Tag: West Virginia

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Packing List: Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia

For a week long road trip that included a college graduation, some family, some friends, and five days fishing, we took some clothes–way too many clothes. For fishing, I also took:

  • Raingear.  Rain pants and a rain jacket. You don’t need rain pants when you’re fishing in waders, but we weren’t in waders on The Chesapeake. I bought Andy a new pair, and discovered my pair had a ripped seat.  It’s probably good I wasn’t sitting down. Kris couldn’t find her rain pants. It rained and it was cold and there was nothing good about that.
  • Waders, boots, wading staffs.  Kris always preferred an old pair of Orvis canvass boots from 20-odd years ago, but they were constantly delaminating and I suggested she buy a new pair for the trip. Not that we trout fished in Maryland, but because of disease felt is no longer allowed there, nor in Alaska, Missouri, Nebraska, Rhode Island, and South Dakota. For the two days on boats I had a new pair of Keen sandals because the old pair were constantly delaminating.  Maybe it’s us.
  • Rods.  More than we needed. Two 9’ 5 weights for trout, two 9’  6 weights for bass, and a 10’ 4 weight because after suffering rod fever in February I didn’t suffer long.  We used the 6 weights for the Shenandoah, and the smaller rods for West Virginia.  We used the guide’s 9 weights for the Chesapeake—I don’t own a 9 weight and will have to contemplate that. We also borrowed the guide’s short 8’  3 weights for the tiny bookies—I don’t own any 3 weights and will have to contemplate that. Fly fishing is a very contemplative sport.
  • Reels.  Some reels. Floating lines.  The guide on the Shenandoah River said he’d toss in a sink tip, but I don’t know if he did and we wouldn’t have used it. We used the guide’s rods on the Chesapeake because I didn’t own heavy sinking lines.  I started to buy them, but wasn’t sure what I needed.  Now I know. I’ll have to contemplate that.
  • Flies. I took no saltwater flies.  I thought about it, mostly because I was curious about whether any of my redfish flies would work, but the flies we used in saltwater were much longer and heavier than anything I own.  They were big 6” flies with big lead eyes. For the Shenandoah, the guide brought Shenk’s white streamers on which we caught fish, and some olives that I never fished.  I had tied a bunch of dragon tails before we left, mostly because I was getting skunked at home on larger black bass. On the Shenandoah I caught some fish, but I also got lots of slappy short takes. The flies were just too long.  I’ve ordered some mini-dragon tails hoping they’re shorter, and long size 4 hooks, but suspect they may just be the same tail as the regular with 1-1/2” cut off the fat end.  I also took all my trout flies–and I have a lot–but mostly we fished the guide’s flies.  I think all of the rainbows and the one brown I caught were on various colors of squirmy worms, and two of the bookies on big stimulaters and the third on a bead-head pheasant tail nymph.
  • Leaders. Some nylon tippet.  Some Fluorocarbon tippet. I never used the Flourocarbon.  For the stripers we used a four foot piece of straight 20 pound.  It fit nicely around my neck.  For the smallmouth we used 9’ 2X.  Approximately 9’ anyway,  I’d tied in bits and pieces of stuff, and I sort of guess at lengths.  For the trout, 9’ 5X with foam strike indicators for the squirmy worms.  The morning I fished on my own I switched to some Orvis strike putty that had been floating around my vest for 15 or 20 years. It worked fine. It always works fine. I don’t know why I ever use anything else.
  • Sunglasses. Amber and low light polarized Smiths.  Everyone loves low light sunglasses.  I love low light  sunglasses. I lost mine in West Virginia that time I fell down in the pond.
  • Fishing vest.  Complete with all the usual junk that accumulates in fishing vests.  Some split shot (which I used), some nippers, hemostats, various kinds of indicators, and nets.  West Virginia apparently prohibits cloth nets on catch and release water. I don’t get the sense that there’s lots of enforcement.
  • Sling pack. I meant to pack a waterproof sling pack for the boats but forgot it.  I didn’t need it.
  • Sunscreen. I meant to pack a buff and sun gloves but they were in the sling pack. I need lots of sunscreen.
  • A water proof Nikon and a GoPro.  I bought a Nikon CoolPix waterproof camera that I wore around my neck while fishing.  It was easier than the GoPro and took better pictures, kept me from draining my phone battery, and kept my phone out of the river.  I loved it, but you can’t see the view screen in high sun. Kris took her birding camera and lenses but never used it.
  • My Corpus Christi Hooks baseball cap, which T.C. Campbell admired. It’s a good looking cap, and because it’s fitted I can wear the GoPro on the back.

