The kids and I like to kick the hedge apples around at the park. I also once had a some hardwood jewelry made from osage orange that looked quite nice.
"This led French explorers to dub the tree the bois d’arc, meaning “wood of the bow” (and, of course, English speakers dubbed it the Osage orange after the tribe that famously put it to use)."
And, in southwestern American speech, "bowdock", I believe.
There are a couple of osage orange trees near where I live in Washington, DC.
I remember spotting one near the FDA building in College Park, Maryland. I wonder if the grapefruit-sized fruit could be used for children's crafts and decorating, or if it just starts rotting.
I'm in France in a city called Vichy, and there are several "Orangers des Osages".
With my wife, we were surprised by the quantity of fruits lying under these trees, and wondered if there was any kind of usage for them.
Apparently not.
In Kansas we called the trees “hedge trees” as they were grown as hedges around fields. They grew thickly and with the spines, cattle were disinterested in passing through the hedge. The branches were used a durable fence posts. The fruit were called “hedge apples”.
Before the days of cell phones, instagram, tiktok, and one used a phone line to dial-up to the internet... we had to entertain ourselves in creative ways.
One such way was "Hedging the Town".
You get a couple of buddies, ride out to a hedge row in one of their pickups, fill the bed of the pickup to the rails with hedge apples.
You then drive to the rival nearby's town main intersection (in the midwest, there's only usually one major intersection that has a stoplight or 4 way stop) and back up into the middle of it around 1am in the morning.
You then drop the tailgate and floor the gas, spreading hedgeapples in a randomized layout in the intersection. By doing this, you are assisting with biodiversity in the rival town. Unfortunately local residents were not commonly pleased with said efforts to help plant diversity.
There's also the help encouraging diversity in grass types by the marching band forming the block letter shapes of their school on the opposing team's field. While in this formation, the band members empty their pockets that had been full of grass seeds. Otherwise, the opposing team's field would just be a monoculture of grass, and that's never a good thing for diversity
this is something from my high school days which were way before 2000. these guys didn't just think it up on their own. they were just two rival college teams that gets talked about in news. podunk high schools don't see coverage outside their local paper. it's a traditional folklore type of texas high school rivalry tale. if you've ever been in a marching band in texas, i'm sure you've heard this tale about some school from somewhere did this. did they really or is it a story passed down as part of the messing with freshmen tradition?
right up there with OSU Cowboys building a new stadium and the brick work was contracted out to someone that was an OU fan. legend has it that the brick was laid in such a manner that the variances of brick patterns could be seen the OU logo in the OSU stadium. urban legend or not, it's what passes as great rivalry stories
There was a building at Texas A&M's campus that was covered in maroon lava rock when I arrived. The heat and cold cycling caused the epoxy to lose it's grip and the rocks slowly fell one by one. You couldn't really blame the architect, as he was a UT graduate and had the undoubted hindrance of a low IQ. It was suspicious though, that the epoxy would be burnt orange...
Thanks for this. I hadn't heard that one. I'll add it to the repertoire! I'm not a big college allegiance type, having never really gone, but my favorite college football team is whoever is on the other side of the line of scrimmage from UT.
It's interesting to see a claim in the article that Wikipedia disputes.
Texas Monthly: "Lipscomb said that the unusually large fruit is a remnant of prehistoric times, once eaten by massive, now-extinct animals like the woolly mammoth"
Wikipedia: "Controversial suggestions have been made that it was consumed by extinct Pleistocene megafauna, but these claims have been criticised as lacking empirical evidence."
It seems likely that something must have eaten them at some point to spread the species around. Those things weigh about 2 pounds and wouldn't move far without help from an animal - or maybe a tornado. I would love to find out that there's a species on this planet whose reproductive strategy depended on tornadoes.
Squirrels and raccoons are very good at shredding even the toughest of pumpkin skins and garbage can lids. I'm sure they can handle some overripe fruit that plopped off a tree.
But do they spread the seed or do they eat the seed?
The seed seems rather large, and the fruit is uselessly huge by comparison, it doesn’t seem much like the sort of things which would be adapted to being spread by squirrels.
Squirrels do eat them, especially the seeds. I suspect that they are not the ideal distribution vector for Osage oranges since they consume the seeds rather than distribute them.
