2021 begins our fourth year of chasing fish around the country. What a difficult year the third year was.
The kitten we found bass fishing. She wasn’t bass fishing, we were, and she had been dumped on the roadside. Somebody doesn’t know what they lost.
At the start of 2020, we had a great steelhead trip to Washington State, right on the cusp of the Covid outbreak, right when the first US cases had been identified in, you guessed it, Washington State. I remember seeing a young Asian woman in a face mask in the Seattle airport and thinking, isn’t it a bit over the top wearing face masks? Is that some Asian thing? Who knew it would turn out to be not an ethnic question but an ethics question.
We had a couple of trips to Kansas, one early in the year when it was freezing, and one late in the year when it was freezing. I think next time we’ll go to Kansas in the spring, when the tornadoes blow in. As I a child of the Plains I always loved going to the storm cellar when the storm siren blew. All the neighbors would come over and sit around in the semi-dark, in the dank crypt-like smell of the underground. There were almost certainly spiders. It was a fine old time.
We nymphed in Tennessee, and we nymphed in North Carolina, and we caught some redfish on the Texas Coast and some bass in local ponds. That was all good, but with Washington it only meant three new states, plus we still have to return to Kansas. We’re never going to finish at this rate. We’ll have to fish in the State of D.C. if we don’t hurry.
2020 had a pandemic, and also George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis. Someone asked me during the Floyd fallout if I thought there was institutional racism. I said yes, but thinking about it later I’m not sure it’s the right question. We share some pretty tragic civic history, from slavery to voter suppression to Jim Crow, and it seems to me the question is whether we can conclude that George Floyd’s death isn’t a continuation of that history. I suspect that if I were black my response would be yep, just more of the same old, this time from the Minneapolis police.
Personally in November and December I went through two months of radiation for prostate cancer, old man cancer, and the radiation left me randomly falling asleep, then I would sleep some more, and then sleep some more. The doctor told me to think of it as a day at the beach. Since I had to go in most days, it was a pretty lousy couple of months for fishing, even surf fishing on the the beach. I hope the radiation worked, but in any event it didn’t leave any side effects, except that now every time I stand up I immediately need to go pee. It’s going to be a pain in waders.
This is not a flats boat.
There was an election, nothing new, with claims of voter fraud, nothing new, and a violent insurrection at the capital that left five people dead, which technically happened in 2021, not 2020, but it felt like 2020 and it was certainly something new. I just wish we still had Mark Twain. Mark Twain could explain this nonsense to us. This nonsense deserves Mark Twain.
As for me, it’s just not plausible that the Democrats could pull off massive fraud without somebody telling their buddy at work you should have seen what I did today! I cast a million votes for Joe Biden! Ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, Deep Throat in parking garages, the Pentagon Papers, that whole raft of Donald Trump ex-advisor porn, Chelsea Manning, J.K. Rowling’s lawyer, Mike Fiers . . . The only reason the Qanon drivel gets traction is because it’s supposedly being leaked by an insider who can’t keep his mouth shut. At least that part , somebody not keeping their mouth shut, is believable. If there had been a massive conspiracy to falsify millions of votes, some conspirator would certainly have said something to somebody who would need to tell the rest of us, and Rudy Guiliani doesn’t count. Somebody is going to blab. Hell, I’ve just told you about my glow-in-the-dark prostate, which is really none of your business, and even worse, an imposition by me on you. I didn’t cast a million votes for Joe Biden, but if I had, you’d almost certainly know by now.
Kris on the Guadalupe
What’s worse, it’s the sort of thing one shouldn’t claim blithely, without hard evidence, and no, that bogus statistical study that concludes if the vote had been the same in 2020 as it was in 2016, Biden couldn’t have won. True enough, but stupid. That’s why the game’s played on the field. Claiming conspiracies without evidence, Sidney Powelling it, will likely get you sued, and worse, it’s a direct attack on democracy, and pretty sketchy under the Ninth Commandment as well. It’s why except for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton none of the lawyers would go into court and say there was fraud; for a lawyer, lying to a court has consequences.
There are always irregularities in elections, elections are hard to run and unless you can show that the irregularities affect the outcome, it’s just noise. There may have been some noise in 2020, but there was no massive fraud. It would have shown up in court if there had been.
Meantime Happy New Year. We’ll all go fishing in 2021! We’re scheduled to go to Pennsylvania in May, and I think we’re going. Hopefully by then we’ll be vaccinated. We may drive to Arkansas tomorrow, and as long as there are plenty of places to pee on the route, that should be just fine.
