Category: Southeast

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Louisiana Deux

Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans; by William Henry Brooke, engraver; engraving with watercolor from The Slave States of America, vol. 1; London: Fisher and Son, 1842.  THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION, 1974.25.23.4.

“Well, you see, it’ uz dis way. Ole missus—dat’s Miss Watson—she pecks on me all de time, en treats treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she wouldn’ sell me down to Orleans.” 

Jim, Huckleberry Finn.

I thought when I started this that I would write some about fishing and some about states and their history and literature. Louisiana didn’t come up by design but opportunity.  It is nearby, we haven’t been in a while, we have a deposit with a guide, and who doesn’t like New Orleans?

And what better way to approach Louisiana than through race and ethnicity? I’m stupid sometimes. I should have stuck to Sazeracs.

New Orleans was founded for the French in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville.  Although intended to be France’s center for trade and government,  the site selected was  a muddy swamp situated in the crescent of the shifting and flooding Mississippi River.  See that first big bend above the Gulf in the big river in the left of the map map below? The bend’s more complicated in real life, but that’s more or less where the French stuck New Orleans.

New Orleans was first destroyed by a hurricane in 1722.

1959-210.website

Le Missisipi ou la Louisiane dans l’Amérique Septentrionale; ca. 1720; hand-colored engraving by François Chéreau; The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1959.210

In 1724, the French adopted the code noir governing slaves. Believe it or not, it didn’t favor the enslaved.

Le_Code_Noir_1742_edition

In 1765 the Spanish, now in charge, brought the first Acadians, the Cajuns, to lower Louisiana from France (where they’d arrived after the British deportation of the French, Le Grand Dérangement, from the Maritimes). This was about the time that the British expelled the Scottish clans from the Highlands, and was apparently a favored British method of social planning. Get rid of ‘em.

In 1786 New Orleans burned, and in 1794 it burned again. The rebuilt city, the city we know by its French Quarter, is actually Spanish architecture, from its St. Louis Cathedral to its wrought iron frills.

Beginning in 1791, New Orleans experienced a sizable influx of slave-revolt refugees from Haiti: white French colonials, slaves, and free blacks. By the late 1700s, New Orleans was a city of French-speaking Acadians, German-speaking Germans, Spanish Canary Islanders, French-speaking refugees from Haiti, slaves from Africa and the Caribbean, and free people of color (often of mixed race).  All of these, French and Spanish colonials, Africans, and Germans, are the Creole, the ethnic and racial stew that made up Louisiana in 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase. There were also Americans.

 In 1803, Louisiana’s population was 35,932, with 21,224 Anglos, 12,920 slaves, and 1,768 free people of color.  By 1850, thirteen years before the Civil War, the population had exploded to 516,702, with 255k whites, 244k slaves, and 17k free people of color.  New Orleans had become the principal slave market of the South, there was cotton, there was sugar cane, there was the port traffic in the the Gulf and on the Mississippi. New Orleans was a major U.S. city and the major city of the South. Samuel Clemens came to New Orleans to work on river boats and from that he wrote Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn. Abraham Lincoln made two trips to New Orleans by flat boat: thus, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. And the Emancipation Proclamation.

One of the world’s great cuisines came out of that ethnic and racial mix.  The food was created out of what people had on hand: rice, seafood, pork, herbs, and the trinity of bell pepper, celery, and onion. Louisianans brought to cooking their cultural history: African, Caribbean, Spanish, French, German.  Which reminds me, on Friday our son, Andy, brought me breakfast — a boudin blanc kolache from his favorite donut shop.   Boudin and heat from the Cajuns, sweet dough from the Czechs,  assembled in Houston by Vietnamese immigrants. It wasn’t really a kolache, it wasn’t really even a klobasnicky, but it was pretty spectacular.

 

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New Orleans’ Guides

I’ve fished New Orleans once before, two days, post Katrina, maybe seven years ago. We stayed in the Roosevelt Hotel, home of the Sazerac Bar. The hotel had just reopened, but it was already a destination for wedding parties and conventioneers, and every time I’ve tried to get a room since it’s been full.  The Roosevelt was what a good old hotel should be, rococo and redolent of a time when people traveled by train and came to New Orleans for business at the Port of New Orleans and with Huey P. Long and for the wildness, but perfectly restored and well-managed.  We ate the best food I’ve ever eaten at Restaurant August, and didn’t feel bad about it because the chef, John Besch, hadn’t yet been called out for sexual harassment. We drank sazeracs in the Sazerac. We had the worst fishing guide ever.