I suppose squirrels might end up propagating the seeds by stashing them away somewhere, then for any number of possible reasons, never actually coming back to eat them.
They roll pretty well until they get mushy, then the seeds are pretty easily dispersed by rain. And the mature tree does really well on hillsides/near streams. So maybe water is the answer?
Also, I'm certain that something ate them. I've personally seen Squirrels, groundhogs, horses, and cows eat them.
Around my house, like the elms, hercules club, and hackberries that are native, bois d'arc tends to be spread by birds shitting the seeds. I have a grove of birdshit elms that I written previously about.
I'm not from Texas, but in Oregon we have a plant, the wild cucumber, that served in the same ecological niche, being a fruit whose sole purpose seems to be furnishing children with satisfying projectiles.
The wild cucumber is shaped like a hand grenade, and splatters a glue-like substance on the target.
Someone in another comment speculated on whether it's possible for some fruit to evolve to propagate its seeds across the landscape by tornado. I suppose it might also be possible for a plant to evolve to present passers-by an irresistible temptation to throw it at someone.
I'm not from Texas either, but there were a few trees in southern Illinois where I grew up.
I live in Oregon now though and my kids love throwing horsetail shoots at each other like spears, which I imagine does a great job distributing its unique spores.
whoa there buddy! thems fightin words. round here, in polite society, we refer to these as tall tales. they're part of the bigger in texas lore. calling them controversial is darn right rude that only a city slicker northerner would dare utter in the great state! that being said, i say bless your heart!
A long time ago I helped remove a barb-wire fence where bois d'arc posts were used as corners. The fence had been built by the owner's grandfather and was more than 50 years old. Those bois d'arc posts were deep yellow inside, rock hard, and with zero rot after all that time in the Texas dirt.
It really is a great material. I've replaced a few broken by equipment pushing 100 years old on a farm in Illinois.
We had 4x4s in the shop but would still replace them with Osage orange limbs. Logic was even though it was more work to find a new limb, it was less work in that long run.
Makes absolutely excellent seasoned cord word as well.
Yes. I agree. It burns nice and hot and clean when dry. I carved a small depression in a small limb for a pipe bowl for my cousin using a sharp pocketknife and finally ended up burning the rest of the bowl to a useful depth with a hot steel bolt. It's great wood and a beautiful yellow.
When I was a kid we called them horse-apples or bois d'arc. We chunked those huge things at each other playing dumb-ass war games.
As an young adult I took an opportunity to quit my perfectly good job and ride off into the wind on a horseback trip with a cousin that would've placed us in Wyoming as an initial stop and ultimately would've taken us to northern British Columbia had everything worked the way we "planned". I am using the most ill-fitting, inaccurate usage of planning here as our only real preparation involved acclimating our mounts and our posteriors to the saddle and acquiring far too few items necessary to sustain such a journey at the time. Neither of us even carried a map. We just figured that with the limited funds available and a strong enough desire to taste the breeze we could figure it out on the way.
I will never forget one of our first nights on the "trail" out along the highway across central Texas when we passed through a town with one of those famously stylish courthouse squares. We were clearly a curiosity and a number of people watched as we plodded along thru town trying to keep our less dedicated steeds pointed down the right sidewalks. On the square, there was an old legacy business where a cobbler or saddle-maker had a shop and out front above the awning to advertise was a large sign and a kid-sized statuesque version of a paint horse hanging over the sidewalk to draw the eye to the small shop.
As we passed under that paint horse statue my own mount let fly a large volume of suitably digested plant matter from the previous morning's grazing of the Johnson grass growing along the highway where we pitched our bedrolls.
It was quite fitting and a perfect spot for a pile of horse shit and we all had a great chuckle.
Continuing out of town along one of the small farm-to-market roads where we hoped to find a spot to camp later we found ourselves passing the second-from-last house out by the city limits sign. There were people in the yard including several kids who were enthralled by our horses. A couple of the parents approached us and asked whether we could let their kids have a quick ride before we passed on out of town. Since our "schedules" were largely free of any planned events for that afternoon or any of the other upcoming afternoons we gladly agreed and were met with gleeful shouts as they jockeyed amongst themselves for the rights to plant the first butt in a saddle.
