Uncertain Adventures (1976-1980)
October, 4 2014
Today I was playing with my new Lenovo laptop and installing
some RV Navigation software so Sharon and I could more easily find RV resorts
and unique places to visit on our trip South (Snow-Birding) this winter. As I scanned areas around Ft. Worth, Texas
where our first stop is planned, I began looking at what places might be of
interest in the area. My investigation
took me over to Shreveport which you might say loosely was an ‘Old Haunt’.
In late summer 1975, I graduated from the Air Force Flight
School at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Georgia. I was blessed, more like cursed, with an
assignment to be a B-52 Bomber Pilot stationed at Barksdale AFB, Shreveport,
Louisiana. After a quick move and some
time off, I was off on a 6 month assignment in Merced, CA where all B-52
crewmembers learn to fly this monster of a plane.
So in the summer of 1976, I find myself in Shreveport, now a
First Lieutenant and a fresh Co-Pilot on a 6 man crew for Strategic Air Command
(SAC). After 25 years of growing up, school, college, flight school and SAC B-52 training, I was done with preparing for life! This began my first years as an
independent young adult looking for adventure and excitement in a somewhat
sleepy town of Shreveport-Bossier City, Louisiana. Since flying and training in B-52s always
started and ended at Barksdale, there was really no real excitement in flying
for SAC. Add to that, the fact that our
mission was to be a deterrent which meant if we were successful, we would never
fly a REAL mission. Like all other SAC pilots, I successfully performed my job and never did fly a REAL mission for SAC.
All our flights were either training or evaluation missions,
usually 12 hours in the air, covering half of the United States each time, so
not much excitement there. One week out
of the month we spent ‘Sitting on Alert’ which was basically living on the Base
that week with your crew in Flight suits, traveling with your crew whenever
leaving the building and being within 5 minutes of your aircraft and another 5
minutes to become airborne loaded with 300,000 lbs. of Jet fuel and 20,000 lbs.
of Nuclear Bombs. Not what I call
exciting either.
What I did find helpful and exciting was learning to fly my
own plane out of the Shreveport Airport.
Alert crews would leave the Base on Thursday mornings with 72 hours of
crew rest. That meant, I could do
anything and go anywhere within 4 hours of the base and not have to be back on
base until Monday. So, I bought an
airplane to expand my 4 hour reach of places I could visit and still be back
within 4-5 hours of an emergency recall.
Around 10 am on Thursday mornings after Alert, you would find me with a
bag of McDonald’s hamburgers sitting in my plane flying somewhere. Many times I would fly home to Minnesota,
landing in Skip’s airstrip next to our farm and spending the weekend home. My first plane took me 6-7 hours plus a fuel
stop to get home, so I was pushing the 4 hour recall limit quite a bit. I asked Mom & Dad for a loan so I could
upgrade to a faster plane. My second
plane was a 1965 Mooney Ranger with retractable landing gear and 180 hp. engine
that could get me home in just over 4 hours non-stop! This became the first of several Mooney’s I
owned and flew for the next 20 years.
But, getting back to Shreveport and my ‘Old Haunts’. Talking with pilots at the airport, I was
told about an abandoned airport on Caddo Lake, 30 miles Northwest of
Shreveport. As I got to know this
airstrip, it became a favorite place to take Dates (i.e. young ladies I wanted to
impress). This old airstrip, next to
Caddo Lake, which happens to be one of the largest natural fresh water lakes in
the southern United States, had a Great Catfish Restaurant just across the road
and on the lake. I would pick a nice
night and generally a good Moon to fly out there for dinner. Normally, I would fly into this 2000 ft.
strip during daylight because it was not lit and over half the runway was cut
out of the trees which loomed 60 to 100 feet high on each side of the runway
and leaving only about 30 yards of actual landing space within the trees.
We would park the plane in the grassy wide parking area at
the end of the runway next to the abandoned Hotel that sat on the airport. From there, my date and I would walk across
the road and have a wonderful Catfish dinner that the South is so well known
for. Now for the exciting part! It would be dark by now and the moon up so we
could still see the outline of the trees and black runway surface as it ran
between the trees bordering the strip.
