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McCloud and Lower Sacramento Rivers, California, Rainbow Trout, July 8-9, 2023

On our second day fishing in California, we fished on the McCloud River near Mount Shasta. I had heard that the Upper Sacramento was fishing really well, but that the McCloud was off-color and too high from late runoff. We had our choice, the Upper Sacramento that was fishing well or the McCloud that wasn’t, so of course we chose the McCloud.

Actually I chose the McCloud without asking Kris. Don’t tell her. We were fishing with Paul Leno from The Fly Shop. I had told Paul about fishing for McCloud River rainbows on Crane Creek in Missouri, and Paul agreed that we needed to see their source. Most of the world’s transplanted rainbows share McCloud River genetics, so not going would be like Christians skipping Bethlehem when they visited the Holy Land. A lot of North American fishing starts on the McCloud.

Google Earth

To get to the river we drove south from the town of McCloud and then turned left onto an unpaved forest road. The forest road descends, and then descends some more, and then descends some more, down into volcanic rubble, ruts, fallen rocks, and dust. I was following Paul’s truck, but if I got too close, say within 50 feet, I couldn’t see the road for the dust. You know those roadside signs, Beware Falling Rock? As a child I thought they meant watch the cliff face and be ready to dodge, but I guess they’re actually warning about the rock that’s already fallen. If you hit that rock hard enough it sure could mess up the rent car.

Anyway, that’s the kinda thing one contemplates on the creep down the forest service road to the McCloud River. That, and wondering if AAA would come get me when I popped a tire. The seven miles took about an hour. I didn’t have much faith that even if they came AAA could ever find us.

When we parked the rental car at the end of the road we still had to hike a mile or so to the Nature Conservancy’s Kerry Landreth Preserve, which lets in ten anglers at a time. There was one other angler already there somewhere, but we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Apparently it’s usually full, but it’s a hard place to get to, and even after we reached the river we had to crawl down the bank through riverside brush and rock to fish.

This was youngster’s fishing. At 16, or 26, or 36, I would have enjoyed the scramble. At 66, perched above the river, trying to get a fly to drift through a 10 foot pocket in a twist of rock garden 10 feet below me, I kind of regretted that I’d traded in my afternoon nap. It was hard, technical nymph fishing, and while it was certainly challenging, I haven’t yet convinced myself that it was fun.

Paul got us to the river, coached us, and at some point corrected the way I was mending my line. Mends are peculiar to fly fishing rivers. The idea is to get the fly to float down the current with no drags or skitters or whatnot that will look unnatural to fish. The problem is that between you and your fly the river has conflicting currents, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, that are put there solely to give the poor angler grief.

To avoid drag you have to mend your line: you force slack into the line between you and the fly, either upstream or downstream depending on the currents, so that the line slack lets the fly drift true. To force slack you lift the line from the water and move an arc of line up or down with the rod tip–down if the current between you and the fly is slower, up if faster. Ideally you move the line without jerking the fly and scaring all the fish for a couple of miles.

I’m pretty good at the theory of mends, but not so good at the application. I long ago gave up on not moving my fly when I mend, and had finally settled on not moving the fly a whole lot. I kinda figured that if I diverted my eyes the fish would be courteous enough to do the same. Paul watched me and said that I was trying to throw the line, and that what I should do is lift the line and set it down as if I was writing the letter C with my rod tip. And it worked.

Dammit, it worked. Here all this time I was content with ignorance, and I found that I didn’t really like being wrong. Worse, it was easy to do it right. Dammit.

I caught two fish (which is about par for my course). With all the creeping and crawling and scrambling involved, and with lunch–never forget lunch–we didn’t actually fish that long, maybe three or four hours. At lunch Paul asked me what I thought about the McCloud.

Paul really loves the place, and he was asking a deeper question than whether or not I had had a good day fishing. I had fished there for four hours on a difficult day. By July in California’s drought years, the McCloud would have been running hundreds of cfs slower. It would have been clear, and it would have reflected a Caribbean blue. We spent one day on the McCloud in a rare wet year when the water was high and cloudy, and for us old folk it was a very hard day.

Still.

