Tag: Baseball

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Michigan

The best thing ever written about fishing, Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, is set in Michigan. There are two paragraphs at the start of the story that I re-read often. Do high school students still read Big Two-Hearted River, or is it dated, something for old men to remember from when they were young? I loved it 50 years ago in high school, I’ve loved it when I’ve read it since, though when I first read it I suspect I was more interested in how the tarp was pitched than in Nick Adams’s post-war trauma.

Nick looked at the burned-out stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log piles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

I understood though, even at 16, why fishing the swamp would be left for another day. It’s not a difficult story, it’s simple and direct, but it’s very beautiful.

So because of a short story I’ve saved Michigan until close to the end of our project. In Michigan I want to find a bridge and look down into the river. I want to look for fish holding in the current. If I’m lucky enough to see any trout I want to watch as they feed.

Geography and Grayling

The lower Michigan peninsula is shaped like a mitten, which everybody knows, but that’s not the amazing thing about Michigan geography. The amazing thing about Michigan geography is that it’s mostly bordered by freshwater, by four of the five great lakes, from left to right, Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie. It has the longest freshwater boundary of any state, and has the highest percentage of area covered by water of all of the states. It is second only to Alaska for total water area.

Waterways and lakes of Michigan, https://gisgeography.com/michigan-lakes-rivers-map/.

The upper Michigan peninsula, the U.P., juts out into Lakes Superior and Michigan from northeast Wisconsin, and is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the narrow strait of Mackinac. If life were fair and rational the U.P. would be part of Wisconsin, but Michigan got it because of its southern border. Do you see that protrusion in the south? Michigan claims that its southern border should have been drawn further south. When Ohio became a state in 1803, Michigan was still a territory with no votes in Congress, and by political fiat Congress gave Toledo to Ohio over Michigan’s objections. Relations got pretty testy between inhabitants of the two states, and to calm things down Congress gave Michigan the Upper Peninsula. Michigan didn’t like it, but, honestly, it got the better deal.

I don’t think Wisconsin got anything, but it still ended up with all the good cheese.

Northern Michigan is heavily forested, and early Michigan fortunes were made in timber. The native fish of Northern Michigan was the grayling, a char that needs cold clean water and can be found now in Canada and Alaska. Logging killed off Michigan’s native grayling. It also damaged the native brook trout populations, which were the trout that Hemingway likely described. Streams were restocked with browns and rainbow trout from Europe and the Pacific Northwest, and with more brook trout. We’ll fish near the City of Grayling, population 1,917, in the center of the Lower Peninsula. In Grayling there are no longer any grayling.

Arctic Grayling, Evermann, Barton W., and Goldsborough, Edmund Lee, The Fishes of Alaska (1907), Washington D.C., Department of Commerce and Labor Bureau of Fisheries.

We’ll fish the Au Sable River. There is a different Au Sable River in New York, which is also a fly fishing river. They are pronounced differently, but according to any random Frenchman, both American pronunciations are wrong. I can’t remember how to pronounce the name of either the Michigan or the New York river, but in French it would be pronounced something like oh Sah-bleh. That’s the only one I’m reasonably sure of.

As logging slowed, Michigan’s south was already selling Fords and Olds and Cadillacs. With mass production of cars, Michigan changed how we do everything, and by the 1920s, Detroit was the center of the automobile universe. It was the fourth largest U.S. city (and home of one of my favorite baseball players, Hank Greenberg). Grayling was visited by the likes of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, but to fish, not to cut timber.

Frank Lyeria, Hank Greenberg, the Hebrew Hammer, 1946, The Sporting News archives.

Michigan geology divides more or less into two parts, the U.P. and the Lower Peninsula. There are the Huron Mountains in the far northwest U.P., the highest peak of which, Mount Arvon, is 1,979 feet. It’s the highest peak in Michigan. Other than the Hurons, Michigan is pretty flat. Actually, even with the Hurons it’s pretty flat.

Both peninsulas are mostly bedrock covered with glacial drift. Apparently there are different ages of bedrock, and the older it gets the better it is for mining, and the oldest and the best mining is in the U.P., so take that, Toledo. The glacial remains have a good bit of variation, but regardless one typically doesn’t go to Michigan to see the rocks. When comparing topography shaped by glaciers and topography shaped by continental plate collisions, go for the collisions every time. That means if you want to look at rocks, go to Utah not Michigan.

