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Small Texas Interlude

Yesterday we drove our skiff from Galveston, on the Texas Gulf Coast, 250 miles west on I-10, the highway that in my world stretches from El Paso to New Orleans (but in reality goes a bit further), to a tiny community outside San Antonio, Elmendorf, where we dropped the skiff off at the builder for some work and its motor’s 100-hour service.

We keep the boat in a dry stack, and don’t trailer often. Everything from loading the boat on the trailer to towing it through Houston down the interstate to San Antonio is terrifying.  We’re still married I think, at least no papers have been served on me yet. Kris did an excellent job on that last 100 miles into the New Water Boatworks. Let me say that again. Kris did an excellent job, and I’m sorry I yelled at her. I’m even sorry I offered advice from time to time while she was driving.

We’d planned to fish the Guadalupe late in the day, but it was after 4:00 when we dropped off the boat. We drove to New Braunfels, found our motel, and ate German food and drank German beer at Alpine Haus. After dinner we went to Gruene Hall to listen to music. Chronologically we might have been the elders at Gruene Hall, but as Kris noted a lot of younger folk looked like they’d been ridden hard more miles than us. Listening to the main attraction, Uncle Lucius, was like reading a pretty good mystery novel the plot of which you’d read a half-dozen times before. The opening act, Folk Family Revival, was terrific.

A couple of months ago, three guides from Go Outside Expeditions had done a presentation at Bayou City Anglers on trout fishing on the Guadalupe. They did such a nice job that last week I emailed them about fishing the Guadalupe.  The owner, Chris Adams, said that with the warmer weather the fishing on the Guadalupe was slowing (which was a surprise to me–I never knew it was fast). He recommended fishing the San Marcos.

I was happy as could be. I like the San Marcos, and many years ago had canoed it a good 20 times and had fished it once, but that was old history. It’s a Texas Hill Country river (though not really in the Hill Country), 75 miles long from its start at San Marcos Springs to its confluence with the Guadalupe. It’s lovely, with greenish clear water and good flow and lots of descents through class I rapids. Clovis Culture artifacts have been found at its headwaters, so it’s one of the oldest continuously settled sites in North America. Bank to bank it’s small, just right for goofing around for a day, which means it’s just right for fly fishing.

Prairie Lea between Luling and the town of San Marcos used to have the best kolaches in Texas, but it’s a long way out of the way from nowhere and the shop didn’t last. My high school classmate Mark Morgan’s aunt is the last house on the right on the way from Prairie Lea to the river, and Mark met us at the river because that’s where we met Chris-the-Guide and Mark happened to be in Prairie Lea. Confused? Kris was. What’s to wonder? Mark was there to add local color, mostly orange.

I only ever remember one lazy fishing guide. A redfish guide once dropped me off the boat and told me to stand there and watch for the fish to swim by. None came. I think the guide motored off and took a nap. Chris-the-Guide on the other hand was great. He knew his river and kept us fishing, working his way through downed trees, rowing us into position to cast, ducking when I cast, and  recovering hung flies. It was hard work, dragging the raft over trees and shallow gravel and staying calm while we dropped stuff into the water, including me. The spa treatment was free.

Kris-Not-the-Guide fished most of the day with a popper, I fished most of the day with a weighted streamer, typical bass stuff. Kris fished her Orvis 5 weight, I fished my Winston 6 weight. It all worked fine, just like Chris had said. Chris-the-Guide was a Winston pro-staff guide, and we talked about how nice the Winston rods felt casting but more important how pretty they are. Chris said there were people who didn’t like their looks.  I would never have imagined someone could find those pretty rods boring. You learn all sorts of stuff from guides.

We talked a lot on the way down the river. Chris suggested places to fish in North Carolina and Georgia and Virginia. He grew up a Southern kid, in Georgia, and while his accent passed for Texan he was more polite than us, and he unfailingly addressed me as sir. With age lots of people do, but I suspect that’s how Chris always talks to clients, and that it was something drilled into him by a correct Georgia upbringing.

Nothing we caught was big, the biggest was maybe a pound, but it was lively and fun casting. We pounded the bank, putting the fly as close as we could then taking a few strips then doing it again, just like Chris-the-Guide told us.  There were black bass, Guadalupe bass, sunfish (which I found myself calling perch–I haven’t called them perch in a good 50 years), and warmouth. We caught several black bass/Guadalupe hybrids, and a few purer Guadalupe bass, and Guadalupes being the state fish of Texas, that was particularly satisfying. I like to think that Guadalupes were what Cabeza de Vaca labeled trout when he came through in the 1500s.  The Guadalupe bass behave more like trout than black bass, feeding in faster water off seams and runs in the river. Or maybe Cabeza de Vaca called all fish trout. Or maybe my memory’s faulty and Cabeza de Vaca didn’t talk about trout at all.

We probably caught 15 fish in the five hours we were on the river, which for us is something of a record.

