Happy, Happy, Happy (13 page)

Once I make a decision, I’m all in and there’s no second-guessing. After I was baptized, I attended regular church services three times a week (twice on Sunday). I also studied the Bible with someone or a group the other five nights of the week. I went back to teaching and worked for Ouachita Christian School, which had just opened in Ouachita Parish. I felt like I needed time with Christian people to get me back on my feet spiritually, so I did
that for about two years. Because everything was in Kay’s maiden name, my old friends couldn’t find me. When they finally tracked us down after about three or four months, I told them never to come back. It was about five years after I was baptized before the pull of sin finally stopped.

Although I was healing spiritually and was beginning to earn the trust of my wife and children again, there still seemed to be something missing in my life. It’s funny how things work sometimes. Even during my romping, stomping, and ripping days, when I was at my lowest point, the hunting and fishing were actually a training ground for what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was in my blood, and I spent as much time as I could doing it. When I was partying, we would go from the beer joint to the woods or lakes and back. Yet out of all that heathen activity came my expertise for duck hunting and catching fish, as well as my dream to one day build my own duck calls. Even as I sank deeper into that wild lifestyle and as my values and sense of worth were severely battered, there was a core of resilience inside that kept me going.

Out of all that heathen activity came my expertise for duck hunting and catching fish, as well as my dream to one day build my own duck calls.

I wasn’t entirely sure where it was going to lead me—until one day Kay found something in the back of a newspaper.

Rule No. 7 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

Buy a House Near Water (It’s a Lot More Fun)

W
hen I started my Christian walk, I began a very intensive study of the Bible. Like I said, I don’t do anything halfway; it’s my personality to become immersed in something once I set my mind to it. I attended services at White’s Ferry Road Church at least twice a week and spent the other five days of the week studying God’s Word with groups of friends or alone. I was determined to become a scholar of the Bible, to understand the true meaning of every verse of Scripture, so I might one day be able to spread His word to other people who found themselves in the predicament I once struggled through.

After a couple of years, I regained my confidence and had a new outlook on life. But in the back of my mind, I still wanted to
return to hunting and fishing, which was always my consuming passion. Kay understood my struggle and was sympathetic when I told her that I could make more money as a commercial fisherman than at my teaching job. It was something I had been thinking about for a few years, as I still yearned to be in the woods, lakes, and rivers, where I was most happy and at peace.

With a lot of faith in me, as always, Kay encouraged me, saying she thought it was a good plan. Together we made a life-changing decision. We decided I would quit my teaching job at Ouachita Christian School and begin fishing. We planned to adopt a lifestyle that would involve virtually living off the land, just like my family had done when I was a child. I told Kay to search for land with water that eventually flowed into the sea. I was gambling that by doing what I wanted to do, I could make a living for my family—which was still growing. Eventually Kay and I would have four sons; Jeptha, our last, was born in 1978.

Kay found six and a half acres of land just off the Ouachita River at the mouth of Cypress Creek outside of West Monroe, Louisiana. It was at the end of a dirt road in one of the most heavily forested areas on the river. The classified advertisement in the newspaper described it as a “Sportsman’s Paradise.” When we drove out to see the land, I knew it was perfect as soon as we crested the hill that leads down to the house where we still live today. The place was absolutely perfect.

The real estate lady sensed my excitement and told me, “Now, Mr. Robertson, I’m required by law to inform you that this home sits in a floodplain.”

“Perfect,” I told her. “I wouldn’t want it if it didn’t.”

Our land fronts a small slough, which eventually flows to the sea by way of Cypress Creek and the Ouachita, Red, Atchafalaya, and Mississippi Rivers. When we purchased the property, two houses stood on the land: one a substantial three-bedroom, white frame house, the other a primitive camp house of weathered, green-painted lumber. The latter was subject to being flooded during times of high water when the Ouachita River overflowed its banks. The front yards of both houses sloped gently down to the slough, which wrapped around the land on the north side.

When we drove out to see the land, I knew it was perfect as soon as we crested the hill.

Behind the houses, the hill continued steeply upward, making a large promontory that jutted out into the juncture of the river and creek. The land was covered with towering oaks and pines.

The Ouachita River varies from a small, crystal-clear stream flowing over the rugged rocks of the Ouachita Mountains in southwest Arkansas to a muddy, turgid, intermingled flood where it joins the Red River just before emptying into the Mississippi
River in southern Louisiana. Deep woods and substantial wetlands lie alongside most of its 605-mile length.

Washita
(another spelling of the river’s name) is an Indian word meaning “good hunting grounds.” The Ouachita Indians, for whom the river is named, and several other tribes—including the Caddo, Chickasaw, Osage, Tensa, and Choctaw—lived along its banks. I later discovered, from potsherds and other relics I found—including a human skeleton uncovered by a spate of rain—that our land was inhabited in the distant past. A team of archeologists from Northeast Louisiana University in Monroe established that the skeleton I found was very old and that of an Indian. In the past, the promontory had been a thriving Indian encampment. Indians lived there for centuries, sallying out to hunt and fish from the small peninsula whose natural advantages gave them easy access to the teeming wildlife and fishing of the area. When their time passed, the river served as a passage into northern Louisiana and southwestern Arkansas for settlers of the area.

When I saw the site and its location for the first time, I knew instantly that it was the land I wanted. It was where I would launch my career as a commercial fisherman, and it was where I would teach my sons the survival skills I learned from my father during my youth.

Even though the property was relatively cheap, it was out of
our price range. Fortunately, my parents were making plans to return to Louisiana from Arizona, and Pa had enough money for a down payment on a small place for retirement. They still owned my boyhood home in Dixie, Louisiana, which they were renting to a poor family that was often behind on the monthly payment. My parents’ dilemma was that while they could make a down payment on any retirement home they wanted, they weren’t sure how they would maintain it once they grew older.

When I showed them the old Indian settlement, they fell in love with it as much as I had. Granny could sense that it would be an excellent retirement home, and Pa was particularly impressed with its solitude and hunting and fishing opportunities. When we began to explore how to acquire the place, we came up with a way that would fit both families’ needs. Kay and I needed a down payment, and Pa and Granny needed to eliminate their worries about monthly payments and long-term maintenance. Having two houses on the place was a godsend that led to an agreement that would solve our problems. Pa and Granny used their savings for the down payment, and Kay and I agreed to make monthly payments and maintain the property. The arrangement led to several years of happy, happy, happy living in a place we all loved.

Pa and Granny elected to live in the camp house, while my larger family took the house farther up the hill. We all settled comfortably into our new homes, and I began my career as a
commercial fisherman. Pa and my sons were right alongside me as I started my fishing business. For Pa, it was a return to a way of life close to that of his childhood and my younger years at Aunt Myrtle’s farm. At first he actively hunted and fished the bountiful area surrounding our property; then, as he grew older, he gravitated more to taking care of the garden he’d started. Most of our food, from spring to fall, came from Pa’s garden. Our meat came from fish we caught or from ducks, squirrels, and deer we shot. We usually ate fish three times a week.

Pa’s first garden on the edge of the slough flooded every year or so. The floodwaters enriched the soil but sometimes delayed planting, so he began another level plot farther up the hill, which stayed dry even in the wettest of years. As Pa grew older, however, he began to slow down, and his interests became narrower. He spent his later years close to home, tending the fire in the iron stove that heated their house and playing dominoes and other games with his family and grandchildren. He enjoyed the role of patriarch of his large extended family, which numbered more than sixty during his lifetime, and he even bragged at one point that he was the oldest Robertson of his line left.