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 teaching old school.
Speaker 1: The term old school usually conjures up antiquated ideas and ways,
Speaker 1: maybe even clothing from a bygone era that most consider outdated.
Speaker 1: My wife will tell you quick that rumbingon through my
Speaker 1: closet is like taking a trip back in time, and
Speaker 1: according to her, it's a bat trial. But in my opinion,
Speaker 1: there's lots to be said for those tried and true
Speaker 1: staples of practicality and function that far surpassed fashion and style.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk about all kinds of old school today,
Speaker 1: but first I'm going to tell you a story. It
Speaker 1: was common old school practice where I grew up for
Speaker 1: folks to occasionally take it upon themselves to burn the
Speaker 1: woods off. Now back before timber companies put their force
Speaker 1: into regular burn cycles and management plans other than harvest,
Speaker 1: the locals would help them out and do it themselves. Now,
Speaker 1: the old school term for that was burning off the woods.
Speaker 1: The new, more acceptable and probably accurate term for that
Speaker 1: is called arson, and it's greatly frowned upon, and for
Speaker 1: good reason. Control burning has been an important forster to
Speaker 1: for a long time. During certain times of the year,
Speaker 1: a good burn helps control the amount of litter build up.
Speaker 1: And by litter, i'm talking about leaves and limbs, dead timber,
Speaker 1: anything else that will burn, not trash. But when all
Speaker 1: that stuff is left to build up over the years,
Speaker 1: it could burn out of control and to the point
Speaker 1: of becoming a wildfire where timber damage and property loss
Speaker 1: or higher risk. By staying ahead of those conditions, you
Speaker 1: can avoid all those problems. There's plenty more advantages to burning,
Speaker 1: like regenerating growth, shifting soil nutrients, and removal of undesired plants.
Speaker 1: That's just to name a few. So with that in mind,
Speaker 1: let me take you on a journey back in time
Speaker 1: to what I was just a lad. It was late
Speaker 1: February and had been unseasonably warm and my Dad and
Speaker 1: I had slipped down to the Slain River bottoms to
Speaker 1: see if we could catch a mess of fish. We
Speaker 1: stopped on a bridge on the lower Potlatch Road to fish. Now,
Speaker 1: there were two main roads that ran through that area,
Speaker 1: the Lower and the Upper Road, with the upper road
Speaker 1: being the major avenue for hauling out timber, as the
Speaker 1: lower road was closer to the actual river bottoms and
Speaker 1: could be flooded from the many sloughs and creeks and
Speaker 1: boughs that criss crossed along the way. Potlatch was a
Speaker 1: timber coming in South Arkansas that owned a huge portion
Speaker 1: of the woods that we liked to hunt in, and
Speaker 1: the roads were built for hauling out harvested timber. When
Speaker 1: I was a kid, that was the biggest place on earth.
Speaker 1: To me. That was my Yellowstone, my Bob Marshall Wilderness,
Speaker 1: and it represented everything that was wild to me. The
Speaker 1: Yellowstone might as well have been on Jupiter. And I
Speaker 1: never even heard of the Bob as my friends and
Speaker 1: Bozeman referred to it. For that matter, I never heard
Speaker 1: of Bozeman either, But I thought there was no way
Speaker 1: that they'd ever be able to cut all that timber
Speaker 1: and we'd have that place to run around in forever. Now,
Speaker 1: this was way before leasing, and folks honored deer camp
Speaker 1: claims for deer season, but that was it. Every other
Speaker 1: cretter that bumped around in the woods when it wasn't
Speaker 1: deer season was fair game to everyone, and there was
Speaker 1: no place that was all limits. Now that didn't apply
Speaker 1: to wild hogs, however, But that's a whole other podcast.
Speaker 1: But that's the way it had always been, and as
Speaker 1: far as I knew, that's the way it would always be.
Speaker 1: I would eventually learn that I was wrong on both accounts.
