Ep. 493: This Country Life – Mine for Now, Theirs for Always

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Speaker 1: Welcome to this country Life. I’m your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trotlining and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences in life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives from the Store More Studio on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I’ve got some stores to share. Mine for now, theirs for always. I have traveled far and wide in this incredible job of mine. I have seen some incredible sights, worked alongside and met some incredible people. All the things that I get to see and do, it is the people that keep raising the standard. I met some just last week, and I’m going to tell you about him now. So meet me at the fire and let’s get started. I saw him standing in line at the Starbucks in a Dinah, Minnesota. I had just gotten my order. If you’re curious, it was black coffee with three packs of honey squeezed in to negate the bitterness of that terrible coffee and taste closer to what I make at home. I’m not a huge fan of Starbucks Coffee or their ridiculous names for small, medium, in large. But it was convenient and my pals Clay nukemb Melissa and Connor Smith and I were on the hunt for caffeine. We were there to kick off the new meat Eater store opening by welcoming folks in for a visit on the first day of business. He said my name as I walked past, and I stopped to say hello to him, man, I’d never met before. I got a friendly vibe right away, and I noticed his matthew’s archery cap above his friendly smile. He said his name was Carried and answered yes when I ask him if he was coming to the event that was scheduled to start in two hours. Y also said he was there with his daughter who wanted to drink that I can only assume is like the ones I get from my daughter Bailey, an amalgamation of seemingly made up words and potions that, when set out loud, has me looking around to see if the furniture is floating, and when mixed together, it resembles a bull for ag. After making a couple laps and a Margherita blender, I’ve got Bailey’s order memorized, but I have no idea what the majority of it means. Venti asaie strawberry lemonade, no inclusions light ice. Just like the farm hands that taught me how to cuss in Spanish when I was just a kid, working right alongside them and I art to made a patch, I didn’t have a clue what I was saying or on which occasion was appropriate to use what they taught me. Judging by how much they laughed at my feeble attempts to gain street crib of my usage of the phrases i’d learned, I never did figure it out. I might have been ordering Bailey’s preferred to lecture way back in the nineteen seventies, or casting dispersions upon the world in general at the delight of my Hispanic colleagues. No way to really know. I don’t speak Spanish or starlights anyway. I told Carrie I felt his pain, and now I looked forward to visiting with him at the store. And then I joined my folks at our table. We made our way over to the store and were greeted by a whole passle of folks standing in line waiting to get in the store. Crew finished the final touches and at ten am the doors flung open and in walked folks from Minnesota and Wisconsin by the droves. The night before, we’d attended a little get together there with some outdoor industry folks to tour the store and to get all of us from out of town familiar with the layout. I met some guys that have an Instagram page and a YouTube channel called Cast and Blast Outdoors. We was going to drop a link in the description if you’d like to check them out, and I hope you do. But Luke, Cody, Keegan, and Vinnie are lifelong friends of each other who, like a lot of folks these days, record their adventures when they’re outdoors having fun. The difference here is they never led with that when I met them. I meet a lot of people who are trying to get in the outdoor industry, and I always offer what limited knowledge I have on it at every opportunity. Anyone that knows my story knows I backed my way into it through a series of unplanned events, and after twenty years of trying to squeeze my way in behind the scenes on the production side, I wound up just the opposite. These guys just wanted to visit, and then I see of folks I didn’t know. I felt familiar with them from the very beginning. They’re all professional young men with families, and the four of them are just as unassuming as anyone you might run into at an outdoor store, a trailhead, or a boat ramp, which ain’t that big of a stretch to do. We talked for twenty minutes or so about their upcoming trip to Alaska. I do it yourself caribou hunt from a drop off camp. And it was during that conversation when I suggested someone should be filming this, and they piped up about their YouTube channel. The excitement that they all shared was more about the grand adventure they were going on than anything that could come as a result of their production. But those are the things that people gravitate towards, the organic highs and lows of an adventure that’s pure and unrehearsed, The chemistry that presents between them as a result of their obvious brotherhood. Even though DNA tests wouldn’t take to put the two of the four in that group. Not only did they talk about their adventures and narrate me through the seemingly limitless scores of trophy photos