Tag: Baseball

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Road Trip! Texas to Wyoming, June 9-15, 2025 (46).

We drove 3,783 miles through eight states. We spent $833 on gas. We fished in three states, and we caught fish in all three–well I did, anyway, Kris didn’t fish in Nebraska. We took our dog for protection.1

I love road trips. I let myself eat junk food on road trips.

We’ve taken lots of road trips. To fish we drove to all the states that surround Texas, to most of the next states over, and to all of the next states over from there except Arizona. We drove to North Carolina during Covid, and we drove to the Driftless Region at the junction of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. We’ve seen a lifetime supply of corn, grass, pine trees, and gas stations. We did not drive to Alaska, which still seems an opportunity lost.

Our first food stop after leaving Houston was for burgers and onion rings at Bevos Drive-In, Vernon, Texas, 437 miles.2 You can usually find a good burger in most American towns. It may shorten your life, it may add to the methane load in the atmosphere, it may be inhumane, but it’s going to taste pretty great.

In Amarillo that evening (611 miles), we ate steak at the Big Texan Steak Ranch. Big Texan is that gaudy theme restaurant in Amarillo where, if you manage to eat the 72-ounce steak in an hour, then your meal is free.3 Big Texan is Route 66 incarnate. I ate there first 50-odd years ago, and once when our children were small, but I’ve never taken the 72-ounce challenge. It’s not the risk of failure but the certainty of after-dinner discomfort that’s daunting.

Our first fishing stop, Thermopolis, Wyoming, 1,439 miles, was a three days’ drive from Houston. I suppose we could have made Houston to Thermopolis in two days, but it would have been exhausting, and we wanted to see baseball in Denver. The Rockies have the worst record in the major leagues, and they didn’t disappoint. They led until the 9th inning when the Giants scored four runs.

Traffic in Denver was memorably frightening. Denver may be worse than Houston for traffic, though it’s probably a shade better than Naples or Mexico City. Coors Field, on the other hand, is a great place to watch baseball, even losing baseball, and this season it’s easy to get tickets.

The landscape from Denver to Thermopolis is about as full of empty as any place I’ve seen. I have in my head a notion of where trout are supposed to live, and it involves tumbling clear water, big hunks of granite, and plenty of trees. The water we fished in Wyoming was clear but not very tumbling. The rocks were mostly crumbly ancient sea sediment, not granite. For shade on the river there were no trees. We ate lunch under bridges.

We had rented an AirBnB outside of Thermopolis, a mile or so from the central business district. We arrived during a thunderstorm, and I was reasonably certain that the storm would blow us, the cabin, and the car on to Montana. It didn’t, and by the time we unloaded the car the storm had blown through. In the late day heat for the next two days there were also storms, big thunder, big wind, big rain, but it was for reasonably short durations. The rough weather never stuck around for long.

We fished with Wind River Canyon Whitewater and Fly Fishing on the Bighorn River, downstream after the Wind River passes through Wind River Canyon and becomes the Bighorn. We fished three days, and caught a lot of rainbow trout. We also caught a lot of brown trout. Neither the browns nor the rainbows are native, but they’ve driven out the native cutthroat. The browns and rainbows were still great fish.

The Bighorn is a moderate-sized river, not Missouri River-big, but too big to fish easily wading, and anyway Wyoming public access law is on the extreme side of landowner friendly. In Wyoming the adjoining landowner owns all rights to the river bed to midstream, so while you can float on the navigable water, you’re trespassing if you stand on the private riverbed. A drift boat is not only handy, but unless the river flows through public land, you can only fish from a boat. You can’t get out of your boat to pee without landowner permission.

There’s plenty of traffic on the Bighorn–the first day we launched with a kayaking church group, singing Shall We Gather at the River as they floated away.4 All day there was a procession of other kayakers, tubers, and other anglers in drift boats. The second day we launched below Thermopolis at Hot Springs State Park, and the river was considerably less crowded. The fishing was better, too, though apparently it’s usually better above Thermopolis.

I was pretty certain that we had arranged to fish the Wind River in the canyon when we booked the guides, but apparently I misunderstood, or the outfitter misunderstood what I was trying to say, and fishing Wind River Canyon wasn’t happening. The Wind River through the canyon is part of the Shoshone and Arapaho Wind River Reservation, and the outfitter is only permitted to fish two boats in the canyon a day. That was two boats other than our boat.

