February 19, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 19, 2004

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February 12, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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February 5, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 5, 2004

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January 29, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 29, 2004

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January 22, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 22, 2004

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January 15, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 15, 2004

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January 8, 2004

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 8, 2004

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December 12, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 12, 2002

December 5, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 5, 2002

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November 28, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 28, 2002

November 21, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 21, 2002

November 14, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 14, 2002

November 7, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 7, 2002

October 31, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 31, 2002

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October 24, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 24, 2002

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October 17, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 17, 2002

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October 10, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 10, 2002

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October 3, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 3, 2002

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September 19, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 19, 2002

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September 19, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 19, 2002

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September 12, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 12, 2002

September 5, 2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 5, 2002

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August 29, 2002

What is it like to be in San Francisco the fourth week of July staying in a small privately owned hotel? It's looking down the street at the corner of Taylor and Post at a black blind man dancing a jig at the beat of his brain-damaged mind.

It's climbing the hill to Taylor and Pine as a mad, mad mamma comes boiling onto the walk, unable to defend her stool against the bartender's rage.

It's climbing Nob Hill, so steep your chin is as close to the concrete as your kneecaps. A climb so steep the change in your pockets rolls over in one corner and you can't pause to rest, or trust a smile of encouragement in a town of so many hustlers. (Ten thousand street people are activated and audited the first of every month by a $400 per head dole from the city.)

Late yesterday on a push to make a play so close to curtain that no time remained for dinner, I bought a pint of milk at the corner store. Fell full force in the climb to reach the theater and meet my friend. Had brown-bagged the milk to carry along to curb my appetite and thirst. Didn't realize the bottle looked like a "tall boy" beer until two long-haired gents carrying backpacks saluted, "Hang in there, buddy."

But please hang on for a blunder turning into a new experience. The hotel's play bill is incorrect. Tonight is dress rehearsal at the theater. Looking for the restroom, I walk into a downstairs dressing room — a long hall with benches and clothes hooks on the wall. If I run, they'll suspect I am one of those "tom peeping fellows," who ogle the theater girls all the way from the box office to the ushers to the stage. But no one pays the slightest attention, so I sit down and drink the bottle of milk.

What a sight the actors and actresses are in gray tails and gaudy dancing tights. Painted faces and abundant wigs vie for small face mirrors. Black mesh stockings and red and black ruffled collars are pulled and patted in place. Upstairs, dancers slide and stomp in unison, counting off a beat to a faint sound of music. Dust sifts from the ceiling from the impact above. Faded and threadbare curtains provide the only privacy for dressing. I sit tight, using the pint of milk as a prop. Signal to leave comes as a security cop arrives, bringing a big order of coffee and doughnuts. His glare is wasted on my back going for the street.

Next morning, the choice was sending my clothes to the Chinese laundry two doors from the hotel and staying in the room, or wearing a travel-weary wardrobe as wrinkled as a camel's dewlap. Too, descending the city's steep hills plunges toenails into socks, cutting dime-size holes that slowly strangulate the digital to the point of fatal gangrene. Closest supply of new socks to the hotel is an Australian store. Wool argyles imported from Australia cost fifty-nine dollars a pair plus sales tax, or 10 staple fleeces of Texas wool in the bale. No offer posted of trade-ins for used socks on such a fancy price. So I opted to send my clothes to the laundry and use the down time to darn my socks.

Laundries were just part of the services in the neighborhood. The hotel also owned the building next door. One tenant was Miss Donna, the fortuneteller. Not really a "Miss," the room clerk said she was paying the hotel damage for the aftermath of a big battle she and her husband pitched celebrating the Fourth of July. (Fortunetellers are very patriotic. Reading star charts links the seer to the field of stars in our country's flag. "Mr. Donna's" patriotism was probably questioned, thus causing the confrontation.)

Fortunetellers can help make short-term plans. Senior citizen discounts are hefty, as reading out the future takes only a small space in a crystal ball, or just a short hand of the Tarot cards. I suggested to my friend that we split a session. We were having difficulty deciding the best days to go to the coast and what nights to try for tickets to the plays and concerts. But before I acted, the front desk denied connection to Miss Donna's, unless Miss Donna trying to steal one of the hotel's vacuum cleaners counted as a partnership by disassociation.

Yes, being in San Francisco the fourth week of July is watching a wisp of a drug-crazed girl dance in floppy boots into the headlights of fierce traffic to hail a cab for the theater crowd. A town of inconsistencies where Tony the shine man opens his theater stand at 8 a.m. to close as the box office folds for the night. Click, click goes the reel next door at $165 for a front row seat; a final pop of the cloth and four bucks goes into Tony's poke. The cable cars screech a block away. Sidewalk evangelists pray for the salvation of the lost and the found. And the city roars into the night, split into human gaps as wide as the fault line causing her earthquakes.

August 29, 2002

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August 22, 2002

Instilled in mind is a rule my editors hold sacred in stories: "Be sure the reader knows the time and place." I agree, but be patient this trip. I'll be up and down the Coast from San Francisco, California and back again to a small hotel on Post Street, still owned by Mr. Andrews today. Keeping time ruins a vacation. What possible difference does it make to you whether I am in Chinatown on a Thursday or down on the Bay the next day?

So as an opener, set the scene in a concert hall in San Francisco, where a jazz combo plays on a modest wood stage of one by twelve pine lumber. An old gray-headed bird pops into the next chair and asks, "Did you ever have to work for a living?" Sitting around bunkhouses and in saddles on long rides teaches how to think sitting down. Be clear on this, the saying "The truth will make you free" guides man over quagmires until he's caught and put under oath on the witness stand. Making a half turn to keep my good ear toward the music, I reply, "If breaking oxen to lay the rails to build a railroad in Texas is considered work, then the answer is yes, I've had to work for a living."

Wasn't hard to pull up the oxen-skinning yarn. Before leaving home, I read how hard men worked to train oxen to pull freight wagons to build the railroads. How teaching "Ol' Bully" to make a turn while "Ol' Molly" held the traces tight tested the skill and patience of men as tough of will as the hides of those powerful beasts. The oldtimer at the line camp in the 1940s told and retold his stories of breaking wild Arkansas-raised mules up on the Cargile Ranch on Rocky Creek in the 1920s. It's not a long hop for a storyteller to change a mule's collar to an ox yoke.

He wasn't interested in an answer. Over and between the music, he launched a resume of his rise from a tutor for high school students to president of a big university. His was a life filled with rousing academic honors and thundering accolades that'd make the ceremony and decoration of the French Legion of Honor match a tarnished version of a Cub Scout awards banquet. He looked the part of a college president, or he did from my limited view of such important persons. Oh, one time in San Angelo, the kids' pediatrician introduced the president of Angelo State University. I wish I had remembered his name.

But the trumpet player was from Australia. (Remember, this is taking place at a concert.) Musicians from the huge continent of vast wastelands develop forces of sound strong enough to rattle the slats in empty chairs. Fat chance Mr. President, the stranger, could have heard if I asked if he knew the college president at Angelo State University in 1979.

I was already too hoarse to shout above the music. Early in the day, before I left a resort up the coast of San Francisco, an obliging fellow arranged a canoe ride down the Russian River. (I warned you the timing isn't in sequence.) He was an "obliging fellow" until we discovered we were too deaf to hear each other 14 feet apart in an aluminum canoe. The Russian River doesn't have a rapid rating in the summer. Having been raised on the eastern edge of the Chihuahua Desert, I don't have a boating rating, winter or summer. Taking the keel, I was supposed to watch for snags and guide us away from the shallows. I could see and hear the boat drag, but I couldn't holler loud enough to warn him.

In swift water, the canoe threw us in reverse. Seemed going backwards, the sound carried better on the water. To catch his attention, I started saying, "One, two, three, four, testing." All us hombres muted by time-rusted ear canals and burst eardrums respond to the litany of sound engineers testing their equipment. Often the countdown is the last thing we hear on a program. For the rest of the trip, we stayed in contact by a loud cadence of one two three fours. The lady at the docks meeting us heard us so far ahead of time, she thought we were racers sculling around the bend.

Be awhile knowing whether keeping dates and places straight matters. I make notes and mark a calendar away from home. Seems people think I'm from Mertzon wherever I am in the world. Few wait to learn how long I've been away from home. Riding backwards in a canoe might be the reason for the indifference to time or place ...

August 22, 2002

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August 15, 2002

At the next convention of the American Association of Retired People, I am going to propose we adopt a secret handshake. Pulling my membership card from the crowded pockets in my billfold at busy airports and hotels to prove such an easy case is ridiculous. Just a slight variation of the Boy Scout's handshake would be enough to open the doorways of the world to AARP.

Masons and maybe Elks and Eagles have signs and passwords. AARP needs to catch up with the secret fraternal organizations. We need a distress signal in case we are at the airport at gate call and a bifocal lens fogs the departure monitor, or a hearing aid microphone switches over to a satellite signal, blotting the sound of the flight information. Backed by a universal handshake, a slight brush of hands will call for help. If the contact has a dead battery, or a sprung earpiece, we can form a quick alliance and find a lip reader or a Braille translator to help us.

Before going any farther, realize that as long as people are living today, the AARP is going to make those other clubs and lodges look like a miniature golf tournament postponed because of an undersize course.

Another idea I am going to present is to make larger association bumper and window stickers for our cars. Any symbol or symptom a senior driver is at the wheel nets four lengths of space on the freeway in all four lanes on all sides and directions. Explains why the freeway traffic last month in Austin faded and opened a right of way wide enough for an 18-wheeler to pass every time I pulled on the fast track.

True, part of the free space yielded to my directional signals blinking all the time, plus a seatbelt looping outside from the bottom of the door on the driver's side, yet a lot of credit is due the AARP bumper stickers. Austin drivers rank nationwide as intrepid daredevils, especially the University undergraduates, but the wildest of all those clowns of reversed cap bills and gold earrings won't crowd the ol' granddads and grandmothers loose on the road.

A mystery is why, when I was stopped on a parking lot dead still, passing cars kept hitting their horns. Instinct must make young guys honk at the sight of gray hair from following so many Town Cars and Sedan de Villes piddling along five miles per hour above stalling speed. I thought of borrowing a baby seat to cast a different image, but I was afraid they might think I was a kidnapper instead of a father.

At Mertzon, drivers can be over-educated and over-qualified. Ones of us holding several certificates for driver's education courses (court-ordered matriculation) have to be deprogrammed. Stop signs, for example, are octagonal shape, painted red with white outline the same as elsewhere. But a driver has to know that S-T-O-P in Mertzon translates into a full phrase of "pause at highway and railroad crossings" and "floorboard it", or "skid and brake" at the off streets.

One of our citizens a few years back lost his sight and his hearing, but not his car keys and driver's license. Neighbors became concerned about his weekly trips to the liquor store across the county line on the busy highway going to San Angelo. He seemed to do all right driving around Mertzon. He knew the townsite well enough to miss the oak trees in the middle of the road and the big boulders on the side. Being a dry year, if he hit a hackberry tree, the trunk snapped right off. But it took a friend of his over at Sherwood named Johnny something or the other to solve the highway problem. Johnny said, "I can't drive anymore, but I can see well enough to guide Jack to the 'licker store' and back."

Before going to Austin last time, I bought a set of glare protection lens to wear at night. Had my hearing aids tuned so sensitive a dime rolling on the sidewalk sounded like an iron hoop bouncing down a hill. As final preparation, I rode to the grocery store a couple of times with my 18 year-old grandson at the wheel. Made myself keep my eyes open and breathe normally. (In motion, this grandson drives resting his bare left foot out the window on the driver's side, so he can flash the mirror with his toes at girl drivers. Very sporting, but hardly suitable for a grandfather to watch.)

Big changes, however, hit us all. I was touched years ago by Carl Sandburg saying "Life is a series of relinquishments." Nowadays, I am not touched, but sorry Mr. Sandburg was so right.

August 15, 2002

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August 8, 2002

My son from Connecticut, John, flew home twice this summer to attend to a commission for a sculpture over in San Angelo. The subject of the work is Saint Angela, the namesake of the city. A second figure is Angela de La Garza, the wife of the original grantee of the land to build the city and also a namesake for the town.

The whole project has been a hardship on my part. He stayed several days each visit, but he was so preoccupied that he didn't help us once at the ranch. June is a busy month. We sprayed the cattle twice for a new drouth-resistant fungus that causes the cows to look like severe cases of lice infection. Been a big help to his old daddy if he'd stayed around to gather and doctor the cattle instead spending all his time over at the art museum in San Angelo.

Folks over in Angelo were making a big splash of the sculpture, how the two figures are going to be bronze one and a half times life-size, or nine or ten feet tall, standing in front of the new visitors' center on the river. I wasn't so carried away. At Mertzon, we have a native stone monument commemorating war veterans and a granite slab with a bronze plaque honoring the Dove Creek Indian Battle in front of the courthouse right by a tall flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes and the banner of the State of Texas. The Mertzon work is unsigned, yet whoever the artist was, he probably stayed in touch with his dad during the sculpting in case the old man needed to work his cattle, doctor his sheep or haul hay.

