Category: Southeast

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Alabama Bass, Spotted Bass, Redeye Bass, Tallapoosa River, Alabama, May 26, 2019

We postponed Kansas because of wind and lightning. Wind and lightning aren’t abnormal for Kansas in the spring, but it was lots of wind and lots of lightning. The New York Times said there were more than 300 reported tornadoes in the Midwest over the last 30 days. Of course whenever I read now of weather that’s a bit more than it should be I wonder if it’s climate change, and whether I should be buying land in soon-to-be-tropical Minnesota instead of going fishing. Being reasonably short-sighted I went fishing.

We fished mid-state, halfway between Birmingham and Montgomery. I picked mid-state in part because I found a guide, East Alabama Fly Fishing. The obvious play for us was the Gulf, from Gulf Shores or Mobile, but we’d already fished for redfish in Mississippi and Louisiana, so we drove four hours further and fished for bass and sunfish. Of course I would have liked to fish for redfish in Alabama, but we only had three days. Choices must be chosen.

So bass. How many species of bass are there? Nine, though it’s not the most settled thing in the world. Fish species identification has a way of being uncertain, even for the best known game species. The nine that are currently agreed on? Largemouth, smallmouth, Guadalupe bass from Texas, Florida bass, Alabama bass, shoal bass from Georgia, Suwannee bass from Georgia and Florida, spotted bass, and redeye. Our guide, Craig Godwin, said we would fish for spotted and redeye on the Tallapoosa.

There’s a problem with that, and it’s a complicated problem. spotted bass, also called Kentucky bass, and Alabama bass, also called spotted bass, are almost indistinguishable. When I thought about it later I had no clue whether we’d been fishing for Kentucky bass or Alabama bass. There’s an easy test. All you have to do is count the pored scales on the lateral line. Alabama bass usually–note the usually–have 71 or more scales with holes. Kentucky bass typically have 70 or fewer. If you use a magnifying glass and don’t lose count you can be pretty certain of your fish. Usually. Since we didn’t have a magnifying glass, and since we haven’t yet been to Kentucky and will likely never go back to Alabama, I’m claiming victory and declaring our spotted bass in the Tallapoosa River as Alabama bass.

Since I’d caught a largemouth just last week, and a smallmouth last year on the Shenandoah, I’m only five species away from a Bassmaster BASS Slam! I may make something of myself yet.

Back to the river, I had never heard of the Tallapoosa. I’ve heard of a lot of rivers, but before we left for Alabama if you’d asked me to name a single Alabama River, I couldn’t have named one. I knew there was a bridge in Selma, but I had no clue what river ran under it. It’s the Alabama, by the way, formed where the Tallapoosa and the Coosa meet near Montgomery.

We met Craig at the put-in at Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, considerably north of where the Coosa and the Tallapoosa meet. Our raft float to the Jaybird Creek boat launch was five and a half miles and a bit more than five hours. It’s a big river by my lights, not Mississippi big, but except around island channels where it narrows it’s at least a football field from bank to bank, and where the river falls it’s a limestone boulder garden. And there’s plenty enough fall. There are Class II and and even Class IV rapids on the river, though thank goodness no class IV where we fished.

It’s a tailwater, with four separate power dams. We were below the H.L. Harris Dam and above Lake Martin and Martin Dam. Craig said that the level of the river was driven by power generation at H.L. Harris, and that the river elevation could vary greatly. Maybe I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem that the dams have changed the fish in the river. These are native fish, the fish that were there before we were.

It’s a clean river too, though no river I’ve ever fished was clean enough that I could see bass in current. Ponds, sure, if a pond is clear I can see fish, but these aren’t stillwater bass. Spotted Alabama and redeye bass hunt in the current and we fished the pockets back of rocks and the lines where the speeds of the river changed, and as close to the banks as we could manage to cast.

They were clean, beautiful fish, perfect for the river. First things first. Redeyes do not have red eyes. Some we caught had a red spot on the gill plate, and that may be where the name comes from, but frankly we saw more red in the eyes of spotted bass. They also aren’t big, and the redeyes we caught in the river seemed to be in the neighborhood of a pound. But the dark green and black backs paired with the turquoise lower jaw and belly was so colorful, they’re an unforgettable fish. They also have on the edges of their fins the slightest tinge of white, a hint, a tell, a joy to discover.