It’s hard to get excited about follow-up for a trip that’s a month gone, particularly with nothing coming up on the horizon. I guess right now I’m more interested in trying to remember how to play an Am7b5 on the guitar, and why it’s likely as not to be followed by a D7b9 (which I also can’t remember how to play). The days are just too busy to be bothered much by writing. Or reading. Or much of anything.
What We Forgot, What We Lost
The big effort of the trip was was the night we camped in Mississippi, which required taking loads of stuff, but I’ve already written about that. What we forgot to pack though was important: we forgot trash bags. It’s hard to camp without trash bags.
We did remember face masks and hand sanitizer, but I guess that’s a given in 2020.
For the first time ever I don’t think we lost anything. After we got home I even found the missing sock. How many times do you actually find the missing sock?
Where We Didn’t Go — Tennessee
I’ve spent a lot of time in Tennessee, in Nashville and Memphis and even in Knoxville. I really wanted to go guitar shopping in Nashville, but we didn’t have the time, and it’s also not the time. The virus was spiking in Tennessee, and while I might take a risk for a guitar, it was unfair to share that risk with Kris. Anyway I’ve shopped for guitars in Nashville before.
I also wanted to visit the area around Sevierville and Pigeon Forge because some of my ancestors settled there, and because of Dollywood. We didn’t make it. Before we settled on the South Holston River Lodge we had tried to get a reservation at Blackberry Farm, which is the spiritual home of the Garden and Gun South. Apparently we would have had to make the reservation considerably earlier than the month before, but I suspect the fishing at the South Holston River Lodge was better..
We didn’t go to Dollywood, but last week we listened to the podcast, Dolly Parton’s America. It’s brilliant, and almost made up for missing Dollywood.
Where We Didn’t Go — North Carolina
We went to no restaurants in Asheville, which I suspect is a criminal offense in most jurisdictions, but there you are. It’s 2020.
Like Tennessee, I’ve spent some time in North Carolina before, but I’ve never made it to Eastern North Carolina. I’d like to have seen the Outer Banks.
Anecdote of the Jar, Wallace Stevens
I have worried about this poem since high school, and I kept thinking about it on our drive:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
I came back from the trip and started reading critical studies of the poem, about meaning (or lack thereof), and they didn’t know what it was about either. It’s one of Stevens’ most famous, and hence one of the best known 20th century poems, but it is about as much of an enigma as why I wake at three every morning. From time to time I decide I do know what it’s about, and if it weren’t for that “slovenly” I’d have a pretty good explanation, but whatever I decide I later decide that’s not quite the thing either.
I have a suspicion, just a suspicion, that Anecdote of the Jar and Dolly Parton’s My Tennessee Mountain Home are sort of about the same thing, but that Wallace Stevens wasn’t as sweet of a soul as Dollie Parton. I can’t really speak to their relative merits as poets, though Dolly is prettier, and has made more money, and she never got into a drunken brawl with Earnest Hemingway in a Key West bar. Not that I know of anyway.
Croquet
Croquet is a big deal in Western North Carolina, and our friends Brian and Jane took us to their club in Cashiers to play croquet. If I’d have played club croquet before I started fishing, I might not be fly fishing now. That is almost a perfect game. Kris and Brian beat Jane and me by one stroke, but Brian cheated by being good.
Tennessee Playlist
There is so much music in Tennessee. Country of course, but the blues, rock & roll, gospel, blue grass, Americana, soul . . . I had put together a playlist for Memphis a few years ago, so I added some country to that. Do you know how hard it is to add some country when you’re talking about Tennessee? You could never add enough Country.
On my phone I had 20 hours and 42 minutes of music, 395 songs. Here are some highlights.
Marc Cohn, Walking in Memphis. This song gets a bad rap, but just try not to feel a little elated when he sings “man I am tonight.”
Paul Simon, Graceland. There’s also a version by Willie Nelson.
B.B. King. All of it. And Albert King. And Memphis Minnie. There’s a lot of blues that came through Memphis.
Valerie June. I love Valerie June. I hope she’s still recording.
Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Louis,, Roy Orbison. There’s a lot of rock and roll that came through Memphis.
Bob Dylan, Stuck Inside of Mobile. Maybe the best Dylan song. Also Nashville Skyline.
