Dirt Eaters

remembrances by my Guest Author, my Dad

Talk about luck. My friend, Mike, got to stay at Brannins all year.  The Brannins – Grannie and the four bachelor uncles – lived two miles below us. The reason Mike got to live there was because the Uncles were going to make a Dude Ranch!  A Dude Ranch was a place where Easterners paid money to work in a hay field, get thrown from a horse and do things that westerners would pay money to keep from doing.

The Brannins were building a guest lodge. It was a new house as big as two barns. Half a dozen log cabins strung out beside the lodge like chicken biddies beside the mother hen. A community rest room with HIS and HERS sides and shower facilities sat in the midst of the cabins. Running water was piped in from a spring on the side of the mountain. All of this construction required an imported work crew.

Two brothers-in-law, Bill Briner and Dad Schraeder, were a part of the work force. Briner brought Cousin Billy. Dump Woods came also. Minnie, Buster and Mike came with him. Buster went to school with Jack and Billy. Mike was like me – too young for school. He wouldn’t have been a good influence on the teacher anyhow.  He pretend-drove the Model-T truck smuggling beer across the Canadian border. I helped him. Besides this, Mike ate dirt.

Minnie told her youngest son not to eat dirt.  She said that it wasn’t good for him.  But, as Uncle Dick would say, “Telling kids that something isn’t good for them don’t make no difference.”  Leastwise it didn’t with Mike.

The men were laying a pipeline to the guest lodge. My friend motioned for me to follow him. We slid down into the trench and walked to where a streak of clay cut through the diggings. Mike took a handful of dirt, inspected it for wildlife, took off a bite for himself and passed part of it to me. “Try this,” he said.

I touched it with my tongue.

Mike ate his handful and reached for more. “Eat it,” he commanded. “It will make you mean.”

When you are five years old and live in a wilderness surrounded by bears, badgers and a vivid imagination you need all the help you can get.  I swallowed my mouthful of dirt.

Before I could feel the meanness taking hold, Dump Woods came along with a length of pipe. He laid the pipe down and picked up Mike. “By golly darn,” he crooned. “Here’s Daddy’s Little Darling.”

Daddy’s Little Darling fooled that old man, but he didn’t fool me. On the way back to the house we walked across the field. Mike picked up a handful of dirt from a molehill.  “This is the real stuff,” he said. But he didn’t offer me any. Not that it mattered. The Lord helps those who help themselves.  Or as Uncle Dick said, “If you want to get good at something, you gotta practice it.”