Give strong drink to one who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress; let them drink and forget their poverty, and remember their misery no more.
Proverbs 31:6-7
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| The Good Samaritan Ferdinand Hodler 1885, Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland |
Each summer during most of my teen years I would spend with Mamaw and Papaw. Each day, Papaw and I would conquer different tasks and visit friends around the community. To me, there seemed to be no real rhyme or reason as to what we would do or where we would go, and oddly enough I never questioned this. Usually, when Papaw and I would pile into the truck I had no clue as to where we were going, what we were doing, or whom we were going to see. I just knew that he told me to climb into the truck and I did. However, one of our usual stops that was a true treat was Mr. Jim’s.
Mr. Jim was a unique old man who lived just a short walk from Mamaw and Papaw’s house. He never lived by any pretense. His life and his lifestyle were untainted by the world around him, and it was dead simple.
Mr. Jim was about 15 years Papaw’s senior. His house was a simple slat board style house with a tin roof. Neither running water, nor electricity had ever passed through its portals. It is also unlikely that a bucket of paint had ever seen that house either. Each board creaked of a simple, no frills life. The only modern convenience he had was a simple battery operated radio and a windup alarm clock, and that’s all he wanted.
The old house stood under an old oak tree that provided shade for the front porch, which is where you would normally find Mr. Jim sitting. Mr. Jim took scruffy to a whole new level. I never saw him wear anything but an old pair of blue jeans style coveralls. He would sit up on that old porch in a ladder back chair with his skinny legs crossed and leaning on one knee as he eyed you across the yard. He only had a few sprigs of hair coming from his relatively shiny head, and rarely shaved either. I am confident that Mr. Jim had bathed before in his life, but he was certainly not going to wear out his wash basin any time soon.
Behind the house stood a orchard of apple trees. None very fancy or finely pruned, just growing as God had intended; kind of scraggly just like Mr. Jim. Continuing on beyond the house, beside the apple orchard was Mr. Jim’s outhouse – his version of modern plumbing. The other half of his modern plumbing was a freshwater spring that provided his drinking water.
To get to the spring, you would continue down the hill, beyond Mr. Jim’s house, on the other side of the apple orchard. It was the type of path that fairy tale legends are made of. Well grown, lush and green with a mossy carpet of grass and undergrowth lining the path. The canopy of trees formed a tunnel through the woods that permitted only the slightest amount of light in. In the heat of summer at high noon you were cool and almost tempted to take a flashlight. The path meandered through the woods for about a half a mile. When you reached the bottom of the hill, you also reached the spring. Sunk into the ground where the spring was formed was a piece of cement sewer pipe up on its end. This allowed a pool to form about a foot and a half deep with a river rock bottom, which helped keep dirt and silt from the water. The water from this spring was sweet and cold. Just on the other side of the spring, Mr. Jim had placed an old wooden mailbox that perpetually had moss growing on it with an old metal dipper. These had the appearance of having been there forever, which they may have been. But, I always took a large ladle full of water and enjoyed its cold refreshing taste on a hot summer day.
Mamaw and Papaw collected their gallon milk jugs for Mr. Jim, and about once a week we would carry the cleaned empty jugs to him. Papaw would then send me down to the spring to collect water for Mr. Jim. This was a special treat for me since I would get to use the dipper to get a little for myself. I would carry the two one-gallon jugs down and fill them up. While I was down there I would try to find crawdads and get many ladles full of water before returning back up the hill. I was especially amazed at how much heavier those jugs became once filled with water. Mr. Jim was about 90 at this time and getting up and down that hill was not easy for him, so this simple act was visibly appreciated by him, and a pleasure for me to do.
One summer that I spent with Papaw, as usual, he told me to get into the truck early in the morning with him. We pulled around behind the house and filled the bed with apples that had fallen from the tree behind the car shed. Then we went up the road to Mr. Inman’s house and got all of his apples off the ground. Then with Mr. Inman in tow, we headed down to see Mr. Jim. I still didn’t really know what we were going to do.
When we arrived Mr. Jim was sitting on his porch as usual, with his usual inviting smile that included a couple of his original teeth. He may have owned other clothes, but I never saw him in anything but blue denim coveralls. Mr. Jim and Papaw proceeded across the yard to an old wooden device sitting in the yard under the large oak tree. It was covered by a galvanized tin bucket upside down. When they pulled off the bucket it revealed a machine that I had never seen before; they called it a cider press.
The cider press was formed with a main supporting framework of solid 4x4 beams. The framework was about 3 feet high by 4 feet long and 2 feet wide. Going along the bottom was sluice made from planks about ½” thick that had a slight slope to it going along the framework lengthwise. At one end of the framework was a chute made from the same ½” thick wood that led into a chamber made from the same material. That chamber exited out above the sluice. Inside the chamber was a barrel shaped drum with metal teeth on its outer perimeter. The drum was connected to a shaft that came out one side to a hand crank and the other side to a flywheel. At the opposite end of the framework was a large metal screw with a double handle crank at the top. The screw went down from the top of the framework toward the sluice. On the lower end of the screw was a wooden disk made from multiple layers of wood about 1 ½” thick. Riding on top of the sluice was an odd looking wooden bucket. There were slats in the bucket each only about 1” wide and separated from the next slat by about 1”.