The Alabama bass are larger, and frankly I’d have confused them with largemouth if I hadn’t known better. The colors, even the lateral markings, often aren’t that different. The most obvious difference is the jaw. The jaw on a largemouth extends back behind the eye, the spotted bass’s jaw is in front of the eye. Plus there’s the whole current thing. Largemouth don’t live long and prosper in current.

We both fished five weights with floating lines, and most of the float we fished poppers. It was funny popper fishing though. We cast the popper, let it drift like a dry fly, and now and again gave it a twitch. Do you know how to fish a popper on a pond? There are lots of ways I suppose, but my best luck is to cast the popper, let it sit until the ripples die, then give it a nudge. Then let the ripples die and give it another nudge. I guess this was similar but in the absence of pond ripples the popper drifted. It was like fishing dry flies on a drift, except for the now and then pop.

Sometimes the sunfish would hit it, but the poppers we were using were just a bit much for sunfish. Look, I have to admit it, and I had to admit it to Craig, give me a choice of any fish in the world to catch I’d probably catch a sunfish. I loved them as a child, and I love them now. I love to see their colors and to try to parse out the species. I love their ferocity. We were catching bass, yeah, and there’s no nobler calling, tarpon or trout-be-damned. But this year I’ve caught a paucity of sunfish. Late in the day I switched to a Barr’s slumpbuster I’d tied up for Kansas, because I knew I would catch sunfish. I caught sunfish. Craig said these were longears, and I’ll go with that.

Just a note on fishing with Craig. I’ve fished with a lot of guides. I’ve fished with well-known guides and I’ve fished with extraordinarily skillful guides. I’ve fished with guides who were too young to be guiding and guides who were fun to fish with precisely because they were old enough to have seen all they could possibly see, older even than me. I never fished with a guide who took as much joy from the place or from me catching a fish.

Late in the day a fish on Kris’s line went under a rock and couldn’t be brought up. Craig went in after it. That’s service, or maybe you just can’t keep an Alabama boy from noodling.

That’s Southern humor, and I can get away with it. Don’t you try it at home.

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Mississippi Packing List

Redfish, Shearwater Pottery.

Gear

For a long weekend fishing Ocean Springs, we took a Loomis Asquith 7 wt with a Tibor Back Country Reel (which are now discontinued–why did they do that?), an Orvis HD3 9 wt with an Orvis Mirage reel, and an Orvis H2 flex tip with a Tibor Riptide reel. All the lines were floating. We fished both the 9 weight and the 10 weight quite a bit, and I caught the black drum on the 10 weight. That was probably for the best. We never touched the 7. I love that 7, but guides generally don’t. We fished with Richard Schmidt.

Over time I keep adding random bits and pieces to my leaders. Richard shortened them because he said it was hard for him to track flies on long leaders, and the fish weren’t leader shy. The leaders were probably about eight feet after he’d finished. They all ended with 16 pound tippet. Or 20. Something more than 6X.

What we didn’t take was bug nets. I’m covered with welts from gnat bites. The good folk from Magnolia Fly Fishers swear by Gnaughty Gnat from Marina Cottage Soap Company as a gnat deterrent. There should be signs on the state border. There’s a version of Gnaughty Gnat with an spf 50 sunblock. I ordered some. If I could go back in time I’d order some then.

Flies

Not gnats. We used Richard’s, and it was purple Clousers or Clouser derivatives all the time. Dark skies, dark flies. They were big flies, maybe a #2 on the 9 and a 1/0 on the 10. Not muskie big, but two to three inches long for the largest.

I’ve never fished purple flies before. Live and learn.

Where We Stayed

We stayed at Front Beach Cottages, which I found online in an article in Coastal Living. We were in the Key West Cabin, and there’s irony in that. It was a lovely little place, within walking distance of the cute shops and restaurants, and even closer to the Walter Anderson Museum. It’s a good place.

Talk

Everybody in Mississippi is up for a conversation, so bring your A-game. In a cute shop (Ocean Springs is chock-a-block with cute shops) I had a long conversation with the proprietor about what it was like to be gay in Mississippi, living in Houston, and living in San Francisco. At dinner the people at the table next to us struck up a conversation that went on and on, and after they left their replacements never missed a beat. I can’t even remember what we talked about, but this is not only a world class fishery it’s a world class place for conversations with strangers.

