Bear Grease - Ep. 287: This Country Life - Measuring Success

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

It's a common misconception that success is only measured in material or money. But success can be assessed in many ways and to Brent, there's no better measurement than good experiences with good people in the great outdoors. He's gonna talk about his formula for reaping the rewards of a good investment and share a listener's Christmas survival story that you won't want to miss.  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 Eaters 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. Measuring success.

There's a lot of ways you can measure success and money into bank in material positions are only two. I'm going to talk about one way that I've learned to calculate it, but first, I'm going to tell you a story. I know it's like three weeks past Christmas, but I had to get a bunch of episodes ahead, so our favorite sound engineer, endure of all things related to the intelligence side of this country life, Reva Hanson could go home to see her folks over the holidays. I didn't do a dedicated Christmas episode because I wasn't really sure in what order they'd be posted. So I filed this listener's story to be told next year, but it correlates to measuring success this week's theme. And I can't wait a year to tell it.

It's too good. And it comes from this country life listener, Oklahoma's own, Dane Fuller. And in Dane's words and my voice, here we go. Growing up, Christmas Eve met one thing, Mamaw and Papaw's house. It was a tradition of the Fullers dating back to, I believe, three days after dirt was invented. R.C., Peck, and Edith Gert, Fuller had a pretty big family. Five boys and one girl. Eventually, as kids back then did, they all left home to start families of their own.

and soon, they began bringing them back for the holidays. Not only kids and grandkids were there, but great aunts and uncles, second cousins, and so forth. By the 1970s, there was approximately 497 men, women, and children crammed into that old house out in the sticks of Muskogee County in northeastern Oklahoma, every Christmas Eve. Not really that many, but it sure seemed like it. One particular December 24th, the house was filled the capacity. We had all eaten supper and everyone was gathered in the front room. All of us grandkids were excited because Pap had finally said we could open presents. Our grandparents weren't rich.

In fact, they had very little. Somehow, though, every year, they managed to get us all something. This year, times must have been a little tougher than normal because instead of buying a tree, Pap had gone up the hill with his double-bid axe and chopped down a seeded tree a few weeks earlier. And by the time the festivities rolled around, that cedar tree had turned into the color of a brown paper bag. Christmas lights back in the 70s were of the variety that could rival the temperature of the sun. Twinkle lights weren't anywhere close to happening. Being as how the tree had morphed into something akin to napalm, the adults in the room had

decided that no string of Christmas lights would be plugged in. The grandkids tried their cow-eyed angel-faced best to talk papal into plugging them in, but he wouldn't budge. All of us tried except for one. Scott. Cousin Scott was born in the middle third of the order as far as grandkid ages went. However, he was lead off on honor. The kind of kid that when his dad said not to do something or he'd get a whooping, Scott would ask how much of a whoop.

It was awesome being Scott's cousin back to him. and I could tear the barn down, and if he was there, I'd never get so much as looked at. Everybody just knew Scott did it. Anyway, he was seated next to me that night. Next to him was the television. Behind it was the outlet that would have had the plugs that were all lying on the floor going to the lights that were still draped on the Christmas tree. The duty of passing out presents this night had fallen to Aunt Judy,

the lone girl of the Fuller Kids. Being a girl with five brothers, Judy had put up with a lot in her day. Not enough, though, to have obtained a calm demeanor capable of taking on anything. To say that she is easily frazzled is an understatement. After the first 20 or so kids had gotten their presence, Judy was nearing the end of her rope, the sound of shredding wrapping paper, squeals of delight and parents yelling at the kids to wait their turn

at taking its toll on Judy. It was at this precise moment, Scott made his move. Without tapping my knee or giving me so much as a, hey, watch this, he slithered behind the TV and picked up the light string plug. Eager to see the lights and maybe get him the busting of his life, I didn't say a word. He gave me a look, and with a crooked smile, he plugged in the lights. Oh, what a glorious sight.

