Bear Grease - Ep. 231: This Country Life - Spotlights, Pink Tomatoes, and Bold Corrections

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

Brent's taking us back to the tomato fields of his youth. You'll hear how he spent a lot of his summers battling the heat on his family's South Arkansas farm and he'll tell about an epic adventure he and two others set out on that didn't quite go as planned. We know. Big surprise, right? Thankfully, the participants are all still here and Brent's sharing their story on this week's episode of MeatEater's This Country Life podcast. Subscribe to the MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop This Country Life Merch 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. I'm coon hunting to trotlining and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This country life is presented by Case Nives on Meat Eat Eater's Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts the Airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. Spotlights, Pink Tomatoes, and Bold Corrections.

I come from what some refer to as the land of tall pines and pink tomatoes. It's a reference to the logging and farming industry that part of Arkansas is known for. It was a great place to grow up, and I'm going to tell you a little about the pink tomato portion of it, but first, I'm going to tell you a story. It was a simple mission, catch them where they weren't allowed to be. We knew the adversary. We knew where they operated. We knew how they operated.

Careful observation had revealed their numbers along with how they infield at X-field from the area of operations into hours. They made no attempt to concealing the trails they used or even bothered to wipe out their tracks. And that's where we had the advantage. We knew how they would come and go and when they were most likely. to do it. Their advantage was speed and their ability to operate in low light. They were masters of nighttime operations.

Their night vision was generations above our own, and while the mission was simple, it was anything but easily accomplished. Also, they didn't have vehicles. We did. That would prove to be our greatest asset in closing in on our adversary and our biggest liability by not knowing the terrain as well as we should have. The scattering reports we had about the lay of the land had been falsified, and it wound up costing us a third of our strength.

It was around 2,300 hours when we moved out. It was early fall of 1979. My brother Tim climbed into the driver's seat of his 1969 Ford truck. Sammy West, our lifelong family friend who Tim had grown up with, And I climbed into the bed and stood up next to the cab facing forward. He was holding the spotlight. I was holding the road. There were deer in the pea patch, and we were fixing the lasso one.

That was our mission. As in any good story, you have to lay a foundation of where the story takes place, and this one was on our farm where we grew up. Tim was married and lived just down the road. I was in junior high school. Our middle brother Chuck was in college, still living at home, and he wasn't there that night, but he would play an important role in the outcome of events. The summer before, he'd grown a patch of watermelons and had sold them for extra money.

They were good, and I helped him pick some and haul them to town to sell. He paid me in watermelon hearts. You know the good part. I'd work for that now. Well, that and case pocket knives, but that's not important. What is important is that after the watermelons were done, he was supposed to take a tractor over there and disc up the hills and run a section harrow over it to smooth out the dirt. He said he did it. And the field had grown up since he'd retired from the watermelon business the year before.

It looked like every other acre over there that didn't have peas and tomatoes growing in it. Weeds that stood about waist high. That's all you saw. Well, that night we eased across the pond levy headed toward the peas. patch with our lights off. The moon was bright enough for Tim to see without them, and when we got close enough to the pea patch, Sammy shined that spotlight and we were looking at a field full of white-tailed deer staring back at us. Their mouths chewing on peas and their bellies getting fuller with each bite. Tim mashed the foot feed and the race was on.

10 to 15 deer took off in every direction out of that peepatch and they made their way across that waist-high weeds of the field that hadn't been planted. The one we were closest to was burning and churning toward the gap and the fence that separated the pea patch from the tomato field. Most of the other deer just jumped the fence, but this one, this one understood the assignment and was beelining it toward the gap, breaking through the weeds like a crab boat in the Bering Sea going through ice. Tim closed the gap when he saw Sammy's light zero in on that fine special of an adult don't. Now I moved around to Sammy's right and I leaned against him. the cab to steady myself as we plowed through the weeds and I readied my rope as we got closer.

