Retrospective

"Brilliance has its limitations, but stupidity has none."
                       Wally Hilliard

Retrospective

Longest fishing trip I eve made. Never spent 3 months living in a car before. Here is a pic of the route I took:

I am glad I did it. Wanted to break out of the routine of going into the same cubicle and doing the same thing every day. It was an adventure. Prompted partly by seeing people I knew and respected, who were about my age or younger, getting strokes or worse. Their lives limited now, or even ended, before they had the opportunity to make their own voyage of discovery. Glad that I made this trip now, cuz I might not ever be able to do this after I have my stroke, which could come at any moment.

In part the basstravaganza was dedicated to fishing, but in a larger sense it was dedicated to exploring the continent I have lived on for so long, but know so little about. Exploring the fishing was an excuse to explore the landscapes, and the people who inhabit them, and the cultures that have grown up within them. I purposely had no schedule, no place I had to go to next, no chance of being late to a commitment. For much of the trip I let the sun be my guide, heading in a general direction, wherever a little road might lead me. I made sure that I had lots of time to ponder the universe, and I took advantage of it. Could have caught a lot more fish if I had done less pondering.

In addition to fishing, I had a lot of time to think. About the events that had occurred in the past in the places I visited. I think they call this History, or if it is older than people, Geology. In many places the landcape today speaks of ancient glaciers, earthquakes, lava flows. In some places it shouts, and you cannot miss seeing the remnants of cataclisms that occurred thousands or millions of years ago. I have tried to capture some of this in pictures, and post it to this blog. It still defines our lives today. This is why there are low, rolling hills across Wisconsin, and why the Snake R follows the course it does across S Idaho, and why there is little but emtpy sagebrush across Nevada.

I wanted to step out of the competition - for money, jobs, status – for a little while, and simply observe the planet I live on. I was trying to figure out the culture that surrounds me, in much the same way that I was trying to figure out the lakes and rivers I visited. Cannot have much success catching fish unless you understand the waters they live in. The people I ran into on the way were common, ordinary. Not wealthy or powerful. Minnows in the human school, like myself. Individuals trying to survive in the midst of forces too powerful to challenge, or even understand.

Survival as a human being in a shifting universe is like calculus. Inserting the correct integral value into the equation to determine rate of change over time. The rate is slow for geology, but often very fast for human affairs. Plug in the right values into the right equation and you can become very wealthy and very powerful very fast. Like Cortes, who conquered and trashed a civilization greater than his own with a tiny and desperate band of looters and psychopaths. Get it wrong and you join the preterite, crushed under the wheel of fate. Humans are competing for space on this planet, just like zebra mussels and kudzu vines. But humans evolve in partnership with technology, which is not regulated by Darwinian constraints, not limited by DNA, does not have to wait for another generation to mature, select mates, and produce offspring. The rate of change is speeding up, exponentially, by orders of magnitude, as geologic and biologic factors are overtaken by technologic advances. Seems like only yesterday I knew how to operate a telephone. No phones are more complicated and sophisticated than computers that took up entire buildings in my youth.

There is a dichotomy, a kind of collective shizophrenia, that pervades all human culture. It is a world in which the masses are indoctrinated and expected to believe in the ridiculous. Just as true now as it was 500 or 1,000 years ago. This is a requirement in order to maintain a society in which material wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few - the King of Spain and his court (as in 1520), or in a world like today where 300 zillionares own more than half of the rest of the global population. Under the reign of the Castille regime it was offocial doctrine that witches caused all the trouble, and had to be burned at the stake. Under the Bush/Obama regime the masses are required to believe that the World Trade Center buildings were brought down by a lone gunman shooting from the 6^th floor of a building in Texas in 1963. Always, the cultural mythology serves to justify pillage and slaughter of weak and innocent people around the globe, in the name of the empire, for the benefit of a few and the control of the many.

The rules of the road in the western hemisphere are descended from the Roman and early Christian eras in Europe. Christ was a revolutionary. His basic message was one of anti-imperialism. That the citizens of the empire – Rome in those days – owed no fealty to their rulers. Should not and did not have to follow its laws, or pay tribute. Instead should work for their own benefit, and live by their own set of rules, crafted for their own needs and not for their rulers, which he condensed into 10 simple and basic guidelines. Like revolutionaries thruout the ages he was mostly ignored as a rabble rouser, much like the Women in Black who stood on the street corners across the US for so long and silently protested the atrocities of Bush’s Iraq invasion. An annoying irritation, but not a threat to the regime. But when Christ walked into the temple of the moneylenders and threw their coins to the ground he could be tolerated no more. So they nailed him to the cross.

The Son of God was dead, but not his message. When the power of his followers became a serious hassle to the empire the Romans turned Christianity upside down. Adopted it as the state religion of the empire. Perverted its original teachings to codify one set of rules for the poor and the many, while justifying any manner of greed, sleaze, and slaughter for the few and the rich. This led to the debauchery of religion - the Medicis, the Borgias, and the Inquisition, and the general merger of the church with organized crime, extortion, murder, torture, and any imaginable form of perversion - which led to the fragmentation of the church into the competing Protestant and Islamic variants, all claiming to be the True Faith, and all competing to slaughter each other for the benefit of the few who controlled and directed the action.

The basstravaganza rejoices in history. For me it was an opportunity to escape the hum drum routine of work/eat/sleep and visit in person the places where glaciers scoured the land, or native people were anhililated by self-righteous psychopaths. Webster Tarpley points out that oligarchy depends on a rejection of history, and reality itself. “Here is history reduced to a fairy tale, with the cocaine-abusing, alcoholic, mentally-impaired Bush as the hero of the good, and the rich, misfit, raving ideologue Bin Laden as the champion of evil....Evil is always external, never home grown, as it was for the racist southern sheriff who thought that all racial tensions were the work of outside agitators.” (or itinerant bass fishermen parked under bridges?)

Change in the geological world requires sea floor basalts creeping across the globe into unimaginably slow collisions with continental granite landmasses. Makes glaciers look like jackrabbits. Evolution in the biological world requires DNA, which requires partners to select mates and produce offspring. Orders of magnitude faster than plate tectonics. But the human speicies has hitched its pony to technology, which is not limited by DNA. Change is speeding up, often faster than the human mind can comprehend. We are left behind, as the digital world races ahead. The planet is becoming a gigantic video game. The terror that the ordinary citizens felt in the face of the Inquisition, or that the native tribes in Florida felt when they watched the conquistadors slice off their chief's nose and force it down his throat, are replaced by make believe, made-for-TV, “reality show” horrors, like the kind documented so eloquently in Tarpley's book “Synthetic Terror”. Religion, which once focused on how people could deal with the incomprehensible, is replaced by pathetic billionaire mega-church preachers bilking money from the poor and ignorant, while promoting slaughter and exploitation of the weak.

Today's neo-con-artist Anglo-American oligarchy are disciples of the neo-nazi Leo Strauss from University of Chicago, who was himself a disciple of the nihilist and psychopath Nietzsche. As Tarpley describes better than I can, “modern irrationalists who camouflage themselves as Christians have left traditional Christianity behind, and have reduced the content of their religion to the cynical support of such figures as Bush and Ariel Sharon, both regarded, and perhaps accurately, as harbingers of the apocalypse.”

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that they possess a more potent military arsenal than all the rest of the world combined, the citizens of the US are a reduced to cowardly people at heart. Peed their pants every time their chickenhawk heros said the words “Sept 11”. Lack the courage to believe their own eyes and ears. The synthetic, make believe, Fox News terror that they cower from is the shadow of the real terror – the bombings, assassinations, torture - that their rulers inflict daily on the rest of the world. Not so long ago it was Franklin Rooseveldt who said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But soon it was Bush who insisted that “The only thing we have to sustain us is fear itself.”

The faith-based regime demanded by Bush (and now Obama - installed into power after Tarpley wrote his book), forces its subjects to reject obvious reality in favor of conformity to the dictates of those more wealthy and powerful than them. As British psychoanalyst Ron Britton has observed, ‘we can substitute concurrence for reality testing, and so shared phantasy can gain the same or even greater status than knowledge.’ True, but at what cost to other variables, such as peace of mind? “the fundamentalist belief structure of Bush and of so much of his base as representing a rejection of human history, personal history, and of natural history as well: 'Just as fundamentalist creationist teachings deny history, the fundamentalist notion of conversion or rebirth encourages the believer to see himself as disconnected from history. George W. Bush’s evasive, self-serving defense of his life before he was born again displays just this tendency….To the believer, the power of spiritual absolution not only erases the sins of the past, but divorces the current self from the historical sinner.' (Frank 59-60)” The “hatred of the lawful character of reality, which we see manifested in Bush – who loves to live outside the law as an individual, from his drunk driving arrests through his National Guard shenanigans to his illegal election – and in the neocons – who hate the very concept of international law: “Wilfred R. Bion points out that the part of the personality that hates internal law – the laws of reality, of time, of responsibility, of loss – hates external reality as well.”

“No thinking person can fail to have been impressed by the degree to which Bush, in his attempt to demonize Saddam Hussein, engaged in self-description. Saddam, Bush alleged, was an oppressor, a violator of international law, a leader in contempt of the international community, an aggressor – all accusations which applied just as well or better to Bush himself.”

It is not pretty to see an empire in decline. Only money left in the US piggy bank nowadays is dedicated to paying for military adventures and bailouts for Wall Street skanks. The neo-cons Great American Century did not even last as long as the Thousand Year Reich. Imploded now, disintegrated, pieces raining down upon its own footprint. The nation bankrupted, like the USSR was bankrupted by their own failed invasion of Afghanistan. Printing money as fast as the presses can roll in order to cover the unauthorized withdrawals of banksters, ranksters, thieves, parasites and psychopaths. Forced to survive on money loaned from China, so the population can go to Wal Mart and buy cheap crap made by their near-slave labor. The many good and honest people I met along the way are stumbling around with me in the dust, like the survivors of the World Trade Center collapse wandering around the streets of New York. What happened?

The USA has always been a land of opposites and ironies. Founded in large part by refugees from political and religious intolerance, who immediately embarked on a campaign of theft and genocide against the native people who followed their own religions. Evolved into democracy – of rich white males ruling over women, dipossessed native peoples and black slaves. The country that invented democracy now reducing it to a cruel and sleazy farce at home, and installing puppet shills by brute force all over the globe. Worshippers of “free enterprise” - as if there ever was any such thing – depending on corporate welfare and trillions of dollars in bailout payoffs to wall Street ponzi scheme con men, in order to maintain a desperate fraction of “profit” for a chosen few. The enormous military juggernaut that my father was part of, that helped smash the nazis, now morphed into the same criminal slime he was sent across the world to fight. Modern day conquistadors bombing and looting Mespotamia – the cradle of human civilization – in the same manner that Cortes trashed Tenochtitlan. A tool for the neo-cons “favorite enterprise of sending other people’s children into useless wars”. Perpetuated now by Barrack Gobombem, the obscene spectacle of the richest, most powerful country on the world has ever known attacking and slaughtering the poorest country on earth.

Now that the basstravaganza is over the question is, what to do next? The same question faced by any basically decent, honest person in the face of the madness and carnage that surrounds us. Loyalty to religions and nations has always been demanded by the rich and powerful. Hard to get a decent job in Seville or Havana in the 1500s if you didn't support the Inquisition, and did not make believe you enjoyed seeing witches burned at the stake. As it was in the time of Cortes, Narvaez and Coronado, the big bucks are to be found in the fields of looting and pillaging, and terrorizing the helpless. It was ever thus. Stand your ground and fight, like Crazy Horse, or take a job at the casino catering to the whims of the degenerate? The same question that must have faced most sane people in Spain during the Inquisition must still be faced by sane people in the post 9-11 world of today. When an insane and brutal oligarchy demands acceptance and obedience to an obviously phony construct claiming to be the True Faith, but really serving only to stuff venal wealth and power into the hands of a degenerate few. This loyalty generates a disconnect and dichotomy, a collective schizophrenia, that forces people to accept conjured phantasms as reality, lies as truth, self serving propaganda as unquestionable doctrine.

Easy to get discouraged nowadays, typing into this blog in McDonalds in Tennessee with the hysterical ranting of modern day witch hunt inquisitors blaring on the Fox TV. Seems like we have not advanced very far. A prince in Saudi Arabia, where slavery is still legal, recently cut off the lips of his maid with a pair of scissors. A trick Narvaez might have enjoyed. One sixth of US citizens are said to be unable to afford enough food to eat, but corporate profits are at a record high, and so are executive salaries and bonuses. Ancient species going extinct faster than the US can arrest terrorists and ship them off to concentration camps for torture. But it is boring to be depressed. And ignorant – the state of a person who ignores reality and history – to hide from the fact that the universe continues to evolve, and the consciousness and compassion along with it, no matter hypocrisy, greed, slaughter and fear mongering may occur along the way.

For all the frustrations of the basstravaganza, it was a heckuva good time.

Hilites of the trip for me were the 3 day float down the Wisconsin R, and going back in to my old secret creek in Indiana and catching a big SM, and having the big musky turn and stare me down while I was snorkeling in Sugar Creek.

The lowlite must have been my first nite in Wisconsin, when I had still not caught a fish or even yet wet a line, and it was too hot and sweaty to sleep, and too many mosquitos to allow me to stop moving, and my legs and arms were just beginning to bust out with poison ivy. When the itching got bad the next day I tried scraping the worst spot with the edge of my knife until it bled. This will stop the itching from a mosquito bite, but is is a bad plan for dealing with poison ivy. Even for the most dedicated fisherman there are times when you have to question if it is really worth the trouble. The volcanic crater of pus on my leg is mostly gone now. Eroded and healed with time into a kinder, gentler landscape.

