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Wisconsin Packing List

We didn’t take any fishing gear to Wisconsin, except for waders, boots, and sunglasses. We didn’t wade, but on the day it rained I wore my boots instead of sandals, and Kris wore her waders and her boots both days to stay warm.  The temperature was in the 40s. It was arctic.

We used the guide’s rods, Orvis Recon 10 weights, and they worked great. We have 10 weights, but we don’t have cold water lines for them, and tropic lines kink in cold water. I could get used to not hauling fishing gear through airports. And as to Recon versus Helios most rods are better than I am.

When we were in Oregon, we asked a waitress what we should do while we were there.  She said she didn’t know, that she’d just moved to Oregon from Milwaukee, so we asked her what we should do in Wisconsin. “Eat fried cheese curds.” Our daughter added that we should also eat fresh cheese curds because they squeak when you chew. They do.

Cheese curds are curdled milk, cheddar in process, and not yet cheese. In the New York Times, Louisa Kamp once described the squeak as two balloons trying to neck. They taste a bit like cottage cheese, with more chew.

We bought a block of cheddar cheese which I stuck in my daypack and forgot about.  At least I forgot about it until the TSA lady pulled me out of the line at the Milwaukee airport to go through my pack. I’m pretty sure that in the scanner the block of cheddar looked just like C-4. “Do you have anything sharp in your bag? Anything that could stick me.” She was pulling on her proctology gloves.

“No . . . yes, wait. I have a block of extra sharp cheddar cheese.”  Wisconsin humor. She looked at me and then laughed. The Wisconsin TSA lady thought the joke was funny, and I’m not in prison.

Cheese

After the fur trade, Wisconsin’s first industries were timber and wheat. The wheat didn’t last, and I can’t remember why. Disease? Poor soil? Short growing seasons? Wheat worked in Nebraska and Kansas, but not in Wisconsin. So Wisconsin turned to dairy, spurred on by the efforts of the University of Wisconsin. I had always assumed that Wisconsin came to dairy because that’s where European dairy farmers immigrated, but no. It was the replacement crop because of the failure of wheat.

Where We Didn’t Go

There was a lot of Wisconsin we didn’t see. There is a peninsula, Door County, in the northeast, roughly paralleling the Michigan upper peninsula on the east side of Lake Michigan. Door County was somewhere referred to as Wisconsin’s Cape Cod. I haven’t been to Cape Cod, but Door County had some appeal to me. The pictures look genteel.

Historically northern Wisconsin was timber, not farming, and Stevens Point was the doorway to the pineywoods. I’ll have a chance to see the north country in Michigan and Minnesota, and it was a long way from Chicago (notwithstanding the draw of the giant fiberglass muskie in Hayward), so we didn’t go. We probably won’t.

The part of the state I wish I’d seen but didn’t was the southwestern Driftless Area.  It is apparently a very fine trout fishery, overlapping Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa. It is also the part of the state with the highest concentration of organic farms and rural Democratic votes. It is geologically different than the rest of the state because the great sheet glaciers didn’t cover the Driftless, and consequently didn’t leave glacial drift, glacial drift being the trash left behind by glaciers after a picnic. Consequently there’s not much glacial rock.

There’s a lovely looking trout town there, Viroqua, and I’m a sucker for trout towns. I had already planned to fish the Driftless region in Iowa, so maybe next year I’ll hit them both.

We also didn’t visit the Milwaukee churches.  I’ll go back for that.

What I Didn’t Write About

Aldo Leopold. John Muir. Hank Aaron. The Art of Fielding.

Bud Selig.

Have you ever had someone be so unjust, perpetrate so many indignities, large and small, deliver so many insults that physically you react to their name? Bud Selig. If Fortunato had only been the Commissioner of Baseball, Montresor’s motivations in The Cask of Amontillado would stand revealed.