Little Feat, Dixie Chicken. One of the things Kris brought to our marriage was Little Feat records, and Dixie Chicken is one of the great story songs.
W.C. Handy. Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy.
Otis Redding, Sam Cook, Sam & Dave, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Isaac Hayes. Next to Motown, Memphis was the sound of 60s soul.
This is cheating, but I downloaded the soundtrack of Ken Burns’ Country Music.
Patsy Cline, Publicity Photo for Four Star Records, March 1957.
Selections by Dolly Parton, Porter Wagner, Kitty Wells, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Loretta Lynne, Conway Twitty, Lefty Frizell, Patsy Cline, Ernest Tubb, Chet Atkins, Jim Reeves, Roy Acuff, Ray Price, Roger Miller, Kris Kristofferson. This list could go on and on, but I think if music was ever tied to a place, country music is tied to Nashville. Maybe country music made Nashville.
The Lovin’ Spoonful, Nashville Cats. When I was a kid, this was a song I’d feed a jukebox for. I sure am glad I got a chance to say a word about the music and the mothers from Nashville.
North Carolina Playlist
A North Carolina playlist isn’t as overwhelming as Tennessee, but it’s good, and maybe more eccentric.
Doc Watson
Sara Hickman
Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs
Bill Monroe
James Taylor
The Avett Brothers
Charlie Daniels
Elizabeth Cotton
Carolina Chocolate Drops
Thelonius Monk
Roberta Flack
Max Roach
John Coltrane
Bernard Gotfryd, Thelonius Monk at the Village Gate, New York City, 1968, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
That’s a pretty great list of singer songwriters, bluegrass musicians, and most surprising, jazz greats. With Tennessee, you can hear links between blues and country and rock and roll and gospel and “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” It’s hard to hear much of a link between John Coltrane and Doc Watson. It is a fine list though.
Last November I mentioned to a colleague that we were trying to catch a fish in each state, and he invited us to their house in North Carolina, in the heart of North Carolina trout country. Their house is near Sapphire, which is eight miles east of Cashiers in the Appalachians in Western North Carolina, about an hour and a half southwest of Asheville. I suspect it was country once populated with hidden stills, but now there are probably more cute shops than stills. It’s pretty wild though, and their house was by far the nicest fly lodge we’ve stayed in. It was just as well it was their house, because otherwise we couldn’t have afforded a three nights’ stay.
Brian booked our guides through a local fly shop, Brookings Anglers, and it may be the prettiest fly shop I’ve seen, not that I’m overly impressed by pretty fly shops. I wouldn’t suggest driving more than a couple of hundred miles to visit. In addition to me and Kris, Brian and Jane had invited other work colleagues and their spouses, and we fished together one day and then the next day Kris and I floated the Tuckasegee River, the Tuck, while they went elsewhere.
The first day, the day we fished together, the Brookings’ guides had access to private water, which was small enough that I won’t give the name; Brookings has the access if you’re interested, and if you’re within three or four hundred miles of Brookings you really should drop by. The problem with the private water was that it was artificially loaded with huge trout that weren’t wild trout. The good thing about the private water was that it was artificially loaded with huge trout that weren’t wild trout. Sometimes that’s just fun. We caught huge trout.
We fished with Roger Lowe, who may be a bit younger than me, but who Brian described as the dean of North Carolina guides. Roger has the peculiar fate of looking exactly like my friend Jim from Austin, who I’ve talked baseball with for the last 20-odd years. Jim was a college pitcher and high school coach, and is a wee bit opinionated about baseball. Sometimes Jim is a bit brusk. Here is a recent response by Jim to something stupid:
“Go the fuck away . . . . Away.“
Which for Jim is pretty measured. In appearance Roger could be Jim’s twin brother. From the time we started fishing I expected Roger to invite me to take my stupid opinions and fuck off. I don’t even know if Roger follows baseball, but I will tell you there is nothing more charming than a guy with a North Carolina accent announcing that we’re going to Euro-nymph, and who then never once responded with expletives in exchange for my casting. If Roger and Jim are long-lost twins, Roger is definitely the more civil of the two.