I am really glad I took the month of July off and stayed in Ashland, drinking homemade frozen fruit juice slurpies day after day in the 100F heat, rebuilding the boat and trailer. I was beginning to break the Bullship in half just from the expedition to BC, and surely would have trashed it on the much longer and rougher trip across the US if I had not taken the time to do this. In the end the boat and trailer made it all around the US, and returned in just as good condition as when they left.

The Volvo was – as expected – a Volvo. You cannot expect a 21 year old car to haul a heavy boat and trailer all around the continent unless you invest a lot of time and effort into maintenance. I am a fanatic about maintenance. You cannot slip up on the maintenance or you are asking for trouble. Whenever the gas gauge gets down near empty you HAVE to fill it back up, or else these old cars will just stop running and die beside the road. So I was obsessive about filling the fuel tank whenever it ran low, and it is because of this obsession for maintaining proper fluid levels that I attribute the trip's success. Otherwise I didn't do much maintenance. I lifted the hood once – somewhere in Wisconsin I think – and checked the water and oil. They were OK. Had one flat tire, which was the only time I had to touch a wrench or tool of any kind. The alternator belts were getting very loose on Van Isle back in May. They needed to be tightened then, and even more so now. I am not a fan of faith based religion or politics. I prefer a life of faith based mechanics. If you own a Volvo and do not mess with it, and truly believe it will keep on running, it will. Total fuel cost was about $2,000 for the car, and maybe $50 for the boat.

The most surprising thing for me, in a positive way, was the people I met in Wisconsin. Everywhere I went on the entire trip people were pretty good to me. Never ran into any serious jerks anywhere except under the bridge in Georgia. But in Wisconsin everybody I ran into for any reason was helpful, informative, and fun to be around. Just as curious about me and what I was doing as I was about their world. The people are a reflection of their environment, which is an inspiring blend of cities and industry mixed with wild lands and waters. People there still respect their forests and streams as much as they do their freeways and mega malls. They have a good thing going there.

Most surprising in a negative way was the change that I encountered almost everywhere once I crossed S over the Ohio R into KY, TN, GA, and AL. A land of stupefying fundamentalist quasi-religion and obsessive flag waving-mock patriotism. Characterized by a lack of public lands, lack of public access, lack of wild, free flowing rivers, lack of rest stops or even pullouts along the hwy where you can stop to take a picture. The people who live there are used to this, but I am not. In the western US and Canada there are still immense tracts of landscape that are owned by no one in particular, but respected by all. In the southeast there is very little public land or public facililties, and when you find any it seems to be full of garbage. Very different world there. It was a mistake to force my way into this country. The lifestyle I had in mind for the basstravaganza - camping out on islands in rivers, or pulling off to the side of the road and sleeping in the boat on its trailer - is no problem in Oregon, or BC, or Wisconsin, but in the SE US this is simply impossible. Now I know.

I got a chance to witness firsthand the seemingly invincible armies of invasive species - kudzu, zebra mussels, asian carp, rusty crayfish – sucking the existing life out of the ecosystem in a desperate struggle against native species, similar to the neo-fascist Bush/Obama invasives swarming the global political ecosystem like kudzu crawling over a valley in Tennessee.

I caught some fish. Did not do really well fishing anywhere, but that is to be expected when you are fishing in a hit & run manner like I did. I was usually spending only a day or 2 , or maybe even an hour or 2, at each spot. As soon as I figured out how to catch fish in one place I would take off to explore another. Amazing that I was able to catch anything with this attitude. Would have caught many more fish if I had stayed at one good spot and pounded it. Heading off to fantasy fishing spots is always disappointing. I never catch as much as I dreamed I would when I explored these places on the internet during winters past. In fantasy fishing land the weather is always good, and the river level is always perfect, and the bite is always on. Not surprising, I have never been skunked in fantasy fishing land. Actually making the effort to go there and challenge the waters and the fish they hold is sometimes a different story.

Could have caught way more fish if I had rented a guide, but something in my soul objects to this. I don't mind spending lots for gas and fishing lures, but the objective of getting out on the water to see what the lake might yield is a personal one for me. I would rather catch less and be humiliated, and explore the ecosystem on my own terms, than pay someone to teach me how to catch lots. The target of the basstravaganza was not so much to catch fish as it was to explore a variety of watersheds, see how they related to the landscape, and how people related to them. I spent only a relatively small fraction of the time actually fishing, and a much larger fraction of the time getting out into places where I might want to fish.

I never ate a single fish all summer, not even in a restaurant. The fish I caught were all released alive, often after posing for a photograph on the Seat of Fame in the Bullship. I don't think I inflicted any permanent damage to any fish, other than to their pride. Must be embarrassing in front of your peers to be the stupid one that gets fooled by the old rubber worm trick. The exception was the one afternoon when I fished with live worms, and gut hooked an unfortunate sheephead. That fish ws bleeding bad, and I put it out of its misery. Insignificant in comparison to the hundreds of butterflies and wooly bear caterpillars, and thousands of other bugs, that I smushed with the car. I stopped using bait after that. Other than that fish, the total amount of blood spilled by all the fish was roughly equal to the amount of my own that I spilled during the process of catching them. And they did not even have to endure the misery of poison ivy.

I mainly used flashy, darting artificial lures, targetting attacks from aggressive, predators like bass, Esox and trout. There are much more efficient ways of catching fish, but it is an exciting and special event for me to see them charge out of the deep and chase my crazy lures. For some reason, knowing that these big predators are out there, and finding out where they lurk and how they live, means a lot to me. The places where they can be found are unique and special. And there is a definite correlation between these locations and places and people that I enjoy being around. I have great respect for the fact that I am descended, very recently, from a lifestyle of hunter/gatherers. It required a tremendous knowledge of the complexities of the ecosystem to survive in this manner. Too many people, and not enough stuff left to hunt and gather nowadays, to allow for this kind of behavior on a large scale any more. Fishing is a way of re-connecting with this past, even if I let the fish go when I happen to catch one.

The art of blogging is new to me. I am awful at it, but getting better, slightly. A very powerful new way to communicate. The public face of the current Bush/Obama regime in the us is fiercely nationalistic. Make a furious show of pissing on the United Nations, or the opinion of the rest of the world, or any concept of global government or resposibility. But in fact, world government already exists, in the form of the World Bank, IMF, Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Skull & Bones. And they are more governed by it than anyone. Just don't like to talk about it in public. The blogoshpere, and the internet in general, is an emerging, evolving, digital electric global consciousness. The awakening brain of Gaia, if you will. It is a pleasure to be a part of it.



10-15-2010

I have been feeling sad lately, thinking about all the injustice in the world. Like, why do I have to fish, when everybody else gets to go to work?


Oct 16                                                                                    

I get coffee and leave at first lite. A short hop down Hwy 72 and I am over the line into Alabam, a place I have never been.

Nice country here. Lots of open space.

The Watts Bar dam I crossed 2 days ago is the uppermost of the huge reservoirs on the mainstem of the Tennessee R. Next on down is the Chickamauga dam in Chattanooga. Next below this is Guntersville dam, which backs up another reservoir that is 100 miles long. Lake G is one of the most famous bass fisheries in the world. LM here, by the ton.

I turn off the freeway into the little town of. Stevensboro. Along the little road into town I see white powdery stuff all along the road. What is this - Agent Orange, dust from the nuke plants? No, it is something worse. The basstravaganza has been chasing the sun south ever since that horrid cold front came thru Eagle R Wisconsin in late August. Now, only minutes across the line into the sunny south, my enemy catches up with me for the first time. FROST!

You know you are in Alabam when you see that they park the bass boat in the garage, and leave the car parked out in the weather. Gotta have a sense of priorities!

Heading E I immediately come to Lake Guntersville. The big lake was named after an employee of the City of Ashland, OR, Street Department.

I am up near the top end of the big lake. Huge long bridge over the lake here.

Right next to the boat launch there is a bass boat fishing. I start chatting with the 2 guys in it. Huge bass tournament on the Big G this weekend. 150 of these boats were competing. 3 day tourney, today is the final day. Field is narrowed down to the top 12 only today. The guys in front of me say they are leading. They guy in front (the star) will win a new boat and truck, and his henchman in the back will win a new boat if they win the tournament.

Bass are a hardy fish. Unlike the delicate trout, they can be caught, released, and caught over and over again. These boats all have live wells inside with pumps that keep a supply of fresh lake water cycling thru. Each boat is allowed to keep the legal limit on board (usually 4 or 5 fish), alive in the live well. Smaller fish are culled if larger ones are caught. At the end of the day the boat goes in to the launch for the weigh in. Heaviest weight, usually over a 3 day period, wins the tournament.

I love fishing but I have no interest in competitive fishing. Zero interest in tournaments. Little curiosity in figuring out how to catch fish out of these giant reservoirs. The guys in the boat are punching heavy jigs thru the weed mat. Good way to catch big bass, but a terminally boring way to fish for me. They say the frog bite is off, not worth fishing. Tell me I will catch a few, but for some reason they are not biting much on frogs right now. Then they crack the throttle and go racing off to another spot.

Just cleared for takeoff here:

Now racing along at 70 mph, throwing a giant roostertail 20 ft into the air. Good luck guys! They may win close to $100,000 worth of boats and gear if they have another good day.

The bass tournament is a uniquely American phenomenon. In Germany it is illegal to let a fish go if you catch one. Must take it home and eat it. But since the advent of these huge reservoirs full of bass that were first created as part of the dam construction craze that helped lift the nation out of the great depression, tournaments are the focus of the “recreation” industry in the south. Bass tourneys are mostly a southern thing, now spread to every state except Hawaii and Alaska.

Kind of cross between NASCAR racing and fishing. The boats have giant racing outboard motors. Usually have 300 hp motors nowadays, much bigger than the engine in my Volvo. By comparison, I am running a 15 hp motor on the Bullship. The tourneys are shotgun start, so at the opening gun everybody races everybody else to the good spots. The boats are loaded with the most sophisticated gadgets. Bow mounted, footpedal controlled electric motors, hydraulic pushrods that stick down into the bottom to hold the boat in place in a wind or current, side scan sonar, GPS overlaid onto digital display screens with detailed charts. Enough technology on one of these rigs to overthrow a small 3^rd world country and install a right wing dictator. All dedicated to outsmarting the wily bass.

There is another boat launching, not part of the tournament. Small one, only 200 hp. But still the motor is still bigger than me.

All boats are painted with a flashy metalflake finish. This is why I never catch anything. If I painted the Bullship metalflake purple with racing stripes I would catch lots of fish.

Kudzu swarming onto the edge of this bridge. Will look really cool if it covers over the entire bridge from shore to shore.

I cross the bridge on Hwy 117. Want to go up the other side of the lake, where there is no freeway. From the E shore you drive right up the side of the valley wall. Soon you are at the top, looking down on the bridge you just crossed.

Kudzu swarming here.

Heading SW along hwy 71 now. Like the Twilite Zone. Like being back in the 1950s. Like going back to the time of the druids. Faith based society. Ancient superstitious rituals. Angry about the central government intruding into their lives. Want free enterprise, no taxes, no govt. But they neglect to remember that it is the central govt and taxes that built the TVA, gave them electricity, built the highways they so love to race on, the big lakes the so love to race bass boats on. Lifted them from being hillbillys to Wal Mart shoppers. Wasn't Jesus who gave them that.

Most people are not wealthy here. Drive rusty old cars, with fenders missing. Old cars parked in the front yard for parts. Live in places that I could relate to – rotting trailers and (by Ashland OR standards) tarpaper shacks. Very stark contrast along this hwy between the places where people live, which are small, old, and ratty, and the many palaces where they worship, which are huge and shiny new. I get to the small town of Section. There is a bluff here on the lot of a new empty megahouse, re-posessed and for sale. Spectacular view of the Big G. 

From the hill I can see the giant weed mats the the Big G is famous for - a long line of weeds runs along the edge of the main channel. Growing on top of an old levee perhaps? This is where the wily bass hides. You throw a frog on top of the weeds and hop it along until a bass comes charging up thru the slop to pounce on it.

The rock on top of the bluff is a weird conglomerate, old river sediments compressed into rock and then shoved high up above the river by tectonic forces.

Lots of backwater areas off the big lake. Mouths of old tributaries, now flooded.

From the edge you can see a couple bass boats racing to new spots, while one boat is parked, throwing a frog onto the weed mats.

I head across the big lake into Scottsboro and find a cheap motel. I seldom see east Indian people around the US except when I rent motel rooms.They seem to own and operate all the cheap motels, including this one. Time to watch the BB playoffs and catch up on the blog. Battle of the Titans tonite - Tim Lincecum vs Roy Halladay in game 1. Doc Halladay is the overwhelming favorite. Neither pithcher is totally sharp, but Tiny Tim hangs on to win 4-3.

Oct 17                                                                               

Spend all day in the motel room. Loading up a million pics onto the blog. Sunday morn. Watching TV. There are at least 12 preachers preaching simultaneously on different channels. I watch the faith healer who is laying hands on his followers, curing their ear problems and headaches. Should go out and check out the big lake, but I cannot get interested in fishing this giant artificial reservoir. Watching TV is more interesting than fishing there, for me.

Oct 18                                                                                    

Blog till checkout time. Leave Scottsboro at noon. Like so many mid size cities now, the downtown core is a shell. Empty buildings, closed down businesses. No problem finding a place to park if you have a Bullship in tow. Just head downtown. The lifeblood of the old downtown was sucked out to the Wal Marts and Home Depots along the highway just out of town. Lower taxes there. Cheaper land. Parking space. Cannot even find a restaurant where I can get a coffee. Everybody goes to the strip malls for the burger stands, pizza huts and taco joints, so the restaurants go belly up and disappear.

