We fished five weights mostly, 9 foot with floating lines and 4x leaders. The Driftless streams would have been perfect for bamboo rods, but I’m done with rod buying I think.
At least until I buy another rod.
Reading
I re-read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead to get ready for Iowa. In our plane trip to Rhode Island, I kept reading excerpts to Kris out loud, because so much of it deserves pondering. I hope the people around us didn’t mind.
I re-read Shoeless Joe (and of course re-watched Field of Dreams). There is a surprising amount of good writing tied to Iowa, mostly because of the University of Iowa creative writers workshop. There’s Jane Smiley, W. P. Kinsella, Flannery O’Connor, W.D. Snodgrass, Wallace Stegner, T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros . . . Frankly, I don’t see how anyone ever wrote a word without going to Iowa first.
I had such success with cooking in New Mexico, I bought a copy of The Flavor of Wisconsin by Harva Hachter and Terese Allen with the plan to try some of the recipes in our Air BnB. I didn’t. It’s a wonderful book, the kind of historic/cultural study of food culture that every state deserves, with a general survey of the food history of the state and then a lot of recipes. The problem is that Wisconsin food is kinda, I don’t know, unappealing in the abstract. Maybe I’ll go back and make that recipe for beef and kidney pie. I’m going to go to my grave though without having eaten the potato and turnip whip.
I’ve written about the Driftless Cafe already, and about trying to find Frito pie in Iowa. There are, I’m sure many good things to say about Midwestern food (and face it, Midwestern food is what we’re talking about here), but the only good thing I can say about those breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches in Iowa is that if you covered them with cream gravy and left out the bread, they’d be a reasonable substitute for chicken fried steak.
You can find 20-year old cheddar in Wisconsin, for obscene amounts of money. They take their cheese seriously.
What We Didn’t Catch
Muskie. Notwithstanding how much I liked the Driftless, I still regret not catching muskie in Wisconsin.
Where We Didn’t Go
We talked about driving to Minneapolis/St. Paul for a Twins game, but we didn’t. I’ve been to Minneapolis; Kris hasn’t.
I’d like to have canoed in the Boundary Waters.
I really wanted to drive through the Amana region of Iowa. I’d been once before, a long time ago, and I liked it. Because of a flat in Missouri we ran out of time. By the way, the family minivan doesn’t have a jack and a spare, but instead has a flimsy fix-a-flat kit, which notwithstanding my distrust, worked fine. Did you know that all the tire repair shops in rural Iowa close on Saturday afternoon? We had a nervous 100 mile drive to Dubuque where we found a Discount Tire that fixed the flat for free. I love Discount Tire, but I’d still rather have a spare tire.
Corn
We crossed Iowa, south to north, in late fall, and the corn stalks were ready for harvest, I suppose for feed? There didn’t appear to be any actual ears of corn. I grew up around wheat and cotton and sorghum and cattle pasture, but I have never seen such monoculture as Iowa corn. There is a lot of corn in Iowa, and that doesn’t even come close to a description. There is more than a lot of corn. There is a plethora of corn, the universe of corn, the place where corn is born and goes to die. No wonder corn fields show up in movies as the place the supernatural comes from; the amount of corn is spooky.
I realized that despite my rural upbringing, I had only the vaguest notion of what silos are for; they could be guard towers, to protect from roving bands of children of the corn? There sure are a lot of them.
Missouri
We were probably in as much of Missouri as anyplace, though we didn’t fish there. We spent a night in Kansas City on the way, at the 21c Museum Hotel. They’re great hotels and pet friendly, but more often than not located in peculiar places–at least if you’re not from there. Louisville and Lexington, Kansas City, Bentonville, Oklahoma City . . . they’re opening a new one in Des Moines. We also drove by the hamlet in north central Missouri where my grandmother was born in 1890, Osgood. I visited Osgood as a child in the early 1960s, and stayed with a great aunt who had no indoor plumbing, and visited a great uncle who kept horse feed in the spare bedroom. It was an adventure. There’s not much of Osgood left, if there ever was much of Osgood. Certainly there’s no tire repair shop.
Osgood, Missouri
On the drive nome we paralleled the Mississippi, and stopped in Hannibal to walk around. I’m not sure we saw the best of Hannibal, or if there is any best of Hannibal.
We spent two nights in St. Louis, took our picture under the arch, visited the Feather Craft fly fishing store (I’ve bought mail order from them for 30 years, but in person it reminds me most of a plumbing supply), and saw a Cardinals game. I hate the Cardinals, but they were playing the Cubs, who I also hate. The Astros played too long in the Central Division of the National League for me not to have strong feelings about the Cardinals and the Cubs.
Music
Iowa. The Everly Brothers are from Iowa, and Glen Miller, and Bix Beiderke. Glen Miller got me through law school. Big Band music was the only music I could listen to and still concentrate on reading.
Minnesota. We listened to a lot of Bob Dylan. I’m not a big fan of Prince (who is of course from Minneapolis or St Paul or whatever), but then we listened to a lot of Bob Dylan.
Wisconsin. I’ve been through this list before. It’s still pretty much the same list.
On Latir Creek in New Mexico we fished 8.5 foot 3 weight rods. On the Cimarron, I stuck with the 3 weight and Kris switched to a 4 weight. On both streams we fished 7.5 foot leaders with a 5x tippet. I wet waded the Latir, Kris wore waders. We both wore waders and boots on the Cimarron.
Wading staffs are always helpful.
In Colorado, we used 9 foot 5 weights, which have just a bit more punch. There weren’t any overhanging trees, and the stream and the fish were larger. Leaders were 9 foot 5x.
