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True Grit

Few things have messed with my head longer than True Grit, beginning with the 1969 movie starring John Wayne. I own a copy of the book, but I didn’t read it until we started planning our trip to Oklahoma. In 1969 I wouldn’t have imagined that the book was anything better than a Louis L’Amour novel. Of course then I couldn’t think of many things better than a Louis L’Amour novel. I might still like Louis L’Amour if I still read him, but I’ll save that for North Dakota. 

The problem with the John Wayne movie was that the geography was all wrong, and at thirteen I knew it. Everyone knows the plot. Fourteen year-old Mattie Ross enlists one-eyed Marshall Rooster Cogburn to go with her into Indian Territory to bring her father’s murderer to justice. Mattie picks Cogburn because she believes him to be a man of true grit. Comparing myself to Mattie and Rooster, I knew that I didn’t know much about grit, but what I did know was the geography of the movie. I knew Indian Territory was Oklahoma, and I had been in and and out of Oklahoma all my life. I knew the movie landscape was southwestern Colorado, and we went to southwestern Colorado and New Mexico from time to time for vacations. One didn’t get on a horse in Fort Smith, Arkansas, cross a river, and end up in Ouray, Colorado. 

I couldn’t believe that the moviemakers could be so stupid (at best) or dishonest (at worst). I even cobbled together an explanation: the Indian Territory of 1870s Oklahoma was bigger than current-day Oklahoma, and the San Juan National Forest was within its borders. That was wrong of course, but it never occurred to me that the moviemakers picked their locale because southwestern Colorado is prettier than northeastern Oklahoma, no slight at all to northeastern Oklahoma. Southwestern Colorado is prettier than just about anyplace.

The Coen Brothers version of the movie is impossibly true to the book, and its tone and language are altogether artier than the John Wayne version. The Coen Brothers version stars a brilliant 13-year old girl, not a 22-year old. It stars the Dude, not the Duke. But it also makes its nod to the original, and for me in the most confusing way possible: by filming in the same landscape.  The Coen’s choice messed with my head anew, even though by then I had realized that it was a matter of artistic choice, not reality.  

So I finally read the novel, and now it’s joined together with the movies to mess with my head.

Take, for instance, LaBoeuf. A part of me says that of course there is a Texan in this novel, just as there is a Texan in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If you’re going to write a novel about bravery, you surely do need a Texan companion to prove the act is not only brave, but extraordinarily brave. Matt Damon’s LaBoeuf (pronounced Lebeef) is excellent. In the original movie, however, Glenn Campbell (who was the very thing in his day, and who played guitar on Pet Sounds) is almost unbearably stilted. Did he know it? Is he such a bad actor? Was this art? I doubt it was purposeful, and then I doubt my doubts. It’s hard to understand such horrible acting.

Then there is the comedy. True Grit and Portis’s other novels are considered some of our best under-the-radar stuff. And the book and the movies are set in a real world with a real history. There was a hanging Judge Parker, and the incursions by Parker’s marshals into Indian Territory began the end of Indian Nation sovereignty. Portis gets his history right. Everybody thinks the novel is brilliant, and it is.

And everybody thinks the novel is comic.

I don’t really get it. Maybe to somebody who thinks southwestern Colorado is northeastern Oklahoma the novel is comic. I listen to Mattie Ross’s narration, fine as Portis has made it, and I hear a mildly exaggerated version of my  aunts talking. I watch Rooster Cogburn (who rode with Quantrill), and I see the righteous and the unrighteous, the just and the unjust, and the line is crossed back and forth from day to day, from moment to moment. Rooster Cogburn and Mattie Ross are forces in both opposition and harmony: unconscious Presbyterian rigidity and riding with Quantrill. Is Mattie comic? It’s a comedy that is hard to pinpoint.  Mattie doesn’t tell jokes. She isn’t amusing or witty. This isn’t a book of pratfalls, and it’s not picaresque like, say, Little Big Man. It is comic only in how Mattie’s uncompromising force collides with the world and overwhelms it. Maybe it is only the exaggeration (and in my mind the very slight exaggeration) that is funny.

