Category: Southeast

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Tennessee

It used to be a joke that every Texan went broke in Tennessee before they came to Texas. I suspect my ancestors kinda went broke other places as well, but still, many Texans have a soft spot for Tennessee. T for Texas, T for Tennessee.

Tennessee looms unnaturally large in our collective history. Some random stuff:

  • The Trail of Tears.
  • Davy Crockett, Sam Houston
  • Martin Luther King’s assassination.
  • The Grand Ol’ Opry, Sun Records, Stax Records, Beale Street, Nashville.
  • Andrew Jackson.
  • Dolly Parton
  • The TVA.
  • Shiloh, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Fort Donelson.
  • Nashville Cats.
  • Andrew Johnson.
  • The Smoky Mountains.
  • Al Gore.
  • The Scopes Trial.
  • Elvis.

You’d think with all that stuff going on, there would be good histories of Tennessee, but I haven’t found one. Stuff seems to be dated or episodic, as if the history itself is too big. There are lots of little histories, histories of Andrew Jackson or the Scopes Trial, or the battles of the War in the West, or individual biographies, or histories of East Tennessee, but nothing general seems satisfactory.

There are really three parts of Tennessee, represented by the three stars in the circle on the Tennessee flag, and maybe that’s the problem: the state’s schizophrenic. From the west, Memphis is that joke about Mississippi; what are Mississippi’s two largest cities? New Orleans and Memphis. It was the largest inland cotton market in the South. It’s on the Gulf Coastal Plain that runs from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River to Southern Illinois, as much the Delta as Arkansas or Mississippi are the Delta, flat, rich; the land of cotton.

Marion Post Walcott, May 1940, Cotton Carnival, Memphis Tennessee, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).

Even today here is no city more Southern than Memphis, population 651,073, with a metro population of 1,371,110. It seems everyone in Memphis is either white or black, without the polyglot of people and cultures that I’m used to. It’s a lovely city, with ducks in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, good ribs, and a rich cultural history, but it’s also a damaged city. It never seems to have recovered from the murder of Martin Luther King. As of 2010, Memphis proper was 27.5% non-Hispanic white, 63.3% African-American, 6.5% Hispanic, 1.6% Asian. The metro population evens out a bit, with 45% non-hispanic white, and 47% black.

When I was in college I ate my first bagel in Memphis, on my way to backpack to Clingman’s Dome in the Smokies.

Memphis Minnie, 1930.

Central Tennessee is higher than West Tennessee (though not Klingman’s Dome), with the Highland Rim surrounding the Nashville Basin. Higher is a relative term. The Highland Rim is rarely much higher than 1,100 feet. It’s hill country, farm country, Nashville.

USGS, Nashville Basin, 1988.

Nashville, with a city population of 670,820 and a metro population of 1,959,495, is growing. One doesn’t go there any more just to make records. In some ways it is the reverse image of Memphis, thriving, maybe even modern, maybe even cosmopolitan. It’s 58.6% non-Hispanic white, 28.6% African American, and 3.5% Asian. 9% of the total population is Hispanic.

Daniel Schwein, Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, licensed under Cretive Commons license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

Nashville is known principally for that pancake place over near Vanderbilt, the Pancake Pantry, and a pretentious but well-acted Robert Altman movie. Nothing else.

East Tennessee is defined by Appalachia, with the Blue Ridge on the border with North Carolina, the Ridge and Valley Appalachians to the west, and The Cumberland Plateau bordering middle Tennessee. By 1794, I had two ancestors, a Hatcher and a Crowson, in Wears Valley, near Sevierville and Pigeon Forge. There is still a Hatcher Mountain and a Crowson Cove in Wears Valley in the Ridge and Valley region, but my direct ancestor (and their descendent), William John Hatcher, was in Sullivan County, Missouri by 1850. In 1861, William John volunteered for the Missouri Infantry, on the side of the Union.

You’d think that would be odd, but Eastern Tennessee was a Union hotbed: there weren’t many slaves in those hills and hollers. Eastern Tennessee is still mostly white. Knoxville’s population is essentially 17% black and 83% white, with everybody else just a wee bit of lagniappe. Historically it was also poor, though it seems to be doing well enough now. This is Dolly Parton country. Maybe Dolly is a cousin.

Dolly Parton and Porter Waggoner, 1968. Pre-1978, no copyright mark.

