The Great Ice Storm

Posted on April 15, 2012 by smith

The Great Ice Storm

I never really saw an ice storm until I moved to Arkansas in 1972. Growing up in Northern Illinois I saw plenty of snow every winter, but seldom did it rain while the temperature was at or below freezing. But the Ozark Mountains are situated in an interesting place, weather-wise. Here we are apt to get huge amounts of moisture blowing up from the Gulf of Mexico, only to crash into frigid Canadian Northers sweeping down out of the Great Plains. When the dense cold air forces it’s way under the warm moist air, and rain occurs, we can get truly spectacular, and sometimes devastating ice storms.

Just such an event occurred in the first week of January, 2009. It started to rain on Tuesday, a fairly steady rain with the temperature at about 26 degrees. Soon every twig and branch had a coating of ice, and it continued to build up through the day and all that night. By Wednesday morning we knew we were in trouble. Several trees had uprooted and fallen on our fences, branches were coming down everywhere, and still the rain fell and the temp remained the same. Wednesday night it sounded like a war zone outside. Tops of pine trees would load up with ice until the tree would either uproot or the trunk would snap 15 or 20 feet off the ground. Every few seconds we would hear a terrific POP followed by the smashing sound of tons of ice crashing to the ground. Oak, ash, pine and even hickory trees lost branches and tops until hardly a single tree on our farm was undamaged. By Friday most of the ice had melted away, and our farm looked like a tornado had hit it.

The ice storm covered a huge area. Parts of Eastern Oklahoma, Northern Arkansas, Southern Missouri and even Western Tennessee and Kentucky were affected. In our county alone over 1000 power poles snapped under the weight of the ice. Some people were without power for as much as three weeks. As a volunteer firefighter I spent a lot of time out in our community helping to clear the roads of all the fallen trees and branches. It was eerie driving through Fox after dark with all the houses dark, just maybe a glimmer of a candle here and there through a window.

One of my jobs as a firefighter was daily service of the generator that provides power for the police and fire department radio repeater, located at the AETN tower about three miles from my house. When I got there on

Ice

Thursday afternoon, after the sun had come out and things had begun to thaw, there were 100 lb chunks of ice falling off the 1000 ft tower. I had to dash from my truck into the relative safety of the generator shed, service the engine, then run back to the truck as bombs of ice fell all around me. It was terrifying!

The way that our community pulled together was heartwarming. A local church started a generator-powered kitchen for the Entergy crews that arrived to restore power as well as anyone else who needed to be fed. The county Office of Emergency Services sent pallets of drinking water to our community center where it was distributed to our residents, none of whom had water since the power was out. Everyone pulled together to clear the roads, all of which were impassable after the storm.

The damage to the timber on our farm was almost overwhelming. Almost every tree was damaged, and many were uprooted or had the tops entirely broken out. The big red oak in our yard lost probably one-half of its limbs, which were now lying in a tangled pile all around the base of the tree. Our 4X4

Our clothsline

clothesline poles broke off when a branch fell on the lines. Our canoe was smashed when a five-lb pine branch coated with 75 lbs of ice fell on it. Our boundary fence and all of our cross fencing was flat on the ground where trees had fallen on them. It took Austin and I two hours and two tanks of chainsaw gas to cut a path to our mailbox just wide enough to drive through.

As soon as work with the Fire Department slowed down we went to work trying to clean up the horrific mess on our farm. A group of dear friends came out one Sunday and we cleaned up the pine grove close to the house. I started cutting and piling up pine logs that were big enough to saw into lumber. Luckily I had a band saw sawmill on the place. Over the next six months I sawed over six thousand board feet of lumber from the trees that were destroyed by the ice storm.

It’s been over three years now since the Great Ice Storm. The trees that fell are gone now, but the stumps remain to slowly rot away. The fences are repaired, I’ve fixed the barn roof that was damaged by a hickory tree that fell on it, and I’ve sold most of the lumber that I sawed from the logs I collected. Still we are reminded every day about the ice storm of ’08. All you have to do is look at the woods and see all the broken branches hanging everywhere. It will be a long time before the woods recover from this disaster.

PIGS

Posted on February 3, 2012 by smith

I guess we started raising pigs about thirty years ago. I figured I could raise two pigs, sell one to pay for the cost of pigs and feed, and butcher the other one.

