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Mississippi

I read too much Faulkner too early, and I didn’t understand much of it. I had an excuse for reading it: Faulkner and I were both born on September 25, different years but it seemed like Kismet. Kismet maybe, but Kismet didn’t aid comprehension. Do you know how incomprehensible Henry Sutpen or Joe Christmas can be to a young man? To an old man?

I had this notion that Faulkner would help me understand the South and what it meant to be Southern. Faulkner taught me many things: how to spell ya’ll, that classy folk come from Virginia and failed folk slide off to Texas, and that well-placed Southern dialect sholy is fun, if only in my head. He taught me that if a white guy had black ancestors then all sorts of hijinx will ensue, and that folk, black and white and in-between, are going to die violently. Because blood, maybe, or maybe just cultural failure.

Carl Van Vechten, William Faulkner, 1954, Library of Congress.

I suspect you can’t be filled with a young man’s optimism and get much out of Faulkner, except maybe The Reivers (which oddly enough is his old man’s novel). Faulkner didn’t write about glories, he wrote about failures. Notwithstanding my expectations, Absolom, Absalom! wasn’t Gone with the Wind, Intruder in the Dust wasn’t To Kill a Mockingbird. He wrote about the failures of history, personal and social, old and new, and that’s not the sort of message a young man will understand. At least I didn’t.

I don’t remember Faulkner ever talking about fishing. Maybe Faulkner should have written about fishing. I would have understood not catching fish.

Mississippi State Flag, Museum of Mississippi History.

All that incomprehensible Faulkner gave me an early and perhaps strangely skewed focus on Mississippi. Other than my friend Byron and a couple of quick drive-throughs, I haven’t had a lot of personal contact with Mississippi except Faulkner, and Byron, an expat (once for money and once for love), always seemed equally entranced with and reticent about the place–and notwithstanding a strong literary inclination has refused to read Faulkner. I had at least one second great-grandfather who landed in antebellum Marshall County, Mississippi, near Memphis at the top of the state. He stayed there long enough to marry a second great-grandmother in 1845, apparently his cousin, and then the two slid off to Texas in time for the birth of my great grandfather in 1848. Their sojourn in Marshall County was pretty much a drive-through. They didn’t start in Mississippi and they didn’t stay long after they got there.

Immediately west of Marshall County the Mississippi Delta runs for 200 miles south from the Tennessee border along the east side of the Mississippi River, to Vicksburg. At its widest the Delta spreads east for 80 miles. It is an alluvial plain, and has the richest soil on earth. West of the river there’s the Arkansas Delta, culturally and geologically and economically similar to the Mississippi Delta, but nobody talks much about Arkansas. It’s Mississippi that grabs the imagination.

Delta wealth was built on slave labor growing cotton. Cotton is still rich enough, but agriculture is mechanized, and doesn’t require the labor force that in the 19th century worked the land. Of the Delta counties 42 are considered distressed, only four are not. Why is Arkansas glad there’s a Mississippi? Because Arkansas isn’t last on every list.

Robert Johnson, c. 1935, Wikipedia.

Mississippi isn’t old, which is another thing I didn’t understand in Faulkner. Antebellum Mississippi was still the Wild West, and Faulkner knew it. In the 1850 census there were 606,526 people, less my second great grandparents who had GTT, having boomed from a population of 7600 in 1800. By 1900, the population was 1.797 million, 2.967 million in 2018. Statewide the population is 59.1 percent white, 37 percent black. About one-third of the Mississippi African American population lives in the Delta, where the African American population is 46 percent of the total. Some Delta counties are 85 percent African American. On the other side of the state, in Alcorn County, the population is 87 percent white. It’s not important, except that it highlights what is often not obvious about Mississippi: Mississippi isn’t one thing.

Jimmie Rodgers, 1935, Wikipedia.

