Category: Books

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Love Story

Looking for Oregon books, I ran across David James Duncan’s The River Why. It’s an improbable love story set against the backdrop of an improbable fly-fishing story, or maybe an improbable  fly-fishing story set against the backdrop of an improbable love story, or a long didactic philosophical and spiritual journey. Or all of the above.

The novel’s hero, Augustine Orviston (get it? get it?), is described at birth as caught from the womb of Ma Orviston. He is as much trout as boy, a bait- and fly-fishing prodigy, an idiot savant, balanced between his parents, Henning Hale-Orviston (H2O) and Carolina Carper (the above-mentioned Ma). H2O is a British accented, tweed-wearing, pipe smoking fly fisherman and fly-fishing writer, author of the Summa Anglia, while Ma is a Camel-smoking blue-jeaned eastern Oregon cowgirl defiling the holy water of the Deschutes with a Sears Roebuck bait caster. Ma and H2O are forever joined and (apparently) forever in conflict.  Ma kills fish. ‘Nuff said.

While fishing Gus (Gus is short for Augustine) finds his love, a water nymph who disrobes to swim steelhead down in the river. They romance over fish and fly rods and fishing. She sends Gus on his final quest with three pound tippet by hooking Gus’s spirit animal, an egg-laden hen Chinook moving upriver to spawn and die, and then handing the rod to Gus.  For the next night and day, day and night, Gus moves upriver with the fish by holding it on the too-light leader with a soliloquy on the power of love.

It ain’t no brief soliloquy either. 

Not much in the novel is brief.  It’s a long, rambling narration by Gus, and sometimes I wished Duncan would just skip a few of the sideshows and get on with things. It was rejected by major publishers because it needed more editing. They were right, and it shares it’s anti-structure of disconnected misadventure (and an other-worldly misfit hero) with A Confederacy of Dunces, which was also rejected by major publishers and finally published by LSU two years before in 1980.  The River Why was published by the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club? Okey-dokey. At least Gus, unlike Ignatius J. Reilly, is likable, if not as amusing. The River Why finally ends gratuitously with a long baffling tag about the Vietnam draft, which even in 1982 was a bit dated.

All that said, it’s a fun book, which I think is what Duncan wanted. One (that’s me) just wishes he wasn’t quite so entranced with his own story. There’s a nice movie version of the novel, though Duncan spent three years suing to get his name taken off the credits. I liked the movie too, but Duncan, for all his Oregonian secularism, seems to have a Puritanical streak.

When I recently wrote about another great fly fishing romance, Shelley and Mark, I got an email from Shelley setting some things I got wrong. The photo, she says, was not taken in Houston but Iceland.

Those are not bluebonnets behind him—they are Lupine which are kind of like giant bluebonnets. When we landed in Iceland, they carpeted the fields leading from the airport.  We thought it was such a nice welcome for Texans.

Icelanders, being descendants of taciturn Norwegian Viking raiders, aren’t the first people who come to mind for their thoughtful friendliness, but there you are. They spread out the lupine.

More important, Shelley explained to me that Kris and I, however large my ego, weren’t responsible for her and Mark’s romance. I kind of suspected that, since we didn’t find out about it until after it was pretty far along and then only by accident, but I’ll never admit it to Shelley.

I had one of those newspaper articles about Mark on my nightstand (plans for flycasting instruction) before I met him. There were lots of other common threads as it turned out—his sister and my brother were on double dates in college, she was the sweetheart of his fraternity; Mark was at a party thrown by my childhood friend, Nancy, that I also attended (there are disputes about whether we actually met there—I say “no”); my friend Ellis was standing in the living room of Mark’s best friend, Herman, the night Mark introduced me to all of his music friends.  I could go on and on.

Shelley said she had the newspaper article on her nightstand so that she could track Mark down for casting lessons.  Between you and me I think she was already learning to sight cast. Or maybe the clipping got there because Mark was practicing his blind casting.  Shelley also said that early on she thought that Mark surely could talk a lot. I guess just like Gus Orviston, literary or real, talking is a necessary talent of anglers.

Shelley also pointed out one last thing I got wrong:

Houston is really a very small city when it comes to lawyers and flyfishermen. And some other things.

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The Ten Best Novels About New Orleans!!!!

