Tag: Music

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South Carolina, Part Two

Now that I’ve offended all of South Carolina in Part One, it seems worthwhile to mention some other stuff. There’s always some magazine or travel email declaring that Charleston is the very best U.S. vacation destination, even better than Fargo, North Dakota. I’m certain there are many good things to say about South Carolina, and I do like the food. There are lots of fish.

Population and lGeography

In 2023, there were an estimated 5.374 million South Carolinians, making South Carolina 23rd of the U.S. States by population. In the 1830 census, there were 581,185 South Carolinians, with 265,784 free and 315,401 slaves, more slaves than free. Of the free residents, 7,921 were reported as free colored. Female slaves outnumbered male slaves by about 4,500, and white males outnumbered white females by about 3,000.

There has never been a decennial census when South Carolina did not report some growth, but there were never any huge gains. From 1860 to 1870, during the Civil War, growth was a minuscule .03%. It’s estimated that as many as 20,000 South Carolinians died in the War, so that certainly slowed down the numbers. Between 1920 and 1930, growth was only 3.3%. That would have been the height of the Great Migration and the early beginning of the Great Depression in the agricultural South, so South Carolina is probably lucky to come out with a net gain.

From 1910 to 1930, South Carolina’s Black population dropped from about 55% of the total population to about 30%. During the Great Migration, Philadelphia was a particularly popular destination for South Carolina Blacks, and Philadelphia rhythm and blues would re-migrate to South Carolina juke boxes in the 1960s as Beach Music.

In the most recent census, more than half of South Carolinians live in six metropolitan census areas, the largest being Greenville-Anderson-Greer with 928,195. Nearby Spartanburg accounts for another 355,241. Greenville and Spartanburg are in Upstate. Columbia, the state capitol, located in the Piedmont, has 829,470, and Charleston in the Lowcountry has 799,636. While the combined statistical metropolitan areas are pretty large, there are no individual cities with populations larger than 150,000. Columbia has 133,803, Charleston has 132,609.

In the 2020 census, 60.3% of South Carolinians were Anglo, 25% Black alone, and 5.8% were two or more races. Hispanics were 6.9% of the population.

The state’s three regions, the Lowcountry coastal plain, the Piedmont beginning at the fall line, and Upstate (which includes South Carolina’s slice of the Blue Ridge Mountains), are together mildly uncomfortable when they sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, each boasting pride of place, and each fiercely protecting its perceived prerogatives. I have heard that the state geographically balances things like highway and education funding so that no area feels slighted. It’s the smallest Southern state, 40th in size among the U.S. states with 32,020 square miles. It’s a miracle that so much discord can be be contained by such a small package.

Politics

South Carolina is Republican. In the 2024 election, Donald Trump carried 58.2% of its 2,548,140 votes. In 2020 Trump carried 55.11% of 2,513,329 voters.

Lindsay Graham and Tim Scott, both Republican, are South Carolina’s U.S. senators. There are seven congressional delegates, and only Jim Clyburn, in South Carolina’s most gerrymandered Congressional District, is a Democrat. Presumably the gerrymandering minimalizes the statewide effect of traditionally Democratic voters. Every elected state official is Republican, and in the General Assembly the senate is 30 Republicans to 15 Democrats. The house is 88 Republicans to 36 Democrats.

It’s a mighty red state. The one Congressional District that voted Democratic for President in 2024 was also Jim Clyburn’s Congressional District.

2024 Presidential Election Results by South Carolina Congressional District, Wikipedia.

Pat Conroy

There was never a more geocentric author than Pat Conroy (1945-2016), and in the 70s and 80s he was all the rage. The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, Lords of Discipline, South of Broad . . . He even wrote a good, readable South Carolina cookbook. I used two of his recipes, the oyster bake and the Frogmore stew, for my daughter’s birthday this year. There are, I suspect, similar recipes throughout the Gulf Coast, but Conroy makes them seem peculiarly South Carolinian.

