Tag: Baseball

Posted on

Fly Fishing the Driftless, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, September 26-29, 2021

I had breakfast in Houston yesterday with a lawyer from Minneapolis, a compliance officer for a securities dealer. He had grown up in Norfthfield, about 120 miles from where we stayed near Spring Grove, and went to law school at the University of Minnesota. I mentioned that we’d been to an area near Austin and Rochester, in the Driftless region, and said how much I liked it. He’d never heard of the Driftless.

We drove 2,122 miles. We fished in three states, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. We fished in five streams, and caught wild brown trout and native brookies. I finally cast a bamboo fly rod. We saw lots of corn.

It’s two days from Houston, Texas, to Spring Grove, Minnesota, which is only 22 miles from Houston, Minnesota. I’d like to tell you that Houston, Minnesota, and Houston, Texas, are similar, but they’re not. Houston, Texas, is located on a flat coastal plain in Southeast Texas, and has 2.31 million residents. Houston, Minnesota, is located in the relatively hilly Driftless region of Southeast Minnesota, and has 979 residents.

They were both named after Sam Houston. Houston, Minnesota, has a wider selection of farm implements.

According to our Minnesota guide, Tim Carver of The Driftless Fly Fishing Company, a lot of his clients are from Chicago. From Chicago, the Driftless holds the closest native trout. I guess that if we lived in Chicago we’d only be five hours from Houston, Minnesota. From here it’s 19 hours. We’d have to be Cubs fans though, so it’s not worth it.

* * *

Gretchen, the Houston Orvis fishing manager, asked where we’d been lately and I told her about the Driftless, how pretty it was, how different from the rest of the Midwest. Gretchen is from New Hampshire, and I told her how it reminded me of New England. She’d never heard of the Driftless.

I hadn’t planned to fish in Minnesota on this trip. In Minnesota I had imagined that one day we would visit the far north, the Boundary Waters, but after I rented a farmhouse near Decorah, Iowa, I figured out it was actually in Minnesota. It was a sign.

Let’s get this out of the way now: each of the streams we fished in the Driftless was a bit different, but I suspect that if I found a place I liked in Iowa, I could find a similar place in Wisconsin, or in Minnesota. None of the water was big, the largest stream was maybe 40 feet across, and each was a mix of pools, slow water, bends, and riffles. What was remarkable was not the variation, but the amount. Minnesota claims more than 700 miles of fishable trout water, Iowa 2,500, and Wisconsin more than 13,000. If I fished a mile of stream each day, I’d be tottering around in a walker and still not out of Iowa.

Our guide Tim was a youngish man, at least to my old eyes, and I suspect that guiding and fly fishing are his anchors. I couldn’t imagine what Tim would do if there wasn’t water to fish, and nothing seemed more important to him than our having a good day. I liked Tim a lot.

We fished the morning on the South Fork Root River. There is also a South Branch of the Root, and a North and a Middle Branch, plus each has tributaries of its own. After they all join together the Root joins the Mississippi near La Crescent, Minnesota, across the Mississippi from La Crosse, Wisconsin. Even with all that joining the Root never seemed like a big river.

On the South Fork we crossed a public easement at the edge of a bit of pasture, and Tim placed Kris at the base of a long pool banked on one side by the pasture and on the other by a sandstone bluff. It was pretty characteristic Driftless karst topology. Kris spent the rest of the morning fishing that pool. Every time she thought about moving she caught another fish.

We started out fishing dry dropper rigs; at first I fished a pheasant tail nymph under a parachute Adams but later switched to a brace of dries, a spinner and a dun. I started downstream below Kris, and then moved around her and upstream.

The fish were spooky, and I was making, for me, long casts. I know all this modern stuff about keeping casts short and relying on stealthy approaches, but there are few things more thrilling than taking a trout on a dry fly after a long perfect cast, or even a pretty good cast, or even a good enough cast. It is such a joy.

