Melted Motorsickle

Yankee gunboats shell the city during the Seige of Vicksburg

                     

     Vicksburg, Mississippi, is not the prettiest town I’ve seen, but it is nice.  The way to see Vicksburg at its best is from the rooftop of the Cedar Grove Mansion at sunset.   Bar service is not available up there, but a few wrought iron tables with chairs are scattered about, and the bartender encourages guests to negotiate the steep, narrow stairway to the roof deck and watch the sun set.  Climbing that stair carrying an icy cold, straight-up Martini is daunting, but well worth the effort.

     Hugh and I timed our road trip to take advantage of this event.  We left Kerrville on our motorcycles at six am, rode diagonally across Texas on Hwy 79, picked up I-20 just outside Shreveport, and pulled up in front of the Beauregard House B&B in Vicksburg eleven hours, ten minutes and 619 miles later.  We checked in, briefly met the weird Beauregard family, hurriedly showered and dressed, and called a cab for the short ride to the Cedar Grove Mansion.  Neither of us is comfortable riding after dark and we flatly refuse to ride if we’ve been drinking.

     The sunset was spectacular.  A wet, foggy haze covered the wooded swamp that is Louisiana, and the waning sun bathed the whole scene with an iridescent golden glow.  The light glinted off girders on twin bridges which span the Mississippi River in the foreground, and the distant forest obscured the featureless plains behind a green/black veil of live oak and Spanish moss.  The warm, humid air was softly perfumed by magnolia blossoms.  Hugh and I, still high on adrenalin, discussed the first day of our ride.

     “What a great ride. Was that super, or what?  This is about as good a day as I can remember.”  Hugh said.  We clinked glasses and took our first sip, a ritual we have performed countless times before in countless other places.  

    “Damn, that Honda will run.  I had trouble keeping up.” Hugh said.  “How fast were you going when you passed those eighteen-wheelers outside Buffalo?”

     “Something over a hundred.  I didn’t mean to go that fast, but I passed the first truck and still had plenty of room, so I fogged it and passed the second, then I just cranked on down and went around the third one.  After I let off the throttle and got back in the right lane,  I glanced down at the speedometer and it was dropping down past 105.  I’d been afraid to take my eyes off the road before that.

     “You know, Hugh, this town has lots of history.  These people really suffered in the Civil War.  Grant surrounded the city and choked off all supplies—food, munitions, whatever.  Yankee gunboats shelled the city from the river and the people dug caves and lived in them for protection.  Most of the houses were destroyed.  The people starved.  Toward the end, they ate boiled shoe leather.  Pemberton finally surrendered on the fourth of July, 1863.”

     “You always learn about history, wherever we go.  Did you see those cannon balls in the dining room downstairs?”  Hugh asked.

     “One stuck in the floor and one in the wall.  They left them there so no one would forget.   The people here in Vicksburg haven’t forgotten.  They refused to celebrate the Fourth of July for almost a hundred years.  Ignored it completely.  Finally, in 1956, President Eisenhower asked them, as a personal favor, to at least recognize the national Independence Day.  They acknowledge it now, but I don’t think  they celebrate it.”

     “Enough history lessons.  What do you think about our boy, Jeffy, back at the B&B?  I’m not sure Jeffy is all here.” Jeffy was the only child of the owners of the Beauregard House, where we were staying.  He did odd jobs and cleaned the rooms, but his main occupation seemed to be timing the bread machine so the house specialty, date/nut bread, would be done in time for breakfast.

     I laughed.  “You noticed ole Jeffy too, huh? What would you expect?  The whole family is nuttier than that bread they make.  The daddy’s name is Jeb Stuart Beauregard, the mother is Miss Melanie, after a Gone with the Wind character, and they met at Ole Miss.  They named the poor kid ‘Jefferson Davis Beauregard,’ and she calls him ‘Jeffy.’  They’re all nuts.”

     “I don’t think it is all hereditary.  I believe that boy had some chemical assistance.  Did you see his eyes when he talked about the motorcycle melting?”

      Jefferson Davis Beauregard was about five-nine and shaped more like a bratwurst than a twenty-eight year old man.  His abundant dark, curly hair topped a head that seemed over-inflated.  His features were soft and rounded and his skin tone was smooth and uniformly pale, like the German sausages they sell in Fredericksburg.  He wore a plaid flannel shirt and rolled-up Penney’s Towncraft jeans, with Boy Scout moccasins.  No young man would choose to dress that way.  It was obvious his mother bought his clothing.

      Earlier that evening, as Hugh and I waited at the Beauregard House for our cab, Jeffy admired our motorcycles, parked under the porte-cochere.  “I had a motorsickle once, but it melted,” he said.  “It was a real wide motorsickle--a Harley-Davidson motorsickle.  Real wide.  Rode it all over everywhere--rode it to California on my way to Michigan once.  Didn’t tell nobody.”   Jeffy glanced warily back toward the house.  It was obvious “nobody” meant his parents.

