Smoked Flies

Today we’re fishing the White River at Branson, Missouri, but this month I’m also going to Cuba. I’ll stay and eat in Cuban homes, and talk to Cubans—I know how to ask where the library is in Spanish–but I’ll also fish for bonefish. And tarpon. And permit.

If you haven’t kept up, it got easier for Americans to travel to Cuba under President Obama, and then as one of his final acts, Mr. Trump reimposed Cuba travel restrictions. Some folks think that reimposing restrictions was a callously political act to drum up Cuban conservative support in Florida, but I can’t imagine that any politician could be so self-serving.

Kris isn’t going. I explained to her that Cuba was almost an American state once, before the Civil War. She didn’t care, there’s no star for Cuba on our flag, even if Yuli Gurriel and Yordan Álvarez are two of her favorite baseball players, and going to Cuba gets us no closer to our goal of all 50 states. I’m on my own.

There are forms to fill out, and questions to be answered. Most of all though, you have to prepare your kit. You can’t depend on having anything ready to hand when you get there. You can’t go to the fly shop for some flies, or tippet, or to replace anything that breaks. You can’t even go to the drug store for aspirin. You have to haul everything there, except for black beans and rice, rum, and cigars. I guess I’ll be living on black beans and rice, rum, and cigars. Dang.

Cuban food is kind of bland though, so I’m taking a bottle of hot sauce. You can’t be too prepared.

From top to bottom, that’s a fuzzy yellowish bonefish fly, and a fuzzy shiny bonefish fly.

Anyway, I’ve been tying lots of flies for Cuba, and it occurred to me that while it’s considered bad form to add scent to flies–you can’t in good conscience dab a bit of stink bait behind a fly’s ears–there is at least one scent I wouldn’t have to add, exactly. I’d just have to get the fly into the correct vicinity.

What could be better than barbecued flies?

As you know, every Texan is born smoking meat. Even if you’re a vegetarian Texan, you’re born smoking tofu. To preserve my cultural heritage I have to smoke at least 10 pounds of brisket every week, and at least a few racks of ribs and some sausage. Only then can I go to the gun range. Why not bring my fly-tying and smoking together?

My first smoked flies were bonefish flies smoked with bacon. I used hickory as the wood. I cured the bacon for 10 days, in a dredge of salt, brown sugar, sodium nitrite, and maple syrup, then brought the internal temperature up to 145 or so. The bacon is delicious. I’m sure the bonefish will find the flies equally tasty.

From top to bottom, that’s a fuzzy brown bonefish fly, and a fuzzy pink bonefish fly, both now flavored with hickory and bacon!

After the bonefish flies, I figured I needed some big flies for tarpon, and that means big meat, and that means brisket. There’s nothing better than smoked brisket, and Texans learn to smoke brisket before they learn how to vote Republican.

I perfected my brisket cooking at Camp Brisket at Texas A&M. Here is everything I know about cooking brisket:

  • The single most important factor in good brisket is the grade of meat. Prime wins every time, and Costco carries good prime briskets. Wagyu doesn’t seem to hold up under the long cook, and choice is just a bit tough.
  • Hickory is the favorite wood for brisket, with pecan a close second, and then oak. Surprisingly, despite its bad rep among aficionados, mesquite is pretty good too.
  • Trim the fat cap down to about a quarter-inch. Apparently it doesn’t add any moisture to leave it on, and it retards absorption of the seasoning. Plus there’s a lot of fat on a brisket, and a one inch fat cap is kind of disgusting.
  • À la Louie Mueller, the seasoning of choice for brisket is half salt and half pepper. I think it takes about a cup, so half a cup of salt, and half a cup of pepper. I put on the seasoning, then let the brisket sit in the fridge for at least 12 hours.
  • The smoker temperature must be low: 200, 225, 250. It will take about 12 hours to cook a 12-pound brisket. If you’re serving brisket at 3 pm, plan to start cooking about 1 am.
  • The meat stops taking smoke flavor around 145 degrees. You could finish the brisket in the oven after that, and it probably wouldn’t change the flavor, but that would be wrong. It’s not smoked brisket if it’s cooked in the oven.
  • The smoke ring has nothing to do with smoke.
  • The brisket will stop cooking–in the vernacular, it will stall–at around 160 degrees, and that’s when you wrap the meat to get it started again. Wrapping in foil makes the brisket mushy. It needs to be wrapped in pink butcher paper and put it back on the smoker, presumably because pink is a complimentary color, and I don’t think anyone makes blue butcher paper. Don’t take the brisket off again until it reaches an internal temperature of 200-210.
  • The brisket needs to rest for an hour or so after you take it off.
  • There is an optimal way to slice the brisket, involving slicing the flat and then turning it to slice the point. At Camp Brisket, Aaron Franklin demonstrated proper slicing, and from the attendees’ yearning you would have thought it was 1960 and Brigitte Bardot was strolling the beach at Saint-Tropez. For a long time there was a video on the internet of Franklin slicing brisket at our camp, but I can’t find it anymore. It was probably drowned in the tears of awe.

