Tag: Flies

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Rio Costilla and Cimarron River, New Mexico, July 26-27, 2021

We fished with Shane Clawson through Doc Thompson’s High Country Anglers in New Mexico, and Shane was great. There are several well-known guides in Northern New Mexico, and I delayed choosing because I couldn’t decide. I called Thompson because he’s Orvis-endorsed. Doc himself was booked, but Shane contracts with him–our good luck.

Covid hit guides in New Mexico hard. New Mexico did what other states should have done to get rid of Covid, but Shane’s business was shut for much of 2020. Later our Colorado guide told us that during 2020 he’d never been busier. Now New Mexico will get hit with the fourth surge like the rest of us, because we didn’t do what was needed.

I told Shane that I wanted to fish for Rio Grande cutthroats in Latir Creek, and wanted to fish the Cimarron River. Ok, I’m lying. I told Shane that I wanted to fish for Rio Grand cutthroats in the Rio Costilla in the Valle Vidal, and that I wanted to fish the Rio Grande River. Apparently late July is too hot for the Rio Grande, so I picked the Cimarron because it’s not far from Taos, and because of the 1976 Poco album. I figured any day spent humming Rose of Cimarron is a day well spent.

As for the Valle Vidal, I had fished there once before, almost 25 years ago. We were on a family camping trip through Northern New Mexico—I promise, if I’d known my daughter had that tiny stress fracture, I wouldn’t have forced her to backpack into the Rio Grande Gorge. And she wasn’t carrying much besides her sleeping bag and some clothes. That and a couple of gallons of water.

Ok. I didn’t really make her carry any water. I made her little brother carry the water.

During that trip I stole an hour from my family to fish the Rio Costilla, and I remember the Valle Vidal as one of the prettiest mountain meadows I’ve ever seen. I didn’t catch anything, and Julie Andrews never sang, so I’ve thought ever since that I’d left something undone–at least for the fishing if not for the singing.

No luck though. The Valle Vidal is closed to fishing for two years for Rio Grande cutthroat trout restoration. Everything with gills in the Rio Costilla will be poisoned, and a pure strain of Rio Grande cutthroat will be reintroduced. Closing the Rio Costilla for two years to remove invasive species is absolutely a good thing, except of course that the two years is smack in the middle of when I finally decided to go back again to the Valle Vidal. Dang it. Dang invasive species.

Cimarron River

Except for the San Juan River, New Mexico doesn’t really have the fishing reputation of other Western states. It’s harder to get to, and except for the San Juan it’s not known for trophy fish. Most New Mexico rivers are small. New Mexican food is special, the mix of people is unique, and the art can be magnificent, plus there’s great high-desert scenery, but some of the best fly fishing is for some of the smallest fish.

Second things first. We fished the Cimarron the second day. It’s popular, and gear anglers are as common as fly anglers. We were in Cimarron Canyon State Park (elev. 7500 ft.) in Carson National Forest, on highway 64 between Taos (elev. 6969) and the town of Cimarron (elev. 6430), with considerable ups and downs thrown in for good measure. It’s a tailwater out of Eagle’s Nest Lake, but the river is still only 25 feet or so across, and that’s being generous. Because it was midweek, we had no problem finding space on the water.

With some detours for downed trees, the Cimarron is wadeable, and there are lots of wild browns. We started in the morning on San Juan worms under a dry dropper. It had rained, and Shane said he only fished worms while they moved in the soil after rain. Later we switched out the worms for small nymphs–WD 40s–still rigged under a dry dropper. Only one largish fish–maybe 12 inches and fat–hit the dry, and it had taken the nymph first and then just kept going. Our tippets were small, 5x, and leaders were short, 7.5 feet.

Cimarron River Brown Trout

The Cimarron was interesting, but the day before, the day we fished for cutthroat, was the reason I was there. I told Shane I wanted to fish for Rio Grande cutthroat. Shane misheard me, or maybe I misspoke. He heard I wanted to catch a Rio Grande cutthroat. I guess I did, but really, I just wanted to be in a high place that held cutthroat. If trout live in pretty places, cutthroat live in the prettiest places.

