Samuel D. Ehrhart, Puck’s greeting to the new year, 1898, from Puck, v. 42, no. 1087, Keppler & Schwarzmann, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
We fished a bunch this year. We fished for cutthroat in Idaho and pike in New Hampshire. In Mississippi I caught my largest fish ever, a black drum, and after fishing for tiny brook trout spent an hour in a peculiarly pleasant Vermont laundromat (which still sends me friendly emails–how did it get my email address?). In the Catskills Joan Wulff told me to relax my shoulder, I jumped a tarpon in the Everglades, and we floated past suburban golf courses near Chicago. I spooked bonefish just outside the fence of the Honolulu airport, while military and commercial jets alternated use of the runway. We stood on ladders in Nevada. It was a good year for for fishing.
Honolulu with Jake Brooks. That’s Kris in the picture, not Jake.
This will start the third year for this blog. Before I kept a blog I kept journals, but a blog is harder. Someone might read it, so the writing needs to be better. My journal now consists mostly of baseball scores and random notes. The last journal entry was during the World Series, October 30. Nationals won. Dammit.
One of the blog’s sideshows is the statistics page. I can keep up with how many people are reading stuff and what country they’re from. I had more than twice the number of lookers this year than last, and I figure not all of those were me reading myself. There’s not a lot of specifics in the statistics. I can tell if someone goes onto the blog on a particular day, what they looked at, and what country they’re from, and there are daily, monthly, and yearly totals. Most visitors are from the States, with Canada a distant second. China is third, but I suspect that most visits from China have more to do with bots than reading. Namibia? Bangladesh? Jordan? I think my kids stopped reading, but I can’t really tell that from the scorecard, so they still got Christmas presents. Where is Moldova?
New Hampshire with Chuck DeGray.
It’s gratifying when someone reads several items, and it’s always fun to see something that I wrote for purely personal reasons, that has nothing to do with fly fishing, get read. Why did that South African read my post from last year about True Grit, and who in England is reading that post about Zurbarán’s Crucifixion? The most popular post for the year was about Ocean Springs, Mississippi, which is a wonderful place and a place I’d encourage anyone to go. My April Fool’s post about buying Pyramid Lake ladders got plenty of traffic.
Early in 2018 I posted a blog that included a lie a guide had told me, about his background as a Navy seal. He wasn’t. He apparently wasn’t any kind of military. In 2019 somebody who knew the guide found the post and it started to circulate. I suppose the guide told the story to work a larger tip, or maybe to justify his wacko right-wing politics. He wasn’t a bad guide, and he told a good story, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to fish with him again. I did leave him a good tip though.
With Richard Schmidt, Pass Christian, Mississippi.
Of all the places we fished last year, the place that surprised me most was the Talapoosa River in Alabama, and the fish that surprised me most was its redeye bass. I had never been on a pretty Southeastern river, so that was some of the surprise, but the fish fit the river. Redeye weren’t the river’s only fish: we caught Alabama bass, bluegill and long-ear sunfish, but it was the redeye that charmed.
They’re a small fish: they rarely weigh more than a pound, but they need clean water and, one supposes, pretty places, because they themselves are so clean-lined and pretty. They have a fine shape, well proportioned scales, fins, and jaws, and a bright iridescent turquoise belly and lower jaw balanced by smallmouth bands of warpaint on the face and olive green horizontal lines rising to their back’s dark mass. Lovely.
Tallapoosa River with East Alabama Fly Fishing
Mathew Lewis is an Auburn-PhD candidate geneticist who studies redeye and has written an excellent small book on fly fishing for Redeye Bass, titled, appropriately, Fly Fishing for Redeye Bass. I’ve fished for river bass before, smallmouth in Virginia and Illinois, Guadalupe and largemouth in Texas, and there’s a commonality to it. Cast to the banks. Cast the slackwater next to current, cast to faster current for smallmouths and slackwater for largemouth. Matthew and I traded some emails, and I meant to come back and write specifically about the redeye, but I never got around to it. I think about those fish and that river though, and it’s a place I would go again.
Catching the five subspecies of redeye should be a thing.
In addition to Matthew’s book there are good things on the web that discuss the redeye:
We spent a great two days fishing with Chuck DeGray as far north as we’ve ever been, and Silver Creek lived up to its hype, but my favorite place to fish–and I suspect Kris’s–was Everglades National Park. It is so alive, so beautiful and isolated, and I promise it wasn’t just because I jumped a decent tarpon. I did jump a decent tarpon though.
