Tag: Fly rods

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Arkansas Packing List, Part I

Vaccines

We had ’em, two of ’em each, plus the 10 days’ grace period. No side effects, though I’m certain that Hillary Clinton is telling me it’s time for another trip to Arkansas.

Besides mind control (of which I’m all in favor–not having to make decisions seems like a real boon), my friend Limey tells me that the CDC has determined that with rare exceptions the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines prevent virus infections, and don’t just lessen the symptoms. I need to check to see where Limey got his information, but part of me wants not to check and believe what’s most favorable to my world-view. I guess I’m having a fake news moment.

Apparently everybody in Arkansas and East Texas has already had the vaccine, because there wasn’t much social distancing or mask wearing. In a gas station, the cashier pulled down her mask so that I could hear her answer my question. I’m pretty sure I’d have heard her anyway, but I guess she figured I needed to read her lips. In a cafe, another cashier told the couple waiting for a table at the register that I was brave so they didn’t need to move. I told her I wasn’t brave at all. Actually, I think I’m brave enough, but I’m not stupid. I am both a baseball fan and a fisherman, so my outlook starts from superstitious, and as a lawyer I’m always belt and suspenders. Why test fate?

We wouldn’t have gone into restaurants without the vaccine, which leads me to

Where We Ate

It’s just as well that fine dining is a consideration but not a requirement, because there isn’t a lot of fine dining in Arkansas. There is some, in Bentonville and Little Rock, but Arkansas doesn’t really rival Paris, France. On the whole it’s a cheap-food-and-lots-of-it kind of cuisine. There’s nothing wrong with that, but as often as not it’s not something one wants to remember.

Kris and I both like to cook, and even before the pandemic we cooked at home most days. Restaurants are rare, so maybe I think more about them than I should. What good things make me remember a restaurant? I can remember some places vividly, a fish place in the Keys where the fish was great and the couples next to us argued about Donald Trump, a dinner at Three Brothers Serbian in Milwaukee with our friends Tom and Sal, a weekend of ethnic eating in Chicago suggested by Tom, a Basque place in Reno (again suggested by Tom) where we sat at a communal table. . . As often as not I remember places because they are great food, sure, but I think as much because they tell me something about the place. I hated Voodoo Donuts in Portland, bad service, bad food, too many gimmicks, but it did tell me something about Portland. That’s not, though, memory created by good things.

On our January pre-Arkansas fishing excursion, we ate at the Hive in Bentonville. The Hive is generic American imaginative–the kind of place you can now find in almost any urban area From Sea to Shining Sea, with pretty similar menus. It was just fine, had a good wine list, and could have been anywhere, from the Wine Country to Connecticut.

So for this Arkansas trip I tried to figure out where Arkansans thought was essential Arkansas eating. A lot of the places were further west than us, a lot involved fried catfish (which I like), and none were in Heber Springs where we stayed. We had been to Heber Springs before, and pretty much knew what was there. I wouldn’t let the food keep me away from Heber Springs, but I wouldn’t go back for it.

On the way to Heber Springs, we drove out of our way to the Bulldog Restaurant in Bald Knob, because (1) who doesn’t want to visit Bald Knob, and (2) they were supposed to have excellent strawberry shortcake. It has excellent strawberry shortcake because Central Arkansas is, apparently, a strawberry-growing region, and there were no strawberries yet, so no strawberry shortcake. We had a good burger and fries, thought it looked like the people at the next table ordered smarter than us. They always do.

On the way home, we ate breakfast at Cheryl’s Diner in Cabot for their chocolate gravy. Apparently chocolate gravy on biscuits is a breakfast thing in Arkansas. If you can imagine a slightly creamier version of chocolate pudding slathered onto a biscuit, you have chocolate biscuits. I like biscuits. I like cream gravy. I have now had chocolate gravy on biscuits. It was certainly memorable. I would go back for Cheryl’s cream gravy on biscuits.

