Walter Anderson, Detail, Ocean Springs Community Center Mural, 1951.
We fished Saturday and Sunday. That seems like a small thing, we fish lots of Saturdays and Sundays, but so far this year I have caught a tiny bluegill (which was all I caught in January) and two small rainbows (which were all I caught in February). Meanwhile we’ve fished at Key West, Oahu, on the Texas Coast, and in the Hill Country. Since we were in Mississippi to try for another state things were bound to go wrong.
And last Saturday was bad even for March fishing on the Gulf. it was overcast and there was a 20+ knot wind from the south–which meant if we had just stood still and held our arms out we could have visited Memphis. To get to the leeward side of Horn Island we had to quarter the wind eight miles through three-foot slop, the kind of scary slop that in our skiff by ourselves would have left us alternately screaming at each other and clinging to each other in terror, hoping we didn’t die.
Our guide, Richard Schmidt, ran the right boat for the water, a Hell’s Bay Marquesas with a 90 hp Suzuki, and we were always perfectly safe. But Richard was pretty dubious about taking us out in that weather, and my jokes about us being casting impaired didn’t help any. The high wind coupled with the low chance of enough sun to see fish left things pretty sketchy, and when Richard suggested that sometimes his customers were casting challenged, I chimed in that he’d be well prepared for us. The joke fell flat. This was not a funny day. I was worried he was going to turn the boat around.
Instead he took us on to Horn Island. He had boiled crawfish and beer in the cooler, so whatever happened we were going to have a good day, and I would have gone to Horn Island just to see it.
Horn Island is part of the Gulf Coast Islands Seashore, and it’s a national treasure because, while it’s pretty enough–eight miles of sculpted pines and sugar white sand and dune colors–it’s Walter Anderson’s subject. I kept saying it was beautiful because, well, it was, but it was also beautiful because my eye had been prepared by Anderson. It’s hard not to see Anderson everywhere on the island.
I had never heard of Walter Anderson until I read The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. Jack Davis spends pages talking about him, and having read Davis the first thing I asked the lady at the front desk at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art was whether he was really crazy? “No,” the nice lady said, “He was just eccentric.” Mississippians being polite have eccentric, us Texans being harsher have crazy.
At dinner Friday Kris and I had talked mostly about Anderson–the lady at the desk said she personally thought he was bipolar, and that may not be crazy all the time but it’s at least eccentric. There were so many things to talk about, about how he lived apart from his family but how still from time to time new children would appear, about how he tied himself to a tree on Horn Island to experience Hurricane Betsy, about his long trips rowing the eight miles to Horn Island to live and sketch, and about his genius. Mostly about his genius. His work is so brilliant, so evocative of the place and more than a bit madly obsessive. How do we all not know Walter Anderson as well as we know Van Gogh, as well as we know Picasso? At least as well as we know Donald Judd?
And Horn Island is exactly what you see when you see much of Anderson’s work. Plus, right off the bat I caught a fish.
It wasn’t a very big fish. It was a 16-inch red that took my fly when I blind-cast to a place that to me looked fishy. The fish was silver, not red or bronze, with the bluest tail I’ve ever seen. Everything in Mississippi has the blues. After that Kris camped out on the casting platform and pretty much stayed there. I napped and ate crawfish, so I was happy, mostly. Kris hooked a redfish, too, a good 20-pounder, but the leader broke. Wind knot? probably a wind knot. There wasn’t a pig tail, so it wasn’t a badly tied connection, and anyway I’m sure that all of my knots are always perfect. The tippet was Rio fluorocarbon so even though the spool was a few years old it shouldn’t have snapped without some cause. Wind knot.
Otherwise while Kris fished I tried to take photos of the bald eagle and the ospreys on the island, and when I walked up into the dunes for a rest break I saw raccoon and seabird tracks in the sand. There was a moment when I was allowed a brief, very short stint back on the casting platform and watched hundreds of schooled sheepshead streaming down the beach, aggregating for their spawn. It is such a living place. We got some sun, and when we did we saw fish. We got some shots.