In East Tennessee, Scott County seceded from the Confederacy and formed its own Free and Independent State of Scott, and didn’t officially rejoin Tennessee until 1986. Pater William John would have served the Union at Shiloh, Corinth, in the Atlanta Campaign, and in Sherman’s March to the Sea, on the opposite side of at least three other second great grandfathers, but as like as not on the same side as his Tennessee brothers and cousins. I’m glad my great-great grandfathers were not better shots. Weirdly, while I knew from my grandparents that a number of their grandparents fought for the Confederacy, I didn’t find out that William John fought for the Union until a couple of years ago. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe that was the sort of thing one kept to oneself in the post-Reconstruction South.

But things change. I’m proud of my Grandfather William John, and East Tennessee is no longer a hotbed of Northern sympathy. East Tennessee along with the rest of Tennessee voted 60% for President Trump in 2016, with only the two most populous counties, Davidson and Shelby, and a majority black county, Hayward, voting for Hillary Clinton.

Ali Zifan, Wikimedia Commons.

Which reminds me of why this came up in the first place. In two weeks we’re supposed to fish in far northeast Tennessee, for trout on the South Holston and Watauga Rivers. We’re driving. I picked it so that I could see Wears Valley, and Shiloh, and because we go from there to visit friends in North Carolina. It’ll be our first road trip, really our first trip of any kind, since the pandemic began. We’ll see if we actually go.

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Fish in the Time of Cholera. Arkansas.

The largest trout I’ve caught was in Arkansas, in the Ozarks on the Little Red River in the northwest part of the state, on a root-beer colored streamer called a meat whistle. Whoever named that fly wasn’t subtle, but neither is the fly.

I caught that trout three years ago, and I considered including it in our list and skipping another trip to Arkansas. For some reason that seemed wrong–if I included Arkansas where would it end? North Carolina 20 years back? That trip to Wyoming 30 years’ ago? So a month ago we booked a weekend trip back to the Little Red on April 4. Then came Coronavirus.

The Little Red is a tributary to the more-famous White River, and like the White it’s known for its trout. It once held the world all-tackle record for brown trout, over 40 pounds. Since the 1980s, the browns are always wild, never stocked. It’s a pretty river, to my eye prettier than the White, and we fished it from a flat-bottomed, jet-motored sled-boat Nothing says Arkansas like a flat-bottomed, jet-motored sled-boat.

Parts of the Little Red are lined with vacation homes, but its banks are heavily wooded and the houses don’t intrude except when your fly gets hung on a dock. There’s always something for flies to get hung on. The Little Red and the White are tailwaters, and while trout aren’t native to Arkansas, water is discharged from the dams at 40-50 degrees, cold enough to dissuade the native black bass and catfish. Trout thrive.

My great-grandfather, Henry Louis Thomas, was born July 17, 1850, in Ozan, Arkansas, two counties northwest of the corner where Texas and Arkansas meet. His father, William Louis Thomas, was born I-don’t-know-where and died in Ozan in 1849. He was 38. Because of problems with a stepfather, as boys Henry and his older brother, James Jasper, left Arkansas on a donkey and came to Bowie County near Texarkana. It seems pretty desperate, but I suspect these were pretty desperate people.

All William Louis left behind was a marriage license, a denied dram shop license application, and two sons. I doubt that my great grandfather Henry could read, or at least that he could read much, and wonder what it must have been like for Amanda Adeline to be widowed and poor and pregnant in Arkansas in 1850. She was born in 1834, two years before statehood, in Argenta, Arkansas, now North Little Rock. She was 16 when Henry was born. She died in 1864 in Bois d’Arc. She was 30.

Bois d’Arc, by the way, is pronounced bow dark.

When I was a boy, my grandmother’s house was a few blocks south, the Texas side, of State Line Boulevard in Texarkana. The Texas side was dry, meaning that alcohol sales were banned. The Arkansas side was wet, evidencing a wildness that I suspected was typical of the other side of the street. The federal post office sits on the line, part in Texas, part in Arkansas. Near the post office is a peculiarly elaborate Confederate memorial dedicated in part to the women of the Confederacy, or at least the white women of the Confederacy.

“O great Confederate mothers, we would paint your names on monuments, that men may read them as the years go by and tribute pay to you, who bore and nurtured hero-sons and gave them solace on that darkest day, when they came home, with broken swords and guns!”

I don’t think there’s a corresponding monument for Southern women who weren’t Confederate mothers.

