Category: Warmwater

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What’s the Matter with Kansas, Part 2, October 16-19, 2020

Here’s a tip. If it’s in the 30s and the wind is blowing hard, and you pull into a Kansas campsite at 11 at night, angry with each other because of the wrong turn you made on the farm road, and because you couldn’t decipher the instructions at the park self-pay station, and because your companion doesn’t believe that this is the right campsite (or that if it’s not screw it, it’s a campsite); and you agree you’ll just sleep in the front seats of the van because it’s cold and dark and blowing and setting up the tent is just more than you can manage, well here’s the tip: when your companion says should we get out the sleeping bags? Say yes, and do it. The car seats will be ok, they recline and you’re exhausted, but by a few hours after you park, the inside of the van will be as cold as if there was no van at all. I froze all night, and woke with one of Kris’s sweaters wrapped around my feet, with a towel wrapped around my legs, and with a small dog snuggled for warmth as close as it could get.

Here’s a second tip. If you decide at the last minute to take the wee dogs along, and the wee dog who sticks by you is not the clean living chihuahua but the miniature schnauzer that daily collects a new layer of oily dirt and dog smells, give the dog a bath before you go. Sure, she’s a sweet dog, but after two days with the dog sleeping near you for warmth, three weeks later you’ll still conjure the smell of that dog. It was bad enough the first night, sleeping loose in the car, but the second night when it got really cold, the dog and I shared my technical skin-tight ultralight Mountain Hardware down mummy bag. In that bag there’s barely space for me, much less a schnauzer, except (because she was shivering) right at the neck. To make space for the schnauzer, I left the neck of the bag unzipped. My schnoz and that schnauzer shared too much space for too long.

Just give the dog a bath. Slightly rancid schnauzer is a smell that lingers. Take the time and give the dog a bath.

Mead State Park is not on anybody’s must-see list, but it’s pretty. In warmer weather it would have been a lot of fun to fish. There were shallow flats where in summer the bass and sunfish would cluster, except that the cold nights sent the bass and sunfish into shock and deeper water and they were nowhere to be found. There was bird life, and Kris got plenty of photos, flickers, eastern bluebirds, redhead ducks . . . The park was also packed with RVs, while we had the only tent. When we got back I asked my friend Schoonover whether he had an RV, and he said I’m old and white, of course I have an RV. I guess I’m supposed to have an RV.

We have a newish tent, and a newish propane stove. I’ve got all the backpacking gear in the world, but I bought the new tent and stove for car camping. Here is another tip, or at least an insight. When you wake up in the morning and the temperature has plummeted below freezing, you’re going to be jealous of those people with RVs. It’s hard to pack camp with numb fingers.

The dogs sat in the car and were no help at all with the packing.

There’s nothing wrong with cold I guess, and after the first cold night we had one extraordinarily beautiful day followed by an even colder, windier night. The next morning after breakfast it was overcast and spitting rain so we threw stuff into the car and drove around southwestern Kansas, to Dodge City and the Cimarron National Grassland. At 5 that afternoon, after it never warmed, we drove home, across the Oklahoma Panhandle, down through the Texas Panhandle, and then east and south to Houston. We drove through the night and got home the next morning by 9.

I was the only fly fisher at Mead Lake, but there were conventional anglers, and they weren’t catching anything either. I did have a safety plan. There’s always a spillway, and at the bottom of the spillway a bit of water where you can find sunfish. I was going to fish the Mead Lake tailwater! Here was the Mead Lake spillway. There weren’t any dry-land sunfish.

Mead Lake gets stocked with trout on November 1, and at dusk Saturday, in the prettiest light in the world, we watched rise forms across the center of the lake. I’d brought a sit-on-top kayak, the kind where sit-on-top actually translates as sit-in-a-puddle, and I tried to fish the rise. I don’t know what the fish were, maybe sunfish, but I’m half convinced it was early-stocked trout. I fished a small streamer, and got a tug, and got enough of a hit to see a quick flash of silver before the fish came off the hook, but I should have thrown out a foam beetle and let it sit. Even fishless though, it was pretty, and I fished until dark.

Here’s a fourth tip. In October Kansas gets cold, and the wind blows. Maybe June’s the time to go to Kansas.

