Tag: Books

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Norwood and Bill

I read some books to get ready for fishing in Arkansas. Two stood out, Norwood by Charles Portis and My Life by Bill Clinton. I was going to read something by Dave Whitlock, but then I found out that Dave Whitlock isn’t from Arkansas. He should be from Arkansas, he’s the best known fly fisher from that part of the world, but he’s from Oklahoma, and still lives in the Oklahoma Ozarks. It’s an easy mistake to make; Eastern Oklahoma is pretty much Western Arkansas, but there’s a line and I will not cross it. Plus that’ll make this post a bit shorter.

I can’t find any indication that the other two writers, Portis (author of True Grit) and Clinton (author of My Life), didn’t fish, or at least didn’t fish enough to write about it. Clinton was also the 42nd President of the United States, and the last President before the last President to be impeached by the House of Representatives. I don’t think he fly fished, and he wasn’t impeached for lying about fishing.

From Pinterest, Oyster bamboo fly rod built for Jimmie Carter, with presidential seal.

The Bushes fished, and Jimmie Carter famously fished and had a couple of exquisite cane rods built for him by Bill Oyster. Herbert Hoover wrote a book about fly fishing, in which he remarked that “Presidents have only two moments of personal seclusion. One is prayer; the other is fishing — and they cannot pray all the time!” He also said that fishing teaches an important lesson to Presidents, that the forces of nature discriminate for no man. President Trump played golf, and taught us that the rules of golf were more bendable than the forces of nature, but he did tell some extraordinary fish stories, only not about fishing.

President Obama fly fished and seemed to enjoy it. He certainly made an elegant presentation on the river. That’s one well-dressed fly fisherman.

White House Archives, Barrack Obama and Dan Vermillion, East Gallatin River, Montana, August 14, 2009.

Portis died in 2020, in Little Rock, so there’s another thing to blame on 2020. Portis is one of those authors who everyone is supposed to read, but who no one much ever actually reads. I’ve written before about my near-lifelong fixation with True Grit, and if you want to read Portis without cracking a book, just watch the Coen Brothers film version. The dialogue and narration seems almost word for word from the book.

Besides True Grit, Portis wrote four other novels for no one to read: Norwood (1966), Dogs of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985), and Gringoes (1991). Except for True Grit, his novels were all out of print for a time. I’ve read Norwood and Dogs of the South, which lets me feel superior to those who haven’t read Norwood or Dogs of the South, but inferior to those who have also read Masters of Atlantis and Gringoes. I’m sure they’re excellent, and maybe one day.

Portis was not a recluse, though he has that reputation. He was apparently a regular in Little Rock beer joints and approachable for strangers, and at the climax of True South Paul Theroux finds Portis in a Little Rock bar–at least that’s how I remember it. Still, Portis wasn’t much shakes as a self-promoter, and while he began his novel-writing in a fishing cabin, and apparently had his own avocations (notably cars), there are no reports of Portis fishing. He may have fished all the time, but unlike yours truly he didn’t feel the need to tell people about it.

As for cars, all of the three Portis novels I’ve read were odysseys, road novels (even if True Grit exchanges a Buick for the Mattie’s horse, Little Blackie). The hero sets out and then returns home changed, except none of Portis’s heroes changes much. Part of what amuses is their immutability, regardless of what crazy weirdness they create. When she gets back to Yell County, Mattie Ross is still a Presbyterian avenging angel and tax accountant, though she is less one arm, and though she has developed familial loyalty for an old man who rode with Quantrill.

Norwood is a road novel too. Norwood goes to New York to collect $70 and to deliver a prostitute, who he doesn’t know is a prostitute, and some stolen cars, which he doesn’t know are stolen cars. When he returns he is still Norwood. Technically Norwood is from Texas, not Arkansas, but it’s just-across-the-border East Texas. Except for his Korean stint in the Marines, and an interlude working for the New York Herald-Tribunein New York and London, Portis lived in Arkansas. He always wrote about Arkansas, and leaving Arkansas, and coming back to Arkansas, even if it’s the Arkansas part of Texas. As the narrator says in Dogs of the South, “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.”

I doubt that I will ever see the movie version of Norwood, and I have absolutely no clue what role Joe Namath played. With the combination of Namath and Glen Campbell, I suspect that the acting is excruciating.

