Guns and Hill Billies

Lord Kadizzle grew up with guns. Now, let's get off on the right track, Kadizzle is for gun control. Back to the story.  Kadizzle had a younger brother.  In our father's infinite wisdom and insanity, my brother and I would often be placed at a wilderness farm my father acquired in the hills of West Virginia.  Calling the place a farm was a misnomer.  It had been a farm at one time, but now it was a house with no electricity, no running, water, and free natural gas.  Old Gold as we like to call our father ran the farm as a plantation. His slaves were nine white children he enslaved the old fashioned way.

Old Gold had insane dreams about ways one could make money from a farm that had no fields, and no animals.  Forest had overtaken just about every inch of the place.  Old Gold had two great schemes, Christmas trees, and potatoes.  The potato adventure is a whole different story.  Basically it involved a lot of work to produce two tons of potatoes which we left in the basement to rot and did not make a cent. The Christmas tree venture worked out about the same.

It was not unusual for my brother and I to spend a week or two alone on Cain's run where the farm was located.  To get to this farm you had to drive through a river, and then a distance up a dirt road.  If one vehicle went by in a month it was heavy traffic.

Kadizzle might have been eleven or twelve, and Colin may have been ten.  We were supposed to fend for ourselves and when the evening came we were alone in the middle of nowhere.  We were armed.  We had a 22, a 410 shotgun, an automatic hand gun, and there were some deer rifles laying around.  For some strange reason there was a military manual about making booby traps.  My brother and I had reservations about our safety at night so we rigged up some serious traps.  The manual for the traps was of the Vietnam war era.

To get to the house you had to cross a narrow footbridge about fifteen feet across that spanned the stream in front of the house.  This is where the first trap was set.  We installed punji sticks.  The punji stick trap was developed by the Vietcong.  Basically you tripped over a wire and fell into a field of sharpened sticks.  If you made it past our first set of punji sticks we had a second set for those coming up the front steps to the porch in order to kill us.  Now, if some how you made it past the traps there was a string strung across the top of the steps which went to a can in a kettle.  When you hit that string the can would rattle and we could then shoot you.  The first night the traps were in place the can rattled. This was not a good sign, but we quickly figured out the attacker was a chicken.

One night we did awaken and realized someone was sitting on the porch. This was a night when the punji sticks were not in place.  Quietly we debated if we should just shoot the person outright or make some inquiries.  It turned out Old Gold had told someone to meet him at the farm. The person had shown up not knowing we were there and Old Gold had not told us.

No one ever drove up that road at night, but one night it happened.  It turned out somehow some drunk had driven up the road and was so drunk he did not know how to get out of the hollow.  In a complete fit of stupidity Kadizzle as a 12 year old came up with a plan to drive him back to the paved road. Kadizzle was not sure of the brilliance of the idea, so he put the automatic in his pants.  To this day I have no idea how I planned to get back.  I think the plan may have been to drive the guy to town and have a sober person bring Kadizzle back.  It was an ill conceived plan.  At some point with Kadizzle driving the drunk became rowdy and demanded Kadizzle get out of his car, and the drunk drove off.  Kadizzle was stuck miles away and clueless.  At least he had a gun.  It was about one in the morning when Kadizzle reached a farmhouse not knowing what they would think.  One thing the farm had where Colin was, was a phone.  Kadizzle called his little brother, and somehow Colin managed to drive the old 49 Ford Truck to pick up Kadizzle.  Reflecting on the whole thing it was one of the stupidest things Kadizzle ever did.

Young people without adult supervision living in the boonies is not a good mixture when you add guns.  One day with sister Suzie we walked to the old country store.  When we got to the river several boys were swimming naked, and were a bit taken aback after they had to run out of the water nude at the sight of my sister.  As usual we were carrying a 22 in case a ground hog needed to be sent to Jesus.  For some reason the boys who were older decided to walk up the road to our farm.  Since we owned the land on both sides of the road and they had made some unfriendly remarks we let them know it would not be wise to step off the road.  When we got to the farm house the boys seemed to be harassing us by walking back and forth in front of the place.  When they went one direction we fired the guns in the other direction.  Apparently they thought we were actually shooting at them and took off over the hill.  They notified the sheriff and he must have got as far as the country store.  The store owner Lutrel Davis told the sheriff we were nice kids and we would never do such a thing.  The Sheriff never showed up until a later incident.  That is a entirely different story and it is too late tonight to delve into to that one, but it also involved a little gun action.  It turned out the sheriff had one leg, and his deputy had one arm, so between them they had complete law enforcement.