Sweetea

I grew up in the south drinking sweetea. I never heard it called iced tea or just tea, never imagined that you could actually drink tea that hadn't been sweetened and for the longest time, frankly, I didn't realize that it was supposed to be two separate words.

I eventually went to college, married and moved away to the city and, at a time and for reasons I can no longer recall, I began to drink unsweetened iced tea. I soon found sweetened tea cloying. I wouldn't drink a cola (colas, cokes, pop, soda and RC Cola being a related topic for another day) with spaghetti or a steak and to me sweetened tea is no different. Yes, I could once drink sweetened iced tea, but then I could once drink Boone Farm Apple Wine.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not making a value judgment about those who prefer their tea with sugar or honey or bourbon, for that matter, but having just returned to the South, I've noticed that it is an important social issue here and I find the entire matter intriguing, though I quickly admit this may be an indication that I have far too much time on my hands.

I love barbecue, the quality of southern barbecue having been one of the major drivers of my decision to return to the South, and sweetea seems to be a particularly touchy issue in barbecue joints. One very popular barbecue joint in our new town will only serve sweetea or soda. There are no unsweetened drinks on the menu. At another, the waitress reserves a special look of disdain for anyone who orders unsweetened tea. Then she pretends that she didn't hear your order. One refused to leave our table until I changed my mind. She just stood there looking at me, the queen of passive-aggression, until I said, "Make that sweetea, please".

A column in a local newspaper addressed this thorny issue last week and unequivocally posited that ordering unsweetened tea in a barbecue joint is just plain wrong (and in doing so, by the way, confirmed that I am not the only person here with too much free time). Furthermore, according to the author, ordering unsweetened tea isn't even grammatically correct in the South-- one should order unsweet tea.

I have seen "unsweet tea" on menus here, though rarely, and as best I can tell, this is not the correct use of the word. According to Princeton University's Wordnet, unsweet is an adjective meaning moderately dry, as in champagne, resulting from the decomposition of sugar in the fermentation process, or it can mean distasteful, as in "he found life to be unsweet". Unsweetened is the adjective that means not made sweet. So, I can have my tea sweet or distasteful?

Grammar police notwithstanding, I don't understand the logic behind having someone else sweeten my drink. What if I want to sweeten my tea with honey or an artificial sweetener? Too bad for me-- if you drink tea in a southern barbecue joint it will be sweetened and it will be sweetened with sugar. I've never known a restaurant or cafe to offer me sweetened coffee. They put sugar on the table and allow the customer to sweeten to their individual preference. Why, then, should they pre-sweeten my tea? Because it isn't simply a question of whether or not tea should be sweetened, but how sweet it should be.

My father-in-law insists on putting four spoonfuls of sugar in his glass of iced tea, which leaves about two spoonfuls undissolved in the bottom of his glass no matter how long he stirs. I tried to explain that cold water can only absorb so much sugar and beyond that point adding more sugar doesn't make the drink sweeter. He could heat the water and it would dissolve a bit more sugar, but then it would be syrup, or at best hot tea, and not iced tea at all. He explained to me that he sweetened his iced tea "to his taste" and, rightly, that it was none of my damned business. I wisely dropped the subject, but my mother-in-law continued to complain bitterly about the inch of wet sugar and lemon she had to clean from the bottom of his glass after every meal.

My oldest son, Cary, grew up in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, which is decidedly not southern despite its location below the Mason-Dixon Line. Now, twenty minutes drive outside of the suburbs and the landscape becomes seriously southern with more pickups than cars, gun racks, drawls and roadside bars, but that isn't where he grew up. In the Northern Virginia suburbs he knew more Asians, for example, than Bubbas and more lacrosse players than NASCAR fans. In the Yankee stronghold of the Washington metropolitan area, waiters don't even ask if you want sweetened or unsweetened tea. They serve iced tea and assume that if you want it sweetened, you'll add sugar.

Farther north, the situation is even more bizarre. I ordered iced tea in a Boston restaurant one autumn and was informed by the waitress that iced tea is a summer drink. I could order a cold beer in a snowstorm, a soda in a glass of ice, or even a milkshake, but there was apparently something about iced tea that made it undrinkable in the cooler seasons of New England. Maybe it was somehow tied to that revolutionary thing regarding tea and Boston Harbor, I don't know, but when she called the milkshake a frappe, I decided to just shut up and eat my lobsta'.

Since we recently moved to North Carolina, Cary has decided that he wants to out-southern his dad, even though I have a twenty-year headstart. He orders sweetea and shakes his head in disgust when I don't. He's an English major, though, and struggles mightily to justify unsweet as an adjective to describe tea. At least he's getting into the southern thing and I should be pleased that he isn't asking why the hell I moved him here. I should be happy that he considers my southern heritage worthy of emulation and, in fact, I am.

I suppose that, in the end, drinking sweetea is a requirement for membership in a club of which everyone who knows me already believes I was a founding member. I look, sound, think and act southern right up to the point when I say, "Unsweetened tea, please", the waitress drops her jaw and tray, and the other patrons give me that "he's an impostor!" glance.

Before my twenty-five years in Washington, I grew up hunting and fishing, riding in the bed of my grandpa's pickup truck, saying "yes ma'm", and knowing that the plural form of you is y'all, but I fear that my inability to reacquire a taste for sweetea may be the undoing of my re-initiation as a southerner.

And that would be unsweet.

109

June 13, 2006

We went to town to buy ice cream. The summer evening was stifling hot and we cooled down after dinner by driving in my grandfather’s car with the windows rolled down. Then we cruised back out highway 109 to “the cabin”, as my grandfather called his small house in the country, at about twelve miles an hour. Dad-dad and Bonnie Cox sat in the front seat of their white 1960 Rambler American and I rode in the back eating an ice cream cone with a warm, twelve mile per hour breeze in my face from the two front windows. I was ten.

We pulled up behind another car, old and rusted, driven by a young couple. She sat close beside him and he wrapped his arm around her shoulder. They were doing maybe eleven. Life passes at a slower pace in rural Kentucky.

After a while, we reached a brief straight section of road and my grandfather pulled into the left lane to pass. As we sped by, my grandmother stuck her head out the window and yelled, “Get a room if you want to do that!”

