Tag: Flies

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Rainbows! Brookies! Pickerel! Pickerel? The Wild Swift River, Massachusetts, April 10-11, 2025 (45)

The lower Swift River is a tailwater, so it has some advantages over wild rivers. The upper forks were dammed in the 1930s for Quabbin Reservoir, and the part of the Swift that we fished flows out of the dam below the lake. Flows are reasonably constant and uniformly cold, which encourages lots of healthy trout. Whether it’s the middle of winter or the middle of August, the water temperatures near the dam on the Swift are likely to be somewhere below 60° and above 30°,1 and the flow will be moderate. If you combine that cold water and steady flow with lots of bugs, it’s trout heaven.

Below Quabbin Reservoir the Swift is only 24 miles long.2 It runs down from Winsor Dam to join the Chicopee River, which then joins the Connecticut,3 which then flows to the Atlantic. Quabbin Reservoir provides drinking water supply, not electricity generation, so water releases don’t increase when Boston turns on its lights.

At least theoretically, free-flowing rivers are wilder, more natural, more authentic, but some of my best days fishing were on tailwaters, and when I’m trying to land a fish it’s hard to focus on the difference. In the South and the Southwest, most well-known trout rivers are tailwaters. South of the Mason-Dixon, only tailwaters are usually cold enough for trout. The Green in Utah is a tailwater. The White in Arkansas, the Colorado at Lee’s Ferry,4 the San Juan in New Mexico, and the Holston in Tennessee are all tailwaters. We’ve also fished for trout in tailwaters in Texas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. Constant cold water, with lots of bugs, that’s the ticket. In all of those places there may be great fishing on free-flowing rivers, but it’s likely not for trout.

Currently there’s a backlash against dams. It’s impossible to build a major new dam, and there’s been a rash of much-heralded dam removals in recent years. Dams can cost more to maintain than the value of any electricity produced, they reduce access to historic spawning grounds for Pacific and Atlantic salmon and other less glamorous fish, and water evaporates and impoundments silt up so that reservoirs fail at their task of water storage. Neglected dams are also dangerous for folks down-river.

Non-native fish pose similar emotional qualms as tailwaters, whether the fish were last stocked one week or 100 years ago. In the Swift, there are brook trout, rainbow trout, and brown trout, but only the brook trout are native to New England. One of the reasons for the Swift’s popularity in Massachusetts–and it’s the most popular freshwater fly-fishing water in Massachusetts–is that it produces large native brook trout, and large brook trout are no longer easy to come by in their native range. Most places the brookies have been pushed out by non-native rainbows and browns. The rainbows are descendants of California stocks, the browns were brought over from Europe, and in the Swift both naturally reproduce and are still being stocked.

For me there is a resonance to catching a native brookie in Massachusetts that’s not there with an introduced rainbow, or a native cutthroat in New Mexico versus an introduced rainbow or brown. One supposes that catching a brown in Scotland feels more authentic than catching an Arkansas brown, and if anybody would like to fly me to Scotland I’d like to find out. Are there native browns in Greenland, or only arctic char? Is that why we want to annex Greenland, so that we’ll have someplace American to catch native browns?

I was thinking about this stuff on the Swift because for most knowledgeable fly fishers native fish in free-flowing rivers in wild places is the ideal. Getting ready for Massachusetts, I re-read Walden, in part because it’s an essential Massachusetts book and in part because I was looking for hints as to why the notion of wildness matters.5 The apparent threats to public land by the current Washington administration also had me thinking about wild places, and, weirdly enough, I was contemplating my own human frailty. I likely won’t be able to traipse off into wild places much longer, so to me their value increases as my opportunities decrease.

