Tag: Barbecue

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Coronavirus road trip, July 27-August 3, 2020

We drove last night from Sapphire, North Carolina, to Houston. We didn’t exactly drive straight through. Around 2 in the morning we stopped in Louisiana at a rest stop on I-10 just west of the Mississippi border and I slept for an hour. I had planned to stop for the night at a motel somewhere in Georgia, but Kris had other ideas and there you have it. I dozed while Kris drove through South Carolina and Georgia, and then it was after midnight and we just kept driving, trading back and forth, through Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana into Texas. It was 941 miles in about 15 hours.

We planned this trip as a car trip because we were just paranoid enough not to get on a plane, but not paranoid enough not to go, and we’d always planned to make the return trip in one long leg. Going home we were going to leave this morning around 4 am and drive straight through, but instead left last night. I hope our hosts will forgive the abrupt change in plans.

Going out was different, slower. We went north through East Texas, into Louisiana at Shreveport, in the heart of Northern Baptist Louisiana, through a bit of Delta Arkansas into Delta Mississippi. We had plugged the Robert Johnson Crossroads marker in Clarksdale, Mississippi, into the GPS because, well Satan, but neither Satan nor Robert Johnson were there, and I’m no better guitarist than before we left. It’s funny though, growing up in High Plains cotton country prepares you for the Delta. You know flat land, and you recognize cotton in the field. The Delta looked a lot like home.

Rowan Oak.

We went on to Oxford to visit Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s house near the University of Mississippi, and then camped nearby at an unremarkable state park. Rowan Oak was closed because of the virus. At the campground, I was drenched with sweat by the time I set up the tent; camping in Mississippi in July may not have been our best idea, but in the evening we drank Four Roses in memory of Faulkner and the Four Roses gave me sufficient courage to try to explain the ukulele to Kris. Kris has wanted to learn the ukulele.

“It’s the top four strings of the guitar a sixth up from the nut, so it’s D-G-B-E only it’s G-C-E-A . . .”

“Show me a chord.”

“This is wait, wait, it’s a 6th up from G, so this is E.”

“I can’t see your fingers, let me see your fingers.”

“Here, right here, this is, wait, a 6th up from G, so E.”

“Show me another chord.”

“This would be, wait, let me translate, it’s up from C so it would be A, or it could also be D-minor . And this is either B or B-flat, is it B-flat a 6th up from D or is it B? “

I thought I was being particularly lucid, but I think Kris got away from the lesson without knowing a single thing about the ukulele. That’s a good thing, since it should have been a 4th up, not a 6th.

***

To get to Shiloh National Battlefield we drove through Northern Mississippi and Southwestern Tennessee, and we started driving past Trump signs, Trump flags, Trump bumper stickers. I am surprised there weren’t Trump cut-outs, or even President Trump himself, waving at us from the side of the road. It struck me that if I lived in the area and was Biden prone, I’d be leary of putting a Biden sticker on my car. It just wouldn’t seem a safe thing to do.

Whatever our discontent with one another now, that locale of the first high-casualty battle of our largest discontent is not an easy place to get to. Because it’s not easy to get to, it’s pretty much as it was in 1862. I don’t know why I feel this need to visit our battlefields, but I continue to do so. Reverence and awe is what I feel when I’m there, for young men whose deaths and bravery were a long time ago, and sadness.

Me and William Faulkner.

***

I like to travel in the South. There is always great stuff to see, and many friendly and often peculiar people, and great food. And this trip there was still great stuff to see, but we weren’t stopping to eat anyplace, not even for donuts.

It may have been my imagination but there seemed to be an overlay of hostility about, of all the stupid stuff, masks. East of Nashville we lost an hour, which we hadn’t expected. Kris wanted to stop at a McDonalds because she thought it would be clean and we could get some iced tea and use their bathrooms: corporate America she thought could manage the virus, even if we collectively couldn’t. There was a sign on the door requiring masks, but inside it seemed to be a point of honor for customers to defy the sign. The staff, stressed with the burden of protecting themselves and America, were angry and yelling at each other, and openly hostile to the customers, who, arrogantly standing maskless, deserved their hostility. We stayed, which we shouldn’t have done, then tossed the food into the trash on the way out the door.

If I die because of the coronavirus, I will blame that McDonald’s.

***

Asheville may be one of the South’s better food cities. We had a barbecue pork sandwich at Little Pigs Bar-B-Q, which was very good and which we ordered to go from the parking lot, but you can’t like anything about traveling through a good city with good restaurants and not stopping at any of them because, well, coronavirus. When I picked up our sandwiches the customers inside wore masks, mostly.

