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Little Red and Norfork Rivers, Arkansas, March 18-19, 2021

We planned to fish Arkansas last April, but then coronavirus. We delayed. We delayed some more. We finally delayed a year, less a couple of weeks.

We should have gone last April. People now are maskless and uninhibited, and we might have been safer traveling during the first days of the pandemic. At least more people were worried then. Traveling this week through East Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, people are done with being careful. Some of it I suspect is mulish stubbornness–contrariness (can you imagine an East Texan or Arkansan being contrary?); I don’t need no stinkin’ seat belt and you don’t need one either. Some of it is exhaustion and the strong gravity of normalcy. There weren’t a lot of masks, and no particular effort to distance. Restaurants were packed. My guess is that we’re in a close race between vaccinations and another upsurge. 

At least it’s spring. Ok, technically today when I’m writing is the first day of spring, and we fished the last days of winter, but this is the South. The dogwoods and redbuds are blooming and beautiful. It was cold though. We caught an unseasonable cold front and it was 36° when we left Heber Springs. It was as cold or colder the two days we fished. I wore long underwear, ear flaps, and wind gear because not only was it cold, it was blowing. And blowing. Don’t forget the blowing.

It never rained. That’s a good thing, and the second afternoon it warmed up and the sun shone. Shined? Was shining.

We fished with Rouse Fly Fishing. I finally re-booked because Jamie Rouse was a February guest on Tom Rosenbauer’s Orvis podcast, which always inspires me. There are three year-round trout rivers in Arkansas: the White, the Little Red, and the Norfork. The trout are all below dams built for power generation and flood control. The White is the longest of the three, with its headwaters in the Boston Mountains in Northwest Arkansas. It flows first perversely north into Missouri, then turns southeast again to cross the state and meet the Mississippi near Rosedale. Rosedale, as you may know, is where you sell your soul to the devil to play the blues. I don’t know whether the White is interested in the blues, but at 720 miles, it moves a lot of water.

Rouse’s guides guide in all three rivers, though truth be told it’s 100 winding miles from Heber Springs to the main fishing on the White. For the White they may not be the most efficient guide choice. It’s ok though, fly fishing is popular in northwest Arkansas, and if you really want to fish the White, Rouse will guide there, and if not you can’t throw a rock in towns like Cotter without hitting a fishing guide. Every hamlet and holler seems to have its fly shop.

Both the Little Red and Norfork are tributaries to the White. Of course none of these rivers were originally cold water rivers, none of them originally held trout. Arkansas is in the southern native range for smallmouth bass, so before the dams they presumably held some combination of smallmouth and largemouth bass, catfish, sunfish, and plenty of other stuff: the Ozark Plateau is one of the richest areas in these United States for different documented fish species. Seventy-four different species of fish have been identified in the nearby Buffalo River.

With the steady cold water releases from the dams, the species list in the three rivers below the dams narrows until only two are ever talked about, rainbow trout and brown trout. The Little Red is an eight hour drive from Houston, even closer to Dallas and Memphis and Oklahoma City. While there are other trout streams that are closer, the three rivers are a draw for trout anglers, and they hold a lot of catchable trout. Stocked fish mostly, and the rivers are not really wadable (though I’ve read that it is possible to wade near the Norfork dam). Still, they have produced world-record brown trout, and there is reproduction of wild fish. All of the brown trout in the Little Red are wild. In any event, when your home fisheries in Texas and Kansas and West Tennessee don’t include a lot of trout, the three Arkansas rivers are a draw.

Our guide was Drew Wilson. I don’t think Kris and I are particularly hard clients to guide. We didn’t hook Drew, not hard anyway. We didn’t break anything on his boat or any of his equipment. We didn’t even get tangled more than the national average.