For general life I took my travel guitar (I’m re-memorizing Tárrega’s Capricho árabe so I can forget it again).  On the plane I read The Chesapeake in Focus by Tom Pelton, who worked for the Baltimore Sun and hosts The Environment in Focus for NPR. We listened to a lot of Tom Rosenbauer’s Orvis podcasts when we were driving. At Harper’s Ferry I bought a copy of Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign by Jonathan A. Noyalas and read that.

When we were driving around we listened to the playlists on my phone:

Maryland

Songs about Baltimore are mostly sad and gritty. There’s just something about Baltimore that makes it perfect for a dismal song.

  • Raining in Baltimore, Counting Crows
  • Baltimore,  Lyle Lovett
  • Baltimore,  with versions by Nina Simone and Randy Newman
  • Streets of Baltimore, with versions by Bobby Bare and Gram Parsons.
  • Baltimore Oriole, with versions Hoagy Charmichael and George Harrison. George Harrison?
  • Hungry Heart, Bruce Springsteen
  • Feets Don’t Fail Me Now, Little Feat
  • The Sad Death of Hattie McDaniel, Bob Dylan
  • The Lady Came from Baltimore, Tim Hardin
  • Tryin’ to Get to Heaven, Lucinda Williams

Plus, lots by Billie Holiday, Eubie Blake, Frank Zappa, and Phillip Glass. I listened to Glass’s Low Synphony three times on the flight. It sounded just like the Chesapeake should sound.  I tried to listen to it in the car in Maryland and Kris made me move on. She doesn’t like Glass.

All of us would be better listening more to Billie Holiday.

Virginia

  • Alexandria, Virginia, Bill Jennings
  • The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Band.  I never thought of this song as tied to a particular place other than the Generic South, but it mentions Virginia and Tennessee.
  • Virginia Girl, Deer Tick.
  • Carry Me Back to Virginia,  Old Crow Medicine Show.  Oddly, I couldn’t find a copy of Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny, which was retired as the Virginia state song because of racial content.  There are lots of versions though, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, and Louis Armstrong.
  • Virginia Moon,  Foo Fighters.
  • East Virginia Blues, by Robert Earl Keen. There’s the classic version by Ralph Stanley, so I had them both.
  • Shenandoah, by Bill Frisell.  Frisell is a jazz guitarist, and this for many years has been a favorite recording.  Shenandoah is apparently the interim state song of Virginia.  It’s apparently not the official state song because the only state it mentions is Missouri.
  • Sweet Virginia,  The Rolling Stones.  I’m Not a Stones fan much. Typical Stones. Kinda self-absorbed.
  • Yorktown, from Hamilton.  Not much Virginia, but I saw Hamilton last week, and Kris liked it.
  • James River  by Checker and  James River by Jan Smith.  Different songs I think.  Haven’t noticed them enough to decide.

Plus Some Old Crow Medicine Show, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ralph Stanley.  I ended up humming Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s Cheek to Cheek all through Virginia and West Virginia. And Jason Mraz.  Not much good to be said about Jason Mraz, but no harm either.

West Virginia

  • My Home Among the Hills, The Carter Family
  • Grandma’s Hands, Willie Nelson
  • Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn.  OK, technically that’s Kentucky, but close enough
  • Country Roads, Take Me Home, John Denver.  I had to buy two versions of this.  The first I downloaded had been remastered with strings. It was awful. I have immensely fond memories of this song from driving out to feed the horse when I was 14.
  • West Virginia My Home, with versions by Hazel Dickens and The Hillbilly Gypsies.
  • Green Rolling Hills, Emmylou Harris
  • Need You, Tim McGraw
  • Linda Lou, Bill Monroe
  • I Wanna Go Back to West Virginia, Spike Jones
  • West Virginia Wildflower, Stacy Grubb
  • A Country Boy Can Survive, Hank Williams Jr. I’m not a fan.

