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West Virginia

In West Virginia we’re staying at Elk Springs Resort & Fly Shop on the Elk River to fish for trout, non-native brown and rainbows most likely.  When I called to book, I asked the reservations lady how far it was from the lodge to Washington D.C. .  She didn’t know.  However far it is, I suspect in some ways it’s further.

Virginia and Maryland share a lot of things, but most of all they share geography. Because of a compromise over the national bank that put the nation’s capitol in the South, they share Washington D.C.. On the east they share the Chesapeake Bay. Coastal Tidelands in each state rise from the Chesapeake and both states turn into a fertile Piedmont region above a fall line.  On the west of both are the Allegheny Mountains, which are part of the Appalachian Mountains.

Interestingly, the Appalachians were named by a Texan, Cabeza de Vaca. Not really, but they were named apparently by de Vaca’s Narvaez expedition.

The Southern Appalachians, the mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, are what I think of culturally as Appalachia, but who knows?  Appalachia may stretch from New York to Georgia. I used to think of the area as isolated, violent, poor, and uneducated, with clan feuds and moonshining. Now I can throw in opioids, meth, and Trump voters.

Some of that stereotyping is fair, too. West Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia, became the bellwether state for articles on why white working class voters were voting for President Trump. And they did in West Virginia, by 67.9 percent to 26.2 percent. My guess is they voted for President Trump because they knew Mrs. Clinton thought them a basket of deplorables.

West Virginia had the highest rate of opioid deaths in the U.S. in 2016, at 43.4 deaths per 100,000. Actually, at 75.4 years, West Virginia has the lowest life expectancy of any state except Mississippi.  The only measured category of death where West Virginia isn’t running with the front of the pack is Alzheimers, one supposes because people don’t live long enough to die of Alzheimers. You want to die by accident? Move to West Virginia. You want to die by suicide or gunshot or meth or black lung? Move to West Virginia. Your chances are usually right up there at the top.

Here’s the oddest thing about West Virginia: it’s 93.6 percent white. If someone told me that a state was 93.6 percent white, I’d assume we were talking about Idaho or Utah. Virginia is 68 percent white, 19 percent black.  Maryland is 58 percent white, 29 percent black. West Virginia is 93.6 percent white. That’s a lot of white folk.

Settlement by whites was pretty thorough, but it didn’t really kick off until the mid-18th century.  The French and Indian War was fought in part over the Ohio Valley, which stretches from Pennsylvania down to Kentucky, with West Virginia at its heart. After the release of claims by the Iroquois and Cherokee (surely absent violence), settlers started in. Ok, they started earlier, but they started in now with England’s blessing.  First were Germans, and lots of Scots via Ulster, the Scotch-Irish.

From early on, West Virginia was different from the rest of Virginia.  It was subsistence living that didn’t support slaves, at least until coal mining.

Louis Hine, 1911

During the Civil War there were two areas in the seceding states that were strongly pro-Union, Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee.  It was Lincoln’s dream that Eastern Tennessee would separate from the Confederacy, but it never did.  West Virginia did. On Amazon you can still find books about why the separation of West Virginia from Virginia was unlawful and unconstitutional.  Get over it.

Coal was the 18th century’s oil. It was the rural industry that turned us into a modern nation. It was and is a bloody, dangerous, unforgiving industry. Coal gave us some of the most violent labor disputes in the nation’s history: think machine guns mounted on train cars and fired into union strikers. Over 150 years coal gave us Mother Jones, strip mining and mountain-top removal and other ecological destruction, mine deaths, and a purchased West Virginia supreme court. it’s all Hatfields and McCoys, one way or the other. It’s always The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, but sometimes at the corporate level.

Hills and hollers. It’s beautiful, a friend said. People use words like hollers when they talk about West Virginia.

When I put together my playlist of songs for West Virginia, it wasn’t very long. There was one person who I greatly admire but didn’t expect, Bill Withers, and there was lots of Mountain Music. And of course there was that John Denver theme: take me home.  It’s the most common theme of West Virginia songs: “My Home Among the Hills,” “West Virginia My Home,” “I Wanna Go Back to West Virginia,” “Green Rolling Hills.”  In our minds we love West Virginia. In our minds West Virginia is the idyllic wildness we yearn for.