In the first place, sculptors should stay home — have a sense of place. The famous Michelangelo was a homebody. Pope Julius II had to threaten the Lord Mayor of Florence with excommunication for all of Florence to get Michelangelo to come do the murals in the Sistine Chapel. Means Michelangelo put his hometown above the very Vatican City of the Diocese of Rome. Had the Lord Mayor not knuckled under, Michelangelo might have had time to do another beautiful piece like his David.

At the unveiling of the model on the big night my son was chosen to do the sculpture, over and over all I heard was: "I just can't believe he's your son." Hand it to Wool Capitol citizens, there's no fooling those hombres. They know ranchers. Know the only speck of color that ever comes into ranch life is a piece of red marking chalk to stripe an old ewe's back. Know further the only exposure to color and light in our past is the swirling front of a nickelodeon in a cowboy joint, where art appreciation refines slow — real slow.

But I didn't expect any town person to appreciate how much I contributed to his being prepared to be an artist. Artists need retreats. Several summers, I allowed him to live at the line camp in complete solitude. Gave him the chance to appreciate nature, to sleep out on the back porch and eat his lunch in the pasture. Also, Goat Whiskers the Younger deserves credit for shaping his life. Whiskers introduced him to the ring of a steel crowbar resounding against flint rock. Showed him the freedom of taking the outside swing on dozens of pre-daylight roundups. And best of all, kept him in the country on weekends, away from the wasteful frivolity of the cities.

One of the reporters for the Angelo daily asked me what schooling or training influenced his career the most. I told him old Cecil Parks on the Whiskers ranch taught him more about gathering stock and throwing a quiet, quick loop at the correct moment than all the days he spent working in my sheep-scattering episodes. The fellow looked puzzled. I explained that unless a hand learns the right move at the right time, he can be more trouble than help around livestock. Hard to tell a city fellow how much time it takes to learn to be a cowboy.

One night sitting in the front yard at the ranch, he admitted how different his brothers in Austin had become. How back when they dug rock holes for Goat Whisker's highway fence, they never hurt each other's feelings. "Sometimes," he said, "we'd become plenty upset over hitting rock six inches below the ground instead of 12. But as far as tender feelings, our backs and palms ached too bad to add a hurt." (The fence they built for Whiskers stills stands over where I join his horse trap.)

He's returning in the fall for more art business. I wrote him a postcard telling him that if he came a little earlier, we needed to wean the calves and ship the old cows. Be a good chance to reattach to the spirit of the land. Pope Julius sure knew how to deal with artists. Maybe I'm using too soft a glove.

August 8, 2002

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August 2, 2002

Two or three times, I've come close to being a cowboy. Problem was, horses don't buck one jump and quit, and all roping contests have a two-loop limit. Been to my benefit, too, to ranch in a catch tank county, or have river front. My score on catching the bottom check valve or fishing for broken sucker rods on windmill jobs matches to a tee the amount of loops I've thrown and jerked up the slack on air.

Learned the language, though I couldn't ride bad horses or rope wild cattle, or qualify as a windmill man. Wherever cowboys gather, be it Montana or Musquiz, I am sure I can serve as a translator. Know all their bunkhouse stories beforehand, too. Can make a good guess ahead of time why a puncher misses work on a Monday morning, or why the saddle horses didn't come in to feed. Even know a bunch of cowboy songs, except for fitting the words to the tunes.

Hiring day hands is another of my skills. Took 20 years to learn to wait until 6:45 a.m. to roust an old boy from bed to bid for his time. Call earlier and the whole household is alerted a herder is looking for help. Call later and the whole household will be awake enough to have a good excuse to refuse a job. Call much later after his wife has gone to work, and you'd be better off dialing "dial a prayer" than gaining even a promise to work a few days. But to prove I know what I am talking about, I'll relay a skit of a call I made last week to a cowboy we call "Jack Dime Time," who was the last prospect male or female in the whole shortgrass country the week I needed a day hand.

Here's how the request went:

Me: "Hello. Jack. Don't you need three days' rest next week starting on Monday and finishing early Wednesday?"

Jack: "Huh?"

Me: "Need to work a little bunch of sheep early in the morning while it's still cool. Thought if you'd drive the feed wagon to bait the gates until we made a round on horseback, we should finish in time for you to be back in town to go to the bank and pay your insurance in San Angelo."

Jack: "Who is this a'talking?"

Me: "Ah, Jack, you're kidding me. By the way, I checked with the clerk and jury duty is postponed next week. Same party said the driver's license renewals are week after next. All four Mertzon churches are having revivals later in the summer. No christenings or baptisms are scheduled for children or grandchildren until then. And the wool house doesn't have any wool to weigh next week. Sounds like the cafe is going to be closed for the next 10 days."

Jack: "Well, I am sorry but I promised Mother I'd mow her lawn next week before the grass grew so tall the poor old soul might be bitten by a rattle snake." (His mother lives in a garage apartment.)

Me: "Jack, I took your mother a cat for snake protection last Sunday. Tears came to her eyes thanking me for giving her son a chance to work."

Jack: "Gawd-a-mighty, I know who you are — Monte Noelke. Last time I helped you, I lacked 30 minutes putting in 24 hours the first day. I am looking for a steady job, but I do want it to break at sunset. Goodbye."

Study those points covered in the interview. I failed to hire Jack, yet every excuse is covered except failing health. Working wives make good doctors for husbands. Sometimes I'll get a break and talk to the woman before the man comes to the phone. However, young brides and girlfriends are a handicap. Mothers of more than five kids working at the cafe or the laundry 60 hours a week are the best bets as strong motivators for a husband to find a job.

The Big Boss was an early student of DNA. He tried to find my place in a long line of horseman. He couldn't believe I was his son, my being so inept at riding bucking horses and throwing a rope. As I have written before, Mother covered her disappointments (over social ineptitude and academic deficiencies) by saying: "He's an orphan. Don't ask questions."

And how did it all turn out? The horse tuners who laughed are about all gone. The last time I remember throwing a rope was at a peacock standing in the gate of a leased place the other side of Mertzon. Best part of the story is that last week after a cool rain, I took a ride on a gentle horse without a critic around to appraise my style.

August 2, 2002

July 25, 2002

Sheep numbers are so few nowadays that unloading at the scales is a private affair. One San Angelo terminal, Mid-West Feed Yards, once had lines of a dozen trucks waiting to back into the loading chute. Those of us waiting to weigh our lambs were willing to help other shippers unload to reduce the lost time and shrink of our delicate product.

Volume at the auction barn remains high from the ewes coming from the north to go to Mexican buyers. Bound to be times the auction docks are congested, as few truckers today know how to handle sheep. I am lucky in knowing two men who can load lambs on their trucks as fast as we can count into the loading pen. Before we start gathering or taking bids on the lambs, I contact those two fellows to know the days they are free. Makes a tremendous difference in weight loss to have a good truck driver.

Range conditions and condition of the sheep plus the weather on shipping day are big factors. Every work has an advantage and a disadvantage. July is a bad bet in the shortgrass country, especially if the humidity is high. Sheep, men and horses pant breathing wet, hot air. Knock the spook ("spook" might be too flavorful, so try "scare") out of a string of lambs on a moist, warm morning, and you may find yourself watching the shadows change from morning to overhead sun to mid-afternoon. Five and one-half hours is the record length for helping load a triple-deck truck with a pot. However, the lambs were sick and the trucker was a goat hauler from Central Texas.

The challenge this July was a race to beat the prickly pear apples ripening. Old ewes were already eating pads and green apples while standing in good sheep feed. First move was a mistake. We penned the adult addicts to remove their influence on the lambs. I rushed over to Mertzon to buy 20 sacks of chicken mash to feed the old sisters in the pen. Chicken mash is all a pear eater can eat after their lips become so swollen and filled with thorns. In the rush, I just asked for chicken feed. The warehouseman, disturbed by my urgency, pitched the feed on the pickup in a big rush. I left without signing the ticket.

At the ranch, I backed into the barn. Rolled two 50-pound bags to the feed pen to see if the pellets were soft enough for the ewes to swallow. Stood awhile and watched them foraging the feed around, holding their heads up to allow for the cubes to pass their swollen tongues.

Next morning, we had to leave early. One of the men opened two more sacks of feed for the hospital bunch. He came back into the horse lot shaking his head, saying, "I never saw a sheep imitating a rooster. Never in my whole life." After I had pitched my saddle on, I walked over to the same spot where I had stood the night before. Instead of throwing their heads up to swallow, the goofy old sisters were throwing their heads up and straining the neck muscles like they wanted to crow.

By the time we penned the first bunch of sheep, the feed pen was back to normal, if you can call bobbing their heads and lifting their heads up to swallow the feed "normal". But the next morning at the first glimmer of daylight in the east, the same neck-stretching act happened except that up close a gurgling sound was audible from them straining so much.

The only cowboy in the country to ever call me "Mr.Noelke" hollered from the barn: "Mr. Noelke, that's not chicken mash. Says on the sack it's 'Game Cock Conditioner.' Must mean it's for fighting roosters, not laying eggs." After he found the trouble, I remembered hearing that the old boy raising fighting chickens on the river had sold out. I didn't tell the warehouseman at the wool house why I wanted chicken feed. He must have thought I'd bought all those Spring Creek fighting roosters.

Took 48 hours to stabilize the feed pen. We diluted the rooster feed with shelled corn. I didn't dare try to work the ewes as long as they scattered in all directions every time we walked in the pen. I am not going to say one of the stronger ones didn't try to jump up on the fence, but several head bedded in the tall cow toughs in the pen.

Once the lambs were weaned the trucker came on time and loaded the lambs as easy as racking a table of billiard balls. The work is over. The ewes are on feed. Wish now I'd fed the game cock conditioner straight, just to add a little life on those determined to die pear-eaters.

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July 18, 2002

Gulf clouds have been bringing serious thunderstorms inland. Radio reports claim flooding in Central Texas. Dark clouds float over us without much more than a mist, but we have had strong rain odors off the front.

In 1955, on the Fourth of July, a storm adverse to rain boiled in from the Plains, so heavily laden with brown dirt that we hovered down underneath a bluff by a small hole of water on Spring Creek to finish our barbecue. After the meal, three of the families followed us to the old ranch. Took nine dustpans full to clean the dust off the kitchen floor to dance. The west wind blew so fierce, the screen doors tapped a two-step beat against the sills. A brown stream of dust spewed from the electric outlets. Took every decibel the Big Boss's record player raised to reach above the storm.

For three days before this Fourth, clouds tormented the shortgrass country. Teased us into a state of nerves as tense as the electricity in the atmosphere flashing into dark purple walls. Late on the evening of the second, the saddle horses came running and pitching to make a circle by the tank and out the double gates of the water lot to go back into the trap.

I puzzled over the behavior. Was it possible these simple-minded beasts, surer of foot than mind, suffered from a pre-storm hysteria? Lots of times before and after a rain, horses stampede into a fence or take a fall from slick ground. I may have told you how the long-legged, sorrel misfit of the Boss's named "Peacock" met a barbed wire death in a mud-slick race to collide into the Santa Fe Railroad's right-of-way fence. We never rode by the place afterwards; we didn't feel grateful for taut barbed wire.

If the horses knew a rain was coming, their prescience was 12 hours in advance. On the morning of the third, six-tenths to an inch fell on the ranch. Conditions were so good good that more than one-tenth fell on the cursed grounds down on the highway. Hearing of heavier rains built up hopes that I might escape from my own planning.

Last fall, I started betting the drouth was going to be over this spring. Bet the old cows were going to be worth more money as pairs on a wet spring to come. Kept all the heifer calves, big ones and light ones alike. Turned bulls in early and left them out late, gambling on selling a bred cow on one end of the gestation period or the other. And took one more long shot on wintering ewes too old to keep on grass.

The spring didn't gel. In May, we started working off the tail end of each category of mistakes. As I confessed in a previous article, or should have, drawing to an inside straight on your longest losing streak in a lifetime beats trying to rebreed those mysterious dry cows that miss their first calf. But where I caught on to my mistake was the morning it rained. I thought we were going to have a flood. My inner thoughts, however, revealed a dreadful miscalculation. On all these wild bets, I was anteing up the last of my grass and tossing 2100 bucks in the pot every time the feed truck augured in a load of cubes without other players calling my bet. Came to mind that the lady at the Barnhart convenience stored offered to sell me a chance on a lottery prize worth $71 million for a buck. Here I was rolling molasses tubs on the dry ground at $43 apiece, thinking making $50 a head more on 28 old cows was going to be hitting the jackpot.