The first day with Drew we fished the Little Red. Kris and I had fished the Little Red once before, four years ago in summer, and it was a different fishery then. I guess every river every day is a different river. In a river where, depending on dam releases, it can rise or fall nine feet in a day, that seems especially true. When we fished with Rouse four years ago flow was low, and I threw mostly streamers, big Barr’s meat whistles and smaller clousers. I caught some big fish, and some browns. Like I said, brown trout in the Little Red are always wild.

This trip the river ran deeper, and on the Little Red we fished marabou jig flies with plenty of weight, eight feet deep on a straight six pound leader below a two foot stiff butt section and a big Thingamabobber indicator–a bobber. It’s funny. Fly anglers are language squeamish. Kris drives me crazy when she calls her fly rod a pole, and I suspect she does it on purpose. Flies are flies, not lures. But with bobbers anglers don’t let their squeamishness get in the way of the truth. We take joy in calling those big round indicators bobbers. What did we see in Arkansas? We saw a big orange bobber floating down a river.

Usually when Kris and I fish with guides, we talk with the guide about everything; children, significant others, schools and jobs and where each of us came from and where we think we’re going. With Drew there wasn’t much of that. I doubt if Drew knows that we’re both lawyers, or have children, and we don’t know whether Drew finished college or whether he has a significant other. Kris never once talked about politics (which may be a sign that at least for Kris the election is finally over). We talked about fish, about rivers, about rigging and flies and boats and rods. The conversations were easy and amusing and we liked Drew immensely. As a guide he was attentive and capable, knowing and unflappable. As a companion for two days he was fun. He even mentioned books he liked, though all of them were about fishing.

And we talked about our dogs. You can’t not talk about dogs. And we caught a lot of fish.

Northwest Arkansas is also popular with gear fishers, and the second day on the Norfork there was a spin fish armada. Out of maybe 15 boats, we were the only fly anglers I saw. The Norfork below the dam is a short river, about five and a half miles long, and because of lower flows we only got within a mile or so of the dam. By day’s end we’d been pushed even further down river, and boats were stacked at the confluence with the White. We were motoring up and floating down the same mile over and over. We started the morning with the deep-water rigs we had used on the Little Red, but ended with a tiny foam tab indicator five or six feet over, of all things, a hare’s ear nymph. It almost felt wrong using such a traditional fly, and a single fly to boot. Where’s my mop fly! Where’s my squirmy worm! Don’t you want me to catch fish?

We caught a lot of fish.

Maybe it was because of the sunshine and the afternoon’s warmer weather, maybe it was the novelty of the river or the pleasure of the lighter rigging, or maybe I just finally caught the rhythm of the fishing, but notwithstanding the crowds I enjoyed fishing the Norfork more than the Little Red. We didn’t catch more fish on the Norfork, but we caught a lot of fish.

Two fairly technical notes. First, Arkansas river boats are unique. On the three rivers gear fishers and fly fishers fish from more or less the same boats, with fly guides likely to have added oar locks and oars. They’re long, fairly narrow, shallow draft rectangles, Jon boats, built from aluminum or fiberglass. Motors are relatively small, Drew’s boat had a 40 HP, and guides favor jet motors instead of props. With their flat bottoms they’re probably more like rowing rubber rafts than the classic high-rockered drift boat, but they’re comfortable to fish from and well designed for Arkansas.

Second, the first day I fished a 10′ 4 wt Thomas & Thomas Avantt rod that I’d bought a few years ago. Nine foot is kind of the standard for fly rods, but there’s a theoretical advantage to a longer rod because they can cast farther. There’s a theoretical disadvantage in loss of accuracy, but none of the theory mattered anyway. None of our casts were much more than 20 feet.

Kris fished a 9′ 5 wt on the Little Red, but the second day she fished a 10’6″ Orvis Helios 3 wt that she’d bought herself for my birthday. It maybe the longest single-handed rod on the market. I don’t know about the other theoretical advantages of the longer rods, but they shine at managing line on the water. Most of the work fishing rivers isn’t casting or playing fish, it’s the constant adjustments to the line to achieve a drag-free drift. It is the hardest work of the day, and that extra foot, or in Kris’s case that extra foot-and-a-half, is a noticeable advantage.