My fish-catching skills have been a bit off.  I’ve been to five states and I’ve caught fish in three, which means I’m batting .600: Great for baseball, not so much for fishing.  On the other hand my state visiting skills are coming right along.  I’ve definitely improved my reading.  Preparing for a state I read new stuff and re-read very good stuff I sometimes don’t remember I’ve read before. And I have an excuse to read trash too. Reading in anticipation of a visit may be the best way to read.

The internet helps, and I’ve taken to searching for books on lists like Ten Best Books about Louisiana!, and 100 Books You Need to Read About the South! Some of the lists are good. I especially like this one.  Some of the lists are  peculiar.  They start well enough with The Awakening and Confederacy of Dunces, plus a Dave Robicheaux novel, but then veer off track into bodice rippers. There are a lot of lurid covers for Louisiana novels.

And Interview with the Vampire is on every list. I just don’t get it.

I hadn’t read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). The novel is set among well-to-do Creoles, with the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, as the interloper from the old Kentucky bluegrass country. She’s beautiful,  throws the best dinner parties, and every man in New Orleans worships at her feet, but domestic duty keeps Edna from full self-realization so she drowns herself. It’s a pretty short novel.

In some ways it’s a bit like Madame Bovary (eats rat poison) and Anna Karenina (throws herself under a train), but with a big difference: both Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina follow their inclinations, are abandoned by their lovers, and off themselves out of shame and despair. While Edna follows some inclinations and finally  despairs, the two aren’t particularly connected and she’s not ashamed. She just refuses to put up with her lot. Readers often see The Awakening as feminist, and maybe oppression of a sort is the source of Edna’s dissatisfaction, but it could also be because of her unsatisfied passion for Robert, or maybe she’s just nuts.  There’s some ambiguity, and nuts is certainly possible. It’s not uncommon after all for folk to live lives of quiet desperation without drowning themselves.

If you’re looking for novels to label as feminist The Awakening might strike your fancy, but I’m not convinced it would be my first choice.  There are too many problems with Edna’s suicide.  Does a woman fail in some important way because she  abandons her children? Yes, of course, and the same is true for a man. That men do so more often is no excuse. Edna is troubling because in part she is wrong, and because of the novel’s late 19th century Naturalism any certain answer about Edna is unsatisfactory. The author’s neutrality makes the book both better and more difficult, but I suspect that Ms. Chopin would be surprised by the notion that Edna’s suicide is explained by some broader context.

I hadn’t read Robert Penn Warren’s  All the King’s Men (1947) either, and it seems to have fallen off of a lot of the lists. Strictly speaking, it’s as much about Louisiana generally as New Orleans. It’s set against the backdrop of Huey P. Long, Governor Willie Stark in the novel, but it’s really about Stark’s right-hand-man, Jack Burden, a Louisiana aristocrat who  has decamped from his birthright to work for the dark side. Maybe it’s fallen off the lists because within the first few pages you get the N-word from the protagonist, but its notions are what they are, and are certainly true for 1930s Louisiana.  Maybe it’s fallen off the lists because it’s a big rambling book with a few too many Luke-I-Am-Your-Father moments: it depends on surprises, so it’s  uneven and contrived from time to time.

It’s good though, and some critics declare it as our best political novel, which seems a bit like declaring a reliever our best left-handed set-up man. I suppose it’s because they feel a need to justify their fondness for it.

Louisiana divides culturally into Creole New Orleans,  the wealthy planters along the Mississippi, the Baptist Appalachian north, and the Catholic Cajun coastline.  Overlay that with African Americans who themselves are divided among downtown and uptown: Creole mixed race descendants of free people of color and the descendants of rural slaves. Nobody ever played those divisions better than Huey P. Long, and that manipulation of the herd, herds rather, for political ends is what Willie Stark is all about. And Willie Stark’s ends, unlike say Huey P. Long’s ends, are mostly good (even if the means are pretty rough and tumble). Of course both Long and Stark ultimately come to a violent end. Luke-I-Am-Your-Father.

But politics aside, Jack Burden, cynical and disengaged, is a peculiarly modern hero not much different than  the hero of The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling, cynical and disengaged, a peculiarly modern hero not much different than  Jack Burden. In broad strokes their stories are the same, Bolling is also an aristocrat (a Bolling no less), their plots are the same, they’re the same. Bolling goes to Chicago on his journey of discovery, not to California like Burden, and unlike Burden the girl goes with him. Pretty much the same girl though.

