After a month of chasing walleyes on the Ouachita River, I was happy to join a good friend for some crappie fishing.
Jess "The Undertaker" Essex had just the place for us to go, a remote water in southeast Arkansas known as Whiskey Lake.
"Imagine my chagrin when I discovered it was full of water," Essex said.
Essex, proprietor of Essex Funeral Home in DeWitt, met my daughter Hannah and me for lunch at The Bullpen, a popular DeWitt eatery that is worth the drive for its chicken salad croissant. They changed the croissant style since last summer, and it's even better than before.
When Essex goes afield, it's near certain that he will experience an equipment crisis. The latest incident occurred during a duck hunt in January when he buried his school bus camper to the axles in mud at Upper Vallier in Bayou Meto WMA. The rescue effort maimed his bumper.
As we followed him to Whiskey Lake, I watched the homemade stem that held his starboard trailer light collapse and descend to the road. When we reached the lake, nothing remained of it.
We piled ourselves and our gear into his boat and meandered through the narrow boat lanes to Essex's favorite crappie hole. It's an open expanse of water in front of a duck blind where the water is only about 3-feet-deep.
"The rule out here, Miss Hannah, is if a boat sinks, just stand up," Essex said.
Not far from the launch area, Essex urged Hannah to watch for Bob and Betty, a pair of bald eagles that nest over the lake. Bob circled over the nest while Betty tended her clutch. We only saw her head, and she tracked us with vigilant disdain.
Bob was mighty irritated with a turkey vulture that circled too close. At the perigee of the vulture's orbit, Bob tilted his head and opened his beak in warning. Hannah badly wanted to see Bob throw down with that buzzard.
"You'll get in big trouble if you harm a buzzard," I said, "but Bob is our national symbol, so he's exempt from game laws. He doesn't even need a fishing license."
Hannah thought that was funny.
"Know how you can spot an immature bald eagle?" I asked.
Essex eyed me suspiciously.
"They wear that white cap backwards, and then pull their feathers almost down to their knees."
Although crappie flipped all around us, they ignored our minnows and jigs, so we passed the time chatting.
Naval history has been a passion of mine since I toured the battleship USS Alabama at age 5. Essex served from 1972-75 on the USS Sea Devil, a nuclear attack submarine, so I am always eager to hear his stories.
"Did you serve?" Essex asked.
"I did not," I replied. "The Navy recruited me pretty hard for the submarine service when I was in high school and college, which I thought was odd because I was inept at advanced math. I think they only wanted me because of my height."
"Because you could fit in the boat!" Essex said with a laugh.
"Had to be," I said. "I've had this lifelong love affair with battleships, and I was in high school when President Reagan reactivated the Iowa-class ships. Man, I was ready to enlist. If I could have been guaranteed an assignment on a battleship, I would have done it, no doubt about it."
Nuclear attack subs spent their time following Russian subs around, and following them close.
"We followed them for weeks, sometimes months," Essex said. "We didn't worry about them detecting us because their subs were so noisy. Our skippers got to know their skippers' habits and tendencies probably better than they knew themselves."
During one deployment in the Mediterranean, the Sea Devil's provisions got so low the crew was put on half rations supplemented by vitamin pills.
"I've got a picture of a buddy holding his knife and fork in front of a plate, and the only thing on the plate is a vitamin pill," Essex said. "We all lost about 25 pounds before we got back to [base at] Norfolk."
Crappie occasionally punctuated the conversation. Essex caught a small crappie, and I caught a keeper that shook off as I lifted it into the boat. The only fish I landed was a needle-nose gar.
As we left, Essex was still sore about losing his trailer light.
"I dodged the pieces all the way out here," I said. "We can collect them up on the way back and glue them back together."
Essex laughed. It was more of a grunt. He sounded kind of annoyed.
Sports on 03/09/2017