Category: Southwest

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New Mexico, Part Dos

Spanish settlement in New Mexico dates from 1598, nine years before the English settled Jamestown and 22 years before Massachusetts got its Pilgrims. The Spanish had already been in and out of New Mexico for a while. Cabeza de Vaca wandered through about 1536 and Coronado came looking for Cibolo in 1540. Exploration was reasonably frequent after that. 

The Spanish left for a bit too. After the 1680 Pueblo Revolt drove the surviving Spanish out, they stayed out for 12 years, but they came back and picked up where they left off. Permanent European settlement of the 50 States really begins with the Spanish in New Mexico.

Settlers’ arrival in 1598 was two years before the birth of Diego Velasquez in Seville, twelve years after the birth of Cervantes, and the year that Phillip III, King of Spain, ascended as Phillip II to the thrones of Portugal, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and to the Dukedom of Milan. The Spanish Armada had failed to invade England only ten years before, but that failure was more an act of God than of man. New Mexico was the furthest settled edge of one of the 16th Century’s most powerful and sophisticated nations.

El Santuario de Chimayo, Chimayo, New Mexico.

The Spanish settlers brought with them Catholicism, government structures, laws, language, and culture, including folkways and a debt peonage system for poor Hispanics and out-and-out slavery for captured Navajos that were every bit as inhumane as chattel slavery. Both outlived adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment by a decade. 

Spanish communities persisted in isolation, preserving a culture with roots not in Pennsylvania or Virginia or Massachusetts, but in Spain and Colonial Mexico. Settlers adopted Pueblan crops–beans, squash, chilis, and corn were as important to the Hispanos as they had been to the Chacoans–but they also developed their own sometimes peculiar offshoots of Spanish culture–Los Penitentes come to mind, as does the possible existence of Crypto-Jews.

Jean Nicolas Du Tralage and Vincenzo Coronelli, Le Nouveau Mexique appelé aussi Nouvelle Grenade et Marata, avec Partie de Californie, 1687, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries Special Collections

In 1848 the United States took New Mexico from Mexico under the treaty ending the Mexican-American War. If they chose, then-Mexican citizens of New Mexico could either keep their Mexican citizenship or renounce it and become Americans. It was a mess. There were no real records of who renounced and who didn’t, and because Mexican citizens couldn’t vote or serve on juries, there were persistent questions as to whose vote counted. Some things don’t change. Questions of who was and who wasn’t a citizen persisted until statehood was finally granted in 1912, more than 300 years after the founding of Santa Fe. 

The American conquest of New Mexico was deeply distrusted by both Mexicans and Indians. The invading Americans disliked the Hispanos’ language and religion. The Hispanos disliked the Americans’ language and religion. In 1847, the allied Taos Pueblans and Spanish New Mexicans violently revolted. The territorial governor, the trader Charles Bent, was murdered and scalped, along with just about everybody else in Taos holding office under the American government. When troops came to re-secure Taos, the rebels took sanctuary in the Taos Pueblo church, which was promptly leveled. In a strange mis-labeling, 28 of the rebels were hung for the crimes of murder or treason, though strictly speaking they weren’t American citizens and were being hung for committing treason against an invasion.

Ruin of the Taos Pueblo church, 1881.

As an attempt to understand this jumble of cultures and prejudices, I’m particularly fond of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop , and every few years will re-read all or parts of it. I always wonder how Cather arrived at writing about a French Jesuit New Mexican bishop. She was not New Mexican, she was not Catholic, and she was not French. It’s a novel with not so much of a plot as a progression, the fictionalized life of Bishop Lamy recounted in a series of episodes, but Cather’s themes, Catholicism at the church’s margins and the intersection of New Mexican cultures, still hold true, though these days there are fewer donkeys.

In addition to Spanish and Chacoan descendants, Navajo, and Apache, New Mexico also has Anglos. Of the roughly 2.1 million people in New Mexico, 36.8% are white only, 49.3% are Hispanic, 11% are American Indian, 2.6% are Black, and 1.8% are Asian. It’s not a populous state; by population, New Mexico ranks 37th. By population density, it ranks 6th, less dense than South Dakota, but denser than Idaho. It is a Western state.

