Urban newspapers cover the big weather failure to the satisfaction, I suppose, of their city subscribers. In the outposts victimized by drouth, printed words describing the disaster are superficial. Dehydrated bodies of starved lambs abandoned by hungry ewes on the feed ground and the profiles of hairball calves trailing along behind the herd stealing milk are difficult pictures to paint in ink, especially for a reporter raised in the city.

Unlike the Richter scale that rates earthquakes, drouths haven't an index. The only base is the county agent's report: "weather conditions are poor for planting and deficient for subsoil moisture," or a broader definition, "all areas in the state are in need of additional deep soil moisture."

Livestock bankers come closer to evaluating dry spells than anyone around town except the herders. Shortgrass jugkeepers once had the sharpest aim of any financial marksmen in the country to target weather disasters. Before the massive banking systems moved in from out of state to seize the deposits to loan elsewhere, the local banks were the best allies ranchers and farmers ever knew, and many existing small jugs still are to this day.

Government programs further confirm the mystery of drouths to outsiders. Last year's disaster program covered 18 states. Flood and drouth victims shared in a five million dollar pot big enough to cover the losses west of San Angelo and probably not enough to remove the bullfrogs from under the kitchen sinks in the high-water districts. Percentage of grazing conditions determined payment for the drylanders, but no one knew to what degree you had to be out of grass to be paid.

Ranchers who sold out prior to application were penalized. I'd have loved to have known whether folks flooded on the Mississippi Delta received help to build an ark, or were paid according to the height of the water marks in their living rooms. But I don't smart off around government offices. In particular, government offices where our fate hangs on a thread one strand thinner than a spider's web and you expect any moment to hear Gabriel's horn over the Musak.

Keeping books on drouths out on the range, like all our home systems, is simple. All across the shortgrass country feed bills have been above normal for 10 years. After hearing and reading over and over the common complaint by ranchers of how much a new pickup costs, I hit upon tallying my drouth losses on how many new pickups I've fed up since I bought my last one in 1992. The count reached 14 custom cabs or 11 crew cabs the first of March of this year. My projections show if winter lasts until the first of August, I'll have invested a sizable fleet in number two corn and 20 percent range cubes.

Younger ranchers don't have to use my system. They can substitute semesters of college tuition, rooms of new furniture, extra bathrooms for the home, ocean cruises to the Bahamas, years of teachers' salaries (man or wife), or percentage of inherited income to calculate their losses. Side income for the young may differ, also, by expanding Mother's Day to include "Mom's" certificate of deposit as surety on the notes at the bank, bounty hunting for smugglers on the Mexican border, tearing up part of the flooring in the ranch house to make a mushroom garden, and sharpening tools for shearing crews (nights only).

Again, recordkeeping need not be complicated. Progress can be jotted down in out of date savings account books. Notching a stick like the Indians used to count buffalo hunts is a good way to keep a livestock inventory. Just don't pull the stick out at a tax audit, or at the bank, because drouth ranchers are under enough suspicion without extra symptoms of incompetence.

In all these years, the only newspaper to ever call the ranch was the Livestock Weekly, and they weren't calling for my opinion on the drouth, but were looking for an article lost in the mail. Takes a plenty savvy scribe to interview the herders out here in good or bad years. By the time all the woes are expounded upon and anti-coyote plugs slipped in, no space is left to share the advantages of being a herder.

But perhaps the reason we are so hard to reach is because we are all waiting for one more glorious spring followed by a beautiful fall when the old country blossoms into a verdant force, making lambs and calves break into a run at the slightest provocation. Be hard for anyone to see why that's worth waiting for 10 years at a span.

May 11, 2000

Beautiful warblers, orioles, kingbirds and numerous other birds I don't recognize lay over on Mustang Island after a long flight across the Gulf from South and Central America. The migration happens in April. Having friends who like to bird watch and friends who scorn bird watching, I have to be more on guard than the birds.

Pressed by a stranger why I am visiting the coast, I carry a sand dollar in my pocket I bought in a shell store in San Francisco 20 years ago to display as my latest find. Pressed by a herder why I visit the coast, I drop my head and mumble, "My German ancestor landed in 1843 close to Port Aransas. My ol' great grandpappy started our lands from the island. The least I can do is spend his birthday down there."

Bird watching caught on at Port Aransas four or five years ago. Rockport and Goose Island up the coast were the original hotspots because of the whooping cranes, but now all the coastal maps designate refuges; local people guide tours free of charge.

Folks wearing binoculars hanging on straps are as common at the post office as on the beach. I was afraid to wear a pair in public for fear someone might ask what kind of bird was perching on a high-line, or bathing by the curb. Instead of going to the inland bird watching spots, I walked every morning and afternoon along the coast to conceal my ignorance.

Shore birds (and I suppose they are residents) feasted on the bugs hiding in the tons and tons of seaweed washing up on the beach. Only competition the gulls and terns had was a city employee running a John Deere grader up and down the beach, scraping the seaweed into piles. On his best days, he probably wasn't behind more than 5000 tons at quitting time. The inexorable forces of the sea are always going to outmatch 12 feet of grader blade powered by a diesel engine.

Shell collectors walked along barefooted between the water's edge and the weeds. Determined mothers herded kids in pink and yellow sun suits through the smelly stuff to wade in the shallows. One morning on the way to the beach, I found a green handled, sponge rubber mop to use as a walking stick and make-do putting iron. The roaring of the sea and brisk winds brought on a deep distraction. I wandered along unaware of time or place. One end of the mop worked at sifting sand in crab holes and the swab portion make a good rake to cover up tracks and push the sand off shells or litter.

Seaward, as I turned down the coast, a gray-headed man paralleled my course, carrying a shell sack but never looking down at the beach. The poor chap suffered pronounced upper torso head and shoulder spasms. We both wore the same color black swimming trunks, fitted slightly below our protruding waistlines.

At the same point, we turned and started back up the beach. He looking straight ahead, the empty plastic bag fluttering in the winds; myself pausing to switch ends of the mob to use for whatever caught my curiosity. Soon I became aware of the crowds fading back on the dunes, the way sharks or stingrays empty an area. Kids stopped wading or building sand castles. Beach chairs and sun shades faced toward land. Mothers wearing extra dark sun glasses took a defiant stance, blew cigarette smoke through their nostrils, and glared at these two strange beachcombers.

Behind us, people moved into the water. Shell gatherers threw sticks to dogs and children played ball and splashed the sea. Next, I noticed when I looked back, if the old gent wasn't trembling too much, he did, too. Slow and clear, the message came, "Monte, you have made a spectacle of yourself again. Those people, those strangers, think you are using the mop to mop up the seaweed, and heavens knows what they think of a shell collector holding his head at the eye level of a brown pelican."

Island law forbids using the old trails going over the dunes as a shortcut to the beach house, but I dropped the mop in a trash barrel and went right on over the top to safety without ever looking back to see what happened to my teammate.

Every time I visit the charming little island, I return refreshed and healed by the sea. Two things, however, are going to change: I am not going to use mops or brooms for walking sticks, and I'll never, never stare at a man with the St. Vitus Dance again without compassion ...

May 18, 2000

Beautiful warblers, orioles, kingbirds and numerous other birds I don't recognize lay over on Mustang Island after a long flight across the Gulf from South and Central America. The migration happens in April. Having friends who like to bird watch and friends who scorn bird watching, I have to be more on guard than the birds.

Pressed by a stranger why I am visiting the coast, I carry a sand dollar in my pocket I bought in a shell store in San Francisco 20 years ago to display as my latest find. Pressed by a herder why I visit the coast, I drop my head and mumble, "My German ancestor landed in 1843 close to Port Aransas. My ol' great grandpappy started our lands from the island. The least I can do is spend his birthday down there."

Bird watching caught on at Port Aransas four or five years ago. Rockport and Goose Island up the coast were the original hotspots because of the whooping cranes, but now all the coastal maps designate refuges; local people guide tours free of charge.

Folks wearing binoculars hanging on straps are as common at the post office as on the beach. I was afraid to wear a pair in public for fear someone might ask what kind of bird was perching on a high-line, or bathing by the curb. Instead of going to the inland bird watching spots, I walked every morning and afternoon along the coast to conceal my ignorance.

Shore birds (and I suppose they are residents) feasted on the bugs hiding in the tons and tons of seaweed washing up on the beach. Only competition the gulls and terns had was a city employee running a John Deere grader up and down the beach, scraping the seaweed into piles. On his best days, he probably wasn't behind more than 5000 tons at quitting time. The inexorable forces of the sea are always going to outmatch 12 feet of grader blade powered by a diesel engine.

Shell collectors walked along barefooted between the water's edge and the weeds. Determined mothers herded kids in pink and yellow sun suits through the smelly stuff to wade in the shallows. One morning on the way to the beach, I found a green handled, sponge rubber mop to use as a walking stick and make-do putting iron. The roaring of the sea and brisk winds brought on a deep distraction. I wandered along unaware of time or place. One end of the mop worked at sifting sand in crab holes and the swab portion make a good rake to cover up tracks and push the sand off shells or litter.

Seaward, as I turned down the coast, a gray-headed man paralleled my course, carrying a shell sack but never looking down at the beach. The poor chap suffered pronounced upper torso head and shoulder spasms. We both wore the same color black swimming trunks, fitted slightly below our protruding waistlines.

At the same point, we turned and started back up the beach. He looking straight ahead, the empty plastic bag fluttering in the winds; myself pausing to switch ends of the mob to use for whatever caught my curiosity. Soon I became aware of the crowds fading back on the dunes, the way sharks or stingrays empty an area. Kids stopped wading or building sand castles. Beach chairs and sun shades faced toward land. Mothers wearing extra dark sun glasses took a defiant stance, blew cigarette smoke through their nostrils, and glared at these two strange beachcombers.

Behind us, people moved into the water. Shell gatherers threw sticks to dogs and children played ball and splashed the sea. Next, I noticed when I looked back, if the old gent wasn't trembling too much, he did, too. Slow and clear, the message came, "Monte, you have made a spectacle of yourself again. Those people, those strangers, think you are using the mop to mop up the seaweed, and heavens knows what they think of a shell collector holding his head at the eye level of a brown pelican."

Island law forbids using the old trails going over the dunes as a shortcut to the beach house, but I dropped the mop in a trash barrel and went right on over the top to safety without ever looking back to see what happened to my teammate.

Every time I visit the charming little island, I return refreshed and healed by the sea. Two things, however, are going to change: I am not going to use mops or brooms for walking sticks, and I'll never, never stare at a man with the St. Vitus Dance again without compassion ...

May 18, 2000

First Mexican cowboy to work in this neighborhood was in the 1930s on the Vancourt Brothers ranch. Reason the date is clear in memory is that in the decade of the 30s we wound up shipping much stuff from the Divide down to the railroad. Along then we trailed our calves and lambs to Noelke Switch via the Vancourt ranch, where the Mexican and his family lived.

Another reason I remember, he was the first cowboy in my young life to leave his horse saddled in the middle of the day. Several times, I watched him ride up to the bunkhouse, tie his horse hard and fast, and fold his stirrups over the seat of his funny-looking Old Mexico saddle.

Mother tried to explain that people have different customs, but she couldn't convince me they were so strange they left their horses saddled in the hot sun. I'd read enough J. Frank Dobie stories to know the state used lots of Texas Rangers in the old days to patrol the Rio Grande. I figured the reason the cowboy kept his horse saddled was so he could make a fast getaway back across the border some 165 miles away. I further knew if the Rangers shot him, he'd be buried in an unmarked grave, face down, for leaving his horse saddled at dinner.

Small bay, black mane and tail horses from Coahuila were our next exposure to Mexico. Agile, unbroken little devils, they needed a saddle soaking on their backs day and night. The biggest part of their body was their heart and the huge brands on their hips. The first summer we had what we called espanoles on the ranch was the summer I earned my Indian name, "Git Back On."

I spent a lot of mornings mounting, catching, and remounting a horse named Pete, who expressed his resentment of an Americano by watching for the chance to buck him off. Pete liked an audience. Was very responsive to day hands. Wanted to wait until we were about to split up at the pasture gate to put on his show. Had it been my choice, I'd have preferred a private showing of my clumsy efforts at horse tuning. But sure as we had extra help, I'd end up on the ground, cursing and trying to hold Pete by my last remaining rein.

Fifteen years or longer passed before unpapered aliens were to became common this far from the Border. The ranches in the cow jungle of South Texas and the salt marshes of the Coastal Plains worked Mexican vaqueros a long time ahead of us. A few men drifted in on the shortgrass outfits, but were used more as ground help than the aerial pursuit of being a cowboy.

To jump ahead, the "wets" became legal passport help. Soon, the passport families moved into town to school the kids and became town folks with high-paying jobs. In sum, the ranchers went back to work, the last Mexican cowboys left were over 60 years old, and Social Security benefits were fast terminating their careers.

Last year, I did contact Mexico by buying a gentle horse from there, a dun pony from so far down in the desert country of Coahuila, our horse trap looked lush to him. He grazed all winter on the six-minute grama grass stubs. On the days I rode him and fed him by himself, he'd leave over half his oats in the trough. He refused sweet feed; ignored range cubes spilled in the back of the pickup.

He also became fidgety when I brushed off his back. Acted like a curry comb was a strange weapon and balked four feet from the trailer gate in sheer terror of a wooden floor. From the looks of the marks on his back, I knew he'd been ridden hard under half-rigged saddles and dirty blankets. Every time I bridled him, he made those awful rollers in his nose, meaning distrust. But one morning, he was a completely different horse. Didn't have to be hemmed up in the corner to catch, or show the slightest signs of distrust. He stood still to be brushed and was easy to saddle.

Slowly the change came to light. For breakfast, I'd had corn tortillas soaked in a ranchero sauce on scrambled eggs. Right there before my eyes was the simple answer to his dietary and behavior problem. On the next trip to San Angelo, I bought 50 pounds of masa harina (corn tortilla flour) from Pop's Tortilla Factory. Every morning, I sprinkle a cup full on his oats. Now he devours every grain; nickers when he sees me leave the house for the barn.

Wish I knew where ol Pete's bones are on the ranch. Old tricksters like he was probably have an ant bed or a black wasp's hole over their grave. Been so long ago I can't remember if he ate gringo oats. One thing I do know, I sure didn't mind turning him loose in the middle of the day.

May 25, 2000

All on the same recent morning, the radiotelephone at the ranch failed and my left hearing aid crashed. Investigation is continuing into whether it might be connected to the infamous "I love you" virus. I was able to contact an employee in Mertzon right a way on a cell phone to report the outage. He was instructed to tell General Telephone, the local carrier, that my number was not in order. Also, I told him when he contacted repair to tell the clerk my left hearing aid was out, too.

At 9 a.m. the telephone came back on, but the hearing aid started making the same sound a kid makes sucking the last drops of Coke through a straw. At 9:30 a.m., the telephone company called to find out if my telephone was working. "Mr. Nolek*," she said, "is your telephone number nineonefive-threeninezerotwofourthreefour?" Stumped by the way she reeled off the numbers, I looked over in the open telephone book and read, "are you oneeighthundredfoureight threeonethousand? If so, this call may be monitored by my supervisor and the Attorney General of the State of Texas." (* Nolekshould be my stage name, as people are always pronouncing Noelke that way. A nolek is a smut-colored tropical fish that rarely ever contacts telephone employees.)

After a silence, she said, "Mr. Nolek, your call is being forwarded to my supervisor." In a few minutes, a very brisk voice came on apologizing for the misunderstanding. I accepted her apology. Told her I needed to know whether the telephone company knew yet if my telephone going out coinciding with my left hearing aid crashing was connected to the "I love you" virus over the Internet. Her manner changed after I explained the ranch was not on-line. Not a perceptible brushoff, yet a message the file was closing. She ended the call, promising to look into the matter.

Without knowing the peculiarities of my hearing aid, the telephone company can't evaluate the problem. As I reported once before, on muggy days, my hearing aids pick up the cattle market at Guymon, Oklahoma off a satellite. Engineers responsible for the aerial at the ranch ask us to report any trouble on the new system. I took being a test case serious after learning the hookup cost 8000 bucks. If I withhold information about the technology of having a satellite phone in a remote place, receiving through a hearing aid, I am no better than the hackers trying to destroy communications.

Wearing hearing aids causes lots of other complications. The other night at the box office at a play in Houston, a young girl kept repeating over and over a litany I thought might be about releasing the theater of liability, but all I heard was a mewing sound. Finally, the guy behind punched me in the back and said,"Tell her you can't hear well enough to be shocked by offensive language, so the line can move on, bud."

Next morning the hotel clerk became so annoyed at having to repeat directions to the art museum, I jerked out a hearing aid and said, "Hon, speak into this and I'll stick it back in my ear real fast to catch your words." She whipped a map from a drawer and drew the way in deep black colored pencil. At lunch, I tried to catch her eye, but she'd had more of a test on the morning shift than she'd ever been tested at hotel training school.

The Mertzon post office is sympathetic toward deaf people. A sign in the lobby reads, "No dogs permitted in the building except for blind and deaf patrons." At the last mail run, I forewarned the clerk that I was going to train a hearing dog to listen for the tumblers falling on the lock to my post box by making a can opener for dog food give the sound of the ratcheting of a lock mechanism. (See "Stob" Crowell's book, "The Training Of Backdoor And Mattress Dogs.") She needed to be warned, as she might think the sounds were a thief drilling a box open.

The head of City of Mertzon Animal Apprehension Department, (A.A.D.) or the town dogcatcher, is an old pal of mine. He already has prospects in mind. He thinks one of those little short-eared looking mutts will make a better hearing dog than the larger flop-eared bassets or Walker hounds. The problem is the same as working in the human sphere. Lots of dogs can hear, but not many are willing to listen.

Looks like the case is going to die on linking the virus to my telephone and hearing aid. Next time the telephone company asks for my cooperation, they are going to have to research my problems to win me back. The play in Houston, by the way, contained lots of offensive features, including the language.

June 1, 2000

Promise of a new career caused me to take a layover in Austin last month on the way to Maryland. Without extra help, I guarded a three bedroom, two bath home in the South part of town for three days not allowing one intruder to break in the place. For 72 hours, I single handed resisted all comers, including a census taker on the grounds house sitters aren't bona fide residents of a domicile.

May sound easy being a house sitter in the state capital, the center of our justice system and the base of the creation of law and order. But consider these facts: Austin is growing at the rate of 150 citizens per day, meaning even if the crime rate dropped 8% in May as the newspapers claim, and the base figure comes to 8%, a dozen new burglars move to town every day needing to work.

Pinpointing crime in Austin is difficult, especially when the state legislature is in session. Wild charges of misconduct fly from each side of the aisle only to make a quiet landing after the press corps leaves the chambers to meet the day's deadlines. The best guideline to rate most of these gentlemen and ladies of glib tongues and eternal smiles is to consider them guilty until a break in the case, or a loophole in the law proves them innocent. However, as long as the worthies are on the capital grounds, the Chief of Police can't be blamed for what it takes to put on such a good show.

The huge Texas University student body further complicates defining the city's crime rate. The problem lies where library fines and parking tickets combined with spirited misbehavior on and off campus stop, and rigging pay phones and utility meters, breaches of promise, hazing and general civil disobedience become a criminal act. The wisest approach here, I think, is denial. Just act as if the 10's of thousands of U.T. students do not exist.

Also, keep in mind, Forbes magazine polled Austin as the best place to do business in the United States. This is for sure to have gained wide interest among the lawless. Upon reading the news, small town crooks probably took a deep look at the future in robbing the gum ball machine in front of the VFW Hall, or nicking the take at the newspaper rack in front of the bus station as the coin box fills in nickels.

Visions of the spoils of a high tech Austin economy is bound to flashed before their eyes. Thirty six hundred dollar lap tops, portable as a pair of roller skates and as merchantable as Krugerand arose in their dreams as sharp as the symbol of sugar plums of legend and verse. Eight hundred dollars worth of hubcaps flicked off 4 wheels of a Jaguar clanging on the curb made a tantalizing sound of easy money. The more creative envisioned kidnapping the groomed lap dogs the Austin rich hold in such high esteem. Others less ambitious thought of all the custom garden tools and thick rubber hoses just waiting to be snatched inside open garage doors.

But the hard part of my jobs was being on duty day and night, having to take calls. A.T. & T. rang on the hour wanting to sell long distance services. Spring and M.C.I. hit three times a day at meals. A. L. "Laudy" Jefferson's lawn service slipped a card under the door. "Try-Back Pizza" hung a coupon for a 12 inch free pie on the front door knob. And "Billy Marie's Beauty Shop" posted a rose colored circular offering three dollars off on a "perm."

In the day light hours, I scanned the back yard through a big picture window, sitting in a web backed rocking chair. Except for a rolling pen, I was unarmed. The only six shooter I own is a Colt I keep in the bank box in Mertzon. After all of my boys sneaked the old gun out for surreptitious target practice as ranch kids have done since the invention of gun powder, I stored it in the bank box to keep it from disappearing the way 4 or 5 pair of good spurs have been lost. The pistol wouldn't have helped anyway, unless the attack was on the right flank in line where the cylinder spits pieces of lead hot and fast as shrapnel.

I took regular naps and read three novels. Hardest physical work was rolling the trash can down to the curb for regular pickup. I am not going to charge a fee until I become more experienced. Having the Austin job on my resume is going to going to look good in out away places like San Angelo. I know the folks I worked for will give me a good recommendation.

June 8, 2000

Airfares are becoming hard to negotiate now that all of the country except agriculture is on a boom that'd make Christopher Columbus think he'd discovered the seven golden cities of Cibolo. Three weeks in advance of last month's trip to Baltimore and Washington D.C., I studied on-line and off-line fares without finding an agent willing to budge at any airline.

Delta finally gave a decent coach price from Austin. By then I'd clicked and dialed the "ticket saver's" and "cheap fares dot com's" until Amtrak and Greyhound started becoming a consideration for transportation, which is a sign of desperation. The cross country bus schedule may be bearable, but if the Hartford, Connecticut life insurance actuary tables handicapping graybeards my age are accurate, and the stories about Amtrak's arrivals are correct, I am already too old to complete a train trip from Austin to Baltimore.

Baltimore/Washington International is one of the three airports handy to the capital. Express metro trains shuttle passengers from the concourses right on down to D.C. Upon landing, I sought refuge in the restroom to readjust my gear and tuck in my shirttail. Just as I reached the lavatory, an old boy popped from a stall and started singing in a Southern drawl the following jazz melody: "The Queen of Sheba weighed a hundred and four pounds. All this day I fried that much hamburger patties. Counting pickles, onions, buns and cheese, I've lifted ol' Sheba twice today. Gonna' go home to 'Bud the beer' and Mary the gal. And rest my soul for another day. Oh, de Queen Sheba weighed a hundred four pounds. I done lifted her twice today."

Before I gave up and caught a cab to town, I tried to find rides on vans, busses, and trains in a speedway of airport traffic, and failed. The cabby hummed all the way, finding his beat in the meter clicking every third of a mile. In case you haven't observed, musicians, professional or amateur, hum in the daytime and snore a replay at night after playing a gig. I pass this on free of charge for ones dead bent on marrying a saxophonist or cello player. (Reader's Digest once quoted Mrs. John Phillip Sousa, wife of the famous band leader, as saying, "I am soured on married men, married life, and the institution of marriage after 30 years of sleepless nights listening to John snort out the brass section of his arrangements.")

Baltimore abounds in music and art. Cab drivers, fry cooks, and sidewalk troubadours, I was to learn, are supported by symphonies and chamber music in the high-class recital halls of the Peabody Conservatory, a dozen jazz places, and a huge new domed concert hall. Furthermore, 45-minute train service to Grand Central Station in D.C. adds all the attraction of the Kennedy Center. As a guy said at the intermission of a play, "My wife and I also make the little theater group at Annapolis."

Checked in, I realized I had made one bad mistake. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore College, and the Peabody School of Music, to name a few of the area's colleges, were holding May graduation services. My room on the third floor of an 1870 mansion overlooked the main passageway for graduates and families crossing the street to the big civic center. (One class was 5000 strong.)

The whole week, throngs of parents and grandparents trailed behind black-gowned scholars. Scholars who I knew will never come west to be cowboys or ranchers. Graduation time once meant a happy occasion, but now it is one more act in the death knell of the herding and tending of hollow horns and woolies. When the pool halls closed and all this malarkey about higher education spread, our labor supply was doomed. I regret to this day giving shaving lotion instead of buying cue sticks for graduation gifts. I don't recall ever hiring a cowboy who played golf and excelled in the academics, but I knew quite a few who were pool sharks and dropouts.

Cool showers on 75-degree afternoons and 60-degree nights washed away the memory of the drouth back home. Early of morning, the owner placed a newspaper and a pot of coffee on a marble-topped table by my chair in the drawing room. Seated so grand, I stared at my feet, thinking how far removed this is from pulling on your boots in an old ranch kitchen to walk to the barn and a dusty corral.

June 15, 2000

Man and his machines wiped away, I was to learn on my last trip, every vestige of the old harbor at Baltimore. Somewhere in H. L. Mencken's writing, rich descriptions tell of handsome clippers once anchored in the bay, rocking in the wash of overloaded whalers in from the spoils of the sea to share the lanes of fishing boats bringing in the late catch of soft shell crabs so famous on those eastern shores.

Today, the harbor is the finished product of all the successful attractions of any tourist development at any coastal city. My interest was twofold; first, to see the city's famous aquarium. Next, to test if I had the stamina to withstand 44 school bus loads of children celebrating the last week of school on a field trip in a state of anarchy that'd make Attila the Hun's rampages seem like an episode from Little Bo Peep.

I was able to enter the aquarium by being on hand, ticketed and ready to go at the opening gate. In long strides, swinging my elbows to hold off an attack from the rear, I ascended to the featured rain forest exhibit on the fourth level before the raucous juvenile voices and the bubble gum breaths of 44 grades drove the birds and small mammals deep into the jungle. (I estimated the four rows of yellow buses parked 11 to the row equaled 44 loads of kids at 60 to the bus to be 2640 students plus approximately 132 school teachers and an unknown number of room mothers.)

Outside the rain forest, I paused in a dark hall at the glassed cage of an Amazon bushmaster and a couple of green vine snakes. The bushmaster languished up in the front of the glass; the two vine snakes draped over live branches held in reptilian trance.

Rapid fire the memory returned of walking in the Amazon jungle along that enormous river, scanning the muddy ground for a deadly bushmaster or a bone-crushing boa constrictor, but the deepest shock was to read the information card real slowly: "The green vine snakes ... are a venomous Amazon valley reptile ... having the unusual trait of having ... fangs in the ends of their tails!

I moved back in the dark hall. My friend Harry Pearson and I never stepped off the rusty riverboat the time we bought passage on the Amazon without looking under the gangplank for snakes and caimans. In the jungle, Harry led the way on the dense trails in knee-high rubber boots. I tailed along in 12-inch top Wellington boots that felt as low cut as a pair of ankle socks in the tall grass. But, we never thought of a vine snake whipping his tail from above to hook his deadly fangs in our cheeks.

I wouldn't know which direction to run from a snake with tail fangs. In the simulated rain forest, every time a parrot or a monkey moved, I watched to keep from backing into a flock of kids. On the way out, I skipped the snakes and avoided the eels.

The Little Italy neighborhood lies within walking distance of the Inner Harbor. Compared to the vigorous Italian neighborhood in Boston, Baltimore's district is a quiet few blocks of fine ethnic food. Lunch specials posted in front of the restaurants offered a number of courses high priced enough to melt the imprint on a Diner's Club card.

I took a window table to be sure to keep in touch with the reflection of the bulge over my belt line and the thin line of my right hip pocket. I decided 19 bucks worth of the house salad and a $6 order of garlic bread should make a nice lunch. The waiter took his time. While I waited, the kitchen staff accepted delivery on a large order of take-out food from a Chinese restaurant. Seems at least they could have had the deliveryman come to the back door.

After lunch, I rode the water taxi across the harbor to Fells Point. Training on salad and bread, I knew not to exert myself and walk from the Italian district on a salad and bread training table. Immediately upon landing, however, I needed reserve strength. Fells Point turned out to be the hangout of the next generation older than the aquarium mob.

Fells Point is a historic district. The surrounding bay may well be the scene Mr. Mencken set so many years ago of clippers and whalers. It's a shame he didn't see the colorful tattooed and bejeweled crowd I waded through. Luck led me to a matinee performance of an excellent play. Secure in the theater, the sidewalk throngs were forgotten.

Late of evening, the sidewalks took on the music of a dozen troubadours using their hats to pay for the engagements. Baltimore keeps plenty of music at hand. I thought on the way back to my room, "Schoolteachers must need the whole summer vacation to recover from the last week of school."

June 22, 2000

Express Metro trains, I found on a May visit, shoot down to D.C. from Baltimore on the hour until way in the night. Passengers hardly unfold their newspapers before the train pulls into Washington Union Station. Cars are clean, the conductors polite and in control of the passengers of the many creed and classes.

Once outside the Washington station, a starter loads long lines of cabs. Fares are based on zones and the driver's honesty. Stern signs on the dividing window between the front and rear seats warn that the city exacts a $50 fine for passengers riding without the seat belts buckled. The law also keeps riders from bouncing on the broken seat cushion springs, bucking across the potholes of the capital's streets.

The luck of the draw in Washington cabs falls five to one against hiring an English-speaking driver in the daytime; twice those odds of hailing one after dark, when the shadows down every alley turn the trash cans the size of three muggers. One night going to a concert, a cabby in a turban and dressed in silk costume like Sinibad the Pirate, was so alarming that I shook so much after the ride, the screws holding my seat at the auditorium came loose. Good thing the music echoed the beat of castanets, or the usher would have thrown me out for making such a rattling racket.

But a zoning map wasn't necessary to check the fares as I always go to the National Gallery by taxi and ride the subway to the Phillips Collection and the Smithsonian museums. Our art treasures are the most positive part of being in the capital. We own thousands of pieces of precious objects. One hallway in our gallery contains more paintings than the entire collection of a country like say, Yugoslavia. Also, seeing once again the white domes and marble pillars of stately buildings, crowned by the "Stars and Stripes" fluttering on gold-capped poles makes me choke up the way singing the "Star Spangled Banner" did in the fifth grade.

I always become emotional visiting the capital. However, on this visit, an article in the Washington Post intensified my feelings. On the way down from Baltimore, I read Congress had appropriated 11 million dollars to help the sheep and goat herders. In a bill giving tobacco farmers three billion dollars, the paper said we were to receive 20 cents a pound on wool, 40 cents a pound on mohair and a nickel a pound, or three bucks a head, on 60-pound feeder lambs and five bucks a head on fats.

It made me ashamed of all the ugly things I had said about the Congress not knowing or caring what happens to the domestic sheep and goat industry. I'd been so selfish, I'd overlooked the tobacco farmers' troubles. The very morning the newspaper hit the stands, homeless guys in front of the Baltimore station were picking snipes off the sidewalks, enjoying free smokes without a dime going back to the farmers' pockets.

The important thing, however, was that somewhere in the Texas delegation, we had an old friend who understood we'd jump at any size bait. Whoever he was, he knew we were so dispirited that such paltry sums were not going to be intimidating. As Knute Rockefeller, or maybe it was John D. Rockne said, "It's not how you play the game, it's how much dignity you show limping off the field after you have lost the game."

The trains leaving D.C. become crowded early in the afternoon. The rush hour seems to be earlier where the majority is government employees. The five or six-hour days in the federal offices wear those folks down until a feeling of exhaustion overrides the aura of the car. Nearly all the passengers carry heavy briefcases home. That may be the reason so much stuff is missing when there's an investigation. I know I am always taking papers from the office to the ranch and misplacing them.

Something about living in Washington makes people lousy housekeepers and flat destroys memories. High moguls are forever losing records and misplacing files just as a congressional investigation hits full force. Seems the rap of a gavel in a federal judge's hand is the best memory stimulant; however, on her own, Mrs. Clinton found one missing file on a coffee table in her bedroom. She was probably straightening up after the maids changed shifts and there the file was, between a copy of Vogue and Good Housekeeping magazines.

Back in Baltimore, a second edition of The Post confirmed the appropriation passed the House. We might get a break after all. With that much dough in the tobacco farmers' pockets, they may get around to buying a new wool suit next winter, a mohair rug for the wife's Christmas, and a big platter of lamb chops to celebrate the windfall of the new century.

June 29, 2000

This incident occurred in Mexico City under the administration of President Carlos Salinas, who served from 1988 to 1994. The exact day, the 16th of September, or Diez Y Seis de Septembre, comes back better than the year as the wide avenues in the Capital were lined by all the military forces of the whole Republic. The exact location was slightly north of the President's Palace.

Snappy presidential honor guards presented arms; soft-whiskered cadets stood at rigid attention. A bearer holding the red, green and white flag of the republic on a slanted staff never wavered as President Salinas rode by, waving from a convertible. The Indian women surrounding my vantage point stared unmoved by the passing of a chief executive, as impassive as the stone images on the palace scrolls.

Congestion from bad planning jammed the young president's motorcade right in the forefront. The Indios' attention, however, focused on an organ grinder so big the owner had to have a helper to move his instrument, not to mention helping yank his monkey out of the reach of kids. He kept playing "Rancho Grande" over and over as if the old song was significant to the act. (The last time I told this story, he was playing the waltz "Cielito Linda," but "Rancho Grande" is a better polka for a monkey's dance.) The parade lasted longer than I did.

On this Sunday, the 2nd of July, Mexico elected a new president, defeating a party that has been in power for 71 years. Part of the initial shock from this side of the border is the large numbers of Mexican citizens who went back to vote. Mexico has no absentee voting. Booths were set up in the border towns and cities. Newspapers said a whopping 100,000 Mexicans were going home to vote from Los Angeles.

Projections of such huge numbers make the oldtime drawing power of the South Texas machine to bring Mexicans to this side of the Big River to vote seem like piddling small-time politics. Once, a border patrolman told us at the bunkhouse one night over supper that his first lesson in border democracy was catching a trio of wets above Brownsville carrying poll tax receipts in their packs. (In the 1950s, the $2.50 we paid to vote in Texas was called a "poll tax." In 1964, the 24th amendment to the Constitution made it illegal to charge to vote in federal elections.)

"The closer it came to Election Day, the more wets we disfranchised," he said. "A few carried sample ballots marked for a prominent county official."

As soon as the shock subsides from the new president, we are going to need to go back to business in the shortgrass country to estimate how long a cowboy or shearer is going to need off to go vote in Acuna or Piedras Negras. Cinco de Mayo and the 16th of September require about five weeks off the ranch with another week thrown in upon return to stabilize the celebrant. The "Cinco" and the "Diez y Seis" were already practically overlapping. July 2nd National Election Day might have to be shifted to fit in between "The Day of the Dead" and the traditional Mexican Christmas, the sixth of January.

Way back before working illegal aliens became against the law, quite a number of hands voluntarily deported themselves in August, especially if livestock were doing good enough to allow time to build fence. Deflecting flint rock with a crowbar tends to cause deep homesickness in the 100 degree August sun. Took me about 20 summers before I learned to shift the job chart to fit the economic needs of the cowboys.

President Fox says he favors a legal program to send workers to the U.S. We need his support. And it may be possible, as he owns a ranch and wears boots to work. Critics claim he doesn't have an economic plan. They probably don't realize how many notes he has written down in his tally book or scratched on the saddle house wall in marking chalk. Like the rest of us, he'll have to book his winter feed in the fall, be sure he has enough bulls to breed his cows, and then he'll be able to set about writing a budget before the December inauguration. (County agents were the first offices to advise ranchers over here to keep written records. Maybe we could do a lend lease deal on county agents until Mr. Fox learned to stop writing down counts on his gloves or his chap pocket.)

In time, we'll know how long voting takes in July compared to, say, seeing about sick grandmothers and sick sisters. I've been out of contact so long I may need a refresher. But I would suppose if you knew the price of "three X beer" extrapolated by the number of dollars per month salary, you'd find the amount of days needed to cast a ballot in Acuna, Coahuilla.

July 13, 2000

This incident occurred in Mexico City under the administration of President Carlos Salinas, who served from 1988 to 1994. The exact day, the 16th of September, or Diez Y Seis de Septembre, comes back better than the year as the wide avenues in the Capital were lined by all the military forces of the whole Republic. The exact location was slightly north of the President's Palace.

Snappy presidential honor guards presented arms; soft-whiskered cadets stood at rigid attention. A bearer holding the red, green and white flag of the republic on a slanted staff never wavered as President Salinas rode by, waving from a convertible. The Indian women surrounding my vantage point stared unmoved by the passing of a chief executive, as impassive as the stone images on the palace scrolls.

Congestion from bad planning jammed the young president's motorcade right in the forefront. The Indios' attention, however, focused on an organ grinder so big the owner had to have a helper to move his instrument, not to mention helping yank his monkey out of the reach of kids. He kept playing "Rancho Grande" over and over as if the old song was significant to the act. (The last time I told this story, he was playing the waltz "Cielito Linda," but "Rancho Grande" is a better polka for a monkey's dance.) The parade lasted longer than I did.

On this Sunday, the 2nd of July, Mexico elected a new president, defeating a party that has been in power for 71 years. Part of the initial shock from this side of the border is the large numbers of Mexican citizens who went back to vote. Mexico has no absentee voting. Booths were set up in the border towns and cities. Newspapers said a whopping 100,000 Mexicans were going home to vote from Los Angeles.

Projections of such huge numbers make the oldtime drawing power of the South Texas machine to bring Mexicans to this side of the Big River to vote seem like piddling small-time politics. Once, a border patrolman told us at the bunkhouse one night over supper that his first lesson in border democracy was catching a trio of wets above Brownsville carrying poll tax receipts in their packs. (In the 1950s, the $2.50 we paid to vote in Texas was called a "poll tax." In 1964, the 24th amendment to the Constitution made it illegal to charge to vote in federal elections.)

"The closer it came to Election Day, the more wets we disfranchised," he said. "A few carried sample ballots marked for a prominent county official."

