Tag: Books

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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.

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James Michener

James Michener’s Hawaii is almost 1000 pages long. It’s longer, cover to cover, than the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon combined.  It’s longer than the complete novels of Anthony Trollope or Charles Dickens. It’s not just a doorstop of a novel, it’s a murder weapon: “Colonel Mustard, in the Library, with Hawaii.

If  you start looking for books about Hawaii, Michener’s Hawaii is still on every list.  It was his first mega-book, after having won a Pulitzer Prize for Tales of the South Pacific.  Hawaii is a saga, beginning geologically, preceding through Polynesian exploration, missionaries, sugar planters, dynastic overthrows, and World War II to statehood.  It came just in time for the re-creation of Hawaii as an airline vacation destination. There are The Hawaiians, The Whalers, The Missionaries. There are The Chinese. There are The Japanese.  Thank God we made Hawaii a state, otherwise the book might still be going. 

But early on, in 1959 when Michener published Hawaii, the well-researched sweeping drama was still something new. In the 60s it was a book everyone had read, highbrow to lowbrow. Did the genre exist before Michener? I suppose there were plenty of historical dramas, but no one wrote historical fiction like Michener, where the history itself is the very thing. Michener’s Hawaii has some characters, plenty of them, many of them memorable, but they’re there to move along the sweep of time, the Grand Theme, not for their own sakes. It’s amazing that Michener does as well with them as he does.

And nothing ever happens in Hawaii that’s not Significant.  Nobody hangs out and drinks beer around the pool, or drives to the grocery store. They hang out around the pool and plot the overthrow of the Hawaiian royalty. They drive to the grocery store and burn down half of Honolulu. A woman character appears, establishes her place in the grand family scheme, delivers a message to the hero-of-the-moment, and is then swept out to sea by a tsunami. It wasn’t like she needed to get swept out to sea by a tsunami, but I guess the tsunami was handy, so Michener sweeps her out to sea. Minor character. Minor incident. Time for Time to march on.

From what I can tell even if it’s not a great novel it’s not bad history, and there’s no cannibalism (though there is some human sacrifice). All in all I appreciate Michener’s attitudes towards All Those People. Michener was adopted by a Quaker, and there’s some Quaker benevolence in his attitudes. There is also a tendency in Michener to deal in racial tropes, but it has less to do I suspect with inherent prejudice than how Michener characters are used. They’re not so much portraits as game pieces, like tiles on an old board game, Stratego, Hawaiio.  When you flip them over they display their value: this red tile is worth 10 whaling ships, this blue tile 20 missionaries, this a Hawaiian queen, this a tsunami.  

Hawaii–the state, not the novel–doesn’t seem to have produced great fiction. There are a lot of very good histories, including a bit of a romp, Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell.  There’s James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, and some people like it, but I can’t get over the notion that the hero finds playing the bugle transcendent, or that someone who found playing the bugle transcendent would risk his embouchure boxing. Everything after those implausibilities is tainted.

It also has Hawaii Five-0 and Magnum P.I., both now in remakes, but doesn’t seem to have a significant fictional detective who lives in novels (unless Charlie Chan counts, and that’s its own set of problems). There’s no Dave Robicheaux, Travis McGee, Sam Spade, or V. I. Warshawski. There’s no Spenser. That surprises me. Hawaii seems ideal for that kind of stuff: it’s ripe for a beach novel detective.  Instead it’s got this really long book.

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Hawaii

I’ve never really wanted to go to Hawaii. People tell me that if you get away from the crowds it’s a beautiful place. I’m sure it is, but it’s never much appealed to me. There are so many other places to see, places with deserts and rivers and such. But damn, Willie Nelson. Willie Nelson now lives in Hawaii. That’s tough to ignore.

The contact I’ve had with Hawaii has been pretty casual. My Dad’s first cousin, Houston O’Neil Thomas, U.S. Navy coxswain and son of Sam Houston Thomas, died on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. I guess that isn’t exactly casual but it was 15 years before I was born, so it was remote. I’ve looked up his name in the Arizona’s dead, and my great-grandmother, Sam Houston’s grandmother, died ten days later, on December 27, 1941, the second family casualty of World War II. Maybe that run-in with Hawaii explains some of its lack of appeal.

Like a lot of bookish teenagers of a certain age I read James Michener’s Hawaii, and I’ve watched enough episodes of Hawaii Five-O to say “Book ’em Dano” with conviction. For years though I thought the lead actor was Darrin McGavin. I’m not much of an Elvis fan either.

