First Grade Memories

Do you remember the name of your first grade teacher?  I certainly do.  And over the many years since then I have never been able to diminish a deep hatred for that name.  Anytime I meet anyone who shares her last name, I find I cannot like him or her for any reason.  I know they haven’t done anything wrong to me, but the name brings back memories of being tortured for using my left hand.

I was somewhat ambidextrous as a young child, but for many activities I preferred one hand to the other.  As an adult I still prefer one hand to the other for many things.  For instance, I swing a golf club (on the two or three occasions I’ve played golf) right-handed.  I swing an ax left-handed.  I swing a bat with either hand.  I throw a ball right-handed, but I also prefer to catch a ball in a gloved right hand.  I shoot a shotgun and a pistol right-handed, but a rifle is more comfortable left-handed.  And many other things have a hand preference.

In the first grade “Mrs. Vlad the Impaler” hated left-handed people.  I mean HATED left-handed people.  I was not allowed to do anything with my left hand at any time or for any reason.  I remember picking up my lunch bag with my left hand.  She grabbed it away from me and threw it in the trash, and then slapped me across the face.  I found using a pencil was easier in my left hand than in my right hand, but each time she caught me attempting to write left-handed, she would grab a brick from a pile she kept in the corner, place my hand on a hard surface, place the brick on my hand, and hit it with a hammer until the brick broke into pieces.  Then I had to sit on my mangled left hand for the rest of the day.  My left hand still bears the scars and evidence of broken bones.

My parents questioned me about the condition of my hand, but they didn’t believe me.  When they questioned the evil queen, she said I must have injured it on the playground.  It’s always been strange to me how I must have injured my hand on the playground almost everyday during my first year in school.  The bruises on my face and body from her slaps and hits with a small club were ignored.

Outside the window of my second story classroom was a slide for use as a fire escape, and I discovered I could escape the fires of hell by jumping out the window when my teacher wasn’t looking.  The first time I tried it, I made it home (about a mile away) only to find my mother waiting for me.  “Mrs. Vlad” had called to say I had run away.  For weeks I got a belt across my backside every morning and every night for doing that; however, the belt was better than the abuse from my teacher.

The last time I jumped out the window at school another teacher “Mrs. Genghis Khan” was waiting for me at the bottom of the slide.  That day I went home from school with blood all over my face and shirt.  This time my parents were really upset, but not because of the beating I took from both the teachers, but because of the ruined shirt.  They were told I had fallen on the playground.  There must be something wrong with me, because I keep falling while playing.

I have many other reasons for my outright hatred of this teacher.  She called the police on me for being taller than my classmates.  She told them I was lying about my age, but I was the youngest person in the class.  I had to bring in my birth certificate to prove my age, as well as have my parents appear in court to prove it to the authorities.  Often she found a reason to throw my lunch in the trash.  My coat always disappeared from the coatroom in cold weather.  On one occasion she smeared dog poop on the seat of my desk and had me sit in it.

Our playground time always consisted of walking around the perimeter of the schoolyard.  There were no games or playing allowed.  (So how could I have fallen while playing?)  Walking was supposedly all the non-curricular activity a child needed, but I always had to make the walk barefooted.  The big stickers we called “goat heads” grew everywhere, and I always managed to step on a few of these things.  More than once they broke off in my feet and had to be removed by a doctor.  I was always in trouble from my parents for not wearing my shoes, but “Mrs. Vlad” would remove them from my feet (along with a couple of slaps or hits from her club) if I didn’t take them off fast enough to suit her.

Fortunately for me I survived the first grade, although I don’t know how.  My parents moved, and I was sent to live with my grandparents because their place was only about five miles from a school as opposed to the over 10 miles to a school from my parents’ new home.  It was an eight-grade four-room country school where I was able to be left-handed without consequences.  I still wrote mostly with my right hand because my right hand had had more practice with writing, and because my left hand was too deformed to hold a pencil.  But never again did I experience anything close to my first grade year.

When I was in high school I read of a teacher (name not given) in a neighboring city who was found bound and gagged with both hands smashed, and several broken bricks were nearby.  Apparently she survived, but wouldn’t tell who did it to her, or why.  I can only assume it was some left-handed former student because I am certain I wasn’t the only left-handed student she had in her classes during her many years of teaching.  No one, not even her, deserves this form of punishment, although at the same time a part of me wants to thank the person(s) who did it.