I’m glad I’m going back. I’ll write about Bud Selig.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bud_Selig_on_October_31,_2010_(2).jpg

Playlist

  • Bon Iver. It was the first album, For Emma, Forever Ago, that was so arresting, so beautiful. I can hum Skinny Love happily forever. I like the other albums, even the strange 22, A Million and side projects like Volcano Choir. But For Emma is beautiful.
  • BoDeans. I’ve listened to the BoDeans since a Stereo Review review of Home back in the 80s.  I miss Stereo Review, but I’m probably the only one. Red River goes into my car trip playlist. 
  • Steve Miller Band. I didn’t really care for them in the 70s, but they’re fun to listen to when your expectations are low.
  • Bruce Springsteen. Cadillac Ranch. Hey little girlie in the blue jeans so tight/Drivin’ alone through the Wisconsin night.  
  • George Jones, Milwaukee Here I Come. There’s also a version by Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. If you never saw Dolly Parton on the Porter Wagoner Show on Saturday night, your education is incomplete. Dolly was 21. “Why Porter! You brung me flowers!”
  • Les Paul, The Best of the Capitol Masters Edition. Luckily he designed a great guitar, otherwise no one would remember him. If you never actually listened to Les Paul (which I hadn’t), don’t. 
  • Ella Fitzgerald, My Cousin in Milwaukee. Singin’ sweet about singin’ sexy. 
  • Smoking Popes, Welcome to Janesville. Paul Ryan is from Janesville. It’s a fine song, but I don’t think it’s about Paul Ryan. 
  • Jerry Lee Lewis, What Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me). Lewis’s late country phase.
  • Brad Paisley, Alcohol. Paisley is from West Virginia, and should have been on my West Virginia playlist. He wasn’t, but only out of ignorance. I suspect he’s not my kind of country, but this is a strange sort of anthem, and probably fitting for the state with the highest alcoholism rate in the country.
  • Kimya Dawson, Tire Swing.  Didn’t know her, and still don’t. Wikipedia lists her genre as anti-folk. Ok then. 
  • Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Milwaukee is a port. 

Guitar

I took a guitar, my cheap travel guitar, and worked on Villa-Lobos’s Choro No. 1. I gave up on the Bach I’d been working on without really learning it. I did manage to play all the way through it though.

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No Muskie, No Cry

We fished the Wisconsin River near Stevens Point, mid-state in Wisconsin, on the last two days of September. The night we got to Wisconsin it froze for the first time this year, months before we could realistically expect a freeze at home. During the day it stayed in the 40s, cold for us, cold for the smallmouth too. Some of the leaves had already changed, but we were told the rest would change and begin to fall during the week after the freeze. Our guide, Abe Downs, said that all but confused smallmouth had migrated for the winter to deeper lake water, and that the fish left in the river were muskie.

That was ok with me.  If the smallmouth were gone so were the summer crowds, and while the trees weren’t the brilliant fall-colors I’d hoped for, there was some color, and plenty enough trees, particularly when measured against the treeless Deschutes we’d fished two weeks before. From what I’d read I figured it was likely we wouldn’t catch a muskie, and I honestly didn’t expect to see fish.

We didn’t catch a muskie. We did see fish.

We fished out of a drift boat and covered a lot of water. It was a big open river lined with trees just starting their change. Off the river in Stevens Point Wisconsinites were friendly even when I couldn’t understand their accents. I think before we return I’ll buy some language tapes.

It was my fault I didn’t catch a fish. I got five strikes and a follow over two days, which for muskie is apparently great fishing. I had expected to deep dredge the flies, but instead they retrieved pretty close to the surface. The water was clean but it wasn’t clear enough to see a fish until it hit the fly. We weren’t sight-casting.

Along with steelheading it was as  repetitious and brutal as fly fishing gets. I would cast and cast and cast, an hour or two of casting, and then while I was daydreaming about cheese curds and beer a fish would violently collapse onto the fly. Being a cool, collected guy I’d freak out and jerk the fly away. Did I know better? Of course I knew better. For me the gap between the knowing and the doing was wide and high.

The rods were industrial Orvis Recon 10 weights, necessary for big flies and big fish but not the delicate whispy wands fly rods are expected to be. The leaders were a few feet of straight 60 pound fluorocarbon attached to a heavy wire bite tippet, attached to a snap swivel, which is the fly fishing equivalent of a steel cable. The flies themselves were huge, gaudy things, close to a foot long with tandem 6/0 hooks. It’s the only time casting a fly rod that I’ve felt like I was throwing a lure, not the line. Soaked muskie flies are heavy. Shoot, the flies were heavy when they were dry. They hauled the line with them, not the other way around.

Abe and Kris talked politics and birds. They both agreed on politics and both were interested in birds, and Abe rowed while we cast, pounding the bank, casting near structure. Abe was an interesting guy, a chemist in his day job, with degrees in mathematics and physics. He also liked bird hunting, which it was the season for, and he liked dogs. He kept us casting, and by the end of the first day my left hand ached from the line retrieve. By the end of the second day my right shoulder ached from casting.

