Tag: Fly rods

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Georgia

Scarlett O’Hara’s Bosom and Early Georgia History, in Order of Personal Significance

I figured that if we were going to Georgia I should re-read Gone with the Wind. I hadn’t read it since I was 12, and when I was 12 I liked it, or at least I liked having read it. All that Southern splendor was mighty fine, plus there was that movie poster featuring Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom. What Southern almost-adolescent boy could ignore the drama inherent in Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom? I had a copy of that poster on my wall, and I suspect it was years before I noticed that Clark Gable had a moustache.

My notion before our trip was to determine whether Gone with the Wind was anything more than a Lost Cause romance. After all, no book except the Bible has sold more American copies than Gone with the Wind. It won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, so somebody once thought it was important literature. The movie won the 1939 Oscar for best picture, and adjusted for inflation, it’s still the highest grossing movie ever.

I downloaded a free copy of the novel on Audible, but I couldn’t listen past the second chapter. What my 12-year old self admired, my 67-year old self found dreadful. Lost Cause propaganda? Who knows–I never got that far. These characters were all of them idiots. They were annoying and unlikeable and inane. Maybe Margaret Mitchell intended that they be annoying and unlikeable, but I don’t think they were supposed to be boring. I was unmoved by the set-up, despised the dialogue, and found Scarlett, cleavage or no, to be a ninny. I wanted to waste no more of my life with Mammy or the twins or Ashley or Melanie. I didn’t give a damn about Scarlett, or for that matter about Rhett.

So I can’t really tell you anything about Gone with the Wind, except I’d advise don’t bother. It had its moment, but that was when I was 12.

Still, that’s the best movie poster bosom ever. It’s Stereophonic.

I did read a good book about Georgia, Georgia, a Short History, by Christopher Meyers and David Williams, and there was some interesting stuff to learn.

Georgia was the youngest of the Thirteen Colonies, founded by James Oglethorpe in 1732 as a second chance for British debtors and a buffer against Spanish Florida. Settlers were from England’s poorest, and Oglethorpe prohibited hard liquor, slaves, and lawyers. Land was to be owned by the colony. Each immigrant’s tract was limited to 50 acres.

That bit of social engineering lasted roughly 20 years. There was no debt forgiveness, so not only were the English urban debtors–who had likely never farmed–expected to farm successfully on small tracts in difficult coastal soil, they were expected to repay their English debts from their unsuccessful farming. Many of the debtors skipped out to northern climes, leaving both Georgia and their debts. By the 1750s there was private ownership of large tracts–up to 500 acres–by slave owners. There were probably lawyers, too.

James Oglethorpe, glam rocker and failed reformer.

What was supposed to be an agrarian yeoman farmer utopia became a utopia for wealthy planters. Before the cotton gin, the planters–the large-tract slave-owning landowners–were confined to rice farms near the coast, but with cotton production Georgia became part of the Cotton Kingdom. The Trail of Tears and railroads opened upland Georgia to white settlement, and large landowners brought slaves and cotton to the upper Coastal Plain and the Piedmont to fill the void.

Georgia also achieved land fraud on a massive scale. After the Revolution, counties and the state sold land to new settlers and speculators, but they got into the habit of selling more land than there was actually dirt. The worst offender, Montgomery County, issued land warrants for 7,436,995 acres of land, which was 7,029,315 more acres of land than Montgomery County actually contained. By 1796, Georgia county officials had issued warrants for 29 million acres. Georgia then contained only 9 million acres.

The State Assembly was good at land sales, too, and in exchange for bribes (which in addition to money included nifty stuff like land, guns, and slaves) sold 50 million acres of Indian land for about a penny an acre–a ridiculous price for land that they had no right to sell. The sales were rescinded by the next Assembly, but were then found valid by the Supreme Court under the Contract Clause. The U.S. Congress ended up buying out the purchasers for $4.25 million. No Georgian should ever complain about federal buy-outs. Their’s was one of the first, and in inflation-adjusted dollars probably rivals anything that came later.

No state’s early American history was as governed by class hierarchy as Georgia’s, and how you see Georgia’s early history really does depend on where you stand. If you look at Georgia from the planters’ eyes, by the 1850s it was an economic dynamo powering a thriving economy. In 1860 Georgia’s per capita wealth was nearly double that of New York, which is pretty impressive, but on the other hand only six percent of white Georgians controlled about half the state’s wealth, which is pretty one-sided.

