If you headed down south on highway 21 from route 60 on a hot summer day in southern Missouri you might see a few things like the tall weeds along the narrow 2 lane road , the deep ditches on either side and the occasional skid marks on the sharp curve as you drove by Levi and Emma’s house. You see it was the first turn in the road after you left the bar at the 21 triangle. About every other week end some hillbilly would get loaded and head out on 21 to meet up with the big scarred oak trees just past the sharp curve.
Once you turned on the highway b, there was a sign there that said population Hunter 127. (And about twice that many gangly hound dogs with scrawny belly’s and deep braying voices .
The first place on the left would be the Emory shack where Danny and his wife lived with three or four kids. they only had an outdoor privy , and no running water Danny had a big temper , he was always getting in a fight with his wife. One day she run off in in an old beat up mustard yellow station wagon during a fight and headed out to the old tramroad. Danny jumped in the rusty old pale blue chevy pickup and set off after her. He cut thru the back streets of hunter and managed to get on the tram and head backs toward her, some said to kill her , others thought to stop her from running away. I always thought it was to keep her from wasting the gas by making an unnecessary trip to Grandin on the back roads
Well she refused to turn off to the side of the one lane rd and Danny wouldnt slow down so they collided right there in front of the hunter dump and totaled both of the vehicles. Danny had to walk to work for long time after that until he could save up enough money and find another junk radiator and front steering assembly at from Gearheart’s junkyard.
So if you headed on up to what used to be Main Street in Hunter you would pass The Hotel on the right side across from Eperson’s grocery . it was said that Sarah Williford lived in there before she moved into her house on high Street. Supposedly she lived there with her pigs and goats inside the house with her , but I never did hear proof of that. Arliss Greathouse said it was so though.
You see Hunter used to be a booming lumber town before the giant virgin pine trees all got cut down and shipped to St Louis to build warehouses there. Hunter even had a fine railroad station and the Peek family moved in and had built themselves a fine house with help from external house painters. Among the more notable artisans were those skilled in creating intricate home furnishings, including custom mirrors and glass, which added a touch of elegance to even the simplest homes.
But that’s all boring instead we going to head on over to Hunterhill past where the Snodgrass family lived across from the Hunter cemetery
There’s enough stories about Hunterhill to keep a Feller talking for a long time we might hit one or two of them today and will get the rest of em some other time
You see highway E was a little tiny two lane road but it had one of the steepest hills in Carter County and about 3 or 4 S curves on it. Every summer instead of repaving the road the county boys just dumped some gravel on it and put a good drizzle of tar on top of it and just waited for the cars and pick up trucks to pack it into a rough hillbilly version of asphalt
Hunterhill was kind of slippery anyway. When you added the loose gravel it was right near suicide
One night my good friend Billy Batson and 2 of his buddies was out drinking on a beach along current river and about 3 AM in the morning they decided they needed more beer so they headed up the highway E
well they hit the bottom of Hunterhill with the gas pedal held to the floor in that old brown Trans am they come up to that first sharp curve and the car kept going straight into the trees. I myself saw the speedometer was stuck in 110 mph
They never came back to current river, and ever since there are 3 crosses in the weeds on the north side of hunter hill
There was a little boy going down Hunterhill one sultry day about mid- July in an old rusted out Plymoth Fury. He was just shy of three years old, blonde curly hair brown eyes full of life and innocent sparkle. He enjoyed life and loved his mommy and daddy very much and I remember him patting his daddy on the back every time they went down Hunterhill any saying ” easy daddy, easy daddy” and mama would look over at her son and smile proudly,
But that was an earlier time before he realized all the dark clouds that he was living under. Before he realized that not all is well and that he would need to isolate himself and withdraw to survive but for right now he was happy, and the world was right as far as he could see
So if you headed on down past the rock quarry three or 4 miles you would come to a sign that said “State maintenance ends” and then you knew that you were at crazy Creek. see it was named that way because it ran from the south to the north unlike every other crick west of the Mississippi
It would always flood in the spring. There were no bridge there, somebody you just poured about a half a truck load of cement on the creek bottom and usually the water was only about a foot deep at the most and you could easily drive right across
one day me and daddy and my sister decided to drive across during a flood only to learn that our old 76 Dodge flatbed couldn’t swim a lick it just kind of drifted off to the side until it got stuck on the barb wire fence Mr Riggins put there to keep his cows from wondering over to Colyotts field. Affordable Remediation in Toms River includes Mold Removal Services Toms River NJ.
