Books Archives - Page 4 of 17 -

June 27, 2022June 27, 2022

Literary Alaska

Rockwell Kent, Mail Service in the Arctic, 1937, oil on canvas, William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building, Washington, D.C., photo by Carol M. Highsmith.

There are so many books about Alaska that there are books about the books about Alaska. This isn’t minor stuff, either. This is some of the best stuff. You could spend a year reading Alaska, and never touch a badly written word. At the end of the year you’d still have plenty left to read.

There’s no great fiction, though everybody knows Call of the Wild. I read it as a child, and then re-read it long enough ago to have forgotten it again. All that stuff about Buck returning to his Wolf Heritage, well, that’s all right I guess, but what I have in my head is that Buck was stolen from a nice vineyard in Sonoma for labor in the Alaskan mines. Sure, maybe Buck liked the wild, but I’m all in for a nice Sonoma vineyard.

Maybe that’s not really how the book goes, but it’s close enough.

The book about the books about Alaska is pretty fine–I’m simplifying here, The Quiet World is more than a book about books, it’s a good if thick book about the Alaskan Wilderness, largely focused on the preservationists who, more often than not, wrote books. It’s written by a neighbor, sort of. The author, Douglas Brinkley, is a Rice Professor, though I think that he actually lives in Austin. We all make mistakes. I live six blocks south of Rice Stadium, so wherever he may actually live, I justly have some neighborly pride.

Rockwell Kent, sketch from Wilderness: *A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska*, 1920, G.P. Putnam’s and Sons, New York, at vii.

There is a tension with Americans and Alaska, and like a lot of our modern tensions, it never reconciles. There’s this draw of wild, preserved Alaska, and you have strange odd creatures like Rockwell Kent–who along with N.C. Wyeth was perhaps the most accomplished book illustrator of the first half of the last century. In 1918 Kent and his nine-year-old son over-wintered in a remote cabin in Alaska–one supposes that his stay-at-home wife had better sense than Kent, but then apparently she let her son go. Kent’s journal, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, was popular in its day and is a good read, in a Henry David Thoreau-sort-of-way. It is also immensely strange. Who takes their nine-year old son to over-winter in a remote Alaskan cabin?

Rockwell Kent, *Bear Glacier*, 1919, Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, Rockwell Kent Gallery. Reproduced under fair use.

Kent had an eye for Alaska though, and you see his eye for wilderness lifelong in his work. His Alaska paintings are at once luminous and gloom-filled. Still, that impulse, that impulse to wander off into the wilderness, magnificent as the result may sometimes be, is the same impulse that roughly 100 years later killed Chris McCandles, when unprepared and plain ol’ stupid he hiked into the Alaskan bush and never came out again. The resulting book, John Krakauer’s Into the Wild is, by its nature, troubling, infuriating, and unhappy. It’s also another of those fine books about Alaska. There is also a movie.

John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country, 1979, was the first of McPhee’s books I remember reading, and in many ways it remains for me his finest, blending personal experience, data, history, interviews, stories, and natural and social observation. In some ways it’s also one of the more dated books about Alaska, written during the bloom of the oil boom and the opening of the Alaska pipeline, the implementation of 1971’s Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act, and the final back-to-nature impulses of an already disappearing counterculture. Still, McPhee captures the tension between the preservationists’ desire for wild Alaska and the developers’ desire for resource extraction. It’s that tension that drives our Alaska conversation, that’s driven the conversation since Teddy Roosevelt.

In recent years the focus of that conflict has been on opening the 19 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. There was a clause in the Trump tax bill that allowed lease sales, and a lease sale was held in the final days of the Trump administration. President Biden immediately canceled the sales after taking office. I doubt if Biden managed a stake through its heart though.

If you fly fish, oil exploitation of the arctic refuge has taken second fiddle to development of the Pebble Mine, a massive copper-gold-molybdenum mine proposed for the Bristol Bay watershed. Bristol Bay is the richest salmon nursery in the world. If you eat wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, the fish like as not comes from Bristol Bay, and the notion of mine leachate damaging the fishery has set both the sport and commercial fisheries’ collective teeth on edge. For a time I couldn’t open an advertising email from a fly rod company without an accompanying message about opposition to the Pebble Mine. Really, the only thing that comes close to the fly fishing world’s obsession with the Pebble Mine is the restoration of the Everglades.

The Obama administration opposed the mine, and developers waited until the end of the Obama administration to apply for licenses. President Trump’s administration strongly indicated that the licensing would move forward, then the permit application was rejected. Everyone, it seems, from Alaska’s Republican senators to Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, Jr., opposed the mine. It’s likely that the project ultimately died because Trump Jr. liked to fish Bristol Bay. In the words of Senator Murkowski, it was the wrong mine in the wrong place.

