Out on the farm

Ain't got no blues, got chickens in my back yard

2009-12-31T21:14:00.000-08:00

OK, so it's a crappy picture. The chickens got huffy and left before I could take another one. 8 or 9 chickens and Jeff's Guineas have been scratching around the front yard a lot lately. These four decided to hop up on the woodpile and peer in the window at me so I retaliated by taking their picture and am now humiliating them by posting it for the world to see.

So far they are taking the cold weather in stride, still laying although not as many eggs as earlier. I've been pampering them a bit, giving them meat scraps from on old buck deer that my nephew gave me last fall (he's butchered and frozen, lest someone fear that they are eating him alive). Also soaking some grain and feeding it to them warm first thing in the mornings. As the old folks say, take care of your barred rocks and they will take care of you.

Shuckin' the Corn (apologies to Earl Scruggs)

2009-12-22T17:53:00.000-08:00

Here is my corn shucking rig, not as cool as a team of mules and a spring wagon, but it works. I planted about a half acre of Reid's yellow dent corn last spring and just finished shucking it today. The planter didn't work very well, so got a poor stand, the deer ate about a third of it, but still I got about 30 bushels. If any of you hippies want some open pollenated organic ear corn for your organic, open pollenated squirrels, get in touch.

As I have sometimes mentioned, my dad tended to primitive agriculture, so we raised and shucked 10 or 15 acres of corn every fall. Generally miserable work, hot sweaty and itchy early in the fall, cold, wet, and muddy late. I was always ashamed to admit to the other dudes in FFA that we didn't own a corn picker. Childhood trauma down on the farm. In retrospect, I am glad for the experience now that I don't actualy have to do it any more.

The early mechanical corn pickers pulled arms off a lot of farmers anyway, so perhaps I should be thankful also for my reasonably intact body. The pickers had a set of serrated rollers, called snapping rolls. The were designed to pull corn stalks througn and were set close enough together to pop the ears off. They tended to plug up, people would try to pull the stalks back out, the plug would break loose, and the stalks would feed in so fast that there was no time to turn loose. The un-plugger then lost an arm, or maybe got completely mashed and was killed. Every fall in Vo Ag, we would have to sit through a safety film that recreated corn picker accidents. Wish I could find one for the tickfest film fest.

All plowed up and no plants to grow

2009-04-29T15:08:00.000-07:00

Not actually true, I do have plants to grow but would like to think of some different ones.

Those of you who have been to the farm have seen my garden the past few years, maybe a half acre total, in which I’ve actually raised a significant amount of food last year. I’ve got about 4 acres more ground plowed and in process of being prepared for planting this year. I will have a separate area for vine crops such as squash and pumpkins as well as plots for corn, soybeans, sorghum for bird and deer food, and probably some wheat and rye for next season. The corn will be open pollinated yellow dent, organic and pesticide free. I am thinking of offering it on the net at an outrageous price for a half bushel or so, hoping that aging hippies will buy it as food for their organic, pesticide free yard squirrels. Also have several pounds of edamame seed which I might try to sell to squirrels as food for aging pesticide free hippies. I will of course try to raise a significant amount of the usual staples such as potatoes, turnips, sweet corn, tomatoes, cabbage, etc.

What I am really trying to figure out is “What can I raise and/or how can I market the stuff in order to make a buck?” If anybody has an idea about a product or a marketing angle, I would really like to hear it. My new motto is something along the lines of “People got to eat, so they might as well pay through the nose for food.” What sort of product would you consider paying through the nose for just because you would really like to have it and there isn’t a consistent supply available? Not looking for a commitment to buy anything, just ideas. Plants or animals considered. If it grows in dirt or walks around and eats stuff that grows in dirt I can probably raise it.

Current project is a bullet proof chicken pen built along the lines of the redneck greenhouse, but covered in chicken wire instead of plastic. I bought 31 chickens two weeks ago and still have all 31, probably because they haven’t been outside the bullet proof chicken house. The chickens will of course be free ranging under normal circumstances, but I think I need a small pen where I can leave them unattended for a day or so and assume they will still be intact when I get back.

Also thinking long and hard about a cellar design. I have almost decided to build it using treated posts and plywood, then coating with tar and wrapping in plastic before covering with dirt. Cost and time would be less than half that of a poured concrete structure. At my advanced age, I would plan to die before it caves in. Anybody got any experience with that sort of thing? (Timber framed foundations, not dying.)

Spring '09

2009-03-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

It’s spring and it’s cold. Here is a picture of the redneck greenhouse which has failed miserably to blow away over a period of about 4 weeks. Encouraged by that, I planted stuff in it about 2 weeks ago. The spinach and onions are up and a bunch of cabbage plants are reluctantly coming fourth in peat pots.

I plan to plant more stuff this year on the assumption that somebody will want it. I am currently forecasting TEOTWAWKI* for late ‘09-early’10. Those with potatoes to sell will name their own price by then. Trade goods still accepted, but I don’t need any more granite counter tops, Hummer hood ornaments, or running shoes. Could still use some banjo strings and a couple pints of moonshine.

Farm population remains stable for now with 2 humans, 1 black dog, and one black cat. Actually 2 black dogs, as Susie found a friend, another dumped black Lab. I felt that we had an opening for another dog, so he got to stay. We named him after that Hope and Change dude. I don’t count Jeff’s livestock in the general population, as they tend to live about as long as fruit flies, usually not long enough to acquire names.

Much will happen around here in the coming months barring catastrophic injury, bankruptcy, volcanic eruption, or massively accelerated continental drift. It shall be reported with some regularity.

*The End Of The World As We Know It, for you non-survivalists.

The garden is dormant, now where do you suppose this handbasket is headed?

2008-11-16T21:36:00.000-08:00

The garden is done for the year, and a pretty good year it was. Not only did I raise a lot of stuff, I let hardly any weeds or grass go to seed at any time. Plus clearing out an old fence row to open up a lot of new ground for next year, plus working the whole area in October and sewing rye over the whole thing. I bought a pretty good sized used upright freezer last spring for $75, and we flat filled the thing in addition to giving a lot of stuff away. Only thing still in the ground is turnips, and plenty of them. Not sure why I planted so many other than that I had the seed and didn’t think they would grow anyway.

I built a small deluxe chicken house with all the features that the up to date farmer would have wanted in 1942, which was when my chicken book was published. I’m going to buy 8 or 10 year old hens yet this fall and pen them in an area of the garden to see what they can do to wreck havoc with bug eggs and weed seeds. Will also try a trick my dad used by putting a large bale of hay in their pen to let them scratch it down this winter, eat the seed out of it, and work the rest into the ground.

I went out and plowed up about 3 acres in a couple of spots in the outlying fields. Will plant field corn, soybeans, oats and milo there next spring to provide feed for the chickens and maybe a few goats by next summer as well as having some grain to grind for bread, grits, rough cereal and that sort of thing.

The seed order for next year is nearly done and will be sent within the week. If anybody wants anything raised and you are within driving distance to come get it, speak now or forever piece your hold or whatever the phrase is. I’m going to raise a lot of stuff next year and will give some of it to anybody who will give anything of value in return, such as work, beer, dope, a reasonably funny joke, chicken feed, fence wire, a pretty good song, Kuggerands, whatever. Just kidding about the dope of course, as we have a new democrat sheriff in Daviess county and I’m sure he will be harder to bribe than the outgoing republican. Yeah, right.

Astonishingly, the lame microsoft spell checker does not include Kuggerand. Further proof that Gates is a wuss. (Ha. The checker doesn’t recognize wuss. Suggestions are woos, buss, fuss, muss, cuss, and puss. That’s about as funny as anything I’ve read today.)

A lot more will be done before spring including a better temporary greenhouse, a concrete pad for a shop, maybe a cellar, and probably start on a harvest kitchen/bunkhouse. I am increasing the pace as much as possible in anticipation of the biblical 7 lean years that are fast approaching. Yes children, I am predicting that in the next 7 years we will see gasoline at $15 per gallon, government default on Social Security payments, failure of private and public pension funds, massive unemployment, and a grinding depression that will make the 1930’s look like a bad weekend. A fair chance for hyper-inflation that will make paper money worthless, destroy all savings, and maybe lead to massive riots, martial law, and a total breakdown of the government as it exists today. Best case we wind down to something like life in the 1930’s and start to rebuild, worst case a demagogue is hailed as a savoir and becomes a dictator. We might already have that guy in place.

Sadly, I’m doing pretty well with predictions these days. In August I moved my measly 401K out of the stock market with the Dow at 11,400 and into fixed returns at 4%. In July, I predicted oil at $75 and gas at $2.75 by year end. I missed on the upside, but that’s closer than anything that I read back then. I am now going to take of the 401K funds and put them in the equivalent of fish hooks, .22 shells, beans, and bandaids.

So how did we come to this? I blame it on Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture 40 or 50 years ago. At least he was the front man for the idiots who decided to remake the US society in a thoroughly stupid way. Details in another post. More recently we can thank a bunch of corrupt politicians of both major parties, a bunch of brilliant bankers who figured out how to manufacture imaginary money from straw, and a bunch of overeducated idiots from prestigious universities who decided that an “information economy” was the wave of the future. Well guess what Corky, regardless of how smart you are and how much information you have, somebody has got to raise some cabbage, mine some coal, and make some stuff if we are going to live as other than animals.

In spite of all the potential misery, I detect little real concern in the folks that I interact with on a daily basis. I keep thinking of a scene from the movie “Titanic”. After the ship has hit the iceberg and everybody is milling around trying to figure out what’s the deal, the captain calls the engineer who designed the ship to the bridge. They lay out a blueprint of the ship and various people point out where the damage is and where water is coming in. The engineer does some mental calculations and starts talking about sinking speed. Captain breaks in and says “Are you saying the ship could sink?” Engineer replies, “No, I’m saying that it WILL sink in approximately 6 hours.”

I feel like that engineer about now. Only good news is that I’ve been wrong about a lot more stuff than I’ve been right about in my checkered life. Never-the-less, I will clean the old .22 and make mental inventory of the rabbit population this winter. And remind myself once again that whatever happens in the confused world of human activity the grass will still grow, chickens still cackle, water run downhill, and beans still sprout. This too shall pass.

Mud and stuff

2008-06-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

Here for your amusement is a picture of the large mud hole that formed just north of my mail box this spring. Please note that the dog is using all four feet to avoid being trapped in it.

The soil here in this part of northwest Missouri is pretty sticky when it forms mud, which it does at the slightest excuse. The road in front of my house first had gravel applied about 1955, when I was 9 years old. Previous to that time the road was raw dirt and the Frazier family simply stayed home for a while after rains fell and when the ground thawed in the winter. Even 4 wheel drive vehicles were soon brought to a stop as the mud stuck to and rolled up on the tires. Our rural mail carrier drove a military surplus Jeep of the type made famous during WWII and he tried to make the rounds as often as possible. Somewhere I have a picture of it sitting in the mud in front of our house. My mother took the picture after the Jeep suffered a broken axle due to mud rolling on the wheels and jamming inside the wheel wells.

In the early 1950’s a politician by the name of King sponsored a piece of legislation that allocated money to improve and spread gravel on a bunch of rural roads. These roads of course were called “King bill roads”, and it was big deal if one was going to be built past your farm. The original road came through the middle of the farmstead directly in front of the old house where Tickfest is held. It then proceeded down the hill, over the branch where the footbridge is currently located, then back east and south to the present road. The King bill road was built in the present location, a great blessing to our chickens as they didn’t wander that far from the house and thus suffered much lower mortality due to passing cars. It also eliminated one source of idle amusement for my brother and me. The road ditch south of our house was washed out deep enough that we could hide in it and throw dirt clods at passing cars without being seen. Overall, it was a great improvement.

A gravel road here in NW Missouri is a triumph of faith over nature, at least when it remains passable. Crushed rock is spread over the dirt, but a combination of rain and the passage of tires soon embed it in the underlying clay. More rock is then added and over time the road surface assumes a sort of uneasy equilibrium with a high enough rock content near the surface to resist the penetration of a tire under the normal weight of a car. Summer rains run off quickly and don’t do much damage. Winter moisture is another story, particularly when the surface thaws and absorbs water while the underlying dirt remains frozen to block any subsoil water from soaking down. Once the surface layer gets soft enough to allow the rock to be moved around by passing tires, all hell breaks loose and your car will sink nearly to that well known warm and unpopular location. When this happens, it is said by the locals that the “bottom went out” of the road. In truth the top is what goes out, the bottom is still there somewhere, but maybe quite a distance down.

That happened a lot this last winter, as it was a good deal colder and wetter than has been the norm lately. The south route remained barely passable, but a major mudhole formed just north of our drive. It perhaps was not the mother of all mudholes, but was at least the aunt of a couple. At least two 4 wheelers came to a dead stop in it before the local drivers learned not to trifle with it and found another way home. After a month or so the road dried enough for the township board to send out a couple of loads of large rock and return the road to passability. Tickfest attendees will note the location as they pass over about 40 yards of road that is rough enough to jar teeth and wreak havoc with front-end alignment. (Your car, not you.)

Last winter was another nail in the coffin of my faith in the whole global warming paradigm. I don’t have a researched opinion on the matter. I have on a couple of occasions in my life set about to reach an informed opinion on some topic or another, and it is quite an exercise in any slightly complex situation. I expect that I would have to work full time for 6 months to study a reasonably portion of the relevant information to form such an opinion on man-made climate change. I don’t care enough to invest that much effort in this case. I will state that my common sense opinion is that the theory is being advanced and promoted by a bunch of fools, liars, and scam artists. If anybody wants to discuss it further, feel free. I could very well be wrong.

Meantime, we got birds in the yard. The hummingbird feeder is quite busy these days. A pair of wrens has successfully raised and evicted a nest full of wrenlets, cleaned out the house and are starting over. The feeder and wren house are within 8 feet of where I sit to drink coffee in the morning.

I am seeing a lot more kinds of birds than I did a few years ago. I suppose I should get a book and keep track like the bird freaks do. Seems like a lot of trouble to find the book and look up every strange bird that stops for a minute or two. Besides I almost prefer to just think to myself, “Now that’s one weird-ass bird”, rather than knowing what to call all of them.