The final muskie, the last one on the second day, struck sideways to the boat. For the first time I saw all of a muskie. It was thick-bodied, and Abe guessed it was about 42 inches long. That’s a big fish. I didn’t jerk the fly away and for a second the fish was on the line, but I needed to strip-set hard, and then strip-set hard again, and I didn’t do it. As fast as the fish struck and I failed to strip-set the fish came off and went back home to catch another re-run of Laverne and Shirley.

I don’t mind going back. Really.

The reels were Orvis Hydros reels with good drags, and I asked Abe if he played the fish on the reels. He said no, that they could be hauled in on the line. Muskie are big fish but I gather that the excitement is in the hook-up not the fight. I failed on the hook-up, but at least I got some of the excitement.

I don’t think Kris is unhappy going back to Wisconsin either. Really. We had a great dinner in Milwaukee with friends at Three Brothers, a Serbian restaurant. I had my first ever goulash, and Kris had the stuffed cabbage. The restaurant was what Milwaukee should look like, old and ethnic. We talked with our friends, Tom and Sal, about dogs and Wisconsin alcoholism and how they met and other stuff, but not much about politics and none about fishing. We would have forced Tom and Sal to look at our fish pictures if we’d had any. Since they probably didn’t want to see fish pictures at least somebody had complete success with our fishing.

That day the Brewers tied the Cubs for the National League Midwest Division, with a one game tie-breaker scheduled the next day to decide the season. Bernie Brewer was with us at the airport, and the Brewers ultimately won. Driving to the airport we wished we had time to go church to church just to see them. To us they were exotic, not the largely functional Baptist churches or mildly British Methodist or Episcopal churches of home. Kris asked me if next time we could fish for something easier than muskie and I said yes, and we will. We’ll go to the driftless region in the southwest to fish for trout, or we’ll come to the Wisconsin River in the smallmouth season.  Meanwhile I’ll think about those fish I didn’t catch. I’ll think about that last fish, the fish I got to see, flashing in the river when I failed to set the hook.

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Scott Walker and Donald Trump

In 2016, historically liberal, progressive Wisconsin voted for Trump, not by much but enough for Trump to take Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes. Wisconsin may have been one of the biggest shocks of election night. Of course for most people it was still a distant second to President Trump winning.

Wisconsin’s liberal bent came honestly. German immigrants, including Bohemians and Czechs and Slovenians, were often ideological refugees. Norwegian culture, the other large source of non-Yankee immigration, was more communal than the nation as a whole, the sort of culture that would embrace sitting around together naked in saunas. The Republican Party was born in Wisconsin, but it was the radical anti-slavery party, not the party of Karl Rove. Urban industrial Wisconsin developed on skilled labor, and there is a strong union tradition. Wisconsin enacted the first progressive income tax, the social insurance legislation that was the model for the New Deal, and collective bargaining for public employees.

That collective bargaining business didn’t last long.

Things have changed, sort of. Scott Walker and Paul Ryan are obvious, and both the state senate and assembly are majority Republican. U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin is one bright spot for the Democrats, but for the 2018 election Senator Baldwin is the primary target of the Republican Party. Republicans are spending more money on the Baldwin race than all other Senate races combined. Wisconsin is the laboratory for modern Republican political infrastructure, but Baldwin is leading in the polls, and in the polling for the Governor’s race Scott Walker is trailing.

I don’t know Ms. Baldwin, but friends tell me she is a lovely woman. We don’t really have a lot of lovely U.S. Senators.

The striking thing about the 2016 presidential vote in Wisconsin is the striking thing in Oregon, in Louisiana, even in Texas. Urban areas, Madison and Milwaukee in Wisconsin, Portland and Eugene in Oregon, vote blue. Rural areas and small towns mostly vote red. 

It doesn’t surprise me. Rural and small town residents face personal economic pressures and limits that urban residents don’t face and don’t understand. Local business ownership is dead. Agriculture is mechanized and ownership is centralized. Locals’ interactions with state and federal government are as often as not burdensome–taxes and regulatory restrictions–and the benefits received are often not obvious. The average resident may receive indirect benefits from crop subsidies, for instance, but that’s not obvious to the small town parts manager at a struggling car dealership. Even in areas where a thriving local economy is driven by recreation and tourism, land costs price locals out of the market.

