Month: June 2019

Posted on

Vermont

Robert Frost, New Englander, wintered in Key West, and he went often enough that in the Key West literary tourist travel boom of later years his rented cottage was dubbed the Robert Frost Cottage. Sixteen winters he flew south. He got into an argument there with Wallace Stevens, but I’m not sure whether it was before or after Hemingway knocked Stevens down. Stevens seems to have been a bit of a drinking man, but there wasn’t any internet, so what else did he have to do? As a young man I preferred Stevens as a poet, he was stylish and inscrutable, but I think as an old man I’m growing into Frost.

I can imagine Frost, sitting as far south as the American South can go, and thinking about the New England winter. I wonder if he missed it? I wonder if he felt guilt that he was warm? How can someone named Frost ever be warm?

I first saw Vermont 30 years after Frost spent his time in Florida, 50-odd years ago, not live but on an RCA console color television. Almost all my notions about Vermont I learned from White Christmas, a movie filmed in a California back lot of Paramount Pictures. No. Snow.

But the lodge! It was so beautiful, stone and wood and that great fireplace where Rosemary and Bing talked about liverwurst and other things. It didn’t matter that it was a set in California. It was beautiful! It was Vermont!

My sister says that Vermont is like a foreign country. I imagine it as rambling lanes and small farms and white clapboard churches. I figure I can’t say it’s as close to a foreign country as the continent offers, since both Mexico and Canada are literally foreign countries, and I suppose New Englanders don’t think they’re foreign at all. But to my sister the Texas girl it might as well be Switzerland. There’s snow, and trees, maple syrup and other cute things. We don’t do cute in Texas.

Vermont was once in fact a foreign country. Not yet having attained Vermonthood, in 1763 the area was ceded to Britain by France after the French and Indian War. It wasn’t clear if the new territory was governed by New Hampshire or New York. Both claimed it, and both granted conflicting land grants to settlers. Tired of its neighbors’ shenanigans, during the American Revolution Vermont formed its own independent republic, the Republic of Vermont. It was not one of the original 13 colonies. It did not join the United States until 1791. The state constitution was the first to ban slavery.

Al Zifan, Vermont Presidential Results 2016, Creative Commons Attribution.

Vermont is forever linked to its mirror-image neighbor, New Hampshire. There are probably other states it could be compared to, Wisconsin and Oregon come to mind, but New Hampshire and Vermont are connected through history and temperament and geography. You can’t read about Vermont without both state mottoes being mentioned, and that Vermont has fewer Walmarts than New Hampshire, and that Vermont has no Dairy Queens. Why the Dairy Queen factoid gets mentioned I don’t know, but it’s part of the litany.

They sprang from different geological forces that produced the soft rolling Green Mountains of Vermont and the rugged, angular White Mountains of New Hampshire. The differences run through their colonial histories and are evident today in their cultures, politics and certainly in their state mottos: Vermont’s feel-good “Freedom and Unity” shrinks before New Hampshire’s stark ultimatum to “Live Free or Die.”

More Than a River Separates Bernie Sanders’s State From Primary’s, Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times, February 7, 2016.

The Spaceman, Bill Lee, lives in Vermont.

Here is the difference between Vermont and New Hampshire: Vermont, population 625,741, voted 55.72% for Hillary Clinton, and only 29.26% for President Trump. Favorite son Bernie Sanders pulled an additional 5.68% as a write-in. New Hampshire, population 1,316,470, also went for Clinton, but it was 48.2% to 46.1%. New Hampshire has greater ethnic diversity, being only about 90% white, while Vermont is more than 95% white. Snow, Snow Snow! Vermont, along with Hawaii, is consistently one of the most progressive states in the country.

Calvin Coolidge Fishing Near Home in Vermont, 1931 From Twitter.

