Such a place

   Bourdain travels in the best way - widely, frequently, and at someone else's expense.   Surprisingly, he has a decidedly favorite hotel - the Chateau Marmont in Beverly Hills.  

   The writer Andrew O’Hagan has a favorite hotel in the city where he lives, to which he retreats to recharge and refresh, to indulge and escape.  For him, it is Claridge’s in London, of which he says, "Claridge’s is a state of mind and everyone should have such a place, even if it’s just a café, a bench or a patch of grass, a vantage point from which one can clearly survey the possibility of improvement."

   Great stuff, that.  

   I don't have a favorite hotel, although maybe I can work on that.  The closest thing I have to "such a place" would be a stream in Vermont.  Not a particular one.  Any one which has in it my waders, my brothers, and some trout.

Clarendon Springs

The Clarendon Springs Hotel, also known as Clarendon House.  Built in 1834.  One of many hotels and “curative spas” that thrived in Vermont in the 1800s, capitalizing on the  purported benefits of the local spring waters and a thriving railroad industry, which brought Southerners and city dwellers north in great numbers.  An article in the August 29, 1867 edition of the New York Times describes the village of Clarendon Springs as “one of the pleasantest places to which [one] can resort during the summer, to avoid the heat, and dust, and noise, and other great annoyances of the Great City.”  The hotel is long closed, and gutted -- the Southerners and city dwellers, the picnics and music and dancing, long gone.  The springs remain, along with just the husk of this once fine hotel.

  

Horses, fences, barns and wires

   So, what do we like about this picture?  Horses are nice, as are barns and fences.  

   And what is not to like?  The angles, for sure; the slope these horses are on make the picture seem tilted when it's not (see the roof line of the barn).  Also, the overhead wires, which are prominent and disrupt the otherwise bucolic scene.  How much better might the picture be without the wires?

   But imagine not the picture but the actual scene, the actual place, without the wires.  Imagine the farmer going out to his barn in the morning, in the dark, to milk his cows with nothing but his own cold hands.  Before the power lines were put in.  Imagine how he felt the day the poles went in right in the middle of his field.  

   I imagine he likes the view just fine.

Fly fishing - season 2

   A Sunday morning in July.  KC is in Los Angeles.  Megan is in Centerville, on the Cape.  Rachel is in Italy.  I am in waders, making my way down the Mettawee River, between North Rupert and Pawlet, Vermont.  A beautiful morning - not too warm yet.  As usual, not another soul on the river.  I move along from pool to pool, trying first a woolly bugger, then a small wet fly with dark red coloring. Casting pretty well, I think, but raising no fish.  I come to a riffle in a narrow crease of the river, with a downed tree on the left.  It like it covers a fairly deep pool.  I take the time to tie the woolly bugger back on, thinking I can float it down through the riffle and then swim it back up through the pool, making it look like a minnow.  I have trouble tying it on, for some reason, but stick with it, and take my time testing my knot.  I position myself left of the crease and loft the fly into the head of the riffle.  The line spools out as the swift current takes the fly downstream.  I have no idea what I'm doing, I think.  I start wondering if maybe I should pack it in early, and spend the morning driving the back roads on camera safari instead.  Half my mind on this, the other half working the fly up through the pool, and WHAM - a fat trout strikes through the fly like a blitzing linebacker, thrashing up to the surface one, twice, heavy on the long, pulsing rod.  I work the fish up into the shallows - stay on, just stay on - and up onto the rocky side of the stream.  A beautiful brown trout - which measures a full 12 inches.  A fine fish for this little stream.  A trophy for the novice fly fisherman.  Heart pounding.  Smiling ear to ear.  

This American life

In the past two weeks I have:

flown to Denver to attend a conference, go for a couple of runs, walk several times up and down the 16th Street Mall, eat some good food at the Squeaky Bean and Kitchen and Lucky Pie Pizza and drink some excellent beer,

flew to LA to interview some lateral partner candidates whom we will never hire, stay for a second time at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Century City, eat moderately well but drink excellent beer at BJ's Brewhouse at the Westfield mall, and - most satisfying - photograph a paparazzo outside our restaurant in Beverly Hills,

flew home and drive directly the next morning to Vermont, to hike up the E trail to the summit at Killington, stay overnight at the not-so-grand but utterly pleasant grand hotel, wake early the next morning to fish on Woodward Reservoir with E - insisting that we fish the setback on the way back in, and catching the fish of the day,

discovered downtown Keene on the way home - after all these years, who knew?

drove Megan to Logan so that she can fly to Chicago to see her boyfriend

drove Rachel to Kennedy so that she can fly to Italy for three weeks

stayed over in Greenwich and then stopping over in Mystic on the way home

played softball on Sunday morning with the boys, rediscovering my stroke with two solid line drive singles, only to pull up with a lame hamstring.  

Ah, well.  

It only means that next weekend I'll be out in my kayak with a fly rod and a camera.  

Let's go.  Let's go.  

Things are looking down

With apologies, sort of, to Kings of Leon:

I've been roaming around,

I've been looking down,

at all I see.

Killing I have done

Every plant given to me, or us.  Pretty quickly, too.  Many trout, a small number of bluefish, striped bass, largemouth bass, perch and panfish, all to eat, about which I feel fine and wish to do more.  A few fish to show off, about which I feel less fine.  A mouse the cat brought in when I was in my teens.  It's back was broken.  I took it out in the yard and killed it with a hatchet.  Mice in the attic, with various "traps."  They do more than trap.  The occasional squirrel or chipmunk with my car.  There is only so much you can do.  The bird that broke its neck against the window of a house I bought?  I refuse to accept responsibility for that.  Japanese beetles, which my brothers and I pulled off the potato plants and dropped into a coffee can with a couple of inches of gasoline.  Old coffee cans were mighty handy.  Many worms, for fishing, and bugs, for all the reasons one kills bugs.  I feel like there is a garter snake back there somewhere, too, it's head cut off with a hoe.  But why would I have done that?