The Rock Bucket Brigade

My dad had a very nice corn/cotton patch about 30-40 acres, which he called the “bottom.” It was very flat land so it never needed any terraces to control water run-off. There was, however, a 1½ to 2-acre spot that he called the hog wallow. It was the lowest spot of the patch and when it rained the water could not run off and stayed on this spot for some time. Whatever he had planted in the patch could not tolerate the standing water and would therefore drown out.

One year my dad hired a man with a bulldozer to haul extra dirt into this low spot with his dozer and scraper. He told the man to just scrape the top off a large hill next to the patch. One day when my dad was moving a house, the dozer guy came to fill the hog wallow with dirt from the hill.

This is where the problem starts.....The hill that he was instructed to take the dirt from consisted of more post oak rock than soil. There were no cell phones or other methods of communicating in those days; and, not even knowing exactly where my dad was that day, the dozer operator did as he was told and continued to fill the low spot with that inferior fill dirt.

You can imagine how my dad felt when he come home late that evening and discovered the mess in his beautiful field! So, we kids had no choice but to go the field every day after school and pick up the rocks. Some of them were as large as a softball but most were the size of a baseball. But it didn’t end there. Each time Dad plowed, cultivated, or planted the patch, he would plow up or uncover more rocks. So back to the patch we went to pick up more rocks. He parked our farm dump truck in the middle of the patch. We put the rocks into a bucket and when my sisters’ buckets were full, they would have me carry them to the truck. There was a short step ladder with round rungs placed against the truck bed and I had to climb the ladder with a heavy bucket of rocks and dump it into the truck bed. Not much fun for a 13-year-old.