Phillips: You have to experience it

Some things in life defy description. I can describe what went on and how we felt, but when it all boils down we had to be there. I remember I was raking hay down east of Mom's and Dad’s house using a C International and a 24-foot Baker dump rake. It was just east of the meadow fence, and the ground was kind of rolling. There were dips in the ground and then a hump, but they weren’t very big. I had already run the dump rake over the ground and was gathering scatterings of hay when my one ear felt like somebody bit it. I didn’t have to look to figure out what it was. It was a bumble bee, and I knew where there was one there was more.

When we were little, Dad showed us to kind of hunker up while sitting on the tractor seat. To put your hand up by your ear with your palm facing forward. Then when a bee came to sting you one could grab it and pinch it. Good plans that probably work for some. Didn’t work for me. I knew you couldn’t outrun them. I knew they went to the highest thing around so I baled off the tractor. Crawled under the tractor and decided to wait it out. I have never understood how something so small can send terror into the heart of teenager or adult.

Both our sons went to Nebraska to work for Mick during the summer, but the older got to experience the terror of having a nest of bumble bees get peeved and you are the only thing they can find to sting. Makes one want to abandon the tractor and run, except it won’t work. You simply have to be there to understand. Unless you can say “been there done that” you have no idea as to the terror one feels.

Dad and my brother-in-law decided to custom mow for a big outfit close to us. They wanted somewhere around 125 to 150 tons of hay cut daily. This wasn't all that hard except for one valley called Bally Valley. Bally was a fairly long valley and wide being about 4 or 5 miles long and a mile wide. Much of this ground was swamps with mouse nests everywhere and you guessed it: Bumble Bee nests as well. The ground was boggy with floating sod, so you couldn’t hurry. You simply had to mow and grind your way out of the swamp. There is nothing like looking ahead, and the bumble bees are just boiling out of a nest where you are going to be in seconds. At that very moment it didn’t matter where you’d change places with anyone anywhere.

But then there was the time back in the 1970s when I was fishing along the north east side of a little lake in the Sandhills. I was using a gold Johnson spoon with a pork frog on it when I hooked a pretty good-sized northern pike. I was wading in an old pair of Levi’s with tennis shoes on and the water couldn’t have been over 3 ½ feet deep. It was along the edge of a bed of moss. It took a while to finally get my hands on the Northern Pike and he was nice. A little over 3 feet. But what made him special was he’d swallowed a whole adult muskrat. I could see the tail sticking out of his stomach into his mouth. You’d have had to been there.

It was in about 1977, give or take a year or two, I was coyote hunting southwest of where we lived in the Sandhills of Nebraska. Marge and I had been bickering and arguing and things had to change. I got to thinking about our wedding vows about till death do us part. We had to make it together. It was that very night that I became a Christian and decided Marge and I would stay married no matter what. Best decision of my life.

Never made that decision? Try it!

Brag later “been there done that!”

Phillips began life as a cowboy, then husband and father, carpenter, a minister, gardener and writer. He may be reached at phillipsrb@hotmail.com.