Bear Grease - Ep. 169: THIS COUNTRY LIFE - Old School (Part 2)

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

Brent's back with a continued line of thoughts and observations on the value of instilling some old school ways into today's modern way of thinking. From recognizing the value of a good rope to tying a knot that's lasted 48 years, we think there's plenty in here to think about and enjoy. Gather up the family, it's time for Old School Part 2 on 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.

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 and 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.

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.

Old School Part 2. Old School Part 2. Old School also. Old school, here we go again. Whatever you want to call it. That's what we're talking about this week. A continued conversation on the things I found value in that the world has generally passed on by. I like innovation and progress, but not just for the sake of change. I'm a big fan of tradition and legacy and paying respect to the folks that got us here by keeping their custom. and practices alive. Round two of old school is up next, but first, I'm going to tell you a story. In 1975, I was nine years old and had narrowed down the path my life would take to either being a policeman, a cowboy, or a stuntman. Now, looking back 48 years later, I have to say, are pretty well called that career from the get-go. What little TV I watched at that time was Adam 12, gunsmoke, Bonanza, the six-me,

million dollar man and swat. Now, a lot of you probably never heard of those shows, but I'm sure some will recall them. Anyway, we also had a barn and a hayloft. Dad kept everything that you associate with that barn in there, and it was also a playground for us kids. Now, y'all hang on because I'm going somewhere with all this. The hay and the loft was used to build hideouts and for playing hide-and-seek, and it was the headquarters for a lot of the adventu.

ventures we'd conjured up. It was an army base, a frontier fort, a place to hide chewing tobacco and cigarettes. It was anything we needed it to be, and it was full of tools, hatchets, axes, hammers, anything a group of well-intended but poorly supervised kids could think of to use for any activity other than their intended purpose. A hatchet turned into a tomahawk and we took turns trying to master the art of chunk of on to stick in a tree. The claw hammer made for a good pistol, and the many gunfights had break out at a moment's

notice, and there were ropes cold and hung around, but they were big and rough, except for the ones that hung with the plow harness that belonged to my great-grandfather. He passed away before I was born, but he was my dad and my uncle's father figure growing up because their father, my grandfather, was killed in an industrial accident in a Navy ship. yard in San Francisco, California. He'd taken a job there during World War II, like a lot of men with families from our area. Work was where you found it, and supporting the war effort was number one on the list, regardless of how far you had to travel to do it.

I'd seen Dad use those harness and our horse buck many times to plow a garden or to skid logs out of the woods that we'd cut for firewood. He'd also used it to pull a ground slide that he'd built out a rough-cut lumber. Ground slide is a decked platform of 2-12, about 10 feet long and 6 feet wide, that sat above the ground on wooden skits. It's more or less a big sled that had a single tree attached to the front. And without going to plumb off the rails here, a single tree is a wooden shaft, a little smaller in diameter of a baseball bat, reinforced with a strap of metal running from one end to the other.

And in the middle would be a ring that you would attach to the sled, and on each end would be rings that would be attached to the harness that was on the horse. The harness on the horse had straps around the horse's chest along his back and round his hindquarters that helped distribute the load when he was pulling. On the horse's head was a head stall on a bit that worked just like a bridle on a saddle. horse. Connected to the head stall and bit was the plow lines or rains, and that was the steering wheel, the brakes, and the gas to drive the whole kit and capoodle down the road. Those plow lines were tightly woven cotton ropes. There were strong, but soft on the hands and easy to grip.

Now, where's Brent going with this story? Well, I had to explain all of that to explain this. That whole harness was precious to my dad. My great-grandfather had used it skidding logs with mules for a living when my grandfather was just a boy. He'd used it hauling out hogs and deer they'd killed in the woods and plowing in the garden for the food they grew. Outside a flower, meal, and a few other things that they didn't grow, raise, or hunt, that harness that hung in our barn had been an integral part of my house.

father's very existence growing up in a tangible item that he could reach out and touch that connected him and the rest of us to our past. My great-grandfather and grandfather had told and sweated holding those plow lines to survive and my father had kept the legacy alive by doing it not so much out of necessity but more out of nostalgia and legacy and the love that he had for those two men. and that's about as old school as it gets. So what does that have to do with TV shows that I was watching growing up or the career path I chose at the tender age of nine? Well, I'll tell you.

In the opening credits of the SWAT TV show, they introduced the actors in different action sequences. Steve Forrest runs up to the corner of a building. Robert Urick hurdles a picket fence like he was shot out of a cannon. Rod Perry jumps head. Head first through a closed glass window into a tool shed. Mark Shera repelled down the side of a three-story building, and James Coleman jumped from one rooftop to another.

