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 old that 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 swamps where 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 sauce that 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.