We skipped a last meal in Arkansas and made it to Jefferson, Texas, to Riverport Barbecue, which is on the Texas Monthly top-50 list. It was 3 in the afternoon, and they were out of just about everything. Except for me and one teenager, no one wore a mask. That teenager was a rebel, and so was I.

We did eat at a great place in Shreveport, Strawn’s Eat Shop, recommended by my high school classmate Cindy (who lives in Shreveport). Great strawberry and coconut icebox pie, and chicken fried steak as part of it’s meat and three lunch special. Larry McMurtry once wrote that only a rank degenerate would drive across Texas without eating a chicken fried steak. We weren’t in Texas, but still. Avoiding rank degeneracy should always be a goal, though some degeneracy probably doesn’t hurt. Cindy texted that Strawn’s would be a good place for a reality TV show: The Waitresses of Strawn’s Eat Shop. Thanks Cindy. You’re right, both about the waitresses and Strawn’s Eat Shop.

The Drive

What’s it like driving up I-40 through Arkansas? It’s like this:

Gear

We took trout stuff; a 9-foot 6 weight for streamers, a 10-foot 4 weight and a 10-foot 3 weight, and a couple of 9-foot 5 weights (because you have to have a five-weight when you fish for trout, even if you never use it). All had reels with floating lines. We fished them all except my Winston 5 weight.

There is a story with the 4 weight, a Thomas & Thomas Avantt that four years ago I’d bought on sale. This year Kris gave me a Thomas & Thomas 10-foot 3 weight for my birthday. 

Here’s the thing about all that weight stuff: with fly fishing, it’s usually the weight of the line that lets you cast the fly, so you match a 3 weight rod to a 3 weight line. You can overline, you can match a 3 weight rod with a 4 weight line, or underline–I’ll let you figure that out yourself–but all of that is nerdy fiddling. Weights and lines are pretty much standardized (if a bit esoteric).

Anyway, I thought I’d taken the new 3 weight, but had accidentally taken the 4 weight. Do I need both these rods that do pretty much the same thing? What a silly question, of course I do. The thing was, I thought I’d taken the 3 weight until I got home. I put a 3 weight line on the 4 weight, and never noticed anything wrong. We had so much weight on the rigs, both with heavy weighted flies and split shot, and all the casts were so short, it made no difference. Not to me anyway. 

All the weighted flies and split shot were to get the flies down in the river as quick as possible and then keep them there. And also to smack me in the back of the head if I tried to get fancy with my casting.

Flies

I’m a firm believer that if I’m fishing with a guide, I should use the flies that the guide brings to the river. It’s funny though, I always look at what should fish in a place, and usually try to tie a few things to fish there. This time I tied some big streamers, Barr’s meat whistles, and fished them for a bit. I foul hooked–snagged–one rainbow in the gill plate, but nothing else. I decided streamer fishing was a lot of work for low reward and stuck to the guide’s stuff. I’ll use the excuse on the streamers that my shoulder’s been hurting.

Drew started us out with mop flies (and I could go into a long digression on mop flies, but won’t), but then switched me to a marabou jig fly, and that worked better. He really liked the jig flies, and bought them pre-tied from Little Rock. He claimed that you could catch anything with a jig fly, and frankly I thought they looked like the perfect fly for crappie and white bass.

Thirty years ago in Arkansas, scud flies were all the rage. Scud flies are an underwater fly that is supposed to look like a shrimp-related crustacean called, of all things, a scud. I don’t think it has anything to do with the missile. Think roly-polies, doodle bugs, but in water. I have never been able to imagine the fly, though from time to time I’ve tried to tie them. Drew said that a study from ASU (translation, Arkansas State University) had determined that scuds were Arkansas trouts’ primary food, and that Arkansans still heavily fished scud flies because Arkansas trout still ate them. He put one on a dropper on Kris’s rig. I thought Oh boy, I’ll see a scud fly, and then I forgot to take a look. I guess I was busy watching my orange bobber.

