Ridge Stories Read online

  Ridge Stories

  Ridge Stories

  Herding Hens, Powdering Pigs, and Other Recollections from a Boyhood in the Driftless

  Gary Jones

  WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS

  Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press

  Publishers since 1855

  The Wisconsin Historical Society helps people connect to the past by collecting, preserving, and sharing stories. Founded in 1846, the Society is one of the nation’s finest historical institutions.

  Join the Wisconsin Historical Society: wisconsinhistory.org/membership

  © 2019 by Gary Jones

  For permission to reuse material from Ridge Stories (ISBN 978-0-87020-923-9; e-book ISBN 978-0-87020-924-6), please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978–750–8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users.

  The front cover image showing Gary Jones as a boy on his family farm is courtesy of the Jones family.

  A number of the essays in this book appeared in a different form in earlier publications, including the Milwaukee Journal, the Milwaukee Sentinel, Cityside (Milwaukee), and the Ocooch Mountain News (Gillingham, WI). They have been edited and updated with new material for this volume.

  Cover design by Ryan Scheife, Mayfly Design

  Typesetting by Wendy Holdman Design

  23 22 21 20 191 2 3 4 5

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jones, Gary, 1944– author.

  Title: Ridge stories : herding hens, powdering pigs, and other recollections from a boyhood in the Driftless / Gary Jones.

  Description: Madison : Wisconsin Historical Society Press, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019010818| ISBN 9780870209246 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jones, Gary, 1944—-Childhood and youth. | Richland County (Wis.)—Social life and customs. | Dairy farms—Wisconsin—Richland County. | Country life—Wisconsin—Richland County. | Richland County (Wis.)— Biography. | Driftless Area—Social life and customs. | Driftless Area—Biography.

  Classification: LCC F587.R4 J66 2019 | DDC 977.5/75—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010818

  To my wife, Lu, who not only encouraged me to write this book, but has heard the stories so many times that she knows them as well as I do, and to my granddaughter Julia, who inherits these stories and may pass them along to her children.

  Contents

  Introduction

  If the Overalls Fit

  Rubber Duckies

  Edna

  Boyhood Games

  Pleasant Ridge School

  Reading, Writing, and Sledding

  A Cold Lunch Program

  Do Ghosts Eat Cake?

  Ida

  Putting Powder on a Pig

  Free-Range Chickens

  Charlotte

  A Civil Defense

  Hike to Steeple Rock

  In Gramp’s Shoes

  Farm Forecasts

  The Grasshopper

  Milking Time

  Making Hay While the Sun Shines

  Threshing on the Ridge

  Getting Up Wood

  Down on the Farm, TV Style

  Memorial Day on Pleasant Ridge

  When Angels Wore Bedsheets

  Minnie and Mae

  The Church Band

  The Catholics

  Hills and Valleys

  Snowbound

  Mixed Nuts

  Within Walking Distance

  The Good Life

  Steve Bryant, the Storyteller

  Victor, the Pig-Cutter

  The Pressure Cooker

  Silas Breese

  Cursing Like a Farmwife

  The Longs and the Shorts of It

  Ain’t That Pretty

  Foods of the Ridge

  Good Gardens

  Uncle Jake

  Raspberry Queen of the Ridge

  A Life of Pie

  Crazy Quilter

  Searching for My Father

  Burying My Father

  Introduction

  “Does the wind always blow this way?” a traveling salesman once asked my father.

  “No,” Paw replied. “Sometimes it blows that-a-way.”

  Wind was a fact of life during my boyhood on our ridge farm. Fields of alfalfa and oats rippled in the wind like ocean waves, and during summer when the haymow was empty, the barn creaked like a schooner struggling in high seas. Elm trees frantically waved their limbs as if fearing they might be yanked out by their roots, and my mother’s laundry on the clothesline flapped like panic-stricken semaphores.

  Sometimes when I crossed the road between our house and barn, I considered putting rocks in my pockets as ballast.

