Tag: Books

Posted on

South Carolina, Part Two

Now that I’ve offended all of South Carolina in Part One, it seems worthwhile to mention some other stuff. There’s always some magazine or travel email declaring that Charleston is the very best U.S. vacation destination, even better than Fargo, North Dakota. I’m certain there are many good things to say about South Carolina, and I do like the food. There are lots of fish.

Population and lGeography

In 2023, there were an estimated 5.374 million South Carolinians, making South Carolina 23rd of the U.S. States by population. In the 1830 census, there were 581,185 South Carolinians, with 265,784 free and 315,401 slaves, more slaves than free. Of the free residents, 7,921 were reported as free colored. Female slaves outnumbered male slaves by about 4,500, and white males outnumbered white females by about 3,000.

There has never been a decennial census when South Carolina did not report some growth, but there were never any huge gains. From 1860 to 1870, during the Civil War, growth was a minuscule .03%. It’s estimated that as many as 20,000 South Carolinians died in the War, so that certainly slowed down the numbers. Between 1920 and 1930, growth was only 3.3%. That would have been the height of the Great Migration and the early beginning of the Great Depression in the agricultural South, so South Carolina is probably lucky to come out with a net gain.

From 1910 to 1930, South Carolina’s Black population dropped from about 55% of the total population to about 30%. During the Great Migration, Philadelphia was a particularly popular destination for South Carolina Blacks, and Philadelphia rhythm and blues would re-migrate to South Carolina juke boxes in the 1960s as Beach Music.

In the most recent census, more than half of South Carolinians live in six metropolitan census areas, the largest being Greenville-Anderson-Greer with 928,195. Nearby Spartanburg accounts for another 355,241. Greenville and Spartanburg are in Upstate. Columbia, the state capitol, located in the Piedmont, has 829,470, and Charleston in the Lowcountry has 799,636. While the combined statistical metropolitan areas are pretty large, there are no individual cities with populations larger than 150,000. Columbia has 133,803, Charleston has 132,609.

In the 2020 census, 60.3% of South Carolinians were Anglo, 25% Black alone, and 5.8% were two or more races. Hispanics were 6.9% of the population.

The state’s three regions, the Lowcountry coastal plain, the Piedmont beginning at the fall line, and Upstate (which includes South Carolina’s slice of the Blue Ridge Mountains), are together mildly uncomfortable when they sit down to Thanksgiving dinner, each boasting pride of place, and each fiercely protecting its perceived prerogatives. I have heard that the state geographically balances things like highway and education funding so that no area feels slighted. It’s the smallest Southern state, 40th in size among the U.S. states with 32,020 square miles. It’s a miracle that so much discord can be be contained by such a small package.

Politics

South Carolina is Republican. In the 2024 election, Donald Trump carried 58.2% of its 2,548,140 votes. In 2020 Trump carried 55.11% of 2,513,329 voters.

Lindsay Graham and Tim Scott, both Republican, are South Carolina’s U.S. senators. There are seven congressional delegates, and only Jim Clyburn, in South Carolina’s most gerrymandered Congressional District, is a Democrat. Presumably the gerrymandering minimalizes the statewide effect of traditionally Democratic voters. Every elected state official is Republican, and in the General Assembly the senate is 30 Republicans to 15 Democrats. The house is 88 Republicans to 36 Democrats.

It’s a mighty red state. The one Congressional District that voted Democratic for President in 2024 was also Jim Clyburn’s Congressional District.

2024 Presidential Election Results by South Carolina Congressional District, Wikipedia.

Pat Conroy

There was never a more geocentric author than Pat Conroy (1945-2016), and in the 70s and 80s he was all the rage. The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, Lords of Discipline, South of Broad . . . He even wrote a good, readable South Carolina cookbook. I used two of his recipes, the oyster bake and the Frogmore stew, for my daughter’s birthday this year. There are, I suspect, similar recipes throughout the Gulf Coast, but Conroy makes them seem peculiarly South Carolinian.

Readers of a certain age (and I’m certainly one), were introduced to South Carolina through Conroy, and all-in-all it’s a pretty good introduction. Conroy’s families are often as not full up with disfunction, but even his villains have their moments, and correspondingly his heroes have their villainy. It may be a complicated world, but end of the day his books are readable and his place, coastal South Carolina, is likable.

A number of Pat Conroy’s books have made pretty good movies, though not the cookbook. No one’s ever made a movie of the cookbook, and that’s a shame. It might be short on plot, but it would be long on character development, mostly mine.

Food

There are things people eat in the South (including Texas as part of the South) that weren’t traditionally eaten elsewhere: barbecue, grits, okra, greens, cornbread, pecan pie, biscuits . . . From Southern region to Southern region the particular versions of those things vary. In my parents’ house, for instance, we usually ate turnip greens, not collards or mustard greens. Central Texas barbecue is mostly beef, while other Southern barbecue (including East Texas) is mostly pork. Recipes in Shreveport probably have more in common with Dallas than New Orleans.

Southern Blacks apparently put sugar in their cornbread, Southern Whites did not. Northerners, who learned about cornbread from African-American Great Migration cooks, use sugar.