Happy New Years! I hope your 2020 is as good as our 2019!
First things first, I caught a fish, but unfortunately Kris didn’t. Actually, I caught two fish, one was a Summit Lahontan cutthroat that probably weighed two pounds. The other was a Pilot Peak Lahontan cutthroat that weighed about five pounds. Those are goodly trout for anyplace else, and they were fun to catch, but I gather they are on the small side for Pyramid Lake.
Kris meanwhile never had a fish take a fly. It was nothing she did wrong. She was casting well, and while the fishing is unique, and while we wouldn’t have figured it out on our own, with a good guide it’s not hard. We were fishing with Casey Gipson out of Reno, and Casey was all the good things a good guide should be. He had good equipment, including excellent ladders. He was patient with the birds nests we made of our leaders. He kept us at plausible locations out of the crowds. When he picked us up at the hotel he had coffee. Coffee is no small thing.
He is also a great cook. You wouldn’t think that was so important, but shows what you know. We had homemade chorizo po’boys for lunch the first day and homemade chicken burritos the second. Whatever else happened, we had great food. And coffee.
Casey’s photo. I’m the model. I’m not really sleeping. Really.
But the fishing was slow. What we kept trying to explain to Casey was that this was just a normal fishing trip with the Thomases. Unless you know that the Thomases are going to be there, April may be the best time to fish Pyramid. If we’re there the fish will be down for our visit. Honestly, except for the nap I took on the bank the second day, we fished hard, we fished reasonably well, and I didn’t hurt anybody with my casting.
Casey told us that the worst fishing days on Pyramid are the nicest days, the days when the barometric pressure is high, the breezes are gentle, and the lake is glass. The best days to fish are the days when the weather is the worst. We had nice days, beautiful days, the days of the first morning of the world. Casey worked his butt off, but what can you do? It’s easy to guide when all you have to do is net and release fish. Poor Casey had to answer all the questions we came up with because we weren’t busy, plus come up with stories to keep us engaged. Nobody ever said guiding was easy.
We had planned to fish one day on the Pyramid and one on the Truckee River, the river that carries water from Lake Tahoe down to Pyramid Lake, but the Truckee flows were dangerously high, around 6,000 cubic feet per second. Our Reno hotel room window looked down on the Truckee, and we constantly checked the river, hopeful, but then had hopes washed away. The river was dashing and carrying on and generally taunting us. It was one whole lot of silted, roiling, angry water. I’m sure most weekends it it’s the gentlest bubbling brook, perfect for a three weight bamboo rod and size 18 quill Gordons.
The first day in Nevada we drove up the Sierra Nevada to Lake Tahoe, and the last day we drove to Silver City. Both are classic Western alpine environments, formed by tectonic pressures that jumbled igneous rock into dramatic poses. There are pine trees and winding mountain roads and when it snowed on our drive to Tahoe we sang “Snow” from White Christmas. Pyramid though is different. It’s also dramatic, but in an Old Testament Biblical sort of way. It looks like where Moses and the Hebrews spent their 40 years in the Wilderness.
And there are no trees, but of course that didn’t stop me from getting my fly snagged in sagebrush. There are rocks, but the rocks aren’t the product of geologic cataclysm. The rocks are tufa deposits, a deposit of carbonate minerals like what accumulates around old plumbing where the water’s hard. Sometimes the deposits are rounded and lumpish, sometimes striated like something shattered and sharp and broken. The color of the deposits matches the sand and the sagebrush; tan, grey, barren, and dry.
The lake is on the Pyramid Lake Paiute reservation, and the fishing season is from October to the end of June. It’s huge, 28 miles long and nine miles across, but the air is so clear and dry that distances are confusing. It looks like it’s two instead of nine miles across. In the warmer months fishing is closed and other uses take over. Casey thought that the tribe closed the fishing season as much to prevent conflicts between jet skiers and anglers as for conservation.
