Author: admin

Posted on

Massachusetts

Tariffs

Massachusetts was not the first state settled by Europeans. The first was Florida, then New Mexico, then Virginia. 1 When the Mayflower finally arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, Jamestown was already celebrating its 13th anniversary.

Currier & Ives, Landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Mass., 1878, Library of Congress.

Massachusetts was, however, the first state to industrialize. Before industrialization, it had some other North American firsts. It had the first college, first newspaper, first witch hunt, first tea party . . . But industrialization was something different. Before the 1830s Massachusetts was pretty homogenous. It was white.2 It was English. It was Protestant. There were artisan craftsmen, farmers, merchants, and the extraction of lumber, quarried stone, and fish, but there wasn’t industry. Before the 19th century the principal Massachusetts manufactured good was rum.3

Beginning in the 1820s everything changed in Massachusetts. Wealthy Bostonians figured out that owning the means of production was better than not, and they invested heavily in factories and mills. Massachusetts became the nation’s principal producer of textiles–especially cotton cloth–and shoes, but everything was made there: buttons, rifles, musical instruments, candy, perfume . . . Farm laborers moved off the farm to factory towns like Lawrence and Lowell and Worcester. By 1865 only 13% of the labor force still worked in agriculture. And the jobs offered by industry brought immigrants from Europe and Canada. The Irish, the Italians, French Canadians, and Eastern Europeans, including large numbers of Jewish Eastern Europeans, came for the work.

Irish Immigrants at Constitution Wharf, Boston, Ballous Pictorial, October 31, 1857.

While things may have been worse back home, those manufacturing jobs weren’t the cat’s pajamas either. Pay was low, living conditions were squalid, hours were long. Children worked. If demand slowed–and from time to time demand slowed–workers were fired.

By the 1900s, Massachusetts was no longer principally English Protestant, and more than 100,000 new immigrants arrived each year. At the same time, industries started deserting Massachusetts. Textiles moved South. Shoemakers closed. You think the Great Depression was bad at your house? You shoulda been in Massachusetts. In 1933, the national rate of unemployment was 24.9%. Estimated unemployment in Massachusetts in 1932 was 34.8%.4

Later, led by technology, defense, and finance, the Massachusetts economy would revive. At $120,011 per annum, Massachusetts now has the second highest median household income by state. 5 Shoemaking, however, never recovered.6

Daniel Webster (1851), John C. Calhoun (1845) (portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy).

What has this got to do with tariffs? Beginning in the 1830s Massachusetts pushed tariffs as a means of protecting the state’s manufacturing. Daniel Webster, now largely remembered for his support of the Compromise of 1850,7 was also a shill for tariffs, and the first important sectional Constitutional crisis,8 the Nullification Crisis of 1832, was brought about because Massachusetts manufacturers were pitted against South Carolina planters. The South Carolinians wanted European goods, and they didn’t want to pay more for them to support factories in the North. Led by John C. Calhoun,9 South Carolinians decided that a state legislature had the right to nullify any federal law that they didn’t like, and South Carolinians proceeded to nullify the federally imposed tariffs. The then-President, Andrew Jackson, saved the union with a combination of threats and reduced tariffs.

I’m not certain how the tariffs affected the stock market.

Geography

Massachusetts Geography is simple. Everything west of Worcester is Western Massachusetts. Everything Worcester and east is the town you’re standing in. Nantucket sits out in the ocean, and everything further East is the Atlantic, at least until you get to England. 

Now the first of December was covered with snow
So was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
Now the Berkshires seemed dreamlike
On account of that frosting
With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go

James Taylor, Sweet Baby James, 1970.

When I was 14, two things happened. I was raising pigs in Texas in FFA,10 and James Taylor released Sweet Baby James. These two things may seem unrelated, but in FFA I had to memorize the breeds of pigs–Hampshires, Durocs, Chester Whites, and, of course, Berkshires. Until post-college I thought Taylor was singing about frosted dreamlike pigs, not a hilly region in Western Mass. Since I found out he wasn’t, I’ve sworn off learning any more about Massachusetts geography. I really liked the notion of frosted dreamlike pigs.

