Tag: Music

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Damn

Salmon and steelhead go home to  spawn.  The best guess is that salmon navigate to their river mouth magnetically, then go upriver by smell or road signs or whatever. It’s no random river either. It’s their natal river, and often their natal stretch of gravel.

There are lots of bad things that can happen to salmon in the ocean. They’re predators, but they’re also prey. There are things bigger than them, including our nets, but if they make it to freshwater their problems are only beginning.

Of course some salmon go astray and end up in the wrong river, which is genetically a good thing, but there are strong ties between a particular salmon and  a particular river. Pacific salmon populations are generally healthy, but salmon populations are often discussed in terms of specific rivers, and even specific river segments.  The Sacramento River chinook population and the Snake River sockeye population are each endangered, while chinook or sockeye as a species are not.

A hen steelhead will contain from 200 to 12,000 eggs, so there’s plenty of redundancy.  Individual casualties happen without hurting a river’s overall population. That said, in Oregon population trends are not upward. There are plenty of natural predators, but we’re the real problem.  We harvest salmon a-plenty, both commercially and for sport. We’ve destroyed habitat by lumbering and farming and development. We’ve hurt the health of populations by introducing hatchery fish into the wild. All of those things have decreased the Oregon salmon population.

And we’ve built dams.

Well, the world has seven wonders, the travelers always tell
Some gardens and some towers, I guess you know them well
But the greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam’s fair land
It’s that King Columbia River and the big Grand Coulee Dam

Woodie Guthrie, Grand Coulie Dam, 1941.

According to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, there are more than 400 dams in the Columbia River drainage. There are 14 on the Columbia alone, and five on the Deschutes. Construction began around the turn of the last century, and continued for 70 years. The Columbia is not a free-flowing river. It’s drainage is not free-flowing.

Roll on, Columbia, roll on
Roll on, Columbia, roll on
Your power is turning our darkness to dawn
So roll on, Columbia, roll on

Woodie Guthrie, Roll On Columbia, Roll On, 1941.

Corps of Engineers, Dip-netting at Celilo Falls, before construction of the Dalles Dam in 1957.

The dams provide flood control and irrigation, but most importantly they provide electric power. In an odd stroke, Woodie Guthrie, unemployed and broke in Northern California, was hired for one month by the Bonneville Power Authority  to narrate a film about the Columbia River dams. He’d never been to Oregon before. He wrote 26 songs in 30 days, and among them are some of his best. He knew the value of elctricity to Depression-era laborers and farmers.

Yes, Uncle Sam needs wool, Uncle Sam needs wheat,
Uncle Sam needs houses and stuff to eat,
Uncle Sam needs water and power dams,
Uncle Sam needs people and people needs land.
Don’t like dictators not much, myself,
But I think the whole country ought to be run
By electricity!

Woodie Guthrie, Talking Columbia Blues, 1941. 

Federal law required fish migration to be considered in dam construction, and fish ladders and bypasses were built into the dams. While the bypasses may have worked well enough for the adult salmon, salmon migration is a two-way street. Juveniles must go to the ocean. Originally that was supposed to occur via the turbines and top-dam discharges, but turbines are fish killers, and spilling off the top left fish stunned and easy pickings or dead.  Dam operators and builders have tried other methods, including bypasses and capturing and trucking juvenile fish. It’s expensive. Maybe some of the methods work.

In recent years some smaller dams have been removed, but there are no plans to remove any of the larger dams.

Fish Ladder, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Deschutes river advocates, notably the Deschutes River Alliance, believe that a 273-foot tall water withdrawal tower constructed by Portland General Electric in 2010 at the Pelton Round Butte dam has destroyed the fishery in the lower Deschutes, right about where we’ll be fishing. The tower was intended to capture fish for transport around the dam and to help restore the river below the dam by controlling discharges. Before construction of the tower, PGE had released only cold, oxygen-rich water from the bottom of Lake Billy Chinook. The Alliance argues that the top water that’s now part of the discharge is contaminated agriculture runoff that violates standards for water temperature, pH, and dissolved oxygen. They believe the contaminated water creates algae blooms in the lower Deschutes, kills insect life, and ultimately decimates trout, salmon, and steelhead.

