Muscadine, Myth, Meth in the Mountains

 

There’s something big and hairy roaming that country down yonder between Wister and Broken Bow along the Kiamichi River and State Highway 259, alright. One day this past week it was Stacy Gibson, Brian Loveland, and me. 

Well, I’m not as hairy as I used to be, and you couldn’t count Brian as such, either, except he sports a pretty good beard to make up for that which he used to carry topside. And Stacy… well, Stacy is as wild and hairy as he ever has been, born and raised in a country, LeFlore County, full of mountains, myths and muscadine grapes, all of which is what we had come for. 

Mountains are geological upheavals of the earth’s crust, often placed in inconvenient locations where travel is concerned. Myths are stories that are… well, maybe true, maybe not. Muscadines are wild grapes that ripen all over that country at this time of the year, make the best jelly imaginable, and in the early days of this country’s history saved the colonists from total “tee-totalry” by providing wine grapes that thrived where imported European grapes withered and died on the vine. God saved the Queen, but didn’t do much for the grapevine cuttings she sent over to make the Puritans happier than thou. 

The Queen’s grapes, like her men, were sissies, unable to cope with the fungus that attacked them in much the same way her men couldn’t stand up to the rifled, long barrels of the guns carried by those early rednecks called Americans. Brian and I were down there, as I said, for the mountains, myths, and grapes. You keep your eyes open to see the mountains dressing in their fall colors, your ears open to hear Stacy’s stories about the backwoods legends he grew up with, and your truck window open to smell (I swear) the grapes at fifty miles an hour as you cruise the wooded backroads. 

“Here. Here! Stop here! There’s some,” Stacy shouted near one of the scenic overlooks along Winding Stair Mountain’s beautiful vista pullouts. The air was suddenly full of the organic, fruity smell of well-ripened muscadine grapes. Stacy smelled them first, but now we all could. 

We gathered up small plastic buckets from our truck, waded into the grapevines, and began gathering up what I think, in all fairness, you would have to call “God’s bounty,” a fruit as wild and free as that found in the Garden of Eden. Being forever wise and loving, God gave man the power of choice, don't cha think, way back when in the Garden: What’ll it be, Mac, juice, or jelly? 

We were there for jelly, but the sound of stories hung in the air like the powerful aroma of the wild grapes filling our buckets as we picked. 

“Stacy,” I asked, “you believe in all these Bigfoot stories I keep readin’ about in the papers?” 

“Nope,” he said, not raising his eyes off the task at hand. Big, fat purple grapes the size of turtle eggs were plop, plop, plopping into his plastic bucket. Somebody was going to have muscadine jelly on hot, buttered biscuits in just a few days.”

“Why not?” 

“Conrad, you just got to know the people down here. If there was such a thing, I’d ‘a seen one mounted on somebody’s wall a long time ago.” 

Brian and I laughed and laughed. All things are funny directly proportionate to the amount of truth in them. 

“They’s gonna’ be a Bigfoot Festival over to Christ’s Forty Acres by Octavia this weekend,” Stacy continued. “I was over there the other day, and they had a big sign up that said,’ Bigfoot, Myth or Meth?’ I figger’ it’s meth.”

“Y’all got a drug problem down here?” I asked. 

“Oh, same as ever’where, I guess. Me ‘n Michael (Stacy’s son) was squirrel huntin’ down one of these old, abandoned loggin’ roads a couple years back when we started walkin’ up on these real neat and tightly wrapped plastic packages right in the middle of the road, ‘bout ever’ hundred yards or so.”

“I knew right off what it was, and told Michael to jump right away off the road whichever way I said the minute I said to do it. Directly, no more’n five minutes, I heard a vehicle of some sort comin’ towards us down off the mountaintop poppin’ rocks with its tires.”

“We jumped behind some brush, and directly here come the prettiest, brand new, candy apple red Lincoln Continental you ever saw. Dallas. I seen it on their tag.”

“We watched ‘em. Whenever they pulled up to one of them packages, one of them folks, dressed like nobody you ever saw dress in this country, gold chains, earrings and such, all over the place, would ease out, look all around, pick up the package, get back in real quiet-like, and then they’d keep easin’ on down the road towards the bottom of the mountain.” 

“They weren’t here for the jelly, were they,” I asked rhetorically. 

“Nope. They was here for the juice. We left, soon’s we figgered they was out of hearin’.” 

And so it went; Myths, mountains, and muscadines, five gallons, total, of the latter, a mindful of the other to occupy our thoughts ‘til we come back. Which we will.

There’s a vacant spot on our wall we need to fill, maybe.

© 2009 Conrad M. Vollertsen