Tag: Baseball

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Set Up. New York City, June 20-21, 2019.

The flight to New York left early, 5:40, and to get to the airport we sat the alarm for 3:30, which ain’t civilized. I called an Uber, and the driver was slow getting to us because of construction. That made us anxious and snappy, mostly at each other, but the driver got us to the airport in plenty of time notwithstanding our contradictory and confusing instructions. He was Nigerian perhaps, or Kenyan, African anyway, and not a talkative guy, but he was patient, and he got us there.

Leaving for ten days I worry about work, but it’s the time in my life when I should worry less about work and I’m trying. There are others who can worry for me.

As much as work I worry about leaving our dogs, the young stray Chihuahua and the old miniature schnauzer. Theoretically they are both Kris’s dogs, my dog having been the big golden who died last year, but the Chihuahua ends up sleeping by me and the schnauzer adores me. Who doesn’t appreciate adoration? I read once that leaving a short-lived dog without you is unkind, that you are its life and that its life is short, and the notion resonated. Our dogs travel with us from time to time, but they’re not fishing dogs, and the relatively yappy small dogs aren’t dogs to leave alone in a hotel while we fish. 

We chose this Northeast swing in part to see the Astros play the Yankees. For a few years we’ve tried to catch an out-of-town game a season, and we hadn’t been to the new Yankee stadium. The Astros are good this year, but there are lots of injuries, Altuve, Springer, Correa, McHugh, and they’re coming off their first four-game losing streak. Everyone’s favorite player, Jose Altuve—who doesn’t like Jose Altuve?—is having a poor season and is just back off the IL, which until this season was the DL, and which I think stands for Injury List. It used to be the Disabled List. Injury List is so much more informative.

The Yankees are good too, and some of the past Astros/Yankees series have been memorable. The plane was amusingly filled with Astros fans, so we figuratively if not literally bumped fists and high-fived and contemplated the fun of a baseball weekend in New York. Had we realized a beer would be $14.25, and worse the selection would be lousy, maybe we’d have been less enthusiastic, but even at $14.25 and lousy it was a beer at a baseball game.

On the plane I was thinking about fish, and specifically about fish in Kansas, and how Kris and I should take the dogs and the skiff and drive north through Oklahoma and Kansas all the way to North Dakota—I reckon it would be the only technical saltwater poling skiff to ever visit North Dakota. I was thinking about when the Astros schedule for 2020 would be released, and how it would be good if they played Minnesota or a Pennsylvania or Ohio team so that we could include them as part of fishing. Kris already has Ohio pegged for April or May fishing and a trip to McGee Marsh to see the spring warblers, and if we could include the Indians or the Reds it would be lagniappe. Then I started worrying about what could go wrong, but the answer in truth is not much. Not much could go wrong except we wouldn’t catch a fish. I bet though that the dogs would like that trip, even if they’re not technical fly-fishing dogs.

Yankee Stadium was largely a bust. The stadium’s nice enough, and the subway ride north from Washington Square is an adventure for out-of-towners, but the Astros lost, 10-6, and the game was worse than the score. It rained, the game was delayed twice, the Astros were getting walloped, and we left after the 5th inning. After last year in Tampa, and this year in New York, I’m thinking my combined fly fishing/baseball vacations may not be the very thing for the Astros won-loss record.

Friday morning we walked to the Donut Project on Bleeker Street. Herman Melville grew up on Bleeker Street. Other residents include James Agee, Robert De Niro, John Belushi, and Alicia Keys. Of the donut shops we’ve been to, the Donut Project ranked maybe a 4 out of 5 on a scale of 5, with the top spots held by the Tatonut in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Blue Star Donuts in Portland, and Shipley’s on North Main or Ella in Houston when the glazed are fresh out of the frier. Four is a very good rating. It was stylish and imaginative, the donuts were very pretty, and then it rained. We had to walk back to our hotel in the rain.