Latir Creek is part of the Rio Costilla drainage, so it’s not far from where I wanted to be. To get there we drove 45 miles north of Taos to Costilla (elev. 7700 ft), turned right on a paved county road that turned into an unpaved county road, then turned right again on a double track road that kept climbing until it petered out into a jeep trail. It’s a satisfying drive, and a drive that I thought justified that extra money for four-wheel drive, though to be honest we didn’t really spend any time on the jeep trail, and drove nowhere my father wouldn’t have driven a Buick LeSabre. Still. I’m manly. I have 4-wheel drive.

Mary Orvis Marbury, Royal Coachman Wet Fly, Favorite Flies and Their Histories, 1892, via Wikipedia.

If the Cimarron was small, Latir Creek was tiny. If I were a jumping man, I could have had a good day jumping back and forth across it. Not being a jumping man, we fished, sometimes from the bank, sometimes wading. Here’s the really cool part though: all day long I fished a parachute Royal Wulff, about a #14, which is like saying that all day long I played Ringo’s drums. It’s iconic, unmistakeable, a beautiful dry fly that floats on top of the water and that has a lineage back to the 1800s. It’s got its own Wikipedia page! Ok, what doesn’t, but still . . . . If I could spend the rest of my fly-fishing-life catching fish on a Royal Coachman descendant, I’d take that deal.

We caught rainbows and cutthroats; rainbows in the lower drainage, and then in the meadows and higher we caught cutthroats. All of the fish I saw were small, five or six inches, and their parr-marks–that’s a series of thumbprints extending down the fish’s body to its tail–hadn’t faded. Parr marks tell you that the fish are less than a year old. They also had the orange cutthroat on the Rio Grande’s lower jaw. I was happy as I could be to see those fish.

Shane wasn’t satisfied. In addition to the orange, on some of our fish there was a line of reddish iridescence–a rainbow–with the parr marks. Shane was concerned that the red line indicated that the fish were cutbows, rainbow-cutthroat hybrids. After the first couple of those, we moved further upstream (just verging on the jeep track), where hybridization was less likely.

Latir Creek Rio Grande Cutthroat

There wasn’t a lot of casting going on during all of this, not the kind of fine, artistic casting at which I am most likely to do injury to those around me and avoid the fish altogether. I would flick the leader a few feet forward in a half-assed roll cast, or just dap. What’s dapping? It’s not casting at all. It’s letting out just enough line to lay the fly on the water beneath the rod tip. Shane kept reminding me to take in more line. He said if I couldn’t make my cast (or in fact my dap), it was because I had too much line extended. By day’s end, I was fishing with only a few feet of leader extended from the end of the rod. It’s the earliest kind of fly fishing, say the mid-1300s, but the lies of the fish were so tiny, so pocketed into bits of soft water in the midst of a mad downhill rush, that nothing else worked. So there I was, happily dapping with a royal coachman for a fish that’s continuously declined in numbers and range since the 1920s. Don’t nobody ever tell me I ain’t hidebound, or at least nostalgic.

Even at the higher elevation, Shane was worried that our fish might be cutbows.

Latir Creek

When we met Tuesday Shane told us he’d spent Monday evening talking to other guides, who assured him that Latir Creek fish were almost certainly pure cutthroats. Apparently for parr fish it’s difficult to tell the difference by color, and other indications include the shape of the tail (rainbow trout caudal fins–tail fins–are square and not forked, while cutthroats’ are forked) and the place. I told him that he could have just told me they were cutthroats, that he didn’t need to spend all of his evening looking at pictures of fish tails on the internet, but he told me he wasn’t that sort of guide. I told him that I was that sort of client, but I really didn’t mean it. Cutthroat or no, I’d done what I wanted.

Latir Creek
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Crawford State Park, Kansas, June 18-19, 2021.