Politics

In 2016, with 63% turnout, Donald Trump carried Michigan by about 9,000 votes, 2,279,543 to 2,268,839. In 2020, with 73% turnout, Joe Biden carried Michigan by about 150,000 votes, 2,804,040 to 2,649,852. It’s about 60 days until the 2024 election. According to the New York Times, current polling averages show Kamala Harris leading in Michigan 48% to 47%, and that’s almost certainly well within the margins of error for the underlying polls. If Harris carries Michigan and Wisconsin (where polling is running about the same), she would likely need only one additional marginal state, North Carolina, Georgia, or Pennsylvania, to carry the election. On the flip side, if Trump manages to carry Michigan, then like as not Harris has lost.

It’ll be kinda fun to be out of Texas and into a state where there’s actual electioneering going on.

From Wikipedia, Michigan State Legislature.

I check the polling about every three minutes, so if anything changes I’ll let you know.

Michigan’s governor is Democratic, as are both of its senators, seven of its 13 members of congress, and both houses of its state legislature (in each case by two-vote margins). It’s a tight squeeze for the Democrats. Its governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was considered as a possible running mate for Kamala Harris.

There is also a U.S. Senate race in progress in Michigan, where the incumbent, Democrat Debbie Stabenow, is unexpectedly retiring. According to polling, the Democratic candidate, Elissa Slotkin, leads the Republican Mike Rogers in the polls.

Population

There are 10,077,331 people in Michigan as of the 2020 census. About 18% of population claims German ancestry, 11% English. About 62% of the population is Anglo, 12.4% Black alone, 18.7% Hispanic, and 6% Asian. Ten percent of the population reports as two or more races. The population is heavily concentrated in the south.

Michigan was part of the Ohio Territory and was admitted as a state in 1837. It didn’t grow as early or as quickly as neighboring Ohio, but once it did start adding population, it piled it on. In 1870, the population was 1,184,059. By 1910 it was 2,810,173, so in 40 years its population more than doubled. Between 1910 and 1920, Michigan grew by 30.5%, to 3,668,412, and between 1920 and 1930 it grew another 32%, to 4,842,325. You can almost see the cars pour into America out of Detroit and Flint.

Then Michigan growth slowed. Because of the loss of industrial jobs, Detroit went from the nation’s fourth largest city to a cautionary tale of white flight, high crime, and unemployment. In 1967 there were the Detroit riots. In 1971, there were more than 600 homicides in Detroit. Between 1971 and 1973, there were 84 killings by police. It was the Wild West. When I came to Houston in the 1980s, there was constant patter about the number of Michigan license plates on the streets. It was the age of Robocop and Roger & Me. Detroit was declining. Houston was on a tear.

In the 2010 census Michigan actually lost population.

Phil Cherner, Detroit, Michigan, 1967, www.philcherner.com, by permission. Thanks Phil.

By 2013, Detroit’s population had dropped from 1.8 million in 1950 to 700,000. Detroit was broke, violent, unemployed, bleeding all but its poorest population, and in 2013 it filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history.

As late as 2018 Detroit had the fourth highest murder rate among major cities, but it’s improved in recent years. In 2023 Detroit had its lowest number of homicides since 1966, with 252. Houston had 348. It’s finances seem under control, and it has invested in its central city. Violent crime is still high, with 2,028 violent crimes–murder, rape, robbery, assault–per 100,000 people, compared to a national average in 2023 of 369 per 100,000. Based on its violent crime rate, Detroit remains the second most dangerous city in the U.S., second only to Memphis and ahead of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Little Rock? Really? I love Memphis, but I always think of Little Rock as nigh onto rural. I did once spend an interesting afternoon there in a tornado.

I’m excited to see Detroit. We’re staying downtown in the new Shinola Hotel. The downtown architecture is terrific, and the Institute of Art is supposed to be among the world’s best museums. Municipal services like street lights and garbage pick-up have been restored, plus the Tigers have always had the classiest uniforms in baseball.

Where We Won’t Go

We won’t see Mackinac Island, or Traverse City. We won’t visit the U.P. , or drive through the U.P. to Wisconsin. We won’t visit Holland, Michigan, where my parents bought my sister a pair of wooden shoes when I was one. The shoes were very uncomfortable, and I learned early that I was not cut out to be Dutch.

