Next week we go to Alaska. This whole exercise–going to each state to catch a fish–is really a desperate ruse to get Kris to Alaska. For a girl who got all the way through law school inside the Houston loop, Kris has a peculiarly well-developed terror of bears. “Kris, do you want to go to Alaska?” I’ve asked that question for nigh on 40 years, and she’s consistently answered no, nope, not on a bet. “There are bears.”
That Werner Herzog movie, Grizzly Man, didn’t help any. I highly recommend it though.
She must be terrified of bears because they infested Poe Elementary and the Rice campus. She must have lost a dozen of her Lamar High School graduating class to grizzlies, and watched horrified as University of Houston law professors were snatched from the lecture hall and dragged to a polar bear’s lair. For a long time I thought it was a joke, and then I thought that maybe it was real but vague, and that she’d get over it. Nope. For as long as I’ve known her she has only been afraid of one thing: bears–Alaskan bears in particular.
Bean, Tarleton H., King Salmon (Oncorhynchus chouicha), 1889, Report on the salmon and salmon rivers of Alaska, with notes on the conditions, methods, and needs of the salmon fisheries, Washington, DC : Government Printing Office, University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank
Ok, two things. My driving and bears. My driving isn’t horrible, and I swear, outside of the zoo, there are no bears in Houston.
Fishing finally got to her. She fishes, and if you fish, Alaska is the very thing. If I listed places I’d like to fly fish, New Zealand, Scotland, Cuba, Mongolia, Montana, Christmas Island, Norway, Chile, Iceland, the Seychelles, British Columbia, Nebraska, the Amazon . . . Ok, maybe not Nebraska. Anyway, it would be a long list, but Alaska would be at the very top. Unlike the lower 48, there are still good salmon runs in Alaska. There are still large numbers of steelhead. We haven’t yet blown it in Alaska, though that’s not without trying. The trout are not dinky little 14-inchers daintily sipping mayflies from a mountain stream. The trout are 28-inch monsters gorging on the rotting flesh of dying salmon.
There are five species of salmon in Alaska, plus sea-run steelhead trout. To plan our trip, we started from when a species of salmon would be in a river. Ok, we started from restaurant quality and when a species of salmon would be in a river. We picked a river, the Kanektok, where all five salmon species have a summer run from the Bering Sea. First, beginning in June and running through mid-July, are king salmon. King’s are the largest Pacific salmon, weighing up to 40 pounds (though they’re protected in some rivers, and can’t be killed in the Kanektok). Sockeye and chum salmon overlap the king season. Pinks have the shortest run, for a couple of weeks in late July. Silvers begin in August and run through September.
Milton Love, male sockeye salmon in spawning shape and colors, Marine Science Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara.
We’ll be on the Kanektok for king season, and also the sockeye and chum. There will also be rainbow trout, arctic char, and dolly varden. Dolly Varden, by the way, are the only fish named after a Dickens character.
When salmon enter the river from the sea they are bright and silver, and then as they move into freshwater their colors change for spawning. They spawn and die, and don’t return to the sea, and they don’t feed as they move upriver. They strike flies out of annoyance, or habit, or maybe curiosity, but not for food. By the time they spawn they are dying, deteriorating, and in the short summer feeding season the trout grow huge on eggs washed out of the spawning gravel and the flesh of decaying salmon. Everything feeds on the salmon, both live salmon and dead. Birds, other fish, bears, Alaskans. . . . There are bears in Alaska, but the usual wisdom is that the bears are too intent on fish to be interested in Texans, even plump, well-fed Texans. That’s the usual wisdom, anyway. I’m kinda counting on it.
The State of Alaska warns of two hazards on the Kanektok River: bears and bugs. Don’t tell Kris about the bears.
Five Species of Pacific Salmon Showing Relative Size and Appearance, 1921, Pacific Fisherman Year Book 1921, University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank
Early May we fished the Housatonic River with Bert Ouellette. We booked two days , but after 20 minutes we’d landed matched rainbow trout, and then one or the other of us really never stopped catching fish. It was dandy fishing both days.
