In 1733, George II established Georgia, and it was the last of the original 13 Colonies. It was the brainchild of James Oglethorpe, a British parliamentarian, as a means to help the English poor. Georgia would give them a new start. It would also be a buffer between the Spanish colony in Florida and the British Carolinas.
It succeeded pretty well as a buffer. As philanthropy, not so much.
Under Oglethorpe, individual land holdings were limited to 500 acres, and charity settlers couldn’t sell their land. Rum was prohibited. Slavery was prohibited. It was gonna be a moral utopia.
William Vereist, James William Oglethorpe, 1735-1736, oil on panel, National Portrait Gallery, London.
It was a bust. Instead of giving immigrants a clean slate, the poor brought their debt with them. The land along the coast, the land settled first, was lousy for farming, and the English poor didn’t know how to farm anyway. For passage, immigrants, including children, were often indentured for long periods, some for decades. Planters from other colonies, particularly South Carolina, began to encroach, while the immigrants began to sneak off to other colonies where they could at least get a drink.
The Colonial Georgia poor were probably worse off than they’d been in England, though at least they didn’t have student loans.
In 1742, Oglethorpe left Georgia in a huff, never to return. In 1750, African slavery was legalized–it was already widespread. As a bastion of redemption and the hope of the poor, Colonial Georgia failed.
With that sterling beginning, Georgia was on a roll. Many Georgians would have been perfectly happy remaining British, and it was the last colony occupied by the British. Early Georgian government land grants were rife with fraud that lined the pockets of Georgia officials, and multiples of the same available land was sold to different buyers at rigged prices.
Georgia was ground zero for the Trail of Tears.
The Civil War? Georgia seceded based on what was probably a fixed election, and the war remained unpopular, particularly in mountainous North Georgia. Then there was the Siege of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea. During Reconstruction, Georgia was the only rebel state to be admitted to the Union, only to be kicked out again after it immediately kicked out all African American members of the Georgia legislature.
Gone with the Wind is set in Georgia, and its portrayal of the South is a deservedly difficult subject. Woodrow Wilson was from Georgia, and his overt racism has sparked his reappraisal. After its demise at the end of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan was revived in Atlanta in 1915. There were 593 recorded lynchings in Georgia. While he was out jogging, Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was shot to death in 2020 in Brunswick, Georgia.
Jimmy Carter is Georgian though, and Martin Luther King was from Atlanta. After the 2020 presidential election, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State may have saved our democracy. Still, if you were going to pick a state where the 2020 election kerfuffle would center, ten’d get you twenty that the center would be Georgia.
American Tobacco Company, Hugh Jennings and Ty Cobb baseball card, 1912, Library of Congress.
I would have loved to have seen Ty Cobb play:
AB 11,440/H 4,189/HR 117/BA .366/R 2,245/RBI 1,944/SB 897/OBP .433/SLG .512
Over a 23-year career, Cobb was on base for 43% of his 11,440 at-bats.
As of 2019, Georgia remains a growing state, its population having increased every year since 1930. In 1990, its population was 6,478,216. In 2019 its population was estimated at 10,617,423. It’s the New South, whatever that may be.
About 55% of Georgians are Anglo, 10% Hispanic, 32.6% Black, 4.4% Asian, and 2.2% multiracial.
in 2016, Donald Trump carried Georgia in a landslide, by 50.3% of the 3,967,067 votes cast for President. In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden carried Georgia by roughly 12,000 votes, or .23% of the 4,935,487 total votes cast for President. It was a surprise, I think, and the aftermath was as important to our democracy as Sherman’s March. If you look at it though, how Georgia actually voted has few surprises, and is consistent with the rest of the country. Turnout was up by 6% over 2016, but turnout was down in 2016 over 2012. By region, there’s the obvious blue vote centering in Atlanta, which is expected. Then there’s Baldwin County in middle Georgia. It’s a county with a population of 45,000, about 55% white. Biden carried the county by 50.5%. That’s a surprise, but it’s a surprise without much effect.
