Tag: Books

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Where We’re Not Going: The Keys

I’ve read a lot of trashy novels, real dreck. I’ve read stuff that no one would admit to reading, from Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour to all of the Game of Thrones novels (well before the television production–I didn’t have that excuse), and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed much of it. I think though that if I had to come up with a list of the ten worst novels I’ve ever read, Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, set in Key West, would be right at the top of the list. It’s the story of an unlikeable fishing guide, Harry Morgan, who does increasingly unlikeable things and then gets shot and dies, and as far as I was concerned his death came 200 pages late. There are also plenty of unlikeable minor characters doing unlikeable things: I remember disliking particularly the drunken playboy based on John Dos Passos.  As a reader I had no empathy for the Haves, sure, but as a reader I didn’t have any empathy for Hemingway’s Have Nots either. As a matter of fact, in addition to the characters, I didn’t like the place, the plot, or the author. I didn’t even like the boat.

EH 8124P Ernest Hemingway fishing, Key West, 1928.
Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

 

And generally I like Hemingway. I fly fish now in large part because of Big Two-Hearted River and A Farewell to Arms. Generations of young men wanted to go to Spain to drink wine and run with the bulls at Pamplona because of A Farewell to Arms.  Not me.  I wanted to go to Spain to drink wine and catch a trout with a McGinty. Not that anyone’s caught a trout with a McGinty in the last century.

Not much of a McGinty, but you get the general notion: It looks like a bee, for the bee hatch. It’s at least as good of a McGinty as To Have and Have Not is a novel.

Like  1920s Paris and Cuba, Key West is forever tied to Hemingway, but plenty  of other writers  also passed through Key West. It’s a Bona Fide Cultural Mecca: Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Annie Dillard, John Dos Passos, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost . . . Key West was the place where the Haves could go to drink and sleep around and in later times do drugs while the Have Nots could go to Key West to drink and sleep around and in later times do drugs. Piracy and smuggling was available to all, or at least real estate development was available to all.  Long before Vegas, Key West like New Orleans was where in the popular imagination everybody could skirt the edges of propriety. Somehow though I suspect fried conch in Key West isn’t as good as the turtle soup at Commander’s Palace.

The Keys are also one of the places, maybe with the Bahamas one of the two places where modern saltwater fly fishing developed.  It’s where Ted Williams had his Florida house and where bonefish and tarpon and permit became a thing. Thirty-six years after To Have and Have Not was published Thomas McGuane would publish his own fishing guide novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade.  It was a much better novel than To Have or Have Not, if a much lousier movie. Peter Fonda isn’t Humphrey Bogart. Margot Kidder isn’t Lauren Bacall. Tom McGuane isn’t Howard Hawks as a director or William Faulkner as a screenwriter. Tom Skelton, the rather hapless anti-hero of Ninety-Two in the Shade, plans to make his reputation as a guide on permit. And then of course he gets shot and dies. If I were a Key West fishing guide I’d be concerned that death by gunshot was part of the job description.

As for Keys’ guides, it’s a running joke that they excel mostly at rudeness. In the popular imagination they give you the opportunity to buy them breakfast, pack your own lunch, and pack their lunch. They will yell at you for missing casts, and then will expect a decent tip for your troubles. So far my exposure to Florida guides has been 50-50, I had a very good Florida guide in Palm Beach and a very bad guide from Florida in Louisiana, and it may be the stories about Keys’ guides are urban mythology. Island mythology? Still. High-handedness could explain the gunshot wounds.

Maybe I’m all wrong about Key West. I haven’t been there, and the only thing more treacherous than long distance-judgments are the close-up kind, but if you read the current crop of Florida writers, the Carl Hiassens and Dave Barrys and Randy Wayne Whites, they ramble through the Keys in the midst of amusing decadence and unamusing debauchery.  Maybe I’m just old, but it doesn’t sound like that much fun to me. Plus there’s no baseball. I think I’ll save the Keys for the next life.

Ok, maybe it sounds like some fun.

