Speaker 1: Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Rieves
Speaker 1: from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living.
Speaker 1: I want you to stay a while as I share
Speaker 1: my stories and the country skills that will help you
Speaker 1: beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as
Speaker 1: part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best
Speaker 1: outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends,
Speaker 1: pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I
Speaker 1: think I got a thing or two the teacher Father's day.
Speaker 1: Being a father is the best job I've ever had.
Speaker 1: I started out as a cheer and tennis dad, none
Speaker 1: of a football dad, and now I'm in my dance
Speaker 1: dad era pretty simple. I drive, I clap, and I
Speaker 1: pay for things. Also, I tell my kids in my
Speaker 1: grand kids stories, some of which are true, and it
Speaker 1: reminds me of listening to my dad tells stories when
Speaker 1: I was their age. This is a special episode for me,
Speaker 1: and I've got a pretty cool surprise for y'all as
Speaker 1: we get further into the show. First, I'm going to
Speaker 1: tell you a story. This story comes from This Country
Speaker 1: Life listener Ethan Powell down in the Great State Louisiana
Speaker 1: and Ethan's words in my voice. Here it is Ethan,
Speaker 1: writes Uncle Brian. If you're still taking hunting stories from
Speaker 1: the public, I have won, along with photographic evidence to
Speaker 1: back up my claim. No it's it's not Bigfoot. But
Speaker 1: may I dare say this tale is equally as terrifying
Speaker 1: as running into a sasquatch. Twenty fourteen, my best friend,
Speaker 1: my best friend since grade school, Clay Ray, the man
Speaker 1: with two first names, and I decided to venture north
Speaker 1: for our first out of state turkey hunt. At the time,
Speaker 1: we were both in our early twenties and finally making
Speaker 1: a decent enough wage to try our hand hunting in
Speaker 1: the other airs besides our stopping grounds in northwest Louisiana.
Speaker 1: I haven't always been intrigued with the mountains. I suggested
Speaker 1: to my compadre that we hunt the Washing Tall Mountains
Speaker 1: in western Arkansas. I just happened to have a very
Speaker 1: distant relatives in that area, and one of those relatives
Speaker 1: was us a shoe box filled to the brim with
Speaker 1: turkey beers. Armed with that knowledge, we made our plans
Speaker 1: and we set out a great adventure. Now pulling up
Speaker 1: in the yard of Joe Cogran, of Kirby, Arkansas. I
Speaker 1: soon found myself swapping turkey tails and soak it up,
Speaker 1: the hot tips being present to my friend and me
Speaker 1: on how to go about killing one of these elusive
Speaker 1: mountain birds. Now, after and evening a fellowship, we decided
Speaker 1: to hit the hay. Laying there all night, I anticipated
Speaker 1: the sound of rolling gobbles across the mountain side. The
Speaker 1: next morning, my dream became a reality as I found
Speaker 1: myself encased in a symphony of rolling thunderous gobbles picking
Speaker 1: out a bird. We struck out in his direction, hoping
Speaker 1: to close the deal. Well, fast forward to four hours later,
Speaker 1: Clay and I found ourselves way back in the mountains,
Speaker 1: no closer to getting to the bird than we had
Speaker 1: been when we started that morning. After stopping on top
Speaker 1: of the mountain ridge to take in the view, I
Speaker 1: thought to myself, God, Lee, we have to be the
Speaker 1: only souls for miles around. We haven't seen or heard
Speaker 1: a person or a truck for hours. Soon enough, though,
Speaker 1: I found out I was wrong. I was bad wrong.
Speaker 1: I came up with the idea that maybe we should
Speaker 1: just make our way back to the truck if we
Speaker 1: couldn't have a turkey. Then a Turkey sandwich would have
Speaker 1: to do. Claire greed, and we turned back down the trail,
Speaker 1: when suddenly a flash to my left caught my attention,
Speaker 1: and instinctively my right hand found the pistol grip of
Speaker 1: my age seventy. As my brain was grappling with the
Speaker 1: fight or flight reflex, I could see the white object
Speaker 1: coming into view from the thick brush. It be a bear,
Speaker 1: or maybe it was a haul, or possibly a panther.
Speaker 1: I'm afraid it was far worse. It was a man,
Speaker 1: and not just any man. It was a butt naked
Speaker 1: man running straight toward me. As I realized what was happening,
Speaker 1: the man looked up in pure terror. From his cardio session,
Speaker 1: he found himself staring at two armed men with nothing
Speaker 1: to defend himself with but a small towel that he
Speaker 1: wore around his shoulders. His eyes were big as saucers
Speaker 1: as he hurriedly snatched that towel off his shoulder and
Speaker 1: wrapped it around his waist. Now being a mere twenty
Speaker 1: five yards apart, I found myself trying to understand the situation.