1980 was a hot year in Texas and this day was just another in a record-setting string of days with high temperatures above 100F (37.8C). We surrendered our sweaty mounts to the exuberance of youth and the control of their parents and as we visited with the other parents waiting for their own child's turn we found ourselves invited to have supper and spend the night with their family. This was at the time a fantastic development for us since our supplies had been diminished a bit over the preceding days and the thought of a supper and a bedroll inside a house on the floor was quite appealing. The price on our end was quite agreeable too - allow the kids to ride our horses and they would take care of removing the saddles, brushing the horses down and grazing them in the backyard vegetation overnight. This was indeed luck of the purest kind and a clear sign from the universe that all would somehow work out in the end for us.
There were two related families living in this large two-story Victorian house that obviously needed a bit of love on the outside but was brim-full on the inside once they all were in their proper places for the evening. One of the husbands approached me and took me off to the side and this is the part where the bois d'arc comes into play in this long post that most will never read.
He told me that his wife had noticed that I was afflicted by a large protruding wart on my left elbow and that if I was agreeable that she would like to help me eliminate that wart but she was too shy to approach me about it. Well, I'm ...
I’m not surprised that the sap might have cured your wart. The sap contains latex and other irritating components. Several cures for warps involve covering them with an irritant and triggering the body to slough off a layer of skin containing the wart. Compound-W is salicylic acid in a waterproof carrier that irritates the skin into peeling off. Some people have used duct tape placed over the wart for that.
Thanks for reading. I learned about the latex in the sap and the duct tape only a couple of years ago and had used Compound-W in the past before these events on a knuckle wart. By the time I encountered this lady I was resigned to having this large wart accompany me thru life since nothing I tried completely removed it.
Indeed, what a fantastic story and read, thanks for sharing. I can barely bring myself to drive to NM or big bend from Austin, and here you were going to cross the state on horseback, and then some. I'll bookmark this for when I lack motivation
That was the second part of my youthful adventures in 1980. It was our second attempt at making the run. The first one was probably an equally epic, though just as poorly planned and executed adventure where we ultimately learned a little about how to prepare for the next attempt. Just a little in the truest sense of the phrase.
>When I was a kid we called them horse-apples or bois d'arc
When I was a kid I had a grove of these in the front yard. I had heard them referred to all of the names mentioned, but never did I see them spelled until much much later in life. To have seen "bois d'arc" spelled out would have been surprising let alone to know it was french in origin.
As a teenager, it was part of my yard work chores to keep the horse-apples cleared from the ground. Being from texas and out in the boonies, "yard" is doing some heavy lifting. The yard was several acres. We had the bois d'arc trees along with texas pecans--the small thick shelled tougher than an aramdillo to crack open kind. So along with the horse-apples, I had to gather all of the fallen limbs. These went into a pile, and when the pile got big enough, we had a bonfire.
>1980 was a hot year in Texas and this day was just another in a record-setting string of days with high temperatures above 100F (37.8C).
This might be the same summer I remember as being old enough to be aware of how hot hot can be in a Texas summer. Maybe it was the record-setting nature that intrigued me, but it definitely sticks out from that time. I would gladly have a summer of a mere 30 consecutive days of triple digits seeing how now we are approaching 90+ days.
>we passed through a town with one of those famously stylish courthouse squares.
So so many towns with the old downtown areas of the courthouse in the center of the square with the shops around it. That number goes down quickly filtering by stylish courthouses. Would this happen to have been Waxahachie, or further north near McKinney? As an adult with much different interests than when I was a kid, I am now attracted to this part of Texas history and how modern day is trying to recapture some of that.
You remind me that for an embarrassingly long time I also had no idea how to spell that correctly. So many words in Texas are not spelled as they are pronounced for a number of reasons.
We also scrounged native hard-sells pecans from wherever we could find them. Old trees in city parks were a great source. Nowadays I have several large easy crackers out here and for the first few years that I lived here I wasted time every season conjuring ways to end up with more ripe pecans than the local birds could abscond with. It was definitely a losing proposition on my end as the crows descended before the nuts were ripe and hauled them as they ripened so that I was largely left with the ones they didn't want to mess with. It became such a joke that I finally gave in and today I sit on the porch and wave as the family of crows that live around my place cycle through stealing my nuts. I am currently trying to lure them close enough to the house to become their friends. Wish me luck.
