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8.
The True (?) History
of Squunk Water
—According to Haley Babcock,
Retired Land Sur veyor
I met him in the bar at the Black Bear Café. I was waiting for a burger and sipping Squunk water with a lemon twist; he was drinking it neat. He leaned over and said, “Good stuff you’re drinkin’, mister. I been drinkin’ it all my life, and I’m ninety.” I protested that he didn’t look a day over seventy, and he showed his driver’s license for proof. “Yup! I were a tiny tot when my grampa discovered Squunk water. . . .” Mr. Babcock wanted to talk, and I put my tape recorder on the bar.
—JMQ
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Well, now, my grampa’s farm was all rocky pasture.
Not a bush in sight. Gramma tried plantin’ vines to shade the front porch, but they grew poorly. Then one day Grampa went to livestock market and come home with some little green twigs. He’d given a Canadian feller a dollar for ’em. Fast growin’ and healthy for livestock, he said.
Well, sir! They growed a foot the first day. In two weeks they covered the dang porch and started over the roof.
Grampa cut ’em back, and, by golly, they crawled across the yard to the dog kennel. Afore we knew it, they were all over the outhouse and the fence. All that summer the family had to fight ’em with axes. You couldn’t find the front door.
Grampa wished he had his dollar back again—and no vines. He hoped the snow and ice would kill ’em over the winter. The dratted vines just went to sleep and woke up 쑽쑽쑽
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Lilian Jackson Braun livelier than ever. Filled the drainage ditch! Crept across the road! Got Grampa in trouble with the county road people.
Then one day Grampa heard a bubblin’ and gurglin’ in the ditch! He put down a pipe and pumped up the cleanest, purest water you ever tasted! The county people tested it and said it was full of healthy minerals. Neighbors started comin’ with jugs to fill up—free. Then somebody told Grampa he should bottle it and sell it.
Funny thing, though. The livestock—they wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with them pesky vines!
JMQ postscript: I later told the bar keeper what I had decided: Mr. Babcock was a shill to promote the sale of Squunk water. As for his look of eternal youth . . . a driver’s license can be falsified. Still, I’ve been consuming more of the stuff lately.
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9.
Whooping It Up
with the Loggers
From a Speech by Roger MacGillivray Roger, a reporter-photographer for the Moose County Something , formerly taught history in the public schools. “I fed the kids salty bits of lumberjack lore to keep them awake,” he says.
Lately, Roger has been a consultant to history reenactment groups.
—JMQ
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You can’t blame the lumberjacks for whooping it up on Saturday night. All week they worked long hours, and it was hard labor. Dangerous, too. The cry of “Timber-r-r!”
meant a falling tree. A logger, dashing to get out of the way, might trip over a tree root.
In winter they worked in freezing cold and deep snow as loads of logs were hauled along skid roads on ox-drawn sledges, to wait for the spring thaw. With their boots full of snow and wet socks, they felled trees, loaded the logs, built the skid roads, drove the oxen.
But they were young! Many were in their late teens.
They did it for adventure—and something to boast about in future years.
They lived on beans and salt pork, turnips, hardtack, and strong tea boiled with molasses. No booze or fist-fighting were allowed in the lumber camps.
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Lilian Jackson Braun At the end of the day they bunked down in a shanty around a potbellied stove—as many as forty men in one room, with forty pairs of wet socks hanging around the stove. Try that on your olfactory senses! And how about snoring? They say it sounded like the Hallelujah Chorus!
But they were young.
On Saturday night they collected their pay and hiked to the nearest lumbertown that had a saloon and a church.
Some of the young fellows attended church socials and met nice girls; they were logging to earn enough money to buy a farm. The majority, they say, went to the saloon to blow their week’s pay. They bought drinks, played cards, had fist-fights, and bantered with the women who hung around.
If one of their buddies drank too much and passed out, they carried him outside and nailed his boots to the wooden sidewalk.
There was always a derelict at the bar who would do anything for a drink: swallow a live minnow or bite the head off a live chipmunk.
Then there is the story about the drinking pal who died (cause of death is not on record). They took up a collection to buy him a coffin, but he couldn’t be buried until spring; the ground was frozen. Meanwhile he was in the deep-freeze shed behind the furniture store, which was also the undertaking establishment. The friends of the deceased thought it would be only right and proper to bring him back for one last time—to the place where he had spent so 쑽쑽쑽
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Short & Tall Tales many happy hours. A task force was sent to break into the undertaker’s shed. The coffin was propped against the bar.
Everyone rose and drank a solemn toast to good old Joe.
This actually happened. What can you say? It was more than a hundred years ago. And they were young.
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10.
“The Princess”
and the Pirates
A Legend from the Days of Sailing Ships The town of Horseradish on the shore of Lockmaster County was once a shipping port as well as an agricultural center. (It was once the horseradish capital of the Midwest.) Now it’s a resort town, but the natives cling to their color-ful legends. I was privileged to have a conversation with Dr. Teresa Bunker and capture it on tape.