***

Kris has a new minivan. Kris loves minivans, and she traded in her ancient Chrysler Town and Country on a new Chrysler Pacifica, which may well be the smartest collection of car compromises ever. It is even a good-looking car, if you can get past its mini-vanness. I hated to drive the Town and Country because it was like driving a bowl of jello; I love the Pacifica, but don’t tell Kris.

We piled so much stuff into that car.

  • tent
  • folding chairs
  • folding table
  • cots
  • sleeping bags
  • kitchen junk
  • food
  • a case of wine
  • some more food
  • stove
  • a five gallon water jug
  • fly fishing gear, including waders and boots
  • more food
  • a Yeti cooler
  • another Yeti cooler
  • still more food
  • a guitar
  • a yukulele
  • clothes, including whites to play croquet in North Carolina, because you can’t play croquet in anything but whites
  • Some more fly fishing gear

And it was all in a constant state of disarray. It was an experiment, to see after all these years, if we could still drive someplace and camp. We did it. We camped for one night. We can do it again.

***

Driving through Mississippi last night at 2 in the morning I told Kris that we were only 10 miles from the Tatonut Donut Shop in Ocean Springs. She said let’s go there and park on the street until they open in the morning. When we checked the internet they weren’t open on Monday. We kept driving. Those are very good donuts though, perhaps the best I’ve ever had. We would have broken up the trip for Tatonut donuts.

***

The Mississippi Delta is Mississippi cotton country, and still today 60% of the population is African American because Delta cotton production was industrial agriculture that depended on cheap labor. That’s where the enslaved were brought. It is also the home of the Blues. It is now one of our poorest regions because in place of cheap labor cotton production has mechanized.

Structurally the blues are usually a 12 bar phrase, repeated again and again with variations. The Blues can be extraordinary sophisticated, think Bessie’s Blues by John Coltrane, or raw and driving, like Cross Road Blues by Robert Johnson. One of the things that makes the blues different from other music is that it is cyclic, there is no chorus, no bridge, the phrase goes that 12 bars, or maybe 16 bars, and then it does it again and then it does it again and then it does it again. Folk music is cyclic as well, and one suspects that there is interplay (or at least a common human bond) between, say, Barbary Allen and Crossroads Blues.

In Clarksdale where we went to see the Crossroads Marker everyone, even people walking randomly down the street, seemed to be wearing masks. It gave me great hope for the drive. One hope, dashed.

***

Downtown Oxford, Mississippi, is charming, with cute shops, restaurants, boutique hotels, and a lovely courthouse with a Confederate soldier out front. There is a current controversy of course about the Confederate soldier, that he should be removed, but forgetting all else it is a charming vignette. It is hard though to forget he’s a Confederate sentinel for the courthouse. He will someday go I suspect, and I suppose I shouldn’t regret it, but I do, a little, but only because the statue is very pretty, and it makes me consider the War.

Current estimates are that there were about 750,000 young men, North and South, who died in the Civil War. If you include Americans both North and South among the dead, it remains our costliest war. We can only speculate at why most of those young men were fighting, but I suspect some of it was that young men fight when called by old men, or maybe, as Shelby Foote told about the answer of a random Confederate private, “because you’re down here.”

If the War was inevitable, both because of slavery and the fragility of the Union some 70 years in, then there had to be Confederate soldiers as well as Union, and the Confederates were as flawed and tragic as Hamlet, or Lear, or best of all, Othello. We may not be able to forgive them, any more than we can forgive Othello the death of Desdemona, but we can recognize their flaw and our collective tragedy. Honestly, I’d like to see that statue stay, rededicated to the dead of both sides, with an addition of a memorial to the cost of the failed Reconstruction and slavery. It would give us a better picture of our history. I suspect that ultimately it won’t stay though, and that’s ok as well.

***

I had a call last night with a young friend, a young African American woman. It started as business but we talked and I told her about driving through the majority-black Delta where everyone wore masks, even walking down the street, and then into East Tennessee, where it seemed a point of honor for the young white men in the McDonald’s to defy mask orders because the Second Amendment and tattoos would protect them. I told her that driving home the night before we had stopped at a convenience store/gas station on the edge of some city, Montgomery I think, and while I filled up the car I watched a series of young black men enter the store to buy cigarettes or beer or whatever.

