thenorphletpaperboy: A really different fishing trip

thenorphletpaperboy: A really different fishing trip:                  A REALLY DIFFERENT FISHING TRIP             When I was in high school, I hunted and fished every time I had a ...

A really different fishing trip

                 A REALLY DIFFERENT FISHING TRIP

            When I was in high school, I hunted and fished every time I had a chance. The summer after my Junior Year, my fishing partner and I had a fishing trip we still remember. It was to one of our favorite fishing places, Wildcat Lake. That was before the Corp raised the water level and the Wildcat Lake I once knew disappeared. My fishing partner that summer was Buddy Henley.  However, that trip really started with a trip to the City of El Dorado’s garbage dump. I know that sounds a little strange that a garbage dump would have anything to do with a fishing trip, and what on earth were two teen age boys doing at the City garbage dump?

            Well, that’s an easy answer. We were shooting rats. Okay, now before you really wonder why shooting rats could have anything to do with a fishing trip, let me explain. Back when I was in high school the City of El Dorado just dumped every imaginable thing that came out of a household into a massive pile of garbage. Just let your imagination run, and think of what it might contain and what it might attract. Birds flocked there during the day, and at after dark the night prowlers were everywhere. However, there were two critters that were more numerous than all the rest; rats and roaches. Yes, 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. Well, we did enjoy it. Of course, all those dead rats weren’t wasted, since possums, coons, and buzzards readily gobbled them up.

            But back to the fishing trip. While we were shooting rats, we talked about a fishing trip to Wildcat, and we had heard the old coot who had the boat rental had gone up 50 cents, which made the boat rental $2.00, and on top of that we needed gas money, and of course we had to buy crickets for bait. Well, 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 the whole week. That’s when we started talking about ways to save money on the fishing trip, and since we were determined to fish in Wildcat Lake no matter what, it didn’t leave many items we could save on. I told Buddy we could save a dollar by digging worms out behind our barn, but we had tried that, 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 straight up under my jeans. Of course with thousands 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.” Yeah, saving a dollar made even a dirty roach look interesting, but you just don’t say, “Okay, let’s grab up some.” Roaches the size of your thumb running through garbage really 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. That’s when we decided to try out roaches as fish bait, and after watching roaches by the hundreds cover up some stale, throwaway bread, we came up with a roach trap, which was just some light bread in a box, and the next night we put it out, and when we ran out of ammo shooting rats, we took the cricket box over and dumped all the roaches in the big box into the 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 highway 82 toward Crossett and just before you get to the Ouachita River Bridge, you make a right turn down a dirt road that is usually just 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 wench on the front. We made it to the boat landing by only having to wench out of two mud holes, and then it was time to haggle with the old coot who owned the rental boats. Of course we wanted an aluminum boat, since we didn’t have a motor and would have to paddle, but he wanted three dollar 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. Yeah, it leaked, but not a lot, so we pushed off, and I sat in the back of the board and paddled with one hand and fished with the other. One of the reasons we really liked to fish Wildcat was that you could start fishing immediately and didn’t need a motor.

            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. Of course, while you were grabbing a fat one to hook as bait, a couple of dozen would try to crawl up your arm. Well, I finally did get that first roach on my hook, and tossed my line, with a little lead shot and a very small cork, right 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. Wow, 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 hand.

“Hey, Buddy; don’t pick your nose or lick your fingers.” I yelled as I laughed.

            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 okay,” I said as I opened the ice chest full of fish.

            That brought about a half dozen men over, and as they looked at our ice chest full of fish, 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, and one men shook his head as he said, ‘“I don’t want to catch fish that bad.”

           

thenorphletpaperboy: Pluses and Minuses from 2019

thenorphletpaperboy: Pluses and Minuses from 2019:                                              Pluses and Minuses from 2019 Plus: The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: Thanks to the vision...

Pluses and Minuses from 2019

                                             Pluses and Minuses from 2019

Plus: The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: Thanks to the vision of our publisher, Walter Hussman, the new digital paper not only guarantees the paper’s future, but makes it a better paper with worldwide potential.

