We were supposed to be in Georgia today, fishing for shoal bass on a northeast Georgia river. We canceled our reservations on Friday. Hurricane Ida was in the Gulf, and there was still the chance it would veer west into Houston. Living near the coast, it’s one of the things you learn about hurricanes. It ain’t over ’til it’s over. Never discount the chance a hurricane may hit until it hits someplace else.
Even if it didn’t hit Houston–and thank God it didn’t–its projected landfall was between Houston and Atlanta, and flying home today was certain to be a mess. We can try again later. Meanwhile, if you do such things, say a prayer for Louisiana.
In 1733, George II established Georgia, and it was the last of the original 13 Colonies. It was the brainchild of James Oglethorpe, a British parliamentarian, as a means to help the English poor. Georgia would give them a new start. It would also be a buffer between the Spanish colony in Florida and the British Carolinas.
It succeeded pretty well as a buffer. As philanthropy, not so much.
Under Oglethorpe, individual land holdings were limited to 500 acres, and charity settlers couldn’t sell their land. Rum was prohibited. Slavery was prohibited. It was gonna be a moral utopia.
William Vereist, James William Oglethorpe, 1735-1736, oil on panel, National Portrait Gallery, London.
It was a bust. Instead of giving immigrants a clean slate, the poor brought their debt with them. The land along the coast, the land settled first, was lousy for farming, and the English poor didn’t know how to farm anyway. For passage, immigrants, including children, were often indentured for long periods, some for decades. Planters from other colonies, particularly South Carolina, began to encroach, while the immigrants began to sneak off to other colonies where they could at least get a drink.
The Colonial Georgia poor were probably worse off than they’d been in England, though at least they didn’t have student loans.
In 1742, Oglethorpe left Georgia in a huff, never to return. In 1750, African slavery was legalized–it was already widespread. As a bastion of redemption and the hope of the poor, Colonial Georgia failed.
With that sterling beginning, Georgia was on a roll. Many Georgians would have been perfectly happy remaining British, and it was the last colony occupied by the British. Early Georgian government land grants were rife with fraud that lined the pockets of Georgia officials, and multiples of the same available land was sold to different buyers at rigged prices.
Georgia was ground zero for the Trail of Tears.
The Civil War? Georgia seceded based on what was probably a fixed election, and the war remained unpopular, particularly in mountainous North Georgia. Then there was the Siege of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea. During Reconstruction, Georgia was the only rebel state to be admitted to the Union, only to be kicked out again after it immediately kicked out all African American members of the Georgia legislature.
Gone with the Wind is set in Georgia, and its portrayal of the South is a deservedly difficult subject. Woodrow Wilson was from Georgia, and his overt racism has sparked his reappraisal. After its demise at the end of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan was revived in Atlanta in 1915. There were 593 recorded lynchings in Georgia. While he was out jogging, Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was shot to death in 2020 in Brunswick, Georgia.
Jimmy Carter is Georgian though, and Martin Luther King was from Atlanta. After the 2020 presidential election, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State may have saved our democracy. Still, if you were going to pick a state where the 2020 election kerfuffle would center, ten’d get you twenty that the center would be Georgia.
American Tobacco Company, Hugh Jennings and Ty Cobb baseball card, 1912, Library of Congress.
I would have loved to have seen Ty Cobb play:
AB 11,440/H 4,189/HR 117/BA .366/R 2,245/RBI 1,944/SB 897/OBP .433/SLG .512
Over a 23-year career, Cobb was on base for 43% of his 11,440 at-bats.
As of 2019, Georgia remains a growing state, its population having increased every year since 1930. In 1990, its population was 6,478,216. In 2019 its population was estimated at 10,617,423. It’s the New South, whatever that may be.