I dug out a 30-year-old vest to take to New Mexico because I thought I’d be carrying lots of stuff. I’m not sure why I ever quit using it in the first place. It holds lots of stuff.
Where we stayed
The first day we drove from Houston to Tucumcari, which has a great selection of Route 66 motels from the 50s and 60s. We stayed at the Roadrunner Lodge because they advertised as pet-friendly, and they were. It’s a great place to stay with dogs. In Taos we stayed at an AirBNB, and it was outstanding. It had a kitchen and we cooked a lot of green chile sauce.
Where we ate
During the past year, I seem to have migrated to spicier food. Maybe it’s age and declining taste buds, maybe it’s Covid boredom, but a trip to New Mexico seemed timely. I vowed that on this trip I would learn to like green chile sauce–in New Mexico you’re supposed to choose green sauce or red, and in the past I always chose red, under (the mistaken) impression that green was hotter. Here’s what I ate:
Green chile sauce cheese enchiladas at the Pow Wow in Tucumcari.
Green chile sauce huevos rancheros at Kix on 66 in Tucumcari.
Green chile cheeseburger at Santa Fe Bites in Santa Fe.
Green chile sauce chile relleno at Rancho de Chimayo in Chimayo.
Green chile cheeseburger at the Abiquiu Inn in Abiquiu.
Green chile sauce chile relleno at La Cueva in Taos.
Green Chile cheeseburger at the Blake’s Lottaburger in Tucumcari. On the way out of town. Just in case.
Plus I had ordered a copy of the Rancho de Chimayo cookbook, and we made two batches of green chile sauce at our AirBnB, one vegan and one con carne. I made green chile cheeseburgers one night and enchiladas another, plus huevos rancheros a couple of mornings. Kris made posole with green chile sauce one night.
I love green chile sauce. The Rancho de Chimayo cookbook has both a vegan and con carne recipe. Both are great. Here’s the Ranco de Chimayo vegan recipe, more or less:
4 C vegetable broth
2 C chopped roasted mild to medium New Mexican green chile. I bought a tub of frozen, and didn’t bother thawing.
2 chopped tomatoes. Or a can of chopped tomatoes would work.
1 T minced onion
1 t garlic salt
2 T cornstarch dissolved in 2 T water
Combine everything but the cornstarch in a large saucepan and bring to a boil for 15 minutes. Add the cornstarch slurry. Reduce to a simmer and cook for about 15 minutes more.
It goes with everything, though I didn’t try any green chile sauce donuts. The con carne sauce basically adds a quarter pound of browned ground beef to the vegan recipe.
Donuts.
Rebel Donut in Albuquerque is decidedly on the “I-learned-my-skills-in-Portland” ledger of the donut world. My son explained that the Blue Sky donut with the blue rock candy is an homage to Breaking Bad, which was filmed in Albuquerque, so civic pride! The strawberry/chocolate donut is high on my list of not-to-be-missed donuts. It’s a great place.
I asked at the counter if they’d fill my thermos with coffee, and it kind of shook them. I asked if they’d sell me the number of large coffees it would take to fill my thermos, and they smiled. They filled my thermos and charged me for three large coffees. I think there were actually four. Friendly folk.
Where we didn’t go.
There are so many things I’ve seen in New Mexico, and so many I haven’t. I hope I get to go again.
We didn’t go south to fish for Gila trout, one of the smallest and most fragile of North American trout populations. Probably best to leave them alone. Still . . .
In Taos, we didn’t visit the Taos Pueblo. I wanted to. I haven’t been since I was a child. The reservation is closed because of Covid. We also didn’t re-visit the Millicent Rogers Museum, or stop at Georgia O’Keefe’s home in Abiquiu. Next time.
Books
I listened to most of the mystery novels by Tony Hillerman, and his daughter Anne Hilleman. I’d read the Tony Hillerman novels before, years ago, and they hold up well.
Hampton Sides’ biography of Kit Carson, Blood and Thunder, is outstanding. All the problems and glories of westward expansion are focused in Kit Carson’s life, and he really was extraordinary.
I re-read Death Comes for the Archbishop. There’s even a vignette about green chile sauce. And Kit Carson.
Playlist
Our Colorado playlist consisted of Rocky Mountain High. Like I said, there wasn’t a lot of preparation for our trip to Colorado.
Our New Mexico playlist was also pretty short. The Shins are from Albuquerque, and I included Michael Martin Murphy because, even if he’s from Dallas, he’s connected in my mind to Red River. The folksinger Anna Egge grew up in a commune near Taos, presumably populated by the kind of near-nuff Buddhists who open their hook gaps. I downloaded a bunch of what I would call Norteño music off of a New Mexico playlist. There’s supposed to be a difference between New Mexico Hispano Norteño and Tejano Norteño, but I’m not that subtle.
We tried to listen to Aaron Copeland’s Billy the Kid, but frankly IMusic sucks and it kept playing the Gun Battle over and over and over.
Around Tucumcari–I really liked Tucumcari–we started listening to (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66. There must be 37 covers, including versions by The Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Manhattan Transfer, and Nat King Cole. Then we started listing to versions of Willin‘. Just to be clear, the lyrics to Willin’, which goes from Tucson to Tucumcari, are not “just give me wheat, rice, and wine.” Kris was right, even if she did laugh at me 38 years ago.
I don’t care. “Wheat, rice, and wine” is altogether better than “weed, whites and wine.” That lyric doesn’t even include the Oxford comma.
Guitar
I took the Kohno, and played transcriptions of lute music by John Dowland. I got a new sticker for my guitar case.
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.
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.
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.
