Bear Grease - Ep. 429: This Country Life - Service

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

This week, Brent's talking about serving others and how the inspiration to do so can come at an early age. It can also come after a lifetime of taking when the realization to give back occurs. A listener story describes how a community served one another in the aftermath of severe weather. This is a good one and hopefully inspirational as well. Thank you to our sponsors, Case Knives and Stor-Mor. Shop This Country Life Merch Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips Subscribe to the MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop This Country Life Merch Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

First Light's 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.com. 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 from the Storemore Studio on Meat Eat Eaters 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.

Service. Serving to others can be a lifelong calling or can be a moment of compassion. Either way, our service to others is important and necessary. I'm going to give you my thoughts on it, but first, I'm going to tell you this story. This story is from this country life listener, Ryan Noss. Ryan is a genetic counselor in Bay Village, Ohio. Yeah, I didn't know what that was either. But my pal Ryan explains it as helping identify folks with cancer or a strong family history of it in ways to fight it or prevent it from starting.

Ryan's wife is an occupational therapist, both of them serving their patients and community in very important ways. Now Ryan sent this story back in September of 2024. I read them all folks and I keep them all waiting for the right time. So y'all just keep sending them in. And remember, they don't have to be about hunting or fishing. Ryan's community was hit by a storm. And in his words and my voice, this is how they handled it. Ten rooftops.

As I look over my eighth acre lot in the Cleveland suburb, I can count the rooftops of ten neighbors' homes. Now, this may seem a surprise in setting to wax poetic on the virtues of country living, but as Brent has been suggesting all along where you find a country way of life might surprise you. It's 3 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon, and I finished at my clinic early, and I'm driving home. As I drive, I begin to consider my options with this extra free time before picking up the kids at daycare. Maybe I can get a workout in or tackle a house project, and then I'm interrupted by a call from my wife.

Now, let me be clear, I dearly love my wife and welcome an impromptu phone call. However, history has told me that if my wife is interrupting her clinic and potentially my own, it's not just a chit-chat. Reagan, our youngest, has what daycare fears is the beginning of hand, foot, and mouth disease. For those without children, it's hard to describe. the flood of emotions and ensuing logical gymnastics you encounter with these unexpected but inevitable calls from the daycare. Concern for her health.

Which one of us is going to cancel their patients tomorrow and however many other days won't she be able to go to daycare, let alone fear of if any of our other kids are catch it? I tell my wife, I'm on my way home. I'll change and head over to. to get Reagan and get her to the doctor. And as I walk in my house, my phone alarm goes off. There has been a tornado warning issued for your area.

Seek Shelter. I find myself looking out our front window, trying to figure out if I have time to go get the kids from school or not. The rapidly darkened and sky and increasingly intensifying wind answers that question. However, while looking out the window, I noticed Tom, the mailman, making his rounds. and I'll wait for him to reach our door and it takes a moment or two to figure out who exactly of us was warning the other

about the tornado. And with that sorted, he makes a beeline to his truck and high-tails it back to the post office and I retreated to the basement. The electricity blinked on and off several times and then boom! A few minutes later, I discovered that the boom was a tree

crashing onto the roof of our garage. At this point I left to go to my children's daycare in school. Reagan and Barrett picked up first, and at two and four years of age, they found hanging around the windowless room of the daycare center armed with flashlights at great adventure, though the treetop on the house next door ruined the four-year-old's mood. We make the drive to get my oldest son at his summer camp, and our commute is atypicalyptine due to the down traffic lights and trees blocking the roads,

eventually we make it. And Owen, wide-eyed, excitedly tells me about his adventure, hunkering in the basement with all his friends. We surveyed the storm damage from the cars. We meander our way past streets, closed off due to falling trees and down power lines. That house is broken, Bear points out as we pass a house whose front room has a large tree serving as a coffee table after crashing through the roof. Next, we went to our driveway, and Owen says,

stairs at our garage, which is now totally draped by branches and limbs and comments, well, at least my bike is okay. It's good to know he has his priority straight. But as the dust settles, texts from our friends on our street trickle in, and fortunately everyone has made it back home safely and outside of our garage no major damage has occurred, though most of the city is without power. Good news. The doctor confirms that Reagan doesn't have hand, foot, and mouth disease, and I have a smaller clinic schedule than my wife, so I decided to stay home with the kids. First order of business, storm cleanup. It's hard to describe the satisfaction associated with working alongside my seven, four, and two-year-old to clean up the branches and the limbs.