The private water we fished wasn’t very big, maybe 20 feet across, and its runs are crammed under every overhanging branch in North America. Most of the day I fished Roger’s 10-foot Hardy two weight, with a long mono leader, 15 feet of 20 pound leader at the butt, 5 feet of 15 pound, and then a two foot stretch of Rio Two Tone Indicator Tippet material, finished off with 4 or 5 feet of tippet. What X tippet? I can’t remember, but there are plenty of descriptions of long mono leaders around the internet. I know this: Rio two-tone indicator is the bomb. Alternating hot pink and fluorescent yellow, it looks like the love child of fishing line and Christmas candy. The fourth time I went back to Brookings–not that I’m overly impressed by a pretty fly shop–I bought a spool. I’ll probably never use it, but I sure do like it.
All I really fished was the leader, and I don’t think I ever once had the fly line off the reel. The long 10-foot rod is for better line control in drifts, but I’d never heard why for tight-line nymphing two- and three-weight rods are preferred to the usual four- or five-weights. Roger explained that when a fish takes the fly, if it feels any resistance it will immediately spit the hook. The two weight’s limber tip delays resistance long enough to set.
As for casting, it didn’t matter. We weren’t casting far. With a 25-foot leader on a 10-foot rod on a 20-foot stream there just isn’t very far to cast. My best casts involved letting leader stretch out on the water behind, then using the water tension to haul the line forward, quartering upriver. I wasn’t much good at it. Most of my casts were big overhand lobs that ended with the fly hung in a tree. The flies themselves were weighted, or maybe Roger added weight, but we were fishing with all the classic flies: mop flies, squirmy worms, I think I fished an egg pattern at some point. Forget the fly though, what was fun was high-sticking the leader through the runs, and keeping enough of the Christmas candy indicator out of the water so that I could see any hesitation. It was mesmerizing, and completely successful. I am now one of those cosmopolitan fly fishers who has Euro-nymphed.
Late in the day my shoulder told me that high-sticking might be a young man’s game, but I kept at it. Like I said, leading that tight-lined bit of colored fly leader through a run was mesmerizing. Plus we caught fish. Roger was pretty entertaining too. Roger told a great story about a client who complained about rain on her fishing trip. Roger told her that sometimes you had to put up with a bit of rain. She was in the back seat, and he said she leaned over the seat, got in his face, and told him that he should shut up, that she could complain all she wanted.
Roger said that he shut up.
The story I won’t share is our next day’s guide’s, Matt Canter, who is manager and a part-owner of Brookings. Did I mention Brookings is a really pretty fly shop? Anyway, the story involves how Matt came to manage and then own part of Brookings. If you’re within four or five hundred miles of the shop, you should visit and get Matt to share the story. It’s a great story, and a really pretty fly shop.
What wasn’t so pretty was that day’s fishing. We were fishing small nymphs under big dry flies, dry dropper rigs, which wasn’t what was wrong. Here is what went wrong with that day’s fishing:
Kris had the greatest day fishing ever.
She caught brown trout, she caught rainbow trout, at some point she started catching nice-sized brookies. After her first brookie I mentioned to Matt that Kris had an Appalachian grand slam and Matt said yeah, but then a few minutes later Kris caught a smallmouth. Matt, whose gloat was very unbecoming, said that now she’s really got an Appalachian grand slam.
Why was Matt gloating? What was I catching? This.
Matt said it’s a kind of sucker, known locally as a knottyhead. That picture’s of a big one. After we got home I searched around on the internet a bit, and never could quite match the fish to a genus and species. For all I know God created them that day just to keep me humble. Kris and I would fish the same fly, same depth, same drift, and Kris would catch a lovely wild brown or a tarpon up from the Gulf or a steelhead come south on vacation and I would catch . . . a knottyhead. Ok, they weren’t the only fish I caught. I caught some nice browns and some nice rainbows, and even got a brown on the dry fly once, but I must have caught 20 knottyheads, one after another, while Kris was having the fishing day of her life.
I said Kris didn’t really have a slam until she caught a knottyhead. She immediately caught her one and only knottyhead. Next time I’m in Brookings I’m complaining to the manager.
Not that I’m jealous.
That night over drinks we were comparing our day’s fishing, and somebody asked if any of us had ever had a double, a fish on each fly?
I answered. “Kris has. Today. Twice.” As my friend Jim would say, a double-fucking-double.
I could have had a double if knottyheads just took dries. And she didn’t land both fish, either time. So there.
