Ep. 137: THIS COUNTRY LIFE - Manly Footwear

manly footwear. What does your footwear say about your manhood? Or does it say anything at all? Was it more important years ago than now? Well we're going to talk about all that. And here's some thoughts from a friend of mine that leans toward the old adage at least for him, that she make the man. Do you believe that? Or have his rubber boots of common sense developed? The leak? We're gonna talk all about it, but first I'm gonna tell you a story. It was cold, It was bad cold,

and guess what it was supposed to get colder. It was January in Arkansas's duck season, and somewhere around nineteen ninety eight, my brother Tim and I were hosting a group of folks from North Carolina at our place, Southern Water Fowler's Guide Service near Raydale, Arkansas. Now, these boys have been customers for a few years and were a good group of folks to hunt with. They all had a passion for duck hunting in green timber and viewed

Arkansas as the pinnacle place to do it. They were an eclectic mix of friends with different backgrounds and occupations, which meant different amounts of disposable income. Some could show up at the last minute if an opened and became available, but most of them, man, they saved all year long for that trip. I'll be honest with you, I couldn't have afforded a hunted with us. At that time. We were charging three hundred dollars a day per person for

half a day hunting. That included a bed in the Rebel Yell, three home cooked meals, and all the adult libations our clients could hold. Now, folks usually booked a minimum of three days, so that's nine hundred bucks plus gas driving out there or the plane ticket to fly to Little Rock. That would have priced this cat plumb

out of the running for a guided hunt. So the boys that Scrimpton saved for that trip were just as high a priority for us to entertain and take care of as the folks that didn't even think about pay

in that amount, maybe even more so. That meant getting up day after day, way before the clients, having coffee and breakfast ready, decoys, loaded, boats, gashed up, hunters assigned of vehicles, snacks made and packed, and after the hunt, dinner made, ducks cleaned, tagged and packaged equipment, maintained, clients, entertained, supper prepared clients, entertained kitchen cleaned clients, entertained clients, put to bed, and the final prep for the following day,

and finally in the bed, usually after midnight, for a few short hours of sleep, before it all started over again at the sound of the alarm. It didn't matter who the fellow was that was paying for the opportunity to hunt with us. We were set on doing our dead level best to ensure that they had the best possible chance to shoot some After all, we like shooting

ducks too. Now, all that being said, when a big arctic coal front rolls in and freezes everything, and I mean everything from the Missouri line down to the Louisiana. It's cold. Schools are shutting down because the pipes for freezing and busting. Businesses were closing early. But guess who's still working. Me and Timmy. We got six class to hunt, eight counting us, and we don't get a day off

until duck season is over. Now. We scouted the evening before and found some ducks in a place that was quickly freezing in the woods around the edges, but there was current out in the timber. The water was abnormally high for that time of year, and it had opened up a lot of places in the woods that weren't

normally flooded. Now, I'm not gonna say the name of the place, because apparently naming a place that's already known by every public land duck hunter this side of the North Pole in a story that happened twenty five years ago, will get you branded these days as a spot burner.

So I'll just call the place the Woods. Eight people don't fit safely in a sixteen footle of a boat, So I took tim a bag of decoys and three of the smallest clients and drove them up the bow to a spot on the levee where they would wait for me to go back, pick up the other hunters, other sack of decoys, and head back to where they were. This was way before daylight and the temperatures were in

the teens. The water that was spraying on me and in the boat was freezing as soon as it made contact, and everything that got wet, including my right hand that I was using to hold the spotlight, was covered in a clear sheet of ice that ran down to my elbow, where a little icicle had formed. Did I tell you all it was cold? Now? It was? But I wasn't and neither was Tim. And while we couldn't have afforded to hunt with us, buying waiters was a business expense.