We won’t see the Detroit Tigers play, because they’ll be on the road. We will not make it to the Motown Museum because it’s closed on the days we’ll be in Detroit. I do promise, however, to hum “Baby Love” at least once an hour, and largely because of Motown my Michigan music playlist is magnificent.

Chris Butcher, Hitsville USA, 2006, public domain.

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Missouri

On Monday we decided that on Friday we’d drive to Missouri, to Branson. That’s a short turnaround, but I’ve been to Missouri plenty. My Grandmother Eva–not that Grandmother Eva, the other Grandmother Eva–was born in Missouri, in Osgood near the Iowa border, in 1890. When I was five or six, circa 1963, we took her home from Texas to see her siblings. We stayed with one of her sisters, and while the house may have had electricity, it didn’t have indoor plumbing. There was a pump in the yard for water and an outhouse for other sundry stuff. It was on a gravel country road, and at night I saw fireflies for the first time. It was wonderful.

I’ve been to Missouri some since, enough to know that Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is as pretty as MLB stadiums get (though I don’t recommend it in August), and that the riverfront town of Hannibal has seen better days. I’ve been to Missouri enough to know that while any Texan would tell you that Missouri barbecue is mediocre stuff, the sandwiches at Gioia’s Deli on The Hill are worth the effort. On The Hill you can still imagine Joe Garagiola and Yogi Berra as children in the neighborhood’s heyday. Not so much Mark Twain and Hannibal.

Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City, 2015.

There are good fishing rivers in the Missouri Ozarks, and if we were being intellectually honest we would target native Missouri smallmouth, but we haven’t fished for trout in a while, and there are plenty of Missouri rivers stocked at one time or another with trout. In Branson there is the Ozarks’ White River at the Taneycomo Lake dam. One Missouri spring creek near Branson, Crane Creek, claims the purest strain of McCloud River redband trout in the world. They were stocked in the 1880s from eggs imported from California and supposedly dumped off a bridge by railroaders.

Records are a bit sketchy, but Crane Creek has been stocked no more recently than the 1920s. Because it was the site of the second national fish hatchery, the McCloud River redband was the original source of most of the stocked rainbow in the world. Only in Crane Creek does the original strain remain unmixed with other rainbow subspecies.

By all reports the Crane Creek trout are small, skittish, and hard to catch. The stream is narrow and overgrown, and there’s poison ivy and water moccasins. Of course that last is likely overblown, and there are more likely a lot of non-venomous northern water snakes and maybe some moccasins. It is a herpetologist’s truism that everybody thinks that every water snake is a vicious, vindictive, or aggressive cottonmouth, but they aren’t more vicious, vindictive, and aggressive than most of us, and most of the snakes you see in the water aren’t moccasins.

Anyway, it sounds like we have to fish Crane Creek.

I’ve been looking at Missouri rivers for a while, thinking we would avoid Branson. We could do it, but Branson is convenient. It’s a strange place, a tourist destination that is a distant cousin to Nashville. It is a vacation destination for devout Southern and Midwestern protestants, seemingly devoted to clean living, family entertainment, golf, lakeside condos, and fatty foods. There is fishing though, and a good fly shop. It’s about a 10-hour drive from Houston. We can take the dogs, and coming home we can spend the night in Bentonville, Arkansas. Branson eateries tend towards family entertainment and national chains. Bentonville, as the business hub of Walmart, has better places to eat.

A short note on pronunciation

Apparently there’s no correct pronunciation of Missouri. The most common pronunciations are either Missour-ee or Missour-uh, but neither is incorrect, and they aren’t even the only ones. I grew up with Missour-uh, and long assumed that since I had some Missour-uh ancestry my pronunciation must be correct, but no. Still, it’s not wrong either. Oddly, how you say Missouri isn’t governed by education, wealth, race, or even geography. It’s not a South versus Midwest thing. It’s just the luck of the draw or maybe personal taste. Some Missourans say Missour-uh, some Missour-ee, and some go back and forth between them. All things should be so accommodating.

The Missouri Compromise

The U.S. acquired Missouri in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, and St. Louis became the jumping-off point for a big part of western expansion. In 1821 it became a state under the Missouri Compromise: to maintain political balance, Maine entered the Union as a Free State, while Missouri entered as a Slave State. After the admission of Missouri, no new territory north of the 36°30′ parallel could enter the Union as a slave state.

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Julio Reis, Map of the United States c. 1849 (modern state borders), with the parallel 36°30′ north, Wikipedia, 2009.

