Category: Warmwater

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Carry On My Wayward Son, and Other Kansas Stuff, January 17-19

We drove to Kansas over the weekend.

We took the dogs, who took the trip in stride. They’re as small as dogs can get and still be dogs: a Chihuahua adopted as a stray when it showed up with heart worms at our daughter’s house and a tiny schnauzer bought at a charity auction after too much wine. They travel in our laps–there should be a French translation, like en crout, sur lap?–and when we travel they sleep and get their heads scratched. They’re dogs.

We spent Friday night in Dallas, Saturday night in Wichita, drove around central Kansas for part of a day, and then drove home. We were home around 1:30 am.

There is a fly shop in Wichita, Ark River Anglers, and I’d planned to get there Saturday and ask them about Kansas fishing. We made it by 4:30, me thinking that they would close at 5:00. They closed at 4:00. Next time.

It was really cold on the prairie, down in the 20s, actually too cold for fishing unless maybe for stocked trout. That didn’t seem like the right color of fish for Kansas, though maybe it was. On our way to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, I bank-fished a bit at Chase State Fishing Lake, not with any expectation of fish, any self-respecting fish was going to huddle in the deeps to stay warm, but we had driven from Texas on the flimsy excuse that we were fishing. Kris walked the dogs and then huddled in the deeps of the car to stay warm. I cast half-heartedly a half-dozen times, lost feeling in my hands, and was done. This doesn’t bode well for the Olympic Peninsula in February.

Even at the Preserve we never left the visitor center. In the spring it would be a good place for a walk, but not at a windy 25 degrees. After all, we had to think of the dogs. After a while we left and headed west. Kris said she wanted to see the Cheyenne Bottoms Nature Preserve, two hours west.

Has anyone ever taken great photos of the prairie? I know there are plenty of photos of stuff on the prairie: windmills, buffalo, cowboys, prairie flowers, hawks, combines, other prairie things, but photographing the prairie itself must be like photographing the ocean: it would take a special talent or at least a lucky eye to do the place justice. There are treeless rolling swells of land, and in winter brown dormant grass broken by green fields of sprouted winter wheat. I loved it, and I loved the Flint Hills particularly: There’s something mythic about their legacy of buffalo herds and plains tribes, and ancient inland seas where the hardest bits of flint stand as outcropped shelves after the softer sediments washed away. I wanted to stay there.

And then there was the great blue sky.

Kris didn’t get nearly so excited. She said it was flat and barren. Here’s a Houston girl calling someplace flat. It wasn’t really flat, that’s only a trick of the omnipresence of the sky. And it wasn’t barren either, at least not to my eye. There was grass everywhere, brown dormant grass, sure, but all over a promise of green, and from time to time there were trees. Ragged leafless trees, sure, but still that promise.

On our way west to Cheyenne Bottoms Kris called out the red tailed hawks huddled in trees and on fence posts. Not many were flying: I supposed it was just too damned cold. We made it as far as the Dairy Queen in Lyons where we bought chocolate dip cones and I declared it was time to turn south and go home. I figured if we skipped Cheyenne Bottoms, still an hour away, we could make Dallas by 9:00 and spend the night. On the way south we crossed the Arkansas River a few times and liked its looks, so we stopped to cast a bit. It was shallow, and clear enough that I could see that fish were unlikely in the cold, but it was also pretty. And it had warmed up to the mid-30s.

Late that night we didn’t stop at Dallas. I got us through the city, and only got lost once because my outdated car gps thought there were freeway exits where there no longer are. I made it an hour further to Ennis and then Kris took us the last three hours home. I dozed. Ok, I slept. I’d do that drive again, especially the sleeping part, but next time I’d like to catch a fish.

Kansas Donuts

Wichita has a strange vibe, like Amarillo if Brooklyn was a distant envied cousin. Want a hipster tattoo? You can get one down near Old Town. Want a grain elevator? There are elevators a’plenty.

