Si-Cology 1: Tales and Wisdom From Duck Dynasty's Favorite Uncle

by Si Robertson

  “I’m the master of distractions! A couple of hand gestures and—bam!— I’ll pull the underwear clean off your butt!”

  Dancing with Wolves

  YOU’VE GOT TO UNDERSTAND one thing about me: I had four older brothers and one older sister. I was the baby boy of the Robertson family. All of my life, wherever I went, people were always comparing me to my older siblings. If I did something wrong in school, one of the teachers would undoubtedly say, “Well, good grief, Harold wouldn’t have done that.” If I did something foolish at church, my Sunday school teacher might say, “Well, goodness, Si, Judy wouldn’t have done that.”

  Hey, news flash: I’m not Harold and I’m not Judy! I’m Silas Merritt Robertson! Growing up, I had an identity crisis because I was always being compared to someone else. All of my life, all I ever heard was “You’re not doing it like so-and-so used to do it.” Hey, guess what? I’m not so-and-so! I’m me!

  My older brothers are the reason I’m afraid of the dark and still have separation anxiety to this day. We’d go into the woods to hunt or play hide-and-seek, and they’d run back to our house without telling me. They’d leave me in the woods alone, and they especially liked to pull the trick when it was dark. I would cry, “Hey, where did y’all go? Hey, come back! Please come back!” But even when it was light outside, I didn’t like to be left alone. Hey, would you want to be left alone with the thoughts being pondered in this head? My mind, it’s wide open. It’s like a hollow tunnel of air!

  When Phil was in high school, he came home one Friday and said he and a couple of his football teammates were going camping on the Red River. They were going to go fishing the entire weekend and wouldn’t be home until Sunday. Of course, the first thing out of Momma’s mouth was, “Take your younger brother with you.” Andy Yarbrough and another football player came by our house to pick up Phil and me, and they made me ride in the back, while the three of them planned our trip in the cab.

  They decided I was going to drive our boat across the Red River to a camping site on the other side and wait for them to get there. We pulled up to the Red River and put our boat in the water, and then they showed me how to crank the motor.

  “You see that big log on the riverbank over there?” Phil asked me. “Drive the boat over there, tie it up good, and don’t let it get away. We’re going to drive the truck the long way, go across the bridge, and come in the back way to the woods. When you get to the other side, you’ll see a trail. Follow it up the hill and you’ll find the campsite. We’ll see you in a little while.”

  “How long before you get there?” I asked him.

  “We’ll get there before dark,” Phil said.

  I told him as long as they were there before dark, I’d do it. I was in the ninth grade and was still afraid of the dark!

  They left in the truck, and I motored the boat across the river just as the sun was starting to set. I parked the boat, tied it down, and then walked down the trail Phil told me about. I walked into the woods and quickly realized there wasn’t a house or another human being within forty miles of me. I was in the wilderness. I had no idea where I was, but I somehow found the campsite, which was about a fifteen-foot circle slap in the very middle of the woods.

  I sat down and waited for Phil and his buddies to get there. After about twenty minutes, I noticed the sun was going down over the horizon. It was barely visible. Darkness was coming—and it was coming quickly! I was getting more nervous with every passing second.

  Suddenly I heard a ruckus behind me. It was a pack of wild wolves! Along with being terrified of the dark, I was also afraid of wolves. They were actually coyotes, but we called them wolves. When you have wild dogs that are capable of dragging down large cattle and killing full-grown bulls, they are wolves.

  I was trying to keep my composure, but the sounds of the wolves were getting closer and closer. I stood up and looked behind me, and I saw one of the wolves poke its head out of the brush! It was looking right at me! I looked to my right and saw tire tracks going up the other side of the woods. As I pondered what to do, I saw another wolf stick his head out of the brush and then another one. I knew I was in trouble, so I took off running down the barely visible road. Hey, Fred Astaire’s got nothing on me, but I wasn’t about to be dancing with wolves! After I took off running, the wolves jumped in behind me and were yelping. They were getting louder and louder. I knew there were a bunch of them behind me but I was too afraid to look back. I felt like Little Red Riding Hood running through the woods to Grandmother’s house!

