoln. One can put up with a lot for A. Lincoln. And I thought Barrack Obama a very good president, and he’s at least as Illinoisian as Lincoln was.

Abraham Lincoln, Matthew Brady, 1860, National Portrait Gallery.

Of course we’re going to go to Illinois to fish, and it’s not known for its fishing. I thought about trying urban fishing in the city, but honestly that feels presumptuous. It seems to me that urban fishing may be best left to local residents, and this exercise is stunt-like enough. Plus I should at least once get out of Chicago. We’ll go looking for smallmouth out of the City.

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New York, Vermont, New Hampshire Packing List, Part Two

Range Rovers

I’ve been looking at new cars. Mine is starting to cost real money to hold together, and its reliability worries me. If price and global warming weren’t a problem, I’d go buy a Land Cruiser and be done. I want a Land Cruiser, but the current model is 10 years old, gets a combined mileage of 15 mpg, and costs north of $80,000. Eighty thousand dollars would pay for a lot of fishing. Plus the Land Cruiser is just too big. The 4Runner is cheaper and smaller but just as old and nearly as guzzly, and their sister cars, the Lexus GX and LX, are old and guzzly and expensive and worse, they’re ugly. The best thing about driving a Lexus SUV is that you don’t have to look at that horrific grill. Is there an uglier grill on the road than a Lexus SUV?

I’ve driven a mid-sized Mercedes SUV since 1998, two of them anyway, but the new GLE has four different interfaces to communicate with your car’s electronic brain: voice, touch screen, a rotary controller, and not one but two steering wheel touch-pads. That gives you just all kinds of useless ways to turn on the radio. Meantime newer electronic safety features and adaptive cruise control are all extra added costs, and the dealer tells me hybrids are only available in California. Apparently Texans don’t care about global warming.

I want a car that will tow the skiff, has some off-road capability, has at least AWD for boat ramps. and has a reasonable array of cutting-edge safety stuff. I think I want a hybrid, and I know I want a car that I can drive home when there’s a foot of water on University Boulevard. This is, after all, Houston, and the streets in our neighborhood flood on a whim.

Which is a long way around to the half-day we didn’t fish in Vermont, when we spent a morning driving the Range Rover Sport on an off road course at the Equinox. The Land Rover Off-Road Driving Experience! I am experienced!

Driving around the course I got to tip the Sport down radical inclines and through mud and over humps and through gullies and whatnot, and I got to drive a car that I’d been thinking about test driving, though we were admonished that Land Rover did not consider the Experience! a test drive. Range Rover Sports are expensive, and I worry that they wouldn’t be easily repaired on the Alaska Highway or in the far-off wilds of Nebraska, but the gas mileage is reasonable, and this fall’s new plug-in hybrids would be great for my daily commutes. Plus how the car managed itself safely down a 12-foot bluff was great fun.

And Range Rovers always look good, and they balance really well on three legs.

Leaves

My experience of fall color is pretty limited. Coming down the Connecticut River, Chuck said more than once that we should see this when the leaves change. I wish we had.

Knots

I have tied my own leaders for a long time, especially for salt water. I’m really good at blood knots, which may be one of the strangest accomplishments anyone can lay claim to. “I,” I say with a swagger, “am a master at blood knottery!”

For some reason I had it in my head that a blood knot was the very thing for attaching two dissimilar pieces of leader material, like flouro to nylon, or if you wanted to make a big jump in tippet diameter. After the Joan Wulff school I now understand that I was wrong, which I rarely am and in any case I never like hearing. I guess what I originally heard was that blood knots were better than surgeon’s knots for attaching larger diameter bits of leader, and I translated that into something different. Now I have to learn a new knot, or at least re-learn how to tie surgeons knots. I hate tying them, and I hate how they put a bit of a bend in a leader. I’m sure that fish hate them too.

Books

I skimmed a history of New Hampshire, Morison and Morison’s New Hampshire: A Bicentennial History. New Hampshire’s first commerce was providing 100-foot mast timbers for the British navy. Harvesting and transporting 100-foot timbers was brutal business, but neither Horatio Hornblower nor Jack Aubrey could have captained British warships without New Hampshire.

I listened to Scott Conroy’s Vote First or Die: The New Hampshire Primary: America’s Discerning, Magnificent, and Absurd Road to the White House. I’m a sucker for a good political story, and this is one. I actually ended up oddly happy that the first presidential primary is in New Hampshire. I also started The Hotel New Hampshire but never finished it. I ran out of time. I’ll finish it up next time.

I listened to a bunch of Archer Mayor’s Joe Gunther mystery novels, maybe a half-dozen, enough that I ended up feeling guilty: these are perfectly good entertainment but not the sort of thing one reads for self-improvement. The first novels are set in Battleboro, Vermont, but then they range further afield to greater Vermont. I liked listening to them on my morning runs and commutes. I also read some Robert Frost poems and some Hart Crane poems. I could never decide where exactly Frost was from, but New England I reckon. I failed to re-read Walt Whitman, and I’m sorry for that.

