Tag: Books

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Key West Packing List

Books

Short of England or Ireland or Manhattan there’s no island anywhere that’s the subject of more literary output than Key West. It runs from the sublime, Wallace Steven’s The Idea of Order at Key West, to the famously bad, Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, to the fine, 92 in the Shade, to the sublimely ridiculous, Dave Barry’s Trip to Key West.

But what Key West and Florida generally are best known for is crime novels. If Oxford, England, has the most literary murders per capita of anywhere in the world, Key West must run it a close second. In novels by Randy Wayne White, Carl Hiassen, Lucy Burdette, Laurence Shames, Tim Dorsey, James W. Hall, and Michael Reisig (and I’m surely leaving some scribblers out) there are folk committing murders and mayhem and whatnot at a fierce pace down in the Keys. I don’t remember any John D. McDonald or Elmore Leonard novels set in the Keys, McDonald was Lauderdale and Leonard Miami, but if there aren’t they should get busy and posthumously take care of that. The remarkable thing about Florida crime fiction isn’t that it’s very good (and some of it is), but how little of anything else good is written about Florida. God is causing the Keys to sink under the ocean either because he thinks all those novels are true, or maybe because they are all true enough.

So I listened to a bunch of crime novels, particularly by Laurence Shames. They’re all entertaining (if not quite the thing as travel guides). I also read Jack E. Davis’s very fine Pulitzer Prize history of the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf: The Making of the American Sea. I can’t remember where or when I bought the book. It was on my bedside table and I was thinking about Mississippi and Florida so I read it. It didn’t have one of those gold stickers on the dust jacket that told me it was important, and I was mostly through it before I realized it was not just any old book but an Anointed Prize Winner.

As much as I’d read and thought about Louisiana last year Davis highlighted my limits. I didn’t think about the destruction of the marshes or deep water drilling or inshore damage from chemical production or the great agricultural dead zone in the Gulf, which are things that should be first to mind. I hit my personal dead zone. For Houstonians the environmental damage to the Gulf is so personal, so much both a part of and separated from our daily lives and so much of our own damn fault that it’s forgotten. We trust oil and chemical companies because we are oil and chemical companies. I loved the first 300 pages of Mr. Davis’s book. I suffered during the last 200.

When I went to my annual physical this week Dr. White and I talked about the book. Last year we talked about the new Ulysses S. Grant biographies and David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage: my annual physical is my annual book club. Anyway we talked about the devastation at the end of Gulf and he told me not to worry about it because he was convinced humanity was doomed anyway. It was oddly comforting. Don’t worry that we’re destroying the planet because it’ll sort itself out after we’re gone.

There were two other minor take-aways from Gulf: Davis (Jack E., not David Brion) quoted off and on from the poet Sydney Lanier, particularly his Florida travel guide but also from his poems, and he wrote at length about the apparently mad painter, Walter Anderson. Lanier I knew as a Confederate soldier because of a local school-naming kerfuffle, but Anderson I didn’t know at all. I’d like to know more about both, but thus far I’ve found Lanier unreadable. It’s something I need to work on.

Rental Car

In Florida we rented a Nissan Rogue from National. Before last September I rented cars from Budget, mostly out of habit and because I always remembered which rental counter to go to. After bad rental experiences in Portland and Baltimore I looked online for car company reviews. I switched to National. I didn’t think it would make much difference, but in Chicago, Hawaii, and now Florida, they’ve been remarkable. They’ve been what customer service should be, and I’ll pay the few additional dollars to National for the customer care.

Meanwhile the Rogue had adaptive cruise control, which unlike when it startled me in Hawaii I expected. For the drive from Lauderdale to the Keys it was the best thing ever. Ever. I’ve seen worse drivers than South Floridians, in Naples and Mexico City the drivers are lawless and remorseless and mad, but South Florida drivers are their own peculiar brand of awful. There seems always to be a septuagenarian cranking 45 in the passing lane while a 20-year old in a Dodge Whatnot screams right and left through traffic, and all of it bordered by lines of 18-wheelers. Plus general heavy traffic and road work. It’s special. The adaptive cruise control helped sort things out.