A lot of plain white folk saw Georgia differently from the planter class, particularly in the northern mountain portion of the state where there were few slaves, and in the southern Pine Barrens which couldn’t support big agriculture. In Georgia cities, slaves devalued free labor, and other than the rice and cotton planters, Georgia agriculture was largely small-parcel subsistence farming. In 1860, Georgia’s slaves were valued at about $400 million, about half the state’s wealth, but only about 37% of the white population owned any slaves, and planters were a sliver of that 37%.

Carrying Cotton to the Gin, Harper’s New Monthly, March, 1854.

And Georgia slaves like as not saw Georgia differently from their owners. When Georgians voted to secede and join the Confederacy, the measure passed by about 1000 votes, 42,744 to 41,717–but remember, these voters could only be white male property-owners. Slaves, who were 44% of the roughly one million Georgians, had no votes, and while one can never be certain, I’d bet good money that the slaves would have voted en masse to stay in the Union. Lincoln may not have planned to free the slaves, but apparently slaves throughout the South were convinced–along with the secessionists–that freedom was Lincoln’s plan.

Among plain white Georgians, the Civil War was increasingly seen as a rich man’s war fought by poor men, and throughout the war there were large numbers of deserters, draft dodgers, and even Union volunteers. In Georgia there were food riots, draft rebellions, and the formation of an active and vocal Peace Society. The cotton class may have seen the War as necessary and righteous, but to support the war effort they kept planting cotton instead of corn, hence the food riots. Wealthy planters were largely exempt from the draft and generally weren’t doing the actual fighting. Whatever else can be said about the South, the Confederacy was badly managed on the home front. By the end of the War, it’s estimated that nearly half of the Confederate army had deserted.

18,250 Georgian Confederates died in the Civil war, roughly a fifth of those who served. Georgia was also a battlefield from Chickamauga in 1863 in northwest Georgia to Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Georgia Geography

Pamela W. Gore, Geographic Regions of Georgia, from the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

By area, Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi, and 24th overall. It divides into five geographic regions. The Coastal Plain is in the south, and the southeastern border of the Coastal Plain is the Atlantic Ocean. The Piedmont is north of the Coastal Plain, above the fall line where rivers tend to rapids and the sedimentary rock of the Coastal Plain gives way to the harder crystalline rocks of the uplands. Generally the Piedmont soils are richer than the soils of the Coastal Plain, and Georgia’s southern Coastal Plain, the Wiregrass Region, is one of Georgia’s poorest regions. The exception for richer Coastal Plain soils is the rich black soil immediately below the Piedmont, the Black Belt that stretches from Georgia through Alabama to the Mississippi Delta. Along with the Delta became the Black Belt became the cotton-producing heartland for the South. The Black Belt was named first for the color of its soil, but the identification took on a new meaning because of the concentration of slaves. Big cotton thrived on black soil and slavery.

Abbasi786786, Majority Black Counties Based on the 2020 Census, from Wikipedia.

In Georgia’s far north, the three remaining regions seem to this outsider divided by terrain but otherwise lumped together, and it’s in North Georgia where Appalachia begins. The Appalachian trail starts northward in North Georgia, from Springer Mountain, elevation 3,780 feet, and James Dickey set Deliverance on a made-up river in North Georgia. We will trout fish in North Georgia, somewhat close to Brasstown Bald, Georgia’s highest mountain at 4,784 feet. I’ll take a guitar in case we run into any banjo players, but I’ll be damned if I do any canoeing.

Georgia is water rich. It has 14 major river basins, with more than 44,000 miles of perennial rivers. Its rivers tend to have great names: the Suwanee, the Ocmulgee, the Coosa, the Llappoosa, the Chattahoochee . . . Plus Georgia has about 100 miles of Atlantic coastline. The combination of elevation, coast, and rivers makes Georgia rich fishing. In the north there are native Appalachian brook trout and imported brown and rainbow trout. There are imported stripers in lakes, and redfish along the coast. There are ten species of black bass, including great river bass like the redeye, and bass unique to Georgia like Bartram’s.

We’re going trout fishing instead of bass fishing because we’re going to Atlanta for a wedding, and our friend Shelley (who will also be at the wedding) likes to fish for trout. Still, there’s always a chance of catching a bass in those northern Georgia rivers. I hope I catch a bass. Well, come to think of it, I hope I catch anything at all.

