Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Mr. Wheat lived next door. His house was a simple tarpaper shingle-covered two-bedroom home with a living room set just behind a classic southern front porch. Inside, he and Mrs. Wheat lived a simple existence, visited occasionally by a large family that lived further south near Memphis, Tennessee.
As an early elementary-aged kid, his yard was a fabulous place to play in and explore. It had to be a great location since my mom constantly warned me about snakes, lizards, possums, hornets, frogs, and just about everything else a young boy could find fascinating.
It was in the big yard behind Mr. Wheat’s house that a bamboo thicket grew tall with the world’s largest species of grass. My dad and grandpa cut a few longer lengths of bamboo, peeled the leaves, and made cane fishing poles. I used these home-made wonders down at Grandma and Grandpa Tucker’s place in Lee County to catch bream, crappie, and even a few channel catfish on just a worm, bobber, and that simple bamboo rod with a 30-foot length of black braided line. Great memories.
One spring I found a rain filled pool teeming with tadpoles. I took a clear gallon glass jar we’d had dill pickles in and filled it with a few dozen tadpoles. Mom bought a little box of fish food for me on one of our weekly treks to the base commissary to buy groceries, and over the next few months, I watched these tadpoles gradually grow legs. Mom bought a few more boxes of fish food as their tails disappeared, and by mid-summer, they were tiny frogs.
I released them into a swampy area near the bamboo thicket. That’s a natural history lesson that every child should learn.
A few years later, when we lived between Sacramento and San Francisco in the little air base town of Fairfield, I found another pool of tadpoles. This time, I had an empty aquarium and raised these slightly different frogs from tadpoles.
North central California teemed with reptiles and amphibians. We caught snap tail lizards and my favorite, alligator lizards (if you’ve ever wondered what the group America was singing about in their hit “Ventura Highway” when the line, “alligator lizards in the air” comes along). No, they weren’t hallucinating, though, as rock musicians, that was a possibility; they were commenting on clouds that looked like the alligator lizards indigenous to the West Coast.
My dad told me the frogs in Arkansas were bullfrogs. I didn’t have any doubts since the summer nights were filled with the bass chorus of their voices.
The California frogs had red legs and looked a bit different than the bullfrogs of the mid-south. They were smaller, and there seemed to be a lot more of them. When I was 12 and mowing lawns at Mather Air Force Base near the Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova, it was part of the process to pick up frogs, sometimes dozens of them, when I mowed lawns in the morning. They disappeared into the shrubbery during the heat of the day, but when the grass was just dry enough to cut, they were often still eating bugs on the lawn.
We don’t see many frogs in the arid Wyoming climate. I’ve found a few in ponds in Niobrara County. There may be more across the state, but mostly I’ve found just a few toads. Sometimes in surprising places.
There used to be plenty of yellow salamanders with red spots in the irrigation ditches on our farm between Pavillion and Kinnear in the 1970s, but I haven’t seen any “Western Tiger Salamanders” (their official name) in our ditch just northwest of Riverton. We were on the Midvale irrigation System out on my parents’ farm, and we use the LeClair System on our place now. Maybe the source of these salamanders doesn’t reach us today, or maybe the population has changed.
One summer morning about 10 years ago, I went out to open and close gates on a section of gated pipe just below the house and discovered a strange creature, very much out of place. Sitting in a stream of water flowing from an open gate was an eight-inch-long catfish. His gills were working overtime as he sat with the water rushing over him. He’d obviously been swept into the main ditch, then through our head gate, and then down a few miles of pipe going through the neighbor’s property before reaching the end of the line at our place.
I walked back to the house, grabbed an empty plastic coffee can and returned. I scooped up the little fish, filled the coffee can with ditchwater and walked about a half mile to our neighbor’s pond and dropped him in. The pond never completely freezes over and is a great nesting site each spring for Canada Geese, Mallard Ducks and Sandhill Cranes. On summer evenings, you can watch fish surface and jump after insects. I like to think that little catfish is sitting on the bottom, enjoying life today.
One more thing about Mr. Wheat’s place. He had a repair shop in the back of the house. Mr. Wheat repaired appliances, clocks, and wristwatches. He was the first man I’d ever seen who had a magnifying visor that he wore when working on watches and other small items. His shop was an absolutely wonderful mess. There were parts of motors, vacuum tubes, and hunks of wire strewn everywhere.
He had a magical device that caught my eight-year-old’s attention, and he worked it for me every time I visited his shop.
It was a metal loop about 10 inches in diameter. Mr. Wheat would turn it on, run a piece of metal through it, and hand it to me. It was a magnet. I’d pick up a few ball bearings or stick it next to a pile of 1943 steel Lincoln cents that he kept on the bench, and it would grab them. I’d hand it back to him, and he’d run it through again. This time, the pennies and the ball bearings just sat there; it was no longer magnetic. I thought it was magic.
He tried to explain to me what was happening with the device, but it was beyond my second-grade comprehension. A few years later, I read about degaussing. That’s the term Mr. Wheat used so long ago, “degaussing.”
It wasn’t magic; it was basic physics, the same process that allows electromagnets to be so effective in moving metal as large as junk cars in a scrap yard. I spent a lot of time as a young teenager with batteries, wire, and metal making electromagnets, and just as much playing with the positive and negative fields of traditional earth magnets.
Did it make me any money? No, it didn’t. Did it change the world? Well, yes, it did for me. Those tadpoles, salamanders, and magical magnets created a sense of discovery, a curiosity that now extends to almost seven decades.
The world is a wondrous place, full of wondrous things. All beyond the pale screen of a tablet or cell phone. Kids are meant to explore and discover.
Thanks for the memories, Mr. Wheat.