My grandfather laughed. So, did I.

“Aw, Mother,” he teased, “You shouldn’t have said that. You’ll embarrass them!”

“Oh, they just smiled and waved.” she replied. Then she smiled, clearly proud of her misbehavior.

My grandmother died last week. I flew to the funeral in western Kentucky where she lived all her life and where I was raised. I expected much wailing and slow, grimacing, head shaking like I experienced at my grandfather’s funeral in the same place six years earlier, but for reasons I still don’t completely understand, there was precious little of that. It was surprisingly upbeat.

She may have been my grandmother, but in terms of parenting she was a second mom. My grandparents always lived close by and I remember spending almost as much time with them as I did my parents when I was little. After my father was killed in a car accident when I was twelve, my mother, two younger sisters and two younger brothers moved in with my grandparents. My mother enrolled in college and my grandparents pretty much raised my siblings and me for those four years.

To the rest of our family, the woman some of us grandchildren called “Bonnie Cox” was our matriarch. My aunt felt that calling her “Bonnie Cox” was disrespectful, and rightly so, so she became “Meemee” to my cousins.

As the oldest grandchild, I suppose I am to blame for calling her by her formal name. I don’t know how that began. I was told that I did it to avoid confusion with my younger sister, Bonny. Kids come up with unusual nicknames for grandparents, but any way you look at it “Bonnie Cox” is a strange nickname for a grandparent, even one named Bonnie Cox.

As we left the young couple in our proverbial dust, Dad-dad held a cigarette between the first two fingers of his left hand, occasionally flicking ashes out the open window as he steered with his right hand, which also held his milk shake. Occasionally, he would hold the wheel and the cigarette with his left hand while he took a sip from the cup with his right. The near total absence of traffic on 109 and our twelve-mile per hour top speed made this maneuver less dangerous than one might at first assume.

Directly, as he liked to say, meaning “not long thereafter”, he interrupted the silence with a serious thought.

“Bonnie?” he reflected.

“What, Bradley?”

“You know, when you’re driving down the road trying to steer the car with a cigarette in one hand and a milkshake in the other?” He spoke the next part slowly for emphasis. “Your ass will itch every time.”

The three of us howled.

My grandmother was funny, happy, likable and loveable. Maybe that’s a reason her services were more a celebration of her life than a funeral. For many years, Bonnie and Bradley lived in that small cabin with aluminum siding that he built on Niles Row Road, then a dirt and gravel road a few miles north of Dawson Springs off state highway 109. Before reaching Niles Row Road, 109 quickly passes Dunn Cemetery and then winds a couple of miles farther past another cabin my grandfather built long ago. The cabin on 109, built of logs and still inhabited, is where my mother was born. Dunn Cemetery is where both of my maternal grandparents now rest.

They had a concrete block foundation laid for the Niles Row Road cabin and then took me to see it. My grandfather lifted me onto the top of the block walls and I walked the perimeter while he told me what the finished cabin would look like.

“The living room and dining area will run all across the front of the house with a fireplace in the middle of the front wall,” he pointed out. The foundation wall formed a small rectangle, a little narrower than it was deep, and a smaller box jutted out of the front wall to support the planned fireplace.

“The bedroom will be on the back left side and Bonnie’s kitchen will be on the right. She says she doesn’t need a big kitchen. She wants everything to be handy.”

I had to stop when I reached the gap in the foundation wall where the door to the crawl space would eventually be and he helped me down. They lived in the cabin for a while with just a plank sub floor and in the winter cold air would filter up through half-inch gaps between the boards. After a few years, they had hardwood floors installed. The exterior was black tar paper for a long time, but was eventually covered with aluminum siding, white on the top half and red on the bottom. They lived most of their years in nicer, larger houses, but they loved that cabin and would occasionally move back to it “for a spell”.

They spent a lot of time over the years, as did I, cruising 109 to and from Dawson Springs. There were deer crossing signs on that stretch of two-lane blacktop that my grandmother must have passed a million times and ignored for the most part, until one summer evening’s after-dinner drive.

“Bradley?”

“What, Honey?” he asked.

“How do the deer know to cross here?”

We lauged at the inanity of the question, but she wasn’t offended. She laughed hardest. Being able to laugh at one’s self is a skill I wish she had taught me.

I also wish she had taught me to bake pies as well as she could. Though she gave me her recipes and countless pointers, no one could bake like my grandmother. Her chess and pecan pies were unbelievable. My father-in-law, Burton, whose wife Lidabel I believe to be the finest cook who ever approached a southern stove, says that no one could bake a biscuit like Bonnie Cox.

When my grandmother was in high school she had a male friend who had a truck and a job delivering something or other around the countryside. My grandfather’s parents had moved from their farm into town so he could go to school. That was unusual for his generation and he would eventually become not only the first in our family to go to college, but also the first to obtain a masters degree.

One day she asked her friend if he ever delivered in Charleston and if he knew Bradley Cox.

“Yes,” he said, “I see Bradley sometimes.”

“Next time you see him,” she instructed, “tell him that I wouldn’t mind going out on a date with him sometime.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Bonnie Cox was always concerned with her appearance. She worked at staying thin, always had her hair done, and always wore attractive clothes. I remember her most often in shorts, sometimes slacks, because she was too active and worked too hard for dresses and skirts, but they were always nice looking outfits. The mortuary did an amazing job with her. She looked thirty years younger.

“If she were here right now,” I told my sister, “she’d say, ‘Damn, I look good, don’t I!’”

“She looks fantastic,” her daughter-in-law, Judy added. “The only part of her that doesn’t look perfectly natural is right around her mouth.”

“That’s because it’s closed,” her son, Tom chuckled.

Actually, it’s Tom and I have reputations in our family for never, ever shutting up. We have that in common with Bonnie Cox. And telling jokes. Our family laughs a lot, even at funerals. I think that's a good thing.

There were a lot of hard-working people in my family when I was growing up, miners, teachers, farmers, coaches, sawmill workers, but I got my work ethic from my grandmother. She worked every day in a factory sewing the same damn stitches over and over, a pocket for a pair of trousers or an inseam, perhaps, and I never once heard her complain. She would brag that she made “production” nearly every day, meaning that she had completed enough pieces to get paid a bit more. The factories were never air-conditioned and they were stifling in the summer. Still, she went to work every weekday looking nice and feeling happy.

