Dac Crossley's Western Blog

It's Chigger Season Again

Don’t forget – I am the US expert on chiggers! Well, there’s Lee Goff in Hawaii. Does he count, way out there? He’s better than I am…

Chiggers don’t carry any human diseases here in the USA but they can be pests of major importance. They show up in June and there’s another generation in August-September. Chiggers are the larval stage of a big red mite; they feed on vertebrate hosts as a dispersal mechanism. We people aren’t very helpful because we scratch them off right away. Their little bites itch for a few more days.

What’s your favorite remedy for chigger bites? My mother used salt and butter on my little bites. Did it help? Mom was an old farm girl. A rubdown with turpentine or coal-oil was just about the limit of rural medication. (Later in life, Mom discovered Vicks VapoRub).

Dabbing fingernail polish on chigger bites was a popular treatment in my youth. Supposedly it smothered the chigger – which was long gone anyway. Maybe the acetone eased the itch.

I used to recommend Preparation H – it had a good dose of a local anesthetic in it. However, Preparation H comes in many flavors now; choose carefully. Might be better to use something with Lidocane in it. Look for an OTC formulation with 4% or 5% concentration.

Best of all – avoid chiggers. Bug sprays will keep them at bay. So will flowers of sulfur dusted around your ankles.

If the worst happens – there’s always single malt.

Dac Crossley
July 26, 2016. Happy Birthday, Bud F!

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one. ‘O lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” – Voltaire.

Grandmother's Gift

The First Grade in Kingsville, Texas was a shock to my young system. I was an outdoors kid and didn’t like that schoolhouse! Mom fretted and tried to help. I didn’t learn much arithmetic – the numbers didn’t mean anything to me. Neither did words. I did not learn to read in the First Grade.

I distinctly remember sitting in the back seat of the Plymouth, next to a cardboard box full of books. On the way to Grandmother Baird’s house. It was her job, that summer, to take over my education.

Grandmother Baird, a public school teacher, was forced into early retirement. She received no pension – the School Board determined that she was too rich since she had an electric refrigerator. This was in the 1930’s, remember. She kept a house with her husband, who was a continual business failure, and two grown children. She tutored troubled students for a living. I guess I was one of them.

Grandmother Crossley, on the other hand, was a full-time clerk for Missouri Pacific Railroad. She lived alone (Dad was her only surviving child). And she showered me with gifts, toys, clothes. I enjoyed visiting my Nan-nan.

But Grandmother Baird gave me the greatest gift of all. That summer, she taught me to read. Arithmetic was a struggle and cursive handwriting impossible. But reading! It opened the world to me.

I discovered my father’s old World Book Encyclopedia, a chaotic jumble of facts and guesses, history and make-believe. I became a reader. Thanks to Grandmother Baird and her gentle ways.

Of course I loved both of my grandmothers and I have happy memories of both. But Grandmother Baird, my Nan-naw, I owe you the most.

Dac Crossley
July 15, 2016

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin.

How Hot Was It?

So hot –

In Kingsville, Texas, in high school, I was a photographer and developed my own film (remember film, kiddies?). And in summer the cold tap water was so warm it would wash the fresh emulsion right off the film. I had to use a hardener, chrome alum, in the stop-bath. Now, that’s hot.

The summer of my junior year I worked at the Naval Air Station, assisting an electrician out on the asphalt flight line. The aviation fuel pumps were supposed to be automatic but they didn’t work. We spent a summer sorting out the below-ground wiring, finding out what was connected to what, sealing our connections with hot tar. That was hot.

The electrician had made a shelter out of parachute cloth that kept us out of the direct sunlight. After a week or so he realized that I could do the work, so he’d get me started and head for the shade. Out there alone on that asphalt it got uncomfortably warm. When you are young you can put up with a lot.

I made friends with a bunch of the sailors (not so much with the pilots; they stayed in the cool). I learned the Yankee tongue and Yankee manners. And decided I would join the Navy as soon as I could. But no airplanes for me! Too hot. I wanted to cruise on a ship. And I did, after boot camp I sailed on the USS Dayton, a light cruiser.

But that’s another story. We were talking hot…

Dac Crossley
July 11, 2016

“We must reject not only the stereotypes that others have of us, but also those that we have of ourselves.” – Shirley Chisolm.
How

A Tortured Land

An early summer evening and I sit on the deck of my Cabin on the Ridge, looking out across the woodlands. A stand of trees, mostly oaks, the canopy closed and only a little undergrowth. My woods are going through ecological succession. They’ve been through their pine phase. I note a pine stump or two, and a few skinny logs of heart-pine. Now my trees are in a slow growth phase.

Like so much of Georgia, my cabin sits on what was once a cotton field of sorts. The ridge-top was plowed into a set of narrow terraces, their rims marked by pile of rocks where larger trees have grown. How narrow? The terraces are only about fifty feet apart. I’m guessing they were plowed using mules. Mules? When I first came to Athens, Georgia, Commissioner Bullock had a mule lot out on the highway. Within a few years he exchanged mules for tractors. (There’s a restaurant there now).

Cotton is a heavy feeder and drives soil fertility way down. Once abandoned, soils recover very slowly. Down toward the river, my land slopes into a set of erosion gullies, the legacy of generations of southern farming.

Aerial photographs show that our ridge-top was cultivated until 1940 or so, possibly until the 1950s. In those latter years boll-weevils made for a difficult cotton crop. Almost every week “cotton dust” rained down from airplanes. Fish died in our rivers. The shrimp and crab industries on coastal Georgia paid the price. Cotton, the Coin of the Confederacy, was no longer king. Those long, long plowed rows I remember from the coastal plains of South Texas, now gone along with King Cotton.

The US Department of Agriculture managed to destroy the boll-weevils a few years back. Yet King Cotton has not returned. The gins, the mills are gone. We have moved on. The old degraded, abandoned cotton farms now grow unsightly scrub pines. The gullies stay with us, as do the depleted upland soils and deeply-incised rivers that will turn muddy with rainstorms for a thousand years to come.

Perhaps the legacy of King Cotton is that bit of advice. Move on. The abandoned clothing mills await rebirth in vain, as do the rusting steel mills of the East. It’s not going to happen, is it? A new day is upon us. The sun will rise tomorrow. Turn the page. Move on.

But as you do – pay attention. Think ahead.

Dac Crossley
July 5th, 2016

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas Edison.