Smack dab in the middle of the 70s and Appalachia, Ted rented a 30 acre farm and inherited a menagerie of animals. Strange given the fact that he grew up in suburban Oklahoma City in the days of "Father Knows Best" never visited his Uncle's farm without having his allergies kick up, and didn't know jack about doing anything demanded of farm life. Another thing, the farm was surrounded by "Varmits" These ne'er-do-wells lived in the hills and hollers of Meigs County, Ohio and became infamous in their own minds for softball playing, cock fighting, dope growing, Grateful Dead listening, free loving, and beer drinking. Ted became "Scoop" to the Varmits through his skills as a first baseman, all the while pursuing a Ph.D. in interpersonal communication at Ohio University back in Athens. This introspective book is Ted's lively account of the adventures of his dual life, attending a cock fight high on mushrooms and giving a graduation address to thousands, skinny-dipping at Varmit State Park and completing doctoral comprehensives, running with outlaws while preparing to become successful in his chosen profession, growing a garden and trying to grow up himself. It was a wild ride, and what he learned about himself being a Varmit has lasted a lifetime.
The Varmits: Living with Appalachian Outlaws
A MemoirBy Ted CoonfieldAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 Ted Coonfield
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4567-3354-4 Chapter One
Moving to the Country
Sometimes we live no particular way but our own Sometimes we visit your country and live in your home (Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, "Eyes of the World")
Living in the country possessed me. An oddity, given the fact I grew up in suburban Oklahoma City, just six blocks off the highway of the Heartland, Route 66. The neighborhood was filled with similar houses of different color brick, all ranch-style three-bedroom homes with two-car garages, chain-link fenced back yards, barbeque grills on cement patios, and home milk delivery. We played baseball in the daytime and kick-the-can in the evenings. My friends and I toilet-papered the houses of cute girls, and became sticky and hairy pugilists in rotten tomato and cattail fights at the local "lake": a gravel pit abandoned by a concrete company and filled with water and snakes, copperheads to be exact. It was an urban existence with just a little bit of the country, and now I wanted more than a taste. I was ready to immerse myself in all things rural. So I was excited to be heading out of Athens, Ohio, on Highway 50, past Albany and down County Road C-10 through a ghost town called Carpenter, with one old abandoned and deteriorating general store, a Baptist church, and a handful of houses hugging the hills, and with the Leading Creek and railroad tracks both dissecting the ghost town. Climbing the curved hill "out of town" I noticed the biggest tree I think I'd ever seen. Months later I learned the tree's species, a Catawba, with giant leaves, and a wingspan covering what seemed like a city block, or whatever they call "a shitload of land" in the country. It would become my friend over the next two years, and talking to the tree as I drove by didn't seem so strange in a county where I was soon to discover that strangeness was the accepted norm, and where "characters" dwelt on every hill, and in every holler, and down every lane.
I answered an ad in the Ohio University newspaper about a 30-acre farm for rent, and being possessed to live in the country, I thought it destiny. It was spring of 1974, and with the first year of my doctoral studies in communication almost behind me, I desperately wanted to leave my single dorm room on the South Green behind. I could touch both walls of that room when putting on a shirt, and I had come to realize that a single bed in a small room not only limited dressing and sleeping, it imposed severe romantic restraint.
"Hello, is this the country place advertised for rent?" I asked on the phone.
"Well, no, this is Mickey," the voice wisecracked, "but I got a place here I'm renting."
"Is it still available?"
"Yea, but we have had a lot of calls and I've already done a few interviews, so it's now or never."
"How long does it take to get there from Athens?"
"Oh, only about 20-25 minutes," Mickey estimated.
"I'll be there in 30; please don't rent it before then," I pleaded.
"OK, we can probably wait that long," Mickey chuckled.
