Sandhills autumn afternoon

[franksolich]

It's about 3:00 p.m. Saturday afternoon; I haven't heard about any college football games today, while the scenery here reminds me very much of college football.  It's about 55 degrees, sunny.

The above are from the summer (I think the summer of 2009), not the way the world looks outside the windows at the moment.

The cats are out romping and playing atop the William Rivers Pitt, that 740-cubic-yard mound of antique swine excrement from circa 1875-1950, about a block and a half, two blocks, east of the house.  Because of its composition, the greenery on the William Rivers Pitt stays alive and green until long after the snow has started falling.  As one might guess, most of the greenery right now is.....catnip.

Me?  I'm just hanging around, sometimes inside the house, sometimes outside the house, doing things.  I'm waiting for someone to come to check the gas-leak emanating from the stove.  Damn, I really dislike natural gas stoves.

[BlueStateSaint]

Can't say that I share your distaste of gas stoves.  I'd much rather have one.  (RedState has a blurb on how the Obamessiah is suddenly in favor of natural gas exploration.  I really haven't read it yet--gotta do that.)  Part of the problem is when the electricity goes out here (which it does with annoying regularity here), everything goes out.  When we finally get a house, one of the very first things we'll get for it will be a natural gas-fired emergency generator.  (One of the next things will be a wood stove insert for a fireplace.)

Now, to the thrust of why I responded to this . . . could you post a pic of the catnip-infested William Rivers Pitt?  I'd love to see it.

[franksolich]

Can't say that I share your distaste of gas stoves.  I'd much rather have one.  (RedState has a blurb on how the Obamessiah is suddenly in favor of natural gas exploration.  I really haven't read it yet--gotta do that.)  Part of the problem is when the electricity goes out here (which it does with annoying regularity here), everything goes out.  When we finally get a house, one of the very first things we'll get for it will be a natural gas-fired emergency generator.  (One of the next things will be a wood stove insert for a fireplace.)

Now, to the thrust of why I responded to this . . . could you post a pic of the catnip-infested William Rivers Pitt?  I'd love to see it.

The only photograph I currently have of the William Rivers Pitt alas has six real-life people in it--the soil scientist, the neighbor's wife and her three toddlers, and myself.  And you know my rule against posting recent photographs of myself on the internet as long as there's jerks and freaks like Fat Che running around.

I keep on planning to take one--the past four years, I've planned to--but just never got around to it.

I will, however.  Remember, though, as I'm not keen on photographs, one has to go through the time and trouble of buying a disposable camera, taking the pictures, sending the film to the big city to be developed.....

I suppose it's just that deal where something is commonplace, everyday, ordinary, to one person, and highly unusual to another person.  I myself see the William Rivers Pitt, looking very much like a miniature Jungfrau, every morning, and pay about as much attention to it as I do all the other features of the Sandhills.

I know it's a minority opinion, but I really really really despise natural gas stoves.

Electricity doesn't explode.

As you might remember, one of the images seared in my memory is that from when I was a little lad, and Old Man Memmerhemmer, who was drunk at the time, lit a match to his gas stove, sending parts of him upwards into four counties (he lived near a county line, where four counties intersected), the biggest piece of him ever recovered being his left leg, dangling from a tree as if a Christmas-stocking.

When I as much as boil water on the stove-top, I first kick all the cats outside, so if something happens, it won't happen to them.

Bleah.  Give me a safe electric stove any time.

[cavegal]

It's about 3:00 p.m. Saturday afternoon; I haven't heard about any college football games today, while the scenery here reminds me very much of college football.  It's about 55 degrees, sunny.

The above are from the summer (I think the summer of 2009), not the way the world looks outside the windows at the moment.

The cats are out romping and playing atop the William Rivers Pitt, that 740-cubic-yard mound of antique swine excrement from circa 1875-1950, about a block and a half, two blocks, east of the house.  Because of its composition, the greenery on the William Rivers Pitt stays alive and green until long after the snow has started falling.  As one might guess, most of the greenery right now is.....catnip.

Me?  I'm just hanging around, sometimes inside the house, sometimes outside the house, doing things.  I'm waiting for someone to come to check the gas-leak emanating from the stove.  Damn, I really dislike natural gas stoves.

OK what is a Williams Rivers Pitt?  a town name?

[franksolich]

OK what is a Williams Rivers Pitt?  a town name?

No.

Surely you're kidding.

You must be the last person alive who's never heard of William Rivers Pitt, the famous best-selling writer who shows up on Skins's island quite often, sober or drunk, but usually drunk.

You really don't know of William Rivers Pitt?

Tell.  Me.  Please.  You're.  Kidding.

I live way out in the country, in an old farmhouse.

This area was first settled in 1875, and the family that homesteaded this land went into the business of raising pigs.  In fact, the first thing they built here was for the pigs, while they themselves lived in a hole dug out of the side of the ground.  They never even built a house for themselves until the pigs were all settled in and comfortable, in then-state-of-the-art swine lodgings.