A pair of barn swallows started one of the mud and wattle nests on top of a 100 watt spotlight bulb at the other end of the porch a few days ago. I didn’t know what to do, as I sort of wanted to see them do their thing, but I was afraid that the bulb would cook eggs and maybe bird if it came on. It’s on a motion detector and the dogs set it off a lot. I tried to unscrew the bulb enough to prevent that, but couldn’t do that and keep the nest on top. Finally just decided to turn the light off until the birds got done, so we now have a swallow nest about 1 foot from the downstairs door. We need smarter birds.

48 acres and not a mule in sight

2008-01-15T19:49:00.000-08:00

To quote a scrap of doggerel remembered from my youth:

Spring has sprung
Fall has fell
Winter has come
It’s cold as hell.

I’ve often heard that term, cold as hell, which makes me question the general understanding of the concept of hell. But that is a different topic. It’s not been unusually cold here this winter in a historical context, just a normal December with a fair amount of ice and snow. Low temperature was about 5 below. The first winter after I returned to the farm, 1984-85, was the coldest I remember with at least one low of –22 Deg. F. If hell were indeed cold, that would be how cold it would be.

Winter is progressing nicely, I am keeping up with the woodstove, burning almost all hedge wood. I’ve got a few more years worth of wood still on the ground from the ‘04 storm and the hedge will last until I get to it. The power was off here during the ice storms, but never more than a half day. We didn’t suffer at all, but every time that happens I resolve to make better preparations for the next one. We seldom lose power out here in the sticks, mostly because the power companies have sense enough to trim the trees near the lines. Rather I should say that the rural residents have sense enough to let them do the cutting. There are a lot of power lines running smack through the middle of trees in most towns. I assume that is because city dwellers are reluctant to allow any trimming of the only tree on their lot. To briefly channel the Byrds;

For every outage.
(Trim, trim, trim)
There is a reason
(Trim, trim, trim)

I kind of like winter long as it doesn’t get so cold I can’t go out without my face hurting. The sky is spectacular when the air gets cold and still and the moon is higher in the sky than in summer. A full moon over snow is better than a milkshake (such a stupid comparison that I am going to leave it in.) One of my favorite sunsets is a clear evening with snow when the western sky has an orange rim fading to deep blue overhead and the black skeletons of trees are outlined against the last light. That sight on a cold evening when I am walking to the house from cutting wood ranks right up there with pumpkins in the corn.

The whole wood heating thing, in addition to the favorable economics, is a set of rituals have been part of my life from childhood except for a few years in the central heated ghetto of Hutchinson, KS. There is a deep satisfaction in getting the wood and stacking it in a safe place, knowing that it will keep me warm and comfortable, a payment in kind that transcends the cash economy. The fire itself becomes like a migratory house pet, something that must be fed, watched, and cleaned up after daily. The temperature in the house moves to some degree in unison with the outside and puts the dwellers in direct touch with the hard edge of reality. All this stuff is worth more to me than all the cash money that can be printed and piled up, but I know I will forever be a freak in that respect.

Still, time moves in a hurry and spring will soon be re-sprung. I got my 20 x 20 hand garden spaded, ashed, and mulched with leaves before the cold hit. I am going to cover half of it with a hoop house made of PVC pipe and 6 mil. Plastic, so should be planting something not much after Feb. 15.

As I think I have previously noted, our family did a division of the ancestral farm such that I now actually own 48 acres as opposed to owning 2 acres and holding arguing rights to 140 more. For a number of reasons, I have been contemplating what level of productivity I would like to reach with that 48 acres. I have no doubt that that much land in a temperate climate such as north Missouri could provide several people with food, shelter, clothing, and enough spare change for at least minimal self actualization. (Maybe self-actualization comes later on the list, if so, apologies to Maslow or whatever the hell his name was.) It would require a good amount of work, a minimization of needs, and maybe a little patch of weed out in the brush. (Just kidding about the weed, you ATF folks can go back to scanning email from the Muslims. (I wish I didn’t make so many parenthetical comments.))

Deciding what to do with the 48 acres sort of ties in with preparing for power outages. I sometimes think about the possibility of our society going completely in the crapper to a degree that would put us all back in some sort of survival mode. It has happened to almost every such society throughout history, including several in the last 100 years. There have been a vast array of predicted catastrophes over the last 40 years or so, a couple of which were instrumental in my move to the farm. In the late 70’s there were very sincere promises of the following:

1. Total depletion of petroleum and natural gas. I remember one article written by a respected academic of the time who stated that gasoline would be nearly gone before the cars currently on the road were wore out.
2. A major worldwide depression brought on by massive inflation of the currency as the government desperately tried to keep up with deficit spending.
3. A rapidly approaching ice age, as industrial pollution entered the atmosphere and reduced the incidence of solar energy at the surface of the earth.
4. Worldwide famine and massive starvation extending to all the major industrial nations.

I was younger and more gullible in those days, and I believed a certain amount of all this. Thus I decided to move my family to the farm, build an earth-sheltered house, start gardening and farming, and in general hunker down for the coming catastrophe. Of course none of it happened, at least not yet, and we are two or three decades downstream from the predicted dates. The folks who made all those dire predictions are still at it and astonishingly, are still being listened to by several people.

There are those on the other side of the discussion who think that we have reached a level of sophistication and knowledge that will prevent our civilization from ever suffering any sort of disintegration. There are also folks who are waiting for little green men to descend to earth and take them up to the mother ship. I say to all the predictors and waiters in a loud clear voice “Bull Hockey.” Nobody knows what is going to happen, and I strongly suspect that the worst problems that we will face are those that we do not remotely anticipate at present. Anything that anybody is talking about can probably be planned for and dealt with.

So what could cause a real deal societal catastrophe which would put us all in survival mode and leave the streets strewn with corpses?

Anything that took out a significant portion of the electrical power grid could likely do it. Wiping out a major portion of the gasoline supply certainly would. Our society is completely dependent on the machines for food, water, heat, medical care, and everything else that keeps us alive on a daily basis. If the lights went off, water quit coming out of the faucet, and food couldn’t be delivered to the grocery store, people would be fighting to the death for those items in a couple of days, maybe less. I suppose that is would be possible for a relatively small, dedicated group of suicidal attackers to knock out enough power generation and gasoline refining capacity to bring about such an outcome. Potatoes in the cellar would be a very good thing to have in that case.

Thus I sometimes fret that I am in a position to be able to prepare for various catastrophi, but I’ve done no such thing. I’d feel really bad if the worst came to pass and some of my starving friends came crawling to the door and I had to tell them that I just live here on a farm, I got no food either, so let’s ‘rassel and see which of us gets to cannibalize the other. Add that to the fact that I would consider it good clean fun to actually have a working farm in place here. I really ought to do a little more about it.

So that’s the thought train that is running through my mind these days as the sunsets get a bit later. I will continue in a future posting.

Punkin's in the corn

2007-10-04T13:10:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture of some pumpkins in my garden. Sometimes I plant corn and pumpkins for the sole purpose of producing this image. I like it as well as anything I ever get to look at.

Clifftop addendum and other festivals

2007-10-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

Clifftop addendum; John Henry and Mike Jones:

As previously mentioned, I didn’t make it to where John Henry fell dead. I set out to go there one morning, but didn’t get past Thurmond. This was once a thriving community on the C&O line between Hinton and Huntington. It was the location of one of the C&O locomotive maintenance shops and thus was a center of a lot of railroad activity as well as a lot of other business, legitimate and otherwise. It is mentioned in the old song about Billy Richardson, whose locomotive passed through here before he leaned out the window and knocked most of his brains out when he struck a mail crane at Scarey. I asked several people where Scarey was located, but no one knew. It must have disappeared years ago.

Thurmond however is still there, barely. There are 3 or 4 occupied houses, the shells of 3 business buildings, and the old C&O depot which has been converted to a museum. I got there about 9:15 only to discover that the depot didn’t open until 10:00. The depot and the town were deserted except for a guy sitting in an old pickup truck. He was black, maybe 30 years old, had an impressive set of dreadlocks and a very cool West Virginia accent. Said he worked for the state, was a musician, name was Mike Jones, did a little rapping, maybe I had heard of him. I chuckled at what was obviously a joke but had to google Mike Jones before I understood it, I don’t get out much in the hip-hop world. He was waiting at the depot to talk to the guy who was going to open it up at 10.

I asked about some of the local stuff including where Scary was located which he of course didn’t know. He did tell me about Pietown which used to be near Thurmond. It was a community of black railroad workers noted for the pies that the women made and sold to C&O passengers and train crews. He also decided to unlock the depot and show me around. Eventually, the talk turned to the location of the Big Bend tunnel and the infamous John Henry incident. He asked me if I thought John Henry was a real person.

I began to reply with my best academic information about the inconclusive research done in the 1930’s, but it soon became apparent that he was baiting me. He gave me to know in no uncertain terms that the story was true and cited a substantial amount of documented evidence to that effect. Turns out that he was not only a musician, but also involved in a group of historical re-enactors that did a recreation of the whole steam drill race as part of their repertoire. As he stated it, he was just doing his part to keep the old history from being crowded out by the new.

I decided to throw caution to the winds and told him there was no option at this point except that I get my banjo out of the car and sing John Henry for him. Which I did, sitting on the bench in front of the Thurmond depot. Mike got into it in a big way, started doing a little flatfoot shuffle and swinging an imaginary hammer over his shoulder. Said he hadn’t heard anything like that in a long time. I was a bit amazed and told him so, as I had to assume that there were 100,000 hillbillies with banjoes in West Virginia and that they sang John Henry every day of their lives. Not true, he replied, it wouldn’t be hard to find 100,000 hillbillies, but they spend their time cooking meth, don’t play banjoes, and never heard of John Henry.

By now it was time to head out to Clifftop to avoid missing the days activities. A carload of tourists had arrived and it was time of open the museum officially anyway. I went away somewhat disillusioned about the state of West Virginia’s hillbillies, but much gratified to have met at least one kindred spirit.

Missouri Valley; Ancient Age and dancing with a washboard:

Several years ago, back when the Missouri Valley festival was held at Avoca, IA and the Wilders band was in a larval stage of development, they and I met a banjo player who shall forever be known as Ancient Age (henceforth to be designated as AA to distinguish him from the liquid death of the same name).

My recollection of the incident was that on a late night stroll, we encountered a jam session which included a quite competent 3 finger banjo player who had a large bottle of Ancient Age brand fire water close at hand. He offered the flask for public consumption, asking if anyone wanted a pull. One of us, who shall remain nameless, did. (Not me) After the party in question swallowed a reasonable quantity of fluid and lowered the bottle, AA’s comment was, and I quote “That ain’t no pull.” The unfortunate wanna-be-puller was then forced to save face by re-hoisting the offending container and gulping down a volume of whiskey which was damn sure by anybody’s standard “a pull”. We than continued the campground tour with one of the party walking a more random path than the others.

About 30 minutes later our pseudo-Brownian motion brought us back past the same jam. The formerly competent banjo player and intelligent conversationalist had in that brief span of time degenerated into a babbling incompetent who could not even hold the banjo for more than a few seconds. Playing was out of the question. We observed then and I think agree to this day that we had never seen a faster and more complete crash and burn due to demon rum.

The only reason that I recount this episode is the fact that I again ran across AA in a jam session this summer at Missouri Valley. At an appropriate break, I introduced myself again and asked if he remembered the night in question. He did in fact, and agreed with my assessment of his rapid fall from grace. There were some mitigating factors which I cannot immediately recall, but the outcome was exactly as I remembered it. It’s good to sometimes confirm some of the stories that have survived for a few years just to see if they actually happened.

I spent a good deal of time at MO Valley with the Recycled band from Red Oak, Iowa. With guitar, mandolin, bass, and washboard, they play a lot of old time jug band and country blues tunes, many of them at a pretty fast tempo. They are fun to watch and to jam with.

I had decided early on to enter the old time dance contest, but was a little undecided about music. The contest rules state that each contestant must provide a band, a rule which later turned out to be totally ignored. I of course had no way to know that in advance. The idea slowly incubated in my fevered mind that would be sort of cool to dance with just the washboard to provide rhythm. Chuck Kleuver is a great player, is in the Recycled band, and I’ve known him for many years. With some coercion, he agreed to do it.

There were only 5 dance contestants, 4 of whom were conventional cloggers. Now anybody who is in the know realizes that clogging is not in fact old time dancing. It was developed in the 1970’s from the old time mountain styles and features silly costumes with short skirts and multiple petticoats, high kicks, and all sorts of things that real deal hillbillies would have laughed and hooted at. I briefly considered protesting on that technicality, but that would have required a degree of seriousness that sane people to not assume at a Bob Everhart festival.

Anyway, I was the last dancer, shooed the band off the stage, and brought up the washboard player. We did our thing. The crowd loved it, but I sensed a mood of icy disapproval from the judges chairs. I assume that they were the grandparents of the cloggers. I got last place which I thought was pretty cool under the circumstances. I will do it again next year if I am foolish enough to go back, which I will probably be.

Winfield:

You know, I can’t think of anything to say about Winfield. It was about the same as last year except with a few different people, I did about the same stuff, I liked it a lot, I will do it again next year, that’s about it.

Nebraska Bluegrass Festival:

I’m going Friday only. Got new overalls for the occasion.

Clifftop '07, Part 1

2007-08-19T21:15:00.001-07:00

“Early Monday morning on that east bound train
Goin’ where John Henry fell dead
Folks goin’ where John Henry fell dead.”
Dave Macon

Clifftop, West Virginia is about 20 miles as the crow flies from where John Henry fell dead, more like 40 miles as the flatlander drives. After 10 years of finding reasons not to go there, I found none and went this year. Good decision.

I left early Monday and made a couple of business stops along the way, finally got to Clifftop Tuesday afternoon. We drove the back roads from Charleston just to look at stuff. Lots of stuff to look at, mostly rocks and trees in a vertical configuration. A lot of the back roads in that area consist of a single paved lane down the center and a gravel shoulder on each side that is wide enough (sometimes) to allow 2 cars to meet. Since visibility is often limited to a hundred feet or so, it makes for a lot of quick darting to the side. The folks over there also have a tendency to build houses and such within 3 feet of the road. This adds even more interest to the required darting. Flat ground is at a premium and they don’t waste any of it.

