I appreciate all funny things, believing that they are the one shield God figured would protect us from ourselves, but I have to admit my favorite kind is "Ozark farming humor," defined by a neighbor, years ago, as "Seein' the comical side of whatever scares you skinny." You don't have to be from mountain country to have this knack, but farming on it sure helps.

Mike Snider, a banjo picker from Tennessee, told an interviewer that his daddy raised hogs, and one time got the biggest check he had ever seen in his life and felt reckless rich. He went to the gas station and told the boy working the pump, "Fill her up, son, and, while you're at it, run two or three gallons out on the ground!" Now that's a lot like the way people here see spells of prosperity, some storm of disaster being further down the line.

Dewey Bird, Salem, Missouri's police chief back in the 1950s, told about an old fellow who, disgusted with farming after three drought years in a row, hanged himself from a tree. It was Dewey's job to tell the wife, and even though he knew that the couple hadn't gotten along at all, he broke the news gently. He said the old woman took it pretty well. "So that's what become of that clothesline!" she said.

Ozark rural folks love to put a twist on a story to make it more real for a person who doesn't understand its importance to someone who lives here. An old farmer named Cletis Malone told a visitor that his son had caught a 20-pound catfish in their farm pond, "The only crop that made, this year." And when the listener wasn't much impressed with the catfish, Cletis went on to explain, that once cranked up to the rod's tip, "There wasn't nothing for the boy to do but climb up there after it!"

I have to admit that my partiality to Ozark farm humor is due to the sheer stubbornness of people who would tackle agriculture in a land known mostly for its steepness, rocky soil and ever encroaching army of timber sprouts. But every year a new crop of farmers turns up, ready to take on their father's calling. One of these, a young man from Bunker, once showed me the first pedigreed bull his family had ever owned, with papers going back to Europe. Looking at the animal's sleek hide, compared to his tattered, rangy, weathered bunch of cows behind a rickety fence, the farmer said proudly: "If this here bull could talk, he wouldn't speak to either one of us."