Speaker 1: After a few seconds, the shock war off, I found
Speaker 1: myself mumbling the question, what are you doing? And the
Speaker 1: naked man nervously answered, I'm a newtist. I like to
Speaker 1: jog naked. Looking at him riding my eyes, I said, well, sure,
Speaker 1: seems like a good morning for it. Maybe a little
Speaker 1: on the cool side, though, And with that the man
Speaker 1: decided to breeze past us and move his way up.
Speaker 1: The trip is when I fumbled from my phone and
Speaker 1: I got a quick picture of the nudest and my
Speaker 1: buddy grinted like apostle. The trip ended out a bird,
Speaker 1: and we had a great time and learned a valuable
Speaker 1: lesson and running in the nude always carry it out well.
Speaker 1: Ethan Powell in northwest Louisiana. I'd say we all learned
Speaker 1: something there, the most valuable being if you're if you're
Speaker 1: lost and in the middle of nowhere, just stripped down
Speaker 1: to your birthday soon and start running. Someone bound to
Speaker 1: see you. And according to Ethan Powell, that's just how
Speaker 1: that happened. Now here's a little extra. Ethan sent the
Speaker 1: picture and I'm I'm gonna post it on my social media.
Speaker 1: It's just like he said. A naked man wearing a towel.
Speaker 1: Father's Day, a day set aside to honor our fathers
Speaker 1: and celebrated by Dad getting up and grilling all day
Speaker 1: to feed everyone else living in the house or has
Speaker 1: lived there in the past. The letter will come back
Speaker 1: and bring others with him. Deed, now his reward for
Speaker 1: toiling over the flame is historically new socks, drawers, and
Speaker 1: maybe an afternoon nap. Father's Day came as an afterthought
Speaker 1: behind Mother's Day. Typical Mother's Day usually follows the same
Speaker 1: ritual of Dad getting up and grilling for everyone, including
Speaker 1: the freeloaders who left and came back with more folks
Speaker 1: to feed. The only difference no new socks or drawers,
Speaker 1: But that's okay. We like it that away. We like
Speaker 1: to feed the masses and visit and talk of the
Speaker 1: fathers who passed away, and welcome the new ones into
Speaker 1: our club. Stories are what keep us bound together, just
Speaker 1: as much as our love and respect for all of them.
Speaker 1: The stories, the stories, and memories. I always say that
Speaker 1: our memories are our own little movies that play in
Speaker 1: our head whenever we want them to. Now we can
Speaker 1: see and color the events and the people involved like
Speaker 1: we can almost hear them. I do that a lot.
Speaker 1: A lot of this podcast is about my memories. Of
Speaker 1: days spent with my father, who passed away at seventy
Speaker 1: four on September seventh, twenty eleven, almost thirteen years ago.
Speaker 1: Over four thousand and six hundred days that he's been gone,
Speaker 1: there hasn't been one of those days that I hadn't
Speaker 1: thought about him, not one. I had him for forty
Speaker 1: five years, five months, twenty three days. That's sixteen thousand,
Speaker 1: six hundred and sixty two sunrises and sunsets. That seems
Speaker 1: like a lot, but it really isn't. Time is always
Speaker 1: relative to the subject matter. Now, that'd be a long
Speaker 1: time to be in jail, but the blink of an
Speaker 1: eye when losing your hero. I kicked myself repeatedly when
Speaker 1: I think about the opportunity I missed by not setting
Speaker 1: my father down and just letting him talk to my
Speaker 1: camera and tell the stories of his life.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Unlike my older brother Tim, my dad, Lloyd Wilton Buddy
Speaker 1: Reeves never met a camera he didn't like. He liked
Speaker 1: having his picture took, and he had enjoyed being the
Speaker 1: center of attention in the life of the party, regardless
Speaker 1: of where he was now. He was the guy who
Speaker 1: told me that you can have fun wherever you are.