Plus some Kathy Mattea.  I also put Copland’s Appalachian Spring and O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz on the list. They seem to fit, even though O’Connor is from Seattle and Copeland from Brooklyn.  We were listening to Appalachian Spring crossing from Virginia to West Virginia, and expected every mountain turn to open into a vista.  Mostly they didn’t, but it sure kept me awake.

 

 

 

 

 

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Eastern Grand Slam. May 16, 2018

Somebody somewhere serendipitously caught three different fish in a day and called it a grand slam, probably over beers that very evening.  Grand slam, of course, is a baseball term, meaning that one is spectacularly off the schneid.  It’s usually a tarpon, a bonefish, and a permit caught on the same day, but there aren’t a lot of places north of the Florida Keys to catch a tarpon, a bonefish, and a permit, so in Texas saltwater it’s a flounder, a redfish, and a speckled trout. For Western trout it’s a cutthroat, rainbow, brown, and brookie. For Eastern trout it’s the same sans cutthroat. It’s all nonsense, but it’s gratifying nonsense.

I caught a rainbow, brown, and brookie on the same Wednesday in West Virginia.  I caught the rainbow and the brown in less than 30 minutes after breakfast before we met Randall the guide.

Earlier at breakfast we sat on the porch at the restaurant and watched this guy on the far side of the river catch and release at least six fish.

Meantimes while he was fishing I had the blueberry pancakes. I suspect that both of us, the guy fishing and me, were satisfied.

The people we talked to in the restaurant were all from West Virginia and Pennsylvania. When we said we were from Texas it was like saying we were from France. Elk Springs seems to be a local draw. It shouldn’t be. It’s a good place, and the blueberry pancakes are outstanding.

I hadn’t taken my camera, so I took no pictures of the first two-thirds of my slam. I was startled by the brown, and kept looking at it in the net for confirmation, but there it was. I wish I had a photo just to prove that I wasn’t lying to myself. It was a brown though, and I’d already caught the rainbow.

I caught the two of ‘em on squirmy worms. Not very orthodox, but fine with me.

Kris and Randall conspired again and took  me away from the Elk River to Kumbrabow State Forest. It’s a beautiful place, deserted on a Wednesday in May except for the three of us, and a group of state highway workers who got lost looking for a highway. We fished a bit of stream and I came to a pool, a tiny pool, a pocket pool, maybe four feet deep and blue as a Caribbean sea. I put on a weighted nymph to get the fly down and hooked my grand slam brookie.  Randall and Kris were standing there watching so I yelled “fish on” and they laughed.

But it was as lovely a fish as ever I caught. I won’t say though that even on a three weight there was much of a battle.

Tiny. Perfect.

We moved to a waterfall where I promptly fell down in the pool below the falls.  Kris and Randall were chattering away and paid me no mind.  Did I say Randall was terse? Kris was chattering and Randall was talking almost as fast–ok, nobody can chatter like Kris in high gear. And she loves a story, both to tell and to hear. Randall and his family and his fishing were to Kris a good story.

And Kris also caught her Appalachian brookie. Who wouldn’t be thrilled?

*  *  *

We piled our rods in the car and left the mountain at three. The lodge had been great, the fishing was great, the staff had been accommodating, friendly, and knowledgeable, the food had been lovely, thoughtful, and well-prepared, and I caught my West Virginia fish. Plus there was a washer-drier. Only 47 more states to go.

The brook trout, by the way, is the the state fish of West Virginia.

One oddity about the Elk Springs Lodge. It is in the National Radio Quiet Zone, where radios, mobile telephones, and wireless internet nterfere with the National Radio Observatory.  There is limited and sporadic cell telephone service. Internet is weak connections at the restaurant. If you buy a signal booster the federales will come to your door and make you remove it.

