Tag: Trout

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North Carolina

Here’s a list of famous people from North Carolina:

  • John Coltrane
  • Dolley Madison
  • The Dale Earnhardts
  • Cecil B. DeMille
  • Billy Graham
  • Sugar Ray Leonard
  • Roberta Flack
  • Thomas Wolfe
  • Andrew Johnson, sort of.
  • Andrew Jackson, though he’s probably from South Carolina
  • James Taylor
  • Doc Watson
  • James K. Polk, sort of.
  • Nina Simone
  • Richard Petty
  • Earle Scruggs
  • Andy Griffith
Hugo Van Gelderen, John Coltrane, 1963.

I left out Soupy Sales, but you get the idea. It’s not a bad list. It’s a very respectable list, and you might come up with people I left out, but here’s the thing: this is not a list that you look at and say that the sons and daughters of North Carolina have changed everything. It’s certainly had its effect on Nascar, and two Nascar movies, Days of Thunder and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, were filmed in North Carolina. That’s a full 24 hours of driving fury. And what state wouldn’t be proud to claim John Coltrane, Doc Watson, and Nina Simone?

Talledega Nights by-the-way is the better movie. After Bull Durham, it may be the most quotable sports movie ever.

Of the three presidents on the list, Polk, Johnson, and Jackson, two were born in North Carolina but are known as Tennesseans, and the third, Jackson, was almost certainly born in South Carolina (and is also known as a Tennessean). North Carolina seems to claim him out of desperation. The state’s most important historical event was the flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The Wright Brothers were from Ohio.

Matthew Brady, James K. Polk, Tennessean, 11th President, daguerrotype, 1849.

North Carolina was always one of our scruffiest states. It is, oddly enough, one of the earliest settled, or attempted settled anyway, by Europeans, first in 1524 by the Spaniard Juan Pardo with a string of forts (that promptly disappeared), and then by the British with two colonies on Roanoke Island, one in 1586 that was abandoned, and one in 1590 that disappeared, taking with it North America’s first English baby, Virginia Dare.

North Carolina wasn’t that far from the Virginia colonies, just across the state border, but the coastline was inhospitable because the Outer Banks effectively blocked navigation, and a monstrous bog, aptly named the Great Dismal Swamp, blocked immigration from English-inhabited Virginia except by the desperate–run-away indentured servants and other rif-raff. Through the Colonial Period North Carolina seems to have been settled mostly by tax scofflaws, pirates, and Quakers, and the former finally ran out the Quakers. Lack of transportation and urban areas left it relatively isolated and poor. Until World War II it was probably our poorest state.

Rebeca Wynn, US Fish and Wildlife Service, The Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, 2010,

I had a lot of ancestors who lived in North Carolina, and at least one, born in North Carolina in 1788, seems to have made it to Texas by 1846, the year after annexation and statehood. It’s too bad, too. If he’d only made it one year earlier I could claim membership in the Sons of the Republic of Texas. I don’t know if there really is a Sons of the Republic of Texas, but I’m pretty sure there must be.

Even North Carolina’s literature seems scruffy. I suspect that nobody reads Look Homeword, Angel, any more. I read it years ago, and tried to read it again years later but couldn’t make it through. I remember it being about people who just seemed, well, scruffy. They weren’t evil enough to be bad, and were too mundane to be really memorable. The writing is supposed to be revolutionary, but that’s old hat. Even the newest, most popular North Carolina novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is about a girl who is raised by wolves in the Great Dismal Swamp, or near enough. I don’t think there are actually wolves. Kris’s book club read it, but I haven’t.

Satellite photo, The Outer Banks, 2009, NOAA.

I’ve fished in North Carolina once before, almost 30 years ago. We fished on the Davidson, in Western North Carolina. Originally this was brook trout territory, but it’s been stocked for years with rainbows and browns and the rainbows and browns have reproduced, spread, and crowded out the brookies, so that the brookies are now found mostly in small high country streams. Twenty-odd years ago I caught my first brook trout in North Carolina, a tiny thing, up above a waterfall where the rainbows couldn’t make lunch of him. We’re fishing for trout again this time, or possibly smallmouth, near the mountain town of Cashiers.

Any smallmouth east of the Appalachians are also transplants.

I’m guessing that there is a saltwater fishery along the Atlantic, and South Carolina is well-known for its redfish, but we won’t make it as far as the coast. After we fish near Bristol, Tennessee (home of Nascar’s Bristol Motor Speedway), we drive south and a bit west back to North Carolina. Shouldn’t work that way, but there you are.

