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Tennessee

It used to be a joke that every Texan went broke in Tennessee before they came to Texas. I suspect my ancestors kinda went broke other places as well, but still, many Texans have a soft spot for Tennessee. T for Texas, T for Tennessee.

Tennessee looms unnaturally large in our collective history. Some random stuff:

  • The Trail of Tears.
  • Davy Crockett, Sam Houston
  • Martin Luther King’s assassination.
  • The Grand Ol’ Opry, Sun Records, Stax Records, Beale Street, Nashville.
  • Andrew Jackson.
  • Dolly Parton
  • The TVA.
  • Shiloh, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Fort Donelson.
  • Nashville Cats.
  • Andrew Johnson.
  • The Smoky Mountains.
  • Al Gore.
  • The Scopes Trial.
  • Elvis.

You’d think with all that stuff going on, there would be good histories of Tennessee, but I haven’t found one. Stuff seems to be dated or episodic, as if the history itself is too big. There are lots of little histories, histories of Andrew Jackson or the Scopes Trial, or the battles of the War in the West, or individual biographies, or histories of East Tennessee, but nothing general seems satisfactory.

There are really three parts of Tennessee, represented by the three stars in the circle on the Tennessee flag, and maybe that’s the problem: the state’s schizophrenic. From the west, Memphis is that joke about Mississippi; what are Mississippi’s two largest cities? New Orleans and Memphis. It was the largest inland cotton market in the South. It’s on the Gulf Coastal Plain that runs from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River to Southern Illinois, as much the Delta as Arkansas or Mississippi are the Delta, flat, rich; the land of cotton.

Marion Post Walcott, May 1940, Cotton Carnival, Memphis Tennessee, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).

Even today here is no city more Southern than Memphis, population 651,073, with a metro population of 1,371,110. It seems everyone in Memphis is either white or black, without the polyglot of people and cultures that I’m used to. It’s a lovely city, with ducks in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, good ribs, and a rich cultural history, but it’s also a damaged city. It never seems to have recovered from the murder of Martin Luther King. As of 2010, Memphis proper was 27.5% non-Hispanic white, 63.3% African-American, 6.5% Hispanic, 1.6% Asian. The metro population evens out a bit, with 45% non-hispanic white, and 47% black.

When I was in college I ate my first bagel in Memphis, on my way to backpack to Clingman’s Dome in the Smokies.

Memphis Minnie, 1930.

Central Tennessee is higher than West Tennessee (though not Klingman’s Dome), with the Highland Rim surrounding the Nashville Basin. Higher is a relative term. The Highland Rim is rarely much higher than 1,100 feet. It’s hill country, farm country, Nashville.

USGS, Nashville Basin, 1988.

Nashville, with a city population of 670,820 and a metro population of 1,959,495, is growing. One doesn’t go there any more just to make records. In some ways it is the reverse image of Memphis, thriving, maybe even modern, maybe even cosmopolitan. It’s 58.6% non-Hispanic white, 28.6% African American, and 3.5% Asian. 9% of the total population is Hispanic.

Daniel Schwein, Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, licensed under Cretive Commons license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

Nashville is known principally for that pancake place over near Vanderbilt, the Pancake Pantry, and a pretentious but well-acted Robert Altman movie. Nothing else.

East Tennessee is defined by Appalachia, with the Blue Ridge on the border with North Carolina, the Ridge and Valley Appalachians to the west, and The Cumberland Plateau bordering middle Tennessee. By 1794, I had two ancestors, a Hatcher and a Crowson, in Wears Valley, near Sevierville and Pigeon Forge. There is still a Hatcher Mountain and a Crowson Cove in Wears Valley in the Ridge and Valley region, but my direct ancestor (and their descendent), William John Hatcher, was in Sullivan County, Missouri by 1850. In 1861, William John volunteered for the Missouri Infantry, on the side of the Union.

You’d think that would be odd, but Eastern Tennessee was a Union hotbed: there weren’t many slaves in those hills and hollers. Eastern Tennessee is still mostly white. Knoxville’s population is essentially 17% black and 83% white, with everybody else just a wee bit of lagniappe. Historically it was also poor, though it seems to be doing well enough now. This is Dolly Parton country. Maybe Dolly is a cousin.

Dolly Parton and Porter Waggoner, 1968. Pre-1978, no copyright mark.

In East Tennessee, Scott County seceded from the Confederacy and formed its own Free and Independent State of Scott, and didn’t officially rejoin Tennessee until 1986. Pater William John would have served the Union at Shiloh, Corinth, in the Atlanta Campaign, and in Sherman’s March to the Sea, on the opposite side of at least three other second great grandfathers, but as like as not on the same side as his Tennessee brothers and cousins. I’m glad my great-great grandfathers were not better shots. Weirdly, while I knew from my grandparents that a number of their grandparents fought for the Confederacy, I didn’t find out that William John fought for the Union until a couple of years ago. Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe that was the sort of thing one kept to oneself in the post-Reconstruction South.

But things change. I’m proud of my Grandfather William John, and East Tennessee is no longer a hotbed of Northern sympathy. East Tennessee along with the rest of Tennessee voted 60% for President Trump in 2016, with only the two most populous counties, Davidson and Shelby, and a majority black county, Hayward, voting for Hillary Clinton.

