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August 23, 2022August 23, 2022

Alaska Packing List

Gear

We took too much stuff. On our flight to Quinagak we were limited to 50 pounds apiece of luggage, and we pushed the limit. They let us on the plane with 101 pounds, but don’t tell anybody. We did well enough on clothes—Ok, I had one too many pairs of long underwear, but Kris ended up borrowing the extra. I have very stylish long underwear.

Where we failed was with fishing gear. We only used four rods, four reels, and four lines. We would have done just fine with nothing but the the two big Spey rods and the two seven-weight single-handed rods that we used for trout.

Meanwhile I had packed five more rods and reels, just in case. I did use some of the flies I tied, which always makes me happy.

Besides long underwear, I had a pair of pile pants to wear under my waders that worked well, and a couple of sweaters, one wool and one capiIene. I don’t think I took the sweaters off until day six. On that sunny day it got within the vicinity of almost hot and all the guides were sporting t-shirts. Show-offs.

Our rain gear got a work out, and the knit cap that fit over my baseball cap did double duty, both keeping me warm and providing padding when I whacked the back of my head on bad casts.

I took the new pair of waders Kris gave me for Father’s Day. Waders are expensive, and sometimes they spring leaks. My last pair were good Patagonia waders that I’d had six or seven years, but the last couple of times out I’d ended up with a wet butt. I’d tried to seal them, but never could find the leak. We have a water feature in our back yard, a shallow pool with a fountain, and weekly in May I’d put on a pair of khakis and my waders and go sit in the cement pond to see if I’d fixed them yet. I never did.

The new waders have a front zipper, which is a recent innovation. Why a front zipper? So it’s easier to pee of course. I’m here to report that for an old man, the zipper is the greatest thing ever, right up there in the list of civilization’s achievements with fire, the wheel, and yoga pants.

The Camp

I had the notion that our stay at Alaska West would be glamping. It wasn’t. Now mind, it was perfectly comfortable. The tent had a propane heater, each cot had its own mosquito net, and there were hangers on a galvanized pipe. The food was good and would have paired well with beer if Quinagak hadn’t been dry. We made our sandwiches each day for our riverside lunch, and there was a perfectly adequate selection of cold cuts. On some days there were Cheetos. The camp runner made our bed each day, and while the cot was made out of 2x4s and a sheet of plywood, it was comfortable, and like I said, it came with mosquito netting. All the luxuries.

That said, nobody knew the thread-count on the sheets, and a memorable part of each shower was spent alternating between cold water and scalding. There were plenty of outhouses though, and there was a shower, not just a hose with a foot pump. I’m sure that in Alaska there are glamorous lodges with down comforters, plush towels, adjustable shower heads, bottles of pinot noir, micro greens applied to plates with tweezers, and flush toilets, and I wouldn’t have minded any of those things, but I also liked our camp at Alaska West. I liked it a lot.

Besides us, there were eight other anglers in camp the week we were there, and Kris and I were the only anglers who hadn’t been there at least once before. Three anglers were from Britain, and one, from California, came every summer and was spending two weeks. Apparently there are a lot of repeat customers.

You know what’s great about almost endless sunlight? You don’t have to find a flashlight if you need to pee in the middle of the night.

Anchorage and Seward

We were in Alaska for ten nights, seven in camp, two in Anchorage, and one in Seward. We flew out of Anchorage at 11 pm on the night we got back from the Alaska West camp, with an Alaska Airlines flight from Anchorage to Denver. In Denver we changed planes and airlines, and got home at 2 the next afternoon. I honestly don’t remember a thing about that flight home.

To get there we flew into Anchorage three days early and took a sightseeing train across the Kenai Peninsula to Seward. The Alaska Railroad is terrific, and they had a tour package that included a visit to a dog-sled kennel, a hike to a glacier, and then a six-hour boat tour of Kenai Fjords National Park. We saw whales! We mourned accelerated glacial melting! We saw seals and sea otters and kittiwakes! No wonder people go on cruises to Alaska.

In Anchorage we stayed the first night at the Comfort Inn Downtown–Ship Creek, so that we could walk to the train station the next morning to catch our train to Seward. We had stashed most of our luggage at our third night’s hotel, The Lakefront Anchorage. In between those two we spent the night at the Harbor 360 Hotel in Seward, which was part of the train tour package. Little known fact, but every hotel in Alaska is required by law to have a stuffed bear in the lobby, and the really fancy places will also have a stuffed muskox.

We ate in Seward at The Cookery. If you own a tourist-dependent restaurant in Seward, you open each year in late spring and close down in the fall, but The Cookery was good enough that if they opened in February I’d go back to Seward just to eat there. What great oysters they have in Alaska.