Fly Fishing Stuff

Given that this was nominally a fly fishing trip I should be telling you what gear we used. We took some reels. We took some rods. Our guide, Andrew Asher, tied a crab pattern onto the 10 wt., and then we didn’t use anything but a 10. We didn’t use any other rod or fly until late in the day when I tried to cast for barracuda.

It was a beautiful day. There was some sun. There was some wind. There was some clear water. I think I’ll go again.

Bakeries

Glazed Donuts on Eaton St. in Key West has great donuts, and if you buy six they give you a box (so of course one always goes for the free stuff). That’s a bittersweet dark chocolate, and the key lime is filled with key lime pie. Quite an accomplishment.

Playlist

You know the Beach Boys are from California, that George Gershwin was from New York, and notwithstanding his current residence in Hawaii Willie Nelson is from Texas. You know the Allman Brothers are from Georgia, but they’re not. The Allmans are from Jacksonville.

You know that Jimmy Buffett is from Florida (except that he’s from Mississippi), and he’s defined how Florida is supposed to sound (which really isn’t quite to my taste), and Arturo Sandoval sounds like Miami, but all in all there’s not much there there when it comes to Florida music. There are great musicians–the Allmans, Sandoval, the Mavericks, Tom Petty, Ray Charles–and travesties, NSync and the Backstreet Boys and Lynyrd Skynyrd, but other than what came out of Cuba or Buffett there’s nothing that says Florida.

The Allman Brothers Band, 1973, from Wikipedia. Those were the days.
  • Dean Martin, Powder Your Face With Sunshine. This really isn’t about Florida, but I found it on a Florida song list. This is what Florida should sound like.
  • Zac Brown Band, Toes. This song is the love child of Jimmy Buffet and Michael Franks performed by a Georgia country and western band.
  • Jesse Harris, Secret Sun. Pretty.
  • Frank Sinatra, Let’s Get Away from It All. A useful song that mentions every state except Nevada. Ok. I’m lying. It doesn’t mention Hawaii or Alaska either, since there were only 48 states when it was recorded.
  • Nanci Griffith and Mac McAnally, Gulf Coast Highway. This was on a list of Florida songs, and it’s lovely, but it’s about Texas. Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris cover it, which is the best,
  • Enrique Iglesias, Ballando. This is what Miami sounds like in the soundtrack in my head.
  • U2, Miami.  John Mellencamp, Miami. Counting Crows, Miami. They’re all different songs. The Counting Crows is the best of the lot.
  • Mel Tillis. Tillis is Florida’s most famous country & western singer, and he predates modern Nashville production. If you listen in the car you can pretend you’re driving a big rig coast-to-coast in 1969. For so long, I wanted you/To be my pretty queen./Now you’re mine, my purty one,/You filled my every dream.
  • The Allman Brothers. You can’t have enough Allman Brothers. I even made Kris listen to the entire 44 minutes of Mountain Jam. I think that will get us into the Guinness Book of World Records.
  • Tom Petty. You can’t have enough Tom Petty, but I did erase that song about zombies from my phone. What was he thinking?
  • Gram Parsons. GP. Everything’s better with Emmylou Harris.
  • Cannonball Adderly. In addition to Arturo Sandoval, Archie Shepp and the Adderly brothers, Nat and Cannonball, are from Florida. That’s pretty good jazz. I grew up with Adderly’s Work Song, and it makes me smile every time I hear it.
Nat and Cannonball Adderley, John Levin Enterprises-management/photographer-Bruno of Hollywood, 1961, reported on Wikipedia as public domain, but if not they can come get me.
  • Archie Shepp. Shepp was born in Florida, but raised in Philadelphia. I guess his connection to Florida is pretty tenuous, but that’s ok. So is mine.
  • Arturo Sandoval. I saw Sandoval and his band a couple of years ago, and he’s a master. He’s Cuban, and closely tied to Dizzy Gillespie. He sounds like Miami.
  • Jimmy Buffett. I’d rather not, but you have to. It’s state law, with stiff penalties for violation.
  • John Vanderslice, Romanian Names. Whenever Vanderslice came up on the play list I thought there’s nothing else in Florida that sounds like this. If I’d been playing a Brooklyn play list I would have thought, oh, another one of those guys. In some ways Florida is more mid-America than Kansas.
  • Lynyrd Skynyrd, What’s Your Name? This is why we should all despise Lynyrd Skynyrd. What a stupid idea for a song. It makes one think that Mr. Young was right after all.
  • Matchbox Twenty, How Far We’ve Come. This is why we should all despise Matchbox Twenty, if we have any clue who they are.
  • The Mavericks. Who knew the Mavericks were from Florida?
  • Ray Charles. Who knew Ray Charles was from Florida?

