Published: July 03, 2008 08:36 pm            

Fourth of July Reflections

The first thing that pops into my mind when I think of Independence Day and the outdoors at the same time is hot days and warm nights. The second thought is of that outing on Toledo Bend Reservoir in East Texas a long time ago with my best fishing buddies. I know, there should be room in my thoughts for the day when we declared that we would be our own country and rule ourselves. And there is, when I am feeling patriotic.

But today I am thinking about bass fishing with some of my finest friends that I miss terribly. Of the three with me that Fourth of July on the water, one is dead and the other two live too far away to see often enough.

It was a crazy fishing outing on that Fourth. It was hot as expected and getting bass to bite our preferred topwater lures would be asking a lot. But we were introduced that day to the phenomenon of the lake “turning over.” We cast our floating Rapalas and Redfins and Spin-A-Didees into the grassy shallows and lo and behold the bass smashed them; right out there in the blazing sun and right up into mid-day and almost non-stop.

We couldn’t figure it out until we lowered a basket full of the fish for our weekend fish fry deep into the lake and they died instantly. Later we figured out that the oxygenated water had left the depths and forced the fish to the top. This was a major lesson to us young anglers.



Cherished Buddies



That landmark trip calls more than its lesson to my mind. It is a rare angler who doesn’t have one or more “good fishing buddies” as we say. And no price can be put on their worth. Let me tell you about my three best pals in those days when the big lakes were new in Texas and full of hungry bass.

Charles M. E. Lovett Jr. was raised in Gulfport and, like me, found work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Texas. His French name, dark hair and complexion labeled him as a Mississippi Cajun. Charlie taught me how to fish the Tiny Torpedo. He made it skip and spit on the water so that bass would come from the depths to eat it. I eventually put special stronger hooks on mine because the original hooks will often bend on a big bass. I never throw a perch color one or a frog color one that I don’t think of Charlie.

Charlie was a bit older than the other three of us and was what today we would call cool. Not easily rattled, loaded with topwater fishing knowledge and a joy to be around was this super guy who had lost one eye in an accident and never complained about that or anything else. He is responsible for me being a topwater fanatic, so much so that I often will cast floating plugs to the shallows when I know the fish are in deep holes.

Wesley E. Jackson, now deceased, was from a mold now broken. Of Wesley most would say he was a “piece of work.” Coming up in northeast Texas in a family of all girl siblings, I suppose his need to establish himself as distinctly different could have been at the heart of his habit of making things explode. Yes, Wesley loved explosions, from a bass smashing a Skipjack or Redfin to detonations he initiated as an explosives expert in the U. S. Army’s famed 10th Mountain Division before he went to work for U.S.D.A.

As a youngster Wesley liked to make bombs; not little bombs, but big bombs. Today he would be spending a lot of time behind bars for some of his “pranks.” He once placed a pipe bomb loaded with black powder in a culvert and was sitting in the local Dairy Queen a couple miles away having a shake when the cigarette fuse reached the powder. The townspeople all felt and heard the explosion and the Dairy Queen milkshakes were real shakes that day. The County workers probably wondered why they had to replace a culvert and a large chunk of the road. Wesley’s habit sadly but necessarily resulted in destruction.

When plastic shotgun shells replaced paper shells the reloading manuals warned handloaders like Wesley and me that loads must be reduced by about 10 percent. I warned Wesley but he insisted On retaining the same high amounts of gunpowder, just to risk getting blown to high heaven I suppose. His new plastic loads loosened the screws in his shotguns and killed squirrels and doves deader than dead.



Lifelong Friends



Ronny Lee and I were like brothers. He had no brother and both of mine were in another state busy getting a lot smarter than me and doing other things. We met when he was an assistant teller at the local bank, both of us newly married and with new, low paying jobs and both renting the same old house, he and Frances living on one side of the entry hall and Lurey and I on the other.

We had learned that both of us liked hunting, he having followed his dad on quail and squirrel hunts in East Texas and I with a lifetime of small game hunting and a few years seeking the newly arriving deer in East Mississippi. Our many years of hunting and fishing together may have gotten kicked off by the deer I had hanging in the stairwell of the hall when one day he came home from the bank with his suit and tie on. I was skinning the deer inside because I didn’t know what the neighbors would think about me if they saw me butchering in the back yard.

I was lucky enough to have bought a new Model 99 Savage .308 in nearby Tyler for $160 and had collected the buck with it. My salary was a little more than his bank salary at the time. Neither of us would have ever dreamed that he would retire as President of the bank some 40 years later and remain as President of its Board of Directors. He acquired his first million a number of years ago. We remain the closest friends of the four who learned about lakes turning over that day on Toledo Bend. We have hunted and fished a zillion hours together I suppose.

Writing about these guys takes me back to those days that formed who I am as an outdoorsman and I celebrate their lives. Readers with such sporting buddies know exactly what I mean.

        

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