Using all the runway, I would roll down the runway and about halfway
down the runway lift off. But I needed
to be 100 feet in the air by the time I reached the end of the runway and where
the big trees reclaimed their territory.
Holding the plane just off the surface of the runway my landing lights
continued to light my path while I kept centered between the trees looming on both
sides. My passenger at this point, was
pretty much focused on the shadows of the dark trees above and on all three
sides of her vision.
As we approached the end of the runway (and Trees), I now
had the speed to quickly climb straight up and over the end trees while staying
centered over the runway which I could no longer reference with my lights once
the nose of the plane came up. In an
exhilarating pull-up and 2 – 3 seconds where all was dark because the landing
lights no longer fell on anything but the sky and the trees kept us in their
shadows, we would break out into the beautiful moonlight and gorgeous lake
falling off our wing tip as I bank up and over the trees toward the lake and
our return home to Shreveport. Moonlight danced off the big black lake and in the distance we could see the city lights of Shreveport lighting up the sky and showing us the way home.
Needless to say, it was always a dinner date to remember and
I will never forget the thrill of taking off at night from this quaint little
airstrip that always served up excitement and the best Catfish in Louisiana.
What was also interesting about this airport and always part
of the experience, was the old hotel that resided on this airstrip. Abandoned, but not badly vandalized and
somewhat intact, we would walk through the hotel and look around. It had about 20 rooms, two stories and out
back was what must have been a scene for many great pool parties. The pool area was big for a small hotel and
looked to be one of those high class resort pools with travertine tiles that helped
you picture celebrity type parties on summer afternoons and evenings. The inside of the hotel still had evidence of high quality
wood paneling and a lobby you might see in a fancy city hotel.
On the wall, and what I remember the most,
was a picture. It was an aerial
photograph of the Hotel and airstrip when it was obviously at its prime. High class Beech Staggerwings
parked in the grass along the runway and people were walking about enjoying a lazy summer afternoon
along the lake and pool. I loved that
picture and always pointed it out to my guest as it clearly showed that this
broken down hotel and airport was once something pretty special for its
visitors.
So, today, I am scanning my map program and the Shreveport
area and I am immediately reminded of Caddo Lake and that airport &
restaurant I enjoyed visiting during my stay in Shreveport. With the help of Google, Google Maps and Bing
Maps, I found my ‘Old Haunt’ from almost 40 years ago now! Turns out my story above isn’t nearly as
interesting as the history of Beer Smith’s Fly 'N Fish Resort located in
Uncertain, TX. Beer Smith was a football
player in high school and his tall husky body and long thin neck reminded you
of a Beer Bottle and thus his Nickname was ‘Beer Bottle’ and later shortened to
‘Beer’.
After several hours of searching and piecing together
comments on the web, I found an article from D Magazine by Rod Davis, February
1992. He quotes:
The late W.L. "Beer" Smith, sort
of the Donald Trump of the area, owned and operated the famous Fly ’N Fish
lodge in a big field across the street from what is now Bayou Landing, a mildly
genteel seafood restaurant owned by the estate of business magnate Sammy Vaughn
III. Vaughn was killed in a freakish 1989 crash as his company plane took off
from the new Uncertain airfield out by the Cypress Estates cutoff.
In its heyday in the ’50s, Fly ’N Fish was
a gathering place not unlike Landy’s at Jim-mie Walker’s restaurant way down on
the Gulf Coast. You could fly in, or drive, and stay at the lodge, and then you
could fish for bass or hunt for ducks and generally have the kind of lost
weekend people in Texas don’t have anymore, certainly not at the Fly ’N Fish,
which recently burned down.
I have attached the Rod Davis article as I was fascinated by
his story of the area written 20 years ago, but catching the flavor of the
community and folklore of this less than typical backwater Texarkana town. The history of Uncertain (no one knew whether
it was in Texas or Louisiana including the Surveyors who labeled the community
as ‘Uncertain’. Beer Smith later
incorporated the town in 1961 because the County was Dry (no liquor) and he needed
a Liquor License for his Resort!)