Yes. 1980 was a doozie. Very memorable when, like me, you spent all day from just before dawn to slightly after dark working outside just waiting for beer thirty when the boss would roll up with some hang-down, cheese, saltines, and an onion with a carton of milk for everyone. That was the 5:30 (beer thirty) supper break for us.
This was the old Hill County Courthouse that burned down in 1993. Willie Nelson did a benefit concert since he was born and raised there in Abbott in Hill County. His annual picnics were the best outdoor events that I ever attended.
Willie's picnics are legendary. Hill Co, hmm. Spent many a summer jumping off the cliffs at Lake Whitney. Can't say I've ever been downtown though. We got to the lake "the back way". I had North Texas in mind, didn't equate the heart of texas as North. That's like someone from Winterfell being called a southerner by a wildling. It just ain't right!
That 80s summer was a bit early for me to be getting off of work, unless I get credit as having a job from being outside all day playing in the woods, creek, and fields doing whatever a young lad in the 80s could get away with since as you've said there was no internet, console gaming, tablet/devices, or anything else other than UHF TV (gag me) and 3 networks (that signed off to the national anthem each night at midnight) to really do. The area I grew up in is steep with history of cowboy vs native american lore. There was a small fort nearby. The creek in the back had ruts hardened into the limestone that I was told were made by wagon wheels. This seemed logical to me as my friends and I found several buried wagon wheels, arrow heads, and lots of fossils in the creek.
Edit: nearly forgot to mention the pecans at my grandparents house. they had the lovely giant soft shelled variety. every year, all of the grand kids would get to play the "who can get the most pecans from the yard" game. these would then become the spoils that we'd use for the next year. as the trees got older, they would produce so many nuts that their limbs would bend to the point of breaking. (for those that don't know, you can shout at a pecan tree and the stress from the sound waves will dislodge at least a couple of limbs.) as we got older, we realized we could just shake the limbs and have fresh pecans that the squirrels hadn't had first crack at yet. after the raining of nuts stopped, those low bowing limbs would let out an audible sigh as the weight they had been carrying was suddenly released.
The 1979 was awesome. I still have my t-shirt, that's how good it was.
Lake Whitney just below the dam was the ranch we were on. The owner was one of those quick-draw McGraw guys who entered six-gun fast draw competitions and was a winner. He might've been a doctor in real life. It's been a while and we only met him in person a couple of times.
I definitely remember the 3 channels with Elvis singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic at sign-off and then the poem High Flight before it all went to snow. That line where he slips the surly bonds of earth and touches the face of God was a great turn of phrase for a sign-off.
I grew up around the old Fort where Cynthia Ann Parker and her family had their Comanche problems that led to the birth of Quanah Parker in a roundabout kind of way. We worked on the land where the Comanche had camped for generations and where they camped before they hit the fort. The sands were full of arrowheads around there and a drive thru a pasture could yield several after a good rain when the gophers would do their home improvements and shove those points up through the dirt to the surface.
Pecans are self-pruning according to an arborist I talked with. They retain as many limbs as they need and in a drought will drop limbs. That is what I use in my smoker. I pick up limbs that the tree drops during the year and keep them around for flavoring briskets or other smoked meats and vegetables.
>I grew up around the old Fort where Cynthia Ann Parker and her family had their Comanche problems that led to the birth of Quanah Parker in a roundabout kind of way
Man as big as Texas is, it seems to be a small world. That's where my mother's family is from too. How many times I've had to correct people on the pronunciation of Mexia. Downtown Groesbeck is somewhere I have spent a bit of time. My mom's dad is related to the Parkers (which by extension means I am as well), but I've never traced it back to confirm.
Mexia. The first time I heard the joke about "how do you say the name of this place?" and the punch line was "Dairy Queen" I was in Mexia.
I used to know all those dirt roads and oilfield lease roads. I learned to drive out there around Shiloh power-sliding around those blind curves at night so you could see whether there was any oncoming traffic.
Some of my family also had deep connections to Hill and Limestone County.
Groesbeck had a great diner near the courthouse where we used to get breakfast every morning on our way out to the Kosse/Marquez area.