The book I’m currently reading, and the book I’ll likely finish on the flight to Alaska, is the 1986 National Book Award winner, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. It differs from the other books, and in many ways is the best of the lot. It’s a natural history set further north than we’re going, above the arboreal tree line that marks the true Arctic. Early in the book Lopez observes that the further north you go, the less species diversity there is, but the more biologic mass is concentrated into those fewer species. Lopez then goes into detailed descriptions of arctic species and their fragility. I’m through the chapters on the musk-ox, the ringed seal, and the polar bear. Humans come into the book marginally, as researchers, as arctic explorers or residents, and as threats. It’s a magnificent piece of writing.

I’m also taking a copy of John Muir’s Travels in Alaska. Muir–and I’m required by law here to note that Muir founded the Sierra Club, and that Muir is a kind of patron saint for wilderness advocates–he may be the first popular writer about Alaska, though he is also established as a glacier expert–a glaciologist. I’ve read Muir before, an autobiography in college, and when we went to fish Florida his book about his 1000 mile walk. Surprisingly (to me at least) he’s an engaging and readable author, a naturalist and a scientist, a fearless mountaineer, and a bit of a mystic, that is if Scots can be mystics. It’ll be a good book to come home on.

Back to Brinkley, perhaps his most surprising inclusion is the in-all-other-ways conservative Walt Disney. I doubt if Disney set out to be a Wilderness Warrior, but there you are–he made a lot of documentaries about Alaska. When Bambi’s mother stepped into that meadow, her death changed a generation’s views about the value of wilderness wildlife. In the 50s and 60s Disney produced a series of documentaries about Alaska for his target audience, American chillens and their parents. People of a certain age–and I include myself in that group–couldn’t escape those documentaries. They’re not really very good as documentaries. In 1958s White Wilderness, for instance, the film crew actually threw lemmings off the cliffs to create the myth of mass lemming suicides. The documentaries personify bears and otters and seals and whatnot to make them charismatic, charming, and relatable.

They’re still fun to watch.

The documentaries were also popular. His 1948 Seal Island won an Academy Award for best short subject, and the 1953 Alaskan Eskimo won an Academy Award for best short documentary. You can watch Disney’s Alaskan Eskimo on YouTube. White Wilderness was 1958s best feature documentary. Seal Island, probably did more to protect Alaska’s seals from harvest than anything short of Gore-Tex. It’s not great natural history, but just like hunting deer after the death of Bambi’s momma, it’s hard to wear sealskin when you’ve watched momma and baby seals go to church on Sunday. Ok. that’s not true, I’m exaggerating. Some of Disney’s seals were Jewish, and went to synagogue on Saturday. You can watch Seal Island on YouTube too.

June 18, 2022June 18, 2022

Connecticut Packing List

Gear

We fished with Bert Ouellette on the Housatonic River, and mostly we fished with Bert’s stuff. We had rods, but Bert said we’d use our rods, a 5-wt for Kris and 6-wt for me, for dry flies. we never fished dry flies, so we never used our stuff.

Instead we fished Bert’s 6-weights, good Orvis Recon and Orvis Helios 3 rods, with sinking lines for bait-fish streamers and a complex leader at the front of a floating line for deep underwater nymphs. For non fly-fishers, I could go into endless detail about all this but your eyes would glaze and you’d wonder off to the kitchen to see what’s in the icebox. It’s not worth the explanation. Leave it be that they were very good rods, set up in pretty sophisticated ways for fishing the river as well as we could fish it. It all worked.

We were fishing out of a drift boat, and never waded in the river, but it was raining the first day so we wore our waders as rain gear. Because we had studs in our boots–think hob-nailed boots, but with screw heads, not nails–we didn’t wear our boots in Bert’s boat. Since we never got out of the boat, neoprene stocking feet were fine.

I’ll only indulge in one bit of fly fishing arcana. At the end of the second day Bert told me that his dry fly leader–remember, we didn’t get to fish dry flies–was usually 25-feet long. The leader is the (usually) nine feet of monofilament line that attaches to the end of the thick plastic-covered fly line. The fly line is the heavy part of the whole business that actually casts, and the leader connects the fly to the fly line. I’m usually feeling mighty lucky if I can cast 25 feet of the fly line, and Bert was fishing 25 feet before he reached the line. He promised to send me the formula, and when I get it, I’ll look at it and gape. I doubt that I’ll ever be brave enough to fish a 25-foot leader.

Restaurants and Inns

In northwestern Connecticut, we were in the land of the cute country inn. There was a cute tiny town every 15 miles or so, with some cute restaurants, and some cute shops selling electric bicycles or Shaker furniture, and a pretty covered bridge and then another pretty covered bridge and some charming barns, and all of it with just a whole lot of charm and prettiness and cuteness and smartness.