“They were all wearing masks, right?” She thought that would be the denouement, that the young white men in East Tennessee arrogantly disobeyed the mask signs that the young black men in Alabama obeyed.

“Nope.”

“I thought you were going to tell me they were wearing masks.”

“Nope.” Having been one myself, I think that young men are sometimes just uniformly stupid.

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Alabama Packing List

What We Took.

Rods

On the Tallapoosa we didn’t expect big fish. We threw a lot of stuff in the car, helter skelter, but we intended to fish with five weight rods, and that’s all we set up for the float. Kris had her Helios D3, and I had the new Winston Pure that Trout Unlimited had sent me for my high school graduation.

So far I’ve caught largemouth, bluegill, longear, redeye, Alabama bass, and a really big catfish on the Pure. It’s an excellent trout rod I’m sure, and someday I plan to catch a trout with it. With the rod Trout Unlimited also sent a Cheeky Reel, which must be the single gaudiest unobtrusive reel ever made. It’s an electric blue and green. It’s also disk drag, smooth and silent, and I don’t fish much with five weight disk drags, smooth and silent. After I put it on the rod I never really noticed the reel was there. Like I said, at once gaudy and unobtrusive.

I have lots of five weight reels, so I loaded the new reel with something different for streamers and poppers, a Scientific Anglers half-weight heavy MPX line. I don’t know what MPX stands for, but I’m used to big weight forward lines for redfish and bass and I liked the MPX. It’s probably the worst possible combination with the Pure, mixing a medium slow rod with a half-weight heavy line to make it faster, but there you are. The combination worked fine for Alabama, where neither the bass nor the legislature is big on subtlety.

I do have one beef with the Winston rod. It has a hook keeper, a rather large, sharpish hook keeper which when combined with the cigar grip and my choked up hand position rubbed my index finger raw. Does anyone actually use hook keepers? Why are they still put on rods? I guess I’ve got lots of rods with hook keepers and cigar grips, but that combination on the Pure really rubbed me the wrong way. All afternoon. And it’s an ugly hook keeper too, and ugliness isn’t part of the whole Winston thing.

Flies

My leaders were a highly technical design: Three or four feet of 20 pound fluorocarbon joined to three or four feet of 16 pound fluorocarbon by a blood knot. They worked fine.

A month or so before we went to Kansas Alabama I lost most of my bass and sunfish flies, four fly boxes worth. They were returned by a Good Samaritan, but not before I’d frantically tied a bunch of new flies, including (at the suggestion of a Kansan I’d been emailing) some Barr’s slumpbusters. Other than the disreputable baseball tie-in, I really like that fly, and fished it about a third of our river time in Alabama. I also tied some BBBs, woolly buggers, and clousers, and used none of them. I tied everything but the BBBs on size 8 streamer hooks, so they should be fine as well for our New York/Vermont/New Hampshire trout swing at the end of June. Of course the whole point of that trip is to learn something about dry flies, so I shouldn’t use them. I really shouldn’t.

The rest of the time we fished poppers. Craig didn’t bother calling them anything but Boogles, which is exactly right. I know there are people out there who tie their own poppers, but I never could get them painted in a way that made me happy, so I am happy to use Boogles. Craig fished with an intermediate size, neither as large nor as small as the ones I usually use. I’m going to have to buy some intermediate Boogles. East Alabama Fly Fishing has an excellent discussion on popper colors, and when to use them. It’s the kind of cool stuff that Craig and the guide service owner, Drew Morgan, are thinking about.

New Shoes

I’m a biting bug magnet. This spring alone I’ve suffered from infestations of gnats, mosquitoes, and fire ants. There’s nothing quite like a couple of hundred fire ants together with your feet in a pair of Keen sandals.

I figure that I’m not likely to pay more attention, so I bought a pair of cornflower blue Converse high tops for our trip to Kansas Alabama. Paired with running socks and some supplemental arch support for the aged they’re pretty comfortable. There’s reasonable traction, and I don’t have to worry about fire ants between my toes. Plus the cornflower blue matches my eyes when I stick my foot in my mouth.

The laces will catch a fly, so it’s another reason to debarb hooks.

I think Kris prefers snake boots, and the Chuck Taylors probably don’t provide much snake protection.