It’s all a bit Lake Okeechobie.

The Alliance sued in 2016, and in August of 2018 the court ruled that the Alliance presented no evidence that PGE was violating its discharge permit. The Alliance says it will appeal.

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Packing List – Maryland

Carl Van Vechten, Billie Holiday, 1942, Van Vechten Collection, Library of Congress

We’re not good at traveling light, but when we went back to Maryland we traveled about as light as we ever have. I didn’t take a guitar. We took no fishing gear. We didn’t take anything we couldn’t carry onto a plane, which did include a book about Northwest salmon and an iPad.  I still managed to take one too many pairs of shoes.

We had trouble getting the car because I’d  changed the plane reservation but not the car reservation and came in seven hours late.  Not only did I change the plane reservation, I had us going home the next morning while we were fishing, but Kris fixed the plane while I waited for Budget to take care of the car.  I use Budget for the fast break, but this time it wasn’t very fast. The Budget counter beat us up for better than an hour.

We never made it to Annapolis for the crab cakes on the harbor side that I’d planned.

As for places in Maryland I’d still like to see, we got the water-side tour of Annapolis, which I figure took care of the Naval Academy, but I’d have liked to see the Antietam National Battlefield: there’s something holy about Civil War battlefields. Along with the civil rights landmarks of the South they may be our only real places of pilgrimage. We didn’t make Antietam, and someday I’ll go back for it.

Driving from Baltimore to Annapolis we realized that Barry Levinson made four Baltimore movies we should have watched: Diner (1982), Tin Men (1987), Avalon (1990), and Liberty Heights ( 1999).  Next time, or maybe this week.

We did manage to eat at Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore for a second time. After we dropped off the car at the airport we took a beat-up and clanking metro train through the city, down past the 50s suburbs, past Camden Yards and the harbor into the hard part of town, the part of town that looks like a city with the nation’s highest murder rate, and finally to a stop in gentrifying Woodberry, one block from Woodberry Kitchen. The couple next to us at the restaurant said there were 220-odd separate neighborhoods in Baltimore, and we saw some from the train. After dinner though we took an Uber to our hotel by the airport. Chickens.

I’ve listened to the Maryland playlist now off and on for a year.  You can’t listen to enough Billie Holiday, and the Low Symphony by Phillip Glass is something special: it sounds like water.  I even liked Eubie Blake’s ragtime piano. Frank Zappa, on the other hand, is just not the thing.

I’m Just Wild About Harry, Eubie Blank and Noble Sissle, 1921, Indiana University.

  • Billie Holiday. Lots of it, but not nearly enough.
  • Bobby Bare, Streets of Baltimore. There’s also a nice version by Gram Parsons, with Emmylou Harris. It’s about an unhappy marriage.
  • Bob Dylan, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. It’s about the murder of a servant.
  • Bruce Springsteen, Hungry Heart. It’s about abandoning your family.
  • Counting Crows, Raining in Baltimore. It’s about rain in Baltimore, and the need for a rain coat.
  • Phillip Glass, Low Symphony. I meant to download more Glass.  It sounds like the Chesapeake.
  • Eubie Blake. Ragtime.
  • Frank Zappa. There was a lot of it, and I listened to it, and wondered why we ever liked him. I guess we were all more juvenile once.
  • Hoagie Charmichael, Baltimore Oriole. There’s also a version by George Harrison, of all people. It’s about a prostitute. It’s used as Lauren Bacall’s musical theme in Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not.
  • Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Baltimore Fire. It’s about Baltimore burning. Like all McGarrigle music it’s terrific.
  • Little Feat, Feets Don’t Fail Me Now. It may be the only happy song of the lot, but Baltimore only plays a cameo role.
  • Lucinda Williams, Trying to Get to Heaven. It’s a Bob Dylan song about desperation.
  • Lyle Lovett, Baltimore. It’s about death.
  • Nina Simone, Baltimore. Written by Randy Newman, and he’s got a version too. It’s about how hard it is just to live.
  • Prince, Baltimore. It’s about police brutality.
  • Talking Heads, Mommy Daddy You And I. It’s about a family car ride, or train ride, or bus ride, or something. It’s one of the sillier moments for the Talking Heads. I hope I never hear it again.
  • Tim Hardin, The Lady Came from Baltimore. It’s a love song about a thief and a lady. It really is a love song though. It’s about poverty and social inequality.

