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Where We’re Not Going: The Everglades

I first read Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’s 1947 River of Grass when I thought I wanted to canoe the Everglades. I thought it was a travel guide, and I’m not certain I finished it. I may have only carried it around for a while. I’ve started it again, and it’s a far better book than I remembered. Shows what a little time will do.

This may be obvious to everybody else, but it wasn’t obvious to me: The Everglades system is not coterminous with the Everglades National Park, and the system was not preserved by designation of the Park.  The Park is about one quarter of the area originally covered by the Everglades. Not small change, but the Park is only the southern part of the original area. It’s separated from its historic northern water sources by building a dike around Lake Okeechobee, building barriers like the Tamiami Trail, changing the direction of water discharges from the Lake, and draining 700,000 acres  for agriculture in the Everglades Agricultural Area.

Before that stuff happened,  sheet flow flowed from Lake Okeechobee down to the Bay of Florida, with normal flows of as little as 100 feet per day. Douglas described the system as a shallow river, often only inches deep, that covered most of South Florida. The river stretched from near present day Orlando south to the Keys where the land ran out.

Map of the Everglades by US War Department, 1856

In the decades after 1920 the flow stopped. After deadly floods in the 1930s, Lake Okeechobee was surrounded by the Herbert Hoover Dike for flood control.  Areas of the Everglades were isolated, drained for agriculture and urban development, urbanized at its boundaries, and managed for different purposes. Today’s arguments aren’t really about restoration to original conditions, but the extent to which regionalization can be reversed and the freshwater sheet flow out of Lake Okeechobee restored to its original southerly meander.

The Park now gets most of its water from the 60 inches of average annual rainfall in Southern Florida, and it doesn’t feed much freshwater into Florida Bay.  Because there isn’t freshwater flowing in, the Bay is hyper-saline. It’s lost thousands of acres of sea grass and is periodically strangled by algae. Not just any old algae, either. You can’t talk about Florida algae without saying toxic algae. It’s gotta be toxic.

And up top the Okeechobee isn’t the cleanest of lakes. Except for industry, it receives pollutants from the same list of sources as The Chesapeake: Agriculture and urban development.  Phosphorous and nitrogen, the stuff of fertilizers for yards and crops, seem to be the biggest problem. Instead of flowing south to Florida Bay, the Lake overflow is now shunted east to the Atlantic estuaries by the St. Lucie Canal and west by the Caloosahatchee River.

The phosphorous-laden freshwater flows hit the saltwater systems on the Atlantic side around Stuart and in the south central bays on the Gulf side. The whole mess plays havoc with fish and wildlife in a big swatch of Southern Florida. The Everglades is also the recharge source for the Biscayne Aquifer, the principal water supply for South Florida, Miami and whatnot. There are 8 million people who depend on drinking water ultimately sourced from the Everglades, plus a lot of golf courses. Where’s the water for putting greens going to come from?

The bad guy in all of this is Big Sugar.  Florida produces about half the nation’s sugar through three refiners. At its worst, Big Sugar’s historic labor practices made the West Virginia coal industry look benevolent.  And the two, coal and sugar,  ran neck and neck for environmental sensitivity: lop off a mountain top here, drain a wetlands there.  Federal sugar subsidies are a favorite target of fiscal conservatives, who argue that artificial support of American sugar prices kills American jobs.  Maybe anymore it doesn’t deserve to be the active bad guy it used to be: Creation of the Everglades Agricultural Area is done, no additional land will be added, and it’s half-life is short because of the subsidence of the soil in the EAA.

But unfairly or no Big Sugar remains the Villain in the eyes of restoration proponents. In South Florida, a fishing guides’ environmental group, Bullsugar, takes its name from the alliteration of sugar and, well, shit. Orvis is a sponsor. Patagonia is a sponsor.  Hell, Raymond James is a sponsor.  Raymond James. There are lots of other similar groups too: The Everglades Foundation, the Everglades Trust, Captains for Clean Water . . . The Everglades Coalition counts over 50 member organizations. Meanwhile in 2016 the New York Times reported that the Miami Herald had reported that over the past 22 years the sugar industry contributed $57 million to Florida elections.  Sweet.

It’s probably no wonder that the proponents think that the governmental group with the most direct control over the Everglades water, the South Florida Water Management District, isn’t an ally. Its board is appointed by a Governor who is not seen as an ally. $57 million.