Eastern New Mexico shares the Llano Estacado with the Texas Panhandle, and driving the 335 miles from Clarendon, Texas, pop. 1,842, elev. 2,733 feet, to roughly Santa Rosa, New Mexico, pop. 2636, elev. 4616 feet, is a lesson in humility, a spur to daydreams, and one of the great challenges to ownership of an electric car. The drive from Fort Worth to Santa Fe is 620 miles, about 12 hours, and, depending on your taste, it is either magnificent or hell, or maybe both. 

Google Maps

It’s a drive I’ve made all or parts of hundreds of times, and I like it. The world changes west of the 90th meridian. Texas sheds more of its Southern heritage and becomes more Western, wet clothes dry faster, all those pesky trees are rarer–and in a lot of it trees just aren’t there. You can see mountains from Albuquerque, and there are mountains south around Cloudcroft and Ruidoso. The gaudiest beauty of New Mexico though is in the northern mountains, surrounding Santa Fe and Taos. Further west things generally flatten again, though it’s high desert, and certainly not flat by Llano Estacado standards. By the time you reach the far west of the state, Farmington’s elevation is 5,394 feet, Gallup’s is 6,468 feet, and even Anthony, just outside of El Paso, is 3,802 feet. Back in the Rockies near Taos, Wheeler Peak in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is 13,167 feet. 

In recent years, New Mexico has tended Democratic, but it switches between Republican and Democratic governors fairly regularly. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the state 48.26%, against Donald Trump’s 40.04%, but Gary Johnson, a home-grown Libertarian, received 9.3% of the 2016 vote (which probably hurt President Trump more than Senator Clinton). In a landslide, Joe Biden received 54% of the vote in 2020, and Trump stayed relatively flat at 43%. Oddly, while rural Eastern New Mexico lines up decidedly Republican, the state is not so clearly split between rural Republican voters and urban Democrats. There’s some of that, but some of New Mexico’s blue counties are decidedly rural. It’s almost as if the high country tends left, both geographically and politically. Maybe the Navajo and the Zuni vote blue. The Zuni are certainly mysterious.

KyleReese64, New Mexico 2020 Presidential Election map, Wikipedia.

Both United States Senators from New Mexico are Democrats, and both houses of the New Mexico legislature are controlled by Democrats.

So what about New Mexico Anglos? For 13,000 years, New Mexico has been a settlement magnet, and Anglo-Americans are just the arrivistes. American traders out of Independence, Missouri, first opened the Santa Fe Trail in 1821 to reach New Mexico silver. That makes Anglos a bit later than the Navajo and the Spanish, but even the Anglos are closing in on two centuries. 

National Park Service, Santa Fe Trail

What do New Mexicans like about Texans? We visit and then get out. We’ve invaded New Mexico twice, once under the Republic of Texas (while New Mexico was controlled by Mexico), and once during the Civil War (while New Mexico was controlled by the Union). Both invasions were disasters. Now Texans just go to New Mexico for vacations, or maybe to retire, which is a kind of extended vacation. 

What do New Mexicans hate about Californians? They come and then they stay. California stuff has proliferated, and now it’s a lot easier to find a good yoga class, or a cute restaurant, or decorative coyotes. Are there still decorative coyotes? I’ll have to check.

Millicent Rogers, 1940s, Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos. This image is almost certainly copyright protected, but is used under the fair use exception. I hope so anyway.

My friend Darrell used to insist that Santa Fe was a town run by rich women. What did he mean? I never knew, exactly, but it’s a statement I’ve pondered–Darrell rarely says things that aren’t worth pondering–and I think I kinda know. The culture of Northern New Mexico was shaped in part by women like Georgia O’Keefe and Millicent Rogers. It’s loaded with museums and opera and of cute and very expensive fine and traditional art galleries in Taos and Santa Fe. Oh sure, there are normal everyday folk in New Mexico. Still, it’s the influx of art beginning in the 1920s that’s so much a part of New Mexico’s appeal, and that gave women space to shape the culture. After New York and Los Angeles, Santa Fe is the States’ third largest art market. Maybe I just made that up, but the notion feels right: New Mexico is one of those places where not just manly industry but feminine high culture has its say.