I think I lost my favorite Corpus Christi Hooks cap.

 

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Packing List – Louisiana

Louis Armstrong, 1952, World Telegraph staff photographer, Library of Congress, no copyright known. From Wikimedia Commons.

Stuff we forgot, stuff that didn’t work, stuff I lost, places we never got to, and music. 

My flies weren’t big enough for our guide, Bailey Short, so we used his.  My leader wasn’t heavy enough, Bailey wanted at least 20 pounds, but that was easy, we just cut off the 16 pound tippet. He wanted 10 weight rods.  Oddly I thought I took a 10 weight rod, but when I got there I’d grabbed a 12, so I fished with his Orvis Helios 3D.  It was hard, but somebody’s gotta do it. What a nice rod.  I never touched my 7 weight and shouldn’t have taken it.

I’d tied up the leader with a 5’ butt section of 20 pound hard Mason monofilament.  I really liked how the leader laid out.  There was about 2.5’ of 20 pound Rio Saltwater Flourocarbon after the butt, so that’s what we fished after the 16 pound tippet was cut. It was about a 7.5’ two-piece leader.

We took insect repellent but I didn’t put it on until too late.  I fished barefoot in the boat and by the end of the second day my feet were covered with horsefly bites.  I guess they caught me when I was napping. And I did nap, especially the second day when I was hung over.  Otherwise I wore long pants and shirt and a buff and had no problems.

As for places, I really meant to go to the WWII museum but didn’t get there. I wanted to go for jazz in the afternoon on Frenchman Street but never made it. I wanted to see the plantations up the river road, especially some of the newer exhibits that cover slave life. There are half-a-hundred places I still haven’t eaten. I’d like to catch a bass out of a john boat near New Iberia in the Bayou Teche. That’s what I get for reading too much James Lee Burke.

Instead we mostly fished.

Now for the playlist. There’s some great music out of Louisiana, or about Louisiana.

  • Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Jerry Jeff Walker wrote Mr. Bojangles after a night in a New Orleans jail. I’d rather not spend a night in a New Orleans jail.
  • Louis Armstrong, including Louis Armstrong and King Oliver, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Red Onion Jazz Babies, Louis Armstrong & His Hot Seven, Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, Johnnie Dodd’s Black Bottom Stompers, and Lillie Delk Christian & Louis Armstrong. Thomas Brothers’ Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans, is as good of a book about early 20th century New Orleans and the birth of jazz as is out there.  His Louis Armstrong’s Chicago is also pretty great, and most of the recordings I have are from Armstrong’s in the 20s in Chicago.  Maybe there are earlier recordings in New Orleans, but I’m not aware of any.
  • Wynton Marsalis. I need to get some newer stuff by Marsalis.  What I’ve got is a bit lush. Hot House Flowers, from the late 80s.
  • Branford Marsalis. Renaissance, again from the late 80s.This was something I really ended up liking, especially Peacock.
  • Dr. John
  • Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Louisiana Rain.
  • Patti LaBelle, Lady Marmalade.
  • The Animals. You can’t go to New Orleans without House of the Rising Sun. 
  • The Rolling Stones. I don’t really like the Stones, and it’s mostly because of songs like Brown Sugar. I’m sorry, but that’s got to be the most reprehensible song ever written. Good riff though.
  • Count Basie, Louisiana
  • Buckwheat Zydeco
  • Arlo Guthrie, City of New Orleans. Ok, it’s about a train, but it’s a good song. 