When the Carolinas split in 1729, North Carolina had 6,000 slaves, while South Carolina had 32,000. Tobacco was North Carolina’s big crop, but it was not an industrial agriculture crop like cotton. There were slaves though, in Eastern North Carolina. The Carolina Quakers actively opposed slavery, which was one of the reasons they were impolitely encouraged to leave. By the 1860 census there were 331,059 slaves in North Carolina, or about 33% of the total population, compared to 57% of the population of South Carolina. There were Confederate states with fewer slaves, but they were western, newer states, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida. In 1860, Florida’s total population was only 140,000. I suspect that a significant part of North Carolina’s enslaved were centered in the southern rice-growing region around Cape Fear, North Carolina’s only port, and where Virginia immigrants had gathered along the coast.

During the Civil War North Carolina was relatively untouched physically, but more Confederate soldiers came from North Carolina than any other state, 130,000, more than 12% of its total population. More than 40,000 Confederate North Carolinians died during the War, about half from disease. As with Tennessee, there was considerable Union sympathy in the Appalachian portion of the state, and about 8,000 North Carolinians fought for the Union, 5,000 black, 3,000 white.

North Carolina’s population today is estimated at 10,488,084, and it’s grown consistently and fast since about 1880, when the population was about 1.4 million. It is our 9th most populous state, after Georgia but before Michigan. About 68.5% of the population is non-Hispanic white, and 21.5% African American, which leaves about 10% for everybody else. About 8.4% of the total population is Hispanic. It’s a pretty place, with a hospitable climate as long as no hurricanes blow in from the Atlantic, and I suspect a lot of the North Carolina’s growth is about it being a pretty place with a hospitable climate. People from Houston retire there.

Rivers Langley, Earl Scruggs, 2005, licensed under Creative Commons license, unedited.

It is still not a wealthy state, ranked 41st, with an average annual income in 2018 of $53,888. I suspect that there are greater disparities in income in North Carolina than there are, say, in Missouri, ranked 40, or Tennessee, ranked 42, but that’s just a hunch. Like I said, affluent people from Houston retire there. Affluent people from Houston don’t retire to Missouri.

North Carolina may be one of the states that decides the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Biden needs about 40 electoral votes over what Hillary received in 2016, which means that unless he wins Texas and Florida he has to win some combination of three larger states that Hillary didn’t win. Of the states that were close in 2016, Pennsylvania (20) and North Carolina (15) would just about do it.

In 2016 President Trump took North Carolina 49.83% to 46.17%, but of all the state electoral maps I’ve looked at, North Carolina’s may be the strangest. It doesn’t appear to be driven so much by an urban/rural or a white/black split as an affluent/less affluent split, but that’s a wild guess. Maybe it’s that North Carolina has become such a refuge, and the refugees aren’t collected in big cities. Anyway, it would take a lot more delving than I’m willing to do to figure it out. Here’s the map:

By Ali Zifan, Wikipedia.

Look up a map of the state and compare the two. It’s a strange jumble of who voted how, and not obviously explained by the usual splits.

One of North Carolina’s Senate seats, held by Republican Tom Tillis, is up in 2020, and the race is generally considered a toss-up, though current polling shows the Democratic challenger leading by seven points. Current polling shows Biden leading Trump 49% to 48%, which is meaningless.

And by the way, the most quotable sports movie, Bull Durham, was set in North Carolina. I will almost certainly watch Bull Durham again before the weird short season baseball business kicks off next week, and we head to North Carolina.

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Fish in the Time of Cholera. Arkansas.

The largest trout I’ve caught was in Arkansas, in the Ozarks on the Little Red River in the northwest part of the state, on a root-beer colored streamer called a meat whistle. Whoever named that fly wasn’t subtle, but neither is the fly.

I caught that trout three years ago, and I considered including it in our list and skipping another trip to Arkansas. For some reason that seemed wrong–if I included Arkansas where would it end? North Carolina 20 years back? That trip to Wyoming 30 years’ ago? So a month ago we booked a weekend trip back to the Little Red on April 4. Then came Coronavirus.

The Little Red is a tributary to the more-famous White River, and like the White it’s known for its trout. It once held the world all-tackle record for brown trout, over 40 pounds. Since the 1980s, the browns are always wild, never stocked. It’s a pretty river, to my eye prettier than the White, and we fished it from a flat-bottomed, jet-motored sled-boat Nothing says Arkansas like a flat-bottomed, jet-motored sled-boat.

