April 2021 -

We fish central Pennsylvania in May. Pennsylvania is one of a clump of states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana, that are a mystery to me. I don’t know what the rivers are like. In fact I don’t really know what the interstates are like, or the colleges, or the music, or anything else. Pennsylvania doesn’t try to be mysterious. It’s part of our national mythology, both patriotic and fishing–its chalk streams are as much a part of fly fishing lore as English chalk streams, but with less tweed. How’s this for peculiar? I’ve been to England to fish chalk streams but never Pennsylvania, and England doesn’t even have a Liberty Bell. Pennsylvania is one of the reasons we set out on our multi-year state fishing binge. Well, Pennsylvania and Alaska. And Maine. And New Hampshire. And all those other states we’ve never been to.

I have a pretty good idea of what Pennsylvania farms look like, and will be deeply disappointed if they don’t.

John Whetten Ehninger, *October*, 1867, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

I also have one personal tie to Pennsylvania. I drank a good bit of Rolling Rock Beer in my 30s. The brewery was later sold to Annheuser-Busch, and it’s supposedly not so good as it once was. In any event it’s no longer brewed in Latrobe in glass-lined vats.

I’ve been reading a history of Pennsylvania, imaginatively named Pennsylvania, A History of the Commonwealth. In the introduction the editors (Messrs. Miller and Pencak) make the following statement:

Pennsylvania’s history is the history of a people who have long been known for their localism and ethnic persistence. Texans will tell you they are from Texas, but Pennsylvanians will tell you they are from Philadelphia or Pottsville or Pequa or Pittsburgh.

At XXI.

Texas history is really pretty simple, not necessarily pretty but still pretty simple, and ripe for expropriation by whoever comes along. It makes perfect sense for a my-age Asian guy in front of me at the grocery checkout to say “howdy!”, and for me to say howdy back, and for both of us then to laugh for the pure pleasure of it. “We only say that in Texas,” he said. Come to Texas and you’re a Texan. Nobody worth arguing with can dispute your claim–they didn’t get here that long ago either. We have our faults, just look at our state’s politics, but if you put two Texans together, whatever our differences, we’ll like as not say howdy.

So telling me that Pennsylvanians don’t mirror our state-level chauvinism is illuminating. Of course while we had cattle and oil and civil rights to deal with, Pennsylvanians had all that plus the industrial revolution. And coal mining. And labor battles. And the Phillies.

Politics

If you follow politics, you’ve considered Pennsylvania over the past five years, since its vote for President Trump in 2016. Since 1900 Pennsylvania has voted Republican as often as it’s voted Democratic, and until FDR and the Great Depression it hadn’t voted Democratic since at least 1900. Since 1990 though the state has voted for a Republican President only once, for Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, Pennsylvania’s 2016 electoral map looked like the map of most other states. Votes were Republican in the rural areas and Democratic in the urban.

I assume that the blue county in the center is Penn State. All bets are off in college towns.

In the wind-up to 2020, Democratic friends told me that driving across Pennsylvania worried them, that the rural areas were awash with Trump signs, but that was true in rural areas everywhere, from Louisiana to Washington State. What is remarkable is the closeness of the 2016 vote. With an estimated 2016 population of 12,784,000, only 44,292 more votes were cast for President Trump than for Hilary Clinton. Of course only 5,897,174 of that 12 million voted, but still, fewer than 1% of the voters gave President Trump a majority. I bet Ms. Clinton is still kicking herself for not having her vaccination mind control in place earlier.

Interestingly, map-wise, things didn’t change all that much in 2020:

Obviously they changed some. The area around Philadelphia is a bit bluer, the mid-state blues are a bit deeper, and Erie went from light pink to light blue. Still, that’s not much change. Numerically though, things were pretty different. The total Pennsylvania vote, 6,835,903 in 2020, increased by almost one million votes over 2016. President Biden won by 80,555 votes, or 50.01% of the votes cast. President Trump received 48.84% of the votes in 2020.

Whichever way you lean, things are close in Pennsylvania.

You get a better sense of the close split between Pennsylvania voters by looking at its modern era governors. The Pennsylvania governorship seems to shift every other election cycle. Since 1951, there have been seven Republican governors for nine 4-year terms, and six Democrats for eight 4-year terms. The current governor, Tom Wolfe, is a Democrat. He’s probably the guy who stole the election from President Trump, so I guess we all owe him a debt of thanks.