The canyon is famous for its fish, but so is the Bighorn below the canyon. There were plenty of healthy, 16- to 20-inch fish, and maybe even a few bigger–Kris says that these were the largest trout she’s caught. We fished with three different guides over the three days. I usually think it’s better to fish with the same guide, but the guides were good and it probably didn’t matter. We caught fish.

We mostly fished with tiny underwater trico nymphs5 under some sort of attractor fly and an indicator, but on the first day our guide found a single rising fish and switched me to a dry fly, a bit of white fluff that floated on the surface. I made the cast and the drift, and there is nothing like watching a good fish take a dry fly on the surface of a river. The current adds to the drama, the fish comes out of the water, and then everything is working towards failure until the fish is finally landed. Or lost. Or never hooked in the first place.

The second day we found a deep hole where rainbows were stacked and feeding. Kris was busy taking bird photos, so I didn’t have to trade off after each fish caught, and I pulled one good fish after another out of the river. I’m still surprised I didn’t find an excuse for us to stay there the rest of the day.

The third day I got tangled, and then I got tangled again, and then I got tangled some more. When I did manage to cast I had a few strikes, but would promptly lose each fish that struck. Finally, late in the day I caught an unremarkable rainbow. I was so grateful to catch that fish.

Even as great as the fishing was, I don’t think that I had managed my expectations for Wyoming. We had purposefully left Wyoming and Montana until the end–unlike say, New Jersey, which we’ve left to the end for no good reason. Unlike Montana, I had never fished in Wyoming before. Wyoming is famously good fishing, and it was good fishing. The Bighorn is a famously good river, and it was a mighty fine river. That said, it never felt like enough.

So we’ll go back to Wyoming. Not, I think, to Thermopolis, great as the fishing was. And maybe we’ll fish some without guides if Congress hasn’t sold all of our public land. I’d like to see the other side of the Wind River Range, and further south towards the Green before it flows into Utah. I’d like to go further north towards Yellowstone. In fact, when we fish Montana in September, we’ll spend a couple of nights in Wyoming, in Yellowstone at Old Faithful Inn. We’ll fish in Yellowstone for native cutthroat, and it still won’t be enough of Wyoming. There is so much of Wyoming to see, and with the Bighorn it feels like we barely got started.

Western Meadowlark

You know what I liked best though about fishing in Wyoming? It wasn’t the fishing, it was waking to the morning bird chorus, and listening to the songs of the Western Meadowlarks. I’ve never heard anything more beautiful.

I guess I’m finally old enough just to listen. Of course I’m also old enough to spend a day getting tangled, but I’ve been that for a long time.

  1. Roo is a mostly chihuahua rescue who as a puppy seven years ago showed up collarless and chipless on our daughter’s front porch. Kris took her to the vet, nursed her through heartworms, and she’s been with us since. She is an excellent travel companion, and is reasonably well socialized for a mostly chihuahua. She did bark at the lady in the Kansas toll booth. ↩︎
  2. I lived in Vernon, Texas, for my first 17 years, and Bevo’s was owned by my cousin James. They have the world’s best cheeseburger. Bevo is the name of the mascot at the University of Texas, but my cousin James didn’t go to the University of Texas, or as far as I know to any university at all, so I’m not sure why he picked the UT theme. Still, hook ’em. ↩︎
  3. There is a livestream of the Big Texan 72-ounce steak challenge. It’s oddly mesmerizing to watch. If you do the challenge, remember that in addition to the steak you have to eat the baked potato, shrimp cocktail, salad, and bread. ↩︎
  4. Not really, but they should have. ↩︎
  5. Tricos are a tiny mayfly, Tricorythodes. Trico nymphs are the nymph phase of the trico mayfly’s life cycle. Trico hatches are common in summer, and bigger mayflies apparently hatch earlier: May is a great time for bigger mayflies. Since we were in Wyoming in June, this was a variant of the common guide explanation that we should have been here last week. ↩︎

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Nebraska

Nebraska was a Train Stop

The first eastern track for the transcontinental railroad was laid near Omaha in 1863, during the Civil War. Starting a major construction project in the middle of a war isn’t the most obvious thing, but before his election Lincoln was a railroad lawyer, he believed in the future of railroads, and he wanted to keep California, newly acquired and separated from the East by the Sierras, the Rockies, and the Great American Desert, from leaving the Union. He could have just sent the Californians candlesticks. Candlesticks are always a nice gift.

