Tag: Pop Stith

Three Strikes Is All You Get

Brother Pop had driven to Snowbird, oh, at least 100 times, but it didn’t matter.  He was lost. Instead of turning left at Big Y, about a mile from the cabin, and coming up the left  fork of Juanite Creek he kept on going straight, up the right fork of Juanite.

[Snowbird is in the mountains of North Carolina, pretty close to Tennessee, in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town, Robbinsville, population 620, is 22 miles away.]

Pop and two buddies had driven to the mountain from Gadsden, AL, in Pop’s Ford  Ranger, pulling a trailer loaded down with two ATVs. His buddies had also been to Snowbird many times.  How all three of them missed the turn I don’t know. 

Whoever was driving just kept on keeping on, up that old logging road, and the further they went the worse it got.  There were deep ruts in the road, deep enough to bury somebody, but they straddled them and kept on going.  There were 10, 12-feet tall trees growing in the road too —that was a another clue — but they just ran over them.

You would have thought that somebody, at some point, would have said, “You know what?  I think we’re going the wrong way.”  But nobody did.

My brother and his buddies didn’t figure it out until they just couldn’t go any further — the truck was surrounded by trees, broken behind them and standing tall in front and on both sides.  There was nothing to do now but turn around.

It was was raining a little, cold, and getting dark when the three men got out of Pop’s pickup and unloaded the two four-wheelers.  They couldn’t back the trailer down that road, no way, and turning the truck around was gonna be a drill.  They were in a fix.

They decided to try to make a little room to turn around by unhooking the trailer, pushing it backwards a little ways and over to the side. 

But they couldn’t unhook it.

The trailer was locked on the trailer hitch ball and they had left the trailer hitch key back in Gadsden.

No matter.  If they couldn’t take the trailer off the trailer hitch, they would take the trailer hitch off the truck — they would unbolt the hitch ball. 

But they couldn’t unbolt it.

They had left their toolbox in Alabama, too.

No matter. They decided to cut the trees blocking their way and carve out a place big enough to turn the truck around.

But they couldn’t turn it around.

Their chain saw wouldn’t start. 

Three strikes. Isn’t that all you get?

Postscript: Pop and his buddies called it a night, left the truck and trailer where they were, and rode their four-wheelers to the cabin. Next day a bunch of us went back with a wrench, took the ball off the hitch, and got that truck turned around.

NOTE: I was up at Snowbird earlier this month and I meant to take a picture of that so-called road. I’ll get one next time.

Coming Monday: The Nankoweap Trail: Don’t Look Down

Covered With Slop And Blood

It was my turn to slop the two hogs Dave and I fed –I was eight or nine years old, my brother was two and a half years older — and I had waited too long. There was still some light outside, but the barn was pitch black.

Without a flashlight I wouldn’t have been able to see anything.

The hogs were in a shed-like enclosure attached to the barn. There were several windows — openings, I guess, is more like it — in the barn wall next to the shed.

We raised hogs to eat. This is one of them, with my mother, Alice Cameron Stith.
We raised hogs to eat. This is one of the sows, with my mother, Alice Cameron Stith.

All I thought I had to do was lean out one of the openings and pour the slop in the trough below. But I couldn’t. The hogs had rooted the trough over to the other side of the pen. I was going to have to get in there with them.

I was late feeding them and the hogs, who could smell the slop, were going nuts. I was afraid of them, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t pour the slop on the ground.

I decided to sprinkle a little of it in their faces, drive them crazy, which would hold them at the first window. I’d leave my light there too, trained on the trough, while I slipped quietly down to the third window, jumped into the pen and ran to the trough with my bucket.  I’d pour the slop and be gone before the hogs knew I was in there with them.

That was my plan.

When I jumped I landed on a plow I had forgotten about –and couldn’t see– gashing my head above my left eye and knocking a small piece of bone out of my skull. I had slop and blood all over me and, moments later, hogs.

Postscript:  That was one of the few times I was taken to a doctor to get sewed up.  We didn’t go to the doctor much, most cuts were just bandaged. I slept in same bed with my two older brothers, Pop and Dave, and, that night, one of them accidentally hit me in the head and knocked the stitches out. A doctor closed the wound again, this time with metal clamps.

There’s still a small crevice in my skull above my left eye.

NOTE: I got my share of scars growing up, including one that was [accidentally] self-inflicted.

I had been warned not to run with an open knife in my hand — advice I ignored.

When I was 12 or 13 I was playing in the woods near the gold mine, at the end of Leigh Avenue in Charlotte, when I fell and stabbed myself in the left thigh.

I was more worried about the repercussions at home than I was about the wound.  So I didn’t tell.

I poured alcohol on the cut, taped it closed, and washed the blood out of my jeans. No one was the wiser. The small hole in my jeans – and the scar on my left thigh were never noticed.

Coming Monday: Everything Is Relative