Coming back from Key West on the Overseas Highway we listened to Debussy’s La Mer (which was a bit oceanic for the calm seas) and two or three versions of Charles Trenet’s La Mer. It gave the drive a very French cast.

I took a guitar, but we went to bars instead.

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Florida Triplex

This will be our third trip to Florida in a year. Friday week I have to be in Hollywood, the Florida Hollywood on the Atlantic Coast between Fort Lauderdale and Miami, so we’ll go two days early and drive south to Key West for a day. The guide, Andrew Asher, says that for February we’re unlikely to see bonefish, which means we won’t catch bonefish; that if it warms up we might fish for baby tarpon, the 20-40 pound fish, which means it will almost certainly be freezing; and that it’s a good time of year for permit. I’m not convinced that anyone ever actually catches permit. I suspect that we will have a five-hour drive and Kris will catch something just to taunt me. She’ll probably catch a permit. Blind casting.

I have an excellent if dated tourist guide for the Keys, The Florida Keys: A History and Guide, Tenth Edition, by the fiction writer Joy Williams. From time to time over the last year I’ve read bits of it because Williams’ observations are so wry and entertaining. It’s dated, it was first published in 1987 and my edition dates from 2003, but it’s very readable. I can’t remember when I bought it, or why.

There’s also a bit of magical thinking on my part. In my prior three days’ Florida fishing I haven’t caught a fish because I snubbed Key West, and I won’t catch a Florida fish until I go there. Funny thing is that whatever happens now that’s true.

If the Florida Peninsula is a long limestone spine covered with sandy soils, the Keys are the dribbling exhaustion of that spine, a 180-mile archipelago extending in a southwesterly crescent from the Everglades. The islands dot and cluster, with 106 miles accessible by car via Route 1 ending at Key West, and once you finally get there there’s no parking. One supposes that in places like Marathon there are plenty of roadside convenience stores to buy the road trip necessaries, Fritos and bean dip, or at least Cheetos. It is Florida, and there has to be roadside stuff, even on a bridge.

Before convenience stores, before the last ice age, the Keys were underwater, covered with coral in the Upper Keys and sand in the Lower. They popped out of the sea (along with the Bering Strait land bridge) about the time that Greenland froze and the oceans sank. Geologists estimate that the current Keys date from about 15,000 years ago, which makes them older than the Bible but younger than North America’s first human settlers. Key West is the southernmost outpost of the Keys (though the Marquesas Keys and Dry Tortugas are further west and a bit north), so of the continental states the Florida Keys are as far south as we can go, further south even than Brownsville (which I hardly knew was possible). The Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution that you can’t legally mention Key West without saying it’s only 90 miles from Cuba. There. Done.

The Keys will soon have a chance to be underwater again.

