Fielding Lucas, Jr., 1817 State Map of Florida, A General Atlas, Of All The Known Countries In The World.
This will be our fourth try to catch a fish in Florida. Florida is as famous for its fishing as its sunshine and orange juice, as its bizarre WalMart behavior and its retirees. And I can’t catch a fish.
We’ve had bad luck, bad weather, missed chances, and no fish. We’ve tried. No fish. We’ve had great guides and gone to interesting places. We’ve drunk rum with escapading Midwesterners in Key West in winter. We’ve been yelled at in West Palm for casting against a bulkhead from a boat by a well-coifed New York lady in yoga pants. In Tampa we’ve watched the Astros lose to the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field and then fished all night. All night. From 9pm until 4 the next morning.
No fish.
Nothing works, and there’s no reason to think that anything will work this time. Maybe I should take up golf, or alligator wrestling.
This time we’re going to Miami Beach. Neither of us have ever been to Miami, or Miami Beach, but Kris keeps hinting that we should go to the Panhandle and fish for redfish, but I still want to go south. I want a shot at a tarpon or a bonefish or a snook or a permit, fish that are different than what we have in Galveston.
We’re fishing one day with Jason Sullivan and one with Duane Baker, both guides with excellent reputations, both completely innocent as to the lousy Florida luck they’re in for fishing with the Thomases. We may also make it to the Miami canals, finally, but there really is a lot of stuff to see in Miami, and we’ll only have one day to see something other than water. There’s water surrounding Florida. Water where people go to catch fish. Not us though. No fish.
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God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.
New Revised Standard Version, Genesis, 1:28.
I’ve been reading again about the Everglades. I’ve been rereading Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’s 1947 classic, The Everglades: A River of Grass, and the more recent The Swamp by Michael Grunwald, published in 2006. The Swamp ends with the defeat of Al Gore by George W., and lays the election of George W. at the feet of Florida environmentalists who voted for Ralph Nader. He’s probably right. Gore lost Florida by 537 votes, and when he lost Florida he lost the electoral college. Nader got 97,488 Florida votes. The environmentalists were angry at Gore because he wouldn’t scuttle the proposed Miami International Airport, the Everglades jetport, before a final Air Force report was published. When it was published, after Gore lost, Clinton killed the airport. Irony is so ironic.
I listened to another book too, not about the Everglades specifically but Florida generally, Oh Florida! by Tampa Bay Times writer Craig Pittman. The central Florida themes, flim-flam, violence, real estate cons, grotesque misadventure, transience, environmental destruction, golf, hanging chads, and over-consenting adults, bring to mind the old joke about Arkansans: that they’re glad Mississippi exists so somebody else can be last in every category. Reviewing Oh Florida!, a book by a writer who is very fond of Florida in a shell-shocked-sort-of-way, the New York Times likened Florida to America’s grease trap. It’s certainly a memorable comparison.
I’m currently reading A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf by John Muir. From what I can tell Muir’s first name was Sierra-Club-Founder, because you never see one without the other. Grunwald writes about Muir at length in The Swamp, and Thousand Mile Walk is a short, readable thing.
Muir is writing after the Civil War, only 10 years or so after Mr. Orvis opened his shop in Manchester, Vermont, and Mr. Thoreau published Walden. America’s opinion about nature seemed to have been changing, or at least in the Orvis shop’s case America had discovered it needed better dog beds. Muir walked south from Kentucky to Florida to look at plants and whatever else in the natural world he might come across, and planned to go on to the Amazon. In Florida he fell ill, probably malaria, and scuttled the rest of the trip.
Before he got sick, when he first arrived in Florida (via a short hop from Georgia by boat), his description of the Florida coast is brilliant, but it is also a bit surprised. There are plenty of mangroves, but no flowers. It’s Florida! Where are the flowers! Where are the golf courses! Ok, skip that last.
Grunwald uses nature’s malice, Muir’s malaria, to establish another theme for Florida. He posits that in Florida Muir, a religious man who sees God everywhere in the natural world, discovers that the Biblical imperative to go subdue may not be quite the thing. I’m not quite sure Grunwald is right, Muir sees no malice in nature, and he always seems to have preferred it to people. But in other ways Grunwald’s aim is true: no place better epitomizes environmental overreach than South Florida. That’s Grunwald’s real theme. As a Houstonian all I can say is thank goodness for Mississippi Florida
Meanwhile chances for progress on Everglades restoration seems to be improving. There’s a good article summing up the current state of affairs in the latest issue of Garden & Gun.
And meanwhile the weather reports for our fourth fishing trip to Florida forecast thunderstorms. Are there fish at Disney World?
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Back in Houston, it’s my favorite time of year to fish salt water in Galveston Bay. The water is high, and there’s no clarity, but the prevailing south wind has finally died and with kids back in school and college football there’s not nearly as much boat traffic. We’re blind casting, but that’s ok. Saturday I caught a small but particularly beautiful speckled trout, and a couple of weeks ago Kris caught a sheepshead–neither one of us had caught a sheepshead on the fly before. I still haven’t.
Plus the Astros finished off the Yankees for the American League pennant last night, and there are few things better than that. I’ll be ok with Florida even if we catch no fish.
And I might as well be, ’cause we’re certain to catch no fish.
