Redneckology
By Gale Sparks
I came from
long line of rednecks. It was my destiny to turn out the
way I am today. Both sides of my family are rednecks. I cut my teeth on
fried rabbit, turtle soup, and
squirrel legs.
We learned to dip, chew,
smoke, and drink by the time we hit our teens.
My Uncle Bernie gave
me my first dip of Skoal when I was
nine, we were floating down the river in a flat bottom boat
cat fishing. He teased me, offering me a dip from his Skoal
can I snatched the can and took a big pinch.
Skoal is powerful
stuff for a kid. You get a light- headed,
warm feeling, your head starts to spin, and you feel as though
the world is going to throw you off. I knew as I leaned over the side
of the boat puking my guts out and seeing the little flash bulb spots popping
that this was good stuff and would do it again,
Over the years,
the redneck’s abilities to obtain things that are
high on his priority list become a little more sophisticated. His
quest for alcohol, wild game, hunting, fishing, country music, and
getting laid, may seem insane to one of his urban brothers yet seem
perfectly logical to his buddies.
One example of my
ingenuity was bootlegging beer onto the Cherokee Indian reservation
and selling it for a fifty percent profit just to make rodeo
money for that weekend.
As well as the time I sweet talked a cute little cowgirl into
crawling inside my sleeping bag, down by the river side, only to be
caught in this compromising position by her drunk, three hundred-
pound pulp truck- driving daddy. After he shook us out of the bag rolling
us onto the gravels like two sweaty rats screwing in a wool sock. As I
ran desperately through the woods to get to my
truck, I realized that I left my
new Stetson hat and Tony Lama boots back with the sleeping bag. I never saaw
Sandy again
You may realize you
have graduated with a Bachelors degree in
redneckology, when you are sitting up on a ridge in the Appalachians
listening to your dogs running a coon. While you and old Clyde
Miller’s sit behind his saw mill running off a batch
of moonshine from his fifty-gallon still. You have finally
reached redneck maturity when you have learned how to make
moonshine on your own back porch. using, a ten
gallon pressure cooker, and ten pounds of white cornmeal from your
nearest Save-a-Lot store.
After all I have
done over the years, last and greatest sign of redneckology
came when me and possibly the cream of the redneck crop were hunting wild hog in
the Okeefenokee Swamp. When we got up at five o'clock, to eat
a quick bowl of cereal, and head into the swamp only
to find that our milk had clabbered and the only other
liquid on hand was a case of Michelob.
It feels impossible to eat your cereal dry, when your
mouth tastes like sawdust from Skoal and beer from the night before.
You pour beer on your Cheerio's, without a second thought and
eat the hair of the dog that bit you.
The raising and
nurturing of a baby redneck is the same as
rearing any other creature: it can be laid back and easy, or fast and
furious. Each redneck child has his own special
quirks, but the end
the results should always be the same: a confident, happy, self-
reliant
little redneck that can make the best out of any situation.
What I'm tryin' to
say is just because someone knows how to skin a cat or gut a deer, likes Waylon, Willie, and David Allan Coe doesn't
make him an inbred, toothless reject from that Deliverance
movie.
They may just as well be doctors or attorneys
or your neighbornext door neighbor The one thing that you can be sure of is when everything
in
this Old World has come to an end the redneck will always find a way to survive.