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.

• 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.

• 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.