Macon, Marietta, and Savannah, all smaller cities, voted blue. Athens and the surrounding area, home of the University of Georgia, went blue, but that’s pretty standard for college towns, whether in Georgia or Idaho. Then there is a scattering of small population counties, remnants of a cotton belt, where the population remains majority African American. Those counties voted blue.
No statewide officeholders in Georgia are Democrats, but both U.S. senators are. The Georgia Senate and itsHouse ofRepresentatives are Republican majorities.
Geographically Georgia is similar to the other Atlantic states, but on a horizontal slant. The southeast is a coastal plain, followed by its mid-state foothills, its Piedmont, rising to the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains in the north. I’m still surprised reading accounts of Appalachian Trail hikes, when the hiker starts in Georgia. I guess I should be equally surprised when the hike ends in Maine. The Appalachians go most of the way up the Atlantic Coast
We fish in northeast Georgia for shoal bass, a river bass. Because of Atlanta’s airport, it’s easy to fly in and out of Georgia from Houston. We’ll poke around Atlanta for an afternoon, go to part of a baseball game between the Atlanta Native American Warriors and the first-place San Francisco Giants, then spend the night in Helen, “the Charm of Bavaria in the Heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.” As far as I know, none of the Atlanta Braves are part of Georgia’s .5% Native American population, and having sat through a series of particularly painful Astros losing efforts against the Braves in the 90s, I’m certain that the Tomahawk Chop is the most despicable fan chant in sports. I completely support efforts to ban it, and public pressure to change the Braves’ name. My opinion is not influenced in the least by my hatred of the franchise. Really though, whatever my opinion of the Braves, given Georgia’s particularly tragic expulsion of the Creek and Cherokee, having a baseball team with a Native American mascot is unforgivable. Of course I’d probably still hate the Braves whatever their name.
Meanwhile shoal bass are one of the 13 species of black bass, a river bass, closest genetically to spotted bass. They’re native to Georgia, northern Florida, and northeastern Alabama, but are endangered in Alabama. They’re most common in the Chattahoochee and Flint River drainages. I figure that I’ll deem any bass I catch that isn’t obviously a largemouth as a shoal bass, and I might even fudge on a largemouth.
Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Shoal Bass.
I’m not really sure what a shoal is, but I think it’s a sandbar in a river.
The Flag of the State of Georgia, by the way, is the flag of the Confederate States of America, with the addition of the seal of the state of Georgia and the words “In God We Trust.” It was adopted in 2003, replacing a flag that included the Confederate Battle Flag.
Flag of the State of GeorgiaFlag of the Confederate States of America
I was ambivalent about fishing Colorado. I had this romantic notion of spending a month or so rambling around the state following inclinations and topographic maps to fish. Instead of a month we only gave Colorado a day. We didn’t even spend the night.
We crossed the border at Antonito, at the Sinclair station and the marijuana dispensary. I grew up in a county that prohibited alcohol sales, so the marijuana dispensary just over the New Mexico line made perfect sense. Since New Mexico has recently legalized pot and in-state sales will start soon, I guess the dispensary will move on to Clovis, in legal New Mexico just over the illegal Texas border, so that it’s ready for the next dry state.
From the Wikipedia entry for Antonito:
The area’s economy has recently experienced an upsurge with the passage of Colorado’s recreational marijuana laws. A 420-friendly town, several recreational marijuana dispensaries have opened within the city limits.
We didn’t visit any of the dispensaries, but there are also a bunch of fly fishing businesses–lodges, cabins, shops, and guides. Every other car sported a rooftop rod rack. I own a rooftop rod rack, but it’s one of the few I’ve seen in Houston. In Antonito they’re required by local law. Given the dispensaries, I suspect there are plenty of mellow anglers trying to remember where they put the key to their rod rack.
This is a car with a rooftop rod rack. I knew where the key was.