Minus: The Arkansas Highway Department’s failure to control roadside litter. When I was a Commissioner on the P. C. & E. Commission, we encouraged the State Highway Commission to make littering a $1000 fine and asked that a call number be placed on the signs. The Highway Department did and received hundreds of calls, but not one person ever paid the $1000 fine. (When I last checked, the calls were north of 600 without any fines.)

Plus: The Arkansas Highway Department: State Highway 167 from El Dorado to Little Rock is slowly becoming a four lane roadway…it’s about time.

Minus: The Arkansas Highway Department: State Highway 167 from El Dorado to Little Rock has mowed mediums without trees. “Hey guys, just quit moving the center ten yards of those mediums, and Mother Nature will do the rest.”

 Minus: The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission: Where are the missing quail? According to the Commission, they have just evaporated, but will return if their habit is improved…along with the Easter Bunny? Come on folks! If we restock quail in a perfect habitat, we are just feeding feral hogs, coons, possums, and fire ants. Restore our ecosystem with apex predators to control the out-of-control scavenger animals.

Plus: Arkansas’s Ecosystem: I have had reported probable sightings of three wolves in the Ozark-Buffalo River Area, and additional numerous cougar sighting. Note: all of the cougars are without collars; no escaped pets, as per the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. A North American Cougar expert contacted me and said the cougars are coming down the Arkansas River to our state because of the abundant of whitetail deer and feral hogs. As an additional benefit these apex predators will help control Deer Wasting Disease. Alaska has a huge population of deer, elk, and moose, but they don’t have DWD. Why? The numerous wolves, cougars, and grizzles in Alaska eliminate the sickly animals, and control the spread of the disease.

Plus: The U. S. Wildlife Service has recommend several locations in the Ozarks and Ouachita Mountains as prime areas to re-stock the red wolf. (Get your Bring Back the Wolf bumper sticker…250 are already on Arkie cars.)

Minus: The misguided folks who chop off their crepe myrtle trees. Crepe myrtles are trees not bushes and chopping them off will slowly kill them. And stop raking your yard leaves or you will starve it to death. Mulch the leaves, but rake the pine straw.

Plus: Governor Asa Hutchison: Praise the Lord! Our governor has seen the light, and the light is to turn off the lights of the hog farm on the Buffalo Nation River’s Watershed. Another plus is the Committee charged to protect the watershed from future hog farms.

Plus: Governor Asa Hutchison: Praise the Lord! Our governor has seen the light again, and placed a woman on the Game and Fish Commission.

Minus: Governor Asa Hutchison: The Highway Commission is still a male only board. “Come on Governor. Gals really do drive cars and trucks.”

Plus: U of A; The new Coach of the Hogs, Sam Pittman: He’s the coach we need, so get ready for some positive fall surprises. I’ve been a Hog Fan from as long as I can remember, and when Saint Frank finally turned the program around, he made me a believer that the Hogs could prevail over anyone. One day we’ll sit in the stands and watch our Hogs run up the score on Alabama.

Plus: The SEC; Alabama was beaten twice this year, so take hope. They aren’t invincible.

Minus: The U of A: The head football coach will make more money per year than the President of the University and the President of the United States combined.

Minus: The U of A still doesn’t have an Exhibit Hall for the 7,000,000 historical items stored in an Agri Building Warehouse, but they did scrape up enough cash, north of $150,000,000, to build some end zone seats, which have been turning up empty, and private fat-cat boxes.

 Plus: U of A’s Women’s Cross Country Team is number one in the nation, and Hog Basketball is on a rebound.

 Plus: A number of states and towns have started to ban Styrofoam, plastic straws, and plastic one use bags.



Minus: Arkansas isn’t one of them.



Plus: 50 more coal burning electrical generating plants have closed since Trump became President; including one of the largest “Big Brown” in Texas, and several coal companies have gone bankrupt. Thank you Mr. President!



Minus: None of them are in Arkansas.



Plus: Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old global warming activist from Sweden was named Time Magazine Person of the Year. She also won the #2019in5words Challenge. “Our house is on fire!”

Plus: Trump didn’t win either one.

Minus: The Sorry State of National Politics: Actually, the only bright spot I see is, I don’t think it can get any worse. Online posts make me want to throw up! And not because they are telling me about some horrible fact about certain political parties, it’s because of the out and out lies that flood the social media.

