Hillbilly Cogitations

skreidle recently published a link to the Ohio Department of Aging Great Depression Story Project.  In reading those stories, I was reminded of my teen years during the 50’s in the Missouri Ozarks.  We had been living a fairly comfortable existence in Overland Park, KS, when my father died.  My mother decided to move me and three younger brothers down to live in a three room cabin in the woods and we would all live on her Social Security check.

We had a living/dining room, a kitchen, and a bedroom.  In the bedroom, there was a standard size bed for mother and bunk beds for us four boys.  We had no TV, no phone, no indoor plumbing, and only a hand pump on the kitchen sink pumping water from a cistern for running water, although we did have electricity. If we wanted to make a phone call, we had to walk a quarter of a mile to a neighbor’s house, and use the crank phone there.  The water in the cistern always had a slight brown tinge and a taste of tannin from the oak leaves on the roofs that drained water into the cistern.

We lived on top of a bluff overlooking the Gasconade River, a truly beautiful spot.  In the spring, summer, and fall,  after breakfast, we boys would usually disappear into the woods and down to the river and be gone all day.  When it started to get dark, my mother would start to get worried and go out on a point of rock sticking out of the bluff and yell for us.

We always had enough to eat, but usually it was navy beans and cornbread; to this day, I can’t stand navy beans and cornbread.  Often today people will serve me cornbread thinking it is a treat.  I will choke down a few mouthfuls, but I can’t eat very much.  But sometimes my mother would fry up some bacon hard and then crumble it up and then put it in the mix for the cornbread.  This made it fairly acceptable.  Also, we never had any fresh milk; it was always powdered milk.  Cornmeal mush was a staple for breakfast.

The winters were rough.  The only source of heat in the house was the fireplace in the living room.  When we went to bed, we would bank the fire and then go through the kitchen into the bedroom.  It got pretty cold in the bedroom; often in the mornings we could see our breaths in the air.  We had a little dog, and we boys would argue over who got the dog that night.  There were some tomato juice cans that we boys could pee into during the night—and my mother had a chamber pot under her bed—but if you needed to do anything else, you had to get up, put some clothes on and trudge out to the outhouse.  The outhouse faced west, and if the wind was from the east it would come up under the outhouse and freeze your bottom.

My next younger brother and I were responsible for getting wood for the fireplace.  We would go out into the woods with a two-man crosscut saw and cut some wood.  The saw didn’t cut very well and jammed up in the cut often.  Sometimes we only came back with a day’s wood.  Later, a neighbor examining the saw said that the teeth didn’t have any “set.”

In the winter, I had to leave to go to high school in the dark, and it was dark when I got home.  My mother said she felt sorry for me.  I had to walk about 1.25 miles to the bus pickup point.  Other kids waited there also, and sometimes we built a fire to stay warm until the bus got there.  The bus was a 1947 International Harvester and vibrated like crazy.  I always felt like the vibration was good for me, like a massage.  The bus ride was an hour and a half; I won’t go into the stuff that happened on the bus.  Then I got to high school and my class of 45.  I never felt that I was bad off, but I saw some of my classmates that I felt sorry for.

Here’s Sister when I first saw her.

As I was driving home from the animal shelter, I was trying to think of a name for her.  My brain wasn’t working very well, and all I could come up with was Sister Mary Elephant of Cheech and Chong fame.


Last January when I left to go to town, all six dogs were standing in front of the garage watching me leave.  When I got back, there were only five dogs.  I never saw or heard anything of Sister again despite papering the two nearest towns with posters and many other efforts.


Sister was about a year old when she disappeared.  She appeared to be a mix of Yellow Lab and German Shepherd, and she grew to be a big, beautiful dog.  She had zero aggression either to humans or other animals.  She sometimes wanted very badly to play with Freda, my older German Shepherd mix dog.  Freda didn’t want to play and would snarl and act aggressive toward Sister.  Sister would act submissive in front but would be upright in back.  It was hilarious to see her galumphing around with her front end on the floor and her back end in the air.


Here are some more pictures of Sister.

Sister had a collar with tags when she disappeared and was chipped.  She was such a beautiful and nice dog, that someone may have stolen her.  That’s my only hope:  that sometime a vet will read the chip and I’ll be notified.  That’s why this eulogy is labeled tentative,


I lost two dogs in January.  I'm still not over it.

I believe it was in the late winter of 2004, and my wife and I were in the process of moving from Albuquerque to the south-central Missouri Ozarks.  I was driving along a back road and saw a little pile of black puppies at the side of the road.  I thought that was pretty weird, and determined that I would stop and investigate if they were still there when I came back.  However, they were gone when I returned that way.

A couple of days later, we were driving on that same road where it crossed Clifty Creek, and came upon a car parked at the side of the road with a woman beside it.  We stopped and asked if she needed help, and she said that a mother dog had been moving her puppies around to keep the coyotes from getting them, had put them on too steep a hillside, and the puppies rolled down to the bottom.  (The mother dog was a stray that nobody owned but was fed at a nearby trailer.)  The woman and her daughter had rescued two of the puppies, and there was at least one more, but nobody could get to it.  My wife said, “We’ll take the male, and you can have the female.”  And that was how “Clifty” came into our lives.  Without our intervention, he would have been a starving, worm-ridden meal for a coyote in a couple of days.

I had to go back to Albuquerque, but my wife stayed there, and Clifty’s first weeks were spent mostly inside my wife’s coat.  We didn’t get a picture of him at that time, but here’s a picture of him a little older and one a little older than that.  We couldn’t figure out if his ears were going to stand up, but, eventually, stand up they  did.

Clifty grew into a big, black, beautiful, very-intelligent dog.  I always said that he was more like a partner than a pet.  He loved to go for rides and would sit in the passenger seat and calmly watch out the window.  When my wife was along, he would sometimes sit half on her lap.  We would point out animals to him as we drove along (“cows,” “horses,” “goats”) and he would look at them and watch until they were out of sight.

His tail had feathers on the bottom, and whenever I said his name or touched him, his tail would start slowly wagging.  He would sit in front of me and stare at me with his big intelligent eyes.  When I would talk to him—other than saying something like, “Good dog”-- his eyes would sharpen and he would tilt his head, trying as hard as he could to understand what I was saying.  And, once in a while, he WOULD understand.  If some dogs have souls—and I think they do—then Clifty had a good one.  But he still had his doggie instincts, and I think those were his downfall.

Clifty seemed to think it was his job to sleep on the big bed with us.  Only sometimes when it was pretty hot would he get down to sleep on the floor.  Bur I'll never forget, when I was lying in bed trying to sleep, being able to reach over and lay my hand on Clifty.  Sleep came soon after.  His origins were humble, but Clifty was a wonderful dog and a wonderful companion.  My wife and I will miss him terribly.