Other than the big tufa rock, the lake shore (and the lake bed) is course sand and small broken rock, a beach perfect for summer recreation. There’s plenty of sage brush, but not much else. The near lake floor is a series of shelves, and you can see the pattern repeated on the shore. Shelf, drop, shelf, drop. The trout cruise the drops, and Casey planted our ladders about 15 feet from the shore at the first drop’s edge. Now Casey is a big ‘ol boy, but it’s height not girth. He’s 6’8”, and Kris (who’s 5’4”) distrusted his awareness of relativity. He did ok though, and she never drowned nor even dunked, much. Casey said that the key to excellent ladder placement was to never wade out past his wader belt, which was not quite to the top of Kris’s waders.
When we fished, we first climbed the ladder, and then cast out 30 feet or so to get beyond the drop to the feeding fish. There be monsters. When there were no fish in the first hours, Casey had me prospect with streamers on a sinking line. I’d let the line sink and then retrieve with short strips. Other than that we fished nymphs under fluorescent Screw-Ball Indicators. Casey said that streamers are generally fished in the fall, and nymphs are fished the rest of the season, and we fished big weighted nymphs: mahalos, holographic midges, red red and more red chironomids. Ok, they weren’t always red, just mostly.
There was no real retrieve on the nymphs. The shifting lake current and the wind carried the indicator and nymphs through a drift, and from time to time you might give the line a twitch to jig the flies or an up-current mend to get slack out of your line. Sometimes the drift went left to right, sometimes right to left, sometimes straight toward you. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d cast and watch the drift again. Then you’d do all of that some more. It was oddly mesmerizing, watching the bobber work through the waves.
If the fishing is on then the fish take is quick and strong. Casey said that when you see the indicator go down, that with a really large fish there will be no retrieve: it’s a full stop, like hooking a rock that commences a fight.
I fished a lot of different rods, mostly 7-weights, some of ours, some of Casey’s. I fished for a while with Casey’s 11-foot two-handed rod using roll casts, and Casey said that Spey rods and switch rods were pretty much all he personally uses on the lake anymore. I liked it for a bit, but then got distracted and my roll cast went to play the slots back in Reno. I went back to single-handed rods. I’m better at daydreaming with single hand rods.
I asked Kris if we needed to go back to Nevada to catch her a fish. So far she’s caught fish everywhere I’ve caught fish except Mississippi and Nevada, but Nevada is a strange place, and it was a hard trip for a long weekend. I think she’s decided that this fish in every state business is mine, not hers, and while she likes going along she doesn’t need to catch a fish. I still need to go to Oxford, Mississippi though, even though I caught a fish in Mississippi. She didn’t catch a fish in Mississippi, but I could use that as an excuse to go again. Maybe Nevada falls into the same category.
From The Great Train Robbery, 1903, directed by Edwin S. Porter.
This is a blog post with footnotes. [1]
Reno Fly Shop has a podcast, and it’s good. It’s an interview format with some national fly fishing personalities and some Nevada or California locals with local knowledge. The episodes are each about an hour, which is just right for my morning stumble around Rice. The host, the shop owner Jim Litchfield, is a generous and engaged interviewer, but the podcast always gets around to Pyramid Lake and the Truckee River. That can be a bit of a stretch for some of the national fly fishing personalities, so the locals have a decided advantage.
A recent podcast was with Meredith McCord, who is not local to Reno, but like me is from Houston. She spoke at Texas Fly Fishers last year. I don’t know her, but from the audience Ms. McCord seems lively and personable, with a Southern Girl’s penchant for girly casual wear and plenty of well-coiffed hair. She also has a penchant for IGFA records.
The IGFA is the International Game Fish Association, which apparently exists to keep lists of world records and establish rules for catching big fish. Like fly fishing competitions, it has little to do with the rest of us.
On the podcast Ms. McCord was talking about her IGFA records–she holds about 9,000. [2] The talk on the podcast sooner or later got around to IGFA records for cutthroat trout, all of which are from Pyramid Lake. The IGFA doesn’t differentiate among subspecies of cutthroat trout, a cutthroat is a cutthroat is a cutthroat, so a westslope cutthroat from a tiny stream in Montana is in the same swimsuit competition as a massive Lahontan, and it’s no contest. On the other hand there are male and female records, not differentiated by the gender of the fish but by the gender of the angler. I’m pretty sure the records are kept separate so that a boy won’t need to feel bad about being beat up by a girl.