Questions of race and food and the sources of Southern cooking are fascinating, but as a general matter everyone loves iced tea, maybe sweet or maybe unsweet, fried chicken, and cornbread, maybe sweet or maybe unsweet. Traditionally Blacks and Whites, poor and rich, ate more or less the same stuff, though I would never put sugar in the cornbread. I have tasted it though, and as a child I put sugar in everything else, including rice and grits and iced tea.

Notwithstanding the South’s generalized food traditions, there are some places in the South that are Meccas for food creativity. New Orleans of course, Central Texas for barbecue, and the South Carolina Low Country. For Central Texans it’s all those German and Czech butcher shops, while for New Orleans it’s all that all dat. For the Low Country I suspect it’s a combination of wealth, copious inshore seafood, the preservation of African culture by the Gullah Geechee, and rice.

Other than Louisiana, the ultimate Southern seafood extravaganzas, the Frogmore stew and the oyster bake, hail from South Carolina. South Carolina lays claim to being the source for shrimp and grits and vinegar-based barbecue sauce for its whole-hog barbecues. South Carolinians don’t just eat black-eyed peas, they throw in rice snd whatnot and turn them into hoppin’ john.

I already owned a copy of The Pat Conroy Cookbook, but before we went I dug it out and read parts. I also bought Gullah Geechee Home Cooking, and used it some. The Gullah Geechee recipe for okra gumbo is not so different from my mother’s. It’s tomato and okra based, but of course the author adds shrimp. South Carolinians put shrimp in everything I reckon, including no doubt the cornbread and the iced tea.

In Charleston, at the Fort Sumter gift shop, we bought a copy of Charleston Receipts, the 1950 cookbook of the Charleston Junior League. Whatever negative things one might say about Charleston, The Junior League, or South Carolina, Charleston Receipts is a masterpiece. There are 22 recipes for shrimp alone, including Shrimp for Breakfast and six different shrimp pies. 

"Fry bacon until crisp.  Save to use later.  Add bacon grease to water in which you cook rice . . . add shrimp . . . "

Hampton Plantation Shrimp Pilau, Charleston Receipts, 1950, 38th printing, p. 75. As if these people don’t already have a jar of bacon grease handy.

Fish

We’ve had a good redfish fall in Texas at Port O’Connor, with lots of fish, so we were primed for redfish, and would go to Charleston to fish some more for them. There are other South Carolina fish to fish for, Native brook trout in the Upstate, redeye and largemouth bass, even a striped bass spawning migration, but right now I’m mostly thinking about redfish and saltwater.

When we were last at the skiff in Port O’Connor, I brought home the boat box of redfish flies I’d stowed nine years ago. They were pretty sadly rusted, as though I’d soaked them in tears for all the fish I haven’t caught. I had to throw most of the flies away, and since then I’ve been tying redfish flies to replenish the box and to take to South Carolina. I’ve been using materials and receipts from Sightcast Fishing, which specializes in Texas Gulf Coast flies. They do well-designed variations of classic Texas saltwater flies, their materials are creative, and their flies are pretty. Of course if you can find them, redfish will usually eat almost anything you throw at them, but still . . . it’s nice to know that what I throw looks good to me, even if the fish ignores it.

Posted on

Michigan

The best thing ever written about fishing, Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, is set in Michigan. There are two paragraphs at the start of the story that I re-read often. Do high school students still read Big Two-Hearted River, or is it dated, something for old men to remember from when they were young? I loved it 50 years ago in high school, I’ve loved it when I’ve read it since, though when I first read it I suspect I was more interested in how the tarp was pitched than in Nick Adams’s post-war trauma.

Nick looked at the burned-out stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log piles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

I understood though, even at 16, why fishing the swamp would be left for another day. It’s not a difficult story, it’s simple and direct, but it’s very beautiful.

So because of a short story I’ve saved Michigan until close to the end of our project. In Michigan I want to find a bridge and look down into the river. I want to look for fish holding in the current. If I’m lucky enough to see any trout I want to watch as they feed.

Geography and Grayling

The lower Michigan peninsula is shaped like a mitten, which everybody knows, but that’s not the amazing thing about Michigan geography. The amazing thing about Michigan geography is that it’s mostly bordered by freshwater, by four of the five great lakes, from left to right, Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie. It has the longest freshwater boundary of any state, and has the highest percentage of area covered by water of all of the states. It is second only to Alaska for total water area.

Waterways and lakes of Michigan, https://gisgeography.com/michigan-lakes-rivers-map/.

The upper Michigan peninsula, the U.P., juts out into Lakes Superior and Michigan from northeast Wisconsin, and is separated from the Lower Peninsula by the narrow strait of Mackinac. If life were fair and rational the U.P. would be part of Wisconsin, but Michigan got it because of its southern border. Do you see that protrusion in the south? Michigan claims that its southern border should have been drawn further south. When Ohio became a state in 1803, Michigan was still a territory with no votes in Congress, and by political fiat Congress gave Toledo to Ohio over Michigan’s objections. Relations got pretty testy between inhabitants of the two states, and to calm things down Congress gave Michigan the Upper Peninsula. Michigan didn’t like it, but, honestly, it got the better deal.

I don’t think Wisconsin got anything, but it still ended up with all the good cheese.