Morgan, the local color at the top of the post and perfectly good fly fisher, had stayed put to catfish bankside where we put in. chicken liver. Doughbait. Eight pound channel cat.

 

 

 

 

 

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Louisiana Deux

Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans; by William Henry Brooke, engraver; engraving with watercolor from The Slave States of America, vol. 1; London: Fisher and Son, 1842.  THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION, 1974.25.23.4.

“Well, you see, it’ uz dis way. Ole missus—dat’s Miss Watson—she pecks on me all de time, en treats treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she wouldn’ sell me down to Orleans.” 

Jim, Huckleberry Finn.

I thought when I started this that I would write some about fishing and some about states and their history and literature. Louisiana didn’t come up by design but opportunity.  It is nearby, we haven’t been in a while, we have a deposit with a guide, and who doesn’t like New Orleans?

And what better way to approach Louisiana than through race and ethnicity? I’m stupid sometimes. I should have stuck to Sazeracs.

New Orleans was founded for the French in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville.  Although intended to be France’s center for trade and government,  the site selected was  a muddy swamp situated in the crescent of the shifting and flooding Mississippi River.  See that first big bend above the Gulf in the big river in the left of the map map below? The bend’s more complicated in real life, but that’s more or less where the French stuck New Orleans.

New Orleans was first destroyed by a hurricane in 1722.

1959-210.website

Le Missisipi ou la Louisiane dans l’Amérique Septentrionale; ca. 1720; hand-colored engraving by François Chéreau; The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1959.210

In 1724, the French adopted the code noir governing slaves. Believe it or not, it didn’t favor the enslaved.

Le_Code_Noir_1742_edition

In 1765 the Spanish, now in charge, brought the first Acadians, the Cajuns, to lower Louisiana from France (where they’d arrived after the British deportation of the French, Le Grand Dérangement, from the Maritimes). This was about the time that the British expelled the Scottish clans from the Highlands, and was apparently a favored British method of social planning. Get rid of ‘em.

In 1786 New Orleans burned, and in 1794 it burned again. The rebuilt city, the city we know by its French Quarter, is actually Spanish architecture, from its St. Louis Cathedral to its wrought iron frills.

Beginning in 1791, New Orleans experienced a sizable influx of slave-revolt refugees from Haiti: white French colonials, slaves, and free blacks. By the late 1700s, New Orleans was a city of French-speaking Acadians, German-speaking Germans, Spanish Canary Islanders, French-speaking refugees from Haiti, slaves from Africa and the Caribbean, and free people of color (often of mixed race).  All of these, French and Spanish colonials, Africans, and Germans, are the Creole, the ethnic and racial stew that made up Louisiana in 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase. There were also Americans.

 In 1803, Louisiana’s population was 35,932, with 21,224 Anglos, 12,920 slaves, and 1,768 free people of color.  By 1850, thirteen years before the Civil War, the population had exploded to 516,702, with 255k whites, 244k slaves, and 17k free people of color.  New Orleans had become the principal slave market of the South, there was cotton, there was sugar cane, there was the port traffic in the the Gulf and on the Mississippi. New Orleans was a major U.S. city and the major city of the South. Samuel Clemens came to New Orleans to work on river boats and from that he wrote Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn. Abraham Lincoln made two trips to New Orleans by flat boat: thus, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. And the Emancipation Proclamation.

One of the world’s great cuisines came out of that ethnic and racial mix.  The food was created out of what people had on hand: rice, seafood, pork, herbs, and the trinity of bell pepper, celery, and onion. Louisianans brought to cooking their cultural history: African, Caribbean, Spanish, French, German.  Which reminds me, on Friday our son, Andy, brought me breakfast — a boudin blanc kolache from his favorite donut shop.   Boudin and heat from the Cajuns, sweet dough from the Czechs,  assembled in Houston by Vietnamese immigrants. It wasn’t really a kolache, it wasn’t really even a klobasnicky, but it was pretty spectacular.

 

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New Orleans’ Guides

I’ve fished New Orleans once before, two days, post Katrina, maybe seven years ago. We stayed in the Roosevelt Hotel, home of the Sazerac Bar. The hotel had just reopened, but it was already a destination for wedding parties and conventioneers, and every time I’ve tried to get a room since it’s been full.  The Roosevelt was what a good old hotel should be, rococo and redolent of a time when people traveled by train and came to New Orleans for business at the Port of New Orleans and with Huey P. Long and for the wildness, but perfectly restored and well-managed.  We ate the best food I’ve ever eaten at Restaurant August, and didn’t feel bad about it because the chef, John Besch, hadn’t yet been called out for sexual harassment. We drank sazeracs in the Sazerac. We had the worst fishing guide ever.