Heinrich Klaus, Fats Domino playing in Hamburg Germany, 1973. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.  His stuff on Flickr is brilliant.
  • Fats Domino.
  • Lucinda Williams. Williams gets all the small town stuff, Slidell, Lake Charles. Louisiana claims her, but I say Arkansas. Still, there are Louisiana songs. 
  • Roy Orbison. Orbison was born in my home town, so he had an excuse for thinking bayous might be blue.  Linda Ronstadt is pretty great too. 
  • The Neville Brothers.
  • Randy Newman. Apparently Newman lived in New Orleans as a child. Who knew? Louisiana is the best song I know about cultural failure. I should have downloaded all of Good Ol’ Boys, especially Kingfish.
  • Creedence Clearwater Revival. They actually sang a lot about Louisiana for a bunch of California kids. 
  • Clifton Chenier.
  • Doug Kershaw & Rusty Kershaw.
  • Jean Knight. Everybody should hear Mr. Big Stuff one more time. 
  • Jimmie Dale Gilmore and the Flatlanders, Eddie LeJeune, Johnnie Allan, Jo-El Sonnier. All of these have versions of Jolie Blon, which is one of the great songs.
  • Tim McGraw. My only nod to the Baptist Louisiana north. It was kind of jarringly out of place.
  • Paul Simon, Take me to the Mardi Gras.
  • Steve Earle, After the Mardi Gras.
  • Johnny Cash, Big River.
  • Sting, Moon Over Bourbon Street.
  • Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine Man (which also means The Byrds), and with the Band, Crash on the Levee. 
  • Led Zeppelin, When the Levee Breaks.
  • Beausoleil. I always thought Bayou Cadillac was Buy You a Cadillac.
  • Allan Toussaint, Last Train.
  • Santana, Toussaint l’ouverature.
  • Benny Goodman, King Porter Stomp. Goodman famously feuded with Armstrong because he thought Armstrong a clown.
  • Mahalia Jackson.

 

Mathew Brady, Portrait of Louis Gottschalk, c. 1855, Library of Congress.

Some of these, Fats Domino, Clifton Chenier, the Neville Brothers, and the others with no comments, had a lot of songs and are so essential that I’ve got nothing to add. I need to go back and add Jerry Lee Lewis, Louis Gottschalk, and more Jo-El Sonnier.

On the guitar I was  working on a transcription of the Bach Fugue in A minor for organ. It’s better than I am. As for lost, it was a pair of reading glasses.  It was a nice pair, too.

 

 

 

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Packing List: Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia

For a week long road trip that included a college graduation, some family, some friends, and five days fishing, we took some clothes–way too many clothes. For fishing, I also took:

