Mostly that title has nothing to do with what I’m about to write, but it’s hard to go to Savannah and not hum Moon River, or ponder the possibilities in a box of chocolates, or try to remember the story line of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I needed to work at least one of those in somehow, but couldn’t think how. So there. Done.
The fish I caught near Savannah was not really one of my best fish. It was maybe 20 inches, so on the small side for redfish. It may have been a second year fish. It had good redfish color though, and I was really proud of that fish. For a combined full day of hard fishing, half a day for trout on Noontootla Creek in North Georgia in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and half a day in the Vernon River near Savannah, it was the only fish I caught in Georgia. Even if it wasn’t a trophy fish, it was a great fish.
I also caught it by luck. I was blind casting where the guide told me, under a bridge between the pylons, and when I picked up my line to recast there was a fish on my fly. I didn’t see that fish and cast to it. I didn’t feel the take. I thought at first I’d hung up on something, but then there it was. My Georgia fish. What a spectacular fish.
I also landed an oyster. It was also catch and release.
I could be less honest and tell you that the redfish was a bit bigger, maybe a lot bigger, and that it was all skill–my perfect cast fell exactly where I knew the fish would be, and when I began to lift the fly ever so gently–a Leisenring Lift in saltwater!–the fish slammed my fly hard and fast. It almost jerked the rod from my hands!
Did I mention it was about 24 inches?
Wait, wait, sorry, I was getting carried away, and Kris and our guide, Chad DuBose of Tall Tides Charters, would like as not call me on it. Not that I would ever tell you anything but exactly what happened, ever. Really.
And anyway blind luck is the way I catch a lot of fish. And I gotta admit I caught that fish by blind luck.
I was kinda sorry to catch that fish. I liked Georgia, especially Savannah and wouldn’t mind having to go back, especially to Savannah. I liked North Georgia, too, but our half-day was hard. We wade-fished, so we had to haul waders and boots and wading staffs from Texas. That’s heavy and bulky, and only gets heavier when wet. The stream where we fished, Noontootla Creek, was high, there were slick rocks and overgrown banks, and my new wading staff kept coming apart when I needed it.
Wading the Noontootla wore me out. I felt old.
The Noontootla is a small stream on private land, and all the fish were wild, none stocked. Normally it would have been terrific fishing, but they’d had rain and then some more rain, so the creek was running high and the fish were either sulking, dispersed, or already over-fed in the wash off. Our guide, Randy Bailey with Reel ‘Em In Guide Service, started the morning confident and ready to spend the day netting fish, and then we actually fished.
Randy must have adjusted my flies a half-dozen times trying to find something that worked. Early on I got one slap from a small fish on an indicator dry fly, and Randy caught a nice rainbow when he flipped out a streamer just to test the water. Otherwise nada. I should have known we were in trouble when the guys at the Fish Hawk in Atlanta told me we were going to catch a lot of fish. I should have knocked on wood, burnt a candle, and turned around three times and spat.
We fished nymphs. We fished dry flies. We fished nymphs under dry flies. We fished streamers. I even fished the girdle bugs they sold me at the Fish Hawk. Our friends Shelley and Mark fished a different beat with a different Reel ‘Em In guide, Chris Bradley , and Shelley caught a nice fish. She might tell you that she didn’t actually land the fish, that it came off when it was almost to hand, but if she won’t tell even a little white lie then I guess I’ll have to do it for her. Shelley caught that fish, and Mark got a photo, if not of the actual fish who’s to know?
Mark didn’t catch a fish. Kris didn’t catch a fish. I didn’t catch a fish. We fished hard. It was a beautiful day and a beautiful creek and by noon I was exhausted. When we were done I slept for about 18 hours, with no breaks except of course for lunch and dinner. I gained about eight pounds in Georgia, so I didn’t miss any lunches or dinners.
Google Maps
The next day Mark and Shelley flew back to Houston from Atlanta. Kris and I drove the half-dozen hours to Savannah, out of the mountains, through Atlanta and Macon, and into the Coastal Plain. Georgia’s a pretty big place, and there were plenty of places to fish that we missed. We didn’t even fish for bluegill in that pond behind the barbecue place, though I was tempted.
Savannah is a great vacation town. You can shop in Savannah. You can eat in Savannah and drink in Savannah, you can go to the beach, and you can just look around and see history. Best of all though, not far from the town, you can fish this.
