Road Trip # 23--The Time Charlie Flowers Demolished the Neighborhood.



Sunset from Buck and Lynn Campbell's back fence in Muleshoe.  A friend says that every picture you see of the Panhandle is at Sunset, because there is not much else to look at.  He's from Wichita Falls.  Have you ever seen a picture of his hometown?



    

      As soon we climbed out of the Canadian River Gorge, we were back on the trackless plains, with space and sky in every direction.  Except for the deer and the antelope playing in their home on the range, we had the country to ourselves.  We came upon several mule deer, grazing near the highway.

     “Look out, Mac.  Those deer will run across the road when you get near them,” Wayne said.  We approached a group of six or seven deer, spread out along the right of way on our side of the fence.  I slowed to a crawl.  Sure enough, just as we came abreast and I started to breathe easier, the whole herd took off across the road in front of us.  I narrowly missed two of them. All of them effortlessly cleared the fence and disappeared into the distance.

     Wayne was either comfortable with my driving or still too tired to care.  He dozed off and I started to daydream.  Imagining how this country must have been a hundred fifty years ago adds to the respect I have for mankind.  The pioneers, the soldiers, and the settlers who came here in the late 1800’s had no roads.  They had no maps.  Most of them had no guides.  They had what provisions they could carry, the courage to face the unknown, and the tenacity and intestinal fortitude to persevere.  They survived because they didn’t know how to give up and their children prospered for the same reason.

     In Logan, New Mexico, there is a bar called, “Whiskey the Road to Ruin.”  Local characters, cowboys, travelers and sightseers have been taking the road to ruin there since 1887.   I always thought there should be a comma after “Whiskey”, but the first guy to make the sign obviously didn’t have a woman to correct him.  He also didn’t have a bottle of Scotch, or he would have spelled it “whisky.”

     My friend, Johnny Latham lives in a house built before 1900, right next door to the “Road to Ruin.” Even though we were running late, we couldn’t go through town without stopping to see Johnny and his lovely wife, Susan.  Johnny and I have been friends since boot camp in the Marine Corps.  Afterwards, we spent a couple of years at Tech, then he married and moved off to New Mexico and we lost touch.  I found him on the internet a few years ago, and we renewed our friendship.  He is truly one of the good guys.

     Our visit was much too short.  We had a glass of iced tea, and bemoaned the fact that the “Road to Ruin” was now the Elk’s Club.  New paint job, same name but now also displaying the “Elk’s Club” in big letters.  We concluded that was a better solution to the march of time than closing altogether, but a hundred- twenty-five-year old saloon should remain in business, even if it has to get a government subsidy.   Makes as much sense as paying farmers not to plant.  The federal government needs to get its priorities straight and spend a little recovery money on a good historic place where the voters can do some drinking.

     We pulled into Muleshoe just before sunset, about an hour later than planned.  Buck and Lynn Campbell and Jerie Flowers had started “Happy Hour” without us, but we caught up.  We sat in the Campbells lovely back yard, talked and laughed and watched the unbelievable sunset. 

     This was my first visit here since Charles Flowers’ funeral and all of us were acutely aware of his absence.  We were also aware that life goes on and enjoyed our visit, knowing that is the way Charles would want it.  In the mid-fifties, Faron Young recorded Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young and Leave a Beautiful Memory.  It could have been a theme song for Charles.

     Lynn told the story about, “When Charles Flowers Demolished the Neighborhood.”  It has become a Muleshoe legend, along with several other “Flowers’ Stories.”  Charles had taken a load of steers to the auction in Clovis.  When he returned home about Ten P.M., in his words, he “might have had a drink or two.”   He was pulling his empty cattle trailer behind his big pickup truck, and made it home without incident.  Almost. 

     Buck and Lynn live on the corner, six houses up the street from Charles.  The street takes a little jog there, and to take advantage of it, Buck had a circle driveway installed, coming in from the side street.  Since the road jogs and Charles’ mind was a bit foggy, he mistook Buck’s circle drive for an extension of the street and entered the driveway at about thirty-five miles per hour, cattle trailer and all.  Getting into the drive was no problem—getting out was something else again.

     The driveway turned a sharp left, back to the street, but thirty-five is too fast to make the turn, so Charles wisely chose to go straight, take out the new oak sapling that Lynn was nursing and go through the neighbor’s yard.  The next thing he knew, he was deep in the grass, still dragging the trailer and, now, the small oak tree.  The neighbor’s brother-in-law and sister were visiting for the week.  They parked their gooseneck travel trailer in front of the house where it would be safe while unoccupied.  Again, Charles used good judgment.

     Seeing the travel trailer on his left and the neighbor’s house on his right, Charles coolly decided to stay the course and move through center of the lawn into Charlie Isaacs’ front yard, the next in line.  He was stomping around on the floor boards, trying to locate the brake pedal, because things were happening fast.  His speed had dropped to about thirty by this time, what with the oak tree dragging and all, but he had forgotten to take into consideration that the cattle trailer he was pulling was at least a foot wider than his pickup.  

     Estimates are that about eight inches of that foot worked like a can-opener and peeled off the side of the camper trailer, front door, picture window, and all.  The refrigerator was somehow cleanly removed and left standing upright in the neighbor’s flower bed.  The dining table and sofa were exposed but untouched.  A copy of Ladies Home Journal, open to page 127, rested on the sofa.

     All the noise made by the travel trailer interrupted Charles’ train of thought.  His plan had been to re-enter the street here, but he was still moving pretty fast and the collision with the camper caused him to involuntarily veer to the right, away from the racket.  Charlie Isaacs, a close friend and good neighbor for many years, had purchased a new GMC pickup that day.  He had bragged to Buck that he knew it was 5.2 miles to the GMC dealer from his house, because that was the mileage on his new pickup.  He parked it up close to the house, right in front of the garage, away from the street.

    As Flowers veered to the right to disengage the travel trailer, his big front bumper whammed into the new pickup’s back side with such force that the new pickup reversed direction.   When Charlie Isaacs came out to investigate the noise, his pickup was facing the street.   The tail end had demolished the garage door and was resting in the caved-in trunk of his wife’s Cadillac.  Lynn’s little oak tree had finally worked loose, and was lying, denuded, in the yard next door.

    Tracks indicate that Charles found the brakes about then, and managed to get almost back into the street.  He parked in front of his home, with one side of the truck and the trailer on the street and the other side in his front yard.  He went in and had warmed-over dinner and mentioned to his wife that he “might have hit something.”

     Meanwhile, the neighbors were assessing the damage.  The brother-in-law with the travel trailer was livid, screaming for someone to call the police.  Everyone else realized that Charles needed sleep right now and might be a bit unreasonable if he was disturbed.  They knew he would make things right in the morning.  Charlie Isaacs, Muleshoe’s “token A-rab”, and a world-class negotiator, managed to quiet the neighbor’s brother-in-law, the police were not called, and most everyone got a good night’s sleep.  The insurance agent, who lives four houses down and across the street, started his report on the remarkable series of “unavoidable accidents” before he went to bed that night.

     It is good to be back in Texas, where neighbors help each other.