The second day we fished shallower, and Drew had us fish hare’s ear nymphs, which are about as traditional a fly as nymphs can be. His flies were sparse, and tied on tiny jig hooks. 

When we came back I tied more Barr’s meat whistles–I wanted to go ahead and use up my cache of streamer jig hooks, and yesterday I fished a purple one at Damon’s. I caught my largest bass in a while, and I watched it crash across a sandy flat to hit the fly. The meat whistle’s usually thought of as a trout streamer, but as often as not, fish are fish. Next time I’ll try a marabou jig fly.

Terrible picture, I know. But it was a big fish, and I wanted to keep it in the water. The purple smudge in the vicinity of its mouth is a purple Barr’s meat whistle.

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Little Red and Norfork Rivers, Arkansas, March 18-19, 2021

We planned to fish Arkansas last April, but then coronavirus. We delayed. We delayed some more. We finally delayed a year, less a couple of weeks.

We should have gone last April. People now are maskless and uninhibited, and we might have been safer traveling during the first days of the pandemic. At least more people were worried then. Traveling this week through East Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, people are done with being careful. Some of it I suspect is mulish stubbornness–contrariness (can you imagine an East Texan or Arkansan being contrary?); I don’t need no stinkin’ seat belt and you don’t need one either. Some of it is exhaustion and the strong gravity of normalcy. There weren’t a lot of masks, and no particular effort to distance. Restaurants were packed. My guess is that we’re in a close race between vaccinations and another upsurge. 

At least it’s spring. Ok, technically today when I’m writing is the first day of spring, and we fished the last days of winter, but this is the South. The dogwoods and redbuds are blooming and beautiful. It was cold though. We caught an unseasonable cold front and it was 36° when we left Heber Springs. It was as cold or colder the two days we fished. I wore long underwear, ear flaps, and wind gear because not only was it cold, it was blowing. And blowing. Don’t forget the blowing.

It never rained. That’s a good thing, and the second afternoon it warmed up and the sun shone. Shined? Was shining.

We fished with Rouse Fly Fishing. I finally re-booked because Jamie Rouse was a February guest on Tom Rosenbauer’s Orvis podcast, which always inspires me. There are three year-round trout rivers in Arkansas: the White, the Little Red, and the Norfork. The trout are all below dams built for power generation and flood control. The White is the longest of the three, with its headwaters in the Boston Mountains in Northwest Arkansas. It flows first perversely north into Missouri, then turns southeast again to cross the state and meet the Mississippi near Rosedale. Rosedale, as you may know, is where you sell your soul to the devil to play the blues. I don’t know whether the White is interested in the blues, but at 720 miles, it moves a lot of water.

Rouse’s guides guide in all three rivers, though truth be told it’s 100 winding miles from Heber Springs to the main fishing on the White. For the White they may not be the most efficient guide choice. It’s ok though, fly fishing is popular in northwest Arkansas, and if you really want to fish the White, Rouse will guide there, and if not you can’t throw a rock in towns like Cotter without hitting a fishing guide. Every hamlet and holler seems to have its fly shop.

Both the Little Red and Norfork are tributaries to the White. Of course none of these rivers were originally cold water rivers, none of them originally held trout. Arkansas is in the southern native range for smallmouth bass, so before the dams they presumably held some combination of smallmouth and largemouth bass, catfish, sunfish, and plenty of other stuff: the Ozark Plateau is one of the richest areas in these United States for different documented fish species. Seventy-four different species of fish have been identified in the nearby Buffalo River.

With the steady cold water releases from the dams, the species list in the three rivers below the dams narrows until only two are ever talked about, rainbow trout and brown trout. The Little Red is an eight hour drive from Houston, even closer to Dallas and Memphis and Oklahoma City. While there are other trout streams that are closer, the three rivers are a draw for trout anglers, and they hold a lot of catchable trout. Stocked fish mostly, and the rivers are not really wadable (though I’ve read that it is possible to wade near the Norfork dam). Still, they have produced world-record brown trout, and there is reproduction of wild fish. All of the brown trout in the Little Red are wild. In any event, when your home fisheries in Texas and Kansas and West Tennessee don’t include a lot of trout, the three Arkansas rivers are a draw.