Readers of a certain age (and I’m certainly one), were introduced to South Carolina through Conroy, and all-in-all it’s a pretty good introduction. Conroy’s families are often as not full up with disfunction, but even his villains have their moments, and correspondingly his heroes have their villainy. It may be a complicated world, but end of the day his books are readable and his place, coastal South Carolina, is likable.

A number of Pat Conroy’s books have made pretty good movies, though not the cookbook. No one’s ever made a movie of the cookbook, and that’s a shame. It might be short on plot, but it would be long on character development, mostly mine.

Food

There are things people eat in the South (including Texas as part of the South) that weren’t traditionally eaten elsewhere: barbecue, grits, okra, greens, cornbread, pecan pie, biscuits . . . From Southern region to Southern region the particular versions of those things vary. In my parents’ house, for instance, we usually ate turnip greens, not collards or mustard greens. Central Texas barbecue is mostly beef, while other Southern barbecue (including East Texas) is mostly pork. Recipes in Shreveport probably have more in common with Dallas than New Orleans.

Southern Blacks apparently put sugar in their cornbread, Southern Whites did not. Northerners, who learned about cornbread from African-American Great Migration cooks, use sugar.

Questions of race and food and the sources of Southern cooking are fascinating, but as a general matter everyone loves iced tea, maybe sweet or maybe unsweet, fried chicken, and cornbread, maybe sweet or maybe unsweet. Traditionally Blacks and Whites, poor and rich, ate more or less the same stuff, though I would never put sugar in the cornbread. I have tasted it though, and as a child I put sugar in everything else, including rice and grits and iced tea.

Notwithstanding the South’s generalized food traditions, there are some places in the South that are Meccas for food creativity. New Orleans of course, Central Texas for barbecue, and the South Carolina Low Country. For Central Texans it’s all those German and Czech butcher shops, while for New Orleans it’s all that all dat. For the Low Country I suspect it’s a combination of wealth, copious inshore seafood, the preservation of African culture by the Gullah Geechee, and rice.

Other than Louisiana, the ultimate Southern seafood extravaganzas, the Frogmore stew and the oyster bake, hail from South Carolina. South Carolina lays claim to being the source for shrimp and grits and vinegar-based barbecue sauce for its whole-hog barbecues. South Carolinians don’t just eat black-eyed peas, they throw in rice snd whatnot and turn them into hoppin’ john.

I already owned a copy of The Pat Conroy Cookbook, but before we went I dug it out and read parts. I also bought Gullah Geechee Home Cooking, and used it some. The Gullah Geechee recipe for okra gumbo is not so different from my mother’s. It’s tomato and okra based, but of course the author adds shrimp. South Carolinians put shrimp in everything I reckon, including no doubt the cornbread and the iced tea.

In Charleston, at the Fort Sumter gift shop, we bought a copy of Charleston Receipts, the 1950 cookbook of the Charleston Junior League. Whatever negative things one might say about Charleston, The Junior League, or South Carolina, Charleston Receipts is a masterpiece. There are 22 recipes for shrimp alone, including Shrimp for Breakfast and six different shrimp pies. 

"Fry bacon until crisp.  Save to use later.  Add bacon grease to water in which you cook rice . . . add shrimp . . . "

Hampton Plantation Shrimp Pilau, Charleston Receipts, 1950, 38th printing, p. 75. As if these people don’t already have a jar of bacon grease handy.

Fish

We’ve had a good redfish fall in Texas at Port O’Connor, with lots of fish, so we were primed for redfish, and would go to Charleston to fish some more for them. There are other South Carolina fish to fish for, Native brook trout in the Upstate, redeye and largemouth bass, even a striped bass spawning migration, but right now I’m mostly thinking about redfish and saltwater.