Food in Anchorage was pretty hit or miss, but our first night there we ate at a popular brewpub, The Glacier Brewhouse. We didn’t have a reservation but they seated us at the bar. Our waitress was from Katy, Texas. The couple next to us at the bar was from Monahans, Texas. I think there’s a good bit of Texas in Alaska, and it just goes to show, wearing an Astros cap is never a bad choice.

Playlist

There is a lot of good writing about Alaska, and there are some pretty good movies, plus we bought the boxed set of six seasons of Northern Exposure, which is still the best thing ever broadcast on network television. It’s too bad that Janine Turner is a nutcase.

Music, though, is limited. There’s “North to Alaska” by Johnny Horten, and I found a pretty good cover of it by a blue grass performer, David Mallett. There’s the song, “Alaska” by Maggie Rogers, which she wrote in Boston, and “Anchorage” by Michelle Shocked which I suppose she wrote in Texas. There’s a band, Portugal the Man, which is likely the best thing to ever come out of Wasilla, Alaska, though I gather they’re now based in Portland. Their stuff is very good, and you’d likely recognize a song or two.

After that Alaska seems to turn out female singer-songwriters, led, of course, by Jewel, and including Anna Graceman, Janet Gardner, and Libby Roderick. I’ve got nothing against female singer-songwriters, I’ve got nothing against Jewel, but of the 39 songs on our Alaska playlist, 30 were by female singer-songwriters, and 19 of those were by Jewel. It made one yearn for another run-through of North to Alaska.

I was surprised at the lack of country and western singers from Alaska. With all those Texans, it seemed like an obvious choice. Maybe I just missed them.

Guitar

To save weight, I took my small travel guitar. I bought it originally so that I wouldn’t cry if it was accidentally destroyed, and I had visions of having to leave it in a trash can to make the Quinagak weight limit. I didn’t have to leave it, and it survived another trip. I took the music for “Recuerdos de la Alhambra”, a song I’ve played through from time to time but never learned, and worked on that most evenings. I’m still working on it, and probably never will learn it.

June 18, 2022June 18, 2022

Connecticut Packing List

Gear

We fished with Bert Ouellette on the Housatonic River, and mostly we fished with Bert’s stuff. We had rods, but Bert said we’d use our rods, a 5-wt for Kris and 6-wt for me, for dry flies. we never fished dry flies, so we never used our stuff.

Instead we fished Bert’s 6-weights, good Orvis Recon and Orvis Helios 3 rods, with sinking lines for bait-fish streamers and a complex leader at the front of a floating line for deep underwater nymphs. For non fly-fishers, I could go into endless detail about all this but your eyes would glaze and you’d wonder off to the kitchen to see what’s in the icebox. It’s not worth the explanation. Leave it be that they were very good rods, set up in pretty sophisticated ways for fishing the river as well as we could fish it. It all worked.

We were fishing out of a drift boat, and never waded in the river, but it was raining the first day so we wore our waders as rain gear. Because we had studs in our boots–think hob-nailed boots, but with screw heads, not nails–we didn’t wear our boots in Bert’s boat. Since we never got out of the boat, neoprene stocking feet were fine.

I’ll only indulge in one bit of fly fishing arcana. At the end of the second day Bert told me that his dry fly leader–remember, we didn’t get to fish dry flies–was usually 25-feet long. The leader is the (usually) nine feet of monofilament line that attaches to the end of the thick plastic-covered fly line. The fly line is the heavy part of the whole business that actually casts, and the leader connects the fly to the fly line. I’m usually feeling mighty lucky if I can cast 25 feet of the fly line, and Bert was fishing 25 feet before he reached the line. He promised to send me the formula, and when I get it, I’ll look at it and gape. I doubt that I’ll ever be brave enough to fish a 25-foot leader.

Restaurants and Inns

In northwestern Connecticut, we were in the land of the cute country inn. There was a cute tiny town every 15 miles or so, with some cute restaurants, and some cute shops selling electric bicycles or Shaker furniture, and a pretty covered bridge and then another pretty covered bridge and some charming barns, and all of it with just a whole lot of charm and prettiness and cuteness and smartness.

I keep a running list of places to stay or eat or fish in different states, and the White Hart Inn, Salisbury, Connecticut, was on my list, probably cadged from some magazine article that caught my eye, and it was near enough to the Housatonic for us to stay there.

The original part of the Inn was built as a farmhouse in 1806. Here’s the Inn’s description from its website:

The property features 16 guest rooms, three dining rooms, a taproom with a full-service bar, two outdoor dining patios, a large porch with drink service, a ballroom and café. The artwork of Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Terry Winters, Donald Baechler, Hugo Guinness and Duncan Hannah is displayed throughout the premises.