As soon as the shock subsides from the new president, we are going to need to go back to business in the shortgrass country to estimate how long a cowboy or shearer is going to need off to go vote in Acuna or Piedras Negras. Cinco de Mayo and the 16th of September require about five weeks off the ranch with another week thrown in upon return to stabilize the celebrant. The "Cinco" and the "Diez y Seis" were already practically overlapping. July 2nd National Election Day might have to be shifted to fit in between "The Day of the Dead" and the traditional Mexican Christmas, the sixth of January.

Way back before working illegal aliens became against the law, quite a number of hands voluntarily deported themselves in August, especially if livestock were doing good enough to allow time to build fence. Deflecting flint rock with a crowbar tends to cause deep homesickness in the 100 degree August sun. Took me about 20 summers before I learned to shift the job chart to fit the economic needs of the cowboys.

President Fox says he favors a legal program to send workers to the U.S. We need his support. And it may be possible, as he owns a ranch and wears boots to work. Critics claim he doesn't have an economic plan. They probably don't realize how many notes he has written down in his tally book or scratched on the saddle house wall in marking chalk. Like the rest of us, he'll have to book his winter feed in the fall, be sure he has enough bulls to breed his cows, and then he'll be able to set about writing a budget before the December inauguration. (County agents were the first offices to advise ranchers over here to keep written records. Maybe we could do a lend lease deal on county agents until Mr. Fox learned to stop writing down counts on his gloves or his chap pocket.)

In time, we'll know how long voting takes in July compared to, say, seeing about sick grandmothers and sick sisters. I've been out of contact so long I may need a refresher. But I would suppose if you knew the price of "three X beer" extrapolated by the number of dollars per month salary, you'd find the amount of days needed to cast a ballot in Acuna, Coahuilla.

July 13, 2000

At the friends of the library sale last year in San Angelo, patrons lined up in front of the high school annex half an hour before opening. The people were not the bookish looking group portrayed in plays and movies. Typical of the urban influence in San Angelo, lots of men wore baseball caps and the women chose workout clothes. (Pink and lime aerobic exercise suits, not housework clothes. Most likely had an apron been unfurled, it would have broken up the crowd into a stampede that'd make an Italian soccer mob seem as orderly as the line at Miss Daisy's dance school.)

A youngster wearing a baseball cap backwards stood in front of me. At first, I was talking to the back of a head, thinking he had the bill pulled over a bearded face. We came in contact when he pointed out I was standing on his long shoelaces, trailing from untied white shoes. He was going to buy books for his mother, he said. Her preference being mystery writers, ones a bit hard to find. Plus, as he said, the dollar price on hardbacks and 50 cents on paperbacks made the sale a good time to stock up on a year's supply.

His reaction to my book list was the first indication of the evening how far I was locked in time. His nods of affirmation were shallow indeed, bare dips of the chin to the likes of John Steinbeck or E.B. White. I should have tried harder to fake a response to his mother's choices, but I wasn't sure whether reading was so much out of style that he was using his mother as a front to buy books for himself.

Once the doors opened, we rushed in to tables lined with books that would never be so neat again. At a buck a throw, one lap around the fiction table cost $6. Paperbacks were in pasteboard boxes on the floor, lined against the wall. Probably by accident, the boxes were close enough together for bifocals to scan one and half boxes at a time. Score me about four books or $2 for every 10 linear feet of paperbacks. If I had a copy at the ranch, I bought an extra for the office, or for my grandson.

On the third round, I paused and looked up. Three ladies and myself controlled the fiction table. Across the whole room, there were only two familiar faces. Old writers like Elmer Kelton and Ross McSwain weren't over scooping up bargains of the Western genre as they always had before. The kid waved from the mystery table. He was doing a thorough job reviewing his mother's books beforehand.

Pressure was off for the next session. My first selections were mainly new hardback editions the library had been sent as samples and chosen not to place in their stacks. Better not ask why your choice of a brand new 20 some-odd dollar book ends up unopened in a dollar sale. Best defense is to remember that F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby" didn't sell at all until after his death — his penniless death, I must add.

So on the next session I paged through library books marked DISCARD in blotched rude letters in the front leaf. Such a travesty to sentence these fine works to oblivion because of broken spines and stained covers. Just because the book was coming apart, the works didn't deserve to be junked. Why not use the money from this sale for tape and glue, was what I thought. Furthermore, we don't drum librarians out of the stacks because they are becoming frayed and faded.

Some of the authors of those tattered books had spoken at writers' conferences and workshops I'd attended. All slants-wise in a row stood a copy of John Casey's sea story, "Spartina," in the same dismal shape as a book having ridden out a stay in a sea bag. John Casey suffers the handicap of stuttering, yet he writes as smoothly as a maple syrup tap fills a bucket. "Gol darn," I stormed to no one, "John, I'll spend a buck to keep your hard work from ending up in a trash dump."

The windup left one woman competing for the whole table. The worst part was leaving bargains behind. At home that night, I leafed through my treasures. The discards hadn't been checked out since 1947. No wonder the lad hunting mystery books looked so bewildered at my choices of writers ...

July 20, 2000

The frontier ended in the shortgrass country as the sons and daughters of the pioneers died off in the 50s and 60s, leaving only a fragment of the descendents that live to this very day. Up until their demise, the scene around San Angelo hotel lobbies and auction barns filled every day with booted and hatted gents ready to trade horses, match horse races, or combine an afternoon playing cards or dominoes with matching events for the next day.

The Big Boss and his cronies led the pack of these second-generation sons of the settlers. All fashioned themselves to be sports — big sports. If interest in running horses waned, they'd leave the dance to go outside and pick a winner in a Bermuda grass mat, free-fall wrestling match.

All the little outposts, in fact, were eager to back their man against one from the next town. At one dance at a country club out west, the fight lasted so long it had to be called a draw. Both men had stained and torn white suits. The supporters from Eldorado popped out five 10-dollar bills and said, "Take this, man, and buy you a new suit of clothes." Not to be outdone, the Big Boss and his pal, Austin Millspaugh, pressed a handful of bills in their man's hand, and said: "Take this, stud, to buy you the best suit of clothes in San Angelo."

The story and the dance didn't end there. Hours later on the way back to the ranch close to daylight, the Big Boss shut off his Ford and demanded his money back from his friend. His friend told me he asked the Boss why he gave him the money in the first place if he was gonna' take it back. The Boss replied, "By gawd, stud, you didn't want 'Aus' and me to look like bad sports in front of those Eldorado boys."

But it wasn't just the Boss; it was the times of big trades and big operators on lambs and calves. There were plenty of cowboys, and black guys to cook for the men on the ranches during roundups. Lots of color reigned in the barbershops in San Angelo and all the adjoining towns. One white-headed barber over on Concho Street kept sloe gin in his tonic bottle. Late on a Saturday, he'd be waving his straight razor over his customers' faces like a maestro sweeping air with his baton.

Just a little later, Ace Reid began to formalize the characters into his gifted work. Ace was the only guy around having enough nerve to tease bankers. The Big Drouth at mid-century made even the bravest wags nervous around jugkeepers. Sometimes an old boy would walk out of the bank after holding his hat in his hand for so long that he'd be halfway back to the ranch before he noticed how much the crown was interfering with the steering wheel.

The other night at a party in San Angelo, I asked a newspaper editor if anybody worked at the paper who'd make a good story, or give a start to make up a story. He just shook his head.

When we sat down to dinner, I had a chance to ask a dean and a professor out at Angelo State University if anybody on the faculty was a distinct and different personality, or perhaps a free thinker. The dean thought a couple of guys in one department he refused to name were a bit different than the rest of the staff. The professor sitting next to him whispered something, but I couldn't catch what was wrong with those two guys. "But on the whole," the dean said, "we can't take chances of being incorrect, or we'll have a lawsuit on our hands."

I also asked the group if they knew any ministers, doctors or lawyers who stood out around town. Again, no one knew of a single soul who would make the start of a good story, much less make a whole story. I'd hoped the editor might have a reporter who owned a jungle cat and had to be told to take a bath when he worked in the office, or perhaps the dean knew a professor who tripped on his shoelaces and spilled oatmeal on his neckties. But I didn't receive any tips or encouragement.

Well, I've given up. I should have known when my mother stopped reading McCalls' magazine and started watching "The Half Baked Dead" soap opera after lunch that man's imagination was coming to an end. I can't keep making up stuff forever. I don't know what I'll do when my grandkids come this summer. Looks like someone in San Angelo would break the rules, even if it were just crossing the street on a green light ...

July 27, 2000

Last year one of my sister's college roommates came back from her editor's job in New York to visit. She edits Home magazine for the Conde Nast publishing group, and travels over wide scopes of the world studying homes and homemaking. One thing she noted in a talk at luncheon was that the new designs in homes are eliminating the dining room and reducing the importance of the kitchen.

For several years, the trend has been to use cabinets and drain boards for kids to store cookies to go with their milk and parents to mix the dog and cat's food. Franchise pizza and fried chicken had to be unwrapped on the counter top. But in the main part, after the Pop Tarts were soaked in the breakfast cereal bowls in the morning, kitchens were a handy placed to leave notes and the children's lunch money.

Women having to go to work outside the home was the main reason families started eating in restaurants so much. Also, women grow tired of cooking before men become tired of eating. But an old gal tearing home from her job to hit a concession stand at the soccer game on a slim margin of time before a piano recital can't be blamed for not cooking a sit-down meal for a household home only long enough to mess up the bathrooms.

The ones of us who do still cook can pass on recipes in big bundles, but we don't have the recipe for how to buy all the high school students a car and a cell phone, staying home baking Betty Crocker devil's food cakes. The front porch of the Mertzon house faces the high school parking lot. Students roar by the house in new pickups and sleek sports cars, fueled on buck-forty a gallon gas, and steered by the immortal nerve of the young. On the cool autumn mornings, I sit and watch this revolving motorcade halt at the first bell, wondering how many hours parents work to pay for the scene.

However, back to cooking: the tip-off on how much a person likes to cook is how much that person worries about how much mess the preparation takes, so now is one test. I am going to tell how to prepare Portuguese sauce the way a mining engineer in Musquiz, Coahuilla passed the recipe on to an old cook at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras. I learned by watching him cook on a huge wood stove flaming with mesquite wood that smoked up the room and darkened his mood. His apron looked like a blacksmith's. A red bandana had slipped over his bad eye. He set the butter in the skillet on fire for effect. I'm sure I was the first gringo to ever enter his kitchen.

Portuguese sauce is made to go on broiled chicken or fried corn tortillas. In its true form, a brown sauce goes over the chicken or the tortillas first, the Portuguese sauce is added next, then a garnish of black olives complete the presentation. The brown sauce prepared correctly is too rich. Prepared incorrectly, only cucumbers and black pepper sausage can match the gastric disruptions of the failed flour lumps and the floating grease suspending a skim of chili powder. (I try to be forthright, but I invariably understate my feelings).

But here is the way the old hombre in the Victory Club and I devised the recipe: sauté one large chopped onion and two cloves of garlic in two tablespoons of butter in a soup pot until wilted, not browned. Peel six of the best tomatoes available. Don't buy the slick-skinned sawdust variety and don't think about the cost. I am trying to teach you to cook, not how to be thrifty. Add the tomatoes cut in wedges to the onion and garlic to simmer. Next, season with two small cans of chopped roasted Ortega peppers, two teaspoons of comino seeds and two boullion cubes. Start adding grated longhorn-style cheddar cheese until the sauce thickens to where you're barely able to pour it. The cheese must be real cheese and not the artificial, phony stuff. Read the labels to be sure the cheese is not that travesty to man's palate that is pawned off in salad bars as cheese when it is not as flavorful or nutritious as Elmer's glue. (I did better in this paragraph at expressing my feelings, don't you think?)

The offer if off if you use jalapenos, margarine, or tomato paste. It's your choice whether the sauce is added to chicken or tortillas. I've served it for supper on Christmas since 1960. But I thought I had better pass it around before my bandana starts slipping over my good eye.

August 3, 2000

A small irrigated valley and Spring Creek divide the two townsites of Mertzon and Sherwood. Mertzon leans heavily toward juniper cedars and massive liveoaks; Sherwood is shaded by huge pecans and oaks mixed with hackberry trees spotted among vines and shrubs growing from roots going back into the gardens of the late 19th century.

Of the two sites, Sherwood holds a big edge for shady roads and such monuments as an old cut stone courthouse and a scattering of houses built before 1900. Connecting the courthouse and the homesteads to the original settlers of the town paints more of an image of a Southern town instead of a Southwestern one. So Sherwood is history and an oasis in a region too close to the desert.

One abandoned house took on the aura of one of William Faulkner's Mississippi stories. Not a grand place, but the white fish scales under the eaves, the scroll design of the yard fence, the oval glass front door, in a setting of wild grape vines hanging from pecan limbs set the mind's eye to see one of Mr. Faulkner's characters opening the green screen door.

In the 1960s the lady who lived there had a quilting frame in her parlor. She patched blue jeans and might have taken in ironing. She wore her hair in a thin tight plait rolled in a gray-blue bun. The kitchen always smelled of baking powder biscuits and fried salt pork. Her husband saw spooks high up in the pecan trees. On moonlight nights, he'd blast the shadows with .22 long rifle bullets. Made things hot for the creatures he saw in his troubled mind. When I'd come by to pick up my boys' patched pants, he'd screw up his red face, close one eye and say, "Noelke, last night I shot at a tree-full of Mexicans right up (pointing) there."

After the boys stopped wearing out the knees in their jeans, I lost contact with the couple. Kept meaning to take photographs of her quilting frame and cane back rocking chair; however, by the time I returned, a grandson was guarding the place armed with a .22 pistol and the house was empty.

In the spring an artist came out for a tour of Mertzon and Sherwood to look for old houses before the leafing of the trees covered the scene. We found four or five prospects in each town. Shadows were changing by the lowering sun by the time we reached the old night hunter's house. The backyard looked the same as a wood lot from a northeastern scene. Thick vines covered the front. There was a long yellow snakeskin on the porch. Gray webs and chalk white spider eggs clung to the half-closed screen door.

On the artist's second trip to see the effect of leafing, the Texas Department of Transportation had been on a tree butchering spree along the road in front of the house that'd make General Sherman's march to the sea look like a minor pruning of the countryside. Where shadows cast soft images before, bare stumps stood among wide slash marks and drooping limbs.

First reaction was to wish the spook-hunting grandfather and his pistol-packing grandson were around to see how far the Highway Department had trespassed over the property lines. The next reaction was to wonder how long man and his chainsaws were going to be turning the only shady spot to the west of San Angelo into an open plain.

After seeing the extent of the damage, I changed courses and drove down to the Arden crossing on the river. The West Texas Utilities company had beat the Highway Department to those trees. The power company had cut deep V-shaped notches in pecan trees 150 years old. Shaken, I began to peer at the rings exposed on a 24-inch diameter pecan tree, now three feet of stump.

Tracing my fingers across the circle, not knowing any more than the stump how to tell time by the rings, I muttered, "Here in the center a squirrel must have planted a nut in the rich river loam. And this ring must be where you became big enough to shade the farmer and his horse plowing his field. And this crooked line must be the one where the legislature granted the power companies dominion over the air space and gave the Highway Department the right to kill trees."

Nightfall caught me on the way back across the river. Next morning, a lawyer assured me the Highway Department and the utilities Company have the right to down the trees in their rights-of-way. I noticed yesterday on a walk in Mertzon that the town banker has a 10-foot windmill wheel mounted close to one of the power lines. He better stay on guard, or the utility company or the Highway Department will be trimming the windmill's sails.

August 10, 2000

The big hollow-horn association, The Texas and Southwestern Cattleman's, published a survey in their journal last month showing the average age of the members to be 58.5 years. About a third of us herders were 65 or older, and less than 5 percent were below 35 years of age.

Just those figures brought all kinds of complications to mind. Looked as if the young men were going to have plenty of country to lease in the next decade. Unclear, however, was how many graybeards were going to leave widows, or how old the widows were going to be at the expiration of the spouse. It's pretty easy to figure without running another poll that any woman who had been married to a rancher in the past two decades of a serious labor shortage wasn't going to keep ranching, or keep marrying ranchers.

The poll further showed only six percent of the members were females. I don't know whether the wives were left out because they normally may have two other careers, like teaching school and keeping house, or because they preferred to be anonymous in case they had to duck out from an over-eager loan company.

Remember in the old shipwreck movies how the women boarded the lifeboats, and it was "Ol' Cap," the glory-struck old fool, who went down with the ship? This isn't saying women haven't been courageous. They have faced down all sorts of adversities all over the ranch country. However, my family history proves my Greatest of Great Grandmothers was afraid of Comanche war parties. One winter in the 1860s, when the Indians were on the warpath, she moved her family from the ranch over to officers' quarters at Fort Concho. Normally she wasn't that flighty, but I suppose she had to face shooting her sawed-off shotgun and packing a new baby on her hip at the same time.

Next quandary was how many young people are going into agriculture in New Zealand and Australia, our country's alternate food source and primary nemesis for domestic agriculture? Might be a way of taking a bank shot at our country in our own behalf by dropping a hint that we have only caught the "Aussies" once adding dingo dog to ground meat. For consumers to keep in mind, a touch of wild flavor improves the taste of hamburger. Further, that Oriental palates put great store in canine recipes.

A French sheep farmer recently caused a stir nationwide by objecting to McDonalds serving Brazilian beef in his country. True, the hide off a South American cow brute is about as tender as her loin, but they might let us know if they were going to add aardvark or anteater meat to their product. Argentine labels on canned corned beef make vague references to the contents. Those cowboys eat their old horses, but that's not like slipping wild dog meat into the grinders.

Takes the human system a lot of time to become adjusted to eating horsemeat or drinking mare's milk. Much more than the slight behavior changes from eating dingo-related products, like growling on moonlight nights and sudden urges to scratch. Twenty years ago, I drank fresh mare's milk in Lower Mongolia. My right ear still flicks forward in a horse corral. And it's all I can do sometimes on crowded dance floors to keep from kicking when another dancer bumps me from behind.

The poll didn't address the prospect of any of us retiring. Jose, the cowboy who worked for us for more than 40 years, made the mistake of deciding he and I were the same age. Jose began watching me pulling up in the saddle like I was climbing a loose rope ladder, until he figured he was in the same shape and quit over 10 years ago. Too bad he took me for an example, and didn't notice his boot heel still cleared the dance floor 12 inches every time they called a polka at the Cuarto Caminos. But once again I was a bad influence on the man I wanted to help so much.

I think every year about going back to conventions and reunions to check on the fraternity of hollow horns and woolies. The other day at the grocery store, I ran across a man who lived at my grandfather's Bentley line camp in 1923. He was waiting for the paperwork on a trip to England. If he was worried about the attrition of herders he was sure keeping up a good front. I wish I had asked him if he filled in the Cattleman's questionnaire. Be a big help in lowering the average age to weed out the retired ones …

August 17, 2000

In Texas, 129 municipalities admit to facing water shortages from the drouth. The state's reservoirs are down 33 percent, at their lowest levels in 23 years. Our governor is off campaigning for president. The legislature is out until the first of the year. City and county governments stay preoccupied studying growth potential. And the folks who are aware they are hooked into failing systems are left to wonder what morning they are going awaken to hear the kitchen faucets sucking air.

In June, I called the water department in San Angelo to check the city's water supply. It's risky for nearby small towns and adjacent landowners for a big city to run short of water. All kinds of spooky stories were circulating on such hombres as the oil magnate, Boone Pickens, buying water rights up on the Plains to sell to the highest urban bidder, or the heirs of the Shanghai Pierce ranch selling the underground water rights for 12 million bucks.

We already knew the Wool Capital had enough savvy to buy water rights, as they owned 26 sections' worth on the old Rollie White ranch close to Brady. Furthermore, the city's car washes and putting greens alone used enough water to drain Spring Creek and dry up Mertzon.

Once I reached the right official, he listed the five lakes as Nasworthy, Three Rivers, North Concho, Spence and Ivie. "Levels," he said, "are sufficient to last the city two and a half years without more rainfall." He went on to say that by pumping (salty) water from Lake Spence on the Colorado River this summer and blending the water from Lake Ivie and adding the water from the 10 city wells in McCulloch County, the city had a good reserve.

Satisfied, I wandered off on other subjects until the daily newspaper in San Angelo reported that a friend of mine on the city council had passed a motion to make selling water outside the city limits illegal. Water truckers and the poor souls out of water east of Angelo reacted in an uproar, making my pal as popular as the drouth. The ban offended me. I drink a pint of Angelo water every time I'm in town. No tonic dispensed by man makes the hair glisten like a good drenching with the city's chlorine recipe.

The whole mess put a big test on our friendship, especially in public. He was the wrong kind of guy to support in a high-wired political situation, as he had too much courage and principle to back down at the right time. Also, he knew about water shortages. His family's ranch seven miles west of Angelo and depends on wells so weak a flight of blackbirds will knock the head off the aquifer. Didn't make sense he'd sponsor a bill cutting off selling water to rural folks unless the city didn't have any water to spare.

The problem came to a head when my busybody sister invited the councilman to speak to her luncheon group in San Angelo. I shot off a hot E-mail advising her that if she was going have him come to not sit between him and the back door in case of a terrorist attack. Too, not to expect me to come to town to hear a guy speak who was hotter than the noon temperature on the sidewalks of Amarillo and Lubbock put together.

She replied that if I chose to be known as "a two-faced coward" she'd cover up the family's shame as much as possible. As poor as her charge fit, I went on into Angelo and plopped down by my pal like I thought he was going to be the next mayor and serve out his council term as mayor pro-tem.

The facts on the water shortage changed, however, once he spoke. Here is part of what he told the group about the water situation in San Angelo: "The city needs 15 to 20,000 acre-feet of water a year. The 36-inch pipe purchased to run the line from the Rollie White wells was sold. Even if the pipeline is run up to Lake Ivie at one million dollars a mile, a court judgement won by a water district limits production to 1500 acre-feet a year until 2006, when the limit escalates to a meager 2750 acre-feet. The well water is further problematic," he said, "because of EPA objections of the radium content."

Things didn't get better: "San Angelo has rights to a limited percentage of the water in Lake Spence. Repairing salt water damage to the pipeline and pumps from Spence is going to take 60 days," he continued. "The pool in Three Rivers Lake caught floodwater last month, however the level is too low to pump into the water station at Lake Nasworthy. I try to tell everyone I can about the judgement against the White water rights. In an emergency, I suppose, we could truck water from the wells."

Sure puts us outlanders in big danger of water prospecting. Pretty clear now why San Angelo doesn't have water to sell. Sidekicks who overvalue the truth are dangerous partners in a fight. Be just like my sister to turn the guest list in to the newspaper.

August 24, 2000

Before I checked into the hospital in San Angelo in July, the last time was June of 1928 as a newborn infant. The exact dismissal date of that stay is clouded by time and record — a blank spot, so to speak. Delay in recording my birth and convincing mother to go home complicates the facts. She refused to accept that she had a red-headed boy instead of the blue-eyed, blond-haired girl her heart was set on.

The Catholic sisters she had as nurses were unable to console her. As a precaution against jumping ship, she became the first mother registered in the hospital to be required to wear an identification bracelet. I remember the bracelet part well, as a cowboy at the ranch cut mine loose when it began to impede the circulation to my hand.

Years passed before I investigated the mystery of the time of my birth. One hospital birth certificate reads, "Boy baby, 8 June 1928, Tom Green County." Other records show vague references to: "Boy baby, 17 June, 1928." A strange affidavit signed by a family member swears he was present at the birth of a boy baby on the third week of June 1928 and visited said child in 1930 at St. John's hospital. Mother refused to talk.

A cowboy told me after I started to school that he knew the crows didn't hatch me, because he was pretty sure my mother broke all records for staying in the hospital for childbirth. Might be imagination, but I think she told her bridge club I was an orphan.

Whatever the time between hospital confinements, it was long enough for a deep-seated phobia to develop. "Terror" is a better word than phobia. After I had advised the doctors and nurses that the only reason I wasn't hyperventilating was because my body was in such a state of shock that the nerve tips were curling up like a sea horse's tail, I saw they weren't interested in treating cowardice. (Reader's Digest reported years ago that holding your breath or holding in your stomach causes the nerve tips to curl. Further, that holding in the stomach endangers collapse of the rib cage upon exhaling.)

The surgeon was forewarned that treating me was like bringing in a terrified savage from the banks of the Amazon that'd never been strapped on a stainless steel table to be gassed under bright lights. I knew enough about hospitals to know I didn't want to be knocked out in a place so full of germs that the help was wearing face masks and rubber gloves.

The operation was scheduled to begin at 8:30 on a Monday. In what a lady called "a slight change in time," the waiting and apprehension portion of the ordeal was prolonged to three in the afternoon. Four of my sons and a friend stayed by my side. After the 14th hour passed without nourishment or liquids, I reminded my supporters that in our tenacious bloodlines our greatest of great grandfathers had once trailed and shot an Indian horse thief at the exact location of the hospital. Before the story finished, nurses jerked off the four blankets warming my nervous chill for a ride into what was to become "the Great Darkness."

Hours later, severe hiccups awakened me from weird slumber in a blue-ceiling room. In one sequence, I was a two year-old playing on a rock wall behind St. John's, the hospital of my birth. In the next, two Catholic sisters were holding me up by my hind legs, pounding my back, trying to force me to spit up 10 rosary beads (one decade of Hail Mary's) I'd swallowed.

Spasms from the hiccups rocked the IV stand and shook the TV monitor off the bed. (Today's medicine treats hiccups using the old "hair of the dog" remedy. The kitchen rushes up leftover broccoli soup or cauliflower casserole to the sufferer.) In a fuzzy frame, I told my friend that I understood now why I felt at home on the St. John's grounds. Much later, she said I mumbled, "I didn't mean to swallow the prayer beads. I want to go home."

Sometime in the grassy haze, a nurse stuck a thermometer in my ear without realizing a sponge rubber earplug was there to drown the noise. Had not my son Ben stopped her, she was headed for the telephone to report 101 degrees of fever to the doctor. Once I regained consciousness, I saw that unless I wanted a deep ear operation, the earplugs had better be saved for hotel rooms.

Weeks later, I am still being waited on at home. Doctors' orders restrict lifting anything over 25 pounds, which is 13 pounds more than I can lift. But maybe I will recover stronger than before. I've learned the language of the sick. Covered in books and comfort, I report daily that I am "weak as a kitten," because I know full well how the pastureland feels in 103-degree heat.

August 31, 2000

In the division of my Grandfather Noelke's estate, the Goat Whiskers' outfit drew one of the best cowboys in the country, Cecil Parks. Cecil worked for the family from 1933 until his death in 1986. The Big Boss claimed he was the best horse tuner to come on the ranch. Put another way, he came from a school of mounted men who tracked and captured what they gathered and didn't spill them at the first gate.

Cecil and his wife lived at the Whiskers' line camp north of the highway. In those days, Goat Whiskers the Elder worked all the pastures south of the highway in a set of cow corrals 11 inches deep in powdered dirt bedded in dried thin residue. Strutting peacocks and chattering guinea hens blocked the outside gates. Lucky indeed was the cowboy who could ride off on the north side with Cecil for a last look from a high point at the swirling dust from the corrals at the headquarters.

After Goat Whiskers the Younger took charge, my sons worked there during the summer months. The main vocation was crowbars and shovels; however, on a couple of summers, John, the middle boy, lucked into a saddlehorn job instead of lining up postholes. Part of the time, he helped Cecil. About all the help Cecil ever needed was to put yearling cattle or yearling ewes across the highway, or maybe round up brushy pastures bigger than 2000 acres.

Being such a loner, the way of all camp men, Whiskers was surprised how often Cecil started asking John and another kid called "Yellowstone" to come over to gather the bulls, or doctor sheep. (Cecil named one "Juan" and the other "Yellowstone.") Later on, much later on, after John was off to college, we'd be over at the Whiskers' outfit working and Cecil always asked, "When's ol' Juan coming back to help us?"

Took several roundups to understand, but I caught on one wet fall when we drove Young Whiskers' lambs over to the railroad to ship. They drifted along, grazing the new fall grass into a light east headwind, jumping to the side now and then from a shadow cast across the trail. We were out of range of the peacocks and guineas. The lady cooking was always on time wherever we were at noon. If we had a care, we'd have had to make it up. While I was down on foot walking out a stiff lamb, Cecil rode over on my drive. Without an opening, he said, "Monte, why ain't 'old Juan' coming back where he belongs?" He turned and rode back on his side of the herd without waiting for my reply. I saw then for the first time that he couldn't imagine a boy giving up a chance to be a cowboy.

It all came back the other day in a story about the musician Dave Bruebeck. His daddy wanted him to be a cowboy, but his mother insisted he go to college. Watching Mr. Bruebeck playing a piano on the stage, flicking across the keyboard, it's obvious he'd have been a good roper. A fellow that coordinated could have recoiled and had another loop in the air while an ordinary hand was pulling up his slack.

No telling how many more good prospects twisted off and went to college. To name a couple, Paul Patterson, who taught English in high school to the likes of Elmer Kelton, threw away a promising career on the Shannon ranch breaking outlawed horses for $30 a month to go to the University. Russell Drake, who wrote for this paper and the The Wall Street Journal, quit an outfit out at Kent, Texas, so western they used a team and wagon to put out salt as late as 1950, to go to journalism school. The only exiles who ever came back to the ranch were the ones who had a relapse and temporarily became unsound of mind.

My son, John, must have had a spell up in Connecticut last year when he bought an old unlined Porter saddle 2300 miles from his dun horse at Mertzon. I ran a test to see how close he was to becoming a dude. Relining a saddle in Connecticut takes a six-month waiting period and costs twice as much as it does in Texas. So I sent him a black rubber pad, guaranteed to slip out from under the saddle all winter and gall a horse's back in the summer.

He must still have some sense, as he hasn't thanked me yet for that crawling piece of heating pad. Porter Saddlery has been out of business a long time. But that doesn't mean the "Juans" and the "Yellowstones" might not fall for buying a memento to make a link to a long ago past as a cowboy. I bet if there was any way of getting the truth from them, ol' Dave Bruebeck, Paul Patterson and Russell Drake wish they'd stayed cowboys.

September 7, 2000

Water well drillers in Shortgrass Country claim to be six months behind on orders for new wells. An article in the daily paper in San Angelo blamed the backlog on wells drying up from the drouth and the precarious water reserves in the cities and outposts.

So far only one well on the ranch has pumped air interspersed with mud. It was drilled before World War One and was once the supply for a household and three pastures heavily stocked with cattle, so the failure of such an oldtimer was traumatic.

In the drouth of the Fifties, all of the wells on dry Spring Creek Draw going through the old ranch had to be deepened. Rickety cable tool rigs thumped away at tinhorn casing lining holes going back to my grandfather's time, caving in about as much filling to the bottom of the well as they gained in a day.

Added to the drama were the horseback men driving livestock away from the rig to the dwindling supplies of other waterings. An old galvanized tank mounted on a wagon pulled by a team of mules kept the headquarters in kitchen water once that well failed. Needless to say, tension around the house peaked in the middle of the hot, parched days when water had to be heated on the stove to wash the dishes and rinse the ever-full pail of diapers.

The water department over at Mertzon revived those long-ago memories last month. Desperate for an additional source, the city drilled a test hole six miles from town, right off the north property line of the old ranch and close to the big draw. After the well failed to pass under steady pumping, the head of the water works came by the house in Mertzon. Insulted that he hadn't asked my opinion before, I directed my reply toward 92 years of ranching history on the big draw, including a sidelight that my first home was 400 yards from his drill site, making the water superintendent's total test time 25 instead of 24 hours.

Now and then a crisis arises where a graybeard or a granny's experience might save making the same mistake twice. I never can remember to use it, but the trick is to wait for someone to ask for your advice. Always seems like consultants are short on consultees. I learned too late that I should have been going to audience school instead of speech class.

In the news story on the area well drillers' overloaded schedules, mention was made of an increase of demand by town ranchers and vacation home owners wanting backup wells in case the municipal water supply worsened. Strong water sands are going to have to be struck to meet those customers' needs. Three minutes of tooth brushing can take six gallons of water if the lavatory faucet is left running; an automatic dishwasher uses 18 gallons in a cycle.

Also, city folks have to be gradually converted to well water. Used to splashing in chlorine concoctions in tubs and pools, flavored with the odor of the deck of a fishing boat, they keep running the shower trying to make it smell right. Years ago an article in Reader's Digest Magazine explained that the reason all city water has fishy odor is an ammonia compound (amine) added for health protection. It's been a long time since I read the article over at my mother's house, but I think the reaction of the ammonia released chloroform, among other things, explaining the dopey behavior city folks display from taking too many baths. One big advantage of highly aromatic formulas is that the ones of us who can't hear water dripping in the house can at least smell the trouble.

Every time a rig passes through Mertzon going back to Angelo, another customer can be checked off the waiting list. Mother should have kept her old copies of Reader's Digest. Then I'd know the percentage of chloroform in the city folks' bath water ...

September 14, 2000

The distance between the city folks and the outlanders is infinite. Rarely does either side have an opportunity to examine themselves, much less understand each other. As long as I have been around the hollow horn and woolie fraternity, I find myself at meetings staring from the back row at the weather-burned necks and the bleached hatband lines above the ears, wondering what drives this determined breed of men to fight such overwhelming odds.

In the cities, I further lose myself watching the strange human forms ballooned into gym pants, bound in wrinkled tee shirts, and shod in run-over blue and white walking shoes laced with red-speckled strings. In parks, I go off course gazing at scantily clad joggers huffing and puffing up the trail, accompanied by big woolly-faced wolfhounds, or long-legged brindle greyhounds. Often I miss my floor on hotel elevators, stunned by the sight of the dinner crowd going out dressed as if off to a skating rink or a bowling alley.

Last month at a dinner theater given by Angelo State University, I looked over the crowd and realized it'd been 40 years since any man wore a seersucker suit and plaid bow tie like mine to a summer affair in West Texas. Other than the college lads, who expect antiquity in centurions (all adults over 40), the rest of the crowd must have thought I was part of the cast, a performer who was going to do a soft-shoe number, twirling a straw boater hat on a walking stick decorated by a red polkadot streamer.

The clincher came next week at the principal grocer's on the south side of San Angelo. Filling a big list, preplanned to pack the perishables in an ice chest to reach the ranch in the heat wave, I nearly missed seeing an old friend from a ranch north of town. She wheeled her cart over without coming to a stop and asked, "Don't you just hate to come to Angelo in all this heat? George (her husband) won't even come in the store. I warned him the car was going to heat up from running the air conditioner." And off she went without ever stopping to mention the drouth or the water shortage.

For the rest of the shopping trip, I watched for another ranch couple. The score on the back of the yellow tablet for grocery lists showed I'd recognized three ranchers at the store since May. George and his wife, Alice, made five. More than five people were riding the handicap carts at any given moment the store was open. Alice had made me realize we might be out of place living in the country.

The population of the wool capital is 96,000 citizens. From where the county road leaves Highway 67 going to the ranch for the next 25 miles, there are seven of us living on ranches. To make a 7 a.m. lab test or 8 a.m. appointment, we have to arise early enough to feed the horses and drive 600 blocks to Angelo. (To convert miles to blocks, multiply the miles by 10. Expedites communication with city folks.) The amount of time it takes to explain this to a 20 year-old receptionist is so tedious it often negates the results of the test and makes the appointment more critical.

Were the seven of us living on or close to the Divide able to pick up the support of 100 or so citizens living in Barnhart or Ozona, we might form a wedge thick enough to reform the Angelo healers and tooth grinders' sense of time and place. After the weather cools, (and we are hoping to have autumn since we missed having spring,) we need to meet and organize. Ranchers and rural folks aren't prone to being joiners, but lately there's been a good response to joining the Mr. Sam's club, so we may be becoming more gregarious.

Nevertheless, it is going to be slow going to bring the neighbors together. Alfredo over on the Brooks' ranch goes out the back way to shop in Eldorado. The neighbors down on the railroad track do a lot of mail order business. Folks west of the ranch split their trade between Ozona and Angelo. However, as hard as the drouth has been on our health, we are probably all going to be hitting the medical centers in San Angelo this winter.

Be nice to be understood somewhere. The opening of the new century promises to be a casual age. If it doesn't swing back soon, my old seersucker suit may not make another decade. But were I down to my last threads, I'd still like to spend an evening every once in awhile at a dressed-up affair, even if it is a town where we are outnumbered 96 thousand to seven…

September 21, 2000

The operation in July took five weeks to recover from. Mertzon was my choice for confinement, to be close to the post Office and the bank, as part of the restrictions were not to drive an automobile. Each week one of my sons or daughters-in-law came to relieve a friend, who was doing all the grocery shopping and supervising the necessary household tasks.

After being home a few days, I was able to walk two miles in the morning coolness. At that hour, town dogs are asleep from the exertions of howling all night, so there's no danger from that quarter. The few mutts that were active shied away from my path. Most likely, they were overdue at home from a night's prowl of flushing range chickens, or perhaps running sheep on the irrigated farms across the river. But just in case a watchdog overstepped his responsibility, I wore a Boy Scout whistle around my neck for protection. (I learned in such abundant cur territory as Mexico and Central America that a blast from a whistle will halt all except the most savage breeds. At least, a whistle offers a chance of summoning help.)

Once the walk ended, my breakfast was served off a tray on the front porch. Only unhandy part of sitting on the front porch was that the coffeepot was in the kitchen. Sometimes I'd have to wait 10 minutes for a second cup. By then the rice cereal softened into a messy mush of bananas and milk. Two or three times, the wait was so long, I considered blowing a few blasts on the whistle. But a story restrained me.

Years ago, an old coot of a dentist in San Angelo took to his bed at an early age from a strange illness brought on by a simple gall bladder operation.

You see, his poor wife nursed him day and night. Her parents bought the groceries and paid the bills. At first, he was content to stay in a bed placed in the downstairs parlor, but sensing the convenience of his location, he demanded to be moved upstairs. By then, moving him was no easy task. Under the luxury of his long convalescence, he weighed over 250 pounds. Further, the bed frame was antique oak and required three strong men to maneuver up the stairs.

