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When
I was a mere three weeks old, my family moved from Eglin Air Force Base
in the panhandle of Florida to the great plains of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
This was in June of 1959. As the story goes, we left the 99 percent
humidity and the 90-plus temperatures of the Deep South to go to a part
of the country having two seasons, July and winter. I have been told
when my family arrived in Cheyenne, the newspaper headlines were
trumpeting the record heat wave going into its third big week and
temperatures were expected to reach to nearly 80 degrees!
Summer
turned to fall and mule deer season came in. Dad went on his first and
last deer hunting trip and they say my brother came home one day with a
double armload of deer legs. My brother would have been five or six
years old at the time. Dad knew what they would smell like when the legs
‘ripened.’ Apparently my parents had quite a time talking him into
discarding those legs and he was quite upset from what I hear. Dad
remembered and patiently waited for his revenge.
Being
from the South, they weren’t used to the hunting of big game animals
like they are up there and the way we are at our house now. I have
always been used to seeing a deer strung up in the neighbor’s back
yard for processing; its one of my earliest memories. Deer legs, shed
antlers and all manner of body parts from deer and elk were the toys of
the neighborhood back then. I guess we were a little like the boys of
the Plains Indians (or at least we thought we were) when it came toys.
One
thing we had was a large shed from a bull elk. I don’t remember who
found it, my brother or myself, but of course it made its way to the
back yard. We drug it around for a while and I don’t remember playing
with it, but it was valuable to us.
We
got a Dachshund when I was in the first or second grade and when he got
big enough to go outside, he found the elk antler. I don’t remember
much about this antler except it was easily bigger than I was and way
bigger than the dog. But Dachshund’s are peculiar in that they are
relatively small dogs but, unfortunately, they don’t know it. This dog
claimed the antler as his own and would attempt to drag it around the
yard. I am sure to his dying day he thought he had killed that elk. It
took him several years of chewing to finish it off.
The
only thing funnier than watching him "drag" that shed around
the yard was watching a nine-inch dog attempt to answer nature’s call
in a four-foot snow drift and a 40 mile-per-hour wind. (It didn’t take
him long to figure out, when on three legs, which direction he should
face to put his back to the wind.)
Back
to Dad’s deer leg revenge. The next summer (I was still way too young
to remember this), my dad got a call from the train station. Dad was in
the Air Force and fought the Cold War as a strategic missile man. The
strategic weapon he worked on was the Minuteman Missile. Back then,
trains to Cheyenne delivered these missiles and dad got to know the guys
at the rail yard fairly well. The phone call was from one of these
buddies and the man told him they had a package down there for
"Sergeant Ricks" and not only was it leaking something but it
smelled funny as well. Dad asked where it was from and the guy told him
"Foley, Alabama." Dad took off at a run.
He
got there and told the guys nothing was wrong and this was a barrel of
Bon Secour oysters my grandmother had sent him. I am sure dad’s mouth
was watering. These gentlemen at the train station just had to see what
an oyster looked like, so dad opened up the barrel. Now, you’ve got to
remember, these are folks who have never seen an ocean, salt water, fish
bigger than a nice rainbow trout nor even smelled the Gulf of Mexico.
The biggest body of water for them, and me until I moved home ten years
later, was a beaver pond in the mountains Dad said they were fascinated.
He didn’t have an oyster knife or he would have shucked one open for
them and eaten it, guts feathers and all just to see the look on their
faces.
Dad
got the oysters home and got ready to chow down. An oyster knife is
probably as easy to find in Cheyenne as it is in Butler County, so dad
made himself one from an old file. Dad ate most of the oysters from that
barrel and gave a few away.
He
told me when he started shucking them, the neighborhood kids all came
around and watched in wide-eyed amazement as he methodically shucked and
either ate the oyster or put it in a bowl for mom to fry.
They
watched as the pile of shells grew and grew. Finally, one of them asked
him what he was going to do with those "seashells." Dad said
he would probably throw them in the trash. One of the braver kids asked
him if they could have them. In a flash, dad said yes and the pile of
shells disappeared. Now when dad shucked an oyster, he always managed to
leave a little chunk of meat attached to the shell, right where the
purple spot is. As dad watched the children carry off their new
seashells, probably the first ones they had ever seen, he thought about
what would happen a few days later when these damp, barnacle encrusted
(dead barnacles) mud caked "seashells" with their little dab
of meat still attached would smell like after two or three days in a
dirty bedroom.
Those
of us who have smelled the signature aroma of decaying seafood can
understand it when dad chuckled to himself as he continued shucking
oysters and handing out more seashells to the kids. He knew he would
have his revenge for the deer legs when the furnace kicked on one cool
night in the Wyoming spring.
Ralph
Ricks is the manager of Quality Cooperative, Inc. in Greenville. |