I love coastal marshes. Sometimes I think it comes from growing up in the Great Plains–it’s flat and mostly treeless and covered with grass, just like home, and if it weren’t for all that water it could be West Texas. I lived years in Houston before I realized that there was wildness just an hour away, and that it was full of stuff no one would ever see unless they took some trouble.
Fishing for redfish near Savannah is a little different from fishing for redfish on the Texas Coast. Instead of fishing in the bay flats inside the barrier islands, Chad took us upstream on the Vernon River, away from the Atlantic into brackish tidal water. There were alligator gar and marsh grass and oysters. We could hear marsh wrens, and a quarter mile away, high in a dead tree, we could see a bald eagle. In the river, we could see dolphin fins while they cruised. The place we were, where land joins ocean, is rich with life, and while you’re there it demands your attention.
We fished out of Chad’s Hell’s Bay Professional, which is a fine Florida poling skiff. He poled the boat along the banks and called out the redfish–there were plenty of fish cruising the banks, and even if they didn’t take we got plenty of casts to cruising fish. While the water wasn’t always clear enough to see the fish themselves, the big pushes of water were unmistakeable. Even the May weather was great, sunny and warm with mild wind.
Chad knew the river, had grown up on the river, but he was also so proud of his city that it was contagious. Sure, he knew the fishing, but he also knew the restaurants, the neighborhoods, the hotels . . . It was fun just sitting back and listening.
And I’m game for more Savannah. There are more fish to catch, and Chad’s right, it’s a special place. Like I said, I’m kinda sorry I already caught that fish in Georgia. I’m ready to go back.
Scarlett O’Hara’s Bosom and Early Georgia History, in Order of Personal Significance
I figured that if we were going to Georgia I should re-read Gone with the Wind. I hadn’t read it since I was 12, and when I was 12 I liked it, or at least I liked having read it. All that Southern splendor was mighty fine, plus there was that movie poster featuring Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom. What Southern almost-adolescent boy could ignore the drama inherent in Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom? I had a copy of that poster on my wall, and I suspect it was years before I noticed that Clark Gable had a moustache.
My notion before our trip was to determine whether Gone with the Wind was anything more than a Lost Cause romance. After all, no book except the Bible has sold more American copies than Gone with the Wind. It won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, so somebody once thought it was important literature. The movie won the 1939 Oscar for best picture, and adjusted for inflation, it’s still the highest grossing movie ever.
I downloaded a free copy of the novel on Audible, but I couldn’t listen past the second chapter. What my 12-year old self admired, my 67-year old self found dreadful. Lost Cause propaganda? Who knows–I never got that far. These characters were all of them idiots. They were annoying and unlikeable and inane. Maybe Margaret Mitchell intended that they be annoying and unlikeable, but I don’t think they were supposed to be boring. I was unmoved by the set-up, despised the dialogue, and found Scarlett, cleavage or no, to be a ninny. I wanted to waste no more of my life with Mammy or the twins or Ashley or Melanie. I didn’t give a damn about Scarlett, or for that matter about Rhett.
So I can’t really tell you anything about Gone with the Wind, except I’d advise don’t bother. It had its moment, but that was when I was 12.
Still, that’s the best movie poster bosom ever. It’s Stereophonic.
I did read a good book about Georgia, Georgia, a Short History, by Christopher Meyers and David Williams, and there was some interesting stuff to learn.
Georgia was the youngest of the Thirteen Colonies, founded by James Oglethorpe in 1732 as a second chance for British debtors and a buffer against Spanish Florida. Settlers were from England’s poorest, and Oglethorpe prohibited hard liquor, slaves, and lawyers. Land was to be owned by the colony. Each immigrant’s tract was limited to 50 acres.
That bit of social engineering lasted roughly 20 years. There was no debt forgiveness, so not only were the English urban debtors–who had likely never farmed–expected to farm successfully on small tracts in difficult coastal soil, they were expected to repay their English debts from their unsuccessful farming. Many of the debtors skipped out to northern climes, leaving both Georgia and their debts. By the 1750s there was private ownership of large tracts–up to 500 acres–by slave owners. There were probably lawyers, too.
James Oglethorpe, glam rocker and failed reformer.
What was supposed to be an agrarian yeoman farmer utopia became a utopia for wealthy planters. Before the cotton gin, the planters–the large-tract slave-owning landowners–were confined to rice farms near the coast, but with cotton production Georgia became part of the Cotton Kingdom. The Trail of Tears and railroads opened upland Georgia to white settlement, and large landowners brought slaves and cotton to the upper Coastal Plain and the Piedmont to fill the void.