There are about 111.7 million acres of designated wilderness on American public land. That’s roughly the size of California, and more than half of our wilderness is in Alaska. The 1964 Wilderness Act defines wilderness as land where the earth is “untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor . . .” Bob Marshall, the founder of the Wilderness Society and the namesake of the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana, defined wilderness as a region “which contains no permanent inhabitants, possesses no possibility of conveyance by any mechanical means[,] and is sufficiently spacious that a person in crossing it must have the experience of sleeping out.”6

But rivers and saltwater and lakes are a little different than big tracts of wilderness. There are few big rivers that you can’t travel with a jetboat, and a lot of perfectly fishable rivers flow down by the golf course and then under the bridge. They are fishable when suburban and even urban. In rivers, though, you can capture a bit of wildness in the most mundane places. Fishing has taken me to plenty of truly wild places. I have flown into high mountain rivers, boated miles up rivers where there was no other mechanical access, ridden horses to mountain lakes in Argentina, fished in national parks in Cuba and the Everglades, and all of it with the weak and wholly unnecessary excuse that I wanted to catch fish. I have also now parked at an industrial park to walk down the improved running path to look for trout in the Swift River in Massachusetts, and I’ve done similar walks in thousands of other places. Was one experience better than the other? Was one more pure?

Well yeah, probably, but the water on the Swift is clear and clean. The approaches take a bit of effort, at least for an old man. The fish are beautiful, strong, and fat. When I’m playing a fish, I don’t really consider that I’m fishing behind a dam and not hundreds of miles from the nearest pavement.

Marshall wrote that we receive physical and psychological benefits from visiting wilderness: physical health from wilderness travel, mental independence from the challenge, satisfaction of an innate craving for adventure, and an opportunity for contemplation and repose not present in the daily business of busy lives.

We also receive intangible esthetic benefits. There is, he says, “the undisputed beauty of the primeval.” This is a constant theme of American writing, whether it’s about the magnificence of a great white whale or the quietly contemplative beauty of finning trout beneath a bridge. Emerson, a Massachusetts guy, suggests that it is in nature that we can strip away the distractions of our mundane world to fully engage with beauty.7

That other Concord, Massachusettian,8 Henry David Thoreau, does his mentor and friend Emerson proud. At different times I’ve thought that Walden was a mechanic’s discussion of housing costs, a gardener’s discussion on how to grow beans, or a surveyor’s discussion of the depth of a pond, but in his sidling way Thoreau suggests something more subtle, that only if we from time to time reduce to essentials can we we truly engage with what’s important.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Thoreau published Walden in Massachusetts in 1854, and that Charles F. Orvis opened his store in Vermont in 1856. One didn’t lead to the other, as far as I know Charles F. didn’t sell copies of Walden next to the dog beds, but they were, I think, a part of the same impulse. 1850s America was one of our most fractious times, loaded with national disputes verging on violence, not unlike today. Parts of the Northeast and New England were changing fast, from agrarian to industrial, from rural to urban, and both Walden and Orvis evidence a yearning for the natural world that was being lost. Bob Marshall (or John Muir, or Aldo Leopold, or Wendell Berry, or Gary Snyder) was still addressing that yearning for Eden well into the next century. The rest of us are still buying fly rods.

We fished two days on the Swift. It was a quick trip, one day flying to Hartford, Connecticut, then driving 50 miles to Palmer, Massachusetts, two days fishing, and then one day home. We fished with Matt Tempesta of Tempco Flyfishing, an Orvis-endorsed guide, and it was a joy. Matt is former career infantry, and he has that easy, confident, genial bearing that the best of ex-military have. He’s still a very young man, at least as I measure these things. He loves the Swift, and he seemed proud and delighted to show it to us.

The first day we waded and walked, and from the bank Matt would study water looking for fish. In a lot of the upper river the fish were apparently hanging out in places where we weren’t. Much of our first day we walked the upper mile of the river, isolated from development by a wildlife management area, looking for fish more than fishing. It’s a fine way to fish, and a better way to get introduced to water, though I will note that they have ups and downs in Massachusetts that we don’t have on the Southeast Texas Coastal Plain. There were times during the day when it seemed to me that notwithstanding Bob Marshall, some mechanical uphill conveyance would be the very thing.

Kris outfished me again, and on the first day she caught a couple of rainbows at the Y–the famous Y–immediately below the dam.9 I caught nothing. For one reason or another I hadn’t cast a fly rod in months, and my cast, which is usually pretty good, was trash. Matt kept complimenting Kris’s cast and making suggestions for mine. I hate fly rods.