From left to right, that’s a black and red tarpon fly, a brown-ish tarpon fly, and a purple and orange tarpon fly, and all of them are now guaranteed to catch tarpon. The professors at A&M recommended a maroon and white fly, but then they would.

Kris said this looked unsanitary, but I think a good dose of saltwater will kill anything that might harm the tarpon.

The final Cuban fish is permit, the holy grail of saltwater fly fishing. For permit I needed something really special. Crab flies are the fly of choice, but I was concerned that the rubber legs on my permit flies would melt, and melted rubber legs might make the meat stringy. I decided I’d smoke the permit flies when I smoked salmon.

Unlike brisket and bacon, salmon is cold smoked. Over the years I’ve developed an extremely sophisticated cold smoking apparatus. It’s good for salmon. It’s also pretty good for Velveta to make smoked queso. Queso, by the way, is Spanish for cheese, but it’s also Tex-Mex for a slab of Velveta melted with a can of Rotel tomatoes, and is served along with salsa for dipping tortilla chips. It can get more complicated than Velveta and Rotel, and our friend Lisa Fain has a whole book on Queso variations, but it’s a basic food group for Tex-Mex, and non-fattening when eaten with chips.

It’s not the smoke, by the way, that preserves raw salmon. To preserve the salmon you have to cure it. My cure is salt, brown sugar, lemon zest, and most important, sodium nitrite, pink salt, to prevent botulism. I did not add sodium nitrite to the flies. After all, exposure can be harmful, and I don’t want to do anything to hurt the fish.

Salmon also needs to have been frozen to kill parasites, but unless you’re standing by a salmon river or your fishmonger has in-season fresh salmon shipped from Alaska, your wild salmon is likely to have been frozen. Otherwise it’d smell a bit ripe. If it’s farmed salmon, and you’re not sure if it’s been frozen, I reckon it could be frozen before or after smoking.

I brine my salmon in iced salt water for an hour or so, then dredge it in the cure. After 48 hours in the fridge under the weight of a couple of six-packs, I wash off the cure and give the salmon a series of water baths. About 45 minutes total is enough to tone down the salt, but I change out the water a couple of times. The salmon dries in the fridge for 24 hours, then gets smoked for four hours with apple wood.

Since there’s only the cure and no heat to protect the meat, I tend not to smoke salmon during a Houston summer.

I originally took my salmon and bacon recipes from Michael Ruhlman and Bryan Polcyn’s Charcuterie, but I really like how this guy does salmon. On the recommendation of my friend Tom, I may try black tea in the cure next time, and the permit might like that better. Smoked salmon is best eaten with the classic Texas combination of lox on a bagel, cream cheese, red onions, and capers, all rolled together in cornmeal and fried.

From top to bottom, that’s a crab fly, and then a crab fly, and then another crab fly. The yellow stuff is some Velveta for queso.

Kanektok River, Bethel Census Area, Alaska, July 3-10, 2022.

I had imagined Alaska, and not just the bears, either. I had imagined glaciers and mountains, forests and Western streams and endless fish–like Yellowstone, but better, with more of all the stuff that makes the West wild. That’s not exactly the Alaska where we fished. We spent a week on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta where the Kanektok River meets the Bering Sea, and it was both different and more interesting.

Swinging for Kings

We fished six days at Deneki Outdoors’ Alaska West camp, five miles upstream from the coastal village of Quinagak, population 856. We were where Alaska ended and the Bering Sea began, with no roads into town through the tundra. Quinagak is 72 air miles from the next largest town, Bethel. It was pretty remote.