Georgia also achieved land fraud on a massive scale. After the Revolution, counties and the state sold land to new settlers and speculators, but they got into the habit of selling more land than there was actually dirt. The worst offender, Montgomery County, issued land warrants for 7,436,995 acres of land, which was 7,029,315 more acres of land than Montgomery County actually contained. By 1796, Georgia county officials had issued warrants for 29 million acres. Georgia then contained only 9 million acres.
The State Assembly was good at land sales, too, and in exchange for bribes (which in addition to money included nifty stuff like land, guns, and slaves) sold 50 million acres of Indian land for about a penny an acre–a ridiculous price for land that they had no right to sell. The sales were rescinded by the next Assembly, but were then found valid by the Supreme Court under the Contract Clause. The U.S. Congress ended up buying out the purchasers for $4.25 million. No Georgian should ever complain about federal buy-outs. Their’s was one of the first, and in inflation-adjusted dollars probably rivals anything that came later.
No state’s early American history was as governed by class hierarchy as Georgia’s, and how you see Georgia’s early history really does depend on where you stand. If you look at Georgia from the planters’ eyes, by the 1850s it was an economic dynamo powering a thriving economy. In 1860 Georgia’s per capita wealth was nearly double that of New York, which is pretty impressive, but on the other hand only six percent of white Georgians controlled about half the state’s wealth, which is pretty one-sided.
A lot of plain white folk saw Georgia differently from the planter class, particularly in the northern mountain portion of the state where there were few slaves, and in the southern Pine Barrens which couldn’t support big agriculture. In Georgia cities, slaves devalued free labor, and other than the rice and cotton planters, Georgia agriculture was largely small-parcel subsistence farming. In 1860, Georgia’s slaves were valued at about $400 million, about half the state’s wealth, but only about 37% of the white population owned any slaves, and planters were a sliver of that 37%.
Carrying Cotton to the Gin, Harper’s New Monthly, March, 1854.
And Georgia slaves like as not saw Georgia differently from their owners. When Georgians voted to secede and join the Confederacy, the measure passed by about 1000 votes, 42,744 to 41,717–but remember, these voters could only be white male property-owners. Slaves, who were 44% of the roughly one million Georgians, had no votes, and while one can never be certain, I’d bet good money that the slaves would have voted en masse to stay in the Union. Lincoln may not have planned to free the slaves, but apparently slaves throughout the South were convinced–along with the secessionists–that freedom was Lincoln’s plan.
Among plain white Georgians, the Civil War was increasingly seen as a rich man’s war fought by poor men, and throughout the war there were large numbers of deserters, draft dodgers, and even Union volunteers. In Georgia there were food riots, draft rebellions, and the formation of an active and vocal Peace Society. The cotton class may have seen the War as necessary and righteous, but to support the war effort they kept planting cotton instead of corn, hence the food riots. Wealthy planters were largely exempt from the draft and generally weren’t doing the actual fighting. Whatever else can be said about the South, the Confederacy was badly managed on the home front. By the end of the War, it’s estimated that nearly half of the Confederate army had deserted.
18,250 Georgian Confederates died in the Civil war, roughly a fifth of those who served. Georgia was also a battlefield from Chickamauga in 1863 in northwest Georgia to Sherman’s March to the Sea.
Georgia Geography
Pamela W. Gore, Geographic Regions of Georgia, from the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
By area, Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi, and 24th overall. It divides into five geographic regions. The Coastal Plain is in the south, and the southeastern border of the Coastal Plain is the Atlantic Ocean. The Piedmont is north of the Coastal Plain, above the fall line where rivers tend to rapids and the sedimentary rock of the Coastal Plain gives way to the harder crystalline rocks of the uplands. Generally the Piedmont soils are richer than the soils of the Coastal Plain, and Georgia’s southern Coastal Plain, the Wiregrass Region, is one of Georgia’s poorest regions. The exception for richer Coastal Plain soils is the rich black soil immediately below the Piedmont, the Black Belt that stretches from Georgia through Alabama to the Mississippi Delta. Along with the Delta became the Black Belt became the cotton-producing heartland for the South. The Black Belt was named first for the color of its soil, but the identification took on a new meaning because of the concentration of slaves. Big cotton thrived on black soil and slavery.
Abbasi786786, Majority Black Counties Based on the 2020 Census, from Wikipedia.
