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Georgia

Scarlett O’Hara’s Bosom and Early Georgia History, in Order of Personal Significance

I figured that if we were going to Georgia I should re-read Gone with the Wind. I hadn’t read it since I was 12, and when I was 12 I liked it, or at least I liked having read it. All that Southern splendor was mighty fine, plus there was that movie poster featuring Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom. What Southern almost-adolescent boy could ignore the drama inherent in Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom? I had a copy of that poster on my wall, and I suspect it was years before I noticed that Clark Gable had a moustache.

My notion before our trip was to determine whether Gone with the Wind was anything more than a Lost Cause romance. After all, no book except the Bible has sold more American copies than Gone with the Wind. It won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, so somebody once thought it was important literature. The movie won the 1939 Oscar for best picture, and adjusted for inflation, it’s still the highest grossing movie ever.

I downloaded a free copy of the novel on Audible, but I couldn’t listen past the second chapter. What my 12-year old self admired, my 67-year old self found dreadful. Lost Cause propaganda? Who knows–I never got that far. These characters were all of them idiots. They were annoying and unlikeable and inane. Maybe Margaret Mitchell intended that they be annoying and unlikeable, but I don’t think they were supposed to be boring. I was unmoved by the set-up, despised the dialogue, and found Scarlett, cleavage or no, to be a ninny. I wanted to waste no more of my life with Mammy or the twins or Ashley or Melanie. I didn’t give a damn about Scarlett, or for that matter about Rhett.

So I can’t really tell you anything about Gone with the Wind, except I’d advise don’t bother. It had its moment, but that was when I was 12.

Still, that’s the best movie poster bosom ever. It’s Stereophonic.

I did read a good book about Georgia, Georgia, a Short History, by Christopher Meyers and David Williams, and there was some interesting stuff to learn.

Georgia was the youngest of the Thirteen Colonies, founded by James Oglethorpe in 1732 as a second chance for British debtors and a buffer against Spanish Florida. Settlers were from England’s poorest, and Oglethorpe prohibited hard liquor, slaves, and lawyers. Land was to be owned by the colony. Each immigrant’s tract was limited to 50 acres.

That bit of social engineering lasted roughly 20 years. There was no debt forgiveness, so not only were the English urban debtors–who had likely never farmed–expected to farm successfully on small tracts in difficult coastal soil, they were expected to repay their English debts from their unsuccessful farming. Many of the debtors skipped out to northern climes, leaving both Georgia and their debts. By the 1750s there was private ownership of large tracts–up to 500 acres–by slave owners. There were probably lawyers, too.

James Oglethorpe, glam rocker and failed reformer.

What was supposed to be an agrarian yeoman farmer utopia became a utopia for wealthy planters. Before the cotton gin, the planters–the large-tract slave-owning landowners–were confined to rice farms near the coast, but with cotton production Georgia became part of the Cotton Kingdom. The Trail of Tears and railroads opened upland Georgia to white settlement, and large landowners brought slaves and cotton to the upper Coastal Plain and the Piedmont to fill the void.

Georgia also achieved land fraud on a massive scale. After the Revolution, counties and the state sold land to new settlers and speculators, but they got into the habit of selling more land than there was actually dirt. The worst offender, Montgomery County, issued land warrants for 7,436,995 acres of land, which was 7,029,315 more acres of land than Montgomery County actually contained. By 1796, Georgia county officials had issued warrants for 29 million acres. Georgia then contained only 9 million acres.

The State Assembly was good at land sales, too, and in exchange for bribes (which in addition to money included nifty stuff like land, guns, and slaves) sold 50 million acres of Indian land for about a penny an acre–a ridiculous price for land that they had no right to sell. The sales were rescinded by the next Assembly, but were then found valid by the Supreme Court under the Contract Clause. The U.S. Congress ended up buying out the purchasers for $4.25 million. No Georgian should ever complain about federal buy-outs. Their’s was one of the first, and in inflation-adjusted dollars probably rivals anything that came later.

No state’s early American history was as governed by class hierarchy as Georgia’s, and how you see Georgia’s early history really does depend on where you stand. If you look at Georgia from the planters’ eyes, by the 1850s it was an economic dynamo powering a thriving economy. In 1860 Georgia’s per capita wealth was nearly double that of New York, which is pretty impressive, but on the other hand only six percent of white Georgians controlled about half the state’s wealth, which is pretty one-sided.