Population

At 21,029,227, Georgia is the 8th largest state by population, bracketed by Ohio at number 7 and North Carolina at number 9. It is one of the fastest growing states since World War II, and us Houstonians see Atlanta as our Southern mirror. Anglos are 50.4% of the Georgia population, African Americans 33.1%, and Hispanics 10.5%. Everybody else is a smidgeon. Most of the population growth is in Georgia’s Piedmont, which is the industrial heart of the state.

Other than the whole slavery thing, the birth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow segregation, Georgia’s civil rights history had some positives. Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Georgians were leaders in the Civil Rights movement throughout the South. Savannah desegregated early, but despite active movements Albany and Atlanta were slow. In 1971, then-governor Jimmy Carter declared a new era of Civil Rights in Georgia, but particularly in the rural areas of the state Jimmy probably jumped the gun.

Valdosta, Georgia Klan Rally, 1922, Georgia State Archives.

Politics

Is any state’s recent presidential politics more interesting than Georgia’s? I don’t pretend to understand what happened in 2020, but I have no doubt that there was no theft of the Georgia election. I’ve officiated over local elections, and massive voter fraud would not be easy. Oh sure, some lone soul might vote twice, or not be registered, but everything in American elections makes massive fraud almost impossible. It certainly couldn’t be accomplished by the efforts of a handful of people. It would take a whole dance card of conspiracy, and people, being what they are, would never be able to hide it. They can’t keep their mouth shut. If there had been massive fraud in Georgia, somebody involved would have bragged about their part over beers, at Thanksgiving dinner, or in their tell-all best seller. Instead as evidence of election interference we have a phone recording of a sitting President urging a governor to manufacture votes.

When you look at how the actual vote went, Georgia’s voting patterns are just like the rest of the country. Urban areas voted Democratic, and outside of the Black Belt, the rural countryside voted Republican. Trump substantially increased his vote totals from 2016, 2,089,104 votes in 2016 to 2,461,854 in 2020, but the Democrats did even better, 1,877,963 to 2,473,633. Democrats mostly carried majorities in the urban areas (as they had in 2016), but more total voters in rural areas also voted Democratic. F’rinstance, Atlanta’s urban Fulton County turned out substantially more Democratic voters in 2020 than in 2016 (529,931 to 334,053), but that trend was true in every Georgia County, even in counties where Trump otherwise had a majority. In the numerous rural counties Donald Trump carried, his margins shrank. Throughout the state voters who would not turn out in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton turned out in 2020 to vote for Joe Biden, or maybe to vote against Donald Trump.

From Wikipedia, AdamG2016, Georgia Presidential Election Results 2020.

Where We’ll Fish

Our plan doesn’t involve voting. We’ll fly into Atlanta and do wedding things for three days, then drive north with our friends the Marmons to Ellijay to fish a half day for trout. We’re taking waders and boots and 5-weights. The next day the Marmons head back to Houston, and Kris and I will head south out of Georgia’s Valley and Ridge, through the Piedmont, down to Savannah on the Coastal Plain to fish in saltwater for redfish. I may not catch any fish, but I will see a lot of Georgia. We fly back to Houston from Savannah.

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Indiana Packing List

I liked Indiana. I liked the friendliness of the people and gentleness of the landscape. I guess in winter it’s probably miserable, but I always wanted to live in a place where I could wear more sweaters. Maybe I’m a Midwesterner at heart.

Walking on a trail through Turkey Run State Park, there were three young African American girls, maybe 16, sitting together on a bench by the river. One of them announced to us and her friends that we were beautiful–I guess she figured that old people walking about was a beautiful thing. I asked her if she always sat by the river and charmed passersby? And I figure that was about right, because she was completely charming. She took our picture, and she did a good job, both at charming and photography.

I liked Indiana.

Gear

We took a rod each, 7 weights, with floating lines and 7 1/2′ 10-pound leaders. The rods would have been too heavy for trout anywhere but Alaska, and were heavy for the smallmouth bass we caught, but they worked, they were fine. Everything in Indiana was fine except the donuts.

We didn’t take waders or boots. We waded in shorts and water shoes.

We fished small poppers and streamers, streamers and poppers. Then we fished more poppers and streamers.

The Turkey Run Inn and Cabins

We decided to fish Sugar Creek because it’s short, small, has a good reputation for smallmouth, and runs through two nearly-adjacent state parks, Shades and Turkey Run. We figured we’d have plenty of river access, and there was the bonus that Turkey Run Inn and Cabins is located at Turkey Run State Park.

With all those running turkeys, I’d have been disappointed if we hadn’t seen some wild turkeys. We did.

