After getting out of the Army in 1963, we moved to Slidell, a little city on the "northshore" of Lake Pontchartrain, across the lake from New Orleans. There I became immersed in playing chess and Fishing in the lake and in the Rigolets. The Rigolets is a narrow mile wide mouth of the lake that spills out into the marsh and Gulf. My buddy Martin Smith and I fished there in a pirogue. Not a good idea.
Friends and Kin:
(Another old rant)
It's Thursday, the day before Good Friday, March 24, 2005
This morning I was reading a bit online about chess champion Bobby Fischer who has been in jail in Japan for six months for violating some passport rules. Seems he played Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia, which violated a US prohibition by the US had against Milosevic's regime, and since has been running from US during which time he was given citizenship by Iceland where he beat Spassky in 1972. Iceland sprung him from jail.
I know a little about chess geniuses. When I got out of the Army in 1963, not being one to just have a dilettante's interest but usually get passionate about my interests, I became a glassy eyed chess enthusiast and got up to be ranked as a class B in the US Chess Federation. I barely remember where to move the Knight these days though. I had moved to Slidell and would have meetings at the White Kitchen, a restaurant on Hwy 90, in downtown when Slidell was a wonderful little out of the way town across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. You wouldn't recognize it now, but then it was a lazy, sweet little city where everyone knew the name of his neighbors kids, and to get to the city you had to drive way around as there were no Interstate highways then.
Anyway, we had tournaments with Chess Clubs in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport. We had a blind guy who would play four or five boards at a time and beat hell out of everybody. There was a guy, Jude Acres, from Baton Rouge, who was Louisiana's Bobby Fischer at the time, and he was, like all of the Chess savants I knew, a little weird. These chess geniuses were tunnel visioned and knew chess but little else, and actually "became" chess. They "were" chess. I had a little taste of this during my euphoric immersion in the game, for I got to "see the board"---it came alive to me with all the intricate, living possibilities, as real as any other part of my life, and I became deadly and so focused it became my very life for nearly a year.
At one tournament, Jude Acres finally was getting out-positioned on the board. While we had chess clocks (when you move you hit the clock to start the time ticking for the other guy to move) we didn’t record the moves at that time and it was way long before any computers or computerized chess. Jude made a very odd croaking sound and suddenly upended the board, scattering the pieces in his opponent's lap and all over the floor. They couldn't then agree on where the pieces had been just before the tumultuous overturning and so Jude was spared the embarrassment of losing his no loss record. He was known to play as many as twelve boards at a time, sometimes blindfolded, beating everyone. These meetings were tense and brutal. There was no drinking, except lots of coffee and smoking cigarettes, with some very strange characters as players. Today, this kind of guy is involved in computer games or programming them, for it is the neatest way to escape from life I know. I also got involved for some years in computer games and would still do so but it is a killer for you just find yourself having wasted hours with no product except having blown all night and much of the morning hours and then are dead tired the next day.
But I gotta tell you, there's no rush like whipping some arrogant asshole who struts in like a sneering gunslinger wearing his guns hung low on his hips and his hat pulled down over his eyes, in a head to head wide open game of kill or be killed.
It was during this time, 1963-65, when I lived in Slidell. My wife Shirley had two daughters by a previous marriage and we had a two year old son John. I had previously moved from Fort Benning, when I got out of the Army as a JAG Captain, to Natchitoches, La., a city fifty miles from my home town in Castor, Louisiana. Johnny Makar, a real maverick from Detroit who moved south with his sharp Yankee accent and succeeded as an opponent to the system but was generally unliked. I stayed for two months before realizing that I would have to outlive the old hierarchy there to get anywhere or become a maverick myself and defy all the standards and institutions of that staid old town to survive or win. I should have known that I was a maverick because of my inability to walk the walk and talk the talk in the Army, and how I won my cases there by defying the rules, but I didn't feel I was ready to just take a stand against convention in that little town.
So I wound up with a feisty old seventy five year old maverick lawyer in Slidell, Sidney Provencal who had gotten into a fistfight with another lawyer on the courthouse square in Covington just a few years before. So I loved Slidell as it was in the sixties. Within a year I was scooped up by a Municipal Bond firm in Metairie, a New Orleans suburb, to travel over Louisiana financing municipal improvements, working with Mayors and engineers building streets, water systems, etc. Meantime, I was in a place I considered to be a fisherman's paradise.
