Tag: Books

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Oregon Packing List I

We didn’t take many clothes to Oregon, and that was just about right.  Ok, we may have taken a few too many layers of polypropylene, and I took a pair of shorts I never wore, but here’s the most important thing you need to know about Portland: You can wear your nylon fishing pants into any restaurant in the City and fit right in. If the only clean shirt you have left for that elegant tasting menu restaurant s a mid-weight Patagonia underlayer pullover, it’s ok. It’s stylish. Stylish. One pair of Keene sandals, my running shoes, and a pair of wading boots would take me anyplace in the state unless I needed some other kind of technical sports shoes. Hiking boots, skiing boots, cycling cleats; those I might need. I wouldn’t need a dressier pair of shoes.

Oregon is an outdoorsy milieu. There are as many Subarus in Portland as there are F150s in Houston. There are a lot of Subarus.

Unlike New Orleans, I didn’t take a blazer, and unlike New Orleans I didn’t need one. I did worry that in a Nike town my New Balance running shoes might not be quite the thing, but Portland folk seem pretty tolerant.

The homeless like Portland, at least in the summer, but I don’t think it’s because they don’t need a blazer. Our first morning I took an early-morning run around the river. There were colonies of the young and ragged sleeping in doorways and camped on the riverside. Someone told me that much of Portland homelessness is about heroin, but I also think it’s some about accomodation. Portland has long been particularly tolerant of  the homeless.

When we first got to Portland we went to Portland Fly Shop. Ok, that’s not true. We first went and ate Pacific Coast oysters at Olympia Oyster Bar. For Gulf Coasters, Oysters on the West Coast are high dollar, about $3 each, but happy hour oysters were half price. They didn’t serve Saltines with the oysters, and I’m not sure they understood the value of salt and lemon or a classic mignonette, but the bread was good. The oysters were good.

So we went to Portland Fly Shop after the oysters and met Jason Osborn, who had helped me buy my 7 weight Beulah Spey rod long distance. Kris finally committed to a Spey rod, a Beulah Onyx 6 weight, and we bought some sink tips and some leaders. Here, though, is the bizarre thing about steelhead fishing:

To fish for steelhead, you honest-to-God could fish for days with two flies, one wet and one streamer.

If there are no tugs by the end of the swing, one doesn’t agonize about whether the fly is the very thing, you take two more steps downriver and cast again.  Changing flies ain’t in it. “Jason,” we insisted, “sell us some flies.” I’d tied a good two dozen flies getting ready for Oregon: multiple fish tacos in many colors, steelhead coachmen, skaters, black things, brown things, orange things. . . Jason seemed baffled that I wanted more flies. He clearly thought we had plenty flies enough. We insisted. He sold us some, but his heart wasn’t in it.

We only changed flies when the spirit spoke to us, or when the light changed.  In the morning or when it was overcast, we cast wets three-quarters downstream on Skandi lines. When it was full sun we cast streamers 90 degrees straight across the river on Skagit lines.  Then we did the two-step (or the four-step). The idea was to cover water. Maybe people who know what they’re doing change flies, but for us, what’s the point? Within the realm of decent steelhead flies one fly was as good as any other.

I was told that the Clousers I brought weren’t in the realm of decent steelhead flies.  What fish doesn’t like a Clouser?

As to other stuff we didn’t need, we took a bunch of trout rods. When we arrived at Maupin and met Travis Johnson, I said that I was in Oregon to catch one fish. He looked concerned and asked if I’d brought a single-handed trout rod, I think in part because trout are easier to catch than steelhead and in part because he worried that my casting would be even less competent than it was. Because I’d caught a Chinook the first day, I never took my single-handed rods or trout flies out of the suitcase. My fish was caught and everything after was gravy.

I took along a better guitar than usual, a 1973 Kohno, because I would be sitting by the side of a river for a few days and that deserves a better guitar.  The Kohno is a bit beat up, but has a lovely tone. My hands though were a wreck.  They were sore, I guess from the rod, and cracked and bleeding from the dry weather and the water.  I worked a bit on the Sor Variations on a Theme from the Magic Flute. I was playing it early in the hotel the first morning–we were running two hours ahead of everybody else on the West Coast–and the person in the neighboring room banged on the wall.  I’d never had that happen before, but they banged on the wall in the middle of the fast 6th variation, so maybe the song was a bit raucous.  Maybe they just weren’t Sor fans.

