Tag: Packing list

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Tennessee and North Carolina packing lists

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.

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Washington Playlist

What We Took

We took 7 wt and 8/9 wt. Beulah Spey rods.. We took skagit lines for both, and a variety of tips. We fished T-17 tips, whatever that means. The smaller rod was matched to a Hardy Marquis Salmon No. 2 reel, and for the larger I stripped a 12 wt floating tarpon line off of a Galvan Tournament Series Reel. They’re both pretty things. I’m a sucker for reels.

We put 8 wt Rio InTouch Salmon/Steelhead floating lines on two saltwater reels, both Tibor Everglades, and fished them on 9 foot 8 wt rods–Kris’s rods, a Helios 3 and a Helios 2. I got the Helios 2.

The Olympic Peninsula may be the last stronghold of boot-footed waders, the kind of waders with attached rubber boots instead of neoprene stockings worn under separate wading boots. Ryan the guide said that boot foot waders are warmer, and I believe it: my feet were always cold once I’d waded, notwithstanding the Darn Tough expedition socks and liners. Plus our boots never dried after we finished fishing, kicking my luggage over the 50 pound limit. “Happy Valentines” the nice lady at the Southwest Counter said when she didn’t charge me for overweight luggage.

I wore everything I had. Everything. The temperatures were warm enough, it was sunny and there was no wind, but I’m from Houston. I wore everything I had.

Victoria, B.C.

The Black Ball Ferry Line ferry, The Coho, runs from Port Angeles to Victoria. I hadn’t been on The Coho since 1962, when I was five, and my memory of it was somewhat spotty. Mostly I remember my sister being seasick, really, really seasick. So does she. We texted about it on the ferry, and I though she was going throw up by text.

We ate in one memorable restaurant, OLO, which is Chinook for hungry, and one less memorable restaurant, Little Jumbo, where I had fish in a sauce that reminded me of cream gravy. I like cream gravy. Loaded up with pepper and served on either biscuits or chicken fried steak it is the very thing, but cream gravy on grilled ling isn’t particularly successful. It was described on the menu as sunchoke cream, but cream gravy is cream gravy and you can’t fool me. It would have been better with some bacon grease.

We had afternoon tea at the Butchart Gardens, which even midwinter are beautiful, and midwinter have the advantage of no crowds. Afternoon tea is a thing in Victoria, and not having tea is punishable with heavy fines. They even ask at the border if you’ve had your tea. I suspect it magnifies their separation from the weird coffee concoctions on the other side of the border, but it also made me feel good. This was my kind of crowd. Afternoon tea is apparently a thing for the post-60s set.

In a bar, Bard and Banker, we ordered a dozen oysters that never came. Management should tell its servers that even raw oysters can’t walk from the kitchen. I watched ice hockey on the bar tv, so I knew I was in Canada. The Lightning won in overtime. I don’t know where the Lightning are from, or who they were playing.

The Royal B.C. Museum is spectacular, mostly because of the First Nation exhibits, both the past–these were pretty sophisticated people with pretty interesting stuff–and the present. Everywhere there are signs explaining that some of the objects are exhibited by treaty.

We had two very strange encounters.

I don’t smoke many cigars, but, when one can buy Cuban cigars one should buy a few, just in case any Cubans come to visit. When we were leaving the Cuban Cigar Shop the other customer was wearing an Astros cap. He was from Conroe, about 50 miles from Houston, and he was in Victoria building its first sewage treatment plant. This is a city of 350,000, and it’s never had a sewage treatment plant. It fine screens the sewage that otherwise goes straight to the ocean, trusting on currents and cold water to clean things up. I was kinda glad those oysters never got served.

Cohibas, the cigar that Castro smoked, are very good.

Victoria has its street life, it’s a walkable city with its best restaurants and shops and bars tightly packed around the port, so we walked. It’s grungier than I had expected, with a rough edge to its street life. Lots o’ street folk. Walking to OLO the first night a young guy on the street lunged at us . . .

And coughed, hacked, coughed hard, uncovered, clearly at us. It was a 21st century, post-coronavirus assault. Kris was shaken, I was angry, but if you just wanted to hassle people it was brilliant. Lunge and cough. Terrifying.

We stayed at the Best Western Plus Carlton Plaza. Nice enough, and central, but they didn’t have morning coffee in the lobby, which is unforgivable. We should have sprung for The Fairmont Empress.

Seattle, Wa.