that always seemed to come out when someone recognizes me, but I absolutely love by the way, but not only did they talk about those, but they also talked about how supportive their wives and their families are. Details and how they spoke of them made me know that these fellows are actually aware that the real trophies are the ones waiting on them at home, regardless of where they go and the things they see. I wish them well on their journey next month. I pray for their safe return, and I look forward to seeing what they do on their channel. Which brings me back to Saturday morning. Remember Carrie, he was the fellow I met in Starbucks, which was actually the day after I met those four guys with Cast and Blast. Well, Carrie and his daughter had followed the serpentine line of people through the store until they reached the table where Clay and I were standing. We shook cans, and he introduced me to his eleven year old daughter, Kayley, who had long finished whatever drink he’d gotten her before they reached our spot. I talked to twenty or thirty people by that time. We all squared up to visit, but I was very ill prepared for what was about to happen. Carrie Pelassio was born in Garden City, kandas Garden City is in Finney County. As of the twenty twenty census, the population of that locale was a smudge over twenty eight thousand. They have the Garden City Community College and the Lee Richardson Zoo, the largest zoological park in western Kansas. There you can see everything from lions, rhinos, coopers, and kangaroos. But if you want to see work care Cary first started making tracks over forty years ago, you’d have to head up north on State Highway twenty five out of Garden City and hang a left at Leote somewhere between there and Tribute, Kansas as the farm where Carrie grew up in the family farm was located. Carrie’s career moved him to Minnesota twenty years ago, and it’s there in the North Star state where Carry and his family make their home. A series of health problems played Carrie’s father back on the family farm in Kansas, and it was the catalyst that caused Carrie to urge his parents to relocate from rural Kansas to an area in Minnesota, an hour and a half away from arguably one of the best medical facilities in the world, Mayo Clintic. They moved northeast in twenty twenty, but Carrie’s father returned each year for harvest season, bringing truth to the old say. And you can take the boy out of the farm, but you can take the farm out of the boy. And it was there on the family farm in extremely rural Kansas that Carrie’s father, Louis Pelassio, died of a heart attack on November nineteenth, twenty twenty five. Carrie escorted his mother back to Kansas to make the necessary arrangements one does in times like those, and counted amongst the final possessions of his father two pocket knives, one of which that had belonged to Lewis father Joe, that had passed away twelve years earlier. They were the things he wanted most, the things he connected with that were a tangible object he could hold in his hands, something that they had held in theirs. And on the long ride back to Minnesota on November the twenty first, twenty twenty five, those two items occupied space and Carrie’s pockets with his mother finally sleeping through the pain and loss of his father. Her husband’s clothes fold immediately in her lap. As she rested, Carrie turned on a podcast to help him pass the time. Episode one eighty seven of This Country Life popped up. The title is Things Lost and Found, and it was published on February the eighth, twenty twenty four. In that episode, I talked about a buffalo someone found, Yeah, I said, a buffalo. Also a shotgun a friend of mine found, and a pocket knape that belonged to my father that I lost. I went back to that place to look for it. That was ironically in Kansas, the very state Carrie was driving in when he tuned it in. It was almost a year ago, but according to Carry, the comforting message he got from that old episode and some of the ones that followed were instrumental in his healing process. So while we visited and talked about the different things that Carrie and Kayley liked their hunt, Carrie made a decision. The conversation had reached the peak the way they do in those events where people are patiently waiting their turn to visit, and they started to walk away. But before they did, Carrie said, I want to give you something. He reached in his pocket and he pulled out a pocket knife, and he said, it’s not a case, but this was my grandfather’s. My dad carried it after he died, and I got it after Dad died last year. I want you to have it. The look on my face, I’m sure would have been one to see. The volume of noise in that story that had caused us to talk a few octaves above normal had faded away as all my attention was focused on Carrie and I couldn’t hear anything else but him. I looked him in the eyes. I tried to do the math on what he just said. Had I heard him right? Did he really say what I thought he said? I didn’t fully understand what was going on and why. I mean, if I heard him correctly, could how could I be worthy of such a monumental heir loom gift. Carrie dropped a small, three bladed knife into my hand, and I stared at it for a second before looking up. And when I did, I caught the movement of my friend and colleague, Alissa Smith, who was taking pictures for folks. Tears were welling up in her