The reds, greens, blues, and orange bulbs came to life. Nobody noticed except for me, Scott's sister, Charmin, and my sister, Karen. The adults were too busy breaking up fights over cat pistols and baby dolls. They had no idea of the coup that Scott had pulled off for about two seconds. Almost as suddenly as the light has appeared, they were being put to shame by the flames shooting out from that long dead cedar tree. Everyone noticed now. Uncle Pee, we grabbed the cord and tried to yank it out of the socket. In doing so, he knocked over the inferno that was once considered a Christmas tree.

Things sort of got blurry after that. The house was full of smoke. Dads grabbed kids and started literally throwing them toward the back door. Moms had to run in the kitchen to catch him before any bones were broken. By this time, Uncle Rudy had waited through the sea of kids wrapping paper and toys and made it to the tree. He began trying to stomp the fire out. Somebody, no one knows who, got the front door open. the very door that hadn't been opened for years because Mamma didn't want it to wear a hole in her carpet.

It terrified me because I was sitting next to the door and had been threatened with a switch for even acting like I might open it. I knew without a doubt I would get busted for snagging the carpet, no matter of the black hole that had just been burned in it. Uncle Tuffy, Scott's dad, grabbed the steel-burning torch of a tree, knocked me out of the way, and threw it in the front yard. Amidst the chaos, the screams and the smoke still in the center of the room was Judy, running for her life with her hands, clasping her face, and she was screaming, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, over and over. Trying desperately to get herself and her kids out alive, she never made it one inch farther from the tree than she was at the moment of combustion. She was literally running in circles. Papp had never made it out of the recliner. Dad had never made it off the couch.

Both were laughing as hard as I'd ever seen anyone laugh. By now, Scott had made it out from behind the RCA. He probably knew that he should run while he was still able, but he was too busy enjoying the fruits of his labor. Enamored by the sights of all the carnage, he never noticed his dad reaching for him. No one knows exactly what happened to Scott once his dad pulled him away,

but after the tears dried up, he was as quiet as the church mouse for the rest of the night. Crisis averted It wasn't long until all the windows And the doors in the house were open To let the smoke out Everyone had resumed their positions Though wearing their coach now

What was left of the presence Was handed out and Scott never sat next To that old TV again And according to Dane Fuller Native Oklahoma Now spying on the Texans down in Childress That's just how that happened Now this is without a

doubt the best submission amongst a sea of great ones that have ever been sent in by you. Stories like this will always find a way to the top. Y'all keep them coming. Thank you, Dane. 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.

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. Measuring success. Any purposeful experience we have where we hope to gain something from the endeavor, whether it's knowledge, a new skill or something tangible, once it's over, we have a reckoning of how successful or unsuccessful that struggle was. was what we gathered from that exercise worth what we sacrificed for the end goal. Now, that's a question we can all relate to in our everyday lives from getting up and going to work or buying groceries or for our leisurely pursuits.

It's easy to get discouraged after a trip to the grocery store when you compare what you paid for for what you brought home. Soon, you have to go back and do it all over again. Now, one way to deal with that is to grow your own, which requires effort on your part. Once you start down that road to do it right, it requires daily attention to reap the best rewards. That's an investment in time and effort versus the rewards and the literal fruit and vegetables of your labors. The end of the growing season dictates if the effort was outweighed by the rewards.

I liked farming growing up, but I was not a fan of gardening. Farming was different in that it was tractors and implements, and gardening was me on the ignorant end of a hoe or stooped over with, with a bucket picking tomatoes and beans and peas. It was always what stood between me and the things I wanted to do. I'm going fishing in the morning. I'll be leaving before breakfast, to which my mother would respond. We're picking peas in the morning. You can go after that stun.

Ah, fulled again. Now, I didn't mind reaping the rewards from those forced efforts when the time came to mash a double handful of them into a piece of hot buttered cornbread, but as a young one with fishing on his mind, Breaking a sweat while bent over in a peepatch trying to fill a five-gallon bucket was the farthest thing from a plate full of goodness that you could get. Now, later on, had you asked me if it was worth the trouble at the sober table after my first bite of peas and cornbread, the answer would have been an emphatic, yes. Yes, it was.