In Georgia’s far north, the three remaining regions seem to this outsider divided by terrain but otherwise lumped together, and it’s in North Georgia where Appalachia begins. The Appalachian trail starts northward in North Georgia, from Springer Mountain, elevation 3,780 feet, and James Dickey set Deliverance on a made-up river in North Georgia. We will trout fish in North Georgia, somewhat close to Brasstown Bald, Georgia’s highest mountain at 4,784 feet. I’ll take a guitar in case we run into any banjo players, but I’ll be damned if I do any canoeing.
Georgia is water rich. It has 14 major river basins, with more than 44,000 miles of perennial rivers. Its rivers tend to have great names: the Suwanee, the Ocmulgee, the Coosa, the Llappoosa, the Chattahoochee . . . Plus Georgia has about 100 miles of Atlantic coastline. The combination of elevation, coast, and rivers makes Georgia rich fishing. In the north there are native Appalachian brook trout and imported brown and rainbow trout. There are imported stripers in lakes, and redfish along the coast. There are ten species of black bass, including great river bass like the redeye, and bass unique to Georgia like Bartram’s.
We’re going trout fishing instead of bass fishing because we’re going to Atlanta for a wedding, and our friend Shelley (who will also be at the wedding) likes to fish for trout. Still, there’s always a chance of catching a bass in those northern Georgia rivers. I hope I catch a bass. Well, come to think of it, I hope I catch anything at all.
Population
At 21,029,227, Georgia is the 8th largest state by population, bracketed by Ohio at number 7 and North Carolina at number 9. It is one of the fastest growing states since World War II, and us Houstonians see Atlanta as our Southern mirror. Anglos are 50.4% of the Georgia population, African Americans 33.1%, and Hispanics 10.5%. Everybody else is a smidgeon. Most of the population growth is in Georgia’s Piedmont, which is the industrial heart of the state.
Other than the whole slavery thing, the birth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow segregation, Georgia’s civil rights history had some positives. Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Georgians were leaders in the Civil Rights movement throughout the South. Savannah desegregated early, but despite active movements Albany and Atlanta were slow. In 1971, then-governor Jimmy Carter declared a new era of Civil Rights in Georgia, but particularly in the rural areas of the state Jimmy probably jumped the gun.
Valdosta, Georgia Klan Rally, 1922, Georgia State Archives.
Politics
Is any state’s recent presidential politics more interesting than Georgia’s? I don’t pretend to understand what happened in 2020, but I have no doubt that there was no theft of the Georgia election. I’ve officiated over local elections, and massive voter fraud would not be easy. Oh sure, some lone soul might vote twice, or not be registered, but everything in American elections makes massive fraud almost impossible. It certainly couldn’t be accomplished by the efforts of a handful of people. It would take a whole dance card of conspiracy, and people, being what they are, would never be able to hide it. They can’t keep their mouth shut. If there had been massive fraud in Georgia, somebody involved would have bragged about their part over beers, at Thanksgiving dinner, or in their tell-all best seller. Instead as evidence of election interference we have a phone recording of a sitting President urging a governor to manufacture votes.
When you look at how the actual vote went, Georgia’s voting patterns are just like the rest of the country. Urban areas voted Democratic, and outside of the Black Belt, the rural countryside voted Republican. Trump substantially increased his vote totals from 2016, 2,089,104 votes in 2016 to 2,461,854 in 2020, but the Democrats did even better, 1,877,963 to 2,473,633. Democrats mostly carried majorities in the urban areas (as they had in 2016), but more total voters in rural areas also voted Democratic. F’rinstance, Atlanta’s urban Fulton County turned out substantially more Democratic voters in 2020 than in 2016 (529,931 to 334,053), but that trend was true in every Georgia County, even in counties where Trump otherwise had a majority. In the numerous rural counties Donald Trump carried, his margins shrank. Throughout the state voters who would not turn out in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton turned out in 2020 to vote for Joe Biden, or maybe to vote against Donald Trump.
From Wikipedia, AdamG2016, Georgia Presidential Election Results 2020.
Where We’ll Fish
Our plan doesn’t involve voting. We’ll fly into Atlanta and do wedding things for three days, then drive north with our friends the Marmons to Ellijay to fish a half day for trout. We’re taking waders and boots and 5-weights. The next day the Marmons head back to Houston, and Kris and I will head south out of Georgia’s Valley and Ridge, through the Piedmont, down to Savannah on the Coastal Plain to fish in saltwater for redfish. I may not catch any fish, but I will see a lot of Georgia. We fly back to Houston from Savannah.
