Month: August 2018

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Sex and Death

Chinook Salmon, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Once at Whole Foods I asked for salmon, and the fishmonger pointed out steelhead. I said steelhead aren’t salmon. He said yes they are. I said no they aren’t they’re trout and he said no, that wee little pale-fleshed thing over yonder is trout and that mighty steelhead right there is salmon. Things went on like that until I gave up, knowing full well I was right and he was wrong, but here’s the thing: I wasn’t right either. People more knowledgeable than me, people with their masters in science, often refer to steelhead (and sea-run cutthroats) as salmon.

Pacific salmon are genus Oncorhynchus, and depending on who you talk to Northwest Pacific salmon includes five major species, excluding Steelhead and sea-run cutthroats, or seven major species, including steelhead and sea-run cutthroat trout.  To make matters more confusing the Northwest Pacific salmon species, five or seven, are not that closely related to the Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar: Different genus, different species. Resident rainbows (which are never referred to as salmon), are Oncorhynchus mykiss, which of course is the same genus and species as steelhead. And the same genus as Pacific salmon . . .

Ocean Steelhead, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

It’s all very confusing, and to confuse things more there is also an Asian Pacific salmon species,Oncorhynchus masou. It’s been suggested that steelhead should be called Pacific trout, not Pacific salmon, because they can survive a spawning run and return to spawn again. Ok. That’ll sure clear things up, particularly since Atlantic salmon can also survive a spawning run and return to spawn again. Maybe steelhead should be called Pacific Atlantics.

The fly-fishing literature suffers the same confusion, but in reverse. It doesn’t ever call steelhead salmon, but it clearly distinguishes between steelhead and resident rainbows.  No angler would ever say “I’m fishing for trout!” when the angler was fishing for steelhead. No flytier would say “I’m tying up a bunch of intruders for trout!” For the fly fisher, trout and steelhead are day and night, night and day. Sort of. Anglers know that steelhead and rainbows are more or less the same, but they’ll never admit it. Steelhead are glamorous, and in comparison, even rainbows are not.

Spawning Steelhead, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Steelhead, like their kinfolk salmon, are that holiest of fly-fishing prey, an anadromous fish. That’s what makes steelhead different from the run-of-the-mill resident rainbow. You think permit are special? Tarpon? They ain’t in it. Oh sure, Ted Williams was proud of his 1000 bonefish and his 1000 tarpon, but it was his 1000 Atlantic salmon that were his first love. To heck with all that saltwater stuff. It’s anadromous fish plucked from a river that get the heart racing. It’s the best of both worlds.

Anadromous. Steelhead (like resident rainbows) hatch in the spring or early summer in the gravel of freshwater rivers, and then (unlike resident rainbows) work their way to the ocean. The steelhead’s genetic sibling, the resident rainbow, might reach five pounds. The ocean-dwelling steelhead, growing huge on ocean shrimp and baitfish, might reach 20 pounds. After two or three years of growing larger than inland rainbows, steelhead get romantic notions and go home to party. After spawning, salmon die. Steelhead don’t. Theoretically the same steelhead may make the ocean/river spawning trek several times, though only about 10 percent of the population survives for return trips. Of course instead of heading back to the ocean steelhead sometimes hang out in their home river and become resident rainbows. It’s a lifestyle thing.

Sockeye Salmon, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

The biggest differences between steelhead and the other five salmon, other than the whole sex and death business, is that steelhead feed in freshwater, unless of course they’re winter steelhead and then they don’t eat much. Steelhead also don’t run the river and spawn in one swift motion, unless of course they’re winter steelhead and then they don’t dawdle. Steelhead may (or may not) take their time, but those five-species salmon stop feeding when they start their spawning run, and they all move in and move up. Then the salmon, the five-species salmon, don’t ever go back to the ocean. Who hasn’t marveled at that  tragedy?  And what fly fisher isn’t a bit repulsed by the notion of a flesh fly?

So there are two distinct runs of steelhead. There’s the summer steelhead, the fish we’ll be fishing for in a bit more than a week. They’re smaller than the winter steelhead, they need a bit of time before they’re ready to spawn, and they feed in freshwater. They start showing up in rivers in May for the next spring’s spawn, and continue to come into the rivers through October.  They then hang out getting ready for the next spring spawn. I suppose that along about Halloween the summer steelhead by general accord stop and let the winter steelhead begin. Things are always precise in nature.

