Month: July 2018

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The Ten Best Summer Steelhead Flies!!!

Disclaimer: I wrote this as a joke, because I have no idea what the ten best steelhead flies might be, winter or summer, and I feel guilty every time somebody ends up here. It’s actually a long shaggy dog story about a fly I tied with an ostrich feather that a drag queen gave me at a pride day parade. I did, in fact, catch a summer steelhead on that fly, so if you want to know the very best steelhead fly, it’s one you tie with a feather given to you by a drag queen at a pride parade.

I’m sure someone knows what the ten best summer steelhead flies are, but I haven’t a clue. In September We  go to Oregon, but before, in less than a week, we go to Louisiana. The jumble has me thinking about redfish and steelhead flies at the same time, and I’m no good at multitasking.

I like simple flies. A few years ago the rage in redfish flies was redfish crack, the hardest part of which was using a magic marker.  Tie some EP fiber to the hook for a tail, wrap some EP brush for a head, use a sharpie to bar the tail, brush out the head, done. I greatly admire that fly.

My current favorite redfish fly is this unnamed thing, or at least unnamed to me. It’s my favorite because I made it up after fishing an Avalon for permit, and because the first fly I ever fished in saltwater, a rattler, had rattles. I later caught 50-odd crappie in a single day with a rattler, and later still caught a four-pound bass. I like flies that make noise. I would name the fly I made up, but I figure lots of people have made up the same fly, and one of these days I’ll stumble across its name.  Meantime it’s easy to tie and catches all sorts of stuff. Plus it’s kinda weedless, or as much as any fly is ever weedless.

Rattler. Ok, maybe it was only 30 crappie. CRAH-pee. Puh-CAHN.

Sac-au-lait.

Steelhead flies though are a different matter. It doesn’t seem like anybody ever thought about making them simple, and I don’t know why.  Are steelhead peculiarly complex? Do they never hit a Clouser? Steelhead flies look like somebody wanted to tie classic salmon flies, smoked a joint, and came up with Modern Steelhead Flies. That’s the book I bought to teach me all about steelhead flies, Modern Steelhead Flies.

It’s hard, by the way, not to make jokes about marijuana and Oregon.

Kris and I finally paraded with my firm in this year’s LGBT Pride Parade, and I learned that sometimes Texas parade routes smell like marijuana. Colleagues ask every year if I’ll march and I say sure but then something happens. I put off joining the parade for two years, and they finally shamed me into it. Personally I think it’s a better world when LGBT folk can do some shaming.

The Pride Parade in Houston is no small affair.  There are thousands of paraders, and tens of thousands of paradees. Our daughter dropped us off on Allen Parkway and we walked a bit to the staging point. I really dressed for the parade too: a pair of running shoes, khaki shorts, blue linen shirt, and the crowning glory, my straw fedora. I was a little worried I might stand out too much, but believe it or not, some participants were even less restrained than me. Really. Kris said there was a topless lady, but I didn’t see her. Ogling the topless lady would have probably been wrong anyway, but Kris thought she might be topless at a parade with some expectation of being ogled. Could be.

There were groups from churches and big oil. There was the mayor and the parents of transgender children. There were Democratic candidates, though I think I must have missed the Republican float. We were the only big law firm, but there were lots of banks, and some smaller firms.

So meantime I haven’t actually read much of Modern Steelhead Flies, but it’s got good pictures. Of course I had absolutely none of the fly tying materials for steelhead flies. This is always a given for any new fly, one never has the stuff. This though was particularly brutal. Hooks? Nope. Hot pinks and purples and blues? Nope? Ice dubbing? Not a bit of it. I didn’t own a single ostrich feather.  The first fly I tried, something called a Fifth Element because of all the blue feathers (none of which I owned), had 72 different layers of materials. I spent an hour ordering from FeatherCraft, and when they didn’t have everything I ordered some more from J. Stockard. None of my local shops were going to carry this stuff. I finally found blue Gamakatsu octopus hooks on Amazon. The Feather Thief got nothing on me.