Turkey Run is about 70 miles west of Indianapolis, and in the earliest days of cars apparently 70 miles was about as far as you could expect to travel in one day. The Inn was built for early adventuring motorists as an out, overnight and then home. The Indianapolis 500 first ran in 1916, and one of its founders, Arthur Newby, was instrumental in the purchase of the park that same year. Of the $40,000 price tag, The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Association gave $5,000. Newby personally gave another $5,000.

The Inn opened in 1919, and it’s very popular with Hoosiers. The Inn and park together feel like a resort. Outside your bedroom door you have this lovely bit of land in which to go a’wandering, and it’s all very pretty. It’s not as expensive as a resort, and maybe the rooms aren’t quite as big nor the restaurant quite as ambitious, but during the busy times of the year it’s probably harder to get a reservation.

It’s like a lot of Indiana. It’s nice.

Restaurants

We ate at some good places in Indiana. On our first day, on the way from the Indianapolis airport to Turkey Run, we took a side trip to Shapiro’s Deli, founded 1905. It’s classic Jewish deli food, with the addition of rhubarb pie. I’ve decided everything is better with rhubarb pie.

We should have split a reuben. Ordering two was hubris.

The first night at Turkey Creek Inn we ate at the Inn restaurant, The Narrows, and it was fine. The second night we ate at Blue Cactus Tacos and Tequila Bar in Crawfordsville, Indiana, population 16,385. It was in a strip mall. I had the tacos huitlacoche, made with huitlacoche corn fungus and queso fresco on homemade tortillas. I can’t remember ever having a bad taco, but I’ve probably had some uninteresting tacos. These tacos were interesting.

I’d go back to try the chorizo and potato tacos. I’d go back to try the squash blossom tacos and even the cactus tacos. I don’t care that Lyle Lovett said never eat Mexican food north of Dallas (and in my mind the notion that Dallas might have decent Mexican food is really stretching it), but in a small Indiana country town those were some interesting tacos. The margaritas were good too.

Our last night we stayed near the airport in Indianapolis and had dinner with a college friend, Andy, and his wife Lorraine. Andy and I were friends at the University of Texas 40+ years ago, dang close to 50, and I ate my first bagel at one of Andy’s cousin’s home in Memphis. I hadn’t seen him since college.

The bagels were imported from New York, frozen, and I’m getting all nostalgic remembering how once upon a time bagels were exotic anywhere south or west of New York City.

Andy and Lorraine have lived in Indianapolis for a while . . . 30 years maybe? And he said two things that stuck, that he’d lost his Texas accent, and that he’s now from Indianapolis. It was clearly their home, with all the good things that word can hold. He and Lorraine were proud of their city, and it was such good fortune to see Indianapolis through them.

We ate at Bluebeard, in Indianapolis’s little slice of Bohemia. Thank goodness we had to catch a fish in Indiana, because otherwise I’d have missed seeing Andy. And I would have missed eating huitlacoche tacos in a strip mall in Crawfordsville.

Donuts

Disappointing. I can’t recommend Indiana for its donuts. Maybe we never got to the right place.

Columbus, Indiana

We had set aside a second day to fish, but since the water was low and we’d caught fish already we diverted to Columbus, Indiana, population 50,474, home of Cummins Inc. Cummins makes lots and lots and lots of diesel engines.

It’s hard to explain Columbus, Indiana, except that it might have been nothing but another company town. It’s not. Back in the 40s, the future Cummins CEO, J. Irwin Miller, proposed a modern building for his family church, First Christian Church, and Eliel Saarinen was invited to be the architect. Saarinen was reportedly reluctant, but Miller’s mother chaired the building committee, and she wrote to Saarinen that she didn’t want a church that paraded its cost, she wanted a church where the poorest woman in Columbus would feel welcome. Saarinen took the bait. After that first church Columbus went nuts for modern architecture.

Under Miller, the Cummins Foundation paid for the architectural design of public buildings. The town library was designed by I.M. Pei (though not with money from the Cummins Foundation). Outside it’s certainly a welcoming space–it’s even got its own Henry Moore statue–but inside it’s one of the most appealing, user-friendly libraries imaginable. And the list just goes on and on. First Baptist Church was designed by Harry Weese. Mabel McDowell School was designed by John Carl Warnecke. Fire Station no. 4 was designed by Robert Venturi.

