MAPLE CREEK MEMORIES XVII

UP THE BRANCH

Part I

You know I grew up in this old hollow. Didn't leave it until I was a freshman in college. And some of my most precious memories come out of here. Of course when I went to school at the local elementary, I had to walk out of this old hollow for six long years. And like all old men, I'll tell you right now that the spring rains were harder, the winters colder, the snows deeper, and everyone knows that the summer days were always hotter here in this hollow. "It was two miles over and three miles back," as Roger Miller told us, and uphill all the way, coming or going.

I parked my old truck down where the tavern used to be. It was torn down about thirty years ago while I was somewhere out west. The tavern was the drinking hole around these parts for as long as I can remember but I guess it just got to be too much for the community. Or maybe it got too expensive to run. Or maybe there were other places to go when it was closing down. I don't know. I wasn't around these parts then. But when I was a kid, I drank my first beer there. I was only thirteen or fourteen at the time but the guy sold it to us anyhow. I think the oldest one of us was only around seventeen or so. We'd go in there and drink Coke most of the time, and shoot pool. The pool room was off to the side of the tavern itself, in a separate room, and they let us play pool without having to be eighteen. At that time you had to be eighteen to buy beer or wine, and twenty-one to buy liquor. Usually my three brothers, a friend and me were the ones who played, and it wasn't very often at that.

We sure saw and heard some strange (to us) things while in there as kids. They used to have cabins out back in the field behind the tavern. I'll leave it to your imagination as to what may have gone on in those cabins, but I will tell you that one cabin was reserved for the gamblers in the area. The others were used for what you are probably imagining.

One time, I couldn't have been more than seven or eight I guess, they had a country music group come out from the city on three or four successive nights. They set up a stage on the creek bank across the field from the tavern to use for playing the music so the crowd would have a fairly large place to sit, stand or whatever. My memory fails me as to what the leader's name was, but my brother told me lately that it was Anderson, but that is not important. The group was made up of six or seven people who appeared regularly on the local radio station. Every evening they had some sort of game they got the kids involved in. The last night they were there, they were going to have a cracker eating contest. Somehow I got put up on stage along with three other kids about my age. The trick was that you had to eat eight or ten crackers and then whistle to win the game.

Of course, you didn't get anything to drink with those crackers until you had whistled. We all started eating those crackers, and I can tell you they were dry as toast. It was hard enough to chew them, dry and stale as they were, much less swallow. But I got it done and finally my mouth got enough spit back in it to let me get out a short whistle before any of the others. So I won. My prize was a small box of candy that you could buy at the store for less than a nickel. Big deal. Then as I was walking down the stairs off the stage, the emcee let the crowd in on the fact that I was the only one of the group that knew how to whistle--and then he gave them a bottle of pop to drink. But I didn't get any. All I got was that danged old box of candy. Can you say "upset?" But I managed to go around behind the stage and found their carton of pop and pulled one out and drank it, while they were busy singing and playing.

Later on, when I was in the ninth grade and after, we had a pickup baseball team. We played other pickup teams from around the area on a field next to the drive in down at Ferguson Ridge Road, or occasionally, at their fields, though usually at our field since it was a regulation field and didn't have stumps and wires and trees and crops to interfere. New baseballs were a little expensive for country boys, so we put out donation jars in all the local stores and the like. We got a pretty good response to our jars (and had fairly good crowds at our games), usually picking up three or four dollars a week at each jar each week. After buying a couple of new balls, we would generally have a few dollars left over, and we would spend it on playing pool or at other stores in the community. I guess we figured we needed to keep the local economy going.

Looking around here at the intersection of the hollow and the hard road I can see there have been a lot of changes, but some things seem never to change. And there on the hard road is the evidence. It looks like a vehicle pulled out of the hollow and was headed north toward Huntington, probably going slow, when a car came around the curve and couldn't get stopped in time to avoid a rear ender, then swerved right, into the ditch and up the side of the hill. I saw it happen at least once a year while I lived in this hollow, and I guess things just never change. At least this one hasn't in the last forty years.

The hollow road is different though. It is now asphalt with gravel along the sides. But not much gravel--not much asphalt either, from the looks of it--and the road is narrower than it used to be. The graders used to scrape the road before elections, and they graded it right over to the fence and to the top of the bank on the other side. Now it must be six or eight feet narrower than it used to be. Back then it was just sand rock, sand and mud. But it was one of the better roads the WPA put in, good drainage and lots of sand rock pounded into it for most of its' length anyway. The elementary school had been relocated up this hollow from out on the hard road after I moved away and the gravel only is along the side of the road up to where the entrance to it was located. The school was closed fifteen or so years ago and is now a community center. Past there, the road narrows even more as there is no gravel side and the scrapers don't come this way anymore.

Looking south from the intersection, I note that Frans' and Eds' place has been torn down and a new mansion has arisen from the dust of where it sat. Must be ten or more rooms in that new place, two story and a huge landscaped yard. Ed used to have a really nice place there, two story, frame, white, long driveway, tall cedars lining it, neatly kept lawn and beautiful flowering bushes around everywhere. Just a beautiful old farmhouse.

The new place looks good, but seems too modern. Plus, too many other buildings have been erected, like the old school building and some sort of garage-type building that is out of place. All the grass is gone, there is no paving, only old ugly dirt and gravel and lots of ruts. The nice small pasture where Ed kept his cow between the hollow and his house is gone, bulldozed over with nothing in it, just an ugly scar on the land.

And looking north, the field that served in my youth as a truck garden is now an equipment yard with heavy machinery in it. What a waste. You didn't even have to fertilize that field. The tomatoes just grew like crazy, and the potatoes and sweet potatoes, too. Squash, like everywhere, grew rampant on that field and the corn was great. Yellow and sweet, you didn't even have to cook it to eat it, it was that good. Now it's just weeds and rusting machinery that someone has abandoned here.

When I was a kid, Grandma and Grandpa rented the field for a few years. All of us kids helped set out the plants or seeds as the case was. We also hoed and weeded for them as they were getting rather old and Pa couldn't see much anyway. One year we had so many tomatoes that we couldn't eat them all, can them all or even give them away. We got into a tomato fight with each other and when we got home, we all looked like we were bleeding to death. Even our two old bachelor uncles were in on the fight. Thank God, they were, or we would probably have gotten some licks if they had not been as red as we were.

Here at the intersection is also where I had a fight with my best friend when I was in the sixth grade. The reason for the fight is no longer significant, only the fact that two really good friends could actually come to blows over some real or imagined wrong the other was doing. I am still glad that it didn't cause any long term problem between us.