Back in New Mexico on the Cimarron, Shane Clawson and I had talked about not catching fish at all. I lose a lot of fish before I land them, and since catch-and-release is the goal anyway, that’s perfectly ok with me–fishing is cruel, and a remote release helps fish survive, plus I always remember the fish I lose better than the fish I catch.
I mentioned to Shane that I’d thought about cutting the point off my flies at the bend of the hook and playing tag with the fish, just watching them rise to my disabled fly but never hooking any. Shane said that a Taos friend did something similar. Most of us already fish with barbless hooks, and Shane’s friend widened the hook gap so that any hooked fish was almost certain to shake loose before landing. He could play them for a second, then watch them disappear.
“Of course he’s Buddhist,” Shane said.
Well of course he is. He’s from Taos. Buddhists are more common in Taos than pot dispensaries in Antonito. I’m pretty sure there’s a prayer wheel aisle at the local Walmart.
That’s a long introduction to hanging out early on Thursday at Conejos River Anglers, waiting for the guide, and saying that I didn’t really care if we caught fish or not. “Bullshit,” someone snapped. I guess so, some anyway, but truth is, I’m always a bit ambivalent about catching fish. I’ve got my Buddhist tendencies, plus if I didn’t catch a fish on the Conejos, I’d still have my chance at a month-long ramble.
Then I went out and caught a fish.
Which is skipping way ahead. To get to that fish–and it was a lovely, fine cutbow, about 19 inches, fat and healthy, and caught not on my first cast but on no more than my tenth–anyway to get to that fish we had to meet our guide, Micah Keys, at the fly shop and then drive. Antonito is at 7,890 feet. Where we fished on the Conejos, near its headwaters below the Platoro Reservoir, is around 9,900 feet. To gain that 2000 feet of elevation we drove 48 long winding miles up the Conejos River, much of it on gravel mountain roads.
That’s a lot of river, and from time to time during the year I suppose almost all of it is fishable. In high summer though we went as high as we could to beat the heat. Fish mortality increases when the water temperature approaches 70 degrees, plus the fish stop feeding. Even at elevation the water was too hot to fish by 2 o’clock.
Before the water temperature stopped us, we caught more fish, all browns. Micah had us fishing size 18 bead-head nymph droppers, not much more than a bit of colored thread with a tail for visual balance and a tungsten bead to make it sink–fished about 20 inches under a parachute Adams floating in the surface. Micah said his name, by the way, was from the sheriff on The Rifleman, not the Old Testament Minor Prophet. That’s probably for the best, since it seems to me that the Minor Prophets would be lousy fishing companions.
Google Earth
Where we fished, the Conejos is a series of braids and random meanders through the meadow. I thought at first it was feeder streams, but it was only the river making it up as it went. None of it was slow, it had 2000 feet to fall after all, but wading wasn’t that hard either, at least not hard qua wading, because frankly any movement was kind of tough. Houston is 80 feet above sea level, and we were fishing close enough to 10,000 feet to make no never-mind. I’m in reasonable shape, but following Micah from the car to the stream was better aerobics than my daily run, and a lot harder.
After lunch Micah and I stood in the river and watched a brown 30 feet away consistently rise to something on the surface. I’ve never watched a fish rise so often or over such a long period. I thought for a while that there was more than one fish, but I don’t think there was. There was just one big fish, actively feeding.
What I should have done, and of course what I didn’t do, was get a photo of the fish before trying any cast, but I didn’t even bother getting a good photo of Micah, much less a hard photo of a fish. Micah helped me get positioned for the cast, and then the fish took my dry fly just like it was supposed to.
And then the fish was on and then it wasn’t. Dammit. Of course it never rose again. Dammit. I hate losing fish.
We took waders, boots with studs, and wading staffs, and we used them. Kris fished with her 10’6″ Orvis H3 3 weight that Trout Unlimited sent her for her intelligence, beauty, and patience. I fished a 9-foot Winston Pure 5 weight that I got from Trout Unlimited because they felt sorry for me.