A lot of plain white folk saw Georgia differently from the planter class, particularly in the northern mountain portion of the state where there were few slaves, and in the southern Pine Barrens which couldn’t support big agriculture. In Georgia cities, slaves devalued free labor, and other than the rice and cotton planters, Georgia agriculture was largely small-parcel subsistence farming. In 1860, Georgia’s slaves were valued at about $400 million, about half the state’s wealth, but only about 37% of the white population owned any slaves, and planters were a sliver of that 37%.

Carrying Cotton to the Gin, Harper’s New Monthly, March, 1854.

And Georgia slaves like as not saw Georgia differently from their owners. When Georgians voted to secede and join the Confederacy, the measure passed by about 1000 votes, 42,744 to 41,717–but remember, these voters could only be white male property-owners. Slaves, who were 44% of the roughly one million Georgians, had no votes, and while one can never be certain, I’d bet good money that the slaves would have voted en masse to stay in the Union. Lincoln may not have planned to free the slaves, but apparently slaves throughout the South were convinced–along with the secessionists–that freedom was Lincoln’s plan.

Among plain white Georgians, the Civil War was increasingly seen as a rich man’s war fought by poor men, and throughout the war there were large numbers of deserters, draft dodgers, and even Union volunteers. In Georgia there were food riots, draft rebellions, and the formation of an active and vocal Peace Society. The cotton class may have seen the War as necessary and righteous, but to support the war effort they kept planting cotton instead of corn, hence the food riots. Wealthy planters were largely exempt from the draft and generally weren’t doing the actual fighting. Whatever else can be said about the South, the Confederacy was badly managed on the home front. By the end of the War, it’s estimated that nearly half of the Confederate army had deserted.

18,250 Georgian Confederates died in the Civil war, roughly a fifth of those who served. Georgia was also a battlefield from Chickamauga in 1863 in northwest Georgia to Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Georgia Geography

Pamela W. Gore, Geographic Regions of Georgia, from the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

By area, Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi, and 24th overall. It divides into five geographic regions. The Coastal Plain is in the south, and the southeastern border of the Coastal Plain is the Atlantic Ocean. The Piedmont is north of the Coastal Plain, above the fall line where rivers tend to rapids and the sedimentary rock of the Coastal Plain gives way to the harder crystalline rocks of the uplands. Generally the Piedmont soils are richer than the soils of the Coastal Plain, and Georgia’s southern Coastal Plain, the Wiregrass Region, is one of Georgia’s poorest regions. The exception for richer Coastal Plain soils is the rich black soil immediately below the Piedmont, the Black Belt that stretches from Georgia through Alabama to the Mississippi Delta. Along with the Delta became the Black Belt became the cotton-producing heartland for the South. The Black Belt was named first for the color of its soil, but the identification took on a new meaning because of the concentration of slaves. Big cotton thrived on black soil and slavery.

Abbasi786786, Majority Black Counties Based on the 2020 Census, from Wikipedia.

In Georgia’s far north, the three remaining regions seem to this outsider divided by terrain but otherwise lumped together, and it’s in North Georgia where Appalachia begins. The Appalachian trail starts northward in North Georgia, from Springer Mountain, elevation 3,780 feet, and James Dickey set Deliverance on a made-up river in North Georgia. We will trout fish in North Georgia, somewhat close to Brasstown Bald, Georgia’s highest mountain at 4,784 feet. I’ll take a guitar in case we run into any banjo players, but I’ll be damned if I do any canoeing.

Georgia is water rich. It has 14 major river basins, with more than 44,000 miles of perennial rivers. Its rivers tend to have great names: the Suwanee, the Ocmulgee, the Coosa, the Llappoosa, the Chattahoochee . . . Plus Georgia has about 100 miles of Atlantic coastline. The combination of elevation, coast, and rivers makes Georgia rich fishing. In the north there are native Appalachian brook trout and imported brown and rainbow trout. There are imported stripers in lakes, and redfish along the coast. There are ten species of black bass, including great river bass like the redeye, and bass unique to Georgia like Bartram’s.

