For Simpler Times And Better Days - More Mayberry Needed and Less Jersey Shore

Lately, with all the fuss going on with the elections, and also living in the urban sprawl for so many years, I have become very contemplative of my own past.  As many of you know, I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, and although at times it could be challenging due to the fact I didn't exactly grow up rich, I still miss a lot of things about those days.  As I get older, I really miss them!  There are many people today - mostly 20 and younger - that have no clue about the simpler pleasures in life because they have been spoiled in recent years with smartphones, Playstations, social interaction reduced to MySpace and Facebook, and it just seems as if a cloud of complacency has descended upon many Gen-Yer's.  For instance, I heard a kid in a thrift store one day, as I was perusing LP records to see if anything was worth adding to my extensive collection, say about them "Mommy, what are those?"  The mother, probably in her late 20's, told the kid, "I don't know - maybe it was some sort of frisbee old people played with back in the 1920's."   Just that mentality alone, as humorous as it sounds, says it all. 

Over the past few years, I have been on my own journey of self-discovery, as I have been writing down events of my life as I recall them as well as working on an extensive family tree.  The wealth of knowledge I have discovered (and the internet helps too, as back in the day we never thought to take a lot of pictures, so at least I can find what I am looking for here too!) has made me somewhat more retrospective of my own life.  Looking back on how I grew up, there are a lot of simple pleasures I miss, and sometimes living in the city doesn't help you much to recover a lot of lost territory either.   So today, that is what I wanted to talk about.

I mentioned that I grew up somewhat as what some would call "disadvantaged" - I came from a single-parent home, we didn't have a lot of money, and often in the lack of such things a kid my age then would find solace in reading and then using imagination to explore the world around me.   And, as a kid, I read a lot - by the time I was 12, I had read the whole contents of the World Book Encyclopedia through three times, as well as the entire Old Testament of the Bible, a gourmet cookbook, and three books on World War II history, among other things (for the younger generation, not to sound condescending, but before Kindle we had these things called books made from ink and paper) including a whole 12-volume set of story books called My Book House that was compiled some years earlier by an educator in Illinois by the name of Olive Beaupre Miller.   I also read age-appropriate stuff as well, including Robert Newton Peck's books (I got to know the author as a personal friend over the years, and he is a marvelous person who lives 40 miles from me here in Florida now) and my early exposure to my beloved Armenians, William Saroyan's book My Name Is Aram as well as his two classic short stories, "The Miraculous Phonograph Record of 1921" and "The Parsley Garden."  As a matter of fact, many of the books I read then are now considered "politically incorrect" by the powers-that-be both in Washington and sitting on many public schoolboards, but back then we called them something else - classics!  Do any of you, for instance, ever read the story of the little Black migrant worker kid, Roosevelt Grady?   Those were good stories with solid values!  Many of these things I read due to some initial exposure from school then (our teacher in 5th and 6th grade - I came from a very small school! - was strict but he taught us much) but many of them I also discovered on my own.  And, whether you read them for leisure or as part of a class assignment, they often had the same effect - things in those stories piqued my imagination, and I would often try to put into practice what I had read.   Which leads now to the next part of the discussion.

