Living in the Country: Part Two

Spiders aside, the countryside was to me the perfect place to live. There was plenty of room to run around and scream without bothering the neighbors, and the neighbors could not even be seen with all the trees around our house. There were acres and acres of woodlands for hiking, and though we established no permanent trails, we hiked with our friends through the woods on a regular basis.

Below the house, the hilly slopes came together in one great ravine, where water collected during rainy weather. When things were dry, the water made a single little pool amidst large rocks, and where it spilled the water was almost immediately dried up. But when rains came the little pool was hidden by a torrent of rushing, crashing water that rose waist-deep and could knock a man over and drag him away. A sorry fate, for if he survived the rocky dashing, then he would have to dodge the barbed wire fence that marked our property’s westerly border.

Our neighbors on the ridge were varied. To one side, nearest the highway, was an old man who raised mules and hunted in the woods on his property. He asked permission to do the same on ours, assuring my dad that it was necessary to curb the coyote population.

“They come up here and breed with the wolves!” he said in deadly earnest. My dad denied him, thinking of his kids running about in the woods with firearms going off from time to time. That said, we became used to hearing the occasional boom thump off the hill side during hunting season, and the coyotes regularly set up a racket, but our dogs drowned them out and kept the place clear.

The next neighbors down were a family, with grandma living by herself in a doublewide next to the house where her son’s family lived. The man raised fighting cocks that he took to matches in neighboring states, since the fighting – but not the raising of – roosters was illegal. He valued his fighters, so we were all a little alarmed when my sister’s dog turned up with Number Thirteen twitching in her mouth. Dad clipped the tag off, beat the dogs with the dead rooster to scare them into submission – he hated every minute of it, too – and tossed the bird into the woods.

On the other side of our property, there lived some kids a little younger. We played often until the high school year took us in different directions. We read the same books, played the same games, and went to the same church for a while. Our fathers even rigged up a “climb-over,” a wooden stockade-style ladder that straddled the barbed-wire fence that divided our properties. Using that, all we needed was a wave and a shouted explanation to our parents before we disappeared over the fence to play for hours.