ERIC LOUIS BLOUNT (ERNKY) 1958-2009

They buried Eric today. I wanted to speak at his funeral, but I didn't have anything ready to say. It began to come to me during the services. I knew Eric well and we had had lots of significant experiences alongside one another. After all, we did meet when he was six and I was seven and we had stayed in touch over the years.
There were three things that I especially wanted to say about Eric. First of all, he was absolutely fearless. He truly wasn't afraid of anything or anybody. That trait almost certainly led him into the trouble he had in his final years. A great number of people talk about their morality but don't actually do a whole lot about developing it. I think for Eric, most of his morality was wrapped up in that notion of courage. He pursued that virtue with a determination few people can summon. I feel safe in saying that he conquered whatever fears he may have had. For that alone, he deserves our admiration and respect. He was also a really funny guy with a great sense of humor.
One of the pastimes of many boys in south Louisiana is scooping bait with a net. You get a long handle scoop net, go to the closest drainage canal and use the net to catch your bait for fishing, usually minnows and crawfish. Eric and I would spend entire days scooping minnows and crawfish, and as our scooping skills increased, the variety of animals we caught also increased. Eventually, we would catch snakes, turtles, bullfrogs, eels, one small alligator, fish and other things I don't remember. The lure of broader horizons beckoned us farther and farther away from our neighborhood. Once, when we were about 10 and 11 years old, after scooping all along a ditch a few blocks from our houses, we found ourselves facing a culvert that went under the road. It was about four feet in diameter, twenty feet long, pitch black, and in our active imaginations, certainly full of large crawfish, bullfrogs, probably some big fish and many other such wonderful things. Eric didn't flinch. He took the net and methodically, thoroughly scooped the entire watercourse in that pitch black concrete pipe. Something big escaped from the net, (probably a bullfrog), but he did catch some good sized perch and some really big crawfish.
That success led him to immediately head to the other end of the canal where it went under Jefferson Hwy. This one was probably seventy-five feet long and open only on one end, which meant that he had to go in, turn around and come back, scooping all the while, which is equal to stirring up anything that might reside in there. He returned with a really big amphiuma eel, the weight of which led him to stop scooping because he obviously had a colossal haul, something big and trying to escape, something he couldn't see because of the darkness in that horrible place. That, my friend, shows some serious cajones for a ten year old boy. Trust me. They got bigger as he grew older.
Eric and Roger moved away from Louisiana for about ten years to go work as union welders in a few different big cities up north. When Eric came back, he bought a nice boat and we started fishing together again. Again, Eric and I went back to using nets to catch our bait, but now we had developed enough fishing skills to really catch a lot of fish when we got the right bait. That's when he introduced me to the wonderful world of pogies, the favorite food of speckled trout. He showed me how to recognize schools of pogies in the water and the right way to sneak up on them in the boat in order to throw a cast net on them. His confidence in using pogies for catching big trout was unshakeable. He was almost obsessed with catching them before we could go fishing. We would pass up the prime fishing time in the early morning, just to catch pogies. Enthusiasm like that for catching bait can best be described in one word: hopeful. He knew that if you put in the work to catch the pogies, you had good reason to believe that you would catch some big trout, and we did.
That was the Eric I remember: fearless, funny and hopeful. He may not have caught the great big trout of worldly success, but he had the right bait for it. His fishing days were cut too short.