Now, I was going to be one of those guys when I grew up. I was going to wear fatigues in a big ballistic vest and towed a rifle hunting bad guys and making the world safer. But it was going to be a long time before I could be old enough to do that for real. So now all I could do was pretend. I could run up to the corner of a bar with my tomato stick M-16 and peek around to see if the coast was clear with no issues. The only fence we had the hurdle was either electric or barbed wire,

and I wasn't built to safely jump over either. According to my maternal grandfather, my legs were barely long enough to reach from my behind to the ground when I stood up, so that was out. And jumping through a closed glass window seemed dangerous to me, and I was still at the age where I thought commandeering the family farm truck and passing the school bus was a good idea.

Y'all remember how that worked out. If you don't know what I'm talking about, skip back to episode 157. But I wasn't about to jump through no glass window. The only roof around was the house and the barn and they were 200 yards apart, and Spider-Man couldn't jump that far. But I did have a two-story barn.

All I needed was some rope. and there was a lot of it hanging up in there. That repelling scene was my favorite anyway, even though I didn't know what it was called. But that's what I was going to do. I just had to figure out how to do it. 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 day. 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. I went through the barn, stuck a pair of slick, palmed, white mule gloves in the bib of my overalls. I grabbed a big coal rope that was hanging on the wall, threw it over my shoulder, and headed up the ladder to the hayloft. The rope was thick, heavy, and rough, and it scratched the fire out of my neck. That was a deal breaker?

How in the world was I supposed to zip down the side of the building looking like a hero on a rope that was so rough, Tarzan would rather walk than swing on it? There had to be something better. I looked all around and hanging in the back corner and hidden in the shadows was a coal of pretty gray rope. My great-grandfather's plow lines. I crawled over an anvil and a box of used horseshoes and stood before the harness. The trace chains and I ran my hands across the smooth cotton braids of strong rope and my

eyes got wide with excitement. That was it. I had found the perfect rope. This mightn't be what that swat man on TV was using. Maybe his daddy had a harness in his barn. I unhooked each end from the bit. I threw it over my. shoulder and smiled as it lay perfectly without feeling like I had a bobcat and a headlock.

I climbed the ladder to the loft, anchored one end of the rope by tying a square knot on a four-by-four post, and I chunked the other end out the loft door where we pitched the hay bails in. I put on that pair of slick white mule gloves, I grabbed the rope and bailed out of the door like I knew what I was doing. I did not. Swinging out into space and squeezing that rope with all my strength did not. nothing to counteract the force of gravity that was pulling beat down that rope like a falling yard dart. I repelled the last four or five feet freestyle after turning that rope loose when my gloves heated up hot enough to bake biscuits in. Slamming into the ground went unnoticed as I continued

my concentration on the smolding pair of gloves that was still adorned my twice-baked hands. I let my hands cool off as I pondered on how that went sideways and what I could do to fix it. And in the days before Google, you had to use your own noggin and not somebody else's to scope the correct procedure out through, in my case, at least, a series of bad decisions. That's called trial and error, or is it applied to me, trial and injury. Back up to the loft I went, but this time it was going to be different. Now, I had to figure out how to stand on the side of that building like that cat on TV did. Must have had a knot in his rope.

I measured out what I thought would be long enough to have me about halfway down the barn wall, tied me a loop that I could sit in, and in it I sat. I stepped up to the edge of the loft door, made a wrap of rope around my arm, and with all the strength I could muster, I squeezed it tight. I backed up to the edge and walked down the side of that barn holding that rope as tight as I could until I got to the end of the slack. Now, in my mind, I had just repeated. What I'd actually done was sat down in a loop of my great-grandfather's plow line

and hung myself on the side of the barn like a Christmas decoration. I was just sitting there looking around, feeling accomplished, and eventually wondering how I was going to get down. Well, that was going to be real easy, but at that time I didn't know how easy it was going to be. But I was more or less just stuck above Mother Earth at an altitude of about six feet. It might as well have been 600. The loop I'd tied in that rope wasn't big enough for me to slide through feet first, so I was just dangling in the sun on the side of our barn, like an idiot.

After some time I heard the dogs barking across the road in the pen. I knew Dad was over there feeding them, and it was only then did I start calculating my folly. I watched him from 150 yards away just doing his chores, walking back and forth, pouring out feed, changing out the water, just doing dad stuff, and I saw him start looking around. I figured he was looking for me, and I got the feeling I should not be hanging on the side of the barn when he found me in Grandpa's plow lines.

