00:00:05 Speaker 1: Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trot lining and just in 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, a first buck in Pennsylvania and my new office. I talk a lot about dads on this show. Being a dad is the best job I've ever had. But there's some mamas out there that are equally towing the mark. And if you've got a good one, there ain't nothing better. Also got a new office, studio, secret hideout that I want to tell you all about too. But first I'm gonna tell you this story. Today's efforts come from way over Yonder in Pennsylvania. This Country Life listener, who we're gonna call Chris. Chris has a job where it's best to keep his name out of public domain. Trust me, he is one of the good guys and Hell's from the Keystone State and says he wants to share a story about how he has the best non hunting mother a son could have. Well, that's a lofty claim, Chris. Let's take a listen and decide for ourselves. So in Chris's words, if that is in fact his real name and my voice, here we go. As I sit here during the white Tail rud in twenty twenty five, I think back to my first archery buck that I killed in the fall of two thousand and six in Pennsylvania. It was November the seventh of that year and I was still in high school. We had a half day of school that day and I begged my parents to let me skip it to go bow hunt on property when we had started hunting a year before. My parents were hesitant to let me go since I wasn't familiar with the new property like I should have been, and hadn't hunted without my father being there with me. He had to work that morning. My mother was to stay at home. Mom, who is not a hunter and she supports us hunting, but she isn't wanted to get in camouflage and go sit in the woods for hours like my father and me. I didn't think they would let me go, but To my surprise, my parents agreed to let me skip school to go, and it was thanks to my supportive mother. She agreed to sit in the truck all morning with blankets to keep her warm while I sat in my stand hoping for any sort of deer movement. My father would let me take his pickup truck and he'd take my car to work that day. I would have to check in with Mama periodically to let her know that I was okay my cell phone. The morning came and my poor mother woke up extra early and got all the stuff to keep comfortable to sit in the truck before the crack of dawn until midday. I remember being excited because the weather seemed great. It was cold, it was overcast, and the rut was in full swim. I drove us to the parking area off the Stone Road where we hunted. I got myself ready and made sure that Mama was setting before I bade my way across the creek and up the hillside where she wouldn't be able to see me anymore. And when I got to my stand, I called my mother let her know I made it in and had my safety harness attached to the tree now it was the waiting game in anticipation for shooting light. It was the perfect cold, overcast morning with a little rain spitting off and on. Movement was slow to start, but around seven that morning, a group of dough came in right behind me. They were moving quick. Now I wasn't against taking a dough during the rut. At this point of my hunting career, I'd only killed one with my bowl before this season. I drew back and I waited for the shot that they never gave me. I was frustrated as a young hunter. This property had not been very productive at this point, and the landowner logged a bunch of the property, which had made hunting kind of tough that year. I thought I had missed my opportunity. I settled back, hoping things would be different. I wouldn't have to wait long. About twenty to thirty minutes later, I caught movement behind me, and to my right, I saw an eight point buck following that same trail as the group of dough used that morning. Felt like he had just appeared out of thin air. He had his nose to the ground trying to find those dough I had just saw earlier that morning. I turned around and had to position myself off to the right hand side of the tree in order to shoot. I remember being at full draw the wind coming around my glasses that I wore at the time. It was making my eyes start to water. I had to keep blinking to try to clear my water and eyes so I could see my pen. The whole time, the biggest tear I ever had a chance was walking twenty yards behind me. To my fortune, the buck stopped to make a scrape and look at low hanging branch on a beech tree. I got my eye to hold itself together. As the bucks started to walk again, fighting the urge to rush the shot, I remembered my father's teachings of being paid. He said to wait for him to step the closest front leg forward and placed that pin in the pocket behind that front shoulder. That buck took one more step at twenty yards broadside and extended that front right leg as my twenty yard green pen rested in the pocket behind the front shoulder. After probably punching my release like I was Mike Tyson, I watched my green and orange fletching bury behind the front shoulder of that buck. He twisted and he bolted back in the direction from where he came. I started shaking worse than an aspen leaf during a windy day. I told my mother what had happened and I would be back to the truck shortly before trying to track this deer. I got out of the standing. I walked to where I shot, and I found blood and a lot of it. My excitement took over at this point. I just took off running for the truck. I called my father at work while I was spread down the hill, and he wasn't able to answer, so I left a voicemail that was an instant classic. He still has it on recording. You can't make out anything I was saying, but you can just hear me trying to breathe while running, and the only discernible thing being I shot the big one. I let him have it. I got back to the truck and I gave my mother a step by step of the events that morning. As I jumped up and down like I was doing jumping Jackson the road. As much as I wanted to look, I told mother I had to wait thirty minutes. She offered to walk with me. My father called me in the meantime, he had played my voicemail for his boss, who told him to go