Google Maps

Key West isn’t in the tropics, but under the Koppen climate classification system it’s tropical. This gets confusing, but the tropics aren’t the tropics because of temperature or flora and fauna, the reasons I would expect, but because of a celestial moment. In the northern hemisphere on the summer solstice, at 23°26’12.5″ latitude north, the sun is directly overhead. That’s the Tropic of Cancer, and as the earth tilts on its axis it is the northern limit of where the sun can sit directly overhead and establishes the northern boundary of the tropics. The southern boundary is the Tropic of Cancer’s southern counterpoint, the Tropic of Capricorn.

At a latitude of 24°33’2.51′ Key West is a bit more than a full degree north of the tropics, and is considered tropical not because of its latitude but because of its warm climate–it has never recorded a frost. It has a wet season from May to October and the rest of the year is the dry season. It has an average of fifty-five 90 degree days per year, and the hottest month is July. Houston averages 74 days, New Orleans 56. Houston (a good bit north of Key West at 29°45’46”) and New Orleans (a good bit north of Houston at 29°95′) are subtropical because of summer heat and humidity and mild, generally frost-less winters, but we are all New England Yankees to the Conchs.

All of Key West, Houston, and New Orleans share hurricanes, though not usually the same hurricane..

Somebody probably has a reckoning of how many islands comprise the Keys, and I’ve read that the number is over 800, but it wouldn’t be a simple calculation. Is that wee bit of mangrove hummock over yonder an island? Are those two tiny bits of sand and mangrove a single island or two? Even without a number though there is a list of names that we know. From the Everglades, and the Upper Keys southwesterly through the Middle Keys and the Lower Keys, there is Key Largo, Islamorada, Marathon, Big Pine Key, Key West, the Marquesas Keys (which is different from the Polynesian Marquesas Islands), the Dry Tortugas . . . Facing south and moving down those names the Atlantic is on the left, with the Gulf Stream, blue water with blue water fish, separated from the Keys by a long coral reef, the Florida Reef. To the right is Florida Bay opening onto the Gulf of Mexico, a bay that hopefully we haven’t irreparably damaged by diverting freshwater flow from the Everglades.

There is a plan in place to restore the Everglades and to improve the Florida Bay water quality, but it takes money and political will. Florida politics is strange and fascinating stuff, and November’s election was textbook Florida, but the president of the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust has sent out a letter stating that the new Republican governor has made it a priority to restore the Glades. “[H]e delivered clear, unwavering messages about the environment and his intent to protect it. Sweeping actions announced by his administration include a $2.5 billion commitment over the next four years for water resources and Everglades restoration, a directive to [the South Florida Water Management District] to immediately begin design of the EAA Reservoir, a commitment to expedite other important Everglades restoration projects, and a call for the immediate resignation of the entire SFWMD governing board.” Whatever else Governor DeSantis may do, if he moves restoration of the Everglades forward that’s big and admirable stuff, and $2.5 billion is a start. A billion here, a billion there, it can add up to real money.

As for the Keys disappearing under the deep blue sea, most of the Keys is less than five feet above sea level. The Keys are already losing land to water, and have been for decades, but the process will accelerate as temperatures rise. The United Nations projects global temperatures will rise by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, which will submerge the Keys, Miami, and the rest of coastal Florida. They could be under water faster if the polar ice melt accelerates. Big Pine Key, home of the key deer, is projected by the Land Conservancy to be underwater in a matter of decades. It’s probably not the place to do any long-term real estate lending. That mortgage isn’t going to be very good security.

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Another Interlude

On Thursday we leave for Hawaii, which for some odd and I suspect Southern reason I pronounce Huh-wah-yuh, which Siri can’t understand when I call up my playlist. We should spend today packing, which we won’t. What do we take? Some shorts, some shirts, some wading boots. The couple of 9 wt rods we gave each other for Christmas. A guitar. We fish with Captain Jesse Cheape of High Tide Fishing, a full day on Friday and a half-day on Saturday. After that we’ll sightsee. I think sightseeing is required by the nature of the thing.