So 50 years after I first watched John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn in a southwestern single screen theater on a little town square I’m still wrestling with True Grit. 

 * * *

I’ve been preparing for Friday’s trip to Broken Bow.  It’s 30 degrees outside, and I hope it warms up just a bit in the frigid north of Oklahoma where it’s even colder. When we went to Wisconsin in September the guide required studless wading boots to protect his boat, and I had dutifully removed our studs and put them away where I wouldn’t lose them. Then I promptly lost them.

In Oregon we’d waded with Patagonia River Crampons, and they worked great, so if I didn’t find the studs I wouldn’t necessarily need to replace them. Studs aren’t much. They’re short sheet metal screws that screw into the bottom of boots, but once they’re labeled with a brand name at a fly shop they get a bit pricey. Maybe they’re tungsten or aluminum or gold or some such. Since we don’t use felt-soled boots anymore, studs are the minimum needed to keep your footing on slick rock. 

The older I get, the more I worry about falls in rivers, and along with studs I now use a wading staff.  I’m a wobbly tripod in the watter, and in a few years I may drop the fly rod altogether and just carry two wading staffs. If a fish comes along I’ll point at it. The staff I use is a Folstaff, a shock-corded tent pole that with a bit of a shake snaps together at five joints. Putting it away is sometimes a bit of a struggle, and the first few times a joint got stuck I used a vice and some vice clamps to separate the sections. I’ve discovered over time that with a bit of wiggling the joints separate well enough, though not altogether easily, and having the separated sections get away from you and snap back together is almost as annoying and as common as a good tangled leader. 

I like my staff, with its collected scrapes and darkened cork handle, but largely because of the separation anxiety I found myself on Saturday eyeing a new Fishpond staff at the shop. It extended like a photographer’s tripod. I imagined that it wouldn’t take desperate measures to put it away, but that it also wouldn’t extend with that satisfying snap.  

Meanwhile Kris looked for the studs and didn’t find them either, but she reminded me that I’d put them in a plastic bag, not a box.  This morning I went right to them and they’re back in the boots.  Now I’d just like a bit warmer weather, and we do need to clean our boots.

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Indian Territory

Map of the Indian Territory, 1892, Library of Congress

I have a new friend, at least on Facebook. We sat at the same table at a lunch, and then last Saturday night we were at the same party. I talked to her husband (who was from Salt Lake) about where we should fly fish in Utah. He suggested Provo.

She works for the Anti-Defamation League. In the interim between our meetings eleven Jewish congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Congregation were murdered. It had been a brutal week, and maybe particularly so for her. This week’s been brutal too, with another mass shooting in California. We are a violent people.

Because of her work I suspect that more than most folk she is attuned to racial and ethnic incongruities, ranging from unintentional slights to out-and-out violence. At one point in our conversation I must have mentioned we were going to fish in Oklahoma, because I said the word Indian and I think she cringed. A few sentences later she said Native American. I took it as a gentle correction.

For most states, Virginia say, or Washington or Wisconsin or Texas, first people history is a repetitious prologue. Before X happened, there were Native Americans: Caddo, Wichita, Comanche, Cherokee, Umpqua, Powhatan, Ojibwe, Fox and Sauk, Alabama, Coushata, Seminole, Karankawa . . . Everywhere there is that iteration, speculative and archeological, and then X happened, X being when the Americans came, or the British or the French or the Spanish came, and the part of the story about the indigenous people ends.

Where did they go? For most states, after the prologue, it’s oblivion. Maybe extermination by violence and disease, or to smaller and ever more confined spaces, but someplace out of the way, someplace else. In San Antonio once, talking to a federal park ranger at a Spanish mission, he pointed across an open field to the local Hispanic neighborhoods and said that’s where I grew up and that’s where the native population is still living. He said that they, part of his ancestors, were incorporated into Spanish mission life. Early Thomas Jefferson thought the answer for the Indian conflict was for the Native Americans to become farmers and join into the new way of life. Tell that to the Cherokee. Late Thomas Jefferson pushed for removal. Mostly late Thomas Jefferson won. 