Plus: Mike Bloomberg for President: Yes, the former Republican, Independent, and now a Democrat seems to be the only person in the race who is actually qualified to be president.

Minus: Denying Global Warming: Science has just been tossed out the window, and politicians and individuals are lining up against or for global warming without even considering scientific studies. Australia has just recorded the hottest days ever recorded and Alaska has seen days of 40 below temps drop by double digits. It seem political dogma and greed are more important than our grandchildren’s future. How sad!  

Plus: The Economy and Stock Market: They are doing great! The Bureau of Labor Statistics says Trump has created 800,000 jobs and Obama 3,000,000 jobs. If the market keeps rising, I may be able to retire at 90.

Plus: Downtown El Dorado: When the new remodeling is finished, El Dorado will have 100% ground floor occupancy around its courthouse square, along with a majority of second floor space and basements occupied…and there is a list of tenants waiting for any retail space to become vacant. As added features: Goat Electric Scooters are on the streets, and there’s ice skating at MAD.

Minus: Downtown El Dorado: The Mayor is the Grinch Who Sold Christmas from our downtown retail stores and restaurants by firing and not replacing the downtown parking attendant.

Plus: Environmental grocery shopping: We went to Walmart, bought $72 worth of assorted groceries without using one plastic sack.

Minus: Non-environmental grocery shopping: Following us out the door was a lady with two buggies of groceries. There were so many plastic sacks that you couldn’t see anything she bought.

But don’t be depressed by looking back at 2019. I can see progress on a lot of the minus categories, and I believe our state will continue to improve in 2020. So hang in there and don’t give up hope.

Christmas in Egypt

               Christmas in Egypt 

When our kids were 14 and 16 we wanted to give then an educational winter break, so we decided to spend the kid’s Christmas vacation in Egypt.

As we made our plans, we talked to an Egyptian Doctor who was working in El Dorado, and Dr. Robbie was extremely helpful. His family still lived in Cairo and his brother-in-law was an attorney admitted to practice before the Egyptian Supreme Court.

Of course, in order to really see the antiquities of ancient Egypt a trip up the Nile to Aswan and then down the river to Luxor was a must.  No tours for us. We had lived Libya so we knew the ropes.

On December 22 we left El Dorado in a small plane I had rented because of icy roads. We took off for Little Rock with sleet pounding the windshield, and a white-knuckle hour later, we landed in Little Rock to catch our flight to New York. Then after an overnight flight to Cairo, we stepped out into warm sunshine.

At customs we were in a long line when a well-dressed Egyptian approached us and asked, “Are you the Mason Family?” “Yes,” I said. He was Dr. Robbie’s brother-in-law, and he said, “Just follow me.” And we walked around the long custom’s line as he waved to the customs agent.

Our time in Cairo was high-lighted by a day spent in the Egyptian National Museums where we marveled over the bust of Queen Nefertiti. Dr. Robbie’s Brother-in-law took us to see the pyramids where he requested I wear a suit and tie. Yes, we looked as if we were going to a state funeral, but just a word from him to any of the workers and guides was enough to move us into any place we wanted to see. A trip to the old bazaar and a few days of very different food was giving our kids a terrific educational experience, but they seemed to relish the adventure.

The next day was Christmas Day, and it was on to Aswan to stay in the Cataract Hotel where Agatha Christi wrote Murder on the Nile, and after settling in, we headed to the Nile River where, after a little haggling, I rented a felucca, a small sail-motor boat the Egyptian use on the river to take small trips across the river to where the ancient tombs and temples are located. The river was clear and the boat ride was fun. As the boat docked in front of a very long set of steps leading up to several ancient tombs, Lara, our artist child, who had seen hundreds of picture of Egyptian art, jumped off the front of the boat and, as our mouths dropped open, ran up the hundreds of steps to the tomb. She was excited. We came back to the hotel and had Christmas dinner in the Agatha Christi Dining Room where the kids kept asking, “What are we eating?”

“Camel” I said. The kids thought I was kidding, but I wasn’t

A couple of days later we headed down the Nile to ancient capital of Egypt, Luxor and the temples of Karnack and across the river to the Valley of the Kings. We would need transportation to see all the sights, and Dr. Robbie had told up to bring some small U. S. dollars because dollars were eagerly sought. With that in mind I started checking cabs at the airport until I found a cab driver who spoke English.