There are buildings by Kevin Roche, Cesar Pelli, Myron Goldsmith, and Richard Meir. There are six buildings in Columbus designated as National Historic Landmarks. There must be 40 buildings in Columbus that are worth seeing. I think that even the local Shell gas stations were all designed by Pritzker Prize winners. Listing Columbus’s architects is a little like saying that the statue of the soldier on the courthouse lawn was sculpted by Michelangelo, or maybe Henry Moore.

Here’s a roundup of Columbus’s fire stations.

Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church must be one of the most striking buildings in the world. Not Columbus. Not Indiana. Not the Midwest. The todo del mundo, the whole pie, the world. And it may not even be the best building in Columbus, Indiana. The town takes your breath.

All this architectural splendor might have been a meaningless gimmick, but it binds the city together. You look at those public spaces and think of the hundreds of ways, good or indifferent, that a foundation could have spent its money, that a community could have invested its treasure, and you know that this money and this effort by this town was well spent. Ok, I reckon some of those roofs may leak, and the maintenance costs are probably higher than anybody expected, but you know that Cummins loves its town, and that the residents are proud of their town. I could have spent days in Columbus.

I’d go to that church. I’d use that library.

J. Irwin Miller was also instrumental in founding the National Council of Churches, and was its president from 1960-63. He led its push for passage of the Civil Rights Act. I miss Rockefeller Republicans.

Books

Kurt Vonnegut is from Indianapolis. So it goes.

Playlist

Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 are from Indiana. I remember hearing the Jackson 5’s version of “Rockin’ Robin” as a child and thinking how peculiar, and that’s pretty much my verdict on Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5. I’m not a fan, and my favorite song by Jackson was perhaps “Ben” (1972), possibly because it so embraced the peculiar. I forgot to put it on the play list.

John Mellencamp, David Lee Roth of Van Halen, and John Hiatt are all from Indiana. For our honeymoon (1984) we drove from Houston to New Mexico with cassette tapes of “Swordfishtrombones” by Tom Waits and “Riding with the King” by John Hiatt, both 1983. We must have listened to those two tapes a hundred times. I still love them.

I don’t know how they got our names
But yesterday this letter came
Mr. and Mrs. Permanent Dweller, your lucky number is

You may already be a winner 

John Hyatt, You May Already be a Winner, 1983.

I highly advise a road trip with “Swordfishtrombones” and “Riding with the King“. Based solely on the one experience I also highly recommend honeymoons.

Wes Montgomery, the great jazz guitarist, was from Indiana, and you can’t be any sort of guitarist without marveling at Wes Montgomery. Freddie Hubbard was from Indiana, and I kept looking forward to his version of “Misty” coming up again on the playlist.

Unknown photographer, Cole Porter and Betty Shevlin Smith, c. 1920. Wikimedia Commons.

Cole Porter was from Indiana, and there were thousands of Cole Porter covers to choose from. When I was a senior in high school, our senior play was Anything Goes, and I sang “Let’s Misbehave” in a duet with Julie Johnson. Me? I was terrible, but Julie was great, so I don’t remember it with too much queasiness. It left a soft spot for Cole Porter.

In addition to all that good stuff, Indiana University at Bloomington is our best public university music school. It’s most famous graduate is probably Joshua Bell, so of course he was on the playlist.

Movies

lndiana is the setting of two of my favorite sports movies, Breaking Away (1979) and Hoosiers (1986). Neither is about baseball. Neither is about fly fishing. Everybody I guess has seen Hoosiers, but having now been to Indiana it’s hard to see how it could have been set anywhere else. I guess that name, Hoosiers, is kind of a giveaway.

Breaking Away doesn’t seem much remembered anymore, but it’s such a fine movie. It so resonates to drive Indiana backroads and highways while channelling the movie’s bike rides–I also once owned a Masi Volumetrica with a Campi Record C groupo, and rode that bike thousands of miles all the while imagining my place on the Tour. I included Schubert’s Italian Symphony in the playlist just to get that rush of Indiana bike-riding exhilaration that Breaking Away evokes. If I were going to come up with a 50-state roadtrip playlist, the first movement of the Italian Symphony might be my entry for Indiana. Ok, that or “Riding with the King.” Ok, those or “Let’s Misbehave.”

Guitar

I played the guitar a lot in Indiana. After dinner there wasn’t much to do at the Turkey Run Inn and Cabins but sit outside on the lawn, drink beer, admire people’s dogs, and play the guitar. But then really, who needs better? I was working on the second Alemande movement of the first Bach Cello Suite. I can play it ok, but I can never remember it. Maybe my memory will get better as I age. I already know I can’t get more beautiful.