Nabisco

At first I started doing it the same way I had always seen it done. I fenced in a pretty good size hog lot out of woven wire and built a wooden pig house so they could get out of the weather. We would feed the pigs wheat bran, corn chops, garden and table scraps and lots of skim milk from our cow. When the pigs reached around 250 lbs I would sell one and get set up for butchering. I used the same method that has been done in the Ozarks for years. I learned it from watching my neighbor, Lonnie Lee butcher his hogs. We built a fire under a 55-gallon barrel full of water, and set up a pulley and rope system to raise the hog and lower it into the water. When the water was almost to a boil, I would shoot the hog between the eyes with a .22 rifle and quickly put a chain loop around it’s leg, pull it off the ground with my truck and sever the aorta with a butcher knife to get a good bleed. Then we would dip the whole hog into the barrel to cause the hair to slip, lay the hog on a home-made table, and scrape all the hair off with knives. When the hair was off, I would hang it, remove the viscera and internal organs, saw the carcass in half from tail to shoulders, and leave it hanging overnight to chill. I always try to butcher on a night when it will freeze. Not only is it important to cool the meat quickly, it is much easier to cut up meat when it is partially frozen.

For several years we tried the traditional method of preserving most of our meat through salting and smoking. This involves injecting the meat with brine, smothering the meat with salt, then after a time, smoking the heck out of it. You wind up with hams and shoulders that will keep without being frozen, but meat that is impossible to eat without soaking in water to remove some of the salt. It didn’t take too many years of this to figure out that a freezer would be a good thing. We bought a used freezer and paid a neighbor to keep it at her house (she had electricity). We continued to scald and scrape our hogs for a few more years until I figured out that the only reason to keep the skin on the hog was as a way of preserving the meat. Then we started skinning rather than scraping. No more smoky fires and dangerous scalding water. With a sharp skinning knife two of us can snatch the hide off a hog in about half an hour.

It only took a few years, though, to see that keeping hogs in a pen is an environmental disaster. I could see that they were wearing a hole in the ground from their constant rooting and wallowing. Not only that, but it was very expensive to buy feed, which of course they needed every day. That is when I discovered a new method of raising hogs. Now when we buy a little feeder pig we put it in a temporary pen in the same pasture with whatever

Oreo

calves I have on hand at the time. The calves are usually fascinated by the pig and spend a lot of time communing with it through the fence. It only takes a few days for the animals to bond—then I can release the pig and it spends the rest of it’s happy life roaming the farm with it’s bovine pals, grazing on grass and finding acorns and all sorts of goodies in the woods. Even though it can fit under the barbed-wire fence that is the boundary of our farm, the pig will NEVER get out of sight of the calves, so there is no danger of it finding it’s way to our nearest neighbor, a half-mile away.

Since I have been teaching guitar and fiddle at the local school one day a week, I haven’t had to buy ANY feed. One day’s lunch tray scrapings from 130 students is enough to feed a pasture-raised pig for a week! Now when I see the crater down in the woods that marks the spot where the hog pen used to be I just shake my head. We live and learn…………….

The Hogan

Posted on January 17, 2012 by smith

Today, January 9th, 2012, we tore down and burned our old cabin, the six-sided log “Hogan” that I built when I first bought my land back in 1973.
I moved onto this land in October of ’73, after a summer of driving 18-wheelers to make my first land payment. My friend Tom Wilson loaned me a 12-foot tipi to live in while I was building a log cabin. The idea for the six-sided design came from a place called the Indian Health Camp at nearby Oxley, Arkansas. There they had built a number of very small (12-ft) hogans for guests to stay in. I was fascinated by the pattern of poles in the roof and the roundness, as opposed to squareness of it, and decided to build a bigger version, 20 ft in diameter and tall enough to walk through the door upright.

The Hogan circa 1980

As soon as I got my tipi up I started cutting and peeling logs for my cabin. Luckily my cabin site was in the middle of a three-acre pine grove, since most of the ten-foot logs had to be carried by hand to the work site. Since most of the logs were from six to eight inches in diameter I figured 12 for each wall—that’s about 100 logs, which all had to be cut, carried to the work site, peeled with a drawknife and stacked in a rack for drying. I also peeled the tops of the trees I cut, down to about three inches in diameter, so I would have poles for the roof.
I left my poles and logs on the drying rack through the next summer, which I also spent driving big rigs. When I came off the road in October, I was ready to start building

.
I had already built the stone foundation pillars, so the walls went up pretty quickly. My only power tool was a heavy old Homelite ZIP chain saw, so the notching was pretty rough and funky. By Spring I was ready to start on the roof. Hogans have a unique roof structure. You lay a pole from the middle of one wall to the middle of the next wall, then fill in behind it with shorter and shorter poles until you get the the corner. Then when that group of six poles are in place, you repeat the process. When I got close to the middle, I

The Northeast wall on a cold winter day

skipped every other log and wound up with a five-foot equilateral triangle-shaped hole. In a traditional Hogan this would be the smoke hole for the central fire. I got a sheet of ¼” plexiglass and made a skylight. Since I had no electric power at all in those days this skylight kept my little cabin from being dark and gloomy. The room was always filled with a glorious light from above, especially at night with the moonlight shining in.