Once situated upstairs, he demanded his mother's copper dinner bell to summon his wife or her aged mother to wait on him. Acoustics in the high ceilings of the house added resonance to the clanging dinner bell. The missus tried to take in boarders to supplement her income; however, the incessant ringing so disturbed the diners that the idea failed.

Stricken by the cacophony, her only companion, a Collie dog, stayed under the house and refused to come out until nightfall. Children fled from the premises, maddened by the bell. A yellow canary, a prince of a singer, molted in her cage, until one morning she dropped dead from a wretched collapse of her voice box. Members of the Missionary Society stopped coming; new ministers came for one visit and never returned.

The poor lady seemed doomed to suffer the same fate as her canary. But one Sunday after demanding the choicest pieces of a large filleted catfish, plus all of the fried roe, her patient choked on a fish bone and died alone upstairs in his bed, or that was the attending physician's report on the death certificate.

Listed in the inventory of his modest estate was an unusual entry: "one copper dinner bell, no clapper, thus no value." The widow, so it was told, lived a long, happy life, comforted by her Collie dog and nourished by her favorite food, fried catfish.

Sitting alone on the front porch, I fingered the whistle. Nurses and family start out eager to aid the sick and the ailing, yet as the cases wear on, patience thins.

"Whistles hold a pea that might turn deadly if swallowed in a cup of coffee," I thought. After reviewing the story, I became a model patient, willing to wait and be waited upon. Old Doc's bell clapper, by the way, must have rolled into a crack in the floor, as it was never recovered.

.

October 5, 2000

The quarried stone of Mertzon School building of 1909 vintage faces east. Ambitious school boards led by resume-building superintendents have all but surrounded the handsome edifice and killed the aura of time with modern brick extensions. However, leading to the southeast from the front entrance, a dim trail to downtown is visible after leaving the parking lot and crossing a draw angling toward the courthouse.

Only a segment of the trail leading by the Methodist Church remains. Houses conceal the other passageways of these long-ago pedestrian and mounted students, who walked and rode horseback to school. Six oak trees stand in front of the school as monument to being the hitching limbs or livery post for the kids lucky enough to have four-legged transportation. There were no school buses then. Country kids boarded in town, or were brought in by private transportation.

Of the traces remaining, the trail crossing Courthouse Hill to downtown is the most important to my past. Somewhere close to the end of the 1930s, David Farrington and I used that route to make our shine stand at the barbershop after school. We split company right behind the drugstore and bank.

If the right kid was working at the grocery store, Dave's detour was often worth a couple of slices of bologna through the back door. The drugstore soda jerks were harder to promote for free ice cream or root beers as the doctor's office and the pharmacist guarded the back of the building. On Saturday nights, however, one of us had to stay late to sweep the floor and clean the public bathtub. Timed right, the soda fountain was an easy mark after the druggist had gone home.

After all, we were street kids, wise to the green felt of the racked balls at the pool hall and aware that a red-headed guy across the tracks sold fierce bootleg whiskey to the sports who shot dice on the work bench at Harkey's garage. Shine boys hear everything stooped over the stand facing the floor. We missed a few fights, but were always on hand if Doctor Deal had to sew up a loser. We knew the beauty operator dyed her hair blonde and was better looking than a movie star. Dave claimed he heard the pistol shot the night an old boy shot through the operator's window up behind the shop in a jealous rage.

Things were lively downtown in those days. The trapper working on the Middle Concho was the biggest act to hit town, including carnivals and medicine shows. Along with chasing one of our customers down the street half-shaven with a barber's apron tied around his neck, he would go down on all fours in the center of the highway leading through town and paw like a bull at the traffic coming down the hill from the west.

Might take three days for him to spend his money and be docile enough to be hauled back to his camp. Just before leaving, the barber would shave the different growths of whiskers and I'd finish shining his boots. He'd give me a dime tip and the barber whatever was left from his spree.

The amount of the trapper's leftover whisky determined the length of the next act. Business fell way off on the mornings we opened and found the barber asleep in his chair. Barbershop shaves were popular, but the popularity didn't extend to being shaved by a shaky hand holding a straight razor in the throes of a hangover.

Our mothers never had the vaguest idea of the goings-on at the shop. Ladies weren't allowed in men's haunts. In fact, part of our job was to answer cars honking out front to tell the wives how long their husbands were going to be getting a haircut.

Dave was the first to quit to go to day working. Soon after, I began to take a lot more time cleaning the polish from underneath my fingernails than shining shoes. The girl in the café down the block started walking different passing by the shop. Had more of a swing to her gait. She also smelled different, leaning over the counter to fill my tea glass. Music on the nickelodian began to cut into my profits. More and more, I developed a lot of different business at the café.

Every time the barber stepped out, I used a squirt of Lucky Tiger tonic to smooth down my cowlick. I didn't miss Dave as much as I thought I would. And then the Saturday came when I had to ask the barber to leave early to go to a dance. The café girl's name is lost to mind, but the soft touch of the first date's hand ended this shine boy's career as it has, I suspect, many a man ...

October 12, 2000

Two modern-day Robin Hoods live on opposite banks of Spring Creek. One lives on the Sherwood side, the other shares a house with her husband on a farm across the river between Mertzon and San Angelo. The latter is Mrs. Robin Hood, a semi-retired interior decorator. I may have written about her as she used to come in off all-night volunteer emergency duty from attending the needy to hang a bill on me for drapes and carpeting that'd make His Highness, the King of Saudi Arabia, want to bury his head in a sand dune.

The Mr. Robin Hood is a retired electrician who has the strange policy of refusing to rewire or repair anyone's system who can afford to pay him. He keeps the pensioned widows and graybeards' appliances in service. His sideline is doing missionary work in the area's jails. He is held in high esteem county-wide, as is Mrs. Robin Hood. But for my money, they are both a couple of softies out of place in this highly sophisticated age where life's score is tallied on the stock market reports.

The other morning at the post office, a new slant developed on the legend of the electrician Robin Hood. He wanted to know if I knew anyone who wanted a rooster. "In the spring," he explained, "raccoons devoured all a widow lady's chickens over at Sherwood except four old hens. By the time I heard about the raid on her chicken house, the feed store in Angelo only had seven baby chicks left, and one of them was dying."

We paused and greeted the citizens coming for their mail. Once the interruptions ended, he continued, "Wife and I kept the chicks in the house. Like to run us crazy peeping all the time. But when they were big enough to sex, five of them turned out to be roosters, leaving only one pullet." So, he says, "I placed the first two on a hobby farm that had two hens, my sidekick Cresencio put his in his freezer, and a trusty over at the jail in Angelo slipped one in the jailyard as a mate for an old hen."

Sounded like his Christian charity had turned into a scheme to be rid of a bunch of noisy roosters. Certainly no sign of good faith to overstock a hobby farmer with two roosters to go with two hens, and certainly a betrayal of trust slipping a rooster in the jailyard to crow his lungs out on a Sunday morning and to awaken Saturday night prisoners incarcerated to sleep off the immoderate use of liquid refreshments.

Also made me nervous to even think about Cresencio butchering a fryer for his freezer. A fortnight before the national press reported that an animal rights group had stopped the Maryland National Guard from training recruits to dress a chicken on the battlefield, opening a complicated case. First of all, The Geneva Accord, to my knowledge, does not cover soldiers living off the countryside. Second, chickens are cannibals. Tilt their rations in the slightest and the large will eat the small. In all, so such high-minded dedication to the rights of animals over the survival of starved infantryman, the question must be further addressed how to rank the rights of animals willing to eat each other.

Furthermore, Cresencio Rodriguez is the pastor of a church too small to keep him in fried chicken. The pen mates of the frozen fryer are living in splendor on a play farm and right out the door of a jailer's kitchen overflowing with tasty scraps. The Robin Hood guy may have oversold his clients on roosters, but until he places the last one, he is not going to let the rooster starve, like the mystic order of animal rights is willing to plot for the soldiers in the Maryland National Guard.

But back to the post office. I told him he might check down the street from my town house for a rooster placement. The fellow living in the pink house on the right-hand side of the street keeps a menagerie of staked billy goats and free-ranging chickens. However, to be sure not to ask the neighbors for directions. Last week the goat herder drew 44 buzzards into town to join him in the final stages of an outdoor goat-butchering ending in the trash barrel. (I'm choosing delicacy here over blurting out the truth.) "Things are mighty emotional in that part of town," was how I left it with "Robin Hood."

Sure as you sign up to be an ambulance driver or a volunteer fireman, the siren will blow right in the middle of the news or a football game. Not many communities can boast of two Robin Hoods. I haven't heard if the animal rights folks have caught Cresencio. But if they do hit town, the goat herders had better lie low ...

October 19, 2000

Ground departure from Philadelphia International Airport offers such standard choices as cabs, rail transit, private vehicles, rent cars, limousines, and helicopter. Interstate 95 going north and south moves motorists into the flow of traffic at rates of speed from a near standstill to 80 miles per hour, depending on the time of day. Trains whisk the more prudent and patient passengers into the city some 20 miles away in 45 minutes. The minute minority riding helicopters and limousines look so far removed from the rest of us, they probably float into town among fluffy clouds to gently alight at their doorsteps.

It took me about an hour to make up my mind how to depart after landing there three weeks ago. The time change from Central to Eastern is one deterrent to making a decision. The other is waking up in the provincial peace of Mertzon next door to Jimmy Harkey's rooster crowing to disembark six hours later in mobs of humanity bounding up concourses, wheels screaming on roller-board suitcases in a race against time that'd overmatch a timekeeper for an Olympic meet.

Airport facilities have undergone extensive changes. All the food services and shops were concentrated between B and C terminals instead of being in the central area. The biggest improvement, however, was a long line of white cane-bottomed rocking chairs all down one side of the terminal, reaching into enclaves overlooking the runway.

Mothers packing babies should have been the principal patrons of the rockers, and a few chairs were occupied by members of the diaper and junior league set. However, to my surprise, the so-called "road warriors," the businessmen just seen striding off the plane, intent on cell phone conversations, sat rocking quietly, retired to the sidelines, expense accounts on hold, indifferent to briefcases or telephones.

Watching this strange scene made my eyes mist. "Somebody like President Jimmy Carter must have inspired putting rocking chairs in terminals," I thought. "Mr. Carter believes in peace and decency. It's bound to be Ol' Jim's influence, as the rest of our leaders leaned more toward battleships and bombers than they did rocking chairs and relaxing."

Philadelphia was our nation's capital for the last decade of the 18th century. Two hundred years apparently are enough time to recover from the event, as I am nearly sure the city is called "The City of Brotherly Love." The reason for the uncertainty is that on the train into town a brother swiped another brother deep into his short ribs boarding the car with his umbrella tip. Had the sister acting as conductor not wedged her 200 pounds between them, all symptoms of brotherhood would have dissolved into a fight.

(Mertzon's new motto is "Bountiful Bermuda," named after our abundant weekend yard sales. In mid-July, Mertzon held 45 yard sales on a Saturday, or one sale for every 17 persons in town.)

My reservations were at the Thomas Bond house on Walnut Street in the historic district. The four-story colonial brick building was the home of Doctor Bond in 1769. He helped found the first hospital in the Americas. Must have had a big family, as eight of the 12 bedrooms were named for his children.

Mine was the Thomas Bond Jr. quarters, furnished with a big four-poster bed and heated by a marble framed fireplace converted to natural gas. Floor to ceiling bookshelves took up all one side of the fireplace. A quick audit of the books favored condensed Reader's Digest volumes 10 to one over selections going back to the 19th century. Next to the shelves facing the wall was a handsome cherrywood desk supplied with stationery and postcards. The dark wood gleamed and the gold-plated hardware completed the opulent scheme.

My imagination focused on the fake logs glowing in the fireplace. Dr. Bond was a friend of Benjamin Franklin. The brochure on the coffee table linked him to the cause for independence in 1776. As private as second floors are, I visualized Mr. Franklin and the Doctor discussing politics. The politics of rebellion and honor, not the TV stuff we have to bear up under today. If the latest biography published on Benjamin Franklin is true, they might have discussed fast buggy horses, or a few other odds and ends, like the new barmaid at the City Tavern. Keep in mind, however, this is all my supposition, so don't go blabbing it around that our founding fathers were human.

Going to dinner was the big event of the day. A driving rain turned my rain jacket into a funnel to turn water down my waistline. I loved being wet for the first time in months. Rain dripped off my nose and fogged my glasses. Once served, I sat for a long time looking through the window over coffee, watching drops splatter on the sidewalk ...

October 26, 2000

For two days of the Philadelphia stay, light rain fell in intermittent showers. My walking shoes absorbed the water the first day. Shortgrass drouths dry leather to the same texture as the wrapping of the mummies entombed in the Great Pyramids. All my other rain gear, except one semi-waterproof jacket, hung in a closet back at the ranch, or lay discarded in the corner of the saddle house.

The bed and breakfast owner filled a rack of big umbrellas to lend customers, but my sloppy style of opening and closing one prohibits public display. Philadelphia links back to the Quakers. Nevertheless, the brotherhood of kindness must have filed the spikes off their umbrellas, or they'd have lost the faith. If you think a hotshot will make a Brangus cow kick, just poke a city guy in his posterior on the way home after a hard day with an umbrella tip, and you'll know why these northeastern boys make such good place kickers.

On the first morning, it took 18 extra blocks of walking to find the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. The more directions I received, the more I lost my way. Residents have had ample time to locate the place. Thomas Jefferson founded the Academy. The present building exceeds the size of an Aesopian cathedral in stature and space, and is 125 years old.

Once I found the Academy, I was no more inside before I was stricken by the grand stairway rising to the second floor and a vast hall spaced with huge gleaming white marble sculptures, setting off an aura of Greek or Roman antiquity. Truly a drama of marble characters mounted as if leading to a royal court or a papal throne. Other art pieces ranged from overwhelming wall-sized historical scenes down through a gradual dimension to the Impressionist age and a startling collection of Andy Warhol's modern art.

Downstairs, the lunch room featured the Warhol Campbell's Tomato Soup Can picture as the soup for the day and "the joke of the day." Serving canned soup in Philadelphia is as absurd as ordering a TV dinner for New Year's Day in the dining room of a Four Season's Hotel. The city's restaurants, as a matter of course, serve corn and fish chowders so rich and succulent, the steam off the bowl causes the taste buds to swirl in anticipation.

"Eat Canned Tomato Soup for Art's Sake," the menu read in bold letters. After finishing a salad plate of fresh tuna dressed in lime vinaigrette, I was better disposed to address this desperate attempt at humor and open insult to my palate. I whipped out my pen and wrote the following on the reverse side of the check (the chef was eight times my size): "Take the canned soup off the menu. You have five working days, counting today, to correct this offense."

The next stop took a six-dollar cab ride in a hard rain to reach the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art. Five minutes is a long wait for a cab in Philadelphia, even on a rainy day. Speed limits evidently aren't enforced. The cabbies plunge down the wet streets, splashing through busy intersections as if in a country lane. All the sights ever seen riding in the cramped back seat are the driver's license and the "no smoking" sign.

The imposing front entrance to the Fine Arts Museum back-dropped the scene in the movie "Rocky" when the star, Sylvester Stallone, ran up and down the stairs training for a fight. The front entrance must be only used to make movies and drink beer. The one time I climbed the stairway, the sole sign of human presence was shards of brown glass leading to tall locked doors bearing the disheartening sign, "Use Other Entrance."

The Museum's senior citizen's discount was skimpy. After seeing the portraits honoring the founding fathers topped in powdered wigs I figured the ticket office might respect white muzzles and gray sideburns. However, I received my money's worth taking a free tour to rooms hard to find. The original curator knew how to recreate a scene of, say, an ancient stone fountain in the center of an Italian monastery with every stone in place and only the monks missing, or the reception room of a rich Chinese ruler's home in the 13th century.

On the way back to the room, I no longer cared to sightsee. After a long day in museums, the exit signs, artistic foot stools, and quilted king size beds become more appealing. On the last lap, I jumped a gutter full of water to cross the street to the B and B. I'd forgotten how frightening high water can be.

November 2, 2000

The most direct route from Philadelphia to my destination in northern New Jersey uses the Garden State Turnpike. Two years before, I'd taken turns relieving a friend driving this turnpike connecting to New York City. At check-in, the rental car attendant noted "deep fingernail prints on the passenger side in the armrests and dashboard." Deep indentations made by my friend, no doubt, as I roared in from a ramp to blend a Mertzon, Texas driving style into a mayhem of motorized insanity unmatched anywhere on asphalt.

This time I ordered a road map of Pennsylvania and New Jersey to chart a new course beforehand. Communicating with the tourist bureaus broke down without ever beginning. I'd ring up an 800 number and say, "This is Monte Noelke down in Texas, Mertzon, Texas. Ma'am, I need to know a road to go from Philadelphia through the country to Waterloo, New Jersey to a poetry festival." (One lady said, "I've never heard of such a thing as a poultry session.")

Next, I'd explain that I knew to use the Turnpike. But I wanted to go through the rural Amish and Dutch area to see sights besides taillights and bumper stickers. Pennsylvania travel referred me back to New Jersey travel. The car rental clerk in Philadelphia said she'd been off the Turnpike once going to New York, but hadn't seen any Amish people around McDonald's.

In the end, I wheedled enough directions from all information booths to hit a highway skirting the Metro area, looping into the Pennsylvania Dutch region. After about 40 miles of the 140 miles to Waterloo, a few small cornfields appeared along the roadway. Stands selling fresh produce enjoyed a swarm of customers starved from living off franchise burgers. One lady left her car door open in her excitement to find real food. Closest I came to finding the Amish people, however, was a brochure at the fruit stand saying tours of authentic Amish homes are available at Lancaster, Pennsylvania some 50 miles off track.

The words "authentic such and such" and "real so and so" are tips to be on guard for a phony exhibit. After 40 linear miles of billboards advertising anAuthentic Swiss Village in Georgia or, say, 40 road signs hawking Real Texas Chili leading to El Paso, the mind rejects such labels and wonders if thevillage is authentic and the chili real, why it requires so much advertising.

All I wanted to see were those old guys dressed in black suits and matching hats sitting by ladies in black dresses and white bonnets, jigging along in a black-topped buggy pulled by a big black horse, oblivious to draft cards and public school ordinances. But I was too discouraged to ask for more directions. Highway signs were as scarce as the Amish, so I had to hurry on to Waterloo before dark overtook me.

The festival opened the next morning at nine. The first day brings high school competition and student day for the kids from New York City. By opening, the students mill in small groups dressed in dark black and purple costumes, adorned in gold ear, eyebrow and tongue baubles, giving off an aura of a strange tribe committed to dyeing their hair in wild streaks to complete the rites of passing through puberty. (Reader 's Digest wrote recently of a 19 year-old Swedish woman dying from "heavy cosmetic metals and tattoo ink poisoning.")

Inside the largest tent ever raised, the students cheered the poets from their respective schools. Parents and grandparents waved toward the stage from crowded chairs seating some 3000 souls. At intermission, to play for and to the audience, a rock band thundered into ultimate amplification, sending the mothers and dads scurrying for the concession stands and book tent to escape decibels of sound ricocheting off the tent poles.

I sought refuge farther away in a small tent where the 95 year-old poet laureate, Stanley Kunitz, read his work. Frail in his dotage yet sharp of mind, Mr. Kunitz's voice flowed forth in a rhythm of gentle words deep in contrast to the raging rock music one half mile away. The poet laureate is the best of all government posts. He or she can not start wars, raise taxes, or plunder our treasury. For thirty-eight thousand a year, they serve the cause of culture and art. Scorned by the power brokers and the spin doctors, held in disdain by blind legislators and administrators, the post of poet laureate is a thin link to decency.

For three more days, the tents filled with fans and poets sitting on steel chairs from eight in the morning until 10 at night. Soft rain fell on the green tent roofs. Removed from the sorrows of weather failure and dull markets, I felt at times the whole festival was being held in my behalf ...

November 9, 2000

The Waterloo poetry festival ended on a Sunday afternoon. After the patrons left, I walked down to the river to the canal diverted under a stone grist mill. Empty of people, Canada geese and black-headed swans swam closer to the banks. Red-headed ducks and black and white coots bobbed to the surface from dives for fish. Maple trees colored to the red hue of autumn reflected in the still water.

By one canal channel, controlled by a lock, an orange sign warned in ominous black letters, "SNAKES AND POISON IVY." I asked a employee if I was in danger on the trail. He laughed and said, "No, Mister, no danger at all. The sign is the only way we can keep people off the lock over a 20-foot deep channel." (Afterwards I recalled a roadside park joining a ranch in the South Texas cow jungle that discovered posting a four-feet square sign depicting a coiled rattlesnake stopped trespassers better than building a six-foot chain link fence.)

The next morning I headed west to turn south into a less settled area of Pennsylvania, trying to find more open country. Once off the Interstate, forested mountains of northeastern size arose, rough and isolated from the mass of humanity covering that part of the nation. Seemed the scattering of farms sold their crops in stands. However, such small plats of tilled land lacked the capacity to feed the huge urban population for one week even if the farmers ground up the roadside stands as filler to increase the volume of food.

But at no time on the trip did I suffer for good food. Every stop on the way supported at least one special restaurant run by an owner determined to defeat the franchise madness. All along, small markets and Italian places struggled against the onslaught of what one of my sons calls "the whatever burger charge." Without any difficulty I stayed in training on fresh baked breads and slices of provolone cheeses on kosher salami.

By early afternoon, I reached the Brandywine River Valley to see the home place of the famous Wyeth family's art collection. The museum's architect designed the building to bend in the same half circle as the Brandywine River. The pictures of N.C., the grandfather, Andrew, the son, and Jaime, the grandson, hang facing the very river the artists roamed, or used as a background.

Each generation perfected a specialty. N.C. Wyeth illustrated such classics as "Treasure Island" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Andrew painted forest scenes highlighting a lovely model to create his Helga series that stunned the public's imagination. And Jaime perhaps is best known for his painting of a glistening Chester White or Yorkshire hog. He spent four months toning his subject by feeding her sweet feed and playing classical music. I doubt if the model ever recovered her true presence. The letdown for the sow must have been dreadful to be shuttled back to the farrowing pens where the best of music barely reached the level of "Turkey in the Straw."

Also on exhibit was a room filled with political quilts dating from the 19th century up to President Carter, a time in our history when women had the right to quilt but not to vote. Quilts were backed with intricate piece-work. The likeness of the presidential candidates on a bandanna was sewed on the top, making a campaign novelty for Mr. Lincoln or General Grant. (I hope I am making it clear that bandanna handkerchiefs were used like campaign buttons.)

Without a magnifying glass, analyzing whether the stitching was done from loyalty to the cause or concession to the cause was impossible. Up to the quilt supporting President Carter( and there was a big gap in the exhibit after women won the right to vote under President Wilson in 1918), the stitches to the naked eye seemed to be pulled tight and determined as if under protest. But the one dedicated to Mr. Carter flashed in a gay green and yellow scene, looped in bright loose patches, showing old Jim's profile in the shape of a peanut.

This proves ladies prior to 1918 expressed the responsibilities of citizenship through needles and thread never to be recaptured by going to the voting booth. By the time a lady quilted six months, sewing on picture after picture of Grover Cleveland or Teddy Roosevelt, she must have felt devotion to the campaign even to the point of giving her blood from the needle pricks.

The Brandywine Museum closed at 5 p.m. The lady at the desk cautioned to be careful entering the five lanes of traffic leading back to Philadelphia. The guard at the door repeated the directions and exit number twice. I suppose I looked so much out of place, those kind souls felt responsible. A time or two in the late evening traffic rush, I shared their concern ...

November 16, 2000

Four weeks of calving heifers passed between the Philadelphia and New Jersey trip and the one just completed to Cuba. Starlight checks in the water lot counting the cows, and daylight afternoons penning the patients, cured the frayed nerves and erased the airport fatigue enough to prepare for a visit to one of the last countries practicing communism.

Further inspiration came from my friend Tony in Missouri, who suggested running a dairy would be a better way to control my wanderlust than running a beef cattle operation relying on calves to do the milking. Somewhere in the past, I remembered being in Canada and reading of Cuba buying Holstein cows from the Dominion. I knew the People to People Ambassador's Program offered a trip to Cuba in November. They were going to visit dairy farms.

"So why not take old Tony's advice," I thought, "and go to Cuba to learn to become a respected dairyman and drop the ruse of being a "Boss of the Plains" cow herder and the laughingstock of Washington D.C. and the state capital.

The sponsors' deadline was flexible as long as time remained to apply for a visa. Speed of modern technology (faxes, e-mail, etc.) plus the program's U.S. Treasury license to go to Cuba, expedited permission to join the group. One hitch was my connection to this newspaper. Bold print on the application form stated: "People to People can not obtain visas to Cuba for Journalists or Free Lance Writers." But thinking back, the last time I was recognized as a writer was in 1997 at a black bull sale in Glen Rose, Texas. After buying four bulls, the auctioneer noted my public profile in generous terms to match my generous bids. Unless that spellbinder showed up in Cuba, I felt safe listing my occupation as "agriculture-retired."

As no direct flights link Cuba to the mainland, the gathering for the initial briefing of the delegation required flying to Nassau in the Bahamas to make new connections on Cuba Air to Havana. President Eisenhower founded People to People to send Americans abroad to meet their counterparts in other countries. Teachers and MD's were already touring Cuba, exchanging information and pleasantries, the latter being the most appealing part of the program.

Passing through Customs in the Bahamas took less time than changing planes in Miami. A commuter line flies to Nassau. The commuter's gates are concealed downstairs underneath an escalator well. The sign faced the reverse direction of the other calls. I charged by the place three times before a lady curtly told me to read the signs. I didn't tell her I didn't wear rearview mirrors to look over my shoulder for gate changes. Working for an airline must give people sour stomachs; unless they have the advantage of a check-in counter as a buffer, they can be as surly as the oldtime railroad conductors.

The Bahamas is a reproduction of the posters in travel agency windows of Caribbean beaches. The islands' 2000 banks aren't advertised in travel agencies. The jugs offer offshore depository service for bigshot dealers needing to scrub their dough, or customers in the same fix because of disagreements with their country's tax code. For our financial preparation, we were warned that Cubans are not allowed to cash traveler's checks or honor credit cards issued by U.S. banks. What they hadn't told us was that dinner for two at the hotel in Nassau, or a snack with a friend at the bar, cost enough to make the numbers on a plastic Bank Americard charges stall in the airways to home base.

Bottle water, in the room or downstairs, cost three bucks for 12 ounces. I felt foolish treating the tap water with iodine tablets. Most likely the water was potable, but not only is being sick on the road miserable, divorce and grandchildren stories make a better conversation topic. I asked the wine steward at dinner what he thought made Americans sicker, the rum cocktails or the Nassau water? He laughed, "Sir, our rum distilled to one 150 proof proves perfectly safe to drink as long as our ice cubes aren't added to the glass." Later I passed by the bar and caught how bright and shiny the patrons' reflections were in the mirror. (In a back issue of Reader's Digest, fumes from 150 proof rum received a score of 10 as a hotel room and elevator disinfectant.)

The next morning at 9:30, the leaders held a briefing, explaining the customs of Cuba and proper behavior around the government officials. (Instead of saying Castro's name, we were supposed to stroke our chins, indicating "the whiskered one.") At the end, we stood up and gave our home states. Thirty-seven came from California. One gentleman was a Canadian; I was the lone stray from Texas. Questions dragged into overtime. We missed lunch, but made the afternoon flight to Havana on time…

November 23, 2000

The Havana terminal and customs office gleamed with waxed floors and polished rails. A quick check at a baggage scale showed my black roll-on bag weighed 16 pounds below the 44-pound maximum. My training weight metered plus two pounds from home. The Livestock Weekly on my business card was blotted in dark ink. My costume consisted of a pair of neutral colored cargo pants held up by a gray leather belt and a blue cotton travel shirt topped by a red bandanna. A slight tic in my right eyelid started flicking from anxiety. Just before time to go to the glassed window, an idiot broke from another line and screamed, "I don't want to go back to Cuba! I don't have or want any money!"

The guy behind poked me into gear. I expected any moment to see three roughshod policemen stamp the raging fool into the floor, but any of the Cuban faces visible remained impassive or laughed aloud. All the customs officer did was initial the date on the Cuban visa. No delay occurred through the baggage inspection area; no questions were asked about my occupation.

We mounted two buses to bounce through pot-holed streets dominated by bold male pedestrians teasing girls in bright red dresses on the sidewalks, reckless bicycle riders wobbling across lanes, and beeping car horns predating the Revolution of 1959. Two-story colonial houses trimmed in white scrolls on backgrounds of green and yellow tints straining to cover patches of bare plaster stood ready to crumble if from nothing else than the weight of the clotheslines hanging across the windows.

The hotel personnel met us in the lobby serving cocktails from trays. The Hotel Melia Havana proved to be more a palace than a hotel. We dined from buffets filled from the offerings of the generous kitchens of Spain, the designers and owners of the place. The American team scored high on table speed as we'd only eaten airport snacks since breakfast.

After traveling all day, my eyes drooped so bad, the lids wouldn't open wide enough to see over the upper lenses of my bifocals. A young guy asked if I was going out on the town. I told him, "Yes, I was going to check the skyline on the glass elevator rising to my room on the sixth floor."

We boarded Cuban Air on the assigned day, November 1. Boarding time, however, proved a vague number saying "1300," or 2 p.m., yet meaning we'd leave Nassau in the afternoon before dark for Havana. Under the auspices of The People to People Ambassador Program, passing from Bahamas customs took so little effort, we passed into the foreign departure area before I realized it.

The U.S. Treasury Department of Cuban Assets Control's license listing each of the delegates' names on the travel documents to Cuba carried a lot of weight to pass all immigration officials. For years, I wore the People to People nametag from the long-ago China trip until the safety pin holding the celluloid envelope sprung out of shape. I marched through such red tape jambs and suitcase snoops at Miami and Montreal as smooth as taking the water slide into a country club swimming pool.

We needed the influence in Cuba. Not to pass Cuban customs, but to pass back into the U.S. Our embargo forbids spending more than $183 daily per citizen on all goods and services, and a more serious restriction limits the total amount of goods to be brought back into the United States to $100 for personal use only. (The Treasury license removes the $183 limit, but the $100 one stands under all circumstances.)

Studying the delegation departing the Bahamas, strolling by the duty-free shop and glancing away from the cigars and rum — a dead giveaway for a smuggler — I'd have bet this was the launching of the biggest fermented cane and stogie smuggling expedition since bootleggers sailed from Havana in the 1920s to circumvent Prohibition. This isn't saying they resembled the thugs on the posters in the Post Office, but I will say that unless the likes of Little Red Riding hood were working for Miami Customs, they were going to be stuck for sure.

We boarded the plane up a steep stairway, leading through a door more like a hatch. Seats must have come from an old movie theater. Takeoff instructions omitted bringing the seat back to an upright position as part of the trick of staying upright took gripping the armrest. Lady in the middle seat wanted to know the carryon luggage restrictions. I told her the important part was the nature of the carry off policy.

"The Cuban Air Force lacks fuel and spare parts," I informed her. "Furthermore, the airline belongs to the State and is bound to be suffering the same shortages." She stayed quiet the rest of the flight, real quiet.

November 30, 2000

Mark four days of the Cuba trip as spent in and out of Havana. Tour operators working for the People to People Ambassador Program work the same way the agents do for the Museum of Natural History or the Smithsonian Institution. There's the selling phase and the actual trip itself. Trips into Communist countries are difficult to plan ahead, as different areas become off-limits for visitors, so no one on the American side knew for sure where we would be going once the Cubans took charge.

Much to my surprise, on the first morning in Havana, the 50-member delegation loaded right on the two buses on time, eager to go to the first professional meeting. Fifty people are enough to make up three tour groups with five standbys to spare. I was impressed. I don't think on any given day six percent of Mertzon's population could be loaded on a bus to San Angelo by 8 a.m. unless there was a football playoff in town or a major weather evacuation at hand.

Rows on the bus were assigned by our names written on notebook paper, hanging on the overhead rack. For the trip, and all day, I rode on the inside. "Good manners reserves aisle seats" is the law of the road. My mother's advice to be polite limits you to seeing the world from a bus over the driver's shoulder or under your seatmate's chin. Wheeling across the city, the only sights visible were when I was pitched high enough in the air over a particularly wide pothole to see the scenes on second-story balconies coming down.

We spent the morning at a tropical research station. The meeting opened on the patio off a reception room. Smart waitresses passed around rum drinks and mango nectars. With the open friendliness of the Americans and the polished demeanor of the hosts, the setting could have been anywhere in the Caribbean Islands. The embargo seemed remote, the animosity between the countries forgotten.

The group moved from the patio down a double lane of tall palms and hedges of flowering vines draped across plastered walls. The compound for the research center was an old military post dating before the 1890s War of Independence from Spain. Passing by a huge mirror, I made a hasty shirttail and zipper check, doing a neat pirouette to examine all sides of the body. I utilize mirrors wherever I land. Taking road attrition in small shots reduces the shock of getting home and facing the deterioration all at once.

We filed into a cramped, dreary classroom, fronted by a small stage with the usual screen and podium. Speakers and translators immediately launched a lecture on the fungus and bacteria being developed in the laboratory to inoculate plant seeds and increase crop production, thus to alleviate the food shortages and export deficiencies. The minute the director ended her presentation, the American professors began to hammer her with questions.

After the leader halted the interrogation, I asked the scholar in the next seat if fungi were the same thing as the "toadstools" growing on the ranch. He answered by saying, "Fungi are thallophytes; toads are amphibians, Mr. Noelke. I am unsure of the connection of 'stools' to either family." I brushed away his disgust with a deep feeling of gratitude that he wasn't marking his grade book. However, no science honors were necessary to understand that Cuba was out of fertilizer and needed the dough, or needed the credit to put it on the thumb to buy some abroad. (We'd already heard the economy was in such bad shape from defaulting on international loans that short-term money was costing 22 percent.)

The next stop at the actual laboratory lapsed into more questions and more scoffing by the American experts. Our leaders toned down the discussion. The grumpy seatmate from the lecture room asked on the way to the bus if Texas cowboys break horses by the whispering method. I told him the only cowboy I personally knew who whispered to man or horse was Jim Johnson, who used to work for the Quarter Circle Y. After being thrown so hard a couple of years ago that the thud of his body hitting the ground was audible on the closed circuit walkie-talkie clipped on his belt, ol' Jim whispered his regrets to his boss flying above him in an airplane. Before the story ended, the good doctor turned to another delegate to talk about his fungus research.

On my last pass by the big mirror, I felt so lonesome and left out, I shot a picture of my reflection. It would have been good for relations to have had a sheep or cow herder admit how many things we needed and couldn't afford. But no better than my story about Jim when over, I don't guess I'd of been the one to do the job.

December 7, 2000

One characteristic of all tour guides is to include shopping trips in the itinerary, especially if the guide gets a kickback from the storekeeper. In the first releases on the People to People Ambassador's trip to Cuba, no mention was made of one of the days in Havana being a chance to buy the native crafts and shop for rum and cigars. Adding air fares and hotel bills to markups for tourists makes a shot glass saying "Best swishes from Hawaii" or a white tea towel embroidered in red thread reading "Dry between the lines" run over the price of two ounces of gold.

The day we hit the shops, the moment we stepped from the bus, cigar salesmen swarmed the delegation. Buses are so obvious, no avenue of escape is possible. My plan was to hit the big line of bookstalls in the square to give the impression I dwelt on a higher plane than street bargains and sidewalk crooks. I won the first skirmish by shouting to the pests in Spanish, "my hearing aid batteries are weak." (Las baterias de mi audiophonos estan debil.) Also in my favor was an old codger sitting on an iron bench, laughing at my defense. An appreciative audience always improves a performance.

The two busloads of Americans moved on to an upper story shop in an old fort without ever looking back. The young scamps gave up after a policeman arrived. I sought refuge in the cathedral. Cubans do not have the right of assembly; however, in deference to Pope Paul's visit in 1998, restrictions were lifted on the practice of religion. Roman Catholicism is the principal faith, however, an African variation called "Santeria" is widely practiced in the homes. The saying goes that if you scratch a Cuban Catholic, you'll find Santeria below.

Lack of decorum inside the church beat the misbehavior of the public anywhere in the world. A young couple threw down backpacks to change clothes behind a large pillar; men and women alike passed by chewing on cigars, or taking a drag from a cigarette. I feared that any minute a huge beam or a rock wall was going to collapse on top of this infamy. "Better to brave the street than to test the patience of the Heavenly Father," I decided.

Outside, I joined one of the American groups headed for the National Museum. They were easy to trail in the smoke stream off the freshly fired stogies. A flood of tears kept a bandanna over my mouth wet enough to prevent suffocation. (No-smoking zones are unknown in Cuba.) Inside the museum, I told a lady guarding a room of horse-drawn coaches to skip fumigating the cushions for moths next spring as the quality of the cigars burning in the room would give protection for two seasons.

Next door, a glass case held a spur lost by a Texan in the Battle of San Juan Hill. Many of the troops lost more than a spur from a yellow fever epidemic, so I had to hope the old boy had made it home with his other spur. The lost spur had a two-inch rowel mounted on a silver-plated gooseneck shank. Be my bet the boy was shot down off his horse looking for his lost spur. The guides ignored questions about San Juan Hill. Anti-American feeling by the government must forbid the subject, or maybe the guides didn't know the story.

Shopping forays dragged the day into a sudden realization that we had to be back to the hotel to dress for a reception at the U.S. Embassy. Dress code at the briefing stated "causal business attire is acceptable; no shorts or sandals at the Embassy." We arrived by taxi at our appointed hour. Guards opened the doors to a sparkling crystal chandelier salon equal to any grand ballroom in the world's castles. The purpose for the elegance was that in 1941, President Roosevelt ordered the place built for a retreat. The lady at the head of the receiving line was indeed of ambassador rank and stature, yet in Cuba she was only a minister there under the auspices of the Swiss government.

