I don’t remember what my brother, Pop, had done to me. Kicked me out of bed on a winter night, probably. Pop, Brother Dave and I slept in double bed in the “boys room” at our farm near Gadsden, Alabama, and sometimes Pop made me sleep on the floor. He was eight years older, so there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Or was there?
This is not Pop, or his car. But this is how he started it.
Pop had an old car — and I do mean old. I don’t remember the make or model, but I do remember he started it with a hand crank.
I decided to put nails under all four tires, back and front, so no matter which way he went all four tires would be punctured. And then I got to thinking about it and decided that would be too obvious. I’d get caught.
So I picked one tire. I propped nails against the front and back of the tire and covered them with dirt.
It worked. Payback! And he never suspected a thing.
For years we camped in the mountains of North Carolina, at Snowbird, in a three-sided shed, with a potbelly stove in the back and three racks on each side. On cold nights we hung a tarp across the front.
The skunk house, after Pop closed in the front and added a kitchen.
After a while Brother Pop and his friend, Dag Grady, and some others closed in the front, built an annex to the shed — a kitchen — and lugged a cast iron stove up there, a little over half a mile. Pop became the camp cook, a job he held for years.
“Eat it or wear it,” he would say.
We took turns doing dishes in a creek not far off. We did the best we could to keep stuff clean, but with no running water in the shed, that won’t easy.
If you came to Snowbird in those days most people understood that you had to lower your standards a little. If you didn’t think a fork or a plate was clean enough you just wiped it on your shirt and went on about your business.
But everybody didn’t always get the message. On one trip to the mountain there was this guy who was constantly on the lookout for germs, and Pop got a little tired of it.
Pop: “Eat it or wear it.”
My brother often bought venison to the mountain which he mixed with anything and everything, trying to get rid of it, I guess. One morning he made biscuits from scratch and he mixed tiny bits of venison into the dough.
A few minutes later the Germ Inspector came into his kitchen and stood there, watching. Pop took a spatula, picked a small piece of venison out of the dough, and flicked it onto the dirt floor. And then another one. And another, and then, almost under his breath, he said, “Damn rats!”
The Germ Inspector heard him, and the rest of us got to share a couple of extra biscuits that morning.