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What’s the Matter with Kansas, Part 1, October 16-19, 2020

I’ve been busy this fall with work and other things, so even without the coronavirus, there have been reasons not to travel. We’ve fished for bass in freshwater and redfish in salt, but since early August all of our fishing has been close to home. I’ve studied maps, and concentrated on where we could reach driving. I’m not ready for airplanes, but I still want to fill in blanks.

And there are blanks to fill reasonably close to home. There are adjacent states I’ve been saving, Arkansas and New Mexico, and states a bit further that we can drive to without too much effort: Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Colorado, and Arizona, maybe South Carolina, maybe Utah. With the exception of Kentucky, I’ve been to all those states before, even if I haven’t been there to fish. What’s the point, though, of finally making it to Kentucky if I can’t visit distilleries? And New Mexico, one of my favorite places, requires visiting Texans to quarantine. Colorado is on fire. Then there’s Kansas, which is a peculiar problem that demands particular attention.

I can’t find a fly-fishing guide in Kansas, and I’ve spent hours on the internet looking. Over the summer I thought I’d finally found one, Paul Sodamann at Flats Lander Guide Service, so I called Paul. He’s a FFF certified fly casting instructor, and he’s taught a fly-fishing course at Kansas State, but he told me he’d stopped guiding. Zebra mussels have infested his local waters, and while the carp were still there, the mussels have so cleansed the water that the carp see you coming. Carp are spooky, and in the clear water he says there’s no reliable approach to spooky fish.

Zebra mussels and carp: America’s heartland has been invaded. See? Kansas is a complicated place.

Since I can’t find a guide I’ve focused on the least-populated Kansas places, and I will tell you there are plenty of least-populated Kansas places. In 2019 Kansas had an estimated population of 2,913,314, with 104 counties, and an average population density of 35.4 people per square mile. That’s a lot of land, and not a lot of people. And the population is not spread evenly. The ten most populous counties represent about 65% of the population, while the 65 least populous counties represent only about 10% of the population. There’s some weird symmetry in those numbers.

After map study we settled on the Cimarron National Grassland which is as far south and west as Kansas goes, with a stop at Meade State Park, an 80-acre lake just over the Oklahoma border, about an hour south of Dodge City. Meade State Park is 641 miles from Houston, or a roughly 12-hour drive. Cimarron National Grassland is about two hours further west, with a side trip to get the hell into Dodge. The description of Meade was of a good warm water lake, with bass, catfish, and sunfish. The descriptions of Cimarron said it had ponds, with bass, catfish, and sunfish.

Cimarron is in Morton County, Kansas. Morton County, Kansas, population 2,539, is not the least populated county in Kansas. That honor goes to Greeley, population 1,232, two counties to the north. Out of 104 Kansas counties, Morton ranks 91st in population. Urban as it is, one wonders, how do 2,539 residents support the communal things people need? A sheriff? A doctor? a high school football team? a high school?

It’s probably no surprise that Western Kansas is flat and rural, and that it doesn’t sport a lot of water or trees. The Cimarron Grasslands is located on the Cimarron River, which in Kansas is an intermittent stream, dry for most of the year. It was dry when we saw it. Even Middle Springs, a dependable watering hole on the Santa Fe Trail, was dry. Semi-arid, this is wheat country that depends on rainfall and aquifer irrigation, and every 15 or 20 miles along the highway there is a community with a co-op grain elevator, a farm supply, and a cafe. My friend Clark, a Nebraskan trained as a city planner, once explained it to me: the farming frontier communities are spaced by how far a pre-automobile farmer could reasonably travel to get to market and home again in a day.

Western Kansas is beautiful, but I may be unnaturally drawn to flat and sparse. It’s also In Cold Blood territory. Writers who trade in horror and violent confrontation should be drawn to Western Kansas. There’s nothing like isolated farmhouses to spur that creepy distrust of the stranger. But sparse as it is, isolated as it is, it’s not wild. This is industrialized agriculture, and everywhere there is evidence of cultivation and the massive machines and infrastructure that make it possible. In Western Kansas there’s rarely even the faux wilderness of uncultivated pasture. Every acre seems farmed. This is grain country, exactly what Kansas is supposed to be.

In 2016, Morton County voted 83% for President Trump, which is also what Kansas is supposed to be, and there was strong support of the President all along the highway. In every community there were Trump signs in yards and at businesses. At farm gates there were Trump flags. In contrast, yesterday morning on my run I counted 12 Biden/Harris signs in five blocks. Kansas was just like my neighborhood, but in reverse. instead of five blocks its political uniformity spreads across hundreds of miles.