Currier & Ives, “Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way,” lithograph, 1869.

The railroad was constructed by the Western Pacific, Central Pacific, and Union Pacific Railroads, at a cost in current dollars of $3.5 billion. Construction was funded by stock sales, federal and state bonds, and federal land grants. The railroad wasn’t actually transcontinental. It didn’t go from, say, Baltimore to San Francisco, but there was already a network of trains in the East. The Transcontinental linked the existing eastern network to the West Coast through the largely unsettled West.

Serious talk of a transcontinental railroad began in the 1850s, and there were actually three proposed routes. A proposed northern route went through Montana to Oregon, a Southern route went through Texas, New Mexico, and modern Arizona,1 and the central route went through what would be Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. Severe cold presented too many technological problems for the northern route, and the supporters of the southern route kinda lost their influence after secession. You snooze, you lose.

Omaha is now Nebraska’s largest city because of the political maneuvers of Council Bluffs, Iowa. In 1854 the acting Nebraska territorial governor–acting because the appointed territorial governor got to Nebraska and promptly died–figured that if the train took the central route, then it would certainly go through Nebraska’s capital, wherever that might be. Council Bluffs wanted to be the train’s starting point, and Council Bluffians were developing Omaha directly across the Missouri River. The acting Nebraska governor, an Iowa boy, declared Omaha the territorial capital. I’m guessing lot prices skyrocketed, and Omaha and Council Bluffs got the train.

In 1867 when Nebraska became a state, every other Nebraskan wanted to punish Omaha for its hubris, so they moved the capital. Lincoln was chosen as the new site. To defeat the move, Omahaians loaded the proposed move with stuff they thought would kill it. If the capital moved, then the state prison would also be in Lincoln, and the new state University would be in Lincoln. Omaha was betting that if it loaded Lincoln with all the good things the move would fail and Omaha could keep the capital. It didn’t fail. The University of Nebraska is in Lincoln. The Nebraska State Penitentiary is in Lincoln.

Omaha still had the train, and it also has the College Baseball World Series.

Geography

At about 77,200 square miles, Nebraska is the 16th largest state by area, and with a population of about 2 million, it’s the 38th most populous state. That gives folk plenty of elbow room.

It is largely treeless prairie that divides into two sections. To the right of the 98th meridian Eastern Nebraska is part of the Dissected Til Plains. Western Nebraska is part of the Great Plains. As a child of the Great Plains, if I had stood in the front yard and looked due north, only Kansas, Oklahoma, and a bit of Texas would have kept me from walking over to Nebraska, and it’s perfectly possible that there were no trees to hinder my path.2 Of course if it had been February we’d like as not have been sharing a Canadian arctic blast, and in April we’d have shared a dust storm or two and some tornadoes. In summer we would have shared dry heat, wheat, and cattle.

From https://www.freeworldmaps.net/united-states/nebraska/nebraska-rivers-map.jpg

The Dissected Til Plains don’t make it as far south as Texas. They basically run from Minnesota down to Kansas, centered on the Missouri/Iowa state line. If you have a yen to grow corn, look to the Til Plains, young man. This is Green Acres country, and it’s the place to be. It was formed by glaciers, and as they retreated the glaciers left plenty of flatness and plenty of rich soil.

It’s a mildly humid region, defined under the Koppen system as a Humid Continental Climate, with four distinct seasons and big shifts in seasonal temperatures. That means in summer, eastern Nebraska gets mighty hot. In winter it gets mighty cold. It would be a great place to see the leaves change, if only there were any leaves. It is not humid like New Orleans, but it’s the last breath of mildly moist air before the Great Plains. Most of Nebraska’s population and its largest cities, Omaha and Lincoln, are in the Dissected Til.

https://unitedstatesmaps.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rainfall-maps-of-us-1536×979.jpg

The Great Plains (and the American West) begin at the 98th meridian, roughly on a line north from Fort Worth, as decreed by Walter Prescott Webb. It is a semi-arid region unique not because of topography or geology but because of the lack of rainfall. Looking north along the 98th, to the right it rains at least 20 inches a year. To the left, stretching to the Rocky Mountains, it rains less than 20 inches a year. It is the beginning of the cultural West, and Webb, who loved the cowboy, says it is the land of barbed wire (bob war, if you want to talk like a native), windmills, and the revolver. It was also the land of the Plains tribes and the great buffalo herds. And the Dust Bowl.