Interestingly, I liked the Thomas & Thomas better than the Orvis, but I suspect it was because we had a much lighter reel on the T&T, and because I’d fished it for a day before before I tried the Orvis. Plus it was Blue. Color matters.

On our last drift of the day, down through the spin-fish armada and into the White, the fish got hot. We landed fish after fish, and when we landed a double the gear fishers in the next boat applauded. When we reached the White (at least I’m saying we were in the White–that way I can claim a fish in all three rivers), I landed my final fish of the day, and the only brown of the trip. Drew offered to take us on another drift, but why would we? How could things get better?

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Norwood and Bill

I read some books to get ready for fishing in Arkansas. Two stood out, Norwood by Charles Portis and My Life by Bill Clinton. I was going to read something by Dave Whitlock, but then I found out that Dave Whitlock isn’t from Arkansas. He should be from Arkansas, he’s the best known fly fisher from that part of the world, but he’s from Oklahoma, and still lives in the Oklahoma Ozarks. It’s an easy mistake to make; Eastern Oklahoma is pretty much Western Arkansas, but there’s a line and I will not cross it. Plus that’ll make this post a bit shorter.

I can’t find any indication that the other two writers, Portis (author of True Grit) and Clinton (author of My Life), didn’t fish, or at least didn’t fish enough to write about it. Clinton was also the 42nd President of the United States, and the last President before the last President to be impeached by the House of Representatives. I don’t think he fly fished, and he wasn’t impeached for lying about fishing.

From Pinterest, Oyster bamboo fly rod built for Jimmie Carter, with presidential seal.

The Bushes fished, and Jimmie Carter famously fished and had a couple of exquisite cane rods built for him by Bill Oyster. Herbert Hoover wrote a book about fly fishing, in which he remarked that “Presidents have only two moments of personal seclusion. One is prayer; the other is fishing — and they cannot pray all the time!” He also said that fishing teaches an important lesson to Presidents, that the forces of nature discriminate for no man. President Trump played golf, and taught us that the rules of golf were more bendable than the forces of nature, but he did tell some extraordinary fish stories, only not about fishing.

President Obama fly fished and seemed to enjoy it. He certainly made an elegant presentation on the river. That’s one well-dressed fly fisherman.

White House Archives, Barrack Obama and Dan Vermillion, East Gallatin River, Montana, August 14, 2009.

Portis died in 2020, in Little Rock, so there’s another thing to blame on 2020. Portis is one of those authors who everyone is supposed to read, but who no one much ever actually reads. I’ve written before about my near-lifelong fixation with True Grit, and if you want to read Portis without cracking a book, just watch the Coen Brothers film version. The dialogue and narration seems almost word for word from the book.

Besides True Grit, Portis wrote four other novels for no one to read: Norwood (1966), Dogs of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985), and Gringoes (1991). Except for True Grit, his novels were all out of print for a time. I’ve read Norwood and Dogs of the South, which lets me feel superior to those who haven’t read Norwood or Dogs of the South, but inferior to those who have also read Masters of Atlantis and Gringoes. I’m sure they’re excellent, and maybe one day.

Portis was not a recluse, though he has that reputation. He was apparently a regular in Little Rock beer joints and approachable for strangers, and at the climax of True South Paul Theroux finds Portis in a Little Rock bar–at least that’s how I remember it. Still, Portis wasn’t much shakes as a self-promoter, and while he began his novel-writing in a fishing cabin, and apparently had his own avocations (notably cars), there are no reports of Portis fishing. He may have fished all the time, but unlike yours truly he didn’t feel the need to tell people about it.

