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Where We’re Not Going: The Keys

I’ve read a lot of trashy novels, real dreck. I’ve read stuff that no one would admit to reading, from Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour to all of the Game of Thrones novels (well before the television production–I didn’t have that excuse), and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed much of it. I think though that if I had to come up with a list of the ten worst novels I’ve ever read, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, set in Key West, would be right at the top of the list. It’s the story of an unlikeable fishing guide, Harry Morgan, who does increasingly unlikeable things and then gets shot and dies, and as far as I was concerned his death came 200 pages late. There are also plenty of unlikeable minor characters doing unlikeable things: I remember disliking particularly the drunken playboy based on John Dos Passos.  As a reader I had no empathy for the Haves, sure, but as a reader I didn’t have any empathy for Hemingway’s Have Nots either. As a matter of fact, in addition to the characters, I didn’t like the place, the plot, or the author. I didn’t even like the boat.

EH 8124P Ernest Hemingway fishing, Key West, 1928.
Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

 

And generally I like Hemingway. I fly fish now in large part because of Big Two-Hearted River and A Farewell to Arms. Generations of young men wanted to go to Spain to drink wine and run with the bulls at Pamplona because of A Farewell to Arms.  Not me.  I wanted to go to Spain to drink wine and catch a trout with a McGinty. Not that anyone’s caught a trout with a McGinty in the last century.

Not much of a McGinty, but you get the general notion: It looks like a bee, for the bee hatch. It’s at least as good of a McGinty as To Have and Have Not is a novel.

Like  1920s Paris and Cuba, Key West is forever tied to Hemingway, but plenty  of other writers  also passed through Key West. It’s a Bona Fide Cultural Mecca: Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Annie Dillard, John Dos Passos, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost . . . Key West was the place where the Haves could go to drink and sleep around and in later times do drugs while the Have Nots could go to Key West to drink and sleep around and in later times do drugs. Piracy and smuggling was available to all, or at least real estate development was available to all.  Long before Vegas, Key West like New Orleans was where in the popular imagination everybody could skirt the edges of propriety. Somehow though I suspect fried conch in Key West isn’t as good as the turtle soup at Commander’s Palace.

The Keys are also one of the places, maybe with the Bahamas one of the two places where modern saltwater fly fishing developed.  It’s where Ted Williams had his Florida house and where bonefish and tarpon and permit became a thing. Thirty-six years after To Have and Have Not was published Thomas McGuane would publish his own fishing guide novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade.  It was a much better novel than To Have or Have Not, if a much lousier movie. Peter Fonda isn’t Humphrey Bogart. Margot Kidder isn’t Lauren Bacall. Tom McGuane isn’t Howard Hawks as a director or William Faulkner as a screenwriter. Tom Skelton, the rather hapless anti-hero of Ninety-Two in the Shade, plans to make his reputation as a guide on permit. And then of course he gets shot and dies. If I were a Key West fishing guide I’d be concerned that death by gunshot was part of the job description.

As for Keys’ guides, it’s a running joke that they excel mostly at rudeness. In the popular imagination they give you the opportunity to buy them breakfast, pack your own lunch, and pack their lunch. They will yell at you for missing casts, and then will expect a decent tip for your troubles. So far my exposure to Florida guides has been 50-50, I had a very good Florida guide in Palm Beach and a very bad guide from Florida in Louisiana, and it may be the stories about Keys’ guides are urban mythology. Island mythology? Still. High-handedness could explain the gunshot wounds.

Maybe I’m all wrong about Key West. I haven’t been there, and the only thing more treacherous than long distance-judgments are the close-up kind, but if you read the current crop of Florida writers, the Carl Hiassens and Dave Barrys and Randy Wayne Whites, they ramble through the Keys in the midst of amusing decadence and unamusing debauchery.  Maybe I’m just old, but it doesn’t sound like that much fun to me. Plus there’s no baseball. I think I’ll save the Keys for the next life.

Ok, maybe it sounds like some fun.