When we were last at the skiff in Port O’Connor, I brought home the boat box of redfish flies I’d stowed nine years ago. They were pretty sadly rusted, as though I’d soaked them in tears for all the fish I haven’t caught. I had to throw most of the flies away, and since then I’ve been tying redfish flies to replenish the box and to take to South Carolina. I’ve been using materials and receipts from Sightcast Fishing, which specializes in Texas Gulf Coast flies. They do well-designed variations of classic Texas saltwater flies, their materials are creative, and their flies are pretty. Of course if you can find them, redfish will usually eat almost anything you throw at them, but still . . . it’s nice to know that what I throw looks good to me, even if the fish ignores it.

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Michigan and Ohio Packing List

I’m lumping these two states together. It’s hard to do them together, but it’s even harder to do them apart, and they do sit next to each other. So they’re lumped.

Gear

Our guides in both states wanted us to use their rods, which helps them because they can come to the launch with the rods rigged. We didn’t take rods at all. Lance in Michigan fished with 4-weight Winston rods, which meant that I was fishing with slightly lighter versions of what I would have lugged to Michigan anyway. Katie in Ohio fished with 7-weight G Loomis NRX or Sage rods, so I was fishing with different brands of the 7-weight that I would have lugged to Ohio.

In Michigan we used floating lines, same for Ohio except for a wee bit of sinking line fishing. I can’t imagine that anybody actually likes to fish with sinking lines. To cast with floating lines you just have to pick the line up off the top of the water. Now mind, that’s no easy task, and a good line pick-up is the heart of the cast, well, that and about a half-dozen other things that are also the heart of the cast, but with sinking lines you have to get the line to the top of the water before you can even begin to pick it up, and sinking lines are not known for casting easily anyway. The whole process is fraught with peril for everyone standing near me.

We also fished out of boats in both states, so in addition to not packing rods and reels we didn’t pack waders or boots. No waders, no boots, no rods, no reels . . . I did take some flies, and used a couple, but the guides had those too. It was the easiest packing ever.

Detroit

Detroit was a joy. Parts of it are still beat up, but I’ve never been in a town where people were prouder of their city. The first night at dinner at Alpino we asked our waiter if there was something in particular we should see, and he wrote out a page-long list of places for us. He recommended places for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He listed don’t-miss destinations and neighborhoods just to drive through. It was good advice, too. We spent parts of three days in Detroit, and could easily have spent three more, and we didn’t deviate much from our waiter’s advice.

The one place recommended by everyone we asked was the Detroit Institute of Art. We spent three hours there before we left for Grayling, and could have spent another four. We barely got off the third floor, which is the smallest floor. As museums go, it’s about as good as anywhere, and should be on everyone’s list of American art museums. I even fished while I was there.

Greek fish dish, between 340 and 330 BCE; Roman fish mosaic, 4th century A.D.; Detroit Institute of Art.

Detroit has a large Middle Eastern population, with estimates of over 300,000 people. Apparently the growth was a combination of the growth of the auto industry and the decline of the Ottoman Empire, which is pretty serendipitous if you ponder it, and was then spurred by the lifting of restrictions on Arabic and Asian immigration by the Immigration and Nationalization Act of 1965. The signage in Dearborn, for instance, is doubled in Arabic. We went to Dearborn for afternoon baked stuff at Shatila Bakery. No donuts, but a good bakery anyway.

Our Alpino waiter had suggested lunch at the Yemen Cafe, which was a diner in a fairly beat-up neighborhood. The cafe was busy with African Americans from the neighborhood and Yemenis in fairly traditional dress, including one guy wearing a jambiya dagger, the dagger that Peter O’Toole wears in Laurence of Arabia. Open carry.