Adults Only

I never really enjoyed being a kid.  Yeah, I had a lot of kid experiences, and from a kid’s perspective, they were fun, but I never felt I belonged in a kid’s world.  The problem was, though, I didn’t know what it was like to be an adult.

I’ve mentioned before that my mother’s mother’s family was extremely large, but so also were the families of all my grandparents.  I basically lived in an adult world when I wasn’t at school.  Of course that wasn’t true all the time, but for the most part I seldom had many friends my own age.

We often visited these family members, and I could only sit and listen to the conversations.  Many were funny, many were informational (although I didn’t realize it until years later), and many were way over my head.  Whenever I asked a question, I would be told the adults were talking, so be quiet and listen.  Regardless, I usually preferred being with the adults than with any young siblings or cousins.  I just didn’t relate to most kids my own age, but most adults didn’t relate to me.

That’s not to say I didn’t have adults to interact with.  My grandparents took an active role in my life, and I learned many lessons, which have had lifelong benefits.  Such as, don’t work on anything electrical without turning it off first.  Even then, some things can retain a charge and zap you anyway.  Another was to squirt the lighter fluid onto the charcoal BEFORE lighting the match.  And a big one was to never place the thumb on top of a nail when hitting it with a hammer.  Believe me, I won’t do that again!

As a teenager, I studied just about everything I saw the adults doing.  Driving cars, doing laundry, fishing, mowing the lawn, everything.  I really wanted to be an adult.  But it took a long time before I was accepted into their world.

The change came about one Saturday afternoon when a number of relatives were gathered at the lake house my Dad’s parents owned.  In just a few yards from their house were the houses of several of my grandmother’s sister’s families, so weekend gatherings were common.  Often the main Saturday afternoon entertainment was a no limit penny-ante poker game.  I had been saving pennies for months and had a small peanut can filled to the brim.  When I asked to join in, everyone looked at my can of pennies with greed in their eyes, and, needless to say, they let me join the game.  No one, not even me, really thought I stood a chance of keeping my money.  But I just wanted to play with the adults.

So the dealing started.  For about an hour I held my own.  I won some, and I lost some, but no one was making fun of me.  The kid was doing okay.  Then it happened.  The game was 5-card draw, and I had the 10, Jack, and King of spades in my hand.  I took two cards just hoping for a couple of more spades or possible a pair or two, but I drew the Queen and Ace of spades.  I had the ultimate royal flush in my hand.  But what surprised me was that everyone else thought they had great hands. 

I just stayed up with each round of bets and raises and let others do the raising.  Basically I just faded into the background while everyone else got caught up in raising the bets.  I always just matched what came my way.  Then my aunt sitting just to my left pushed everything she had to the center of the table.  So did everyone else.  What else could I do?  Everything I had went to the center.  My aunt laid down a nine high straight flush.  Then everyone else started folding.  She cackled loud enough for the neighbors to hear, and she reached to rake in the pot, but I laid down my hand.  Everyone including Father Time froze as she looked at that royal flush.  For about fifteen seconds silence reigned supreme.  No one had thought the kid could pull this off.  Then one of my cousins drew out his wallet and asked if he could buy back some pennies. 

I made about seventeen or eighteen dollars that day.  Big money for a kid in the early ‘sixties.  But I had also been watching the adults for a long time by then, and I made certain to let them win most (but not all) of it back.

From that time forward I was always a part of the poker games.  No one tried to exclude me or tell me I would just be losing my money.  I also discovered when the adults were gathered for any reason no one tried to make me go away or shut up.  I was allowed to participate in conversations.  I was still a kid, about fourteen or fifteen at the time, but they no longer saw me as a kid.  I was now treated as an adult.  It certainly felt good.

Mule Man

I have been informed many times in my life I’m as stubborn as a mule.  Thank you.  I take that as a complement.

I like mules.  They are extremely intelligent, strong, protective, and gentle.  It’s much easier to ride a mule than a horse, and the mule is always looking to make that ride as enjoyable as possible.  A horse will try to scrape off a rider with a low hanging tree branch, while a mule will make room for you.  A pig or a snake can easily spook a horse, whereas a mule will just acknowledge its presence and continue about its business.