You guys are sparking some memories. I grew up on a small horse farm in North Texas (fairly near McKinney, back when McKinney was a sleepy little town) and we had a ton of "bowdark" trees. The horses loved the apples. We used to shoot them (the apples, not the horses) with our BB guns because their white oozing sap was visible evidence of hitting the target. Never heard of using the sap for warts but I'll take your word for it.
Sometimes my brother would make beautiful things out of bois d'arc wood. If you have the patience and the carbide-tipped tools to work it it's gorgeous wood that lasts forever because it's hard as a rock.
The summer of 1980 was indeed unbearably hot. Texas summers are always hot but the summer of 1980 was something else entirely. I remember not feeling cool for the entire month of July, even at midnight.
McKinney. Pretty funny that one time probably when you were probably around there our crew stayed at a small motel on the north side of town. It was a "no pets" property. One of the crew had just adopted a mutt puppy who looked like a promising companion and he tried to hide that pup from the cleaning lady. We were all kicked out and finally found a place to land in Sherman just off of 75. I think it is the old Travelodge property that is decaying today. We used to have races around that parking lot and ridiculous quantities of beer were consumed around the pool after work. Too many stories.
We did seismic work all over that area for months. One rancher invited the whole crew to a calf fry so we shut down and enjoyed mountain oysters and cold beer. That area is full of good people.
I grew up in Gainesville. Pump jacks were everywhere. Or more accurately, companies that built pump jacks were everywhere. Also drillers, mudders, cementers, etc.
Gainesville was quite prosperous in those days. But it was a dry town [then], so you couldn't have had a beer party without attracting some attention. That's probably why you went 30 miles away to Sherman :-)
I did a stint at a well logging company in college. The big French one that starts with 'S.' Or rather two such companies if you count TI. They're a semiconductor powerhouse now but they started out in the seismic business.
Oh yeah. Dry towns. Havens for hypocrites who would just drive down the road across the county line to the liquor store and stock up for the week. Pathetic people. The first task any surveyor had on our crews was to locate the nearest liquor and beer so that everyone on the crews would know which way to go after work. The ideal situation would have us in a motel in a town with good beer joints or clubs but we definitely had no problems taking control of any local private clubs in dry counties where you had to pay a small "membership" fee to buy beer.
Scumbagger. I know the one.
EDIT: I don't know when you were there but I was MWD for Analdril. Biggest collection of liars, maggots, self-interested pricks, and thieves in the industry. If you worked there you would understand and have a personal perspective on why the O&G industry's poor public reputation is something that they have obviously earned and cultivated.
Prior to covid and border being closed, I was looking to acquire a quantity of seeds to test how they might fare in Northern Australia's climate, with the aim to make a hedge fence. The choice seemed ideal since a hedge of it was claimed to be pig/hog tight, horse high, and bull strong. If it can keep a pig out, it'd probably stop a roo or wallaby.
There’s a big one down my block in DC, on the corner. In the fall it’s an insane hazard and I either cross the street or cover my head as I walk under it. It also makes a big mess on street, as cars run over the fruit and then they slowly rot.
Seems like it would be an interesting wood to work with. I don't think I've ever seen it for sale at a hardwood store, though maybe I would if I lived in its native geography.
I get it periodically. I turned handles and nobs out of osage orange for my old school lever espresso machine. It was very orange colored at first, and has darkened to almost brown with exposure to light.
I’ve worked small pieces with hand tools, and found it dense, but enjoyable.
71 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] threadAnd, in southwestern American speech, "bowdock", I believe.
There are a couple of osage orange trees near where I live in Washington, DC.
When cut open, they release a natural insect repellent. Works against many species of ants and cockroaches among other insects.
The wood is excellent material for fences. Very tough and durable.
Apparently, "bowdock" and other similar names are a corruption of "bois d'arc".
One such way was "Hedging the Town".
You get a couple of buddies, ride out to a hedge row in one of their pickups, fill the bed of the pickup to the rails with hedge apples.
You then drive to the rival nearby's town main intersection (in the midwest, there's only usually one major intersection that has a stoplight or 4 way stop) and back up into the middle of it around 1am in the morning.
You then drop the tailgate and floor the gas, spreading hedgeapples in a randomized layout in the intersection. By doing this, you are assisting with biodiversity in the rival town. Unfortunately local residents were not commonly pleased with said efforts to help plant diversity.
