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 tail gate.
Speaker 1: I think I got a thing or two. The Teaching
Speaker 1: Old School Part two Old School Part two Old School,
Speaker 1: also Old School. Here we go again, whatever you want
Speaker 1: to call it, that's what we're talking about this week.
Speaker 1: A continued conversation on things I found value in that
Speaker 1: the world has generally passed on by I like innovation
Speaker 1: and progress, but not just for the sake of change.
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of tradition and legacy and paying
Speaker 1: respect to the folks that got us here by keeping
Speaker 1: their customs and practices alive. Round two of Old School
Speaker 1: is up next, But first I'm going to tell you
Speaker 1: a story. In nineteen seventy five, I was nine years
Speaker 1: old and had narrowed down the path my life would
Speaker 1: take to either being a policeman, a cowboy, or a stuntman. Now,
Speaker 1: looking back forty eight years later, I have to say
Speaker 1: I pretty well called that career from the get go.
Speaker 1: What little TV I watched that time was Adam twelve Gun,
Speaker 1: Smoke Bonanza, A six Million Dollar Man, and Swat. Now
Speaker 1: a lot of you probably never heard of those shows,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure some will recall them anyway. We also
Speaker 1: had a barn and a hay loft. Dad kept everything
Speaker 1: that you associate with that barn in there, and it
Speaker 1: was also a playground for us kids. Now, y all
Speaker 1: hang on, because I'm going somewhere with all this. The
Speaker 1: hay in the loft was used to build hideouts and
Speaker 1: for playing hide and seek, and it was the headquarters
Speaker 1: for a lot of the adventures we'd conjured up. It
Speaker 1: was an army base, a frontier for it, placed to
Speaker 1: hide chew in the back of cigarettes. It was anything
Speaker 1: we needed it to be, and it was full of
Speaker 1: tools hatchets, axes, hammers, anything a group of well intended
Speaker 1: but poorly supervised kids could think of to use for
Speaker 1: any activity other than their intended purpose. A hatchet turned
Speaker 1: into a tomahawk, and trying to master the art of
Speaker 1: chunk of one to stick in a tree. A claw
Speaker 1: hammer made for a good pistol, and the many gunfights
Speaker 1: said break out at a moment's notice. And there were
Speaker 1: ropes cold and hung around, but they were big and rough,
Speaker 1: except for the ones that hung with the plow harness
Speaker 1: that belonged to my great grandfather. He passed away before
Speaker 1: I was born, but he was my dad and my
Speaker 1: uncle's father figure growing up because their father, my grandfather,
Speaker 1: was killed in an industrial accident in a Navy shipyard
Speaker 1: in San Francisco, California. He'd taking a job there during
Speaker 1: World War Two. Like a lot of men with families
Speaker 1: from our area, work was where you found it, and
Speaker 1: supporting the war effort was number one on the list,
Speaker 1: regardless of how far you had to travel to do it.