After drinks, we sat down for a briefing of the situation. The salient fact was that the U.S. agreed in 1994 to allow 20,000 Cubans to emigrate to our shores. Five hundred thousand entered the lottery. Thus, unlike any other foreign problems, our country must cushion against causing a mass exodus across the sea. Much more was discussed, but the threat of all these people fleeing, and the tragic impact of their confinement in a totalitarian state, overrode the rest of the discussion.

As final as the lights dimming in a club, we were dismissed. Long lines of taxis whisked us back to the hotel. Out the cab window, Havana looked much more serious after hearing the ambassador. "This country is in shambles," I thought. "Death or Socialism," Castro's slogans read. Darkened by the talk, it sounded like "death" had won ...

December 14, 2000

Please pay close attention to the story of my last night in Havana, a Saturday night, or you will have the wrong impression. Foremost, keep in mind that the Ambassador's program scheduled all of the arrangements. The itinerary stated in innocuous terms, "An opportunity to study the pre-Revolutionary culture of Havana will be offered by going to the 'Tropicana,' a nightclub extravaganza in existence since 1939."

Before the news reaches Mertzon that I was at a fleshpot over in Cuba every night, nothing in those words implied the delegation was going to be led into an open-air, elevated floor show featuring 100 long-legged gals kicking over their heads. One hundred long-legged gals dancing in costumes brief enough to make a bikini seem as big as a hoop skirt. Make further note that the ringside seats were no more comfortable than the back row. I moved down closer to hear the music better. I found premium seats as hard as the cheaper ones, plus the bouncer fusses if you rest your chin on the edge of the stage.

The next morning, culture studies switched to a professional meeting in the San Juan Valley three hours away from Havana. Located in a national park, 1000 ex-farmers and families had been moved to live in a huge apartment complex. We were told the farmers experimented with growing tobacco and coffee and worked in forestry projects on park lands. The most likely scenario, however, was that the farmers had been kicked off the land and were maintaining the park roads and facilities. After seeing the chaos of a million Chinese removed from Beijing to Lower Mongolia and one half million citizens being shipped from Jakarta in Indonesia to the wilds of New Guinea, my hunch is these displaced families prove the hardships of a totalitarian regime.

Walking around while the delegation visited an apartment, I talked to a young man carrying a fighting rooster in a sack on his back. He liked living in the complex over a farm. He assured me his family had more food than the people in Havana from the gardens and the open acres in the park. The Americans descending upon us made him fidgety. A delegate wearing a Che Guevara beret approached before he could retreat. This "Che" costumed fellow demanded to know the sack's contents. I intervened and answered, "Un gallo fino," or "a fighting rooster." "Che" wanted to photograph the rooster until I warned that the cocks wear razor-sharp blades on the feet, honed to an edge that'd slash a man's shutter finger to the bone. Satisfied, "Che" saluted and left.

From Sunday on, we toured more of the outlands. Stood on the farming sites approved for public viewing by the State, like pathetic chicken hatcheries and dreary packing sheds. We saw dark-hided Vietnamese water buffaloes imported to cover Castro's blunder of buying Canadian Holsteins to move to the tropics. (He planned on air conditioning the dairies.) We caught glimpses of the scrawny native cattle, weighing 300 pounds at yearling age. (Citizens caught butchering a beef without the State's permission face five years' jail time.) Time-shattered paper mills closed from lack of parts or capital. Nuclear generators left uncompleted from the 1992 exodus of Russian capital. Yet we all stood around smiling and asking polite questions.

The Castro myth ended after a guide showed her food ration book to the delegation. (It would take an international court to settle the moment the guides shut off propaganda and start hustling for tips.) Cheerfully, she admitted adults are allowed monthly rations of six pounds of rice, six pounds of beans, six eggs and five pounds of sugar, plus one tube of toothpaste and a bar of soap every two months.

Late that same evening, we stopped at a state-owned "peso store." Dim lighting added to the gloom of the sparsely stocked shelves. Unable to hear the clerk interviewed, I found a blackboard on the projected arrival of the month's allotment. Delivery on rice and beans, the staples of the Cubans' diet, were two weeks away. The space for eggs and oils was blank. The one chicken per child up to 12 years of age was postponed to next month.

Before boarding the bus, the guides defended rationing by explaining that workers able to earn dollars bought whatever they wanted in the more expensive "dollar stores." Unintentionally, she clarified why a professor of etymology hustled a carnival game at a tourist spot. Also, why doctors covet jobs in resort hotels and why Elian Gonzales' father worked in a resort hotel. Made clear, too, why tour guides are so fat and sassy from the tips they receive.

Back on board, people slept rocked by the rhythm of the road. Out the window, darkness allowed candlepower light to peep from stained glass panes. Stunned, I calculated how close I came to consuming two months' ration in the past eight days. How smooth the spiel flowed to this point. We Americans live in such grand abundance, we can't even recognize poverty staring us in the face.

December 21, 2000

Yesterday, I parked in downtown San Angelo in the exact space I used in the 1950s to go inside to borrow money from the San Angelo National Bank. Down the street heading north were two more banks financing herders as dry and broke as I was in those days. Fifteen or so blocks away across town, a big wool house and loan company carried more ranch customers through the horrible drouth. From there the PCA., the Land Bank and jugs in the outlying areas held the line. Fit in the insurance companies and federal disaster relief, and you have the full picture.

Yesterday, it wasn't possible to renew chattels inside. Insurance brokers occupy the main floor. Little goes on in the upper stories. There is a San Angelo National Bank in town, but not the old one that sold twice and eventually became a Chase holding bank.

I lowered the windows on the pickup. The sidewalks were empty except for a skateboarding kids or two. Across the street, the old jewelry store window flashed a huge yellow liquidation sign. Warehouse doors blocked the wall of a long-ago bootmaker's shop, later a loading dock for a busy variety store, McClellan's.

On past the warehouse doors, now out of date renewal by the telephone company property erased every trace of the once boisterous bar, "The We Know How Cafe" — a very popular watering spot for dime a glass beer and nickel apiece boiled egg patrons of the mid-century. On the 180-day cycle of financial life, "The We Know How" reduced the trauma of heading back to the ranch before lunch. Toward the end of the Big Drouth, ranchers and jugkeepers alike sought solace in the malt-soaked aura of scratched captain's chairs and beat up oak tables. Fifty cents went a long ways in "The We Know How." I never knew the origin of the name.

All I lacked to finish my town errands was a battery for my travel watch from the jewelry store before the big bank closed around the corner. The big bank concerned money controlled in a trust and the battery concerned catching airplanes on time.

Startled from the reverie of the past, I rushed across the street and forked over five dollars for the battery and tore back to the pickup like I really meant to attend to banking at hand. Instead of backing out, I remained in the cool shade of the old building.

Then the truth hit: "I don't know how to deal with those people. Trust or no trust instrument, I am going close those accounts. And to speed the process, I am going to the southside branch on the way home."

I plopped in the empty chair at the first manned desk and stated my intention to close the accounts by passing over the file containing the trust history and deposit slips. The lady responded by ignoring the file and asking for my social security number to open her computer. Next contact in this chill of a depot agent's air, she wanted to see my driver's license. I handed the license over. She faced the monitor screen; I faced the near-empty lobby.

Her computer went down at mid-point. I was requested to sign a affidavit of receipt of funds on a piece of lined notebook paper. After that, she arose to have the cashier checks signed by a vice president. I squirmed a bit as I had sat longer without removing my hat or exchanging a pleasantry at a lady's desk than I had in my entire life. I expected any moment for my late mother to storm up from behind and cut off the crown of my straw hat in the slash of a butcher knife.

In a short time she returned, followed by a bank officer who knew how to shake hands and identify himself by name. He opened by asking, "Are you moving this money, Mr. Noelke, because of rates?"

Pause for a bit of sidelight, please: Etymologists prove under high powered magnification that spiders do actually give a big smile upon catching a fat fly in their web. Psychologists know a lifetime of subservience holds back the same smile in reserve in humans.

Looking Mr. So and So full face, I replied, "No, it is not the rates, it is the service. I shouldn't have ever walked inside this huge bank in the first place. I don't like tellers who never say good morning. I don't like doing business in an atmosphere as cold as Wal-Mart or K-Mart. And I don't like a giant moving into town and going counter to every facet of what the culture of the Southwest means to me."

I strode out the door exhilarated to be free. Good judgment says for a herder to never burn a bridge leading to a source of credit, but sometimes judgment has to be pushed aside to allow for a passion of the past to rule your being.

July 8, 1999

Feed trucks still run through Mertzon heading west on Highway 67. Now and then a gooseneck load goes by on sale days at the auction, signaling some old boy is cutting his herd down again. The rattle of the tailgates and the singing of the tire treads on those ominous wagons cut deeper than the sight of a funeral procession. The ones of us listening know somewhere a heartsick hombre and his mate are watching the skies part and miss their place.

Moisture conditions are spotted in the Mertzon area. Keeping records on the outfit on the highway became so tedious, adding on the tenths to one-hundredths of an inch, I simplified the bookkeeping by using the letter S for showers and WB for wet bugs. The wet bug designation idea developed after I discovered all the tubes were going to catch down there were what we call "rain gauge beetles."

The fellow who works up here at the ranch keeps a police scanner on at night. First thing early of morning, he relays the storm reports from the sheriff's patrol. We don't pay any attention to crime as man's misbehavior is insignificant compared to drouths. The officers locate flooding highways or baseball-size hailstones by the big sign on the entrance to Goat Whisker's the Younger's ranch, or the townsite of Barnhart. For the first five years of this drouth we'd be plenty excited until the sun came up and revealed the rain had fallen farther west or north of us.

In the first stages of the dry spell, I called the recording at the weather station and the USDA market report every morning from San Angelo. Last year during hunting season, one of my sons came in the kitchen and said, "Dad, if that was Uncle Walter you were talking to, I'd have liked to have said hello." (My brother and I converse two or three times a week on the weather and the market.) I don't remember my reply, but I sure do remember being startled into realizing I was talking back to both of those tape recordings.

After my son left for his hunting blind, I ran a test on the market report. I called the reporter by her first name. Set right in disagreeing in a strident voice on the quotes on the cows I'd seen sell on Thursday just like the lady was on the wire. I performed worse on the weather tape. Ended up calling the weatherman at the end of the long range forecast "Old Short Stuff" and slammed down the phone before I remembered I was running a test.

The old cowboy who lived next door in Mertzon for a long time kept the cemetery after he retired. (I've written this story before, but I am going to make it better this time.) Things were hard then, too. The cemetery association furnished a mower worth 35 bucks on a strong market. Shufford Masters — and that was his real name — had coiled lots of ropes in his time. He had a couple of fingers severed as proof. However, "starter rope" to Shufford meant doubling a 36-thread manila and pulling it off of a balky bull or a sullen cow's rear.

In the summer, he cut his yard after he finished mowing at the cemetery. Late in the evening at Merton after the kids go to supper, the town is quiet, so Shufford's depreciation of the lawnmower reached over in my backyard. "You little John Brown Sapsucker of a two-bit brown-headed scissors-billed ..."

Then the motor would pop and run long enough for him to drop the starter rope. "I ought to stomp yore rusty red frame into the mother earth," meant he was going down to one of our neighbors for help.

Alone on that fateful morning, I worried I might throw the telephone against the wall, or have a cussing fit like Shufford matching his lawnmower to a fight. Took the rest of deer season to taper of calling the weather station and the market reporter.

All last week, I checked on the section 201 act against imported lamb at the ASI office in Denver to see whether the President had signed the deal. I did real well until one evening the message reported the President was in Europe, and wasn't expected to act over the weekend.

I lost all restraint: "Well, by gawd, looks like the Arkansas traveler could stay at the White House long enough to give us time to sell our lambs before the needlegrass and heat cook their hides." And then a voice said, "I beg your pardon. Did you need to talk to an operator?"

The lady coming on the line may cure me of talking back to tapes. Going to be hard to stay off the air, however, faced by the Aussies' and New Zealanders stealing our market ...

July 1, 1999

Alibis have good and bad seasons just like crops and stock markets. The star-studded collection of all-time excuse makers on the Potomac fall some sessions, only to rebound the next in a spellbinding row of successes only to be surpassed by the master snake charmers of India.

Tax dodgers and husbands and wives awaken one morning to find they are out of material. I am going to have to stop counting sheep just like I stopped roping. After 50 years, I began to bore myself blaming the dust in the pens for being off 50 head and the wind for having to throw eight extra loops before catching a front foot.

Developments on the ranch scene stay static. For example, just last week, a Mexican cowboy told his boss he needed a week off in July to go to Mexico City for a haircut. Seems he made a promise to los santos in April that if the Border Patrol didn't arrest his niece before her baby was born in the U.S. this spring, he'd go without a haircut until he was able to make a pilgrimage to Mexico City.

His presentation was professional. The airline employing his son connects to Mexico City and offers big discounts to family members. Haircuts can be arranged on short notice on the cathedral steps in Mexico City. If ranch business becomes urgent in July, he assured his boss, only one day off would be necessary to fly down and fly back from the Federal. And last, his prayers had been answered, as his niece had given birth to a fine new citizen of the United States on May 6 of some eight pounds and a few ounces without being so much as questioned by the Border Patrol.

In all the years of working imported labor, I had never heard such a convincing excuse for time off to go to Mexico. Most likely every leg of his case had been ruled in his favor by the federal court system. Look, too, at the man's indisputable honor. First, keeping his vow to his protectors — los santos. Second, further proving his loyalty by assuring his boss that if a crisis arose at the ranch, he would make the round trip from San Antonio, Texas to Mexico City in one day. (This is proof he believes in miracles, as changing planes in Mexico City is more complicated than mapping an excursion through the Pentagon in Washington during a blackout.) And in his wrapup, showing he was a law-abiding person by only praying, not obstructing, the path of justice to protect his then-pregnant niece.

Asked for my opinion on how to handle the situation, I recommended he be given his Christmas bonus six months ahead to avoid the inevitable advance to pay for such incidentals as the discounted fare to Mexico, the full fare on a taxi from the airport, and the price of a haircut on the cathedral steps.

After a bit more thought, I suggested giving him the two weeks, but marking him off the payroll for two more weeks. If he is like 99.47 percent of the Mexican cowboys, he isn't going to make it back to the ranch on time, so why not strike July, and have him home in time to wean the calves in August? My final advice was to slip a pair of barber scissors and a shaving mirror in the bunkhouse bathroom in case he needed to do a bit of primping before taking his long plane ride.

A long time ago, a college professor tipped me off how to handle the sick grandmother stories occurring before shearing and shipping. He told his students at the first class to advise their grandmothers to be careful before six weeks' and final exams, and to be further cautious the day after classes take up from the holidays, as many a dear old lady's illness conflicted with university schedules.

But when I used the professor's plan, somewhere in the translation from the English mind to the Spanish language, they decided I knew beforehand their grandmothers were going to be sick; so untimely furloughs to Mexico increased, instead of being reduced by my ploy.

The best trick, it turned out, was when they wanted to go home, the sooner I ticketed them on the bus headed south, the better chance I had of keeping my help and my dignity.

The timing looks favorable for the cowboy to make his pilgrimage to Mexico City. June rains put his boss in a good humor. The christening of the new baby can be postponed until he has his hair cut in Mexico. If he doesn't run into a lot of uncles in the capital, he'll be back at the ranch in August, ready to start rebuilding another Christmas bonus and a new story for a winter vacation.

June 24, 1999

A cowboy named Elton Howard imitated ewes bleating and calves bawling better than any of the other hands at the old ranch. He had plenty of time to practice as he worked for the family from 1946 up into the 1980s. The pastures he looked after are a slick ledge rock country, covered with juniper cedars entwined in oak shinnery and prickly pear cactus. Such inhospitable terrain for man and his horse requires all the tricks of the trade. Calling runaway lambs back to their mothers, or making a cow hunt for her baby, were just some of Elton's specialties. On many occasions, he gathered large scopes of country alone.

Modern-day livestock, however, work differently than the woolies and hollow horns of those days. This generation of sack-trained animals expects to be fed very time they are untracked. Bonded to feed wagons, the helpless old sisters resist being driven without range cubes strewn along the road to the corral.

Not long ago, a South Texas cowboy explained the reason one third of the strays in last fall's floods in his country were unbranded (23,000 head drowned). He claimed the mavericks among these thousands of head of strayed cattle were the ones who refused to follow a pickup to the pens, thus were left without a hot iron or a vaccinating needle ever touching their hides.

Don't misunderstand; the cow jungle has always been hard to gather. In other times, the likes of such expert wild cow hunters as David Leiberman and Ed Cassain roped unbranded bulls having more rings on their horns than the trunks of an oak tree. But stories today aren't about the Daves and Eds or the Eltons. All over the shortgrass country and the cow jungle, the whir of helicopter propellers and the grind of four-wheeler gears mark the roundup scenes.

Woe be it to old fashioned outfits buying cattle never driven on horseback. The other morning, I had a small dose of intermingling the machine age and the horse age. Three of us set out to gather three sections of mesquite thickets sparse enough in a few parts to ride through in a trot without being dragged off by a limb. In one of those clear spots, I rode up on a young bull we bought last winter. He'd only been in our pens at calf marking. Upon seeing my horse, he jumped up and bellowed the bawl cattle do from a hot dose of antibiotic.

He pawed the ground and snuffed in his own dust. I took down my rope. The rope had been coiled so long from disuse it flew apart the way the starter spring on a gasoline engine comes free. The bull turned his head from one direction to the other, rumbling a bellow he used to warn bulls across fences how fierce he was.

The cows arose and stood motionless; calves stretched and expressed inexperience by moving toward the mothers. The bull threw his head down and swung his body aligned in my direction. I hit my rope against my chaps. I warned him he'd better mind his manners, or he'd be given a free ride on the end of my rope to the pens, smoking from the hair burning off his black hide against mother earth. (No doubt this bull was stupid, but not dumb enough to believe a graybeard sitting in a saddle with a nylon rope flared out in his lap was going to be able to pick up his heels.)

Perhaps the exertion caused me to clear my throat. Presto, the bull wheeled and the cows responded by throwing up their tails and striking a run toward the windmill. He hit a trot and followed right in behind them.

Once the rest of the cattle were gathered, every time the bull looked back, I cleared my throat. I must have updated one of Elton's tricks by accidentally imitating a four-wheeler changing gears, or maybe reproducing the sound of a U-joint hitting the housing. The gentle cows' spooking stems from the unfenced road going through the pasture. Oil transports speed at breakneck speeds, cattle or no cattle in the road. Several times, we witnessed the drivers gearing down to allow livestock time to escape.

Scores of high school graduates are interviewed every spring without a one wanting to be a cowboy. Summer help, once taken for granted, no longer exists to my knowledge. On the odd days I help round up, I forget the old days. The clock, the weather, and the lunch pail become too important to hold a history class.

June 17, 1999

Two years ago, the doctor who looked after my eight kids formed a group to lunch each Tuesday in San Angelo. Being one of the big novelties in all parts of the Wool Capital, it was no surprise he chose a slate of unusual characters. In a previous report, I profiled the membership. For now, just take my word they are an odd assortment of humanity, ranging from a mixture of herders and auction owners to a retired state senator, on to a builder and an insurance man, to a fertilizer expert of wide travels.

All were chosen by Doc in the initial organization. I came in later to lend stability to the club that the doctor had chosen to name by then, "The Miscreants" - a most puzzling choice of titles. His diction is deft and correct, however. The third meaning in the first definition of "miscreant" is "base," like base behavior. Most likely, his choice of miscreant developed from one of the members eating a hot dog as a main course. A gustatory offense, I must add, only equaled by live goldfish eaters and rutabaga fanatics.

Tuesdays became very important. I rushed through errands and postponed appointments to reach the meetings. Folks staring at us in the dining room caused discomfort at first. Other diners eavesdropping on our conversations 10 tables away violated my sense of privacy. Also, the waiters disappearing for periods long enough to make jury duty at fall court was trying.

Nevertheless, caught up in the conversation, I began to be as slow at eating as the waiters were at serving the food. Often I founf myself alone finishing a cup of coffee, staring at the chairs vacated minutes before by my brothers, stricken by thoughts of the strong bonds of my fellow Miscreants, and touched to near tears over these new and loyal friends.

Two weeks ago on a trip out to the Davis Mountains, I missed a meeting. Driving over the desert expanses of greasewoods and alkali flats allows plenty of time to think. Other trips, I thought, had made me miss luncheons before, yet not once had voice mail or e-mail recorded an inquiry of my whereabouts from the Miscreant circle. For all they knew, I could have been lying out on this cursed piece of dry ground from a horse accident for Tuesdays on end.

The Chihuahua Desert going west toward the mountains fosters an emptying of soul and being. Coyotes do howl out there. Not only howl, but devour with an insatiable appetite the flocks of man. Discouraging words are uttered out there, too. Boots and saddles are hung in empty corrals. And the deer and the antelope play; but they'd better keep their playgrounds off the ranges of the mountain lions, or the recesses will have sad endings.

At Fort Davis, I stopped at the pioneer cemetery. A one-pedestrian concrete walkway leads to the plot. Hostile householders all but block the walk by backing wheelbarrows against the fence and poking shovel handles through the wires.

Talk about potter's field, or any literary depreciation of man's burying grounds, here it was in a mesquite-infested layout of four or five acres of vandalized tombstones, some marked only by native stones piled at the head of sunken graves. Two desperadoes killed in a gunfight and seven children buried in a common grave lost from diphtheria rated a call on a sign. Most of the faded dates on the few upright stones looked like the late 1800s. The most disturbing sight was a pile of shattered and broken bits of monuments that caused me to bolt and tear back to the car.

On the drive to a mountain lodge, the impact of the graveyard struck harder. I thought: "Gosh-a-mighty, 'Boothill' in Tombstone, Arizona isn't that lonely, and never was." Next, I remembered how my maternal grandfather always warned about ending up in an unmarked grave. Then I remembered seeing all those nameless mounds over in China, scattered helter-skelter, handy to where the person expired.

Checked intp the lodge, and stunned by the grim afternoon, I decided to test to see how loyal Doc and his Miscreants were before I really needed them. From a bedside table, I wrote each member the same message on a postcard, expressing a subtle need for cash: "Dear Brother, In case you want to reach me, I am checking out of Indian Lodge to move to an upstairs room downtown above 'The Javelina and Jalapeno Gift Shop.' The telephone number is under the gift shop's name. My room number will be scratched on the wall by the pay phone upstairs in case of trouble."

Days have passed at this writing, and no one has replied. True, I had the name of the store wrong. It's "The Javelina and Hollyhock." Jalapeno is the pepper every joint in Fort Davis puts on the plate to season everything from apricot jam to watermelon preserves.

June 10, 1999

Last fall, high winds did $3000 worth of damage to the wheel and tail of a 12-foot mill down on the highway. I know part of the history of that windmill. The Texas Highway Department paid Grandfather Noelke's estate to put in the watering in 1934 to compensate for the land cut off by the new highway. In the drouth of the Fifties, the well had to be deepened from 285 feet to 305 feet. A fumble-headed cable tool driller jackknifed the tower lowering it to the ground.

The Big Boss and myself spent a week borrowing sections of tower legs and braces from our neighbor's wrecked windmills. Best I can remember, the well driller assuaged his sorrow for dropping the tower by fishing in the dirt tank, waiting for the Boss and myself to find windmill parts.

At the time the storm hit last fall, the windmill watered 60 head of sheep and one saddle horse. All the cattle had been moved the year before because of the drouth. When the mill went down, the tank had enough water to last the sheep and the horse nine months.

On 60 nine-pound fleeces at sixty cents a pound and 60 head of 70-pound lambs at 80 cents, $3000 amortizes to a payoff date in the year 2075. The added worth of $25 a day for the horse, using the rent day workers charge on their mounts, might pay for the paper and pencil lead to figure the deal.

The way I found the incentive to repair the mill was to estimate the cost of replacing the same size tank, the same amount of water troughs, and the same depth and mill size. Including clearing off the brush and bedding the tanks and water troughs, the grand total came to $37,000.

Now, this wasn't going to be a deep well. Off the big draw going west toward the Goat Whisker's outfit, the Trinity sand is a little over 300 feet deep, or right on the border of what a 12-foot mill will lift, but more in the range of a 14-foot mill. Electricity was no longer an option. Due to the uncertainty over deregulation, the REA stopped running feeder lines to well locations.

Instead, the co-op offers solar panels at $14,000 big enough to run an electric pump. The panels, I understand, last for 10 years. Sunshine is a very reliable power source in the shortgrass country. Given big enough solar panels, we could blow all the transformers in a city twice the size of Houston and have enough extra voltage to short out Galveston.

The sun is so strong out here in July, we have to use a number 15 sunscreen inside the house to keep from burning from the reflection off the window panes. Thirty years ago, the citizens grew tired of pictures of frying eggs on the sidewalk. Heat waves so severe as to warp railroad rails might make the fourth page of a daily. Hailstones big enough to knock down rock fences might win the floor at the coffee house. But I don't think anyone ever listened when I mentioned the wind tearing up a windmill wheel.

One of my neighbors had an old style wheel on the ground. He's a hardheaded old dickens. He descends from a line of Englishmen having domes so hard they'd make a piece of Central Texas granite seem soft as a mush melon. But from long experience and practice, he knows how to be a good neighbor and sure knows about ranch and windmill disasters.

The classification "old style," however, turned out to be tricky. The Aermotor people, going back into the 1890s, eventually manufactured the first self-oiling windmill and the first tail to turn the wheel out of high winds. I wasn't able to find why there are two models of wheels, "old, old style" and "old style." I don't guess the Aermotor people realized we were going to be patching on their product into a new century way after parts were out of stock.

But as it ended up, my neighbor had the wrong model. Kind of left a bad taste in my mouth when I realized he was only in on the deal to the extent of his one odd-sized windmill wheel. Never knew him to draw light on a deal before. Had he pitched in 500 bucks it'd have helped a whole lot.

Where the digging is dirt or caliche, pipelines hooked into submersible pumps are the best solution. Windmills are still good for weak wells and remote locations. Used to take two generations to fence and water a ranch. I don't think that formula will work anymore. The way waterings cost and fence builders charge, we may be heading back to the days of open range and open river-front...

June 3, 1999

The front page of the May 17th edition of the San Angelo daily newspaper ran a picture of a deputy in Fort Stockton holding a Nile monitor lizard most likely born of parents from South Africa. So the story goes, the officer found the lizard underneath a lumberyard where he'd been hiding after being abandoned by a carnival group in March.

Meter deposit at the Chamber of Commerce helped the sheriff's department find the owner. However, by the time they located the carnival hand, he was in California out of reach of whatever regulations, if any, govern willfully abandoning Nile monitor lizards under lumberyards in Fort Stockton, Texas.

The guy cleaning my house threw the paper away before I clipped the story. I remember the lizard was four feet long and suffering from dehydration. Fort Stockton is west of the Pecos River. So you don't need a clipping of a lost Nile monitor lizard story to know he is going to be suffering from dehydration unless he hid in a sewer pipe, and I have already told you he was under a lumberyard.

Grolier's Encyclopedia wasn't much more helpful than the house cleaner who threw out the newspaper. The "M" section reads: "Nile monitor lizards live in South Africa. They lay their eggs on termite hills. Heat from hills decaying incubates the eggs." I already knew the fierce Komodo dragon, the largest monitor in the world, and by far the meanest beast on earth, laid her eggs up on a megapod bird's nest for the same reason. (Megapods are a large chicken-like bird. Their claws grow long to build a huge nest of tree limbs trashy enough to make a pack rat's home look like he's been studying basket weaving. Megapods nest on the ground and roost in trees, ranking them only a few notches above the monitor's on the scale of motherhood. At least megapods don't eat their young like monitor lizards do.)

In early spring, a spell of rattlesnakes hit here much worse than collecting run-away carnival lizards. Old grass and new growth in the yard reached such proportions, I had to mow around the house to be able to even see a snake. Running a mower in snake country takes a careful eye and steady hand on the throttle. Experienced gardeners refuse to work out of town. High school kids are too sleepy-headed to turn loose until the grass has been cut a few times. Fellow on the north side of San Angelo gives good money for rattlesnake skins, but he won't give a dime for one run over by a power mower.

On the fourth or fifth round of my mowing, a snakeskin lying by an old flower bed caused me to veer 12 feet off course and barely miss a hydrant. Thirty-five feet farther around the house, a medium-sized rattlesnake raced into a big clump of horehound.

Self protection and protection of property goes back to my greatest of great grandmothers. Once when she was up late watching for Comanches, the grandfather clock she brought to Texas from Mississippi as a wedding gift stopped ticking from a rattlesnake coiled around the striker. Being unwilling to shoot her clock, she clamped the snake in a set of fireplace tongs and hurled him into the fire, filling her cabin, I feel sure, with the pungency of roasting rattler.

But unlike Granny, I didn't reach for tongs; I rushed inside for my shotgun. Before the south side of the yard was cut, two much larger snakes crawled out from under the house right into the path of the mower. By then my nerves reached such high pitch, I was dodging the shadows from the netwire fence and cutting crisscross swaths more like a runaway mower instead of a guided one. Perhaps gripping the control bar too fight, or cutting the wheels too short, or both, brought the machine to a sputtering halt, choked down by its own fumes.

The lawnmower shop in San Angelo promised to have it running in 10 days. Having no other choice, I returned home and used the sidewalk. On day five after the lawnmower quit, I turned in this desk chair to find a rattlesnake coiled by the end of a roll-top desk. Cut off from a broom or shovel, I scarred the office baseboard chunking paperweights and ash trays at the snake. As soon as my breathing abated, I called a yard man to come out from Mertzon to cut the rest of the grass.

Counting the yard work and mower repair, I am one hundred and fifty bucks in the hole clearing off an opening around the house. Anytime I walk outside I never notice whether it's cloudy or not. I never take my eyes off the ground. First thing I do in the morning is pull on my boots. Shadows around this office look mighty threatening.

May 27, 1999

The gap widens every year between country people and city folks. Town-raised kids' only contract to the land is dad's hunting lease or granddad's deer blind. Men looking for steady ranch jobs are 60 years old or over. Families willing to live out of town are rare cases. School bus routes run down the pavement; rural mail routes serve farms on the rivers and subdivided land.

On many a day, were a recording of Gene Autry singing "Empty Saddles in the Old Corral" to come on out here about sundown, the lowest note I'd hit would be high enough to knock a Maria Callas tape off the disk. The older I become, the more maudlin I become about long-ago cowboys and saddle horses dead years ago.

Only select memories remain. The part about "Salty," or maybe it was "Pea Picker Dan" coming back from town a week late in the middle of the work, or "Chico" or "Chief" stumbling and falling on flat ground in the Clay Water Hole pasture fade from sight. Strong in focus is riding off before dawn in a bunch of wild men, striking a fast trot to beat the threat and the rising sun, free in spirit on a stout horse, laughing so hard at the odds of the life, breakfast was hard to hold own.

Instead of wasting time thinking of those days, I need to find a cure for being a cowboy. The last horse I have is stifled. The first horse trader I called was a young fellow over at Ozona. I explained I needed something easy to mount and certified to pass at least four of the five standards of equine sanity. Not a cutting horse or a roping horse, but a gentle pet able to stay under a 35-pound saddle and a 210-pound bulk of humanity fast on the way of becoming equal amounts of inertia.

He proved he understood the part of a graybeard needing a gentle horse by saying, "Yeah I know what you mean, Mr. Noelke, about taking a fall. Ol' Johnny such-and-such got in a horse wreck the other night at a roping at Rankin. Broke some ribs and wrenched his shoulders so bad his elbows are going to be out of line too much to ever rope again."

To regain my attention, he had to tap on his telephone. "Ol' Johnny such-and-such" and I are within months of the same age. Bad thing is our bones are the same age. I signed off as dignified as possible under the circumstances, sending my regards to his grandmother and the rest of his family.

The Department of Agriculture claims Texas leads the country in the 600,000 head of horses reported to be in the state. Every time there's a roping in the park at Mertzon, the figure seems low comparing the amount of custom trailers and fancy haltered horses under the big oak trees around the arena. Supposing the census is correct, from a half to a full percentage point of those four-legged dirt daubers ought to have enough sense to trust to pack an old herder around and across a bitterweed sheep operation to look after a few black cows.

Offers continue to come in to solve my problem. One high-rolling super salesman unloaded a black and white paint gelding over at the house on the highway last week that sent a chill of desperation to the base of my being. Fifty feet from the trailer gate, my father and grandfather pastured hundreds of heads of horses in bands of big chestnut mares and papered stallions.

Proud indeed they were of the "seven h" brand and the bloodlines of their riding stock. Grandfather and the Big Boss worshipped the very tracks those old bangtails made stamping out the grass in the spring and drinking the dirt tanks dry in the summer. And here stood a son and grandson of all that glorious record of horsedom, held in such low esteem as to be offered a black and white paint horse to ride in his dotage.

Other prospects ranged from a housebroken kid horse to an abandoned six year-old entering his third year of not being ridden, or even being penned. Before I had a chance to look at the kid horse, a dude wrangler bought him out at Fort Davis. According to his former owner, he was ideal for trail riding because he'd balk or throw a fit without another rider around. The rancher asked if I'd ever seen one like him. Without going into detail, I told him, "Yes, but I have seen more cowboys who had ridden together to talk than horses who suffered from 'manic loneliness.'"

I never thought about being on foot. I am going to be out at Fort Davis the end of May. Might be a good idea to check on the housebroke kid horse to see how well he's adjusted to community life to project into my future in case I have to move to town ...

May 20, 1999

This April marks the first time in seven years we haven't continued feeding on into May.

The bins had enough range cubes left after the first rains to keep calling the cattle together to breed; the old ewes were lambing on a self-limiting block. Days after the rains, the woolies started chasing after the green pickings. The blocks were left for the birds and raccoons to eat, concluding the final contribution to those freeloaders for the season.

However, the prolonged feeding seasons increase cattle's addiction to cottonseed meal. From calfhood, our cows bond to the spout of the auger off the bulk feeder. In the rush for a protein fix, the old sisters learn how to crease their tongues and open their throats to form a funnel up under the spout, kind like the guy who swallows swords at the circus stays in practice gargling whole olives after work. Sound of the starter motor and whir of the auger triggers an excessive flow of salvia in the galloping herd descending upon the truck. At the end of a run, the cowboy sitting in the driver's seat has looked down so many slobbering mouths, he's ready to tooth the cattle at the head gate of any size auction in the country.

The next shock after parking the feed wagon was opening the mail box on the first of May without a big feed bill waiting to be paid. All the feed on the Mertzon wool house bill was six sacks of oats for the saddle horses. Oats aren't really feed on this outfit. Bait is a more accurate classification. Just enough feed is spread down the troughs to trick them into coming in every morning. Major exertion for modern-day ranch horses is hopping up in the back of a trailer. A few pound coffee cans of grain are sufficient to keep an old pony in condition to brace himself for bumpy roads, or adjust for sharp curves.

The Big Boss received a 40-to-one return on every bucket of oats he bought. During the work, he allowed us to fuel the night horse on a gallon of oats to bring in 40 head of grass fat horses before daylight. His riding stock trained on the mesquite leaves bitten off on the way to work and the small amounts of grass at the noon hobbling.

My first of the month mail run wasn't dull. An insurance company billed me for a workman's comp payment and the liability insurance for the pickups in a row of figures that'd make the Secretary of the Treasury think his computer was stuck wide open. One of the better San Angelo machine shops, sponsors of a slate of greaseball mechanics, sent another startling claim of over $400 worth of front end work in which "Technician 4" received $272 for his labor.

Try as I might, I was unable to identify "Technician 4" in the scowling force of greasy mechanics rolling jacks across the floors, or suddenly appearing from under broken-down pickups on a roller board. The most technical thing I observed was the finetuning button on the volume control of the radios blaring on the work benches. Nevertheless, whoever number four was, he was technical enough to stick me for 272 bucks to fix the front end on a pickup doubtful of carrying a bid to $136 in a claiming race on a hot market.

Quite a stir is on about how to pass computers into the millennium. I didn't think to ask technician four while I had him hired what the chances were, if any, of our vehicles lasting to the beginning of the new century. One way to evaluate a ranch pickup after they are no longer listed in the blue book is to go by a junkyard for spare parts and not be able to find your year model because weeds have grown over such out of date models. Technician fours aren't necessary to know where you stand if the junkyard owner laughs in your face.

Word is out on us without being fingered by a junk dealer. For years, the eternal wail of us herders was that nobody understood how tough our business was. Today, salesmen flinch at the sound of the word "rancher." Like wives and girlfriends, they are catching on too well what's amiss on the grasslands.

One of the Angelo horse traders told a man working for me outright that he didn't handle horses cheap enough for us to buy, meaning we weren't in the league of his calf roping and barrel racing customers. Even though he is right, it sure stings to be scorned by a horse trader. Makes me understand better how bad old Ira Jones felt the time he was barred from going to any more chicken fights up at Robert Lee ...

May 13, 1999

Instead of saying, "We turned our bulls out with the cows the first part of February," we should say, "We turned our bulls loose on the countryside the first part of February." As long as I have been trailing black muley bulls under watergaps, over fences and cattleguards, down county lanes and railroad rights-of-way, we have never had as many fence-breaking cases as we have this season keeping these papered oxen in the pasture.

What time they weren't roaming the country, they were standing on the fence bellowing and threatening the neighboring bull in the rumbling bovine sounds that blooded sires use to express maleness. The pawed ground along the fencelines looked like the scooped-out pans we once called buffalo wallows.

Long strands of barbed wire and broken woven wire from these inglorious battles laid ready to entangle any four-legged beast. One particularly active warrior cut his left front ankle so severely in the barbed wire, he was retired the first week of breeding season to be converted from a $2700 investment to a total return of $798 of dressed meat off the rail of an Angelo packing plant. His half-brother was brought in five days later dragging a hind leg. Thirty bales of hay, 150 pounds of range cubes, and 250 cc of antibiotic later, he will be shipped as soon as the slaughtering restrictions on the medicine end. If the fever is gone from his injury, he might rail out the cost of his last confinement.

While the bulls are out with the cows — or better, away from the bull pasture — a one-strand electric fence has been strung on the inside of a 47-inch high woven wire fence, topped by three barbs. Short of yoking and hobbling these wandering beasts, a hot wire is the last resort.