Like a lot of dammed Western rivers, the McCloud pre-dam held migratory runs of salmon. It doesn’t anymore, and in my mind that’s tragic, but it’s the same tragedy shared by a lot of rivers, East and West. The McCloud is special though because it also has that strange history of being the site of the first federal fish hatchery, and its trout, the particular rainbow subspecies of McCloud River redbands, were transported everywhere, to New England and Montana and New Zealand and Argentina and Chile and, well, everywhere, even to Crane Creek in Missouri.

I guess I can’t answer Paul’s question. It was different. It was rugged. The fish that I saw were stunningly beautiful. Would I go back there? I don’t know. I’m still decompressing. Would I think about about the river? All the time. I will never forget it.

𐫱   𐫱  𐫱   𐫱   𐫱  𐫱   𐫱   𐫱 

We planned to fly out of Sacramento early on Monday, and we were only going to fish a half-day Sunday. Paul suggested that we meet in Redding and fish the Lower Sacramento in the city. We’d be fishing on a good-sized river roughly two football fields wide in the middle of a good-sized town of about 100,000 people, but when you float it the river still feels reasonably remote. More important, after our day on the McCloud, it was mighty comfortable. We were fishing from a drift boat. There were donut shops and paved roads. I could have napped if I’d wanted.

Google Earth

We were fishing under bobbers, with deep nymphs drifted alongside the boat. It is, I think, about as lazy as fly fishing gets, especially when someone else is doing all the rowing.

As usual though, I can find some way to screw things up. I could handle the floppy water haul cast we were using, and I don’t hardly remember getting tangled at all. I couldn’t get the hook set right though, and even though I got takes from time to time, Paul said that I was pulling the hook out of the fish’s mouth. I was at the back of the boat, between Paul in the row seat and the motor on the transom. Trout always feed into the upstream current, so they were facing towards us.

Whenever I tried to set the hook, I would unfailingly lift the rod to my right. I don’t know why, I’m far from right-leaning, but the bobber bobbled and I went right.

That was fine as long as I was fishing on the left side of the boat. I’d pull right and the hook would set upstream into the current, into the fish. On the right side though when I’d go right I’d pull away from the fish. It was stupid, and if I had a year or two I might work myself out of it.

Apparently I wasn’t going to work it out that morning. I caught a couple, one a tiny salmon, both on the left side of the boat, but mostly I just missed. That was ok though. I’d learned something, or at least I’d theoretically learned it.

Kris on the other hand was getting plenty of sets but then had trouble landing the fish. Sitting at the back of the boat I got to watch it all. Now mind, I lose about as many fish as I catch, and I always think that if I just had more practice, that if I only hooked more fish, that sooner or later I’d figure it out and get better. Part of the problem is that I’ve heard and read so many contradictory things about playing and landing fish, usually when I’m trying to land the fish, that I don’t really have a very clear picture of what I’m supposed to be doing. Hold the rod tip up, hold the rod tip low at 30 degrees so the backbone’s in the rod, hold the rod to the side to lead the fish and tire it, don’t lead the fish because you’ll wear a hole and the hook will flop out, tighten down the drag, don’t tighten down the drag, horse the fish in as fast as you can, let the fish run, don’t ever bother getting freshwater fish onto the reel . . .

I’ve never fished with a guide as certain or as precise in his directions as Paul. Hold the rod tip up, not back but up, with the butt of the rod in front of your face. Face the fish so that the spine of the rod is fighting the fish. Get the line on the reel so that the fish is fighting the reel, not you. It was a joy to watch him coach Kris, and to watch Kris become a much better angler in the in the time it took to land one fish, . If I had been fighting the fish I’d probably have garbled his directions in all the excitement, but since all I had to do was watch it was easier to ponder, and maybe even absorb. Some of it anyway.

Now if I could just get that hook set right I could practice.

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Fall River, California, Rainbow Trout, July 7, 2023

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In California we fished for rainbow trout in three separate rivers, the Fall River, the McCloud, and the Lower Sacramento. We could have picked other places to fish in California. There’s a guide who fly fishes for big sharks out of San Diego, there are steelhead in the coastal rivers, golden trout in the Sierras, and carp in LA parks. There were even other well-known trout rivers close to where we fished.