Oddly, I’d read The Moveigoer (1961) and didn’t remember a thing about it except for one line: “‘Jean-Paul ate some lungs.’” It was Bolling’s much younger half-sister’s line while the kids were eating crabs on a sawbuck picnic table at a fishing camp. I loved that line, and for years after I read it I would tell my kids about it every time we ate crabs because it is a very very funny line for anyone who ever cracked open crabs. I thought I’d read it in a James Lee Burke novel.

When I re-read The Moviegoer I read an appreciation of the novel in The Atlantic by Andrew Santella, in which he admitted to an unhealthy youthful obsession with Binx’s droll disconnected sophistication, which Santella now sees as pretty messed up. Truth is though that Binx never does anything particularly bad, and his movie-going is a metaphor for how he observes his own life. He’s not that disengaged. When it comes time for Binx to be the hero of his movie, if only in a fairly ordinary way, he steps up.

“I did my best for you, son. I gave you all I had.  More than anything I wanted to pass on to you the one heritage of the men of our family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women–the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life.”

It is Bolling’s Aunt Emily haranguing him for what she believes is his great failure, but that’s also a pretty good description of Binx Bolling. When it is time for him to prove his lightly worn nobility, he does it. He calls his secretary’s roommate, sure, and you think with horror that he’s going to blow it, but he calls her not about sex but about connection. He is a gentle man. He tells her he’d like to come over Saturday and bring his fiancé. Binx is all right. Binx will be all right.

Ignatius J. Reilly comes into the world with such a strange provenance. John Kennedy Toole had committed suicide after Confederacy of Dunces (1981) was rejected by publishers. Toole’s mother (and you can’t help but wonder at her connection to Ignatius’s mother, Irene), drops the manuscript off with Walker Percy, who was teaching writing at Tulane. Percy gets the novel published by LSU. It posthumously wins the Pulitzer Prize.

I read it first when it was all the rage back in the early 80s, and second ten years back on a trip to New Orleans. It’s a comic novel that holds up well, is often compared to Don Quixote, and since I’m a careless and inattentive reader I’ve found things new in it every time I’ve read it.  It can be ponderous,  heavy-handed, and sophomoric, but it can also be great fun. Part of the fun now is realizing how the world has changed in my lifetime. Where are these people’s cell phones? There’s a bakery in a department store? There’s a department store? There’s a pants factory in New Orleans? Lan Lee’s pornographic postcards seem so mild, and Burma Jones’ black dialect verges on the racially insensitive.  Ooo-wee.

But still, if you can’t imagine the interior of the Night of Joy bar you haven’t been to the French Quarter, and the plot, fantastic and mundane all at once, seems like a flimsy but funny excuse for the people and the places. No novel was ever tied so closely to a city, so that Ignatius’s one earlier attempt to leave New Orleans, an 80-mile bus trip, becomes Dante’s journey: “The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. . . .”

And Ignatius. The book’s epigram is from Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Is Ignatius a genius? He’s more likely a fool, but then again maybe he’s a madly misdirected genius. He’s certainly not like the rest of us. He also certainly deserves more trouble than he gets–except I feel a bit bad when he’s threatened with the mental ward at Charity. But then again . . . .

What a weird, funny novel, and whatever its unevenness no one can doubt Toole’s appreciation of theology and geometry.

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Fifty Shades of Fish

I’m not a horrible fly fisherman, I’m really not. My casts could be better, sure, my hook sets may not be quite the thing, and when I actually hook a fish I may not land it, but I’m not always incompetent. Some days the sun shines. Natheless I’m skunked again in Margeritaville. I’m worn out with Florida, and last weekend I failed to catch any fish.

It wasn’t my fault exactly, and it certainly wasn’t Captain Court Douthit’s (pronounce Dow-thit’s) fault. Court clearly loves Florida and the fish and the sport and he’s investing a big part of his life in it. That’s why people like me need guides: I want to learn something, I need a boat, I don’t know the water or the fish . . . That’s why you pay good guides: they make the investment to know what you don’t and have the stuff that you need that you don’t have. Our first day out what Court had was a plan, and given the weather it was a good plan, but fishing is a sadomasochistic sport, and fly fishing even more so. Some days one’s not the sado. This weekend we weren’t the sado.