I have to admit, I’ve got no clue who Terry Winters, Donald Baechler, Hugo Guinness, or Duncan Hannah are, but I’m certain it’s my loss. What’s worse is that I noticed none of the artwork displayed through the premises. I did have two great dinners in the restaurant, and it was a completely cute and smart and charming place. Score.

Fly Shops

There are no fly shops in northwestern Connecticut. Bert said there was one, but then one day it was open and then the next day it was closed. I’m going to use that as an excuse to tell you about the fly shops we visited in New York.

We started the trip at Joan Wulff’s casting school in the Catskills, near Livingston Manor, New York. There are actually two nearby towns, Livingston Manor (which has its annual Trout Parade), and Roscoe (“Trout Town USA“). Look, I’m a relatively unsophisticated trout angler, and always feel that if I catch a trout, the fishing gods for some peculiar reason have smiled on me for my innocence and devotion. The Catskills though are the area where American trout fly fishing developed, and reached a level of sophistication that still defines the sport. The Catskills have had other things going on–Jewish Borscht Belt humor for instance, and Hudson River School painting. In recent years it’s become a destination for Brooklyn hipsters seeking a weekend in the woods. But trout, and fly fishing, have been the area’s mainstay for 150 years.

In Roscoe, New York, there are three fly shops on one street. Roscoe, population 541, has almost as many fly shops as Houston, population 3 million. In Livingston Manor, just up the road from Roscoe, there is Dette Fly Shop (which actually moved to Livingston Manor from Roscoe). Dette opened in 1928, and inside it looks exactly like a fly shop from Diagon Alley. It’s now owned by the third generation of Dettes. I’ve been tying flies for Alaska, and had a list of obscure materials that I couldn’t find in Houston. Dette had it all, and the counter help led us down aisles packed with obscure bits of fluff and feathers to find a dozen different colors of the very thing crammed into a bin stacked underneath another bin.

It was highly entertaining, and going there and looking at the place is a pilgrimage for every fly fisher. It was so packed with stuff that they displayed fly rods on the ceiling because there was otherwise no space. On. The. Ceiling.

Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, and Mark Twain

I ran into Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens–figuratively, not literally–at roughly the same time, in Mrs. Miller’s American Literature class my junior year in high school. She played The Unanswered Question in class for us, and ever since I’ve had a fondness for Ives. I don’t think it’s misplaced, though Kris would disagree. She found the number of Ives pieces I had on my Connecticut playlist annoying.

Me on the other hand, I love Ives. I love listening for the Easter eggs in his music, and the complications, and the moments of intense serenity. I read once that Ives is hard for musicians because of the dissonances, rhythmic tumbles, and linear incoherencies. To me that’s the fun of it, but I did download a lot of Ives.

Ives was born and raised in Connecticut, attended Yale, then owned and ran an insurance agency in New York. He is considered the originator of modern estate planning, at least by Wikipedia. He wrote his music in obscurity, but was wealthy enough to be a New York music patron and to fund, from time to time, performances of his music. He wrote music for 20 years, then more or less stopped. He may be the fifty states’ most significant composer. Me, I just find the notion of two marching bands in the town square playing different tunes at the same time completely believable, and delightful.

Stevens, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish. He was born and raised in Connecticut, attended Harvard, then worked as an insurance company lawyer in Hartford. Does this sound familiar? His poetry is obscure and difficult. Does this sound familiar? I had to write an essay about the Emperor of Ice Cream.

Take from the dresser of deal, 
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet 
On which she embroidered fantails once 
And spread it so as to cover her face.

That essay still embarrasses me. Did Mrs. Miller think that a 15-year old would understand what death has to do with a roller of big cigars from the preceding verse, or concupiscent curds? I didn’t, but I take comfort now in knowing that even though I like the poem, and could probably recite it by memory with a wee bit of preparation, I still have little clue what’s going on.

Stevens was apparently kind of difficult. There is the famous punch-out of Stevens in Key West by Ernest Hemingway, instigated by a probably drunk Stevens, but better still is the famous put-down of Stevens in Key West by Robert Frost, whose poetry is, at least, mostly comprehensible:

“The trouble with you, Robert, is that you’re too academic.”

“The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you’re too executive.”

“The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about– subjects.”

“The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about– bric-a-brac.”

Bric-a-brac. Was there ever a harder slam? And it was, after all, a sheet on which she embroidered fantails once. If that ain’t bric-a-brac, what is?