As for cars, all of the three Portis novels I’ve read were odysseys, road novels (even if True Grit exchanges a Buick for the Mattie’s horse, Little Blackie). The hero sets out and then returns home changed, except none of Portis’s heroes changes much. Part of what amuses is their immutability, regardless of what crazy weirdness they create. When she gets back to Yell County, Mattie Ross is still a Presbyterian avenging angel and tax accountant, though she is less one arm, and though she has developed familial loyalty for an old man who rode with Quantrill.

Norwood is a road novel too. Norwood goes to New York to collect $70 and to deliver a prostitute, who he doesn’t know is a prostitute, and some stolen cars, which he doesn’t know are stolen cars. When he returns he is still Norwood. Technically Norwood is from Texas, not Arkansas, but it’s just-across-the-border East Texas. Except for his Korean stint in the Marines, and an interlude working for the New York Herald-Tribunein New York and London, Portis lived in Arkansas. He always wrote about Arkansas, and leaving Arkansas, and coming back to Arkansas, even if it’s the Arkansas part of Texas. As the narrator says in Dogs of the South, “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.”

I doubt that I will ever see the movie version of Norwood, and I have absolutely no clue what role Joe Namath played. With the combination of Namath and Glen Campbell, I suspect that the acting is excruciating.

The character Norwood is honest and marginal, but it is the delight of the novel that notwithstanding all of the bad things that could happen to Norwood–and really bad stuff could happen–nothing ever does. There is a Twainish insistence that things turn out all right, even when a Faulkneresque apocalypse may be more realistic. Norwood finds love on a Greyhound bus, rescues a chicken, and recovers his $70. When I read the novel, Norwood’s final fate made me immensely happy, as does the fate of the chicken. I guess this is a spoiler, but when you get to the end of Norwood and he’s home and the axe hasn’t fallen, it’s ok, it’s more than ok, it’s great. Norwood the character may be hidden away in the Arkansas part of Texas, but he’s authentic and honest, and authentic and honest shines.

The other Arkansas book I read, My Life by Bill Clinton, is also a road novel. Mr. Clinton is born in Hope (not far from El Dorado where Mr. Portis was born), then moves to sin city, Hot Springs (which really was sin city in its heyday), then to Georgetown and Yale (not to be confused with Yell County) and Fayetteville and Little Rock and onward and upward. The book did pretty well when it came out, selling 2.3 million copies, but I suspect that’s because everybody bought it for the sex scenes. There aren’t any, at least in the book. There is a detailed description of political maneuvering at Arkansas Boys’ State. At 1000+ pages, it’s a little long for most folks, but Clinton is a talkative guy talking about two of his favorite subjects, Bill Clinton and politics, and he’s a readable writer, with an eye for detail, then some more detail, then some more detail, then he’ll add in a little detail. He never does tell us what we really want to know. Like I said, there are no sex scenes.

Just like Portis, whenever now that I think of the Clintons, I think of Paul Theroux’s Deep South. Theroux is a bit obsessed with the Clintons. He finds them a basketful of deplorables, but for none of the reasons one might think. Theroux compares parts of the South, particularly the Delta, to Africa’s poorest places, Third World poor, devastatingly poor, irredeemably poor, and he’s right, they are. He was angry that the Clintons–at least one of whom had deep ties to Arkansas and the South–had abandoned Southern poverty after their road trip to Washington. He is angry that the Clintons achieved exit velocity. The Clintons became citizens of the wide world, but no longer citizens of Arkansas, and in Theroux’s mind Arkansas had as much need for them as anyone.

I do suspect that if I were going to cast Joe Namath in a movie, My Life would be a better choice than Norwood.

Official portrait, Bill Clinton, 1993.