I grew up with mules, and I even rode one to school for most of the third grade.  I was about six or seven years old when I was braiding a bridle for the owner of the farm next to ours, and Curly came into the barn to watch me for a while.  Curly was the smallest of our four plow mules, but at over seventeen hands high, he wasn’t exactly small.  He, and Moe, Larry, and Shemp, were bred from a Mammoth Jack and Percheron crossing, so small is a bit relative.  But Curly was always the most curious of the four.

After looking over my shoulder for a few minutes, Curly walked over to the wall where an ancient McClellan saddle was hanging on a peg, grabbed it with his teeth, and dropped it beside me.  Then he knelt down and nudged the saddle a little closer to me.  I couldn’t believe it.  He was telling me he wanted to go for a ride.  He was a plow mule and had never been ridden in his life. I had him stand back up while I went in search of a saddle blanket, bridle, and anything else I might need to make this work. 

I couldn’t find much of anything I needed to take Curly out for a ride, but I did find an old piece of rug that would serve as a saddle blanket.  Trial and error finally succeeded in saddling Curly, and he knelt back down so I could climb on.  I didn’t have a bridle and reins, but I could grab onto his mane, and he knew all the plowing commands for right, left, go, and stop (Gee, Haw, Giddup, Whoa), so I thought I could make this work.

There was a learning curve for both of us.  The first time I said “Giddup,” Curly lurched forward like he was in the plow harness, and I discovered the barn floor wasn’t very soft.  But we tried again and again until we understood how the process would work for us.  It was a great summer riding Curly around whenever he wasn’t pulling the plow, but when school started, our fun was quickly curtailed and confined to the weekends. 

It took a while for me to find out just how Curly got the idea of being ridden.  After I completed the bridle for farm owner next to ours, Levi (the owner) told me Curly had spent a lot of time watching him ride his horses.  Each time he would saddle up, Curly would come over to the fence to study the process. 

School was a few miles away, and usually I walked both directions, although on occasion someone would take pity on the little kid walking along the dirt road and give him a ride.  But it was a long walk (10 miles uphill both directions and always snowing).  I left home about 5:30 each morning and usually returned about 5:30 in the evening.  Then there was the homework.

I don’t know why I didn’t notice the hitchin’ rails in front of the school until the year was almost over, but the next year, I decided to ride Curly to school one morning.  Curly wasn’t really needed until spring plowing began again, so, Why Not?  When I arrived, I tied him to the rail and went into the classroom. 

My school was a 4-room building.  Grades 1 and 2 were together.  3 and 4, 5 and 6, 7 and 8.  Two grades per room.  This was my first time in the 3^rd and 4^th grade room, and my first time with this teacher.  About two hours into the morning, she called me aside to ask about my mule.  “Does he have food and water?”  I hadn’t thought about these things.

Mrs. Stephenson (I don’t remember her name, but this one works) brought me out to her truck where she peeled a flake from a bail of hay she had.  We brought it along with Curly to the old barn in back of the school where she placed him in a stall, gave him the hay, and filled a bucket with water for his thirst.

“David, every two hours I want you to check on him.  It doesn’t matter what we are doing in class, just make sure your mule is happy.  I’ll bring a couple of hay bails tomorrow, but after that, you will need to provide something for him to eat.”

Wow.  I thought I was going to be in trouble for riding my mule to school, but it turned out everyone was jealous of me, including the teacher.  I never did need to bring food for him to eat.  Someone, and I never found out who it was, always brought hay and feed for Curly.

When my third grade ended, so did my time with Curly.  We sold the mules and bought a tractor.  My parents moved into the city and I changed schools.  My grandfather still had the farm, and I would visit on weekends and summers, but it was never the same after the mules were sold.

Snakebite

Many of the experiences of my life have been just a few moments long, and as such are difficult to put into writing.  And just as many are of moderately short duration, and are very memorable, but still are difficult to put into writing.  The problem I have in writing this one is that it was of short duration; however, it has had a lifelong effect upon me.  Looking back at it is no more fun today than it was when it occurred over fifty years ago, although I do need to face my demons and come to terms with the fact that I was bitten by a snake.

I was fourteen years old and working for a summer camp west of Fort Worth.  The weeks were filled with boys learning camping and outdoor skills that only a few would ever pursue as an adult, but that most would find useful from time to time throughout their lives.  My job was to teach the proper use of axes and knives—something I had used all my short life growing up on a farm.  Just like on the farm each work day at the camp started at 4am and ended about 10pm, so I was glad when the weekends arrived and I could have fun for a couple of days (a luxury we didn’t have on the farm).