Anyway, for 50 years I’ve off and on tried to read Wallace Stevens with some comprehension, appreciation, and intelligence. I’m a failure. Sometimes there are moments of brilliance that make it through to my small brain–“death is the mother of beauty“–sometimes there are moments of sublimity–“for she was the maker of the song she sang./The ever hooded, gesturing sea . . . “–but mostly I’m just stupidly baffled. I should give it up, but I probably won’t.

Mark Twain, an adopted Connectician, wasn’t born in Connecticut, and didn’t attend either Harvard or Yale. He did move to Hartford in 1873 and became a director of the Hartford Accident Insurance Company. As a director he gave a brilliant speech on the importance of accident insurance:

Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance line of business–especially accident insurance. Ever since I have been a director in an accident-insurance company I have felt that I am a better man. Life has seemed more precious. Accidents have assumed a kindlier aspect. Distressing special providences have lost half their horror. I look upon a cripple now with affectionate interest–as an advertisement. I do not seem to care for poetry any more. I do not care for politics–even agriculture does not excite me. But to me now there is a charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable.
Mark Twain, Speech on Accident Insurance, 1874.

Unlike that other Hartford insurance man, Wallace Stevens, Mark Twain is mostly comprehensible.

Pizza

New Haven is particularly famous for its pizza. Bert said we had to have the pizza on our way back to LaGuardia, and said that since we wouldn’t go through New Haven we should stop at the Frank Pepe’s in Danbury. Frank Pepe is credited as the originator of New Haven style pizza, The Guardian claims that the original Pepe’s pizza in New Haven is the best in the world, and The New York Times says that even the Pepe’s outlets are consistently good.

We ate at the Danbury outlet. It was the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. Dear Lord, please let me eat that pizza at least once again.

I’d show you a picture of the pizza, but we ate it before we thought about a photo. I did get a picture of the box.

Where We Didn’t Go

I’d like to have visited the Mystic Seaport Museum. Maybe when we go back to Rhode Island we’ll sneak across the border.

Playlist

Charles Ives, of course.

Did you know the Carpenters are from Connecticut? Karen and Richard. My senior year in high school, they had to be the most popular singers in America, and I thought then that if I never heard Close to You Again, my life would be richer for it. I despised them.

The Carpenters and Richard Nixon, 1973, White House Photo.

Look at that hair! The Carpenters’ hair is pretty remarkable too.

I suppose that I’ve mellowed since I was 17, but if I hadn’t gone to Connecticut I would never have heard Close to You again. And I was right. I would have been richer for it.

On the day that you were born the angels got together
And decided to create a dream come true
So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair of gold and starlight in your eyes of blue

Who can say those words with a straight face, or at least a crippling dose of irony. The only thing I can say is that there are worse things on a Connecticut playlist. Michael Bolton is also from Connecticut.

Laura Nyro is from Connecticut, and I love Laura Nyro. Sometimes the only thing better than Laura Nyro is listening to covers of Laura Nyro: And When I Die by Blood Sweat & Tears, Wedding Bell Blues by the 5th Dimension, Stoney End by Linda Ronstadt (ok, ok, and Barbara Streisand), Eli’s Coming by Three Dog Night . . . Such good stuff.

I came across an interesting Laura Nyro factoid, that after Al Kooper left Blood, Sweat & Tears, but before David Clayton Thomas, the band invited Laura Nyro to be the lead singer. She turned them down. Lordy, Lordy, what might have been.

The jazz pianist Horace Silver is from Connecticut, and there’s a very good big band song, Connecticut, that was recorded by Judy Garland and Bing Crosby, and by Artie Shaw. I liked the song Kylie from Connecticut by Ben Folds a lot.

Willie Deville of Mink Deville is from Connecticut, and after his punk phase he moved to New Orleans and recorded some terrific Americana, including covers of Spanish Harlem and Come a Little Bit Closer. John Mayer is from Connecticut, and is perfectly acceptable.

It was, all told, a pretty good playlist, though Kris got sick of all the Charles Ives.

I remember when Mrs. Miller played The Unanswered Question for us, she left me thinking that the question unanswered was something big, existential, the meaning of life and whatnot . . . When I hear it now I amuse myself by substituting other questions: Would you like to go to prom? What’s for dinner? Where did you fish? I guess those are pretty big questions too, and in my experience as like as not to be unanswered.

Guitar

I took the Kohno and played a good bit, especially on the front porch of the Beaverkill Valley Inn in New York, mostly trying to relearn a transcription of Cadiz by Albeniz. Bert promised that he would send a decal for my guitar case, and I need to follow up.

