Tag: Restaurants

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Happy New Year! North Dakota!

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/10159

John Caleb Bingham, Trappers Descending the Missouri, 1845, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I know, I know, it’s February, and I haven’t written anything since, I dunno, August of last year? I’ve stalled. It’s past Valentine’s, and I haven’t wished you Happy New Year.

Happy New Year!

We have fished. We’ve fished for Redfish at Port O’Connor, for bonefish on South Andros in the Bahamas, and I caught a 12-pound grass carp at Damon on a six weight Winston trout rod. The carp dragged my canoe around until it finally came to hand. We were both exhausted, but I’m pretty certain that I was the only one happy about it.

I’ve planned fishing trips. In April I’m going with a group from Houston to Cuba, which is these days a hot fly-fishing destination. We’re going for the benefit of the Cuban people, but we’ll also fish. In September Kris and I are going to Maine, so maybe we’ll add at least one state this year.

And we’ve traveled without fishing. In November we went to Spain for our son’s wedding, and that took a lot of physical and mental energy. I had to write a speech for the wedding dinner, and it was the best wedding speech ever. You should have been there.

gratuitous photo of a barracuda I caught on South Andros with a spinning rod.

Gratuitous photo of a barracuda I caught in January in the Bahamas with a spinning rod.

We cleaned out our storage bin, mostly, and I learned Spanish, some. The Astros won the World Series.

So we’ve been stuck at 31 states since last August, and all of my angler’s block stems from our September trip to North Dakota.I had dreaded North Dakota. Even though I grew up in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota is just a wee bit past the middle. There are big lakes in North Dakota, some natural lakes left by glaciers, some man-made, and if you want to fish for walleye with conventional gear, it’s a good place to go. Not so much for fly fishing.

From time to time in recent years I’ve checked the internet for suggestions for fly fishing in North Dakota, and have come across a lot of forum posts that look something like this:

QUERY: I’ve just moved to North Dakota for medical school/to count grasshopers/for the climate. Where is there to fly fish?

REPLY: South Dakota. All the rivers in North Dakota are flat, slow, and muddy.

It’s kinda hard to separate South Dakota and North Dakota, though Congress clearly managed it. The best history of North Dakota, Dakota by Norman Rijsford, is also the best history of South Dakota. The Dakota/Lakota, the Mandan, the Cheyenne, the Crow, the Hidatsa, the Chippewa . . . they all blatantly disregarded the state line. When Lewis and Clark traveled up the wide Missouri, they never mentioned when they crossed from south to north. Congress separated the Dakotas when they entered the Union because the locals couldn’t agree on a location for the state capitol. South Dakota still ended up with Pierre.

There is one difference between the states. There are no native trout in North Dakota, and at least historically there wasn’t much fly fishing anywhere without trout. South Dakota, in and around Badlands National Park, has trout. North Dakota also has a national park, Theodore Roosevelt, but no trout.

After a lot of internet perusing I found a guide in Bismarck, halfway between the state’s eastern and western borders, about 16 hours and 980 miles almost directly north of Vernon, Texas, my hometown. That driving route is roughly on the line of the 100th Meridian, where the wetter east gives way to the drier Great Plains.

From The Great Plains Trail. I don’t know where they stole it from. The dry line may be moving east because of Global Warming. Just another thing to keep you up at night.

We didn’t make that drive though. We flew from Houston to Minneapolis, which would have been a roughly 17 hour and 1,230-mile drive. In Minneapolis we went to a late-season Twins game at Target Field on St. Olaf College night, ate fried walleye, bought some pike flies at a local fly shop, and had a delicious, healthy breakfast at the Minnesota State Fair: Mini donuts shot into a deep frier out of a mini-donut gun, fried cheese curds, deep fried corn on the cob, and a corny dog. I had a corny dog anyway. Kris didn’t really eat her fair share of the cheese curds either.

The guide I found, Kurt Yancy, isn’t a full-time fly fishing guide, but he is a full-time fishing guide who dabbles in fly fishing, and he said we might catch smallmouth, walleye, pike, or carp. On his website there are lots of photos of guys dressed against a north wind holding large walleyes. You can catch walleye on fly rods, but they’re mostly caught deep in lakes, as much as 30 feet, and once you get much beyond ten feet fishing with a fly rod starts getting really stupid. Stupider.

It’s also hard to ice fish with a fly rod, so our potential North Dakota season was short.

Driving from Minneapolis to Bismarck takes about six hours. We ate lunch at the Fisher’s Club on Middle Spunk Lake in Avon, Mn., and the Fisher’s Club is charming and someplace everyone should visit. At the visitor center in Fargo we met North Dakota’s most famous actor. Almost to Bismarck, we drove past miles and miles of ponds that set my heart racing, but Kurt told me later that the ponds were very shallow, only a couple of feet deep, and that they froze solid in winter. Fish couldn’t survive the freeze. A thousand miles further south and those miles of ponds would be a destination, except of course when they dried up in the heat of the summer.

Well, actually, a thousand miles further south they’d be High Plains playa lakes, and those aren’t something you fish either.

At the Fargo visitor’s center, North Dakota’s most famous actor. He was autographed by the Coen brothers.

Ok, that’s enough of a wind up. Here’s the bottom line: we didn’t catch a fish in North Dakota. It was hard to get to, and then it was even harder getting home–it was our first intimation that things are a bit screwed up at Southwest Airlines. Coming home we had a 16-hour day and were routed through New Orleans from Austin to get to Houston. We could have gone to Paris from New York and back to New York again.