Maybe that’s what Darrell meant, or maybe he just meant that the Santa Fe city council was stacked with rich woman. Maybe it’s all just sexist drivel. I’m not sure.

Beyond high culture, New Mexico is also poor. It’s per capita annual income, $23,683, ranks 47th among the states. Out there among the decorative coyotes, there’s real poverty. New Mexico’s alcohol-related death rate is the highest in the nation, and is highest among Native Americans. Española, New Mexico, a largely Hispanic town of 10,044 near Santa Fe, is regularly ranked as one of the most violent communities in the nation. In 2017, the violent crime rate in Española was 644.86% higher than the national average.  Traveling the 30 miles to Española from Santa Fe, you can turn right to go to Chimayo, left to Abiquiu and the San Juan, or continue northwest to Taos. You can’t get many places north of Santa Fe without going through Española, and there are plenty of places in the north worth going to. Española, maybe not so much.

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New Mexico, Part 1

My father first visited Santa Fe, in 1945. He was 22, an Army Air Corp flight officer stationed at Kirtland AFB as the war wore down. He borrowed a car and drove north until the road dumped him into the Santa Fe plaza. I suspect there was more to Santa Fe than he remembered, but he found a parking place on the Plaza, which may be the last time any tourist did.

From our West Texas home, I spent plenty of time in New Mexico growing up, and then more time later. Along with the the fine roads into the Rockies, the architecture, the cool summer nights and pleasant days, the smell of piñon, the inhabited Pueblos and the uninhabited Anasazi ruins, the clear cold water, the high desert, it was, and is, beautiful.

I caught my first trout in New Mexico, and my second and my third. Kris and I honeymooned in Santa Fe, and it was the first time I’d been to Santa Fe in the winter. Later, one late night driving down a washboard road to Chaco Canyon, my rearview mirror fell into my lap. In the village of Cordova, in a modest home off the high road from Santa Fe to Taos, I bought an unpainted hand-carved Santo of St. Michael and the dragon. As I left, the señora–she seemed ancient–gave me a small home-grown apple almost as wizened as she was. I was driving and camping, de-toxing after the bar exam, and had been backpacking for a few days at Bandelier National Monument. I probably smelled a bit ripe. I think she suspected I was spending my last dollars on her family’s carvings, and like as not I was. I still have the St. Michael bulto. Even more, I still have that apple’s kind intent.

Sammy Cordova, Cordova, N.M, St. Michael and the Dragon, 1984.

I joke that there are two kinds of Texans: Texans who love Santa Fe and Texans who love New Orleans. I’ve grown to like New Orleans well enough, but my heart is always with New Mexico. I have spent a lifetime pondering it, appreciating it, wishing I was there. I have never spent enough time there. I never will.

Beyond its physical beauty, there is no state where disparate cultures have coexisted for so long, or have been so studied, or have so preserved their own identity. There is a Navajo joke about the typical Navajo family consisting of a mom, a dad, four kids, and an anthropologist. Our country’s most irksome mystery, the 12th century disappearance of the complex pre-Pueblan cultures at and surrounding Chaco Canyon, reaches us after an earlier archeological progression of hunter-gatherers, basket-weavers, pottery makers, complex builders, farmers, hunters of mega-fauna . . . All traceable through a rich legacy of physical remains. People paint onto the abandonment of Chaco (or Mesa Verde, or Keet Seel, or any of the others) their own predispositions, whether they’re prone to the wacko or the scientific, whether they believe in alien invasions or ecological disasters; the mystery of the abandonment is large enough to accommodate and in their mind validate their notions, however peculiar.

I have a duffer’s understanding (maybe misunderstanding) of New Mexican Indian history. In the east the culture was Plains, Comanche and Kiowa I think, not so different from West Texas, and as far as I know none of that culture survives there except as artifacts. Along the Rio Grande and to the west there are 19 remaining Pueblos, dating from more than 1,000 years ago and reduced from the 100 or so inhabited Pueblos when the Spanish arrived. These are our country’s oldest continually settled communities. The remaining Pueblos are certainly (but somewhat mysteriously) connected to the abandoned pre-Pueblan sites, though they are divided among Keresan, Tewa, Hopi, and Zuni language groups.