* * *

To meet Tim, we came into Preston down a long hill onto the main street. It was a handsome street, lined with houses and shops that seemed to pre-date World War I. A lot of the buildings sported American flags. It reminded me of a record cover I’d once owned, or maybe that I imagined, of Charles Ives’ New England Holiday Symphony, an Impressionistic cover that I recall as a mishmash of American flags and New England town. Likely as not I was making it up to fit the moment.

At the shop, there was a ridiculously good-looking young couple from Rochester, also meeting their guide. He was handsome and tall and dark and she was tall and red-headed and movie-star pretty. I fantasized that they were young doctors or some such from the Mayo Clinic–it’s what Rochester is best known for–learning to fly fish (they were being fitted for rented waders, so I think that I was right they were learning. I was certainly right about them being ridiculously good looking).

We talked about where they were from, and I mentioned that Preston reminded me more of New England than of the Midwest–I was still pondering the memory of that probably mis-remembered record cover–and she said that was good to know, because she’d never been to New England. I suppose that some day she’ll drive into a New England town and think to herself that it looks absolutely nothing like Preston, Minnesota.

In Decorah, Iowa, we fished with Liz Siepker, of Driftless Fishers LLC. I had googled guides in Decorah, and picked Liz first because I realized that after 20-odd states I had yet to hire a woman guide. Unfortunately Liz was only available for an afternoon, and I wanted to fish a full day. I emailed another guide who never answered, and a third who responded that on a Monday in October both he and his guiding partner had to work their real jobs. We booked the afternoon with Liz.

When I met Liz I accused her of having a Midwestern accent, but it turned out she was from Pennsylvania. Her masters was in one or another kind of fishology, and she got to Iowa via a fisheries job in Missouri and an Iowa-born husband. I still swear I heard her say you betcha.

At least theoretically, fishing in Iowa differs from the other Driftless states in a couple of ways, neither of which affected us. There is a trout season in both Wisconsin and Minnesota, and with a few exceptions in both states, trout fishing in the Minnesota and Wisconsin Driftless mostly stops on October 15. Iowa has no season, fishing is year ’round, and our guides in Minnesota and Wisconsin admitted that in late fall and winter they would cross into Iowa for their own off-season fishing.

Iowa also stocks rainbow trout in some places, though where we fished we only caught wild browns–I think Wisconsin has stopped all stocking in the Driftless. There is natural reproduction in Iowa, both among brown trout and brook trout and I’d guess the general population, and at least one Iowa creek is set aside for naturally reproducing native brook trout.

Liz suggested that we fish Trout Run, in a county park on the edge of urban Decorah. To be honest, compared to Houston, Texas, Decorah is never particularly urban, though it is multiples larger than Houston, Minnesota. It’s still fewer than 10,000 people. Urban or no, on Trout Run we were isolated enough to forget that the town was nearby, and the only other angler we saw was back at the parking lot; us going, him arriving.

Even if Liz wasn’t from Iowa, you betcha she knew the water like a native. She even took us on a jungle adventure into deepest, darkest Iowa.

With Liz we fished nymphs under a foam indicator with no added split shot. Like Kris the morning before in Minnesota, I caught all of my fish, maybe a dozen, fishing one deep pool. Nothing we caught in the Driftless was particularly large, but all of the guides assured us that there were 22-inch browns right there, right where we were fishing, and that nighttime fishing with mouse patterns was great for big browns. I’m sure it is, and I hope they enjoy it.

* * *

I am a superstitious baseball fan, which is redundant, and one of my longest running superstitions is Frito pie. Do you know Frito pie? If you’re not from New Mexico or Texas you probably don’t. It is great stuff: spicy, unctuous chile mixed into a bed of crisp salty Fritos, then topped with onions and cheese and whatever else comes to hand. Sometimes a small Fritos bag is split down the side and the chili–at Texas high school football games it’s likely Wolf Brand from the can–the chili is mixed straight into the bag. It’s our version of a hot dog.

Frito pie is my comfort food for baseball superstitions. I’m constantly finding new sources of Frito pie in Houston, Texas (though not Houston, Minnesota), from ice houses to upscale, and if the Astros are losing, I eat Frito pie and know that I’ve done all that I can to help turn things around.