It is the second farthest distance we’ll travel, closer than Alaska but further than Maine. I’ve actually practiced casting some, which is frustrating and unrewarding. I’m such a mediocre caster. I’ve tried to keep up my Hawaii reading, and have been through a couple of additional Hawaiian books–The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings, which was very likable, and Dreams from My Father by Barrack Obama, which was about his birth in Kenya.

I guess my thoughts have moved on to Mississippi, which I’ve been working on for May, and Florida which I have to go to in February. I’m beginning to despise Florida and its uncatchable fish, but the Astros open there in April, and if we fail again in February (with a one-day fishing trip to the Keys) maybe we’ll make a fourth trip in April.

Hawaiian music hasn’t really grabbed me: it’s melodic, sweet, all major keys and thirds and fifths and pure tones. I’ve been cheating on Hawaii with Mississippi Blues. It shares a slide guitar, but not much else.

Frontispiece, Life on the Mississippi, The Baton Rouge, 1883, Gutenberg.org.

I also cheated on Hawaii with Mississippi books, and re-read Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. It is such an essential book. It’s only a bit more than a six-hour (read eight-hour) drive from here to Vicksburg, and we could visit the battlefield memorial and the National Cemetery over the long Martin Luther King weekend. Of course with the government shut-down nothing at the National Cemetery would be open. It’s too bad all presidents aren’t required to be born in Kenya.

Early on Twain also traveled to Hawaii (née the Sandwich Islands) and wrote a series of letters from there for a San Francisco newspaper. I didn’t find the letters particularly illuminating, though Twain liked the place immensely and always talked of going back.

I’ve tied some leaders which won’t turn over, and some flies which won’t catch fish. I’ve also bought some flies, almost all of which are some kind of spawning shrimp, which is the only fly I can ever seem to remember on Captain Cheape’s list. I do own a bunch of bonefish flies, almost none of which are on said list. I’ll haul them along anyway.

Meantime the weather here in Houston is as good as it gets: clear, windless, dry, and cool, 61 degrees this morning with a high of 71 degrees. There’s a mockingbird singing through the open door to the porch. Maybe I’ll go look for black bass this afternoon, or spawning crappie. Yesterday we took the skiff out on Galveston bay, and the combination of cold weather and still air left the water clear. We saw some redfish, too.

Didn’t catch those either. We did get some excellent oysters and ceviche at the Black Pearl Oyster Bar on 23rd Street.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR REDUX!

Thomas Rowlandson, British, Anglers of 1811, 1811, hand-colored etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, metmuseum.org

I’ve been doing this for a year, and I have a story that’s more or less true about how I got into this business. It started with a New Year’s Resolution. I’m good at New Year’s Resolutions, mostly. I make them and as long as they don’t involve wine I keep them, sort of. And they’re not confined to January either. Once I found myself telling an acquaintance that it was my New Year’s Resolution to go down a bayou in a canoe and somewhat high-handedly she asserted that you can’t make New Year’s Resolutions in July. Shows what she knows.

Thomas Best, Frontispiece, A Concise Treatise on the Art of Angling, 9th Edition, 1810, Wikimedia Commons.

I always figured that some day I would make it to all 50 states. I have been to plenty of states, particularly on the left side of the map and the center and the South, but then there are plenty of places I haven’t been. I haven’t been to Ohio. Who hasn’t been to Ohio? I haven’t been to the Dakotas. Ok, plenty of people haven’t been to the Dakotas.

But I’m not young, and mortality intrudes with bleak notions, such as I’d better get a move on or I’m never going to Maine, or Vermont, or New Hampshire. Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire are probably doing fine without me, so it’s no loss to them, but the first movie I remember that didn’t involve any of Walt Disney, Jerry Lewis, or John Wayne was Lawrence of Arabia, and it gave me forever the bug for travel, riding camels, and blowing up trains. I will never ride a camel or blow up a train, but I figure for a Texas boy Maine is at least as exotic as the Arabian Peninsula. Maybe more so, because how can those people be so different and speak English? They speak English, right?