But we picked our three rivers, and they were good choices. Redding, California, is the gateway to Northeastern California’s trout rivers. It sits at the northern edge of the flat California Central Valley, and from Redding things can only go up.

We flew into Sacramento, 30 feet above sea level. To put this in perspective, Houston at 79 feet is universally envied for its flat terrain and low elevation. Sacramento is lower than Houston and equally flat. I bet it can’t match us for humidity though.

Redding, 165 miles north of Sacramento, is at roughly 500 feet. Driving there from Sacramento shares all the scenic wonder of a drive from Houston to Dallas, which is also roughly 500 feet. That change in elevation doesn’t really do justice to the flatness of the three-hour drive from Sacramento to Redding. It’s flat, really flat, or close enough to make no difference.

Then things change quickly. Where we spent the first night, the town of Fall River Mills, is 70 miles northeast of Redding at an elevation of 3,323 feet. Mount Shasta dominates the region north of Redding at 14,180 feet. The Cascade Range was formed by volcanoes (including Mount Shasta), and volcanic rock and debris are everywhere. Snowmelt and rain seep into the porous volcanic rock, and then after percolating underground for some years the water reappears at springs, cold and clean, and begins its run south to the Sacramento River, south to Redding, and then on to the City of Sacramento and the Central Valley.

Fall River is a tributary to a tributary of the Sacramento River. It’s fed by a huge conglomeration of springs. It flows slowly, and its surface is glass. It’s a perfect spring creek.

The river meanders roughly 22 miles through a high flat agricultural valley nestled between the Cascades and the Sierras. They grow wild rice in the valley–the kind of grass seed I thought only came from Minnesota–and cattle, but the landowners appear to take good care of the river. The cattle are fenced away to limit bank and bed damage.

Fall River is not all flat and meandering. There are falls on the Fall River, but not in the valley. We could see them from a highway overlook south of Fall River Mills, right before the Fall River joins the Pitt River. The Pitt flows south and joins the Sacramento at Lake Shasta.

Private ownership both protects the Fall River and makes it difficult to access. You can’t get there from here. You have to fish from a boat, and to get a boat with access you pretty much have to hire a guide. The guide puts in on private land, floats downstream, then motors back up to the put-in. On the way down and back he works you into the river.

Fall River is as pretty as a trout stream gets. Meanwhile the towns near the river aren’t exactly reaping the benefits, I guess because of the difficulty of access. You want to buy a vacation home or business in a prime trout location? Go to Fall River Mills. I think everything’s for sale, and nothing seems to be selling very fast.

We fished with Maciel Wolff,1. He met us at Glenburn Community Church at the country crossroad of Glenburn, then we followed him to the put-in. He told us that he had previously guided full time for a lodge, but that the lodge had shut because of fire risk. The owner could no longer afford property insurance. Who knew there were wildfires in California?

We booked Maciel through The Fly Shop. The Fly Shop sends its catalog to every fly fisher in North America. When I would tell one of my Houston friends that we were going to fish near Redding, the response would always be “I get The Fly Shop catalogue . . . ” There is supposed to be a famous hexagenia mayfly hatch on the Fall River, but that assumes that hatches–the point when hideously ugly mayfly nymphs under water transform into things of beauty and go on a short-lived aerial sex spree–actually exist. Having only ever seen a couple of hatches, I’m still dubious, but Maciel assured us it was true.

Meanwhile we were nymphing, which meant we were fishing flies that imitated the underwater life phase of mayflies, or caddis flies, or midges. As far as I can tell nymphs just imitate the ugly life stage of aquatic insects when they live underwater, and as flies go they’re relatively fungible. Dry fly anglers–anglers who might fish the mythical hexagenia hatches–talk endlessly about the specific insect and the specific life-phase that their fly is tied to imitate. Nymph fishermen seem to talk mostly about size (ranging from mighty small to ridiculously tiny) and color (the choice of which seems to be about as fickle as haute couture).

