Rivers of Memory and Streams of Schlock...

                            
                               “You know (in supercilious tone), Nietzsche says "From chaos, comes order.”’

                               “Ah, blow it out yer ass, Howard.”

                                                                         From a great scene in a great movie...

And if you’ve read the blog long enough, you know that pretty much sums up how I feel about the majority of flyfishing writing. Insufferably pedantic, overheated, self-important, metaphor-choked twaddle that cranks the gratuitously pensive prose knob to eleven until our brains - unable to take any more - just say fuck it and go all Scanners on us. It's the Vogon poetry of the outdoors literary scene: excruciating to the ear, the tongue and the brain.

Don't believe me? Spend a few hours in the sports section of your local Barnes & Noble (can't very well do it with Borders any more, can we?) perusing the flyfishing titles. I promise you'll end up carrying your exploded noggin home in your favorite literary figure tote bag...

Which makes it such a damn mystery why I continue to love Harry Middleton, who, it could easily be argued, is the very embodiment of all that I loathe about the genre. Prose? Here is an honest-to-gawd random passage from the Middleton book I'm currently reading. I promise you I did not cherry-pick this; I just opened a random  page without looking and placed my finger on a random spot, again, without looking...

"The only break in the day's otherwise olamic tincture of grays was the luteous glow of my room's single 40-watt desk lamp. It had been like that for three days, the island enveloped in a thick, merciless composition of grays: griseous dawns, cinereous afternoons, dismal dingy gray evenings. I imagined that even the wind and the sounds of the sea were some shade of gray, perhaps an oyster-gray mist rising off the pounding lead gray sea."

You know, it must have been a real bitch to play Scrabble against him...

I mentioned this propensity for wordiness when I blogged about "The Bright Country" last year...

As much as I liked it, though, I did have some quibbling little issues with “The Bright Country.” One, it’s pretty obvious the book is at least semi-fictionalized. Middleton described it as “more real than imagined” but many, if not most of the characters, settings, events and dialogue were simply too perfect to the story to be real. Second, Middleton was an incredibly wordy writer. I’ve got a pretty good vocabulary, but some of his words were simply lost on me, to the point where they began distracting a bit from the story.

But I guess the difference between Middleton and many of the others, and the reason I tolerate his excessive wordiness, his bottomless bag of adjectives and his feathering of fact and fiction, is because the pain and the raw emotion he puts (or rather put, since he's dead...) down on the page isn't the droning, affected naval-gazing gibberish of all the single-malted Compleat Morons out there who somehow, inexplicably, scored a book deal. It's real. Long-winded, perhaps, but real nonetheless.

When Middleton writes about depression and pain and longing, about losing everything and having to climb on the back of a garbage truck every night to go to work, about how the wind and the splatter of rain sometimes reminds him of wild rivers he can no longer fish, well, I can relate to that, I can feel that.

But a book-length exploration of your boring-ass upper middle-class twit existential crisis set on a river, or perhaps a formulaically contemplative recounting of your worldwide flyfishing adventures and what it all means in the cosmic sense? Not so much. I'll just stick with the hard-luck hardscrabble angst and leave the rest of that high-falutin' shit to the "Fifty Places" crowd.

Which brings me to the original point of the blog...

I recently picked up a copy of "Rivers of Memory" which was published in 1993, the year of Middleton's death. It's a little book, eight essays, barely a hundred pages long and long out of print. It's a highly-collectable title, I got it for a good price and as such it will go in my meager collection of decent books, but not before being read, of course. And like all of Middleton's books, it gyrates wildly between passages of forlorn darkness and sublime wonder, all in the arc of a single sentence...

Each night as I haul myself onto the back of county garbage truck number two, there is familiar wind, some shred of moonglow or starlight, a splatter of dark rain on my skin, something that stirs my memory, and again, if even for a brief moment, I am on some mountain river, some stretch of bright water, water full of possibilities, including the possibility of trout, perhaps one that, when hooked, will haul me in and out of time, in and out of life's mysterious and frightening, wondrous and incomprehensible continuum, even to the edges of the universe.

Good stuff...  

A Little Maudlin Nostalgia...

A while back I wrote a blog detailing my penchant for collecting old and largely-worthless fishing tackle from the seventies and early eighties, explaining that...

"I have a special interest in vintage tackle and ads from the seventies and eighties because well, that's when I came of age. I'm constantly cruising the pawn shops and little small-town hardware stores for the tackle that time forgot. Old rods, reels, tackle and tackle boxes: it's amazing what's still out there sitting on store shelves. Whether it's pawn shops or some old ramshackle small-town bait store, I'm always on the prowl...old tackle from the seventies is like drinking an ice-cold coke made with real sugar out of a glass bottle with a bunch of salty peanuts in it, a delicious and fleeting evocation of a time and place you can't get back to."

