Look for the Helpers

Across the Fence #441

The events of this past week have many people wondering if there’s any hope that mankind will survive all the violence that’s occurring around the world. I’ve heard the question asked, “How can people be so cruel to each other and have so little regard for human life? 

I was struggling with the same questions as I tried getting to sleep on the Monday night of the Boston Marathon bombings. People seem to be intent on killing everyone who doesn’t think, believe, or do what they think, believe, and do. We could take away every gun, bomb, knife, bat, club, pointed stick, rock, broken bottle, or any other item that we could use to kill each other and the last two people left on earth would still find a way to strangle or break the neck of the other. Those are some pretty pessimistic thoughts.

Then I thought of something Mr. Rogers said his mother told him when he saw scary things. “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” Yes, we can’t understand how someone could hurt innocent people, but look at all the good people who jumped in and helped the injured, with no regard for their own safety.” 

Some people ran to get away from the area, afraid that more explosions would take place. Others ran to help the wounded, comforted them, and saved lives by performing emergency first aid. A friend wondered which person they would have been if they had been there.

I told my friend that no one knows the answer to that question unless they’re confronted with the choice. I didn’t tell them that I had once wondered the same thing. In an emergency situation, would I react and try to help, or would I panic and do nothing?

Many of you know that I was an army medic during the Vietnam War. After twelve months of intensive training we graduated as 91B20’s–army medical specialists. But I think we all wondered how we would react and perform our duties when a real situation presented itself and bullets were flying. It didn’t take long to find out the answer.

After medical training, twenty of us returned to Fort Lewis, Washington and rejoined the units of the 4th Infantry that we had gone through basic training with. Everyone received a two-week leave to go home before returning to Fort Lewis and shipping out for Vietnam.

One evening, 1,000 of us who would be in the advance party of the 4th Infantry, were let loose to head for the Sea-Tac Airport where we would get flights and fly home. My friend Reagan, also a medic, and I managed to get near the front of one of the long lines at the ticket counter. Most of us were flying standby to save money. Can you imagine a thousand army guys trying to get a flight at the same time? 

When only a couple more people were ahead of me, gunshots suddenly rang out to the right of us. Our first reaction was to crouch down, just like we’d all been trained to do. Then many people started scrambling away from the shots. People were yelling, “Medic!” Reagan, I, and several of our friends, headed in the direction of the shooting. I don’t remember even thinking, “What should I do?” It was just instinct. I saw two of our guys struggling with another soldier. Our friends joined them and threw the guy to the ground as Reagan and I went to help two people lying on the floor. An MP had blood pouring from a wound in his thigh. We went to work, trying to stop the flow of blood. Then I went to the other man who had been shot in the hand. One finger was gone, and two others hung by shreds. We were oblivious to everything around us. We weren’t aware that airport security had arrived and cordoned off the area around us. Someone brought us a first aid kit. Soon the EMT’s arrived and took over. Reagan and I helped them until a policeman grabbed us and told us to get out of the way. We complied.

We stood there for a few minutes, our hands and clothes covered with blood. Then we retrieved our bags and went to a restroom to wash up and change uniforms. By the time we returned to the line, most people had their tickets. We had to buy full-fare, instead of stand-by tickets if we wanted a flight that night. It was a bittersweet moment. We had done what we had been trained to do, but in the end had been rudely told to get out of the area, and had to pay a lot more money for tickets because of it.

At least we both felt more confident that we’d be able to react and do what we had to in a stressful situation. Our friends told us later that the soldier who did the shooting had gone AWOL and was being returned by the MP’s. We never heard another word about the incident.

Yes, it’s easy to be cynical and pessimistic when so much violence seems to be occurring. But try to think of the many people who are trying to help others, not the few trying to hurt them. There’s still a lot of good in the world. 

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Package Delivered Hours of Fun

Across the Fence #440

Each day I waited anxiously for the mailman to arrive. Each day I was disappointed when I opened the mailbox and there was no package. I felt like Charlie Brown waiting for a valentine to appear in his mailbox, but it was always empty. The ad said to allow 3-4 weeks for delivery, but that seemed like an eternity when I was young. I probably started checking the mailbox after one week.

One day as we were hoeing tobacco in the big field alongside our road, I saw a cloud of dust to the west. It was 9:00 and that meant it was our rural mail carrier, Howard Crume. Unless there was bad weather, like a raging blizzard, you could set your watch by his arrival. In those days, very few cars used our road, now known as Sherpe Road. When I was young the road didn’t have a name. It was simply a gravel county road halfway between Tri-State Breeders and Smith School.

As Howard came alongside the tobacco field, he saw us hoeing and honked his horn to greet us. Then he held up a package so we could see it. He knew we’d been waiting for it to arrive for close to a month. It was only 9:00 but there was no way we could wait until noon to retrieve the package from the mailbox. The weeds in the tobacco would have to wait, even if Dad got mad at us for abandoning our hoes in the field. He was busy cutting hay in the back forty. Maybe he wouldn’t notice that we were AWOL from our post before we returned.