“How much to take our family around Luxor and to the Valley of the Kings?----in American dollars?”

A few minutes and $20 dollars later, we had a cab and driver for a day. That turned out to be the best $20 I have spent in a long time.  His first suggestion was:

“We should stay on this side of the river in the morning and go to Karnack Temples because the tour buses go over to the Valley of the Kings in the morning and come back at noon.”

He was right, and that next day we had the ancient temple city of Karnack almost to ourselves. I can still visualize the long row of granite lions leading into the temple area. Then at noon, we headed for the Valley of the Kings, when we came to a small village.

“This is a tomb robber’s village,” our driver said. He said for centuries the villagers had made a living robbing the ancient Egyptian tombs.

Minutes later, a man ran up to the car and waved the head of an Egyptian statue. It was about five inches tall, and I thought it looked real, but our driver said, “It’s a fake. It has been buried to look old.”  I told the man I wasn’t interested, and after he tossed out a several hundred dollar figure, I was ready just trying to get rid of him, and I waved a twenty dollar bill.

“I’ll give you twenty dollar American,” I said

Well, he acted insulted and said $250 was his bottom price.

I told our driver to go, but the man with the fake head ran along beside the cap until we stopped at an intersection.

“Here,” he said. “For twenty dollars American.”

We drove off with me holding a “fake” head thinking I had just bought a trinket to take home. However, back home a friend, who is an archeologist, took a hard look and nodded, “It’s real.”

Then it was on to The Valley of the Kings, which was the highlight of the trip. We ventured into tomb after tomb. Going into the tomb of King Tutankhamun was breathtaking. Our flashlights turned out to me a valuable addition, since some tombs were lit by young boys with a mirror shining it into a dark tomb.

But the highlight or as Vertis put it the lowlight were the tombs that were not open to viewing. However, our cab driver, took a few dollar bills and …presto; closed tombs were opened for a private tour. Then one of the guards told the cab driver a newly opened tomb could be seen, but we would have crawl into the lower chamber where there were still mummies. We did, for a few more dollars, and when we raised up in the lower chamber it was a sight I haven’t forgotten.

Hundreds of years ago tomb robbers had looted the tomb, and since many ancient mummies were wrapped and put in the tomb with precious jewelry on their bodies, the tomb robbers had ripped off the gauze wrapping and after taking anything of value, had thrown the wrapping and bare skeletons into an adjoin chamber. It was a ghastly sight and that’s when Vertis left, but both kids started taking pictures.

Our kids, who are now middle-age, still talk about that tomb, and so does Vertis, but her comments aren’t exactly fit to print.

The two weeks we spent in Egypt gave our kids a hands-on educational experience that would be hard to duplicate. It was a history lesson, but so much more because of all the interactions with the Egyptian people. Truly a trip of a lifetime.

           

thenorphletpaperboy: Goodbye Houston.....

thenorphletpaperboy: Goodbye Houston.....: Goodbye Houston…New Orleans…Miami The inhabitants of our planet cannot continue along the same path we are now treading. If we do, t...

Goodbye Houston.....

Goodbye Houston…New Orleans…Miami

The inhabitants of our planet cannot continue along the same path we are now treading. If we do, there will be such a reduction in the quality of life for the peoples on Earth that life for huge numbers of the Earth’s population will be at risk, but as the 16 year-old young lady from Sweden, Greta Thunberg said, ”Adults don’t care.” Of course she was right and as one reporter wrote about her address to the United Nations, “She called them a bunch of jerks.” That exactly right and if you’re sitting on your hands doing nothing about global warming, you are at risk of being a jerk! And as Greta said to that bunch of bureaucrats, "People are dying and dying ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth," she said, as she fought back tears. "How dare you!"  

It seem to me, prophesy is being fulfilled, as just in Sweden, over 100,000 schoolchildren have joined her crusade with thousands more school age kids around the world joining every day…..”And a child will lead them.”

It’s hard to separate science from politics, but in spite of what you hear and read, basic science should be a non-political item. Anyone who doubts settled science in place of political rhetoric should rethink their position in the light of the obvious, and climate change caused by global warming is as certain as gravity.

