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NE Ohio: the heart of it all
As I motored over a hilltop crest on the highway earlier this week, I was flanked by twin fields of corn in a vista as pretty as any farmstead postcard photo.
The corn was tall – far more so than the venerable “knee high by the Fourth of July” saying even though it was only June 27. The sky was vivid blue with a few puffy clouds, and a white farmhouse built back when my grandfathers were young men stood proud on the knoll a couple hundred yards off the highway.
It occurred to me that I was viewing Ohio the way Ohio deserves to be seen. I was 140 miles or more from my house in Poland, but I felt like I was home.
That the highway on which I was driving was U.S. 224 certainly helped reinforce the homey feeling in my heart. But more powerful was the sense I was near people who were like me.
Ohioans, we are, and many of us have grown weary of being judged by others from elsewhere that somehow we are not quite as fortunate as our fellow Americans in, say, Atlanta or Boston or Chicago.
I am also a fisherman – an Ohio fisherman. It occurred to me as I drove through the Ohio countryside that not only am I tired of being labeled as a Rust Belt resident, but I’ve also heard enough chuckles about the condition of fishing here in Ohio.
“Is it your turn to catch the bass that lives in Ohio?” I heard that question from a friend in Georgia. Yeah, right, we have one bass here. Funny.
“Sorry you don’t have good fishing close to home,” another friend said. Really?
Perhaps this friend has no sense of geography. Has he never heard of the walleye capital of the world? It’s here, in Ohio. It’s that big lake we call Erie.
Bassmaster Magazine says nearby Pymatuning Reservoir is one of America’s best bass lakes. What’s that? A lake 35 miles from Youngstown?
Want to catch a musky? You’re as likely to catch one at Milton, West Branch or Pymatuning as any other lake in our country.
But Ohio anglers don’t need outsiders telling us about our fishing. We know what we’ve got, and it’s more than just a ranking on a list. Lists are made by people. Sometimes they don’t have all the facts.
To me, good fishing is as much about the entire experience of getting to the water and setting out on an adventure as it is about reeling in fish. Make no mistake, I love catching as much as anyone, but I really am passionate about fishing.
Good fishing means getting up out of my own bed and retiring there later that night after a day on a lake I know like the back of my hand. Good fishing means figuring out a new trick on a lake where I thought I’d already learned all of its secrets.
But good fishing also means lots of bass, crappie and walleyes. To me, that means Mosquito, Pymatuning, Erie and other great lakes I can drive to without spending a king’s ransom on gasoline.
Don’t tell me I’m a Rust Belt survivor in a state where fishing sucks.
I’m home in a town that gave the wedding cookie table to America, for goodness sake, not to mention statesmen, scholars, athletes and probably our nation’s best pizza. I’m home in a state where our corn is just as good as any other state’s corn.
And I’m home in a place where fishing for walleye, crappie, bass and musky is close enough to world-class, especially with all of it available an hour or less from home.