Tag: Florida

Posted on

Stoneman Douglas High School and Mar-A-Lago

West Palm Beach is about 40 miles from Stoneman Douglas High School, where  a 19-year-old ex-student killed 17 students on Valentines Day.   There’s nothing special about Florida in that. It will happen again, somewhere, sooner rather than later.

Mar-A-Lago, President Trump’s Florida White House, is also about 40 miles from Stoneman Douglas, 4 miles from where we’re staying in West Palm Beach. I understand that the President has polled members of Mar-A-Lago about gun control, and actually I think a little better of him for it. Most of us are looking at our friends and asking what can be done.

I still have friends saying arm teachers, bring God into classrooms, restore decency. I’m fond of my friends, but some of them are nuts. Most teachers don’t want to be armed, and either God can go where he wants or not.

As for decency, there was the story today of a 15-year old victim, Peter Wang, who was murdered while he held the door open for other students.  He was wearing his JROTC uniform. Apparently he wanted to go to West Point, and yesterday, five days after he died, he was admitted to the class of 2025.

Posted on

Florida Canals

The highest point in Florida is Britton Hill at 345 feet above sea level, way up in Walton County in the Panhandle.  The average elevation in Houston is 80 feet above sea level, so 345 feet is pretty high. I suspect I’d have to worry about altitude sickness. Florida’s mean elevation is 100 feet.  The low point is the Atlantic Ocean which is, oddly enough, at sea level.

What that means–and I know this from recent experience with our own Hurricane Harvey–when it rains in Florida the water doesn’t necessarily drain. It sits. If it rains fast enough (and in Florida sometimes I’m guessing it rains fast enough) it piles up. To get stuff to drain you have to spend a lot of money on drainage improvements.  I bet in Denver they don’t have to spend a lot of money on drainage improvements. We do here in Houston. I bet they do in Florida.

So there is the South Florida Water Management District.  It oversees 2100 miles of freshwater and brackish canals in south Florida.  Then there are secondary canals run by cities and counties and water control districts. In South Florida there are a lot of canals that exist to move water in flat land where water don’t move.

In 1984 florida introduced peacock bass into the southern canals, both to create a game fishery and to add an aggressive fish that could control the other weird fish, and there’s some weird fish. According to the internet there are

Peacock Bass (photo from Wikipedia), baby tarpon, largemouth bass, grass carp, tilapia, snook,

oscars (from Wikipedia), jaguar guapote, Mayan cichlid, black acacia, clown knife fish,

snakehead (from Wikipedia). I have heard estimates that as many as 80 species live in the canals. Folk have to dump their aquariums somewhere.

Snakehead make excellent eating, but it may be an urban myth that you can’t catch and release.

It is somewhat of a thing in Florida to traipse or kayak along the canals to fly fish for exotics. In July Kris and I saw a presentation at Texas Flyfishers of Houston (which is sort of like the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, or the Texas Rangers of Arlington), by Jim Gray of the Austin Fly Fishers, on fishing the canals.  We walked out not intrigued so much as disgusted.  These were some ugly fish.

People fish these canals like I fish for black bass, with 6-8 weights and streamers, and I thought that maybe next week in West Palm we would look for a canal to fish. I chickened out and hired a guide.  I still thought maybe we would squeeze in an hour or so, and I asked the guide about them.  “Fire ants” he said, “moccasins” he said. “Be careful.”

Now honestly, I’ve been bit enough by fire ants to know their misery and its limits, and I have just as good a chance of moccasins hereabouts as I might have in Florida. Still, they’re ugly fish. We’re fishing salt water.

 

 

Posted on

Ted Williams

from the Boston Public Library

Florida’s population in  1850 was 87,445.  The population of Texas, also granted statehood in 1845, was 212,592 (which included at least one of my great grandfathers, Joseph M. McReynolds, and another great-great grandfather, Samuel Elliott).  As of 2015, Florida was estimated to have a population of 20.24 million, making it the third most populous state behind California and Texas. In 1900 the population of Florida was 528,542.  Between 1960 and 2010 the population grew from 6,789,443 to 18,801,310.

I don’t think I have any ancestors who landed in Florida, and Texans don’t go to Florida to retire, but that’s what I’m finding out about Florida.  People come to Texas for oil and gas, or maybe medicine, NASA, or agriculture; people go to California for tech and agriculture and to be stars; people go to the Sunshine State for, well, sunshine. The Boys are Where They Are for sunshine.  The 17% retiree population is in Florida for sunshine.  It is the state of land speculation and oranges and sunshine. South Florida is further south than Brownsville, Texas, which I thought was as far south as the world went.  The average temperature of West Palm Beach, which is where we’re a’heading for our fishing foray, is 75.35°, which is higher even than the average for Houston,  69.05°.  It better not be humid.

And there were plenty of carpetbaggers after sunshine, from Henry Flagler to Governor Rick Scott. Ernest Hemingway carpetbagged.  Tennessee Williams carpetbagged.  Jack Kerouac carpetbagged. It’s a thing.

