Bear Grease - Ep. 490: This Country Life - A Coke or A Comb

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Brent is telling two stories his father told him when he was a little boy. They made an impression on him even at an early age. As he's grown older the meaning of the stories remains the same but the reason they're meaningful is easier to see through the eyes of an adult. Brent is also offering up a little first hand advice that could pay huge dividends for your family later on. It's time for MeatEater's "This Country Life" podcast. 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 MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on Internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. The wait is over. Join us Saturday, August 15th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for the grand opening of the new Meat Eaters store at 50th and France in Edina, Minnesota. Meet Clay Newcomb, Brent Reeve.

Spencer Newhart and my personal white-tailed-sense, Tony Peterson, be one of the first 150 people in line to receive an exclusive gift and stick around for hourly giveaways all day long. We'll see you there. Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From Coon Hutton 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 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. A Coke or a comb. The stories my dad told me still resonate within my memories. And from a very early age, I can recall with great clarity the actual settings that

where we were for the vast majority of them. Some may have been about a specific place or an activity that we were engaged in, and some just seemed to come out of thin air. I know now that there was a reason he was telling me those out-of-the-blue stories, and I'm going to talk about a couple of them today. So join me at the fire, and let's get started. The conversations we had were similar throughout the lifetime that we shared, Together, my dad and I.

He spoke direct to me about most everything and everybody. A lot of our conversations centered around family and places and the legacy of our family in that environment. And he told me stories of relatable times from when he was my age and the things that he did and the events that happened that he remembered. Some were humorous. Some weren't. But he had a way of telling a story.

that kept me on the edge of my seat, even about the most trivial topics. It could be about anything, but the way he told it had me not only hearing what he was saying, but seeing it play out in my mind. I could feel the gravel beneath my feet as he told about running barefoot up the road that ran in front of the house. The same unpaved road that I was digging my toes in at the time as I ran across the rocks from one place to another, seemingly underlined. Unphased by what I had just done.

Shoes were an option for me as a young man, but at times a luxury for him when he was my age. And it was his stories and anecdotal descriptions that made me want to experience the same things. I wanted to live the way he was raised when times were slower and distractions, fewer and farther between. One day we were outside by the Taterhouse.

It was a leftover structure from when my father was a child that was originally a smoke house built by my great-grandfather. It had a door and boarded walls with tarpaper siding on the outside and exposed rafters to hang the meat from on the inside. Back in the day, my great-grandfather would build a fire in a wash tub with smoldering green wood and set it inside on the concrete floor. smoke would then cure the meat after the prescribed smoke time. I don't remember it ever being used as a smokehouse, but we had potatoes by the garden full laying in there on the cool concrete and onions hanging by the bunches tied off with hay baling string from the rafters where the hams used to be.

But laying on the outside of that taterhouse was a couple of metal rings about an inch or so wide and ten inches in diameter. I told the story before in passing, but I like to hear it myself, so I'm going to tell it again in more detail. I don't know if Dad was talking to me or just remembering out loud, but he said, boy, I have pushed one of them things many a mile around here. I looked at the two rusted metal rings that years of time and rain and dirt had secured their places leaning against the wall, and planted the bottom third an inch deep in the soil. I pulled one of the rings from the soil and looked at it. The rust instantly turned my hands and fingers orange

as I tried to figure out the sport of pushing this thing around that could remotely resemble fun. Go get me an empty Prince Albert can. There's one in the house by the carport door. As fast as my feet would go, I ran to the house. I grabbed that empty cigarette tobacco, can and returned to where I had left my dad only a few seconds before, only to see him standing there with a one inch by one inch stick that we used to steak tomatoes with.

He also had a hammer and a fence staple. Here, son, take this hammer and flatten out that Prince Albert can. Well, I did just what he told me. Now put it long ways even at the bottom end of that stick and nail it right. in the middle of that can. Well, I failed miserably getting the staple started while successfully testing the compression strength of most of my fingers on my left hand. That exercise in futility finally grew to the point where Dad sat here.

Let me help you. He then got it nailed to the stick and then bent the outside portion of the can on each side of the stick at a 45-degree angle to form wings. Now, I was still at a loss for how all this was tied together. And then he stood the ring upright on the ground and took off at a trot, rolling the ring and steering it by changing the angle of the wings on the can. It was as simple of an invention as the wheel itself, but made as dynamic of an impact on my humanity as the wheel did on the planets.