I keep a running list of places to stay or eat or fish in different states, and the White Hart Inn, Salisbury, Connecticut, was on my list, probably cadged from some magazine article that caught my eye, and it was near enough to the Housatonic for us to stay there.

The original part of the Inn was built as a farmhouse in 1806. Here’s the Inn’s description from its website:

The property features 16 guest rooms, three dining rooms, a taproom with a full-service bar, two outdoor dining patios, a large porch with drink service, a ballroom and café. The artwork of Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Terry Winters, Donald Baechler, Hugo Guinness and Duncan Hannah is displayed throughout the premises.

I have to admit, I’ve got no clue who Terry Winters, Donald Baechler, Hugo Guinness, or Duncan Hannah are, but I’m certain it’s my loss. What’s worse is that I noticed none of the artwork displayed through the premises. I did have two great dinners in the restaurant, and it was a completely cute and smart and charming place. Score.

Fly Shops

There are no fly shops in northwestern Connecticut. Bert said there was one, but then one day it was open and then the next day it was closed. I’m going to use that as an excuse to tell you about the fly shops we visited in New York.

We started the trip at Joan Wulff’s casting school in the Catskills, near Livingston Manor, New York. There are actually two nearby towns, Livingston Manor (which has its annual Trout Parade), and Roscoe (“Trout Town USA“). Look, I’m a relatively unsophisticated trout angler, and always feel that if I catch a trout, the fishing gods for some peculiar reason have smiled on me for my innocence and devotion. The Catskills though are the area where American trout fly fishing developed, and reached a level of sophistication that still defines the sport. The Catskills have had other things going on–Jewish Borscht Belt humor for instance, and Hudson River School painting. In recent years it’s become a destination for Brooklyn hipsters seeking a weekend in the woods. But trout, and fly fishing, have been the area’s mainstay for 150 years.

In Roscoe, New York, there are three fly shops on one street. Roscoe, population 541, has almost as many fly shops as Houston, population 3 million. In Livingston Manor, just up the road from Roscoe, there is Dette Fly Shop (which actually moved to Livingston Manor from Roscoe). Dette opened in 1928, and inside it looks exactly like a fly shop from Diagon Alley. It’s now owned by the third generation of Dettes. I’ve been tying flies for Alaska, and had a list of obscure materials that I couldn’t find in Houston. Dette had it all, and the counter help led us down aisles packed with obscure bits of fluff and feathers to find a dozen different colors of the very thing crammed into a bin stacked underneath another bin.

It was highly entertaining, and going there and looking at the place is a pilgrimage for every fly fisher. It was so packed with stuff that they displayed fly rods on the ceiling because there was otherwise no space. On. The. Ceiling.

Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, and Mark Twain

I ran into Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens–figuratively, not literally–at roughly the same time, in Mrs. Miller’s American Literature class my junior year in high school. She played The Unanswered Question in class for us, and ever since I’ve had a fondness for Ives. I don’t think it’s misplaced, though Kris would disagree. She found the number of Ives pieces I had on my Connecticut playlist annoying.

Me on the other hand, I love Ives. I love listening for the Easter eggs in his music, and the complications, and the moments of intense serenity. I read once that Ives is hard for musicians because of the dissonances, rhythmic tumbles, and linear incoherencies. To me that’s the fun of it, but I did download a lot of Ives.

Ives was born and raised in Connecticut, attended Yale, then owned and ran an insurance agency in New York. He is considered the originator of modern estate planning, at least by Wikipedia. He wrote his music in obscurity, but was wealthy enough to be a New York music patron and to fund, from time to time, performances of his music. He wrote music for 20 years, then more or less stopped. He may be the fifty states’ most significant composer. Me, I just find the notion of two marching bands in the town square playing different tunes at the same time completely believable, and delightful.

Stevens, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish. He was born and raised in Connecticut, attended Harvard, then worked as an insurance company lawyer in Hartford. Does this sound familiar? His poetry is obscure and difficult. Does this sound familiar? I had to write an essay about the Emperor of Ice Cream.

Take from the dresser of deal, 
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet 
On which she embroidered fantails once 
And spread it so as to cover her face.

That essay still embarrasses me. Did Mrs. Miller think that a 15-year old would understand what death has to do with a roller of big cigars from the preceding verse, or concupiscent curds? I didn’t, but I take comfort now in knowing that even though I like the poem, and could probably recite it by memory with a wee bit of preparation, I still have little clue what’s going on.

Stevens was apparently kind of difficult. There is the famous punch-out of Stevens in Key West by Ernest Hemingway, instigated by a probably drunk Stevens, but better still is the famous put-down of Stevens in Key West by Robert Frost, whose poetry is, at least, mostly comprehensible:

“The trouble with you, Robert, is that you’re too academic.”