Well, I don’t want to steal the whole story from Rod Davis,
but I do think the author does a great job telling his story of his visit to
Uncertain, Texas on Caddo Lake.
I believe I will try to visit Uncertain if we get in the
area and take a ride on the last known wood fired Paddlewheel Steamship in the
World that still runs on Caddo Lake.
Enjoy the read…
UNCERTAIN TIMES
Stressed out? In need of
solitude? Escape for the weekend to a place in East Texas where everything is
more certain than you might think.
BY ROD
DAVISFROM D MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 1992
You
have to like a swamp-country roadhouse where you can jump right into happy hour
bonding. In this case the tail end of some sharing between a big ol’ boy with
wrists the size of your neck and a grizzled graybeard on the adjacent stool.
"I can weld anything from a broken heart to the crack of dawn," the
big guy declares. His friend nods, or perhaps teeters, in affirmation. In an
instant, you revise your ambivalent expectations of a weekend in Uncertain,
Texas. Too bad you’re laughing. Which, fortunately, gives you another reason to
like Uncertain. "Bones" Brown, the guy with the wrists, doesn’t kill
you on the spot, as might happen in, say, Pasadena or Fort Worth. Instead, he
accepts your quick explanation that your mirth was an involuntary outburst of
admiration at the best job assessment you’ve heard in your life. Except that
you didn’t actually say "job assessment." You said, "That’s damn
poetic coming from a welder."
Is this
undiscovered rustic bohemia or what? Against all odds, "Bones" smiles
at being recognized for his sensitive side. He also notices you’re wearing the
same kind of denim work shirt and jeans as he is. He says, "You look like
you could be a welder, too. Are you a welder?"
To
which you say, "No, I’m a writer." He looks at you over the lip of
his beer bottle. You add, with just a hint of suicidal competitiveness, "I
sorta weld words, I guess." A half-second of hell ensues. Then
"Bones" laughs. All of a sudden you’re one of the boys. Donna
wriggles up to the bar from the stack of Red Baron pizza boxes back at the
microwave and, leaning across the counter, asks if you want another beer. You
really, really do.
And
then, just as you relax, truly liking-no, loving-your first foray into
Uncertain society, the stubbled-face in the camouflage hat at the table behind
you leans over to his long-haired day-shift buddy. "Just kill him,"
he rasps, holding his finger to the voice box in his larynx. You have no idea
what that means, but it seems to bear a serious intent.
Donna
brings you another beer-a dollar a draw; we don’t run no stinking tabs at The
New Rocket Club-as your enthusiasm for the place wanes slightly. The poetry
kind of evaporated. For company, you turn to the juke box. but the eclecticism
of the selections-Hank Williams Jr. to Elton John to Taylor Dayne-disturbs you
in a way you couldn’t possibly explain, even to "Bones."
You
study the jar of pickled eggs in front of you and begin to have second
thoughts. Exactly what are you doing in a swamp-country
roadhouse bar in deep East Texas? Must have been that damned Oliver Stone
movie: No. notthat damned Oliver Stone movie, the one before it-The
Doors. In "Roadhouse Blues," Jim Morrison sings: "I woke
up this morning and I got myself a beer/The future’s uncertain and the end is
always near."
So I
woke up in Dallas and got myself a cup of coffee and drove dead east for three
hours to the Louisiana border at Caddo Lake because I’m a guy very interested in
the future. Or is it the end? Whatever. Anyway, Uncertain, pop. 167. sounded
like the place to be. Or not to be. You get the picture.
ONE
THING FOR SURE-IF THE FUTURE IS UNCER-tain, buy stock in headstones. For an
alleged weekend getaway, this little spit of bayou paradise comes on like a
mecca for voluntary euthanasia. Except you don’t have to kill yourself; the
town is so dead it can nail you through osmosis. If it does, ask to be buried
near the Caddo Lake Church- nondenominational, of course-at the edge of town.
The sign out front says, "Thanks Be Unto God For His Unspeakable
Gift." The funeral services have got to be theological dynamite.
