Quote:
Originally Posted by MRM
It’s not bad if you’re careful, but if you are spearing fresh tobacco and aren’t careful to keep the juice off your body (or if you have the habit of touching your face) it’s a lot like chewing tobacco. Lots of Chewing tobacco. All day long in the hot sun. There’s no getting around the fact that tobacco juice is sticky and unpleasant, but Planting the small plant is mostly just muddy and dirty because you don’t get so much juice on you. Packing it in the spring is gross because the concentrated juice is everywhere, but you don’t ingest it like you do when you’re spearing and hanging it. Ok, so in retrospect, it is gross and disgusting when you confine all the juice to your clothes, and it’s like swallowing a can of Copenhagen in the hot sun when you don’t.
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Yeah, it's pretty nasty. I seem to remember one of the worst parts was that the plants (in the field) seemed to have these giant caterpillars on them and it never failed that when you were cutting, you would grab the plant and one of those caterpillars at the same time. Just nasty. We usually did a one guy cuts/one guy spikes and you really had to keep moving.
One of my coolest scars is from a tobacco spike. I was cutting and the guy spiking dropped the stick (with the spike on it) and as it arced down it sliced right across my forearm. That was probably 40 years ago and I still have a a big scar. Probably because we kept working and I got tobacco juice in the cut all day long...
