Days 105-111, September 2-8, Iowa to Wisconsin

I'm home now, safe and sound on Drumbore Farm in PA.  Before I compose a final wrap-up about my summer-long trip, I want to cover in this post the last social and fishing stops I made before my return.

After the events in my last post, Trish joined me at her father's house in Walnut, IA shortly before Labor Day.  All of the in-laws came to town for an afternoon party on the 4th.  To tell you the truth, I was getting homesick by that time.  But I had one last hook-up scheduled with friends, and I didn't want to forego the opportunity to see them.

The friends, in this case, were Carl Thompson and his brother Dave.  I've known Dave longer than any other continuing friend except for Dave Loebsack, a U.S. Congressman from Iowa.  Representative Loebsack and I met when we were both freshmen at Iowa State, residing in Ayres House in Larch Hall.  We became roommates as sophomores at the same time Dave Thompson matriculated at ISU and moved into Ayres House.    A few years later I moved into an off-campus house with three other former Ayres House residents - Dave Thompson was one of them.  Through him I met his older brother Carl, with whom I later resided in another house while I was still attending graduate school in Ames.   The adventures that Dave, Carl and I had over the years we lived together, and for many years afterward, cemented a relationship that we've actively maintained over four decades.  But it had been too long since we were last physically together.

On Labor Day I drove to Ames (Ames was a full-on nostalgia trip in its own right) to have lunch with Carl and his wife Karen - Karen is another long-time friend.  Fortunately their oldest son Greg was visiting and I had a chance to chat with him for a short time.  In the early afternoon Carl and I climbed into Excalibur and carved a crooked path on quaint byways to southwest Wisconsin, stopping in Platteville for the evening.  Carl's youngest son Joe attends college in Platteville.  We took Joe out to dinner and wound up spending the night in the driveway of the old house in which Joe resides with several roommates.  The situation reminded both Carl and me of our time living on 119 Beach Avenue in Ames, way back when.  It was fun to sit around a backyard campfire with Joe and his roommates, conversing into the late hours.  A couple of the roommates were English majors, as I once was.  Talking with these kids about poetry and novelists and other subjects that don't come up in my day-to-day life in PA transported me back to my twenties.  It was exactly the kind of experience I craved.

Classes started on Tuesday and our new young friends disappeared quickly, so Carl and I snuck out of Platteville right after breakfast, landing that afternoon at Castle Rock Creek near Fennimore.  Carl hadn't fly-fished for many years but he gave it the college try, and before long we landed several solid brown trout.  Castle Rock Creek is a pretty little spring-fed stream that flows through numerous lovely farms nestled in a deep, narrow valley.  Countless other cliff-lined valleys that surround and connect to the one we were in combine to form a latticework through the Driftless Region of Wisconsin.  The Driftless Region is an area surrounding the adjoining corners of Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota - an area that avoided the glacial scrubbing subjected to most of the upper Midwest in the last ice age.  This unique regional geology is a blessing to fly fishers because the rivers and creeks there are cold and clear enough to support healthy populations of trout, which is why we were there.  Many thanks to Trout McGee, a fly-fishing blogger like me (and a much-better photographer than me).  He was very kind to point me in the direction of Castle Rock, which is roughly in his neighborhood.  He knows the Driftless Region well.

That evening Carl and I set up Camelot in a private, deserted campground on the banks of an improved portion of the stream, directly beneath the gray cliff that gives Castle Rock Creek its name.  There we found numerous trout rising to a variety of hatching flies late in the evening.  The evening passed too quickly, but not before we caught several chunky browns.  Under a burst of starlight and a waxing gibbous moon we made a campfire, enjoyed a steak dinner, and debated economics, investing theory and related topics well into the night.  Here's a look at the scenery in which we found ourselves (remember, you can click on the pictures to make them larger):

The next morning we tried to catch a few more fish but we didn't get it done.  It didn't really matter.  We decided to leave Castle Rock and head for Delavan, WI to meet Dave.  Shortly after we launched, we stopped in a little pub for lunch.  The young waitress there was an unusually flirtatious and attractive gal, but Carl and I are far too old and much too married - we moved on, feeling pleasantly flattered by her attentions the rest of the day.  Around 3 pm we rolled into Delavan, joining Dave in his lake house there.  What a great afternoon and evening!  Dave has a neat little Bayliner on the lake and we took it out for a spin on a superlative late afternoon, kicking up a big wake in the shadows of lakeside mansions until sunset drove us back to shore.  That night Dave prepared a succulent Italian dinner.  We reminisced about the past, watched videos of Dave's talented boys playing guitar and sax and competing in track, talked about our present lives and generally enjoyed one another's company as we always have.

I've had this kind of wonderful experience many times this summer, reacquainting myself with old friends.  When we saw each other, in some cases after several years apart, it felt like we had just been hanging out yesterday.  Friendships that sustain themselves that way are the best kind.  If I'm glad about any single recurring theme of my trip this summer - more than the fishing, the amazing sights and my immersion in nature - it was the camaraderie of friends and family I spent time with along the way.  I love them all.

On Wednesday I dropped Carl off at the Milwaukee airport so he could fly back to Ames, and then started for home.  More about that next time.

Days 100 - 104, August 28 to September 1, Lake Icaria, Iowa

You may recall that in early August I spent several days with one of my oldest friends, Buck Boehm, helping him improve his fly-fishing skills in Montana.  This week I’m in Iowa, where Buck resides, and we’ve been back at it together, trying to catch some fish.  In this case, largemouth bass rather than trout have been our targets.