     “Was it a Wide-Glide?”  Hugh rode a state-of-the-art Harley Convertible Soft Tail, with all the chrome bells and whistles, and could talk Harleys with anyone.  I rode a more sensible and more powerful Honda 1200 Gold Wing.  “What do you mean, it melted?” Hugh continued. “The whole motorcycle just melted?”

      “That’s it.  That’s what it was—a Wide-Ride Harley, metallic green with gold pinstripes.  It just melted and sank down through the sand in the Mojave Desert.  Disappeared, just like that.  Gone.”  Jeffy’s eyes had a far away look that replaced his usual vacant stare.  He was more animated than I’d seen him.

      “I was riding across the desert and I stopped to look up close at a Joshua tree.  Never seen any such-a thing up close.  All spiny and sharp—cool looking.  I was standing there on the sand looking up close at that Joshua tree and I hear this hissing sound behind me.”  Jeffy was becoming downright entertaining.
  
     “I turned around just in time to see my gas tank melt off.  The handlebars looked like chrome noodles and the front tire was half gone.  I just stood there and watched as the motor sank out of sight and those two big chrome shocks just dripped down between the melted spokes of the front wheel.  It was completely gone in less than five minutes.  Just a tire track coming across the sand to that little wet green spot.  Then the wet evaporated and there wasn’t nothing left but the track.”

     Hugh and I looked at each other.  This kid was serious as a heart attack.  I don’t know if his Harley melted or not, but he was convinced it did.  I tried to think of something to say.  Hugh had enough presence of mind to ask, “What did you do?  What happened?”

     “Oh, I thought about it for a long time.  Finally, I decided that I had to walk because I didn’t have a motorsicke to ride anymore.  I started following the track and these little puffs of sand poofed up behind my heels every time I took a step.  Poof.  Poof.  Poof.  Just like walking through talcum powder.  Poof.  Poof.  Only the powdery sand was light purple, with bright neon orange and green highlights on the black Joshua trees.  It was really cool.”

     Hugh and I again exchanged glances as Jeffy’s father, Jeb, came outside to join us.  Jeb was a big man who spoke with a deep southern drawl, “Jefferson, you need to go inside and set up the bread machine for in the morning.  You telling these folks about your motorcycle getting stolen by the highway patrol?”

     “You know it didn’t get stole, Papa.  It melted.  I had the keys in my pocket and they melted, too.  I showed you the empty key ring.”  Jeffy was hurt that his father didn’t believe him, and they obviously had this conversation often.  “I come out here to find out when these gentlemen want breakfast, so I can set up the bread machine for Mama’s date/nut loaf.  It’s not as good if it’s cold.”

      “We’ll be down for breakfast at eight thirty,” I said to Jeffy.  It was the fourth time I had told him and Hugh had told him twice.

     “Let’s see, then, I’ll plug in my formula.  Eight point five, minus four, plus point five.  Let me write that down—whatever the answer is, that’s when I set the bread machine to come on.  Mama’s date/nut loaf ain’t good if it’s cold.  Won’t melt the cream cheese.”  Jeffy went into the house, furiously scribbling on a note pad.

     “That is a good boy,” his father drawled as he sipped a bourbon on the rocks.  “Gets his talent for math from me.  Did I tell you I was a NASA engineer and should have been in charge of the whole Marshall Space Flight Center over in Huntsville, Alabama?  The big shots screwed me over and put an ass-kisser from MIT in ahead of me.  I promise you, I’ll get even one day.  Ass-kissers always get it in the end.  Heh, heh, heh.”  As Jeb relayed the story, he flashed a conspiratorial wink, as if we knew all about crooked people and the doings behind the scenes at NASA.

     “What happened to Jeffy’s motorcycle?” I asked.  I was almost afraid to bring up the subject.

     “Miss Melanie and I got a call from the Arizona Highway Patrol, saying they had Jefferson and we needed to come get him.  They said they found him wandering in the desert outside Yuma, stoned out of his gourd.

     “We told them that couldn’t be our son, because he was up in Michigan and he didn’t do drugs.  They put Jefferson on the phone and he was pretty disoriented, but it was him.  It took three days for us to get out there and pick him up.  I asked the captain about Jefferson’s bike, and he said there wasn’t any motorcycle.”  Jeb paused expectantly, waiting for one of us to catch the significance of his words.  Again, the wink.

     “You can see what happened, can’t you?  One of them laws found Jefferson riding across the desert on that fancy new Harley and decided he wanted it.  So they picked Jefferson up on a trumped-up charge, confiscated his Harley, drugged him, and called us.  They can’t fool me.  I’ve been around crooks like that my whole life.  NASA’s full of them.  You can’t ever take things to be what they look like.  They’s always a turd in the punchbowl, somewhere.”  He winked again.