We didn’t drive to Libby Camp the obvious way. If we’d stayed on the highway we could have driven on paved roads a good bit longer, so of course we didn’t do that. We drove the back way, west and then north around the back side of Baxter State Park. Kris drove and I napped.
I napped because I was sick, having been blindsided with a cold on the flight to Maine the morning before. I worried that it might be Covid, but it felt so purely like a cold that I didn’t worry much, and anyway there were no tests handy. I had been fine the day before we left. When I got onto the flight the next day I felt awful, but by then I was committed. By our second day in camp I was tired but mostly recovered. And anyway by then it was Kris’s turn to be sick, and she was doing an exemplary job of it for both of us.
So for me the cold was short-lived but rife with misery. The morning we drove to Libby Camp from Bangor I felt so bad that I didn’t even pretend I wanted to drive. I alternately dozed, blew my nose, and displayed manly stoicism, manly stoicism being the same as frequent and bitter complaining. I was particularly whiny when I woke up after lunch and had no clue where we were. Kris wasn’t real sure either, so I didn’t accomplish much except to increase her angst.
Kris at least was following a downloaded route, and it wasn’t her fault that the map app had gone on a backroads buying spree. We had only wanted to see Mount Katahdin when we left the highway. What we got was a tour of the Great North Maine Lumber Roads.
There are roughly 3.5 million acres of land in the North Maine Woods, and most of what isn’t water is a mix of second- or third- or more-growth mixed timber. Most of those 3.5 million acres are privately owned by lumber companies, and all of those dirt roads exist for the happiness of lumber company lumber trucks. By both the rules of the North Maine Woods and simple physics Nissan Rogue rental cars must yield.
I’m guessing returning a flattened rental car to National would have raised questions.
Back to that first day, at the Telos Road checkpoint on the backside of Baxter State Park we paid our $100 entry fee for a week in the Great Private North. Had we been 70+, our passage would have been free, but all in all we got our money’s worth. I’m not in any hurry for free passage. It’ll get here soon enough.
Jeffrey Labree, not Neil Thomas
Libby Camp has been in the North Maine Woods for somewhere north of 100 years. They cater to hunters, fishers, and winter snowmobilers. In addition to those field sports they offer family adventures–hiking, orchid hunting, canoeing, staying in a cabin in the woods with no TV or internet . . . It sounds wholesome and unforgettable. When I was 10 if my parents had taken me there I’d have been in heaven. I was pretty much in heaven six decades down the road.
We had signed up for Orvis Week, and there were three other anglers with us for the week: Bruce from South Carolina, Mike from upstate New York, and Paul from Tampa via Austin. Off and on while we were there we also met other anglers. There was a nice downstate Maine couple who interpreted many things Maine for us, and who called the state game warden at Bar Harbor to make sure we’d be safe notwithstanding the projected arrival of both the Thomases and Hurricane Lee. And the first night at dinner there was a strong personality who complained that while he had caught plenty of fish, he hadn’t caught anything big. Outside of politics I’ve rarely met someone with such a strong grasp of missing the point, but he was amusing, and his friend was along for the ride. After dinner they left for Portland, five hours south. I hoped they wouldn’t hit a moose. I’m rather fond of moose.
Did you know that in South Carolina they apparently mispronounce both crappie and pecan? All I’ve got to say is that since they kicked off the Civil War and repeatedly elected Strom Thurmond, South Carolinians shouldn’t be allowed the final word on anything.
At the heart of Libby Camp is a lodge building where we all hung out and ate communal meals. Libby’s guest cabins and work buildings surround it. Everything faces onto Lake Millinocket, where Libby keeps its float plane, a trio of small motorboats, and a passel of canoes and kayaks. The lodge building has both electricity (thanks to a generator) and internet (thanks to Mr. Musk’s Starlink), but the cabins don’t have either. Light in our cabin was from propane lanterns, which were wholly admirable for producing warm glows, but were maybe not the completest thing for finding lost socks. Heat in the cabins was from a wood stove and piled quilts. Air conditioning in the cabin was from opening the windows and deconstructing piled quilts.
There was a point, probably when I was admiring one of the mounted moose heads, when I thought what a mighty fine job Libby Camp had done mimicking a backwoods fishing lodge. Then I realized I was a mighty fine idiot. I had experienced this weird sense of dislocation once before in Hawaii, in the bar at the Hotel Moloka‘i, when I caught myself admiring what a fine job they’d done copying a tropical bar. Sometimes you get lucky enough to stumble into the real deal.
