Bows and arrows fascinated me when I was growing up. We searched woods and fields for arrowheads and were constantly on the look-out for any rock that resembled one. Most of what we found were just random pieces of rock somewhat arrowhead shaped but we were sure we had found something once used to take down game.

At six years old I really did not understand differences between kinds of rocks. Our farm had a lot of soft sandstone, a good bit of granite from chunk to boulder size, and a few flint rocks.

The sandstone would break easily and there were all kinds of shapes of stones. I now know it is easy to shape but too soft to be of much use for anything but crushing softer stuff. But we thought arrowheads could be made of that reddish rock.

It was easy to shape it by breaking off small pieces and even by rubbing it on the granite boulders. It did not flake, it just came apart as small pieces and sandy residue. And an ax head made from it would break as soon as you hit a tree with it.

Looking back its funny, but we tried to make stone axes by shaping rocks with the blunt end of our steel hatchets. Talk about going backwards! And getting a stone chunk to stay on any kind of handle was a joke. We tried the way we had seen in pictures, splitting a stick handle, putting the stone between in the split then lashing it into place with baling twine.

Little did we know you needed something much tighter than that twine could be tied. If lashed on with leather strips then soaked in water, the leather shrank as it dried and got very tight. With our home made stone axes the head often flew off the handle before the head could hit the tree and crumble.

We did make some realistic looking arrowheads from the sandstone but did not realize they would have been useless. No matter how carefully we worked the edges could never be sharp. Flint flakes into sharp edges when chipped, sandstone merely gets rounded on the edges. But we had fun making our axes and arrowheads.

Bows and arrows were interesting, too. We thought any bent stick with a string on each end would suffice but, if the stick did not break when bent back, it had no strength to spring back to propel an arrow. And baling twine was probably not the best bow string.

Any somewhat straight stick could be an arrow, but they never worked. We did not know about wetting and heating sticks and straightening them. We just used them how they grew, and sweetgum, the most common type tree on our farm, is useless for bows and arrows.

Trips to the north Georgia mountains on summer vacation introduced me to blowguns, something Cherokees used for hunting small game. The ones we bought at tourist traps were about three feet long and came with a couple of rubber tipped darts. They never worked well, having a range of just a few feet.

We tried to make them, too, with pieces of cane that grew along Dearing Branch. It did not take long to give up trying to hollow them out by boring through each joint. If daddy had made me work as hard on the farm as I did working on blowguns I would not have liked it. But again, it was fun trying to make them.

I sometimes wonder if kids have any experiences like those I had growing up. I hope so.

Getting bait was always fun but sometimes we tried weird baits. Like all good fishermen, if we heard the fish were biting something we had to try it. That is why there are such huge selections of colors and types of plugs and worms at Berry’s Sporting Goods!

One time this desire to use anything we were told fish were biting taught me a lesson. Uncle Slaton and his family was visiting from Texas and we were all camping at Clarks Hill. As usual, we fished for bass, bream or crappie during the day and ran trotlines at night for catfish.

One afternoon Uncle Slaton came back to the camp from fishing and pulled out a nice catfish. He said he was fishing in a cove and found a trotline. The catfish was on it and since the line had not been checked all day he took the fish.

More important, he held up a half of a black plastic worm. He said it was on the hook the catfish was on and the rest of the line was baited with other pieces of black worms.

We immediately pulled out all our black plastic worms and started cutting them up. That night we baited all our trotlines with them. The next morning we didn’t have a fish on our lines.

I do not know how Uncle Slaton smothered his laughs. He later told us he played a trick on us, there were no plastic worms on any of the hooks where he found the catfish.

We had to go to the store and buy more black worms for our bass fishing.

One time I heard catfish would bite little chunks of Ivory Soap. That sounded like a nice clean bait to use rather than the stinky chicken guts we usually used. You washed your hands every time you baited a hook.