SMU is in Dallas, Texas.
I’m not sure that’s common outside of that awesome, righteous incident?
right up there with OSU Cowboys building a new stadium and the brick work was contracted out to someone that was an OU fan. legend has it that the brick was laid in such a manner that the variances of brick patterns could be seen the OU logo in the OSU stadium. urban legend or not, it's what passes as great rivalry stories
Texas Monthly: "Lipscomb said that the unusually large fruit is a remnant of prehistoric times, once eaten by massive, now-extinct animals like the woolly mammoth"
Wikipedia: "Controversial suggestions have been made that it was consumed by extinct Pleistocene megafauna, but these claims have been criticised as lacking empirical evidence."
It seems likely that something must have eaten them at some point to spread the species around. Those things weigh about 2 pounds and wouldn't move far without help from an animal - or maybe a tornado. I would love to find out that there's a species on this planet whose reproductive strategy depended on tornadoes.
The seed seems rather large, and the fruit is uselessly huge by comparison, it doesn’t seem much like the sort of things which would be adapted to being spread by squirrels.
BTW - we always called them “hedge apples”
Also, I'm certain that something ate them. I've personally seen Squirrels, groundhogs, horses, and cows eat them.
The wild cucumber is shaped like a hand grenade, and splatters a glue-like substance on the target.
Someone in another comment speculated on whether it's possible for some fruit to evolve to propagate its seeds across the landscape by tornado. I suppose it might also be possible for a plant to evolve to present passers-by an irresistible temptation to throw it at someone.
I live in Oregon now though and my kids love throwing horsetail shoots at each other like spears, which I imagine does a great job distributing its unique spores.
whoa there buddy! thems fightin words. round here, in polite society, we refer to these as tall tales. they're part of the bigger in texas lore. calling them controversial is darn right rude that only a city slicker northerner would dare utter in the great state! that being said, i say bless your heart!
Not exactly the same thing:
Birds, insects hitch a ride in hurricanes
https://wildlife.org/birds-insects-hitch-a-ride-in-hurricane...
Hurricanes May Bring Unusual Pests
https://specialtycropindustry.com/hurricanes-may-bring-unusu...
I have read that it is believed that flies and other insects found on remote islands originate with one or a few being blown in on a hurricane.
We had 4x4s in the shop but would still replace them with Osage orange limbs. Logic was even though it was more work to find a new limb, it was less work in that long run.
Makes absolutely excellent seasoned cord word as well.
As an young adult I took an opportunity to quit my perfectly good job and ride off into the wind on a horseback trip with a cousin that would've placed us in Wyoming as an initial stop and ultimately would've taken us to northern British Columbia had everything worked the way we "planned". I am using the most ill-fitting, inaccurate usage of planning here as our only real preparation involved acclimating our mounts and our posteriors to the saddle and acquiring far too few items necessary to sustain such a journey at the time. Neither of us even carried a map. We just figured that with the limited funds available and a strong enough desire to taste the breeze we could figure it out on the way.
I will never forget one of our first nights on the "trail" out along the highway across central Texas when we passed through a town with one of those famously stylish courthouse squares. We were clearly a curiosity and a number of people watched as we plodded along thru town trying to keep our less dedicated steeds pointed down the right sidewalks. On the square, there was an old legacy business where a cobbler or saddle-maker had a shop and out front above the awning to advertise was a large sign and a kid-sized statuesque version of a paint horse hanging over the sidewalk to draw the eye to the small shop.
As we passed under that paint horse statue my own mount let fly a large volume of suitably digested plant matter from the previous morning's grazing of the Johnson grass growing along the highway where we pitched our bedrolls.
It was quite fitting and a perfect spot for a pile of horse shit and we all had a great chuckle.
Continuing out of town along one of the small farm-to-market roads where we hoped to find a spot to camp later we found ourselves passing the second-from-last house out by the city limits sign. There were people in the yard including several kids who were enthralled by our horses. A couple of the parents approached us and asked whether we could let their kids have a quick ride before we passed on out of town. Since our "schedules" were largely free of any planned events for that afternoon or any of the other upcoming afternoons we gladly agreed and were met with gleeful shouts as they jockeyed amongst themselves for the rights to plant the first butt in a saddle.