And one of the places I most often frequented back in the age of sideburns and polyester was the venerable and ubiquitous chain of Oklahoma-based auto supply stores known as OTASCO. Like most typical Main Street-based auto parts-hardware-variety stores of yore (think Western Auto, Montgomery Ward's, TG&Y, Sears, etc...) OTASCO carried a full line of sporting goods.

My first bicycle came from OTASCO (a Flying O, remember them?) My first .22 came from OTASCO (a Winchester 190) and in all likelihood my first fishing pole came from OTASCO, though I was far too young to remember. OTASCO sold a surprising variety of fishing and hunting equipment, and the downtown Norman store was, along with the TG&Y just down the street, one of the icons of my childhood. If I had a nickel for every cardboard tube of Daisy BBs I purchased from that store...

But eventually, inevitably, OTASCO went the way of virtually every other sporting-goods retailer of that era. Some, like Sears, stopped selling hunting and fishing gear altogether (every time I walk into a Sears today I want to cry) while others, like TG&Y (damn how I loved that place) and OTASCO slowly closed stores until they disappeared. I can't remember exactly when the central Oklahoma stores closed. I do remember buying shotgun shells at the Noble, Oklahoma OTASCO up until sometime around the mid to late eighties, but by the end of the decade OTASCO was done for.

I hadn't thought about OTASCO in years, but yesterday I was perusing the Fishing For History blog and what did I see as this week's installment of the blog's excellent series "52 Trade Houses in 52 Weeks" but a very interesting history of the Oklahoma Tire and Supply Co., which is, of course, OTASCO.

Cool stuff, and an interesting read if you grew up anywhere near one of OTASCO's 455 stores scattered across 12 states. After reading it I immediately went and rummaged through some of my old junk. A cursory search didn't reveal any OTASCO-branded tackle (though I think I do have some lying around somewhere) or hunting gear (although I'm pretty sure I've got a few old shotgun shell boxes with OTASCO price stickers on them, again, somewhere...) but I did manage to come up with this:

Back in the day (early to mid-eighties, maybe?) that was the largest (1500 count) box of Daisy BBs you could buy (at least that I'm aware) and I went through a ton of them. I almost certainly purchased this box (and another I still have) from the Norman OTASCO when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. I have no idea why I still have it, but I sure wish I still had the old-school, wood-stocked Crosman 760 through which I shot all my BBs back then. Which was bought at...OTASCO.

Ahhh, good times...

Mallard's Infinite Playlist: Song of September...

I am - for the most part - a proud ignoramus when it comes to sports. I never played sports (my youth was given over wholly to fishing, hunting, drinking beer and skipping school to repeat items 1,2 and 3), and I never grew up around anyone who did, so it's not that I've lost interest in sports, it's that I never cared to begin with. I couldn't tell you who won the Super Bowl last year (the Dodgers, right?) or the World Series, or that Stanley Bowl thing. I have no clue what an ERA is and I don't know my AL West from my NL East.

I've heard that my home state now has a professional basketball team, the Thunderclap something or other, but since watching basketball interests me about as much as watching platypuses screw, I know nothing of the team, other than most of us here in Oklahoma pay much more attention to our millionaire ballplayers than we do our low thousandaire public-school teachers (current ranking: 49th! Break out the Andre! OK, OK, I'll stop being a political bore...)

But there is one glaring exception to my disinterest. See, I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. And when you grow up in Norman, Oklahoma, you are beaten daily as a child until you develop an interest in Sooner football (honest, it's in the city charter). So gradually, even if you're not naturally inclined to do so, your interest in college football grows, along with the scar tissue on your backside, until one day you wake up and realize that you are one of them, a...fan.

Sounds brutal, I know, but at least in Oklahoma it's confined to Norman. I hear that in Nebraska - a state much like Oklahoma in its lack of excitement but with only one state university football program to distract its people from ingesting meth and/or watching crops grow - the required beating is a statewide mandate. That would certainly explain a lot... (I kid, I kid my Nebraska homies).

I mean, let's face it: it's Oklahoma we're talking about. It's not like we have a helluva lot we can point to in this state and say "see, look how good we are at this!" So for the past half-century or so we have placed our collective pride and our sense of shared self-worth in the on-field accomplishments of the University of Oklahoma football team (sorry Aggie fans, but it's true...).