     Thankfully, our cab pulled up.  Jeb followed us to the car, still talking.  “They haven’t heard the last of me.  I hired a private detective out in Phoenix to find that Harley and get it back.  He’s staking out that captain’s house.  We paid over $23,528.00 for that Harley.”  Jeb was getting intense.  

      “They just don’t understand who they’re dealing with.  I’m through letting people screw me over.  Just like them NASA suits, they’ll find out.   I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.   When I'm getting even, I’m mean as a snake and I don’t ever forget.”  He finished his bourbon and pitched the ice under an azalea bush. 

     “You all have a good time now, ya hear?  All of a sudden, I'm dry,  I got to get Miss Melanie to put a half-sole on this here bourbon.”

    

Road Trip #24 Back in Texas--Reflections on the Trip

Wayne and I followed I-10 until it hit the ocean and turned right.

     Sunday morning, we had breakfast with Buck and Lynn in Muleshoe and left for Lubbock at eight a.m.  Others might not enjoy the drive from Muleshoe to Lubbock, but Wayne and I found it exhilarating.   The High Plains infects its people with a hunger for the sky and a thirst for open space.  We didn’t talk much, just soaked up the scenery—the ever-present, overpowering sky, a few sand hills, a grain elevator every so often, endless plowed fields, and two or three cattle feeding operations.  No matter where we’d been or what we’d seen, looking at this country filled us with pride and contentment.  We were back in the Panhandle.  “Home” looks different to everyone, but this is what it looks like to us.  We were glad to see it.

     We made the eighty miles to the Pecanderosa Forge before ten o’clock because R.G. Box planned for us to guest star at his Sunday Morning Coffee Clatch.  We met several old friends, drank coffee, told stories, joked, and generally did what older folks do when they socialize.  Fifty years ago, we would have been bored.  At this time of our lives, it was an enjoyable way to spend the morning.

I don't know the young fellow up close on the left, but that's John Bacon with the white hair and moustache and R.G. Box on the stool beyond.  James Eby has his back to us and that may be Garland Weeks pointing his finger in front of Bacon.

     R. G.  rounded up the usual suspects—James Eby, John Bacon, Garland Weeks and several others.  Roy Turner brought his lovely wife, Nelda, who may have been the first female, other than a family member or potential customer, to visit R.G.’s Smithy.  Nelda added some much-needed class to the affair.  James Pope, one of the regulars, didn’t show.  He was confused and forgot all about the coffee and went to a local café instead.  Forgetfulness happens when you get our age. Wayne and I have not aged all that much—we just have prematurely gray hair.

Ratisseau, looking into the distance and telling a spell-binding story to Roy and Nelda.  Note the Iron Roses and Apples on the table in the foreground.  R. G. did these during his "Fruit and Floral" period.  He did the Roses pretty well, and the Granny Smith Apples are OK, but he never learned to do a Red Delicious, Fuji or Winesap.

     After the coffee and visit, John Bacon invited us over to see his new home.  Actually, I pushed him for the invitation, because the house is unique and I take every opportunity to see it when I’m in Lubbock.  I notice new details with every visit and am fascinated by the whole thing.  John and Patricia designed the home and had it built, with John supervising every phase of construction every day. The results are pretty much what anyone with the advantage of world travel, good taste, and unlimited creativity would build.  John and James Eby, a boyhood friend who happens to be a landscape architect, are currently finishing the back yard.  It will be another masterpiece.

     About fourteen miles past Lamesa on Highway 87, near the turnoff to Sparenburg and Patricia, the odometer on Wayne’s pickup said we'd been 5,000 miles since we left my driveway in Kerrville two weeks ago.  I never pass that intersection without thinking of my college friends, Bobby Brown and Donell Echols.  They both live somewhere down that road and have all their lives.  I never see them, but I think about them, and wish we could have a nice long visit and remember our college days. 

     Nice long visits with seldom-seen old friends are great fun most of the time.  Sometimes, however, when I get a long visit with an old friend, it gets to be too long.  I want him to be the person he was forty years ago, and he wants the same from me.  We both end up wanting the visit to end, so we can put each other back into neat little boxes we’ve created in our minds.  Like an old book in the shelves of the library, we can look at it and remember it fondly, without having to go to the trouble of reading and understanding all the latest footnotes and revisions.

     Wayne and I passed through Big Spring, (my dad irritated and embarrassed me by calling it “Big Sprangs” all his life), Water Valley, (the only green spot in the county is the high school football field), and San Angelo.  We were nearing the end of our trip.  We were eager to get home, but saddened because such a great experience was coming to an end.