But it is some things: it is the poorest state in the Union, between whites and blacks the most racially complex and more often than not the most tragic, the place where income, education, health care, poverty, life expectancy, teenage pregnancy, STDs, and history walk extreme racial and class divides. Within the state there’s a division between east and west, with the coast thrown in for good measure. A hundred years ago the Mississippi east was populist and progressive, and the Mississippi west was Dixiecrat planters controlling the votes of African Americans. Now things are flipped. In the 2016 presidential election Mississippi voted 57.86 percent for President Trump, but unlike much of the rest of the nation the split wasn’t urban/rural, the split was Delta and southwestern counties versus most of everybody else, black versus white. This map lays it out:

2016 Mississippi election map, stolen from Wikipedia. Forgive me.

Mississippi is also the source of some of our best good things. It’s the place of the Blues, B.B. King, Jimmie Rodgers, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson. It’s the place of a good half-dozen of our finest writers, past and present, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, and Jesmyn Ward, all are from Mississippi. There are whole hosts of novelists like John Grisham and Greg Iles who write pretty good if mostly forgettable novels. It can be argued that as the principal home of the blues it’s the principal home of rock-and-roll. It is certainly the home of Elvis (and directly across the River from Natchez in Louisiana Jerry Lee Lewis). All of this in one of the least literate states in the nation. Where the heck did all that come from?

Mississippi also gave us Jefferson Davis, the post-Reconstruction Mississippi Plan, 589 lynchings (539 of blacks–the most in the South), Emmett Till, and more than its fair share of the violence of the Civil Rights Movement.

We go to Ocean Springs in March to fish the salt marshes with Richard Schmidt. Ocean Springs is apparently the most charming city on that odd geographic panhandle that makes up the Mississippi Coast, Biloxi having been taken over by casinos, and it’s about an hour east of New Orleans. It is also the site of the 1699 French landing in Mississippi/Louisiana by Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville. Who doesn’t like to say Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville? The French accomplished many things in Louisiana, including the decimation of the Native American population by disease and warfare, the eradication of the Natchez Indians, and the introduction of African slavery. They didn’t accomplish permanent French settlement, losing out to the English who lost out to the Spanish who lost out to the new Americans, though the French did found Biloxi and Natchez. And New Orleans.

Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville. National Library and Archives of Quebec.

On pretty much a whim over the long Martin Luther King holiday we drove to Mississippi and visited Natchez, Vicksburg, and Jackson. Oddly, Natchez is closer to Houston than my hometown in Texas, but driving six hours west from Houston through Fort Worth and Wichita Falls is a decidedly different experience from driving through Louisiana and Mississippi. Natchez is full of sometimes pretty and sometimes magnificent Antebellum homes turned into bed and breakfasts, but as Byron had pointed out to me, nobody wants to stay in the slave quarters. We didn’t fish–it was cold, and there was flooding because of winter rains. At the Vicksburg National Battlefield, I realized that my Union great-great grandfather from Missouri via Eastern Tennessee was probably shooting at one or more of my Confederate great-great grandfathers. I could have ended right there on that battlefield more than 90 years before I got started.

At a popular restaurant in Vicksburg black and white Saturday night diners ate under decidedly Lost Cause paintings of the Siege. On the flip side, a popular country-clubby restaurant in Jackson populated by black and white churchgoers, Char, was decorated with old photos. Prominent in the entry of the place was a copy of a 60s photo of Medgar Evers. As I recall I had the catfish, or maybe the fried chicken. I definitely had the fried green tomatoes. I also kept wondering if I’d misidentified the portrait photo of Medgar Evers. It is a strange place, Mississippi, and the past there really is never dead. But black and white diners are eating happily at Sunday brunch under a photo of Medgar Evers. I reckon things are changing.

Maybe someday soon I’ll make my pilgrimage to Oxford and finally understand Faulkner.

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Key West

Florida Bay near Key West is beautiful, and in February we had the flats to ourselves. Miles of brilliant blue and green clear water, mangrove islands, three-foot sharks and 30-pound turtles and lurking barracuda and porpoising porpoises. Away in the west over the calm green and blue we could see the distant Marquesas, and behind us almost distant Key West. There was blue sky and white clouds and it was a very gentle 80 degrees.

Of course we had Florida Bay to ourselves because in February Key West is full of Midwestern drinking folk who are busy drinking, not fishing. Gauging by the number of bars per square mile it’s full of drinking folk year round, but other times of the year there might also be fly anglers. Probably drinking fly anglers, recounting tales of their fabulous Key West fish over rum drinks garnished with umbrellas. There are plenty of rum drinks in February but there aren’t any fly anglers because in February there aren’t any fish, fabulous or no.

