We were going to New Mexico for a week, and hadn’t really planned on adding Colorado. If you look at the map though, the state line is only 60 miles north of Taos. We could be in the next jurisdiction faster than Bonnie and Clyde.
I kept vacillating though. I could spend weeks fishing Colorado. I could spend years fishing Colorado. There’s a seemingly infinite number of places to fish–famous places, the Platte and the Gunnison, the Eagle and the Frying Pan and the Roaring Fork. There’s the St. Vrain for goodness sake. Some of those rivers I’ve fished before, some I’ve wanted to fish, and some I still want to fish.
But truth be told fishing 50 states has taken a surprising amount of effort. By year’s end we hope to have added New Mexico, Arkansas, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Georgia, Iowa, and Wisconsin. We also fished in Delaware (I failed, Kris didn’t). That’s a lot of travel, and it still leaves 22 states. Meantime I keep googling trips to Belize, Mexico, and the Bahamas. I keep thinking I want to see Arles, France, and–heresy–not fish at all.
But in Southern Colorado there are a bunch of rivers I’ve wanted to fish. The Los Pinos, the Dolores, the Animas, and the Conejos are all great trout streams. I’ve never fished there but I’ve wanted to, so, last minute, we decided to make a side trip to the Conejos in Southern Colorado. We gave Colorado short-shrift, just to get it out of the way, but there are too many places in Colorado, and the Conejos is as interesting as any, and who doesn’t want to fish a river named rabbit?
All of our preparation for a side-trip to Colorado consisted of downloading Rocky Mountain High, and calling the first guide service that popped up on a Google search for the Conejos. We also listened to about half of The Stand on the drive out, but that was only because I couldn’t listen to the other Stephen King novel set in Colorado. I read The Shining a long time ago, and I saw the movie when it was released, and it still gives me the willies. I’m not doing that again.
So Colorado called out, “come and play with us,” and we did. Not forever and ever and ever though. Redrum.
We fished with Shane Clawson through Doc Thompson’s High Country Anglers in New Mexico, and Shane was great. There are several well-known guides in Northern New Mexico, and I delayed choosing because I couldn’t decide. I called Thompson because he’s Orvis-endorsed. Doc himself was booked, but Shane contracts with him–our good luck.
Covid hit guides in New Mexico hard. New Mexico did what other states should have done to get rid of Covid, but Shane’s business was shut for much of 2020. Later our Colorado guide told us that during 2020 he’d never been busier. Now New Mexico will get hit with the fourth surge like the rest of us, because we didn’t do what was needed.
I told Shane that I wanted to fish for Rio Grande cutthroats in Latir Creek, and wanted to fish the Cimarron River. Ok, I’m lying. I told Shane that I wanted to fish for Rio Grand cutthroats in the Rio Costilla in the Valle Vidal, and that I wanted to fish the Rio Grande River. Apparently late July is too hot for the Rio Grande, so I picked the Cimarron because it’s not far from Taos, and because of the 1976 Poco album. I figured any day spent humming Rose of Cimarron is a day well spent.
As for the Valle Vidal, I had fished there once before, almost 25 years ago. We were on a family camping trip through Northern New Mexico—I promise, if I’d known my daughter had that tiny stress fracture, I wouldn’t have forced her to backpack into the Rio Grande Gorge. And she wasn’t carrying much besides her sleeping bag and some clothes. That and a couple of gallons of water.
Ok. I didn’t really make her carry any water. I made her little brother carry the water.
During that trip I stole an hour from my family to fish the Rio Costilla, and I remember the Valle Vidal as one of the prettiest mountain meadows I’ve ever seen. I didn’t catch anything, and Julie Andrews never sang, so I’ve thought ever since that I’d left something undone–at least for the fishing if not for the singing.
No luck though. The Valle Vidal is closed to fishing for two years for Rio Grande cutthroat trout restoration. Everything with gills in the Rio Costilla will be poisoned, and a pure strain of Rio Grande cutthroat will be reintroduced. Closing the Rio Costilla for two years to remove invasive species is absolutely a good thing, except of course that the two years is smack in the middle of when I finally decided to go back again to the Valle Vidal. Dang it. Dang invasive species.
Cimarron River
Except for the San Juan River, New Mexico doesn’t really have the fishing reputation of other Western states. It’s harder to get to, and except for the San Juan it’s not known for trophy fish. Most New Mexico rivers are small. New Mexican food is special, the mix of people is unique, and the art can be magnificent, plus there’s great high-desert scenery, but some of the best fly fishing is for some of the smallest fish.
Second things first. We fished the Cimarron the second day. It’s popular, and gear anglers are as common as fly anglers. We were in Cimarron Canyon State Park (elev. 7500 ft.) in Carson National Forest, on highway 64 between Taos (elev. 6969) and the town of Cimarron (elev. 6430), with considerable ups and downs thrown in for good measure. It’s a tailwater out of Eagle’s Nest Lake, but the river is still only 25 feet or so across, and that’s being generous. Because it was midweek, we had no problem finding space on the water.