That night it snowed. It was April and it snowed. At home in Houston my tomatoes were well-along to producing fruit.

We fished the next day out of Matt’s raft in the lower river. I fished either a single nymph under an indicator or small streamers, but I never caught anything on a streamer. One of the remarkable things about the Swift is that over its short distance it continually changes, so that the narrow sections near the dam broaden and allow drift fishing. In some sense the Swift is several different rivers held together by the same water. I had better luck fishing from the boat, and on the second day caught a fine native brookie and a rainbow. Kris got the prize though, catching an unexpected pickerel. I had never seen one, and notwithstanding what Mr. Thoreau said,10 it’s an ugly fish, primeval and vicious, the smaller cousin of pike and muskie, a predator.

Matt had brought us a beer to end the day, and we stood by the launch and drank a bit. As I recall the scene, Matt was wearing a tee shirt and shorts, working on his tan. Kris and I were huddled together shivering. After a day in the wind on Massachusetts’ water, we were way out of our comfort zone. It would snow even more that night, and us poor Houstonians weren’t up for more cold. We left the last of the beer in the can, piled into the car, and turned on the heat. Then we turned up the heat. That was plenty enough wilderness for one day.

  1. The water is cold because it’s released from deep in the lake. The water temperature isn’t affected by air temperature. ↩︎
  2. Or 7. Or 31. Or 25. I’ve never found a consistent number for the length of the Swift below the dam. Somebody surely knows it, but I don’t. It’s short. The first mile below the dam is fly-fishing only. Or maybe it’s the first two miles. ↩︎
  3. 460 miles. For comparison, the Mississippi is 2,340 miles. The longest river that flows through Texas, the Rio Grande, is 1,896 miles. ↩︎
  4. The Glen Canyon Dam at Lee’s Ferry is the largest dam to ever be proposed for removal. It’s a stupid dam that loses about 6% of the Colorado River’s water to evaporation, and has always been controversial. It is great for recreation, and below the dam there’s a fine tailwater fishery. Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang revolves around a plot to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. It’s not going to get taken out any time soon, either through official channels or by The Monkey Wrench Gang, so you’ve still got plenty of time to go fish there. ↩︎
  5. (1854) I feel like I need to say that Walden is by Henry David Thoreau. A few years ago in an adult Spanish class I made a joke about Walden and the Louisianan sitting next to me didn’t know what it was. They do things different in Louisiana, and he clearly had never had Pat Miller for American Literature. He was a very handsome young man, and he was learning Spanish for his trips to bars in Mexico, but I thought he should also spend some time reading Walden. For some reason he was very proud that he’d never read Romeo and Juliet, and never would. ↩︎
  6. Bob Marshall, “The Problem of the Wilderness”, Scientific Monthly 30 (2), February 1930. ↩︎
  7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836). I have read some Emerson, but find him archaic and almost unreadable. He always baffles me, so I may be making this up. ↩︎
  8. Massachusetter? Massachusatonian? ↩︎
  9. Fish stack up at the Y, but so do anglers. We fished there about an hour. We were there early on a Thursday work-day morning, and two people arrived while we fished and two more were arriving when we were leaving. The usual notions of fishing etiquette don’t work at the Y, and the anglers closely line the prime water without the usual regard for distance. That’s ok. I didn’t hook anybody. ↩︎
  10. Thoreau loved to fish, and he loved pickerel. I quoted Thoreau on pickerel before, but it bears repeating:
    “Ah, the pickerel of Walden! . . . They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water.” Walden, The Pond in Winter. I still reckon that they’re kinda ugly, but then I’ve never caught one. ↩︎

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South Carolina Packing List

Gear

We took eight-weight 9 foot rods, floating lines, and seven foot 16 pound leaders. We took redfish flies, which are generally any fly that looks even vaguely like a shrimp, crab, or small fish. If redfish are eating, they will eat anything you throw at them, including feathers, fur, polyester, and baseballs. Tan is my preferred color, unless my preferred color is chartreuse, purple, red, or pink, or if I’m feeling natural either olive or white. As long as they’re eating, redfish are a happy fish, and almost any color works.