     I need to get something off my chest.  I can say smart alec things like “Wayne and I have prematurely gray hair,” all I want, but it doesn’t change the facts.  We are three quarters of a century old.  In human years, any way you cut it, that’s old.  We are healthy, active, mobile, and lucky as all get out to be that way.  Some of our friends are still in decent shape, some are not in such good shape, and some are dead.  I can’t help but notice this.

     When I get up in the morning, I take my blood sugar, swallow nine dollars worth of pills, brush my teeth, look at the old man in the mirror and wonder, Is that all there is?  Am I through? Will I just go to the doctor every three months, let him adjust my meds, and hunt around for something meaningful to do with the rest of the day, the week, the year... my life?

     I am not foolish enough to think that I have as much time left as I’ve already used, but I intend to enjoy what time is left.  As much as I’d like to, I don’t expect to splash around in a hot tub with a bevy of naked cheerleaders, but I can have fun in other ways.  That’s the important thing—sight adjustment—adjusting my sights to fit my capabilities.  If I can’t play a furious game of handball, I can ride my bike to the grocery store.  If I can’t write the great American novel, I can peck around on my blog.  If I can’t impress heads-of-state and super-models with my quick wit and incisive remarks, I can write a truculent letter to the editor of a small-town newspaper.

From the right, James Pope, Wayne Ratisseau and myself, enjoying a cold beer and fantastic seafood at the King's Inn, on the shores of Baffin Bay, near Kingsville.

     I can take a road trip with an old friend, and I have lots of old friends.  James Pope joined Ratisseau and me for a mini-trip around Texas last spring.  We explored historic sites, ate Polish sausage—did you know the first Polish settlement in the United States was in Texas in 1845?—and spent a half-day at the Texas State Aquarium in Corpus Christi.  We stood in the courtyard where James Fannin, the most inept commander in the Texas Army, was executed. We ate Coconut Meringue Pie at the local café in downtown Utopia, where Robert Duvall hung out as they filmed Seven Days in Utopia.  We sat in the basement of Arkly Blue’s Silver Dollar Club in Bandera, drank beer and listened to great country music as "Open Mike Saturday" went down.

     All that does not hold a candle to splashing around in a hot tub with cheerleaders, but it will have to do.  As my baseball coach said, sixty odd years ago,“Don't ever give up--as long as you’re swinging, you’re dangerous.”

You can tell right away that this ain't Wichita Falls.

      

    

    

    

    

Some Texas Humor Ain't Funny

      Someone gave me a book entitled Texas Humoresque.  I was eager to read it and find out about everything funny in the Lone Star State.  I was disappointed.  Maybe the book was too intellectual, written for people with more intelligence than I possess.  Maybe my sense of humor is underdeveloped.  Maybe the guy who wrote it is a jerk.

     I have never been comfortable laughing AT other people.  I prefer to laugh WITH other people.  The author of this stilted work is a PhD from Harvard named C. L. Sonnichsen, and he evidently enjoys laughing at other folks, especially Texans.  “Author” may be the wrong word.   He didn’t write any of the book himself, except the foreword and a few introductions.  None of that was funny.  I’m reminded of the old saw, “Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach.”

     Published in 1990 and subtitled Lone Star Humorists From Then Till Now, the book is a collection of dozens of articles by Texans and some non-Texans.  I saw familiar names in the table of contents—Joe Bob Briggs, Leon Hale, John Henry Faulk, H. Allen Smith, and Shine Phillips.  I flipped over to a Leon Hale story.  He grew up on the edge of the Caprock, on a farm near Petersburg, and wrote for the Houston Chronicle.  Leon is a columnist and a humorist and his pieces always leave me with  a warm feeling.  He is one of my favorite storytellers. 

     Dr. Sonnichsen picked a Leon Hale article that had to do with Aunt Lizzie dipping snuff, spitting with great accuracy, and talking like an East-Texas hick.  I suppose all that would be funny to a Harvard PhD, but I admire the more self-deprecating sense of humor which Hale displays in most of his writing.  I remember a bit he did on the proper way to prepare and eat a hamburger, another on how to teach chickens to fly, and his annual articles about the exact location of spring.  All of them are wildly funny and none of them have fun at the expense of others. 

     Hale wrote honestly about his Aunt Lizzie, describing her character, her idiosyncrasies, and her speech patterns.  The learned professor chose to ignore all this good work and laugh at the way Aunt Lizzie talked.   It was the only way she knew to talk and she’d been talking that way for over eighty years.  While the fine doctor was living in a dorm in Boston,  reading Chaucer and Shakespeare, Aunt Lizzie was washing clothes on a rub-board, hoeing cotton all day, and cooking on a wood stove.  He hasn’t earned the right to laugh at her.