In Seattle we had an early flight so we stayed near the airport. We walked around the Ballard neighborhood on the first day, trying to find oysters, and on our last evening ate at Matt’s in the Market, in the Pike Place Market, mostly because there were pictures of it all over the internet and it looked pretty. We wanted to see the Market, but by the time we got there from Victoria almost everything was\closed. Someday we’ll go back to Seattle for a baseball game. They did have coffee in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express.

What We Didn’t Do

We didn’t eat at our acquaintance Jack’s barbecue place in Seattle. We didn’t spend much time in Seattle, and none in Vancouver. We didn’t see any baseball or catch a sea-run cutthroat trout. We didn’t do any yoga. We smoked no marijuana, though I started to ask the cluster of accountants outside the Pike Place Market for a toke. Really? Accountants? They had to be accountants. They looked like either accountants or lawyers, but tax lawyers.

What I Lost

I lost an Apple Air Pod, which left me with a case and a single Air Pod. Did you know that you can buy a single Air Pod from Apple? It’s not cheap, about $70, but cheaper than a new set.

I lost my Nikon waterproof point and shoot, with all the best pictures of our fishing trip. I’d decided to replace it with a new iPhone, but last night Jack Mitchell of the Evening Hatch texted that they’d found my camera. That’s a pretty good trip for me. Only one Air Pod lost. Only one fly rod broken.

Donuts

Empire Donuts in Victoria had good coffee, and a Star Wars theme. There was nothing wrong with the donuts. We went out of our way to go to Sidney Bakery, about 20 miles from Victoria but close enough to the Butchart Gardens to make it easy. It was an old-fashioned bakery, doing a great Wednesday morning business. I ordered a pecan roll so I could hear them mispronounce pee-can.

Playlist

There were 247 songs on my Seattle playlist. That’s a lot. There is a tremendous amount of great music from Seattle.

  • Songs titled “Seattle”: Sam Kim, Perry Como, Mary Mary, Felly, Public Image Ltd., Jackson Walker, Bobby Sherman. The Perry Como is a great example of bad choices. The Bobby Sherman is the same song, from a late-60s television series, Here Comes the Brides. The Public Image is the best of the lot, though I’m not sure what it has to do with Seattle. I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with any television series.
  • Bands That Live in the Part of Seattle That’s Actually Greater Brooklyn: Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes, The Head and the Heart, Laura Love, Nieko Case, Death Cab for Cutie, the Highwomen, Brandi Carlile, Chastity Belt, Perfume Genius, Tacocat. I’m very fond of Fleet Foxes, who remind me of Bon Iver. Death Cab for Cutie is better than they should be. I thought Brandi Carlile was off of one of those tv talent competitions, but she’s not, and I was pleased to find her. Tacocat is the greatest name ever, and there need to be more bands like Perfume Genius.
  • Grunge and Post-Grunge. Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam. I had never listened to Pearl Jam, which seems very odd, and I may be the only person who thinks Eddie Vedder sounds exactly like Darius Rucker. I understand that the Mariners play Smells Like Teen Spirit instead of Take Me Out to the Ballgame during the seventh inning stretch.
  • Rock. Jimy Hendrix, Heart, Queensryche, the Ventures. I’ve never really liked Hendrix. At his best he’s a good blues guitarist, but usually I find him cloying. I downloaded Rod Stewart’s cover of Angel, and Derek & the Dominoes cover of Little Wing, and they’re still better than Hendrix’s originals. As for Heart, hadn’t heard them since the 70s, and listening to them 50 years later was great fun. I always thought the Ventures did Wipeout, but that was the Surfaris. The Ventures did do The Theme from Hawaii Five-0, which I’ve added to my Hawaii playlist, and Pipeline. I wish I could play that first hook in Pipeline.
  • Hip-Hop, Rap. Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Mary Lambert (only because of her ties to Maklemore, she keeps me warm is lovely), and some song by Kanye West. We watched the Taylor Swift documentary, Miss Americana, after we got back, so I’m not talking to Kanye right now.
  • Jazz. Bill Frisell, Kenny G, Ernestine Anderson, Quincy Jones. That’s too broad a list to mean anything. I never made it through a full Kenny G. song, but I’m a fan of Bill Frisell because I’m a guitar fan. Ernestine Anderson grew up in Houston, but I’d never listened to her. It’s music that goes well with martinis.
  • Classical. John Cage, Mark O’Conner. I liked the Cage I listened to. Mark O’Conner is from Seattle, and bluegrass, but his Appalachia Waltz with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer is wonderful.
  • Bing Crosby. I can always listen to White Christmas.
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Idaho Playlist

