What I Learned From Rufous

 

                                                            Large Camouflaged copperhead

Rufous Still must have been in his late sixties or early seventies when I met him. I expect he was born around 1900 or just a few years later.   I was the head naturalist for the state park system in Arkansas, assigned the task of setting up interpretive nature programs in several of the state’s parks.  The best state park of them all was the one on the Buffalo River called Buffalo Point and Rufous worked there.  

He lived a few miles away and had spent his whole life in that beautiful Buffalo River country, and truthfully he was likely the most important person in that big state park because he could do about anything that required a little common sense and he was a treasure trove of information for me about the north Arkansas Ozarks and the creatures and the people who lived there.

Rufous and I had many long talks about the Ozarks and the Buffalo. One of the things he talked about was venomous snakes, and the problems they caused for mountain people who had no doctors within reach, no anti-venin. Rufous said that he remembered that death from snakebite was not unusual in his youth, that he remembered many people dying or becoming maimed by a lost hand or foot, or a limb that never functioned properly for the rest of a person’s life. 

Rufous said the worst time to be in the woods in Arkansas, if you were worried about timber rattlers, was September and October.  In years to come I found out he was right. I know how the book-trained naturalists tell you that if you will just not bother a venomous snake, you have nothing to worry about.  Rufous told me that most everyone he knew when he was young who were bitten by poisonous snakes were not making any effort to disturb them…  most just didn’t know they were there.  He recalled people going into their cellar being bitten by copperheads, small children playing barefoot around the old cabins where they lived, wood-cutters trying to get a store of firewood cut in late summer and country folks on their way to their privy on a late summer night.  He said he remembered a lady who lived alone being bitten in her old cabin by a copperhead that found a way to get under her bed.  

        He said that if you were bitten by a copperhead you certainly seemed to have a better chance than if you were bitten by a timber rattler or cottonmouth.  The best possible treatment back then was just what they tell you not to do today.  You took a very sharp knife just as soon as possible, cut into both fang marks and sucked out all the blood you could, knowing you had a chance to remove much of the venom if you did it in a hurry.   Rufous said there wasn’t a doubt in the world that worked on many occasions, but it had to be done quickly, not an hour later. He said people who had chickens would kill and cut open a chicken and try to wrap the opened carcass around the bite location, wrapping it with rags, tightly on the arm or leg.  It was also commonly though that you could draw out venom with rags soaked in coal oil and placed on the bite.
        When you hear self-proclaimed naturalists who have spent more time in a never fatal, they have no sense of history, and they just haven’t been ‘out there’ enough.  Our conservation department here in Missouri had a website and a printed pamphlet saying that no one in this state has ever died from a snakebite. A camper at Sam a. Baker State Park died from a copperhead bite three summers ago, and it may have been because he read that pamphlet and was just slow to get medical attention.   Common sense asks anyone, why should a copperhead in my lawn be protected by law, while no laws protect red wasps, brown recluse spiders, black widow spiders or scorpions?   On the first day of August, I killed a 28-inch copperhead in my garden, about 30 yards from my front porch.  Every year I kill a couple, up here on this wooded ridgetop where I live.  

I am a naturalist who grew up in the outdoors and then worked for a salary as an interpretive naturalist for more than a dozen years in two states.  Many, many times I came across venomous snakes out in the wilderness of Arkansas while working, studying wild areas for the State Heritage Commission. In those wilderness places, where they were no threat to humans I didn’t kill any of them. Those places were their natural habitat, and I wasn’t there to change anything, but instead to study and report what was there.  But when I and other naturalists were working on new trails for the State Park Department and we came across copperheads, cottonmouths, or rattlesnakes we dispatched of them because we didn’t have time to catch them and transfer them to some far away place, and they represented a very real threat to hikers who would use those trails.

Rufous and the old-time Ozarkians in his Buffalo River community had what the world lacks today… common sense.  And every time I hear someone remind people that it is illegal to kill any snake, and that they are not ever aggressive or dangerous, I wish I could tell them about the times I have seen just the opposite. I would like to have them on an Ozark river in August and show them the temperament of a cottonmouth. 