I pulled open the lid of the mailbox and there it was, a brown, paper package addressed to me. Standing in the middle of the road I tore open the package and there they were. A clear plastic bag containing 50 plastic army men. 25 were green and 25 were gray. They were 2-inch figures, molded out of hard plastic and came in several different poses. Those little plastic figures were relatively cheap compared to the action figures that were available in later years. They cost about a penny each. That pack of 50 was around 50 cents plus postage. There were riflemen standing, kneeling, crawling, and prone, throwing grenades, shooting machine guns, with bayonets, a radioman, and one with a pistol to lead them. We now had an army. 

World War II and the Korean War had been a part of my world during my early years and army men were my heroes. Now we could stage those battles that we had seen pictures of in newspapers and magazines. But first there was tobacco to be hoed and staging battles would have to wait. Work always came before play. That was the way of life for farm kids.

That little package of army men provided us many hours of fun. We played with them in the dirt and staged battles inside when it rained and we couldn’t work or play outside. When we had access to firecrackers around the 4^th of July we were able to add explosions to our battles, as we bombed the gray-colored German troops. Unfortunately, we found out that a direct hit on an army man could also damage them. You also learned not to leave them lying around outside when not playing with them. Dogs liked chewing on them and left them full of holes and mangled. Those figures became casualties in our battles after that, since they were already severely wounded.

Later, plastic army trucks, jeeps, and tanks also became available through the mail and at the dime store in Viroqua. We were able to add some men and vehicles to our army with money we earned mowing the lawn. Dad paid David and me 25 cents each week. It was a large lawn and we used a push mower and took turns. That was the only money we earned doing work around the farm, except for tobacco harvest when he paid us 50 cents an hour when we got older. That was big money for us. The men and women he hired got $1.00 an hour. Would anyone do that kind of back-breaking work for a dollar an hour today?

I was reminded of our army men days when I received a message from my friend John in the Madison area. My story about playing in the water reminded him of his days doing the same thing. He wondered if I also sailed boats down those rivers. They used sticks and pretended they were ships navigating the mighty river. They even lashed sticks together to make a small raft and had hours of fun and always ended up soaked to the bone.

Yes, we also had boats during those spring thaws. We used pieces of busted tobacco laths as boats. It seems everything we did was connected to tobacco in one way or another. For extra excitement, we put our army men on the lath boats and suddenly they were troops heading into battle. When the boats wedged against the side of the ditch the men would storm ashore from their landing crafts. 

Those simple army men provided us many hours of fun in all kinds of weather. Little did John, David, and I know that years later we would all become army men for real. 

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Transitional Games of April

Across the Fence 439

April was the month of transition from winter to spring when we were young students at Smith School. The snow and winter activities we had enjoyed, were pretty much gone. Dirty patches of snow were making last-ditch stands along the fence lines where big drifts had been.

When we were young, the winter seemed to last forever and we were ready for warm weather. That transitional period when we were restless must have been hard for our teacher. It reminds me of when we let the cows out in the spring after they’d been cooped up in the barn all winter. They ran around, jumped, and head-butted each other. Spring will do that to you if you live in the Midwest.

In spring we didn’t have to spend half the recess dressing and undressing in order to play outside without freezing to death. We were tired of winter and ready to start playing ball, but the ground was still too wet and muddy in many places. Our ball field had low areas that collected puddles of water. 

Our schoolyard wasn’t large enough for a regulation ball field so a lot of improvising was done. We sometimes used part of Iverson’s field that adjoined our schoolyard on two sides. It made it a lot tougher when they planted corn instead of hay. The two outhouses along one edge of the yard tended to get in the way of our ball field too. You didn’t want to run into the side of the outhouse while chasing a pop fly. Our ball field may have been lacking in sophistication compared to the ones kids play on today, but I don’t remember ever thinking it was inadequate. It was all we knew and we made it work.

While we waited for the ground to dry out, there were plenty of other games and activities to keep us occupied during recess. There was Annie-over, kick the can, jacks, Simon says, and the great game of “flip stick,” also known by the Norwegian name of “vippe pinne.”

The equipment needed was easy to obtain and cheap. We’d find a couple of sticks about an inch in diameter and make one about two feet long and the other six inches. We scooped out a small slit in the ground using one of the sticks. Then we chose up two sides and were ready to begin. The short stick was placed across the slit in the ground and the tip of the long stick was placed under it. The “batter” then flipped the small stick as far as he could and the people on the other team tried to catch it. That’s where the name of the game, flip stick, comes from. 

If someone caught the stick, the batter was out. If not caught, the person closest to where the stick landed threw it back in to see how close to the hole they could come. If it was within one length of the long stick, the batter was out.

Another part of flip stick was the “pinkle.” Don’t ask me why it’s called the pinkle. I have no idea. The art of pinkling was accomplished by balancing the short stick on the long stick and hitting it into the air as many times as you could, before swatting it as hard as you could into the field. Can you imagine having a sharp-pointed stick flying toward your head at 200 miles an hour? Well, it was probably a lot slower than that, but it seemed like a guided missile as it streaked toward your head. That’s when you had a choice. You could show off your bravery and try catching it, or duck and let it hit some poor soul behind you. The batter was out if you caught it, and you were congratulated for your bravery. I think points should have been awarded for having the good sense to get out of the way. All I know is that flip stick would be outlawed on any playground in this day and age. Someone could get hurt and sue the school. In our day if someone got hit it was, “Hey dummy, catch the stick or get out of the way!”

