February 19, 2004

A fellow pumping gas in Mertzon observed last week that motorists no longer yield the right-of-way to skunks. He thought the 70 mile an hour speed limit turned the highways into a free-for-all road kill if not even an animal as odoriferous as a skunk slowed traffic.

Next morning, Goat Whiskers the Younger called to report he was loose herding one of my cows off the pavement, waiting for the sheriff to halt traffic. By the time I arrived, red Hondas and shiny crewcabs roared by, tires singing as if the three men, the three vehicles, the flashing lights and the one black cow in broad daylight were the starting gate for the straight-away track.

We hadn't stocked cattle on the highway since 1992. We lack one half mile of replacing the right-of-way fence on each side of the highway. The only weak points are the 14-foot cattleguards that oil companies so graciously left us to maintain.

We tried to clean the fill from one guard using ranch equipment. Neither the hydraulic lift on our tractor nor the blade on the steel track would budge one end of the heavy pipe frame six inches, much less lift it. After the tractor stalled and a hose broke on the steel track, a neighbor suggested hiring an oilfield workover crew and a winch truck to do the job. I told him if they'd work for the salvage value of the two tractors, I might give the idea a try. Otherwise, 12 feet of wire gap was going to have to block the cattleguard.

Restoring this guard was not only important for keeping my cattle off the highway, it also gave fossil fuel miners complimentary access to their leases. It was further convenient for the general public to whip in off the hot asphalt for a few cans of beer to fight road fatigue, take a stroll over to hunt arrowheads in the flint beds close by, or have a handy spot to dump ashtrays and litter bags.

My cow venture got off to a bad start without cattleguard problems. The first cattle we moved pushed over a wire gate in a corner and escaped onto my brother's pasture. Took two men on horseback three trips to gather the cows. During hunting season, there are only four hours in the middle of the day when a man can ride without being a backstop for a hunting blind, and midday is the most difficult time to see a black cow shaded under a cedar bush, unless you search after dark.

The second bunch were the light end of the heifer calves from on the Divide. Four red bulls were turned in on the eighth of January. The pasture waters on the highway. On the tenth of January, a neighbor called and said, "I saw four old Mexico steers in your cattle on the highway. Wonder how the heifers are going to gain weight with the steers running with them?"

The insult had a short life and shorter attention span. Along with the cow jumping into the highway and the ones escaping onto my brother's pasture, a five year-old cow nursing a big bull calf changed from a sleek, fit mother into a listless brute too weak for her calf to nurse in a week's time. She'd come to feed, but wouldn't eat.

I knew this was a desperate case. When a black cow loses her appetite, it's too late to call for the doctor unless she's also connected with the rendering plant. I've seen Angus cattle slip their hair, lose their teeth, go blind, scour, take hoof rot, swallow beer cans and fan belts, drink oil and salt water, run fever and have chills, and do a combination of all those ills, and still consume four chips of hay and 10 pounds of cake at a feeding.

Four different men thought the sick cow had hardware disease. Enough trash blows off the highway right-of-way to dam an irrigation ditch, much less block the alimentary canal of a cow. However, the diagnosis was unclear. Did they mean hardware or hard-wear? Range doctors blame all mysterious aliments on hardware disease, but shortgrass cattle also suffer hard wear disease from grazing in between small stones and licking the moss around big rocks.

Two prominent hollowhorn and goat specialists in Ozona denied hardware or hard wear as the illness. Admitted they were stumped. Kept the cow two days in the hospital. Agreed her two month-old calf must be weaned. Closed the case in the bookkeeping department.

Tonight at this writing, she's bawling down at the barn for her calf sleeping at the auction barn. Cow ranching on a major highway is a perilous life. Probably part of the trouble was the 13-year intermission for the drouth. My red bulls may look like Mexico steers, but the song will change, chorus and verse, when the judges at the auction pass the ribbons next year at the feeder calf sale.

February 19, 2004

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February 12, 2004

For the first time in 30 or 40 years, Mid-West Feed Yards in San Angelo failed to send an Ace Reid calendar in December. Hard for an order buying and yardage firm to justify the price of a six-inch ruler on an outfit as low on volume as mine is today, much less an embossed collection of cartoons.

Months are not all that important, anyway. So it's said, old Felipe, who lived and died on the Aldwell ranch South of Sonora, dropped a rock in a five-gallon bucket each working day. My maternal grandfather opened his saddle house door to reach his records. Used an old saddle blanket to erase the blue chalk marks. His entries opened: "Sheared 1600 sheep spring of '27," or "Fourth clip of unsold mohair stored fall of '34."

Jose, who worked for the ranch over 40 years, never owned a watch or a calendar. The infamous Angel, the witch doctor, camped on the big draw in the Stage Stand pasture all one long winter without a timepiece or a scrap of paper. Angel cut notches in his tent pole in the middle of the day to count the days. Claimed he knew by mid-day if he was going to charge a full day's work. Angel's books were perilous to audit, as the yellowjacket wasps he fed syrup in the summer hibernated in his tent in the winter.

In the lawless era of unpapered aliens, the old ranch worked deep interior Mexicans too simple to notch a stick or drop a rock in a bucket. Every first of the month, we bought cashier's checks to send the payroll home, less the few dollars of personal items the men drew for tobacco and toothpaste. Paid whatever they presented, be it a notched stick or crude pencil marks on the flap of a carton of tobacco.

Big ranch bookkeeping problems arose after shearing capitans stopped counting sheep off the shearing boards, relying entirely on the metal tabs or checks given the sheep peeler for each sheep. Required further difficult mathematical challenge to triple the ram count to pay extra charge for those big brutes.

Every spring at Goat Whiskers the Elder's sheep peeling and woolie stampede, it took more time to audit the counts than to load and freight the wool to the Mertzon wool house. Whiskers carried a big handicap, entering as an engineering major from Massachusetts Institute of Technology matched against a gent who might have been allowed to go to grade school after the cotton harvest ended in the fall and before the shearing season began in the spring.

Put another way, the match was a school of fractions and decimals against a school of hard knocks and slim margins. Whiskers carried a slide rule in a scabbard; the capitan packed a grimy sack of metal checks. Shearing cost 30 cents a head. Closest the two accounts ever came to agreeing was a difference of 20 sheep on a harvest of over 3000 head. Whiskers refused to split the difference. After advancing the capitan five hundred interest-free, unsecured dollars and giving him six additional mutton goats to feed his crew, the victor stalked back into the house, muttering over all the world's incompetent shearing crews and bookkeepers, and adding flaming slurs aimed at surveyors, bankers and school teachers.

Whiskers used green ledger sheets and filled his accounts with precise lettering. His brother, the Big Boss, kept his inventory on his glove or the flap on his chap pocket. My contribution to the Boss's system ranked somewhere between the dates carved on flat rocks by early explorers and Daniel Boone recording a bear kill by carving the notation on the bark of a tree. However, I brought a shoe bag back from college with six empty pouches to use as a filing cabinet. The glove box and the sun visor in the pickup stored the rest of the paperwork.

In those times, checks were stubbed on the pasteboard backing of free counter checks. I don't remember having a copy of the financial statement at the bank. After registering for the draft, my only government business was filling in the agriculture census every 10 years and doing a short form for the IRS every April.

I miss having a new cartoon of Ace's every month, but honoring the four seasons is accurate enough to run a bitterweed ranch. The few tally books and a couple of ballpoints the feed mill sent compile the perks to start 2004. One field of accounting I keep current is the rainfall. Don't need much more than the back of a glove to cover the whole year.

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February 5, 2004

Time for a herder to flee from his home range is the day neighbors start selling land without bothering to call. Next sign is a dead telephone on a rainy morning. It's too late to leave after the deer fences rise on tall posts and the big gateways hang the new owners' brand from a black iron arch.

In Texas, red-caps are buying land to stop paying leases. A big land boom is in full pitch. Prices rise every month, it seems. Instead of worrying if the neighbor's bull breeds your heifer calves, nowadays the problem is whether he is going to choose Russian boars over, say, bringing back the buffalo and the gray wolf.

Last week, we turned four Longhorn bulls into a pasture of heifers on the highway where cow brutes last grazed at the start of the dry spell in 1992. Before releasing the sleek, rambling oxen, the risk of introducing a new bloodline in the neighboring pastures had to be considered. Difficult to stay current on who runs ratites for feathers and who is into antler harvesting from African deer.

My son rode the outside fence. Whether the cattle escaped wasn't as much the problem as what beast might break into the pasture and eat my bulls. Every hunting season, hunters see huge mountain lions. Also, as fierce as wild hogs are, there might be a boar loose ferocious enough to gobble a Longhorn, starting at his forelock and ending at the switch of his tail. (Tempting as it is, I am not going to retell Uncle Mark's story about a boa constrictor in Brazil swallowing a Longhorn cow head first.)

The breeder tipped the bull's horns before delivery. After realizing we might be moving into a wilderness area, I began to wish he'd left the tips sharp in case the "Save the Gray Wolf" group moved to Mertzon or the "Free The Bengal Tiger Association" set up camp.

But if the horns were to be tipped, the work needed to be done in the breeder's chute. Ours are designed for working Angus cattle and proving how many times a piece of pine lumber can be patched. One of our chutes dates back to the horned cattle times, but the boards are so rotten, there'd be a danger of a bull poking his foot through a crack and spraining his ankle. (The status of downers changed after December 23. If cattle start limping, the safe thing to do is to shoot the cripple on the spot. My pistol is in the bank box at Mertzon. Be unhandy, but I guess I could run to town during banking hours to make a kill.)

I wasn't aware at the time, but a compadre of mine specializes in handling Longhorn cows for insemination. He is an old hand at wrapping wet chain on drill stem beneath the derricks of the world's oceans. Faced with helping to work Longhorn cows without a chute, he devised a rope and chain method to snub the cows' horns to a pipe fence rail. (Breaks my heart to have missed the sight of a Longhorn cow bucking and snorting snubbed to a pipe rail, especially if the most exciting event of your day is watching a black cow licking a yellow salt block.)