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Where We’re Not Going: The Everglades

I first read Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’s 1947 River of Grass when I thought I wanted to canoe the Everglades. I thought it was a travel guide, and I’m not certain I finished it. I may have only carried it around for a while. I’ve started it again, and it’s a far better book than I remembered. Shows what a little time will do.

This may be obvious to everybody else, but it wasn’t obvious to me: The Everglades system is not coterminous with the Everglades National Park, and the system was not preserved by designation of the Park.  The Park is about one quarter of the area originally covered by the Everglades. Not small change, but the Park is only the southern part of the original area. It’s separated from its historic northern water sources by building a dike around Lake Okeechobee, building barriers like the Tamiami Trail, changing the direction of water discharges from the Lake, and draining 700,000 acres  for agriculture in the Everglades Agricultural Area.

Before that stuff happened,  sheet flow flowed from Lake Okeechobee down to the Bay of Florida, with normal flows of as little as 100 feet per day. Douglas described the system as a shallow river, often only inches deep, that covered most of South Florida. The river stretched from near present day Orlando south to the Keys where the land ran out.

Map of the Everglades by US War Department, 1856

In the decades after 1920 the flow stopped. After deadly floods in the 1930s, Lake Okeechobee was surrounded by the Herbert Hoover Dike for flood control.  Areas of the Everglades were isolated, drained for agriculture and urban development, urbanized at its boundaries, and managed for different purposes. Today’s arguments aren’t really about restoration to original conditions, but the extent to which regionalization can be reversed and the freshwater sheet flow out of Lake Okeechobee restored to its original southerly meander.

The Park now gets most of its water from the 60 inches of average annual rainfall in Southern Florida, and it doesn’t feed much freshwater into Florida Bay.  Because there isn’t freshwater flowing in, the Bay is hyper-saline. It’s lost thousands of acres of sea grass and is periodically strangled by algae. Not just any old algae, either. You can’t talk about Florida algae without saying toxic algae. It’s gotta be toxic.

And up top the Okeechobee isn’t the cleanest of lakes. Except for industry, it receives pollutants from the same list of sources as The Chesapeake: Agriculture and urban development.  Phosphorous and nitrogen, the stuff of fertilizers for yards and crops, seem to be the biggest problem. Instead of flowing south to Florida Bay, the Lake overflow is now shunted east to the Atlantic estuaries by the St. Lucie Canal and west by the Caloosahatchee River.

The phosphorous-laden freshwater flows hit the saltwater systems on the Atlantic side around Stuart and in the south central bays on the Gulf side. The whole mess plays havoc with fish and wildlife in a big swatch of Southern Florida. The Everglades is also the recharge source for the Biscayne Aquifer, the principal water supply for South Florida, Miami and whatnot. There are 8 million people who depend on drinking water ultimately sourced from the Everglades, plus a lot of golf courses. Where’s the water for putting greens going to come from?

The bad guy in all of this is Big Sugar.  Florida produces about half the nation’s sugar through three refiners. At its worst, Big Sugar’s historic labor practices made the West Virginia coal industry look benevolent.  And the two, coal and sugar,  ran neck and neck for environmental sensitivity: lop off a mountain top here, drain a wetlands there.  Federal sugar subsidies are a favorite target of fiscal conservatives, who argue that artificial support of American sugar prices kills American jobs.  Maybe anymore it doesn’t deserve to be the active bad guy it used to be: Creation of the Everglades Agricultural Area is done, no additional land will be added, and it’s half-life is short because of the subsidence of the soil in the EAA.

But unfairly or no Big Sugar remains the Villain in the eyes of restoration proponents. In South Florida, a fishing guides’ environmental group, Bullsugar, takes its name from the alliteration of sugar and, well, shit. Orvis is a sponsor. Patagonia is a sponsor.  Hell, Raymond James is a sponsor.  Raymond James. There are lots of other similar groups too: The Everglades Foundation, the Everglades Trust, Captains for Clean Water . . . The Everglades Coalition counts over 50 member organizations. Meanwhile in 2016 the New York Times reported that the Miami Herald had reported that over the past 22 years the sugar industry contributed $57 million to Florida elections.  Sweet.