The character Norwood is honest and marginal, but it is the delight of the novel that notwithstanding all of the bad things that could happen to Norwood–and really bad stuff could happen–nothing ever does. There is a Twainish insistence that things turn out all right, even when a Faulkneresque apocalypse may be more realistic. Norwood finds love on a Greyhound bus, rescues a chicken, and recovers his $70. When I read the novel, Norwood’s final fate made me immensely happy, as does the fate of the chicken. I guess this is a spoiler, but when you get to the end of Norwood and he’s home and the axe hasn’t fallen, it’s ok, it’s more than ok, it’s great. Norwood the character may be hidden away in the Arkansas part of Texas, but he’s authentic and honest, and authentic and honest shines.

The other Arkansas book I read, My Life by Bill Clinton, is also a road novel. Mr. Clinton is born in Hope (not far from El Dorado where Mr. Portis was born), then moves to sin city, Hot Springs (which really was sin city in its heyday), then to Georgetown and Yale (not to be confused with Yell County) and Fayetteville and Little Rock and onward and upward. The book did pretty well when it came out, selling 2.3 million copies, but I suspect that’s because everybody bought it for the sex scenes. There aren’t any, at least in the book. There is a detailed description of political maneuvering at Arkansas Boys’ State. At 1000+ pages, it’s a little long for most folks, but Clinton is a talkative guy talking about two of his favorite subjects, Bill Clinton and politics, and he’s a readable writer, with an eye for detail, then some more detail, then some more detail, then he’ll add in a little detail. He never does tell us what we really want to know. Like I said, there are no sex scenes.

Just like Portis, whenever now that I think of the Clintons, I think of Paul Theroux’s Deep South. Theroux is a bit obsessed with the Clintons. He finds them a basketful of deplorables, but for none of the reasons one might think. Theroux compares parts of the South, particularly the Delta, to Africa’s poorest places, Third World poor, devastatingly poor, irredeemably poor, and he’s right, they are. He was angry that the Clintons–at least one of whom had deep ties to Arkansas and the South–had abandoned Southern poverty after their road trip to Washington. He is angry that the Clintons achieved exit velocity. The Clintons became citizens of the wide world, but no longer citizens of Arkansas, and in Theroux’s mind Arkansas had as much need for them as anyone.

I do suspect that if I were going to cast Joe Namath in a movie, My Life would be a better choice than Norwood.

Official portrait, Bill Clinton, 1993.

On the flip side, notwithstanding conspiracy theories, the Clintons didn’t kill anybody or have anybody killed, and I suspect that much of modern Arkansas, Trump’s Arkansas, would be decidedly hostile if the Clintons lived there. It’s notable that when one Southern President, Jimmie Carter, returned home and became a moral light, his state voted for President Biden. Nobody much argues that Mr. Clinton is a moral light, so maybe that sort of thing only goes so far, and maybe Mr. Carter and the recent Georgia elections are unrelated. It is odd that while Mr. Clinton arguably oversaw our longest period of sustained national economic growth and Mr. Carter’s presidency was an economic failure, it is President Carter who is most admired. It’s not all about the money.

I will say though that the part of My Life about the politics of Arkansas Boy’s State is a dilly.

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Andrew Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 7, 1864, “The war in Tennessee: Confederate massacre of black Union troops after the surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864, New York, New York Public Library.

It’s no accident that two of our most violent predecessors, Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877) and Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), were both from Tennessee. I had saved reading an Andrew Jackson biography for this trip, though I’d been thinking about it since President Trump’s election. President Trump compared himself then to President Jackson, and they were both arguably Men of the People, or at least some people anyway. There were also differences. Jackson was a man of great personal bravery, a brilliant general, devoted husband, and from all indications he didn’t really want to be President. Jackson ended up on the $20 bill, though to our modern sensibilities his presence is something of an affront. He was scheduled to be replaced by Harriet Tubman until President Trump’s election.

Hammatt Billings, The Battle of New Orleans January 8, 1815, Abbot’s Lives of the Presidents, engraved print, 1882, Library of Congress.