Let me change that. There weren’t any target fish on the day we were on the water. I’m sure every other day in February there are all sorts of fish. Bonefish. Permit. Tarpon. Arctic char. Crappie. Sunfish. Giant trevaly and channel cats. One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. You name it, any day we’re not on the water the fish are there in spades and they’ve brought their friends. You’d better bring your three weight and eight weight and 12 and both of your Spey rods, and some golf clubs and do some pushups, because you’re going to be casting and fighting fish with all of them all day long. But not on February 7 when we were on the water.

Andrew Asher was our guide, and besides having a name that sounds like a British film star he has the best guiding voice ever. In another life he will have a British accent and be the voice of the BBC. But Andrew is a guide and he’s a good guide and he knows about fish and water and the grace it takes to guide well. There. I got in my statutorily required Hemingway imitation.

Andrew did a great job. He ran a Maverick skiff with a 115 hp engine that ran easily from flat to flat at 40. He sat us up with the wind and the sun and I trusted that he saw what was there, even when we didn’t see it. He knew enough to say “fish at two o’clock,” pause while I looked left and then calmly follow with “fish at two o’clock on the right.” Then we would decide it was something he called a box fish which is apparently a kind of puffer, and I’d cast to that for a while and it would ignore me until it meandered off.

He and Kris pretty much agreed on politics though, which meant I didn’t have to worry about getting thrown off the boat.

Zane Grey said that he, Zane Grey, not Andrew Asher, was a hard-luck angler, and I think about that a lot, whether there’s just something about me that makes me unlucky at fish. I’ve been so lucky in most of my life. My career has been fortunate and meaningful, our children are grown and are good people with real jobs, and Kris likes to fly fish and seems to like me. We now own a Chihuahua. But on February 7 there were no fish near Key West. Maybe things balance out, and I deserve some fish misfortune for being the recipient of so many good things.

Late in the day Andrew suggested I cast to barracuda. I was not a natural. My attempt at casting was awkward and embarrassing, and I put a wind knot in a 40 pound wire leader. I think I amazed Andrew, who as a guide should be inured to client stupidity, but there you are: when it comes to casting I can be amazing. I certainly amazed myself.

* * *

From Brown, Jefferson B., Key West: The Old and the New, 1912, St. Augustine, The Record Company.

As of the 2010 census, Monroe County had 73,090 residents, of which 25,478 lived in its county seat, Key West. The population is about 85 percent white folk.

By the 1760s, the Native Americans, the Tequesta or the Calusa or both, were gone from the Keys, and Key West was transferred from the Spanish to the British. In 1821, back in the hands of the Spanish, Florida was ceded by Spain to the US. In an early act of piracy (or at least real estate development) the owner of Key West, a Spanish artillery officer, sold it first for about $525 to a former South Carolina governor and then sold it a second time to John Simonton for $2000. After some string pulling Simonton ended up with it, and streets in Key West bear the names of Simonton and his cronies. When the island sold there were no permanent residents. By 1830 there were 517 residents, by 1880 there were 9,800, by 1910 there were 19,945.

Key West’s first industry was pirating, which after naval intervention (the first significant U.S. presence in the Keys) was replaced by marine scavengers (the surrounding coral reefs being an excellent provider of scavenge), smuggling (including slaves before the Civil War, rum during Prohibition, drugs during the 70s, and whatever is now the going concern), fishing, sponges, and finally, after Monroe County had become one of the poorest counties in the nation during the Great Depression (“They’re living on fish and coconuts”), tourism and real estate. It was first connected to the mainland in 1912 by Henry Flagler’s overseas train, which blew away in the 1935 hurricane, and which was replaced by the Overseas Highway. U.S. 1 runs all the way from Maine down the Atlantic Coast, and as much as anything we went to Key West to drive the Overseas Highway.

In 2016, Monroe County voted for President Trump, but the Key West part of Monroe County voted for Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t really close, Trump took the county by 54 percent, and I imagined I could see the dichotomy between the county and its county seat on the drive: the approach down the county through harder or at least more suburban living, where most contact with government is seen as an intrusion, a burden, and where there is a perceived unfairness in the distribution of all good things derived from the burdens imposed. In Key West there was greater affluence, education, urban living. Key West looks Democratic.

In 2018 the vote for governor was also Republican but very close, and Monroe County went Republican 49.59 percent to 49.18. Darcy Richardson of the Reform Party tipped the county Republican by taking 0.57 percent. It didn’t make much difference in the big scheme, but Darcy Richardson is one of those proofs that every politician thinks they’re special and that they can win, even when they’re not and they can’t.