I head down Hwy 79, following the W side of the Big G. Cloudy today, flat calm. Monday afternoon, and bass boats everywhere, throwing frogs up onto the grass mats.

I ask one boat how they are doing. They say they were blanked all day until they just got hit right here - moments before I got there. A nice fish boils along the hwy, but they get no more bites.

I have changed my mind about fishing the Big G. It is just too big. Could fish a frog along the shore all day every day for a year and not get around the entire lake. I will leave this one to the bass boats and their 300 hp engines. I am off to find the Flint River.

Kudzu here.

The Flint R starts in Atlanta, GA, and heads S to the Gulf of Mexico. Internet said this morning that there are 3 sections to this river. The upper section runs over limestone, then it goes over a fault into a slow and winding section. Finally goes back over sedimentary rock again as it nears the gulf. The internet has never been known to be wrong, so I will head for the rocky sections. Looking for shoals. Where else would you look for shoal bass?

I cross the Big G one more time at the town of G, then head SE to Aubreyville. Giant 10 mile long strip mall here. Turn NE onto Hwy 75, then SE on Hwy 68 up over Lookout Mtn. Starting down now, I have crossed another great divide. Looking down into the Coosa River valley now. Left the Mississppi at the top of the hill. I was riding the crest of the Mississippi divide on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Now I have crossed it. The Bullship has now traveled from the Rogue River thru the Columbia and Fraser watersheds, back to the Rogue, across the Columbia again, across a corner of the Colorado to the Mississippi. Then into the St Lawrence and now back thru the Mississippi to a watershed that drains out thru Alabama.

Most of the rivers in the Appalachians runs NE>SW, following the valleys in the mountains. The Tennessee R collects the flow of many of these mountain rivers – the Powell, Clinch, S Holston, Watauga, Nolichucky, French Broad, and then suddenly takes a right turn at Guntersville and heads NW and finally N back into the Ohio R. The Coosa parallels the Tennessee but does not make this turn. Instead it continues SW into the Alabama R and on into the Gulf of Mexico.

Flashy new butterfly here, the gulf fritillary.

Chunk bitten out of its wing by a bird.

This is a southern butterfly, common from S America all thru Central America and Alabam. Only very rarely would one of these make it up to the Chicago area when I was a kid. Big event to see one.

Kudzu here. This entire part of the continent will be a giant topiary garden in a few years.

I cross the Coosa at the town of Centre. It is a big lake here, impounded like most streams around here.

The river below the dam is very turbid, may be an algae bloom happening?

Looks like this dam dumps right into another lake. Coosa R is all dams downstream from here. This is the chain of reservoirs where they like to hold the Bassmaster Classic - the Super Bowl of competetive bass fishing. Lay Lk, Logan Martin Lk, Mitchell Lk. Everything is dammed here in N AL. They don't know what rivers are any more here. Treat their rivers like niggers here. Get to work you lazy bastard! Damned if they do, and dammed if they don't.

Then off SE on little roads. The litterbugs are bad all over the south, but this is ridiculous. Looks like people are opening boxes of cotton puffs and throwing them around everywhere. But wait, this is not litter. It really is cotton puffs. Real ones! I have come upon my first cotton field, ripe and bursting, and ready to harvest.

Most fields are already picked. Some plants are still in flower as well as full of cotton puffs.

Stopped at this gas station, could not get any service. Turns out they were closed. Went out of business during the recession. The one in 1929.

I see an old cemetery back off the road. Love these quiet little places. This one is very old.

One of the stones is from 1804.

Some are graves of Civil War veterans.

Some are simply angular slabs of stone, probably never had any inscription on them.

In one corner are some ancient limestone slabs over graves. Stonehenge, AL.

Grave robbers seem to have molested some of the slab burials.

Behind the cemetery are a bunch of gulf fritillarys.

No camouflage on the underside of these wings. Spectacular silver metalflake - magnesium white on brown and orange. If I ever get a bass boat I will paint it up like a gulf fritillary.

Take Hwy 71 accidentally to Hokes Bluff - meant to take Hwy 9. Must turn back on Hwy 278, but there are no signs. I stop and ask a guy in a gas station for directions. When I head out of the gas station lot I miss seeing the speed limit sign. One of the great miracles of the basstravaganza is that I have been able to drive all across the country, thru cities, towns and country, without a single traffic violation. I think I am out of this town, doing 55 mph, when I see I am still surrounded by houses. Step on the brakes right away, but it is too late. Car behind me - the local sheriff in his 4x4. Pulls right up about 10 ft off my rear bumper. Busted by the local sheriff in Alabam. Just the kind of catastrophe I had nightmares about before leaving Ashland. I do what I always do when I am helpless in the face of impending horror – start repeating my mantra. Mba kayere, mba kayere, mba kayere. This was the mantra the Hereros used in Gravity's Rainbow, when they were pursued by nazis during the meltdown of WWII. Means "I am passed over." in Herero. Pynchon's Hereros were fictional characters, I am not. At least I don't think so. So I don't mind stealing their mantra. Mba kayere, mba kayere. The real Hereros were exterminated, chased into the Namib desert by von Trotha, and forced to remain there until they died by the tens of thousands, of hunger and thirst. No mantra will protect you against this. Cop stays on my tail for 5 miles. Mba kayere, mba kayere.... Cop passes me and heads off down the highway.

I head on past Jacksonville, where they have a big university, and on into Anniston. Spend an hour in McDonalds posting to the blog. They have TVs in McDonalds now. Play almost exclusivley phony news shows.  Everybody's talkin bout Obama's HSA (Hidden Socialist Agenda). AL playoff game going on right now. They have 2 TVs but no BB game - both are spewing out Sean Hannity gibberish rant.

Sleep in the Wal Mart lot there.

Oct 19                                                                                                  

Get up late, sun already coming up. I bought 2 Mitchell 308 reels early this summer. Both have crapped out already. They need to be lubed. I tried to take one apart and oil it while I was parked at a bridge. Dropped a tiny a screw into the dirt, so now that reel is lost. And now the other reel needs lube. I go in and check at Wal Mart, buy a really cheap tiny Mitchell reel. $20. The joys of Chinese slave labor. Wal Mart originally promoted itself as a store that sold American products. Not any more.

There is an elephant here. I check to see if I can pull a tusk out but I can't. I am in the wrong town. Like Groucho said, I need to go to Tuscaloosa.

Head S on Hwy 431 across the Tallapoosa R. Slow and muddy, but good rock formations downstream.

No visible current. Is this a river or part of a lake? There is a little road down under the bridge, so I drive down. Looks like this access was built by Alabama Power Corp. Often the companies that own the dams own the land along the rivers too. No boat launch here, just steps down to the water. A couple local guys come down to launch their johnboat. They say there is no dam for miles downstream, til you get to a big lake (R. L. Harris Res). No flow cuz they are not letting any water out of the dam upstream. Good bass and really good catfish in there, they say.

Under the bridge is a wasteland. Often seems that in regions that idolize the concept of private property there are fewer public lands and free access places. And the few there are get abused harder. Most offensive to me is using these places to dump industrial trash. The river access here is full of piles of broken glass, window screen and who knows what.

Some indication about the intelligence of the people who do this may be gained by observing their grafitti. So clueless they can't even draw their own fuhrer's symbol correctly.

I spend a lot of time here loading up the new reel with 6 lb test line, and reloading the malfunctioning one with 6 lb also. Wading these streams requires long casts that do not spook the fish. Cannot use the 8, 10 & 12 lb line I usually use when fishing out of the Bullship. Need to throw very light lures a long way. Now I am ready for the Flint. R – except that I wish I had my neoprene waders.

Dead owl on the road here.

Want to cross the Chattahoochie R, which forms the border between AL and GA, upstream from the big West Point Res, so I head E on Hwy 82. Cross over the Little Tallapoosa R. There is a USGS guy under the bridge. They have an automated stream flow gauge here, and he is calibrating it, as they need to do periodically. Says they are in a state of severe drought here. Has not really rained since April. Flow here is about 12 cfs, not as bad as in 2007 when it was less than half that much. The river is rocky and a bit silty. Not near as silty as the big Tallapoosa. Looks like good bass water here. The USGS guy says it is probably spotted bass that live in here.

Take a wrong turn and end up heading down Hwy 87. It parallels the GA border but there are no roads E across it so I end up on Hwy 22 in Rock Mills. There is an old factory here that still makes yarn. They don't use the falls for power any more tho.

Hwy 22 turns into Hwy 34 as I cross over into GA. Only an hour away from Atlanta, but this is very rural country with lots of forested land. The forest turns from 90 percent hardwood to 90 percent pine in GA. Some industrial logging here.

I cross the Hillabahatchee R, a hillbilly name for a stream if there ever was one.

There is a turtle on a log, jumps in just before I click the shutter. You can see the rings.

Then the turtle comes back up to check me out.

I try to take a real artsy pic of the river. What do you think?

It is hot out - near 90F. There is a lizard basking in the sun.

This log is about 8 ft in diameter and the lizard was about 20 ft long. Chased me all the way back to the car.

Butterflies here - southern types I have never seen before. Some kind of tiny sulfur.

Some kind of ringlet?



And some kind of tiny blue butterfly, all beat up.

I cross the Chattahoochie at the town of Franklin. Big slow muddy river here.

Head SE on Hwy 100 above West Point Res. There is another New R that feeds into this lake. But nowhere to pull off the road and too much traffic to turn around, so I don't get to look at it. Been driving all day, past thousands of houses, and I realize I have not been past a single grocery store. Everybody gets their grub at Wal Mart here. I head up Hwy 29 to Newnan. Need to find an internet connection where I can Google Earth the Flint R. Do they even know what the internet is here? I find a pizza/beer place, and they say they have WIFI. I make the classic rookie mistake. Order a Rogue Dead Guy ale and 2 slices of pizza – before checking their WIFI connection. I does not work. 5 bars, but it won't connect. Common problem in the blogosphere. Wasted $10, except I get them to turn the TV onto the Giants playoff game. Matt Cain starting for the Gigantics. Just watched him shut out the Cubs at Wrigley a few weeks ago. I watch the first 2 innings, and Cain is stifling the Phillies vaunted sluggers. I am the only customer in the whole place wearing a Pacific NW GIS Conference T shirt. Who would have guessed?

Must find a place to get a GA fishing license, so I repeat the horrid strip mall dance - towing the Bullship around these busy commercial zones is not the most enjoyable part of the basstravaganza. In the process I find a Starbucks. Yikes - a Starbucks in GA? Maybe this is not the end of the world after all. This is where I make this post to the blog. Now off to the Flint R to find the elusive shoal bass, native only to the Flint/Chattahoochie watershed.

I drive S out of Newnan in the dark, looking for the boat launch I saw in Google Earth. I will sleep there - if it is really like what I saw in GE, and if there are no signs saying I can't. Down Hwy 27 to Greeneville, then Hwy 18 to Woodbury. Boat launch is right there where it is supposed to be. Would have been so much easier for Lewis & Cole if they had used Google Earth. But there were no Starbucks west of the Mississippi in those days, and the McDonlads had lousy WIFI. Big parking lot here. I check out the river with a flashlite. Very cloudy water, much siltier than the pics of the Flint R that I saw on the internet. Radio says Matt Cain shut out the powerful Phillies just as easily as he shut out the Cubs at Wrigley.

Oct 20                                                                                

When you look for sites to dam your rivers you pick the places with the fastest water and the steepest gradient. The places that remain undammed are usually the slowest, laziest parts of the river. You lose the fastest water, where the shoals are. You lose that habitat of the shoal bass.

In most of their native range the bass split into 2 species, the LM and the SM. LMs prefer warmer water with little or no current. Happy to live over mud bottom. SM prefer cooler water. Will live in lakes but also in streams with lots of current, which the LMs will usually avoid. Don't like mud bottom lakes or rivers, prefer rock and boulders. Around the SE end of the Appalachians the bass radiated into numerous varieties. LM, SM, redeye, shoal, spotted, Suwannee, Guadalupe. Taxonomists nightmare. During last year's American Fisheries Society national convention vicious fights broke out among the bass experts. Species or subspecies? Ended with many black eyes, and 3 ichthyologists left with broken arms. Why all this differentiation here? Perhaps cuz this region was never glaciated. In the northern regions of their habitat the slate was wiped clean by the glaciers, and only the LM and SM were ever able to recolonize?

At the first grey of hope I want to start fishing. The big Wal Mart semis are rolling by overhead on the high bridge. This is their hour. While the rest of the world sleeps, the bass fishermen and Wal Mart truckers are on the prowl. I have no GA fishing license yet, but I will cheat this morning and throw a zara spook around the pool in the dawn's early lite when there are no fish wardens around. This will help me decide whether to purchase a 3 day license ($25) or a full year license ($45). But an hour before dawn it starts to drizzle, then stops. Then starts raining hard an hour later, the instant I step out of the car to get my rod. I wait a half hour – more steady rain. They need it in this land of drought. The basstravaganza tour is like a rain dance. I should drive the Bullship around Ethiopia.

I finally go out and tie on a spook, walk down under the bridge, make a few casts. I jerk the spook in crazy lurches. Need to make lots of noise to get the fish to notice when the surface is already spattered by raindrops. Attention Wal Mart Shoppers! No bites.

(pic missing)

Serious erosion problem here. Lots of people use this area in summer. Very sandy soil, and no effort made to channel the runoff from the big bridge above into safe areas. The runoff is cutting channels into the soft substrate.

(pic missing) 

The 4x4 crowd love to frolic in these channels. Like rutting bison. This makes the erosion worse, and it all runs right into the river.

