"Hello, bet you can't catch me!"

[Note from Christopher: Almost everyone loves to eat shrimp. But somebody has to catch them first… and catching shrimp is hard work. I grew up watching shrimp boats work the bays and shallow offshore waters along the Upper Texas Gulf Coast. I always wanted to go out on one of those boats. Then I finally realized the easiest way to do that was to get a magazine to pay me for a story on shrimpers and shrimping. In 2003, Texas Co-op Power Magazine agreed to do just that. So I spent several days with shrimper Mark Gilbert on Galveston Bay. This is the article I wrote. My thanks to the magazine for letting me re-publish it here.]

 
An hour before dawn, the time of deepest silence, when all the world still seems to be dreaming, Mark Gilbert is down in his engine room among the grease with a wrench adjusting valves, checking gears, wiring, oil. The yellow glow of his work light creeps up the ladder, falls over the moist deck, casts the winch and ropes looped over pin rails in flickering shadow.

Overhead, beyond the upstretched outriggers, low coastal clouds chase a glossy half-moon past stars over the Bolivar Peninsula. A warm southeast breeze carries the salty tang of sea, of surrounding bay and fertile marsh, of rank organic decay procreating new life.

With a quick jab, Gilbert punches the starter button on the wall and the V-6 diesel growls, grumbles, awakens. The deck of the Stingaree 2 vibrates, the low rumble rolls over the dark water, and Gilbert comes up the ladder wiping his hands on a towel, an expression of satisfaction on his face. Time to undo the mooring lines. Time to hit the bay.

Time to chase those shrimp.

***

Gilbert has been pursuing mudbugs since he was a boy. His father was a shrimper, and so was his grandfather. In the pilot house, he lights a cigarette and sips black coffee, reflects for a moment on his own life at age 42. No benefits, no retirement, imports pushing down shrimp prices, fuel costs rising, eternal boat maintenance, state regs in chronic flux, hard labor, long hours, blazing summer heat, starving to death in wintertime. And unpredictable shrimp.

Otherwise, it’s a cushy occupation.

Gilbert laughs loudly, a machine gun discharge, a cheerful affirmation of life’s small ironies. Then, as if summing up, adds, “Only you don’t have to kiss nobody’s ass like on a 9-to-5 job.”

He hits the throttle, turns the wheel. The 40-foot trawler advances slowly along the narrow canal past darkened dockside homes on pilings and covered boat stalls, past the Stingaree Marina with its boat ramps and bait shed—all silent, not even the first gull’s cry of a new day yet—then crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, heading north through a slender cut past Goat Island into open water, the shallow East Bay.

The bay, with an average depth of only two to six feet, is part of greater Galveston Bay, the northernmost in a series of five major bay systems along the 400-mile arc of Texas Gulf coastline. The bays, along with their barrier islands and marshes and wetlands, form complex estuarine systems where fresh river water meets sea water. The commingling creates a salinity gradient influenced by upland droughts and floods, and by how much precious river water is removed upstream by people: city dwellers, farmers, industries. That, in turn, determines the quality and quantity of thousands of species of marine life that breed and grow in the fecund estuaries. Too little fresh water flowing in and the bay ecosystems will collapse. If that happens, then no more shrimp, no oysters, no crabs, no more… well, the intricate web of nature is woven tight, and the consequences much larger than just the bays.

Gilbert nudges the wheel, gazes eastward. The sky is breaking open with a rosy flush of dawn over the marsh. The first black-headed laughing gulls whip past, then several brown pelicans gliding in close formation over the surface, enormous bills thrust forward. Pesticides almost drove these regal birds to recent extinction. Now on the rebound, they are still listed as threatened.

The wind has shifted and picks up, the waves on the bay are becoming choppy, churning the water, a condition Gilbert prefers. “I like it rough and muddy,” he observes. “When the water’s clear, shrimp can see the net coming. They scoot away.”

He falls silent and slows the boat, one eye glued to the depthfinder perched on the dash next to his GPS. Moments later, he explains his worry. The bottom in here is especially shallow since last winter when a drilling company pushed two rigs several miles up East Bay to Frozen Point.

