smellslikepoopie: February 2009

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

The story behind, "that'll make a turd"

My dad was always a nice guy. He didn't swear, he was always helping people, he didn't drink, never had a facial hair more than a day old. The man didn't like to camp because it hurt his back. Growing up in Wyoming I always thought he was kind of wussy. Josh lived behind me. Now Josh's dad was a true-blue, Wyoming, mountain man. He worked in soda ash mine, we was a bearded, swearing, drinking, hunting, fishing, hulk of a man--all the things you're supposed to be when you live in Wyoming. The man had a knife collection. A fucking knife collection! It's every Wyoming boy's dream to have a knife collection. When ever I would eat dinner over at Joshes house and I'd utter the words, "I'm full," his dad would grumble back, "Fulla Sheit."

Anyways. Back to the story at hand. I was elk hunting with Josh and his dad. We woke up at the ass crack of dawn to make breakfast. It was cold as shit. I'm not talking about the, "gee it's cold" kind of cold. I'm talking about sleeping in a tent in the middle of winter on top of a mountain in Wyoming at the ass crack of dawn cold. The kind of cold that makes your nostrils freeze together for a second of if you breath in too deep. So, we fired up the grill, cooked some bacon, cooked the potatoes in the bacon grease--home style--with lots of onions, then threw a grip of eggs on top of everything and scrambled the shit out of it. Right out of the pot Josh's dad doused the whole concoction in what seemed like a quarter of a container of maple syrup and rationed it out between the three of us.

There we sat with on top of a mountain, in the miserable cold, with the first few rays of sunlight coming over the horizon. Josh's dad took a few bites of the onoiny, homefry, syrup scramble, and he looks up still chewing, looks around, and says, "that'll make a turd." I kept waiting for him to start laughing or give me wink or something, but he just went right along eating. I'm not sure exactly what went though his head, but as he sat there eating, I can imagine it was, simply, "that'll make a turd." He wasn't trying to be funny, not trying to cheer us up, just commenting on the fact that the food we are eating will make a nice turd. And this is why I had to move to California. I realized right then and there that I will never be a true mountain man.