  I was running in second gear and my legs were already burning. But I knew if I slowed down, they were going to catch me. I shifted to third gear and thought, Goodness, I’ve never run this fast! But the wolves were gaining on me, and I could almost smell them when the road turned from dirt to gravel. The wolves were getting even closer, so I switched it to fourth gear. Then the dirt road switched to pavement, and I figured I’d better run with whatever I had left in my tank. So I put the pedal to the metal and sprinted at full throttle. I put the hammer down and was running in fifth gear!

  After about half a mile, the wolves started losing ground, and then they lost interest in eating me altogether. If someone had timed me with a stopwatch, I would have set every world record from forty yards to ten miles! From a sprint to a marathon, I was moving, Jack!

  When I stopped running, I bent over and tried to catch my breath. My lungs were burning and my shirt was drenched in sweat. Good grief, it’s hot, I thought. Then I smelled burning rubber. I figured some farmer was using tires to start a brush fire.

  But then I looked down, and the rubber soles of the tennis shoes I was wearing were on fire. They were ablaze in flames!

  Fortunately, it had rained the night before, so I stepped into a mud puddle and extinguished both of my shoes before my feet were badly burned.

  Hey, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and I wasn’t going to stick around just to be burned—or eaten!

  “I sting like a butterfly and punch like a flea!”

  Bumblebees

  WHILE I WAS GROWING up, my favorite thing to eat for breakfast during the winter was Momma’s homemade buttermilk biscuits with honey. Boy, were they good! It’s hard for me to get much sweeter, but I just love the pure taste of honey. Now my wife tells me all the time, “I need honey, honey.” Look, when you get honey in your beard, it literally stays there for two weeks. When my wife kisses me, she’s like, “Oh, that was good.” She doesn’t even know why. She just thinks I’m sweeter than most males.

  When I was seven, I was sitting on our front porch one day with Phil and Daddy. We looked over at Mrs. Wilson’s house next door and saw a swarm of bees that had flocked on the purple jasmine over her back door. The swarm of bees was as big around as two basketballs.

  “Hey, we’re fixing to have us a beehive,” Daddy said.

  He told Phil and me to get two chairs out of the kitchen while he went to get a hammer. We walked into the backyard, where we had a one-room shed. Daddy took the hammer and knocked a knot out of a pine board on the side of the shed. Then he took a saw and cut a board out of the shed. He cut two two-by-fours and nailed them to the inside of the shed, which is where the bees could build a honeycomb. He nailed a board back on the shed, which could easily be taken off and put back on to get access to the beehive whenever we wanted.

  “Get one of those chairs and come with me,” he told us.

  We walked over to the purple jasmine and put the chair in front of it. Daddy told me to stand on the chair.

  “What do you mean get on the chair?” I asked him. “Those bees are fixing to tear me up.”

  “Boy, get up here on a chair before I take off my belt and tear you up,” he said. “If you don’t get up here, you’re going to get torn up one way or the other.”

  I figured the bee stings wouldn’t hurt as bad as Daddy’s belt, so I climbed on the chair. Daddy cut one end of the vine with his pocketknife and handed it to me.

  “Be careful,�
� he said. “Don’t be shaking the vine and moving it around or we will get stung.”

  Daddy cut the other end of the vine and told Phil to take the chair back to the shed and put it next to the other one. Then we carefully carried the vine with the hive hanging from it to the chairs. We slowly sat the vine on the chairs, with thousands of bees swarming around it. I didn’t even know bees liked jasmine. I thought their favorite flowers were bee-gonias and honeysuckle! Hey, what do I know?

  “Go get me another chair,” Daddy said.

  I brought him another chair, and he sat down and waited. Finally, the queen bee rolled up to the top of the vine, and Daddy flicked her into the hole in the shed. Within a matter of seconds, every one of the other bees followed her into the hole.

