This episode of our View Of Life In The South, covers a few activities we had around Thanksgiving. We'll cover our family tradition of seasonal apple picking, the local past-time of "brush hogging", Thanksgiving 2010, and a trip to see a reenactment of the 148 anniversary of the Civil War battle at Prarie Grove, Arkansas.
There are no photos of apple picking because, apparently self-pickin is not something people do down here. Maybe we're spoiled by places like Apple Holler in Wisconsin where your kids can pet a goat (watch your fingers Nora), see bees in a hive exhibit, take a hayride, pick 30 varieties of apples, eat a pie or bring out a few beers and have a picinic. The apples down here are not much to write home about. With the exception of one variety, the Arkansas Black, most could only be considered no better than a horse-apple. It's got a tough skin, and as a result, is considered a peeling apple, and has an old-timey spicy taste. The only story to come out of the trip was that we drove for about 1 1/2 hrs to get to the orchard near the border of Missouri, but the GPS directed us to the address of the apple picker's ratty meth trailer in the middle of a cow pasture. I'm not kidding. Jacqui insisted that we continue to follow the GPS off the main road, down a dirt trail past 20 mamma cows and their calfs. I finally decided to turn around in a field so we wouldn't get shot as cow poachers, or meth-lab trespassers. If you have seen the movie Winter's Bone ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0khRUfTfPM ), which featured life in the area, you probably know what I'm talking about.
I don't have much to say about brush hoggin, aka bush hoggin. In the south, it seems that you can add the term "hoggin" to almost anything to give the impression of it being more intense. Like, "catfish hoggin" where you go fishing for ... catfish...with your bare hands...by thrusting your hand into an underwater hole in a riverbank and hopefully don't get bit by a croc, or a snake, or snapping turtle. Brush hoggin is driving a type of tractor into heavy brush that probably may contain bees, snakes, birds, deer or some combination of all of that. It makes a racket, all that stuff comes flying out, and you'd better have a few beers "cause this job's gotta git done".
We took a road trip to St. Louis to visit Jacqui's cousins and celebrate Thanksgiving ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ujt7n64NkRg ). Had a good time, Jack got to go in a "bouncy house" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voHw1QFhQ7c) , and we ate some great food. Everybody's got their own holiday cooking mishap story, and this year we did too. Somehow, the oven got shut off, leaving the Turkey pretty raw when we took it out to carve. Put it back in for about 2hrs at around 400 and it came out great.
The fall season of sailing is over, frostbite sailing season starts next week. Here's a link to a video of our last race on the J24 named Jaded with Captain Jimmie ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SI9vHrn-TQc ) and our crew. We won, and as a result took first place over-all for the fall season.
Then, there's Prarie Grove Battlefield. I went to the 148th anniversary reenactment of the Civil War battle. In a word - Awesome! The first thing you see when you pull into the parking area is a huge tent city holding a few thousand guys. These guys camped out in old-time white cotton tents, in December! The first guy I came across was too hungover to participate in the battle.
He said there were some hijinks in the night after they passed around the moonshine (real shine in a jug). He said the yankees snuck into camp and stole some wood, so they went over and knocked down some tents.
Then I saw some guys from the 12th Texas regiment doing drills. Some of these guys take it very seriously, staying in character, talking in old-timey accents, but then there are some other guys that seem to be having some fun with it see my video( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtJqoPXBoY4) . So when I asked a group of them "where do we go to get the yankee costumes" I was surprised that they took some offense. I learned the gear is called a "kit", "you gotta bring it with you", and most of these guys lost a some family members in the war. So, no surprise I guess, that they sent me on a 1hour walk in the wrong direction, through the woods, to find the Yankee camp. After I figured that out, I changed direction, and came across this "old sawbones" guy .
He was portraying a field medic. There were a couple of people there talking to him and he was telling a story about how they treated venereal disease among the troops. He said they heated this very thin silver wire then threaded it up the ureathra wiggling it and rotating it around and yanking it out to "pull out the mucus and pustuals". It got very quiet and uncomfortable at the edge of the forest there. He started to rearrange his leech boxes and horsehair sutures and a few people walked away, and I'm struggling so I said "so, did you ahh, .... is there a, ahhh, ummm, Was it any better to be on the other side?"
So I kept walking through the field behind him where I could see the other camp (and porta potties - not authentic).
These guys were from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. I was hoping for New Englanders or maybe even New Yorkers or some guys from Jersey (Ed Hardy shirts under the kit). Makes sense though as many of these guys had relatives that fought in this battle too. The guys from the northeast fought in Virginia, SoCarolina, Alabama, and then burned Atlanta - twice (sorry Nan).
These guys were from Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. I was hoping for New Englanders or maybe even New Yorkers or some guys from Jersey (Ed Hardy shirts under the kit). Makes sense though as many of these guys had relatives that fought in this battle too. The guys from the northeast fought in Virginia, SoCarolina, Alabama, and then burned Atlanta - twice (sorry Nan).
I saw two very official looking guys, one was the bugler, so I interviewed them next ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um_vqWZ7ggk ) and got the story on the battle. Good history lesson.
Hope you enjoy these photos and videos. More can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/user/eyevid101?feature=mhsn#p/u
Hope you had a good Thanksgiving, and we look forward to sharing our view of Christmas and our latest adventures next time.