I do like the music, or what I know of it. There’s a particular style of guitar in Hawaii, called slack-key.  The name comes from slacking the guitar’s standard tuning to an open tuning.  If the 1st and 6th strings are tuned down, slacked, from E to D, and the 5th string is slacked from A to G, the guitar is tuned to a G chord without the left hand–every beginning guitarists dream. The open tuning changes chording and scales, but there are some famous open tuning players–I always think of Joni Mitchell–and slack key guitar is lovely. This song by Keola Beamer is pretty perfect. 

But open tunings were never enough to make me want to go to Hawaii. I’m not a beach guy, and at least from what I can tell, all of Hawaii seems to be an enormous beach town. I suspect I’m too old to learn to surf, and always was. Or maybe just too pale to learn to surf, and always was. Or maybe just too dubious about my own athleticism.

So last year when I made my New Year’s resolution I was thinking I’ll have to go to Hawaii, and this is the only thing that would ever get me there. I’ve never wanted to go to Las Vegas either, though I did have a layover in the airport once. I wouldn’t mind a layover in Hawaii on my way to Christmas Island.

Maybe I’d think differently if Hawaii was a fishing destination, but it’s not. I think there’s some offshore fishing, but I get seasick, and I think it may be touristy stuff. Of course I guess I’m a tourist. There’s also  spear fishing, but it’s hard to catch and release with a spear. Anyway Hawaiian fishing was unregulated and subsistence or commercial for long enough to deplete much of the inshore fishery, and despite all that ocean there are apparently not a lot of fish. 

And it’s not really known to fly fishers, except as a layover for the Christmas Islands. There is some freshwater fishing in a freshwater supply reservoir near Honolulu, but the only report I’ve read was during a drought, and it wasn’t very appealing. Maybe in better years it’s like any other lake. There are also stocked trout at high elevations on Kauai. Trout fishing in America.

The last decade though there’s been some good press on Hawaii bonefish, o’io. They’re big. Bonefish are a destination fish, and the best places I know, Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, Los Rocques, Venezuela, parts of the Bahamas, the east coast of the Yucatan, Belize, and South Florida, are destination fisheries. Los Rocques and Christmas Island are supposed to be the best, if you can get past traveling to Venezuela, on the one hand, or the time and money investment of going to a place where there’s one plane a week. The plane! The plane! Book ’em Danno.

Belize and the Yucatan are really the same place separated by a border that the fish ignore. The fish there are smaller, mostly in the one to three pound range, but there are lots of them.  That’s where I’ve fished, Belize, with small, relatively easy-to-catch fish. Big fish are apparently a different fish: warier, faster, stronger . . . The Bahamas is a destination not because of quantity but because it has big fish.

Hawaii is supposed to have big fish, as big as the Bahamas, but the bonefish flats, the places where you fly fish for bonefish, are apparently small, scattered, and mostly on Oahu. Mountainous volcanic islands that pop up out of the ocean aren’t the best places to find flats. There must be something there though. There are lots of guides. Maybe there are lots of tourists? I suspect there are lots of tourists.

It’s also a place where apparently the wind blows hard much of the time, up to 25 knots (that’s a nautical mile, or 1.15 statute miles), and if you do hook a fish you have to keep them out of the coral or you’ll lose the fish. When we go it will also be the rainy season. It’s not ideal. 

But we’ll go, right after New Years.

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Oklahoma Packing List

Stuff We Took

We took my car. It’s a 2012 diesel with 117 thousand miles. It needs the tires rotated and it uses a bit of oil. It ran great. For our other trips this year we’ve flown and rented, and we’re now pretty proficient at hooking the phone through the rental car radio (if they’re still called radios). We can hook into whatever Mitsubishi or Ford or Mazda mid-sized SUV the rental company gives us with minimal stress and only a few harsh words, but it’s still nicer to be in my car. 

I fished with a 10′ 4 wt. Kris fished with her Helios 3D 5 wt. that I gave her for Christmas last year. Chris the Guide wished it was the softer version, but she cast beautifully. Maybe she missed more strikes because of the hard rod, but man was it fun to watch her cast.  

There’s nothing else remarkable about what we packed except that I bought a bag of Cheetos. You can’t have a road trip without Cheetos, unless it’s a road trip with Fritos and bean dip. 