About 55% of Georgians are Anglo, 10% Hispanic, 32.6% Black, 4.4% Asian, and 2.2% multiracial.
in 2016, Donald Trump carried Georgia in a landslide, by 50.3% of the 3,967,067 votes cast for President. In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden carried Georgia by roughly 12,000 votes, or .23% of the 4,935,487 total votes cast for President. It was a surprise, I think, and the aftermath was as important to our democracy as Sherman’s March. If you look at it though, how Georgia actually voted has few surprises, and is consistent with the rest of the country. Turnout was up by 6% over 2016, but turnout was down in 2016 over 2012. By region, there’s the obvious blue vote centering in Atlanta, which is expected. Then there’s Baldwin County in middle Georgia. It’s a county with a population of 45,000, about 55% white. Biden carried the county by 50.5%. That’s a surprise, but it’s a surprise without much effect.
Macon, Marietta, and Savannah, all smaller cities, voted blue. Athens and the surrounding area, home of the University of Georgia, went blue, but that’s pretty standard for college towns, whether in Georgia or Idaho. Then there is a scattering of small population counties, remnants of a cotton belt, where the population remains majority African American. Those counties voted blue.
No statewide officeholders in Georgia are Democrats, but both U.S. senators are. The Georgia Senate and itsHouse ofRepresentatives are Republican majorities.
Geographically Georgia is similar to the other Atlantic states, but on a horizontal slant. The southeast is a coastal plain, followed by its mid-state foothills, its Piedmont, rising to the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains in the north. I’m still surprised reading accounts of Appalachian Trail hikes, when the hiker starts in Georgia. I guess I should be equally surprised when the hike ends in Maine. The Appalachians go most of the way up the Atlantic Coast
We fish in northeast Georgia for shoal bass, a river bass. Because of Atlanta’s airport, it’s easy to fly in and out of Georgia from Houston. We’ll poke around Atlanta for an afternoon, go to part of a baseball game between the Atlanta Native American Warriors and the first-place San Francisco Giants, then spend the night in Helen, “the Charm of Bavaria in the Heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.” As far as I know, none of the Atlanta Braves are part of Georgia’s .5% Native American population, and having sat through a series of particularly painful Astros losing efforts against the Braves in the 90s, I’m certain that the Tomahawk Chop is the most despicable fan chant in sports. I completely support efforts to ban it, and public pressure to change the Braves’ name. My opinion is not influenced in the least by my hatred of the franchise. Really though, whatever my opinion of the Braves, given Georgia’s particularly tragic expulsion of the Creek and Cherokee, having a baseball team with a Native American mascot is unforgivable. Of course I’d probably still hate the Braves whatever their name.
Meanwhile shoal bass are one of the 13 species of black bass, a river bass, closest genetically to spotted bass. They’re native to Georgia, northern Florida, and northeastern Alabama, but are endangered in Alabama. They’re most common in the Chattahoochee and Flint River drainages. I figure that I’ll deem any bass I catch that isn’t obviously a largemouth as a shoal bass, and I might even fudge on a largemouth.
Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Shoal Bass.
I’m not really sure what a shoal is, but I think it’s a sandbar in a river.
The Flag of the State of Georgia, by the way, is the flag of the Confederate States of America, with the addition of the seal of the state of Georgia and the words “In God We Trust.” It was adopted in 2003, replacing a flag that included the Confederate Battle Flag.
Flag of the State of GeorgiaFlag of the Confederate States of America
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 theDJ 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.
We had ’em, two of ’em each, plus the 10 days’ grace period. No side effects, though I’m certain that Hillary Clinton is telling me it’s time for another trip to Arkansas.
Besides mind control (of which I’m all in favor–not having to make decisions seems like a real boon), my friend Limey tells me that the CDC has determined that with rare exceptions the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines prevent virus infections, and don’t just lessen the symptoms. I need to check to see where Limey got his information, but part of me wants not to check and believe what’s most favorable to my world-view. I guess I’m having a fake news moment.
