Month: February 2018

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Ted Williams

from the Boston Public Library

Florida’s population in  1850 was 87,445.  The population of Texas, also granted statehood in 1845, was 212,592 (which included at least one of my great grandfathers, Joseph M. McReynolds, and another great-great grandfather, Samuel Elliott).  As of 2015, Florida was estimated to have a population of 20.24 million, making it the third most populous state behind California and Texas. In 1900 the population of Florida was 528,542.  Between 1960 and 2010 the population grew from 6,789,443 to 18,801,310.

I don’t think I have any ancestors who landed in Florida, and Texans don’t go to Florida to retire, but that’s what I’m finding out about Florida.  People come to Texas for oil and gas, or maybe medicine, NASA, or agriculture; people go to California for tech and agriculture and to be stars; people go to the Sunshine State for, well, sunshine. The Boys are Where They Are for sunshine.  The 17% retiree population is in Florida for sunshine.  It is the state of land speculation and oranges and sunshine. South Florida is further south than Brownsville, Texas, which I thought was as far south as the world went.  The average temperature of West Palm Beach, which is where we’re a’heading for our fishing foray, is 75.35°, which is higher even than the average for Houston,  69.05°.  It better not be humid.

And there were plenty of carpetbaggers after sunshine, from Henry Flagler to Governor Rick Scott. Ernest Hemingway carpetbagged.  Tennessee Williams carpetbagged.  Jack Kerouac carpetbagged. It’s a thing.

Going to Florida for baseball and fishing, I’ve been thinking a lot about the carpet baggerTed Williams.  There was never a purer hitter than Ted Williams.  He was the last player to hit .400, and maybe the last ever (though I have some vague hope for Jose Altuve).  He spent three prime seasons in military service as a navy fighter pilot in World War II and Korea.  He didn’t get along with Boston fans, for which one can hardly blame him, didn’t get along with his players when he managed, didn’t get along with the Boston press, was a 17-year All Star, a two-time MVP, and between 1941 and 1958 led the league in hitting six separate times. His head is frozen in a cryogenic lab, and I don’t think the lab has ever been paid. 

A generation bought Ted Williams sporting gear from Sears Roebuck: he was the paragon of the late mid-century sportsman. Williams’ had a 3,193-square-foot home on Upper Magecumbe Key on Islamorada.  There was a Sears Ted Williams model boat and motor, and Ted Williams shotguns and baseball gloves and weights. There was Ted Williams fishing gear. He was one of a group including Lefty Kreh, Joe Brooks, Chico Fernandez, and A.J. McClane who invented fly fishing for bonefish.  At one point Williams claimed to have caught 1000 bonefish and 1000 tarpon and 1000 Atlantic salmon, so he hit 1.000 for something.  He was obsessed with fly fishing. He was obsessed with fishing. I suspect he was as opinionated and fussy of an angler as he was a manager, if not a batter.

I’m not sure he would have been fun to fish with.  He would have been great to fish with.

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Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Rita Mae Brown

To get ready to fly fish Florida, I need to do some reading.  I’ve been preparing.

Possibly the best known authors from Florida are three women: Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Rita Mae Brown. I’ve read one novel by each (though I may long ago have also read a collection of folklore by Hurston).  Hurston of course was an African American author whose most famous work,Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937. Rawlings was a white carpetbagger-author from Washington, D.C. who published The Yearling in 1938. Both novels were about rural hard-scrabble Florida and were published at the end of the Great Depression. Brown wrote a lot of mystery novels that involve a cat which I don’t think I’ve read, but is famous for Rubyfruit Jungle, a lesbian coming-of-age novel published in 1973.  I probably read it in 1978 or so.  I haven’t re-read it.

Their Eyes Were Watching God begins early in the 1900s in Eatonville, a black community north of Orlando.  I guess it’s a coming-of-age novel, though the heroine Janey shoots right through the coming-of and lands on independent womanhood. It does take three husbands, one of whom she marries as a child and then abandons, one of whom she is happy to see die, and one of whom she shoots with a rifle when he gets rabies and tries to shoot her with a pistol.  She liked the last one. There are a paucity of white folk, and a lot of rural black dialogue, but it’s an immensely likable novel, and important. I’m not really sure I remember how God comes into it, but being omnipresent he’s probably in the center of things.