1980 was a hot year in Texas and this day was just another in a record-setting string of days with high temperatures above 100F (37.8C). We surrendered our sweaty mounts to the exuberance of youth and the control of their parents and as we visited with the other parents waiting for their own child's turn we found ourselves invited to have supper and spend the night with their family. This was at the time a fantastic development for us since our supplies had been diminished a bit over the preceding days and the thought of a supper and a bedroll inside a house on the floor was quite appealing. The price on our end was quite agreeable too - allow the kids to ride our horses and they would take care of removing the saddles, brushing the horses down and grazing them in the backyard vegetation overnight. This was indeed luck of the purest kind and a clear sign from the universe that all would somehow work out in the end for us.
There were two related families living in this large two-story Victorian house that obviously needed a bit of love on the outside but was brim-full on the inside once they all were in their proper places for the evening. One of the husbands approached me and took me off to the side and this is the part where the bois d'arc comes into play in this long post that most will never read.
He told me that his wife had noticed that I was afflicted by a large protruding wart on my left elbow and that if I was agreeable that she would like to help me eliminate that wart but she was too shy to approach me about it. Well, I'm ...
I’m not surprised that the sap might have cured your wart. The sap contains latex and other irritating components. Several cures for warps involve covering them with an irritant and triggering the body to slough off a layer of skin containing the wart. Compound-W is salicylic acid in a waterproof carrier that irritates the skin into peeling off. Some people have used duct tape placed over the wart for that.
When I was a kid I had a grove of these in the front yard. I had heard them referred to all of the names mentioned, but never did I see them spelled until much much later in life. To have seen "bois d'arc" spelled out would have been surprising let alone to know it was french in origin.
As a teenager, it was part of my yard work chores to keep the horse-apples cleared from the ground. Being from texas and out in the boonies, "yard" is doing some heavy lifting. The yard was several acres. We had the bois d'arc trees along with texas pecans--the small thick shelled tougher than an aramdillo to crack open kind. So along with the horse-apples, I had to gather all of the fallen limbs. These went into a pile, and when the pile got big enough, we had a bonfire.
>1980 was a hot year in Texas and this day was just another in a record-setting string of days with high temperatures above 100F (37.8C).
This might be the same summer I remember as being old enough to be aware of how hot hot can be in a Texas summer. Maybe it was the record-setting nature that intrigued me, but it definitely sticks out from that time. I would gladly have a summer of a mere 30 consecutive days of triple digits seeing how now we are approaching 90+ days.
>we passed through a town with one of those famously stylish courthouse squares.
So so many towns with the old downtown areas of the courthouse in the center of the square with the shops around it. That number goes down quickly filtering by stylish courthouses. Would this happen to have been Waxahachie, or further north near McKinney? As an adult with much different interests than when I was a kid, I am now attracted to this part of Texas history and how modern day is trying to recapture some of that.
We also scrounged native hard-sells pecans from wherever we could find them. Old trees in city parks were a great source. Nowadays I have several large easy crackers out here and for the first few years that I lived here I wasted time every season conjuring ways to end up with more ripe pecans than the local birds could abscond with. It was definitely a losing proposition on my end as the crows descended before the nuts were ripe and hauled them as they ripened so that I was largely left with the ones they didn't want to mess with. It became such a joke that I finally gave in and today I sit on the porch and wave as the family of crows that live around my place cycle through stealing my nuts. I am currently trying to lure them close enough to the house to become their friends. Wish me luck.
Yes. 1980 was a doozie. Very memorable when, like me, you spent all day from just before dawn to slightly after dark working outside just waiting for beer thirty when the boss would roll up with some hang-down, cheese, saltines, and an onion with a carton of milk for everyone. That was the 5:30 (beer thirty) supper break for us.
This was the old Hill County Courthouse that burned down in 1993. Willie Nelson did a benefit concert since he was born and raised there in Abbott in Hill County. His annual picnics were the best outdoor events that I ever attended.