Google Maps tells me that it’s 9 hours and 51 minutes and 617 miles to Crawford State Park, near Girard, Kansas, population 2,707. Google Maps is lying. The 617 miles is true enough, but map apps don’t account for gas breaks, walking the dogs, road work, slow traffic in the left lane, and side junkets and side bets, even if you drive a reasonable five miles faster than the speed limit for most of the distance. If Google Maps tells me that it’s 23 minutes from my house to my office in downtown Houston, that’s pretty close to right. On the other hand, if Google Maps tells me its 2 hours, 45 minutes from Houston to Austin, it’s short by 15 or 20 minutes after I stop at Hruskas for gas and kolaches. It took us about 11 and a half hours to drive from Houston to Southeastern Kansas, notwithstanding the map app’s 10-hour claim.

Pro Tip #1: If you’re driving from point A to point B and you drive the speed limit or a bit over, add about 20 minutes to the app time for every 200 miles you drive. Add another 45 minutes for lunch. 

We picked Southeastern Kansas because (1) I still needed to catch a fish in Kansas, (2) the reservation site claimed that Crawford is one of the most beautiful state parks in Kansas, and (3) the dogs could go. Plus it was Juneteenth weekend; you gotta celebrate Juneteenth. I made a reservation to camp three nights at the park. We stayed one night. 

Google Maps

This was our third trip to Kansas, fourth if you count a weekend trip to Kansas City in 2016 to see the Astros play the Royals (that whole Missouri/Kansas thing with Kansas City confuses everybody who isn’t from Missouri/Kansas, but I think we drove through Kansas City, Kansas, on the way to the airport). In 2020 we drove to Wichita in the dead of winter to get donuts, and last October we drove to Mead State Park and the Cimarron National Grassland. Cimarron National Grassland is sparsely magnificent, and standing on the Santa Fe trail in Western Kansas is one of those things that everyone should do, especially if they love New Mexico. Mead State Park is also very pretty; notwithstanding the internet, I thought it prettier than Crawford State Park. Kansas was bitter cold in February though, and our October trip was unexpectedly cold and fishless. 

Crawford Lake is smallish, about 150 acres, which makes it easier for fly rods, but it was bigger than I thought it would be. We were on the upper right-hand finger of the lake, out of the wind–the wind blew hard on the lake’s main body–but it was also hot. Really hot. Even in the evening when we got there, when it was supposed to be cooling, the temperatures were in the 90s, and I was sweat-drenched by the time I’d set up the tent. I thought about fishing when we got there, but by the time I’d set up camp I was too beat to take the kayak off the roof rack.

The park was packed with campers in RVs and tents, though everybody was reasonably quiet, self-contained, and polite–this was Kansas. Still, living outside with a crowd makes me feel a bit too displayed and on-guard. 

Pro Tip #2: Nobody camps at state parks on a summer weekend. It’s too crowded. 

Early Saturday morning I put in the kayak and fished for about an hour down the sheltered bank. I started out fishing a size 8 BBB fly, and used a 9-foot 7 weight rod and a floating line with a 9 foot leader and 16 pound tippet. At least I fished a 16 pound tippet until I broke it off in a tree. Then I fished a 7 foot leader with a 20 pound tippet–I’d left the spool of 16 pound in the car. I stayed in the protected finger of the lake where we camped. I didn’t catch any bass. but I did catch this typical Kansas sunfish. 

A typical Kansas bluegill. Photo courtesy of Nick Denbow, Western Caribbean Fly Fishing School.

Ok, I lied. That’s neither a sunfish nor in Kansas. It’s not me either. This is what I actually caught:

Clearly I needed the 20 pound tippet. In an hour I caught six of them, all about the same size, one after another. I tossed the fly close to the weeds by the bank and let it sink, and the blue gill would take it. 

I love catching blue gill. I love their aggression, I love their iridescence and colors when brought to hand. When the next overlord tells me I have to give up catching every fish but one, blue gill will like as not be the fish I choose to keep. Plus if I’d glued all six of my Kansas fish together I’d have had a pretty good-sized fish.

I was off the water in a bit more than an hour. Kris didn’t want to go out in the kayak, so we packed up the car and left. We didn’t want to suffer the afternoon heat and the crowd didn’t lend itself to park exploration. 

We didn’t go straight home. We were across the Kansas/Missouri border from Branson, Missouri, and Carolyn Parker of Branson’s River Run Outfitters had been on Tom Rosenbauer’s Orvis podcast the week before. It was only 70 miles away, so we drove to Branson. 

