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Sun 11 Mar, 2007 05:50 am
My great uncle Dave had a wooden leg. He actually had a wooden leg. He owned a coal mine ( a 2 man operation) and when it caved he was buried so his partner took out his pocket knife and cut off his buried leg so he retired from the coal mining business and got himself a wooden leg. So uncle Dave lived in my great-grandfathers housestead which was separated from my place by a friend named Lee. Now Lee and I shared a pasture for our horses but they had an attitude which was to get to the greener grass so they was always digging under or going over the fence. one day Lee got tired of it all and bought an electric fence and installed it around our little pasture and my uncle Dave came outside to inspect the work, He lifted himself off his good leg so he was only standing on the wooden leg and grabbed the electric wire and said to our mutual friend, Lee "This doesn't seem to be working" at which point Lee also grabbed the electric fence wire and it knocked him about 15 feet back. My great-uncle said "ok, maybe it does work. but I got this wooden leg I'm standing on so I couldn't tell"
we do that with the tourists all the time. Ho ho, its always good for a laugh. The only part thats different is that we dont have wooden legs, we just wear rubber ducks or gumboots out in the fields.
On the other side of my place lived a man named Lejon ( he was Polish) and he taught art at the high school anyway I had a goat named Maynard who could climb any fence ever built. One day while I was off earning a living, my great aunt came driving by and saw my goat Maynard grazing on the roadside she stopped and put Maynard in her car (62 Chevy) and took him on down to my grandmothers house to eat the weeds. When I got home that night there was a very nasty note from my great aunt telling me that my damned goat ate all of grandma's roses and what was I goiny to do about it. I told her "nothing."
Now Lejon was wathching all this and being an artist and all he wrote a children's story book about Maynard the fence climbing goat with lots of water colour paintings showing Maynard climbing the fences. lejon eventually submitted one of his water colours of a duck on my farm that became a nation duck stamp so he retired and bought a place up the river about 50 miles so he could concetrate on his art.
This thread is dedicated to my friend Noddy to asked me to write down some of my farm memories. I will probably continue.
Dys--
I am touched and flattered. I'm also being vastly entertained. Thank you.
What ever happened to Maynard? Was gus in the area at the time?
Maynard 's story is a perfect example of the paths our lives can take. We cannot plan effectively, we can only react correctly.
bookmarking what I am sure is going to become my favorite thread.
repost true story;
It was late July and the Rio Grande coming down off Slumgullion Pass was running slow and clear as Jesse and his grandfather headed out of Creede. They had stopped and picked up a bale of straw for bedding under the old army tent they would be living in for the next month. Jesse was only 14 yrs old at the time but he was driving the old '31 model A and pulling the old 2 wheel trailer that carried the tent and straw. On some of the steeper roads Jesse had to turn around and back up as those old fords did not have a fuel pump and the gas ran by gravity from the tank down to the engine so that if the road was too steep the engine was higher than the gas tank unless you went backwards.
As was their habit they had packed all the condiments and dry goods like soap powder, flour, salt, sugar and coffee in old Ball canning jars and stowed them in boxes under the tent.
Finally pulling into a seemingly unused area along side the Rio Grande to the north of Box Canyon, they unloaded the trailer and spread out the straw. While Jesse finished setting up the camp his grandfather headed down along the river with his fly rod and a can of grasshoppers he caught in the tall grass around the campsite. Although his grandfather has lost most of his left arm in a railroad accident in the early 30's he managed that old bamboo fly rod with skill usually having two hooks set with grasshoppers and not all them seldom catching two of those wily rainbows at once.
Jesse had made a cooler box out of pine planking and machine wire mesh across the bottom and a heavy wooden top. By moving some stones around in the river Jesse managed to set the box so that the mesh screen on the bottom was just above the rushing water which was cold enough being mostly snowmelt from the higher peaks that the milk, lard and eggs stayed cool.
On the tent floor above the straw Jesse spread out the homemade quilts that they would sleep on and under for the next month or so. He then gathered up some firewood and cleaned out the ashes from the old fire-ring and set up the kerosene stove. The cooking utensils consisted of a large old cast iron skillet, a caldron and a coffee pot along with an assortment of forks, knives spoons and related odds and ends. All the can goods he kept in a box that was placed under the camp trailer where the bears would have a hard time getting to it. Jesse then got out the kerosene lantern and set it on a hook on the tree beside the tent and sat down waiting for his grandfather to return.