On the drive from Houston I re-listened to a lecture by Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas, based on his 2004 book of the same name. I haven’t read the book, and the lecture isn’t so much about Kansas as it is about conservative voters generally, with Kansas appearing mostly in the title as a bit of shorthand. If I follow the lecture correctly, the right on the left side of Kansas is no longer driven by economics; those Trump flags aren’t out there because of fiscal conservatism, but because of cultural divides. The Kansas Trump voters are now driven by anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-antifa, and anti-whatever, not economics.

Maybe there’s some truth to that, but I suspect Mr. Frank misses part of the point of all those miles of wheat fields. Farmers are business owners, and the people who work for them and depend on their trade are deeply tied to the success or failure of their business. I’d guess their political convictions were developed more from Jimmy Carter’s 1970s inflation, followed by the 1980 Russian grain embargo, than from any deep seated dislike of what’s happening culturally in Chicago or Denver or Dallas, or for that matter Wichita or Amarillo. As much as there is to admire about Mr. Carter, he didn’t do much for Kansas farmers, and I’d guess 40 years on Kansas farmers still see government generally and Democratic government in particular as less a help than an intrusion, or a ruination.

This corner of Kansas was also the heart of the Dust Bowl, and Cimarron National Grasslands only exists because of government intrusion in the 30s, when a bit more than a hundred thousand acres of environmentally ravaged land was purchased by the government to add to the national forests, sans trees. Even in the photo above, the trees are imports, not natural parts of the landscape. There are also bits of the national grassland throughout the dustbowl plains, in Colorado, Kansas, and Texas, and it’s held as grassland in part to protect against a repeat of the Dust Bowl. In the urban mind, those Kansas farmers are always less cognizant of their dependence on the government aid they receive than they should be.

Meanwhile, we traveled to Morton County, Kansas, to fish. We may well be the only people hereabouts who can say that. We drove about 1400 miles and I didn’t catch a fish, not a bass, catfish, nor sunfish. Not a one fish, two fish, red fish, nor blue fish, of either the Republican or the Democratic variety. At least I get to think more about Kansas. What’s the matter with Kansas? We didn’t catch a fish.

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I went fishing

You may not know this, but it’s a peculiar time. On a Saturday back in April, the first time I’d left the house after my office shut down, I went to Houston Dairymaids and they delivered cheese curbside. I ordered barbecue from Pinkerton’s and they delivered curbside. We picked up a curbside order at Houston’s big liquor store, Spec’s. We were out of Four Roses bourbon, and running low on gin. It’s that kind of time.

It’s been too windy this spring for the Bay, so except to fish on our local bass ponds that day’s trip from one curbside delivery to another is about as much as I’ve traveled. I haven’t been to a restaurant except to pick up take-out. I’ve been into a grocery store, but even for groceries I usually order online and pick up curbside.

I continue to work, though it feels odd, disconnected, like working on holiday. My firm laid off some employees and reduced salaries for most employees. Those decisions were beyond my pay grade, and my heart ached for affected friends and colleagues. I completed a project for a bank, advised a client whose rental car and hotel revenues had suddenly stopped, and participated in a lot of conference calls. Kris cut my hair. She needs to cut it again.

I postponed our trip to Arkansas. We were supposed to go April 4, to fish the Little Red. I offered to pay the guides for the delayed trip when I canceled, but they said come when we can. I’ve prepaid our guides for our July trip to North Carolina. I worry about how my guide friends are doing.

This is not a warbler.

The warbler migration has come and gone.

I wear a mask when I go into stores or the office, but not when I run. I wash my hands more than before. I’ve cooked a lot, and I try to keep my daily workout schedule, with more discipline than enthusiasm, but that’s always been the case. I don’t read books as much as I should, and play the guitar constantly, working through all the jazz method books I’ve collected over the years, filling notebooks with diagrams of chords with strange names like G7(b9) and Ab m7b5. I’ve been working through the songs in the sixth edition of the Real Fake Book, most of which are jazz standards that I’ve never heard. Did you know that Airegin by Sonny Rollins is Nigeria spelled backwards? I didn’t know the song at all.

I read a funny quote about jazz guitarists, that they make a living playing wrong notes.