“They needed eight feet of draft but had three feet of water. They plowed up the bottom. Destroyed two acres of oyster beds, left a hill of mud down each side of a false channel. And never came back to clean it up. Seems like there’d be a law.”

Did they find oil?

“Naw, they didn’t.” He shrugs, in no mood now for laughter, and guns the throttle, rotating the wheel to bear west toward Hannas Reef and Port Bolivar, about six miles away, where East Bay opens into the main bay.

“Let’s go for deeper water.”

Gilbert is a short, sturdy man with a beard permanently trimmed in a three-day growth, his head hair cut to a gray burr. His skin is sun-burnished, wind-whipped, his keen eyes crinkled from the relentless bright light. His gimmee cap reads: Commercial Fisherman, Endangered Species. He does not think his own son, Patrick, will become a shrimper. Or his daughter, Claudia.

Nor does he want them to.

***

Half an hour later, Gilbert steps onto the back deck and lowers the portside outrigger. At its tip hangs the try net, a small net used for locating shrimp during 10-minute test drags (or “tries”). He puts out the try net, and when he hauls it back in shortly, out spill a dozen shrimp. They flip and vault over the deck, tiny legs treading air along the transparent shells. Several are sizable. Gilbert quickly winches out the main net (the otter trawl), moving from transom to cathead to pin rail, tying and untying ropes, lazy line and cables, stepping in a familiar dance with the gear.

Woven of green nylon cord with a 1 3/8 inch mesh, the otter trawl is 90 feet long and 38 feet wide at the bottom, 32 feet wide on top. The net precisely conforms to state regulations limiting mesh and net size for the bay for this time of year. In the byzantine universe of commercial fishing regulations, if this was September instead of June the net could be larger, but so must the mesh. That is, if he’s shrimping on his bay license instead of his bait license.

Gilbert watches the long net trail backward in the frothy wake, then finally drops the boards, two large slabs of steel shaped for their namesake. He shoves the throttle forward, the engine roars and vibrates, the prop boils up mud as the doors veer outward in the water like twin rudders spreading the mouth of the net. A long tickler chain connecting the boards bumps over the bottom mud where shrimp are burrowed down, causing them to leap upward for the net to scoop them inside.

The drag will last about 45 minutes, so Gilbert returns to the cabin and settles into the pilot’s chair for breakfast, a pint of chocolate milk and a packet of small sugar donuts. Not exactly health food, but easy to prepare. Meanwhile, he steers the boat along a serpentine route and listens to chatter on the marine band radio.

Working a boat alone, as Gilbert does, is unusual. It’s dangerous—fall overboard and it’s a long swim or a slow drowning—but deckhands are famously unreliable. They bum cigarettes and food, tend to drink and show up hung over, or simply don’t show.

“Plus I’m a cheap SOB,” he adds with a chortle. “I like to keep what I make.”

Even with a deckhand, the long hours on a boat on open water are isolating. The marine channel stays busy. If other shrimpers are coming up empty, they readily share the news; if they’re hitting shrimp heavy, they probably won’t mention it. Not even the most sociable want to share paydirt with a crowd.

After scarfing the final donut, Gilbert talks briefly on the radio, sympathizing with a fellow shrimper a mile away. He takes a call on his cell phone from his wife, Chris. The Gilberts recently leased the North End Bait Camp at Rollover Pass. Chris manages it and needs more live bait shrimp ASAP; he says he’s working on it. Hanging up, he describes the bait camp as an effort to diversify the family economy.

“I’m getting old, pardner. I can’t see working this boat when I’m sixty. I need to think ahead.”

The Gilberts also bought a home with an attached duplex apartment they rent short-term to sportsfishermen. A little here, a little there, he reasons, and it adds up. A shrimper covering his bills learns to scrabble.

He stubs out a cigarette, says, “Let’s haul in that net. I’d sure like to catch some and go in. Man, I’m still tired from yesterday.”