We'd both just got a brand new pair of fleece lined insulated near prene waiters, five millimeters thick and sixteen hundred grams of theensilating the boots. We were virtually bulletproof to freezing anyway. With the last group and all their plunder loaded in the boat, we headed back up the

baou to find Tim and the others. The high water allowed us to easily pull the boat out of the bio, across the levee and into the woods, and as far as I knew, we were the only folks on the planet that knew where an open water was in the woods, and the afternoon it was full of Mallard ducks. The only issue was there was about one hundred yards of ice between us and the creek channel that we'd found the day before where the ducks were. We pulled the boat across the levee and knocked out a hole in

the ice for the boat. The water wasn't deep enough to run the motor, so Tim had to get on the front deck to raise the back end high enough for me to put the motor in shallow water drive. We took off and broke ice like we were in the barren sea. We were blazing the trail and knee deep water, kicking up a rooster tail of ice leaves and freezing water, and six North Carolinians were following in

our wake, hooping and hollering and cheering us on. We left the extra early because we figured it wasn't going to be easy. Unfortunately, we were righted. The ice was thick and the water a little deeper eventually, and Tim had to stand on the ice as the boat moved forward, causing ply of wood sheets to break free and him to come splashing down while still holding onto the front

of the boat and landing on his feet. He had his coat tucked down inside those new chest waiters, and water had splashed way up past his waist, but other than his gloves freezing up and sticking to the front of the boat, he was dry as a bone. The water finally got deep enough to drop the motor all the way, so he hopped up on the front with his butt flat on that aluminum deck and his legs poked out in front of him, with his heels of his new waiters skating across the top of the ice.

As I motored us forward through the thinning ice and toward the open water, I looked behind the boat and falling was a train of stumbling and tripping duck hunters, And back to the front was my brother, looking like a camouflaged hood on it, wearing his wool army helmet lighter with a smoking marlbor or red clenched between his teeth. He was grinning like a mule, eating sawbriers and shining in the spotlight. As the water that had been splashing

on him froze on the outside of his waiters. We got to the edge of where we were going to set up, and I shined up into the leafless trees. In a hole about sixty feet by eighty feet appeared in the canopy. There were duck feathers laying everywhere from where the ducks had been bushed up the day before. Buddy, we were on the ex tim jobbed to paddle down in front of him, touched the bottom, said it ain't too deep, and when he tried to jump off the boat,

he didn't go anywhere. He said, I'm stuck to the boat. My waiters are froze to the deck. He rocked back and forth a couple of times, and with one mighty heave, he pushed down with both hands and jumped forward out of the boat into waste deep water, leaving the seat of his brand new waiters still frozen and stuck to

the deck. The cold, fridgid water poured into his waiters quicker than he had jumped out of the boat, and he unleashed a violent string of colorful metaphors that quieted the crowd and filled the darkness with a soul as tirade that seemed to go on in perpetuity. I figured it's still out there floating around in space, knocking satellites out of orbit. But eventually he regained his composure and he toughed it out until around ten o'clock that morning,

when we called it. The big raft of ducks that we'd seen the day before never returned, but we kept the skunk away by scratching out enough for a mess. Those boys paid for the opportunity and dry boots or wet ones. We were going to make sure they had one. And that's just how that happened. Mainly footwear, let's talk about it. Jerry Clower mentioned broke Ann's shoes in his

story about Coonan. It was the bran John U. Banks preferred to wear until tree climbing time came, and then he'd slipping them brogans off and commenced to climbing the tree. My dad mentioned Brogan shoes to me, describing what woods looked like when he was a boy, saying them wood's over there behind little lake used to be so open. I could run down through them bottoms barefooted. Now I wouldn't do it wearing a pair of brogans. The Brogans

wasn't a company it was a style of boot. They were issued to soldiers on both sides during the War between the States, and you can buy them now, a boot that's had its origin traced back to Scotland and Ireland where they originated in the sixteen hundreds. Now that's a pair of manly footwear. Everyone from farmers the soldiers were kicking around doing everything from growing corn ten and sheep and shooting at one another while wearing them. Now they're just as likely to be worn by a fellow

sporting a man bun. How times have changed, and along with haircuts, so of men's shoes. Boots. That's what a real man wears, they say, boots made from the clothes last night's hamburger was wearing. Now what more perfect of an animal could have been gifted to us from our creator than a cow ground zero for hamburgers and steaks.

Through the most simple and organic methods, these wondering machines have the ability to turn plants into meat, something college educated scientists that can place humans on the moon and bring them back home have yet to master. While cows, they walk around doing it like Obi Wagu Knobi's with no reverse or thumbs and wearing a closet full of future boots and footballs. The cow I may have to do a podcast on them now me. I like a good pair of boots as well as the next fellow.