And like I said, we didn’t catch a fish. We fished the second day at Nelson Lake and watched carp gulp air into their swim bladders because the outfall from the power plant was heating the lake. It was frustrating. The first day though we fished in the side channels of the Missouri River, and the Missouri, maybe our most famous river after the Mississippi, was magnificent for every reason except fly fishing. You can’t stand beside the Missouri without thinking about Lewis and Clark, Teddy Roosevelt, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, western migration, buffalo, migratory birds and antelope and seas of grass, everything the plains are. North Dakota feels as wild as it gets in the lower 48.

Thoreau wrote a series of essays about Maine, and in one, Chesuncook, after a companion gratuitously kills a moose, he is at his best, writing about our relationship to nature and to wildness, and how–and I paraphrase here–our highest use of nature is not to catch a fish, or chop down a tree, or kill a moose–those uses are petty. Our highest use is to discover our shared immortality with the fish, or the pine tree, or the moose. I’m not sure I buy that immortality business, but I get what he’s saying, at least a bit, and he recognizes in 1853, when there was still plenty ‘o wildness, that something was lost if our incidental uses used up the unsullied natural world, or if we only approached the natural world as something only to be fished, or lumbered, or hunted. In North Dakota, there’s still some natural world left to contemplate, and some of the human world too, particularly while standing on the bank of the Missouri River.

But dangit, higher aspirations and Henry David Thoreau aside, I surely would have liked to catch a fish.

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Narragansett Bay, Newport, Rhode Island, for Striped Bass, August 17-19, 2022.

This was our second trip to Newport, and we had to go back because the first trip we didn’t catch anything. This time one of us caught a good striped bass, and one of us foul-hooked something called a chub mackerel. Foul-hooked means you accidentally snag the fish somewhere besides the mouth. Here are two truths about fly fishing: whenever you foul-hook a fish, it’s a bad thing; and whenever you catch something called a chub, it’s also a bad thing. The combination creates kinda the worst of undesirables. I would have counted the chub though, if only I hadn’t foul-hooked it.

I guess I have to go back. Kris doesn’t, not that I’m jealous, but I suspect she’ll want to go along. She catches great fish in Rhode Island.

We fished with Captain Rene Letourneau, who has spent 71 years in Rhode Island. Rene put us on fish after fish after fish. Why didn’t I catch a fish? I couldn’t keep my line untangled. I couldn’t keep from standing on my line. I couldn’t cast. I was hopeless. Now mind, I’m not usually a horrible caster, but after spending a week two-hand casting in Alaska, I guess I’d forgotten how to cast a single-handed rod.

Last Saturday back in Houston, at the Texas Flyfishers annual mini expo, Jeff Ferguson from Lake Charles told me what I was doing wrong, and I slapped my forehead and said duh. Then I mentioned that in Rhode Island I was fishing with sinking and intermediate lines, not floating lines.

“Oh, that’s different . . . ” and then Jeff tried to explain how I needed to cast a sinking line and it was too much information and I had to walk away.

Even casting badly, I got plenty of shots. We were fishing where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Rhode Island coast, so even if Rhode Island is a tiny state it’s a pretty big place to fish, and seeing from the ocean side where the Atlantic meets the rocks is in itself worth the trip. Captain Letourneau went to where he expected fish and then we watched for birds. The striped bass chase baitfish to the surface, then the birds join the feeding frenzy. The water is boiling with fish and the sky is boiling with diving gulls. It all lasts a few minutes, and then it dies until it pops up again 200 yards away. I had some hook-ups but lost them. My most exciting fish wasn’t a striper at all but a a toothy bluefish that took my fly just long enough to cut my leader.

Did I mention that one of us caught a great striped bass, over 30 inches and about 12 pounds, and it wasn’t me? Dammit.

When we were in Alaska one of our guides, Tom Schaeffer, was from Maine, and he told us about his nephew’s new bonefish lodge in the Berry Islands in the Bahamas, Soul Fly Lodge. In Rhode Island, Rene was telling us about his trip to Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas with Peter Jenkins, who owns The Saltwater Edge in Newport. We’d met last year the first time I didn’t catch a fish in Rhode Island. Our last day at the dock there stood Peter, who was buying a new used boat, and who told us he’d invested in Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas. Now I kinda feel it’s preordained that we go to Soul Fly Lodge in the Bahamas. Are the Bahamas a state? Can we fit it in after the Dakotas?

Anyway, I’m ok with going back to Newport. We found a place to stay that wasn’t extraordinarily expensive–and there are a lot of places to stay in Newport that define expensive. The Sea Whale was roughly $200 per night, which in Newport counts as a bargain. The Sea Whale had it’s own humble charm and free parking, was spotless, and was only a block from Flo’s Clam Shack.

We reconnected with clam shacks, which are the greatest invention since taco stands, and over the three days we were in Rhode Island we made it to three: Flo’s in Middletown, Tommy’s World Famous in Warwick, and the Sea View Snack Bar in Mystic, Connecticut, where we went to see the Mystic Seaport Museum. There are a lot more clam shacks to visit. Fried clams and chowder are now high on my list of great picnic table eating, though for my money clam cakes are a poor second to hush puppies. Clam cakes could be greatly improved with some green onions and corn meal, but then hush puppies could probably be improved with some bits of clam.

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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.

Demonstrating the Nap T.

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. 

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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.

Charles Ives, 1913

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?

Sylvia Salmi, Wallace Stevens, 1948.

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.

Laura Nyro, circa 1968, from Wikipedia

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.

The White Hart Inn dining room.