“The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you’re too executive.”

“The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about– subjects.”

“The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about– bric-a-brac.”

Bric-a-brac. Was there ever a harder slam? And it was, after all, a sheet on which she embroidered fantails once. If that ain’t bric-a-brac, what is?

Anyway, for 50 years I’ve off and on tried to read Wallace Stevens with some comprehension, appreciation, and intelligence. I’m a failure. Sometimes there are moments of brilliance that make it through to my small brain–“death is the mother of beauty“–sometimes there are moments of sublimity–“for she was the maker of the song she sang./The ever hooded, gesturing sea . . . “–but mostly I’m just stupidly baffled. I should give it up, but I probably won’t.

Mark Twain, an adopted Connectician, wasn’t born in Connecticut, and didn’t attend either Harvard or Yale. He did move to Hartford in 1873 and became a director of the Hartford Accident Insurance Company. As a director he gave a brilliant speech on the importance of accident insurance:

Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance line of business–especially accident insurance. Ever since I have been a director in an accident-insurance company I have felt that I am a better man. Life has seemed more precious. Accidents have assumed a kindlier aspect. Distressing special providences have lost half their horror. I look upon a cripple now with affectionate interest–as an advertisement. I do not seem to care for poetry any more. I do not care for politics–even agriculture does not excite me. But to me now there is a charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable.
Mark Twain, Speech on Accident Insurance, 1874.

Unlike that other Hartford insurance man, Wallace Stevens, Mark Twain is mostly comprehensible.

Pizza

New Haven is particularly famous for its pizza. Bert said we had to have the pizza on our way back to LaGuardia, and said that since we wouldn’t go through New Haven we should stop at the Frank Pepe’s in Danbury. Frank Pepe is credited as the originator of New Haven style pizza, The Guardian claims that the original Pepe’s pizza in New Haven is the best in the world, and The New York Times says that even the Pepe’s outlets are consistently good.

We ate at the Danbury outlet. It was the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. Dear Lord, please let me eat that pizza at least once again.

I’d show you a picture of the pizza, but we ate it before we thought about a photo. I did get a picture of the box.

Where We Didn’t Go

I’d like to have visited the Mystic Seaport Museum. Maybe when we go back to Rhode Island we’ll sneak across the border.

Playlist

Charles Ives, of course.

Did you know the Carpenters are from Connecticut? Karen and Richard. My senior year in high school, they had to be the most popular singers in America, and I thought then that if I never heard Close to You Again, my life would be richer for it. I despised them.

The Carpenters and Richard Nixon, 1973, White House Photo.

Look at that hair! The Carpenters’ hair is pretty remarkable too.

I suppose that I’ve mellowed since I was 17, but if I hadn’t gone to Connecticut I would never have heard Close to You again. And I was right. I would have been richer for it.

On the day that you were born the angels got together
And decided to create a dream come true
So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair of gold and starlight in your eyes of blue

Who can say those words with a straight face, or at least a crippling dose of irony. The only thing I can say is that there are worse things on a Connecticut playlist. Michael Bolton is also from Connecticut.

Laura Nyro is from Connecticut, and I love Laura Nyro. Sometimes the only thing better than Laura Nyro is listening to covers of Laura Nyro: And When I Die by Blood Sweat & Tears, Wedding Bell Blues by the 5th Dimension, Stoney End by Linda Ronstadt (ok, ok, and Barbara Streisand), Eli’s Coming by Three Dog Night . . . Such good stuff.

I came across an interesting Laura Nyro factoid, that after Al Kooper left Blood, Sweat & Tears, but before David Clayton Thomas, the band invited Laura Nyro to be the lead singer. She turned them down. Lordy, Lordy, what might have been.

The jazz pianist Horace Silver is from Connecticut, and there’s a very good big band song, Connecticut, that was recorded by Judy Garland and Bing Crosby, and by Artie Shaw. I liked the song Kylie from Connecticut by Ben Folds a lot.

Willie Deville of Mink Deville is from Connecticut, and after his punk phase he moved to New Orleans and recorded some terrific Americana, including covers of Spanish Harlem and Come a Little Bit Closer. John Mayer is from Connecticut, and is perfectly acceptable.

It was, all told, a pretty good playlist, though Kris got sick of all the Charles Ives.

I remember when Mrs. Miller played The Unanswered Question for us, she left me thinking that the question unanswered was something big, existential, the meaning of life and whatnot . . . When I hear it now I amuse myself by substituting other questions: Would you like to go to prom? What’s for dinner? Where did you fish? I guess those are pretty big questions too, and in my experience as like as not to be unanswered.

Guitar

I took the Kohno and played a good bit, especially on the front porch of the Beaverkill Valley Inn in New York, mostly trying to relearn a transcription of Cadiz by Albeniz. Bert promised that he would send a decal for my guitar case, and I need to follow up.