Did you know that if you took any song written about Mexico, and changed it to Idaho, the meter still worked? That’s why Canadians sing “South of the border/Down Idaho way.“

What We Took

We took gear for trout. We took a 3-weight rod, a 4-weight rod, and two 5-weights, and we never took the 4-weight out of the luggage. I liked the flimsy 3-weight just fine until it got windy, but it got windy a lot so I finally gave it up for the 5-weight. Both rods I took were Winstons, a new Pure 5-weight that Trout Unlimited sent me because I won their annual spelling bee, and a Boron IIIX that I picked up at a Gordy & Son’s remainder sale because Winston came out with the Pure. Kris took her Helios 3D 5 weight. I fished it for just a bit. I’m used to big booming saltwater rods. I’m not used to big booming trout rods. That rod is a big booming trout rod.

We took floating lines and some 5x and 6x leaders I’d tied. We didn’t use the 6x, and I think the guides laughed at me for owning 6x tippet. We took some reels, a couple of Abels, a Ross, a Hardy, but I caught exactly one fish on the reel, and then I was reeling in my line for a pause in fishing when for some unfathomable reason a fish hit the skating fly.

We took waders and boots for Silver Creek, but didn’t take them on the Middle Fork. The guides strongly discouraged waders in the boats, something about getting thrown out, waders filling with water, and drowning. All things being equal I’d just as soon not.

Our gear was limited by the weight we could take on the bush plane, 30 pounds apiece, and I was already taking 11 pounds of guitar and case. I paired down and then paired down again. Instead of taking all ten foam hoppers that I’d tied, I only took five. Really. I’m stupid.

We took a bottle of Four Roses bourbon in honor of William Faulkner’s birthday, and poured the contents into a plastic water bottle to save weight. Happy birthday William!

I gave myself a new guitar case for my birthday, a Visesnut, maybe the best guitar case made (though they make a carbon fiber model for about $800 more). For years I’ve traveled with a cheap 3/4 size classical that I would stow in the overhead bin. Coming through Chicago Midway on Labor Day I talked to a guy who always checked his guitar with his luggage, and when I asked Kris if I should get a better case and check my guitars she immediately said yes please. Apparently with a guitar case on a plane I’m a nuisance.

We took too many clothes, but that’s probably because we had great weather. I discovered that I really liked wearing a fishing shirt on the water, the kind with lots of pockets, because, well, pockets. When I just wore a knit pullover I wanted pockets.

I bought a new pair of shoes for the trip, Simms Riprap wet wading shoe. They worked great, except that I didn’t wear socks until the final day on the water. I should have worn socks. They’re better with socks.

What We Lost. Where We Didn’t Go.

Kris destroyed her IPhone on Silver Creek by dunking it. I destroyed my Nikon Coolpix W300 waterproof camera on Silver Creek by ignoring the warnings about cleaning the seals and then dunking it. If you ignore the warnings it’s not waterproof. I had to take pictures the rest of the trip with my GoPro, which was better for stills than I thought it would be. Kris had to use my phone. She takes most of the photos I post, and is better at it than I am.

We didn’t go to McCall or Couer d’Alene, both of which my parents loved 60 years ago. I’m sure they haven’t changed. We didn’t fish the Henry’s Fork.

What We Ate.

On the way out of Boise we stopped by the Basque Block and bought a baguette and cheese, which got us to Ketchum. Ketchum is a strange mix of college town sans college and affluent resort, but I enjoyed the Pioneer Saloon, where I had a long conversation with an older south Idaho rancher and his daughter about barrel racing, how I could never break 20 seconds as a kid, and why I don’t much like horses. Some of us just aren’t really horse whisperers.

The guides kept us fed on the river, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In order of dinner entrees: fried chicken, pork chops, fajitas, salmon, steak. It was always excellent, though Idahoans could use some advice on how to serve tortillas. I got two deserts on my birthday, though one may have been for William Faulkner.

Books

I’ve already written about Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, which stands alone as a peculiarly great book about Idaho. Hemingway famously died there, but he didn’t really write anything important in Idaho except maybe A Moveable Feast, and that’s about Paris. But did you know that Hemingway’s buddy Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho?

Ezra Pound is at the heart of American literature, he really is. I like some of his poems very much, and there is still no writing more beautiful to me than Pound’s The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

Ezra Pound circa 1913, doing his best Bob Dylan, from the Paris Review.