I left the pavement behind just outside Carpenter following the gravel road up the hill past a large sheep farm and cresting at the Dyesville road intersection. I steered my old maroon Impala down a long winding hill to the valley floor, dotted with a couple of trailers and a very old log cabin on the right. The entryway to the property was just as Mickey described: "Follow the gravel drive with the grassy knoll in the middle to the partially graveled parking lot by the creek, cross the bridge, walk up the road, past the chicken coop and goose pen, and we'll be in the house. They call this Copperhead Hollow, you know. You drink coffee?"
"No thanks, but I love hot tea," I replied.
"We'll put a kettle on for you."
Copperhead Hollow, I thought. How did those snakes migrate all the way back east from Oklahoma?
The "we" turned out to be Mickey and his wife, Anise. Transplanted Easterners, I guessed. Their accents and trappings of ethnicity gave them away. It was mutual interest at first sight, interesting for an Okie, who had only months before discovered that bagels were not just hard, inedible donuts; interesting for Mickey and Anise, who had visions of Native Americans living in teepees way out there on the prairie.
Offered tea, I sat in the small, slate-floored and old lath-paneled living room with its big stone fire place taking up most of one wall. Mickey said, "I didn't get your last name on the phone."
"It's Coonfield, spelled C-O-O-N-F-I-E-L-D, just like it sounds. I got the name from my parents."
They both just cracked up with laughter, not at my attempt at humor, but because of a coincidence they found irresistibly funny. Anise yelled out, "Cranfield, come! Cranfield, come on in here boy!" I heard the door bang shut and in bounded a large German shepherd, who immediately trotted over to sniff me a good one. I patted him on the head, not a small gesture for one who has been terrified of and allergic to dogs most of his entire life. Well, you can fool some of the dogs some of the time. Cranfield looked past my shortcomings and curled up around my feet with obvious satisfaction. Mickey and Anise looked on like satisfied Yentas having just consummated a successful union.
"Maybe Cranfield and I will be the couple you wanted," I offered, trying to make light of the fact that I obviously was not a couple as the ad had specified. I feared that they might be hesitant to rent to a single guy in his twenties, a demographic hardly trustworthy with your home, not to mention your daughter, and other things.
"You said you were a student at OU, What are you studying?" Mickey asked. (Even after a year in Ohio, this Okie had trouble not thinking "boomer, sooner" whenever he heard "OU")
"I'm doing a Ph.D. in the School of Interpersonal Communication. You know, the old speech department, with debate, group dynamics, public-speaking, interpersonal, intercultural, and organizational communication, and rhetorical studies."
Mickey sat still with a puzzled look, obviously processing all those words very carefully. After a deliberate moment, Mickey deadpanned, "Jeez, I didn't realize that university gave degrees in hodgepodge." I may have laughed, but more likely I just changed the subject.
"How long will you be gone on the trip you mentioned on the phone?" I inquired. Anise responded that they wanted to take at least a year, driving through Central America and visiting every South American country. "Ambitious," I thought. I was even more surprised when Mickey proudly stated they were going to do it in the old Volvo sports car parked out front. As if hearing my silent concern, Mickey explained, "I got a box in the back with enough parts to totally rebuild the engine if we need to."
Having no inkling about the mechanics of cars, I was duly impressed.
We chatted for a good while about taking care of the place and the animals. I waxed eloquently about my father growing up a farmer and coming from hardy Okie stock. I declared I wanted to plant a garden, eat a lot of peaches, can some tomatoes, let others find Jesus, and enjoy the solitude of the country to study and write. Of course, my actual days in the country to that point in life were numbered on one hand, and they were always punctuated by allergic attacks. But what the hell, living in the country possessed me, and I was meant to be there. Never shying away from a passionate appeal, I told them how much I wanted to live in the country, how I always left a place better than I had found it, and how I loved animals and wanted to experiment with self-sufficiency. It was a load of mostly bullshit, but hey, when you're possessed, you cannot be totally responsible for your own behavior. Anyway, Mickey said he'd call and let me know one way or the other, for they still had some more interviews to do.