A few weekends into this, several of the staff members decided to take a day hike to a lake a few miles away, and I joined them.  We were traveling single file down a trail when the guy behind me shouted, “David, Look Out!  That snake is about to bite you!”

I seem to recall jumping straight up, turning around with a summersault twist and landing about fifteen feet away. 

“I’m sorry, David.  I meant to say ‘That snake just bit you’.”

The snake, a copperhead, was way out of place in this part of Texas.  Much too far west of where its territory was believed to be, but there it was.  One of the guys used a long stick and tossed it over the edge of a ravine nearby while the others looked after me.

Out came the snakebite kits and rusty pocketknives.  Basically they tied a couple of strings around my leg as tourniquets, cut a hole in the calf of my right leg, applied the suction cups from the kits, and tried to carry me back to camp about eight miles away.  After falling off the stretcher made out of several shirts and some tree branches a couple of times, I decided I’d rather walk.

The closest main highway was about five miles away, so I started walking to it instead of the camp.  My leg was in pain.  It wasn’t the bite that hurt, it was the tourniquets and knife cuts that was causing the discomfort.  I fashioned a crutch from a tree branch and kept walking until we reached the highway.  There one of the guys flagged down a passing pickup truck.  When we explained to the driver the situation, he drove us to the emergency room at the small hospital in the town of Mineral Wells just a few miles away.

The doctor immediately came over to examine me.  He removed the tourniquets, and the sudden rush of blood through the leg was excruciating.  I thought I was going to die right there.  I was already getting sick from the poison in my system, but this felt like a good reason to say goodbye to the world.  He cleaned out the hole in my leg and applied some kind of goop to it.  He placed a clean bandage over it and left the room while saying he needed to check something.  The doctor returned after a few minutes and let me know there was nothing more he could do for me.

Just a few minutes ago I had wanted to die, but now I had changed my mind completely on the subject.  I stared at the doctor with eyes as big as baseballs, and my mouth open wide enough for a bird to nest in.

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to scare you.  I just meant that you’ll be fine.  The poison will make you very sick for a few days, and it will have an effect on you for a few months, but you will live.  Just change the bandage every few hours and put this ointment on the wound until it closes up in a few weeks.”

Over time the leg healed, the dizzy feelings from the poison diminished, and I resumed my normal life.  Fifty-plus years later the scar on the leg is a bit difficult to find, and I haven’t had a dizzy spell in several years, but the fear of snakes remains.  To this day I find I cannot even visit enclosed exhibits of snakes.  Lizards also worry me some.  But I still remember how to jump straight up while turning around with a summersault twist while landing about fifteen feet away.  I’ve put that move to good use on more than one occasion.  

Remember the Alamo

It was the summer of 1955, and I was almost 6 years old the first time I saw the Alamo in San Antonio.  Dad had some vacation time, so he packed up the car, and the family went for a Texas road trip.  I don’t remember much about traveling in the car, but I do remember several of the stops we made before returning home to Fort Worth.

 

The first stop was in Hillsboro (just a little south of Itasca and not too far from Carl’s Corner) where we stopped for gasoline and a Dr. Pepper.  I remember it because I wanted to know where the hills were.  For some reason I needed to know the answer to this, and I made certain to ask everyone I saw why there were no hills in Hillsboro.  Finally Dad put me back into the car and we drove down the road to West.

 

Wait a minute!  West?  It was a great stop, and I was introduced to my first kolache at a bakery where no one spoke English or Spanish, but why was the name of the town West when clearly it was South of Fort Worth?  Dad rushed me back to the car.

 

It was just about one half of an hour before we stopped again.  Mom went into a convenience store for a few minutes, and Dad, my brother James, and I walked around outside.  I couldn’t read much at that time, but I could figure out some simple words.  It didn’t take me long to figure out the name of the town—Waco.  Now Waco is pronounced with a long ‘a’ as in ‘David,’ but I was absolutely certain it was pronounced a short ‘a’ as in ‘wacko.’

 

I needed to know how and why this town got the name Wacko.  Was there something wrong with the people living there?  Or was there something wrong with the people who stopped there as we had done?  As soon as Mom came out of the store, we hit the road again.  A little fast as I remember.