April 26, 2022April 26, 2022

A Texas Whatever in Connecticut’s Court

The best known writer from Connecticut, Hank Morgan, was a travel writer, and a good one, or at least a fun one to read. It doesn’t get edgier than when his strong Yankee character clashes with the customs and peculiarities of England. No writer is as arrogantly certain of his own superiority as Morgan, but that’s part of his virtue, and his descriptions are completely trustworthy. He has other shortcomings: I’m still not clear how Morgan got from Connecticut to England.

I’ve been to Connecticut once before, to poke around New Haven, which is best known for its pizza. I didn’t have any, not knowing then what I know now.

This time we’ll be in northwest Connecticut, on the Housatonic River. How do you say that? House-a-tonic? Whose-a-tonic? I don’t know, though even I know that it’s not Conn-ec-ti-cut, but isn’t that “c” dandy to pronounce? Who doesn’t like to? Connect. Connect. Conne-c-ti-cut.

Daniel Beard, Travel Writer Hank Morgan Up a Tree, 1889, Charles L. Webster & Co., New York, New York.

Connect-i-cuters don’t really have a very useful appellation. Nothing rolls off the tongue; not Connecticucator, Connecticutensian, Connecticutan. . . According to Webster (who was from New Haven), Connecticuter is correct, but I figure if I told somebody they were a Connecticuter, I’d have made an enemy for life.

Connecticut Yankees are also known as Nutmeggers, presumably because of the state’s vast fields of native nutmeg.

Demographics and Geography

Connecticut is the third smallest state, with 4,845 square miles. It’s smaller than Hawaii (with 6,423 square miles), but more than four times larger than Rhode Island (1,034 square miles). For all of that paucity of space, it is heavily populated, with 745 people per square mile. Compare that to Wyoming, with 55 people per square mile. In order of density, the states are New Jersey (1,263), Rhode Island (1061), Massachusetts (901), and then, crowding in at fourth, Connecticut.

Jim Irwin, Connecticut population density, English Wikipedia.

Population in the state isn’t uniformly distributed. It concentrates along the coast and the Delaware River. Hartford, for instance, population 123,000, has a population density of 7,091 people per square mile.

Connecticut has eight counties, but apparently no county governments, which seems odd given that politicians abhore a vacuum. There is the state, and there are towns. There’s other stuff, but state and towns without the bother of counties seems a notable effort at efficiency. In addition to the towns and the state, Connecticut has more than 300 special taxing districts and school districts, so I guess minimizing counties really doesn’t clear out much space government-wise.

The Connecticut counties that apparently don’t do much.

Connecticut is the southern-most New England state, which may seem obvious to most, but to those of us less familiar with the Northeast that’s a revelation. If you asked me most days what states comprise New England, I’d like as not throw in anything northeast of Missouri. Why, for instance, is New Jersey not New England, but Vermont, which was a relative late-comer, included in New England? It’s a mystery, probably tied to Beacon Hill snobbery.

With a population of 3,605,944 based on the 2020 census, Connecticut has a lot of white people, 80%, a surprising number of Hispanics, 17%, and is about 12% African American. Everybody else surely fits in somewhere, but not in any big numbers. It’s a rich state, 6th in median household income at $79,855. More than 90% of its adults have at least a high school degree, and 40% have at least a bachelors degree.

Compare that to West Virginia, just down the map, which is 92% white and only 1.7% Hispanic. About 88% of the of West Virginia adults have a high school degree, but only 21% of adults have a bachelors degree or higher, and the median annual income is $48,037. Wealth begets wealth.

Connecticut isn’t actually on the Atlantic Coast, but on Long Island Sound, sheltered from the Atlantic by the long Long Island peninsula. See United States v. Maine, 469 U.S. 504 (1985) (determining that Long Island is not, in fact, an island, but leaving open the question of length). A coastal plain extends west-east along Long Island Sound, and a river valley that follows the Connecticut River north-south smack dab through the center of the state. At 400 miles the Connecticut is the longest river in the Northeast, and we’ve happily fished it for trout and pike in New Hampshire, almost to Canada. The coastal plain and the river valley are the population centers.

The seashore is at sea level, and the average elevation in Connecticut is 500 feet. The highest point in Connecticut is the south slope of Mount Frisell on the Massachusetts border at 2,379 feet. The peak of Mount Frisell, 2,454 feet, is in Massachusetts. Mount Frisell is part of the Taconic Range, that is part of the Appalachians.

The remainder of the state is north-south hills and valleys created by plate tectonics, almost reminding one (if one is so inclined) of the Nevada basin and range system. Tectonic plates took land that measured more than 500 miles across (with estimates up to 3000 miles across), and scrunched it into 100 miles. I’m pretty certain that the technical geologic term for the cause of all those ups and downs is scrunching.