* * *

I really had high hopes for some memorable sights in Key West. From what I’d read it’s nigh on the most decadent place on earth, more decadent than San Francisco during the Summer of Love or Bourbon Street on the night before Lent or Las Vegas on a day that ends with a “y” or even Kansas City during revivals of the musical Oklahoma!. Maybe it’s that tropical lushness that confuses Midwesterners. I guess I’ve lived in a warm wet big city for too long, ’cause it all seemed rather tame to me. Maybe the decadence migrates in with the tarpon and the fly fishers later in the spring.

We didn’t see any memorable decadence. We hung out our first night in a nice wine bar with our new friends Mike and Bill from Michigan. We discussed politics, their house in Ft. Lauderdale and their home in Michigan and ours in Houston, places to eat, and some more politics. We talked about Bill’s work to create the River Raisin National Battlefield Park, and the Recent Republican Troubles. And then we talked some more about politics. They bought us wine, and we owe them some wine and hope someday we get to repay. I also told them the long complicated story about the steelhead fly I tied from the ostrich feather I was given at the Pride Parade and on which I caught my steelhead. I’m very proud of that fly. They politely listened, for which I’m grateful.

On night two we ate at Sole, while on Duval Street the snowbirds drank and a gregarious drag queen invited folk into a bar. We talked to a Canadian couple who obsessively followed horse racing. Lexington and Sarasota they said were prime destinations, but the Kentucky Derby is nothing but an excuse for dilettantes to drink and wear hats. There was some anger there.

Later at a different bar a woman from Pella, Iowa, had drunk too many rum painkillers and felt strongly (if very politely in an Iowan way) that I should be drinking them too. Neither she nor her husband could tell me anything about trout fishing the Iowa Driftless Region, and seemed surprised any one would want to go to Iowa to fish. Who doesn’t want to go to Iowa to fish? Iowa is heaven.

At 9 at night everyone was friendly and talkative and lubricated and if you just stood around long enough you’d find people to talk to, just like a giant cocktail party. It seemed to me that Key West was all-in-all pretty tasteful and pretty tame, though there were plenty of tacky t-shirts.

Andrew the Guide told us that he lived near Duval but for him it was rarely a destination, and when on the rare occasions he went to the bars he left long before midnight. He said that ’round midnight things on Duval changed, and that the drunks came out of the bars to punch each other and so forth. I guess we missed it. Maybe the horse racing aficionado found a Kentucky Derby fan to punch. Maybe the Iowa lady passed out on rum painkillers. Maybe somewhere near Sloppy Joe’s a tipsy Wallace Stevens threw a punch at Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Hemingway knocked him down. I guess I’ll have to wait until next time and stay awake until midnight. Even better, maybe we can find Mike and Bill and buy a bottle of wine.

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Hawaii Packing List

I took my board shorts to Hawaii. I’ve had a pair for more than a decade, but before Hawaii I’d worn them only once to a charity gala, along with a tuxedo shirt and jacket and a bow tie with little palm trees. The fundraiser was formal but Hawaiian-themed. In Hawaii I wore them wade fishing and Kris made fun of them, even though I thought them dashing. Maybe she was making fun of my skinny white legs. The board shorts will be at Goodwill soon.

We both took 9 wt. rods, Kris took an Orvis HD3 and I took a Loomis Asquith, our Christmas presents to each other. I liked mine better. The Asquith is nigh on to perfect, but I need to use the H3 a bit to get used to it. They had different lines, too, and I may have cast the Rio line better than the Orvis. No one was injured by my casting.

I took a pair of Patagonia flats boots, the neoprene kind Patagonia doesn’t make anymore. I’d read that coral was a problem on the flats, and that heavy boots were needed. The Patagonias aren’t really heavy, but I didn’t have any problems other than sand in the boot, even around the volcanic rock. The bigger problem was that there was no way to tie them to the roof of the rent car, and they didn’t dry before we had to pack. Do you know how hard it is anymore to find a newspaper to stuff into your booties?

The rental car was a Subaru with adaptive cruise control. I’d never used adaptive cruise control, and didn’t know the car had it. It also had lane drift correction. That’s some startling stuff when you don’t expect it.