I was supposed to fish five days but fished four, with one day off to look after Kris, sleep off cold remnants, and play the guitar. Kris fished three days and slept two. Of the four days I fished, I spent two of the days floating in canoes on ponds while our guide, Jeffrey Labree, moved me into position so that I could look good casting. Two other days we waded rivers. The ponds involved a bit of hiking. One of the rivers involved a 30-minute trip in a Cessna float plane, and the other needed four hours of driving and being on watch for lumber trucks.
There’s a lot of the North Maine Woods.
There were also a lot of fish, and I didn’t catch many larger than ten inches. Jeffrey said that one of my missed hits was easily a 20-inch landlocked salmon, which would have been a fish of a lifetime. I missed it. I’ve missed enough fish-of-a-lifetime by now to know that’s ok. The fish aren’t hankering to participate in my obsession, and just knowing they’re there and being lucky enough to spend some time in their vicinity is plenty good for me. And the memory of that hit from that fish is its own good thing. Sitting here days later and a thousand miles away I think I can conjure everything about that instant in my mind’s eye.
Landlocked salmon.
On the day I fished without Kris, I spent a day on Brown Brook Pond in a canoe, throwing dry flies that I’d tied, an elk-hair caddis and a Goddard caddis, and Jeff’s streamers until I was tired of catching fish. Jeffrey guessed I caught somewhere north of 40 brook trout and maybe as many 50, lovely tiny perfect things, and I must have missed an equal number because, well, that’s what I do. I rarely keep count of fish, not because I’m too proud to know, but because I lose track. I’ll trust Jeffrey’s number, mostly because I want to, but also because it felt like a 50-fish day. Whether it was or not doesn’t matter.
You know the best thing about fishing in Maine? The entire week we only fished with dry flies on the surface and streamers. We never fished with nymphs underwater. I know that if you want to catch fish, you have to fish underwater with nymphs, and I have done it from west to east, from here to Alaska, but truth be told I kinda hate them. Fishing with streamers–baitfish imitations–is most of what I do here in Texas, and fishing with surface dry flies is just a joy.
Fishing on the ponds you could just throw the fly any old place and the fish were like as not to be there. Fishing the streams we fished mostly downstream–which is not by any means the norm with dry flies. With the streamers you would let the streamer swing while you retrieved upstream. With the caddis dry flies–and we fished caddis dry flies and nothing else–you’d sometimes let the flies drift and sometimes skate them across the surface. It was all very satisfying.
Brook trout.
Our final day we went to Webster Pond in the float plane, and it was the first time Kris and I could really see how big things were. At the pond outfall Kris stood in one place for the day casting one of Jeff’s flies, a candy caddis. It was named by his granddaughter because it looked like candy, and Kris suspected there may have been actual candy involved. Jeff told me a story about his own childhood which I will shamelessly steal, about fishing at 10 with his aunt and uncle for Atlantic salmon, and while the party let Jeff cast to a salmon he was supported in the river current by another angler. The other angler was Ted Williams.
That last day I moved up and downstream around Kris, fishing some with the candy caddis, some with a black ghost streamer that I had tied. I picked the black ghost because it was pretty and, well, with me and flies pretty will always do it. Jeff told me later that they fished black ghosts mostly in ponds, and while I wasn’t in a pond, like I said, it was pretty. I caught some fish, and some of them were brook trout.
Neil Thomas, not Jeffrey Labree.
Kris said that day that without moving much she had caught 19 trout and asked me how many I caught. I asked her if I could count fall fish and she said no–fall fish are considered a trash fish not worthy of notice. Honestly though my judgment’s not that refined. Of course counting them or no, I had no very precise idea how many fish I had caught, and I didn’t lie, either. I told her that with fall fish it was certainly more than 19, but without, no, I hadn’t caught 19 trout.
And I think that’s true. Between you and me though, I’m counting the fall fish.
We go to Maine on Friday, via United Airlines to Bangor and then north from Bangor by car, past Mount Katahdin and Baxter State Park, further into the north woods to Piscataquis County, about as far north as counties in the continental States dare go. I’ve never been to Maine, and we’ll be so far north that to our left, to our right, and straight ahead all the land will belong to Canada. It’ll be just like the Charge of the Light Brigade, though hopefully without the cannon.