Rural residents could potentially benefit from increased government services, universal health care for instance, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t rational reasons for rural residents to deeply distrust government, and to have preferred Trump to Hillary. Hillary didn’t visit Wisconsin during the 2016 campaign, so why would a rural Wisconsin resident think the Democrats shared their concerns? Nobody likes to be taken for granted. Of course that doesn’t mean there aren’t other irrational reasons for rural Republican votes, race or homophobia or religion or whatever, but those reasons aren’t peculiarly rural, and drive urban votes as well. It’ll be interesting to watch how rural Wisconsin votes in November.

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Wisconsin

Saturday and Sunday we fish with Abe Downs in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. I have to be in Chicago, and we’re driving north Friday evening. I’ve seemingly given Wisconsin short-shrift. Oregon and steelhead have taken so much attention that in some ways I have, but I’ll be damned if I’ll read Little House in the Woods.

We’re fishing for muskie, which is probably a mistake. Muskie is the new glamour girl of the fly fishing world. They are big, which is always appealing, and they’re apparently hard to catch–one hears ad nauseam that they are the fish of 10,000 casts. Steelhead, which are ridiculously hard to catch, are only the fish of 1,000 casts. I guess if I’ve given Wisconsin too short of a shrift, and if I don’t catch anything, I’ll get to go back. It’s kismet.

Herbert, Henry William (1851) Frank Forester’s Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provinces of North America, New York, NY: Stringer & Townsend

For a glamour girl muskellunge surely are ugly.  They are ambush predators, lurking and attacking with short bursts. They eat big stuff, and a big muskie will eat fish more than half their length. They also eat ducks and muskrats. Muskie flies are big and expensive, flies on the internet can cost $15 apiece, and apparently 10 weights are the rod of choice, in part for the fish and in part for the flies.  We’ll be using whatever Abe brings. He’s told us to bring waders, and boots without studs, but I think it’s for warmth, not wading.

National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, Hayward, Wisconsin

IGFA records the world record all-tackle muskie, caught in Hayward, Wisconsin, in 1949, at 67 lbs 8 oz, and slightly longer than five feet.  Hayward, Wisconsin (home of the National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame and a 143′ long giant muskie) has been banking off that fish ever since.

Muskie average about 30″, and are the largest of the pike family. They remind me of gar or barracuda, which are also sharp-toothed, long-snouted lurkers. The difference, at least for barracuda, is that barracuda are reportedly fun to catch. Muskie apparently give up pretty quick.

Unknown – (1896) First Annual report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests of the State of New York, New York City, NY: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co., Printers

Muskie are North American, but east of the Mississippi have a pretty broad range, from Georgia to southern Canada. They’re concentrated in the upper Midwest, particularly northern Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. In Wisconsin they seem to be the right color of fish. They spawn in the spring in the shallow area of lakes, but don’t nest. Their spawning consists of a hooked-up lakeside stroll distributing milt and roe hither and yon, wherever it may land on sand or rock, but preferably not mud or silt.  The males do a lot of tail-slashing, either to spread the fertilized eggs or because they’re guys. Eggs hatch in about two weeks. Juveniles grow to about a foot their first year.

Muskies otherwise live in slower rivers or river backwaters. They prefer clear-water lakes. For such an ugly fish they are surprisingly sensitive environmentally, particularly to over-fishing.

As for Wisconsin I have been twice before. Once after college I drove late at night from Chicago to Minneapolis on US 90 and 94, and remember huge fiberglass animals, a Holstein and a dinosaur, looming up from roadside attractions. I don’t remember a giant fiberglass muskie, but apparently giant fiberglass animals are quite the thing in Wisconsin.

The second time I drove from Chicago to Milwaukee to see the Astros play the Brewers at Miller Field. It was an uneventful meaningless end-of-the-season baseball game.  The Astros won, there was good beer and sausage, and there were people wearing cheeseheads, not many but some. I think they got their sports confused.

Traditionally Muskie haven’t  been a fly fishing target. There’s even a series of Wisconsin mystery novels, the Loon Lake Mysteries by Victoria Houston, where the heroine fly fishes for trout and the hero fishes gear for Muskie. Now though on YouTube muskellunge are all the rage for fly fishers, mostly by young guys with trucker hats and beards. I didn’t get through enough of the Loon Lake Mysteries to know whether the loss of tension, muskie versus trout, gear fishing versus fly fishing, damaged the novels. Hope not.  They couldn’t take much damage.