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Where We’re Not Going: The Everglades

I first read Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’s 1947 River of Grass when I thought I wanted to canoe the Everglades. I thought it was a travel guide, and I’m not certain I finished it. I may have only carried it around for a while. I’ve started it again, and it’s a far better book than I remembered. Shows what a little time will do.

This may be obvious to everybody else, but it wasn’t obvious to me: The Everglades system is not coterminous with the Everglades National Park, and the system was not preserved by designation of the Park.  The Park is about one quarter of the area originally covered by the Everglades. Not small change, but the Park is only the southern part of the original area. It’s separated from its historic northern water sources by building a dike around Lake Okeechobee, building barriers like the Tamiami Trail, changing the direction of water discharges from the Lake, and draining 700,000 acres  for agriculture in the Everglades Agricultural Area.

Before that stuff happened,  sheet flow flowed from Lake Okeechobee down to the Bay of Florida, with normal flows of as little as 100 feet per day. Douglas described the system as a shallow river, often only inches deep, that covered most of South Florida. The river stretched from near present day Orlando south to the Keys where the land ran out.

Map of the Everglades by US War Department, 1856

In the decades after 1920 the flow stopped. After deadly floods in the 1930s, Lake Okeechobee was surrounded by the Herbert Hoover Dike for flood control.  Areas of the Everglades were isolated, drained for agriculture and urban development, urbanized at its boundaries, and managed for different purposes. Today’s arguments aren’t really about restoration to original conditions, but the extent to which regionalization can be reversed and the freshwater sheet flow out of Lake Okeechobee restored to its original southerly meander.

The Park now gets most of its water from the 60 inches of average annual rainfall in Southern Florida, and it doesn’t feed much freshwater into Florida Bay.  Because there isn’t freshwater flowing in, the Bay is hyper-saline. It’s lost thousands of acres of sea grass and is periodically strangled by algae. Not just any old algae, either. You can’t talk about Florida algae without saying toxic algae. It’s gotta be toxic.

And up top the Okeechobee isn’t the cleanest of lakes. Except for industry, it receives pollutants from the same list of sources as The Chesapeake: Agriculture and urban development.  Phosphorous and nitrogen, the stuff of fertilizers for yards and crops, seem to be the biggest problem. Instead of flowing south to Florida Bay, the Lake overflow is now shunted east to the Atlantic estuaries by the St. Lucie Canal and west by the Caloosahatchee River.

The phosphorous-laden freshwater flows hit the saltwater systems on the Atlantic side around Stuart and in the south central bays on the Gulf side. The whole mess plays havoc with fish and wildlife in a big swatch of Southern Florida. The Everglades is also the recharge source for the Biscayne Aquifer, the principal water supply for South Florida, Miami and whatnot. There are 8 million people who depend on drinking water ultimately sourced from the Everglades, plus a lot of golf courses. Where’s the water for putting greens going to come from?

The bad guy in all of this is Big Sugar.  Florida produces about half the nation’s sugar through three refiners. At its worst, Big Sugar’s historic labor practices made the West Virginia coal industry look benevolent.  And the two, coal and sugar,  ran neck and neck for environmental sensitivity: lop off a mountain top here, drain a wetlands there.  Federal sugar subsidies are a favorite target of fiscal conservatives, who argue that artificial support of American sugar prices kills American jobs.  Maybe anymore it doesn’t deserve to be the active bad guy it used to be: Creation of the Everglades Agricultural Area is done, no additional land will be added, and it’s half-life is short because of the subsidence of the soil in the EAA.

But unfairly or no Big Sugar remains the Villain in the eyes of restoration proponents. In South Florida, a fishing guides’ environmental group, Bullsugar, takes its name from the alliteration of sugar and, well, shit. Orvis is a sponsor. Patagonia is a sponsor.  Hell, Raymond James is a sponsor.  Raymond James. There are lots of other similar groups too: The Everglades Foundation, the Everglades Trust, Captains for Clean Water . . . The Everglades Coalition counts over 50 member organizations. Meanwhile in 2016 the New York Times reported that the Miami Herald had reported that over the past 22 years the sugar industry contributed $57 million to Florida elections.  Sweet.

It’s probably no wonder that the proponents think that the governmental group with the most direct control over the Everglades water, the South Florida Water Management District, isn’t an ally. Its board is appointed by a Governor who is not seen as an ally. $57 million.

