Month: January 2020

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Carry On My Wayward Son, and Other Kansas Stuff, January 17-19

We drove to Kansas over the weekend.

We took the dogs, who took the trip in stride. They’re as small as dogs can get and still be dogs: a Chihuahua adopted as a stray when it showed up with heart worms at our daughter’s house and a tiny schnauzer bought at a charity auction after too much wine. They travel in our laps–there should be a French translation, like en crout, sur lap?–and when we travel they sleep and get their heads scratched. They’re dogs.

We spent Friday night in Dallas, Saturday night in Wichita, drove around central Kansas for part of a day, and then drove home. We were home around 1:30 am.

There is a fly shop in Wichita, Ark River Anglers, and I’d planned to get there Saturday and ask them about Kansas fishing. We made it by 4:30, me thinking that they would close at 5:00. They closed at 4:00. Next time.

It was really cold on the prairie, down in the 20s, actually too cold for fishing unless maybe for stocked trout. That didn’t seem like the right color of fish for Kansas, though maybe it was. On our way to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, I bank-fished a bit at Chase State Fishing Lake, not with any expectation of fish, any self-respecting fish was going to huddle in the deeps to stay warm, but we had driven from Texas on the flimsy excuse that we were fishing. Kris walked the dogs and then huddled in the deeps of the car to stay warm. I cast half-heartedly a half-dozen times, lost feeling in my hands, and was done. This doesn’t bode well for the Olympic Peninsula in February.

Even at the Preserve we never left the visitor center. In the spring it would be a good place for a walk, but not at a windy 25 degrees. After all, we had to think of the dogs. After a while we left and headed west. Kris said she wanted to see the Cheyenne Bottoms Nature Preserve, two hours west.

Has anyone ever taken great photos of the prairie? I know there are plenty of photos of stuff on the prairie: windmills, buffalo, cowboys, prairie flowers, hawks, combines, other prairie things, but photographing the prairie itself must be like photographing the ocean: it would take a special talent or at least a lucky eye to do the place justice. There are treeless rolling swells of land, and in winter brown dormant grass broken by green fields of sprouted winter wheat. I loved it, and I loved the Flint Hills particularly: There’s something mythic about their legacy of buffalo herds and plains tribes, and ancient inland seas where the hardest bits of flint stand as outcropped shelves after the softer sediments washed away. I wanted to stay there.

And then there was the great blue sky.

Kris didn’t get nearly so excited. She said it was flat and barren. Here’s a Houston girl calling someplace flat. It wasn’t really flat, that’s only a trick of the omnipresence of the sky. And it wasn’t barren either, at least not to my eye. There was grass everywhere, brown dormant grass, sure, but all over a promise of green, and from time to time there were trees. Ragged leafless trees, sure, but still that promise.

On our way west to Cheyenne Bottoms Kris called out the red tailed hawks huddled in trees and on fence posts. Not many were flying: I supposed it was just too damned cold. We made it as far as the Dairy Queen in Lyons where we bought chocolate dip cones and I declared it was time to turn south and go home. I figured if we skipped Cheyenne Bottoms, still an hour away, we could make Dallas by 9:00 and spend the night. On the way south we crossed the Arkansas River a few times and liked its looks, so we stopped to cast a bit. It was shallow, and clear enough that I could see that fish were unlikely in the cold, but it was also pretty. And it had warmed up to the mid-30s.

Late that night we didn’t stop at Dallas. I got us through the city, and only got lost once because my outdated car gps thought there were freeway exits where there no longer are. I made it an hour further to Ennis and then Kris took us the last three hours home. I dozed. Ok, I slept. I’d do that drive again, especially the sleeping part, but next time I’d like to catch a fish.

Kansas Donuts

Wichita has a strange vibe, like Amarillo if Brooklyn was a distant envied cousin. Want a hipster tattoo? You can get one down near Old Town. Want a grain elevator? There are elevators a’plenty.

The Donut Whole was on the hipster side. The counter girl had admirable vivid dyed blue hair, and grimaced when I told her I preferred my gluten caged. It was $14 for a half-dozen donuts and a coffee, but I figured I got charged extra for the joke. They sold cake donuts, many with peculiar flavors like orange creamsicle. The place was so hip they should offer gluten-free donuts fried in CBD oil, or maybe they already do and the counter girl wouldn’t tell me because she was a’feared of another joke.