On the flip side, notwithstanding conspiracy theories, the Clintons didn’t kill anybody or have anybody killed, and I suspect that much of modern Arkansas, Trump’s Arkansas, would be decidedly hostile if the Clintons lived there. It’s notable that when one Southern President, Jimmie Carter, returned home and became a moral light, his state voted for President Biden. Nobody much argues that Mr. Clinton is a moral light, so maybe that sort of thing only goes so far, and maybe Mr. Carter and the recent Georgia elections are unrelated. It is odd that while Mr. Clinton arguably oversaw our longest period of sustained national economic growth and Mr. Carter’s presidency was an economic failure, it is President Carter who is most admired. It’s not all about the money.

I will say though that the part of My Life about the politics of Arkansas Boy’s State is a dilly.

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Arkansas

Arkansas seems to sit on the margins, out of sight and out of mind for most of us. Oklahoma, its neighbor to the west, has the complex history of Indian Territory to ponder, while Tennessee to the east can can always fall back on music. Texas and Louisiana to the south are their own myths. Maybe Missouri is similar, but with both the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals, it seems like a different world. If Arkansas were part of a family, it would be the younger brother who never quite outgrew his own self-destruction. It’s the brother with the hip flask, jobless, who spent his last dollar on a half-wild horse and a half-broken pistol. He’s the brother who shows up for Thanksgiving already contrite, but never really sorry.

Over the Martin Luther King Holiday, we drove to Arkansas, to the Ozarks. It wasn’t a fishing trip. It could have been a fishing trip, the weather was ok, but it was planned so that when I wrote the report on our Arkansas fish, I wouldn’t have to say that we didn’t go to the Crystal Bridges Museum. We made it to Crystal Bridges, and for a short stop for lunch in Hot Springs, and then came home.

Arkansas is relatively poor (currently ranked 47th in household income, trailing Mississippi and West Virginia, but ahead of Louisiana and New Mexico), and now overwhelmingly Republican. Arkansas voted 62% for Trump in 2020, and all of the Biden counties were located in the Delta, or near enough.

Tyler Kutzbach, from Wikipedia.

The Arkansas population is still pretty binary. An Arkansan is probably black or white, and more likely white than black. As of the 2010 census, 77% of the roughly 3 million population was white, while 15% was black. That’s not a very true picture though. Chicot County in the Southeast Arkansas Delta has a white population of 4,733 and a black population of 5,861. A bit further north along the Mississippi, in Crittenden County–West Memphis–the white population is 21,763 and the black population is 23,789. Flip to our destination in the far northeast, Benton County, the white population is 227,609 and the black population is 4,359. Cut to the chase: Western Arkansas is white, the Delta isn’t. According to the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, about 100 sundown towns (and three sundown counties) existed in Western Arkansas into the 70s.

No malaria, no mosquitoes, no Negroes. Siloam Springs is clearly quite the place.

The Delta black population is a slavery remnant, brought to Arkansas for cotton. If the definition of a functional economy is an economy that provides a decent living standard and opportunity for its participants, the Delta was always a dysfunctional economy, but after World War II, as agriculture converted from labor intense to mechanized, the Delta, both in Arkansas and across the river in Mississippi, brought dysfunction to high art. Most of Arkansas’s poorest counties are located along or near the Mississippi. Post-World War II, mechanization replaced much of agricultural labor, and in the Delta no new industries provided new sources of jobs. Until the Civil Rights Act, Delta planters controlled significant political power in the state, and it wasn’t in their interest to spend tax money on education or economic development–education and economic development would challenge control of labor. Since the 1920s the largest political question in Arkansas was, as often as not, not how to fund schools but how (and whether) to pay for road improvements.

About 70% of the population of Arkansas is Protestant, which includes a vast festering range of denominational and doctrinal disagreement. Only in such places do things like drinkin’ and dancin’ and playing the pipe organ in church still seem like the major philosophical questions of the age, and the principal query among decent folk is whether you’re Baptist, Methodist, or Church of Christ, or maybe even Evangelical (though that’s skirting the edge of decency).

