Tag: Maine

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Brook Trout, Libby Camp, North Maine Woods, September 9-14, 2023

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We didn’t drive to Libby Camp the obvious way. If we’d stayed on the highway we could have driven on paved roads a good bit longer, so of course we didn’t do that. We drove the back way, west and then north around the back side of Baxter State Park. Kris drove and I napped.

I napped because I was sick, having been blindsided with a cold on the flight to Maine the morning before. I worried that it might be Covid, but it felt so purely like a cold that I didn’t worry much, and anyway there were no tests handy. I had been fine the day before we left. When I got onto the flight the next day I felt awful, but by then I was committed. By our second day in camp I was tired but mostly recovered. And anyway by then it was Kris’s turn to be sick, and she was doing an exemplary job of it for both of us.

So for me the cold was short-lived but rife with misery. The morning we drove to Libby Camp from Bangor I felt so bad that I didn’t even pretend I wanted to drive. I alternately dozed, blew my nose, and displayed manly stoicism, manly stoicism being the same as frequent and bitter complaining. I was particularly whiny when I woke up after lunch and had no clue where we were. Kris wasn’t real sure either, so I didn’t accomplish much except to increase her angst.

Kris at least was following a downloaded route, and it wasn’t her fault that the map app had gone on a backroads buying spree. We had only wanted to see Mount Katahdin when we left the highway. What we got was a tour of the Great North Maine Lumber Roads.

There are roughly 3.5 million acres of land in the North Maine Woods, and most of what isn’t water is a mix of second- or third- or more-growth mixed timber. Most of those 3.5 million acres are privately owned by lumber companies, and all of those dirt roads exist for the happiness of lumber company lumber trucks. By both the rules of the North Maine Woods and simple physics Nissan Rogue rental cars must yield.

I’m guessing returning a flattened rental car to National would have raised questions.

Back to that first day, at the Telos Road checkpoint on the backside of Baxter State Park we paid our $100 entry fee for a week in the Great Private North. Had we been 70+, our passage would have been free, but all in all we got our money’s worth. I’m not in any hurry for free passage. It’ll get here soon enough.

Jeffrey Labree, not Neil Thomas

Libby Camp has been in the North Maine Woods for somewhere north of 100 years. They cater to hunters, fishers, and winter snowmobilers. In addition to those field sports they offer family adventures–hiking, orchid hunting, canoeing, staying in a cabin in the woods with no TV or internet . . . It sounds wholesome and unforgettable. When I was 10 if my parents had taken me there I’d have been in heaven. I was pretty much in heaven six decades down the road.

We had signed up for Orvis Week, and there were three other anglers with us for the week: Bruce from South Carolina, Mike from upstate New York, and Paul from Tampa via Austin. Off and on while we were there we also met other anglers. There was a nice downstate Maine couple who interpreted many things Maine for us, and who called the state game warden at Bar Harbor to make sure we’d be safe notwithstanding the projected arrival of both the Thomases and Hurricane Lee. And the first night at dinner there was a strong personality who complained that while he had caught plenty of fish, he hadn’t caught anything big. Outside of politics I’ve rarely met someone with such a strong grasp of missing the point, but he was amusing, and his friend was along for the ride. After dinner they left for Portland, five hours south. I hoped they wouldn’t hit a moose. I’m rather fond of moose.

Did you know that in South Carolina they apparently mispronounce both crappie and pecan? All I’ve got to say is that since they kicked off the Civil War and repeatedly elected Strom Thurmond, South Carolinians shouldn’t be allowed the final word on anything.

At the heart of Libby Camp is a lodge building where we all hung out and ate communal meals. Libby’s guest cabins and work buildings surround it. Everything faces onto Lake Millinocket, where Libby keeps its float plane, a trio of small motorboats, and a passel of canoes and kayaks. The lodge building has both electricity (thanks to a generator) and internet (thanks to Mr. Musk’s Starlink), but the cabins don’t have either. Light in our cabin was from propane lanterns, which were wholly admirable for producing warm glows, but were maybe not the completest thing for finding lost socks. Heat in the cabins was from a wood stove and piled quilts. Air conditioning in the cabin was from opening the windows and deconstructing piled quilts.

There was a point, probably when I was admiring one of the mounted moose heads, when I thought what a mighty fine job Libby Camp had done mimicking a backwoods fishing lodge. Then I realized I was a mighty fine idiot. I had experienced this weird sense of dislocation once before in Hawaii, in the bar at the Hotel Moloka‘i, when I caught myself admiring what a fine job they’d done copying a tropical bar. Sometimes you get lucky enough to stumble into the real deal.