We’re going trout fishing instead of bass fishing because we’re going to Atlanta for a wedding, and our friend Shelley (who will also be at the wedding) likes to fish for trout. Still, there’s always a chance of catching a bass in those northern Georgia rivers. I hope I catch a bass. Well, come to think of it, I hope I catch anything at all.

Population

At 21,029,227, Georgia is the 8th largest state by population, bracketed by Ohio at number 7 and North Carolina at number 9. It is one of the fastest growing states since World War II, and us Houstonians see Atlanta as our Southern mirror. Anglos are 50.4% of the Georgia population, African Americans 33.1%, and Hispanics 10.5%. Everybody else is a smidgeon. Most of the population growth is in Georgia’s Piedmont, which is the industrial heart of the state.

Other than the whole slavery thing, the birth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow segregation, Georgia’s civil rights history had some positives. Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Georgians were leaders in the Civil Rights movement throughout the South. Savannah desegregated early, but despite active movements Albany and Atlanta were slow. In 1971, then-governor Jimmy Carter declared a new era of Civil Rights in Georgia, but particularly in the rural areas of the state Jimmy probably jumped the gun.

Valdosta, Georgia Klan Rally, 1922, Georgia State Archives.

Politics

Is any state’s recent presidential politics more interesting than Georgia’s? I don’t pretend to understand what happened in 2020, but I have no doubt that there was no theft of the Georgia election. I’ve officiated over local elections, and massive voter fraud would not be easy. Oh sure, some lone soul might vote twice, or not be registered, but everything in American elections makes massive fraud almost impossible. It certainly couldn’t be accomplished by the efforts of a handful of people. It would take a whole dance card of conspiracy, and people, being what they are, would never be able to hide it. They can’t keep their mouth shut. If there had been massive fraud in Georgia, somebody involved would have bragged about their part over beers, at Thanksgiving dinner, or in their tell-all best seller. Instead as evidence of election interference we have a phone recording of a sitting President urging a governor to manufacture votes.

When you look at how the actual vote went, Georgia’s voting patterns are just like the rest of the country. Urban areas voted Democratic, and outside of the Black Belt, the rural countryside voted Republican. Trump substantially increased his vote totals from 2016, 2,089,104 votes in 2016 to 2,461,854 in 2020, but the Democrats did even better, 1,877,963 to 2,473,633. Democrats mostly carried majorities in the urban areas (as they had in 2016), but more total voters in rural areas also voted Democratic. F’rinstance, Atlanta’s urban Fulton County turned out substantially more Democratic voters in 2020 than in 2016 (529,931 to 334,053), but that trend was true in every Georgia County, even in counties where Trump otherwise had a majority. In the numerous rural counties Donald Trump carried, his margins shrank. Throughout the state voters who would not turn out in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton turned out in 2020 to vote for Joe Biden, or maybe to vote against Donald Trump.

From Wikipedia, AdamG2016, Georgia Presidential Election Results 2020.

Where We’ll Fish

Our plan doesn’t involve voting. We’ll fly into Atlanta and do wedding things for three days, then drive north with our friends the Marmons to Ellijay to fish a half day for trout. We’re taking waders and boots and 5-weights. The next day the Marmons head back to Houston, and Kris and I will head south out of Georgia’s Valley and Ridge, through the Piedmont, down to Savannah on the Coastal Plain to fish in saltwater for redfish. I may not catch any fish, but I will see a lot of Georgia. We fly back to Houston from Savannah.

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Maine Packing List

Gear

We took 9-foot 5 weight rods with floating lines, which is sliced white sandwich bread, or a Toyota Camry, or a Wilson fielder’s glove. It’s so basic it almost doesn’t need to be said. If all I said was that we took fly rods, like as not you’d assume they were 9-foot 5 weight rods with floating lines. 

Rods get heavier than 5 weights, especially in salt water, and lighter, especially because once you’ve bought a 9-foot 5 weight, rod companies depend on you catching rod fever and buying more rods. And buying more rods will almost certainly make you a better angler. Really.