Meantime proponents believe that establishment of a storage and treatment reservoir in the Everglades Agricultural Area is the key to Everglades restoration. The reservoir would use about 15 percent of the EAA area. It would release water South, surely whistling Dixie, down through the supposedly cleansing and detoxifying Glades to the southward bay. Neither east nor west but only south.

Apparently the money is there: as a result of federal lawsuits Florida has pledged expenditures for restoration. Maybe the plan is there.  Expenditures are being made and the Tamiami Trail is being raised. Apparently the big hold-up to return of substantial southward flow is Big Sugar’s willingness to sell the land for the Okeechobee drainage reservoir. 26,800 acres were purchased by the state in 2010. The proponents want 46,800 more acres. Sugar backed out once. It reached agreement and then . . . hesitated. And of course the concern is that on the horizon Big Sugar sees the possibility of more lucrative residential development, and maybe there’s a lack of sufficient interest at the state level to force the issue.

So’s anyway we’re heading to Florida, but we’re not going to the Everglades.

http://www.evergladestrust.org/toxic_algae, From the Everglades Trust, Algae Bloom in Stuart, Florida

 

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Florideuce

We’re going back to Florida. Our trip in February wasn’t really planned. The Astros won the World Series, Kris bought spring training tickets because she wanted to go, and we threw in a half day fishing.  It was pretty spur of the moment.

This isn’t spur of the moment. Most summers we take a baseball trip  somewhere, somewhere we otherwise wouldn’t go.  Last summer it was Baltimore. The summer before was Kansas City.  This summer it’s Tampa/St. Pete. Friends tell me that Tampa has great cigar stores and the only true Cuban sandwich, but even with those accomplishments without baseball it’s unlikely I’d go there. it’s not an obvious place for a random trip from Houston. But late June is apparently the heart of the Tampa tarpon season, the Astros are playing the Rays, and I really want to catch a tarpon.

Kris has caught a tarpon, and I have a great photo of that holy shit moment where she realizes that she’s hooked something different.  And that tarpon was small. I, on the other hand, ain’t.  I’ve had them follow my fly but that’s it. I ain’t.

Ted Williams caught more than 1000 tarpon. I want one. Just one.

C’mon St. Ted. You didn’t get me a hit in little league. You owe me.

*  *  *

Meantimes Saturday we drove to Elmendorf, Texas, 196 miles from Houston, to pick up our boat. We’d had some work done, and most important New Water had added a casting platform on the bow.  That’s how us nautical types talk.  On the bow.

We then trailered the boat 246 miles back to Galveston, where the hardest part of the day, getting the boat down the ramp and off the trailer, was waiting for us.  Success! We docked the boat, parked the trailer,  and drove the 50 miles back to Houston. That’s nearly 500 miles in the day, plus unloading the boat, plus that whole thing in the McDonald’s parking lot. I got back to Houston and went to bed.

Sunday we took the boat out for the first time since its return, and after more than a year one of us finally caught a redfish off our boat.  It was a dinky, tiny redfish but there you are. It was a redfish. It even had room for multiple spots.

Kris also caught a flounder.  If she’d only caught a Speck we’d have had a slam.

 

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Packing List: Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia

For a week long road trip that included a college graduation, some family, some friends, and five days fishing, we took some clothes–way too many clothes. For fishing, I also took:

