By JACK M. WILLIS
Journal Correspondent

Off Highway 8, west of Jena, Louisiana, where the piney woods meets the Little River Basin, is located a unique retail outlet. The conventional flashing sign with the add-on plastic letters proclaim "Summac Bayou Grocery - Cold Beer".

The cold beer declaration designates the chief commodity dispensed therein. The closest cold beer to this locale is roughly 25 miles to Alexandria or 10 miles to Jena. It's a prime stopping-off place for fishermen and hunters to pick up their favorite beverages, ice, picnic supplies, and knick-knacks prior to heading for Kitterling Creek Bay near Rogers or Catahoula Lake. The store is located on the last ridge before you reach the rich alluvial soil on the east bank of Little River.

When you turn off Highway 8, the graveled, pothole-marked road to the store leads past the LaCroix-Whatley Cemetery on the right going in. The graves date back to the early 1800s, some marked only by litered pine splinters. There is a veteran of the Spanish-American War supposedly buried there.

About fifty yards beyond the cemetery is the store building. When you first pull up in front of the store and roll your window down the first thing that assails your nostrils is the smell from the hog pen situated just to the left of the front door of the store. Behind the pen fence are all sizes and denominations of the "piney wood rooter" variety swine. The owner later told me that about a month ago a big Cadillac drove up tin front of the store, and the driver blew the car horn rather demandingly. The front bumper license plate denoted the car was from the neighboring state of Texas. When the storeowner, Chet Whatley, finally opened the massive wooden front door to see what all the horn blowing was about, an expensively dressed gentleman unfolded from the confines of the El Dorado. He handed a camera to the storeowner and asked him to take a picture of him in front of the pen with the pigs and hogs in the background. One of the shoats even had his snout stuck through a crack in the board fence. The tourist remarked he hadn't smelled hog manure since he left his Grant Parish home as a teenager, and didn't miss it a bit!

(Some of the captive swine bore a remarkable resemblance to Phineas Woodson Rooter, a Winn Parish native. Do you suppose? . . .Naw.)

While swinging right and driving over to the storeowner's house one couldn't help but notice the vast menagerie of animals on the grounds. Everything from mallard ducks and bantam chickens to horses and long-legged Catahoula cur dogs that could probably straddle a Purple Martin box. There are even two Manx tailless cats and a white pig named, appropriately enough, "Babe".

The focal point of the "spread" is the house. From a distance it looks like a conventional ranch style house, board and batten construction, reminiscent of the turn of the Twentieth Century houses. You can readily see it has a gallery or porch all the way across the front. On the far end one can distinguish a variety of riding saddles hanging from the rafters, a frequent sight at country homes seventy-five years ago.

On the way over to the house it became evident, that the back porch was utilized as a hot beer warehouse. Cases of various denominations were stacked to the ceiling. Alighting from my GMC pick-up, after blowing the horn, the front door flew open and out hustled my host Chet Whatley, buttoning up his shirt. After "howdying and shaking", he quickly went back inside and brought out two chairs. One would about half-way expect them to have cowhide bottoms in keeping with the rustic atmosphere of the porch. A variety of saws ranging from a six-foot crosscut saw, to a one-man saw used to saw up blocks of ice at an ice house, decorated the porch walls. Walking up on the porch, the first thing that to catch your eye is how rustic the wood is that makes up the porch columns. Heart cypress from sinker logs dredged up from near by Little River, the host tells me even before I ask. All of the lumber appears to be rough cut and totally rural.

Chet: Just about all the lumber used in the construction of this house came from "sinker" logs I retrieved from Little River, by myself. You have to roll them out of their beds to free them from the suction of the mud.

Before we got started discussing a variety of subjects, Chet gave me a tour of the house. Inside, in the Den/Living room, the walls are sealed out with blue heart, red heart and pecky cypress. The blue heart has portions of the planks that are literally bluish-gray in color and have a natural sheen because of the rich resin content. The bluish-gray color comes from the infusion of riverbed clays into the pores of the woods during the years of immersion in the river. The red heart cypress has a burnished hue usually reserved for wild cherry, and the pecky cypress is pitted from parasites that assaulted it during is sojourn in the bottom of the river.