That said, I suspect I wouldn’t have much liked Pound in the flesh. Since college, whenever I’ve thought of Idaho, I’ve wondered how Pound could have been bred and born in Hailey? I finally looked it up. Turns out he was born there because his broke father took a political appointment in Hailey’s general land office. He was born and then a month later Mom left one of the most beautiful places on earth for New York City because she wouldn’t raise her son in such a God-forsaken wilderness. Dad soon followed. It explains a lot.

Baseball

When we left Ketchum and civilization, the Astros had clinched the American League West. When we got back to Salmon they had clinched home field advantage over the Yankees and the Dodgers. It was a good way to return to WiFi. That whole Ukraine thing happened with the President too.

Birds

Kris birds, seriously birds, as in she’s permanently attached to a pair of binoculars and a birding guide, and she spent as much time in Idaho looking at her copy of Peterson’s New Birder’s Guide as I spent playing the guitar. There are birds, eagles and ospreys, that fish for a living, and we saw ospreys but we never saw an eagle. She was thrilled with the osprey skull found at a campsite.

There is a small bird on the river, called an ouzel by the guides but the American dipper by the guidebooks. It lives in the rocks by the river and is a delight and joy. They’re the only aquatic songbird in America, and one dusk when we heard a bird song I said to Kris that sounds like a mockingbird. Of course I always tell Kris every pretty bird song is a mockingbird, even when in Idaho where there are no mockingbirds, but for once I was sort of right; it was an ouzel. The New Birder’s Guide said its strong sweet tones sound like a mockingbird. And they do.

Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren – American Dipper, from Wikimedia Commons.

Music

After Kris got tired of my collection of Josh Ritter (which is surprisingly extensive, and his Wolves is a great favorite), she found a bunch of songs with Idaho in the name or the lyrics and an internet comment that said there are a lot of songs with Idaho in the name or the lyrics, none of which have much to do with Idaho. Like I said, you can substitute Idaho for Mexico anytime you want, and it looks like lots of songwriters do.

Victor Wooten, a well-known jazz bassist and the bassist for Bella Fleck and the Flecktones, was born in Idaho. His parents were military, and he apparently stayed about as long as Ezra Pound.

  • b-52s, Private Idaho. I could do without ever hearing this song again.
  • Riders in the Sky, Idaho (Where I’m From). Ranger Doug is a great Western Swing guitarist, and Too Slim is responsible for the Paul is Dead Hoax.
  • Bryan Lanning, Idaho. It is stunning that there are so many songs called Idaho. This may be the only pop anthem called Idaho.
  • IDAHO, To Be the One. And this may be the only band called Idaho. I’d change my name, just because it’s so hard to google.
  • Gregory Alan Isakov. Idaho.
  • Gorillaz, Idaho. Bon Iver meets Harry Nilsson, and I’m not sure it works,.
  • BoDeans, Idaho. I’m just a BoDeans kinda guy. They’re from Wisconsin.
  • Jeffrey Foucault, Idaho. I liked this. Foucault is also from Wisconsin, and this song would have worked if sung about Mexico.
  • Y La Bamba. Idaho’s Genius. A Spanish lament out of Portland that mentions Idaho. I should have had these people on our Portland playlist.
  • Hot Buttered Rum, Idaho Pines. Bluegrass. Tennessee mountain music about Idaho.
  • Caitlin Canty, Idaho. Clean voices, clean guitars. Good Nashville.
  • Down Like Silver, Idaho. This is also Caitlin Canty, with Peter Bradley Adams. She must have a thing for Idaho.
  • Ron Pope, Twin Falls Idaho. Road song. More ok Nashville, but it’s kind of the problem with songs about Idaho: they don’t have to be about Idaho. It’s convenient. It’s exotic. It’s a place to yearn for in a sadly yearning sort of way.
  • Rick Pickren, Here We Have Idaho. This is the state song. It’s kind of a polka song.
  • Jeremy McComb, Bury Me in Idaho. McComb was born in Idaho. McComb sounds like he’s from Nashville. What is it with Nashville and Idaho?
  • Old Bear Mountain, Idaho. More Idaho Bluegrass.
  • Ronee Blakly, Idaho Home. This was from Robert Altman’s Nashivlle. Inauthentic old-time Nashville meets Idaho, and Blakly is still authentically great.
  • Clare Burson, Take Good Care. I don’t know what this song has to do with Idaho.
  • Cori Connors, Idaho Wind. I don’t know what this song has to do with Idaho.
  • Rosalie Sorrels, Way Out In Idaho. Sorrels was part of the 50s-60s folk movement, and recorded a number of Idaho timber and mining songs. They’re very earnest.
Tony Rees, John Renbourn and Stefan Grossman, 1978, Norwich Folk Festival.
  • John Renbourn, Idaho Potato. For guitarists of a certain type and age, Renbourn is a hero. This is classic Renbourn. If I were picking out a road trip playlist, this would be my Idaho song.
  • Drew Barefoot, Idaho. Instrumental that would fit just fine on an Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western soundtrack.
  • David Robert King, Bad Thing. This guy listened to too much Tom Waits as a child. This is off his album “Idaho.”
  • The Eisenhauers, Idaho. Every time this came on I had to pick up the phone to see who sounded so great. They’re Canadian. I think they thought they were writing about Mexico.
  • Amy Annelle, Idaho. Annelle is from Austin, and has a troubled medical history and a lovely voice. Apparently writing about Idaho in Austin isn’t quite the thing that it is in Nashville. She’s the only Austin musician on the list.