  The winter wind blew drifts of snow. Because country road banks bristled with brush, the hilltops filled with snow, subsequently blocking the passage of school buses and milk trucks. When I was in the eighth grade and read John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem Snow-Bound, I felt that I could relate.

  Our farm was located on a high spot on Pleasant Ridge offering panoramic views of ridge fields separated by forested valleys, and at night distant yard lights mingled with the twinkling stars overhead. And just as County Highway D divided our farm to the north and south, Si Breese Lane marked the western boundary between our eighty-acre homeplace in Willow Township and the one hundred in Rockbridge, both in Richland County, part of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area.

  But the wind we sometimes cursed enabled my greatgrandfather Isaac Johnson to farm the land. Because the closest spring was at least a mile away in any direction, the only water that I knew as a child was pumped from a well, once powered with a readily available source of energy: the wind. My great-grandfather had topped the white pines on our lawn to allow the windmill full force of the western gales.

  His tall hip-roofed barn sat on a basement of stones that had been quarried from a bluff in the night pasture to the south. The barn featured a tin cupola—which we, like everyone else on the ridge, pronounced “KEW-puh-low.” This 1917 building replaced the original barn, a log structure that had been moved from the foot of the cemetery and served as a church until the construction of the traditional white church that we saw from our kitchen window.

  The classic T-shaped farmhouse, two-story living quarters and single-story kitchen, dated from the 1870s. When I was four, my family, in the spirit of modernism, tore the building down and moved into a remodeled cottage. Outbuildings included a large machine shed and small A-frame hog houses, all contemporaries of the red barn. The round, galvanized-steel government surplus granary, the corn cribs, and the white frame chicken house were added a generation later.

  Buildings on Pleasant Ridge farms varied, but each homestead had a windmill.

  In 1937, a few years before my birth, power lines brought electricity to the ridge, and our fan blades came down, although the tower remained. In the 1950s when television signals were beamed in the direction of the ridge, my father topped it with an antenna turned by a rotary device in the hope of coaxing snowy TV reception from stations in Green Bay, La Crosse, or Cedar Rapids.

  But the advent of satellite dishes rendered the remnant of a windmill useless for any purpose. The tower came down, and eventually the barn, milk house, and silo, along with the outbuildings that had been rendered obsolete by progress and considered attractive nuisances by insurance companies, came down as well. Only the house—now inhabited by strangers—remained.

  The utility and road maintenance crews have removed all traces of the scenic country drive that once passed our farm. The roadside hickory trees have been cut, as have the wild roses, sumac, hazelnuts, and lilacs. The banks alo
ng the road have been graded flat, removing wildflowers and wildlife habitat in the process. Snow drifts less on the road in this Driftless region, where wider roads more easily accommodate snowplows, and tree branches are no longer a menace to high-line wires.

  As time passes, fewer remain who remember when today’s farming corporations were only eighty-acre farmsteads with a dozen milk cows, or where the now razed one-room schools stood, or the saw mills, or the cheese factories. Many of the remaining farmhouses have become homes for those who commute to their work in towns or cottages for seasonal residents.

  And traveling salesmen rarely make house calls.

  When my parents retired from farming, I purchased half of the acreage as an investment both emotional and financial. Perhaps the adage is true that while you can take the boy off the farm, you can never take the farm out of the boy.

  From the time I was a little boy in bib overalls at the Pleasant Ridge one-room school, I knew that I didn’t want to be a farmer like my father, but a teacher like my mother. I enrolled in the school of education at Platteville’s Wisconsin State College and Institute of Technology. In 1966, I became an English teacher at Weston High School, not far from Reedsburg, and married my college sweetheart.

  My career was interrupted by a draft notice that sent me to the Army. After my service, I continued my education through the GI Bill, earning both a master’s degree and doctorate in English.