The United States purchased Arkansas from France in 1803, as part of the Louisiana Purchase. As with most such New World land acquisitions, the indigenous Caddos, Osage, and Quapaws weren’t consulted. By 1836, there was sufficient American population–30,000 in 1830 and 97,000 in 1840 –to have achieved statehood. I had some ancestors there by 1836, a couple of pair of many greats grandfathers and grandmothers, but like a lot of Arkansans they don’t appear to have been particularly successful. One pater died young in 1850, and the other was in Texas by 1846. It is so common for white North Texans’ ancestors to have passed through Arkansas, that Ancestry recognizes a distinct DNA group, West Tennessee, Arkansas, and Northeast Texas Settlers. According to Ancestry, them’s my people.

Arkansas Territory, 1819, Arkansas Digital Archive

In the War, as part of the Union push to control the Mississippi, the Arkansas Confederacy was dealt with and survived only in the southwestern corner of the state, with the capital at Washington, 33 miles from Texarkana. In a later stage of the War, the Little Rock Nine were escorted into Central High in Little Rock in 1957.

Along with the Little Rock Nine being escorted into Central High, perhaps the most enduring image of Arkansas is the Arkansas Traveler/Lil’ Abner hillbilly. Lil’ Abner was not clearly from Arkansas, he hailed from Dogpatch, USA, but did anyone doubt that the Ozarks was his home? As for the Arkansas Traveler

Oh, once upon a time in Arkansas,
An old man sat in his little cabin door
And fiddled at a tune that he liked to hear,
A jolly old tune that he played by ear.

Edward Payson Washbourne, The Meeting Between the Traveler and the Squatter, 1856.

Hillbilly is not a flattering designation, combining squalor, meanness, poverty, and ignorance, though The Arkansas Traveller does allow the old man superior practicality along with tunefulness. “Neighbor, why don’t you fix that roof?” “I can’t fix it now ’cause it’s raining, and when it ain’t raining it don’t need fixing.” In the modern age you can toss in the assumptions of opioid addiction and meth.

In recent years, Arkansas points to three corporations as signs of economic change, Walmart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt Transport Services, all located in Northeast Arkansas. I can’t judge whether cheap goods, cheap chicken, and big rigs is the world on a platter for Arkansas, but it can’t hurt. I will say that Tyson produces the best commercial bacon, Wright Brand, and when I don’t cure my own it’s my go-to.

Tourism also plays a part in Arkansas’s economy, and Western Arkansas, up the Ouchitas to the Ozarks, is beautiful. All those bad things you can say about Arkansas? Western Arkansas is beautiful, truly, spectacularly beautiful.

Back to the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Our drive up the Ouchitas to the Ozarks wasn’t a fishing trip, exactly, though we did take rods, the weather was good, and we took a quick look at the White River. It was more of a pre-fishing trip, so that we wouldn’t have to say we’d never been to Crystal Bridges. The Museum collection is a good survey of important American art, but nothing in itself to drive 600 miles for. The real draw is the setting and the building, designed by Moshe Safdie. Together they’re magnificent. Crystal Bridges was founded by Alice Walton, Sam Walton’s daughter, in 2011, and there is a bit of a Medici feel to the enterprise. Here are some of the principal donors:

There’s something to be said for cheap goods, cheap chicken, and big rigs.

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Happy New Year! Late! 2021.

2021 begins our fourth year of chasing fish around the country. What a difficult year the third year was.

The kitten we found bass fishing. She wasn’t bass fishing, we were, and she had been dumped on the roadside. Somebody doesn’t know what they lost.

At the start of 2020, we had a great steelhead trip to Washington State, right on the cusp of the Covid outbreak, right when the first US cases had been identified in, you guessed it, Washington State. I remember seeing a young Asian woman in a face mask in the Seattle airport and thinking, isn’t it a bit over the top wearing face masks? Is that some Asian thing? Who knew it would turn out to be not an ethnic question but an ethics question.

