Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin packing list

Gear

We fished five weights mostly, 9 foot with floating lines and 4x leaders. The Driftless streams would have been perfect for bamboo rods, but I’m done with rod buying I think.

At least until I buy another rod.

Reading

I re-read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead to get ready for Iowa. In our plane trip to Rhode Island, I kept reading excerpts to Kris out loud, because so much of it deserves pondering. I hope the people around us didn’t mind.

I re-read Shoeless Joe (and of course re-watched Field of Dreams). There is a surprising amount of good writing tied to Iowa, mostly because of the University of Iowa creative writers workshop. There’s Jane Smiley, W. P. Kinsella, Flannery O’Connor, W.D. Snodgrass, Wallace Stegner, T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros . . . Frankly, I don’t see how anyone ever wrote a word without going to Iowa first.

I had such success with cooking in New Mexico, I bought a copy of The Flavor of Wisconsin by Harva Hachter and Terese Allen with the plan to try some of the recipes in our Air BnB. I didn’t. It’s a wonderful book, the kind of historic/cultural study of food culture that every state deserves, with a general survey of the food history of the state and then a lot of recipes. The problem is that Wisconsin food is kinda, I don’t know, unappealing in the abstract. Maybe I’ll go back and make that recipe for beef and kidney pie. I’m going to go to my grave though without having eaten the potato and turnip whip.

I should have made a tater tot hot dish.

Food

I’ve written about the Driftless Cafe already, and about trying to find Frito pie in Iowa. There are, I’m sure many good things to say about Midwestern food (and face it, Midwestern food is what we’re talking about here), but the only good thing I can say about those breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches in Iowa is that if you covered them with cream gravy and left out the bread, they’d be a reasonable substitute for chicken fried steak.

You can find 20-year old cheddar in Wisconsin, for obscene amounts of money. They take their cheese seriously.

What We Didn’t Catch

Muskie. Notwithstanding how much I liked the Driftless, I still regret not catching muskie in Wisconsin.

Where We Didn’t Go

We talked about driving to Minneapolis/St. Paul for a Twins game, but we didn’t. I’ve been to Minneapolis; Kris hasn’t.

I’d like to have canoed in the Boundary Waters.

I really wanted to drive through the Amana region of Iowa. I’d been once before, a long time ago, and I liked it. Because of a flat in Missouri we ran out of time. By the way, the family minivan doesn’t have a jack and a spare, but instead has a flimsy fix-a-flat kit, which notwithstanding my distrust, worked fine. Did you know that all the tire repair shops in rural Iowa close on Saturday afternoon? We had a nervous 100 mile drive to Dubuque where we found a Discount Tire that fixed the flat for free. I love Discount Tire, but I’d still rather have a spare tire.

Corn

We crossed Iowa, south to north, in late fall, and the corn stalks were ready for harvest, I suppose for feed? There didn’t appear to be any actual ears of corn. I grew up around wheat and cotton and sorghum and cattle pasture, but I have never seen such monoculture as Iowa corn. There is a lot of corn in Iowa, and that doesn’t even come close to a description. There is more than a lot of corn. There is a plethora of corn, the universe of corn, the place where corn is born and goes to die. No wonder corn fields show up in movies as the place the supernatural comes from; the amount of corn is spooky.

I realized that despite my rural upbringing, I had only the vaguest notion of what silos are for; they could be guard towers, to protect from roving bands of children of the corn? There sure are a lot of them.

Missouri

We were probably in as much of Missouri as anyplace, though we didn’t fish there. We spent a night in Kansas City on the way, at the 21c Museum Hotel. They’re great hotels and pet friendly, but more often than not located in peculiar places–at least if you’re not from there. Louisville and Lexington, Kansas City, Bentonville, Oklahoma City . . . they’re opening a new one in Des Moines. We also drove by the hamlet in north central Missouri where my grandmother was born in 1890, Osgood. I visited Osgood as a child in the early 1960s, and stayed with a great aunt who had no indoor plumbing, and visited a great uncle who kept horse feed in the spare bedroom. It was an adventure. There’s not much of Osgood left, if there ever was much of Osgood. Certainly there’s no tire repair shop.

Osgood, Missouri

On the drive nome we paralleled the Mississippi, and stopped in Hannibal to walk around. I’m not sure we saw the best of Hannibal, or if there is any best of Hannibal.

We spent two nights in St. Louis, took our picture under the arch, visited the Feather Craft fly fishing store (I’ve bought mail order from them for 30 years, but in person it reminds me most of a plumbing supply), and saw a Cardinals game. I hate the Cardinals, but they were playing the Cubs, who I also hate. The Astros played too long in the Central Division of the National League for me not to have strong feelings about the Cardinals and the Cubs.

