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Rain Falling on Cedars

One night last week I woke up in the middle of the night and checked the Washington weather. There were flood warnings again on the Queets and Hoh Rivers. The next morning the Queets was over 13.5 feet, and running at over 15,000 cubic feet per second. I gather that flows below 4,000 cfs are considered safe for wading, so flows of 15,000 . . . Probably not. We were supposed to fish the next day, but we went sightseeing instead.

Meantime that day it was 46° in Quinault, Washington, and 37° in Houston. I didn’t run that morning in Houston; I might have in Quinault.

On social media I viewed a succession of snow pictures from friends in the Texas Panhandle and Vernon and Dallas, which all-in-all were more interesting than the news about the failed Iowa caucuses and the impeachment vote. On a lark I checked the temperatures through the Great Plains. That morning it was 16° in Vernon, Texas, 19° in Wichita, Kansas, 16° in Omaha, and 16° in Fargo, North Dakota. I hope my friends in Vernon were warm. It’s been 45 years since I left there, and I can still remember both the bitter Plains winds and the excitement of a cold, still morning when the earth was covered with snow.

Tra Cardwell, Vernon, Texas, February 5, 2020.

That night Jack called from The Evening Hatch to warn us about what we already knew, that the rivers were blown out for Saturday, but Sunday and Monday might be better.  I told him I could get in plenty of guitar practice on Saturday. He said good attitude. I didn’t tell him that attitude was fine but that what he should really wish for was a better guitarist. 

Getting ready for our trip to Washington I read some stuff by Washington State writers. I didn’t reread Trout Fishing in America, but Richard Brautigan was from Spokane. It’s the only Washington State book I ran across that was arguably about fly fishing, but I’d just re-read it two years ago when I started this exercise. I googled its genre because I figured Tom Robbins, a Seattle writer, was similar, and it might give me some insight into their mix of 60s sexual adventurism, improbable plots, and moral superiority. Magical realism came to mind, but I figured magical realism had to be South American, then I saw Robbins and Brautigan described as magical realists. As far as I can tell Washington State is decidedly not in South America, so maybe I was wrong.

But I also found their work described as Fabulism, which description I really liked, mostly because I initially mispronounced it “fab” as in “Fab Four,” and for me every good impulse in the 60s is summed up in the Beatles. Even if I didn’t exactly like Brautigan or Robbins or even the 60s. On reflection though I figured out it was Fabulism as in fable not Fabulism as in Fab Four, and that made more sense: these books are fables, adult fairy tales with lots of sex but still a moral. I suspect though that the moral is that having sex with the author is a good thing. Honestly, if all young male achievement is driven by the desire for sexual partners (and any male who doesn’t at least suspect that isn’t being entirely honest), Brautigan and Robbins may be the most honest writers ever, even if reading them’s a mixed bag, and if honesty by a fiction writer isn’t quite the point.

I remember pretty vividly the last time I read Tom Robbins, in 1976. The book was Another Roadside Attraction, and I remember the couch I was on and the room I was in when I read it, but I don’t remember anything about the novel itself. This time I tried to read Robbins’ memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie, which made me think of Robbins as the enfant terrible who I might have envied a long time ago; I tried to read the book about the sexual adventuress hitchhiker with the big thumb, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (which happily set off a several-month long binge of Emmylou Harris singing in my head), but I got bored; and I started his last novel, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, but I gave up after four pages, when he said a moth resembled a clitoris with wings. Sometimes a moth is just a moth.

I only got very far with one novel, his second, Still Life with Woodpecker. It’s about a red-headed terrorist bomber nicknamed the Woodpecker having sex with a red-headed princess from a deposed East European royal family.  The usual stuff. Sometimes Robbins can be an interesting observer: “That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to ‘protect the revolution.’ That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant, minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile . . .” Mostly though he’s only the enfant terrible: “And, of course, Bernard, as all men, carried around in his trousers the most renowned redhead of all—characteristically funny and dangerous.”