On the third day, trying to tight-line nymph with a medium-length leader and only a foot or so of fly line out of the rod tip, I couldn’t control the short casts of the leader. Some of it was unfamiliarity, but whatever it was, my casts were mostly big looping air balls with minds of their own.
Dom recommended that I pick up the line earlier, before the leader passed me on it’s way downstream. With the increased line tension I could get a better back-cast, and that helped, but I’ve wondered since if one of the longer, lighter rods used for Euro-nymphing–like the Orvis rod Kris was using– wouldn’t have made those casts easier? That if an advantage of the long, light rods is that the greater leverage and limber tip section make short casts of light lines easier? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be curious enough to try it and reach a conclusion, or maybe not.
We fished Dom’s flies and Dom’s leaders, or Jim’s flies using pretty standard trout leaders. I don’t think we fished anything smaller than a 5x tippet, which is good since anything lighter than 5x tippet has to be manufactured by captive fairies in Celtic sweatshops. It must have been ok. We caught some fish.
Penns Creek
Other than being a pretty great place to fish, Penns Creek holds an oddly significant place in American history. In 1755, a group of Lenape massacred 14 Irish and German settlers on Penns Creek, and took another 11 captive. While William Penn lived, the Lenape and Penn’s Quaker-controlled government had good relations–maybe the longest-lasting good relations between Europeans and Native Americans in the British colonies–but after his death the English pushed the Lenape out of their historic territory into territory controlled by the Iroquois, and then the Iroquois joined the pushing. The Lenape struck back at Penns Creek.
The Penns Creak Massacre kicked off the Western Pennsylvania colonist/Indian conflicts of the French and Indian War, and as a direct result of the massacre, Pennsylvania assemblyman Benjamin Franklin led the effort to fund a common defense. Military funding was something that the Quaker-controlled Assembly had previously refused to do, and still because of their religious convictions didn’t want to do. Franklin won. In response, the remaining Quaker assemblymen resigned from government. It represented the end of Pennsylvania Quaker dominance, a broader divorce of religion and government, and a spasm of self-governance that arguably spurred Franklin toward the Revolution. That’s a pretty heavy load for a little crick.
Moccasins, Probably Lenape, history unknown, purchased 1908, National Museum of the American Indian.
The colonist/Indian conflicts in Western Pennsylvania were particularly violent. The Indians, encouraged by the French, fought a bloody no-holds-barred war against settler families. The English, encouraged by the English, offered bounties of $150 for Lenape men’s scalps and $130 for women’s. In the end, after the French surrendered, the Lenape were pushed out of Pennsylvania further into Ohio. Ultimately the largest groups of the Lenape–now known as the Delaware–settled in Oklahoma, with tribal governments in Bartlesville and Anadarko.
Irony of ironies, when I was 10 I shook Roy Rogers’ hand in Anadarko.
Knife sheath, possibly Lenape, 1780-1820, National Museum of the American Indian
Gettysburg
The Battle of Gettysburg, together with the concurrent fall of Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the end of the Confederacy, even if they wouldn’t admit it for another two years. Gettysburg was Lee’s greatest military blunder, other than rebelling in the first place. We called too late to get Segway tours of the battlefield, which sounded pretty fun, but we did find a horse-drawn wagon tour, which was probably better since it was too cold and windy to go zipping around on Segways. There were about twelve of us huddled in the wagon, not counting the horses, and it was a wee bit awkward being the only Southerners. I’m not sure that it helped that I was the only person who could answer the Guide’s question about which president besides Lincoln was born in Kentucky? It was Jefferson Davis, who hardly seems to count as a president, but I knew the answer so I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
Because we were going to Gettysburg, I was reading Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. Along with the rest of his army career, General Seidule is the former head of the West Point history department. He rightly touts his Southern, military, and historical bona fides. I don’t have any military bona fides, and barely any historical, but I certainly have Southern: five of my great-great grandfathers fought in the War, four for the Confederacy, one for the Union, but even the Yankee was a Southerner, having migrated from Eastern Tennessee to Missouri. During Gettysburg all of my great-greats would have been somewhere in the West, not Gettysburg, but still, notwithstanding family ties, it’s Gettysburg that captures attention. There’s a lot more romance in Pickett’s Charge than in siege starvation at Vicksburg.