     Elsewhere in the book, the good doctor included a drive-in movie review by Joe Bob Briggs.  Being a fan of Joe Bob’s, I considered this particular review somewhat mediocre when compared to most of his work.  This one dwelt on the fact that Tanya Robert’s boobies were so unimpressive that she popped her top on the big screen and the movie still got a “PG” rating.  Joe Bob’s sense of humor and lack of taste finally got him fired at the Dallas newspaper where he worked.  I’m not sure if his comments about Oral Roberts and his brother Anal got him fired, or if it was something else, but Joe Bob continued to write and do late-night TV for a devoted audience.    

     I don’t know why Dr. Sonnichsen assembled this work, except the idea that he must publish something to be taken seriously by the intelligentsia—those brilliant folks back East.  The stories he quoted wove the same theme all through the book—Texans are rude, crude, loud, dumb, and lack good taste.   They are rural, have double first names, are socially unattractive, and incapable of speaking proper English.  The whole state is one big Aggie Joke, told especially for the enjoyment of brilliant Yankees.

     Having said all that, I do not believe the man held any malice toward his adopted state.  He taught at Texas School of Mines in El Paso (now UTEP) for many years. I think he had a sense of humor warped by too much high-toned education.  He picked the right authors but the wrong stories.  His PhD is in English Literature and perhaps he should have stayed in that field, instead of wandering into the fields of Texas, where good honest humor is serious business.  Humor is necessary for survival here.

     I should point out that condescending Harvard PhD’s may not be alone in their distain for what they consider lesser beings.   Many Texans, including me, demonstrate a biased point of view when it comes to our well-educated neighbors to the north.  I don’t think that will change—look at how the Kennedy family treated Lyndon—and what he thought about them.  

     Leon Hale said, “Nobody reads books anymore.  If you think people read books, just write one.”  Dr. Sonnichsen published this book in 1990.  Thankfully, neither has been heard of since.

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.

    

    

    

    

Buddy Holly, Glenna Goodacre, and Judge Tom Head

Lubbock Girl, Glenna Maxey Goodacre, poses with some of her work.

     When I was in Lubbock High School in 1953 or 1954, a rumor floated around town about a report Lloyd’s of London published.  The report concluded Lubbock would be one of the top ten most populated cities in the United States by the year 2000.  Some of the rumor mongers flatly stated Lubbock would be the largest city in the nation.  Most everyone in town wanted to believe this notion and it was fifty years before anyone would know, so, even though no one saw the report, it was accepted as fact.

     Back then, Lubbock was just starting to show up on the national radar. In 1959, Buddy Holly died in that plane crash, but other Lubbock folks were gaining national attention.  E. J. Holub became the first consensus All-American football player at Texas Tech and went on to a stellar career with the Dallas Texans, and later the Kansas City Chiefs.  Ralna English signed a long term contract to sing on the Lawrence Welk Show.  Waylon Jennings lived to carve his niche in country music after he gave his seat on Buddy’s ill-fated plane to Richie Valens.  Mac Davis’s songwriting career took off—Nancy Sinatra, Elvis, Bobby Goldsboro, and others recorded his music.  Mac’s TV and movie career developed later, during the seventies and eighties. Glenna Goodacre attracted some attention with her compelling bronze sculptures, and in a relatively short time, she gained world-wide recognition.

     Most everyone in Lubbock had some contact with one or more of these celebrities, and everyone knew they were “regular” folks.  Any sort of “uppity” behavior or pretense is frowned upon in West Texas and these people all grew up in that atmosphere.  Lubbock citizens have come to expect some of their associates to become internationally famous.  They also expect these people to say “Hi” when they see them on the street. 

     In addition to this “down home” attitude, people from the panhandle have developed a quiet confidence that the world revolves around that part of Texas.  They are convinced that Lubbock plays an important role in world affairs.  

     Some people on the South Plains become famous for less than noble reasons, and consequently, the whole country gets to point at Lubbock and giggle.  Judge Tom Head is the latest plainsman to gain the attention and ridicule of the national media.  Judge Tom was minding his own business, trying to get a bond issue passed.  He brought up a ”worst case scenario” during a local TV interview and all hell broke loose.

     A little more background here.  Lubbock was named “The second most Conservative City in the Nation” in cities with more than 100,000 people by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research, a California think-tank concerned with such things.   (Provo, Utah, was first, although it couldn’t have been by much)  Liberal Democrats are not so rare in West Texas, but it is next to impossible to find anyone out there who will admit they voted for Obama.

     Judge Tom said he is expecting civil unrest if President Obama is re-elected.  “He is going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N.” Judge Tom said.  “O.K.  What’s going to happen when that happens?  I’m thinking worst case scenario: civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war, maybe.  And we’re not talking just a few riots here and demonstrations.  We’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy.”