Speaker 1: I'd seen Dad use those harness and our horse buck
Speaker 1: many times to plow a garden or to skid logs
Speaker 1: out of the woods that we'd cut for firewood. He'd
Speaker 1: also used it to pull a ground slide that he'd
Speaker 1: built out of rough cut lumber. Ground slide is a
Speaker 1: decked platform of two to twelve is about ten feet
Speaker 1: long and six feet wide that sat above the ground
Speaker 1: on wooden skids. It's more or less a big sad
Speaker 1: that had a single tree attached to the front and
Speaker 1: without going plumb off the rails. Here, a single tree
Speaker 1: is a wooden shaft, a little smaller and diameter of
Speaker 1: a baseball bat, reinforced with a strap of metal running
Speaker 1: from one end to the other. And in the middle
Speaker 1: would be a ring that you would attach to the sled,
Speaker 1: and on each end would be rings that would be
Speaker 1: attached to the harness that was on the horse. The
Speaker 1: harness on the horse had straps around the horse's chest,
Speaker 1: along his back, and round his hindquarters that helped distribute
Speaker 1: the load when he was pulling. On the horse's head
Speaker 1: was a headstall and a bit that worked just like
Speaker 1: a bridle on a saddle horse. Connected to the headstall
Speaker 1: and bit was it plow lines or reins, and that
Speaker 1: was the steering wheel, the brakes, and the gas to
Speaker 1: drive the whole kitten kvoodle down the road. Those plow
Speaker 1: lines were tightly woven cotton ropes. There were strong but
Speaker 1: soft on the hands and easy to grip. Now where's
Speaker 1: Brent going with this story? Well, I had to explain
Speaker 1: all of that to explain this. That whole harness was
Speaker 1: precious to my dad. My great grandfather had used its
Speaker 1: skinning logs with mules for a living when my grandfather
Speaker 1: was just a boy. He'd used it hauling out hogs
Speaker 1: and deer they'd killed in the woods and plowing in
Speaker 1: the garden for the food they grew outside of flour
Speaker 1: meal and a few other things that they didn't grow,
Speaker 1: raise or hunt. That harness that hung in our barn
Speaker 1: had been an integral part of my father's very existence,
Speaker 1: growing up in a tangible item that he could reach
Speaker 1: out and touch, that connected him and the rest of
Speaker 1: us to our past. My great grandfather and grandfather had
Speaker 1: told and sweated holding those plow lines to survive, and
Speaker 1: my father had kept the legacy alive by doing it,
Speaker 1: not so much out of necessity, but more out of
Speaker 1: the nostalgia and legacy and and the love that he
Speaker 1: had for those two men. And that's about as old
Speaker 1: school as he gets. So what does that have to
Speaker 1: do with TV shows I was watching growing up or
Speaker 1: the career path I chose at the tender age of nine. Well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you. In the opening credits of the SWAT
Speaker 1: TV show, they introduced the actors in different action sequences.
Speaker 1: Steve Forrest runs up to the corner of a building,
Speaker 1: Robert Urick hurdles a picket fence like he was shot
Speaker 1: out of a cannon. Rod Perry jumps head first through
Speaker 1: a closed glass window into a tool shed. Mark Sheer
Speaker 1: repelled down the side of a three story building, and
Speaker 1: James Coleman jumped from one rooftop to another. Now I
Speaker 1: was going to be one of those guys when I
Speaker 1: grew up. I was gonna wear fatigues and a big
Speaker 1: ballistic vest and tote a rifle, hunting bad guys and
Speaker 1: making the world safer. But it was going to be
Speaker 1: a long long time before I could be old enough
Speaker 1: to do that for real. So now all I could
Speaker 1: do was pretend I could run up to the corner
Speaker 1: of a barn with my tomatoes stick M sixteen and
Speaker 1: peek around to see if the coast was clear with
Speaker 1: no issues. The only fence we had to hurdle was
Speaker 1: either electric or barbed wire, and I wasn't built to
Speaker 1: safely jump over either. According to my maternal grandfather, my
Speaker 1: legs were barely long enough to reach from behind to
Speaker 1: the ground. When I stood up, so that was out,
Speaker 1: and jumping through a closed glass windows seemed dangerous to me,
Speaker 1: and I was still at the age where I thought
Speaker 1: comming deer in the family farm truck and passing the
Speaker 1: school bus was a good idea. Y'all remember how that
Speaker 1: worked out. If you don't know what I'm talking about,
Speaker 1: skip back to episode one fifty seven. But I wasn't
Speaker 1: about to jump through no glass window. The only roofs
Speaker 1: around was the house in the barn, and they were
Speaker 1: two hundred yards apart, and Spider Man couldn't jump that far.
Speaker 1: But I did have a two story barn. All I
Speaker 1: needed was some rope, and there was a lot of
Speaker 1: it hanging up in there. That repelling scene was my
Speaker 1: favorite anyway, even though I didn't know what it was called.