The rust was removed one rotation at a time. to the point that the roughness was sanded smooth and the metal polished to that of a blue brown and a five. The Prince Albertan's red-colored tin was thin and worn silver on the side that touched and directed the course of the ring while the back held on to the only clue of its initial intended purpose. I have no idea how far I followed that metal ring around the yard to drive way and up and down that gravel road. But when I described it to my kids, I repeated my father's claim of many a mile with profound confidence in its accuracy. These are the things I remember. Anecdotal remembrances of his that I couldn't help but take note of even at an early age. Stories that amazed me then for seemingly adventurous spirit of my father as a child, but

revealed a deeper meaning as we both grew older. I've hinted or spoken vaguely of my non-conformity to being told what to do during my time in elementary school. With me, it all started in the sixth grade and carried on throughout my not-so-distant past. But if my aversion to authority was a seven on a scale of one to ten, my father's hovered somewhere around in 83. He told me that when he went to the service, the one thing that grated his nerves more than the haircut,

the training, the moving from Arkansas to Georgia, was everyone he saw outranked him and could boss him around. I've heard him tell a story of being in basic training that my friend Mark Shatley witnessed him tell, and Mark quotes it as one of his favorites he ever heard my dad relate. But dad said I was in basic training and they had us all in a big classroom not long after we got there, kind of giving us the lay of the land and how things would be going through training. I'd been up since early that morning and I was tired. The sergeant of whoever he was got to

talking about the mess hall and how we were going to be eating. Now, I've been eating all my life. I didn't need any help with how to eat, so I decided to take me a nap until he started talking about something I didn't really know how to do. The next thing I know, I hear him screaming at me saying I best wake up, and he called me jaco. Now, the first time I heard him tell that story, I guess my dad had been out of the service for 30 years or more. But the amount of aggravation it caused him was easily still the sun. name. He had a problem with authority and things that he deemed unnecessary. Being told how to use a fork by someone who referred to him as jaco, well, that fit both of those categories. Here's another example. When my grandfather died as a result of an industrial accident during World War II, my dad and his mother

and his siblings lived at one time up north. My dad was nine or ten as the story goes that he told me, but with good reason, he decided that the current living situation he found himself in would be better if his zip code was different than that of everyone else with whom he was currently residing. Dad said, me and this other boy that lived close by, we just left. We taken off walking and didn't look back. And the first night out, we slept in some bushes close to some folks' houses that we didn't know. It was cool but not cold, and we managed all. all right. I asked him where they were going and if they had a plan and he said no, we just leaving. We planned on getting some work somewhere else and making us some money. And I don't

know what that other boy was going to do and I didn't care. I was going home to Arkansas and live with Grandpa. I done that all I wanted of Michigan. Well, a one-way ticket from where he was to Little Rock in the late 40s would cost to run. around $20, which works out to close to 250 today. No small task for anybody working for a living at the time, even more so, for a child. He said they spent the next day walking and dodging cars that might be out looking for them. Every time we heard a car coming, we duck in the bushes or lay down in the ditch until they went by. They spent two days walking, and it made it quite away from where they had started.

He said we ain't had anything to eat since we left. All we'd been doing was walking and hiding, and I was give out and hunger. I know we could have got someone to feed us, but we were scared they'd turn us in, so we'd never ask nobody for nothing. I was in high school the first time I heard my dad tell that story, and as incredible as it was at the time, I can't imagine something like that happening today with my kids. It's humorous to a degree, but it's absolutely terrifying.

Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Before we get back into it, I want to tell you about the new First Light Bear Grease Bibs. I have collaborated with First Light to build. the perfect backcountry utility bib overall. And these might be new to the world, but they're not new to me.

In 2019, almost seven years ago, I sketched out the first drawing, and I wanted these bibs to have a chapped front, to make them briar-proof. I wanted them to be breathable. I wanted them to have kind of an athletic fit. I wanted them to have a weatherproof pocket on the front for your cell phone. If you fell in the river, they've got lots of big pockets, lots of ventilation. They're tough, they're durable. They're made for small game hunting.

They're made for working on the farm. And they're the bear grease bibs, man. They're now for sale at the meat eater.com slash bibbs. He continued with the story this way. He's getting close to dark and getting colder than the night before. We was getting close to the next town, kind of right on the edge of it. And these folks had a couple apple trees next to their house and it was absolutely loaded. I was about starved to death.

We waited for it to get plum dark, and then we went to work on them apples. I ain't never hit an apple since that was as good as a bushel of them I ate that night. He said, man, our bellies was poached out from all them apples, but I done got cold. And there was a tarpaulian laying on the swing on their front porch, and we took it off that swing and got under it and went to sleep.