As a child Andrew Jackson was poor, even by 18th Century standards. He was poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, a slave trader, a commander in wars against the Creek and Seminole, and an under-qualified justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court (though to be fair no one else was probably qualified either). He married a married woman, gambled big time on horse racing, and was an uncompromising and violent general, the sort of general who during the Creek War (1814-15) stood in front of potential deserters and told them that if they tried to leave he would order the canon at their back to fire. Of course he was also in front of the canon. To modern sensibilities his greatest sin was the forced removal of the Southeastern tribes to Oklahoma, and the deaths of thousands in that removal.

As a Tennessee congressman David Crockett opposed Jackson’s Indian policies. Defeated for a third term in Congress, Crockett was in Mississippi when a third Tennessean (and Jackson protege), Sam Houston, got in trouble in Texas. Crockett went there to help, leaving us with his immortal line, “I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas.”

Whatever his failings, Jackson was a true believer in democracy in its broadest sense, and the great unionist of his age. The reason Jackson is on the $20 bill is that Lincoln needed Jackson. As President, Jackson had first faced down South Carolina’s threatened secession in the 1832 Nullification Crisis, receiving Congressional authorization to send troops to South Carolina to enforce Federal law. It wasn’t over slavery, it was over tariffs, but it was North-South, and Jackson gave Lincoln his precedent for a military response to preserve the Union. It didn’t hurt Lincoln either that Jackson was Southern. Hence Jackson enters the American pantheon, not merely as a man of action, but as a man central to an idea, the Union, and it was an idea that Jackson revered, both as a general and as President. It’s no accident that his Texas protege, Governor Sam Houston, resigned when Texas voted to secede.

Pierre Langlume, General Andrew Jackson, lithograph, c. 1824, Library of Congress.

***

In his study of slavery, Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis suggests a number of conditions for slavery to exist, but one of his suggestions, and here I’m paraphrasing, is that we simply have no clue how hard and violent the lives of these people were. They were surrounded by death (50% of infants never reached adulthood), cruelty (corporal punishment of soldiers and sailors wasn’t that different than corporal punishment of slaves), privation, and violence to both man and beast.

I have a family story that I ponder when I think about these people. One of my 16 fourth great-grandfathers (along with 16 fourth great-grandmothers, nature being demanding that way), one Andrew Davidson, was born in 1768 in Rocky Gap, Virginia, and died in 1853 in Bedford, Tennessee. I don’t know much about Davidson, but he is famous enough to have a historical marker in West Virginia:

Even with a historical marker, Davidson isn’t famous enough to have a Wikipedia page, but there are plenty of descriptions of what happened to Mrs. Davidson. Mrs. Davidson, a Rebecca Burke, was pregnant, and she gave birth shortly after her abduction. The raiders drowned the newborn. Two of her other children were murdered and one was taken from her and subsequently died by accident. At some later date she was sold to a white family in Canada. All of her children, the newborn, two daughters, and one son, were dead. Lord only knows what she endured.

Davidson, to his credit, went looking, and it took about three years for him to find her in Canada. He brought her home, and then she died. She was 28. I think about that story when I try to imagine the outlook of these people, the level of violence that must have been, if not exactly their norm, at least not uncommon, certainly not as uncommon as it would be for us. The violence of Jackson and Forrest would not have been alien to Andrew Davidson. Andrew Davidson would probably have admired them both without reservation.

Davidson, by the way, remarried (this time to one of my 16 fourth great grandmothers) and had more children, for which I am grateful.

***

I read H.W. Brands’ biography of Jackson. There were others, including at least one newer, but Brands’ seemed to have the best reviews. Then I read some stuff about Shiloh, and after went on to read Jack Hurst’s biography of the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Hurst starts out saying that he isn’t a Forrest apologist, but I suspect it’s impossible to write a biography without empathy for the subject, even if the subject is Nathan Bedford Forrest. Notwithstanding his disclaimer Hurst is a bit of an apologist.

After the Civil War, Forrest considered a plan to invade Mexico. He said he had been promised 20,000 muskets. It’s not clear who made the promise, or whether they were able to deliver, but it’s not unusual for a lack of clarity to surround Forrest and his deeds. This was during the 1867 elections when Forrest was almost certainly the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Forest is often reported as the founder of the Klan, but he wasn’t; it had been around a bit before he joined. There’s considerable speculation about Forest’s role in the Klan, but during its first incarnation, first as a social club born in Nashville and later as a violent means of suppressing black and white Republican votes, he was the Grand Wizard. He was almost certainly integral to its post-1868 election violence. The sheets, by the way, were to give the Klansmen the appearance of Confederate ghosts.