Where We Stayed

We stayed three nights in an Airbnb. I had tried to book Airbnbs before, but it never worked out. We were in a 15th floor apartment in an older apartment tower, and the tower showed its age, but it was central, within walking distance of Waikiki shopping, and cheaper than any of the Waikiki hotels. I gave them a sterling review, and they gave me a sterling review, and I doubt that either of us were exactly misleading the public or exactly telling the truth. We weren’t in the apartment much, and the coffee pot worked. The sheets were clean.

I’m guessing that a lot of Hawaii is a resort economy, which means a lot of folk scraping by on service jobs, and things are expensive. According to Jake the guide Airbnbs pull a lot of available housing off the market, and drive up the cost of what’s left.

Honolulu from Diamond Head

We spent one night at the Turtle Bay Resort because I wanted to see the north side of O’ahu. There were fashion models hanging out in the coffee shop, at least I guessed they were fashion models: they were young, thin, remarkably tall, pretty, and armed with a photographer. There were C.F. Martin ukuleles in the gift shop, and bad karaoke in the bar. There was a nice weight room and huge breakers. We weren’t there long enough for any resort activities, but sitting on the balcony playing the guitar and drinking coffee and watching the breakers was worth the effort. There was no free coffee in the lobby. I am immensely fond of free morning coffee in lobbies, but if I’d had free coffee I would have missed the fashion models.

Our final night we stayed at the Best Western Palace Hotel Honolulu, because we wanted to stay near the airport. We dropped the rental car that afternoon, took an Uber to dinner, and the next morning used the airport shuttle. It’s a plan that works well, unless the hotel is the Best Western Palace Hotel Honolulu. It’s tucked in at the edge of a grimy bit of freeway, has itself seen better days, and for the first time I recall I pulled back the covers and checked the bed for bedbugs. It was fine for the night before an early flight, and convenient, but next time I suspect I’ll pass. There were no bedbugs.

Where We Ate

We ate dinner the first night at Alan Wong’s, which is famous. It’s the granddaddy, and The Obamas Ate Here. Our waiter had learned his trade watching Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and things could have gone better. I’m sure it’s ok most nights, but I didn’t like the food much, and they lost us in the shuffle. Kris gave them one star on Yelp! I guess people only do Yelp! reviews when they own the place or they’re angry.

The Pig and the Lady

Waikiki shopping is like shopping Rodeo Drive, or the Miracle Mile, or Fifth Avenue, with all the high-end retail anyone could ever need. We ate dinner at a place called Roy’s Waikiki. It was very popular and perfectly decent and I greatly admired the lips of the Australian woman next to us at the bar, which were immense and must have been made, literally, for Waikiki. There were other parts of her that looked manufactured as well.  If you’re going to eat in Waikiki Roy’s is fine, though it’s not a place that looks like a Hank’s, or a Joe’s, or a Roy’s. I liked the tuna poke appetizer. Maybe if you go there the Australian woman will still be at the bar and you too can be amazed at the size of those lips.

The two hottest places in Honolulu are The Pig and the Lady, which was spectacular and my favorite, and Senia, which was Kris’s favorite and spectacular. They’re next door to each other in the old Chinatown, which pre-WWII was the place for sailors to go for tattoos, liquor, and sexual shenanigans and is apparently now the place to go for cheap rent and leis. The Obamas had dinner at The Pig and the Lady the week before, which if I didn’t like the Obamas would make an amusing joke. I do like the Obamas though, and I liked The Pig and the Lady. Those two places made up for Alan Wong’s.

At the Rainbow Drive-in Kris ordered for us and I got the plate dinner, but with fish, beef, and chicken on a single plate, plus chili covering the side of rice (but not the side of macaroni and cheese). It was delicious, all of it. We ate tuna poke at a random sushi place in a strip center (which I’d never have done in Houston). As for baked goods, the Coco Puffs at Liliha Bakery are obligatory, plus I had the Full Hawaiian Breakfast with Spam, rice, and fried bananas. I have a secret and long-standing fondness for Spam, Salt! Fat! Pork!, so I am one with the Islands.

Liliana Bakery

The malassadas at Leonard’s Bakery are the very thing, and if you order enough of them they come in a pink box. Get the one stuffed with guava jelly, and the one with the cinnamon and salt, and the rest of them.

Malasadas

I had the Obama shaved ice at Waiola Shave Ice, then ate the rest of Kris’s shaved ice which was some other set of flavors. It was healthy. It was fruit.