Northern Michigan is heavily forested, and early Michigan fortunes were made in timber. The native fish of Northern Michigan was the grayling, a char that needs cold clean water and can be found now in Canada and Alaska. Logging killed off Michigan’s native grayling. It also damaged the native brook trout populations, which were the trout that Hemingway likely described. Streams were restocked with browns and rainbow trout from Europe and the Pacific Northwest, and with more brook trout. We’ll fish near the City of Grayling, population 1,917, in the center of the Lower Peninsula. In Grayling there are no longer any grayling.

Arctic Grayling, Evermann, Barton W., and Goldsborough, Edmund Lee, The Fishes of Alaska (1907), Washington D.C., Department of Commerce and Labor Bureau of Fisheries.

We’ll fish the Au Sable River. There is a different Au Sable River in New York, which is also a fly fishing river. They are pronounced differently, but according to any random Frenchman, both American pronunciations are wrong. I can’t remember how to pronounce the name of either the Michigan or the New York river, but in French it would be pronounced something like oh Sah-bleh. That’s the only one I’m reasonably sure of.

As logging slowed, Michigan’s south was already selling Fords and Olds and Cadillacs. With mass production of cars, Michigan changed how we do everything, and by the 1920s, Detroit was the center of the automobile universe. It was the fourth largest U.S. city (and home of one of my favorite baseball players, Hank Greenberg). Grayling was visited by the likes of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, but to fish, not to cut timber.

Frank Lyeria, Hank Greenberg, the Hebrew Hammer, 1946, The Sporting News archives.

Michigan geology divides more or less into two parts, the U.P. and the Lower Peninsula. There are the Huron Mountains in the far northwest U.P., the highest peak of which, Mount Arvon, is 1,979 feet. It’s the highest peak in Michigan. Other than the Hurons, Michigan is pretty flat. Actually, even with the Hurons it’s pretty flat.

Both peninsulas are mostly bedrock covered with glacial drift. Apparently there are different ages of bedrock, and the older it gets the better it is for mining, and the oldest and the best mining is in the U.P., so take that, Toledo. The glacial remains have a good bit of variation, but regardless one typically doesn’t go to Michigan to see the rocks. When comparing topography shaped by glaciers and topography shaped by continental plate collisions, go for the collisions every time. That means if you want to look at rocks, go to Utah not Michigan.

Politics

In 2016, with 63% turnout, Donald Trump carried Michigan by about 9,000 votes, 2,279,543 to 2,268,839. In 2020, with 73% turnout, Joe Biden carried Michigan by about 150,000 votes, 2,804,040 to 2,649,852. It’s about 60 days until the 2024 election. According to the New York Times, current polling averages show Kamala Harris leading in Michigan 48% to 47%, and that’s almost certainly well within the margins of error for the underlying polls. If Harris carries Michigan and Wisconsin (where polling is running about the same), she would likely need only one additional marginal state, North Carolina, Georgia, or Pennsylvania, to carry the election. On the flip side, if Trump manages to carry Michigan, then like as not Harris has lost.

It’ll be kinda fun to be out of Texas and into a state where there’s actual electioneering going on.

From Wikipedia, Michigan State Legislature.

I check the polling about every three minutes, so if anything changes I’ll let you know.

Michigan’s governor is Democratic, as are both of its senators, seven of its 13 members of congress, and both houses of its state legislature (in each case by two-vote margins). It’s a tight squeeze for the Democrats. Its governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was considered as a possible running mate for Kamala Harris.

There is also a U.S. Senate race in progress in Michigan, where the incumbent, Democrat Debbie Stabenow, is unexpectedly retiring. According to polling, the Democratic candidate, Elissa Slotkin, leads the Republican Mike Rogers in the polls.

Population

There are 10,077,331 people in Michigan as of the 2020 census. About 18% of population claims German ancestry, 11% English. About 62% of the population is Anglo, 12.4% Black alone, 18.7% Hispanic, and 6% Asian. Ten percent of the population reports as two or more races. The population is heavily concentrated in the south.

Michigan was part of the Ohio Territory and was admitted as a state in 1837. It didn’t grow as early or as quickly as neighboring Ohio, but once it did start adding population, it piled it on. In 1870, the population was 1,184,059. By 1910 it was 2,810,173, so in 40 years its population more than doubled. Between 1910 and 1920, Michigan grew by 30.5%, to 3,668,412, and between 1920 and 1930 it grew another 32%, to 4,842,325. You can almost see the cars pour into America out of Detroit and Flint.

Then Michigan growth slowed. Because of the loss of industrial jobs, Detroit went from the nation’s fourth largest city to a cautionary tale of white flight, high crime, and unemployment. In 1967 there were the Detroit riots. In 1971, there were more than 600 homicides in Detroit. Between 1971 and 1973, there were 84 killings by police. It was the Wild West. When I came to Houston in the 1980s, there was constant patter about the number of Michigan license plates on the streets. It was the age of Robocop and Roger & Me. Detroit was declining. Houston was on a tear.

In the 2010 census Michigan actually lost population.

Phil Cherner, Detroit, Michigan, 1967, www.philcherner.com, by permission. Thanks Phil.

By 2013, Detroit’s population had dropped from 1.8 million in 1950 to 700,000. Detroit was broke, violent, unemployed, bleeding all but its poorest population, and in 2013 it filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history.