Meantime proponents believe that establishment of a storage and treatment reservoir in the Everglades Agricultural Area is the key to Everglades restoration. The reservoir would use about 15 percent of the EAA area. It would release water South, surely whistling Dixie, down through the supposedly cleansing and detoxifying Glades to the southward bay. Neither east nor west but only south.

Apparently the money is there: as a result of federal lawsuits Florida has pledged expenditures for restoration. Maybe the plan is there.  Expenditures are being made and the Tamiami Trail is being raised. Apparently the big hold-up to return of substantial southward flow is Big Sugar’s willingness to sell the land for the Okeechobee drainage reservoir. 26,800 acres were purchased by the state in 2010. The proponents want 46,800 more acres. Sugar backed out once. It reached agreement and then . . . hesitated. And of course the concern is that on the horizon Big Sugar sees the possibility of more lucrative residential development, and maybe there’s a lack of sufficient interest at the state level to force the issue.

So’s anyway we’re heading to Florida, but we’re not going to the Everglades.

http://www.evergladestrust.org/toxic_algae, From the Everglades Trust, Algae Bloom in Stuart, Florida

 

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Dave Robicheaux: Sex, Drugs, and Other Such

“Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.”
James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending

I’ve been listening to James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels. Other than Ann Rice ( who I find unreadable), they’re perhaps the most popular novels out of Louisiana. I read most of the novels the first time spaced over the years as they were published, but I’ve been listening to them in bunches. In bunches they’re relentless.

Burke was born in Houston, and still has ties here.  I went into Orvis once to buy something, tippet or leaders probably, and the young woman behind the counter had a name tag, Alafair. I told her I was reading a novel with a character named Alafair and she said that it was a grandmother’s name and that Burke was her great uncle. Even before Orvis I had linked Burke with fly fishing; I started reading Burke after a local bookshop, Murder by the Book, recommended  Black Cherry Blues as reading material for a fly fishing trip to Idaho, and Burke’s main characters, Robicheaux and Cletus Purcell, fly fish. In Black Cherry Blues a serial killer runs over Purcell’s fly rod with a car. Dang. They’re violent books.

There was another young woman in law school with me who I also think of when I think of Burke.  I didn’t know her, and never talked to her, but she was noticeable: petite, pretty, dark honey skin and lighter honey hair, and well-dressed for a student. Rich looking I guess. I remember a conversation about her once with other law students. Someone said her family was New Orleans’ mafia and to stay away. As far as I could tell most everyone did stay away. I’m sure there’s plenty of organized crime in Houston, but somehow New Orleans’ mafia just had that special ring.

Burke captures that special ring, that special Louisiana familiarity with prostitution, poverty, violence, drugs, alcoholism, murder, racism, gambling, corporate and environmental greed, and general depravity.  Laissez les bons temps rouler. Before there was Las Vegas there was New Orleans. Before there was online porn there was Storyville and Bourbon Street.

Mostly nothing good ever happens in a James Lee Burke novel. Made guys bring crime into Iberia Parish day-in, day-out, and then for the weekend Roubicheaux visits  New Orleans for some real violence. Wives get executed when the mob hit misses the hero.  Victims of childhood abuse nail their hands to the backyard gazebo.  The hero’s sidekick drinks Scotch in his milk and regularly goes off the rails.  Gun bulls rape the inmates, oil wells blow, Justice is not just. The only time that violence isn’t a breath away, the only time there’s anything like peace, is when Roubicheaux is in the natural world, watching gar turning in bayou currents under the green canopy of the Louisiana coast. The books ring true, unrelenting as they are, because we are certain that New Orleans’ mafioso and corrupt politicians and violence are the stuff of Louisiana. And it’s true. Louisiana routinely has the highest murder rate in the nation, more than twice that of Texas, which is not a place known for peaceful coexistence.