***

By noon, Gilbert is finishing his fifth drag and the trawler is broiling beneath a white-hot sun in a pale, blanched sky. The heat seems unyielding. The boat rocks, the engine drones, the pungent reek of fish and sour mud and diesel hangs over the slick deck. Even the shallow bay water registers 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

A sweating Gilbert winches in the trawl and raises the bag, loosens the bulging pocket over a tank. The catch falls with a whoosh and a splash. The pocket is retied, the net winched back out, the doors plunge beneath the surface for another drag.

Wiping his face with a forearm, Gilbert squints upward hoping for a cloud. Nada. He dips into the drop tank and lays part of the catch on the culling board: mullet, shad, silver ribbon fish with sharp teeth, small jellyfish (“sea wasps”), croaker, cigar minnows, crabs, robinfish, a mean-looking sting ray… and shrimp.

He slides the by-catch offboard into the bay, a thick flock of gulls screech and spar for anything dazed enough to float. Sleek black cormorants dive for what sinks, pelicans loaf for what’s overlooked, and magnificent pterodactyl-like frigatebirds circle high above, primed to dive-bomb unsuspecting gulls and pirate away a prize. For foraging birds, a shrimp trawler is a water-borne cafeteria.

The shrimp, unlike the by-catch, go into a second tank, then a third and a fourth, if necessary. Tank pumps circulate bay water in an effort to keep them alive. Live bait shrimp bring in twice the money of dead shrimp.

Gilbert keeps careful watch on his course while culling, steering the boat from a second wheel by the tanks, avoiding the crab traps marked with small white buoys dotting the bay. “A crab trap tearing up the net can sure ruin a day,” he allows.

He culls quickly, expertly, while commenting on the varieties of shrimp and their behavior, and the man-made laws governing shrimpers. None of it is simple.

Take the matter of spawning. Shrimp grow and thrive in the estuarine bays and marshes but they aren’t born there. Brown shrimp (Penaeus aztecus) spawn offshore in the Gulf in about 400 feet of water during winter months, while white shrimp (Penaeus setiferus) spawn in about 35 feet of Gulf water in the spring. (A third variety, the pink shrimp, isn’t found much this far north; it prefers the saltier water found in Texas bays further south.)

Once spawned, the larvae of all shrimp work their way back into the bays and marshes to grow. They are omnivores, feeding on smaller organisms living among the rich sediments and nutrients of the estuary. The brown shrimp then migrate en masse back into the Gulf during spring and summer, the whites wait until several months later. These differing spawning and migratory patterns result in complicated—and increasingly restrictive—regulations on when and how shrimpers work, aimed in part to ensure annual spawns aren’t disrupted.

Following the regulatory scheme, Texas bay shrimpers landed about 9.4 million pounds of shrimp in 2001. Almost half of that came from Galveston Bay, the most productive estuary in Texas and easily one of the most productive in the nation. Gilbert’s boat was one of 132 shrimp boats working Galveston Bay on May 15 this year, the opening day of spring bay season; a total of 182 boats were working other Texas bays.

On the other hand, Texas Parks and Wildlife figures show about 1,200 bay licenses currently in effect, and another 1,200 bait licenses. With a bait license there’s no closed season but the bag limits are much smaller and half the shrimp must be kept alive. Almost all bay shrimpers carry both licenses so they can work year round, though winter takes are small.

The numbers indicate most bay shrimpers, unlike Gilbert, are part-timers holding other full-time jobs. A license is tied to the boat, not the shrimper, and the state is issuing no new ones. In fact, the state is buying back bay licenses—25 percent of them have been “retired” since 1995—to increase each remaining shrimper’s slice of the total pie. At least theoretically.

Gilbert shrugs, grins, offers his machine gun laugh. In his view, there’s still too many bay boats. And the shrimp are being depleted. Though it isn’t the shrimpers’ fault, he says. Estuary degradation caused by loss of wetlands to developers—the Houston Metroplex now overruns the northern and western stretches of Galveston Bay—as well as urban runoff, industrial pollution, and agribusiness pesticides and herbicides all conspire to hurt the shrimp.