We ate two dinners the night we arrived, just to try things out: chicken fried steak at Abendigo’s and pizza at the Grateful Head.  Both were excellent, and the local beers were excellent. I no longer eat nearly enough chicken fried steak. We had leftover pizza on the river on Saturday, so two dinners was perfectly reasonable. We stayed at the Hotchatown Country Lodge, and had a breakfast burrito at Adam and Eve’s Coffee Shop before we fished on Saturday.  That place has good coffee. 

Beavers Bend is in the Choctaw Nation, but we missed most of the cultural stuff. We did take a photo of the casino. We also walked through the Forest Heritage Center Museum, which is peculiar, but there’s no doubt this is a lumber town. 

I now believe that forest science research is best carried out in white pumps. 

When we started planning Oklahoma, I asked an Oklahoma fly fishing group on FaceBook where we should fish, and here’s what I got:

• Sandies in the spring, but no specifics on places
• Bluegill, but no specifics on places
• Trout on the Lower Illinois
• Trout on the Lower Mountain Fork
• Smallmouth on the Upper Illinois in the summer
• Stripers on the Lower Illinois in the summer
• Carp, but no specifics on places

Personally, any of those could have been great, and I’d already thought about white bass. End of the day, the Mountain Fork was convenient. Kris already talks about Oklahoma more fondly than anyplace we’ve fished, and we were only really there for one day.

The other place I thought about was the Wichita Mountains. It’s the nation’s oldest wildlife preserve, and notwithstanding Yellowstone it deserves credit for preserving the buffalo. Hiking there once I looked up at a ridge line and watched a dozen elk watching me. They seemed to find me peculiar, and many share their opinion.There’s a series of ponds and small lakes spread through the refuge, and it would have made a good place for bluegill.

What I Didn’t Write About

The Cherokees, slavery, and the Confederacy. There are two recognized Cherokee tribes in Oklahoma. They seem to have split over the Civil War: the larger tribe supported the Confederacy, the smaller the Union. The Cherokee who owned slaves took them along to Oklahoma.

The 1909 Jim Crow amendments to the Oklahoma Constitution. Roosevelt refused to approve the Constitution for 1907 statehood until the Jim Crow provisions were removed, then the state constitution was amended in 1909 to put them back in.

Part of district burned in race riots, Tulsa, Okla, .American Red Cross, 1921, Library of Congress

The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. One of the bloodiest two day white riots in American history, it’s also known, appropriately, as the Tulsa massacre. Thirty-six African Americans died, and thirty-five blocks of the established African American Greenwood neighborhood were burned to the ground.

Tulsa burning, Alvin C. Krupnick Co., photographer, 1921, Library of Congress

Quanah Parker. I didn’t write enough about Quanah Parker. I didn’t write enough about the Wichita.

Boom Town, by Sam Anderson. It’s on the New York Times’ 100 notable books for 2018, and it’s a fine book about Oklahoma City. It had me checking The Thunder in the NBA standings, and recommending the book. Great book.

Ralph Ellison. Ralph Ellison is from Oklahoma City. I tried to re-read Invisible Man, but couldn’t. It’s a hard book.

The 2018 Elections. There’s now a Democratic congresswoman from Oklahoma City. There’s also a pretty interesting war going on in the Oklahoma Republican Party.

Playlist

I should have known Oklahoma had such great music, but I didn’t. I’ve already mentioned that Oklahoma was the home of five of the finest guitarists I know. And Woodie Guthrie. And John Moreland.