In New York City, we stayed near Washington Square, at the Washington Square Hotel. It’s a small, old hotel, very European and very likeable. it’s only a block or so from the Stonewall Inn, and I got very confused, both as to day and date, and thought we would be leaving Washington Square on the morning of the Pride Parade. It’s the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, and the neighborhood was decked out. There’s nothing I like better than a good Pride Parade, but I figured the neighborhood would be a madhouse and that we would never get out of the City. Fortunately I’d miscalculated by a week. We’ll be in time next Saturday for the Pride Parade in Pittsburg New Hampshire, population 869.

I hadn’t really thought about it, but we will drive 390 miles almost due north from New York City to Pittsburg, N.H. Then we’ll turn around and drive south 169 miles to Manchester N.H. It’s a big swing, and a lot of miles. And none of it’s as frightening as driving out of New York City on a Friday morning. Whatever may happen, and however much a man of good will I may be, I’d rather not try to navigate Greenwich Village on the Saturday of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riot.

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Alabama

For each destination state I’ve written at least one blog entry before the trip, but we went to Alabama on the spur of the moment so it didn’t get done. Usually they were evidence of my preconceived notions, and sometimes they were out-and-out wrong. For Alabama I started to skip it because it’s supposed to be a precursor not a post-cursor. I can’t quite bring myself to waste a perfectly good postcard though, so I’ll tell some stories from our trip.

Alabama doesn’t quite match Mississippi for music and literature. There is the one book, lots of people’s favorite book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Fannie Flagg is enjoyable, but neither Ms. Flagg nor Harper Lee are Faulkner or Eudora Welty or Jermyn Ward. There’s some important blues like W.C. Handy and Ma Rainey, and there’s Hank Williams and Emmylou Harris, but it’s not the almost endless list of musicians from Mississippi. There’s Muscle Shoals though. That’s pretty good. And don’t tell Kris but I’ve had a crush on Emmylou Harris since I was 17.

Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Willie McCovey, and Satchel Paige were all from Alabama. Maybe they played on the same high school travel team.

And there’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” Ok, that’s harsh, Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t even an Alabama band, but the song is embraced by the state, there’s even a sweet home proclaiming sign when you cross the border from Louisiana, but the song’s resentment and outrage never seemed like quite the thing to me. It’s a catchy tune, but dang it’s pissy.

*

It’s fitting that we did Alabama and Mississippi in the same year. Mississippi and most of Alabama were ceded to the United States by Spain in 1798. Mississippi was admitted as a state in 1817, and Alabama was admitted two years later in 1819. In the 1820 census, the Alabama population was 127,901. and some of my second and third great-grandparents lived in Alabama in the 1820s.

Alabama and Mississippi are a weird counterpoint to two other matching states, New Hampshire and Vermont, so going to the four in the same year has a weird resonance. The pairs of states are different, sure, but get rid of the state line and we could easily be back to 48 states without much change in the national character. They really are matched sets. There’s a lot more difference between, say Northern California and Southern California, or West Texas and East Texas, than between Alabama and Mississippi, or Vermont and New Hampshire.

Alabama has 4,887,871 residents, so it’s almost 2 million people larger than Mississippi. It’s also richer than Mississippi, but not by much. Mississippi now ranks ahead of West Virginia at 49th in median wealth per household, with $43,529, Alabama 45th, with $48,123. Alabama and Mississippi are also essentially white and black, with Alabama 68.5% white and 26.2% black, and Mississippi 63.5% white and 35.6% black.

Alabama Presidential Election Results 2016.svg
Alabama Presidential Election Results 2016, Wikipedia, US gov – derivative work: Ali Zifan.

In 2016, Alabama voted 62.08% for President Trump, and 34.36% for Hillary Clinton. Like most states, there is a rural/urban split, with Montgomery and Birmingham voting for Clinton, but like Mississippi there is a black majority in the rural historic cotton counties, the rich-soil agriculture region that belts the south-central counties of the state. In Mississippi it’s the Delta along the Mississippi River. In Alabama it’s the Black Belt. Where 150 years ago the majority of residents were slaves, 150 years later the majority of the residents are black.