Following are the women’s records for cutthroat:
IGFA Women’s Fly Fishing Records for Cutthroat
If reports are right and ten- to 20-pound Lahontan cutthroat trout are reasonably common at Pyramid Lake, then these records are ready to be broken. [3] Even I could probably land a trout a bit bigger than two pounds on 20 pound tippet. Of course I’d have to change my self-identification, and nobody makes that kind of decision just to catch a fish.
Looking at the list, the second column is the problem. The second column represents a recent rule change that requires a minimum weight for record fish based on the weight of the tippet. The change was adopted after some records were already set, which is why some of the cells are blank: one way or another those records met the new rule requirement. The rule change might attest to the sportsmanship of IGFA rulemakers, but I suspect it probably goes more to the credibility of a 1 lb 12 oz fish being the record cutthroat for 16 pound tippet.
The change requires that for a fish to establish a record, it must weigh at least half of the weight class of the tippet. [4] You don’t put a bantam weight in the ring with a heavyweight and still call things sporting. Of course there’s a four pound tippet class for tarpon, and catching a 100 pound tarpon on a four pound tippet seems more like needless cruelty than sport, so, like I said, credibility is a better explanation than sportsmanship.
Because many of the women’s cutthroat records are oddly low, Pyramid Lake is prime for new records, particularly for women. Listening to Meredith McCord in the podcast I started wondering if Kris would like a record of her own.
The tackle side of establishing records is pretty straightforward. You can fish with any kind of rod as long as it is at least six feet long and is generally recognized as a fly rod. An Orvis Practicaster probably doesn’t cut it, but anything else sold as a fly rod is probably fine. Same goes for reels. [5]Your line can be any kind of fly line and backing. Really the tackle rule comes down to this: if you’re using tackle that’s generally recognized as a fly rod, reel, and line, then from (a) inside the knot attaching your leader to the tippet to (b) inside the knot attaching your tippet to your hook, your class tippet, the one that tests 2 or 4 or 16 or 20 pounds, has to be at least 15 inches long. That’s pretty much it: at least 15 inches inside the knots. It can be longer, but it can’t be shorter. [6]
Now once you sort out the whole gear thing, the conduct thing [7], and the species identification thing [8], you get to the real problems: the weight and length thing, and the fly thing.
Notwithstanding that I’ve got this whole list going on of fish-I-caught, I’m not a particularly ambitious angler. I want to catch a fish in Kansas, but in Kansas I’d be perfectly happy if it was a six-ounce sunfish. I also understand that from the fish’s perspective fishing is a pretty cruel thing to do. I’m not going to stop fishing, but all in all I want to play a fish quick and get it back in the water so that it can go on about its business of killing and eating stuff and fish sex. I’d kill a fish and eat it, but I don’t really like to clean fish. I’d just as soon put the fish back.
But when I put them back I want them to survive, and our notions of how to handle fish for fish survival are evolving. There are the great guidelines from KeepEmWet Fishing, most of which involve keeping the fish wet, using a net, using barbless hooks, and reducing handling.
Ernest Hemingway and family with four marlins, 1935, Bimini, Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Massachusetts, Public Domain.
I’ve assumed that IGFA records were all established with dead fish, and that’s not right. While there’s nothing I see in the IGFA rules that prohibits killing fish, IGFA is a partner of KeepEmWet, and has adopted its own rules, guidelines really, for releasing fish. [9] However good the angler, and however good the angler’s intentions, [10] establishing a record requires handling, and there’s a tension between any handling and keeping a fish alive. The IGFA has established procedures for handling and weighing fish aimed at release, and the pictures in my head of dangling dead fish are wrong, or at least unnecessary to establish a record. [11] Still, all in all, all of this folderol seems a lot of trouble, and I’d just as soon not bother. If sometime Kris wants a record, I’ll surely help, but I don’t think I’ll mention it to her. Don’t you mention it to her either.
In addition to the weight thing, there’s the fly thing. Saltwater anglers hate the 12 inch bite tippet regulation [12], which according to rumor is too short to effectively deal with tarpon. For freshwater anglers, the really dumb part of the IGFA rules is a prohibition against droppers. [13] Only single flies are allowed, one supposes to discourage snagging, but really? It’s not like fishing droppers isn’t one of those things done since Dame Juliana Berners, and everybody fishes at least tandem flies when they nymph. The last known person to fish a single nymph was in 2006, and that was only because he’d lost his dropper in a tree. From what I can tell all fishing in Pyramid Lake involves dropper-rigged nymph fishing or streamers, and the practice is to fish tandem streamers. The IGFA rule is inconsistent with how anybody fishes, and I’m not setting any records until the rule is changed. Hah! Showed them. Let them defend their vaunted credibility now.