 

Where was the big wooden horse in Troy?  I want to see the temple in Temple.  I can’t hear the bells in Belton.  Is everyone in Georgetown named George?  We spent the night in Round Rock, and I never did see that rock.

 

The next morning was a new day, and the things so important to me yesterday were already forgotten.  Our first stop was the Texas capitol building in Austin.  I think I was actually speechless.  I can remember the giant paintings hanging on the walls in a big room.  Sam Houston, William Barrett Travis, Stephen F. Austin, and many other heroes of Texas history were depicted there.  But as hard as I tried I couldn’t find Davy Crockett.  I was told he was on one of the paintings, and all I had to do was look, but he should have had a prominent place on the wall.  He should have been easy to find.

 

I didn’t say anything about this, but it bothered me that I couldn’t find the greatest hero in world history among the paintings on the walls of that huge building.  Didn’t they see the television show about him?  I kept my disappointment to myself, but I thought about this for years.

 

We hit the road again, but this time we turned east and drove to a market in Elgin.  There Dad bought a big bag of sausages, some Dr. Pepper, Grapette, Big Red, and orange Nehi sodas along with some ice for our cooler.  As we traveled, we munched on those sausages and drank those sodas to cool the burn, but we kept on munching.  This was my first taste of the famous Elgin ‘Hot Guts,’ and it certainly wasn’t my last.  Yes, they were hot, but to someone raised on fresh jalapeno peppers for breakfast, this wasn’t a problem, even at my young age.

 

We ended up in San Jacinto where Sam Houston and his rag-tag army defeated General Santa Ana and gave Texas its independence from Mexico.  I understood some of this, but why didn’t anyone acknowledge Davy Crockett’s contribution?  That night we were on Galveston Island and I saw my first palm trees.  But where were the monkeys and coconuts?

 

I think we spent another night there before driving up to Houston.  Somewhere in that city we stopped for lunch and I can remember that hamburger as though it was yesterday.  It had three slices of bread and two pieces of meat.  I didn’t know this could be done to a hamburger, but there it was.  Should I eat the top part or the bottom part first?  I can’t remember just how I resolved this problem, but I also don’t remember going hungry.

 

We got back on the road and that night we slept in San Antonio.  The next morning I had one the best surprises of my young life.  We went to the Alamo.

 

I couldn’t understand how the big battle took place with all the department stores just across the street, but I was assured this was where it happened.  There was as much about Davy Crockett as I could hope to find.  Coonskin caps were being sold at a small desk set up in the courtyard out front, and small plastic rifles called ‘Betsy’ were right beside those caps.  Finally someone appreciated this great hero.

 

There were a number of cannon on display nearby, and I didn’t want to leave without taking one of the cannon home with me.  Dad told me I could have one if I could get it into the car by myself, but in the end, I left it behind to safeguard Texas again if need be.

 

There are other missions in the San Antonio area and we did go to one or two of them before we drove to Brackenridge Park for a late lunch picnic.  Then we drove into the evening before we stopped in San Marcos.  The next morning we were back on the road, and Dad was in a hurry to get to some destination before it was too late.

 

By mid-morning we were a few miles to the east in Lockhart, and Dad stopped near an old brick building where he disappeared behind it for a while.  When he came back to the car he had a bunch of meat and bread wrapped up in butcher paper for us to enjoy for lunch—if we could wait that long.  The smell was wonderful, and I don’t think he drove more that a few blocks before stopping the car.  We devoured the barbeque.  As if that wasn’t enough, we were parked just a few yards away from another barbeque place.  Dad went in.

 

It was quite a few years later before I became a regular customer at those two places, and I certainly miss them now that I live in California.  The first one was Kreuz Market (now known as Smitty’s), and the second one was Black’s.  Two of the best.

 

We traveled home with a huge bag of barbeque, but by the time we drove into our driveway late that evening, the bag was empty, the sodas were gone, and James and I were asleep in the back seat.

 

I started the first grade in the fall of that year, and a few weeks into the torture process, I was asked to tell what my family had done that summer.  Like a true Texan, the only thing I could remember was the Alamo.

Hunting Dog

My friend Mike had a dog he wanted to train to hunt.  On the surface, this sounds reasonable, but when one considers Mike and I were only some 10 years on this earth, and the dog was a freebie from a bin of puppies in front of Buddie’s Hardware, one must reconsider the word ‘reasonable.’