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I have never been a particularly devout alumnus of the University of Texas. I don’t belong to Texas Exes or go to football games or answer the phone when the fundraising calls come in from Austin, but still, from time to time I check the football scores, and if I ever drive cross-country I’m going to stick the largest longhorn I can find on my rear window out of a strange mix of perversity and pride. Kris went to Rice, so her experience doesn’t really embrace the goofy. Hook ’em.

On the way out of town Sunday morning downtown Montgomery was deserted except for one family, African American, standing on a corner looking mildly lost Two were wearing burnt orange tee shirts and one of the tee shirts was clearly decorated with a white longhorn. I was overcome, rolled down the car window, flashed the hook ‘em horns hand sign and screamed hook ‘em! They were startled for a second, long enough for it to dawn on me just how stupid I was being, and how a black family in Alabama might not expect friendly gestures yelled from passing cars by white guys, but then all four of them flashed the hook ‘em horns sign and yelled hook ‘em! I was feeling pretty satisfied.

Except that Kris was beating on me, not just any mild sort of beating either. She was pounding on my shoulder just as hard as she could.

“Why did you yell fuck ‘em at those people!”

*

Earlier in May the Alabama legislature approved legislation that effectively banned abortion in the state. Alabama was followed by Missouri and Georgia. I think Louisisana’s legislation is on the governor’s desk.

I get it. Abortion is a difficult issue, and it should be. In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court didn’t conclude that these questions are no-brainers, and that the litigants were wasting their time. I’ve been mulling the issues raised in my undergraduate Philosophy 101: Moral Philosophy: Abortion class for 40-odd years. It is an extraordinarily subtle and morally ambiguous question, which I admit I weigh out for the most part on the side of women’s rights, but there was a particularly gleeful screw-you totalitarian current to the Alabama vote that seemed to have more to do with political positioning than a thoughtful moral stance.

By happenstance after the trip a Republican congressman who I particularly like visited our office. He was not optimistic for his party for 2020, though he, a Republican in one of the most Democratic districts in the country, named a litany of party failures. He noted that 30% of the 2020 voters would be millennials, and that their first concern is climate change. Ok, climate change and college debt. He talked about the failure of both parties to adopt a sensible immigration policy, and how if legislation wasn’t adopted before the fall it wouldn’t get done because the parties needed it as an electioneering punching bag.

He said that in 2018 his party had lost 20% of its educated suburban women voters. He asked if we could think of what the party had done to recover that vote. “Georgia and Alabama,” I said. I forgot Missouri and Kentucky and Louisiana. It wasn’t only a mean-spirited choice by the states, it was a choice that given the 2018 election and what’s coming for the Republican Party in 2020 was incredibly naive.

*

Notwithstanding what goes on in the capitol building, Montgomery is a pleasant place to visit. We did lots of stuff in our short stay: ate at a recommended restaurant, Central, saw part of a Montgomery Biscuits baseball game and even better went shopping in the Biscuits’ store, the Basket, and instead of donuts had excellent Sunday morning biscuits, the baked good not the ballplayers, at Cahawba. We also visited The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the national African-American lynching monument. It’s reminiscent of the Vietnam monument in Washington, and is incredibly effective.

It’s the African American lynching monument, but it’s probably worth noting that not all lynching victims were black. In the period from 1882 to 1968 there were more than 1200 white victims, and more than 3400 black. Most African American lynchings were in the South. There were 347 recorded lynchings in Alabama: 299 African American and 48 white victims. Mississippi lynched 589 African Americans. Texas lynched 352 African Americans (and 141 whites, though that number is likely to include Mexican Americans). The monument signage says that African American lynchings included levels of torture and brutality that were generally not part of white lynchings, though I suspect South Texas Mexican Americans might raise issue with that. Black lynchings in the South were in part, maybe in big part, to control political authority, and in part to enforce the codes of racial etiquette that were thought to be required for a moral society. Irony is so ironic.

