Month: January 2019

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Another Interlude

On Thursday we leave for Hawaii, which for some odd and I suspect Southern reason I pronounce Huh-wah-yuh, which Siri can’t understand when I call up my playlist. We should spend today packing, which we won’t. What do we take? Some shorts, some shirts, some wading boots. The couple of 9 wt rods we gave each other for Christmas. A guitar. We fish with Captain Jesse Cheape of High Tide Fishing, a full day on Friday and a half-day on Saturday. After that we’ll sightsee. I think sightseeing is required by the nature of the thing.

It is the second farthest distance we’ll travel, closer than Alaska but further than Maine. I’ve actually practiced casting some, which is frustrating and unrewarding. I’m such a mediocre caster. I’ve tried to keep up my Hawaii reading, and have been through a couple of additional Hawaiian books–The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings, which was very likable, and Dreams from My Father by Barrack Obama, which was about his birth in Kenya.

I guess my thoughts have moved on to Mississippi, which I’ve been working on for May, and Florida which I have to go to in February. I’m beginning to despise Florida and its uncatchable fish, but the Astros open there in April, and if we fail again in February (with a one-day fishing trip to the Keys) maybe we’ll make a fourth trip in April.

Hawaiian music hasn’t really grabbed me: it’s melodic, sweet, all major keys and thirds and fifths and pure tones. I’ve been cheating on Hawaii with Mississippi Blues. It shares a slide guitar, but not much else.

Frontispiece, Life on the Mississippi, The Baton Rouge, 1883, Gutenberg.org.

I also cheated on Hawaii with Mississippi books, and re-read Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. It is such an essential book. It’s only a bit more than a six-hour (read eight-hour) drive from here to Vicksburg, and we could visit the battlefield memorial and the National Cemetery over the long Martin Luther King weekend. Of course with the government shut-down nothing at the National Cemetery would be open. It’s too bad all presidents aren’t required to be born in Kenya.

Early on Twain also traveled to Hawaii (née the Sandwich Islands) and wrote a series of letters from there for a San Francisco newspaper. I didn’t find the letters particularly illuminating, though Twain liked the place immensely and always talked of going back.

I’ve tied some leaders which won’t turn over, and some flies which won’t catch fish. I’ve also bought some flies, almost all of which are some kind of spawning shrimp, which is the only fly I can ever seem to remember on Captain Cheape’s list. I do own a bunch of bonefish flies, almost none of which are on said list. I’ll haul them along anyway.

Meantime the weather here in Houston is as good as it gets: clear, windless, dry, and cool, 61 degrees this morning with a high of 71 degrees. There’s a mockingbird singing through the open door to the porch. Maybe I’ll go look for black bass this afternoon, or spawning crappie. Yesterday we took the skiff out on Galveston bay, and the combination of cold weather and still air left the water clear. We saw some redfish, too.

Didn’t catch those either. We did get some excellent oysters and ceviche at the Black Pearl Oyster Bar on 23rd Street.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR REDUX!

Thomas Rowlandson, British, Anglers of 1811, 1811, hand-colored etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, metmuseum.org

I’ve been doing this for a year, and I have a story that’s more or less true about how I got into this business. It started with a New Year’s Resolution. I’m good at New Year’s Resolutions, mostly. I make them and as long as they don’t involve wine I keep them, sort of. And they’re not confined to January either. Once I found myself telling an acquaintance that it was my New Year’s Resolution to go down a bayou in a canoe and somewhat high-handedly she asserted that you can’t make New Year’s Resolutions in July. Shows what she knows.

Thomas Best, Frontispiece, A Concise Treatise on the Art of Angling, 9th Edition, 1810, Wikimedia Commons.

I always figured that some day I would make it to all 50 states. I have been to plenty of states, particularly on the left side of the map and the center and the South, but then there are plenty of places I haven’t been. I haven’t been to Ohio. Who hasn’t been to Ohio? I haven’t been to the Dakotas. Ok, plenty of people haven’t been to the Dakotas.