Geography Begats History

God didn’t lay out Pennsylvania on a grid, but like a quartered onion, with sweeping arced layers from southwest to northeast.

It’s not so big a state as I would have thought. At 46,015 square miles, it ranks 33rd in total area among all states. I guess it feels bigger because most of the states around it are small, and in the Northeast only New York is larger. Elevations go from sea level on the Delaware River to 3,315 feet at Mount Davis in the Alleghenies. It’s not 14,000 feet, but zero to 3,000 is a pretty good jump.

In the southeast, Philadelphia sits near sea level at 39 feet. The Coastal Plain extends into the Piedmont Upland. It was these areas, Philadelphia and the Piedmont, that were first settled by Europeans, and that begat a German/English/Scots-Irish culture that, along with New England and the Southern cradle states, became the nation’s predominant Euro-American cultural influences. Pennsylvanian settlement didn’t really extend beyond the Piedmont until after the 1750s, both because the ridge-and-valley Appalachians stopped expansion, and because, at least while Penn lived, settlement agreements between Penn’s Quaker colony and Native Americans were largely honored. The agreements didn’t really outlive him.

The French and Indian War began in the 1750s on the left side of the state, along the southern border with Virginia, the British victory in the French and Indian War and subsequent defeat of the Iroquois Confederacy, and the decline of Quaker influence changed the map of westward expansion. Pittsburgh was settled in the west in the late 18th Century, and Pennsylvania’s wealth–agriculture, soft and anthracite coal, iron ores, oil–primed an industrial and extraction boom that lasted well into the 20th century. From the War of 1812 through World War II, the industrial development of Pennsylvania provided the resources that equipped our wars. Pennsylvania was a manufacturing power anyway, but it produced those kinds of things, steel and fuel chief among them, that modern wars demand. For Pennsylvania, our wars were its steroids.

Industrialization

There were some businesses, U.S. Steel, the Pennsylvania Railroad, Carnegie Steel, Westinghouse, that were massive monopolistic powers. Other Pennsylvanian industries were medium-sized concerns built by local investment and craftsmen, and the number and types of goods were vast: pharmaceuticals, clothing, chocolate, machines, lumber, cloth, glass, furniture, ketchup . . . Kentucky rifles were manufactured in Pennsylvania, as were Zippo lighters, as were Crayola Crayons.

My contribution to the Pennsylvania economy

Think of C.F. Martin & Co.. Do you remember the cover of the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album, Deja Vu, with the band goofily dressed up like frontiersman? There’s a guitar in the picture (and one Kentucky rifle), a pre-World War II Martin, and Martins defined the album’s sound. C.F. Martin founded his luthiery in Pennsylvania in the 1830s, and it’s still a going concern. It’s not a big company I reckon, but as much as the monopoly behemoths it’s the kind of company that powered Pennsylvania’s manufacturing growth. Pennsylvania depended on great products built by skilled craftsmen.

It’s too bad the Martin factory is closed to visitors because of the pandemic. I’d trade touring the Liberty Bell for a tour of C.F. Martin. No tours though.

Becoming an economic powerhouse didn’t come easy. If the first age of Pennsylvania was farming, skilled trades, and merchants, the second age was industrial production. By the late 1800s, the Pennsylvania Railroad was the largest corporation in the world. Without transportation, Pennsylvania didn’t work, and the Pennsylvania Railroad made Pennsylvania work. In 1877, during a nationwide economic depression, Pittsburgh railroad employees went on strike. Two days later the National Guard fired on protesters, 20 people were killed, and Pittsburgh burned. By the end of the riots, an estimated 53 rioters died, and 109 were injured. Damage to railroad property was estimated at $2 million, and to the larger city of $5 million. And that was when a million dollars meant something.

M.B. Leiser, Burning of Pennsylvania Railroad and Union Depot, Harper’s Weekly, engraving, August 11, 1877, via Wikipedia.

Fifteen years later, the Homestead Steel Strike would be nearly as bloody (and certainly as violent). In all, it’s estimated that there were over 4,000 work stoppages in Pennsylvania in the last half of the 19th Century.