"Night Train" sired the last Longhorn bulls we bred to heifers. They were evil-tempered beasts unwilling to stay home at night and unable to remember the way back the next morning. Before we shipped those fence and corral hurdlers, we had the original cost of $600 a head, plus another 200 bucks' freight trailering horses to pick up the bulls on neighboring ranches. (Too sensitive a subject here to review how many grandsons of "Night Train" hit the ground in the neighborhood the next fall. However, if it hadn't been for calves on the neighbors' cattle, we'd have been unable to run a color test on the bull, such less a quality test, as we calved fewer than 10 head of his offspring.)

The only cattle joining the pasture were across the highway on my brother's ranch. To avoid the migration problem of Night Train's sons, we shot the heifers with lutalyse for estrus synchronization. Figured the bulls' attention needed to be on the heifers and not on the open road. With all the ranch traffic of trucks and trailers on Highway 67, be a big risk the bulls might catch a whiff of their home turf from the other side of the Pecos River, and head west.

My son didn't find any bristles or alien spoor along the fence. Prospects for Longhorn cattle sound good. I read in a journal the other day of a ranch cloning eight offspring of a $79,000 registered Longhorn cow for $59,000. Might be the reason behind my pal inseminating the cows on the fence rail. Sure is nervewracking waiting every day after the feed runs to hear whether those open range bulls are settled…

February 5, 2004

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January 29, 2004

In an older part of San Angelo, an eatery called Mr. T's feeds big crowds of Wool Capitol citizens. Folks not attuned to franchise houses flock into the former grocery store. Business is brisk; many prominent citizens are regular customers.

My favorite time to eat at Mr. T's is after my annual physical at the clinic, so I can visit hombres my age sitting around worse off than myself. I enjoy going before the momentum of springing free of the doctor's office wears off and I'm back to fearing every throb from my navel to my adam's apple might be a coronary attack.

Last week I ate at Mr. T's because I had a new set of hearing aids to test during the lunch rush. The din of the noonday crowd reaches a peak as high school students barge in to gulp down hamburgers, mingled with bridge players training on tuna salad for afternoon matches and working guys handicapping football games fueled by bowls of beef stew.

I chose a table close to the counter in the noisiest part of the building and folded my jacket over one chair to keep a margin of space. I took off my hat, hoping to signal that I was an outsider too aloof to join for company, and unfolded a newspaper for further protection.

No sooner had the stage been set than a big red-faced, gray-bearded guy bounded over, asking to sit down without waiting for an answer. Not waiting for an answer, I soon learned, was his forte. At the scrape of his chair leg, he blurted, "I know you, Noelke. Leased land in Irion County from your family 50 years ago. Did you know the county judge?"

"Yes," I replied. "I was shining shoes the night His Honor shot at a man three blocks behind the barber shop. Judge's aim was bad. Sheriff pried the bullet from a porch rail way off …"         

On he came with, "This may make you mad, but do you think the economy is recovering? 'Cause if you do, you are one of those dumb-heads who watch the Dow Jones and don't know the State of Texas, along with San Antonio, is as broke as the United States of America."

A slight pause … "and Noelke, do you know the spacing on those gas wells down in Sutton County? Make a guess how much one family makes a day in gas royalties. I've found a gas field in Edwards County. Did you ever see an ownership map? Bet by gawd you haven't."

The waitress interrupted the grilling long enough for me to set my hearing aids on channel two, hoping to drown the background noise. The drink machine dropping ice cubes hurt worse than hubcaps and tire tools careening off a mechanic's stall.

And here he came again: "You don't know it, Noelke, but bigshots come in here every morning who'd be driving a dump truck if their dads hadn't left 'em a ranch with oil wells. Been a multi-millionaire twice. United States owes more money than any country in the world. Didn't know that, did you?"

The counter thinned as a cousin of mine came for an outside order. Hooked a chair leg, but still was able to invite him to come meet this wildcat of a mad hatter of a fossil fuel miner. He caught the urgency in my voice, so he joined us.

No introduction was allowed past saying my cousin was a CPA. He launched the same questions used on me. When my cousin flunked the first one, I intervened, "Just one minute; Cousin is an honor graduate of one of the finest universities in the South. For the first time in his life, I am giving him a failing grade."

  Right on he shot his questions: "Mr. CPA, how much did the richest client you ever had make per day? Bet you can't guess what a family in Sutton County's royalty check is per day."

I whispered the answer, but "Cuz" had cut off his hearing aid to allow for the ice machine resounding like a winch rolling in the chain. Didn't matter, as our interrogator had produced his ownership map from under the table.

Before he unrolled the map, I trumped him. "If you unroll your map, you are going to have to cut us in on your gas field. We've got plenty of money to gamble on gas wells." The shock struck so severely, he rolled the map of the enormous gas field in Sutton County, forgot about his stake in Edwards County, and followed my cousin out the door, telling him a joke.

  My cousin's answers scored less than my new hearing aids. Remembered too late that the richest dump truck driver ever known was an old boy who drove for the county the year he sold a big New Mexico ranch. However, I sure couldn't have matched that old guy. Mr. T's attracts all kinds and year models …

January 29, 2004

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January 22, 2004

Days after the holidays, my sister called; she was sending her table leg elevators to the ranch so her wheelchair would fit under the dining room table. Point being that at Thanksgiving and Christmas, she ate sidesaddle at the end of the table, packing a handicap of one against 18 at one feast day and a full nine at Christmas. My first response was to remind her that at age 13 she started eating at my table in a series lasting on and off until she graduated from college.

For support, I turned to an etiquette guide at the ranch — a gift offer from the Book of the Month Club that Mother ordered after World War II. Mother's edition didn't address the conduct and hosting of long-term guests, so pertinent during the Great Depression times of in-laws and cousins dropping by for a couple of months or maybe a layover of 90 days. (In the 30s my stepdad and mother attracted non-paying boarders like a Harvey House on a busy passenger line.)

Mother's book was also too early to cover behavior at guest ranches. Try as I might, was unable to recall the exact wording of my invitation for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Remembered telling her dinner was at one p.m. for each occasion, but couldn't recall offering to board her during 2004.

I returned to the book and paged back through the guest etiquette. Then I researched the chapter on packing lunches the night before to speed departure of overnight guests. Browsed out of curiosity a chapter headed, "Sleeping Potions Suitable for the Late Hour Guest." Failed to find any reference on altering the dining room table to meet the guest's dimensions, or preferential seating arrangements.

On her next call, she reopened the discussion of elevating the table, ignoring my question about whether the other guests were going to be resting their chins on the table edge, leaving kids to stare underneath the table. Refused to even listen to my suggestion that she saw the arms off the wheelchair or deflate the tires to make it accessible to all tables.

"No, no," she replied, "we are only going to raise my end three inches. Is three inches too much to ask on a plateau 2560 feet above sea level in a ranch house settling on its foundation that many inches a year?" (Visualize temper here — hot, smoldering temper. Unreasonable temper.)

"While we are disputing who runs this ranch house you are deprecating, my dear little princess," I said, "I want to remind you that as pitiful as the ranch is, I run a sheep and cow outfit, not a guest ranch for dudes demanding special tables." (Score this as a fulfilling retort, a slam from my side of the net.)
            
On she came: "Nobody said you were running anything. I bought the elevators to go under the dining room table legs at my ranch from The Vermont Country Store for $18 plus shipping. You, big brother, are going to put two on my end of your table. If the table tilts, write The Big Anchor Gift Shop for a set of heavy-bottomed dishes suitable for sailing the high seas."

From there the conversation wound to an end. She knows I am too good-hearted to refuse her wishes. But give in on the table and the next thing will be reserved parking for her wheelchair in the living room.

Next time she's invited to the ranch, (and it may be awhile) a waiver is going to explain the conditions of the premises and services offered. Then if "little miss princess" is dissatisfied with the table height, she can use her Vermont Store elevators as shims under her wheelchair for a safe landing at Dairy Queen.

January 22, 2004

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January 15, 2004

At first light on the feast day in the Christmas kitchen, cookbooks lead to familiar paths: "Sauté the chopped onions until golden, add the garlic before the onion turns, slowly dribble the oil for the broth down the sides of the pan, preheat the oven.

Next, the "hunt and chase" phase; must stop mixing and turn the knob to see if the pilot flickers on the burner; where are the gosh-a-mighty hot pads — oh, hiding under the tongs; and aside and apart, rush to the east door to see the sunrise over the mesquite plains.

Once too proud to allow guests to bring food, I now all but beat on a tambourine and ring bells over a swinging pot asking for help. For every mile of distance between the ranch and a grocery store, I save four or five dollars a mile staying home and imposing on my friends and children. The hardest items to remember or find in San Angelo hit a mean of between two and three dollars an ounce. Wild rice and piñon nuts, for example, are hard to locate, yet white hominy and crushed red pepper flakes all but fall over in the cart.

Big void in the menu is wines. The package store close to Angelo is on the wrong side of the highway going to town and sets off the road too far coming home. I don't drink wine, but lots of recipes call for wine.

The ones who drink wine, I've learned, have to have long-stemmed glasses and a piece of paraphernalia to lift the corks. Have to have red and white wines. Can't be mixed into a blend of colors to make a pink. All the wine drinking I ever knew was just breaking the seal and unscrewing the top to take a swig.

Told my friend who buys the wines that if I have to add high-priced glasses and a fancy corkscrew especially for wine drinkers, I am going to charge a corkage on every glass, like, say three dollars on the first glass and six bucks on the next one.

Cooking, however, wasn't all that was happening Christmas morning. The last 10 heifers to calve grazed around the yard fence in stillness so profound the clipping of the dry grass crunching was audible at the back door. As I dumped the trash, it seemed the only concern a first-calf black bovine has the last term of pregnancy is tormenting her nurse to the very last hour of her time.

Guests began to arrive early. Grease popped in the roast beef pan. Bright tissue paper checkered the living room rug like a ribbon race at a Scout camp. Foods hit the serving table. The welcome speech and the blessing of the food came swift and abbreviated. At family gatherings, yielding the floor may mean making a choice of hearing, say, the story of the Grandfather and Frank Harris roping a bear on Devil's River and eating a congealed gravy over cold bread, versus praying so long the gang is speechless.

Our after dinner tradition is to read A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. Mother left the book when she moved to town as her eternal gift to civility and love. We set a fine holiday scene gathered in the living room, passing the book from reader to reader. My sister napping in her wheel chair; her driver nodding on the couch. Red tapers burning on the big table. The dishwashing crew rejoining the circle to give a smug glow of service and sacrifice to the backsliders shy of soap and water.