 

Mike and I liked to think we were hunters.  We had made bows from willow sticks, bowstrings from kite string, and arrows from a pile of old bent dowel rods we found in the trash behind the hardware store.  We sharpened the dowel rods and cut notches in the other end and called them ‘arrows.’  Good enough.

 

The hunting instinct runs deep in some dogs and people.  In others, well, it just isn’t there.  Mike and I were hunter wannabees, and over time we became real hunters, but this dog had no concept of hunting anything more than his feed bowl and a place to nap.  This dog knew the difference between opening a can of dog food and a can of corned beef hash.  Essentially they look and smell the same, but the dog knew the difference by sound.  What a dog.

 

This dog had a name.  It was ‘Mutt’, and we usually called him that, but he answered only the to sound of a can opener.  He was big, shaggy (probably a sheepdog mix), and was about 3 years old when Mike decided to train him to hunt, and he had never done anything but eat and sleep.  We borrowed some books on dog training from the local library, and in a few days had fashioned Mutt a dog collar and leash from a long piece of old rope we picked up somewhere.  Neither one made Mutt very happy.

 

We took turns trying to get Mutt to ‘heel, sit, come, and stay.’  ‘Stay’ was the only command Mutt would obey, and only because he was too lazy to get up to do anything at all.  Finally Mike tied the rope to his bicycle handlebars to take Mutt for a walk.  The ride was a short one.  In fact Mutt never moved.  Mike reached the end of the rope, and the rope tightened as Mutt was still lying down.  Mutt never moved in the slightest, but the handlebars on the bike were twisted to the side, and Mike took a hard fall.  End of the first training lesson.

 

Over a few weeks, we managed to get Mutt to understand that when the rope was tied to the bicycle, it was time for a walk.  Slowly Mutt would get to his feet, and slowly he would walk behind the bike, and slowly the bike would be peddled, because if the rope grew tight, Mutt would lie down and not move until he heard the sound of a can opener.  This was working well enough until the day Mutt crossed paths with a cat.

 

It was my turn to walk Mutt.  I had learned to tie the rope to my seat post rather than my handlebars since this gave me a bit more stability if Mutt suddenly stopped.  We had gone about two houses distance down the sidewalk when a big fuzzy white cat walked in front of us.  I heard a hiss from the cat, a whimper from the dog, and the next thing I knew I was lying in someone’s yard.  I sat up to see that the cat was still where I remembered it, but Mutt and my bike were not to be seen.

 

I looked down the sidewalk and saw Mike chasing Mutt while my bicycle was bouncing along behind him as though he didn’t know it was there.  The chase ended when Mutt jumped a low fence and the bike didn’t make it over.  Mike caught up with his dog and untied the rope from his neck.  Then he picked up my bicycle and started to carry it back to me, but Mutt picked up the rope dangling from the seat and took the lead in returning my bike.  Mike and I just stared at the dog for a moment simply not believing he actually did something on his own.  Maybe something had changed.  We were going to find out.

 

The next day Mike had the honors of taking Mutt for a walk, besides, my bike needed some repair.  It was nothing serious, but the handlebars and seat were twisted, and the rear fender was smashed.  When Mike tried to tie the rope onto Mutt’s collar, Mutt growled and bared his teeth.  Wisely Mike backed off, but when he got on his bike to ride over to where I lived, Mutt followed along on his own.  Unbelievable.

 

We decided it was time for Mutt to go hunting.  When my bike was repaired enough to ride, we gathered up our bows and arrows and rode over to the field near the railroad tracks where cottontail rabbits were everywhere.  Mutt just followed along.  We rode at our normal speed, and the dog kept up with us.  When we reached the field, we dropped our bikes, grabbed our bows, and began our hunt.  Rabbits were jumping everywhere, arrows were flying everywhere, and Mutt was guarding our bikes and watching the show.

 

Mutt was right.  He didn’t need to be trained to be a hunting dog.  It was Mike and I who needed to be trained as hunters.  We gathered our arrows and tried again.  The rabbits had nothing to worry about.  Our unfletched crooked dowel rods couldn’t shoot straight under any circumstances.  I don’t remember how many times we gathered up our arrows and tried to hit a rabbit.  It must have been at least seven or eight times and could easily have been many more.  But no rabbit went home with us that day—or for several more years.