The Donut Whole was on the hipster side. The counter girl had admirable vivid dyed blue hair, and grimaced when I told her I preferred my gluten caged. It was $14 for a half-dozen donuts and a coffee, but I figured I got charged extra for the joke. They sold cake donuts, many with peculiar flavors like orange creamsicle. The place was so hip they should offer gluten-free donuts fried in CBD oil, or maybe they already do and the counter girl wouldn’t tell me because she was a’feared of another joke.

How can they sell gluten-free donuts in Kansas?

The lady at Paradise Donuts didn’t have blue hair, but Paradise was still in the hipster part of town. When she asked why we were in Kansas I told her it was for the donuts. She said it was nice we’d picked her place to stop and I explained that we weren’t missing many donut places. She laughed. She didn’t offer me anything that was gluten-free, but I think she might have laughed at my joke about caged gluten. Over time Paradise would wear well, but I guess that’s kinda the point of paradise.

Peruvian Food

Saturday night we got take-out from Gabby’s Peruvian, a small cinder block cafe on a commercial side street. I can’t remember having Peruvian food before, and of course it brought to mind guinea pigs. They weren’t on the menu, but what we had was familiar: a carne guisada, arroz con pollo, fried yucca dipped in green and red salsas, tamal . . . None of it was quite the things I was used to in Tex-Mex: it was yucca instead of tortilla chips, white beans instead of pinto, there was no tomato in the arroz con pollo, and the tamal was larger and less defined in its contents than our tamales and wrapped, I think, in banana leaves. Do they have bananas in Peru? But it was all good, and the place was reasonably crowded and the reviews online were proud of Wichita’s cosmopolitan worldliness–on a side street in Wichita there is a very good Peruvian cafe. That’s about as American as it gets.

Playlist

I’ve had “Carry On My Wayward Son” playing in my head for nearly a week now. I hate that song, I didn’t like it when it was ubiquitous on the radio, back when there were radios, and this week I hate it more than ever.

I probably haven’t spent enough time on my Kansas playlist:

Kris: “Didn’t we just hear Melissa Etheridge?”

Me: “It was three or four songs back. There just aren’t that many choices from Kansas.”

Kris: “Play the next song. Isn’t there anything but Charlie Parker?”

Me: “I like Charlie Parker.”

Kris: “Play Count Basie.”

Me: : “I hate ‘Carry On My Wayward Son.’ Kansas was from Topeka. I think Count Basie played on the Missouri side.

We listen to “Kansas City” from Oklahoma!. There’s a live version of “Kansas City” by Muddy Water. I think all those songs titled “Kansas City” are actually about Missouri.

Me: “Okkervil River is an Austin band.”

I like a song called “Kansas City” by a band called The New Basement Tapes.

Kris: “Didn’t we just hear Melissa Etheridge?”

And then “Wichita Lineman,” plays and we sing along. It has that great romantic line, “And I need you more than want you/ and I want you for all time. . . ” Who hasn’t listened to that song and yearned? Jimmy Webb was from Elk City, Oklahoma, not far from my hometown, maybe a bit more than 100 miles, out on the Oklahoma plains about another 100 miles to Kansas. He would have known what it was like to be a lineman for the county on a 20 degree day when the wind was blowing.

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A Short Walk in the Kansas Kush

Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, First Edition, 1958, Secker and Warburg, London.

Even without Bloody Kansas and John Brown, there’s a passel of important stuff out of Kansas: Count Basie and Charlie Parker, the Dust Bowl, the Kansas City Monarchs, Brown v. Board of Education, the Koch brothers, Dwight Eisenhower and Bob Dole and Bill James and Amelia Earhart, Superman, wheat, the terminus of the Texas cattle drives and Marshal Dillon.

Ok, technically some of that stuff is Kansas City, Missouri, but that’s too fine a line for my simple notions.