There may not be an Obama statue in Hawaii, but they sure let you know where the Obamas eat.

Where We Went That Didn’t Involve Fishing

The National Park Service and the Navy are keeping the Pearl Harbor monument open during the government shut-down with private donations. The Arizona Memorial is closed, not because of the shut-down but because it needs repairs, so we didn’t get to see my cousin’s name in the list of the dead: Houston O’Neal Thomas, age 20, coxswain. He was a bit older than my father, and I suppose they must have grown up together. He was a child. I suppose he had no notions of war. I hope his death was sudden and painless.

We toured the Ilioni Palace, which was the last royal residence of the last king, King David Kalakaua, and then the last queen of Hawaii. Queen Liliuokalani. The conspirators wanted immediate annexation of Hawaii into the States, but President Cleveland refused, and sent a delegation to explore restoration of the monarchy. When asked, Liliuokalani sensibly said she planned to cut off the conspirators’ heads. Her answer derailed restoration, but she was, after all, a queen, and off with their heads is always a queenly answer. Hawaii was later annexed by President Cleveland’s successor (technically his second successor), William McKinley.  The palace (which is modest as royal palaces go), is a monument to regret at the loss of sovereignty.

The Bishop Museum is also a bit of a monument to the monarchy, but it’s very fine, and probably the best collection of Polynesian artifacts in the world.

We climbed Diamond Head. There was some guy jogging up and down the path carrying a boom box blasting 80s music. Somebody should import ear pods to Hawaii.

Where We Didn’t Go

We didn’t see any of the other islands. We didn’t snorkel, so I still haven’t. We didn’t surf, and I never will, particularly since I’m getting rid of my board shorts. 

We didn’t eat poi at Helena’s Hawaiian. I’m not certain that Helena’s Hawaiian is ever actually open. It was closed all day Sunday and Monday and even on days it claimed to be open it closed by 7:30.

We didn’t see hula, though I did buy a reprint of a book first published in 1907 about the songs of the hula. We didn’t attend a luau. We didn’t visit a ukulele factory. We didn’t feed the mongoose, though I saw it.

We didn’t see the Honolulu Museum of Art, and we never walked on Waikiki Beach. We didn’t eat shrimp out of a food truck. Luckily we get to go back.

I didn’t buy a Panama hat from Newt at the Royal, so I’m glad I’m going back. It’s startling to realize that with a Panama hat, a cigar, and a goatee I could pass for a planter, or at least Colonel Sanders. They’re a bit fine to use as fishing hats.

Newt at the Royal Hawaiian.

Playlist

Hawaiian music is everywhere, everywhere. Maybe it’s just atmosphere, or maybe it’s pride and love. It can get cloying, but in reasonable doses it’s beautiful.

Unlike prior trips where I’ve depended on my own music collection with some supplemental purchases, I owned no Hawaiian music. I finally subscribed to Apple Music. It’s miraculous. I was able to download a perfectly respectable list of Hawaiian musicians.