(pic missing) 

I drive in to Thomaston. Rain stops after an hour. I find a restaurant - sort of - on the downtown square. Weird place. 2 benches out on the sidewalk, with older guys hanging out there, both black and white. Inside is a small greasy spoon in the front half of the building, and a bunch of pool tables in back. The place is already hopping. Bunch of old guys shooting pool at 8:30 AM. I  have really bad sausage, eggs & pancakes, plus really bad coffee with plastic creamer. I think I may be the only person in here who attended the Pacific NW GIS Conference. Or attended school past grade 6. Don't bother to ask if they have a WIFI connection. Get gas and head back out to look at the river.

At the gas station a couple young guys are in trouble – dead battery. Ask if I have jumper cables. Yes. But now I am faced with one of the drawbacks of owning a Volvo. It has been so long since I looked under the hood that I can't remember what side the battery is on. We get it straightened out.  While I am giving them a jump one guy looks at my license plates. Did you come all the way from Oregon? Yup. He is stunned. Turns out he is an avid shoal bass fisherman. Says the place I camped last nite is too deep and slow - need to find the shoals. Go to the Hwy 36 bridge, and the canoe rental guy there will give you a ride up to Sprewell Bluff. Then you can float back to Hwy 36. I ask if I can make this float in the Bullship, and he says no problem. He does it in his johnboat. When I leave the gas station they have left a $5 bill on my seat.

Can't find Hwy 36 and end up back on Hwy 74. Big roadblock here. 4 cop cars are stopping everybody, checking drivers licenses, asking what you are doing round here so far from Oregon? Lookin for shoal bass. At times like these it help to be a bass fisherman, and have a boat in tow.

Turns out I accidentally did the right thing. Sprewell Bluff is off Hwy 74, not 36. I head down the road to find it. It is a state park. Along the road is a picnic table beside the road. Common in Wisconsin but rare around here.

From the picnic table is a stunning view of the Flint R. You can see why they say this is the prettiest stream in this state.

You can see why there are shoal bass here. This river is not lacking in shoals. There are rock ridges everywhere. The river is like a cheese grater. No way the Bullship is going over all that shallow rock.

Right after this overlook you enter the park. Lots of shoals here, slanted ledges of calcified sediments, the ancient cemetery of zillions of corals and diatoms, now happy home for the shoal bass.

Big maple in the floodplain, barely hanging on. One more big flood and it will become driftwood.

The Flint R is one of the longest un-dammed rivers left in the E US. Ironic for a river that begins its life as the stormwater runoff from the Atlanta International Airport. The sign in the park says there was supposed to be a big dam and lake built right here in 1970. But the governor at the time, some wingnut with a hidden socialist agenda, stopped it. Otherwise there would be jet skis and rocketship bass boats ripping it up here now. Some guy named Jimmy Carter.

This area used to be mostly longleaf pine. The native forest is all logged off now.

This river looks exciting to fish, but impossible to run in the Bullship. Impossible even to float downstream. Hundreds of jagged bedrock ledges would slash my boat to pieces. Maybe I can wade it, or rent a canoe?

I drive out to Hwy 36 and head down to the bridge. There is a huge canoe rental / campground / store complex at the bridge. I tell the lady I want to catch shoal bass, can I rent a canoe? Nope. River is too low, not renting canoes any more. I could make it down this river in a canoe without damaging it. No way to make it down in the Bullship without damage. But if I was renting canoes there is no way I would rent one to a stranger from the other side of the continent. I sympathize with her decision, even if it is not a good one for me.

Squashed in the road is a critter that I have not seen before. Don't recall ever seeing one of these in OR. It is an armadillo. They have a suit of armor, like a cross between an anteater and a conquistador. Protects them from coyotes and bobcats I guess. Unfortunately for the armadillos, when their species radiated out from the more furry mammals they never thought about evolving a suit of armor that would protect them from an encounter with a truck tire. Would have been better to have Intelligent Design at this point in the evolutionary tree. As Richard Brautigan said in Trout Fishing in America about a road killed cat: “The traffic had not appreciably helped the thickness of the cat”. Ditto for this armadillo. And I thought I was having a rough day...

(pic missing)

I still need a license. Heading back towards Thomaston I see a road sign pointing to the Joe Kurz Wildlife Management Area Public Fishing, so I head down that way. Public fishing, what a novel idea. Must turn down a long gravel road. I ask a guy in another truck, who says it is 8 miles to the river. OK. Now I am in the WMA. Deer season here. Hunters everywhere. Big public campgrounds in here, lots of them. All full of 4x4s and campers. Lots of trucks parked along the road. Many more at the campsites during the day. Must be at least 50 people camped in here hunting bambis. Some trucks are carrying ladders, to access deer blinds up in trees. Suddenly I come to a pretty little lake, about 2 miles long, reservoir full of stumps and blowdowns. Looks like the kind of place I like to fish. Public fishing - but you need a special WMA fishing license to fish this lake, along with your regular GA fishing license. Nice picnic table beside the lake. 

(pic missing)

There is a weird bird calling from the top of the big pine tree above the car. I don't usually pay a lot of attention to birds, but this one sounds like something out of the Amazon. As soon as I stand under the tree with the camera it goes silent. I have taught myself never to leave stuff out on the car. Might space out and drive away. But I put the camera on the hood where I cannot miss seeing it if I start driving away. Have a can of chilli for lunch, write up some blog on the laptop, and drive away. The camera is so thin I did not notice it on the hood. I am back on the hwy before I realize what I did. Go racing back. It should have fallen off in the picnic parking lot, in which case I will probably find it still there. If it did not fall off until I was back out on the gravel road there is little chance. Hunters driving by there every couple of minutes. When I get to the picnic area there is no camera. Lost a $100 camera, plus a half days worth of great pics.

Bummed out now, I drive back to Thomaston. Need to find an Office Depot, where I bought the camera. None in Thomaston, need to drive 45 minutes back to Newnan. Traffic is horrid. Getting tired of hauling this rig around. I park under the bridge where I slept last nite. Thinking very seriously about calling this whole thing off. Not fun any more. Too stressful.   

Getting burned out. When I was in Wisconsin I was a free man in Paris. Fishing was fun in Wisconsin and Indiana. Fish anywhere, public lands everywhere, camping available in lots of places. It is a real struggle here. There is almost no public land, and when you find any it it is crowded. Can't find many places I want to fish, and when I find them I can't fish there. People everywhere. As soon as I get on the road I am instantly holding up traffic. Terrified to even drive at the speed limit cuz if I miss one speed limit sign I will get busted for speeding. I am tense all the time. I often pull into mall lots or gas stations just to get out of traffic and decompress for a few minutes. Driving around for days now, and have not even wet a line. Now I have wasted another day, plus a camera.

When I was at Wabash I took a full semester seminar in the works of Hemingway and Faulkner. Both great American authors. One of Faulkner's main themes was the concept of a huge weight that pressed upon the people in this part of the world. The result of a society based on 2 centuries of slavery. Freeing the slaves did not free them from responsibility for the choices they and their ancestors had made. Even if the slavery no longer exists there is still a remnant memory, like a deep pool in Creek X where a big tree used to be. Cannot escape it. Like an invisible ball and chain shackled to the souls of the people who live here now. Cannot see it, but you can feel it everywhere.

Everyone I have met in TN, AL and Ga has been civil, and most have been really nice. It is not the people I meet, it is the ones I do not meet that concern me. The people you do not meet at state parks or boat launches. Something dark and menacing that I feel. I am not comfortable here. Waiting for something bad to happen. Running scared. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be black here in 1825. I can't think straight, cuz I am scared of the world around me. In Wisconsin I was just a dingbat, but here I am a threat to the assumptions that are enforced by mass media and religion.

I must drive back up to Newnan to find an Office Depot, and show them my purchase slip. I paid an extra $35 for a full replacement policy. Will I get a replacement camera? Need to phone their 800 number, so I go to Starbucks and they let me use their cell phone. Office Depot will honor the replacement contract, but it will be tedious. I finally decide to buy another camera identical to the one I lost. Then I will get a replacement when I get back to OR, and have a backup. These are great cameras. Kodak. Simple to learn, simple to use, and work fine for my needs. After I buy the new camera I drive back to The Flint R bridge at Hwy 74.

Oct 21                                                                                   

I launch at dawn.

I will head upstream. Don't have a license yet, so I will only explore up to the first rapid, make a few casts, and then go into town for breakfast and a license. There is an old rail bridge just above the launch. Looks deep here but there is a ridge of bedrock running right under the bridge, and I can barely ease thru with the electric motor. Plus, when they dismantled the bridge they just threw the rails into the river, and some of them are right on top of the rocks.

Looks really fishy. Lots of wood along shore for bass to hide in. The pool is very long and still, but in places there are ridges and rock outcrops in the middle of the deepest looking water. Don't dare go fast here.

I fish for an hour with no bites. Water is quite murky, only about 18" vis, so I switch from rapala to a tiny white buzzbait. This will cause more commotion, and get the fish's attention. Whether they want to chase after a metal propeller skittering along the surface is another matter.

There are a few swirls. Defnitely bass in here. I see a swirl near me and throw the buzzer over it. On the retieve it gets bit. Shoal bass?

The shoal bass is said to resemble a SM, and this fish clearly resembles an LM. Plus, it was not caught in a shoal but rather in a muddy slow area. So I take the taxonomic liberty of declaring it a new species - the mudhole bass.

I can squeeze thru the rock bars in this huge pool, and it keeps going on and on. About 1 mile and a half up I come to a shoal. There is slight current around these rock shallows. I get another fish on the buzzer. This one was caught on a shoal, so I decide that I have caught a shoal bass. Turns out I am wrong. This is not a shoal bass. Like the first fish, it is actually another species I have never caught before, the spotted bass. Native to the SE US, but not to the Flint R. They are introduced here.

Eventaully I make it 3 miles up the river, where I come to a bedrock slide of fast shallow water. End of Bullship navigation.

Below the rapids is some moving water and rock ledges. I see another swirl, and throw the buzzbait over it. Another quick, slashing hit. This one IS a shoal bass! 2 more new species for me this morning.

Below the rapid is a little island of solid bedrock. I could set up my tent and air mattress here, and get out of sleeping in the car. How I miss the Wisconsin R and Chippewa Flowage. Campfires under the stars are so much nicer than Wal Mart parking lots.

Looking upstream there is a slick above the fast water. If I was a shoal bass I would be hanging out here. I must take a pic before I disturb this spot with a lure.

I might be able to slide the Bullship up thru this if I waded in and worked hard, but not this morning. Instead I get out and sneak up on the tailout, cast across to the far bank and buzz the glassy water just above the rapid. A much bigger shoal bass slashes at the buzzer and misses. I wait a couple minutes and cast over the tailout again. I get bit again, but by a smaller fish, a spot.

Then I get hit again right along the shore of the rock island I am standing on. Amazing hit in fast water less than 6" deep. Shoal Bass!

Feels soooo good to be on the water again. I am glad now that I didn't bail on the basstravaganza yesterday. This is a tough place to penetrate, but there is some really nice country and river around here.

I had planned to be gone only a short time, but it is after noon before I get back to the car. Can only creep along on the return trip, cuz there are rock ledges everywhere, and the water is too cloudy to see them. I continue downstream past the launch for a while, but the pool goes out of sight that way. I will explore this later. First I must off to town. I load the boat out. There is a cool rope swing here. In spite of the fact that it is almost Nov the water is really warm. Maybe 75F.

Butterflies are hanging around the parking lot. Some kind of crescent maybe? I will have to look this one up when I get time.

Gulf fritillarys here too.

I can't get a good pic that captures the spectacular colors on the underside of the wings - big silver spots edged in black on orange and brown background.

So I steal a couple pics off the internet. I could have stolen all the butterfly pics in this blog off the web, and nobody would have known the difference. But I did not.

This would look killer painted on a bass boat!

Cloudless sulfurs are feeding.

You can see the proboscis unrolled and pllunged down into the flower, siphoning out nectar. Like B 52 bombers refueling in the air.

I drive back to Thomaston. There is a bait shop I saw yesterday. I would rather give him my license business instead of Wal Mart. And I can pick his brain for fishing tips. He says you need to go downstream from the launch to find the bass. Where I went is all garfish. He fishes in a different manner than I do tho. He uses a trotline (a rope stretched across the bottom, with maybe 50 short lines with hooks and bait coming off it.) You set the trotline and then come back the next day and pull it, and see if you have caught anything. You mostly catch catfish this way. Slightly different protocol than casting a tiny lure that will fool a bass into a surface bite. At the baitshop they are registering and gutting deer. It is deer season here, and it is a very dangerous time to walk around in the woods if have antlers on your head.

On the hwy in town is another armadillo, not nearly so flat as the one I saw and photographed yesterday. (That pic was lost with the camera.)

I will go back to the launch and fish downriver tonite. On the way back is a gas station that has a bin of sodas I have not seen since I was a kid. Had no idea they still made this stuff. Nehi, RC Cola. Sundrop. I buy a Nehi peach soda. It is to die for.

When I get back to the bridge it is 85F, perfect evening. I laze around the boat launch, listening to music and sucking on my  peach soda. I am too lazy to launch the boat. I will relax and decompress, and then go wade the river at Sprewell Bluff tomorrow.

Oct 22                                                                                                     

I drive out to the state park at the dawn's early lite.

No need to start too early, cuz it got cold last nite. Nearly freezing. I am not keen on wading into the river until it warms up a bit. I pay my $5 entry fee and talk to the park lady. Then walk out along the shore, throwing the little buzzer around.

No bites. I go back to the car and get my little wading kit together. I am sitting in the car sipping coffee when I notice swirls in the tailout of the pool I just fished. Shoal Bass!

I know I can fool these agressive early morning fish. I walk back down and wade in. The air is cold, but the water is way warmer than Sugar Creek in Ind. The fish are hot. I start getting hits right away. I get 6 hits, but only catch one fish.

