Fishing in Simplicity

Fishing in Simplicity Fishing in Simplicity I live in Louisiana, not far from Lake Charles. It's a backwater kind of place surrounded by bayou and meandering molasses streams, water barely moving at all. The streams know they're eventually going to end up lost in the ocean - a drop in the bucket, so to speak - and they're in no hurry to get there. This is as good a place as any to meander, "this" being my hometown - Simplicity, Louisiana. There isn't much to the town. I guess that's why the name

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Fishing in Simplicity



Fishing in Simplicity

I live in Louisiana, not far from Lake Charles.It's a backwater kind of place surrounded by bayou and meandering molasses streams, water barely moving at all.The streams know they're eventually going to end up lost in the ocean - a drop in the bucket,so to speak - and they're in no hurry to get there.This is as good a place as any to meander, "this" being my hometown - Simplicity, Louisiana.There isn't much to the town. I guess that's why the name fits so well.

It was on these Simplicity backwaters when I was eight years oldthat I made what I thought was the most historical of discoveries.Any one of a hundred lazy summer nights,my granddaddy would tell the story of an old house lost in the swampswhere slaves used to hide out before the Civil War.

The old house is gone, but his story has it that the place kind of lights up once in a while,all filled with ghosts and such.The only remnant of the house is a staircase that seems to go nowhere.That's why, I suppose, they call it Nowhere House.

That's why, when I found an old stone staircase that butted up against a sinkhole filled with water that fed Syrup Creek,I thought for sure I had found Nowhere House.My granddaddy just laughed and laughed.He said it was the old Deucane place that washed away in the flood of 63.There's nothing left except for thirteen steps up and a long drop to the water.

Fewer than a thousand people live in Simplicity,and most of them work for DeWilde's Feed and Seed or they don't work at all.DeWilde's does about everything: it's a flour mill where grain is ground,and they even have a shed out back where cayenne pepper is made into a hot saucethat would leave blisters on the sun.

In front of the flour mill and lumberyard is the big store where you can buy anything and everything:a quart of fresh milk, barbecue sausages, persimmons, live crawdads, and even fishing tackle and lures.

It was the fishing tackle that drew me to DeWilde's.When I was nine, I didn't have two nickels to rub together,but that never stopped me from wishing up and down the fishing aisles.

Early spring of my tenth birthday,DeWilde's decorated the main window on the big front-porch side of the store with a fishing pole and all the rigging.It wasn't one of those long cane poles like my granddaddy used- it was a spinning reel with a pole made of fiberglass.

I wanted that pole in the worst of ways.Early in the morning before the sun heated everything beyond intolerable,I stood beside that window and stared.I don't know how many times I found myself standing there staringwhen I heard the school bell ring on the other side of town.I was late so many times that the principal, Mr. Dusard,taped a piece of paper with my name on it to the chair outside his office.

Now, I loved to fish - there was nothing better - but I didn't have a fancy rig.I only had a length of fishing line with a bobber and a barbless hook tied to the end.I always kept the line rolled up in my pocketbecause I just never knew when a fishing opportunity was going to happen.

Sometimes opportunity does knock, and when it does,you'd better open the door fast before it runs away.On Wednesday, two weeks after Easter, there was a sign at DeWilde's.The sign told of a catfish-catching contest.Not a big deal in Simplicity - we have catfish-catching contests all the time.What made this special was the prize: the pole and reel in the window.

I may have only been ten years old,but I had a better feeling for catfish than any of the adults in town.Even my granddaddy said so, and that was hard for him because he was pretty good in his own right.He was enchanted by the competition himself.

You see, he fished with a big old cane pole and a single line, and that fancy rig would do him real proud.It was my granddaddy who first taught me how to fish, but I kept on learning.That pole was going to be mine, and I told him so.So there ended up being a contest within the contest - me against my granddaddy.But my granddaddy never knew that I had a secret plan.

There were two basic rules:You could only catch one catfish fresh on the day of the contest, and there was a time limit.Since most folks who live here don't have a watch,the contest was ruled to be over half past dark, thirty minutes after sunset, no exceptions.In other words, if you were fishing and it got dark and all,you'd better hightail it to DeWilde's with whatever you had caught.

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