Music

Iowa. The Everly Brothers are from Iowa, and Glen Miller, and Bix Beiderke. Glen Miller got me through law school. Big Band music was the only music I could listen to and still concentrate on reading.

Minnesota. We listened to a lot of Bob Dylan. I’m not a big fan of Prince (who is of course from Minneapolis or St Paul or whatever), but then we listened to a lot of Bob Dylan.

Wisconsin. I’ve been through this list before. It’s still pretty much the same list.

Arkansas packing list, part 2

What we didn’t see

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

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

US Forest Service, Buffalo River

Where We Went

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

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

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

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

Playlist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guitar

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

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

Happy New Year! Late! 2021.

2021 begins our fourth year of chasing fish around the country. What a difficult year the third year was.

The kitten we found bass fishing. She wasn’t bass fishing, we were, and she had been dumped on the roadside. Somebody doesn’t know what they lost.

At the start of 2020, we had a great steelhead trip to Washington State, right on the cusp of the Covid outbreak, right when the first US cases had been identified in, you guessed it, Washington State. I remember seeing a young Asian woman in a face mask in the Seattle airport and thinking, isn’t it a bit over the top wearing face masks? Is that some Asian thing? Who knew it would turn out to be not an ethnic question but an ethics question.

We had a couple of trips to Kansas, one early in the year when it was freezing, and one late in the year when it was freezing. I think next time we’ll go to Kansas in the spring, when the tornadoes blow in. As I a child of the Plains I always loved going to the storm cellar when the storm siren blew. All the neighbors would come over and sit around in the semi-dark, in the dank crypt-like smell of the underground. There were almost certainly spiders. It was a fine old time.

We nymphed in Tennessee, and we nymphed in North Carolina, and we caught some redfish on the Texas Coast and some bass in local ponds. That was all good, but with Washington it only meant three new states, plus we still have to return to Kansas. We’re never going to finish at this rate. We’ll have to fish in the State of D.C. if we don’t hurry.

2020 had a pandemic, and also George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Someone asked me during the Floyd fallout if I thought there was institutional racism. I said yes, but thinking about it later I’m not sure it’s the right question. We share some pretty tragic civic history, from slavery to voter suppression to Jim Crow, and it seems to me the question is whether we can conclude that George Floyd’s death isn’t a continuation of that history. I suspect that if I were black my response would be yep, just more of the same old, this time from the Minneapolis police.

Personally in November and December I went through two months of radiation for prostate cancer, old man cancer, and the radiation left me randomly falling asleep, then I would sleep some more, and then sleep some more. The doctor told me to think of it as a day at the beach. Since I had to go in most days, it was a pretty lousy couple of months for fishing, even surf fishing on the the beach. I hope the radiation worked, but in any event it didn’t leave any side effects, except that now every time I stand up I immediately need to go pee. It’s going to be a pain in waders.

This is not a flats boat.

There was an election, nothing new, with claims of voter fraud, nothing new, and a violent insurrection at the capital that left five people dead, which technically happened in 2021, not 2020, but it felt like 2020 and it was certainly something new. I just wish we still had Mark Twain. Mark Twain could explain this nonsense to us. This nonsense deserves Mark Twain.

As for me, it’s just not plausible that the Democrats could pull off massive fraud without somebody telling their buddy at work you should have seen what I did today! I cast a million votes for Joe Biden! Ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, Deep Throat in parking garages, the Pentagon Papers, that whole raft of Donald Trump ex-advisor porn, Chelsea Manning, J.K. Rowling’s lawyer, Mike Fiers . . . The only reason the Qanon drivel gets traction is because it’s supposedly being leaked by an insider who can’t keep his mouth shut. At least that part , somebody not keeping their mouth shut, is believable. If there had been a massive conspiracy to falsify millions of votes, some conspirator would certainly have said something to somebody who would need to tell the rest of us, and Rudy Guiliani doesn’t count. Somebody is going to blab. Hell, I’ve just told you about my glow-in-the-dark prostate, which is really none of your business, and even worse, an imposition by me on you. I didn’t cast a million votes for Joe Biden, but if I had, you’d almost certainly know by now.

Kris on the Guadalupe

What’s worse, it’s the sort of thing one shouldn’t claim blithely, without hard evidence, and no, that bogus statistical study that concludes if the vote had been the same in 2020 as it was in 2016, Biden couldn’t have won. True enough, but stupid. That’s why the game’s played on the field. Claiming conspiracies without evidence, Sidney Powelling it, will likely get you sued, and worse, it’s a direct attack on democracy, and pretty sketchy under the Ninth Commandment as well. It’s why except for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton none of the lawyers would go into court and say there was fraud; for a lawyer, lying to a court has consequences.

There are always irregularities in elections, elections are hard to run and unless you can show that the irregularities affect the outcome, it’s just noise. There may have been some noise in 2020, but there was no massive fraud. It would have shown up in court if there had been.