But this is the magic of the passage of time, both in the measure of success and the maturity of a person. I find it a lot easier to recognize where my efforts are heading with each passing birthday, something I couldn't see past where I was standing earlier in my life. I tended to live my life for the here and now, never thinking beyond tomorrow because tomorrow was a long way away. But before I knew it, tomorrow was today. I spent several days with some folks in Kansas last week at one of the meat eater experience events. The Latvian eagle himself, Janice Patelis and I gathered up with nine folks from all walks of life in all parts of the country to hunt ducks and geese in central Kansas with the folks at Fowl Plains, waterfowl outfitters.

My colleague Michael Redveld from First Light was there in organizing the whole affair from the admin side of things and had everything squared away from the moment Janice and I got there. As I stumbled my way through this life of mine, I find an interest in how uncommonly common, it is for me to run into someone that I know or have have a connection with in the most random places. I take away the many people I run into airports and restaurants that follow this show and others I've been blessed to be a part of and focused on the ones that I run into that I actually know or have been acquainted with, and it never ceases to amaze me.

Michael met Yonnes and I and showed us inside, and shortly thereafter introduced us to one the owners of foul planes. Chase White, a strapping lad with a beard long enough to quali him aesthetically to play with ZZ Top. I shook his hand and introduced myself. He said, I think I met you about 10 years ago. Immediately, I started throwing through my mind's antiquated rolodex that loses more index cards with each passing day, trying to figure out where I could have met someone that was running a duck hunting operation in a part of Kansas that I'd never been in before. I wouldn't have it any luck.

Uh-oh. Was it in my other career? The law enforcement one? Then Chase said, I was got deer hunters down in Southeast Kansas and met you. I imagined him without the beard, and I remembered him immediately. Well, I remember the day that you and what you were doing, Chase,

you were in a farm shop building ground blinds out of cattle panels and camo tarps. He started laughing and we reminisced about the people that we knew in common, Max Griffin and Ethan Bennington, who were guiding for the same concern back then. It's always funny to me to have those experience and have it bring to mind a million things that I wouldn't have ordinarily thought about without some sort of trigger. Chase and his family live in Virginia and he and his business partner, Cody Crook, a native Kansan, owned and operate foul planes in the central part of the state. Now, when Chase comes out to Kansas the guy, he brings his wife Megan and their little boy on the annual pilgrimage.

A short time later, John, Johnny, Sean, Phil, Jen, Carrie, Brent, not this Brent, the other Brent, as I would refer to him throughout our stay, Michelle and Jason walked through the door, and our camp was complete. The foul playing staff worked feverishly behind the scenes as we all got better acquainted with each other. An eclected group of humans from Michigan, North Dakota, Missouri, Virginia, Montana, and Montana, Montana, Idaho, Kansas, and Arkansas would share a common space for the next three days, all seeking the opportunity to bag limits of ducks and geese and the company of strangers.

I talked about how to be a guest at a duck camp way back on this country life episode 119 entitled Duck Camp Etiquette. Having been a waterfowl guide myself for 26 years, I have a pretty good idea on what all it entails to put on a hunt for clients and what hunters like to know to make them more confident guides than the opportunity to be successful. After all, guides can't control the weather or the animals. What they can do is provide a clean, comfortable place to stay, good food, and communicate them with their guests.

Now, keeping their hunters up to speed on what's going on as far as what's expected of them, where they'll be hunting, the environmental conditions they can expect to encounter, and the equipment they'll need to keep them comfortable. It's important. These were all things that my brother Tim and I focused on when we were guiding it. It made for a more relaxed atmosphere in camp when the only questions left unanswered were controlled by Mother Nature. Chase and his crew did an excellent job of explaining it all in great detail. They also had a grease board posted in the mudroom.

Now on the grease board, all the pertinent information for the next day's hunt was posted, what time we were leaving, how far we were going. We were hunting ducks, geese, or both. Another time that was posted would allow you to roll out early with the guide crew if you wanted to help set up. Now, for those not versed and what goes into prepping a spot for ducks and geese, it's a fun way to learn the do's and donts of decoy placement, the number of decoys used, why you use that number, and the rest of the ingredients that go into the mix of having a safe and successful hunt.

When there's nothing left to question, all that's left is to get to know. one another. Where else could such a diversely located group of people whose main similarity is a love for the outdoors gather together to celebrate a common passion? It's the main investment in measuring the success of the hunt. It can't all be about how many ducks and geese you bring back to camp. There was a time when it was for me, just like some of the folks that I visited with in Kansas.