Our waiter brought us free glasses of Yemeni tea to try. We ordered slabs of hot Yemeni bread, chicken gallaba with hummus, and lamb fasah. We were taking the advice of our Alpino waiter and didn’t know exactly what we were ordering, but sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Detroit was at it’s peak of wealth and industrial might in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Art Deco buildings from its heyday are magnificent. Our Alpino waiter suggested the Guardian Building and the Fisher Building, both of which have been preserved in fine form. It’s kinda like visiting the Sistine Chapel. You don’t so much comprehend it as just stand around and gawk. There were great mosaics in the Fisher Building, though I saw no fish.

Guardian Building, 1929

Fisher Building, 1928

The first morning I went for a run along the Detroit River, and when I tripped on the sidewalk and sprawled, customs officers offered me a bottle of water. The guy running in front of me came back to make sure I was ok. Detroiters are not only proud of their city, they’re friendly.

We took the Detroit Windsor Tunnel to Canada, and no matter what you may have heard I didn’t go there to buy Cuban cigars. Windsor looks like a good place to go if you’re in the market for cannabis, or a tattoo, or Cuban cigars. Cigars are heavily taxed and expensive in Canada, not that I would know.

We didn’t get to see the Tigers play because they were on the road, and I’m kinda glad. it gives me an excuse to revisit Detroit.

The first night we picked Alpino for dinner because it was the kind of Germanic high cuisine that we don’t really get in Houston. Alpino serves food from the Alps, which is German tinged with Swiss tinged with Italian, which makes for a nice combination. The food was good, our tour guide/waiter was great.

Our second night in Detroit we ate at Buddy’s Pizza, which first served Detroit-style pizza. Buddy’s was a Detroit bar, a former speakeasy, and it started serving pizza as a bar snack in the 40s. Square pizza is Sicilian, and the first pizzas were baked in liberated drip pans from the plants. I like to think of the pans as liberated anyway, though in truth they were apparently purchased from auto suppliers. Liberated drip pans just has a nice ring to it.

There are now multiple Buddy’s in the Detroit area, and I’m sure they’re all fine, but the original location reeks of authenticity. On the way in we asked an employee standing near the back door which pizza we should get. He told us his favorite was the Detroiter. Well of course it was.

He was a waiter but not our waiter, but before we left he went out of his way to visit our table and make sure we liked the pizza. Like I said, everyone was proud of their city, and who wouldn’t be? We really liked Detroit.

Cincinatti

After a day’s fishing in Ohio we spent two nights in Cincinatti. We went to a Reds game. We visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I ate a hot dog with Skyline Chili and cheese, and we sat on a nice downtown square and listened to a lively band during Cincinnati’s Oktoberfest. We ate dinner at a completely forgettable restaurant, then we ate dinner the next night at another completely forgettable restaurant. We went to Graeter’s Ice Cream, and visited in line with two American Airlines flight attendants flying out of Dallas. It was nice enough, but it suffered in comparison to Detroit.

Skyline Chili, by the way, is actually a Greek ragu sauce usually served on spaghetti. It was dubbed as chili during the nationwide chili craze in the early part of the last century. It is not chili, and for Texans, calling it chili is heresy. It has cinnamon in it, and chocolate. I’ll just note that the Cincinnati Reds in recent years have consistently beaten my Astros, so eating Skyline Chili was debasement in hopes of appeasing the baseball gods. It’s no wonder that I didn’t enjoy Cincinnati as much as Detroit.

Of course Detroit then knocked my Astros out of the wild card round of the playoffs. Did I mention that I hate Detroit?

Hotels

In Detroit we stayed downtown in the Shinola Hotel. The room had lots of Shinola accessories, there was a Shinola watch store, and the downtown location made getting around Detroit easy. We walked to dinner at Alpino, and had the Tigers been in town we could have walked to the stadium.

In Cincinnati we stayed downtown at the 21C Museum Hotel, and were able to walk to the Reds game. There was plenty to do downtown, and we didn’t take the car out until we drove to the airport our last morning.