The Booke of haukynge, huntyng and fysshyng, with all necessary properties and medicines that are to be kept, Tottel, 1561, http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/berners/berners.html
[1] Lawyers love footnotes of all things. Some of the best stuff is always in the footnotes. I wish I could figure out how the text notation could jump to the footnote, and vice versa, but I can’t, so there you are. If you want to read the footnotes you’ll just have to do it manually. Sorry.
[2] Ms. McCord holds a lot of records, but I made up the number 9000. It just sounded good.
[3] IGFA measures things by kilograms, but I skipped straight to the stateside pound translation. If you want to get back to the IGFA designation a kilogram equals 2.2046 pounds.
[4] If you’re paying close attention, this is probably confusing because the chart gives the minimum weight for 16 pound tippet at 8 pounds, 14 ounces. Even by my low math standards that is more than half of the weight of the 16 pound tippet class. That’s because the IGFA doesn’t use good ol’ American tippet, but some kind of European stuff measured at 8 kilograms. The 16 pounds is an approximation of eight kilograms. Eight kilograms weighs more than 16 pounds. Who knew?
[5] The exact language of the reel rule is as follows: “The reel must be designed expressly for fly fishing. There are no restrictions on gear ratio or type of drag employed except where the angler would gain an unfair advantage. Electric or electronically operated reels are prohibited.” I guess that you couldn’t use a Tenkara rod because the reel for the rod isn’t expressly designed for fly fishing. Maybe someone could argue that the absence of the reel was expressly designed for fly fishing, and that counts for reel design. This is a shame, since I reckon that all of the saltwater Tenkara anglers are out there right now trying to beat the record for sailfish.
[6] At this point you should be asking yourself how the heck do I know that my leader actually tests at that weight? There are pre-tested tippet spools you can buy from companies like Courtland, which should provide consistent break points over the length of the line. This differs from how most of us buy tippet, which actually has less to do with the break strength than the tippet diameter. We don’t really care if our .015 diameter tippet measures a bit more than 8 lbs over its length. Record setters do, and you have to send your leader and tippet in for testing with your record application. You’d think these IGFA people think that fishers are all liars, or at least poor judges of their catch.
[7] This is gross over-simplification, but the conduct rules pretty much come down to catch the fish as you normally would, don’t actually shoot it, and except for netting or gaffing in the final stage, don’t let anybody help you land the fish.
[8] Take lots of pictures of the whole fish. Take pictures of the fish from every conceivable angle. If there’s going to be any doubt of the fish’s species, The IGFA recommends you take the fish to your nearest ichthyologist for identification. I kid you not. A photo has to show the full length of the fish. A photo has to show the rod and reel used to the catch the fish. I think a photo has to show the scale used to weigh the fish, and I think I’d send in a photo of the scale in the very act of weighing the fish. Scales are notorious liars, as anybody with a bathroom scale knows.
[9] One supposes best practices for keeping fish alive doesn’t include taking the fish to the nearest certified scale. The scale certification rules confuse me, but I gather that the best scales are spring scales—not digital as one would expect—and that Boga grips are considered good scales, but not good fish handling devices if you’re using them to hang fish up by the lips. Lip hanging is both hard on the fish’s jaw and on their internal organs, which will come as a shock to us largemouth bass anglers. IGFA will pre-certify your scale for a charge and a membership fee, or will certify the scale after the fact. Then of course you run the risk of having used a bad scale, plus you still have to pay the membership fee.
[10] Now if I were a particularly devious sort of record chaser, and I’d caught a record fish, then I might conclude that if I release a fish and it lives long and prospers, then somebody could break my hard won record next year with the same fish. I don’t know how the minds of record chasers work, so maybe none are that sort of devious.
[11] Apparently the best way to weigh a fish is in a cradle or a net, so you have to establish the weight of the sling or net and subtract it. I’ve got no idea what the IGFA requires to establish the weight of the sling or net.
[12] In addition to the class tippet rule there is also a special rule for bite tippet, which is important for fish like tarpon. That’s a whole other discussion. Twelve inches.