Remember that from mid-August into early October, all snakes, which are cold- blooded creatures, seek out warm places as cool nights come on.  In the dusk or dark, be careful on concrete or paved driveways, on gravel bars or rock ledges, where the warmth of a hot day is stored into the coolness of the night.  If you live in the country, as I do, don’t leave a basement door open.  Seeing a copperhead or cottonmouth first is your best defense, so be aware.  

Too Soon Old

 

Grandpa McNew and me - 1953

    My maternal grandparents, Bert and Hilda McNew, had a little farm out southeast of Houston, Mo a few miles. I was born in their old farmhouse. They were wonderful people whom I dearly loved.

    Scratching out a living with a few milk cows and chickens and a hog or two was a difficult thing in those days, so Grandma sold some eggs and milk and butter, tended a big garden and canned and sewed a lot. Grandpa did a little work on the side when he could find it. One of the things he did for a while was pick up trash from businesses along Main Street to haul to the city dump in his old faded 1940’s era red Chevy pickup. 

    When I was only five or six years old I would go with him on Saturday mornings, and it was a wonderful thing to go through that trash as he raked it from the bed of his old truck into the city trash dump three miles south of town. Grandma always wanted him to look for jars she could use for canning, and I would look for comic books and magazines. There were a bunch of them, and they always had the top few inches cut off of the cover. I guess the stores had to do that to prove they hadn’t sold them, and that’s the way I came across my first outdoor magazines, which fascinated me. 

    But one day I found a little oblong wooden plaque, obviously cut out of a small pine tree, with the phrase printed on it, “Ve get too soon old, and too late smart.”

    I clung to it like a valuable prize, and wrapped it up and gave it too my dad on Father’s Day. It was the first gift I ever gave anyone and I was tremendously proud of it. For a while Dad hung it in the kitchen, and it seemed everyone was amused by it. Dad said it was advice he could use.

    In time of course I forgot all about it, and recently, going through Mom and Dad’s photos and things after they had passed away, I came across so many old things I had forgotten. And there was that little plaque in the bottom of a box! 

    As I held it in my hands, it brought me back to that time long ago when I rode in town with Grandpa, looking so forward to driving down the alley with him, behind the Main Street businesses, to load up and haul off someone else’s refuse. And it was a time when I realized that someone’s trash could be someone else’s treasure.

    But the words of that old plaque had such an impact on me now… “Ve get too soon old and too late smart”. My gosh, there is so much truth in that. 

    I wish I could go back and do things differently. I wish I had gotten smart long before I got old. Well I’m still not all that smart! But one thing I remember well was the words from old Bill Stalder, who listened to me late one summer evening about July of 1950, going on about how I couldn’t wait until duck season came and I could hunt ducks on the Piney with Dad.

    “Don’t wish your life away, boy,” Ol’ Bill said with a sad and solemn look, remembering I am sure, his own youth. “It ain’t tomorrow that overtakes a man, it is the years beyond it.”

    He told me to enjoy each day, and use it to accomplish something. For a man with almost no education, it was wisdom way beyond my years. I learned, there in that pool hall my Dad and Grandpa McNew had acquired when I was only 10 years old, that there is a big difference in possessing intelligence and gaining wisdom. If only I could go back to my boyhood I would indeed grow too soon old, as I have done. But I would not grow too late smart.

 

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In closing, I can vaguely remember a time when I was a little boy on my grandparent’s farm, and my grandmother told me she once had a small container of prunes, which had become moldy! She said she threw them out the back door by an old revolving-blade lawn mower, the kind you had to power as you pushed it. A blue- jay landed on that mower handle and eyed those prunes and finally flew down to pick one up. He flew up on the lawn mower handle and struggled to eat it, but he finally got it down. Over an hour or so, he must have flown down to retrieve five or six of those moldy prunes, and ate every one. 