*

The University of Alabama is in Tuscaloosa, 80 miles north and east of Selma. We didn’t make it to Tuscaloosa, but we did drive from Montgomery to Selma on Sunday morning. Selma could be a graceful Southern town, with pretty churches and handsome early houses, but it’s not. Driving around it looks beat up and ragged, with a lot of public housing and a lot of boarded businesses.

When we got home I talked to a young friend, a graduate of the University of Alabama, who said Tuscaloosa would look just like Selma if it weren’t for the University and the Mercedes plant. Would you put your Mercedes plant in Selma? Sometimes it seems the sites of such extraordinary racial conflict never really recover, and whatever the notions are 50 years later the places are still battlegrounds. I felt sorry for Selma, black and white, but I wouldn’t put my Mercedes plant there.

*

Floating the Tallapoosa on the long Memorial Day weekend there were other users, though it was never crowded. Where roads, not much more than tracks really, came down to the river through the hardwoods there were bank encampments of families and friends. They could be pretty elaborate, with multiple tents and pop-up shelters and dogs and children and pickups and boats and every kind of cooking gear imaginable, and, one suspects, plenty of beer. All of it seemed a bit slovenly, but a fun way to fill the weekend. Backwoods is a derogatory term for Alabama whites, like cracker in Florida and Georgia, or hillbilly in Arkansas, or redneck for anywhere in the South, and we were clearly in the backwoods. Our guide Craig made jokes but said they were his people, and I reckon they were some of my people too, though like I said none of my ancestors have lived in Alabama since before the War. Cousins.

There was an assortment of guys drinking beer and bait fishing where we took out of the river, a big guy came over to tell us all about himself. While Craig was loading the raft he talked, and he talked, and he talked. He told us about the tuna he caught while he was in the merchant marine, and his grandmother’s Irish potato salad, and where in those hills there was gold that could still be found. Craig thought he might have already drunk a bit of beer, but there was also a bit of the Boo Radley about him. Craig said that every time he came off the river there was always some weirdness. There was some weirdness, though the potato salad sounded pretty good. He ate it on Saltines, just like boudin.

*

It had been way too long since my last Moon Pie, and in Alabama they were two for a dollar. You can get two Moon Pies and an R.C. Cola for two bucks. Inflation.

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Kansas

Oops.

Our next trip was going to be late June to New York/Vermont/New Hampshire to fish for trout. Now look what’s happened. I realized we had a Memorial Day Holiday, and that we could spend a long weekend in Wichita, Kansas.

On Southwest there’s one direct flight a day to Wichita, and it’s at 6 am. The other flight has a layover in Phoenix, and would take slightly longer than the three day weekend. There are on the other hand about a thousand flights a day from Houston, an oil town, to Tulsa, an oil town, and Tulsa is only a two hour drive from Wichita. Flying though we won’t have a canoe, so we’re stuck to walking the banks once we get there. I certainly do that often enough, but in a strange place you never know what you’ll find. Snakes, the beginning of mystery novels where the corpse is discovered, but most of all trees and brush and high banks and deep, unfathomable or worse unfishable water.

John Vachon, untitled photo, 1938, Farm Security Administration, Coffey County, Kansas, Library of Congress.

There are plenty of kinds of fish in Kansas: channel cats, largemouths, stripers, wipers (oh Lord, why couldn’t someone come up with a better name?), bluegill, white bass, northern pike, stocked trout, and that glamour girl of glamour girls, carp. Any of those can be taken with a fly, and at one time or another I’ve caught all but the white stripe hybrids (there, better) and pike. We don’t allow northern pike in Texas. But I have been skunked before, and I’m terrified of not catching a Kansas fish.

I’ve been to Kansas twice before. Once was long ago, and I don’t remember much except for someone saying look, we’re in the Flint Hills. The other was a recent trip to Kansas City to see the Astros play the Royals at Kauffman Stadium. Kauffman is a mid-century modern masterpiece, and one of MLB’s prettiest baseball stadiums. There are other things worth seeing in Kansas City as well: the National WWI Museum, the American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum at 18th and Vine, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the magnificent American, a restaurant in Crown Center. Unfortunately the American is now permanently closed. Too bad, too, because Kansas City barbecue sucks.