Fishing for salmon in Alaska is about time. Arrive two weeks too early or two weeks too late and you won’t catch the salmon you want. The salmon come in from the sea on a schedule, year after year, in bigger or smaller numbers, though it seems that these days the numbers are always smaller. We chose early July for king salmon, the largest Pacific salmon. Hubris I reckon.

Fly fishing for kings differs from most other fly fishing. The rods are different. The lines are different. The flies are different.

Spey rods are long, 13 feet compared to the usual 9-foot fly rod, and heavy. You use both hands to cast, and there’s no back-cast. It’s the simplest fly cast, a roll cast, but with some complicating twists and turns and issues of timing, and the arcane lines are the heart of it. We fished with Skagit lines. There is another type of spey line, a Scandi line, but it’s the Skagit that’s used on the Kanektok for kings.

Skagit lines are short, as short as 20 feet, and thick and heavy. They’re the colors of Play-Doh so you can see them on the water, and they’re thick as baling wire, nearly an 1/8th of an inch. Skagit line weights are measured in grains. The heaviest part of a regular 9-weight redfish line, a heavy line, might weigh 330 grains. My 8/9-weight Skagit line weighs 600 grains. See what I mean by arcane? They use an ancient alchemist weight system to measure the lines, and I doubt that much of anybody knows what a grain actually is. Regardless, nearly twice the weight makes a difference, whether it’s measured in grains or in kilograms or in ounces.

The Skagit line is attached to the reel through 100 feet of thin plastic-coated running line, and then through 200 yards of braided nylon backing. We would cast some of the running line, but only saw the backing when a hot fish ran.

Skagit lines are designed to pick up and throw a sinking tip that is also heavy. A sink tip’s plastic coating is mixed with ground tungsten to sink into the river as much as 7- or 8-inches per second. At the end of that heavy ten-foot sink tip is a large, annoying fly with the added water weight of a good river baptism. And the flies are annoying. Once they hit freshwater from the sea, salmon aren’t feeding. The flies are designed for provocation, not imitation.

Learning to spey cast is not for the faint-hearted. The heavy lines, large soaked flies, and high line speed can leave a lasting impression, even if you don’t actually hook yourself. I thwacked my left ear hard, and another bad cast took my stocking cap into the river. If I hadn’t been wearing the cap it would have been bits of my scalp.

When we started on Sunday we were less than competent casters. By the next Saturday we were casting more or less in the vicinity of ok. Our guides were good teachers, and we were at it most of 10 hours a day for six days. Even I had a chance of getting better.

We waded along gravel bars, trying to fish the places the salmon might hold before another upstream push. There was enough river and few enough anglers to always have our own private gravel bar. We’d wade out in the shallows then cast across to the deeper water, maybe 70 feet, more likely 60, and let the fly and 10-foot sink tip drag down and across in the current. That arc–more of a rounded right angle, really–is the swing, arced down and across from me, the pivot. When the line and fly were almost directly below me I would let the fly hang in the current, then retrieve line back until I could cast again.

When I usually fish, I cast to fish I see, or cast to where I think fish are likely. This was more like broadcasting on the radio, casting out to as much of the river as I could cover and then letting the fly search. Cast, swing, retrieve, step downriver one or two steps, and then do it all again. Then do it all again. Then do it all again. I never really knew who was out there.

Those tungsten sink tips? Rio fly lines sells them as MOW tips, and I was told that MOW are the initials of three former Alaska West guides who developed the lines. The Kanektok has the reputation of one of the best places in the world to swing flies for kings, and whether or not you catch fish, it’s a mesmerizing business.

The River, the tundra, and the sea.

Most anybody can work up some mystical awe for a mountain, but it’s hard to work up much awe for a delta. Its beauty is more difficult to parse. I’ve probably spent more time fishing coastal marshes than most, and that’s what first struck me about the Kanektok. Out of context, if someone told you that those were mangroves, not stunted alders, and that that was marsh grass, not tundra grass, you’d like as not believe you were somewhere in Belize, or Galveston, or New Orleans.

The Kanektok flow was steady and smooth. The gravel bottom was easy to wade, though it did get deep. We stayed in the shallows, and I doubt that I ever waded in water that was much above my knees.

At the sea the mouth of the Kanektok is a tidal plain. At low tide at the outlet there were sand bars and tall, cut banks. Twelve hours later, everything we saw would be hidden under ten feet of high tide. I climbed up a bank, in part from a full bladder and in part from curiosity, and from there the tundra grass, flat and seemingly endless, was dotted with purple fire weed, white yarrow, and yellow grundsels.