I don’t know whether I’ll finish “Still Life,” but I will recognize that woodpecker is certainly a double entendre, which is a lot of what you need to know about Tom Robbins.

The first 100 pages of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette, may be the best travel guide to a city, Seattle, I’ve read. Early in the book Bernadette rants off-and-on about Seattle, and her rants describe the architecture, restaurants, rain, private schools, behavior, blackberry bushes . . . all the things that a good description would tell about a city. Bernadette is a bit of a Fabulist as well, and maybe that’s characteristic of a lot of post-WW II literature. But if Robbins’ characters achieve fulfillment through sex, Bernadette is surprisingly chaste: she only achieves fulfillment when she hitchhikes to Palmer Station in Antarctica and signs on to design the new South Pole station. Does that make it a women’s book? It does make me suspect that Maria Semple is built differently than Tom Robbins, and one is certain that Bernadette doesn’t have abnormally large thumbs, nor does she need them.

“They were young and scruffy, like they could all have worked at REI . . .” Was there ever a more Seattle-ish description of anything. 

Gunderson’s Snow Falling on Cedars is as far from Fabulism as it gets. It’s a lovely book, with a flaw, but still lovely, slow and descriptive, evocative of a place and unforgettable. It is a story about a death that might be a murder, an accused the reader suspects is wrongly accused, and a moral dilemma for a damaged man. It is a story about a moment in time, post-World War II, when pride in the community mixes with guilt over the treatment of neighbors and friends: the Japanese internment, and the place of the Japanese Americans in the post-war community. It’s a book about a small town, an island in Puget Sound, and people who at their best are careful, deliberate. Their island demands it. The flaw—the accused’s silence—is explainable if not entirely convincing, but then the novel would have been profoundly different if he’d told his story early, like how you can’t have The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn if there were a realistic ending.

There’s a good movie version, that looks just like the book reads. 

If I recommended a single book about the Pacific Northwest it would probably be Timothy Egan’s The Good Rain, and if I were to recommend a single book about the Texas and Oklahoma plains it would probably be Egan’s The Worst Hard Time. The Good Rain is an older book now, published in 1990, but Egan told me that I was going to a place where the best descriptions might be green, rivers, Pacific, mountains, logging booms and busts, and drip, drip, drip. For Oregon and Washington Egan talks about the right stuff, the history of the place, the natural world, and the people who could only come from there. The book holds up well.

Post script: there was an moment when we were driving through the Olympic Peninsula, re-listening to The Good Rain in the car, and Egan was describing the road we were on. Good timing.

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Mt. Olympus, Rain, and Bunny Leeches

Gurling, Mike. National Park Service, Mount Meany (right) and Mount Olympus, Olympic National Park, September, 1990.

Next Thursday we go to the Olympic Peninsula for steelhead. The Olympic Mountains cut through the center of the Peninsula, and their name evolved from the highest peak, 7,980 feet, which was dubbed Mount Olympus in 1778 by English captain John Meares. He thought the peak looked godly, or at least Greek. The name Olympus not only stuck, it spread to the mountain range and finally to the Peninsula.

It must have been a sunny day when Captain Meares saw Mount Olympus, because he actually saw it. Here’s next week’s forecast for Quinault, Washington, where we’ll stay. Quinault is on the rainy west side of the mountains.

Snow, sun, snow, rain, rain, rain, rain, sun, rain. There’s not a lot of promise for visibility. We will fish Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, but I’m thinking we should take the day off Sunday to sunbathe. The mountains create a rain shadow on the northeast side of the peninsula, so parts of the Peninsula have as little as 15 inches of rain a year, but we fish in the wet west. You’ve heard Seattle is wet and rainy? Well this is from whence those rumors arise. Drip, drip, drip.

At Quinault it rains 189.7 days per year, and winter when the steelhead come is the wettest season. The Quinault Steelheads could never actually complete a 162-game baseball season without a domed stadium. At Quinault average annual rainfall is 122 inches, 10 feet of rain each year, compared to a US average of 38 inches, plus there’s another 7 inches of snow. The average monthly winter rainfall for the Hoh Rainforest valley is 18.33 inches. The average annual rainfall for Lubbock, Texas, is 19.18 inches. I’m betting the Hoh Rainforest doesn’t look much like Lubbock.