Speaker 1: But on this day, all the old school rules still applied,
Speaker 1: and Dad and I had stopped on the Lake Slough
Speaker 1: Bridge on the lower Potlatch Road and went fishing. We
Speaker 1: walked up and down the bank and fishing beside cypress
Speaker 1: needs and had caught enough fish to fry up a
Speaker 1: mess for the two of us. We scrouned around the
Speaker 1: barn and duck some worms to fish with, because no
Speaker 1: one had crickets yet and we had a bad hankering
Speaker 1: for some fried fish. The plan was to catch some
Speaker 1: fish and fry them up wherever we caught them, if
Speaker 1: it was at our first stop or our last one
Speaker 1: fish was on the menu, and we didn't take the boat,
Speaker 1: but we did take a coal bucket, some charcoal, corn meal,
Speaker 1: a skillet onion, taters, oil, and a jug of sweet tea.
Speaker 1: We were on a mission to eat fish, not go fishing.
Speaker 1: The slew was up and running water, and it didn't
Speaker 1: take long for us to catch them. As a fish.
Speaker 1: We cleaned them pretty quick, and Dad had me to
Speaker 1: build in the fire while he cut the taters up
Speaker 1: and got the fish mealed and ready to fry. Now
Speaker 1: I was working at a fevered pitch and could taste
Speaker 1: those fish we were about to cook already. Man, it's
Speaker 1: going to be good. I'd cleared off a small spot
Speaker 1: beside the bridge and off the road on a dim
Speaker 1: logging road, a trail, really, and I'd kicked away the leaves,
Speaker 1: sitting the coal bucket down and getting the charcoal doused
Speaker 1: with lighter flood and lid. Dad was sitting on the
Speaker 1: bank of the slough cutting up to taters when I
Speaker 1: lit the fluid soaked charcoal that blazed up like a volcano.
Speaker 1: I backed up and stared at how high it was burning,
Speaker 1: and I didn't pay attention to the lighter flood that
Speaker 1: had run out on the vents at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the bucket and had caught the leaves on fire that
Speaker 1: I hadn't kicked away. Augusta wind later, and the fire
Speaker 1: had crossed that old dim trail and was lighting the
Speaker 1: fuse on a huge cane thicket. For anyone not familiar
Speaker 1: with switch cane thicket, play on me to pontificate they
Speaker 1: grow tall and thick, and when they're green, he came't
Speaker 1: burning with napalm. But when they're dead and dried out
Speaker 1: like these were, they burned like Daffy Duck in a
Speaker 1: Buck's Bunny cartoon. Strike a match and poof ashes and smoke,
Speaker 1: They're gone. I took off my jacket and I commenced
Speaker 1: a whooping the flames that were burning around that charcoal bucket.
Speaker 1: When I saw Dad jump up from the bank of
Speaker 1: the slough and see that cane thicket explode in a
Speaker 1: wall of flame, his eyes were big and bugging out
Speaker 1: of his head in horror. I'd only seen him that
Speaker 1: big once before, when a few years earlier I nearly
Speaker 1: killed him with a truck. But that's a story for
Speaker 1: another day. Dad Dad broke off a big pine limb
Speaker 1: and started thrashing that fire in a feudal attempt to
Speaker 1: stop it. It was no use, and he and I
Speaker 1: both knew it. He kicked the coal bucket over toward
Speaker 1: the area that had already been scorched to bald earth
Speaker 1: and chunk the bucket in the back of the truck,
Speaker 1: along with every shred of evidence that we'd been there.
Speaker 1: The fire had traveled so far away from where it
Speaker 1: started that you could really feel the heat from it.
Speaker 1: But man, you could see it and you could hear it.
Speaker 1: That cane was the head of a huge cane and
Speaker 1: briar thicket that went on for quite a ways and
Speaker 1: had grown up that thick as a result of the
Speaker 1: timber being cut many years before. It's probably five acres
Speaker 1: or so. And by now it was roaring pretty good,
Speaker 1: and the dried cane stalks popping with when they built
Speaker 1: up with gas, and the holi sections like somebody was
Speaker 1: shooting a gun. It was a pie pole, pile pile.