home and help me. He was a good distance away and told me to go ahead and track without him, but if I lost the blood, I should just wait for him. At that last spot. My poor mother, who was set up for taking a nap and the truck was now walking across the creek getting up the hill with me. She found herself up on the ridge where I had my standing listening to me talk a mile a minute about what had happened. I started tracking and had good blood. We got to where I lost sight of the buck, and I found my arrow. It was absolutely saturated. I was able to follow the trail to where the ridge line makes a drop down to the creek. And as we started down this hill my mother, probably wondering what she had gotten herself into, I saw a set of antlers sticking out of a thicket just ahead of us. My mama probably got one of the biggest hugs ever. I was so proud of that deer. I remember making sure those tying tips stuck up in the back of the truck so anyone behind me on the ride home would see that I had a buck. Back there. My friend started getting out of school after half a day, and I was calling them to come to my house and see the deer I got that morning. My agricultural teacher had a bullety board that the students could post their deer kills for that year. My buck ended up being the best one taker. I've killed more bucks, and some nicer ones than that one on that November morning nineteen years ago. In each with their own story, that first archery buck, skipping school and having my loving and patient mothers sitting there in a truck so her son could do something he loved will always be a hard one to top. That A point hangs on the wall in my house today, and each time I go in that room where it hangs, I think about that special morning and that special moment with my mother, And according to Chris, that's just how that happened in Pennsylvania. Chris is one of around six hundred and fifty thousand deer hunters with a one in a million months. Thanks for sharing, brother and stay Frosty. Last April, I was in Bozeman at the Meat Eater office to record and film a lot of different content in one week play and I did Giannis's Mead Eat a Roast, showing once as contestants and once as judges. Then I did a couple of rounds of trivia and the Meat Eater Radio live show, and an experimental production where Jannis and I tried to knock a scope off zero by abusing it with an extreme prejudice. You may have seen that one on the mediater YouTube channel. There's never enough time to see all my friends at work there traveling, lodging it and cheap and if they've gone to the expense of getting me up there, my time is understandably scheduled pretty tight, working on projects and making the best use of my time while I'm there. And it was during the right for one of those shoots that my friend and colleague Matt Miller asked me if I would ever have used for storage shit. I thought it rather odd that he'd asked me that specific question. The look I gave him before I actually resembled the look I had a few years ago. That was when Bailey's second grade teacher was explained to me how the new way of adding and subtracting was better than the old way, the old way being what we'd used to settle the frontier kick Germany's butt on the world stage. Twice. They used the metric system with why and go to the Moon and back a half a dozen times. Yes, Matthew, I absolutely would have use for one. The reason I thought it was a little lot that he'd asked me about that is because my wife Alexis and I had been on a three or four month search for just such an item, and we talked about it at length. The night before I left from Montana, she said, we're running out of room in the garage, and your upstairs room is packed with all your stuff. That all my stuff, she was referring to, is all the clothing gear that comes with doing this job. I please don't misunderstand either one of us. I'm not complaining in the least, and neither is she. I go to sleep and wake up counting my blessings daily to have this job that I have, but in doing so I represent First Light and all the other companies we own and all our partnerships. It doesn't take long, especially with clothing and equipment, to amass a bunch of stuff, as Alexis refers to it. We'd also talked about moving my studio into a separate space out of the house, and we could combine that with a storage shed. It would be the best of both worlds. Until recently, I recorded every episode except for the remote ones, in our son, Hunter's old room upstairs, bigger than Bailey's room and has a walk in closet, and she deserves it for her room more than me using it to record twenty minutes of Shenanigans every week. I know there's some of you saying, hey, dummy, just for our prooms. Well, believe it or not, we'd already thought of that. Decided to move the computers and recording equipment just once when we found the perfect building that we wanted to buy and finish out ourselves. Plus there wasn't any room to move that stuff into Bailey's room, so we started looking. They're easy to find. It seems like there's a lot full of them on just about every corner or big building supply store that you come to. All of them in various stages of completion, but none really compatible with what we were looking for. I didn't have a need for a door big enough to drive lawnmore through. Some of the worksmanship on a few brands was less than what I could do, and I ain't no carpenter, and I'm sure we could have gotten them up to speed, but it would it take us hiring a contractor or doing a lot of the work ourselves, and with my travel schedule, I don't have time to do that, not to commit to a project like that, So we were kind of stuck in limbo. We found some decent buildings here and there, but we'd have to insulate it, do this, and do that, and it was gonna wind up being a bigger project that we could take on. Then I went to Montana and Matt Miller asked me that question. Why do you ask me that, Matthew? He just smiled and said, no reason. I told him the story. I just told y'all all about how Alexis and I had been looking for months now and had discussed it just the night before. And he looked at me dead in the eyes