Its lakes, the Connecticut River Valley, the seashore, and its streams and riverswere formed by glaciers, the same Wisconsinite Glaciers that formed the Great Lakes about 10,000+ years ago. Wisconsinite Glaciers did’t do things in moderation. They dumped about 10 feet of junk over the hills of New England, and glacial drift covers about 99% of Connecticut bedrock.

Settlement, History

Massachusetts Puritans psuedopodded into the Hartford area in 1636. There followed various Puritan settlements, which were finally combined into a colony by royal charter in 1662. Connecticut later repaid the King’s generosity by joining in the American Revolution. The first major New England Indian/Colonial war, the Pequot War, centered in Massachusetts and Connecticut from 1636-38. The Pequots were actually interlopers themselves, and the Naragansetts and Mohegans joined with the English to drive out the Pequots. The Pequots lost, but then so ultimately did the Naragansets and Mohegans.

Pequot prisoners were exchanged in the West Indies for African slaves, so black slavery has an early start in Connecticut, and slavery was not ended until 1848. As of 1790, there were 2,764 slaves in Connecticut, out of a total population of 237,946. By 1830, the total population of Connecticut was 297,675, but the slave population had decreased to 25.

Into the 20th century, Connecticut was a leader in seafaring and ship building. During the Civil War, Connecticut was a manufacturing center for the Union, and the defense industry remains one of its important crops. Also insurance. Don’t forget insurance. Connecticut produced two famous insurance agents, Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives.

Connecticut also produced two presidents, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.

Hank Morgan typified the 19th century Yankee from Connecticut: industrious, capable, innovative, maybe a bit too sure of his virtue, but something in the national perception of the Connecticuter changed by the late 20th century. Connecticut became in the popular mind a New York bedroom community. Think of films from Connecticut, with their dark undercurrent of suburban angst: The Swimmer, The Stepford Wives, The Gilmore Girls . . .

I’ve watched The Gilmore Girls. It’s creepy that anyone can talk that much.

Politics

Connecticut is a Democratic state, with about 50% of its population Democratic or leaning Democratic. That’s consistent with the trends of urban areas and wealthier states tending to vote Democratic. All of Connecticut’s major state offices are held by Democrats, along with both US Senators and its five Representatives. There are some Republicans in the state assembly, 12 of the 36 senators and 54 of the 151 Representatives.

In 2016 Connecticut voted 54.57% for Hillary Clinton, with two counties, Litchfield (where we’re going) and Windham voting 54% and 50% respectively for Donald Trump. In 2020, Joe Biden carried 59% of the state’s votes; Donald Trump again carried Litchfield and Windham by 51%.

Tyler Klutsbach, 2020 Connecticut presidential voting, for Wikipedia.

Rivers and Fish

Fly fishing in Connecticut is all about trout. Connecticut would have been a brook trout state, but stocking programs favor rainbows and browns. I’m sure along the coast there are fly anglers who fly fish in saltwater, but search online and most of what you see is trout. Like a lot of stuff in Connecticut, I figure its angling is heavily subsidized with folk from New York City.

The big river through Connecticut is the Connecticut, which seems appropriate. As mentioned, we’ve fished for trout in the Connecticut River, but we fished way north, long before the Connecticut leaves New Hampshire. By the time the river reaches Connecticut it’s too warm for trout.

The best known trout river in Connecticut is the Farmington, which, including its West Branch, is 80 miles long, and which is part of the Connecticut River Basin. We’re not fishing the Farmington. No reason, but there you are.

Karl Musser, Housatonic River watershed, for Wikipedia.

We’re fishing the Housatonic (HOOS-ə-TON-ik), which runs 149 miles and drains a chunk of Western Connecticut and Massachusetts into Long Island Sound. It’s also a trout river, at least in the northwest portion of the state where we’ll fish. We’ll fish in Litchfield County, where 51% of the fish voted for Donald Trump in 2020. I figure it was the brown trout. Brown trout always seemed to me to tend Republican.

March 2, 2022March 11, 2022

Kentucky

Kentucky has whiskey and horses, a coal-miner’s daughter, Daniel Boone, and Muhammed Ali. I like whiskey, perhaps too much, and I wish all horses well. The legacy of coal is becoming more and more just that, a legacy. Muhammed Ali was The Greatest. He said so, and I agree.

I’ve never been to Kentucky (or for that matter its northern neighbors, Ohio and Indiana). I’ve been in Missouri across the Mississippi from Kentucky, and often enough to Tennessee, but never Kentucky. This is how Kris and I will look entering Kentucky for the first time, except that I’ll be carrying a fly rod instead of a rifle:

George Caleb Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap, 1851, oil on canvas, Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis.