But
wait. There’s a funny thing about small towns, even those with half-hearted
aspirations of tourism. They’re kind of like catalogs from Victoria’s
Secret-far stranger, kinkier and more exciting than they look. Not that anyone
in Uncertain looks like anyone in Victoria’s Secret, or, in all probability,
knows what Victoria’s Secret is. Or cares. Uncertain has plenty of secrets all
its own.
The
most important as I arrived on a crisp winter afternoon, when the mosquitoes
had migrated to Houston for a few weeks, seemed to be: "Who’s that guy
dressed like ’Bones’ Brown?" What I wanted to know was who werethey? What
kind of people picked up and moved to a place so dense with cypress, moss and
snakes it might as well have been in Louisiana? But I was in Texas; I expected
better of these folk. And yet I knew I was broaching difficult emotional
terrain, zooming into town with my German sedan and Cuban merengue cassettes,
getting ready to probe the innermost psyche of a covey of Cajun ringers. So I
stopped at the tourist information center.
Or so
the sign said out front of The Fish Hook, the only liquor store for miles
around and thus a sort of communications center. It’s conveniently located at
the intersection of FM 2198 and Cypress Road, in the thick of the metropolitan
core. To the immediate left is the Motor Supply Warehouse, the town’s major
employer not counting the huge, underground Thiokol Longhorn Army Ammunition
plant in neighboring Karnack.
I could
see The Fish Hook was a happening place-anyone from the mayor to
"Popsicle," the friendly cleanup man from Bayou Landing Restaurant,
might run into each other. Not that you’d run into the mayor that often, since
he doesn’t live there and only drops by for occasional city council meetings in
the front office of the pre-fab volunteer fire department headquarters.
I know
because I tried to find His Honor to ask him the question I now felt obligated
to seek through unofficial channels. The Fish Hook’s owner, G.D. Gibson, a
retired schoolteacher and proud, though financially depleted, father of both an
SMU and a University of North Texas graduate, looked like he’d do. I said, "Do
you have any Jack Daniels?" But that was just a reporter’s trick question
I use a lot. In fact, I was aiming to pry out of him the biggest secret around:
How a George Jones and Patsy Cline kind of town wound up with a name from a
song by the Doors.
This really
marked the beginning of my stay, for the simple query drew me into a world of
increasingly vague answers and disarmingly concrete people. They pretty much
don’t care whether you come or go, but if you stay and don’t put on any airs,
they’ll slowly make you start to understand why what looks like a cypress swamp
is merely an illusion. It’s really an oasis. If Texas is a haven from the
United States and the Piney Woods are a haven from Texas, Uncertain is a refuge
unto itself.
If only
the residents could figure out how their hamlet, so to speak, got its name.
Uncertainites live in appalling etymological ignorance. Or did, until I
arrived. Like Diogenes in search of the truth, I roamed from Crip’s Camp to the
Dallas Caddo Club to the Big Pines Lodge to the Light-House grocery and beauty
salon-which isn’t far. But I stopped for lunch at Terry and Jackie Weeks’ Shady
Glade Restaurant, Motel & Marina. Easily distracted, I also had several
cups of coffee and listened to the regulars try to make sense of why Clint
Black married Lisa Hartman.
lt
isn’t like people around here are rubes. Big, really big celebrities like
Jan-Michael Vincent, Jack Elam. Ned Beatty and Y.A. Tittle have been in and out
of town. A former Playmate was even here for a major theatrical role in the
critically acclaimed soft-porn scuba classic Picasso Trigger, which
some view as an artistic precursor to A Fish Culled Wanda. Altogether,
more than a dozen films, including a few from Disney studios, have used Caddo
swamps around Uncertain for a backdrop. Why? Why not? A swamp is a swamp on
celluloid.
So
people in Uncertain know plenty about the rich and famous. It’s just that local
history thing. Had it not been for G. D. Gibson’s willingness to pause during
the brisk after-work trade to make some phone calls on my behalf, 1 might never
have solved the mystery. Nor would I, as Diogenes, have cast long-overdue
illumination upon the darkness of the town’s murky paternity;
Myth
#1: "Uncertain" was temporarily penciled in on a government
application for incorporation and got made permanent by simple-minded state
bureaucrats. People who believe the Warren Commission generally find this
plausible. It has just enough crazy believability to suspend common sense.
