Word: mule
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Rarely seen at public events without his derby or his pet cross-eyed mule, Sam Lewis has been the butt of jokes in San Angelo, Texas, for most of his 56 years. People laughed when someone put a live rattlesnake, with its mouth sewn shut, in his bedroll at a chili-cooking contest. They laughed even harder when he tried to peddle Hawaiian Delight pizzas, a terrifying concoction of Canadian bacon, pineapple chunks and cherries smothered in tomato paste and melted cheese...
...Jean-Paul Sartre. Good books, some of those novels, but sometimes just too frustratingly weird. Crews also used to write a column called "Grits" for the pre-Felker Esquire, and the best of them stick in your memory like Georgia mud to your boots--an old, nearly-blind mule trader sagely discusses the art and artifices of a trade that is almost dead; a poacher takes Crews alligator hunting in the Florida swamps. And now in A Childhood, we have an account which blends the best of the columns and the best of the novels with the life that produced...
...times, A Childhood is a wondrous and fearful book--funny, too, as when Crews describes how people doctor mules to make them appear younger, concluding that "a farting mule is a good mule." But always he comes back to his central thesis: It was a hard time in a hard place, and lot of times the only way to find the courage to get by was to by-God want what you had more than the next fellow. The book ends, skipping forward 15 years, in 1956, with Crews just home from the Marine Corps, cropping tobacco with his cousins...
...more than myth; it was from these garrulous sources that Crews acquired both his material and the lively idiom that animates his narrative. "A way of life gone forever out of the world" is recalled in these pages, enriched by a wealth of unlikely lore: how to estimate a mule's age, cook a possum, butcher...
...South Kaibab Trail. Twenty yards up the trail was a big sign saying "WARNING--THIS TRAIL NOT RECOMMENDED FOR HIKING OUT. THERE IS NO SHADE, ONLY ONE EMERGENCY TELEPHONE, AND IT IS VERY STEEP. TAKE AT LEAST FOUR QUARTS OF WATER, ALLOW SIX TO EIGHT HOURS FOR HIKE! MULE RESCUES ARE COSTLY AND NOT ALWAYS AVAILABLE." Scratched under that was the legend "Jim Duggin did it on only two quarts, 4/13/77." I had no water at all, and I planned to make the whole ascent in three hours, so I set off at a rapid pace...