One of the first things Bill Smith asked me was, “If you die, do you think you’ll go to heaven?” I told him, “I sure do. Let me tell you what I’ve been living with.” I went into how bad Phil was and how I’d still been a faithful and loving wife to him. Smith asked me if I thought I’d earned my way to heaven, and I told him that I certainly had. Smith asked me if I had peace and hope in my life, and I told him, “Now, that’s the problem.” There was some sort of disconnect because I felt I had earned my way to God, but I didn’t have any hope and didn’t feel any peace.
Smith shared the gospel with me, and I became convinced that I couldn’t be saved on my own good works. I was a good person, but I was a good person without Jesus Christ in my life. That’s not enough. Smith told me that if I wanted to, I could leave the church that day with Jesus Christ in my life. I confessed to Jesus and made him the Lord of my life and was baptized. The best thing Smith told me that day was that when I went home, Phil would still be as drunk as ever and would still act terrible. But Smith told me I would be different because I would have God’s spirit living in me. He told me that when things were bad here on Earth, I just had to think about my next life in heaven and how wonderful it would be. I left his office as a Christian and started developing my own faith.
I went home and tolerated Phil’s behavior because I knew God would help me through it. I was working in the offices at Howard Brothers Discount Stores in West Monroe, and Phil wasn’t doing much of anything besides drinking and staying out all night. I came home from work late one night, and Phil started in on me about running around on him again. He looked at me and said, “I’m sick of you. It was bad enough that I had to live with you before, but now you’re a holy roller.” He also called me a Bible thumper and a goody two-shoes. “You think you’re an angel,” he said. “I want you to get out and take the three boys with you. I want y’all to leave.” He knew he couldn’t separate me from my sons.
I asked Phil, “Are we messing up your bachelor’s life?” He told me yes, and I knew there was nothing else to do but leave. Our little boys were so sad and had tears streaming down their faces. They didn’t want their daddy drunk, but they loved their father. We stayed with Phil’s brother Harold for one night. He told us we could only stay one night because he was afraid of what Phil would do. I never held that against Harold because I didn’t know what Phil would do either.
The boys and I moved into a low-rent apartment, and White’s Ferry Road Church helped me pay the rent and get some furniture. We were apart from Phil for about three months; I was really hiding from him. I put everything in my maiden name, thinking he wouldn’t be able to find us. I went to lunch every day with one of my girlfriends at work, and one day when we came back to the office, we saw Phil’s old, gray truck in the parking lot. Phil’s head was lying on the steering wheel, so I figured he’d driven there, then passed out drunk. I told my friend to go on into the office and watch out the window and if she saw Phil flashing a gun to call the police. “You can’t go out there by yourself,” she told me. “Let’s go in and call the police.” But I didn’t want Phil following me into my office and hurting anybody, so I told her to watch out the window and call the police if anything bad happened.
I walked up to Phil’s truck and opened the door. His face rose up, and there were big tears streaming down his face. I had never seen him cry. The macho man never cried. He looked at me and said, “I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything. I want my family back.” He told me he wouldn’t drink anymore and was done with partying. Of course, I’d heard that many times before. I felt God’s courage inside me and told him, “Phil, you can’t do it by yourself, buddy. You just can’t.” Phil told me he needed help and then asked me where he could find it.
“There’s only one person who can help you,” I told him.
“God?” Phil asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t know how to find Him,” Phil replied.
“I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything. I want my family back.”
As a boy, Phil had gone to church and Sunday school, but he had been away from God for a long time. I told Phil I knew someone he could talk to and to be back at my office at five thirty, when I got off work. I told him I’d lead him to my apartment. When I went back upstairs to my office, I was so happy I sailed up three steps at a time. I called Bill Smith, the preacher, and told him to be at my apartment at five forty-five. He said, “Well, let me check my calendar.”
“What is more important than one lost soul coming back to the Lord?” I asked him. “If you have anything else, you have to cancel it.”
“You know what?” Smith told me. “Nothing is more important than that.”
Smith and his wife, Margaret, met Phil and me at my apartment. The first thing Phil told him was: “I don’t trust you.” Smith told Phil that he could understand why he didn’t trust him. “Considering the people you’ve been running around with, I wouldn’t trust anyone either,” Smith told him. Then Smith held up his Bible and said, “Do you trust this?”
“Yeah, I trust that book, but I’m going to check out everything you say,” Phil said. “I don’t take any man’s word for anything.”
I went into the back room with the boys and Margaret, and Phil and Smith studied the Bible together for several hours. When they were finished, Phil told Smith he was going to check out everything they’d talked about, and they scheduled another meeting for the next night. We let Phil move into our apartment, and the first thing the boys asked him to do was bring back our big TV. The next day, the boys and I left to go to the grocery store. When we returned home, I found a note from Phil, telling us to come to White’s Ferry Road Church. When I walked into the back door of the church, Phil was already in the baptistry. He’s so impatient, he couldn’t wait for me to get there! Smith had taken Phil’s confession and was in the process of baptizing him. I looked down at our boys and they were crying. Alan looked at me and said, “I guess that devil is going to be gone now.” Phil was twenty-eight years old, and our lives were starting over.
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.
SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE
Rule No. 7 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy
Buy a House Near Water (It’s a Lot More Fun)
When I started my Chris
tian 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.
Pa helped me with projects around the place, such as building a boat launch and dock, house repairs, and a multitude of tasks that kept the place going. Both families were bent on making our lives successful. It was Granny who suggested a drop box at the boat launch we built, where customers using it could deposit payment of a small fee. The honor system is still in place—the suggested fee is two dollars—and the boat launch is used daily by those launching their boats onto Cypress Creek and the Ouachita River.
Once I began fishing full-time, it didn’t take long for the business to become successful. Before too long, I was making more money than I did as a teacher. The fishing was profitable from the beginning and grew as I made enough money to buy more nets and trotlines. I caught about sixty thousand pounds of fish—thirty tons—the first year, and that’s about what we averaged annually.
Before too long, I was making more money fishing than I did as a teacher.
&n
bsp; We caught a cascade of catfish, buffalo, gaspergou (freshwater drum), alligator gar, and a number of white perch. The catfish were worth about seventy cents a pound, the buffalo thirty cents, and the market always determined the gar’s price. More gar are caught and sold in Louisiana than any other freshwater fish. Fish brings a higher price during cold weather; in warm weather almost everybody in Louisiana fishes, and the surplus catch goes into the commercial market, driving prices down.
The white perch, or crappie, are game fish and cannot be sold. They are lagniappe and usually ended up on our dinner table. The man we sold our fish to at the market ate only the poorer parts of the fish, the parts he couldn’t sell. But that wasn’t my style. I fed my family the best of my catch and sent the rest to market. My selectivity continues today, as I carefully pick the best of the ducks killed on a hunt, usually teal or wood ducks. If I’m doing all the work, why should someone else enjoy the pick of the litter?
I decided early on that if my boys were going to eat the fish, they were going to help catch them, too. Setting out the nets wasn’t too much of a task for me, but getting the fish from my boat, up the hill, and into my truck took some serious work. When it rained, it was even more arduous because the hillside was slick and muddy. After one catch, I was slipping and sliding all over the hill, struggling to carry a heavy tub to my truck.
When I got to the house, the boys were all there. Kay was getting ready to take the fish to town and sell them. We did this about two or three times a week; it was the only money we made. The boys usually went with her and always looked forward to it. I went in the house and said to them, “Y’all come over here and sit down for a few minutes. I want to explain something to you.
Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander Page 7