Jackie Robinson, Kansas City Monarchs, 1945, Kansas City Call (newspaper), Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97518994/.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the Order of the Day to Paratroopers somewhere in England before the Normandy Invasion, June 6, 1944, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

I’m tempted to make fun of Kansas: Middle America, Methodists, Sam Brownback and his faith in supply-side economics. . . My boyhood home is so much more sophisticated than Kansas. I am from the Texas Plains, none of this Kansas Plains stuff for me. Of course from my boyhood home it would only have been a four-hour drive due north to Dodge City, the same route, by the way, as the Great Western Cattle Trail from Texas to Dodge City. It was a shorter distance to Kansas than to Austin, San Antonio, Laredo, El Paso, and certainly Houston. Only Oklahoma lay between us. Just a little bit left and a few hours further north and I could still have grown up in Texas and only 70-odd miles from Kansas.

Google maps

I’ve never once travelled that four hours to Kansas. If you had asked me as a boy who came from Kansas, I would have said Yankees. In some ways it was the most Southern thing (as opposed to Western thing) about growing up then in Texas. Everyone who wasn’t Southern Or Texan was a Yankee. Except for that whole Yankees‘ farm-team thing in the 50s, when the now-Oakland A’s were in Kansas City and seemingly traded, on demand, their best players to the Yankees for scrubs, it would probably confuse most Kansans to know that they were Yankees. This, by the way, was one of the longest sustained periods of Yankee baseball dominance, and the Kansas City A’s played an important supporting roll. Just like my ancestors, I’ve grown to distrust and generally dislike Yankees, though now it’s all baseball specific. I’m generally ok I think with people not from Texas.

Map of the Great Western Cattle Trail, From the Handbook of Texas, no source named.

E.B. White almost got it right:

To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.
To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.
To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.
To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.
To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.
And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.

There are two problems. “To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner” should be “To Southerners, a Yankee is every American who isn’t,” and there’s a problem with the pie thing. There’s nothing better than pie for breakfast.

Truth is though that no matter how close you are to Kansas, it seems most of us don’t go there, certainly without reason. Over the Martin Luther King holiday I think we’ll take a drive without reason to Kansas, at least with no reason but to get to Kansas. From Houston it’s further than the boyhood four hours, probably closer to ten, but it’s closer than Big Bend, or Marfa, or El Paso, or Lubbock. It’s also probably too cold to fish, but we’ll go, we’ll take our puppies along to protect us, we’ll try to make it to the Flint Hills, and then we’ll turn around and come home.

Instead of making fun of Kansas I’ve decided to think of it as an exotic destination, though I guess we won’t be doing any mountaineering, even in the Flint Hills. Think about it: everybody goes to Hawaii, there are cruise ships cruising north daily to Alaska, and trips to Los Angeles or Chicago or New York are common as dirt, but Kansas? There is plenty of dirt but nobody goes. Last year my son made it to Thailand, Singapore, and Japan. My closest work colleagues went to Paris, Prague, Egypt, Greece, and Vermont, which my sister says is also a foreign country. My daughter went to Disney World. No one I know went to Kansas. Ok, maybe it’s not the Hindu Kush, but it is full of Yankees. And when I get there I’m having pie for breakfast just like the natives.

Breakfast.
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Happy New Year and Redeye Bass

Samuel D. Ehrhart, Puck’s greeting to the new year, 1898, from Puck, v. 42, no. 1087, Keppler & Schwarzmann, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division 

We fished a bunch this year. We fished for cutthroat in Idaho and pike in New Hampshire. In Mississippi I caught my largest fish ever, a black drum, and after fishing for tiny brook trout spent an hour in a peculiarly pleasant Vermont laundromat (which still sends me friendly emails–how did it get my email address?). In the Catskills Joan Wulff told me to relax my shoulder, I jumped a tarpon in the Everglades, and we floated past suburban golf courses near Chicago. I spooked bonefish just outside the fence of the Honolulu airport, while military and commercial jets alternated use of the runway. We stood on ladders in Nevada. It was a good year for for fishing.

Honolulu with Jake Brooks. That’s Kris in the picture, not Jake.

This will start the third year for this blog. Before I kept a blog I kept journals, but a blog is harder. Someone might read it, so the writing needs to be better. My journal now consists mostly of baseball scores and random notes. The last journal entry was during the World Series, October 30. Nationals won. Dammit.