  There are no fireplaces. No firecrackers popping, however, a cork exploding interrupts my train of thought, but that might just be an idiosyncrasy, not a real distraction. The white mountain sheep skin the Boss left comes the closest to having a dog sleeping on the living room floor. Sprigs of mistletoe serve for pine trees, wreaths and music. We aren't heathens, just country people who seek the solitude of the ranch to celebrate in our way.

I am sorry, but passages are too long to read you a portion from Mr. Capote's book. When my friend and I were in the San Juan Islands in the fall, we bought an extra edition at a bookstore in Friday's Harbor. But if you want a copy of The Christmas Memory, bookfinders.com might be the place to order one.

January 15, 2004

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January 8, 2004

Countdown for the U.S. hollow-horn operators began when we became aware that a black and white milk cow in Washington state tested positive for mad cow disease the day before Christmas — a slow, dreary count set to the beat of a hangman's footsteps climbing the gallows. Feedlot hombres and herders alike are bound to have heard a dirge like Nero tuning his fiddle to play for the finale for the fall of Rome.

As the press worked overtime to spread the news, the big-time dailies stayed current with each country banning U.S. beef and each possible site of contamination. Words spewed from Washington assuring that the domestic supply was safe. Photographs flashed on the 'Net of Japanese butchers removing U.S. beef from the shelves.

At the ranch, my son and his friend left on the morning of the 26^th. The Royal Guard of the French army never witnessed such an emotional farewell. Surrender and defeat cast a spell over the parting. My son Ben kept repeating, "Now, Dad, this is not the end of the world, just the end of a good cow market. As soon as the Secretary of Agriculture convinces 290 million Americans and one half of the world's population that beef is safe, you will be able to sleep past three in the morning and go back on solid food."

Ten head of heavy-bred Angus heifers watered at the horse trough before I went indoors. These pampered beasts needed to rinse away the dry grass and cottonseed meal taste before going over to lick a free-choice $440 a ton mineral. Fifty-five head of weaned calves bawled across the fence, bemoaning the late start of the feed wagon as if the life of a black calf is in danger if she misses a handout on Christmas day followed by a delay the day after.

I tried to stretch before my morning walk, but my body was so tense from the bad news, the only parts loose enough to flex were the joints of my little fingers. By noon, sage newscasters predicted some repercussion for beef producers from the contaminated milk cow. Might as well have reported that Far Eastern insurance companies are considering refusing Saddam Hussein's option to increase the size of his accidental death benefit.

The guests left a half-gallon of organic whole milk in the refrigerator. This was the first organic milk on the shelves since my friend insisted we milk the colostrum from a heifer to feed dogies. By lunch, I felt my stomach was stable enough to sip warm milk. As bleak as the future seemed, I hoped the organic milk might have come from a Washington State dairy.

Takes a big dose of Cow and Scientist Madness (CSM — Please let this slip by to see if a new label floats.) to outdo the sadness at the end of the best cow boom since work oxen had a flush season back in 1860 when all the horses were off in the war. Takes more than your mother's training to keep from being resentful about the sick milk cow, harboring a hunch she came from Canada. Lots of those big Holsteins in Canada. (Fidel Castro was so impressed with Canada's dairy cattle, he imported a herd of Holsteins to improve milk production. Hungry as the Cubans are for meat, they probably can verify Canadian milk cows are safe to eat, including the horns and the tails of Canadian milk cows.)

The only inkling I had of the lurking fear of Disturbed Cow Disorder (DCB — I am going to continue to downgrade the label) was at a resort hotel in Kerrville, Texas. The German lady running the restaurant refused to serve us a rare steak, claiming "Wild Cow Disease" was the reason, which I supposed was the same as Bovine Fury Reaction (BFR).

She was wrong, but I'd rather try to change a federal judge's mind on tenure than so much as disagree with one of those Teutonic Central Texas products only three generations removed from the homeland. I wanted to tell this purveyor of myth and panic that 20 people worldwide had already died from the Cow Fury Disorder, (latest label; CFD) or advise her it was a lot more risky to park at the grocery store than to have a full body message in ground beef followed by a rare steak dinner for four.

At this writing, the news was improving. My hunch the milk cow came from Canada is being investigated. Her two calves have been destroyed. Next time I go to Kerrville, I am going to carry a lunch of carrot sticks and rhubarb stalks. Might as well be a vegetarian as risk the palate eating well done meat, and if the cafe lady was scared two months ago, she's going to be frantic after this fiasco.

January 8, 2004

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December 12, 2002

Stop staring at your boot toe, little cowboy; the post office is no place to cry. Fold the cow receipts back into the envelope. Lift up your chin, and for the last time, stop staring at your boot toe. The post cow sale litany of opening the mail from Box 636, Mertzon, 76941.

Charge the above against me on a Friday afternoon trip to town to pick up the receipts from the first gooseneck load of old cows from the Divide place. Only 12 head and a light steer calf, but a big deal for an operator my size. The problem, however, is that six of the cows tested dry.

Here's the way the bill of sale read: "6 head pregnant at $510 per head; 5 head of open cows cut in 3 orders averaging 1100 pounds at .35 cents, and one open cow weighing 750 pounds at .28 cents." (Mark the last old sister at a gross of $222.60.) The steer weighed four and a half and brought 87 cents, making my guess on the price 10 cents too high and off 30-plus pounds on his weight.

Trucking came to two hundred dollars for a 70-mile haul. Allowing the steer calf to ride free, the freight on the cows ran over 16 bucks per cow and the nick-knacks like stockyard board and passing through the ring cost another 16 or 17 dollars a head. But again, the distressing part was that 50 percent of the old cows tested dry in that draft.

Stop staring at your boot toe. Move; you can't stay in the post office all night. Who, pray tell, is going to lead a song of salvation at the ranch on the final day the chute is emptied and the last cow tested?

Out on the parking lot, head resting on the steering wheel, the investigation began: "Twenty-nine head of eleven year-old cows were cut into the best grass on the ranch September '01. Three different bulls ran with the cows from February 12 to May 30. The cattle went on range cubes the first of November; the last feed run was the end of May. From September '01 to last month, 22 dollars per head worth of free choice molasses tubs enhanced the ration. In August, the herd weaned 29 calves."

I never noticed a steering wheel feeling hot before. Reckon this darn Ford burns so much oil, the steering wheel overheats from carbon expulsion. Was it last winter or winter before last that the feed wagon had to drag a trailer to the north side for extra feed for the old cows? I must be having a nervous chill. Now the steering wheel is cold — cold as the bars on an oldtime teller's cage.

I tossed the rest of the mail on the dashboard. Watched the postmaster lower the flag to the tune of the rusty pulley grating from the motion of the descending banner. Thought of a new sign for the lobby door: "In Observance of Pancake Tuesday and all subsequent Tuesdays, no mail will be delivered from this office." Thought deeper as the conveyer of post turned toward the building how soon he'll be going to a post office in a comfortable resort town to pick up a handsome pension check, unencumbered by commission, yardage, feed, testing, trucking, chute charges, checkoffs and insurance.

Took five days to arrange the testing. Actually, five days and five nights, as after the bad news, I flounced around in the bedclothes the way those elephant seals sun on the beaches of California. One thing certain: If that many old cows were 50 percent bred, I wasn't spending the holidays wondering how many of the young cattle were open, especially the second-calf heifers.

On the fateful morning the test fell, I checked the calving heifers at five instead of six. Stopped by the pecan tree my stepfather and mother planted. Realized the sounds of heavy cows sighing and groaning in the darkness set an end of the trail scene fading away in the dissolution of ranches that'd make the image of the Indian slumped on the buffalo nickel seem light as the froth of the meringue on a chocolate pie.

By noon, we tested 104 head. My report card shows the oldest cows, counting the twelve head sold, hit 75 percent. A pasture of mixed age cows ran 95 percent; a group of young cows reached 83 percent. As I grabbed the last pipe to catch the last cow, I must have jabbed a splinter under my thumbnail. I can't be sure, as I didn't notice the pain until I pulled off my boots at the house.

Drouths demand their toll. A herder must pay his dues to the dry devil. All pastures aren't in yet, but my thumb is healing and it's a better crop than I thought ...

December 12, 2002

December 5, 2002

The hardest problem storytellers face is that witnesses live forever. No matter how old the story is, or where the story was set, up pops a busybody who knows more than the writer does.

Write about ol' "Six-shooter" falling on a line camp cowboy named "Rowdy" in a 60-section pasture before the patenting of land, and darned if an eyewitness won't come forth to claim the horse's name was "Screwdriver" and the cowboy's name was "Percy."

And the way readers abuse writers, you'd think the license to create ended with the Mother Goose rhymes. Every week, I eat lunch with a table of guys as naïve as the treasurer of a Girl Scout troop. The first thing they want to know at the ending of a story is whether it's true. I became so discouraged, the last time I went to Austin I brought back a true story.

Please listen to the story first. The very exalted officer of the Austin Independent School District, the superintendent, was ticketed for driving 27 miles an hour in a school zone. According to the article on the front page of the Austin American Statesman, he called the news desk on his cell phone immediately and reported his crime. (Speeders have to drive faster than 27 miles an hour to hit an Austin kid, especially one raised close to the University area.)

Omitted in the news report but pertinent to the case is that the superintendent's confession was the first time since the founding of the township that a public figure failed to have an alibi at hand. For example, state legislators caught in embarrassing nocturnal activities often blame the cursed after-midnight shock that causes man to lose his memory in smoky taverns and questionable lodgings.

The only comment in my audience was, "I don't ever know when to believe you, Monte." They lost me there. Try as I could, I couldn't recall asking anyone to believe me. Look at this, please: the average age of the table is three quarters of a century, or 75 years old. Suppose I claimed to have witnessed the incident and said, "The superintendent, idling his red Mercedes blocking traffic, held a brown bottle in his right hand and slipped the cop a green-colored piece of paper with his left."

At the table are a land man, an auction owner, an ex-senator, a rancher, a doctor, an insurance broker, and a builder. Is a slight embellishment going to corrupt these august gentlemen, who passed their twenty-first birthdays close to the middle of the 20th century?