I have a mental image of the Oregon winter steelheader standing in the sleet and snow, spey-casting to a fish that isn’t interested. “During the winter I only work two days a week,” my imaginary steelheader tells me, “so I fished for 67 days last year and landed three fish. It was my best season ever.” He has a steelhead tattoo, and another of an intruder.  He doesn’t know that the Astros won the World Series.

Pink Salmon, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The winter steelhead have the same ultimate goal as the summer steelhead, but they’re bigger fish, physically ready to spawn, and they’re not lollygagging in the summer pools eating caddis or whatever. They have to be provoked into yelling the salmonic equivalent of get off my lawn.

That guy? That Oregon winter steelheader? Don’t tell him, but he’s salmon fishing.

Ephemera & Young, A, The Book of Salmon in Two Parts, frontispiece, 1850.
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Love Story

Looking for Oregon books, I ran across David James Duncan’s The River Why. It’s an improbable love story set against the backdrop of an improbable fly-fishing story, or maybe an improbable  fly-fishing story set against the backdrop of an improbable love story, or a long didactic philosophical and spiritual journey. Or all of the above.

The novel’s hero, Augustine Orviston (get it? get it?), is described at birth as caught from the womb of Ma Orviston. He is as much trout as boy, a bait- and fly-fishing prodigy, an idiot savant, balanced between his parents, Henning Hale-Orviston (H2O) and Carolina Carper (the above-mentioned Ma). H2O is a British accented, tweed-wearing, pipe smoking fly fisherman and fly-fishing writer, author of the Summa Anglia, while Ma is a Camel-smoking blue-jeaned eastern Oregon cowgirl defiling the holy water of the Deschutes with a Sears Roebuck bait caster. Ma and H2O are forever joined and (apparently) forever in conflict.  Ma kills fish. ‘Nuff said.

While fishing Gus (Gus is short for Augustine) finds his love, a water nymph who disrobes to swim steelhead down in the river. They romance over fish and fly rods and fishing. She sends Gus on his final quest with three pound tippet by hooking Gus’s spirit animal, an egg-laden hen Chinook moving upriver to spawn and die, and then handing the rod to Gus.  For the next night and day, day and night, Gus moves upriver with the fish by holding it on the too-light leader with a soliloquy on the power of love.

It ain’t no brief soliloquy either. 

Not much in the novel is brief.  It’s a long, rambling narration by Gus, and sometimes I wished Duncan would just skip a few of the sideshows and get on with things. It was rejected by major publishers because it needed more editing. They were right, and it shares it’s anti-structure of disconnected misadventure (and an other-worldly misfit hero) with A Confederacy of Dunces, which was also rejected by major publishers and finally published by LSU two years before in 1980.  The River Why was published by the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club? Okey-dokey. At least Gus, unlike Ignatius J. Reilly, is likable, if not as amusing. The River Why finally ends gratuitously with a long baffling tag about the Vietnam draft, which even in 1982 was a bit dated.

All that said, it’s a fun book, which I think is what Duncan wanted. One (that’s me) just wishes he wasn’t quite so entranced with his own story. There’s a nice movie version of the novel, though Duncan spent three years suing to get his name taken off the credits. I liked the movie too, but Duncan, for all his Oregonian secularism, seems to have a Puritanical streak.

When I recently wrote about another great fly fishing romance, Shelley and Mark, I got an email from Shelley setting some things I got wrong. The photo, she says, was not taken in Houston but Iceland.

Those are not bluebonnets behind him—they are Lupine which are kind of like giant bluebonnets. When we landed in Iceland, they carpeted the fields leading from the airport.  We thought it was such a nice welcome for Texans.

Icelanders, being descendants of taciturn Norwegian Viking raiders, aren’t the first people who come to mind for their thoughtful friendliness, but there you are. They spread out the lupine.

More important, Shelley explained to me that Kris and I, however large my ego, weren’t responsible for her and Mark’s romance. I kind of suspected that, since we didn’t find out about it until after it was pretty far along and then only by accident, but I’ll never admit it to Shelley.

I had one of those newspaper articles about Mark on my nightstand (plans for flycasting instruction) before I met him. There were lots of other common threads as it turned out—his sister and my brother were on double dates in college, she was the sweetheart of his fraternity; Mark was at a party thrown by my childhood friend, Nancy, that I also attended (there are disputes about whether we actually met there—I say “no”); my friend Ellis was standing in the living room of Mark’s best friend, Herman, the night Mark introduced me to all of his music friends.  I could go on and on.