I suspect that many of us white Southern boys of a certain age are reckoning with our Confederate legacy. It’s hard to tell four of your ancestors that morally they sucked, even if the conversation is only in your own head. My great-greats were mostly privates, but I don’t really doubt that they knew they were fighting for the preservation of slavery. They may have made treasonous choices for indefensible reasons, but like as not they weren’t unaware of the reasons the War was fought.
I suspect too that General Seidule’s book has a limited audience–old Southern white guys with a moral conundrum; their early reverence for the South smacking up against their delayed realization that the Confederacy doesn’t deserve reverence–but it’s an audience who will be comforted by General Seidule’s authority and certainty and urgency. I appreciated it anyway.
As an odd aside, I re-read the Gettysburg Address before we went to the battlefield. In Pennsylvania it finally registered that Lincoln was only memorializing the Union dead. Only the Union dead were buried in the new national cemetery. The Southern dead were left on the field and then buried in mass graves, and Lincoln’s words didn’t extend so far. It was a startling realization, that unlike what came after the end of Reconstruction the memorialization of the War didn’t always include the South, and that Lincoln’s consecration said nothing ennobling about the Southern dead. That’s tough stuff for a Southern boy.
In Philadelphia we ate. Yeah, yeah, we saw the Museum of Art, and the Barnes Foundation collection, we walked around the preserved Colonial part of town and looked at the Liberty Bell through a window. It was all fabulous, but mostly we ate. Then we ate some more. Then we ate.
Of course I consulted my friend Tom, font of all trustworthy food suggestions. “Tom,” I asked, “Pittsburgh? Philadelphia?”
Tom didn’t know anything about Pittsburgh. About Philadelphia he was certain:
DO go to Zahav, Michael Solmonov’s paean to Israeli/Middle Eastern food. Great food. Great service. Great cocktails. And contrary to everything I say, it’s ok to order the set menu here – for two. Lots of appetizers, salads, entrees, and dessert.
Getting a reservation to Zahav is a bit like going fly fishing. It takes preparation, memory, some luck, and a credit card. Still, it’s worth it. It is an unflinching barrage of food, fabulous food, the kind of food that wears you down and leaves you drained and unhappy that you can’t eat it all, and thrilled that you ate what you ate.
There is also the Reading Terminal Market, where we ate roast beef and roast pork sandwiches at Tommy DiNic’s, then went back the next day to eat Philly cheese steaks at Carmen’s. Since it’s the only Philly cheese steak I’ve had, I can attest that it is, as far as I know, the best in Philadelphia.
We failed to get the Amish donuts at Reading Terminal Market on Saturday because I didn’t know the owners were Amish and I didn’t want to stand in line, and then they were closed on Sunday. It’s a lot of God to ask us to give up donuts for the Sabbath, so instead of the Amish donuts we went to Federal Donuts and Fried Chicken. I’m sure the fried chicken is excellent, but I really regretted missing my chance at the Amish donuts. Our daughter says they’re outstanding.
There was a very good market in Lancaster, the Central Market, which had lots of Amish goods but I recall no donuts. After visiting the Lancaster Market we ate lots of pickles. It’s a great place to buy pickles, plus after Philadelphia we needed some kind of a purge.
As for Pittsburgh, there were vendor stalls all over the Strip District, but as a market it was not so good as Reading Terminal Market, and while Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art is very fine, it’s not so good as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I screwed up and we didn’t see the Pirates at PNC Park, which is unforgivable because the park is beautiful and I like the Pirates. The Pirates are far more likable than the Phillies.