The next morning we woke up. early when them folks went to stir it in that house and we lit out before they caught us. We just knew we'd go to jail for eating all them apples if they caught us. We put the tarp back where we found it and it was covered in frost. We took off walking and made it down the road a piece and went into town. I figured on getting me a job pretty quick so I could get some money to live on while I saved up for that ticket home. And that boy had brought a dime from home for emergencies.

and had kept up with it all this time. And we was just sitting on a curb in that town in front of a drugstore, just sitting there looking around. And he said, let's get us a Coke in the drugstore with this dime. I told him, no, let's buy a comb. You could buy a Coke or a comb in a drugstore back then for the same money. Now, I remember laughing when my dad said, no, let's buy a comb. And I asked him why he thought it necessary.

to buy home. And I'll never forget what he said and how serious he was about the focus of his mission. How sad it makes me now as I realize how desperate he must have been to get back home to Arkansas. He said, I could see my reflection in the window that drugstore. My hair looked wild. It was all over the place and I just knew wouldn't nobody hire me with my hair. looking like that. He wanted something to drink, and I was just trying to get home.

I said, Dad, what did y'all do? He said, well, that idiot bought a Coke. It was his dime, and I helped him drink it, and it tasted good, too. I don't think I've ever drunk another one that tasted any better, but we could only drink a Coke one time, and I just knew we'd messed up. He said, I slicked my hair down best as I could, and we left there and went walking through through town just looking around and a car come by us that had an old man in it. And he looked at us when he went by and I told that boy, that fellow right there's going to get us.

Sure enough, he turned around, pulled up beside us and asked us why we wasn't in school. I told him I didn't go to school. I was just out looking for a job. I don't remember what that other boy told him, but it didn't matter. He was the truant officer in that town and he snatched us both up and took us down to the police station. I wouldn't tell them my name for a long time, but they finally weasled it out of me by threatening to send me to reform school, which they did anyway. I ought not ever told them nothing.

They called my mother, but she didn't have no way of coming and get me, and I spent about a week or more in that place. I asked him what it was like, and he said, it was like jail. That wouldn't let me out of that room. I was in except to go to a classroom with a bunch of rough boys for school or to eat. I didn't think I was ever going to get out of there, but they eventually come and got me. It wasn't long before we moved back, and it's a good thing we did, too. It was watching me pretty close, but the next chance I got, I was fixing to paint the road red to Arkansas again. Turned out it just didn't have to.

I think about that story he told me out of the blue, and I wonder what triggered that memory. What caused him to tell that story and how often did he? did he think about it? I've studied on how he must have felt being so far away from where he wanted to be. How he missed his grandpa and wanted to be there with him on that portion of the planet he called home his entire life. Maybe that was a reason that he rejected authority. At a very impressionable age, it had stood between him and getting home, both in the house where he lived and by the state in which that house was located. I believe he saw it as a physical barrier keeping him in a place that he didn't want to be.

I believe that our little spot in southeast Arkansas was the only place that my dad ever felt comfortable. He could fit in anywhere. He could talk to anyone about anything and had a way of making everyone around him feel at ease. But the only way he truly felt that way was at home. It was where he felt most safe. We went to several places together where we'd stay and be away from home. He loved being at those places and seeing things he'd never seen before or visiting with friends, but he was usually ready to go home not long after we got there.

I used to get so aggravated about him, talking about going home shortly after we got to where we were. As I grow older, I feel more akin to that way of thinking, which I believe is only a natural progress. and the maturation of my life. My brother Tim was much the same, even more so, actually. He'll go just about anywhere, but he prefers dark to catch him at the house. The apples don't fall far from the tree.

There are a million questions now that I wished I would have asked him when I had the opportunity. And believe me, when I say this, I asked him a lot. but if I have one regret, it is that I had a chance to set him in front of a camera and just let him talk, and I never took advantage of it. He loved to be in the center of attention and entertaining everyone within earshot and would have loved the opportunity that I just never gave him. So I'm just going to have to tell you about them here when they come to mind. I'll share them with y'all in the hopes that you find. them at the very least entertaining and at most a little inspiring.

Take advantage of your own opportunities to preserve your family's story. Be intentional with what time you have and ask them questions you might not otherwise. Think about asking. Make a list. And if you have the ability, record it. Get your phone out. Get a camera. Whatever you have on hand, a pencil and a piece of paper. Take it from me. You won't regret having that to look back on. One thing we can all agree on, time is a thief. Thank y'all so much for listening to Bear Grease,

Backwood University, and yours truly here on this country life. Until next week, this is Brent Reeves. Sounding all. Y'all be careful. Meat Eaters Elkamp is live, and if you're anything like me, this is the time of year you've been thinking about, since the end of last elk season. Elk camp isn't just another hunting trip.

It's the place where the planning stops, the excuses disappear, and you finally get to spend time in the mountains with the people who matter most. Whether you punch a tag or not, those mornings around camp and those miles on the mountain are the things you remember.

That's why we pulled together the elk camp collection over at the meat eater store with the gear we actually reached for this time of year. And while you're there, check out the limited edition Meat Eater Phelps easy estrus cow call. It sounds sweet. We only have a few, so when they're gone, they're gone. Head over to themeatheater store.com to see the full Elkamp collection and get geared up before the season gets here.