In the 1970s, a pair of pilgrims from Big D rode their thumbs to the Blue Grass State.

Ragged motels and greasy spoon cafes bankrupted them quickly. It was in that deficited economic condition, when Edwin and Berol hitchhiked along a rural blacktop, they got a ride from a guy in a flat bed bobtail.

He told them, "I'm sorry, but I'm only goin' to the next town. Mebbe it'll help a little. You fellas ever cut divina?"

"Never even heard of it `til just now when you said it," Edwin told him.

"That's what we call tobacco hereabouts," he informed them proudly. "Y'alle need work? Or are ye' jest' passin' thoo'?"

The truth of the matter was, both's treasuries were empty, but they answered as one, "Could be."

Berol asked, "You lookin' for help?"

"Yep," the guy said. "Seasonal. Divina's ready to cut. My dad's got a hunerd'n ninety acres."

"Ain't got no experience."

"Don't need none. 'Tain't hard."

"Okay. Ya' gotcher' self two greenhorn hands."

And so it came to pass that the two became migrant tobacco help.

Most folks thought cigarettes, cigars, snuff, chaw, and pipe tobaccos come from the same plant... They don't.

Cigarettes came from a taller, lighter shaded plant. In the last half of the last half of the 20^th century, Havana cigars and Turkish cigarettes were about the only tobacco imported into America.

Cigars, snuff, chaw, and pipe tabacky' came from a shorter, darker green plant that was sometimes moistened with a cheap, syrupy solution when processed, so it tasted sweet to the human palate. It was treated ultra heavily with the sweetgum for pipe smokers, even moreso for chewers.

Some chaw tobacco was molded into small bricks like adobe, and some cigarette tobaccos were shredded but left in loose leaf form for afficianados, the cheap smoker, or the incarcerated who either had to, or preferred to, roll their own cigarettes.

Not much of a hand axe was required to separate a tobacco plant from the ground. The guy who'd picked them up turned on an AC crackerbox stick welder back at the farm and used a sixty eleven electrode to affix two thin, plate segments sharpened on one side onto handles, forming a pair of rude hand axes.

The harvest took place in August. Edwin never knew it could be so hot. A hand had to slurp water and blow every 20 to 30 minutes or have a heat stroke.

In one of the fields, watermelon seeds had been sown with the tobacco. In each row was at least one melon. They were stacked under a tree, and one torn open at the frequent breaks.

Sticks 1 inch square and 5 feet long were scattered in the field with the seeds. They littered the ground... better too many than not enough. The cutter grabbed the plant to be cut's stalk halfway up, bent it over with one hand, then sliced it off below the leaves, preferably in one chop.

The severed plant was handed back to the 'spiker,' who had picked up a stick previously. He put a hollow, sheet metal, cone sharpened on the business end open end down. It was called the 'spike'. Four large, five medium, or six small plants were impaled on the stick before the spike was removed. The full stick was dropped, an empty picked up, bespiked, then the process repeated.

The cutter and his spiker could get a rythym going that was almost an art. It was something to see. Edwin and one of the owner's sons got in sync and could mow down a row faster than anyone. Toward the end of one day, they got it going too fast. They were almost finished with the row when it happened. Both's tongues were hanging out, and sweat cascaded off them. Edwin cut a plant, and handed it back to the boy, who spiked it with such gusto, he penetrated his hand.

He had to have sutures on both sides. They had been driven by the knowledge they could sit, rest, gulp ice water, and eat watermelon under the shade tree after the row'd been mown, and had gotten careless.

It was nearly time to knock off, so the crew stopped. The farmer and his boy sped off to the hospital.

At the end of each day, a reward was realized in a spring fed pond approximately 10 feet deep. It was hidden in a copse of trees and surrounded by high, rocky, banks. The water was clear and cold.

A heavy rope on a thick branch swung out over the middle of the chilly pond. It was a shock to come there sweaty (with wide open pores), swing out, release the rope, and plunge into the frigid water. It was especially exhilarating after a drop of 6 or 7 feet.

Edwin and Berol wore spectacles. Both were myopic. Edwin's were so thick they looked like the bottoms of coke bottles [all 'soft' (aka: 'cold') drinks, soda, pop, (or soda pop) non alcoholic carbonated beverages were called 'cokes' in the Southeast]. If he looked full into the sun with them on, he might get a free keratotomy.

Berol left his on at the end of one day. When he fell into the water, the impact didn't knock them off, only askew. He sank down to the sandy bottom, reached up, and straightened them nonchalantly, as if he were on dry land.

They were the sole occupants of the boss man's itenerant house and took meals with the family. The boss's wife could really rattle the pans. She should've had her own television cooking show. Before dawn on each workday, a breakfast fit for a king was had. The boss and his sons weren't in the least obese: every calorie was burned. By lunchtime, they were hungry anew. Everyone of the menfolk would waddle away from the table, then burn it off in the field.