 

Mutt sat patiently as we gathered up our arrows one last time.  The ride home was hot and dusty, and when we got to Mike’s home, we sat for a while on his front lawn and cooled off with a Big Red.  Mutt found a cool drink of water and came over to join us.  Mike reached out to pet his dog, but Mutt just backed away a few feet.  When Mike told him he’d never have to go hunting again, Mutt stood up, walked over to Mike and lay down with his head in Mike’s lap.  I commented that I just might like to try it again.  Mutt’s response was a low growl, bared teeth, and a stare that made me take back my words.  That dog was a whole lot smarter than I had ever given him credit for.  What a dog.

Watermelon Run

Kids will be kids.  For me, well I was a kid, and my friends were kids.  And although we were kids, not everything was our fault.  Some things are genetic, some things are learned, some things just happened.  In every case, it started long before we were born.  At least that’s how we justified it.

I like to think it started with Marco Polo.  His insatiable desire to travel brought people in contact with far away places and gave them a yearning to visit those places.  Christopher Columbus was one of those people on whom the Marco Polo Effect was strong, but unlike Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus traveled west.  This was the catalyst that began countless travels by people of all means across the ocean between Europe and America.  Some of these people stayed in America and started the process of traveling to the west across the continent.  Needless to say, the methods of travel were rather slow, and eventually this led to the invention of trains.  (I know this is a big step forward in time, but trains are essential to this story).  Traveling by train created more desire to travel and, therefore, the need for more trains.

The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, known as the M.K.T., or just the Katy, built a small concrete dam across Fossil Creek in the early 1900’s.  It was just an impoundment to provide water for the steam locomotives traveling in and out of Fort Worth, but it quickly became a swimming hole.  I know this because my grandmother remembered swimming there when she was a child.  Forward a few years, and my friends and I discovered it.

When Rick, Ron, Mike, and I found the dam it had long since been forgotten.  To the south, about sixty yards away, the railroad tracks were still in use, but an oak woods had grown up hiding the water from view.  To the north was a cane break running a mile or so to both the east and west.  It was our private swimming hole.

The woods became our campground, and in the summers we would spend the night there two or three times.  During the hot summer days we would play in the water for hours.  We tied a rope to a big tree limb to swing out over the water and drop in just like we had seen in some movie.  We tried to make a slide out of some old sheet metal, but the rust wasn’t very slippery.  We had a great time there for several years.  Oh, and we never brought swimsuits.

It didn’t take us long to discover that the cane break was only some ten or fifteen yards deep.  We made a trail through it each year, (it grew back rather quickly), and on the far side our trail came out about ten yards from a bob-war (barbed wire) fence.  On the other side of that fence was property belonging to a watermelon farmer.  A swimming hole, big watermelons, and kids.  It was a match made in heaven.

At first we talked about taking just one watermelon.  Who was going to miss it?  Who was the watermelon farmer anyway?  And where was he?  After we returned home a lot of questions were asked and we discovered the name of the person with the title to the watermelons.  It was Farmer West!  Oh, no!  He was notorious for making life miserable for anyone found on his property, or so the rumors went.  At the same time it was said he would give anything he owned to anyone who asked.  But he lived several miles away, and who would miss one watermelon?

It was late August and hot.  The four of us decided it was time to try our hand at “borrowing” a watermelon.  We believed the justification for “borrowing” was in repayment by planting the remaining seeds.  We arrived at the swimming hole, stripped down and swam across.  On the other side we worked our way through the cane break trail and stopped in horror just as we reached the fence.  The watermelons were gone!  Every one had been harvested and were all now beyond reach.

We climbed through the fence and walked out to the lone big oak tree about fifty yards away looking everywhere for a forgotten melon, but Farmer West did not leave a single one behind.  We went back to the swimming hole where we cooled off and made our plans for next summer.

To any kid a school year is a long time, but it didn’t compare to the following summer while we were watching the watermelons grow.  School was out during the last week of May, and by June 1^st, we were at the swimming hole building a new path through the cane break.  We were ready to feast on our first watermelon that afternoon, but we discovered that the watermelons were not much bigger than softballs at this time.

The only distraction we had that summer was in family vacations and summer camps, otherwise the march of time would have been unbearable.  By the end of July all vacations and camps were over, and the first watermelons were starting to ripen.  And we were back at the swimming hole.