We cut bars of soap into half inch squares and baited a bunch of hooks – one time. We did not catch a fish. I may be slow but after one night I gave up on black plastic worms and Ivory Soap on trotlines!

Spottail minnows are one of the best baits for many game fish, no joke. Guides on Lanier and other lakes bait up places with rice to draw them in and either set out traps for them or catch them in a cast net. Spotted bass love them.

The biggest spottails I have ever seen were less than three inches long, a good size for most game fish. Last weekend Jack “Zero” Ridgeway called me about them. He had been fishing from a dock at West Point lake and had caught some spottails six inches long. He sent me a picture of one of them.

Neither of us had ever heard of spottails that big, and that would bite a bait so you could catch them on a hook. I looked them up and found out that spottails are a type of shiner minnow and their average size is two to three inches, but they can grow up to six inches long. They range from Canada as far south as the Chattahoochee River drainage in Georgia. Since West Point is on the Chattahoochee River that fits right in.

Damming Dearing Branch was always a favorite summer activity when I was growing up. The branch entered our farm in the woods that ran along the edge of our big hay field. It came under a fence at the adjoining property line and left the other side of our land, running under another fence and going into a culvert under Iron Hill Road.

The woods were about a quarter mile wide from our field to the pasture on the other side at Rodgers’ Dairy. Right where it first hit our woods it was about eight feet wide and the area around it was flat and sandy. In other sections it had cut deep and was only three or four feet wide with two feet of water in that ditch area. The sandy area was only a few inches deep unless there had been a big rain.

About 20 yards past the fence on the upper end two big trees squeezed the water into a narrow gap three feet wide. We wanted our own private swimming hole and those two trees made a perfect place for a dam.

The first time we tried we quickly found that no matter how fast we shoveled sand between the trees it just washed away with the current. I don’t know where we got the idea for sand bags, probably from reading books, but we got croaker feed sacks from the barn and filled them with sand. That worked.

We would dig sand from the bottom of the shallow area to fill the sacks and struggle to drag them to the trees. As the water rose at the gap between the trees it would start running around either side so we extended the dam out to the sides.

Our best effort was one summer when we got an old cross tie and drug it across the field and through the woods to the dam site. It took all the strength three 12-year-olds could muster but we got it there and in place. It made a great base. We then started digging sand and filling sacks.

That summer we had a pool almost four feet deep, coming about chest high on us. We could almost swim in our 20-foot-wide, 20-foot-long private pool. Since it was down in the woods we didn’t bother with bathing suites, we just wore what we were born with. Skinny dipping was so exhilarating!

Every summer our dams would wash away with the first big rain and we learned a lesson about the power of moving water. But the cross tie was such a good base it held up for a couple of months. After a very big rain it, too, washed enough to turn the cross tie sideways, moving it from the trees and destroyed out pool. But that was a memorable summer.

It took a tremendous amount of effort to make the dams. Dragging the cross tie was the worst, but just filling bags with shovels and moving them a few feet was strenuous work. If our parents had made us work that hard we probably would have been upset but our own effort was fun and worth it. That was another lesson learned, if you wanted to do something no amount of effort was really “work.”

My mother loved flowers. Although daddy thought planting anything you could not eat was a waste of time, he made sure she had a nice flower bed that ran between our side yard and the field on the other side. It was about 200 feet long and ten feet wide and contained a huge variety of flowers, including annuals and perennials.

There were also a few blooming bushes, like the Rose of Sharon that grew right at the end of the bed closest to the house. This was her favorite and she thought it was a biblical flower. But it was really a Hibiscus syriacus, a deciduous flowering shrub native to east Asia.

I always wanted one in my yard and thanks to my mother-in-law I do. There is a big one at her house and she gave me one of the sprouts that grew up around it. I planted it near my woodshed but it had a rough life.