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Smallmouth Bass, Sugar Creek Indiana, August 27, 2023

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I had to have been to Indiana once before, when my parents drove from Texas to Fremont, Michigan, to see my namesake Uncle Neil. They would have clipped the northwest corner, around South Bend. I was only one, so my memory of the trip is pretty hazy. I’m reasonably certain I wasn’t driving.

Whatever happened on that first trip, my memory from last week is mostly reliable. Indiana is a pretty place, particularly if you like fields of corn offset by fields of soybeans. It is green, and everywhere in August there are cornfields, scattered silos, picturesque barns, and stands of oaks and maples. It’s green. I like green.

Where we fished, Sugar Creek, was just a bit south and an hour or so west of Indianapolis. In the south the landscape starts to vary more than northern Indiana, with more rise and fall. On Sugar Creek there was heavy riverside growth and intermittent limestone bluffs. The water in Sugar Creek was low, but clear and like everything else tinged green. It was lovely.

We found Sugar Creek on the internet, searching best places to fly fish in Indiana. I had first contacted a guide on the Tippecanoe, which is a river further north and east, but more famous than Sugar Creek for its role in presidential politics. “Sugar Creek and Tyler Too!” was never going to be a thing in any election. When we asked the Tippecanoe guide about a Saturday though, he said there were too many inner-tubers on the weekends. We decided to go it on our own. We did take his advice and skipped the weekend.

There were a couple of canoe liveries on Sugar Creek, and we rented a canoe from Clements, who couldn’t have been nicer. I had emailed them about a ten mile trip, but they said because of low water they were only doing five miles. They weren’t kidding. Because of the low water we frequently had to get out of the canoe to drag it through low water riffles. It took much more effort than I would have expected.

I was glad Kris was there to do all the work.

Sometimes the front of the boat with Kris floated fine, and only my fat butt would drag. I could stand and put one leg in the water to push the boat forward, like I was skateboarding the river. It was kinda fun.

It took us roughly five hours to go five miles from the put-in back to the canoe livery, which even allowing time for fishing was pretty slow. At that rate we wouldn’t have finished the ten-mile trip until some time next week. Some of that time was fishing, some of it canoeing, some of it dragging. By the time we were done I had a blister on my little toe from scuffling through river rocks, and I was pretty certain I was going to wake up sore tomorrow. We’d both had enough. We decided that since we’d caught fish, one day’s Indiana fishing was plenty.

We fished on a Monday, and with all the Indiana kids back in school we had the river pretty much to ourselves. There were two gear fishers in another canoe, and we shared the shuttle with them to the put-in and then leapfrogged canoes a good bit of the morning. One of the gear fishers told us that the river was so low because it was already dry, but that an abnormal heat wave the week before had sucked out more water. I don’t know whether he was right or not, but it was such a vivid image that it was hard not to admire the description.

Late in the day we were passed by three kayakers. Then we leapfrogged them for a while. That was it for river traffic.

We caught fish early, we caught fish late. We both caught a rock bass, which I’d never seen before. I thought they were crappie, but Kris did an INaturalist identification. There’s nothing like wilderness internet.

I caught some pretty small smallmouth, and I also caught some mighty small smallmouth. Kris got the best hit of the day from a biggish smallmouth, but it let us go our way without having to land it. That’s a win all around.

Evermann, B.W., Hildebrand, S.F, common white sucker, Notes onf the Fishes of East Tennessee, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Fishes vol. 34, 1914, Washington, D.C., Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

In the river there were hundreds of suckers, lined nose to tail and moving sedately out of our way when the canoe drifted through. Many of them were 20 inches or more, and all of them seemed to be looking for something. Kris couldn’t believe it wasn’t us. It wasn’t. She had to cast to them though because, well, fish.

We fished some from the boat, and some wading, mostly casting towards the shore into the deepest water we could find. We had relatively big rods, 7 weights, which were certainly big for what we actually caught. Still, we could hope. I’m sure that there are big fish in Sugar Creek that aren’t suckers. Everybody says so, and everybody in Indiana is honest.

Small creek, small fish, small flies. It was perfect weather with just enough work to tire us and enough fish and scenery to keep us entertained. If it hadn’t been for the blister, it couldn’t have been a gentler day. I don’t recall ever getting tangled, or casting into a tree, or losing a fly. I fished the same two flies all day, either a stylish blue popper or a variation on a bluegill fly called a BBB. The fish took both.