The Missouri River borders Nebraska on the east, and continues north through the Dakotas into Montana, where it and its drainage is one of the great fly fishing destinations.3 The Republican River swerves through southern Nebraska from Colorado and on into Kansas.4 In central Nebraska the North and South Platte descend from Colorado to form the plain ol’ Platte, which then joins the Missouri between Omaha and Lincoln. North Nebraska has the Loup River,5 then the Niobara. We’ll be fishing in the far western Niobara region, just below the South Dakota Black Hills and above and to the left of the Nebraska Sandhills.

Population

As of 2024, the estimated population of Nebraska is 2,005,465. That’s less than the population of any of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, or Houston. It is a smaller population than the 35 most populous metropolitan statistical areas. It’s smaller than the Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro SMA, but larger than San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland SMSA.

More than 76.2% of the population is Anglo, 5.5% Black alone, and 12.9% Hispanic. Native Americans are 1.7% of the population.6 As already mentioned, it’s a big state without a lot of people, and there are only 25.5 people per square mile. New Jersey, the densest state, has 1,263 people per square mile. Nebraska has fewer people per square mile than Nevada (29) and more than Idaho (24).

Wikimedia Commons

Nebraska’s population is concentrated in the east. Omaha on the eastern border with Iowa has a population of 483,335, Lincoln, just a bit south and west, is 294,757. The Omaha and Lincon SMSAs contain more than half the state’s population. Of Nebraska’s 93 counties, 66 have populations of less than 10,000, and 11 have populations of less than 1,000. Of the smallest ten counties by population, all are located central to west, well west of Omaha.

Farm in Custer County, Nebraska, 1886, Nebraska State Historical Society.

In a European sort of way, Nebraska is ethnically diverse. More than 40% of the population identifies its heritage as German. That’s presumably a combination of railroads advertising Nebraska settlement in Germany in the late 19th century, European economic depression, and available land. There are also sizable populations of English and Eastern European settlers, and I’m certain there’s at least a smattering of Swedes.7

Nebraska is a meat-packing state, and it has a history of foreign-born and African American immigration to man the meat plants. Attitudes toward non-European immigration have been decidedly ambivalent, and from time to time, in the 1930s and the 2000s, immigration of recruited Mexican workers was followed by repatriation campaigns. There really is nothing new under the sun.

Politics

Nebraska gained statehood in 1867, before it had the required population. Presumably statehood was pushed through the Republican Congress to support the 14th Amendment. The same thing happened with Nevada during the Civil War, though there was also silver involved. Nebraska had its own connection to silver, with William Jennings Bryan, a Nebraska boy, electrifying the nation with his Cross of Gold speech at the 1897 Democratic national presidential convention.8

William Jennings Bryan, Grant hamilton, 1896, Judge magazine, New York City.

Nebraska was (and is) an agricultural state, and Nebraska politics were central to the rise and fall of the Populist Party in the 1890s. The Populists were a Southern and Midwestern farmer’s party with mildly socialist leanings, and by 1890 Populists controlled the Nebraska legislature. They passed a bunch of progressive legislation, including secret ballots, mandatory education, free textbooks, an eight-hour day (10 hours for farms), and railroad rate regulation. They pushed for public ownership of the railroads. Bryan coopted Populism, and as the new leader of the national Democratic Party folded the Populists into the Democrats.

From 1894 to 1900, Nebraska elected Populist governors. After 1900 there was a mishmash of Democrats and Republicans, leaning Republican. Since 1994, all of Nebraska’s governors have been Republican.

Nebraska voters now pretty much vote Republican. Nebraska is the only state with a unicameral legislature, and in the current legislature there are 33 Republicans, 15 Democrats, and one independent. There are no Populists. Probably leftover from its Populist days, it seems like every statewide office in Nebraska is elected, from Governor down to the university board of regents. A bunch of the elections are non-partisan, but all of the partisan statewide positions are held by Republicans.

Nebraska and Maine are the only states that allocate their electoral votes by Congressional District, which actually makes a lot of sense to me, so while Donald Trump carried 59.32% of Nebraska’s statewide popular vote in 2024, Kamala Harris carried Omaha and Lincoln, and Democrats received one of Nebraska’s five electoral college votes.