The state lines in the map above are mostly modern boundaries. West Virginia wouldn’t exist until the Civil War. None of the grey states existed, except California. It’s the green line, the extension of the Mason-Dixon Line along 36°30′ that purportedly controlled American expansion for the next 30 years. See that far north border of Texas, and the Oklahoma Panhandle? The Oklahoma Panhandle was originally claimed by Texas, but when Texas entered the Union in 1845, that northern bit was above the line. To preserve the Missouri Compromise, it was cut off and left as part of the Indian Territory.

After the Missouri Compromise, there was a push among Southern slaveholding states to annex Cuba as a Slave State, to maintain Southern legislative power. It wasn’t going to happen. Cuba was valuable to Spain, and there was no real interest in annexation among most Cubans, but it’s amusing to guess whether Governor Fidel would have been a Republican or a Democrat.

The Missouri Compromise lasted until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 provided that Kansas and Nebraska would enter the Union as slave or free based on the votes of Kansas or Nebraska settlers. The seemingly sensible resolution threw the now-raging national slave debate into armed war. Abolitionists came to Kansas from the north, and pro-slavery Border Ruffians raided into Kansas from Missouri, and all of them brought convictions, guns, and knives. John Brown got his bones in Bloody Kansas. Kansas finally voted to enter the Union as a free state, but allowing popular local vote to determine only made the Civil War inevitable.

In 1857, in the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court determined that African Americans could not be citizens, that the federal government could not prohibit slavery in its territories, and for good measure that the already superseded Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.

Reynolds's Political Map of the United States 1856.jpg

New York: Wm. C. Reynolds and J. C. Jones – “Reynolds’s Political Map of the United States” (1856) from the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

Population and Demographics

In 1820, the 66,586 population of Missouri was .6% of the nation’s total population. By 1920, Missouri’s 3,404,055 population was a biggly 3% of the total. St. Louis was the 6th largest city in the U.S., and had two major league baseball teams, the Cardinals and the Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles). Kansas City was 19th. By 2020, the St. Louis metropolitan statistical area, with a population of 2,820,253, was ranked 21st. Kansas City, with 2,192,035, was 31st.

In 2020, the total Missouri population of 6,154,913 was .1% of the total U.S. population of 329.5 million. It had gone from .6% in 1820, to 3% in 1920, to .1% in 1920. Missouri still had two major league baseball teams, though one was now the Kansas City Royals. The Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 2020. They won again this year.

Missouri’s national importance was driven in part by Mississippi River trade and Westward Expansion, and with the decline of both, the its national importance also declined. Still, Missouri is where the South and the Midwest meet, in the same way that Texas is where the South and the Southwest meet. It is a black/white population, with heavy emphasis on white. Approximately 82% of Missourians are white, with less than 5% of that population Hispanic.

About 12% of the Missouri population is black, mostly centered in St. Louis and Kansas City, and in a stretch of southeastern counties along the Mississippi River, an apparent extension of the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. That delta population is likely a remnant of slavery, and the population growth in St. Louis and Kansas City was fueled by the Great Migration, both from the South and from less populated areas in Missouri. Hannibal, for instance was 14.5% black in 1900, but only 6.1% by 2020. Conversely, St. Louis was 6.1% black in 1900, but by 2020 the greater St Louis area was 17% black.

Satchel Paige, Untitled Photo, between 1935 and 1942, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

It’s worth noting that Kansas City became an African American cultural Mecca, being, along with New Orleans, Chicago, and New York, a major jazz hub. Count Basie was from Kansas City. So was Dexter Gordon, Lester Young, Big Joe Turner, Count Basie, and Charlie Parker. It was also the home of the Kansas City Monarchs, perhaps one of the greatest baseball conglomerations ever. Jackie Robinson jumped from the Monarchs to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Satchel Paige played for the Monarchs, and so did Cool Papa Bell, Turkey Stearns, Wilbur Rogan, and Buck O’Neil.

Lester Young by Ojon Mili. Time Inc. – Life magazine, Volume 17, Number 13 (page 40), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44359804

The American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum are at 18th and Vine in Kansas City, and are worth a special trip. And did I mention that Kauffman Stadium is one of the finest stadiums in Major League Baseball? It’s just too bad that Kansas City Barbecue isn’t better.

Of course Mark Twain is from Missouri, and T.S. Eliot, and Maya Angelou.