I went to Clifftop to dance, starting with a workshop Wednesday morning. Charlie Burton was the lead instructor and he is a great old time dancer. There were a lot of others who came by for one or two days to demonstrate steps and ideas, including Ira Bernstein, Mike Seeger, Phil Jamison, and 6 or 8 other outstanding dancers some of whom I had heard of and some that I had not. The workshops averaged 2 hours per day for four days, and that’s plenty when the temperature is close to 90 with a fair amount of humidity. Dry shirts became a premium commodity in short order.

In addition to the workshops, there were dancing jams. The wooden porch of the main camp lodge was a prime location and featured some long sessions with 5 or 6 musicians and a rotating group of dancers. 3 or 4 dancers at a time would go on the porch and dance until they had enough. Somebody else would then step up and take a turn. There were also a couple of other jamming groups that had plywood dancing boards set up in their camps and there was seldom a shortage of participants.

Dancing is a totally different thing than playing or singing at a festival. I didn’t find a single individual that I know the whole weekend. In that situation, it would have been very hard to do much playing or singing, as its very hard among strangers to find people who want to play with you, play the material you want to play, and do it at a skill level that will make it enjoyable for all concerned. Not so with dancing. If you can keep the rhythm, match the tempo, and do a few interesting steps, you will be welcome to dance anywhere. At least that was true at Clifftop.

I will have to say that the music was wonderful all over the campground. This is truly Mecca for oldtime, the place was crawling with fiddlers and banjo players. I did play a bit, particularly with a guy that I met who was from Wichita and relatively new to oldtime. In all, I met three people from Kansas and one from Missouri. Also a couple from Arkansas if that counts.

This is a contest and jam festival. Banjo and fiddle on Thursday, progressive old time bands (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean) on Friday, dancers and real deal oldtime bands on Saturday. Preliminaries in the afternoon, finals in the evening. The only bands that played were the ones for the dances and the two winners from last year’s contests. Square dances every night and a few workshops and showcases by individual performers.

A lot of people and bands enter the contests. There is a fair range of ability levels, not just hotshots. There seems to be a very relaxed atmosphere about the whole thing, not the gunslinger mentality that you tend to see at the Winfield contests for example. I decided to do the flatfoot contest even though I knew that I wasn’t going to do any serious damage. They had two age groups for kids 15 or so total entries, adults which probably had 40 contestants, and over 60 with about 12 people.

The dance judges held a special workshop to explain the rules, which was pretty cool. Not too complicated:
1. Dance in time with the music. No brainer.
2. Keep your feet close to the floor. Jumping and kicking are OK with clogging, but flatfooting is just what the name implies.
3. Move around and do a variety of steps.
4. Look at the audience and act like you’re enjoying the whole thing.

I of course was 60 on the day of the contest so was entered with the old folks. This somehow seemed like cheating. I understand that dancing is a physical activity and that physical capacity diminishes with age. When I used to run distance races I always welcomed the turn of a 5-year age span in order to move into a theoretically slower group of competitors. Still, we all ran the same race and I had the opportunity to beat anyone out there regardless of age. This was going to be a separate contest, sort of like being confined to a dancing ghetto of the lame and halt. All this went through my mind in spite of the fact that I knew I would not be able to win any division of this contest.

Once I resigned myself to the fact that it was too late to lie about my age, I began to assess my chances. I had seen one old guy that I had no chance against, he was one of the best dancers at the festival. I didn’t really see any other folks in that age range that were impressive in a contest sense. My biggest weakness was lack of experience and a limited repertoire of steps. My greatest asset was that judges often screw up the results of contests and I might get a better score than I deserved.

I showed up backstage at the appointed time. The younger contestants were first, so I had time to evaluate the situation. Total dancing time was no more than 45 seconds. The band played the same song for everybody, 1 measure of potatoes, two A parts, two B parts, and a shave and haircut ending. Tempo was fast, not an all out breakdown, but faster than a normal dance speed. The judges said that you could ask for a slower tempo if you wanted, but nobody was going to do that. You might as well wear a shirt with “I am a wuss” written on it. 3 judges sat on the stage right beside the dance surface, which was 8 feet square.

Once I decide to do something like this, I am competitive enough to want to maximize my chances. Thus, I sought out a place out of sight, but where I could hear the contest band and began to try to work out something that I could do. It’s good that I did. The tempo was fast enough that there was no time to think after starting, and the first dozen times through I made a mess of it. After 15 or 20 repetitions, I had a sequence of steps that might work. I went back to the stage, waited my turn, and did it with reasonable success.

I heaved a sigh of relief and sat down in the audience to await results. About 5 minutes after the contest, the announcer called for Dale Frazier and somebody else to come back stage to do another dance to break a tie. Somewhat amazed, I want there and found that I was tied for third with a little old lady who wore tap shoes and danced the Charleston. This further puzzled and confused me as I couldn’t figure out what the Charleston had to do with flatfooting. I was also frantically trying to decide what to dance, as I didn’t want to do the same sequence as before, although in retrospect that is exactly what I should have done. Who was going to remember? To make short work of this story, I never did figure out what to do and mostly did a two step shuffle in one place and finished fourth, out of the money and glory.

By now I was physically and mentally exhausted, so watched part of the band finals and went to bed. Got up Sunday and drove about 950 miles to get home and that is that.

Well, not quite. I made some side trips that will rate a short addendum, but not right now.

Tickfest '07 and cetera

2007-07-26T16:05:00.000-07:00

Tickfest was good. Not so many people this year for a variety of reasons. No shocking incidents or amazing happenings, just the usual low-key pretty good time. I’ve been slow in writing a summary, because I can’t actually think of much to write about. Only a couple of things stand out in my mind, one of which was the fact that Phil’s ticktarp finally split down the middle when a gust of wind hit it, another institution bites the dust. LVJ went on stage with a guitar and sang a song, allegedly for the first time ever, and it came out pretty good. Bill Rexroad forgot his cannon and had to go to the microphone and say “Bang” to start the festivities. What a letdown. Jeff Brown’s Claytonmobile wouldn’t start when he got ready to leave, but it would have been remarkable if it had. Once again, the Burr of Knowledge was not found. Far as I know, nobody even looked this year.

The music was as good or better than ever. Several new bands were formed as usual at Tickfest. I was in a couple of them, but can’t remember the names right now.

I noticed a fair amount of Codgertalk creeping into the camp discussions. “What year was that when (whoever) sang that freaky duet with (whoever). And (somebody else) was playing the electric (random instrument)? Wasn’t that ’97?” “Nah, that was in ’03 ‘cause that was the year that (anonymous) got so drunk and fell in the fire pit.” I suppose all that discussion will eventually degenerate to endless repetitions of “Whad-ja say sonny?” if we all live to get much older.

Not that it’s a bad thing. As the old song says “Good memories are what we’re living for.”

I observed two unusual examples of natural phenomena during the weekend. Friday night about 1 AM I, along with a two or three other festers, saw the brightest and most spectacular meteorite of my life. It passed almost all the way from the eastern to western horizon’s, took at least 4 or 5 seconds to do it, and was amazingly bright the whole time. It could have been the spirit of the Great Tick arriving at last after all these years for all I know.

The second occurred on Monday afternoon. Jeff Brown and I were sitting on the porch south of my house waiting for a shower to pass when a very localized blast of straight line wind came out of the north. It lasted for about 20 seconds and was strong enough to break limbs out of the large Sycamore tree in my yard. It only seemed to hit the one tree. Again, it could have been the spirit of the Great Tick leaving in disgust after seeing that not all that much was happening here.

I probably missed most of the good stuff, so if anybody knows of any, feel free to fill me in. I’m leaving Monday to go to Clifftop finally after threatening to go for each of the last 10 years. Will report on that in good time.

As a postscript to my June post, my knee is steadily improving and I can sort of dance. I plan to try quite a bit at Clifftop, so may have to UPS my knee home early.

June '07

2007-06-10T18:36:00.000-07:00

The garden is a struggle this year, a few more bugs, worms than usual, late cold weather, floods, rabbits and groundhogs and who knows what else. Some stuff will grow, some won’t, I’ll be happy either way. So far about 80 to 90 of LVJ’s cabbage plants look very good, the rest fell along the way. I’m not going to do another big garden until I have a rabbit and deer repellent fence and a flock of chickens to clear out the weed seed and bugs over the winter, plus probably a garden dog to discourage attempts to breech the perimeter.

I have managed to keep ahead of the mowing around the tick grounds, but not much else done. I’ve got to do some re-plumbing and stuff , probably get a start on that next week. Lot’s of work related travel lately. In the last month I’ve been to Hot Springs, Amarillo, Iowa City, Chicago, and Oklahoma City, still got another Chicago trip and one to Aberdeen SD in the next two weeks. Hard to find time to pick a tune or hoe the corn. I’m gonna quit this crap in a couple of years and start looting out the Social Security trust fund before you 40 and 50 something folks get there and want your share.

Looking forward big time to a week off for Tickfest. Otherwise, I got nothing to say, so will spare any readers and not say it.

Might as well, can't dance...

2007-04-10T17:03:00.000-07:00

That was the cool guy standard response to any suggested activity back when I was a pimpled adolescent trying to fit in with the high school crowd. I may re-adopt it because it looks like I really can’t at least without a knee replacement. I did some fairly aggressive flat-footing at the Nebraska bluegrass festival last October, tore a bit of cartilage in my left knee, and finally had to have a small operation to get it to quit hurting. I thought it was completely healed, so tried to do bit of dancing a couple of weeks ago. Right on schedule, it swelled up and started hurting again. Not only can’t dance, I can’t run or ride a bike either.

They’ve got some pretty impressive replacement knee and hip joints available now, so I suppose someday I might get one of those. For now, I can walk OK so am not going to spend that kind of money just so I can hop around on stage from time to time. Also, I’ve heard that the replacement joints tend to attract lightning strikes.

To avoid involuntary obesity, I bought an exercise machine. It’s a German hand forged double bit axe. Cost me $109.00 with shipping, not too bad for an exercise machine, pretty expensive for an axe. But it’s a very fine axe. I of course had an axe, an old Tru-temper with a new handle that would likely have cut anything that the new one will. I am prone to occasionally splurge on a tool of the very best quality available for several reasons. One is that if I give $109 for an axe, I will keep it sharp, store it properly, and not abuse it by using it for a sledgehammer or something. I won’t leave it out somewhere and lose it. I will not loan it to anybody without a lecture on its cost and value that will almost certainly intimidate the potential borrower into changing their mind and buying their own damn axe. And finally, there is simply great pleasure to be had in using a tool and knowing that it is the best available.

The first day I used it, I kept hearing a peculiar ringing tone that took a few minutes for me to understand. Finally figured out that it was the axe head. Any time that it strikes wood and does not imbed itself, it rings with a beautiful clear tone and the sound will sustain for a few seconds. I’ve never heard a tool do that before. I tried my old axe and it makes only a dull metallic thud. This sheds a new light on the old song lyric about a hammer that "rings like silver and shines like gold", or on John Henry’s claim that "Nobodies hammer in this tunnel rings like mine." I think I can safely say that nobodies axe in Daviess County rings like mine.

Getting back to the point of all this, chopping wood is one of the few things that I can do using my upper body only and still get a decent aerobic workout. It used to be common as part of the training regimen for boxers, at least it was always shown in those old low budget boxing movies that had a series of spinning newspaper headlines describing a sequence of massacres by the up and coming young future champ. I could swim, but a pool would cost a lot more than an axe and there aren’t any within reasonable driving distance from where I live in the woods. Besides that, I can only swim enough to get out of the water and since the water around here tends to not be very wide, that’s not very far.

I of course cut and burn a lot of wood to heat my house and the shop in Gallatin. It is a way to generate heat with very little cash expense, it is carbon neutral according to the global warming scolds, it makes productive use of the brushy growth that would make the place a jungle if not controlled, and it provides good exercise even with a chain saw. Some wise person once said that the secret of success in life is to never be doing just one thing at a time.

I sold my gasoline powered wood splitter years ago, I prefer to split wood with a maul. It enhances the exercise aspect of the job, plus it’s fun to do. Wood splitting is a very interesting combination of art and science. It requires evaluating a piece of wood for grain structure, placement of knots, pre-existing splits and a half dozen other factors that will determine where the most likely splitting plane is. You also have to know about the nature of the particular species of wood. Ash, White Oak, Hackberry and Walnut split easily through the middle of the trunk. Sycamore is harder and requires that flakes be taken off the outside. Pin Oak usually has so many small internal knots that it is very hard to split. Honey locust and hedge are medium tough, but will split with multiple strikes. You have to have enough faith to hit it repeatedly even if not visible split has formed. All wood splits better if struck on the bottom end of the stick, unless there is a knot in a low position in which case a split started at the top will often work through the knot. Frozen wood splits easier than warm. Elm will not split at all under any circumstance until it is partially rotted. That’s not a big deal, since Dutch Elm Disease has killed almost all the Elm big enough to need splitting anyway.

Bottom line is I can split most wood with a maul almost as fast as with a splitter, although I can’t work as long without a break. Eliminating the hassle of keeping the splitter running makes up the difference and I have no plans to get another one unless I become completely infirm.

I am considering buying a good one-man crosscut saw and exploring the possibility that I could cut enough wood to heat the house and shop without any power tools whatever. It would be year round project and might be exactly what I need to maintain some semblance of physical condition without totally wrecking my knee.

I have reached tentative agreement with fellow anachronism Jeff Brown to start on a log cabin this summer. We have discussed the idea of doing that project using only primitive hand tools. After reminding myself of the amount of work required to simply cut down and limb a medium sized tree, I have my doubts. The idea of doing that with 50 to 75 trees, then hewing the logs flat on two sides and chopping the notches required for stacking is pretty overwhelming. I am astonished that people were able to go into a howling wilderness centuries ago with only a few hand tools and make shelters, clear garden spots, and produce enough food to survive.

In closing, I have to mention Bud Dunham. He lived in Pattonsburg many years ago where he had a metal building maybe 75 feet long by 24 wide. It was completely packed with an amazing array of antiques, junk, and just weird stuff. After he had accumulated a critical mass of material, he began to call it a museum and this inspired folks around town to donate things to him to display. I can’t remember if he charged admission or not. I was only inside the place once or twice that I can recall. The one thing that I have always remembered seeing there was a boot with the front portion from about the arch forward almost completely severed. It had belonged to a local resident who was wearing it when he accidentally chopped his own foot off. We are but pale shadows of the giants who went before us.