The bedrock here is not limestone like I expected. Must be some kind of metamorphic rock, cuz a lot of it is full of mica. Some rocks have strange patterns in them.

Along the shore I find a fishing rod. Somebody must have left it behind yesteday. At first I plan to take it up to the park lady, but then I decide to keep it. Fair trade for the camera of mine that somebody else got 2 days ago.

There is a strange plant growing here that I have never seen before. I think I know what it is called, and I am right. Palmetto. Looks like a baby palm tree between the 2 maples.

I get a few more hits on the buzzbait right in front of the parking lot, catch one. This fish hit in faster water than I have ever seen a bass hanging in. These shoal bass live up to their reputation. They always seem to be in moving water, and this one is in a fast run I would only expect to find trout in. Upstream is all shallows filled with cheese grater rapids.

There is a trail to the top of Sprewell Bluff, and a nice lookout there with a great view of the river below.

You can see the rocks and the slots that the shoal bass hide in.

I hike over the top of the bluff and back down to the stream. There is some kind of poo left on a rock by some animal. I have never seen feces like this before.

I meet a guy with a fly rod - the only other fisherman I have seen on the river anywhere. This is giant bass boat country, and I don't think many locals fish in the river. Most locals are out deer hunting, if they are not shopping at Wal Mart or listening to Fox news.

Gulf fritillary here. He is sucking moisture from the wet sand. Only the males do this, in order to obtain trace elements that they use to generate pheromones that attract the babes.

You can see him poking into the gravel with his proboscis.

The websites I looked at said that the surface bite is better in the middle of the day on this river. Normally I never throw a buzzbait if the sun is hitting the water, but here I keep on throwing it, across better looking shoals than I have seen anywhere else on the river. But the buzz bite is over. This is probably the first time in history that the internet has been wrong. I try yum worm, spinnerbait, rapala. Nothing will bite.

I am about a half mile upstream, so I walk back to the car thru the forest. They do prescribed burns here to remove underbrush, just like in OR. Decreases fire hazard, leaves the big trees, and makes for a nice forest that is easy to walk in.

I have not worn shoes since in almost 3 months. Only flip flops all day every day. Have hardly ever even worn socks. The locals tell me this is a bad idea. Around here they have water moccasins that will bite you if you are in the water, and all sorts of rattlesnakes that will warn you and then bite you if you are on land, plus copperheads and cottonmouths that will bite you on land without even the courtesy of warning you first. Most people wear boots when they walk around in GA. But this is a faith based society, and I have faith that the snakes here will tolerate Oregonians and not bite them. Seems to work for me.

When I get back to the park there is an armadillo on the lawn. This one has not been run over yet.

I used to make fun of the creationists, but now I realize they were right all along. No way could natural selection produce an animal that looks this stupid. Nothing would mate with it unless they put paper bags over their heads.

The little guy is not bothered by me taking pics. He is snuffling around, and digging little holes everywhere.

Sometimes he digs deeper, and pokes his whole head into the ground.

They have long tongues, and I think they eat ants.

Then a squirrel wanders by.

Hot again now. In the mid 80s every day here still. I head back W thru Woodbury and get a slurpy. They are masters of the slurp technology down here, which makes sense in this climate. The weather is perfect now, but the fly fisherman said it was over 95 for 67 consecutive days this summer, with stifling humidity. Glad I was not here then. This slurpy has variable ice grain size. Some of the ice particles are the size of peas, so they take longer to melt in your mouth, which extends your slurping pleasure.

There is a marker W of Woodbury for the Historic Concord Cemetery. But nowhere to pull off the highway, and the entrance road is locked. So I head back to the river for the evening bite.

The shoalies are in the mood again now that the sun is off the water. I get a couple hits on the tiny white buzzer, and then switch to a black cavitron buzzbait. Cavitron is my choice of buzzbait models, but I never use this 1/4 oz lure because I prefer using the next larger size for LM and SM. But it gets hit here.

I am getting hits again, but they miss a lot, so I don't catch many. I miss a couple fish that are much larger than the ones I catch.

The evening bite ends early and I head back to the car and drive out just after dark. On the road out of the parking lot there is another armadillo hit by a car. Somehow, this one is balanced on its back with its feet pointing straight up into the air. Seems impossible, since its back is round armor. I hope it is not my little friend that I photographed earlier.

I head back to the Hwy 74 bridge. I will launch at dawn and go downstream this time. There is a big cleared area where people have made campfires, and you can park right under the bridge where you are out of sight of traffic. I listen to the end of the AL baseball playoff game on the radio. The evil Yankees go down to the upstart Rangers. YES! 11 PM now, and I am eased back listening to tunes on my stereo when a spotlite suddenly floods my world. Cops.

I have had encounters with police a number of times on this trip. Got into a similar situation at a county park in Wisconsin. In that case I was breaking the law. There was a sign there that said you were not allowed to be in the park after 10 PM, but I did not see it in the dark. The cop was very polite, and actually apologized for blinding me with his spotlite. I explained who I was and what I was doing. All the police I met in Wisconsin were very respectful and understanding. But that was Wisconsin, and this is not. In this case I am not breaking any laws, but this guy wants to know everything about me. After a long quiz he takes my license back to his car - leaving the floodlites on me the whole time. Gonna run my license. Fine. I have not had a traffic violation in the US for over 6 years. Finally he comes back, but this time he brings a couple buddies. Black uniformed SWAT commandos, and I ain't talkin Storm Water Advisory Team here. It is pitch dark, but with my X ray vision I can see their fingers twitching on their tasers. One wrong move here could be disaster. Must stay cool. The cop grills me again. Then they finally leave. Snuck up on me in the dark with their lites off, so they were obviously looking to make some big bust. The floodlites were probably for the movie cameras. I could have been star of one of those TV shows I never watch, where the cops wreak justice on the blacks and the poor. 

Then they are gone, but for how long? This basstravaganza is over. Fishing is not fun around here. Should leave right now, but I would probably attract attention driving this late at nite, and another chance to be a TV star. The Fox News zombies at McDonalds could watch me next week while they stuff McBurgers and McFries into their guts. But I can't sleep. Then 2 more cars drive into the parking lot, headlites flooding the area. They used to have a nasty habit around here of lynching people they didn't like. I am sure there are still trees growing in the area that were used for this purpose. Seems like these 2 are not cops but just locals drinking beer, but when they leave after a half hour I am shaken. Time to say goodbye to Georgia. Outahere.

I head E on Hwy 74 to Greeneville, then Hwy 109 W across into Alabam. Turn N on Hwy 431 back up to Anniston, where I went thru before, and then W onto I-20. I have been avoiding freeways for the most part,

but tonite I will make an exception. I have been curious to see how far this Bullship could go in a day if I stayed on the interstate.

Oct 23                                                                                                        

By 4 AM I am just E of Birmingham. No rest stops on the freeways in Georgia, or Alabama, or Mississippi, of course. I am nodding and ready to crash, so I park next to a couple big rigs idling for the nite behind a big gas station. No rest stops for truckers down here either. At 8 AM I am awake and rolling past Birmingham, heading NW up Hwy 78, into Miss. Not stopping at every bridge to check out the river any more. Just want to get out of Dodge.

This is a dismal and pathetic culture. Fox “news” blabbering in the McDonalds. Like listening to Pravda in Moscow. Wall to wall Wal Marts and Burger Kings. When you ask where you can find a grocery store they give you directons to Wal Mart. Ridiculous phony card trick religion. Fake warmonger patriotism that is just as sleazy as the weapons of mass deception they invent as justification - in their own crippled and venomous souls – for the slaughter of helpless people on the other side of the world. The people I meet along the rivers are nice, but the world they live in is scary. On the bright side, they have come a long way here. Only 150 years ago they kept half the population as slaves, while praying to their god every Sunday. Only 50 years ago civil rights visitors were getting murdered. Seems strange that people could be babbling about bringing freedom to the middle east, and also gunning down Iraqis and Afghans for sport. But now I think I can understand how that could come about.

W of Birmingham the country is all empty, rolling pine hills. Nobody seems to live here. This is the emptiest place I have seen S of the Ohio R. Do not even look at the map as I cross Mississippi. I am heading W, which means out of this Wal Mart wasteland, and that is good enough for me. Can only get 4 stations on the radio, all preachers - 3 Baptists and Rush Limbaugh. finally at 11 AM there is a football game. Mississppi vs Arkansas. The announcers are from Miss, and I can't understand what they are saying, but it is better than anything else on the dial. The Miss quarterback is Jeremiah Masoli, who played for U of Oregon the past 2 years. Was a leading candidate for the Heisman Trophy (best college player in the country) until last winter, when he was suddenly kicked off the OR team for run ins with the law. U of O's star running back was also kicked off the team for one game,  for similar reasons. They did not have to do this. It is unprecedented for a highly ranked team to discipline its players in this way, and jeapordize their season. But Oregon has just beaten UCLA 60 -13, and are ranked #1 in the country for the first time in the history of the universe. Alabama, the previous 31, has just lost, and the people in the southland are seething. Masoli is now playing QB for Mississippi, where the character issues are not so important.

After noon I am in Memphis. Need to find the bridge over the Mississippi, but confusing road signs get me lost. Must get off I-240 and ask for directions. Suddenly I am on a 6 lane hwy in a slum area like nothing I heve ever seen on the W coast, when a pack of 50 Hells Angels comes roaring in from an on ramp, dodging in and out at hi speed on all sides of me. Nearly 2 accidents directly ahead. Not easy to haul a Bullship around downtown freeways on a busy weekend afternoon. I finally find my way back onto I-55, and in minutes I am over the big river and back in the USA. Can't even see the river from the bridge, but I assume I crossed it cuz there are signs saying “Welcome to Ark”.

One last patch of kudzu here, and then I see no more. Is it still expanding its range to the W, or is there some environmental variable here that is stopping it?

This is flat land now, not rolling hills like I what I have been crossing from Georgia to the Mississippi R. I had hoped to spend some time in Arkansas. 2 places in particular: 1) Fish the tailwater trout fishery in the White River, and also fish lower down on the White R where it becomes a trackless swamp, said to possibly still contain a remnant population of the ivory billed woodpecker, long thought to be extinct; and 2)  Visit the airport in Mena, Ark. This is a US historical site in its own way - the place Oliver North, Bush 1 and Ronald Reagan used to import cocaine from S America. The coke was sold on the streets, helping to fuel the crack craze that devastated inner cities in the US. The profits were used to fund terrorists who murdered nuns, overthrew elected governments, and installed regimes friendly to the US. Reagan is dead now, Bush 1 intalled his son as pres, and Ollie North is out of jail and running a talk show on Fox News.

I was debating when I left Indiana whether to head to Tennessee or to Arkansas. Like the poet Robert Frost, I now regret the road not taken. But it was an adventure, and I did manage to catch redeye, spots, and shoal bass. And escape with my life and liberty. I wanted to see that part of the south that people do not see when they go to a convention in Atlanta and stay at the Marriot. And I guess I did. Now I know.

Ark looks like a really cool place. They should call this the River State. Every few minutes I seem to be crossing another big river. Should spend a whole summer exploring these watersheds in the Bullship. And as soon as you get into Ark they have rest stops along the freeway. Plus, they speak English here.

But I am on a roll now. So determined to put miles behind me that I take the wrong interstate of out Little Rock. After cossing the ag land - cotton and soy - W of the Mississippi R the rest of the state is all pine forest. Some really beautiful rivers here, and wild looking places too. The Ouachita and Caddo rivers are particularly pretty and fishing looking. This would be a good target for a future basstravaganza. But today I am rolling W at 65 mph.

By evening I am in Texas, still heading W. Hot again today, but there is a storm brewing. As I get past Texarkana into New Boston it is starting to rain, with big lightning flashes. Don't want to fight thru this, so I pull off and go to a McDonalds where I post pics onto the blog, and try to swallow another burger and fries. Did you know that you can keep a McDonalds burger on the shelf for 10 years and it will not have any mold on it? Found that out on the internet, which has never been known to lie, except about the topwater bite on the Flint R.

Giants vs the Phillies tonite, so after my computer battery runs out I go back into the car and listen on the radio. There is a rest stop on the freeway a half hour W of here, but it is still raining hard and I don't want to drive. Uribe homers in the 8th inning and the Gigantics win! They will play TX in the World Series. I am tired from a long day of driving, and fall asleep in my car right there in the McDonalds lot.

5 states in 1 day - not bad for a tired old Volvox and Bullship.

Oct 24                                                                                   

At first lite I am heading W on Hwy 78. Should have gone straight W out of Little Rock, now I am way south of my course. I will rent a motel today, take a shower, watch football games on TV, and write up the blog. Last nite I sent emails to my cousins Leslie in New Mexico and Jeff in Arizona. If they are home I will go thru that way and visit.

By 11 AM I am in Gainseville, TX, - just N of Dallas - where I stop and find a motel.

Odd fact: There are lots of people in Canada who are of East Indian descent. Sihks and Punjabis. There was even a Sihk elected to parliament recently, who wore his turban in the House of Commons. Imagine wearing a turban in the House of Representatives in the US? There would be mayhem. I have neve seen a single E Indian on this trip, except when I stop at motels. Every single motel I have stayed at is run, and owned I suppose, by E Indians. I wonder how they have evolved into that ecological niche?

Gonna be near 90F today. There is a big thunderhead mushrooming up to the E, from whence I came. Looks impressive.

This one is gonna grow up to be a big boy.

It is a good thing I headed on from Texarkana. The FB game on TV is interrupted soon by tornado warnings, and by afternoon there are reports of funnel clouds, and hail the size of golf balls, with some the size of baseballs, in the area I just came thru. Baseball size hail could trash my car, boat, and outbaord motors - for which I have no insurance. I am glad I am on the sunny side of this storm.