At least once a day I read the Houston Chronicle, The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post, The New York Times. I haven’t watched TV much. There’s no baseball, so what’s the point? I did watch videos of George Floyd’s death. The Floyd protests in Houston came past our office building, and I half-heartedly planned to go downtown and stand on the street in support, but they closed our building for the big march and the stationary part of my half-heartedness won. My daughter went. If I’d known she was going I’d have gone with her. My Houston neighbors reacted to the death with surprising restraint and civility. I was worried about coronavirus, and Kris was sick from some other bug that we thought might be coronavirus, so I stayed home.

It wasn’t coronavirus, but man was she sick, and it frightened us.

There are now two Black Lives Matter yard signs on our block. It’s a pretty diverse block, with both doctors and lawyers. There are no African Americans. There are Asians, Middle-Easterners, a Scot, a couple of gay households, an Austrian professor of mathematics, plenty of everyday garden variety white folk, and a Chinese-American geophysicist who is Kris’s go-to expert on local birds. . . I’m proud that two of my neighbors have signs.

Meanwhile my friend Melvin posted on Facebook that as an adult black man he’d been stopped a dozen times by police for no cause. Was it a dozen, or was it ten? One was too many for one of the best men I know. A black work colleague told us that he never ran in his neighborhood without a baggie with a drivers license and a business card. Someone wrote that responding to Black Lives Matter with a statement that All Lives Matter is a bit like responding to your wife’s query about your love for her with a statement that you love everybody. It might be true, but it’s not relevant.

Two acquaintances, maybe three, died of the virus, one black, two white. My friend Peggy told me her brother had died.

I’ve thought a lot about Colin Kaepernick. In the immediate aftermath of Kaepernick’s knee, I was disappointed that something important, continued institutional violence against blacks, was trivialized into something unimportant, whether it was acceptable for a football player to take a knee during the National Anthem. It was actually two players, Kaepernick and Eric Reid, who took the knee, and there was an article in the Chronicle last week interviewing Reid’s brother on the Texans, Justin, who said the same thing, that the narrative got twisted from a protest against police violence to an uproar about flag disrespect. There was a difference though between my reaction and Justin Reid’s. My reaction was to blame Kaepernick for the twisted message. I was wrong. I guess it just goes to show, it’s easy to blame the victim.

Did I mention that I’ve been through lots of Four Roses?

I’ve spent some hours most weekends drifting in a canoe on the lakes at Damon’s. I have a solo Wenonah, a lovely little thing, made for travel, and I’ll sit in the canoe and drift across a pond while I cast. I caught a four or five pound catfish one day, a four pound bass another, both on a six weight Winston with a Hardy Marquis reel. I’ve caught a lot of smaller bass and sunfish, bluegills and greens, and they always bring more joy to me than any other fish. My cast right now is very good, and I’ve tied a lot of flies too, variants on BBBs, with possum dubbing and long soft hackle guinea hen collars that I’d bought for steelhead flies. Don’t tell anyone, but while I’m home I can tie during conference calls.

Looking at the photos of me holding the big bass and catfish with a boga grip, the results aren’t good for catch and release. I’ve decided to use a net from now on, even for warmwater fish.

My mother loved guinea hens. She always said they were better farm guard than dogs. Maybe I’ll get some guinea hens for our yard, during the pandemic there’s not as much traffic on my street as there used to be. Maybe I’ll get a Black Lives Matter sign.

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Call me in Kansas

Former Kansas Governor Sam Brownback measuring a Kansas bluegill.

I started work at my law firm on June 1, 1984, and I’ve been there ever since. I don’t know how long exactly that is, it’s now April 2020 and I’ve run out of fingers and toes for counting. It’s a pretty long time. I bet I’ve practiced law more than I’ve done anything else except sleeping and being married to Kris. I guess over 60-odd years I’ve slept more than I’ve practiced law, but mostly I’ve managed to keep the two separate for a proper work-sleep balance. I’m a good lawyer. I’m also good at sleeping. As for being married to Kris, I guess I must be perfect. She hasn’t bothered marrying anybody else during that time.

Me practicing law at my English law firm. Henry VIII never showed.

Stuck at home during the pandemic I’ve had time to take stock, and I’ve decided it’s time to chuck lawyering. It’s time for a new challenge, something where I can make some real money. I’ve decided to quit practicing law and hang out my shingle as a fly fishing guide. 

Me not practicing law.