When they were finally gone, he sat there awhile and then finally tried to fly off to the adjacent apple orchard. He only made it a few yards, and then he fluttered to the ground and died. Grandma told me I should learn a lesson from that. “Don’t go flying off the handle,” she said, “when you are full of prunes!” 

I did a lot of that flying off the handle when I got older. Wish I’d have listened closer to my grandmother.  But, I got too late smart!

 

LIFE AND POETRY

 

         It dawned on me recently that the way to know if your life has been a success is by being able to hire someone to mow your lawn when you have become too old to do it yourself.  You cannot be a failure if you have a lawn to look at and a porch to sit on while you watch some neighborhood kid mow it for only ten dollars.  But you are a big-time success in life if you can talk him into mowing it for five.  

My dad never had much money because my mom had things to do with it before he got it, and he had to pay my sisters a quarter apiece each week just to be good.  It was hard even then, to make them be good for a quarter.  He never paid me anything, and bragged often to his friends that I was good for nothing.

 

It is awful when a poem-making compulsion plays over into your daily life. I myself have been into poetry since I learned to write and as I go through my daily life I make up short poems for the situation. I stopped in a café the other morning to have breakfast, and the poor lady waitress, who had the demeanor of a lady who had too many old timers telling her jokes that week, asked me what I wanted. I told her I wanted bacon and 3 eggs.  She asked how I wanted them cooked.  I told her I would like them even better that way!  She didn’t even smile so I added a poem in good humor,  “If my bacon is all floppy, it won’t make me very hoppy, and if my eggs are soft and runny, you won’t get any money.”  She just looked at me as if bored, and walked away with my order.  Later when I got ready to leave her a quarter for a tip, I asked her what she thought of my poetry. With a bored look on her face she answered in prose… “Men look really weird, when they have egg yolk in their beard!”         

 

Since I am from the Ozarks, and growing older a great deal quicker than I once did, I do not like to be told what to do by some machine.  I put my debit card in a gas pump the other day and it told me to remove it quickly.  Well I didn’t and I’ll be darned if I will do anything a machine tells me to.  I removed my card at my own pace until I couldn’t get the gas pump to give me any gas, so then I sped it up a little.  But every time I go there, I take my card out of my billfold really slow, and put it back my billfold real slow, hoping that machine is watching.

Actually I have lived all of my life without credit cards, but I have one now because the bank told me they would give me two and one-half percent interest on the money I have in a checking account, if I would take something they call a ‘debit card’ and use it only ten times in a month.  I got to figuring… if I maintain somewhere between 100 and 200 dollars a month in my checking account, which is what I have had on occasion when times are good, that interest comes to almost a dollar every couple of months.  It is hard to turn down a free dollar when you have grown up in the Ozarks.  

 

I am having that big “sell everything I have got” sale up here on Lightnin’ Ridge this fall. It was scheduled for September 26 but the heat worries me so I am rescheduling it for Saturday, October 24. If it rains I will have it a week later on October 31.  So mark that on your calendar.  If you want a list of everything that will be sold that day, let me know via email lightninridge47@gmail.com, or send me a mailing address. My address is P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.  In a month or so I will post all that on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors.  Mostly it is boats and trailers and fishing and hunting gear and wildlife art and hundreds of antique outdoor magazines.  There is a lot of stuff I have used and accumulated over the years of my life that I have no one to leave it too. The real prize is some of my grandfather’s sassafras paddles he carved before I was born and a couple of his old guns. My age and health have convinced me I won’t be using much of it in the future, and I can’t take it with me when I leave to go float heaven’s rivers with my dad and uncle Norten.  I can imagine someone in the future saying, “This fishing lure is one used once by that outdoor writer, Larry Dablemont.”  And someone else saying, “Who the heck was he?”

 

Bullfrogs in the Snow

 

         Bullfrog season is open!  I might go down to my pond soon and grab a couple to eat. Usually, when you read a natural history account, it discusses the basic things you find in a nature book of some type, like when the bird or animal migrates or hibernates, how many young it has, and what it eats.  People who write such things often live in a town or city and get their information from a book someone else wrote long ago.  When  I was a kid I read where bullfrogs lay about five or six thousand eggs and I set out to see if that was correct.  I found a big bunch of frog eggs in a little backwater slough and began to count them, and I was up around four or five hundred when something distracted me, so I never did get a completed count.  I have decided to go with what the book says.  

