Ep. 205: This Country Life - A Tale of a Few Books

tale of a few books. I've been influenced by different folks in my life. Places, I've been, things I've seen in experience, but there's been a lot of books that I've read over the years that have done the same. I'm going to talk about a few of them that I've enjoyed reading multiple times in a couple that might surprise you. But first I'm going to tell you story. The alcove at the back of the church sanctuary was

where the cool kids sat on Sunday morning. Mostly high school kids and their friends and girlfriends took up the last few pews and if there was room in the first couple of rows that allowed us younger kids to see you had to stay on alert, however, because thumping ears was a big thing back then, and elementary school boys with short hair and ears poking out like wing nuts offered a tempting target for the upper classmen, and I didn't understand why until I became one of them,

and then it was clear some ears just begged for it. And what better place to do it than in the house of our Lord, where the victim had to remain silent or face repercussions for interrupting the service at school the following day for being a snitch, and the perpetrator could seek forgiveness for his transg It was mighty convenient for all involved. On this Sunday, there were several older kids absent. The main ear thumper was one of them. I was glad too. I didn't know where he was.

I hoped prison, but doubted i'd be that lucky. All I knew was on this Sunday. I had a plan that I had formulated in haste as we got out of the car for church, and the thumper being gone was only going to help me with my mission. I was twelve, wearing a coat and tie, and in the sleeve of my suit coat the latest issue of Field and Stream was wrapped around my forearm, hidden from everyone.

Set me in Jesus. I was reading it when I left the house that morning, all the way to town from the farm, and just before we pulled into the parking lot, I decided to take it with me. While everyone else was listening to the sermon, I'd be reading Jean Hill talking about quail hunting. We still had quail back then in Southeast Arkansas, oh quail were mentioned in the Bible. That's how I justified it in my head that reading an outdoor magazine in church wasn't a bad thing.

Twice the Good Lord save the Israelites by giving them a big mess of quail to eat. And the fishing articles. Well, those fishers of men that were the apostles, four of them started out as fishers of fish. A twelve year old had justified reading Filled to Stream in church with the lukewarm knowledge of the Bible. One of my friends sat beside me and his eyes bugged out of his head when I slipped that glossy periodical from the sleeve

like a magician. I smiled at him, knowing that during the next forty five minutes he'd be sitting still, wishing he had his own magazine, and I'd be quail hunting and fly fishing for the duration of the service. He poked me with his elbow and asked me to let him see the magazine. I whispered to him to kick rocks. But if he could read fast enough, he could read with me. But I wasn't going to read it to him or wait for him to catch up. When I got ready to turn the page, the page would be turned.

I gave him one last smug look before I turned my attention back to my magazine. He looked a little sire. Too bad, my magazine, my rules. Now this went on for a little while, me reading him trying to read, and me flipping the pages, knowing he hadn't finished the paragraph. I thought it was funny. The holder of the sneaked in magazine holds more than just a magazine. He holds all the power as well. And I wielded my power selfishly, with no regard for my friend, who desperately tried to

keep up the pace. I'll admit some of the articles I didn't finish reading before turning the page, just to aggravate him. I'd catch him out of the corner my eye, his eyes feverishly following along and write in mid sentence. I turned the page just to see the frustration building here. It makes ol a big puff of air. But absolute power corrupts absolutely And after torturing him for thirty or more minutes, when I looked out of the corner of my eye, I saw my friend holding his Bible and

watching the preacher contently. I was trying to contain my laughter looking at him paying attention in church Like all the other kids, we made fun of whatever loser. I looked back at my magazine that I kept lowering my lap, just in time to see a shadow cast over the top of the page and a pair of women's dress shoes appeared on the ornate carpet where my legs dangled above the floor. Those shoes looked like my mama's shoes.