Our guide was Drew Wilson. I don’t think Kris and I are particularly hard clients to guide. We didn’t hook Drew, not hard anyway. We didn’t break anything on his boat or any of his equipment. We didn’t even get tangled more than the national average.

The first day with Drew we fished the Little Red. Kris and I had fished the Little Red once before, four years ago in summer, and it was a different fishery then. I guess every river every day is a different river. In a river where, depending on dam releases, it can rise or fall nine feet in a day, that seems especially true. When we fished with Rouse four years ago flow was low, and I threw mostly streamers, big Barr’s meat whistles and smaller clousers. I caught some big fish, and some browns. Like I said, brown trout in the Little Red are always wild.

This trip the river ran deeper, and on the Little Red we fished marabou jig flies with plenty of weight, eight feet deep on a straight six pound leader below a two foot stiff butt section and a big Thingamabobber indicator–a bobber. It’s funny. Fly anglers are language squeamish. Kris drives me crazy when she calls her fly rod a pole, and I suspect she does it on purpose. Flies are flies, not lures. But with bobbers anglers don’t let their squeamishness get in the way of the truth. We take joy in calling those big round indicators bobbers. What did we see in Arkansas? We saw a big orange bobber floating down a river.

Usually when Kris and I fish with guides, we talk with the guide about everything; children, significant others, schools and jobs and where each of us came from and where we think we’re going. With Drew there wasn’t much of that. I doubt if Drew knows that we’re both lawyers, or have children, and we don’t know whether Drew finished college or whether he has a significant other. Kris never once talked about politics (which may be a sign that at least for Kris the election is finally over). We talked about fish, about rivers, about rigging and flies and boats and rods. The conversations were easy and amusing and we liked Drew immensely. As a guide he was attentive and capable, knowing and unflappable. As a companion for two days he was fun. He even mentioned books he liked, though all of them were about fishing.

And we talked about our dogs. You can’t not talk about dogs. And we caught a lot of fish.

Northwest Arkansas is also popular with gear fishers, and the second day on the Norfork there was a spin fish armada. Out of maybe 15 boats, we were the only fly anglers I saw. The Norfork below the dam is a short river, about five and a half miles long, and because of lower flows we only got within a mile or so of the dam. By day’s end we’d been pushed even further down river, and boats were stacked at the confluence with the White. We were motoring up and floating down the same mile over and over. We started the morning with the deep-water rigs we had used on the Little Red, but ended with a tiny foam tab indicator five or six feet over, of all things, a hare’s ear nymph. It almost felt wrong using such a traditional fly, and a single fly to boot. Where’s my mop fly! Where’s my squirmy worm! Don’t you want me to catch fish?

We caught a lot of fish.

Maybe it was because of the sunshine and the afternoon’s warmer weather, maybe it was the novelty of the river or the pleasure of the lighter rigging, or maybe I just finally caught the rhythm of the fishing, but notwithstanding the crowds I enjoyed fishing the Norfork more than the Little Red. We didn’t catch more fish on the Norfork, but we caught a lot of fish.

Two fairly technical notes. First, Arkansas river boats are unique. On the three rivers gear fishers and fly fishers fish from more or less the same boats, with fly guides likely to have added oar locks and oars. They’re long, fairly narrow, shallow draft rectangles, Jon boats, built from aluminum or fiberglass. Motors are relatively small, Drew’s boat had a 40 HP, and guides favor jet motors instead of props. With their flat bottoms they’re probably more like rowing rubber rafts than the classic high-rockered drift boat, but they’re comfortable to fish from and well designed for Arkansas.

