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Today the workin' man earns about $1 million annually. Haggard has an office, Hag. Inc., located across the street from the cemetery where his father is buried. But The Hag himself rarely is in the office. "As long as he's got a fishing boat and a pole, he couldn't care less about the business," says Bonnie. At home, Merle is a somewhat casual father of four children, but he is not at the mansion all that often either. "Maybe it's too fancy or something," says Bonnie. Whatever it is, Haggard tends to drop out of sight for days at a stretch, then calmly reappear. Aloof from all but a few friends, who predate his fame, and indifferent to publicity, Haggard would rather be jamming all night at J.D.'s, a small club in Ridgecrest in the Mojave Desert. Or gambling in Reno, where he dropped $80,000 two weeks ago. Or else engaged in his unending hunt for the perfect fishing hole.
When he vanishes upcountry, he is alone or with Bonnie or with his close friend and manager Fuzzy Owen. "After going into every city in America three or four times, after traveling every highway and eating at every truck stop, it gets old, and I gotta stop and recharge my batteries." His most recent recharge expedition—three days at Orange Lake, Fla., last month, angling for black bass without much luck—left him nostalgic. "I'd give all the money I have if I could go back to live in the '30s," he says. "I would like to have seen the Depression, see people sleep beside roads with no fear of being harmed, live in an age when a person could go to the back door to ask for a sandwich."
But, as Haggard well knows, a country singer must go forward, meeting and reflecting his public. Indeed, Haggard may still be belting it out in the 1990s, if the longevity of some of his older colleagues is any indication. Roy Acuff, dean of the Grand Ole Opry, is still going strong at 70. So are Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, at 62, and Eddy Arnold, the Tennessee Plowboy, at 55. "Country music fans are the most loyal there is," says Haggard. Besides, the open road, the one-night gigs, meeting people—all these make a way of life that Haggard would no more give up than he would casting for smallmouthed bass in a cold, clear, wilderness lake. As he puts it in Ev 'ry Fool Has a Rainbow...
He'll give up a bed of roses
for a hammock filled with thorns.
And go chasing after rainbows
Ev'ry time a dream is born.