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.
Whoever dubbed the larvae that skitter around the stones on the bottom of rivers as nymphs had a peculiar sense of humor. This is a proper nymph:
John William Waterhouse, Hylas with a Nymph, 1893, private collection, oil on canvass.
After that this is at best a disappointment, if not a horror:
Jim Rathert, mayfly nymph (or naiad), Missouri Department of Conservation, https://nature.mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/field-guide/mayfly-larvae
Unless of course you fly fish for trout, in which case you’re all in with the latter, and wouldn’t know how to tie a proper imitation of the former.
If you don’t fly fish, this takes some explanation. There are, more or less (and ignoring a bunch of important stuff altogether), three ways to fly fish for trout. If you fish on the surface with a fly that imitates surface bugs, that’s dry fly fishing. If you fish below the surface with a fly that imitates baitfish, that’s streamer fishing. If you fish with a fly that imitates larval bugs that swim or saunter along beneath the surface, that’s nymphing.
In North Carolina and Tennessee we went a’nymphing, and over four days’ fishing it was kind of a master class. Nymphing is more often than not the most productive way to trout fish, though historically it was thought unsportsmanlike by some. Frederic Halford, the English Father Of Modern Dry Fly Fishing, said just say no to nymphs, while G.E.M. Skues, the English Father Of Modern Nymphing, would infuriate Halford by tempting with a variety of seamy sinking flies. The residue of that argument hasn’t completely gone away.
Nymphs.
John William Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896, oil on canvass, Manchester Art Gallery.
Still, that controversy has mostly gone by the board, but anglers who nymph like to think that they’re doing something mildly disreputable. I don’t fish with dries often, but in some ways it seems the simpler method: to paraphrase Bull Durham, see the bugs, match the bugs, float the fly. That whole match the bug thing is a mystery, bug hatches being a tall tale pawned off on unsuspecting Texans, but still, if hatches did exist one would know one’s task. See the bug, match the bug, float the fly.
Meanwhile nymphing has taken on all manner of unexpected complexity. There’s Euro nymphing and the varieties thereof; French nymphing, Polish nymphing, and Czech nymphing. There are dry dropper rigs, and more different kinds of indicators (think bobbers) than would seem quite seemly. One writer touts New Zealand indicators sheared from the wool of a certain breed of high-country New Zealand sheep, while another swears by plastic globes only slightly smaller than beach balls. Those little foam tape tabs are making a comeback, and a friend makes his indicators from small party balloons. If you want to go online and search, you can find at least a couple of reams of discussions on building nymph leaders using bits of metal, different colored lines of different diameters, human skulls, and barbarous incantations at midnight.
It seems altogether fitting that the high priest of modern nymphing, George Daniel, was at the South Holston River Lodge when we were there. You’d expect that the guy who wrote the book on modern nymphing, Dynamic Nymphing, would be kind of nerdy, but Daniel is a young, handsome guy, tall, tan, and fit, and doesn’t even seem to wear a monocle. All-in-all it was kind of intimidating. If John McPhee can look exactly like a shad fisherman, why couldn’t George Daniel have the decency to look like a nymphing nerd?
***
The South Holston River and the South Holston River Lodge are in the northeastern corner where Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina come together. President Roosevelt built a bunch of dams on rivers up there as part of the TVA projects, giving the lie to those who think government never benefits anybody. In addition to social security, Roosevelt created a fine trout fishery. The 14 miles of South Holston trout river is fed by releases of deep cold lake water from the South Holston Dam, at a fairly constant 47°, so that even in the middle of the summer when water temperatures can otherwise be too hot for trout, or in the middle of winter when water temperatures can otherwise be too cold for folk, the South Holston is fishable, and more than fishable: it is an extraordinarily buggy river with estimates of up to 8,500 fish per mile, mostly brown trout, and mostly wild trout.
8500 is a lot of fish.