April 11, 2022April 21, 2022

Kentucky Packing List

Gear

We took waders and wading boots. It was March and still cold, so we also took sweaters and rain jackets and gloves and knit caps. We took long underwear. We needed the sweaters, and long underwear helps when you wade in cold water, but the gloves (and the mukluks) were a bit of overkill.

I‘ve written already about my new/old bamboo rod. I used a 6-weight, weight-forward floating line with a 9-foot 4X leader, which is meaningful if you fly fish but gibberish if you don’t.

I used a Hardy Duchess reel, which is a newer reel that harkens back to designs from before the last World War, or maybe the one before that. It’s handmade in England, is very pretty, and most of all it looks right with a bamboo rod.

You don’t really use a reel when you fly fish for freshwater fish. To bring the fish in you just pull in the line by hand and let it pile up at your feet, so honestly the reel has a lot in common with ear rings or the color of a car’s paint job. It’s meaningful but not essential. That means that for no rational reason your reel needs to be as pretty as possible. The Hardy is very pretty.

I caught my wee trout on a dry-dropper rig, a dry fly floating on the surface so that I could see it and a trailing nymph underwater. The dry fly was a #14 Royal Wulff, which seems to be my go-to dry these days, and the nymph was a random #14 pheasant tail mayfly nymph that caught my eye when I poked through my fly box. I watched the dry fly so that when it went under, I knew the fish had taken the nymph.

Whiskey

By law, when you go to Kentucky, you are statutorily required to visit at least one whiskey distillery for each day you’re in the state. Kentucky makes it convenient by locating a distillery every 37 feet. We were in Kentucky three days and met the statutory minimum for distillery visits.

What is or is not bourbon is defined by statute. It must be corn-based, and it has to meet certain standards during distilling and aging. Whiskey taxes were a significant source of revenue for the federal government in the 19th century, and 1897 laws regulating bourbon pre-dated the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. By 1900 if you were buying bonded bourbon, you were buying something that didn’t contain lead, or wood alcohol, or any number of other things that shouldn’t be in the bottle. Not that it was good for you, it just wasn’t as bad as it might be.

Other than being American, bourbon doesn’t come from a particular place. It doesn’t have to be made in Kentucky. There are bourbon distilleries located in places like Indiana and Ohio and Texas, but Indiana bourbon just doesn’t trip off the tongue. When one thinks of bourbon, one thinks of Kentucky.

There is a side-note here, about water. A waitress in Southern Kentucky apologized to us for Kentucky’s lousy drinking water. I’m guessing that she was saying that her local water was poor quality, but the area where bourbon historically comes from, the area of North-Central Kentucky west of the Appalachians, actually has great water. That’s one of the reasons that bourbon is made in Kentucky. Well, great water and corn. Well great water and corn and money.

When we fished the Driftless in the Midwest I learned that what makes the Driftless special is its karst topology. Karst is characterized by relatively porous sandstone, dolomite, and limestone lying close to the surface and from time to time poking through. In Kentucky, the rock is mostly limestone. Water that seeps underground fractures the rock–Kentucky’s caves, including Mammoth Cave, are the products of fractured and hollowed limestone. Water literally runs through the fractures and seeps through the pores, and the pressure from rain forces clean and mineralized water out at springs. There are springs everywhere. For fly fishers, it’s one of the best things going. The resulting spring creeks, clean and enriched, support plenty of bug life, which in climes further north support trout and should support smallmouth in Kentucky. It’s also one of the best things going for whiskey.

Kentucky Geological Survey, Karst Topology of Kentucky. The dark blue is the heaviest karst areas, the light blue less so.

Over the course of a couple of days with an additional day fishing, we toured the Buffalo Trace, Makers Mark, and Woodford Reserve distilleries. At Woodford Reserve, the tour guide distilled (get it? get it?) whiskey making for us: whiskey making is making beer and then distilling the beer to clean out the mess and concentrate the alcohol. It’s not, he told us, very good beer, but I guess bad beer makes pretty good whiskey. To be bourbon, it has to be at least 50% corn-based and and the distilled beer must be barrel-aged in new oak barrels. There’s no minimum time for aging, but the longer it ages, the better it should be, but the longer it ages the more loss there is from evaporation, the longer it has to be stored, and the more expensive it all becomes.

There are few things that smell better than a warehouse full of aging bourbon in oak barrels.

Where We Stayed

We stayed in the 21C Hotel in Louisville. It’s the third time we’ve stayed in a 21C. The other times were in Bentonville, Arkansas, and in Kansas City. They’re a bit pricey, but they are unbelievably friendly to pets, have interesting art everywhere, and lurking red plastic 4-foot penguins that you can move around in the hallways to disturb your neighbors. The first of the 21C Hotels were in Lexington and Louisville.