Fog on the west side of the peninsula adds up to 30 additional inches of moisture to the rainforests each year. No wonder vampires love it.

Apple Maps.

Winter steelhead season, wild steelhead season, begins in February and ends in April. I’ve fished for steelhead once before, last year in Oregon, but those were summer steelhead, and winter steelhead are a different kettle of fish. Steelhead are ocean-dwelling rainbow trout that, like salmon, come back to their natal river to spawn, and they are often considered a species of Pacific salmon, but they’re genetically the same as rainbow trout which stay in freshwater snd are not considered a species of Pacific salmon. It gets confusing.

Anadromous. Steelhead (like resident rainbows) hatch in the spring or early summer and then (unlike resident rainbows) work their way to the ocean. The resident rainbow might reach five pounds (which would be huge). The ocean-dwelling steelhead, feeding on ocean shrimp and baitfish, might reach 20 pounds or more. After two or three years of growing, steelhead get notions for some hanky-panky and go back home. 

But going home can be early or late, depending on the steelhead’s genetics. Summer (and fall) steelhead come into the rivers before they are sexually mature. The early arrival is probably a reproduction strategy that gives summer steelhead time to move further inland. They may swim upriver a thousand miles or more. Winter steelhead on the other hand come into the rivers already hot and bothered, have their liaisons closer to saltwater and then, if they’re lucky, return to the ocean. Unlike the other Pacific salmon, steelhead can survive the spawn and return to spawn again next season. They don’t usually, maybe 10 percent or so return from a prior season, but they can. The rest of the Pacific salmon never swim back. They die.

National Forest Service, spawning steelhead.

Because winter steelhead are mature when they enter the river, they are much larger than summer steelhead. We had two spey rods for summer steelhead, a 6 wt. and a 7 wt. In our gear list for next week we were told to bring 8 and 9 wts. We’ll take a 7 and and the new 8 (don’t tell Kris), and otherwise use the outfitter’s rods. We’ll leave the 6 at home.

We were also told to bring both regular and dual or triple density Skagit lines, with a wide variety of sinking tips. Floating Skandi lines weren’t on the list. Apparently we need to get our flies down deep.

I hope your eyes are starting to glaze over. Spey rods. Weights. Skagit and Skandi heads. Tips. It’s not really important, except that the bigger the weight of the rod, the bigger the fish it can handle, and the bigger the fly it can throw. Spey rods are long two-handed rods designed to cast to salmon and steelhead. Skandi heads (named for Scandinavia) float on top of the water. Skagit heads (named for Skagitavia) usually also float, but they’re short and heavy, and are designed to throw sinking tips and bigger flies. There. I’ve explained everything, right? Of course I could also be wrong. I’m from Houston. What do I know about all this stuff?

So I emailed Jason Osborne at The Portland Flyshop. Jason has helped me before more than once, and had suggested The Evening Hatch as our outfitter on the Olympic Peninsula. He called me to sort out my confusion, and then told me I was going to the most beautiful place on the planet.

“You will see every shade of green,” he said, “and the Queets is the perfect river when it’s on. It’s wadeable, and easy to read, and the water is beautiful.” It was pretty exciting, but I could have told Jason that if in mid-August he’d go to Lubbock, Texas, he could probably see every shade of brown.

Wild Olympics, Proposed Wild and Scenic Rivers, https://www.wildolympics.org/forests-and-rivers/wild-scenic-rivers/ .

The Queets isn’t the only river on the Olympic Peninsula to fish for winter steelhead. From what I can make out there’s also the Sol Duc, Calawah, Hoh, Bogachiel, and Quinault. The Peninsula is home to a spider web of rivers running to all points of the compass from the central mountains. Some are fed by the (disappearing) Olympic Mountain glaciers, some by springs. This week though, they’re all fed by rain. Western Washington, including the Peninsula, has received as much as 9 inches of rain in a day in the high mountains, and along with landslide warnings the rivers are in flood.