We drove last night from Sapphire, North Carolina, to Houston. We didn’t exactly drive straight through. Around 2 in the morning we stopped in Louisiana at a rest stop on I-10 just west of the Mississippi border and I slept for an hour. I had planned to stop for the night at a motel somewhere in Georgia, but Kris had other ideas and there you have it. I dozed while Kris drove through South Carolina and Georgia, and then it was after midnight and we just kept driving, trading back and forth, through Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana into Texas. It was 941 miles in about 15 hours.
We planned this trip as a car trip because we were just paranoid enough not to get on a plane, but not paranoid enough not to go, and we’d always planned to make the return trip in one long leg. Going home we were going to leave this morning around 4 am and drive straight through, but instead left last night. I hope our hosts will forgive the abrupt change in plans.
Going out was different, slower. We went north through East Texas, into Louisiana at Shreveport, in the heart of Northern Baptist Louisiana, through a bit of Delta Arkansas into Delta Mississippi. We had plugged the Robert Johnson Crossroads marker in Clarksdale, Mississippi, into the GPS because, well Satan, but neither Satan nor Robert Johnson were there, and I’m no better guitarist than before we left. It’s funny though, growing up in High Plains cotton country prepares you for the Delta. You know flat land, and you recognize cotton in the field. The Delta looked a lot like home.
Rowan Oak.
We went on to Oxford to visit Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s house near the University of Mississippi, and then camped nearby at an unremarkable state park. Rowan Oak was closed because of the virus. At the campground, I was drenched with sweat by the time I set up the tent; camping in Mississippi in July may not have been our best idea, but in the evening we drank Four Roses in memory of Faulkner and the Four Roses gave me sufficient courage to try to explain the ukulele to Kris. Kris has wanted to learn the ukulele.
“It’s the top four strings of the guitar a sixth up from the nut, so it’s D-G-B-E only it’s G-C-E-A . . .”
“Show me a chord.”
“This is wait, wait, it’s a 6th up from G, so this is E.”
“I can’t see your fingers, let me see your fingers.”
“Here, right here, this is, wait, a 6th up from G, so E.”
“Show me another chord.”
“This would be, wait, let me translate, it’s up from C so it would be A, or it could also be D-minor . And this is either B or B-flat, is it B-flat a 6th up from D or is it B? “
I thought I was being particularly lucid, but I think Kris got away from the lesson without knowing a single thing about the ukulele. That’s a good thing, since it should have been a 4th up, not a 6th.
***
To get to Shiloh National Battlefield we drove through Northern Mississippi and Southwestern Tennessee, and we started driving past Trump signs, Trump flags, Trump bumper stickers. I am surprised there weren’t Trump cut-outs, or even President Trump himself, waving at us from the side of the road. It struck me that if I lived in the area and was Biden prone, I’d be leary of putting a Biden sticker on my car. It just wouldn’t seem a safe thing to do.
Whatever our discontent with one another now, that locale of the first high-casualty battle of our largest discontent is not an easy place to get to. Because it’s not easy to get to, it’s pretty much as it was in 1862. I don’t know why I feel this need to visit our battlefields, but I continue to do so. Reverence and awe is what I feel when I’m there, for young men whose deaths and bravery were a long time ago, and sadness.
Me and William Faulkner.
***
I like to travel in the South. There is always great stuff to see, and many friendly and often peculiar people, and great food. And this trip there was still great stuff to see, but we weren’t stopping to eat anyplace, not even for donuts.
It may have been my imagination but there seemed to be an overlay of hostility about, of all the stupid stuff, masks. East of Nashville we lost an hour, which we hadn’t expected. Kris wanted to stop at a McDonalds because she thought it would be clean and we could get some iced tea and use their bathrooms: corporate America she thought could manage the virus, even if we collectively couldn’t. There was a sign on the door requiring masks, but inside it seemed to be a point of honor for customers to defy the sign. The staff, stressed with the burden of protecting themselves and America, were angry and yelling at each other, and openly hostile to the customers, who, arrogantly standing maskless, deserved their hostility. We stayed, which we shouldn’t have done, then tossed the food into the trash on the way out the door.
If I die because of the coronavirus, I will blame that McDonald’s.
***
Asheville may be one of the South’s better food cities. We had a barbecue pork sandwich at Little Pigs Bar-B-Q, which was very good and which we ordered to go from the parking lot, but you can’t like anything about traveling through a good city with good restaurants and not stopping at any of them because, well, coronavirus. When I picked up our sandwiches the customers inside wore masks, mostly.