This is going to get down in the weeds, but bear with me. A week before a casting instructor had filmed my cast at a Texas Fly Fishers event. I think he said “damn,” but I suspect it wasn’t in a good way. Mostly my cast was ok, except for the strangest glitch. On a short cast I picked up the line from the water too early, and the early pick-up caused my backcast to go straight up, which isn’t exactly the very thing. It wasn’t the worst thing I ever did, casting or otherwise, but it did create all sorts of short cast problems.

Like I said, way down in the weeds, but every now and then fishing on Sugar Creek I’d think I ought to correct it. Naw. It was too nice a day to think.

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California Packing List, Fall River and McCloud

Gear

We took 5-weight rods but never used them. Our guides had rods set up when we got there, and it would have taken some work to get our rods re-rigged. They didn’t seem excited about redoing their effort.

We took waders and boots and used those the day we wade-fished on the McCloud. We also took our Patagonia wading crampons, which were designed to provide increased traction on wet rocks, of which there were plenty on the McCloud. We bought them five years ago for our trip to the Deschutes for steelhead, and that was the last time we used them. They had worked great on that trip, but had otherwise been sitting in a zip-loc bag in my closet for the last five years. I used mine on the McCloud, and they helped. The straps on Kris’s broke, so hers are now useless. They were a good idea, but heavy and klunky. I don’t think Patagonia makes them any more.

Northern California

The Mount Shasta region of Northern California may be the strangest place I’ve ever been. There’s plenty of stuff going on, but it doesn’t necessarily sync well. There’s skiing in the winter, fly fishing, biking, hiking, bird-watching, radical right-wing separatists, libertarian marijuana farmers, and survivalists. The town of Mount Shasta sports something like 30 new-age businesses, a lot of cute old tourist motels, and the only combination liquor store-fly fishing shop I’ve come across.

There are weekend tourists from San Francisco who have strong opinions about wine lists, and State of Jefferson separatists who want the San Franciscans to go back where they came from. The separatists took over the town government of Redding when the City commissioners tried to impose mask regulations during Covid. This is the land for which God made Subarus, and also a land of Trump flags, which just about sums up its schizophrenia. It’s mostly white folk, too, so you’d think that everybody would be driving around in a new BMW calling each other Skipper, just like God intended.

June Yu, Lenticular cloud formation at Mount Shasta, 1918. Cloud formation? Not on your life. This is actually a photo of the Lemurians blasting into outer space.

Mt. Shasta juts up in the middle of things. It’s out of place and a bit out of line with the other West Coast volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire. There is a debunked geological theory from the mid-19th century concerning the lost continent of Lemuria, so named because it explained the distribution of lemurs on the surviving continents and on Madagascar. Madagascar was thought to be a remnant island fragment of the sunken continent.

Here’s most of what you need to know about sunken continents. Because of the relative density of continental crusts, they won’t sink. They may move around some, but sinking ain’t in it. Of course this is likely one of those fake facts expounded by so-called scientists. Now back to Lemuria.

Lemuria was either in the Pacific or Indian Oceans, depending on who you talk to. Disappearing continental crusts have long been the very thing, Atlantis being the most popular, but Lemuria was right up there, or right down there as it were. 

Way down below the ocean
Where I wanna be, she may be
Way down below the ocean
Where I wanna be, she may be
Way down below the ocean
Where I wanna be, she may be

"Atlantis," Donovan Leitch, 1968

Watkins, Carleton E., Mt. Shasta, California, 1870-1880, albumen print, Library of Congress; Denney, Ewen, Aerial photo of Mt. Shasta, 2006, Wikipedia.

Little known fact: humans are descended from the Lemurians, who, realizing their continent was sinking, decamped to Mount Shasta and started a new, self-sustaining civilization inside the mountain. They’re still there. Plenty of locals run into them out in the woods around Mount Shasta–you can always spot a Lemurian because of their height, their long, flowing hair, white robes, and sandals, presumably Birkenstocks. We didn’t happen to spot any Lemurians while we were there, but I reckon we could have bought a crystal that would have helped us communicate. I bet you could too.

Some folks say that the Lemurians are from outer space, but the better information is that the outer space visitors–and the area around Mount Shasta is chock-full of UFOs–are Lizard People, who also come and go from Mount Shasta. Apparently there’s no problem with Lizard People/Lemurian cohabitation inside Mount Shasta, though that sort of thing is generally frowned upon most places, so don’t be surprised if you see them strolling along together out in the woods, long thin hand in sharp scaly claw.