For five years, we have had the most critical portion of the fence charged. But the electrified fence may be the reason my bulls don't respect ordinary linefences once they are turned out. The minute the electricity goes off, they know the difference. I suspect once they are away from the electric fence, freedom rings.

I know I reported when we bred those ferocious three-quarter black Brahman bulls, we worked them horseback in a waterlot fenced less than 40 inches high. The height was so unrelated to their jumping ability, those ring-eyed monsters never were able to decide where we wanted them, inside or out.

I was so terrified of the horns and the hooves of crossbred bulls that had they broken off a post or splintered a picket, the cracking sound alone would have been enough to put me in shock. Bystanders have advised for time immemorial "not to let that so-and-so bluff you." But most of that advice was passed through the planks of a strong two-by-twelve crowd pen, by an hombre holding a hotshot or a punch stick.

Be hard to say on which occasion the Big Boss was the most disappointed in the courage of his oldest son (me). But the time he drove up on a cowboy and myself standing on a round corral, dangling a catch rope inside, hoping to jerk it behind the tusks of a boar hog, comes closest to being the winner.

We'd lured the old hog off the railroad right-of-way by stringing out corn into the shipping pens. He'd never been anywhere in his long life that he wasn't able to break out of. The Boss drove off saying: "Gawd-a-mighty, I've raised a fisherman instead of a cowboy. Up on the river, Cal Johnson and Jim Bassham rope and tie down hawgs bigger than that one by themselves."

We have a couple of dozen calves every fall from a neighbor's bulls jumping outside fences. For awhile, he bred Herefords. We weaned 10 or 15 black baldie heifers every fall from his cattle. Last year, he switched over to a gray Brahman bull. Chances were high this humpy bull threw low birthweight calves.

The day I discovered the gray bull, I called my neighbor and asked if the Brahman would be out long enough for me to move the baldie heifers over next to him. I figured he'd be pleased about expanding his bloodlines to a three-way cross. He acted real cold to the idea. He hasn't been too neighborly since he learned we didn't bother vaccinating our cattle. Lots of time all this modern ranching stuff can be a big handicap.

The hollow horn association in Fort Worth opened a new hotline last week for members to report any disparaging comments they overhear about beef. Bulls ending up on the rail certainly qualify as beef, especially after the meat is cased into a thousand or so hotdogs. Nevertheless, if all this fence-wrecking and rounding up keeps taking place, I might as well turn myself in right now, because I am going to be plenty outspoken on the subject of fence-breaking bulls.

May 6, 1999

Buried in boxes by my desk are mementos from 15 years of travel. Newspapers written in the pidgin English of New Guinea and photographs of huge stones in England lie among menus from French restaurants and programs from Dallas concerts.

On a bookshelf, there's a gray piece of roofing slate from a walking trip in the Lake District in England; in a desk drawer, there's a carved cow bone that Argentine cowboys use to play a gambling game on saddle blankets. Arrogant, knife-fighting rascals, those dark-headed gauchos. Mean enough to eat horse meat, yet willing to give a guest a keepsake they'd packed for years in a saddle bag.

The bedroom closet holds a big accumulation of travel equipment. It falls four units short of controlling the world's supply of shaving kits and handy plastic pouches. The stash of mink oil boot dressings, 24-hour insect repellant, and double duty sun screens exceeds the combined inventory of Angelo's sporting goods stores.

Two bottom dresser drawers store cameras and binoculars. The longer the trips became, the harder I searched for lighter gear. At first I carried along a case full of lenses and cameras to shoot two kinds of film. After a few trips, I dropped the photographer's bag in favor of a lighter camera and a slimmer pair of binoculars to pack in a disgraceful army surplus gas mask pouch that must have been on the losing side of a war.

Lots of the horde is being saved until I need things like an air mattress that deflates every three hours, or a poncho to stay dry in a heavy mist. Folding utensils stowed in a mess kit from a long-ago island camping trip on St. Kitts are on reserve for emergency evacuation of the shortgrass country in the event the millennium closes down the area's grocery stores and hamburger joints. Three sizes of water flasks and a rusty capped bottle of water purifier are also on-ready in case the escape route goes south into Mexico.

On the closet floor, a rubber boot left from an Arctic trip is better for storing house slippers and tennis shoes than a shoe bag. The folding baggage cart, made obsolete by modern luggage, is on standby in case my roll-aboard suitcase needs to be sent to the shop for new bearings, or wheel alignment. The old cart brings back a lot of memories of how many pesos I saved in Mexico, propelling it across the cobblestones to the catcalls of the hundred so porters hustling the airport crowds. (Those damn kids can fleece you out of a dime a bag faster than a shuck comes off a fat tamale.)

The only orderly part of the closet is the five pairs of walking shoes from Maine on a cedar shoe rack. Until Christmas, every time I slipped on a pair, I visualized a New England shoe cobbler, snowbound all winter in a log cabin, hammering and sewing shoes to hand to his little grandson to polish and thread in the laces.

But a shopping trip to Austin changed the image. My old shoes were size 11 or 12 B. The pair the clerk fitted on me were size 13MK, or 13 medium kayak. Such a huge shoe makes finding standing room at theaters difficult and riding an escalator facing the right direction impossible. Doctors prescribe heavy shoes to strengthen the patient's calves. But I didn't want to be strong, and I sure don't want to leave a track like the skid mark of a Michelin 500.

Back home, I discovered why the new size was larger. Printed on the tongue was the following: "Uppers made in China. Bottoms man-made." The tongues in the other read from "Portugal," "Croatia," "Brazil" and "Ecuador." Croatia scored the highest on leather quality, the Portuguese produced a better fit, and the Brazilians and Ecuadorians tied for the best shine.

I rang up customer service in Rockport, Maine for a tip on a use for the new pair of Chinese Rockports, like maybe trimming the soles small enough to make sled runners, or a set of children's skis. After a stunned silence, she parroted a command to send the shoes back for examination. I told her mail service to China from Mertzon was terrible and could she exchange the Chinese pair for a pair of Portuguese Rockports? She became so upset, she said she'd send a new pair of shoes.

The drouth has sure changed my travel plans. The county claims they are going to have to pave the road by my ranch house. If they'll get busy I might raise enough dough selling some of this stuff in a garage sale to take one more trip ...

April 29, 1999

One of the more prominent shortgrass horse and mule doctors, pursuing a side practice of hollow horns and lap dogs, was telling a friend the other day how many foxes and coons are catching rabies this spring. His purpose being to remind his two-legged clients not to be doctoring his four-legged patients until they studied the symptoms.

He said the sheriff in one outpost had shot several rabid varmints on the town site, risking not only being bitten, but being attacked by an animal rightist opposed to killing fox and coons. Sounded like to be politically safe, the sheriff was going to have to wait for a doctor's diagnosis before shooting mad dogs, or foxes lying around in alleys slobbering and fighting their shadow.

The Sunday after hearing the story, the same friend and myself took a picnic lunch down to the head of Spring Creek. We live on ranches; we know about rattlesnakes and rabies epidemics. Our pickups are always equipped with flashlights, tire tools, and spare tires; yet rare is the occasion either one of us carries a .410 shotgun or a .22 rifle behind the seat.

Of all people, I should pack a gun even if it won't shoot. On trips, I tell city folks we ranchers are desperate gunmen, how we empty our guns into ever tree full of song birds we see. Works better than telling the truth. Like Andrew Johnson, or maybe it was Andrew Jackson, said: "Butter is easier to find on the top of a biscuit than underneath the crust." Again, maybe the saying came from the Good Book instead of the White House. Lots of things politicians say even up to this day are hard to trace.

We took our time reaching the water's edge. Several limestone outcrops along the trail could be snake dens. Just as we descended, my friend said, "that bird is acting funny." Then, "Watch out, Monte, a sick fox is coming down the bluff!"

Right close, the flow from the springs had cut off a solid rock island four feet from our side of the river. By the time the fox stopped in on the ledge 20 steps away, we had taken a short run and jumped over on the island, landing without a stick or a rock to defend ourselves.

One name for rabies is hydrophobia. We theorized he wasn't going to come to water. (Rabid animals can't drink, I'm told.) The fox looked our way, yet showed no signs of fear or recognition. He stood for a long time, licking a rock and emitting a woeful cry before he started up river toward the pickup. I hadn't noticed before, but when you stand real still and hold your breath, quartz movement watches stop running. Mine was short 17 minutes the next checkpoint.

After he disappeared, we stockpiled rocks and broke off a limb for protection. Water bubbled from the springs and rushed down the rock channel. High on the bluffs, kid goats played and loosened pebbles to shatter downside. Clouds rolled out long white streamers heralding a weather change.

Indians told the Spanish explorers that wolves dragged people underneath the very banks below us. Perhaps the red man took refuge from the wolves right on the huge rock we were sitting on among the holes where the tribes ground mesquite beans to make a crude flour.

The Spanish were thorough bureaucrats. The Catholic priest along on the expedition named every camp and made three hand-scribed copies of his descriptions. (Keep in mind the Father didn't have a briefcase or a laptop.) This camp was called "Los Ojos de Los Lobos" or "The Springs of the Wolves." The good Father wrote, "There is adequate timber to repair cart wheels, abundant grapes and lots of wild hens(turkeys)."

The rattle of a kingfisher perched in a tall pecan broke our reverie. He kept returning to the same branch. Once again the anguished cry of the fox carried over the water. The kingfisher flew over down river to dip for a minnow, only to fly back to rattle his call.

One trail ran right under the big pecan tree where the kingfisher was calling. The other trail had the advantage of being a gravel bar. I figured if the fox took after us in all that loose rock, we'd throw so much gravel in his face, he'd give up.

Darkness was two hours away. We distracted ourselves clipping watercress. The winds changed to the north, pulling the kingfisher farther upstream. The fox's cries grew weaker and then faded. Without plan or debate, we chose an upper trail and ran for the pickup.

The sheriffs and the activists are going to have settle their own battles. It's not my business to protect school kids, or to decide when to kill wild animals. But they'd better leave kingfishers alone. Next time it comes up for a vote, I think kingfishers, especially Spring Creek kingfishers, should be the state bird ...

April 22, 1999

Austin Public Radio reaches as far as the first railroad crossing past Noelke Switch, 15 miles from Mertzon. The signal resumes at the cattleguard entering my front yard. Reception inside the house is strong and clear. Programs cover a wide range of subjects and music scores. On the nights high winds tear across this plateau, causing my old ranch house to creak and tremble to the same rhythm as a clipper ship at high sea, classical music, or even the bongo beat from an Austin group distracts from the raging weather.

Newscasts last over an hour in the mornings. Interviews are the main theme of the evening news. Being from Austin, environmental issues are common, much more so than on stations in the shortgrass country. After all, the broadcast is from the University campus, a hotbed of causes and youthful fervor.

Unlike the early days of families gathered around battery-powered radios on ranches, I don't sit down to listen. However, the other night, I had to sit down. A broadcast from a northeastern public radio station was interviewing a fellow who was proposing wolves be introduced to Central Park in New York City. In glowing terms, he described the playful and lovable disposition of wolves. He went on to explain how popular the park will become once wolves roam the grounds and can be heard howling in the evening. He proposed a restaurant and observation platform be constructed on one end of the park so families could come and watch the wolves.

A few soreheads living close to Central Park were not so enchanted. One lady made it clear she wasn't going to be comfortable taking her two and a half year-old daughter to play around wolves. She sounded too upset to point out how real the story of "Little Red Riding Hood" would be where a child might actually get to see a wolf yawn and know what grandmother's teeth looked like to Red Riding Hood.

My son, living in Connecticut, says coyotes are so thick in the state that all owners ever recover from lost pets are the collars found on the golf greens and in the woods. The flea collars are lost, however, explaining the northeastern coyote's rich fur. (For sure, coyotes are collar-wise. Until the Texas Health department's massive aerial rabies vaccine program, coyotes in South Texas only attacked dogs wearing an immunization tag on their collars.)

But wolves kill coyotes. Where he lives is only two hours away from Central Park. One coyote male has already been trapped in the park, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. Makes me think a share-the-wolf program might be initiated between the two states to control coyotes in Connecticut and heighten the excitement in Central Park by having a Coyote Festival and a Wolf Chase once a year.

The danger of the humane society or animal rights groups being able to object to a chase or festival is slim. I don't think a court would listen to a group cruel enough to turn a wild animal loose in a city populated by 7.4 million people and visited by 20 million more tourists a year. Not to mention forcing the poor creatures to den up among the homeless people and the drug dealers in an 840-acre park, surrounded by the busiest streets in the Northeast.

Last month's Texas Wildlife Damage report made the news from Oklahoma seem the state was past needing an observation deck to watch prairie wolves up there. Under the heading, Wildlife Services Around the Country, came the following: "Oklahoma: a feedlot operator in Texas County lost 50 head of yearling cattle to coyotes last month. A Wildlife Specialist inspected the feedlot and was amazed at the abundance of evidence of coyote activity." The final note being the overlooked part of the cruelty of coyote damage: "Most of the cattle had to be destroyed due to their injuries."

(Texas County is in the Panhandle of Oklahoma. No data is available on whether cattle-killing coyotes honor state boundaries in the narrow space where Oklahoma divides Texas and Kansas, however in this writer's experience, coyotes have a poor sense of man's geography. For example, 18 sheep-raising counties in Texas might have 18 trapping clubs that their quarry lumps into one big feasting ground.)

The day may come when we hear the catchy phrase, "as cool as a New York gray wolf," or read a review of a play called, "The Big Bad Wolf of Broadway." Stocking Central Park, however, is going to take more money than has been spent in Yellowstone and White Sands to bring back wolves. Keeping them alive there will be the marvel of the next century.

April 15, 1999

Saturday morning a week ago, a drizzle moistened the sidewalk at the ranch. All was still. Not a twig moved on the old mulberry tree in front of the house. Breaking the hush, a low rumble changed to claps of thunder on into the smashing cracks of a billion volts of lightning.

The electricity blinked in the kitchen, otherwise the tension listening for rain may have caused a drouth spasm to lock my eyelids shut. Moments later the wind swept in a rain hard enough to be audible on a thick composition roof.

It fell fast enough on the tin rain gutters to chorus a song we used to sing on rainy mornings in the bunkhouse at the old ranch: "Rattle, rattle, shine up the boots and polish the belt buckles; park the feed wagon and turn out the night horse. Be on the asphalt before the draws come down and the gaps wash over. Be in the Wool Capitol when they turn on the lights."

My opening thanks at the first drops always goes the same. I shut up my eyes and say, "Oh Heavenly Father, please bring us rain. Please bring deep soil moisture to relieve the misery of all your misguided children, but please help the ones of us who can't be cured of ranching and farming. Amen."

Next, I unplugged the computer and the cordless phone, muttering all the time a deprecation of the local weather station: "Oh yes, you purveyors of mad hatter news and hollow forecasts, how do like this Saturday morning flood you predicted to be less than a 20 percent chance of scattered showers?" A pause: "You must mean you have a 20 percent batting average. Had Noah listened to weather reports, his ark would have floated off without man or beast aboard."

For the longest time, I stood in the front door staring at the pools of water forming between the house and barn. Wave after wave of heavy showers followed a healing drizzle. As is always true of the Divide in stormy weather, thunderbolts shook the ground and rattled the window panes.

Twice I checked Granny's quilting box under my bed to free up space. I am not afraid of storms, but I have to be cautious about lightning to be sure my metal-rimmed bifocals and hearing aids are grounded. If electricity starts jumping from one to the other, it'll cause an eye twitch the best doctors at Mayo's Clinic can't cure.

In the next 18 hours, anywhere from one to three inches fell on the shortgrass country. We measured an inch-nine in a gauge over on the highway that hadn't caught much more than spider webs in the past seven years. Keeping a glass tube pointed skyward for seven years to catch two tenths of rain every 90 days takes either a devoted scientist studying the formation of deserts, or a hopeless herder dead bent on staying broke.

By 1993, the smokiest skywriter to ever spell out Drink Pepsi Cola could not have made the forecasts clearer in the empty skies. But as late as last fall, we were still running a few sheep on country where we should have been taking up the salt troughs, turning off the windmills, and locking the gates.

Two months ago, I started calling one rancher a week, hoping to divert their minds from the gloom of the drouth and the market failures. Of the first five I contacted, three were on canes or walkers. The remaining two had had the flu from Christmas and still sounded like a wind-up phonograph on low speed.

In every instance, the physical review lasted three minutes and the weather and market report consumed the rest of the time. One old boy had been in the hospital in serious condition the week before. He was worried because a few of his bigger calves had developed the white scours while he was in the hospital.

However, I ended up contributing to the very problem I hoped to solve. One guy I called was a neighbor wintering in Laredo working for an oil company until conditions improved up here. First thing he reported was how thankful he was he had passed a physical for a company insurance plan the day before.

Next, he asked how I was. Before I thought, I told him about the dreadful wool market and the big cow outfit north of us going into recreation ranching, meaning more coyotes were going to be drifting south. He interrupted me in the middle of the news of Mamie Lee's Beauty Shop closing because cellular phones make gossiping so easy.

"Gosh-a-mighty," he said, "I'm glad you didn't call before my physical, or my blood pressure would of thrown me in a high risk pool. I'll call later, goodbye."

Now we have had rain, I won't have to be an angel of mercy. My neighbor in Laredo must not have heard of the rains as he hasn't called for a report. Be best, I think, to wait until he calls me. He sounded pretty upset hanging up the phone.

April 8, 1999

A year ago, Austin was reporting growth of 70 citizens a day. Last week, The Austin Statesman claimed the increase was only 48 head per day. Nowhere in either of the articles was a breakdown of the numbers leaving town.

Way back, the deans at the University sent a lot of students packing back to their homeland for bad grades and worse behavior. The Catholic school over on the south side ran the University a close race, big difference being the good padres just didn't have as big a student body to cull from.

The legislature and the government offices cause the population of Austin to fluctuate, as do the colleges. However, the only time the state payroll decreases is in the campaign speeches on election years. No special census is necessary to calculate the growth in the state government. Just looking out the window of the second story of the Capitol building at all new the parking lots proves the case.

The death rate is hard to check. The cemetery on my route is the old one off I-35. The University of Texas is buying up property on the east side of the campus in such huge chunks, the college may have the old graveyard so surrounded that no more space is left for plots. I keep hearing the University has bought the cemetery. What isn't said is when the nights will be long enough for all those graves to be moved without causing a big uproar.

Austinites harbor strong passions. They aren't the kind to mess around moving their family plots. For that matter, moving a parking meter over six months old may take a permit from the historical society. Highway engineers used to bulldozing oak trees and mowing off wildflowers learn to be careful of stepping on acorns, or stepping off the sidewalks around that town. Seems like the activist element at the University flows over into the rest of the community. When I go to church in Austin, I always sit in the middle pew to be sure to be on neutral ground.

On my last visit, the overpopulation jammed I-35. Saturday night motorists forced me off the access road onto the howling revelry of East Sixth Street. So much marijuana smoke drifted off the crowds, my car's air cleaner choked on the fumes. Flashing neon signs from the tattoo parlors and barrooms reflected off my windshield into streams of rainbow-colored light. A city detective captured in the same traffic snarl caught my eye and burst out laughing. We wouldn't have been more out of place holding court in a Far Eastern sultan's tent.

Walking presents problems, too. Sidewalks are more like the floors of a big kennel than a concrete walkway. Walkers fade and sidestep the dog scat the way a ballet is danced on the stage of a Russian theater. Runners on the jogging paths without at least one dog on a leash are social outcasts. To be fashionable takes more plaited leashes and rhinestone collars than Velcro straps and cotton cord holding up the sweatsuits. I wheeze so hard exercising in the high humidity, I'm always afraid I'll whistle up a pack of loose potlickers. However, the leash laws must be serious, as more homeless people are seen wandering around downtown than stray dogs or alley cats.

Exotic pets are also popular in the city. In last week's classified sections of the daily, an advertisement offered a nine-foot boa constrictor and a wooden cage for $450. But the ad stipulated, "the snake needs a family atmosphere." I was also barred from the next offering: "Beautiful Moluccan cockatoo. $1100. Very gentle. Hates men (smart.)"

The other listings didn't discriminate. "A gentle ostrich" was open for bids. Kitties could be had for free. All the kennel club dogs were priced more than steer calves brought last summer, and some were higher than what the same cattle brought after being finished in the feedlot.

The most puzzling ad was a 40-gallon lizard lounge. I had to call the pet store in San Angelo to find out why a lizard needs a lounge. The lady explained, "a lizard lounge is a dry glass aquarium, 40 gallons in size, warmed by overhead basking lights to keep reptiles comfortable." She went on to say the lizard business is seasonal. "Picks up in the warm months and ends in the winter."

The whole scene is becoming too complex for country people. I don't mind asking over the telephone about lizard lounges. And I think I can eventually guess why the old gal wanting to sell the Moluccan cockatoo included the "hates men (smart)" in her ad. But I don't know whether I'd ever be convinced a nine-foot Boa constrictor needs a family atmosphere. The ones I watched in the jungle movies 60 years ago sure weren't family oriented...

April 1, 1999

Depending on the season, four out of 10 lambchops in the supermarkets are imported from Australia or New Zealand, or that's the way it comes out, figuring the Southern Hemisphere's dominions take an average of more than 40 percent of our domestic market. The competition grates on the ones of us still trying to raise sheep in the midst of weather failures and banner coyote whelping years.

However, taking a closer look, producers' share in the retail value of lamb is 30 percent of the sale, so actually we are only involved in two of the 10 chops.

I don't know if my information is reliable. Sheep organizations keep thick files on discouraging news. Membership drives are based on the dreariest of predictions. I used to come back from the woolie conclaves so downcast, I'd spend the rest of the year recovering from the tri-annual reports in time to be dragged back down in the dumps by the annual convention.

It wasn't anyone's fault but mine for being so sensitive. The executive secretary of the Texas sheep and goat herder's association in those days had strong ties to Mertzon. He did more than his part to liven up the meetings, being so happy over his new job. You see, he moved from being county agent out here to becoming the chief officer in the association, right on to later becoming a state senator. However, the lessons he learned as our county agent are what put him over the top.

At a critical stage in his career as county agent, two Mertzon cowboys taught him to be able to think on his feet and speak impromptu by tying a rattlesnake underneath the seat of his pickup while he ate lunch in the café with his district supervisor. Little did he realize that after disposing of the rattler with a tire tool, he'd never be blind-sided by man or beast again. After that experience, the political reporter would not be born capable of misquoting him or corrupting his purpose.

He sidestepped the trickery of D.C. while representing the association and was reelected numerous terms to the State Senate after fierce campaign debates. All his successes go back to once having been within a pickup door's width of a furious rattlesnake tied only by number 14 stay wire. (I am sorry, but I can't report what happened to the district supervisor. He has never been back to Mertzon to this day.)

For the longest time, like from 1950 on, I supported the sheep and goat herders and the woolgrowers' organization programs. I wrote the worthies in Austin and Washington letters of displeasure and profiled the grief and suffering out here in the sheep country. (Ninety percent of the sheep in Texas are raised in the shortgrass country and only 17 percent of the coyotes.) I made most of the meetings and paid my dues on time. Seemed like I had hardly gotten started when, at a district meeting in Mertzon a year or so ago, the secretary read out my name as one of the directors subject to retirement. The tone of her voice made me think how the coroner must sound reading off tags from the unclaimed bodies at the morgue during a meeting of the commissioner's court.

Being retired from a woolie organization is nowhere near as traumatic as, say, finding a rattlesnake tied under a pickup seat at the turning point of a young county agent's career. However, the first impact does cause the head to drop like a chill hitting an ostrich her first day away from the outback of Australia.

Retired directors are still allowed to vote on resolutions to send to Washington and give the wool house authority to deduct the dues from your wool check. PAC organizations, I learned, will accept donations from any age group. Also, as the lady over in the office in San Angelo explained, the association signs on my ranch gates didn't have to be changed to "Monte Noelke, retired."

So I think the main reason for retiring graybeards was to remind us to limit our observations to 30 seconds and found them in this century. Nobody actually minded the stumbling over folding chairs or spilling coffee down the front of the shirt. Those habits start in sheepmen way before retirement age.

In last week's post, the Texas and Southwest Cattle Raisers in Fort Worth billed the ranch for annual dues. Copies of brands and earmarks on the form go on the same picture of a horned bull the association used the first time I ever joined the outfit. I like drawing in the brand and earmark better than writing a check. However, the timing was good. Fat cattle closed at 65 bucks last week on a small showlist. I don't think 100,000 pounds of wool has sold this year in Texas, so I'm going to hold back on the cattleman dues and send it to the sheepherders.

March 25, 1999

March 18, 1999

 

San Angelo holds their rodeo and fat stock show on the second week in March every year, the timing being set to come after the big show in Houston.

Shortgrassers need distraction in March, as the weather is usually dustier and colder than in February or April. Up until the coliseum was built, watching an outdoor Angelo rodeo was as cold as catching the early trials of the sled dog races in the Yukon.

Way back, the fairground association tried to hold the event in June, but attendance dropped off so bad, they learned the hard way how invigorated West Texans are by blowing dust and frigid north winds. Much to the association's astonishment, they discovered the trade from the outposts liked to eat cotton candy and hotdogs outdoors in raging wind and billowing dust. It was the same as the way the old sailors on the clipper ships were restored by storms popping the sails and bending the mast, except the rodeo fans were exhilarated by the wind-driven grit hitting the hotdog buns and spinning the cotton candy in the gales.

I have lived through two distinct periods of the rodeo week. As a child of the Great Depression, I survived playing under the old grandstands and climbing the corral fences full of bucking stock. It was an era of early weaning times, and boys had to beat their mothers to the parking lot after the rodeo, or they'd find themselves sleeping in the loft above the show barn until they caught a ride home.

The next period occurred 25 years later, herding my own family of eight children to the Friday matinee, or school day at the rodeo. The broad age span made this a challenging event. The youngest had not learned to mind, the middle group was beginning to resent authority, and the older ones were embarrassed being around parents in public.

Short of using leg manacles, I tried to find a way of holding the herd together in the only time of year we were in a crowd. In such a mob of children, gathering a stray was a big problem. A buddy system worked as long as the lead and the tail end stayed in sight. However, the moment we passed by an open tent flap or a snow cone vender, the cadence was sure to break and they'd spread out of control.

Being ranch-raised, they weren't interested in the same shows as city kids. The ones over six years old had already had to help mark calves and lambs, so sideshows and Ferris wheels were the big drawing cards. (Their horsemanship was too advanced for merry-go-rounds.) Choices weren't up for discussion as I didn't have the wherewithal to buy tickets for the rides and shows for such a big operation. If they set up too big a howl to see "the Giant from Borneo," or take the thrill of a lifetime ride on the roller coaster, I'd tell them to shut up, or I was going to take them to the petting zoo and afterwards have all the boys' pictures taken riding sidesaddle on the paint pony tied outside the main gate.

Most of the time, I didn't have to tell them to calm down or shut up. The older ones held swift court to control the younger brothers. I noticed last Christmas how the three youngests' noses turn up slightly and the points of their chins droop from their older brothers holding their hands over their mouths to keep them quiet. The Flat Head Indians in the Pacific Northwest shaped papooses' heads by strapping a board to the forehead. The same thing must have happened to shape the boys' upper lips and chins from the firm grip of their older brothers.

I started out to the fairgrounds last Friday, but lost my nerve. Age weakens the will to confront the young. There's a pretty rowdy gang of new age kids coming on. Around the better hamburger joints now, you see a heavier-duty highchair and thicker web seatbelts to contain the toddlers. Spoons are hurled farther and harder than I remember silverware being thrown.

By my guess, the increased adhesion of the disposable diaper to highchair bottoms, compared to the smoother texture of the oldtime cotton diapers, improves the infant's swing the way spiked shoes stabilize batters standing at the plate. Stands to reason a guy can't make a good throw skidding around on a slick surface. (Baseball games are called off because of rain, but babies have to play on through being babies regardless of how wet things become.)

All my old pals have retired from judging the shows and helping run the rodeo. The rides back to the ranch at night were measured by fitful elbow jabs and knee jambs in a station wagon full of tired kids. Every time I see a big family unloading at a show, I smile and recall what grand times those were for the Noelke family to come to the San Angelo rodeo.

 

March 11, 1999

 

Deep sadness reigns over the Shortgrass Country. Ranchers are feeding their way through another dry winter; fossil fuel miners' hopes and happenings are in a downspin of serious layoffs and stacked drilling rigs. County governments and school districts face huge drops in revenue from the cheap oil and natural gas; bankers don't look up from their desks until close to closing time.

Convenience stores and coffee houses, the very backbone of the West Texas towns, are as empty of customers as if the towns were evacuated to go to a district football game. Where scratched lottery tickets once fluttered to the floor of the stores in the wake of the boom, the tickets are rolled in tight little balls and thrown in the trash.

Things are worse farther west. I stopped in Barnhart for a Diet 7UP last week on the way to the ranch. The last time I'd seen a lady in Barnhart smile as warmly as the cashier was in 1949 at a Christmas dance up at the school when the band leader mixed everybody in a set called "Paul Jones." (A "Paul Jones" is the dance where the men form a circle around a circle of women to give dancers new partners when a whistle is blown. It is still my favorite dance as I was 23 years old before I stopped being too bashful to ask a girl to dance on my own.)

However, the fixers and arrangers over in San Angelo must still be doing good. In October last year, I started hunting for a lawyer to write a simple document. Four members of the family are licensed attorneys, however, they work in other fields of law. I'd been using the Ask a Lawyer column in the newspaper for advice until this matter arose. Just the thought of a doorplate carrying lawyers' names in bronze letters causes me to tremble like a fashion show judge caught with a run in her stocking.

In the days when my family vowed to regain dominion over the mineral and surface estate of Grandfather Noelke's lands whatever the cost, piles of dough were spent on legal fees at a big Angelo law firm, matching the oil company's determination to rule. Took several fall and spring sessions of district court to teach us the advantage of being level-headed over being hard-headed.

The puzzling thing about being ignored was that landowners, large or small, get into scrapes far out of proportion to their net worth, or the realm of reality. Less than a fortnight before Christmas, one of the city's dreadnoughts of the courtroom admitted at a party how much he envied the smooth way one of the other trial lawyers in town converted legal charges into acres.

Several weeks were wasted waiting for tips to pay off on calls to independents, who were said to need the business. It didn't help matters for President Clinton to come on TV in January and tell everyone how well the country was doing. But I sure couldn't fault Mr. Clinton, because I'd been laying it on pretty heavy at the bank for seven straight state of the nation anniversaries how well I was doing.

And I was ready to do the same at the law offices. So when I'd call a new prospect I'd tell the secretary, "Been a little oil strike out here at the ranch. Maybe a will gonna' be contested and a title disputed over a divorce settlement involving an out of wedlock heir. If ol' Henry still got his courthouse coat and britches, I might be needing him." (A cornpone act makes urbanites think we country people are quaint provincials unaware of our wealth.)

For three weeks, one prominent arranger had me believing he was right on the verge of writing the document. Over the wire, he sounded like he just needed to press the print tab on his computer to be finished. When he stopped returning my calls, I began looking through the yellow pages again. Late one afternoon, I found a familiar name hidden in a long list of barristers. His secretary put my call right through. He set his fee and agreed to do the work. Two weeks later, he mailed out the first draft.

By the next week the deal was finished in spite of his being sick with laryngitis. But I was so glad to be through, I didn't demand the customary 50 percent discount due a client for the temporary loss of his lawyer's voice. (The loss of voice by a barrister is called the doctrine of voce-perdia, but that might be wrong. Voce-perdia might be a mountain range in southeast Spain, and again it may not be. Maybe I'd better get back to you on this.)

Guess that'll show those San Angelo smart alecks who didn't bother to return my call. By the time this wreck is over, they are going to be easier to find ...

 

March 4, 1999

We finished shearing at noon on the Sunday of Valentine's Day. After the last bales were unloaded at the wool house, I drove up to the Mertzon place for a nap. I parked on the schoolyard side of the property to keep the trailer from being out in the street. South winds had blown so hard in the night that a pasteboard box had rolled over the school's chain link fence. It was the exact size of the boxes Miss Greengoss used to have to hold Valentines for her fifth grade class.

Being inside the pickup out of the wind felt so good, I just sat and stared at the boxtop flapping in the mighty gusts of wind. Miss Greengoss covered the Valentine boxes in green and red crepe paper, or she did the three parties I attended in her room. Mother helped her every year as she took being room mother mighty serious. She was a good sport about my delayed passage, but she did get testy at PTA programs if one of the women asked her after the fifth grade performed if her son wasn't awful big for his age.

Even sitting there under the oak trees next to the old playground, I wasn't able to bring back all those beautiful girls passing through the room each year. Valentines couldn't be forwarded like e-mail can be today. I tried to join freshman class society by having a second drop a card in the box for a girl I had a crush on, but a big showoff of a tattletale I'd known in the first grade told the principal, Mr. Glasscock.

Mr. Glasscock was so offended by the mere suggestion of a violation of class lines, he threatened to audit every Valentine box in school. In later life I was to run into several carbon copies of Mr. Glasscock. Some were called "Dean Slide Rule Smith" and others "High Pockets Jones" behind their backs. Took us each less than a minute to find out we despised each other. It would have been all right with me if we could have cut the time in half.

Kids driving by in sports cars playing the booming beat of jungle music on the radios knocked me from my reverie. On Monday following Valentines Day, I shopped in Angelo to replenish the groceries from the sheep work. I avoid the grocery stores that attract all the produce pirates in town. I don't like to be around people wearing sweaty gym clothes, stuffing their mouths with grapes, and dropping toothpicks from the food samples in the aisles.

The fashion editor for Modern Maturity Magazine, which I follow so faithfully, reported gentlemen were beginning to wear French cuffs and monogrammed shirts again. The only thing French around the Angelo stores is the baguettes of bread, or perhaps a slouchy kid standing out front blowing cigarette smoke through his nostrils. For monograms, all I've seen anywhere were logos written on tee shirts, ranging from common vulgarities to cliches bad enough to make an advertising editor for a radio station sick.

But worse news than ever hit at the store. Right behind the checkout counters, 14 carts full of Valentine candies were marked half-price. I stood stricken in utter disbelief. Here stood a long row of evidence that Valentines Day had been a complete flop in the Wool Capitol.

Perhaps Super Bowl Sunday was falling too close to Valentine's Day for couples to recover and rekindle from the strain of the football game parties. However, Super Bowl Monday is supposed to be a day of rest and peace to recover from the game. A few romances might have broken up along party lines after the big trial in Washington. As far as the kids buying Valentines, by the time they pay for gold earrings and nose bobs, they may not have the dough for a four-dollar box of candy. Only other reason for the dead market was that the warm winter had caused golf players to overspend on green fees and left them broke.

The circular in the cart snapped right back, announcing that this Monday was President's Day and to load up on Abraham Lincoln style pork and beans and the kind of beef brisket Dolly Madison cooked for the holidays. Hand it to those supermarkets; they don't shed any tears over a bad deal. Be nice if the management sprinkled chocolate candy among the grapes to keep down the thievery, but I guess the next thing to hit would be an onslaught of customers with a sweet tooth.

February 25, 1999

At least once a quarter, I report on the woolie business in shortgrass country, hoping to turn the contempt for sheepmen held by the hollow horn operators and the rest of the hard-hearted denizens of this cold old earth to compassion. We face so much foreign competition in lamb and wool that unless coyotes become so thick the packs attack ships and refrigerated rail cars full of Australian product, we are headed for extinction.

So my story begins as the first inning of the 1999 wool harvest opens at Goat Whiskers the Younger's Holiday Inn Ranch. To launch the season, Young Whiskers mustered a roundup crew of a half-dozen adults and a sprinkling of children. Being an equal opportunity outfit, he recruited three mounted cowgirls, a fellow wearing a tropical shell hat for ground and saddlehorn work, a foreman driving a four-wheeler, and a Hispanic cook of the hot temperament of the skillet hand and the Latin race. (As I was to learn at the first coffee break of the day, Buenos dias, señora, was an outrageous insult to the English-speaking ranch cook.)

Whisker's shearing crew travels to all of the western sheep-raising states. Along with the nine shearers, I counted eight wool handlers and pen loaders of various degrees of talent, from expert wool pickers to broom and shovel help. Using Whiskers' elevated ramp method styled after Australian and New Zealand herders, the captain claimed his men sheared up to 1500 head in a day. That's a phenomenal amount of sheep for nine men to shear compared to crews turning out less in several days of work.

Included in the Whiskers scene was a grader certified to be of Australian rank from the wool house in Mertzon. Tires on the trailers, four-wheelers, and pickups, parked in a row, were inflated to proper amount; horses tied outside the pens were shod all the way around. Fleeces rolled off the big ewes soft and white with few defects and no double-cut fibers to go in a bailer set at perfect pressure. And all the while, Goat Whiskers and the shearing captain presided over this flawless operation in the way the grandest of Viennese maestros once mounted polished mahogany stages to wave ivory batons over the magnificence of the Austrian National Symphony.

Whiskers agreed to allow me to shear two pastures of ewes in his pens before the crew started on his hair goats. The water lot to his shearing corrals corners at the Southwest point of my outfit. It was a big favor to ask. He needed the goats peeled, but Whiskers is a softhearted soul and a good neighbor.

The big catch, or the gigantic catch, was that the domestic wool market is in the throes of a darkness so severe, should a light of hope big as the flicker of an exploded match head flash on the horizon, it'd look like a lightning bolt to us. The middle range of the new-era shearing job (sacks, bailing, grading, and shearing) costs about thirty cents a pound. Depending on the house, commission drags from six to ten cents a pound more off the price. The sheep and goat herder association dues take a small assessment. By the time such extras as labor and freight are added, the 40-odd cents a pound quoted for three-inch staple wool won't cover the harvest expense.

I realized this travesty was on Whiskers' mind when he agreed to stop everything except his overhead to allow me to shear a little bunch of sheep. On top of the trauma of a profitless shearing operation, he had stopped smoking. The drug he was taking was so powerful it not only made cigarettes taste bad but gave him leg cramps so severe, he was unable to slip off far enough from the house to sneak a smoke.