One of the factories was nearly two miles from our home when I was in high school. My grandfather picked her up at work after he left the school where he taught political science and history and I attended, but occasionally he couldn’t for some reason or other or the car was in the shop and she would walk home. I had a friend near the factory so a few times in the summer I would play tennis with him and then walk home with my grandmother. She would work all day in a factory, walk two miles, cook supper for six of us and then wash the dishes. And she never complained. I never knew anyone who worked harder.

If I were asked to describe what it was like in my home during my high school years in a single scene, it would have to be around the dinner table. My grandfather would sit at one end of the table and I at the other, with my brothers and sisters on either side. One evening, I had finished eating and was about to push my chair back from the table when Bonnie Cox asked if I’d like some dessert. Given her baking prowess, this was not a question one dismissed lightly.

“Sure,” I said. “What do we have?”

“Well, what would you like?” she proposed.

“I’d like some cake.”

“Well, we don’t have any cake.”

“Well, what do we have?”

“Well, what would you like?”

“How about some ice cream?”

“I think we’re out of ice cream,” she informed me.

“What do we have?” I tried again.

“Well, what would you like?”

At this point, my grandfather, who was sitting at the opposite end of the dinner table and was not widely known as a patient man, laid down his fork and jumped in.

“Dammit, Bonnie! Will you just tell the boy what we have? He’s been guessing for half an hour now.”

In her eighties, Bonnie Cox’ driving skills diminished and she had a few minor accidents. Then a bigger one. Finally, the children decided they needed to intervene so they took her for a driving test. She failed and had her license taken away. Still, she insisted on owning a car and promised that a neighbor would drive her wherever she needed to go. She had a red car at the time and told them that she needed a white one that wouldn’t draw the attention of the police. This stipulation apparently went unnoticed by her children.

A few weeks later, of course, they learned that she had driven herself to Madisonville, thirty miles away, to do some shopping and they went to her home to confront her. She told them that there was nothing to worry about. “I got up early,” she explained. “I drove the back roads, got my shopping done, and was back home before the cops even got up.”

Bonnie Cox had a long history of skirting the motor vehicle laws of Kentucky. She taught me to drive when I was fourteen, which was nice except that the legal driving age was sixteen. By the time I got a learner’s permit and could legally sit behind the wheel, I had been driving for two years and could already drive better than the state policeman who administered my driving test. In fact, she taught several of the grandchildren to drive, all long before legal driving age. She was a great driving teacher, low keyed, unflappable. We learned in large parking lots before we went out on the road. The only rule was that Bradley couldn’t know. Nor, presumably, could his insurance company.

Once, my underage cousin Mark asked Bonnie Cox to take him somewhere after dinner. Bradley grabbed his keys and offered to drive him right then. Mark explained that it would be much better if his grandmother drove him and that he didn’t mind waiting. When the two of them returned an hour later, my grandfather was sitting in a chair reading. He lowered the newspaper and said, “Well, Mark, how does she drive?”

We could never be sure how much he really knew.

Both of my grandparents quit smoking at the same time about twenty years ago. At least that’s what he thought. He’d tell us that they hadn’t smoked for years and we’d smile and nod approvingly, knowing well that she smoked in their small bathroom by opening the window and rolling up a towel to seal the crack under the door.

After he retired, she wanted to buy some new dishes, but didn’t want to ask his approval so she waited each day until he took a nap. As soon as he dozed off, she walked to town and bought a dish. By the end of summer she had the full set. Their marriage wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough and they made it work.

After my grandfather retired, Bonnie Cox volunteered to help at the local nursing home. I’m not certain what she did there, but I believe she helped them sew and knit for recreation. She spent the last three years of her life living in that same home.

I visited her there as often as I could, but living six hundred miles away I could only manage a couple of visits or so a year. At first she was completely lucid, but her mental capacity slowly declined until our conversations would include stories from when she was my grandmother and stories from when she and I were in high school together. We would talk for hours and leaving her was one of the hardest things I ever did. I told myself that she wouldn’t miss me long because she wouldn’t remember that I had been there. That was probably true but it never really made feel any better about leaving.

One night last week, the nursing home called to say that her time was near. My mother and Tom rushed down to find her unconscious and, not knowing whether she would wake up, my mother sat next to her and spoke quietly near her ear, sharing feelings that she hoped her mother could somehow hear. Mom told me that she had been doing this for nearly a half hour when Bonnie Cox opened her eyes, looked at her daughter and very deliberately said in her best maternal voice, “Shut up!”

Then she told her daughter that it was past her bedtime. Apparently, she thought my mother was a teenager and was keeping her awake with all the talking.

My grandmother was born in 1914 and lived nearly 92 years. That means that she not only rocked, but at various times she was cool, neat, groovy, hip and the bee’s knees. Bonnie Cox always kept up with the latest thing.

We finished dinner and I went to my bedroom one Sunday evening when I was twelve. Bonnie and Bradley had come to our house in Madisonville to visit. It was February 9, 1964, a little after 8 pm CDT, to be exact. She came back to my bedroom to hurry me into the living room.

“Dirk, aren’t you going to watch the Ed Sullivan Show? Don’t you want to watch the Beatles?” she asked.

“What are the beagles?”

My dog, Lady, was a beagle and I thought she was pretty cool, so we started walking toward the living room’s enormous black-and-white TV set.

“The Beatles,” she corrected. “They have long hair and they sing really loud. They’re from England and they’re really the latest thing. Haven’t you heard about them from the kids at school?”

From the next room I heard, “She loves you and you know that can’t be bad. . .”. I had missed All My Loving and Till There Was You, but had made it in time for She Loves You, I Saw Her Standing There, and I Want To Hold Your Hand. My life was never the same. I suspect that makes me one of a handful of people from my generation who can say that his grandmother turned him on to the Beatles.

I’m glad my grandmother is no longer living in a nursing home. Maybe that’s another reason we were upbeat. During the funeral, I kept imagining her walking around in a pair of knee-length shorts looking like she did when I was in high school, free from her frail body and weakening mind.

