Bear Grease - Ep. 137: THIS COUNTRY LIFE - Manly Footwear

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

Have a seat, slip off or untie those boots, and back out of those Crocs and flip-flops. We’re talking about manly footwear this week and which ones make the cut. Can leather boots be the only proper adornment for your feet or have others slipped into and out of the closet? Hear what Brent thinks and decide for yourself on today's episode of This Country Life. Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

First Lights fieldwear collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days in real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season. Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new fieldwear gear at firstlight.com.

Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From Coon Hunting to Trotlining and just general country living, I want you to stay a while as I share my stories and country skills that will help you beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the Airways have to offer. All right, friends, pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I think I've got a thing or two to teach you.

Manly footwear. What does your footwear say about your manhood? Or does it say anything at all? Was it more important years ago than now? Well, we're going to talk about all that, and here's some thoughts from a friend of mine that leans toward the old adage, at least for him, that shoes make the man. Do you believe that? Or have his rubber boots of common sense develop the leak? We're going to talk all about it. But first, I'm going to tell you a story. It was cold. It was bad cold. And guess what? It was supposed to get colder.

It was January in Arkansas' duck season. And somewhere around 1998, my brother Tim and I were hosting a group of folks from North Carolina at our place, Southern Waterfowler's Guide Service, near Raydale, Arkansas. Now, these boys have been customers for a few years and were a good group of folks to hunt with. They all had a passion for duck hunting in green timber and viewed Arkansas as the pinnacle place to do it. They were an eclectic mix of friends with different backgrounds and occupations, which meant different amounts of disposable income. Some could show up at the last minute if an open and became available, but most of them, man, they saved all year long for

that trip. I'll be honest with you. I couldn't have afforded to hunt with us. At that time, we were charging $300 a day per person for half a day hunting. That included a bed in the Rebel Yale, three home-cooked meals, and all the adult libations our clients could hold. Now, folks usually booked a minimum of three days, so that's $900, plus gas driving out there or the plane ticket to fly to Little Rock. That would have priced this cat plumb out of the running for a guided hunt. So the boys that scrimped and saved for that trip were just as high priority for us to entertain and take care of as the folks that didn't even think about paying that amount.

Maybe even more so. That meant getting up day after day, way before the clients, having coffee and breakfast ready, decoys loaded, boats gassed up, hunters assigned to vehicles, snacks made and packed. And after the hunt, dinner made, Ducks cleaned, tagged and packaged, equipment maintained, clients entertained, supper prepared, clients entertained, kitchen cleaned, clients entertained, clients put to bed, and the final prep for the following day. And finally, in the bed, usually after midnight for a few short hours of sleep, but before it all started over again at the sound of the alarm.

It didn't matter who the fellow was that was paying for the opportunity to hunt with us. We were set on doing our dead level best to ensure that they had the best possible chance to shoot some ducks. After all, we like shooting ducks too. Now, all that being said, when a big Arctic cold front rolls in and freezes everything, and I mean everything, from the Zuri line down to Louisiana, it's cold. schools are shutting down because the pipes were freezing and busting. Businesses were closing early, but guess who's still working? Me and Timmy.

We got six clients to hunt, eight counting us, and we don't get a day off until duck season is over. Now, we scouted the evening before and found some ducks in a place that was quickly freezing in the woods around the edges, but there was current out in the timber. Their water was abnormally high for that time of year, and it had opened up a lot of places in the woods that weren't normally flooded. Now, I'm not going to say the name of the place, because apparently naming a place that's already known by every public land duck hunter this side of the North Pole in a story that happened 25 years ago will get you branded these days as a spot burner. So I'll just call the place the woods. people don't fit safely in a 16 foot aluminum boat. So I took Tim, a bag of decoys, and three of the smallest clients, and drove them up the bio to a spot on the levee where they would wait for me to go back, pick up the other hunters, other sack of decoys, and head back to where they were.

This was way before daylight, and the temperatures were in the teens. The water that was spraying on me and in the boat was freezing as soon as it made contact in everything. that got wet, including my right hand that I was using to hold the spotlight, was covered in a clear sheet of ice that ran down to my elbow where a little icicle had formed. Did I tell y'all it was cold? Now, it was, but I wasn't, and neither was Tim. And while we couldn't have afforded to hunt with us, buying waiters was a business expense. We'd both just got a brand new pair, of fleece lined, insulated neoprene waiters, five millimeters thick and sixteen hundred grams of thincillate in the boots.