Then I tied the fly, got to the end and realized I’d  forgotten to order the last five layers of stuff.  I tied in some black marabou and called it a day. It looked pretty good, too, as long as you didn’t pay attention to the big gaps on the back side where I didn’t get the materials all the way around the hook.

The third fly in the book, which was also on the list of flies the Oregon outfitter sent, was Jeff Hickman’s fish taco.

Now Mr. Hickman’s fish taco really appealed to me. It was on the outfitter’s list. It was relatively simple compared to the other stuff, only 67 layers or so. Most of all I could look at the fly and think, that looks fishy. That’s the highest praise for any random fly sitting in a box: It looks fishy. Plus it was a taco. I might prefer an enchilada, or even a chalupa, but I’m a Texan and if what you can get is a taco you take a taco. I know and like people who’ve written admirable books about queso and salsa, and I’ll throw in a gratuitous plug for them here. I have also gone miles out of my way to get barbacoa and lengua tacos with just a brush of onion and cilantro, and this was a taco.

I was sitting in my office one day and got distracted and watched a video of Jeff Hickman tying Jeff Hickman’s fish taco. He seemed like a genuinely reasonable guy. He drank unpretentious beer. He took it in stride when he forgot to tie in the 33rd layer of rainbow black flashabou.  I figured this was a guy who wouldn’t mind if I had to use a hot pink hot spot instead of red because I only ordered hot pink ice dubbing.

I also had no ostrich feathers, and 90% of the fish taco is ostrich feathers.

So Kris and I are walking to the staging point for our LGBT Pride parade group and I’m dressed in my gaudy outfit and I feel a hand on my shoulder. A big hand.

Now I’m 6 feet, or I was 40 years ago, but I turn and look up, way up, into the face of either a transgender lady or a drag queen–the taxonomy confuses me some but you can be one without being the other, or vice versa–in a long black satin sheath gown and enough dyed black ostrich feathers to festoon, well, an ostrich. We were of a certain age together, but she’d spent a bit more time in tanning beds, and I was dressed more like a law firm partner taking his grandkids to the zoo. I had no ostrich feathers.

“Darlin’, we gotta spruce you up.” Ok, maybe that wasn’t precisely what she said, but that’s what it sounded like to me.  She plucked an ostrich feather and stuck it in my hat and declared me more festive. I now have a spirit animal for this trip to Oregon, but I haven’t decided whether it’s an ostrich or a 6-foot-4 drag queen in the LGBT Pride parade. I’m leaning towards the latter.

So meantimes.

Kris and I are driving from Galveston and talking about what we need to take to Oregon and she says she’s been looking at the email from Jeff Hickman and I say who? She says Jeff Hickman and I say the fish taco guy? She says what? Jeff Hickman it turns out is our outfitter. I guess I knew that, we’d exchanged emails and all, but it hadn’t registered that the guy I was watching on YouTube tying fish tacos was the guy I was e-mailing. I’m slow like that.

But I catch up sooner or later and this is all coming together. I might even catch a fish. I’ll tie up some hot pink redfish crack with lavender hot spots. If nothing else I’ll learn to tie a fish taco, and I’ll use ostrich herl scavenged from the wild.

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The Ten Best Novels About New Orleans!!!!

My fish-catching skills have been a bit off.  I’ve been to five states and I’ve caught fish in three, which means I’m batting .600: Great for baseball, not so much for fishing.  On the other hand my state visiting skills are coming right along.  I’ve definitely improved my reading.  Preparing for a state I read new stuff and re-read very good stuff I sometimes don’t remember I’ve read before. And I have an excuse to read trash too. Reading in anticipation of a visit may be the best way to read.

The internet helps, and I’ve taken to searching for books on lists like Ten Best Books about Louisiana!, and 100 Books You Need to Read About the South! Some of the lists are good. I especially like this one.  Some of the lists are  peculiar.  They start well enough with The Awakening and Confederacy of Dunces, plus a Dave Robicheaux novel, but then veer off track into bodice rippers. There are a lot of lurid covers for Louisiana novels.

