Many years ago when I was in college, I took quite a bit of ribbing from some of the big city boys in Atlanta who thought their culture was superior to mine. Yet they always wanted to know what I did when I went home to Whigham, and they seemed a bit envious of our country-boy activities. Some of them were actually jealous that they had never been squirrel hunting, snipe hunting and had never seined a creek. They thought a “trot line” had to do with some fast way of picking up girls in a bar.

They were always throwing one-liners at me. One day one of them said, “I heard when you guys butcher hogs, you use everything but the squeal.”

I said, “Well Spike, you’re wrong. We also use the squeal. We congeal it and make ‘oinkment.’ It’s good to put on burns, scrapes and chapped lips.”

For a moment it went right over Spike’s head.

Once he asked me what I was going be doing over the weekend since I was headed back home for a couple of days. I told him that some of my old high school buddies and I were going Naugha hunting . Of course I said it with a deep southern drawl, kind of like I was dipping Copenhagen and trying to sing Amazing Grace at the same time.

“So do you eat those things?” he asked.

I said, “No, we don’t eat them. Naughas are tough. But there’s a really good market for Naughahydes. We pick up quite a bit of spending money from Lay-Z-Boy and Broyhill.

It took him a few seconds to unravel my words and realize he had taken the bait and run under a log.

Of course when I told him about making “oinkment” from a hog’s squeal, I wasn’t far off the truth. We did utilize most of the carcass on hog-killing day.  The hog’s feet were pickled, the intestines were washed and were used to case sausage and make chitluns. And my favorite non-standard byproduct was a collection of proteins, fats and gristle that went into the manufacture of souse meat.

I’m still fond of souse meat, saltines and Tobasco Sauce.

When I take a bite, I do some time travel. I can imagine the coldest day in December with two or three families in the barnyard cutting up hog carcasses. The frost is still on the grass and fat is being dumped into a big wash pot to be cooked down into hog lard, later to be transferred to five-gallon cans and eventually to render golden fried chicken and catfish.

Now yes, I’m being facetious about making “oinkment.” That was just a way to tell my big city friends that we were very proficient in salvaging most forms of protein for some use.

But then my facetiousness is not far from righteousness in this instance. Today I just read a story out of Eureka, Mo., where they are making asphalt out of recycled hog manure.

An engineer up there has found how to take the bio-oil from manure and use it as a binder in asphalt manufacture.  So now if someone tells me I don’t know crap about road repair, I can say, “Au contraire!” (My only practical application of four quarters of French).

I truly love American ingenuity. Almost as much as I love good souse meat.

(You may email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)