Bear Grease - Ep. 223: This Country Life - Happy Father's Day!

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

It’s time to pause and give a salute to the dads out there. They do a lot for us, and this week we’re recognizing their efforts by putting them in the spotlight. Brent's sharing something special with us that we think you’re sure to enjoy. Plus, we’ve got a listener story that will have you covering your eyes just listening to it. It’s “Father’s Day” on MeatEater’s This Country Life podcast.  Check out Brent's cousin Valerie's book Preserving Family Recipes. 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.

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.

Father's Day. Being a father is the best job I've ever had. I started out as a cheer and tennis dad, then a football dad, and now I'm in my dance dad era. Pretty simple. I drive, I clap, and I pay for things. Also, I tell my kids and my grandkids stories, some of which are true. And it reminds me of listening to my dad tell stories when I was their age.

This is a special episode for me, and I've got a pretty cool surprise for y'all as we get further into the show. But first, I'm going to tell you a story. This story comes from this country life listener, Ethan Powell, down in the great state of Louisiana. In Ethan's words and my voice, here it is. Ethan writes, Uncle Brent, if you're still taking hunting stories from the public, I have won along with photographic evidence to back up my claim. No, it's not Bigfoot, but may I dare say this tale is equally as terrifying as running into a Sasquatch. Back in 2014, my best friend, my best friend since grade school, Clay Ray, the man with two first names,

and I decided to venture north for our first out-of-state turkey hunt. At the time, we were both in our early 20s and finally making a decent enough wage to try our hand-hunting in other areas besides our stomping grounds of northwest Louisiana. I haven't always been intrigued with the mountains, I suggested to my compadre that we hunt the Wachita Mountains in western Arkansas. I just happened to have very distant relatives in that area. And one of those relatives possessed a shoebox filled to the brim with turkey beards. arm of that knowledge we made our plans and we set out a great adventure. Pulling up in the yard of Joe Cogburn of Kirby, Arkansas, I soon found myself swapping turkey tails and soaking up the hot tips being presented to my friend and me

on how to go about killing one of these elusive mountain birds. Now, after an evening of fellowship, we decided to hit the hay. Lay in there all night, I anticipated the sound of rolling gobbles, across the mountainside. The next morning, my dream became a reality as I found myself encased in a symphony of rolling thunderous gobbels. Picking out a bird, we struck out in his direction, hoping to close the deal. Well, fast forward to four hours later, Clay and I found ourselves way back in the mountains,

no closer to getting a bird than we had been when we started that morning. Now, after stopping on top of the mountain ridge to take in the view, I thought to myself, Godly, we have to be the only souls for miles around. We haven't seen or heard a person or a truck for hours. Soon enough, though, I found out I was wrong. I was bad wrong. I came up with the idea that maybe we should just make our way back to the truck. If we couldn't have a turkey, then a turkey's...

sandwich would have to do. Claire agreed, and we turned back down the trail when suddenly a flash to my left caught my attention. Instinctively, my right hand found the pistol grip of my 870. As my brain was grappling with the fighter flight reflex, I could see the white object coming into view from the thick brush. It would be a bear? Or maybe it was a hog or possibly a panther.

I'm afraid it was far worse. It was a man, and not just any man. It was a but-necked man running straight toward me. As I realized what was happening, the man looked up in pure terror from his cardio session. He found himself staring at two armed men with nothing to defend himself with but a small towel that he wore around his shoulders. His eyes were big as saucers as he hurriedly snatched that towel off his shoulder and wrapped it around his waist. Now, being a mere 25 yards apart,

I found myself trying to understand the situation. After a few seconds, the shock wore off, I found myself mumbling the question, what are you doing? And the naked man nervously answered, I'm a nudist. I like to jog naked. Looking at him riding the eyes,

I said, well, sure seems like a good morning for it. Maybe a little on the cool side, though. And with that, the man decided to breeze past us and move his way up the trip. This is when I fumbled from my phone. And I got a quick picture of the nudist. And my buddy grinning like a possum, the trip ended out of bird.

