Bunkhouse Bits of Bull

Bunkhouse Bits of BullByDavid “Buffalo Bill” Nelson


Moments ago I shined my flashlight into the coffee pot sitting atop a pile of lit-up logs to see if the coffee was ready. I dropped an old horseshoe into the pot and that piece of ferrous floated. Ah-ha, I smiled. It was strong enough and hot enough. I poured a tin cup full. It continued to boil while I walked the fifteen-feet over to my bunkhouse porch here and I sat down on my rocker sippin’ and thinkin’.
I do some of my best thinkin’ long before the sun comes up. I enjoy writing at this time of day as well. I don’t know why, but it’s just easier to make up lies in the dark. It doesn’t matter if it’s late at night around the fire or early in the morning like right now. I like the dark. And, I like to lie. Sometimes, however, the truth does seem to squirt out of my lips. This story is one of those rare moments of truth.
Now, the difference between a storyteller and a liar is a storyteller gets paid. I’m a professional storyteller and a cowboy poet. I am indeed, the Cowboy Poet Laureate of Tennessee. Several years ago our Governor and General Assembly honored me with that title. I figured they were impressed with my lies. Why, when I’m introduced anywhere in the country before my shows, the crowd hears I am the “The Biggest Liar in East Tennessee.” The name of my program is called “Cowboy Comedy Show.” Here’s a link to it. www.cowboycomedyshow.com
I’ll be entertaining some folks up there in my hometown of Dubuque, Iowa on August 6that a location called, “Happy’s Place.” Now, as they say here in Tennessee, “Let me axe ya something. Who couldn’t have fun at a spot named Happy’s Place?”
Speaking of fun, I had a darn, good time these past several days with a couple of old friends who stopped by for a visit. Trixie and I have known them for some thirty-five years or more. Years ago, Lynn and I worked together at an outpatient clinic in Florida where I was the administrator. That was my previous life when I was a physical therapist. Seems a million years ago. She was the best employee I ever knew during my forty-years as a therapist. She only made one bad judgment call in her entire life. That was when she married Merle. Now, that’s not true – but I had to throw a little barbed wire into the yarn here.
The last few nights Merle and I sat and told stories of our youth sitting around the campfire at night. Trust me, we weren’t drinking coffee. There we were, a couple old guys talkin’ places we had been and things that we had seen. Isn’t it funny how the older ya get, the better ya were? By the time we made our fourth trip each to the old horse trough to snag a beer buried in ice, a stranger would truly have admired us.
To hear tell it, we were the fastest, strongest and smartest kids in high school. We had the best cars, the prettiest girls and were the envy of our friends. As for me, half of what I say is a lie and the other half isn’t true.
Somehow or another, we got to talkin’ about toys. Smiles ran across our faces when toys like the hula-hoop, baseball and the slinky were mentioned. As I said before I grew up in town in Dubuque, Iowa. Merle was raised on a farm in the fear northwest corner of Minnesota near the borders of North Dakota and Canada.
In Dubuque you can’t drive five minutes without going up some hill. I even wrote a collection of short stories about my hometown and here in East Tennessee where I currently live. It’s titled, “If The Hills Could Talk.” In Merle’s area it was so flat you could stand on a can of tuna fish and see a hundred miles.
In addition to our Midwest roots, we have another thing in common. Some of our ancestors were from Scandinavian countries. Merle is Swedish and I am Norwegian. That fact, in itself, makes for bona fide reasons to tease one another. I reminded Merle of how the good folks in my area once tried to start a “Sons of Norway Club.” We couldn’t get enough people interested to join, so we allowed the Swedes to join us and we re-named the group. It’s called “The Sons-a-Bitches Club.”
So, back to the stories about toys. Merle lived some thirty-miles from town. He didn’t have access to toys at stores like I did. He had heard about them on the radio and seen ads for them in magazines that were kept in the outhouse.
When he saw the hula-hoop he knew right away he could make one himself. He tore apart a wooden barrel held together with metal rings. He said it was a might bit heavy to twirl one of those rings of steel around his hips, but he managed to have a little fun for five minutes. “I never did see what the big deal was with the hoopla hoop. I had to play with mine behind the barn because if any of my buddies saw me, well, they would not have been impressed.”
Sitting there by the fire, Merle drained the last of a beer, crushed his can and belched. “My favorite toy was the stick.”
I spit some of my beer to avoid choking and looked over at him. “A stick? Your favorite toy was a stick? What kind of stick? Was it the kind with branches used to cover your tracks on the dirt road like the bad guys did in the 1950’s Roy Rogers Show? Was it a stick shaped like a spear that Tarzan used?”
