A dozen black books rest on the recliner arm. The recliner is aged beyond belief and camouflaged, with two great windows at its back drawing in the sun to age it further still; so that the printed, fabric leaves consume the light and briefly taste the woods. At arm’s length from the recliner, ice cubes dilute sweet tea in a sweating mason jar. Sweating with it is a man who looks like a child’s Sunday school rendition of God the Father, if that child was from Northeast Louisiana and God the Father was a swamper. Which He may be—“I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.”
The man thumbs through the books as time crawls up his face and meets an ashy mustache. The whole room feels of time; time spent, rusted even. Time captured in the pages of those books, undoubtedly, and within the stories he’s recalling.
Perhaps it only feels that way because, for the man in the recliner, time on earth is now complete.
It is a bit strange watching this Realtree interview of Phil Robertson two days after he has passed away. The video is from two years ago, but you can sense the fullness, the finished nature of Robertson’s life. I reckon that’s because he has seemed ready to die for some time now. Even in the heyday of the Robertson family’s blockbuster show Duck Dynasty, if he’d have passed away while filming, he probably would have been prepared for death; pleased and satisfied to meet his Lord. In the age of The Golden Bachelor, it’s increasingly rare to find that kind of peace in older men. At least in the ones on TV.
Yet it was not always that way for Phil Alexander Robertson.
Contained within those black books by the recliner is his life’s work: Duck hunting. Over decades, he recorded every hunt. For the non-hunting reader, that’s roughly 60 days of hunting each season since the 1980s. Every duck of every breed in every type of weather with wind blowing from every direction—all of it—recorded after the hunt.
He began keeping track of all those hunts not long after he founded Duck Commander, the small business that sold his hand-made duck calls of Louisiana cedar, in 1972.
Before that, he was the quarterback at Louisiana Tech in the late ’60s, starting over the first pick in the 1970 NFL draft and four time Super-Bowl champion, Terry Bradshaw, the stunner from Shreveport. Even while he was throwing for the Bulldogs—and by most accounts, he was pretty good—all he ever loved to do was hunt. Terry Bradshaw told ESPN that Phil “loved hunting more than he loved football. He’d come to practice directly from the woods, squirrel tails hanging out of his pockets, duck feathers on his clothes.”
One time, the dean of men at Louisiana Tech called Phil into his office for a talk. The president of the university happened to be showing some “dignitaries” around campus when they arrived at the football facilities and came up on Phil’s place, the dean scolded him: “Mr. Robertson, I got to tell you, when we got to your house there were nets, there was duck feathers and blood on the sidewalk, an old deer hide and antlers and a bunch of old junk piled up.” He finished, “I want you to get out there and get that stuff out of sight because it’s just not real scholarly, Mr. Robertson.”
Phil could have been drafted into the National Football League, too, but he declined to play his final season at Louisiana Tech, where he, again, would have kept Terry Bradshaw on the bench. Bob Brunet, the running back at Tech, relayed the story to ESPN, “The last game of my senior year was Phil’s junior year. He and I and Bradshaw were standing on the field before our last game, and we used to call Terry “Bomber.” [Robertson] looks at Terry, says, ‘Bomber, I’m not coming back next year.’ He said, ‘You’re not? What are you gonna do?’ He said, ‘I’m going for the ducks, you can go for the bucks.’”
So he stopped playing and started for the swamps and bogs of Northeast Louisiana, to build a life trailing the swaths of waterfowl that come tumbling down the Ouachita River with the leaves and out across the basin tributaries of the brooding Mississippi.
But he ended up chasing a lot more than ducks.
Of course, while in college he was introduced to the same things as every other student in the late 1960s: sex, drugs, and rock and roll; at the time, he was also a few years into a marriage with his high school sweetheart, Marsha Kay Robertson, known to Duck Dynasty fans as “Miss Kay,” and coming home each night to his firstborn son, Alan. But life got especially tough for the Robertsons as they exited college.
Phil was deeply addicted to drugs and alcohol and sex, and his young family was dirt poor. Night after night he hopped from bar fights to home, or from the beds of women other than his wife. Eventually, he kicked his entire family out of his home.
This was the turning point, where the fidelity of Miss Kay would in due time come to save not only Phil but the entire Robertson family. Friend after friend, family member after family member, told Miss Kay to leave Phil, especially due to the affairs. She called it “the worst advice I ever got,” and claimed it was against her raising: “I attribute a lot of [sticking with Phil] to my grandma. She was such a stickler for staying with your marriage. She always used to say, ‘You have to fight for your marriage.’”
It was excruciating. Her boys would cry over and over again for their daddy, asking when they could see him again. She told them, “We’re just gonna pray for him. We’re gonna pray for him… But we don’t want him like he is, because the devil has a hold of him… The devil is who’s controlling your dad right now. And that’s why he acts bad. He’s a good man. But he needs God. And he needs the devil out of his life.”
Phil was cast back in solitude, but not the serene solitude found in wooded duck blinds or running jon boats over lazy rivers. This was the deafening quiet of an empty home.
Eventually, he was fed up with the sin and solitude. So he mustered up the courage to meet with Miss Kay, telling her he couldn’t “keep living like this.” He needed to see the preacher who once tried to evangelize him in a beer joint, whom he threw out of the bar: “I only want to talk to him.”
At 28 years old he was baptized. He then began the slow process of mending back together a family that had until then known only turmoil.
That would become the family millions of Americans came to know and love in Duck Dynasty. And Phil Robertson would become the stable, patient, watchful, stoical patriarch at the head of the supper table blessing the food after each show, with great-grandchildren gathered ‘round him.
That Realtree interview Phil did two years ago began with him quoting Saint Paul from memory: “Make it your ambition—the Apostle Paul to the Thessalonians… Make it your ambition, meaning this is your goal in life, to live a quiet life. Make it your ambition to live a quiet life. Mind your own business. Work hard with your hands doing something that’s good, so that your life will win the respect of outsiders.”
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Well, he has certainly won the respect of outsiders across these United States, and in a country filled with atomization, disordered desire, artificiality, and social collapse, Phil Robertson’s life can be looked to for the hope of renewal. Renewal in the way he found it, too: through fidelity, family, place, and the Christian religion.
After taking the boys from Realtree around his land for morning chores on the River, he said: “What y’all saw this morning was a glimpse—a glimpse—of a quiet life… You go to the woods, and it’s quiet.”
I pray that he has now found more than a glimpse.