I also put Appalachian Spring on the play list, and Mark O’Connor’s brilliant Appalachia Waltz.  O’Connor is from Seattle, and of course Copland was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn.  We all have our notions about Appalachia. Take me home.

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I did finally get a decent photo of a bluegill, a tiny thing that hit a tiny yellow popper and as is their want hit it hard enough to take in the whole thing.  Lepomis machrochyrus. I originally misidentified the fish because it didn’t look like the pictures of a bluegill on the Texas Parks and Wildlife website, and maybe my fish is something entirely different.  Sunfish are wanton little devils, spawning from May to August, and apparently they hybridize readily among species.  This one has the wrong color fins and the colors generally seem off. It’s just as likely that this fish is the product of some unfortunate parental liaison between two breeds of sunfish.

I caught a nice bass on the same tiny fly,  next to the grass in a pond backwater.

 

 

 

 

 

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Maryland

Steven Johnson, Wikimedia Commons

I suspect that Maryland has always felt the curse of being so close to Virginia, both in geography and demeanor, but always coming off as a bit the lesser. It got started  later, 1630 instead of 1607. It wasn’t quite as English, being a haven for Huguenots and Catholics and other non-Anglicans. For us outsiders looking in it feels more foreign, less so than Louisiana but still, foreign. Baltimore ain’t an Anglo Saxon sort of word. It was settled by more tradesmen and fewer gentlemen. It was more urban, with Baltimore the major Southern City in the 18th Century. Even it’s most famous corpse, Edgar Allan Poe, was raised in Virginia. Virginia produced George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson. Maryland produced Spiro T. Agnew.

Virginia shows up in the state song, Maryland My Maryland:

Dear Mother! burst the tyrant’s chain,

Maryland!
Virginia should not call in vain,
Maryland!

What Maryland seems to have done in the modern world better than just about anybody is produce slightly quirky but immensely influential musicians (and also John Waters, who fits right in): Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, Frank Zappa, Phillip Glass. I really like Phillip Glass. I really like Phillip Glass. I really like Phillip Glass. I really like Mr. Glass.

Sorry.

Maryland, with +6 million residents and about 12,400 square miles, ranks sixth among states in population density. Modern Maryland is an urban state. Modern Marylanders do not identify as Southern, but historically Maryland was a slave state, with 87,000 slaves in 1860. Had Lincoln not suspended habeas corpus, declared martial law, and arrested the Confederate sympathizers in the Maryland Assembly, Maryland would likely have seceded. Not that there’s anything wrong with Mr. Lincoln, notwithstanding the Supreme Court ruling against him on the whole habeas thing. About a third of Maryland volunteers in the Civil War fought for the Confederacy. Of course the other two-thirds fought for the Union.

Again, Maryland My Maryland: 

She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she’ll come! she’ll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!

So Maryland, like Missouri, Kentucky, and Delaware–the other slave states that didn’t secede–was a bit on the cusp. It had always been different than its Southern neighbor. It had 87,000 slaves in 1860, but it also had 84,000 free blacks. However, if you asked Frederick Douglass, another Maryland famous son, whether Maryland was North or South, I’m pretty sure Mr. Douglass would say South, no question. It was in Maryland that Douglass was enslaved. It was from Maryland that Douglass escaped.

What Maryland is now is tougher to say. There are the D.C. bedroom communities: relatively wealthy, educated, urban. There’s agriculture, and there’s the Chesapeake Bay. There’s Baltimore, a city built to hold tens of thousands of stevedores but now coping with container shipping. It takes a lot fewer people to operate a crane. In 2017, Baltimore had the highest per capita murder rate of any city in the nation.

Notwithstanding its troubles, Baltimore is a fun city. Camden Yards is great, and the Astros won when I saw them there. I also had two great dinners in Baltimore, at a classic restaurant, Charleston, and an edgier place, Woodberry Kitchen. I’ve eaten the crab cakes while drinking local beer. We also had some good hipster donuts. If Brooklyn were in the South, it would be Baltimore. And in Maryland, on the Chesapeake, we’ll fish for stripers. I’ve never caught a striper. Don’t get your hopes up.

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Virginia

We fish in Virginia on May 14 on the South Fork of the Shenandoah River for smallmouth and May 17 in the Shenandoah Valley for trout.  I’ve been getting ready, both fishing-wise and Virginia-wise.

