The day the still exploded

The other night while working my weekend job (bullfighter) a fellow came up to me and asked if I was the same guy who writes “that newspaper column.”

I am, so I said, “Yes.”

“My wife gets a real kick out of it,” he said. “Are those stories true?”

“Absolutely,” I lied.

Then he asked a question I hear a lot: “Where do you come up with that stuff?”

I’ve never had a good answer for this, but the question got me thinking, which I do from time to time, despite a significant body of evidence to the contrary. The ideas I get from living day to day, like everybody else. But the ability to put them down every week in 650 words or less … that I get from my Grandpa Seeley, “Milt” to his contemporaries.

My grandfather died several years back and he was never a writer, but he could tell a story better than anyone I’ve known before or since. Having lived an amazing life, he had many good stories to tell.

However, my favorite, by far, is the story I came to think of as…“The Day the Still Exploded.”

Milt was a young man, not long out of his teens, and working as a “shanty boy” in Michigan’s then-untrammeled north woods. It was the height of the logging era, and many a young man with a strong back and a desire to make a buck spent months out of every year deep in the state’s northern forests, sawing trees and moving them via waterways and rail to mills farther south.

My grandfather was a popular guy in camp; even back then he could tell a story, and times being what they were, this was a skill of some importance.

Conditions were at best rugged, and the weeks and months living in tents and shanties took their toll on even the hardiest logger. Little heat, no women, no entertainment, bad food and bunkmates unafraid to express themselves through excessive flatulence … these factors and more made for a hard, hard life.

The only bright spot in an otherwise dark forest was the little shed located just north of the logging camp. Inside that shed was a small fire. Small, but to the loggers, very important. For directly over that fire perched a still, which manufactured whiskey - very bad whiskey - 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The men took shifts tending the fire, day and night. The job was a simple one; add wood to the fire when needed, occasionally sample the whiskey to make sure the network of tubes and vials were in working order, stay awake.

My grandfather’s turn in the rotation came ‘round on a particularly cold late-November day. A muscular west wind sheared the last leaves from the oaks as the season’s first real snow peppered the shanties.

Sitting there, alone in the semi-darkness of the still shack, Milt added bits of wood to the fire, sampled the product, checked the still’s pressure gauge, added more wood, sat, sampled the product, added more wood.

As the day drew on and the cold increased, Milt found himself sampling the product with increasing regularity and adding more wood than was strictly necessary, in an effort to warm the interior of the shack.

He was working so hard at the job, especially the “sampling” part, that he soon grew tired and dozed off. If he’d been awake, he might have noticed the still’s pressure gauge slowly creeping into the red.

His fellow loggers were just returning to camp when the shed exploded. Splintered wood, shards of metal, twisted copper tubing and my grandfather all flew through the air with equal velocity.

When he came to, hours later, Milt found he was missing his right index finger, and was no longer the most popular man in camp.

To contact Mike Taylor with your questions, comments, or moonshine recipes, e-mail mtaylor325@gmail.com or write via snail mail to: Mike Taylor, c/o Valley Media, Inc., PO Box 9, Jenison, MI 49429. Miss a week? More Reality Check online at http://realitycheck.shoutpost.com.