Just shortly before sundown his grandfather came back and pulling off his waist high waders empted out his wicker creel of 5 nice rainbows all about 12" and fat. Jesse took the fish down to the stream and gutted them out ready to flour and fry in that skilled with some flour and a pat of lard. As Jesse walked back to the camp his grandfather was already heating up the skillet on some coals and the lard was spitting out hungry for those rainbows. Jesse walked over to the box of Jars and picked up the flour and brought it over to his grandfather to roll the fish in before throwing them on the fire. Now, on most occasions he would have used cormeal but in the dimming light he was not so easy to spot so grandfather went ahead with the flour, coated the fish real good and threw them in the skillet. And that's when a funny thing happened. The trout was a'bubbling and a'bubbling away in that skillet. Neither one of them said a word but just sat there watching those fish bubbling away and turning brown. After about 10 minutes of that Jesse forked them out of the skillet onto a couple of tin plates and they began to chow down on those fish..Something ain't right here they both thought but kept right on eating.
Jesse looked up at his grandfather only to see them same bubbles floating out of his mouth and a big grin on his face but nary a word was spoke by either of them. It wasn't long before grandfather starting laughing and still eating and laughing even harder. Now Jesse was a pretty bright kid and he knew something was wrong but he surely had no clue as to what it was, and he just kept on eating. After grandfather had picked all the bones out of the second trout and cleaned all the meat off, he sat his plate down on a rock and with a huge smile on his face, the bubbles still coming out. He told Jesse that he didn't think dry soap power made such a good coating for frying fish
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If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.
J
My great aunt Mable was married to my great uncle Dave (he of the wooden leg) and she played the honky-tonk piano and she played it well. She was known in the family as "snaggletooth" Mable because she only had one tooth. She played that honky-tonk piano at the Fawn Hallow Tavern till it was closed by the US Army but that's not what this story is about. What this story is about is my grand-fathers toilet.
In about 19 and 24 my grand-grandfather lost his arm in a railroad accident outside of Trinidad Colo and was fired the next day so he decided to build a farm which meant building a farm house. So he built a house and he build it with a bathroom, flush toilet and all. Well my great aunt Mable was quite upset that my grand-father had a flush toilet (in the house) so she demanded that my great uncle Dave put a toilet in their house but he was a stubborn and was of the opinion that indoor toilets were unsanitary so one weekend he put a toilet in the house, right in the middle of the kitchen. Not a bathroom mind you but right in the middle of the kitchen. She was delighted and to everyone who visited she showed the toilet, right in the middle of the kitchen. Uncle Dave never used that toilet because he said they were unsanitary.
I didn't recall anything sanitary about the outhouses we used, during my childhood. Perhaps he knew something we don't.
Hmmm... better an outhouse outside than in the kitchen!
Good stuff, Dys.
Piffka wrote:Hmmm... better an outhouse outside than in the kitchen!
Good stuff, Dys.
well, the thing was, went you went outside to use the outhouse you had to bring in an armload of firewood to keep the house warm. It was practical as well as efficient (the firewod bin was on the way to the outhouse.)
some years ago we stayed on a sheep-farm in the black-forest for a week . in the morning we set out for a nice hike in the woods .
after a nice lunch and a couple of glasses of the "fresh" wine at a restaurant in the village , it was time to climb up to the farm again .
we were a little tired - too much wine ?(:wink: ) and decided to cut across the fields .
we noticed some fences with thin wires attached - but what did we know - nothing !
finally we had to squeeze between some of the wires to reach the farmhouse and i noticed an odd sensation when my legs touched the wires - but what did i know - nothing !
when we reached the farm , the farmer asked us , if we had enjoyed the little electrical shocks from the fence wires - now we did know !
hbg
hamburger wrote:some years ago we stayed on a sheep-farm in the black-forest for a week . in the morning we set out for a nice hike in the woods .
after a nice lunch and a couple of glasses of the "fresh" wine at a restaurant in the village , it was time to climb up to the farm again .
we were a little tired - too much wine ?(:wink: ) and decided to cut across the fields .
we noticed some fences with thin wires attached - but what did we know - nothing !
finally we had to squeeze between some of the wires to reach the farmhouse and i noticed an odd sensation when my legs touched the wires - but what did i know - nothing !
when we reached the farm , the farmer asked us , if we had enjoyed the little electrical shocks from the fence wires - now we did know !
hbg
Hamburgler, this is america, we don't do funny little electrical shocks we zap THEM ACROSS THE FIELD.
Oh Boy!! Thank you, Noddy, for finally talking him in to writing down these wonderful stories. Dys's grandfather was the single most important person in his life and all the stories really did happen.
OK Dys, time for more.
Reading along and enjoying.
When you raise sheep,you gotta have a fence that reaches out and touches them through all those layers of wool. We like the Australian chargers because they work over long distances with gfood results. I guarantee that if you came even close to one of our fences it would arc a blue one as long as yer finger. For us its actually more for keeping wild dogs out as it is for keeping the sheep in.
The worse stories I ever heard were those where people have tried to pee on an electric fence. I never knew whether that was a rural legend because I dont know a damn person dumb enough to try it in the first place.