It’s probably no wonder that the proponents think that the governmental group with the most direct control over the Everglades water, the South Florida Water Management District, isn’t an ally. Its board is appointed by a Governor who is not seen as an ally. $57 million.

Meantime proponents believe that establishment of a storage and treatment reservoir in the Everglades Agricultural Area is the key to Everglades restoration. The reservoir would use about 15 percent of the EAA area. It would release water South, surely whistling Dixie, down through the supposedly cleansing and detoxifying Glades to the southward bay. Neither east nor west but only south.

Apparently the money is there: as a result of federal lawsuits Florida has pledged expenditures for restoration. Maybe the plan is there.  Expenditures are being made and the Tamiami Trail is being raised. Apparently the big hold-up to return of substantial southward flow is Big Sugar’s willingness to sell the land for the Okeechobee drainage reservoir. 26,800 acres were purchased by the state in 2010. The proponents want 46,800 more acres. Sugar backed out once. It reached agreement and then . . . hesitated. And of course the concern is that on the horizon Big Sugar sees the possibility of more lucrative residential development, and maybe there’s a lack of sufficient interest at the state level to force the issue.

So’s anyway we’re heading to Florida, but we’re not going to the Everglades.

http://www.evergladestrust.org/toxic_algae, From the Everglades Trust, Algae Bloom in Stuart, Florida

 

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Florideuce

We’re going back to Florida. Our trip in February wasn’t really planned. The Astros won the World Series, Kris bought spring training tickets because she wanted to go, and we threw in a half day fishing.  It was pretty spur of the moment.

This isn’t spur of the moment. Most summers we take a baseball trip  somewhere, somewhere we otherwise wouldn’t go.  Last summer it was Baltimore. The summer before was Kansas City.  This summer it’s Tampa/St. Pete. Friends tell me that Tampa has great cigar stores and the only true Cuban sandwich, but even with those accomplishments without baseball it’s unlikely I’d go there. it’s not an obvious place for a random trip from Houston. But late June is apparently the heart of the Tampa tarpon season, the Astros are playing the Rays, and I really want to catch a tarpon.

Kris has caught a tarpon, and I have a great photo of that holy shit moment where she realizes that she’s hooked something different.  And that tarpon was small. I, on the other hand, ain’t.  I’ve had them follow my fly but that’s it. I ain’t.

Ted Williams caught more than 1000 tarpon. I want one. Just one.

C’mon St. Ted. You didn’t get me a hit in little league. You owe me.

*  *  *

Meantimes Saturday we drove to Elmendorf, Texas, 196 miles from Houston, to pick up our boat. We’d had some work done, and most important New Water had added a casting platform on the bow.  That’s how us nautical types talk.  On the bow.

We then trailered the boat 246 miles back to Galveston, where the hardest part of the day, getting the boat down the ramp and off the trailer, was waiting for us.  Success! We docked the boat, parked the trailer,  and drove the 50 miles back to Houston. That’s nearly 500 miles in the day, plus unloading the boat, plus that whole thing in the McDonald’s parking lot. I got back to Houston and went to bed.

Sunday we took the boat out for the first time since its return, and after more than a year one of us finally caught a redfish off our boat.  It was a dinky, tiny redfish but there you are. It was a redfish. It even had room for multiple spots.

Kris also caught a flounder.  If she’d only caught a Speck we’d have had a slam.

 

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Packing List: Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia

For a week long road trip that included a college graduation, some family, some friends, and five days fishing, we took some clothes–way too many clothes. For fishing, I also took:

  • Raingear.  Rain pants and a rain jacket. You don’t need rain pants when you’re fishing in waders, but we weren’t in waders on The Chesapeake. I bought Andy a new pair, and discovered my pair had a ripped seat.  It’s probably good I wasn’t sitting down. Kris couldn’t find her rain pants. It rained and it was cold and there was nothing good about that.
  • Waders, boots, wading staffs.  Kris always preferred an old pair of Orvis canvass boots from 20-odd years ago, but they were constantly delaminating and I suggested she buy a new pair for the trip. Not that we trout fished in Maryland, but because of disease felt is no longer allowed there, nor in Alaska, Missouri, Nebraska, Rhode Island, and South Dakota. For the two days on boats I had a new pair of Keen sandals because the old pair were constantly delaminating.  Maybe it’s us.
  • Rods.  More than we needed. Two 9’ 5 weights for trout, two 9’  6 weights for bass, and a 10’ 4 weight because after suffering rod fever in February I didn’t suffer long.  We used the 6 weights for the Shenandoah, and the smaller rods for West Virginia.  We used the guide’s 9 weights for the Chesapeake—I don’t own a 9 weight and will have to contemplate that. We also borrowed the guide’s short 8’  3 weights for the tiny bookies—I don’t own any 3 weights and will have to contemplate that. Fly fishing is a very contemplative sport.
  • Reels.  Some reels. Floating lines.  The guide on the Shenandoah River said he’d toss in a sink tip, but I don’t know if he did and we wouldn’t have used it. We used the guide’s rods on the Chesapeake because I didn’t own heavy sinking lines.  I started to buy them, but wasn’t sure what I needed.  Now I know. I’ll have to contemplate that.
  • Flies. I took no saltwater flies.  I thought about it, mostly because I was curious about whether any of my redfish flies would work, but the flies we used in saltwater were much longer and heavier than anything I own.  They were big 6” flies with big lead eyes. For the Shenandoah, the guide brought Shenk’s white streamers on which we caught fish, and some olives that I never fished.  I had tied a bunch of dragon tails before we left, mostly because I was getting skunked at home on larger black bass. On the Shenandoah I caught some fish, but I also got lots of slappy short takes. The flies were just too long.  I’ve ordered some mini-dragon tails hoping they’re shorter, and long size 4 hooks, but suspect they may just be the same tail as the regular with 1-1/2” cut off the fat end.  I also took all my trout flies–and I have a lot–but mostly we fished the guide’s flies.  I think all of the rainbows and the one brown I caught were on various colors of squirmy worms, and two of the bookies on big stimulaters and the third on a bead-head pheasant tail nymph.
  • Leaders. Some nylon tippet.  Some Fluorocarbon tippet. I never used the Flourocarbon.  For the stripers we used a four foot piece of straight 20 pound.  It fit nicely around my neck.  For the smallmouth we used 9’ 2X.  Approximately 9’ anyway,  I’d tied in bits and pieces of stuff, and I sort of guess at lengths.  For the trout, 9’ 5X with foam strike indicators for the squirmy worms.  The morning I fished on my own I switched to some Orvis strike putty that had been floating around my vest for 15 or 20 years. It worked fine. It always works fine. I don’t know why I ever use anything else.
  • Sunglasses. Amber and low light polarized Smiths.  Everyone loves low light sunglasses.  I love low light  sunglasses. I lost mine in West Virginia that time I fell down in the pond.
  • Fishing vest.  Complete with all the usual junk that accumulates in fishing vests.  Some split shot (which I used), some nippers, hemostats, various kinds of indicators, and nets.  West Virginia apparently prohibits cloth nets on catch and release water. I don’t get the sense that there’s lots of enforcement.
  • Sling pack. I meant to pack a waterproof sling pack for the boats but forgot it.  I didn’t need it.
  • Sunscreen. I meant to pack a buff and sun gloves but they were in the sling pack. I need lots of sunscreen.
  • A water proof Nikon and a GoPro.  I bought a Nikon CoolPix waterproof camera that I wore around my neck while fishing.  It was easier than the GoPro and took better pictures, kept me from draining my phone battery, and kept my phone out of the river.  I loved it, but you can’t see the view screen in high sun. Kris took her birding camera and lenses but never used it.
  • My Corpus Christi Hooks baseball cap, which T.C. Campbell admired. It’s a good looking cap, and because it’s fitted I can wear the GoPro on the back.