The Navajo and Apache were relative latecomers, and speak a closely-related Athabaskan language. They arrived in what is now New Mexico and Arizona late, in the 1500s, and the Apache remained hunter-gatherers. The Navajo changed. They borrowed from everybody–they made pots, they built stone defensive structures, they farmed, and after the Spanish arrived they stole sheep and became nomadic shepherds. They even borrowed religious practices from the Hopi, the Hopi being top-notch at getting rid of witches. Among both the Pueblos and the Navajo witches are commonly believed to be a source of many of the world’s evils.

The Navajo seem to know how to absorb: not always, not too much, but plenty enough for us to recognize and identify with their relative plasticity. The Zuni, the most remote and traditional of the Pueblan cultures, will remain mysterious to almost everybody but the Zuni, precisely because of their adherence to tradition. Navajo culture on the other hand makes a lot of sense. After all, every Navajo family has its own anthropologist.

Stella Chavarrio, Santa Clara Pueblo, carved jar, 1984.

Through the 19th century, the Navajo fought with everybody–the Utes in Colorado and Utah, the Pueblo settlements, the Spanish, the Mexicans, and then the Americans. They didn’t completely appreciate the concept of property ownership, and all of those other folk were kinda like the supermarket. When in August 1846 during the Mexican-American War, General Kearney led American Troops to take Santa Fe from Mexico, the occupation was extremely unpopular, but at least at the time it was bloodless. Among other things, Kearney promised to end Navajo depredations. He didn’t. The Navajo pretty much did what they wanted until violent and destructive campaigns in the 1860s forced many of the Navajo to walk nearly 300 miles to the Bosque Redondo reservation at Fort Sumner in Eastern New Mexico. The exile to Bosque Redondo, the Long Walk, was a brutal disaster, and is still a bitter memory among the Navajo. In 1868 the Navajo were allowed to return to their traditional lands.

The territories of the Utes and the Navajo were divided by Western New Mexico’s most certain source of water, the San Juan River, John the Baptist River, or in Navajo Są́ Bitooh, Old Man River. The San Juan feeds into the Colorado, and before it was dammed it was broad, slow, and muddy. It was a catfish river, and still is in its warmer parts. In its colder parts every fly fisher knows the San Juan. In Pennsylvania, sitting with a group of anglers at a picnic table at Fisherman’s Paradise, someone asked where we’d go next. I said I thought New Mexico. Two people immediately offered that they knew where we could fish in New Mexico, the San Juan. It’s now one of the Southwest’s glamour rivers, a clear, cold, nutrient-rich tailwater offering big trout for even the most incompetent. Being among the most incompetent, I’ve fished the San Juan a few times, and it deserves its reputation. We won’t go there.

Navajo, wool weaving, 1990.
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Oklahoma Packing List

Stuff We Took

We took my car. It’s a 2012 diesel with 117 thousand miles. It needs the tires rotated and it uses a bit of oil. It ran great. For our other trips this year we’ve flown and rented, and we’re now pretty proficient at hooking the phone through the rental car radio (if they’re still called radios). We can hook into whatever Mitsubishi or Ford or Mazda mid-sized SUV the rental company gives us with minimal stress and only a few harsh words, but it’s still nicer to be in my car. 

I fished with a 10′ 4 wt. Kris fished with her Helios 3D 5 wt. that I gave her for Christmas last year. Chris the Guide wished it was the softer version, but she cast beautifully. Maybe she missed more strikes because of the hard rod, but man was it fun to watch her cast.  

There’s nothing else remarkable about what we packed except that I bought a bag of Cheetos. You can’t have a road trip without Cheetos, unless it’s a road trip with Fritos and bean dip. 

We ate two dinners the night we arrived, just to try things out: chicken fried steak at Abendigo’s and pizza at the Grateful Head.  Both were excellent, and the local beers were excellent. I no longer eat nearly enough chicken fried steak. We had leftover pizza on the river on Saturday, so two dinners was perfectly reasonable. We stayed at the Hotchatown Country Lodge, and had a breakfast burrito at Adam and Eve’s Coffee Shop before we fished on Saturday.  That place has good coffee. 