I had hoped to fish more than I have while I’ve been in Iowa the past several days.  I graduated from Valley High School in West Des Moines and I have three degrees from Iowa State University in Ames.  I started my accounting career in Des Moines, working there for seven years before Trish and I moved to New York and eventually to Los Angeles and Bucks County, PA.  I had some of my earliest bass and bluegill fishing experiences, including experiences with a fly rod, while in graduate school at ISU.  So I have a major soft spot in my heart for Iowa.  As I’ve journeyed around the country, I’ve looked forward to revisiting Iowa and fishing here.  The problem has been that the best fishing opportunities here are on the lakes, and a boat is almost a necessity to exploit those opportunities.  On Monday I was able to borrow a kayak, but then a storm rolled in that night – rain and wind nixed my fishing plans for Tuesday.

But on Wednesday the sun came out and I drove from Walnut to Corning, Iowa, which is near beautiful and uncrowded (at least during midweek) Lake Icaria.  Driving through the rolling hills of southwest Iowa, I felt like I was moving through a modernized 3D version of a Grant Wood painting.  As in Wood’s art, there were stylized fields of tall corn and beans flowing up and down the hillsides, dotted with white farmhouses, red barns and gleaming silos.  The modern elements in the scenery included dozens of towering white windmills, courtesy of the 21^st century drive to develop clean energy.  I was strangely comforted by their presence and had no doubt that Grant Wood would have happily incorporated them in his paintings if they had existed then.  When the wind farms in the area were first proposed, I thought they would be eyesores, but in fact they are quite dramatic and seem as if they have been there for centuries, like the wooden windmills of Holland.  As I write this, back in my father-in-law’s home in Walnut, I can see from his picture window a trio of tapered blades spinning in a crisp south wind striking a distant tower.  It’s quite beautiful.

When I arrived in Corning at noon Wednesday, I surveyed the dining options in downtown and selected Kay’s Kafe as the place to meet Buck, who arrived soon after I did.  Among the local farmers who wandered in to have lunch with friends, we consumed some hardy farm-style cooking before heading for nearby Lake Icaria.  On the way out of town I noticed the building in the picture below:

That scene brought back a lot of memories.  The bank in the picture is one of dozens for which, early in my accounting career, I supervised the performance of “Director’s exams” and audits.  It’s strange now to think about how my colleagues and I spent our summers traveling around to little towns like Corning to work in these little banks.  On a typical day in such a place, we might work late for one or two evenings so we could get ahead of schedule and create short days later in the week.  On the short days we often played golf at a local course, and almost always we searched out the best little cafés, and sometimes lounges, in the area.  We had a lot of fun together, to be sure.  Many of the folks I worked with then remain my friends today.  None of us will forget the crazy things we did while on the road on those sweltering days in the heartland, surrounded by cornfields.  We could almost hear the corn growing as we lay in our beds, sweating out the hot nights in mom-and-pop motels.

When Buck and I left Corning, we soon found that the Lake Icaria campgrounds with electric hookups were fully occupied with RVs.   The vast majority of the RVs were void of people – their owners had set up these rigs to hold their places pending arrival of their families on Friday for the Labor Day weekend.  We decided to park Camelot in an empty non-electric campground, which afforded us considerable privacy, a nice breeze and excellent evening shade.  Once we established our campsite we went to the marina, rented a roomy aluminum jon boat and began exploring the lake.

The guy who ran the marina wasn’t particularly forthcoming with useful fishing advice, but I had come equipped with a map that I obtained on the internet showing the contours of the lake bottom and the location of underwater structure, including brush and rock piles.  I had a notion that bass could be found near the brush piles just offshore of sharp points, and that’s where we started.  Fortunately, I guessed correctly.  I’ve watched enough bass-fishing TV shows to know that shad patterns often work well for bass in the heat of the summer (the temperature was about 90 degrees when we started out), so I tied on one of those.  In short order I caught a fat largemouth.  Here he is:

 

If the expression on my excessively hirsute face appears to be somewhat pained, it may be because I just plopped my rump on an aluminum boat seat that had been absorbing the heat of the afternoon sun.  But that was of little consequence to me – I was just glad to have figured out how to catch bass after hearing nothing but “slow fishing” reports about Icaria and other western Iowa lakes.  The fishing definitely wasn’t slow by ordinary bass-fishing standards.  Within a couple of hours I caught three more bass of similar size to, or larger than, the one in the picture, and brought another one to the boat before it threw the hook.

Buck was trying other techniques, including live worms that he acquired in Adel that morning, but after a while he tied on a shad lure similar to mine.  Before long he found himself pumping on a big bass that he yanked out of deep brush.  As we were mutually rejoicing, Buck’s reel suddenly detached itself from his rod.  He had little choice but to drop the rod and reel in the bottom of the boat, grab the bare monofilament line and start hand-lining the fish, hillbilly style.  As I laughed heartily, Buck succeeded in bringing the big bass to the side of the boat.  Just when we thought the fish was his, it made a sudden leap, splashing Buck with green water, pulling the knot loose from the lure and finning away post haste into the depths from which it had come.  All we could do was laugh.  That’s fishing.

Buck and I capped off the evening at our campsite with a bottle of Spanish wine and a couple of ribeye steaks that we cooked to perfection over a campfire.  We talked into the wee hours, reminiscing about old times and old friends, discussing poetry and music and philosophy, and in general reinforcing the deep connection we’ve had with one another for almost 40 years.  It was another marvelous time on a glorious evening in Iowa, much like those we enjoyed decades ago.  The novelist Thomas Wolfe famously said that “you can’t go home again.”  But the fact is, you can.