And what hurts the shrimp hurts the shrimpers.

Still, unregulated global trade is putting the biggest economic hurt on Texas shrimpers, including offshore Gulf shrimpers who annually land three times the catch of bay boats. Imported pond-raised shrimp from cheap labor markets in Asia and South America are, says one Parks and Wildlife official, “killing our shrimpers.” The imports don’t taste as good as wild shrimp, and some have been found laced with animal antibiotics detrimental to human consumption, but about 85 percent of the shrimp consumed in the U.S. is imported. Some argue it all should be imported. Texas shrimpers feel beleaguered from every side.

“Personally, I think they’ll close the bays to commercial shrimping within ten years,” Gilbert observes. “They’re already trying. They’ll make sportsfishermen go to artificial bait. Right now, if you aren’t selling live bait, you can’t make a living. Price on food shrimp barely covers your operating costs.”

***

By 2 p.m., the trawl net on the Stingaree 2 is out of the water, pursuant to state regulations for bay shrimpers from May 15 to July 15. Gilbert is beat. The wind has died, the sun is a searing torch, the pilot house has become a sauna. Gilbert is cruising homeward to off-load the day’s catch: six gallons of live shrimp, about 40 pounds of dead. It’s not even close to a limit.

“An average day,” he observes, “which ain’t good. Haven’t had a really good day in a while. We’ve had three, four bad years in a row.”

Once docked, he’ll do some maintenance, repair a clutch seal. He lights a cigarette, leans back in the pilot’s chair—the captain’s chair, really—and pops the tab on a cold soda. He closes one eye, calculating.

“Add and subtract it all,” he finally announces, “I’m making minimum wage.”

He wags his head and lets go. The laughter rockets through the small cabin: a working man’s commentary on the absurdity of it all—chasing those shrimp, trying to catch them, what happens when you do, or don’t, in a world mostly beyond your control.

*****

Sunset on Galveston Bay.

The Graceful Ghost navigates cypresses on Caddo Lake. (Photo by Randy Mallory)

[Note from Christopher: I think Caddo Lake in northeast Texas is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. And strangely enough, not that many people know about it. A few years ago, they also didn’t know about an unusual boat plying the lake’s water, a 19th century-style paddlewheel steamboat. So I decided to write about that boat and the lake, too. This article ran in Texas Co-op Power Magazine in 2000. If you look at the next article in this Magazine section of the website, you’ll find a short accompanying sidebar I wrote about a very different kind of boat also working Caddo Lake, Billy Carter’s Go-Devil.]

 
As Mark Twain tells it in his Life on the Mississippi, when he was a boy there was but one ambition among his friends, to become a steamboatman. “So by and by,” he wrote, “I ran away.”

A century later, a young woman in Tyler shared a similar dream and the same impulse to give it substance. Lexie Palmore, then in her early twenties and in possession of a master’s degree in art, had never been the sort to vie for a slot as a Tyler Rose Festival debutante. Lexie was sure the world was larger than East Texas, and she loved boats. So by and by, she headed for the Mississippi.

As with Twain, who cribbed a lowly position in steerage on his first effort, Lexie’s career began modestly. She worked as a maid in housekeeping on the Delta Queen, a majestic riverboat 285 feet long. And like Twain, no matter how mundane her official duties, she kept ending up in the pilothouse pelting the helmsman with questions, just itching to get her hands on the wheel.

Twain left the boats and went on to write about his stint as a river pilot, but Lexie—now Lexie Palmore McMillen—really never quit. Three decades later, she holds more inland waterways pilot’s and master’s licenses than any woman in the country. She has piloted the Delta Queen and the even larger (at 385 feet) Mississippi Queen. And she is the captain of her own paddlewheel steamboat.

Granted, at 50 feet in length, the Graceful Ghost may seem like a minnow against the whale-sized proportions of the great Mississippi riverboats. But then, Caddo Lake isn’t exactly the Great Father of Waters, either.

