Living the Simple Life

    There are times when my mind goes back to an era where you could just sit on your front porch with an ice cold glass of tea. As you sat there neighbors would come by to say ‘howdy’. Everyone in town knew everyone else. Down at the local barbershop, the elderly men would swap old war stories or tall tales with one another.

     I remember the classics of Pecos Bill riding a tornado, or of the mighty Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. As you listened to the stories you almost could hear the steady thump, thump, thump of a new fangled machine driving railroad spikes as John Henry raced to try and beat it.

     Then there were the local tales of the Eryine, made up of different kinds of animals who lived in the mountains and would come down to devour bad little boys and girls. There were the occasional snipe hunts. My uncle used to take me out camping in the woods and one time he told me we were going to go Snipe hunting. I was only about eleven years old and I was excited about the adventure.

     Needless to say, my uncle first told me the story of the Eryine and then took me snipe hunting. He would give me a potato sack, the old fashioned burlap kind and take me deep into the woods at midnight. He then told me that he was going to the other end of the woods and scare the snipe toward me and I was to catch them and put them in the bag.

     After some time, when my uncle didn’t come back, I began to get worried. At night there were strange sounds in the woods and I wasn’t sure if what I was hearing was a Snipe or an Eryine. I stayed out there for several hours listening to ever growing snarls and growls, becoming more frightened as time went by. After what seemed like an eternity my uncle finally came back and asked how many Snipe I caught.

Later at home he told me that he had played a joke on me and that he was never far away and the noises I heard was him making them.

     Then there was the story of the ghost fish, a large white bass, which supposedly was only seen on a certain night at midnight. The story went that on this night if you sat on the bank of the pond at midnight a ghostly glow would appear at the bottom of the pond and slowly rise to the surface, then the ghost fish would leap out of the water and splash back down, never to be seen again until a year later.