Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The most backwater place you ever spent time in.

Backus, Minnesota

We stayed up in that area at a little resort for deer hunting one year. The resort was shut down as they owner was prepping to sell it. He'd dump his teenage son at the empty cabin that was the office each morning to keep an eye on the place while we were there. There wasn't a stick of furniture in that office. He left him a TV, a Nintendo, and a case of beer to get through the day. The kid was about 14 years old, and the beer would be gone by 2:00 in the afternoon. Him and the dad were never sober the whole time we were there.

We went to a local watering hole called the Grey Fox. The kind of place where when you walked in, they didn't ask you if you had a gun, they asked you if you wanted one. We got pretty friendly with the waitress, and invited her to stop by for a nightcap after her shift was done. She said "Honey, you guys can't handle me." There were five of us, and I have no doubt she was right! The locals were getting a little agitated that we were making time with "their" girl. It was time to leave. The waitress, and the bar got busted the next spring for selling drugs.

To this day we talk about the Legend of the Green Toothed Hag.

I had coffee and a meal or two in Wabigoon, Ontario.

I was stationed in Armstrong, Ontario for five and a half years.

Odessa Texas comes to mind, a whole city full of bass boats in the middle of a desert.

Jacobabad pakistan. There is a reason human life means so little to those people

Nyala, Sudan 1985

Probably Magalawa Island, off the coast of Zambales, Luzon. 27 hectares, pretty much all coconut plantation, it was owned by a first cousin of Ferdinand Marcos whom I was doing some things for at the time. 27 families lived there, no electricity, no running water. The overseer and I were good friends. He was a real, hard-case guy. Each family contributed two day's work per month on the plantation in return for being allowed to live there. Any work beyond that they were compensated at a rate equivalent to a dollar a day. Other than that they fished, often with dynamite. I was there once for the feast day of their patron saint, a real party weekend. Some of the men got drinking and a disagreement broke out between two factions, fights, knives... Jorge, the overseer, got his family back to his house which stood a little apart from the barrio and left me there with to watch over them while he went back to to the barrio to settle things down. He gave me his 12 gauge A-5 (FN) and said if I saw a lighter flash anywhere in the bushes around the house just fire a load of buckshot at it...his biggest fear is that someone, in the confusion, would take the opportunity to settle some old grievance by tossing a fish bomb in his house. One evening, patrolling around the island, he shot a coconut thief from the mainland out of one of the trees with his lever action Marlin .22 WMR. Didn't kill the guy, but he walked with a limp after that. Week or so later the local constabulary boss asked if he shot somebody recently...told him, only a fruit bat. Good times...

I think that was San Isidro. miles

Bayou Meto, Arkansas. We go every year and love it!

You don't have to travel internationally to find this kind of place. Anyone around a rez can tell you that. My vote is Lame Deer, Montana on the Cheyenne Indian reservation...

Upper Fruitland, NM


Sycamore

Wewahitchka, Fl.
Wasn't there more than ten minutes and a 5'8" 300lb sweat stained wife beater undershirt accused me of "lettin' awl da f'n ni gg ers loose!" more or less because I wasn't from there.

Jeffery City, WY. in the late sixties was a cultural center of interest as well. Even more so now.

Back in the early 80's, when I was still caving, I went with another caver to a cave in RockCastle County, Kentucky. This is REAL KY, FYI, not that one near DaNang. What I'm giving you is all I know about this place.

The name of the cave was Hail Cave. It's on the map. We drove to within a couple miles of the place and the road ended at a barrier. We got out and started following a path through the woods.

On the way through the woods, I was warned by the trip leader that we were going to be going through some hairy stuff, and that I should not talk to or look at any of the people I might meet. We could walk through and that was it.

After a while, we came out of the woods into a clearing. There were just about a half-dozen white frame cabins and a small white church. We were on what passed for a road, but it had zero sign of recent traffic. It was composed of sandy ground and grass. There were no vehicles of any kind in sight. The really creepy thing was that there were no people evident; I was told they had all gone and hid.

As we passed the cabins, I heard a door come open, and I looked up briefly and saw a 10 yr old boy in homemade bibs standing in the open door, watching us. Behind him, in the shadows, was a double-barreled shotgun pointed our way. In all the time were were there, I saw nothing that would have indicated we were anywhere except the mid 19th century.

We said nothing. We kept our heads forward and kept going. Within a quarter mile or so we were back in the woods and kept going. There was no sign of any roads leading in or out of the clearing except the path we were following.

Ras Ghareb (spelling?)

Some schitt hole port in the Red Sea.

At a Petrobras gas facility. We were over a 100 miles north of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte.

Nothing around besides jungle and wild burros.

Natal is kinda' cool. The Air Corp had a large base their during WWII. They flew planes from Natal to Africa, then north Africa and Italy.

You can get a real cheeseburger and fries.

Iraq. Some of the places were at least a time warp....

Made a port call in Karachi, Pakistan and in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Walked around a bit, had a beer(both places).
That was enough.

Diego Garcia, before the build up was pretty damn austere.

Several villages in Vietnam I "visited" would fill the bill.

. . .And while we're on the subject of Kentucky, here are some other places I've been:

From up around me:

Browningsville-- the last people there were a couple that honeymooned there for a week in the 1950's. For a while, there was a black bear living in the basement of the old mill.
Ely-- closest town to me. However, it hasn't shown up on a map since the 1850's.
Neave, KY. -- Things started to go downhill after the stage from Falmouth stopped running.
Bachelor's Rest, KY
Brownings Corner, KY
Hells Half-Acre, KY, south of Falmouth, KY. I went there once and could not find a trace of it, but it still shows up on the Rand McNally.


From my wife's part of the state:
Oz, KY
Yamacraw, KY
Rattlesnake Ridge, KY
And let's not forget the Greater Pine Knot/Revello/Strunk metroplex, your gateway to scenic Stearns-- at least if you're coming up from Oneida, TN. Look out on your right and you may catch a glimpse of Granny Holt's Knob!

Uzbekistan, was there on a business trip in the late 90s. Looked like what this country must have been in the mid 1800s.

You really can't appreciate how bad it is there until you try to fill your truck with fuel in the only gas station in town and there is a line a block long at each gas pump waiting to put 57 cents worth of gas in their tank. And while you are waiting in line, there is some Indian trying to sell you a broken screwdriver or a pint of his babies blood to get enough money to buy a can of Heet so he can go home and get high on some type of alcohol...