Month: November 2018

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Oklahoma Packing List

Stuff We Took

We took my car. It’s a 2012 diesel with 117 thousand miles. It needs the tires rotated and it uses a bit of oil. It ran great. For our other trips this year we’ve flown and rented, and we’re now pretty proficient at hooking the phone through the rental car radio (if they’re still called radios). We can hook into whatever Mitsubishi or Ford or Mazda mid-sized SUV the rental company gives us with minimal stress and only a few harsh words, but it’s still nicer to be in my car. 

I fished with a 10′ 4 wt. Kris fished with her Helios 3D 5 wt. that I gave her for Christmas last year. Chris the Guide wished it was the softer version, but she cast beautifully. Maybe she missed more strikes because of the hard rod, but man was it fun to watch her cast.  

There’s nothing else remarkable about what we packed except that I bought a bag of Cheetos. You can’t have a road trip without Cheetos, unless it’s a road trip with Fritos and bean dip. 

We ate two dinners the night we arrived, just to try things out: chicken fried steak at Abendigo’s and pizza at the Grateful Head.  Both were excellent, and the local beers were excellent. I no longer eat nearly enough chicken fried steak. We had leftover pizza on the river on Saturday, so two dinners was perfectly reasonable. We stayed at the Hotchatown Country Lodge, and had a breakfast burrito at Adam and Eve’s Coffee Shop before we fished on Saturday.  That place has good coffee. 

Beavers Bend is in the Choctaw Nation, but we missed most of the cultural stuff. We did take a photo of the casino. We also walked through the Forest Heritage Center Museum, which is peculiar, but there’s no doubt this is a lumber town. 

I now believe that forest science research is best carried out in white pumps. 

When we started planning Oklahoma, I asked an Oklahoma fly fishing group on FaceBook where we should fish, and here’s what I got:

• Sandies in the spring, but no specifics on places
• Bluegill, but no specifics on places
• Trout on the Lower Illinois
• Trout on the Lower Mountain Fork
• Smallmouth on the Upper Illinois in the summer
• Stripers on the Lower Illinois in the summer
• Carp, but no specifics on places

Personally, any of those could have been great, and I’d already thought about white bass. End of the day, the Mountain Fork was convenient. Kris already talks about Oklahoma more fondly than anyplace we’ve fished, and we were only really there for one day.

The other place I thought about was the Wichita Mountains. It’s the nation’s oldest wildlife preserve, and notwithstanding Yellowstone it deserves credit for preserving the buffalo. Hiking there once I looked up at a ridge line and watched a dozen elk watching me. They seemed to find me peculiar, and many share their opinion.There’s a series of ponds and small lakes spread through the refuge, and it would have made a good place for bluegill.

What I Didn’t Write About

The Cherokees, slavery, and the Confederacy. There are two recognized Cherokee tribes in Oklahoma. They seem to have split over the Civil War: the larger tribe supported the Confederacy, the smaller the Union. The Cherokee who owned slaves took them along to Oklahoma.

The 1909 Jim Crow amendments to the Oklahoma Constitution. Roosevelt refused to approve the Constitution for 1907 statehood until the Jim Crow provisions were removed, then the state constitution was amended in 1909 to put them back in.

Part of district burned in race riots, Tulsa, Okla, .American Red Cross, 1921, Library of Congress

The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. One of the bloodiest two day white riots in American history, it’s also known, appropriately, as the Tulsa massacre. Thirty-six African Americans died, and thirty-five blocks of the established African American Greenwood neighborhood were burned to the ground.

Tulsa burning, Alvin C. Krupnick Co., photographer, 1921, Library of Congress

Quanah Parker. I didn’t write enough about Quanah Parker. I didn’t write enough about the Wichita.

Boom Town, by Sam Anderson. It’s on the New York Times’ 100 notable books for 2018, and it’s a fine book about Oklahoma City. It had me checking The Thunder in the NBA standings, and recommending the book. Great book.

Ralph Ellison. Ralph Ellison is from Oklahoma City. I tried to re-read Invisible Man, but couldn’t. It’s a hard book.

The 2018 Elections. There’s now a Democratic congresswoman from Oklahoma City. There’s also a pretty interesting war going on in the Oklahoma Republican Party.