"Jackpot" ended here in 1940, the year the neighbors moved to town and the small goat roping arena at the Devils River Mill fell to ruin. I tried to remember if I even thought in terms of a jackpot. The dream I know was this: "Comes a wet spring, Angus cattle are going to be higher than mink stoles in Dallas before the opening of the opera season."

Sitting on a feed trough in late autumn waiting for a heifer to calve, visions floated by of Angus heifers going through the ring at San Saba to the golden tune of a wooden hammer tapping the final bid. "Sebenteen hunert and fifty dollars a head for Mr. Monte Noelke's cattle out at Mertzon. Let's give him a big hand."

Six-tenths of an inch isn't going to cover my action. The old ewes are eating prickly pear too bad to ship. Angus cattle may have slipped in price, it's been so long since rain inspired buyers. The big lottery prize was cashed weeks ago. But I am not going to gamble my money away, especially on a game that doesn't take a rain to be a winner.

July 18, 2002

July 11, 2002

During the Depression years of the thirties and into the next decade, ranch wives were identified by their baking skills. "Miss Myrtle," they'd say, "can shore bake cornbread, but her biscuits would sink a trotline to the bottom of the creek." Or, "I'll swear, 'Miss Ruby' makes the lightest biscuits, but when we were helping shear out there, the hound dogs wouldn't eat her cornbread."

Note, too, that another quirk was calling married women "Miss so and so." Likely the reason was to be formal without being too formal and to use "Miss" to avoid the slightest reference to the women's ages. Both ideas are suppositions, as the ones of us following the shearing and marking crews were young and plenty dumb, yet knew enough to be polished diplomats at the kitchen tables. For an extra break at the bread plate, we'd called the cooks "Her Highness."

Mother used specials pans and crocks to make bread. She said the first batch of yeast bread she made became such a dismal failure, she buried the dough in the back yard. As the day warmed, the dough rose through the dirt cover to reveal her shame not five steps away from where the cowboys washed their hands at a faucet.

Part of her equipment was an old silver spoon. Her grandmother had worn the scoop in half, stirring dough and batter for three meals every day back in Kentucky. My stepfather further utilized the spoon as a symbol to prove how hard our ancestors had to work. His nephew stayed at the ranch in the summer. We were more interested in a walking cane his grandfather brought from Oklahoma that concealed a long thin sword in the stem than we were a worn silver bread spoon. We knew about Oklahoma. One halfblood gunman had camped on the Middle Concho from the Territory a little before our time, but close enough for us to know that we needed a sword more than a bread spoon.

A ranch on Dove Creek was the first outfit to serve store-bought bread for breakfast, or it was the first one I knew to do so. Was a blessing, too, as the foreman got us up so early in the morning and kept us in the pasture so late, the kerosene fumes from burning lamps in the darkness flavored the food. The bread was so precious, the lady kept the wrapper sealed too tight for it to become contaminated.

For old times' sakes, I reassembled Mother's baking pans and measuring cups. The worn spoon and the walking cane were lost a long time ago. However, I found the white crock mixing bowl and the blackened barrel lid she used to cook cornbread. Just as I heated the bacon grease, it hit how I ought to be wearing a spoon down making bread like ol' Granny did to leave the grandchildren.

Started whipping the corn meal and eggs and buttermilk so furiously the stroke became a frantic beat of metal against glass. As the batter turned to a yellow mush, a horned-tailed grasshopper jumped from the shelf and hit right at the moment I made a powerful swirl of the spoon. Before I stopped, I pulverized the hopper into bits too small to separate from the brown specks in the corn meal.

All the grasshopper left in one piece was his hooked tail. I went outside and caught another grasshopper the same size. Estimated he'd make two teaspoons of chopped grasshopper meat, excluding the horn tail I'd extracted in one piece. Mother's recipe is the one on the corn meal sack. A footnote reminded me that if bacon or cracklings are added to the recipe, the prescribed sugar and the salt have to be reduced. I wasn't up to tasting the captured grasshopper raw to see if he tasted sweet or salty, so I just cut the sugar and salt the same proportion to allow for the two teaspoons of chopped grasshopper.

Cooked, the cornbread tasted of roasted almonds. Only comment by a guest was how she liked ranch food, as the flavor always seems to be "a wild one." I kept my mouth shut. Only person I ever saw eating grasshoppers was a fisherman camped on Lake Travis who deep-fried a batch once at a beer fest. He claimed fried grasshopper tasted like fried cricket and a little like popcorn. I guess I need to add that when a fisherman starts eating his bait, it's a good sign he needs to change hobbies.

Those ol' ranch gals deserved more title than "Miss" for being up so early and staying up so late cooking for roundups. Work was hard enough for everybody to have a good appetite. Wish Mother was around to laugh at the grasshopper-flavored cornbread ...

July 11, 2002

July 4, 2002

On one of my walks last week in Mertzon, a hard-working welder stopped to talk. He was hunting for the high school student who had been helping him weld on a tough job under the direct summer sun. All I could tell him was that if he wanted to give the lad a scare, just say "ranch work."

I did give him a tip that the boys hired to paint and hoe weeds at the school might be lured away. Not that sitting under the dark shade of an oak tree puffing on cigarettes and talking would meet his job qualifications, unless he was going to open an art school and needed models to do still life portraits.

When the summer reading program was announced for the school library, a further drain hit the youth labor market. The cool stacks of books and magazines hold a lot more appeal than the wool house. I don't know where the idea comes from that kids are supposed to read in the summer. Looks like they'd get enough written work in the winter studying the TV schedule and reading the gas gauge on the family car.

One of my problems is spending too much time at my house across the street from the school. Taxpayers should never live in sight of their dependents. In April, I watched so many football practice sessions from my front porch that I learned the numbers of the plays. I found myself going around the yard, muttering: "Get em, Kill em, men, break their legs! But don't crush those helmets. They cost a lot of money."

The worst began, however, after I became conscious how early the security lights flashed on before dusk and how long they burned after dawn. Also, I became aware of the laps the superintendent made from his office, purring to a stop in the school's silver Buick under a carport attached to the brick house the district furnishes him. Began to flinch at the motor revving in the sprawling motor pool of vans, buses, pickups, a huge coach, and a spare automobile. It's a scene I think I once likened to the Shah of Iran's private parking lot.

I calmed down by admitting that all eight of my children graduated from this school able to pass the entrance exams to enter college. I myself spent a lot of years behind those quarried brown stone walls in rapture of "the three R's," spellbound by maps of the world on a spinning glove of blue oceans and orange continents, captivated by the teacher's pointer tapping the spelling words letter by letter on the blackboard, and invigorated by dusting erasers and dumping ashes from the black wood stove outdoors in the brisk winters of those childhood days.

But now I had to admit I was out of step, of another age; "behind the times" is the best definition. Promised the next time I was in San Angelo, I'd go by Wal-Mart and buy a big box of bubble gum to give to the librarian to reward the children. Swore I'd stop moving the water off the grass on the practice field at night to water the oak tree across the street in front of my house. Vowed I was going to be a good neighbor. Be a good citizen willing to pay my part to have winning football and basketball teams made of students smart enough to master the intricacies of the games and smash our enemies into smithereens on the gridiron and the court.

My good intentions lasted until the daily paper in San Angelo carried a story of a complaint that the school's spring examinations for the Texas Board of Education were graded unfairly. The superintendent denied the claim by saying, "The problem was caused by an inadvertent error in the scoring and testing procedures." He must have fared well, as no follow-up story was printed.

But it put me to thinking that if in the new century, wired to the finest technological equipment designed made "inadvertent errors in testing and scoring procedures" possible, just what kind of little song and dance was going on those three years in the red-penciled copies of Miss Greengoss' grade book charged against Monte Noelke in the fifth grade?

First, I have to check on the statute of limitations on inadvertent testing and scoring procedures for fifth grade. Next, before matching a fight, I want to sell my wool to pay on my tax bill. Then when the time seems right, I am going to walk over to the superintendent's office and say right casual, "I'd like a look at my transcript from the fifth grade." I think I can make a big change, but I'll let you know when I have the results...

July 4, 2002

June 27, 2002

The heavy traffic in the residential districts over in San Angelo the past three months has been from the three hailstorms generating a brisk business in roofers posting company signs in front yards and insurance adjusters loading and unloading ladders from the curbs. Actual restoration of the roofs and processing of the claims won't cause any jams of any nature, except that by fall, ombudsmen for insurance companies and better business bureaus will probably be flooded with complaints.

Mertzon had a summer windstorm two weeks ago from this writing. Ominous dark clouds rolled in from the northwest and west, igniting the skies with lightning and shaking the townsite with claps of thunder. Biggest danger was whether the multitude of mobile homes scattered about town were going to stay grounded. Previous storms, however, taught the mobile dwellers to anchor the houses to the hard limestone bedrock endemic to any site in Mertzon, so losses were limited to fallen limbs and torn shingles or flashing.

Electric service failed once the atmosphere became charged with celestial electricity. My partner and I remained calm as our interest was whether the front reached our respective ranches some 22 and 35 miles to the south of town. Whether we survived the storm or expired in the darkness wasn't as important as whether the rain clouds rolled over our pastures and added a few drops of moisture to the scant readings of the week before.

After the winds died, the electricity stayed off all over town. So we moved onto the coolness of the front porch in time for a string of cars to pass by leading to the school gymnasium one half block away. The motorcade sounded a concert of the pistons of idling motors hacking a metallic tune and squat race cars' mufflers rumbling the mating call of the young male drivers, enforced by boom boxes drumming a hollow beat.

Accustomed to the fervor of the sports programs running summer and winter in Mertzon, we supposed a candlelight basketball game was on tap. But in the glow of headlights, our attention was focused on a couple of white objects high in the oak tree in front of the house. Once a spotlight from a car parked on the school lot flashed strong enough to give us a quick glimpse, yet too fast to identify the mysterious objects.

Two neighborhood pooches loose on the town from a storm-torn fence solved the mystery. The two dogs freed to roam and be a public nuisance identified "the white objects" as two kitties that had blown up into the high branches of the oak tree. Wind whipping around my two-story house had floated the cats airborne into the upper reaches of the tree. Not a helicopter or fixed-wing craft made that can make a landing as short and smooth as a cat. All that was needed for the feat was room for the cat to lift off and a limb to land upon. ("Pine Cone" Elkins, the owner of the Mertzon coffee house, disputes that cats can be airlifted in a storm, but her trust has been severely tested by hearing the same stories from her customers every morning six days a week.)

My sister keeps cats in her Angelo townhouse. Also runs 30 head in her backyard at the ranch on a slow season. But it'd take a mighty powerful wind to use her cats for an experiment, as she keeps them so fat the closest they come to flying, or even moving, is when her neighbor's sheepdog comes for a visit.

Turned out the traffic to the school was from a police report that the roof on the gym had blown off, causing $70,000 worth of damage. (In Mertzon we make on-the-spot estimates of a disaster, because so much of our lives are a disaster, i.e. losing football games to old rivals, losing opponents we can beat to the six-man league, bait stand closing on weekends, grocery store running short of varied flavors of Blue Bell ice cream, etc.) No wonder so many cars were coming by and spotlights flashing up the gym wall. If the roof had caved in on the gym floor, the town would have plunged into a funk too dark for the coming of the Oprah Winfrey show to revive.

The electricity came on at 3 a.m. The big fat dog stopped barking at the kittens at dawn. Her mate slacked off about seven or seven-thirty. I finished a novel at around eight to signal the end of the vigil on the dog and cat show. The cats were down from the oak tree and at the back door by mid-day. As expected, not a hair was out of place on either cat. It sure would have been a sight to have glimpsed those two, hair fluffed in full wing, flying through the air as graceful as feathered birds.

June 27, 2002

June 20, 2002

Last week the bank held a reception for a candidate running for state representative for our new district. He packs a lot of wallop in Austin as Speaker of the House of Representatives. I claim no party affiliation, yet I have enough clean shirts and good sense to know that when the speaker of the house is in Mertzon, I am going to be glad of hand and first in the reception line.

Irion County is the southernmost county under the new redistricting plan. Our current representative, Rob Junell, is retiring the end of the year. When I was feeling so optimistic last fall after a wet spell, I predicted Mr. Junell's retirement as chairman of the Appropriations Committee signaled the end of representative government for the shortgrass country at the state level.

After a hard winter and a worse spring, I don't think we are going to come out that good. Once the district lines were carved, we had to face the awful truth that Harris County's seat, Houston, earns more representatives than all the counties west of I-35. Instead of grieving over the loss of Mr. Junell, we better hope our new representatives aren't assigned the broom closet for offices. No more strokes than rural constituents are going to have, the closest we are going rank for a committee chair is the one in charge of tidying and sweeping the chambers at night.

However, our desperation failed to move the Mertzon community. About 15 of us joined the two worthies at fruit punch and cookies. Two members of the commissioner's court plus the county judge and the justice of the peace represented the county government. A couple of jugkeepers, the local hardware man, and a herder or two made up the crowd. Word must not have reached Mertzon that Mr. Junell is one of President Bush's nominees for a place on the federal bench. Didn't sink in at the coffee house that when Mr. Junell becomes Judge Junell, if it so suits his honor, he can make every citizen stand at attention from Angelo to Big Lake until he's ready to order "parade rest."