Second, the first day I fished a 10′ 4 wt Thomas & Thomas Avantt rod that I’d bought a few years ago. Nine foot is kind of the standard for fly rods, but there’s a theoretical advantage to a longer rod because they can cast farther. There’s a theoretical disadvantage in loss of accuracy, but none of the theory mattered anyway. None of our casts were much more than 20 feet.

Kris fished a 9′ 5 wt on the Little Red, but the second day she fished a 10’6″ Orvis Helios 3 wt that she’d bought herself for my birthday. It maybe the longest single-handed rod on the market. I don’t know about the other theoretical advantages of the longer rods, but they shine at managing line on the water. Most of the work fishing rivers isn’t casting or playing fish, it’s the constant adjustments to the line to achieve a drag-free drift. It is the hardest work of the day, and that extra foot, or in Kris’s case that extra foot-and-a-half, is a noticeable advantage.

Interestingly, I liked the Thomas & Thomas better than the Orvis, but I suspect it was because we had a much lighter reel on the T&T, and because I’d fished it for a day before before I tried the Orvis. Plus it was Blue. Color matters.

On our last drift of the day, down through the spin-fish armada and into the White, the fish got hot. We landed fish after fish, and when we landed a double the gear fishers in the next boat applauded. When we reached the White (at least I’m saying we were in the White–that way I can claim a fish in all three rivers), I landed my final fish of the day, and the only brown of the trip. Drew offered to take us on another drift, but why would we? How could things get better?

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I went fishing

You may not know this, but it’s a peculiar time. On a Saturday back in April, the first time I’d left the house after my office shut down, I went to Houston Dairymaids and they delivered cheese curbside. I ordered barbecue from Pinkerton’s and they delivered curbside. We picked up a curbside order at Houston’s big liquor store, Spec’s. We were out of Four Roses bourbon, and running low on gin. It’s that kind of time.

It’s been too windy this spring for the Bay, so except to fish on our local bass ponds that day’s trip from one curbside delivery to another is about as much as I’ve traveled. I haven’t been to a restaurant except to pick up take-out. I’ve been into a grocery store, but even for groceries I usually order online and pick up curbside.

I continue to work, though it feels odd, disconnected, like working on holiday. My firm laid off some employees and reduced salaries for most employees. Those decisions were beyond my pay grade, and my heart ached for affected friends and colleagues. I completed a project for a bank, advised a client whose rental car and hotel revenues had suddenly stopped, and participated in a lot of conference calls. Kris cut my hair. She needs to cut it again.

I postponed our trip to Arkansas. We were supposed to go April 4, to fish the Little Red. I offered to pay the guides for the delayed trip when I canceled, but they said come when we can. I’ve prepaid our guides for our July trip to North Carolina. I worry about how my guide friends are doing.

This is not a warbler.

The warbler migration has come and gone.

I wear a mask when I go into stores or the office, but not when I run. I wash my hands more than before. I’ve cooked a lot, and I try to keep my daily workout schedule, with more discipline than enthusiasm, but that’s always been the case. I don’t read books as much as I should, and play the guitar constantly, working through all the jazz method books I’ve collected over the years, filling notebooks with diagrams of chords with strange names like G7(b9) and Ab m7b5. I’ve been working through the songs in the sixth edition of the Real Fake Book, most of which are jazz standards that I’ve never heard. Did you know that Airegin by Sonny Rollins is Nigeria spelled backwards? I didn’t know the song at all.

I read a funny quote about jazz guitarists, that they make a living playing wrong notes.

At least once a day I read the Houston Chronicle, The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post, The New York Times. I haven’t watched TV much. There’s no baseball, so what’s the point? I did watch videos of George Floyd’s death. The Floyd protests in Houston came past our office building, and I half-heartedly planned to go downtown and stand on the street in support, but they closed our building for the big march and the stationary part of my half-heartedness won. My daughter went. If I’d known she was going I’d have gone with her. My Houston neighbors reacted to the death with surprising restraint and civility. I was worried about coronavirus, and Kris was sick from some other bug that we thought might be coronavirus, so I stayed home.

