“Smelder Hill,” kids never used the correct pronunciation “Smelter” when talking about it, was a mile or so northeast of town. a rocky and rutted road ran north from the east side of town, went past “Smelder Pond” and on to the top of that hill.  Smelder Hill was too steep and the road too rough to pedal a bicycle to the top so we walked alongside and pushed our bike.  Occasionally, when feeling adventurous, my friends and I would push our bike to the top, turn around, take a deep breath and shove off down the hill.  The object of this was to see if we could coast all the way to the bottom without putting on the brakes.  It was a wild toboggan ride and much too often our bike would careen out of control, leading to a tangled mass of boy and bike.   Bragging rights were the reward of success.  Of course no one attempted that wild ride unless someone was there to verify his claim.

Smelder Hill was not a solitary hill standing out on the plains.  It was actually the eastern end of a long ridge out north of Caney that ran for several miles east and west.   The part of the ridge that the road passed over was called Smelder Hill.   A mile or so to the west that same ridge was called “The Shale Pit.” It got that name because in early times a brick factory had been located in Caney at the base of that hill.  Its workers had excavated most of the southern slope of the hill to get clay the factory needed to make bricks.  After a few years the excavation left a semi-circle of steep cliffs falling down to a large, flat floor.   It would have made a wonderful amphitheater for outdoor productions but in the mid-1940’s it was just another one of our playgrounds.

With the passage of many decades erosion had turned these steep cliffs into a series of corrugated gullies.  They resembled the bellows of an accordion or a series of “U”’s.  Imagining ourselves mountaineers we enjoyed getting into one of the gullies and climbing to the top.   There was nothing to do once we were on top except hike in the woods that lay behind it.  It was a kid’s playground and a cow pasture; nothing more.  One day while carrying my .22 rifle in the woods I shot a rabbit.  I decided it would be a good time to try what I had read about in the Boy Scout Manual.  I started a little campfire, skinned and disemboweled the rabbit, cut a sturdy branch, impaled the carcass with it and held it over the campfire.  Before long the surface of the rabbit carcass was blackening and giving all appearances of being cooked.  I took it away from the fire, held the stick like a popsicle and bit into the rabbits hind leg.  Blood squirted into my mouth and ran down my lips.  I threw the surface-burned, otherwise uncooked rabbit into the fire and gave up trying to cook like a Boy Scout.  To this day I am squeamish about eating meat.

Many years later a physician, seeing gold, not “In them `thar’ hills” but rather in ministering to the medical needs of an aging small town population, came to Caney and opened his practice.  A few years and hundreds of gall bladders later he bought the Shale Pit,  had a road cut into the hillside and built a large home on the crest of the hill.  With the steep cliffs of the Shale Pit falling dramatically from his front yard the doctor could sit in his picture-windowed living room and, like a planter surveying his crops, serenely view the ripening fields of revenue lying below him.

Shale is slick.  Two pieces of it can be rubbed together with little friction between them.   That characteristic made climbing to the top of The Shale Pit harder than might be imagined.  Like sinners bound for heaven climbing it was a matter of taking three steps upward and backsliding two as the slippery shale gave way beneath our feet.  Climbing the cliff in the little ravines was in no way life threatening.  We picked up a few scrapes and as we slipped on the slick surface.  A daredevil occasionally upped the ante by climbing the cliff not in one of the ravines; where there were walls to cling to should he start sliding backwards, but out on the face of the cliff.   Unless fear overcame bravado part way up, prompting a rapid, crab-like sideways scuttling to the safety of the nearest ravine, the cliff-climber could brag for all time.

The view from the top the Shale Pit was spectacular, so much so that it caused me to have a very emotional experience one day.  My country had been at war for almost as long as I could remember.  Rudy,  the most brotherly of all my brothers, had been killed in action in a B-24 bomber while returning to England from a bombing mission over Germany.  All my other brothers were in uniform and I was living as an only child, with parents who had been numbed and dispirited by the loss of their, perhaps favorite, son.  Also, I was entering puberty with all the inner turmoil that goes along with that process.    It was a confusing and difficult time for me.

One summer day I went to the Shale Pit alone.  I climbed to the top and while standing there admiring the panorama that lay off to the northwest, where Cheyenne Creek flows crookedly towards its union with the Caney River and the Santa Fe railroad tracks run northward towards Kansas City, I felt something very strongly.  As I looked out over that scene my emotions overwhelmed me.  I began singing.  I stood there, fists clinched, sobbing, throat-choked and gasping, singing “America, the Beautiful” to no one save God and His creation.   Tears were streaming down my cheeks from a feeling I did not and still do not understand.   I was glad no one was there to see me.  I never told anyone about it.