Beavers Bend is in the Choctaw Nation, but we missed most of the cultural stuff. We did take a photo of the casino. We also walked through the Forest Heritage Center Museum, which is peculiar, but there’s no doubt this is a lumber town. 

I now believe that forest science research is best carried out in white pumps. 

When we started planning Oklahoma, I asked an Oklahoma fly fishing group on FaceBook where we should fish, and here’s what I got:

• Sandies in the spring, but no specifics on places
• Bluegill, but no specifics on places
• Trout on the Lower Illinois
• Trout on the Lower Mountain Fork
• Smallmouth on the Upper Illinois in the summer
• Stripers on the Lower Illinois in the summer
• Carp, but no specifics on places

Personally, any of those could have been great, and I’d already thought about white bass. End of the day, the Mountain Fork was convenient. Kris already talks about Oklahoma more fondly than anyplace we’ve fished, and we were only really there for one day.

The other place I thought about was the Wichita Mountains. It’s the nation’s oldest wildlife preserve, and notwithstanding Yellowstone it deserves credit for preserving the buffalo. Hiking there once I looked up at a ridge line and watched a dozen elk watching me. They seemed to find me peculiar, and many share their opinion.There’s a series of ponds and small lakes spread through the refuge, and it would have made a good place for bluegill.

What I Didn’t Write About

The Cherokees, slavery, and the Confederacy. There are two recognized Cherokee tribes in Oklahoma. They seem to have split over the Civil War: the larger tribe supported the Confederacy, the smaller the Union. The Cherokee who owned slaves took them along to Oklahoma.

The 1909 Jim Crow amendments to the Oklahoma Constitution. Roosevelt refused to approve the Constitution for 1907 statehood until the Jim Crow provisions were removed, then the state constitution was amended in 1909 to put them back in.

Part of district burned in race riots, Tulsa, Okla, .American Red Cross, 1921, Library of Congress

The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. One of the bloodiest two day white riots in American history, it’s also known, appropriately, as the Tulsa massacre. Thirty-six African Americans died, and thirty-five blocks of the established African American Greenwood neighborhood were burned to the ground.

Tulsa burning, Alvin C. Krupnick Co., photographer, 1921, Library of Congress

Quanah Parker. I didn’t write enough about Quanah Parker. I didn’t write enough about the Wichita.

Boom Town, by Sam Anderson. It’s on the New York Times’ 100 notable books for 2018, and it’s a fine book about Oklahoma City. It had me checking The Thunder in the NBA standings, and recommending the book. Great book.

Ralph Ellison. Ralph Ellison is from Oklahoma City. I tried to re-read Invisible Man, but couldn’t. It’s a hard book.

The 2018 Elections. There’s now a Democratic congresswoman from Oklahoma City. There’s also a pretty interesting war going on in the Oklahoma Republican Party.

Playlist

I should have known Oklahoma had such great music, but I didn’t. I’ve already mentioned that Oklahoma was the home of five of the finest guitarists I know. And Woodie Guthrie. And John Moreland.