Parts of the Little Red are lined with vacation homes, but its banks are heavily wooded and the houses don’t intrude except when your fly gets hung on a dock. There’s always something for flies to get hung on. The Little Red and the White are tailwaters, and while trout aren’t native to Arkansas, water is discharged from the dams at 40-50 degrees, cold enough to dissuade the native black bass and catfish. Trout thrive.

My great-grandfather, Henry Louis Thomas, was born July 17, 1850, in Ozan, Arkansas, two counties northwest of the corner where Texas and Arkansas meet. His father, William Louis Thomas, was born I-don’t-know-where and died in Ozan in 1849. He was 38. Because of problems with a stepfather, as boys Henry and his older brother, James Jasper, left Arkansas on a donkey and came to Bowie County near Texarkana. It seems pretty desperate, but I suspect these were pretty desperate people.

All William Louis left behind was a marriage license, a denied dram shop license application, and two sons. I doubt that my great grandfather Henry could read, or at least that he could read much, and wonder what it must have been like for Amanda Adeline to be widowed and poor and pregnant in Arkansas in 1850. She was born in 1834, two years before statehood, in Argenta, Arkansas, now North Little Rock. She was 16 when Henry was born. She died in 1864 in Bois d’Arc. She was 30.

Bois d’Arc, by the way, is pronounced bow dark.

When I was a boy, my grandmother’s house was a few blocks south, the Texas side, of State Line Boulevard in Texarkana. The Texas side was dry, meaning that alcohol sales were banned. The Arkansas side was wet, evidencing a wildness that I suspected was typical of the other side of the street. The federal post office sits on the line, part in Texas, part in Arkansas. Near the post office is a peculiarly elaborate Confederate memorial dedicated in part to the women of the Confederacy, or at least the white women of the Confederacy.

“O great Confederate mothers, we would paint your names on monuments, that men may read them as the years go by and tribute pay to you, who bore and nurtured hero-sons and gave them solace on that darkest day, when they came home, with broken swords and guns!”

I don’t think there’s a corresponding monument for Southern women who weren’t Confederate mothers.

I doubt my family history is uncommon. I expect that lots of early immigrants to Texas came through Arkansas: white, black, or brown they could only have come through Arkansas, Louisiana, Mexico, or the Gulf. Maybe there were a rare few souls from New Mexico. My family history is probably only nuanced by the time some of my ancestors actually stayed in Arkansas.

Henry Schenck Tanner, Arkansas, A New Universal Atlas Containing Maps of the various Empires, Kingdoms, States and Republics Of The World, 1836.

Since Thursday I’m home, self-isolating. A colleague in Dallas may have the virus, and there is a feeling of inevitability about the spread of Covid-19. Fifteen days ago I went to a breakfast for the Harris County Community College system with about 500 others, and after the breakfast I stood in the foyer for an hour discussing local politics with a friend, the wife of a Harris County commissioner, and greeted passers-by. That evening I stood with our mayor in a crowded room for a reception for Cory Booker, and then left for a dinner at a Chinese restaurant with about half of the Harris County state representatives–the purpose was to advertise the plight of Asian Town restaurants. At all those events we were still shaking hands, hugging, standing closer than six feet.

Now of course our mayor has ordered all Houston dining room service closed, and I’m at home. Everything’s canceled. Everything’s ground to a halt.

I haven’t canceled our trip to Arkansas yet, and haven’t discussed canceling with Kris. I should go ahead and cancel, I’m pretty sure we won’t be going, but part of me wants to stock the van with groceries and sleeping bags and drive, to see deserted highways, to make Henry’s trip on that donkey in reverse. We wouldn’t have to interact with anyone except the fishing guide, and that would be outdoors. We could sleep in the van in WalMart parking lots, right? There are WalMarts in Arkansas, right? It would be a small rebellion against our current paralysis. At some point life must go on, or maybe not.

I need to spend a day outside. And I’ve only been home since Thursday.

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Olympic Peninsula Steelhead, February 9-10, 2020.

I didn’t catch a steelhead on the Olympic Peninsula. I caught fish. I foul-hooked a couple of whitefish, landed two or three small rainbow—I remember a par and a smolt—and caught one nice 18” rainbow. I also caught a Dolly Varden. I didn’t know that Dolly Varden are named after a Charles Dickens character from the novel Barnaby Rudge, 1841. Dolly Varden are a pretty fish, with bright silver and pastel yellow jewels along their back and sides. Naming a pretty fish after a pretty Dickens’ character is such a 19th century sort of thing, you gotta like it.  There was also a style of women’s dresses called Dolly Varden, which I suspect was named after the Dickens’ character and not the fish. The dress doesn’t much resemble the fish.