Dreamlike Berkshire pig, from Brett’s Colonists’ Guide, 1883, Auckland, New Zealand.

Dreamlike Berkshire Mountains, from Wikipedia, 2013.

Population

Massachusetts is the 16th most populous state at 7,001,399, which is roughly stable since the 2020 census population of 7,136,171. The non-Hispanic White population is 68.8%, Black is 9.6%, and Asians are 7.9%. Hispanics are 13.5% of the total. Boston is the largest city with a population of 653,833, and nine other cities have populations greater than 100,000.

Massachusetts urbanized early, right along with industrialization and immigration. By the end of the 19th century, more than 76% of its population lived in cities. As of 2024, the Boston-Cambridge-Newton statistical area had a population of 4,919,179, so slightly more than 70% of the Massachusetts population. Providence-Warwick is another 581,841 people, and Worcester 866,866. By population density, Massachusetts ranks third, with 899 people per square mile, but the population density of the Boston-Cambridge-Newton statistical area is 2,075 people per square mile. That’s dense.

Luckily they’ve got all those colleges and universities to keep things elevated. Otherwise they’d likely sink to the center of the earth.

In the first census of 1790, with a population of 378,787, Massachusetts was the fourth most populous state after Virginia (691,937), Pennsylvania (434,373), and North Carolina (393,751). By 1860, with a population of 1,231,066, Massachusetts trailed New York (3,880,735), Pennsylvania (2,906,215), Ohio (2,339,511), Illinois (1,711,951), and Indiana (1,350,428). At 10,554 square miles, it was also substantially smaller than the next smallest state, Indiana–with 36,419 square miles–so there was substantially less area to stack all those people. And states like Ohio were receiving substantial immigrants from Massachusetts.

Spenser

The Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker taught me everything I know about living in Massachusetts, and we re-listened to the first two novels in the series, The Godwulf Manuscript (1973) and God Save the Child (1974), while we were driving around looking for fish. They hold up well.

I was also very fond of The Scarlet Letter and Walden, and the Pequod sails from Nantucket. Massachusetts probably rivals Mississippi for important books per square mile, but The Scarlet Letter and Walden are probably a bit less informative about modern Massachusetts than the Spenser novels. For that matter, they’re probably less informative than Absalom, Absalom! remains about modern Mississippi.

Mary Hallock Foote, Hester Prynne before the stocks, 1878, James R. Osgood & Co., Boston.

Politics

Governors in antebellum Massachusetts were elected from time to time from various parties, including Federalist, Democratic-Republican, and Whig, but after the Whigs fell apart over abolition Massachusetts became predominately Republican and remained Republican from the Civil War until the 1930s. The Democrats made inroads by building coalitions with the Italians and Irish, and the first Irish mayors in Boston were Democrats. Patronage matters.11

Everything changed with Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Depression. Since the 1930s, Massachusetts has been predominately Democratic. The current governor is Democratic, though Republicans are well-represented among recent governors, including a long period from 1991 to 2007. Even with the diverse governors, Democrats predominated. Currently both U.S. senators and all of the congressional delegation are Democrats. The Massachusetts General Court–their quaint name for their state (quaintly called the commonwealth) legislature (quaintly called the general court)–is overwhelmingly Democratic.

In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris defeated Donald Trump 61.22% to 36.02%. Trump carried no Massachusetts counties.

From Wikipedia.

Fish

Ah, the pickerel of Walden! . . . They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. 

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, The Pond in Winter.

Planning for Massachusetts, I thought seriously about trying to fish Walden Pond. There are apparently black bass and sunfish, and of course there are pickerel. But to fish Walden I would have needed to have a canoe delivered from Boston. It was complicated, so I gave it up. Simplicity! Simplicity! Simplicity!

We could also have fished the coast. There is famous striped bass fishing in Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and even Boston Harbor, but we’d fished for stripers and blues in Rhode Island, and there’s never a guarantee of me catching coastal fish. I had visited Massachusetts several times before, and I did not want to return just to fish. Over a couple of days, I can usually come up with one trout in decent trout water, and our friend Jim Litrum had emailed that the Swift River in southwest Massachusetts was his favorite place to fish. We followed Jim’s advice and fished the Swift.