We were virtually bulletproof to freezing. Anyway, with the last group and all their plunder loaded in the boat, we headed back up the bio to find Tim and the others. The high water allowed us to easily pull the boat out of the bio across the levee and into the woods, and as far as I knew, we were the old. only folks on the planet that knew where an open water was in the woods. And the afternoon before, it was full of mallard ducks.

The only issue was there was about 100 yards of ice between us and the creek channel that we'd found the day before where the ducks were. We pulled the boat across the levee and knocked out a hole in the ice for the boat. The water wasn't deep enough to run the motor, so Tim had to get on the front deck to raise the back end high enough for me to put the motor in shallow water dry. We took off and broke ice like we were in the Bering Sea. We were blazing the trail in knee-deep water, kicking up a rooster tail of ice, leaves, and freezing water,

and six North Carolinians were following in our wake, hooping and hollering and cheering us on. We'd left extra early because we figured it wasn't going to be easy. Unfortunately, we were right. The ice was thick, and the water a little deeper eventually, and Tim had to stand on the ice as the boat moved forward, causing plywood-sized sheets to break free and him to come splashing down while still holding on to the front of the boat and landing on his feet. He had his coat tucked down inside those new chest waiters, and water had splashed way up past his waist, but other than his gloves freezing up and sticking to the front of the boat, boat, he was dry as a bone. The water finally got deep enough to drop the motor all the way, so he hopped up on the front

with his butt flat on that aluminum deck, and his legs poked out in front of him with his heels of his new waiter skating across the top of the ice as I motored us forward through the thinning ice and toward the open water. I looked behind the boat and falling was a train of stumbling and tripping duck hunters, and back to the front was my brother, looking like a camouflage. flogged hood on him wearing his wool army helmet ladder with a smoking marlborough red clenched between his teeth. He was grinning like a mule-eating sawbriars and shining in the spotlight as the water that had been splashing on him froze on the outside of his waiters.

We got to the edge of where we were going to set up and I shined up into the leafless trees and a hole about 60 feet by 80 feet appeared in the canopy. There were duck feathers laying everywhere from where the ducks had been bunched up to day before. Buddy, we were on the X. Tim jobbed a paddle down in front of him, touched the bottom, said it ain't too deep. And when he tried to jump off the boat, he didn't go anywhere. He said, I'm stuck to the boat. My waiters are froze to the deck.

He rocked back and forth a couple of times and with one mighty heave, he pushed down with both hands and jumped forward out of the boat into waste deep water, leaving the seat of his brand new waiters still frozen and stuck to the deck. The cold frigid water poured into his waiters quicker than he had jumped out of the boat, and he unleashed a violent string of colorful metaphors that quieted the crowd and filled the darkness with a soulless tirade that seemed to go on in perpetuity. I figure it's still out there, floating around in space, knocking satellites out of orbit. But eventually, he regained his composure, and he, he was a little bit of his composure, and he was

toughed it out until around 10 o'clock that morning when we called it. That big raft of ducks that we'd seen the day before never returned, but we kept the skunk away by scratching out enough for a mess. Those boys paid for the opportunity. And dry boots or wet ones, we were going to make sure they had one. And that's just how that happened. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker.

I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed. Then there was a pool of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't.

This season, we're going deeper. from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th.

Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Manly footwear. Let's talk about it. Jerry Clower mentioned Brogan's shoes and his story about Coonunhun. It was the brand John Eubanks preferred to wear until tree climbing time came, and then he'd slip them Brogans off and commenced to climb in the tree. My dad mentioned Brogan's shoes to me, describing what woods looked like when he was a boy saying, and them woods over there behind Little Lake used to be so open,

I could run down through them bottoms barefooted. Now I wouldn't do it wearing a pair of Brogans. Now, Brogans wasn't a company. It was a style of boot. They were issued to soldiers on both sides during the war between the States, and you can buy them now. A boot that's had its origin traced back to Scotland and Ireland where they originated in the 1600s.