I was supposed to fish five days but fished four, with one day off to look after Kris, sleep off cold remnants, and play the guitar. Kris fished three days and slept two. Of the four days I fished, I spent two of the days floating in canoes on ponds while our guide, Jeffrey Labree, moved me into position so that I could look good casting. Two other days we waded rivers. The ponds involved a bit of hiking. One of the rivers involved a 30-minute trip in a Cessna float plane, and the other needed four hours of driving and being on watch for lumber trucks.

There’s a lot of the North Maine Woods.

There were also a lot of fish, and I didn’t catch many larger than ten inches. Jeffrey said that one of my missed hits was easily a 20-inch landlocked salmon, which would have been a fish of a lifetime. I missed it. I’ve missed enough fish-of-a-lifetime by now to know that’s ok. The fish aren’t hankering to participate in my obsession, and just knowing they’re there and being lucky enough to spend some time in their vicinity is plenty good for me. And the memory of that hit from that fish is its own good thing. Sitting here days later and a thousand miles away I think I can conjure everything about that instant in my mind’s eye.

Landlocked salmon.

On the day I fished without Kris, I spent a day on Brown Brook Pond in a canoe, throwing dry flies that I’d tied, an elk-hair caddis and a Goddard caddis, and Jeff’s streamers until I was tired of catching fish. Jeffrey guessed I caught somewhere north of 40 brook trout and maybe as many 50, lovely tiny perfect things, and I must have missed an equal number because, well, that’s what I do. I rarely keep count of fish, not because I’m too proud to know, but because I lose track. I’ll trust Jeffrey’s number, mostly because I want to, but also because it felt like a 50-fish day. Whether it was or not doesn’t matter.

You know the best thing about fishing in Maine? The entire week we only fished with dry flies on the surface and streamers. We never fished with nymphs underwater. I know that if you want to catch fish, you have to fish underwater with nymphs, and I have done it from west to east, from here to Alaska, but truth be told I kinda hate them. Fishing with streamers–baitfish imitations–is most of what I do here in Texas, and fishing with surface dry flies is just a joy.

Fishing on the ponds you could just throw the fly any old place and the fish were like as not to be there. Fishing the streams we fished mostly downstream–which is not by any means the norm with dry flies. With the streamers you would let the streamer swing while you retrieved upstream. With the caddis dry flies–and we fished caddis dry flies and nothing else–you’d sometimes let the flies drift and sometimes skate them across the surface. It was all very satisfying.

Brook trout.

Our final day we went to Webster Pond in the float plane, and it was the first time Kris and I could really see how big things were. At the pond outfall Kris stood in one place for the day casting one of Jeff’s flies, a candy caddis. It was named by his granddaughter because it looked like candy, and Kris suspected there may have been actual candy involved. Jeff told me a story about his own childhood which I will shamelessly steal, about fishing at 10 with his aunt and uncle for Atlantic salmon, and while the party let Jeff cast to a salmon he was supported in the river current by another angler. The other angler was Ted Williams.

That last day I moved up and downstream around Kris, fishing some with the candy caddis, some with a black ghost streamer that I had tied. I picked the black ghost because it was pretty and, well, with me and flies pretty will always do it. Jeff told me later that they fished black ghosts mostly in ponds, and while I wasn’t in a pond, like I said, it was pretty. I caught some fish, and some of them were brook trout.

Neil Thomas, not Jeffrey Labree.

Kris said that day that without moving much she had caught 19 trout and asked me how many I caught. I asked her if I could count fall fish and she said no–fall fish are considered a trash fish not worthy of notice. Honestly though my judgment’s not that refined. Of course counting them or no, I had no very precise idea how many fish I had caught, and I didn’t lie, either. I told her that with fall fish it was certainly more than 19, but without, no, I hadn’t caught 19 trout.

And I think that’s true. Between you and me though, I’m counting the fall fish.

Fall fish.

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Maine

We go to Maine on Friday, via United Airlines to Bangor and then north from Bangor by car, past Mount Katahdin and Baxter State Park, further into the north woods to Piscataquis County, about as far north as counties in the continental States dare go. I’ve never been to Maine, and we’ll be so far north that to our left, to our right, and straight ahead all the land will belong to Canada. It’ll be just like the Charge of the Light Brigade, though hopefully without the cannon.