Playlist

I should have known Oklahoma had such great music, but I didn’t. I’ve already mentioned that Oklahoma was the home of five of the finest guitarists I know. And Woodie Guthrie. And John Moreland.

Bob Wills Publicity Photo, C. 1946, Wikipedia
  • John Moreland. In the Throes. I saw a review of John Moreland’s new album in Garden & Gun a few weeks ago, then ran across him in an inernet list of 10 Oklahoma bands you should be listening to now. If Bruce Springsteen sang Americana music he would be John Moreland. This is music about the Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, high school prom. Robin, take note: this is great stuff.
  • The Call. Some random songs. I didn’t pay much attention to them the first time around, and gave them short shrift this time. They probably deserve better. Or maybe not. 
  • Garth Brooks. I think I would like Garth Brooks, but his music is only available on Amazon, and I’m not technologically proficient enough to know whether I can download something on Amazon and listen to it on ITunes. 
  • The Flaming Lips. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. My daughter tells me that The Flaming Lips were one of her favorite bands in high school. Wayne Coyne lives in Oklahoma City, and is a central character in Sam Anderson’s Boom Town.
  • Woodie Guthrie. I’d been listening to Guthrie in Oregon. I downloaded covers of his songs from his 100th birthday celebration at the Kennedy Center and some other stuff. Billy Bragg and Wilco’s “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key” is the best Woodie Guthrie song that Woodie Guthrie didn’t write.
  • Charlie Christian. Charlie Christian: The Genius of the Electric Guitar. Charlie Christian invented the electric guitar solo, and then died of tuberculosis at the age of 26. He made some fine recordings with Benny Goodman. 
Charlie Christian, Charlie Christian Family Archives
  • Leo Kottke. Acoustic Guitar once did a list once of the 50 greatest acoustic guitar albums. I don’t know where Kottke’s 6- and 12-String Guitar ranked, but I remember the review. The record came out in 1969, and they guessed that more joints were rolled in college dorm rooms on that album cover than on any other. I bet they were right. It at least ran a close second to Sergeant Pepper.
  • Michael Hedges. Hedges was New Age Music, which was once a thing. I had Hedges’ Aerial Boundaries because of that Acoustic Guitar list. He died in 1997 in a car wreck.
  • Roy Clark. “But I Never Picked Cotton.” He died last week. After a near 50-year interval I once again spent way too much time watching Hee Haw, this time on YouTube. His duets with Glen Campbell in the TV heyday were pretty amazing. 
  • Tuck Andress, of Tuck and Patti. Tears of Joy. Andress is such a fine jazz guitarist. He’s also St. Vincent’s uncle.
  • Jerry Jeff Walker, “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” She was, after all, born in Oklahoma.
  • Merle Haggard, “Okie from Muskogee.” The companion piece to “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” Together the two songs form the yin and yang of country music.
  • Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Bob Wills–For the Last Time. Wills was born in Turkey, Texas, near my hometown, but the Playboys spent a good part of their career on Tulsa radio. I took that as enough of an excuse to include Bob Wills on the playlist. I don’t know how I’ll get him into the Hawaii list. There is a steel guitar. 
  • Cross Canadian Ragweed. Cross Canadian Ragweed. There’s an Americana sub-genre of country out of Oklahoma called Red Dirt Music. I picked Cross Canadian Ragweed because I liked the name, but there are several others, and I suspect some may be better. The Canadian River, by the way, is the longest tributary to the Arkansas River. It starts in Colorado, and crosses New Mexico, the Texans Panhandle, and Oklahoma. 
  • Chet Baker. Chet Baker Sings. Chet Baker is a cross between Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and James Dean. 
  • Jimmy LaFave. Texoma. More Red Dirt Music, LaFave left Oklahoma for Austin, and died last year. I can’t say enough good things about LaFave.
  • J.J. Cale. Troubadour. The guy who wrote “After Midnight.”
  • Jimmie Webb. The guy who wrote “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman.” 
  • Hoyt Axton. The guy who wrote “The Pusher,” “Never Been to Spain,” and “Joy to the World.”
  • Leon Russell. Carney. I always figured “This Masquerade” was a cover of a much older song. It’s not. 
  • Blake Shelton. Red River Blue. There was absolutely nothing memorable about Blake Shelton, except Kris yelling turn him off every time one of his songs shuffled through. My daughter told me that this is a sub-genre of country known as Bro’ Country, which is mostly about drinking, driving pickups, and admiring young women. I did think the song about the honey bee was cute, but then Kris yelled at me to turn it off.
  • Reba McEntire. Reba. Reba has a nicer voice than I expected, and she handles her material well. Some of the material is decidedly mediocre. Some is pretty good. 
  • Gordon MacRae. “Oklahoma!” and “Oh What A Beautiful Mornin’.” If you can keep from singing along to “Oh What A Beautiful Mornin”’ you’re a better man than me. That goes into my master road trip playlist, just for the joy of singing along. 
  • David Frizzel and Shelly West. “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma.” In 1981 this was number 1 on the country charts for seven weeks. It is a lovely song, and makes me pine for cold nights on a prairie country road in a pickup. Ok, it’s probably totally manufactured Nashville country, and you can’t go home again, but it’s still a lovely song. 