Meantime Happy New Year. We’ll all go fishing in 2021! We’re scheduled to go to Pennsylvania in May, and I think we’re going. Hopefully by then we’ll be vaccinated. We may drive to Arkansas tomorrow, and as long as there are plenty of places to pee on the route, that should be just fine.

This is a flats boat.

Coronavirus road trip, July 27-August 3, 2020

We drove last night from Sapphire, North Carolina, to Houston. We didn’t exactly drive straight through. Around 2 in the morning we stopped in Louisiana at a rest stop on I-10 just west of the Mississippi border and I slept for an hour. I had planned to stop for the night at a motel somewhere in Georgia, but Kris had other ideas and there you have it. I dozed while Kris drove through South Carolina and Georgia, and then it was after midnight and we just kept driving, trading back and forth, through Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana into Texas. It was 941 miles in about 15 hours.

We planned this trip as a car trip because we were just paranoid enough not to get on a plane, but not paranoid enough not to go, and we’d always planned to make the return trip in one long leg. Going home we were going to leave this morning around 4 am and drive straight through, but instead left last night. I hope our hosts will forgive the abrupt change in plans.

Going out was different, slower. We went north through East Texas, into Louisiana at Shreveport, in the heart of Northern Baptist Louisiana, through a bit of Delta Arkansas into Delta Mississippi. We had plugged the Robert Johnson Crossroads marker in Clarksdale, Mississippi, into the GPS because, well Satan, but neither Satan nor Robert Johnson were there, and I’m no better guitarist than before we left. It’s funny though, growing up in High Plains cotton country prepares you for the Delta. You know flat land, and you recognize cotton in the field. The Delta looked a lot like home.

Rowan Oak.

We went on to Oxford to visit Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s house near the University of Mississippi, and then camped nearby at an unremarkable state park. Rowan Oak was closed because of the virus. At the campground, I was drenched with sweat by the time I set up the tent; camping in Mississippi in July may not have been our best idea, but in the evening we drank Four Roses in memory of Faulkner and the Four Roses gave me sufficient courage to try to explain the ukulele to Kris. Kris has wanted to learn the ukulele.

“It’s the top four strings of the guitar a sixth up from the nut, so it’s D-G-B-E only it’s G-C-E-A . . .”

“Show me a chord.”

“This is wait, wait, it’s a 6th up from G, so this is E.”

“I can’t see your fingers, let me see your fingers.”

“Here, right here, this is, wait, a 6th up from G, so E.”

“Show me another chord.”

“This would be, wait, let me translate, it’s up from C so it would be A, or it could also be D-minor . And this is either B or B-flat, is it B-flat a 6th up from D or is it B? “

I thought I was being particularly lucid, but I think Kris got away from the lesson without knowing a single thing about the ukulele. That’s a good thing, since it should have been a 4th up, not a 6th.

***

To get to Shiloh National Battlefield we drove through Northern Mississippi and Southwestern Tennessee, and we started driving past Trump signs, Trump flags, Trump bumper stickers. I am surprised there weren’t Trump cut-outs, or even President Trump himself, waving at us from the side of the road. It struck me that if I lived in the area and was Biden prone, I’d be leary of putting a Biden sticker on my car. It just wouldn’t seem a safe thing to do.

Whatever our discontent with one another now, that locale of the first high-casualty battle of our largest discontent is not an easy place to get to. Because it’s not easy to get to, it’s pretty much as it was in 1862. I don’t know why I feel this need to visit our battlefields, but I continue to do so. Reverence and awe is what I feel when I’m there, for young men whose deaths and bravery were a long time ago, and sadness.

***

I like to travel in the South. There is always great stuff to see, and many friendly and often peculiar people, and great food. And this trip there was still great stuff to see, but we weren’t stopping to eat anyplace, not even for donuts.

It may have been my imagination but there seemed to be an overlay of hostility about, of all the stupid stuff, masks. East of Nashville we lost an hour, which we hadn’t expected. Kris wanted to stop at a McDonalds because she thought it would be clean and we could get some iced tea and use their bathrooms: corporate America she thought could manage the virus, even if we collectively couldn’t. There was a sign on the door requiring masks, but inside it seemed to be a point of honor for customers to defy the sign. The staff, stressed with the burden of protecting themselves and America, were angry and yelling at each other, and openly hostile to the customers, who, arrogantly standing maskless, deserved their hostility. We stayed, which we shouldn’t have done, then tossed the food into the trash on the way out the door.

If I die because of the coronavirus, I will blame that McDonald’s.