Speaker 1: But that's what I was gonna do. I just had
Speaker 1: to figure out how to do it. I went through
Speaker 1: the barn, stuck a pair of slick palmed white mule
Speaker 1: gloves and the bib of my overalls. I grabbed a
Speaker 1: big cold rope that was hanging on the wall, through
Speaker 1: it over my shoulder and headed up the ladder to
Speaker 1: the hayloft. The rope was thick, heavy, and rough, and
Speaker 1: it scratched the fire out of my neck. That was
Speaker 1: a deal breaking kind the world? Was I supposed to
Speaker 1: zip down the side of the bill didn't Looking like
Speaker 1: a hero on a rope that was so rough Tarzan
Speaker 1: would rather walk than swing on it. There had to
Speaker 1: be something better, and I looked all around, and hanging
Speaker 1: in the back corner, and hidden in the shadows, was
Speaker 1: a coal of pretty gray rope my great grandfather's plow lines.
Speaker 1: I crawled over an anvil and a box of used
Speaker 1: horseshoes and stood before the harness the trace chains, and
Speaker 1: I ran my hands across the smooth cotton braids of
Speaker 1: strong rope, and my eyes got wide with excitement. That
Speaker 1: was it. I had found the perfect rope. This mightn't
Speaker 1: be what that swat man on TV was using. Maybe
Speaker 1: his daddy had a harness in his barn. I unhooked
Speaker 1: each end from the bit, I threw it over my
Speaker 1: shoulder and smiled as it lay perfectly without feeling like
Speaker 1: I had a bobcat and a headlock. I climbed the
Speaker 1: ladder to the loft, anchored one end of the rope
Speaker 1: by tying a square knot on the flour or four post,
Speaker 1: and I chunked the other end out the loft door,
Speaker 1: where we pitched the hay bells in. I put on
Speaker 1: that pair of slick, white mass gloves, I grabbed the
Speaker 1: rope and bailed out of the door like I knew
Speaker 1: what I was doing. I did not. Swinging out into
Speaker 1: space and squeezing that rope with all my strength did
Speaker 1: nothing to counteract the force of gravity that was pulling
Speaker 1: meat down that rope like a falling yard dark. I
Speaker 1: repelled the last four or five feet freestyle after turning
Speaker 1: that rope loose. When my gloves heated up hot enough
Speaker 1: to bake biscuits in slamming into the ground went unnoticed
Speaker 1: as I contended my concentration on the smolding pair of
Speaker 1: gloves that was still adorning my twice baked hands. I
Speaker 1: let my hands cool off as I pondered on how
Speaker 1: that went sideways and what I could do to fix it.
Speaker 1: In the days before Google, you had to use your
Speaker 1: own nogging and not somebody else's to scope the correct
Speaker 1: procedure out through in my case, at least a series
Speaker 1: of bad decisions. That's called trial and error, or is
Speaker 1: it applied to me? Trial and injury. Back up to
Speaker 1: the loft I went. But this time it was going
Speaker 1: to be different. Now I had to figure out how
Speaker 1: to stand on the side of that building like that
Speaker 1: cat on TV did. Must have had a knot in
Speaker 1: his rope. I measured out what I thought would be
Speaker 1: long enough to have me about halfway down the barn
Speaker 1: wall and tied me a loop that I could sit in,
Speaker 1: and in it I sat. I stepped up to the
Speaker 1: edge of the loft door, made a wrap of rope
Speaker 1: around my arm, and with all the strength I could muster,
Speaker 1: I squeezed it tight. I backed up to the edge
Speaker 1: and walked down the side of that barn, holding that
Speaker 1: rope as tight as I could until I got to
Speaker 1: the end of the slack. Now in my mind I
Speaker 1: had just repelled. What I'd actually done was sat down
Speaker 1: in the loop of my great grandfather's plow line and
Speaker 1: hung myself on the side of the barn like a
Speaker 1: Christmas decoration. I just sitting there, looking around, feeling accomplished,
Speaker 1: and eventually wondering I was going to get down going
Speaker 1: to be real easy. But at that time I didn't
Speaker 1: know how easy it was going to be. But I
Speaker 1: was more or less, just stuck above Mother Earth at
Speaker 1: an altitude of about six feet it might as well
Speaker 1: have been six hundred. The loop I tied in that
Speaker 1: road wasn't big enough for me to slide through feet first,
Speaker 1: so I was just dangling in the sun on the
Speaker 1: side of our barn like an idiot. After some time,
Speaker 1: I heard the dogs barking across the road in the pen.