I don’t remember the guide’s name, and wouldn’t tell it if I did. I’d asked a Houston shop for a recommendation. Their recommended guide was booked but he passed me on to this guy. Kris was there for a conference, and I fished the first day alone. It was March, maybe the worst time to fish Louisiana: windy and overcast. The guide picked me up at the hotel and drove to a place where I bought breakfast. It wasn’t anything special. His boat was in the shop–he had a Mitzi Skiff that seemed to be permanently in the shop and he was permanently and vocally unhappy with the boat and the company. He had borrowed a Hell’s Bay for the day. We got about a mile from the dock when he realized he had no gas and we had to turn around.  He speculated the gas had evaporated.

He was from Florida, the Panhandle, and guided in Louisiana in the winter. He was a Florida guy. He told me a story about how someone in Florida had just caught a record tarpon, maybe 190, on some impossibly light set up: a 4 lb tippet, a 4 weight rod, a 4 ounce brain. I don’t remember, but the angler seemed to have fought it for nine hours and it seemed cruel to the fish and stupid.  They could have hooked a rock with a 4 weight and had as much fun.  At least the rock would have already been dead.

The Florida guy re-rigged my redfish set-up, cutting off a nail knot on fly line because in Louisiana the fish were bigger.  I could have landed a tarpon on that nail knot. I did catch a redfish early the first day. It was the only fish we caught over two days. He wanted to take a picture and it took forever, me holding a dying fish while he changed camera lenses.

The second day when Kris went with us things got worse. He took the rod out of her hands to show her how to cast. There was a point where the forward gear on the boat wouldn’t work and the guide was banging on the motor with a wrench. I thought we’d spend the next five hours backing back to Venice. When he drove us back to the Roosevelt in his truck he drove and drank beer.

He was a young guy, and I hope he grew up smarter. What I remember the night we returned to Houston was Kris on the phone telling off the guide in New Orleans who’d made the recommendation. I’ve never seen Kris so mad, not even at me.

 

 

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Guadalupe River Triple Redux

I finally caught my trout today. Off and on I’d fished the Guadalupe since the Super Bowl was in Houston, a bit more than a year ago. I fished two days then and came up blanked. I started this year in December, and finally caught my fish today, March. It was nothing special, a 12-14″ rainbow that spit out the hook after it came into the net.  I’d hooked another earlier, and had a hit later, and foul hooked and landed a carp, a big carp, much later.  Because of their mouth carp always seem to foul hook.

I knew what I was doing though with the trout. I set up the rod with two droppers below an egg, with an indicator two feet up from the egg, no weight other than the weight of the brassies on the top dropper.  The fish stayed on the hook.  I didn’t take a picture. I wanted the fish back in the water, and I was worried about fumbling my phone.

Earlier, before the fish, I fell into the river, and tonight the muscle pull in my left calf hurts because of the fall. A half gallon or so of water came over the top of my waders, and when we left the river we stopped at Gruene Outfitters to buy dry clothes.  I bought a pair of Patagonia Guidewater pants, grey because even though I wanted tan Kris told me to get the grey.  They will be go-to’s for future travel, fishing and otherwise, but I’m sorry I had to buy. On future river trips I need to bring extra clothes.

On the way out of the store though I saw one of the great objects of men’s fashion, a Howler Brothers Gaucho Snapshirt, with embroidered alligators.  I’d first seen Howler Brothers shirts in Belize, where the younger guys at the bar compared their Howler Brothers shirt embroidery.  The embroidery then was great, the yellow rose and the shrimp and the blue crabs are works of art, but more important their shirts had pearl snap buttons, which for me is always the height of male fashion.  I came back to Houston and bought one sans embroidery, and you know what? When you roll up the sleeves of a a fishing shirt with pearl snap buttons they stay up. They don’t need those sewn-in goofy straps that seem like good design but aren’t. Pearl snap buttons have purpose.    There’s no sleeve creep when you roll up your sleeves.

So I caught my trout and got a great pair of pants and the work-of-art shirt I need to wear to Louisiana. I wish I had a photo of the trout.

It was windy today, and overcast, and the day on which daylight savings time started so we were already tired and late when we left Houston. I got water down my waders. On the way to the river we checked out donut shops in Seguin. Apparently like all donut shops in Central Texas they were Buddhist donut shops. The Donut Palace had a pretty good glazed, but no kolache, sausage rolls but no kolache. It was packed more or less. I wouldn’t recommend anything but the glazed, but I would recommend the glazed.

Top Donut had a good cat, but the donuts were only good efforts.

At three when we came off the river I wanted to go to Black’s in Lockhart for Barbecue, but it would have added two hours and Kris didn’t want to make the investment. We found a place in New Braunfels for German food, Uwe’s Bakery and Deli, that made its own bratwurst, and I suspect its own pickles and sauerkraut. It was outstanding. If I lived in New Braunfels, I’d go to Uwe’s every Tuesday for chicken and dumplings, and every Saturday for the goulash, and I’d be happy.