Posted on July 9, 2009 - by Hubba

The Summer of ‘89

It’s hard to believe that 1989 was twenty years ago.

In 1989, I was ten years old.  I would be hard pressed to name one newsworthy event, popular song, or movie from that year, because I didn’t have a clue.  Alabama’s “High Cotton” reminds me of my childhood, so long ago- “We didn’t know the times were lean/ ’round our house the grass was green/ didn’t seem like things were all that bad…”

Except that ’round our house in 1989 the grass wasn’t green, that I do remember.  And we had a hired man named Scott.

Scott was a neighbor kid, probably in his early twenties at the time.  My brothers Nick and Al hated all hired men as soon as they came to work for us, but I didn’t mind most of them (some of them I should have stayed away from) so I usually helped the hired man if he needed it.

And me and Scott got along just cracking, because he chewed Skoal.  I had been chewing tobacco some for two years by then, but I had never had a full time supply, which Scott provided.  Looking back, it seems like he should have charged me for that, because I took a chew every time he did, provided we weren’t near the house.  Bless his heart, my mom could have killed him.

Anyway, back to the grass.  1989 was a terribly dry year in our part of the country.  Unlike the recent drought we went through, it was a solitary dry year sandwiched in between two wetter ones, but that didn’t make Dad feel any better by late June.  We had lost our summer lease from the year before, and all of our cows were standing on a skinned piece of ground looking over the fence.

Mom probably prayed about the situation, probably she made us pray about it too, and one day in late June, God’s messenger showed up in an old Ford pickup with a beat up hat on his head.

And God said that this guy’s distant relations or some such thing had a pasture in the Black Hills with good grass and plenty of water, and this guy didn’t have cows to run on it, and did we want to take a few up there?

About a week later, my uncle Milton, my cousin Todd, and some kid riding a broncy Shetland came over and helped us round up and load out.  Me and Nick and Al got to go, but just Dad took his horse, for reasons I can’t remember.  We unloaded them, and we three boys and the other kid were suppose to hold them at a dam, while Dad and his horse did something else, for reasons I also can’t remember.  Everything was going fine until Nick and the other kid got in a fistfight because Nick wanted to ride the Shetland, and the cows, seeing that our one horse was tied up, ran around me.  Eventually we got the cows all squared away, and just about dark, Milton, Todd and the kid took off.

We found them at the Maverick Junction Saloon.  Milton’s back had got to hurting during the afternoon, so he was medicating it.  Dad must have gotten into the medication a little bit too, because Todd started giving us quarters, and we fed the robotic arm arcade machine and the jukebox the whole time we were there, which was several hours, and Dad didn’t seem to mind. I bet we played every song on the jukebox, but we never got a toy out of the arcade machine.

When we left Maverick Junction, Milton bought us all a bag of dill pickle flavored chips, and me and the kid with the Shetland pony rode in the gooseneck of Todd’s trailer to Rapid City, where we had supper at an incredibly late hour.  It was one of the funnest days of my life.

We were to learn a lot more when we returned to get our cows that fall…