Author: Thomas Fleming

The alien found the good old rebels still making merry in the Elbo Room, and, for the sake of health and sanity, they ordered a pizza.  Nursing their drinks as they waited for their food, they listened to the thunder overhead and watched the people, giggling and wet to the skin, bustling in for dinner.  More rain meant high water and bad fishing, but it had also broken the back of the heatwave.  They repeated the Finlander jokes they had heard, and then moved on to Polish jokes and redneck jokes.  Mississippi did  not blink at the usual changes rung...

He leaves the two storytellers drinking their lunch and walks five blocks up Tower Avenue to the offices of the Tyomies Society.  He had written to a dozen newspapers in Northern Wisconsin and received only two responses: one, from Joan Melchild who writes for the paper in Shell Lake (population 1300), and one from the Finnish American Reporter, published by the socialist/communist Tyomies Society. The history of Tyomies is an American saga.  The newspaper, which was founded in Massachusetts in 1903, and moved first to Hancock, Michigan, and then in 1913 to Superior, was generally known as the second largest...

In the morning they headed toward the Brule to check out the water, which was very high.  It was also very hot, especially once he had got into his neoprene waders.   He was still hot, walking waist deep against the strong current that sweeps past Winneboujou landing.  There was no sign of a tricho hatch that morning; nothing broke the water’s surface.  He tied on a nymph and cast out the line, watching it collapse helplessly in wrinkled coils.  It had been two years since he had waded a stream, and subsequent casts were hardly better than the first. ...

This is a slightly revised version of a Perspective published in 1999.   John Lukacs was kind enough to send me a note complimenting the prose. His father used to say that the country was good; it was the people that made it intolerable.  Now his father’s son was headed up to that North country, where he had not lived for forty years.  He had been back, several times over the years, fishing for trout on the Brule River or trolling for walleye on the Chippewa Flowage.  He had visited the desolate city of his birth several times, and once...