Guitar. 

I took the Kohno since I didn’t have to worry about airplanes.  My shoulder hurt by the end of the day, but my hands never did, so I worked on Mazurka Marieta by Tarrega. I memorized it a long time ago, and it was one of those songs I never seemed to forget, but then I forgot it.  Relearning went quickly though. 

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Broken Bow, Oklahoma

Saturday we fished with Chris Schatte on the Lower Mountain Fork River. I was going to brag that I caught two fish for every one of Kris’s, but then Kris caught another fish. It wasn’t a day with a lot of fish, but I never remember much about catching a lot of fish. I remember specific fish, not multitudes. 

We picked the Mountain Fork because it was in Oklahoma and close enough for a long weekend drive. The names are a bit confusing. It’s the Lower Mountain Fork River, which is a tailwater below Broken Bow Lake, which is in Beavers Bend State Park. It’s near the towns of Hochatown and Broken Bow, just past Idabel. It’s a pretty trout river within three hours of Dallas/Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, and there are a bunch of smaller cities, Norman, Lawton, Tyler, Longview, Shreveport, Texarkana, that are even closer.  It’s popular. It’s pretty.

To be fair, most of the folk in that photo were an on-the-water class, and if we’d walked further upriver we would have probably walked away from the crowd, but in the afternoon we picked our bit of river and fished that bit. I figured that it would get me ready for fishing in New York and Connecticut and Montana, all the crowded places. I’ve never fished much with crowds, and usually I tend to cast and move. There wasn’t much casting and moving.

We had fished a different part of the river that morning, and there were fewer people. It was theoretically a better place to fish, but at least this trip we didn’t get any strikes. Chris the Guide thought that three days’ heavy generation had put down the fish.  

Southeastern Oklahoma looks like Wisconsin. The trees are different, sure: I didn’t see a single cypress knee in Wisconsin, but at the end of the day lumber is business in both places. Driving out of Oklahoma Saturday evening there was lumbering machinery and lumber trucks everywhere. The cheese is better in Wisconsin, and the cheese curds, but Hochatown, Oklahoma had Stevens Point beat for pizza, and they both had good beer.  Even the weather, mid-November in Oklahoma and late September in Wisconsin, was pretty similar. I’m not sure if there’s been a freeze yet in Beavers Bend.

Out of curiosity we would probably have gone to Mountain Fork sooner or later, and might go back again, but the river’s probably happiest without us. People should go to the Mountain Fork because it’s their river, not because it’s a destination river. I suspect there are rivers all over the country just like it. Good places to go for days and weekends year after year, places that satisfy the need for pretty but close enough for frequent fliers, a place to know and criticize and praise, and maybe love.

We fished nymphs and emergers under a bobber without added weight. I missed a bunch of strikes, especially at the end of the swing when I made a few short strips before picking up the line. I was casting well enough, and at one point I fished three flies without killing anybody. I didn’t get hopelessly tangled until it was time to quit for the day, and then we quit for the day. 