Speaker 1: If it ain't fun, you make it fun. I have
Speaker 1: lived by that motto beyond the point of professionalism more
Speaker 1: times than I care to remember. I was reminded of
Speaker 1: such an occasion not too long ago by my oldest
Speaker 1: daughter Amy. Dad. I'm cutting Dereck Reyntol's hair today, and
Speaker 1: he was telling me about riding with you one time
Speaker 1: when you were a patrol lieutenant at the sheriff's office
Speaker 1: in the Eldorado. Now, for the rest of the planet,
Speaker 1: that's Eldreda, Arkansas, or if you saw it on the map,
Speaker 1: you'd probably refer to it as El Dorado, but you'd
Speaker 1: be wrong. It's El Dorado. She continued her story about
Speaker 1: me letting Derek ride with me that night, and Derek
Speaker 1: was and he is a close family friend, and at
Speaker 1: the time he was a senior in high school or
Speaker 1: somewhere thereabouts. Anyway, she asked me if I remembered what happened,
Speaker 1: and I didn't remember any details. I did remember him
Speaker 1: coming up over, but just about all the details of
Speaker 1: my law enforcement career are really a blur. I tried
Speaker 1: to forget most of it as it happened, and I
Speaker 1: only recall certain events when someone brings up something specific
Speaker 1: or something triggers it. But she said, he was riding
Speaker 1: with you, and you answered a call to somebody's house
Speaker 1: and they were in a dispute with their neighbor about something.
Speaker 1: And the woman went into a long tirade of how
Speaker 1: she'd been wronged by her neighbor and was raising cane
Speaker 1: on her front porch, while you just stood there and listened, quietly,
Speaker 1: paying attention to every detail as she droned on and
Speaker 1: on about the issue that, while insignificant in the grand
Speaker 1: scheme of things, it was obviously very important to her. Then,
Speaker 1: when she finished her speech of how it all went down,
Speaker 1: starting right after creation and ending only moments before you
Speaker 1: y'all arrived, you calmly said, okay, I have one question, ma'am.
Speaker 1: Is your hair purple? Her hair was purple, and it
Speaker 1: kind of caught her off guard, and she smiled. I
Speaker 1: remember it now. I smiled too, and Derek laughed, and
Speaker 1: she could see I wasn't making fun of her, and
Speaker 1: I wasn't of just trying to lighten her mood. And
Speaker 1: then I went about helping her find a resolution to
Speaker 1: her issue, the domestic one, not her choice of hair. Color.
Speaker 1: But that was a direct lesson from my dad in
Speaker 1: bringing fun into a fun free zone. It works. Laughter
Speaker 1: can be good medicine. It's not always the best medicine.
Speaker 1: I don't care what readers died, just says broke Leg.
Speaker 1: I'm going to the er, not the comedy club, but
Speaker 1: the things I lament for the sound of my father's voice,
Speaker 1: the stories as he told them over and over and
Speaker 1: me laughing anticipating the punchline that I knew was coming.
Speaker 1: Those are the things I wish I could I could
Speaker 1: hear outside the confines of my imagination. And thanks to
Speaker 1: my cousin Valerie fry Stone, I can. Valerie wrote a
Speaker 1: book titled Preserving Family Recipes, How to save and celebrate
Speaker 1: your food traditions. During her research in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: she traveled from out of state back home to Southeast
Speaker 1: Arkansas and interviewed several members of our family, including my dad.
Speaker 1: They talked about recipes mostly, but my dad, being my dad,
Speaker 1: when he had the floor, he seized the opportunity to
Speaker 1: cover several topics about rural life and his childhood. The
Speaker 1: best part is Vallee recorded all the audio and she
Speaker 1: sent me the recordings on a CD not long after
Speaker 1: my father passed away in twenty eleven, and I stuck
Speaker 1: that package and unlabeled CD in a drawer and I
Speaker 1: forgot about it. Recently, I was looking for some archived
Speaker 1: Hurricane Katrina pictures to post on social media in support
Speaker 1: of episode two fifteen Messing with Critters, and I found
Speaker 1: the disc, thinking that it was one of the disc
Speaker 1: full of photos. I had to go buy a disc
Speaker 1: reader to see what was on there. Computers don't come
Speaker 1: standard with them anymore, apparently, but I hooked it up,
Speaker 1: I installed the software, I pushed play in instead of photos.
Speaker 1: I heard my dad talking to me for the first
Speaker 1: time in nearly thirteen years, So what better way to
Speaker 1: share his stories than to let him tell them. There's
Speaker 1: a couple of stories involving my dad and someone's hat
Speaker 1: getting shot while squirrel hunting in the river bottoms. Now,
Speaker 1: both stories had the hats being shot on purpose, and
Speaker 1: neither of the folks who got their hat shot were
Speaker 1: wearing them at the time. Now, one of them happened
Speaker 1: to be after my dad was an adult, and the
Speaker 1: one you're about to hear now him tell was when
Speaker 1: he was a teenager. The other team in the story
Speaker 1: is Wayne Fry. Now Wayne was Valerie's father and one
Speaker 1: of my dad's favorite cousins. They were squirrel hunting with shotguns.