Come to think of it, maybe that guy was the first to say "Might as well, can’t dance".

The Piling of the Brush

2007-02-17T19:20:00.000-08:00

I built a brushpile today, or at least made a good start. It’s not going to be a shabby little worthless brushpile either, it will be a thriving wildlife community in a couple of years. I started it with 3 pieces of honey locust trunk, about 8 inches diameter by 5 feet long. That will keep the whole thing from sinking completely to the ground as the brush rots and keep some passages open under the structure. Most of the body of the pile will be hedge, which means it will last for decades. There is a red cedar tree at one end which will prosper in the coming years since the taller trees have been wiped out. That will make for good bird cover when the winter winds blow and the lower branches will touch the ground providing the same bit of cover for ground dwellers. At the other end, about 30 feet away is a hedge tree that has been cut ground level and is sprouting back. That tree will be a thorny mess in a few years and will provide secure nesting for anything that wants to use it.

I will digress briefly to praise the wonderful Hedge tree, also known as the Osage Orange, or Bois-de-Arc (literally, “wood of the bow” I think, and pronounced Bow-Dark by the distinctly non-French hillbillies around here.) I am cleaning up tornado debris, which is 2/3 Hedge in the approximately 1 acre area directly in front of my house. Hedge is sometimes used for exactly what the name implies, and with a bit of pruning to encourage lateral sprouting, it will become an impassable fence in a few years. It makes the best possible fence posts, as it will easily last 75 years in the ground, 3 times as long as a standard preservative treated post. As firewood, it burns clean and hot with little or no creosote release and ash buildup. It is far better than oak or hickory in my estimation. The green seed balls repel all sorts of bugs if you put a few in your basement. Only problem is that it has vicious thorns, not nearly as long as honey locust, but more of them. I’ve learned not to mess with a hedge tree without very heavy gloves, helmet with face screen, and Kevlar chainsaw chaps. My ongoing project will be to cut up the trees blown down to clean up the mess, build brushpiles, get firewood for house and shop, and accumulate fence posts for my eventual goat pasture. No hurry, since the Hedge will not rot for decades.

Anyway, back to the pile. I’ve been building brush piles since I was helping my dad at the age of 10 or 12 years. A slowly rotting brush pile is an incubator for all kinds of bugs and worms. Mice, rats, and shrews gather and eat the bugs and worms, snakes, possums, and weasels eat all the preceding, rabbits and groundhogs will burrow and nest under the pile, then foxes, coyotes, and bobcats will skulk around and try to catch and eat all the above. I will eat the occasional rabbit, but will decline the rest of the menu unless times get a lot harder than they are now.

The virtue of brushpile construction was drummed into my skull several times in the course of my primary and secondary education, usually as part of the hunting safety courses that used to be a standard part of 4-H, Boy Scouts, FFA, and high school. This often involved, (gasp), “guns in school”. For what it’s worth, most of the guys at that time also carried a knife that was sharp enough to shave with. Oddly, we did not slaughter each other. People weren’t any smarter back then, but they had more sense. (Old codger moment executed. Please excuse.)

In addition to being instructed in how to use a rifle or shotgun without killing anybody, we were taught how to maintain habitat so there would be something to hunt. That involved leaving some crop residue in the field, leaving some brushy cover, building ponds, and of course the ubiquitous brush pile whenever possible. Wildlife will exist without any human input whatsoever, but not to the degree that a lot of people might think. Particularly in an intensively farmed area, there may be little suitable habitat for any wildlife larger than a mouse. Even in the total absence of humans, many natural landscapes do not support a great variety of animals. A mature pine forest for example is very sterile compared to a well managed farm.

I also try to leave some brush lying on the ground during the cold part of winter. Rabbits and mice are hard pressed to find anything to eat right now, and it is surprising how much bark they will remove from the upper part of a tree if is on the ground within reach. The bark near the ground is thick, course, and I assume not very palatable, as would have to be the case if a tree is going to survive. A medium sized honey locust top will be nearly stripped of all bark up to a foot from the ground within a few days.

It will no doubt surprise and dismay those who have bought into the Disney/PETA model of nature, but there is a lot of suffering and death going on in the woods right now. When the temperature gets cold and snow covers up the food, the whole survival of the fittest thing plays out in a big way. Those who are not the fittest are currently in process of dying of starvation, freezing, or being eaten alive by starving and freezing predators. Almost all those rabbits that were playing on the lawn last summer are either dead or dying, and those who are fated to survive are suffering greatly. Wild animals do not die in hospital beds surrounded by friends and family, listening to soft music. Keep that in mind the next time your friendly neighborhood vegetarian starts to lecture you on the morality of eating the little beasts.

It means nothing in the great scheme of things, but the survival rates will be a bit higher at the Tick Ranch. I’ve gone through about 150 lbs. of sunflower seed, cut a good number of locust sprouts to the ground, and piled up a bunch of brush. Next year, I hope to get some small grain plots in the cleared areas. In return, I expect to eat a few rabbits and quail and a couple of deer. Apologies to the animal lovers, but I will take them more seriously when I see some of them building a brush pile.

For what it’s worth the short-legged semi-beagle dog has been named Charlie, and has been a great help in my woods work. He goes with me in the worst of weather, and he stands and watches with the best of them. I am confident that if I should suffer a horrible chain saw accident, he would be a great comfort as I bled to death.

And finally, a guinea update. All five flew up into a tree about 30 feet from the ground 3 nights ago and refused to come down and go into the coop. It was about 5 below that night, and the next morning all 5 were still in the tree squawking from time to time. Next night, cousin Jeff got a ladder and climbed up high enough to snag one and put it in the coop, but the other four spent another night in the tree. I think they all came down today and went in the coop tonight. We have much to learn from these mysterious birds, if only we can figure out what the hell it is.

Road Trip/Side Trip -with musical accompaniment

2007-01-27T17:36:00.000-08:00

I made a big ol’ solo road trip this week, left 6 AM Tuesday, back 10 PM Thursday, 1545 miles, 2 meaningful business stops, one semi-meaningful, and a little messin’ around. Since it was just me, decided to listen to some stuff, so I left with the early Monroe Brothers box set, 13 individual CD’s including Clark Kessenger, 10 assorted early country blues classics, one Ruby’s Begonia, and one other which I can’t remember.

Tuesday was devoted to getting to Greenville, Mississippi. Stopped in St. Louis to have lunch with my brother Dean, he bought since I was traveling, we had a decent talk, and as usual parted with both of us feeling slightly glad that we are not the other one. (He more than me.) I didn’t get into my CD’s until south of St. Louis and I started off with Kokomo Arnold. It was fun, but didn’t listen to all 30 tracks on the double CD. Country blues is of course a tightly defined genre and you don’t expect a lot of variation, but I am probably safe in saying that old Kokomo only actually had one song. It is a tribute to his ingenuity that he managed to get it recorded 30 times. I finished out the drive to Memphis with Ruby’s Begonia, jazz-grass and swing, a still active band. Again, didn’t finish the CD, good but not spell-binding. Memphis to Greenville is about 2 hours, so tried some Ma Rainey and Memphis Minnie for that leg. Most of the Rainey recordings had some very hot horn players on them which was worthwhile, but the vocals were buried in the mix to the point of being meaningless, so not much there. Ma’s real name was Gertrude for those who care, she took the "Ma" moniker when she married a performer who called himself "Pa" Rainey. I didn’t know that. Minnie was better, but frankly none of those old female blues singers keep my attention for very long.

Got a skanky motel in Greenville and finished Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I sort of like the opening paragraph of this book,although some will find it cliché ridden. A strong cliché always beats a weak originality. I will reproduce it for those of you who slept through your college literature classes.

" Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing."

Wednesday morning took care of the primary reason for the trip, which was to deliver a rebuilt medical air compressor to Greenwood Leflore Hospital, help install it, and haul the old one away for rebuild or salvage. This task, which could have been done in 4 hours by a reasonably active and agile person, was accomplished in that length of time by seven maintenance guys with suggestions from me. They wanted to help, so I assumed my aged and infirm persona, acted is if I could barely walk and could lift nothing and let them have at it. I drove away at 11:15 with everyone’s good wishes.

Greenwood Mississippi is at the eastern side of the Mississippi delta and is significant in music history as the location of the juke joint where Robert Johnson was poisoned. With a little time on my hands, I decided to stop at the country history museum about a block from the hospital. Pretty interesting plus I saw a flyer for the Greenwood Blues Museum, devoted primarily to the aforementioned Mr. Johnson. I sought out this edifice, and found it on the third floor of a downtown building at the top of a long metal outside stair, formerly a fire escape.
It was a well done small museum, maybe 20 x 100 feet in size, with a lot of interesting stuff if you are interested in that sort of stuff. There was a picture of the RJ’s gravestone, a nice new one erected a couple of decades ago. It’s not actually on his grave, as nobody can figure out where they buried him, but they are pretty sure it’s in the right cemetery. I found it mildly ironic that the town where the man was killed and buried in an unmarked grave now finds that he is their primary claim to any sort of fame. I bought a double CD set of all his recordings plus 12 alternate takes and headed back down the stairs.

For reasons which escape me now, I did not visit Robert Johnson’s grave, maybe because he may not be buried there.

Now properly fortified with the correct music, I determined to spend the rest of the afternoon driving up Highway 49, across the delta, through Tutwiler, up to Clarksdale at the intersection of 49 and 61, which is where everybody that played any delta blues was from at one time or another or claimed to be. And that is just what I did, another white boy wannbe’ musician driving past the cotton fields and farm shacks, marveling at Johnson’s virtuosity, at one with Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, and 10,000 others who in truth can’t come much closer to doing what he could do than I can.

At Clarksdale, I spent an hour at the official Delta Blues Museum, another very cool place with much to gawk at. Didn’t buy anything there, although I was tempted by a Charlie Patton t-shirt. Finally decided against it because it had his picture on it plus his name under it. If you have to have the name written under a picture of Charlie Patton, I don’t want you to start a conversation with me and thus the shirt would draw the wrong crowd. Thus, I passed. Drove across the Mississippi River and into Arkansas, through Helena, home of the radio station that carried the original King Biscuit blues hour and home of the current King Biscuit blues festival which I am going to go to someday.

By the time I got to Hot Springs I had listened to all 41 Johnson tracks twice. Everybody needs to do that at 2 to 3 year intervals.

Thursday morning I did a bit of work at the Hot Springs hospital, then headed north. Went through a Big Joe Turner CD which didn’t do much for me, then a Jimmy Yancey one that did. Yancey was a wonderful blues/boogie woogie pianist and I liked it a bunch. Then I put in a Big Boy Crudup and it was so much fun that I stayed with that all the way to Kansas City. Double CD, 40 cuts, just fun music. About half of them sound a lot like "That’s All Right Mama", but again, I have the greatest respect for a man who can sell the same song 20 times.

My last stop was in Springdale Arkansas to see a man about a vacuum pump, and damned if he didn’t have a King Biscuit Blues Festival poster on his wall. Thus, we had something to talk about besides pumps.

December miscellaneous

2006-12-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

1. I got a bum knee. I can walk but not run or dance. This is not good. I am gaining weight at roughly one pound per hour and if I don’t get it fixed I may never move again. The witch doctor thinks it is torn cartilage, will go in Friday to make a plan. Damn.

2. Full moon tonight, or technically tomorrow. Very impressive at moonrise, but it always is. People who can’t or don’t look up at night are seriously missing the boat. Quite a few years ago I was running on the sand roads in central Kansas about sunset. Going east, about 5 miles out and ready to turn around when I noticed the moon starting to come up. It was full and I was in the middle of one of those Kansas flat spots where the sky seems to reach the ground about 500 miles away. Decided to go a little further to watch the moonrise. Once it cleared the horizon and was fully visible, just sitting on the eastern rim of the world, looking bigger than I have ever seen the moon look, I turned around. There on the western horizon, was the sun, blood red, also sitting on the rim ready to start to set. I just about fell into the road ditch. I suppose you had to be there to understand, but I was so stunned at the spectacle that I will never forget it.

3. We got guineas around here. Cousin Jeff bought 20 of the wretched things and 5 survived to be adults. He is gone for a few days, so I have been feeding them, turning them out in the morning and shutting them up at night. They are ugly as sin, make an incredibly bad noise, and dart around as if they are insane. The chickens walk out of the coop in the morning with some dignity. The guineas jump out and take to the air to fly 30 or 40 feet, squawking as loud as they can manage, which is damned loud. I like them quite a lot.

4. To goat or not to goat? I have been fighting an obsession with goats lately, fanaticizing about fixing some fences and getting some goats. They seem about as ugly and irritating as guineas, so I don’t know what it’s all about. There is a goat auction next Saturday down by Chillicothe. I think I'm gonna go and soak up a little goat ambiance and see how it feels.

5. We got another gift from nature in the form of a short-legged dog. Looks like he is mostly of the Beagle persuasion. I guess he is going to stay. Unless some of you all are very lonely and need a faithful dog companion. Also another cat skulking around the place. People who dump animals should die, go to hell, and be beaten with a board all the way there.

6. It’s cold. It’s winter and supposed to be. Switched over to burning Hedge to get a little more heat out of the old stove. I think the long fire is officially burning now. Supposedly, that’s what some bunch of Indians called it when they started a fire and planned to keep it burning until spring. Tell me again why global warming is bad?

7. Speaking of that, I’m not excited about it. Back in the early 70’s, I got really excited about global cooling, which was attributed to the same things now causing global warming. In many cases, the very same people were hyping it. Excuse me if I’m a little harder to convince this time. Yeah, it gets cooler sometimes and warmer sometimes, but common sense tells me that given the scale of the planet and the scale of human activity, the latter is unlikely to cool or heat the former very much.