Speaker 1: You could just hear it out there. The good thing was,
Speaker 1: after about thirty acres or so, that fire had nowhere
Speaker 1: to go. It was surrounded by Lake Slough on one side,
Speaker 1: which was wider than the road we'd driven in on,
Speaker 1: and another fork of Lake Slough that joined a quarter
Speaker 1: of a mile or so in the direction of where
Speaker 1: the fire was headed. There was nothing we could do
Speaker 1: but leave, and we did that with the reckless abandon
Speaker 1: Now that may sound terrible, but my dad knew that
Speaker 1: far wasn't going anywhere. But he also didn't want his
Speaker 1: son to be branded an arsonists at such a young age.
Speaker 1: That's a moniker you should earn on purpose, not on accident. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we scadadled and went to the house, which wasn't that
Speaker 1: far away, and I watched that smoke. As we got
Speaker 1: further and further away, it was like the whole world
Speaker 1: was on fire. I fretted about that fire, and for
Speaker 1: good reason. I'd made a mistake, and I was inattentive
Speaker 1: to everything that I was supposed to be doing. Building
Speaker 1: a fire was only half of my job. I was
Speaker 1: also responsible for making sure it didn't burn where it
Speaker 1: wasn't supposed to. Attention to detail is what wrecks just
Speaker 1: about everything, or the lack of it, I should say.
Speaker 1: I kept pestering Dad for us to go check it,
Speaker 1: and not long after we got home we went back
Speaker 1: just like every criminal returned to the scene of crime.
Speaker 1: We did take time to get the charcoal bucket and
Speaker 1: everything else is out of the truck before we went,
Speaker 1: just in case we ran into somebody. But it was
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere, and there was no logging
Speaker 1: going on, and there was no hunting season going on,
Speaker 1: so the chances of us running into anybody was very remote.
Speaker 1: The smoke had decreased from what had been an hour ago,
Speaker 1: and we could see that it was running out of field.
Speaker 1: Dad said, it'll be on the bank of Lake Slough
Speaker 1: before long, and that'll be the end of it. You
Speaker 1: learned a valuable lesson today, son, And it could have
Speaker 1: been costly, maybe even deadly, but it wasn't, and that's
Speaker 1: a good lesson to learn. I felt better about it.
Speaker 1: The main thing I felt better about was my dad
Speaker 1: wasn't mad at me, and I hadn't destroyed someone's home
Speaker 1: or hurt anybody. He said, let's go home and eat
Speaker 1: some fish. Well. Dad pulled down in that old logging
Speaker 1: trail where it all started, and even the charcoal had
Speaker 1: burnt to the point of blowing away in the wind.
Speaker 1: He backed out in the road and stopped abruptly, causing
Speaker 1: me to turn away from that big flume of smoke
Speaker 1: and see mister Junior Williams's truck pulling across the lake
Speaker 1: slow bridge and ride up beside us. Mister Junior was
Speaker 1: a family friend, and he had some running dogs and
Speaker 1: would hunt with Dad a lot, and I'd known him
Speaker 1: all my life. Mister Junior was a good man. Mister
Speaker 1: Junior raised chickens, and my dad was his serviceman for years.
Speaker 1: But raising chickens wasn't mister Junior's only job. He was
Speaker 1: also the Arkansas Forestry Commission's county forest ranger for Cleveland County.
Speaker 1: In other words, he was the wildfire police. And he
Speaker 1: was pulling up beside my Dad's truck and rolling down
Speaker 1: his window. I was going to prison and would never
Speaker 1: again see the light of day. I would never make
Speaker 1: it to junior High school, and I would never taste
Speaker 1: a fried bluegilt brim again. My life was over. Hey, buddy,
Speaker 1: how are you, Junior. I'm good. Looks like we got
Speaker 1: a little smoke going. My dad said, yeah, it looks
Speaker 1: like it. I was mortified. I knew it any minute
Speaker 1: that our very own Columbo of the Woods was going
Speaker 1: to slap the cuffs on me and haul me off
Speaker 1: to comings prison farm, the state penitentiary, where I'd be
Speaker 1: sentenced to life in the electric chair for burning up
Speaker 1: thirty five acres of pot lash's cane thicket. I was doomed.