Now, that's a pair of manly footwear. everyone from farmers to soldiers were kicking around doing everything from growing corn, tending sheep, and shooting at one another while wearing them. Now, they're just as likely to be worn by a fellow sport in a man bun. My, how times have changed. And along with haircuts, so with men's shoes. Boots, that's what a real man wears, they say. Boots made from the clothes last night's hamburger was wearing. And what more perfect of an animal could have been gifted.

to us for my creator than a cow, ground zero for hamburgers and steaks. Through the most simple and organic of methods, these wonder machines have the ability to turn plants into meat. Something college-educated scientists that can place humans on the moon and bring them back home have yet to master, while cows, they walk around doing it like Obi-Wagu Canobis with no reverse or thumbs. And wearing a closet full of future boots and foot. footballs, the cow. I may have to do a podcast on them. Now me, I like a good pair of boots as well as

the next fellow, but anyone that's ever listened to the bear grease render will know that I ain't opposed to crocs or flip-flops. My brother, the great bear grease rhetorician himself, Clay Newcomb, who infers that shoes make the man, has on more than one occasion cast disparagement upon my choice of kicks. His core philosophy. and I ain't kidding, is that a man should wear leather boots of some type 99% of the time unless he's exercising. He said Crocs might be okay in a camp setting, but only if you were in arms or reach of a gun. He said he feels uncomfortable when he's not wearing cowboy or hacking boots. A rascal also told me once, and I quote,

A man can't properly defend his family in a fight wearing crocs are flip-flops. Hmm. Well, Claybow, I got some news for you. When I'm defending my family, I'm pressing the fight and moving forward, not backing up, so my shoes, they're going with me. And for that matter, you can fight barefooted. If you're a good fighter, you ain't going to be fighting long anyway. As a young man in school, I held truer to Clay's way of thinking than I do now, unless I was on the football field wearing cleats. I was cruising in a pair of cowboy boots or roared. Red Wing Model 612 moccas and toe lace-up boots. I wore those red wings for years, even after I got out of school. It was the style for folks that worked in the woods, and for a time back in the 80s, you could pick out a forestry worker nine times out of ten by what he was wearing. A colored T-shirt with a pocket, overalls, or a pair of Levi's with a skull ring on his back pocket and a pair of red wings.

When I was working for Georgia Pacific, managing timber before I started fighting crime for a living, the Red Wing Boot Man would drive a semi with a custom trailer to the parking lot, and we could go get fitted, sign a payroll reduction form, and walk out of there with a brand new pair of boots, a free pair of socks, and a can of minkgo. Those boots were $60 a pair, and I couldn't have afforded them without the payroll installment plan. $10 a paycheck. Fast forward to last weekend when my wife Alexis and I were shopping for our daughter Bailey's school shoes. That same $60 didn't go far, and the shoe store demanded I pay him full price before we left.

Not funny how times have changed. Anyway, this whole men wear boots and only boots has a lot of basis in the fact that that's what men mainly wore when this country was settled and tamed. They didn't have a lot of choices. Cowboys, soldiers, explorers have all been celebrated as iconic figures. And even old Merle Haggard paid homage to boots in his song, Oki from Muskogee. He sang that leather boots are still in style for manly footwear. Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen. Now, old Merle didn't say men wasn't wearing them in Muskogee.

He just said they wouldn't be seen wearing them. The internet sometimes is such a wonderful thing. Being a detective for all these years, I played a hunch and Googled Merle Haggard Crocs. And there they were, in all their polyethylene vinyl acetate glory, a pair of Merle Haggard Crocs for $44.95. That's almost as much as a pair of red-wing model 612's cost that I was making bimonthly payments on back in the day. The Marshall Tucker band opined that you shouldn't be with a woman long enough for your boots to get old. And not to be outdone, Nancy Sinatra said her boots were made for walking.

So it works both ways. There's validity in what Clay says because whether I agree with it or not, it's his belief and his core value. And people must figure out what theirs are. We should respect them. It's all right with me if he wants to say. set around a camp and a pair of hot leather boots while my piggies are all going to the market and digging the freedom of a pair of rubber shoes. S.D. Gordon was a minister and a writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he offered up the following. Shoes divide men

into three classes. Some men wear their father's shoes. They make no decisions of their own. Some are unthinkingly shot by the crowd. The strong man, is his own cobbler. He insists on making his own choices. He walks in his own shoes. I like that. I read it about five times and I think I got more out of it

every time I did. Obviously, you have to make your own way and walk your own path and it doesn't matter if you're wearing a pair of cowboy boots, brogans, or Merle Haggard Crocks when you do it. Just do it. No, wait, that's running shoes.

Oh, well, it don't matter. Do what makes you happy. That's good for you and everyone around you. Y'all be respectful and good to one another. And that's just about as country as country gets. This is Brent Reeves, signing off. Y'all be careful. First Lights Fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day

and continues when the season ends. products built for early mornings, full days, and real use, hardwaring where they need to be versatile where it matters, no shortcuts, just gear designed for the work that earns the season. Built to perform, built to last. Check out, First Light's new fieldwear gear at firstlight.com.