Where We’ll Fish

This is disingenuous. To finish this out I should talk about the decline of American steel and the Rust Belt industries, and the attempted economic transformation of cities like Pittsburgh, but I don’t want to. I don’t understand it, and it worries me. Apparently it was caused by foreign competition for steel production, transportation costs, intransigent unions, and a decline in raw material production near the Pennsylvania mills. It’s depressing to think that all of those jobs have gone away.

I should have talked about Native Americans too, but oddly Pennsylvania sat on the margins of woodland cultures to the east and Ohio cultures to the west, and really wasn’t significantly settled. I’ll stick to where we plan to fish.

We’re actually making our way from Philadelphia to Coburn, near State College, where we’ll fish two days in the area that includes Penn’s Creek. We have one day that isn’t planned, and I’ve thought about Letort Spring Run (which is famous). Kris and I watched some YouTube videos about the Letort, and she thought it looked too difficult to navigate. We’ll see.

We’re getting to Coburn via Gettysburg, but first we’ll go to Delaware to fish for shad. We had planned that trip a year ago, and I wrote then about Delaware and shad. I have a Westerner’s surprise at how close together all these places are. In Rabbit, Run, when Rabbit first leaves Janice, he takes off driving and drives and drives and drives. I figure he drives all the way to New Mexico, the next state to the west from me, a good 560 miles from where I’m sitting. Instead he ends up in Maryland, or Virginia, or someplace probably 70 miles away from where he started. All these places, all these people, all so crammed together. Give me some good urban spread any day, where a man can breathe.

Then we’ll fly out of Pittsburgh. It’s 70 miles from Philadelphia.

I think in the East this translates as 70 miles. From Roadtrippers.

What we didn’t see

Even before this trip, I’ve seen a lot of Arkansas. I’ve visited the Clinton Library, and the vaccine microchip hadn’t yet told me to. I went to Fayetteville as a teenager and as an adult I’ve seen the Arkansas Delta and Washington and Hot Springs. In January we went to the new museum in Bentonville, Crystal Bridges. My parents took us camping for a week at the Albert Pike Campground, to me a magical place with sparkling clear water where we swam in the heat of the day in the river, and that in 2010 was washed away by flood waters. Sixteen campers were killed. It’s never re-opened.

I have seen the Buffalo River, the first designated National Wild and Scenic River, but only from a car from a bridge. I’ve intended to canoe the Buffalo for 30 years. I still haven’t. I should have gone there to catch my fish. I didn’t. I guess I still need to go back to Arkansas.

Where We Went

Other than fishing, we stopped at the Dulcimer Shoppe in Mountain View Arkansas (“Folk Music Capital of the World”). I bought a jar of wild elderberry jelly, since that seemed suitably folksy, but Kris wanted a dulcimer. Did you know that in addition to your index and middle fingers, you use your thumb to fret a dulcimer? I didn’t, so I both learned something and got us out of the shop without a dulcimer. Success! It was a nice shop, and Kris really was sold on dulcimers. The jelly is good too, whatever elderberries may be.

This trip we went out of our way to see Little Rock Central High School. Everyone knows the photo of Elizabeth Eckford walking into Central High: the dignity and vulnerability of Miss Eckford, the rage of the white students . . . In person what’s striking about Central is its size, it’s big, and also its neighborhood. In 1957 when Eisenhower enforced integration there were three high schools in Little Rock . One of the schools, Horace Mann, was black, two others, Central and Hall, were white. One of the white schools, Hall, was generally affluent, which is why integration was slated for working-class Central.

The Central neighborhood hasn’t improved since the 50s. It’s still the same small houses, now 70 years longer in the tooth. It has slipped below working class, or maybe the working class has slipped below what it had achieved in the 50s. The school itself is handsome. Its neighborhood is rough.

Derek Chauvin’s trial for George Floyd’s murder started this week, so racially charged photographs are in the forefront, but there was another Arkansas event this week that brought Miss Eckford to mind. The Arkansas Legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto of a bill forbidding transgender youth from receiving therapy, puberty blockers and hormones, that would aid transition. Many won’t notice the legislation, but it is, well, central, and certainly central to the transgender youth and their families. The proponents’ reasoning is that minors are too young to make gender decisions, and the opponents’ reasoning is that those decisions are best left to the youth, their parents, and their doctors, not the state legislature. I don’t know why anybody would be dubious about the decisions of a state legislature. The Arkansas legislature must be at least as qualified as the Texas.

