Country Wisdom. Horse sense?

Maybe I'm wrong, there always needs to be a first time, but maybe I'm right, I think country people may not be smarter than city people, but they are a hell of a lot wiser. Yes, I'm picking a fight, as long as it's a fair fight. If you want to tell a story about wisdom that you've seen, it's okay, but you have to tell us about it. It's okay to point out why you think city people might be wiser if you want, I'm all ears, as they say. What made me think of this is my cousin Oregon explaining why somebody only found broken dishes in the dump sight. It just seemed reasonable to him that "I figure they only threw out the broken china." Now to a country person, that just makes plain old ordinary horse sense.

Granted, it’s been a while, but when I worked in the woods, sometimes we were so anxious to get to work on time that we would leave to work without enough gas to get home. When you work on a crew, you had to be to work on time so as not to hold other people up. There was a saying on our crew that, "If you show up to work on time, you are already late". It was imperative that you be to work, before starting time. Then we were stuck with figuring out how to get home. A lot of times we would mix all of the chain saw gas, a little bit of diesel, and siphon the gas out of the Cat starting engines to get home. Now that's what I call "wisdom". Then, the next morning we had to be to work early enough to replace all the fuel before starting time.

Now, Just to show you how wise I really am, I already know what you're thinkin'... You're thinkin' that a city person would have been smart enough to put gas in his tank. That's probably true, but, that's where the ol' country wisdom really kicks in. The city guy would have been smart enough to get gas in his tank, he would have apologized to his girlfriend, left her standin’ on the dance floor with her motor already runnin', and he would have gone to the gas station to get gas for morning, then he would have gone home and got a good nights sleep.

To me that's just plain stupid. When I worked in the woods, I would hang out on the dance floor, and dance my girl around the pool table until she wanted to go home. My wisdom tells me that you already know where this story goin’ from here, so I’ll spare a few details. The short version is I would already be awake (still) when it was time to go to work in the morning. I already knew that I had enough gas to get to work, so I would figure how to work out the details on how to get home… later. One option would be to ride with somebody else, but that would put a person on somebody else’s schedule. The number one rule of a country person is “never let anybody else run your schedule”.

I always got to work on time when I worked on a crew. I’ve seen people that thought that they could show up late and get away with it. The bull-buck didn’t even have to fire him. The crew would run him off. It’s a pretty humiliating thing to be run off by a logging crew. You would have to be a pretty valuable employee with a darn good excuse to get by without being run off for being late. A logging crew’s language can melt the bark off trees. There is no word that doesn’t get used. The logger language includes good hearted racism, sexism, homophobia, hog swill, and then really rough language. I know the city folks would say that some of that kind of cussin’ goes too far. The loggers liked criticism, when that happened, it was an opportunity to fight. Don’t get me wrong, the reason that I say that their cussin’ was “good hearted” is that they would fight FOR anybody if somebody was being unfair to them, no matter what race, creed, color, or sex. To quote a logger friend of mine, for an example. “My friends call me “Fat Boy” but you shouldn’t try it.” It was kind of a cliquish group. You were either IN or OUT, but you got a fair chance.

Wisdom: When I was young and dumb. I always thought that I could work hard enough to impress the old guys. In the winter time, a lot of the guys that worked in the woods would make redwood split-stuff, like rails, boards and posts. You always stacked the work as you made it. At the end of the day, you tallied your work. No matter how hard I worked, the old guys would always beat me. The kicker is, they didn’t work that hard.

One of the old timers said; “You know what your problem is Ernie? You’re dumb”. Now, you city-slickers would probably be insulted if somebody said that to you. But in the woods, you know that an Old-timer is about to spill his beans. My reply was: "You wouldn’t say something like that unless you intended to prove it, what makes you think that I’m ‘Dumb‘- asshole.” That’s woods talk. It’s strategy to get the old timer to spill his guts. By calling him “asshole” he knows that I respected him a lot, because I wouldn’t call him "asshole" unless I respected him. Because, he would kick my butt if he even half-way thought I was serious. So, then he knew that I  respect him, and that I had just challenged him to “Put-up, or shut up”. He goes on to say. "You just gotta’ be smarter than a board to make more rails.” He went on to show me how to "push my split". When splitting boards into 2x2 rails, the work always had to be divided evenly to get the rail to split down the middle. If the split is not exactly divided in the middle it will run out to the weak, or narrow side. To split a six inch board into 2x2 rails works out that you have one narrow side. One 2" side and one 4" side. He showed me how to "fool a board into thinking it was a two by eight". You stick the board into the crotch of a tree and bend the board to the fat side while pulling the 2'x2' off the narrow side. To steer the slit you just lean heavier onto the board and the split will follow the pressure. It's easier to show you than explain it, but it works. You can steer perfect splits every time. Before that, I was loosing a 2" inch rail on every odd size split, because it would run out on me and be ruined. I had to throw it on the burn pile.

The Old-Timer explained to me that he didn't give a damn that I wasn't making better money. He said that he was tired of watching me ruin good redwood. Some people are hard to read, but I think that he liked me. It seems that I've learned everything that I know the hard way, but I had a lot of good people break the trail for me. I did notice that they still out-split me. I finally figured out that they could "read a log" and tell how good it was going to split before they ever chose it. They explained to me that some things you just have to know. That there is no way that you can be smart enough to know a good log, that's wisdom that comes with experience.

I've run into more country wisdom than most people because I've been around a lot of the wise Old-Timers. I can almost always coax a story or two out of them because I listen to everything that they have to say. That's a little of MY wisdom.

I'm open to any stories that you might have about city or country wisdom. This is your chance to defend your honor.