 In Oklahoma, A History, Messrs. Baird and Goble write that every place has its birth story, and sometimes more than one. They suggest three for Oklahoma: the forced immigration of the Five Tribes; the Oklahoma land rush; and the oil boom.  Of course before the five tribes, before the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, there were already Apache, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita in Oklahoma. Even in Oklahoma there is that first people prologue.

National Park Service, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail

The problem with referencing Indians, whether the term of choice is American Indian or Native American or Indian, it is always imposed. Among American indigenous people there was never an Indian. There were Yamparika Comanche, or there were Powhatan, or there were Karankawa. Any label that suggests a unified indigenous people is an exonym, and any one is as artificial as any other. Every one of the labels has its critics, but each also has its supporters. Columbus’ word wasn’t so much a misnomer as a creation, and it’s useful and ubiquitous.

For most of us there aren’t day-to-day reminders of American Indian history and culture. Unlike, say, statues of Robert E. Lee, we don’t have many monuments about that other national tragedy. Oklahoma is one we’ve got, but if I think about Oklahoma (and I don’t generally) it’s as a collection of tropes: red state, cowboys, oil, tornadoes, Dust Bowl, and Indians. Tropes are useful as shorthand for things that are more complex, but only to the limits of our own understanding.  For Indian, the complex thing contained in the Oklahoma trope is the geographical summation of every betrayal, every displacement and epidemic, every conflict, but there are the Native Americans who are there now, and whose families have now been there for generations. There are people who are Oklahomans.

S.C. Gwynne writes about the Comanche as cruel and violent. He writes that they were finally confined to Oklahoma only because they came across another people equally cruel and violent: Texans. The Searchers after all is not bad history. But Texans were not uniquely violent. There was plenty enough violence to go around. Oklahoma is one of the proofs. There are now 39 recognized tribes shoehorned into Oklahoma, from the Comanche in the southwest to the Cherokee in the northeast, and every tribe’s place in Oklahoma is both a conclusion and a continuation.

Did I mention before that we are still violent?

Usually I’m pretty comfortable dealing with information, sorting through and coming out the other side with a notion of what happened.  I can’t seem to do that with Oklahoma. I have only a vague notion of what happened to its first people, what happened with the forced immigration of the other tribes, the betrayal of the white land rush, and how that fits together now: those are matters for real and dedicated scholars.  All I can do is look at the mess with confusion as to the details, and a bit more knowledge that among those Oklahoma tropes there is something important, and something worth remembering.  

Creek Orphans Home Baseball Team, 1904, Oklahoma Historical Society, Alice Robertson Collection.

 * * *

There’s a cold front in, with a heavy north wind and daytime temperatures in the 50s.  Our skiff is in the shop, and the temperature’s dropped too much too fast for bass or sunfish. The first stocking of trout in the Guadalupe isn’t until next weekend (when we’ll be in Oklahoma). We drove to Surfside Beach to check the jetty: I had wanted to try spey rods in the surf.

Didn’t happen.  I have never seen either the surf or the tide so high. 

On the other hand, Killens Barbecue isn’t really out of the way coming back from Surfside. And by 2:30 there was hardly any line.  We did catch it at a bit of a lull though. 

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Tailwaters

In two weeks we’re driving to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, 328 miles and 5 1/2 hours, to fish with Chris Schatte at Beavers Bend Fly Fishing Guide Service on the Lower Mountain Fork River.  I don’t know Chris, though my friend Mark Morgan says he’s from our home town. There are few enough people from my home town that it surprises me that I don’t know one who fly fishes, but there you are.  Maybe he was Church of Christ or Baptist. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t Methodist.

The Lower Mountain Fork River is a tailwater, which means it’s the waterway below a dam. There are all sorts of peculiarities about tailwaters. Flow can be dangerous or at least weird, particularly where electrical generation’s involved, and river temperatures below the dam can be substantially lower than above the dam. Our Guadalupe River changes from a nice warmwater fishery above the dam to a trout river below the dam, at least for a few miles. Water released from the bottom of a deep lake does that, and on rivers like the San Juan and the Green it turns an ignored high desert river supporting a population of catfish into a trout angler’s amusement park.