We were fishing two tiny weighted bead-headed nymphs below a swivel which was in turn below a bobber. At one point I did a rough measurement of the leader. Below the swivel the tippet was a long six feet designed to fish well below the surface of Fall Creek. Above the swivel there was a bit more than six feet of butt section. Neither the butt section nor the tippet was graduated, so the butt was something like one solid piece of 15 pound leader, and the tippet one solid piece of 6x fluorocarbon. I’ve rarely fished with a leader so specific to a place.

Maciel told us early that we wouldn’t really cast, we’d let the line touch the water behind us to create tension then then flop the flies ten feet in front of us, close to the boat. Theoretically that cast would reduce tangles by keeping everything open and in a line, but “reduce” is the key word in that sentence. All leaders I cast are prone to Gordian tangles, and once I get two flies involved then tangles are specifically required by my fishing licenses. According to Maciel the fish wouldn’t be particularly bothered by the boat, so the boat would be pretty close to our bobber. I know in my head that he was right, but both Kris and I cheated some with our casts. It’s hard not to believe in your heart of hearts that the water 30 feet away is oh-so-much-better than the water 10 feet away. Maciel was patient with us though, and he put us in position to fish, managed the boat to help with our drifts, adjusted our bobbers for depth, changed out our flies when he thought some new color was all the fashion, and untangled our tangles. He coached us through landing fish.

But truth is I am a terrible trout fisherman. The more I fish for trout, the more I realize how bad I am. The fly fishing things I’m actually moderately good at, casting fairly far, retrieving a streamer fly, and setting the hook with a strip set, the things I do all the time in saltwater and for bass, are largely–not completely but largely–useless in trout rivers. And the biggest problems I have in my usual fishing–keeping fish on the hook and releasing the fish–seem magnified.

Worse, because of the water clarity we were fishing with 6x tippet.

Size 6x tippet may take some explanation. Tippet is the final connection between the fly line and the fly, and 6x tippet is in fact a split hair. There are supposedly even smaller diameters of tippet, 7x and 8x, but I suspect anything smaller than 6x is a scam, and that all you’re actually buying is an empty spool. It makes sense sometimes to use 6x tippet, especially in spring creeks like the Fall. The leader should be harder for the fish to see, should let flies sink faster, should allow flies to drift more naturally, and should immediately break when you do something stupid. I guess that last part’s not a reason to fish it, but it’s certainly true. I caught two fish, and I probably broke off three, and all three were lost because I did something stupid. I held onto the line when the fish ran. My finger nudged the line when the fish ran. I breathed heavy when the fish ran.

Size 6x tippet has a diameter of .005 inches, and has a breaking strength of about 3 pounds. What I usually fish with, 16 pound tippet, has a diameter of .013 inches and a breaking strength of, well, 16 pounds. You can break size 6x tippet with just plain ol’ stupid, but 16 pound tippet takes really extraordinary stupid to break.((I can do that too, but not quite so often.)) Maciel would tell me how to land the fish, and then I’d go and do something different.

So I’m terrible at setting the hook with a trout set, I’m terrible at line management, I’m terrible at keeping the fish on the hook, and I’m terrible at releasing the fish if, by chance, I land it.

Still all that doesn’t really bother me. We were in a beautiful place. Maciel brought along great sandwiches from Ray’s Food Place grocery in Fall River Mills, and he coached us well. We watched barn swallow acrobatics over the water, and listened to red-winged blackbirds. We talked about hawks. We caught some fish and we lost some fish. It was lovely. Maciel and Kris made for good company, and the place was perfect. Fishing was exactly what it should be. I may not be much of a trout fisherman, but I’m pretty good at hanging out with trout.

  1. Mossy works contract with The Fly Shop and other Redding guide services, and also has his own guide service. His email is macielwolff@gmail.com or phone 831-278-2439, or contact The Fly Shop. [↩]
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California Girls

I’ve been playing “California Girls” in my head now for a couple of weeks. Sometimes I play the classic Beach Boys version and sometimes I hum the David Lee Roth with those lascivious leers added to the chorus. I’m just glad after all that ear-worming that I still like the song.