I was going to pay dearly for this. I looked over at my buddy, who would have seen her coming, but didn't say a word or warn me in any way. He had the most innocent look on his face as my mama snatched that magazine away from me, laid it on the seat, and ushered me to the family pew about halfway between the alcove and the pulpit. As I scooted past my grandparents on my walk of shame to take my seat, I looked back at my buddy, who

was smiling at me my fielding stream. Opening his hands barely visible above the back of the pew in front of him, he bowed his head to read my magazine. I took my seat, and I bowed mine to pray I'd lived through this, and that's just how that happened. Literature was my favorite subject in high school, along with girls, Agriy, forestry, girls again, and football. In high school, if you took Agriy, you had the option to join the FFA, the Future

Farmers of America. To join, you had to go through a week of school sponsored hazing at the direction of the upper classmen. It wasn't demeaning or dangerous just to write a passage during that week. The pledges were known as green hands, and for a week you had to wear a cardboard painted green hand pinned to your shirt, a spiney pine cone adorned a haystringed necklace that you

wore around your neck. Your shirts were worn inside out and along with the pockets of your blue jeans or your overalls, A myriad of silly requirements and meaningless tasks that green hands and during the week to be counted. When Friday came as a full fledged member, now everyone who wanted to participate did so and no one complained.

I loved it. We went on field trips and FFA sponsored contests at in state colleges summer camps, and got to get out of school and out of town, off the farm to see things and go places that at the time were a big deal like the State Fair rodeo, similar activities, but English class, especially literature and composition, and that was my favorite. I lived agri class. My life was the same as a FFA sponsored field trip every day. The only added bonus to actually being in FFA was

getting the witness at somewhere else. In fact, some of those FFA field trips when I was in school was at our forum, like the time I raised catfish through a study sponsored by the Extension Service. I promised this episode is about literature, but let me tell you about this project first. The University of Arkansas System Cooperative Extension Service is a state wide network associated with the University

of Arkansas's Division and Agriculture. Their mission is to provide research based information through non formal education to help all archansms improve their economic well being and their quality of life. Whether it's AG or four ahe family, consumer science, or community development. Whatever the government and they're here to help. But when they say it, they actually mean it. Now.

Miss Jene Frisbee was the Extension Agent staff chairman for Bradley County and Warren, Arkansas, and she had held that position since God was a child and retired in nineteen ninety five. Her specialty was home economics, and she'd greet me every morning on radio station KWRF when I stayed at my grandparents' house in town. I'd be sitting at the table eating breakfasting He'd come Miss Jene with good morning, mister, and missus homemaker, it's time for your second cup of coffee.

Then she had expounded on whatever her topic was for the day on a program. But the Extension Service was doing a fish farming study around commercial catfish farming. They supplied the material to build a floating cage similar in looks to a shark cage, with styrofoam floats supporting a two before framed Mashon enclosure that the fingerland sized catfish swam around in. Now. The county agent, mister Paul Cooper helped me build it, and I fed them according to

a strict schedule. I made notations on a daily log, and after a period of time several months if I remember correctly, another extension agent involved with the project came to the farm. My forestry class came out for that trip, and we took samples from the enclosure wage and measured them, and that was it. Then all the fish were mine. I turned a lot of them, loosened the pond, but kept some in a cage at any time for several

months afterwards. That we wanted to mess a catfish, I just go down and dip up another for supper, kind of like what Tim and I do now in the Arkansas River, except that project was a lot easier anyway. As many places and trips I took physically during school and FFA or any other class that afforded me the opportunity to step on a bus and go somewhere, none compared to English class in there. I traveled at any place I wanted to go, and some I was told

to go and I never left the schoolhouse. In the eleventh grade and Miss Pat Hayworth's English class, we read The Red Badge of Courage and I was immediately transported back in time to the darkness that was the War between the States, which fed and inspired a lifelong fascination of history in the battles that were fought near where I grew up. I've always been a reader. My maternal grandfather was accurately described as a voracious reader. He read everything.

My brothers both read a ton and I was no different. Still am. The impact of some of the books that I read has had a profound effect on my life. They garnered and fed a passion for exploration, an adventure, and helped shape me into the man I am today. Robert Ruark's The Old Man and the Boy is a prime example. It's about a boy in his grandpa's relationship

hunting and fishing. The old man is the boy's teacher, and just like the boy in roue Ark's book, I played that part in real life, with my dad playing the part of the old man as he teaches the boy how to hunt and fish and just general life lessons. He teaches him conservation, responsibility, and stewardship of the resource all things I was taught at an early age. That

book is profoundly good on several levels. It first ran his monthly articles in Field and Stream magazine and was compiled as a book afterwards in the late nineteen fifties. I first read that book in high school. The best part about reading the book so young is that when reading it now, I get to see that story from the old man's point of view. When I first read it, I only had one frame of reference, and that was from the boy. Here's a couple quotes that have stuck

with me over the years. Anytime a boy is ready to learn about guns is the time he's ready, no matter how young he is. And you can't start too