And Interview with the Vampire is on every list. I just don’t get it.

I hadn’t read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). The novel is set among well-to-do Creoles, with the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, as the interloper from the old Kentucky bluegrass country. She’s beautiful,  throws the best dinner parties, and every man in New Orleans worships at her feet, but domestic duty keeps Edna from full self-realization so she drowns herself. It’s a pretty short novel.

In some ways it’s a bit like Madame Bovary (eats rat poison) and Anna Karenina (throws herself under a train), but with a big difference: both Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina follow their inclinations, are abandoned by their lovers, and off themselves out of shame and despair. While Edna follows some inclinations and finally  despairs, the two aren’t particularly connected and she’s not ashamed. She just refuses to put up with her lot. Readers often see The Awakening as feminist, and maybe oppression of a sort is the source of Edna’s dissatisfaction, but it could also be because of her unsatisfied passion for Robert, or maybe she’s just nuts.  There’s some ambiguity, and nuts is certainly possible. It’s not uncommon after all for folk to live lives of quiet desperation without drowning themselves.

If you’re looking for novels to label as feminist The Awakening might strike your fancy, but I’m not convinced it would be my first choice.  There are too many problems with Edna’s suicide.  Does a woman fail in some important way because she  abandons her children? Yes, of course, and the same is true for a man. That men do so more often is no excuse. Edna is troubling because in part she is wrong, and because of the novel’s late 19th century Naturalism any certain answer about Edna is unsatisfactory. The author’s neutrality makes the book both better and more difficult, but I suspect that Ms. Chopin would be surprised by the notion that Edna’s suicide is explained by some broader context.

I hadn’t read Robert Penn Warren’s  All the King’s Men (1947) either, and it seems to have fallen off of a lot of the lists. Strictly speaking, it’s as much about Louisiana generally as New Orleans. It’s set against the backdrop of Huey P. Long, Governor Willie Stark in the novel, but it’s really about Stark’s right-hand-man, Jack Burden, a Louisiana aristocrat who  has decamped from his birthright to work for the dark side. Maybe it’s fallen off the lists because within the first few pages you get the N-word from the protagonist, but its notions are what they are, and are certainly true for 1930s Louisiana.  Maybe it’s fallen off the lists because it’s a big rambling book with a few too many Luke-I-Am-Your-Father moments: it depends on surprises, so it’s  uneven and contrived from time to time.

It’s good though, and some critics declare it as our best political novel, which seems a bit like declaring a reliever our best left-handed set-up man. I suppose it’s because they feel a need to justify their fondness for it.

Louisiana divides culturally into Creole New Orleans,  the wealthy planters along the Mississippi, the Baptist Appalachian north, and the Catholic Cajun coastline.  Overlay that with African Americans who themselves are divided among downtown and uptown: Creole mixed race descendants of free people of color and the descendants of rural slaves. Nobody ever played those divisions better than Huey P. Long, and that manipulation of the herd, herds rather, for political ends is what Willie Stark is all about. And Willie Stark’s ends, unlike say Huey P. Long’s ends, are mostly good (even if the means are pretty rough and tumble). Of course both Long and Stark ultimately come to a violent end. Luke-I-Am-Your-Father.

But politics aside, Jack Burden, cynical and disengaged, is a peculiarly modern hero not much different than  the hero of The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling, cynical and disengaged, a peculiarly modern hero not much different than  Jack Burden. In broad strokes their stories are the same, Bolling is also an aristocrat (a Bolling no less), their plots are the same, they’re the same. Bolling goes to Chicago on his journey of discovery, not to California like Burden, and unlike Burden the girl goes with him. Pretty much the same girl though.