The Klan died out in Tennessee by 1871, in part because of Federal suppression, but also because it had accomplished what it wanted: suffrage for former Confederates and suppression of Southern Republican voters, black and white. Some of the credit for the first death of the Klan probably goes to Forrest, who for whatever reasons seems to have ordered it disbanded. It would next rise in Georgia in 1915, in part because of the popularity of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

Nathan Bedford Forrest, Brady-Handy Collection, 1862-1865, Library of Congress.

Forrest shares a lot with Jackson. He was poor as a child, poorly educated, a duelist, a slave owner, and a slave trader. Forrest made a fortune before the War trading slaves, while Jackson seems only to have dabbled and to have made his fortune as a planter. Forrest was never an Indian fighter, the Southeastern tribes having been removed during Jackson’s presidency. As a boy he did once shoot at a man over an ox, after he’d shot the ox. He gambled at cards, and was an uncompromising and violent field commander. During the war he was shot four times, had 29 horses shot out from under him, and claimed personally to have killed as many Federal troops as he had lost horses. He didn’t drink. He was devoted to his wife and children.

Forrest is considered to be one of the great cavalry commanders, not just of the American Civil War but of any war, with an extraordinary sense of field tactics and leadership. Of all the Confederate generals of the Civil War, he was probably the most consistently successful. Forrest was born to fight in the violent West, the western theater lacking the patina of gentility present in the east, and part of Sherman’s strategy on his March to the Sea was to keep just enough troops in Tennessee and Mississippi to keep Forrest busy and out of his hair.

During his lifetime, Forrest was most notorious for the 1864 massacre at Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River in Western Tennessee. Forrest always denied that he had ordered the massacre, but 300 Union forces, many of them African-American, were murdered after the fort’s surrender. It is probably the greatest battlefield atrocity of our most atrocious war, and at the time was widely known, now largely forgotten. Instead of Fort Pillow being Forrest’s legacy, his legacy is the Klan.

At the end of his life, Forrest seems to have found religion and was, perhaps, one of the few Southern voices for reconciliation, not only between North-South, but between whites and blacks. Maybe it was too little too late. Like Jackson and Lincoln he’d come to view the Union as the most important thing, the only economic path forward for the destroyed South, and I suppose he deserves some credit for it. Of course that’s not why there are public (and private) statues of Forrest in Tennessee.

Brent Moore, photographer, Nathan Bedford Forrest statue on private land on I-65 in Nashville, 2006. While there are plenty of moral sensibilities that could be offended by a statue of Forrest, I’m not sure that the moral offense isn’t matched by the aesthetic offense of this particular statue. It would deserve to come down even if it wasn’t a statue of General Forrest. That is one ugly piece of fiberglass.

***

Meantime the fishing near Houston, both for bass and redfish, has been outstanding. I had maybe my best day fishing for redfish ever, not so much in the landing, but in the seeing, and Kris did almost all of the day’s poling. The next day I sat in my canoe and watched what must have been a four-pound bass come out of the water to eye level after dragon flies. I never caught that bass, but I caught plenty of other stuff. And sometimes the seeing is the best part.

Now if I’d just remember to get my hand out of the way of the fish photo.

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North Carolina

Here’s a list of famous people from North Carolina:

  • John Coltrane
  • Dolley Madison
  • The Dale Earnhardts
  • Cecil B. DeMille
  • Billy Graham
  • Sugar Ray Leonard
  • Roberta Flack
  • Thomas Wolfe
  • Andrew Johnson, sort of.
  • Andrew Jackson, though he’s probably from South Carolina
  • James Taylor
  • Doc Watson
  • James K. Polk, sort of.
  • Nina Simone
  • Richard Petty
  • Earle Scruggs
  • Andy Griffith
Hugo Van Gelderen, John Coltrane, 1963.

I left out Soupy Sales, but you get the idea. It’s not a bad list. It’s a very respectable list, and you might come up with people I left out, but here’s the thing: this is not a list that you look at and say that the sons and daughters of North Carolina have changed everything. It’s certainly had its effect on Nascar, and two Nascar movies, Days of Thunder and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, were filmed in North Carolina. That’s a full 24 hours of driving fury. And what state wouldn’t be proud to claim John Coltrane, Doc Watson, and Nina Simone?