Shearwater Pottery

Shearwater Pottery is in a kind of raggedy compound in Ocean Springs. It was founded by Walter Anderson’s oldest brother, Peter, and all three brothers, Walter, Peter, and James, made their living out of the pottery. It’s now run by descendants, and according to locals some of them still tend towards the eccentric. Richard said a descendent did magnificent tattoos, so if you’re in the market it’s a consideration. Some of the pottery is incredibly beautiful, and I guess because of the influence of Sophie Newcomb Memorial College there is a lot of innovative and interesting decorative and functional pottery made in Mississippi. The Museum of Mississippi History/Mississippi Civil Rights Museum store in Jackson has a great selection of potters from around the state, including Shearwater.

Shearwater Pottery.

Books

I listened to a bunch of stuff, and read some. There is so much great literature out of Mississippi, it’s baffling. Here’s my booklist.

  • Faulkner, The Hamlet. I read The Hamlet 40 years ago and it’s amazing how much of it I remembered, especially the Texan with the spotted horses and Eula Varner. She’s the world’s most literary pinup girl. We listened to it driving back and forth from the Guadalupe River and to Ocean Springs. It’s Faulkner at his happiest, which for other writers is their most grim.
  • Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, I probably read this 40 years ago too, but I didn’t remember anything if I did. Faulkner originally wrote this as a children’s book, with illustrations, but then he drank a bottle of Four Roses or ten and things got muddled. Not really about the children’s book, but there probably was some Four Roses. It’s usually compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses, without the humor, and the plot is announced early so you always know what’s coming, but when Henry Sutpen finally kills Charles Bon to stop him from marrying Judith Sutpen it is still stunning, Maybe the most stunning murder ever written, even though you knew from chapter one that it was coming, and the reason: not that Charles is Judith’s half-brother but because he has black blood. It’s perfect Faulkner, perfect.
  • Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1. I know the Civil War reasonably well, and I thought I could listen to this. I had to re-listen to the same stuff so often that I’d probably recommend buying the book. Where Foote shines is in his anecdotes about the big personages: Lincoln and Davis, Lee and Jackson and the string of Union Generals. He doesn’t have much to say about the small folk, and his descriptions of battles were usually where my mind would wonder. I missed the entire Seven Days Campaign and had to go back to re-listen.
  • Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi. I’d read it before, so I listened this time. Twain’s observations are so acute you have to trust them, even when he’s at his most outlandish.
  • Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones. Ward has now won two National Book Awards, and her first was for this. She’s on every list, but I was dubious. I invested in a listen and it was stunningly good. Can an old Texas white guy identify with a pregnant black 15-year-old whose brother has a fighting pit bull and whose father is an alcoholic? I reckon. It’s riveting, and the description of Katrina is as gripping as Faulkner’s murder of Henry Bon. She claims Faulkner as one of her influences, and I think he’d be proud.
  • Thomas Merton, Lectures on William Faulkner. Merton did a series of lectures at the Abbey of Gethsemani on Faulkner and some other stuff shortly before his death in 1968. His description of Easter in The Sound and the Fury made me wish that we didn’t drive cars to church. These are great to listen to, and each lecture is about 15 minutes long. I didn’t re-read The Bear (though I had intended to), but I got Merton’s description which may have been better.
  • Eudora Welty, Why I Live at the PO. I read more stories by Welty than just the one, but it was that one that every Mississippian seems to mention. I read it, but after a few drinks in our little cabin in Ocean Springs we played a YouTube recording of Ms. Welty reading the story. It’s worth doing both, and Kris suspects every Mississippian mentions the story because listening to Ms. Welty was the high point of 10th grade English. The talkative store owner said his sister’s cat was named Stella-Rondo, which I vow to appropriate if I ever own another cat.
  • Mark Childress, One Mississippi. I read this when it was published, and started listening to it but never quite finished. Parts of it ring true, parts don’t, but what Childress does catch is the 1970s. That’s pretty much exactly how I remember it.
  • Greg Iles, Natchez Burning. This is the first of a trilogy, and it’s a pretty engaging road trip listen. By volume two it’s just a bit too outlandish, even for Mississippi. I think Kris listened to all three. I got bored.
  • Westley F. Busbee, Jr., Mississippi: A History. It’s a college textbook so it’s pretty dry, and only got to the Civil War. I’d like to read through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement, and maybe I’ll get there when we go back for Kris’s fish.
  • Elijah Ward, The Blues: A Very Short History. This is a personal beef of mine: If you’re going to produce an audio book about music, why not do it right and include snippets of the music you’re writing about? It seems like the best of all possible media. The book has a particularly good chapter on Jimmie Rodgers.
  • Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto. I love books like this, and it was apparently a New York Times bestseller when it was published. It’s a memoir of an English literati who moves to the Mississippi Delta with his then girlfriend, now wife. Grant is a careful and sympathetic observer, and he likes pretty much everybody and makes them likable, notwithstanding flaws. I’m guessing he’s a lot like Mississippi, but I wish he’d mentioned the gnats.