Oddly, I’d read The Moveigoer (1961) and didn’t remember a thing about it except for one line: “‘Jean-Paul ate some lungs.’” It was Bolling’s much younger half-sister’s line while the kids were eating crabs on a sawbuck picnic table at a fishing camp. I loved that line, and for years after I read it I would tell my kids about it every time we ate crabs because it is a very very funny line for anyone who ever cracked open crabs. I thought I’d read it in a James Lee Burke novel.

When I re-read The Moviegoer I read an appreciation of the novel in The Atlantic by Andrew Santella, in which he admitted to an unhealthy youthful obsession with Binx’s droll disconnected sophistication, which Santella now sees as pretty messed up. Truth is though that Binx never does anything particularly bad, and his movie-going is a metaphor for how he observes his own life. He’s not that disengaged. When it comes time for Binx to be the hero of his movie, if only in a fairly ordinary way, he steps up.

“I did my best for you, son. I gave you all I had.  More than anything I wanted to pass on to you the one heritage of the men of our family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women–the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life.”

It is Bolling’s Aunt Emily haranguing him for what she believes is his great failure, but that’s also a pretty good description of Binx Bolling. When it is time for him to prove his lightly worn nobility, he does it. He calls his secretary’s roommate, sure, and you think with horror that he’s going to blow it, but he calls her not about sex but about connection. He is a gentle man. He tells her he’d like to come over Saturday and bring his fiancé. Binx is all right. Binx will be all right.

Ignatius J. Reilly comes into the world with such a strange provenance. John Kennedy Toole had committed suicide after Confederacy of Dunces (1981) was rejected by publishers. Toole’s mother (and you can’t help but wonder at her connection to Ignatius’s mother, Irene), drops the manuscript off with Walker Percy, who was teaching writing at Tulane. Percy gets the novel published by LSU. It posthumously wins the Pulitzer Prize.

I read it first when it was all the rage back in the early 80s, and second ten years back on a trip to New Orleans. It’s a comic novel that holds up well, is often compared to Don Quixote, and since I’m a careless and inattentive reader I’ve found things new in it every time I’ve read it.  It can be ponderous,  heavy-handed, and sophomoric, but it can also be great fun. Part of the fun now is realizing how the world has changed in my lifetime. Where are these people’s cell phones? There’s a bakery in a department store? There’s a department store? There’s a pants factory in New Orleans? Lan Lee’s pornographic postcards seem so mild, and Burma Jones’ black dialect verges on the racially insensitive.  Ooo-wee.

But still, if you can’t imagine the interior of the Night of Joy bar you haven’t been to the French Quarter, and the plot, fantastic and mundane all at once, seems like a flimsy but funny excuse for the people and the places. No novel was ever tied so closely to a city, so that Ignatius’s one earlier attempt to leave New Orleans, an 80-mile bus trip, becomes Dante’s journey: “The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. . . .”

And Ignatius. The book’s epigram is from Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Is Ignatius a genius? He’s more likely a fool, but then again maybe he’s a madly misdirected genius. He’s certainly not like the rest of us. He also certainly deserves more trouble than he gets–except I feel a bit bad when he’s threatened with the mental ward at Charity. But then again . . . .

What a weird, funny novel, and whatever its unevenness no one can doubt Toole’s appreciation of theology and geometry.

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Oregon and the Color of Fish

In September, after Louisiana and a quick-trip again to try for Maryland stripers, we go to Oregon to fish for steelhead on the Deschutes. We have a bit more than a month between Louisiana and Oregon, and I’ve decided there are no two places in this country further apart, if not quite physically then in most other ways that matter. Even the Oregon names, Oregon, Portland, Deschutes, ring different than Louisiana names: Louisiana, Vieux Carre, Atchafalaya.

Eugene. Acadiana.