8. I am however much amused that the alleged foremost authority on the science of climatology (however you spell it) is a guy who flunked out of divinity school. (Naming no names, but his initials are Al Gore)

9. OK, I’ll shut up now. Not sure where all that came from.

Winfield 06

2006-09-20T20:49:00.000-07:00

I decided to go down to Winfield on Tuesday this year to get a little down time before the weekend. I negotiated a spot in vendor camping as part of my MC deal, so I didn’t have to do the whole land rush insanity. Got there about 3 PM. I spend the evening saying hello and visiting with a variety of folks. Spend a couple of hours at Rick Bentley’s camp, from Tulsa. Rick won the banjo contest back in the 80’s sometime, and he is the best banjo player at Winfield the years that Trishka or Fleck don’t show up. He is also borderline insane, which makes for a pleasant couple of hours of conversation. Also checked in with the Chicken Train folks, and went by Stage 7 to see who was there. Sadly, Frat Camp was non-existant this year. Wandered a while and turned in early. Still feeling washed out from a cold I picked up at the Missouri Valley festival Labor Day weekend. Mary, my festival widow, also had a cold and she spent a lot of the weekend reading in the trailer.

Decided at the last minute to sign up for a 4 hour mandolin workshop with Bruce Graybill on Wednesday. I figured I didn’t have to learn much to be worth $30. Found out I’m not really doing much wrong in the way of technique, so I guess I just need to practice once in a while. Big letdown, I was hoping for a magic insight. Spent the evening with more visiting. Laughed my rear nearly off listening to the two dudes from swamp country down in Lousiana. Got to see Betse set up her tent, that’s always a scene I look forward to every year. Actually, she has gotten pretty good at it, so no big incidents to report. In years past it has involved the Winfield fire dept. Went to bed before 1 AM for the second night in a row.

Thursday was a 6 hour work day, including an afternoon session MC’ing the main stage. Phil drove the brown clown in right on schedule, and the rest of the band materialized in that mysterious fashion in which bands do. Introduced the afternoon Wilders show in a totally responsible manner. Got to see small Gretel doing her baby walk around backstage. (Actually she walks about as well as her dad does sometimes). Did my guest slot in the evening, 3 songs, no catastrophes, much fun. This was three of the only 8 songs that I actually played and sang at any time at the festival this year.

Also, tried out my flatfooting for the first time in front of actual people, not counting tickfest. A review was once written about a dancing pig act and it said in essence, “The remarkable thing about the dancing pig is not how well the pig dances, but the fact that the pig dances at all.” That pretty much sums up my situation at present. Strangely, the crowd responded in such a favorable manner that I decided to quit my job and dance full time from here on out. Or at least try it again. Betty, Norm, and Vieta came by after the show and were surprisingly polite about my performance.

Met Nick, the young dancer with the David Munnelly band. He is very much into traditional dance and music, from Michigan, learning clawhammer banjo. Showed me a couple of steps that he thought I might have sense enough to understand, nothing fancy. He is the friendliest guy you will ever meet, he called out “Hi, Dale” every time he got within 50 feet of me the rest of the weekend. Third night early to bed. Damn, I must be maturing.

Friday was another 6 hour work day, 5 of it with Andrea Springer who was in a band with me in the 80’s. Got to catch up on all the lowdown in Hutchinson, KS, my former home and had a generally good time. She was married for a time to the crazy English banjo player that I sometimes quote. Used my Leatherman tool to clip strings for Steve Kaufman and Pat Flynn, but did not seem to be able to play any better for it. Found Sam, Greg, Amy, Sarah, and Murph from KC early in the evening. Spent a couple of hours guiding LVJ in the camp and showing him around. Due to my bad directions, he got to Winfield, then drove east almost to Joplin, MO before turning around and heading back. We got to LaLa land, found Peggy and Rick. Then, in one of these remarkable coincidences, Galen Jeter from Iowa walked by. Galen and I have been fellow revelers up at Avoca and Missouri Valley for many years, but it was his first time at Winfield. Spent an hour or so with him, he provided lubrication, and I gave him a tour of the bowels of hell down in the south Pecan grove. Galen is the sort that appreciates such things.

Shortly after that I played two more of my eight songs for the weekend. I was carrying the banjo past a group of people sitting in front of a row of Porta-Johns. They asked for a song, said they were guarding the johns and it was getting boring. I really appreciate people who do that sort of thing, so I played Hot Corn, Cold corn for them. They asked for another one, so I did another then headed to Chicken Train to sing in the can. Unfortunately I was too late, the can had been put away. So I sang the songs that I would have sang, three of them. General consensus seemed to be that it was just as well that I got there too late to record, although everybody was too polite to actually say that. By that time, I couldn’t remember what I sang, so put the banjo away. Attended the Wilders 3 AM show, participated slightly, all that has been reported by others. Hit the sack at 5 AM, my only late night.

Got up late Saturday, worked the main stage 4 hours. Used the Leatherman to disassemble and repair an accordion. Temperature got up to near 100, the wind blew about 50 MPH, dust, dirt, trash, trailers, anvils, all sorts of stuff blew across the stage, but everybody managed to play their sets anyway. I can’t remember what I did Saturday night for various reasons, other than a bike ride with Phil and Kim and more visiting. Pretty strung out and tired by then. Normally spend early Saturday night apologizing for all my asinine acts and statements so nobody goes home mad, but only had a few things to deal with this time. Hope I didn’t miss any offendees. Declined Sarah’s offer to climb trees, maybe next year. Saw Betse go on stage with David Munnelly and crew, but it was at 11:52 and I had 8 minutes to get a shower or sleep with a half inch coat of dust, so bailed out and washed. Also missed Splitlip Rayfield on stage 5 due to hygenic obsession. Early to bed, quickly to sleep, woke briefly to thunder, lightning, and rain, decided to hell with it and went back to sleep.

Got up Sunday to a cold north wind, worked stage 1 again for three hours until 1 PM. Loaned my coat to various freezing performers and workers. Wilders came up for their set, Ike was freaked out because he had a suit custom made for Conway Twitty. Couldn’t get much out of him except “Hello Darlin’.” Told him I had Conway’s skull in my private collection but he ignored me. Danced one more time, hitched up the Airstream and went home. Got there about 9 PM, happy to be home, a little grief stricken that it was all over for another year.

For a long time, Winfield has marked the turn of the year for me, more so than Jan. 1. It comes at the end of summer and when I get home I always have a whole new set of priorities, like cutting wood for the winter. Summer stuff is done and gone for another half year or longer. I also often leave with a sense of time and opportunity wasted as I realize how little I have accomplished in the last 12 months and all the things I wish I had done and didn’t. Not so much this time. I learned enough flatfooting to call myself an old time dancer in the last 12 months, and that is going to be a calling for a while if my lower extremities hold up. First new skill since I took up clawhammer banjo after seeing the Freight Hoppers for the first time a few years ago. I think it’s going to be a very good 12 months before I roll back into the fairgrounds next year.

Apologies to all who amused, entertained, and nourished me and whom I didn’t mention. Having a hard time catching up after a week gone and my mind is a little confused. Also, am going to bed instead of editing this. Any mis-spellings shall be permanent.

Tickfest '06 after action report

2006-07-26T13:09:00.000-07:00

We decided to combine the 60th and the 9th tick festivals this year and call it the 69th. (For those who don’t know, tick festivals are not done in numerical order. We did the last one three or four years ago, then did the first one a couple of years after that. We are now trying to catch up and get the others done. It’s a relativity thing.) By all accounts, it was a good one.

The usual suspects and workaholics showed up Thursday to make final preparations. Jeff Brown drove the Claytonmobile down from Chicago again to everyone’s amazement, and as far as I know he has now driven it back. Forgot to ask how many miles it has on it, but I suppose close to a million by now.

A good number of folks showed up for the Friday night film festival. Features included:
- A documentary about Jessco White, an insane tap dancing hillbilly Elvis impersonator from Kentucky or some such place
- Vintage footage of an early Wilders practice which raised questions about how they got any gigs.
- Vintage footage of an early Santa Rosa String Band performance which confirmed why they never got any gigs.
- Educatonal films about the dangers of drugs for teenagers and dirty books for all ages
- A home move of Don Carrick and Mike Murphy doing a Blues Brothers bit that left all speechless
- A Trouble in Mind feature done by a TV station back before they matured and became cynical

After the films, most of the Recycled band from Red Oak Iowa took to the stage and played with such persistance and determination that some gritters joined them and provided melodious and lullibic entertainment for those who went to bed before 3 AM.

A bunch more people arrived late Friday and Saturday. The usual 20 or so Rural Grit regulars were there (in various combinations, the represent about 65 performing bands.) Bill Rexroad again arrived with cannon in tow and effectively got everyones attention when needed. The Iowa folks arrived bringing a good deal of garden produce to cook, a few chickens, and a healthy attitude. The Eilts brothers and friends came in and showed good taste and judgement by camping 100 yards east of everyone else. Chris Rexroad led? a small but dedicated contingent from KU. All Wilders except Ike who has now missed 2 tickfests. If he doesn’t show up next year, he will be declared tickdead and his organs harvested to feed other parasites. (Well, maybe not his organs, but at least his polyester suits.) A few of my family came in long enough to confirm their suspicions about my judgement and sanity before leaving. And a few others, some of whom I see regularly, some of whom I hadn’t seen for several years.

The afternoon music was made up of 5 and 15 minute slots in which a lot of folks did their favorite solo stuff, tried out new original material, or tried to do stuff that they maybe had not totally mastered. High point for me was Phil and Betse doing a duet while confused about which instruments they can play. Evening was a good mix of real bands, pseudo-bands and not bands at all doing a whole bunch of good music. Trouble in Mind did a great set, these are the guys who started it all, and without them there would be no Rural Grit or tickfest. At one point, three guys wearing nothing but ski masks and fresh air ran past the stage. A paint ball sniper will be on duty next year to punish any repeat performance.

I enjoyed a bike ride Saturday morning until Kim Wade revealed her sadistic side by setting a killing pace on the return leg. Also a good talk about the Burr of Knowledge with KC Stanton, the greatest living authority on the subject. We still believe that someday, the Burr will sprout and mature in time for a tickfest. KC filled me in on two of the false burrs, Aaron and Under the Saddle.

I did not engage in a foolish adolescent stunt to celebrate my 60th birthday, as my whole life to date has been such a stunt and anything I might do seems redundant.

So there you have it. I’m sure a lot of others did really cool, fun stuff while I wasn’t around, but you can’t be everywhere.

Tickfest '06

2006-07-16T17:17:00.000-07:00

OK, here's the official Tickfest '06 exchange site. Anybody who wants to comment, ask questions, or complain about it have at it.

Next weekend, July 21 and 22. I don't know who is coming or what they will do when they get here, but somebody likely will show up and do something.

Hotter than hell right now, and looks like it will be for the next 3 to 4 days. However, long range forecast calls for temps in the 80's daytime, 60's at night on Friday and Saturday. Maybe an amazing third consecutive cool Tickfest.

Directions from KC:
North on I-35 10 miles past Cameron to exit 64.
Turn West, left, and go about 4 miles to an intersection. State road EE goes south there, Santa Rosa road is the gravel going north. Take the gravel road
Go about1.5 miles to Otter Road. Turn East, or right.
Go one half mile to 108th St. Cope cemetery on left. Turn North, left.
Go 1.5 miles to the Tick Ranch. Go to the second driveway. No other houses anywere around here.

If you get lost and can't figure out where you are, call one of these numbers. My office phone is 660-367-4400, my house phone is 660-367-2273. My cell phone won't work out here.

DO NOT STOP AND ASK THE NEIGHBORS WHERE THE TICK FESTIVAL IS !!!. They don't know anything about it and I'd prefer to keep it that way. Some of them will shoot you on sight, others will release dogs, and a couple will try to re-enact scenes from "Deliverance".

Water and solar shower available. Bring whatever you want to eat or drink. Nearest food/drink is 10 miles away. My long suffering wife will be preparing a mess of smoked pork for Friday night, so plan on a bit of that.

The livin' is easy

2006-07-15T18:46:00.000-07:00

The last few days have pretty well captured the essence of July-August in north Missouri. Hot and humid. I’ve been trying to soak as much up as possible instead of whining about it as usual. The air conditioner in my van went belly up toward the end of June and I haven’t had it fixed yet. Just rolling down the windows, turning up a hard rock FM station good and loud, and cruising down the road thinking about the good old days. Sweating a lot, carrying a gallon jug of water instead of a little weenie bottle. Been doing some shop work most days, and that isn’t air-conditioned either. I’ve even went for some runs in the afternoon when the temperature is still about 90 or so just to experience it and enjoy the sensation of being hot and sweat soaked, then hosing down with cold water when I get back. Life is good.

Photosynthesis is in full swing in the fields of corn, soybeans, oats, and mile. The road where I run is lined with fields. I suppose that those plants dumping water into the air keep the relative humidity along that road near 100%, even if it is a little lower officially. All those plants have unique smells this time of the year and it’s a veritable smorgasbord of olfactory delight. Of course the smell of rotting road kill and stagnant ditch water tempers the joy a bit.

The garden just didn’t happen, I am concentrating on keeping the area mowed so that nothing goes to seed. I will then fall plow it and try again next year. Work situation will be entirely different then.

I will be wearing a couple of hearing aids the next time anybody sees me, I finally gave up and ordered them. Got a pair of the high dollar solid state kind that go inside the ear. I haven’t been able to hear much with my right ear since I had a bad infection when I was about 12 years old. Machinery noise and a bit of loud music have done my left one no good over the years. I’ll still be just as loveable, I just won’t be saying “Huh” as much. I wanted to avoid getting to the point where I did the stereotypical cracked voice “Whadja say, sonny?” I also got an optional third one so I could hear what was being said behind my back, but delicate good manners prevent my revealing were I will be wearing that one.

A couple of runs

2006-07-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

I was driving down by Columbia last Thursday and had planned to stop for a run on the Katy Trail near Rocheport. I got there about 7 PM. It was hot, still near 85 Degrees and I had been driving all day with no air conditioning. Decided to run anyway, figured I could always dunk in the river if I got too hot.

The trail is a lot better than my road for running. For one thing it’s flat, no hills. Also, no loose gravel. At that location it runs along the Missouri River right next to some fairly tall rock bluffs. As most runners know, once you get past the gasping struggling stage and reach a level that allows a degree of meditation while moving, it is possible to draw a good deal of energy from certain surroundings. Running water is always a good source and the big old Missouri River is a veritable dynamo as far as the energy it broadcasts. The tall rock cliffs of course are rooted pretty deep in the earth and bring up another kind of power, and the big river bottom trees that survived the ’93 flood are also helpful. Once you learn to mentally communicate with all those things, they will help when you need it.