If I understood what they meant by saying they can't tell when I am telling the truth, I'd rewrite the story, researching the files of the Austin American for the exact wording of the article. But it beats me how you are going to tell a good story without adding some action.

I try to keep from being cornered. A scribe with the Fort Davis newspaper wrote asking the bloodlines of the stallions my Grandfather Noelke used on the hundreds of head of mares he ran on his lands. Nature of her craft made it risky making up a "Steel Dust" ancestry, or trumping up a line of "Blow Ditch" colts. ("Blow Ditch" was the famous race horse who lost a hind foot from kicking the Ferris wheel over at Sherwood one Fourth of July.) So I wrote her that by the time I came along the registration papers had disappeared. And all I could remember of the branded horses at the old ranch was that they trailed bridle reins real well and left a lot of cowboys on foot.

I referred her to Paul Patterson at Crane, Texas. He worked for my grandfather. I knew Paul spun yarns wound in tight enough balls to make the creator of Harry Potter think the ink was dry in her word processor. He said, "They were sorrels and duns, the mares showing a Spanish bloodline."

Paul helped drive 500 head of Granddad's horses from Monument on Spring Creek to across the Pecos River. The drive allowed time to study equine ancestry over his saddlehorn — a very accurate position from which to view the horse world. It was also an excellent opportunity to adjust to alkali dust and direct sunlight reflecting off alkali soil to peel the hide from a cowboy's nose.

Sad to think of corrupting a table of graybeards by enlarging the truth. Be too bad if I was a bad influence on those seasoned gentlemen, as well thought of as they are in the community and state. I imagine ol' Paul loaded the lady writer to full tilt on the horses. Wish there were more guys like Paul around. Sure would take a lot of pressure off my tales.

December 5, 2002

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November 28, 2002

The longest high water confinement at the old ranch was the flood of 1957. Spring Creek Draw ran wide and deep for five days. By the end, an African American cook named Alex and myself rationed tobacco and skimped on the coffee. Alex was the cook famous for telling us, "The time to get the pie is when it's passed the first time," a rule that works a thousand times out of a thousand tries.

In October on a Gulf Coast trip, a short recollection of being stranded by high water came to me in Corpus Christi. Six and a half inches of tropical rain fell on one afternoon, spiked by an electrical storm and a tornado that killed one person. My friend and I were in a mall bookstore constructed, I'm sure, with side walls and flat roof every bit as strong as the straw hut of three little pigs fame.

Rain fell in such solid sheets that the big windows turned the green of Mexico glass. Cars parked at the curb faded from sight. Clerks hovered in the employee's lounge. We were left to read on small stools. Coffee pots emptied early in the storm to smolder on hot plates brought back memories of old Alex and me sitting at the bunkhouse table, watching brown flood water wash into the front yard, telling and retelling old stories.

At five, we wound around the flooded mall to a hotel. Detouring high water, we parked 200 feet from the front entrance. The hotel had no rooms. Telephone calls from the desk confirmed that all the other hotels were booked, and high water on the access roads prevented returning to our place on Mustang Island. Returning to the bookstore would have been precarious.

Our only hope for a room was a cancellation at 6 p.m., our only choice to wait in a lobby dominated by a television newscast flashing pictures of the damage the tornado wrought five miles away. The repetitious weather news was broken by campaign ads of the most disgusting verbiage and projected images man can assemble short of portraying the degradation found on restroom walls.

I told my friend that if the TV continued, I was ready to drown. Ready to risk the road back to the island in Port Aransas if it meant crossing the Bay on the open deck of a ferry, lashed to a mast pole in pouring rain, braving 20-foot waves backed by a roaring headwind. For every three minutes of weather news, the station showed 10 minutes of such delightful play of politics as a short on a staggering candidate being tested for DWI on the highway to a claim that one of the hopefuls was connected to the Mafia in Mexico.

Minutes after the six o'clock deadline, the clerk ended hope for a room in any of the hotels. Forced to leave Corpus, we found one access road open to the freeway. Traffic crawled over the long arched bridge crossing the Bay; water lapped on the edge of the highway. Using binoculars in the falling eve-tide, we made wild guesses at the bumper depth of the cars ahead of us.

Nobody should feel sorry for people who have ranch houses on the high ground of the 09 Divide for washing away on a trip to the Coast. Once in dry clothes, I remembered reading on the bulletin board at St. David's Church in Austin how the organist, Fanny Croaker, took her first vacation in 15 years to be washed away by the Indianola hurricane of 1886. How the Big Boss claimed his Uncle Joe never missed Sunday church in Cuero, Texas in his whole life span of some 80 years. Thought also of a neighbor way back, taking his family in a new Mercury automobile to see the Gulf of Mexico for a summer vacation. He arrived at the coast just before dark, allowed time for a good look on the beach and started back home to be at the ranch to milk the next evening.

My son's Port Aransas house stands 12 feet above ground on telephone pole stilts. Wrapped in a blanket, covered by a raincoat, a panorama opened off the balcony facing the beach. Lightning illuminated the massive white-capped waves hitting in such force to splash over the green-topped sand dunes. Shells, water and seaweed sloshed ashore, dropping cracked Japanese fisherman's floats mixed with broken cords of shrimper's nets, destroying a day's work of abandoned sand castles to end a kid's dreams.

Crescendos of thunder shook the stilted house to elevate my exhilaration. "By gosh," I thought, "this is the way to get the pie the first time around." Fannie, the neighbor, and Uncle Joe cut their own trail. Alex never was caught on the wrong side of Spring Creek again. And from now on, the only time my conscience is going to hurt is when I miss a chance to take a trip.

November 28, 2002

November 21, 2002

Way back, we scheduled heifer calving to hit after the leaves fell from the mesquites. As the land became a solid thicket, we shifted to bringing the heavies to a trap to be penned every night. By opening a calving hospital, we stopped losing cows and started losing sleep.

Penning the cattle every evening and walking through the herd horseback makes for gentle animals the rest of their lives. This year's class is so sack broke and so accustomed to humans, at night I have to be careful to keep from stumbling over one. Black cattle blend well into a dark night. The cost of flashlight batteries converts so poorly to the price of steer calves that constant illumination of a big holdover pen is unaffordable. I just blink my light toward the tailhead and make fair guesses.

One Saturday night after a dance in Angelo, I checked the cows in a light rain. Missed 13 of the 21 head the first lap around the run-around. Second try missed the same amount. Gave up on the third count, as my flashlight wasn't strong enough compensate for the rain fogging on my glasses. Wet weather ruins hearing aids, so I had left them at the house. Harder rain began to fall.

The only support left was my sense of smell and my sense of touch. In the shortgrass country, the odor of wet cow hair is as unfamiliar as privacy to a doorman. I didn't know whether wet cattle smelled like cedar bark or grape jelly. Feeling for the missing cattle in the darkness was out of the question. Doesn't take long to discover what defense measure replaces horns for a muley cow. After one work, you learn to watch the heels instead of the head. Blinded by the rain and unable to hear in the downpour, I gave up and went back to the house.

My friend called as I reached the door to see if I had made it home over the dirt road. Being a cow person in her own right, she wanted to know if my heifers were all right. Not willing to admit I'd missed about as many as I'd found, I said, "Oh, I think they'll be okay until morning." Certainly a safe guess, considering the time was 1 a.m. and the closest I'd come to resting was resting my hand on the top board of a wet gate to steady myself in the mud.

Just at daybreak I checked to find all the heifers gone. But I did find the gate open to a trap. I couldn't read the signs in the mud. I wear a size 13-D rubber boot. I'd made so many rounds sloshing in the mud, I'd obliterated any ruts smaller than those of a dually truck tire. So no clues were left as to how the gate latch came unsnapped.

Custom reigns to blame crows and ravens, unpapered aliens, raccoons, or deer hunters. Crows and Chihuahua ravens are prime suspects for any mysterious crime, as those black devils are deft enough to unlace a pair of high-topped shoes. Unpapered aliens circumvent the shortgrass country, believing we are bad luck going back from the way the Border Patrol used to keep us under vigil. Coons have grown so fat and careless of habit since the fur markets ended that about all they deface or destroy is at ground level. Red-caps are nimble-fingered fellows from squeezing triggers, lifting bottle openers and twisting corkscrews; but the ones around the ranch have been careful to close gates, especially ones tied open to pen livestock.

The advent of low birthweight bulls brought a big improvement to calving heifers. Be better, as I have written before, if cows laid eggs. Robert Petty, a prominent black oxen raiser up at Nolan, Texas, has added a bloodline named "Sleep Easy" to his herd. His catalogue does not say whether the man or the beast sleeps easier.

Among we better manipulators of obstetric chains and chrome calf pullers, a question continues whether to breed toward heavy sleeping or light sleeping cattle. Until I dropped checking my heifers twice a night, awakening the cattle caused more births in darkness. For a solution, I stopped keeping the heifer calves from the first-calf heifers. I also added a bloodline named "Cloudburst," a bull famous for rapid presentation of a calf. The first calving season, I'd hardly have time to awaken before the calf was on the ground.

The gates are wired closed. The moon changes next week. Might be a good idea to cull the cows that don't bed down early. A cross between "Sleep Easy" and "Cloudburst" might be the solution to spending less time in the darkness checking heifers and keeping me safe in bed on the early Sunday morning shift.

November 21, 2002

November 14, 2002

The move from the Mohonk Guest House in New Paltz to a bed and breakfast at West Cornwall in western New Jersey was a dramatic change in my September trip. My small room was right over the kitchen. The chef specialized in caramelizing onions to a thin enough vapor that the odor made a cloud bank in the room.

Hard rain pelted the thin walls. Four wire coat hangers on a hat rack served as a closet. It took a fancy sidestep to enter or leave the bathroom. When I called West Cornwall for the room, I visualized an English ivy-covered quarried stone house with a big fireplace in the living room, sizzling pine logs and pewter tankards thumping on oak tables served by saucy maidens wearing lace caps and aprons. Instead, I was stuck in an asbestos-shingled loft in a cold rainstorm wondering if my clothes were going to smell like cooked onion the next day.