The Pittsburgh airport is remarkably inconvenient. It’s hard to figure out where near the airport to stay, and Uber rides from downtown to the airport are ridiculously expensive. We did eat the famous local sandwich at Primanti Brothers, which for some reason is stuffed with French fries, and on Saturday night ate at a good Italian place, Picolo Forno.
The French-fry stuffed sandwich is not so good as the Philly cheese steak.
George Catlin, Ambush for Flamingoes, c. 1856-57, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The Feathered Hook
We stayed at some good places, and a lousy airport Holiday Inn Express in Pittsburgh–it was advertised as an airport motel but it was seven miles from the airport and its airport shuttle was shut down for Covid–but best of all we stayed at the Feathered Hook in Coburn, which is a fly shop on Penns Creek with an attached bed and breakfast. This is not a romantic bed and breakfast decorated with period gew-gaws and serving artisanal breakfasts. This is a place for anglers to sleep when they fish Penns Creek. It’s decorated with fly fishing gew-gaws and second-hand furniture that might be antique someday but more likely will be discarded as junk, and there is a bit of a college frat house vibe about the place, that is if the college frats were 60-year-old fly fishermen. Kris was the only woman there, so if it is considered a romantic getaway it’s romance for a decidedly niche clientele.
Breakfast at the Feathered Hook is bacon and sausage and eggs and toast; three eggs, however you want them (though probably not poached, and certainly without any hollandaise). I guess that could be considered artisanal among the same niche that goes to The Feathered Hook for romance.
Coburn itself consists of The Feathered Hook, a main street with a few dozen raggedy clapboard houses, a bridge over Penns Creek, some vacation homes, and four Trump 2024 signs. The fly shop at The Feathered Hook is very good, and they have a fine selection of handmade bamboo fly rods. I have no reason to own a handmade bamboo rod; there’s no fishing I commonly do where I could enjoy a handmade bamboo fly rod, and they’re expensive–even for fly rods–so of course I’ve long wanted one. They’re pretty. If The Feathered Hook had put prices on the rods, I probably would have bought one, but I didn’t want to ask because then I would have been committed and Kris would have been aghast. I would probably find as many uses for an English riding saddle.
I’ve long wanted an English riding saddle.
We stayed at the Feathered Hook two nights, and the first night we drank whiskey in the kitchen with the Antietam Fly Anglers of Maryland. There was a very funny story about one of the members, a doctor, who had organized a trip to Argentina, and then a couple of days before the trip he collapsed and had to have immediate heart surgery. His friends, some of whom were at the kitchen table–as I recall it is a fine formica and chrome table that perfectly matches the decor, but memory is tricky and it may have been deal–went on to Argentina to fish for golden dorado without him. Ok, that’s actually not a very funny story. Maybe it was a funnier story because of the whiskey.
Anyway, the next day the members of the Antietam Fly Anglers were gone and were replaced by members of Long Island Trout Unlimited. They were good to drink whiskey with too, and I think that maybe Kris told them the heart bypass story, though in her version I bought a handmade bamboo rod for an extravagant outlay before I collapsed after she brained me. I can’t remember if in her version she went fishing for golden dorado without me.
Playlist
The Pennsylvania playlist was particularly fine, especially the jazz. Art Blakey, Keith Jarrett, Melody Gardot, Stanley Clarke, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Billy Eckstine, Joe Venuti, Joe Pass, and Stan Getz are all from Pennsylvania. Three of the great jazz pianists, Errol Garner, Billy Strayhorn, and Ahmad Jamal, all attended Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh. I could listen to that music forever.
I hadn’t listened to Jim Croce in years, or Todd Rundgren or Labelle or the O’Jays, and I’m a fan of them all. Henry Mancini grew up in Pennsylvania and was the composer of the soundtracks to the movies of my childhood, and you know what? It’s terrible music, almost unlistenable. The two best songs, Peter Gunn and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, just can’t do enough to make me forget the Theme from Hatari! or Love Story or Dear Heart. If Mancini had been all we had to listen to, I couldn’t have left Pennsylvania fast enough.