Anyway, we were in the Driftless in the final week of the baseball season and the Astros were stalled. After our afternoon fishing with Liz, Kris and I stopped at the Decorah Fareway grocery. There was no Wolf Brand in the canned soup aisle (which was also the Miracle Whip aisle–this was Iowa). I thought maybe the store stocked some kind of frozen chili, and found the store manager on the frozen food aisle. “Do ya’ll have frozen chili?”

I said those four words; I really did. It may have been the most Texas thing I’ve ever said. The guy just stared at me. After a bit he said I’ve never heard of anything like that and walked away. We found a chili spice mix where the Wolf Brand should have been, added it to some ground beef, and the Astros won the division. It was pretty good, too.

Liz had recommended the Root River Rod Company in Lanesboro, so on Tuesday on our way out of \Minnesota for Wisconsin we stopped there. Kris bought some stuff, and then bought some more stuff–she was jealous of Liz’s wading boots, so it was a pretty good day for the Root River Rod Company. Liz was right, it was a good shop, but best of all the owner, Steve Sobieniak, let me cast one of his bamboo rods; he both builds and restores bamboo. I cast one of his builds, and it was a lovely thing, casting soft and true. If I fished the Driftless day to day, season to season, that’s what I would own. The Driftless is bamboo rod water.

* * *

I’ve read that there are more certified organic farms in Driftless Wisconsin than in any other area in the States. The first night in Viroqua we ate at the farm-to-table Driftless Cafe. At the table next to us were guys passing around fish photos on their phones. I didn’t have the Frito pie, but it was wonderful. The second night at the Driftless Cafe (we went back the second night), we had the pizza, and not only were guys at the table next to us declaiming how they ate there every time they came to Viroqua to fish, our guide Matt was there for his Dad’s birthday. The third night (we made night three) we ate appetizers and a salad at the bar (which was inlaid with a swimming trout), and we saw their framed James Beard semi-finalist certificate. I reckon you don’t get a lot of James Beard semi-finalists in cafes in towns of fewer than 5,000, even if the cafe is pretty upscale. If I was still in Viroqua I’d be back for night four. They also have good martinis.

On Wednesday we fished a half-day with Matt Bethke of Driftless Angler. I figured we’d fish with Matt in the morning, then explore in the afternoon. Matt grew up in the area, moved around the country some, and came home to Westby, just up the road from Viroqua.

Agriculture almost killed the Driftless streams before World War II, sort of like agriculture almost killed the southern plains with the Dust Bowl. Trees were clear cut, everything was plowed for planting, and streams filled with silt from erosion. It was the damaged Wisconsin of A Sand County Almanac. What had been spring-fed coldwater wild-trout streams was choked with silt. The states have largely reversed the damage, and private groups like Trout Unlimited have also invested heavily in stream restoration.

Matt took us to Weister Creek, in the Kickapoo Valley Reserve. The Reserve was originally land accumulated by the Corps of Engineers in the 1960s for a since-abandoned dam project. After the proposed dam project was finally abandoned, a chunk of the Corps-owned land in the Reserve, about 8600 acres including part of Weister Creek, was given to the State of Wisconsin or held in trust for the Ho-Chunk Nation. The land has been undeveloped and reclaimed by nature since the 60s. I don’t think it’s an accident that Weister was the most deeply incised water we fished; I suspect that the Weister was as close as we came to what the streams were like before the Driftless was farmed.

We fished a nymph under a foam beetle, and the fish were spooky. We cast a lot from the banks, though I couldn’t stay out of the water–since Pennsylvania I’m a convert to the notion that my best drifts are straight towards my rod tip, and that can be hard to manage from a bank. Most of our casts were pretty short–there wasn’t sufficient space between cut banks on a winding small stream to make long casts or take long drifts.

That morning we fished about a half-mile of river and caught wild brown trout. We didn’t see anybody else.

