This is My World

My dad has played a guitar all my life.  I remember when my dad and I were on his computer researching prices for my first guitar, I almost tripped over this little black box in the floor.  He said, “If anything ever happens to me, you get in here and get that.  It’s worth a lot of money and most people don’t know what it is.”

Time went by and I had nearly forgot about it.   Earlier this week, however, Dad decided he was going to go ahead and sell that little black box.  He said I could put it on Ebay.  Today, I went to pick it up and he told me a little more about it. 

It is a 1960’s or 1970’s Maestro Echoplex solid state.  He bought it used in the late 1970’s and used it for years in bars and such.  It gives the guitar a richer sound.  He sold it once to a local preacher who used it in church.  Eight years later he bought it back. 

Dad plugged in the Echoplex today.  It sounds new even though it’s almost 50 years old.  He played a few of my favorite old songs.  That Echoplex just made his guitar sound amazing.

Dad said that Chet Adkins used one all the time and that there has been sound created on an echoplex that you just can’t recreate with modern equipment.  He told me to clean the case up.  Then, he showed me to take pictures of different specific parts.  So, I did.  And now it’s on Ebay.  The link is a couple paragraphs up.

Well, here’s another fish story.  This one is about the fish with a bite on its tail.

One summer my dad and I were running a trop line to catch fish.  What’s a trop line?  Well, a trop line is a line that has hooks every couple of feet on it.  To use it, you first tie a lead (rope with no hooks) long enough to get a good ways into your body of water (in this case the Ohio River) to a tree on the bank. Then, you tie your trop line to your lead and, using a boat, you put bait on every hook as you’re run your line out straight as far as it will go.  If your body of water has a swift current, you’ll probably have to use a combination of anchors and jugs to keep it in place.

The next day you check it.  You start at the shallow end of the line, pulling it out of the water. Then, you keep following it, pulling off the fish you caught and replacing the bait as you go.

Well, one day my dad and I were about in the middle of the Ohio River in a tiny green john boat doing just that, checking our line.  I was pulling and he was driving.  About the middle of the Ohio River we got to a place where I couldn’t pull up anymore.  I’d pull and pull, it wouldn’t get very far and all the sudden it would jerk back.  Well, Dad saw a couple of these swift jerks and he wanted to try.  He pulled real hard, and it jerked him back. 

Since we were in the deepest part of the river (the channel) and right close to a bend that’s difficult to see around, we had to look for traffic bigger than us.  Well, I looked up and there was a barge rounding the bend.  Dad saw it too.  He had a few extra jugs in the boat just for such an occasion.  He tied three or four of them to the line, and he headed closer to shore to wait on the barge to pass.  This also served as a good opportunity to think about how to get that fish up.  We thought it might be stuck under a rock.

The barge passed directly, and we resumed our attempt to get this fish up.  I’ve mentioned in a previous post that this little john boat also had the option to be a row boat.  There was little things protruding from the side of the boat to accept the proper attachment of your oars, aka eyes.  Well, Dad wrapped the trop line around that eye.  Then, he ran the boat up and down river a little ways until we were certain that fish decided to move.  We got back to where we were, and proceeded to pull on that trop line.  After a few pulls, up rolled this catfish about as big as the boat.  We got it in, and finished checking the line. Then, headed back to dad’s house start cleaning.

We started on that troublesome fish first.  We weighed it as 22lbs and got a couple pictures.  Then, before cleaning it, Dad noticed the end of its tail.  In the picture it looks like it got scratched up by the rock it was under.  In person, however, it looked like another fish had a hold of it by the tail, trying to keep us from getting it.

Did I ever tell you about the first squirrel I ever killed?  Of course not, or it would be on my blog. 

My brother had just come home from Iraq.  This was the first Desert Storm.  It was squirrel season, and my dad and brother suggested going squirrel hunting.  Of course, I wanted to go as well.  So, my brother took off up in the woods one way, and my dad and I went the other way. 

Dad was trying to teach me how to track a deer in the meantime.  He explained to me that the main purpose for squirrel season is so you can find out where the deer are before deer season starts.  He said that if you see a squirrel, by all means shoot it, but the deer you get later in deer season will have more meat on it and last longer. 

After a while we came up on a tree full of squirrels.  Dad had a .12 gauge shotgun and knocked two of them out of the tree.  One was dead, but the other was still trying to crawl away.  I had a little bitty single shot rifle.  Dad told me that since we were so close to the squirrel, I needed to be the one to shoot it because my bullets were smaller.  So I shot it.  Later, Dad shot two more squirrels.  We put sticks through their feet to carry them easier and continued on our way. 

We found a couple deer beds and a few places where turkeys were scratching.  However, we didn’t find anymore squirrels that day.  So, we headed back to Granny’s to have our picture taken.  Then, we cleaned them.

For every PETA member that reads this blog, those squirrels were real tasty fried up in the skillet.  They were also full of protein, which is an essential part of the human diet.

For all the people that swear I’ve never done a lick of work my entire life…

“Show your city friends how we cut wood.”

I couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old then.  Deer season was in and no one was having any luck finding one.  Of course, everyone was blaming it on someone else.  The fact was that small piece of woods just wasn’t big enough as many hunters that were hunting that season. 

My dad and I were at my great-grandma’s house.  Aunt Rosa had the wood stove going in the house.  So it had to been around a hundred degrees in that trailer.  If you notice, I had long sleeves on that day.  Therefore, I was outside.

After a while I had ventured up to the wood lot and noticed that someone had already tried to cut that old log.  So, I went inside and asked Dad about it.  He said that it was too big for any chainsaw that happened to be around. 

Then an idea popped in his head.  In my great-grandpa’s tool shed there was a double handled saw specifically made for that size of tree.  Well, we went down and got it and commenced to cutting that log.  It took a little bit, but we cut off a good slab of it. 

Just goes to show you that you don’t need fancy new tools to get a job done.  We used probably one of the oldest tools on the place to get the job done.  There was a lot of fire wood in that log.