Virginia-wise, I have 4096 10th great grandparents. It’s nothing special: most people do. Half of them were women, which is how that works. The one 10th great grandparent I can identify  is pretty interesting, though with 4095 others out there somewhere our connection is pretty remote.  Her name was Cicely or Sisely or Cecily Reynolds Bailey Jordan Farrar. Husbands died off and she married a lot. Other than spelling, a lot is known about Cicely.  She even has her own Wikipedia page, though like a lot of Wikipedia pages written by descendants it includes some information and some wishful thinking. She arrived in Jamestown from England in 1610, right after starvation had killed off most of the colony, on the Swan.  She was 11, and her parents weren’t with her. While she likely did have parents, there’s not much certainty in their identity. Her probable daughter (there’s a bit of probability involved), Temperance Bailey Brown Cocke, my 9th great grandmother, was born in Virginia in 1617, making her one of the earliest surviving English children born in the New World.  To put things in perspective, the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth in 1620.

She was the first of my many English ancestors who arrived in Virginia between 1610 and the Revolution.  There was a pile of them. I suspect that’s not uncommon for Southern folk whose ancestry is mostly English. Oh sure, there were outliers. There were some Ulster Scots who emigrated to Pennsylvania, and an Irishman who emigrated to Maryland, but even they pretty much moved on to Virginia. They weren’t all English-Scots-Irish-Welsh either.  There was at least one set of French Huguenots and a German. But all-in-all Virginia seems to have been really good at importing English and Africans.

As a general rule the English-Scot-Welsh-Irish immigrants to Virginia were largely of two groups: relatively wealthy, relatively aristocratic immigrants who started arriving in the Tidewater in larger numbers in the 1630s, and their white servants and manual labor. Aristocratic British did not actually expect to do manual labor, and they received grants of land for each person they sponsored to bring over.  They apparently brought over cousins for company and the poor for heavy lifting, and Britain used the colonies to clean out its poor and its petty criminals. In her study of poor whites, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in American, Nancy Isenberg starts with the importation of Southern workers: the poor are always with us, but they were particularly with us down in Virginia where an underclass was imported as cheap labor.

It was really a pretty lousy deal.  If you came over as an indentured servant, you were the property of your master for five to seven years. Life expectancy in Colonial Virginia was less than 25 years. The chance of surviving a five-year term of servitude was roughly 50-50. You could be sold.  You could be beaten. You were dependent on the jerk who brought you over for your shelter and your daily bread. These were not kind times.

Of course there were worse things.  There was slavery. Slavery was for life, no 50-50. Children inherited the enslavement of their parents. Worst of all slavery was premised on the slaveholder’s certainty in the African slave’s moral and genetic inferiority (not that the British aristocrat wasn’t certain of the indentured servant’s moral and genetic inferiority). African slavery doesn’t begin in Virginia, African slavery was the norm in Portuguese Brazil and the West Indies, but by 1619 there were Africans in Jamestown, and by the late 17th Century the Virginia aristocracy ran out of white people–giving the lie to Bingo Long.  Birth rates were down in Britain, and the  British economy was booming. It needed its poor for its own devices. David Brion Davis in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World notes that in Virginia in 1670 white servants outnumbered black slaves four to one. By the 1690s slaves outnumbered white servants four to one. That’s a sea-change.

The Virginians had tried to enslave the Native Americans, but it didn’t work well.  They were susceptible to European disease and unfamiliar with industrial agriculture. Africans on the other hand were familiar with large-scale agriculture and European disease. But an odd thing happened in Virginia.  Throughout the New World–and these are very rough numbers–about 43 percent of slaves, mostly male,  went to Brazil, about 41 percent of slaves, mostly male, went to the West Indies, and about 5 to 7 percent, still mostly male, went to the North American British Colonies.  There were worse things than Virginia. Slave life on a Brazil or West Indies sugar plantation was short and brutal. Slaves were a replaceable commodity, and life expectancy for slaves was two to three years.