She was married at age fifteen, gave birth to my mother in a log cabin when she was sixteen, was married to her childhood sweetheart for seventy years, had eight grandchildren, twenty-two great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren, all who loved her dearly, lived to nearly 92 and was in good health for nearly all of it.

We should all be so blessed.

The Walk-Off

On June 9, 2007, the Tar Heels traveled to Tuscaloosa, Alabama to play the University of Alabama Crimson Tide, the winners of the Atlanta Regional in a “Super Regional” best of three series. Bama had beaten Troy twice to advance and would host the Super Regional against the Heels, and the winner would move on to the NCAA College World Series in Omaha.

Unlike North Carolina, Alabama is a traditional baseball powerhouse as evidenced by the comparative seating capacities of their baseball stadiums. Alabama’s Sewell-Thomas Stadium seats 6,118, while “The Bosh” holds about half that many spectators in Chapel Hill. I watched the game on ESPN and noticed maybe two hundred Carolina blue shirts and caps sitting together, as if on a lifeboat, in a sea of crimson. I wished for a moment that I had gone to Tuscaloosa to see the game in person, but with my recent fishing trips and an entire weekend of regional tournament games at The Bosh fresh in my history, I was pushing Vicki’s consideration of her husband’s sports addictions to its rightful limits. In fact, just watching the game on TV as she read on the bed next to me was pretty risky. We had been married for thirty-two years and I really wanted to see thirty-three.

Before the game, there was much discussion of Carolina’s highly vaunted pitching staff. Andrew Miller had just been selected with the sixth pick in the first round of the draft by the Detroit Tigers. There had been much speculation that he would go first overall. Andrew would start the first game on Friday night. Daniel Bard was the 28th pick overall by the Boston Red Sox and would start the second game.

Miller was unstoppable in the first game. Cavvy led off with the perfect at-bat, fighting off Bama’s previously undefeated starting pitcher for nine straight pitches, ending with a single. After Shelton flied out, Josh Horton, my favorite Tar Heel, batted third in the top of the first inning and drove the first pitch deep over the right field fence for a two-run lead and the Heels never looked back.

Josh was a sophomore All American shortstop batting over .400. That’s an amazing achievement at any level of baseball. Josh, Chad Flack and about a half dozen other baseball players rent a house across the street from my home. He’s an extremely polite and well-mannered young man who waves to me as he drives through the neighborhood and called me “Sir” on those rare occasions we have spoken.

In addition to winning my respect with his character and play, I probably root for Josh because I once played shortstop, too. It was Little League in Dawson Springs, Kentucky. After much begging, the coach, my best friend’s dad, moved me to short. I believe I was there for about an inning before he moved me back to the outfield. If I could have been a baseball player, though, I would have wanted to play shortstop.

“Fedex”, Mike Federowicz, also homered that inning and the team put up a total of seventeen hits. Carolina won the game 11-5, with Bama only able to make it look respectable by scoring a few runs in the late innings, well after the game had been decided.

Seventeen hits and a 95 mile-per-hour fastball are a deadly combination and the Alabama crowd spent a subdued evening in the stands. The crowd was still quiet at the start of game two on Saturday evening and they faced another top draft pick in Bard.

Cary’s girlfriend joined us for dinner. We grilled steaks and ate on the deck, enjoying the fabulous Chapel Hill weather that was partially responsible for our decision to move here. We sat under a perfect blue sky with the temperature in the low eighties and no humidity, just the kind of dinner I envisioned when I thought about how my retirement would be.

After dinner, I washed dishes and cleaned up the kitchen. By seven o’clock, I folded the damp dish towel, dropped it onto my clean kitchen counter and wandered up the stairs to find Vicki already settled on the bed with her book and a curled up ball of orange tabby lying beside her. Marco was well into his early evening nap.

When penguins find a hole in the ice, they line up single file and push the penguin at the head of the line into the hole. Then they wait, so the story goes. If the penguin returns to the surface soon, they assume that the area is free of leopard seals and other predators and they all dive in to feed. If the first penguin doesn’t return, they go looking for another hole in the ice.

I pushed a penguin into a hole in the ice.

“Honey, I may watch a few minutes of the Carolina game.”

“OK.” She didn’t even look up.

The first penguin had returned to the surface unscathed, so I turned on the TV, honestly planning to watch only an inning or so.

Daniel Bard’s start was disastrous and the laugher twenty-four hours earlier seemed like it was ages ago. Bard hit three batters in a row, loading the bases, and then walked in a runner. I have never seen a worse start. I felt terrible for the kid, having just become a millionaire with all the glory and glitz of the major league draft, only to fall on his face on ESPN. He got out of the inning without major damage, but Bama was able to score a run without a single hit.

Bard’s pitching woes continued until Coach Fox pulled him with two outs in the third inning. It was not the kind of night anyone had imagined for the usually outstanding young pitcher. Alabama led 2-1.

Bama had base runners every inning and the bases loaded on several occasions, but they were unable to score more than a single run each time. The Tide led 4-2 at the end of the fourth inning when Vicki laid down her book and looked at the TV.

“Sounds like they’re having a tough night,” she said.

“You know, they are. Nothing is going right for Carolina, but they only trail by two runs. That really isn’t bad, all things considered.”

Vicki went back to her book and I continued to watch in quiet pain through the middle innings. Then in the eighth inning, all hell broke loose.

Trailing 4-2, Carolina’s Reid Fronk was hit by a pitch to lead off the inning. Josh followed with a single. With two men on, Chad Flack crushed a three-run homer over the scoreboard in left field to put Carolina in the lead for the first time all evening. As usual, the entire Carolina team met Flack behind home plate for a round of high-fives after he touched ‘em all.

The small Carolina contingent cheered wildly in the stands, and so did I. I jumped off the bed, threw my fist in the air as the camera tracked the ball’s flight into the night and screamed, “Yes! It’s gone!” Vicki looked at me like I had lost my mind, a look I had seen thousands of time while watching my beloved Kentucky Wildcats play basketball on TV. Her look no longer fazed me.