Speaker 1: I'll give a little context here and there, but from
Speaker 1: now on the fame the squirrel dog training, cayu, chasing,
Speaker 1: brim catching buckskin, horse loving, hog gutting pistolero. The storyteller
Speaker 1: of all storytellers. Here he is my dad, Buddy Reeves,
Speaker 1: me and him.
Speaker 2: And Uncle EVI and Uncle Ball had been done, bought
Speaker 2: him squirrel off and been over behind the lake. We
Speaker 2: had a good sport, all go, Bob, but that you
Speaker 2: would get after deer and you run him for about
Speaker 2: fifteen minutes enough to get we off somewhere, and I
Speaker 2: guess he would tod he died, But uh, we done
Speaker 2: got down to the lake, and we crossed the lake
Speaker 2: on the drift more logs and stuff out there, and
Speaker 2: we done got across him. Oh, Bob had run a
Speaker 2: deer off, but he had stopped and treated the squirrel.
Speaker 2: We back up that lake, across the lake. I didn't
Speaker 2: want to go back up that uncle an. Uncle Bob
Speaker 2: went to get h So we were gonna play that
Speaker 2: way on and I told, and Wayne had just bought
Speaker 2: him one and he good back hats. And I told Wayne,
Speaker 2: I said, off my hat up, and then you shoot
Speaker 2: it if you throw years of him and he SHO
Speaker 2: did it? He said, okay, so I throw the man up.
Speaker 2: He shot it.
Speaker 3: He never touched her fut when he threw it up.
Speaker 3: I wish now I hadn't he mischief, But I didn't.
Speaker 3: I mean not to all the pieces.
Speaker 2: And I'm playing like a bob. I heard them shots.
Speaker 2: Oh I got back down there, Bob. Should y'all shooting that?
Speaker 2: And what happened in your hat?
Speaker 1: If I could only see a picture of Wayne wearing
Speaker 1: that hat that was shot, all the pieces of my
Speaker 1: dad on that on that squirrel hunting drill, I swear
Speaker 1: that would be the best thing ever. But in the
Speaker 1: last tw week's episode, I talked about hogs and how
Speaker 1: my family and others in the area had hogs running
Speaker 1: loose at the river bottoms. My father talks about that
Speaker 1: and what my great grandfather did to survive and provide
Speaker 1: for his family. Now his dad, my grandfather, had been
Speaker 1: killed during World War Two in an industrial accident in
Speaker 1: a shipyard out in California. My father lived with several
Speaker 1: family members growing up, and mostly he stayed with my
Speaker 1: great grandfather, whom everyone called Grandpa. He talks about going
Speaker 1: to my great uncle Henry's home place that was down
Speaker 1: in the Saline River bottoms where our hall claim was.
Speaker 1: Years later with my uncle Jimmy Ray, now my dad's
Speaker 1: younger brother, who's listened to this from ground zero right
Speaker 1: now at our family's home place in Cleveland County, Arkansas.
Speaker 1: And I'll bet you anything, he's wearing overalls and a
Speaker 1: white T shirt. Hey, uncle jim Ray. Anyway, here's the
Speaker 1: sweet voice of my cousin Valerie asking my dad about
Speaker 1: farming and a glimpse into how my family lived.
Speaker 4: He farmed most of the time, right, so he was
Speaker 4: there most of the time. How many acres did they have,
Speaker 4: you know, mm hmm, cotton or just mostly like subsistence farming.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he didn't, right, I don't ever remember. And raised
Speaker 2: in cotton they had. He had a hole in the
Speaker 2: wood off Henry tram On. I draw my own brother
Speaker 2: on the place down there in the bottle. He lived
Speaker 2: down there and he kept he raised holes.
Speaker 4: In the woods, you know.
Speaker 2: Camp I right, a good big corn patching la little garden.
Speaker 2: You cow of the morning, I don't never remember. There's
Speaker 2: no cotton and the county uh log you know, with
Speaker 2: the team like in the summer times. His little money
Speaker 2: out of history.
Speaker 1: Lived on.
Speaker 2: And when he when on any dive, I'm all of
Speaker 2: them got older being here, everything down on, walking old,
Speaker 2: all of I'm all others then on that I guess
Speaker 2: I'm even had an eighty eight boy dig came.
Speaker 4: He was right down there in the river bottom, ye see,
Speaker 4: the one that had a spring down there. And he
Speaker 4: always kept a dipper down.
Speaker 2: There, a well down there he kept a gold dipper.
