“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” - Robert Frost
Monotony and tractors seem to go hand in hand this time of year. The first pass at mowing an overgrown pasture and you tend to begin calculations concerning just how long and monotonous the rest of this particular problem is going to last.
Hours and hours spent in the saddle of some diesel gulping, slow moving and clanging beast when you could be fishing.
Yes, fishing this time of year can be monotonous. We all know that. But, if you have to choose good monotony, fishing wins hands down every time over the thump of the diesel and the clattering of the old bush hog. It’s not even a fair contest.
After a couple of hours of listening to the tractor and clanging of the bush hog, I detected a subtle but growing whine. A harsh change in harmonics slapped me out of the monotony. Maybe it was the growing cloud of smoke that alarmed me to remove the power take off to the bush hog before the dry weeds caught the whole of the desperately dry pasture on fire.
Bob war, two feet of old, rusty and well hidden bob war in fact, had managed to very tightly wind itself around one blade and melt one 77 inch drive belt. That immediately ended that day’s entertainment with monotony.
Finding a replacement belt took the better part of three days and as many trips to belt dealers. You can find a descent supply of illegal drugs from south of the border faster than the time it takes to locate a good belt for an old rusty bush hog, (or so I’m told).
The incredibly complex mechanical endeavor involved in actually replacing an old, stretched and badly melted belt, with a brand new and overly expensive, hard to find, new belt is anything but monotonous. The monotony of the growing pasture is waiting. The fishing days are waiting. Time is wasting. The only thing that isn’t wasting is the grease and grime being collected in this miserable exercise.
The new belt worked fine until the water pump on the old Ford decided to die. That particular death wasn’t necessarily as audible as belt death by bob war. It was a more of a “death in your face” moment. Steaming radiators are a lot more obvious than rusty bob war.
Somewhere in the heat of the latest particular nightmare, I stumbled on the disturbing realization that I had managed to lose my knife.
I lost track years ago of the number of knives I have managed to let escape my pockets. A lost knife is such a sad thing. It’s so sad a thought to me that I try my best to repress any and all memories of such profound loss. It’s right up there on the “sad scale”with colonoscopies, divorces that were all your fault and your best bird dogs dealing with hip problems.
This particular knife was a found knife. A free knife. I never forget free knives. This one was an easy opening, read quasi switchblade like, a Kershaw. It looked brand new, complete with a little clip designed to secure itself to the lip of your pocket.
Apparently the knife designer added this clip to the knife so it would be immediately available at a moments notice, like in the event that a bear jumped on your back. As you felt the bears teeth sink into the back of your neck, you could immediately grab the knife from the edge of your bloody pocket and stab your way to freedom. The fast acting clip ensured your living another day, to tell everyone who would listen, about the time your three inch pocket knife saved your life from some savage predator.
The other marvelous design feature about the clip on the side of the easy opening knife is that it makes the knife almost impossible to lose. This design flaw failed twice. Once when my wife found it on the rail of the fishing bridge at St George Island, three or four years ago, and lastly, when it decided to abandon ship when the water pump on the old Ford provided a good deal of excitement in another day of overgrown pasture monotony.
Another found knife comes to mind. This one is very dear to me and if I ever manage to lose this one, it will undoubtedly be one of the darker days in this journey of outdoor life.
This particular blade is a Case sheath knife my wife found on our honeymoon in the Rocky Mountain National Park. It too looked to be brand new, as it lay glistening in the parking lot of a steep trail head. It unfortunately did not come with a sheath, or a clip. Clips on knives had not yet been invented back in those days apparently.
I treasure this free knife and the sheath I made for it. I treasure it for more that a few reasons, but mostly, it is a superiorly designed tool for field dressing deer. I’ve lost count of the game opened and dressed for the table by this found knife.
Losing knives always takes me to a dark place for a few days. Molly Ivins referred to it as “The White Trash Hall of Fame”. I’m not sure if I’ve made it yet by losing so many good knives, but I’m certain I’ve spent a good deal of time over the years with some pretty strong contenders.
One strong White Trash Hall Fame candidate was an old Alabamian named Chester. We pumped gas together on the corner of Ashland Terrace and Hixson Pike the year Shell decided to up the price of regular gas to 29.9 cents a gallon.This new level of corporate greed set off a firestorm of negative public opinion and outright outrage directed at everyone involved in the filling station business. None of us in the petroleum business at the time could ever have imagined gas going up to 33 cents a gallon. Nor, could we have ever imagined any paying customer pumping his or her own gas.
Chester was from Lick Skillet, or Dog Town, or maybe it was Fyfe. I don’t really seem to recall exactly which metropolis he hailed from down on Sand Mountain. But, before we were both fired, he did manage to impart some manner of Sand Mountain life lessons in our time pumping gas together.
I always wondered if one of the writers or producers of the Andy Griffith show was somehow associated with Fyfe Alabama in some way, and that’s the reason they gave Barney his last name?
Chester had at least six to eight functioning teeth and a rather prodigious craving for alcohol about an hour before Shell’s closing time. He claimed nightly that he had to be about half lit by the time he got home every night, because his “old lady” hadn’t left him yet, because he still owed her money.
He claimed he was famous on Sand Mountain for raising “da-mayters” that grew as tall as the telephone pole out by his single-wide. He claimed he was forced to drive all the way to Scottsboro once to buy a twenty foot extension ladder just so he could pick his “da-mayters”.
One nugget of wisdom he imparted was that you had to always carry a raw “tater” with you when you ‘was drankin’ an drivin’. ‘Drankin’ an drivin’ was much more of a cultural norm in those days, much more so than it is today.
Chester explained ‘a good decent sized ‘tater,’ when chewed rigorously, which I supposed was somewhat difficult to accomplish with a minimum amount of functioning teeth, prevented the “Law’s breath-o-lizer" from detecting whatever it is that you’ve had a little too much of and got you pulled over in the first place. He claimed that a good Sand Mountain tuber had saved him innumerable DUI’s.
What got us fired was his ability to turn off all of the gas station lights a closing time, quickly partially disassemble a gas pump, always hi-test, and fill his El Camino, free of charge, no taxes. Chester’s logic seemed impeccable to him, and he reasoned that the owner would never figure out what was happening to his missing hi-test.
He was badly wrong about the owner’s ability to detect missing gallons of hi-test when the station owner found Chester at the dark pump one rainy night. Fortunately, I had left early that night and in doing so I failed to witness Chester’s firing. But, the next night I did get to witness mine.
I never saw or heard of Chester after that. He’s probably in the Hall of Fame by now.
There are many more “Hall of Famer” stories, and maybe I’ll get around to a few, one of these rainy days, but right now I’m looking for hoses, belts, a water pump and a lost Kershaw in the tall weeds. Then it’s back to monotonous.
“How can a chicken eat all the time and never get fat in the face?” - Roger Miller
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