Five thousand Tide supporters couldn’t believe it. With one swing of the bat, Alabama’s star freshman pitcher, Tommy Hunter, who had put on a beautiful performance for seven innings left the game with the potential to go into the record book as the losing pitcher. The crimson-clad fans sat in silence as the team escorted Flack back to the dugout. Jay Cox singled and Benji Johnson doubled him home for a 6-4 Tar Heel lead.

The Tide fans weren’t quiet for long. A few minutes later, in the bottom of the eighth, the Tide’s Alex Avila, who had recently gone something like oh-for-2006, hit a three-run homer to put Bama back on top 7-6.

I felt deflated, but apparently Chad Flack did not. Carolina got a runner into scoring position, but Josh struck out swinging and Carolina was down to its last three strikes. The Tide fans stood and cheered for their team to get the final out and force a game three on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Flack walked over to an assistant coach and said, “We’re not going to lose this game.” (An assistant coach later confirmed this story, according to the local newspaper.) He then stepped up to the plate and drove a walk-off two-run homer over the fence, the right field fence this time, for the second consecutive inning.

As the ball sailed into the night and Bama’s right fielder turned and ran backwards toward the fence, I again jumped off the bed, waved my fist in the air and screamed, “Is it going? Is it going? Yes!”

Cary and Eric had joined us in the bedroom after my eighth inning screaming episode and had decided to watch the end of the game. Cary and I exchanged high fives and the two of them laughed at my inanity.

Vicki smiled. “Dirk, please. You’re scaring the cat.”

Again, the Carolina team waited for Flack to round the bases and touch home, but this time, instead of a round of high-fives and an escort back to the dugout, the entire team devolved into a huge human pile of screaming college baseball players on top of home plate, celebrating their upcoming trip to the College World Series in Omaha.

I believe the last Alabama game was one of the most amazing baseball games I have ever watched. I have watched many over the years and Chad Flack’s personal performance was among the very best I have ever seen.

I watched Bucky Dent, a fellow Kentuckian by the way, hit his game-winning homer for the Yankees in Fenway Park. I watched Tony Perez of my beloved Big Red Machine do the same thing in the same park for an eventual World Series win for Cincinnati. Probably the most heroic at-bat I ever saw, maybe anyone ever saw, was Kirk Gibson limping to the plate for the Dodgers to hit a come-from-behind home run to beat Oakland in the World Series.

Now, granted, these were in the Majors, not college. But they only did it once. Chad Flack did it twice in consecutive innings. His three-run blast in the eighth should have won the game, but when it didn’t, he just walked up to the plate and did it again in the ninth.

The New

“Are you snagged?”

It looked that way to Cary, standing in the next pool downstream and waiting for me to fish the proverbial “one last spot” before calling it a day. He had decided to rest his sore wrist (too much wrist and not enough forearm in his fly rod casting motion) and just watch me for the last few minutes.

My rod was bent nearly in half and the line appeared to be snagged on something next to a fallen log, or perhaps on the log itself. In fact, he was witnessing a momentary stalemate between me and a rather large smallmouth bass that had just swallowed my fly and was trying its best to swim under that log to break off my leader. Maybe he had gotten word from the only bass I had hooked the day before that had successfully broken off my tippet at the fly knot and had disappeared downstream, jumping two more times on the way in attempts to dislodge my now untethered fly. I was trying to horse this latest fish into open water without repeating yesterday's broken tippet heartbreak, but for a moment the tug-of-war was a draw and I suppose it did appear that I was simply snagged on something.

Another minute and I worked him away from the log and then landed him by grabbing his lower jaw firmly with my thumb and forefinger and lifting him out of the water. After two days of fishing, I had finally landed a nice fish minutes before giving up. One’s perception of a fishing trip can improve dramatically with the landing of a single, nice fish, as Cary had also learned about fifteen minutes earlier when he caught his only fish of the day. I had been fishing the pool downstream from where Cary now stood (we leap-frog pools when we fish together) when I glanced upstream to check on my son and found him grinning broadly and holding a large smallmouth by the lower jaw.

Wading a river to fly fish is physically demanding. Fishing upstream to avoid spooking the fish in clear, low water, every step is against the current. You fight to maintain your balance while stepping on underwater rocks that you can barely see and you sometimes guess wrong and fall. In fast-moving water, just looking down at your feet is disorienting. You can stand perfectly still and yet sense that you are being swept downstream. I am more exhausted by a day of wading than by weight lifting or mountain biking.

We left the river early the night before to set up our camp and to get dinner started and as it turned out we needed the extra time. Cary is an excellent cook so I offered to set up the tent and build a fire while he grilled a couple of filets on the disposable grill I had brought along. The charcoal that came with the grill wouldn’t light so he decided to cook them on the Coleman. A critical piece of the stove had been left at home, though, so we considered cooking them over the fire.

You need hot coals to cook over a campfire and it can take hours for logs to burn down that far. Finally, I decided to drive to a nearby country store for better charcoal and ice and in no time at all Cary was grilling the filets.
If anything tastes better than an ice-cold beer out of the cooler, ice water dripping from its sides, with a grilled filet after a day of fishing I am yet to find it. It brought out the Iron Chef in Cary. He cooked some sliced onions in a frying pan over the remaining coals with a beer reduction and drizzled the onions over the steaks. We are talking some serious campfire eating here.

The entire trip had gotten off to a dubious start before we even left Greensboro. I picked Cary up at his apartment near campus and as we started to leave for the river, I noticed a screw in the outer edge of the Jeep’s tire tread and the depressing bulge of the sidewalls that tells you the tire is going flat. The tire store found another screw in the center of the tread, remnants from our recent home roofing job. I find that when you have that kind of work done you need to plan on about six months worth of flat tires until you find all of the stray nails. The first screw appeared to be too close to the sidewall to permit a repair and I began to think about where I might find a matching tire to purchase. The repair looked workable once the mechanic saw the inside of the tire, though, and he had us back on the road in half an hour.

