Beginning

That first little farm that Dad owned was a 160-acre strip along near the last road for quite a while, woods and swamps for a good ways from there. He was just getting going in farming, his brother had died and left it all to him. It was an interesting place, being a mile long and a quarter wide the terrain varied a good bit. There was a good hundred acres of workable land after he cleared about forty acres of forest. Another two dozen acres or so lay in an old riverbed, the river practically dried up and was just a little pond a few hundred yards long full of dead trees. Dad wanted to use it but it flooded any time there was a good rain so he built a levee around it. Had a fellow with a big dragline and dozer come out and spend a couple of weeks of his spare time building it, a good deal for both.

The place already had a levee along one side as the United States Army Corps of Engineers had many years before dug some big ditches in that area to make it drain better. You can still see them from the air, they run straight for miles with no curves and no variation in width. This one was close to a hundred feet wide and usually the water would be something less than ten feet deep. The levee had gaps so they were filled in and the new levee looped around the acreage to join the existing levee. We had a real nice ditch alongside the new levee and one where the road was raised about five feet or so.

The kid brother and I fooled around all over the farm when we weren't working or in school. We fished and hunted frogs and hunted squirrels and rabbits and killed a lot of snakes. Dunno how we didn't get snake-bit, running around barefoot most of the time, snakes all over the place. While we killed any snake we saw - not a good thing I know now but that's what country folk did then. Partly it was because there were a lot of venomous - poison we called them - serpents around. Cottonmouths in the wet places and their kissing cousins the copperheads on the high ground, and a fair number of rattlesnakes back them. People used to cut the rattlers off for souvenirs and some had some big ones. I suppose we were justified in killing chicken snakes since they ate chicken eggs. Once in a while one would get in the henhouse and ingest a few eggs and go to sleep so with the thing lying there with the half dozen eggs clearly where they shouldn't be it was going to die.

One way that always seemed to me a good way to get bit was frog-hunting. Tromping around at night in the edges of ponds and streams gigging frogs. More than once a guy would jab something with his clamp gig and hold it up to the light (some guys still used carbide lights) to find he had a snake. Never knew anyone to get bit that way though. I preferred an easier way. I'd get in a little boat and cruise along the ditches with a little .22 Winchester. Bolt action single shot, pocket full of .22 shorts that didn't make much noise. See a frog sitting on the bank, put one under his chin, he flops back on his back most of the time.

Illegal as all get-out, but I wasn't taking any chances. Only time a game warden almost caught me I was sitting in the boat talking to a couple of kids up on the bank. Had a half-dozen frogs in a bucket and the rifle across my knees. Game warden comes up and starts chatting with them, looks down and sees me in the ditch. Tells me to come up there, like I'm gonna do that. The boat was a lightweight ten-footer, felt like being in a beer can compared to most boats. Had a Ted Williams trolling motor, so I reached over and pressed the go button and off I went. The ground up on the levee was so rough the guy could only walk, and not very fast. I was about a half a mile from where the ditch joined the big government ditch. I kept going and eventually put in at one of several landings I used.

No cell phones back then so I had no idea what went on after I departed. When we met up later they said he wanted to know who I was and they said I was just some guy they'd never seen before. Today they'd be indicted for lying to a law enforcement officer, teenagers or not. I was just a teen, almost seventeen. The other kids were a couple years younger. If the game warden dude had known I was just a few hundred yards from where I lived...

That was the ditch along the levee protecting that lower acreage. The big government ditch I escaped into ran a long ways through some wild country. A few years later I was smoking marijuana occasionally and figured on growing some. Back then the seeds were in it and if you didn't take them out they would have mini-explosions in your joint. Marijuana grew well in that area, and a couple of guys I began to run with pretty regular smoked together regularly in high school and afterwards. Pot was going for one and a quarter a pound then, usually guys would go to Memphis or Jonesboro and get a pound, split it and keep one or two lids for personal use and sell the rest, clearing almost a hundred bucks a pound. Digression in 3,2,..

Charlie was a quiet little guy, kind of hung with whomever he happened to fall in with at any whenever. He was around some then, smoked a joint with us now and then. One day we were talking - someone or other had gotten busted for possession with intent to deliver - and he said he didn't deal and wouldn't have to worry about that. A hot-shot sheriff's deputy, dude named Jerry Dearing, looking to be sheriff was aggressively pursuing dealers. Used to run Steve in once in a while and try to get something on him. One night some dude, I didn't know him, came into town holding a pound. However it happened he got Charlie to give him a ride somewhere. With the dope. Deputy Dearing detained them, way Charlie and some others told it looked like a setup. Said the dope wasn't his, Charlie took the rap. Eight years.

Okey-dokey. I found a couple or three spots along the big ditch with a suitable clearing miles from the nearest human and accessible only by boat. Grew some nice plants there, carried them back to an old house I knew about. Unoccupied and uninhabited as the doors and windows were gone and it was covered up in vegetation. An attic was the perfect place to dry the weed, bag it and sell it for a hundred a pound. We did that for several years, until I enlisted in the Air Force and the guys were getting a little tired of it anyway. I had Miracle Whip jars full of cash, over forty thousand clams in 1970-something dollars in just a few years.

In my later years I developed the principles by which a man should live if he wants to be happy later in life. Not getting married is important but not the biggest. Here you go: (1) Get as much money as you can, any way you can without endangering your own life or liberty or harming innocent people and pinch every penny twice before you let go of it (2) Ninety-something percent of humanity sucks diseased donkey balls and you should never trust any of them for one second (3) the only person who cares about you is you. Take that last one however seems best.

These days prepping is the big thing among the non-sheeple. Turning as much of your money as you can into gold and silver is one of the most important. As I write this some bad things are on the horizon and that US currency is about to be worth even less that it is now. I believe when I had to dig those jars up and get the old bills changed for new ones silver was around five or six dollars an ounce. I began buying silver Eagles at six bucks apiece then - I was working in the bank and the banks would sell them in quantities as small as one - and long ago got all of my drug trafficking revenue into silver and gold.

I would have been violating one of my principles if I'd had them then - I definitely endangered my liberty. We were pretty careful though, cut-outs for deals, decoy cars when transporting, we were pretty well covered. As for causing harm to my fellow beings - innocent beings that is - people buying drugs aren't exactly innocent. And anyway marijuana is legal these days so presumably it wasn't harming anyone then. I never sold any other drugs and only used them a few times - they really are bad news. Anyway as I said I didn't have the principles then. A lot of things I did then I wouldn't do now, and the fact that I'm getting a little old for sex has... I certainly wouldn't screw a married woman or an underage one. OK?

Not a year after we stopped using the old house it burned down. There were always a few miscreants running around even then, and one night some of them burned it. I've burned a couple of houses that I owned because there was nothing in them worth salvaging and it was quicker and cheaper than tearing them down. But people like that are pretty sick. The main one did eventually go to prison for something else, so while the mills may grind slowly the grinding does eventually get done. I'm still waiting to see the outcome of a few but some have been satisfying to watch. What was it the guy said about enjoying some obituaries? I've enjoyed seeing news about certain people going to prison.

Aside from that I didn't have any special attachment to the place once we moved away. We kept the house and I used to stay out there sometimes, usually partying with a handful of friends. When I went into the Air Force Mom and Dad rented it out to some acquaintances cheap just to have someone take care of it. Eventually they sold the place. Some rich duck hunters from Memphis bought it and flooded the lowland making about a hundred acre lake. And that's about all for the old home place.