With some detours for downed trees, the Cimarron is wadeable, and there are lots of wild browns. We started in the morning on San Juan worms under a dry dropper. It had rained, and Shane said he only fished worms while they moved in the soil after rain. Later we switched out the worms for small nymphs–WD 40s–still rigged under a dry dropper. Only one largish fish–maybe 12 inches and fat–hit the dry, and it had taken the nymph first and then just kept going. Our tippets were small, 5x, and leaders were short, 7.5 feet.
Cimarron River Brown Trout
The Cimarron was interesting, but the day before, the day we fished for cutthroat, was the reason I was there. I told Shane I wanted to fish for Rio Grande cutthroat. Shane misheard me, or maybe I misspoke. He heard I wanted to catch a Rio Grande cutthroat. I guess I did, but really, I just wanted to be in a high place that held cutthroat. If trout live in pretty places, cutthroat live in the prettiest places.
Latir Creek is part of the Rio Costilla drainage, so it’s not far from where I wanted to be. To get there we drove 45 miles north of Taos to Costilla (elev. 7700 ft), turned right on a paved county road that turned into an unpaved county road, then turned right again on a double track road that kept climbing until it petered out into a jeep trail. It’s a satisfying drive, and a drive that I thought justified that extra money for four-wheel drive, though to be honest we didn’t really spend any time on the jeep trail, and drove nowhere my father wouldn’t have driven a Buick LeSabre. Still. I’m manly. I have 4-wheel drive.
Mary Orvis Marbury, Royal Coachman Wet Fly, Favorite Flies and Their Histories, 1892, via Wikipedia.
If the Cimarron was small, Latir Creek was tiny. If I were a jumping man, I could have had a good day jumping back and forth across it. Not being a jumping man, we fished, sometimes from the bank, sometimes wading. Here’s the really cool part though: all day long I fished a parachute Royal Wulff, about a #14, which is like saying that all day long I played Ringo’s drums. It’s iconic, unmistakeable, a beautiful dry fly that floats on top of the water and that has a lineage back to the 1800s. It’s got its own Wikipedia page! Ok, what doesn’t, but still . . . . If I could spend the rest of my fly-fishing-life catching fish on a Royal Coachman descendant, I’d take that deal.
We caught rainbows and cutthroats; rainbows in the lower drainage, and then in the meadows and higher we caught cutthroats. All of the fish I saw were small, five or six inches, and their parr-marks–that’s a series of thumbprints extending down the fish’s body to its tail–hadn’t faded. Parr marks tell you that the fish are less than a year old. They also had the orange cutthroat on the Rio Grande’s lower jaw. I was happy as I could be to see those fish.
Shane wasn’t satisfied. In addition to the orange, on some of our fish there was a line of reddish iridescence–a rainbow–with the parr marks. Shane was concerned that the red line indicated that the fish were cutbows, rainbow-cutthroat hybrids. After the first couple of those, we moved further upstream (just verging on the jeep track), where hybridization was less likely.
Latir Creek Rio Grande Cutthroat
There wasn’t a lot of casting going on during all of this, not the kind of fine, artistic casting at which I am most likely to do injury to those around me and avoid the fish altogether. I would flick the leader a few feet forward in a half-assed roll cast, or just dap. What’s dapping? It’s not casting at all. It’s letting out just enough line to lay the fly on the water beneath the rod tip. Shane kept reminding me to take in more line. He said if I couldn’t make my cast (or in fact my dap), it was because I had too much line extended. By day’s end, I was fishing with only a few feet of leader extended from the end of the rod. It’s the earliest kind of fly fishing, say the mid-1300s, but the lies of the fish were so tiny, so pocketed into bits of soft water in the midst of a mad downhill rush, that nothing else worked. So there I was, happily dapping with a royal coachman for a fish that’s continuously declined in numbers and range since the 1920s. Don’t nobody ever tell me I ain’t hidebound, or at least nostalgic.
Even at the higher elevation, Shane was worried that our fish might be cutbows.
Latir Creek
When we met Tuesday Shane told us he’d spent Monday evening talking to other guides, who assured him that Latir Creek fish were almost certainly pure cutthroats. Apparently for parr fish it’s difficult to tell the difference by color, and other indications include the shape of the tail (rainbow trout caudal fins–tail fins–are square and not forked, while cutthroats’ are forked) and the place. I told him that he could have just told me they were cutthroats, that he didn’t need to spend all of his evening looking at pictures of fish tails on the internet, but he told me he wasn’t that sort of guide. I told him that I was that sort of client, but I really didn’t mean it. Cutthroat or no, I’d done what I wanted.
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.