Not much to look to on my road. All the big trees got blown down a few years back and saplings are no help. They are like pre-teen girls, all giggles and chatter, no substance. The corn around here is so stoned on Nitrogen fertilizer that you can’t get a rational thought out of it. About the only outside help is the occasional thunderstorm, and those are very intermittent.

I have of course been slowly increasing my running pace on a half-hearted schedule, mostly just covering the miles and observing the pace. My best for 6 miles previous to last Thursday was 8:46 per mile. With all that help, I averaged 8:19 per mile and it felt better than any run since my resumption of expedited ambulation.

At the last minute, I also decided to enter a 4 mile race on July 4 in Cameron. It was at 7:30 AM which was a big turnoff, as I hate to run hard early in the day. Still, the competition induced adrenaline kicked in and I managed a 7:48 per mile pace which is the fastest that I have ran in at least 10 to 12 years. I finished ahead of almost all the women and children.

Nothing hurts very bad, so will continue the experiment.

June farm report

2006-06-19T20:23:00.000-07:00

Lightning bug update: There sure are a lot of them this year, especially around where the grass doesn't get mowed. It's good that they're free, I couldn't afford this many othewise. Strangely, very few June bugs this year. Also, the huge bunch of little blue butterflies that usually show up a couple of days after the first major influx of lightning bugs were complete no shows. I don't understand this nature stuff.

Tickfest update: The festing of the tick is 4 weeks from Saturday. The grounds are cleared out and mowed better than ever before, biggest remaining job is to rebuild the solar shower. I’m going to wait another week or so and see if anybody attacks it, otherwise I will find some material and do it myself. If anybody wants to bring a bicycle, feel free. I’ve been scouting out the back roads around here. Might lead a sunrise bike ride one morning when there is a sunrise.

Dead horse update: I finally ran 24 miles at sub 9 minute pace last week. Have had a few nagging minor injuries so have resorted to running every other week for the last 6 weeks. Thus, I got to the 24/9 mark in week 16, not week 12 as originally planned. Still as Mehitible (sp?) the cat was prone to say, wotthehell, wotthehell, wotthehell, I got there. Best part was I did it with four runs of 6 miles each, I think longer runs are better for the old body. I’m going to stick with the every other week with bicycle riding in between until absolutely nothing hurts.

Garden update: It’s a fiasco. There will be some potatoes and maybe some late corn and a few tomatoes, not much else. Cold weather, drought, and rabbits wiped most everything out and I didn’t have the time to deal with it.

10 Good Summer update: Been studying a bit about aging now that I’m getting kinda’ old and all. It appears that the human body and mind don’t really change that much between the ages of 50 and 85 or so if (big if here) you eat properly, maintain weight, and exercise maniacally. For whatever reason, not more than one person in 500 do all that. And of course you can always catch a bad break and die of some weird thing. Right now I feel lucky so I think I will plan for 35 or 40 good summers.

Life: Is hard when you’ve got too many things that you enjoy and want to do. For several years, I’ve been trying to juggle income production, music, farm and garden, and 4 or 5 minor things. This year I’m very focused on makin’ some bucks at the expense of the other stuff. If I can stick with that for another 18 months, life will be a lot easier. Then I can raise some serious Rutabagas and learn to play a damn fiddle or something.

10 Things I've Never Done

2006-05-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

And most likely never will.

- Played golf
- Bought a boat that I couldn’t carry
- Watched a reality show (or an episode of American Idol)
- Bought a ringtone
- Got a tatoo or an intentional piercing
- Removed a dandelion, or any other weed, from my lawn
- Bought a lottery ticket
- Worn a ring or any other piece of jewelry
- Attempted to remove or add any hair to any part of my body
- Gone on a cruise

It seems that we can be defined as well by what we don’t do as by what we do. The above are the first 10 things I could think of that a lot of people do but which I most likely will never even consider. I dunno, maybe its dumb, but that’s what I’m thinking about tonight.

Evening Farm Report

2006-04-22T17:32:00.000-07:00

Dead Horse Report: 8 weeks of running now, did 17, 18, 19, and 20 miles as planned. Pace goals were 9:35 down to 9:20. Actual pace – 9:11, 9:04, 8:51, and 9:18. Once I passed the 9:00 mark, decided to relax last week as I was getting a little ragged. Still had a mild pull in my right calf Friday of this week, so will have to modify things a bit. I may go ahead and take a week off to let things heal up. Also, thinking about getting a bike for a lower impact alternative. May need to take a little longer to build back to the 30 mi/week range.

Buzzard Report: Saw a dead buzzard in the road last week, highly unusual for a buzzard to be road kill. The carcass laid around for several days, nothing seemed to be eating it. Professional courtesy among scavangers?

It’s Spring Report: Found 2 or 3 gallons of morels this week, redbuds are fully in bloom, rabbits are going nuts on the lawn, etc.

Log Cabin Report: OK, I’m going to build it with a little help from my friends. Will be about 1/8 mile from the gravel road, totally isolated. Those who make a serious contribution to the building will have dibs on hiding out there. First step will be to stake it out and build a stone foundation/fireplace/chimney. Probably next summer for that job. Will use mortar, not mud, may buy and have hauled in a dump truck load of flat limestone rather than try to gather and use the round rocks from the creekbed. Got to study fireplace construction so I can build something that will draw, heat the place, and be workable for over-the-fire traditional cooking. Advice solicited.

Current plan will be about 12 x 16 feet with an 8 x 12 sleeping loft over the front door and opposite the fireplace. Banjo pickin’ and critter watchin’ porch on front, which will face north due to the lay of the area. Alternative is south entrance which is a lot more traditional with porch on three sides including the north end which will have the best view.

Now as to construction. Will use a tractor in lieu of a mule, that’s legitimate. Chainsaw/ax debate yet to be resolved. There will have to be some rough sawn lumber used for floor, window and door frames, roof, etc, so a saw will come into play somewhere along the line. All that work will be second or maybe third year, so I am actually thinking of trying to acquire a used portable sawmill. Roof will probably be metal over wood. Shingles would be cool, but the durability and fire issues may prevail.

No electricity, maybe a cistern for washing water, other wise will just carry it in. Maybe a sandpoint and pump near the stream at the bottom of the hill.

At present, am evolving toward the idea that I am more interested in getting the thing done and being able to use it rather than doing it all in fully old time way. Not sure yet.

Seein' Bob

2006-04-18T18:31:00.000-07:00

Went to the Bob Dylan concert at the Midland Theater last night. Also Merle Haggard, but that’s not the topic at present.

I have never been inclined to go to high dollar concerts by big name performers. People sometimes approach me in a moderate state of excitement and say something like. The famous “Famous Person” is playing here next week, you oughta’ go see him.” My standard response has always been, well OK, I like “Famous Person” some, and if he wants to stop by the house and pick a few tunes, I’ll buy some beer and snacks and invite some other folks over. However, I am not interested in spending $50 or $100 on a ticket to see and hear somebody who can’t actually sing that much better than I can.

That attitude has served me well and saved me a good deal of money and time. I have managed to see live performances by a fair number of famous persons at festivals or other places where the cost was minimal, and I have seen hundreds of live shows by not so famous persons who were very good. However, a combination of circumstances combinated to cause me to go see Bob. I had to go to Kansas City anyway for some work, I have always really liked Bob Dylan, I had never been to the Midland, and I had a chance to attend with some people that I like to hang out with. So I shelled out $50 for a cheap seat and went. Caught a break and actually got to sit in a much better seat than I paid for, so that part worked well.

As to the music, I saw 2 guitar players, bass player, drummer, and a multipurpose steel and violin player, all competent, none in any way inspired or inspiring. Your standard competent to pretty good rock band. Sound level was a bit too much for the acoustics of the hall, so everything tended to get mushy as it bounced around. Mostly the only way to determine that one song had ended and another started was that the crowd stood up and screamed.

As to Bob, he stood in one place, mostly in one position, played keyboard, occasionally blew a bit of harp, and sang. His vocals were lost in the mix to the degree that if you didn’t already know the song, you could not understand a word. That seems to me to be the ultimate screw up for a guy whose claim to fame is to be the greatest lyricist of the last 40 years. The show was mildly entertaining because and only because I knew that one of those guys down there in the black coast and hats was Bob Dylan.

So why was everybody standing up and screaming? Same reason I was mildly amused, because it was Bob Dylan and when he finishes a song at a live concert, you stand up and scream. No way in hell was anything else happening there that would inspire anybody to wild applause.

So was it worth it? Yeah, it was. I had a couple of drinks and a couple of laughs before and after the show, was impressed by the venue, and “saw Bob Dylan”. Would I go again? No way.

Got to thinking today, Dylan is enough of an artist that he must realize by now that that screaming applause after every blessed song means absolutely nothing other than that he is who he is. Part of performing is the bit of disappointment when you do something that you think is pretty decent and get only polite applause. That’s what makes it so great when something really goes down well and you get some serious hoots and hollers. Seems to me that a performer would get really cynical after a few years or no meaningful feedback from a concert audience. If it were me, I would likely stay in the bus until show time than go out and do my songs with no attempt to interact with the audience, then get back on the bus and get out of town with however many thousands of dollars. Which of course is what happened near as I can tell.

Haggard’s show was a lot better for what it is worth.

Beating a dead horse

2006-03-10T20:21:00.000-08:00

(or nearly so (dead that is, not beating(multiple paranthesis alert)))

I’m gonna’ get in shape. Boastful words, spoken in jest or in vain, mistakenly, or as a downright lie at least 1000 times more often than as a sincere, well thought out statement of intent. A vow usually made with no more capability of being carried out than the oldtime song title, “Honey, all night long.” Still, I’m gonna’ get in shape.

I make the statement in public as a motivational device. There is at least a minimal chance that someone will read this and observe that I’ve failed miserably (if I do) in a few months and will seize upon the opportunity to mock and humiliate me more than my acquaintances usually do when I meet them in public.

Why bother at this late date when I’ve one foot in the grave and the other on a slick spot?

For one thing, I am simply curious about what degree of physical ability I have left at this point in my life, one of the questions to be answered as part of my 10 good summers. Back in my 30’s when I was a recreational distance runner, I could maintain a pace of 5:30 per mile for a 10K run (6.2 mi.) It’s been 20 years since I have trained in any meaningful fashion, so this will be a start from just about ground zero. It takes 3 to 5 years to train for maximum performance in a distance race, and I seriously doubt that I will want to work that hard. 90% of the results will come in 12 to 18 months, that might be a little more reasonable.

Another is that I have developed a fascination with flatfoot dancing, an interest that was strongly reinforced a few weeks ago be seeing a live performance by Ira Bernstein. Holy crap, the man can dance. I have quickly discovered that a performance quality flatfoot dance is about equal to an all out sprint of ½ mile or so. That ain’t going to happen without flagellating the old body a bit.

And finally, it just feels good and I like it. Everything is better, you can get up earlier, stay up later, do more of whatever, and to paraphrase Davy Crockett, dive deeper and come up dryer. Best reason not to do it is stupidity. (Which has been sufficient for me the last 20 years or so.)

So I’m gonna’ run. Almost all distance runners are fanatically detail oriented so I will run 4 times, 3 miles each, 10 minutes per mile or faster the first week. I will add one mile per week for 12 weeks and bring the pace down to 9 minutes over that time. I will then take 1 week off and resume by adding ½ mile per week for 12 more weeks which will bring me to 32 miles per week. Pace at that time will be 8:30. Another week off, then 12 weeks to work the pace down to 8:00 or better per mile. Thus will run 32 miles at below 8 minutes per mile the week of Nov. 12, 2006. At that point, I will take a week off and decide between maintenance at that level and preparing for some age group racing in 2007. I will be more physically fit than 98% of the US population.

The first two weeks are done, 36 weeks to go. Deal is off in the event of serious injury, death, dismemberment, capture and beheading by fundamentalist Methodists, high speed collision with a deer in the road without benefit of car, you know the possibilities. We shall see.

10 good summers

2006-03-03T20:58:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, I was sitting in a small back yard jam session with 3 or 4 other folks. I was a nice summer evening and all was fine with the world. One of the other musicians was a good friend, a little over 60 years old. He made a statement that caught my attention at the time and that has stayed with me since. He observed that he hoped to play a little more music that year than in the recent past. He finished by saying, “I’ve only got about 10 more good summers.”

I don’t know all the details but from what I was able to hear he suffered a serious nervous breakdown shortly after that and was hospitalized for some time. I’ve seen him possibly twice since then but as far as I know he doesn’t play at all any more. I guess he didn’t have any good summers left at all, at least in the context that he was using when he made the statement. I’ve often wondered if he effectively ended his musical life because of the stress of worrying that it wasn’t going to last much longer.

So here I am turning 60. In my mind, I already have. I am looking at the world and re-interpreting it through the eyes of a 60-year-old man. Maybe I’ve only got 10 good summers left.

Now I gotta’ take time out for a couple of disclaimers here. First, I have no idea if I will live until June 21 any more than anybody else does. My dad was not a fountain of wise sayings, (he was however, often a fountain of very profuse, eloquent, and incredibly diverse profanity, something for which I have always admired him) but his response to inquiries about the future was often “Hell, I ain’t promised tomorrow.” Nor am I, nor are you. Disclaimer two is that I fully expect to live a little over 100 years and I expect all the summers to be good ones.

Still, the odds shift a little more in the favor of the reaper as the years pass. The terrain gets noticeably more treacherous after 70. Not very many of my family seem to get to make it through the following decade.

60 seems like a good time to take stock and consider what things should be done during a respectable life and which ones are superfluous. 10 good summers is a manageable number. Nobody can really think in any detail about 20 years of life and nobody can possibly foresee what 20 years will bring. There is no sense of urgency, if you embark on a course of action and fail to carry through, 18 or 19 years is still plenty of time to correct your course. 10 years is different. An enterprise postponed is likely an enterprise abandoned at this point. Plus, a decade is short enough that plans can be made with reasonable hopes that the fundamental conditions of life will not be completely altered before the plans can be carried out.