young to learn to be careful. I've told stories on here about hunting by myself when I was in elementary school, you know, ten or eleven years old, Like the time on a cloudy evening when I lost my horse after I dismounted and ran on foot from tree to tree behind our squirrel dog, Prissy, as she followed a timbering squirrel that was doing its dead level best to avoid riding out in my saddle bags. Once I finally got

him shot out of a tree. I realized that I didn't know which direction I'd been running, and to walk out to get back to my horse before dark. I told Pricy to go find my horse, and in short order she did just that, running slap out of sight in the opposite direction I thought i'd come from. After circling tree after tree, looking up trying to find that running squirrel, she barked about one hundred yards away, and when I got to her, she was standing on a

stump beside my horse. A large majority of the people who have lived a life far removed from my own that I've told that story to, when I get to the end, they don't even remark that Prissy the squirrel dog could understand English. They want to talk about how a ten year old boy gets a twenty two rifle and goes hunting by himself, which to me is the most insignificant part of that whole story. My age didn't have anything to do with it. I was taught from

the beginning about gun safety. It was like learning to walk or tell time. I assure you, had I not been responsible enough to do it, my father wouldn't have allowed it. Here's another quote from that book. A gentleman starts down at his boots and works up to his hat. A gentleman is first of all polite. A sportsman is a gentleman first. But a sportsman basically is a man who kills what he needs, whether it's fish, bird, or an animal, or what he wants for a special reason.

But he never kills anything just to kill it, and he tries to preserve the very same thing that he kills a little from time to time. The books call this conservation. It's the same reason why we don't shoot that tame covey of quail down to less than ten birds. Ruark references a gentleman in another passage like this, A gentleman never talks down to nobody, or even to anybody. That says anybody instead of nobody. A gentleman ain't greedy.

A gentleman don't holler at anybody else's dogs. A gentleman pays his score as he goes. He don't take what he can't put back, and if he borrows, he borrows from banks. He never troubles his friends with his troubles. Now I get what he was saying in the last part about not troubling his friends with his troubles. But in far bid from me to correct one of the greatest writers I admire most. But I take the last line somewhat loosely. I want my friends to come to

me first with an issue. If they're a true friend, I'm going to go to them. But Riarck talks about money, and hear's something about money that I learned from my dad when I was young, kind of in the same theme of the old man and the boy. But I worked for a fellow once that made promises he didn't keep, and he stole money that was meant for me through handshake deal, not a contract, so I had no legal recourses when we parted company. I stewed on it for

a long time, quite some time. Times were pretty lean then, and that money would have helped my young family. All I could see was that clown stealing food from my kids,

not stealing money from me. Months later, I was at my dad's barn putting up that more after more than one afternoon, and while I was making round after round cutting grass, I had had enough and I decided that when I finished the yard, I was going to drive to that man's house and give my money or give him some boxing lessons until I felt he'd receive the amount equal to what he owed me. I was walking out to my truck when my dad drove up and

he asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to so and So's house to get my money. He said, oh, he decided to make it right. I said, no, sir, I decided to make it right. He don't know I'm coming. My dad said, boy, you sit down. We're gonna talk about and he asked me how much the man owed me, and I told him. He looked at me and said, that's the best money you ever spent. I looked at him like a calf looks at a new gate. I didn't get what he

was saying. He said, I have no doubt that you can go to his house and give him the whooping he deserves. But you're gonna get in trouble. You're probably gonna lose your job, you ain't gonna get any of the money he owes you, and he'll wind up getting some more out of you. And if all it cost is what he stole from you, to find out what kind of person he is and how not to do business from now on, My son, that was money well invested.

He was right, it was. I spoken more than once on how Wilson Rawls's book Where the Red Fern Grows snatched me up out of a desk by the gallaxies of my overalls in elementary school. The fire of that atomic Wedges Parks is still burning today, just as bright as it did then. I'm recording this and old whaling my tree, and walker Coonhoun is laying in his favorite

spot beside my desk. Now, that passion was ignited by the community in which I lived, in the love I already possessed for hunting dogs, and that book helped me focus a portion of it toward coon hunting. And here I am, forty six years later, just as enamored with that practice, that book its message as I was when I first read it. Here's a few of my favorite quotes from Wilson Rawl's wonderful book. It's strange, indeed, how memories can lie dormant in a man's mind for so