Image result for natty bumppo

Driving we tried to listen to The Deerslayer, which is set in the area that would be Cooperstown. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Last of the Mohicans, since a high school English teacher pointed out to us that in both Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and Scott’s Ivanhoe the dark-haired girl had to die for her ethnic transgressions, while in each case the blonde girl lives. I think the teacher was pointing out something about the 19th century, and letting us know that part of the authors’ message was that we could empathize with those dark-haired heroines and certainly with Chingachgook, but growing up in the South one never knows. Maybe she was warning us about the inevitable outcome of ethnic transgressions. We never made it all the way through Deerslayer, and I suspect Mark Twain was right. I got mighty weary of Natty Bumppo’s virtues during the long wind ups to some bit of actual business.

I read and listened to Burrows and Wallace’s Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, which is magnificent, both as to size, over 1400 pages, and content. Economics, social mores, riots, battles, politics, sanitation, wampum, slavery, disease, immigration; through the 19th century the book covers New York City history with granular particularity, but even when it overwhelmed me it never bored me. The book weaves New York through the national story and then tells the story of both the city and the nation. It’s a fine history.

Playlist

New York

There’s too much music on my New York playlist. I don’t think I ever got through it all, and I’m still listening to it. Big Picture? There’s New Wave and Punk, Brill Building, Gershwin and Bernstein and Copland. There’s Be-Bop. There’s Tin-Pan Alley. There’s 60s folk music and all those interchangeable current bands that could come from no place but Brooklyn. There’s Bennie Goodman and Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. Was there ever a musician tied more closely to a city than Paul Simon? Ok, maybe Leonard Bernstein? Ok, maybe Duke Ellington?

I carried the small travel guitar and played Gershwin transcriptions. When I got back to Houston, a friend pointed out that Gershwin died when he was only 38. I’m still working on the transcriptions, and wishing there were more, at least 40 years more.

George Gershwin, Carl Van Vechten, 1937, Library of Congress.

New Hampshire

Bill Morrisey, Mandy Moore, and Aerosmith. I liked Ray Montagne, who I’d never listened to before.

Vermont.

Vermont’s music comes off better than New Hampshire’s. If nothing else you can always cue up Moonlight in Vermont. l must have downloaded 27 versions, including Billie Holiday and Willie Nelson and Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz. Phish hasn’t recorded it, but I’d never listened to Phish, and I’m glad I did. Apparently jam bands are a thing in Vermont, and I’d take Phish any day over Aerosmith. I also came across a young woman named Caroline Rose on a list of ten Vermont bands I was supposed to listen to now, and decided in fact she was someone I needed to listen to now.

There was also a Bing Crosby/Peggy Lee version of Snow from White Christmas.

Duke Ellington and band members playing baseball in front of their segregated motel (“Astor Motel”) while touring in Florida, Charlotte Brooks, 1955, Library of Congress.
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New York, Vermont, New Hampshire Packing List, Part One

Mount Equinox overlook, Manchester, Vermont

Rods, Reels, Waders

We took five rods, two 9′ five weights, a new Winston Pure and an Orvis Helios 3D; an 8’6″ four weight Orvis T3; a Scott 8′ four weight STS; and a Winston 9′ six weight boron IIIx. We never used the six weight, but being a Winston it looked good in our luggage. the Winston Pure unhappily broke when I slammed a weighted streamer into its tip, but I’ve broken rods before and will break them again. It’s off at Winston getting repaired. I think the repair cost is $75.

The broken Winston Pure is the rod Trout Unlimited sent me for my work as chair of our Houston Mayor’s Commission for Preservation of Bayou Salmonids. Restoring brook trout to Houston’s bayous is a real priority of mine.

Our reels were a mixed lot, all click and pawl, some older Abels and Orvis Battenkills and a newer Hardy. In Vermont on the Waloomsac River the combination of largish trout and current made a disk drag useful, and it’s the only time I’ve ever wanted a disk drag for trout. All of our lines were coldwater floating lines.

For pike we used Chuck DeGray’s eight weights with Orvis Mirage reels and 250 grain Depth Charge lines. I used the Recon and Kris got the Helios 3. Go figure. The Mirages are great, powerful reels, and I’d fish with Recons any day.

We took waders and boots. The hardest thing about air travel with wading boots is that post-wading they’re ten pounds heavier, and it’s usually enough to take our luggage over the weight limit. To dry them I’ve tied them to car roof crossbars, stuffed them with newspaper, perched them on air conditioning vents, and used a motel room hair drier.

By happenstance this trip I found the perfect answer: we didn’t wade the last two days fishing. Where we fished the Connecticut isn’t a wadeable river, so we stayed in the boat. That meant by the time we got to the airport the boots had dried. If I can help it I’ll never wade on the last day of a trip again. And I’ll try to get a rental car with rooftop crossbars just in case.

Chuck had two specialized bits of gear for pike fishing. To land fish he used a cradle net. It seemed harder to manage than a normal landing net, but it worked well for pike. He also used a jaw spreader to keep a pike’s mouth open for hook removal, which reminded me of a tool my dentist might use when I was being uncooperative.