The Swift is a tailwater, with fairly constant water flows and temperatures. It’s stocked with browns and rainbows, and has a native population of brook trout. To get to the Swift, it’s an easy 50-mile drive from the Hartford-Bradley Airport in Hartford, Connecticut. And of course, I thought, Southwestern Massachusetts should fish warmer in April than fishing for stripers on a boat off the coast. I wanted Massachusetts done, and I also wanted to be reasonably warm.

Pickerel (Lucius reticulus), From a Pond in Massachusetts, First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game and Forests of the State of New York, 1896, facing p. 124, Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford Co., New York, New York, from the University of Washington Freshwater and Marine Image Bank.

  1. St. Augustine (1565), Jamestown (1607), Santa Fe (1610), These are more or less permanent settlements, so I’m ignoring Taos (the settlement of which seemed to come and go), and also ignoring the abandonment of Santa Fe during the Pueblo Rebellion. This is my footnote, so I get to do what I want. ↩︎
  2. This is not completely true. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first English colony in North America to legalize slavery–another first! Enslaved Africans were landed in Jamestown earlier, in 1619, but their status as slaves was not clear, and there were African slaves in St. Augustine even earlier. The Dutch brought slaves to New Netherland by 1626. African slavery was a global trade, and it’s enough to say that Massachusetts played its part, both as owners and particularly as slavers. by the 18th century Massachusetts’ African population was as much as 12% of its total, mostly used in rum production. ↩︎
  3. I think that’s right, but I haven’t double-checked. If it’s not right it should be. New England was the rum stop on the triangular trade that ran Molasses from the West Indies, rum from North America, and slaves from Africa. ↩︎
  4. Michigan had the highest unemployment in the nation, at 45.9%. Weirdly, in the 1930s there were no unemployment statistics kept by state, and state statistics were estimated much later by the Social Security Administration. ↩︎
  5. New Jersey is first at $124,487. Mississippi is last at $70,821. ↩︎
  6. Alden and some New Balance shoes are still made in Massachusetts. ↩︎
  7. The Compromise of 1850 prescribed how slavery would be decided in the new territories acquired from Mexico, and allowed slavery to spread beyond the existing slave states. It included stringent fugitive slave laws that required the return of fugitive slaves from free states. Webster’s reputation in his home state of Massachusetts was substantially damaged by his support of the Compromise. ↩︎
  8. A sectional crisis is a crisis pitting the interests of one section of the nation against another. The Civil War, for instance, was also an important sectional Constitutional crisis. Our current Constitutional crisis is not particularly sectional. ↩︎
  9. At the time, Calhoun was vice president, which seems to me like a conflict of interest. Calhoun was a hero of the South, and we keep our skiff in Port O’Connor, Calhoun County, Texas. ↩︎
  10. Future Farmers of America. ↩︎
  11. Allegedly among the important public jobs created by Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald, maternal grandfather of J.F.K., were watchmen to watch watchmen, tree climbers, and city watering crew inspectors. ↩︎

Posted on

South Carolina Packing List

Gear

We took eight-weight 9 foot rods, floating lines, and seven foot 16 pound leaders. We took redfish flies, which are generally any fly that looks even vaguely like a shrimp, crab, or small fish. If redfish are eating, they will eat anything you throw at them, including feathers, fur, polyester, and baseballs. Tan is my preferred color, unless my preferred color is chartreuse, purple, red, or pink, or if I’m feeling natural either olive or white. As long as they’re eating, redfish are a happy fish, and almost any color works.

What could be easier?

So of course we had a problem with our reels. I have used the same reels in saltwater for 30 years: Tibors. They’re beautiful things, handmade in Florida, and they come in different sizes for different fish, the 8-9 Everglades for bonefish and redfish, the 9-10 Riptide for permit and jacks, the bigger 11-12 Gulfstream for tarpon, and finally the massive Pacifica for things like sailfish and marlin, whatever those might be. Actually, I own some other 11-12 reels but I don’t own a Gulfstream, and I don’t need anything as big as a Pacifica. I own several Everglades and a couple of Riptides, but I lust after an orange Gulfstream. Not that I’d ever mention it because then Kris might feel obligated to remember that on my birthday or Christmas.