Did you know that there’s more Allen’s Coffee Brandy sold in Maine than anyplace else? Did you know that there’s something called Allen’s Coffee Brandy? Until sometime in the early 2000s it was the most popular liquor sold in Maine, though now various vodkas are higher on the list. It’s still well up there. There’s also a popular regional soft drink called Moxie, and in Maine the mix of Moxie and Allen’s Coffee Brandy is called a “Burnt Trailer.” The mix of Allen’s Coffee Brandy and Diet Moxie is called a “Welfare Mom.” Even in the interest of science, I doubt that I’ll try either one.

Moxie, by the way, was originally sold as a tonic brewed to prevent softening of the brain, nervousness, and insomnia. I might could use some of that. Moxie and vodka, by the way, is a Moxie mule.

Maine has a population of 1,372,000, 92% Anglo, with a total area of 35,385 square miles. That puts it 38th on the list of states by population density, ahead of Oregon, Utah, and Kansas. Roughly 80% of Maine is forested, and most of it’s population is in the remaining 20%. It’s the largest New England state. With a few exceptions, Mainers cluster reasonably close to its coast, but even along the coast there aren’t large urban centers. Maine’s largest city, Portland, has a population of 68,424. Lewiston, the second city, has 38,493. In the north and west of the state there’s forest, and some mountains, too. The north end of the Appalachian Trail is Mount Katahdin, 5,269 feet. Then there’s some more forest.

About half of the population lives in the southeast corner around Portland. All of the reported vampire population is in Jerusalem’s Lot, and hopefully they’ll stay there.

William Bradford, The Schooner Jane of Bath, Maine, 1857, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago.

Reading Maine history is peculiar. Until the Civil War, Maine seems to have been the hottest thing going. They built ships in Maine. Maine’s captains sailed the world. Maine produced timber, and there was land to be had. That’s not to say that Maine didn’t have its troubles: the English were prone to try to move the border, and Mainers had to rid themselves of Massachusetts. There were always French folk trying to migrate south from Canada. Into the 20th Century though if you bought a shoe it was like as not made in Maine. If you bought a sailing ship it was like as not made in Maine.

Then winter came, and it wasn’t. L.L. Bean boots and Hinckley Yachts are still made in Maine, and there must still be a Bath Iron Works, but I think Maine’s most significant exports now are Steven King novels and potatoes. Even Allen’s Coffee Brandy and Moxie are made in Massachusetts.

Jacobson, Antonio N., S.S. State of Maine, ca. 1892, oil on canvas, Maine Historical Society. The S.S. State of Maine was built in Bath, Maine.

Before the Civil War Henry David Thoreau wrote three travel essays about Maine, two of which were published in periodicals during his life and collected after his death as The Maine Woods. His trips weren’t far from where we’re going. On one trip he climbed Mount Katahdin. On another a Native American guide took him and a companion by canoe to Moosehead Lake. Some of the essays are pure travelogue, but they’re well written and appealing, with enough wilderness spark to provide drama. Some of the writing is better than mere travelogue. From time to time in The Maine Woods you’ll find some of Thoreau’s loveliest observations about nature, and nobody ever did mysticism and nature better than Thoreau.

Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable was changed into a pine at last? No! No! It is the poet . . . . ((Thoreau, Henry David, “Chesuncook”, The Maine Woods at 112, Yale University Press 2009, New Haven, Ct.))

You’ll also find his god-awful attempts to reproduce the dialogue of his Native American guide. Tonto’s script writers produced less stilted vernacular. “Kademy . . . good thing–I suppose they usum Fifth Reader there . . . You been college?”((Thoreau, Henry David, “The Allegash and the East Branch”, The Maine Woods at 183, Yale University Press 2009, New Haven, Ct. Interestingly, “that looks like Ned and the First Reader” was my father’s standard description of messy work, as in “your casting looks like Ned and the First Reader.” I never knew there was more than one Reader until I read Thoreau. I still don’t know who Ned was.)) After reading Thoreau’s dialogues, you realize why his best work is about living alone at Walden Pond.

Paul Bunyan statue, Bangor, Maine. Paul Bunyan was also resident in Michigan, Minnesota, and Nova Scotia.