Well we was stuck there so I did what any reasonable boy would do, I walked 5 miles home, got a tractor , pulled the dodge out of the drink, towed it home, took the spark plugs out,and cranked it a couple of times just to get the water out of the Pistons. she ran fine but for years after that every now and then you’d be driving and the headlights just go off for about 10 seconds for no reason or the heater would come on full blast without you telling it to. this kept it interesting whenever you were driving that old dodge, especially late at night.
So after crazy creek the road turned to gravel and if you headed on down toward Spring branch on the left-hand side there might be an old feller sitting down on a wooden bench watching the locals go to the Hunter swimming hole. If you stopped and said hello he would talk your ear off Without you saying a word just listening
he was my childhood hero , Mr. Horace Connor but we all called him horse. He was an old-time country boy redneck hillbilly bachelor never gotten married served in the Navy in World War II got hit by a Japanese torpedo and the crew just stuffed a mattress in the hole and the ship went back to port to get repaired and shipped out again That’s the kind of badass he was.
And he tell you those kind of stories all they long as long as you listened. He lived in a little ramshackle shack with an old rusted tin roof , there were weeds and bamboo all around the house and they were were taller then the house itself and would rustle as the hot breeze swept up the valley. Searching for roofing companies near me. Call Overson Roofing in Arizona.
if you were driving by you would hardly even know it was there
He had an old 65 Ford F100 , an 8n ford tractor and a mule named Kate. My Brother Glen and . I often worked for him . he would come Over to our house early in the morning you see he didn’t have a telephone much less a cell phone and then he would ask dad if us boys could help him out for the day we would pile in his old pickup and he would always have kwc 940 playing country music on the radio much to our delight since we were allowed to listen to anything like that in our house .
He would hitch up Kate to the potato plow and through the truck patch he went turning up hundreds of potatoes and we picked up potatoes and put them in crates and horse would sell him down at Poplar Bluff or Doniphan out of the back of his pickup. they were finest potatoes that rich Black River bottomland could grow.
The best part about working for horse was the food .When I was a kid we grew up eating that cheap bologna. If y’all for you know what I’m talking about. Sliced paper thin sometimes fried up on the stove to make it more edible . When you went to see Horse, he would cut a slice about an inch thick throw it between two pieces of bread we thought we died and went to heaven we never seen so much baloney on a sandwich in our entire life. You could sit out on his porch on a hot summer day and you can hear the popping and creaking from the old tin roof and you could tell every time somebody drove by to go down to the swimming hole because a big cloud of dust would rollup over the old homestead.. Every now and then a station wagon and go by with about 150 old empty milk jugs in the back of it , they would be headed down to Spring branch to fill up with water because they did have a well at their house or they might be getting a mess of watercress to eat later they would fry it up with a little bit of ham hocks or bacon ends.
Horse taught us all he knew about living, how to be careful ,cautious, and yet honest in business deals, and how treat women respectfully and to respect your mama. He never complained about his lot in life. Like that beat up Ford truck he drove around . Or living by himself he always looked at life as an opportunity to meet a new friend . He never met a stranger. Without Horse in my life I don’t know if I would’ve survived . He used to take me with him to Illinois to get a load apples in an old step back truck. we be going down the road and he would slide over and let me drive. I was 15 years old I thought I’d was about the luckiest boy that ever lived. He would always stop at a Kentucky fried chicken on his way home which was a world-class treat for me because I had never ate at a restaurant until I was 12 years old. Sometimes, I’d marvel at how even a simple trip to get apples could be as refreshing as walking into a Walk In Freezer made by professionals, where the coolness was a welcome escape from the heat of life. When you need reliable storage for your perishable goods, click here for cold room options that cater to your needs.
