Jim Casada Outdoors

June 2007 Newsletter

Jim Casada Web site: www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com
1250 Yorkdale Drive E-mail: jc@jimcasadaoutdoors.com
Rock Hill, SC 29730-7638
803-329-4354

The Joys of June

June is a fine time for looking back, but of course when you are my age any season lends itself to nostalgia. I just came in from a fairly extended session in my largish garden, and while I wielded a hoe, pulled weeds, and did a bit of early harvesting there was plenty of time for reflection. That’s one of the great things about gardening. Just like fishing and some types of hunting, it lends itself to unhurried thought and somehow lets the worries of the world slough off your shoulders. Incidentally, the first fruits of the garden are now being harvested—cucumbers, zucchini, broccoli, and cauliflower. The first raspberries have ripened as well, but I’ve promised my granddaughter a feast in a few days, and we are so dry I think they’ll “hold” without going bad. Netting is in place, so the birds can lust but they can’t get to the luscious red and blackcap berries.

That’s all by way of an aside though, for what I want to share this month are some of the things in the month of June which have given or continue to give me pleasure. As a boy, the most significant thing about June was that school let out for the summer. Even though I worked, and for the most part worked hard, as a teenager, there was nonetheless a sense of freedom once school was no longer in session. I could steal away to a nearby creek for an hour or two of trout fishing at daylight or dusk, spend the occasional lazy day when all my chores were done or when I was off from work at the river which flowed through my home town, spend the night with one of my buddies, or maybe join my Grandpa Joe for a passel of piddling.

The latter pursuit might involve most anything. There would certainly be some work—weeding the garden, slopping the hogs, feeding the chickens, gathering eggs, staking tomatoes, making a second planting of corn with October beans thrown in each hill as well, or perhaps helping him mow the lawns he tended around town. But along with the work there would be fun. Grandpa had a knack for making even the dullest of drudgery seem enjoyable. He would point out ground cherry plants coming up in the corn we were hoeing and note that we’d have some good eating along about roastin’ ear time. Or as we worked out a row of pickling cucumbers which would furnish the raw material for Grandma Minnie’s bread-and-butter pickles, he would say: “I reckon a pig will eat anything on God’s green earth except a cucumber. Maybe there’s a message there, but I’ll just have to ignore it. I’m mighty partial to fresh cucumbers splashed with vinegar and speckled with pepper, and a man who doesn’t like your Grandma’s pickles just ain’t right.”

Sooner or later we’d take a break from work and head back to the house. There was always a big gallon jug of water kept in the refrigerator, and after an icy glass or two we’d sit down on the porch for a spell. Grandpa might work on a flutter mill, he might be whittling a whimmydiddle, or maybe he was crafting a slingshot from a carefully selected fork of dogwood. Two things though were guaranteed in these rocking chair sessions. Grandpa Joe would have his knife busy on something and he’d be telling stories. You couldn’t have rushed him with and announcement that the Russians had invaded or that the country was in revolt. Grandpa simply wasn’t a man who would worship the false god of haste, and looking back I know that of all the things he gave me the most precious was that priceless commodity—time.

He always had time for a small boy, he never talked down to me, and he had a staunchly held opinion on everything. If anyone happened to disagree he had a standard response: “You’ll learn.” Often, I must say, that succinct summation of things proved him to be all too prophetic.

There are three things Grandpa and I did quite often, and I have fond memories of each of them. We did a lot of fishing in the river, usually catching knottyheads and catfish, and if ever a man treasured his hours of angling it was Grandpa. We also consumed a world of watermelons. In my mind’s eye I can still see him, stooped and slow of gait, coming back from town toting a tow sack. In that serviceable item made of twine would be the biggest watermelon he could find, one of the dark green, round types known as “cannonballs.” I don’t know what happened to them but it’s been a coon’s age since I last saw one. The two of us could do yeoman duty on that 50-pound item of pure delight, and nothing was wasted. The rinds were either saved for watermelon rind pickles (if you haven’t eaten them, you’ve had a life of culinary deprivation) or, if Grandma had put up enough of them for the year, fed to the hogs.

Our third frequently shared pursuit would be a trip to the local liar’s corner known as “Loafer’s Glory.” It actually had a second name, one which referred to a condition that is today addressed by Viagra, but for reasons of delicacy and knowing I have some female readers, I’ll forebear to use it. Loafer’s Glory was the assembly point for an assortment of old men, young boys, the occasional itinerant Bible thumper (usually on Saturdays), n’er-do-wells, and when court was in session, most everyone. There were shady benches where mean games of checkers took place, knife swapping went on in vigorous fashion, and the shavings from an aggregation of whittlers would have been enough, in just a week, to mulch my entire garden.

Grandpa loved this place, because it gave him a forum for calling back his youth, precisely the same thing most all of the “regulars” found so appealing about Loafer’s Glory. I now realize that the sharing of stories and recollections of the good old days is an intensely human trait, one which gathers momentum and appeal as we age. Then I was just a starry-eyed boy, and that was a time when no one had to tell me I was to be seen and not heard. About as close as I ever came to being heard was when Grandpa would use me as a reference by saying “my grandboy here, he was with me.” I would nod on cue and feel for a moment like I was really important.

June days brought other joys as well. Being able to sample and savor the Smokies on the cusp of summer was then, as it is now, a rare privilege. In mid-month there are ripe service berries found along trout streams, a welcome chance for the angler to enjoy an impromptu feast should he enjoy the good fortune of coming across a tree laden with these reddish-purple delicacies. These berries, overlooked by most humans but beloved by birds and bears, soon give way, towards month’s end, to other gifts from nature’s rich bounty.