Another commonality is that with age and maturity comes the piece that goes beyond the ducks and geese we bring home. I've seen it a million times in people I've guided for who bring their sons and daughters and younger family members. The youngsters are chomping at the bit to get to the trigger, while the older folks kind of sit back and enjoy the ride. I learned that lesson from a client of ours that I only had the pleasure of honey with once early in my guiding career.

He was from Pennsylvania and asked me questions about everything we saw that day, Trees, bushes, farm crops, birds, bugs, everything that he was hearing and seeing that he didn't have back in Pennsylvania was of interest to him. I didn't know half of what he was asking, and he seemed a little disappointed that I didn't. There were no apps or cell phones then that could give you the answers. I was supposed to be his Google for Arkansas, and I had failed him miserably. He was an older gentleman who, while I only hunted with him a few days, he made a lasting impression on me. He was confested more into this hunting trip than just how many ducks he could chew. He wanted to know how I grew up, what it was like living here,

and anything he could about everything I didn't know. It made me see value in my place like I'd never seen before, even though there was no other place on this planet that I wanted to be than right there where I was, standing beside him and flooded green timber, ignorant of the majority of my surroundings. I felt guilty for not being able to answer him. I vowed to myself to learn more about the things I took for granted that now are so important to me,

yet at the time were of little consequence. With each trip outside, I took note of more of the little things. I looked them up, and I asked other folks I was with, and I tried to learn something every day, still do. That Yankee from Pennsylvania taught me to be more invested in whatever I was doing, and my returns grew way beyond what I brought home to skin and eat. Yonison Chase played ping-pong and the rest of us cheered and jeered to the monotonous tone of the back and forth between them. And during that hypnotic demonstration of hand-eye coordination, I learned that I was sitting in the company of medical professionals, veterans, and engineers, amongst others. Three sets of married folks, a father and a son, and one flying solo, all happy to be there.

They're all with humility and varied levels of duck hunting experience, ranging from veteran waterfowlers to novices. They shared a genuine interest in what my and Janice's job entailed and asked questions with enthusiasm. They all reminded me, every one of them, with a man from Pennsylvania that I'd taken hunting almost 40 years ago. They wanted to learn everything, and they weren't afraid or too vain to ask questions about things they didn't know. They were educating themselves to better understand the environment in which they were now operating, and in doing so, they would see the bigger picture beyond the end of their shotgun and what was really going on. People like that are my kind of people, regardless of their level of ability in anything, but especially the outdoors. Some of them could have taken my place in the hosting duties and been better at it, I'm sure, than I was.

Always looked for a common denominator when I'm talking to a person. group of folks, but the only one to parent at first was our respect for the wild things. And once we started talking, all the others rose to the circus. And there was a lot of them. A notable difference from the eclectic group of folks I sat with for three hours in the Dallas Fort Worth Airport. All of them close enough to talk but miles away on their phones and laptops. I got home and I unpacked getting my stuff cleaned, washed, and ready to leave again for a film were shooting in a few days. When I lay down last night, after saying my prayers, my thoughts drifted back a day to the new

friends I'd made and wondered if they'd all gotten home yet. I'd only known them for a little over 72 hours, but in that time, I'd invested in them as much or more than they'd invested in me. I knew their kids' names, where they went to church and much of the day-to-day things that make up their lives. Things like that matter, and they matter. because we each asked the other a question, and instead of marking time until we could speak again,

we'd listen to the answer. I couldn't tell you how many ducks and geeks we shot over those three days. It wasn't a limit every day, but we didn't get skunked by any means. And had we been hunting for the skillet, we'd have all went to bed full at night. A year from now, I doubt I could pick out the places we hunted have shown a picture of them among three others.

I guarantee you that I'll remember the people, and when I do, I'm going to smile. And that's how I measure success. I can only hope that they do the same. Thank you all so much for listening to me and my pod and the Claybow on the old Bear Grease channel. Until next week, this is Brent Reeve. Sign it all. Y'all be cooking.

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. 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 Phelpsgamecauls.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.