There are plenty of causes for Louisiana crime. U.S. News & World Report seems now to be mostly a publisher of lists: best of this, worst of that.  It ranks states, and of the 50 states Louisiana ranked last. I don’t know how they come up with their list, but they try to measure different weighted factors that are supposed to matter to people: health care, education, economy, infrastructure, crime and corrections . . . Health care? 47. Education? 49. Its highest ranking, 42, is for quality of life. You have someplace where everything else is bad, It makes sense crime is bad. Or maybe it’s just always been that way.

It does have good fishing though, and gumbo.

 

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Louisiana Deux

Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans; by William Henry Brooke, engraver; engraving with watercolor from The Slave States of America, vol. 1; London: Fisher and Son, 1842.  THE HISTORIC NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION, 1974.25.23.4.

“Well, you see, it’ uz dis way. Ole missus—dat’s Miss Watson—she pecks on me all de time, en treats treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she wouldn’ sell me down to Orleans.” 

Jim, Huckleberry Finn.

I thought when I started this that I would write some about fishing and some about states and their history and literature. Louisiana didn’t come up by design but opportunity.  It is nearby, we haven’t been in a while, we have a deposit with a guide, and who doesn’t like New Orleans?

And what better way to approach Louisiana than through race and ethnicity? I’m stupid sometimes. I should have stuck to Sazeracs.

New Orleans was founded for the French in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville.  Although intended to be France’s center for trade and government,  the site selected was  a muddy swamp situated in the crescent of the shifting and flooding Mississippi River.  See that first big bend above the Gulf in the big river in the left of the map map below? The bend’s more complicated in real life, but that’s more or less where the French stuck New Orleans.

New Orleans was first destroyed by a hurricane in 1722.

1959-210.website

Le Missisipi ou la Louisiane dans l’Amérique Septentrionale; ca. 1720; hand-colored engraving by François Chéreau; The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1959.210

In 1724, the French adopted the code noir governing slaves. Believe it or not, it didn’t favor the enslaved.

Le_Code_Noir_1742_edition

In 1765 the Spanish, now in charge, brought the first Acadians, the Cajuns, to lower Louisiana from France (where they’d arrived after the British deportation of the French, Le Grand Dérangement, from the Maritimes). This was about the time that the British expelled the Scottish clans from the Highlands, and was apparently a favored British method of social planning. Get rid of ‘em.

In 1786 New Orleans burned, and in 1794 it burned again. The rebuilt city, the city we know by its French Quarter, is actually Spanish architecture, from its St. Louis Cathedral to its wrought iron frills.

Beginning in 1791, New Orleans experienced a sizable influx of slave-revolt refugees from Haiti: white French colonials, slaves, and free blacks. By the late 1700s, New Orleans was a city of French-speaking Acadians, German-speaking Germans, Spanish Canary Islanders, French-speaking refugees from Haiti, slaves from Africa and the Caribbean, and free people of color (often of mixed race).  All of these, French and Spanish colonials, Africans, and Germans, are the Creole, the ethnic and racial stew that made up Louisiana in 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase. There were also Americans.

 In 1803, Louisiana’s population was 35,932, with 21,224 Anglos, 12,920 slaves, and 1,768 free people of color.  By 1850, thirteen years before the Civil War, the population had exploded to 516,702, with 255k whites, 244k slaves, and 17k free people of color.  New Orleans had become the principal slave market of the South, there was cotton, there was sugar cane, there was the port traffic in the the Gulf and on the Mississippi. New Orleans was a major U.S. city and the major city of the South. Samuel Clemens came to New Orleans to work on river boats and from that he wrote Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn. Abraham Lincoln made two trips to New Orleans by flat boat: thus, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. And the Emancipation Proclamation.

One of the world’s great cuisines came out of that ethnic and racial mix.  The food was created out of what people had on hand: rice, seafood, pork, herbs, and the trinity of bell pepper, celery, and onion. Louisianans brought to cooking their cultural history: African, Caribbean, Spanish, French, German.  Which reminds me, on Friday our son, Andy, brought me breakfast — a boudin blanc kolache from his favorite donut shop.   Boudin and heat from the Cajuns, sweet dough from the Czechs,  assembled in Houston by Vietnamese immigrants. It wasn’t really a kolache, it wasn’t really even a klobasnicky, but it was pretty spectacular.