One of the blog’s sideshows is the statistics page. I can keep up with how many people are reading stuff and what country they’re from. I had more than twice the number of lookers this year than last, and I figure not all of those were me reading myself. There’s not a lot of specifics in the statistics. I can tell if someone goes onto the blog on a particular day, what they looked at, and what country they’re from, and there are daily, monthly, and yearly totals. Most visitors are from the States, with Canada a distant second. China is third, but I suspect that most visits from China have more to do with bots than reading. Namibia? Bangladesh? Jordan? I think my kids stopped reading, but I can’t really tell that from the scorecard, so they still got Christmas presents. Where is Moldova?

New Hampshire with Chuck DeGray.

It’s gratifying when someone reads several items, and it’s always fun to see something that I wrote for purely personal reasons, that has nothing to do with fly fishing, get read. Why did that South African read my post from last year about True Grit, and who in England is reading that post about Zurbarán’s Crucifixion? The most popular post for the year was about Ocean Springs, Mississippi, which is a wonderful place and a place I’d encourage anyone to go. My April Fool’s post about buying Pyramid Lake ladders got plenty of traffic.

Early in 2018 I posted a blog that included a lie a guide had told me, about his background as a Navy seal. He wasn’t. He apparently wasn’t any kind of military. In 2019 somebody who knew the guide found the post and it started to circulate. I suppose the guide told the story to work a larger tip, or maybe to justify his wacko right-wing politics. He wasn’t a bad guide, and he told a good story, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to fish with him again. I did leave him a good tip though.

With Richard Schmidt, Pass Christian, Mississippi.

Of all the places we fished last year, the place that surprised me most was the Talapoosa River in Alabama, and the fish that surprised me most was its redeye bass. I had never been on a pretty Southeastern river, so that was some of the surprise, but the fish fit the river. Redeye weren’t the river’s only fish: we caught Alabama bass, bluegill and long-ear sunfish, but it was the redeye that charmed.

They’re a small fish: they rarely weigh more than a pound, but they need clean water and, one supposes, pretty places, because they themselves are so clean-lined and pretty. They have a fine shape, well proportioned scales, fins, and jaws, and a bright iridescent turquoise belly and lower jaw balanced by smallmouth bands of warpaint on the face and olive green horizontal lines rising to their back’s dark mass. Lovely.

Tallapoosa River with East Alabama Fly Fishing

Mathew Lewis is an Auburn-PhD candidate geneticist who studies redeye and has written an excellent small book on fly fishing for Redeye Bass, titled, appropriately, Fly Fishing for Redeye Bass. I’ve fished for river bass before, smallmouth in Virginia and Illinois, Guadalupe and largemouth in Texas, and there’s a commonality to it. Cast to the banks. Cast the slackwater next to current, cast to faster current for smallmouths and slackwater for largemouth. Matthew and I traded some emails, and I meant to come back and write specifically about the redeye, but I never got around to it. I think about those fish and that river though, and it’s a place I would go again.

Catching the five subspecies of redeye should be a thing.

In addition to Matthew’s book there are good things on the web that discuss the redeye:

There should be more.

We spent a great two days fishing with Chuck DeGray as far north as we’ve ever been, and Silver Creek lived up to its hype, but my favorite place to fish–and I suspect Kris’s–was Everglades National Park. It is so alive, so beautiful and isolated, and I promise it wasn’t just because I jumped a decent tarpon. I did jump a decent tarpon though.

Happy New Years! I hope your 2020 is as good as our 2019!

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Goodbye Joe

I’ve known the coffee bean fly for a while, decades really, and a long time ago I tied a few and fished them. They were simple to tie.

  • Size 8-10 dry fly hook
  • Brown thread
  • Coffee bean
  • Super glue
  • Five-minute epoxy

Wrap thread from the eye to the bend to lay down a base. Score the coffee bean down the center line of the flat side with a hack saw, then Super Glue the bean onto the thread along the scored line. Cover the bean with epoxy. Let dry. Done.

I suspect that now I’d cover the bean with an ultraviolet resin instead of epoxy, but to tie any I’d still need to find my hacksaw. Most internet discussions recite its origins as beetles generally, and invasive Japanese beetles particularly. It’s rough justice that a fly for an invasive Asian fish imitates an invasive Asian bug. Palmered hackle is sometimes added for legs, though we don’t bother with that down on the Bayou.