Did I mention that Joe Pass was from Pennsylvania? And also Joe Pass?
Hans Bernhard, Joe Pass and Ella Fitzgerald, 1974, licensed under Creative Commons attribution.
Taylor Swift is from Pennsylvania, and Pink and Christina Aguilera and Joan Jett and Ethel Waters. Chubby Checker, Frankie Avalon. Fabian, and the Stylistics are from Pennsylvania. There’s also a pretty good classical orchestra in Philadelphia, and the Curtis Institute, and lots of new young bands. It is, all in all, a pretty great state for driving around listening to music.
Here’s a recording of the Guarneri Quartet with Emmanuel Axe playing the single best piano quintet ever written about trout, and brown trout specifically. All but one of the Guarneri Quartet studied at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute.
Guitar
I took the Kohno, and played a good bit, though I don’t remember playing anything in particular; some Bach, some Villa-Lobos, some Sanz. I almost certainly worked some on a guitar transcription of Pavane for a Dead Princess. I always work some on a guitar transcription of Pavane for a Dead Princess, and never remember any of it beyond the first couple of pages. Too bad there are five pages. Ravel, by the way, was not from Pennsylvania, but I bet he would have liked it.
Even before this trip, I’ve seen a lot of Arkansas. I’ve visited the Clinton Library, and the vaccine microchip hadn’t yet told me to. I went to Fayetteville as a teenager and as an adult I’ve seen the Arkansas Delta and Washington and Hot Springs. In January we went to the new museum in Bentonville, Crystal Bridges. My parents took us camping for a week at the Albert Pike Campground, to me a magical place with sparkling clear water where we swam in the heat of the day in the river, and that in 2010 was washed away by flood waters. Sixteen campers were killed. It’s never re-opened.
I have seen the Buffalo River, the first designated National Wild and Scenic River, but only from a car from a bridge. I’ve intended to canoe the Buffalo for 30 years. I still haven’t. I should have gone there to catch my fish. I didn’t. I guess I still need to go back to Arkansas.
US Forest Service, Buffalo River
Where We Went
Other than fishing, we stopped at the Dulcimer Shoppe in Mountain View Arkansas (“Folk Music Capital of the World”). I bought a jar of wild elderberry jelly, since that seemed suitably folksy, but Kris wanted a dulcimer. Did you know that in addition to your index and middle fingers, you use your thumb to fret a dulcimer? I didn’t, so I both learned something and got us out of the shop without a dulcimer. Success! It was a nice shop, and Kris really was sold on dulcimers. The jelly is good too, whatever elderberries may be.
This trip we went out of our way to see Little Rock Central High School. Everyone knows the photo of Elizabeth Eckford walking into Central High: the dignity and vulnerability of Miss Eckford, the rage of the white students . . . In person what’s striking about Central is its size, it’s big, and also its neighborhood. In 1957 when Eisenhower enforced integration there were three high schools in Little Rock . One of the schools, Horace Mann, was black, two others, Central and Hall, were white. One of the white schools, Hall, was generally affluent, which is why integration was slated for working-class Central.
The Central neighborhood hasn’t improved since the 50s. It’s still the same small houses, now 70 years longer in the tooth. It has slipped below working class, or maybe the working class has slipped below what it had achieved in the 50s. The school itself is handsome. Its neighborhood is rough.
Derek Chauvin’s trial for George Floyd’s murder started this week, so racially charged photographs are in the forefront, but there was another Arkansas event this week that brought Miss Eckford to mind. The Arkansas Legislature overrode a gubernatorial veto of a bill forbidding transgender youth from receiving therapy, puberty blockers and hormones, that would aid transition. Many won’t notice the legislation, but it is, well, central, and certainly central to the transgender youth and their families. The proponents’ reasoning is that minors are too young to make gender decisions, and the opponents’ reasoning is that those decisions are best left to the youth, their parents, and their doctors, not the state legislature. I don’t know why anybody would be dubious about the decisions of a state legislature. The Arkansas legislature must be at least as qualified as the Texas.