eyes as I looked at her in disbelief, her expression confirming that what I’d heard was just what I thought you want me to have this. I choked the words out as best I could, with my voice breaking, feeling the enormous weight of what was happening. Carrie looked at me with a facial expression full of relief and emotion, and he nodded his head and started to walk away. But I wouldn’t let him leave. Why would you give this to me? A little knife weighed only a few ounces, but it felt like anvils on a yoke that had just been placed on my shoulders. And this guy lost his mind? Did he did not know what he was doing. I’m not worthy of such gift. But I could see the gratitude in his eyes, and he said, I wanted to thank you for what you did for me. You helped me through a really tough time. And then he just turned to walk away with his beautiful daughter. No crying aloud, Brient, that’s what Alissa said, and I snapped back at her, I ain’t crying, in an effort not to match what was on the verge of falling out of her eyes in front of the mass of people that were in that building. Carrie and Kayley had gotten halfway across the store when I called for him to come back. I had to shake his hand one more time and get a picture with him and maybe get another clue why he’d done what he’d done. They came back and posed for a photo, and that’s all I got out of it. He simply walked out of that store and disappeared, with me having no way of knowing his last name or where to reach out to him. All my years of investigative experience had disappeared in a puff of smoke about the size of a little black and silver pocket knife. Brent, why didn’t you get his phone number or at least his last name? That event in our conversation had been at the forefront of every idle moment I’d had since he and Kayley left. I had no other explanation for anything until later that night. I was sitting on a plane in the Minneapolis Saint Paul Airport, taxing toward the runway about to take off, when I got a message on Instagram from Carrie. Turns out it was the second message I had gotten from him. The first one was sitting in August of twenty twenty four, a little over a year before he would lose his father. When he’d sent that message, that little knife he’d given me a few hours before was still in his father’s pocket. It was a picture he’d taken in an antique store somewhere of some old knives. The caption said he was walking around listening to an episode of This Country Life when he saw those knives and thought I might like to see them. I get a lot of those kinds of messages. I try to answer them all the best I can. And even though I had answered it very promptly, I didn’t remember doing it, even looking at the photo and reading our short exchange from back then. But this message said he really enjoyed meeting me and had gotten out of there without taking a picture on his phone and asked me if i’d share one of the ones that I’d had a Lissa take from me. It was a wash of relief to be able to find this man and know who he was. I immediately took a screenshot of his profile, and I thought to myself, I got you, now, buddy. My response was a bit long. With the picture I sent with him, I asked him to hug his mama for me and I could call him after I got back home so we could we could talk some more, and he agreed to do both. Today, when we talked on the phone, I asked him when he decided to give me that night. His answer caught me just as off guard as the gift itself did. He said, it was two people in front of us and everyone before me when you took your hat off to shake every woman’s hand, even Kayley’s. I thought, this is a man I’d be proud to tell my Grandma was coming over for Sunday Dinnerrry said some other very nice things. But as much as I like to talk and be the class clown, my least favorite subject is me. Carrie went on to say that the memories of his grandfather and his father didn’t live in that life, had lived in him, and it was a moment of closure for him to be able to pass that object on to me as a thank you for helping him navigate a storm of loss in his life. It allowed him to release some feelings that he needed to get gone. Now I’ll go knuckle and skuld with anyone who’d bereat or questioned Carrie’s actions judgment of another’s motivation without standing in his shoes is about as bad as he gets. And I’ll admit that my first instinct was to refuse what he’d given me, But I knew when I looked at him and how he’d done it, that it was my responsibility to accept it. I couldn’t bring it back with me on the plane with no checked baggage, so I had the store ship it to me, and it has a spot right here beside my desk, and right here is where it will remain until the moment Carrie should decide he’d like it back, or seven years from now when Kayley graduates high school, whichever comes first. The instructions are in the case alongside it. Should I make a hasty exit, but until then it is my honor and privilege to hold it for them. These are the things we do not for ourselves, but for each other, the way it should be done, with acceptance and respect. Made some new friends, and I learned some new things about myself on this trip, none of which were expected, all of which I am thankful. Thank y’all so much for listening to all of us here on the Bear Grease Channel. Clay Lake and I appreciate it very much. Until next week, This is Brent Reeves signing off. Y’all be careful.