Branson is Las Vegas for devout Southern Baptists who don’t drink, gamble, or watch cavorting showgirls. It’s is in the heart of the Ozarks, and in lieu of neon the countryside is devastated by Branson billboards. There are shows, Dolly Parton’s Stampede, Presley’s Country Jamboree, Amazing Pets, The Haygoods, Legends of Country at Dick Clark’s American Bandstand Theater, illusionists and magicians and comedians, JESUS at Sight and Sound Theater (there’s an illusionist, magician, and comedian joke there, but for once I’m exercising restraint) . . . . There’s a big lake for bass fishing, golf courses, and a tailwater. There are lots of 50s diners in Branson, and I suspect a Golden Corral.

We originally thought we’d spend the night there, so we stopped at a visitor center–there are lots of visitor centers in Branson, but I don’t know if any are official. I asked the lady at the counter to suggest a hotel where we could take the dogs, and she said what kind of hotel, and I said a hotel with a bar. She told me there weren’t a lot of bars in Branson, but she called a hotel with a bar for us. The hotel was full–she said that on summer weekends Branson is packed, but I’ll always suspect that the hotel was full because of its bar. 

Kris wanted to stay and fish, but I just couldn’t do it. We didn’t have any trout rods; we could have used the shop’s rods but I was looking for excuses. The guys at the shop told us that the river was particularly high because of dam releases, so I used that as well. Bottom line though, all those Southern Baptists on holiday made me nervous.

Pro Tip #3: On a summer weekend, if you’re a devout Southern Baptist out for a good time, Branson, Missouri, is for you. 

We drove on to Bentonville, Arkansas, home of WalMart, where I had a decidedly un-Baptist Manhattan at The Preacher’s Son, an upscale place with ties to the Waltons built in a former church. There was no show, but I guess religion was the day’s motif. 

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Pennsylvania Packing List

Gear

We took waders, boots with studs, and wading staffs, and we used them. Kris fished with her 10’6″ Orvis H3 3 weight that Trout Unlimited sent her for her intelligence, beauty, and patience. I fished a 9-foot Winston Pure 5 weight that I got from Trout Unlimited because they felt sorry for me.

On the third day, trying to tight-line nymph with a medium-length leader and only a foot or so of fly line out of the rod tip, I couldn’t control the short casts of the leader. Some of it was unfamiliarity, but whatever it was, my casts were mostly big looping air balls with minds of their own.

Dom recommended that I pick up the line earlier, before the leader passed me on it’s way downstream. With the increased line tension I could get a better back-cast, and that helped, but I’ve wondered since if one of the longer, lighter rods used for Euro-nymphing–like the Orvis rod Kris was using– wouldn’t have made those casts easier? That if an advantage of the long, light rods is that the greater leverage and limber tip section make short casts of light lines easier? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be curious enough to try it and reach a conclusion, or maybe not.

We fished Dom’s flies and Dom’s leaders, or Jim’s flies using pretty standard trout leaders. I don’t think we fished anything smaller than a 5x tippet, which is good since anything lighter than 5x tippet has to be manufactured by captive fairies in Celtic sweatshops. It must have been ok. We caught some fish.

Penns Creek

Other than being a pretty great place to fish, Penns Creek holds an oddly significant place in American history. In 1755, a group of Lenape massacred 14 Irish and German settlers on Penns Creek, and took another 11 captive. While William Penn lived, the Lenape and Penn’s Quaker-controlled government had good relations–maybe the longest-lasting good relations between Europeans and Native Americans in the British colonies–but after his death the English pushed the Lenape out of their historic territory into territory controlled by the Iroquois, and then the Iroquois joined the pushing. The Lenape struck back at Penns Creek.

The Penns Creak Massacre kicked off the Western Pennsylvania colonist/Indian conflicts of the French and Indian War, and as a direct result of the massacre, Pennsylvania assemblyman Benjamin Franklin led the effort to fund a common defense. Military funding was something that the Quaker-controlled Assembly had previously refused to do, and still because of their religious convictions didn’t want to do. Franklin won. In response, the remaining Quaker assemblymen resigned from government. It represented the end of Pennsylvania Quaker dominance, a broader divorce of religion and government, and a spasm of self-governance that arguably spurred Franklin toward the Revolution. That’s a pretty heavy load for a little crick.