How can they sell gluten-free donuts in Kansas?

The lady at Paradise Donuts didn’t have blue hair, but Paradise was still in the hipster part of town. When she asked why we were in Kansas I told her it was for the donuts. She said it was nice we’d picked her place to stop and I explained that we weren’t missing many donut places. She laughed. She didn’t offer me anything that was gluten-free, but I think she might have laughed at my joke about caged gluten. Over time Paradise would wear well, but I guess that’s kinda the point of paradise.

Peruvian Food

Saturday night we got take-out from Gabby’s Peruvian, a small cinder block cafe on a commercial side street. I can’t remember having Peruvian food before, and of course it brought to mind guinea pigs. They weren’t on the menu, but what we had was familiar: a carne guisada, arroz con pollo, fried yucca dipped in green and red salsas, tamal . . . None of it was quite the things I was used to in Tex-Mex: it was yucca instead of tortilla chips, white beans instead of pinto, there was no tomato in the arroz con pollo, and the tamal was larger and less defined in its contents than our tamales and wrapped, I think, in banana leaves. Do they have bananas in Peru? But it was all good, and the place was reasonably crowded and the reviews online were proud of Wichita’s cosmopolitan worldliness–on a side street in Wichita there is a very good Peruvian cafe. That’s about as American as it gets.

Playlist

I’ve had “Carry On My Wayward Son” playing in my head for nearly a week now. I hate that song, I didn’t like it when it was ubiquitous on the radio, back when there were radios, and this week I hate it more than ever.

I probably haven’t spent enough time on my Kansas playlist:

Kris: “Didn’t we just hear Melissa Etheridge?”

Me: “It was three or four songs back. There just aren’t that many choices from Kansas.”

Kris: “Play the next song. Isn’t there anything but Charlie Parker?”

Me: “I like Charlie Parker.”

Kris: “Play Count Basie.”

Me: : “I hate ‘Carry On My Wayward Son.’ Kansas was from Topeka. I think Count Basie played on the Missouri side.

We listen to “Kansas City” from Oklahoma!. There’s a live version of “Kansas City” by Muddy Water. I think all those songs titled “Kansas City” are actually about Missouri.

Me: “Okkervil River is an Austin band.”

I like a song called “Kansas City” by a band called The New Basement Tapes.

Kris: “Didn’t we just hear Melissa Etheridge?”

And then “Wichita Lineman,” plays and we sing along. It has that great romantic line, “And I need you more than want you/ and I want you for all time. . . ” Who hasn’t listened to that song and yearned? Jimmy Webb was from Elk City, Oklahoma, not far from my hometown, maybe a bit more than 100 miles, out on the Oklahoma plains about another 100 miles to Kansas. He would have known what it was like to be a lineman for the county on a 20 degree day when the wind was blowing.

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Kansas Supply Side Fly Fishing

Kansas Mountains

Kansas Mountains, a preenactment

Kansas is a pretty conservative state, more conservative than most. Kansas hasn’t had a Democratic senator since 1938, when George McGill, elected in 1930 to fill an unexpired term, lost his second bid for reelection. There was one other Kansas Democrat elected in the last century, in 1913. He lost in 1919. Maybe he won as a peace-time Democrat, that sort of thing happened before World War I, and it’s interesting that at some point we switched from electing senators in odd years to even. It clearly wasn’t a change that helped Kansas Democrats.

The current governor is a Democrat, and that happens in Kansas from time to time, not like all the time but every now and again, so maybe Kansas is less conservative than one might think. But over the last eight years Kansas was uncharacteristically prominent in the national news for a peculiarly conservative administration. Another governor, Sam Brownback, made Kansas the nation’s petrie dish for supply side economics. Brownback resigned the governorship to become President Trump’s United States Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, and by the end of his second term when he resigned both Republicans and Democrats couldn’t get him out of Kansas fast enough. Hence there is now a Democrat in office–Brownback blowback.

Gage Skidmore, photographer, Sam Brownback measuring the bluegill he caught in Kansas, CPAC, 2015, Wikipedia.