         I can say for sure that tadpoles hatch from the eggs and begin, in time to sprout legs and slowly, throughout the course of the summer, become a small bullfrog.  The book says that in about two years, that little frog will be a full grown, eating-size bullfrog about 5 inches long.  It says that bullfrogs only get to be about 6- or 7-inches long, and I don't buy that at all.  I know I have caught some that were 8 or 9 inches long and 18 inches long with their legs stretched out.  

         Ol' Bill Stalder, down at the pool hall when I was a kid, said he had seen 'em 24- inches long when he was younger, and I can tell you that Ol' Bill knew more about river critters than whoever wrote those books.  You remember seeing that picture of the heron trying to swallow a bullfrog, and the bullfrog hanging out the big birds beak with it's front feet wrapped around the heron's neck trying to choke it to death...?  Well Ol' Bill actually seen something like that happen once.

Bullfrog eating a fish
       I know from studying bullfrogs on my own that they will eat about anything they can, and they eat both at night and during the daytime.  I never recall ever seeing one asleep; never saw one that wouldn't eat whenever the opportunity presented itself.   They really can unroll that tongue out there and nail an insect before them, and they can also swim up to a crawdad under water and eat it too.  I imagine they prefer crawdads to about anything when they can get them, but then, a pond bullfrog which has no crawdads in his pond has to settle for insects or small fish or small snakes.  A bullfrog is a little like some of my relatives on my mother's side, he will eat whatever he can get, whatever
comes along that looks capable of being swallowed.

         Bullfrogs usually fatten up and hibernate in the muck or mud somewhere, and that is to me one of the most amazing things when you think of it.  They just sense when it is time to burrow in somewhere and when spring comes along they wake up and get back to a normal life.  Think about that this Christmas when there's about a foot of snow on the ground.... down at the river, there are dozens of bullfrogs snoozing away in a foot or so of frozen mud, not breathing or eating, with about one heartbeat every three days.

         From my own experiences with bullfrogs, without consulting the books, they are very prolific, lead a fairly boring life, miss the whole winter sleeping but stay awake all summer, can jump the full length of a johnboat, eat almost everything that is smaller than they are and feed almost everything larger than they are including me. Their deep bellowing call adds a great deal to an Ozark river on a summer night.  It wouldn't be the same without them.

         I was watching one of those nature shows from the British Broadcasting channel and actually saw this or I wouldn’t believe it either. They showed big bullfrogs in the French Alps, which is where my ancestors came from, poking their heads up out of a snow bank in the spring, coming out of hibernation.  There were a dozen or so of them and they emerged to slide down a hillside of snow and into a small pool of freezing water.  They seemed to enjoy that slide over the snow.  Watching slick, wet bullfrogs sliding several hundred yards down a snow covered hillside was a jaw-dropping experience for a naturalist like me that thought he knew everything about bull-frogs.  Even Ol’ Bill Stalder wouldn’t have believed that.

 

         Read my future columns and back columns on the computer under larrydablemontoutdoors.  See my books and magazines at www.larrydablemont.com

 

A Floater From the Fifties

 

         I tried my best to create a Big Piney River museum and Nature Center near my hometown of Houston Missouri.  But it was not to be and now I have to empty it in hopes that someone else can take over and use that building, there in a beautiful, wooded setting a mile south of town, for something useful and lasting.  It could have been something great with all the Big Piney artifacts I have from 100 to 60 years ago.  I planned all kind of exhibits and a Big Piney aquarium filled with river creatures. I thought God wanted me to do it but I know that sometimes I have tackled things I thought God wanted me to accomplish when it wasn’t His idea at all, but just a product of my own misguided enthusiasm.