The Yearling, published a year later, is set earlier, after the Civil War, but again a bit north of Orlando. It is also a coming of age novel, a dark coming of age novel about a boy who is forced to choose between his greatest friend, a yearling deer, and his family’s survival.  The deer decides the corn crop is ready to hand and tasty. The Yearling probably qualifies as young adult fiction. There are the bad guys who burn houses but are always there to lend a hand,  likable Pa who in the book is remarkably small but in the movie is miscast as Gregory Peck, the world-weary and no-nonsense Ma who is large and ugly but in the movie is miscast as Jane Wyman, and Jody the boy who almost kills himself getting to manhood.  As young adult fiction it is extremely important, as adult fiction maybe not so much.  It did win a Pulitzer, and it was my mother’s favorite novel–she was 21 the year it was published–and I suspect her childhood on a Texas dryland farm was closer to the childhood in The Yearling than it was to my childhood. I love the book.

In Finding Florida T.D. Allman lambasts Rawlings because there are no blacks in The Yearling, when a significant portion of Florida’s population was and is black, but it doesn’t seem that strange to me.  InTheir Eyes Were Watching God, other than Janey’s birth story, there’s no significant white presence (though like God there may be some omnipresence).  Among the rural Southern poor, there wasn’t always much cross-racial exchange.  You might as well criticize Rawlings and Hurston for failing to include lesbians.  I’m sure there were some lesbians in Florida, I don’t think lesbians were invented in 1973, but they wouldn’t have been particularly central to the lives of the characters in these novels. It is easy to forget how complete segregation was, and among poor whites there were no servants from which to wring a Driving Miss Daisy or The Help.  It is perfectly likely that The Yearling’s Baxters on their  isolated farm had as much interaction with African Americans as Rawlings portrayed. Maybe some more, but not so much as to be worth noticing, and the Baxter’s attitudes probably wouldn’t have made them more likable; maybe taught us something, but only as a sideshow.

As for Rubyfruit Jungle, I don’t remember much about it.  The heroine was a young woman who always knew she was a lesbian and grew into it and out into the world. It was the novel of the age when it was published, rich with feminist principal and sexual liberation, but for me at least its age has probably come and gone.  Maybe not, but I suspect it’s past its shelf life. When I read it originally I’m not sure I got the reference in the title, I was far more familiar with ruby red grapefruit, Texas’ finest, than other forms of ruby fruit, but I’ve always been a bit slow.  It is more parochial than the other two novels.  I suspect that many lesbians would say it’s more personal than the other two novels.

I don’t believe there’s a mandate that Florida authoresses have three-part names.

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Guadalupe River Fever

Yesterday we drove to the Guadalupe and I lay in cypress roots by the side of the river and thought I was going to die.  I’d been nauseous driving, and then at some point over the three hour drive it struck me:  “hey! I’m sick!” I’m quick that way.

I was going to sleep in the car while Kris fished but no, I’m a manly man and thought I needed to at least try the river.  Last week I’d rigged nymph rigs, but being sick and stupid I’d left them at home. I rigged from scratch which took forever, and then  my line was threaded wrong through my reel.  How did that happen?  How did I do that?  I always thought the feminine name was the worst part of a Hardy Duchess. Can reels be girly?  But the worst part of the Duchess reel is that the line is supposed to thread through a closed window.  Unlike every other reel I’ve ever owned, you can’t fix line problem by removing the spool, re-routing the line, then putting the spool back in.  You have to start all over.

I still like the reel though.  It’s a lovely thing. I’m sure it appeals to my feminine side. And I guess really good fly fisherfolk never screw up their rigging.

We were parked at a steep bank below a high bluff.  There were stairs down and then a path along the river.  I made it maybe 100 feet downriver, enough to get away from Kris and the other guy fishing.  Then my dropper rig got tangled before my first cast.  Do you know how to keep dropper rigs from tangling? Fish with streamers.

It took awhile, but I worked out the tangle, then cast four or five or ten times, then got tangled again, then cut off my flies and lay down in the cypress roots. I have always loved cypress, and the roots going down into the river look like something made up by Tolkien.  When I was laying in the roots and deciding whether to throw up I wondered, do I barf in the earthy space between the roots,  or go for the river?  Either was ready to hand, with my feet in the water and my back on the knobby roots.  I decided on the earthy space, but lay back down and the nausea went away.  Still thinking about it, just in case, I decided the ground was the right choice.  Barf floating downriver doesn’t sound pleasant.  Chum?  Maybe carp? I had no upchuck emergers.