Mid-afternoon I lay down on the bank and took a long nap.  Kris said I slept for about an hour, and that’s fine with me.  I guess people moving upriver had to step over me, or at least around me, but nobody tripped or kicked. It was a fine river for a nap, and I’ve napped by many fine rivers. If I did a product review of the FishPond Summit Sling, I would note that it’s exactly the right size to use as a pillow for napping bankside. For me that’s not a small consideration.

I watched Kris the Angler cast and she was casting beautifully.  Last year she didn’t cast so beautifully. 

When I planned Oklahoma I had thought that we would fish without a guide. I wouldn’t have used emergers, and I wouldn’t have known where to fish, but sooner or later, this trip or the one after or the one after that, we would have caught fish, but we fished with Chris the Guide because he was a freshman at my high school when I was a senior, and I got to spend the day talking about people and places we knew, the Osbornes and Joe Chat, what businesses were left downtown in our hometown, Johnson’s Jewelry, and what was wrong with the town’s water system. Chris has a good life: they picked Broken Bow because land is cheaper in Oklahoma than in Colorado. They bought some acreage. They built a house. He started guiding. They own an Airstream and his wife does triathlons and they go to Canada and Minnesota in the summer. It all sounded great to me.  

Plus I caught my fish. 

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True Grit

Few things have messed with my head longer than True Grit, beginning with the 1969 movie starring John Wayne. I own a copy of the book, but I didn’t read it until we started planning our trip to Oklahoma. In 1969 I wouldn’t have imagined that the book was anything better than a Louis L’Amour novel. Of course then I couldn’t think of many things better than a Louis L’Amour novel. I might still like Louis L’Amour if I still read him, but I’ll save that for North Dakota. 

The problem with the John Wayne movie was that the geography was all wrong, and at thirteen I knew it. Everyone knows the plot. Fourteen year-old Mattie Ross enlists one-eyed Marshall Rooster Cogburn to go with her into Indian Territory to bring her father’s murderer to justice. Mattie picks Cogburn because she believes him to be a man of true grit. Comparing myself to Mattie and Rooster, I knew that I didn’t know much about grit, but what I did know was the geography of the movie. I knew Indian Territory was Oklahoma, and I had been in and and out of Oklahoma all my life. I knew the movie landscape was southwestern Colorado, and we went to southwestern Colorado and New Mexico from time to time for vacations. One didn’t get on a horse in Fort Smith, Arkansas, cross a river, and end up in Ouray, Colorado. 

I couldn’t believe that the moviemakers could be so stupid (at best) or dishonest (at worst). I even cobbled together an explanation: the Indian Territory of 1870s Oklahoma was bigger than current-day Oklahoma, and the San Juan National Forest was within its borders. That was wrong of course, but it never occurred to me that the moviemakers picked their locale because southwestern Colorado is prettier than northeastern Oklahoma, no slight at all to northeastern Oklahoma. Southwestern Colorado is prettier than just about anyplace.

The Coen Brothers version of the movie is impossibly true to the book, and its tone and language are altogether artier than the John Wayne version. The Coen Brothers version stars a brilliant 13-year old girl, not a 22-year old. It stars the Dude, not the Duke. But it also makes its nod to the original, and for me in the most confusing way possible: by filming in the same landscape.  The Coen’s choice messed with my head anew, even though by then I had realized that it was a matter of artistic choice, not reality.  

So I finally read the novel, and now it’s joined together with the movies to mess with my head.

Take, for instance, LaBoeuf. A part of me says that of course there is a Texan in this novel, just as there is a Texan in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If you’re going to write a novel about bravery, you surely do need a Texan companion to prove the act is not only brave, but extraordinarily brave. Matt Damon’s LaBoeuf (pronounced Lebeef) is excellent. In the original movie, however, Glenn Campbell (who was the very thing in his day, and who played guitar on Pet Sounds) is almost unbearably stilted. Did he know it? Is he such a bad actor? Was this art? I doubt it was purposeful, and then I doubt my doubts. It’s hard to understand such horrible acting.

Then there is the comedy. True Grit and Portis’s other novels are considered some of our best under-the-radar stuff. And the book and the movies are set in a real world with a real history. There was a hanging Judge Parker, and the incursions by Parker’s marshals into Indian Territory began the end of Indian Nation sovereignty. Portis gets his history right. Everybody thinks the novel is brilliant, and it is.