Or Father’s Day. Father’s Day is coming up.

Tibors are bombproof, easy to work on in the field, and for any given size their parts are interchangeable. They take almost no maintenance, and their design hasn’t changed significantly in the 30 years I’ve used them. Tibor engraves your name on a nameplate for the reel, and there is something so satisfying, so validating when one screws on that identifying nameplate. It’s there for everybody to see: this guy Neil Thomas ain’t fooling around. He owns a Tibor, so he must be special!

I love them. Mine have my name on them. I’m special.

Tibor makes other reels, the Signature, the Backcountry, the Billy Pate, but only the Tibor is just the Tibor. Tibors now come in fancy colors, though as I recall the originals were either gold or black. My oldest is gold, though the gold has faded and it’s pretty beat up. It’s the reel I used in South Carolina, and right now it’s in our skiff down the coast at Port O’Connor. It’s a well-made thing.

Kris doesn’t like them, and that was our problem. It’s not that they don’t work, but she says they’re heavy, and bulky, and to her they just don’t feel right. I keep trying to slip them in on her, hoping she’ll grow as fond of them as I am, because then I’d have an excuse to buy more. When we were packing for Charleston her usual eight-weight reel had a seven-weight line on it, so instead of switching the line I packed one of my Everglades. She complained the whole time we fished.

It was too heavy. It didn’t feel right on her rod. Where was her reel?

So now she has a new reel, a Hardy that she picked out at Gordy & Sons. It was a Christmas present, and by me a capitulation. It’s lightweight, probably flawless, probably made in Korea. It’s certainly very nice. It’s not a Tibor.

Hotels

Visiting the King Street shopping district in Charleston is a Garden & Gun ad incarnate. There’s jewelry and ball gowns, beachwear and books. I’m certain there are Luis Vuitton purses, and purses made at a boutique South Carolina saddlery shop, and purses made of woven sea grass. There’s crockery and cookware and antiques. I always wondered why Charleston was such a vacation magnet, and now I know. People go to Charleston to shop.

Where once slaves were auctioned, now there are bibelots, and bibelots don’t come with the same moral downside. I bought a spool of 20 lb. saltwater tippet at the Orvis store, so I did my part. My shopping was completely successful.

There are also hotels. You can spend as much as you’d like on a King Street hotel, though probably not as little. We actually stayed outside of the shopping district several miles inland, in an area of town that is gentrifying from the possibly dangerous to the marginal. I’m fond of mid-century modern motor inns, and we found a restored one in Charleston. In Savannah, just down the coast, we had stayed at a great restored motor inn, but the Starlight Motor Inn in Charleston was not as finely finished as the Thunderbird Inn in Savannah, nor was it as central. It was very good though, with small but well-appointed rooms. The room rates were immensely reasonable, and parking was free. I’d stay there again in a heartbeat.

The strange thing about the Starlight, I guess the ultramodern thing about the Starlight, was that we never saw any live employees. Check-in was by internet, which included a room code but no card or key. There was only a keypad for room entry. Room-cleaning was by request at an extra cost, which seemed fair since the room rate was so low. There was a storage unit with extra towels and coffee and whatnot in a cabinet in the stairwell under our room, and whether or not we were supposed to we helped ourselves to what we needed. There is a bar at the Starlight, but it’s open Thursday to Sunday and we were there Monday to Wednesday. I’m certain we could have roused someone if we’d needed, but there was never a need.

There was a pickle ball court painted onto the parking lot, and a moveable net, but there wasn’t a pool. Kris didn’t tip me when I carried our bags to the room.

Donuts

Annie’s Hot Donuts, in Mount Pleasant, was outside of Charleston proper but on the way to the ferry for Fort Sumter. At Annie’s, donuts are made when ordered, with fat fry-dom on demand and toppings from an ice cream sundae buffet of choices. It is such a miracle, why have I never seen one of these before? Why isn’t there one in Houston? Granted, in the morning, at the best Houston Shipley’s, the glazed donuts are hot when you get them, and a hot Shipley’s glazed is donut perfection, but that’s turnover and time of day, not the business plan. Every donut at Annie’s is hot when delivered. Miraculous.