The colorful names on the map lured me to West Cornwall. "Jinny Jump Mountain," Bull Bridge, "New Village," Washington, and the likes of the Housatonic River start the mind imagining crossing grounds connected to our early history. Notably close to West Cornwall is Bull Bridge, a red wooden covered bridge linking a road General George Washington used to go north to seek support from the French for the Continental cause. It was important also as the spot where the rescuing of the general's horse from a fall off a bluff into the Housatonic River cost $215, a hefty expense item for the Continental Congress to review.

As the father of our country, Mr. Washington could not tell a lie. However, as General Washington, he might have had broader latitude in regard to veracity, say "a fib." All the guide book said was "At Bull Bridge, General Washington, on the way to seek aid from the French, was delayed while his horse was retrieved from a fall into the river at a cost of $215."

I understand why he didn't tell lies. If General Washington had been a storyteller, he'd have left a whopper on how his old pony skidded off the bluff at full speed, barely giving him three seconds to kick loose from the stirrups and swing free from the saddle on an overhanging branch. How he tore his velvet hat, lost a pearl-studded snuff box, and filled the air with a dust as potent as sneeze weed pollen from his wig hitting a tree limb.

Close to the townsite of Washington, I found the Institute of Native American Culture on a side road. Just as my friend and I parked, five school bus loads of kids vacated the museum. The sudden departure of so much bedlam sent the staff scurrying to the coffee room. The two of us stood in free reign of large glass displays of Indian artifacts and wall murals of tribal scenes. The Muzak sounded several notches higher than normal to compensate for the eerie stillness left over from the departing mob of children. Stuck on the menu was a recording of Indians imitating the sad call of loons — a chilling sound electrifying the nerves.

The music had a deep effect. Close to the reception area, an auburn-haired lady walked through the room, only pausing long enough to say, "Admission is free for the rest of the day; so is the coffee." At that moment, the loon cries peaked. I stopped her and said, "Beg your pardon, Ma'am, but that loon music haunts me. My mother left me as a mere tot to be raised by schoolteachers. (long pause) In Texas in those days, redhead, freckled-faced boys could be left without any recourse or penalty by the state. (deep sigh) There was a lost child department in El Paso, and six hundred miles to the East at Beaumont, there was a found child department. The most dreaded of all was to be put in a claiming race in the first grade."

Before I finished telling her that the cry of loons is identical to schoolteachers' nightmares, I felt the gentle touch of my friend's hand on my coat sleeve, increasing to a firm grip moving me away from the stunned curator. At the same time, she was saying, "Now, now Monte, people up here don't know about storytellers."

I caught the staff people peeking from the coffee room once, hoping we were gone. I'll end with an Onondoga Indian prayer I copied at the museum to bring home: 

Oh Great Creator whose voice I always listen to in the winds 
Hear me 
I am a small part of You; I need wisdom
Let me walk in your beauty
Keep my ears ever sharp for your voice
Help me travel a path of wisdom, so I may understand all people
I seek knowledge not to be greater than my brother, but to learn to share a great understanding Make me always helpful and ready to come to all earthly causes with clean hands and clean thoughts. 
Amen.

November 14, 2002

November 7, 2002

Fellow named Wayne Greenstone from Newark, New Jersey, made a good suggestion for a side trip last month in New York state that brought the Catskill Mountains into full autumn focus.

I called him at his law office and asked where to see the Catskills without doing a lot of driving. Modern traffic codes nationwide turn the driver's side on automobiles into cellular telephone booths. Once I leave the dirt road leading to the ranch, at any second a busy signal or a wrong number is apt to send the oncoming traffic off the road.

He recommended the Mohonk Mountain Guest House close to New Paltz, New York, some 65 miles from New York City. A "mountain guest house" turned out to be 300 rooms cornered by castle-like rock spires on 2600 acres of forest land by a private lake. Grounds blossoming in a flush of red and yellow fall flowers blended into a setting of purple vine arbors tended by 10 gardeners. At summer high season, the guest house employs 600 people, or enough staff to make a ratio of one employee to one guest.

The last addition to the lodge was a maple wood paneled dining room in 1907. Rates include meals, valet parking, porter services, guided nature walks, lectures, and a room looking at either the lake or the mountains. Fifteen percent gratuity plus seven per cent state tax is added at a checkout so informal that the feeling is of having been a guest.

When Alfred and Albert Smiley, twin brothers, bought the land in 1869, they gradually turned it in to a commercial establishment. The reason the brothers had the money to buy property after the Civil War is that the North won and also that they were Quakers. From what the books said in the library, Quakers don't crouch in trenches or return from battles dragging a hind leg from deflecting a barrage of grapeshot.

In 1869, the year the Smileys raised $28,000 to buy lands, citizens in war-shattered Texas tried to rustle enough maverick cattle from the dense thickets of East Texas and the cow jungle of South Texas to buy flour and beans. The only chance of raising 28,000 bucks down here in 1869 would have been finding the Bowie mine, or maybe a sunken Spanish ship off the Gulf Coast.

But back to nowadays ... early in the mornings hot tea and black coffee are served on the wide verandah by caned rocking chairs overlooking the private lake. Amber shale in the lake bottom purifies the water. Enormous gray boulders lining the shore form perfect crevices for little boys to risk breaking an arm or shattering a kneecap. Aluminum canoes thump moored against the wharf, with ka-whomp, ka-whomp resounding from the modern world. Above and beyond, a pileated woodpecker, Woody Woodpecker size, knocks off pieces of thick chestnut bark in chunks the size of shoe heels, hammering away in a thumping staccato, pile-driving her sharp beak to intercept trunk-burrowing ants.

My room without a private balcony was in the more modest wing of the resort the Smileys leased to a boy's school during the Great Depression. Must have been a desperate situation to allow students on the grounds if they were like the guys I knew in Texas private schools. One morning, I caught a whiff of the smell of dormitories of old. Later, however, outdoors I located a muskrat's nest upwind from the open hallway, wafting in the powerful pungency of young males.

Sitting on the big open porch or retreating indoors to a soft velour-covered sofa in front of the fireplace by the stairwell saved 65 dollars a day by forsaking a private balcony. Each of the six floors had built-in bookshelves, plus a reading room filled with books on the first floor to further assuage the hardship of no balcony. Television existed on the ground floor, but I never heard the speaker sound or caught a flash from the screen.

Take warning, however; balconies or no balconies, rooms don't have TVs or air conditioning. Wines, spirits, and beer may be purchased at meals. Folks in need of late-hour diversion may choose listening to the grandfather clock chime in the big ballroom, or move outdoors to hear the lake water lapping on the shores. Movies are shown every night in a theater. Dances are held during holidays. Ice skating on an enclosed rink up the hillside offers winter diversion, as does cross-country skiing. As mentioned, lecturers and performers provide evening programs.

The days passed walking in autumn sun illuminating green to red-gold boughs drooping over the paths. At breakfast, the leaves floated across the big picture windows, framing a background of tall conifers fading into hazy mountain slopes speckled with white clearings. At night, a five-course dinner was served to ladies and gentlemen dressed for the affair. Bless ol' Wayne for finding a record of man's gentility frozen in time.

November 7, 2002

October 31, 2002

The two-section Mertzon townsite was the heaviest stocked country in the county in the 1930s. Milk cows grazed staked to cedars; burros ranged free to bray at the saddle horses contained in small traps. Chickens vied for room claimed by turkeys and geese and ducks. Dogie lambs bleated a mournful cry on the dry springs. Rare was a dwelling without a collection of dogs, cats and maybe a rabbit hutch. And I wrote you about the old man who wintered over two hundred ewes on town lots.

Open range law still prevails in Mertzon. Over west of the school, a fellow keeps chickens. His inventory runs heavy on roosters. He might be more of a sportsman than an egg producer, as Mertzon has a strong history of successful game chicken operations. (In Texas, cock fighting is against the law. Raising or owning chickens is not, be they fighters or layers.)

San Angelo is in the process of enacting a difficult-to-enforce pet law. Proposed is a statute to prohibit citizens from owning more than four dogs without having a kennel license. I haven't read a paper in a week, but the last edition I read had some plenty hot letters complaining over the size of the allotment. In one letter supporting a ceiling on canines, goats were included. Once in the summer, the City Council considered — and may still be considering — limiting goat ownership to 40 animal units, or two hundred head. If the limit is correct, the odd 10 square miles of the Wool Capital are destined to be a goat ranch the likes of which haven't been seen in Texas since the glorious days of the Angora reigning over the hill country.

One lady wrote that she loved her six dogs as much as she would children. Little does she know, but equal love was the theme of the Big Depression for kids and dogs. Parents loved dogs as much as they loved children. Neither party was showered with affection. It was all a distant love, keeping the kids and the dogs out of sight in the back yard or in the pasture, or down on the river bank.

If the issue continues, balancing dog legislation against goat regulation is going to be tedious for the Council. Red and white Boer goats do twin. But Boers don't have litters, so a citizen with six dogs is going to out produce the goat man with six goats at the rate of 20 or 30 puppies every three months to a dozen kids every six months.

Boer goat husbandry makes raising woolies look like the downside of a penny arcade. Eleven thousand of all breeds of goats were slaughtered a week or so ago nationwide. On the same week, four thousand sold at the Tuesday sale in San Angelo. The way every patch of ground nowadays is a goat ranch, seemed like 11,000 head were pastured between San Angelo and my turnoff out of Mertzon. Any space large enough to unroll a big bale of hay is considered large enough to raise goats.

Must be a way to resolve the issue of how many dogs people living in San Angelo need. Might be a solution to permit transferring the quota from goldfish lovers to dog lovers, or maybe to give credit for not having a backyard stocked with Boers or a laundry room full of Siamese cats. (Watch for a coalition between the National Audubon Society and International Goldfish Bowl Association attacking feral and domestic cats. Bird watchers have already endorsed leghold traps in California, much to the chagrin of the Pan American Council of Tabbies Unlimited.)

Even four dogs per household will make goat ranching pretty tough in town. Dogs sure like to hear the piercing death cry of goats. Boer goats are probably as high-strung as the hair variety when facing death.

I know I sure was emotional in the days when I tried to raise more Angora goats than the bobcats could eat over north of Mertzon. I'd be driving down the road on a beautiful day and break down sobbing so hard I couldn't see to hold my pickup on the road. A merciful post-shearing rain removed my misery. All that remained after an August cloudburst was 20 head of spoiled nannies we missed in the brush and a mortgage at the San Angelo National Bank on 300 dead Angora goats.