          It was all something I had done before with great success, in the 1970’s when I was Chief Naturalist for Arkansas, working on those nature center projects in State Parks.  Trouble is, when I started thinking about a Big Piney Nature Center I was in my sixties.  In Arkansas I did all that back then I was only 20-some.  I didn’t realize, ten years ago how quickly I would start approaching 80, and I was stupid enough to believe I was still going to be feeling young enough to make it all work despite health problems that would come my way due to my age.

 

        So here I am with a pair of old antique johnboats that I have to do something with.  In the 1980’s I built a wooden johnboat 15-feet long that is a duplicate of the ones my dad and granddad built for the Piney and Gasconade rivers between 1920 and 1970. For many years that boat I built was on display at the Jim Gaston White River Museum.  Now it is a good old antique, with the paint wearing off and the wood deteriorating.  It will be great for a display in a museum or old country store or perhaps one of the Ozark river resorts.

         The best part is, I will give it away to someone who wants to come and take it. I also will give away two display cabinets, one that is 8 feet long and made from Ozark walnut.  Both need glass tops but I couldn’t get that done.  A lady at the local glass company said they were too busy to mess with it.  Again, I will give all of this away plus some other items too numerous to mention.  I can provide pictures of the old wooden boat and display cabinets.

         Many springs ago I was hunting turkeys at a ladies ranch in the Ozarks when she showed me an old aluminum johnboat her late husband had bought that was made for the old-time Missouri Conservation Commission in 1950.  I noticed that the serial number was 0001 so I started investigating and found that it was made in Richmond MO by a fellow named Appleby. Mr. Appleby had come to my grandfather’s home on the Big Piney to watch him make wooden johnboats. He then decided to try to make one out of aluminum that was much longer, for the MCC to use on the Current and the Gasconade Rivers.  

         I was so fascinated by it that I bought it and the custom-made trailer and the little 3-horse Mercury motor that was on it.  It is on display now at that Big Piney nature center I built, but will be removed shortly.  I paddled it down two or three Ozark rivers that would accommodate its 20-foot length. It is just like the old White River johnboats from the days of Jim Owen and Charlie Barnes, the men from Branson who made Ozark float fishing famous in the early years of the last century.

           Appleby went on to establish an aluminum boat company named the Richline-Appleby Company at Lebanon, Mo.  He had a daughter named Diana Lowe, who took over the boat company after she was married.  Her son Derrick created a branch of the Lowe Company called Generation Three Boats.  I have a custom-made hard-topped camping-pontoon boat that Derrick put together for me in 1988, and a Lowe Paddle-Jon river boat made in 1969, which nearly duplicates my grandfathers wooden boats.  In the ‘70s and ‘80s I used a half dozen aluminum Lowe lake-boats and got to know Diana and Derrick. Just last week I visited the Marine Center in Joplin Missouri (which I believe is the best boat company in the Ozarks) and there were a bunch of new Lowe boats of all sizes.  May the company last forever!  

         See the first boat Mr. Appleby made in 1950, my camping boat and some of the other Lowe boats I owned years back on my internet site … larrydablemontoutdoors.

 

Pork Rinds and Blackberries

    There have been many innovations since the use of the first fishing lures, including the advent of the many varieties of pork-rind. Probably the use of pork-rinds all came about when some old-timer couldn’t find any fishin’ worms, and turned as a last resort to a strip of thin-sliced bacon. My uncle, an old time fishing guide, swore that the most effective lure in Ozark reservoirs over all seasons was a large jig with a long, slender port-rind eel. Leave that eel off, he told me, and the effectiveness of the jig is reduced considerably. He told about landing a ten-pound bass from Table Rock after the hook pulled free in the last foot or so. The fish fell to a tough pork-rind eel wrapped around the bony structure beneath the gill.

    Fishing with him years ago on the War Eagle River in northwest Arkansas, I watched him cut a two-inch long razor-thin strip of white pork-rind to adorn the rear treble of a Flatfish lure. Using a similar deep-running wobbling crankbait, I came up with the idea of two thin strips on two of the three rear hooks. With the lure wobbling through the water, those strips looked like tiny white legs whipping and flagellating behind the lure.