He popped the top off another beer and looked over at me through the smoke from the campfire. “Ya have to remember, we went to town maybe once a month when I was a kid. So all of us kids had to make our own toys. We had to make our own fun. I had all kids of toys for a while. They were all sticks. I kept them in a pile right inside the barn next to one of the milking stations. I used to fight my shadow on the barn wall with a stick I made to look like a pirate’s dagger. My shadow always won,” he cackled.
“I sharpened sticks to look like knives and threw them in into the dirt at targets I had scratched out with my foot. I had one stick that was like a spear. I threw it over and over out in the pasture like a javelin. I rolled an old tire into the yard and tried to see if I could get that spear to land inside that tire. I was always pretty good with eye and hand coordination.”
I put more logs on the fire, wiped smoke from my eyes and sat down. “I suppose next you’re going to tell me another toy was a rock,” I said as I chuckled.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I did use rocks for toys. I painted a series of round circles on the backside of the barn. You know, like a dartboard. I used piles of rocks to throw at my target like I was a pitcher on a baseball team. I kept that pile of rocks next to my sticks in the barn. In the winter I made snowballs with a rock inside each snowball and threw those at the target.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I yelled. “Why the rocks inside the snowballs?”
“The rocks packed inside the snowballs gave just enough weight to make it easy to throw at my target on the barn. I paced off the exact distance of sixty-feet and six-inches from me to the barn. That’s the distance from the pitcher’s mound to the home plate in baseball. I practiced pitching all four seasons up there in Minnesota.”
I furrowed my eyebrows and squinted my left eye. “What was the point? I can understand the boredom, but that sounds more like an obsession.”
“All that practice paid off for me. That’s how I received a scholarship to North Dakota State University to play baseball. I played all through high school as a pitcher and then pitched at the university.”
I nodded and knew he was not telling a lie. I had heard the story about his scholarship and knew he was a graduate from NDSU. Merle was an industrial arts teacher at a high school in a town where I once lived. He coached high school baseball for many years. Later in his career he went into administration and retired from education a long time ago.
It’s interesting that his son won the Golden Spike Award from the University of Georgia and was a pitcher for many years in professional baseball. Merle’s son is now a pitching coach for a major league baseball team that has won the World Series several times.
I sit here this morning in the dark and see the scene so clear in my mind. A little Swedish boy winding up and throwing rocks at a barn decades ago. I smile when I think that maybe, just maybe, Merle and his son owe their success in baseball to a pile of rocks.
The moments of silence after Merle’s story were broken when he stood and walked to the iced down beer. “You want another one?”
“You betcha,” I replied in my midwestern brogue.
The combination of two old friends meeting again in life, sitting by a campfire and drinking beer lends itself to story after story. “So, what was the best toy ya ever had?”
Merle put a plug of tobacco between his cheek and gums. “Without a doubt I thought it was going to be a Slinky. I begged the old man for extra chores so he’d buy one for me one Saturday we went into town. There was only one problem. We didn’t have any steps at the farmhouse. It was all one level.”
I choked, gagged and laughed. Yep, I stood bent over laughing at my moronic friend picturing him with a Slinky and no steps to play with the toy. “What did ya do with it then?”
“I set the toy on an anvil in the barn and looked at it. That’s all I could do. I touched and poked it. Nothing happened at all. I kept waiting for that Slinky to move. Years later, I blew the dust off and noticed how rust had collected on the coiled springs.”
Trixie and Lynn opened the house door to see what all the noise was about out by the fire. The howling from my laughter apparently could be heard inside the house.
My composure returned and I looked over at Merle. “Oh my gosh, that is too funny. Ya know, Merle ya can’t fix stupid.”
I don’t think we realize that great memories are being created as we pass through life. It’s only when we’re older that we reflect on days gone by and smile at such great times.
The sun is over the mountain now and time to end my story. Before I go, I want to say, “Thanks, Merle for the memories these past couple of days.”

Here are some links you may enjoy.
www.davidnelsonauthor.com
https://youtu.be/79f-fVyS3rE