But we had a great time and learned a valuable lesson. Running in the nude always carry a town. Well, Ethan Powell in northwest Louisiana, I'd say we all learn something there. The most valuable being if you're lost and in the middle of nowhere, just strip down to your birthday suit and start running. Someone is bound to see you. And according to Ethan Powell,

that's just how that happened. Now here's a little extra. Ethan sent the picture, and I'm going to post it on my social media. It's just like he said, a naked man wearing a towel. Father's Day. A day set aside to honor our fathers and celebrated by dad getting up and grilling all day to feed everyone else living in the house or has lived there in the past. The latter will come back.

and bring others with them to eat. Now, his reward for toiling over the flame is historically new socks, drawers, maybe an afternoon nap. Father's Day came as an afterthought behind Mother's Day, typical. Mother's Day usually follows the same ritual of Dad getting up and grilling for everyone, including the freeloaders who left and came back with more folks to feed. The only difference, no new socks or drawers. But that's okay.

We like it that way. We like to feed the masses and visit and talk of the fathers who passed away and welcome the new ones into our club. Stories are what keep us bound together just as much as our love and respect for all of them. The stories. The stories and memories. I always say that our memories are our own little movies that play in our head whenever we want them to. We can see and color the events and the people in body. like we can almost hear them.

I do that a lot. A lot of this podcast is about my memories of days spent with my father who passed away at 74 on September 7, 2011, almost 13 years ago. Over 4,600 days that he's been gone. There hasn't been one of those days that I hadn't thought about him, and not one. I had him for 45 years, five months, 23 days.

That's 16,662 sunrises and sunsets. It seems like a lot, but it really isn't. Time is always relative to the subject matter. Now, that'd be a long time to be in jail, but the blink of an eye when losing your hero. I kick myself repeatedly when I think about the opportunity I miss by not setting my father down and just letting him talk to my camera and tell the stories of his life. Now, unlike my older brother, Tim, my dad, Lloyd, Wilton, Buddy Reeves, never met a camera he didn't like.

He liked having his picture took and he had enjoyed being the center of attention in the life of the party regardless of where he was. He was the guy who told me that you can have fun wherever you are. If it ain't fun, you make it fun. I have lived by that motto beyond the point in professionalism more times than I care to remember. I was reminded of such an occasion not too long ago by my oldest daughter, Amy. Dad, I'm cutting Derek Reynolds' hair today, and he was telling me about riding with you one time when you were patrol lieutenant at the sheriff's office in El Dorado. Now, for the rest of the planet, that's El Dorado, Arkansas.

Or if you saw it on a map, you'd probably refer to it as El Dorado. But you'd be wrong. It's El Dorado. She continued her story about me letting Derek ride with me that night. And Derek was and is a close family friend, and at the time he was a senior in high school or somewhere thereabouts. Anyway, she asked me if I remembered what happened. And I didn't remember any details. I did remember him coming over,

but just about all the details of my law enforcement career are really a blur. I tried to forget most of it as it happened, and I only recall certain events when someone brings up something specific or something triggers it. But she said, he was riding with you and you answered a call to somebody's house. and they were in a dispute with their neighbor about something,

and the woman went into a long tirade of how she'd been wronged by her neighbor and was raising cane on her front porch while you just stood there and listened quietly, and paying attention to every detail as she droned on and on about the issue that while insignificant in the grand scheme of things, it was obviously very important to her. Then, when she finished her speech of how, I had all went down starting right after creation and end in only moments before y'all you all arrived.

You calmly said, okay, I have one question, ma'am. Is your hair purple? Her hair was purple, and it kind of caught her off guard, and she smiled. I remember it now. I smiled, too, and Derek laughed. And she could see I wasn't making fun of her, and I wasn't. I was just trying to lighten her mood. And then I went about helping her find a resolution to her issue,

the domestic one, not her choice of hair color. But that was a direct lesson from my dad in bringing fun into a fun-free zone. It works. Laughter can be good medicine. It's not always the best medicine. I don't care what Reader's Digest says. Broke leg, I'm going to the ER, not the comedy club. but the things I lament for, the sound of my father's voice,

the stories as he told them over and over, and me laughing and anticipating the punchline that I knew was coming, those are the things I wish I could hear outside the confines of my imagination. And thanks to my cousin, Valerie Fry Stone, I can. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest.