     The judge went on to say that he would block the road by standing in front of the U.N. armored personnel carriers to keep them out of Lubbock County, and the county sheriff has already promised to watch his back.

     A local criminal defense attorney, Rod Hobson, immediately went to the A-1 Flag Company and bought their entire stock of U.N. flags.  Both of them.  He has one hanging outside his office, two blocks from the court house.  Rod’s wife made a blue U.N. beret for their five pound Yorkie, a “war dog” now on duty protecting the law office.

     Many Lubbock people are embarrassed by all this, and several Democrats have called for Judge Head to resign.  The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal has also called for his resignation, but, not surprisingly, he has a small, very vocal group of supporters.
 
     That’s the way it is in Lubbock.  The judge publicly repeated something he and his cronies have been saying privately  for months.  They don’t like our current president.  They don’t want him in office.  They’re afraid of what he might do and they feel powerless to prevent the disasters he has planned.  So they think about it and they talk about it.

     My friend, Charles Flowers, said, “You can’t let people go to thinking.  If you let them go to thinking, there’s no telling what they might think up and get to believing.”  That’s true in Lubbock and it is true everywhere else.

     I’m not embarrassed by Judge Head.  I’m amused.  He is obviously very Lubbock in his thinking.  People out there believe that the world revolves around West Texas and the nation is waiting to hear what Lubbock thinks before making a move.  Some of them actually believe that Obama has singled out Lubbock County for attack by the United Nations Peace Keeping Force.  That’s silly.  Everyone knows they’ll hit New York City first.

Road Trip #22 On the Road Back to Reality---Almost

James Collins and Neil McMullen prepare breakfast on a nice spring day at the AntHill.

     I spent the night alternating between freezing outside and sweating inside the thirty-below sleeping bag, with little moments of sleep sandwiched between the extremes. I had to get up and pee a lot more than I did when I was sixty.  Altogether, during the night I slept almost six minutes, but I was very grateful I didn’t die.  I figured I could catch up on my sleep while Wayne drove to Muleshoe later in the day.  In the meantime, I was delighted to be alive.

     At 4:30 AM, James Collins stoked the fire and made coffee.  I was wide awake, so I joined him.  James quoted John Wayne, who said nothing good came from “burning daylight.”  I wondered, what daylight?  It was dark as pitch out there.  In two more hours we saw the first hint of light in the east.  We drank coffee and visited, two old friends in the dark, remembering a long and happy life, a lot of good people, and two or three regular horses' asses.

     Around 5:30, Wayne and Neil joined us, and we cooked breakfast.   Collins fried a pound of bacon and scrambled a dozen eggs.  Neil baked scratch biscuits, did hash brown potatoes with onions and made cream gravy.  Wayne and I fed the fire and set the table.  We had coffee, milk, and orange juice to drink.   Butter and jelly for the biscuits, and Tabasco and ketchup for the hash browns--it was another feast fit for the Queen of England.

    By the time we finished breakfast, it was light enough for the guys to go fishing.  I stayed in camp to strike my unused tent, deflate the unused air mattress and pack the unused gear.  I hoped to get in a little nap, but no such luck.  When I finished my chores, the guys were back, not a single fish among them.  The wind was frightful.  We decided to load up and move down into the valley, where Neil and James had a fishing lease at a nearby ranch.  We picked up Wayne’s truck as we moved down the mountain past the submariner’s place.

     Eighteen miles down the valley, we turned into a private gate and entered the “fishing lease.”  The same creek that flows past the Anthill meanders through the valley and the guys enthusiastically started working the banks on either side.  I stayed behind to watch the trucks and maybe catch a little shut-eye.  I was tired and sleepy.

     A deserted barn stood near the gate where we parked. I strolled over to look at several sets of elk antlers attached to the gable end of the primitive, unpainted structure.  I was not sure if the horns were trophies of past hunts, or simply picked up after they’d been shed.  Either way, I realized this valley was a special place.  Beavers built dams, bears roamed the woods and elk shed their horns here.  I saw a few live elk once, in Canada, but I have never seen a live bear in the wild.  During the seventies, beavers were talked about incessantly by truck drivers with C/B radios.  I understand they were desirable fuzzy little creatures, highly valued as trophies, but they certainly didn’t fell trees or build dams.

     Before I managed to get settled for a nap, the guys trekked back in from the stream, once again without any fish.  So far today the scoresheet read:  Fish 6; Boys 0.  Wayne and I said our goodbyes and prepared to load up for the 600 mile trip to Muleshoe.  We had enjoyed ourselves, but were both eager to get back to Texas.  Neil and James had been more than perfect hosts.  They had several hours work ahead of them, cleaning up and stowing gear when they got back to Gunnison.  We had left everything in disarray. Even the dirty dishes were piled in a box in the back of James’s vehicle.  One Dutch oven had the remnants of a pretty good cherry cobbler clinging to its sides.

