Bear Grease - Ep. 167: THIS COUNTRY LIFE - Old School (Part 1)

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Brent's going old school this week. We know, big shocker, right? He's a walking example of "old school", but he's got some interesting takes on his definition and some stories that we think you'll enjoy hearing. Stoke the fire and sit a spell, it's time for MeatEater's "This Country Life" podcast. Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 got a thing or two to teach you.

Old school. The term old school usually conjures up antiquated ideas and ways, maybe even clothing from a bygone era that most consider outdated. My wife will tell you quick that rummaging through my closet is like taking a trip back in time, and according to her, it's a bad trip. But in my opinion, there's lots to be said for those tried and true staples of practicality and function that far surpassed fashion and style. I'm going to talk about all kinds of old school today,

but first, I'm going to tell you a story. It was common old school practice where I grew up for folks to occasionally take it upon themselves to burn the woods off. Now, back before timber companies put their force into regular burn cycles and management plans, other than harvest, the locals would help them out and do it themselves. Now, the old school term for that was burning off the woods. The new, more acceptable and probably accurate term for that is called arson, and it's greatly frowned upon and for good reason.

Control burning has been an important forestry tool for a long time. During certain times of the year, a good burn helps control the amount of litter buildup, and by litter, I'm talking about leaves and limbs, dead timber, anything else that'll burn. not trash, but when all that stuff is left to build up over the years, it can burn out of control and to the point of becoming a wildfire where timber damage and property loss are higher risk. By staying ahead of those conditions, you can avoid all those problems. There's plenty more advantages to burning, like regenerating growth, shifting soil nutrients and removal of undesired plants. That's just to name a few.

So with that in mind, let me take you on a journey back in time to what I was just alive. It was late February and had been unseasonably warm, and my dad and I had slipped down to the Saline River bottoms to see if we could catch a mess of fish. We stopped on a bridge on the lower potlatch road to fish. Now, there were two main roads that ran through that area, the lower and the upper road. with the upper road being the major avenue for hauling out timber as the lower road was closer to the actual river bottoms and could be flooded from the many sloughs and creeks and biots that crisscrossed along the way.

Potlatch was a timber company in South Arkansas that owned a huge portion of the woods that we like to hunt in and the roads were built for hauling out harvested timber. When I was a kid, that was the biggest place on earth to me. That was my Yellowstone. my Bob Marshall Wilderness, and it represented everything that was wild to me. The Yellowstone might as well have been on Jupiter, and I'd never even heard of the Bob, as my meat eater friends in Bozeman refer to it.

For that matter, I'd never heard of Bozeman either. But I thought there was no way that they'd ever be able to cut all that timber, and we'd have that place to run around in forever. Now, this was way before leasing, and folks honored deer camp claims for deer season, but that was it. Every other critter that bumped around in them woods when it wasn't deer season was fair game to everyone, and there was no place that was off limits. Now, that didn't apply to wild hogs, however, but that's a whole other podcast.

But that's the way it had always been, and as far as I knew, that's the way it would always be. I would eventually learn that I was wrong on both accounts, but on this day, day, all the old school rules still applied. And Dad and I had stopped on the Lake Slough Bridge on the Lower Potlatch Road and went fishing. We walked up and down the bank and fishing beside Cypressenies and had caught enough fish to fry up a mess for the two of us. We'd scroungs around the barn and dug some worms to fish with because no one had crickets yet, and we had a bad hankering for some fried fish. The plan was to catch some fish and fry them up wherever we caught them. If it was at our first stop or our last one, fish was on the menu.

And we didn't take the boat, but we did take a cold bucket, some charcoal, cornmeal, a skillet, onion, taters, oil, and a jug of sweet tea. We were on a mission to eat fish, not go fishing. The slew was up and running water, and it didn't take long for us to catch. a mess of fish. We cleaned them pretty quick and dad had me to building the fire while he cut the taters up and got the fish milled and ready to fry. Now I was working at a fevered pitch and could taste those fish we were about to cook already. Man, it's going to be good. I'd cleared off a small spot beside the bridge and off the road on a dim logging road, a trail really, and I'd kicked away the leaves sitting the cold bucket down and getting the charcoal doused with lighted fluid

and lit. Dab was sitting on the bank of the slew cutting up to taters when I lit the fluid soaked charcoal that blazed up like a volcano. Woo! I backed up and stared at how high it was burning, and I didn't pay attention to the lighter fluid

that had run out on the vents at the bottom of the bucket, and it caught the leaves on fire that I hadn't kicked away. A gust of wind later, and the fire had crossed that old dim trail and was lightened the fuse on a huge, huge cane thicket. For anyone not familiar with switch cane thicket, allow me to pontificate. They grow tall and thick and when they're green, you can't burn them with napalm.