and said, don't buy one on tour with my emotions. Matthew, you have no idea how important this is to my family. I'm not kidding. We've been actively searching for a building. Well. Old Matt works in the content Partnership division here at Meat Eater was out telling me anything that would violate the non disclosure agreement that all those folks work under. During the negotiations. Part of those deals, Matt said, there was a storage building company that really liked meat Eater, and it acquired as to how they could work with us and specifically me in my show. I was absolutely floored. Lexis and I have been praying about this, and now it looked like our court was dadhing from getting a bite from a fish that looked a whole lot like a storage building. Well as in cases like this, Meetings between Matt and his boss, Art Brady, and the storage building folks eventually included a meeting where yours truly was invited to attend. My brother. Anytime I'm telling him about someone he hasn't met that he's about to, he will ask me, are they one of us? Now? This question has nothing to do with politics, race, religion, gender, or where they're from, and all to do with an observationally perceived attitude for having fun regardless of what we're doing, treating others like we'd want to be treated, and standing behind what we say. Well, from the moment I met all the folks at store More, it was plain as day that they were definitely one of us. Now, before anyone gets their drawers in a wide thinking here Brent goes doing a commercial for one of his sponsors, let me stop you right there. As I have said before, I have one hundred percent control on whatever is said or isn't said on this platform, and what I'm telling y'all now would have helped me tremendously. When Alexis and I started our journey down the road looking for a quality storage building, I didn't know the first person who'd bought one from any company. This is our experience and if it helps someone get pointed in the right direction, whether they buy one from these folks or not, and I have done my job. Here's some background on Store Moore. First, i'd never heard of them before Matt and Art brief me on their company. I had no reason to be familiar with them up till now. I didn't need a building. The last three months have had me necked deep in research on the ground and online, and let me tell you, there is a noticeable difference in what I've found. These folks are headquartered in Kentucky and it was there that Darren Warren opened Portable buildings in twenty seventeen with his cousin in corner, Chris Burnett. Now, in eight years, the company has grown to service twenty six states and nearly two dozen different partners, manufacturing their buildings to very define specification. You can do all your shopping online or pull up to four hundred different places where you could look at someone eyeball to eyeball and figure out what you're looking for. To say they've built a successful company, be it understatement to say they're a business that's all about themselves will be an absolute life. Darren Warren was diagnosed with non Hodgkin lymphoma at the age of sixteen. It took one hundred and twenty chemotherapy treatments over multiple years before he and the good folks at Saint Jude kicked cancer out of his life. Since then, Darren, in every business venture he's been involved with and encouraging all his business partners, have made a goal to share their blessings with Saint Jude Hospitality. From the onset to the end of this year, store More is own target to raise and donate nearly one million dollars the Saint year. That's not only being grateful and remembering where you came from. That's supporting the people who helped you to continue to help others. Those are the kinds of people I'm dealing with and still getting to know. A humble bunch of folks who take their business seriously and their philanthropy even more so. During the first series of meetings that included me began in June of this year, Art and Matt introduced me to Graham Hall and Kevin Shavaria, and Caitlyn Colinberg and John Stevens. I'd get to know others along the way, but it was during this process that my storage shed morphed into a new studio and secret hideout for me and Old Whalen. It was the easiest and most difficult thing I'd ever done. Easiest by having a three D model on their website where I could I could design my own layout from the interier, and difficult by having so many color combinations to pick from. I enlisted my daughter Bailey's help, and after trying just about every combination, imagine the more we settled on. While I'm sitting in right now, I would absolutely live in this thing. My descriptions won't do it justice, but I'm going to share pictures of it on my social media and I love y'all check it out there. I wouldn't have had a place to set it up had my good friend John Howard not leveled and prepped the space that we picked out in the backyard. He and his team went above and beyond anything I could have dreamed of, so much so that when Storeboard delivered the building, they were blown away about how good it was in the day arrived, in delivery was at hand. There's a video of it being driven into my backyard. How smooth a professional that was done. Is something to see. I'll be sure it's posted, so if you're interested, you can watch it. Now. That brings us to what I really wanted to talk about, and that's the stuff inside the structure, the mementos new and old that adorned the wall, and the shelves that's surround me, and I'm gonna tell you all about them in the next episode of This Country Life. That's terrible and I should be ashamed of myself, but I ain't. I get mouthed and I run out of time, and there's some items laying around and hanging in here that I want to tell you about, and I'm going to next week. The big Black Friday sale is opponus, and I know there's some folks waiting for it. Well, here it is First Light, Phelps, FHL, Dave Smith Decoys in the Mediator store. They've all got it going over right now. If he's shopping, it's time to get busy til next week. This is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all be careful