***

Asheville may be one of the South’s better food cities. We had a barbecue pork sandwich at Little Pigs Bar-B-Q, which was very good and which we ordered to go from the parking lot, but you can’t like anything about traveling through a good city with good restaurants and not stopping at any of them because, well, coronavirus. When I picked up our sandwiches the customers inside wore masks, mostly.

***

Kris has a new minivan. Kris loves minivans, and she traded in her ancient Chrysler Town and Country on a new Chrysler Pacifica, which may well be the smartest collection of car compromises ever. It is even a good-looking car, if you can get past its mini-vanness. I hated to drive the Town and Country because it was like driving a bowl of jello; I love the Pacifica, but don’t tell Kris.

We piled so much stuff into that car.

  • tent
  • folding chairs
  • folding table
  • cots
  • sleeping bags
  • kitchen junk
  • food
  • a case of wine
  • some more food
  • stove
  • a five gallon water jug
  • fly fishing gear, including waders and boots
  • more food
  • a Yeti cooler
  • another Yeti cooler
  • still more food
  • a guitar
  • a yukulele
  • clothes, including whites to play croquet in North Carolina, because you can’t play croquet in anything but whites
  • Some more fly fishing gear

And it was all in a constant state of disarray. It was an experiment, to see after all these years, if we could still drive someplace and camp. We did it. We camped for one night. We can do it again.

***

Driving through Mississippi last night at 2 in the morning I told Kris that we were only 10 miles from the Tatonut Donut Shop in Ocean Springs. She said let’s go there and park on the street until they open in the morning. When we checked the internet they weren’t open on Monday. We kept driving. Those are very good donuts though, perhaps the best I’ve ever had. We would have broken up the trip for Tatonut donuts.

***

The Mississippi Delta is Mississippi cotton country, and still today 60% of the population is African American because Delta cotton production was industrial agriculture that depended on cheap labor. That’s where the enslaved were brought. It is also the home of the Blues. It is now one of our poorest regions because in place of cheap labor cotton production has mechanized.

Structurally the blues are usually a 12 bar phrase, repeated again and again with variations. The Blues can be extraordinary sophisticated, think Bessie’s Blues by John Coltrane, or raw and driving, like Cross Road Blues by Robert Johnson. One of the things that makes the blues different from other music is that it is cyclic, there is no chorus, no bridge, the phrase goes that 12 bars, or maybe 16 bars, and then it does it again and then it does it again and then it does it again. Folk music is cyclic as well, and one suspects that there is interplay (or at least a common human bond) between, say, Barbary Allen and Crossroads Blues.

In Clarksdale where we went to see the Crossroads Marker everyone, even people walking randomly down the street, seemed to be wearing masks. It gave me great hope for the drive. One hope, dashed.

***

Downtown Oxford, Mississippi, is charming, with cute shops, restaurants, boutique hotels, and a lovely courthouse with a Confederate soldier out front. There is a current controversy of course about the Confederate soldier, that he should be removed, but forgetting all else it is a charming vignette. It is hard though to forget he’s a Confederate sentinel for the courthouse. He will someday go I suspect, and I suppose I shouldn’t regret it, but I do, a little, but only because the statue is very pretty, and it makes me consider the War.

Current estimates are that there were about 750,000 young men, North and South, who died in the Civil War. If you include Americans both North and South among the dead, it remains our costliest war. We can only speculate at why most of those young men were fighting, but I suspect some of it was that young men fight when called by old men, or maybe, as Shelby Foote told about the answer of a random Confederate private, “because you’re down here.”

If the War was inevitable, both because of slavery and the fragility of the Union some 70 years in, then there had to be Confederate soldiers as well as Union, and the Confederates were as flawed and tragic as Hamlet, or Lear, or best of all, Othello. We may not be able to forgive them, any more than we can forgive Othello the death of Desdemona, but we can recognize their flaw and our collective tragedy. Honestly, I’d like to see that statue stay, rededicated to the dead of both sides, with an addition of a memorial to the cost of the failed Reconstruction and slavery. It would give us a better picture of our history. I suspect that ultimately it won’t stay though, and that’s ok as well.

***

I had a call last night with a young friend, a young African American woman. It started as business but we talked and I told her about driving through the majority-black Delta where everyone wore masks, even walking down the street, and then into East Tennessee, where it seemed a point of honor for the young white men in the McDonald’s to defy mask orders because the Second Amendment and tattoos would protect them. I told her that driving home the night before we had stopped at a convenience store/gas station on the edge of some city, Montgomery I think, and while I filled up the car I watched a series of young black men enter the store to buy cigarettes or beer or whatever.

“They were all wearing masks, right?” She thought that would be the denouement, that the young white men in East Tennessee arrogantly disobeyed the mask signs that the young black men in Alabama obeyed.

“Nope.”

“I thought you were going to tell me they were wearing masks.”

“Nope.” Having been one myself, I think that young men are sometimes just uniformly stupid.