Moccasins, Probably Lenape, history unknown, purchased 1908, National Museum of the American Indian.

The colonist/Indian conflicts in Western Pennsylvania were particularly violent. The Indians, encouraged by the French, fought a bloody no-holds-barred war against settler families. The English, encouraged by the English, offered bounties of $150 for Lenape men’s scalps and $130 for women’s. In the end, after the French surrendered, the Lenape were pushed out of Pennsylvania further into Ohio. Ultimately the largest groups of the Lenape–now known as the Delaware–settled in Oklahoma, with tribal governments in Bartlesville and Anadarko.

Irony of ironies, when I was 10 I shook Roy Rogers’ hand in Anadarko.

Knife sheath, possibly Lenape, 1780-1820, National Museum of the American Indian

Gettysburg

The Battle of Gettysburg, together with the concurrent fall of Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the end of the Confederacy, even if they wouldn’t admit it for another two years. Gettysburg was Lee’s greatest military blunder, other than rebelling in the first place. We called too late to get Segway tours of the battlefield, which sounded pretty fun, but we did find a horse-drawn wagon tour, which was probably better since it was too cold and windy to go zipping around on Segways. There were about twelve of us huddled in the wagon, not counting the horses, and it was a wee bit awkward being the only Southerners. I’m not sure that it helped that I was the only person who could answer the Guide’s question about which president besides Lincoln was born in Kentucky? It was Jefferson Davis, who hardly seems to count as a president, but I knew the answer so I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

Because we were going to Gettysburg, I was reading Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. Along with the rest of his army career, General Seidule is the former head of the West Point history department. He rightly touts his Southern, military, and historical bona fides. I don’t have any military bona fides, and barely any historical, but I certainly have Southern: five of my great-great grandfathers fought in the War, four for the Confederacy, one for the Union, but even the Yankee was a Southerner, having migrated from Eastern Tennessee to Missouri. During Gettysburg all of my great-greats would have been somewhere in the West, not Gettysburg, but still, notwithstanding family ties, it’s Gettysburg that captures attention. There’s a lot more romance in Pickett’s Charge than in siege starvation at Vicksburg.

I suspect that many of us white Southern boys of a certain age are reckoning with our Confederate legacy. It’s hard to tell four of your ancestors that morally they sucked, even if the conversation is only in your own head. My great-greats were mostly privates, but I don’t really doubt that they knew they were fighting for the preservation of slavery. They may have made treasonous choices for indefensible reasons, but like as not they weren’t unaware of the reasons the War was fought.

I suspect too that General Seidule’s book has a limited audience–old Southern white guys with a moral conundrum; their early reverence for the South smacking up against their delayed realization that the Confederacy doesn’t deserve reverence–but it’s an audience who will be comforted by General Seidule’s authority and certainty and urgency. I appreciated it anyway.

As an odd aside, I re-read the Gettysburg Address before we went to the battlefield. In Pennsylvania it finally registered that Lincoln was only memorializing the Union dead. Only the Union dead were buried in the new national cemetery. The Southern dead were left on the field and then buried in mass graves, and Lincoln’s words didn’t extend so far. It was a startling realization, that unlike what came after the end of Reconstruction the memorialization of the War didn’t always include the South, and that Lincoln’s consecration said nothing ennobling about the Southern dead. That’s tough stuff for a Southern boy.

Philadelphia to Pittsburgh

It is further than 70 miles from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. Who knew?

In Philadelphia we ate. Yeah, yeah, we saw the Museum of Art, and the Barnes Foundation collection, we walked around the preserved Colonial part of town and looked at the Liberty Bell through a window. It was all fabulous, but mostly we ate. Then we ate some more. Then we ate.

Of course I consulted my friend Tom, font of all trustworthy food suggestions. “Tom,” I asked, “Pittsburgh? Philadelphia?”

Tom didn’t know anything about Pittsburgh. About Philadelphia he was certain:

DO go to Zahav, Michael Solmonov’s paean to Israeli/Middle Eastern food. Great food. Great service. Great cocktails. And contrary to everything I say, it’s ok to order the set menu here – for two. Lots of appetizers, salads, entrees, and dessert.