I debated whether to call him "Your Honor." I needed to do a bit of patching on our past. Once, instead of giving him a campaign contribution, I sent him a pair of polo spurs the Big Boss shipped around with his polo horses to Long Island and on down once to Mexico City. The spurs weren't silver plated, but I figured if Mr. Junell had enough dough to play polo, he'd consider the sentimental value of the gift instead of the monetary value. But standing in the lobby of the Mertzon jug last week, I was struck how inappropriate a pair of spurs were going to be for a federal judge. (Justice Sandra O'Connor was a cowboy, but she quit before her judgement was ruined to go to law school.) Short-shank English spurs wouldn't show underneath his robe even if he bothered to snap the leathers on his black boots to coordinate his costume.

My fascination for politicians goes way back. In the 1950s one session, I hung out at night on the floor of the House visiting the pages after the meetings adjourned. I worked for the Land Office, but liked to be over watching the action going on and about the Capitol building.

Plenty lively bunch hit town in those days. Beverage alcohol inspired the imagination and behavior of our then public servants, especially the Panhandle delegation spending the winter in Austin away from the howling winds of the Plains, where the closest legal drink was across the New Mexico line. (I refuse to defame the past by telling the full story of the night a worthy plunged from the north capitol door and directed a cab driver to take him home. The cabby asked, "Where's home?" "Why, the 'Capitol Tavern,' boy. Ain't you got any sense?" Be up to a less responsible writer to dishonor the men who served before tattletales lurked in front of microphones and poised behind word processors ready to blab every deficiency known to man in ink and word.)

One night after adjournment, a page shot an empty brass spittoon down the middle aisle with a croquet mallet. The spittoon banked off the base of the speaker's podium, cleaned to a stop for a perfect side pocket under the Sergeant of Arms' desk. The racket set off pandemonium among the janitorial forces cleaning up behind the tobacco fiends who puffed on thick cigars and gnawed on big plugs of black chewing tobacco.

But it always was my trouble to be associating with a bunch of near primates, while guys headed to the top studied and carried around library cards in their hip pocket instead of playing spittoon croquet and packing an update of the week's handicap on the football games. Until the election and the nominations are set, I am going to be on hand for all occasions. I just hope His Honor to be places as much value on those polo spurs as the Big Boss did slipping 'em on his high-topped riding boots.

June 20, 2002

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We don't work big enough bunches of stock nowadays to stir the dust in the corrals. Weeds grow in the cutting chutes; ant beds flourish in the loading alleys. In my tender years, I wept copious tears at Roy Rogers singing "Empty Saddles in The Old Co

We don't work big enough bunches of stock nowadays to stir the dust in the corrals. Weeds grow in the cutting chutes; ant beds flourish in the loading alleys. In my tender years, I wept copious tears at Roy Rogers singing "Empty Saddles in The Old Corral". The abandonment is so traumatic now that my lips won't pucker enough to whistle in the horses, much less hum an old cowboy dirge.

In spite of the change, the works on cool mornings can be pleasant. Two weeks ago from this writing, we gathered over at my maternal grandfather's place to pregnancy test a small bunch of heifers. The cattle looked better than the pasture. Status of cattle were that they had either lost their first calves calving or failed to breed the first time around. Pulling such a stunt as putting a bull in behind previous failure can't be sweated out in a mineral bath or blown from your brain cells by a powerful drug. "I know it won't work, but I'm still going to try it" should be a standing coat of arms of the hollow horn trade.

The veterinarian drove from way south to hit this small outfit north and east of Mertzon. Before the good doctor closed his pickup door, he launched a story of a German exchange student he and a horse trader had converted from animal rights to being a veterinary nurse and a tuner for the green horses the trader schools at her ranch. (The German government recently passed a bill listing animal rights, so you see what Doc and the trader were up against.) The doctor's version was a touching tale of a conversion matched only on the TV channels spreading the Word on a Sunday morning. I avoided coming to tears as I was steeling my emotions to face the results of the doctor's examination of my cows.

My helpers, however, encouraged the doctor to continue by all but applauding each step of her change from animal rights to animal husbandry. Also, a cowboy's interest is easy to hold by the image of a robust young Teutonic college girl, her blond ponytail flopping against the back of her blue Chambray shirt, riding a dark bay colt in a tight circle in a water lot. Twice, I tried to change the subject. The third time I suggested we test the cows, then go up under the shade of the mulberry my grandfather planted and devote full attention to this momentous conversion.

My suggestion worked. The chute sits on a slight curve. Cattle pass through easily, but the lead cow has to be caught quick by a bar, or she'll halt the whole procedure. I took the job of catching the lead cow. Just as I grabbed a pipe off the ground, the doctor said "animal rights" one more time. Bent over lifting the pipe slick with thin residue, I stopped and faced the doctor and the two men: "Starting right now," I said, "cowboys are going to have rights. From this moment on, I am not picking up any more messy pipes until these black cows learn some standards of hygiene."

The cow responded by backing up, freed by a poor catch. The doctor and other guys tried tentative smiles. I emphasized my point by taking a discarded salt sack and carefully polishing the catch pipe. "Now hear this, all of you town dudes and passionate resistors devoted to making the raising of food for this country difficult: starting this day," I declaimed, "I am through standing behind cows and calves to be kicked to load meat on the hoof for an ungrateful world who believes the food in the grocery stores originates on a Styrofoam tray."

By then, the doctor and the men started releasing the cows in the back of the chute to keep one from being knocked down. Made no difference to me: "Just be on notice, if a cow brute steps on my toe, or a horse I am saddling steps on my instep, I am going to lead a charge on the biggest grocery store in San Angelo, Texas and dump the meat counter. First time it takes all morning to find a cow down calving, I'm going to make a red mark on the barn wall. When the score reaches 30 days, I am going to take a month off. If my cattle die while I'm gone, the protesters can live on yard signs and stay their hunger holding marches."

I finally wound down. We ran the cows through without incident or much surprise at the results. On one count I am wrong: town folks better not depend on my judgement of breeding heifers for food. I sure bummed the deal on that bunch of cows, but what's one more longshot in this great game we insist on playing? — www.noelke.org/monte

c

June 6, 2002

The tail end of a weather alert the other day proclaimed "wicked weather is ahead until 10 p.m. for the Edwards Plateau (shortgrass country)." Sounded like a good chance that the 15 years of drouth might be over at 10 o'clock. For the ones of us hearing the deadline out on the rangelands, staring at the ravages of a dry spring, the relief was immense — as immense as if we'd slipped a noose weighted by Neptune's anchor.

But as is the case in most episodes involving city folks and country folks, the weatherman meant that what he calls "severe thunderstorms" and we campesinos call hard rain, might fall before 10 p.m. Part of his guess also included a chance of a hail storm, and all of our guesses and hopes were that we'd have a flood by 10 p.m.

That was going to be short notice for my outfit. Our long range plan was already set to receive another load of feed for Thursday morning by 10 a.m. predictions were that the amount of feed left in the funnel of the bin on Wednesday afternoon would feed the first run on Thursday morning, unless the alternator on the feed wagon kept undercharging the battery, causing the auger to kick out less feed. Should that be the case, we could go until mid-day without more feed. (Our business is an exact science, but a slight lag in performance occurs using 27 year-old pickups and 30 year-old homemade self feeders to calculate time and weight.)

A hard shower fell in Mertzon before 10 p.m. One of my compadres over at Angelo reported a bruised face from being caught outdoors in heavy hail, switching his insured town car from the garage to shelter his uninsured ranch pickup from hail stones. Maybe that needs a rerun: He didn't out and out say he was moving the car from the garage to put the pickup indoors. But he sells insurance, and has for over 50 years. He knows to the centimeter the space a one dollar bill displaces in his pocket book pressed flat or folded. He records to memory the serial number of every bill as large as a five he pockets.

And to show how mighty his huge roll of dough grows, he sold out on the best goat market in the 20th century, then leased his ranch at a figure unknown away and apart from the diamond fields on the South African coast. Knowing those facts beforehand possibly slanted my story, as he is not the kind of guy to be poking his head outdoors for hail stones to ricochet off his cheek bones.

One distraction during the month of May was an epidemic of a moth we call "candle bugs" and the Mexican people call palomitas. There never is time to look up the correct name as they keep you busy sweeping and mopping once an onslaught hits. When they don't land to lie in a sullen gray mass, they flutter into the light, flitting back and forth from window sills and leaving a spotted mess only removable by a high-powered sander.

Candle bugs do not pollinate, or do little else except propagate and defecate. Their life spans are short, as under full siege, an average size kitchen floor will yield four dustpans of bodies every 24 hours. Lady over on a big Boer goat operation west of Barnhart, collects dead candle bugs in gallon buckets to feed the goats in her house trap. Sprinkled with ground cinnamon and white cane sugar, she claims the insects make her nannies give more milk. The only drawback is that the goats bed down under her security light every night and are afraid of shadows.

San Angelo being the largest sheep market in the U.S. gives us woolie operators a chance to share our misery. The sheep sales last two days a week now instead of one short sale run. Dried out herders from as far away as Colorado are shipping to Angelo. Hombres in those climes don't have a flowering crop of prickly pear fruit and a wholesome stand of catclaw beans in the offing like we have coming on in the summer. Not much nourishment for an old mountain bred ewe in a pine cone, or a bed of dried pine needles.

I suspect being hit in the forehead by a lug wrench hurts worse than shipping ewes to a 20-cent a pound market from Colorado, bearing a freight bill and a shrink of proportions high enough to rattle the equanimity of a Las Vegas pit man. However, if there was a chance of the wrench landing a glancing blow, the pain might be less than facing an interstate sheep wreck.

Wicked weather is still on, at this writing. No reports have come on amounts of damages from the hail stones, or how the Barnhart goats weathered the cool front full of candle bugs. Wonder how much more dry weather it's going to take for us to give up… www.noelke.org/monte

June 6, 2002

May 30, 2002

"Here," for the moment, is the fifth floor surgery wing of Scott and White Hospital in Temple, Texas. More specific, the end of the southeast hallway at a round table crowded in an alcove. Up the hall, white caps dart in and out of rooms, dragging chrome poles with tubes and bags swinging in the furor of activity. Young doctors in blue costumes topped with skull caps stop at doorways to dash off notes on drop leaf note boards before entering the patients' rooms to report.

I have chosen the small waiting space for protection. Understand, I am a minor figure in the act. Only here to support a friend while her mother has an operation. Thanks to a good heart and a persuasive hospital chaplain, the large, comfortable fifth-floor waiting room is off limits. An hour ago, the chaplain interrupted my reading to ask me to witness the signing of a patient's medical directives. Hospital staff or family members cannot sign as witnesses to these ominous but necessary documents, appointing a person to act in case the patient can only survive on life supporting devices.

Hoping to gain favor with the chaplain as a move to use her office as a place to write without the distraction of TV, I agreed to serve without considering the patient's past or his condition. Pause and consider the danger of becoming part of a stranger's fate. You don't know if the subject had been hiding from his brother-in-law, or has defaulted on his gambling debts. He might have a price on his head. But Mother always told me to be nice to those appointed to the cloth, so nice I was to this lady minister.

Along with an outpatient case worker, the chaplain led us to a small room occupied by an African American male in the bed and a large, tall lady standing at bedside. The chaplain squeezed into a space crowded by the feet of a second person sprawled in a chair so far against the wall she was out of our sight. The other witness and myself shared the corner extending off the bathroom.

The chaplain explained the forms, than began reading one. Suddenly, a strident voice cut the air from the doorway: "Roosevelt (the patient), are you sure you want her named on that form? You know I am still your wife."

We found room to turn toward the doorway, though the place seemed more crowded. She, the wife, looked to be a middleweight in top fighting condition, so mad the whites of her eyes glowed around black shadows. I hadn't felt so penned in since Jose slammed a crowd pen gate closed, shutting me in with a three-quarter humpy bull.

Roosevelt replied, "Yes." The mad, mad wife said, "Preacher, is that form legal? I'm Roosevelt's wife." The chaplain continued to read, ignoring the question. Roosevelt slid down in the bed, nodding assent to her questions. Mad, mad wife snarled she was going to go see a lawyer, but continued to block the door. After signing the forms, I watched a pigeon on the window ledge. The smartest pigeons known are the homing kind. Great on geography, they still only have an IQ above eight, yet I've been told pigeons won't nest in a loft that doesn't have an escape hatch.

We stepped aside to allow the chaplain the honor of leading us to safety. Mad wife started to let us pass, reconsidered, and commenced a harangue aimed at the chaplain, backing the two witnesses to the end of the bed. Roosevelt, the trouble-maker, slipped his right hand from under the sheets to rest on his appointed guardian's knee. Glancing over my shoulder, I caught the pigeon preening a bit, before flying to the open skies.