[13] If you’ve read down to this footnote, and you don’t know what a dropper is, then I’m a more engaging writer than I thought I was, or you’re one of my children and you’re humoring me. If you think about fly #1 tied to a fly line, and then fly #2 tied to a piece of line tied to the hook bend of fly #1, fly #2 is the dropper. The whole thing together is a dropper rig.
C.S. Fly, Orient Saloon at Bisbee, Arizona, Faro Game, c. 1900, National Archives.
Generally I distrust generalizations, but I’ve got this generalized story-line in my head about what happens in Nevada. Think of two of the state’s three important books :
Roughing It, Mark Twain, 1872, illustrated by various artists. Twain’s semi-autobiographical romp through the silver mining towns of Nevada, set in 1861. It includes a wild stagecoach journey west with his companion, an attorney, various wild scrapes and outrageous cultural observations, and the author’s ultimate retreat from the territory in dubious circumstances.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Hunter S. Thompson, 1971. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman. Thompson’s semi-autobiographical romp through a Nevada gambling town, including a wild journey east in a convertible with his companion, an attorney, various wild scrapes and outrageous cultural observations, and the author’s ultimate retreat from the state in dubious circumstances.
First Edition, from Wikipedia.
The third important Nevada book, Basin and Range, 1980, by John McPhee, is about geology, but even it has a Harvard geology professor who goes west in part to look at road cuts and in part to look for silver. Everyone goes to Nevada to get rich, along with other wild and crazy stuff. Basin and Range also has long discussions about the history of the science of geology, and the nature of geologic time. It’s really the most depressing book of the lot, given how insignificant we are, and how certain it makes it seem that this will all end badly.
Maybe that’s the Vegas story line after all. More on that story line later.
Almost nobody living in Nevada comes from Nevada. They never have. In 1860, Nevada’s population was 6,857. It’s largest population over the rest of the century was in 1880, with 62,266. That’s a growth in 20 years of 808%. Since in 1860 there were only 760 women in Nevada, I’m guessing that the population increase wasn’t solely caused by the birth rate. That would be a lot of labor for 760 women.
That’s not the last time Nevada boomed. Between 1900 and 1910 there was another mining boom, almost doubling the population from 42,335 in 1900 to 81,875 ten years later. This time mining was accompanied by labor violence and the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, in the Nevada mines. That was the closest Nevada ever came to an industrial-syndicalist utopia, though it did come close to a Mormon utopia back before silver was discovered. That didn’t turn out well either. I’m not sure whose utopia it is now.
Like Hawaii, Modern Nevada wouldn’t exist without airlines. On a random Sunday in May I can choose from six nonstops from Houston to Vegas on Southwest Airlines. If that’s not enough there are another 15 Southwest flights that will take me to Vegas with a layover, and United has four additional nonstops. If I want to get to Vegas I can get to Vegas.
And the combination of airplanes and sin is unbeatable. In 1940, the population was 110,247. Over 30 years that’s not really much different than the 81,875 population of 1910. Between 1940 and 1960, the population grew 158 percent, to 285,278. That’s a pretty good increase, but then things really took off. Between 1960 and 2000 Nevada was the fastest growing state in the Union, with growth of 600 percent, to 1,998,257. The population estimate as of 2018 is 3,034,392, another 51 percent.
Airplanes. You can’t have modern Nevada without airplanes.
By population Nevada’s not a particularly big state. It ranks 31st, after Iowa and before Arkansas, and this in a state that is 7th in area, after Arizona but before Colorado. Western states are just bigger.
Like everyplace else Nevada’s population isn’t evenly distributed, but Nevada’s can be peculiarly uneven. An estimated 2,112,436 people live in Clark County, the site of the former railroad town known as Viva Las Vegas! That’s almost 70 percent of the total state population. Another 15 percent live in and around Reno. That puts 85 percent of Nevada’s population in roughly 13 percent of its area.
Jim Irwin, Population Density Map of Nevada, 2010, GNI Free Documentation License, Wikimedia Commons,
Nevada is a vast state, with a lot of vast emptiness. Seven counties, White Pine, Pershing, Lander, Lincoln, Mineral, Storey, Eureka, and Esmeralda (which is Spanish for Emerald) have populations smaller than 10,000 people. That puts less than two percent of the population in about 30 percent of the area.