Shelley said she had the newspaper article on her nightstand so that she could track Mark down for casting lessons.  Between you and me I think she was already learning to sight cast. Or maybe the clipping got there because Mark was practicing his blind casting.  Shelley also said that early on she thought that Mark surely could talk a lot. I guess just like Gus Orviston, literary or real, talking is a necessary talent of anglers.

Shelley also pointed out one last thing I got wrong:

Houston is really a very small city when it comes to lawyers and flyfishermen. And some other things.

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Packing List – Maryland

Carl Van Vechten, Billie Holiday, 1942, Van Vechten Collection, Library of Congress

We’re not good at traveling light, but when we went back to Maryland we traveled about as light as we ever have. I didn’t take a guitar. We took no fishing gear. We didn’t take anything we couldn’t carry onto a plane, which did include a book about Northwest salmon and an iPad.  I still managed to take one too many pairs of shoes.

We had trouble getting the car because I’d  changed the plane reservation but not the car reservation and came in seven hours late.  Not only did I change the plane reservation, I had us going home the next morning while we were fishing, but Kris fixed the plane while I waited for Budget to take care of the car.  I use Budget for the fast break, but this time it wasn’t very fast. The Budget counter beat us up for better than an hour.

We never made it to Annapolis for the crab cakes on the harbor side that I’d planned.

As for places in Maryland I’d still like to see, we got the water-side tour of Annapolis, which I figure took care of the Naval Academy, but I’d have liked to see the Antietam National Battlefield: there’s something holy about Civil War battlefields. Along with the civil rights landmarks of the South they may be our only real places of pilgrimage. We didn’t make Antietam, and someday I’ll go back for it.

Driving from Baltimore to Annapolis we realized that Barry Levinson made four Baltimore movies we should have watched: Diner (1982), Tin Men (1987), Avalon (1990), and Liberty Heights ( 1999).  Next time, or maybe this week.

We did manage to eat at Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore for a second time. After we dropped off the car at the airport we took a beat-up and clanking metro train through the city, down past the 50s suburbs, past Camden Yards and the harbor into the hard part of town, the part of town that looks like a city with the nation’s highest murder rate, and finally to a stop in gentrifying Woodberry, one block from Woodberry Kitchen. The couple next to us at the restaurant said there were 220-odd separate neighborhoods in Baltimore, and we saw some from the train. After dinner though we took an Uber to our hotel by the airport. Chickens.

I’ve listened to the Maryland playlist now off and on for a year.  You can’t listen to enough Billie Holiday, and the Low Symphony by Phillip Glass is something special: it sounds like water.  I even liked Eubie Blake’s ragtime piano. Frank Zappa, on the other hand, is just not the thing.

I’m Just Wild About Harry, Eubie Blank and Noble Sissle, 1921, Indiana University.

  • Billie Holiday. Lots of it, but not nearly enough.
  • Bobby Bare, Streets of Baltimore. There’s also a nice version by Gram Parsons, with Emmylou Harris. It’s about an unhappy marriage.
  • Bob Dylan, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. It’s about the murder of a servant.
  • Bruce Springsteen, Hungry Heart. It’s about abandoning your family.
  • Counting Crows, Raining in Baltimore. It’s about rain in Baltimore, and the need for a rain coat.
  • Phillip Glass, Low Symphony. I meant to download more Glass.  It sounds like the Chesapeake.
  • Eubie Blake. Ragtime.
  • Frank Zappa. There was a lot of it, and I listened to it, and wondered why we ever liked him. I guess we were all more juvenile once.
  • Hoagie Charmichael, Baltimore Oriole. There’s also a version by George Harrison, of all people. It’s about a prostitute. It’s used as Lauren Bacall’s musical theme in Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not.
  • Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Baltimore Fire. It’s about Baltimore burning. Like all McGarrigle music it’s terrific.
  • Little Feat, Feets Don’t Fail Me Now. It may be the only happy song of the lot, but Baltimore only plays a cameo role.
  • Lucinda Williams, Trying to Get to Heaven. It’s a Bob Dylan song about desperation.
  • Lyle Lovett, Baltimore. It’s about death.
  • Nina Simone, Baltimore. Written by Randy Newman, and he’s got a version too. It’s about how hard it is just to live.
  • Prince, Baltimore. It’s about police brutality.
  • Talking Heads, Mommy Daddy You And I. It’s about a family car ride, or train ride, or bus ride, or something. It’s one of the sillier moments for the Talking Heads. I hope I never hear it again.
  • Tim Hardin, The Lady Came from Baltimore. It’s a love song about a thief and a lady. It really is a love song though. It’s about poverty and social inequality.