Now 10 years is 10 years regardless of age. I regret that I did not internalize that fact sooner, but maybe it is impossible for the reasons above. Still, I intend to set goals and make plans with no regard to my age. I will proceed based on what I see as the inherent value of certain activities and accomplishments, just as if I had been assigned 10 more summers at age 21, 35, or 50. I suspect that 10 years of well planned effort toward well established goals would be more effective than the 60 years that I have expended to this point. Not promising that, but I can fantasize.

Thus I do not see 10 good summers as a limit or a reason to stress out and fret about a decline to dotage. I see the limit as a way to focus on getting as much reward and enjoyment as possible out of those summers and I will be giving a fair amount of thought to ways and means in the next few months. Suggestions welcome.

On being a ghost

2006-02-02T16:17:00.000-08:00

I went for a walk/jog a week or so ago, went north from the farm, a direction that I don’t usually go. I noticed that the old farmhouse just west of the Buzzard Glory church has collapsed. That was the last of the houses where people lived along this road when I was a kid.

Dean Merrigan lived there, don’t remember if he had a wife but I think he did. He moved away when I was pretty young. The only thing that I clearly remember about him was that he drove a Studebaker pickup truck. I haven’t seen one since. Later Chloe Lewis moved into that house with his wife and son, but not for very long. People tended to starve out pretty quickly in this neighborhood.

First house north where the little kit log cabin sits was occupied by Joe and Blossom Pribil and their son Kent. There was a big barn there at one time and they kept a few dairy cows. They built the pond on top of the hill south of the road and buried a pipe from the pond down to the barn so they could have running water. The pond never had any water in it since it is built smack on top of a hill. Don’t know why they thought it would. Joe bought a truckload of hogs at the Gallatin sale barn once and they all got sick and died not too long after he brought them home. They couldn’t catch a break. Kent grew up to be really weird and went to the University of Missouri when I was there.

After they left, Harold and Hazel Middleton moved in. I worked for them a little bit hauling hay and used to take them fish that I would catch with trotlines in Grindstone creek during the spring rains. Several other people lived there and finally the place was bought by a guy from Harrisonville who knocked down the house and put up the cabin. Last year a local guy bought it, but he was in a logging accident and broke a bunch of bones and now it is for sale again. Nobody seems to have much luck there.

Straight east of the farm was where George and Viola Myerdurk lived with their two sons Larry and Duane. Out behind where the house used to be is the shell of a 4 door 1938 Chevy. I remember going up there one time and the Chevy was laying on its’ side in the driveway. George was working on the underside of it. I guess he didn’t want to crawl under it so he threw a chain over the top and pulled it up on the passenger side with his tractor. Try that with your Toyota and see if you can drive it away. Duane and Larry used to come down to my house to play with my brother and I. Kent Pribil was too weird, he never went anywhere. We made a space ship out of an old Case threshing machine that used to belong to my grandfather. The straw blower tube made a hellacious cannon. It’s about a foot in diameter and 8 feet long and you can point it any direction if you have a half hour to struggle with the cables and pulleys. I heard that Duane ended up in prison, and Larry probably did too.

Second house to the south was where Duke and Doc Clapper lived, a pair of battler brothers. Duke used to hire me to haul a pickup load of coal for him from Pattonsburg about once a month during the winter. Maybe that’s why I like those black greasy fireman songs. I’m the only guy I know who has ever actually shoveled a load of coal. Duke gave me a double barrel 12 gauge shotgun that I still have, don’t remember if it was for hauling coal or not. I still have it.

There were 6 or 8 other families on this road back then, but they are all gone now. Almost all dead for a long time.

It occurred to me while walking along one time that this is what it’s like to be a ghost. I’m still here, but all the people are gone. I can see them, I can walk down their road, through their yards and through their houses, but they can’t see me or touch me. Like a ghost, I really shouldn’t be here. I should be somewhere in some suburb with other aging baby boomers, keeping the lawn trimmed, watching my 401K, woodworking in the basement, doing whatever those people do. But I’m not. I’m still here.

The road is haunted, but down the road I go.

I Yam What I Yam

2005-10-21T19:58:00.000-07:00

Dug the last of the sweet potatoes today, about 75 or 100 lbs. total. Largest single tuber weighed in at 7 lbs and that was after a mole ate maybe a pound of it. We named it Moby Yam and gave it as a door prize at Happy Hour last Monday. Overall the sweet potatoes were a roaring success. (They don’t actually roar, more of a low gurgling sound.)

Still got 3 of 8 rows of regular potatoes to dig and that will be it for this summers garden other than a few radishes. I left three or four radish plants to go to seed, they grew about 4 feet tall and seeded a large area. Those secondary radishes are tasting pretty good now. I failed at root cellar building this summer, but did finally get a good well house built and it has a pit where the potatoes, sweet and sour, can live until eaten. Cellar is job one for next summer.

Only major failure was squash, I guess the borers got them as all the plants died. I planted them same place as last year and that was likely a dumb move. I hope to get the garden disked this weekend which will put me way ahead of last year when winter is over, which will be surprisingly soon..

The garden area, previously noted as having been a hog lot for about 30 or 40 years, is astonishingly fertile and anything planted will grow. Now if I can get that harvesting and storing thing figured out, all will be well.

Attention now turns to cutting wood for the solar heater. I believe that I have perfected the low tech version of solar heat. The sun shines on trees, they grow, I cut them and burn them to harvest the stored heat. Solar panels, pipes, glass, fans, and all the other silly details are thus eliminated (and will be consigned to "Stuff that is Silly").

Upon review, this post is not what you would call very exciting stuff. I guess you can’t be excited (or exciting) all the time. For what it’s worth, there is a decent sized snake living in the above mentioned well pit. He occasionally excites some folks.

Tickfest 05, Part 1

2005-07-31T20:09:00.000-07:00

My intent was to write a big list of thank you's to everybody who supplied a moment of fun, surprise, fulfillment, or stunned amazement at Tickfest. I may yet do that, but the list is going to take a while to compose and I want to at least say something about the event. Only two regrets, one is that I went down hard and early on Friday (New lyric: Tickmeister sitting and feeling fine, along came a Turkey and said "You're Mine") and no doubt missed a bunch of good stuff, the other is that it's over.

In years past, I have marked time and the passing of years by Winfield. If these things keep getting better I'm going to make up a new calender based on the year of the Tick. If Phil's memory is correct, it all started in 1997. Since then we've had the first one, the last one, the 49th one and the 129th one. I can't recall what the other ones were. (For those who don't know, the Years of Our Tick do not occur in numerical sequence, but rather at random.)

I gotta' go to Tulsa tomorrow and work a couple of days, but will get a decent writeup done when I get back.

Dave Macon days

2005-07-13T19:59:00.000-07:00

I have gone to Dave Macon Days, returned with little damage, and am prepared to answer questions. Just in case nobody has any, will give the answers anyway.

Location was very good in a historic park in Murfreesboro with a bunch of old buildings and a decent museum. Attendance was amazingly large considering the program, probably 10,000 people over 2 days. Not much on stage. The show was 90% contests, not particularly well judged contests, and mostly a group of bout 40 or 50 people who made up just about all the entrants. Probably about 20 contests, usually with 5 to 10 entries, and I thing some folks must have been in 8 or 10 of them. Leroy Troy was the only actual professional entertainer on the program. Thus I didn’t watch much, although a lot of people did.

That’s the bad news. Good news was that I went with Jerry Spahn of Lincoln, NE who seems to be close friends with every banjo player in the world as well as most of their relatives. Thus, we spent about 4 or 5 hours in Leroy’s parents’ house checking out their incredible collection of old time music ephemera. Most of it was early Grand Old Opry stuff, with a fairly good selection from Leroy’s Hee-Haw days. Also a good inventory of Duckbill overalls, which aren’t collectible, but Leroy got a good deal on a bunch of them when a local store went out of business. You never know who will need a pair of Duckbills at an odd hour.

Then we got the tour of Goodlettsville on our way over to see Leroy’s new house. On the way, we drove by the churchyard where Grandpa Jones is buried and where his widow Ramona has taken up with the preacher, the farm where Stringbean was killed, (although you can’t see the house from the road due to the brush), and various other obscure things like that. And then we spend most of the festival hanging out in the Boswell tent, (that being Leroy’s real last name), while every ancient musician and backwoods wise man in the world came through. Charley Acuff came through, one of the guys that Jeff Brown interviewed a couple of years ago. He was getting some sort of award for playing a fiddle while living almost forever. Also, Ernie Hacker, an octogenarian (if that ain't right, you spell it) mandolin player. Several people told me that Ernie's claim to fame was that he used to play with the Bailes Brothers back in the 40's and 50's. I haven't yet googled the Bailes Brothers, so not sure how famous he really is. In summary, a load of people came by and they all played (or used to play) twice as better than I will.

I heard some amazing things and heard them at length, since getting to the point is not considered a virture amongst those folks. Most interesting thing I learned was that you can’t keep sorghum in a wooden barrel, as there isn’t enough moisture in it to keep the wood from drying out and leaking. (That's really interesting to me, I don't expect it to be interesting to very many people.) The same old codger who told me that, Jim Stafford by name, also sketched on the back of a festival schedule his method of building a mountain banjo. I will at some future time try to recreate the instructions. For now, just the first line "First, you catch a groundhog....."

In keeping with the spirit of the whole thing I also told them some stuff, some of which was true.

A fair amount of enthusiastic jamming, but it ended early since almost nobody camped there. I have no idea where all those people came from, couldn't have been more than a couple of dozen campers and about that many tents on site and there was only one parking lot in the vicinity which held maybe 200 cars. The place was packed Friday night, so we assumed that we would have to park a couple of miles away when we came back Saturday morning. I was prepared to spend up to $25 bribing somebody to get on the lot at the festival, and up to $50 to get under a pole barn right at the edge of the stage area. We rolled in about 8:30 AM, and the lot and the pole barn were empty. Then the massive crowd appeared, watched, and vaporized. By the end of the show at 11:30 PM, we drove out without a bit of delay.

Something I hadn’t seen before was a tendency to throw down a piece of plywood and have flatfoot and clog dancing right in the middle of the session, usually one person at a time. That seems like a good idea.

Overall, it was a fine thing.

Memorial Weekend 05

2005-05-29T20:42:00.000-07:00

A bunch of people showed up and we did much cleanup, mowing, gardening. Many thanks to Phil and Kim, Sam and Greg, KC, Don, Mark, Patrick and Michelle, and Murphy. Also had two of Mary's sisters and one of her daughters overnight, and of course cousin Jeff, so the farm was eat up with people most of whom did some work. Ain't nothing much cooler than when friends and family show up, except when they show up with beer and stuff, and they did that too. Damn.

Anyway, there's more stuff fixing to grow out here than you can imagine. Plans in the works for a root cellar in time for harvest, and the complete upgrading of the well and water system was started today.

The big tornado was Saturday night a year ago. We didn't have another one this year. I liked it better without one.

The first time I moved to the farm

2005-05-25T05:16:00.000-07:00

I am rapidly approaching the age at which I will be allowed to start telling repetitive and boring stories about my youth, inflicting paralyzing ennui on listeners while rambling uncontrollably about how much better things used to be and drooling into my shirt pocket. This will serve as a first installment.
My folks were married in 1945 immediately after much inconvenience due to a war of which I will say nothing, as I was not present for that event. They both spent most of their youth as residents of the infamous Pattonsburg flood plain with all the subtle pleasures that periodic inundation brings. A letter from my dad during the war contains a statement to the effect that "If I ever get home and get a farm, it damn sure won’t be in the river bottom." He thus demonstrated a level of comprehension that escaped the other residents of Pattonsburg for several decades.
I will digress briefly from my description of the current farm to point out that I was an early resident of a log cabin, a resume item which seems to have lost some luster in recent decades. It used to be a critical first step for a good "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" style success story. To be completely accurate, the dwelling was in fact a two story log house located on a farm north of Pattonsburg where my parents lived for a couple of years before acquiring the farm. To be even more accurate, I wasn’t actually born there. My mother chose to go the Bethany hospital for the big event. I accompanied her there and back.
I have only one memory of the log house, and that is of moving day. I remember standing in an empty room looking out at the bed of a logging truck onto which the contents of the house were being loaded. I recall being stunned and confused and wondering why this was happening. I suspect that the reason that memory persists is because I still encounter situations which engender identical emotions on at least a weekly basis.
The move was completed in spite of my lack of approval. This was in 1948. The family at the time consisted of me, my parents, one black dog, two or more cats, a flock of chickens, and an infant brother. This list of participants is arranged in descending order of importance according to my perspective at the time. Age and maturity have shown me that the chickens were more important than the dog and cats. Electricity was not available and the nearest gravel road was 2 miles away. Conditions were primitive but so were we. Thus, no notice was taken.
Living conditions were consistent with subsistence farming activities in this country pretty much from the post-Civil War period until the middle of the 20th century. Water was carried up the hill in buckets from a hand pump on the old well. An outhouse was located out back, baths were taken in a #2 washtub once a week or so depending on social obligations. Laundry was done with a gasoline engine driven washing machine and dried on a line. The house was heated with wood cut by axe and belt driven buzz saw and lighted with kerosene lamps. Food storage was in the cellar and in a wooden icebox. Transportation was a pre-war Ford pickup. From the time that significant rain fell until the road dried, there was no transportation. I did not wear shoes during warm weather until I started high school.
The home entertainment center consisted of a battery-powered radio. And yes, before anybody asks, I do have memories of listening to the Grand Old Opry fading in and out on Saturday night. I clearly remember only hearing Hank Snow, Bill Monroe, and an advertisement for Prince Albert tobacco. Hearing the Opry did not inspire me to make a guitar by chewing it out of a cottonwood log and become a country singer. In fact it made no impression at all. I can only attribute this to a genetic defect, which haunts me to this day and causes me to be at best a mediocre musician.
Electricity arrived about 1955 and with it a kitchen sink with hot and cold water. At that time, the wood burning kitchen range gave way to an electric stove and an enormous freezer was added. A couple of years later a large boxy Zenith TV set was acquired. That was a couple of years behind all the neighbors, so my own personal mass media induced brain cell destruction was delayed a bit. Our first night with a television set just happened to coincide with the annual broadcast of The "Wizard of Oz". My grandparents came over and bought along a large can of shoestring potatoes for the occasion. I suppose it is appropriate that the intrusion of the television set was celebrated with junk food.
Sometime in the mid-1960’s, my folks installed a telephone and an inside bathroom. By then, I was long gone.
(To be continued in spite of all protests)

Lee Harvey Oswald...