Speaker 1: Time slowed down to a crawl as I prayed for
Speaker 1: my dad to take his foot off that clutch and
Speaker 1: get us out of there. That fire ain't going nowhere,
Speaker 1: is it, buddy, now Junior? It ought to be about
Speaker 1: burnt out, but now lake slough goes all the way
Speaker 1: around it. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Probably a good thing
Speaker 1: at burnt now, mister Junior said, it's rather than this summer.
Speaker 1: When lake slough's drying, it could get out. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: stop until it got to the river. Man, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be a camp left down there. When he said that,
Speaker 1: I wanted to die. It made me sick at my stomach.
Speaker 1: I knew all the folks that had camps down there,
Speaker 1: and I had been a guest, and most of them.
Speaker 1: I glanced back at that smoking. When I looked back,
Speaker 1: mister Junior was looking at me dead in the eyes,
Speaker 1: and he said, Brent, did you burn them woods up? Sweet? Jesus,
Speaker 1: I'm called. I just sat there, looking back at him
Speaker 1: and waiting for him to pull his pistol on me.
Speaker 1: Dad turned his head towards me and said, well, answer
Speaker 1: the man. Now I'm betrayed by my father. I'm going down.
Speaker 1: I gathered up all the gumption I had and I said,
Speaker 1: I cannot tell a lie, mister Junior. I did it.
Speaker 1: He started laughing and hitting his hand on the steering wheel.
Speaker 1: Dad started laughing, and I wanted to cry, and just
Speaker 1: about to when mister Junior said, Buddy, that boy is
Speaker 1: as crazy as you are. Dad said, its sure is, Junior.
Speaker 1: We're late for dinner. I'll see you, and with that
Speaker 1: we took off. I barely heard mister Junior say bye
Speaker 1: before we were making tracks toward the ponderosa. Now I've
Speaker 1: always thought that he knew we'd done it. After all,
Speaker 1: I did confess to him. I didn't lie about it.
Speaker 1: But there was a lesson learned and one I will
Speaker 1: never forget. And that's just how that happened. Old school.
Speaker 1: It can describe a lot of things, but the main
Speaker 1: message I get from it is it's a if it
Speaker 1: ain't broke, don't fix it kind of vibe. There may
Speaker 1: be a better way to do things that are better
Speaker 1: and more time efficient, but time to me these days
Speaker 1: is measured in joy. I can sit down with a
Speaker 1: wet rock and a case pocketknife and sharpen it all evening,
Speaker 1: just slowly back and forth, honing that blade to a
Speaker 1: razor's edge, and I could use any number of sharpening
Speaker 1: tools and have it done in a matter of minutes,
Speaker 1: which is more efficient, but not nearly as satisfying or relaxing.
Speaker 1: I used to sit and watch my dad sitting in
Speaker 1: his recliner doing the same thing with the very Arkansas
Speaker 1: stone that I use. I couldn't wait to learn how
Speaker 1: to do it, and when I did, it's something I enjoy.
Speaker 1: There's something therapeutic about it. Maybe it's the sound or
Speaker 1: the motion that connects me with the past and those
Speaker 1: memories of watching my dad do it. It's a cheap
Speaker 1: and harmless pastime and it serves a purpose because a
Speaker 1: dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one. I
Speaker 1: gonna say that again so the folks in the back
Speaker 1: can hear me. A dull knife is more dangerous than
Speaker 1: a sharp one. You don't agree, well, hear me out.
Speaker 1: My brother Tim and I were rabbit hunting one Saturday
Speaker 1: afternoon when I was fourteen. We were walking up some
Speaker 1: old ditches and briers tickets on a friend's farm a
Speaker 1: couple miles from Eys that was covered up in cottontails.
Speaker 1: We shot two or three when another one busted out
Speaker 1: on my side of the ditch and I shot him,
Speaker 1: but I didn't make a killing shot on him. It
Speaker 1: was in the middle of a soy being filled, and
Speaker 1: there wasn't a tree or a fence post within a
Speaker 1: quarter of a mile to knock his head on. So
Speaker 1: I pulled out my pocket knife and I was gonna
Speaker 1: quickly give him the old coop of grad to the throat.