William Powell Frith, Dolly Varden, 1842, oil on canvass, The Victoria and Albert Museum. This is not the fish.

Kris had worse luck than me.  She foul-hooked a whitefish, and her waders leaked. She was cold and wet and miserable the first day. It looks like a manufacturer’s defect, so back to Patagonia they go.  

We fished with Ryan Steen of The Evening Hatch, and stayed at The Evening Hatch’s lodge on Lake Quinault.  We don’t stay at a lot of lodges, but they are fun, and when we have, in Argentina and Belize, it’s been pretty luxurious, for us pretty glamorous. The Evening Hatch lodge wasn’t exactly luxurious, but it was very nice and the food was great and the coffee was excellent. It was less like a glamorous destination than when as a kid we visited my aunts’ house in Texarkana. The food was great at my aunts’ house too, though both aunts being Church of Christ there was nothing to drink but ice tea. Jeff and Jan Cotrell ran the lodge, and filled in well for relatives. If they weren’t younger than us they’d have made a great uncle and aunt. If we’d just played a bunch of dominoes it would have been my childhood all over again. 

I caught the Dolly Varden on the Quinault River, above Lake Quinault. We floated from early to late, I’d guess six or seven miles, alternating between wading and swinging streamers with Spey rods, and nymphing with artificial salmon eggs, either plastic beads or yarn. The eggs were seven or eight feet under a bobber, and the point was to let the egg drift deep while we rafted downriver.  We were fishing 9 foot 8 weights, with the bead drifting below a swivel and lead pencil weight crimped to the leader. Some folk would say that’s not fly fishing at all, but it takes some care to throw that monstrous rig without damaging your guide or yourself. I mostly managed.

Dolly Varden trout, Salvelinus malma malma, adult female, The Fishes of Alaska, 1906, Bulletin of the Bureau of Fisheries, Vol. XXVI, P. 360, Plate XL. Wikimedia Commons.

On the single hand rods we fished floating lines with a 30 lb nylon mono butt to 20 lb mono and finally to 15 lb tippet. When the bobber bobbed Ryan yelled SET! SET! SET!, and if I wasn’t watching the scenery I usually did. The set was sidearm, upstream, not a straight up trout set and not a strip set.  The idea was to pull the bead out of the mouth and pull the hook trailing the bead into the mouth. The rig is supposed to result in fewer foul or deep hook sets for trout and steelhead, though because of their small mouths the poor white fish that went after the eggs were always foul-hooked, outside the mouth and in its skin. Maybe that’s why Western anglers don’t really like whitefish. It’s all that foul-hooking guilt.

In the river we drifted the egg along the seams and in the softer water just beyond the seams, and we caught a lot of trees, both drifting and casting.  Poor Ryan lost a fortune in plastic beads and octopus hooks. 

The Olympic Peninsula is a beautiful place, and the rain forest reminded me oddly of New York City back in the 80s, where if you stood still too long you’d get graffitied. Instead of spray paint the rain forest covers everything with moss. It’s lush, with each nook and cranny covered with something green and growing: ferns, moss, the largest red cedar in the world, the largest Sitka spruce in the world, the largest . . . Oh hell, I don’t know. Just about the largest every kind of tree except mesquite and mangrove, and they were probably there too until somebody logged them.  

This is northern spotted owl country, which from its photos is a lovely little owl that doesn’t really deserve its notoriety, but it’s not an easy place for people to live either. There’s tension between the wildness of the place and its human inhabitants. Ryan tells good stories about the area, insightful stories, about backwoods North Carolinians who moved there a century before for logging, and who still live in isolated backwoods pockets; about Theodore Roosevelt creating the national park to save the elk wintering ground for hunters and how he incidentally saved the rivers for salmon and steelhead; about tribal netting of salmon and steelhead; about boom and bust logging and the minimal old growth forests preserved for the spotted owl. 

It can’t be an easy place to live, either for the remaining tribal nations or the loggers, the commercial fishers, or the small business owners. The population is estimated to be a bit more than 100,000, or about 28 people per square mile, which is 15 more people per square mile than my hometown county in Texas, but still . . . It feels more remote, especially on the west side, and especially in the midst of all that isolating forest. Plus in West Texas we had oil and cotton and wheat and cattle, they’ve got trees and fish and tourism, tourism and fish and trees, and balancing wild places with making a living can’t be easy. It’s probably better now. At least for loggers and millworkers forest land is probably better managed, but it will never be perfect, and there’s always spotted owls to blame.