I might be partly to blame. At Christmas, I gave him and his friend Aunt Annie a book on American Indian customs. One chapter told how the squaws cut their captives' heel tendons to keep them from escaping. I was sure Aunt Annie had read the book. I also knew she was determined to cure Whiskers of smoking at any cost. Further indictment was that she and the doctor prescribing this string halter remedy are thick as oatmeal cakes. If old Doc told her fitting a hackamore made of grape vines over Whiskers' head was going to stop him from smoking, Whiskers' might as well start hoping the skin the throat latch rubbed off behind his ears healed before fly time.

Every time Whiskers hobbled over to his pickup to look once more in the ash tray to see whether Aunt Annie might have missed a butt, I felt sorry for him. Coming off nicotine is a tough withdrawal without having to suffer around a shearing crew. I just hope by next year the good doctor has found a way of curing Whiskers and myself of running sheep.

February 18, 1999

Few visitors come by the ranch. During hunting season, my sons and grandsons come bird and deer hunting. Christmas used to draw a few members of the family, but heavy church and holiday responsibilities brought on by parenthood stopped all travel.

The remnants of my generation are bonded to the TV screen, or so involved in either keeping their grandkids or boarding pets while their prodigies take vacations, I rarely see them, much less have them out for dinner. If they do have spare time, they spend it mailing out pictures of the grandchildren, or taking more pictures to print and to post later on.

One strange habit all overnight guests at the ranch have is leaving full bottles of shampoo in the shower stall. Well water is so much more refreshing than showering under a chemical splash of chlorinated city water, they apparently don't think they'll ever need shampoo again.

There are six leftover shampoo bottles in the bathroom cabinet. Two or three more bottles are on the edge of the tub in the other bathroom, and four or five old bottles are aging underneath the lavatory. Abandoned hair conditioner and unclaimed toothbrushes make up part of this lost and found but never reclaimed inventory.

Just as a sidelight, I will profile a few other categories in a hall closet: three pair of hunting boots without laces, a child's miniskirt, 31 socks (unmatched), a pair of green ski mittens, and a 2x5 closet floor covered in various calibers and gauges of rifle and shotgun ammunition.

All of the shampoo labels make huge claims to solve dryness, oily scalp, scaling, dandruff, broken ends, faded coloring, tighter coiling of spit curls, and better backgrounding of bangs and forelocks. The directions don't come right out and say so, but imply these miraculous potions smooth out cowlicks in pubescent boys and make pigtails come out even in young girls. The only appeal to graybeards or grannies I've found on any of the labels was a warning that excessive suds might make the shower floor slick.

I shampoo with a special home recipe I brought back from California made of eucalyptus bark and leaves. The cleansing power is moderate enough to leave sufficient residue on the scalp to support the downy stem of the hair. Also, the dripping suds from the genus eucalyptae (No such thing as genus eucalyptae. I just wanted to fancy this up a bit.) shampoo running down off the forehead into the eyes helps prevent cataracts. Gargled, I have been told, the minute amount of eucalyptus sap leftover in the bottom of the bottle makes dentures seat better. I know I hear better after washing my hair. Has something to do with the way I throw my head back to direct the flow of water to my back instead of down my face.

This morning I grabbed a more recent acquisition, a bottle of pink herbal shampoo, designed to restore the color to dyed hair and highlight the original hue. The aroma was of one of those fancy tropical rum drinks called piña colada and so important in creating bedlam on the beaches during the college spring breaks. Just the modest amount in my palm brought visions of white sand beaches shaded by palms and awash in the blue rollers of soft ocean waves. Of lovely copper-skinned, barefooted Polynesian girls dancing in gold and brown sarongs on overturned dugout canoes, pounding out the same beat as drummed on hollow logs by their ancestors.

But the results of this pink herbal concoction weren't like a ukulele serenade on St. Andrew's Bay. The more I rinsed, the more lather boiled up on my head and down off my brow. Blinded, I didn't dare take the chance of hoping to pick a conditioner out of the row of bottles on the shelf outside the stall. As the suds subsided, my temples started throbbing and a strange sensation passed up my sideburns and over my scalp.

I just knew I was having a stroke. At my age, too powerful a sneeze can cause brain trauma and make the stems of the nervous system tremble like the strings on an acoustic guitar. Then I remembered the label said, "To help restore hair to its original hue." So all the pounding was a chemical reaction in the follicle to bring back the red color that had vanished 20 years ago.

By mid-morning, the pounding had gone away and the comfortable numbness of advanced age returned to my temples. My hair glistened in an alabaster sheen only slightly tinted in red. At odd moments during the rest of the day, I glanced in the mirror at the big change in my appearance. A change so big I was bound to be hard to recognize by those who had never known me as a redhead…

February 11, 1999

One of the most prominent physicians around the Wool Capital is a guy named Ralph Chase. Native to San Angelo, he has spent his professional career doctoring on sick children without any regard to the part of town the kids lived in, or country of origin of the parents. His clientele range from the coin-short barrio to hombres covered in dough seven inches deep on all surfaces. I fit in the Doc Chase legacy for having been a volume customer for his early pediatric practice as the father of eight children.

Eight patients under one roof was a matter of important business consequences for the oldtime Angelo pediatricians. Doctors then valued the epidemic potential of large families. Doctor Chase and his colleagues realized such a mob of kids, scattered from the playing field in the Noelke backyard up to the 4H barn and over to the schoolhouse, spread a lot of germs in a school the size of Mertzon's.

Modern-day healers have a much different view. The advent of fertility drugs may well turn pediatrics into a booming business. Eight births staggered over a dozen years can't start to reach the drama of octuplets. These modern mothers could shell out one whole branch of our family tree in a single hospital visit.

After the children grew up, I hung on, hoping to cash in on his rising fame. Granted, about the only chance a herder has of sharing in an associate's success is to sell a dumptruck load of gravel to run the foundation for his statue in the park, or maybe enjoy a few fried chicken dinners at award ceremonies.

But as I reported before, I tried to persuade him to endorse a wind colic medicine, or put out Doctor Chase's quick-dry diaper rash salve. Ninety percent of the Spanish-speaking households in the Wool Capital knew him by name or reputation. Had he listened, we could have bottled a baby salsa so popular it'd have made the Heinz baby food folks think they had been struck down by Planned Parenthood in the first inning of play. (The "salsa" was a conflict of interest, as he taught many a Maria and Josephina how to feed their children to prevent an anemia that once ran rampant in the Mexican people.)

One thing I knew better than to try was to talk him into a ranch deal. He may not have seen the future of cashing in on baby formulas or brass safety pins, but he sure wasn't a prospect for throwing off his hard-earned money on a horse ranch or a papered cow operation, like a lot of Angelo doctors.

Most of the time in our letters, I remembered to omit reference to the current and continuous eternal miseries befalling my grand calling to the West. But a few weeks ago, I strayed off into a litany of catastrophes of fallen markets and failed thunderclouds in an e-mail letter of such graphic sorrow, Doc's long ago oath to heal and comfort mankind was activated.

He replied in what was to be his first online diagnosis: "You have confusion of psyche, or what is known as psychasthenia. This malady of mind was found mainly in wives who lived in dugouts in the drouths on the Great Plains in the 19th Century. The wind, sun, snow and blowing dirt these people had to face left them addled of brain as they struggled to live."

I whipped back a reply: "Two points in your diagnosis, Doc, prove you are wrong about my problem. One is I don't live in a dugout. I only write about people who once lived in dugouts. And two, it doesn't snow often enough in the shortgrass country to suit me. Snow enriches the ground. You'd know this if you didn't use all your spare time giving away free medical service to poor people." (I really had him on the last count. Like I have told him hundreds of times, if his itinerant patients had income taxes and property taxes to pay, they'd forget about being sick. Instead of "a war on poverty," what this country needs is "a tax on poverty.")

The "net cooled," I suppose is the way to say the exchange of e-mail slowed down. Good thing I am exempt from jury duty because of advanced age, or his diagnosis would be grounds for a contested exemption. The part toward the end of his diagnosis about "being addled of mind as they struggled to live" is heavy stuff. I can't honestly say I object to his charge. I do become awful jumpy once the winds start blowing dirt ...

February 4, 1999

The quietest place in a supermarket to study your grocery list is in baking supplies. It is used mainly as a shortcut to reach TV dinners and frozen concoctions from prepared foods in the delicatessen, so even on the busiest of holidays, carts don't have to be parallel-parked. No one cares if you back against the flour shelf for a comfortable rest to review the orders at hand. Minute amounts of flour dust stick to the seat of my pants, but bakers count so little among the mobs of microwave cooks that there's more danger of being reported as a suspicious character than for being unkempt.

Mother left the legacy to bake bread in my family. Her recipes for oatmeal rolls and cornbread continue on even in this age of wadded-up sandwich loaves, so full of preservatives and imitation flavors that mice refuse to eat deeper into the wrapper than the wax paper. The heavy lid from a 10-gallon keg she used to cook cornbread is shelved here at the ranch. What's missing are such principal ingredients as bacon grease, twice as flavorful as vegetable oil, and yard eggs double the weight of the anemic supermarket brands.

Before Christmas, the neighbor to the west sent a card featuring the picture of a grisly old puncher in a red longhandle underwear top, flipping a pancake on the front and the recipe for sourdough starter on the back to make pancakes outweighing the skillet. I kept the card face down to remember to make the starter and to hide the other side so as not to ruin the holidays with memories of what poor hands a lot of those bunkhouse marvels were in the kitchen.

Once things settled down, I made a batch of starter to work in one of mother's old milk crocks. Recipe books offer vague references to the exact ratios of flour to starter to make sourdough bread. The reason is the big variations in the fermentation and composition of the base formula. The recipe on the Christmas card prescribed using two cups of boiled potato water mixed in flour and a little sugar thick enough to be dough. (It's best to make the consistency the same as buttermilk instead of as thick as dough.)

Timing and amount of sugar, however, are critical. Throw in too much sugar and let the potato water stand too long, and the starter may turn into vodka instead of dough. If heavy distilling occurs, the only difference in procedure is that time-out rules need to be liberalized to give the cooks rest from the sampling.

My starter went right to bubbling and roiling up potato flakes in the creamy depths of the crock. The old kitchen revived yeast spores left over from all the loaves of bread Mother cooked. Fruit flies flew around the rim of the crock and resembled the ones from so many years back that feasted on her dough. (No DNA exists for fruit flies or vinegar flies. However, if this bothers you, try a new hobby or taking more physical exercise, like laying bricks or building sea walls.}

The first biscuits weighed the same as the ones Uncle Goat Whiskers used to call "sinkers." Inspired by the delicious odors from the yeast bread, I ate hot biscuits or toasted halves every meal. Big changes began happening to my body shape and body chemistry. First thing I noticed was that reaching over to change the bottom rack in the oven strained as much as bending over to pull on my boots. The next change came, (and this was a big one,) after a hot shower opened my pores; the fruit flies swarmed off the starter and enveloped me in a mass of fluttering wings.

The only way I found to keep nature in balance in the kitchen or the bathroom was to artificially stimulate the starter by adding enough yeast cakes to the crock to overcome the drawing power of my body odor. Before I gave up and refrigerated the starter, it was taking four yeast cakes to hold the fruit flies over the crock. (Fruit flies are second cousins to house flies and first cousins to gnats. Just like their kinfolks, they never know when enough is enough.)

The most detailed recipe I found is for sourdough cornbread in Joy Of Cooking. I fumbled through several different recipes for biscuits and loaves in cookbooks from Georgia and the Carolinas until I learned to sprinkle flour in the bowl instead of shoveling flour into the bowl.

Funny, but the Boss's old hook to pull on his English polo boots works good to change the rack in the oven and pull on my boots. Fruit flies stay trim from flying so much of the time. They are the only beasts around who train on sourdough and are still able to go very high off the ground, unless you want to count the momentary kick of the vodka...

January 28, 1999

One resolution I kept in 1998 was to start complying with the environmental rules I could afford to keep, "environmental rules" being my understanding of the real or imagined laws and restrictions supported by such outfits as the Sierra Club and Green Peace.

Attacks on landowners had been too terrifying to develop a clear understanding of the policies. Nothing has been written on the subject, but prisoners sentenced to the gallows learn very little about the tensile strength of manila rope or the operation of a trap door until it's too late to use the knowledge.

The first thing I did was save all the old newspapers for recycling at a waste disposal drop over in San Angelo. Even though I clip a lot of printed material to guide my kids and friends onto the safe grounds of my political and spiritual philosophy, I still ended up having huge bundles of newsprint.

At first, I hated sentencing my stuff in The Livestock Weekly to the recycling plant. Words die a fast enough death without tossing the pages in a big bin to be ground back to pulp. I also was uncertain whether I wanted to contribute the column inches 800 words take to save part of the forest to hide timber wolves, or provide nesting for the spotted owl. But then I realized my loss was going to be offset by disposing of all the pundits that readers and critics gush over as being "bright" and "lucid, and "deft of pen."

Right quick, I began enjoying bundling up ol' wise guy's and ol' smart mouth's columns to tie in a strangulation knot. My long-ago wife used to fold my articles face up in the bottom of her bird cage. She was one of the first practitioners of performance art in Mertzon. I still have bad dreams on the full moon from recasting the time I came home too late for dinner and found my pet tomcat lying dead on the dining room table from a hollow point .22 bullet between his eyes.

The next project was to save aluminum cans and coat hangers in reusable plastic bags. Took the first quarter of the year to set up the operation I named "AC&H-RPB." The way it was planned, I saved the 12-pack boxes to put the empties back in place. Then I kept the plastic grocery sacks to take back the cans and boxes to bring back more diet sodas. As the pantry became filled with sacks and cartons in various positions, from spilling out on the floor to tilting against the door, I used the coat hangers to fish out the sacks to rearrange the storage space.

By the second quarter, can sales became impressive. At 45 cents a pound f.o.b. Angelo, on a no-shrink, no-commission deal up front, the cans sold mighty stout compared to packer cows at a quarter and original bag 12-months wool at 35 cents a pound. (For the best weighing conditions on aluminum cans, chill in the freezer to induce vaporization. At weigh-in, don't watch the scales; watch the eyes of the person operating the scales.)

The disparity in values wasn't new. The grand old game of herding woolies and hollow horns steels us against tides of foreign competition and desperate market and weather disappointments painful enough to make a dental nurse change professions. At no time since the bloody history of the Roman gladiators, pitted against arenas full of roaring African lions, has a battle been fought as one-sided as the American ranchers matched against the subsidized forces of the beef and sheep industries of Australia and New Zealand.

The Wall Street Journal had just reported how China ruined the apple business in Washington State last year by causing juice apples to drop from $70 a ton to $10 a ton. Market quotations the week before this writing credited the tonnage of Australian and New Zealand lamb with 60 percent of our dressed market and all the major wool movement. (Over the weekend, the newest supermarket in San Angelo displayed New Zealand butterflied lamb in packages so bloody, it looked like the shad gizzards sold at a Highland lake bait stand.) So I figured I'd better ship my cans before the Australians moved on the deal and dumped a load of cans and coat hangers on the West Coast.

I no longer burn old tires to smoke polecats from underneath the saddle shed. Pour-ons are too high for a bitterweed sheep operation to use on the cow herd, and the sprayer hose leaks too much to spray anything but the ground. The trick is going to be to hit a happy medium as a new-day environmentalist, so my old adversaries won't come out to check my progress and my colleagues won't become jealous and turn me in for my digressions.

January 21, 1999

Hard to imagine unless you have been through an armistice how fast the ceasefire happens the first week of January at the end of hunting season.

On closing day, the pastures resound with the mortal blop of soft-pointed lead propelled at high speed hitting meat and bone. Up until the final hour, I cringe at the sound of every distant volley.

As I reported before, I descend from a faint-hearted line. My greatest of great grandmothers fled with her five children to Fort Concho from the ranch in the 1870s, frightened by the Comanches going on the warpath. Great grandfather admitted in his dotage that during the War of Northern Aggression, he broke out in goose pimples when the bluecoats charged, sabers drawn and bayonets aimed at chest level.

However, in spite of the peril, the November whitetail deer season attracts a lot of extra business to the shortgrass country. On opening day, the county roads billow with the dust of bright new pickups racing to the leases. The road going through the ranch takes on a silver tinsel of newcrop aluminum cans. In every outpost, all parties from the gasoline grinders to the feed stores celebrate the arrival of the free-spending redcaps.

By nightfall, lights from the hunting camps change the landmarks on the skyline on the way to the ranch. Takes a week for the new subscribers to locate their pastures. Car lights shine nearly any night as hunters turn into our north mill, three or four miles off course and two or three fences removed from the right boundary. It's easier to pick up the beer cans the next morning at the mill than it is go over at night to give directions and ask them to take their empties with them.

Difficult to tell whether any of the redcaps are lost and never found. They dress in such elaborate jungle costume the only way to find one once he goes down is to spot the reflection from the keeper on his bowie knife sheath, or maybe catch sight of his gold fillings when he yawns.

Waiting for a next of kin or missing person bulletin for a lost hunter is a lot like the way mothers looked for strayed kids during the Great Depression. We were lucky the school called the roll on weekdays and Sunday school superintendents reported attendance on Sunday, or we'd have been the lost generation for sure, not just in the eyes of our critics. Only time a skip-out was ever missed was at lamb marking or shearing time. Sure didn't take a detective to figure out why the Christmas stockings included a road map stuffed in the toe.

Doesn't mean hunters don't stick together. The hunting camps are bound together in a grand camaraderie making the mystic brotherhood of the Freemasons and Elks look like the organization of a summer softball team at a Boy Scout camp. Down at the corrals we call the Old Barn, gnawed-over steak bones and fried oyster shells are scattered on the ground, signifying a ritual of brotherhood, the way the Karankawa Indians left cooking middens on the Gulf Coast. Dainty cans of smoked fish lie among empty bottles of the richest years of French vintage. The finest shelled corn from the fields of the Midwest, bought for deer feed, rides in the backs of the handsomest vehicles known to Germany or Japan, past flocks of woollies and herds of hollow horns lucky to get a handout from a rusty pickup bed.

Not since the days of the King's royal hunting parks and the indentured gamekeepers has there been such class disparity as between the hunters and the ranchers. So much time has passed since my outfit was able to afford bulk corn to winter our old ewes, the bottom rusted out of the granary. I am ashamed to drive by the Old Barn when the whole fleet of new trucks and vans is in camp. To work cattle downwind from the rich foods grilling on the cooking fires is sheer agony. It is a good thing the cooking makes your mouth salivate, as I'd die of thirst before I'd drink from the tank in front of hombres who sip French mineral water.

But come the end of the season, the high-stepping redcaps and all their colorful style migrate back to the cities, like mountain bluebirds suddenly leave in one day to go south. In town the gas pumps clear and the cash registers are quiet. By the end of January, they are calling us again to ask about next fall's prospects. And the harder our game becomes, the more eager we are to do business.

December 17, 1998

The newsletter a week ago from the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, a big hollow-horn group, reported that the Secretary of Agriculture has arranged for 300.1 million metric tons of food to be shipped to Russia. Just flipping through the list of the shipment are the following: "120,000 metric tons of beef, 50,000 metric tons of pork, 500,000 metric tons of corn," and on and on, through wheat and soybeans to a conclusion of "30,000 metric tons of non-fat dry milk."

Sounded as if this $625 million dollars worth of food will leave the U.S. in December to reach those unfortunate people at about the peak of the coldest winter in a long time in Europe. My hopes were the Russians might become our friends. I mean friends of the farmers and ranchers in this country.

I looked up "metric ton" in the dictionary, the only reference book at the ranch except Dr. Le Gear's Veterinarian manual. A metric ton is 204 pounds heavier than a regular ton, or 2204.6 pounds. I set out to multiply 300.1 million times 2204 to find the amount of pounds involved, then realized if I wasn't able place 300.1 million in zeroes, I wasn't going to be able to place 2204 times that much in zeroes, much less place that many commas. My idea was to find the amount of pounds the food weighed. Next, in case the environmentalist camp wanted in on our act, they could ship the Russians a bigger boat load of pamphlets and best-selling books.

However, I was becoming comfortable in reading of millions and billions of dollars and only uncomfortable in comparing how the millions and billions were being spent. Like the recent budget gave farmers six billion dollars, and the closest the tenders of flocks came to being part of the bill was a low interest loan program for Angora goat herders. Other tidbits were five billion dollars to pass through the World Bank to help Brazil, 400 million to comfort Israel, and a whopping 200 million bucks to heal ranchers from the 1998 drouth and flood disasters.

I was so eager to sign up for the drouth assistance, the night the meeting was held in the Community Center in Mertzon, I had to wait outside in my pickup for the building to be unlocked. An inside tip had warned the money was to be split among livestock producers in 18 states. The 60 or 70 ranchers in Irion County were going to be dividing up all that dough with herders from Alabama to the Carolinas up into the Dakotas and back across to Colorado and Kansas to take in the Southwest.

Turned out the meeting was to explain the program requirements and to make an appointment to do the paperwork. The chairman was sure the shortgrass country was going to pass the below average rainfall and deficit forage test by a wide margin as we are accepted as being the leaders in global dehydration and scalped earth practices.

About the only chance I saw of cornering any of the coin was if the fall cattle market had stunned the whole industry to the point that out of state operators had stopped reading the newspapers and were unaware of the program. Perhaps an old boy stuck off out on the flats in New Mexico would become so heartsick over his light lambs and his thin cows going into the winter, he might overlook a new program. But you can bet your Aunt Tillie's silver set against next year's fur market on white striped skunks that the New Mexico jugkeepers banking the cattle are going to know about any bill helping ag loans before the first page hits the bottom of the hopper in Congress.

Didn't take long to understand the program wasn't clearly defined. The USDA man emphasized the amount of payment wouldn't be known until the volume of the applicants were determined after the January 8th deadline. So here we all were, the grand fraternity of hardpan herders from Irion and surrounding counties looking at more disappointment. (Later I was to learn the original proposal was for seven million dollars. Congressman Henry Bonilla and Mr. Stenholm were able to raise the ante to $200 million.)

Sitting way in the back, I remembered the 300 million metric tons of food we were sending to Russia. In front of me were some of the villainous enemies of nature who helped raise that food. I found myself wondering how we had attracted so many enemies when we are the only industry able to feed hungry people here or abroad. We even have to raise the food to feed the wolves and the coyotes. On the way back to the ranch, I thought of all the thousands of words written and spoken by the likes of Bruce Babbitt and Al Gore without ever once using the word famine.

December 10, 1998

At this writing, I am in Vista, California, a small town in northern San Diego County. Not small like Mertzon, but small for a community 30 miles from the Pacific Ocean between such populous giants as San Diego and Las Angeles. The motel management agreed to allow me inside the office to write as long as the door stayed locked by a deadbolt and I agreed to keep out of the way of the office work.

The word processor appears to be a standard unit, however, the desk is behind thick protective glass. The reception area is so cramped, a gangster and his moll would have to squeeze in a mighty small space to rob the place. The sonar system on the door bongs an extra loud alert upon opening. The owner and the clerk scowl through the heavy glass, demanding not only a credit card be passed through a slot under the glass, but also that photographic evidence of the card and the holder match to approve credit.

The desk chair demands a stiff-back military posture. However, no support is needed to keep me upright, as I sense that close to the cash drawer is a loaded German Luger pistol, or a double-barreled sawed off shotgun. I can tell by the intimidating way the management treats the public that robbing this joint is going to involve more than a misdemeanor hearing in Justice Court — more like the crossfire in the opening volleys at O.K. Corral.

I committed a serious breach of the State of California's landlord's code this morning by asking to change the 20-watt energy saving florescent bulb in the bedside lamp up to, say, a glaring 60 watter, so I'd able to read the headlines of the Los Angeles Times in bed. I further explained that I have to be able to see to tie my shoes in the morning. The front desk denied the request on the grounds that non-smoking rooms require less light than smoking rooms, because of the absence of pollution.

I asked the lady at check in if it was safe to walk a few blocks to eat in the only restaurant open on Sunday night. She said, "Yeah, I guess so. Things have settled down here a lot since two high school kids were shot in a gang war in front of my place last month."

Security questions of room clerks are a waste of time as they are trained to be non committal on the subject of guest's off premise safety. The best approach is to case the neighborhood on your own. If the financial district consists of pawn shops and bail bondsmen, for example, mail your traveler's checks home in a self addressed envelope and tape your credit cards inside your shoe tops. Should the security chain be broken loose from the motel door at check in, ask to be moved to the second story. Limit jewelry to imitation pearl handled pen knives, or gold plated ball points, and keep them in the hotel's safety deposit box. Excessive oil on the parking lot, or an old car with two flat tires parked by the swimming pool means shorten your stay. After looking about, if the only recreation center you find is "Tony's Adult Movie World," and "Maudie's Oriental Spa," relocate until the city fathers have time to tidy up a bit.

The walk to the restaurant was safe. The kitchen was the dangerous part. Named "Green Dragon of China," the egg rolls tasted like they had rolled down hill in an Easter egg race. The egg drop soup had indeed, been dropped. The steamed rice was so dry, the chop sticks stuck in the bowl. After dinner, I gargled two jiggers of soy sauce and seared my taste buds in dashes of hot Chinese mustard to restore my palate. (Oriental etiquette permits discreet gargling. Gentlemen, however, are expected to shield their mouths with their companion's fan; ladies, however, under more lenient restriction, may use anything handy from a kimono sleeve to the cook's apron to cover their mouths.)

One sidelight apart from the meal: on the top of the menu, bold letters proclaimed: "English Speaking Staff." Upon ordering, the young oriental waitress motioned to the manager, her mother, to come. She bowed and said, "Buenas noches, señor. Quieres uno traigo o una cervezav?" Distracted by the long list of choices, I failed to notice she was speaking Spanish, until I overheard the old boy in the next booth say, "Damn, Chinese sure sounds a lot like Spanish." And she did sound Spanish-speaking, calling crepes tortillas, and rice arrot.

Before the first draft ended, the room clerk told several seedy looking hombres the motel had no weekly rates. At each bong of the door, I crouched behind the monitor screen. It would have been a waste of breath to ask if the thick glass was bulletproof, or how long the gangs were going to stay settled down. One thing for sure, I wasn't going to drag out my stay to find the answers.

December 2, 1998

The owner of a big fence supply company in San Angelo said last week that out of the 12 crews working from the yard, 10 were building game fences.

"Game fences" meaning sales of not only two steel posts instead of one, but twice the amount of net wire used in a conventional fence. All being a big bonanza for his business, especially considering most of us better drouth and bitterweed ranchers were looking at a fencing budget of baling wire and pickets cut from native cedar bushes.

Before I talked to the fencing guy, I had already thought of asking the bank for a loan to build a game fence on the place down on the highway. I didn't want the loan, but I figured if I ask for, say, $100,000 to fence a couple of pastures and my feed bill ran 25 or 30 thousand over my budget this winter, I'd look like a disciple of Benjamin Franklin for being so thrifty saving on net wire.

Behind the scene, jug keepers are bound to respect finesse. Bankers show lots of style filling in long columns of self-proving figures on furnishings balancing against fixtures and big charge-offs for travel expense to and from the water cooler.

Two deer hunters were by the ranch looking for a lease on the opening day of the season, because of a game fence. Not because of game being fenced in, but because of the deer being fenced out. These redcaps claimed after a neighbor's outfit erected a high fence around the principal cover in the area, deer sightings dwindled to nothing at their blinds.

First thing they asked was whether my neighbors planned on raising the fences. I thought they meant were we going to prop up the fences falling down on the outside of the ranch. But then I caught on, and confessed a neighbor and I talked about adding one strand of barbed wire above a 47-inch tall woven wire fence to a stretch weaned calves ran over last fall. However, the conversion on domestic beef cattle to imported barbed wire was so heavy in favor of the wire, we decided to find a natural solution to the problem by branding earlier and running shorter-legged English cattle less prone to jumping fences. Seemed to answer the question, but they did look puzzled.

For some reason, hunters were confused on the dates of the rifle season. The sheriff called the ranch one morning a week before the rifle season opened to ask if any of our hunters had been out putting corn in their feeder pens? He said, "A 16 year-old boy and his father were in the grocery store early this morning looking for the locker plant to cut up the boy's buck he shot while putting out corn." According to the sheriff, the cashier warned the season was closed, but they contended that 16 year-old boys were not under the same restrictions as adults (correct in reality but incorrect by statute).

Until the sheriff called, I thought the season was open too. In a law office over in San Angelo the day before, a legal secretary explained that the big bouquet of yellow roses on her desk was a tradition from her husband, "old super bubba," on the day he left for the hunting lease. While I waited, I imagined "old super bubba" by a campfire, wearing a red plaid shirt, the tail propped up by a hip flask, laughing how he always fools his old lady by sending a dozen roses.

I am sure he'd be surprised to know he was called "super bubba" behind his back, instead of the "snookums," or "honey bun" she uses on the final day of retrieving a dress from lay-away. And she'd probably be astounded to learn her old mother and grandmother pulled variations of the same tricks she uses.

Lots of outfits are going all out for the recreation money, by guiding and feeding hunters and opening camp grounds and bed and breakfast places to supplement income. On the Coastal Plains and in South and Central Texas, classified ads quote mighty hefty prices for deer, quail and turkey leases. Ruins my trip every time I go to San Antonio or Austin to hear how much hunters are willing to spend compared to the paltry amount we charge out here. I don't know why we are so far behind. It must be high school football and the basketball games and the hunting season coinciding. Sports are so important, we just don't have time to wait for the high bids on the hunting leases.

Too bad the ending to the story of the 16 year-old boy who jumped the season is unavailable. However, I haven't seen a chain gang working the roads in Mertzon, so the kid's dad was right; 16 year-olds can hunt any time they please ...

November 26, 1998

hortgrass citizens still live in the outlying towns, yet country people in the sense of other times are fading away.

Mertzon probably stocks 150 head of chickens today, counting laying hens and the few flocks of fighting cocks, compared to a townsite once covered in Rhode Island Red hens and White Leghorn roosters. Milk cows aren't staked on the cedar hills for schoolboys to practice riding anymore, and the horse population is down to 10 head. Long gone are such sounds as Burro Miller's jack braying on a late summer evening, or bulls bellowing in the pasture adjoining the city limits as the weather cooled in the fall.

Young boys continue to ride bicycles to fish off the low water bridge in the spring. (Small town kids aren't allowed to drive on the highway until their 11th birthday.) But wooden benches no longer sit in front of the stores for men to rest up from tiring domino matches and stressful political debates.

Males and females use the same shop for haircuts. Instead of chairs full of men smelling of Lucky Tiger hair tonic and all forms of tobacco, the two sexes mingle in the lacquered odor of sprays and smells of singed hair. Waiting time is spent in such diversions as the pictorial emptiness of People magazine, or staring at such brain-numbing television shows as "Dip the Bucket of Passion," or "Four Feet in Love." (Reference points for television shows are hard to monitor if you don't own a set.)

On weekends, a friend and I walk in the more provincial setting on the other side of Spring Creek at Sherwood, the old county seat. Golden leafed pecans and lighter gilded soapberries brighten the roads in autumn light, along crumbling irrigation ditches, long dry from disuse. Street signs mark Wabash Avenue and Missouri Street leading to maybe two houses on four blocks.

Where the mercantile and the post office once stood across from the courthouse, cracked slabs of flaking concrete foundations and sidewalks gradually allow the mesquites and shifting dirt to reclaim the spot for nature. An array of trailers park where the Odd Fellow's Lodge once met in the finery of fez and silver-plated sabers.

The road winding off the hill from the east is the same one the stagecoach from San Angelo raced spans of horses down, the tongue riding high on the collars, trace chains rattling slack against the gravel, brakes screeching against the iron rims of the wheels, and the driver holding the lines, blowing a bugle heralding the bi-weekly post.

The trails my grandfathers and uncles and aunts followed to pick up the mail after the stage run are overgrown by a profusion of garden vines and bedded flowers mixed with wild cactus and dense brush. Blooms from honeysuckle vines or sweet potato plants gone wild mark the final chapter of the vacating of the land.

Ruins and deserted property are scattered about the town. The vacant house I know only as the Kagle Place belongs in a William Faulkner story in Mississippi. An overgrowth of vines fills the front yard; gingerbread scales under the eaves drop from formation onto drooping gutters. The garage, once a buggy shed, is Model T Ford wide. The only hope vandals will not destroy the old house is that miscreants may recall how many rounds of .22 ammunition a former owner fired at imaginary spooks on moonlit nights. Ghosts, you know, are good watchmen.

After heavy rains, erosion uncovers handmade square nails and broken bits of blue and white dishes on the vacant lots. Here and there, a shard of brown glass from a snuff bottle, or a rusty harness buckle work from the ground. Old knife handles and misshapen forks too weathered to read the trademarks sift through the fine dirt to surface.

I poke around in the loose dirt with a stick. I wonder what if I were to find a button from the Confederate uniform of Great Grandpa Ferdinand Noelke, who lived up the street, or what if I were to find a live cartridge from the gunbelt of Black Jack Ketchum, the infamous train robber, who hid out in a cave on the Middle Concho? Just to unearth a piece of a spur rowel would bring Black Jack into focus, tying his horse down on Baptist Hollow to walk up town to play cards in back of the livery stable. Uncovering one old pewter button is all it'd take to revive the image of Ferdinand picking his way up to the store. He'd be in his dotage, wearing a pair of elastic banded house shoes instead of his old army boots and swinging a hickory cane the way he once wielded a saber on the battlefield.

I linger by the Kagle Place on every walk, remembering a prim, gray-headed lady quilting on a frame hanging in her parlor. The smell of biscuits cooking in the oven of a wood stove comes back and I curse the day the laws of nutrition banned eating redeye gravy.

November 19, 1998

Late fall rains and healing misty days soaked a big portion of the shortgrass country in October and into November. Up until the very end of the wet spell, the scope and location of the country still dry is unknown. The drouth had been on too long to feel comfortable asking another herder if he has had rain. Also, years had passed since follow-up moisture had covered much of the area.

After so much dry weather, we didn't know who was still in a drouth. Pasture to pasture to fenceline made a big difference in conditions. Seemed like farm to market roads or even railroad tracks were strong enough barriers to hold back the clouds. Chicken Little in the fairy tale thought the sky was falling when an acorn hit her in the head, or I think it was an acorn. From where we were standing watching the clouds split on the far horizon, I began to believe the sky was breaking in half.

Until reports began to come in on the rains, I avoided bringing up the subject, which in West Texas is as hard as keeping a Wall Street trader away from the Dow Jones averages. At the post office, I found the safest way to approach a friend was to glance at his mail and say: "Well, well, I see you and Maudie still have box 231," or, "Man, the old trash can here in the lobby sure is full." (During the Big Drouth of the 50s, I forgot to pick up my mail for a while. I don't know how long the interruption lasted. However, life cycled back then on 180-day demand note renewals. It had to be less than six months, or the bank would have put out an all-state bulletin on my behalf.)

However, just seeing an old boy going down the road is enough of a clue to tell if he has had a rain the night before. If he slumps down so far his head barely clears the steering wheel of his pickup, or is driving eight miles an hour on the shoulder with only the crown of his hat showing, no need for a weather report from his outfit. One thing about meeting a driver pulling a trailer load of feed and looking at the floorboard, it sure settles the dispute over who has the right-of-way.

With or without drouth fever, we herders drive so slow from piddling around in the pastures on the verge of stalling the engine, we tend to open the lanes of traffic on the asphalt. Nevertheless, now that John Glenn blasted back into space at age 77, kids are going to have a harder time making a case for pulling old gramp's or granny's driver's licenses. The first time one of us knocks over the post box 10 feet from the driveway, or parallel parks two wheels over in the gladiola bed, we can ask how many of their age group has been into space twice in a lifetime?

I keep my membership card in the American Association of Retired Persons by my driver's license to alert traffic officers of my influence. The AARP wields lots of political clout, plus many of us better members had matriculated several driver's ed. courses before these new age policemen graduated from the police academy.

You may not have noticed, but the citizens directing traffic at school crossings are nothing more than old coots who have probably been grounded for speeding in school zones. You can tell the way they brandish the red stop signs and step out in the middle lane and scowl that they are mad at motorists. I don't let them worry me as long as they have good sturdy signs to steady themselves on the pavement and are surrounded by enough kids to keep from being run over.

I hear of a few bunches of young cows going back to the country. Well, one bunch of young cows going back to the country. The rains are too late to heal the bare spots, yet enough weeds are coming to winter the old ewes and help the cattle along. I sure was sweating John Glenn making it back okay. He's going to be the key to renewing a lot of senior citizen insurance ...

November 12, 1998

Heifer calving started a week ahead of schedule this October. The gestation period is always earlier on the range than on the charts.

We gathered the heaviest cows into the horse trap 10 days ahead of time to watch closer. The lighter bred stock was left in an adjoining pasture. The ones cut to calve right away stood around in the water lot in sight of my front door, chewing their cud and fighting horn flies. They showed about as much interest in motherhood as those gals do hanging out at Baskin Robbins eating double dip cones and admiring their reflections in the showcases. (Ice cream parlors use trick glass to give trimmer profiles of their clientele.)

Every evening I rounded up the trap bunch; every morning I counted the two-section pasture. By counted, I mean that by mid-morning I might still be out 15 or 16 head of cattle. Along about then, I'd tire from driving in the pickup and go back to the house for a horse. By one o'clock, if my luck continued bad, I'd tie my horse in a thicket close to the windmill, shade up on the dark side of the tank and let the missing ones hunt for us.

Seemed like the more heavy cows I worked into the trap, the more births occurred over the fence in the bigger pasture. The last handbook the ranch owned on heifer calving burned in the bunkhouse fire in '86 or '87. Unsupported by a reference book, I decided the reason the heifers showing the least symptoms of pregnancy were calving ahead of the ones showing the most signs was from the disturbance caused by riding and driving through the herd so much. Lots of premature babies are born after events like Halloween carnivals and junior high football playoffs. So I started stirring the ones in the trap more and leaving the ones in the pasture alone.