Wikipedia, 2024 Nebraska presidential results by county.

Nebraska Pride

I have the sense that no state instills more pride in its children than Nebraska. It’s generally admirable, but it was insufferable when the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers had better college football teams than the University of Texas.

In addition to a unicameral legislature, the University of Nebraska is also unicameral, having rolled both its land grant agricultural college and state university into one campus. Such thrift seems uniquely Nebraskan.

The University of Texas has gone to Omaha for the College World Series 38 times, which is the record. The University of Southern California holds the record for titles, with 12.

  1. And just a wee bit of Mexico, which led to the Gadsden Purchase. In 1854, planning for the southern railroad route, the US gave Mexico ten million dollars and received Tucson, Yuma, and the lefthand side of southern New Mexico. Ten million dollars went a lot further in 1854 than it does today. You couldn’t buy Greenland for that now. ↩︎
  2. This is gross exaggeration. There are often trees on the plains where there’s water, and in shelter belts. In Texas there were mesquites (though they were invasive from South Texas because of over-grazing). ↩︎
  3. I haven’t fished the Missouri in Montana, but I have in North Dakota. I didn’t catch anything. Together with the Mississippi and the Ohio, the Missouri forms the world’s fourth largest river system at over 3,900 miles. I haven’t fished the Ohio, either, or for that matter the Mississippi. ↩︎
  4. The Republican River Flood of 1935 was one of the Nebraska’s worst natural disasters, resulting in 113 deaths. Before the Europeans, the Pawnee farmed beans, corn, and pumpkin along the Republican River with the occasional jaunts afield for buffalo. In Kansas, the Republican joins the Missouri before the Missouri joins the Mississippi at St. Louis. ↩︎
  5. Loup is French for wolf, so French fur traders must have made it to Nebraska. ↩︎
  6. Native Americans in Nebraska included the Sioux, the Pawnee, the Sac and Fox, and the Omaha. Much of the indigenous population was displaced south to Oklahoma. There are eight remaining reservations in Nebraska, for the Ogallala and Santee Sioux, the Omaha, the Oto, the Pawnee, the Ponca, the Sac and Fox, and the Winnebago. ↩︎
  7. This is because my friend Clark, whose family is Swedish, is from Nebraska. I was surprised when at least half of Nebraska’s population wasn’t originally from Sweden. ↩︎
  8. The amount of dollars in circulation was limited by the value of the gold owned by the federal government. Western and Southern farmers wanted silver coinage to increase the money supply, spur inflation, and make their existing debts easier to repay. Bankers didn’t. ↩︎

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Michigan and Ohio Packing List

I’m lumping these two states together. It’s hard to do them together, but it’s even harder to do them apart, and they do sit next to each other. So they’re lumped.

Gear

Our guides in both states wanted us to use their rods, which helps them because they can come to the launch with the rods rigged. We didn’t take rods at all. Lance in Michigan fished with 4-weight Winston rods, which meant that I was fishing with slightly lighter versions of what I would have lugged to Michigan anyway. Katie in Ohio fished with 7-weight G Loomis NRX or Sage rods, so I was fishing with different brands of the 7-weight that I would have lugged to Ohio.

In Michigan we used floating lines, same for Ohio except for a wee bit of sinking line fishing. I can’t imagine that anybody actually likes to fish with sinking lines. To cast with floating lines you just have to pick the line up off the top of the water. Now mind, that’s no easy task, and a good line pick-up is the heart of the cast, well, that and about a half-dozen other things that are also the heart of the cast, but with sinking lines you have to get the line to the top of the water before you can even begin to pick it up, and sinking lines are not known for casting easily anyway. The whole process is fraught with peril for everyone standing near me.

We also fished out of boats in both states, so in addition to not packing rods and reels we didn’t pack waders or boots. No waders, no boots, no rods, no reels . . . I did take some flies, and used a couple, but the guides had those too. It was the easiest packing ever.

Detroit

Detroit was a joy. Parts of it are still beat up, but I’ve never been in a town where people were prouder of their city. The first night at dinner at Alpino we asked our waiter if there was something in particular we should see, and he wrote out a page-long list of places for us. He recommended places for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He listed don’t-miss destinations and neighborhoods just to drive through. It was good advice, too. We spent parts of three days in Detroit, and could easily have spent three more, and we didn’t deviate much from our waiter’s advice.