And everybody thinks the novel is comic.

I don’t really get it. Maybe to somebody who thinks southwestern Colorado is northeastern Oklahoma the novel is comic. I listen to Mattie Ross’s narration, fine as Portis has made it, and I hear a mildly exaggerated version of my  aunts talking. I watch Rooster Cogburn (who rode with Quantrill), and I see the righteous and the unrighteous, the just and the unjust, and the line is crossed back and forth from day to day, from moment to moment. Rooster Cogburn and Mattie Ross are forces in both opposition and harmony: unconscious Presbyterian rigidity and riding with Quantrill. Is Mattie comic? It’s a comedy that is hard to pinpoint.  Mattie doesn’t tell jokes. She isn’t amusing or witty. This isn’t a book of pratfalls, and it’s not picaresque like, say, Little Big Man. It is comic only in how Mattie’s uncompromising force collides with the world and overwhelms it. Maybe it is only the exaggeration (and in my mind the very slight exaggeration) that is funny.

So 50 years after I first watched John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn in a southwestern single screen theater on a little town square I’m still wrestling with True Grit. 

 * * *

I’ve been preparing for Friday’s trip to Broken Bow.  It’s 30 degrees outside, and I hope it warms up just a bit in the frigid north of Oklahoma where it’s even colder. When we went to Wisconsin in September the guide required studless wading boots to protect his boat, and I had dutifully removed our studs and put them away where I wouldn’t lose them. Then I promptly lost them.

In Oregon we’d waded with Patagonia River Crampons, and they worked great, so if I didn’t find the studs I wouldn’t necessarily need to replace them. Studs aren’t much. They’re short sheet metal screws that screw into the bottom of boots, but once they’re labeled with a brand name at a fly shop they get a bit pricey. Maybe they’re tungsten or aluminum or gold or some such. Since we don’t use felt-soled boots anymore, studs are the minimum needed to keep your footing on slick rock. 

The older I get, the more I worry about falls in rivers, and along with studs I now use a wading staff.  I’m a wobbly tripod in the watter, and in a few years I may drop the fly rod altogether and just carry two wading staffs. If a fish comes along I’ll point at it. The staff I use is a Folstaff, a shock-corded tent pole that with a bit of a shake snaps together at five joints. Putting it away is sometimes a bit of a struggle, and the first few times a joint got stuck I used a vice and some vice clamps to separate the sections. I’ve discovered over time that with a bit of wiggling the joints separate well enough, though not altogether easily, and having the separated sections get away from you and snap back together is almost as annoying and as common as a good tangled leader. 

I like my staff, with its collected scrapes and darkened cork handle, but largely because of the separation anxiety I found myself on Saturday eyeing a new Fishpond staff at the shop. It extended like a photographer’s tripod. I imagined that it wouldn’t take desperate measures to put it away, but that it also wouldn’t extend with that satisfying snap.  

Meanwhile Kris looked for the studs and didn’t find them either, but she reminded me that I’d put them in a plastic bag, not a box.  This morning I went right to them and they’re back in the boots.  Now I’d just like a bit warmer weather, and we do need to clean our boots.

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Indian Territory

Map of the Indian Territory, 1892, Library of Congress

I have a new friend, at least on Facebook. We sat at the same table at a lunch, and then last Saturday night we were at the same party. I talked to her husband (who was from Salt Lake) about where we should fly fish in Utah. He suggested Provo.

She works for the Anti-Defamation League. In the interim between our meetings eleven Jewish congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Congregation were murdered. It had been a brutal week, and maybe particularly so for her. This week’s been brutal too, with another mass shooting in California. We are a violent people.

Because of her work I suspect that more than most folk she is attuned to racial and ethnic incongruities, ranging from unintentional slights to out-and-out violence. At one point in our conversation I must have mentioned we were going to fish in Oklahoma, because I said the word Indian and I think she cringed. A few sentences later she said Native American. I took it as a gentle correction.