The flip side of all that fecundity is the rivers. The rivers aren’t rich with all the good things trout love, insects, baitfish, crawfish, there are few of them. The rainfall scours the rivers too often, much of the flow is glacial melt or spring water or rainfall, without a lot of organic stuff taking hold, and there’s not the richness in the water that grows concentrations of trout. There is some stuff, but the wealth in the rivers on the Olympic Peninsula is its access to saltwater. It’s salmon in the fall and steelhead in the winter that make the rivers great fishing, but it’s ultimately access to the Pacific, to baitfish and glass shrimp, that make the coastal rivers a destination fishery.

Kris didn’t have all the bad luck.  I failed a cast—this is an important life lesson. You have to end the snap of the snap-T with the rod tip in or near the water or the weighted fly will slam into your rod tip and snap it. Notwithstanding its name, that’s not what the snap-T is all about, it’s not the snap-tip. It was operator error, but operator error that Beulah the rod maker will repair with a small contribution from the operator.  Thank heavens for no-fault rod warranties.

The second day fishing we didn’t swing flies. I don’t know if it was because Ryan wanted to cover more water (we covered a lot of water), or because he was worried about Kris’s wader leak and wanted her to stay dry and warm (relatively warm anyway—we are, after all, from Houston), or maybe because he was sick of watching us flail around with Spey rods and wanted to watch us flail around with single handed rods (I don’t blame him, variety is the spice and all that). We were on a different river, the Clearwater, above where it joins the Queets. Fishing with Ryan was a bit like taking a river tour, only the sights to see were usually just the other side of that seam, closer to the bank, alongside that rock, and this is shallow. Every now and again he’d yell SET!

The Quinault ran through a broader bed with more channels and, as I recall, more riffles and rapids than the Clearwater. There was more rock in the river and on the banks, and more room between the river and the trees. The Clearwater ran in more of a channel, through heavier forest. 

On the Clearwater I came as close as we got to a steelhead. There was a set, a thrash, a feel that this 8 weight may be too small for this fish, a streak of silver at the surface . . . It was enough to know that this is a big fish, to wonder if I could handle this big of a fish, and then it was gone. Just that moment, it lasted no more than that, but then again that’s the kind of lost fish that lasts a lifetime.

We had two days of sun while on the river, and it was amusing that Ryan had no sunscreen in his kit. “The next ten days,” he told us, “it’s rain.” Of course for all I know he was just telling us a tall tale. It may never rain on the Olympic Peninsula, and may always be sunny. I do know there are steelhead though. For a few seconds I hooked a steelhead.  

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Kansas Supply Side Fly Fishing

Kansas Mountains

Kansas Mountains, a preenactment

Kansas is a pretty conservative state, more conservative than most. Kansas hasn’t had a Democratic senator since 1938, when George McGill, elected in 1930 to fill an unexpired term, lost his second bid for reelection. There was one other Kansas Democrat elected in the last century, in 1913. He lost in 1919. Maybe he won as a peace-time Democrat, that sort of thing happened before World War I, and it’s interesting that at some point we switched from electing senators in odd years to even. It clearly wasn’t a change that helped Kansas Democrats.

The current governor is a Democrat, and that happens in Kansas from time to time, not like all the time but every now and again, so maybe Kansas is less conservative than one might think. But over the last eight years Kansas was uncharacteristically prominent in the national news for a peculiarly conservative administration. Another governor, Sam Brownback, made Kansas the nation’s petrie dish for supply side economics. Brownback resigned the governorship to become President Trump’s United States Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom, and by the end of his second term when he resigned both Republicans and Democrats couldn’t get him out of Kansas fast enough. Hence there is now a Democrat in office–Brownback blowback.

Gage Skidmore, photographer, Sam Brownback measuring the bluegill he caught in Kansas, CPAC, 2015, Wikipedia.

In 2011 as a newly-elected governor Brownback pushed through radical tax reductions. Being a religious man, he had faith that if Kansas decreased taxation, the resulting economic stimulus would increase tax revenues. Common sense supports Brownback’s notions, at least somewhat: If you tax too much, say 100%, people won’t pay or won’t work and no taxes get collected. The generally accepted notion though isn’t that reduced taxation will always result in economic stimulus, but that there is an optimum level of taxation, a level at which necessary economic drivers like schools and roads and health care aren’t crippled, but the supporting taxes don’t themselves hold back the economy. In the Kansas Experiment, Brownback slashed rates of taxation in 2012 to lower tax revenues by $231 million. Brownback was certain that the reduced taxation would stimulate a slow Kansas economy, and promised more future cuts.