Jack Mitchell at The Evening Hatch says that everything’s blown out but that we should hit things about right. If we do it will be the first time, but on the flip side I’m happy with just about anything short of a landslide. As long as I’m not drowning in mud I can spend my time hanging out and working on Bach on the guitar. I am happy to see that after reaching 22. 5 feet the Queets is moving in the other direction. Ideal flow for fishing the Queets is probably something less than 4,000 cfs. The current 20,000 cfs is probably still just a wee bit high, even if it’s better than the 70,000 cfs it was running this time yesterday. That’s blown out.

Meanwhile I’ve been tying flies. A winter steelhead’s digestive system shuts off when it comes back to freshwater, so even if it does take a fly it’s not feeding. The notion is to tie a fly that triggers something: curiosity, anger, habit, and then keep your fingers crossed.

This is clearly hubris on my part: I’ve got no notion of what flies might be useful or worthwhile in winter in Western Washington. I tied fish tacos last time, and caught my steelhead on the fish taco I tied from the ostrich feather the guy in drag gave me at the Houston Pride Parade. This time I’m tying bunny leaches in various attractive color combinations and weights: pink/orange, pink/purple, black/pink, blue/orange. They’re not much like anything I’ve tied before. For all I know they may not be like anything anyone else has tied either, though I’d like to think there are people catching steelhead with them all over steelhead country. In any case, I’m taking that Pride Parade fly with me.

But the good news is that it probably doesn’t much matter. To fish steelhead you stand in the river and cast and cast and cast and then cast a thousand times more and maybe get a strike. Maybe. I haven’t caught any fish so far this year, to be honest I haven’t fished much, and like as not I’ll keep my streak going. There’s always Bach.

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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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Kansas Supply Side Fly Fishing

Kansas Mountains

Kansas Mountains, a preenactment

Kansas is a pretty conservative state, more conservative than most. Kansas hasn’t had a Democratic senator since 1938, when George McGill, elected in 1930 to fill an unexpired term, lost his second bid for reelection. There was one other Kansas Democrat elected in the last century, in 1913. He lost in 1919. Maybe he won as a peace-time Democrat, that sort of thing happened before World War I, and it’s interesting that at some point we switched from electing senators in odd years to even. It clearly wasn’t a change that helped Kansas Democrats.

The current governor is a Democrat, and that happens in Kansas from time to time, not like all the time but every now and again, so maybe Kansas is less conservative than one might think. But over the last eight years Kansas was uncharacteristically prominent in the national news for a peculiarly conservative administration. Another governor, Sam Brownback, made Kansas the nation’s petrie dish for supply side economics. Brownback resigned the governorship to become President Trump’s United States Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, and by the end of his second term when he resigned both Republicans and Democrats couldn’t get him out of Kansas fast enough. Hence there is now a Democrat in office–Brownback blowback.

Gage Skidmore, photographer, Sam Brownback measuring the bluegill he caught in Kansas, CPAC, 2015, Wikipedia.

In 2011 as a newly-elected governor Brownback pushed through radical tax reductions. Being a religious man, he had faith that if Kansas decreased taxation, the resulting economic stimulus would increase tax revenues. Common sense supports Brownback’s notions, at least somewhat: If you tax too much, say 100%, people won’t pay or won’t work and no taxes get collected. The generally accepted notion though isn’t that reduced taxation will always result in economic stimulus, but that there is an optimum level of taxation, a level at which necessary economic drivers like schools and roads and health care aren’t crippled, but the supporting taxes don’t themselves hold back the economy. In the Kansas Experiment, Brownback slashed rates of taxation in 2012 to lower tax revenues by $231 million. Brownback was certain that the reduced taxation would stimulate a slow Kansas economy, and promised more future cuts.