We found Bert through Orvis, which makes finding guides easy. Deciding on the Housatonic in the first place was harder. The Farmington River is the best known Connecticut river, and while we were at the Wulff School our fellow students from Connecticut–just about every third citizen of Connecticut was at the Wulff School for casting lessons–insisted that the Farmington was the very place to fish. I started having buyer’s remorse for booking the Housatonic.
Now mind, I don’t know much about Connecticut rivers, but I’ve been looking at Connecticut as a fishing destination off and on now for three years. The impression I have–almost certainly wrong–is that the Farmington is smaller, wadeable, and very pretty, but it’s also more crowded. The upstate Housatonic, more remote and harder to fish without a boat, is less crowded. We saw some anglers wading, but it didn’t look easy. We only saw two other boats, and one of those was a couple of UConn graduate students counting radio-tagged fish.
We fished out of Bert’s ClackaCraft drift boat. Drift boats are funny looking row boats, usually around 16 feet long, 6 feet wide at the beam, and pointed at the bow and stern to move forward or backward in current. Drift boats are best known for their radical, rocking-horse rocker that lets the rower maneuver through rapids. All things being equal, if given a choice between a rubber raft and a drift boat, I’d get in the drift boat every time.
Bert was good company . . . On the other hand Kris and I badly misled Bert. By the time we got to Connecticut, we’d been practicing casting for two solid days. We will probably never be better casters than we were for the two days we fished with Bert. Bert thought we were pretty good casters, though I disabused him as quickly as I could by catching my fly in every other tree along the bank, and tangling my line into implausible knot combinations just to prove it could be done. It wouldn’t be a fishing trip without that sort of thing.
Bert rowed the drift boat, changed out flies, told stories, told us which side of the boat to fish on and how, and untangled my tangles. He tried to teach me some stuff about downstream drifts, and why I was tangling my line so often–apparently when something happened in the water, when either I caught a snag or I had a tug from a fish, I’d jerk the rod up and then suddenly stop, so that the line met itself coming and going. I did manage some world-class tangles.
The upper Housatonic is pretty big, perhaps 150 feet across, tree-lined with hardwoods, hemlock, and pine, and protected from development along one bank by a railroad right-of-way. It falls out of the Berkshire Mountains and deeper, slower water and shallow riffles break up long stretches of steady current.There are rocks everywhere, ancient metamorphic gneiss I think, pushed up along the continental plates to form the Berkshires and the rest of the Appalachians. In fast water the rock gardens jut out of the river to challenge the rower, and in the longer deeper drifts they lurk underwater to snag flies. Particularly my flies.
The weather in early May was just like fish like it, cloudy and drizzly and a bit cold. On sunny days fish are more visible to overhead predators and can be even more skittish than their norm. Overcast makes them happy. Even with the cloud cover we watched a bald eagle dive to catch a fish, and then bicker over its catch with an osprey. The eagle kept the fish. Usually it’s the other way around, and I suspect before we saw it that the eagle had already forced the osprey to drop the osprey’s fish. I think we only saw the second part of the drama.
Upstate Connecticut is second-home country, and the bank without the railroad is dotted with interesting houses. It gave us something to talk about between fish, but the houses, even the uglier houses, were surprisingly unobtrusive. Everything is tempered by the woods.
Over our two days we caught rainbow trout, brown trout, smallmouth bass, and one native yellow perch. I’d never seen a yellow perch, and it was in full spawning colors and full of eggs. Kris wanted to rush it to the maternity ward. Bert noted that it was funny that the one native fish we caught was the most tropical-looking of the bunch.
Nothing was happening on the surface of the river, so I fished with nymphs some of the time, and some of the time with streamers. Kris fished with streamers, sometimes with two on her line at once. A nymph is supposed to imitate bug life underwater, and Bert set up a drop-weight rig with clinch weights at the bottom underneath a surface bobber, so that the flies floated in the current close to river bottom and the bobber would indicate a take. Streamers usually imitate underwater baitfish, or sometimes crawfish (or in saltwater, shrimp or even crabs), and are what I’m most used to fishing. You have to let the nymphs float along with the current, and in my ideal world they would float along at the same speed as the boat. All I’d have to do is relax and watch the bobber, and that’s a job I’m probably competent to do. Of course the world doesn’t much pander to me, so nymphing usually consists of mending and adjusting the line until it drifts too far and you have to start over. It can be a lot of work.