Donuts

Tatonut Donuts in Ocean Springs is the best. The donuts aren’t elaborate, but they’re still warm and if you eat in the shop you can get coffee in a real ceramic mug. Every donut shop should do this. We had a second breakfast at Phoenecia Gourmet, and that was pretty good too. On the road trip we also hit both a bakery and a donut shop in Lafayette, Louisiana, which may have more real bakeries per capita than anyplace in the world short of Paris. And I’ve yet to run across a donut shop in Paris.

The dozen oysters we ate at Charred in Ocean Springs before dinner were uniform and plump, as good of Gulf oysters as I’ve eaten, and Richard explained that they were farmed. At Vestige where we actually ate dinner the other diners were memorably talkative. Mary Mahoney’s Old French House in Biloxi feels like it’s 30 years past its prime, but the Chimneys in Gulfport is outstanding. That was the best sauced tripletail I’ve ever eaten.

Tripletail, The Chimneys, Gulfport.

Where We Didn’t Go

We still haven’t been to Oxford, and we haven’t been to a juke joint in the Delta. We haven’t caught a sunfish or a bass or a catfish in freshwater, and of course Kris didn’t catch a fish. Did I mention I caught a big fish? Let me show you a picture.

Music

There is so much great music out of Mississippi. Here’s a list of who was on our playlist, and I’ll only talk separately about stuff that was particularly interesting to me. Albert King, Mississippi John Hurt, Elvis Presley, Mississippi Fred McDowell, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, Faith Hill, North Mississippi All-Stars, Cedric Burnside, Jimmie Rodgers, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Cream. It could have had a dozen more.

  • Johnny Cash & June Carter, Jackson. This was very popular when it was released in 1967. Kris had never heard it. She’s a lot younger than me.
  • Cedric Burnside. This was a surprise. When you listen to Burnside you hear bands like the White Stripes and the Black Keys. He should be as well known.
  • Faith Hill, “This Kiss“. I originally downloaded a bunch of Faith Hill, then I got rid of everything but “This Kiss.” It’s an infectious song, but listening to Hill made me think less of country music than of a Broadway musical without the complexity of a Broadway musical plot. I couldn’t take it. She did record the theme song to Lilo and Stitch, which is one of the strangest movies ever.
  • North Mississippi All-Stars. This is a current band, and a band I’d go out of my way to see.
  • Jimmie Rodgers. I think I’d always confused Jimmie Rodgers with Governor Jimmie Davis from Louisiana, who may or may not have co-written “You Are My Sunshine“. I had never listened to Rodgers, who’s considered one of the foundations of country music, but is just as important as a white guy singing the blues. On “Blue Yodel No. 9” Louis Armstrong on trumpet and Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano accompany Rodgers on the blues and where the heck did that come from? With yodeling? Elijah Ward says that Howlin’ Wolf said that he howled because he couldn’t yodel like Rodgers, which if true may be the single wittiest thing anyone has ever said.
Jimmie Rodgers, source unknown.

Movies

O Brother Where Art Thou. There’s a cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ “I’m in the Jailhouse Now.”

Mississippi Burning. Mississippi had more than its share of Civil Rights Movement confrontation and violence. Richard Grant tells a story about pulling up to the collapsing store in Money, Mississippi, where the Emmett Till tragedy started. The tag line is basically that the folk of Money were exhausted: the murder of Emmett Till was the only thing they were known for. I suspect a lot of Mississippi, black and white, feels that way and wants to move on. I thought Mississippi Burning was no worse than it should be, but I suspect moving past that story line is the real story about modern Mississippi.