I don’t remember the guide’s name, and wouldn’t tell it if I did. I’d asked a Houston shop for a recommendation. Their recommended guide was booked but he passed me on to this guy. Kris was there for a conference, and I fished the first day alone. It was March, maybe the worst time to fish Louisiana: windy and overcast. The guide picked me up at the hotel and drove to a place where I bought breakfast. It wasn’t anything special. His boat was in the shop–he had a Mitzi Skiff that seemed to be permanently in the shop and he was permanently and vocally unhappy with the boat and the company. He had borrowed a Hell’s Bay for the day. We got about a mile from the dock when he realized he had no gas and we had to turn around.  He speculated the gas had evaporated.

He was from Florida, the Panhandle, and guided in Louisiana in the winter. He was a Florida guy. He told me a story about how someone in Florida had just caught a record tarpon, maybe 190, on some impossibly light set up: a 4 lb tippet, a 4 weight rod, a 4 ounce brain. I don’t remember, but the angler seemed to have fought it for nine hours and it seemed cruel to the fish and stupid.  They could have hooked a rock with a 4 weight and had as much fun.  At least the rock would have already been dead.

The Florida guy re-rigged my redfish set-up, cutting off a nail knot on fly line because in Louisiana the fish were bigger.  I could have landed a tarpon on that nail knot. I did catch a redfish early the first day. It was the only fish we caught over two days. He wanted to take a picture and it took forever, me holding a dying fish while he changed camera lenses.

The second day when Kris went with us things got worse. He took the rod out of her hands to show her how to cast. There was a point where the forward gear on the boat wouldn’t work and the guide was banging on the motor with a wrench. I thought we’d spend the next five hours backing back to Venice. When he drove us back to the Roosevelt in his truck he drove and drank beer.

He was a young guy, and I hope he grew up smarter. What I remember the night we returned to Houston was Kris on the phone telling off the guide in New Orleans who’d made the recommendation. I’ve never seen Kris so mad, not even at me.

 

 

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Louisiana

We fish out of New Orleans in late April. We fly in early on the day April 21, and fly out late in the day on April 22.  Quick trip, but we had booked the guide in November for the big redfish moving into the marsh to feed, but had to postpone because of weather. We had our best weekend ever fishing in Galveston.

It’s cheap to fly from Houston to New Orleans because Houston and New Orleans are physically close, it’s only a six-hour drive, and they’re close in other ways too, like siblings who love each other but are a little astonished at the craziness their sister’s up to. If Houston is the great melting pot, the place where whites and blacks and Asians and hispanics are jumbled into the little engine that’s not little that thinks it can, New Orleans is the pot that never exactly melted, and where the most foreign folk of all may be the local white people.

What we share: The energy industry. the Gulf. Food. What we don’t share: Ambition (for Houston), history (for Louisiana).

I used to think there were two kinds of Texans, Texans who went to Santa Fe and Texans who went to New Orleans. For me growing up in West Texas New Mexico was only a long car ride away, as was everything else, and I know it and love it. What I first remember from New Orleans was walking past the strip bars on Bourbon Street, eating Beignet and drinking chicory coffee heavy with cream at the Cafe du Monde, and tasting crawfish etoufee. I think I was 14.  I thought at the time the etoufee was bland. I’ve never quite figured Louisiana out.

Houston’s got the ambition, New Orleans the history. Oil and the Gulf may be self explanatory, maybe, but Etoufee is no longer anything extraordinary. There is a Brennan’s in Houston, and it was here long before me.  I can get good red beans and rice or etoufee by walking from my office across the sky bridge and standing in line at Treebeards.  Every seafood place in Houston sells a pretty decent gumbo.

It’s easy to look at Louisiana and feel self-satisfied. Our education system, sorry as it may be, is better. Our politicians may be crazy but they’re not corrupt or as incompetent. Our history, incredibly blemished as it is, is not the slave block or the quadroon ball or Storyville. On the other hand we weren’t the birthplace of jazz.

A young friend of mine is a lovely young woman, Princeton for undergrad and Harvard for law school, a Houston city council member. Someday she will be in at least Congress, and she is one of our city’s stars. We went to lunch a few months ago, before Hurricane Harvey I’m certain because the restaurant, Reef, hasn’t yet reopened.  She shook what I swear was a half bottle of Tabasco–she said she preferred Louisiana but they didn’t have it–into her gumbo.  “You know my family’s from Louisiana?” It surely would have perked up that Etoufee. I think us Texans just never quite get it.

 

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Palm Beach

Scott Hamilton is a big guy, thick in a strong way through the calves and thighs and shoulders, and thick in a working man’s way through the center. His voice has a baritone authority, only slightly tinged by his Marlborough Menthols. His hair is fine and straight and a bit shaggy, apparently untouched by grey, with a mustache that follows suit. The mustache is whispier than a proper hero’s mustache, but too benign for a villain’s. Before he guided in Palm Beach he guided in Key West, and my bet is that’s where he picked up the diamond stud. Before Key West he guided in Maine.  He’s been guiding fly fishers in Palm Beach since 1991. That’s a lot of guiding.