many years. Yet those memories can be awakened and brought forth fresh and new, just by something you've seen, or something you've heard, or the sight of an old familiar face. Now I have to tell y'all that is almost one hundred percent how this podcast comes to life. Each week, as I'm stumbling on my way around on this planet, something will remind me of something else, maybe from yesterday, last week, or more than likely from years gone by

that triggers a memory. My notebook and my pencil are always ready, and I learned the hard way that when one of those occurrence happens, I have to log it immediately. I'll pull over on the side of the road, or get up out of bed, or just stop whatever I'm doing and write it down. Trusting myself to remember to make a note about it later has bit me in behind more than once. Here's another quote from that book that's one sentence long, but it speaks volumes about its subject.

Here it is, I've learned that a hunting dog smells like a dog, and a sleeping dog smells all most humor. Now I read that, and to me, it's looking at the same thing with two sets of eyes, seeing the totality of what you're looking at. I think a lot of that ability comes from stacking birthdays on top of one another. There's nothing more peaceful than a sleeping dog,

and I'm looking at one right now. That book is about a boy, but it's told from a narrator's perspective of looking back as an adult, and mister Raw's statement was more about how his heart saw his dogs when they were hunting than at rest. It described the bond he had with his dogs. Heck, it describes the bond I have with mine right now. I get emotional thinking about it. What better way to spend your time than

with something that loves you unconditionally. You won't find that represented any more clearly than a four legged family member that doubles is a good hun dog. Now, I can't say that I learned all that from reading Where the Red Fern Grows, but I can tell you that book helped me understand and put a voice to what I was feeling. My favorite of all is this one. People have been trying to understand dogs ever since the beginning

of time. One never knows what they'll do. You can read every day where a dog saved the life of a drowning child or laid down his life for his master. Some people call this loyalty. I don't. I may be wrong, but I call it love. The deepest kind of buff It's a shame that people all over the world can't have the kind of love in their hearts. He said. There would be no wars, slaughter or murder, no greed or selfishness. It would be the kind of world that

God wants us to have, a wonderful world. A man, ain't that good? I sure think so. I hope you do too. I hope you think it's good enough to read those books yourself. And I didn't even get the surface scratched on the books that I've read or the poetry that I've enjoyed so much. Yep, I said poetry. Mss Mary Cupp, my twelfth grade English teacher, introduced me to a collection of poems by Robert Frost, a man whose work I enjoyed this day. There are others, too,

but none I've enjoyed more than another Robert. But this one's nickname was the Bard of the Yukon, and his given name is Robert W. Servis. He was eighty four when he died in nineteen fifty eight. He wrote volumes, but a poem that he wrote titled The Men that Don't Fit In stands out to me the most I had read and reread that poem for years, And on my second trip to Saskatchewan for Bear Hunt Magazine as a cameraman for my old buddy Clay Bow make a non lethal shot on a bear and it would be

the only shot we got all week. That bear lived, but I wasn't sure Clay would. It was a big investment for his magazine to come home empty handed. And we sat in silence on the bank of that lake, a two our boat ride away from camping, over two thousand miles from home. Clay was feeling defeated, disappointed in himself, and I'm sure wondering if what we were doing was what we were supposed to be doing. Now. That poem came to mind as I looked for something to cheer

my friend up. Now, I quoted the first standard to him, and I'll do it for you now. But I looked at him and I said, there's a race of men that don't fit in a race that can't stay still. So they break the hearts of kith and kin, and they roam the world at will. They ranged the field, and they rove the flood, and they climbed the mountain's crest. Theirs is the curse of the Gypsy blood and they

don't know how to rest. I followed that up with we were there because that was where we were supposed to be, and we were doing the things that we were meant to do. Whatever comes of it, comes of it, nothing more, nothing less. He gave me that old Thanks Pal fist bump. But it was still a long ride home. But looking around now six years later, I'd say it worked out pretty good. The turkeys in Mississippi for me,

were quite challenging, to say the least. After finally hearing a couple and messing with one most of the morning of my hunt, me, Keith and Jordan heard one of them get sent to glory less than one hundred and fifty yards from where we sat. That shut our turkey down and put me in the highway headed home. Next stop Missouri and hopefully better luck. I thank y'all so much for listening and good luck in the turkey woods and the catfish water. I'm about to jump on them

both to all four feet until next week. This is Brent Reeve signing off. Y'all be careful