Restaurants, Barbecue

Coming into Alabama, the lady at the visitor center sent us to a Dick Russell’s for barbecue. It wasn’t really so much a barbecue place as a plate-and-three place, with an incredibly good two instead of three and pretty mediocre barbecue as the meat. I had turnip greens and black-eyed peas, and I’d go back for them. They also didn’t have white sauce barbecue, which southern Alabama is known for: Mayonnaise, vinegar, brown sugar, mustard, horseradish, salt and pepper. It sounds awful for pork or beef, but is supposed to be great on chicken.

In Montgomery everyone I talked to told us to eat at Central, which was around the corner on the same block as our hotel. It was the kind of elegant modern American place which seems to be everywhere and because of which the world is better off, and on a Saturday night it was crowded. One of the servers suggested Cahawba for biscuits the next morning for their breakfast biscuit sandwiches. The cheese in the eggs was a bit much, but the biscuits were excellent. I’ve never baked a decent biscuit, though from time to time I try. Because of my own failures I admire the craft of a good biscuit.

Back in Mobile heading home we ate breakfast at Time to Eat, which had the only Amnesty International and Human Rights Campaign stickers on doors in Alabama, and a smoking room. We accidentally ate in the smoking room. It had good grits, and the view of the locals coming in to smoke and drink coffee was pretty memorable.

In Louisiana we tried to get po’ boys in Lafayette, one of the great po’boy towns, but everyplace was closed for Memorial Day.

Where We Didn’t Go

We didn’t see Birmingham, home of both the AA Birmingham Barons and the former Negro League Birmingham Black Barons, for whom Willie Mays, Satchel Paige, and, of all people, Charlie Pride played. Pride and another player were apparently traded to the Barons in 1956 by the Louisville Clippers for a team bus. Everyone seems to like Birmingham, and it was once, along with Memphis and Atlanta, the industrial heart of the South.

The Northern part of the state is supposed to have gorgeous waterfalls. Our guide Craig Godwin said it was the prettiest part of the state.

We didn’t try enough barbecue, and we didn’t catch a redfish on the coast. The same server who suggested Cahawba for biscuits suggested the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, Montgomery having been Zelda’s home. It didn’t open until noon on Sunday, so we didn’t make it.

Playlist

I didn’t know that Charlie Pride played for the Birmingham Black Barons, or he would have been included.

  • Alabama Shakes. This is one of those bands I follow because of their appearance on Austin City Limits. There’s just nothing not to like, except that I guess they may not exist any more.
  • Emmylou Harris. I probably have more Emmylou Harris music than anything else. For someone who doesn’t write many songs, she’s consistently had the best taste in music, and has a liberating way of making other people’s songs her own. I actually needed to cut 50 or so songs so I could hear something else, but I just never got around to it. She was a military brat, and didn’t spend much time in Alabama after she was born there, but being born there was enough of an excuse to listen to Emmylou. And of course there was “Boulder to Birmingham.”
  • John Prine, “Angel From Montgomery.” I had versions by Susan Tedeschi and Bonnie Raitt, but oddly I first knew the song from a high school John Denver record. It was a good version.
Handy’s Memphis Orchestra, 1918.
  • Paul Simon, “Loves Me Like a Rock,” “Kodachrome.” First I ever heard of Muscle Shoals, sometime circa 1973.
  • Arthur Conley, “Sweet Soul Music.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Wilson Pickett, “Land of 1000 Dances,” “Hey Jude,” “Mustang Sally.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, “Old Time Rock & Roll.” Muscle Shoals.
  • James & Bobby Purify, “I’m Your Puppet.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Clarence Carter, “Snatching it Back.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Jimmy Cliff, “Sitting in Limbo.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Etta James. James, from California, had a long and strange career, and she recorded a lot of fine rhythm & blues, but none finer than what she recorded in 1967 in Muscle Shoals. “Tell Mama,” “I’d Rather Go Blind.”
  • Aretha Franklin, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” “I Never Loved a Man.” Muscle Shoals.
  • The Staple Singers, “I’ll Take You There.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Percy Sledge, “When a Man Loves a Woman.” Just try not to sing along. Muscle Shoals.
  • The Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar,” “Wild Horses.” Muscle Shoals.
  • Ma Rainey, “Bo-Weevil Blues,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “See See Rider.” Rainey made some of the first important blues recordings, and the available versions are pretty poor quality. She said she was born in Georgia, but scholars think she was born in Alabama five years before the year she admitted to. Charlie Pride did the same thing in minor league baseball, and this is now known in baseball circles as Dominican Aging Syndrome.
Ma Rainey, 1917.
  • Hank Williams. What a lot of great songs in a too short life. There’s a Williams museum In Montgomery, but it closed before we got to it.
  • Erskine Hawkins, “Tuxedo Junction.” I had versions by Hawkins, Glen Miller, Duke Ellington, and Manhattan Transfer. Tuxedo Junction was a blues bar in Birmingham. One of the great happy songs.
  • W.C. Handy. Ma Rainey is the mother of the blues, and Handy is the father. I had the Louis Armstrong plays W.C. Handy recording. If I’d known “Loveless Love” was by Handy I would have included the Billie Holiday version. I probably should have included Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” as well, in honor of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, but it’s a tough song to contemplate, as is the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. One was enough.
  • Alabama, “Dixieland Delight,” “Song of the South.” I liked these more than I thought I would.