It wasn’t coronavirus, but man was she sick, and it frightened us.

There are now two Black Lives Matter yard signs on our block. It’s a pretty diverse block, with both doctors and lawyers. There are no African Americans. There are Asians, Middle-Easterners, a Scot, a couple of gay households, an Austrian professor of mathematics, plenty of everyday garden variety white folk, and a Chinese-American geophysicist who is Kris’s go-to expert on local birds. . . I’m proud that two of my neighbors have signs.

Meanwhile my friend Melvin posted on Facebook that as an adult black man he’d been stopped a dozen times by police for no cause. Was it a dozen, or was it ten? One was too many for one of the best men I know. A black work colleague told us that he never ran in his neighborhood without a baggie with a drivers license and a business card. Someone wrote that responding to Black Lives Matter with a statement that All Lives Matter is a bit like responding to your wife’s query about your love for her with a statement that you love everybody. It might be true, but it’s not relevant.

Two acquaintances, maybe three, died of the virus, one black, two white. My friend Peggy told me her brother had died.

I’ve thought a lot about Colin Kaepernick. In the immediate aftermath of Kaepernick’s knee, I was disappointed that something important, continued institutional violence against blacks, was trivialized into something unimportant, whether it was acceptable for a football player to take a knee during the National Anthem. It was actually two players, Kaepernick and Eric Reid, who took the knee, and there was an article in the Chronicle last week interviewing Reid’s brother on the Texans, Justin, who said the same thing, that the narrative got twisted from a protest against police violence to an uproar about flag disrespect. There was a difference though between my reaction and Justin Reid’s. My reaction was to blame Kaepernick for the twisted message. I was wrong. I guess it just goes to show, it’s easy to blame the victim.

Did I mention that I’ve been through lots of Four Roses?

I’ve spent some hours most weekends drifting in a canoe on the lakes at Damon’s. I have a solo Wenonah, a lovely little thing, made for travel, and I’ll sit in the canoe and drift across a pond while I cast. I caught a four or five pound catfish one day, a four pound bass another, both on a six weight Winston with a Hardy Marquis reel. I’ve caught a lot of smaller bass and sunfish, bluegills and greens, and they always bring more joy to me than any other fish. My cast right now is very good, and I’ve tied a lot of flies too, variants on BBBs, with possum dubbing and long soft hackle guinea hen collars that I’d bought for steelhead flies. Don’t tell anyone, but while I’m home I can tie during conference calls.

Looking at the photos of me holding the big bass and catfish with a boga grip, the results aren’t good for catch and release. I’ve decided to use a net from now on, even for warmwater fish.

My mother loved guinea hens. She always said they were better farm guard than dogs. Maybe I’ll get some guinea hens for our yard, during the pandemic there’s not as much traffic on my street as there used to be. Maybe I’ll get a Black Lives Matter sign.

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Washington Playlist

What We Took

We took 7 wt and 8/9 wt. Beulah Spey rods.. We took skagit lines for both, and a variety of tips. We fished T-17 tips, whatever that means. The smaller rod was matched to a Hardy Marquis Salmon No. 2 reel, and for the larger I stripped a 12 wt floating tarpon line off of a Galvan Tournament Series Reel. They’re both pretty things. I’m a sucker for reels.

We put 8 wt Rio InTouch Salmon/Steelhead floating lines on two saltwater reels, both Tibor Everglades, and fished them on 9 foot 8 wt rods–Kris’s rods, a Helios 3 and a Helios 2. I got the Helios 2.

The Olympic Peninsula may be the last stronghold of boot-footed waders, the kind of waders with attached rubber boots instead of neoprene stockings worn under separate wading boots. Ryan the guide said that boot foot waders are warmer, and I believe it: my feet were always cold once I’d waded, notwithstanding the Darn Tough expedition socks and liners. Plus our boots never dried after we finished fishing, kicking my luggage over the 50 pound limit. “Happy Valentines” the nice lady at the Southwest Counter said when she didn’t charge me for overweight luggage.