A big limb fell and broke it to the ground the third year it grew. But it recovered and was about six feet high when a fire in my woodshed killed the trees around it and, when they were cut down, it was again broken to the ground. But it recovered again and is now about ten feet tall and covered with blooms.

For years I had daddy’s attitude and planted only edible things. But then some of my mama came out and I started planting some flowers. I was never real serious about it, planting marigolds around my tomatoes and some impatiens in a shady bed near my carport, but I did try to have a bed similar to mama’s.

I have always liked wild flowers or flowers growing wild in ditches and old home places. When I worked as transportation director and rode all the back roads of Pike County checking bus routes I kept a shovel and bucket in my truck. If I saw a flower in the ditch I would often stop and dig it up and take it home.

I made a long, narrow bed across my back yard between the woods and yard, something like my mother had where I grew up. It contained several kinds of daffodils, many tiger lilies, another of my favorites, and one of my favorites growing up, butterfly bushes.

Mom never had butterfly bushes but they grew in ditches around my house. I’m still not sure what they are, and they may just be weeds, but some nurseries sell them. They are small and have bright orange feathery flowers. I found several to bring home.

Tiger lilies, or what we called wild lilies, grew everywhere and I had a bunch of them. These bright orange striped flowering plants can be grown from the roots or from seed and they make a great border plant.

A rare flower I saw in the woods sometimes is a pretty, white cup-shaped flower on short stem. The one flower on a plant stands out under trees. I found out they are wood anemones. I tried bringing a few home, but they are hard to find and do not transplant well, so I never had much success with them.

One plant I had way too much success with and should never be planted in your yard is wisteria. I planted a small piece of root by an eight-inch-thick oak tree by my woodshed and another in the edge of the yard. I let the one by the wood shed grow up the tree and kept the one in the yard trimmed, trying to make it umbrella shaped, with hanging bloom clusters.

Both were a big mistake. Within a few years the vine growing up the oak tree was thicker than the tree and all the trees around it were covered in vines from the roots spreading from the original. The one in the edge of the yard spread with roots just under the ground everywhere and I have to cut them away from my garage and yard light pole. They got so thick on the pole they covered the light until you could hardly tell when it came on. And it almost killed the fig bush daddy brought me to plant by the garage.

Although the grape like clusters of lavender to purple flowers are pretty, I wish I had never brought this one home!

Daffodils are pretty and easy to transplant and grow. They line the edge of my flower bed and start blooming before anything else. They are often the only color in late February when everything else is drab browns and grays. The splash of yellow reminds me spring and good fishing is close.

Daddy did like his fresh fruit. We had a huge fig bush by the side door and he planted peach, apple, pear and Japanese Persimmon. And one of my favorites was the overhead scuppernong arbor. I loved standing in the shade under it and reaching up to pick the golden fruit.

Somewhere I tasted Niagara Grapes. You cannot buy them in the store, they do not ship well, but they are delicious. I made trellises around my back yard and planted three Niagara and three Concord grape vines. Home grown Concord grapes taste better than any you can buy, like most anything else you grow.

I was warned we are too far south for those varieties to grow successfully. My vines produced abundant clusters of grapes for about five years then died. Now wisteria covers the old trellises. But they surely were good when I had them.

Fruit trees take a lot of work, and if you don’t spray them they will not produce. My plum tree gets a disease that makes the fruit rot when it first starts growing and I always forget to spray it in the winter when it is dormant. And my pear trees got what I was told was “phony pear” disease, causing the trees to grow tiny fruit like a Bradford pear.

Maybe I should stick with flowers.

In the last two weeks I have listened to two audio books. “One Second After” and its sequel “One Year After” by William R. Forstchen take place at a small North Carolina town near Ashville. The first starts with a normal day in small country town with life as normal. But suddenly every electrical device stops working.

Later you find that two of the countries that have been promising to destroy the US got their hands on enough technology to set off three Electro Magnetic Pulse bombs that cover the US and more that cover parts of Europe and Asia. Those bombs send out a strong burst something like a sunspot does and it burns out anything that uses electricity.

