Bear Grease - Ep. 271: This Country Life - Tents, Crawfish, and Sleep Apnea

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

"Everyone loves camping!" "Most people like camping!" Ok, some people go camping and Brent’s experiences in that endeavor put him somewhere in the midst of one of those statements. Pitch the tent, light the fire, and get ready for camping stories on this episode of MeatEater’s “This Country Life” podcast.  Hurricane Relief: https://www.redcross.org/donate/cm/onxmeateater-pub.html/ 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. From 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 Knives on Meat Eat Eater's Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts that Airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share.

Tents, crawfish, and sleigh. sleep avenue. Camping is something a lot of us like to do. There are those who camp solely for the experience of spending time out in nature and those who do it in conjunction with some other activity. Regardless of your reason for being there sleeping outside comes with ups and downs and I'm going to talk all about them. But first, I'm going to tell you a story. My older brother Tim has told this story for years. It's a good one and I'm going to share it with you now. But Tim, and some of his friends went camping in high school. This would have been in the early's 1970s.

He said there were three or four of them on this particular outing one summer, and they'd all decided to boil some crawfish to go along with the bologna and bread they'd brought for supper. They built a fire that night, and they stained up some crawfish from the creek and had a pot of water they dropped some whole taters in to boil hanging over the fire. They carried on as boys do, playing, rassling, and doing every, thing except focusing on the cooking pot. They would soon regret that admission of responsibility. After some time, someone decided the taters had to be done by now,

so they dropped all the crawfish in and went back to roughhousing. For those of you who may not know, crawfish like shrimp, don't take long to cook. They're pretty well done after about five minutes, and then you turn the fire off and just let them soak up the seasoning. Tim said they didn't have any crawfish season and had only decided to cook some after finding them in the creek where they were fishing and frog gigging up and down that night. They also weren't keeping up with the water in the pot with the taters

because they'd run all their flashlight batteries down by then and didn't see they'd bowl the majority of the water out of the pot. Add another cloud to the perfect storm of the fire dying down to the point that the crawfish that didn't die in the pot when they were dropped in were standing on the corpses of their fallen comrades that had managed to get semi-cooked at the point someone suggested they commenced to eating them. Tim said he and the others all jammed their hands down in there to grab a crawfish before they were gone and peeled at them so fast it didn't really take time to look at them.

It wouldn't have mattered because they didn't have a light with a, enough juice in it to look at them anyway. He said the first one he had was a little chewy, but he had it swallowed and was working on his second one and thinking to himself, man, they didn't rinse them very well because the first one was not only chewy,

but it was a little gritty. He was having a time peeling the second one when someone hollered, hey, these crawfish ain't done. Well, somebody grabbed the pot off the hook and held it down near the fire so they could see in there. Tim said, the dead ones

weren't cooked, and the live ones were mad at the world and spoiling for a fight. They cut the live ones loose. They figured they'd earned that by then, and they kept the dead ones for bait, and they fished the taters out of the pot to eat. Now, apparently, when they dropped all those crawfish in there, probably a dozen or so, they landed on their feet like cats, and were doing the hot foot to stay alive using those taters like islands of sanctuary in a sea of bowl.

and water. And according to my brother Tim, that's just how that happened. Camping means a lot of things to a lot of different folks, but a simplistic definition is the activity of spending a vacation living in a camp, tent, or a camper. I've done a whole lot of it throughout my life, and I enjoy it very much.

Coffee tastes better. The food you eat tastes better. The whole experience to me is refreshing and a reboot for my brain. Last January, Clay and I spent the night on an island on the Mississippi River while filming a deer and duck hunting film for the Bear Gries Road Show. There were two other guys on that trip, cinematographers Drew Steckline and Dave Gardner. They were there and they were sleeping in a big boat that Sea Arc boats had provided for us to use.

That rascal had a canopy that fully enclosed the cabin into an heatable retreat, complete with lights and couches that doubled his beds. Very comfortable, I guess. Clay and I were 80 yards away on a pointed land down inside the bank that shielded us from the cold wind but did nothing to protect us from the cold ground. After a supper, we each crawled into our separate tents, and I realized after getting inside, cocooning myself in my sleeping bag, and laying down that I'd made an egregious error,

not only in figuring the slope of where I'd set up my solo tent, but also the orientation of it. My feet were uphill. The incline was such that the material of my sleeping bag was sliding off the air mattress, and there would be no way I'd be able to get any sleep because of it. I laid their way in my options. I could get back up and reset everything by tearing my tent down and turning it at 180 degrees,

or I could just flip around and put my feet where my head was now. That makes sense. I'm sure while I was reciting this, the majority of you were saying, just turn around, dummy. Well, if it were only that easy. That solo tent was sloped, narrowed in height and width, making one end specifically designed for your feet. To break it down, I'd have to get dressed,

unload everything from inside, and redo the whole operation from start to finish. By this time, we'd all been up for over 20 hours. I was ready to go to sleep. We'd be up and going again the next morning at daylight to try and beat the rain that was moving in was still another 125 miles to go. Every minute I was awake was a minute I wasn't going to get to sleep.