     As we started back toward the truck, Wayne pitched me the keys and said, “Do you want to drive a while?”

     I wasn’t sure I could make the twelve miles back to pavement without falling asleep.  I hadn’t slept at all the night before.  It was nine hours to Buck’s place in Muleshoe and my plan was to sleep at least six of those hours.  Wayne was obviously very tired.  He had been afraid to allow me near the driver’s seat for the last 4,000 miles, but he had been wading, sloshing around and desperately fishing since daylight after a night with little sleep.  I knew he must be exhausted to even consider letting me take over the wheel.

     I grinned.  “Sure, I’ll drive.  I’m fresh as a daisy.”

     I managed to keep the truck on the road until we got to the pavement at Hwy 114, then turned right and headed southeast to Saguache.  Wayne was trying to stay awake and watch my driving, but it was a losing battle.  I was fighting to keep at least my good eye open.  At Monte Vista, we turned due east and paralleled the New Mexico border to Walsenburg, then turned right and took I-25 into New Mexico.  We turned off the freeway at Wagon Mound and headed toward Roy, in the high, rolling plains country that had once been the exclusive domain of the Comanche.

Wagon Mound.  A lonesome reminder of the Santa Fe Trail.

     This country is full of history.  I-25 roughly follows the route of the Santa Fe Trail, and Wagon Mound was a landmark on the old trail. Kit Carson led wagon trains up and down this trail, and lonely soldiers protected traders and travelers as they moved from the civilized areas east of St Louis to the Spanish colonial center at Santa Fe.  Trade was brisk and the trail was relatively safe.  But it wasn’t safe away from the trail.  Wayne and I were headed into the heart of Comancheria.

     The terrain here is vacant grassland, with undulating plains as far as the eye can see.  No trees, no cactus, no mesquite, nothing but endless dry grassland, as plain and limitless as the sea.  The road was straight, with a slight turn one way or the other every twenty miles or so.  Wayne was sound asleep.  I was hallucinating.

     I saw a troop of U.S. Calvary, headed by Col. Ranald Mackenzie, called “Bad Hand” by the Comanche.  A couple of hundred soldiers on horseback were strung out parallel with the highway, about four hundred yards away, followed by pack mules and two wagons.  The troops seemed to be moving slowly, but they stayed beside me over a hundred miles, just moseying along on the rolling grassland, searching for Indians and water, not necessarily in that order.  It was 1873, and I was watching Bad Hand and his troops as they moved across the trackless plains.

     The troops halted and set up camp.   Mackenzie called his chief scout, and two junior officers to his tent.  “How far to fresh water, Mr. Bent?”  He asked the scout.

     “Well, Colonel, I don’t rightly know.  This is the first time I ever come this far east of the trail.  It ain't safe out here.  The horses and mules don’t act like they smell no water.  I been out ten miles ahead and they ain’t no water up there.  I think we better backtrack while we can.”

     “Captain Johnson, how are our supplies holding out?”

     “Sir, we have plenty of everything except water.  We’re ten days out now.   If we go on half rations, the water might last ten more days.  If everyone keeps drinking a full canteen every day, we’ll be dry in five days.  We better head back.”

     “Very good.  Cut the water ration to one canteen every three days.  Same ratio for the horses and mules. We’ll dry camp here tonight and continue east tomorrow morning.  I will not return to Fort Union without Comanche scalps. That will be all, gentlemen.”  Mackenzie listened to his men, but made decisions on his own.  He was a strict disciplinarian, considered cruel by many of his troops.  He was arguably the greatest Indian fighter who ever lived.

     A few miles east of Mackenzie’s camp, I was shocked out of my reverie by a triangular road sign.  It was bright yellow and the most unusual thing I had seen all day.  Except for grassland, a few antelope, and dejected soldiers, I had been all alone on this sea of grass, operating on auto pilot. I could not remember any detail of the road for the last hundred miles.  I was glad Wayne was still asleep.  He would have been bent out of shape if he waked up and caught me napping.

     The road sign had no words, just a silhouette of a truck on a steep downhill grade.  Another sign showed a sharp curve to the left.   I slowed some and had no trouble negotiating the curve as Wayne came awake.  We were on a long slope, down into a deep, steep-walled canyon.  A mile later, at the bottom of the canyon, the road did a sharp right turn and we crossed the bridge over the Canadian River.  On the flat banks near the river, cottonwood trees and deep green grasses grew, while sheer rocky cliffs rose up 2000 feet on either side.  The setting was absolutely beautiful and completely unexpected.  The Indians must have loved this place.  It was invisible from a half mile on either side of the canyon rim.