The deer was now within the easy roping distance off the right front bumper. We were doing every bit of 25 miles an hour and it was going to be two turns above my head and on the third one I was going to have that deer rope faster than Roy Cooper could have done. Here we go. Rope ready, one turn, two turns and all of a sudden the truck started bucking up and down by the lens The spotlight went out. It got dark, quick. Tim hadn't bothered to turn the headlights on the truck. It wouldn't have done any good anyway. The weeds were taller than the lights.

I grabbed onto the cab and I looked over at Sammy, but Sammy was gone. So was the light. I started beating on the cab of the truck and yelling for Tim to stop. Stop! Stop! A process he'd already initiated upon being bounced around in the cab of his truck like a bean in a coffee can. The truck came to an abrupt stop and Tim jumped out and looking back at us. Well, where us had been that had been reduced to looking at me. I hollered, Sammy's gone. Tim said, where did he go?

I said, I don't know, but he took the light with him. Tim yelled Sammy, Sammy. We heard a faint voice from the middle of the field behind us say, I'm over here. I jumped down on this truck, and we made our way through the weeds. only to meet Sammy walking towards us, still holding on the spotlight with the wires that had been ripped from the battery posts. Tim said, what happened?

Sammy said, Brent pushed me out of the truck. I said, no, I didn't. I was fixing the rope that deer when the truck started bouncing and the light went out. I looked around and you was gone. That's when we knew. That's when we figured it out. That's when Tim, Sammy, and I started. started a trio of coarse and disparaging monologues about our brother Chuck for not

disking and leveling that watermelon patch like he said he did. Truth be told, he probably saved us all from getting our butts kicked by a roped white-tailed dough. I don't know what we'd have done had I actually roped it, but Sammy was uninjured and I never got another chance to rope one. Chuck never leveled that watermelon patch either. And that's just how that happened. 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 Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning calls.

who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Gardens. Nothing spread hate and discontent quicker than your parents saying, it'll be good to have you out of school to help with the garden this summer. Garden? Ain't got time for no garden? What about all those tomatoes growing in that big field across the pond? That ain't enough gardening for y'all?

There's a love of humanity. There's frogs to gig and fish to catch, swimming holes to jump in, and campouts with my friends. I ain't got no time for no garden. On top of the cabillion acres of tomatoes, we already had growing, and I'd be struggling in half the summer anyway. Actually, the most of we ever had was about five acres,

but it seemed like a cabillion. Turns out I did have the time after all, but I didn't like it. My friends that lived in town didn't have to suffer through all this nonsense. They were all racked up in there, watching Bob Barker and waiting on the YMCA pool to open up so they could all meet up and swim in that chlorinated clear water urinal. Me?

I was stuck in the middle of our farm, praying for rain to a cloudless sky and sticking tomato sticks in the ground and wishing I was dead. Don't get me wrong. I love tomatoes. And the tomatoes that were developed specifically for the soil where I'm from and grown in my hometown are second to none. Some of you may have just rolled your eyeballs out of the back of your head and jerked a creak in your neck looking at the radio when I made that claim.

Like last summer when I received all kinds of watermelon feedback when I talked about watermelons. You didn't mention this town or that town or this type of watermelon, and they were right. I didn't. I was merely talking about the places I knew of that proclaimed themselves to be the watermelon capitals of the world. There can be several that hold that title. You've got the biggest watermelons in the world.

You've got the place with the most produced watermelons in the world, et cetera, et cetera. But when it comes to tomatoes, there's only one tomato and only one place, and that's the variety grown in Bradley County, Arkansas, and aptly named the Bradley tomato. This deliciously mildly acidic fruit or vegetable, depending on which camp you're in, stands alone at the pinnacle of the Tomato Hall of Fame due to taste alone, period, there are none better. Save your emails, calls, letters, and bomb threats. I will not budge from this position of how far head and shoulders above all other varieties of tomatoes there are. And believe

