Lost in the mail: Tackling the big questions

A steelhead, one could argue, is a rainbow trout on steroids.
Gary Dodson
A steelhead, one could argue, is a rainbow trout on steroids.
Let us open the Tangled Lines mailbag and see what the populi is voxing about.
Agnes Day of Spore City, Ohio writes:
You keep talking about wet flies. Aren’t all flies wet once you cast them into the water?
I could go into a detailed explanation of how the wet fly imitates a transitional stage in an aquatic insects life cycle but I won’t, because this is a family newspaper.
I will offer this anecdote:
I was about 14 and fishing Woodland Valley Creek, a tributary of the Esopus in the Catskills. Dries only. I was having some success but occasionally my fly got waterlogged and provoked strikes, especially when I was trying to retrieve it when it was submerged downstream.
I was working a pool right by a cabin. The building was so close to the stream you could fish from the porch. As I puzzled over how to get that fish that was hanging out by the lower part of the pool, the old-timer on the porch was watching me. I didn’t realize it.
He scared me out of a year’s growth when he spoke up. He asked what fly I was using. “Royal Coachman,” I said. He asked if I had a wet version. I replied, Agnes-like, “A what?”
He came off the porch and made his way to where I was perched at the top of the pool. He borrowed my fingernail clippers and cut off most of the hackle on the Royal and left the white wing.
Then he advised adding a couple of feet of finer tippet, waiting 10 minutes for things to settle down, and flopping the thing into the current, allowing it to swing through the tail out.
I did this and after a couple of false starts caught the fish that had been tormenting me.
Afterwards the old-timer said I should try fishing wet flies upstream just like dries. When I objected that I wouldn’t be able to see the fly he said “Yeah but they’ll see it, and if they see it they’ll let you know soon enough.”
Fester Karbunkle of Potzrebie, New Jersey wants to know:
Do you ice fish?
No I do not. Ice fishing involves walking gingerly out on a frozen pond or lake, cutting a hole in the ice, and staring at it for indefinite periods of time.
I want no part of it. Especially the cutting the ice part. The ice is all that is between me and a cold, watery grave AND WOULD YOU PLEASE STOP CUTTING THE %$@# ICE!
Linus J. Scrimshaw of West Cornwall inquires:
What was your best trout in 2024?
This was a difficult year, with way too much rain at some points and none to speak of at others.
So the most satisfying catch was on the East Branch of the Delaware around Margaretville, New York. The stream was very low and I had to hoof it a couple hundred yards through inhospitable terrain until I found a pool deep enough to justify the term.
I could see the trout, and they could see me. So it just turned into a grim battle. Who would give up first?
After considerable time, and several “look but don’t eat” moments, I finally got a fat brown on a Bread and Butter nymph fished naked and alone. (The fly, that is. Not me.)
Then I had to go a couple hundred yards through inhospitable terrain back to where I started. My buddy Gary had wisely stayed put and was yanking a fish in when I fetched up. His fish was better than mine.
Honolulu Jones of East Drizzle, Wyoming objects:
Wait a minute. Didn’t you catch a steelhead back in April?
Yes, and you could argue that a steelhead is a rainbow trout on steroids.
But that trip to Pulaski and the Salmon River was so completely out of the usual run of events that I think of it the way other people think of significant milestones, like marriage, or the first arrest.
I forgot half my gear, sprained my wrist turning the knob in the shower, and almost lost an earlobe when a gust of wind blew a size 4 black Wooly Bugger (with rubber legs) back into my personal face.
And after fruitlessly flogging the water for two days, I absently flipped the Bugger into a deep hole, just trying to get some line out, when the steelie loomed up and chowed down.
So no, my first and only steelhead wasn’t the best fish of 2024. It was a happy accident and nothing else.
SHARON — Sharon Dennis Rosen, 83, died on Aug. 8, 2025, in New York City.
Born and raised in Sharon, Connecticut, she grew up on her parents’ farm and attended Sharon Center School and Housatonic Valley Regional High School. She went on to study at Skidmore College before moving to New York City, where she married Dr. Harvey Rosen and together they raised two children.
Sharon’s lifelong love of learning and the arts shaped both her work and her passions. For decades, she served as a tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History and the Asia Society, sharing her knowledge and enthusiasm with countless visitors. She also delighted in traveling widely, immersing herself in other cultures, and especially treasured time spent visiting her daughter and grandsons in Europe and Africa.
She was also deeply connected to her hometown, where in retirement she spent half her time and had many friends. She served as President of the Sharon East Side Cemetery until the time of her death, where generations of her family are buried and where she will also be laid to rest.
She is survived by her husband, Harvey; her children, Jennifer and Marc; and four beloved grandchildren.
Claire and Garland Jeffreys in the film “The King of In Between.”
There is a scene in “The King of In Between,” a documentary about musician Garland Jeffreys, that shows his name as the answer to a question on the TV show “Jeopardy!”
“This moment was the film in a nutshell,” said Claire Jeffreys, the film’s producer and director, and Garland’s wife of 40 years. “Nobody knows the answer,” she continued. “So, you’re cool enough to be a Jeopardy question, but you’re still obscure enough that not one of the contestants even had a glimmer of the answer.”