Reading was by no means the only thing many of us from my generation did.   In those days, we enjoyed doing a lot outside.  Some kids played sports, and although it wasn't my cup of tea personally, that too taught them some important lessons about teamwork.  Play then was not idle entertainment - you learned from it.  Although I wasn't into sports, what I did like to do was fish a lot, as well as learning about wild plants and catching different critters.   Let me spend a few hours around a shallow creek bed, and I would come home with a coffee can chock full of all sorts of things.   Primarily, I caught crayfish (which we called "Crawdaddin'" then), and those were always fun to get your hands on.  Where I grew up at near Grassy Lick Run in Kirby, WV, as a matter of fact, I often found baby crayfish, smaller than a kernel of corn, and caught them by the dozens.  Then there were these odd little critters called water pennies, which looked like tiny pennies under rocks and of course you had to know what you were looking for.   As I read up on those things - I would check out scores of books from the public library about freshwater life (I would have made a great limnologist as a matter of fact!) and then I would see either what I had caught, or I would go looking for some of these things.  That actually made me an ace in Biology later on too.   But, my wildlife collecting was not limited to aquatics, as I also loved haunting a bunch of hazelnut bushes growing just beyond our driveway, where I would often find scores of walking stickbugs, as well as the occasional praying mantis.  I learned from an early age that these stickbugs for some reason loved hazelnut bushes, and come to find out later that is actually one of their favorite foods.  In the fall, I also harvested a lot of the hazelnuts myself - what people will pay $4 a jar for in Wal-Mart these days (hazelnuts, or filberts as some call them, are expensive at times) I got by the bushel for nothing!  And praying mantises - oh what an adventure those were.  For some reason, it was always quite a prize to catch one of those, because then that was probably the biggest bug we had in West Virginia, and it generated fascination.  I remember reading somewhere that people would tie a "leash" on a praying mantis in Vietnam or somewhere, also making it a little house, and of a night it would catch mosquitoes and other pests.  So, I decided to try that, and managed to make a tiny house out of the top of an old Clorox bottle for the next mantis I caught.  I attached the "house" to my bedpost, and when I caught a good-sized mantis, I leashed him with some packing string to the bedpost.  I cannot recall if it worked or not, but it was a good idea (at least at the time!).   When I was around 7 or so as well, I used to also catch Japanese beetles which for some reason loved the flower bushes around my great-grandmother's house in Hendricks, WV.   For some wondering what a Japanese beetle was, it is an invasive species that somehow got loose in the US and would often reek havoc on flowerbeds and gardens.  Back then, we had them all over the place, and they were fun to catch.  They had a glossy brown carapace with a green head, and also had spiky legs.  They were fairly easy to catch, and ironically my catching of those did a great service to my great-grandmother's flowers - she never needed pesticide with me around! 

A major creature that always had my interest as well were toads.  Toads came in all sizes - some were tiny peepers, and others were bigger than my hands.  I mentioned in another story how at times - for some reason it involved church functions! - toads and frogs would get me into trouble.  But, I could not resist catching them.  After a rain, in particular, it was fairly easy to find toads all over the rural roads, and in a night I could sometimes catch a dozen of those.  The last time I actually caught a frog was when I was in my early teens, and that led to a humorous situation.   My family used to like just taking leisurely drives (another lost art today, as everyone is so choked with their own concerns that they don't take time out to just travel - sad really), and on this one particular occasion my grandmother Elsie, my step-grandfather Lonnie, Mom, and I went on one of those trips, exploring the back roads of Hampshire and Hardy Counties.   It was summer, and it had just rained then, and of course the roads were full of toads and frogs.  And, since we were in no hurry, I was catching a bunch of them.   Now, as we were cruising along down these dark country roads in the early evening, one of the frogs got loose, and somehow it made its way to the front seat.   Now, to preface this story,  my grandmother Elsie was not a little woman, OK?  She easily weighed over 300 pounds, and she always wore skirts.  Any rate, we are traveling along, when simultaneously that frog that made its way to the front seat found its way up my grandmother's leg, and at the same time, I opened a can of Pepsi with a "SHHHHHEEEEEEE!" to which Mom hollered "Snake!"  My grandmother went ballistic!  When my step-grandfather brought the car to a screaming halt, my grandmother hops out of the car and is doing some screaming herself as she is jumping around trying to get that "snake" off her leg.  Finally, the frog has had enough of that, and just sort of leaps out of her skirt and lands in some tall grass on the side of the road.  By this time, all of us except my grandmother are laughing hysterically.  That is one of the most fun nights I ever had, and to this day I still chuckle when I picture my rotund grandmother dancing around on that West Virginia country road screaming like a banshee trying to shake a snake off her leg.   If only we had video technology with us then - that would have made a funny YouTube!