In 2011 as a newly-elected governor Brownback pushed through radical tax reductions. Being a religious man, he had faith that if Kansas decreased taxation, the resulting economic stimulus would increase tax revenues. Common sense supports Brownback’s notions, at least somewhat: If you tax too much, say 100%, people won’t pay or won’t work and no taxes get collected. The generally accepted notion though isn’t that reduced taxation will always result in economic stimulus, but that there is an optimum level of taxation, a level at which necessary economic drivers like schools and roads and health care aren’t crippled, but the supporting taxes don’t themselves hold back the economy. In the Kansas Experiment, Brownback slashed rates of taxation in 2012 to lower tax revenues by $231 million. Brownback was certain that the reduced taxation would stimulate a slow Kansas economy, and promised more future cuts.

It didn’t exactly work. The Kansas economy continued to lag, and by 2017 the Kansas legislature had slashed expenditures on roads, schools, bridges, and other necessary stuff. The legislature, both Republican and Democrat, rolled back the tax rollbacks, and then overrode Brownback’s veto.

The Laffer Curve, a Historical Reenactment. Much of our fiscal policy over the last 40 years is derived from this napkin.

The notion that lower tax rates result in higher tax revenues isn’t new, and was the theoretical support for a number of U.S. tax cuts, even pre-Reaganomics, even by Democrats. Maybe its most famous association (other than with President Reagan) is with the economist Arthur Laffer, who in 1974 as a White House staffer sketched the Laffer curve onto a napkin for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Winner winner chicken dinner! I hope it was a paper napkin. I’d hate for a conservative administration to waste cloth napkins. On the other hand, maybe if it’s still around it could be like the Shroud of Turin, and we could charge admission.

Before that, in 1924, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, he of Mellon Bank and one of our then-richest folk, wrote “It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue to the government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower rates.” At that time the marginal tax rate was 73%, and since as one of the .01% Mellon lived at the margins, maybe he had a better understanding of the result than most. The marginal rate was ultimately reduced to 24%, but then it was increased in 1932 at the outset of the New Deal to 62%. By 1951 following World War II, the highest marginal rate was 91%.

Trinity Court Studio, Andrew W. Mellon, 1921.

Tax optimization theory is not inherently conservative, but it does go hand-in-hand with a bulwark of conservative economics, Supply-Side Economics, dba trickle-down theory, dba voodoo economics. Supply-Siders believe that the economy is driven by production, by those willing and able to invest capital into producing more, and that the only way the economy grows is if production grows. Production only grows if the triumvirate of minimal regulation, stable monetary policy, and–here’s where tax reduction comes to play–low taxes spur producers to invest in production. It can’t, for instance, spur producers to go fly fishing in New Zealand instead of investing in production, because that’s not the sort of thing producers do. Consumption, the theory goes, will follow production, one supposes in part because of increased funds available to workers and in part because of the availability of goods. If you build it, they will come. Just look what happened to Iowa!

The direct counterpoint to Supply-Side Economics is Keynesian Demand-Side Economics. Give a consumer a dollar, and he’ll spend it on consumption, which in turn will spur production. I’m sure that there are Supply-Siders with complex calculations that prove Supply-Side is the very thing, and Demand-Siders with their own set of complex calculations that prove that Demand-Side is the very thing, and that I would make head-nor-tales of neither set of calculations. As a demonstration model though Kansas isn’t a very convincing proof for the Supply-Side. Maybe it failed because the state reduced tax rates for both the highest payers and the lowest? Maybe they should have increased taxation on the lowest to spur production? Maybe, but end of the day the Kansas economy started stagnant, and six years later was apparently still stagnant, and the state government was a mess. I hope Ambassador Brownback fares better with religious freedom, ‘cause if he doesn’t we’re all going to end up under Sharia law.

I’ve been thinking about Kansas a good bit, mostly because fishing Kansas is kind of intimidating to me. There are no fly fishing guides. There are no fly fishing guidebooks. It’s not a destination fishery and it’s a bit short on the fly fishing resources that destination fisheries usually have. I figure the cause must be a combination of high taxation and excessive regulation.

Kansas flat with tarpon, a preenactment

Just consider: fly-fishers like mountains, and Kansas is one of our flattest states. If mountain producers would just produce some mountains in Kansas, then fly fishers would flock there. If, for instance, mountain producers dug out the eastern portion of the state, and dumped the spoil in the west, Kansas could have both a mountain range and an inland sea: just add salt. Fly fishers would flock to both the mountains and the sea, as would bonefish, permit, tarpon, and trout. Clearly, the only reason that hasn’t happened is because of Kansas laws that discourage mountain and inland sea production, and the current high taxation on Kansas mountain and seaside property. If you produced a mountain in Kansas with a few good trout streams, I reckon just about everybody–not just fly fishers–would come to see it.