Because of dam releases for power production the river flow can change radically over the course of a day. Jon Hooper, the chief factotum, head guide, and general manager of the lodge told us that because it had been dry, flows could be below 100 cfs, but that in high water the flows could be above 2500 cfs. Apparently the river can go from 60 feet from bank to bank to 100 feet from bank to bank in less than an hour, and then do it again the next day. Wading’s not safe when the water’s rising. That was ok with us. We fished from a drift boat.
You can’t fish gin-clear water at 100 cfs the same way you fish gin-clear water at 1500 cfs. We were nymphing, of course: there’s supposed to be an excellent sulphur and baetis hatch from time to time on the river, but I’ve never seen an excellent hatch and I won’t be fooled by the stories these non-Texans tell me. Our guide, Brandon Barbour, was way ahead of us, so in the morning with the water low we fished tiny size 22 midge nymphs on tiny 6x tippet. If you’re argumentative, 6x tippet is in fact split hairs. The water was slow and clear, and the fish educated, so that’s what we used. The indicator was a small bit of yellow foam tape. That was our first method of nymphing during the trip: light tippet, light indicator, tiny weighted flies, and no weight added.
What did we see in Tennessee? We mostly saw a tiny press-on foam indicator floating in a square foot of river, because that’s what we watched to know if a fish took our fly.
In the afternoon Brandon took us higher on the river, closer to the dam where released water would reach first. We ate lunch and watched water rise on the legs of a wader until it made all of us nervous. I guess it finally made the angler nervous too, because he finally left the river.
Brandon liked the fishing better at higher flows. He said the fish had less time to study the flies, and had to react quicker. The problem was that to get the nymphs down in the swift current Brandon had to add weight, and then add more weight, and then add a couple o’ more bits of weight. All of this weight, four or five BB sized pinch on weights, was at the very bottom of the rig, then two nymphs were tied onto the uncut tag ends of surgeon’s knots, about three inches from the leader itself. This wasn’t 6x tippet.
At the top of the rig was a particularly large plastic indicator, a Thingamabobber. The indicator had to be large enough to suspend the hooks and weight below it. The weight would bounce along the bottom, and we’d have to distinguish the bottom bounce from the fish take. You’d think that something involving nymphs and called bottom bouncing would be more lewd than it was, but what it lacked in prurience it made up for with fish.
Jam-stop Thingamabobber
What did we see in Tennessee? A big orange thingamabobber getting jiggy while we bottom bounced. That could well be a metaphor for the modern world. It sounds meaningful anyway.
Casting the light rig was pretty easy. We weren’t casting far, 20 or 30 feet for the most part. I seemed to roll cast a lot, and every now and then would throw in a fairly standard cast. The bottom-bouncing rig was a different matter. I tried a standard cast once and got a clump of BB weights to the center of the back, hard enough to evoke what I suspect was an unmanly shriek. Casting the rig required a water haul, laying out the line behind and then using the drag of the water to load the rod when I pulled it forward. I expect it wasn’t pretty. No fish were going to come out of the water for my shadow cast, but it was better than a clump of weights to the back of my head.
We fished the Holston with Brandon the first day, low water early and high water later in the day. The next day we fished the Holston with Brandon at low water in the morning and then moved over to the Watauga, another nearby tailwater, for higher flows in the afternoon. Because the Holston was so low, everybody else was on the Watauga as well. That was ok, it wasn’t combat fishing, but it’s a smaller river and drifting along we had plenty of lively and pleasant companions, and caught fish.
***
I always think the same thing when I travel, could I live here? Would I like to come here and stay? I liked where we were, and on the way down the river the first day I got Dolly Parton’s “Tennessee Mountain Home” stuck in my head while I fished. Technically it wasn’t Dolly Parton’s version, it was Maria Muldaur’s version (which I know better, but which honestly isn’t as good). I liked it in my head. I liked the South Holston River Lodge and Jon and Lynne and Brandon and the chef, J.D., and all the other people at the lodge who took care of us. I could live there, on that river. I won’t, but I could.
Plus I really liked the nymphs.
John William Waterhouse, Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus, 1900, oil on canvass, private collection. I think this was on the Watauga, not the South Holston.
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.