I wore everything I had. Everything. The temperatures were warm enough, it was sunny and there was no wind, but I’m from Houston. I wore everything I had.

Victoria, B.C.

The Black Ball Ferry Line ferry, The Coho, runs from Port Angeles to Victoria. I hadn’t been on The Coho since 1962, when I was five, and my memory of it was somewhat spotty. Mostly I remember my sister being seasick, really, really seasick. So does she. We texted about it on the ferry, and I though she was going throw up by text.

We ate in one memorable restaurant, OLO, which is Chinook for hungry, and one less memorable restaurant, Little Jumbo, where I had fish in a sauce that reminded me of cream gravy. I like cream gravy. Loaded up with pepper and served on either biscuits or chicken fried steak it is the very thing, but cream gravy on grilled ling isn’t particularly successful. It was described on the menu as sunchoke cream, but cream gravy is cream gravy and you can’t fool me. It would have been better with some bacon grease.

We had afternoon tea at the Butchart Gardens, which even midwinter are beautiful, and midwinter have the advantage of no crowds. Afternoon tea is a thing in Victoria, and not having tea is punishable with heavy fines. They even ask at the border if you’ve had your tea. I suspect it magnifies their separation from the weird coffee concoctions on the other side of the border, but it also made me feel good. This was my kind of crowd. Afternoon tea is apparently a thing for the post-60s set.

In a bar, Bard and Banker, we ordered a dozen oysters that never came. Management should tell its servers that even raw oysters can’t walk from the kitchen. I watched ice hockey on the bar tv, so I knew I was in Canada. The Lightning won in overtime. I don’t know where the Lightning are from, or who they were playing.

The Royal B.C. Museum is spectacular, mostly because of the First Nation exhibits, both the past–these were pretty sophisticated people with pretty interesting stuff–and the present. Everywhere there are signs explaining that some of the objects are exhibited by treaty.

We had two very strange encounters.

I don’t smoke many cigars, but, when one can buy Cuban cigars one should buy a few, just in case any Cubans come to visit. When we were leaving the Cuban Cigar Shop the other customer was wearing an Astros cap. He was from Conroe, about 50 miles from Houston, and he was in Victoria building its first sewage treatment plant. This is a city of 350,000, and it’s never had a sewage treatment plant. It fine screens the sewage that otherwise goes straight to the ocean, trusting on currents and cold water to clean things up. I was kinda glad those oysters never got served.

Cohibas, the cigar that Castro smoked, are very good.

Victoria has its street life, it’s a walkable city with its best restaurants and shops and bars tightly packed around the port, so we walked. It’s grungier than I had expected, with a rough edge to its street life. Lots o’ street folk. Walking to OLO the first night a young guy on the street lunged at us . . .

And coughed, hacked, coughed hard, uncovered, clearly at us. It was a 21st century, post-coronavirus assault. Kris was shaken, I was angry, but if you just wanted to hassle people it was brilliant. Lunge and cough. Terrifying.

We stayed at the Best Western Plus Carlton Plaza. Nice enough, and central, but they didn’t have morning coffee in the lobby, which is unforgivable. We should have sprung for The Fairmont Empress.

Seattle, Wa.

In Seattle we had an early flight so we stayed near the airport. We walked around the Ballard neighborhood on the first day, trying to find oysters, and on our last evening ate at Matt’s in the Market, in the Pike Place Market, mostly because there were pictures of it all over the internet and it looked pretty. We wanted to see the Market, but by the time we got there from Victoria almost everything was\closed. Someday we’ll go back to Seattle for a baseball game. They did have coffee in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express.

What We Didn’t Do

We didn’t eat at our acquaintance Jack’s barbecue place in Seattle. We didn’t spend much time in Seattle, and none in Vancouver. We didn’t see any baseball or catch a sea-run cutthroat trout. We didn’t do any yoga. We smoked no marijuana, though I started to ask the cluster of accountants outside the Pike Place Market for a toke. Really? Accountants? They had to be accountants. They looked like either accountants or lawyers, but tax lawyers.