Streamers meanwhile are retrieved across the current. Bert had us do something odd with the streamers. If you think about retrieving with a conventional rod and reel, you retrieve by cranking the reel, and unless you do something with the rod the retrieve tends to be steady. To give the lure action, you twitch the rod and hesitate or speed up during the retrieve. With a fly rod, the reel ain’t in it, and all the retrieval is done with your line hand, usually your left hand if you’re right-handed. The streamer always has a bit of up and down action because the retrieve has built-in stops and starts.
That wasn’t enough for Bert. He had us twitch the rod to impart even more motion to the streamers. No one had ever told me to twitch the rod tip on a streamer before, but it worked. It was kind of fun, too–I felt just like a real fisherman. We caught a lot of fish. Now I’m going to try it on my favorite bass pond.
Trout love mayflies of all things, and trout anglers love it when trout feed on the surface on rising mayflies. Not all mayflies are the same, and not all mayflies rise at the same time–different species will rise over the course of the spring and summer from April to October. Still, all mayflies of the same species do rise more or less together, otherwise they’d be coming off the river randomly and never hook up to party and reproduce the species. They have to plan ahead. Girl mayfly can’t text boy mayfly and say let’s us hook up on Tuesday in a couple of weeks.
Mayflies live most of their lives underwater as hideously ugly nymphs, and then emerge from the surface as pretty and delicate duns that mate, lay their eggs back in the water, and then die. Their out-of-water lives are so short that they don’t have mouths. There’s no drinkin’ at mayfly parties, though they do kinda dance. The emergence of those duns kicks off the prettiest (and most fun) kind of fly fishing, dry fly fishing, culminating during each hatch with the evening spinner fall when the spent mayflies fall dead back into the river en masse. When you talk to trout anglers, they talk a lot about which hatch is going to rise when, and what time to be on the river for the spinner fall.
Meanwhile, here in Texas, about as close as I get to fishing hatches is switching to bass popping bugs when the dragonflies show up on the bass ponds. I prefer blue for early season, and yellow as things get hot. Hotter.
The Hendrickson mayfly hatch is supposed to be the first major hatch on the Housatonic, but at least for now it’s apparently disappeared. I saw two lonely Hendricksons rising from the river in what should have been the heart of the Hendrickson season. Other mayflies will certainly hatch later, but it’s something you hear through the grapevine, that major hatches on major rivers, because of drought, climate change, whatever, are disappearing. It’s an odd thing to be worried about in these later times, but there you are.
So we fished nymphs and streamers, caught fish, and talked with Bert. What good company he was, what good fishing it was. By the end of the second day, I was worn out, and was sitting quiet at the back of the boat, watching Bert row and Kris fish. And fish. And keep fishing. Bert said that he’d never had a woman fish so hard from his boat, and I suspect Kris will think for all time that Bert says the sweetest things. Meanwhile back in Houston I reported Bert’s line to our kids and they laughed. When could Mom ever do anything she’d latched onto in moderation?
The best known writer from Connecticut, Hank Morgan, was a travel writer, and a good one, or at least a fun one to read. It doesn’t get edgier than when his strong Yankee character clashes with the customs and peculiarities of England. No writer is as arrogantly certain of his own superiority as Morgan, but that’s part of his virtue, and his descriptions are completely trustworthy. He has other shortcomings: I’m still not clear how Morgan got from Connecticut to England.
I’ve been to Connecticut once before, to poke around New Haven, which is best known for its pizza. I didn’t have any, not knowing then what I know now.
This time we’ll be in northwest Connecticut, on the Housatonic River. How do you say that? House-a-tonic? Whose-a-tonic? I don’t know, though even I know that it’s not Conn-ec-ti-cut, but isn’t that “c” dandy to pronounce? Who doesn’t like to? Connect. Connect. Conne-c-ti-cut.