And taxes. You can’t talk about Vermont and New Hampshire without mentioning that Vermont’s tax burden is 4th, New Hampshire’s 46th. I tracked down my old friend Mark who with his husband moved to Vermont after he left Texas. Mark worked for the IRS for a while but left when President Trump was elected, but now he’s moved on to Florida, largely because of . . . wait for it . . . Vermont taxes. The tax burden for the average resident is roughly 10.31%. If I’m going to sneak a new bamboo fly rod into my luggage on this trip, I’ll pay a combined 7% sales tax, though that’s cheaper than Texas.

New Hampshire has no income tax or sales tax, but it does have one of the nation’s highest property tax rates, with a rate of about $2.19 per $100 of value. All of that said, I gather that the Vermonters who stay, who like their state, are for the most part proud of its peculiarities and political stances, and want to be there. Freedom and unity! Ok, it’s not the quirkiness of Live Free or Die!, but it’s at least as good as Friendship. I could be perfectly happy with freedom and unity, at least as long as I don’t have to buy Birkenstocks.

There’s plenty of speculation about why the states are different. Sure, you can chalk it up to New Hampshire’s historic development as a water-powered mill state, a port state, a state with more difficult geography and weather, but my favorite theory is that modern Vermont was the result of an effective advertising campaign. They picked what they would be, a place of ski lodges and cows and Birkenstocks, and they sold it. Cultural immigrants like Bernie Sanders and Bill Lee believed the pitch, and Vermont was its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bringing in maple sap to the sugar house. Frank H. Shurtleff farm, North Bridgewater, Vermont, 1940, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

A colleague suggested that I check to see if New Hampshire and Vermont are ranked by any sort of happiness index. The World Happiness Index is published by the United Nations, and in 2019 the happiest country on the planet is left-leaning, frigid Finland. I don’t pretend to have studied the Index methodology, though it’s based on polling. Finland though would seem to bode well for left-leaning, frigid Vermont. There’s a Gallup poll that’s supposed to measure happiness and health, and left-leaning but decidedly un-frigid Hawaii seems to come out on top most years. Last year Vermont was way down, but this year it was 7th. New Hampshire was 11th. Alabama and Mississippi, those other bookend states on the Southside, are Nos. 44 and 47. West Virginians are still the least happy of our lot.

Posted on

Alabama Packing List

What We Took.

Rods

On the Tallapoosa we didn’t expect big fish. We threw a lot of stuff in the car, helter skelter, but we intended to fish with five weight rods, and that’s all we set up for the float. Kris had her Helios D3, and I had the new Winston Pure that Trout Unlimited had sent me for my high school graduation.

So far I’ve caught largemouth, bluegill, longear, redeye, Alabama bass, and a really big catfish on the Pure. It’s an excellent trout rod I’m sure, and someday I plan to catch a trout with it. With the rod Trout Unlimited also sent a Cheeky Reel, which must be the single gaudiest unobtrusive reel ever made. It’s an electric blue and green. It’s also disk drag, smooth and silent, and I don’t fish much with five weight disk drags, smooth and silent. After I put it on the rod I never really noticed the reel was there. Like I said, at once gaudy and unobtrusive.

I have lots of five weight reels, so I loaded the new reel with something different for streamers and poppers, a Scientific Anglers half-weight heavy MPX line. I don’t know what MPX stands for, but I’m used to big weight forward lines for redfish and bass and I liked the MPX. It’s probably the worst possible combination with the Pure, mixing a medium slow rod with a half-weight heavy line to make it faster, but there you are. The combination worked fine for Alabama, where neither the bass nor the legislature is big on subtlety.

I do have one beef with the Winston rod. It has a hook keeper, a rather large, sharpish hook keeper which when combined with the cigar grip and my choked up hand position rubbed my index finger raw. Does anyone actually use hook keepers? Why are they still put on rods? I guess I’ve got lots of rods with hook keepers and cigar grips, but that combination on the Pure really rubbed me the wrong way. All afternoon. And it’s an ugly hook keeper too, and ugliness isn’t part of the whole Winston thing.

Flies

My leaders were a highly technical design: Three or four feet of 20 pound fluorocarbon joined to three or four feet of 16 pound fluorocarbon by a blood knot. They worked fine.