I'll just flip around. My face will only be a few inches from the tent where normally my toes would be point. but so what? I was tired. I think I could have hung myself on a nail by the shirt collar and rested. That option sounded better than what actually happened. Did I mention that I have sleep at me? I probably should have because that also played a major role in that night's slumber party. I'd prepared for our night under the stars by purchasing off the interwebs a big rechargeable power supply that was guaranteed to run a CPAP machine for, for nine hours.

I'm not sure what nine hours in China is where that big battery was made, but it converted to about three hours inside the levees of the Mississippi River. Also, because of how cold it got that night, the condensation that built up in the air holes had me hollering for a lifeguard half a dozen times before the battery finally died two and a half hours before the alarm went off. Nothing like trying to sleep with a bubbling plastic tube hooked up to your face. and finally drifting off to sleep only to inhale a nose full of water. I might as well have been sleeping in the live well on that boat,

but instead I was flying out of my tent sliding off that air mattress like Aladdin was singing a whole new world to me as I fought gravity to stay inside. Could this night get any worse? Yep, it could and it did. The inside of the tent at the footbed where I'd been trying to, to sleep had frosted over on the inside and was beginning to melt and drip on my face as I lay there trying to remember I was having fun while Clay snored like a groundhog sawmill in his tent

next door. I crawled outside to a heavy frost. I brought the air mattress and my sleeping bag and I laid down on a little less grade and dozed on and off for what seemed like eternity until the alarm went off. Oh yeah. Camping? It's fine. 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 contest. 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. I heard a comedian say one, time if being outside is so good, why are all the bugs always trying to get in your house? Well, he's got a point. But if I'd pitch my tent correctly the first time and properly vetted the power supply for my CPAP machine prior to that trip, I'm confident it would have been a different experience. I still like to do it. I just have to deal with the CPAP issue.

I'm working on a solution and praying that goes well. Anyway, roughing it, as they say, means different things to different people. To me, when I hear we're going to be roughing it, I'm thinking on the ground, miles deep in the wilderness, with nothing other than what you could tote in there with you. To my wife, roughing it is anything below a suite at the Hampton Inn. As she puts it, I'm not about that little house on the prairie life. Duly noted. We can't talk about camping without talking about some traditional camping meals.

There's a lot, and some are just better than others. I can't think of anything that ain't better than raw crawfish like Tim and his pals were eating, but outside of freshly fried fish, one of my favorites is the old hobo campfire meal. I heard someone say not too long ago that it wasn't politically correct to use the term hobo anymore. I swear, I never know what I can't. and I can't say. But I also don't know what else to call it. If there's any persons out there who favor free load and travel by riding the rails over the security of long-time employment and an address,

send me a message and tell me what I'm supposed to call it because houseless person food doesn't sound too appetized. Anyway, y'all know what I'm talking about. My son Hunter and I have made it a hundred times over the years when we'd be off somewhere hunting and not necessarily camping, but not wanting to go back into town to eat dinner. That's a new meal at our house. It's good and it's easy. Hamburger meat of some kind. Carrots, taters, onions, some cabbage, if you like,

butter, salt, pepper, and aluminum full. You wrap it all up, chuck it in the coals next to a fire. In about 30 minutes, you're in business. The first time I ate it was when I was in the Boy Scouts. It was in the spring of 1979. we were headed to Camden, Arkansas for the DeSoto Area Council Jamboree. Scouts from all over Arkansas were assembled, and the area where we were camping was in a portion of Wachitae County

that had been used for making bullets to keep Germany and Japan on their side of the planet back in the 40s. Acres and acres of concrete bunkers were strategically placed all through the woods. The bunkers were shaped like long igloos that were all. underground except for the openings where you entered and along with a regular door, the igloo had two large barn doors that would open the line trucks and machinery inside when it was in use. And now they were just all sealed and set empty and preparedness for a time when they would be needed again, which would be not long after my troop finished chowing down on a wheelbarrow full of houseless person food. We had to close in ceremonies for the evening and were all tucked.