Bob Wills Publicity Photo, C. 1946, Wikipedia
  • John Moreland. In the Throes. I saw a review of John Moreland’s new album in Garden & Gun a few weeks ago, then ran across him in an inernet list of 10 Oklahoma bands you should be listening to now. If Bruce Springsteen sang Americana music he would be John Moreland. This is music about the Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, high school prom. Robin, take note: this is great stuff.
  • The Call. Some random songs. I didn’t pay much attention to them the first time around, and gave them short shrift this time. They probably deserve better. Or maybe not. 
  • Garth Brooks. I think I would like Garth Brooks, but his music is only available on Amazon, and I’m not technologically proficient enough to know whether I can download something on Amazon and listen to it on ITunes. 
  • The Flaming Lips. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. My daughter tells me that The Flaming Lips were one of her favorite bands in high school. Wayne Coyne lives in Oklahoma City, and is a central character in Sam Anderson’s Boom Town.
  • Woodie Guthrie. I’d been listening to Guthrie in Oregon. I downloaded covers of his songs from his 100th birthday celebration at the Kennedy Center and some other stuff. Billy Bragg and Wilco’s “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key” is the best Woodie Guthrie song that Woodie Guthrie didn’t write.
  • Charlie Christian. Charlie Christian: The Genius of the Electric Guitar. Charlie Christian invented the electric guitar solo, and then died of tuberculosis at the age of 26. He made some fine recordings with Benny Goodman. 
Charlie Christian, Charlie Christian Family Archives
  • Leo Kottke. Acoustic Guitar once did a list once of the 50 greatest acoustic guitar albums. I don’t know where Kottke’s 6- and 12-String Guitar ranked, but I remember the review. The record came out in 1969, and they guessed that more joints were rolled in college dorm rooms on that album cover than on any other. I bet they were right. It at least ran a close second to Sergeant Pepper.
  • Michael Hedges. Hedges was New Age Music, which was once a thing. I had Hedges’ Aerial Boundaries because of that Acoustic Guitar list. He died in 1997 in a car wreck.
  • Roy Clark. “But I Never Picked Cotton.” He died last week. After a near 50-year interval I once again spent way too much time watching Hee Haw, this time on YouTube. His duets with Glen Campbell in the TV heyday were pretty amazing. 
  • Tuck Andress, of Tuck and Patti. Tears of Joy. Andress is such a fine jazz guitarist. He’s also St. Vincent’s uncle.
  • Jerry Jeff Walker, “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” She was, after all, born in Oklahoma.
  • Merle Haggard, “Okie from Muskogee.” The companion piece to “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” Together the two songs form the yin and yang of country music.
  • Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Bob Wills–For the Last Time. Wills was born in Turkey, Texas, near my hometown, but the Playboys spent a good part of their career on Tulsa radio. I took that as enough of an excuse to include Bob Wills on the playlist. I don’t know how I’ll get him into the Hawaii list. There is a steel guitar. 
  • Cross Canadian Ragweed. Cross Canadian Ragweed. There’s an Americana sub-genre of country out of Oklahoma called Red Dirt Music. I picked Cross Canadian Ragweed because I liked the name, but there are several others, and I suspect some may be better. The Canadian River, by the way, is the longest tributary to the Arkansas River. It starts in Colorado, and crosses New Mexico, the Texans Panhandle, and Oklahoma. 
  • Chet Baker. Chet Baker Sings. Chet Baker is a cross between Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and James Dean. 
  • Jimmy LaFave. Texoma. More Red Dirt Music, LaFave left Oklahoma for Austin, and died last year. I can’t say enough good things about LaFave.
  • J.J. Cale. Troubadour. The guy who wrote “After Midnight.”
  • Jimmie Webb. The guy who wrote “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman.” 
  • Hoyt Axton. The guy who wrote “The Pusher,” “Never Been to Spain,” and “Joy to the World.”
  • Leon Russell. Carney. I always figured “This Masquerade” was a cover of a much older song. It’s not. 
  • Blake Shelton. Red River Blue. There was absolutely nothing memorable about Blake Shelton, except Kris yelling turn him off every time one of his songs shuffled through. My daughter told me that this is a sub-genre of country known as Bro’ Country, which is mostly about drinking, driving pickups, and admiring young women. I did think the song about the honey bee was cute, but then Kris yelled at me to turn it off.
  • Reba McEntire. Reba. Reba has a nicer voice than I expected, and she handles her material well. Some of the material is decidedly mediocre. Some is pretty good. 
  • Gordon MacRae. “Oklahoma!” and “Oh What A Beautiful Mornin’.” If you can keep from singing along to “Oh What A Beautiful Mornin”’ you’re a better man than me. That goes into my master road trip playlist, just for the joy of singing along. 
  • David Frizzel and Shelly West. “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma.” In 1981 this was number 1 on the country charts for seven weeks. It is a lovely song, and makes me pine for cold nights on a prairie country road in a pickup. Ok, it’s probably totally manufactured Nashville country, and you can’t go home again, but it’s still a lovely song. 

Guitar. 