Sunday the problem wasn’t wind. There was no wind so instead we got fog, heavy fog that Kris and I wouldn’t have braved alone and that nobody else did either, and gnats. Gnats from hell. Gnats that we breathed, and ate, and that searched out every small bit of exposed and un-sprayed skin for a good feed. I was on the platform at one point and I looked down at a bit of hand I’d missed with bug spray and there were at least 200 gnats a’swarming. I have gnat bites on my bald spot. I have a raccoon-ring of welts around each eye where the Buff didn’t quite meet my sunglasses, and where I had avoided spaying bug spray for my eyes. Driving home Sunday, about the time we reached Louisiana, the gnat bites started itching. They were still itching 24 hours later.
Richard ran the boat 30 minutes through fog into the marshes out of Pass Christian, which is pronounced “Pass Christy-Anne,”with just a hint of “-ch-” between the “t” and the “y”. The water wasn’t clear, it had been better when we’d fished the day before, but Richard said that even in the marsh it usually was clear on the east side of the Mississippi. The Corps was diverting freshwater out of the Mississippi River through Lake Pontchartrain into the Gulf to avoid flooding downriver from New Orleans, and it killed the clarity. Apparently it also kills the oysters.
Richard said that beginning in May he guides mostly for jack crevalle on the flats and triple-tail near the crab traps. Kris never did catch a fish, so I’m thinking that means we need to go back. I’ve never landed a big jack crevalle. I’ve never fished for triple-tail. Plus the Mississippi Coast may be as pretty a place as I’ve ever fished.
And on the second day, late in the day, Kris let me on the platform just a wee bit more and I saw a swirl in a couple of feet of water and made a magnificent 90-foot cast to set my fly on the nose of the new world-record black drum. Ok, I’m lying, it isn’t the new world-record black drum, but it was one huge black drum–in the Gulf Coast parlance a big ugly. Richard thought it weighed somewhere between 40 and 50 pounds, so it was at least 60. And of course it’s growing.
And ok, I’m lying. It wasn’t a magnificent 90-foot cast, it was more of a rod-lenth flick. The fly was purple, with barbell eyes and it probably traced its lineage to a Clouser. I was fishing a ten weight Orvis Helios II and a Tibor Riptide (it’s probably important that you know that the Tibor was blue and that my shirt was sea-foam green). People always say black drum are blind, and maybe they are, but this drum made a six-inch rush to my fly, ate it, and I strip set. I really did. I strip-set.
Then everything stopped. The big drum pondered a bit and started to mosey away. It stopped, started moving again, realized it was hooked to something, and then it did something black drum don’t do: it ran. Their cousin the redfish will run, but black drum usually hunker down and make you pull them out. Ok, it didn’t run wild and fast like a permit or a jack, it didn’t twist and jump like steelhead, it ran like a train, straight and hard and purposeful and surprisingly fast, all the way into my backing: bubble-gum pink by the way, I’d never seen it before from that angle. Then when it stopped and figured out it was still hooked it ran some more. And then it ran some more. Richard polled in its direction which helped, but every time I started bringing it back it ran some more. It was big and it ran.
It didn’t take that long to land, less than a quarter hour, but it was some work. When I brought it boatside and Richard lipped the fish with his Boca Grip the hook fell out. We got some pictures, though they didn’t do it justice. Look at those shoulders! That color! That tail hanging halfway to the deck! It may not have been a world record, but it was without doubt the handsomest big ugly ever landed. It probably would have shown better if I’d held it up in front of us, arms extended, but I’m not sure I could have lifted it.
We fished a couple of more hours, and would be fishing still if it were up to Kris and Richard.
I loved fishing Ocean Springs. I have rarely been to a prettier place. Richard was a fine guide, plus he brought crawfish, and once you get past the Biloxi casinos the Mississippi Coast is charming. And did I mention? I caught a big fish–the black drum of the world, the most beautiful black drum ever landed and for that moment I was the handsomest gnat-infested angler who ever landed a fish. There just aren’t better places.
