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Speaker 1: Welcome to This Country Life. I’m your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trot lighting and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives from the store More Studio on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I’ve got some stores to share. Going home, some folks say you can’t go home again. I’ve never researched the implied meaning for that, but I assume it means it’s impossible to return to a place from your past and have it to be exactly as you remember it being. When fishing with my brother Tim the other day, and I thought a lot about how that all played out. I’m going to share it with you today, But first I’m going to tell you a story. In the summer of two thousand and four, my dad, my brother Tim, and my six year old son Hunter and I lost a boat from the boat ramp in Cleveland County, Arkansas. It’s located eight and a half miles from New Edinburgh, a bustling metropolis of one hundred and thirty four inhabitants according to the twenty twenty census. That’s a five and a half percent growth from the one hundred and twenty seven ar Kansas talented in a twenty ten accounty. That boat ramp in two thousand and four was called the Mount Elba East Saline River Access and had been since Cleveland County officially took over the upkeep in nineteen seventy four, since the Donald of Man. According to my father, it had been known simply as Mount elby we Southerners, taking liberties and pronunciation by removing the letter N from the word mount and elongating the a in Elba to a more resonant sound that flows off the tongue, like the Seleine River itself, effortlessly with a subconscious feeling of familiarity with others who would immediately recognize anything different. As a little boy the age of my son, who was following me around as I did my father in that same place, albeit thirty two years later, I couldn’t have imagined that place would be named after my father. A decade later, and on September nineteenth, twenty fourteen, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and cooperation with Cleveland County officially named that boat ramp as the Lloyd Wilton Buddy Reeves Mount Elba access to the Sline River, but that day it was still just Mount Elby and the four of us were going fishing. It was all the fly rids, ultra lights, and tackle boxes loaded. We finished off with a fish cooker and all the ingredients needed to host a fish fry, a fish fry that depended on us catching enough fish that day to feed ourselves. There wasn’t a safer bed in Vegas than three generations of Reese boys being able to scrap out enough bluegills to put hunger in a headlock. As far as I knew, my daddy invented brim fishing. We motored past the Big Tree Top on the east side of the river, where a local man fish with Dad and I one afternoon when I was around Hunter’s age. He’d been invited to go that morning, but he didn’t make the mustard, so we went without him. After fishing, we took our midday nap and vitals, breaking Uncle Dobb’s cabin, a cabin that still stands today and one that I talked about two years ago in episode one thirty five entitled Swimming Holes. If you hadn’t heard that one, I highly encourage you to do so. Anyway, as we were getting ready to go fishing that afternoon, old mister late for the morning fishing trip shows up. How he got there was a mystery. His conveyance wasn’t a mystery. He drove his truck. How he got there without running out through the woods, that was the mystery. This old fellow was known to imbibe to excess on occasion, and it turned out the latest such ucation had been the reason for his tardiness. He more or less bored himself out of that truck and told my dad, let’s go fishing. Now. I have thought about that day many times since then. That can only conclude that my dad thought it’s safer for him to be in the boat with us rather than in his truck out on the road. Fishing that afternoon went without incident, and we caught a lot of fish in spite of all the racket that old man was making. But time and the summer Arkansas sun allowed sobriety to take over, and that evening, when we pulled back on the bank, he was safe to drive home. And he did. We found out a few days later that the missus didn’t allow him back in the house and he spent the night in his truck out in the driveway. It sounds like I went down a rabbit hole there, straying away from the original story. But bear with me. There’s there’s a method to my madness. But that day with the old Man flashed in its entirety, and half the time it took me to tell you about it, it was a scene played out like a whole movie in my head as we drifted by that spot on the river, me looking at that spot and seeing us in Dad’s old boat as we passed, like I was riding through a theme park of my life. I looked back in the boat and could see my son’s eyes looking at everything. As we rowed down the river. He soaked in every twist and turned every overhanging tree, pointing at birds and turtles, and he was making his own home movies. As we rounded