Once in the wide hall, mad wife lost her advantage. Later, the chaplain came around to say thanks. I told her to thank my mother as doing good deeds is not my nature. Furthermore, starting now, the Roosevelts and the rest of the world's trifling husbands can hire professional witnesses. For herself, she can pass a second collection on Sunday to pay for the services. And if she follows her true calling, she'll go back to Roosevelt's room and tell him life-sustaining devices aren't made to protect him from a jealous wife, especially lying flat on his back in a hospital bed.

So I am going to wait at the table by the stairway leading to the fourth floor in case Mrs. Roosevelt fails to honor the neutrality of witnesses. I've had a hard time concentrating on my book. Next time the passage comes up in church about leading us to still water, I am going to check which way the water flows into the pool…

May 30, 2002

May 23, 2002

Until World War II, the men working on the ranches went by nicknames instead of their real names. First time they learned they had full names was when they registered for the draft. One old boy over at Sherwood we called "John Peter Paul Sweptson" became mighty incensed with his mother upon learning his name was "John Marian Sweptson."

The other night in a Ozona steak house, a man introduced himself as "Peanuts." Only "Peanuts" around Mertzon in my youth lived down across the tracks on the river. No record survives of the origin of his name except I remember Peanut sure wasn't small-time at playing nine ball. But hearing the name "Peanuts" again brought back all the Jakes, Shortys and Firecrackers who used to hang out around my shine stand at the barbershop.

One particular Jake was a fisherman and trapper forced to run the county road grader to support his vocations. Jake loafed in the barbershop during off seasons after the fur season ended and before the river warmed enough to be good fishing. Road grading was always "off season." However, feeder roads leading to the Middle Concho River and ranches having dirt tanks stocked with fish got plenty of attention.

Jake wasn't a customer. His wife cut his red hair; his faded tennis shoes wouldn't take a shine. On rainy days, he sat slumped in a chair, smoking a foul black tobacco called Tobacco Negro, rolled in yellowed corn shucks that smelled almost as good as a hair pad smoldering in a trash fire. The mien of a trapper surrounded him with a musty aroma from baits. His vision was so crossed, he had to hold the corn shuck to the side to catch the tobacco. I caught the rest in my dustpan, sweeping the shop at night.

Unlike the other men, Jake addressed me as an adult. He'd slump lower in his chair and say, "One time down there in Henderson where I was raised, I ran a popularity poll. Don't ever do that, boy. Ran for commissioner on the Ku Klux Klan ticket. Got four votes in a precinct where half the voters were kin to me. That fall took another blow to my standing over a social matter involving the hired hand's daughter. Took such a drop, I figured I better leave town."

He'd readjust, look out the window to give his floating eyesight a chance to catch his gaze, and resume: "Went by Papa's and stole his Colt six-shooter in case the social matter erupted into pursuit by the girl's brothers. Dropped off a freight in Fort Worth. Hocked the six-shooter at the stockyards for the down payment on Claudine, the biggest financial and personal mistake of my life, including running for commissioner on the Klan ticket and getting that girl in trouble."

Claudine was a mail order bride. Jake claimed they never had butter as Claudine drank all the cream his little yellow Jersey cow gave. Jake swore the next time he ordered a wife in the mail, (and I think he had two more wives,) he was going to consider "the disposal expense" as Claudine was already too big to pass through the mail car's doors, much less stuff in a return envelope.

Seemed the best storytellers were the worst customers. One named "Mac" of Irish blood traded next door, but told stories in our shop. Mac's past paralleled Jake's. He too took his Dad's pistol on a fast getaway from East Texas. The difference in the two was a pistol seemed like it'd only been extra weight in Mac's pocket. He was a wiry rock mason of a chap. On election years, Mac shortened the domino games down at Doc Sorrels' pool hall by several hands a day, challenging the players to defend their principles.

Barbershop loafers weren't the only opportunity for the subject of pistols. Pulp cowboy magazines on the magazine rack advertised imitation pearl handle Harrington Richardson and Iver Johnson pistols for 10 bucks or a bit less. Young cowboys drawing their first paychecks bought second-hand guns to add western flavor to the tin suitcases they brought on the job filled with meager goods of the trade. Stowed under a cot or lying in the suitcase by a bedroll on the bunkhouse floor, these questionable weapons offered the waddies protection from the villains they read of in the wild west magazines under kerosene light. Nightmares were less fierce protected by a nine-shot pistol that next payday might leave enough to buy a box of shells.

I wish I knew for sure, but either Claudine or one of Jake's other wives hooked a ride with a carnival moving on west, leaving him to fish in peace and have enough cream to churn. Mac whipped the old man at the Texaco station so bad the year the district court ruled on a tie in precinct two, he never was able to find another match. We don't have a barbershop today. If I had it to do over again, I'd keep better records.

May 23, 2002

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May 16, 2002

I may need to tell this story more than you need to hear the story. An April of 1969 photograph surfaced in a bottom desk drawer last month, bringing back memories of a period of high-pitched livestock activity in the shortgrass country. Evidence of an intense roundup was a black and white picture taken at the front door of the Monument ranch house of my son Ralph Noelke, his friend David Low and myself.

Printed at the bottom of the photograph was "Young Cowboys," as Ralph and David were 10 years old. David Hills, a family member, took the shot the Saturday we finished a weeklong lamb marking expedition. Bloodstained clothes stuck to our bodies in the mark of the trade. Our faces showed late afternoon weariness from a six-day work beginning before dawn and ending in pastures as long as two hours' ride from the house.

Expressions on the boys' faces show distrust of strangers as Mr. Hills was new to the boys. What aren't shown are how many miles the two apprentices had trailed behind on horseback, following Jose or Felix. Two boys filled with the grit necessary to stay with the crew across slick ledge rocks, thick unweilding brush, and obstacles ranging from crossing the iron rails of the Santa Fe to passing under concrete bridges on Highway 67.

I recall now how we never thought of letting up for the boys, but lots was overlooked in those hectic times. The shortgrass country was fully stocked in 1969. Herders hauled trailer loads of horses, hands riding in the back on frantic races to do the spring work on any piece of ground for lease or pasturage. Hombres like Lea Aldwell and "Bully" Johnson started rounding up way south of Sonora to hit somewhere close to Robert Lee, then swing by Barnhart and Stiles to finish in El Paso weeks or months later.

Part of the scene was ranchers gathering before daylight to drink coffee in a rush to hit the ranch. Given a break, we helped neighbors mark and shear, or run outlawed goats for sport. One spring, a big crew from several ranches started marking lambs down close to Mertzon and stopped at night on the county line 13 or 14 miles from the beginning. My sons slept in the bed of the pickup going home, but were rested enough upon unloading to stage a wrestling match in the front yard.

How or why did we carry off the mass hysteria to work so hard and take so many chances? Today, seeing how empty the country is of the past, seeing ghost ranches turned to deer camps, the question is harder to answer than the work once done to hold the country together. Let me try, please: The ranches, the pastures, the corrals, the horses, the livestock were and are our place in life. We, the few left, belong under open skies unshadowed by buildings, guided by the winds, free to stop without signal or sign, and safe to walk out into star-filled nights without guards or guardians.

Sound over-dramatic? Go back then to the horse trap in front of the Monument ranch headquarters, the source of my obsession. Drive a herd of 50 head of saddle horses along the east fence. Be sure two head wear bells instead of the usual one horse. To please the Big Boss entertaining guests on the bunkhouse porch, three hundred yards from the corrals spook those ponies into a run on course to overshoot the pens, pass in front of the bunkhouse and pile up between the big draw and south division fence.

Try to capture the surge of wild energy pulsing blood to your temples, riding far to the outside of horses racing full speed, "Ol' cold-jawed Benny," the night horse, kicking dirt clods to the sky, swirls of dust rolling along trying to stay up with the herd, by giving a pickup full throttle after you hit the asphalt going to town. Can't be restaged, of course. The Big Boss is dead, his horses sold long ago. And the lands divided and operated by business people too sensible to stage a wild horse stampede.

Last week, the last horse to come from the old ranch died. She was over 30 years old. John Noelke broke her whatever summer he broke horses at the line camp after high school. Her red roan coloring gave her extra bottom. All my grandkids rode her, up to the newest crop. You may remember my bragging on how she was able to stay under the worst cowboy to ever come onto the ranch.

I don't recall feeling so bad about the horses dying in the old days. I asked a man I work with if the new age cowboys feel sad over totaling a four-wheeler. He answered: "Do if the four-wheeler rolls over on 'em."

May 16, 2002

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May 9, 2002

The Taos writer's workshop broke into groups of four students the first morning. We met four times a day to do 10-minute writing practices. If we chose, we read the work aloud. However, the other class members were not allowed to praise or criticize the assignment.

Meeting sites were at the group's choice. A small coffee house's patio was the most colorful place. Characters flavored by the street roamed among the wobbly tables, looking over the writers' shoulders, leading tan dogs and carrying canvas backpacks. One particularly vigorous chap carried on a monologue, originating somewhere in the spaces of his damaged brain. Well over six feet tall and right at 300 pounds in heft, he demanded a lot of attention bellowing disjointed sentences and breaking into remnants of operetta — a slight resemblance to the score, I must add.

On one writing excursion, a Greek girl from New York City wanted to use the restroom after an exercise. She made the turn to the door to find this monster (note: he becomes larger each telling) singing an aria of his choice and composition blocking the doorway. Seasoned by the violence of Manhattan and her home in Athens, she knew to retreat. She told the cashier (who was also the cook and waiter) that a huge man was holding a concert in the door to the ladies' restroom. The cashier nodded and returned to working a crossword puzzle. One of the customers handed her his dog's leash, drew his knife, and said, "I'll take care of him."

Before she can flee, the customer returns, leading the giant by one of his big mitts. (He gained a little more in size here.) The knife is sheathed. He assured her the restroom was now safe for occupancy. The cashier/cook continued working a crossword puzzle. The leash goes slack in the Greek girl's hand as the dog falls asleep under a stool. Her benefactor and the enormous beast of a man strolled out the front door as congenially as if they lived under the same bridge (which they may do), leaving the dog and the Greek girl to fend for themselves.

After hearing the story, I chose a much less hip coffeehouse over west of the square to write. The pastries came from an oven in the back; the chairs spread large enough to accommodate my bulk. I wandered down alone one afternoon. Just as I reached the parking lot in front, a gravel bounced onto the sidewalk. Moments later another skipped across the asphalt to do a bank shot against the parking lot curb. The assault traced to a girl in her twenties, sitting crosslegged on the far curb with her slouchy skirt "cupped," I suppose is the right word, to hold a gallon or so of rocks.

I backed from range. After awhile she ran out of ammunition, rose and brushed the dirt from her long skirt, and left down the alley. The traffic resumed dodging the larger rocks scattered across the pavement. I walked through the book shop portion of the coffeehouse, thinking the lady in charge might comment on the recent barrage going on in front of her place. She seemed as serene as if a rock fight was part of owning a private business in New Mexico. (Any Mertzon kid's first reflex to anger is to grab a rock. My son, the Austin trial lawyer, claims when he's mad he scans the courtroom floor for a rock.)

The workshop schedule kept us up on the hill at the Dodge house eight to 14 hours a day. One night a novelist from north of Taos, Summer Woods, reviewed her new book, Adobe. Miss Goldberg assigned the book to be read beforehand. Mrs. Woods spent an hour talking of the procedures and ideas she used to write her first novel. She was new enough to addressing the public to have a fresh approach, unlike some of the canned stuff older jaded writers hash out at conferences.

One thing that struck was that the way she raised the money to subsidize writing the novel was working as a carpenter. By then, I was discouraged by being around enthusiastic young writers, bubbling over in ambition and so smooth of cheek their faces gave sheen as soft as ostrich plumes. Not to mention how successful an image the author made in polished brown boots, a green Irish wool skirt set off by a pearl button silk blouse.

Miss Goldberg told us if we'd write 10 minutes a day for two years, we would be ready to do serious work. After hearing Summer Woods, I have been wondering whether, if I studied being a carpenter, say, an hour a day for two years, I might be better off. I wrote Mrs. Woods a postcard asking her advice. I haven't heard back yet. Could be she might change the whole course of my life…

May 9, 2002

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May 2, 2002

Once we entered the canyon leading to Taos from Santa Fe, snow brightened the shade of the dark green pines on the hills and banked deeper on the mountain slopes. We tried to picnic at a park close to Embudo, but the strong New Mexico gales rushing down the canyon walls turned the styrofoam plates into disc-like kites.

The center of Taos is called "Rancho de Taos." The narrow streets and small land space keep traffic creeping in procession. "By 1615," the books say, "Taos was a thriving Spanish colony." But I don't think the Spanish intended to found such a traffic snarl. Also, horns on the oxen pulling carts defeated even trail tailgating. The moment we reached the motel parking space, walking the mile up to the workshop seemed safer than driving a lane and a half, two-way street, facing impatient motorists looking for a stretch for a break-away.