***

Caddo Lake is breathtaking all the same, a magnificent body of water in its own insular and mysterious way. Straddling the Texas-Louisiana line east of Jefferson, in the outlaw borderlands once claimed by both Spanish and French, it is a waterborne forest of towering bald cypress draped in Spanish moss, an interlocked labyrinth of shallow open lakes and narrow connecting boat roads, of bayous and shadowed backwaters and silent oxbows within the cypress brakes, of slender channels snaking through vast aquatic fields of floating green pads starred by delicate white and yellow blooms: water lilies, spatterdock, and the glorious yonqupin, otherwise known as the American lotus.

Depending on how (and where) you see it, Caddo Lake is either river or delta swamp or open lake. Its size is in dispute because no one is certain just where it should begin upstream along its feeder bayous, Big Cypress and Black Cypress and Jeem’s Bayou among others. But most agree that measuring has to stop at the dam below Mooringsport, Louisiana. So it’s safe to say that Caddo Lake is somewhere between 25,000 and 33,000 acres in size.

It’s also safe to say where the lake got its name. Two confederations of Native American tribes living in this region were known as the Caddo Nation. Peaceful hunters and fishermen, farmers and traders, the Caddos virtually disappeared under the onslaught of European settlers, but not before passing along their word for friends, teychas. The Spaniards pronounced it tejas. In good time, it became the name Texas. And the Caddos left their own name to the lake.

But try to assert how Caddo Lake got its start and you’re in for another dispute. The Caddos were content with a legend. A great chief had a vision in which the lands were flooded, so he moved his people upland to an area now occupied by Caddo Lake State Park. And the flood did come, as predicted. A good story, but not science. So some old-timers claim the lake was formed by the great earthquakes of 1811-1812 which centered on New Madrid, Missouri, to the north. But most agree the lake resulted from the Great Raft of the Red River, a natural log jam 150 miles long near present day Shreveport. The jam backed up water into the Big Cypress watershed, forming Caddo Lake.

Whatever the cause, the result was the largest “natural” lake in Texas, a place of almost unsurpassable beauty. It has had more than one incarnation. When the Red River Raft was cleared in the late 1800s, Caddo virtually disappeared. It became swamp. Then oilmen discovered the big Louisiana field in the early 1900s and lobbied for a dam so they could float their drilling equipment in. The dam was built, the lake reappeared. Its various parts reveal by name its colorful history of settlers, outlaws, bootleggers, and poachers: Hog Wallow, Whangdoodle Pass, Jack Daddy Pocket, Government Ditch.

Nowadays, fishermen come casting the waters, and duck hunters appear during winter. And eco-tourists come year-round to luxuriate in the wildlife inhabiting the dappled surface and the moist air hovering above it. They find beaver, otter, blue herons, great egrets, alligators, and a galaxy of roaring frogs.

They also find the Graceful Ghost, which Lexie Palmore McMillen, along with her husband Jim McMillen, operate as an excursion boat based on Taylor Island in the little town of Uncertain.

***

Sitting near the boat dock, beneath a canopy of shade trees, Lexie tells how she got from here. She is a tall, fair-skinned woman with short blonde hair going gray. She dresses comfortably and walks with an outdoorsman’s carriage but wears a cell phone on her belt. Calls come in regularly from folks asking about the 90-minute excursions onto the lake or arranging a charter, and she’s ready. The boat operates late March through November, except for Sundays, church day, and the sunset excursion is a favorite.

She speaks softly, going back to her time on the Delta Queen, when she asked to steer the boat “just to say I had”. Fortunately, they let her. “And I did it more and more,” she recollects. “Well, it seemed like all their pilots were getting older, ready to retire, and a company guy suggested I go to the National River Academy in Helena, Arkansas, to learn piloting. So I did.”

Lexie spent two years at the school, alternating classes with work on the steamboats, and she earned a mate’s license. “The mate’s second in command, in charge of the deck crew, maintenance and handling lines,” she explains. “It’s not hard work, but I didn’t like it much. I wanted to be a pilot.” Mark Twain had once expressed the same yearning when he wrote, “Pilot was the grandest position of all.”