Talledega Nights by-the-way is the better movie. After Bull Durham, it may be the most quotable sports movie ever.

Of the three presidents on the list, Polk, Johnson, and Jackson, two were born in North Carolina but are known as Tennesseans, and the third, Jackson, was almost certainly born in South Carolina (and is also known as a Tennessean). North Carolina seems to claim him out of desperation. The state’s most important historical event was the flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The Wright Brothers were from Ohio.

Matthew Brady, James K. Polk, Tennessean, 11th President, daguerrotype, 1849.

North Carolina was always one of our scruffiest states. It is, oddly enough, one of the earliest settled, or attempted settled anyway, by Europeans, first in 1524 by the Spaniard Juan Pardo with a string of forts (that promptly disappeared), and then by the British with two colonies on Roanoke Island, one in 1586 that was abandoned, and one in 1590 that disappeared, taking with it North America’s first English baby, Virginia Dare.

North Carolina wasn’t that far from the Virginia colonies, just across the state border, but the coastline was inhospitable because the Outer Banks effectively blocked navigation, and a monstrous bog, aptly named the Great Dismal Swamp, blocked immigration from English-inhabited Virginia except by the desperate–run-away indentured servants and other rif-raff. Through the Colonial Period North Carolina seems to have been settled mostly by tax scofflaws, pirates, and Quakers, and the former finally ran out the Quakers. Lack of transportation and urban areas left it relatively isolated and poor. Until World War II it was probably our poorest state.

Rebeca Wynn, US Fish and Wildlife Service, The Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, 2010,

I had a lot of ancestors who lived in North Carolina, and at least one, born in North Carolina in 1788, seems to have made it to Texas by 1846, the year after annexation and statehood. It’s too bad, too. If he’d only made it one year earlier I could claim membership in the Sons of the Republic of Texas. I don’t know if there really is a Sons of the Republic of Texas, but I’m pretty sure there must be.

Even North Carolina’s literature seems scruffy. I suspect that nobody reads Look Homeword, Angel, any more. I read it years ago, and tried to read it again years later but couldn’t make it through. I remember it being about people who just seemed, well, scruffy. They weren’t evil enough to be bad, and were too mundane to be really memorable. The writing is supposed to be revolutionary, but that’s old hat. Even the newest, most popular North Carolina novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is about a girl who is raised by wolves in the Great Dismal Swamp, or near enough. I don’t think there are actually wolves. Kris’s book club read it, but I haven’t.

Satellite photo, The Outer Banks, 2009, NOAA.

I’ve fished in North Carolina once before, almost 30 years ago. We fished on the Davidson, in Western North Carolina. Originally this was brook trout territory, but it’s been stocked for years with rainbows and browns and the rainbows and browns have reproduced, spread, and crowded out the brookies, so that the brookies are now found mostly in small high country streams. Twenty-odd years ago I caught my first brook trout in North Carolina, a tiny thing, up above a waterfall where the rainbows couldn’t make lunch of him. We’re fishing for trout again this time, or possibly smallmouth, near the mountain town of Cashiers.

Any smallmouth east of the Appalachians are also transplants.

I’m guessing that there is a saltwater fishery along the Atlantic, and South Carolina is well-known for its redfish, but we won’t make it as far as the coast. After we fish near Bristol, Tennessee (home of Nascar’s Bristol Motor Speedway), we drive south and a bit west back to North Carolina. Shouldn’t work that way, but there you are.

When the Carolinas split in 1729, North Carolina had 6,000 slaves, while South Carolina had 32,000. Tobacco was North Carolina’s big crop, but it was not an industrial agriculture crop like cotton. There were slaves though, in Eastern North Carolina. The Carolina Quakers actively opposed slavery, which was one of the reasons they were impolitely encouraged to leave. By the 1860 census there were 331,059 slaves in North Carolina, or about 33% of the total population, compared to 57% of the population of South Carolina. There were Confederate states with fewer slaves, but they were western, newer states, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida. In 1860, Florida’s total population was only 140,000. I suspect that a significant part of North Carolina’s enslaved were centered in the southern rice-growing region around Cape Fear, North Carolina’s only port, and where Virginia immigrants had gathered along the coast.