So I lay in the roots and looked up through the tree limbs and wondered if this was how it felt to be a wounded soldier on the field of battle. I get dramatic when I’m sick. Honestly though, to get out of there I had to climb up the bank through the tangle of roots and then up the stairs to the car and I just didn’t think I would make it.  If there had been anyone to haul me out I’d have agreed. I did it though, sooner or later, and I didn’t even break my rod.  We drove home and I slept on the drive then slept through to this morning.

On the upside, we did find kolaches, at the recommendation of my friend John Geddie, at The Original Kountry Bakery in Schulenberg.  I hadn’t realized I was sick yet, so I ate two, a cherry and a poppy seed.  They were perfectly acceptable, though I thought the sugar glaze was gilding the lily.

And oh yeah, Kris pointed out that all those nymph rigs were in a box in the car, right where I’d have seen them if I’d just looked.

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Nymphing Rod Fever

I’ve got fly rod fever.  I’ve been reading Dynamic Nymphing, and I’m not sure how I’ve survived without a 10′ rod.  I need a nymphing rod. It’s a wonder that I’ve ever successfully mended a line, and maybe I haven’t. That set me off on an internet search where I learned many things but most of all that what I need is not just a 10′ rod, but a 3 weight rod.

Now I have an old 3 weight somewhere that I bought many many years ago.  It’s a two-piece.   I may have even used it once. Are two-pieces back in vogue yet?

The reason I need a 3 weight is because each of those subtle takes I’m going to be feeling will just not telegraph well through the 6 weight that I had settled on–mostly because a have a surplus of 6 weight reels.  So when I surveyed the rod-makers websites, Hardy, Thomas & Thomas, Orvis, Winston, Scott, all the usual suspects, plus Fenwick and St. Croix, seemed to make exactly what I needed to catch fish.

Yesterday when I couldn’t stand it any longer I bailed work a bit early and started trolling shops.  I made it first to Gordy & Sons, which is elegant, spacious, and new.  It’s a three-story purpose-built temple that worships some kind of British custom shotgun and also sells high-end fly fishing gear.  They keep an Islamoralda skiff down in the parking area just to prove  they’re serious.  They have a casting pond.  They have cigars and whisky.

They also have Scotts and Winstons.  “We sell a lot of the Winstons.”  Marcus said they were likely to have a 3wt. upstairs.

I went from there to Bayou City Angler, but they were better than Gordy at spotting a man with the fever and had me out in the parking lot casting in a trice.  Both were 4 weights, and they had no long threes. The Winston felt oddly heavy and awkward to me. For trout rods I’m usually a Winston kind of guy, green is my favorite color, but this time no.

Maybe there was a reason for that clunkiness.  These are rods for trout nymphing in all situations. Unlike any other old 9′ 4wt., nymphing rods are designed not for delicate presentations to delicate fish (though every manufacturer assures me that they are the very thing for that very thing) but for responsive protected tips for delicate takes by big fish. The butt of the rod has to be substantial for landing bigger fish.  Hence I’m guessing the odd awkwardness of the Winston.

The Thomas & Thomas cast much better, plus my last name is Thomas! Plus it was blue! Plus it was 20% off! It was the Avantt I think. They only had a 4 weight, but they assured me they could get the 3wt.  Checking on line this morning though there doesn’t seem to be a 3wt., and I just don’t know if I could catch fish with a 4wt.  Not, of course, that I catch fish now.  But it’s 20% off! And my last name is Thomas!

And it’s blue!

Nobody around here sells Fenwick or St. Croix, so I’m tempted to buy one online, but what if I didn’t like it? And don’t I owe a duty of loyalty to my local shops?  I think I do, really.  But I like the idea of St. Croix, and it’s American made.  The cheapest, Fenwick, is Korean.

I’m certain that a nymphing rod will allow perfect mends. It will be so much fun and excitement and the joy of the world to perform perfectly that Czech-method straight-line nymphing that I’ve been reading about. I’ll have to learn some Czech, or maybe  some Polish, so that I can properly address the fish I’ll be catching.

I want to try the Orvis Recon still.  It gets very good reviews and is a very good price.  I don’t know if the fish will like a second tier rod, but then I suspect Thomas & Thomas is about to roll out a newer model, and the fish may not like that Avantt either.

Of course I know that if I just hold I’ll be over this in a few weeks, and the Buddha tells me that the satisfaction of one desire only begets new desire.  Sounds true to me, and I’m not even Buddhist. But then I’m going to West Virginia in May.  I need this rod for West Virginia.