We spent a long time in Powell’s Books, which is one of the great bookstores. I bought Tom Robbins for Washington and Seattle, which isn’t scheduled, and replaced my copy of Sometimes a Great Notion. Mostly I was reading Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom, getting ready for Mississippi.

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Love Story

Looking for Oregon books, I ran across David James Duncan’s The River Why. It’s an improbable love story set against the backdrop of an improbable fly-fishing story, or maybe an improbable  fly-fishing story set against the backdrop of an improbable love story, or a long didactic philosophical and spiritual journey. Or all of the above.

The novel’s hero, Augustine Orviston (get it? get it?), is described at birth as caught from the womb of Ma Orviston. He is as much trout as boy, a bait- and fly-fishing prodigy, an idiot savant, balanced between his parents, Henning Hale-Orviston (H2O) and Carolina Carper (the above-mentioned Ma). H2O is a British accented, tweed-wearing, pipe smoking fly fisherman and fly-fishing writer, author of the Summa Anglia, while Ma is a Camel-smoking blue-jeaned eastern Oregon cowgirl defiling the holy water of the Deschutes with a Sears Roebuck bait caster. Ma and H2O are forever joined and (apparently) forever in conflict.  Ma kills fish. ‘Nuff said.

While fishing Gus (Gus is short for Augustine) finds his love, a water nymph who disrobes to swim steelhead down in the river. They romance over fish and fly rods and fishing. She sends Gus on his final quest with three pound tippet by hooking Gus’s spirit animal, an egg-laden hen Chinook moving upriver to spawn and die, and then handing the rod to Gus.  For the next night and day, day and night, Gus moves upriver with the fish by holding it on the too-light leader with a soliloquy on the power of love.

It ain’t no brief soliloquy either. 

Not much in the novel is brief.  It’s a long, rambling narration by Gus, and sometimes I wished Duncan would just skip a few of the sideshows and get on with things. It was rejected by major publishers because it needed more editing. They were right, and it shares it’s anti-structure of disconnected misadventure (and an other-worldly misfit hero) with A Confederacy of Dunces, which was also rejected by major publishers and finally published by LSU two years before in 1980.  The River Why was published by the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club? Okey-dokey. At least Gus, unlike Ignatius J. Reilly, is likable, if not as amusing. The River Why finally ends gratuitously with a long baffling tag about the Vietnam draft, which even in 1982 was a bit dated.

All that said, it’s a fun book, which I think is what Duncan wanted. One (that’s me) just wishes he wasn’t quite so entranced with his own story. There’s a nice movie version of the novel, though Duncan spent three years suing to get his name taken off the credits. I liked the movie too, but Duncan, for all his Oregonian secularism, seems to have a Puritanical streak.

When I recently wrote about another great fly fishing romance, Shelley and Mark, I got an email from Shelley setting some things I got wrong. The photo, she says, was not taken in Houston but Iceland.

Those are not bluebonnets behind him—they are Lupine which are kind of like giant bluebonnets. When we landed in Iceland, they carpeted the fields leading from the airport.  We thought it was such a nice welcome for Texans.

Icelanders, being descendants of taciturn Norwegian Viking raiders, aren’t the first people who come to mind for their thoughtful friendliness, but there you are. They spread out the lupine.

More important, Shelley explained to me that Kris and I, however large my ego, weren’t responsible for her and Mark’s romance. I kind of suspected that, since we didn’t find out about it until after it was pretty far along and then only by accident, but I’ll never admit it to Shelley.

I had one of those newspaper articles about Mark on my nightstand (plans for flycasting instruction) before I met him. There were lots of other common threads as it turned out—his sister and my brother were on double dates in college, she was the sweetheart of his fraternity; Mark was at a party thrown by my childhood friend, Nancy, that I also attended (there are disputes about whether we actually met there—I say “no”); my friend Ellis was standing in the living room of Mark’s best friend, Herman, the night Mark introduced me to all of his music friends.  I could go on and on.