* * *

The van’s change oil light came on, so Thursday I spent part of the morning at the Viroqua Chrysler dealer. I waited on the sales floor for the oil change, and passed some of the time talking to a salesman. We talked a lot about the Brewers winning their division. He asked what we were doing there, so I told him we were fishing. He asked what for? Walleye?

I’d like to catch a walleye. I’ve never seen a walleye.

Following Matt back from Weister Creek to Viroqua, he showed us a bit of isolated stream where the state had eradicated the European browns and reestablished the native strain brook trout. That evening Kris and I went back to the brook trout stream and fished a quarter mile up the easement until dark. We didn’t catch anything.

The next day after the oil change I worked at lawyering through the afternoon, and then in the evening, before our third dinner at the Viroqua Diner, we went back to the little creek. At first nothing, but after a while I figured that maybe we were too close to the road, that maybe that portion of the water got fished too hard and too often. I walked further upstream, maybe a half mile from the road, and watched trout rising in a long pool. I was fishing dry flies, and I caught a brookie, went back and got Kris to show her where I had fished and how, and on my example cast caught another brookie on a long just-good-enough cast with a Royal Wulff. She had lost her fly, so we traded rods and I headed back to the car. I’d caught a perfect fish.

Posted on

Georgia

In 1733, George II established Georgia, and it was the last of the original 13 Colonies. It was the brainchild of James Oglethorpe, a British parliamentarian, as a means to help the English poor. Georgia would give them a new start. It would also be a buffer between the Spanish colony in Florida and the British Carolinas.

It succeeded pretty well as a buffer. As philanthropy, not so much.

Under Oglethorpe, individual land holdings were limited to 500 acres, and charity settlers couldn’t sell their land. Rum was prohibited. Slavery was prohibited. It was gonna be a moral utopia.

William Vereist, James William Oglethorpe, 1735-1736, oil on panel, National Portrait Gallery, London.

It was a bust. Instead of giving immigrants a clean slate, the poor brought their debt with them. The land along the coast, the land settled first, was lousy for farming, and the English poor didn’t know how to farm anyway. For passage, immigrants, including children, were often indentured for long periods, some for decades. Planters from other colonies, particularly South Carolina, began to encroach, while the immigrants began to sneak off to other colonies where they could at least get a drink.

The Colonial Georgia poor were probably worse off than they’d been in England, though at least they didn’t have student loans.

In 1742, Oglethorpe left Georgia in a huff, never to return. In 1750, African slavery was legalized–it was already widespread. As a bastion of redemption and the hope of the poor, Colonial Georgia failed.

With that sterling beginning, Georgia was on a roll. Many Georgians would have been perfectly happy remaining British, and it was the last colony occupied by the British. Early Georgian government land grants were rife with fraud that lined the pockets of Georgia officials, and multiples of the same available land was sold to different buyers at rigged prices.

Georgia was ground zero for the Trail of Tears.

The Civil War? Georgia seceded based on what was probably a fixed election, and the war remained unpopular, particularly in mountainous North Georgia. Then there was the Siege of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea. During Reconstruction, Georgia was the only rebel state to be admitted to the Union, only to be kicked out again after it immediately kicked out all African American members of the Georgia legislature.

Gone with the Wind is set in Georgia, and its portrayal of the South is a deservedly difficult subject. Woodrow Wilson was from Georgia, and his overt racism has sparked his reappraisal. After its demise at the end of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan was revived in Atlanta in 1915. There were 593 recorded lynchings in Georgia.  While he was out jogging, Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was shot to death in 2020 in Brunswick, Georgia.

Ty Cobb was from Georgia. Much of his bad reputation is based on Al Stump’s erroneous and slanderous biography, but still . . . Ty Cobb.

Ty Cobb, 1910, Library of Congress.

Jimmy Carter is Georgian though, and Martin Luther King was from Atlanta. After the 2020 presidential election, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State may have saved our democracy. Still, if you were going to pick a state where the 2020 election kerfuffle would center, ten’d get you twenty that the center would be Georgia.