Politics

Both U.S. Senators from Missouri and four of the six Representatives are Republican. All of the six statewide elected officials, governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, auditor, treasurer, and attorney general, are Republican, and there are sizable Republican majorities in the state senate and house of representatives.

In 2020, Donald Trump carried the state by 56.80% of the vote, compared to Joe Biden’s 41.41%. Biden carried only Boone, Jackson, and St. Louis Counties. Jackson is Kansas City, St. Louis is, well, St. Louis, and Boone, in the middle of the state, is Columbia, home of the University of Missouri. Like other states, less-populated areas vote Republican, urban centers and college towns vote Democratic.

2020 presidential election, Missouri, By KyleReese64 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95975673

Geography

Missouri is divided into three major geographic regions, the Ozark Highlands, the Northern Plains, and the Coastal Alluvial Plain. No mysteries here. The Northern Plains are rolling, and you can grow corn and soybeans, soybeans and corn, and corn. There are lots of streams. It’s Iowa just a wee bit south of Iowa.

The smallest region, the southeast Coastal Alluvial Plain, is an extension of the Arkansas Delta, which is just like the Mississippi Delta but west of the Mississippi. It’s flat, wet, and a good place to grow rice, and cotton. Of course cotton.

The Ozarks are the Ozarks. They extend into Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It’s a dome, cut into topography by erosion, faults, bluffs, rivers, and streams. It’s beautiful, dramatic country.

On the state’s eastern border there’s the Mississippi River. Cutting across the center of the state, roughly along the line that divides the Plains and the Ozarks, is the Missouri River. The Missouri meets the Mississippi at St. Louis.

Mark Twain’s Confederate Service

Mark Twain served as a Confederate militia lieutenant in Missouri, and he deserted after two weeks. Twain scholars have suggested that his desertion didn’t evidence opposition to the Confederacy, as much as concern as to the likely outcome of militia service in what was substantially Union-controlled territory. It’s pretty likely that Twain was dedicated to the South, and that his later reevaluation of the South and its cause was a principal source of his satirical brilliance. It’s hard to imagine Huck Finn written by someone who didn’t distrust most people’s pronouncements, including from time to time his own.

Osgood, Missouri, 2021.

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Happy New Year! North Dakota!

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/10159

John Caleb Bingham, Trappers Descending the Missouri, 1845, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I know, I know, it’s February, and I haven’t written anything since, I dunno, August of last year? I’ve stalled. It’s past Valentine’s, and I haven’t wished you Happy New Year.

Happy New Year!

We have fished. We’ve fished for Redfish at Port O’Connor, for bonefish on South Andros in the Bahamas, and I caught a 12-pound grass carp at Damon on a six weight Winston trout rod. The carp dragged my canoe around until it finally came to hand. We were both exhausted, but I’m pretty certain that I was the only one happy about it.

I’ve planned fishing trips. In April I’m going with a group from Houston to Cuba, which is these days a hot fly-fishing destination. We’re going for the benefit of the Cuban people, but we’ll also fish. In September Kris and I are going to Maine, so maybe we’ll add at least one state this year.

And we’ve traveled without fishing. In November we went to Spain for our son’s wedding, and that took a lot of physical and mental energy. I had to write a speech for the wedding dinner, and it was the best wedding speech ever. You should have been there.

gratuitous photo of a barracuda I caught on South Andros with a spinning rod.

Gratuitous photo of a barracuda I caught in January in the Bahamas with a spinning rod.

We cleaned out our storage bin, mostly, and I learned Spanish, some. The Astros won the World Series.

So we’ve been stuck at 31 states since last August, and all of my angler’s block stems from our September trip to North Dakota.I had dreaded North Dakota. Even though I grew up in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota is just a wee bit past the middle. There are big lakes in North Dakota, some natural lakes left by glaciers, some man-made, and if you want to fish for walleye with conventional gear, it’s a good place to go. Not so much for fly fishing.

From time to time in recent years I’ve checked the internet for suggestions for fly fishing in North Dakota, and have come across a lot of forum posts that look something like this:

QUERY: I’ve just moved to North Dakota for medical school/to count grasshopers/for the climate. Where is there to fly fish?

REPLY: South Dakota. All the rivers in North Dakota are flat, slow, and muddy.