One Sunday after going to the boss man's protestant church, a multitude of black birds landed in a huge old oak tree by the house. It was difficult to hear anything over the mass chirping. With the house doors and windows shut, and the air conditioner going, conversation was impossible.

The boss took a 16 gauge, pump shotgun loaded with birdshot outside and fired thrice into the tree. It rained black birds. Most only had a couple pellets in them. They couldn't fly, but could, and did run. The boss had four bird dogs. They wore themselves to a frazzle chasing after the birds. No sooner had they caught one, than they'd turn it loose, and run after another.

The best was yet to come in the divina adventure. When all the plants had been cut and spiked, a tractor pulled a flat bed trailer through the field. The loaded sticks were lain on it.

The trailer was towed into the drying barn, where the divina would hang until it dried and cured. It would be taken down later, and the leaves torn from the stalk in the winter months.

After they were packaged in burlap bags, they'd be sold to tobacco companies the next spring, while a new crop grew.

The cultivation of divina was harder on the soil than cotton. It leached nutrients from the dirt. A field was allowed to lay fallow every third season. Bugs that could be seen with the naked eye left it alone naturally, although some microscopic pests fed on it.

The drying barn was six stories high and gave the appearance from the outside of a rickety, ramshackle structure in danger of imminent collapse. Like a book that can't be judged by its cover, the barn was actually quite sturdy. It was honeycombed throughout with 4 by 4 inch beams at 10 foot intervals vertically and perhaps 4 feet horizontally.

A man got on each level in vertical alignment. When the hand on the trailer lifted a plant laden stick up, the man on the first level took it and passed it up. The guy on the second level grabbed it, handed it up, and so on until it got to the top. The uppermost man placed both ends on the horizontal timbers, and stepped back. The next stick would stop at the next to the top level and have the ends placed on the lateral beams, then the hand would step back. The next stick stopped at the third level under the uppermost, and so on.

When the job was finished, the divina was in perfect alignment, and the barn's space was utilized as economically as was possible.

Edwin started out on the trailer but after lunch was consigned to the top. He had always been scared of heights. Because of the gloom, no one could see the fear he felt there.

All kinds of winged insects buzzed by him, as if to let him know they resented the intrusion into their airspace. Myriad tabacky' particles had fallen down his tee shirt while he was on the trailer. That afternoon's artesian dip not only refreshed, it washed the flakes off.

Seasoned hands reached down and seized the over 100 pound sticks with both hands. They momentarily balanced on their feet alone. Not so with Edwin. He took them with the left hand and kept a death grip on the right lateral beam all the time. A peg couldn't've been driven in his bottom with a sledge. If someone fell from that height, it might not kill them, but he couldn't feature it doing them any good.

One morn after they'd cut and hung a 40 acre field, Edwin and Berol were assigned the grisly task of going to the swine pen to remove a dead hog. One of the owner's sons followed them on a tractor with a front loader scoop to bury it.

Edwin and Berol each got it by a cloven hoof and drug it out in the open, so the boy on the tractor could easily get to it. It'd been dead for a few days, and its belly was grossly distended from the evolution of gases.

The bottom edge of the scoop was studded with fingerlike portrusions that seemed to bite vengefully into the earth, and a hole was created in no time. When the boy drove over to get the hog, the unthinkable happened. He set the scoop down too soon. The metal fingers punctured the corpse's abdomen. The rotten corpse exploded. The blast slung decayed innards in all directions. Berol blew chow straightaway, and the way Edwin's guts were bucking, he knew the dinosaurs (ralphasauri) were soon to be called.

Miraculously, they weren't. The boy rolled the stiff into the hole and covered it quickly. The stink from specks of decay on shirts and pants would linger throughout the day, but the worst was behind them.

Edwin gagged every time he smelled it.

After a month, Berol and Edwin heard the call of the road and felt the highway twitch. They drew their pay, collected their sleeping bags, packs, etcetera, and rode their thumbs to Nashville.

By the time they got into town, it was well after midnight, and they were hungry. They ate at a waffle house, the name of which they'd not recall later, and found an old but clean dive motel. They crashed for one full day, then half another before they ventured forth to tour the town.

There was a full size replica of the ancient Grecian Parthenon that had been constructed there for one of the world's fairs. It had been built from marble, or something that looked like it, then made into a museum afterwards. It was a splendid one. They caught a bus that went around the city and passed more than one noteworthy location. One such was The Grand Old Opry House. After they saw the sights, they continued their journey southward and that very day crossed The Mason Dixon Line. Although it was probably an illusion, the temperature seemed to lower and dispositions improve when they crossed the marker.