This is a latino town. The labels and prices in the grocery store are in spanish..They have a really neat selection of pastries I have never seen before. They should get together with the Czechs and pool their genius pastry talents. I come back to the motel and blog till late. The Bears lose again, as their superstar QB throws 4 interceptions to THE SAME GUY. The TV is playing Mutiny on the Bounty, with Mel Gibson starring, in Spanish. He is a better actor in Spanish.

Oct 25                                                                                       

No word back from Leslie or Jeff, so I will head NW from here. I head out at first lite. The storms are gone, and a cold front is supposed to be moving in. The pine forest disappeared as soon as I got into TX. Changes to big hardwoods there. The trees get smaller and smaller as you head W. Hwy 68 merges with Hwy 287 just E of Wichita Falls. Ferocious SW wind today. Lots of cotton fields here. Some harvested, some not. The harvested fields are blowing dust storms. Lots of topsoil moving E today. Dryland cotton farming is one of the most water intensive crops. Would never grow here except for massive govt subsidies. Your taxpayer dollars at work, paying TX farmers to suck the aquiifers dry, and putting cotton farmers in other, wetter parts of the world out of business. I think they call this Free Trade. The vast waseland of US talk radio is swarming with dittohead sleazemongers who complain about wasted govt spending. But they never complain about subsidies to TX cotton farmers.

The hwy runs along the transcontinental RR track all across N TX, and the wind is so bad today they have shut down the RR. Mile long freight trains are all sitting still, idling. Screaming northwesterly. The Wicked Witch of the North blowing cold and hard, stabbing summer in the back with a giant dagger of ice. Dust storms are blowing out of the cottonfields that have been harvested.

All across TX I have been running parallel to the Red R, where John Wayne used to drive cattle. I cross it W of Childress. On the map it shows as a huge and wide blue channel. At full flood it must be nearly a mile wide here, but now at the end of summer it is barely flowing, less than 100 ft wide. Maps can be deceiving. It is very red, like the soil here. Liquid mud.

Onto I-40 thru Armadillo, which is a giant city in the middle of nowhere.. Following the headwaters of the Canadian R now, across the border into N Mexico. I got no reply from Leslie and Jeff, so I will head on back to OR. If I keep moving I can get back to catch the end of trout season. It has become a tradition of mine to go brown trout fishing at the end of Oct in the headwaters of the Deschutes R, and at East Lake high up in the Newberry Caldera.

Somewhere W of Tucumcari I cross another divide. Now I am in the headwaters of the Pecos R, which is in the Rio Grande watershed. Should take a pic, but there are no signs to mark the divide, and I am past it before I know I crossed it. Pretty country here – flat topped mesas, cactus and yucca. It is dark as I pass thru Santa Rosa, but I keep on driving until I get to a truck stop in Moriarty. This is the hardest I have ever pushed the Vovlo. I am only going 55 – 60 mph, but hauling the Bullship up the E slope of the mountains into a howling wind that has switched to due W now - directly head on. This is one of the windiest days I have ever been thru anywhere. I can barely force my car door open when I stop for gas. Hard to stand up outside. I am bucking straight into it. Speed limit is 75 mph here, and nothing slows the big rigs down. Wicked turbulence as they barrel past me. At the truck stop they say the winds are 75 mph, which is hurricane force on the Beaufort scale, and gusting over 90. I buy dinner at the truck stop and sleep in the car among the big rigs.

Oct 26                                                                                                 

I leave at dawn. The wind has passed, and it is near freezing. Heading N thru Albequerque I am caught in a traffic accident at rush hour. 6 lanes of flashing cop lites and a maelstrom of people forcing lane changes around me, then people running out in front of me to grab broken glass off the pavment as I approach the turnoff. It is a miracle that I have had only 1 flat tire on this trip.

I miss the turnoff to Hwy 550, and lose 45 minutes backtracking to find it. Back to Bernillo, where I cross the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

I am tracing the footsteps of Coranado here. Amazing to realize that he trekked over this country only 49 years after Columbus discovered that the pope was wrong when he declared that the earth was flat.

Coronado was following up the exploration of Cabeza de Vaca and the Narvaez ezpedition. Narvaez had tried to arrest Cortes, but failed. Cortez' soldiers arrested him instead, and poked one of his eyes out, and his own soldiers deserted him and went over to Cortez, who had booty to offer them. Narvaez was sent back to jail in Spain. Eventually talked his way out, and received permission from the king of Spain to conquer, convert, and civilize N America, the way Cortes had done to Mexico. In 1528 he landed 8 ships and 350 conquistadors onto the W coast of Florida. Like Cortes, Narvaez abandoned his ships and marched inland on a mission of pillage and plunder. But things did not work out well. These natives were hard to convert. Especially after the Christians cut the chief's nose off at the first village they visited, and made him eat it. By the end of summer when they stumbled back onto the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, they had already lost 100 men from disease, starvation and the arrows of the people they were sent to convert. Ate their last horse and despaired about what to do next. In an amazing feat of desperation, they re-forged their armor and swords not into plowshares, but into axes and saws. Cut down big trees, sawed them into boards, and built 5 boats that held 50 men each. Sewed their shirts into sails and headed W along the Gulf coast till they were caught in the outflow of the Mississippi R, separated, and swept out to sea. Washed up at various places along the Texas coast more naked and helpless than the people they were sent to conquer. After a winter of slaughter at the hands of the natives, starvation, disease and cannibalism, Narvaez was long dead, and only Cabeza de Vaca and 3 others were left alive.

They lived 5 years as slaves of the tribes they were sent to enslave, then escaped and headed S towards Cortes. Without weapons now, they began curing the sick with prayer and the sign of the cross. Became celebrity healers, trekking from village to village, looting and curing the sick, gaining more followers as they went. Life was good all of a sudden, so they no longer wanted to meet up with Cortes. Turned NW instead of S, across the mountains, back across the Rio Grande into what is now Texas and New Mexico, maybe Arizona. Nobody is exactly sure how far they got into NM, but they eventually acquired a following of 2,000 people who wanted to be near the magical healers and the spoils of looting. The towns in their path began meeting the shaman entourage with gifts of food and gems (rather than get looted). Almost reached the Gulf of Cortez, then finally turned S again. Back in what is now Mexico they met up with Christian slavers who brought them back to Mexico City – dressed in deerskins 8 years after they left as conquistadors.

The scenery was pretty yesterday evening, but the hwy from here past the little town of Cuba is stunning, breathaking. You could park in a spot for a week and never take it all in. These are limestones and sandstones here, the same rocks that make up the Grand Canyon to the W. The Colorado Plateau. Ancient sea floor sediments somehow lifted by the Hand of God a mile and half into the sky. If I stop to take pics I will never leave. Must head on the get to the Deschutes before trout season ends. And before I get caught in a snowstorm. So I just bang off a few quick shots from the car.

Soon I am over another continental divide into the Colorado R watershed. This is about the highest elev the Bullship has ever been at.

The towns along here must be some of the highest non-skiing towns in the US, around 7,000 ft. I am in the Navajo Nation now. One of the few places in the continental US where the aboriginal people still live on and control huge areas of their ancestral land. Into the town of Brookfield. The San Juan River flows thru town, running rather muddy today after the big storm front that just passed by.

Can't throw people in jail here for having their hair too long. Have to arrest every guy in town. This is a nice little town, where the grocery store has a great selection of delicious pastries. They seem to be doing quite well here. Does not hurt to have working oil wells beneath a lot of your ancestral homeland.

I follow the San Juan's trib the Animas River N towards Colorado. This is a pretty stream, not silty, looks like a trout stream.

I take Hwy 550 north to Durango, Colorado. In the distance I see something I have not seen in a long time - SNOW, on top of a distant mountain range.

First time I have ever been in this state. Up over a huge steep grade to the W, and soon I am in Utah. Also another state I have never visited before. There is some agriculture here all of a sudden, fed by irrigation canals from some watershed.

Following Hwy 191 N I come over a crest and see a staggering vista ahead.

The famous Utah canyonlands. Nothing like this anywhere else on earth. Again it is hard to keep my eyes on the road. Don't dare to stop long and take pics. Not enough disc space on all the hard drivers in the world to capture this. Cannot be described in words. And it seems to be almost all public land. You can stop anywhere and start hiking. Must get back here some day when I have time to appreciate it. I bang off a few quick shots and head on to Moab.

Nobody lives around here, except in the bustling tourist town of Moab. Surrounded by national parks - Arches NP, Canyonlands, NP, Bryce NP. I like this town, and the area is astounding. In terms of scenery that is - the bass fishing sucks here.

Continue N to I-40. Could take the easy way and follow the interstate to Salt Lake City, but it is quicker to take the Hwy 6 cutoff thru Price, so I do. Met a guy at the gas station in Moab who just came from there. Said it is a good hwy, but can get snowy sometimes. I head W along I-40 across the Green River.

Next gas station along the freeway is an astounding 106 miles. Heading N on Hwy 6 it is 60 miles of total emptiness. taking a chance here. This would be a bad place to break down in the growing dark.

Basin and range country here, where the earth's crust was stretched apart rather than compressed. Huge fault blocks (the basins) dropped along fault lines, leaving towering cliffs (the mountain ranges) on either side. In the fading lite I drive along the W side of a towering escarpment. 1,500 ft high vertical cliff that runs for 30 miles.

Suddenly I am in Price - before I run out of gas. This is a big city. Seems to be mines and big industry here. I continue on, heading up a winding canyon in the dark, steep rock walls right alongside the road. From I-40 to Price it was basically flat, but now I am climbing. Only 85 more miles and I am back to the interstate at Provo. But now there is some kind of dust hitting my windsheld, and powder along the road. What is this? Snow! Hauling the Bullship over the Wasatch Front at nite in a snowstorm was not part of the Scope of Services the Bullship signed off on before agreeing to lead this basstravaganza, but it keeps plodding along. I come to a gas station and pull off until these flurries end. Nobody here, but the lites are on so you can purchase gas from the pumps with a credit card. After about 20 minutes another car pulls in. They say I am at the summit. All downhill from here, and the road is clear. So I take off again. Past a rest stop. Even Utah has rest stops, unlike TN, GA, AL, MS. It is snowing harder now.

The pavement is above freezing, but it keeps snowing harder. Big rigs keep coming up behind me so I pull off wherever I can. But soon it is a whiteout, Cannot even see the shoulder of the road. I finally find a pullout. This is the end of Bullship navigation for this nite.

I roll the seat back and pull my sleeping bag and blanket over me. Yesterday I was in Gainesville TX, where it was 87F and tropical. Now it is winter all of a sudden. What happened to fall? In the middle of the nite there is a knock on my window, and a flashlite shining in. Cop. But this time there are no floodlites, no movie cameras for Fox News, no blackshirt gestapo. This is a good guy, checking all the stranded motorists to see if they are OK.

Oct 27                                                                 

Very cold this morn. My ballpoint pens on the dashboard will not write - frozen.

After I melt the snow off the windshield I ease down the winding hwy over glare ice and intermittent snow into Provo. Blech n' blog at McDonalds and off again. At the gas station a lady asks me if I can loan here $10. Her kids are in the car, and her VISA card will not work. I can give here my phone # and she will pay me back. No, I can't, cuz I live in Oregon and have no phone. But I can give her $10, so I do. Continue on thru Salt Lake City and then W on the freeway. There is a snowstorm brewing over Great Salt Lake.

Then across the great Bonneville Salt Flat, flooded now cuz of the recent storm.

The water looks really deep in this pic, but it is really only about 2" deep.

Too bad - could have turned off at Bonneville Speedway and set the world land speed record for old Volvos towing Bullships. Into Nevada now, looking back over the flats to Salt Lake.

I am looking to find the traces of the Applegate Trail. Part of my fascination with some of the old cemeteries I have seen on this trip stems from my experience in putting the 3 cemeteries in Ashland, OR, into a GIS. Sorting out the data, creating a grid, and placing the burials accurately in space was one of the most challenging and rewarding GIS jobs I have ever done. Lindsay Applegate is buried in the Ashland cemetery.

The Oregon Trail went down the Snake River and then the Columbia R to Portland. The California Trail branched off at Fort Hall (where I visited the replica in Pocatello, ID, on the outbound leg of this trip) down thru Nevada and over the Sierras. The N end of Nevada is high desert. The only way to cross it was to follow a water course, and there is only one to follow - the Humboldt River.

In many parts of this basin and range country the rivers do not drain out to the sea. They drain into a basin, where the water either evaporates or soaks into the ground to refill aquifers. The place where the water soaks into the ground is called a sink. The Humboldt R runs E > W across N Nevada, until it empties into the Humboldt Sink. It is mostly flat, gently downhill, no big fallen trees to block the trail - a perfect path for wagon trains to follow.

Both Jesse and Lindsay Applegate had come over the Oregon Trail in 1843 to claim homesteads in Oregon. Each had watched a son drown in the rapids of the Columbia, and decided there had to be a better way. In summer, 1846, they blazed a new trail that now bears their name. On June 26 they headed S down the Willamette instead of N to the Columbia and the Oregon Trail, then across the Umpqua and Rogue Rivers and
 over the Siskiyou Mtns to Klamath Lake, and then across the brutal Black Rock desert to meet up with the California Trail near Humblodt Sink.

I meet the Humboldt R and the old California Trail in Wells. The main street of this historic town is still largely unchanged from when it was built in the late 1800s. The info center about the old trails (on the left) is closed.

Looking NW from I-80 you can see the vast and wide Humboldt Valley heading W to the horizon.