The Deschutes is a lovely river, I’ve seen it. But its name calls out for a gesundheit.  It’s not just the brutality of the names though that make Oregon different from  Louisiana. Oregon is liberal, eccentric, and whatever its history may be it seems to have no great effect on its present.  Louisiana is none of those things, except of course for eccentric. In Oregon you can legally smoke pot and legally commit suicide. In Oregon you drink pinot noir or pinot gris and craft beer, or maybe Pabst Blue Ribbon. In Louisiana you try to drink yourself to death with drive-through daiquiris and sticky sweet hurricanes in to-go cups from Pat O’Brien’s and complex mildly bitter Sazeracs. Interestingly, based on CDC data, Louisiana ranks only 17th among states for rates of heavy drinking among adults, Oregon unexpectedly ranks higher than Louisiana at 16th. I suspect all those tea-totalin’ Baptists in north Louisiana keep it from achieving its proper place as number one, and all those winery owners boost Oregon.

Maybe I’m wrong and they’re not really different. Maybe we’ve all blended into the same thing. But can you imagine if Duck Dynasty had been made in Oregon? It would be Portlandia. And vice versa.

Evermann, Barton Warren  and Goldsborough, Edmund Lee, The Fishes of Alaska, , 1907, plate 38, Steelhead Trout

On driving trips we used to play a game naming the natural color of cars. The natural color of a car is the color of the wild car before its domestication.  The natural color of a 1980s Ford Crown Vic is brown. The natural color of a BMW five series is blue, a Honda Accord is silver, and a 1970s F-150 pickup is red.  It’s a fun game, because there are so many cars where the answer strikes everyone playing as obvious.

We picked the Deschutes for steelhead because it’s the natural color of Oregon fish. What else could we fish for? Where else could we fish? Some states don’t have a natural color of fish: Florida and Alaska have too many colors to pick just one.  Texas doesn’t really have a natural color of fish, unless it’s channel cat and they’re hard to get to take a fly. I’ve fished in Oregon before, for trout on the McKenzie out of a McKenzie boat, and even though we caught fish it was somehow unsatisfactory. I think it was unsatisfactory because we fished the wrong color of fish. In Maryland you gotta fish stripers in the Chesapeake. In Louisiana you gotta fish redfish in the coastal marsh. In Oregon you gotta fish for chromers–I think that’s what they call them –on the Deschutes. Everywhere else a chromer is a stocked trout. In Oregon it seems to be the wildest of trout.

I suspect in Oregon the natural color of fish is steelhead, not because there aren’t other perfectly good targets.  There are plenty of perfectly decent rivers in Oregon and miles of coastline, but I suspect it’s steelhead because in Oregon steelheading is at least in part about the style of the thing. Could you fox hunt without red jackets and stirrup cups? I reckon, but it ain’t quite the thing.  It ain’t quite the thing to fish for steelhead out of a drift boat with a 9 ft 7 wt and nymphs under a bobber, even though that apparently is the best way to actually catch steelhead. It’s just not done. You have to cast gaudy flies with a 13 foot spey rod that’s good for not much else. You have to use impossibly named incomprehensible line and leader combinations. It’s not just a thing to be done, it’s a thing to be done in the right way.

It seems to me that spey casting is popular in Oregon not because it’s the best way to catch fish but because it’s fun to do in and of itself, and even more fun to do in and of itself while mildly stoned. This is what happens to a perfectly good sport when you legalize marijuana.

There is certainly fly fishing in Louisiana, but talk to most of the Louisiana fly guides and you begin to suspect that there’s not much purity in the heartland of the spoon fly. “I was after a record fish, so I had five rods set up and I’d hook one fish and if it didn’t seem big enough I’d hand it off to  the guide and he’d bring it in while I took one of the other rods to cast again.”  I heard someone say that about fishing to a school of bull reds in the Louisiana marsh. In Oregon the discussion seems to be about how many days one casts from dawn to dusk before one actually catches a fish. They don’t actually wear red jackets though. At least I hope so.  I don’t own a red jacket.

Meanwhile we keep trying to fish Galveston. Kris caught a bit of redfish Saturday morning blind-casting in Green Lake mud.  I put down some tailing redfish.  I’d forgotten how skittish redfish could be on a flat on a still summer day.

That’s Kris’s fish. I only photobombed.