We fished the Gulf side out of Dunedin (pronounced Done Eatin’, which in Gaelic means cute shops), not in Tampa Bay. Dunedin is protected by narrow barrier islands, and the other side of the barrier islands, what Court called the beach side, was where the tarpon usually cruised. We weren’t going out there though. We couldn’t have seen whales cruising and the waves were downright scary. Instead we looked for tarpon on the leeward side of the islands. All we found were crusty old guys in boats (“That’s Old Bag of Rocks. He had his driver’s license taken away because he’s blind. He carries a bag of rocks to chunk at jet skiers.”)

The weather was all wrong. For all I know there’s never any sunshine in Tampa, it’s always overcast except when it storms, and the wind always blows hard. Sunshine and calm waters in Tampa may be like hatches: a practical joke to play on unsuspecting Texans. The night before we’d gone to bed during lashings o’ rain and lightning. We figured the next morning on the water it could get bad. It got bad. Before it got really bad Court polled us across a flat looking for snook. I got some casts which landed somewhere near a snook, so of course it turned and moseyed off in the other direction. Mostly we saw a lot of mullet stacked up on the sand.

It never rained but I still got soaked. Coming back through the slop to the marina the waves were fast and high, and we had buckets of saltwater spray us with each wave. It wasn’t cold, and as spa treatments go it was fine. It would have been better though if Court had fixed us a nice cup of herbal tea to go with the salt rub.

It was obvious Captain Court felt bad, but there was no reason for it. He’d taken a risk to get us out on the water and we appreciated it. He said the forecast was the same the next day (pronounced it’s going to be crap again tomorrow and there’s no reason to try the same thing), but that if it wasn’t lightning we should try something else the next night.

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Dunedin is a pretty little town with a pretty little marina that looks like somebody set Georgetown down on the Florida coast. It was charming. At the little marina diner we ate fresh tuna and avocado carpaccio with ginger and lime, called in South Florida tuna poke. Most marina diners would have had grilled cheese or burgers with soggy fries, and the raw fresh tuna was a big improvement. So were the fresh grouper tacos. They also had local beers, and after lunch I took a nap in the car while Kris checked out the shops. Success.

Our day wasn’t done, and except for the diner and the nap it didn’t get better.  Not only did we get skunked and drenched, the Astros lost to the Rays. The Rays are a fine young team, and the Astros’ offense was dead, their defense was sloppy, and Gerrit Cole pitched subpar.  The stadium also lived down to its reputation. The crowd (pronounced the stadium was mostly empty) was friendly and the food and beer was surprisingly good. There were a lot of Astros fans, and also some Rays fans, but it was sparsely populated. I found a Tampa friend from my favorite Astros fan site just by looking. He was pretty much sitting next to us. I had prime seats that I’d bought as soon as tickets went on sale. He’d bought his tickets that morning. Not much demand.

Saturday morning there was lightning and rain. We went to the St. Petersburg fine arts museum, which was small but nice enough and which had some fine Asian pieces, and the St. Petersburg history museum which houses the world’s largest collection of autographed baseballs. By game time the weather had cleared enough to fish the underwater dock lights for snook and baby tarpon, 20 to 40 pounds. We’d have some visibility to spot fish against the underwater lights. Kris was all for it, and I’m all for Kris.

* * *

Kris asked me where we were going to eat in Tampa, and I told her Hooters. Actually, I told her that there was a famous national restaurant chain founded in Tampa and that we should go there. She asked which one and I said I can’t remember the name.

“What’s it famous for?”

“Breasts.”

“Chicken?” I hadn’t considered chicken.

“No, lady breasts.”

“Twin Peaks?” No. “Hooters?” That was the one. “I guess it’s because of all the owls in Tampa,” she said.

I know Hooters was founded in Tampa because six years ago my friend Patrick was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Patrick has his peculiarities.

The first day he left the convention for food, but every civic volunteer suggested Hooters. It was founded in Tampa. What good Republican wouldn’t want to go to Hooters? Patrick wouldn’t want to go to Hooters. After the third or fifteenth Hooters suggestion someone suggested a Thai restaurant.

Now I’m stealing Patrick’s story, and it is one of the best stories ever. Ever. Patrick, if for some odd reason you ever see this forgive me, but I can’t resist. It’s the best story ever.

When Patrick got back to Austin from Tampa he called me. “You won’t believe who I met in Tampa! Mark Naimus!” “Who?” “Mark Naimus!” “Who is Mark Naimus?” “What are you talking about! You know Martin Amis!”