Our little cabin in the woods

In the spring of 1975 I was able to move in. Things were pretty basic in those days—a kerosene lamp for light, a battery-powered radio for entertainment, an old Servel gas refrigerator, a wood stove for heat. Sometimes I would go for three or four days without seeing another person. In November of 1977 Maria moved in with me, and began to apply a lady’s touch to the place. She cleaned up all the empty oil cans and trash in the yard, made curtains for the cabinets, and really turned the place into a comfortable and unique home. Before long we got a small 12-volt television that we hooked up to our truck to power it, then some solar panels and a house battery.

Maria's kitchen in the Hogan

This little cabin that I built as a temporary shelter wound up being home for fifteen years. After we finished our new log home the Hogan became my leather shop. In 2007 hurricane Ike passed through here as a tropical storm and blew a big ash tree over on the cabin, severely damaging the roof. I had a sawmill on the farm at that time, and I sawed the lumber that I would need to replace the whole roof, planning on doing it in February, when we usually have a spell of dry weather. But then in January 2008 we were hit by a devastating ice storm (see related story) that kept me busy for over a year with cleanup. By this

Down she goes.......

time the leaking roof had caused the floor to rot, so we made the difficult decision to tear the old Hogan down. Since Jed and Austin were both home to help, we got a good fire going on the brush pile and with much trepidation I drove the forks of the tractor through the wall of our former home. The comfy home that took a year to build was gone by sunset.

Oh, well, it was meant to be a temporary home anyway.

A Short History of this parcel of land

Posted on December 29, 2011 by smith

Our Jersey Heifer, Pinky and her friend Nabisco

The first notice of my land came in 1835, when surveyors passed along the North line of my South forty, which is a section line. They noted good timber on the ridges and actually saw some small fields along Meadow Creek near it’s mouth at the Middle Fork of the Little Red River, just a couple miles SW of here.
This particular parcel was homesteaded by Earnest Bilke in 1916. He cleared a field and built a house on this land. Several years later he traded land (a common thing in those days) with a man called Daddy Richardson. Mr. Richardson built a new house and farmed this place for a number of years, clearing about five acres on the ridge (where my pine woods is today), growing cotton, corn, and sorghum. When I bought this place there was still a rock foundation and chimney where the cooking pan for molasses had been set up. Richardson farmed until 1936, then left for California without even trying to sell it. It went back to the state for taxes. In 1963 it was purchased for said taxes, $30.00, by a land company made up of two local ranchers and two Mountain View businessmen.
In the Spring of 1973 I borrowed a horse from a friend and rode across a one-hundred acre piece of land that was for sale for $100 per acre. It had been logged recently and looked very dry, but I kept riding down an old unused logging road until the timber got better and I came upon a pine grove, which I knew was evidence of an old field. I figured that if there had been a field, then someone must have lived here, and if someone had lived here then there must be water. I rode the horse down past where the pond now stands, and found evidence of a year-round spring. I then rode over the ridge to where it drops off into Bear Pen Hollow. Since the leaves were on the trees and the whole place was like a jungle, I had to shinny up a tree to see the great view to the West. Then and there I decided that this was the land for me. I rode back to the owner of the 100 acre parcel and found out that the place with the spring on it belonged to Robert Linville. He and his land partners had recently sold some land to some hippies, and they had a feeling that land was about to start selling. After some haggling they agreed to sell me this 40 for $145.00 per acre, which was on the high side for unimproved land at that time.
A name seemed to be in order for this place, so I chose Bear Pen Farm, since about 15 acres of my land lay on the side of this steep and rugged holler.
That Fall I started to build a six-sided log “Hogan”, twenty feet in diameter, as a temporary structure until I could build a bigger house. This would prove to be such a comfortable home that it would be seventeen years before the bigger house would be finished.