Myth
#2: Roads in and out of town were so bad you didn’t know if you’d ever get out
once you got in.
Myth
#3: Nobody was really sure if the town could get incorporated
back in ’61 or ’62 or ’64 or whenever. The name was a simple expression of
social realism.
Myth
#4: Uncertain is uncertain because "Beer" Smith was damn sure what he
was doing. Actually, this is the real truth.
The
late W.L. "Beer" Smith, sort of the Donald Trump of the area, owned
and operated the famous Fly ’N Fish lodge in a big field across the street from
what is now Bayou Landing, a mildly genteel seafood restaurant owned by the
estate of business magnate Sammy Vaughn III. Vaughn was killed in a freakish
1989 crash as his company plane took off from the new Uncertain airfield out by
the Cypress Estates cutoff.
In its
heyday in the ’50s, Fly ’N Fish was a gathering place not unlike Landy’s at
Jim-mie Walker’s restaurant way down on the Gulf Coast. You could fly in, or
drive, and stay at the lodge, and then you could fish for bass or hunt for
ducks and generally have the kind of lost weekend people in Texas don’t have
anymore, certainly not at the Fly ’N Fish, which recently burned down.
Despite
Smith’s innkeeping success, he had a big problem. Harrison County was dry. Most
of the visitors who flew and fished were men, and men are generally unable to
have a good tune when they go back to nature unless they can take part in the
ancient ritual of getting plastered every night. Wildman, Schmildman. What does
Robert Bly know? He’s a Yankee, for God’s sake.
Smith
figured the best way to be a good host and augment the local economy was to get
wet. He laid out a plan incorporating a town with just enough people to vote in
a liquor referendum. He called his creation Uncertain. It wasn’t an accident,
nor was it a whim. Not only did Uncertain have a Sar-trean cachet-or "ring
about it," as they say this side of Paris (France)-it was drenched in
tradition. Nervous steamboat pilots tracing the Red River up through the dicey
Caddo bayous had been calling the place names since the 1840s. They tied up at
"Uncertain" for the night before going on to Jefferson, at that time
a bustling river-port center.
The
water traffic ended about 1874 when the federal government lowered the level of
Caddo Lake. After that the big boats couldn’t draw enough water for passage.
The "Uncertain" landing sank into Conradian obscurity with the frogs.
You’d
think most everyone in town would be as familiar with this simple civic
genealogy as they are with snakebite remedies and cabin fever. But the only
ones who really know the tale are those bred into it: people like
"Beer’s" daughters "Pud" and Dottie, who. like other
members of the extended Smith clan, pretty much constitute the ruling elite of
the town, or at least the family with the oddest nicknames. "Beer,"
by the way. doesn’t refer to drinking habits but to the height of the late
patriarch. He was so tall he reminded people of the long necks served in bars.
I have no idea what "Pud" (rhymes with "hood") stands
for-some things are best left in the dark of polite ignorance.
I do
know that Crip’s Camp is named for the late "Crip" Haddock, who, in
fact, was crippled and apparently not sensitive about it. "Crip" died
in a duck-hunting accident several years back. His body was found in the take
clutching that of a black, teen-age companion with whom he had apparently gone
out for the day and who, it would seem, drowned trying to save Crip’s life.
Uncertain,
not to say Gothic, mortality pervades the town like early morning fog. Not long
before 1 arrived, the elderly Hilda York Walker, daughter of a former area
physician, was found floating in the bayou by fishermen. Her local boyfriend
was arrested as a murder suspect and put in jail over in Marshall, the county
seat. The local buzz was he was guilty, but, as you might expect. no one was
certain.