Now, you might think that getting a flat, losing a fish to a broken leader and encountering multiple difficulties with our cooking apparatus were signs of a fishing trip gone awry, but you would be mistaken. In fact we were having a blast. It takes a lot more than that, a hurricane perhaps, to spoil two days of fly fishing and camping with your son or daughter. We still hadn’t landed any fish at that point, but the fishing was fun, the river was beautiful and we’d had a great meal and couple of cold ones. We sat around the campfire and talked about everything and nothing until ten o'clock, then decided to pack it in and get an early start.

The temperatures had been cool during the day for August and a slight but constant breeze on the river made it even sweeter. The evening low was in the mid sixties, ideal for sleeping, a bit warm for the sleeping bags at times. I kept rotating into the bag when I got cool, out when I felt hot. We could hear geese honking and flying over the nearby river all night. The sound was pleasant until a flight flew right over our tent about 3:00 a.m. Those suckers are loud up close enough to hear their wings flapping. I asked Cary if they had awakened him the night before and he said yes, and that during those first confusing moments of honking after he awoke he feared that he was driving the wrong way on the Goose Expressway.

After a quick breakfast of pecan rolls, plums and orange juice (my coffee maker was useless without the Coleman), we briefly debated whether to bike part of the New River Park Bike Trail that ran right through our camp or to wade back into the river for round two with the smallmouth. The bikes seemed like a better use of the cool, early part of the morning, so we pulled them off the back of the Jeep and headed out on a trail that follows the river with great views around every turn. We passed two older ladies walking the trail and I asked them to take our picture with my point-and-shoot camera. It would have been a great picture, too, if she had pushed the shutter release instead of the power on button.

We struck camp and got back on the road to Greensboro and Chapel Hill, exhausted and exhilarated. We talked a little, but mostly we both just watched the center line of the interstate zip by. As a friend told me years ago, sitting around after an hour of full court basketball, you're damned near at peace with the world when you're exhausted. I could nap for a week. Then it hit me.

“Want to shoot a round of sporting clays?” I asked.

He stared intently at the road ahead and thought for a few seconds. “I don’t have any classes next Friday”.

Desperately Seeking

“Murray’s Fly Shop,” a young lady answered my call.

“Hi. Is Harry or Jeff in? I have a smallmouth emergency.”

“A smallmouth emergency? Uh. . .OK.”

Mr. Murray, wack job on line one. “Yeah, Harry is in. Just a minute, please.”

“Hello, this is Harry Murray.”

“Harry, it’s Dirk. I need your advice. We moved to Chapel Hill a year ago. I’ve fished the New River in North Carolina from Boone to Jefferson and on to the Virginia line. I’ve been three times since we moved and I haven’t seen a smallmouth, caught a smallmouth, or spoken to another fisherman on the water at the same time that has caught a smallmouth. I’m thinking I should try the New north of the state line, maybe at Independence. What do you think?”

The New River is frequently said with great authority to be the second oldest river in the world and an outstanding smallmouth stream. Its age is subject to some debate among geologists, though, and many suspect that it isn’t even the oldest river in the U.S. The Grand Canyon dwarfs the New River Gorge, after all. I was beginning to develop a dissenting opinion on the outstanding smallmouth part, too.

“Well. . .” , Harry began.

His pause wasn’t because he didn’t know what to say, but because he didn’t want to offend his Tar Heel friends.

“I just don’t understand it, but I’ve had several customers move to North Carolina and tell me the same thing. They’ll drive all the way back up here to the Shenandoah, driving right past some of the best smallmouth fishing in the state. I’d try the New in southern Virginia. Fish the fast water and pound the banks. Try the first few hours of daylight, or better yet, plan to be on the water until nearly dark.”

I moved to North Carolina planning to systematically locate the best trout and smallmouth fishing in the state, and to fly fish saltwater along the way. The south fork of the New River gets rave reviews, but in three trips I’ve drawn a big fat zero. Had I lost my ability to catch smallmouth on a fly? Were my smallmouth-catching skills somehow limited to Virginia streams?

Or, maybe the fish were really there but I just couldn’t see them.

I’ve done better with trout. My oldest son, Cary, and I fished the Wautaga River last fall with a guide and we caught some nice, big browns. Better yet, I discovered that the best trout streams in Virginia are much closer now than when I lived in northern Virginia. Big Wilson Creek, for example, is just over the Virginia border and less than three hours drive from my new home. It would have been nearly six hours from Northern Virginia.

But back to the smallmouth. I packed a six-weight and an eight-weight fly rod into the back of my SUV and headed north. I stopped the first evening near Independence, Virginia and unloaded next to the New River near the US 21 bridge close to the NC border about six in the evening. As I approached the water, I noticed a metal sign across the dirt road that paralleled the river. A branch covered most of it, but I could read enough to see that it was not a “No Parking” sign, which was good enough for me. Ignoring signs is rarely a wise decision, but when I get that close to a good fishing spot, the “wise” area of my brain short-circuits or something. I ignored it and waded in.

I fished the banks for about an hour and caught nothing, so I decided to try the fast water in the middle of the river. The water was August-shallow and clear as Perrier. Wading wet in just a pair of fishing shorts, a T-shirt and some wading shoes, I fished fifty yards across the river and I don’t think I ever got the legs of my shorts damp.

Thirty or so feet of fly line tied to a flexible nine-foot graphite fly rod make a fairly complex physical system. Once you develop the skill to make the weight of the line and the leverage and flexibility of the rod work in harmony, that system feels almost alive. Maybe that’s why we speak of “killing a cast” when we lose the timing of our motion and the fly line falls into a heap on top of the water instead of shooting out to our target. When it all works together, though, it feels like magic. That feeling is what I like most about fly fishing.

My family had given me a waterproof, 6 megapixel digital camera for Fathers Day. It is tiny enough to fit in a shirt pocket and they figured I could take pictures while I fish without worrying about dropping it into the water. It has a self-portrait mode for those snapshots people like to take of themselves and a friend by holding the camera at arm’s length. I wasn’t sure that I could take the camera from my pocket, turn it on and aim it, all while I had a fish on the line, so I tried a practice shot. It worked well enough without the fish, so I returned to covering the fast water with my fly.

I drifted a light blue popping bug behind a large boulder and suddenly my six-weight rod bent in half. The fish was so large that I had to work him into a few inches of water near the bank to land and release him. The eight-weight rod that I left in my trunk was starting to seem like the better choice.