As late as 2018 Detroit had the fourth highest murder rate among major cities, but it’s improved in recent years. In 2023 Detroit had its lowest number of homicides since 1966, with 252. Houston had 348. It’s finances seem under control, and it has invested in its central city. Violent crime is still high, with 2,028 violent crimes–murder, rape, robbery, assault–per 100,000 people, compared to a national average in 2023 of 369 per 100,000. Based on its violent crime rate, Detroit remains the second most dangerous city in the U.S., second only to Memphis and ahead of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Little Rock? Really? I love Memphis, but I always think of Little Rock as nigh onto rural. I did once spend an interesting afternoon there in a tornado.

I’m excited to see Detroit. We’re staying downtown in the new Shinola Hotel. The downtown architecture is terrific, and the Institute of Art is supposed to be among the world’s best museums. Municipal services like street lights and garbage pick-up have been restored, plus the Tigers have always had the classiest uniforms in baseball.

Where We Won’t Go

We won’t see Mackinac Island, or Traverse City. We won’t visit the U.P. , or drive through the U.P. to Wisconsin. We won’t visit Holland, Michigan, where my parents bought my sister a pair of wooden shoes when I was one. The shoes were very uncomfortable, and I learned early that I was not cut out to be Dutch.

We won’t see the Detroit Tigers play, because they’ll be on the road. We will not make it to the Motown Museum because it’s closed on the days we’ll be in Detroit. I do promise, however, to hum “Baby Love” at least once an hour, and largely because of Motown my Michigan music playlist is magnificent.

Chris Butcher, Hitsville USA, 2006, public domain.

Posted on

Arizona

(June 23, 2024)

We’re in Northern Arizona, near Lee’s Ferry below the Glen Canyon Dam. I texted the guide to find out whether we meet at 6:30 a.m., Mountain Daylight Savings Time (which is the time that my telephone says it is), or 6:30 a.m., Mountain Standard Time (which apparently is the actual time). She’s texted back to say that Arizona doesn’t observe daylight savings time, which is kind of true because the state doesn’t, but the Navajo Nation does, as do other tribal areas. Driving across nonconformist Arizona is weirdly disorienting, the GPS time jumps each time we cross a state or reservation border, and I have to check the internet to figure out what time it should be. The applicable time zone (and the time displayed in our GPS) seems to change at whim.

We would meet the guide at Lee’s Ferry on the Colorado River, and on one side of the river, the non-Navajo side, it is 4:10. On the other side of the River, the Navajo side, it is 3:10. Or is it the other way around? My phone says it’s 3:10. My phone apparently agrees with the Navajo Nation, even though reality differs. I figure it’s one of those mystic things the Navajo picked up from the Hopi.

It’s the end of June, and it’s 102° at 3:10 (or 4:10, depending on where one stands), which is serendipitously the same time that the Yuma train is famously scheduled to arrive. It’s dry and sunny, which covers a lot of Arizona weather. I will only note that Willis Carrier invented central air conditioning in Houston. I’m not certain Arizona has invented shade.

The Colorado River below at Navajo Bridges.

Getting ready for this trip, I finally read Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. It’s a fun-filled romp by a romantic band of fictional 70s eco-terrorists who have gun battles, sabotage big machinery, destroy bridges, dislike almost everybody, have hot sex, and make plans to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam. I had read Abbey’s Desert Solitaire many years ago and admired it, but reading The Monkey Wrench Gang I realize that today the eco-terrorists’ methods would like as not be used by Bundy’s protesting the BLM. Mr. Abbey’s means make me queasy, and worse seem unproductive.

Some History

Arizona gained statehood in 1912 as the 48th state. Until 1821, Arizona was Spanish, and then Mexican after the Mexican Revolution. It was ceded to the United States in 1848, after the Mexican-American War. What a successful real estate deal that was.

Besides The Monkey Wrench Gang, I started reading a terrific history of Arizona, Arizona, A History, by Thomas Sheridan. At least what I read of it was terrific. It was dense and long, over 500 pages, and I only managed about 200 pages before we left for Arizona. That was enough to get me through the Civil War and into the late 19th century, when railroads, cattle, mining, and cotton spurred Arizona development, at least a bit. Arizona didn’t really get spurred until the U.S. government stepped in with massive water projects. Water transfers let Arizona boom, hence the Monkey Wrencher’s plans to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam.

By the 17th century, long before the United States took over, the Colonial Spanish had started early missionary settlement in Arizona, but they (and then the Mexicans) never really did much until the late 18th Century. Then they bought off the Apache with food, other supplies, and guns. The Mexican Revolution brought chaos, and the Mexican government couldn’t continue the Spanish payoffs to the Apaches. The Apache again went to war.

Arizona was on the furthest fringe for Spain, and even with the Apache payoffs Spanish settlement was sparse and precarious. The Pre-Spanish native populations, on the other hand, were complex and well-established. The prehistoric Ancestral Pueblo, Mogollon, and Hohokam developed complex civilizations, though they didn’t have much respect for state borders. The Mogollon and Hohokam developed water control systems for farming, and the Ancestral Pueblo, née Anasazi, built complexes throughout the Southwest, including Mesa Verde, Keet Seel, Canyon de Chelly, and Chaco Canyon. Meanwhile the Hohokam built ball courts similar to the courts of Mesoamerica, and the Mogollon created Mimbres pottery.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mogollan Mimbres pottery, 10th to 12th century and 850-1050, public domain.