So it was back to school, along with two years of pilot training aboard a boat. “Then you can take the test. You have to know the rules of the road and navigation. You have to draw the river by memory.” That means knowing each underwater and highwire crossing, mile markers, bridges, locks and dams. “And you have to know each of them to the tenth of the mile.”

Lexie pauses to let the utter magnitude of that requirement sink in, then says, “I eventually got a first class license for piloting 1,750 miles of the Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee rivers.”

She strokes her orange tabby, Puddy, and glances over at her husband Jim, who is working on the wood-fired boiler of the boat. He is from Wyoming, not a place known for birthing mariners. But he was a Navy officer in Vietnam, and after earning a university degree in English he moved to Clear Lake on the Texas coast. He developed his shipwright skills and taught at a maritime school in Houston, eventually qualifying for a Coast Guard license as a Master of Steam and Motor Vessels. By the time Lexie and he met, she had acquired her own Unlimited Inland Master’s License.

You might say the two of them know boats. And you might say they are eminently qualified to navigate a waterway. A good thing, too, as Caddo Lake is no ordinary waterway.

“It can be challenging,” Lexie admits, “because of all the trees out there you have to slither through. Plus the stumps. And the wind blowing.” The double-decker Graceful Ghost has a flat bottom so requires a lot of ballast for steady steerage. They use concrete blocks and lead, and three 55-gallon drums of water for the boiler. The boiler itself weighs 1,000 pounds. The ride is solid.

And she knows the lake. Though it changes day to day, year to year, she sees those changes as they occur. Lexie says she has read Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, in which he wrote, “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book.”

***

Lexie, like Jim, is a quiet person. It takes a while to learn that she eventually left the Mississippi steamboats to pursue her love for painting. She’d tried that once before, right out of college. “I’d kind of hung out my shingle for art work,” she says with a small smile, “but it seemed like I was doing a lot of sign painting.” Only this time she persisted. Based in Tyler, she also spent time scuba diving and doing volunteer work on the schooner Elissa docked in Galveston. And she devoted time to helping archeologists try to locate the sunken remains of the Mittie Stephens, a riverboat that went down in Caddo Lake in 1869 with a hundred people aboard.

The Mittie Stephens was one of hundreds of steam-powered riverboats that plied the waters of Caddo Lake from the Red River all the way up to Jefferson, then the second largest port in Texas, during the 1800s. The cotton plantations and demand for goods kept the steamers busy until the double whammy of the Red River Raft destruction and the Confederate defeat ended plantation culture in northeast Texas. The lake became calmer, and the Mittie Stephens slowly settled into the lake bed.

Lexie and the archeologists never found the remains, but the search moved her to nearby Jefferson during the mid-1980s, where she painted and occasionally piloted one of the local excursion riverboats based on Big Cypress Bayou. That’s where she would eventually meet Jim, who also was piloting.

“I had a little steam launch back then,” Lexie recalls. “Twenty-six feet long, propeller driven, named Willie after Steamboat Willie, the Mickey Mouse character.” But she was interested in a larger boat and found a design in a catalog for a traditional 19th century riverboat. “They built a lot of these boats back then and shipped them in pieces to countries in South America where they didn’t have the technology to do it.”

She located a ship’s carpenter, Joe Babcock, downstate near Plantersville. Then she got cold feet. “Because of the money,” she says. “But Joe talked me into it. It took a long time to build, about one and a half years. He did between other jobs and me getting the money to pay.” The initial cost came to about $50,000. “Of course,” she muses, “if I’d have waited a little longer, Jim could’ve built it.”

Still, she had a beautiful riverboat. Fifty feet long and 12 feet wide “over the deck”, with a draw of 20 inches. Two 10-horsepower engines with horizontal pistons 16 inches long were located aft to turn the paddlewheel, with a smokestack behind the pilothouse and a three-chime whistle. “It’s historically accurate,” Lexie says, mama-proud.