Garland Jeffreys never quite became a household name, but he carved out a singular place in American music by refusing to fit neatly into any category. A biracial New Yorker blending rock, reggae, soul and R&B, he used genre fusion as a kind of rebellion — against industry pigeonholes, racial boundaries and the musical status quo. Albums like “Ghost Writer” (1977) captured the tension of a post–civil rights America, while songs like “Wild in the Streets” made him an underground prophet of urban unrest. He moved alongside artists like Lou Reed and Bruce Springsteen but always in his own lane — part poet, part agitator, part bridge between cultures.
“I think what I tried to do with the film, wittingly or unwittingly, was just to show that we all have these lives and they don’t often meet our dreams of what we think we’re entitled to, we’re talented enough to get or whatever,” said Claire. “We all have these goals, but we’re sort of stymied. Often, it’s partly circumstance and luck, but it’s also very often something that we’re doing or not doing that’s impeding us.”
This is not the typical rock-and-roll redemption story. There are no smashed guitars, no heroic overdoses, no dramatic comeback tour. What we get instead is something quieter and more intimate: hours of archival footage that Claire spent years sorting through. The sheer effort behind the film is palpable — so much so that, as she admitted with a laugh, it cured her of any future ambitions in filmmaking.
“What I learned with this project was A, I’m never doing it again. It was just so hard. And B, you know, you can do anything if you collaborate with people that know what they’re doing.”
Claire worked with the editing team of Evan M. Johnson and Ben Sozanski and a slew of talented producers, and ended up with a truthful portrayal — a beautiful living document for Garland’s legions of fans and, perhaps most importantly, for the couple’s daughter, Savannah.
“She’s been in the audience with me maybe three or four times,” said Claire. “The last time, I could tell that she was beginning to feel very proud of the effort that went into it and also of being a part of it.”
Savannah pursued a career in music for a while herself but has changed tracks and become a video producer.
“I think she couldn’t quite see music happening for herself,” said Claire. “She was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to struggle the way I saw my dad struggling and I’m going to get a job with a salary.’”
The film doesn’t just track the arc of an underappreciated musician, however. The music, always playing, is the soundtrack of a life — of a man navigating racial, musical and personal boundaries while balancing marriage, parenthood, aging, addiction andrecovery. Garland and Claire speak plainly about getting sober in the film, a life choice that gave them both clarity and shows Claire as a co-conspirator in his survival.
“I did some work early on with a director,” said Claire. “He wanted the final cut, and I didn’t feel like I could do that — not because I wanted so much to control the story, but I didn’t want the story to be about Alzheimer’s.”
Diagnosed in 2017, Garland, now 81, is in the late stages of the disease. Claire serves as his primary caregiver. The film quietly acknowledges his diagnosis, but it doesn’t dwell — a restraint that feels intentional. Garland spent a career refusing to be reduced: not to one sound, one race or one scene. And so the documentary grants him that same dignity in aging. His memory may be slipping, but the film resists easy sentimentality. Instead, it shows what remains — his humor, his voice, his marriage, the echo of a life lived on the edges of fame and at the center of his own convictions.
The Moviehouse in Millerton will be screening “The King of In Between” on Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. Peter Aaron, arts editor of Chronogram Magazine will conduct a talkback and Q&A with Claire Jeffreys after the film. Purchase tickets at themoviehouse.net.
The Haystack Book Festival, a program of the Norfolk Hub, brings renowned writers and thinkers to Norfolk for conversation. Celebrating its fifth season this fall, the festival will gather 18 writers for discussions at the Norfolk Library on Sept. 20 and Oct. 3 through 5.
Jerome A. Cohen, author of the memoir “Eastward, Westward: A Lifein Law.”Haystack Book Festival
For example, “Never Take the Rule of Law for Granted: China and the Dissident,” will be held Saturday, Sept. 20, at 4 p.m. at the Norfolk Library. It brings together Jerome A. Cohen, author of “Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law,” and Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong King’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic” in dialogue with journalist Richard Hornik to discuss the rule of law and China.
The Council on Foreign Relations stated, “Few Americans have done more than Jerome A. Cohen to advance the rule of law in East Asia. He established the study of Chinese law in the United States. An advocate for human rights, Cohen has been a scholar, teacher, lawyer, and activist for sixty years.”
Cohen, a professor at New York University School of Law and director of its U.S.-Asia Law Institute, revealed his long view on China: “We are now witnessing another extreme in the pendulum’s swing toward repression. Xi Jinping is likely to outlive me but ‘no life lives forever.’ There will eventually be another profound reaction to the current totalitarian era.”
Mark Clifford, author of “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”Haystack Book Festival
In “The Troublemaker,” Clifford chronicles Lai’s life from child refugee to pro-democracy billionaire to his current imprisonment by the Chinese Communist Party. Clifford is president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, a Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, and holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. He was the former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and The Standard (Hong Kong and Seoul).
Journalist Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.Haystack Book Festival
Richard Hornik, adjunct senior fellow at the East-West Center, will moderate the discussion. Hornik is the former executive editor of AsiaWeek, news service director of Time magazine, and former Time bureau chief in Warsaw, Boston, Beijing and Hong Kong.
Betsy Lerner, author of “Shred Sisters,” is giving the 2025 Brendan Gill lecture at the Haystack Book Festival.Haystack Book Festival
The Brendan Gill Lecture is a highlight of the festival honoring longtime Norfolk resident Brendan Gill, who died in1997. Gill wrote for The New Yorker magazine for fifty years. Betsy Lerner, New York Times-recognized author of “Shred Sisters,” will deliver this year’s lecture on Friday, Oct. 3, at 6 p.m. at the Norfolk Library.
Visit haystackbookfestival.org to register. Admission is free.