For most states, Virginia say, or Washington or Wisconsin or Texas, first people history is a repetitious prologue. Before X happened, there were Native Americans: Caddo, Wichita, Comanche, Cherokee, Umpqua, Powhatan, Ojibwe, Fox and Sauk, Alabama, Coushata, Seminole, Karankawa . . . Everywhere there is that iteration, speculative and archeological, and then X happened, X being when the Americans came, or the British or the French or the Spanish came, and the part of the story about the indigenous people ends.

Where did they go? For most states, after the prologue, it’s oblivion. Maybe extermination by violence and disease, or to smaller and ever more confined spaces, but someplace out of the way, someplace else. In San Antonio once, talking to a federal park ranger at a Spanish mission, he pointed across an open field to the local Hispanic neighborhoods and said that’s where I grew up and that’s where the native population is still living. He said that they, part of his ancestors, were incorporated into Spanish mission life. Early Thomas Jefferson thought the answer for the Indian conflict was for the Native Americans to become farmers and join into the new way of life. Tell that to the Cherokee. Late Thomas Jefferson pushed for removal. Mostly late Thomas Jefferson won. 

 In Oklahoma, A History, Messrs. Baird and Goble write that every place has its birth story, and sometimes more than one. They suggest three for Oklahoma: the forced immigration of the Five Tribes; the Oklahoma land rush; and the oil boom.  Of course before the five tribes, before the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, there were already Apache, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita in Oklahoma. Even in Oklahoma there is that first people prologue.

National Park Service, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail

The problem with referencing Indians, whether the term of choice is American Indian or Native American or Indian, it is always imposed. Among American indigenous people there was never an Indian. There were Yamparika Comanche, or there were Powhatan, or there were Karankawa. Any label that suggests a unified indigenous people is an exonym, and any one is as artificial as any other. Every one of the labels has its critics, but each also has its supporters. Columbus’ word wasn’t so much a misnomer as a creation, and it’s useful and ubiquitous.

For most of us there aren’t day-to-day reminders of American Indian history and culture. Unlike, say, statues of Robert E. Lee, we don’t have many monuments about that other national tragedy. Oklahoma is one we’ve got, but if I think about Oklahoma (and I don’t generally) it’s as a collection of tropes: red state, cowboys, oil, tornadoes, Dust Bowl, and Indians. Tropes are useful as shorthand for things that are more complex, but only to the limits of our own understanding.  For Indian, the complex thing contained in the Oklahoma trope is the geographical summation of every betrayal, every displacement and epidemic, every conflict, but there are the Native Americans who are there now, and whose families have now been there for generations. There are people who are Oklahomans.

S.C. Gwynne writes about the Comanche as cruel and violent. He writes that they were finally confined to Oklahoma only because they came across another people equally cruel and violent: Texans. The Searchers after all is not bad history. But Texans were not uniquely violent. There was plenty enough violence to go around. Oklahoma is one of the proofs. There are now 39 recognized tribes shoehorned into Oklahoma, from the Comanche in the southwest to the Cherokee in the northeast, and every tribe’s place in Oklahoma is both a conclusion and a continuation.

Did I mention before that we are still violent?

Usually I’m pretty comfortable dealing with information, sorting through and coming out the other side with a notion of what happened.  I can’t seem to do that with Oklahoma. I have only a vague notion of what happened to its first people, what happened with the forced immigration of the other tribes, the betrayal of the white land rush, and how that fits together now: those are matters for real and dedicated scholars.  All I can do is look at the mess with confusion as to the details, and a bit more knowledge that among those Oklahoma tropes there is something important, and something worth remembering.  

Creek Orphans Home Baseball Team, 1904, Oklahoma Historical Society, Alice Robertson Collection.

 * * *

There’s a cold front in, with a heavy north wind and daytime temperatures in the 50s.  Our skiff is in the shop, and the temperature’s dropped too much too fast for bass or sunfish. The first stocking of trout in the Guadalupe isn’t until next weekend (when we’ll be in Oklahoma). We drove to Surfside Beach to check the jetty: I had wanted to try spey rods in the surf.

Didn’t happen.  I have never seen either the surf or the tide so high. 

On the other hand, Killens Barbecue isn’t really out of the way coming back from Surfside. And by 2:30 there was hardly any line.  We did catch it at a bit of a lull though.