The Hopi, Zuni, and O’odham are thought to be descendants of the prehistoric groups.

The Apache and Navajo came to Arizona and New Mexico from the Rockies as a single language group as late as the 1500s, but then split, with the Apache moving further south from Arizona to Texas. The Navajo/Apache language group, Athabaskan, stretches through Alaska and Western Canada, then makes a big jump to the American Southwest. They apparently didn’t like Washington or Idaho.

The Navajo are great incorporators, and took religious practices from the Hopi and Zuni, sheep from the Spanish, and weaving from the Pueblos. The Apache meanwhile waged brutal battles with the Spanish and Mexicans in both Arizona and northern Mexico. It’s estimated that about 5,000 Mexicans were killed by Apaches between 1820 and 1835, and then they continued to fight with the Americans. When they were finally subjugated, they were just lucky that our Indian policies were so peaceful, fair, and equitable. Just kidding.

The U.S. had 5,000 troops in the field in 1886 to accomplish the surrender of Geronimo and 30 other Apache warriors. The Apache and Navajo are now reunited as part of the Navajo Nation.

C.S. Fly, Apache warriors, Arizona Historical Society, 1886. Geronimo is on the far right.

Under U.S. control, Arizona was the Wild West. Kit Carson decimated the Navajo in Canyon de Chelly in a war of attrition and starvation. The U.S.-Apache Wars were nearly continuous for a half-century. Arizona mining boomtowns came and went, and the Earps, Doc Holliday, Cochise, Fort Apache, the OK Corral, Geronimo, Tombstone, the Buffalo Soldiers, the Hashknife, and the Range Wars are as much touchstones of our culture as Generals Grant or Eisenhower, or Lexington and Concord, or the passage of the 19th Amendment. They trigger a mental image that we immediately recognize.

And Arizona gave us mythology. The 3:10 arrived in Yuma not once but twice, and both times it was on time. The gunfight at the OK Corral continues to be fought on screen every few decades, with variations that explore either the Earps’ thugishness or their nobility. Before we left for Arizona, we watched John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach starring the young John Wayne in his first major role. Watching it now, it was like seeing Star Wars for the first time. I realized why every boy child for the next two generations–including me–would wear a cowboy hat and pack a six gun as he entered the frontier range of his neighborhood. It was all you could ask for imagination.

Climate

Arizona is dry and hot. Statewide average annual rainfall in Arizona is 12.26 inches. In Yuma, bordering California and Mexico, average annual rainfall is a whopping 3 inches. Summer in the southern desert can average highs of 115°. We traveled in the High Desert, at the higher elevations of far north Arizona, but it’s still hot, still dry, just not as hot or as dry as the south.

Population

It seems like everything in Arizona is south, and then a bit further south, and then crammed right up to the border with Mexico. Ain’t true. Physically about two-thirds of the state is north of Phoenix. Still, it is true that most of the population is crammed around Phoenix and Tucson in the south. There are towns north of Phoenix–Prescott (47,603), Winslow (9,005), Sedona (9,790), Flagstaff (75,907)–but the further north you go the fewer people there are. The population of Page, the northern town of any size closest to Lee’s Ferry, is 7,440.

By population, Arizona is the 14th largest state, with a total population of 7,151,502. Almost 70% of that population, 4,845,832, is in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. Another 1,057,597 is in the Tucson Metro Area, southeast of Phoenix. Phoenix is the nation’s fifth largest city by population, trailing Houston (2,314,157), but leading Philadelphia (1,550,542), but it also represents the bulk of Arizona’s population.

Arizona map of population density, from Wikimedia Commons.

In 1860, Arizona’s non-native population was 6,482. By 1910, two years before statehood, the total population was only 204,354. As late as 1950 the population was still less than 1 million. Since 1950 Arizona has boomed. It’s a relatively diverse state, though most of the population is either Anglo or Latino. Anglos are 53.4% of the population, Latinos 30.7%.

Native Americans are about 3.7% of the population, giving it the third largest indigenous population by state–California and Oklahoma are numbers one and two. After English, the most common languages spoken in Arizona homes are Spanish, Navajo, and Apache.

Geography and Fish

There are three geographic regions in Arizona. The Basin and Range region covers most of Southern Arizona, and also most of Nevada, Western Utah, and parts of mainland Mexico west of the Sierra Madres. It’s the corduroy geography of interspersed flat basins or valleys and narrow mountain chains that John McPhee describes in Basin and Range. We didn’t make it to the Arizona Basin and Range.

The Colorado Plateau where we spent our time is named for the Colorado River, the “Colored Reddish” River, and the Colorado River cutting through the Colorado Plateau formed the Grand Canyon. It is the nation’s 5th largest river, and famously it is used up for urban water supply and agricultural irrigation by the time it reaches the Gulf of California. The Plateau is high country with a mean 6,352′ elevation, centered on the Four Corners Region. The Plateau is drained by the Colorado River, the San Juan, and the Green.

Map of the Colorado Plateau, from Wikimedia Commons.