It didn’t exactly work. The Kansas economy continued to lag, and by 2017 the Kansas legislature had slashed expenditures on roads, schools, bridges, and other necessary stuff. The legislature, both Republican and Democrat, rolled back the tax rollbacks, and then overrode Brownback’s veto.

The Laffer Curve, a Historical Reenactment. Much of our fiscal policy over the last 40 years is derived from this napkin.

The notion that lower tax rates result in higher tax revenues isn’t new, and was the theoretical support for a number of U.S. tax cuts, even pre-Reaganomics, even by Democrats. Maybe its most famous association (other than with President Reagan) is with the economist Arthur Laffer, who in 1974 as a White House staffer sketched the Laffer curve onto a napkin for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Winner winner chicken dinner! I hope it was a paper napkin. I’d hate for a conservative administration to waste cloth napkins. On the other hand, maybe if it’s still around it could be like the Shroud of Turin, and we could charge admission.

Before that, in 1924, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, he of Mellon Bank and one of our then-richest folk, wrote “It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue to the government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower rates.” At that time the marginal tax rate was 73%, and since as one of the .01% Mellon lived at the margins, maybe he had a better understanding of the result than most. The marginal rate was ultimately reduced to 24%, but then it was increased in 1932 at the outset of the New Deal to 62%. By 1951 following World War II, the highest marginal rate was 91%.

Trinity Court Studio, Andrew W. Mellon, 1921.

Tax optimization theory is not inherently conservative, but it does go hand-in-hand with a bulwark of conservative economics, Supply-Side Economics, dba trickle-down theory, dba voodoo economics. Supply-Siders believe that the economy is driven by production, by those willing and able to invest capital into producing more, and that the only way the economy grows is if production grows. Production only grows if the triumvirate of minimal regulation, stable monetary policy, and–here’s where tax reduction comes to play–low taxes spur producers to invest in production. It can’t, for instance, spur producers to go fly fishing in New Zealand instead of investing in production, because that’s not the sort of thing producers do. Consumption, the theory goes, will follow production, one supposes in part because of increased funds available to workers and in part because of the availability of goods. If you build it, they will come. Just look what happened to Iowa!

The direct counterpoint to Supply-Side Economics is Keynesian Demand-Side Economics. Give a consumer a dollar, and he’ll spend it on consumption, which in turn will spur production. I’m sure that there are Supply-Siders with complex calculations that prove Supply-Side is the very thing, and Demand-Siders with their own set of complex calculations that prove that Demand-Side is the very thing, and that I would make head-nor-tales of neither set of calculations. As a demonstration model though Kansas isn’t a very convincing proof for the Supply-Side. Maybe it failed because the state reduced tax rates for both the highest payers and the lowest? Maybe they should have increased taxation on the lowest to spur production? Maybe, but end of the day the Kansas economy started stagnant, and six years later was apparently still stagnant, and the state government was a mess. I hope Ambassador Brownback fares better with religious freedom, ‘cause if he doesn’t we’re all going to end up under Sharia law.

I’ve been thinking about Kansas a good bit, mostly because fishing Kansas is kind of intimidating to me. There are no fly fishing guides. There are no fly fishing guidebooks. It’s not a destination fishery and it’s a bit short on the fly fishing resources that destination fisheries usually have. I figure the cause must be a combination of high taxation and excessive regulation.

Kansas flat with tarpon, a preenactment

Just consider: fly-fishers like mountains, and Kansas is one of our flattest states. If mountain producers would just produce some mountains in Kansas, then fly fishers would flock there. If, for instance, mountain producers dug out the eastern portion of the state, and dumped the spoil in the west, Kansas could have both a mountain range and an inland sea: just add salt. Fly fishers would flock to both the mountains and the sea, as would bonefish, permit, tarpon, and trout. Clearly, the only reason that hasn’t happened is because of Kansas laws that discourage mountain and inland sea production, and the current high taxation on Kansas mountain and seaside property. If you produced a mountain in Kansas with a few good trout streams, I reckon just about everybody–not just fly fishers–would come to see it.

We need to get Governor Brownback back in Kansas.