Louisville is not a rich city. Kentucky is a poor state generally, and I guess it always has been. After all, Daddy sold a hog each fall to buy us kids shoes. On the flip side, there’s a lot of wealth–just drive down a horse-farm back road. Those splits, poverty/wealth, whiskey/conservative Protestants, urban/country, they all seem harder in Kentucky than in other places, at least harder than I’m used to. Kris thinks I’m making it up. She thought Louisville was great.

Where We Didn’t Go

I never made it to the Louisville Slugger Museum. It was two blocks from our hotel, and I never made it.

We never made it down by the Green River where Paradise lay. We never saw Appalachia from the Kentucky side (we’ve been to West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania), or Mammoth Cave.

Restaurants

I wouldn’t write home about the donuts or the barbecue, but Louisville has pretty good restaurants. We ate at the hotel one night, at Proof on Main, and the next night at a very good interior Mexican food restaurant, Maya Cafe. The last night we ate at at Everyday Kitchen, and to my eye its menu had a lot of East European food. East European food is to me mighty exotic, it’s just not something I’ve seen very much of, and at the same time it’s completely comprehensible, like Mom’s home cooking. My brushes with East European food in Milwaukee and Chicago and Louisville may be one of the things I like most about the Old Northwest.

I had stuffed cabbage.

The most remarkable thing about the restaurants in Louisville was the amount of whiskey on the menus. There were moderately priced whiskeys by the barrel, and expensive whiskeys that made fly reels look cheap. There were pages of whiskeys, regiments of whiskeys, whiskeys waiting in the wings just to get on stage. I didn’t know there were that many whiskeys in the world.

Mind, that picture only starts with the letter “O”. There were 13 letters of the alphabet preceding. Those aren’t bottle prices either.

Route

Going out we drove from Houston to Nashville; coming home we left early and drove straight through. There are more eighteen-wheelers on the road from Little Rock to Memphis than there are distilleries in Kentucky. If I ever drive to Kentucky again, I’ll drive through Louisiana.

Music

What a lot of music there is from Kentucky. There’s not a lot of jazz; Les McCann and, if you stretch it as to the jazz, Rosemary Clooney. There is a lot of bluegrass and country. Besides Loretta Lynn, there’s the Monroe Brothers, Tom T. Hall, Crystal Gayle, The Judds, Rickey Skaggs, Merle Travis, and Dwight Yoakum. “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” isn’t nearly as bad as I remember it.

I looked forward to Sturgill Simpson and My Morning Jacket coming up on the playlist. Simpson put out Metamodern Sounds in Country Music in 2014, and a A Sailor’s Guide to Earth in 2016, and both albums astonish me, as much for the lyrics as the music. “Turtles all the Way Down” is a country song about Jesus, or Buddha, or LSD, or the turtle that holds up the world. Or something.

My Morning Jacket always satisfies.

Main Street, Paradise Kentucky, 1898. From Wikipedia.

And then there are the 37 versions of John Prine’s “Paradise.” John Fogarty, Johnny Cash, John Prine, Tom T. Hall, Dwight Yoakum, Jackie DeShannon, John Denver, Roy Acuff, Tim O’Brien . . . And Sturgill Simpson. Everybody’s recorded “Paradise.” I think if you are from Kentucky, you have to record a cover of “Paradise” before you’re allowed to open a distillery.

Guitar

I took the Kohno, and played a good bit. I’ve been working on the first movement of Bach’s 4th Lute Suite, but I can never get much past page 2, and it’s a lot longer than two pages. I’ve also been working on songs I once knew but don’t know any more–an arrangement of Summertime, some Tarrega, some Sanz, and a transcription of Albeniz’s Cadiz. That’s gone a lot better.

March 2, 2022March 11, 2022

Kentucky

Kentucky has whiskey and horses, a coal-miner’s daughter, Daniel Boone, and Muhammed Ali. I like whiskey, perhaps too much, and I wish all horses well. The legacy of coal is becoming more and more just that, a legacy. Muhammed Ali was The Greatest. He said so, and I agree.

I’ve never been to Kentucky (or for that matter its northern neighbors, Ohio and Indiana). I’ve been in Missouri across the Mississippi from Kentucky, and often enough to Tennessee, but never Kentucky. This is how Kris and I will look entering Kentucky for the first time, except that I’ll be carrying a fly rod instead of a rifle:

George Caleb Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers Through the Cumberland Gap, 1851, oil on canvas, Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis.

I hope we can get a horse at the Kentucky border. Otherwise Kris will have to walk.