Detail from a fountain, Palacio Nacional, Sintra, Portugal

So last New Year’s we were in Lisbon, the one in Portugal, and the whole time Kris kept asking why we weren’t fishing? I was pretty happy sampling port and eating pastel de Belém, but Kris would have none of it, and I couldn’t very well tell her there were no fish in Portugal. In Lisbon you can go to fancy shops to buy souvenier sardines in a tin, and they’re good, too, and pretty. Meanwhile I’d taken along a copy of Jim Harrison’s The English Major to read. I’d never read any Harrison, and The English Major had sat on my bookshelf since it was published in 2008. I remember pulling it off the shelf as we were walking out the door.

Tile detail in the cloisters, Porto Cathedral. Or maybe not.

The English Major is a book about a 60-year old whose beloved dog Lola dies and whose wife leaves him. He sells the cherry farm and goes on a mission to visit each state and rename the state bird. He also fishes. It resonated. I was 61. I wasn’t going to rename any birds but I fished. My 15-year old dog Lola was dying. I didn’t want Kris to leave me because I hadn’t arranged to go fishing in Portugal in January. I went back and read the New York Times review of the book and thought that the reviewer was too young to review that book. It’s an old man’s book.

Lola, South Padre Island

Oddly it was a month or so before it registered on me that I’d made a resolution to catch a fish in each state because I was reading Harrison. I’m quick that way.

There is a passage at the end of Batfishing in the Rainforest when Randy Wayne White says, more or less, that carrying a fishing rod gives you an excuse for being someplace, and that if you want to get to know the people in a place go to the local church. He’s talking mostly about Central America as I recall, but it’s good advice for just about anyplace that’s not Brooklyn.

So last year we made it to nine states (including the one we were standing in), caught fish in seven (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Oregon, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland), and owe two, Florida and Wisconsin, a re-visit. Who the hell can’t catch fish in Florida? Who the hell can catch a muskie? We fished a good bit, though I don’t recall going to any churches. We did make it to a lot of bakeries, which includes donut shops.

For next year we have only two certain things planned. We go to Hawaii in a bit more than a week, and in September we take a raft trip on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. I go to Florida for business in February, but it’s Miami and I hate to give up on tarpon, and it will be hard to take Kris–this has become as much her project as mine. In May we may try the wee bit of Mississippi on the Gulf. I’ve looked at Minnesota, Massachusetts, New Hampshire/Vermont, New York, and a long road trip to catch the three great Southwestern tailwaters, the Green, Lee’s Ferry, and the San Juan.

The problem is that there’s always more in each state than we’ve got time for, and in each state there are so many other places to be. It becomes hard to get off the schneid. I could spend a week in Mississippi–we’ll be on the Gulf Coast, and I want to see Faulkner’s house at Oxford. I want to see Vicksburg and the Delta where the Blues were born* and Jackson. I want to see the two great Mississippi cities, Memphis and New Orleans. And the day on the San Juan we could spend on a tailwater road trip is short shrift for my beloved New Mexico. Waily, waily, waily! A drive through the Southwestern tailwaters should take a month.

Meanwhile Hawaii. Happy New Year!

Thomas Best, Frontispiece, A Concise Treatise on the Art of Angling, 7th Edition, 1807, Wikipedia.

*Kris and I have argued about this a good bit. She says that “blues” is singular, I say “the blues” are plural. There is an unimaginable amount of impolite discourse on the internet about this very subject. My thought is that the word encompasses more than a style of music: where the Baroque was born would always be singular, as would blues music. But “the Blues” encompasses a style of music, a collection of songs, a way of playing an instrument, and a state of being. It also ends in an “s.” I’m sticking to my guns, mostly because “the blues was born” to my ear sounds dreadful. At least one dictionary by the way says that “blues” is a plural noun which may have singular construction, whatever that means.