My father grew up Church of Christ, and they practice a rigorous kind of orthodoxy about the strangest things. They don’t allow, for instance, musical instruments as part of the service, just like the Greek Orthodox. While my Dad became an apostate Methodist and took his family along, I figure I inherited that orthodoxy gene, and it comes to the fore about tailwaters.  There’s just something about them that seems artificial.

Now mind, fishing 50 states is an excuse: visiting all 50 states is something I’ve wanted to do that I haven’t made time for yet, like playing Layla on the guitar and reading Ulysses. But when you reach my age, time isn’t a limitless commodity. If I’m going to see the country, I need to get a move on. We like to fish. We like to travel. Fishing gives the travel a purpose, an excuse, a prod, and not a gentle one either.

So this whole enterprise is a bit artificial. Even the geography of it is arbitrary. The difference between the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and the Gulf Coast of Alabama or between a trout stream in New Hampshire and a trout stream in Vermont is some miles, and not very many either. So why, since this whole business is a bit made up, do I resent the stocking of Southern and Southwestern tailwaters with trout? Why is it that tailwaters in particular bother me?

Because I’m a hypocrite of course, because all winter long I drive up to the Canyon Lake/Lower Guadalupe tailwater and fish for stocked trout. Am I dubious about stocked trout? Yeah. Do I fish for them? Yeah. And I’m happy as can be when I catch a tailwater fish.  From time to time I’ve gone out of my way to fish tailwaters: the White and the Little Red in Arkansas, the San Juan in New Mexico, the Gunpowder in Maryland.

Come to think of it, there’s only one natural lake in Texas (which I’ve never fished), and every time I drive out to Damon’s and spend a couple of hours catching bass I’m participating in the fly fishing equivalent of an amusement park, or at least a golf course. Nearly every time I fish, most places I fish, there’s some unnaturalness going on, some dam upstream or downstream, some introduced species not native to the place, some native population supplemented by stocking. I ought to recognize my scruples for what they are: my tendency for misplaced orthodoxy.

Meantime when we go to Broken Bow we’ll come back through Texarkana and have breakfast with my cousins. I haven’t seen them in years, and we were close when we were younger. The elder, six years older than me, seems bent in her FaceBook posts on forcing President Obama from office.  Can’t wait to see them.

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The Native Fish Society

When I was reading about Oregon I didn’t find a conservation organization to donate to. There was nothing like the Tarpon and Bonefish Trust that reached out and gave me a good shake and said we’re doing good work. A week or so later I got one of the usual fishing emails,  this time from The Venturing Angler, announcing the Native Fish Society Native Trout-A-Thon in Oregon.

I looked at the Native Fish Society website, and they were what I had been looking for: a Pacific Northwest conservation organization for the protection of salmon, steelhead, and trout. They need to work on how easy they are to find on search engines, at least by random folk like me.  I sent them some money, and they promised to send me a ball cap. I am now a member of the Adipossessed Society of the Native Fish Society, clipping of the adipose fin being the marker for hatchery fish. Adipossessed. Cute.

If I had been willing to donate $5,000, the Society would have sent me a C.F. Burkheimer custom spey rod inscribed with “Native Fish Society Lifetime Member.” That seems like a pretty reasonable price for a Burkheimer Spey rod, but alas, I have no current need.

I can always use another ball cap. 

From the 2016 Native Fish Society Annual Report. 

Meanwhile in Houston it’s the prettiest time of year, which could only be better if the Astros were in the World Series. This morning I went out early to hand out push cards for a neighbor who’s running for Congress–his mother had called and asked if I’d work the polls for early voting, and how can you turn down someone’s mother? It was in the mid-50s, and clear and bright and excellent people watching. By the afternoon it was in the 80s and I went out and fished for largemouth at Damon’s. Lately I’ve started each bass trip with whatever fly was successful the last time (unless it was lost in the trees) and then moving on if that’s not working.  Today I moved on to a dark blue and black Clouser, which never works. Today it worked, I think because the water was clear with the cooler weather and in the bright sun the dark color was the thing, maybe. In any case, what’s more fun than casting to a particular fish then watching it take, whatever the fish?