***
Kris has a new minivan. Kris loves minivans, and she traded in her ancient Chrysler Town and Country on a new Chrysler Pacifica, which may well be the smartest collection of car compromises ever. It is even a good-looking car, if you can get past its mini-vanness. I hated to drive the Town and Country because it was like driving a bowl of jello; I love the Pacifica, but don’t tell Kris.
We piled so much stuff into that car.
tent
folding chairs
folding table
cots
sleeping bags
kitchen junk
food
a case of wine
some more food
stove
a five gallon water jug
fly fishing gear, including waders and boots
more food
a Yeti cooler
another Yeti cooler
still more food
a guitar
a yukulele
clothes, including whites to play croquet in North Carolina, because you can’t play croquet in anything but whites
Some more fly fishing gear
And it was all in a constant state of disarray. It was an experiment, to see after all these years, if we could still drive someplace and camp. We did it. We camped for one night. We can do it again.
***
Driving through Mississippi last night at 2 in the morning I told Kris that we were only 10 miles from the Tatonut Donut Shop in Ocean Springs. She said let’s go there and park on the street until they open in the morning. When we checked the internet they weren’t open on Monday. We kept driving. Those are very good donuts though, perhaps the best I’ve ever had. We would have broken up the trip for Tatonut donuts.
***
The Mississippi Delta is Mississippi cotton country, and still today 60% of the population is African American because Delta cotton production was industrial agriculture that depended on cheap labor. That’s where the enslaved were brought. It is also the home of the Blues. It is now one of our poorest regions because in place of cheap labor cotton production has mechanized.
Structurally the blues are usually a 12 bar phrase, repeated again and again with variations. The Blues can be extraordinary sophisticated, think Bessie’s Blues by John Coltrane, or raw and driving, like Cross Road Blues by Robert Johnson. One of the things that makes the blues different from other music is that it is cyclic, there is no chorus, no bridge, the phrase goes that 12 bars, or maybe 16 bars, and then it does it again and then it does it again and then it does it again. Folk music is cyclic as well, and one suspects that there is interplay (or at least a common human bond) between, say, Barbary Allen and Crossroads Blues.
In Clarksdale where we went to see the Crossroads Marker everyone, even people walking randomly down the street, seemed to be wearing masks. It gave me great hope for the drive. One hope, dashed.
***
Downtown Oxford, Mississippi, is charming, with cute shops, restaurants, boutique hotels, and a lovely courthouse with a Confederate soldier out front. There is a current controversy of course about the Confederate soldier, that he should be removed, but forgetting all else it is a charming vignette. It is hard though to forget he’s a Confederate sentinel for the courthouse. He will someday go I suspect, and I suppose I shouldn’t regret it, but I do, a little, but only because the statue is very pretty, and it makes me consider the War.
Current estimates are that there were about 750,000 young men, North and South, who died in the Civil War. If you include Americans both North and South among the dead, it remains our costliest war. We can only speculate at why most of those young men were fighting, but I suspect some of it was that young men fight when called by old men, or maybe, as Shelby Foote told about the answer of a random Confederate private, “because you’re down here.”
If the War was inevitable, both because of slavery and the fragility of the Union some 70 years in, then there had to be Confederate soldiers as well as Union, and the Confederates were as flawed and tragic as Hamlet, or Lear, or best of all, Othello. We may not be able to forgive them, any more than we can forgive Othello the death of Desdemona, but we can recognize their flaw and our collective tragedy. Honestly, I’d like to see that statue stay, rededicated to the dead of both sides, with an addition of a memorial to the cost of the failed Reconstruction and slavery. It would give us a better picture of our history. I suspect that ultimately it won’t stay though, and that’s ok as well.
***
I had a call last night with a young friend, a young African American woman. It started as business but we talked and I told her about driving through the majority-black Delta where everyone wore masks, even walking down the street, and then into East Tennessee, where it seemed a point of honor for the young white men in the McDonald’s to defy mask orders because the Second Amendment and tattoos would protect them. I told her that driving home the night before we had stopped at a convenience store/gas station on the edge of some city, Montgomery I think, and while I filled up the car I watched a series of young black men enter the store to buy cigarettes or beer or whatever.
“They were all wearing masks, right?” She thought that would be the denouement, that the young white men in East Tennessee arrogantly disobeyed the mask signs that the young black men in Alabama obeyed.
“Nope.”
“I thought you were going to tell me they were wearing masks.”
“Nope.” Having been one myself, I think that young men are sometimes just uniformly stupid.