I doubt my family history is uncommon. I expect that lots of early immigrants to Texas came through Arkansas: white, black, or brown they could only have come through Arkansas, Louisiana, Mexico, or the Gulf. Maybe there were a rare few souls from New Mexico. My family history is probably only nuanced by the time some of my ancestors actually stayed in Arkansas.

Henry Schenck Tanner, Arkansas, A New Universal Atlas Containing Maps of the various Empires, Kingdoms, States and Republics Of The World, 1836.

Since Thursday I’m home, self-isolating. A colleague in Dallas may have the virus, and there is a feeling of inevitability about the spread of Covid-19. Fifteen days ago I went to a breakfast for the Harris County Community College system with about 500 others, and after the breakfast I stood in the foyer for an hour discussing local politics with a friend, the wife of a Harris County commissioner, and greeted passers-by. That evening I stood with our mayor in a crowded room for a reception for Cory Booker, and then left for a dinner at a Chinese restaurant with about half of the Harris County state representatives–the purpose was to advertise the plight of Asian Town restaurants. At all those events we were still shaking hands, hugging, standing closer than six feet.

Now of course our mayor has ordered all Houston dining room service closed, and I’m at home. Everything’s canceled. Everything’s ground to a halt.

I haven’t canceled our trip to Arkansas yet, and haven’t discussed canceling with Kris. I should go ahead and cancel, I’m pretty sure we won’t be going, but part of me wants to stock the van with groceries and sleeping bags and drive, to see deserted highways, to make Henry’s trip on that donkey in reverse. We wouldn’t have to interact with anyone except the fishing guide, and that would be outdoors. We could sleep in the van in WalMart parking lots, right? There are WalMarts in Arkansas, right? It would be a small rebellion against our current paralysis. At some point life must go on, or maybe not.

I need to spend a day outside. And I’ve only been home since Thursday.

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2020

We’re at 16 states, with two more, Hawaii and Wisconsin, where we didn’t catch fish. I thought this would take ten years, but then Louis Cahill wrote that we were doing it in five, and that wormed its way into my head. If ten, we’re way ahead, if five we’ve got some catching up to do.

Going someplace and catching a fish is pretty easy, except for time, money, and effort. There are states that are left, Tennessee, New Mexico, Arkansas, North Carolina, Colorado, California . . . Where I’ve spent enough time in my life that I could probably fly or drive in, catch a fish, and check the state off my list without missing much, but there are also states, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Maine, where spending less than a week just seems wrong.

If we really spend a week in all the places that deserve a week ten years won’t be enough.

In eight days we can do some justice to three states, say Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee, but try to add Georgia into that and it’s just too much for anything but a drive-by. Pennsylvania, for instance, is one of the reasons we’re doing this. Neither of us have ever been to Pennsylvania, and how can we not spend at least a couple of days in Philadelphia, and how can we not see Gettysburg? I could probably spend a week in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile I’ve still got work, and there are our dogs at home who love us, and there is the cost of long trips.

So we’ve been planning for 2020. Earlier this year I had decided Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa as a trip, taking about a week so we could fish the Au Sable, some of the UP, Hayward for Muskie, and then the Driftless in SW Wisconsin/NE Iowa. We had talked about a ten day driving trip north, fishing in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. We booked Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, mostly to fish with the guide and teacher, Dom Swentosky in Pennsylvania; and to see Philadelphia. We talked about a great tailwater trip through New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, but no.

Here’s the first map I came up with. The proposed 2020 states are light blue or pink.

And now that’s all shot to hell. Instead we’ve scheduled Washington in February, which is great fun to tell people, and which I blame on Kris: She didn’t say no. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina are still on for June, and then, because of a chance conversation, we’ll go to North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia in early August. That driving trip to the great Southwestern tailwaters will have to wait, and we won’t be driving straight north to North Dakota.

Here’s how the map looks now. Blue states are pretty settled. We’ll try to pick up some of the pinks as we go along. Maybe we’ll make Arkansas Christmas morning.

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More Florida Playlist

Gear

We took five rods. We took my 7 weight G. Loomis Asquith with a Tibor Everglades reel and a bonefish line. When we weren’t fishing for big tarpon that’s the only rod we used in the Everglades. It’s a little known fact, but Lord Asquith was the commander of the British forces in Florida during the Revolutionary War, and made a pile selling swampland to British loyalists escaping from New York and New England.