  • Raingear.  Rain pants and a rain jacket. You don’t need rain pants when you’re fishing in waders, but we weren’t in waders on The Chesapeake. I bought Andy a new pair, and discovered my pair had a ripped seat.  It’s probably good I wasn’t sitting down. Kris couldn’t find her rain pants. It rained and it was cold and there was nothing good about that.
  • Waders, boots, wading staffs.  Kris always preferred an old pair of Orvis canvass boots from 20-odd years ago, but they were constantly delaminating and I suggested she buy a new pair for the trip. Not that we trout fished in Maryland, but because of disease felt is no longer allowed there, nor in Alaska, Missouri, Nebraska, Rhode Island, and South Dakota. For the two days on boats I had a new pair of Keen sandals because the old pair were constantly delaminating.  Maybe it’s us.
  • Rods.  More than we needed. Two 9’ 5 weights for trout, two 9’  6 weights for bass, and a 10’ 4 weight because after suffering rod fever in February I didn’t suffer long.  We used the 6 weights for the Shenandoah, and the smaller rods for West Virginia.  We used the guide’s 9 weights for the Chesapeake—I don’t own a 9 weight and will have to contemplate that. We also borrowed the guide’s short 8’  3 weights for the tiny bookies—I don’t own any 3 weights and will have to contemplate that. Fly fishing is a very contemplative sport.
  • Reels.  Some reels. Floating lines.  The guide on the Shenandoah River said he’d toss in a sink tip, but I don’t know if he did and we wouldn’t have used it. We used the guide’s rods on the Chesapeake because I didn’t own heavy sinking lines.  I started to buy them, but wasn’t sure what I needed.  Now I know. I’ll have to contemplate that.
  • Flies. I took no saltwater flies.  I thought about it, mostly because I was curious about whether any of my redfish flies would work, but the flies we used in saltwater were much longer and heavier than anything I own.  They were big 6” flies with big lead eyes. For the Shenandoah, the guide brought Shenk’s white streamers on which we caught fish, and some olives that I never fished.  I had tied a bunch of dragon tails before we left, mostly because I was getting skunked at home on larger black bass. On the Shenandoah I caught some fish, but I also got lots of slappy short takes. The flies were just too long.  I’ve ordered some mini-dragon tails hoping they’re shorter, and long size 4 hooks, but suspect they may just be the same tail as the regular with 1-1/2” cut off the fat end.  I also took all my trout flies–and I have a lot–but mostly we fished the guide’s flies.  I think all of the rainbows and the one brown I caught were on various colors of squirmy worms, and two of the bookies on big stimulaters and the third on a bead-head pheasant tail nymph.
  • Leaders. Some nylon tippet.  Some Fluorocarbon tippet. I never used the Flourocarbon.  For the stripers we used a four foot piece of straight 20 pound.  It fit nicely around my neck.  For the smallmouth we used 9’ 2X.  Approximately 9’ anyway,  I’d tied in bits and pieces of stuff, and I sort of guess at lengths.  For the trout, 9’ 5X with foam strike indicators for the squirmy worms.  The morning I fished on my own I switched to some Orvis strike putty that had been floating around my vest for 15 or 20 years. It worked fine. It always works fine. I don’t know why I ever use anything else.
  • Sunglasses. Amber and low light polarized Smiths.  Everyone loves low light sunglasses.  I love low light  sunglasses. I lost mine in West Virginia that time I fell down in the pond.
  • Fishing vest.  Complete with all the usual junk that accumulates in fishing vests.  Some split shot (which I used), some nippers, hemostats, various kinds of indicators, and nets.  West Virginia apparently prohibits cloth nets on catch and release water. I don’t get the sense that there’s lots of enforcement.
  • Sling pack. I meant to pack a waterproof sling pack for the boats but forgot it.  I didn’t need it.
  • Sunscreen. I meant to pack a buff and sun gloves but they were in the sling pack. I need lots of sunscreen.
  • A water proof Nikon and a GoPro.  I bought a Nikon CoolPix waterproof camera that I wore around my neck while fishing.  It was easier than the GoPro and took better pictures, kept me from draining my phone battery, and kept my phone out of the river.  I loved it, but you can’t see the view screen in high sun. Kris took her birding camera and lenses but never used it.
  • My Corpus Christi Hooks baseball cap, which T.C. Campbell admired. It’s a good looking cap, and because it’s fitted I can wear the GoPro on the back.

For general life I took my travel guitar (I’m re-memorizing Tárrega’s Capricho árabe so I can forget it again).  On the plane I read The Chesapeake in Focus by Tom Pelton, who worked for the Baltimore Sun and hosts The Environment in Focus for NPR. We listened to a lot of Tom Rosenbauer’s Orvis podcasts when we were driving. At Harper’s Ferry I bought a copy of Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign by Jonathan A. Noyalas and read that.

When we were driving around we listened to the playlists on my phone:

Maryland

Songs about Baltimore are mostly sad and gritty. There’s just something about Baltimore that makes it perfect for a dismal song.