But alas, there was nothing I could do but literally just hang around until he saw me and got me down. By his measured and purposeful walk, I realized the moment he saw me. As he got closer, I could see the confusion on his face of how I had gotten where I was, and when he got close enough to realize I was hanging on the side of the barn, holding onto a knot the sides of an orange that I'd tied in Grandpa's plow lines, I saw that look of confusion turned to fission as a nuclear fission, as in how an atomic bomb goes about being an atomic bomb. His face flushed red.

His jaw tightened up, and I could feel his eyes burning me hotter than the rope had earlier when I slid down it like a zip line. Is that grandpa's plow lines? Not what are you doing hanging on the side of the barn? Not are you stuck? Not do you need help? No, it wasn't none of that. But he was now standing under me, and when I answered him,

I don't think I got to the pronunciation of the letter R in yes, sir, when he grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and snatched me out of that loop I tied in the lines. He didn't say a word. He didn't whip me. He never won't. Not once. So if y'all are thinking one of these days, Brin's going to tell a story about how his dad finally reached his limit and beat the ever-loving pudding out of him, you'll still be waiting when Jesus comes back because there ain't going to be one of them stories.

There should have been, but there was a little bit. wasn't. And I don't want you to get the idea that my father wasn't strict or that he just let me run wild. You'd be wrong thinking that. Had I done anything remotely to anyone else like the things I did to him or his things, I'd be telling you this story from Reeve Cemetery. What he did do was give me stern lessons and what it was to be a man, to stand up for what I believed in, to respect others to be courteous to defend the weak and to stand up to the strong even though I might be scared when I did it. He also taught me to deal with what life dealt me and go on.

Maybe that's why he never tried to get that knot out. He just coiled the lines back up and hung them in their place on the wall with the rest of the harness. Now, I certainly deserved a whoop and I got my share of them from my mama, but never from him. The disappointment that I could see in his face when I had done something out of line was way worse than any other punishment that I could have ever received. Now, first of all, I wasn't a malicious child. I didn't do things out of meanness or with harmful intent, and I guess he knew that. I was bumbling my way through life, and he was giving me enough slack in my own range to just go about my business and make my own decisions about things and learn for myself. A tried and true old-school concept that is not popular in a lot of places today.

Helicopter parents, they're called, just hovering around waiting for junior to come up against some kind of adversity so they can come in and fix it for them and make it easier. You know the saying about glass house as well, I ain't going to start chunking rocks because I'm as guilty of it as anyone, but I try not to be. Alexis and I want Bailey to grow up and be a responsible adult who makes informed decisions based on our faith, teachings, and her knowledge and belief in what we've taught her to be true. We also want her to face adversity, and as hard as it is to witness, she has to lose sometimes, and she has to feel rejection and disappointment because life, real life, is full of that.

And that's where the good folks come from. the ones that get knocked down and get back up with the risk of getting knocked down again. Intestinal fortitude, guts, gumption, whatever you want to call it, you got to have it to make it, especially in a world where everyone's an expert and has an opinion that they can hide behind a username when they give it. I was talking to Pat Durkin the other day about a recent article he wrote. Pat's one of my favorite contributors of the written word and has a ton of interesting articles on the meat eater website.

We were talking about how people were reacting to a guy killing a mountain line that had approached him. I don't care what your opinion of it is, and I'm not going to belabor you with mine because it's been adjudicated and it's over. Plus, I wasn't there. What we were discussing was the ration of fertilizer that guy was getting pummeled with online. That was the topic of our conversation.

I told Pat that so-called social media should have a rule that when you run your mouth, about something, especially something that you don't know anything about, you should have to post your address with it as well. We both figured there'd be a lot less of it if that was the case. Regardless, the practice of not saying anything if you didn't have something good to say is an old-school lesson we should all get behind. Except when it comes to possums and rats, I don't care if you're in church on the radio or both, let it rip and give them no quarter. Now, I talked about how my father had taught me to be a man, how to be strong, how to learn from adverse conditions and do the right thing.

Those attributes ain't confined to boys, and while a lot of what he was teaching me was the building blocks of manhood, they're the same lessons I'm teaching Bailey. Some of the strongest people I know and look up to are women, and it's my nightly prayer that we're raising another one. read a quote the other day that said adversity shakes the foundation of our character to see if what we believe in value is really worth standing for. Man, I like that. I find a lot of truth in it.

You know, I'm reminded of a portion of my father's adversity every day when I look at a coal rope hanging in my garage. It's smooth and gray rope that you can tell as strong when you run your hands over. On each end is a set of snaps that were used long before I or my father was born to attach the ends to a horse's pit. Somewhere between those two lines is the knot about the size of an orange, the nine-year-old boy tied. Y'all keep your plowed line straight, and thank you so much for listening. I look forward to visiting with you next week, and until then, 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 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 fieldware gear at first light's new fieldware gear at first

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