There is an online list from Eater of Charleston’s essential donuts, but it unforgivably doesn’t include Annie’s. On the morning we fished–we fished one morning and then the next afternoon–we were on the water before any of the Eater-listed donut shops opened. We tracked down where Glazed Gourmet Donuts on King Street had been, but it’s now permanently closed. Joey Bag of Donuts was out of our way, though it was certainly one of the best names ever. On the day we fished in the afternoon, we had breakfast at The Junction, which was on the list, but it wasn’t donut day at The Junction so we had to settle for biscuits. I’ll grant that they were excellent biscuits.

The Junction was interesting not just for the biscuits, but because it was in Park Circle, even further west of the King Street shopping district than our motel. Park Circle seems to be the Bohemian, as opposed to the Garden & Gun, side of town, where because of cheap rents you can find a micro-brewery, or a bike shop, or a vinyl record store. It looked fun to explore, and I recall the biscuits fondly.

Restaurants

There are as many restaurants in Charleston as there are guitar pickers in Nashville, and in addition to the redfish that I didn’t catch, we left a bunch of restaurants untested. For our two lunches we had oysters near King Street. If we had had three days for lunch, we would have had oysters three days. We didn’t eat near enough oysters.

The two places we ate lunch, 167 Oyster Bar and Amen Street Fish and Raw Bar, weren’t joints. They were upscale, focused on seafood generally, and we paired our oysters with other more substantial things. At Amen Street in addition to oysters we had the shrimp corny dogs, she crab soup, and at 167 for some reason a lobster roll. I don’t think lobster rolls are native to South Carolina, but sometimes I give over to my baser desires.

There are authentically joint-like oyster joints in Charleston, but we didn’t make it to any and its a shame. Next time.

The first night in town we ate at Rodney Scott’s, which is whole-hog South Carolina Barbecue. There was this strange disconnect when people asked where we ate and we said barbecue, because they immediately assumed we’d eaten at a newer place, the Central Texas-style Lewis Barbecue Charleston. Why, I ask you, would we go from Texas to South Carolina to eat Hill Country brisket? I’m sure it’s excellent brisket, and I’m vaguely curious if it’s any good, but the world of barbecue is large, and for us whole hog is a rare treat. Brisket is not. Even great brisket is not.

At Rodney Scott’s, who orders both the hush puppies and the cornbread? Who doesn’t?

Monday night we ate at Hannibal’s Kitchen, which is traditional Charleston Gullah Geechee and which sports authentic 1980s Black Liberation decor. it was a great place, and we both ate the crab and rice. Both Rodney Scott’s and Hannibal’s are places I’d go back to. If Hannibal’s were in my neighborhood I’d go back way too often.

Tuesday, our last dinner, we went to Fig. I’m always so proud of myself when I get a reservation at a place like Fig, because it means that I’ve planned far enough ahead to do something hard. Fig might be the best known of all of Charleston’s high-toned restaurants, and it’s not easy to nab a reservation. Did I have to make the reservation 60 days ahead? 120? On the day our oldest child was born? I can’t remember, but whenever, I did it.

I read in some review that Fig is the place locals go for special occasions: Graduations, anniversaries, Tuesday nights . . . The decor is a bit dated, but it was presumably always meant to be clubby. The menu is American modern with a South Carolinian bent. It’s pricey.

After all that build-up though for some reason the waitstaff couldn’t get my orders right. My drink was wrong and had to go back to the bar. My entree was wrong and had to go back to the kitchen. I am apparently getting crankier with old age, because it bugged me, when usually I would have written it off to the sorts of normal human foibles at which I excel. Then I realized the staff was just dazzled by Kris’s beauty and couldn’t pay attention to me, so it was ok. After all, who wouldn’t be so dazzled?

Just as a reminder, that’s the orange Tibor Gulfstream. With blue backing.

Fig also had oysters, and we ate some.

Fort Sumter

We’ve been to a lot of Civil War battlefields, Shiloh, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Bull Run, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and Central High School in Little Rock. Fort Sumter may have been for me the most emotionally charged of all of them. Perched out in Charleston Harbor, in the midst of all that historic Southern outrage, it held the deepest reservoir of failed possibilities. Bombarding Fort Sumter was the path we chose, and we’re still paying.