We need to get Governor Brownback back in Kansas.

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A Short Walk in the Kansas Kush

Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, First Edition, 1958, Secker and Warburg, London.

Even without Bloody Kansas and John Brown, there’s a passel of important stuff out of Kansas: Count Basie and Charlie Parker, the Dust Bowl, the Kansas City Monarchs, Brown v. Board of Education, the Koch brothers, Dwight Eisenhower and Bob Dole and Bill James and Amelia Earhart, Superman, wheat, the terminus of the Texas cattle drives and Marshal Dillon.

Ok, technically some of that stuff is Kansas City, Missouri, but that’s too fine a line for my simple notions.

Jackie Robinson, Kansas City Monarchs, 1945, Kansas City Call (newspaper), Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97518994/.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the Order of the Day to Paratroopers somewhere in England before the Normandy Invasion, June 6, 1944, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

I’m tempted to make fun of Kansas: Middle America, Methodists, Sam Brownback and his faith in supply-side economics. . . My boyhood home is so much more sophisticated than Kansas. I am from the Texas Plains, none of this Kansas Plains stuff for me. Of course from my boyhood home it would only have been a four-hour drive due north to Dodge City, the same route, by the way, as the Great Western Cattle Trail from Texas to Dodge City. It was a shorter distance to Kansas than to Austin, San Antonio, Laredo, El Paso, and certainly Houston. Only Oklahoma lay between us. Just a little bit left and a few hours further north and I could still have grown up in Texas and only 70-odd miles from Kansas.

Google maps

I’ve never once travelled that four hours to Kansas. If you had asked me as a boy who came from Kansas, I would have said Yankees. In some ways it was the most Southern thing (as opposed to Western thing) about growing up then in Texas. Everyone who wasn’t Southern Or Texan was a Yankee. Except for that whole Yankees‘ farm-team thing in the 50s, when the now-Oakland A’s were in Kansas City and seemingly traded, on demand, their best players to the Yankees for scrubs, it would probably confuse most Kansans to know that they were Yankees. This, by the way, was one of the longest sustained periods of Yankee baseball dominance, and the Kansas City A’s played an important supporting roll. Just like my ancestors, I’ve grown to distrust and generally dislike Yankees, though now it’s all baseball specific. I’m generally ok I think with people not from Texas.

Map of the Great Western Cattle Trail, From the Handbook of Texas, no source named.

E.B. White almost got it right:

To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.
To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.
To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.
To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.
To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.
And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.

There are two problems. “To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner” should be “To Southerners, a Yankee is every American who isn’t,” and there’s a problem with the pie thing. There’s nothing better than pie for breakfast.

Truth is though that no matter how close you are to Kansas, it seems most of us don’t go there, certainly without reason. Over the Martin Luther King holiday I think we’ll take a drive without reason to Kansas, at least with no reason but to get to Kansas. From Houston it’s further than the boyhood four hours, probably closer to ten, but it’s closer than Big Bend, or Marfa, or El Paso, or Lubbock. It’s also probably too cold to fish, but we’ll go, we’ll take our puppies along to protect us, we’ll try to make it to the Flint Hills, and then we’ll turn around and come home.

Instead of making fun of Kansas I’ve decided to think of it as an exotic destination, though I guess we won’t be doing any mountaineering, even in the Flint Hills. Think about it: everybody goes to Hawaii, there are cruise ships cruising north daily to Alaska, and trips to Los Angeles or Chicago or New York are common as dirt, but Kansas? There is plenty of dirt but nobody goes. Last year my son made it to Thailand, Singapore, and Japan. My closest work colleagues went to Paris, Prague, Egypt, Greece, and Vermont, which my sister says is also a foreign country. My daughter went to Disney World. No one I know went to Kansas. Ok, maybe it’s not the Hindu Kush, but it is full of Yankees. And when I get there I’m having pie for breakfast just like the natives.