Prayer in my life had mostly waned, but if there was any facsimile of cosmic justice left in the world, the place should be mine. Two days later, I got the call. Mickey and Anise just couldn't get over the Coonfield/ Cranfield coincidence, so they were ready to rent their little farm to me. I had encountered a couple who had morphed from Brooklyn suffer-no-fools-realists into way-kum-ba-ya hippies, and the balance of cosmic justice had tilted in my favor. I was moving to the country. Somehow they overlooked the "couple" thing, or maybe they bought my line about Cranfield and me being a couple. Anyway, I could cook and clean with the best of the female clan, and what the heck, Cranfield could lick the plates. Lyrics sang in my head.
Gonna leave the city put my troubles behind People in the city goin' out of their minds Goin' to the country just to feel like gold People in the country really let themselves go
Goin' to the country and leavin' right away No time to talk, I got to make a getaway Gonna leave the city, it's a crime and a shame People in the city are goin' insane. (Steve Miller and Ben Sidran, "Going To the Country")
I called my parents and told them I got the place and would move in a few weeks, after spring quarter classes were over. My father, not really wanting to rain on my parade, but oozing vibes I could feel over the phone, said simply, "That's interesting. Can you afford the rent?" How could such a seemingly caring and innocuous question imply to me so many other things like, "Do you have any idea what you're doing, what responsibilities you're incurring, how little you know about animals, gardening, and fixing equipment? What about the commute, will your studies suffer, and who's going to be your roommate?" Yep, I heard those things, yet all unspoken by the Major.
"Yes, I can afford the rent `cause I plan to split it with a roommate," I comforted. "Anyway, it's what I want to do, and I can learn how to do a lot of cool things, like gardening and canning."
That logic my parents understood. They had a long history of knowing I was going to do what I wanted to do, and the realities of life were not as important as getting what I wanted. Spoiled? No, let's call it determined.
In mid-May, the oaks were in full leaf, the grass green, the air clean, the sun bright, and the country calling. I was moving to Meigs County, Ohio, home to one of the largest deep coal mines in the world at the time, with a conveyor belt stretching across the rolling hills to a processing plant twenty-six miles away. What is Meigs, County, Ohio? It is the question that fits the Jeopardy answer "the poorest county in the state of Ohio." Lying in the foothills of Appalachia, the county is named for Return J. Meigs, Jr., the fourth Governor of Ohio. It's a mere 43 square miles of beautiful vistas and rolling forests, yet full of poverty, coal miners, farmers, moon shiners, and as I would soon learn, Varmits. It so happened that one of my college roommates, Greg, just out of a three-year gig as an officer in the Marine Corps, wanted to come to OU to do a master's degree in economics and could room with me that first summer. The stars were aligned, but not for long.
Moving in was a piece of cake. I was going from a tiny dorm room cell to a furnished country place and most everything fit in the old Impala my father had bestowed upon me. With a secondhand mattress and box spring tied across the roof, I retraced my route from Athens to Meigs County with new excitement and countrified eagerness. Out of Carpenter, I again did a double take by the big old Catawba tree and said spontaneously, "Old tree, I'm goin' be your neighbor, and I bet you got some stories to tell."
The wind nodded the biggest of the swooping branches and the tree seemed to reply, "You're so right my boy. There are lots of stories in these hills, and some are mostly true."