These doomsday books follow a retired Army Colonel that was teaching at the small local college as he and his neighbors try to survive. The author is very good with explaining the big things as well as the little details that would probably happen as civilization falls apart.

Other movies and books like these have made me want to become a survivalist, and if I was not so old I might make preparations. Other doomsday scenarios include nuclear war, epidemics, and invasion by aliens that totally disrupt out way of life. They do make you think about what would happen.

Within weeks, about half the population of the area in the book are dead. The first to go are those on life support at hospitals and nursing homes. Then the folks that depend on daily medication that is no longer available at your corner drug store. Since almost no vehicles run, out of shape people walking to find food and water or cutting wood for fires and trying to carry it home die of heart attacks. But the biggest threat to somewhat healthy people are that most deadly animal, other people.

Riots and looting start within the first day. Hording of food may give you something to eat, but it attracts hungry folks that will kill you for it. Then, when things get brought to a semblance of order, people start starving and dying of diseases like salmonella and other bacterial infections from lack of sewage processing plants. And the folks of the small town, who have tried to keep order and ration what little food they have so they can survive, have to fight off city folks by the thousands arrive wanting to “share” their scant provisions.

One thing surprised me. When folks realize their frozen and refrigerated meats, fresh fruits and vegetables are going to spoil they start gorging, eating all of it. The professor does try to salt some of his meat down with a bag of road salt he has stored for the winter.

I was amazed that no one thought of making jerky and pemmican. Those relatively simple processes will preserve meat and fresh berries for months to years.

Many of the folks in this rural area know how to hunt and do have guns. They have some outdoor skills. But, without matches, it is amazing how many can’t even build a simple fire for boiling water and cooking game. And many of the ones that manage to build a fire burn their houses and themselves since they do not have a clue about safety with an open fire.

Game starts disappearing but too many, in my mind, do not consider a lot of sources of food. The squirrels the professor kills go to his two golden retrievers rather than to his family. Of course, pet dogs become a serious problem, in several ways, when dog food runs out.

The professor does kill a couple of possums, but they don’t have a clue how to cook them. And it takes weeks for them to realize songbirds are edible. It seems the only wild plants they know is edible are dandelions.

No consideration is given to other wildlife like bugs and grubs, although the book talks of people going into grill type restaurants and scraping grease traps for something to eat. The author does know a little about surviving like people did 200 years ago, about the level society degenerates to, but misses important points.

Bullets and guns become invaluable. In one place he says five .22 bullets will buy you a rabbit or squirrel, after they finally realize tree rats are edible by humans. And higher caliber rounds are horded for protection.

Few realize the value of good boots and clothes that protect you. Many are barefoot, especially those fleeing the cities, since their shoes wear out within a few days of walking. Bathing is almost non-existent since soap would quickly run out.

In the second book the small town has survived for two years and is somewhat stable since they were able to grow some food during the two summers between books. A few small farmers and the professor realize the importance of keeping some seeds for the next year as well as keeping some breeding stock of pigs, chickens and cows rather than eating them all.

But then a bigger threat arrives, in the form of “help” from the reforming US government. Of course some bureaucrats and politicians survived in well stocked bunkers near Washington, DC and some of our military assets from other places not affected by the EMP blasts, like the middle east and South Korea, make it home. And some of our navy ships survive and return.

The problem is many of those government type officials think they have power over everyone else and want to take from them, but have no clue what it takes to survive without confiscating others supplies. Tin pot “supervisors” that become little dictators when sent to places like Ashville to establish regional government are a scourge, almost destroying what the survivors have worked to establish.

These books are interesting and make you think of what could happen, and how important basic outdoor skills can be, even if they are depressing.

I loved growing up wild in Georgia. Most of my happy memories are of things I did outdoors. Thank goodness video games and TV either did not exist or were so unimportant that they took very little of my time.