A month or so before we went to Kansas Alabama I lost most of my bass and sunfish flies, four fly boxes worth. They were returned by a Good Samaritan, but not before I’d frantically tied a bunch of new flies, including (at the suggestion of a Kansan I’d been emailing) some Barr’s slumpbusters. Other than the disreputable baseball tie-in, I really like that fly, and fished it about a third of our river time in Alabama. I also tied some BBBs, woolly buggers, and clousers, and used none of them. I tied everything but the BBBs on size 8 streamer hooks, so they should be fine as well for our New York/Vermont/New Hampshire trout swing at the end of June. Of course the whole point of that trip is to learn something about dry flies, so I shouldn’t use them. I really shouldn’t.

The rest of the time we fished poppers. Craig didn’t bother calling them anything but Boogles, which is exactly right. I know there are people out there who tie their own poppers, but I never could get them painted in a way that made me happy, so I am happy to use Boogles. Craig fished with an intermediate size, neither as large nor as small as the ones I usually use. I’m going to have to buy some intermediate Boogles. East Alabama Fly Fishing has an excellent discussion on popper colors, and when to use them. It’s the kind of cool stuff that Craig and the guide service owner, Drew Morgan, are thinking about.

New Shoes

I’m a biting bug magnet. This spring alone I’ve suffered from infestations of gnats, mosquitoes, and fire ants. There’s nothing quite like a couple of hundred fire ants together with your feet in a pair of Keen sandals.

I figure that I’m not likely to pay more attention, so I bought a pair of cornflower blue Converse high tops for our trip to Kansas Alabama. Paired with running socks and some supplemental arch support for the aged they’re pretty comfortable. There’s reasonable traction, and I don’t have to worry about fire ants between my toes. Plus the cornflower blue matches my eyes when I stick my foot in my mouth.

The laces will catch a fly, so it’s another reason to debarb hooks.

I think Kris prefers snake boots, and the Chuck Taylors probably don’t provide much snake protection.

Restaurants, Barbecue

Coming into Alabama, the lady at the visitor center sent us to a Dick Russell’s for barbecue. It wasn’t really so much a barbecue place as a plate-and-three place, with an incredibly good two instead of three and pretty mediocre barbecue as the meat. I had turnip greens and black-eyed peas, and I’d go back for them. They also didn’t have white sauce barbecue, which southern Alabama is known for: Mayonnaise, vinegar, brown sugar, mustard, horseradish, salt and pepper. It sounds awful for pork or beef, but is supposed to be great on chicken.

In Montgomery everyone I talked to told us to eat at Central, which was around the corner on the same block as our hotel. It was the kind of elegant modern American place which seems to be everywhere and because of which the world is better off, and on a Saturday night it was crowded. One of the servers suggested Cahawba for biscuits the next morning for their breakfast biscuit sandwiches. The cheese in the eggs was a bit much, but the biscuits were excellent. I’ve never baked a decent biscuit, though from time to time I try. Because of my own failures I admire the craft of a good biscuit.

Back in Mobile heading home we ate breakfast at Time to Eat, which had the only Amnesty International and Human Rights Campaign stickers on doors in Alabama, and a smoking room. We accidentally ate in the smoking room. It had good grits, and the view of the locals coming in to smoke and drink coffee was pretty memorable.

In Louisiana we tried to get po’ boys in Lafayette, one of the great po’boy towns, but everyplace was closed for Memorial Day.

Where We Didn’t Go

We didn’t see Birmingham, home of both the AA Birmingham Barons and the former Negro League Birmingham Black Barons, for whom Willie Mays, Satchel Paige, and, of all people, Charlie Pride played. Pride and another player were apparently traded to the Barons in 1956 by the Louisville Clippers for a team bus. Everyone seems to like Birmingham, and it was once, along with Memphis and Atlanta, the industrial heart of the South.

The Northern part of the state is supposed to have gorgeous waterfalls. Our guide Craig Godwin said it was the prettiest part of the state.