I took the Kohno since I didn’t have to worry about airplanes.  My shoulder hurt by the end of the day, but my hands never did, so I worked on Mazurka Marieta by Tarrega. I memorized it a long time ago, and it was one of those songs I never seemed to forget, but then I forgot it.  Relearning went quickly though. 

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Broken Bow, Oklahoma

Saturday we fished with Chris Schatte on the Lower Mountain Fork River. I was going to brag that I caught two fish for every one of Kris’s, but then Kris caught another fish. It wasn’t a day with a lot of fish, but I never remember much about catching a lot of fish. I remember specific fish, not multitudes. 

We picked the Mountain Fork because it was in Oklahoma and close enough for a long weekend drive. The names are a bit confusing. It’s the Lower Mountain Fork River, which is a tailwater below Broken Bow Lake, which is in Beavers Bend State Park. It’s near the towns of Hochatown and Broken Bow, just past Idabel. It’s a pretty trout river within three hours of Dallas/Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, and there are a bunch of smaller cities, Norman, Lawton, Tyler, Longview, Shreveport, Texarkana, that are even closer.  It’s popular. It’s pretty.

To be fair, most of the folk in that photo were an on-the-water class, and if we’d walked further upriver we would have probably walked away from the crowd, but in the afternoon we picked our bit of river and fished that bit. I figured that it would get me ready for fishing in New York and Connecticut and Montana, all the crowded places. I’ve never fished much with crowds, and usually I tend to cast and move. There wasn’t much casting and moving.

We had fished a different part of the river that morning, and there were fewer people. It was theoretically a better place to fish, but at least this trip we didn’t get any strikes. Chris the Guide thought that three days’ heavy generation had put down the fish.  

Southeastern Oklahoma looks like Wisconsin. The trees are different, sure: I didn’t see a single cypress knee in Wisconsin, but at the end of the day lumber is business in both places. Driving out of Oklahoma Saturday evening there was lumbering machinery and lumber trucks everywhere. The cheese is better in Wisconsin, and the cheese curds, but Hochatown, Oklahoma had Stevens Point beat for pizza, and they both had good beer.  Even the weather, mid-November in Oklahoma and late September in Wisconsin, was pretty similar. I’m not sure if there’s been a freeze yet in Beavers Bend.

Out of curiosity we would probably have gone to Mountain Fork sooner or later, and might go back again, but the river’s probably happiest without us. People should go to the Mountain Fork because it’s their river, not because it’s a destination river. I suspect there are rivers all over the country just like it. Good places to go for days and weekends year after year, places that satisfy the need for pretty but close enough for frequent fliers, a place to know and criticize and praise, and maybe love.

We fished nymphs and emergers under a bobber without added weight. I missed a bunch of strikes, especially at the end of the swing when I made a few short strips before picking up the line. I was casting well enough, and at one point I fished three flies without killing anybody. I didn’t get hopelessly tangled until it was time to quit for the day, and then we quit for the day. 

Mid-afternoon I lay down on the bank and took a long nap.  Kris said I slept for about an hour, and that’s fine with me.  I guess people moving upriver had to step over me, or at least around me, but nobody tripped or kicked. It was a fine river for a nap, and I’ve napped by many fine rivers. If I did a product review of the FishPond Summit Sling, I would note that it’s exactly the right size to use as a pillow for napping bankside. For me that’s not a small consideration.

I watched Kris the Angler cast and she was casting beautifully.  Last year she didn’t cast so beautifully. 

When I planned Oklahoma I had thought that we would fish without a guide. I wouldn’t have used emergers, and I wouldn’t have known where to fish, but sooner or later, this trip or the one after or the one after that, we would have caught fish, but we fished with Chris the Guide because he was a freshman at my high school when I was a senior, and I got to spend the day talking about people and places we knew, the Osbornes and Joe Chat, what businesses were left downtown in our hometown, Johnson’s Jewelry, and what was wrong with the town’s water system. Chris has a good life: they picked Broken Bow because land is cheaper in Oklahoma than in Colorado. They bought some acreage. They built a house. He started guiding. They own an Airstream and his wife does triathlons and they go to Canada and Minnesota in the summer. It all sounded great to me.  

Plus I caught my fish.