Speaker 1: I knew Dad was over there feeding them, and it
Speaker 1: was only then did I started calculating my folly. I
Speaker 1: watched him from one hundred and fifty yards away, just
Speaker 1: doing his chores, walking back and forth, pouring out feed,
Speaker 1: changing out the water, just doing dad stuff, and I
Speaker 1: saw him start looking around. I figured he was looking
Speaker 1: for me, and I got the feeling I should not
Speaker 1: be hanging on the side of the barn when he
Speaker 1: found me in Grandpa's plow lines. But alas, there was
Speaker 1: nothing I could do but literally just hang around until
Speaker 1: he saw me and got me down by his measured
Speaker 1: and purposeful walk. I realized the moment he saw me.
Speaker 1: As he got closer, I can see the confusion on
Speaker 1: his face of how I had gotten where I was,
Speaker 1: and when he got close enough to realize I was
Speaker 1: hanging on the side of the barn, holding onto a
Speaker 1: knot the sides of an orange that I tied in
Speaker 1: Grandpa's plow lines. I saw that look of confusion turned
Speaker 1: to fission, as a nuclear fission, as in how an
Speaker 1: atomic bomb goes about being an atomic bomb. His face
Speaker 1: flushed red, his jaw tightened up, and I could feel
Speaker 1: his eyes burning me hotter than the rope head earlier.
Speaker 1: When I slid down it like a zip line? Is
Speaker 1: that Grandpa's plow lines? Not what are you doing hanging
Speaker 1: on the side of the barn, Not are you stuck?
Speaker 1: Not do you need help? No, it wasn't none of that.
Speaker 1: But he was now standing under me. And when I
Speaker 1: answered him, I don't think I got to the pronunciation
Speaker 1: of the letter R in yes, sir. When he grabbed
Speaker 1: me by the collar of my shirt and snatched me
Speaker 1: out of that loop I tied in the lines. He
Speaker 1: didn't say a word, he didn't whoop me. He never won,
Speaker 1: not once. So if y'all are thinking, one of these days,
Speaker 1: Brent's gonna tell a story about how his dad finally
Speaker 1: reached his limit and beat the ever loving pudding out
Speaker 1: of him, You'll still be waiting when Jesus comes back,
Speaker 1: because there ain't gonna be one of them stories. There
Speaker 1: should have been, but there wasn't. And I don't want
Speaker 1: you to get the idea that my father wasn't strict,
Speaker 1: or that he just let me run wild. You'd be
Speaker 1: wrong thinking that had I done anything remotely to anyone
Speaker 1: else like the things I did to him or his things,
Speaker 1: i'd be telling you this story from Reeve's cemetery. What
Speaker 1: he did do was give me stern les and what
Speaker 1: it was to be a man, to stand up for
Speaker 1: what I believed in, to respect others, to be courteous,
Speaker 1: to defend the weak, and to stand up to the strong,
Speaker 1: even though I might be scared when I did it.