She named it the Graceful Ghost after a piano rag she’d heard. The words and music are framed and hang on the main deck. “It’s a real pretty piece,” she adds. “It seems to fit.”

***

There are at most a dozen or so excursion steamboats in the nation. Lexie says the Graceful Ghost is the only one in Texas “as far as we know.” She and Jim brought the boat from Jefferson to Taylor Island on Caddo Lake in 1993 because they loved the place. Also, it seemed the boat fit the lake and there would be people eager to take excursions in it. They were right on both counts. It’s a very quiet ride and a good way to view Caddo.

Unless they’ve been out earlier in the day, they fire up the boiler a couple of hours before an excursion. The engines and boiler are efficient. They burn scrap wood, and an armful powers the steamboat for the hour and a half trip.

Leaving the dock before sunset, the paddlewheel churns water astern and the twin escape pipes rising in back above the top deck whisper and sigh like the breath of a sleeping dragon. On the lower deck, passengers sit or walk about and watch the boat machinery at work. Topside, beneath an awning, cushioned benches face port and starboard for convenient viewing of the passing scenery. Lexie and Jim take turns at the wheel and explain the ecology and history of the lake.

The boat slips from beneath the cypress trees and into a lane between the deep green flowering pads enveloping the surface. A night heron wings overhead, and the lake to either side passes back into cypress brakes drenched in Spanish moss and unseen shores. Crickets and cicadas hum, the chorus of frogs begin their evening song. It is not hard to imagine one is in church, a great natural temple celebrating the sanctity of life.

And so the passengers murmur, or soon fall silent, as the Graceful Ghost quietly glides into the embrace of Caddo Lake, with Captain Lexie Palmore McMillen at the helm. Pilot and navigator, her gaze sweeps the everchanging lake. She reads it like a book.

*****

Caddo Lake.

[Note from Christopher:  Back in 2000, while writing an article for Texas Co-op Power Magazine on Caddo Lake and its Graceful Ghost paddlewheel steamboat, I needed a place to stay. So I was very fortunate to run into Billy and Dottie Carter, a charming couple of East Texans who run Spatterdock Guest Houses there on the lake. Billy has a special boat for taking folks on tours of the Caddo Lake backwaters. So I wrote the following short piece on Billy and his boat as a sidebar to the main steamboat story. In case you missed it, the main story, “The Graceful Ghost of Caddo Lake,” is here in the Magazine section of the website.]

Billy and Dottie Carter.

If you put four accountants and an outdoors guide into a lineup, you’ll have no problem picking out Billy Carter. He’s the one who looks like he doesn’t spend much time indoors. And if steamboats aren’t your thing, then Billy’s Go-Devil might be the ticket.

Billy and his wife, Dottie Carter, run the Spatterdock Guest Houses on Caddo Lake at Uncertain. Dottie, an artist, grew up on the lake, and Billy, 52, once owned a motorcycle shop in Longview. But he’s spent much of his life on Caddo, as well. An old framed Dallas Morning News article framed on the wall shows a photo of him at age 11 headlined, “The youngest fishing guide on Caddo Lake.”

A muscular, sun-burnished man, Billy works as a fishing guide all summer and duck hunts in the winter. He also runs Go-Devil Tours, which means a ride into the remote backwaters of Caddo in a 16-foot flat-bottom aluminum boat powered by the bizarre Go-Devil engine. The motor sits aft on the boat, the long propeller shaft angles out at about 60 degrees. That puts the propeller barely into the water and permits travel through the shallowest parts of the lake and back into the cypress brakes.

And that means you see some things you aren’t likely to see unless you travel by canoe or kayak. For instance, the heron and egret rookery, with hundreds of nests with baby birds tucked into the treetops, or an occasional alligator. Along the way, Billy will point out the duck blinds he’s made, beaver dams, and the perfect spot for catching big perch. All off the beaten path, complete with a running commentary sure to inform and entertain.

Billy and Dottie can be reached at the Spatterdock at (903) 789-3268, or at www.spatterdock.com on the web.

*****