Population distribution might be affected by federal ownership of 81 percent of Nevada land, but I suspect it’s just not very hospitable land. Federal ownership of land is one of the radical Western conflicts, giving rise to Nevada’s Cliven Bundy’s and endless constitutional theoretics. All I know is that I’m not excited about giving up my share for the Bundys, and I like national parks. Get over it.
Only about 24 percent of Nevadans are born in Nevada, but the transience tends to be urban. A higher percentage of residents are native born in the hinterlands, there’s just not enough population in the hinterlands to make much difference. The biggest source for immigration is California, but foreign-born immigrants, legal and otherwise, comprise about 19 percent of the population. It is a diverse population, about 67 percent white, 8 percent Asian, 9 percent African American, and 10 percent other. Of the total population approximately 34 percent is Hispanic.
David Vasquez, Welcome to Las Vegas sign, 2005, Wikimedia Commons, 2005.
Sorry, this is getting down in the weeds, isn’t it? Summary, Nevada has grown fast. Everybody in Nevada pretty much lives in Vegas, or maybe Reno. At least in Vegas and Reno it’s pretty diverse, and about a third of the population works in leisure, hospitality, or food services. There are strong unions in the service industries, one supposes because of mob/union ties back in the 60s, but it’s no longer the Wobblies.
Like everyplace we’ve been but Mississippi, that rural/urban split plays out in the state’s politics. Red rural, blue urban. Republicans controlled state offices from 2015 to 2018, but in the 2018 elections they lost control to Democrats. Both US senators are Democrats, as are three of the four members of congress. Its six electoral college votes have gone for the Democrat since Barrack Obama’s first election. In 2016, the state went marginally for Clinton, 47.92 percent to 45.5 percent, with the Reno and Vegas urban counties voting Democratic while all or the rural counties voted red.
2018 US Senate elections in Nevada by County, GNU Free Documentation License, Wikipedia.
I’m down in the weeds again. Summary: Nevada currently leans Democratic, with the usual rural/urban split.
But back to the Nevada story line in my head. I’ll tell the story this time through song. Sing along if you’d like.
I’m going to Las Vegas, I’m going to have a good time/get drunk/win a lot money/get laid/get married/get divorced/see Elton John/turn 21/and my life will be something better than better. “Vegas,” Sara Bareilles. “Gonna sell my car and go to Vegas/’Cause somebody told me/That’s where dreams would be . . . ” “Reno,” R.E.M., “You know who you are/You’re gonna be a star.” “Viva Las Vegas.”
Bright light city gonna set my soul Gonna set my soul on fire Got a whole lot of money that’s ready to burn, So get those stakes up higher There’s a thousand pretty women waitin’ out there And they’re all livin’ devil may care And I’m just the devil with love to spare Viva Las Vegas, viva Las Vegas
From Roughing It.
Have mercy Jesus what have I done. “Ooh Las Vegas,” Gram Parsons. “Ooh, Las Vegas ain’t no place for a poor boy like me/Every time I hit your crystal city/You know you gonna make a wreck out of me.” “Vegas Lights,” Panic at the Disco. “We’re swimming with the sharks until we drown.” “Waking Up in Vegas,” Katy Perry.
You gotta help me out It’s all a blur last night We need a taxi ’cause you’re hung-over and I’m broke I lost my fake id but you lost the motel key
It’s time to leave now. I’ve done the damage get me home. “Friend of the Devil,” Grateful Dead. “Leaving Las Vegas,” Sheryl Crow.
I’m Leaving Las Vegas Lights so bright Palm sweat, blackjack On a Saturday night Leaving Las Vegas Leaving for good, for good
From Roughing It.
Meantime in Houston it’s time for the warbler migration, when the warblers leave the Yucatan and fly across the Gulf heading to warbler sex and parties at their summer place in Ohio. Kris drives most every day to Galveston an hour away to watch for the birds. These guys like the warblers too.
Agkistrodon piscivorus, water moccasin, cottonmouth
I’m always dubious about identifications of cottonmouths, because to Texans every water snake in or near the water is a cottonmouth. This is a no doubt proper identification, and Kris was probably wise not to walk on by. It’s cousin the copperhead also likes the wee birdies.
BlackburnianIndigo BuntingHoodedProthonotary warbler. Northern ParulaWorm-eatingBrown ThrasherBlack and White