For general life I took my travel guitar (I’m re-memorizing Tárrega’s Capricho árabe so I can forget it again).  On the plane I read The Chesapeake in Focus by Tom Pelton, who worked for the Baltimore Sun and hosts The Environment in Focus for NPR. We listened to a lot of Tom Rosenbauer’s Orvis podcasts when we were driving. At Harper’s Ferry I bought a copy of Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign by Jonathan A. Noyalas and read that.

When we were driving around we listened to the playlists on my phone:

Maryland

Songs about Baltimore are mostly sad and gritty. There’s just something about Baltimore that makes it perfect for a dismal song.

  • Raining in Baltimore, Counting Crows
  • Baltimore,  Lyle Lovett
  • Baltimore,  with versions by Nina Simone and Randy Newman
  • Streets of Baltimore, with versions by Bobby Bare and Gram Parsons.
  • Baltimore Oriole, with versions Hoagy Charmichael and George Harrison. George Harrison?
  • Hungry Heart, Bruce Springsteen
  • Feets Don’t Fail Me Now, Little Feat
  • The Sad Death of Hattie McDaniel, Bob Dylan
  • The Lady Came from Baltimore, Tim Hardin
  • Tryin’ to Get to Heaven, Lucinda Williams

Plus, lots by Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, Frank Zappa, and Phillip Glass. I listened to Glass’s Low Synphony three times on the flight. It sounded just like the Chesapeake should sound.  I tried to listen to it in the car in Maryland and Kris made me move on. She doesn’t like Glass.

All of us would be better listening more to Billie Holiday.

Virginia

  • Alexandria, Virginia, Bill Jennings
  • The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Band.  I never thought of this song as tied to a particular place other than the Generic South, but it mentions Virginia and Tennessee.
  • Virginia Girl, Deer Tick.
  • Carry Me Back to Virginia,  Old Crow Medicine Show.  Oddly, I couldn’t find a copy of Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny, which was retired as the Virginia state song because of racial content.  There are lots of versions though, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, and Louis Armstrong.
  • Virginia Moon,  Foo Fighters.
  • East Virginia Blues, by Robert Earl Keen. There’s the classic version by Ralph Stanley, so I had them both.
  • Shenandoah, by Bill Frisell.  Frisell is a jazz guitarist, and this for many years has been a favorite recording.  Shenandoah is apparently the interim state song of Virginia.  It’s apparently not the official state song because the only state it mentions is Missouri.
  • Sweet Virginia,  The Rolling Stones.  I’m Not a Stones fan much. Typical Stones. Kinda self-absorbed.
  • Yorktown, from Hamilton.  Not much Virginia, but I saw Hamilton last week, and Kris liked it.
  • James River  by Checker and  James River by Jan Smith.  Different songs I think.  Haven’t noticed them enough to decide.

Plus Some Old Crow Medicine Show, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ralph Stanley.  I ended up humming Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s Cheek to Cheek all through Virginia and West Virginia. And Jason Mraz.  Not much good to be said about Jason Mraz, but no harm either.

West Virginia

  • My Home Among the Hills, The Carter Family
  • Grandma’s Hands, Willie Nelson
  • Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn.  OK, technically that’s Kentucky, but close enough
  • Country Roads, Take Me Home, John Denver.  I had to buy two versions of this.  The first I downloaded had been remastered with strings. It was awful. I have immensely fond memories of this song from driving out to feed the horse when I was 14.
  • West Virginia My Home, with versions by Hazel Dickens and The Hillbilly Gypsies.
  • Green Rolling Hills, Emmylou Harris
  • Need You, Tim McGraw
  • Linda Lou, Bill Monroe
  • I Wanna Go Back to West Virginia, Spike Jones
  • West Virginia Wildflower, Stacy Grubb
  • A Country Boy Can Survive, Hank Williams Jr. I’m not a fan.

Plus some Kathy Mattea.  I also put Copland’s Appalachian Spring and O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz on the list. They seem to fit, even though O’Connor is from Seattle and Copeland from Brooklyn.  We were listening to Appalachian Spring crossing from Virginia to West Virginia, and expected every mountain turn to open into a vista.  Mostly they didn’t, but it sure kept me awake.