“California Girls” started playing because tomorrow we go to Northern California, north of Redding. I’ve been to California quite a bit, but I’ve never been north of the Wine Country, and I’ve never fished anywhere.

If everybody had an ocean
Across the U.S.A.
Then everybody’d be surfin’
Like Californ-i-a

Did you know that “Surfin’ USA” is actually Bryan Wilson lyrics set to the tune of “Sweet Little Sixteen” by Chuck Berry? I didn’t, but it seems an apt metaphor for California. The state is this amazing thing in and of itself, with the Pacific on the left and the Sierra Nevadas on the right, beautiful, interesting, and grandly diverse, both geographically and culturally. In the far south there are the deserts and beaches. In the far north there are redwoods and mountains and trout.

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But a big part of California seems imported from elsewhere: Joni Mitchell, “Sweet Little Sixteen,” the Gold Rush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Dodgers and the Giants, the movie industry, surfing, Tom Joad . . . . Even its geology is a mash-up from the ocean floor and marauding island crescents. You may not recall this, but until geologists invented tectonic plates in the 60s, California was completely flat. There wasn’t any elevated ground in the whole state, and it was number 3 on the list of our flattest states. Then the geologists got creative and overnight California had all those mountains. Tectonic plates are really what made California what it is today.

Lucille Lloyd, detail of Queen Califa Mural, 1937, California State Capitol.

Even California’s name is borrowed. It’s the name of an island of black Amazonian women described in the 1510 Spanish novel, Las sergas de Esplandián. The Californian amazons fed their males to the gryphons that they rode into battle.

All of California’s geological shifting still left the Central Valley flat as a pancake. It extends from Bakersfield in the south to Lake Shasta in the far north. About half of the fruits and vegetables produced in the United States are produced in the Central Valley. I’m not aware of any trout in the valley, though I’d expect there to be some bass ponds, and almost certainly some carp. We’ll be fishing north of there, just a bit up Highway 5, within sight of Mount Shasta, elevation 14,179. Mount Shasta was formed in 1967 by a group of geologists from Stanford.

Geologic Map of California, California Geological Survey. Red and green are tall, yellow isn’t. The blue off to the left is sea level.

California makes me wish I knew something about geology. Obviously I don’t.

California has approximately 39 million people, about 10 million more than second place Texas. The largest centers of population are coastal, centered on Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, and in the Central Valley. There aren’t a lot of people in the deserts or the mountains.

There’s no dominant ethnic group. About 35% of the population is white alone, 6.5% black, 16% Asian, and 40% Hispanic. About 35% of the population is college educated, and 84% have high school degrees, which is pretty close to the national average and close enough to Texas to make no difference. The median income is about $84,000, ranked number 5, and 12% of the population lives in poverty. That poverty rate places it in the solid center of states.

Cost of living in California is roughly 135% of the national average, and only Massachusetts and Hawaii are more expensive. There are earthquakes, fires, the decline of San Francisco, droughts, and the Dodgers. In only a few 100s of millions of years the California coast will slam into Asia, and no one seems the least bit worried.

Alta California, one of the names for Spanish and Mexican California before it was ceded to the States, was first settled in 1804, but wasn’t really ever much of a thing. In 1840 before the Mexican-American War, the non-native population of California is estimated at 8,000. There had been a sizable and diverse Native American population before the Europeans, with as many as 200,000 Native Americans, about 12% of the total estimated population for the U.S. There were more than 100 tribal groups. By 1870, because of death and removal, the California Native American population had declined to about 12,000.

California’s population boomed with the Gold Rush, reaching 379,994 by 1860. In some ways the Gold Rush seems nothing but a footnote, but it really is the seminal event in California history. The state hasn’t stopped growing since.

California has a reputation of left-leaning politics, but that’s shifted back and forth over the years. Ronald Reagan, after all, was from California. Since World War II, there’s been a Democratic governor for 32 years and a Republican governor for 42, but currently the state is very Democratic. All of the elected state officials are Democrats, Both Senators are Democratic, and only 12 of the 62-member congressional delegation are Republican. The California State legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried California 61.7% to 31.6%, and in 2020, Joe Biden carried 63.5% of the California vote. Trump’s percentage increased to 34.32%, but the total vote in 2020 increased by about 3.9 million. In 2020 most of the urban and coastal areas voted for Biden, while portions of the Central Valley and the far north voted Trump.