In the middle of this desolate space I come upon a guy on a ridiculously overloaded bicycle, also heading W. And I thought I was crazy?

Heading W out of Wells the river is just a snake of bushes in a vast landscape.

It was thru this barren scrubland that the 49ers passed to Califonia, and thousands of emigrants migrated to Oregon. All had to drink from the river or perish. The river is dry here now. In late fall there is nothing but a line of wetland shrubs along the channel. Fresh snow from last nite's storm covers the mountains.

The Applegate party did not arrive at Fort Hall until late in summer, when many wagon trains had already gone by. They were able to convince about 150 settlers to follow them back along their new route. Some say there were perhaps 100 wagons that left Fort Hall on Aug 9, following the Applegate party SW back along the California Trail. Ahead of them on the trail was the Donner Party, heading to California.
The Hastings Cutoff was touted a a shortcut on the California Trail. The Donner party took the cutoff, but did not get back onto the main trail until the Applegate party had already passed them.

The Donner party of 87 emigrants were so late getting into the Sierra Nevada Mtns that they got caught in an early snowstorm. Progress turned to desperation and eventually into cannibalism. Only 48 members of the group survuved.

The Applegates rode on ahead of the wagons on the return trip, cutting deadfalls out of the way and trying to improve the road. So they were happily tucked back in to civilization, toasting their toes in front of the wood stove when the weather turned to winter. But the main party were stifled when they hit the steep grades and dense forests between Klamath and Eugene. The long wagon train straggled out as rain and then snow began to fall. They were harassed by natives, and running out of food. Like the Donner party, many members of this first emigration over the Applegate Trail never made it to Oregon, but instead were buried beside the new road.

I follow the river E for 200 miles. Must be the only river I have ever seen that has no trees growing along it, anywhere.

I pass a big nuke plant in the middle of the desert near Valmy. How do they keep this thing cooled?

Near the town of Shoshone I see a herd of antlope - first ones I have seen since I was heading E thru the Sweetwater R valley.

In the late afternoon I get to Winnemucca. This is the area where the Applegate party branched off from the river and headed towards Klamath over searing desert. Big gambling town now. Slots and hookers. Big billboards for the Wild West Casino. Girls! Girls! Girls!. The Applegates got into an argument here. Lindsay won $15 on the slots, and had his eye on th showgirl in the 2nd row - the one with the big new silicone boobs. But Jesse insisted that they push on.

Tonite is game 1 of the World Series. Giants vs Rangers. Tim Lincecum vs Cliff Lee - 2 former Cy Youngs head to head. I wrote the Cubs off before the season began this year, and adopted the Giants as my default team to root for. At least they try. The Giants games are replayed every nite at midnite on their radio station KNBR. So I can follow the Giants in Ashland by tuning the game in after getting back from a late evening of bass fishing. I have been looking forward to this improbable game since the season started in April. I will watch the game, check my emails, and blog.

I find a Motel 6 and check in at 5 PM. There are cell phones that have bigger TV screens than this place.Thought the game started at 5:30, but it is already in progress. Just started, and Lincecum has already given up a hit to the first batter. Cannot allow a run. Lee is a machine, a master. Has never lost in the postseason. If you give up a run against him you lose. Walks the next batter. Obviously not himself. Got the jitters. Next batter hits a one hop smash off his leg, bounces into center field, 1-0.

I cannot get the network to connect, cannot get my laptop hooked up to internet or email. Running in and out to load stuff out of the car, and it is the 2nd inning already. Man on first with Lee up. Lee is from the American League, never swings a bat. Fakes a bunt and smacks a double. 2-0. Game over.

I talk to the manager. You need to pay $3 extra to get internet connection. *(#(*^%&^)!%^(!  You can get a free internet connection at McDonalds. Every other motel in the country has free WIFI. I pay the $3. I run next door where it takes 13 hrs to get a Kentucky Fried Chicken. The WIFI connection still does not work. Giants are rallying against the invincible Mr Lee. But I must take my laptop down to the office. They are ruining my evening. They cannot get their own network to work. I paid $3 for nothing. This dump is not a motel where people come to watch TV and send emails. Get me outahere.

I get my money back, Giants have tied the game as I am leaving. Next door is a lot where semis park. Must be 50 big rigs here. The drivers are all downtown playing with the slots and hookers. I slide in between 2 trucks. Should head downtown where I could surely find the game on a big TV in a casino, but first I check the radio. I know I am back out west now, cuz I can get KNBR loud and clear. Sounds cool to hear the home town announcers. Mike Krukow, the Polish Prince, who once pitched for the Cubs, has developed into a superb analyst. As soon as I turn the game on the Giants mount a stupendous rally, and crush Cliff Lee into oblivion. Lincecum is not sharp, but again he beats the other team's ace. I sleep in the car among the big trucks.

Oct 28                                                                                         

I head down to a casino for breakfast.

I see roads on my map across the Black Rock Desert, often following near the path of the Applegate Trail. Is the road paved? I ask some locals having breakfast at the next table. No, it is not paved. It is 150 miles of  washboard gravel, maybe graded once a year, maybe not. I will break the Bullship in half if I haul it over this road. I will have to abandon this part of the plan, and head straight up to the Deschutes.

As I leave town I see that they do not send SWAT teams out to hassle people who sleep under bridges here. Don't want to disturb the customers for the casinos.

Here is my last look at the Humboldt R, never a big stream in volume, but always huge if you were crossing Nevada on foot where this was the only water available anywhere.

I head N from Winnemucca along Hwy 95. Looks like a pipeline being dug in parallel to the hwy here. Is this part of the proposed natural gas pipeline from Coos Bay? After a half hour I come to the junction where Hwy 140 splits off to the W. If I follow this road to its other end I will be in Medford, OR.

After another 1/2 hour I cross over from Nevada into Oregon. Such empty country here that there is not even a sign to announce the border, except a one that warns boaters that they need an invasive species permit.

I am in the heart of basin and range country. The earth's crust was stretched here until it pulled apart, split along long cracks called faults. Some sections of crust (the basins) dropped along the faults while others (the mountain ranges) stayed high. In this picture - taken from the bottom of a basin - you can clearly see the different fault blocks sitting at different elevations, sharply divided by the edges of the fault scarps.

As they say around here, without faults geology and people would be very boring. No glaciers ever bulldozed over this landscape, so it is ancient. I come to the crest of another range, looking down into a deep basin.

From the crest of another hill I can see snow capped peaks in the far distance. It is my old friends the Three Sisters, which I last saw on Day 2 off the basstravaganza when I headed E across the Oregon desert. These are not fault block mountains, they are giant volcanoes. They mark the end of the basin & range country and the start of the Cascade Range. Looks like they are fairly close, but it actually takes 3 hours of steady driving to reach them from here.

I reach the edge of another towering fault scarp, looking down into a deep basin.

At the bottom of the basin you can see more fault blocks - flat topped and staggered along the break lines that created them - while in the far background are the sloping, conical shapes of the Cascade volcanoes.

Looking back up the hwy you can see the long, wicked grade I just came down, much steeper than it looks here. No fun going up or down this hill when you are towing a boat.

Now I am down in another basin, looking up at giant fault block ranges.

Running low on gas now, when I get to the bottom of another basin, the Warner Valley. Suddenly there is water here, and it looks bassy. I find a small gas station / restaurant along the hwy here. There are about 600 deer heads mounted on the wall, along with a Bassmasters logo. So I have to ask. Turns out that there are bass in these sloughs, but they are all on private land. The seeds of a future basstravaganza are planted. Must ask permission to get a boat into these sloughs and see what lives in them - some other day.

I continue W to Hwy 395 at Lakeview. In basin & range country the streams often do not drain to the ocean. When it rains they flood the nearly flat bottom of a basin, creating a huge, shallow lake. Some of the biggest of these lakes are Klamath, Tule, Clear, and Goose Lakes. The town of Lakeview got its name because you could see Goose Lake in the distance. The Applegate Trail skirted to S end of Goose Lake. Must have been wonderful to see this huge waterbody after crossing the barren Black Rock Desert. Then the emigrants headed due W to Klamath Lake. Instead, I will head NW to conduct some business with the brown trout of the Deschutes.

Heading N on Hwy 395 I suddenly see a towering fault scarp. Looks to me like a thick layer of lava that poured over the entire landscape. Then the earth split, and the basin where I am standing dropped. Seems very likely that there is an identical layer of lava under the road I am driving on.

The towering cliff goes on and on.

Soon I come to a sign. Turns out this is the Albert Rim, which is said to be the longest exposed fault scarp in N America. The folks around Price, Utah, may wish to dispute this claim.

Vast areas of old bottom of Albert Lake are dry for decades at a time, depending on rainfall. This makes for ideal hay growing country.

Some time in the future an El Nino winter may flood this land, but now it is producing a small fortune in hay.

Heading NW on Hwy 31 now, past Summer Lake. Most rivers flow to the sea, and so deposit the salts they leach out of the earth into the ocean. The streams here deposit their salt into the lake, which dries up during the hot season. The wind blows steady from the NW here all summer, all day, every day. So the salt builds up along the SE shore where the waves splas onto the beach.

The 2nd Fremont expedtion passed by here, helping to explore the country the Applegates would later cross on their trail. Fremont - aka "The Pathfinder" - was the illegitimate son of a wealthy southern plantation owner socialite and a French immigrant. Gained prestige when he married the daughter of sentaor Thomas Hart Benton. Was the first person to discover that the Great Basin, including Great Salt Lake, was endorheic (had not outlet to the sea). Lead the armies of the west during the Civil War until he was fired for freeing the slaves in his area without first asking permission from Lincoln. Was the first presidential candidate for the Republican Party, and the first presidential candidate to run on a platform of abolishing slavery.

Heading NW past mountains of recently harvested hay, and getting closer to the Cascades. The sharp, angular blocks of basin & range country are coming to an end, replaced by gentle slopes of volcanic debris.

Now I am back at Fort Rock, which is where I turned off on the outbound leg of this trip in August. I have returned to the road I followed E, after completing a huge circle around the US. Caught a few fish, lost many bigger ones, got out onto a lot of different water, and learned a lot.

There is scattered snow along the hwy here. I am taking a risk heading out to the upper Deschutes. There is a run of about 12 miles below Wickiup Reservoir where there are free campsites all along the river. Wonderful spot, but it is not summer here any more. I stand the risk of getting snowed in if the weather gets a few degrees colder.

I get back to Hwy 97 at La Pine, get gas and buy a nice thick steak. If I can get into my spot I will make a campfire, listen to the World Series on the car radio, cook my steak and drink the last of the Rolling Rock beers I have been carrying around since Wis. Still a bit of snow along the 15 miles of pavement into the Deschutes, and then onto 15 miles of washboard gravel to my spot. Cold drizzle falling, but no snow.

The Deschutes River runs high and fast all summer, delivering irrigation water to users downstream. In mid-Oct they begin shutting it off, storing the flow in Wickiup Reservoir just upstream. By now they have shut off the flow almost completely. The big trout range all thru the river in summer, but now they are confined to winter quarters. Most of the river is way too shallow to hold trout now, so they are all stacked up in the deeper water, which is almost still because of the minimal flow. Only happens once a year here – at the very end of trout season. Now that the flow is turned off for winter you can see bottom almost everywhere. Most of the river is very shallow now. In places you can walk across the it without going over the top of your gumboots.

Since the Wickiup dam was built the big floods are stored in the lake, and the river has less power to wash big trees downstream. The banks are full of pines washed in along shore, underwater all summer but high and dry now. There are patches of rooted vegetation growing from the bottom everywhere. The brown trout love this place.

I find my spot, and the little side road to the campsite has an inch of snow. Pretty dicey hauling the Bullship down here. I unhinge the trailer and park next to a big log.

2 years ago I canped beside this log, which is a big ponderosa pine snag that fell across the road. Very hot and dry fall that year. I opened my bottle of wine and turned the World Series game on the radio. Lit a pile of twigs beside the log to start a campfire, and within a few minutes the fire was so hot I had to back the car away to keep the tires from melting. Before I could stop it the fire was creeping under the log and off into the forest in all directions. Had to spend the rest of the nite trying to put the fire out. Running back and forth to the river 100 yards away to fill juice jugs with water, searing big blisters on my fingers from pulling burning wood out of the fire. Had to keep doing this until 3 AM before I had it under control enough to have another sip of wine, when the baseball game was long over. Nearly burned down most of S Oregon that nite.

The big charred chunks from that fire are still lying around. But this year it takes me an hour to get a decent fire going – everything is soaking wet and covered in snow.

Finally get a good fire going. Relax by the fire in my $10 Wal Mart folding chair. Drink the last 4 Rolling Rock beers I have hauled here from Tennessee, and listen to the radio. Matt Cain is just as tough in the World Series as he was in the playoffs, or when I watched him at Wrigley. Another shutout. Has not allowed an earned run in 3 games of postseason. I cook my steak over the fire. A delicious meal, with all the 3 major food groups – steak, steak, and steak. The coals bank off the big log thru the open doors to heat my car, so it is toasty warm when I go to sleep.

There are different kinds of freedom. In Georgia they are free to shop at Wal Mart and burn rubber in the Hooters parking lot. Here in the Deschutes I have the freedom to make a campfire and watch the stars. Took it for granted when I lived here - but not any more. This is a freedom that is much harder to find in the US than I ever expected when I left on this trip.

Oct 29                                                               

I go down to the river at first lite. My bootprints are the only ones. I am the first person to fish here since they shut the current off. Dawn and dark are when the browns get aggressive.