Did you know that there’s more Allen’s Coffee Brandy sold in Maine than anyplace else? Did you know that there’s something called Allen’s Coffee Brandy? Until sometime in the early 2000s it was the most popular liquor sold in Maine, though now various vodkas are higher on the list. It’s still well up there. There’s also a popular regional soft drink called Moxie, and in Maine the mix of Moxie and Allen’s Coffee Brandy is called a “Burnt Trailer.” The mix of Allen’s Coffee Brandy and Diet Moxie is called a “Welfare Mom.” Even in the interest of science, I doubt that I’ll try either one.
Moxie, by the way, was originally sold as a tonic brewed to prevent softening of the brain, nervousness, and insomnia. I might could use some of that. Moxie and vodka, by the way, is a Moxie mule.
Maine has a population of 1,372,000, 92% Anglo, with a total area of 35,385 square miles. That puts it 38th on the list of states by population density, ahead of Oregon, Utah, and Kansas. Roughly 80% of Maine is forested, and most of it’s population is in the remaining 20%. It’s the largest New England state. With a few exceptions, Mainers cluster reasonably close to its coast, but even along the coast there aren’t large urban centers. Maine’s largest city, Portland, has a population of 68,424. Lewiston, the second city, has 38,493. In the north and west of the state there’s forest, and some mountains, too. The north end of the Appalachian Trail is Mount Katahdin, 5,269 feet. Then there’s some more forest.
About half of the population lives in the southeast corner around Portland. All of the reported vampire population is in Jerusalem’s Lot, and hopefully they’ll stay there.
William Bradford, The Schooner Jane of Bath, Maine, 1857, oil on canvas, Art Institute of Chicago.
Reading Maine history is peculiar. Until the Civil War, Maine seems to have been the hottest thing going. They built ships in Maine. Maine’s captains sailed the world. Maine produced timber, and there was land to be had. That’s not to say that Maine didn’t have its troubles: the English were prone to try to move the border, and Mainers had to rid themselves of Massachusetts. There were always French folk trying to migrate south from Canada. Into the 20th Century though if you bought a shoe it was like as not made in Maine. If you bought a sailing ship it was like as not made in Maine.
Then winter came, and it wasn’t. L.L. Bean boots and Hinckley Yachts are still made in Maine, and there must still be a Bath Iron Works, but I think Maine’s most significant exports now are Steven King novels and potatoes. Even Allen’s Coffee Brandy and Moxie are made in Massachusetts.
Jacobson, Antonio N., S.S. State of Maine, ca. 1892, oil on canvas, Maine Historical Society. The S.S. State of Maine was built in Bath, Maine.
Before the Civil War Henry David Thoreau wrote three travel essays about Maine, two of which were published inperiodicals during his life and collected after his death as The Maine Woods. His trips weren’t far from where we’re going. On one trip he climbed Mount Katahdin. On another a Native American guide took him and a companion by canoe to Moosehead Lake. Some of the essays are pure travelogue, but they’re well written and appealing, with enough wilderness spark to provide drama. Some of the writing is better than mere travelogue. From time to time in The Maine Woods you’ll find some of Thoreau’s loveliest observations about nature, and nobody ever did mysticism and nature better than Thoreau.
Is it the lumberman, then, who is the friend and lover of the pine, stands nearest to it, and understands its nature best? Is the tanner who has barked it, or he who has boxed it for turpentine, whom posterity will fable was changed into a pine at last? No! No! It is the poet . . . . ((Thoreau, Henry David, “Chesuncook”, The Maine Woods at 112, Yale University Press 2009, New Haven, Ct.))
You’ll also find his god-awful attempts to reproduce the dialogue of his Native American guide. Tonto’s script writers produced less stilted vernacular. “Kademy . . . good thing–I suppose they usum Fifth Reader there . . . You been college?”((Thoreau, Henry David, “The Allegash and the East Branch”, The Maine Woods at 183, Yale University Press 2009, New Haven, Ct. Interestingly, “that looks like Ned and the First Reader” was my father’s standard description of messy work, as in “your casting looks like Ned and the First Reader.” I never knew there was more than one Reader until I read Thoreau. I still don’t know who Ned was.)) After reading Thoreau’s dialogues, you realize why his best work is about living alone at Walden Pond.
Paul Bunyan statue, Bangor, Maine. Paul Bunyan was also resident in Michigan, Minnesota, and Nova Scotia.