We also took Kris’s 8-weight Helios 3 with an Orvis Hydros reel, a 10-weight Helios 2 with a Tibor Riptide reel, and a 11-weight Helios 2 with an Orvis Mirage reel. All of them had floating lines. In the Everglades we used the guide’s 11-weight H3 because we needed an intermediate line and because H3. We used the guide’s 10-weight H3 out of Key Largo because the guide didn’t like my leader and because H3. My leader was tied with lots of bits and pieces of fluorocarbon and his was a simple 40-20-40 or thereabouts.

It rained out of Key Largo, so our rain gear came in handy. I wore my Converse high tops. Kris kept wanting me to go barefoot so I’d feel the line under my feet, but I never did. Together with my blue sun gloves, blue Buff, blue cap, and blue eyes I was very color-coordinated, and going barefoot would have ruined the whole ensemble.

Unfortunately my boat bag was orange. I need to work on that.

We also took Kris’s 5-weight Helios 3 for the Miami canals. More on that later.

Flies

We only used a few. For the bonefish it was a lead-eyed root beer crazy charlie, probably size 8 or 10. The tarpon fly we used was a black toad, not very big, only a couple of inches long, tied on the the usual sized hook for tarpon, 1/0 or 2/0. For the smaller fish and the baby tarpon we switched to an orange and white baitfish pattern, size 4 maybe. it wasn’t a fly I knew, but any clouser variant or baitfish pattern would probably have done. These were all guides’ flies.

The Canals

I wanted to fish Florida canals on our first trip to Florida, but we didn’t have the time, or at least the energy. This time we did, but only for an hour because of a luggage snafu. ProTip: Don’t try to late-check a bag of food and expect TSA to get it onto your plane, and if you do be ready for the recriminations of the lady at the Southwest baggage claim who feels wronged because you late-checked luggage. Also, buy the Coke Zero when you get there. When one explodes in the plane and mixes with the instant oatmeal it’s a real mess, even when you bag is waterproof. Maybe especially when your bag is waterproof.

At the canal it was too windy for Kris’s 5-weight, and it was hot. We were fishing on the side of the road in a warehouse district. It wasn’t a transcendent outdoors experience.

Hotels

We had great luck with hotels. We stayed at The National in the heart of Miami Beach. The National was built in the 50s, and is immaculate. I wanted to spend the weekend floating by the poolside bar and drinking mai tais, and if I’d done it the other guests could have gone home and told their friends that in Florida they’d seen the Great White Manatee.

In Key Largo we stayed at Popp’s Motel. There are nine cottages with a beach. There are palm trees and hammocks. Nobody was there but us, though in-season my guess is it’s packed.

Restaurants

On the way out of the Everglades we stopped at Robert is Here in Florida City. I had the mango and strawberry milkshake, Kris had the blackberry. There is a low-rent zoo in the back where you can sit at picnic tables and watch tortoises and goats and the other customers while you drink your milkshake. There are parrots and motorcyclists with tattoos and The Great White Manatee. It’s a fine place.

In Miami we went to Joe’s Stone Crab for lunch. I had expected something close to Felix’s Oyster Bar in New Orleans, something with a formica counter and twirly stools. Instead it was white table cloths and waiters in tuxedoes. A waiter who spoke tourist gave great guidance, and there was crabmeat and key lime pie. The waiter had a good Houston story about being stuck in Houston during Hurricane Harvey, and volunteering at the George R. Brown shelter.

The guy behind us had stories too, and he announced them with unflinching gusto. Here are his stories.

  • He was raised right here in Miami, and every time he came home he came to Joe’s, and he especially wanted to bring her to Joe’s.
  • He loved her, and that story she told about her parents was funny, and her family must think he was robbing the cradle.
  • Don’t worry about how much food he was ordering, because he could eat it all. Gusto!
  • People come for the crabs, but really it was the coconut shrimp that he loved.
  • These weren’t local crabs. These were west coast crabs. He could tell, he was raised here.
  • She would love the key lime pie.
  • Ok, she hadn’t loved the key lime pie. They’d order the chocolate cake.
  • She was so funny. He loved her.
  • He loved her.

My back was to them, but while it was impossible to see I could hear him fine, more than fine, more than I wanted. Whether or not raised in Miami his accent was Jersey, and she was 25 (or at least he said she was 25) and her accent Asian. She didn’t talk much.