Daniel Beard, Travel Writer Hank Morgan Up a Tree, 1889, Charles L. Webster & Co., New York, New York.
Connect-i-cuters don’t really have a very useful appellation. Nothing rolls off the tongue; not Connecticucator, Connecticutensian, Connecticutan. . . According to Webster (who was from New Haven), Connecticuter is correct, but I figure if I told somebody they were a Connecticuter, I’d have made an enemy for life.
Connecticut Yankees are also known as Nutmeggers, presumably because of the state’s vast fields of native nutmeg.
Demographics and Geography
Connecticut is the third smallest state, with 4,845 square miles. It’s smaller than Hawaii (with 6,423 square miles), but more than four times larger than Rhode Island (1,034 square miles). For all of that paucity of space, it is heavily populated, with 745 people per square mile. Compare that to Wyoming, with 55 people per square mile. In order of density, the states are New Jersey (1,263), Rhode Island (1061), Massachusetts (901), and then, crowding in at fourth, Connecticut.
Jim Irwin, Connecticut population density, English Wikipedia.
Population in the state isn’t uniformly distributed. It concentrates along the coast and the Delaware River. Hartford, for instance, population 123,000, has a population density of 7,091 people per square mile.
Connecticut has eight counties, but apparently no county governments, which seems odd given that politicians abhore a vacuum. There is the state, and there are towns. There’s other stuff, but state and towns without the bother of counties seems a notable effort at efficiency. In addition to the towns and the state, Connecticut has more than 300 special taxing districts and school districts, so I guess minimizing counties really doesn’t clear out much space government-wise.
The Connecticut counties that apparently don’t do much.
Connecticut is the southern-most New England state, which may seem obvious to most, but to those of us less familiar with the Northeast that’s a revelation. If you asked me most days what states comprise New England, I’d like as not throw in anything northeast of Missouri. Why, for instance, is New Jersey not New England, but Vermont, which was a relative late-comer, included inNew England? It’s a mystery, probably tied to Beacon Hill snobbery.
With a population of 3,605,944 based on the 2020 census, Connecticut has a lot of white people, 80%, a surprising number of Hispanics, 17%, and is about 12% African American. Everybody else surely fits in somewhere, but not in any big numbers. It’s a rich state, 6th in median household income at $79,855. More than 90% of its adults have at least a high school degree, and 40% have at least a bachelors degree.
The New England States, WikiTravel. As you can see, New England doesn’t include either Ohio or Oregon or Oklahoma.
Compare that to West Virginia, just down the map, which is 92% white and only 1.7% Hispanic. About 88% of the of West Virginia adults have a high school degree, but only 21% of adults have a bachelors degree or higher, and the median annual income is $48,037. Wealth begets wealth.
Connecticut isn’t actually on the Atlantic Coast, but on Long Island Sound, sheltered from the Atlantic by the long Long Island peninsula. See United States v. Maine, 469 U.S. 504 (1985) (determining that Long Island is not, in fact, an island, but leaving open the question of length). A coastal plain extends west-east along Long Island Sound, and a river valley that follows the Connecticut River north-south smack dab through the center of the state. At 400 miles the Connecticut is the longest river in the Northeast, and we’ve happily fished it for trout and pike in New Hampshire, almost to Canada. The coastal plain and the river valley are the population centers.
The seashore is at sea level, and the average elevation in Connecticut is 500 feet. The highest point in Connecticut is the south slope of Mount Frisell on the Massachusetts border at 2,379 feet. The peak of Mount Frisell, 2,454 feet, is in Massachusetts. Mount Frisell is part of the Taconic Range, that is part of the Appalachians.
USGS
The remainder of the state is north-south hills and valleys created by plate tectonics, almost reminding one (if one is so inclined) of the Nevada basin and range system. Tectonic plates took land that measured more than 500 miles across (with estimates up to 3000 miles across), and scrunched it into 100 miles. I’m pretty certain that the technical geologic term for the cause of all those ups and downs is scrunching.