Natalie Goldberg reserves the Mabel Dodge Luhan house to hold her workshops. Her three books on writing draw an overflow of applicants. Early registrants stay in the multi-story house Mabel Dodge built for her fourth husband, the Indian named "Tony Luhan." The rest of us stayed in an adobe motel at the foot of the hill.

You may have read the Mabel Dodge story as she supported the New Mexico literati in the 1920s. She arranged for D.H. Lawrence to move to a small ranch close to Taos in 1923, for example. Mr. Lawrence left England for writing, or to write "Lady Chatterly's Lover," depending on whether or not you believe Her Majesty's government would expel a writer for composing a torrid series of sex scenes (I do). He wrote the book after leaving New Mexico, nevertheless, a Greek guy who owned La Fonda hotel on the square later on had a lot of fun tormenting the British Office of the Admiralty via post for censoring Mr. Lawrence. He owned four Lawrence watercolors. For pure deviltry, he offered to negotiate with the British museums to swap the Lawrence paintings for the large load of Greek artifacts the British had ransacked on military expeditions to Greece.

Mabel Dodge's husband located the home adjoining the Indian reservation as she wasn't permitted to live on tribal lands. "Home" is a poor choice of words. Better to say "sprawling adobe castle." Sixty of us ate in a long dining room and foyer off a kitchen 30 feet square. Low-cut doorways caused students five and half feet tall to stoop and put us six-footers into a crouch. Mr. Luhan must have had an open sky complex to offset his openings, as the white plastered ceilings must have been 16 feet tall, beamed with tan lacquered timbers off the nearby mountain slopes.

The only upstairs towered in pueblo size rooms for two flights above the ground floor. The room's windows opened into a gradual unfolding of gray-blue sagebrush to a mountain vista of peaked snow caps broken with green ribs of pine forest. The north windows looked on the sacred mountains of Luhan's people. Being married to a rich Anglo wasn't such a bad deal. If he became homesick, all he needed to do was climb the narrow stairway to look over his homeland.

One evening, walking back to the motel after class, I detoured over to the Kit Carson cemetery to look for Mabel Dodge's grave. Tribal law forbade burial on Indian lands next to her husband. Her gravesite was so far over in the southwest corner, she nearly missed being placed in the white eyes' cemetery. An 18 inch tall white marble slab marks the place.

I thought constitutional and international law enforced by ecclesiastical and common law required rich people to be buried in fine style. Be no problem to gain permission to mark herders' graves with a tin can lid nailed on a two by four. But somebody with as much dough as Mabel Dodge needs a marble crypt, if not a pyramid made from adobe bricks to remind poor folks to be respectful. Sure lowered my opinion of the citizens of Taos. They ought to be ashamed, marking a rich woman's grave with a slab too small for a footstone on the Kit Carson lot.

The writing classes started slow. Been a long time since my last classes. Miss Goldberg maintained an impersonal profile. After Mother kept saying I was an orphan, I became accustomed to being the teacher's pet. But Miss Goldberg didn't recognize abused or neglected childhood. I offered to tell her my life story, but failed to get a chance.

The days turned warm. We climbed the hill every morning invigorated by the high altitude and stimulated further by the exposure to books and words. I stopped raising my hand or looking up during the question period. I tried to remember how long it'd been since I was in school. Didn't really matter, as it was obvious Miss Goldberg didn't respect or offer tenure.

May 2, 2002

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The time of day to be in the square in Santa Fe, New Mexico is the same as my last trip — or any previous trips — early, early in the morning. Early in the morning before the Indians spread blankets on the north side to sell jewelry and trinkets. Early in the morning, before the swarms of visitors hit the sidewalks on an eternal mission to shop and snack in the ice cream stores.

For on the square at the break of day, the old photographs in the state archives around the block on Lincoln Street of the religious processions down to the cathedral in 1800 come alive. Volkswagens fade away to oxen pulling carts loaded with water. Stray dogs following mounted men are resurrected from the sepia-shaded paper of a long-ago cameraman. Flowers wilted from the promenade of the night before lie in the gutter. A yellow and rose fan blade dropped from the fingers of a coquettish senorita flares in the wind. Two spent pistol shells spill on the sidewalk from an over-exuberant cowboy's first night in town and subsequent stay in the city jail. Butts of thin cigars once stashed in dandies' pockets lie smashed on the walks. So it all awaits imagination's charge, sitting on a steel bench before Santa Fe awakens into a day booming with tourist activity.

Natives adjust to the bustle and traffic jams. One permanent fixture is a guy who trained a big black and tan pooch to let a white and gray black brindle tomcat ride on his back without the cat dumping a white rat riding on his back. This three-tiered spectacle attracts folks packing still and movie cameras. The act pays well in tips and treats in the ice cream store, as the trainer and his charges looked sleek and healthy.

Fellow on the string town road going to Sherwood named Shorty Baker had a cat out in his barn that nursed three puppies the summer we helped him bale hay. Too bad Shorty wasn't a showman. He might have developed a strain of dogs broke for tomcats to ride. I don't think he'd have gone so far as to add a white rat to the act. The reason Shorty kept the cat in the first place was to keep rats out of his barn, not to raise puppies.

Takes 15 minutes to walk from the place where we stay to the square. By mid-morning, the streets and sidewalks swarm with such a mass of humanity that the tempo is from one shop window to the shopkeeper's place next door. Over two blocks off the northeast corner of the square is one of the fanciest dining spots in Santa Fe. (I think there are 75 or 80 restaurants in town.) It's called Casa Sena. The house specialty for 30 or 40 years has been a rainbow trout bedded in pinion nuts and baked in clay (trout and nuts from the nearby mountains).

A few years back, we stopped having dinner at the Casa Sena as signing the credit card voucher ran so many left-hand decimal places that the final tab caused a nervous chill followed by a scalding hot flash. Still attracted to the crisp atmosphere of white linen cloths and beamed Spanish ceilings over a crowd of diners perhaps brightening the day with a glass of red wine and a thin yellow and blue bowl of creamed soup, I am drawn back to the place for lunch.

On this particular visit, the maitre 'd showed us the menu for the Sunday brunch (the trout was now being stuffed with jalapeno, so I'll ignore it) featuring slow roasted wild boar loin as the entrée. Lot of Sundays had passed since I ate the wild hogs we used to catch for the taking on the Middle Concho River at home. Those particular hogs weren't slow roasted, but they sure were fast on foot.

Though I don't drink wine, or read French well, the only word in the suggested vintner for the wild boar course I recognized was "Telegraph." If I'm not mistaken, the "telegraph" line was the dam side of a two year-old horse that won the Grand Prix race in France in 1983. I kept quiet. It would have been disrespectful to question the wine list of a joint charging 69 bucks for a late Sunday breakfast.

We stopped in Santa Fe to adjust to the high altitude before going to the writers' workshop in Taos. On the Sunday we left town, a light snow frosted the iron benches around the plaza. Sharp, thin mountain air made exposed skin smart from the cold. Brisk footfalls scraped and scrunched against the sidewalks. The bells in the massive stone belfries rang in the cathedral across the old town, announcing Palm Sunday mass as has happened since 1869. And I suppose the slow roasted boar was about done once again in the brick oven at "Casa Sena."

April 25, 2002

After spending the night in Hobbs in an executive room smokier than the vent flaps of a teepee, I resuscitated in the motel breakfast room by inhaling the fumes off a styrofoam cup of scorched coffee. One brown-skinned banana rested on the buffet nex

After spending the night in Hobbs in an executive room smokier than the vent flaps of a teepee, I resuscitated in the motel breakfast room by inhaling the fumes off a styrofoam cup of scorched coffee. One brown-skinned banana rested on the buffet next to a big bowl of the sugar-coated cereals kids eat in front of TV sets on Sunday mornings. Half the floor space was reserved by a mammoth-sized truck driver dunking a sweet roll in a cup of Coca Cola, resting on a brown plastic-topped table splashed with rivulets of coffee and floating sugar crumbs.

The bill on the executive room came to $59 including tax. I refused the senior citizens discount the night before. Looking over the clients standing in line, I wanted to show strength, not age. But at checkout, the lobby overflowed with a family atmosphere out of old Bombay. Dark-skinned mothers chirped to babies all but hidden in the flowing saris from India.

The male clerk, a swarthy gent presiding over the inn and the clan, promised he would have the microwave, the telephone, the reading light, the handle on the commode, and the security lock in 245 repaired by my return visit. I always leave work orders wherever I stay as a service to help the hapless travelers on the road. I direct maids to move end tables and vacuum dust stratas reaching back to geological time. Do this even though if forced to return, I'd prefer sleeping in the prairie dog town adjoining the city to braving another night at the inn.

Tracing the day's journey on west toward Socorro continued to torment my memory. My friend drove. I was supposed to be the navigator, but instead of watching for road signs, I searched for familiar brands, or names on ranch signs. Herders make inspiring companions commenting on the way the turpentine weed overruns the pasture land, or how many lambs Charlie Waller contracted one fall to run in the mountains on his ranch above Clines Corners 50 years ago. Quick asides arise, too. "Did you see that windmill wheel with the sails rattling loose in the wind?" Or "Looks like there's been more rain here than back down the road."

Our destination was San Antonio, a small outpost on the railroad south of Socorro. The bed and breakfast lady rents rooms in an adobe house she saved from ruin. All around the small townsite is evidence of the extent of her restoration in the form of white plaster walls cracking away from brown clay bricks, melting back into the ground, set in weed beds of wrecked cars and rusty fences. But our room had wall to ceiling shelves filled with books to read on a sun-lighted porch, or to sit propped on a homemade quilt in the bedroom.

Her morning paper confirmed politics was in season. The night before at dinner, we sat in the crowded dining room of an old hotel in Socorro filled with delegates for a county convention. Political parties in New Mexico nominate candidates by the convention method versus the primary election system in Texas. We ate amidst smiling name-tagged folks ready at any moment to start a spirited march. All ages of easygoing people. Had we wanted to join the reception in another room, I'm sure we would have been welcome. (Best way to crash a party for a man is give off a boyish look of uncombed hair and a cow lick. For women — oh, they know all the tricks by age 12.)

However, a front page story in the morning edition of the Albuquerque Journal dispelled being accepted so easy. His honor, a Mr. Chavez, the mayor of Albuquerque, addressing the news of the University of Texas making a bid to run the Sandia private laboratory, said, "We want Texans to spend money — and then we want them to leave." (Sandia laboratory fulfills government contracts for White Sands.)

I contacted the contributing scribes at the Journal to prevail upon Mr. Chavez to show more mercy. Jurisdiction is different in New Mexico than Texas. Like I told the reporter, if the mayor's stroke extends past the city limits, or his philosophy spreads, Tejanos playing the races at Ruidoso or Santa Fe would have to commute from the Texas Panhandle most of the season. Be an end to an old boy from San Angelo sitting on the front porch of his log cabin, rattling odd change in his pockets while reading a racing form, hoping to make a score but happy to be in Cloudcroft or Ruidoso for the summer.

The mayor must be thinking of the fast kill of the casinos. Takes awhile to go broke at the tracks. Sure can't fault his sense of timing, however, wanting us to leave after we run out of money. One thing Mr. Chavez needs to consider is that the University owns two million acres of land, so he may need to evict UT on different grounds.

x

April 11, 2002

Before I reached the state line between Texas and New Mexico, fine red sand enveloped the pickup in a metal-framed glass cocoon. Sheets of sand swirled across the black road in flurries the same as blowing snow. Light traffic sped along, headlights deflected by the powdery red haze.

Enshrouded in dust, I searched in memory for the name of the old man who lived in the uncharted sand dunes in a dugout on a ranch straddling the Texas and New Mexico line. His brother was the cowboy I wrote about once, who helped roundup bands of wild mares in New Mexico in the open range days. Helped hold a huge herd of horses as a 12 year-old for each rancher to pair his colts with his brand in land as vast and endless as the sky above. (If you have heard me tell this story before, appreciate what a better job I do each time.)

The dugout story didn't come first-hand. A fossil fuel miner told of hunting for two weeks for old so-and-so to have him sign a division order to cash a big roll of dough for gas royalties. Folks living underground in dugouts and caves don't have street addresses. If it'll help locate him, he wore a black roll brim, full crown hat with a red bandanna handkerchief for a neck piece. Probably weren't more than 100 cowboys from the state line going west to Artesia fit his description. Same was true of his boots, which weren't boots at all, but brogan shoes to withstand the grating of the sandy soil.

Hard to place the dugout, too, as an airtight lean-to covered over in the night can become a dugout the next morning after a big sandstorm. One reason, I suspect, that he located in sandy country was because his dad's ranch close to Mertzon rested on solid limestone rocks. The rock was so hard the postholes the family dug fencing the country took 13 inches of digging to make 10 inches of hole.