In Grayling we stayed at the Gates Au Sable Lodge, which sits on the bank of the Au Sable River, has a good fly shop and guide service, and has a good restaurant where we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner for every meal. The Lodge has also collected all of the possible trout fishing bibelots produced in its 50-year history to adorn every available decorative niche, as if it had hired an interior decorator from the classified ads at the back of an old copy of Field and Stream. There were rod racks on the wall above the bed, and wader hangers by the door to each room. There were framed flies and fish prints and mounted fish, and Au Sable boat-shaped light fixtures. I was especially fond of our room’s trout fishing carpet.

Playlists

There are a lot of similarities between my Ohio and Michigan playlists. They seem balanced, as if the two states took turns producing songsters, and they share a kind of rock and roll grit that you just don’t always find in other states. In Ohio there are the Black Keys, in Michigan Jack White. In Ohio there is Josh Ritter, Marc Cohn, and The National, in Detroit there’s MC5 and Fountains of Wayne. Of course it’s hard to top Detroit’s Motown. With Motown you get Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Aretha Franklin, the Spinners, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, the Jackson 5 . . . Ohio does have the O’Jays, the Isley Brothers, and the Ohio Players, but Motown is Motown.

In Detroit there was Motown music playing everywhere. Well of course there was. It was like Hawaiian music in Hawaii. These people love their city.

The Supremes, The Ed Sullivan Show, CBS Television, 1966.

They really are good playlists, amazing playlists. Devo, Madonna, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Rare Earth and Grand Funk Railroad. Roy Rogers, Dean Martin, and Nine Inch Nails. Tracy Chapman and Doris Day. The Foo Fighters. They are great lists full of great music, and I won’t report you if you skip Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes. No one has to listen to Kid Rock or the Amboy Dukes when they can listen instead to Stevie Wonder. Or Roy Rogers.

I had vowed I’d hum Baby Love every day in Michigan, and I did.

Guitar

I took the Kohno. I worked on Bach.

The Tyler Davidson Fountain, Cincinnati.

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Michigan

The best thing ever written about fishing, Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, is set in Michigan. There are two paragraphs at the start of the story that I re-read often. Do high school students still read Big Two-Hearted River, or is it dated, something for old men to remember from when they were young? I loved it 50 years ago in high school, I’ve loved it when I’ve read it since, though when I first read it I suspect I was more interested in how the tarp was pitched than in Nick Adams’s post-war trauma.

Nick looked at the burned-out stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log piles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

I understood though, even at 16, why fishing the swamp would be left for another day. It’s not a difficult story, it’s simple and direct, but it’s very beautiful.

So because of a short story I’ve saved Michigan until close to the end of our project. In Michigan I want to find a bridge and look down into the river. I want to look for fish holding in the current. If I’m lucky enough to see any trout I want to watch as they feed.

Geography and Grayling

The lower Michigan peninsula is shaped like a mitten, which everybody knows, but that’s not the amazing thing about Michigan geography. The amazing thing about Michigan geography is that it’s mostly bordered by freshwater, by four of the five great lakes, from left to right, Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie. It has the longest freshwater boundary of any state, and has the highest percentage of area covered by water of all of the states. It is second only to Alaska for total water area.

Waterways and lakes of Michigan, https://gisgeography.com/michigan-lakes-rivers-map/.

The upper Michigan peninsula, the U.P., juts out into Lakes Superior and Michigan from northeast Wisconsin, and is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the narrow strait of Mackinac. If life were fair and rational the U.P. would be part of Wisconsin, but Michigan got it because of its southern border. Do you see that protrusion in the south? Michigan claims that its southern border should have been drawn further south. When Ohio became a state in 1803, Michigan was still a territory with no votes in Congress, and by political fiat Congress gave Toledo to Ohio over Michigan’s objections. Relations got pretty testy between inhabitants of the two states, and to calm things down Congress gave Michigan the Upper Peninsula. Michigan didn’t like it, but, honestly, it got the better deal.

I don’t think Wisconsin got anything, but it still ended up with all the good cheese.