Bruce Martin, Adult scarab beetle, Popillia japonica, commonly known as the Japanese Beetle, 2006, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

I learned to tie the fly from a friend and guide, Mark Marmon, and Mark was the first person I knew who fished the fly. I thought for years that he had created it, but if so he was probably not its only creator–pre-foam beetles it’s a pretty obvious choice, at least among coffee drinkers. There are reports on the internet of the fly used for trout as early as the 30s, and not even Mark and I are that old. He did start fishing the fly for carp on Brays Bayou 30 years ago. That’s long before the current carp craze, long before Orvis published a book on carp and long before there were Internet forums on fly fishing for carp. Shoot, this was before there were Internet forums. Mark discovered carp early, particularly grass carp, and he figured out that they take flies, sometimes nymphs, but also sometimes a coffee bean fished as a dry.

Brays, also spelled Braes or Brae’s, runs 30-odd miles from west to east through Houston and then empties into Buffalo Bayou, which in turn empties into Galveston Bay. The Corps of Engineers channelized large parts of Brays 50 years ago for flood control. Brays was once probably slow and meandering, at least during low flow, but prone to flooding. Straightened and lined with concrete Brays water never moves slow but it still floods, and maybe floods more as concreted Houston has spread west and global warming has increased our severe rain events. Harvey, Tax Day, Imelda . . . In the rash of recent 500-year Houston floods Brays has done its part, and more than its part, to flood the city. Two years after Harvey I can still find boarded windows and cleared lots along the Bayou.

Aerial view of Hermann Park, Harris Gulley and Brays Bayou looking north. 1925, John P. McGovern Historical Collections and Research Center, Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library: https://hdl.handle.net/1911/36730Courtesy of Photograph Collection at the McGovern Historical Center, HAM-TMC Library, 1133 John Freeman Blvd, Houston, Texas 77030, 713-799-7141, mcgovern@library.tmc.edu.

Only the Corps could come up with the verb “channelized,” and only the Corps could think concrete was our best drainage solution. Channelized Braes isn’t pretty, at best you can say its a fine example of 50s Brutalist Architecture, and is part of the excess of concrete that gives a good city an ugly reputation. The walls are maybe 15 feet high and slope at 30 degrees, but they don’t meet to form a V. At the base there is a flat, 50 feet across, gently sloping towards a narrow deeper center channel. Even at low flow there is always flow in the center channel, partly from upstream sanitary sewer plant effluent. After a few days’ rain Brays can rise 15 feet and run 100 feet from bank to bank. At lower flows the water doesn’t look particularly dirty, though there is an odd ozone scent in the air, and downwind from the City’s Braes Bayou treatment plant the odor can be decidedly rich. I wouldn’t recommend contact recreation.

On the Bayou Purel is part of any smart angler’s kit.

There are always enough runners and bikers along Brays to make me feel conspicuously foolish approaching the water with a fly rod, or even a camera, and I’m always conscious that I’d just as soon no one I knew saw me. It’s one of the reasons I stopped going. If this is glamorous fly fishing, it’s decidedly perverse glamorous fly fishing.

For the first few coffee beans I tied I didn’t coat them with epoxy. A glued bean is secure and they look fine, but because the roasted beans are brittle and the banks are hard, unless you cover the bean with epoxy the flies don’t last. One slap against the concrete slope and the bean is crushed. When I long ago fished Brays somewhat regularly I wasn’t a very good caster, and in addition to not casting where I wanted I couldn’t keep the fly from slapping the slope. I coated the next batch, and that’s probably the last batch I tied.

Brays runs not far from our house, and this year for the first time in a decade I’ve been down there a few times. Originally Kris wanted to go for carp and I went along. I don’t really like carp: I’m old enough to think of them as an undesirable trash fish, and ugly, with coarse scales, ragged fins and tales, and unrefined features. Plus I’ve been told all my life that carp are inedible, and notwithstanding Czech Christmas traditions I’m good with that. I’m not eating anything I pull out of the Bayou, even if it is Christmas.