On principal I did not download “Sweet Home Alabama.” I meant to download a selection by St. Paul and the Broken Bones, but never got around to it. If you’ve never watched the Muscle Shoals documentary, Muscle Shoals, do. Muscle Shoals is some of the best of Alabama because, well, it’s some of the best of all of us.

Guitar.

I took the Kohno since we were driving, but then worried about the heat of the day when it had to live in the car while we went down the river. I worked on the Allemande movement of the first Bach Cello suite, the Duarte transcription that I always associate with Segovia. I’ve been told that Duarte was kind of a jerk, but it’s a good transcription, and the Allemande is actually my favorite movement. I can’t remember it for anything.

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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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Carp Diem

Note: For the last year I’ve looked at this blog post and debated whether I should correct it. The fish probably weren’t carp (notwithstanding what folk on the Guadalupe call them), but some form of cold water sucker. Basically, my sucker identification skills suck.

Fried carp and carp stew are a traditional Czech Christmas eve dinner. Carp eggs are eaten as caviar here in the states. Carp are popular sport fish in Europe. Carp are native to Asia and Europe, but have spread everywhere. I’ve fished for carp before, grass carp, in Buffalo Bayou.

I grew up thinking carp were trash fish and a nuisance. I’m not over it.

Yesterday we found carp in the cold tailwater of the Guadalupe River. Kris talked to a guy in a kayak who said he’d caught carp and striper coming down the river.  Kris saw them at the tail end of a large pool about a quarter mile upriver from Texas Highway 46. I was trying to fish below her, but she was yelling that there were fish and lots of fish and that the fish were nuts and just sitting there and get over there right now.  They were nuts, and they were just sitting there.  Move toward them they moved away but they didn’t leave, and they were in the shallow end of the pool where you could watch them easily in a foot or so of water. There must have been 20 of them, hanging in pods of four or five fish, all of them about two pounds. I came up and hooked two but they came off the hook and I said these trout surely are peculiar.  I’m quick that way.

I had hooked a trout earlier, but again my leader broke, above the tippet ring. I’ve got to figure out my leaders. That’s twice I’ve broken off trout in the Guadalupe.

Kris hooked a carp on a black streamer and kept it on the hook. I knew it wasn’t a trout once the dorsal fin flared. It wanted whatever was about to have it for lunch to regret those first few bites.

We could watch the carp roll on the surface and move to eat under the surface.  I fished up the river looking for trout but then hooked a carp on a pheasant tail nymph below a prince nymph below a bead egg.

We left mid-afternoon as it started to rain.  What Reims is to sparkling wine, Lockhart is to barbecue, so we headed to Lockhart. Lockhart is on the way to nowhere, but it was enough on our way home to make it worth the trip. There are four barbecue places of note in Lockhart: Smitty’s, Black’s, Kreuz Market, and Chisholm Trial. Kreuz Market and Smitty’s are connected in a family drama.

I’ve never been to Chisholm Trail, but of the other three the quality of the barbecue is inverse to the atmosphere. Smitty’s is my favorite, located in a charming storefront with a pressed tin roof and clean white walls. Black’s is still in an ancient meat market a couple of blocks from the courthouse. Kreuz is a barn of a place, decorated with randomly placed butcher tools. There’s nothing appealing about the place and there is a long line, but it is great barbecue.

I ordered three pork chops because I wanted to try them, and it was two too many. Other than that I’ve got my barbecue order for the two of us down to an art: one pound fatty brisket, one sausage, four ribs. My half of the sausage goes into a slice of white bread for a sandwich, with pickles and onion and sauce. The rest is finger food.

At Kreuz your get free Blue Bell ice cream at the end. At least theoretically you get free Blue Bell ice cream at the end. I don’t know how those people in the Blue Bell line had room.