Playlist

I liked the music we listened to driving around Arkansas. We listened to a lot of Lucinda Williams because, while she was born in St. Charles, she attended the University of Arkansas. I first heard her name on Houston’s nonprofit Pacifica radio station, when the DJ said she had a crush on Lucinda Williams. I’ve listened a lot to Ms. Williams since. I always thought that if I could choose someone famous to sit by on an airplane–this is my personal version of who you’d like at your dinner party–Lucinda Williams would be high on the list. I finally saw her on stage a dozen years ago, and she appeared to be just what I should have thought: a little tough, a little road-weary, a little wild. I don’t share that DJ’s crush, but I would like to talk to Ms. Williams for an hour.

Is there a better road song (or a better song about living in the country) than Car Wheels on a Gravel Road?

Currier & Ives, The Fall of Richmond, Va., on the Night of April 2, 1865, lithograph, Library of Congress.

Levon Helm was from Arkansas. That lets in all sorts of great music, including the troubling The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, which is a song I like in part because it is troubling. It is arguably about white loss with no connection to slavery, and is often heard as a South’s arising anthem. Ta-Nehisi Coates apparently wrote of the song that it was another song of the “blues of Pharaoh,” but it’s hard for me to equate Virgil Kane with Pharaoh, and it seems one of the points of the song that Pharaoh is Pharaoh and everybody else isn’t. Kane, the narrator, doesn’t mourn Dixie’s defeat, Kane suffers it; hunger, poverty, the death of a brother, and there’s no pride, no blame, only desperate endurance. As the lyrics say, you can’t raise a Kane back up when he’s in defeat. As difficult to interpret as it may be, it remains one of the great antiwar songs, and Kane could have been black or white–it wouldn’t change the song’s bleak message. Whatever happens to Pharaoh he’s still Pharaoh. The rest of us are going to be Virgil Kane.

There’s a common misinterpretation of the lyrics that explains some of the ambivalence of the song. There’s a line where Virgil’s wife calls to him: “Virgil, quick, come see,/There goes Robert E. Lee . . . “, the general. At least that’s the way the lyrics are as often as not misinterpreted. The lyrics are “the Robert E. Lee . . . “, the steamboat, which is apparently clear in the live version but a bit muddled in the original. I like the steamboat better, both as a matter of history–Robert E. Lee was never in Tennessee and the steamboat was on the Mississippi –and because the steamboat had its own fame and tragedy. It’s the sort of steamboat on which Pharaoh would ply the Nile, while Virgil Kane watched from the shoreline.

August Norieri, The Robert E. Lee, oil, 1884

In addition to The Band and Lucinda Williams, there’s also Al Green, Johnnie Cash, Lefty Frizzell, Roy Buchanan, Iris Dement, Conway Twitty, and blues musicians from the Delta: Robert Lockwood, Jimmy Witherspoon, Son Seals. If you ignore Black Oak Arkansas, Arkansas has a pretty good lineup.

Glen Campbell is also from Arkansas, which justifies Galveston and Wichita Lineman, but not Rhinestone Cowboy. Nothing justifies Rhinestone Cowboy.

Guitar

I took the old Kohno. Four years ago when we last fished in Arkansas, I sat on a balcony above the Little Red and tried to play Duarte’s transcription of Pavane pour une infante défunte. The lady on the next cabin balcony asked what I was playing–which either meant I was playing the piece well enough to be nearly recognizable or I played it badly enough that it was unrecognizable. I like to think that the name of the song–Pavane for a Dead Princess in English (though a more literal translation would be Dance that a long-dead princess might have danced)–was on the tip of her tongue, and she just couldn’t quite think of it.

This year I was still trying to play Pavane pour une infante défunte, so for me Ravel will always have a weird connection to Arkansas. I don’t know that Ravel ever went there, and I still can’t play the Pavane. I’m pretty sure there were no steamboats named The Maurice Ravel.

Month: April 2021