All those songs called “Idaho?” You may not believe it but every one is a different song. If I ever write a song I think I’ll call it Idaho, and it will never mention Idaho once.

Reckless Kelly is from Idaho. I think of them as an Austin band. My fail.

One song named Idaho stood out: Idaho by Afroman. “Idaho, Idaho, Idaho baby/potatoes ain’t the only thing they grow.” Then the song gets obscene. Really really party rap obscene. Don’t listen to this with your children. Don’t listen to this if you’re squeamish. I’m squeamish, but it was funny to listen to once or twice.

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New York, Vermont, New Hampshire Packing List, Part Two

Range Rovers

I’ve been looking at new cars. Mine is starting to cost real money to hold together, and its reliability worries me. If price and global warming weren’t a problem, I’d go buy a Land Cruiser and be done. I want a Land Cruiser, but the current model is 10 years old, gets a combined mileage of 15 mpg, and costs north of $80,000. Eighty thousand dollars would pay for a lot of fishing. Plus the Land Cruiser is just too big. The 4Runner is cheaper and smaller but just as old and nearly as guzzly, and their sister cars, the Lexus GX and LX, are old and guzzly and expensive and worse, they’re ugly. The best thing about driving a Lexus SUV is that you don’t have to look at that horrific grill. Is there an uglier grill on the road than a Lexus SUV?

I’ve driven a mid-sized Mercedes SUV since 1998, two of them anyway, but the new GLE has four different interfaces to communicate with your car’s electronic brain: voice, touch screen, a rotary controller, and not one but two steering wheel touch-pads. That gives you just all kinds of useless ways to turn on the radio. Meantime newer electronic safety features and adaptive cruise control are all extra added costs, and the dealer tells me hybrids are only available in California. Apparently Texans don’t care about global warming.

I want a car that will tow the skiff, has some off-road capability, has at least AWD for boat ramps. and has a reasonable array of cutting-edge safety stuff. I think I want a hybrid, and I know I want a car that I can drive home when there’s a foot of water on University Boulevard. This is, after all, Houston, and the streets in our neighborhood flood on a whim.

Which is a long way around to the half-day we didn’t fish in Vermont, when we spent a morning driving the Range Rover Sport on an off road course at the Equinox. The Land Rover Off-Road Driving Experience! I am experienced!

Driving around the course I got to tip the Sport down radical inclines and through mud and over humps and through gullies and whatnot, and I got to drive a car that I’d been thinking about test driving, though we were admonished that Land Rover did not consider the Experience! a test drive. Range Rover Sports are expensive, and I worry that they wouldn’t be easily repaired on the Alaska Highway or in the far-off wilds of Nebraska, but the gas mileage is reasonable, and this fall’s new plug-in hybrids would be great for my daily commutes. Plus how the car managed itself safely down a 12-foot bluff was great fun.

And Range Rovers always look good, and they balance really well on three legs.

Leaves

My experience of fall color is pretty limited. Coming down the Connecticut River, Chuck said more than once that we should see this when the leaves change. I wish we had.

Knots

I have tied my own leaders for a long time, especially for salt water. I’m really good at blood knots, which may be one of the strangest accomplishments anyone can lay claim to. “I,” I say with a swagger, “am a master at blood knottery!”