Speaker 2: And and then I just whim, I just walking five
Speaker 2: foot of that well.
Speaker 3: Get in there, now, you can get in there.
Speaker 2: I remember out in here front yard he had a
Speaker 2: three big old postal troop. Uh he had a some
Speaker 2: kind of thing grow in. There was a ring on
Speaker 2: the way to tie your horse, and that tree fell
Speaker 2: me generally was down and that years later, I told
Speaker 2: you myself, I'm gonna come down and he can get
Speaker 2: that so and so that out of there. But I
Speaker 2: never kid I like that.
Speaker 1: Man. I wish he'd had gotten that ring out of
Speaker 1: that tree too. But more than anything, I'd like to
Speaker 1: have a drink out of that spring, fed well with
Speaker 1: that gored dipper on a hot summer day. My dad
Speaker 1: and I would get watermelons in the summertime when we'd
Speaker 1: go to the river fishing and lay them in the
Speaker 1: spring that was walled out big enough for two good
Speaker 1: sized melons layd. We fished just about all day, but
Speaker 1: before we went back up the river to the camp,
Speaker 1: we'd pull up on the bank and go cut those
Speaker 1: watermelons and eat both of them right there. They were
Speaker 1: so cold coming out of that spring water that they'd
Speaker 1: hurt your teeth when you bit into them. We leave
Speaker 1: the rinds laying on the edge of the river for
Speaker 1: the coons now on after dark when they started making
Speaker 1: their rounds. But then we'd waddle down to the boat
Speaker 1: with our bellies poking out tight as fiddle strings from
Speaker 1: eating all that cold watermelon. Man, I can taste it now.
Speaker 1: This last story is a favorite of mine, And any
Speaker 1: time I get to feeling sad about only having my
Speaker 1: dad for forty five years, I think about him only
Speaker 1: having his a little over six. Here's my daddy talking
Speaker 1: about his daddy. Do you remember him?
Speaker 2: It is ombo he wear overall we show back down,
Speaker 2: he'll going to the house.
Speaker 1: I'd be standing up.
Speaker 2: Time on foot each one of his back pockets and
Speaker 2: holding on to his gallases. He'd be saying, you can
Speaker 2: hear him, old god boy, he sing, and I that
Speaker 2: where you get out on the road. A flying squirrel
Speaker 2: say a lot of something to fall away over the
Speaker 2: way up a little dead Yeah, pine tree snag went
Speaker 2: in that hole and they said you want to squirrel?
Speaker 2: I said, yeah, he's sitting me down out there. Ut
Speaker 2: push a little snag or coup to girl.
Speaker 4: Flying squirrel.
Speaker 2: Now I have he call him that mort.
Speaker 1: Did you?
Speaker 4: Did you take him home? Take the squirrel home?
Speaker 1: Now that's a story that I can see from his
Speaker 1: point of view. I can see it and I can
Speaker 1: feel it because he used to carry me the same
Speaker 1: way on that same road, right where this happened. My
Speaker 1: connection to those people in that place has many facets,
Speaker 1: and that's why they're both so special to me. My
Speaker 1: family worked hard to scratch out and living in that
Speaker 1: far away corner of rural America. Most times they didn't
Speaker 1: have extra, but they always seem to have enough. And
Speaker 1: enough is in abundance when there are those with less.
Speaker 1: My dad never met a stranger. He loved life, and
Speaker 1: he loved having fun. He made folks laugh, and that
Speaker 1: is funeral. A man walked up to me and said, son,
Speaker 1: you don't know me, and you probably don't know half
Speaker 1: of the four hundred people that are at this service.
Speaker 1: But I promise you two things. Number one is that
Speaker 1: as long as folks hunt with dogs, your daddy will
Speaker 1: never die. They'll talk about him until judgment day. And
Speaker 1: number two, you see all these people here. I looked
Speaker 1: around and I said, yes, sir. He smiled and said,
Speaker 1: every one of them thinks to they were his best friend,
Speaker 1: because that's how he treated all of them. He took
Speaker 1: hold of my shoulders and he looked me dead in
Speaker 1: the eyes and he said, you be that way. Happy
Speaker 1: Father's Day to all the dads out there, and cherish
Speaker 1: your time with them. We only get them for so long.
Speaker 1: I appreciate all of you so much for listening, and
Speaker 1: hope you've enjoyed hearing my dad tell his stories as
Speaker 1: much as I have. I've got a few more that
Speaker 1: we may share in the future if it fits what
Speaker 1: we're doing. That's all from now and until next week.
Speaker 1: This is Brent Reeves signing off, y'all be careful.
Speaker 2: I don