Guitar.

I took the Kohno, and sat in front of our cabin and played Bach. Another guest asked if I was hired or a guest which was flattering, but I should have told her I worked for tips.

Walter Anderson, Part of a Wall, Ocean Springs Community Center Mural, 1951.
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Ocean Springs

Walter Anderson, Detail, Ocean Springs Community Center Mural, 1951.

We fished Saturday and Sunday. That seems like a small thing, we fish lots of Saturdays and Sundays, but so far this year I have caught a tiny bluegill (which was all I caught in January) and two small rainbows (which were all I caught in February). Meanwhile we’ve fished at Key West, Oahu, on the Texas Coast, and in the Hill Country. Since we were in Mississippi to try for another state things were bound to go wrong.

And last Saturday was bad even for March fishing on the Gulf. it was overcast and there was a 20+ knot wind from the south–which meant if we had just stood still and held our arms out we could have visited Memphis. To get to the leeward side of Horn Island we had to quarter the wind eight miles through three-foot slop, the kind of scary slop that in our skiff by ourselves would have left us alternately screaming at each other and clinging to each other in terror, hoping we didn’t die.

Our guide, Richard Schmidt, ran the right boat for the water, a Hell’s Bay Marquesas with a 90 hp Suzuki, and we were always perfectly safe. But Richard was pretty dubious about taking us out in that weather, and my jokes about us being casting impaired didn’t help any. The high wind coupled with the low chance of enough sun to see fish left things pretty sketchy, and when Richard suggested that sometimes his customers were casting challenged, I chimed in that he’d be well prepared for us. The joke fell flat. This was not a funny day. I was worried he was going to turn the boat around.

Instead he took us on to Horn Island. He had boiled crawfish and beer in the cooler, so whatever happened we were going to have a good day, and I would have gone to Horn Island just to see it.

Walter Anderson, Turtle Diptych, Walter Anderson Museum, Watercolor on Two Sheets of Typing Paper, c. 1960.

Horn Island is part of the Gulf Coast Islands Seashore, and it’s a national treasure because, while it’s pretty enough–eight miles of sculpted pines and sugar white sand and dune colors–it’s Walter Anderson’s subject. I kept saying it was beautiful because, well, it was, but it was also beautiful because my eye had been prepared by Anderson. It’s hard not to see Anderson everywhere on the island.

I had never heard of Walter Anderson until I read The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. Jack Davis spends pages talking about him, and having read Davis the first thing I asked the lady at the front desk at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art was whether he was really crazy? “No,” the nice lady said, “He was just eccentric.” Mississippians being polite have eccentric, us Texans being harsher have crazy.

At dinner Friday Kris and I had talked mostly about Anderson–the lady at the desk said she personally thought he was bipolar, and that may not be crazy all the time but it’s at least eccentric. There were so many things to talk about, about how he lived apart from his family but how still from time to time new children would appear, about how he tied himself to a tree on Horn Island to experience Hurricane Betsy, about his long trips rowing the eight miles to Horn Island to live and sketch, and about his genius. Mostly about his genius. His work is so brilliant, so evocative of the place and more than a bit madly obsessive. How do we all not know Walter Anderson as well as we know Van Gogh, as well as we know Picasso? At least as well as we know Donald Judd?

And Horn Island is exactly what you see when you see much of Anderson’s work. Plus, right off the bat I caught a fish.

It wasn’t a very big fish. It was a 16-inch red that took my fly when I blind-cast to a place that to me looked fishy. The fish was silver, not red or bronze, with the bluest tail I’ve ever seen. Everything in Mississippi has the blues. After that Kris camped out on the casting platform and pretty much stayed there. I napped and ate crawfish, so I was happy, mostly. Kris hooked a redfish, too, a good 20-pounder, but the leader broke. Wind knot? probably a wind knot. There wasn’t a pig tail, so it wasn’t a badly tied connection, and anyway I’m sure that all of my knots are always perfect. The tippet was Rio fluorocarbon so even though the spool was a few years old it shouldn’t have snapped without some cause. Wind knot.

Otherwise while Kris fished I tried to take photos of the bald eagle and the ospreys on the island, and when I walked up into the dunes for a rest break I saw raccoon and seabird tracks in the sand. There was a moment when I was allowed a brief, very short stint back on the casting platform and watched hundreds of schooled sheepshead streaming down the beach, aggregating for their spawn. It is such a living place. We got some sun, and when we did we saw fish. We got some shots.