  • Raining in Baltimore, Counting Crows
  • Baltimore,  Lyle Lovett
  • Baltimore,  with versions by Nina Simone and Randy Newman
  • Streets of Baltimore, with versions by Bobby Bare and Gram Parsons.
  • Baltimore Oriole, with versions Hoagy Charmichael and George Harrison. George Harrison?
  • Hungry Heart, Bruce Springsteen
  • Feets Don’t Fail Me Now, Little Feat
  • The Sad Death of Hattie McDaniel, Bob Dylan
  • The Lady Came from Baltimore, Tim Hardin
  • Tryin’ to Get to Heaven, Lucinda Williams

Plus, lots by Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, Frank Zappa, and Phillip Glass. I listened to Glass’s Low Synphony three times on the flight. It sounded just like the Chesapeake should sound.  I tried to listen to it in the car in Maryland and Kris made me move on. She doesn’t like Glass.

All of us would be better listening more to Billie Holiday.

Virginia

  • Alexandria, Virginia, Bill Jennings
  • The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Band.  I never thought of this song as tied to a particular place other than the Generic South, but it mentions Virginia and Tennessee.
  • Virginia Girl, Deer Tick.
  • Carry Me Back to Virginia,  Old Crow Medicine Show.  Oddly, I couldn’t find a copy of Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny, which was retired as the Virginia state song because of racial content.  There are lots of versions though, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, and Louis Armstrong.
  • Virginia Moon,  Foo Fighters.
  • East Virginia Blues, by Robert Earl Keen. There’s the classic version by Ralph Stanley, so I had them both.
  • Shenandoah, by Bill Frisell.  Frisell is a jazz guitarist, and this for many years has been a favorite recording.  Shenandoah is apparently the interim state song of Virginia.  It’s apparently not the official state song because the only state it mentions is Missouri.
  • Sweet Virginia,  The Rolling Stones.  I’m Not a Stones fan much. Typical Stones. Kinda self-absorbed.
  • Yorktown, from Hamilton.  Not much Virginia, but I saw Hamilton last week, and Kris liked it.
  • James River  by Checker and  James River by Jan Smith.  Different songs I think.  Haven’t noticed them enough to decide.

Plus Some Old Crow Medicine Show, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ralph Stanley.  I ended up humming Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s Cheek to Cheek all through Virginia and West Virginia. And Jason Mraz.  Not much good to be said about Jason Mraz, but no harm either.

West Virginia

  • My Home Among the Hills, The Carter Family
  • Grandma’s Hands, Willie Nelson
  • Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn.  OK, technically that’s Kentucky, but close enough
  • Country Roads, Take Me Home, John Denver.  I had to buy two versions of this.  The first I downloaded had been remastered with strings. It was awful. I have immensely fond memories of this song from driving out to feed the horse when I was 14.
  • West Virginia My Home, with versions by Hazel Dickens and The Hillbilly Gypsies.
  • Green Rolling Hills, Emmylou Harris
  • Need You, Tim McGraw
  • Linda Lou, Bill Monroe
  • I Wanna Go Back to West Virginia, Spike Jones
  • West Virginia Wildflower, Stacy Grubb
  • A Country Boy Can Survive, Hank Williams Jr. I’m not a fan.

Plus some Kathy Mattea.  I also put Copland’s Appalachian Spring and O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz on the list. They seem to fit, even though O’Connor is from Seattle and Copeland from Brooklyn.  We were listening to Appalachian Spring crossing from Virginia to West Virginia, and expected every mountain turn to open into a vista.  Mostly they didn’t, but it sure kept me awake.

 

 

 

 

 

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Eastern Grand Slam. May 16, 2018

Somebody somewhere serendipitously caught three different fish in a day and called it a grand slam, probably over beers that very evening.  Grand slam, of course, is a baseball term, meaning that one is spectacularly off the schneid.  It’s usually a tarpon, a bonefish, and a permit caught on the same day, but there aren’t a lot of places north of the Florida Keys to catch a tarpon, a bonefish, and a permit, so in Texas saltwater it’s a flounder, a redfish, and a speckled trout. For Western trout it’s a cutthroat, rainbow, brown, and brookie. For Eastern trout it’s the same sans cutthroat. It’s all nonsense, but it’s gratifying nonsense.

I caught a rainbow, brown, and brookie on the same Wednesday in West Virginia.  I caught the rainbow and the brown in less than 30 minutes after breakfast before we met Randall the guide.

Earlier at breakfast we sat on the porch at the restaurant and watched this guy on the far side of the river catch and release at least six fish.

Meantimes while he was fishing I had the blueberry pancakes. I suspect that both of us, the guy fishing and me, were satisfied.