It’s kinda hard to separate South Dakota and North Dakota, though Congress clearly managed it. The best history of North Dakota, Dakota by Norman Rijsford, is also the best history of South Dakota. The Dakota/Lakota, the Mandan, the Cheyenne, the Crow, the Hidatsa, the Chippewa . . . they all blatantly disregarded the state line. When Lewis and Clark traveled up the wide Missouri, they never mentioned when they crossed from south to north. Congress separated the Dakotas when they entered the Union because the locals couldn’t agree on a location for the state capitol. South Dakota still ended up with Pierre.

There is one difference between the states. There are no native trout in North Dakota, and at least historically there wasn’t much fly fishing anywhere without trout. South Dakota, in and around Badlands National Park, has trout. North Dakota also has a national park, Theodore Roosevelt, but no trout.

After a lot of internet perusing I found a guide in Bismarck, halfway between the state’s eastern and western borders, about 16 hours and 980 miles almost directly north of Vernon, Texas, my hometown. That driving route is roughly on the line of the 100th Meridian, where the wetter east gives way to the drier Great Plains.

From The Great Plains Trail. I don’t know where they stole it from. The dry line may be moving east because of Global Warming. Just another thing to keep you up at night.

We didn’t make that drive though. We flew from Houston to Minneapolis, which would have been a roughly 17 hour and 1,230-mile drive. In Minneapolis we went to a late-season Twins game at Target Field on St. Olaf College night, ate fried walleye, bought some pike flies at a local fly shop, and had a delicious, healthy breakfast at the Minnesota State Fair: Mini donuts shot into a deep frier out of a mini-donut gun, fried cheese curds, deep fried corn on the cob, and a corny dog. I had a corny dog anyway. Kris didn’t really eat her fair share of the cheese curds either.

The guide I found, Kurt Yancy, isn’t a full-time fly fishing guide, but he is a full-time fishing guide who dabbles in fly fishing, and he said we might catch smallmouth, walleye, pike, or carp. On his website there are lots of photos of guys dressed against a north wind holding large walleyes. You can catch walleye on fly rods, but they’re mostly caught deep in lakes, as much as 30 feet, and once you get much beyond ten feet fishing with a fly rod starts getting really stupid. Stupider.

It’s also hard to ice fish with a fly rod, so our potential North Dakota season was short.

Driving from Minneapolis to Bismarck takes about six hours. We ate lunch at the Fisher’s Club on Middle Spunk Lake in Avon, Mn., and the Fisher’s Club is charming and someplace everyone should visit. At the visitor center in Fargo we met North Dakota’s most famous actor. Almost to Bismarck, we drove past miles and miles of ponds that set my heart racing, but Kurt told me later that the ponds were very shallow, only a couple of feet deep, and that they froze solid in winter. Fish couldn’t survive the freeze. A thousand miles further south and those miles of ponds would be a destination, except of course when they dried up in the heat of the summer.

Well, actually, a thousand miles further south they’d be High Plains playa lakes, and those aren’t something you fish either.

At the Fargo visitor’s center, North Dakota’s most famous actor. He was autographed by the Coen brothers.

Ok, that’s enough of a wind up. Here’s the bottom line: we didn’t catch a fish in North Dakota. It was hard to get to, and then it was even harder getting home–it was our first intimation that things are a bit screwed up at Southwest Airlines. Coming home we had a 16-hour day and were routed through New Orleans from Austin to get to Houston. We could have gone to Paris from New York and back to New York again.

And like I said, we didn’t catch a fish. We fished the second day at Nelson Lake and watched carp gulp air into their swim bladders because the outfall from the power plant was heating the lake. It was frustrating. The first day though we fished in the side channels of the Missouri River, and the Missouri, maybe our most famous river after the Mississippi, was magnificent for every reason except fly fishing. You can’t stand beside the Missouri without thinking about Lewis and Clark, Teddy Roosevelt, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, western migration, buffalo, migratory birds and antelope and seas of grass, everything the plains are. North Dakota feels as wild as it gets in the lower 48.

Thoreau wrote a series of essays about Maine, and in one, Chesuncook, after a companion gratuitously kills a moose, he is at his best, writing about our relationship to nature and to wildness, and how–and I paraphrase here–our highest use of nature is not to catch a fish, or chop down a tree, or kill a moose–those uses are petty. Our highest use is to discover our shared immortality with the fish, or the pine tree, or the moose. I’m not sure I buy that immortality business, but I get what he’s saying, at least a bit, and he recognizes in 1853, when there was still plenty ‘o wildness, that something was lost if our incidental uses used up the unsullied natural world, or if we only approached the natural world as something only to be fished, or lumbered, or hunted. In North Dakota, there’s still some natural world left to contemplate, and some of the human world too, particularly while standing on the bank of the Missouri River.

