Gulf Coast Boy... Teenage Years

The second installment in my father's series of short autobiographical pieces.

***
Deep woods…. Wild Peach community… 1960… I was 12years old.
I hated to move from Freeport and all my friends and adventures. We had no close neighbors, much less boys my age. But I had a dog and we hunted in the woods every day. I learned to love the woods and even the solitude.
We cleared several acres, mostly by hand. Chain saws weren’t too common back then, but axes were. Red bugs and ticks and poison ivy were a new form of torment. Of course, the mosquitoes were old friends. I had to ride a bus to school. The folk that lived in Wild Peach back then were often ‘unusual’. So were their kids. A bus ride to school could be filled with terror or boredom. Amazingly enough, the bus driver was never bothered by the sound of a punch or a scream from some girl being held down. Against her will. But try to tell him he missed your stop and he’d rip your head off….he was my science teacher too.
My family always deer hunted. We had a great lease about a hundred miles away. 3200 acres…$800.00 a year…that’s .25 cents an acre… prime deer country…. The landowner only wanted 8 ‘guns’ on the lease, so each man had to pay $100.00 a season. I remember my dad having to go to Great Western Finance to borrow the money to hunt on. Rates have gone up since then I’m told…
But I had a knack for deer hunting…I killed my first one when I was 10. We lived on venison most of the year. We only took bucks and nothing was wasted.
Back then we just hunted…no deer feeders, no walkie-talkies, no four wheelers…no catalytic heaters…just sit beside a tree and wait…if it was raining you might take a piece of plastic to sit on so your butt wouldn’t itch…I loved it and would stay out all day…If you killed a deer, you walked back to camp and got the wheel barrow and went back for it. After you lugged and tugged it back you strung it up and dressed it. If wasn’t cold enough, we would have to take it into town to the ice house until we were ready to go home. I never failed to get my limit… (and my mothers and grandmothers and anyone else who had an open tag)… we lived on venison.
One day leaving the lease, my uncle’s car got stuck. I jumped out and ran to a dead tree on the ground. I planned to shuck off the bark to put under his tire. I had my rubber boots on… about the 3rd lick with my hatchet it bounced off the log and went through my boot. It didn’t hurt, and I thought it was just a scratch…when I took the hatchet out, the blood came with it…
One of my older cousins was there and took my boot off. He had been a medic in the Korean War. He suggested I lay back and let him check it. “No way” I said… “I want to see it”…but seeing your own blood for the first time isn’t always what you thought it would be. I laid back… and that car got unstuck in an instant and we were off to Yoakum to the clinic. Somehow, I had cut completely through my foot but between the tendons…anywhere else and I would have been in surgery and had a limp for life. They stitched me up and I was good to go.
When my dad and I got home, my mother was waiting outside for us. She saw the huge bandage on my foot and actually trembled as she asked what happened.
I was cocky, my first real wound and all, and I said “I shot myself in the foot” with a smirk.
I will never forget the pain and horror in her face. The suffering I caused her with that stupid statement has haunted me ever since. I learned something about life and a mother’s love that day, but she paid for my lesson. I was 14 years old.
As time moved on, I met new friends, even out in Wild Peach…it was becoming a pretty good way to grow up, looking back. We would haul hay bales or cut wood or do ranch work for extra money.
We thought we were ready for the world… we never damaged anyone’s property or caused any trouble… but we enjoyed being teenagers. About the worst thing I was involved in was when we saw a squirrel run up a tree and into a hole. One of the guys thought he could smoke it out of the hole by dropping matches into it. Squirrel didn’t come out so we left… 2 days later my dad and I were headed off to the deer lease and we had to stop for some road blockage…seems a large live oak tree had burned down at the base and was blocking the road…. The county crew was clearing it…strange…I was 15.
But, boys have to experiment, I guess. I used to tell my mom I was going night fishing and we would find some beer or something and go down to the mouth of the San Bernard River and drink a bit.
One trip a friend of ours came over from Bay City. He had 2 bottles of whiskey with him. Being such accomplished drinkers, we stopped and bought one coke each to mix with the whisky.
We found a secluded stretch of the river and began our party. One coke each and 2 bottles of whiskey doesn’t work out too well. But after the first jolt, you don’t really care what it tastes like. Pretty soon we were chasing the wild range cows and rolling down a small hill like idiots.
Then we saw the tugboats pushing shell barges up the river about every 30 minutes. We decided to see who could swim out and get the closest to the tugs as they passed. It was pitch dark and the tugboats couldn’t see us… but every time one would come by, one of us would swim toward it. It was a rush to swim to it and then feel the prop wash suck you in toward it… about 30 feet from that monster your self survival instinct would kick in and you’d swim like hell to get away from it. I was 16 years old.
I had a girlfriend about then. Girlfriends require money to date. Wild Peach wasn’t the commerce capital of the world, but there was money to be made. Some of my ‘friends’ told me to go to a local egg farm and I could get a job. I drove up the driveway of this ‘Mom and Pop’ egg farm. About then a wild and crazy old man came running out of his horrible house, his wife behind him. “Git off my property, you bastard…git…git…git…”
I shouldn’t judge, but this man was without a doubt the ugliest man I have ever seen…he literally had thousands of huge blackheads on his face…and he had the meanest look I have ever seen. His wife was a bit calmer and asked me what I wanted. I said I just wanted a job. He lit into me again and said all boys were no good and wouldn’t work and he wouldn’t have one on his property. About then I realized my ‘buddies’ had set me up. Some of them had worked for him and spent more time behind the chicken coop smoking than working.
But they needed help…it was just the two of them…they had two large chicken houses and there was a lot to do.
I was hired. $1.00 an hour…
My main and primary job was to shovel chicken crap from under the chickens onto his old 1954 Chevy truck and drive it to the back of the property and un-shovel and repeat all day long.
Chicken shit never gets hard…it makes a horrible sludge that fills with squirmy things you don’t want to know about. As you shovel the stuff from under the coops, the chickens are going nuts with their squawking… I couldn’t eat eggs or chicken for 2 years.
On occasion I would get to go with the Mrs. into town to deliver eggs to the stores they supplied. That was the best part of the job.
But they paid me…$8.00 for 8 hours…and that would cover a date pretty good in 1965.
At the end of the summer I told them I had to go back to school… and these mean, cynical old people gave me the best compliment I have ever received… they said I had changed their mind about ‘young people’ and maybe not all of ‘them’ were bad…
I missed them after I left. I was 17 years old.

End of part 2