When Kris unpacked her rod the tip was broken. She vaguely remembered breaking it on our trip to California, and vaguely remembered forgetting breaking it. Luckily I’d brought a spare rod—I’m really good about packing a spare—except that I blew it and it wasn’t a spare Winston 5 weight but a Winston 3 weight. I had grabbed the wrong green rod tube. The 3 weight was a bit light, so Kris used the guide’s Orvis 5 weight all week, which was exactly the same model as her broken 5 weight. It’s a good rod.

Back at the lodge, Kris got on the Orvis website and ordered a new tip for her rod. It was waiting at the house when we got home. Kudos to Orvis for great service.

Hotels

In the North Maine Woods we stayed at Libby Camps. Food, lodging, and guides were all included in the trip price we’d paid six months before, so once we got there we only had to pay for alcohol, taxes, and tips. Paying for everything was long forgotten. It felt free!

After we left Libby Camps and the North Woods, we spent two nights on the Atlantic Coast, in Bar Harbor, and one night by the airport in Bangor. Staying in an airport hotel is convenient for early flights, but what can you say? Airport hotels aren’t known for their charm, because, well, universally they have none.

In Bar Harbor we splurged on charm, and stayed in a popular inn a block off of the Main Street, Bass Cottage Inn. We were three flights up with no elevator, but that was ok, or at least once we got our luggage up the three flights it was ok.

The next day while Tropical Storm Lee, née Hurricane Lee, blew through we mostly hung around the inn. This year on fishing trips we’ve survived a tornado in Little Rock and the remnants of a hurricane in Bar Harbor. Travel is so broadening.

Acadia National Park shut down for Hurricane Day, as did a lot of businesses in Bar Harbor. We went for a walk in the rain, and watched the wind and waves in the harbor until we were blown into the nearest place serving lobster and chowder. In the afternoon I played the guitar in our room while the weather reports reminded us it was wet and windy, and later we played cards down in the lobby. It was a nice inn, but by the end of the day even the weather reporters were a little bored.

I got scolded at the inn for entering the kitchen and putting a dirty cup in a dish tub. A staffer nabbed me on the way out of the kitchen, and made certain I knew that it was a working kitchen and that I didn’t belong. Do I seem annoyed? I was annoyed. It wasn’t like I had pranced into the heart of the kitchen to mingle maple syrup with the lobster. It was a mild scolding, maybe only an admonishment, but still. Kris would tell me I’m overreacting about something petty, but there you are. You take your victim as you find them.

It wasn’t even my cup. It was Kris’s cup.

The morning after the storm we drove through Acadia National Park, about 20 minutes from downtown Bar Harbor. There were lots of cute tourist lodges near the park, far from the Bar Harbor main drag, cute clapboard places that looked like they were built for auto trips in a 1968 Buick LeSabre, and I kept wishing we’d stayed at one of those. It would have been cheaper, and I’m certain no one there would have scolded me, no matter what I did with their damned ol’ cup.

Really. I’m over it.

Restaurants

There are four main food groups in Maine, lobster, blueberries, maple syrup, and chowder. While visiting Maine, we tried to keep our diet properly balanced. Outside of Libby Camp, we ate a lot of lobster, blueberries, maple syrup, and chowder, though not necessarily at the same time.

A few restaurants stood out. In Bar Harbor, we ate at Havana, which is a Cuban-tinged restaurant, and there was a good classical guitarist. He played a lot of things that I play, only better. I vaguely recall eating scallops, which aren’t very Cuban, but which are very Maine. I don’t remember seeing black beans and rice on the menu.

In Bernard at Thurston’s Lobster Pound the guy two tables over had on an Astros cap, and I told him that it was very stylish. He complemented mine right back. We had lobster there, and Thurston’s is now closed for the season.

The most popular restaurant in Bangor is the Timber Kitchen and Bar, located at the Embassy Suites. I’d never been to a restaurant at an Embassy Suites. It had the longest menu ever compiled, and the pizza was good. I could have done without the blueberry compote on the pizza though.((I’m lying. They served it on the side.))

Moxie

Moxie is the state soft drink of Maine. I asked our fishing guide, Jeffrey Labree, about Moxie, and he said it must be the greatest advertising campaign ever, because the stuff is terrible. He brought me one, and because it’s guaranteed to prevent softening of the brain I tried it.