But dangit, higher aspirations and Henry David Thoreau aside, I surely would have liked to catch a fish.

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Kentucky Packing List

Gear

We took waders and wading boots. It was March and still cold, so we also took sweaters and rain jackets and gloves and knit caps. We took long underwear. We needed the sweaters, and long underwear helps when you wade in cold water, but the gloves (and the mukluks) were a bit of overkill.

I‘ve written already about my new/old bamboo rod. I used a 6-weight, weight-forward floating line with a 9-foot 4X leader, which is meaningful if you fly fish but gibberish if you don’t.

I used a Hardy Duchess reel, which is a newer reel that harkens back to designs from before the last World War, or maybe the one before that. It’s handmade in England, is very pretty, and most of all it looks right with a bamboo rod.

You don’t really use a reel when you fly fish for freshwater fish. To bring the fish in you just pull in the line by hand and let it pile up at your feet, so honestly the reel has a lot in common with ear rings or the color of a car’s paint job. It’s meaningful but not essential. That means that for no rational reason your reel needs to be as pretty as possible. The Hardy is very pretty.

I caught my wee trout on a dry-dropper rig, a dry fly floating on the surface so that I could see it and a trailing nymph underwater. The dry fly was a #14 Royal Wulff, which seems to be my go-to dry these days, and the nymph was a random #14 pheasant tail mayfly nymph that caught my eye when I poked through my fly box. I watched the dry fly so that when it went under, I knew the fish had taken the nymph.

Whiskey

By law, when you go to Kentucky, you are statutorily required to visit at least one whiskey distillery for each day you’re in the state. Kentucky makes it convenient by locating a distillery every 37 feet. We were in Kentucky three days and met the statutory minimum for distillery visits.

What is or is not bourbon is defined by statute. It must be corn-based, and it has to meet certain standards during distilling and aging. Whiskey taxes were a significant source of revenue for the federal government in the 19th century, and 1897 laws regulating bourbon pre-dated the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. By 1900 if you were buying bonded bourbon, you were buying something that didn’t contain lead, or wood alcohol, or any number of other things that shouldn’t be in the bottle. Not that it was good for you, it just wasn’t as bad as it might be.

Other than being American, bourbon doesn’t come from a particular place. It doesn’t have to be made in Kentucky. There are bourbon distilleries located in places like Indiana and Ohio and Texas, but Indiana bourbon just doesn’t trip off the tongue. When one thinks of bourbon, one thinks of Kentucky.

KyBourbonTrail.com

There is a side-note here, about water. A waitress in Southern Kentucky apologized to us for Kentucky’s lousy drinking water. I’m guessing that she was saying that her local water was poor quality, but the area where bourbon historically comes from, the area of North-Central Kentucky west of the Appalachians, actually has great water. That’s one of the reasons that bourbon is made in Kentucky. Well, great water and corn. Well great water and corn and money.

When we fished the Driftless in the Midwest I learned that what makes the Driftless special is its karst topology. Karst is characterized by relatively porous sandstone, dolomite, and limestone lying close to the surface and from time to time poking through. In Kentucky, the rock is mostly limestone. Water that seeps underground fractures the rock–Kentucky’s caves, including Mammoth Cave, are the products of fractured and hollowed limestone. Water literally runs through the fractures and seeps through the pores, and the pressure from rain forces clean and mineralized water out at springs. There are springs everywhere. For fly fishers, it’s one of the best things going. The resulting spring creeks, clean and enriched, support plenty of bug life, which in climes further north support trout and should support smallmouth in Kentucky. It’s also one of the best things going for whiskey.

Kentucky Geological Survey, Karst Topology of Kentucky. The dark blue is the heaviest karst areas, the light blue less so.

Over the course of a couple of days with an additional day fishing, we toured the Buffalo Trace, Makers Mark, and Woodford Reserve distilleries. At Woodford Reserve, the tour guide distilled (get it? get it?) whiskey making for us: whiskey making is making beer and then distilling the beer to clean out the mess and concentrate the alcohol. It’s not, he told us, very good beer, but I guess bad beer makes pretty good whiskey. To be bourbon, it has to be at least 50% corn-based and and the distilled beer must be barrel-aged in new oak barrels. There’s no minimum time for aging, but the longer it ages, the better it should be, but the longer it ages the more loss there is from evaporation, the longer it has to be stored, and the more expensive it all becomes.