But I’m not young, and mortality intrudes with bleak notions, such as I’d better get a move on or I’m never going to Maine, or Vermont, or New Hampshire. Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire are probably doing fine without me, so it’s no loss to them, but the first movie I remember that didn’t involve any of Walt Disney, Jerry Lewis, or John Wayne was Lawrence of Arabia, and it gave me forever the bug for travel, riding camels, and blowing up trains. I will never ride a camel or blow up a train, but I figure for a Texas boy Maine is at least as exotic as the Arabian Peninsula. Maybe more so, because how can those people be so different and speak English? They speak English, right?

Detail from a fountain, Palacio Nacional, Sintra, Portugal

So last New Year’s we were in Lisbon, the one in Portugal, and the whole time Kris kept asking why we weren’t fishing? I was pretty happy sampling port and eating pastel de Belém, but Kris would have none of it, and I couldn’t very well tell her there were no fish in Portugal. In Lisbon you can go to fancy shops to buy souvenier sardines in a tin, and they’re good, too, and pretty. Meanwhile I’d taken along a copy of Jim Harrison’s The English Major to read. I’d never read any Harrison, and The English Major had sat on my bookshelf since it was published in 2008. I remember pulling it off the shelf as we were walking out the door.

Tile detail in the cloisters, Porto Cathedral. Or maybe not.

The English Major is a book about a 60-year old whose beloved dog Lola dies and whose wife leaves him. He sells the cherry farm and goes on a mission to visit each state and rename the state bird. He also fishes. It resonated. I was 61. I wasn’t going to rename any birds but I fished. My 15-year old dog Lola was dying. I didn’t want Kris to leave me because I hadn’t arranged to go fishing in Portugal in January. I went back and read the New York Times review of the book and thought that the reviewer was too young to review that book. It’s an old man’s book.

Lola, South Padre Island

Oddly it was a month or so before it registered on me that I’d made a resolution to catch a fish in each state because I was reading Harrison. I’m quick that way.

There is a passage at the end of Batfishing in the Rainforest when Randy Wayne White says, more or less, that carrying a fishing rod gives you an excuse for being someplace, and that if you want to get to know the people in a place go to the local church. He’s talking mostly about Central America as I recall, but it’s good advice for just about anyplace that’s not Brooklyn.

So last year we made it to nine states (including the one we were standing in), caught fish in seven (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Oregon, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland), and owe two, Florida and Wisconsin, a re-visit. Who the hell can’t catch fish in Florida? Who the hell can catch a muskie? We fished a good bit, though I don’t recall going to any churches. We did make it to a lot of bakeries, which includes donut shops.

For next year we have only two certain things planned. We go to Hawaii in a bit more than a week, and in September we take a raft trip on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. I go to Florida for business in February, but it’s Miami and I hate to give up on tarpon, and it will be hard to take Kris–this has become as much her project as mine. In May we may try the wee bit of Mississippi on the Gulf. I’ve looked at Minnesota, Massachusetts, New Hampshire/Vermont, New York, and a long road trip to catch the three great Southwestern tailwaters, the Green, Lee’s Ferry, and the San Juan.

The problem is that there’s always more in each state than we’ve got time for, and in each state there are so many other places to be. It becomes hard to get off the schneid. I could spend a week in Mississippi–we’ll be on the Gulf Coast, and I want to see Faulkner’s house at Oxford. I want to see Vicksburg and the Delta where the Blues were born* and Jackson. I want to see the two great Mississippi cities, Memphis and New Orleans. And the day on the San Juan we could spend on a tailwater road trip is short shrift for my beloved New Mexico. Waily, waily, waily! A drive through the Southwestern tailwaters should take a month.

Meanwhile Hawaii. Happy New Year!

Thomas Best, Frontispiece, A Concise Treatise on the Art of Angling, 7th Edition, 1807, Wikipedia.

*Kris and I have argued about this a good bit. She says that “blues” is singular, I say “the blues” are plural. There is an unimaginable amount of impolite discourse on the internet about this very subject. My thought is that the word encompasses more than a style of music: where the Baroque was born would always be singular, as would blues music. But “the Blues” encompasses a style of music, a collection of songs, a way of playing an instrument, and a state of being. It also ends in an “s.” I’m sticking to my guns, mostly because “the blues was born” to my ear sounds dreadful. At least one dictionary by the way says that “blues” is a plural noun which may have singular construction, whatever that means.