Mr. Jim put a piece of cheesecloth in the bucket that was on the sluice and lapped it over the edges. Then Papaw and Mr. Jim told me to start turning the hand crank going to barrel inside of the chamber. At this point, Mr. Inman, Mr. Jim, and Papaw began to throw apples into the chute at the top. It was much more difficult to get the drum turning than I thought it would be. It must have taken me about a minute to get it up to speed, but I stuck with it. None of the three men even thought of offering to help because they knew that I was more than capable and had way too much pride to let one of them do it. However, Mr. Jim did help in his own very unique way; he sang.
“Me and my wife and stump tailed dog, crossed the creek on an old oak log…” If I wasn’t already in the country, I just got sent very deep into old country. As long as I turned that wheel he sang that old song. Actually, to describe it as singing is probably being a bit generous since I doubt that he used more than about two notes and those weren’t on pitch, but I loved it and I would do just about anything to hear that again today. As I have discovered this was his own version of “Little Brown Jug” without the identifiable tune or words; ah, but everyone is a music critic. It also fits with the mystique that defined Mr. Jim since it is a song primarily associated with moonshining.
As I turned the handle I was noticing that the apples they were throwing in the chute were not exactly the pick of the apples. In fact, most of them were somewhat rotten or worm infested. No apple was too good or too bad to be considered for making cider. The gap between the teeth on the outer rim of the barrel and the chute was very small, and really was too small for even an apple seed to make it through unscathed so the likelihood that a worm from one of the apples made it through in one piece was impossible (for those who may have enjoyed some of that cider with me over the years you probably don’t really want to think very deeply about that part of the reality of cider making). As I turned the bucket under the chamber began to fill with apple pulp and the juice started to flow down the sluice where Mr. Jim had placed a clean, white, porcelain, enamel metal bucket to collect the juice.
After about ten minutes the bucket under the chute was full of apple pulp and Mr. Jim told me, “‘at ‘ll do boy,” which of course everyone understands that means, “We have ground a sufficient amount of apple pulp to move on with the next part of the process, so if you would be so kind as to stop the machine that would be wonderful.”
Unfortunately, my Mr. Jim universal translator was not functioning at its optimum level so I responded in the only way I knew, as I huffed and puffed turning the hand crank, “What?”
Papaw then helped me out a bit and said, “Boy, go ahead and stop that thing.”
“Oh, OK”, and foolishly, I attempted to do just that. I stopped putting forward motion onto the hand crank and tried to stop it. What resulted from this action is one of my first studies into Newton’s laws and I found that bodies in motion tended to stay in motion. Since the mechanical advantage caused by the flywheel far exceeded my own hold on the gravitational forces of the planet I became part of Newton’s experiments and went into motion myself, and was launched headlong across the yard. Mr. Jim, Papaw, and Mr. Inman all three loved this and practically begged me to try it again. Fortunately, I was a quick study and decided that this was not in my best interest and certainly not the approach that I wanted to take in the future.
Once the barrel came to a stop on its own, Mr. Jim gently folded the flaps of the cheesecloth over into the bucket below. Then he slid it down until it was under the vertical screw mechanism. Then we started to turn the screw until it the wooden plate at the end of it started to press down onto the apple pulp under the cheesecloth. The more we turned this mechanism, the more juice came pouring from the sluice until we reached a point that we could no longer turn and no further juice was coming out anyway. Mr. Jim then took another metal ladle and tested the batch and declared through his toothless grin, “Ah, jus’ right.”
Eventually, I was given a ladle full of the cider. It was tangy and sweet at the same time. It was nothing like the apple juice that I had gotten at the store. Instead this was a darker brown cloudy liquid with much more tang to it. Mr. Jim was exactly right, it was absolutely fabulous, and I was hooked. It was probably the flavor added by the worms.
We made a few more passes worth of the cider that afternoon. We had enough that Mr. Inman was able to take some home with him and Papaw and I were able to take a couple of gallons home with us. Mr. Jim put his in a ceramic crock that sat out on his porch.
One thing I learned about real homemade cider is that it doesn’t have a very long shelf life. After about a week you have apple cider vinegar and it is almost impossible to drink. Mr. Jim found that if he put about a cup of sugar in his and left it on his porch it became something much more entertaining. The sugar in the cider combined with the fact that Mr. Jim had no power and therefore no refrigeration which meant that the cider was constantly warm. This would cause his cider to start to go through a fermentation process. I tested some of his cider after just a few days, and I am positive that there are a number of states that his concoction would have been illegal in, and certainly illegal to have been serving to me.
Mr. Jim’s simple life and ways were a tremendous blessing on me. Papaw was wise enough to see that the influence of that simple life would demonstrate to me that there is a certain magic to living beyond the cares of the world, and I will be eternally grateful for that lesson.
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