What I Lost

I lost an Apple Air Pod, which left me with a case and a single Air Pod. Did you know that you can buy a single Air Pod from Apple? It’s not cheap, about $70, but cheaper than a new set.

I lost my Nikon waterproof point and shoot, with all the best pictures of our fishing trip. I’d decided to replace it with a new iPhone, but last night Jack Mitchell of the Evening Hatch texted that they’d found my camera. That’s a pretty good trip for me. Only one Air Pod lost. Only one fly rod broken.

Donuts

Empire Donuts in Victoria had good coffee, and a Star Wars theme. There was nothing wrong with the donuts. We went out of our way to go to Sidney Bakery, about 20 miles from Victoria but close enough to the Butchart Gardens to make it easy. It was an old-fashioned bakery, doing a great Wednesday morning business. I ordered a pecan roll so I could hear them mispronounce pee-can.

Playlist

There were 247 songs on my Seattle playlist. That’s a lot. There is a tremendous amount of great music from Seattle.

  • Songs titled “Seattle”: Sam Kim, Perry Como, Mary Mary, Felly, Public Image Ltd., Jackson Walker, Bobby Sherman. The Perry Como is a great example of bad choices. The Bobby Sherman is the same song, from a late-60s television series, Here Comes the Brides. The Public Image is the best of the lot, though I’m not sure what it has to do with Seattle. I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with any television series.
  • Bands That Live in the Part of Seattle That’s Actually Greater Brooklyn: Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes, The Head and the Heart, Laura Love, Nieko Case, Death Cab for Cutie, the Highwomen, Brandi Carlile, Chastity Belt, Perfume Genius, Tacocat. I’m very fond of Fleet Foxes, who remind me of Bon Iver. Death Cab for Cutie is better than they should be. I thought Brandi Carlile was off of one of those tv talent competitions, but she’s not, and I was pleased to find her. Tacocat is the greatest name ever, and there need to be more bands like Perfume Genius.
  • Grunge and Post-Grunge. Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam. I had never listened to Pearl Jam, which seems very odd, and I may be the only person who thinks Eddie Vedder sounds exactly like Darius Rucker. I understand that the Mariners play Smells Like Teen Spirit instead of Take Me Out to the Ballgame during the seventh inning stretch.
  • Rock. Jimy Hendrix, Heart, Queensryche, the Ventures. I’ve never really liked Hendrix. At his best he’s a good blues guitarist, but usually I find him cloying. I downloaded Rod Stewart’s cover of Angel, and Derek & the Dominoes cover of Little Wing, and they’re still better than Hendrix’s originals. As for Heart, hadn’t heard them since the 70s, and listening to them 50 years later was great fun. I always thought the Ventures did Wipeout, but that was the Surfaris. The Ventures did do The Theme from Hawaii Five-0, which I’ve added to my Hawaii playlist, and Pipeline. I wish I could play that first hook in Pipeline.
  • Hip-Hop, Rap. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Mary Lambert (only because of her ties to Maklemore, she keeps me warm is lovely), and some song by Kanye West. We watched the Taylor Swift documentary, Miss Americana, after we got back, so I’m not talking to Kanye right now.
  • Jazz. Bill Frisell, Kenny G, Ernestine Anderson, Quincy Jones. That’s too broad a list to mean anything. I never made it through a full Kenny G. song, but I’m a fan of Bill Frisell because I’m a guitar fan. Ernestine Anderson grew up in Houston, but I’d never listened to her. It’s music that goes well with martinis.
  • Classical. John Cage, Mark O’Conner. I liked the Cage I listened to. Mark O’Conner is from Seattle, and bluegrass, but his Appalachia Waltz with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer is wonderful.
  • Bing Crosby. I can always listen to White Christmas.