Missing Grandma

If we happen to know who are parents are, and I do, sometimes you even get to know a grandparent or two.  I was one of the lucky ones and knew my Grandma.  This week is the anniversary of  her passing so I paused a moment over my 10^th or 12^th Buckhorn to reflect on all the fond memories of her.

Grandma was a product of prohibition.  So she knew the lost art of how to make bathtub gin and beer.  Saturday bath day was always a bit amusing to see if we had to take one or skip that month because Grandma had a batch going.  I remember one time, Grandpa became a bit touched, he actually took a bath in the tub of gin.  Grandma went out of her mind being mad at him, but Grandpa was one happy boy.  Grandma still sold the batch tough, and some regular old time customers even claimed that batch was the best batch ever.  She never told them why.

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A year or so after Grandpa died, Grandma began a man hunt.   So began a parade of dirty old men in and out of our trailer.  Buster, though, remains on of my favorites.  The man had a full beard that reached down to the belt buckle and with the mountain of a belly of his it looked more like a waterfall cascading down.  Buster drove one monster of a truck.  It was an old 2 ½ ton army truck still in the original Army Green.  He would drive up the driveway to pickup Grandma for one of their “dates” and you could feel as well as hear that truck pounding up the driveway.  I almost never saw him in the cab of it though.  Buster only stood just  under 5 foot tall and look up at the cab all you could see was the steering wheel.  But Grandma really seemed to like the man so off she would go in his Army truck.  I watched the first time that she tried to get in, Buster had to plant himself beneath her butt and help shove her in.  We never had a camera but this picture will forever be in my mind.

I never got to rind in that Army truck.  At 9 years old, I really hoped that Grandma would marry buster so that someday I would be able to ride in it.  But it was not to be.  Their breakup stands as almost legend in our family, but one of those legends that are only spoken of in whispers.  These many years later, it’s hard to separate the fact from the myth because Mama never really explained what happened.  What I can gather though is that one evening Buster shoved Grandma up into the truck and off they went.  Both of them had dipped into Grandmas’ homemade beer and were working on the bottom half of a quarter barrel.  This being mid February in Michigan, the discussion turned to driving the Army Truck out onto a nearby lake in Pullman Michigan.  This was something that Buster had done before and with the thickness of the ice, again it was no problem.  Once in the center of the lake, they parked the truck and began necking as only an 70 year old Grandma and a short bearded elf can.  But soon after tiring of sucking face the discussion turned, as it always does with passionate lovers, to blowing up the lake.  Now guess what Buster has.  A case of dynamite in the back end of his truck.  So together, they cut a hole in the ice, and with a long waterproof fuse, lit the dynamite and shoved it in the hole. They race back to the truck, Grandma gets shoved in, Buster get in the other side, cranks the engine and guess what wont start.  The Army Truck.  Grandma, never prone to panic, jumps out of the truck and heads for shore.  Buster stays with the truck trying disparately to save his truck.  At the last minute, he also races for the shore.  Shortly after Grandma hits the shoreline, a massive explosion rocks the entire area.  The blast broke windows all around the lake and a mountain of ice rolled up onto the shore.  Buster was lucky, he rolled up, face down on an ice chunk and nearly landed at Grandmas’ feet while she was still running.  To this day, the truck is still at the bottom of the lake.

Buster blamed loosing his truck on Grandma.  It was her beer and her idea.  Grandma, of course, blamed him.  It was his dynamite.  And what idiot carried a case of dynamite around in his truck?  Once in a while I’d see Buster around town.   After loosing his truck, he began to ride a fat-wheeled bicycle with a big basket up front around town.  The towns people nick-named him Bicycle Buster.  The poor people of Pullman never found out what caused the explosion that had been heard almost 20 miles away.  Some people blamed the government.  Others blamed the Russian communist, somehow trying to take over the world by blowing up a lake in a small trailer trash town.  I actually heard an old-timer say that it was space aliens with a secret space weapon and that he saved the town by shooting at them with his shotgun.  But Grandma mostly kept the secret to herself and the story slowly fed through the family in the same way that we all knew that Grandma was a moonshiner  but the cops never found out.

Pullman Michigan

This map shows the location of the lake.  The lake that blew up is the upper one.  Great Scott Lake.   Pullman Michigan

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