Shelley said she had the newspaper article on her nightstand so that she could track Mark down for casting lessons.  Between you and me I think she was already learning to sight cast. Or maybe the clipping got there because Mark was practicing his blind casting.  Shelley also said that early on she thought that Mark surely could talk a lot. I guess just like Gus Orviston, literary or real, talking is a necessary talent of anglers.

Shelley also pointed out one last thing I got wrong:

Houston is really a very small city when it comes to lawyers and flyfishermen. And some other things.

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The Monteleone and Oysterology

I remember the first time I saw Kris. She walked past and I couldn’t believe how pretty and bright and lively she was. It worked out well, too.

I also remember the first time I saw the Hotel Monteleone.  I was at a tax and securities law conference at the Marriott on Canal, and walking down Royal I saw the prettiest, brightest, liveliest hotel I’d ever seen. I wondered why I wasn’t staying there. Every time I’ve been to New Orleans since I’ve tried to book the Monteleone, but it’s always full. I thought maybe this would be a final trip to New Orleans, we have so many places to go to get 50 fish, so I made a special effort to get the right restaurants and a reservation at the Monteleone.

The restaurants were great. The Monteleone not so much.

Like I said, the restaurants were great. We had Beignet Friday morning at Morning Call in City Park, which has altogether better beignet than Cafe du Monde. That didn’t stop us though from buying beignet at the Cafe du Monde early the next two mornings, because their beignet is pretty good too.  Morning Call put us near the New Orleans Museum of Art, which has a good early Italian art collection, a good collection of moderns, and an El Greco. It was time well spent.

We ate lunch late, around 3, at Willie Mae’s Scotch House in the Treme. I may never go to New Orleans again, but if I do it will include Willie Mae’s Scotch House.  That’s some great fried chicken, and we were smart enough to order extra for the next day’s fishing. Fried chicken is even better cold. Dinner Friday night was at Commander’s Palace, old school. I had pecan-crusted black drum and the turtle soup–exactly what I’d have had at Brennan’s in Houston, so it felt very homey. I have to say, the service is even better in New Orleans. I wore a jacket because, well, that’s what one does at Commander’s Palace.

Dinner Saturday was at La Petite Grocery.  I had the triple tail.  I’m still working on my 50 fish dinners, but I’m collecting them faster than my 50 fish. Mostly the rest of the time we fished, except of course for the dozen raw at Felix Oyster Bar.

We have a friend who is a bona fide oysterologist, complete with PhD, and anticipating this trip I asked him about oysters in August. He said that the problem with oysters in summer wasn’t that they were more dangerous, eating raw oysters is always risky, but that I would probably be ok if I was otherwise reasonably healthy. Oysters aren’t particularly safer at  60° than they are at 80°  (though I guess the danger of spoilage is less). The problem with summer oysters is that oysters spawn in the summer.

Oysters broadcast spawn, like tarpon, except that they have neither fins nor feet, so they aren’t traveling to spawning grounds. They’re either in bed together or they ain’t. When summer comes around and the oysters are fat and lusty they broadcast their boy stuff and their girl stuff to make baby oysters, and oyster sex leaves them flat and limp and altogether less satisfying than the cool-weather, non-spawned, pre-orgasmic oysters. But flat and limp or fat and lusty I still had a dozen at Felix, and so far I’m not dead yet. They were also pretty great, and at Felix I didn’t have to stand in line at Acme Oyster House across the street. Pro tip from my daughter.

I also had a shopping spree at Faulkner House Books which isn’t a restaurant, but I had to prepare for my future trip to Mississippi, and where else does one buy Faulkner? I also bought some Eudora Welty who I’ve never read.  Mississippi here I come.

But first the Monteleone.  Some things just don’t work out the way you plan.  The Monteleone is in the center of the quarter, a block off Bourbon Street, and for at least a half-dozen blocks the traffic is as bad as midtown Manhattan at rush hour. Then I had to circle the block because there was no place to park at the entrance. Toss in plenty of pedestrians, many with to-go cups and on the wet side of sober, and a brass band and my nerves were fried. The rooms are nice but small, and the Monteleone didn’t have coffee made at 5 am, which is unforgiveable.  The Carousel Bar is famous, and big, but it’s hard to find a vacant chair at either bar or table. There are people everywhere.