The one place recommended by everyone we asked was the Detroit Institute of Art. We spent three hours there before we left for Grayling, and could have spent another four. We barely got off the third floor, which is the smallest floor. As museums go, it’s about as good as anywhere, and should be on everyone’s list of American art museums. I even fished while I was there.

Greek fish dish, between 340 and 330 BCE; Roman fish mosaic, 4th century A.D.; Detroit Institute of Art.

Detroit has a large Middle Eastern population, with estimates of over 300,000 people. Apparently the growth was a combination of the growth of the auto industry and the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which is pretty serendipitous if you ponder it, and was then spurred by the lifting of restrictions on Arabic and Asian immigration by the Immigration and Nationalization Act of 1965. The signage in Dearborn, for instance, is doubled in Arabic. We went to Dearborn for afternoon baked stuff at Shatila Bakery. No donuts, but a good bakery anyway.

Our Alpino waiter had suggested lunch at the Yemen Cafe, which was a diner in a fairly beat-up neighborhood. The cafe was busy with African Americans from the neighborhood and Yemenis in fairly traditional dress, including one guy wearing a jambiya dagger, the dagger that Peter O’Toole wears in Laurence of Arabia. Open carry.

Our waiter brought us free glasses of Yemeni tea to try. We ordered slabs of hot Yemeni bread, chicken gallaba with hummus, and lamb fasah. We were taking the advice of our Alpino waiter and didn’t know exactly what we were ordering, but sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Detroit was at it’s peak of wealth and industrial might in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Art Deco buildings from its heyday are magnificent. Our Alpino waiter suggested the Guardian Building and the Fisher Building, both of which have been preserved in fine form. It’s kinda like visiting the Sistine Chapel. You don’t so much comprehend it as just stand around and gawk. There were great mosaics in the Fisher Building, though I saw no fish.

Guardian Building, 1929

Fisher Building, 1928

The first morning we were in Detroit I went for a run along the Detroit River, and when I tripped on the sidewalk and sprawled, customs officers offered me a bottle of water. The guy running in front of me came back to make sure I was ok. Detroiters are not only proud of their city, they’re friendly.

We took the Detroit Windsor Tunnel to Canada, and no matter what you may have heard I didn’t go there to buy Cuban cigars. Windsor looks like a good place to go if you’re in the market for cannabis, or a tattoo, or Cuban cigars. Cigars are heavily taxed and expensive in Canada, not that I would know.

We didn’t get to see the Tigers play because they were on the road, and I’m kinda glad. it gives me an excuse to revisit Detroit.

The first night we picked Alpino for dinner because it was the kind of Germanic high cuisine that we don’t really get in Houston. Alpino serves food from the Alps, which is German tinged with Swiss tinged with Italian, which makes for a nice combination. The food was good, our tour guide/waiter was great.

Our second night in Detroit we ate at Buddy’s Pizza, which first served Detroit-style pizza. Buddy’s was a Detroit bar, a former speakeasy, and it started serving pizza as a bar snack in the 40s. Square pizza is Sicilian, and the first pizzas were baked in liberated drip pans from the plants. I like to think of the pans as liberated anyway, though in truth they were apparently purchased from auto suppliers. Liberated drip pans just has a nice ring to it.

There are now multiple Buddy’s in the Detroit area, and I’m sure they’re all fine, but the original location reeks of authenticity. On the way in we asked an employee standing near the back door which pizza we should get. He told us his favorite was the Detroiter. Well of course it was.

He was a waiter but not our waiter, but before we left he went out of his way to visit our table and make sure we liked the pizza. Like I said, everyone was proud of their city, and who wouldn’t be? We really liked Detroit.

Cincinatti

After a day’s fishing in Ohio we spent two nights in Cincinatti. We went to a Reds game. We visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I ate a hot dog with Skyline Chili and cheese, and we sat on a nice downtown square and listened to a lively band during Cincinnati’s Oktoberfest. We ate dinner at a completely forgettable restaurant, then we ate dinner the next night at another completely forgettable restaurant. We went to Graeter’s Ice Cream, and visited in line with two American Airlines flight attendants flying out of Dallas. It was nice enough, but it suffered in comparison to Detroit.

