Jason Harper: Mister Smooth, the Glib-Tongued One. Funny wisecracks and ad libs come easy for him. Life’s a bowl of cherries, all wine and roses.
Or at least that’s the Jason Harper we know when we watch the FLW Outdoors television program on VERSUS, or see him on a weigh-in stage, or watch his Reel Cast video reports posted on flwoutdoors.com. Off-stage, however, Jason has to scramble like the rest of us. Underneath the smooth surface, he sometimes is forced to paddle furiously to stay above water. And sometimes, like the rest of us, he gets dunked anyway.
A case in point involves his most recent visit to FLW Outdoors Operations headquarters in Benton, Ky. Jason and his producer, Billy Cannon, made the 5-hour trip from Little Rock okay. After spending most of the day searching through video archives to find the footage they needed, they set off for home at quitting time. And that’s where things started to fall apart.
After traveling through west Tennessee and into northeast Arkansas, the pair found that floodwaters from recent rains had flooded some roadways and prompted the Highway Department to close down several roads, including stretches of Interstate 40. The pair decided to take an alternative route around the flooded area, but things went from bad to worse quickly.
“About dark, we got off I-40 near Jonesboro so we could go around,” recalls Harper. “All went well for a few miles, but then we started hitting detours, and every time we got on to another road, it was smaller. Finally, we hit a detour barricade that didn’t tell us which way to go. I turned the wrong way, I guess, because we got on a gravel road that went through rice country. I was driving along, no problem, when all of a sudden the road just turned into mush and the next thing I know we’re buried in mud up to the frame. It was definitely a case of operator error – me.”
After trying in vain to free themselves, the pair realized that there was no way they were going to get out of the thick muck without help. That posed another problem; there wasn’t a light to be seen in any direction, much less a town to walk to. Harper called OnStar. Using satellite technology, the operator determined that Harper and Cannon were still on the Planet Earth somewhere, but that was pretty much it.
“She called a wrecker service in Jonesboro and gave them our coordinates, and we thought `okay, we’re out of here,” notes Harper. “But after the wrecker showed up, the winch broke down and we had to use some old fire hose he had to connect to the truck’s cable. Then he finally just jerked us out and put us on the right road to I-40. We got home around 2 o’clock in the morning after a 10 1/2-hour trip.”
Before they parted company, Harper asked the driver if they were, indeed, near the farm community of Weiner, Ark., when they got stuck in the mud.
“He told me we were closer to nowhere than to Weiner.”