The oil man said once he found the old man, his mate stayed inside, peering from the darkness. In order to execute the division order, he had to ask if she was his wife. The reply was, "I reckon so. But she don't sign papers, considering how the white people cheated her people out of their tribal lands."

As soon as I uncovered the clue, "I reckon she is," I figured I'd better drop the subject. As cheap as a man's overhead is living in a dugout, and as big as royalties will accumulate with no withdrawals, he may have left some prominent heirs to take grand exception to such a tale. "The grand exception" by someone with an override spewing money from a wellhead might take the form of a fierce Dallas law firm going for your scalp. So here is where we better call the dugout story off before it takes a bitter turn.

Turning back my watch an hour crossing into the new time zone made the sandstorm last longer. I began swerving every time a big brown tumbleweed rolled, bouncing across the road. Steamboat pilots on the Mississippi River used to change shifts if the night man started dodging floating sticks, thinking they were snags. Same is true in driving in a sandstorm. Once you start fading lanes to miss the tumbleweeds, you'd better stop for the night.

Hobbs, New Mexico was the next town having motels. I checked at three places before I found a vacancy. The clerk called the room "an executive room," which should have aroused my suspicion. I didn't ask any questions, just signed the register and handed her my credit card.

The assignment for the coming writer's workshop in Taos was "short descriptive sentences" or "phrases to fit a familiar place." After I'd opened the door to the executive room and discovered the room was actually "a chain smoker's haunt," I sat down at the desk and here's my homework, titled, "Smoker's Refuge in Hobbs, New Mexico". "Mirror so clouded by yellow tint, the reflection emanates a jaundiced image. Watery eyes drain tears over deep sinus manifestations. Smoke-blurred peephole in hollow core door. Tarnished knob bearing nicotine-stained prints. Carbon fumes rising from dead green carpet way before the morning haze lifts."

I spent a fitful night in the executive room. Executives must smoke a lot on the road. I kept dreaming I swallowed one of the filters from my long-ago corncob pipe. Winds rattled the panels around the air conditioner. Way in the night, I wondered if the old man in the black hat and his dark-skinned woman really lived in a dugout covered by a sand dune, or was that just another story made up crossing the plains of Texas on the way to New Mexico…

April 11, 2002

April 4, 2002

Packing and closing the ranch house are the same routine every trip. I use a king size bed to lay out the clothes to fill a 22-inch roll aboard bag. On airline trips, my wardrobe borders on the frugality of the costume closet of a burlesque house. On automobile travel, however, if I bring along overboots, the next move is to include a snow shovel.

The point of the trip makes a difference, too. On this one, I was headed for Natalie Goldberg's Writer's Workshop in Taos, New Mexico. Her project requires tablets, pens, and half-dozen books. "The weather," the instructions say, "can be snow flurries to basking in the mountain sun." Dress code is skipped over as nowadays dungarees topped with slouchy tee shirts and grounded by faded white exercise shoes are the prevailing fashion. I carry a jacket and bow ties matched to dark slacks from long habit and deference to my mother's rules of etiquette, but today a Granny Goose costume combined with a Hobo Bob suit will do anywhere from the Ritz to Joe's Grill.

One new addition to my gear is tea bags. Sounds harmless enough, doesn't it, to go in the kitchen for tea bags? Wait up before answering. There's a ticking sound. No, there's a thonk, thonk, thonk coming from under the sink. And what does that "thonk" mean? It means a water leak to be controlled by calling a plumber 30 miles away or cutting off an electric pump 150 yards from the house.

Before I choose, the telephone rings. The following exchange ensues. Only my side of the conversation is available. Piece in the other party's conversation by use of your imagination. Me: "He jumped the fence and hit on his back?" Pause. "Thought he told you the horse was broke." Longer pause. "What to do? Well, tell the horse trader we'll swap him the corral-hurdling black bull in the 'two section' for his pen jumper, if he'll throw in a Johnson halter stout enough to snub his horse to a post." Scratchy noise on other end of the line. "Be sure and tell him our bull lands on his feet. Not going to hurt his kidneys or break his back. Don't let him trick you. He knows what happens when you throw a calf too hard." More scratching. "Bye."

Lying on the kitchen floor by the sink, I find the pipes too rusty to locate the leak. The "thonk" sound is inaudible from floor level. However, given a better perspective of the problem, I put a biscuit pan under the drip, changing the sound to a metallic urgency more like ball bearings spilling on concrete than water leaking.

Back to packing my bag, one of the two clean long sleeved shirts is missing a button from one cuff. My sewing kit is over at Merton. The other clean shirts are at the laundry in San Angelo, including the missing cuff button. I find four turtlenecks wilted enough around the collars to be comfortable, yet not so wilted a bandanna handkerchief won't support the roll below my chin.

The telephone rings. Me: "The clutch is out?" Pause. "You stranded in the pasture?" Muttering sounds over wire from a cell phone connection. "In San Angelo at Wilson's? Is that what you're saying? WILSON! W-i-l-s-o-n, the gosh-a-mighty garage where we have traded for 20 years!" More noise and interference. "Five hundred pounds? I thought you had put out molasses tubs. I didn't know you were feeding cubes." Short pause. "Oh, five hundred dollars to fix a clutch. Where do clutches come from nowadays? Germany?" Before hanging up, "She what? You mean the mare we junked died from a fall coming down the loading ramp at the scales. Okay, okay, call that trucker. Tell him when the contract comes up at the rendering plant, he can use me as a reference."

Once off the telephone, I abandoned a packing procedure equal to the finest rollers of surgical bandages to ever grace the operating rooms of Mayo Brothers' clinic to adopt a clothes tumbling and paraphernalia tossing act worse than a rag picker's dreams. I stuffed turtleneck shirts in pockets. Stuck my coat in button side down, sleeves flared to the side. Socks fell where they might land in pairs or singles. Toiletries went in the top of the bag in whatever condition they were from my last trip — empty or overfull.

Going out the door, I remembered to leave emergency numbers on the breakfast table. In a firm hand, I listed the stopovers on the way to Taos: Hobbs, Socorro and Santa Fe. By each one I printed "Call" and added three digits — 911.

April 4, 2002

March 28, 2002

Wool production in Texas dropped 20 percent last year. Sheep numbers are so low in Irion County that woolie operators can be audited on a finger count. If any deals on yearling ewes or solidmouths occur, the news sure misses Mertzon.

The labor shortage is one factor hurting sheep ranching. During shearing over at Goat Whiskers the Younger's ranch, a crew of 10 men dropped to seven in one morning. Two shearers demanded more money. The capitan, the shearing contractor, stopped shearing to settle the dispute at lunch. The matter didn't settle. The two shearers packed their gear and left. The capitan disappeared, we thought to hunt replacements.

Short three men, output changed from over 900 head a day to under 700 head. Repercussions extended to prolonging the work, thus increasing the overhead and overloading the small pastures gathered ahead of time to stay up with a full crew.

Young Whiskers allowed me to shear the small herd of sheep on the highway in his pens to save moving the contractor's crew and equipment to my outfit. The plan was to finish mine, then while Whiskers peeled his sheep and goats, we'd gather the sheep on the Divide. To accomplish the roundup with no extra help, we had to be in contact every night. "We" being the Capitan, Whiskers and myself.

As all these details come together, I have to hope the reader's compassion for a sheep herder's woes hasn't dropped below the 20 percent figure for wool production. But to continue the story, after the Capitan left at lunch on the fateful day the two men quit, he no longer answered his cell phone. Whiskers, I knew, was in no humor to chat as part of his workforce had departed for a stock show in San Antonio.

Somewhere in the timeframe of two days, the Capitan's wife reported her husband was attending a fence builder's convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. All I remember about the rest of the phone call was staring at a hole in the toe of my right work boot. I have no recollection if she gave his return date, only that I was hypnotized by the small oval hole on the toe of my right boot. For some strange reason, I started rolling the rowel of the spur buckled to my left boot against the floor tiles. Must have been a reaction to "hang on" or "dig in".

My coffee grew cold. Dawn broke enough to make the frost on the dead grass out the kitchen window sparkle. Our saddle horses walked by the cattleguard going to the barn. The old wound under my right shoulder blade from a long ago horse wreck took a sharp stab at the right nerve to make me flinch. Without dialing, I lifted the telephone and said, "Whiskers, our great grandfather Ferdinand Noelke sheared 800 ewes in the spring of 1871 at Georgetown, Texas. A cold rain killed every sheep the next night. He was so broke, he had to let the tutor go, schooling our grandfather and great uncles. Cousin Whiskers, looks like the choice now is whether we cry like babies or fire the tutor."

In the period, the crew came onto the Divide. The smallest wool harvest here since 1955 took one day. I didn't ask about Las Vegas. I did my part and minded my business. I am thankful Whiskers was a good enough neighbor to let me shear in his pens. I forgot to ask where the workers went who struck for higher pay. Might be they were off to Las Vegas, too.

March 28, 2002

March 21, 2002

Lady at a dance in the community center the other night explained being late because she'd been grading papers for her fourth grade substitute teacher job at Mertzon. She said she announced the first day she wasn't going to teach arithmetic as she didn't want to cause the class to lose ground. The band played too loud to catch the full story. One part hit, however, when she mentioned that fourth graders study "improper fractions." I bet improper fractions were what we had in the fifth grade so many years ago.

All mathematics was improper for me. I learned fractions by cooking after I finished school. Measuring spoons and cups replaced a blackboard and tablet. Look how easy it is: a third of a cup of milk fills one of the three parts of a glass measuring cup. If you need to know the other two-thirds, look in the space above the fluid line to the top bar. You don't need to subtract or call in a logarithm table. Just pour it in the recipe real quick before someone tries to explain what is left from three thirds take away one third.

Sometimes I can field questions on cooking by being comfortable with fractions. Last month, or maybe two last months ago, a fellow from Pecos wrote that his drop biscuits were so heavy, he was afraid one might roll off the board and injure his foot. He wanted to know a remedy. I told him to check his family tree to see whether he might descend from my maternal grandmother, Eulena Hodge Lackey.

Grandmother made biscuits so heavy, one placed on the top of a wood stove weighed enough to tilt the stove lid. She used a biscuit cutter, but the dough dropped anyway from being so dry. My grandfather made lots of water cornbread for his dogs, but as time passed, the dogs had to split with us if we beat Grandmother getting up in the morning.

I studied his case. If he was making a mistake in the measurements it was probably measuring the shortening. I don't know the right method, but I know the easy way to find half a cup of shortening is to put one half cup of water in a measuring cup, then add shortening until the water rises to the one cup bar. Persnickety cookbook writers denounce the water displacement method in favor of packing shortening or lard into a measuring cup to the point where your fingers and shirt cuffs are encrusted in grease.

The way to catch one of these kitchen scientists is to look for a sanctimonious section indexed "how to measure for this book." Slash dash old gals and boys who cooked for a family deadline of stock shows and PTA programs don't need to know how to measure. All we need is time to throw the meat in the pot, and when the steam drops, decide how much room is left to add the carrots and onions to the hash.

Gourmet Magazine

lays out a holy writ of level teaspoons, sifted measurements to the last speck of flour, humidity allowances, temperature estimations and granular counts of the sweetening that'd make Einstein's final equations for splitting the atom seem as slouchy as a college boy's laundry list. (Follow Gourmet recipes and you will be spending more time hunting for Turkish bay leaves and Armenian pepper pods than you spend cooking or eating. I lost patience with that magazine 20 years ago over a lousy restaurant they recommended in New Orleans.)

Instead of telling the guy at Pecos to try using fewer solids and more liquids, I told him the one thing I'd learned about baking using sourdough. I felt I was safe on sourdough as a subject because the smart-alecks today casseroling canned fish and using mushroom soup as basic foodstuff don't know how to skim the fruit flies off a sourdough crock, much less use starter to bake bread. And what I'd told him was to use King Arthur's flour. Throw King Arthur's in the sourdough starter, use King Arthur's to flour the breadboards, and use King Arthur's to bake bread.

The way my luck has ran of late, I don't have advice to spare. I cooked a baking hen after Christmas tempered by time. I marinated her in a strong saline solution overnight. Baked her four hours in a 400-degree Fahrenheit oven. She was still so tough Sunday morning I double-wrapped her in aluminum foil, tied her up in a coffee bean sack, swung her on the back bumpers of my pickup, barely touching the ground, and fagged her around the block in Mertzon until she was tenderized. I learned that trick in an offbeat way. Old man Burro Miller used to tie his jack hard and fast to the bumper of his pickup on the days when the burro tested his patience. Miller's jack ended up having the best disposition of any four-legged animal in town.

But I can't pass on that method to strangers. He may need a lighter finger on the flour can or perhaps a more refined lard. As long as I can stay away from fractions, I might solve his problem. Yet if fractions are improper, it might not be my fault for being so blind to numbers...