It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com.

I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Valerie wrote a book titled Preserving Family Recipes, How to Save and Celebrate Your Food Tradition. During her research in 2007, she traveled from out of state back home to southeast Arkansas and interviewed several members of our family, including my dad. They talked about recipes mostly, but my dad, being my dad, when he had the floor, he seized the opportunity to cover several topics about rural life and his childhood. Now, the best part is Valerie recorded all the audio.

And she sent me the recordings on a CD not long after my father passed away in 2011, and I stuck that package in an unlabeled CD in a drawer, and I forgot about it. Recently, I was looking for some archived Hurricane Katrina pictures to post on social media in support of episode 215 messing with critters, and I found the disc thinking that it was one of the disc full of photos. I had to go by a disc reader to see what was on there. Computers don't come standard with them anymore, apparently. But I hooked it up, I installed the software, I pushed play, and instead of photos, I heard my dad talking to me for the first time in nearly 13 years. So, what better way to share his stories than to let him tell him? There's a couple stories involving my dad and someone's hat getting

shot while squirrel hunting in the river bottoms. Now, both stories had the hats being shot on purpose, and neither of the folks who got their hat shot were wearing them at the time. Now, one of them happened to be after my dad was an adult, and the one you're about to hear now, him tell was when he was a teenager. The other teen in the story is Wayne Fry. Now, Wayne was Valerie's father and one of my dad's favorite cousins. They were squirrel hunting with shotguns.

I'll give you a little context here and there, but from now on, the famed to squirrel dog training, coyote chasing, brim catching, buckskin, horse-loving, hog-hunting pistilero, the storyteller of all storytellers. Here he is. My dad, Buddy Reeves.

Me and him and Uncle Ed and Uncle Bob had been down there and bottom squirrel, And we've been over behind the lake. We had a good furlough of old Bob. But that jup would get after a deer. He'd run him for about 15 minutes, enough to get we off somewhere. And I guess he'd good till he died. But we then got down to the lake, and we crossed the lake on the drift,

and old logs and stuff out there. And we done got to cross him. Old Bob had run a deer off, but he had stopped and three to three to six. squirrel we back up that lake across the lake. I didn't want to go back up there. Uncle Ed and Uncle Ed and Uncle Bob went to get it until we were going to stay there and wait on. And I told and Wayne had bought him on these good duckback hats. And I told Wayne, I said, I throw my hat up and let you shoot at it. If he'd throw your ears up, let me shoot at it. He said, okay. So I throw man up.

And he shot it and he never touched her that thing. But when he threw this up, I wish now I hadn't, I'd missed it, but I didn't. I mean, I tore up. Nearly all the pieces. And Uncle and Uncle Bob

heard them shots. He got back down there and Uncle Bob said, what was y'all shooting that? He said, and what happened to your hat? If I could only see a picture of Wayne wearing that hat that was shot all the pieces by my dad on that on that squirrel hunting drip. I swear that would be the best thing ever. But in last week's episode,

I talked about hogs and how my family and others in the area had hogs running loose in the river bottoms. My father talks about that and what my great-grandfather did to survive and provide for his family. Now, his dad, my grandfather, had been killed during World War II in an industrial accident in a shipyard out in California. My father lived with several family members growing up, and mostly he stayed with my great-grandfather, whom everyone called grandpa. He talks about going to my great-uncle Henry's home place that was down in the Saline Riverbottoms where our hall claim was years later with my uncle Jimmer Ray. Now, my dad's younger brother who's listening to this from Ground Zero right now at our family's home place in Cleveland County, Arkansas.

And I'll bet you anything. He's wearing overalls and a white t-shirt. Hey, Uncle Jim, Ray. Anyway, here's the sweet voice of my cousin Valerie asking my dad about farming and a glimpse in how my family lived. He farmed most of the time, right? So he was there most of the time. Yeah. How many acres did they have?