Speaker 1: But my knife was so dull that when I tried
Speaker 1: to force it into the spot where I needed it
Speaker 1: to end it quickly, I had to push extra hard,
Speaker 1: and it slipped from where I had it intended and
Speaker 1: jobbed it into the palm of my hand that I
Speaker 1: was holding that wiggling rabbit with, and it sunk into
Speaker 1: my hand about two inches. I laid my shotgun on
Speaker 1: the ground, swapped hands, and gave the stock a love
Speaker 1: tab with that rabbits knogging and ended that portion of
Speaker 1: the suffering. But I was now bleeding like crazy, and
Speaker 1: rightfully so, seeing as I had just stabbed myself. It
Speaker 1: was a common phrase of my mother's every time you
Speaker 1: or your brother opens a pocket knife, you cut yourself
Speaker 1: about one more time, and I'm going to hide it
Speaker 1: from you. She wasn't wrong, although this time I had
Speaker 1: stabbed myself instead of cutting myself, which could be considered
Speaker 1: a technicality. Tim said, Mama's gonna be mad at you. Well,
Speaker 1: we ain't gonna tell mama. I looked across that field
Speaker 1: and there was Clement's Grocery half a mile away, a
Speaker 1: country store that friends of our family owned, and where
Speaker 1: Miss Billy Ruth Clemens would be working. I'd get her
Speaker 1: the doctor on me and that'd be the end of that.
Speaker 1: Take me to the store, Tim, Miss Billyruth will fix
Speaker 1: it up. So that's what we did, and that's what
Speaker 1: she did. She boiled it out with some proxy. I'd
Speaker 1: dabbed some kind of ointment on it and bandaged it
Speaker 1: up with galls and tape. I swore her to secrecy,
Speaker 1: and we went back hunting and killed some more rabbits.
Speaker 1: Now here's the lesson. If my knife had been sharp,
Speaker 1: i'd finished that rabbit off in short order. Never hurt myself,
Speaker 1: and it was my fault that it had all happened anyway.
Speaker 1: From the poor shot to the dull knife, two creatures
Speaker 1: had suffered. Needlessly shoot straight and keep your knife sharp.
Speaker 1: Some would say that even toting a knife is old school,
Speaker 1: and I've talked about it before, and y'all know the
Speaker 1: regular listeners anyway, But for the new folks, I carried
Speaker 1: two knives, and one of them used to be a loner,
Speaker 1: for that sad sack that I would run into that
Speaker 1: asked to borrow a knife instead of being a man
Speaker 1: to begin with and having one of his own. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't loan out my case knife because someone that doesn't
Speaker 1: care enough to tote one ain't gonna use my good one.
Speaker 1: So I carried a loaner. There was anything but a
Speaker 1: case Now. I got tired of toting the loaner, so
Speaker 1: I stopped. Now. I didn't stop carrying two pocket knives.
Speaker 1: That'd be weird. No, I carry a case knife in
Speaker 1: both pockets now, and I don't loan either one of them.
Speaker 1: That's old school and may be a little selfish, but
Speaker 1: I'm drawing the line in the dirt and it stops
Speaker 1: right there. What doesn't stop is my affinity for most
Speaker 1: things old school. And we've just scratched the surface here today.
Speaker 1: So how about we continue this next week. Well, Brin,
Speaker 1: I think that's a great idea. Now, this is my
Speaker 1: favorite time of the year. With the holidays and hunting
Speaker 1: season and full swing, I'm spending lots of time in
Speaker 1: the outdoors with folks I'm partial to, and that makes
Speaker 1: all the difference in the world. Take the opportunity to
Speaker 1: invite someone who may not normally have the opportunity to
Speaker 1: get a chance to do something in the wild, and
Speaker 1: opportunity maybe all that person needs to shine. I promise
Speaker 1: you'll get more out of it than they will. I
Speaker 1: thank y'all for listening and would appreciate it if you
Speaker 1: shared our show with other folks you think might like
Speaker 1: it to Until next week, this is Brent Reeves signing off.
Speaker 1: Y'all be careful