I went into something akin to a full-bore panic the other day when I discovered my primary pocketknife was missing. Miss Rhonda found my beloved Sodbuster in the laundry, none the worse for wear after an unscheduled but likely badly needed bath. A quick wipe with the oil rag and a swipe or two on the whetstone were little enough of an apology for my constant and most reliable companion.
I cannot understand how people exist without carrying a pocketknife, but I know some folks who don’t even own one. I also know others who carry steampunk Chinesium things that looked like they were rejected from some fantastical video game that involve fighting aliens and zombies, but couldn’t open a package of Nabs without resorting to brute force.
I cannot recall a time since I was seven that I did not carry a knife; my first was a sheep’s foot Barlow (with a rounded tip and no point) that Papa bought for me at a hardware store, after he determined I wouldn’t do anything terribly stupid with it. It was a major milestone. I was old enough and mature enough to be trusted.
I shamelessly abused that knife, but it somehow survived, even when I lost it for a month in the yard while mowing. I still have it, even though the fittings are long since too loose to trust and the scales are scarred from any number of misadventures (including the lawnmower incident).
I later moved up to a Scout knife (as it was then called), a Kamp King with four or five different blades of varying utility. There was a long, slim “Fisherman’s Pal” that I honestly bought because it looked like a switchblade. After a while came a Victorinox, with even more blades and tools. There have been a few hawkbills, even though as a child we were told that the only reason to carry one was to hurt someone. I have discovered my current “bellyripper” to be far more plowshare than sword, however. There were plenty of others along the way, some good and some bad.
One of the old veterans at the barbershop of my childhood saw my new Barlow and told me how his had possibly saved the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during World War II. A fellow sailor’s sleeve was caught in a piece of machinery during the Battle of the Coral Sea, and my fellow customer used a pocketknife brought from home to save his buddy’s arm, as well as allowing their ship to continue its role in that battle. My friend may have been exaggerating, but I felt a little proud that my pocketknife had come from the same store where a war hero bought his forty years before.
Years later I wrote about a deputy who saved a woman from a burning car by using his pocketknife to cut her seatbelt. He remarked how he had spent a little more time sharpening it after skinning a mess of squirrels that weekend, and he was glad he had done so.
I have almost every pocketknife my father ever owned, from a two-bladed Bluegrass with bone handles to a similar Barlow style whose maker has long since been worn off. Both of those were sharpened to the extent that they could no longer be carried, since the tips were no longer enclosed. There’s a tiny, high-end, razor-sharp vest pocketknife I gave him when I was a teenager. He had several others as well, since folks desperate for gift ideas always give you a knife if they know you carry one.
If the world finds out you carry a pocketknife, you will receive pocketknives for Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries and other times. I make it point to carry each one of those gifts on occasion, since folks thought enough of me to buy and gift said knives, but I always go back to my beloved yellow-handled Sodbuster.
A good pocketknife was as much a sign of maturity as it was a useful tool. Sure, I used my first Barlow to cut the strings on newspaper stacks, scale and clean fish, snip fishing line, and sharpen pencils, but it was the first sign of growing up that I remember. That’s not to say I haven’t done plenty of stupid things with knives (and I still have some of the scars to prove it) but one was less likely to get in trouble if one had to take the time to retrieve a pocketknife from one’s jeans or overalls and open the blade. You had time to consider the ramifications of your actions.
There were still plenty of trees, desks and wooden chairs that were initialed or otherwise defaced, since boys do that, but the thought of losing a knife to an angry grownup had a tendency to weigh on a boy’s conscience when faced with some temptations.
Today, of course, most schools have a zero-tolerance policy toward knives. Almost a half-century ago, I remember an assistant principal drafting all the burly boys in our class to unload boxes of new schoolbooks, and fussing at the ones who weren’t carrying knives. At school, mind you. Similarly our carpentry teacher and civics teacher had conflicting views on the best way to sharpen a pocketknife, and they required volunteers to demonstrate the proper technique – in their classrooms.
The only time I remember anyone being cut when I was in school – intentionally, that is – was when two girls got into a donnybrook over a boy. That fight involved a box cutter, anyway, and occurred a few hundred yards off campus.
My current everyday companion has a backup (a multitool) but that Sodbuster is the one that gets the daily workout. Feed bags, a package of Nabs or Nekots, mail, cleaning my always-hopeless fingernails; something needs opening, scraping or poking every single day. I have others, of course, some more specialized, some very generic. But the Sodbuster is always there.
I am certain that I was destined to have that knife from the moment it left the Case factory; Missus and I were heading down the highway when we came up to an intersection. I spotted it in the middle of the side road and swung the car around, concerned about preventing someone else from having a flat tire because of a piece of debris shining in the sun.
I did a smooth if not entirely legal U-turn so I could roll up beside the piece of whatever-it-was in the road, and popped my door open, expecting to find a broken screwdriver, wrench or random piece of scrap metal.
Instead there lay a battered Sodbuster, open and obviously run over a few times.
I snatched the pocketknife up like a beggar finding a hundred-dollar bill. When we got home, I thoroughly cleaned it with toothpicks and 3-in-1 Oil. It took a half-hour to polish out a nick in the blade. I did ask around the town if anyone had mentioned losing a knife, but never had any takers, so I counted my blessings and gave it a home in my pants pocket, where it has lived almost every day for the last decade.
Since then it has skinned deer and coyotes in a pinch, cut landscape net from around an injured and ungrateful owl, trimmed bandages for hurt animals, cleaned catfish, separated priceless pictures glued together by floodwaters, cut the umbilical cord on baby goats, opened Christmas presents, and cleaned about a thousand battery terminals, as well as a thousand more prosaic everyday chores.
The joke in our family is that I have never gone on the big family vacations because I refuse to go anywhere I cannot carry a pocketknife. Honestly, it ain’t far from the truth.
As my Old Man said, I’d as soon walk out of the house without a pair of pants than to go out without a knife in my pocket.
After all, one never knows when one might have to free a comrade’s sleeve and save the free world, rescue a damsel in distress from a jammed seatbelt, cut the cord on a newborn baby goat, or just open a pack of Nabs.