2020 California Presidential Election Map by County, Wikipedia.

Besides surfing (which was an import from Hawaii), California gives us our movies, a lot of music, our wine, and our computers. It is the largest economy in the U.S., and would rank 5th in the world if it were a separate nation. Oil production, defense industries, agriculture, solar power . . . The Port of Los Angeles imports approximately 20% of the cargo coming into the States, with the most imports coming from Asia.

To prepare for our trip to California, Kris and I came up with a list of movies set in California. It’s an endless list, and we’ll catch a fish long before we run out of movies. We watched Vertigo, but we didn’t get around to The Birds. We watched Clueless, but never got around to re-watching American Graffiti. We watched The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but not Chinatown.

Wasn’t Back to the Future set in a California suburb? I think I’ll stop this and go watch Chinatown. Or maybe Big Trouble in Little China.

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Rhode Island Packing List

Gear

We took three rods, two 9-foot 8-weights with floating lines and a 9-foot 9-weight with an intermediate line, a line that sinks just a bit below the surface. Mostly we fished with the 8-weights, but I used the 9-weight some in the fog when I was blind casting in deeper water. I caught my fish on my 8-weight, and the fish was strong enough to make me think a 9-weight might have been better.

Our guide, Ray Ramos, had suggested that we bring waders and boots in the likely event that the weather stayed bad. If it stayed bad we were going to try a bit of coastline casting. The water is still pretty cold in Rhode Island, and we’re not much used to cold, so we would have needed the waders. We never used them, which is good. No matter what Mr. Simms and Mr. Patagonia and Mr. Orvis tell you, waders are a nuisance.

When we left Ninigret Pond the second day, the pretty day, a UPS driver in shorts kidded us about our cool weather clothes and asked if we thought it was cold. We told him that we were from Houston, and that it was freezing. He told us we’d never survive the winters. I’d guess that’s about right.

A Word About Phil

Phil Shook writes about fly-fishing, and wrote Flyfisher’s Guide to Texas and Flyfisher’s Guide to Mexico, and co-wrote Fly-Fishing the Texas Coast. Phil also wrote Flyfisher’s Guide to the Northeast Coast, which covers New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut, right next to Rhode Island. Last week he sent me a photo of a clip from an article he wrote in 2010 for Eastern Fly Fishing, now American Fly Fishing, about fly fishing Ninigret Pond. I should have known to talk to Phil first.

From Phil Shook.

Hotels

The first time we went to Rhode Island we were in Newport on the weekend of the boat show. Newport is an upscale East Coast tourist destination, and it is the home to The America’s Cup. I reckon it’s the center of the sailboat universe. Every recreational sailor in North America was in Newport for the boat show, and it was tough to blanch for all the tans. Because of the crowds, prices were jacked, rooms were hard to come by, and there were people everywhere. It was a terrible time to be in Newport unless you sailed, and we paid an extravagant amount of money for a depressingly mediocre hotel room.

The second time we went prices were calmer, and we found a great old refurbished motor inn, The Sea Whale Motel. It was kinda cool and not too funky, reasonably central, and so much more likable than the first place we had stayed. For this trip I booked us again for the Sea Whale.

Except I didn’t. I booked us for the Blue Whale. You see what I did there? Sea Whale? Blue Whale? See how anybody could make that mistake? Well, I certainly see it.

I was a bit surprised when we followed the GPS directions from the airport and ended up an hour across Block Island Sound from Newport. The Blue Whale was tiny, and our room was a tinier part of that tiny. It was great though, and in that tiny room I did some world class sleeping. From the Blue Whale it was a quick, calm drive to Ninigret Pond, and much more convenient than Newport would have been. Prices at the Blue Whale were even cheaper than at the Sea Whale–of course it was a bit early for beach-goers, and beach-goers are the Blue Whale’s clientele.