We timed our visit right because Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest was published in 2024, and it is a great introduction to both the antebellum mindset and the particulars of Fort Sumter. It is also a timely book and pilgrimage to ponder the current state of affairs in these late days. It would have been a shame to miss either the book or the pilgrimage.

Playlist

Dizzie Gillespie was born and raised in Cheraw, South Carolina, then moved to Philadelphia when he was 18, and then moved on to New York. He also once stabbed Cab Calloway in the leg.

Moving to Philadelphia was a right of passage for South Carolina African Americans, who repatriated their popular music to South Carolina as Beach Music. Stay (Just a Little Bit Longer), Under the Boardwalk, Sixty Minute Man, My Girl, Such a Night . . . Motown was Detroit, Stax was Memphis, but Beach Music had its own sound and its own audience, and the audience was at least partially White and in South Carolina, busily Shagging.

Not that. That wasn’t invented until later. The Shag is the state dance of South Carolina.

Gillespie didn’t play Beach Music, but after the stabbing he was fired by Cab Calloway. It apparently wasn’t much as stabbings go, and he tried to apologize, but Calloway held a grudge, as bossmen will.

Gottlieb, William P., Portrait of Dizzy Gillespie, New York, NY, 1947, public domain.

Gillespie went on to become the first great trumpet player of BeBop, and influenced a generation of trumpeters that included Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, and Clifford Brown. Gillespie wasn’t the only great jazz musician from South Carolina. Hank Garland, the great jazz/country/rock and roll guitarist, was from Cowpens. Freddie Green, the greater jazz guitarist, was from Charleston. The great country blues guitarist, Reverend Gary Davis, was from Laurens.

Popular bands from South Carolina tend to have an edgy new-wave feel. The Country band, Shovels and Rope, is from Charleston, Ben Bridwell of Band of Horses is from Irmo, and Iron and Wine is from Chapin.

There’s enough diversity among good musicians from South Carolina to make for a fine playlist. Even The Marshall Tucker Band is perfectly ok in small doses. Did you know that there was never anybody in the band named Marshall Tucker? He was a blind piano tuner from Spartanburg.

Freddie Green, circa 1938, Library of Congress.

John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas was born on Parris Island, though he grew up in Virginia. I figured it was a close enough connection to include his Monday, Monday and Words of Love.

When Dizzie Gillespie appeared before his World War II draft board, he said, and I quote, “in the United States whose foot has been in my ass?”, and questioned whether they really wanted to give him a gun. He was classified 4-F. It’s good to know one’s limits. The funny thing is that notwithstanding the shooting threat and the stabbing, Gillespie is generally considered to have been not only a great jazz trumpeter (maybe along with Louis Armstrong the very best), but also a good-natured guy.

Guitar

I’m writing this so long after we went to South Carolina that I can’t remember if I took a guitar, or, if I did, whether I played it. Too late now to figure it out.

Posted on

Happy New 2025!

We’re on the last leg, though I’m pretty sure that fish don’t have legs. Six states to go, and our plan is to finish the last six this year. New Jersey, Massachusetts, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana . . . We completed the South last year with Georgia and South Carolina, and the Southwest with Utah and Arizona. We’re saving Wyoming and Montana for last.

Nothing is planned, except a trip to Montana in September and then a few days at the Old Faithful Inn fishing in Yellowstone. I keep thinking I need to plan, but in January–on January 6 no less–it’s hard to have much faith in the future. What a black day.

I keep thinking that I should calculate things like how many miles we traveled, how many nights we spent, how much money we spent, and how many species of fish we’ve caught. Maybe I will, but not today. Today maybe I’ll think more about Wyoming. Wyoming is a good place to fish.

We won’t be the first people to catch a fish on the fly in each state, but we have earned some great stories, and we’ve met some great people. Someone said to me recently that when we finished we could start again.

God no.

Posted on

Redfish and Seatrout, October 21-22, 2024, Some South Carolina Tidal Area (44)

I’m almost maybe sure that in South Carolina we were fishing in the vicinity of the Kiawah River, or maybe not. I know we met our guide, John Irvin, at a public boat launch on Folly Island, and that both the Kiawah and the Stono Rivers are near Folly Island. At least I think it was Folly Island.