Getting a reservation to Zahav is a bit like going fly fishing. It takes preparation, memory, some luck, and a credit card. Still, it’s worth it. It is an unflinching barrage of food, fabulous food, the kind of food that wears you down and leaves you drained and unhappy that you can’t eat it all, and thrilled that you ate what you ate.

There is also the Reading Terminal Market, where we ate roast beef and roast pork sandwiches at Tommy DiNic’s, then went back the next day to eat Philly cheese steaks at Carmen’s. Since it’s the only Philly cheese steak I’ve had, I can attest that it is, as far as I know, the best in Philadelphia.

We failed to get the Amish donuts at Reading Terminal Market on Saturday because I didn’t know the owners were Amish and I didn’t want to stand in line, and then they were closed on Sunday. It’s a lot of God to ask us to give up donuts for the Sabbath, so instead of the Amish donuts we went to Federal Donuts and Fried Chicken. I’m sure the fried chicken is excellent, but I really regretted missing my chance at the Amish donuts. Our daughter says they’re outstanding.

There was a very good market in Lancaster, the Central Market, which had lots of Amish goods but I recall no donuts. After visiting the Lancaster Market we ate lots of pickles. It’s a great place to buy pickles, plus after Philadelphia we needed some kind of a purge.

As for Pittsburgh, there were vendor stalls all over the Strip District, but as a market it was not so good as Reading Terminal Market, and while Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art is very fine, it’s not so good as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I screwed up and we didn’t see the Pirates at PNC Park, which is unforgivable because the park is beautiful and I like the Pirates. The Pirates are far more likable than the Phillies.

The Pittsburgh airport is remarkably inconvenient. It’s hard to figure out where near the airport to stay, and Uber rides from downtown to the airport are ridiculously expensive. We did eat the famous local sandwich at Primanti Brothers, which for some reason is stuffed with French fries, and on Saturday night ate at a good Italian place, Picolo Forno.

The French-fry stuffed sandwich is not so good as the Philly cheese steak.

George Catlin, Ambush for Flamingoes, c. 1856-57, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Feathered Hook

We stayed at some good places, and a lousy airport Holiday Inn Express in Pittsburgh–it was advertised as an airport motel but it was seven miles from the airport and its airport shuttle was shut down for Covid–but best of all we stayed at the Feathered Hook in Coburn, which is a fly shop on Penns Creek with an attached bed and breakfast. This is not a romantic bed and breakfast decorated with period gew-gaws and serving artisanal breakfasts. This is a place for anglers to sleep when they fish Penns Creek. It’s decorated with fly fishing gew-gaws and second-hand furniture that might be antique someday but more likely will be discarded as junk, and there is a bit of a college frat house vibe about the place, that is if the college frats were 60-year-old fly fishermen. Kris was the only woman there, so if it is considered a romantic getaway it’s romance for a decidedly niche clientele.

Breakfast at the Feathered Hook is bacon and sausage and eggs and toast; three eggs, however you want them (though probably not poached, and certainly without any hollandaise). I guess that could be considered artisanal among the same niche that goes to The Feathered Hook for romance.

Coburn itself consists of The Feathered Hook, a main street with a few dozen raggedy clapboard houses, a bridge over Penns Creek, some vacation homes, and four Trump 2024 signs. The fly shop at The Feathered Hook is very good, and they have a fine selection of handmade bamboo fly rods. I have no reason to own a handmade bamboo rod; there’s no fishing I commonly do where I could enjoy a handmade bamboo fly rod, and they’re expensive–even for fly rods–so of course I’ve long wanted one. They’re pretty. If The Feathered Hook had put prices on the rods, I probably would have bought one, but I didn’t want to ask because then I would have been committed and Kris would have been aghast. I would probably find as many uses for an English riding saddle.

I’ve long wanted an English riding saddle.