The Mertzon dog catcher says he misses the days when citizens looked after pets and practiced their own animal control. He'd just set a live trap in front of my town house for a black and white cat on the loose after biting a school kid. He asked the color of my cat in case he trapped her. I tried to remember. Last I saw of her was in either '94 or '95. He must be awfully busy running his trap line, as he drove off before I could finish my answer...

October 31, 2002

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October 24, 2002

In 1950, the R.E.A. strung wires across the 09 Divide, bringing an end to generators, wind chargers, and Coleman lanterns. Doorbells and door knockers were the only appliances separating us from city folks. Had we wired in a bell, the clapper would have rusted from disuse. Living 22 miles from a post office with 15 miles of dirt track, we'd bound from the house at the sight of dust or the sound of a motor, to meet guests at the front gate.

Nowadays, the office is in the front of the house. People go to the back door, out of range of my hearing aids. Absorbed in a word processor on the days the winds rage across this big plateau, I could be the most popular man in northeastern Crockett County without ever noting the attention.

University Land employees frequenting the area know the handicap. They hammer on the back door a few raps, then shout from the kitchen, "MONTE, I KNOW YOU ARE HOME." Takes a few minutes to shut down the computer. I have to hurry or they'll shout again, thinking I didn't hear the first outburst.

In August, a UT land man came to the front door, signaling something important. After a brief greeting, he said, "There's a couple of guys with the Corps of Engineers out back looking for the old World War II bombing targets. We need your help to find the targets. And, Monte, no act, please. These gentlemen don't understand ranchers."

I selected for my hat a 16 year-old Laredo straw, fitting for an antiquarian familiar with war relics. Walked out the back door to face two men dressed in slacks and short-sleeved summer shirts, carrying rolls of maps. They looked out of place, were out of place, so much out of place they didn't know the difference.

Without introduction, the oldest said, "We want you to show us a bombing target at grid so and so."

I replied, "I picked this hat to look my age. I lived here during the bombing in 1943. Every part of Crockett County was a target, along with portions of Irion and Schleicher counties."

The University man might have laughed, but the two Government guys stared as if being addressed in mystic tongues. I continued, "The closest target is over south of this house, about a hundred and fifty yards away from my bedroom. Can't tell where the targets start and where the limits ended, as bombs dropped in all directions and in all pastures."

I paused, searching for a smile, then continued: "Mr. Bode Owens took a hundred-pounder, or maybe a five hundred, to as far as the old drugstore in Barnhart to have it explode in the back of his pickup. Burned him real bad. You'd of liked Bode. He was a good fellow. Barnhart is 18 miles from here. The old drugstore is called the Yellow Rose now." (No response.)

Right quiet, the University man interrupted and asked if I was going to locate the target on Kathleen St. Claire? Audible, I answered, "I'll show you the target, but only if you start laughing at my stories."

Again the faces froze to Mt. Rushmore frowns. Noted right then to never accept an assignment to address a government agency, especially the Corps of Engineers. Might as well have used my material on the next band of missionaries to come by distributing pamphlets as I had those frozen faces. In short, I'd wasted some good stuff on a bum audience.

The drive over to the old bombing range took 10 minutes. Seemed like four hours riding with those muted city guys. In the lull, my thoughts wandered back to the flares floating on silk parachutes, lighting the winter skies over the ranches and the targets, starting grass fires that lasted as long as three days. Twin-engine planes thundering close to the ground, shaking the earth. Bombs hitting with a thud, followed by a sharp clap.

Remembered the Wade brothers losing a big, big string of yearling ewes piled up in fence corners of 40 sections of burned-up ranch. By the time damages were settled by Congress, interest consumed the brothers' equity. I was so distracted I forgot to ask why the Corps of Engineers felt the need to cold trail bombing targets abandoned 60 years ago.

I am no closer to putting in a doorbell than Mother was the day the R.E.A. brought us electricity. The Engineers did disclose that one target had three bombs buried in the bullseye. Must have been planted by foot soldiers, as the student bombardiers of my memory had a hard time hitting within the boundaries of the Pecos and Concho rivers and staying away from the banks of the Rio Grande.

They also found an unexploded bomb. If they hadn't been so unfriendly, I'd have warned them to be sure not to take the bomb to Barnhart and risk being burned like ol' Bode...

October 24, 2002

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October 17, 2002

General rains fell over the shortgrass country Sunday night, the eighth of October. San Angelo weathermen made a call for a 70 percent chance on the Sunday morning forecast. Giving a 70 percent chance of rain in this land the Indians called "Thin Promise" falls in line with predicting that 70 percent of the people who went to Las Vegas last year are going to open savings accounts this year and stay home to study Mr. Greenspan's advice.

The 70 percent from my vantage point at the ranch was coming in lopsided over the taped message from the weather bureau. The tape said, "At 5 a.m., it is raining in San Angelo. Five-tenths of an inch have fallen since midnight." At 5 a.m. the gauge on the south side of the ranch house held two and one-tenth inches. My friend 12 miles south of me had two point seven inches. An ol' insomniac coot of a herder south of here reported three inches.

I had to wait until 6 a.m. for the late riser report. Over north of Mertzon, where the dust has been settled nicely in the past 18 months, two inches were recorded. One cagey hombre played his hand tight against his chest by claiming they'd had a slow rain all night at a river town called Christoval. A rain so slow, the last drops hadn't dripped down the tube of his gauge for a final reading at 6 o'clock in the morning. The fact that his wife was grumbling in the background to unplug the telephone before another idiot rancher called to find out how much it rained shaded the story.

Oldtime shortgrassers denied being in bed for a call three minutes after midnight, much less before daylight. In the days of rising dust, deep tracks and thin residue over the ranch land, a strong belief reigned among the herders that 14-hour days were going to reduce the awful balances on the mortgages and chattels hanging as heavy on their necks as blacksmith anvils. An old fellow ranching up the Big Draw from us in the 1950s burned up an enamel coffee pot every six months boiling coffee from two in the morning to daybreak. He became quite social about two a.m., cranking his telephone into action on the party line, the only outlet possible in the days when the central telephone office closed at nine at night.

He always spoke well of me. One Christmas season, he roared up to the old ranch to borrow a Mexican cowboy. He caught me in his headlights going to the barn carrying a milk bucket. In those days, the only dances we made were Christmas and Fourth of July. Even as well versed as he was in the mores of the neighborhood from eavesdropping on the telephone, he didn't realize I was up because I hadn't been to bed. Milking the cow ahead of time was a ruse to get more sleep.

However, all ranch citizens become restless close to tax deadlines, during documentation and audit of sworn statements on the application for government payments, before 180-day cycles of demand notes, and the combination of all of the above. Those awesome events tend to cause hombres to arise way before dawn to be on the lookout for trouble like the Indian fighters of old. Hard to slip up on an old boy packing a $40 note on a $20 ewe nursing a 30-pound lamb on his pillow. And even less likely if he's soaked a herd of nine, 10 and 11 year-old cows deeper than Old Ned's basement to pay the lease on an outfit where the buzzards scout year-round for its bounty.

Late as it is, the rain is going to make us all feel better. I am attached to the recorded voices from the weather station. I've met greaseball mechanics from Barnhart and tight-handed jugkeepers from as far east as Mason scurrying around following the hollow horn and woolie trade. But I never have met a weatherman. Weather forecasters must be like those shy bittern birds hiding in the reeds in the wetlands.

Could be the meteorologists stationed in San Angelo are being punished for making bum forecasts in climates where a stock broker could hold the job. Weather forecasting is a cinch out here as long as rain is left from the forecast. All the weather prophet needs to say is, "High wind advisory on area lakes. Dust storms possible in the river beds. Whirlwinds likely on the golf courses and public flower gardens. Low in the morning such and such: high in the afternoon a miserable so-and-so."

Weeds and winter grass will soon be covering the bare spots. Pillows will have deeper creases; wives will be able to sleep longer once the novelty of rain wears off. It sure pumps life into the shortgrass country. I'd like to meet the weather people before another weather failure befalls us...

October 17, 2002

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October 10, 2002

The second time my helper brought in the cow to dig out green prickly pear leaves lodged in her throat, he dispensed with the sophisticated mouth spreader and hooked a crude set of nose tongs to elevate her head and used a tie rope to pry open her jaws. (If this sounds brutal, go take a short nap or a quick bath, as rescuing pear-eating bovines is not for folks of delicate nature.)

He released her from the squeeze chute just as I appeared to watch her reeling and regurgitating cactus in the hospital pen. She heaved to the point that all four stomachs pulled together. Her number brand showed her to be seven years old. Her weaned calf stood in the next pen. He was her fourth or fifth calf. From the looks of her dead hair and shriveled udder, the black birds scratching in the pens were better choices for mothers.

"What you wanna do with her?" the helper asked. An audit showed we still had one 50-pound sack of dehydrated alfalfa cubes left from feeding the last pen of prickly pear-eating ewes. (You can relax. The dreary graphic part is over.) We had enough hay in the barn to feed the first-calf heifers overnight for 60 days. The overhead bin had a thousand pounds of range cubes left over from spring, plus approximately 16 or 17 ounces of black-headed weevils per hundredweight. (Black-headed weevils test the same protein as their feed source, but they are poor in Vitamin A and low in energy.) Deer hunters' corn strewn over the floor by raccoons and ravished by mice completed the inventory.

So if we soaked the alfalfa pellets overnight and sprinkled in corn, we could soften the ration so old bristlehead could swallow and also double the bulk of the feed. To satisfy her roughage requirements, we could drop a bale off the heifers' allotment for however many weeks or months necessary to put the old sister in shape. She was weaned in 1995. No records exist of what her share of the hay came to in the weaning period, but hay was cheaper, so she still might have credit for her part.

Looking at the marketing choices short and long range, shipped next sale, she ought to hit three hundred bucks gross, less $15 worth of commission and trucking. For the past 12 years, the Angelo cow traders have seen lots of drouth cattle in worse shape than the road kill on the way to town. Those ringside gents of pivoting chairs and pungent stogies know bovine ribs and hipbones better than the Houston doctors know human hindlegs and kneecaps.

