ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½

Over many summers we loaded and hauled square bales of hay without number out of that river bottom. Some summers the hay dust was so bad I believed I could blow a bale of hay out of my nose.

But not all down there was “river� bottom. If you took a right turn inside the “bottom gate,� just over a little rise you would be looking into the “spring bottom.� Named for a surging, all-weather spring which fed a creek leading to the Cumberland River, it comprised five acres of the farm’s most fertile ground.

Most of the years I remember corn growing there. But the spring bottom was subject to late planting. Before the TVA system of dams were in place, backwater usually covered it each spring. Another series of small creeks allowed the backwater to creep around in front of our farm. Some years it covered our mailbox on the Old County House Road. If the backwater lingered, we took a boat from the cattle gap to beyond the submerged mailboxes.

I remember well driving the tractor in the spring bottom while my father and a neighbor named Thomas Denton gathered corn by hand. I was a fourth grader at the time. I discovered my first Monarch butterfly chrysalis in the spring bottom at corn harvest time. (You may read about it in my first book, titled “Fireflies in Winter.�)

One year my father planted pumpkins with the corn in the spring bottom. You’ve never seen so many pumpkins in your life! That year he decided to “hog the corn� at harvest time. That means he turned the hogs in on the field and let them do the harvesting. One problem became obvious. After we took the pumpkins we wanted, the hogs didn’t know what to do with them. So, we took tobacco knives and hatchets, and opened up the pumpkins. Talk about “hog heaven!� I laughed to witness hogs smiling as they smacked their mouths on fresh pumpkin through orange-stained lips.

Then there was the year we planted field peas with the corn. I’ve never seen so many field peas. They took over the corn. We ate field pea until they were coming out of our ears!

One spring after the backwater had receded, a ground hog was doing some damage to a new crop. He was so bold he had dug a new den right in the edge of the corn field. My father, ever the inventor and scientist, decided to try and “smoke him out.� My brothers and I followed him to the spring bottom equipped with a can of gas, a shovel, old, burlap sacks and a box of matches.

My father soaked the sacks in gasoline and stuffed them in the mouth of the den. Little did he know, as he moved the gas can to a safe distance, he left a trail of gasoline on the ground. When he pitched a lighted match on the burlap, the flames ran along the ground and set the gas can on fire.

My brothers and I had but one choice, and that was to run. We did! I looked back to see my father scooping loose dirt with both hands a flinging it on the fire. In short order, the fire was out — gas can saved.

The entire effort failed. The groundhog stayed ’til a bullet put him in his grave.