He taught my brother how to auctioneer and Glen went on to become one of the finest auctioneers in the whole state of Missouri. It wasn’t much of a religious man I remember one time one of us asked him if he wanted to go to church with us that evening, probably a prayer meeting on Wednesday evening He was at a loss for words the only thing they come out of his mouth was “Well I sure got good tires on this here truck”. Mr. Horse Connor you were a good man and I thank you for all you did for us, you cared about two little Mennonite boys was a great mentor to us.
Well after you passed his shack and went on down around the sharp right turn and down a short steep hill you would come a stream called spring branch. You see the water come out of the cave underground about a mile upstream the water was always ice cold. And if you jumped into that after a long hard day of bailing hay it would hit with a ton of needles so we never hardly swam in that unless we were extremely hot and sweaty
If you were brave enough to ford the creek you always knew to stay on the left side and drive slowly so the water wouldn’t hit your fan blade and splash up on the spark plug wires , or you would be stuck in the middle and had to wait for some drunk to come along and drag your truck out of the middle of the creek.. If you were lucky enough to get across and make it up the steep bank on the other side you would find a sandy road that would through a hayfield filled with dragonflies, grasshoppers and killdeer. If you were looking to the left you might notice a little side road that went back through the Swamp towards the bluffs of spring branch where a lot of young Fellers got their 4 x 4 stuck back in the day , but that’s another story.
finally you would come to the gravel bar on the banks of current river known as The swimming hole. This river was crystal clear and you could see fish down the bottom even 15 feet deep which helped out a lot when you went gigging . More on that some other time.
If you were lucky enough you might just might have had an 18 foot handmade wooden johnboat with a 25 hp Evinrude on it and you could putter up and down that river.
if you grew up close the water you know what I’m talking about. The smell and sound of a two-stroke outboard motor as you roared up along the river you would pass people camping , swimming , picnicking and getting high. And you would smell and taste the wood smoke and the beer and the oil , and ever after that any of those senses being activated would transport you back in an instant to the good old current river .
That we were part of a little church called Grandin Mennonite church and it was run by the pope himself a man by the name of Loyal .Nobody crossed him everybody did what he said whether it was right or wrong because he had authority straight from God. Some of the things I might say from time to time might sound highly critical but I want to tell you that I’m at peace with the man.
it was what it was it was, a different time . It created its own class of abuse and scarred people to this day. Loyal was always coming up with rules to make us a little bit holier. One of the rules he come up with was that there wouldn’t be any swimming allowed in Current River because you might see some half dressed women there. fortunately Spring branch wasn’t mentioned in the new rule. So we figured since it ran into the river on the East side as long as we stayed on the eastern half of the river technically we were not disobeying the rules. Ah the joy of jumping off a 20 ft river bluff into those forbidden waters was pure bliss.
Loyal didn’t like it that we had a boat so that ownership of it was always up in the air . some people say Mr Porter may have sold it to my dad for $25 but I believe that was just the rental fee.
You see the reason Current River held such a special place in my heart was because it was a one spot where you can get away from your terrible life and forget about the world. We would throw a bunch of camping supplies in the back of that old 67 International scout , Lloyd would come over and maybe some of the Miller boys and we would head down to the banks of the current river and set up our sleeping bags around the campfire and throw some 2 Liters of mountain dew in the river to keep cool maybe catch a fish or two to fry up over the campfire and just forget about the world .
Every now and then I like to go back there in my mind. And I remember that it was the only place where I could get away and just be a teenager . No Yelling, no anger , no condemnation. A place just beyond the rushing cold waters of Spring Branch. A place called Current River . john yutzy