We stayed at the Feathered Hook two nights, and the first night we drank whiskey in the kitchen with the Antietam Fly Anglers of Maryland. There was a very funny story about one of the members, a doctor, who had organized a trip to Argentina, and then a couple of days before the trip he collapsed and had to have immediate heart surgery. His friends, some of whom were at the kitchen table–as I recall it is a fine formica and chrome table that perfectly matches the decor, but memory is tricky and it may have been deal–went on to Argentina to fish for golden dorado without him. Ok, that’s actually not a very funny story. Maybe it was a funnier story because of the whiskey.

Anyway, the next day the members of the Antietam Fly Anglers were gone and were replaced by members of Long Island Trout Unlimited. They were good to drink whiskey with too, and I think that maybe Kris told them the heart bypass story, though in her version I bought a handmade bamboo rod for an extravagant outlay before I collapsed after she brained me. I can’t remember if in her version she went fishing for golden dorado without me.

Playlist

The Pennsylvania playlist was particularly fine, especially the jazz. Art Blakey, Keith Jarrett, Melody Gardot, Stanley Clarke, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Billy Eckstine, Joe Venuti, Joe Pass, and Stan Getz are all from Pennsylvania. Three of the great jazz pianists, Errol Garner, Billy Strayhorn, and Ahmad Jamal, all attended Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh. I could listen to that music forever.

I hadn’t listened to Jim Croce in years, or Todd Rundgren or Labelle or the O’Jays, and I’m a fan of them all. Henry Mancini grew up in Pennsylvania and was the composer of the soundtracks to the movies of my childhood, and you know what? It’s terrible music, almost unlistenable. The two best songs, Peter Gunn and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, just can’t do enough to make me forget the Theme from Hatari! or Love Story or Dear Heart. If Mancini had been all we had to listen to, I couldn’t have left Pennsylvania fast enough.

Did I mention that Joe Pass was from Pennsylvania? And also Joe Pass?

Hans Bernhard, Joe Pass and Ella Fitzgerald, 1974, licensed under Creative Commons attribution.

Taylor Swift is from Pennsylvania, and Pink and Christina Aguilera and Joan Jett and Ethel Waters. Chubby Checker, Frankie Avalon. Fabian, and the Stylistics are from Pennsylvania. There’s also a pretty good classical orchestra in Philadelphia, and the Curtis Institute, and lots of new young bands. It is, all in all, a pretty great state for driving around listening to music.

Here’s a recording of the Guarneri Quartet with Emmanuel Axe playing the single best piano quintet ever written about trout, and brown trout specifically. All but one of the Guarneri Quartet studied at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute.

Guitar

I took the Kohno, and played a good bit, though I don’t remember playing anything in particular; some Bach, some Villa-Lobos, some Sanz. I almost certainly worked some on a guitar transcription of Pavane for a Dead Princess. I always work some on a guitar transcription of Pavane for a Dead Princess, and never remember any of it beyond the first couple of pages. Too bad there are five pages. Ravel, by the way, was not from Pennsylvania, but I bet he would have liked it.

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Spring Creek and Penns Creek, Pennsylvania, May 13-14, 2021.

After our day of fishing on Spring Creek at Fishermen’s Paradise, we fished two more days near State College with Dom Swentosky guiding; one day on a different part of Spring Creek, and then a day on Penns Creek. For the uninitiated, (1) these are Cricks not Creeks, and (2) Dom Swentosky is a good writer, he plays the guitar, and his sons play little league baseball. I guess as much as anything, those are the reasons we hired him.

A lot of Dom’s writing is the kind of detailed technical nuts and bolts stuff that warms fly fishers’ hearts: after reading one of Dom’s blog posts, I swapped out my elastic wader belt–the kind that sags–with a police utility belt that doesn’t sag. I’ve never regretted it, at least not after I figured out how the safety catch worked and could stop wiggling. Dom also has a blog post on how while wearing waders to stay warm, dry, and pee. It’s not a post that will speak to Kris, but for 50% of the population it’s useful, particularly if you already know about the safety catch. 

Dom wade fishes in trout streams. It’s everyone’s mental image of fly fishing; romantic, peaceful, aesthetically pleasing. It may also be the least guided fishing in these late days, what with the rise of drift boats and saltwater angling, and it’s certainly the kind of fishing I do least. Wading in a warmwater bayou just doesn’t have quite the appeal, plus one is likely to lose boots in the muck. It doesn’t matter whether I ever get to do it though. Wading in a trout stream is what fly fishing looks like. 