We had a couple of trips to Kansas, one early in the year when it was freezing, and one late in the year when it was freezing. I think next time we’ll go to Kansas in the spring, when the tornadoes blow in. As I a child of the Plains I always loved going to the storm cellar when the storm siren blew. All the neighbors would come over and sit around in the semi-dark, in the dank crypt-like smell of the underground. There were almost certainly spiders. It was a fine old time.

We nymphed in Tennessee, and we nymphed in North Carolina, and we caught some redfish on the Texas Coast and some bass in local ponds. That was all good, but with Washington it only meant three new states, plus we still have to return to Kansas. We’re never going to finish at this rate. We’ll have to fish in the State of D.C. if we don’t hurry.

2020 had a pandemic, and also George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Someone asked me during the Floyd fallout if I thought there was institutional racism. I said yes, but thinking about it later I’m not sure it’s the right question. We share some pretty tragic civic history, from slavery to voter suppression to Jim Crow, and it seems to me the question is whether we can conclude that George Floyd’s death isn’t a continuation of that history. I suspect that if I were black my response would be yep, just more of the same old, this time from the Minneapolis police.

Personally in November and December I went through two months of radiation for prostate cancer, old man cancer, and the radiation left me randomly falling asleep, then I would sleep some more, and then sleep some more. The doctor told me to think of it as a day at the beach. Since I had to go in most days, it was a pretty lousy couple of months for fishing, even surf fishing on the the beach. I hope the radiation worked, but in any event it didn’t leave any side effects, except that now every time I stand up I immediately need to go pee. It’s going to be a pain in waders.

This is not a flats boat.

There was an election, nothing new, with claims of voter fraud, nothing new, and a violent insurrection at the capital that left five people dead, which technically happened in 2021, not 2020, but it felt like 2020 and it was certainly something new. I just wish we still had Mark Twain. Mark Twain could explain this nonsense to us. This nonsense deserves Mark Twain.

As for me, it’s just not plausible that the Democrats could pull off massive fraud without somebody telling their buddy at work you should have seen what I did today! I cast a million votes for Joe Biden! Ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, Deep Throat in parking garages, the Pentagon Papers, that whole raft of Donald Trump ex-advisor porn, Chelsea Manning, J.K. Rowling’s lawyer, Mike Fiers . . . The only reason the Qanon drivel gets traction is because it’s supposedly being leaked by an insider who can’t keep his mouth shut. At least that part , somebody not keeping their mouth shut, is believable. If there had been a massive conspiracy to falsify millions of votes, some conspirator would certainly have said something to somebody who would need to tell the rest of us, and Rudy Guiliani doesn’t count. Somebody is going to blab. Hell, I’ve just told you about my glow-in-the-dark prostate, which is really none of your business, and even worse, an imposition by me on you. I didn’t cast a million votes for Joe Biden, but if I had, you’d almost certainly know by now.

Kris on the Guadalupe

What’s worse, it’s the sort of thing one shouldn’t claim blithely, without hard evidence, and no, that bogus statistical study that concludes if the vote had been the same in 2020 as it was in 2016, Biden couldn’t have won. True enough, but stupid. That’s why the game’s played on the field. Claiming conspiracies without evidence, Sidney Powelling it, will likely get you sued, and worse, it’s a direct attack on democracy, and pretty sketchy under the Ninth Commandment as well. It’s why except for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton none of the lawyers would go into court and say there was fraud; for a lawyer, lying to a court has consequences.

There are always irregularities in elections, elections are hard to run and unless you can show that the irregularities affect the outcome, it’s just noise. There may have been some noise in 2020, but there was no massive fraud. It would have shown up in court if there had been.

Meantime Happy New Year. We’ll all go fishing in 2021! We’re scheduled to go to Pennsylvania in May, and I think we’re going. Hopefully by then we’ll be vaccinated. We may drive to Arkansas tomorrow, and as long as there are plenty of places to pee on the route, that should be just fine.

This is a flats boat.