  For the next ten years, whenever we wanted honey, we went to the shed, pulled the two nails out, and robbed the honeycomb.

  One time when it was time to rob the beehive, Phil walked out wearing two pairs of blue jeans, three football jerseys, a pair of gloves, and a homemade screen-wire helmet that went down to his shoulders. Phil was convinced he couldn’t be stung!

  We didn’t trust him, so Momma, Tommy, and me sat in the kitchen watching him through the window. Phil took the nails out and pulled out the board but didn’t know there was a large honeycomb on the back of the board he had just pulled out! He threw it to the ground and it landed faceup! Within a matter of seconds, you couldn’t see Phil’s legs. They were covered in bees! He took off running, swatting the bees with every step. I don’t know how many times he was stung, but it was a lot, Jack!

  Whenever we robbed the honey, we cut out the honeycomb, leaving just enough for the bees to survive. By the time we were done squeezing the honeycomb, we’d have about three gallons of honey, which lasted for nearly a year. It was another way we lived off the land.

  Phil wasn’t the only one stung by bees. When Phil was in the eighth grade and I was in the sixth, we went squirrel hunting one day. As usual, Phil was walking in front of me, and we were about to cross under a barbed-wire fence. As Phil crawled under the fence, he grabbed ahold of a fence post, which was rotted from the ground up. As soon as he grabbed the post, bumblebees started swarming out of it. Phil took off running, but I was already making my way under the barbed wire before I noticed them. I panicked and unknowingly ripped my blue jeans clean across my rear. I took off running behind Phil, with the bumblebees chasing us.

  As I was running, I remembered something Momma told me: if bees are chasing you, you’re supposed to fall down and lie still, because they follow your vibration. So I fell down and played dead. Unfortunately, I didn’t know my jeans were ripped. There was now a full moon in the middle of the day! I looked up and it was like World War II, with Allied fighter pilots bombing Germany. My white underwear was showing, and the leader of the bees said, “Boys, there’s our target!” They must have had advanced targeting systems, because they didn’t miss! Trust me, it didn’t take them long to get me off the ground. I was running and crushing my underwear at the same time.

  When I got home, Momma said, “Well, drop your drawers.” When I did, she busted out laughing.

  “Hey, it’s not funny,” I said.

  “If you could see it from my angle, it’s funny,” she said. “That’s the biggest your butt has ever been.”

  Momma sat in the kitchen and pulled twenty-seven bee stingers out of my rear while she and Phil laughed.

  Look, what’s worse than being a fool? Fooling with a bee, Jack! Like the Beatles sang, let it bee!

  “Jack, I can hurt you, physically and metaphysically.”

  Kamikaze Pilot

  WHEN PHIL LEFT TO play football with Tommy at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston in 1964, Jan and I were the only kids left in the house with Momma and Daddy. I was older than Jan, but I didn’t pick on her because my older brothers picked on me so much. I didn’t think it was the right thing to do, because she was a girl. If she had been a boy, I’m sure things would have been much different.

  After Phil left for college, I still had to finish my junior and senior years at North Caddo High School in Vivian, Louisiana. I was a pretty good football player in high school, but there was this problem: I weighed one hundred and thirty-five pounds when I was soaking wet. If I had weighed one hundred and sixty or one hundred and eighty pounds, like Tommy and Phil, I would have gotten a scholarship to Louisiana Tech, there’s no doubt in my mind.

  We grew up playing football in our backyard. We even had goalposts at one end, which Jimmy Frank and Harold made from a couple of oak-tree uprights and a sweet-gum crossbar. Our football field was about thirty yards long and half as wide. We played two-hands-below-the-waist touch football year-round. Jimmy Frank managed to bring home a few old footballs from his high school team, so we were always playing in the backyard.