  • Raingear.  Rain pants and a rain jacket. You don’t need rain pants when you’re fishing in waders, but we weren’t in waders on The Chesapeake. I bought Andy a new pair, and discovered my pair had a ripped seat.  It’s probably good I wasn’t sitting down. Kris couldn’t find her rain pants. It rained and it was cold and there was nothing good about that.
  • Waders, boots, wading staffs.  Kris always preferred an old pair of Orvis canvass boots from 20-odd years ago, but they were constantly delaminating and I suggested she buy a new pair for the trip. Not that we trout fished in Maryland, but because of disease felt is no longer allowed there, nor in Alaska, Missouri, Nebraska, Rhode Island, and South Dakota. For the two days on boats I had a new pair of Keen sandals because the old pair were constantly delaminating.  Maybe it’s us.
  • Rods.  More than we needed. Two 9’ 5 weights for trout, two 9’  6 weights for bass, and a 10’ 4 weight because after suffering rod fever in February I didn’t suffer long.  We used the 6 weights for the Shenandoah, and the smaller rods for West Virginia.  We used the guide’s 9 weights for the Chesapeake—I don’t own a 9 weight and will have to contemplate that. We also borrowed the guide’s short 8’  3 weights for the tiny bookies—I don’t own any 3 weights and will have to contemplate that. Fly fishing is a very contemplative sport.
  • Reels.  Some reels. Floating lines.  The guide on the Shenandoah River said he’d toss in a sink tip, but I don’t know if he did and we wouldn’t have used it. We used the guide’s rods on the Chesapeake because I didn’t own heavy sinking lines.  I started to buy them, but wasn’t sure what I needed.  Now I know. I’ll have to contemplate that.
  • Flies. I took no saltwater flies.  I thought about it, mostly because I was curious about whether any of my redfish flies would work, but the flies we used in saltwater were much longer and heavier than anything I own.  They were big 6” flies with big lead eyes. For the Shenandoah, the guide brought Shenk’s white streamers on which we caught fish, and some olives that I never fished.  I had tied a bunch of dragon tails before we left, mostly because I was getting skunked at home on larger black bass. On the Shenandoah I caught some fish, but I also got lots of slappy short takes. The flies were just too long.  I’ve ordered some mini-dragon tails hoping they’re shorter, and long size 4 hooks, but suspect they may just be the same tail as the regular with 1-1/2” cut off the fat end.  I also took all my trout flies–and I have a lot–but mostly we fished the guide’s flies.  I think all of the rainbows and the one brown I caught were on various colors of squirmy worms, and two of the bookies on big stimulaters and the third on a bead-head pheasant tail nymph.
  • Leaders. Some nylon tippet.  Some Fluorocarbon tippet. I never used the Flourocarbon.  For the stripers we used a four foot piece of straight 20 pound.  It fit nicely around my neck.  For the smallmouth we used 9’ 2X.  Approximately 9’ anyway,  I’d tied in bits and pieces of stuff, and I sort of guess at lengths.  For the trout, 9’ 5X with foam strike indicators for the squirmy worms.  The morning I fished on my own I switched to some Orvis strike putty that had been floating around my vest for 15 or 20 years. It worked fine. It always works fine. I don’t know why I ever use anything else.
  • Sunglasses. Amber and low light polarized Smiths.  Everyone loves low light sunglasses.  I love low light  sunglasses. I lost mine in West Virginia that time I fell down in the pond.
  • Fishing vest.  Complete with all the usual junk that accumulates in fishing vests.  Some split shot (which I used), some nippers, hemostats, various kinds of indicators, and nets.  West Virginia apparently prohibits cloth nets on catch and release water. I don’t get the sense that there’s lots of enforcement.
  • Sling pack. I meant to pack a waterproof sling pack for the boats but forgot it.  I didn’t need it.
  • Sunscreen. I meant to pack a buff and sun gloves but they were in the sling pack. I need lots of sunscreen.
  • A water proof Nikon and a GoPro.  I bought a Nikon CoolPix waterproof camera that I wore around my neck while fishing.  It was easier than the GoPro and took better pictures, kept me from draining my phone battery, and kept my phone out of the river.  I loved it, but you can’t see the view screen in high sun. Kris took her birding camera and lenses but never used it.
  • My Corpus Christi Hooks baseball cap, which T.C. Campbell admired. It’s a good looking cap, and because it’s fitted I can wear the GoPro on the back.

For general life I took my travel guitar (I’m re-memorizing Tárrega’s Capricho árabe so I can forget it again).  On the plane I read The Chesapeake in Focus by Tom Pelton, who worked for the Baltimore Sun and hosts The Environment in Focus for NPR. We listened to a lot of Tom Rosenbauer’s Orvis podcasts when we were driving. At Harper’s Ferry I bought a copy of Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign by Jonathan A. Noyalas and read that.