But anyone that's ever listened to the bear grease render will know that I ain't opposed to crocs or flip flops. My brother, the great bear grease rhetorician himself, Klay Knukelem, who infers that shoes make the man, has on more than one occasion cast disparagement upon my choice of kicks. His core philosophy, and I ain't kidding, is that a man should wear leather boots of some type ninety nine

percent of the time unless he's exercising. He said. Crocs might be okay in a camp setting, but only if you were in arm's reach of a gun. He said he feels uncomfortable when he's not wearing cowboy or hiking boots at Rascal also told me once and I quote, a man can't properly defend his family in a fight wearing crocs are flip flops. Well, Clay Bow, I got some news for you. When I'm defending my family, I'm pressing the fight and moving forward, not backing up. So

my shoes they going with me. And for that matter, you can fight barefoot. If you're a good fighter, you ain't gonna be fighting long anyway. Now. As a young man in school, I held truer to Clay's way of thinking that I do now. Unless I was on the football field wearing cleats, I was cruising in a pair of cowboy boots or Red Wing Model six twelve moccasin toe lace ub boots. I wore those red Wings for years,

even after I got out of school. It was a style for folks that worked in the woods, and for a time back in the eighties, you could pick out a forestry working nine times out of ten by what he was wearing, a colored T shirt with a pocket overalls, or a pair of Levis with a skull ring on

his back pocket and a pair of red Wings. When I was working for Georgia Pacific managing timber before I started fighting crying for a living, the red Wing boot man would drive a semi with a custom trailer to the parking lot and we could go get fitted, sign a payroll, a dut uction form, and walk out of there with a brand new pair of boots, a free

pair of socks, and a can of mink on. Those boots were sixty dollars a pair, and I couldn't have afforded them without the payroll installment plan ten dollars a paycheck. Fast forward to last weekend when my wife Alexis and I were shopping for our daughter Bailey school shoes. That's same, sixty dollars didn't go far and the shoe store demanded I pay him full price before we left. Not funny

how times have changed. Anyway. This whole men wear boots and only boots has a lot of basis in the fact that that's what men mainly wore when this country was settled and tamed. They didn't have a lot of choices. Cowboys, soldiers, explorers have all been celebrated as iconic figures, and even Old Merle Haggard paid homage to boots in his song Okie from Muskogie. He sang that their boots are still in style for manly footwear. Beads and Roman sandals won't

be seen now. Old Merle didn't say the men wasn't wearing them in Muskogie, He just said they wouldn't be seen wearing them. The Internet sometimes is such a wonderful thing being a detective fraud these years. I played a hunch and googled Merle Haggard crocks, and there they were, in all their polyethylene vinyl acetate glory. A pair of Merle Haggard crocks for forty four dollars and ninety five cents.

That's almost as much as a pair of red Wing Model six twelves costs that I was making bi monthly payments on. Back in the day, the Marshall Tucker Band opined that you shouldn't be with a woman long enough for you boots to get old, and not to be outdone. Nancy Sinatra said her boots were made for walking, so it works both ways. There's validity in what Clay says, because whether I agree with it or not, it's his belief and his core value, and people must figure out

what theirs are. We should respect him. It's all right with me if he wants to set around a camp and a pair of hot leather boots while my piggies are all going to the market and digging the freedom of a pair of rubber shoes. SD Gordon was a minister and a writer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he offered up the following Shoes divide men into three classes. Some men wear their father's shoes. They make no decisions of their own. Some are unthinkingly

shot by the crowd. The strong man is his own cobbler. He insists on making his own choices. He walks in his own shoes. I like that. I read it about five times, and I think I got more out of it every time I did. Obviously, you have to make your own way and walk your own path. And it doesn't matter if you're wearing a pair of cowboy boots, brogans, or Merle Haggard crocks. When you do it, just do it. No wait, that's running shoes. Oh well, it don't matter.

Do what makes you happy. That's good for you and everyone around you. Y'all be respectful and good to one another. And that's just about its country as country gets. This is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be careful