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More Louisiana

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Kris asked me if there was ever an end to stories about Louisiana, and I don’t think so. I haven’t written about the Louisiana Purchase, or the names in the Times-Picayune obituaries. There was the LSU chancellor who bet wrong on the market and secured his loans by printing up University bonds on the basement printing press. There is Ray Nagin’s baffling behavior during Katrina, his Chocolate City speech, and his ultimate corruption conviction. There’s Huey P. Long, Edwin Edwards and his corruption conviction, and Duck Dynasty’s fall from grace. There’s Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Jerry Lee Lewis.  I worry with some states that I’ll have nothing to say, with Louisiana I worry if I’ll ever finish talking.

We fish Louisiana somewhere near New Orleans August 4-5 with Captain Bailey Short. Captain Short is an Orvis-endorsed guide, so he should be a pretty safe bet. August 4-5 is less so. It’s hot in Louisiana in August, and while there may or may not be redfish, the fish won’t be the big 30+ pound bulls. Those start in October and stay through the winter.**

People from Houston love New Orleans in August.  The heat and humidity’s no worse than Houston, and there are no tourists. You can get hotel reservations. You can get restaurant reservations.  I guess we’re tourists too, but the ties are so close between the cities, like Houston and Dallas or Houston and San Antonio, that it doesn’t feel that way.

We’d originally tried to schedule Captain Short in November of last year: November is prime for the big reds. In Texas we also have bull reds, but not in the marsh. Our marsh is on the mainland side of the barrier islands. Because in Louisiana barrier islands don’t stand between the Gulf and the mainland, the bulls come in. Our bull reds stay on the surf side where I don’t trust our skiff. Maybe I should, but I don’t. Old age.

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In November it stormed or at least threatened so we delayed. We fished in Galveston in clear water on a cold day and I caught a nice red on a nice sight cast with a fly I’d made up. Sometimes things work, even in salt water. We re-booked for April, the advantage to which is that it’s not March. March is the worst month on the Gulf Coast. There’s hard wind, dirty water, and no fish. April is a smidgen better, or maybe by April I’m just used to hard wind, dirty water, and no fish. We didn’t get to go with Captain Bailey in April either. Storms.

I’ve gone fly fishing but not caught fish, a lot of different kinds of fish, a lot of times. I’ve now not caught tarpon in Belize and Florida. I’ve hooked but not landed trout all winter on the Guadalupe, and I’ve hooked and not landed two permit. More than any other fish I’ve fished for and not caught I’ve not caught redfish. I’ve caught some, but I’ve fished a lot more. In Galveston I’ve fished and failed to see redfish for days on end, so I’ve not caught a whole lot of redfish. The only other fish that might be close is sheepshead.

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Notwithstanding conventional wisdom I think redfish are hard. Maybe I’m wrong, but bonefish are a payload easier for me than redfish. Get on a good Belizean flat and sooner or later you will catch bonefish: you just have to remember not to pull the fly out of the fish’s mouth. Get on a grassy flat in Galveston Bay and sooner or later you’ll see some mullet jump 100 feet away. The sun’s not shining. The water’s off-color. The wind’s too high.  There are no fish.  Most days you won’t see redfish.

Galveston visibility is bad, and my experience in Louisiana is the same. Often you see reds just as they see you and are heading the other direction. When everything is working for me I can cast pretty well, but you know the hardest cast in fly fishing? It’s a nine-foot cast to the redfish that you just spotted as your skiff’s about to run it over.

Most weekends when we’re home we’ll take the skiff out on Saturday because we can’t resist, and we keep thinking this will be it. This will be the weekend when it all comes together. It never is. Most weekends when were home I’m likely to go bass fishing on Sunday so I’ll remember what it’s like to catch fish.

I’ve caught one more tilapia this year than I’ve caught redfish.

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**Postscript. This is one of those times I was just flat wrong, even if I was certain. There are plenty of really big reds in August, and big black drum as well. I had no clue what I was talking about.