Luggage

For years I’ve had a rolling FishPond rod case. It looks great, long and thin and stylish like a lot of FishPond stuff, with a lot of serious looking pockets and such for reels and fly boxes. It’s big enough for four rods, a vest, waders and boots, plus the other miscellany necessary for a fly fishing trip. The problem is that every time I drag it behind me through an airport it flips, and when I wrestle it back upright it immediately flips again. If I lean it against something, say an airport check-in counter, it immediately slides down onto the floor. It will not stand upright and it will not lean. I put up with it out of a certain earned fondness from familiarity, and it’s problems are no more than an annoyance and its virtues many, but Kris, who is a woman of strong opinions, passionately dislikes that case.

She bought an Orvis Safe Passage rolling bag a few year’s back. It’s pretty, but it has it’s peculiarities. It has these two three-quarter inch aluminum tubes inside that seem to go nowhere and do nothing, and for the life of me I can’t figure out their purpose. Still, it’s big enough for waders and boots and vests plus a goodly number of clothes. It’s got one real problem: It’s not big enough for rods.

So for Father’s Day this year Kris bought me a different FishPond bag, the Grand Teton, which rolls without flipping, at least some of the time stands without falling over, and is long enough for rods. In the old bag the hard bottom let me carry rods in Neoprene socks without tubes, which saved both weight and space, but I don’t trust rods in the new bag without tubes. Stuff is piled right on top of them. It does stand upright in an airport, and it doesn’t immediately flip over when I roll it along behind me. So far so good.

Rental Car

We usually rent mid-sized SUVs because we can load rods inside the car without breaking them down, but for some reason the cost of an SUV out of New York City was ridiculous. Instead of the SUV we got a full-sized Chevy Malibu. I guess it’s not really amusing to most people, but driving a Chevy Malibu around America sure amused me. It just seemed so 1960s, like a living television commercial during the Sunday night Bonanza episode.

Manchester, Vermont

We picked our New York hotel because it was close to a National car rental pick-up near Washington Square. There’s a premium paid for picking a car up in NYC, keeping it a week, and then dropping it off in Manchester, NH. I don’t know if we also paid a premium because the car was a Malibu.

Hotels

We had great luck everyplace we stayed, the Washington Square Hotel in NYC, the Beaverkill Valley Inn, the Equinox in Vermont, and the Lopstick Lodge in New Hampshire. I’d stay at any of them again.

Donuts

I’ve already mentioned our New York City donuts, and we didn’t look for bakeries in the Catskills. Manchester, Vermont, however, is a donut rich environment. I had read that the Equinox Resort had the best donuts in town, and the cider donuts are very good, warm, and dusted with sugar. The problem is that donuts are only available in the dining room at breakfast, and two of our three mornings we were gone before the dining room opened.

Mrs. Murphy’s Donuts, Manchester, Vermont.

Our second Manchester morning though we made it to Mrs. Murphy’s donuts. They were already open and full of morning coffee drinkers at six when we got there. The guys at the counter had ceramic mugs, so high marks for Mrs. Murphy.

When we looked for donut shops in New Hampshire all the offerings we found were Dunkin Donuts. This didn’t surprise me. Getting ready for New Hampshire I’d read Scott Conroy’s Vote First or Die, about the 2016 New Hampshire primary. It prepared us for New Hampshire’s fondness for Dunkin Donuts. I don’t have a strong opinion about Dunkin Donuts, it’s a chain that’s not that common in Texas, but years ago when I read the Spencer detective novels Spencer always ate their corn muffins. I buy one whenever I’m in a Dunkin, but as someone who grew up on cornbread I think they could be better. Don’t tell Spencer.

What We Didn’t Do

In New York we didn’t explore the Catskill rivers, other than one small bit of the Beaverkill. There is also river fishing further north, and winter steelheading is a thing in the far New York north. There are a lifetime of rivers there, and I’d love to have seen more.

We’d been to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown before, and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art many times. I’ve heard there’s not much else to do in New York.

In Vermont we didn’t visit Robert Todd Lincoln’s home, or fish the Batten Kill. There are lots of streams we could have explored but didn’t. We did stop at a farmhouse to buy maple syrup, so that’s off our list.

I really wanted to rent one of these tiny boats in New Hampshire. Puttering around the lake in the marine equivalent of a go cart just looked unimaginably fun to me. I had worked out a plan for fishing the lake from one of those boats rigged like we fished Pyramid lake in Nevada, with a balanced leech and a dropper nymph on a long leader under a bobber. I think I could have spent at least a day drifting and watching the bobber, but I never rented the boat.

In New Hampshire I also never got to shake the hand of a presidential candidate, or eat at the Buck Rub Tavern. I could have probably crossed both thoseoff my list in one trip to the Buck Rub. I’m pretty sure there’s always at least one presidential candidate shaking hands and busing tables at the Buck Rub.

We didn’t actually drive into Canada. We took our passports, but just couldn’t bring ourselves to put up with the bureaucratic brouhaha of getting over and then immediately turning around and coming back. I kept looking for the wall between us and Canada but couldn’t find it. Build the Wall!