When we were driving around we listened to the playlists on my phone:

Maryland

Songs about Baltimore are mostly sad and gritty. There’s just something about Baltimore that makes it perfect for a dismal song.

  • Raining in Baltimore, Counting Crows
  • Baltimore,  Lyle Lovett
  • Baltimore,  with versions by Nina Simone and Randy Newman
  • Streets of Baltimore, with versions by Bobby Bare and Gram Parsons.
  • Baltimore Oriole, with versions Hoagy Charmichael and George Harrison. George Harrison?
  • Hungry Heart, Bruce Springsteen
  • Feets Don’t Fail Me Now, Little Feat
  • The Sad Death of Hattie McDaniel, Bob Dylan
  • The Lady Came from Baltimore, Tim Hardin
  • Tryin’ to Get to Heaven, Lucinda Williams

Plus, lots by Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, Frank Zappa, and Phillip Glass. I listened to Glass’s Low Synphony three times on the flight. It sounded just like the Chesapeake should sound.  I tried to listen to it in the car in Maryland and Kris made me move on. She doesn’t like Glass.

All of us would be better listening more to Billie Holiday.

Virginia

  • Alexandria, Virginia, Bill Jennings
  • The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Band.  I never thought of this song as tied to a particular place other than the Generic South, but it mentions Virginia and Tennessee.
  • Virginia Girl, Deer Tick.
  • Carry Me Back to Virginia,  Old Crow Medicine Show.  Oddly, I couldn’t find a copy of Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny, which was retired as the Virginia state song because of racial content.  There are lots of versions though, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, and Louis Armstrong.
  • Virginia Moon,  Foo Fighters.
  • East Virginia Blues, by Robert Earl Keen. There’s the classic version by Ralph Stanley, so I had them both.
  • Shenandoah, by Bill Frisell.  Frisell is a jazz guitarist, and this for many years has been a favorite recording.  Shenandoah is apparently the interim state song of Virginia.  It’s apparently not the official state song because the only state it mentions is Missouri.
  • Sweet Virginia,  The Rolling Stones.  I’m Not a Stones fan much. Typical Stones. Kinda self-absorbed.
  • Yorktown, from Hamilton.  Not much Virginia, but I saw Hamilton last week, and Kris liked it.
  • James River  by Checker and  James River by Jan Smith.  Different songs I think.  Haven’t noticed them enough to decide.

Plus Some Old Crow Medicine Show, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ralph Stanley.  I ended up humming Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s Cheek to Cheek all through Virginia and West Virginia. And Jason Mraz.  Not much good to be said about Jason Mraz, but no harm either.

West Virginia

  • My Home Among the Hills, The Carter Family
  • Grandma’s Hands, Willie Nelson
  • Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn.  OK, technically that’s Kentucky, but close enough
  • Country Roads, Take Me Home, John Denver.  I had to buy two versions of this.  The first I downloaded had been remastered with strings. It was awful. I have immensely fond memories of this song from driving out to feed the horse when I was 14.
  • West Virginia My Home, with versions by Hazel Dickens and The Hillbilly Gypsies.
  • Green Rolling Hills, Emmylou Harris
  • Need You, Tim McGraw
  • Linda Lou, Bill Monroe
  • I Wanna Go Back to West Virginia, Spike Jones
  • West Virginia Wildflower, Stacy Grubb
  • A Country Boy Can Survive, Hank Williams Jr. I’m not a fan.

Plus some Kathy Mattea.  I also put Copland’s Appalachian Spring and O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz on the list. They seem to fit, even though O’Connor is from Seattle and Copeland from Brooklyn.  We were listening to Appalachian Spring crossing from Virginia to West Virginia, and expected every mountain turn to open into a vista.  Mostly they didn’t, but it sure kept me awake.