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.

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.

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.

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.