Google Earth.

Mount Shasta really is the strangest thing. There it is, all 14,179 feet of it, dominating the measly 3,000-foot terrain that surrounds it. It’s so disproportionate to everything around it that you can’t help checking from time to time just to make sure you didn’t imagine it. Wallace Stevens got it wrong. That jar was placed atop a hill in Shasta County, California, not Tennessee, right on top of Mount Shasta.

I don’t know why the State of Jefferson separatists include two XXs in their Great Seal. Maybe that’s how they sign their name.

Hotels and Restaurants

We stayed in the Fall River Hotel in Fall River our first night in California. We split a chicken fried steak at the hotel restaurant, which suggested OklaTex depression origins for Fall River’s high cusine. There’s also a bar, and it’s a good looking bar. In the bar there were locals drinking whiskey or beer or something else manly but making sure I knew it was not Bud Light. I started to order a Bud Light and join them, but we went driving around instead. We saw the falls, we found where we were supposed to meet the guide the next morning, and we stopped at the grocery store and bought a couple of beers. Neither beer was a Bud Light. I’m comfortable with my masculinity so I keep meaning to drink one, but I’m not a light beer drinker and keep forgetting.

Actually, the grocery store, Rays Food Place, was my favorite place in Fall River. We went twice, and it had everything I might have wanted and good conversations to boot. Folk were immensely friendly, both the staff and other customers, and it may offer the town’s best nightlife. The next day our fishing guide brought us sandwiches from there for lunch on the river, and they were outstanding, which is hard to do with a sandwich. For breakfast, however, I’d recommend Annie’s Rendezvous Cafe. I’m not sure I’d recommend its Table of Wisdom, though. That looks like a place you can only aspire to.

Both Annie’s and the Fall River Hotel were for sale. I’m betting they still are. It may not be the liveliest of towns, but it’s still one of the prettiest rivers I’ve ever fished.

The next two nights we stayed in McCloud, 40 miles to the west and much closer to Mount Shasta. It’s not far off of I-5 that runs up the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle, so it gets more of the San Francisco tourist trade than Fall River. We stayed at the McCloud Hotel–McCloud River, Town of McCloud, McCloud Hotel. . . There seems to be a theme here, but the funny thing is that nobody is really certain about who McCloud was. He may have been a Hudson Bay Company trapper named McLeod, but if he was, folks didn’t spell very well.

The hotel was a charming old place, laid out kinda rambling and ramshackle, but it was very well maintained and pretty. I think we got some kind of suite, because we had a couch and a couple of armchairs in the room, and a huge bath tub, more of a hot tub really, right in the middle of the bedroom floor. I’ve seen these kinds of tubs other times in other places, and I figure they’re supposed to have something to do with romance. This one would likely have taken a couple of hours just to fill, which in my mind would have killed the mood. I actually think this one was there just because they had a big empty space that they didn’t know what else to do with.

Both nights we stayed in McCloud we ate at the restaurant in the hotel, the Sage, and it was the kind of ubiquitous new-American cuisine that now seems to be everywhere. I guess it’s the new comfort food. We ate there the second night too because I wanted wine after clambering around the river all day, and I don’t drink and drive. It was very good and easy to get to. Plus I liked the wait staff.

In Sacramento our flight out was at 6:30 the next morning, so we stayed in an airport hotel. It’s something I’ve taken to doing. I book an early flight, turn in the rent car the night before, then use an airport hotel shuttle to get back and forth from the airport. I’m terrified of missing planes, and usually show up the recommended two hours in advance. If nothing else I figure that if I show up really early, there’s less chance of the airline losing my luggage. So far it’s worked. The weird thing about Sacramento airport hotels is that they’re pretty far from the airport, clustered together about nine miles away. It must be one of those California things.

The indigenous cuisine of Sacramento is sushi. We picked a random strip mall sushi joint close to our hotel but far from the airport, and it was fine.

Our flight back had a connection in Las Vegas. The only place I’ve been in Las Vegas is the airport, when I’ve had a connection to someplace else. The airport makes me glad that I’m not a gambling man.

Ticks

Our guide on the McCloud warned us to check ourselves for ticks, and we did. This is not a euphemism. Fortunately waders are a pretty good tick deterrent.

You can tell this is me and not a Lemurian because I’m not wearing sandals.