*  *  *

2015 median household income data shows West Virginia as third lowest, ahead of Arkansas (49) and Mississippi (50).  It marches almost lockstep with life-expectancy data. The poorer you are, the shorter your life.

In West Virginia, we passed through nice towns, hamlets really, with nice houses, where I’d think I could live.  The natural spaces between the towns were as often as not extraordinary, but there was also rural squalor dotted in and among the towns and countryside.  I’ve seen rural squalor off and on all my life, and there’s plenty of hard-living in Houston, but in West Virginia it’s on Main Street, nestled up against the highway, not hidden down some side road. Heaven only knows what’s down the side roads.

In Paul Theroux’s Deep South he rails at the Clintons for abandoning the Southern poor. His anger startled me when I read the book, but it rings true. He suggests that the Clintons expect the devotion of the American poor without any skin in the game. Hillary didn’t get that devotion in West Virginia. Trump took West Virginia 69% to 26%.

During the 2016 campaign and its aftermath there was so much written about Hillary and West Virginia and Hillary and the white poor, but bottom line it came down to her disdain versus Trump’s bluster: I doubt if many people believed Trump would bring back coal or otherwise help West Virginia, but at least there was no talk of baskets of deplorables. Hillary, and maybe the Democratic Party, bring nada to America’s rural poor. Trump didn’t either. Maybe no one can.

Trump also carried Mississippi and Arkansas, 58% to 40% and 60% to 34%. Those are landslides where I come from.

*  *  *

One last story about West Virginia. It’s a condescending, stupid story that could have happened anywhere but there you are. It happened in West Virginia, and I can’t resist.

On our way back to Virginia from Elk Springs we stopped at a gas station and I broke down the fly rods in the parking lot while Kris bought bean dip and Fritos in the store. A woman, maybe older than me but I suspect a good bit younger–you couldn’t tell by looking–got out of a beat up truck and said “you’re not going to catch any fish in this parking lot.”  It was that dry, slightly aggressive humor that I grew up with in Texas, so I said something like I won’t know until I try and she grinned and laughed.

She had no front teeth.

West Virginia. You gotta go.

 

 

 

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Rainbow Trout and Brookies. West Virginia, May 15, 2018

If I owned a Lamborghini, or maybe just a Miata, I’d move to Luray, Virginia, and make the drive to Elk Springs Resort and Fly Shop every day.  I’ve never seen a prettier road. We were in a rental Mitsubishi SUV and it was still fun, in a brittle,  “I hope we don’t scream at each other at the next switchback,” sort-of-way.

That map app is lying about the 3 h 33 min.  It was nearly five hours through the mountains. Of course it was raining hard on the Virginia side, but we left the Shenandoah around 4 and didn’t make it to the lodge until almost 9. That was with only one stop for gas and a bathroom, and another for a bathroom and diet Coke. Fortunately Kris had called ahead and the lodge had a pizza ready, because there aren’t many other restaurants nearby, and the nearest grocery was 40 miles away.

Food desert. A rural food desert.

Man it was a pretty road. Man I’m glad the phone didn’t die before we got there, because we would never have made it. Man I’m glad we had a paper map. Man that pizza was good.

We told our guide in Virginia we were going to the Elk River and he said it was known for its hatches. Now I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a hatch, so I was kind of excited in an abstract way. I like the notion of a hatch, though I’m not certain I’d know what to do with one. When we got there though we were told that because of the late April freeze the hatches were thrown off. There had yet to be hatches this spring.

“This time of night you should be walking through bugs,” we were told. There were no bugs. I’m pretty certain that hatches are a lot like snipe hunts.

Even without bugs the lodge was great. There was pizza, and we’d bought some West Virginia beer at the last stop. The rooms all had themes, and ours was NASCAR. I was kind of hoping for Hippy, but you can’t beat NASCAR.  Next door to NASCAR was Harley-Davidson.

Actually, this was the most elegant lodge I’d ever stayed in. Our room had its own washer-drier. Do you know how terrific that is after a few days fishing? It’s beyond terrific. It’s elegant.