Plecostomus, Braes Bayou

When I first fished Brays I hired Mark as a guide. It’s sight-fishing, walking along the concrete liner to look for feeding fish. At low flows–you don’t get near the Bayou at high flows–you can see the fish, both pods and singles, and if you’re a good enough caster the idea is to lead the fish by a few feet when they coast onto the shallow flat to feed. There are more fish than carp in the Bayou; there are supposedly largemouth, certainly mullet, gar, and the occasional rogue koi. One night late after an Astros game we boarded the train downtown with a guy with a spinning rod and a catfish in a five-gallon plastic bucket, caught in Buffalo Bayou. I talked to him, and he said he fished the Bayou often. He seemed . . . simple, sketchy, but I don’t know if his deficiencies began before or after he started eating Bayou fish.

Maybe I caught a carp that day with Mark; I don’t remember. What I remember was catching two mullet on the coffee bean fly. When I went with Kris to the Bayou last spring I cast for a while in the general direction of a seven or eight pound carp holding in shallow water. I’ve seen osprey this winter on the Bayou, so carp holding in the shallows to sun may be a summer avocation, and anyway in the Bayou feeding carp are moving carp. This fish was just sitting, from above looking all the world like a dark tumorous lump, and it was something I was decidedly ambivalent about catching. In any event it ignored me. It finally got tired of my fly slapping around its head and moved into deeper water.

Plecostomus, Braes Bayou

Recently I’ve thought a good bit about the coffee bean fly, in part because I opened an old box of flies and found a couple, and in part because of the rash of perfect tiers I follow on the internet. It’s apparently the golden age of fly tying, where everyone but me is artful, creative, and careful. I’m not. I mostly follow recipes and hope that the end result is useable. On my bench I keep a razor blade to scrape off failures and salvage hooks, and I use it often. Even if tied well the coffee bean fly, along with San Juan worm variants, beaded salmon eggs, and spoon flies, is as far from artful tying as one can get (though it takes some skill to tie a decent spoon fly). Even in its day it was controversial. Mark would have the record for grass carp on the fly except that the bean has a scent, and therefore doesn’t meet IGFA standards. Who knew carp drink coffee?

In the same box where I found the coffee beans was a brown spun deer hair fly shaped to look like a coffee bean. I guess that’s Artful, Creative, Careful. I didn’t remember when or where I got the fly, but it was certainly something I had bought. Like I said, my tying is none of those things.

According to Benjamin Gosset at Bayou City Angler the Braes fish have moved out of the channel for winter, into the wider, deeper water where the concrete ends, but at least once recently I saw a few large carp stacked in a plant outfall on the far bank. I gather that both the grass carp and mullet are essentially vegetarians, so when 20 years ago an otherwise forgotten fly shop clerk said he wouldn’t fish with a coffee bean fly because he wouldn’t fish with something designed to imitate shit–that’s the alternate explanation to a Japanese beetle–his denunciation had the ring of truth, even if it also rang of arrogance.

I tried a couple of times to cast to the stacked fish in the outfall. There were four or five, and they were big: I could see their tails and their backs, and who wouldn’t try to make that cast? I had to cast across the center channel current and there was too much drag on the fly, but about the fifth stubborn cast I snagged a fish, and it ran out into the current and upstream until I was left with nothing but a smashed coffee bean hooked through a thick ugly scale. I suspect that both of us, me and the fish, were ok with that result. I didn’t want to snag fish and the fish didn’t want to be snagged. After it came off the hook I went back to my car and dug the Purel out of the center console. Down on the Bayou you can’t have enough Purel.

Mark still guides, and I hope we fish trout together on the Guadalupe over the Christmas holiday. There was another young guy guiding carp for a while, Danny Scarborough, but I heard that Danny moved to Dallas. Here in Houston carp are now Chosen Ones, and there’s even a local carp tournament in the spring, because carp are now a lifestyle choice. Bayou City Angler is always good for advice on carp. It’s magic having a destination fishery so close to home.