Makes a hard choice. Take about $110 to feed her hay and cubes a month. Say she brings top money for a gimpy cow of two bits a pound after healing from her addiction. No, that's not right. The way I figured the deal sitting on a feed trough on the fateful day she was hoping to die, overfeeding her hay and giving her 10 pounds of cubes a day, by Christmas we'd have a $400 feed bill in her. By selling her on the thirty-first of December, the sale could fall in either tax year. Counting those advantages, we could recover half of the feed bill and be a candidate for being humane to animals.

We'd had rain. Death loss had been high over in the oilfield. I was pretty tender on the subject of turning her out to die. I thought, and think, someday the drouth will end. Maybe enough herders left foolish enough to buy cows to cause a boom. I keep betting on the come. Sitting in the hospital pen on a feed trough, staring at a sick cow, however, makes the stark attached to reality an understatement.

No longer able to decide, I told the cowboy to keep her in the pen. I felt so lousy, I decided to go to the post office and eat in town. On the way, I stopped to look at cows along the public road. A strange cracking sound caught my attention. Hard to locate until an old sister raised her head to try to swallow what I'd guessed to be a bone. Infuriated, I picked up a stump bearing three prongs of dead roots. Hurled the stump at her with such force that had the missile landed on target, she'd have fallen to her knees. Instead, she whirled, spitting out an aluminum beer can in the motion. I thought, "Gosh-a-mighty, with deer season coming, the ungrateful black sapsuckers are going to be choking to death on the trail of cans going down this road."

Right then sealed the fate of ol' Granny the suicide prickly pear-eater. Hollowhorn beasts are going to ruin us all. I skipped lunch and read the newspaper in the city park. Left for the ranch determined to contribute one more carcass to the pet food people. One for sure to taste of raw prickly pear ...

October 10, 2002

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October 3, 2002

A boy dressed in a tattered orange suit, disheveled as windblown newsprint, walked right by me in the corner grocery store on the Tuesday morning we left San Francisco. Muttered these words to a wall lined in six packs and 20/20 wine: "Woe-be, woe all the misery be, using an ash can for a headboard and the morning sun for a blanket. Woe, woe, deep this misery be, using the curbstone for my doorstep and the black asphalt for my yard."

I've written before that 750,000 people live on the 47 square-mile township of San Francisco. Two hundred fifty thousand more pour into the city to work during the week. Ten thousand make up the poor, homeless wretches. I called the office of statistics for the percentage of Asians in the population. The man who knew the answer was on vacation. His subordinates had never bothered to find the sum.

But without knowing, I'd guess the largest Chinese population in the U.S. lived in San Francisco, judging by walking down the streets of Chinatown. The Japanese section is much smaller. We ate lunch one day in the Japanese section. Must have been mating day on the Asian calendar, as all the tables except ours were taken by young lovers eating the traditional fish and rice dishes accompanied by Coca Colas.

Contact by the males amounted to elbows on the tables offering open hands, fingertips facing her across the table. Females responded by brushing fingertips from the same pose against his. Impossible to gauge the thermal energy rising from the finger brushes. Eating with chopsticks, herding a mushroom cap and a piece of tuna as a buffer to corner rice kernels, I couldn't appraise the force of the hormones swirling in the young diners' bodies.

Five Japanese businessmen passing from the bar through the dining room held less of the mystery of the East, or the West. The youngest of the five showed his companions a reverse karate kick, setting off an explosion of laughter by the other four men common to any culture fueled by liquid refreshments at noon. Finger brushing stopped and the click of chopsticks ceased. The hostess whispering and cajoling the five into postponing the floor show was the only audible sound in the dining room.

One display of Caucasian culture we missed was a young lady protesting the tigers being caged by the circus in town. Her photograph in the San Francisco Chronicle showed a comely lass crouched quite naked in a galvanized mesh cage, black stripes painted on her bare skin. Just my luck to be leaving town too soon to go by the protest site. In the 40 years I've written for a newspaper, a caged naked lady would rank high among the coverage. Other than once being on the scene in Mertzon during a gasoline price war of two hours' tenure, my beat extends to raccoons causing fresh-weaned heifers to stampede at night to an account of the day Les White brought an 82-pound yellow catfish into the Mertzon Locker Plant to be butchered.

The Chronicle gives animal rights and animal happenings good coverage. A lead story in the second section of the Sunday edition wrote of a new patient rights bill before the city council in San Diego protecting dogs and cats at veterinarian offices. Side issues came to mind, like age of consent, full knowledge of procedure, warnings of consequences of procedure (i.e. should a puppy be told about docking his tail beforehand?), and a vague mind boggle whether in cases of artificial or natural breeding programs, should the issue of consenting adults be addressed.

Somewhere in Connecticut, I think it was, folks were too scared to take off their clothes to protest about tigers. A tiger lover was running his cats loose on his farm, or play place. The neighbors were plenty nervous being so close to free-ranging tigers, but I don't think the caged tiger lady in Union Square wanted the circus to turn the tigers loose in the city. I hope she didn't stay in the cage so long the sun rays deflected by the mesh spoiled her stripes.

By January of next year, the City of San Francisco promises to have completed a subway line from the International Airport into town. We might have saved a little dough riding a van to make our flight. San Francisco is an exciting town filled with good food and grand sights. But it'd be a bit easier to take if the homeless people were spread over more space.

October 3, 2002

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September 19, 2002

Imagined or real, the style of a city or the image of a city influences a visitor. Novels and plays set a scene — a mindset, so to speak.

Under the spell of my idea of a gracious San Francisco, I kept slipping on a sports coat every morning before leaving the hotel, thinking I needed to be dressed for a snappy lunch. A cold crab salad served on a crisp white linen table cloth, for instance, graced with heavy silverware at a table close to a quiet water fountain bubbling in an ornate pond under the yellow, red, and blue stained glass atrium of the likes of the old Palace Hotel.

Looking in the bathroom mirror, I debated whether to wear a tie or fold one in my breast pocket. (This isn't going to take long. I dress in a hurry. Always have.) Might just be the day my friend said, "Know what I'd like to do? I'd like go to tea over at the St. George Hotel in time to dance to the new combo." Thus inspired, I turn to the closet for a bow tie and knot it into a daunting butterfly of a bow in front of the closet door mirror before I can change my mind.

And how does the day unfold? We are out all day. The Palace Hotel Garden Room is closed for renovation. As for tea at the old St. George, by tea time, we are five miles away at the Museum of Natural History, drinking powdered coffee from a styrofoam cup in a cafeteria framed in plastic and chrome. All the tie adds is more respect from the waitress. Poor kid, she probably thought I was a director of the museum, checking on the cafeteria.

Nightfall brings a different atmosphere. Mounting one of those four-wheel rocket ships of a taxi cab I warned of before, we race over to the Legion of Honor building for the second performance of the Summer Mozart Festival of Music. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, copied after the 18th Century Palais de Legion d Honneur in Paris, was built in 1924 to commemorate the dead of World War I.

There the imagined elegance becomes genuine. We find our way down wide, gray-white swirled marble staircases, making an entry to an oval-roofed hall of grooved pillars that frame arched doorways fit for a queen and her entourage. Here are the ladies and gentlemen of my imagination. The ladies range from the sleek in black dresses cut to show white pearls or glittering jewel necklaces to the thicker dowager shapes of abundance in skirts of a purple hue displaying heavier stones and longer strands of pearls. The men go from tailored dark suits to doughty ol' gents wearing thick tweeds bought in England 40 years ago. All drink yellow-gold champagne fizzing in flutes as thin as the stems of the flowers in her majesty's centerpiece.

The lights make a polite blink for curtain call. Only one blink to summon such a high class crowd to the concert hall. Not, blink, blink, blink, but a gentle wink. The wine flutes land on napkins on the bar or on the waiters' trays. I hold in my stomach and walk loose and casual, guiding my friend's elbow into a concert room upholstered as soft as the texture of cashmere. The feel of her elbow steadies me. However, that same old doubt returns: "Gawd-a-mighty, little cowboy, who would ever believe a chunk of the roughest grade of coal ever measured in Mertzon was at a chamber music concert in San Francisco?"

Oh, how fine and light, the musicians fiddled and feathered the bows across the strings of the violin and cello. I was far enough back to study the audience. "Here must sit the best educated and best oriented people in the whole city of San Francisco," I thought. Yet, as we all sat under the fragile sky blue ceiling of the concert hall, close by, beneath the homes of the elite, the sides of the San Andreas fault line were grinding together to bring on another earthquake some day. (One of my pals claims the reason for the elan of the San Francisco person is the rumbling, earth-shaking destiny lurking in the city's under berth.)

At intermission, a polished attendant assured she would see that a cab picked us up after the performance. For a bow, I substituted the deepest nod possible, to avoid scraping my chin on my starched collar. My cup of decaf looked ordinary in such high style of thin flutes filled with sparkling wine. But I continued to hold in my stomach, smiled the way Mother said to do among strangers, and allowed my imagination to feed on a true story...

September 19, 2002

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September 19, 2002

A time and date check shows the dateline to be a Thursday in July in San Francisco, 2002. The prompter on the notepad for the day reads: "As a last resort on a trip, ask for directions." My friend and I are sitting on a bench in a park one block from the Grant Street gate to Chinatown. We are resting from a hard, needless climb up on the highest hills in San Francisco. The real reason we are resting is because I remembered a shortcut from downtown to Chinatown.

The park has changed from the 1980s. Back then, around the block at a Chinese joint offering takeout orders of dim sum dumplings, a couple of bucks purchased a nice picnic lunch. Now six or seven bucks makes a small ding on the cash register in the same place. After a short rest, we walked through the gate to become part of the throng of tourists shopping for bargains.

Thursday is marketing day for the citizens of Chinatown. Grandchildren lead the crumpled ancients from grocery market to grocery market to stalls of dried mushrooms and tubs of live turtles hidden from the hordes of visitors. Try these descriptions, please: "the implacable oriental faces of the weathered ones" or "the inexorable movement of the ancient ones." Comes close to the sight of frail solemn grandparents guided so carefully by youngsters who might be great-grandchildren instead of grandchildren. If words are exchanged, the exchange is too quiet to detect in the hubbub of the market. To peek in the shopping bags would be too serious an invasion to risk.