Do you know? He. Cotton or just mostly like subsistence farmer? Yeah, he didn't raise. I don't ever remember. He had hounds in the wood. Uncle Henry. Trammell had a grandma's brother on the place down there in the bottom.

He lived down there and he kept, he raised hogs in the wood, you know. Grandpa raised a good big corn patch and Lasel Garden and milk a cow every morning. I don't ever remember. There's no cotton in the D County, uh, log, you know, with the team like in the summertime, get a little money, I guess, lived on. And when I got all of any day, well, all of them got all of it. So he inherited or everything down on, walking oil and

all of them all brothers he was right down there in the river bottom right. Yeah. See the one that had the spring down there and you always kept a dipper down there? Yeah, well down there. He kept a gourd dipper.

And now that that's up well. I had walking five foot of that well you get in there now you can't get in there. I remember I didn't hit a little. I remember out in his front yard, he had a big old postal tree. He had some kind of thing drove in there with a ring on the way to tie your heart. And that tree fell. Me and Jim Ray was down in that.

This is a year later. And I told Jim, I said, I'm going to come down here and get that. Bram and see that thing out of that, but I never did give you. I'd like to have it. Man, I wish he'd have gotten that ring out of that tree too, but more than anything, I'd like to have a drink out of that spring-fed well with that gourd dipper on a hot summer day. My dad and I would get watermelons in the summertime when we'd go to the river fishing and lay them in a spring that was walled out big enough for two good-sized melons to lay in.

We'd fish just about all day, but before we went back up the river to the camp, we'd pull up on the bank and go cut those watermelons and eat very much. both of them right there. They were so cold coming out of that spring water that they'd hurt your teeth when you bit into them. We'd leave the rinds laying on the edge of the river for the coons to know on after dark when they started making their rounds. But then we'd waddle down to the boat with our bellies poking out tight as fiddlestrains

from eating all that cold watermelon. Man, I can taste it now. This last story is a favorite of mine. and any time I get to feeling sad about only having my dad for 45 years, I think about him only having his a little over six. Here's my daddy talking about his daddy. Do you remember him? Yeah, this is.

I think my name was my memory. He'd be a grandpa overall. We start back down the hill going to the house. I'd be standing up, have one foot leech. one of his back pockets and holding on to his gowsers. He'd be sang. You could hear him all over the country, boy, he'd sing. And right there where you get out on the road,

a flying squirrel sailed out of something, and he fell way over there and went up a little dead pine tree, snagged, wind in that hole. And the dad said, you want that squirrel? I said, yeah, he set me down out there, and I don't put it on snaggle and cut that little blind squirrel. Now, how did he call him? I didn't want him?

Did you take him home? Take the squirrel home? No. Now, that's a story that I can see from his point of view. I can see it and I can feel it because he used to carry me the same way on that same road right where this happened. My connection to those people in that place has many facets, and that's the, That's why they're both so special to me. My family worked hard to scratch out and living in that faraway corner of rural America.

Most times they didn't have extra, but they always seem to have enough, and enough is in abundance when there are those with less. My dad never met a stranger. He loved life and he loved having fun. He made folks laugh. And at his funeral, a man was. walked up to me and said, son, you don't know me, and you probably don't know half of the 400 people that are at this service. But I promise you two things. Number one is that as long as folks

hunt with dogs, your daddy will never die. They'll talk about him until Judgment Day. And number two, you see all these people here? I looked around and I said, yes, sir. He smiled and said every one of them thinks they were his best friend, because that's how he treated all of them. He took hold of my shoulders, and he looked me dead in the eyes, and he said, You be that way. Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there and cherish your time with them. We only get them for so long.

I appreciate all of you so much for listening and hope you've enjoyed hearing my dad tell his story. stories as much as I have. I've got a few more that we may share in the future if it fits what we're doing. That's all for now. And until next week, this is Brent Reeves. Signing off. Y'all be careful. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls

in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.