The summer after my junior year in high school, my fishing partner Buddy Henley and I had a fishing trip we still remember to one of our favorite places, Wildcat Lake. That was before the Corps of Engineers raised the water level and the Wildcat Lake I once knew disappeared.
The trip started with a visit to the city of El Dorado’s garbage dump. Why? We were shooting rats. Back when I was in high school, El Dorado just dumped every imaginable thing that came out of a household into a massive pile of garbage. Think of what it might contain, and what it might attract.
Birds flocked there during the day, and after dark, night prowlers were everywhere. Two critters that were more numerous than all the rest: rats and roaches. We were there to shoot rats as a sport. Big-deal trophy hunters may go to Africa to shoot elephants, but country boys from Norphlet would go to the El Dorado garbage dump to shoot rats. We enjoyed it. And those dead rats weren’t wasted since possums, coons, and buzzards readily gobbled them up.
While shooting rats, we talked about a fishing trip to Wildcat. We had heard the old coot who had the boat rental there had raised his price by 50 cents, which made the boat rental $2. On top of that we needed gas money, and we had to buy crickets for bait.
My paper route paid $3.50 a week, but if I went to a movie or bought nearly anything else that $3.50 wouldn’t last. That’s when we started considering ways to save money on the fishing trip. I told Buddy we could save a dollar by digging worms out behind our barn. We had tried that before, and although we caught a few small bream, crickets were really the bait we needed to catch a decent mess of fish.
That was when a roach ran up my foot and under my jeans. With thousands of roaches everywhere, that wasn’t much of a deal. That’s when one of us said, and I can’t remember who, “What about using roaches instead of crickets for bait? We’d save a whole dollar.”
Saving a dollar made even a roach look interesting, but you just don’t say, “Okay, let’s grab up some.” Roaches the size of your thumb running through garbage aren’t something you want to pick up, much less hold and put on a fish hook, but the more we talked about it, the more we wanted to try and see if fish would bite roaches.
After watching roaches by the hundreds cover up some thrown-away bread, we came up with a roach trap—bread in a big box—and the next night we put it out. When we ran out of ammo shooting rats, we dumped all the roaches in the big box into our little cricket box. Wow, it was wall-to-wall big brown roaches.
Well, you just don’t drive up to Wildcat Lake and hop in a boat. Not hardly. You head down Arkansas 82 toward Crossett, and just before you get to the Ouachita River Bridge make a right turn down a dirt road that is usually a string of mud holes. But we were ready for the mud holes.
Earlier in the year my daddy had bought a four-wheel-drive Jeep with a winch on the front. We made it to the boat landing by having to winch out of only two mud holes, and then it was time to haggle with the owner of the rental boats.
We wanted an aluminum boat since we didn’t have a motor and would have to paddle, but he wanted $3 for them, so we had to settle for one of his old beat-up wooden boats, which came with a tin can to dip water. It leaked, but not a lot, so we pushed off.
One of the reasons we really liked to fish Wildcat was that you could start fishing immediately and didn’t need a motor. I sat in the back and paddled with one hand and fished with the other.
We put the cricket box full of roaches on the seat between us, but reaching into a little box full of roaches took some getting used to. While grabbing a fat one to hook as bait, a couple of dozen would try to crawl up your arm. I finally did get that first roach on my hook, and tossed my line, with a little lead shot and a very small cork, beside a big cypress tree.
As I watched that roach flutter as it went under, I wondered if we had made one really stupid mistake. But then zip! My line and cork went under, and in a few seconds I had landed a huge bream. As Buddy pulled in another big bream, we knew those roaches were going to help us catch a lot of fish.
From that moment on it only got better, and our ice chest was full of bream and bass in a couple of hours. After that first tentative roach grab, we didn’t think anything about grabbing up a roach, hooking it on, and
getting roach gunk on our hands.
It was a little before noon
when we pulled up to the dock
with our ice chest full of fish,
and of course several guys were
standing around.
“Hey, boys. Y’all do any good?
Didn’t seem to be bitin’ for us.”
“Yes, sir. We did OK,” I said as
I opened the ice chest full of fish.
That brought about a half dozen men over. One of them asked,
“What’d y’all use for bait?’
“Roaches,” I said. I held up my cricket box, which still contained a lot of live roaches. One man shook his head as he said, “I don’t want to catch fish that bad.”
Email Richard Mason at richard@ gibraltarenergy.com .