There are few things that smell better than a warehouse full of aging bourbon in oak barrels.

Where We Stayed

We stayed in the 21C Hotel in Louisville. It’s the third time we’ve stayed in a 21C. The other times were in Bentonville, Arkansas, and in Kansas City. They’re a bit pricey, but they are unbelievably friendly to pets, have interesting art everywhere, and lurking red plastic 4-foot penguins that you can move around in the hallways to disturb your neighbors. The first of the 21C Hotels were in Lexington and Louisville.

Louisville is not a rich city. Kentucky is a poor state generally, and I guess it always has been. After all, Daddy sold a hog each fall to buy us kids shoes. On the flip side, there’s a lot of wealth–just drive down a horse-farm back road. Those splits, poverty/wealth, whiskey/conservative Protestants, urban/country, they all seem harder in Kentucky than in other places, at least harder than I’m used to. Kris thinks I’m making it up. She thought Louisville was great.

Where We Didn’t Go

I never made it to the Louisville Slugger Museum. It was two blocks from our hotel, and I never made it.

We never made it down by the Green River where Paradise lay. We never saw Appalachia from the Kentucky side (we’ve been to West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania), or Mammoth Cave.

Restaurants

I wouldn’t write home about the donuts or the barbecue, but Louisville has pretty good restaurants. We ate at the hotel one night, at Proof on Main, and the next night at a very good interior Mexican food restaurant, Maya Cafe. The last night we ate at at Everyday Kitchen, and to my eye its menu had a lot of East European food. East European food is to me mighty exotic, it’s just not something I’ve seen very much of, and at the same time it’s completely comprehensible, like Mom’s home cooking. My brushes with East European food in Milwaukee and Chicago and Louisville may be one of the things I like most about the Old Northwest.

I had stuffed cabbage.

The most remarkable thing about the restaurants in Louisville was the amount of whiskey on the menus. There were moderately priced whiskeys by the barrel, and expensive whiskeys that made fly reels look cheap. There were pages of whiskeys, regiments of whiskeys, whiskeys waiting in the wings just to get on stage. I didn’t know there were that many whiskeys in the world.

Mind, that picture only starts with the letter “O”. There were 13 letters of the alphabet preceding. Those aren’t bottle prices either.

Route

Going out we drove from Houston to Nashville; coming home we left early and drove straight through. There are more eighteen-wheelers on the road from Little Rock to Memphis than there are distilleries in Kentucky. If I ever drive to Kentucky again, I’ll drive through Louisiana.

Music

What a lot of music there is from Kentucky. There’s not a lot of jazz; Les McCann and, if you stretch it as to the jazz, Rosemary Clooney. There is a lot of bluegrass and country. Besides Loretta Lynn, there’s the Monroe Brothers, Tom T. Hall, Crystal Gayle, The Judds, Rickey Skaggs, Merle Travis, and Dwight Yoakum. “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” isn’t nearly as bad as I remember it.

I looked forward to Sturgill Simpson and My Morning Jacket coming up on the playlist. Simpson put out Metamodern Sounds in Country Music in 2014, and a A Sailor’s Guide to Earth in 2016, and both albums astonish me, as much for the lyrics as the music. “Turtles all the Way Down” is a country song about Jesus, or Buddha, or LSD, or the turtle that holds up the world. Or something.

My Morning Jacket always satisfies.

Main Street, Paradise Kentucky, 1898. From Wikipedia.

And then there are the 37 versions of John Prine’s “Paradise.” John Fogarty, Johnny Cash, John Prine, Tom T. Hall, Dwight Yoakum, Jackie DeShannon, John Denver, Roy Acuff, Tim O’Brien . . . And Sturgill Simpson. Everybody’s recorded “Paradise.” I think if you are from Kentucky, you have to record a cover of “Paradise” before you’re allowed to open a distillery.

Guitar

I took the Kohno, and played a good bit. I’ve been working on the first movement of Bach’s 4th Lute Suite, but I can never get much past page 2, and it’s a lot longer than two pages. I’ve also been working on songs I once knew but don’t know any more–an arrangement of Summertime, some Tarrega, some Sanz, and a transcription of Albeniz’s Cadiz. That’s gone a lot better.