Its lakes, the Connecticut River Valley, the seashore, and its streams and riverswere formed by glaciers, the same Wisconsinite Glaciers that formed the Great Lakes about 10,000+ years ago. Wisconsinite Glaciers did’t do things in moderation. They dumped about 10 feet of junk over the hills of New England, and glacial drift covers about 99% of Connecticut bedrock.
Settlement, History
Massachusetts Puritans psuedopodded into the Hartford area in 1636. There followed various Puritan settlements, which were finally combined into a colony by royal charter in 1662. Connecticut later repaid the King’s generosity by joining in the American Revolution. The first major New England Indian/Colonial war, the Pequot War, centered in Massachusetts and Connecticut from 1636-38. The Pequots were actually interlopers themselves, and the Naragansetts and Mohegans joined with the English to drive out the Pequots. The Pequots lost, but then so ultimately did the Naragansets and Mohegans.
Pequot prisoners were exchanged in the West Indies for African slaves, so black slavery has an early start in Connecticut, and slavery was not ended until 1848. As of 1790, there were 2,764 slaves in Connecticut, out of a total population of 237,946. By 1830, the total population of Connecticut was 297,675, but the slave population had decreased to 25.
Into the 20th century, Connecticut was a leader in seafaring and ship building. During the Civil War, Connecticut was a manufacturing center for the Union, and the defense industry remains one of its important crops. Also insurance. Don’t forget insurance. Connecticut produced two famous insurance agents, Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives.
Connecticut also produced two presidents, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
Hank Morgan typified the 19th century Yankee from Connecticut: industrious, capable, innovative, maybe a bit too sure of his virtue, but something in the national perception of the Connecticuter changed by the late 20th century. Connecticut became in the popular mind a New York bedroom community. Think of films from Connecticut, with their dark undercurrent of suburban angst: The Swimmer, The Stepford Wives, The Gilmore Girls . . .
I’ve watched The Gilmore Girls. It’s creepy that anyone can talk that much.
Politics
Connecticut is a Democratic state, with about 50% of its population Democratic or leaning Democratic. That’s consistent with the trends of urban areas and wealthier states tending to vote Democratic. All of Connecticut’s major state offices are held by Democrats, along with both US Senators and its five Representatives. There are some Republicans in the state assembly, 12 of the 36 senators and 54 of the 151 Representatives.
In 2016 Connecticut voted 54.57% for Hillary Clinton, with two counties, Litchfield (where we’re going) and Windham voting 54% and 50% respectively for Donald Trump. In 2020, Joe Biden carried 59% of the state’s votes; Donald Trump again carried Litchfield and Windham by 51%.
Tyler Klutsbach, 2020 Connecticut presidential voting, for Wikipedia.
Rivers and Fish
Fly fishing in Connecticut is all about trout. Connecticut would have been a brook trout state, but stocking programs favor rainbows and browns. I’m sure along the coast there are fly anglers who fly fish in saltwater, but search online and most of what you see is trout. Like a lot of stuff in Connecticut, I figure its angling is heavily subsidized with folk from New York City.
The big river through Connecticut is the Connecticut, which seems appropriate. As mentioned, we’ve fished for trout in the Connecticut River, but we fished way north, long before the Connecticut leaves New Hampshire. By the time the river reaches Connecticut it’s too warm for trout.
The best known trout river in Connecticut is the Farmington, which, including its West Branch, is 80 miles long, and which is part of the Connecticut River Basin. We’re not fishing the Farmington. No reason, but there you are.
Karl Musser, Housatonic River watershed, for Wikipedia.
We’re fishing the Housatonic (HOOS-ə-TON-ik), which runs 149 miles and drains a chunk of Western Connecticut and Massachusetts into Long Island Sound. It’s also a trout river, at least in the northwest portion of the state where we’ll fish. We’ll fish in Litchfield County, where 51% of the fish voted for Donald Trump in 2020. I figure it was the brown trout. Brown trout always seemed to me to tend Republican.
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 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.