You know what I want in a hotel? I want a quiet place. I want to go into the hotel bar and sit down and be welcomed from the moment I arrive. I want coffee at 5 am that I don’t have to make myself. I don’t want French Quarter tourist craziness in the hotel lobby, in the parking garage, or at the hotel entrance while I’m waiting on an Uber. I’m not cut out for the Monteleone. Next time the Columns.

And then of course I screwed up.  I apparently made our reservation for Friday, not Friday and Saturday. When we got back to the hotel late Saturday afternoon we were locked out of our room.

Thank God.

We got on Hotels.com and got a room at the Roosevelt, Huey P. Long’s favorite hotel and a place we’d stayed before. It’s in downtown, on the edge of the Quarter, so outside the craziness. It’s got a good bar, the Sazerac, where I shouldn’t have stopped but did. It’s got bigger rooms. It’s got one of the great lobbies in hoteldom.

These were important life lessons.  If you’re older than 30, don’t stay in the Quarter, no matter how bright and shiny that face. And don’t think you won’t ever return to New Orleans. And go ahead with the dozen raw.

 

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The Ten Best Summer Steelhead Flies!!!

Disclaimer: I wrote this as a joke, because I have no idea what the ten best steelhead flies might be, winter or summer, and I feel guilty every time somebody ends up here. It’s actually a long shaggy dog story about a fly I tied with an ostrich feather that a drag queen gave me at a pride day parade. I did, in fact, catch a summer steelhead on that fly, so if you want to know the very best steelhead fly, it’s one you tie with a feather given to you by a drag queen at a pride parade.

I’m sure someone knows what the ten best summer steelhead flies are, but I haven’t a clue. In September We  go to Oregon, but before, in less than a week, we go to Louisiana. The jumble has me thinking about redfish and steelhead flies at the same time, and I’m no good at multitasking.

I like simple flies. A few years ago the rage in redfish flies was redfish crack, the hardest part of which was using a magic marker.  Tie some EP fiber to the hook for a tail, wrap some EP brush for a head, use a sharpie to bar the tail, brush out the head, done. I greatly admire that fly.

My current favorite redfish fly is this unnamed thing, or at least unnamed to me. It’s my favorite because I made it up after fishing an Avalon for permit, and because the first fly I ever fished in saltwater, a rattler, had rattles. I later caught 50-odd crappie in a single day with a rattler, and later still caught a four-pound bass. I like flies that make noise. I would name the fly I made up, but I figure lots of people have made up the same fly, and one of these days I’ll stumble across its name.  Meantime it’s easy to tie and catches all sorts of stuff. Plus it’s kinda weedless, or as much as any fly is ever weedless.

Rattler. Ok, maybe it was only 30 crappie. CRAH-pee. Puh-CAHN.

Sac-au-lait.

Steelhead flies though are a different matter. It doesn’t seem like anybody ever thought about making them simple, and I don’t know why.  Are steelhead peculiarly complex? Do they never hit a Clouser? Steelhead flies look like somebody wanted to tie classic salmon flies, smoked a joint, and came up with Modern Steelhead Flies. That’s the book I bought to teach me all about steelhead flies, Modern Steelhead Flies.

It’s hard, by the way, not to make jokes about marijuana and Oregon.

Kris and I finally paraded with my firm in this year’s LGBT Pride Parade, and I learned that sometimes Texas parade routes smell like marijuana. Colleagues ask every year if I’ll march and I say sure but then something happens. I put off joining the parade for two years, and they finally shamed me into it. Personally I think it’s a better world when LGBT folk can do some shaming.

The Pride Parade in Houston is no small affair.  There are thousands of paraders, and tens of thousands of paradees. Our daughter dropped us off on Allen Parkway and we walked a bit to the staging point. I really dressed for the parade too: a pair of running shoes, khaki shorts, blue linen shirt, and the crowning glory, my straw fedora. I was a little worried I might stand out too much, but believe it or not, some participants were even less restrained than me. Really. Kris said there was a topless lady, but I didn’t see her. Ogling the topless lady would have probably been wrong anyway, but Kris thought she might be topless at a parade with some expectation of being ogled. Could be.