During the Civil War North Carolina was relatively untouched physically, but more Confederate soldiers came from North Carolina than any other state, 130,000, more than 12% of its total population. More than 40,000 Confederate North Carolinians died during the War, about half from disease. As with Tennessee, there was considerable Union sympathy in the Appalachian portion of the state, and about 8,000 North Carolinians fought for the Union, 5,000 black, 3,000 white.

North Carolina’s population today is estimated at 10,488,084, and it’s grown consistently and fast since about 1880, when the population was about 1.4 million. It is our 9th most populous state, after Georgia but before Michigan. About 68.5% of the population is non-Hispanic white, and 21.5% African American, which leaves about 10% for everybody else. About 8.4% of the total population is Hispanic. It’s a pretty place, with a hospitable climate as long as no hurricanes blow in from the Atlantic, and I suspect a lot of the North Carolina’s growth is about it being a pretty place with a hospitable climate. People from Houston retire there.

Rivers Langley, Earl Scruggs, 2005, licensed under Creative Commons license, unedited.

It is still not a wealthy state, ranked 41st, with an average annual income in 2018 of $53,888. I suspect that there are greater disparities in income in North Carolina than there are, say, in Missouri, ranked 40, or Tennessee, ranked 42, but that’s just a hunch. Like I said, affluent people from Houston retire there. Affluent people from Houston don’t retire to Missouri.

North Carolina may be one of the states that decides the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Biden needs about 40 electoral votes over what Hillary received in 2016, which means that unless he wins Texas and Florida he has to win some combination of three larger states that Hillary didn’t win. Of the states that were close in 2016, Pennsylvania (20) and North Carolina (15) would just about do it.

In 2016 President Trump took North Carolina 49.83% to 46.17%, but of all the state electoral maps I’ve looked at, North Carolina’s may be the strangest. It doesn’t appear to be driven so much by an urban/rural or a white/black split as an affluent/less affluent split, but that’s a wild guess. Maybe it’s that North Carolina has become such a refuge, and the refugees aren’t collected in big cities. Anyway, it would take a lot more delving than I’m willing to do to figure it out. Here’s the map:

By Ali Zifan, Wikipedia.

Look up a map of the state and compare the two. It’s a strange jumble of who voted how, and not obviously explained by the usual splits.

One of North Carolina’s Senate seats, held by Republican Tom Tillis, is up in 2020, and the race is generally considered a toss-up, though current polling shows the Democratic challenger leading by seven points. Current polling shows Biden leading Trump 49% to 48%, which is meaningless.

And by the way, the most quotable sports movie, Bull Durham, was set in North Carolina. I will almost certainly watch Bull Durham again before the weird short season baseball business kicks off next week, and we head to North Carolina.

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American Shad (Alosa sapidissima)

Hugh M. Smith, Shad (Alosa sapidissima), Fishes of North Carolina, Plate 5, North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey, Vol II, E.M. Uzzell & Co., 1907, Raleigh, N.C., Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, University of Washington.

Like the glamorous salmon, American Shad are anadromous–when shad spawn they migrate from salt water back to their natal river. Unlike the glamorous salmon, American shad are potbellied algae eaters. To my eye they are decidedly unglamorous, but shad anglers are devoted. There is a fine blog dedicated to fly fishing for shad, Shad on the Fly, and plenty of other information on the web, and of course John McPhee, our greatest nonfiction writer, wrote The Founding Fish because of his devotion to shad on the fly rod. Shad on the fly is a thing. Maybe not the biggest thing, maybe it doesn’t rival tarpon or steelhead or bluegill, but it’s at least as much of a thing as standing on a ladder in Pyramid Lake for Lahontan cutthroat.

Have you ever seen a picture of John McPhee? I’d read plenty of McPhee, off and on, and will certainly read more, but I don’t know that I’d ever seen his picture. I hold him in such esteem that I kinda expected Paul Newman, or maybe James Stewart.

John McPhee. From http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/media/resources/pictures.xml. I stole this from Wikipedia, which stole it from Princeton, which seems to say if you aren’t using the photo for commercial purposes you can steal their photos. Hope so.

That picture actually makes me happy. McPhee, notwithstanding his Princeton and Oxford education, his professorship at Princeton, his Pulitzer, and more than anything his lifetime’s worth of essential writing about the natural world, looks a lot less like Paul Newman than a guy who fishes for shad. That’s satisfying.