Northern Michigan is heavily forested, and early Michigan fortunes were made in timber. The native fish of Northern Michigan was the grayling, a char that needs cold clean water and can be found now in Canada and Alaska. Logging killed off Michigan’s native grayling. It also damaged the native brook trout populations, which were the trout that Hemingway likely described. Streams were restocked with browns and rainbow trout from Europe and the Pacific Northwest, and with more brook trout. We’ll fish near the City of Grayling, population 1,917, in the center of the Lower Peninsula. In Grayling there are no longer any grayling.

Arctic Grayling, Evermann, Barton W., and Goldsborough, Edmund Lee, The Fishes of Alaska (1907), Washington D.C., Department of Commerce and Labor Bureau of Fisheries.

We’ll fish the Au Sable River. There is a different Au Sable River in New York, which is also a fly fishing river. They are pronounced differently, but according to any random Frenchman, both American pronunciations are wrong. I can’t remember how to pronounce the name of either the Michigan or the New York river, but in French it would be pronounced something like oh Sah-bleh. That’s the only one I’m reasonably sure of.

As logging slowed, Michigan’s south was already selling Fords and Olds and Cadillacs. With mass production of cars, Michigan changed how we do everything, and by the 1920s, Detroit was the center of the automobile universe. It was the fourth largest U.S. city (and home of one of my favorite baseball players, Hank Greenberg). Grayling was visited by the likes of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, but to fish, not to cut timber.

Frank Lyeria, Hank Greenberg, the Hebrew Hammer, 1946, The Sporting News archives.

Michigan geology divides more or less into two parts, the U.P. and the Lower Peninsula. There are the Huron Mountains in the far northwest U.P., the highest peak of which, Mount Arvon, is 1,979 feet. It’s the highest peak in Michigan. Other than the Hurons, Michigan is pretty flat. Actually, even with the Hurons it’s pretty flat.

Both peninsulas are mostly bedrock covered with glacial drift. Apparently there are different ages of bedrock, and the older it gets the better it is for mining, and the oldest and the best mining is in the U.P., so take that, Toledo. The glacial remains have a good bit of variation, but regardless one typically doesn’t go to Michigan to see the rocks. When comparing topography shaped by glaciers and topography shaped by continental plate collisions, go for the collisions every time. That means if you want to look at rocks, go to Utah not Michigan.

Politics

In 2016, with 63% turnout, Donald Trump carried Michigan by about 9,000 votes, 2,279,543 to 2,268,839. In 2020, with 73% turnout, Joe Biden carried Michigan by about 150,000 votes, 2,804,040 to 2,649,852. It’s about 60 days until the 2024 election. According to the New York Times, current polling averages show Kamala Harris leading in Michigan 48% to 47%, and that’s almost certainly well within the margins of error for the underlying polls. If Harris carries Michigan and Wisconsin (where polling is running about the same), she would likely need only one additional marginal state, North Carolina, Georgia, or Pennsylvania, to carry the election. On the flip side, if Trump manages to carry Michigan, then like as not Harris has lost.

It’ll be kinda fun to be out of Texas and into a state where there’s actual electioneering going on.

From Wikipedia, Michigan State Legislature.

I check the polling about every three minutes, so if anything changes I’ll let you know.

Michigan’s governor is Democratic, as are both of its senators, seven of its 13 members of congress, and both houses of its state legislature (in each case by two-vote margins). It’s a tight squeeze for the Democrats. Its governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was considered as a possible running mate for Kamala Harris.

There is also a U.S. Senate race in progress in Michigan, where the incumbent, Democrat Debbie Stabenow, is unexpectedly retiring. According to polling, the Democratic candidate, Elissa Slotkin, leads the Republican Mike Rogers in the polls.