What could be easier?

So of course we had a problem with our reels. I have used the same reels in saltwater for 30 years: Tibors. They’re beautiful things, handmade in Florida, and they come in different sizes for different fish, the 8-9 Everglades for bonefish and redfish, the 9-10 Riptide for permit and jacks, the bigger 11-12 Gulfstream for tarpon, and finally the massive Pacifica for things like sailfish and marlin, whatever those might be. Actually, I own some other 11-12 reels but I don’t own a Gulfstream, and I don’t need anything as big as a Pacifica. I own several Everglades and a couple of Riptides, but I lust after an orange Gulfstream. Not that I’d ever mention it because then Kris might feel obligated to remember that on my birthday or Christmas.

Or Father’s Day. Father’s Day is coming up.

Tibors are bombproof, easy to work on in the field, and for any given size their parts are interchangeable. They take almost no maintenance, and their design hasn’t changed significantly in the 30 years I’ve used them. Tibor engraves your name on a nameplate for the reel, and there is something so satisfying, so validating when one screws on that identifying nameplate. It’s there for everybody to see: this guy Neil Thomas ain’t fooling around. He owns a Tibor, so he must be special!

I love them. Mine have my name on them. I’m special.

Tibor makes other reels, the Signature, the Backcountry, the Billy Pate, but only the Tibor is just the Tibor. Tibors now come in fancy colors, though as I recall the originals were either gold or black. My oldest is gold, though the gold has faded and it’s pretty beat up. It’s the reel I used in South Carolina, and right now it’s in our skiff down the coast at Port O’Connor. It’s a well-made thing.

Kris doesn’t like them, and that was our problem. It’s not that they don’t work, but she says they’re heavy, and bulky, and to her they just don’t feel right. I keep trying to slip them in on her, hoping she’ll grow as fond of them as I am, because then I’d have an excuse to buy more. When we were packing for Charleston her usual eight-weight reel had a seven-weight line on it, so instead of switching the line I packed one of my Everglades. She complained the whole time we fished.

It was too heavy. It didn’t feel right on her rod. Where was her reel?

So now she has a new reel, a Hardy that she picked out at Gordy & Sons. It was a Christmas present, and by me a capitulation. It’s lightweight, probably flawless, probably made in Korea. It’s certainly very nice. It’s not a Tibor.

Hotels

Visiting the King Street shopping district in Charleston is a Garden & Gun ad incarnate. There’s jewelry and ball gowns, beachwear and books. I’m certain there are Luis Vuitton purses, and purses made at a boutique South Carolina saddlery shop, and purses made of woven sea grass. There’s crockery and cookware and antiques. I always wondered why Charleston was such a vacation magnet, and now I know. People go to Charleston to shop.

Where once slaves were auctioned, now there are bibelots, and bibelots don’t come with the same moral downside. I bought a spool of 20 lb. saltwater tippet at the Orvis store, so I did my part. My shopping was completely successful.

There are also hotels. You can spend as much as you’d like on a King Street hotel, though probably not as little. We actually stayed outside of the shopping district several miles inland, in an area of town that is gentrifying from the possibly dangerous to the marginal. I’m fond of mid-century modern motor inns, and we found a restored one in Charleston. In Savannah, just down the coast, we had stayed at a great restored motor inn, but the Starlight Motor Inn in Charleston was not as finely finished as the Thunderbird Inn in Savannah, nor was it as central. It was very good though, with small but well-appointed rooms. The room rates were immensely reasonable, and parking was free. I’d stay there again in a heartbeat.

The strange thing about the Starlight, I guess the ultramodern thing about the Starlight, was that we never saw any live employees. Check-in was by internet, which included a room code but no card or key. There was only a keypad for room entry. Room-cleaning was by request at an extra cost, which seemed fair since the room rate was so low. There was a storage unit with extra towels and coffee and whatnot in a cabinet in the stairwell under our room, and whether or not we were supposed to we helped ourselves to what we needed. There is a bar at the Starlight, but it’s open Thursday to Sunday and we were there Monday to Wednesday. I’m certain we could have roused someone if we’d needed, but there was never a need.