Unlike Pacific salmon, American shad can return to the Atlantic after spawning, and in northern climes can spawn and return for several seasons. Their US Atlantic range, and the range of their smaller also-fishable cousin, the hickory shad, covers much of the East Coast, from the St. John’s River in Florida to Maine. There are also shad in the Pacific Northwest, imported by that other cross-country migrant, Americans. They are fished commercially in both the Atlantic and Pacific, but it’s in rivers that they are a sport fish.

Photo of a Plankton Fly, Robert Rauschenburg, White Painting, 1951, Robert Rauschenburg Foundation, https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/art/series/white-painting.

Why shad bite is kind of a mystery, though it’s likely either territorial aggression or sexual frustration. Shad are mostly filter feeders, planktivores, so they aren’t a traditional fly fishing target. The photo of my favorite plankton fly has a lot in common with Robert Rauscheburg’s white paintings. It’s an easy fly to tie, but hard to fish. It’s not clear that shad feed at all in freshwater, but in saltwater they also feed on small shrimp and fish, so shad flies tend to remind me of bonefish flies, which usually imitate small shrimp or fish.

In Colonial America shad were so common on the East Coast that they were a major component of the Colonial springtime diet. They were generally thought delicious:

The Shad is held in greater estimation by the epicure than by the angler. When properly in season, it is considered by many the most delicious fish that can be eaten. Fresh Salmon, or a Spanish Mackerel, or a Pompano may possibly equal it; but who can forget the delicate flavor and juicy sweetness of a fresh Shad, broiled or ‘planked;’ hot from the fire; opened, salted and peppered, and spread lightly with fresh May butter.

Norris, Thad, The American Angler’s Book, 171, E.H. Butler & Co., Philadelphia, 1864.
Map of US American Shad Distribution, USGS

Apparently they are also extraordinarily, difficultly, perversely bony, and nothing short of uncommon skill or nuclear annihilation can handle the bones. The current literature suggests that they may have been less the Founding Fathers’ favorite fish than, salted and preserved in barrels for year-round consumption, the Founding Fathers’ slaves’ necessary fish. It’s probably some of both, but in any case shad consumption has fallen out of favor.

The hen’s roe is also eaten. I can find, for instance, relatively recent shad roe and bacon recipes online from Food and Wine, Martha Stewart, and the New York Times. Martha Stewart has a video, and watching Martha separating a shad roe sack is . . . memorable, and creepy. The roe is usually prepared wrapped in bacon, so one wonders whether the appeal is the roe or the bacon. Everything’s better with bacon. Since we will theoretically be in the shad’s territory during the run, I’ll try to find someplace to eat shad, though I’m not sure Kris is convinced, and I’m squeamish about the roe. In 1864, Thad Norris (whose quote about the most-excellent deliciousness of shad appears above) said nothing about eating the roe, but reported that it makes good bait.

Shad’s population decline probably explains shad’s eating decline as much as anything. Damn, Dams. Shad declined not from over-fishing, not sport fishing, not climate change, but dams. If all goes well we will fish the Brandywine in Wilmington, near Bullroarer Took’s old place, and until 2019 the Brandywine dams had stopped much of the Creek’s shad run for more than a century. In 2019 the 115-year old Brandywine Creek dam, first in line from the Christina River and ultimately the Atlantic, was breached in Wilmington. That should help, but the City Dam, a mile further along, is next in line. Wilmington depends on the City Dam for its water supply, so it’s not going away. There’s discussion of ladders, and of rock ramps, but apparently nothing is happening. Imagine building a dam today without provision for fish migration? Even upstream beyond City Dam there are eight additional dams on the Brandywine, some dating back 200 years. There’s not much call for water-powered gristmills in these late days, but demand is apparently enough to stop the shad migration.

Brandywine Creek, Wilmington, Delaware near Tookville, Google Middle Earth.

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Yesterday I fished for largemouth for the first time this year. It was windy, as windy as I can remember fishing, but for whatever reason it didn’t bother me. I fished an olive pine squirrel leach, cast across a back channel at Damon’s Seven Lakes, and caught four bass, three small, one about two pounds. They were pretty; dark and fat, ready for the spring spawn. Kris fished for a few minutes, but then got her binoculars out of the car and looked for birds. She said there were coots, but I didn’t take it personally.