Confederate Sharpshooter

I have been sitting around for some days now, attempting to think of a good story to tell that wouldn’t involve an activity that in these enlightened times would be considered ‘politically incorrect.’ I came up with a few, but quite frankly they all seemed boring. So after much deliberation and thought I’ve decided to just go ahead and tell you the truth about some things that happened. All of this was perfectly legal at the time, and no one got hurt. It was a lot of fun, too. Overly protective nanny types, take note: I still have all my fingers and toes, and grew up to be a productive member of society.

Grandpa Clyde was the kind of grandpa every kid should have. He delighted in making all of us laugh, and his favorite thing to do when we were munchkins was to screw up his face into wild contortions, stick his false teeth out of his lower jaw, and open his eyes wide- invariably greeted with howls of laughter by us, and stern rebukes from grandma. He’d ignore those, of course, and proceed to do something else fun to keep us entertained. Somewhere in this time he got the nickname ‘Clyde Crash cup’, after a popular black and white carton of the time. It fit. Clyde Crash cup was the best kind of grandpa ever.

As the years passed, I was helping out more at the machine shop, and on my other grandpa’s farm. One of my favorite things to do was stump blasting, the easiest way to remove a field full of stumps from newly logged fields. For those of you who think the only way to pull stumps is to bring in an expensive, heavy backhoe and spend hours per tree digging, let me enlighten you- before political correctness and the nanny state got carried away, the way to pull a stump was explosives. Much cheaper- about $2 per stump back then- much faster, and as side benefits you loosened up a lot of dirt, and the explosives used (still used today, if you are properly licensed) are great fertilizer for the soil, so it was a win-win situation. The fireworks aspect of it were just icing on the cake for a teen age boy working for the family farm. Everybody back then loved things that went ‘boom.’

Grandpa Clyde had a small house in a somewhat rural area away from town, typical of the time. Situated at the bottom of a hill, it was about 75 feet below the area church, which sat beside the parsonage and another house, which my mother had been raised in along with my great-grandmother and grandparents. At Clyde’s house, the main features were a very small wooden garage (just big enough for a model T, and used for a workshop then) and a couple of wooden chicken houses, for grandpa enjoyed trading chickens and raising them. The chicken house was about 35 feet from a large, dying apple tree, and the house itself was slightly farther than that from the same tree. Remember those relations, please- they will be important.

The apple tree wasn’t good for much of anything. The apples were sour, and likely to send you to the bathroom for an extended stay if you ate one. There were few enough of them, as the tree was all but completely dead. The branches were so low as to make getting under it a problem. It needed to go away, and grandpa one Saturday pulled out his trusty chainsaw and sawed off all of the big limbs and branches, leaving about a 10 foot section of trunk sticking at an ugly angle from the ground. He then tried to pull the tree/stump out of the ground with a logging chain and his old Dodge pickup, with predictable results: a couple of slick spin marks in the grass, and an unmoved apple tree trunk. He called my dad, and asked a question he would forever remember as an understatement: did we know of a good way to get that tree out of the ground? Uh, well, yes, in fact we did. Oh, yes, we certainly did. And we’d be over shortly to help him out.