     As we climbed up the east slope, I caught a glimpse of smoke rising from several teepees scattered along the west bank of the river.  Cook fires in the Comanche camp.  By the time Mackenzie and his troops get here, the camp will be gone, faded into the high plains without a trace.  Comanche scouts have been watching the soldier’s progress since they left Fort Union. I blinked and shook off the images.  No reason to mention any of that to Wayne.  He'd think I'd been drinking or something.

Ruins of Fort Union.  Mackenzie passed thru here in 1881, when he was commander of the district of New Mexico for the US Army.

Meet Gus Gaunt of Santa Monica/Texas

Gus, with his game face on, and his boots.

    

      I was finished with the “How Come Texans Are So Dad-Blamed Proud” series, when a young friend of mine, Rachel Chamberlain Gaunt, published a Facebook picture of her four-month-old boy, Gus.  It reinforces my point about how we raise our children to grow up and be proper Texans, and I felt I must share it. I contacted Rachel and she added some details.  Gus was born as the sound of George Strait singing “Amarillo by Morning” wafted thru the delivery room.  I want you to read it in Rachel’s words:

     “Amarillo by Morning was one of those happy accidents that, after the fact, seem meant to be.  The anesthesiologist asked what kind or music I’d like to listen to during my C-section.  (I had no idea we could choose our music, but the surgery room was equipped with Pandora so I could choose any artist and it creates a playlist of the same genre)  So, of course, I said Willie Nelson.  All the nurses and the doctor did a double take—this is Santa Monica, California—and said they hadn’t had that request before.  I explained that I was from Texas and this baby would recognize the country music from his time in the womb.  He selected Willie on Pandora and the first song to play was Good-Hearted Woman, followed by Willie, Waylon and Me, and Blue Skies, then Amarillo By Morning, and a loud cry from Gus.  It was a magical experience made even more special by the music I’d grown up with and I’ll never forget it!  While the doctor sewed me up to Folsom Prison Blues and Georgia, he said he really liked the music so my husband, Kevin,    made him a CD of all the songs.  We gave it to him at the post-surgery checkup and he was tickled!!  We Texans leave our mark!!  I have a copy of the CD too, of course, and I cry every time I listen to it—Gus’ anthem is a rodeo song!!  Lucky boy!”   Rachel

     Rachel’s parents are naturalized Texans—they were not born here, but got here as quickly as they could.  Many of us have those little closet secrets, but we don’t talk about them.  One of my grandsons was born in Boston, of all places, and we sure don’t advertise it.  Charlotte carried a plastic baggie full of Texas dirt up there, and rubbed it on his feet while the nurses weren’t looking.  We think it worked, but time will tell—that boy does march to a different set of drums.

     Rachel finished college and went to California in search of adventure and gainful employment.  She met and fell in love with a handsome young man named Kevin Gaunt.  They went to Houston for their formal engagement party.  Charlotte and I made the trek back for the party, showing how much we love Rachel and her parents. (If I ever forget why I left Houston, my memory comes back at about I-10 and Mason Road.  The traffic is awful, and people live there because they have jobs there.  It is a great and exciting city and I love it, but the time comes to move on.)

Gus, with his Austin City Limits shirt, provided by family members in Austin.

     At the engagement party, it was decided that we could not have sweet Rachel living with a foreigner, so we had to make young Kevin an Honorary Texan.  It was a simple, but solemn ceremony.  Kevin had to down a shot of tequila, kiss an armadillo on the lips, and sing the “Eyes of Texas” a cappella, from memory.  He passed with flying colors.

     I know there are more stringent conditions for some applicants for Texas Citizenship, but Kevin was a decent sort and we respected Rachel’s judgment.  We used a stuffed armadillo and waived the provision for kissing the other end of a live armadillo.  No one could find a quart of warm Lone Star beer for him to chug-a-lug, so that provision was slightly altered also.

     Kevin and Rachel are at home now, in the Santa Monica area, living their life and rearing their son, Gus.  Look carefully at the picture and you can see they are doing a fine job.  At four months, Gus has his first pair of cowboy boots and his first UT outfit.  He has been listening to country songs since before he was born.

     Observe the position of his brawny arms, set up in exactly perfect form for an all-everything linebacker about to plug a hole in the defensive line.  I expect, however, he will play in the backfield and get the girls.  Just think what that great Southwest Conference announcer, Kern Tipps, could have done with that name.  “Gus Gaunt Gains Gobs of Ground ‘Ginst the Ganders!”

     I’ve said this before in other ways, but one of the nice things about growing old is watching people you knew as children grow into adults.   Seeing them on a whole new level, hearing about their achievements, watching them contribute to society, and knowing, deep inside, that as good as you were, they may be better.

    As Rachel said, “We Texans leave out mark!”  Watch out, Yankees.  Gus is coming.

Gus, preparing to sneak up on a deer.  Camos provided by family members in Dallas.