In The Maine Woods, Thoreau mentions the red shirts of the lumbermen several times. I thought certain that when we got the gear list for Libby Camp it would require us to bring red flannel shirts, but there was nary a one listed. These days anglers are more prone to camouflage than red, on the theory that fish will more easily spot threats who wear bright colors. Whatever the styles preferred by 19th century Maine lumbermen or 21st century fly fishers, it’s hard now to find a red flannel shirt, even with the help of the internet. The closest I could come was an L.L. Bean chamois shirt, probably made in China, and somehow the notion of buying a heavy shirt during the current Houston heat wave was just more than I could stomach. I’ll wear no red in Maine, and I apologize to Henry David and Paul Bunyan.

We could go to Maine to fish the seacoast. It’s a drowned seacoast, a seacoast that because of rising oceans after glacial retreat left a rugged and interesting shore. This time of year there should be not only striped bass but migrations of bluefish and false albacore. I do get seasick though.

Cornelia “Fly Rod” Cosby, the first registered Maine guide.

There was also a time when you could go to Maine to fish for Atlantic salmon, but through a combination of dams, pollution, and over-fishing we’ve done an excellent job of eradicating U.S. Atlantic salmon runs. Maine is the last North American place south of Canada where there are Atlantic salmon, but they’re critically endangered.

There are largish native wild brook trout left in Maine, when they’ve otherwise disappeared from the rest of their U.S. native range. Generally they can’t compete with rainbow trout introduced from the Pacific Northwest and brown trout from Europe, so outside of Maine they’ve been marginalized into smaller streams, and there’s not sufficient food in the streams to grow big fish. But in Maine for whatever reason they’re still the inland fish of choice.

Along with the brook trout there are also landlocked salmon. Landlocked salmon are Atlantic salmon that at the end of the last glaciation were cut off from the ocean. Apparently they make their spawning runs from lake to river in September, and they’re absolutely right to do so. September is always the best time to travel, when temperatures are starting to cool and the kids are back in school.

The last of the large native brook trout in the U.S. are a good enough excuse to see the Maine woods, but there’s also a sporting tradition. Train travel opened the Maine woods to both Henry David Thoreau and lots of traveling fishers and hunters. By the end of the 19th century, Maine fishing and hunting camps were scattered through the far Maine woods, and they were the very thing. We’re going to Libby Camp, which can trace it’s ancestry to the 1880s, but there are plenty of others. There are few things as iconic to a fly fisher as a Maine camp.

We know there can’t be a fish because the angler is wearing a red shirt. He must have dropped his hat.

In other matters, Mainer’s didn’t vote for Donald Trump in either 2016 or 2020, voting 48.2%, or 357,735, for Clinton, and then 51%, or 435,072, for Biden. Interestingly–and this is repeated in other states as well–there is more than a 3% drop in votes for the Libertarian candidate between 2016 and 2020, from 5.09% for Gary Johnson in 2016 to 1.73% for Jo Jorgensen. One supposes two things, that about 2% of the population really does vote Libertarian, and that in Maine in 2016 about 20,000 voters wouldn’t vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. In 2020 most of those 20,000 voters were either more enthusiastic about Biden or less enthusiastic about Trump.

There was 73% eligible voter turnout in Maine in 2016, then 78% turnout in 2020. That’s huge turnout. To put that in perspective, turnout nationally in 2020 was 66.7%.

Maine 2020 presidential election results by county, Wikipedia. That would also double for a pretty good population map.

Maine does something peculiar with its electoral college votes in presidential elections that I don’t think is done anywhere else. Instead of all or none, it splits two of its four electoral college votes by congressional district, so in 2020 Trump took one electoral vote and Biden three others. That was the only electoral vote for Trump from New England. It’s not a bad way for the electoral college to work, though unless other states did the same thing it only hurts Maine’s overall majority.

Neither of Maine’s Congressfolk are Republican, though one of its senators is a moderate Republican, which along with Atlantic salmon is a critically endangered species. Unlike the rest of Mainers, she doesn’t have a reputation for being particularly independent. The other senator, Angus King, is in fact independent, but caucuses with the Democrats.

Both Maine’s state senate and house are mildly Democratic. Its governor is Democratic.

One last note on fly fishing in Maine. Mainers created some of the most beautiful streamer flies in the American catalogue. They’re simpler variations of classic British salmon flies. I tried to tie some, though it was hard, and my results were decidedly mixed. I’m sure they’ll look a lot better in the water, and just fishing them is enough of a reason to go to Maine, whether or not I have a red shirt.

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Brook Trout

Currier & Ives, Brook Trout, 1868, chromolithograph, Library of Congress.