I hope we can get a horse at the Kentucky border. Otherwise Kris will have to walk.

As of the 2020 census, Kentucky has a population of 4.5 million. The population is 87.5 percent white, 8.5 percent black, and 4 percent everybody else. Less than 5 percent of the population is Hispanic or Latino. The consolidated city-county of Louisville, the state’s largest metro area, has a population of 782,969, with the city itself being 32.8 percent Black and 62.8 percent white. Consolidated Lexington, the second largest area, has a population of 322,570. The urban areas in Kentucky are seeing substantial growth, both economic and by population. The rural areas are generally suffering population losses, and they’re poor. As of 2019, Kentucky ranked among the poorest states, 44th, with a median annual family income of $52,295, just ahead of New Mexico and just behind Oklahoma.

In the 2020 presidential election, Kentucky voted 62 percent (1,326,646) to 36% (772,474) for Donald Trump. That’s pretty consistent with the other poor states, except New Mexico. The only two areas voting for Democrats were the two most populous counties, Fayette (Lexington–59.25% for Biden) and Jefferson (Louisville–59.06% for Biden). The Kentucky senators are Republicans Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell. Five Kentucky Congressmen are Republicans. The sixth, John Yarmuth, is retiring.

Interestingly, the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky are Democrats, though nobody else in Kentucky appears to be. The Governor, Andy Beshear, won the 2019 election by fewer than 5,000 votes, and the election must have seemed a harbinger for the 2020 presidential election. Maybe it was, but not in Kentucky.

On the north, Kentucky is bordered by the Ohio River, on the east the Appalachians, on the west the Mississippi, and the south, well, nothing really. It’s just one of those arbitrary borders that separates two places, in this case Kentucky and Tennessee. The Appalachian/Cumberland Plateau takes up the eastern third of the state. Central Kentucky is apparently rolling hills covered with bluegrass pastures, while the northwest again becomes hilly. There’s some Mississippi River marshland down in the southwest, but not a lot.

There are two coal-producing areas, the Western Coal Field and the Eastern Coal Field. Butcher Holler is in the Eastern Coal Field, somewhere to the right of Lexington.

My daddy worked all night in the Van Lear coal mines
All day long in the fields a-hoein corn

Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner’s Daughter, 1969.

Kentucky coal mining, Kentucky Geological Survey, University of Kentucky

In addition to the Ohio, there are two other major rivers in Kentucky; the Cumberland wanders through Southeast Kentucky and North Central Tennessee, and the Kentucky runs from the Appalachians northwest through central Kentucky to the Ohio. There’s also a bit of the Mississippi. The Green River, the one in John Prine’s Paradise that Mr. Peabody’s coal train hauled away, is in the Western Coal Field.

The Green is supposed to be a pretty good smallmouth river.

For anglers, all of that stuff–except maybe the whiskey and the rivers–is of secondary importance to the real question: what kind of fish are there, and where. Kentucky is not a destination fishing state, at least for fly fishers, but in addition to the big three there are plenty of smaller rivers and streams. There are stocked and naturally reproducing trout, but they’re not native–though a lot of the fly fishing literature on the state is about where to find trout. Most of the guides in the state appear to be located near the Cumberland in Southern Kentucky–a dam tailwater–though there are also some guides out of Lexington. In addition to trout, there are catfish and sunfish, spotted bass, largemouth bass, and smallmouth bass. When we go next week, I hope we can try for smallmouth near Lexington, but it may still be too cold.

I recall that spotted bass used to be called Kentucky bass, but I had a hard time finding references to Kentucky bass on the internet.

Micropterus Dolomieu
Small-Mouth Black Bass — John J. Baird, Small-Mouth Black Bass, 1897, Manual of fish culture based on the methods of United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, from the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

In addition to Muhammed Ali and Loretta Lynn, Kentucky has had a penchant for producing (or being the home of) poets, especially reasonably important 20th Century poets. There are, in more or less historical order, Robert Penn Warren, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, and the recently deceased bell hooks. I can’t say that I’ve read anything by Warren except for All the King’s Men, which I vaguely recall is a novel, but Warren is the only person to have won a Pultizer Prize in both fiction and poetry. I’ve read a good bit of Merton, particularly The Seven Storey Mountain, which I vaguely recall is an autobiography. Reading his poetry–which isn’t always comprehensible–feels almost like reading parts of the Bible–which also isn’t always comprehensible. I’ve read almost none of bell hooks, who honestly until her recent death I hadn’t heard of. Old white Southerner, black feminist writer–I guess I’m not her target audience. I’ve reserved a couple of her books from our local library, but don’t have them yet.