All four of us had a sense of adventure, and it quickly became evident that each one of us had to have our own melon.  We sat at the edge of the cane break and surveyed the farm as far as we could see in every direction looking for Farmer West, and when we determined it was safe, we climbed through the fence and each picked out a melon and snapped it free from its vine.  Back to the swimming hole we ran with our prizes.

We tossed the melons into the water and let them float and cool off as we did the same for about two hours.  Then we each broke open our melon by whacking them with some thick oak sticks, and we feasted.  Needless to say one watermelon was enough to feed all four of us, and we had considerable left over.  The remains we carried away from our swimming hole to a place we would normally not visit, and this area became our compost heap.

We had about four weeks of watermelon harvesting before Farmer West began his harvest.  But it was a great four weeks, and we weren’t tired of watermelon by the time the feast came to an end for the year.  Again we returned to school, and again we waited for the melons to grow the following summer.  And again we had a watermelon banquet.  The third year started out no differently.

We were now about twelve years old, and we could now carry away the bigger melons.  For three weeks we did just that.  The biggest and best watermelons could be found floating in the water three or four times each week, and by now there was very little left over.  Sometimes it was necessary to do a second harvest in a single day. 

Farmer West wasn’t a blind man.  A quick inspection of the southeast corner of his farm was all he needed to figure out what was going on with his watermelons.  And anyone could follow our trail through the cane break

It was the last week of August, and we were hoping to get in one more raid on the watermelon patch before the harvest began.  We started out about mid-morning riding our bicycles the two or three miles up the old gravel road to where we could turn off onto a dirt path that brought us to the railroad tracks.  By the time we got to our swimming hole, we were hot and ready for watermelon.

We stripped off the shorts, t-shirts, and tennis shoes and dived into the water.  Immediately we came out the other side and ran into the cane break.  As usual, we stopped at the opening to our trail and examined the field for any sign of movement.  When we determined the coast was clear we ran to the fence and climbed through.  We each picked out our melon and were just about to head back to the swimming hole when we heard the voice.

“Boys, you know all you have to do is ask and I’d give you all the melons you could eat.”

We froze.  Turning slowly towards the voice we could see the error of our surveying technique.  We forgot about the lone big oak tree.  And there was Farmer West stepping out from behind it with his double-barreled shotgun.

“I don’t like it when people don’t ask.”

We took off running, each of us hanging onto his watermelon.  As we ran, we drew closer together as our destination was the one place where the fence was wide enough to crawl through.  When we got to the fence, Farmer West fired off both barrels of the shotgun at the four shiny hineys scrambling to get away.  All four of us felt the sting.  I ran into the fence slicing my watermelon in half on the wire.  Mike dropped his in the opening where it broke into a slippery mess for us to crawl through.  Somehow both Ron and Rick got through the fence with their melons in tact.  And we ran through the cane break.

We realized we weren’t dead, so we examined each other for buckshot wounds, but all we could find were whelps and blisters, mostly across the middle third of our backsides.  We figured we were lucky.  The two remaining watermelons were tossed into the water and we jumped in afterward.  That’s when we realized we were not so lucky.  The blisters and whelps were caused by rock salt, and the water did nothing to ease the pain.  Salt water in a wound is not fun, especially when the wounds are located across one’s backside.  We climbed out of the water on the wooded side of the swimming hole in tears but to the sound of laughter.  Standing there where we had entered the water was Farmer West.

“Boys, I’m harvesting tomorrow, but next year come see me and we’ll work this out.  No kid should be deprived of a watermelon.”  He looked down at the melons floating in the water.  “Or two.”  Farmer West looked at the swimming hole for a few moments, and then he commented that it was just like he remembered it.  With that he disappeared back into the cane break.

We were uncomfortable for more than a few days.  It hurt to sit, stand, walk, or move in any manner, but not one of us let on to our families what had happened.  We endured the pain until it went away.  I had red spots for months where the rock salt had embedded under my skin, and I’m sure the others did also.  But we didn’t talk about it.  There wasn’t anything to say about it.

It was a normal long school year, and when it was over we weren’t in any hurry to go back to the swimming hole.  About the end of July, my grandmother asked me if I wanted a ride to Farmer West’s house.  I gave her a sideways glance to discover she was giving me a sideways glance.  Then she told me about the swimming hole, the cane break, and stealing watermelons, but it wasn’t me she was referring to.  It seems Farmer West’s grandfather was also known as Farmer West.