As of the 2020 census, Kentucky has a population of 4.5 million. The population is 87.5 percent white, 8.5 percent black, and 4 percent everybody else. Less than 5 percent of the population is Hispanic or Latino. The consolidated city-county of Louisville, the state’s largest metro area, has a population of 782,969, with the city itself being 32.8 percent Black and 62.8 percent white. Consolidated Lexington, the second largest area, has a population of 322,570. The urban areas in Kentucky are seeing substantial growth, both economic and by population. The rural areas are generally suffering population losses, and they’re poor. As of 2019, Kentucky ranked among the poorest states, 44th, with a median annual family income of $52,295, just ahead of New Mexico and just behind Oklahoma.

In the 2020 presidential election, Kentucky voted 62 percent (1,326,646) to 36% (772,474) for Donald Trump. That’s pretty consistent with the other poor states, except New Mexico. The only two areas voting for Democrats were the two most populous counties, Fayette (Lexington–59.25% for Biden) and Jefferson (Louisville–59.06% for Biden). The Kentucky senators are Republicans Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell. Five Kentucky Congressmen are Republicans. The sixth, John Yarmuth, is retiring.

Interestingly, the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky are Democrats, though nobody else in Kentucky appears to be. The Governor, Andy Beshear, won the 2019 election by fewer than 5,000 votes, and the election must have seemed a harbinger for the 2020 presidential election. Maybe it was, but not in Kentucky.

On the north, Kentucky is bordered by the Ohio River, on the east the Appalachians, on the west the Mississippi, and the south, well, nothing really. It’s just one of those arbitrary borders that separates two places, in this case Kentucky and Tennessee. The Appalachian/Cumberland Plateau takes up the eastern third of the state. Central Kentucky is apparently rolling hills covered with bluegrass pastures, while the northwest again becomes hilly. There’s some Mississippi River marshland down in the southwest, but not a lot.

There are two coal-producing areas, the Western Coal Field and the Eastern Coal Field. Butcher Holler is in the Eastern Coal Field, somewhere to the right of Lexington.

My daddy worked all night in the Van Lear coal mines
All day long in the fields a-hoein corn

Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner’s Daughter, 1969.

Kentucky coal mining, Kentucky Geological Survey, University of Kentucky

In addition to the Ohio, there are two other major rivers in Kentucky; the Cumberland wanders through Southeast Kentucky and North Central Tennessee, and the Kentucky runs from the Appalachians northwest through central Kentucky to the Ohio. There’s also a bit of the Mississippi. The Green River, the one in John Prine’s Paradise that Mr. Peabody’s coal train hauled away, is in the Western Coal Field.

The Green is supposed to be a pretty good smallmouth river.

For anglers, all of that stuff–except maybe the whiskey and the rivers–is of secondary importance to the real question: what kind of fish are there, and where. Kentucky is not a destination fishing state, at least for fly fishers, but in addition to the big three there are plenty of smaller rivers and streams. There are stocked and naturally reproducing trout, but they’re not native–though a lot of the fly fishing literature on the state is about where to find trout. Most of the guides in the state appear to be located near the Cumberland in Southern Kentucky–a dam tailwater–though there are also some guides out of Lexington. In addition to trout, there are catfish and sunfish, spotted bass, largemouth bass, and smallmouth bass. When we go next week, I hope we can try for smallmouth near Lexington, but it may still be too cold.

I recall that spotted bass used to be called Kentucky bass, but I had a hard time finding references to Kentucky bass on the internet.

Micropterus Dolomieu
Small-Mouth Black Bass — John J. Baird, Small-Mouth Black Bass, 1897, Manual of fish culture based on the methods of United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, from the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

In addition to Muhammed Ali and Loretta Lynn, Kentucky has had a penchant for producing (or being the home of) poets, especially reasonably important 20th Century poets. There are, in more or less historical order, Robert Penn Warren, Thomas Merton, Wendell Berry, and the recently deceased bell hooks. I can’t say that I’ve read anything by Warren except for All the King’s Men, which I vaguely recall is a novel, but Warren is the only person to have won a Pultizer Prize in both fiction and poetry. I’ve read a good bit of Merton, particularly The Seven Storey Mountain, which I vaguely recall is an autobiography. Reading his poetry–which isn’t always comprehensible–feels almost like reading parts of the Bible–which also isn’t always comprehensible. I’ve read almost none of bell hooks, who honestly until her recent death I hadn’t heard of. Old white Southerner, black feminist writer–I guess I’m not her target audience. I’ve reserved a couple of her books from our local library, but don’t have them yet.