2005-05-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

was a time traveling assassin sent from the future to eliminate John Kennedy before he did great harm to the human race. He was also a shape changer who re-manifested himself as Jack Ruby in order to kill himself and return to the future. He had a critical second assignment or he would have waited to be tried and executed in order to better conceal his identity. I am not sure why a time traveler would ever have to hurry, but some things I simply cannot explain.

This was revealed to me in a dream last night, and I wanted to share.

April Update

2005-04-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

Dang, it's been a month since my last post. Guess that is mostly because of minimal news out here. KC, Don, Sarah, Kim, and Mark were out weekend before last for cleaning and mowing around the old house and tick grounds. Much thanks. Still haven't got power back into that building, but will have to get it done in the next week or so.

Big freeze here two nights ago, but minimal harm. Frostbit the potatoes, but they will resume growth. Mean frost free date here is supposed to be April 8, but I am convinced that we get frost at least two weeks later than that every year. Anyway, nothing else up that would be damaged by frost.

Planted a lot of sweet corn, peas, beets, and stuff today. Also about a half acre of field corn to provide shade for a pumpkin patch and feed the local deer herd. We have a decent tractor and machinery up and running this year, so can plant with impunity and are doing so. Harvest will be the challenge.

Morels are out. I suppose I will go out and root around in the Buckbrush a couple of hours tomorrow and find a few. Ticks are also out, so there will be a price to be paid. Anybody know if Frontline works on humans, and if so what are the side effects? Sterility, or an overpowering urge to howl at the moon? Neither of those would be of much concern to me at present.

I've been thinking about a lot of profoundly stupid thinks lately, but have been too lethargic to write them down. Stay tuned.

Couple of books

2005-03-18T20:54:00.000-08:00

I don't get to read as much as I would like and that isn't going to change because I could read 16 hours per day and it wouldn't be as much as I would like. I just finished a couple of books that made a bit of an impression.

One was a biography of Johnny Cash. Two things impressed me:

First, how quickly and easily he went from unknown to a nation wide star. Only took a couple of years and that in spite of the fact that he and his band could barely play their instruments. Seems like that happened a lot back in those times and it seems almost impossible now without some corporate entity spending millions of bucks to do it.

Second, just how sick and disabled he was for the last 5 or 6 years of his life. Nearly blind and in continuous pain, barely able to walk, he still recorded maybe his best material during that time. Amazing and inspriring. Maybe I just need to get old and crippled to do some good music.

The other was not so profound, Kinky Firedmans "Kill Two Birds and get Stoned". Decent book, made me think of "Steppenwolfe", which has always been one of my favorites. (The book, not the band.)

Tried to read a biography of Jack Kerouac, couldn't do it, totally boring, had to throw it in about 1/3 through. He wrote a lot better than he lived.

Stuff that is Silly

2005-03-03T06:32:00.000-08:00

Silliness is subjective. Here’s my current opinion.

Sunglasses:

Haven’t owned a pair for at least 30 years. The human eye has evolved (or been created, depending on your outlook) to view the world as illuminated by the sun. I see no evidence that performing that function will cause "strain", or require that the organ be protected. Some folks wear them to look cool. Nothing wrong with that, and I would, except that I refuse to spend more than about $1.75 to look cool and you can’t seem to buy sunglasses for that amount any more.

Jewelry:

I wore a high school class ring for about a year, jumped off a hay wagon one time, snagged the ring on a standard, (review the original Walking Tall movie if you don’t know what that is) and nearly pulled my finger off. Threw the ring away and have worn no rings, chains, etc. since. Couple of people have tried to put stuff around my neck in an aggressive and non-complimentary way, damned if I will do it on purpose.

Piercing:

Have been pierced enough by accident and malicious intent, will not pay to get it done.

Tattoos:

See piercing.

Shaving:

I currently shave the bottom half of my face, but it is silly. I’ve done that for less than half my life. If hair grows, let it. There are those who think they will be more sexually attractive if they scrape off most of their body hair. Not likely.

Wigs, comb-overs, hair transplants, hair re-growth medications:

C’mon, get a life. If hair don’t grow, it’s OK. Haven’t had hair on top of my head since I was about 20 years of age. Can’t think of a single situation that would have turned out significantly better if I had. (Women get half a pass on this silliness due to severe societal pressure to have hair on their heads.)

Other stuff:

Plenty of it, but that’s enough for now.

Why is there anything?

2005-02-06T20:57:00.000-08:00

That's the question that I keep coming back to. We can look at anything, such as a sow bug, the earth, the galaxy, or whatever and marvel at the complexity and wonder how it could have been created and by what mechanism. It seems to me that a much more elegent and perfect condition would be for there to be nothing at all. What need is filled by the existence of things that could not be eliminated, and therefore perfectly filled, by the existence of nothing at all. Every material thing is changing and becoming something else all the time, never seems to get to a perfected condition. A void is and will always be perfect and complete as long as it remains a void.

I can think of a thousand questions about why there is good and evil, why do we have consciousness, why is there a force of gravity, etc. All those questions seem to me to mean very little compared to the very simple one of why there is anything at all.

Essential days

2005-02-06T20:37:00.000-08:00

Essence: The quality or qualities of a thing that give it its identity.

I have for many years amused myself by trying to identify a day each month that characterizes the essence of that month. I picked out a rare double for January, don't remember the dates.

First one was an ice storm day. Grey, cold, first rain, then freezing rain, then sleet and a bit of snow. That's January all the way. Next morning, there was about an inch of new snow, bright sunshine, bitterly cold, with all the snowflakes still fully crystalline. Each flake acted as a prism to produce a tiny point of light so that the entire surface of the ground was covered with a blanket of diamonds. Actually a lot better than diamonds, just points of pure light. Those are the two facets of the essence of January. Most months have only one in my mind.

It is not permissable to simply go out and look at an essential day, you've got to spend some time immersed in it. Thus I went out and cut brush off the township road right of way for about an hour the first day (which reminds me that I've got to write something about forest regeneration and Arbor Day foolishness sometime). Also managed to jog about 5 miles each day, nearly froze my butt, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Not often that time permits such total immersion in an essential day.

I think the essence of February is a heavy snow. Might be with wind which makes it a blizzard, or without wind, which makes it a .... heavy snow, I suppose. got to be at least 6 inches, 8 or more is more valid.

Health

2005-01-16T11:37:00.000-08:00

Healthy is good. If you haven’t tried it, you ought to.

For a long time, I didn’t. For a long time before that I did. It’s sort of like the old saw about "I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better."

In my 35th year, I was a distance runner. It was a very good year for big city girls who lived up the stairs…. Sorry, got to channeling Sinatra for a minute.

All through my 30’s, I ran. I averaged 50-60 miles per week, ran races mile to marathon, ran up mountains, through deserts, through cow pastures and chicken pens, through big cities, everywhere. Sometimes up to 100 miles per week. Ran to work, ran home, ran downtown to do errands, ran everywhere. Got my weight down to 142 lbs., same as high school graduation, and was a pretty fair amateur runner. I finished races ahead of all but the elite college runners. Pretty healthy, except when I exhausted myself to the point of catching colds and things.

In 1984, I moved to the farm and took a job in outside sales. Never totally quit exercising, but it became sporadic. I sat and drove for many miles per day, ate burgers and fries, donuts, Ding Dongs, Snickers bars, etc. Gained 25 pounds, loaded up on cholesterol, and got away with it until last fall. Then in rapid succession, chest pains, sonogram, blocked arteries, and a relatively easy decision. Leave it alone and 90% chance of a fatal heart attack, cut things up and reassemble with a 1% chance of being killed in the process. I liked the 1% deal better.

So, substantial expense, massive inconvenience, some pain (not much, the hospitals are where they keep the really good dope), and a new start.

I have been convinced for years that almost all of the things that folks suffer from, heart disease, cancer, arthritis, diabetes, Alzheimers, depression, etc. etc. are either completely caused or greatly exacerbated by sitting on our butts and eating crap. And I don’t even want to talk about smoking. A whole bunch of people are getting rich dosing us with medicines and slicing us up so that we can more or less survive while continuing to sit and eat as noted. If anybody wants to disagree with that, gather your information and statistics and start writing, but I don’t think you will prevail. Of course the dosing and slicing are expensive, so then we have to wail and gnash our teeth about the cost of "health care" and how we will pay for it, and how those who waste their money on the crap that causes their sickness are going to pay for it. What passes for modern "health care" is mostly the medical profession feverishly trying to keep alive people who are feverishly trying to kill themselves.

That's not a blanket statement. Of course people are sometimes afflicted with things over which they have no control, and of course people have accidents. I suppose at least 10% of sickness is not self caused.

I have known intellectually for most of my adult life that I was mostly in control of my own health. Paying attention and behaving accordingly is where the trick comes in. There’s nothing quite like having your chest cut open and the contents re-arranged to drive home a point, so I’m now paying attention and having reasonable success in changing my actions.

It’s really not all that hard to drink water only with a bit of coffee, alcohol once a week or so, eat mostly fruits and vegetables with an occasional egg white or bit of meat, and put stuff back on the shelf if the list of contents shows its soaked in fat. It doesn’t make that much difference what food tastes like anyway once you are finished eating and not hungry any more. Think of it as fuel and building material. There are plenty of decent foods that taste good anyway, and you can always find a trick or two. KC Masterpiece barbecue sauce has 0 fat and it’s amazing how good it makes a big pile of steamed broccoli and cauliflower taste.

Also, it’s not that hard to do something that will make you sweat for 30 minutes a day. (I can foresee some totally disgusting responses to that one, spare me please.) I’ve finally gotten back to being able to run and am now up to 25 miles per week.

So I’ve lost 20 pounds since my operation, feeling good, and fully expecting to continue to do so for another 30 or 40, or until I die or am maimed by accident or killed by biological terrorism or something. (No reason to get overly optimistic here.)

Which brings me to the point. I am not writing this to indulge in the irritating gloating of the recently converted. I am hoping that anyone who reads it will take a bit of it to heart and do a few things to reduce self-inflicted damage to whatever is left of your physical machinery. A wise human learns from the stupid mistakes of others. I just finished up making some major ones, so take advantage of the opportunity. I won’t get much enjoyment out of going to Winfield when I am 100 if you all are too sick or dead to come out and jam a bit.

Fall gardening and beyond

2005-01-05T20:28:00.000-08:00

I failed fall gardening, didn’t do the fall plowing, didn’t plant those fall potatoes that are supposed to mature before frost as I’ve been told for so many years, didn’t clean things up properly or finish all the harvesting that could have been done. Just flat wore down late in the summer, will do better this coming season, or not.

Last year was satisfactory all things considered. Had all the tomatoes, carrots, spinach, peppers, potatoes, onions, okra, eggplant, yams, cucumbers, and squash anybody could want. Also a few melons, broccoli, beans, a bit of corn, a few strawberries, a bit of misc. Groundhog ate most of the peas, but the dog ate the groundhog, so it was a wash.

Will probably use about the same amount of ground this year as last and try to be more efficient in planting and harvesting. That alone would double the harvest. Plenty of work for anyone who can tolerate the long drive to get here, and likely plenty of produce for said workers. Odds of another tornado or similar interruption two years running seem low, so should get a lot more done this year.

I’m still motivated largely by wanting to eat the best food that I can get, raising it seems the best option. I know I can go to the local grocery store and buy all that stuff, but I don’t really know what has been done to it before it gets there. I have evolved into a food fanatic, an avid reader of labels, and a semi-vegetarian health nut. (A semi-vegetarian eats no meat except road kill. Stuff run over by semis. That’s a joke. Pretty funny, huh?) The best stuff from the grocery store is pretty lame, and the stuff that people actually buy and eat is mind boggling. I’m amazed that anybody is actually alive.

Not that I am preaching or anything. I ate a lot of that debris and came pretty close to dying I suppose.

My other motivation/problem is that I am a farmer. Folks who grow up on actual working farms, of which there aren’t any left, seem to have one of two reactions.
Some recoil in horror at what they perceive as drudgery, boredom, isolation, and misery. They will go anywhere and do anything to escape, including working at what are called "jobs". I haven’t really had one of those for 20 years or so, but from what I recall it was a nasty and demeaning experience.

Others come to think that any economic activity other than farming is perverted and un-natural and will seek out any possible way to be a farmer. That often involves marrying a patient woman and sending her out to get a "job", living in poverty, or engaging in petty crime to generate actual cash income. I chose the final option, thus my activity selling air compressors. Also, I scaled the farming way down to what I can afford (read gardening) and hope to build it back up from there. (Farming isn’t my only vice, I also carry the "musician/entertainer" virus which causes those infected to engage in non-income producing activity to the dismay of all relatives. That is another topic.)

So I will soon buy seed. I still fantasize about a greenhouse, root cellar, harvest kitchen, well house, shop, orchard, chicken house, etc., etc., etc. One or more will likely materialize this summer and we shall see after that. If anyone has suggestions for the coming season, I’m all ears. Well, partly ears, actually mostly not ears, but what the hell.

Why

2005-01-05T20:11:00.000-08:00

Well, I want to write some stuff. My mind is cluttered with ideas, opinions, thoughts, memories, and fantasies that need purged and or organized. I've found that the best way to figure out what I know or think about something is to put it in writing. It is not sufficient to write it for myself, because there is no motivation to get it right or to properly express things. Knowing that someone else might read this stuff will impose a bit of discipline that would otherwise not exist. In addition, maybe somebody will tell me something that will clear up some of my confused and puzzled opinions.

Second reason, I read today that there are now about 8 million bloggers. With that many out there, I am bound to not be the dumbest SOB in the group.

Third, I have reached the age and level of experience that allows me to indulge in the fantasy that I am qualified to express opinions or give advice. That same level of age and experience allows me to understand that nobody will respect my opinions or take my advice, which removes any concern about actually knowing anything.

Another (yawn) blog

2005-01-05T20:01:00.000-08:00