Coastal South Carolina is a confusing mess of rivers and streams and islands and creeks, and ins and outs and ups and downs. Look it up on Google Earth. Locate Charleston and then study the surrounding coast. It’s like the spread out pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that almost but don’t quite fit together. It’s a jumble, a hodge-podge, a physical kerfuffle . . . What I’m used to in Texas is a reasonably coherent system of big bays and barrier islands. From what I can tell coherence isn’t how South Carolina works.

In South Carolina, even if you stand in the same spot, everything changes over the course of the day. There are tides in South Carolina, tides that demand consideration, tides that changed how we fished. Today, where we keep our skiff in Port O’Connor, the tide will range from a low at 2 pm of -.03 feet, to a high of one foot at midnight. It’s a tide of about 15 inches. That’s a smallish tide, even for Port O’Connor, but add a foot and the tide would be judged large. The moon tonight is a waxing sliver so there’s less lunar pull, and late-fall tides on the Texas Coast are usually low anyway. Sometimes we might get a big tide, two feet or more, but even the small tides move bait, and the moving bait triggers fish to feed. Still, the tides are generally so small they don’t really mandate how we fish.

South Carolina is different. Today at Fort Sumter the high tide at around 10 am will be well over five feet, and the low tide at 4 pm will be just a bit over sea level. That’s a five foot tide. When we fished in South Carolina the tide was taller than me, almost seven feet. Between the morning and the afternoon the tide moved enough so that if I’d only picked a low spot and stood still then sooner or later I would have drowned. At low tide we saw mountains of oyster beds. At high tide the oysters were gone and we could fish in the grass. We could fish where six hours before there was only dry–ok soggy–land.

That South Carolina tide was surprisingly magnificent. It’s not magnificent like the Rocky Mountains or the redwood forests or the Gulf Stream waters, but every day twice a day it is the most splendid thing. I was surprised by it, sure . . . I’m used to itsy bitsy tides and this ain’t no itsy bitsy, but I was also awed by it. The South Carolina tidal flats are better than mere surprise. They are magnificent.

John told us that at low tide South Carolina folk would often harvest a bushel of oysters for home consumption. At home I see oyster beds often enough. Over the years I have lost a good dozen flies to oyster beds. I suspect our skiff’s fiberglass is scarred with oyster scrapes. I suppose that if I wanted I could harvest my own bushel where I usually fish in Espiritu Santo Bay, but in South Carolina harvesting oysters appears to be a way of life. While I might be queasy about eating an oyster I randomly harvested from a Texas bay, for Lowcountry South Carolinians it’s an expectation.

But this is about fly fishing, not oystering. I have a theory about redfish, and my theory mostly involves me not catching them. If I appear, they do not, and South Carolina held true. We fished for redfish with John for two days, and Kris caught a very nice red. I think she caught it sight-casting but I’m not completely sure. I got one hit blind-casting where John told me to cast, which hit I diligently missed. John saved the trip by taking me to an oyster reef where there were small speckled trout, spotted sea trout, and I caught a couple of those blind-casting.

I think I’m required by South Carolina law to mention that speckled trout are not trout, but I don’t think anyone would ever confuse the two. If you squint real hard, spotted sea trout resemble trout in a way that a redfish or flounder or even a black bass do not, and it’s easy to see where they got their popular name. They look troutish. I don’t think though that anyone ever thought they lived in rivers and gobbled mayflies.

Speckled trout aren’t really much fun on a fly rod, but they are the great favorites of Texas gear anglers. They’re voracious, run in packs, are excellent on the table, and are reasonably easy to find in legal sizes. And a trophy winter speck is many a Texas gear angler’s life goal.

But the specks I caught were no one’s life goal. They were pretty, and certainly they satisfied my personal goal of a South Carolina fish, but I felt like I’d left something on the table. I wanted a South Carolina redfish. On the other extreme, I had been ecstatic only a few months before with my tiny North Dakota bluegill. It’s all relative, and with my South Carolina speck I’d left things undone.