Ali Zifan, Wikimedia Commons.

Which reminds me of why this came up in the first place. In two weeks we’re supposed to fish in far northeast Tennessee, for trout on the South Holston and Watauga Rivers. We’re driving. I picked it so that I could see Wears Valley, and Shiloh, and because we go from there to visit friends in North Carolina. It’ll be our first road trip, really our first trip of any kind, since the pandemic began. We’ll see if we actually go.

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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.

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Fish in the Time of Cholera. Arkansas.

The largest trout I’ve caught was in Arkansas, in the Ozarks on the Little Red River in the northwest part of the state, on a root-beer colored streamer called a meat whistle. Whoever named that fly wasn’t subtle, but neither is the fly.

I caught that trout three years ago, and I considered including it in our list and skipping another trip to Arkansas. For some reason that seemed wrong–if I included Arkansas where would it end? North Carolina 20 years back? That trip to Wyoming 30 years’ ago? So a month ago we booked a weekend trip back to the Little Red on April 4. Then came Coronavirus.

The Little Red is a tributary to the more-famous White River, and like the White it’s known for its trout. It once held the world all-tackle record for brown trout, over 40 pounds. Since the 1980s, the browns are always wild, never stocked. It’s a pretty river, to my eye prettier than the White, and we fished it from a flat-bottomed, jet-motored sled-boat Nothing says Arkansas like a flat-bottomed, jet-motored sled-boat.

Parts of the Little Red are lined with vacation homes, but its banks are heavily wooded and the houses don’t intrude except when your fly gets hung on a dock. There’s always something for flies to get hung on. The Little Red and the White are tailwaters, and while trout aren’t native to Arkansas, water is discharged from the dams at 40-50 degrees, cold enough to dissuade the native black bass and catfish. Trout thrive.

My great-grandfather, Henry Louis Thomas, was born July 17, 1850, in Ozan, Arkansas, two counties northwest of the corner where Texas and Arkansas meet. His father, William Louis Thomas, was born I-don’t-know-where and died in Ozan in 1849. He was 38. Because of problems with a stepfather, as boys Henry and his older brother, James Jasper, left Arkansas on a donkey and came to Bowie County near Texarkana. It seems pretty desperate, but I suspect these were pretty desperate people.

All William Louis left behind was a marriage license, a denied dram shop license application, and two sons. I doubt that my great grandfather Henry could read, or at least that he could read much, and wonder what it must have been like for Amanda Adeline to be widowed and poor and pregnant in Arkansas in 1850. She was born in 1834, two years before statehood, in Argenta, Arkansas, now North Little Rock. She was 16 when Henry was born. She died in 1864 in Bois d’Arc. She was 30.

Bois d’Arc, by the way, is pronounced bow dark.

When I was a boy, my grandmother’s house was a few blocks south, the Texas side, of State Line Boulevard in Texarkana. The Texas side was dry, meaning that alcohol sales were banned. The Arkansas side was wet, evidencing a wildness that I suspected was typical of the other side of the street. The federal post office sits on the line, part in Texas, part in Arkansas. Near the post office is a peculiarly elaborate Confederate memorial dedicated in part to the women of the Confederacy, or at least the white women of the Confederacy.

“O great Confederate mothers, we would paint your names on monuments, that men may read them as the years go by and tribute pay to you, who bore and nurtured hero-sons and gave them solace on that darkest day, when they came home, with broken swords and guns!”

I don’t think there’s a corresponding monument for Southern women who weren’t Confederate mothers.

I doubt my family history is uncommon. I expect that lots of early immigrants to Texas came through Arkansas: white, black, or brown they could only have come through Arkansas, Louisiana, Mexico, or the Gulf. Maybe there were a rare few souls from New Mexico. My family history is probably only nuanced by the time some of my ancestors actually stayed in Arkansas.

Henry Schenck Tanner, Arkansas, A New Universal Atlas Containing Maps of the various Empires, Kingdoms, States and Republics Of The World, 1836.

Since Thursday I’m home, self-isolating. A colleague in Dallas may have the virus, and there is a feeling of inevitability about the spread of Covid-19. Fifteen days ago I went to a breakfast for the Harris County Community College system with about 500 others, and after the breakfast I stood in the foyer for an hour discussing local politics with a friend, the wife of a Harris County commissioner, and greeted passers-by. That evening I stood with our mayor in a crowded room for a reception for Cory Booker, and then left for a dinner at a Chinese restaurant with about half of the Harris County state representatives–the purpose was to advertise the plight of Asian Town restaurants. At all those events we were still shaking hands, hugging, standing closer than six feet.

Now of course our mayor has ordered all Houston dining room service closed, and I’m at home. Everything’s canceled. Everything’s ground to a halt.

I haven’t canceled our trip to Arkansas yet, and haven’t discussed canceling with Kris. I should go ahead and cancel, I’m pretty sure we won’t be going, but part of me wants to stock the van with groceries and sleeping bags and drive, to see deserted highways, to make Henry’s trip on that donkey in reverse. We wouldn’t have to interact with anyone except the fishing guide, and that would be outdoors. We could sleep in the van in WalMart parking lots, right? There are WalMarts in Arkansas, right? It would be a small rebellion against our current paralysis. At some point life must go on, or maybe not.

I need to spend a day outside. And I’ve only been home since Thursday.