Many of those memories also involve wild critters. I was in a church group, the RAs, that went on camping trips every summer. One very memorable one was to a mill pond about 20 miles from Dearing. There were about ten of us kids from about ten to 14 years old, and several adult supervisors.

We put up our pup tents the afternoon we go there and went exploring. I wandered off by myself, not unusual for me, and walked along the creek below the mill pond dam, trying to catch anything that would bite my earthworm on small hook under a cork. I was in the edge of the water, for some reason I always had to wade, and looked down near my feet then jumped back to shore. There was something on the bottom I had never seen and it scared me.

That ugly mottled brown lizard shaped critter was about a foot long, with a big, wide head, long vertical flat tail and four legs. It also had what looked like red downy feathers around its neck. The thing was lying or standing in shallow clear water and not moving.

I picked up a stick and hit it and killed it. At that age it was not unusual to kill anything new, often to get a better look at it. When I gingerly picked it up its body was smooth and slimy. Taking it back to camp everyone gathered around and even the adults said they had never seen anything like it although most of them had spent most of their lives outdoors.

When I got home I went to my trusty Encyclopedia Britannica and finally found it. It was a type of salamander called a “Hellbender” and its range included some of Georgia, although more common further north. It was rare and I was sad I had killed it.

It was interesting to me when I started bass fishing a lot with artificial baits in the early 1970’s one of the most popular plugs was a “hellbender.” Another was the “waterdog,” which is another name for the hellbender salamander. Those were two of the early crankbaits and I have often wondered if they were named after the salamander. They are still available and are great for trolling.

Saturday night on the mill pond camping trip most of us were fishing near our camp right on the edge of the water. A “water moccasin” swam up to investigate and someone killed it. I’m sure it was some kind of harmless water snake but back then every snake that was near water was a dangerous, poisonous, deadly, kill-you-if-it-could, water moccasin, so it was kill or be killed.

I had my trusty pocket knife in my pocket, as did every other boy there. We would just as soon leave home without our pants as without our knives. Since I was always curious I decided to “dissect” the snake. When I cut it from head to tail, I found two surprising things.

First was a fish head. That told us why the snake was so close to us. Earlier we had cleaned some bream and thrown the heads and guts into the water, and the snake was after an easy meal. Even more surprising were the 17 yellow, marble size eggs in it. We were happy we had actually killed 18 snakes rather than just one.

After cutting the snake open I made another discovery. I threw the body on the fire, and found out how terrible a burning snake smells! The men in camp almost ran me out of camp for doing that.

A few years later I made another fire discovery. By then we had plastic milk jugs and when an empty one is put on a fire with the cap on it, it will often take off like a rocket. The air inside heats up and as soon as a tiny hole melts in the plastic it acts like a jet engine nozzle.

I discovered a painful critter when camping with my family at Clarks Hill Lake when I was about 15 years old. Daddy smoked back then. One day an hour after eating lunch I went into our big tent to change into my bathing suit. I put my hand down on the floor going in to the door and thought daddy had left a burning cigarette there.

I probably screamed and daddy came running. We got a flashlight and looked closely, and found I had put my hand down on a small brown scorpion. Although only 20 miles from our farm, where I had spent hundreds of hours exploring everything outside, I had never seen one.

For some reason they were rare in that area. But not here in Griffin. I find them every time I turn over a piece of wood in my yard, and have had them drop from the ceiling into my bed at night. I solved that problem by sealing the crack around the overhead light fixture. I now have to clean a few out of the globe on it every few months, but at least when they come from the attic along the wires they are trapped up there before they can join me in bed!

I did learn some useful things when out in the woods back then. I learned how to build a fire, patch up cuts, cook several kinds of food on an open fire to make them at least barely edible, and the importance of clearing rocks and sticks from the area you planned on putting your sleeping bag.

If you have a kid take them outside and let them learn about the real world!