I think I lost my favorite Corpus Christi Hooks cap.

 

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Working Water

This was our third trip to Maryland in roughly a year. Last August we visited Camden Yard to see the Astros play the Orioles, and caught rainbows on a side-trip to the Gunpowder River.  In May we fished the Chesapeake for one day. We got blown off the water and caught nothing.

We fished in May with Captain Tom Hughes.  It was terrible weather, but that’s what you get sometimes, particularly fishing with the Thomases, and allowing only one day for a place doesn’t always work, particularly in saltwater.  Captain Hughes told us to come back and fish a half-day for the cost of gas. We split the difference and booked a whole day.

Fishing once with a guide is kind of random. You don’t know the guide and the guide doesn’t know you. Fishing the second time with Captain Tom was fishing with a friend. First thing he said was we’re getting your fish. We started north up the bay, a big working waterway like our home Port of Galveston, to where the freighter UBC Sacramento was anchored under load. There were birds working and bait popping, and for the next three hours we fished, both of us with his 9-weight Orvis Helios rods, fine rods, but me with a 350-grain Orvis Depth-Charge line and weighted Clouser and Kris with a popper on a floating line. In 50-feet of water she was fishing poppers. It didn’t matter though what we were fishing: we both caught fish.

I had fished freighters once before, offshore from South Padre Island just north of Mexico, where freighters stacked up for the Port of Brownsville. We were fishing king mackerel, called kingfish in Texas, at 30 feet with 10-weights and for blue runners on the surface with a 6-weight. There were big rollers and I was seasick, really seasick, and the guide was annoyed that I didn’t know what I was doing with a sinking line, but who knows how to fish a freighter? Captain Tom knows. And unlike that South Texas guide Captain Tom knew how to tell us what to do.

Of course that South Padre guide may also have been annoyed that I kept throwing up over his boat’s gunnels. Mostly I made it over the gunnels anyway.

I was surprised how much I liked fishing the Depth Charge line. It was easier to cast than I thought it would be, and Captain Tom knows how to translate the screen of a fish finder into presentation of a fly at a depth. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it, and together with knowledge of structure (including the UBC Sacramento) and observation of birds may be the best way to consistently fish big water like the Chesapeake. Periodically he’d tell me fish were stacked around 20’ and 40’, and to let the line sink for a 12-count, about a foot a second with the heavy Clouser. I asked him why if the fish were at 20 feet he didn’t tell me to let the line go for a 20-count? These fish, he said, are aggressive. These aren’t lazy fish. They’ll come up to the fly if they’re feeding. If they won’t come up to the fly don’t bother.

Sometimes when we were in a flock of working birds and there were stripers crashing the surface I stripped in the Clouser as soon as it hit the water. I was fishing poppers too.

Captain Tom has to report to Maryland how many fish are caught out of his boat when he guides, and he somewhat conservatively came up with 56, all in the first four hours. All of us thought he under-counted a bit. It was hard to keep up, and and in addition to the fish landed Kris and I both missed plenty of strikes. The fish weren’t giants, the smallest few were not much more than a pound and the largest probably three, but there was nothing tentative about them. They were saltwater-bright and strong even at a pound, and whatever: I know I caught my fish. I caught my Chesapeake rockfish. That’s the right color of fish for Maryland.

When I go back to fish stripers again maybe I’ll want to hunt for larger fish. Or maybe not. 56 fish is anybody’s good day.

By the end of the day we covered 35 miles of water, and when the fish finally shut off Kris and I were worn out. We ate lunch drifting in the bay. Later I napped a bit while Captain Tom explored the bridge pilings, but there was nothing there, at least nothing worth breaking out the rods for. Kris said she never got to nap because I wouldn’t shut up. Later still Captain Tom gave us a water-side tour of the Naval Academy and the Annapolis waterfront. There are lots of sailboats in Annapolis.

It was a good day. Every angler should fish the Chesapeake, it’s quintessential American water, and anybody who’s interested in fly fishing big water should fish the Chesapeake with Captain Tom. It’s pretty great fly fishing, fish or no fish.