We didn’t try enough barbecue, and we didn’t catch a redfish on the coast. The same server who suggested Cahawba for biscuits suggested the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, Montgomery having been Zelda’s home. It didn’t open until noon on Sunday, so we didn’t make it.

Playlist

I didn’t know that Charlie Pride played for the Birmingham Black Barons, or he would have been included.

  • Alabama Shakes. This is one of those bands I follow because of their appearance on Austin City Limits. There’s just nothing not to like, except that I guess they may not exist any more.
  • Emmylou Harris. I probably have more Emmylou Harris music than anything else. For someone who doesn’t write many songs, she’s consistently had the best taste in music, and has a liberating way of making other people’s songs her own. I actually needed to cut 50 or so songs so I could hear something else, but I just never got around to it. She was a military brat, and didn’t spend much time in Alabama after she was born there, but being born there was enough of an excuse to listen to Emmylou. And of course there was “Boulder to Birmingham.”
  • John Prine, “Angel From Montgomery.” I had versions by Susan Tedeschi and Bonnie Raitt, but oddly I first knew the song from a high school John Denver record. It was a good version.
Handy’s Memphis Orchestra, 1918.
  • Paul Simon, “Loves Me Like a Rock,” “Kodachrome.” First I ever heard of Muscle Shoals, sometime circa 1973.
  • Arthur Conley, “Sweet Soul Music.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Wilson Pickett, “Land of 1000 Dances,” “Hey Jude,” “Mustang Sally.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, “Old Time Rock & Roll.” Muscle Shoals.
  • James & Bobby Purify, “I’m Your Puppet.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Clarence Carter, “Snatching it Back.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Jimmy Cliff, “Sitting in Limbo.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Etta James. James, from California, had a long and strange career, and she recorded a lot of fine rhythm & blues, but none finer than what she recorded in 1967 in Muscle Shoals. “Tell Mama,” “I’d Rather Go Blind.”
  • Aretha Franklin, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” “I Never Loved a Man.” Muscle Shoals.
  • The Staple Singers, “I’ll Take You There.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Percy Sledge, “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Just try not to sing along. Muscle Shoals.
  • The Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar,” “Wild Horses.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Ma Rainey, “Bo-Weevil Blues,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “See See Rider.” Rainey made some of the first important blues recordings, and the available versions are pretty poor quality. She said she was born in Georgia, but scholars think she was born in Alabama five years before the year she admitted to. Charlie Pride did the same thing in minor league baseball, and this is now known in baseball circles as Dominican Aging Syndrome.
Ma Rainey, 1917.
  • Hank Williams. What a lot of great songs in a too short life. There’s a Williams museum In Montgomery, but it closed before we got to it.
  • Erskine Hawkins, “Tuxedo Junction.” I had versions by Hawkins, Glen Miller, Duke Ellington, and Manhattan Transfer. Tuxedo Junction was a blues bar in Birmingham. One of the great happy songs.
  • W.C. Handy. Ma Rainey is the mother of the blues, and Handy is the father. I had the Louis Armstrong plays W.C. Handy recording. If I’d known “Loveless Love” was by Handy I would have included the Billie Holiday version. I probably should have included Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” as well, in honor of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, but it’s a tough song to contemplate, as is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. One was enough.
  • Alabama, “Dixieland Delight,” “Song of the South.” I liked these more than I thought I would.

On principal I did not download “Sweet Home Alabama.” I meant to download a selection by St. Paul and the Broken Bones, but never got around to it. If you’ve never watched the Muscle Shoals documentary, Muscle Shoals, do. Muscle Shoals is some of the best of Alabama because, well, it’s some of the best of all of us.

Guitar.

I took the Kohno since we were driving, but then worried about the heat of the day when it had to live in the car while we went down the river. I worked on the Allemande movement of the first Bach Cello suite, the Duarte transcription that I always associate with Segovia. I’ve been told that Duarte was kind of a jerk, but it’s a good transcription, and the Allemande is actually my favorite movement. I can’t remember it for anything.