Population

There are 10,077,331 people in Michigan as of the 2020 census. About 18% of population claims German ancestry, 11% English. About 62% of the population is Anglo, 12.4% Black alone, 18.7% Hispanic, and 6% Asian. Ten percent of the population reports as two or more races. The population is heavily concentrated in the south.

Michigan was part of the Ohio Territory and was admitted as a state in 1837. It didn’t grow as early or as quickly as neighboring Ohio, but once it did start adding population, it piled it on. In 1870, the population was 1,184,059. By 1910 it was 2,810,173, so in 40 years its population more than doubled. Between 1910 and 1920, Michigan grew by 30.5%, to 3,668,412, and between 1920 and 1930 it grew another 32%, to 4,842,325. You can almost see the cars pour into America out of Detroit and Flint.

Then Michigan growth slowed. Because of the loss of industrial jobs, Detroit went from the nation’s fourth largest city to a cautionary tale of white flight, high crime, and unemployment. In 1967 there were the Detroit riots. In 1971, there were more than 600 homicides in Detroit. Between 1971 and 1973, there were 84 killings by police. It was the Wild West. When I came to Houston in the 1980s, there was constant patter about the number of Michigan license plates on the streets. It was the age of Robocop and Roger & Me. Detroit was declining. Houston was on a tear.

In the 2010 census Michigan actually lost population.

Phil Cherner, Detroit, Michigan, 1967, www.philcherner.com, by permission. Thanks Phil.

By 2013, Detroit’s population had dropped from 1.8 million in 1950 to 700,000. Detroit was broke, violent, unemployed, bleeding all but its poorest population, and in 2013 it filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history.

As late as 2018 Detroit had the fourth highest murder rate among major cities, but it’s improved in recent years. In 2023 Detroit had its lowest number of homicides since 1966, with 252. Houston had 348. It’s finances seem under control, and it has invested in its central city. Violent crime is still high, with 2,028 violent crimes–murder, rape, robbery, assault–per 100,000 people, compared to a national average in 2023 of 369 per 100,000. Based on its violent crime rate, Detroit remains the second most dangerous city in the U.S., second only to Memphis and ahead of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Little Rock? Really? I love Memphis, but I always think of Little Rock as nigh onto rural. I did once spend an interesting afternoon there in a tornado.

I’m excited to see Detroit. We’re staying downtown in the new Shinola Hotel. The downtown architecture is terrific, and the Institute of Art is supposed to be among the world’s best museums. Municipal services like street lights and garbage pick-up have been restored, plus the Tigers have always had the classiest uniforms in baseball.

Where We Won’t Go

We won’t see Mackinac Island, or Traverse City. We won’t visit the U.P. , or drive through the U.P. to Wisconsin. We won’t visit Holland, Michigan, where my parents bought my sister a pair of wooden shoes when I was one. The shoes were very uncomfortable, and I learned early that I was not cut out to be Dutch.

We won’t see the Detroit Tigers play, because they’ll be on the road. We will not make it to the Motown Museum because it’s closed on the days we’ll be in Detroit. I do promise, however, to hum “Baby Love” at least once an hour, and largely because of Motown my Michigan music playlist is magnificent.

Chris Butcher, Hitsville USA, 2006, public domain.

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North Dakota Packing List

Gear

I took a rod that was way too big for what I caught. Besides that I tied some 9 foot 3x trout leaders. I tied a lot of flies, including some almost perfect wooly buggers, which only took 30 years to accomplish. I also tied some Clouser minnows that I never used. My fly selection was fine, and really, for what I caught in North Dakota, they don’t make a rod that small.

Hotel

We stayed in downtown Fargo, in the Hotel Donaldson. The Donaldson is small, it only has 16 rooms, but its rooftop is a good place to sit in the evening, and downtown Fargo is a surprisingly lively place. It has a restored movie theater, and some good restaurants and coffee shops. It has stores. Where else can you find a downtown with stores?

There are more street people than one would expect, but it seems reasonably safe. I did have to skirt a couple of bodies on the way past the city library, but I think they were only sleeping.