That 80s summer was a bit early for me to be getting off of work, unless I get credit as having a job from being outside all day playing in the woods, creek, and fields doing whatever a young lad in the 80s could get away with since as you've said there was no internet, console gaming, tablet/devices, or anything else other than UHF TV (gag me) and 3 networks (that signed off to the national anthem each night at midnight) to really do. The area I grew up in is steep with history of cowboy vs native american lore. There was a small fort nearby. The creek in the back had ruts hardened into the limestone that I was told were made by wagon wheels. This seemed logical to me as my friends and I found several buried wagon wheels, arrow heads, and lots of fossils in the creek.
Edit: nearly forgot to mention the pecans at my grandparents house. they had the lovely giant soft shelled variety. every year, all of the grand kids would get to play the "who can get the most pecans from the yard" game. these would then become the spoils that we'd use for the next year. as the trees got older, they would produce so many nuts that their limbs would bend to the point of breaking. (for those that don't know, you can shout at a pecan tree and the stress from the sound waves will dislodge at least a couple of limbs.) as we got older, we realized we could just shake the limbs and have fresh pecans that the squirrels hadn't had first crack at yet. after the raining of nuts stopped, those low bowing limbs would let out an audible sigh as the weight they had been carrying was suddenly released.
Lake Whitney just below the dam was the ranch we were on. The owner was one of those quick-draw McGraw guys who entered six-gun fast draw competitions and was a winner. He might've been a doctor in real life. It's been a while and we only met him in person a couple of times.
I definitely remember the 3 channels with Elvis singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic at sign-off and then the poem High Flight before it all went to snow. That line where he slips the surly bonds of earth and touches the face of God was a great turn of phrase for a sign-off.
I grew up around the old Fort where Cynthia Ann Parker and her family had their Comanche problems that led to the birth of Quanah Parker in a roundabout kind of way. We worked on the land where the Comanche had camped for generations and where they camped before they hit the fort. The sands were full of arrowheads around there and a drive thru a pasture could yield several after a good rain when the gophers would do their home improvements and shove those points up through the dirt to the surface.
Pecans are self-pruning according to an arborist I talked with. They retain as many limbs as they need and in a drought will drop limbs. That is what I use in my smoker. I pick up limbs that the tree drops during the year and keep them around for flavoring briskets or other smoked meats and vegetables.
Man as big as Texas is, it seems to be a small world. That's where my mother's family is from too. How many times I've had to correct people on the pronunciation of Mexia. Downtown Groesbeck is somewhere I have spent a bit of time. My mom's dad is related to the Parkers (which by extension means I am as well), but I've never traced it back to confirm.
I used to know all those dirt roads and oilfield lease roads. I learned to drive out there around Shiloh power-sliding around those blind curves at night so you could see whether there was any oncoming traffic.
Some of my family also had deep connections to Hill and Limestone County.
Groesbeck had a great diner near the courthouse where we used to get breakfast every morning on our way out to the Kosse/Marquez area.
Sometimes my brother would make beautiful things out of bois d'arc wood. If you have the patience and the carbide-tipped tools to work it it's gorgeous wood that lasts forever because it's hard as a rock.
The summer of 1980 was indeed unbearably hot. Texas summers are always hot but the summer of 1980 was something else entirely. I remember not feeling cool for the entire month of July, even at midnight.
We did seismic work all over that area for months. One rancher invited the whole crew to a calf fry so we shut down and enjoyed mountain oysters and cold beer. That area is full of good people.
Gainesville was quite prosperous in those days. But it was a dry town [then], so you couldn't have had a beer party without attracting some attention. That's probably why you went 30 miles away to Sherman :-)
I did a stint at a well logging company in college. The big French one that starts with 'S.' Or rather two such companies if you count TI. They're a semiconductor powerhouse now but they started out in the seismic business.
Scumbagger. I know the one.
EDIT: I don't know when you were there but I was MWD for Analdril. Biggest collection of liars, maggots, self-interested pricks, and thieves in the industry. If you worked there you would understand and have a personal perspective on why the O&G industry's poor public reputation is something that they have obviously earned and cultivated.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40U8F8ZD9f0
Beautiful tree, though.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/kyle-muns...
That's better than kale farmers calling their crop a superfood.
Seems like it would be an interesting wood to work with. I don't think I've ever seen it for sale at a hardwood store, though maybe I would if I lived in its native geography.
I’ve worked small pieces with hand tools, and found it dense, but enjoyable.