In a week, 10 percent of the heifers had babies on the ground. All were natural births until the eighth morning of the eighth day. I drove for hours hunting and looking for one cow. I climbed up in the back of the pickup bed a half dozen times to peer over the tree lines. (Looking a long time for one cow brute in the brush causes Advanced Imagination Disorder, to the point where the hunter starts thinking his quarry can fly. So I've been told, the worst case of A.I.D. ever recorded was when a cowboy named "Ridge Bone" Harris dove to the ground from the shadow of a Border Patrol plane flying across a pasture where he had spent a week hunting a black bull.)

I sat up on a high ridge and looked through binoculars at every header having a dark shadow, or a deceiving-shaped cedar bush. I went in all the corners and made sure a cow wasn't hiding behind a spreader dam, or lying out of sight in a caliche pit. I made one last check at the three waterings and headed for the house to get my horse.

Before saddling up, I radioed my son and another cowboy to come help. By the time they reached the pasture, I found the heifer down in heavy labor. While she was distracted by her misery, I slipped my rope around her neck and looped a half-hitch over her nose. (A catch is a catch in my book.) As I struggled to dally her to a stump, she flounced and fell over in between two large cactuses and a dead mesquite tree.

In 30 minutes, we put her through a head lock/hip lock delivery that'd make the rankest battlefield operation ever performed in the trenches of France look like an advertisement for Band Aid. The calf was dead and the mother too wobbly from nerve damage to stand. Doctors and patient were panting in long whistling breaths the way the north wind whistles through the cracks in on old ranch house.

I rallied enough to brush off the dirt clods and remove the larger cactus thorns. Somewhere in the tussle, a dead mesquite limb shattered under my chaps and fell in one boot top. But before taking off my boot, I needed a place free of cactus to lie on my back to shake out the big pieces of bark and thorns. When I found a clean spot, my hands were still too wet to pull off my boot. So I fished around the best I could in the boot top to dislodge what felt like a cord of wood. I sure didn't want to ride back to the house with the stirrup leathers pressed against the mesquite bark.

The heifer stayed down for a week. Water and feed had to be hauled to her twice a day. As I remember, the heifer calving manual said to sterilize the calving pens and wear gynecological gloves. Nothing was mentioned, however, about how to restore the doctors and nurses after a range delivery on a hillside in a prickly pear cactus and mesquite thicket. I suspect that chapter is one learned from the great old school of looking over saddlehorns and dashboards ...

November 5, 1998

After the poetry festival ended, a major toll road called the Garden State Parkway routed me all the way down to Cape May in the southeast corner of New Jersey, against Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Coast. Unlike driving in the Southwest, cruising along in the slow lane at 65 miles an hour, New England states don't last long. About the same amount of time, in fact, a fast driver takes to cross a county in New Mexico.

Money goes fast, too. Toll fees took a sandwich sack loaded with quarters and dimes. The short delay by the toll window, however, was worth the fee just to unfreeze my fingers from the steering wheel. The toll lane also offered the only refuge from being sideswiped by a Volkswagon or clipped by a Trans Am. But as soon as the red light above the control arm changed to green, the cars raced from the stall the way a roping horse charges a barrier.

The bed and breakfast place I booked claimed to be 30 minutes from Cape May, but turned out to be about 35 miles in distance and about an hour in time after the rush hour ended.

"Abraham Lincoln," the same brochure said, "stayed in the room as a young lawyer." He tried law cases in a town close by called "Cape May Courthouse." The farmer who built the house took in roomers. He and Mr. Lincoln, I suspect, sat in front of the fireplace and talked politics while the farmer's wife did the supper dishes and made up the beds.

I pulled a rocking chair up within the space I figured necessary for his long legs to reach the hearth. Pressed my fingers together to under my chin, rested the heels of my hands on my chest and closed my eyes to imagine being Honest Abe, the young lawyer from Illinois. Drawing up my hindlegs to rock a bit, I imitated a few rolls of "four score and ten" to hit the right beat. I tried and failed to visualize where a candidate named Honest Abe; or for that matter, Honest Alice might fit in today's political scheme.

Cape May looked as if all the Victorian houses on the Coast had moved to town. Every street is lined in two and three-story gingerbread houses, painted in striking tri-color décor, and surrounded by heavy spiked black iron fences. Strict zoning preserves the aura of the past. On any block, carpenters and painters work at tedious restoration of porch rails and framing blue and yellow stained glass windows, or hanging screen doors decorated in the wooden curlicues of the era.

A lady in an art gallery said old money kept the town under control. None of the excesses of the resort towns is permitted; newcomers of 10 years' residence or less are expected to behave as Victorian as the architecture. Bottles wrapped in brown paper sacks rested on the restaurant tables. Liquor licenses are exorbitant in New Jersey, so blue or red nose laws are easy to enforce, whether by tradition or economic reality.

The population of Cape May varies day to day from checkout to checkin time at the inns and hotels. About every other lot is a bed and breakfast place. I moved to town after discovering how much driving it took to rent Abe Lincoln's room. (Please don't confuse this with the room the Clintons rent in the White House.)

Before I register in a bed and breakfast, I look the room over. If the bed is covered with rag dolls and stuffed animals, I check the shower pressure and run the hot water hydrant to see whether the landlord is using the dolls and teddy bears to divert from serious plumbing defects. (Strange, since children are unwelcome, that bed and breakfast operators can have a fetish about decorating a room like a nursery.) Bowls of perfumed potpourri may mean a chicken processing plant is upwind; bail bondsmen, low class bars and pawn shops are good clues how to judge security.

Cape May brought out my finest skills of fooling around, taking walks and reading books in outdoor restaurants. Ferry schedules worked right to cross the Bay to nap in a bobbing deck chair. Marked paths led down to walks along the beach for kicking chips of driftwood and turning over shells in the wake of the lowering tides of the ocean. Verdant wetlands held such spectacular sights as a flight of swans, flushing from a big clump of reeds to bank and circle, then land back on the same pond in a whirring of wing beats strong as a diminishing air brake.

Abe Lincoln hadn't stayed at the new place. But I think he'd have been better satisfied in a room closer to the courthouse …

October 29, 1998

Prior to the trip to New Jersey, my exposure to poetry had been limited to the times at workshops when writers take parts of poems, demonstrating the rhythm in our language. In the fifth grade, I remember picking up the beat patting the dust from erasers in the back of the room as Miss Greengross recited portions of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." (Eraser dusters become quite musical after a few semesters' practice.) But the Dodge Festival was my first chance to hear poets of laureate rank read their work.

There must have been a thousand or more of us seated under the big concert tent every morning at nine to listen to the readings until 9:30 at night. Television cameras swung across one side of the stage on a long arm, taping for the Bill Moyers show. The audience varied from old grannies and graybeards to onslaughts of students and teachers on special days. All were bipeds. Just the shuffling of so many feet should have been distracting, yet for so huge a gathering, the acoustics and visibility from the floor were clear and audible.

Takes me about four days to stop gawking at people from the time I leave the ranch and to go to the city. Few in the crowd resembled the commonly held Greenwich Village Bohemian image of a poet. Most of the patrons and the participants dressed in denims and outdoor clothes. Costumes in the VIP section ran from a few professors dressed in coats and ties to dungarees and T-shirts. On the day New York City high school students over ran the grounds, more strange looking hair cuts and skin-piercing ornaments passed by than when I was in the Southern Highlands in New Guinea among the Hull Wig Men wearing human hair for headdresses. I tried to avoid staring at the gold bobs shining from the tongues and the tattooed snakes and spider webs on the shoulder blades. (Young nubile skin is perfect for tattoo art. Holds color, too.) Several times I asked the girls in the information tent direction, but the small gold specks bobbing on their tongues was so distracting, I had to request them to write things down.

At lunch, school kids raised to ride subways in New York City controlled the lines leading to the food booths. By taking turns, a friend and I were able to hold two spaces on a bench attached to a picnic table. After the meal, I stood up as straight as possible in the short distance between the bench and the edge of the table to stretch my back. When I sat down, a pirate-looking kid dressed in a slouchy black shirt and wide-legged pants had slipped under me. I said: "Whoops, beg your pardon." He responded in an outburst of street language at the correct level for a boy his age and urban bearing. I regained my composure by being grateful the incident didn't happen just before going in a tunnel on the subway in New York City.

Everybody else was friendly. I learned the parking routine the hard way. Cars were parked in meadows surrounding the grounds in the daytime, guided by attendants. However, after dark, the way back changed to paths through heavy timber, leading to a field spotted with sporadic rows of darkened automobiles. Just as I walked out of the woods to the lot, a lady behind me, the only person around, said, "I better go along with my flashlight and help you find your car." And she did, and she saved me a long walk wandering around hunting for the rent car in the darkness.

Three or four of the poets' work showed strong racial tones. One African American fellow, in particular, won over the audience with spellbinding readings, reminiscent in cadence and sound of the oldtime preachers striking the pulpits and shouting the gospel under tents in the hot Texas summers of my youth. I like ethnic food and music better than I trust ethnic causes and cases.

No way of hiding a Southern drawl as pronounced as mine. To keep myself out of a jam around the people who think of "South" as synonymous with "racism," I tell folks of all races how "energizing" I find their work. About one time out of 10, this strategy works. May not be a high rate of success, but it beats the insincerity of political correctness by several innings.

By day two, I lost contact of the drouth and the market failures at home. Lunch became a picnic down by a big pond surrounded by yellow butterflies fluttering about the wild flowers and gold and red plum colored leaves floating on the water. I didn't have to memorize one line of poetry. But I did bring home a quote from a Japanese poet written on a New Year's Day: "Fiftieth birthday; every morning from now on is pure profit."

October 22, 1998

New Jersey is the only state I know where the road system is unmapped. The state, I feel sure, was much easier to travel in colonial times than today. In the old days, a traveler followed the axe marks on the trees and camped by the rivers. Nowadays, however, racing along at 65 miles per hour, holding three inches of space between the front and rear of bumperless cars, an exit sign announcing a lane change 30 feet from the exit to Ant Crawl Avenue enroute to Dip Street is a challenge indeed.

After I landed in Philadelphia, I tried to buy a New Jersey map and failed. I had a new McNally road atlas along, and the rental people furnished an abbreviated map of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Once I crossed over into New Jersey, however, the maps disagreed on how to go by Princeton and to my ultimate destination up west of New York City.

The density and momentum of the traffic continued to increase outside of Philadelphia. Over across the state line, signs began to appear: "Right Turns Only." I needed to exit to the left to go by Princeton University. I'd roll up to a signal light and spot the correct highway number, only to be pushed on further by a "no left turn" sign. On top of the trauma of being locked in the wrong lane, the turn indicator signals on the rent car kept clicking and clacking without flashing on the dashboard. Took about 10 blocks to discover the clicking was my head throbbing from a tension attack.

Way past the last Princeton exit, a sign warned Route 95 was merging into the New York Turnpike. I cut across two lanes of solid Peterbilts and Toyotas to make a right turn. I knew I'd be safer anywhere in the country than lost in New York City.

The turn proved to be a moment of enlightenment. Slowly it sunk in: "the only way to make a left turn at an intersection in New Jersey is to turn right and a circle goes around to the traffic light, thus the meaning of right turns only."

The situation was so desperate, I stopped for directions at a car lot. The salesmen paused at his desk and mocked my drawl: "Wal, Tex, whut yawl needs to do is go back on that thar turnpike and take exit 83, thurty miles from here." I was so relieved I complimented him on his accurate enunciation of our idiom and also how lucky I felt running into a bilingual car salesman.

Safe on the way, I had better tell where I was headed. Every two years the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation underwrites a poetry festival at Stanhope, New Jersey. The "R" in the Foundation's title stands for Rockefeller. Geraldine, a daughter of John D., left enough dough to her foundation to bankroll holding a $3 million festival every two weeks, much less pulling one off every two years. Bill Moyer taped the last festival on PBS, drawing more attention to what was already the largest poetry festival in the Americas.

Hotel reservations were tight a month before the festival. Twelve thousand people buy tickets for the four-day affair. Among the patrons are 1000 teachers, loads of students, plus special bus service from West Point Academy and New York City. My room was an hour's drive from Stanhope. I added 30 minutes travel time, stopping at fire houses and gasoline stations for directions.

The worst guide was a fireman. He must have been suffering mental fatigue from playing too much solitaire or dominoes. Had I followed his directions, the festival would have ended before I made home base. Several gasoline grinders tied for being the most incomprehensible. Hotel clerks helped the most. They did radical things for guides, like consult maps and write down directions.

I had plenty of reasons to go to the festival. Miss Greengross read lots of poetry the six semesters I was in the fifth grade. The Northeast is beautiful in September. And I was worn out by the drouth and weary of the political malaise darkening our country. I wanted to hear the poet laureate of the United States and all the other gifted poets on the program read their work. I was tired of pricing cow feed and pasturing old ewes on dry stubble and cactus fruit. I wanted to hear new words and phrases instead of old phrases, like "captive cattle" and "imported lamb."

The first morning breakfast was at picnic tables underneath hardwood trees, setting their golden leaves to flight in the sharp autumn air. Beneath a large white gazebo, people gathered to listen to amateurs read. Under an enormous green circus tent, a jazz group played. On the walks, Peruvian Indians played out a furious dance of aborigine passion on a rawhide drum and wood flute.

Time dissolved, and I was glad I had risked my life on the Jersey expressways and braved the insult of a secondhand car salesman to make the festival ...

(no subject)

October 15, 1998

Dropping the trappers also meant the Animal Damage Control program stopped using helicopters to control the coyote packs up on the big cow outfits in the north end of the county. Furthermore, no control meant soon the Mertzon, Barnhart, and Big Lake townsites were going to be overrun by the packs, ending the days of free ranging pets and beginning the times of confining children to secured areas.

On the first rainy afternoon in months and months, a reorganization meeting convened at the courthouse. The full Commissioner's Court, about a dozen ranchers, and four Animal Damage Control personnel were present.

I was wearing a floppy brimmed hat. To give the impression the ranchers' delegation amounted to more than the actual number, I kept my hat on. I was not only hoping to fool the Court, but to pull the brim over my face to hide how embarrassed I was at our camp's turnout.

The judge and commissioners acted favorably toward protecting the community from an epidemic of predators. A guy representing a sportsman's group proposed that lease hunters put up 25 bucks a season and be given prizes for helping control predators on their leases. An old friend from my school board days suggested the ranchers pay $30 a section, just like we had been paying.

Then I blew off my big yapper and suggested the Salvation Army might help us fight coyotes. (Mother blamed my inappropriate behavior on her brother, scaring me as a child by jumping out from behind the barn wrapped in a Mexican wolf hide late one evening. Perhaps talking about coyotes revived the phobia.)

Nobody even smiled. Cousin Goat Whiskers the Younger jumped up and went out to smoke his tenth cigarette of the afternoon, one of my other cousins looked like he might take up smoking, and the old school board pal stared mesmerized by a moth circling the skylight. No doubt he was recalling the many nights when superintendents and the board blanched at my outbursts.

The county agent broke the silence by suggesting an ad hoc board be nominated to contact other ranchers to hold another meeting.

Many a time, I've wished for a word retriever to catch my spouting off in midair. The heaviest caliber weapon the Salvation Army issues is a tambourine to shake over the iron pots at Christmas. Decked out in gray and red uniforms, emanating charity and good will, they hardly fit the profile of coyote fighters. For the first time of the afternoon, I was glad the audience was so small.

At the next meeting, the county agent showed his trapping skills by smoking beef brisket and boiling beans to bring the herders into closer range. After lunch, by-laws passed and a board was elected. The group adopted a new program of including deer hunters to join at $30 apiece. We agreed to award prizes to the redcap gaining the most points for controlling predators.

Goat Whiskers suggested an elk head be mounted for first prize. The only objection I saw to giving away a bull elk's head as an award was that the only game farmer in the county gave me a lesson on selling solidmouth ewes 35 and a half years ago this fall that is still fresh. So fresh that if he offered to sell me an elk's head, I'd demand the director of the Game and Fish Commission tooth him before the embalming fluid the taxidermist used sealed his mouth shut.

I felt faint from being quiet, but I never uttered a word louder than a few weak "ayes" to support the motions on the floor. Quite a number left checks on the table. Looks like we may keep the program another year. I just hope the minutes from the first meeting skip my part about the Salvation Army ...

(no subject)

October 8, 1998

Fellow at a party in San Angelo the other night reviewed growing up at a line camp on the huge Matador Ranch up north. He touched on the cowboys and the cooks he knew. Admitted that he got such an overdose of cowboying as a kid, he left the ranch for good once he was out of high school.

Like I told him, had the boys around Mertzon in 1940 so much as had a chance to cut wood or haul the water for the Matador chuckwagon, we'd have given any four fingers off either hand for the privilege.

Next day, I read about a group of pathologists exhuming the remains of six sailors buried in the permafrost in Greenland — or maybe it was the Northwest Territory of Canada. The purpose is to study the tissue of these six victims of the influenza epidemic of 1918. The Matador story was still fresh from the night before. I began to wonder if pathologists would be interested in studying live cowboys before the last one was gone. I knew a few old boys some time ago who used to sell blood. Perhaps there were still some around who would sell tissue.

To my knowledge no one but wives or sweethearts had ever even tried to find out the cause of the cowboy disease. In lots of instances, the ladies' interest was pretty shortterm, coming to a swift conclusion from a traveling salesman hitting the country in a new car, or a county agent moving to town with a steady income. Maybe a panel of scientists could launch a study and learn why a waddie wasn't able to be content working on the ground instead of being up in the air riding an animal that has a hard time placing tenth in an intelligence test of 10 species.

I pulled the file of all the I-9 forms collected since the law was passed in November of 1986. All except three or four were day workers. Many were passport Mexicans. First, I sorted the forms according to the seasons of the workers' births. Thirty-two were born in the winter, mainly in December. Of the 24 born in the summer, way over half listed July as their birth date. I found spring to be only one man more than the 12 who were born in the fall. So of the 81 hands I worked, 40 percent had been born in the winter months.

I looked in the astrology charts in the newspaper for a clue, but the only thing I found revelant was a short note saying: "Babies born in the cold months may confuse perspiration with their own blood." Under July, the only applicable message was: "Watch for theatrical heat strokes in babies born this month."

Next, I stacked the ones who promised to come the following week and failed to appear. Five of the eight were between 30 and 40 years of age. Half of them drew advances from five to 10 dollars to buy gasoline to come to work Monday. At least 10 to my best memory in a younger grouping had to take their wives to the doctor in Del Rio.

Here my system broke down. But those I-9 forms held lots of memories. I remembered three cases of boys who became lost in the horse trap. I recalled one gentleman costumed in black hat and silver band who tried to shift the blame, because his broken stirrup leather buckle rubbed a sore on his horse. I recalled vividly of watching old Cindy, the kid horse, make equestrian history by staying under the most inept rider to ever put foot to stirrup. I found one of those reminder stick-um notes on a form of one hand: "Next time there is a fire as big as the one that burned down the bunkhouse, throw all the extra saddles in the blaze at the highest point."

After one more big selloff from the drouth in August, my brother called one morning to ask whether I was going back in the sheep business once it began raining again. Sheep, as you may know, require lots of labor. The question was a shock. Our great grandfather was a sheepman. All the land patents under the family name traced back to woolies. I couldn't answer him. I don't have any idea how I'd buy bulls and cow feed without my old ewes to foot the bills.

The I-9 forms are still out on the dining room table. I brought the stick-um note under careful scrutiny. I wonder when it'll be changed to read: "Throw your rigging in the fire the next time there is one big as the one that burned down the bunkhouse."

(no subject)

Bookstores are roadblocks in my life. It doesn't matter how many unread books cover the tables and shelves at the ranch, nor does abundance or lack of funds make a difference; if I see a book under-priced, out of print, or on my list to buy, in the sack it goes. So, not surprisingly, my part of this story begins in the poetry section of a musty second-hand bookstore in Fort Worth.

That was where I opened a collection of poems published by a vanity press years ago and found an envelope bearing a cancelled, red two-cent stamp, postmarked Brownwood Texas, June 23, 1930, 1 PM. It was addressed to a Miss Cora H. at 1301 Ave. C, Corpus Christi, Texas.

The poetry section of used bookstores is a very private place. Also, I knew my mother would have flushed my eyes with iodine if she even thought I would peek in another person's mail. Yet, in one swift maneuver, I slipped the letter in the breast pocket of my jacket. In another quick move, I replaced the atrocious poetry book on the shelf. The bookstore owner paid little attention to my purchases. I went directly to the hotel to read the letter.

The first page was dated June 23, 1930. The simple letterhead read: Rebecca H., Box 106, Brownwood, Texas. The letter opens: "Dear Cora, Your letter was waiting for me when I got here the afternoon I left. When I reached Sweetwater, (120 miles or so west of Brownwood) after a hot dirty drive, Paula was there to meet me in a Ford sport model coupe."

Now a number of characters enter the letter, like John, Hallie, Sam and Mabry, who must be some of Cora and Rebecca's family. But the strongest clue is that Rebecca is Paula's bossy big sister, or her bossy aunt. She writes, "That evening Paula took the sport coupe for a drive. I persuaded her that along with saving $30 difference in price, she would be getting more car for less money in a tudor sedan. She disgusted John by telling him she thought she looked cute in the sport coupe."

Rebecca prevailed. Paula turns in the sports coupe the next morning for what Rebecca describes in her letter as "a very pretty green dull color tudor Paula will be better pleased with than a sports coupe."

Next we find them taking a drive in the new tudor on a Saturday evening. "Paula drove. She was so afraid she would burn the bearings out that she went about 15 miles per hour, and I was sure it would be eleven before we got home. Later, however, I told her she would not injure the car on a good stretch by driving twenty or twenty-five, so she speeded up some." (I think she grew more confident, or needed space, as Paula leaves for Dallas in the new tudor.)

October 1, 1998

Sunday, Rebecca spends the day with Hallie and her husband John. She is still in Sweetwater. Her current topic is Sam and Mabry. Sam doesn't appear, she explains, as he has to wash the week's dishes and get the baby ready to go to church with his wife. Sam has been working for John, but now has a new job in Phoenix. Rebecca has plenty to say on the subject about how the old lady (Mabry's mother) had warned Sam in this quote, "Mabry couldn't and wouldn't cook a lick. That he took her for better or worse and shouldn't complain because everything has turned out for the bad was no reason for quitting." Worst of all in Rebecca's eyes, was how Mabry told Sam "to buy some honey almond cream to put on his hands so that people in the store in Arizona wouldn't know he'd done manual labor."

Something else Hallie and Rebecca covered on the Sunday visit was Paula and her roommate's love affairs. Rebecca reviews Hallie's report: "Paula is keeping up a hot correspondence with Mr. Eckert. She hears and writes every day, with specials (delivery?) in between. Her roommate, Myrtle, is going out with the town barber, who does not meet Paula's approval." So Rebecca writes on, "Hallie reminded her that her flame, Mr. Eckert, had been divorced by the Baptist minister's daughter because he was so conceited and belched all the time."

Here Rebecca adds in crowded longhand: "I don't want to forget to tell you, Momma and I ran into Mrs. Bean the other night at the drugstore, when we stopped in to drink grape juice and eat a cheese sandwich. Mrs. Bean said 'nights have been too hot for me to sleep.' Later, I told Momma I was sleeping under a blanket every night and bet Mrs. Bean was hot living over in that hole on West Street."

Somewhere along in the first reading, the guilty feeling disappeared. My sister found a letter of the writer Upton Sinclair in a library book when she was in college at Cornell. Mother never objected to the framed copy of Mr. Sinclair's letter hanging on the wall at the ranch. But I do feel obligated to buy the old poetry book the next time I'm in Fort Worth. However, I know from having read the first poem that I skimmed the top off the works when I stole Rebecca's letter to Cora.

(no subject)

September 24, 1998

A small tonnage of staple finewool sold a few weeks ago in Texas for one dollar and two and a half cents a pound. I realize news of wool sales interests the hollow horn operators and the meat goat herders about as much as a line judge's job at the U.S. Tennis Open appeals to Mark McGwire. However, I think it is healthy for all segments of agriculture to share our misery, then split off on our own on the rare occasions when good times hit. After all, most of the waterholes and springs that the sheepmen and the cattlemen fought over in the old days have dried up.

On the way back and forth to the ranch, I drive through several straight cow outfits. All of this country once was dual species operations, running thousands of head of woolies and big herds of whiteface cows on the Spring Creek watershed. Nowadays, when we do have grass, more cattle are seen than sheep.

Plenty disheartening to be involved in a business so full of misery you can't enjoy a short drive from the ranch to town. Enroute, I am constantly reminded of our plight. All year long, right off the road is a preview of the current disaster.

If a windmill man turns in a gate going to the neighbor's, hauling a big string of high-priced pipe or rods, I might as well go fill in his name on the next check in the book. Help the same neighbor pull a calf one week, and all next month we'll be imposing on him to do the same thing. Should a truck run through the fence on my brother's outfit on the highway, I might as well stop at the wool house for enough steel posts to be ready to patch mine the next week.

The ranch closed-radio circuit heralds plenty of commonly held grief. It is amazing, for example, how many batteries and starters go dead in the winter at the same time on days when it is critical to feed the livestock. No determinations can be made of the number of miles ranch pickups have been dragged by wives frantic to get the kids to the school bus. Had nature not ordained our homeland to be called the shortgrass country, "the big tow rope" would have been a good second choice. (For part of the seven years of the drouth of the 1950s, we parked a bobtailed truck on the hill behind the old ranch for emergencies. Visitors thought it was because of the danger of flooding from the big draw in front of the house, but the reason was the dreadful condition of the ignition systems of our rolling stock.)

Short time ago, an agent offered a special rate on an auto club. The plan provided insurance and wrecker services. I told the lady the protection I needed wasn't the same as her company's conception of road hazards. What I wanted was a vehicle guided by looking through a periscope like a submarine. My peril was not breaking down mechanically on the road, but from "breaking down emotionally" from the sights off the road. Unlike most telephone solicitors, she excused herself in a hurry.

In the winter, I go out the back way through Barnhart. Ranchers over there seem to do better than in my neighborhood. As late as the middle of the day, their sheep and cattle are still eating on the big piles of cottonseed and bales of hay they throw out every day. Must be something to do with the amount of feed or regularity of the feed runs, as they ship a lot heavier lambs and calves than I do following a hit and miss program designed for the town and country type rancher. I learned a long time ago that on a 180-day financed operation, a three pound coffee can was a better measuring cup than a five gallon bucket.

The Australian and New Zealand producers took 57 percent of the dressed lamb market three weeks ago in the U.S. Australia, I read, has 400 million pounds of wool stockpiled and ready to ruin our prices for raw wool at any call. Sheep ranching must be the worst of all herder oriented diseases. Looks like a bunch of us are going to need a cure ...

September 17, 1998

Drouths never release their grip until the last droplet of reserve is squeezed from their victim. The present one is the most treacherous to fall in this century.

"Treacherous," because last year a large portion of the Shortgrass Country began to receive good rains. Restocking began in high-priced cattle, and expensive heifer calves stayed home. Woolie operators and goat herders bought back into the game. If feed was booked at all, only modest amounts were reserved for winter.

Then, the drouth backlashed in a mighty blow that'd made a stingray look like a piece of seaweed floating in the waves. Before we realized what had happened, the dry winter skipped over spring and turned into an even drier summer. One hundred-degree temperatures boiled the life from newcrop lambs and the toasted prairie lands turned the hairball calves into matching mates for their winter-coated mothers.

There was no place to hide or escape. The entire state dried up into a serious series of crop failures and water shortages. The best time to travel in any direction was after darkness concealed the stubble in the pastures and empty windrows. Even then, the awful smell of dead grass contaminated the air-conditioning system. On the way from the ranch to Mertzon, the only oasis was on the railroad right-of-way, where the moisture condensed underneath the bridges and beneath the rails on cool nights.

Spring Creek dropped so low over at Mertzon, the shady pecan bottoms no longer offered a retreat to forget about the drouth. After Memorial Day, the city lost the one employee in charge of removing litter. The scene worsened as all forms of disgraceful trash covered the banks. For a short time, I tried sacking the mess, but gave up the evening I found a piece of shag carpet halfway thrown in the water and too soaked to move. Crossing the low-water bridge became so painful, I'd cover one side of my face with my hat.

But losing the walk along the river was minor compared to the other consequences. Markets broke, and every hoof going to town gave the buyers' circle at the auction an advantage in price and weighing condition. Any age cow above a three year-old went to the packers; the buyers from Mexico skimmed off the ones they wanted to send home to their killing floors. (The Mexican demand saved the old ewe market and pumped a little life into the loosely defined packer cattle trade.)

Losses on the fat markets, sheep and cattle alike, made the collapse of the stock market in the 1920s read like "A Child's Garden of Verses." Handholds on the arms of the seats in the stands at the auction barn had nail prints a half-inch deep. Wasn't anything to see an old boy hit the front door wearing his hat backwards to join the race of pickups and empty goosenecks headed for one last stop at the feed store.

We shipped every week all summer. On every count, we came up short. On every work, we tried to beat the heat and the dust and lost on every case. Sales receipts got cursory glances. Trucking bills and feed bills were paid without being checked. (I paid one of my pals twice for a load of cows.) The hardest time, however, for me happened at daylight in mid-July. Before I'd pulled on my boots one morning, a cowboy burst in and said, "Your gray mare broke her hind leg last night, Monte."

"Oh dear, little cowboy. Oh dear, oh dear, go find a place to hide your head and a new spot to bite on your tongue. The Big Boss thought he was going to be afoot if he bred fewer than 30 head of mares and weaned fewer than that many colts in the summer. In all those years I worked for him, I only had to shoot two horses with broken legs."

Seemed unreal such a small outfit as mine could generate so much hard luck and so much sorrow. The dust in the horse corrals kept my sinuses draining and my eyes watering. One of the men had to help catch the new mount. My headstall was too long and the curb strap too loose. Took an extra wrap to tighten the cinch. The saddle blanket didn't set right. In the back of my mind, I wondered if the drouth was going to eventually take away my saddle.

I wasn't much help gathering. If a young stout horse could break a leg in a water lot, I figured a graybeard my caliber might pop his bridle reins on his chaps a little to hard and throw his hind leg out of place, or knock a knee out of joint.

Lots of outfits got rain in August, but there's still enough dry country to remind us the scourge hasn't ended. Ranching in a desert has always been a tough game, but it doesn't have to be so bad as to take away a man's pet horse.

The flight plan from Livingstone airport in Zambia followed the Zambezi River downstream from Victoria Falls to land on an airstrip every bit as smooth as the dirt ones on New Mexico ranches. From the air, a few villages of cone-shaped thatch roofed huts appeared reminiscent of Jungle Jim's old movies. We might have passed over one road and did see a long bridge crossing from Zambia to Zimbabwe.

September 10, 1998

Dr. Livingstone assured His Majesty's Government that the waters below Victoria Falls were navigable to the Indian Ocean. The famous explorer was believed until he returned to the Zambezi outfitted to navigate the river. So the story goes from the Museum lecture, Dr. Livingstone cut across on land the first trip, fabricating the part about reaching the falls by water. On the next expedition, rapids and boulders blocked his path, infuriating him to the point that he kept hammering the prow of his boat into a rock embankment.

The airstrip was an hour and 45 minutes from camp over a winding, brushy road. However, our time was extended by a broken fan belt just as night closed in over the forest. Stranded on the dark of the moon in African bush tests a man to see if he is frightened of the dark. We had already seen more lions than on the rest of the trip put together.

Sitting in the darkness in the open-topped Rover, the grunt of the hippopotamus resounded over water like the heavy brass section of a symphony orchestra. Closer by, a pack of hyenas cracked the bones and ripped the hide of an elephant carcass in an eerie tune of favorite menu of these fierce predators.

Embarrassed by the delay, the driver began to make calls, causing the lady on the back seat to order him not to bring the animals closer. I recalled that in the Namib Desert, after a guide assured us the snake he held by the tail was dead, this same woman laughed and said, "I know all about snakes. My mother and her sister charmed snakes."

So I knew if she was scared, it was time to start worrying.

Once in camp, a water buffalo bull blocked the trail going to my tent. Two of us were given flashlights to flick around in the bush and left alone in the Rover. In the 30 minutes we waited, I counted 56 shadows resembling a charging cape buffalo and 24 shadows the shape of a stalking lion.

No other experience matches awakening at dawn on the bluffs overlooking the Zambezi River, so eager to be off on a drive that you throw on your clothes. Hippos plunging off the banks 200 yards away, launching dirigible-like bodies to float and wallow all day. Hippo bulls opening their mouths as wide as the hood on a Peterbilt truck. Muddy buffalo bulls grazing cross stream, visible in the dim light from the white egrets perched on their backs.

On the right, water bucks big as mule deer trotted to water. Fish eagles landing in easy range forced blue herons to rise over the water. Baboons stopped and spun around on their posteriors to check for a weak spot in the defense of the camp. (Baboons are vicious camp-wrecking bandits. Unafraid of women, a big male dropped down in a lady's open-topped bathroom and destroyed her toiletries. I gave the camp manager a choice whether to tell the truth how baboons are controlled around such avid animal lovers, or to allow me to guess. He studied the question and replied, "Think in terms of a sling shot.")

One the morning of my birthday, the 17th of June, my friend asked what I'd like to see most before leaving Africa. Without pausing, I replied, "A large herd of elephants." In less than an hour, our Range Rover parked in a breeding herd of 200 elephants. All around, alert mothers and innocent baby elephants grazed. Babies so small they hadn't learned to use their trunks to put food in their mouths. Babies so small they walked underneath the mothers, dragging the flanks with their backbones.

Lauren's Vader Post wrote in his book Far Out Places, "I don't think there'd be a plant or animal in Africa that wouldn't be relieved to see the last human." Parked in the Rover, the dominant female swung her head to express her fury at our presence. The most chilling moment, however, came when a huge bull circled us to the right, charged from behind and trumpeted within 40 steps of the Rover.

As he halted, I shot a quick photo head-on of his ears flared in anger. Pulses beat in my body, motored by surges of adrenaline. The Rover lurched forward to safety. After escaping, I felt exactly like I had the night when the Long John horse fell in the railroad pens, and in the scramble to retrieve his footing, my boot came loose in the stirrup...

September 3, 1998

Jack's Camp originated as a free refuge for travelers disheartened and disheveled from crossing the huge Kalahari Desert. Jack was a real person. The nature of his business isn't of record. After he was killed in a plane wreck, his son started the camp as a safari business. No zoning permits were required. I think all the pans together are 4000 square miles in size. The neighborhood consists of a rancher, his two wives and a flock of kids. A bushman and his wives and more kids make up the rest of the roster.

We visited the cattle ranch. The owner and one wife had taken the car and driven 70 or 80 miles across the desert to town. The other wife was left home to plaster on her house, using a mortar of cow dung and clay. When we drove up, she was balancing a five gallon bucket of water on her head, drawn from the well for the livestock.

Two brothers or half-brothers rode in on dun horses driving mares and colts to pen in big corral. They were very proud of a blue-eyed albino colt and mighty camera shy. The only drawback I could think of to having more than one wife at the same time was that the boys can't be named "junior," and it's awkward to call girls "little Mary," or some such. Otherwise, the two families looked pretty comfortable by African standards.

The rancher free-ranges his 750 head of cattle. Cattle and wives are a symbol of wealth in Botswana. I wasn't able to meet the other wife, but if she was as content as the one doing the masonry work and other little chores, like shoveling maize in the vats to make beer, I'd support our country adopting the custom to spread out women's work loads and lighten the burden of the men.

Four miles from the ranch, we stopped under a boabab tree 88 feet in diameter at the base. The tree is the second largest in all of Africa. From the beginning of the exploration of the Kalahari, this immense landmark guided explorers to a once source of fresh water. The big thing was to sit beneath the shade of the same tree the famous explorer and missionary, Dr. David Livingstone and his wife camped under in 1857. Mrs. Livingstone was pregnant. She was a missionary's daughter. Nevertheless, as hot as the desert becomes, she might have supported the idea of ol' Doc having two wives.

On the final afternoon, the bushman, Cobra, led us out on the pans. His people can live nine months in the desert without standing water. He showed us the roots and tubers bushmen dig for food and water. He dug up a big, red meat, tuber barely perceptible above ground.

Told us how women push straws down in the sand to make a seep well. Stood motionless, only pointing while a kori bustard, the largest flying bird in the world, took flight for the short distance his wings lifts his 90 pounds of weight. Flicked away dead sprigs of grass with his spear to show us an old track of a brown hyena. Said the brown hyena eats all the meat he can scavenge. After the animals leave, he eats roots and tubers just like these Stone Age people adapt their diets to fit the circumstances. (Movies emphasize the sweet disposition of the San or bush people. However, their enemies have a hard time forgetting how straight they shoot poison arrows.)

The next transition required checking out of customs from Botswana to pass customs into Zimbabwe and immigrate to Zambia. In the course of two short flights and one motor trip, we crossed the long bridge the British built paralleling Victoria Falls. A British guy talked above the roar of the falls how the bridge was built in London to be assembled in two sections.

"The brilliance of the engineers was such," he said, "the precise temperature and time to complete the feat the sections had to be lowered was 6 a.m. Following directions, the bridge fit together with only a quarter of an inch gap."

We had a picnic on the banks of the Zambezi above the falls. Spray rose high in the air like upside down rain. This was our only exposure to tourism. Spoiled monkeys and aggressive baboons eyed our lunch sacks; people walked by from all over the world. The group made a desperate raid on a curio shop before we were loaded on vans to go to Livingstone airport.

After so many days in the bush, being in traffic shocked me. The big shock, however, came when a pilot radioed for instructions on how to start his plane, then taxied onto the field, strewing luggage from an open hatch. These pilots, you see, were the ones to fly us to a landing strip so remote that thorns are placed around the tires to keep the jackals from causing a flat.

7/30/98

The challenge of seeing the Big Five: elephant, rhino, leopard, lion and cape buffalo, never arose when planning the African trip. I wanted an itinerary centered on the outdoors; I wasn't going to bring along a scorecard.