  After my retirement from Gibraltar Schools in Fish Creek on the Door Peninsula, I worked as a part-time adjunct at what had become the University of Wisconsin–Platteville, teaching the class I had taken fifty years earlier as a freshman.

  I hope to pass the land to my children and grandchildren, along with my recollections of an earlier time when Guernsey cows browsed in a pasture, Leghorn hens clucked contentedly in the henhouse, and Duroc hogs cooled themselves in a wallowing hole.

  Sometimes I fantasize about becoming a farmer for my second career, but I envision an eighty-acre plot of land like my great-grandfather’s, with twelve cows, a team of horses, a few pigs, and a flock of chickens—an enterprise as outdated as the Pleasant Ridge one-room school where I began my education.

  Times continue to change life on the ridge, but at least the wind remains a constant, sometimes blowing this way, and sometimes, that.

  If the Overalls Fit

  Three identical men peered back at me, each clad in stiff, blue denim bib overalls. They put their hands in the oversized pockets and slowly turned from side to side. They were all smiling.

  “It’s not you,” my wife said. “It is definitely not you.” She was not smiling. “Go take them off.”

  I recalled that farmers used to rest their hands on their stomachs underneath their overall bibs. I tried it and studied the effect in the three-sided fitting room mirror. The three old men grinning back at me looked authentically folksy.

  “Anyway,” my wife continued, “the silly fad of wearing bib overalls in the city passed decades ago. You seldom see people in them now.” She rested her hands on her hips. “Go take them off. Please. Why don’t we go look at housewares instead?”

  The overalls were remarkably comfortable. After wearing trim, low-riding, belted jeans, I felt a new sense of freedom in my overalls. True, the straps tugging at my shoulders would take some getting used to, but the looseness about my middle was wonderful.

  I studied those three rural-looking chaps in the mirror again. For a genuine grassroots look, the overalls should be a couple of sizes larger.

  My wife had begun tapping one foot. “Where would you wear that ugly outfit anyway?” she asked. “You can’t teach in overalls. They’d be much too warm for gardening in the summer. And it’s only fair to warn you: I won’t be seen in public with anyone wearing foolish farmer pants.”

  She glanced at her watch. “Go take them off.”

  A couple of sizes larger, I mused. And I remembered old Gramp Jones. A diminutive man, he followed the custom of other slight and short farmers, habitually wearing bib overalls much too large for his frame. Perhaps it was an ego thing with him, seeing himself as the size of the pants he purchased rather than the little man who donned them.

  One time, though, his oversized work attire may have saved his life, or at least, his male prowess. He was slopping hogs when suddenly one of the brood sows that had recently farrowed apparently felt that her litter was threatened. “Woof, huff, ruff!” she grunted, charging Gramp.

  He unwisely dismissed her aggressiveness with a volley of curses, but the old sow, spurred on by porcine maternalism, was not bluffing. She charged with as much alacrity as a lumbering sow with two rows of swelling milk-filled udders could manage and sank her fierce yellow teeth into poor Gramp’s crotch.

  Luckily, the crotch of Gramp’s overalls hung so low, no harm was done, other than to the fabric of his overalls.

  “Here,” said my wife, “try these on instead.” She handed me a pair of low-riding, skinny-legged denim jeans. “If you must wear absurd denim pants, wear these. Go take those overalls off.”

  As I studied the three farmers in the mirror, I noted all the pockets the overalls boasted and remembered how farmers used those pockets. Take Victor Crary, our squirrel-hunting, pig-cutting next-door neighbor, for example.

  In the bib pockets, Vic carried his pipe tobacco, a pencil stub, and a little notebook. In the front pants pockets, he stored his gold watch on its chain, his jackknife used for cutting everything from apples to pigs, wooden matches and toothpicks, and miscellaneous change, nuts, bolts, screws, and nails. The side pocket held a pair of pliers, a folded ruler, and his pipe. A bandanna handkerchief filled one back pocket and a worn leather wallet the other. I imagined Vic trying to find room for all his stuff in those fashionable denims.