Playlist
I liked the music we listened to driving around Arkansas. We listened to a lot of Lucinda Williams because, while she was born in St. Charles, she attended the University of Arkansas. I first heard her name on Houston’s nonprofit Pacifica radio station, when theDJ said she had a crush on Lucinda Williams. I’ve listened a lot to Ms. Williams since. I always thought that if I could choose someone famous to sit by on an airplane–this is my personal version of who you’d like at your dinner party–Lucinda Williams would be high on the list. I finally saw her on stage a dozen years ago, and she appeared to be just what I should have thought: a little tough, a little road-weary, a little wild. I don’t share that DJ’s crush, but I would like to talk to Ms. Williams for an hour.
Is there a better road song (or a better song about living in the country) than Car Wheels on a Gravel Road?
Currier & Ives, The Fall of Richmond, Va., on the Night of April 2, 1865, lithograph, Library of Congress.
Levon Helm was from Arkansas. That lets in all sorts of great music, including the troubling The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, which is a song I like in part because it is troubling. It is arguably about white loss with no connection to slavery, and is often heard as a South’s arising anthem. Ta-Nehisi Coates apparently wrote of the song that it was another song of the “blues of Pharaoh,” but it’s hard for me to equate Virgil Kane with Pharaoh, and it seems one of the points of the song that Pharaoh is Pharaoh and everybody else isn’t. Kane, the narrator, doesn’t mourn Dixie’s defeat, Kane suffers it; hunger, poverty, the death of a brother, and there’s no pride, no blame, only desperate endurance. As the lyrics say, you can’t raise a Kane back up when he’s in defeat. As difficult to interpret as it may be, it remains one of the great antiwar songs, and Kane could have been black or white–it wouldn’t change the song’s bleak message. Whatever happens to Pharaoh he’s still Pharaoh. The rest of us are going to be Virgil Kane.
There’s a common misinterpretation of the lyrics that explains some of the ambivalence of the song. There’s a line where Virgil’s wife calls to him: “Virgil, quick, come see,/There goes Robert E. Lee . . . “, the general. At least that’s the way the lyrics are as often as not misinterpreted. The lyrics are “the Robert E. Lee . . . “, the steamboat, which is apparently clear in the live version but a bit muddled in the original. I like the steamboat better, both as a matter of history–Robert E. Lee was never in Tennessee and the steamboat was on the Mississippi –and because the steamboat had its own fame and tragedy. It’s the sort of steamboat on which Pharaoh would ply the Nile, while Virgil Kane watched from the shoreline.
August Norieri, The Robert E. Lee, oil, 1884
In addition to The Band and Lucinda Williams, there’s also Al Green, Johnnie Cash, Lefty Frizzell, Roy Buchanan, Iris Dement, Conway Twitty, and blues musicians from the Delta: Robert Lockwood, Jimmy Witherspoon, Son Seals. If you ignore Black Oak Arkansas, Arkansas has a pretty good lineup.
Glen Campbell is also from Arkansas, which justifies Galveston and Wichita Lineman, but not Rhinestone Cowboy. Nothing justifies Rhinestone Cowboy.
Guitar
I took the old Kohno. Four years ago when we last fished in Arkansas, I sat on a balcony above the Little Red and tried to play Duarte’s transcription of Pavane pour une infante défunte. The lady on the next cabin balcony asked what I was playing–which either meant I was playing the piece well enough to be nearly recognizable or I played it badly enough that it was unrecognizable. I like to think that the name of the song–Pavane for a Dead Princess in English (though a more literal translation would be Dance that a long-dead princess might have danced)–was on the tip of her tongue, and she just couldn’t quite think of it.
This year I was still trying to play Pavane pour une infante défunte, so for me Ravel will always have a weird connection to Arkansas. I don’t know that Ravel ever went there, and I still can’t play the Pavane. I’m pretty sure there were no steamboats named The Maurice Ravel.