Sunday the problem wasn’t wind. There was no wind so instead we got fog, heavy fog that Kris and I wouldn’t have braved alone and that nobody else did either, and gnats. Gnats from hell. Gnats that we breathed, and ate, and that searched out every small bit of exposed and un-sprayed skin for a good feed. I was on the platform at one point and I looked down at a bit of hand I’d missed with bug spray and there were at least 200 gnats a’swarming. I have gnat bites on my bald spot. I have a raccoon-ring of welts around each eye where the Buff didn’t quite meet my sunglasses, and where I had avoided spaying bug spray for my eyes. Driving home Sunday, about the time we reached Louisiana, the gnat bites started itching. They were still itching 24 hours later.

Richard ran the boat 30 minutes through fog into the marshes out of Pass Christian, which is pronounced “Pass Christy-Anne,”with just a hint of “-ch-” between the “t” and the “y”. The water wasn’t clear, it had been better when we’d fished the day before, but Richard said that even in the marsh it usually was clear on the east side of the Mississippi. The Corps was diverting freshwater out of the Mississippi River through Lake Pontchartrain into the Gulf to avoid flooding downriver from New Orleans, and it killed the clarity. Apparently it also kills the oysters.

Richard said that beginning in May he guides mostly for jack crevalle on the flats and triple-tail near the crab traps. Kris never did catch a fish, so I’m thinking that means we need to go back. I’ve never landed a big jack crevalle. I’ve never fished for triple-tail. Plus the Mississippi Coast may be as pretty a place as I’ve ever fished.

And on the second day, late in the day, Kris let me on the platform just a wee bit more and I saw a swirl in a couple of feet of water and made a magnificent 90-foot cast to set my fly on the nose of the new world-record black drum. Ok, I’m lying, it isn’t the new world-record black drum, but it was one huge black drum–in the Gulf Coast parlance a big ugly. Richard thought it weighed somewhere between 40 and 50 pounds, so it was at least 60. And of course it’s growing.

And ok, I’m lying. It wasn’t a magnificent 90-foot cast, it was more of a rod-lenth flick. The fly was purple, with barbell eyes and it probably traced its lineage to a Clouser. I was fishing a ten weight Orvis Helios II and a Tibor Riptide (it’s probably important that you know that the Tibor was blue and that my shirt was sea-foam green). People always say black drum are blind, and maybe they are, but this drum made a six-inch rush to my fly, ate it, and I strip set. I really did. I strip-set.

Then everything stopped. The big drum pondered a bit and started to mosey away. It stopped, started moving again, realized it was hooked to something, and then it did something black drum don’t do: it ran. Their cousin the redfish will run, but black drum usually hunker down and make you pull them out. Ok, it didn’t run wild and fast like a permit or a jack, it didn’t twist and jump like steelhead, it ran like a train, straight and hard and purposeful and surprisingly fast, all the way into my backing: bubble-gum pink by the way, I’d never seen it before from that angle. Then when it stopped and figured out it was still hooked it ran some more. And then it ran some more. Richard polled in its direction which helped, but every time I started bringing it back it ran some more. It was big and it ran.

It didn’t take that long to land, less than a quarter hour, but it was some work. When I brought it boatside and Richard lipped the fish with his Boca Grip the hook fell out. We got some pictures, though they didn’t do it justice. Look at those shoulders! That color! That tail hanging halfway to the deck! It may not have been a world record, but it was without doubt the handsomest big ugly ever landed. It probably would have shown better if I’d held it up in front of us, arms extended, but I’m not sure I could have lifted it.

We fished a couple of more hours, and would be fishing still if it were up to Kris and Richard.

I loved fishing Ocean Springs. I have rarely been to a prettier place. Richard was a fine guide, plus he brought crawfish, and once you get past the Biloxi casinos the Mississippi Coast is charming. And did I mention? I caught a big fish–the black drum of the world, the most beautiful black drum ever landed and for that moment I was the handsomest gnat-infested angler who ever landed a fish. There just aren’t better places.

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What I Want for Christmas

We’re driving to Ocean Springs, not flying. It’s a ‘fer piece, according to Apple Maps more than 400 miles, mostly east but a bit north (Yankees!), six hours and 19 minutes skirting roughly half of the north shore of the Gulf of Mexico. In our driving time six hours means seven. And 19 minutes.