  If I wore bib overalls for teaching, I could dispense with my backpack. With all those pockets, I could carry everything I needed right on my person, and if, like Gramp, I wore them big, I might even have room for a paperback or two and maybe some carefully folded student papers.

  Of course, I’d make room for a jackknife and a pocket watch.

  “If you don’t take off those overalls pretty soon,” my wife scolded, “you’re going to wear them out admiring yourself.”

  I unbuttoned the sides of the pants.

  “Not here!” she gasped. “Go into the changing room!”

  The three men now had gaping sides on their overalls, just like Banjo Schaeffer, the old farmer who lived out the lane to our north. A little guy like Gramp Jones, Banjo never fastened his side buttons and wore his overalls several sizes too large.

  Perhaps he affected that unbuttoned look not as a fashion statement but for comfort, like one of those Southern houses with a central hallway, the front door at one end, the back door at the other. When both doors were open, a cooling breeze would blow through the hall.

  But the seemingly practical choice came with risks. Ridge folks told the story that one day, as Banjo was walking down the driveway of his barn during milking, a cow that had been pastured on lush spring grass coughed just as nature made an urgent call. The open left side of Banjo’s overalls made a perfect catch, the foul mess slithering down his bare leg and over his socks before spilling to rest atop his shoe.

  It was unlikely I’d encounter any careless bovine behavior in my line of work, but I rebuttoned the sides of my overalls just the same. Shoving my hands into my pockets, I rocked back on my heels for a final inspection of the three rustics in the mirrors. Then I left for the fitting room.

  “Finally,” sighed my wife as she slumped against the rack of men’s packaged underwear. A moment later she inadvertently knocked a package to the floor when I returned with the pants I had worn into the store folded over one arm.

  I handed the clerk my charge card and the tags I had torn from my new overalls that I was proudly wearing. “To go,” I said, pointing to them. “Please bag my old jeans.”

  As we left the store, my wife maintained a ten-pace distance between u
s and displayed an extraordinary interest in everything she passed. But I was undaunted. Shortly after, I purchased a second pair, this time for my two-year-old granddaughter, Julia.

  Rubber Duckies

  Many Europeans, I have often been told, feel that Americans are preoccupied with their bathing habits. That may be true today, but we were not compulsive in matters of bathing hygiene back on the ridge. We joked about the bachelor Hyde brothers (nicknamed the Skin brothers by local wags) who reportedly took their annual bath in the creek as soon as the weather warmed in spring, an ablution that had to last until the following spring.

  But while we laughed and felt superior, the fact was that our own rubber duckies stayed dry from one week to the next. True, we took daily sponge baths, those spit-and-a-promise cleanups that involved washing face and hands, and sometimes armpits, with soap and water at the bathroom sink. But when I was small, a true bath was a big deal.

  We had neither an indoor bathroom nor a water heater until I was eight.

  Before that time, I remember having a hat-and-white-gloves visitor who requested use of the facilities. Always trying to be polite, I followed her outside and showed her the path to follow to our outhouse, a trail that led by Granny’s former duck pen in the locust grove on the way to the chicken house. “If you don’t see it,” I told her, “you’ll smell it.”

  The outdoor toilet, of course, was not for bathing, nor, for that matter, for washing your hands once you had done your duty. No convenient hand-sanitizer dispenser was attached to the wall. If you remembered, you washed your hands in soap and cold water after you returned to the house.

  Before indoor plumbing became more than a distant dream for the future, Saturday night was reserved for bathing. We had a round galvanized washtub, like the ones people today use to chill beverages on ice for outdoor social gatherings. My mother put the tub on the linoleum-covered kitchen floor and poured a modest amount of cold tap water in it while a large teakettle of water heated to boiling on the kitchen stove. After adding the hot water, she finger-tested the temperature and, if necessary, cooled it with more tap water.