This trip I would fish the Colorado River, the San Juan, and the Green, the San Juan in New Mexico with my great niece, and the Colorado in Arizona and the Green in Utah with Kris.

The Mogollon Rim is the third major Arizona geographic region, and is the transition zone between the Colorado Plateau and the Basin and Range. There is an escarpment, and in places it rises as high as 8,000 feet from a basin to the Plateau . We didn’t make it as far south as the Mogollon Rim either.

There are two major rivers in Arizona, the Colorado and the Gila (which is a tributary to the Colorado). There are two native trout, the Apache trout and the Gila trout, both native to waters located along the New Mexico border. The Apache is endangered (though it is proposed for delisting), and the Gila threatened. Their restoration is part of the wider movement to restore native trout. Restoration a good thing, though it means the removal of transplanted rainbows and browns, and they’re awfully fun to catch.

In the Colorado River in Glen Canyon we would be fishing for rainbow trout, which survive and reproduce because of the cold water releases from the Glen Canyon Dam. There appear to be no current stocking programs. Fortunately for our fishing we got there before the Monkey Wrenchers blew up the dam.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Apache Trout.

Politics

Since World War II, Arizona politics has been pretty consistently inconsistent, with 10 Democratic governors and 8 Republicans. For President, the only Democrats who have carried Arizona were Harry Truman in 1948, Bill Clinton in 1996, and Joe Biden in 2020. The current governor, Katie Hobbs, is a Democrat. U.S. Senator Mark Kelly is a Democrat, and U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema is nothing at all, other perhaps than a nutcase. The Congressional delegation is currently six Republicans and three Democrats.

There is a slight–two vote–Republican majority in both houses of the Arizona legislature: two votes in the senate, two votes in the house. Overall Arizona is considered to lean Republican.

Joe Biden carried Arizona in the 2020 election by about 10,000 votes, and Arizona is an exception to most states in that the Democrats carried several areas that are largely rural, particularly in the tribal areas of the far northeast. in 2016, Donald Trump carried Arizona by about 90,000 votes, including Phoenix’s Maricopa County which then flipped in 2020. Total turnout in 2020 increased by more than 700,000 votes, with both Trump and Biden benefitting from the increased turnout. Biden benefited a wee bit more.

2020 Election Results in Arizona by County, Wikipedia, by AverytheComrade.

Where We’re Going

This is an ambitious trip. By trip’s end I will have fished the three major drainages on the Colorado Plateau: the San Juan in New Mexico, the Colorado in Arizona, and the Green in Utah. That’s also the three major Southwestern tailwaters–rivers that exist as destination trout fisheries because of the cold water flowing through dams from deep lakes. By the end of the trip we will have driven about 1500 miles and floated about 25 miles of river.

We’ve already caught our New Mexico fish, and Kris didn’t fish the San Juan. She’s fished it before, and I took my 16 year-old grand-niece fly fishing for the first time. I booked the guide, James Brown, “JB”, through Duranglers in Durango, but he also runs his own guide service. He couldn’t have been a better choice to guide Eva. Before we went I was going to try to teach Eva how to cast, and after nearly an hour got as far as showing her how to hold the rod. I didn’t get as far as showing her how to hold the line with her left hand. JB had her throwing flies in about 30 minutes.

Because JB thought Eva would catch fish all day, we fished the lower heavily stocked catch-and-take section of the river instead of the flies-only trophy water. Quantity trumped all, and we mostly had the lower half to ourselves. She landed a bunch of fish, missed a bunch of fish, and may or may not have taken a nap. Half the time I think JB was as excited as she was, which made the day fun for all of us. Believe it or not he and I talked a lot about fishing. I caught a bunch of trout, both wild browns and stocked rainbows, and I’m not going to complain about catching a bunch of trout, wild or stocked. I’m not proud, and I can use the practice.

Posted on

Georgia

Scarlett O’Hara’s Bosom and Early Georgia History, in Order of Personal Significance

I figured that if we were going to Georgia I should re-read Gone with the Wind. I hadn’t read it since I was 12, and when I was 12 I liked it, or at least I liked having read it. All that Southern splendor was mighty fine, plus there was that movie poster featuring Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom. What Southern almost-adolescent boy could ignore the drama inherent in Scarlett O’Hara’s bosom? I had a copy of that poster on my wall, and I suspect it was years before I noticed that Clark Gable had a moustache.

My notion before our trip was to determine whether Gone with the Wind was anything more than a Lost Cause romance. After all, no book except the Bible has sold more American copies than Gone with the Wind. It won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, so somebody once thought it was important literature. The movie won the 1939 Oscar for best picture, and adjusted for inflation, it’s still the highest grossing movie ever.

I downloaded a free copy of the novel on Audible, but I couldn’t listen past the second chapter. What my 12-year old self admired, my 67-year old self found dreadful. Lost Cause propaganda? Who knows–I never got that far. These characters were all of them idiots. They were annoying and unlikeable and inane. Maybe Margaret Mitchell intended that they be annoying and unlikeable, but I don’t think they were supposed to be boring. I was unmoved by the set-up, despised the dialogue, and found Scarlett, cleavage or no, to be a ninny. I wanted to waste no more of my life with Mammy or the twins or Ashley or Melanie. I didn’t give a damn about Scarlett, or for that matter about Rhett.

