Every year about this time in October, my family got together for the Clarke County Picnic. My mother’s family had farmed there for several years. Typical of the time, this was a three-generational household, plus at least one hired man for most of the year.
Being farmers, they seemed more comfortable outdoors than indoors and, except for wintertime and bad weather, most family gatherings involved picnics. Probably the last generation that seriously relied on wild game as a means of providing some of the food for a family, they were all hunters and fishermen and, depending on the seasons, picnics often included an hour or two when the children were kept close to the picnic site while the men headed out with guns in search of squirrels, pheasants, or other in-season game. Clarke County was hilly, heavily timbered and teeming with game. Even after my grandparents had moved on to another rented farm near Perry, Iowa, they maintained contacts with farmers there who welcomed our annual invasion, and we continued to picnic and hunt in Clarke County until several years after I was married.
Then, sometime in the 1960’s, the new owner of our familiar old picnic grounds told us politely that this would be our last family picnic on his property, and we were forced to relocate to various state and county parks. There were advantages to this – access to water, electricity and rest rooms, and several family groups took to camping in tents, campers and motor homes. No longer renting land, the uncles had bought a farm near Clear Lake and almost everybody else now lived quite a bit farther north and east of Clarke County, so when we moved to the country near Morse, with a pond, timber and 160 acres of elbow room, it seemed natural to offer a more permanent site for the family picnic.
Scheduled for the last full weekend in October, the “Octoberfest” as we called it, often included Halloween along with the change back to standard time. Our son had built what was known as a Texas Smoker, that worked as a slow-cooking barbecue oven, and it was kept in service for the entire weekend, cooking whole turkeys, cut-up chicken, big roasts, hamburgers, slabs of salmon, trays of oysters – anything people brought to cook in the big, smokey stone oven. Many brought charcoal grills, and camp stoves for cooking side dishes and breakfast. Hunting, fishing and gathering walnuts and hickory nuts occupied some of the time, along with eating, naps, games, reminiscing, seeking fall mushrooms and exploring the timber and creeks on the farm. The septic tank worked overtime, and we were glad we’d installed an extra-large one.
As years rolled by and our children accumulated more friends, and relatives brought in-laws and other guests, what had begun as a family reunion morphed into something we had not intended. There were friends of friends and other new faces that were strangers to us. People brought fewer things to cook in the big smoker and many relied on the food and drink furnished by others. Something had to change, but we didn’t know quite how to go about it. We couldn’t really blame the people who thought they’d been invited to a party and weren’t expected to bring food and drink to share. Others seemed to use it as an overnight stop with bathroom facilities and free buffets.
It was a young cousin of mine who gave me the courage to act. She brought along her husband’s rude and rebellious teenage sister and her own two young children. It soon became evident that she expected me to baby-sit for the evening while she attended a Halloween party in Iowa City. The approaching evening found her demanding that I furnish her with a costume! I offered her orange-colored caftan and black tights. She pawed through my jewelry and “borrowed” an obsidian necklace which she never returned, sprayed herself liberally with my Chanel No. 5, and didn’t return until noon the next day. By then, I had no trouble at all in announcing that this had been the final time we would host the family Octoberfest.