And as much as I hate to admit it, as much as the snobbish too-good-for-sports, shun-the-herd iconoclast in me fervently wants it to be otherwise, when I hear this song I completely understand how emotionally invested someone can get in a hometown sports team.

                        


When I was a student at OU I used to live in a crummy little apartment on the south edge of campus, an area that during WWII had been part of a military base. It's mostly developed now, but back in the mid-90s it was an overgrown, largely forgotten jumble of crumbling old buildings and encroaching wildness.

On Saturday mornings during dove season (and later deer bow)I would throw my shotgun in a dufflebag, hop on the bike, cross the highway south of campus and go hunt the south Canadian riverbottom. But even then, miles away from the stadium, I could still hear the roar of the crowd and the band playing the fight song, and I'd hum along to it, heart swelling with Sooner Pride.

"OK," you ask, "if you're such a fan, what the hell were you doing dove hunting when you should have been there watching the game, supporting your school, your team and watching stalking admiring your future wife?" (who as a member of the Pride of Oklahoma's flag corps spent every fall Saturday marching on Owen Field to that very song)

To which I can only reply, it was dove season, man, and during hunting season being a fan has its limits...

And just to give you an example of that, the Sooners are a consensus pre-season #1 and we're the odds-on favorite to win the national championship, but one of the toughest and most important games of the year is September 17th at sixth-ranked Florida State. Every Sooner fan has had that date circled all year.

Where will I be? Hunting prairie chickens in Kansas. Like I said, being a fan has its limits. But you can bet your ass I'll have a radio...

When Good Arachnids Go Bad...

Damn, the economy must really be in the dumper when you've got superheros knocking over convenience stores...

From this story in the Oklahoman

Police are looking for a man who wore a Spider-Man mask and another masked robber who pointed a gun at a clerk's head during a convenience store robbery. About 8:40 p.m. Aug. 5, police were sent to Fred's Food Mart at 3123 N. Portland Ave., police Master Sgt. Gary Knight said. The store surveillance camera captured video of the robbery. The man who aimed the gun at the clerk was wearing the Spider-Man mask. The other robber can be seen wearing a blue mask in the video.

Maybe he lost a ton of money on the Broadway musical debacle? Or maybe crime-fighting just doesn't pay any more, but I figured if Spider-Man really wanted to steal from the public he'd be smart enough to run for public office instead of this penny-ante stuff. But whaddya expect from a superhero who can't fly and can be killed with a can of Raid? You damn sure wouldn't see Superman robbing the Quickie-Mart...

In other news, apologies for the (continued) lack of activity on the blog, but damn, can you blame me? Who the hell can be motivated to find anything to say in the dead of summer? I sure can't. Can't train dogs. Can't fish. Can't find anything worth saying.

But September is two weeks away. And with apologies to Havilah Babcock, my health (mental and otherwise) starts getting better in September.

Until then, watch out for six-foot spiders...

Hot Enough For 'Ya?

Yesterday my shaded back porch thermometer hit 109, and if anything, it reads a degree or two cool. We're now in something like our fiftieth (a little less, a little more depending on location) day of 100-degree or higher temps for the year. This July has just been officially declared the hottest month ever recorded in the oven formerly known as Oklahoma (quite the accomplishment for a state not known for the gentleness of its climate...) Today, Oklahoma City will likely break its all-time record high temperature. No rain, and no rain in the extended forecast, either.

Meanwhile, far southwest Oklahoma and a huge chunk of Texas is in even worse shape. Think moonscape, throw in the surface temperature of Mercury for good measure and you get a decent idea of what those folks are dealing with. The latest newsletter from the Rolling Plains Quail Research Ranch  reads like, well, an obituary for the coming quail season. And we're just now (just now!) entering what is traditionally the hottest three-week period of the year. Yay.

I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I'm going to have to drive for my bird hunting this year. And I'm beginning to suspect that - despite the fact I now have a boat to duck hunt out of - I will have no water on which to float the damn thing because the area lakes will be too low to launch boats.

And dog training? Fuggetabout it. Don't want to take the chance running the dogs in this heat, and every bit of water around me is either gone or coated with a nasty green sheen of algae, dead fish and beer cans.


A few days ago, in an e-mail to Steve Bodio I jokingly wrote "forecast high tomorrow of 107 and 110 on Tuesday. I used to think it was just bird season that was looking grim. I may have to upgrade that pessimism forecast to include existence itself...

Hyperbole or a wee bit of whistling past the graveyard? I guess we'll see in the next decade or so, but I've got one eye (and a head full of daydreams) trained in the direction of Montana. And I'm not the only one...

You just have to ask yourself what's worse: winter in Montana or summer in Oklahoma? Decisions, decisions...