Getting ready to go to Kentucky, I’ve read a good bit of Wendell Berry, who is, I think, peculiarly Southern in his dedication to agrarian values and anti-government convictions, and peculiarly un-Southern in his antiwar convictions. He also doesn’t seem to ever write a funny line, which seems peculiarly un-Southern except among evangelicals. The closest I could come to a funny line was this:

It may be that we can keep without harm some industrial comforts; warm baths in wintertime maybe, maybe painless dentistry.

From Our Deserted Country, Ten Essays.

I say it’s not funny. It’s kinda funny, but I suspect even in that Berry was mostly serious. In his photos he looks happy enough.

Berry in December 2011 — Guy Mendes, 2011, Wendell Berry

Besides the poets, I am old enough to have grown up revering Daniel Boone, but probably the folk hero Daniel Boone, not the actual Daniel Boone. The actual Boone never wore a coonskin cap, and no American hero has survived more historical (and ahistorical) revisions than Boone, culminating in the 1964 TV series Daniel Boone, starring Fess Parker.

I loved that show.

The actual Boone was born in 1735 to a Quaker family in Pennsylvania. After his father, Squire Boone, fell out with local Quakers, the Boones moved to North Carolina. Daniel married Rebecca in North Carolina in 1756, but he didn’t much cotton to farming. Even after marriage he spent most of his time on months- and even years- long hunts for pelts for the fur trade. He wandered as far from North Carolina as Florida, and purchased land there. At some point he wandered into Kentucky.

In the popular imagination, Boone opened Kentucky for settlement. He first entered Kentucky in 1767, and in 1769 returned and spent two years exploring. That’s two years out gallivanting. There is a possibly apocryphal tale of Boone returning from a long hunt to find that Rebecca had a new daughter fathered by Boone’s brother. Possibly apocryphal, possibly true. If true, Boone apparently took it in stride.

Boone famously trail-blazed the Wilderness Road from Virginia to Tennessee through the Cumberland Gap. Boone entered Kentucky during a peculiarly violent period of American history. Beginning with the Revolutionary War and continuing through the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, there was constant warfare and the threat of warfare with the British and the Northwestern tribes. Boone had the reputation of an Indian fighter, and he was certainly involved in the Northwest Indian War, but late in life Boone said that he had only ever killed three Indians. He was a brilliant pathfinder, a respected leader, a great hunter, but not the rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man the frontier ever knew. He was a colonel in the state militia, at a time when because of the constant threat of local war the rank meant something.

My favorite Boone quote was that he was never lost, but that he was misplaced for a few days from time-to-time.

In 1799 Boone moved west to Missouri because he went broke in Kentucky. He had claimed a lot of land in Kentucky, but didn’t really have the temperament to be a land investor, and didn’t have the resources to hold all of his land together.

In 1820 he was 85 when he died in Defiance, Missouri. He was a legend in his own time, largely because of a contemporary popular pamphlet. Later the penny press took up Boone, and created the folk-hero that lasted through my childhood infatuation with the Boone portrayed by Seth Parker.

D. Boon cilled a bar and swung through the forest on grape vines.

Carl Wimar 1855, The Abduction of Boone’s Daughter by the Indians, oil on canvas, Amon Carter Museum of American Art

In the 1800s Wisconsin historian Lyman Draper collected Boone’s papers and the oral remembrances of his descendants and his contemporaries, so unlike many historical figures we know a lot about Boone. Boone himself wasn’t shy about telling his story, and unlike many, he was pretty reliable. Later still there would be largely discredited revisionist theories concerning Boone, that pronounced that most settlers of Kentucky came down the Ohio River, not across the Wilderness Road, or that Boone was only the lackey of real estate investors who told him what to do, or that in some other way Boone should get no credit for the settlement of Kentucky. That, apparently, is about as bad of history as the folk tales, even though it was propagated by academic historians.

Interestingly, the folk-hero Boone is the subject of an early statue removal, in this case in the nation’s capital. A marble statue of The Rescue, generally believed to be Boone rescuing his family, was displayed in the Capital from 1853 until 1959, more than 100 years, until it was removed during building work and never put back. By 1959 it was the subject of considerable controversy, and I figured that they did the building work just to get rid of the statue, along with the statue of Christopher Columbus on the other side of the stairway (which is also still in storage).

Horatio Greenough, The Rescue, 1837-1850, white marble. It was dropped by a crane at some point, and is now in storage. I’ve never heard that it was dropped on purpose.

Boone was 43 by the time he made it to Kentucky. For my first trip to Kentucky I’m a bit older than that, but instead of founding Boonesborough, I can make a motel reservation. In any event, I’m just in it for the whiskey. I mean the fish.

Tag: Music

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