But when they're dead and dried out like these were, they burn like daffy duck in a Bucks Bunny cartoon. Strike a match and poof. Ashes and smoke, they're gone. I took off my jacket and I commenced to whooping the flames that were burning around that chart coal bucket when I saw dad jump up from the bank of the slew and see that cane thicket explode in a wall of flame. His eyes were big and bugging out of his head and horror. I'd only seen him that big once before when a few years earlier I'd nearly killed him with a truck. But that's a story for another day. Dad broke off a big pine limb and started thrashing that fire in a futile attempt to stop it.

It was no use. I both knew it. He kicked the coal bucket over toward the area that had already been scorched the bald earth and chunked the bucket in the back of the truck along with every shred of evidence that we'd been there. The fire had traveled so far away from where it started that you could barely feel the heat from it, but man, you could see it and you could hear it. That cane was the head of a huge cane and briar thicket that went on for quite a ways and had grown up that thick as a result of the timber being cut many years before. It's probably five acres or so, and by now it was roaring pretty good,

and the dried cane stalks popping when they built up with gas and the hollow sections like somebody was shooting a gun. It was just pow, pow, pow, pow, and you could just hear it out there. The good thing was, after about 30 acres or so, that fire had nowhere to go. It was surrounded by Lake Slough on one side, which was wider than the road we'd draw, driven in on and another fork of Lake's Lou that joined a quarter of mile so in the direction of where the fire was headed. There was nothing we could do but leave and we did that with a reckless abandon. Now, that may sound terrible, but my dad knew that fire wasn't going anywhere, but he also

didn't want his son to be branded an arsonist at such a young age. That's a moniker you should earn on purpose, not on accident. Anyway, we skedaddled and went to the house, which which wasn't that far away, and I watched that smoke as we got further and further away. It looked like the whole world was on fire. I fretted about that fire, and for good reason, I'd made a mistake, and I was inattentive to everything that I was supposed to be doing. Building a fire was only half of my job. I was also responsible for making sure it didn't burn where it wasn't supposed to.

Attention to detail is what wrecks just about everything, or the lack of it, I should say. I kept pestering dad for us to go check it, and not long after we got home, we went back. Just like every criminal returned to the scene of the crime. We did take time to get the charcoal bucket and everything else is out of the truck before we went, just in case we ran into somebody, but it was in the middle of nowhere, and there was no logging going on, and there was no hunting season going on, so the chances of us running into anybody was very remote. The smoke had decreased from what had been.

had been an hour ago and we could see that it was running out of fuel. Dad said it'll be on the bank of Lake Slough before long and that'll be the end of it. You learned a valuable lesson today, son, and it could have been costly, maybe even deadly. But it wasn't, and that's a good lesson to learn. I felt better about it. The main thing I felt better about was my dad wasn't mad at me. And I hadn't destroyed someone's home or hurt anybody. He said, let's go home and eat some fish.

Well, Dad pulled down in that old logging trail where it had all started, and even the charcoal had burnt to the point of blowing away in the wind. He backed out in the road and stopped abruptly, causing me to turn away from that big plume of smoke and see Mr. Junior Williams' truck pulling across the Lake Slough Bridge and right up beside us. Mr. Jr. was a family friend, and he had some running dogs that would hunt him. with dad a lot and I'd known him all my life. Mr. Jr. was a good man. Mr. Jr. raised chickens and my dad was his serviceman for years, but raising chickens wasn't Mr. Jr.'s only job. He was also the Arkansas Forestry Commission's County Forest Ranger for Cleveland County.

In other words, he was the wildfire police and he was pulling up beside my dad's truck and rolling down his window. I was going to prison and would never again see the light of day. I would never make it to junior high school, and I would never taste a fried blue gilt brim again. My life was over. Hey, buddy. How are you, junior?

I'm good. Looks like we got a little smoke going. My dad said, yeah, looks like it. I was mortified. I knew at any minute that our very own Columbo of the woods was going to slap the cuffs on me and hauled me off to Cummings Prison Farm. The state penitentiary where I'd be sentenced to life in the electric chair for burning up 35 acres a potlatches cane thicket.

I was doomed. Time slowed down to a crawl as I prayed for my dad to take his foot off that clutch and get us out of there. That fire ain't going nowhere, is it, buddy? No, junior, it ought to be about burnout by now. Lake Slu goes all the way around it. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Probably a good thing it burnt now, Mr. Jr. said. It's rather than this summer when Lake Slu's dry and it could get out.

It wouldn't stop until it got to the river. Man, it wouldn't be a camp left down there. When he said that, I wanted to die. It made me sick at my stomach. I knew all the folks that had camps down there, and I had been a guest in most of them. I glanced back at that smoke, and when I look back, Mr. Jr. was looking at me dead in the eyes, and he said, Brent, did you burn

them woods up? Sweet Jesus, I'm called. I just sat there looking back at him and waiting for him to pull his pistol on me. Dad turned his head toward me and said, well, answer the man. Now I'm betrayed by my father. I'm going down. I gathered up all the gumption I had, and I said, I cannot tell a Mr. Junior. I did it. He started laughing and hitting his hand on the steering wheel.