As multiple 500 year storms tear Houston apart, are we seeing one of the countries great cities becoming unlivable? I’ve lost count of how many 500-year-storms the city has suffered through in the past 5 years. How many more will it take before there is a mass exodus? Of course, New Orleans and Miami will also become inhabitable and the Bahamas will be history, and what is even more unthinkable is the worst is yet to come! That’s right, and after another 20 years, when only a few flat earth non-believers are remaining, it will be too late. The atmosphere will be so carbon-dioxide toxic that large areas of the world will suffer from extreme drought while other parts of the globe have constant torrential rain. The remnants of our coastal cities will be under constant flooding and evacuations to the interior of the country will send a torrent of refugees into the center of countries around the world. Venice will only be a memory.

The hottest September on record tells us that global warming is only getting worse; and tornadoes, where they haven’t had them in years, are sweeping the country. But we are not only asleep at the wheel, we are cascading off into the ditch as fast as we can. We pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord stating, “We don’t want to do anything that would harm our economy.”  And then to pile stupidity upon stupidity our government is suing California because its new pollution standards are tougher than the recently drastically reduced Federal Standards. Yes, instead of going forward in trying to combat the inevitable warming of the Earth’s Atmosphere, we are doing everything we can to increase the problem.

The California wildfires have destroyed thousands of houses, and of course a big part of the annual wildfire problem this year is because of record hurricane winds. Just consider 80 mile per hour winds on top of an exceptional dry season and add flames to that. The record hurricane force winds are a direct result of global warming, and the extreme drought in California, which is contributing to the disaster, is also caused by global warming. On the flip side, Colorado and Wyoming set October records for low temperatures, and the recent November cold snap set hundreds of low temperature records nationwide. Huh? Yes, that is exactly what scientists have predicted as side effects of our plant’s warming. We can look forward to a winter where one week we will set a record for the warmest January day on record, and before the month is out, a record low-temperature snowfall will pound us----and it will only get worse.

Yes, our severe weather will only get worse, and what’s even scarier is, the scientists who predicted this global disaster are stating that the situation is deteriorating much faster and with more severe weather than they expected. With that in mind, and considering the past five years of weather events, as soon as 20 years from now, we can expect an exodus of Biblical proportions to begin from coastal cities, and within another 15 years after that these coastal cities will become uninhabitable. Yes, that does sound like a doomsday scenario, but consider, if someone had predicted exactly the weather we have encountered recently, ten years ago, we would have dismissed them as an alarmist.

Of course, while isolated weather events such as flooding, hurricanes, and tornadoes are terrible for the local inhabitants, they really don’t affect the majority of the world’s citizens. However, the overall result of global warming, which is more sinister and is not as noticeable, is the real danger confronting us. The population of the Earth is currently around 7.7 billion people and it is increasing yearly. As it stands right now, just trying to provide food for that many people is taxing the arable land available for food production. If the scientists are right, and as the earth’s temperature increases, the amount of land available for food crop production will dramatically be reduced as droughts eliminate huge swaths of land, and in other areas torrential rains will make food production difficult. The world will face a tremendous shortage of food supplies, and as coastal residents abandon the cities and lands that will be submerged by rising sea levels and record storms, the world will face frantic people by the millions who won’t be able to find food. Chaos will ensue and the world’s civilizations will be reduced to a constant economic war of the haves and haves nots.

Is this the world we want to give our grandchildren? Actually, is this the world we want to give our children? The clock is ticking and every minute wasted in denying global warming will contribute to the impending disaster. 

Of course what we need are more Greta Thunbergs’ who just received a major environmental prize. She turned down the $52,000 prize money with this statement: “The climate movement does not need any more prizes. What we need is for our rulers and politicians to listen to the research,” 

She should have been invited to the White House, but instead our President, who walked right by her and snubbed her at the United Nations, invited a “hero” dog to the White House. It was slightly wounded in the Special Forces attack that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi the ISIS leader. I’m all for hero dogs, but to snub a 16 year-old hero girl, who is trying to do what she can to keep our world a better place in which to live, shows us we have our priorities in the wrong place.

God help us!