it or not, there are more than 10,000 different varieties available today to grow. 10,000 plus. That's more than twice the amount of people who live in Warren, Arkansas, the county seat. The place where some of the most dedicated and frustrated educators of all time attempted to learn me stuff. And home to the Pink Tomato Festival. A hometown event that's been going on annually for the last 68 years. It's always held on the second Friday of June and lasts all weekend with events and entertainment for the whole family. music, arts and crafts, games, lots of great food. In one event that they don't have anymore and haven't had for quite some time,

but it was quite popular back when I was the mere slip of a lad I am today, and that was the tobacco spitting contest. You heard me right. If that ain't good enough for you, it was open to all ages. I remember seeing my pals in the sixth grade competing, but I was terrified someone would tell my mama, so I abstained from competition, never fully realizing my potential as a tobacco-spitting athlete.

They had a big sheet of plastic about three feet wide and rolled out on the courthouse lawn that was printed like a big tape measure. Contestants would get a big chew of tobacco or a dip of snuff, and once they built up a sufficient reservoir tobacco juice, they'd let her fly and whomever spat the farthest won. I don't remember what the trophy was, but I do remember them giving out free samples to anybody that wanted them.

Good Lord, those were different times and times changed, and this time they changed for the better. You won't see that contest there anymore, but you will see a lot of good stuff there, and you should check it out if you had the opportunity. But back to the Bradley Tomato for just a second. In 1961 at the University of Arkansas, Dr. Joe McFerrin at the age of 44 developed the Bradley tomato plant to grow specifically in the soil and the humid climate found in Bradley County in June. All my life I heard folks talk about how cool it was that that specific tomato plant that produced the epitome of the T in BLT was developed and named after Bradley County.

and for 58 years I've heard nothing different. Bradley Tomato developed by the University of Arkansas for Bradley County. End of story. Then I did a little research for some background on Dr. Mafferan, who passed away 13 years ago in 2011. He had an identical twin brother named Jack. He was a decorated veteran of World War II and also served in Korea. His mom's name was Alice and his father's name was Bradley.

Hmm, what a coincidence. Maybe his dad changed it to Bradley after he had a bite of one and experienced just how good they are. But that line of thinking is flawed really because I'd be known as fried squirrel grits reeves. Anyway, the tomatoes are good, and towards the end of May every year, my social media is festooned with folks from my hometown talking about who's got Bradley's. and the out of town folks are wanting to know when someone is headed north with a load. You can get a BLT in just about any place that serves hot food, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and bread. It's as simple as that, and there are as many ways to fix one as you can think of. You can put cheese or onion, potato chips, this kind of bread, that kind of bread.

There's no limit to what you can do. But until you've had one in the combination, any combination, with a Bradley tomato, you'll never really know the festival of flavor your taste buds will experience. It's like fried chicken. I love fried chicken, and I don't care if it comes from KFC, churches, Popeyes, Cracker Barrel, Your House, or the hospital. I love it. It's all good, but nothing will ever come close to your grandma's fried chicken.

The Bradley tomato is your grandma's fried chicken compared to everything else calling itself a tomato. Now, there were a few perks to growing tomatoes. When the tomato market opened, the area of farmers would haul the tomatoes to town for auction at the fairgrounds. Produced buyers from out of state had seasonal offices there, and the farmers would line up early to get inside when the gate opened. Then pick up trucks, cattle trailers, and bob trucks would back up to a long covered concrete slab about the length of a commercial chicken house. Each truck was backed into an individual parking spot with a big wooden table where each girl. which set out a sample of his tomatoes for the buyers to bid on as they followed an auctioneer around from table to table. The only air moving in that blistering asphalt melting heat was the big industrial fans mounted in the rafters that blew the hot air from one end of the tomato shed to the other, but at least it was moving.

Not being one of the first to fill the many slots meant you had to wait in a shadeless line until one of the slots opened up. It made for a long hot day, but it beat the tomato fields by a long shot. Also, a lot of my friends would be there. Some of them had farms and grew tomatoes too, and some worked up at the packing shed. A lot of the girls whose family didn't raise tomatoes that I went to school with would get summer jobs packing tomatoes up there. That place was full of pretty gals, and me and my cohorts frequently patrolling that location while we waited our turn to sell tomatoes.