  I played quarterback during my freshman and sophomore seasons at North Caddo High School and then moved to end on offense, and cornerback and linebacker on defense. Tommy and Phil were really good football players—they played quarterback and halfback and were all-district and all-state players—so I had a pretty big legacy to live up to. I wasn’t very big, but I was crazy enough and dumb enough not to know that the guy I was trying to tackle was twice as big as me! I didn’t care how big he was—I was coming in there like a torpedo! I was a kamikaze pilot on the football field. I was the meanest and craziest one-hundred-and-thirty-five-pound player on the field! Because my older brothers picked on me growing up, I didn’t have a problem taking on guys who were bigger than me.

  I really enjoyed playing football and probably got the most from my God-given abilities. I played in a couple of games as a senior in 1965, but then I broke my arm in a car accident and missed the rest of the season. When the season was over, my coach called me into his office and told me he could get me a tryout as a walk-on player at Louisiana Tech. He told me if I was good enough to make the team and worked hard to get bigger and stronger, the Louisiana Tech coaches might even be willing to give me a scholarship a couple of years down the road. My coach told me he thought I was talented enough to do it. When my coach was finished talking, I busted out laughing.

  “Hey, I’ve been in the Louisiana Tech locker room with Phil and all those boys,” I told him. “Excuse me, I’ve been in the locker room with Phil and all those men. I weigh one hundred and thirty-five pounds. I love the game, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not stupid. I might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I’m not the dullest one, either. I love football, but I’m not getting on the field with those men.”

  What I didn’t tell my coach was that I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to college. I wasn’t sure that four more years of school was the right thing for me. I’d had enough of going to class five days a week. Some parents get all bent out of shape because their kids don’t want to go to college. Look, college isn’t for everyone. I tried college ten times and never liked it. To me, college is an endurance test. You put up with four or five years of crap just for someone to hand you a piece of paper that says you have some sense.

  Hey, news flash for all you people: I got sense without the paper! And I didn’t have to endure four or five years of crap for someone to tell me I’m smart!

  During the second half of my senior year of high school, we moved to Gonzales, Louisiana, because Daddy took a job there. I graduated from East Ascension High School in May 1966 with a bunch of strangers. It was terrible. Moving during my senior year really ruined my high school experience. I didn’t get to graduate with the friends I grew up with, and we moved too late for me to make close friends with kids at my new school.

  Right after high school, I went to work for Daddy as a welder’s apprentice on an oil rig. It was grueling work. I did okay on the smaller rigs, but once we were on the bigger rigs, it was too much for me physically. I wasn’t as strong as Phil and Tommy and didn’t have their stamina. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the offshore drilling business wasn’t for me.

  A coup
le of months after high school ended, Momma informed me I was going to college, whether I wanted to go or not. While we never had much money, every one of my brothers and sisters graduated from college. Most of them even went back and received master’s degrees.

  “No, I don’t want to go to college,” I told Momma. “I don’t want you and Daddy wasting your money.”

  “No, you’re going to college,” she said. “You don’t have a choice.”

  “What don’t you understand?” I asked her. “I’m going to go to college and do nothing but party.”

  Momma smiled at me and said, “Well, have a good one, because you’re going to college.”

  I asked Momma why she wanted to waste her money on sending me to school.

  “Because when you’re out there digging ditches, I don’t want you to say it was Mom and Dad’s fault,” she said. “We’re giving you the opportunity to go to college.”

  Like it or not, it was up to me to make the most of it.

  “I’m like an owl. I don’t give a hoot.”

  The roe deer in Germany aren’t nearly as big as the white-tailed deer we have in the United States, but they’re just as tasty!

  C Is Always the Best Answer

  WHEN I ENROLLED AT Louisiana Tech in the fall of 1967, there were four Robertson brothers attending the same school. Tommy and Phil were playing on the football team, and Harold came there to get a master’s degree after earning a bachelor’s degree at Louisiana State University. It was like a family reunion.

  While my older brothers were at Louisiana Tech to actually get an education, I went there for three quarters and did nothing but party for two of them. Hey, I told Momma that’s what I was going to do, and I’m a man of my word!