Why not look your best for market day?
Fashion is never out of fashion even at a place as laidback as the Memphis Farmers Market in Downtown Memphis. A recent visit uncovered a surprising number of women making stylish ensembles out of the most comfortable and casual clothing.
Favorite choices were large bags and totes (often colorful), hats from buckets to fedoras, embellished sandals, tank tops and shorts. Dresses were less common but looked cool and breezy.
And though we may think it was all artlessly done, we notice how often toenails are painted, jewelry is thought- fully chosen, there is at least one stylish accessory — whether its sunglasses, beads or a hat — and bra straps aren’t showing.
“The better you look, the better you feel,” said Michelle Samuel, who was there with her niece, Harlee Lowder, 21, and styled from t he ground up in metallic shoes, creatively ripped white denim capris, a blue denim shirt jacket, a turquoise top and piles of chains. Lowder turned her shorts and camisole into an outfit with a faded, sleeveless denim vest.
SENSE OF STYLE
still young.
The office work on Capitol Hill was stimulating, but Moinester says he knew something was missing.
“After three and a half years of working there, I sort of realized that I needed to take a little bit of a break from the federal policy side and get out into the field and have a better understanding of how environmental issues play out on the local level,” he said last week in a telephone interview from Northern California.
“It’s one thing to hear about these things and meet with people while you’re sitting in a leatherbacked chair and wearing a suit, but you get a much different perspective on things when you are out in the field and you see these resources firsthand and get to meet the people who have dedicated their lives to protecting them,” he said.
He came up with a plan after he talked with fellow Potomac River fly fishermen. One of them was Dan Davala, 35, an expert fly fisherman and customer adviser at the Orvis store in Arlington, Va., and the founder of Tidal Potomac Flyrodders.
“I’m a big believer in chasing your dream,” said Davala, who jumped from a career as an auto mechanic to professional fisherman five years ago. “I’ve watched Paul evolve from a person who was really into fly fishing into someone who is … a seriously fishy dude, which is a compliment. He’s really, really become quite the fly fisherman on this journey.”
Moinester set out to explore the habitats of Florida tarpon; western brown, rainbow and steelhead trout; and salmon in some of the most pristine and remote environments. So far, he’s fished the Florida Keys; Louisiana’s Grand Isle, to see the impact of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill; Oregon; Washington state; Idaho; and Colorado. From California, he was planning a trip into Alberta in Canada to look at the downstream impact of coal tar sand mining for oil and the Northern Gateway pipeline planned to deliver it to British Columbia’s Pacific coast. He’ll end his travels in Alaska and return to Memphis in late August.
Moinester’s journey is being financed by “burning through my life savings” but is also underwritten by sponsors such as Orvis, which supplied high-end fishing gear and for which he’s blogging; Patagonia, which supplied some equipment; Advanced Elements, which gave him an inf latable kayak; and the National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited and Save Our Wild Salmon.
Trout Unlimited’s Idaho- based spokesman, Chris Hunt, said the group, with more than 400 chapters in 38 states, has been hooking Moinester up with volunteers to study local projects for making fishing better, protecting habitat and reconnecting watersheds, and has been following his posts.
“It’s been fun to watch his progress,” said Hunt. “He’s been doing a great job just shining some light on some issues that otherwise might not have received it. It’s not nearly as sexy as the (George) Zimmerman trial or, now, Aaron Hernandez, but for those of us who fish, this is the kind of thing that gets our heart pumping.”
Gilly Lyons, the Save Our Wild Salmon policy director based in Portland, Ore., said her coalition met with Moinester and members gave him advice or what to see and where to fish along the lower Columbia River. They’ve linked their Web pages. Lyons said it’s a wonderful thing he’s doing calling attention to the plight of fish.
Moinester fished for steelhead, the oceangoing version of rainbow trout, in the Columbia before visiting — 900 miles upstream, over eight dams — the areas where they spawn in Idaho’s Snake River.
Moinester’s running commentary on his own website, www.upstreamjourney.com, keeps fol- lowers aware of his adventures. He’s also on Twitter @upstreamjourney, last week telling of catching the best fish of his trip near Redding, Calif., and displaying the monster.
In his stories from the wild, he shows himself to be a gifted writer. Trying to explain a passion for fishing he’s had since he started at age 3, he wrote: “Thoreau famously said that many men go fishing all of their lives without realizing that it is not fish they are after … It’s the pursuit that drives me. Not the pursuit of record-setting fish and the subsequent grip and grin shots, but the pursuit of connecting with nature; the pursuit of wild places and the pursuit of wild fish on a planet where the wild is disappearing at an unbearable and unspeakable rate.”
In Florida, he learned that pesticide-laced diesel fuel used in the 1970s to eradicate mosquitoes also devastated the marine invertebrates and bait fish that once attracted huge populations of migrating tarpon. In Oregon and Washington, he studied the decline of steelhead and salmon and the negative impact of hatcheryraised fish on their wild cousins. In Colorado, he saw the impact of what he called “antiquated water rights” that allow cities like Denver and Fort Collins to suck up much of the Colorado River and its Fraser tributary to water Kentucky bluegrass lawns in what’s naturally an arid climate, a phenomenon he said “doesn’t make any sense.”
He couldn’t f ish the Snake River in Idaho because the snowmelt made the water volume too high, but he has he fished almost everywhere else, releasing every one he’s caught so far, and memorializing his battles with the elusive steelhead, the “fish of a thousand casts” he has yet to land.
“After a long day of f ishing, I’d rather just warm up a can of soup rather than clean and gut a fish,” he said. Besides that, many of the best trout runs are catch-andrelease-only.
A critic of dams along the Snake River used to produce hydroelectricity and permit barge traffic, he visited the site of the former Elwha River dam in Washington State demolished in 2011, which opened up 70 miles of habitat behind it for salmon returning from the sea.
“One of the big factors on salmon and steelhead habitat recovery is the availability of pristine habitat,” he said, noting that the river above the Elwha Dam is a national park.
The trip so far has taught him that many environmental issues are local or regional but the need for habitat preservation is everywhere. Fish like tarpon are ancient and resilient, he says, but he’s worried about the impact of global warming, which has already destroyed 26 miles of what he called “blue ribbon trout habitat” in the Yellowstone River.
“For people who are really dedicated to protecting and preserving these fish, wrapping your head around how you resolve that issue (global warming) is a really complicated one,” he said.