    I caught several nice Kentucky and largemouth that day and took the same procedure to Bull Shoals Lake to experience success there. In mid-summer a year or so later, I used the same set-up  on a Wiggle-Wart lure to tempt a pair of big smallmouth from an Ozark stream. Almost any deep-running, wobbling lure becomes twice as effective with one or two thin strips of pork rind on rear hooks.

    Such thin strips are a favorite too of experienced fly fishermen. At times nothing more is needed for panfish, trout and bass. Fishing the Big Piney as a boy, I was taught by my dad to use small white fly-strip rind, about ¼ inch wide and two to three inches long on a small spinner and jig. We would split the tail of the pork-rind, and the combination was more effective against smallmouth on that little “Shimmy-fly”, than any other lure.

    Now there are so many types and colors of frog chunks and rind available that you can’t get them all in your tackle box. But it you had nothing else to fish with, the pork-rind baits would allow you to catch fish almost any time, anywhere.

Black Raspberries

    Ol’ dad would just as soon never see another blackberry thicket. In boyhood days back in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, cousins Dave, Darb, Butch and I picked enough blackberries to fill a dump truck. We were forced into the thickets by cruel mothers who saw such outings as social occasions, and canned more blackberries than the fruit cellar would hold.

    Back then I didn’t eat many blackberries. A couple of old men in the pool hall said that eating raw blackberries caused appendicitis because of the seeds. I swore back then that when, and if I ever grew up, I’d never be caught in a blackberry patch…unless it was the dead of winter and I was hunting rabbits or quail.  But I loved the blackberry pie my daughter Christy baked for me over the Fourth of July weekend. I didn’t have to pick any, just eat the pie.  Therefore I got no chiggers!

    I only knew one blackberry picker who wasn’t bothered by chiggers. His name was George Halley and George was a professional. He picked blackberries all summer and sold them door-to-door to folks in our rural community. My cousins and I looked up to George. He didn’t take baths, or make his bed, or have a regular job and we figured he had to be the bravest man in the world to wade through a blackberry thicket looking only for berries and no snakes.

    He sometimes traded blackberries for home brew, which was one of the local farm products in Big Piney country at that time. Uncle Roy the father of Butch, Dave and Darb   made some hisself.  Us boys I talked it over an decided that it was the home brew that kept George from being over run by ticks and chiggers, so Butch got a sneaked a pint jar of it from his dads cellar and we medicated ourselves with it. It’s been years, but I can tell you from clear memory that if home brew in the blood won’t kill ticks and chiggers, nothing will!

    That experience with alcohol may be the reason I have drink nothing stronger than ice tea and lemonade my whole life-long. In the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder if less fortunate souls may not have been steered toward alcoholism by thoughtless mothers bent on hording blackberries.

    I have two computer sites now, one is ‘larrydablemontoutdoors’, which carries my columns and photos, and the other is ‘larrydablemont.com’ which shows all my books and magazines which you may order.

 

 

I Am Serious...Wasn't Lying

 

            One of my readers told me recently that he thought my newspaper column last year about how I love to eat the buds of those orange day-lilies, which are thicker in the summer than thorns on a locust, was all a tongue in cheek effort to try to get gullible folks to do something silly.  But people, I am as serious as three-day blizzard when I say that those buds, cut just before they bloom, are delicious.

            He remembered the column I wrote telling folks I had envelopes filled with nearly invisible morel mushroom seeds for sale for a five dollars each and the one where I said that raw gizzard shad soaked in catsup tasted just like sardines.  I regret those feeble attempts at humor but that’s the truth about day-lily buds.  Sautee them like asparagus or roll them in eggs and flour and fry them and you will be amazed how good they are. In fact they have been called ‘poor man’s asparagus’.  They grow all over my place here on Lightnin’ Ridge and I like them so much that hardly any ever get to bloom!  Don’t take my word for it, ask someone who is honest and trustworthy!!!