I’ve read that in summer the Bering Sea hosts the largest biomass on earth, and that carries over into the Delta. Even along the relatively people-inhabited river we watched swallows attack a golden eagle, compared the glaucous gulls to our own smaller laughing gulls, saw beaver swim dragging fresh-cut alder, and watched tiny yellow warblers, maybe from as far south as the Yucatan, explore the bankside alders.

An odd factoid: the average American eats about one ton, 2000 pounds, of food each year. In Quinagak, about 700 pounds of each resident’s annual food supply comes from subsistence fishing, hunting, and gathering. Even with our annual fig crop and July okra production, plus those two or three tomatoes each year that actually ripen, I doubt that we get 25 pounds of food per year from anywhere but the HEB. And this year the figs didn’t make because of the drought. We’ve had a lot of okra though.

There’s Yup’ik archeological history near Quinagak that dates from as early as 1350, so it’s a well-established trading site, and probably a fishing site. During the year though the current residents’ ancestors would disburse throughout the region to gather food. I suppose that’s part of the legacy of the Alaskan Native Claims Act: it mandated that Native Alaskans pick their spot. Maybe there’s an anthropologist somewhere who knows.

Anyway, back to that 700 pounds. There always seemed to be Quinagakians on the river snagging sockeye. It wasn’t sporting, but then it wasn’t meant to be. It was harvesting. And from the river mouth we could watch Quinagak boats put out to sea to net fish.

On the Kanektok, the king return was down, and for the season Alaska had banned chum salmon fishing because the numbers of returning chum are way off. Global warming maybe, maybe the efficiency of gill nets, maybe both. Probably combinations of things I can’t imagine.

Fish, No Fish

The first day I caught five fish. Now mind, any day with five fish is a good day, and I caught one 15-pound king, a couple of smaller jacks, and two chum. They were bright, fast fish, only a few miles from the ocean and not yet changing to their spawning form and colors, not yet dying.

We couldn’t target chum, but when we fished for kings we couldn’t help accidentally catching chum. We landed and released them as quickly as we could. The jacks are a bit of an oddity, and are defined by Alaska law as any king salmon that’s less than 30 inches long. The two Jacks I caught the first day were big for jacks, maybe close to ten pounds. They were good fish, but they weren’t 30 inches. They weren’t kings.

Kings go out to the ocean for five to eight years before they return to their home river. Jacks are immature males, always males, teenagers, who go out to the ocean but then return to their river after one to three years. People say it’s a bit of a mystery why the jacks return early, but do teenage boys ever believe in the possibility of death? Are teenage boys everywhere not stupid for the chance to get laid? Where’s the mystery?

The first day my five fish were the best catch for the camp, and I reveled in it, certain that I had this Alaska thing down. The next day I followed it up with nothing. Nichts, nada, nil. I worked hard, and came back to camp in the evening shamefaced. Kris caught fish, Kris always catches fish. Within a couple of hours of arriving at camp she walked down to the river and caught a nice rainbow. Then she caught a jack, a chum and a rainbow on Monday, a jack and two rainbows on Tuesday, a chum on Wednesday, two rainbows on Thursday, a jack, a king and the first pink of the season on Friday, and three rainbows and two jacks on Saturday. She mostly spent her time in Alaska outfishing me.

I had imagined Alaska as a steady stream of fish, and after going nil on Monday, on the third day, Wednesday, I caught one jack.

None of this matched my imagination. On Thursday again I caught nothing. I hooked two fish and lost them after setting the hook. Once I tried to set the hook too soon after the slightest nudge.

I got plenty of practice casting.

All of this was done under lead skies, in cold and rain. Kris caught fish and I caught nada.

Besides the obvious differences in rod and line, maybe the biggest difference between swinging flies and other fly fishing is the take. So much of fly fishing is visual, or a fish attacks a retrieved streamer. You watch the line, you watch an indicator on the line, you watch the fish, or you watch the fly. You’re active, you’re looking. Swinging the fly, on the other hand, is all tactile. The connection through the line between you and the hook is direct, and it’s the only connection. We couldn’t see what was happening beneath the surface, but could only feel a nudge, a tug, and then the heavy pull of the fish on the line. If you hadn’t already blown it, that’s when you would set the hook. It is the most connected, electric thing.