Skyline Chili, by the way, is actually a Greek ragu sauce usually served on spaghetti. It was dubbed as chili during the nationwide chili craze in the early part of the last century. It is not chili, and for Texans, calling it chili is heresy. It has cinnamon in it, and chocolate. I’ll just note that the Cincinnati Reds in recent years have consistently beaten my Astros, so eating Skyline Chili was debasement in hopes of appeasing the baseball gods. It’s no wonder that I didn’t enjoy Cincinnati as much as Detroit.

Of course Detroit then knocked my Astros out of the wild card round of the playoffs. Did I mention that I hate Detroit?

Hotels

In Detroit we stayed downtown in the Shinola Hotel. The room had lots of Shinola accessories, there was a Shinola watch store, and the downtown location made getting around Detroit easy. We walked to dinner at Alpino, and had the Tigers been in town we could have walked to the stadium.

In Cincinnati we stayed downtown at the 21C Museum Hotel, and were able to walk to the Reds game. There was plenty to do downtown, and we didn’t take the car out until we drove to the airport our last morning.

In Grayling we stayed at the Gates Au Sable Lodge, which sits on the bank of the Au Sable River, has a good fly shop and guide service, and has a good restaurant where we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner for every meal. The Lodge has also collected all of the possible trout fishing bibelots produced in its 50-year history to adorn every available decorative niche, as if it had hired an interior decorator from the classified ads at the back of an old copy of Field and Stream. There were rod racks on the wall above the bed, and wader hangers by the door to each room. There were framed flies and fish prints and mounted fish, and Au Sable boat-shaped light fixtures. I was especially fond of our room’s trout fishing carpet.

Playlists

There are a lot of similarities between my Ohio and Michigan playlists. They seem balanced, as if the two states took turns producing songsters, and they share a kind of rock and roll grit that you just don’t always find in other states. In Ohio there are the Black Keys, in Michigan Jack White. In Ohio there is Josh Ritter, Marc Cohn, and The National, in Detroit there’s MC5 and Fountains of Wayne. Of course it’s hard to top Detroit’s Motown. With Motown you get Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Aretha Franklin, the Spinners, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, the Jackson 5 . . . Ohio does have the O’Jays, the Isley Brothers, and the Ohio Players, but Motown is Motown.

In Detroit there was Motown music playing everywhere. Well of course there was. It was like Hawaiian music in Hawaii. These people love their city.

The Supremes, The Ed Sullivan Show, CBS Television, 1966.

They really are good playlists, amazing playlists. Devo, Madonna, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Rare Earth and Grand Funk Railroad. Roy Rogers, Dean Martin, and Nine Inch Nails. Tracy Chapman and Doris Day. The Foo Fighters. They are great lists full of great music, and I won’t report you if you skip Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes. No one has to listen to Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes when they can listen instead to Stevie Wonder. Or Roy Rogers.

I had vowed I’d hum Baby Love every day in Michigan, and I did.

Guitar

I took the Kohno. I worked on Bach.

The Tyler Davidson Fountain, Cincinnati.

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Smallmouth Bass, Tuscarawas River, Ohio, September 20, 2024 (43)

We fished until noon on Michigan’s Au Sable, then drove eight hours south from Grayling, Michigan, population 1,917, to Coshocton, Ohio, population 11,016. Our drive required two hamburgers, two fill-ups, a shopping spree at a Krogers for our next day’s lunch, a shopping spree at a Walgreens for reasons I can’t remember, and finally two more hamburgers. In case you’re curious, at the Krogers we bought cheese, crackers, cookies, and a pear.

The drive started out in the Michigan Northwoods, then moved into flat plains, and finally at dusk we were in some of the prettiest, most bucolic, hilliest farmland I’ve seen. Then it got dark and we drove another hour. The area around Coshocton seemed well-supplied with streams, cornfields, pastures, and handsome two-lane country roads. There were lots of busy small towns and barns. We saw no Haitians, but in Ohio I figure they were immigrating everywhere, just lined up to eat our fish and irk J.D. Vance.

The next day we fished the Tuscarawas River with Katie Johnstone. We had hired Katie through Mad River Outfitters in Columbus, Ohio, after we had decided that we would fish for smallmouth. Smallmouth are a good river fish, they’re native to Ohio, and it’s not a fish we see a lot of in Texas. Also, the Cincinnati Reds were in Cincinnati, so if we fished near Columbus we could drive a bit further and see a baseball game on Saturday. The Reds beat the Pirates. I kept a scorecard.