I also didn't want a big load of camera equipment. Just packing a 35mm single lens reflex and a $15 secondhand pocket size camera felt like moving a darkroom across town after I added a pair of military binoculars and eight rolls of film in X-ray-proof canisters to the pack. (By the time I made a few plane changes, had I found a set of 500mm lenses left behind in an airplane seat, I'd have had to have help to carry them to the lost and found department.)

So I wasn't trophy hunting, or thinking of entering a contest back home. I took plenty of long range shots with a normal lens on the first part of the trip, knowing the zebras galloping 300 yards away were going to look the same printed on film as pinpointing black tsetse flies swarming on the horizon.

Several times I regretted being without a telescopic lens. Like the late evening we sat for an hour watching a dozen bull elephants graze down the bank of a big draw, stripping bark from trees and pulling grass up with their trunks and shaking the clods from the roots before curling their trunks to their mouths.

It would have been exciting to have a video on the morning the tracker led us in such breathless stealth to see a white rhinoceros and her calf grazing in the bush. But if we'd had a movie camera along, we'd have had to leave it in the carseat, because to stalk rhinos, even a plastic rain coat makes too much noise to succeed.

We walked single file, avoiding so much as breaking a twig. I held my breath and prayed I wouldn't be the one to trip and scare her. We managed to come within 300 yards before they bolted and ran. The ranger rushed us back to the Rover for a wild ride to watch her and her calf race for the park boundary. Breathing heavy from excitement and running so far, we sat panting and grinning at each other, like we had landed a big fish.

Checking out to go back to Johannesburg was easy. The manager at Tanda Tula confirmed our plane reservations a day ahead of time. He also arranged for a van to transport us from camp to the airport. The airfield is a military base. Boarding passes are issued in advance, and airport taxes are collected at a hotel franchised to operate on government property. Ground transportation from the hotel to the airplane was handled by an independent contractor.

Over my jet lag by then, I was able to pay more attention riding from the airport in Johannesburg to the hotel than when I arrived before. I asked the driver if the cars burned grass. The whole freeway smelled like a prairie fire back home. He laughed and said, "No, the cars burn a derivative of coal. The smoke you see and smell is not pollution, but from the grass fires we always have during the dry season."

He offered to make a drive around the city, but I needed to wash my clothes at the hotel to be ready to leave on the American Museum of Natural History trip at five the next morning. I didn't see much of any Southern African city. In the course of the whole trip, three nights were in hotels. The rest of the time we slept in comfortable tents and ate outdoors. I shopped for several years to find an African trip focused entirely on nature. The museum also knew how to bait the hook. The name of the tour was

"The Last Of The Wild Places." Staying in the bush suited me fine. Before I caught on, I wasted a lot of dough and time sitting on a tour bus while a guide took the group through his buddy's craft store, or arranged for his brother-in-law to guide a tour of the city's night spots for 50 bucks a head.

After a meeting at the hotel, the museum's leader took the group to dinner at a Portuguese café. I ordered a fish kabob called espeto bufferia, or "a spiked buffet." An elaborate dish of huge scallops and big chunks of fish and red prawns threaded on an iron rod hanging from a rack curved to position the skewer above the plate of the chef's lime and butter sauce. Takes a nimble fork to keep from splashing sauce by dropping fish in the plate, but the thick homemade bread made just the shield I needed to stay dry ...

August 8, 1998

The museum's trip left the hotel in Johannesburg before daybreak. The flight to Windhoek in Namibia requires passing from South Africa customs and being admitted by Namibia customs; thus airlines require a two-hour check-in before flight time. So we were raced out to the air terminal to stand among sleepy-eyed transits and pass in front of half-awake ticket agents to make a very short flight of one hour on Air Namibia.

After landing in Windhoek, we connected with a charter service to fly to a private airstrip in the Namib Desert. Look at the map along the Atlantic Coast of southwestern Africa to find this huge 100-mile wide and 1200-mile long desert. The desert is mainly in Namibia. Namibia, before winning independence, was German West Africa. Perhaps the best landmarks are the big diamond mines down against South Africa. Students tend to pay attention to the sites of gold and diamond mines. Sheep and cow ranching regions are the forgotten lands.

From the air, the landscape looked like red clay mountains. The pilot made a six-word seat belt announcement at take-off. I rode in the front seat of the plane, but flying over a huge desert, any questions I had about foothills or mountains could be postponed until after the plane taxied to a stop. A lady sitting in the back seat, noting my dilemma, sent up a note explaining that the mountains were sand dunes, the tallest in the world. She added what I thought was a bit terse and personal notation for such a short acquaintance: "To see and climb sand dunes is why we are going to the Namib Desert, Monte."

Once unloaded from the plane, 11 of us mounted an open-top white Dodge-looking safari wagon that refused to start. Drivers of other vehicles roared around vying for position to pull or push the old crate off, depending on direction of approach. The baggage truck, driven by a girl, spun in against the front bumper and pitched our driver a towrope. She jerked so hard the front wheels straightened and the motor backfired through an open exhaust system with a loud bang.

Racing single file, the vehicles tore off across terrain much like the alkali flats west of the Pecos River in Texas, to a complex of thatched roof adobe structures called Kulala Lodge. Are such foolhardy races the reason St. Christopher medals cut marks in sweaty hands? A porter talked me down from the safari vehicle by saying, "Steady, old fellow, she stands still without a driver." Waiters passed around ice tea, but my hand shook too much to hold a glass to my mouth.

The sleeping area of the guest tents was built on a wooden platform and covered by a roof of thatch to insulate against the extreme temperatures of the desert. Adjacent was the bathroom of the same clay as the big dining room and reception. By keeping the flaps closed during the day, the thick wall cooled the cot closest to the door for naps. In the night, the bathroom was closed off to hold a reasonable temperature for dressing in the morning. All the power was from solar panels. Bathing, after walking in the sand, was so luxurious, I don't recall caring whether the water was hot. Shaving was no challenge as I let my beard grow where mirrors and poor lighting viewed through bifocals make using a razor dangerous.

The Nambib Naukluft National Park is a one-hour drive from the lodge. (Cut 10 minutes off the time for each year the driver is below 20 years of age.) The park entrance rents spaces for campers and affords a very modest store for fuel and supplies. The road leads into an enormous flood plain, bordered on each side by red and golden dunes sloping off into swirls and waves of sand, reminiscent of modern paintings.

Here lives the most unusual creatures. Beetles that stand on their heads at night to catch the dew dripping into their mouths; long-legged beetles who use the elevation to hold their bodies off the hot sand; shovel-nosed lizards capable of swimming underneath the sand. The same fellows raise their tails and front legs to dance across the hot spots. Also, impalas, a small antelope, able to postpone parturition as long as two weeks to wait for rain. And not to leave out the side-winding puff adders, who drink the water collecting on their scales in the night.

But the most miraculous of all is the oryx, a long-horned antelope. He has a special blood vessel close to his brain to cool his blood. He can live in temperatures reaching 135 degrees Fahrenheit, like no other mammal in the world.

This characteristic also develops in humans living on the desert. One cocky matriarch of hiking clubs and library societies, along on the trip from Tucson, Arizona, lost her bag in an inexcusable mix-up at the hotel. On a later occasion, passing through U.S. customs in Miami, a drug sniffing Beagle dog barked at her backpack. Her face flushed at each challenge; nevertheless, she is bound to have had a blood coolant to keep her temper under such trying circumstances.

---

August 13, 1998The managers at Kalala, the desert camp, were of Belgian descent. How near or how far removed from the motherland you never know in Africa, as colonization goes back to the 18th century. Also, political upheavals have been so dramatic for the rulers and the ruled, such questions may be inappropriate.

Making a guess, I placed them as bored Frenchmen. However, so few English speaking people outside of the Southern United States understand my dialect, the language barrier might have been the reason contact was so cold. (A German boy at Tanda Tula said he understood Zulu better than my English. Who knows, I may have inspired the lad to study Zulu and later on marry into the tribe.)

The rest of the staff was friendly Nama people. Descendants of the bushmen, these delightful folks click their tongues against the tops of their mouths speaking certain words. They work hard and may do a few quick dance steps on the way back to the bar or kitchen. On the last night in camp, the waitresses and maids sang songs in their language and did a finale in English of the old hymn "Marching to Zion." Their childlike delight in entertaining us smoothed over the amateurish effort.

Five charter planes picked us up on the camp's airstrip early the next morning. We flew over the very dunes we had climbed the day before to hit the Skeleton Coast on the Atlantic Ocean. Along the miles and miles of desolate beach, rusty shipwrecks, the origin of the coast's eerie name, stuck from the sand. Old mining equipment, likely the dreams of a promoter in London or Berlin, lay abandoned and wasting away with caved-in roofs and machines strewn over the ground.

Flamingos in abundant flocks cast roseate reflections in tide pools; colonies of seals flopped on the beaches like black seaweed washed ashore. The ocean framed one side of the picture in raging white-capped waves rising from a royal blue sea. A vision lingered of the many diamond prospectors and shipwrecked sailors who struggled up this desolate coastline hoping to reach the two small seaports, Swakopmund and Walvis Bay.

We landed for lunch at Swakopmund, so deeply Germanic that Hitler's birthday is still celebrated in private. Hops from the small brewery come from Germany. Streets and sidewalks glisten with the clinical cleanliness of the Teutonic race. Lunch was asparagus soup and big orders of Wiener Schnitzel and thick yeast bread. Right on the sea, the resort bore none of the markings of the casual housekeeping of many such towns. The history of German West Africa, or present day Namibia, links the colonists to a horrid past. However, I will go no further along those lines, as such subjects are for political historians.

The afternoon flight landed in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, for the night at a hotel. I chose to skip going downtown to clean my camera lens and empty the sand from my body and gear. By using tables gained from reading a Sea Scout's manual long ago, I was able to fill the bathtub to the exact level of body displacement without running over the tub. But the sands washing from under my finger and toenails threw my calculations off a full three inches.

Packed under a baggage limitation of 25 pounds, all of my costumes were the same, khaki pants and J.C. Penny chambray shirts. However, to add a bit of dash to my attire, I tied a blue bandana around my neck in a classy square knot. (Cf. Boy Scout Troop 116, Mertzon, 1941) So close to the diamond fields, it is safer not to give the impression of the nouveau rich. The hotel had a casino downstairs. After sweating a hand or two of blackjack, I suspect a lot of guys checked out next morning more conscious of their hip pockets than the crease of their blazers.

The group assembled in front of the hotel at bare daylight, an astounding collection of 19 travelers and four leaders. "Astounding," because not only were these folks going through time and season changes, they were loading and unloading off airplanes and open air safari vehicles on schedule, like descendants of P.T. Barnum's family. Hours later, passing through customs into Botswana, I watched in absolute disbelief as four of the women returned from an airport shop on time without having to be handcuffed to a guide to be lead on the plane.

At the next stop in the Okivango Delta in Botswana, nine of us were assigned to one camp and 10 to the other. On the short flight, herds of cape buffalo and scores of elephants and giraffe were seen from the plane. High grasses bordered the airstrip. Excitement mounted as just minutes on the ground, baboons and impalas grazed by, sharing their eternal vigil for lions and hyenas.

August 20, 1998

On the second afternoon in the Okivango Delta, one of the tour coordinators contracted by the Museum of Natural History took six of us on a walk. He is native to Southern Africa and a skilled guide and knowledgeable naturalist. Walks are difficult to arrange in big game country. Gun bearers must be along to support the guide. The camp manager loaned him a large bore rifle to take along, showing he had enough confidence in this particular fellow to let him go without one of his staff.

I hadn't recovered enough from the night before to serve as a gunner. About midnight, a hyena laughed close to the tent just as a baboon hooted a warning of lions nearby. I cracked my head on the bottom of the metal cot so hard the blow caused a slight concussion. The confusion made it difficult to crawl from under the bed where I always sleep on safari in case a lion jumps through the side of the tent. So I was in no condition to carry any type of weapon heavier than a walking stick.

Once out of camp, the ground set a perfect stage for tracks. It looked like the soft dry gray drilling mud around a new well location in Texas. Reddish brown grasses stood waist high along the trails; palm trees grew thick and tall over what are islands in the spring or September. Trunks of jackal berry trees, the source wood for canoes, stood long and keen as mast poles on a clipper ship. Splintered white bark lay strewn about from elephants stripping the trunks.

The ranger showed us wart hog burrows, so alive and vital, he warned us, that dirt sifting into the top of the hole might send the hogs shooting from underground, slashing blindly with their ugly tusks. Our path crossed a busy elephant road, leading, he said, "to an elephant highway." (Botswana's elephant population reaches 80,000 head.) "An elephant's track is distinct as human fingerprints," he told us.

Pointing to another huge track, he said, "Hippos' tracks look alike. Studies of individuals are impossible. Oh, we know the young nurse underneath the water in 20 second intervals, but hippos can't be ear-tagged and they are too dangerous for close observation."

We stopped next by a termite hill 15 feet high and perhaps 30 feet in circumference. The guide began his lecture by explaining that termites are not ants, but are related to cockroaches. "Termites are farmers," he said. "The workers carry food down in the den to cool and grow fungus, the only thing they eat."

He pauses, looks down in the loose soil by the hill: "A lion was by here a short time ago, leading her cubs." He continues, "the first study of termites was done in 1917 in a book, The Soul Of A White Ant, by a poet named Eugene Marais. Mr. Marais learned how the colony kept the temperature of the interior of the den at 70 degrees F. by opening small holes at night to propagate the fungus."

He shifts the rifle to his right hand, "The colony fits well into the food chain. Elephants have poor digestive systems; they eat 600 pounds of matter a day. Termites thrive on their spoor. Natives consider termites a delicacy, and wild dogs turn the hills into dens. Also, the mounds become the nucleus for starting an island when the delta floods in ..."

Again repositioning the rifle, he said, "We had better go back to camp. Please form a single file and follow me. Do not lag behind."

The lady closest to me whispered, "Hear her growling? She's not far away. She's the lioness we saw last night. The guide said she had to hunt in the daytime to feed her cubs, because of an abscessed tooth."

I tried to nod, but discovered I was so tense I was only able to blink my eyes. The safety manual says not to run if you encounter a lion. The safety manual does not need to cover the disposition of a lioness nursing three playful cubs while suffering a throbbing toothache. Under spotlight, she showed to have mud on her sides from lying in pools to cool her fever. However, trailing three pesky cubs back from the water hole was probably enough to offset the effect of the treatment.

The file of walkers began making tracks like baboons make in a high run. Any minute, I expected to see the lead parties start jettisoning their glasses and cameras. I figured I'd keep mine on, hoping a buckle or strap might be left to identify my remains.

It took the rest of the afternoon to calm down in camp. I thought of asking for an armed guard to watch my tent, but remembered the safety manual said heavy canvas will keep a lion outside long enough for help to come ...

August 27, 1998 

Nights around the fire at camp in the Okivango Delta, the guides saved the most frightening stories for a pre-bedtime reminder to obey the rules on staying in our tents after darkness and not to leave the grounds in the daytime unescorted.

On one evening, I visited the site of a lurid tale. A native poled two of us in a mokoro (a dugout canoe) through a swamp close to one of the tragedies. We skirted pools full of hippos, bathing and rumbling out a thundering, grunting song like a giant playing a huge trombone off-key, which is enough trauma to cause a baseball umpire to have high blood pressure.

Stricken by the serenity of floating through the reeds and flowering plants, I named it, "the ride of the lily pad walkers." In each small pool, the jacana bird stepped from lily pad to lily pad on long gray legs, without rippling the water. The elusive amphibious antelope, the sitatunga, also runs over the wetlands faster than on dry ground. (Had I known beforehand that a three-ton hippopotamus in Zambia bit a crocodile in half and splintered a big rowboat to trash, I'd of packed rubber flippers so I could walk on top of the water like the jacanas and sitatungas.)

The ride ended at dusk. We docked in a still, shadowed lagoon, surrounded by tall reeds, perfect for a hippo to wallow and go aground to graze in the full moon, or a crocodile and a cape buffalo bull to face off in mortal contest. The night before, the camp manager waited until I was sleepy to tell us of a client the year before, who after the mokoro ride, demanded to be allowed to return for a photograph of a buffalo bull seen across the very pool where we landed. The guide refused permission; the client, a strong-willed German, slipped back alone to be gored to a horrible death.

Standing within paces of the tragedy, the sound of poles rubbing the sides of the mokoro sounded exactly like a bull's horns scraping the side of a chute. (Mokoros are no longer carved from jackal berry trees. Conservationists provide fiberglass ones, much noisier and harder to keep upright in the swamps.) Energized by the story and inspired by the light-footed jacana, I barely left marks in the mud bounding from the mokoro to the safety of the seat in the Range Rover.

The pace continued the next morning to check out from one camp to fly charter to a check-in at Jack's Camp on the eastern edge of the Magadikgadi Pans Game Reserve. In a few hours, (and we are still in Botswana) the scenery changed from the rich wetland savannas to the Kalahari Desert's salt clay pans as white and dry as the chalk tray of a blackboard. Huge expanses of smooth, shallow pans, unmarked by one leaf of grass or shard of stone, framed islands rising on the horizon, covered in palms, left over from an ancient lake.

At nightfall, we rode four-wheelers out on the pans, wearing turbans for effect, bundled in all of our clothes against the cold, to lie under the stillness of a moonless sky, lighted in stars like prisms of crystal glass. Returning, a caravan of Rovers met us. A bar was set up under lanterns; 30 minutes later, we were served a full course meal lighted by candles in silver holders over damask cloth. Near invisible waiters put shovels of live coals beneath our chairs. Heavy china kept the food hot. Chilled, we were ravenous, tearing into the cutlets like the animal providing the fare. (I think it was zebra steaks.)

On the way back to camp, an aardvark ran in front of the Rover. The driver raced after him, disregarding the terrain or our safety. He shouted over and over, "I've worked here six years without seeing a (expletive deleted) aardvark."

The next thing he did that he hadn't done in the six years was drop his rear wheel in an aardvark burrow. Out he jumped and threw the Rover in four-wheel drive without ever checking on two of the passengers lodged on the floor of the back seat.

Aardvark lore is hard to come by. They feast on termites by poking their 18-inch tongues into the hill and closing their nostrils to keep from being choked by their prey. The tail is six inches longer than the tongue. The burrows are big enough for bushmen to crawl down in the hole to capture the aardvark while he sleeps. But bushmen pull the same trick on porcupines and honey badgers. The one we saw, however, through a tilted windshield and over a bucking motor hood, looked like a kangaroo wrapped in a river hog's hide.

---

January 9, 1997

Electronics scored a big success over the holidays. General Telephone hooked the ranch up to a microwave system working off a satellite in late November. Days later, a discount store supplied a fax machine slow enough to be connected to the new telephone system.

I was so excited over being relieved of maintaining seven miles of private line and enduring the delay of repairs on 15 miles of company-owned lines that the first day on the satellite, I contacted human voices on 16 answering machines without ever leaving the breakfast table.

My friends all have personal secretary services, or home answering machines, plus pagers and call forwarding devices. The messages add to the Christmas spirit. Senior generations have their children, or grandchildren, program the machines. I am always glad to hear young Peter has an adult voice and little Mary no longer squeaks, but has developed an authoritative tone from hollering at her kids and challenging her old man to a debate.

People have stopped being cute on the tapes. In fact, a few are so abrupt, they border on being curt. One number I call has a recording sounding like a cartoon character gurgling out his lines. On the old party line, we were unable to use an answering machine, but one of us was around to report who was out of town or busy shearing. Further back in history under the switchboard system of central office fame in Mertzon, operators knew everyone's business, including their blood type and breakfast preferences. Taped messages would have been a burden to those old sisters. By the time they retired, they knew more about the family history of Mertzon than the local historians.

The telephone company spent eight thousand bucks raising the aerial and hiring an electrician to run the wiring. I had already been prepped on the questions to ask the telephone men on faxes and on-line possibilities. I read enough in the computer columns to toss around a few words of the new vocabulary. From the way I talked to the telephone men you would have thought I was going to set up a system to back the airlines, or run the Department of Commerce.

But masquerades have short life on ranches, especially masquerades using modernism as a theme. On the afternoon they began testing, the temperature rose to 80 degrees. The guy working indoors started up to the back door just as my house cleaner Beto swept a small rattlesnake over the door sill. Snakes den up under the deep freeze in the winter, seeking the warmth of the electric motor.

Beto knows to sweep them outside to smash their heads. Even killing a small rattler like that one on a vinyl floor makes a mess. Wasn't a big snake, or a lively one, but he upset the engineers so bad, they quit work early without leaving a name or number to call for service. We needed an extra jack in the living room, however, I don't think the telephone men would have ever worked close enough to the foundation to poke a wire underneath the house, much less go under the house to do the job.

The telephone company hired a contractor to take down their end of the line from the highway out to the railroad siding at Sugg Switch. The salvage people offered to give us the old rotten poles and the green glass insulators. The insulators are worth good money in tourist towns. One out of 10 of the poles will do for temporary fencing. By the time we made a 10-mile round trip from the ranch dragging a flatbed to the right-of-way, figuring the insulators worth, say, six bits a dozen wholesale to an antique store, the loss on the posts looked like around two to three dollars apiece. Compared to raising beef cattle and finewool sheep on today's market, hauling second-hand posts seemed like a better deal and the insulator business sounded fantastic.

Sunspots interfere with microwave telephones, and smart-alecs in town disturb your peace asking about spot removers. On foggy mornings, the line goes dead. I read the satellites are 450 miles from earth. Next thing we will be looking into is buying a spaceship. The year looks promising for joining the electronic age. Beto knows now to be careful when city folks are around...

January 16, 1997

Around they glided in a grand opening of a grand march. December 21, 1996, 111 years of the Cowboy's Christmas Ball at Anson, Texas. High-topped boots, black and hand-stitched, with frock coats draped over the shoulders of ruffle-fronted shirts; red satin dresses, ankle length, sweeping across the dance floor of the Pioneer Hall to twirl to a Texas waltz. Listen now, please, to Michael Martin Murphy lead his band in "The Red River Valley."

Fifty years ago, two displaced farm boys from the Cumberland Ranges of Tennessee played on a harmonica and yodeled away on a lonely Saturday night of leaving the same valley in front of the bunkhouse at the old ranch.

How long can you go without losing such songs as "The Streets of Laredo" and "When The Work Is All Done Next Fall"? One answer is to go to the Cowboy Ball for a revival; but keep in mind, tickets have to be ordered a year in advance. Another answer might be to buy one of Mr. Murphy's tapes. But buying a tape isn't going to be the same as sitting up in the bleachers, watching daddies teaching their 10 year-old daughters to two-step, or seeing the same girls dragging a little brother out on the floor to practice. The tickets are issued in July. Rules are stated on the ticket: "No Split Skirts and No Hats on the Dance Floor." This means: Wear a dress and leave your hat in the car, as the whole hall is off-limits for toppers.

Refreshments are coffee and barbecue sandwiches served on homemade bread. No alcoholic beverages are allowed in the hall. Were there any drinkers, they must have had good control and strong breath mints. Stovepipe boots, the fashion of the northland cowboy, help keep the ankle and knee joints from buckling. But unless American distillers are using new recipes, boottops aren't going to stabilize cases of serious indisposition from over-indulging in liquid refreshments. I tried to evaluate the glint from the wives' eyes to determine whether purity was of the spirit, or from an iron hand. However, it is hard to evaluate leadership ability and degrees of domestic retaliation without insight into the full picture.

Two or three times, I had narrow escapes from a fierce kick to a fiddler's tune; and a close call or so from the backswing of a bootheel to a Cotton-Eyed Joe. The only clue I can think of why the standards of deportment ran so high is that the lady in charge of selling tickets through the Anson 

Chamber of Commerce is named Nettie. One time at Mertzon, the board hired a teacher named "Miss Nettie" to teach the sixth grade. She completely redirected a bunch of outlawed country boys' lives. Could be this "Nettie" had the same powers.

Mr. Murphy appeared five times more than the other name band musicians I've heard at dances. He had a couple engaged to be married lead off one dance. So smooth and natural the next reel was for the couples engaged to be married the coming year. When time came for the ranchers and cowboys to dance, we looked the least colorful of the whole crowd.

The hombres I'd pegged to be on standby to run "the Sixes," or perhaps wranglers to ride the Matador rough string, retired to the sidelines. I was sure no help. The boots I wear at the ranch are a disgrace to go to the post office in, much less to a cowboy ball. After the shirt makers in Taiwan began to cut western shirts with big shoulders and scrimp on the waist and tail, I had to stop wearing them to effect a modest midriff. I own a few pairs of jeans, but the legs are too short to stuff in the top of a pair of dancing slippers even though they slip down pretty far below my waistline.

The only western flavor I found was a belt buckle with my Grandfather Noelke's trail brand stamped in gold plate. The buckle lacks about four inches sticking out enough to catch a downside view. Laundries deliberately starch dress shirts so they bulge in front. Seems like the more a shirt is laundered, the more tapered it becomes.

All the next week, those old bunkhouse songs kept coming back. The two stand-in cowboys from the Tennessee mountains made a harmonica ke-wah, ke-wah out such a mournful tune. All they had for boots were brogan shoes, but that's been a long time ago ...

January 23, 1997

At the last general election, 723 out of 1272 registered voters in Irion County went to the polls. Further calculations showed this less than 57 percent turnout left 549 people to find better means of exerting their influence on the way the country is run. Such power plays as filibustering coffee house sessions or threatening to write letters to newspapers are thought to be among the alternatives.

For the two-week period of absentee balloting and the 12-hour polling day, the non-voters surrendered their proxies to the ones of us who voted without signing over a thing. The best part about not voting is the ease of inaction. It takes about 20 minutes to vote in such a small town. I spend a little over half an hour to drive from the ranch to Mertzon. Three and a half more minutes are needed to strike the offenders and check my choices. Voting straight ticket is faster. Hotheads who draw bullseyes around their enemies' names, or want to trace off a skull and crossbones by an offending party's label use a few more minutes to complete their artwork. Citizens over 65 may vote by mail, offering another big time-saving procedure. We also only have to register once in Texas to be franchised for life.

The state's constitution may not say so in exact words, but somewhere in that hefty document of hundreds of amendments rests an inalienable right to complain, whether we vote or not. Voting or staying home makes no difference; Texans have the right to find fault with any and all levels of government and any and all capacities of office.

How pollsters cull the voters from the paralyzed majority is a mystery. Hard to say how they tell over the telephone if a citizen is bluffing or plans on voting. Terms like "swing vote" are still used, but who knows who is on the swing?

In the days when I hit the cafe every morning in Mertzon at opening time, we knew most of each other's secrets and all of our stories several times over. Fellow from up at Barnhart was a regular customer. On one of many morning of caffeine-inspired political caucuses, he voiced a strong volley of support for a candidate named Barefoot Sanders. At the time, Mr. Sanders was running a tight race for U.S. Senator on the Democratic ticket. (One reason I keep retelling this story is because "Barefoot" was the president of the student body at the University in my college days. He might have spoken to me one day walking across the campus before a student election. I can't be sure. Even then, 18,000 of us swarmed the place.)

But the Barnhart coffee drinker reared way back and said, "By gawd, ol' Barefoot is my man. When ol' Ed and me were hauled up in district court for underestimating the talent of the audit division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture on checking the drouth feed certificates for our feed store, ol' Barefoot was the prosecuting attorney for the government. He seen right off Ed and me was guilty as hell."

He was the same guy I wrote of once, who every Thanksgiving used to bring up the matter of his wife refusing to eat turkey because turkeys were second cousins to buzzards. He must have been raised next to a testing ground or a bombing target; he shouted when he talked. The theory of the turkey's second cousin grew tiresome, but his delivery always entertained everybody in the cafe from the cook back in the kitchen to route men parked in the street waiting for the stores to open.

In December, a run-off between candidates for state senator drew 150 votes in the county. Because it was more a decision on which party would rule the Texas Senate next term than an ideological battle, few citizens bothered to vote. Before I ever unfolded my ballot I could feel the wallop my pencil was going to yield. I felt plenty important, in that being the number 10 voter at 6 p.m. I was making the choice for 50 or 60 citizens.

Might be the last chance for a herder to be in power. I sure miss hanging out at the cafe. I know those guys would have had a man in the race ...

93/03/11

SHORTGRASS COUNTRY

By Monte Noelke

     Once a lamb buyer of wide pasturage experience said the Middle Concho Valley in Irion County, Texas yielded the highest gains of anywhere in the state of Texas.  Brought closer to home, for years we've watched the herders up on the river do better than the rest of the county put together.

     The privileges aren't limited to grazing.  The best two-year-old ewe salesman in Texas winters his prospects in the area.  he and his partner sold $60 sheep when the rest of us were accepting collect calls, hoping for a $40 bid delivered in town.  Also, by far the leading real estate lady to ever hit the country lives up there on a ranch.  She brings about such sales in deserted townships that the thought alone of so much commission would make her colleagues over in San Angelo dump their pockets doing handsprings out on the sidewalks.

     Newest prodigy of the river neighborhood is an English guy who runs a restaurant in San Angelo successful enough to ranch on the side.  He, I suspect, has learned a lot from the sheep salesman and the real estate woman.  Every weekend the dinner menu features more items related to the fauna and flora of the Middle Concho than to the local supermarkets.  Doesn't take much of a detective to link catfish crusted in pecans, or hare amandin garnished in water cress to the shady banks or the rippling waters of the big

waterhole in his horse pasture.

     His patrons are lucky he trained in Montreal and New Orleans under French chefs instead of cooking under the tutelage of a Mississippi River hand, or some skillet and grease artist from Mobile, Alabama fishing camp, or he'd of been rolling everything in cornmeal from the mud catfish in the bottoms of the creek to the possums hiding high up in his pecan groves.

     Making a living off the river isn't the only advantage the valley offers, however.  Two weeks ago, when most outfits were measuring two tenths of an inch of rain, a rancher on the Middle Concho watershed had enough moisture that a brown pelican landed on his outfit.  He was already cleaning up in the rare game business.  But to show how smart he was, he called the game and fish folks of both the state and federal levels for directions on how to feed this rare bird and where to send him.  The Sheep and Goat Herder's Assn. backed his play.  And for the first time in decades, newspaper scribes in San Angelo covered the front pages chortling and clucking away how environmentally conscious and how noble all the ranchers are up on the Middle Concho in Irion County.

     All year long, they come on the ranch radio channel talking about rain delaying their work and how much grief it is to ranch around oil wells.  Their kids win stock shows and all it ever takes for one of their saddle horses to go sound is a small shot of penicillin and a few days' rest

     Southern cookbooks cover wide ranges of food from fox squirrel stews to fat raccoons stuffed in sweet potatoes.  The ones of us who don't fall over ourselves at the first word about an endangered bird, know how to handle the news of a brown pelican being lost in a thunderstorm.

     I fear the longer the Englishman lives under the influence of the citizens in the blessed valley, the better he's going to become at creating specials from the fruits of his lands...

93/03/04

Shortgrass Country

by Monte Noelke

            Our bulls were turned out with the cows on the eighth of February. By the next week, we'd shipped two to the packers and moved one more to break up a 24-hour bellowing contest where all that was keeping these two gladiators from a fight to the death was a 14 gauge, 75 year-old string of rusted net wire.

            On one morning of a heifer gathering, a pair of young bulls, calved on the same ranch and summered in the same pasture, started scuffling on the way to the pens. After reaching the corrals, the scurred bull hit his half brother such a blow on the right hip that he knocked him up in the air. And in 15 seconds, the picture changed from a two low-birthweight breeder program to one with a three-legged bull and a conquering champion.

            Four to five decades of losing money so fast finally seasons a man. The first thing I do is step off my horse and tighten the belt of my chaps and pull my cinch strap up a couple of holes. Next, I remount and ride off trying to look like John Wayne used to look in his movies, leaving the fort on a big black stallion with his sergeant stripes torn off his shirt and the colonel's beautiful daughter sobbing at the gates.

            Fertility testing is fine, but if an ox is going to spend all his waking hours either bellowing on the fence or jumping fences, his potency is of no value, least of all to the cowboy trailing him down and patching up the water gaps and steel gates he's ruined.

            On the dark mornings, I swear I'll throw the whole herd in one pasture and count them once a year at shipping. If spring turns out as dry as last fall, these sons of peripatetic Pathfinder and Royal Stifle had better be conserving their energy to stay alive and off the packing house rails.

            Be sure and take this advice: before any kind of outburst occurs, be certain your breathing rate checks normal. It sure is hard to curse real loud in a high wind. or throw rocks holding your reins in one hand, or kick at a steel gate if you are hyperventilating.

            Practice and experience polish our behavior. Germination may occur down at the pool hall, or at a Sunday goat roping. For example, the base of my communicative skills on the range happened not our in the pasture, but in the milk pen. On the late evening of my tenth summer, a quarter-blood Brahman milk cow kicked me so hard with her right hind hoof that I fell back far enough for the milk bucket to tip over in my lap and hurt so bad that I violated the code of all young cowboys and bawled like a full crazed panther.

            At that moment, my vocabulary matured far in advance of my age. I hurled the bucket at her and froze in disbelief as she jumped over the corral fence.

            Instead of using the E.P.D. system to rate bulls, I'm in favor of having these better house cat and lap dog doctors to turn their interest toward developing a CAT scan that'll diagnose what's on a bull's mind, fighting or breeding cows. Should the idea fail to pay off, they could always use it one their customers to weed out the bad credit risks

93/02/25

Shortgrass Country

by Monte Noelke

            The Texas Commissioner of Agriculture said a few weeks ago that young people are the principal exports from rural communities. It's been realized a long time that college opportunities, military service and bad influences like commencement speakers and school teachers cause the young to move off an leave July sheep working sessions and January row crop plowing.

            Necessity is another strong impetus to move away. The several-generation inherited patches of farmland and cut up ranch pastures increase the exodus where keeping an extra collie dog can be a hardship, much less feeding a second family.

            If ranching and farming ever supported a lifestyle equal to the cities, historians failed to be quick enough to catch the period. Pinpointing an agriculture boom takes a sharp-sighted analyst. Scanning one page too fast in a reference book can make a writer overlook the biggest hollow horn windfall of a decade, or the loftiest milo prices of all seasons.

            Herders and farmers outrace recessions so bad, there's no match. By the time the banks started failing in the early years of the 80's, we'd already had a drouth, an over expansion of the cow herd, and three or four disasters around the grain elevators and cotton gins, that'd of shook the windows of every brokerage house on Wall Street if stocks had taken such a plunge.

            Out here, things have been to so tough for so long, we are starting to profit from the bad times. Like last week, I was inquiring about a couple of newspaper scribes in San Angelo. My main lead reported that these two august gentlemen of dangling participles and floating adjectives had opened a cabinet shop. At first, the news was stunning, however, after thinking it over, the longer the recession lasts, the more inclinations we are going to have to launch new careers.

            Unless Mr. Clinton and Mrs. Clinton come to the rescue, we are going to have more one-man bands and back alley cabinet makers and home-based hot tamale shops than Mexico City has straw hat weavers. It's also possible the President and the First Lady understand improvised circumstances ahead of time. Their home state has fielded many a chicken pickings factory and a lot of small time saw mills. Up in the northeastern ranges of Arkansas, quite a few sidelines like stretching coon hides and making unstamped corn whiskey hold life together.

            Human ingenuity increases during desperate periods. A pressed flower uncovered in an old family Bible may be all it takes to put a housewife to drying every petal and bud in her front yard, so going from punching a typewriter to nailing shelves together doesn't sound far-fetched.

            On the last quarter of '92, government statistics showed the unemployment rate down because of the jobs provided by election day in November. The news was heartening. We already knew by December in Texas we were going to have a special election in May. Christmas seemed happier knowing there'd be extra jobs in the spring.

            I didn't make a call on the new cabinet makers. From what I've seen of converting cowboys to carpenters, I am going to hold off making an order

93/02/18

Shortgrass Country

by Monte Noelke

            President Clinton's bad luck in nominating attorney generals guilty of hiring illegal immigrants for nursemaids has revived how bad we all feel in the Shortgrass Country about once working so many unpapered aliens out of Mexico. Unlike the two scorned nominees in Washington, our disgrace goes way back into our history.

            Lots of Shortgrassers are double bred wet Mexican users. Grandpas on both sides of the family probably herded their first flock of sheep with hombres who thought wading the Rio Grande at low level was enough legal procedure to enter the country.

            Clearing up the records on domestic help for a big family like mine goes further than the threat of a Senate investigation, or the fanfare of an unfriendly press. The old account book tells how many Mexican cowboys were terminated by Border Patrol raids. But identifying all the baby-sitters and house maids during the childhood of my eight kids would take the full force of the U.S. Customs office from Del Rio, Texas down to Laredo, plus the added support of the police departments on both sides of the border.

            Recollections run like this: "Juana, for the sake of all the patron saints of Mexico and all the goodness your sweet mother taught you on her lap, please don't leave until my wife comes home from the hospital. By then, we'll have our next to the youngest potty trained and working around here will be a snap."

            Not, "Juana, the most important thing is to see a copy of your birth certificate and proof of a valid passport, so if I die from rocking chair vertigo and drowned flesh from washing bottles and rinsing diapers, the Judiciary Committee of the Senate won't order that I be buried in an unmarked grave." The truth is at peak production, with an appointment to Chief Justice pending, we'd of hired a momma orangutan from Southern Borneo if she'd of been staked on a stout enough chain to gentle her down.

            Mrs. Baird, the first nominee, testified that the Peruvian aliens were hired by her husband on a summer he was off from work. Blaming her husband was a lousy excuse, but had the Judiciary Committee thought what happens leaving a kid with his daddy on vacation, they'd of researched the influence of golf courses and snooker games on young minds, and been more understanding.

            I think if she'd of made a pitch based on avoiding bad influence for her baby, and tearfully pled she'd exhausted all the baby-sitting services from Georgetown to the northern perimeters of D.C., she'd have a staff of civil service employees to keep her child today.

            Nominees for Mr. Clinton's cabinet may be about to produce the records for all t