I’ve fished with a lot of guides, and one thing I’ve realized is that money-wise fly fish guiding must be about the best thing going, better than lawyering, better than just about anything that doesn’t involve trust funds and inherited wealth. Think about it. Fly fishing guides work hard.  Everywhere except Florida guides have to make lunch. They have to get up early and go to bed late.  They have to have a general notion of where they are, even when it’s foggy. Most of all they have to put up with extraordinary anglers like me, who know that my failure to catch fish has nothing to do with my skill, and that my failure is their fault.  

Guides could only put up with that sort of stuff for the money. Lots of money. More money than just about anything short of hedge fund management, and I bet these days even hedge fund managers are sucking air. Those fishing guides are out there getting rich while we’re sitting in our office on the phone and reading emails. Do you know how many emails I get most days, and how many of them are asking me questions that take work to answer? Chuck it. Like I said, fish guiding must be about the best thing going.

Where will I be guiding? That’s been a tough question.  I thought about here in Houston, but I’d hate to take all the business from local guides; I thought about trout country, but I don’t really like the cold; and fishing guides in the Florida Keys always get shot and die.   Nothing hooked me until I thought of Kansas.

Kansas.

A fly for Kansas bluegill.

If you’ve fished much you know some fly fisher who’s been to Patagonia for sea-run browns, or to Mongolia for Taimen, or to the Farquahar Atoll for whatever’s on the Farquahar Atoll. But think about it: how many anglers do you know who have made a special trip to Kansas? It’s the last fishing wilderness, the last of the world’s exotic destination fisheries.

There is not a single fly-fishing guide in Kansas, so I sense real opportunity. Since I’m an expert on supply-side economics, I know that consumption follows supply. If I produce the goods in Kansas, consumers will be there to buy them. All I have to do is show up with a truck and a boat and a couple of rigged fly rods and after that it’s all gelt, wampum, moolah, and a life of ease. Plus Kansas is far from the rising seas so I don’t have to worry about global warming. It’s already got enough tornadoes and dust storms and drought and hail and locusts that changing weather patterns can only be to its benefit. Like they said in that movie about that Kansas corn field, if you build it, they will come.

Kansas. 

A Kansas longear sunfish.

Of course I’ll have to start rooting for the Chiefs, but that’s easy since they just won the Super Bowl for the good people of Kansas. 

What will I guide for? Apparently Kansas has a spectacular sunfish fishery.  Kansas sunfishing may be better than sunfishing in the Amazon Basin or Kamchatka. It’s not very well known, but I’ve been told it’s legendary. You can talk about your Caribbean permit, or your Florida tarpon. You can talk about Olympic Peninsula steelhead or Alaska salmon or Pyramid Lake cutthroat. None of those hold a candle to Kansas bluegill. Bluegill in the 20-pound range are common, and the longears . . . You should have been here two days ago.

See? I’m practicing my guiding.

I’ve been working on my Kansas sunfish leaders: they involve 40 pound butt sections and 60 pound bite tippet, and are 14 feet long because of the bluegills legendary skittishness. They’re strung together with Bimini twists and blood knots and huffnagles and some spare links of an iron chain I found in the garage. I originally thought 9 weight rods would be the very thing, but now I’m thinking 11 weights? From what this guy I know told me we’re talking big game here. These are powerful bluegill that always run you into your backing. Any reels without heavy duty saltwater drags are worthless.

Our new house in Elmdale.

I haven’t told Kris about my plans yet, but I have bought a house in Kansas, in Elmdale. I bought it online, and from the pictures it may need a little work. Whatever, I know she’ll be thrilled, and Elmdale ought to be remote enough for these troubled days. The guy who sold me the house said that of course there were fish near Elmdale. He reminded me that the whole area was once an inland sea. I paid his asking price, which was very reasonable, not too much more than what houses go for in my neighborhood, and with plenty of character. This is going to be so popular that I think I may go with the Florida model and let clients bring their own lunch. Apparently there’s no grocery store in Elmdale, so bringing lunch from Wichita probably works best anyway. It’s only 70 miles.

I’ve let the major manufacturers know I’m available for their pro staffs, and I’m waiting to hear from them. I think the Abel series of Kansas sunfish reels are pretty nifty, and I’m trying to decide whether the new Orvis Recons will be sufficient or if I need Helios 3s. You can’t skimp when you’re chasing Kansas bluegill.

When you’re ready to fish Kansas, inquire within. We’ll be on Main Street in Elmdale.

On the edge of the inland sea with a typical Kansas bluegill. Photo courtesy of Nick Denbow, Western Caribbean Fly Fishing School.