The people we talked to in the restaurant were all from West Virginia and Pennsylvania. When we said we were from Texas it was like saying we were from France. Elk Springs seems to be a local draw. It shouldn’t be. It’s a good place, and the blueberry pancakes are outstanding.

I hadn’t taken my camera, so I took no pictures of the first two-thirds of my slam. I was startled by the brown, and kept looking at it in the net for confirmation, but there it was. I wish I had a photo just to prove that I wasn’t lying to myself. It was a brown though, and I’d already caught the rainbow.

I caught the two of ‘em on squirmy worms. Not very orthodox, but fine with me.

Kris and Randall conspired again and took  me away from the Elk River to Kumbrabow State Forest. It’s a beautiful place, deserted on a Wednesday in May except for the three of us, and a group of state highway workers who got lost looking for a highway. We fished a bit of stream and I came to a pool, a tiny pool, a pocket pool, maybe four feet deep and blue as a Caribbean sea. I put on a weighted nymph to get the fly down and hooked my grand slam brookie.  Randall and Kris were standing there watching so I yelled “fish on” and they laughed.

But it was as lovely a fish as ever I caught. I won’t say though that even on a three weight there was much of a battle.

Tiny. Perfect.

We moved to a waterfall where I promptly fell down in the pool below the falls.  Kris and Randall were chattering away and paid me no mind.  Did I say Randall was terse? Kris was chattering and Randall was talking almost as fast–ok, nobody can chatter like Kris in high gear. And she loves a story, both to tell and to hear. Randall and his family and his fishing were to Kris a good story.

And Kris also caught her Appalachian brookie. Who wouldn’t be thrilled?

*  *  *

We piled our rods in the car and left the mountain at three. The lodge had been great, the fishing was great, the staff had been accommodating, friendly, and knowledgeable, the food had been lovely, thoughtful, and well-prepared, and I caught my West Virginia fish. Plus there was a washer-drier. Only 47 more states to go.

The brook trout, by the way, is the the state fish of West Virginia.

One oddity about the Elk Springs Lodge. It is in the National Radio Quiet Zone, where radios, mobile telephones, and wireless internet nterfere with the National Radio Observatory.  There is limited and sporadic cell telephone service. Internet is weak connections at the restaurant. If you buy a signal booster the federales will come to your door and make you remove it.

*  *  *

2015 median household income data shows West Virginia as third lowest, ahead of Arkansas (49) and Mississippi (50).  It marches almost lockstep with life-expectancy data. The poorer you are, the shorter your life.

In West Virginia, we passed through nice towns, hamlets really, with nice houses, where I’d think I could live.  The natural spaces between the towns were as often as not extraordinary, but there was also rural squalor dotted in and among the towns and countryside.  I’ve seen rural squalor off and on all my life, and there’s plenty of hard-living in Houston, but in West Virginia it’s on Main Street, nestled up against the highway, not hidden down some side road. Heaven only knows what’s down the side roads.

In Paul Theroux’s Deep South he rails at the Clintons for abandoning the Southern poor. His anger startled me when I read the book, but it rings true. He suggests that the Clintons expect the devotion of the American poor without any skin in the game. Hillary didn’t get that devotion in West Virginia. Trump took West Virginia 69% to 26%.

During the 2016 campaign and its aftermath there was so much written about Hillary and West Virginia and Hillary and the white poor, but bottom line it came down to her disdain versus Trump’s bluster: I doubt if many people believed Trump would bring back coal or otherwise help West Virginia, but at least there was no talk of baskets of deplorables. Hillary, and maybe the Democratic Party, bring nada to America’s rural poor. Trump didn’t either. Maybe no one can.

Trump also carried Mississippi and Arkansas, 58% to 40% and 60% to 34%. Those are landslides where I come from.

*  *  *

One last story about West Virginia. It’s a condescending, stupid story that could have happened anywhere but there you are. It happened in West Virginia, and I can’t resist.

On our way back to Virginia from Elk Springs we stopped at a gas station and I broke down the fly rods in the parking lot while Kris bought bean dip and Fritos in the store. A woman, maybe older than me but I suspect a good bit younger–you couldn’t tell by looking–got out of a beat up truck and said “you’re not going to catch any fish in this parking lot.”  It was that dry, slightly aggressive humor that I grew up with in Texas, so I said something like I won’t know until I try and she grinned and laughed.

She had no front teeth.

West Virginia. You gotta go.