For some reason I had it in my head that a blood knot was the very thing for attaching two dissimilar pieces of leader material, like flouro to nylon, or if you wanted to make a big jump in tippet diameter. After the Joan Wulff school I now understand that I was wrong, which I rarely am and in any case I never like hearing. I guess what I originally heard was that blood knots were better than surgeon’s knots for attaching larger diameter bits of leader, and I translated that into something different. Now I have to learn a new knot, or at least re-learn how to tie surgeons knots. I hate tying them, and I hate how they put a bit of a bend in a leader. I’m sure that fish hate them too.

Books

I skimmed a history of New Hampshire, Morison and Morison’s New Hampshire: A Bicentennial History. New Hampshire’s first commerce was providing 100-foot mast timbers for the British navy. Harvesting and transporting 100-foot timbers was brutal business, but neither Horatio Hornblower nor Jack Aubrey could have captained British warships without New Hampshire.

I listened to Scott Conroy’s Vote First or Die: The New Hampshire Primary: America’s Discerning, Magnificent, and Absurd Road to the White House. I’m a sucker for a good political story, and this is one. I actually ended up oddly happy that the first presidential primary is in New Hampshire. I also started The Hotel New Hampshire but never finished it. I ran out of time. I’ll finish it up next time.

I listened to a bunch of Archer Mayor’s Joe Gunther mystery novels, maybe a half-dozen, enough that I ended up feeling guilty: these are perfectly good entertainment but not the sort of thing one reads for self-improvement. The first novels are set in Battleboro, Vermont, but then they range further afield to greater Vermont. I liked listening to them on my morning runs and commutes. I also read some Robert Frost poems and some Hart Crane poems. I could never decide where exactly Frost was from, but New England I reckon. I failed to re-read Walt Whitman, and I’m sorry for that.

Image result for natty bumppo

Driving we tried to listen to The Deerslayer, which is set in the area that would be Cooperstown. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Last of the Mohicans, since a high school English teacher pointed out to us that in both Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and Scott’s Ivanhoe the dark-haired girl had to die for her ethnic transgressions, while in each case the blonde girl lives. I think the teacher was pointing out something about the 19th century, and letting us know that part of the authors’ message was that we could empathize with those dark-haired heroines and certainly with Chingachgook, but growing up in the South one never knows. Maybe she was warning us about the inevitable outcome of ethnic transgressions. We never made it all the way through Deerslayer, and I suspect Mark Twain was right. I got mighty weary of Natty Bumppo’s virtues during the long wind ups to some bit of actual business.

I read and listened to Burrows and Wallace’s Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, which is magnificent, both as to size, over 1400 pages, and content. Economics, social mores, riots, battles, politics, sanitation, wampum, slavery, disease, immigration; through the 19th century the book covers New York City history with granular particularity, but even when it overwhelmed me it never bored me. The book weaves New York through the national story and then tells the story of both the city and the nation. It’s a fine history.

Playlist

New York

There’s too much music on my New York playlist. I don’t think I ever got through it all, and I’m still listening to it. Big Picture? There’s New Wave and Punk, Brill Building, Gershwin and Bernstein and Copland. There’s Be-Bop. There’s Tin-Pan Alley. There’s 60s folk music and all those interchangeable current bands that could come from no place but Brooklyn. There’s Bennie Goodman and Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. Was there ever a musician tied more closely to a city than Paul Simon? Ok, maybe Leonard Bernstein? Ok, maybe Duke Ellington?

I carried the small travel guitar and played Gershwin transcriptions. When I got back to Houston, a friend pointed out that Gershwin died when he was only 38. I’m still working on the transcriptions, and wishing there were more, at least 40 years more.

George Gershwin, Carl Van Vechten, 1937, Library of Congress.

New Hampshire

Bill Morrisey, Mandy Moore, and Aerosmith. I liked Ray Montagne, who I’d never listened to before.

Vermont.

Vermont’s music comes off better than New Hampshire’s. If nothing else you can always cue up Moonlight in Vermont. l must have downloaded 27 versions, including Billie Holiday and Willie Nelson and Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz. Phish hasn’t recorded it, but I’d never listened to Phish, and I’m glad I did. Apparently jam bands are a thing in Vermont, and I’d take Phish any day over Aerosmith. I also came across a young woman named Caroline Rose on a list of ten Vermont bands I was supposed to listen to now, and decided in fact she was someone I needed to listen to now.

There was also a Bing Crosby/Peggy Lee version of Snow from White Christmas.

Duke Ellington and band members playing baseball in front of their segregated motel (“Astor Motel”) while touring in Florida, Charlotte Brooks, 1955, Library of Congress.