In two hours, I caught only two fish, but one was the biggest smallmouth I’ve ever caught and the second wasn’t far behind. I left the river at dark and called Cary to tell him about my new personal best. And as I reached the car, I got a better look at that sign. Located on a small bend in the river that dips down into my new home state, it said “North Carolina State Line”. I had caught both fish in NC water. Technically, my Carolina smallmouth drought was over.

I spent the night in a hotel near I-77 and planned a few hours fishing the next morning before heading home. I decided to drive north about twenty miles to a place called Fosters Falls. I parked at the New River Trail State Park, picked up the lighter six-weight fly rod again, having learned absolutely nothing the night before, and waded into a beautiful spot on the river.

Upstream to my left was a small island, a dozen yards wide but a hundred yards long, covered with tall shade trees and splitting the river into a small stream on one side and a wide river on the other. The river was covered with large boulders, the sign of good smallmouth habitat. Just upstream of the island were the falls, a series of a half dozen drop-offs, each two to three feet high where the water poured over with a roar and flowed about fifteen feet to the next drop. Downstream I could see high bluffs on the opposite bank. The river was crystal clear, low and fast moving, with two great blue herons and geese everywhere on the water. A flight of twenty-two flew so low over my head in their giant vee that above the roar of the falls I could hear their wings beating the air. This is why I love to fish smallmouth rivers.

Using the same tactics and the same light blue popping bug as the night before, I picked up where I left off. Within twenty minutes, I landed a smallmouth larger than my personal best the night before. That was just the start. I caught about a dozen nice, fat smallmouth bass in a little more than two hours, none less than 12 inches long.

The sun was beating down by noon, but the cool water up to my knees and a light breeze made it very pleasant. I waded out and headed for home, with plans to stop in Greensboro for lunch with Cary.

When I reached our favorite barbecue joint, Cary had already gotten a table. I handed him my camera and said, “Take a look at the pictures of the fish I caught. I haven’t seen them, yet.” Then I headed to the men’s room to wash up.

When I returned to the table, Cary was smiling.

“Nice fish, huh?” I asked.

“Dad, “ he said with that special glee that teenagers reserve for ridiculing their parents, “you need to work on your self-photography. Only one of the pictures actually includes the fish.”

“What?” I reached for the camera and checked the LCD screen, flipping through the shots. Sure enough, four of the five pictures showed my big smile and my arm holding something completely out of the picture.

Oh, the fish is there, you just can’t see it. Fish are like that sometimes.

Guides

Friday, February 18, 2005

Cary and I sneak quietly out of the beach house in Captiva at 5:30 am to reach the dock and meet our guide south of Naples, near the Ten Thousand Islands area of the Everglades, by 7:00. Waking a 16-year old at 5:00 am is nearly impossible on a school day, but to do it on a vacation day seems cruel. Still, he staggers to the car, half asleep but enthusiastic on some near-conscious level. I think the most remarkable achievement of my life has been to raise teenagers who actually want to be with me. I am truly blessed.

We have to leave this early to catch the tides just right and spend several hours fly fishing for snook, redfish and maybe even a tarpon. A snook is a tropical saltwater version of a largemouth bass, though typically a good deal larger, with a distinctive thin, black lateral line down each side from head to tail fin. I'm told that they are delicious, but so are redfish and we will keep neither. We're pretty strict catch-and-release guys, as many fly fishermen seem to be.

I drive the two hours down I-75, just the trucks and me, in darkness and silence as Cary sleeps in the backseat. We meet Captain Al at the dock at Goodland, a town in only the most generous sense, a few miles southwest of Naples at a small marina beneath a huge, arching bridge, quickly load a little gear and my favorite 8-weight fly rod onto his 19-foot flats boat and fly off into the still-dark morning.

And I do mean fly. The small white boat, even with three of us aboard, is overpowered and spends a lot of its time slightly airborne. This "flats boat" is a mobile casting platform and only the raised poling station at the rear rises more than a foot or so above the waterline at rest. It is designed to float in a foot of water-- most of our fishing will be in waters only knee-deep-- and to skim the waves like a frisbee at full speed. Cary and I share a bench seat just in front of the boat's center console, with Al right behind us. We hold onto our caps with one hand and put the other in a jacket pocket to keep it warm as the cool morning air hits us at high speed, bringing tears to our eyes and making us shiver as the first rays of light and the promise of warmth creep over the horizon into a sky now the color of polished steel. We are dressed for the 80-degree day ahead of us, not for a wind chill of 37 degrees. The clumps of black shadow we see ahead slowly materialize into mangrove islands and, though Al knows the area like the back of his hand, Cary and I are quickly lost as he threads through them at breakneck speed.

The little boat drifts into the high speed curves, skidding sideways like a skier leaning into his inside edges. Time after time we speed headlong into coves with a mangrove island looming just ahead and no apparent way out, but Al banks the boat hard to the right or left and darts through a gap in the islands that we don't see until the last second. The thrill of the ride to our first fishing site alone is worth the price of admission.

Al cuts back on the throttle and the deafening roar of the outboard is suddenly replaced by a ringing in our ears that will be replaced in turn by near silence. It is eerily quiet. We are far from any populated areas, well into the Everglades, and the only sound we hear is the wake from our boat gently lapping against the mangrove roots. Ospreys nest nearby, alligators doze with one eye open and waterbirds fill the sky, all without making a sound.

Our guide grabs a long pole from the side of the boat and climbs up onto the poling platform where the better viewing angle eliminates surface glare and lets him scan ahead for fish laid up in the mangrove roots as he slowly poles us forward. The sky is brightening, sharp tropical blue now mixing with the early dawn, and we see a small sliver of red first sun on the horizon. The chill of the boatride is replaced by a soul-soothing, late March tropical warmth. We have travelled a thousand miles by plane, sixty more by car and the last five by boat for this moment. It's time to fish.

I move to the front of the boat, stand on the casting deck and begin to make blind casts to the edge of the mangrove roots with a weedless dry fly. It's a technique that is rarely productive, but it fills the time until Al can spot a laid-up fish to which we can sight cast. I cast to the edge of the mangrove roots, strip eight inches of line at a time to make the fly dart a few feet across the water, then backcast and repeat as Al slowly and silently poles us along the mangroves.