We leave Friday and will be back Monday. It’s not a blue highway sort of drive, it’s I-10, the interstate that runs from Santa Monica, California, to Jacksonville, Florida, and it’s a drive I know well: from El Paso to Houston but also east. There’s Rao’s Bakery in Beaumont and the donut shop in Lake Charles where the boudin kolache was created. There’s boudin and crawfish pie at the Sausage Link in Sullivan and the 18-mile bridge over the Atchafalaya Basin. If we went earlier, Thursday evening, we could spend the night in Lafayette and go dancing. Last time I checked they still sell Haspel Suits in Baton Rouge. Once we get to Slidell above New Orleans on the northeast shore of Lake Pontchartrain I’m not so familiar with things, and every time I’ve gone as far as Mobile on I-10 I’ve turned north toward Atlanta, but we stop short of Mobile. Mobile will have to wait for a different trip.

We originally planned to fly to New Orleans, rent a car, and drive to Ocean Springs, and I had made all the reservations. A direct flight from Houston to New Orleans is only about an hour, and I’ve always got Southwest flight points: instead of enhanced Medicaid every Texan gets 10- or 20-thousand Southwest points every couple of months. With airport and driving time from New Orleans to Ocean Springs we could make the trip in about five hours. Five hours and 19 minutes. But truth is I love a good road trip, and with flying you lose the imagination of the countryside: that road would be good to bike down, that bayou would be good to canoe, would that farmer let me fish that pond? Could we live here? It’s better than buying a lottery ticket.

Plus there’s seven hours in which we can play the Mississippi playlist and finish listening to Faulkner’s The Hamlet (which I think hilarious and Kris thinks grim) and eat Cheetos and boudin and search for donuts. And how can Kris think The Hamlet grim, at least parts of it anyway? What reasonably empathetic heterosexual (or maybe not even heterosexual) male can’t see the goofier side of his infatuation in Labove and Eula Varner? I’m just lucky Kris didn’t whack me across the head.

So at TroutFest there was one of these from Four Wheel Pop-up Campers:

https://fourwh.com/product/hawk-short-bed-popup-truck-camper-regular-size/

And there was one of these from Into the Wild Overland:

https://itwoverland.com/#

And they were either one about $30,000 as outfitted–they had every possible accessory. My children have been to college and beyond, and I can imagine retirement. I was taken with the notion of driving one of those things to a donut shop in the Rockies. Out of Denver the Into the Wild campers are available for rent for $150 per night. It doesn’t seem to have a toilet, and that might be a deal-killer.

When you start looking around you can find all sorts of folk who have caught fish on a fly, or at least a fish, in all 50 states. There’s a guy and his son who did all 50 states in 50 days, which makes my stomach queasy. There’s a lovely husband and wife who did all 50 states in a year. There’s a guide in southwest Colorado who tallied up his prior experience and realized he only lacked six or so states and went out and got them. But dang, I could spend a year reading books from Mississippi, much less fishing the farm ponds and eating the tamales and listening to the blues. I’m not in any hurry, and spending less than a month in Montana seems like a crime. So this whole RV thing is really appealing.

https://mercedessprinterrvrentals.com/mercedes-sprinter-rental-fleet/

I’d thought next year of a grand Southwestern tailwater tour: the San Juan, Lee’s Ferry, and the Green. I can rent a Mercedes Sprinter Van for 10 days from Mercedes Sprinter RV Rental for about $6000, which is expensive but I wouldn’t at the end of the day have to own the thing, and it’s about the price for one of us staying in a very good lodge for a week in Alaska, not including drinks. I could pick it up in Albuquerque and not have to skip Taos or Chama or Chaco Canyon, and we could drop it off in Salt Lake City. We could also drive on that tailwater road trip and stay in motels. For cheaper. Or dig one of the tents out of the attic.

I don’t know. I didn’t much like staying in the Airbnb in Hawaii, nothing wrong with it but nothing right with it either, and I kept thinking that I’d rather be staying inThe Royal Hawaiian. Or a camper. A road trip camper. With a standard poodle named Charlie on a Blue Highway, self-contained, meandering. Of course once I got there I’d still rather be staying in The Royal Hawaiian.