On arrival my dad went directly to the smoke house, which in years passed had been used to smoke pork meat after slaughter, but now was used as storage for yard tools and fertilizer. As you might expect there were several bags of various types of same, and to my dad’s delight there was a 50 lb. bag of one of his favorites. He handed me a shovel and a pick, and followed me into the yard with the fertilizer bag over his shoulder. Grandpa came out of the house, and followed us down. He looked puzzled when he saw the fertilizer, and told dad he didn’t want to make the old tree grow, he wanted it out of the ground so he could get rid of it. I got the impression he’d expected dad to come over with a bigger truck and a stronger chain to pull the big stump out of the ground. Dad’s response was to pull a 1/3 stick of kinny pack (a type of explosive) out of his jacket pocket, and smile. This concerned Clyde, of course, being so close to the house and even closer to the chicken coops, although at the time I don’t think there were any chickens in it- it must have been one of the days he’d sold out everything and not bought any new ones. Clyde’s biggest concern was the chicken coops- he absolutely did not want to get any dirt on the chicken house. Was that possible? Sure, dad told him. I won’t get any dirt on the chicken house. Not a bit. You watch. Son, he ordered, get the pick and start digging right there- he marked a spot with his boot, and I went to work. I soon had a perfect round hole all the way to the tap root, which is what you have to break to get an apple tree out of the ground. I stopped digging, thinking I was done. Nope- dad ordered me to keep digging, a little more room and a little deeper, please. This puzzled me, as I’d done enough of this to know what I had was plenty big for a small charge to get things done. Then I noticed dad had on a poker face, yet I could detect a slight smile behind it. Something was up, and from his look, it was going to be fun. I kept quiet and paid attention. Soon I was handed a Merida Bread wrapper, and stuffed it with a couple of handfuls of fertilizer, thinking that was plenty, and pushed it deep into the hole I’d dug. Dad told me to put in another handful, and another, until I was looking at him with wide eyes and a questioning stare- are you sure about this? Finally he was satisfied, and I back filled the hole with dirt and packed it carefully and tight. Dad had always been famous for smoking cigars, big ones, and as grandpa was walking back to the carport he looked a me, and with a swagger that would have made Babe Ruth proud, pointed to a spot in the exact middle of the field next to the house- it’ll land right THERE, he announced, and smiled mightily. Yes, I asked, but how high will it go? I couldn’t help but ask, and my answer to that was hearty laugh and ‘that’s a good question, I guess we’ll find out soon, won’t we?’

I guess this is as good a time as any to point out the obvious: Kids, don’t try this at home, and never, ever try to make things that go boom without proper education and advice. My family had been doing this a long time, and dad had a gift for estimating things of this nature. This is not the sort of thing you learn by trail and error, ok? Nuff said.

The wires were run back to the carport, where the single, lone light fixture hung from the ceiling. Making sure the power was off, we hooked the end into the plug, and with a devilish grin dad simply told Clyde when he wanted to get rid of the tree, just pull the chain on the light fixture. Without a thought, Clyde yanked the chain. It was, in a word, magnificent. The entire house shook, the ground seemed to raise under our feet, and the shock wave took the very breath out of your lungs and rattled off the surrounding hills… stepping out from the carport and looking up, I watched the tree doing a perfect spiral, turning like a properly thrown football, arcing ever upward, higher than the surrounding hills, and peaking just over the altitude of the church and parsonage nearest us. I heard through the grapevine later that the pastor had been out doing yardwork around this time, and turning to see what the noise was, was very surprised indeed to see a large apple tree trunk hanging in mid air, with no visible means of support, then gently, slowly, dropping from view and out of sight. Back at the foot of the hill, the noise and shock wave had just died out, and suddenly with a mighty THUMP the tree landed- exactly where predicted, in the center of the field. Then, it began to rain. Softly at first, then a downpour of dirt. Mainly loose dirt, but a few fist sized dirt clods thrown in for good measure. All raining down on the main house- as promised, not a speck, not a particle, fell on the prized chicken house. Clyde was standing there, wide eyed and open mouthed, as he stared at a crater nearly big enough to bury the tree in. Dad had by this time grabbed me and put me back in the car, and was getting in himself, when Clyde regained his senses, and turned to start asking questions. The first, obvious question came as dad closed his door- “What in world do I tell people when they asked what happened?” To which came the expected reply “Tell ‘em you heard it too, and have no idea what it was” and away we went.

It was some time before I got to visit at grandpa’s again, but when I did, I remember clearly opening the smoke house door to check on something, and finding a big, empty space where the fertilizer had been. Grandpa had taken all of it to the land fill that same day, having decided that having such things in close proximity to the main house was not a good idea, especially with crazy people like us around.