"Can't Win For Losin'"

One of the cruelest things anyone can do is to give a lollipop to a child, but tell him he can’t lick it. In fact, a bank recently ran an ad campaign on TV in which bicycles, ice cream, toy trucks and even a pony are given to children, but the kiddies are told they’re not allowed to enjoy them. The point the bank and its clever advertising agency are trying to make is that it does no good – and, in fact, is actually worse – to give people something they want if they’re not going to be allowed to enjoy it.

A little-known fact is that this ad campaign was based in large part on my two most recently planned Arkansas duck trips.

A good friend of mine has a duck camp in east Arkansas. To say he has a duck camp in east Arkansas doesn’t do it justice. My friend’s camp is east of Stuttgart and west of Marianna, smack dab in the middle of the epicenter of Arkansas duck hunting. His impressive patchwork leasehold includes rice fields and flooded timber on and around East Lake, Big Cypress Creek and Peckerwood Lake.

A few years ago, I received an invitation to spend four days at my friend’s duck camp in early January. By all accounts, the hunting had been stellar prior to my arrival and, not having done any significant duck hunting in the past, I looked as forward to that trip as anything else I can remember in recent years. The experience did not disappoint.

I cannot, in good conscience, call myself a duck hunter, even though I have hunted ducks. Duck hunters are far too dedicated and work far too hard for an occasional and journeyman waterfowler like I to assume their moniker. But that trip turned me into a starry-eyed lover of duck hunting. During my four days in Arkansas, we hunted tupelo gum holes, sunken rice field levee blinds and flooded timber – the works. It was there that I was introduced to legendary Mississippi Flyway duck hunting, the ice-breaking capabilities of a shotgun stock, the whistling wings of a pre-dawn flight of teal, and, fortuitously, the extra-dry gin martini. I have tired of neither of them since.

For the better part of the following year, I eagerly awaited another invitation, but dared not ask for one. Then in September of that year, it came: I’d been slated to arrive in duck camp on January 6 to hunt for four days. During the ensuing three-and-a-half months, I was like an impatient kid waiting for Christmas to come. Until I received a phone call from my friend two days before I was to depart for Arkansas.

“I hate to tell you this, Rog, but the duck hunting here is dead. Everything’s frozen solid and has been for two weeks now. The other day, I drove my four-wheeler all the way across Peckerwood Lake. Anything that’s not frozen, like the rivers and creeks and stuff, is under eight feet of water from the flood. We don’t have any holes anymore and there’s no place to stand. The ducks have all gone to Louisiana. Last weekend, the duck plucker in Stuttgart cleaned twenty-four ducks – the entire weekend. Normally, they clean three hundred-a-day. Sorry, but I’m packing up my dog and my stuff and heading home. Maybe next year.”

I was pretty disappointed but I understood. There’s always next year, I thought. Well, apparently not. Next year was last month and, thanks to Mother Nature once again, I did not get to spend any of it hunting ducks in Arkansas.

Honestly, the thought of another duck trip having to be canceled never crossed my mind. To the extent that such a thought may have crossed my mind, I immediately would have dismissed it and chalked up the 2010 cancellation to a combination of freak weather phenomena.

But sometimes, as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men . . .

This time, a trip didn’t even get scheduled before it was called off. Instead of a phone call, an email announced the bad news. And unbelievably, instead of too much water, now there wasn’t enough water. The creeks and rivers were at their lowest in recent memory. Peckerwood Lake was at a fifty-year low; so low, in fact, that the water was even below the intake valves for the pumps that flood the rice fields. There was literally no water for the ducks. Again my friend was forced to scratch out what little duck hunting he could from sympathetic local farmers and cut his season short. And again, my return to his Arkansas duck blinds and cypress brakes would have to wait.

From solid ice, to too much water, to no water at all, I can’t win for losin’. I’m sure, given favorable conditions, an Arkansas encore is inevitable. But if I call you up to tag along next year and there’s something else you already had on the books for that weekend, don’t cancel your other plans until you hear me honk in your driveway.

I’d hate for you to feel like one of the kids in those commercials.

(c) Roger Guilian 2011