They had their priorities right; it was after all the pigs that kept them alive, and so it was of utmost importance to keep the pigs alive.  The usual pioneering-in-Nebraska attitude.

Anyway, from 1875 until June 25, 1950, this place raised mostly pigs.  The same day that the socialists invaded South Korea, however, the barn burned down.  As hog prices weren't particularly good at the time, the family then went into raising cattle, which it still does to this day.

For three generations, waste-material from the barn and its environs was dumped into a nearby crevasse.  Seventy-five years of pig excrement can add up to a lot, especially if one has lots of pigs.  Photographs from 1906 show that already the crevasse had been filled in, and a mound was starting to grow.

And it grew and grew and grew until the fire.

It looks rather ordinary; it of course lost any stench it had when Dwight and Mamie were in the White House, and by the time Jack and Jackie moved into the White House, it had the texture of ordinary dirt. 

To a non-Sandhillsian, it looks like just another mound.  To a native Sandhillsian, it's a mound, but a man-made one.  To a soil scientist, it's 740 cubic yards, or cubic tons, of pig shit.

The stories about the William Rivers Pitt are buried deep deep in the archives here, but that's an awful lot of reading matter.  The above is the Reader's Digest condensed version.

[BattleHymn]

Frank,

Your early settlers in your immediate area didn't happen to bring some iris bulbs with them that they planted, did they?  I'm told that abandoned dugout houses and locations of former sod houses can still have the original irises growing.   

[franksolich]

Frank,

Your early settlers in your immediate area didn't happen to bring some iris bulbs with them that they planted, did they?  I'm told that abandoned dugout houses and locations of former sod houses can still have the original irises growing.

Yeah, they did.

Actually, irises with antecedents going back to the 1870s and 1880s in Nebraska are a dime a dozen dozen.

I'm not a horticulturalist, but I assume irises were popular because they could grow here.

There's always been plenty of water in the Sandhills, but the soil is, uh, a little hostile towards some green stuff.

But irises by the boatload all around.

[BattleHymn]

How much of the old dugout house is left, if anything?

Sorry if it sounds like I am prying.  I've always been an avid student of history.

[franksolich]

How much of the old dugout house is left, if anything?

Sorry if it sounds like I am prying.  I've always been an avid student of history.

You're not prying, sir, and so no problem.

The ground's been worked over much here, although two summers ago, a prairie archaeologist spent six weeks here, mapping out the ground, locating even six different sites of sod outhouses (the place got indoor plumbing during the 1920s.....but no electricity until 1961).

Among other things.

As you know, the custom was, whenever a new house was built, to convert the older one to other useful purposes.

The pattern was usually: canvas tent, canvas tent with hole in the ground, hole in the ground ("dug-out"), small sod house, larger sod house, same larger sod house with wooden addition, and finally a wooden Victorian abode of some sort.  Construction in the Sandhills was quick and easy, and the materials usually already there (excepting wood).

The average life of a sod house was usually about 20 years (although some lasted far longer than that), which was enough time to put it to other uses after the family had upgraded--for chickens, for livestock, for storage of crops.

All such sod buildings had been gone several decades by the time I moved out here the autumn of 2005.

But however, the prairie archaeologist was able to map each one of them out; he could discern, for example, the locations of the outhouses by the flora growing in a particular area, flora that needs lime to grow.

Incidentally, I spent my adolescence near the world's most famous two-story sod house; it was still standing when I was around, but considerably eroded away.  Sod is just dirt, so anything built of it not going to last long.

[franksolich]

Actually, sir, flowers have always been big in the Sandhills.

You and thundley4 and cavegal resurrected my memory; usually after I write something, I let it go and forget all about it, more interested in writing something else.  I have no idea how much I have here (and on other sites), but I suddenly remembered this one:

"Draper Tappermann's wife"

The time and place is in the middle of the Sandhills, early 1970s.

http://www.conservativecave.com/index.php/topic,23353.0

[BattleHymn]

Actually, sir, flowers have always been big in the Sandhills.

You and thundley4 and cavegal resurrected my memory; usually after I write something, I let it go and forget all about it, more interested in writing something else.  I have no idea how much I have here (and on other sites), but I suddenly remembered this one:

"Draper Tappermann's wife"

The time and place is in the middle of the Sandhills, early 1970s.

http://www.conservativecave.com/index.php/topic,23353.0

That does it.  Starting tonight, I bookmark your stories. 

When inquiring with a local the last time I was up through there, I was told that your irises differ in their plant makeup than the irises found back east.  I am not sure if there is any truth to that or not, but it seems plausible. 

[JLO]

That does it.  Starting tonight, I bookmark your stories. 

When inquiring with a local the last time I was up through there, I was told that your irises differ in their plant makeup than the irises found back east.  I am not sure if there is any truth to that or not, but it seems plausible. 

Indeed he does tell some good stories, eh?  He should write a book.