I also vowed to taste Skyline Chili in Cincinnati. I did. Since I’m a generous spirit, I won’t say more.

Sometime in the recent past, Orvis ads pushed 50/50 on the Water for fly-fishing gender parity. If there was ever an old white guy sport, it’s fly fishing, and most fly-fishing excursions are jam-packed to the gills with old white guys. Orvis’s 50/50 on the Water was intended to expand the universe of fly fishers by tapping into the half of the population who traditionally didn’t. One could cynically wonder if 50/50 wasn’t intended to expand Orvis’s customer base, but I try to ascribe the best motives to people and institutions. I do make exceptions, especially for Skyline Chili, but 50/50 on the Water always seemed to me well-intentioned.

Our guides in Michigan and in Ohio shared a similar biography. Both were closer to 30 than 70, and had become obsessed with fly fishing as young adults. They both started guiding after giving up other jobs–one in photography and one in graphics. They had each guided full time for three years. Both tied flies, fished Midwestern rivers, and were socially skilled enough to act amused when we told stories.

The difference between the guides, of course, was that Lance in Michigan was a big-ish, guy-ish guy with a beard and a Y-chromosome, who guided from a drift boat. Katie was a petite pretty young woman with her hair in a blonde plait. She was good at wrestling her river raft. She was Y-chromosome deficient.

They were both excellent guides.

Fishing with Katie after fishing with Lance made me ponder why more women don’t fly fish. There’s nothing about fly fishing that seems particularly masculine. It’s an elegant sport, and I’ve always fished with women–my mother (and father) fished, though neither fly fished. Kris fly fishes, so I’m almost always 50/50 on the water, and while I wouldn’t admit it, Kris often as not out-fishes me. I cast better, really I do, and I tie better knots. I tie flies. Still, on any given trip she’s apt to catch more fish, not that I would ever admit it. On those trips I will only acknowledge that we caught exactly the same number of fish. On every other trip I catch more fish.

Kris claims she only fishes because I do, but when we went to Portugal, when I vowed we’d return to the States and catch a fish on the fly in every state, it was Kris who kept complaining that we weren’t fishing. I was perfectly happy drinking port and eating endless Pastels de Nata. Of course she probably saved my life. If she hadn’t distracted me with fishing I’d probably weigh 300 pounds and have no liver.

In Ohio, thanks to Katie we caught a lot of smallmouth. Katie rowed the raft, told us where to cast, switched out flies when the fishing slowed, and retrieved hung-up flies from the bankside brush. It was a pretty little river, lined with trees and tinged green. It wasn’t weedy, which is always a good thing, though drought had spurred an incipient algae bloom.

Katie fished streamers differently from the way I fish them. Hers were bigger, and she had us retrieve with short irregular strips and pauses. I would have just chunked and retrieved, chunked and retrieved, chunked and retrieved . . . Her method actually took some concentration, and with irregular strips and pauses I concentrated some. I used her retrieve for largemouth after we got home, and it worked well.

I no longer fish for trout during August in the Lower 48. Pre-global warming, August was an ok month to fish, but the major rivers in trout country are warming, and it seems that in August most rivers will now reach at least 70 degrees by early afternoon. When a river reaches 70 degrees, trout still feed, but they have trouble surviving being caught. Cold water is oxygenated water, and recovering trout need oxygen. Fifty degree water is the optimal temperature for trout fishing, and even then an angler will kill some fish from stress and mishandling. Higher temperatures pretty much guarantee death.

Hence smallmouth. Smallmouth are better suited for hotter water and will survive what trout can’t. Now instead of pushing 50/50 on the Water, companies like Orvis are encouraging anglers to go fish for smallmouth in August. Meanwhile warmer water is allowing smallmouth to push trout out of traditional trout waters. At least smallmouth are fun to catch.

It wasn’t August, but it was a hot September, even in the far northern climes of Ohio, and the Tuscarawas River was pretty, quiet, and thanks to Katie we caught and released a bunch of smallmouth. I’m pretty sure Kris and I each caught exactly the same number of fish. Meanwhile Katie was great at telling us how to fish the river, and the river was a joy to fish. It’s the kind of river I wish I lived next to. At least we got to visit.