Each Texas delegate had a straw Stetson, blue jeans, and a Lone Star Flag pearl-snap shirt. It was a handsome ensemble. Then-governor Rick Perry autographed Patrick’s Stetson on the font brim, and future-governor Greg Abbott autographed it on the back.  When he went into the Thai restaurant in full regalia Patrick spotted Martin Amis at the bar. Now think about that for a second: it wasn’t somebody you or I would recognize. It wasn’t John Wayne or Elvis Presley or Paul McCartney. It wasn’t even Stephen King. It was Martin Amis. Patrick, who’d just finished Lionel Asbo, recognized Amis and introduced himself.

Amis was covering the convention for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Patrick told Amis that he’d just read Lionel Asbo, and then they talked about Laurent Binet’s HHhH, a French novel that had won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman and which they both admired. It’s a very good novel which of course I hadn’t heard of. Martin Amis autographed the crown of Patrick’s hat, and I’m pretty certain it is now the only cowboy hat anywhere autographed by Rick Perry, Greg Abbott, and Martin Amis.

The next day Patrick was on the floor of the convention and a runner tracked him down. Mr. Amis was making a film of the convention for the Daily Beast. Mr. Amis was wondering if Patrick and other members of the Texas delegation would agree to an interview. Mr. Amis would come to their motel to film the interview.

So when Patrick called me bubbling about meeting Martin Amis I said Patrick, you know what’s going to happen. Martin Amis, sardonic, liberal, witty, is going to shred you. No no Patrick insisted. We talked by the pool about books for an hour!

“It was great!’ Ok, Patrick may not have said it was great, but you could tell he surely thought so.

So the video was posted by the Daily Beast, and sure enough, Martin Amis shredded the Republican Party and the convention and in the middle of the film, wearing his Stetson, is Patrick, and Amis treats a delegate to the Republican National Convention with the greatest delicacy, the greatest kindness. And who wouldn’t?

And of course there’s that hat.

* * *

The Astros lost Saturday’s game as well, with some bad luck and some sub-par pitching by Justin Verlander and more dead bats. At 9 that night we met Court in a St. Petersburg neighborhood park to fish the boat slips for snook and baby tarpon. We fished until 4 the next morning.

If you don’t fish saltwater you may not know about fish lights. Bait is attracted to light. Game fish are attracted to bait.  Any light works, but spooky underwater green lights work best of all. I figure that the bait thinks it’s natural plankton luminescence, and being planktivorish it shows up to gorge. It’s not a very good theory, and as far as I know planktivorish isn’t a word, but it’s something. Bait could just be dumb. Or maybe it just likes green.

Did we see fish? You betcha. Looking into those weird nighttime pools of green we saw snook and baby tarpon enough to make any sight fisher happy. Over the seven hours we fished, moving from dock to dock, I must have made 300 casts to fish, at least some of which were in the vicinity of fish. Kris must have made another 100 casts–She didn’t want to come back to Florida so she let me cast more than was my due. Court put us on fish and we tried every fly, small light, small dark, large light, large dark, gurglers, purple things that looked like Cookie Monster, green things, tan things, and back to small white, small dark  . . . Nothing worked until . . . Skip that. Nothing worked.

I had three hits, three, all of which I pulled out of the fish’s mouth with a trout set–don’t tell Captain Court, but I swear I have an excuse.  Nine o’clock is my bedtime. It’s not when I start fishing.

By the next morning we were punch drunk and exhausted and had caught nada, but we’d seen baby tarpon roll by the dozens, flashing up through the green glow and hitting the surface like big salmon taking a fly. Just not my fly. At least we didn’t get a sunburn. Not that the sun ever shines in Tampa.

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When you’ve got two days in a strange place to catch fish there are no guarantees that either the fish or the weather will cooperate, and there are never any guarantees fishing for saltwater fish. If we’d had longer the weather would have cooperated and sooner or later we would have landed a fish, but we ran out of sooner with no later at all. I would fish with Captain Court again in a heart beat. I just hope next time its a bit luckier day. Or a bit luckier night.

* * *

We didn’t eat at Hooters. Mostly we ate at the ballpark except for the marina diner and the first night at Columbia in Ybor City with Kris’s 34-year-ago maid-of-honor and her husband.  I bought some cigars in a random cigar roller’s shop.  I didn’t miss Hooters, and no one suggested Thai.  We didn’t see Martin Amis.

 

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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.