Breakfast.
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Happy New Year and Redeye Bass

Samuel D. Ehrhart, Puck’s greeting to the new year, 1898, from Puck, v. 42, no. 1087, Keppler & Schwarzmann, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 

We fished a bunch this year. We fished for cutthroat in Idaho and pike in New Hampshire. In Mississippi I caught my largest fish ever, a black drum, and after fishing for tiny brook trout spent an hour in a peculiarly pleasant Vermont laundromat (which still sends me friendly emails–how did it get my email address?). In the Catskills Joan Wulff told me to relax my shoulder, I jumped a tarpon in the Everglades, and we floated past suburban golf courses near Chicago. I spooked bonefish just outside the fence of the Honolulu airport, while military and commercial jets alternated use of the runway. We stood on ladders in Nevada. It was a good year for for fishing.

Honolulu with Jake Brooks. That’s Kris in the picture, not Jake.

This will start the third year for this blog. Before I kept a blog I kept journals, but a blog is harder. Someone might read it, so the writing needs to be better. My journal now consists mostly of baseball scores and random notes. The last journal entry was during the World Series, October 30. Nationals won. Dammit.

One of the blog’s sideshows is the statistics page. I can keep up with how many people are reading stuff and what country they’re from. I had more than twice the number of lookers this year than last, and I figure not all of those were me reading myself. There’s not a lot of specifics in the statistics. I can tell if someone goes onto the blog on a particular day, what they looked at, and what country they’re from, and there are daily, monthly, and yearly totals. Most visitors are from the States, with Canada a distant second. China is third, but I suspect that most visits from China have more to do with bots than reading. Namibia? Bangladesh? Jordan? I think my kids stopped reading, but I can’t really tell that from the scorecard, so they still got Christmas presents. Where is Moldova?

New Hampshire with Chuck DeGray.

It’s gratifying when someone reads several items, and it’s always fun to see something that I wrote for purely personal reasons, that has nothing to do with fly fishing, get read. Why did that South African read my post from last year about True Grit, and who in England is reading that post about Zurbarán’s Crucifixion? The most popular post for the year was about Ocean Springs, Mississippi, which is a wonderful place and a place I’d encourage anyone to go. My April Fool’s post about buying Pyramid Lake ladders got plenty of traffic.

Early in 2018 I posted a blog that included a lie a guide had told me, about his background as a Navy seal. He wasn’t. He apparently wasn’t any kind of military. In 2019 somebody who knew the guide found the post and it started to circulate. I suppose the guide told the story to work a larger tip, or maybe to justify his wacko right-wing politics. He wasn’t a bad guide, and he told a good story, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to fish with him again. I did leave him a good tip though.

With Richard Schmidt, Pass Christian, Mississippi.

Of all the places we fished last year, the place that surprised me most was the Talapoosa River in Alabama, and the fish that surprised me most was its redeye bass. I had never been on a pretty Southeastern river, so that was some of the surprise, but the fish fit the river. Redeye weren’t the river’s only fish: we caught Alabama bass, bluegill and long-ear sunfish, but it was the redeye that charmed.

They’re a small fish: they rarely weigh more than a pound, but they need clean water and, one supposes, pretty places, because they themselves are so clean-lined and pretty. They have a fine shape, well proportioned scales, fins, and jaws, and a bright iridescent turquoise belly and lower jaw balanced by smallmouth bands of warpaint on the face and olive green horizontal lines rising to their back’s dark mass. Lovely.

Tallapoosa River with East Alabama Fly Fishing

Mathew Lewis is an Auburn-PhD candidate geneticist who studies redeye and has written an excellent small book on fly fishing for Redeye Bass, titled, appropriately, Fly Fishing for Redeye Bass. I’ve fished for river bass before, smallmouth in Virginia and Illinois, Guadalupe and largemouth in Texas, and there’s a commonality to it. Cast to the banks. Cast the slackwater next to current, cast to faster current for smallmouths and slackwater for largemouth. Matthew and I traded some emails, and I meant to come back and write specifically about the redeye, but I never got around to it. I think about those fish and that river though, and it’s a place I would go again.

Catching the five subspecies of redeye should be a thing.

In addition to Matthew’s book there are good things on the web that discuss the redeye:

There should be more.

We spent a great two days fishing with Chuck DeGray as far north as we’ve ever been, and Silver Creek lived up to its hype, but my favorite place to fish–and I suspect Kris’s–was Everglades National Park. It is so alive, so beautiful and isolated, and I promise it wasn’t just because I jumped a decent tarpon. I did jump a decent tarpon though.

Happy New Years! I hope your 2020 is as good as our 2019!