  • Israel Kamakawiwoʻole. A half dozen years ago Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s cover of Somewhere Over the Rainbow was all over the internet. He was a monstrous man, a man the size of a Sumo, and he was playing a tiny instrument and singing sweetly. He also did a cover of Take me Home Country Roads that doesn’t once mention West Virginia. I’m not sure that’s legal, but he was a bit of a rebel: he was a sovereignty activist.
  • Mark Keali’i Ho’omalu and Kamehameha Schools Children’s Chorus, Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride, from Lilo & Stitch. Lilo & Stitch may be the strangest Disney movie ever made. I can’t describe the plot but trust me, it is . . . strange. And this is a fun song.
  • Elvis Presley, Hawaiian Wedding Song and Blue Hawaii. Elvis fits the jet-fed Hawaii. There’s also a very fine version of Blue Hawaii by the famous Hawaiian musician, Willie Nelson.
  • Keola Beamer and Kapono Beamer, Honolulu City Lights. This is a 70s album, and it sounds it. It is much loved, but they probably made records that carried the dated date less heavily.
  • Ry Cooder, Chicken Skin Music. In 1970 Ry Cooder made an album that probably still baffles folk. Chicken skin music is apparently a Hawaiian description of music so good that it brings goose bumps. The album features the great Norteno accordianist, Flaco Jimenez, and the great Hawaiian slack key guitarist, Gabby Pahinui. There is a cover of Irene Goodnight, and a cover of Stand by Me. The most Hawaiian song on the album, Hank Snow’s Yellow Roses, was as far from Hawaii as Tennessee, but it manages to sound like both.
  • Don Ho, Tiny Bubbles and Pearly Shells. I am of an age that remembers Don Ho. They are likable songs.
  • Gabby Pahinui. Of all of the Hawaiian musicians, Gabby Pahinui (1921-1980) is the one guy everyone should know. Gabby Pahinui is B.B. King or Ty Cobb. Ok, I’m mixing metaphors, but in his place, in his time, he was the distillation. He was a drinking man, but in the introduction of Iz’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow Iz announces “This is for Gabby.” It is Gabby who Ry Cooder included on Chicken Skin Music. It is lovely stuff
  • Na Leo Pilimehana, Local Boys and Waikiki. Na Leo Pilimehana is the girl group, and if the Beach Boys had been three Hawaiian women they would have recorded Local Boys. I sang Waikiki to myself for days. Sometimes I might have sung it out loud.
  • Steel Guitar Rag. It’s the song that stateside crystalized the popularization of Hawaiian slide guitar. There are versions by Bob Wills, Merle Travis, Les Paul, and John Fahey.
  • Louis Armstrong, To You, Sweetheart, Aloha. There’s also an album by Andy Williams. 
  • I guess Jack Johnson is the most famous contemporary musician from Hawaii. He was a competitive surfer but was injured, so he became a popular singer and guitarist. It’s hard to see how the boy ever got a date. It’s likable, amd it incorporates the sounds of Hawaiian music: sweet guitars, ukuleles.
  • Ka’au Crater Boys, Guava Jelly.  Motown meets Honolulu. “Ooh baby, here I am, come rub upon my belly like guava jelly.” That goes on to my road trip list.
  • Jake Shimabukuro, As My Guitar Gently Weeps. I think Shimabukuro may have single-handedly resurrected the ukulele.
  • Nathan Aweau, Akaka Falls.
  • The Brothers Cazimero, Home in the Islands.
  • Hawaiian Style Band, Let’s Talk Story. This one’s something of an ear worm.
  • Ho’ai Kane, Kona Red.

To get ready to go we watched a lot of the new Hawaii Five-0, and it’s addictive. I’m going to have trouble quitting.

For guitar music I worked on the Allemande movement to Duarte’s transcription of Bach’s first Cello Suite. I’ve worked on it off and on for years, and still can’t remember where the bass notes go.

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Bonefish Orgy

Robert W. Hines, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2013.

Fish reproduction is peculiar, not sensible like human reproduction. Salmon run upriver and die. Bass get mean. Meaner. Tarpon daisy chain, which nobody can figure out. And then there are bonefish.

Ok, maybe human reproduction isn’t all that sensible either.

There’s always some introductory justification when researchers turn into bonefish voyeurs : Bonefishing is an X-Hundred-Zillion-Dollar-Industry here in the Bahamas, or in Florida, or the How-Do-I-Get-There Atoll out in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I don’t think though that the researchers are only watching bonefish sex for the money, there’s love involved. After all, it’s a tough job. You have to hang out on tropical seas.

Even now, when observers are starting to figure out spawning, they’ve still got no notion of bonefish adolescence. Why the heck are bonefish such a mystery? One supposes that this isn’t rocket science, but it seems like UFO science.

Of course the whole business involves the full moon. Tarpon do that too, but really? The full moon?

Bloch, Marcus Elieser; Schneider, Johann Gottlieb;  A. plumieri & Poecilia vivipara, Systema ichthyologiae iconibus CX illustratum (1801)

In 2017 researchers from the Bonefish & Tarpon Trust identified a seventh bonefish pre-spawn aggregation site at Andros in the Bahamas. This is important, bonefish can’t meet likely mates on the web, so they throw big parties. Raves, Roman orgies, high school proms have nothing whatsoever on a bonefish aggregation. The sites can’t just be random, there’s no text messages saying “meet here.” There are no invitations. If a site is damaged, if a site is developed or destroyed, then future generations of bonefish are damaged.

“The aggregation was comprised of approximately two thousand adult bonefish, which were exhibiting pre-spawning behavior, like gulping air and porpoising.” Gulping air, porpoising, sexy. But these fish are just getting started.