Bob Wills Publicity Photo, C. 1946, Wikipedia
  • John Moreland. In the Throes. I saw a review of John Moreland’s new album in Garden & Gun a few weeks ago, then ran across him in an inernet list of 10 Oklahoma bands you should be listening to now. If Bruce Springsteen sang Americana music he would be John Moreland. This is music about the Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, high school prom. Robin, take note: this is great stuff.
  • The Call. Some random songs. I didn’t pay much attention to them the first time around, and gave them short shrift this time. They probably deserve better. Or maybe not. 
  • Garth Brooks. I think I would like Garth Brooks, but his music is only available on Amazon, and I’m not technologically proficient enough to know whether I can download something on Amazon and listen to it on ITunes. 
  • The Flaming Lips. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. My daughter tells me that The Flaming Lips were one of her favorite bands in high school. Wayne Coyne lives in Oklahoma City, and is a central character in Sam Anderson’s Boom Town.
  • Woodie Guthrie. I’d been listening to Guthrie in Oregon. I downloaded covers of his songs from his 100th birthday celebration at the Kennedy Center and some other stuff. Billy Bragg and Wilco’s “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key” is the best Woodie Guthrie song that Woodie Guthrie didn’t write.
  • Charlie Christian. Charlie Christian: The Genius of the Electric Guitar. Charlie Christian invented the electric guitar solo, and then died of tuberculosis at the age of 26. He made some fine recordings with Benny Goodman. 
Charlie Christian, Charlie Christian Family Archives
  • Leo Kottke. Acoustic Guitar once did a list once of the 50 greatest acoustic guitar albums. I don’t know where Kottke’s 6- and 12-String Guitar ranked, but I remember the review. The record came out in 1969, and they guessed that more joints were rolled in college dorm rooms on that album cover than on any other. I bet they were right. It at least ran a close second to Sergeant Pepper.
  • Michael Hedges. Hedges was New Age Music, which was once a thing. I had Hedges’ Aerial Boundaries because of that Acoustic Guitar list. He died in 1997 in a car wreck.
  • Roy Clark. “But I Never Picked Cotton.” He died last week. After a near 50-year interval I once again spent way too much time watching Hee Haw, this time on YouTube. His duets with Glen Campbell in the TV heyday were pretty amazing. 
  • Tuck Andress, of Tuck and Patti. Tears of Joy. Andress is such a fine jazz guitarist. He’s also St. Vincent’s uncle.
  • Jerry Jeff Walker, “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” She was, after all, born in Oklahoma.
  • Merle Haggard, “Okie from Muskogee.” The companion piece to “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.” Together the two songs form the yin and yang of country music.
  • Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Bob Wills–For the Last Time. Wills was born in Turkey, Texas, near my hometown, but the Playboys spent a good part of their career on Tulsa radio. I took that as enough of an excuse to include Bob Wills on the playlist. I don’t know how I’ll get him into the Hawaii list. There is a steel guitar. 
  • Cross Canadian Ragweed. Cross Canadian Ragweed. There’s an Americana sub-genre of country out of Oklahoma called Red Dirt Music. I picked Cross Canadian Ragweed because I liked the name, but there are several others, and I suspect some may be better. The Canadian River, by the way, is the longest tributary to the Arkansas River. It starts in Colorado, and crosses New Mexico, the Texans Panhandle, and Oklahoma. 
  • Chet Baker. Chet Baker Sings. Chet Baker is a cross between Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and James Dean. 
  • Jimmy LaFave. Texoma. More Red Dirt Music, LaFave left Oklahoma for Austin, and died last year. I can’t say enough good things about LaFave.
  • J.J. Cale. Troubadour. The guy who wrote “After Midnight.”
  • Jimmie Webb. The guy who wrote “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman.” 
  • Hoyt Axton. The guy who wrote “The Pusher,” “Never Been to Spain,” and “Joy to the World.”
  • Leon Russell. Carney. I always figured “This Masquerade” was a cover of a much older song. It’s not. 
  • Blake Shelton. Red River Blue. There was absolutely nothing memorable about Blake Shelton, except Kris yelling turn him off every time one of his songs shuffled through. My daughter told me that this is a sub-genre of country known as Bro’ Country, which is mostly about drinking, driving pickups, and admiring young women. I did think the song about the honey bee was cute, but then Kris yelled at me to turn it off.
  • Reba McEntire. Reba. Reba has a nicer voice than I expected, and she handles her material well. Some of the material is decidedly mediocre. Some is pretty good. 
  • Gordon MacRae. “Oklahoma!” and “Oh What A Beautiful Mornin’.” If you can keep from singing along to “Oh What A Beautiful Mornin”’ you’re a better man than me. That goes into my master road trip playlist, just for the joy of singing along. 
  • David Frizzel and Shelly West. “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma.” In 1981 this was number 1 on the country charts for seven weeks. It is a lovely song, and makes me pine for cold nights on a prairie country road in a pickup. Ok, it’s probably totally manufactured Nashville country, and you can’t go home again, but it’s still a lovely song. 

Guitar. 

I took the Kohno since I didn’t have to worry about airplanes.  My shoulder hurt by the end of the day, but my hands never did, so I worked on Mazurka Marieta by Tarrega. I memorized it a long time ago, and it was one of those songs I never seemed to forget, but then I forgot it.  Relearning went quickly though.