In The Maine Woods, Thoreau mentions the red shirts of the lumbermen several times. I thought certain that when we got the gear list for Libby Camp it would require us to bring red flannel shirts, but there was nary a one listed. These days anglers are more prone to camouflage than red, on the theory that fish will more easily spot threats who wear bright colors. Whatever the styles preferred by 19th century Maine lumbermen or 21st century fly fishers, it’s hard now to find a red flannel shirt, even with the help of the internet. The closest I could come was an L.L. Bean chamois shirt, probably made in China, and somehow the notion of buying a heavy shirt during the current Houston heat wave was just more than I could stomach. I’ll wear no red in Maine, and I apologize to Henry David and Paul Bunyan.
We could go to Maine to fish the seacoast. It’s a drowned seacoast, a seacoast that because of rising oceans after glacial retreat left a rugged and interesting shore. This time of year there should be not only striped bass but migrations of bluefish and false albacore. I do get seasick though.
Cornelia “Fly Rod” Cosby, the first registered Maine guide.
There was also a time when you could go to Maine to fish for Atlantic salmon, but through a combination of dams, pollution, and over-fishing we’ve done an excellent job of eradicating U.S. Atlantic salmon runs. Maine is the last North American place south of Canada where there are Atlantic salmon, but they’re critically endangered.
There are largish native wild brook trout left in Maine, when they’ve otherwise disappeared from the rest of their U.S. native range. Generally they can’t compete with rainbow trout introduced from the Pacific Northwest and brown trout from Europe, so outside of Maine they’ve been marginalized into smaller streams, and there’s not sufficient food in the streams to grow big fish. But in Maine for whatever reason they’re still the inland fish of choice.
Along with the brook trout there are also landlocked salmon. Landlocked salmon are Atlantic salmon that at the end of the last glaciation were cut off from the ocean. Apparently they make their spawning runs from lake to river in September, and they’re absolutely right to do so. September is always the best time to travel, when temperatures are starting to cool and the kids are back in school.
The last of the large native brook trout in the U.S. are a good enough excuse to see the Maine woods, but there’s also a sporting tradition. Train travel opened the Maine woods to both Henry David Thoreau and lots of traveling fishers and hunters. By the end of the 19th century, Maine fishing and hunting camps were scattered through the far Maine woods, and they were the very thing. We’re going to Libby Camp, which can trace it’s ancestry to the 1880s, but there are plenty of others. There are few things as iconic to a fly fisher as a Maine camp.
We know there can’t be a fish because the angler is wearing a red shirt. He must have dropped his hat.
In other matters, Mainer’s didn’t vote for Donald Trump in either 2016 or 2020, voting 48.2%, or 357,735, for Clinton, and then 51%, or 435,072, for Biden. Interestingly–and this is repeated in other states as well–there is more than a 3% drop in votes for the Libertarian candidate between 2016 and 2020, from 5.09% for Gary Johnson in 2016 to 1.73% for Jo Jorgensen. One supposes two things, that about 2% of the population really does vote Libertarian, and that in Maine in 2016 about 20,000 voters wouldn’t vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. In 2020 most of those 20,000 voters were either more enthusiastic about Biden or less enthusiastic about Trump.
There was 73% eligible voter turnout in Maine in 2016, then 78% turnout in 2020. That’s huge turnout. To put that in perspective, turnout nationally in 2020 was 66.7%.
Maine 2020 presidential election results by county, Wikipedia. That would also double for a pretty good population map.
Maine does something peculiar with its electoral college votes in presidential elections that I don’t think is done anywhere else. Instead of all or none, it splits two of its four electoral college votes by congressional district, so in 2020 Trump took one electoral vote and Biden three others. That was the only electoral vote for Trump from New England. It’s not a bad way for the electoral college to work, though unless other states did the same thing it only hurts Maine’s overall majority.
Neither of Maine’s Congressfolk are Republican, though one of its senators is a moderate Republican, which along with Atlantic salmon is a critically endangered species. Unlike the rest of Mainers, she doesn’t have a reputation for being particularly independent. The other senator, Angus King, is in fact independent, but caucuses with the Democrats.
Both Maine’s state senate and house are mildly Democratic. Its governor is Democratic.
One last note on fly fishing in Maine. Mainers created some of the most beautiful streamer flies in the American catalogue. They’re simpler variations of classic British salmon flies. I tried to tie some, though it was hard, and my results were decidedly mixed. I’m sure they’ll look a lot better in the water, and just fishing them is enough of a reason to go to Maine, whether or not I have a red shirt.