Getting ready to go to Kentucky, I’ve read a good bit of Wendell Berry, who is, I think, peculiarly Southern in his dedication to agrarian values and anti-government convictions, and peculiarly un-Southern in his antiwar convictions. He also doesn’t seem to ever write a funny line, which seems peculiarly un-Southern except among evangelicals. The closest I could come to a funny line was this:

It may be that we can keep without harm some industrial comforts; warm baths in wintertime maybe, maybe painless dentistry.

From Our Deserted Country, Ten Essays.

I say it’s not funny. It’s kinda funny, but I suspect even in that Berry was mostly serious. In his photos he looks happy enough.

Berry in December 2011 — Guy Mendes, 2011, Wendell Berry

Besides the poets, I am old enough to have grown up revering Daniel Boone, but probably the folk hero Daniel Boone, not the actual Daniel Boone. The actual Boone never wore a coonskin cap, and no American hero has survived more historical (and ahistorical) revisions than Boone, culminating in the 1964 TV series Daniel Boone, starring Fess Parker.

I loved that show.

The actual Boone was born in 1735 to a Quaker family in Pennsylvania. After his father, Squire Boone, fell out with local Quakers, the Boones moved to North Carolina. Daniel married Rebecca in North Carolina in 1756, but he didn’t much cotton to farming. Even after marriage he spent most of his time on months- and even years- long hunts for pelts for the fur trade. He wandered as far from North Carolina as Florida, and purchased land there. At some point he wandered into Kentucky.

In the popular imagination, Boone opened Kentucky for settlement. He first entered Kentucky in 1767, and in 1769 returned and spent two years exploring. That’s two years out gallivanting. There is a possibly apocryphal tale of Boone returning from a long hunt to find that Rebecca had a new daughter fathered by Boone’s brother. Possibly apocryphal, possibly true. If true, Boone apparently took it in stride.

Boone famously trail-blazed the Wilderness Road from Virginia to Tennessee through the Cumberland Gap. Boone entered Kentucky during a peculiarly violent period of American history. Beginning with the Revolutionary War and continuing through the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, there was constant warfare and the threat of warfare with the British and the Northwestern tribes. Boone had the reputation of an Indian fighter, and he was certainly involved in the Northwest Indian War, but late in life Boone said that he had only ever killed three Indians. He was a brilliant pathfinder, a respected leader, a great hunter, but not the rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man the frontier ever knew. He was a colonel in the state militia, at a time when because of the constant threat of local war the rank meant something.

My favorite Boone quote was that he was never lost, but that he was misplaced for a few days from time-to-time.

In 1799 Boone moved west to Missouri because he went broke in Kentucky. He had claimed a lot of land in Kentucky, but didn’t really have the temperament to be a land investor, and didn’t have the resources to hold all of his land together.

In 1820 he was 85 when he died in Defiance, Missouri. He was a legend in his own time, largely because of a contemporary popular pamphlet. Later the penny press took up Boone, and created the folk-hero that lasted through my childhood infatuation with the Boone portrayed by Seth Parker.

D. Boon cilled a bar and swung through the forest on grape vines.

Carl Wimar 1855, The Abduction of Boone’s Daughter by the Indians, oil on canvas, Amon Carter Museum of American Art

In the 1800s Wisconsin historian Lyman Draper collected Boone’s papers and the oral remembrances of his descendants and his contemporaries, so unlike many historical figures we know a lot about Boone. Boone himself wasn’t shy about telling his story, and unlike many, he was pretty reliable. Later still there would be largely discredited revisionist theories concerning Boone, that pronounced that most settlers of Kentucky came down the Ohio River, not across the Wilderness Road, or that Boone was only the lackey of real estate investors who told him what to do, or that in some other way Boone should get no credit for the settlement of Kentucky. That, apparently, is about as bad of history as the folk tales, even though it was propagated by academic historians.

Interestingly, the folk-hero Boone is the subject of an early statue removal, in this case in the nation’s capital. A marble statue of The Rescue, generally believed to be Boone rescuing his family, was displayed in the Capital from 1853 until 1959, more than 100 years, until it was removed during building work and never put back. By 1959 it was the subject of considerable controversy, and I figured that they did the building work just to get rid of the statue, along with the statue of Christopher Columbus on the other side of the stairway (which is also still in storage).

Horatio Greenough, The Rescue, 1837-1850, white marble. It was dropped by a crane at some point, and is now in storage. I’ve never heard that it was dropped on purpose.

Boone was 43 by the time he made it to Kentucky. For my first trip to Kentucky I’m a bit older than that, but instead of founding Boonesborough, I can make a motel reservation. In any event, I’m just in it for the whiskey. I mean the fish.

Tag: Books

Literary Alaska

Rockwell Kent, Mail Service in the Arctic, 1937, oil on canvas, William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building, Washington, D.C., photo by Carol M. Highsmith.

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