It doesn’t deserve praise, but raising tobacco or wheat was easier on slaves than sugar production, and the African population in Virginia grew. Importation of African slaves into Virginia slowed,  and over a few generations the original mostly male population became (as these things do) a mix of males and females.  By 1800 there were about 346,000 slaves in Virginia, most native-born. By the early 1800s the two largest slave markets in the U.S. were in New Orleans and Richmond. Virginia had more slaves than it needed for labor, and it exported its slaves, largely descendants of the Igbo from modern Nigeria, down South for cash.

Virginia also exported white people, though there was more self-determinism involved.  By the early 1800s I had no ancestors left in Virginia.  By the Civil War they had settled at one time or another throughout the South: Georgia, Maryland, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Missouri, and of course Texas.  The only Southern places missing seem to have been Louisiana, Florida, Delaware, and West Virginia, and as far as I can tell none went North.  At least for my ancestors, Colonial Virginia was our Ellis Island, and that’s not an uncommon Southern pattern for whites.  They also appear to have mostly married and had children with their own kind, and stuck to the same kind of cultural identity.  When my parents met and married in 1949 in Crane, way out in West Texas near Odessa, two of their separate family ancestors, two of my 9th great grandfathers (of which there are only 1024, and 1024 9th great grandmothers–that’s the way this works) were the two representative in the Virginia House of Burgesses from Henrico County, Virginia, in 1644. The families were still neighbors after 300 years.

There’s a good book on Virginia em- and im-migration, white and black, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement, by Fischer and Kelly. Why is it that scholarly works all require a colon? There’s a bad joke there I think. In addition to English and Africans, the Virginians also imported brown trout, rainbow trout, smallmouth, and tobacco. My 10th great grandmother’s second husband’s land, Jordan’s Journey, bordered land owned by John Rolfe who brought tobacco to Virginia from the West Indies and married Pocahontas.

Meanwhile our saltwater skiff is still in San Antonio. The boat builder is repairing Harvey-damaged boats, so we need to be patient. I’m sill fishing for bass and sunfish, out of a canoe and from the bank, and have been trying to get some decent sunfish photos.  On Go-Pro I’ve use a chest strap and taken photos of my forearms, just above the fish, and a cap to take photos of the back of my head. I’m just not very good at it.

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Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia

 

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So far Florida and Louisiana have been pretty interesting, but a bust when it comes to fishing.  But our son Andy finishes his masters in May in Washington D.C., and we’ll hit graduation and three states, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia.

We were in Maryland last year to watch the Astros play the Orioles and poke around Baltimore.  Astros won, and we fished a lovely little tailwater below the Baltimore water supply called the Gunpowder, which is the best river name ever.  We both caught small rainbows, didn’t take any pictures, and liked Baltimore well enough.  This time though we’re fishing the Chesapeake near Annapolis for whatever saltwater stuff happens to be going on in mid-May.

I’ve been to Virginia twice, once to interview students at the University of Virginia–who sticks a university in such a hard place to get to?–and once to have Thanksgiving in Jamestown.  I had all sorts of ancestors in Jamestown and thereabouts 400 odd years ago, and it seemed right to go see it.  We stayed on the Chesapeake but didn’t fish, but this time we’ll go inland. We’ll try for trout I think.

I’ve never been to West Virginia, and only know that it split from Virginia during the Civil War, and is famous for coal miners and voters for President Trump and John Brown’s raid.

Meanwhile our skiff’s still in the shop and I’ve been fishing a lot for bass and sunfish.  Kris birdwatches every day on the Coast: it’s the annual warbler migration.  I can’t manage a decent picture of sunfish because the little devils flop and flip, but Kris has taken some great photos of warblers.  They’ll have to do.  She could even tell you what kind of warblers they are.

And she did.  The first is a Baltimore Oriole, the second is a Summer Tanager, the third a thrush of some sort, or a thrasher, and the final an Indigo Bunting.  But they all come with the warblers.  I’ve heard the warblers migrate from the Yucatan across the Gulf of Mexico–800 miles?–where they fall into Galveston, rest a bit (and by a bit I mean hours) then take off for further north. Some will migrate as far as Alaska.  If you’ve ever seen the movie The Big Year where all the birdwatchers show up in Ohio? They’re there for the warbler fall. Paparazzi.

In addition to birds, in our photo files we also have thousands of interesting photos of sticks and leaves.

Autofocus and burst photography has its downside.