But of course everything in Kansas City seems actually to be in Missouri. Even Kansas City, Kansas, actually seems to be in Missouri. So this time we’re going to Wichita, where there’s no danger of stepping over any nearby state line. I guess we’ll get to Kansas and start driving around with a road atlas (that’s a kind of paper Google maps for any younger reader) and Google Earth in hand.

Ho! For the Kansas Plains, sheet music, 1856, Boston, Oliver Ditson, pub., Library of Congress.

If you look at a map of Kansas, it’s veined with rivers and dotted with reservoirs. There’s a lot of conventional tackle fishing on large Kansas reservoirs–we’re talking tens of thousands of acres of big reservoirs and even natural lakes. Of its 87,000 square miles, 459 squire miles of Kansas is covered with water. But fishing the bigger reservoirs without a boat or even a ladder is hard with a fly rod, as are the bigger rivers–there’s both the Arkansas (which must give Kansans fits pronouncing) and the Missouri, and lots of tributaries to both.

There are lots of smaller waters though: Park lakes, creeks, small rivers, natural ponds and ponds left from mining of coal and sand. I would even bet that Kansas has farm ponds, and that driving down a road you can knock on a door and spend an hour fishing. I can catch fish on a farm ponds, and that really seems the right color of fish for Kansas.

We’ll find something, surely, or we’ll go back to Kansas again. Kauffman Stadium is beautiful, and it couldn’t get better than watching the Astros play the Royals in Kauffman on a spring day, even if I had to eat more Kansas City barbecue.

John Vachon, Corn, Kansas, 1938 Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress.
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Wisconsin Packing List

We didn’t take any fishing gear to Wisconsin, except for waders, boots, and sunglasses. We didn’t wade, but on the day it rained I wore my boots instead of sandals, and Kris wore her waders and her boots both days to stay warm.  The temperature was in the 40s. It was arctic.

We used the guide’s rods, Orvis Recon 10 weights, and they worked great. We have 10 weights, but we don’t have cold water lines for them, and tropic lines kink in cold water. I could get used to not hauling fishing gear through airports. And as to Recon versus Helios most rods are better than I am.

When we were in Oregon, we asked a waitress what we should do while we were there.  She said she didn’t know, that she’d just moved to Oregon from Milwaukee, so we asked her what we should do in Wisconsin. “Eat fried cheese curds.” Our daughter added that we should also eat fresh cheese curds because they squeak when you chew. They do.

Cheese curds are curdled milk, cheddar in process, and not yet cheese. In the New York Times, Louisa Kamp once described the squeak as two balloons trying to neck. They taste a bit like cottage cheese, with more chew.

We bought a block of cheddar cheese which I stuck in my daypack and forgot about.  At least I forgot about it until the TSA lady pulled me out of the line at the Milwaukee airport to go through my pack. I’m pretty sure that in the scanner the block of cheddar looked just like C-4. “Do you have anything sharp in your bag? Anything that could stick me.” She was pulling on her proctology gloves.

“No . . . yes, wait. I have a block of extra sharp cheddar cheese.”  Wisconsin humor. She looked at me and then laughed. The Wisconsin TSA lady thought the joke was funny, and I’m not in prison.

Cheese

After the fur trade, Wisconsin’s first industries were timber and wheat. The wheat didn’t last, and I can’t remember why. Disease? Poor soil? Short growing seasons? Wheat worked in Nebraska and Kansas, but not in Wisconsin. So Wisconsin turned to dairy, spurred on by the efforts of the University of Wisconsin. I had always assumed that Wisconsin came to dairy because that’s where European dairy farmers immigrated, but no. It was the replacement crop because of the failure of wheat.