If you asked me to name one dessert dish, above all others, I would choose to satisfy my sweet tooth, it just might well be a dewberry cobbler. Dewberries are an interesting plant. They grow in places where you would think nothing, with the possible exception of kudzu, could “take holt.” Find a patch of ground where the topsoil has been scraped away, leaving nothing but bare, hard red clay, and invariably the first plants to grow there will be dewberries.

They make for tough picking, thanks to necessity of constant bending in order to get the berries, but this is one case where I’ll gladly stoop to conquer. You won’t find dewberries just anywhere, but once established they can be tenacious. The briar-laced vines are tough as a seasoned piece of hickory sapling, just what you would expect from a plant that can grow under such adverse conditions. A patch of them provided me the opportunity to witness an experience which still, a full half century after it happened, sets my funny bone in overdrive.

When we were boys, a buddy of mine named Jackie Corbin (who, by the way, was one of a team of researchers at Vanderbilt University who developed the afore-mentioned Viagra) took after a crippled cottontail through a patch of dewberries. Predictably, they tripped him as surely as the sturdiest of ropes could have done. He turned a full flip, using his gun barrel as a balance point while doing so, and continued apace after the rabbit (which he eventually caught). Dad and a friend of his spent a good quarter hour cleaning the dirt out of his barrel, and one of the adults eventually muttered something to the effect of “no wonder Jackie’s nickname is ‘Grubby’” (which it was).

Following close on the heels of ripening dewberries are blackberries, and you can count on them being ripe, at least at lower elevations in my highland homeland of the Smokies, by month’s end or thereabouts. The glories of blackberries merit poems of praise, and no less scribe than old Will Shakespeare mentioned them several times in his writings. There’s so much to be said in favor of the blackberry.

For starters, they are found most everywhere—on road banks and along fence rows, in pastures and abandoned fields, around old house places and in overgrown gardens. They bear as predictably and certainly as spring gives way to summer. Mast crops may fail or frost kill the blossoms of fruit trees, but you can count on blackberries having fruit year in and year out. The size of the berries can vary according to the fertility of the soil, location of the vines, or abundance of rain, but berries there will be.

The things that can be done with those berries, cooking wise, guarantee a smile of pure satisfaction from any country boy (or girl) gourmet. You can eat breakfast in the finest multi-star restaurant in Paris or New York, but take my word on it—they won’t have anything which even comes close to a cathead biscuit made the right way (with lard), slathered in real butter, and then anointed with a thick layer of blackberry preserves. Tasty as that treat undoubtedly is though, a stack cake with blackberry jam liberally applied between each layer will vie with it as a toothsome treat.

Then there are deep-dish blackberry pies, blackberry cobblers, blackberry leather, and a tonic fit for a king, blackberry wine or cordial. Grandpa never allowed alcohol to touch his lips, and in fact he wouldn’t even indulge in a soft drink, but I did occasionally hear him say something to the effect, “Now those old folks over there on Indian Creek, they used to make some mighty fine blackberry peartin’ juice back before the Park was built.” Of course the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was “built,” it was created, but Grandpa and most other folks referred to it as if a 1934 act of construction had brought into being.

You can also make rich syrup from blackberries which will give a stack of pancakes a college education, and of course they lend themselves to canning or freezing to be eaten, months down the road, as the ideal topping for a big bowl of home-churned ice cream.

As someone who was hooked for life on trout fishing when still a tad of a boy, no mention of June is complete without a bit more allusion to wading area streams with the long rod and whistling line. Big old brown trout prowl at dawn and dusk during June, and the water at first light is cold enough to have you wide awake when you first step into the creek. By the same token, if you are roaming in the gloaming at the end of a hot day, the water will be deliciously cool. All in all, it’s a grand time for trout fishing.

Likewise, smallmouth bass in streams like the Tuckaseigee and Little Tennessee, the two “big waters” of my boyhood home, can offer some great fun in June, and there’s nothing wrong with sitting on the bank of one of these rivers, or in a shady cove somewhere on nearby Fontana Lake, waiting for a bobber to bounce. If you can’t do some serious, worry-free thinking while fishing, then my straightforward advice to you is to hie thee hither to one of those pricey, pointy-headed psychologists. It’s for sure you’ve got some problems.

June generally ain’t too terribly hot, the fish are still biting though possibly not as well as they did in May, and everywhere you look the fullness of nature in her late spring finery assaults the eyes. You can skinny dip without over-much fear of freezing your private parts, and for boys at least you’ve been going barefooted long enough to laugh at bull nettles and stomp out glowing cigarette butts with the ball of your foot. I don’t reckon, at my age, that I’ll do any of the running for the sheer joy of being footloose and fancy free that I once did on June days, but my thoughts turn that way. Maybe there is enough vigor and flexibility left in these old bones for a short spate of buck dancing (that’s clogging without a partner, for those of you who are among the uninitiated when it comes to Appalachian social customs). I’ll find out come the wedding of a nephew just a few days down the road.

Meanwhile, smells of cooking vegetables fresh from the garden are emanating from the kitchen, and I know there’s a mess of recently caught trout waiting to be kitted out in their dinner jackets of stone-ground cornmeal then fried to a golden turn. It won’t taste as good as a meal cooked over a back country campfire, something else I regularly enjoyed during Junes of yesteryear, but I have no doubt it will satisfy the inner man. Yes, in June there’s reason for joy.

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