Speaker 1: He also taught me to deal with what life dealt
Speaker 1: me and go on. Maybe that's why I ain't never
Speaker 1: tried to get that knot out. He just cooled the
Speaker 1: lines back up and hung them in their place on
Speaker 1: the wall with the rest of the harness. Now, I
Speaker 1: certainly deserved a whooping, and I got my share of
Speaker 1: him from my mama, but never from him. The disappointment
Speaker 1: that I could see in his face when I had
Speaker 1: done something out of line was way worse than any
Speaker 1: other punishment that I could have ever received. Now, first
Speaker 1: of all, I wasn't a malicious child. I didn't do
Speaker 1: things out of meanness or with harmful intent. And I
Speaker 1: guess he knew that I was bumbling my way through life,
Speaker 1: and he was giving me enough slacking my own range
Speaker 1: to just go about my business and make my own
Speaker 1: decisions about things and learn from myself. A tried and
Speaker 1: true old school concept that is not popular in a
Speaker 1: lot of places today. Helicopter parents. They're called just hovering
Speaker 1: around waiting for junior to come up against some kind
Speaker 1: of adversity so they can come in and fix it
Speaker 1: for them and make it easier. You know the saying
Speaker 1: about glasshouse as well. I ain't gonna start chunking rocks
Speaker 1: because I'm as guilty of it as anyone, But I
Speaker 1: try not to be Alexis. And I want Bailey to
Speaker 1: grow up and be a responsible adult who makes informed
Speaker 1: decisions based on our faith, teachings, and her knowledge and
Speaker 1: belief in what we've taught her to be true. We
Speaker 1: also want her to face adversity, and as hard as
Speaker 1: it is to witness, she has to lose sometimes, and
Speaker 1: she has to feel rejection and disappointment because life, real
Speaker 1: life is full of that, and that's where the good
Speaker 1: folks come from, the ones that get knocked down and
Speaker 1: get back up with the risk of getting knocked down again.
Speaker 1: Intestinal fortitude, guts, gumption, whatever you want to call it,
Speaker 1: you got to have it to make it, especially in
Speaker 1: a world where everyone's an expert and has an opinion
Speaker 1: that they can hide behind the user name when they
Speaker 1: give it. I was talking to Pat Dirkin the other
Speaker 1: day about a recent article he wrote. Pat's one of
Speaker 1: my favorite contributors of the written word and has a
Speaker 1: ton of interesting articles on the media to website. We
Speaker 1: were talking about how people were reacting to a guy
Speaker 1: killing a mountain lion that had approached him. I don't
Speaker 1: care what your opinion of it is, and I'm not
Speaker 1: going to belabor you with mine because it's been adjudicated
Speaker 1: and it's over. Plus, I wasn't there. What we were
Speaker 1: discussing was the ration the fertilizer that guy was getting
Speaker 1: pumbled with online. That was the topic of our conversation.
Speaker 1: I told Pat that so called social media should have
Speaker 1: a rule that when you run your mouth about something,
Speaker 1: especially something that you don't know anything about you should
Speaker 1: have to post your address with it as well. We
Speaker 1: both figured there'll be a lot less of it if
Speaker 1: that was the case. Regardless the practice of not saying
Speaker 1: anything if you didn't have something good to say, it's
Speaker 1: an old school lesson we should all get behind, except
Speaker 1: when it comes to possums and rats. I don't care
Speaker 1: if you're in church, on the radio, or both. Let
Speaker 1: it rip and give them no quarter. Now. I talked
Speaker 1: about how my father had taught me to be a man,
Speaker 1: how to be strong, how to learn from adverse conditions
Speaker 1: and do the right thing. Well, those attributes ain't confined
Speaker 1: to boys. And while a lot of what he was
Speaker 1: teaching me was the building blocks of manhood, that the
Speaker 1: same lessons I'm teaching Bailey. Some of the strongest people
Speaker 1: I know and look up to a women and it's
Speaker 1: my nightly prayer that we're raising the other one. Great
Speaker 1: a quote the other day that said, adversity shakes the
Speaker 1: foundation of our character to see if what we believe
Speaker 1: in value is really worth standing for man. I like that.
Speaker 1: I find a lot of truth in it, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm reminded of a portion of my father's adversity every day.
Speaker 1: When I look at a coil of rope hanging in
Speaker 1: my garage, it's smooth and gray rope that you can
Speaker 1: tell a strong when you run your hands over. On
Speaker 1: each end. There is a set of snaps that were
Speaker 1: used long before eye or my father was born, to
Speaker 1: attach the ends to a horse's bit. Somewhere between those
Speaker 1: two lines is the not about the size of an
Speaker 1: orange of a nine year old boy tied. Y'all keep
Speaker 1: your outline straight, and thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1: I look forward to visiting with you next week. And
Speaker 1: until then, this is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be
Speaker 1: careful