Cary fly fishes, but these are long, difficult casts and a bit out of his range. Al notices him sitting quietly watching his dad and suggests that Cary pick up a spinning rod and fish off the other side of the boat. He happily takes a rod, casts a jig opposite my fly casts and quickly begins to hook a strange assortment of fish: a long, skinny ladyfish and a sail catfish come first. The catfish looks just like a river catfish, barbels included, except that it has a tall, surreal sail sprouting four inches from the middle of its back. He's having a ball because our guide was as focused on his customers both enjoying themselves as much as he was focused on finding fish.

We've had less enjoyable experiences. We once hired a guide closer to Captiva to fish Pine Island Sound and avoid the long drive to the Everglades. I should have listened when the guys in the local fly shop told me that Ray "is the best guide around, but he isn't patient or forgiving of inexperienced fly fishermen".

I spoke to Ray on the phone and he suggested that we "fish the lights" for snook. He'd had great luck with them that week. The only downside was that Cary and I would have to meet him at 3:00 am. I had no idea what "fishing the lights" meant, but it turns out that people who own homes on the canals install a light bulb a few feet above the water near their docks. The light attracts baitfish and the snook hold up a few feet away waiting for a meal. If you cast a fly into the lighted area, you might just catch a snook.

Reaching these lights meant quietly cruising with the trolling motor-- it was 3:00 am, after all--past the many close-set homes of millionaires, each with an expensive power boat hanging from a boat lift and many with a small "snook light" at the edge of their dock. The canals were laid out like streets in a suburb. Ray would stop the boat and I would try to cast a fly into the small circle of light.

I had never tried to cast in pitch darkness. Not being able to see your flyline and blinded by staring into a light bulb from nearby darkness is a fly casting challenge to say the least. Ray was visibly disappointed by my ineptitude and seemingly unimpressed by the fact that I was paying him several hundred dollars to help me enjoy my vacation. After about twenty minutes, I got the hang of it, but Cary struggled mightily. The guide mumbled profanities and paced around the boat.

"Urban snook trapping" at 3:00 am was not what I had in mind when I hired a guide. I found it slightly more entertaining than just buying the fish in the seafood department, but then I am rarely criticized for how I push my grocery cart. Ray is a good fly fisherman and he knows where to find fish, but for the life of me, I don't understand how he has enough repeat business to make a living as a guide.

Al, on the other hand, is a pleasure to spend time with even when the fish aren't biting. He understands that his customers want to catch fish, but that they want to enjoy themselves while they're doing it. This year, we decided Al was worth the drive.

Now, the red sun yellows and rises into a brilliant azure sky with just a few wisps of pure white clouds to set off the blue. The gray of the early morning quickly subsides with the risen sun and our world is as bright as a flashbulb. Our jackets are a distant memory. Al spots a snook cruising toward us and off to port.

"See him, Dirk? About twenty feet out at 10:00?"

I pick up the fish quickly, make a quick backcast and then, to my horror, make the worst cast I've made in years. The fly lies motionless 20 feet from the boat and the fly line meanders to it in loose coils on top of the water like a string attached to a burst balloon. Trying hard not to panic, I hold my rod tip near the water and start stripping line rapidly as the snook approaches my fly. The fly sits motionless on the water for what seems like forever as I strip in the loose line, but eventually the fly at its end moves and begins to dart toward me in 8-inch jerks right toward the nose of the snook. At the last instant, the snook notices the fly and makes a hard cut to its right to attack it. I raise my rod tip and set the hook, then break into a smile.

Al breaks into a smile, too.

"Snook fever", he chuckles, referring to my panicked cast upon sighting the fish. Still smiling, he steps down from the platform to help me land the fish, then takes a picture of me holding my first snook. "Nice recovery, though!"

The excitement of the catch soon subsides as I make many more unproductive, blind casts and Al continues scanning the water. I cast ahead of the boat and my fly lands less than a foot from mangrove roots. I am startled as the water explodes around my fly with a sound like a shotgun firing and my flyline pulls taut, but a few seconds later there is silent stillness. I look up at Al on the poling platform with an expression that apparently says, "What the heck just happened?"

Al laughs loudly. "Well, you wanted to hook a tarpon!"

Actually, I wanted to catch a tarpon.

It is now high tide and Al realizes that conditions are no longer ideal for fly rods. "Why don't we put away the long rods, catch some live bait and try the spinning rods?", he asks rhetorically.

We stow the rods and sit down for another mad dash through the mangroves to a place where Al knows he can easily net the minnows he calls "snook candy". He pulls out a net, tosses it over the side, and pulls in enough minnows in a single toss to fill his live well, then we're flying again through the mangrove islands in search of more snook.

Eventually, Al looks at his watch and wrinkles his brow, but not because he is in a hurry to end his workday. He has just realized that Cary has yet to catch a snook. I hook a smallish snook while chatting with our guide, swing the rod back firmly to set the hook and start reeling him in.

"Cary, your Dad caught your snook!", our guide teases.

I appreciate that Al is so intent on Cary catching a snook and he suggests one more place where we might find one before we need to head back to the dock. Another five minutes of sweeping through the 'glades at full throttle and Al once again cuts the outboard, silencing the roar and coasting near a mangrove island. After a few casts, my son hooks a fish. We're all grins as he lands his first snook. I grab the camera and get a shot of Cary holding the fish and standing just in front of Al, who is still on the poling platform. We're actually a little past our allotted time and our guide fires up his outboard one more time for the run back to the dock.

When we reach the car and stow our gear, Cary climbs into the front seat. We are at the same time tired and exhilarated from rising at the crack of dawn to fish all day. I point the rental car back toward Captiva and we head up the interstate, listening to the radio, resting and saying little. He is soon asleep. You're at peace with the world when you're exhausted.

Down the road, something awakens Cary for just a minute. He rolls his head toward me, too tired to lift it from the headrest, as we cruise up the four-lane highway, his eyelids drooping and a slight smile on that wonderful, teenaged face.

"Dad?"

"Yeah, buddy?"

"I think that's the best fishing trip we ever took."

Now, that's a guide.