Going to Florida for baseball and fishing, I’ve been thinking a lot about the carpet baggerTed Williams.  There was never a purer hitter than Ted Williams.  He was the last player to hit .400, and maybe the last ever (though I have some vague hope for Jose Altuve).  He spent three prime seasons in military service as a navy fighter pilot in World War II and Korea.  He didn’t get along with Boston fans, for which one can hardly blame him, didn’t get along with his players when he managed, didn’t get along with the Boston press, was a 17-year All Star, a two-time MVP, and between 1941 and 1958 led the league in hitting six separate times. His head is frozen in a cryogenic lab, and I don’t think the lab has ever been paid. 

A generation bought Ted Williams sporting gear from Sears Roebuck: he was the paragon of the late mid-century sportsman. Williams’ had a 3,193-square-foot home on Upper Magecumbe Key on Islamorada.  There was a Sears Ted Williams model boat and motor, and Ted Williams shotguns and baseball gloves and weights. There was Ted Williams fishing gear. He was one of a group including Lefty Kreh, Joe Brooks, Chico Fernandez, and A.J. McClane who invented fly fishing for bonefish.  At one point Williams claimed to have caught 1000 bonefish and 1000 tarpon and 1000 Atlantic salmon, so he hit 1.000 for something.  He was obsessed with fly fishing. He was obsessed with fishing. I suspect he was as opinionated and fussy of an angler as he was a manager, if not a batter.

I’m not sure he would have been fun to fish with.  He would have been great to fish with.

Posted on

Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Rita Mae Brown

To get ready to fly fish Florida, I need to do some reading.  I’ve been preparing.

Possibly the best known authors from Florida are three women: Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Rita Mae Brown. I’ve read one novel by each (though I may long ago have also read a collection of folklore by Hurston).  Hurston of course was an African American author whose most famous work,Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937. Rawlings was a white carpetbagger-author from Washington, D.C. who published The Yearling in 1938. Both novels were about rural hard-scrabble Florida and were published at the end of the Great Depression. Brown wrote a lot of mystery novels that involve a cat which I don’t think I’ve read, but is famous for Rubyfruit Jungle, a lesbian coming-of-age novel published in 1973.  I probably read it in 1978 or so.  I haven’t re-read it.

Their Eyes Were Watching God begins early in the 1900s in Eatonville, a black community north of Orlando.  I guess it’s a coming-of-age novel, though the heroine Janey shoots right through the coming-of and lands on independent womanhood. It does take three husbands, one of whom she marries as a child and then abandons, one of whom she is happy to see die, and one of whom she shoots with a rifle when he gets rabies and tries to shoot her with a pistol.  She liked the last one. There are a paucity of white folk, and a lot of rural black dialogue, but it’s an immensely likable novel, and important. I’m not really sure I remember how God comes into it, but being omnipresent he’s probably in the center of things.

The Yearling, published a year later, is set earlier, after the Civil War, but again a bit north of Orlando. It is also a coming of age novel, a dark coming of age novel about a boy who is forced to choose between his greatest friend, a yearling deer, and his family’s survival.  The deer decides the corn crop is ready to hand and tasty. The Yearling probably qualifies as young adult fiction. There are the bad guys who burn houses but are always there to lend a hand,  likable Pa who in the book is remarkably small but in the movie is miscast as Gregory Peck, the world-weary and no-nonsense Ma who is large and ugly but in the movie is miscast as Jane Wyman, and Jody the boy who almost kills himself getting to manhood.  As young adult fiction it is extremely important, as adult fiction maybe not so much.  It did win a Pulitzer, and it was my mother’s favorite novel–she was 21 the year it was published–and I suspect her childhood on a Texas dryland farm was closer to the childhood in The Yearling than it was to my childhood. I love the book.

In Finding Florida T.D. Allman lambasts Rawlings because there are no blacks in The Yearling, when a significant portion of Florida’s population was and is black, but it doesn’t seem that strange to me.  InTheir Eyes Were Watching God, other than Janey’s birth story, there’s no significant white presence (though like God there may be some omnipresence).  Among the rural Southern poor, there wasn’t always much cross-racial exchange.  You might as well criticize Rawlings and Hurston for failing to include lesbians.  I’m sure there were some lesbians in Florida, I don’t think lesbians were invented in 1973, but they wouldn’t have been particularly central to the lives of the characters in these novels. It is easy to forget how complete segregation was, and among poor whites there were no servants from which to wring a Driving Miss Daisy or The Help.  It is perfectly likely that The Yearling’s Baxters on their  isolated farm had as much interaction with African Americans as Rawlings portrayed. Maybe some more, but not so much as to be worth noticing, and the Baxter’s attitudes probably wouldn’t have made them more likable; maybe taught us something, but only as a sideshow.

As for Rubyfruit Jungle, I don’t remember much about it.  The heroine was a young woman who always knew she was a lesbian and grew into it and out into the world. It was the novel of the age when it was published, rich with feminist principal and sexual liberation, but for me at least its age has probably come and gone.  Maybe not, but I suspect it’s past its shelf life. When I read it originally I’m not sure I got the reference in the title, I was far more familiar with ruby red grapefruit, Texas’ finest, than other forms of ruby fruit, but I’ve always been a bit slow.  It is more parochial than the other two novels.  I suspect that many lesbians would say it’s more personal than the other two novels.

I don’t believe there’s a mandate that Florida authoresses have three-part names.