Eventually the ground dried up enough to start playing ball. In small, rural schools like ours, there weren’t enough kids to have two teams with nine players on each team. Not all the kids would play, since our ages could range from six to fourteen. Because of that, the younger kids, and those who didn’t like playing ball, played other games while the older ones played “work-up.” Then you could play with seven or more players since that didn’t require teams. One person was the batter and continued batting until he made an out. Then he went to right field and the catcher became the batter. Everyone else rotated one position. It may sound strange but it worked.

The transitional month of April is a lot like playing flip stick or work-up softball. You had to adjust and make up the rules depending on the weather, the size of your playing field, and who wanted to play. It was a far cry from the adult-organized games that kids play today. Boys and girls all played together, and the older kids helped younger kids. That made it a great learning experience and everyone had fun.

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Spring Thaw Brings Running Water

Across the Fence #438

It’s April Fool’s Day as I write this and the snow is finally melting. Can I hear an “Amen” from everyone? It’s been a long winter and most people are anxious for spring to arrive. Now we’re experiencing the spring thaw and runoff as the melting snow heads for lower ground. Water is flowing like a river in the little valley behind our house. Actually, I shouldn’t call it a valley; it’s more like a swale, or just plain low area on the prairie. It’s where the water runs in the spring and during heavy rains, and can sometimes be fifty feet across.

The pond is filled to overflowing. I wish it would stay that way, but I know it will soon disappear. I really think it’s turned into a sinkhole. A dry waterhole isn’t much good when it comes to attracting wildlife.

The spring thaw also brings us soft, mushy ground and lots of mud. Most of the side roads have gravel or blacktop these days, but I bet many of you can remember when roads became a muddy quagmire in the spring. Those were the days when you went from being stuck in snowdrifts to being stuck in the mud. The ruts became so deep, that once your wheels dropped into them you couldn’t get out until you came to firmer ground. 

Spring was, and still is, a dirty time of year as the frost works its way out of the ground. It’s especially muddy around barnyards. We slogged through the mud doing our chores as we brought feed from the granary to the barn in a wheelbarrow. If you haven’t tried pushing a loaded-down wheelbarrow through the mud, you’ve missed out on one of the character-building moments in life. It ranks right up there with balancing a wheelbarrow full of manure on an icy plank as you push it from the barn to the manure pile outside. 

Spring was also when you got rid of that huge manure pile that had accumulated behind the barn during the winter months, when you couldn’t get out in the fields to spread it. We spent many days standing knee-deep in the fragrant manure pile and filling the manure spreader one forkful at a time. That was before Dad finally bought a front-end loader to do the job after I had graduated. That kind of hard, physical work would kill me now.

Another spring job was cleaning out the chicken house where droppings had accumulated a foot deep during the winter. Our chicken house was divided into two rooms. The front part was where we fed the chickens and where the nesting boxes were located along the walls. That was where the hens laid their eggs. 

The back room was where they roosted at night. Chickens liked to spend the night off the ground, where they roosted, not roasted, on horizontal poles that were supported by notched supports on the walls of the chicken house. The chickens flew up, sat on the poles, and slept during the evening. I always wondered how they could balance on those poles and sleep without falling off. I guess it’s easy if you have the DNA of a chicken. If chickens can think, they probably wonder how we can sleep in a bed. Chickens, like other birds, roost high in a tree at night to avoid predators, like foxes and coyotes, who are looking for a meal. That inbred survival instinct remains, even when chickens are kept in the safety of a hen house at night.     

Just like the Crooked River Country where we live, this story seems to have taken a few twists and bends too. I started telling you about cleaning out the chicken house in the spring and the next thing you know where sailing up a tributary of the fjord and talking about chickens roosting at night. Never let it be said that you don’t get a well-rounded education reading these meanderings.

Anyway, the droppings under those roosting poles had to be cleaned out too. It wasn’t much fun. The dry dust from all those droppings filled the air as you worked, and you breathed it all in. That’s not good for the lungs as I found out later. All that “chicken dust” settles in your lungs and can cause an infection resulting in calcified lymph nodes, which I’m now blessed with. Guess they were just getting even with me for beheading a few of their relatives so we could have them for dinner. Yes, there was a time when people didn’t depend on Colonel Sanders or the supermarket for a chicken meal.

Luckily there are some things that never seem to change. Young kids still like to go splashing through water and mud puddles and building snow dams when the water is running in the spring. I’ve always liked hearing the sound of rushing water. We would build dams and when enough water had backed up behind our dam, we would knock a hole in the dam and watch the water rush through it and quickly fill the ditch below it. 

Children love wading in the mud and playing in the cold water during the spring thaw. Maybe I need to get in touch with that playful side of me again, instead of complaining about all the running water and mud.  

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