Maybe it wasn’t quite the thing with red wine. A Mainer at the table asked if I’d ever had Dr. Pepper and said it tasted like Dr. Pepper. She was wrong.

Acadia National Park

What a beautiful place. It was closed the day of the storm, so the day we were supposed to go we spent in our hotel room in Bar Harbor playing card games and getting admonished for walking into the kitchen. The next morning we drove the national park loop. What a magnificent place. We didn’t stop at the park’s Jordan Pond House tea room because we didn’t have a reservation, but my sister told me later that they’d make room if you showed up, and that the blueberry popovers really are all that. I forgot to ask if they came with maple syrup.

L.L. Bean

We didn’t spend enough time in Acadia because we wanted to see Maine’s other national treasure, L.L. Bean. We had to drive out of our way, but how could we not visit L.L. Bean? Freeport is a shopping enclave, and everybody and their dog was there, literally, enjoying a beautiful post-storm day in the great outdoors by shopping indoors at L.L. Bean. It is a great place to dog watch and people watch on a sunny day.

There was a Vermont Flannel company store next to L.L. Bean, and I bought a red flannel shirt that promised it was Made in America. It’s so heavy that I’ve already scheduled the one day next February that I’ll get to wear it in Houston. Still. I’m now prepared for my future career as a Maine lumberjack.

Books

While we were driving around Maine, we listened to the new Steven King novel, Holly. Did you know that there is always a new Steven King novel? It’s almost like the plot of a horror novel. I’m guessing that it has to do with the long winters and not the supernatural, but if it turns out that Steven King sold his soul down on the crossroads, I’m not sure I’ll be surprised. Holly was as much mystery as horror, and it’s a good driving novel. I also re-listened to Salem’s Lot, which I first read in college. It holds up pretty well.

We visited Steven King’s house in Bangor, and were told by locals that sometimes he does house tours, and that when It was published he put a red balloon in an upstairs window. That’s mighty classy. It’s a scary neighborhood though: apparently Senator Susan Collins lives directly across the street. I wouldn’t go out at night. I’m certain she’s some kind of shape-shifter.

I’ve already mentioned that before we went to Maine I had read Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, and I was better for it. Because I read Thoreau I knew I needed a red flannel shirt.

There’s a series of Maine mysteries by Paul Doiron, the Mike Bowditch mysteries, about a Maine game warden. The books are great for local color, and a lot of fun to listen to. It was from the Mike Bowditch mysteries that I learned about Moxie.

There are two major poets from Maine, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edna St. Vincent Millay, neither of whom wrote about Moxie. I must have read some Longfellow at some point, but I can’t say I remember any. Weirdly, because of Evangeline, Longfellow is probably as well remembered in Louisiana as Maine.

Millay is mostly remembered these days as a bisexual free spirit and morphine addict, but I always pause when I come across one of her poems. There’s almost always something there to ponder:

And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

Renascence

Music

Patty Griffin. Sorry, that’s almost all I’ve got. Doris Day recorded “That Jane from Maine,” and Rudy Vallee was from Maine. Howie Day seems likable. Apparently the long winters are better for writing horror novels than for making music.

As an aside, the It Girl of popular music right now seems to be a guy from Vermont, Noah Kahan. It’s low-key stuff, with plenty of banjoes and fiddles, very likable, and a New York Times critic noted that one of the reasons for Kahan’s current popularity may be that New Englanders so rarely have a popular music icon to embrace, so they’ve embraced Kahan with a vengeance.

So we listened to Patty Griffin, who, last I heard, was living in Austin. Then we listened to more Patty Griffin. Luckily Steven King was there to take up the driving slack.

Guitar

Between the one day that Kris and I were sick and the day of the storm I played the guitar a lot in Maine. I think with the windshield washers slapping time I managed to play every song that driver knew, or at least most of the songs that I know. Libby Camps gave me a free sticker, and it’s now in a place of honor on my guitar case.

Great place, Libby Camps, and for at least part of the year it’s an excellent place to sit on the front porch of the lodge and play the guitar. I wouldn’t want to try it in winter, even in a red lumberjack shirt.

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Indiana Packing List

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.

Here’s a roundup of Columbus’s fire stations.

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.