I didn’t follow any of my rules for picking Captain Hamilton: I found him on the internet by searching Palm Beach and fly fish. There aren’t a lot of choices. He’s not endorsed by Orvis, and while he’s proud of being the longest tenured Redington guide, I didn’t find him on Redington’s website. His boat’s principal interest to me was its oddity: a 26′ Power Catamaran with twin 140 hp Suzuki motors mounted on a jack plate. It has a T-Top. Tidy and well-maintained, Scott says it drafts in a foot and handles five foot waves offshore. I’ve been in five foot swells before, on a 22′ Boston Whaler, and I hung my head over the gunnel and gave my guts to Neptune. I was just as glad it was blowing hard enough to keep us in the Intracoastal.

 

Three things struck me about fishing the Intracoastal at Palm Beach. First, this is an urban landscape. There are boats everywhere. I’ve spent some time on the Intracoastal around Galveston. It’s a relatively narrow deep channel where the most common traffic is chemical barges and bay boat sport-fishers speeding through. Nobody hangs out on the Intracoastal. On the other hand the Florida Intracoastal is an urban landscape, and I saw nary a barge. There are 70-, 80-,  100-foot yachts with three thousand gallon diesel tanks capable of a quick cruise to Monte Carlo, the twin of the Kennedy’s yacht cruising about in a constant state of party, lots of Hinkley’s, 60-foot deep sea fishing boats ready for a quick cruise to the Bahamas, and 40- and 50-foot live-aboard sailboats anchored randomly through the waterway because, apparently, the owners don’t want to pay marina fees. Kris asked Scott if it was dangerous to leave one’s boat anchored in the waterway. Scott said the biggest danger was the bilge pump failing during a heavy rain.

Second, the water is blue, and by late in the day with the incoming tide we could see the bottom in ten feet. There’s clear water further south in Texas, but there’s rarely much clarity in Galveston. We get mud from the Mississippi, Florida has boat traffic.

Third, people who build $3 million houses on the shoreline of Florida waterways surely can have bad taste. Why spend all that money on all that view and then decide that you need a couple of life-size bronze elk statues to make everything perfect? Elk? Elk? And both of them male? Of course the elk aren’t really complete until you surround them with statues of Greek goddesses.

We started the morning with Scott bemoaning the lack of clarity and running a search pattern looking for tarpon on sonar. Scott put Kris on the front of the boat, which I thought was unfair but was too gentlemanly to mention. I fished the back by the motors with a Redington 11-weight and a fast sinking lead-core line. Scott asked me if I had practiced my backhand, and all I could think of was Venus and Serena Williams. I tried to cast like I thought the Williams sisters might, and proceeded to wrap that heavy line around one of the Suzukis. Scott got me unwrapped without yelling and tried to explain again. All day Scott was immensely patient. I finally figured out that I should ask where he wanted me to put the fly and go with it on my backcast, which was what he was saying in the first place. That seemed to work. We fished for a while then moved on. No tarpon.

Thursday, the day before we left for Florida, our daughter Austin and I had a conversation while walking through downtown Houston to her office–I was going to the annual Anti-Defamation League lunch, she was going back to work. “What happens if you don’t catch a fish?” Well of course I won’t catch a fish. I never catch fish. “I’ll have to go back” I said. “That’s a problem for Delaware” she said.

Scott kept saying the same things over and over, trying to drill them into my thick head. The takes would be fast. The fish were hard-mouthed and setting the hook would take a hard strip-set then another and another and another. I’ve fished with guides, especially trout guides, who fanatically checked the integrity of the leader: Scott fanatically checked the sharpness of his hooks. He was justly proud of his own tied flies, and when I kept wrapping flies around every available nook and cranny he switched me out to a kind of bend back with a stiff fish-hair wing and taught me how to slow the retrieve to keep from getting hung in mangroves. Slow, really slow. It was a good lesson, and at least another hour before I lost that fly.

We spent a long time searching for snook against bulkheads, among dock pilings, under mangroves. I got a bump I couldn’t identify and forgot to set. Kris and Scott saw my line get thwacked by a big needle fish but I forgot to set. We caught nothing except a New York lady in yoga pants who wanted us to move along so her dogs would stop barking. If you could fish for New Yorkers in Palm Beach, I’m pretty sure I’d have caught my limit.

Meanwhile Scott worked hard–good guides work hardest when the fishing is bad.

End of the day Scott put Kris on a 10-weight with a clear Courtland floating line and a 9-inch needle fish fly.  Big fly, heavy rod, heavy line. Scott cast, Kris retrieved, I kept the boat in a straight line. The barracuda that took the fly took the leader with it.  Kris said it was like watching the great vicious Jaws maw  come out of nowhere. Scott said it was at least 40 pounds. I think 50, but I was holding the boat on line and didn’t see it. Their yells sure sounded like 50.

One more bump for me by a small barracuda.  I guess I have to go back to Florida.