Shepherding Outdoors

PICKENS COUNTY FARM NO ELECTRICITY

BY WALT MERRELL

My wife, Hannah, grew up in Andalusia, Alabama. It is a small, quiet town that may be most well known for her mother, Brenda Gantt, the sweet little old lady who found internet fame by teaching the world how to make biscuits and for the fact that “we pass through it on the way to Destin.” Brenda spent her toddler years in Pickens County, but “grew up” in Northport, Alabama. Her father, Cecil Hicks, was born a sharecropper’s son and they made their livelihood in the sandy loam fields and in the flood plain of Coal Fire Creek, a dozen or so miles outside of Carrolton, Alabama.

Cecil and his wife, Flo, were married in 1944 in Lucedale, Mississippi by a justice of the peace. Cecil was 23 and Flo was 17. Cecil worked in the shipyards for a year or so while they lived in Fairhope in an apartment. Flo said, “We had the most beautiful views of the sunset that I ever did see.” The apartment overlooked Mobile Bay, from near the foot of Fairhope Avenue, just atop the bluff that stands guard over what is now the Fairhope Pier. Soon enough though, the war efforts started winding down and they moved back to the Hicks family farm in the Springhill area of Pickens County, Alabama. Flo always remarked that “it was a long way from Fairhope to Pickens County.” Having been to both, I know that her assessment was true in mileage and community.

The First Hicks Family Farmhouse

Cecil grew up in a farming family. They row cropped “about 80 acres back in those days” he once told me. “We also ran cattle and had an old mule to turn the ground and pull wagons. Corn mostly,” he offered, “but we also grew field peas and potatoes, and we had a big turnip patch. We only ate what we could grow or shoot. So, we ate a lot of yard birds, a few deer and a turkey every now and then, too. We sold the calves.”

Times were simpler, I suspect, in the mid-1940s in Pickens County, Alabama. Enviously simple, I’d imagine. Quiet nights filled with the song of the whippoorwill accompanied by the chorus of a thousand crickets and clear blue-sky days clouded only by the dust of the plow and the mist of the morning fog … much different from today. Crickets are drowned out by passing semi-trucks and the clarity that comes from the peace of mind of simple living is clouded by the clutter of the internet. “I’ve seen a lot of change in my life,” Flo once remarked … “Oh, yes Lord. A lot of change,” as she shook her head and walked back into the kitchen of her Northport home.

Cecil loved to speak of the change he’d seen in his lifetime too … sometimes good and sometimes bad. He was generally a light-hearted and jovial man … shorter than most men, and a bit more portly too, and his personality fit the stereotype that such statured men usually carry. He most often had a smile, and hetook pleasure in seeing other people smile. He loved to tell a story …

“I remember one morning, Hannah” – he shared this story with her several times. “I was out working in the fields. It was spring and we were turning the ground getting ready to plant. That ole mule was being stubborn, and I was having to work a lot harder than I wanted too.” His smiled crescented the lower half of his face as the wrinkles around his eyes drew tight with fond recollections … “We were setting out rows and the mule must have gotten into the neighbor’s mash because he sure didn’t want to walk a straight line that day!” We all chuckled as he sat up in his velvety green recliner, so as to have a better ability to “deliver” the story. The fire crackled in the fireplace behind him as he drew us all in … “I always knew when it was coming on near time for lunch because I could see the smoke from the fire.” The fields he plowed surrounded their wood sided, stick built, country home… nothing more than a few rooms heated by wood fires and no indoor plumbing. “When I saw the smoke that meant I needed to get to a stopping point and go on up to the house and draw water to wash up.”

Cecil and Flo, and their three children, Brenda, Steve and Kenneth

“With the mule being stubborn and all, I had worked up a pretty good appetite. We’d set off a row … the whole time I was walking towards the house … and I couldn’t see any smoke. Then we’d turn the other way and we’d set off the next row. I just knew that by the time I got to the end and turned around again, there would be smoke coming from the stove pipe. But every time … no smoke.”

Cecil described the dust caking to his cheeks as the morning wore on and how the perch of the sun in the midday sky said it surely was noon or later. The coolness of the morning air had long faded and the only thing hotter than his brow was his temper … “I was so mad and hungry I finally threw those plow handles down, hollered at the mule, and marched across the field to the house. I didn’t even bother to wash up … just stormed up onto the porch and straight into the house.” He chuckled a little as he looked around the room to make sure we were all still listening intently. “When I went through the door, I realized what had happened … and thank the good Lord I managed to figure it out before I raised any Cain and put my foot in my mouth!”

Cecil said that coming through the back door, he saw a bowl of piping hot field peas, some corn bread and a few pieces of country fried deer steak in the center of the tablecloth covered round table. Flo was finishing up washing a few dishes at the double basined, cast-iron sink that sat below the single paned window. She stared out the window overlooking the field where he worked. Behind her, their beautiful new, white enamel, General Electric stove that had been delivered the day before.

“Yes, Lord… a lot of change,” Flo said from the other room, as the rest of us laughed at Cecil’s forgetful adjustment to the changing times. But sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same …

Hannah and Cecil riding horses on the farm

Through the years, the farm had become less of a farm and more of a retreat. Hunting trips in winter and play-cations during the summer. And through the years, not much changed, except the world around it …. Electricity is still about the only modern amenity at the old farmhouse now. No cable. No central heat or air conditioning. No internet and no telephone … and in the kitchen sits the very same General Electric stove … it still works today almost as good as it did all those years ago. That’s not to say that all of those modern conveniences aren’t available in Pickens County. They are. But, Cecil and Flo never felt obliged to embrace those changes, instead preferring that the simplicity of life remain intact at their old Pickens County farmhouse.

George, Cecil and Flo on the back porch in the early 2000s.

Some years later, George and Brenda took our girls, and their other grandchildren, to Pickens County for a weeklong summer vacation. Brenda cooked on that old stove while George tended to chores that needed doing around the farm. All of the kids played in the yard … they hunted Big Foot; made supper in a dirt kitchen out under two cedar trees; caught fireflies at night and painted their faces … and they soaked up all that the good Lord provided under those crystal-clear blue skies … unpolluted by the clutter of modern-day conveniences … and they had the time of their lives.

And of course, all of the family have been back to that old dust covered farmhouse more times than anyone can remember. It’s where Hannah learned to ride a horse. It’s where Bay and Cape both killed their first buck. We chased rabbits and killed water moccasins, trailed deer through the briar patch and saw eagles soar. We shot coyotes and watched bucks fight. Cape even called up her first bobcat in one of those fields. We froze our tails off and hiked out of the midnight woods to the warm glow of the lamp light of the old farmhouse … always welcoming us back, no matter how long we’d been away.

That old farmhouse is where we found God in all His glory, uncorrupted by man. A lot has changed since 1944 … but thankfully, not everything. For that old Pickens County farm is where we went shepherding outdoors … more than a few times.

Cape's First Bobcat

Bay's First Deer

Walt Merrell writes about life, family and faith. An avid hunter and outdoorsman, he enjoys time “in the woods or on the water” with his wife Hannah, and their three girls, Bay, Cape and Banks. They also manage an outdoors-based ministry called Shepherding Outdoors. Follow their adventures on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube at Shepherding Outdoors. You can email him at shepherdingoutdoors@gmail.com.