Apparently everybody in Arkansas and East Texas has already had the vaccine, because there wasn’t much social distancing or mask wearing. In a gas station, the cashier pulled down her mask so that I could hear her answer my question. I’m pretty sure I’d have heard her anyway, but I guess she figured I needed to read her lips. In a cafe, another cashier told the couple waiting for a table at the register that I was brave so they didn’t need to move. I told her I wasn’t brave at all. Actually, I think I’m brave enough, but I’m not stupid. I am both a baseball fan and a fisherman, so my outlook starts from superstitious, and as a lawyer I’m always belt and suspenders. Why test fate?
We wouldn’t have gone into restaurants without the vaccine, which leads me to
Where We Ate
It’s just as well that fine dining is a consideration but not a requirement, because there isn’t a lot of fine dining in Arkansas. There is some, in Bentonville and Little Rock, but Arkansas doesn’t really rival Paris, France. On the whole it’s a cheap-food-and-lots-of-it kind of cuisine. There’s nothing wrong with that, but as often as not it’s not something one wants to remember.
Kris and I both like to cook, and even before the pandemic we cooked at home most days. Restaurants are rare, so maybe I think more about them than I should. What good things make me remember a restaurant? I can remember some places vividly, a fish place in the Keys where the fish was great and the couples next to us argued about Donald Trump, a dinner at Three Brothers Serbian in Milwaukee with our friends Tom and Sal, a weekend of ethnic eating in Chicago suggested by Tom, a Basque place in Reno (again suggested by Tom) where we sat at a communal table. . . As often as not I remember places because they are great food, sure, but I think as much because they tell me something about the place. I hated Voodoo Donuts in Portland, bad service, bad food, too many gimmicks, but it did tell me something about Portland. That’s not, though, memory created by good things.
On our January pre-Arkansas fishing excursion, we ate at the Hive in Bentonville. The Hive is generic American imaginative–the kind of place you can now find in almost any urban area From Sea to Shining Sea, with pretty similar menus. It was just fine, had a good wine list, and could have been anywhere, from the Wine Country to Connecticut.
So for this Arkansas trip I tried to figure out where Arkansans thought was essential Arkansas eating. A lot of the places were further west than us, a lot involved fried catfish (which I like), and none were in Heber Springs where we stayed. We had been to Heber Springs before, and pretty much knew what was there. I wouldn’t let the food keep me away from Heber Springs, but I wouldn’t go back for it.
On the way to Heber Springs, we drove out of our way to the Bulldog Restaurant in Bald Knob, because (1) who doesn’t want to visit Bald Knob, and (2) they were supposed to have excellent strawberry shortcake. It has excellent strawberry shortcake because Central Arkansas is, apparently, a strawberry-growing region, and there were no strawberries yet, so no strawberry shortcake. We had a good burger and fries, thought it looked like the people at the next table ordered smarter than us. They always do.
On the way home, we ate breakfast at Cheryl’s Diner in Cabot for their chocolate gravy. Apparently chocolate gravy on biscuits is a breakfast thing in Arkansas. If you can imagine a slightly creamier version of chocolate pudding slathered onto a biscuit, you have chocolate biscuits. I like biscuits. I like cream gravy. I have now had chocolate gravy on biscuits. It was certainly memorable. I would go back for Cheryl’s cream gravy on biscuits.
We skipped a last meal in Arkansas and made it to Jefferson, Texas, to Riverport Barbecue, which is on the Texas Monthly top-50 list. It was 3 in the afternoon, and they were out of just about everything. Except for me and one teenager, no one wore a mask. That teenager was a rebel, and so was I.
We did eat at a great place in Shreveport, Strawn’s Eat Shop, recommended by my high school classmate Cindy (who lives in Shreveport). Great strawberry and coconut icebox pie, and chicken fried steak as part of it’s meat and three lunch special. Larry McMurtry once wrote that only a rank degenerate would drive across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak. We weren’t in Texas, but still. Avoiding rank degeneracy should always be a goal, though some degeneracy probably doesn’t hurt. Cindy texted that Strawn’s would be a good place for a reality TV show: The Waitresses of Strawn’s Eat Shop. Thanks Cindy. You’re right, both about the waitresses and Strawn’s Eat Shop.