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Brook Trout, Libby Camp, North Maine Woods, September 9-14, 2023

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We didn’t drive to Libby Camp the obvious way. If we’d stayed on the highway we could have driven on paved roads a good bit longer, so of course we didn’t do that. We drove the back way, west and then north around the back side of Baxter State Park. Kris drove and I napped.

I napped because I was sick, having been blindsided with a cold on the flight to Maine the morning before. I worried that it might be Covid, but it felt so purely like a cold that I didn’t worry much, and anyway there were no tests handy. I had been fine the day before we left. When I got onto the flight the next day I felt awful, but by then I was committed. By our second day in camp I was tired but mostly recovered. And anyway by then it was Kris’s turn to be sick, and she was doing an exemplary job of it for both of us.

So for me the cold was short-lived but rife with misery. The morning we drove to Libby Camp from Bangor I felt so bad that I didn’t even pretend I wanted to drive. I alternately dozed, blew my nose, and displayed manly stoicism, manly stoicism being the same as frequent and bitter complaining. I was particularly whiny when I woke up after lunch and had no clue where we were. Kris wasn’t real sure either, so I didn’t accomplish much except to increase her angst.

Kris at least was following a downloaded route, and it wasn’t her fault that the map app had gone on a backroads buying spree. We had only wanted to see Mount Katahdin when we left the highway. What we got was a tour of the Great North Maine Lumber Roads.

There are roughly 3.5 million acres of land in the North Maine Woods, and most of what isn’t water is a mix of second- or third- or more-growth mixed timber. Most of those 3.5 million acres are privately owned by lumber companies, and all of those dirt roads exist for the happiness of lumber company lumber trucks. By both the rules of the North Maine Woods and simple physics Nissan Rogue rental cars must yield.

I’m guessing returning a flattened rental car to National would have raised questions.

Back to that first day, at the Telos Road checkpoint on the backside of Baxter State Park we paid our $100 entry fee for a week in the Great Private North. Had we been 70+, our passage would have been free, but all in all we got our money’s worth. I’m not in any hurry for free passage. It’ll get here soon enough.

Jeffrey Labree, not Neil Thomas

Libby Camp has been in the North Maine Woods for somewhere north of 100 years. They cater to hunters, fishers, and winter snowmobilers. In addition to those field sports they offer family adventures–hiking, orchid hunting, canoeing, staying in a cabin in the woods with no TV or internet . . . It sounds wholesome and unforgettable. When I was 10 if my parents had taken me there I’d have been in heaven. I was pretty much in heaven six decades down the road.

We had signed up for Orvis Week, and there were three other anglers with us for the week: Bruce from South Carolina, Mike from upstate New York, and Paul from Tampa via Austin. Off and on while we were there we also met other anglers. There was a nice downstate Maine couple who interpreted many things Maine for us, and who called the state game warden at Bar Harbor to make sure we’d be safe notwithstanding the projected arrival of both the Thomases and Hurricane Lee. And the first night at dinner there was a strong personality who complained that while he had caught plenty of fish, he hadn’t caught anything big. Outside of politics I’ve rarely met someone with such a strong grasp of missing the point, but he was amusing, and his friend was along for the ride. After dinner they left for Portland, five hours south. I hoped they wouldn’t hit a moose. I’m rather fond of moose.

Did you know that in South Carolina they apparently mispronounce both crappie and pecan? All I’ve got to say is that since they kicked off the Civil War and repeatedly elected Strom Thurmond, South Carolinians shouldn’t be allowed the final word on anything.

At the heart of Libby Camp is a lodge building where we all hung out and ate communal meals. Libby’s guest cabins and work buildings surround it. Everything faces onto Lake Millinocket, where Libby keeps its float plane, a trio of small motorboats, and a passel of canoes and kayaks. The lodge building has both electricity (thanks to a generator) and internet (thanks to Mr. Musk’s Starlink), but the cabins don’t have either. Light in our cabin was from propane lanterns, which were wholly admirable for producing warm glows, but were maybe not the completest thing for finding lost socks. Heat in the cabins was from a wood stove and piled quilts. Air conditioning in the cabin was from opening the windows and deconstructing piled quilts.