Animals were not the only thing I hunted a lot back then either.  For us Appalachian people, wildcrafting is something that is integral to our culture, and from an early age we were taught about certain plants that either were nutritional or medicinal, and it is a passion I still have to this day although I don't do as much of it - wild plants are just not that readily available in the metropolitan Tampa Bay area.   You basically learned the seasons certain things were harvestable, as well as how to find them.   Back in the day, it was more for necessity than it was the hobby it became later when my generation came along, but it was still a good skill to learn.  What I find interesting though is how now these celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay are taking things we used to gather in the wild as a staple and turning them into gourmet delicacies.  Take ramps, for example.   For the person not familiar with mountain culture, ramps are a type of wild leek with broad leaves and a pungent (that doesn't describe it - they reek!) smell that we used to gather in the woods usually after the first snow melt in April.  Back home, a ramp harvest meant at least a month of ramp suppers at churches, fire halls, etc., and many a poor mountain family even made a little extra income off their wild harvest.   The traditional way of cooking them was to saute them in bacon grease or butter, and they were usually cooked with potatoes and/or eggs and served with some sort of beans on the side.   I personally never ate them that way, but also found them to be a great ingredient in soups and sauces though (not to mention they are fairly good raw, but if you are married, do not plan on kissing your wife or husband for a while afterward, because you may be sleeping in a separate bed until the odor wears off!).  Then, a couple of weeks ago, I watched Gordon Ramsay on Master Chef doing a mystery challenge with a bunch of amateur but talented chefs that entailed - you guessed it! - ramps.  Mind you, many of these people had probably never seen a ramp before, so it was actually quite funny to watch them cook with ramps - they really had no idea, not even the best of them!  Any rate, besides ramps I got to know poke greens pretty well, as one summer at my step-grandfather's we ate a lot of those (with a lot of groundhogs too!) and my step-grandfather taught me all about how to harvest them.  Basically, what poke greens (or pokesalad as they are sometimes called) are entail the shoots and tender tops of the pokeweed plant.  The milky substance in the stems of the plant is poisonous, as are the clusters of black berries, but the young leaves are edible and have a similar taste to kale or collards when cooked.   Today, I would not eat them anymore personally, but I would have no problems gathering them.   Also, there was wild garlic, the slightly milder cousin of ramps and much more abundant.  I gathered wild garlic all the way up into my early adult years, as I still value it as a cooking ingredient.   Back in the day though, I would go out and gather whole grocery bags full of it, because it was quite abundant then.  Many people thought of it as a weed, and cattle farmers hated it because it tainted the milk their cows produced, but I thought it was a great commodity.   Any rate, it is really too bad I don't have the access to wild plants like I used to, because there are so many more worth mentioning.