The Drive
What’s it like driving up I-40 through Arkansas? It’s like this:
Gear
We took trout stuff; a 9-foot 6 weight for streamers, a 10-foot 4 weight and a 10-foot 3 weight, and a couple of 9-foot 5 weights (because you have to have a five-weight when you fish for trout, even if you never use it). All had reels with floating lines. We fished them all except my Winston 5 weight.
There is a story with the 4 weight, a Thomas & Thomas Avantt that four years ago I’d bought on sale. This year Kris gave me a Thomas & Thomas 10-foot 3 weight for my birthday.
Here’s the thing about all that weight stuff: with fly fishing, it’s usually the weight of the line that lets you cast the fly, so you match a 3 weight rod to a 3 weight line. You can overline, you can match a 3 weight rod with a 4 weight line, or underline–I’ll let you figure that out yourself–but all of that is nerdy fiddling. Weights and lines are pretty much standardized (if a bit esoteric).
Anyway, I thought I’d taken the new 3 weight, but had accidentally taken the 4 weight. Do I need both these rods that do pretty much the same thing? What a silly question, of course I do. The thing was, I thought I’d taken the 3 weight until I got home. I put a 3 weight line on the 4 weight, and never noticed anything wrong. We had so much weight on the rigs, both with heavy weighted flies and split shot, and all the casts were so short, it made no difference. Not to me anyway.
All the weighted flies and split shot were to get the flies down in the river as quick as possible and then keep them there. And also to smack me in the back of the head if I tried to get fancy with my casting.
Flies
I’m a firm believer that if I’m fishing with a guide, I should use the flies that the guide brings to the river. It’s funny though, I always look at what should fish in a place, and usually try to tie a few things to fish there. This time I tied some big streamers, Barr’s meat whistles, and fished them for a bit. I foul hooked–snagged–one rainbow in the gill plate, but nothing else. I decided streamer fishing was a lot of work for low reward and stuck to the guide’s stuff. I’ll use the excuse on the streamers that my shoulder’s been hurting.
Drew started us out with mop flies (and I could go into a long digression on mop flies, but won’t), but then switched me to a marabou jig fly, and that worked better. He really liked the jig flies, and bought them pre-tied from Little Rock. He claimed that you could catch anything with a jig fly, and frankly I thought they looked like the perfect fly for crappie and white bass.
Thirty years ago in Arkansas, scud flies were all the rage. Scud flies are an underwater fly that is supposed to look like a shrimp-related crustacean called, of all things, a scud. I don’t think it has anything to do with the missile. Think roly-polies, doodle bugs, but in water. I have never been able to imagine the fly, though from time to time I’ve tried to tie them. Drew said that a study from ASU (translation, Arkansas State University) had determined that scuds were Arkansas trouts’ primary food, and that Arkansans still heavily fished scud flies because Arkansas trout still ate them. He put one on a dropper on Kris’s rig. I thought Oh boy, I’ll see a scud fly, and then I forgot to take a look. I guess I was busy watching my orange bobber.
The second day we fished shallower, and Drew had us fish hare’s ear nymphs, which are about as traditional a fly as nymphs can be. His flies were sparse, and tied on tiny jig hooks.
When we came back I tied more Barr’s meat whistles–I wanted to go ahead and use up my cache of streamer jig hooks, and yesterday I fished a purple one at Damon’s. I caught my largest bass in a while, and I watched it crash across a sandy flat to hit the fly. The meat whistle’s usually thought of as a trout streamer, but as often as not, fish are fish. Next time I’ll try a marabou jig fly.
Terrible picture, I know. But it was a big fish, and I wanted to keep it in the water. The purple smudge in the vicinity of its mouth is a purple Barr’s meat whistle.