Wading in a trout stream with Dom is also a barrage of information. He had something useful to tell us about everything happening on the stream–as Dom would say, another data point–and the info was compressed into a constant stream of well-honed nutshells. I thought about making a list of the best stuff Dom said, but then I figured I’d probably forgotten most of it, or worse had garbled most of it.  I suspect that it’s all in Troutbitten anyway, and Dom says he learned to fish from books by Joe Humphreys and George Daniel, so among the three I wouldn’t be telling anybody anything new. When we got home I started re-reading Daniel’s Dynamic Nymphing, and came across this at the very beginning of the chapter on tight-lining:

The style is . . . physically demanding. You must be able to get close enough to present the patterns in a natural manner without opposing currents creating drag. As a result, a straight up-and-across approach is common to ensure that the line and leader end up in current flowing at the same speed. In large bodies of water, this means having to wade further out to cast directly upstream . . . .

George Daniel, Dynamic Nymphing, p. 48.

I suppose I had read that heartwarming passage before, but to me it only had meaning after I stood in the crick with Dom and he explained that to avoid dragging the fly, I should try to cast straight up from the rod tip and not cross currents. When I first read that passage in Daniel at home, it apparently didn’t register. Standing in a trout stream it made sense. 

There are a lot of possible streams near State College, and at the end of our first day Dom named some choices and asked us where we wanted to fish? The first day with Dom we had fished Spring Creek again, just a bit upriver from where we fished with Jim, and I was tempted to fish Spring Creek the third day, to adopt it as my short-term home water. We had seen Penns Creek though, and it was beautiful. It seemed a shame not to fish it. We chose, but I oddly hadn’t wanted the burden of choices. I don’t know why choosing was harder than it should have been.

I got a little obsessed with why it was hard to choose, which led to why do I fish with guides anyway? Which led to why do I fish? These are big existential questions, and I came up with and discarded dozens of answers. No single answer was completely satisfactory. Since I didn’t list what Dom told me, here’s a list of some of the best reasons, replete with bullet-points:

  • I like water. Think of songs about water, La Mer for instance, or Down by the Riverside or Shenandoah or Take Me to the River. There must be thousands. Everybody likes water. We need water.
  • I like to hold fish, if only for a second. At that moment of connection everything is centered.
  • Traveling with a fly rod is a good excuse. Why did we go to Pennsylvania? We went to Pennsylvania to fish. We could have gone to Pennsylvania to see the Liberty Bell, or to eat scrapple, or to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates. We went to fish.
  • I like the technical stuff. I don’t pretend I’m much good at it, but I enjoy the mechanical focus that fly-fishing demands.
  • It’s something my parents gave me, though I’m no longer baifishing for catfish. Still, I’ve always fished.
  • It’s something Kris likes. She likes golf, and she likes crochet, but I’m not going to play golf or take up crochet. Among the things we share, we share fishing.

Like I said, these were big questions, and of all the answers, the one I came back to most often was sitting bankside for lunch with Kris and Dom while we watched a sulphur mayfly hatch come off the water. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of mayflies, and they were lovely, delicate things, pale yellow and tiny. They drifted off the water like the gentlest act of creation. I napped a bit–I may not be so accomplished of a fly fisher, but I will brag on my streamside napping–and when I woke we still sat and watched the mayflies for a long, long time. There was anticipation, trout feed on rising mayflies and we expected at any moment to see the rings on the water where the fish were starting to rise, but they never rose. It didn’t matter. There was satisfaction in the moment, joy even. It was just enough of everything.

* * *

Before we left State College, we stopped by Flyfisher’s Paradise. There was a tray of sulphur flies on the counter, and the guy tying flies behind the counter joked that it was good to know when he came to work what he was going to do all day –tie sulphurs. For a couple of weeks he would tie sulphur after sulphur after sulphur. We bought some to bring home with us, a couple of spinners, a couple of emergers, and a couple of duns, not that we’re ever likely to use them. It doesn’t matter. Now I have them.