On Friday, I lost a good king after a good fight, and landed another king within a mile of the ocean. There was a lamprey wound on its belly, and it still had the sea lice it would lose in freshwater. Kris also landed a king, and her fish had the beginning colors of the spawn. Late in the day I hooked a salmon, and it ran down and across the river, taking all of the 100-foot running line and a good bit of the braided backing. I saw the fish once, 100 feet across and downriver, dragging the long curve of my line and jumping upriver parallel to the surface. While I fought the fish it started to rain, the only rain of the day, big, heavy drops. When I finally landed the fish it was a huge chum, bigger than any of the kings I’d caught, and by then the rain had stopped. Alaska can be a volatile place.

Chris the Guide spent time reviving the fish, and Kris the companion snapped a photo when he took it from the net. It was nothing but a moment, a few minutes to revive the fish, and a brief glimpse of the sea, of the river, of a different place from what I had imagined.

Our last day

Our last day fishing, Saturday, was bright and clear, warm and sunny, with low tides. It was a terrible day for fishing, though of course Kris caught all sorts of fish. We fished for a bit, caught nothing, then went down to the mouth of the river at the sea, as much to see it as to fish. After lunch Chris the Guide ran the boat upriver 15 miles to fish for trout with single-handed rods. We caught some on heavy sculpin patterns, and Kris caught a couple of jacks, but we went as much to sightsee as to fish.

They were good rainbow trout, big by the standards of the lower 48, as much as 20 inches. They weren’t big Alaska trout though. Those would come later in the season, and downriver, closer to the ocean, after more salmon had spawned and died and the trout were fat with salmon flesh and eggs.

Upriver I sat bankside to change flies and was swarmed with mosquitos. They weren’t as substantial as our Gulf Coast mosquitos, more of whisps of mosquitos, but they were real enough and plenty numerous and persistent, plenty annoying, and until we left that place the swarm stayed with me. I guess that was something I hadn’t really imagined either. Just like I hadn’t imagined the tundra, or the wildflowers, or the tiny bank-side yellow warblers.

On our final sunny day I could finally see the sockeye ghosting upriver to spawn. It was a continuous line of driven fish, and I watched hundreds, maybe thousands. They coasted up the shallows where I stood, and would come within a few feet of me then swerve deliberately, out and around me, never stopping, never running, saving their energy to move upstream.

The sockeyes were fish I couldn’t catch, or at least that I wouldn’t snag. I would go again just to watch those fish.

North to Alaska

When I say that we’re going to Alaska, people usually ask if we’re taking a cruise. I gather that cruises go from Seattle up through the Inner Passage, hitting some of the coastal towns along the way. In September, I could sail from Seattle to Alaska on the Carnival Spirit for as little as $579, plus taxes and port costs of $279. Is that per day? That’s cheaper than a flight to Anchorage from Houston.

It doesn’t matter. I can’t fly fish off of a cruise ship.

Photo by Ice Cream for Everyone, Sign at Quinhagak Airport, 2011, from Wikipedia.

Tourism employs one in eight Alaskans. About 2 million visitors arrive in Alaska every year, about half on cruise lines, and tourism is crammed into the four months from June to September. Alaska’s tourism mimics Alaska’s natural world: make hay while the sun shines. Far North winter survival depends on the solar energy stored during the long summer day. Everything blooms, grows, breeds, and feeds during summer, and that stored energy is then converted into winter survival. Alaskan tourism is on the same schedule.

Here’s an Alaska travel tip: everything is cheaper in February. In February, a hotel room that’s $400 in July only costs $150. A car that rents for $350 in July only costs $100. Flights are cheaper. Uber rides are cheaper. If you could find a lodge that thought fishing in Alaska in February was a good idea, the lodge would be cheaper.

There are no fishing lodges open in February, so like everybody else, we’re going now. Tomorrow we fly to Anchorage. Actually, because Houston flights to Anchorage are expensive, we’re flying Southwest on points to Seattle, then we’ll switch to Alaskan Air to fly to Anchorage. It makes for a longer day, but with 11-hour flights the day’s shot whatever we do.