There was a pickle ball court painted onto the parking lot, and a moveable net, but there wasn’t a pool. Kris didn’t tip me when I carried our bags to the room.

Donuts

Annie’s Hot Donuts, in Mount Pleasant, was outside of Charleston proper but on the way to the ferry for Fort Sumter. At Annie’s, donuts are made when ordered, with fat fry-dom on demand and toppings from an ice cream sundae buffet of choices. It is such a miracle, why have I never seen one of these before? Why isn’t there one in Houston? Granted, in the morning, at the best Houston Shipley’s, the glazed donuts are hot when you get them, and a hot Shipley’s glazed is donut perfection, but that’s turnover and time of day, not the business plan. Every donut at Annie’s is hot when delivered. Miraculous.

There is an online list from Eater of Charleston’s essential donuts, but it unforgivably doesn’t include Annie’s. On the morning we fished–we fished one morning and then the next afternoon–we were on the water before any of the Eater-listed donut shops opened. We tracked down where Glazed Gourmet Donuts on King Street had been, but it’s now permanently closed. Joey Bag of Donuts was out of our way, though it was certainly one of the best names ever. On the day we fished in the afternoon, we had breakfast at The Junction, which was on the list, but it wasn’t donut day at The Junction so we had to settle for biscuits. I’ll grant that they were excellent biscuits.

The Junction was interesting not just for the biscuits, but because it was in Park Circle, even further west of the King Street shopping district than our motel. Park Circle seems to be the Bohemian, as opposed to the Garden & Gun, side of town, where because of cheap rents you can find a micro-brewery, or a bike shop, or a vinyl record store. It looked fun to explore, and I recall the biscuits fondly.

Restaurants

There are as many restaurants in Charleston as there are guitar pickers in Nashville, and in addition to the redfish that I didn’t catch, we left a bunch of restaurants untested. For our two lunches we had oysters near King Street. If we had had three days for lunch, we would have had oysters three days. We didn’t eat near enough oysters.

The two places we ate lunch, 167 Oyster Bar and Amen Street Fish and Raw Bar, weren’t joints. They were upscale, focused on seafood generally, and we paired our oysters with other more substantial things. At Amen Street in addition to oysters we had the shrimp corny dogs, she crab soup, and at 167 for some reason a lobster roll. I don’t think lobster rolls are native to South Carolina, but sometimes I give over to my baser desires.

There are authentically joint-like oyster joints in Charleston, but we didn’t make it to any and its a shame. Next time.

The first night in town we ate at Rodney Scott’s, which is whole-hog South Carolina Barbecue. There was this strange disconnect when people asked where we ate and we said barbecue, because they immediately assumed we’d eaten at a newer place, the Central Texas-style Lewis Barbecue Charleston. Why, I ask you, would we go from Texas to South Carolina to eat Hill Country brisket? I’m sure it’s excellent brisket, and I’m vaguely curious if it’s any good, but the world of barbecue is large, and for us whole hog is a rare treat. Brisket is not. Even great brisket is not.

At Rodney Scott’s, who orders both the hush puppies and the cornbread? Who doesn’t?

Monday night we ate at Hannibal’s Kitchen, which is traditional Charleston Gullah Geechee and which sports authentic 1980s Black Liberation decor. it was a great place, and we both ate the crab and rice. Both Rodney Scott’s and Hannibal’s are places I’d go back to. If Hannibal’s were in my neighborhood I’d go back way too often.

Tuesday, our last dinner, we went to Fig. I’m always so proud of myself when I get a reservation at a place like Fig, because it means that I’ve planned far enough ahead to do something hard. Fig might be the best known of all of Charleston’s high-toned restaurants, and it’s not easy to nab a reservation. Did I have to make the reservation 60 days ahead? 120? On the day our oldest child was born? I can’t remember, but whenever, I did it.