That was just a coincidence. But folks worked hard raising tomatoes. There wasn't any easy thing about it, from driving stakes, tying up to plants so they wouldn't fall over to running irrigation pipe, spraying for bugs, to actually picking them. It was hot, backbending work that would have you in bed early at night and asleep before your head hit the pillow, just to get up the next morning before daylight and do it all over again. There's not many of my friends that don't have war stories about the tomato fields of our youth. but you could always get a job in the summer, and at least it wasn't hauling hay.

Ooh, hauling hay. I may be having a flashback just thinking about it. Tomatoes were sold by the lug. That's a box to all you folks not raised in tomato country, and the lug averages about 30 pounds. A fella could get a pretty good workout handling tomatoes because just like, hey, you had to handle it more than once. You had to pick them, load them up, box them up,

Load them at the farm, unload them at the tomato shed after they sold. Buyers bid against each other, and the highest bidder bought the whole load of what was represented on the table. It was hot. It was stressful, and some families were dependent on what the tomato crop brought as a substantial portion of their yearly income. I remember once when the market was down, or on occasion it was rumored that the buyers had conspired together to keep the prices low to increase their profit. I don't know if that happened or not, but the farmer wasn't being paid enough to cover the cost to the expense of planting, growing, harvesting, and what the buyer offered was an absolute insult to the folks that had labored day after day to bring the best produce to market. After all, the grocery store prices hadn't fallen in relation to what the farmer was being paid, nor had the cost of producing them. and I saw it explode one day as we waited our turn to sell

and seeing the ones before us getting pennies on the dollar for their invested labor in one of the purported buyer conspiracy times. My mama was worried and stressed knowing the bad news that was coming when I are sold. But this one farmer, he made a statement. He pulled his truck away from the shed and dumped the whole load in the middle of the fairgrounds. Regardless of how you feel about it, right or wrong. indifferent, he'd made a stand. He'd rather throw them away than be insulted with what they were offering.

Several others followed, not but nothing there's too, but refusing to sell them to those buyers at that price, and they sell them themselves as best as they could. That's a prime example of our inherent freedom to protest and take a stand against something that you feel is wrong. I doubt it solved anything other than letting off some steam, but don't want to be. But don't be afraid to make a bold correction. That was instruction given to me in AIT at Fort Sill, Oklahoma in 1987 by an instructor in reference to adjusting artillery fire onto the target. Don't be afraid to make a bold correction.

I've never forgotten that, and I've used it as advice for my life. I've had more than one bold correction in my life to make, and I'm thankful I did, and I'm ever vigilant for the next one. If you take one thing away from this episode today where I went down more rabbit holes than one of George Pennington's champion beagles, let it be that one. Make a bold correction when necessary.

Stand up for yourself, fix yourself when you need to fix it. Don't be scared to do it. I'm so glad you allowed me the time to run around between years this week, and I hope I didn't step on anything important. You know, I get to do it. several messages from folks about supporting the show and what we're doing.

And the best way to do that is by checking out the sponsors you hear us reading ads for. It really does make a difference and has a direct impact. Thanks to y'all that have reached out about it. Also, y'all screwed on over and subscribe to the new Meat Eater Podcast Network channel on YouTube. It's separate from the Meat Eater channel. You'll be able to hear all your favorite podcasts and see all the ones that are being filmed. We just started filming the Bear Greek Shrinder episodes, which is pretty cool. Now, this country life isn't slated for filming, and who wants to watch me stare at a microphone

while struggling to read the stuff I wrote doing take after take? But we've got some other stuff we're working on that will be included that I hope you'll enjoy, and on that channel is where you'll see it eventually. One more thing. This heat is rough on folks and pets. Try to make some time to check on them any other. and all of them that might be affected by these high temperatures. Take them a drink of water and some tomatoes.

Bradley's, if you have the means. 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 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.