According to researchers from Florida Tech, sometimes aggregations can be 10,000 fish. The fish rush to the surface to gulp air. They bump each other. Let me say that again, they bump each other! All of this timed by the lunar month, each full moon. Then after the bumping things get really wild.

As night fell, fish in the school quickened their pace and headed for the drop-off at the edge of the reef, where water depths exceed 1,000 feet. Using special tags they had inserted into the bonefish on a previous day, the team tracked the school as it quickly descended past 160 feet and drifted about a quarter mile from the edge of the drop-off. These shallow water fish were now suspended in the deep ocean, in water thousands of feet deep. After an hour in the deep, the bonefish suddenly rushed upward, releasing their eggs and sperm as they reached 80 feet below the surface.

University Researchers Observe Surprising Bonefish Spawning Behavior in the Bahamas, Florida Institute of Technology Newsroom, December 11, 2013.

So thousands of fish aggregate, get all hot and bothered, rush the ocean and dive, then after some deep-water foreplay rush the surface broadcasting their boy stuff and their girl stuff in a massive orgiastic exhalation. Now tell me that’s not peculiar.

The rushing of the surface isn’t random. Apparently the change of pressures is a piscine erotic massage required for the release. In the lab, researchers have only recently gathered pre-spawning bones, shot them up with spawn-inducing hormones, and then massaged the fish to gather eggs and sperm. I kid you not.

After all that rushing and broadcasting, the fish go home.

Meanwhile fertilized eggs are left drifting in the current. This isn’t different really than the life-cycle of tarpon, or redfish, or the American eel. Go to the ocean, have a fling with a couple of thousand other fish, then go home and leave your larval children to make it or not. “I gave them a good start,” says Momma and Papa Bones, “Now they’re not my problem.” The larval stage lasts a couple of months.

From the Bonefish & Tarpon Trust:

If they survive the planktonic stage, larval bonefish find shallow waters where they change into miniature versions of their parents. Unfortunately, we’re not sure where this occurs.

Frankly, it’s almost a surprise that we know it occurs at all. Then the juvenile stage:

Despite extensive sampling throughout the Florida Keys and Caribbean, we don’t have a handle on which habitats are required by juvenile bonefish.  We have found a lot of juvenile bonefish while sampling sandy beaches and open sandy bottom, but nearly all have been Albula garcia – not the species caught by recreational anglers. The search goes on.

If they’re like most juveniles, they don’t want the adults to know what they’re doing.

* * *

The weather is not good. A bit too cold for fish, and too many fronts coming through. The flow at the Guadalupe is too high for wading, and it’s not the time of year for bass. All my friends who spend time outdoors seem to be hunting. Hunting’s one of those vices I haven’t cultivated.

So Friday on the 50-fish dinner trail we went and ate sushi at MF Sushi. I had been there once before, several years ago in a different location, and it was better this time. Kata Robata, Uchi, and MF Sushi are the three sushi hotspots in Houston, with two of those being imports, Uchi from Austin and MF from Atlanta. They offered baby barracuda. I had never seen barracuda on a menu, and Kris wouldn’t order it because she was certain it would immediately kill her.

The barracuda was grilled, but cooking doesn’t kill the ciguatoxin that occurs in barracuda. It’s a chemical toxin that’s produced in algae and accumulates in apex predators, so the “baby” gave me comfort. The toxin also occurs in grouper and amberjack. Even though it’s dangerous, barracuda are eaten throughout the Caribbean.

Even if you get sick, barracuda doesn’t usually kill you, and that’s what I remembered. The worst symptoms are usually cramps, muscle and joint aches, vomiting, and diarrhea. What I didn’t remember was that the symptoms can last months. If I’d remembered that, and if I hadn’t had that martini, I’d probably have skipped the barracuda. It does seem fitting though that writing about bonefish, I was eating one of their principal predators. Maybe it was fitting, or maybe it was that martini.

The next morning we took out the boat. It was too windy and choppy, and running across the bay we got soaked. We spent most of the time floating deeper water looking for fish on the sonar. We didn’t see anything bigger than bait.

Most tides in the Galveston bays are small, a foot is a huge tide, but Sunday was bizarre. See that dock? High tide would usually be a few inches below the deck. Low tide might show some oysters. Yesterday the combination of the winter solstice moon and the high winds had knocked all the water out of the bay. It wasn’t a day for the flats, even in a skinny water boat.