Smoking Grape Vines
My last gasp of childhood took place at my Uncle Ron (Mother’s brother) and Aunt Thelma’s house in the country in Indiana’s beautiful, lush, hilly Brown County.
I was 13, working hard at being a teenager, and had been invited to spend the late-summer weekend in the country. It was a good deal for me because this aunt and uncle had four boys, so I always got special treatment.
The oldest of the boys was my cousin Tom who was a year younger than me. When I was very young and we lived not too far away, Tom and I had been good pals.
Tom had white-blond hair and a slow southern Hoosier drawl. He was infamous for not being able to resist any dare. (I knew this because my cousin Rhonda and I had tested him thoroughly–daring him to jump out of trees, walk across the narrow, high rail of the bridge over the creek by our grandparent’s house and hurtle himself down the rocky “cliff” that was a frequent play area.)
I always thought Tom and his brothers were more at home in the woods and fields than their own house. So, as to be expected, when I arrived for the weekend we immediately headed out back to the creek and woods.
We waded along the creek until we came to what looked like a great swimming hole. Best of all, some limbs of a tree on the south bank were exposed, one curving out over the water. We fooled around for quite a while, trying to attach a “diving board” onto the root and swimming in the creek.
Next we decided to build a primitive raft to float down the creek. When we couldn’t gather enough fallen logs, Tom ran back to the house and snuck back a small axe. We hacked down a few little trees in the woods to round out our stock.
(Later we found out they were young oaks. Tom caught the devil from Uncle Ron but I got off the hook because I wasn’t from the country and didn’t know they were valuable oaks–and because I was such an “innocent” girl.)
Bound with rope, our raft bobbed and dipped down the creek–a trail of tree trunks and branches in its wake.
That night, after a meal at the house, we headed back to the creek and built a bonfire on a sand bar to cook our dinner. Tom climbed into the house via a window and came back with purloined butter and hot dogs. We dug potatoes and picked sweet corn in the garden. Tom had read that the Native Americans cooked potatoes in mud, so we packed mud from the creek on the potatoes and stuck them in the hot coals. We cooked the corn in their husks and hot dogs on switches over the flame.
In my dim memory, I remember that meal as one of the best I’ve ever eaten. We told stories around the fire and Tom and I talked about smoking.
It seems Tom had been caught with a partial pack of cigarettes. Uncle Ron made him sit down and smoke every one of them–one right after the other–until the pack was empty and Tom was green. That made Tom swear off cigarettes–but not smoking. He said he’d become fond of smoking grape vine bark.
Last winter I talked with Tom on the phone for the first time in years. He has struggled with terrible asthma all his life and shares the risk of esophageal cancer that is in our family. I asked him if he’d been able to kick his smoking habit.
“I know I need to and I’ve sure tried. But I just can’t seem to do it,” he said.