American Tobacco Company, Hugh Jennings and Ty Cobb baseball card, 1912, Library of Congress.

I would have loved to have seen Ty Cobb play:

AB 11,440/H 4,189/HR 117/BA .366/R 2,245/RBI 1,944/SB 897/OBP .433/SLG .512

Over a 23-year career, Cobb was on base for 43% of his 11,440 at-bats.

As of 2019, Georgia remains a growing state, its population having increased every year since 1930. In 1990, its population was 6,478,216. In 2019 its population was estimated at 10,617,423. It’s the New South, whatever that may be.

About 55% of Georgians are Anglo, 10% Hispanic, 32.6% Black, 4.4% Asian, and 2.2% multiracial.

in 2016, Donald Trump carried Georgia in a landslide, by 50.3% of the 3,967,067 votes cast for President. In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden carried Georgia by roughly 12,000 votes, or .23% of the 4,935,487 total votes cast for President. It was a surprise, I think, and the aftermath was as important to our democracy as Sherman’s March. If you look at it though, how Georgia actually voted has few surprises, and is consistent with the rest of the country. Turnout was up by 6% over 2016, but turnout was down in 2016 over 2012. By region, there’s the obvious blue vote centering in Atlanta, which is expected. Then there’s Baldwin County in middle Georgia. It’s a county with a population of 45,000, about 55% white. Biden carried the county by 50.5%. That’s a surprise, but it’s a surprise without much effect.

Macon, Marietta, and Savannah, all smaller cities, voted blue. Athens and the surrounding area, home of the University of Georgia, went blue, but that’s pretty standard for college towns, whether in Georgia or Idaho. Then there is a scattering of small population counties, remnants of a cotton belt, where the population remains majority African American. Those counties voted blue.

No statewide officeholders in Georgia are Democrats, but both U.S. senators are. The Georgia Senate and its House of Representatives are Republican majorities.

Geographically Georgia is similar to the other Atlantic states, but on a horizontal slant. The southeast is a coastal plain, followed by its mid-state foothills, its Piedmont, rising to the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains in the north. I’m still surprised reading accounts of Appalachian Trail hikes, when the hiker starts in Georgia. I guess I should be equally surprised when the hike ends in Maine. The Appalachians go most of the way up the Atlantic Coast

We fish in northeast Georgia for shoal bass, a river bass. Because of Atlanta’s airport, it’s easy to fly in and out of Georgia from Houston. We’ll poke around Atlanta for an afternoon, go to part of a baseball game between the Atlanta Native American Warriors and the first-place San Francisco Giants, then spend the night in Helen, “the Charm of Bavaria in the Heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.” As far as I know, none of the Atlanta Braves are part of Georgia’s .5% Native American population, and having sat through a series of particularly painful Astros losing efforts against the Braves in the 90s, I’m certain that the Tomahawk Chop is the most despicable fan chant in sports. I completely support efforts to ban it, and public pressure to change the Braves’ name. My opinion is not influenced in the least by my hatred of the franchise. Really though, whatever my opinion of the Braves, given Georgia’s particularly tragic expulsion of the Creek and Cherokee, having a baseball team with a Native American mascot is unforgivable. Of course I’d probably still hate the Braves whatever their name.

Meanwhile shoal bass are one of the 13 species of black bass, a river bass, closest genetically to spotted bass. They’re native to Georgia, northern Florida, and northeastern Alabama, but are endangered in Alabama. They’re most common in the Chattahoochee and Flint River drainages. I figure that I’ll deem any bass I catch that isn’t obviously a largemouth as a shoal bass, and I might even fudge on a largemouth.

Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Shoal Bass.

I’m not really sure what a shoal is, but I think it’s a sandbar in a river.

The Flag of the State of Georgia, by the way, is the flag of the Confederate States of America, with the addition of the seal of the state of Georgia and the words “In God We Trust.” It was adopted in 2003, replacing a flag that included the Confederate Battle Flag.

Flag of the State of Georgia
Flag of the Confederate States of America

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

*

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.