It didn’t exactly work. The Kansas economy continued to lag, and by 2017 the Kansas legislature had slashed expenditures on roads, schools, bridges, and other necessary stuff. The legislature, both Republican and Democrat, rolled back the tax rollbacks, and then overrode Brownback’s veto.

The Laffer Curve, a Historical Reenactment. Much of our fiscal policy over the last 40 years is derived from this napkin.

The notion that lower tax rates result in higher tax revenues isn’t new, and was the theoretical support for a number of U.S. tax cuts, even pre-Reaganomics, even by Democrats. Maybe its most famous association (other than with President Reagan) is with the economist Arthur Laffer, who in 1974 as a White House staffer sketched the Laffer curve onto a napkin for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Winner winner chicken dinner! I hope it was a paper napkin. I’d hate for a conservative administration to waste cloth napkins. On the other hand, maybe if it’s still around it could be like the Shroud of Turin, and we could charge admission.

Before that, in 1924, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, he of Mellon Bank and one of our then-richest folk, wrote “It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue to the government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower rates.” At that time the marginal tax rate was 73%, and since as one of the .01% Mellon lived at the margins, maybe he had a better understanding of the result than most. The marginal rate was ultimately reduced to 24%, but then it was increased in 1932 at the outset of the New Deal to 62%. By 1951 following World War II, the highest marginal rate was 91%.

Trinity Court Studio, Andrew W. Mellon, 1921.

Tax optimization theory is not inherently conservative, but it does go hand-in-hand with a bulwark of conservative economics, Supply-Side Economics, dba trickle-down theory, dba voodoo economics. Supply-Siders believe that the economy is driven by production, by those willing and able to invest capital into producing more, and that the only way the economy grows is if production grows. Production only grows if the triumvirate of minimal regulation, stable monetary policy, and–here’s where tax reduction comes to play–low taxes spur producers to invest in production. It can’t, for instance, spur producers to go fly fishing in New Zealand instead of investing in production, because that’s not the sort of thing producers do. Consumption, the theory goes, will follow production, one supposes in part because of increased funds available to workers and in part because of the availability of goods. If you build it, they will come. Just look what happened to Iowa!

The direct counterpoint to Supply-Side Economics is Keynesian Demand-Side Economics. Give a consumer a dollar, and he’ll spend it on consumption, which in turn will spur production. I’m sure that there are Supply-Siders with complex calculations that prove Supply-Side is the very thing, and Demand-Siders with their own set of complex calculations that prove that Demand-Side is the very thing, and that I would make head-nor-tales of neither set of calculations. As a demonstration model though Kansas isn’t a very convincing proof for the Supply-Side. Maybe it failed because the state reduced tax rates for both the highest payers and the lowest? Maybe they should have increased taxation on the lowest to spur production? Maybe, but end of the day the Kansas economy started stagnant, and six years later was apparently still stagnant, and the state government was a mess. I hope Ambassador Brownback fares better with religious freedom, ‘cause if he doesn’t we’re all going to end up under Sharia law.

I’ve been thinking about Kansas a good bit, mostly because fishing Kansas is kind of intimidating to me. There are no fly fishing guides. There are no fly fishing guidebooks. It’s not a destination fishery and it’s a bit short on the fly fishing resources that destination fisheries usually have. I figure the cause must be a combination of high taxation and excessive regulation.

Kansas flat with tarpon, a preenactment

Just consider: fly-fishers like mountains, and Kansas is one of our flattest states. If mountain producers would just produce some mountains in Kansas, then fly fishers would flock there. If, for instance, mountain producers dug out the eastern portion of the state, and dumped the spoil in the west, Kansas could have both a mountain range and an inland sea: just add salt. Fly fishers would flock to both the mountains and the sea, as would bonefish, permit, tarpon, and trout. Clearly, the only reason that hasn’t happened is because of Kansas laws that discourage mountain and inland sea production, and the current high taxation on Kansas mountain and seaside property. If you produced a mountain in Kansas with a few good trout streams, I reckon just about everybody–not just fly fishers–would come to see it.

We need to get Governor Brownback back in Kansas.