So I can’t really tell you anything about Gone with the Wind, except I’d advise don’t bother. It had its moment, but that was when I was 12.

Still, that’s the best movie poster bosom ever. It’s Stereophonic.

I did read a good book about Georgia, Georgia, a Short History, by Christopher Meyers and David Williams, and there was some interesting stuff to learn.

Georgia was the youngest of the Thirteen Colonies, founded by James Oglethorpe in 1732 as a second chance for British debtors and a buffer against Spanish Florida. Settlers were from England’s poorest, and Oglethorpe prohibited hard liquor, slaves, and lawyers. Land was to be owned by the colony. Each immigrant’s tract was limited to 50 acres.

That bit of social engineering lasted roughly 20 years. There was no debt forgiveness, so not only were the English urban debtors–who had likely never farmed–expected to farm successfully on small tracts in difficult coastal soil, they were expected to repay their English debts from their unsuccessful farming. Many of the debtors skipped out to northern climes, leaving both Georgia and their debts. By the 1750s there was private ownership of large tracts–up to 500 acres–by slave owners. There were probably lawyers, too.

James Oglethorpe, glam rocker and failed reformer.

What was supposed to be an agrarian yeoman farmer utopia became a utopia for wealthy planters. Before the cotton gin, the planters–the large-tract slave-owning landowners–were confined to rice farms near the coast, but with cotton production Georgia became part of the Cotton Kingdom. The Trail of Tears and railroads opened upland Georgia to white settlement, and large landowners brought slaves and cotton to the upper Coastal Plain and the Piedmont to fill the void.

Georgia also achieved land fraud on a massive scale. After the Revolution, counties and the state sold land to new settlers and speculators, but they got into the habit of selling more land than there was actually dirt. The worst offender, Montgomery County, issued land warrants for 7,436,995 acres of land, which was 7,029,315 more acres of land than Montgomery County actually contained. By 1796, Georgia county officials had issued warrants for 29 million acres. Georgia then contained only 9 million acres.

The State Assembly was good at land sales, too, and in exchange for bribes (which in addition to money included nifty stuff like land, guns, and slaves) sold 50 million acres of Indian land for about a penny an acre–a ridiculous price for land that they had no right to sell. The sales were rescinded by the next Assembly, but were then found valid by the Supreme Court under the Contract Clause. The U.S. Congress ended up buying out the purchasers for $4.25 million. No Georgian should ever complain about federal buy-outs. Their’s was one of the first, and in inflation-adjusted dollars probably rivals anything that came later.

No state’s early American history was as governed by class hierarchy as Georgia’s, and how you see Georgia’s early history really does depend on where you stand. If you look at Georgia from the planters’ eyes, by the 1850s it was an economic dynamo powering a thriving economy. In 1860 Georgia’s per capita wealth was nearly double that of New York, which is pretty impressive, but on the other hand only six percent of white Georgians controlled about half the state’s wealth, which is pretty one-sided.

A lot of plain white folk saw Georgia differently from the planter class, particularly in the northern mountain portion of the state where there were few slaves, and in the southern Pine Barrens which couldn’t support big agriculture. In Georgia cities, slaves devalued free labor, and other than the rice and cotton planters, Georgia agriculture was largely small-parcel subsistence farming. In 1860, Georgia’s slaves were valued at about $400 million, about half the state’s wealth, but only about 37% of the white population owned any slaves, and planters were a sliver of that 37%.

Carrying Cotton to the Gin, Harper’s New Monthly, March, 1854.

And Georgia slaves like as not saw Georgia differently from their owners. When Georgians voted to secede and join the Confederacy, the measure passed by about 1000 votes, 42,744 to 41,717–but remember, these voters could only be white male property-owners. Slaves, who were 44% of the roughly one million Georgians, had no votes, and while one can never be certain, I’d bet good money that the slaves would have voted en masse to stay in the Union. Lincoln may not have planned to free the slaves, but apparently slaves throughout the South were convinced–along with the secessionists–that freedom was Lincoln’s plan.

Among plain white Georgians, the Civil War was increasingly seen as a rich man’s war fought by poor men, and throughout the war there were large numbers of deserters, draft dodgers, and even Union volunteers. In Georgia there were food riots, draft rebellions, and the formation of an active and vocal Peace Society. The cotton class may have seen the War as necessary and righteous, but to support the war effort they kept planting cotton instead of corn, hence the food riots. Wealthy planters were largely exempt from the draft and generally weren’t doing the actual fighting. Whatever else can be said about the South, the Confederacy was badly managed on the home front. By the end of the War, it’s estimated that nearly half of the Confederate army had deserted.

18,250 Georgian Confederates died in the Civil war, roughly a fifth of those who served. Georgia was also a battlefield from Chickamauga in 1863 in northwest Georgia to Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Georgia Geography

Pamela W. Gore, Geographic Regions of Georgia, from the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

By area, Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi, and 24th overall. It divides into five geographic regions. The Coastal Plain is in the south, and the southeastern border of the Coastal Plain is the Atlantic Ocean. The Piedmont is north of the Coastal Plain, above the fall line where rivers tend to rapids and the sedimentary rock of the Coastal Plain gives way to the harder crystalline rocks of the uplands. Generally the Piedmont soils are richer than the soils of the Coastal Plain, and Georgia’s southern Coastal Plain, the Wiregrass Region, is one of Georgia’s poorest regions. The exception for richer Coastal Plain soils is the rich black soil immediately below the Piedmont, the Black Belt that stretches from Georgia through Alabama to the Mississippi Delta. Along with the Delta became the Black Belt became the cotton-producing heartland for the South. The Black Belt was named first for the color of its soil, but the identification took on a new meaning because of the concentration of slaves. Big cotton thrived on black soil and slavery.