Dad started laughing and I wanted to cry and I was just about to when Mr. Junior said, buddy, that boy is as crazy as you are. Dad said he sure is, Junior, we're late for dinner, I'll see you, and with that, we took off.

I barely heard Mr. Jr. say bye before we were making tracks toward the Ponderosa. Now, I've always thought that he knew we've done it. After all, I did confess to him. I didn't lie about it.

But it was a lesson learned and one I will never forget. 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 bag

and there was a full 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 backwoods. 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. Old school. It can describe a lot of things, but the main message I get from it is it's a, if you're it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of vibe. There may be a better way to do things that are better and more time efficient, but time to me these days is measured in joy. I can sit down with a wet rock and a case pocket knife and sharpen it all evening, just slowly back and forth, honing that blade to a razor's edge, and I could use any number of sharpening tools and have it done in a matter of minutes, which is more efficient, but not nearly as satisfying or relaxing. I used to sit and watch my dad sitting in his recliner doing the same thing with the very

Arkansas stone that I use. I couldn't wait to learn how to do it, and when I did, it's something I enjoy. There's something therapeutic about it. Maybe it's the sound or the motion that connects me with the past and those memories of watching my dad do it. It's a cheap and harmless pastime and it serves a purpose because a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one. I'm going to say that again so the folks in the back can hear me. A dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one. You don't agree? Well, hear me out.

My brother Tim and I were rabbit hunting one Saturday afternoon when I was 14. We were walking up some old ditches and briar thickets on a friend's farm a couple miles from ours that we were. was covered up in cotton tails. We'd shot two or three when another one busted out on my side of the ditch, and I shot him, but I didn't make a killing shot on him. It was in the middle of a soybean field, and there wasn't a tree or a fence post within a quarter of a mile to knock his head on. So I pulled out my pocket knife,

and I was going to quickly give him the old coup de grace of the throat, but my knife was so dull that when I tried to force it into the spot where I needed it to end it quickly, I had to push extra hard, and it slipped from where I had it intended, and jobbed it into the palm of my hand that I was holding that wiggling rabbit with, and it sunk in my hand about two inches. I laid my shotgun on the ground, swapped hands, and gave the stock a love tap with that rabbit's noggin and ended that portion of the suffering. But I was now bleeding like crazy, and rightfully so, seeing as out I had just stayed.

to myself. It was a common phrase of my mother's. Every time you or your brother opens a pocket knife, you cut yourself. About one more time and I'm going to hide it from you. She wasn't wrong, although this time I had stabbed myself instead of cutting myself, which could be considered a technicality. Tim said, Mama's going to be mad at you. Well, we ain't going to tell Mama.

I looked across that field and there was Clement's grocery a half a mile away. a country store that friends of our family owned and where Miss Billy Ruth Clements would be working. I'd get her to doctor on me and that'd be the end of that. Take me to the store, Tim. Miss Billy Roof will fix it up. So that's what we did and that's what she did. She boiled it out with some peroxide, dobs some kind of ointment on it, and bandaged it up with gauze and tape.

I swore her to secrecy and we went back hunting and killed some more rabbits. Now here's the lesson. If my knife had been sharp, I'd have finished that rabbit off in short order. Never hurt myself, and it was my fault that it had all happened anyway, from the poor shot to the dull knife. Two creatures had suffered needlessly. Shoot straight and keep your knife sharp. Some would say that even totting a knife is old school.

I've talked about it before, and y'all know, the regular listeners anyway, but for the new folks, I carry two knives, and one of them used to be a loner for that sad sack that I would run into that asked a bar a knife instead of being a man to begin with and having one of his own. I wouldn't loan out my case knife because someone that doesn't care enough to tote one ain't going to use my good one. So I carried a loner. There was anything but a case.

Now, I got tired of toting a loaner, so I stopped. Now, I didn't stop carrying two pocket knives. That'd be weird. No, I carry a case knife in both pockets now, and I don't loan either one of them. That's old school. It may be a little selfish, but I'm drawing the line in the dirt, and it stops right there. What doesn't stop is my affinity for most things old school, and we've just scratched the surface here today, so how about we continue this next week? Well, Brent, I think that's a great idea. You know, this is my favorite time of the year With the holidays and hunting season in full swing

I'm spending lots of time and outdoors with folks I'm partial to And that makes all the difference in the world Take the opportunity to invite someone Who may not normally have the opportunity To get a chance to do something in the wild And an opportunity may be all that person needs to shine I promise you'll get more of the moment out of it than they will.

I thank y'all for listening and would appreciate it if you shared our show with other folks you think might like it to. Until next week, this is Brent Reeves. Signing off. Y'all be careful. 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 bag and there was a full 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 backwoods. 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 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.