There were groups from churches and big oil. There was the mayor and the parents of transgender children. There were Democratic candidates, though I think I must have missed the Republican float. We were the only big law firm, but there were lots of banks, and some smaller firms.

So meantime I haven’t actually read much of Modern Steelhead Flies, but it’s got good pictures. Of course I had absolutely none of the fly tying materials for steelhead flies. This is always a given for any new fly, one never has the stuff. This though was particularly brutal. Hooks? Nope. Hot pinks and purples and blues? Nope? Ice dubbing? Not a bit of it. I didn’t own a single ostrich feather.  The first fly I tried, something called a Fifth Element because of all the blue feathers (none of which I owned), had 72 different layers of materials. I spent an hour ordering from FeatherCraft, and when they didn’t have everything I ordered some more from J. Stockard. None of my local shops were going to carry this stuff. I finally found blue Gamakatsu octopus hooks on Amazon. The Feather Thief got nothing on me.

Then I tied the fly, got to the end and realized I’d  forgotten to order the last five layers of stuff.  I tied in some black marabou and called it a day. It looked pretty good, too, as long as you didn’t pay attention to the big gaps on the back side where I didn’t get the materials all the way around the hook.

The third fly in the book, which was also on the list of flies the Oregon outfitter sent, was Jeff Hickman’s fish taco.

Now Mr. Hickman’s fish taco really appealed to me. It was on the outfitter’s list. It was relatively simple compared to the other stuff, only 67 layers or so. Most of all I could look at the fly and think, that looks fishy. That’s the highest praise for any random fly sitting in a box: It looks fishy. Plus it was a taco. I might prefer an enchilada, or even a chalupa, but I’m a Texan and if what you can get is a taco you take a taco. I know and like people who’ve written admirable books about queso and salsa, and I’ll throw in a gratuitous plug for them here. I have also gone miles out of my way to get barbacoa and lengua tacos with just a brush of onion and cilantro, and this was a taco.

I was sitting in my office one day and got distracted and watched a video of Jeff Hickman tying Jeff Hickman’s fish taco. He seemed like a genuinely reasonable guy. He drank unpretentious beer. He took it in stride when he forgot to tie in the 33rd layer of rainbow black flashabou.  I figured this was a guy who wouldn’t mind if I had to use a hot pink hot spot instead of red because I only ordered hot pink ice dubbing.

I also had no ostrich feathers, and 90% of the fish taco is ostrich feathers.

So Kris and I are walking to the staging point for our LGBT Pride parade group and I’m dressed in my gaudy outfit and I feel a hand on my shoulder. A big hand.

Now I’m 6 feet, or I was 40 years ago, but I turn and look up, way up, into the face of either a transgender lady or a drag queen–the taxonomy confuses me some but you can be one without being the other, or vice versa–in a long black satin sheath gown and enough dyed black ostrich feathers to festoon, well, an ostrich. We were of a certain age together, but she’d spent a bit more time in tanning beds, and I was dressed more like a law firm partner taking his grandkids to the zoo. I had no ostrich feathers.

“Darlin’, we gotta spruce you up.” Ok, maybe that wasn’t precisely what she said, but that’s what it sounded like to me.  She plucked an ostrich feather and stuck it in my hat and declared me more festive. I now have a spirit animal for this trip to Oregon, but I haven’t decided whether it’s an ostrich or a 6-foot-4 drag queen in the LGBT Pride parade. I’m leaning towards the latter.

So meantimes.

Kris and I are driving from Galveston and talking about what we need to take to Oregon and she says she’s been looking at the email from Jeff Hickman and I say who? She says Jeff Hickman and I say the fish taco guy? She says what? Jeff Hickman it turns out is our outfitter. I guess I knew that, we’d exchanged emails and all, but it hadn’t registered that the guy I was watching on YouTube tying fish tacos was the guy I was e-mailing. I’m slow like that.

But I catch up sooner or later and this is all coming together. I might even catch a fish. I’ll tie up some hot pink redfish crack with lavender hot spots. If nothing else I’ll learn to tie a fish taco, and I’ll use ostrich herl scavenged from the wild.