After breakfast the next morning—biscuits and sausage gravy for me, and it was good—we met our guide, Randall Burns, in the fly shop. It’s a fine fly shop, with enough stuff to keep any fly fisher happy exploring. We fished the morning on the Elk. Kris caught the first fish then disappeared. I caught four nice trout, all rainbows, on squirmy worms. Randall said the bottom of his net was 20 inches.  Ok, maybe he said 12 inches, but 20 is my story and I’m sticking to it. These were nice trout, some stocked, some wild.  I think Randall said it had been a few months since they’d last stocked.

So far Randall has had two occupations: he’s guided for trout in Virginia and West Virginia, and he’s been a Navy Seal.  Randall looks like a Navy Seal. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Randall is a pretty terse, reserved kind of guy, so mostly I fished and he watched. He switched flies, he taught patience (which is a lesson I badly need), and he told me what to look for.

Meantime Kris disappeared and it worried us. We kept looking for her to return to fish, but here’s what you have to know about Kris: She’s not a great caster, she has never quite figured out what all that tippet stuff means, and I’m not sure she knows the difference between a trout fly and a bass fly, but she ain’t into easy, and the Elk is kind of an easy river.  I was having fun. I was hooking fish and after the first fish threw the hook I asked Randall if I was trying to play  the fish too fast. He said yes, I slowed down, and  I didn’t lose another.  I got to practice landing fish in a river. The Elk River at Elk Springs Resort is a great place to catch fish, maybe as good as it gets, and if there had been hatches–if hatches aren’t some Yankee prank played on gullible Texans–I never would have strayed. If someone asked me “where should I go to learn to catch trout,” or just “where should I go to catch some trout,” I’d say the Elk is a mighty fine choice.  It is a prolific bit of river. But Kris was done after her first fish. She was the same way, by the way, on the San Juan in New Mexico. I dread our trip to the Green in Utah, or back to the San Juan, or for heaven’s sake Alaska. The Elk is a place you are certain to catch big rainbows, some stocked and some wild, and you will catch plenty o’ fish. Nice fish.

But Kris and Randall were conspiring.

At lunch Kris and Randall announced we were going that afternoon to the lodge’s Point Mountain Wilderness property to fish for brook trout. Wild Appalachian brook trout.

If you look at that photo carefully, there’s a seam of coal in the ledge above the water, black in the rock. The property is the site of a shuttered and reclaimed underground coal mine: not surface mining mind, but tunnel. It’s a beautiful property. We caught nothing in the pond but I would have loved a float tube.

From the pool we watched a small black bear, maybe 200 pounds and a quarter of a mile away, rooting for food at the edge of the trees. Randall said that there was a problem keeping poachers off the property because black bear gall bladder sells in Asia for as much as $5,000.

We left the pond and drove up and around and down the mountain where we fished in a tiny stream with stimulators for brook trout.  I caught two, the largest bright and colorful and maybe 6 inches, ok 5, but I utterly failed with photos of the fish. Kris, who caught no brookies, was happy as she could be. I was happy. I think Randall was happy.

On the way back from the stream we stopped to watch a flock of wild turkey. There can’t be places prettier than West Virginia.

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West Virginia

In West Virginia we’re staying at Elk Springs Resort & Fly Shop on the Elk River to fish for trout, non-native brown and rainbows most likely.  When I called to book, I asked the reservations lady how far it was from the lodge to Washington D.C. .  She didn’t know.  However far it is, I suspect in some ways it’s further.

Virginia and Maryland share a lot of things, but most of all they share geography. Because of a compromise over the national bank that put the nation’s capitol in the South, they share Washington D.C.. On the east they share the Chesapeake Bay. Coastal Tidelands in each state rise from the Chesapeake and both states turn into a fertile Piedmont region above a fall line.  On the west of both are the Allegheny Mountains, which are part of the Appalachian Mountains.

Interestingly, the Appalachians were named by a Texan, Cabeza de Vaca. Not really, but they were named apparently by de Vaca’s Narvaez expedition.

The Southern Appalachians, the mountains of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, are what I think of culturally as Appalachia, but who knows?  Appalachia may stretch from New York to Georgia. I used to think of the area as isolated, violent, poor, and uneducated, with clan feuds and moonshining. Now I can throw in opioids, meth, and Trump voters.