We were minutes from Lake Pontchartrain. My best friend and old college roommate and TKE fraternity brother,, Martin Smith, originally from Boyce, a little town north of Alexandria, was in Slidell. I had told him of the Fritchie law firm needing help when he was clerk for a Shreveport Federal judge, and he moved to Slidell to become part of the silk stocking crowd there. I moved in to become part of the mavericks with Provencal and later to change to the sophisticated Brooks Brothers suited financier. What a change.
Anyway, Smith and I would go fishing in the Rigolets, the narrows where the big Lake Pontchartrain enters the Gulf. (pronounced Rig-a-lees) The area, including the lake, is shaped like a balloon, with the small part you blow on being the Rigolets. A bridge crossed the Rigolets, which perhaps is a mile across, area for car and train traffic. We had no money and no boat, but we scrounged a pirogue as our fishing vessel. A pirogue is a shallow little boat, which design probably came from a hollowed out log. This is the Cajun fishing boat designed for marshes and shallows where you can paddle over very shallow mudflats and pick it up easily, carry it over areas and put it back in. There's only inches of freeboard to keep the water from coming over the sides. Two men can fish in it, sitting or kneeling flat on the bottom.
Having been raised in the country, fishing and hunting in the woods and waters of North Louisiana, I had no fear of anything, and thought if it was fishing it was totally safe, with never a thought of a life preserver which I thought was sissy.
So Smith and I would go fishing in the Rigolets in that pirogue. We would paddle out beneath the bridge and, a six pack of beer each, with our rods and reels and a bucket filled with live shad as bait, and drop our lines over into the deep brine. Sometimes my line would go down a hundred feet before touching bottom. Once I hung a ray that was as big across as our pirogue. We caught shark, big gaff top catfish, flounder, specs, whatever, and had a great time. We never thought about safety.
The Rigolets, at times, has a rip tide that will almost carry you to the wide gulf when it flushes from the lake or sucks you into the lake with the rising tide. We would struggle out there, and tie onto one of the bridge stanchions or, if we were in a shallower area, drop an anchor. On the final trip, our fourth of fifth, there was a riptide and a heavy chop which didn't whitecap but was getting there. We didn't care, we were having fun, and never thought of safety. A big boat came by raising a huge wake that set us bobbing like a cork, and water started coming over the edge. I think the reality of our getting dead hit us simultaneously. I remember my own fear as the first thought of getting drowned hit me. I still feel it. There we were, almost a half mile from land on both sides, with the riptide growing and the chop getting higher. We paddled like madmen until we finally hit the beach and we got out and sat on the dry land, saying nothing, realizing finally that we had really been typical rednecks who you know are rednecks when they say, just before dying, "hey ya'll, watch this!"
That is the story of fishing in the Rigolets. Later, I would rent a bigger skiff, suitable for fishing out there, and then later got a real boat with motor and all and was fixed but that was the closest I ever came to meeting my maker in a pirogue.
LDSledge
Rantor
Hi LD!
Great story! I lived in Slidell in 1965 with my 1st husband and infant daughter. We used to fish in a pirogue on Lake Ponchartrain, usually under the 5-mile bridge. One time I will never forget was when we started fishing and the fish were really biting. As soon as we put the bait on the hook and cast into the water we would get a bite. My husband would pull one in, and then I would. This went on continuously, and finally our arms were so tired from pulling in the fish that we took a break. I looked at the bottom of the pirogue and it was just full of fish. We were ankle deep in fish, and the little boat was very low on the water.
At first, we had been so excited about catching so many fish that we just pulled them off the hook, put on a new bait, and threw it back in the water. We weren't paying any attention to how many we had. We were caught up in the thrill of pulling in fish after fish. We had never experienced anything like it, and we had been fishing the bayous for months.
When we finally stopped, the pirogue was so full of fish that it was starting to sink. Thank goodness we were only about 1/4 mile from shore. We rowed like crazy and managed to get to the boat ramp just before the water came in over the sides.
I will never forget that day, and I can still remember how sore my arms were from the non-stop pulling and casting. We were giving fish away to everyone we knew for at least a week!
Thank you for writing your story that brought these memories back to me!
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Posted by: Boat Ladder | December 22, 2009 at 01:59 AM