There was a point, probably when I was admiring one of the mounted moose heads, when I thought what a mighty fine job Libby Camp had done mimicking a backwoods fishing lodge. Then I realized I was a mighty fine idiot. I had experienced this weird sense of dislocation once before in Hawaii, in the bar at the Hotel Moloka‘i, when I caught myself admiring what a fine job they’d done copying a tropical bar. Sometimes you get lucky enough to stumble into the real deal.

I was supposed to fish five days but fished four, with one day off to look after Kris, sleep off cold remnants, and play the guitar. Kris fished three days and slept two. Of the four days I fished, I spent two of the days floating in canoes on ponds while our guide, Jeffrey Labree, moved me into position so that I could look good casting. Two other days we waded rivers. The ponds involved a bit of hiking. One of the rivers involved a 30-minute trip in a Cessna float plane, and the other needed four hours of driving and being on watch for lumber trucks.

There’s a lot of the North Maine Woods.

There were also a lot of fish, and I didn’t catch many larger than ten inches. Jeffrey said that one of my missed hits was easily a 20-inch landlocked salmon, which would have been a fish of a lifetime. I missed it. I’ve missed enough fish-of-a-lifetime by now to know that’s ok. The fish aren’t hankering to participate in my obsession, and just knowing they’re there and being lucky enough to spend some time in their vicinity is plenty good for me. And the memory of that hit from that fish is its own good thing. Sitting here days later and a thousand miles away I think I can conjure everything about that instant in my mind’s eye.

Landlocked salmon.

On the day I fished without Kris, I spent a day on Brown Brook Pond in a canoe, throwing dry flies that I’d tied, an elk-hair caddis and a Goddard caddis, and Jeff’s streamers until I was tired of catching fish. Jeffrey guessed I caught somewhere north of 40 brook trout and maybe as many 50, lovely tiny perfect things, and I must have missed an equal number because, well, that’s what I do. I rarely keep count of fish, not because I’m too proud to know, but because I lose track. I’ll trust Jeffrey’s number, mostly because I want to, but also because it felt like a 50-fish day. Whether it was or not doesn’t matter.

You know the best thing about fishing in Maine? The entire week we only fished with dry flies on the surface and streamers. We never fished with nymphs underwater. I know that if you want to catch fish, you have to fish underwater with nymphs, and I have done it from west to east, from here to Alaska, but truth be told I kinda hate them. Fishing with streamers–baitfish imitations–is most of what I do here in Texas, and fishing with surface dry flies is just a joy.

Fishing on the ponds you could just throw the fly any old place and the fish were like as not to be there. Fishing the streams we fished mostly downstream–which is not by any means the norm with dry flies. With the streamers you would let the streamer swing while you retrieved upstream. With the caddis dry flies–and we fished caddis dry flies and nothing else–you’d sometimes let the flies drift and sometimes skate them across the surface. It was all very satisfying.

Brook trout.

Our final day we went to Webster Pond in the float plane, and it was the first time Kris and I could really see how big things were. At the pond outfall Kris stood in one place for the day casting one of Jeff’s flies, a candy caddis. It was named by his granddaughter because it looked like candy, and Kris suspected there may have been actual candy involved. Jeff told me a story about his own childhood which I will shamelessly steal, about fishing at 10 with his aunt and uncle for Atlantic salmon, and while the party let Jeff cast to a salmon he was supported in the river current by another angler. The other angler was Ted Williams.

That last day I moved up and downstream around Kris, fishing some with the candy caddis, some with a black ghost streamer that I had tied. I picked the black ghost because it was pretty and, well, with me and flies pretty will always do it. Jeff told me later that they fished black ghosts mostly in ponds, and while I wasn’t in a pond, like I said, it was pretty. I caught some fish, and some of them were brook trout.

Neil Thomas, not Jeffrey Labree.

Kris said that day that without moving much she had caught 19 trout and asked me how many I caught. I asked her if I could count fall fish and she said no–fall fish are considered a trash fish not worthy of notice. Honestly though my judgment’s not that refined. Of course counting them or no, I had no very precise idea how many fish I had caught, and I didn’t lie, either. I told her that with fall fish it was certainly more than 19, but without, no, I hadn’t caught 19 trout.

And I think that’s true. Between you and me though, I’m counting the fall fish.

Fall fish.