Taming Wild Rivers

Food was integral to our way of life. We were producers of food. We gardened, ranched and farmed and I, the boy, milked the cow with strong streams so that the milk foamed in the bucket and ran over the side. I’d put my head into the cow’s flank to keep her stepping in the bucket or kicking me and partially avoided the scratch of pee soaked cockleburs in her tail as she swiped it back and forth over her back to scare flies. In this manner, I generally managed to milk her while occasionally squirting a stream of warm milk at the cats. In the kitchen the milk was strained through a linen cloth and set in refrigerator until the cream, being lighter, rose to the top and was skimmed off. That old cow was called “Old Reddy” and I cried when Dad hauled her off to the sale barn to be sold for rendering just as I cried when I buried my rabbit. An ignored life (even when wheezing and dying in freezing weather on its last overcast, gray day) constituted the existence of that rabbit in a hutch except for a door slam when watered and fed a few grains of maize by a preoccupied boy.

In the summer, I was responsible for watering the garden, so a hoe without a handle became my bull dozer and I built contoured roads, mammoth dams and reservoirs and diverted raging rivers down rows of corn and beans allowing the water to sink into the murky, dark swamps of the tomato and rhubarb patches.

Late in the summer and early fall, my mom and aunts canned green beans, black-eyed peas, corn and peaches when Kerr Jars were a staple and lids popped as the jars cooled and sealed the hot fruit and vegetables safely inside. Butchering in the fall after a freeze killed the flies and bugs was routine. Some calf or steer (heifers were more valuable) would be shot, its throat cut and bled out. Gutted, skinned and quartered, the beef hung and cured from the windmill, safe from coons, badgers, bobcats, coyotes, and domestic pets. Similarly, we’d go down to my father’s people near Seneca and a hog was shot, dipped in a boiling barrel of water, and the hair was scraped off before butchering the hog. In dead of winter I would be sent to dig out carrots preserved safely in the frozen ground. We were close to our food. So in the earlier depression years, when much of the country was hungry during the depression, my parents’ families were fed. They had little money for other things, but starvation was never an issue. In that country, if people dropped by, a meal was customary. To this day, my parents feel obliged to offer food in abundance to any visitor.