The longest, deepest pool in this part of the river is the one at the Tenino boat ramp, about ½ mile below Wickiup. But it there is a road right to it and it gets pounded hard by fishermen. The 2^nd longest pool is right below my campsite. On the plus side, the big fish are all concentrated now, and I know where they are at. A lot of them are right here. On the negative side, the water is so low and clear and still now that the fish are very edgy. Hard to fool them. They have been fished hard all summer, and by now they know the name and serial number of every lure ever made.

My 308 reels are toast – need to be taken apart and lubed. I load the new $20 reel with 6 lb line. There are trophy brown trout in this river. Should not use a $20 reel for big fish, because the drag is likely to be very crude. Tie on a big golden rapala, the one I caught good fish on in Wisconsin. But there are no gold colored fish in this river. Will the trout notice? As I am looking out over the pool and clicking off a pic a big trout swirls.

I knew they were in here, but this is good confirmation.

The Deschutes R flows N along the E side of the Cascade Range, thru the downwind shadow of Mt Mazama. The volcanoes in the Cascades do not pour out rivers of liquid diarrhea lava like the ones in Hawaii. The Cascade volcanoes are constipated, with lots of gas and vapor trapped inside. When the pressure from below gets too intense they explode into dust, like Mt St Helens did in 1980. The dust is often referred to as volcanic ash, which is a misnomer. Ash is the residue of burned carbon. This dust is powdered rock. When Mazama blew up, a gigantic mountain much larger than St Helens was converted into dust in an instant, and it fell back to earth as far away as Canada. The area immediately downwind was smothered in a thick layer of dust, which has now become the clay that supports the dense forest of ponderosa pine which blankets the landscape. Deeper beneath the surface the dust is being compressed into shale. The Deschutes River cuts down thru the softer layers until it hits something harder. This stuff is not quite rock, because you can still crumble it up with your fingers. But it is not soil either. There is almost no true rock in the bed of the upper Deschutes, only this crumbly clay.

The crayfish here are the biggest I have ever seen. Maybe a unique species? Very much in danger of getting wiped out by other invasive species of crayfish imported by humans, as is already happening in the Rogue R.

After a few casts a big fish boils on the rap, turns away at the last moment. Brown trout are frustrating in this way. Very fast, vicious predators, but also very smart. I see another good fish chase the rap, then turn away with just a little tap. I spend an hour throwing the rap over the area in this pic.

I get at least 12 good fish to charge the rap, including a few big fish that boil after it on the surface. Only hook one, and it shakes off immediately. They are definitely on the feed. I am very close, but they just do not want what I am throwing at them. If you are fishing for bass you will hook probably 80 percent of the fish that attack a rapala. Bass are anbush feeders. Charge out of a hiding spot, turn on their prey, and swallow it head on. With brown trout I am lucky to hook 10 percent. Brown trout are such fast swimmers that they chase their prey down from behind, like heat seeking missiles. Time and again big fish come rocketing in on the rap, check it out, and dive away. Often you can feel a tap when they nip at the lure. How they can get their mouths this close to a wobbling, erratic lure that has 2 triple hooks dangling off it without getting a hook stuck in their mouth is one of the great mysteries of fishing.

I finally give up and go back to the car, rebuild the fire and make coffee. My own coffee over my own campfire. A luxury I have not enjoyed since Wis.

There are 3 or 4 campsites along about ¼ mile of spur road here. Public land. Enough room for 50 people to camp. In TN or GA this would be a recipe for trash – enough rubbish to fill a dump truck. Here I can find only 2 beer cans. Way to go, Oregonians!

Later I go back down and try again with a RB trout pattern rap. I catch one little brown, and miss a good surface hit. Then the sun comes out. The morning bite is over.

Here is an image from Google Earth showing the Deschutes below Wickiup.

The trout sulk when the sun comes out, but in the afternoon some clouds cover the sky again. I go back down and make a few casts. A huge brown, over 24”, charges the rap, and turns off at the last instant. Then the sun comes out again. I will try again in the evening. Wish I had my neoprene waders. Standing on the bank I am much more visible to the fish than I would be if I was wading, and this river is way too cold to stand in without neoprene.

I spend the day decompressing, sorting out junk in the car, drinking coffee by the fire. For the first time in 3 months I do not drive the Volvo an inch.

I go back down and throw the RB rap around again. The crazy chases and charges I was getting this morn are not happening tonite. A few good fish are swirling. I get one big fish to chase on the surface. Then catch another small one.

Then another big fish charges, wants to chomp the floating rap, but turns away at the last instant. But on the deep retrieve I get a crushing hit. Big fish. But it breaks off with my rainbow rap instantly. You get what you deserve when you fish with a $20 reel.

Oct 30                                                                            

I go up to Tenino at first lite. Big fish here, and lots of them. But hit hard by fishermen, so they are very wise. Here they will not even chase the rap like they do at my campsite. I get only a couple follows, and snag off my Smithwick Rogue crankbait on a sunken log, and give up.

Then head back down to my campsite. The garish firetiger rap that generated big hits from SM, pike and skis in Wisconsin does not seem to interest the fish in this river. I must revert to my old standby, the basic silver and black. But the only ones left in my tackle box are dull and scratched, with rusty old hooks. Still I catch a small brownie.

And then a bigger one.

And then the biggest one yet - about 15"

More and bigger fish chase and nip at the rap. If I had a new lure with a nice finish and sharp hooks I would have gotten into some nice fish this morn.

But just seeing these big browns chasing after my lure is fun enough for me. Some other day I will figure out how to actually hook them. Satisfied, I head back into La Pine and get a final motel room. Shower, pizza, and TV. World Series game on this aft, plus a big FB game - U of Oregon, ranked #1 in the nation, vs USC.

Giants lose, but the Ducks break open a close game in the 2^nd half, and win going away. Nobody can keep up with the Quack Attack. Frantic, no huddle offense, no rest for the defense.

Oct 31                                                                                   

Raining and blowing hard at 5 AM, but it lets up at 6:30.  I had hoped to spend at least one morning fishing at East Lake, which is about a 20 minute drive NE from here. Aside from holding many lunker brown trout, East Lake is a really cool place to fish. Exactly like its more famous neighbor Crater Lake to the SW, East Lake is located inside the caldera of a gigantic volcano that exploded into dust. The Newberry Caldera is even bigger than the one at Crater Lake, and older, and also filled with centuries of rainwater and snowmelt which created a big lake inside the crater. And exactly like at Crater Lake, another volcano erupted from the bottom of the new lake and built up a cinder cone that began as an island. But in the Newberry Caldera the cone kept growing until the island split the lake into 2 lakes – Paulina on the W and East Lake to the E. Both lakes were fishless for centuries until the forest service planted them with trout, and both lakes are now trophy trout fisheries, where the browns may weigh in over 30 lbs.

I love fishing the shoreline of East Lake at dawn. In addition to the fishing this is a truly spectacular spot on the planet earth. In Wisconsins or Alabam you do not have the option of fishing in lakes inside of volcanoes, with the world's largest obsidian flow pouring down to the water's edge. The SE corner of East Lake is still volcanically active, and when the water is calm you can see little bubbles of gas bubbling up to the surface. I happened to be fishing there one calm morning, shortly after Hugo Chavez followed George Bush to the podium at the UN, and made his famous comment that he knew Bush had been there because the smell of sulfur was still in the air. The whole SE end of East Lake smelled of sulfur that morning, and a passing boater asked me if George Bush might be trolling in one of the other boats nearby. There are even sulfur hot springs bubbling up thru the beach, and if you have the energy you can dig a pit in the beach and sit in a pool of hot spring water while the waves splash icy cold lake water into your little beach bathtub.

At the end of Oct I like to drive up to a place on the caldera rim where you can look back out over the Deschutes, and the rest of the world, and reminisce about the past fishing season, and the weird and tumultuos history of my life, and the planet I live on. But East Lake is up around 6,000 ft elevation, and I dare not try towing the Bullship up there in this weather. One snowstorm is enough for this trip.

Instead I will leave the Bullship chained to the motel and drive in a 1/2 hour to find a good pool on the river. I will look for a new spot. I have floated the entire first 7 miles of the river below Wickiup in a canoe in years past. There is a good pool just upstream from Tenino, with a couple of lesser pools in between.

The morn is still and perfect at the big pool.

A big fish is rising in the tailout but it won't bite. Then I catch a small one.

And then I hook a really nice fish, bigger than the biggest one I caught yesterday. Gets off as I am trying to drag it up on the moss for a pic.

Then I get up to the deep pool. Big fish rising all over the tailout. The bite is on this morn. I throw the rap out and twitch it once. A big fish rips it right off the surface. This is what I came here for! 17” beauty brownie, much bigger fish than it looks like in this pic. Surface hit on the floating rap.

The whole bottom end of the pool is spooked now from the commotion of the first fish. But further up I hook another good fish that gets off. Then a much bigger fish that chases again and again and again. Even if you don't catch them it is fun to watch these big trout chase the rapala around in crystal clear water. Very hard for me to fish here, cuz of big weed beds growing along the shore where I am walking. Sure wish I had a pair of neoprene waders. Above here it gets too shallow to hold big trout, so I head back to the motel, load my stuff back in the car, check out, and head back up to my campsite.

On the way I stop at the demonstration signs in the expermental forest.

You can see the difference between the plantation on the right side of the road - lots of stems, lots of wood fiber, and lots of low level fuel that equates to an enormous fire hazard. On the left are fewer, bigger stems with little low-level fuel. A fire here will burn thru the grass but not likely get up into the crowns of the big trees.

I go back to my campsite and rebuild a roaring fire. Then drive back up to the Tenino pool. I will wade back in to retrieve my Smithwick Rogue from the log I snagged it on, then run back and warm up beside the fire. When I get there I see a guy with his young son and daughter fishing. Idiots. I can't even get a bite at dawn in this pool where the trout get fished so hard. They are fishing in the middle of the day. As I am walking down to the water the kid catches a beauty brown, about 18”. Bigger that anything I have caught yet this year. Dumb luck. But as I am walking past the kid catches another, bigger this than the last.

Turns out that they live in one of the few cabins along the river between here and my campsite. The dad inherited it from his dad. Has been fishing here since he was 7, and has kept detailed records for 25 years. They are using the same lure as me – a big floating rapala – but in a different color pattern. One I would never expect, and a color I have never bought in my life. Looks totally outrageous, like nothing that ever lived in this river. He says the trout here only bite on 2 colors here. They will bite reluctantly on the basic silver and black, which is what I have resorted to, although mine are old and beat up. But on the other color they go nuts. Any colors besides these 2 are a waste of time. The trout will just chase and not commit. I can attest to that, with many years experience.

I wade in and get my lure back. The water is bitterly cold. My feet are in pain when I get out. Sure wish I had some neoprene waders. The kid is reeling in another big brownie, almost 20”. I compliment him, but his dad says this is nothing. They have caught browns here up to 35”, which – if my math is correct – is almost 3 feet, which is a big trout anywhere in the world. The kid is a master. His dad says the kid has caught over 200 browns over 20” out of this river THIS YEAR. Has an aggressive, hard jerk-and-pause cadence that I have never seen or used before. I am not allowed to tell the blogoshpere what color rap they are using, or the kid will track me down and rip my intestines out thru my eyeballs. Enough to have seen a true genuis in action, and to know that next time I return here I will be rigged with the right color rap, and a decent reel. I head back to thaw out my frozen feet by the fire.

Later I go back upriver looking for a new pool. There is another good deep pool downstream from the Wickiup dam. So I drive up and then walk down the trail to the dam.

There are already 2 flyfishermen working this pool. I don't want to spook their fish, so I take a pic and head back down to the pool I fished this morn.

A huge fish is swirling, but won't bite. Wish I had a magic colored rap. I get a nice fish about 17”. But after a couple jumps and runs it dives into the weedbeds in shallow water. I can't get it out. Sure wish I had some neoprene waders. Lucky for me, it shakes loose and I manage to pull my rap out of the weeds without losing it. It is the last day of trout season, and there are fishermen everwhere. 2 guys come around the bend, so I leave this pool to them and head back to my campsite. For some reason hardly anybody seems to bother fishing in that spot.

Another cup of coffee beside the fire, and then I walk back down to “my” pool. Getting dark now. They have done fuel reduction work here, thinning the forest and removing a lot of small trees and brush. Little chance of a wildfire crawling up these big ponderosa trunks to reach the crown.

The fish are skittish about chasing the same lure they have seen me throw at them for the past 2 days, but I am still able to catch a beauty. 19” . Biggest brown of the year for me. And - since trout season ends at dark, which is now - the last. It is the end of trout season, and the last fish of the basstravaganza.

I head back to my campfire. World Series game on the radio tonite. Giants rookie Madison Bumgarner starting against the Texans, on KNBR. And The Mad Bum shuts out the vaunted Rangers sluggers. Giants win 4-0.

Nov 1                                                                                                  

I sleep late – no need to chase the dawn bite any more. Lounge around the campfire one last time, and then gather up my stuff and head into town. Breakfast at Gordies 24 hr truckstop in Wickiup Junction (highly recommended!), and then S on Hwy 97 and E on Hwy 230 past Crater Lake. No snow on the summit, so it is clear sailing all the way back to Ashland now. When I get there I will watch the final game of the World Series, in which the Invincible Cliff Lee – who had never lost a postseason game until he was beaten by Tiny Tim Lincecum the other day – faces off against Lincecum once again. And loses again. Gigantics are world champs! A feat almost as unlikely as me completing this transcontinental pilgrimage without suffering any major disasters to the Bullship, Volvox, or myself.

I am playing Stan Rogers on my stereo as I cross the Cascade summit. In closing, I will quote from his great song Northwest Passage, while granting myself the artistic liberty of making one slight change in the lyrics:

How then am I so different from the first men thru this way?

Like them I left a settled life. I threw it all away.

To seek a (southeast) passage at the call of many men

And to find there but the road back home again.