It wasn’t obvious to me, but Anchorage isn’t really a destination, it’s a gateway. Visiting Anchorage seems a bit like visiting Fort Worth, or Albuquerque, or Salt Lake City–all nice cities, but after a day or so it’s time to move on. Because of the lack of roads in Alaska, to get out of town and actually see stuff you have to fly into Anchorage and then go elsewhere, as likely as not by train, or boat, or plane, but usually not by car. Not only are there few roads, but that $350-a-day July car rental is pretty steep. And even post-retirement, driving is just too much of a time commitment.

So we fly to Anchorage, and after a short train excursion and another day of piddling, we fly in a 9-passenger charter plane 300 miles west to the coastal Native Alaskan village of Quinhagak, population 776, elevation 38 feet, on the Kuskokwim Bay of the Bering Sea.

I don’t have any clue about how to pronounce this stuff.

Quinhagak sits on a delta, a huge delta, with more in common geologically with the Mississippi Delta than with Glacier Bay or Denali. We’re going to a flat, treeless coastal plain of raggedy fishing villages and countless mosquitos. Maybe that’s why we picked it. It sounds a lot like home.

From Quinhagak, we travel by jet boats up the Kanektok River, to a tent village where we’ll stay for the next six nights. It’s a nice tent village, at least according to the website. According to the website we’re actually going a’glamping. There are showers, there’s a dining hall, and there’s even a drying tent for boots and waders. Because it’s technically within the boundaries of Quinhagak, there’s no alcohol. Quinhagak is dry.

I didn’t know it was possible to fish without a wee dram at the end of the day. We didn’t notice that clause when we booked, and I suspect they keep it in the fine print. Alaska is marijuana friendly, but we’ll skip that as well.

Google Earth

We’re bringing along a lot of baggage, sort of.

For the flight from Anchorage to Quinhagak, we’re each limited to 50 pounds of luggage and a 15 pound carry-on. There are currently three resident gamefish and three salmon runs in the Kanektok; king salmon, sockeye salmon, chum salmon, rainbow trout, arctic char, and Dolly Varden, ranging in size from 50 pounds to a few pounds. I can’t catch a 50-pound fish on the same rod I’d use for a two-pound fish, and it’s no fun catching a two pound fish on the same rod I’d use for a 50-pound fish, so that means a lot of our weight limit is made up of six single-handed rods, three apiece, plus one big game rod for the king salmon, and a dainty 5 weight just because, well, just because. The big king salmon are usually fished on long, 13-foot double-handed rods, spey rods, so that’s two more rods apiece. Then we’re taking another lighter spey rod for backup. It’s a lot of rods.

Egg-sucking leech

And the rods aren’t really the heavy part. Every rod has a reel, and a lot of the reels are massive things. Those long spey rods are counterbalanced by heavy big game reels that must weigh a couple of pounds apiece, and each of the single-handed rods has both a floating line on the reel and a sinking line on a spare spool. It’s a lot of metal, and along with our boots and waders, fishing gear takes up a good chunk of that 50 pounds.

Intruder

We can bring home 40 pounds of salmon apiece, though you can’t harvest the kings. If we do bring salmon back, it will be the most expensive sockeye ever eaten.

We’re also taking flies, not that flies weigh much, but I’ve been tying flies for Alaska for months. There are big gaudy flies for the king salmon, and smaller flashy flies for the sockeye. Sockeye are filter feeders, and in the ocean feed mostly on zooplankton, but they may also eat small shrimp. The flashy sockeye flies are tied to mimic tiny bright crustaceans.

Flesh Fly

Or maybe not. Who knows why salmon strike flies?

Anyway, the weirdest flies are the trout flies. In the Lower 48, trout flies are mostly lovely, delicate things with lovely, delicate names like quill gordon, prince nymph, meat wagon . . . ok, forget that latter. They imitate mayflies, or caddis flies, or stoneflies, or perhaps a wind-blown hopper or small baitfish or crayfish.

In Alaska the flesh flies imitate rotting salmon.

Flesh flies, mice, leaches, egg-sucking leaches, sculpin, fish eggs . . . there’s no part of this that sounds lovely and delicate. The lodge lists bass poppers in its fly lists.

At least the forecast is for warm and sunny days in Quinhagak. Just kidding

That’s ok. Fish like rain.

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.

Charles Ives, 1913

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?

Sylvia Salmi, Wallace Stevens, 1948.

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.

Laura Nyro, circa 1968, from Wikipedia

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.

The White Hart Inn dining room.