the bend and passed through the swimming hole. That place triggered a million memories, like the old tree top, those running in no particular sequence, just flashes of cinematic joy from the last forty something years of living and being there in the water and on that sand, with the people in the boat with me, some far away living their own lives now, and others that I would never see again, at least not in this life. We went on through and we started fishing at the head of the Stretch, a moderately straight portion of the river that for about a mile was wider than most, with sloping banks and deep Every species of fish that swam in the river could find something they liked, and we caught brim and bash and catfish and cropping, depending on which species we were targeting right there, and by the middle of the morning we had more than enough fish to cook. One hundred prouds have participated in stalking the ice chest and looking forward to what was coming next. Dad moted us on down the river to Bug Island, a gradual shallowing at the end of the stretch, where for years and generations we would stop resting the shade of sycamore wheeling cypress trees, clean our fish in the shallow currant, and lay in the cool water as it washed away the sweat and sand from our bodies. Countless times I’d done this with my dad, and each time we did, I heard a favorite story or a new one I hadn’t heard before, each one triggered by the movies that played inside his head as we talked of old times and old people, all the stories, in one way or another, connected to that place, the river, and everything that went with it. After we ate, having stuffed ourselves with brim fried taters and onions, we gathered at the river cool The water was barely deep enough to flow over our chests. As we lay facing skyward in the shade, Toes pointed downstream, water was swift enough to fill the tiniest of pebbles as they rolled along the bottom and around us three adults lying still, while the youngest crawled around, digging up rocks and mussels and asking questions after question for any of us had time to completely answer the previous dozen. Then the three of us, on the quiet suggestion of my father, rolled over on our bellies, and we started slowly crawling up streams side by side, as Hunters sat in one spot with a shallow water barely deep enough to cover the belt loop on his cutoff, Levi’s it’s back to us digging in the gravel, oblivious to our retreat Eventually he realized we’d slipped away, and when he turned his head, we’d made it about ten yards still army, crawling away from where he sat, he hollered, hey, and as we’d all turned to laugh, and how we tricked him, he said, pow. He grabbed his chest if he’d been sniped by an unseen enemy. Without hesitation, he started slowly crawling towards us, his six year old frame brown as a biscuit and dripping with the water as he crawled while feigning a mortal wound. Weakly, he said, I’m not gonna make it. Save yourselves, go on without me. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen my dad laugh any harder than he did at that moment. Ever, laughing was and is a constant in my family. And we’ve been accused of being too loud, irreverent, boisterous, juvenile, and a laundry list of other adjectives that infer attitudes and activities of a less than serious way of looking at life. And those opinions they ain’t without merit. We just like to have fun. That’s just how that happened. Going home, Are we going fishing? Or what that was? The question posed to me by my brother Tim. This whole summer, we’ve been plagued by high water in my schedule that has given us zero opportunities to go fishing. We’re commercial fishermen, for goodness sake, We’re supposed to be fishing. But the Arkansas River has been high for quite a while, and since we’re actually commercial fish fisherman in name and license only, we haven’t been braving the high water to set our nets. Real commercial fishermen, the ones who depend on fishing to earn a living. Now, they’ve been fishing. Tim and I not so much, not any Actually, when he asked me that question, kind of rudely, I might add, I started telling him about my schedule again and how we’d only be able to let the nets soak for a short period before we had to go pull them. He said, no, dummy bream fishing. Oh, Friday, I can go Friday. So at five thirty am when the alarm went off, I’d already had my stuff loaded in the truck. It was pouring my first cup of coffee iron. Forty five minutes later, I met Tim at his house and we rode together on the twelve mile journey from his home through the country. We talked about what was currently going on with our lives, passing the time, cracking jokes, generally solving all the world problems. But with every twist and turned down that gravel road, I was semi consciously noting the timeline of my lifetime on a road that I used to live on. Right there, across that field is where I caught my first gray fox. Right there on the side of the road is where that big flint airhead came from. As we drove on other places, spoke