into our two-man tents when thunder rumbled in a distance. We all looked outside. The stars were shining. Back in a tent and soon enough once the boyish buffoonery stopped, we were all asleep. I woke up sometime in the night to someone yelling, Troop 54, up and at them, fall in. What in the world was going on? It's still dark outside except for all the lightning flashes, and why was all this water running through our tent? can't find my light. Where's my boots? Where's my breeches? Why are all these adults hollering at us to hurry up? I didn't understand everything I knew about what was going on, but I was panicked, and it seemed like it took me forever to unzip that tent. I poked my head outside to see what the calamity was

about, and there in the pouring rain stood Mr. Jim Dean. Our scoutmaster lit up in the glow of a Coleman lantern. He was standing there with his hands on his hips like a hero. in a movie. Lightning flashed to the sky behind him. He had on a red windbreaker. Scoutmaster uniform shirt neatly tucked into his shorts, hiking boots, and wool socks rolled down over the top. He was a recruiting poster for the Boy Scouts of America, and I wasn't afraid anymore. I was the troop leader, and he said, Brent, gather the boys do a headcount and get him in the back of that truck. A tornado is coming, and we need to move out. He stood by a, calmly while I did what he told me.

We all climbed in the back of that truck, me next to last and him after me. The remainder of the night, we spent in one of those bunkers soaking wet, but sheltered from the storm, and, man, did we have a story to tell? That was my first real lesson in leadership, making sure the people for which I was responsible were all accounted for before leaving for safety. They were my priority and I never forgot that lesson.

I look back now as an adult and I see how smart Mr. Dean was to allow me the opportunity to lead, even as a child. While he stood by to take over in an instant, should I not be able to follow through with the task. It was a defining moment for a 13-year-old boy and a time I'll never forget. I tried to carry that lesson throughout my career as a leader of men. I'll leave you with this one from the first time. I ever slept in a tent. I have no idea where the tent came from or what happened to it afterward, but Dad had it set up in the woods just down from Grandpa's old home place where my

Uncle Jimmy Ray was living. I couldn't have been more than five or six, and the tent was made from red canvas. It smelled like pneumonia and mothballs and had so many holes in it that had it been on the deck of a ship, you could have accurately navigated by the stars without ever leaving your sleeping bag. Dad set it up on a little pine-thicket for us kids to play in, and his darkness approached. I begged him to let us sleep in it, just me and him. I remember the angst on his face as he tried to talk me out of it by steering the conversation to make it sound like it was my idea.

Son, you don't really want to sleep in that tent, do you? We'll have to sleep on the ground and we might get cold. Dad, we can bring some quills and cover up. It'll be fun, and we can take your flashlight. Ah, the flashlight. My dad had a flashlight that he used when he ran his hounds a night, and to mess with it was a capital offense. I scared to look at it, much less pick it up from its designated spot on a little table at the end of the couch just inside the front door. A place for everything and everything in its place.

That was my dad's motto. Death to anyone who didn't respect it was another one. But that light was an orange craftsman explorer, too, and a portion of the house. housing around the lens glowed fluorescent green when you turned it off so you could find it in the dark. It was a present we'd given him, and it came from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, where just about everything we had came from back then. Now, all the dad's cowt hunting buddies used them, and it was a mark of professionalism to me. My dad was the best hunter in the world, and if someone in his circle had something that he had, then that must mean they were pretty good,

too. And if we were camping, that meant I might be. get to use it. We ate supper in the house and we went to the tent right after dark. I got to shine that flashlight around looking at peanut, the squirrel dog, in the back door of the single wide house trailer that two adults and seven kids shared until the house was completed. Thinking back on how chaotic that time was in such a small space, I'm surprised he didn't have all the kids living out in the woods, like in Oklahoma. But he built a little fire and we sat around it and we watched it. And I'm sure I're asking a million questions,

and I'm positive he had a million answers. He still wasn't committed to staying all night, even though we had plenty of quilts to sleep on and cover up with. It was cool, and the fire felt good, and when it had died down, we'd lay down in the tent, staring through the holes in the canvas and looking at the stars. Occasionally, he'd say something to the effect. Now, if you're scared to stay out here,

we can go inside and sleep in the bed. Not me. What did I have to be scared about? The bravest man in the world was sleeping in the tent with me, and the world's greatest squirrel dog was sleeping just outside. I don't remember going to sleep, but I remember him waking me up early the next morning to go eat breakfast. I thought about it a million times as I've gotten older how well his hair was combed,

and his face was clean-shaven, and how rested he looked. Either he liked camping a whole lot more than he let on, or I spent the night in the backyard with peanut and dad's lived in the house. I never asked him, but I think I know the answer. Thank you all so much for listening to This Country Life, the render in Bear Grease here on the Bear Grease Channel. I hope everyone's having a good and safe hunting season. If you have the opportunity, take a younger or an adult

who might not have the same opportunities as the rest of. You'll get more out of it than you'll put into it, I promise you. Remember our friends affected by the hurricanes and our servicemen and women here at home and abroad. Until next week, this is Brent Reeve. Signing off. Y'all be careful. 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 guess. 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 callers

who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.