One set of directions I do follow is Fromer's guidebook. In the Guide To San Francisco, page 63, the book states, "The New Asian Restaurant serves the best food in Chinatown." Fromer's misses noting that 95 percent of the customers at lunch are Asian locals. Nor does the book explain that the busy restaurant refuses credit cards at lunch. Once the routine of ordering dim sum dumplings from waitresses unable to speak English is mastered, the method of payment doesn't matter. All the Chinese needed to translate is to point on the menu, or point at a steaming dish of dumplings on the cart. The New Asian, by the way, doesn't suit the Betty Crocker palate. The Chinese are very clean. However, the adventure of eating shark fins instead of chicken might be too much the first time.

Later, I was taught a lesson on adventurous eating. One night in the Thai restaurant, a ginger-flavored soup made from giant prawns and a red pepper used in Thailand to singe the fuzz off the Buddhist monks' heads turned my mouth into an inferno. An inferno that'd make Zoro the flaming sword eater think he'd been slipped a branding iron. The reaction was so intense, I dreamed I sat on the sunny side of the bullfight ring in Acuna, Mexico, drinking straight jalapeno juice, too broke to buy a bottle of Corona beer. The gastric attack struck so fierce that dissolved bicarbonate of soda hitting the boiling caldron of my stomach solidified.

On another jaunt, in contrast, we found a Persian restaurant dedicated to cooking such delicate food, Persians must be akin to stove fairies or light-fingered kitchen nymphs. The roast lamb turned from a spit onto a deep red sauce of pomegranates and walnuts made such a fine touch that a serving in the right place could bring world peace. Nut flavors and maybe ginger enhanced the marinades. The waitress stood poised about six feet from the table, ready for command. My napkin slipping off my lab caused such a flurry of attention, I felt I'd committed a major insult to the management.

We used city buses for long rides and climbing the hills. Using public transportation gives a city flavor to a country guy. Makes us smell of chlorinated water and carbon pollution mixed with burnt grease off a hamburger grill. The hotel was also effective at calling cabs. Years ago, the then mayor cut licensing requirements for taxi drivers to solve a shortage of cabs. His honor should be remembered as the father of four-wheeled rocket ships. Took half a dozen rides before we learned we could be anywhere in the city in 20 minutes, make the first curtain calls, and still have time to read the billboards in front of the theater. On one ride, the back seatbelts lacked buckles; in frantic improvising, we knotted the webbing into a surcingle and still had a tough time staying on board.

The ascent to Chinatown tabled my shortcut plans. Be hard to convince a chicken fried steak man how good those Persians and Chinese cook. Fromers did a good job showing us around. I am sorry I missed the opportunity to clock one of those rocket ships on the straightaway, but to use a stopwatch, you have to be brave enough to keep your eyes open...

September 19, 2002

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September 12, 2002

Three choices are available to make side trips outside of cities on vacations without private transportation. In San Francisco last month, the choices were: rent a car, join a tour, or hire a guide and his car. Business was so bad for the small companies, the latter was the best deal. Also, we needed to be in Muir Woods in the redwoods before the tour buses arrived. I wanted my friend to have a better angle of view of this natural magnificence than peeking between some guy's ear and his head, or shooting around the bill of a baseball cap on a trail too crowded to move.

To avoid this, we left the hotel before 7 a.m., escorted by a hired guide. In an hour, we were on the trail underneath the giant redwoods alone. So early the light was poor, nevertheless the privacy reigned sacred among the mystic creaking of branches and flicking sound of black and white woodpeckers swooping in short flights from trunk to trunk, tapping a mating call at every landing.

Sounds don't echo in such dense and tall coverage. It's my nature to whistle on a walk. Under the redwoods, the tune barely left my lips. Trilling "Can't Live Without You Baby," my favorite, under the grove means the sound waves hover around three feet or so in circumference. Until I caught on to the phenomenon, I was walking in a mass of broken whistles stifled by the forest.

Mr. Muir, the early protector of the woods, explored the grove so thoroughly he tied himself in the treetops during a lightning storm. Alone by the sign telling about Mr. Muir's lightning experiment, I peered into the trees with binoculars, wondering how deep lightning reached down the trunks. Tried to imagine being tied aloft in a big thunderstorm in a 250-foot redwood.

I stood in the stillness below the snapping of the branches and heard the very stream rushing that Mr. Muir waded his horse across to reach the wilderness. Mr. Muir remains a renowned naturalist. Deciding whether he used good judgment depends on how many trees you've seen in your life split to the base of the trunk by a lightning bolt.

An hour into the woods, voices came from the parking lot. In 30 more minutes, small chattering groups hit the trails. By the time we reached the car, all the parking spaces where filled with buses and oversized vans. Big women wearing baggy white shorts and wrinkled tee shirts matching green flip flop rubber sandals squished around, herding wild kids and driving every chipmunk and wren deeper into the forest. The chance of communing with nature, like Mr. Muir, would have taken quite a tree climber. For the next six hours, few pine cones or pine needles free-fell from the trees without being deflected by human form.

We drove from Muir Woods to the lighthouse at Point Reyes. Part of the Point Reyes National Park permits stocking cattle on lands called a "pastoral zone." Black and white Holsteins and small herds of beef cattle range on lands as windswept as the islands off the coast of Ireland. Tule elk grazing on the hills add an Old World aura to the scene. Better, the tall antlers of the elks are reminiscent of Old World paintings of stags being chased by hounds in royal forests.

"Pastoral zone" is National Park terminology meaning the pastors relinquish the testamentary rights to pass the land on to their heirs and learn to live with the public until they die a natural death, or the experience kills them. Once before at Point Reyes, I left the road on a trail to discover a group of tourists gathered around a Holstein having her calf. If the old cow surrounded by sightseers was an example of a "pastoral zone," the pastor and his black and white milk cow had to be mighty patient to produce any milk and butter.

Once at Point Reyes, we stood on the observation deck, watching visitors climb and descend the 300 steps a lighthouse keeper once transversed to keep the lamps burning. On stormy nights, (and there were and are many on this point jutting out in the Pacific,) he had to hold on to a rope to keep from being swept over the steep cliffs. Below we saw seals and sea lions sleeping on slick black rocks under swarms of cormorants and gulls. The black, jagged rocks broke the waves into white pinnacles of spray. At hand, a kid transported by his parents at a great cost in money and time to see Point Reyes showed his appreciation by rattling the coin return on a pay telescope.

September 12, 2002

September 5, 2002

Way early on the morning walks last month in San Francisco, I watched policemen make a route, using batons for alarm clocks to rouse the homeless people from any indentation large enough to shelter a human form. Down by the square, heard a fiddle whine to find a tune for a forlorn voice singing: "Mustang Molly, better slow yore mustang down. One of these early mornings, you gonna be wiping yore weepy eyes from riding too fast around dis town."

Country boys from Mertzon make low scores on street knowledge. Yet we learn to stay back from outbreaks of human misery until the scene becomes homogenized by workers joining the idle ones. Go bogeying into early morning rehearsal — or worse, early morning withdrawal tremors — and chances run high that you will be ruled out of bounds and punished for the indiscretion.

For a long time, I thought the buskers around train stations and sidewalk concert halls, playing those deep wracking Southern blues on warbling saxophones or palming pain-enshrouded harmonicas, were the reason train rides and train whistles made me sad. Blamed the subway dirges for my sadness until I made this last trip to San Francisco to ride the train across the Bay to Berkeley. Waiting at a station, a fragmentary memory returned of how Mother used to mutter as the passenger train passed through Mertzon, "Just wish he was on that train." A second flashback followed of a small boy I helped in a big train station in southern France, with a tag tied around his little neck giving directions to his grandparents' home.

My friend thought the impending train ride underneath the Bay was causing my apprehension. I denied being scared. Blamed being uncomfortable on meeting the new people over in Berkeley. See, my old pal Horace Kelton discovered he had a sister living in Berkeley two years ago — a poet, just like he is. A redhead so full of life, she writes church music after juggling sick babies around in a pediatric hospital on the graveyard shift as a nurse. Horace and I have been friends for 50 years. I wasn't going to take a chance of missing meeting an extension of a guy I liked as much as I do him.

And she was fun; knew how to entertain us, too. Took us to a book store run by a codger not quite as old as his books, but in overall contrariness and seasoning way ahead of any human to ever walk in or out of a California book store. His inventory, all collector editions, reached such huge proportions that the 12 foot tall polished wooden shelves rolled on rubber wheels, propelled by a crank to open and close spaces. "Old Dominic," or whatever his name was, might be rolling open a section for a customer and at the same time be threatening a reader nearby with being squashed by the adjoining shelves coming together.

Regular customers delighted in watching newcomers bound from an aisle that Dominic was fast cranking closed. I was looking for a copy of Conrad Richter's "Sea Of Grass," but once he hit the crank, I didn't want an extra copy bad enough to become a compressed book lover. At checkout, I told the curmudgeon of a book peddler I wasn't coming back unless he put a warning whistle on his shelves. If he even smiled, I missed it.

One guess why the book dealer was so soured is that he was close to the vigor and energy of the youth being expanded on the nearby campus of the University of California. Be hard on an ol' cuss to be around such a lively student body.

Horace's sister took us up on a high point overlying the university's magnificent facilities. Overlooking the red tile roofs of the cream-colored stucco buildings and filled with the pungent Eucalyptus odors wafting in sea air around us, I understood why student discontent festered down there in the 1960s. Man's burdens aren't limited to the squalor of the ghettos. Backpacks laden with pamphlets strapped on the shoulders chafe the skin. Hands blister and fingers cramp carrying protest signs. Sit-downs are no joke on hot sidewalks. Life can be mighty difficult now knowing whether your next check will come from your parents or your grandparents.

Going back on the 10 o'clock train to San Francisco, no musicians or abandoned kids boarded our car. At the downtown station we scurried up the steel steps, ignoring the crusaders, the panhandlers, and the guy selling the homeless newspaper. (I wanted a copy, but couldn't risk losing the momentum of escape.) Broke free up into the everybody world of tourists strolling hand in hand and young lovers walking the crosswise gait of the entwined. On the last turn, the fiddler blocked the sidewalk confronting a competitor over dominion of his corner. Smart as a city guy, we dodged into the street and avoided the fight, continuing a bee line for the hotel...

September 5, 2002

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