Growing up, I spent my time sitting behind home plate playing catcher versus sitting in a tree stand deer hunting, though I'm increasingly enamored with the outdoors and do my best to foster that in my children. This shit comes as no surprise. I felt a great sense of joy and pride as my seven-year-old explained to me how the tree in our yard is a white oak, and our neighbor has a red oak based on the rounded versus pointed edges of their leaves. If the first 24 hours without power come and go, my mind is increasingly drawn to our fridge

in our freezer. I don't need to explain the treasured commodity that is six pounds of bluegill crop and hybrid bass filets thawing in our non-functioning freezer. So I send an invitation to our family of friends on our street that we will be having a fish right because I'll be darned if I'm going to let those fish go to waste. One family had their power restored and insists we come there for supper and charge whatever electronics that we needed to. Another neighbor who is a brewer assures us

there will be plenty of cold beer and others quickly volunteer to round out a feast. That evening, we are all able to gather and enjoy the laughter of good company and the deliciousness of fish bathed in hot oil. Another morning comes with no power for my family and the others. It's my turn to go to work

as my wife and neighbors coordinate who can watch the kids as daycare as we. remain closed. In between patience, my spirit is lifted when I catch up on text messages to discover the husband of the sole house with power is asking what we are all having for dinner at their place tonight. That evening, while slicing tomatoes in my neighbor's kitchen, one of their daughters comes up to me asking, are you making fish again tonight? I said, oh, did you like it? A big smile and an enthusiastic head shake answered the affirmative. Well, not tonight.

Mr. Clark and Mr. Nate brought over steak and chicken. That answer must have sufficed that she happily scampered off to join the rest of the kids, and the pride from that interaction rejuvenates the soul in a way only surpassed from the smiles and laughs as us parents got watching the logjam of 12 neighborhood kids, all trying to go down the backyard slide in rapid fire success. The conversations of the upcoming weekend unfolded and an unspoken agreement develops. If we can all make it through tomorrow and we can strip our professional responsibilities, then we can all go our separate ways for the weekend should we still be without power.

Saturday afternoon we are enjoying the company of my sister, her husband, and their newborn twins in my parents' house an hour and a half away from the tornadoes' destruction. We finally get word after four full days, power has been restored. Now, I wouldn't have traded meeting my nieces for the first time for anything, though it would have been something to hear firsthand the cheers of joy that reportedly echoed up and down our street when the lights came on. It is not lost on me that we are very fortunate not to have faced the loss of home or life that others faced during a tornado,

though in that physically and mentally exhausting time, the outstretched helping hands from trusted friends was a welcome all the same. Now, it could be pride of looking at riping and tomatoes and I raised a bed, gardens that must be pretty good considering how a few seem to make it back into the house when I ask the kids to go pick them. Or maybe it's the joy of knowing this year's bumper crop really

is social capital. And the amount of social capital being reserved isn't only for towns and country songs with a single traffic light. We look after each other. We take pride in one another's success and don't hesitate to offer help where we see need. Now, if that ain't country living,

can someone help me with my Wu Pig Sui and point me in the direction of the nearest pig farm? and according to Ryan Noss, that's just how that happened. Well, Ryan, my friend, that's as country as cornbread, and your woo pig suey is well received and on point. But more importantly, your story is a perfect example of service. And I thank you for sending it in. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls

in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragm. 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 goblers 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 the, 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 come from a family of service members, both in the military and in law enforcement, my dad, my brother, my uncles, nephews, and cousins from the present all the way back to the war between the states. Duty has been a common thread in our family, just as it has been for many others. But I was reminded of it a few days ago on a fishing trip of all things. My brother Tim and I were running our nets in the Arkansas River,

and we had our longtime family friend Jeff Childress with us. Jeff's more than a longtime friend. He's a cousin of Tim's wife, Barbara. The lady whose case knife collection rivals my own, Not that I'm jealous or anything like that. But anyway, I was running the motor at a slow island, and Jeff was sitting in the back with me talking, and Tim was sitting on the bow of the boat,

holding a rope with a net drag attached, scarring the bottom of the river for a barrel net that we couldn't find. For 15 minutes, as we slowly troled back and forth, we talked about everything under the sun while making fun of Tim's less than fruitful attempts at finding our net. One good thing about having three retired folks in the boat on the river, none of us was in a hurry to be any place else, mainly because we didn't have any place else to be.

So there we were. Three retired folks that drift on the open sea, well, the Arkansas River anyway, just cruising and killing time. Just a retired logger and a trapper and a good one. He's been catching a fire out of coyotes, coons, and bobcats. What Jeff really excelled at, especially when he was a younger man, was sending turkeys across the River Jordan. I don't know how many turkeys Jeff's killed in his six and a half decades on this spinning orb we all call home, but you can rest assured it is a number unequaled in many circles.

Some folks are natural athletes. Some are natural musicians. Jeff is a natural-born turkey killer and has turned the wood south. it in more states than not. He's good at it, but we weren't talking about turkey hunting right then. We were talking about trapping and nest predators. We were talking about how much we enjoyed trapping in the sets he was making and how he was making them.

And as if prodded by some unseen force, he spontaneously said, Brent, I've been taken from the woods for a long, long time. And it's time I gave back. Now, that didn't catch me off guard or even surprised me. Really, Jeff's a good man, and I actually don't remember a time when I didn't know him. The rural community that were both from is small and close-knit, and it's the kind of place where families are friends generationally. His word is good.