to me just past the curve in the road where the creek crosses, where I saw that big gobbler cross in front of me. The memories of instances from my past playing now with each passing moment. I can’t help but ask myself why those seemingly insignificant moments are so key to my core memories. Why would I remember a turkey crossing the road at a very specific place forty years ago. I didn’t kill that turkey. He wasn’t on land I had permission to be on, so I didn’t even hunt him. Yet I can see him vividly as he crossed the road in front of me. According to a little research I did on why we remember insignificant things. Most of the professionals agree that memory isn’t usually prioritized by importance. Things that you remember are most often based on some sort of emotional attachment. I’ve got boxes full of turkey beards, and if I was held a gunpoint and told to tell an individual hunting story, for the number of bears represented, I might get a third of them. Maybe, so, I guess I answered my own question. More or less. I probably remember that turkey because I couldn’t hunt him. He was one of the many that got away. And as soon as I say that, I can now see him and many others getting gone in the roll of decks of turkey, sadness that haunts me still. And as we got closer to the river, I saw a bunch of other places and people’s houses that trigger conversations about times past and present. And finally we made it to the river, our river, a place as familiar and welcoming as your grandparents’ home, a place that ten years could pass in between visits, but you could easily find your way around in in the dark. Pull the truck in here and swing to this side, because the boat ramp runs out at an angle away from where you park and get the boat straps undone and make sure the plug is in. None of this was out loud. It didn’t have to be. It was second nature to both of us and just part of the routine that we’d done forever, having both been taught by the man whose name adorned the sign that kept watch over that ramp. We headed off downstream, tim in the front of the boat, pointing at underwater obstacles that lay in wait for those une with how the channel laid. We zigged and zagged down the narrow river, talking about this spot and that spot, while each of us remembered other things in occurrences that we didn’t bring up. Nothing bad, just moments shared with others and ourselves that were better musings than subjects of conversations, Like the spot where that big tree top was located just below the boat ramp that I talked about Hunter seeing when he was a kid in the opening story. That happened twenty years ago, and that day reminded me of fishing there with my dad and the fellow who wasn’t safe to drive twenty years before that. It’s not just one particular incident that I recall and we live when I go back there. It’s a catalog of emotions for people in a time when my world didn’t extend far beyond what we could see. The river felt the same hot boat seat burned my hands like always, and dropping a blue gill brim into the ice chest was as satisfying as it had ever been. And when we had enough fro mess weedzed on down the Bug Island. We pulled the boat up on the bank and we sat down in the river to cool off, clean our ketch twenty four bluegill and red belly brim later, and we walked up in the shade to take in the breeze that was blowing just enough down the river to make it comfortable and relaxing. We shared a cantalope I brought from home, cutting it open with the same case knives that we’d cleaned the fish with. Not to worry, though, we washed them off in the river before we ate. We sat there in the shade, on that small piece of earth where generations of our family had stood before us, camping, cooking, and fellowshipping. It was as comfortable as a favorite pair of old boots. It was a natural extension of ourselves and our homes, regardless of our different zip codes. On the drive back home, I thought about how it felt to be there, and about that old saying of you can’t go home. In a way, I guess that’s true. The big old timber has all been cut in the bottoms, and pine plantations and thickets have replaced the hardwood flats of my father’s youth and mine. But even after all the change to that beautiful scenery, feelings remain the same. I could focus and brood over what’s not there anymore, or except that with time, change is inevitable. While change is the last thing you wanted, something that’s perfect, it can’t change the way it makes me feel to be there, and when I’m there it feels like home. So yes, Thomas Wolfe, I beg to differ, sir. You can go home again, And I did it last Friday. Y’all keep sending those stories in I want to hear about farming and Grandma’s house and hunting and fishing and just sitting on the porch. I appreciate y’all so much for listening to me. Lake and Clay here on the Bear Grease Channel, we really really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Until next week, This is Brent Reeves signing off. Y’all be careful.
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