Then there was fishing.  Up until I was about 9, I had never actually fished.  For one I was afraid of water and couldn't swim (still can't to this day) and my contact with a river at that time was skirting the edge and wading in the shallows looking under rocks for critters.  Then, when I was 9, I spent a year with my dad in Brunswick, GA, and he taught me how to fish, and I have enjoyed it since.   My earliest fishing was for crappies and brim in the cattle pond above my grandmother's house in Augusta, WV at the time.  It was fairly easy to catch them, and my favorite fishing spot was an overhanging willow on the shore of the pond that had a deep hole.   I learned to fish two ways then - one was with a conventional rod-and-reel, and the other was with a simpler hand-line.   The hand-line worked fantastic at the pond, because the willow was directly over the hole and I could just drop the line straight down.   Fishing was reserved for the nearby creeks and rivers.   In the Grassy Lick Run in Kirby back then, there was a fairly deep hole almost directly behind our house, and essentially there were two sizeable fish you could catch - chubs and hogsuckers.   Chubs were essentially large minnows that had no real nutritional value and were better as a bait fish, although they could grow up to a foot.   Hogsuckers though were the fun fish to catch.  If you have ever seen one of these fish, they are just plain ugly!  They are often hard to spot, as they are the same coloration as the bottom of the creeks, but they also grew to a good size - some reached 3 feet if you could find them.  They didn't have any nutritional value either - you could eat them, but they were greasy, bony, and by just looking at them you would wonder how anyone could eat something that ugly anyway!  But, some of the poor hillbillies in the area loved them, so when I caught them I would either give them to one of those families that lived in town or feed them to Jill, our dog.   The fun was in catching them, though.  A hogsucker will not bite a baited hook, so you have to be clever with them.  The trick to catching one is to maneuver an unbaited hook as close to their mouth as you can get it, and then give a good yank and snag them.   And, boy, would they put up a fight too!  I guess no one, not even an ugly hogsucker, likes having a hook jabbed in their lip though.   Also, handlines would not work with these - the hole in the creek was too deep where these fish were found, and also you had to be on the lookout for snakes, as the abundant brush and big rocks around would easily harbor both rattlers and copperheads.   So, a rod was much safer.   I later learned how to make my own fishbait too from some fishfood I had from an unsuccessful turn at keeping goldfish at home - the recipe I used was simple; you mixed the fishfood with water and cornmeal, formed it into small balls, and baked it.  Found out later it was a good catfish bait too.   It has literally been years since I fished last, and I have often thought about taking advantage of the many lakes we have here in Polk County, FL, and maybe doing some fishing when the weather cools down in the fall.   There is something therapeutic and relaxing about fishing a quiet lake or stream, and perhaps it would save a lot of people tons of money on therapy if they would learn how to fish.  Besides, these shrinks get paid way too much anyway, if you ask my humble opinion.

The unattractive but fun to catch hogsucker.

Another interesting little fish - less than 5 inches long - that I often caught with my hands in the rock pools in the creek was a curious little thing called a "miller's thumb," or banded sculpin.  A homely little fish, it was a small inedible perch that you could find all over the creeks.  Usually they liked prowling in large rockpiles near or under bridges, and their coloration made them hard to spot.  They were also hard to catch, as they flitted and darted about in such a way that you had to match their speed.  The fact they were a unique little critter made them a prized catch for me as a kid, and I would spend hours sometimes trying to track the little devils down.   They also had voracious appetites, and could crush a small crayfish in their big mouths.   But, you had to be careful catching them, because they hung out in areas that were also perfect hangouts for copperheads.   The creek I first encountered these was Grassy Lick when we first moved to Kirby in 1980 when I was about 10.  Although native to the area, I always was puzzled why they could never be found elsewhere - could have been just the geography of Grassy Lick Run I suppose. 

The elusive "millersthumb," or banded sculpin.

There are many more things that could be said about these simpler times I once knew - sitting up by the radio on summer nights listening to WBT-AM when my big band show was on, building forts in the woods, and hunting down ladyslipper flowers in the pine forest on the ridge above the house.   It was also a time when you didn't have hippies yelling about "global warming" and you still could drink soda out of a glass bottle, and then make ten cents off the empty bottle at the local general store.  And, it was also a time when on Saturday mornings you could look forward to good cartoons (the primetime networks have diminished themselves further by eliminating Saturday lineups like that), and one had a social life - in my teens I was always busy with either church functions or high school band, so I was never bored.   You read books, they sparked the imagination, and you learned something in the process while having fun without some "thought police" telling you that you couldn't do that.   I often miss those days.  Sometimes we didn't have much to work with then, as during part of my childhood I spent at my grandmother's where they didn't even have an indoor bathroom or hot water.  However, I also remember that feel of clothing washed in a wringer washer and air-dried on a clothesline, as well as having homemade piping-hot yeastbread once a week (my grandmother made these huge hotrolls that were delicious, with Robin Hood flour if anyone remembers that).  I often wonder if I am better off now than I was then, or is it the other way around?  I guess I can be thankful for the long way I have come as I have gotten a family, am in graduate school, and have accomplished so much in other areas.  However, those simpler times do beckon at times, and I feel the pangs of homesickness on occasion, but I also know that the best of my experience will always be with me.  And, in writing them down, may they also be a legacy to others, that some may rediscover the simpler way of life one day.