Many years ago, my cousin bought a piece of bottomland along the Embarras river in southern Illinois.

It was abandoned at the time, he bought it on a tax sale, and got it for a song. He went in, sank a shallow well point with a sledgehammer and a ladder, and dug a septic and seepage bed. He borrowed a bulldozer and carved out a flat spot on a bluff overlooking the river, and dragged in an old mobile home.

I think the total cost was around $6000.00, not including his labor, for the whole shooting match, fourteen acres of arable land and about six wooded acres. The gravel for the driveway cost almost a thousand of that 6k.

I loved to visit my cousin, he was living my dream life. We’d sit on his front porch (actually several old skids nailed to tree stumps cut level with his trailer floor) and cast our lines directly into the river, catch fish, eat them for dinner. At night we’d shoot coyotes sniffing around his henhouse.

He never touched the farm, he had a neighbor who plowed, planted, harvested, and he got 1/3 of the crop, and never had to lift a finger. It was a good deal, he always had fresh sweet corn and a very small garden out behind the trailer provided as much fresh produce as he could eat. He had two big freezers which he filled with food he either caught, shot, or grew, and at any moment he could probably live for a year and never lift a finger.

The farm was beautiful. See, bottomland tends to be very fertile, southern illinois growing seasons long, and it was a rare summer he wasn’t able to get two full crops off the land. He was living pretty high on the hog, by my standards.

One spring I saw news footage of people being rescued by DNR boats off the embarras, and to my surprise, I saw as uniformed DNR officials and cops in an Evinrude tri-hull rescue my cousin off the roof of his almost submerged trailer.
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