Because we were downtown we drove a lot to look for fish. Over two days we put 450 miles on the rental car.

Donuts

There are three Sandy’s Donut shops in Fargo, though the one downtown isn’t open on Monday. They were oddly expensive, but they had a wide selection, and when you walked through the door the girl at the counter said “Can I help ya?” in a thick North Dakotan accent. Unlike, say, Ocean Springs, Mississippi, I wouldn’t go back to Fargo just for the donuts, but they made for a healthy pre-fishing breakfast.

Restaurants

Notwithstanding the one awful hamburger in Valley City, food in North Dakota was pretty good. My friend and former law partner Brian said that when he was litigating in North Dakota during the fracking boom he ate walleye at every meal, including breakfast, and that it became his favorite fish. To find walleye on a menu we had to go to East Grand Forks, Minnesota, to the Blue Moose Bar and Grill. It was good, and if I ever go back to North Dakota I’ll get North Dakota restaurant suggestions from Brian. Weirdly, in Minnesota they served the walleye without tartar sauce. Tartar sauce may be too picant for Minnesotans.

Back in Fargo, we went across the river to Moorhead, to the oldest existing Dairy Queen franchise. As a Texan, I was surprised that Dairy Queens exist anyplace but Texas. I was stunned that Dairy Queens actually originated in Minnesota, and that per capita the highest concentration of Dairy Queens is in Minnesota, not Texas. The Moorehead Dairy Queen franchise agreement dates from the 1940s, and they have strange things on the menu that newer agreements don’t allow. They have, for instance, the favorite of my childhood, cherry dip cones.

There’s no seating inside the Moorehead Dairy Queen, but there’s a big seating area on the patio. My guess is that it gets cold on that patio in winter. I had the cherry-dipped Dilly Bar because (1) cherry dip and (2) the Moorehead Dairy Queen invented the Dilly Bar. Kris had a chocolate dip cone.

Now if I could just find a K&N Root Beer Stand.

When we got to the DQ there was one youngish couple. By the time we left, the patio was packed with old people. I suspect they heard I was there.

I had read something on the internet about Fargo’s best knoephla soup. Knoephla is a German potato/dumpling soup that’s ideal for Fargo winters. According to the internet, the best knoephla was at Wurst Bier Hall, where the menu featured (1) various kinds of wurst, (2) braised cabbage, (3) knoephla soup, (4) spoetzle dumplings, and (5) beer.

There were four kinds of mustard to go with your choice of wurst.

The second placed knoephla was at Luna Fargo, which was high end in a low-key sort of way. It tended more to wine drinking than beer, and there was no knoephla soup on the menu the night we went. There was a pickle appetizer plate which seemed properly North Dakotan, and the pickled watermelon rind was brilliant.

Our last night in Fargo we ate at Mezaluna. We could walk there from our hotel. It’s the kind of place where one orders martinis, and I did. The fish was very good.

Where We Didn’t Go

We didn’t go to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park to see the Badlands. I would go back to North Dakota to see the Park, but not to fish.

Playlist

If Utah is cursed by the Osmonds, North Dakota is cursed by Lawrence Welk. The guy started recording in the 30s, and it’s brutal that he never stopped.

There’s also Peggy Lee, but you can only listen to “Fever” so many times. Kris asked why there was so much Lynne Anderson on the play list. I like Lynne Anderson well enough but I thought it was obvious that there weren’t a lot of other choices.

Famous Actors

We stopped by the Fargo-Moorehead Visitors Center to pick up a highway map and to visit again with North Dakota’s most famous actor. He’s still there, still as handsome as ever, and he’s still autographed by the Coen Bros.

It’s too bad there’s not an Oscar for best portrayal of a wood chipper.

Guitar

I didn’t take one. I felt guilty about not practicing, and I may need to make some money busking before this is over, but it was liberating not having to haul it through the airport.