Local News, Barbed Wire, and Deer Poop

Nothing captures the flavor of small town America better than a small town newspaper. The local paper, the News Observer, is no exception. Published in Blue Ridge twice weekly, the paper covers Fannin County here in Georgia and Polk County just across the Toccoa River in Tennessee. It continues to provide fodder for this blog.

Copperhill, Tennessee, is located on the other side of the Toccoa River from McCaysville, Georgia. Talk about a small town. The headline of a recent News Observer story was “Radar added in Copperhill.” The subheadline read “Council votes to equip both city police cars.” I guess that’s one car for Andy and one for Barney.

Since I came up with the theory that the squirrels around here are zombies because of their odd behavior, I’ve kept my eye on the pesky animals. The following News Observer headline caught my eye: “Squirrel kills power to 6,000.” According to the story, a squirrel took out the power to 6,000 customers in Fannin and Polk Counties for 45 minutes. That sounds like something that a mindless zombie squirrel would do. I mean how many squirrels try to bury their nuts in a power line? Unfortunately there was not enough left of the squirrel to do an autopsy to confirm my zombie theory. The image of a crisply charred squirrel reminds me of the line in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?: “Gopher, Everett?”

It doesn’t take much to be a newsworthy item in the News Observer. In an article titled, “Suspicious fires investigated in Fannin County,” I learned that ten firefighters, two engines, a tanker, an ambulance, and an Air and Light unit responded to a house fire only to discover that the home’s occupants “had already extinguished the fire with a garden hose and pots of water.” That was some two alarm fire, wasn’t it? It sounds to me like the local fire brigade was sitting around scratching their asses for something to do that evening. I have no idea what an air and light unit is. Is there an Earth, Wind and Fire unit?

Turning to another matter, I’ve discovered that the only thing worse than putting up barbed wire is taking it down.

Years ago, we let our neighbor run his cows on our field. The cows would come up to the front steps in the evening. It was a symbiotic relationship: we would watch them, and they would watch us. There were many evenings when I sat eye to eye with a cow contemplating what a cow’s life is like. This works best after several beers. I know that doesn’t sound very entertaining, but watching a cow chew its cud is very calming. I came to understand that a cow is just a big cellulose digesting factory. It’s a brilliant scheme. It has four legs to get to the grass, a mouth to take in the grass, multiple stomachs to digest the grass, and a very active waste elimination system.

My enjoyment with these close cow encounters ended early one morning when I came down the steps, stepped in a fresh cow plop, and slid half way to Mineral Bluff. There is nothing more slippery than fresh cow shit. It has a coefficient of friction approaching zero. NASA scientists cannot improve on it.

That was the end of bovine appreciation nights at the Yacavone homestead. I promptly built a barbed wire fence around the cabin to keep the cows out. Eventually a new neighbor moved in, and he fenced his pasture so that the cows cannot get on our property. This eliminated the need for our barbed wire enclosure so I decided to take it down the other day.

If you don’t know, barbed wire comes in tight coils, and you have to stretch it out when you put it up. It has a remarkable ability to remember it was once coiled and a strong desire to resume its coiled shape. That means when you cut a stretched strand, it whips through the air at slightly less than the speed of sound. That’s a problem when, because of age and a dissolute lifestyle, you have the reaction time of a banana slug. I spent most of the morning trying to remember when I last had a tetanus shot.

Based on this experience, I’ve determined that there are three types of barbed wire. There’s the “I’m going to scratch you and give you lockjaw” type. There’s the “I’m going to scar your face so you can scare the crap out of kids on Halloween” type. The worse is the “Have you been circumcised?” type. The lesson here is that if anyone asks you to help take down barbed wire, find an excuse to do something else. It’s probably safer to defuse bombs.

Finally, I was laying on the couch watching TV the other night, and Meredith started to read to me from a book she checked out at the local library. The section she read informed me that deer poop is shiny when fresh and that male deer tend to stand still when they crap while female deer tend to crap on the move; thus, small piles of deer poop indicates a buck and scattered deer poop indicates a doe.

The first thought that ran through my mind was who does she think she marries, Hiawatha? Do I really need to know whether I am looking at a male or female deer turd and whether it is fresh or not? It’s not like I’m Daniel Boone. I really doubt that the answer to any question on Jeopardy will be, “What is shiny scattered deer shit?” I can just imagine it: “I’ll take Deer Poop for $200, Alex.” The next thing you know, we’ll be talking about weasel piss.