Some of that stereotyping is fair, too. West Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia, became the bellwether state for articles on why white working class voters were voting for President Trump. And they did in West Virginia, by 67.9 percent to 26.2 percent. My guess is they voted for President Trump because they knew Mrs. Clinton thought them a basket of deplorables.

West Virginia had the highest rate of opioid deaths in the U.S. in 2016, at 43.4 deaths per 100,000. Actually, at 75.4 years, West Virginia has the lowest life expectancy of any state except Mississippi.  The only measured category of death where West Virginia isn’t running with the front of the pack is Alzheimers, one supposes because people don’t live long enough to die of Alzheimers. You want to die by accident? Move to West Virginia. You want to die by suicide or gunshot or meth or black lung? Move to West Virginia. Your chances are usually right up there at the top.

Here’s the oddest thing about West Virginia: it’s 93.6 percent white. If someone told me that a state was 93.6 percent white, I’d assume we were talking about Idaho or Utah. Virginia is 68 percent white, 19 percent black.  Maryland is 58 percent white, 29 percent black. West Virginia is 93.6 percent white. That’s a lot of white folk.

Settlement by whites was pretty thorough, but it didn’t really kick off until the mid-18th century.  The French and Indian War was fought in part over the Ohio Valley, which stretches from Pennsylvania down to Kentucky, with West Virginia at its heart. After the release of claims by the Iroquois and Cherokee (surely absent violence), settlers started in. Ok, they started earlier, but they started in now with England’s blessing.  First were Germans, and lots of Scots via Ulster, the Scotch-Irish.

From early on, West Virginia was different from the rest of Virginia.  It was subsistence living that didn’t support slaves, at least until coal mining.

Louis Hine, 1911

During the Civil War there were two areas in the seceding states that were strongly pro-Union, Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee.  It was Lincoln’s dream that Eastern Tennessee would separate from the Confederacy, but it never did.  West Virginia did. On Amazon you can still find books about why the separation of West Virginia from Virginia was unlawful and unconstitutional.  Get over it.

Coal was the 18th century’s oil. It was the rural industry that turned us into a modern nation. It was and is a bloody, dangerous, unforgiving industry. Coal gave us some of the most violent labor disputes in the nation’s history: think machine guns mounted on train cars and fired into union strikers. Over 150 years coal gave us Mother Jones, strip mining and mountain-top removal and other ecological destruction, mine deaths, and a purchased West Virginia supreme court. it’s all Hatfields and McCoys, one way or the other. It’s always The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, but sometimes at the corporate level.

Hills and hollers. It’s beautiful, a friend said. People use words like hollers when they talk about West Virginia.

When I put together my playlist of songs for West Virginia, it wasn’t very long. There was one person who I greatly admire but didn’t expect, Bill Withers, and there was lots of Mountain Music. And of course there was that John Denver theme: take me home.  It’s the most common theme of West Virginia songs: “My Home Among the Hills,” “West Virginia My Home,” “I Wanna Go Back to West Virginia,” “Green Rolling Hills.”  In our minds we love West Virginia. In our minds West Virginia is the idyllic wildness we yearn for.

I also put Appalachian Spring on the play list, and Mark O’Connor’s brilliant Appalachia Waltz.  O’Connor is from Seattle, and of course Copland was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn.  We all have our notions about Appalachia. Take me home.

***

I did finally get a decent photo of a bluegill, a tiny thing that hit a tiny yellow popper and as is their want hit it hard enough to take in the whole thing.  Lepomis machrochyrus. I originally misidentified the fish because it didn’t look like the pictures of a bluegill on the Texas Parks and Wildlife website, and maybe my fish is something entirely different.  Sunfish are wanton little devils, spawning from May to August, and apparently they hybridize readily among species.  This one has the wrong color fins and the colors generally seem off. It’s just as likely that this fish is the product of some unfortunate parental liaison between two breeds of sunfish.

I caught a nice bass on the same tiny fly,  next to the grass in a pond backwater.