Where We Didn’t Go

There was a lot of Wisconsin we didn’t see. There is a peninsula, Door County, in the northeast, roughly paralleling the Michigan upper peninsula on the east side of Lake Michigan. Door County was somewhere referred to as Wisconsin’s Cape Cod. I haven’t been to Cape Cod, but Door County had some appeal to me. The pictures look genteel.

Historically northern Wisconsin was timber, not farming, and Stevens Point was the doorway to the pineywoods. I’ll have a chance to see the north country in Michigan and Minnesota, and it was a long way from Chicago (notwithstanding the draw of the giant fiberglass muskie in Hayward), so we didn’t go. We probably won’t.

The part of the state I wish I’d seen but didn’t was the southwestern Driftless Area.  It is apparently a very fine trout fishery, overlapping Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa. It is also the part of the state with the highest concentration of organic farms and rural Democratic votes. It is geologically different than the rest of the state because the great sheet glaciers didn’t cover the Driftless, and consequently didn’t leave glacial drift, glacial drift being the trash left behind by glaciers after a picnic. Consequently there’s not much glacial rock.

There’s a lovely looking trout town there, Viroqua, and I’m a sucker for trout towns. I had already planned to fish the Driftless region in Iowa, so maybe next year I’ll hit them both.

We also didn’t visit the Milwaukee churches.  I’ll go back for that.

What I Didn’t Write About

Aldo Leopold. John Muir. Hank Aaron. The Art of Fielding.

Bud Selig.

Have you ever had someone be so unjust, perpetrate so many indignities, large and small, deliver so many insults that physically you react to their name? Bud Selig. If Fortunato had only been the Commissioner of Baseball, Montresor’s motivations in The Cask of Amontillado would stand revealed.

I’m glad I’m going back. I’ll write about Bud Selig.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bud_Selig_on_October_31,_2010_(2).jpg

Playlist

  • Bon Iver. It was the first album, For Emma, Forever Ago, that was so arresting, so beautiful. I can hum Skinny Love happily forever. I like the other albums, even the strange 22, A Million and side projects like Volcano Choir. But For Emma is beautiful.
  • BoDeans. I’ve listened to the BoDeans since a Stereo Review review of Home back in the 80s.  I miss Stereo Review, but I’m probably the only one. Red River goes into my car trip playlist. 
  • Steve Miller Band. I didn’t really care for them in the 70s, but they’re fun to listen to when your expectations are low.
  • Bruce Springsteen. Cadillac Ranch. Hey little girlie in the blue jeans so tight/Drivin’ alone through the Wisconsin night.  
  • George Jones, Milwaukee Here I Come. There’s also a version by Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. If you never saw Dolly Parton on the Porter Wagoner Show on Saturday night, your education is incomplete. Dolly was 21. “Why Porter! You brung me flowers!”
  • Les Paul, The Best of the Capitol Masters Edition. Luckily he designed a great guitar, otherwise no one would remember him. If you never actually listened to Les Paul (which I hadn’t), don’t. 
  • Ella Fitzgerald, My Cousin in Milwaukee. Singin’ sweet about singin’ sexy. 
  • Smoking Popes, Welcome to Janesville. Paul Ryan is from Janesville. It’s a fine song, but I don’t think it’s about Paul Ryan. 
  • Jerry Lee Lewis, What Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me). Lewis’s late country phase.
  • Brad Paisley, Alcohol. Paisley is from West Virginia, and should have been on my West Virginia playlist. He wasn’t, but only out of ignorance. I suspect he’s not my kind of country, but this is a strange sort of anthem, and probably fitting for the state with the highest alcoholism rate in the country.
  • Kimya Dawson, Tire Swing.  Didn’t know her, and still don’t. Wikipedia lists her genre as anti-folk. Ok then. 
  • Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Milwaukee is a port. 

Guitar

I took a guitar, my cheap travel guitar, and worked on Villa-Lobos’s Choro No. 1. I gave up on the Bach I’d been working on without really learning it. I did manage to play all the way through it though.