It had rained earlier in the day so the road from the parking lot to the house was quite muddy and draining the last of the runoff. "I need to buy some rubber overshoes," I thought as I sloshed ahead up the hill. The entrance to the house was through both a ratty torn screen and old wood panel door into a small kitchen with a sink and an old-fashioned water pump (yep, no hot running water in that room), a large, red, square oil heater, a fridge, and a few haphazardly strewn cabinets tacked around the edges to the wall. The kitchen opened into the dining room with a big oak table in the middle surrounded by antique rickety pressed-back oak chairs, a giant pot-bellied heating stove with nickel-plated ornamentation adorning the base and top, which now, in reflection, reminds me of the grill of my 1954 Chevy pickup truck. Narrow, rough-hewn floor to ceiling shelves covered one wall. They would become perfect for storing and displaying all the canned goods from the garden. Occupying corners were a few quintessentially seventies plants: wandering Jew, avocado, fern, and something so weird-looking I did not recognize it, but it was definitive evidence that maybe plants did absorb dope smoke after all. A double French door opened into the small living room with its massive rock fireplace, slate flooring (recycled from the farmhouse roof), and swayback, threadbare, pinkish couch next to a lamp and end table. Right in the middle of these three rooms was a steep and narrow set of stairs that led to the attic. It was un-insulated, and hardly high enough for my tallish frame, but it would become my bedroom. Summer, fall, winter, and spring, whatever the weather was outdoors, it was exactly the same up those stairs. Next to the stairs, a hallway led to the bath with sink, tub, toilet, and window. The walls were covered with burlap, which, unfortunately, absorbed all the odors produced within those walls. Our only hot water sprang forth from the tub and sink spigots. Past the bath, the hall ended in a little corner bedroom with space enough for a single bed and small desk. "Toto, we're a long way from suburbia," I thought to myself.
I had the first week to myself before Greg arrived from his spit-and-polish days as a jarhead. And I had just learned that another college friend was coming for a visit as well. Everything seemed to be going along quite well: Cranfield and I were buddies, and he introduced me to the other members of the animal menagerie vested in my care. They included one tiger-striped cat with three legs named Rutabaga, and a pure white cat with one green eye and one blue eye, deafer than a door knob and named Succubus, some famous mythical character that the lusty Anise thought cool. Being a curious scholar, I looked the name up in the dictionary, and lo and behold Succubus was a "demon in female form, said to have sexual intercourse with men in their sleep."
"I must remember to shut the door to the attic at night," I thought. It did add quite a new twist to getting some pussy, and the sexual cat thing would come back later to haunt me, but that's another story. I learned to not underestimate cats with disabilities, for Rutabaga was as fast on three legs as the fastest four-legged fur ball, and Succubus could see, feel, touch, and smell far better than her hearing counterparts. They were ferocious hunters of rats and other rodents in Copperhead Hollow, but in the evening they would curl up on my lap (or that of any willing visitor), snuggle in for a long winter's nap, and become soft and sensual purring machines. I would not let Succubus too close to my naughty bits (as the English say) for quite some time, until we developed a mutual understanding of what each of us meant by the words pussy and sex.
The tranquility of the country was growing on me, although I confess that I was feeling the need for more social action. Daily chores fit in between the commute to class, for the chickens, geese, the dog, and cats needed their daily feeding and watering.
One day, walking the road in my newly purchased rubber slippers an eerie feeling welled in my gut as I crested the rise and stepped onto the lawn leading to the house. Something was just not right. Something was different, and it spooked me. The door had been jimmied and broken loose, and with trepidation I stepped inside. Clearly the invaders had violated the tranquility of my space. A quick reconnaissance of the place revealed that no one was there; I breathed a sigh of relief. But I'd been ripped off. My little dorm room stereo was gone, with turntable, speakers, and all. All the cabinets had been rifled through, the chest-of-drawers ransacked. The pitted stomach knot nauseated my innards. "Welcome to the country," I thought sarcastically. A few moments of reflection brought me to realize little harm had been done: the door was repairable, the stereo easily replaceable, and the clean-up would only take an hour or so of angry distraction.
That evening, sitting alone at the big ol' oak table, still a little depressed about being violated, I thought about conflict and communication, the country and community, common interest and criminal behavior. I hit upon the idea that maybe the neighbors would have seen or known of something that day, so I vowed to go do some investigating with a little reverse Welcome Wagon strategy and introduce myself to the neighbors. That's when I met the Varmits.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Varmits: Living with Appalachian Outlawsby Ted Coonfield Copyright © 2011 by Ted Coonfield. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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