Other rooms revealed pine planks used as flooring, some, after measurement, were found to be 14 inches wide. Knot formations and growth rings revealed years and years dedicated to the maturation process. One wall was sealed out with red gum boards, a species long extinct in the area. The host reiterated that the reason for the rich hues of the woods was the sap content. The tour of the house was a literal tour in woods gone by. Each room had a different smell permeated by Mother Nature's own woody, musky fragrances.

As we walked back to the front porch, Chet pointed out a curio cabinet he had constructed out of lumber from an old building on his Grandmother's place. It was full of interesting keepsakes, like the skull of a snapping turtle. Looking at the size of the skull made you wonder how big the rest of the turtle was. From a place of safekeeping there came forth an amulet in the shape of an arrowhead found on the shore of Catahoula Lake during a coon hunt. It had a small, neat round hole bored in it near the haft. Before I could ask, the host volunteered the information, that a leather thong could be inserted in the hole and threaded so the ancient owner could wear it around his neck. One side was smooth as if it had occupied a position rubbing against his chest for decades.

We then eased out and took our seats on the porch. Again the question was then posed as to what major changes from the "old life style" had he seen lately that he regretted.

Chet: The thing that hurt us was the recent passing of the Stock Law in this Parish. I hope we don't ever have another Depression. People will starve to death! The only thing that saved us back in the 30s, according to my granddaddy, was the hogs and cattle we had, and Little River and Catahoula Lake.

Chet went on to say that even though he is only 42 years of age, he had accumulated a ton of wisdom, knowledge and experience, by being the fourth-generation to eke to eke out a living on the surrounding land and water. His Grandfather J.W. "Coot" Whatley was a pioneer in the commercial fishing trade and procedures utilized today when there is any water to fish in. The elder Mr. Whatley fished from boats equipped with oarlocks. This was in an age before boat propulsion was mechanized. You rowed everywhere your nets were set out.

Chet: Everybody on the river or lake owned at least a piece of trammel net. It was three-inch mesh weave with a cork line on top and a lead line on bottom, with 12-inch walls to catch and hold the larger fish. People supported their families off of the sale of fish and cattle and hogs. It became a way of life out of necessity and fine-tuned over several generations. Chet showed me a carbon copy of a ticket where he had sold over $500 worth of gar he had caught in one morning in years past. Chet maintains the one thing that killed commercial fishing for him and a lot of others is the policy of opening the Diversion Canal locks on Catahoula Lake on or before July 1 every year. He went on to say that the lack of water had cost him over $500 in sales that particular day because people had called long distance wanting to buy fish. He laconically remarked, "You can't sell 'em, if you can't catch 'em."

Somebody drove up over at the store about that time, and Chet hollered in a voice that could have been easily heard across Little River, "I'll be right there!" As he left, the den door opened and a cute little female teenager emerged. She related that her name was Kristine and she was just as talkative as her Dad was. She went on to say she would be in the tenth grade when school resumed in the fall. She already has a four-year scholarship to NSU in English Education on the strength of an essay she composed the previous year. But her heart's desire is to become an equestrian veterinarian. She went out and caught the halter of a pony cropping grass in the front yard. She led him up to the foot of the steps and right up on the porch where I was sitting. She went on to say he was a mustang her father had captured as a colt. He had a classic curved Roman nose and a love for cookies. By now her Dad had returned and Kristine led the horse back out into the yard. It was time for my final question and it was what he missed most about life in general that had changed since he was a kid?

Chet: I used to could ride my horse from Summac (pronounced "shoe-make" Bayou here in front of the house all the way to Catahoula Lake without getting a scratch from a berry or saw briar. There's no livestock to keep the under growth down now. I could sell, at a premium price, all the alligator snappers and soft-shelled turtles I could catch. And a sound you'll never, ever hear again is an old hog crunching on hickory nuts. He looked off out towards the woods around the yard and said very softly, "Gone forever."

One couldn't help but feel the sadness that suddenly permeated the atmosphere on the porch. About that time, as a punctuation mark to the finality of that statement, a white cattle egret sailed majestically in from over the treetops in front of the house, and lit in the yard and began searching for insects. Thank goodness, some things concerning Mother Nature haven't changed.