I’m a great planner, and from now on I’m making all my lodging choices based on whether or not there’s a whale in the mix.

Restaurants

I’ve already written about the magnificence that are clam shacks: lobster rolls, fried clams, picnic tables, chowder . . . And we ate at two that were a stone’s throw from The Blue Whale Inn, Monahan’s and Salty’s. At Salty’s, Kris asked the girl at the counter what she liked best, and the girl said the hot lobster roll, at least she sort of said that. She actually said the hot lab-sta roll. I made her say it again it was so wonderful, but I had embarrassed her and she Midwesterned her accent.

I vaguely recall that there’s some reason that we’re not supposed to be eating lobster, over-fishing probably, but I figured eating lab-sta just once was ok.

My college roommate, Robert, had sent us a photo of the Matunuck Oyster Bar, ((At least that’s what I think Robert sent us. I couldn’t find the original email, but on my possibly-flawed memory of his advice we went to Matunuck Oyster Bar and it was great, so whatever he sent Robert gets the credit.)) and we made a reservation there for our first night. We almost canceled when saw their wall of advertising in the Providence airport–airport advertising isn’t something I’m prone to trust–but the place was wonderful. Northeastern oysters are different than our Gulf Coast oysters, smaller, firmer, brinier . . . I love Northeastern oysters. Of course I also love Gulf Coast oysters, Northwestern oysters, French oysters, McDonald’s French fries, and fried bologna. You can take my judgment for what it’s worth.

We had Northeastern oysters. We had steamer clams. I had striped bass because, after all, that’s what I was in town for. The place was crowded and noisy and happy and the food was delicious. ((If you’re keeping track, that photo below is another lobster roll for Kris. We also split a lobster roll the next day for lunch. I don’t think she ate any lobster rolls for breakfast, but I can’t be absolutely certain. If the lab-sta fishery collapses, I’m blaming her.))

The next afternoon after fishing and clam shacking we drove into Providence, about an hour north of Ninigret Pond. Providence itself isn’t very big. The current population estimate is 189,692, but the population of the metropolitan area is more than 1.6 million, so there are plenty of people in the area. Providence is old, founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, and it’s the home of Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design. It was once ground zero for New England’s Mafia.

We found a parking place where the parking meter didn’t work, but then we parked anyway. I figured that if it took them decades to clean out the Mafia, then I didn’t have to worry about a couple of hours of illegal parking. We walked around Brown and went through the excellent Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art–it’s small, but chock full of really great stuff. This, for instance, was the cover art on one of my college textbooks:

I think maybe it’s Roman, maybe older? Maybe Babylonian? I was excited to see it, but I was so worried that I had never finished my class reading that I forgot to check the signage.

Before we went back to The Some Whale Inn, we ate at Al Forno in Providence. In 1992 its chefs won one of the first Jame’s Beard awards, largely on the strength of their grilled pizza, and every few years like clockwork it gets a new nomination. Who doesn’t like pizza? And their grilled pizza is something strange and special. We ate grilled pizza. We split a roasted beet salad. We ate espresso-doused ice cream for desert. We watched the people around us eat other stuff and we envied them for what they’d ordered.

Playlist

The band Talking Heads came together at the Rhode Island School of Design, and I kept debating adding them to the Rhode Island playlist. I finally decided that each person is granted a certain measure of enjoyable Talking Heads listening, and after that the band passed their sell-by date. I think I passed my Talking Heads sell-by date somewhere in the early 80s.

You’d think that there wouldn’t be a lot of Rhode Island music to choose from, but here’s the thing; the Newport Jazz Festivals and Folk Festivals were incredibly influential, and if you just download a couple of festival compilations you’ll be set with a lot of great music. Somehow it is immensely satisfying to listen to “If I Had a Hammer” followed by Louis Armstrong singing “Mack the Knife.” I don’t care if any musician ever actually came from Rhode Island, so many musicians touched it that Rhode Island makes for a great playlist.

George M. Cohan was from Rhode Island, as were the Cowsills. On a side note, as a kid I saw the Cowsills at the Texas State Fair.

Guitar

I took a guitar, but I never played. Our hotel room was too small to open the case.