I read in some review that Fig is the place locals go for special occasions: Graduations, anniversaries, Tuesday nights . . . The decor is a bit dated, but it was presumably always meant to be clubby. The menu is American modern with a South Carolinian bent. It’s pricey.

After all that build-up though for some reason the waitstaff couldn’t get my orders right. My drink was wrong and had to go back to the bar. My entree was wrong and had to go back to the kitchen. I am apparently getting crankier with old age, because it bugged me, when usually I would have written it off to the sorts of normal human foibles at which I excel. Then I realized the staff was just dazzled by Kris’s beauty and couldn’t pay attention to me, so it was ok. After all, who wouldn’t be so dazzled?

Just as a reminder, that’s the orange Tibor Gulfstream. With blue backing.

Fig also had oysters, and we ate some.

Fort Sumter

We’ve been to a lot of Civil War battlefields, Shiloh, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Bull Run, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and Central High School in Little Rock. Fort Sumter may have been for me the most emotionally charged of all of them. Perched out in Charleston Harbor, in the midst of all that historic Southern outrage, it held the deepest reservoir of failed possibilities. Bombarding Fort Sumter was the path we chose, and we’re still paying.

We timed our visit right because Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest was published in 2024, and it is a great introduction to both the antebellum mindset and the particulars of Fort Sumter. It is also a timely book and pilgrimage to ponder the current state of affairs in these late days. It would have been a shame to miss either the book or the pilgrimage.

Playlist

Dizzie Gillespie was born and raised in Cheraw, South Carolina, then moved to Philadelphia when he was 18, and then moved on to New York. He also once stabbed Cab Calloway in the leg.

Moving to Philadelphia was a right of passage for South Carolina African Americans, who repatriated their popular music to South Carolina as Beach Music. Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer), Under the Boardwalk, Sixty Minute Man, My Girl, Such a Night . . . Motown was Detroit, Stax was Memphis, but Beach Music had its own sound and its own audience, and the audience was at least partially White and in South Carolina, busily Shagging.

Not that. That wasn’t invented until later. The Shag is the state dance of South Carolina.

Gillespie didn’t play Beach Music, but after the stabbing he was fired by Cab Calloway. It apparently wasn’t much as stabbings go, and he tried to apologize, but Calloway held a grudge, as bossmen will.

Gottlieb, William P., Portrait of Dizzy Gillespie, New York, NY, 1947, public domain.

Gillespie went on to become the first great trumpet player of BeBop, and influenced a generation of trumpeters that included Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, and Clifford Brown. Gillespie wasn’t the only great jazz musician from South Carolina. Hank Garland, the great jazz/country/rock and roll guitarist, was from Cowpens. Freddie Green, the greater jazz guitarist, was from Charleston. The great country blues guitarist, Reverend Gary Davis, was from Laurens.

Popular bands from South Carolina tend to have an edgy new-wave feel. The Country band, Shovels and Rope, is from Charleston, Ben Bridwell of Band of Horses is from Irmo, and Iron and Wine is from Chapin.

There’s enough diversity among good musicians from South Carolina to make for a fine playlist. Even The Marshall Tucker Band is perfectly ok in small doses. Did you know that there was never anybody in the band named Marshall Tucker? He was a blind piano tuner from Spartanburg.

Freddie Green, circa 1938, Library of Congress.

John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas was born on Parris Island, though he grew up in Virginia. I figured it was a close enough connection to include his Monday, Monday and Words of Love.

When Dizzie Gillespie appeared before his World War II draft board, he said, and I quote, “in the United States whose foot has been in my ass?”, and questioned whether they really wanted to give him a gun. He was classified 4-F. It’s good to know one’s limits. The funny thing is that notwithstanding the shooting threat and the stabbing, Gillespie is generally considered to have been not only a great jazz trumpeter (maybe along with Louis Armstrong the very best), but also a good-natured guy.

Guitar

I’m writing this so long after we went to South Carolina that I can’t remember if I took a guitar, or, if I did, whether I played it. Too late now to figure it out.

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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 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.