If you fly fish, sooner or later you hear two things:

  1. You idiot. Brook Trout aren’t a trout.
  2. Brook trout have been driven out of their native range.

The first, that brook trout aren’t a trout, isn’t so much spoken as declaimed. Those aren’t trout! Those are char! What’s actually being said is that brook trout, Salvelinus fontinalis, are taxonomically closer to members of the genus Salvelinus, commonly called char, than they are to brown trout, Salmo trutta, always called trout. Of course that begs the question of why rainbow trout, Oncorhynchus mykiss, get a pass on trouthood when they’re taxonomically closer to Pacific salmon than to brown trout. And that begs the question of why Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) are a salmon when they’re taxonomically closer to brown trout than to Pacific salmon.

Worthington Whittredge, Trout Brook in the Catskills, c. 1874, National Gallery of Art, Hudson River School. There’s an angler in that painting, though well hid. He’s above the rock on the left in the small falls. The painting could have just as well been named Brook Trout in the Catskills, but not Char in the Catskills.

These are probably the sorts of existential questions that trout ponder, but for me at least there’s some irrelevance to it. One supposes that all that taxonomic relativity means something scientifically, but common usage is common usage, and it’s brook trout, not brook char. One also supposes that the taxonomic classification of beetles is just as confusing as the various fishes, but likely as not every time you say June bug no one says that’s not John but Paul.

Historic Brook Trout Eastern Range Map, Trout Unlimited.

Questions about brook trout range are much more interesting. There was a time, roughly coinciding with somewheres in the Pleistocene to 1883, when brook trout were the only river trout in eastern North America. They ranged from Georgia to as far west as Michigan and north into Canada. By the 19th Century the Catskills were the destination fishery for New York, like now New Zealand and Iceland and Christmas Island and Kansas are the destination fisheries for modern anglers, and without cars or even trains the Catskills weren’t much easier to get to than Christmas Island. When in 1830 you fished the Catskills for trout you fished for brook trout, and I suspect that no officious busybody butted in to to tell you that’s not a trout it’s a char.

Brook trout first declined in much of their native range because of over-fishing and habitat degradation. Meanwhile innovators were beginning to raise hatchery brown trout, and the browns were adaptive and more heat and environmentally tolerant. Brown trout were first introduced into Michigan, but their introducers quickly took them east. Rainbows from the west coast were also introduced. While being crowded out of the east, brook trout meanwhile were carried west, and, along with their cousin the lake trout, brook trout are now an invasive species in cutthroat habitat. Poor cutthroat. They catch it from everybody.

By the way, lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) are not a trout but a char.

U.S. Geological Survey, Native and Introduced Ranges of Brook Trout, 2013. I have never heard of brook trout introduced in Texas, but I’m sure somebody did. Howdy!

There are efforts by the the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, a coalition of states, local governments, and private entities, to restore brook trout populations and habitat in their native range and to preserve the rivers and lakes where brook trout populations are healthy. the following Joint Venture map is dated, but it indicates where to fish for native brook trout. Maine. Go to Maine. And northern New Hampshire.

Hey! We’re on our way to northern New Hampshire!

From Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, Eastern Brook Trout: Roadmap to Restoration, before 2012. Who doesn’t date data?

Brook trout, which are members of the char family, spawn in the autumn beginning in their second year. I came across this peculiarly lurid description of brook trout spawning on a U.S. Fish and Wildlife website:

Pre-spawning courtship of the brook trout begins with the male attempting to drive a female toward suitable gravel habitat to facilitate spawning. A receptive female chooses a spot and digs a redd. While the female brook trout is digging, the male brook trout continues his courtship activity, darting alongside the female and quivering, swimming over and under her and rubbing the female with his fins.

https://www.fws.gov/fisheries/freshwater-fish-of-america/brook_trout.html.

Dang. These are your government employees at work. Pretty salty stuff.

And speaking of salt, like rainbows brook trout can move into the ocean (in which case they’re called salties). They return to freshwater to spawn.

If there’s a creature that a brook trout can put in their mouth, they’ll eat it. They feed by sight, so they’re daytime feeders. They’re short-lived, commonly living three to four years. Their size varies based on habitat.

50 fish from American Waters, Allen & Winter, Richmond Virginia, 188__. Cigarette cards.

Man they’re pretty. They’re also not a trout, but a char.

Four to eight pound brook trout are trophies. All of the IGFA tippet class records for brook trout are from Canada, and range up to about 10 pounds. The all tackle record is a bit more than 14 pounds. Weirdly all of the women’s records are vacant except for two pound tippet, which is for a 2 lb 8 oz fish. Kris really does need to get busy.