What I did take notice of was how he said it. It was as much a testimonial as it was an oath to creation to be a better steward. to leave it better than he found it, and to give more than take. All those turkeys over all those years that brought him so much pleasure had come full circle in his appreciation. They had served him well, and now it was his turn to serve them, and he was going to do it one coon and coyote at a time. Now that's service, and to me the very definition of it,

taking on a task for the betterment of something else, regardless of what stage of life it comes to you, called a service to work for the betterment of the collective above the individual, even when it's aimed at turkeys, it's a good thing. I remember the day I decided that I wanted to be a soldier. We were on a family vacation in Washington, D.C. I'd walked in some of the Smithsonian Institutions Museums along the National Mall. I stood below that iconic African elephant known as Henry

that stood watching the rotunda of the National Museum of Natural History since 1959 and I looked up at the massive 14-foot-tall 11-ton icon of the dark continent. I climbed the 87 steps from the reflecting pool up to the Lincoln Memorial and after reaching the central chamber in the steamy hot D.C. summer, I realized while Lincoln was sitting down. I saw the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial, and the Eternal Flame that marks the grave of President John F. Kennedy. All wondrous works of art and fitted memorials to America's leaders of the past. Then after a half-mile ride south, it seemed to take forever in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

We got out of the car and I stood beside my mama and watched the changing of the guard at the tomb of the unknowns. A six-year-old boy who had never seen so many people in one place or building so big, but recognized the immediate reverence of the place I was in, even though I didn't understand all that I was seeing. I remember the silence. The first time there hadn't been any racket since we got there. No cars, no horns, no sirens. Not even a whisper of words, just the rhythmic cadence of the soldier steps,

they gracefully moved from one point to the next on their tour. 21 steps across a 63-foot black mat with a 21-second pause at each point, honoring the fallen who made the ultimate sacrifice of service. Each time they clicked the metal plates together on the hills, it echoed across the plaza like a bolt of lightning. I was mesmerized by their uniforms, the inspection of the soldier in his weapon that was. standing in relief of the sentinel on guard,

and the relief commander making sure he and his uniform and his weapon were worthy of such an important duty. My mama cried silently as she watched. I remember a lot of folks wiping tears, and I've shed a bunch of my own since then when watching now as an adult with a clear understanding of what that ceremony stands for. All the soldiers looked the same, their uniforms, their haircuts, their movements. I couldn't tell one from the other.

And through the years, as I grew older, I realized they all looked that way because it wasn't about them. Their uniformity has been on display, just as we see it now, 24 hours a day, and has been continually since July 2nd, 1937, up to the very second, regardless of when you listen to this. I was six when I saw it. And from that moment, I knew I wanted to be a part of something.

something bigger than I was. It was team sports for me all through school and the bond that was formed with my teammates surpassed practice and games. We shared the hardships of discipline and the brutal summer practices along with the relentless beratement of our performances by our coaches. If one made a mistake, we all paid the penance. I didn't know it, but what those coaches were showing us was that the actions of one can have an effect on everyone.

In that case, it was negative, but more times than not, the actions of one can be positive. I spent half my life in the service of my community, state, and nation in official capacities, and it was all sparked from a visit to the nation's capital in 1972. I seriously doubt those soldiers had any idea that their dedication to perfection would have such an impact on a first grader, but it did. Inspiration to serve comes from so many different places, and it doesn't have to be in the military or in a role as a first responder. I think about the teachers I've had all through school, and the professors and administrators I met over at the University of Tennessee a couple weeks ago. I think about the man that drives the garbage truck that comes by every Monday morning.

and my wife who works two jobs, one at the state capital that has her at her desk every day before 6 a.m. And the other job as Bailey's personal Uber driver that runs late into the night for dance practices. Service doesn't have to come from a uniform. Sometimes it's trying to bring normalcy to a storm ravaged neighborhood like Ryan's store he's soon in. or helping turkeys and other prey species like what Jeff's doing. Or can be picking up trash on a daily walk like my neighbor does without bragging about it. But I see you, Mr. Mooney. Service should arise when the opportunity presents itself.

And it's hard to know what's right these days with so much information coming in from every direction. It can be confusing to pick a path. with much certainty. But by focusing on the folks around us with a servant's heart, we can be the example of someone else is waiting to see. Thank you so much for listening to all of us here on the Bear Greas channel. Clay Lake and I really appreciate it. Tomorrow is March the 7th, and it's the Black Bear Bananza in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Hit up Google for all the info, and y'all don't worry about the rain. We're going to be inside with plenty of rain. room. Bring your young insin. Let's have fun. Until next week, this is Brent Reeves. Sign it all. Y'all be careful. 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 Lights new fieldware gear at firstlight.