When we left I got my only glimpse of them. He was closer to 60 than 25, a bit rotund, a bit worn, a bit sagging. If he’d been a fish he would have been a gizzard shad. She was nondescript. She could have been 25 or 30 or 40, a bit rotund as well, and not glamorous, nor seemingly striving for more glamour than any of us might seek. Was she Korean? Vietnamese? How did these two meet? Online? Was there some sort of matchmaker? Would things end well? I wished them well if well was in the cards, but I guess didn’t really think it was.

That evening we went to The Surf Club at the Four Season’s Hotel. The blurb promised nostalgic cuisine and the Thomas Keller touch. That sounded fun, expensive what with Thomas Keller touching our bank account, but fun. And nostalgic cuisine! 50s-60s cuisine! It sounded just right for Miami.

Here is what I learned: you can’t high concept authenticity. You can high concept all you want, and if the concept is good it will travel, but if a restaurant is concept and the concept is authenticity (and that’s really what you’re at when you’re grabbing nostalgia), well, you can’t Make America Great Again. It doesn’t matter how good the service, how finely sourced the beef, how excellent the dang-that’s-really-expensive wine list, a $46 soft boiled egg is still a soft boiled egg, even if it comes with caviar and a buckwheat blini.

I was dressed in my finest fishing wear, including my bright blue Converse high tops, so I didn’t exactly fit the space, but I figured nothing said 1960 like Converse high tops. Kris told me not to get the oysters Rockefeller, but I’m a sucker for roasted oysters. It never works out though. Except for the Oysters Gilhooley at San Leon’s Gilhooley’s (cash only, you can smoke at the bar, and be sure and stop and admire the Harleys out front) I’m always disappointed. The oysters were surprisingly fine, still plump and fresh, but how do you make bread crumbs bitter? Were they scorched? And why ruin an oyster with a slather of spinach? I ate the oysters anyway, just so Kris wouldn’t know she was right. They needed some hot sauce, but so did much of the 50s.

Kris didn’t do more than taste her lamb chops and said they were over-salted and overdone. They took them off the bill. Great service, and the crudite and martinis were magnificent. They cook magnificent crudite. My steak was a steak. It was a bit over salted in pockets, but I didn’t tell Kris.

Just like lunch there was an old man with a much younger woman, and this old man was frightening–if he wasn’t Miami mafioso he had missed his calling–while Kris was certain that any woman that tall and with arms that thin was a young man in drag. She was so coiffed and painted that you couldn’t tell what she’d begun as, male, female, beautiful, plain.

She had a mass of frosted hair over a dark underlayer–there were a lot of women in the room with a mass of frosted hair over a dark underlayer, and there was a magnificence in the complexity of it. How did they do that? In more innocent places you’d just guess their roots were showing, but this was so planned, so well-executed, and so universal that it could be nothing but premeditated. Did they dye their hair dark, then dye it again light? It had to take hours, did it take days? I wondered why Kris didn’t do the same, but she’d have to add more hair to get the effect. I like her hair just fine.

I don’t think she was a young man in drag, but I didn’t ask. When I was leaving the maitre d’ asked if I’d enjoyed my golf. Our kind of place.

South in Key Largo we ate at The Fish House. Its concept was to throw fishy looking bibelots on the wall and serve the same menu they served last year and the year before and the year before that, with whatever fish was fresh that day. The couples at the tables next to us got into a heated argument about the President until one stormed out. My nose was so far into my plate that I couldn’t tell who took which side, but the remaining couple, the couple immediately to our right, lived in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, and guessed from our intro that we’d dined with Thomas Keller the night before. They were younger than us, but not by much, and said that they’d had dinner the night before at the Trump Doral, the one that had made all the headlines for the G7 conference, and that there had been a woman in a sequined Make America Great Again dress that wasn’t meant to be ironic.

At the fish house the oysters were from Texas, just like us. There was no slather of spinach. On our way out of the Keys the next day we stopped again for a second lunch.

Our final night in Fort Lauderdale we found a red-sauce Italian place, Il Mulino, and ate comfort food. We didn’t talk to anybody. We didn’t watch anybody or overhear any conversations. We split a pair of Apple Airpods and streamed the Astros beating the Nationals in World Series game 4 through Kris’s phone. Those were more innocent times.

Donuts

No donuts. We didn’t eat a single donut.

Playlist

I’ve covered my Florida playlist before, and there’s nothing more to be said except this time I liked it. I liked Mel Tillis. I liked the Adderly Brothers and Ray Charles and Arturo Sandoval and John Vanderslice. Not a single Jimmy Buffet song cycled through, and I liked that. I’ve made my peace with Florida. I’ve caught my Florida fish.