Abbasi786786, Majority Black Counties Based on the 2020 Census, from Wikipedia.

In Georgia’s far north, the three remaining regions seem to this outsider divided by terrain but otherwise lumped together, and it’s in North Georgia where Appalachia begins. The Appalachian trail starts northward in North Georgia, from Springer Mountain, elevation 3,780 feet, and James Dickey set Deliverance on a made-up river in North Georgia. We will trout fish in North Georgia, somewhat close to Brasstown Bald, Georgia’s highest mountain at 4,784 feet. I’ll take a guitar in case we run into any banjo players, but I’ll be damned if I do any canoeing.

Georgia is water rich. It has 14 major river basins, with more than 44,000 miles of perennial rivers. Its rivers tend to have great names: the Suwanee, the Ocmulgee, the Coosa, the Llappoosa, the Chattahoochee . . . Plus Georgia has about 100 miles of Atlantic coastline. The combination of elevation, coast, and rivers makes Georgia rich fishing. In the north there are native Appalachian brook trout and imported brown and rainbow trout. There are imported stripers in lakes, and redfish along the coast. There are ten species of black bass, including great river bass like the redeye, and bass unique to Georgia like Bartram’s.

We’re going trout fishing instead of bass fishing because we’re going to Atlanta for a wedding, and our friend Shelley (who will also be at the wedding) likes to fish for trout. Still, there’s always a chance of catching a bass in those northern Georgia rivers. I hope I catch a bass. Well, come to think of it, I hope I catch anything at all.

Population

At 21,029,227, Georgia is the 8th largest state by population, bracketed by Ohio at number 7 and North Carolina at number 9. It is one of the fastest growing states since World War II, and us Houstonians see Atlanta as our Southern mirror. Anglos are 50.4% of the Georgia population, African Americans 33.1%, and Hispanics 10.5%. Everybody else is a smidgeon. Most of the population growth is in Georgia’s Piedmont, which is the industrial heart of the state.

Other than the whole slavery thing, the birth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow segregation, Georgia’s civil rights history had some positives. Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and Georgians were leaders in the Civil Rights movement throughout the South. Savannah desegregated early, but despite active movements Albany and Atlanta were slow. In 1971, then-governor Jimmy Carter declared a new era of Civil Rights in Georgia, but particularly in the rural areas of the state Jimmy probably jumped the gun.

Valdosta, Georgia Klan Rally, 1922, Georgia State Archives.

Politics

Is any state’s recent presidential politics more interesting than Georgia’s? I don’t pretend to understand what happened in 2020, but I have no doubt that there was no theft of the Georgia election. I’ve officiated over local elections, and massive voter fraud would not be easy. Oh sure, some lone soul might vote twice, or not be registered, but everything in American elections makes massive fraud almost impossible. It certainly couldn’t be accomplished by the efforts of a handful of people. It would take a whole dance card of conspiracy, and people, being what they are, would never be able to hide it. They can’t keep their mouth shut. If there had been massive fraud in Georgia, somebody involved would have bragged about their part over beers, at Thanksgiving dinner, or in their tell-all best seller. Instead as evidence of election interference we have a phone recording of a sitting President urging a governor to manufacture votes.

When you look at how the actual vote went, Georgia’s voting patterns are just like the rest of the country. Urban areas voted Democratic, and outside of the Black Belt, the rural countryside voted Republican. Trump substantially increased his vote totals from 2016, 2,089,104 votes in 2016 to 2,461,854 in 2020, but the Democrats did even better, 1,877,963 to 2,473,633. Democrats mostly carried majorities in the urban areas (as they had in 2016), but more total voters in rural areas also voted Democratic. F’rinstance, Atlanta’s urban Fulton County turned out substantially more Democratic voters in 2020 than in 2016 (529,931 to 334,053), but that trend was true in every Georgia County, even in counties where Trump otherwise had a majority. In the numerous rural counties Donald Trump carried, his margins shrank. Throughout the state voters who would not turn out in 2016 to vote for Hillary Clinton turned out in 2020 to vote for Joe Biden, or maybe to vote against Donald Trump.

From Wikipedia, AdamG2016, Georgia Presidential Election Results 2020.

Where We’ll Fish

Our plan doesn’t involve voting. We’ll fly into Atlanta and do wedding things for three days, then drive north with our friends the Marmons to Ellijay to fish a half day for trout. We’re taking waders and boots and 5-weights. The next day the Marmons head back to Houston, and Kris and I will head south out of Georgia’s Valley and Ridge, through the Piedmont, down to Savannah on the Coastal Plain to fish in saltwater for redfish. I may not catch any fish, but I will see a lot of Georgia. We fly back to Houston from Savannah.