Foul
play, too, hangs in the often sponge-like air. Local history is replete with
outlaws, thieves, gamblers, bootleggers, speakeasies and a kind of general
feeling that anything can and does happen in dark bayou mazes. Robert Potter,
first secretary of the Texas Navy, pioneered swamp noir last
century. He was shot to death by political enemies-in those days the Texas Navy
was no plum job like it is today-while trying to swim to a cypress brake near
his home at what, lest we forget, is still known as Potter’s Point.
But as
best I could tell. the major crime in the area at the moment, other than the
possible murder of Hilda York Walker, is limited to the ongoing theft of the
green-and-white city limit signs, which get sawed off and toted away at the
rate of about a half-dozen a year. You can see why. What teen-ager’s bedroom,
duck hunter’s den or philosophy professor’s office would be complete without
the very definition of postmodern Zen?
Once I
had got all that settled. I was ready to eat, a practice that more or less
formed the core of my socializing in Uncertain. That’s how I met Ardell and
Bobbie Sweatman, retirees from Longview who now live along one of the bayou
roads that in the last decade have become filled with hundreds of similar folk.
Ardell and Bobbie now spend their days fishing and puttering in their back
yard, feeding the raccoons and trying to live by the motto over their boat
shed: "Les Le Bonne Temps Rolle." On summer nights, though, they have
to turn on their air conditioners- not so much for the cooling but to keep out
the noise from the road and lake traffic. Over the last 10 years, word of the
good life around Uncertain has spread, not just to Dallas, its major patron,
but also to Shreveport and Texarkana and the greater ArkLaTex co-prosperity
sphere. If only "Beer" Smith could see what takeout liquor hath
wrought!
If only
"Beer" Smith could show me where to cat! I’d been to Shady Glade and
Bayou Landing-both excellent-but I’d heard there was still better. By better I
mean improved variations on the basic East Texas food group: deep-fried.
Catfish, bread, alligator, frog legs, shrimp, rabbit. Eat enough of this stuff
and whatever else in your life is uncertain, your cholesterol level won’t be.
But if your tastes run in the deep Tat direction-and you know they do-Uncertain
is gourmet heaven.
The
ranger at Caddo Lake State Park said the locals favored the catfish at Big
Pines Lodge, a rustic bam of a place along Cypress Bayou. She was right. The
catfish was downright succulent-and I say that about damn few bottom-feeders.
Moreover, the beer was cold, the hush puppies spicy. But what I liked most
about Big Pines was the gun shop behind the cash register.
This
can be explained. For a start, it’s East Texas. Here, as with God, all things
are possible, even a culinary fusion of the Second Amendment. Perhaps of more
relevance is the owner, George Williamson, an ex-cop from Austin. A
restaurant/gun store just combines his lifelong interests. A lot of cops, whose
patrol cars frequently grace the parking area, apparently share George’s
passions. Makes sense to me. A busy gendarme just doesn’t find that many places
to get fresh channel cat and a sale-priced .357.
George
was pretty smart, if you think about it. Big Pines gets nice word-of-mouth on a
number of levels. And once the customers come in. they can fill even more of
their one-stop shopping needs: mosquito repellent, candy, machetes, motor oil,
dominoes. . .It’s like they say-in the Uncertain business world, you keep your
options open.
My
option now was to leave. I’d done all I could for these people, and if I didn’t
go soon, they would start to realize it. Or I’d get sick. "This lake gets
in your blood," Terry Weeks had sighed one pensive morning at the Shady
Glade. I’m sure he didn’l mean it as a health precaution, but I took it as
such.
Or I
might get trapped.
Glenn
Kempf, a stocky, big-knuckled man who looks like actor Ed Harris might have if
he’d grown up in Longview and worked in the oil patch, got stuck in the bayou
in 1966. He and his wife, Bobbie, bought Crip’s Camp and have run it ever
since. Sometimes, though. Glenn looks out past the floating john-boat docks and
his collection of converted housetrailers and reflects. He asks himself the big
Life Questions. His answer isn’t very big, but 1 kind of like it. "You can
do just about anything you want to make a living, so you might as well do
something you like. That’s why I’m here,"
All I
can add is this: You can go just about any place you want to get away from the
city, so you might as well go somewhere you can get good catfish, clean sheets
and a room without a phone or TV.