 

March 14, 2002

In 1977, I started walking two miles a day over at Mertzon on the weekends and on odd town days. 1977 is an important marker. See, I quit walking after becoming a licensed driver in 1940. From 1940 to 1977, my track reached from the back door to the pickup. Long distance was from the house to the barn. So the first term was 14 years of school and prowling the countryside plus the past 25 years of exercising, giving a sum of 39 years of walking the streets of a two mile square town.

On the second round, I had little competition on my walks. One lady gathering aluminum cans crossed my route on occasions. The old fellow called "Cowboy Bob" might ride by on the days I went to the river. School kids didn't count as they were so embarrassed being on foot, a mere nod was a glorious salutation from a student.

Dogs seemed to be more offended by my presence than the citizens, but as this story unfolds that may be questioned. Mertzon's biggest dog years, however, have been over for a long time. In the 1970s, Mrs. Boyd Baze kept a kennel stocked with 75 white German Shepherds surrounding her house at the railroad crossing going to the river. Up on the schoolhouse hill, Granny Height sheltered a wild dog colony numbering 118 head in a chain link fence.

Granny's pack came to a fierce end. School and public health officials paired off against Granny and her dogs. In the settlement, she was allowed to keep seven dogs for company at home and for her trips around town. She was a charitable old soul. Quick to come to the aid of the needy and always present to comfort the mourning at every funeral. Treated the community and visitors to dramatic auto spectacles, making roaring straight-of-ways down main street, scolding her dogs not to hang out the windows, and veering across lanes at will in defiance of oncoming highway traffic.

Mrs. Baze's kennel just disappeared — dissolved without a trace. One day her front and back yard on Fleming Street behind the roadside park sent swirls of white dog hairs afloat and wafting odors strong as a wolf's den over the neighborhood. Next morning, nothing remained but the packed earth and refuse from so many canines. (Much later, one of the sons said his mother sold the dogs. I am sorry I don't have the details as the event is bound to be the largest dispersal of pets to ever occur in the shortgrass country.)

Many other things have disappeared besides Granny's and Mrs. Baze's kennels, such as the ranchers around town. As Goat Whiskers the younger mentioned during the February shearing exercise, he said he didn't know 10 percent of the people in town. I didn't agree at the time, but I began to notice on my visits after shearing how few houses I knew the occupants of. Cars passed by with strange drivers. Faces were unfamiliar at the post office. Other than old employees at the bank, I might as well have been trading at the Wells Fargo in San Angelo.

But the real proof of Whiskers' case happened last week on my walk onto Highway 67 in the downtown school zone. Traffic was heavy in after-school activity. A big red and white pinot dog came bounding off his master's yard, headed for the meaty part of my hind leg. I held him at bay with a walking stick. Backed toward the highway, hoping to stall the 20 mile an hour traffic long enough to either escape or climb in the back seat of a vehicle. (Once a van driver in Tennessee came just in time to save me from two giant German beasts, the worst imaginable of dogs.)

Poised for attack, the dog eased closer. Ten vehicles must have passed before a lady named Minnie Bailey cut across the oncoming lane to rescue me. She was from across the river at Sherwood. Sherwood is a separate community, sylvan by nature of tall pecans and gurgling irrigation ditches. Isolated from the highway and railroad, citizens live a quiet life. Living as such made her too kind-hearted to watch a gray-whiskered pedestrian's hind leg gnawed away by an 80-pound dog.

Mertzon is my home town. I grew up there during the Big Depression. Came back from college to live 12 miles from town and send all eight kids through the public school. But if cars won't stop creeping through a school zone at the sight of a dog attacking a fellow man, what's to happen to stop them once they hit the 40 mile an hour stripe?

The answer is I am going to do more civic work in the future. Keep better company and trim my gray whiskers neater. Create a better image by sitting up front at church and singing louder. Going to be slow to build support. In the meantime, I am bypassing the red dog's territory. Minnie might not be around the next time I need help.

March 14, 2002

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March 7, 2002

The auras of the Austin trips fit the same pattern. No city in the state revives more memories of the past. Around the Capitol grounds waves of nostalgia hit with powerful blows. Just a glance at an old sidewalk or a Sixth Street building front brings back the 1950s days of collecting debit insurance or running errands for the Land Office.

One night last month, déjà vu nearly caused a serious wreck. I cut across downtown to take a friend to the symphony. Detours diverted the route. Past the main avenue, I was driving cool as his majesty's carriage driver until the shape of an old 1950 two-story tin building on the river street side loomed in sight. "Gosh-a-mighty," I all but shouted, "That's old man Brandon's building where I found a dead man at the second landing one morning on my insurance route."

My friend has the calming talent of a horse whisperer. Cool, she starts to save our lives by saying, "Monte, Monte, watch the cars. Move to the left lane to turn at the next light. We will talk about Brandon's at Eight and Red River once we are parked on the LBJ lot." Back on beam, I dodged the rush of the head-on traffic. By bluff or bumble, made the left lane in time without being forced onto the Interstate.

Once parked, it took a bit for my fingers to release their grip on the steering wheel. She accepted my apology. But the story started swelling into a gorge of words and phrases forming in the rerun compartment of the brain in the old reels of the past. Seated in the concert hall, I thought, "So what if I am the last man left who remembers Pasqual, the East Sixth procurer's (pimp's) murder early one morning in old man Brandon's rooming house (bordello)? You have written the story, told the story, and made up part of the story." Thus calmed, I relaxed as the musicians tuned for the performance.

The story stayed at rest until intermission, when I glanced above the frame of the huge stage and caught the sight of a marble cherub. Instantly, I remembered that my two new granddaughters and one grandnephew haven't heard of the time on Eighth Avenue at old man Brandon's rooming house when I walked onto a dead man sprawled on a rough pine floor. Once again the words roiled inside, wanting to escape, yearning for an audience. Trapped and miserable, the microphone pinned on the conductor's shirt looked as big as a bullhorn.

But back then I wasn't collecting insurance in the toughest part of Austin for fun or flavor or to gather stories. The job paid better than my previous position as an errand boy for the Land Office — much better. Running your training camp on a state job's pay in 1950 was a slim proposition. Favoritism and nepotism ran rampant in the Capitol, but didn't include underlings hoofing it back and forth between the Land Office and the Capitol rotunda, carrying such important state business as secretaries arranging meetings after work, or placing a bet for the Commissioner at the bookie shop at the Capitol Tavern.

Nowadays, I try to skip over the past. I watch for the new spots in town even if I don't go there. Places like "Sullivan's" serving the lobbyists and legislators succulent slabs of Angus beef aged for 27 days and priced higher than a Sultan's ransom, or joints of the elegance of "the Forum" where the figures run so high your fingers tingle signing the credit voucher.

The new Austin is a mod town of young people, leading braces of whippet hounds or packing pairs of Siamese kitties in a sling or papoose pouch. On any day, pampered pooches and curried kittens are led on the walkways in a display of four-legged pedigrees that'd make the image of a Park Avenue dowager's lap dog look as shabby as a small town circus.

One of my sons furthered my outlook at a chain store so active that "Ball Baby Pythons" were marked down from $70 to fifty-nine bucks. Headlining the reptile section was a Malaysian Hood Python for only $249. The clerk claimed that given proper treatment, these pythons became affectionate pets.

Looking at the pythons lying in the wood chip bedding behind glass, the difference between the $59 model and the $249 snake must be slight. However, you can't learn to price or judge snakes if every time you see one over three inches long, your primary response is to grab a hoe to chop off its head.

The scene has changed too much for an old premium collector to catch up. One thing for certain, I sure grew up the morning Pasqual died. Made me realize how the Sixth Street of those times could absorb a murder without the police or the newspapers needing to be seen or heard.

March 7, 2002

February 28, 2002

The last cattle we had trouble penning were some imported from an outfit on the eastern edge of the shortgrass country. After two winters on the ranch, hard times and sacked goods tempered the spook in these old sisters. As is always the case, handling the cows quiet and easy going through gates changed their dispositions from escape artists to manageable black muleys.

The first year we used the feed wagon and chemistry to pen the cows. The '83 model truck tolls cattle better than the other vehicles. The exhaust pipe expels on the same side as the spout on the feed hopper. The motor burns oil — lots of oil. On a still morning, poking along at five miles an hour, the meal sifting from the spout fogs the fumes from the exhaust at the right height to intoxicate the lead cattle. Drunk on carbon monoxide fumes, they walk into the pen unaware of incarceration.

New age cattle's mothering instincts have diminished. The end of the screwworm scourge, I think, did more to change the mother cow's behavior than all the cow sense collected in Texas. In the days of doctoring every calf born in the spring all summer long, cowboys knew they'd better be quick catching a calf's hind leg on the ground, or the mother would be snuffing right on up in their belt loops. Powerful worm medicines, harp dehorners, and young cowboys aspiring to be rodeo hands contributed also to outlawing cattle. Big pastures and widespread or no corral systems, along with rough techniques such as snubbing posts and choke ropes, increased the temperatures of the handled and the handlers.

In all those days of thick dust, deep tracks and thin residue, the only calves I ever saw weaned by mistake were in a calf marking exercise at Uncle Goat Whiskers' ranch. Two adjacent pastures of Hereford cows and baby calves were turned back at the same time late one evening. The calves collapsed in the bushes, shocked and bleeding from dehorning. Cows bawled all night; a few head jumped the fence. Took the cowboy up at the line camp several days to straighten the mess. As good a hand as he was, a few orphans (dogies) were left in each pasture.

My evidence of those hectic screwworm times burned in the bunkhouse fire. Shots of grim looking hombres decked in all the creases and shapes possible for the crown and brim of a Stetson, plus pictures of men on stout horses, manila ropes tied hard and fast to the saddlehorns and threaded through a neck rope, turned to ashes. Big losses for those of us who can never be cured of the smell of burned hair at branding, or the thrill of trailing a hollow horn through the thickets and ledge rocks to capture her in the end.

Hard to understand cows being hard to pair and so easy to wean from the calves. Working off the calved heifers from the trap, we are careful that the mother claims her baby before moving her. Last week, one cow jumped back in the trap and left her calf in an adjacent pasture. We found her on the far side of the trap, eating a big leaf of prickly pear as contented as the Dairyman's Institute's advertisement in a Wisconsin farm journal.

Once driven from the cactus, she made a straight line to the pasture gate. Inside, she trotted right to her calf. A few fibers of green prickly pear dropping from her mouth proved she loved eating thick-leafed pear pads better than nursing her 60-pound newborn calf. Was a bit puzzling she'd jump the fence from a pasture covered in prickly pear to go back to a particular cactus. Must be some ingredient in prickly pear mighty special to cause that much exertion.

After I made sufficient gain last fall to winter eating ice cream at Baskin Robbins, I lost touch with the ice cream parlor crowd. However, in the summer, the mothers padding around at Baskin's wearing seersucker short suits tailored like cup towels made cursory roll calls herding the kids back to the cars. Every once in awhile, one of the older models would throw up her head right quick just like an old humpy cow acts before she bolts from the herd. Made me think of the Big Depression. Kids learned plenty fast to be in the back seat of the car before the circus ended, or the rodeo was over.

Good thing cattle have changed. Sure bet the old guard of hombres such as myself would have stayed the same. I wish film existed of those long-ago works. Might make me thankful the only reason one jumps the fence nowadays is to eat prickly pear.

February 28, 2002

February 21, 2002

Mr. Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Board declined to cut interest rates at the February meeting. Prime rate, at this writing, is at 4.75 percent. Any of the better jugs in Angelo pays 1.75 percent on short-term CDs of over $90,000. The last quote circulated on livestock paper fell a tad below eight percent on a Production Credit offer. In the business section of the news, home mortgages run slightly over six percent.

Car dealers beat all of the above rates, dropping finance charges to zero before the first of the year and kicking off a bigger spurt of business than the Fed conceived of. In a complex session of fine line amortization on a 1985 model feed wagon and three early 1990 model pickups, I figured my rolling stock declared a dividend by lasting through the year without major overhauls. And those old buggies never were in sight of Mr. Greenspan's or Ford Motor Company credit corporation. The only direct contribution they made to the economy, huffing and puffing around the pastures hauling feed to the woollies and hollow horns, were fan belts, spark plugs, motor oil and battery clamps.

Well, I guess staying off the road and keeping the old wrecks out of sight was a plus for the economy. A plus a lot like the same way folks felt in the Big Depression about closeting red-headed, freckle-faced boys on church meeting days. One side thought that keeping us home improved the cosmetic standards of the congregation, thereby strengthening the spirit. The dissenting camp contended that having us sunburned, speckle-faced, red maned rascals in sight made the congregation grateful for the beautiful little blond-headed girls the Heavenly Father sent to adorn the church.

I don't have firsthand memory of the schism as Mother always sent my dog Spot and me down on the river to play on Sunday morning. I guess I told you about the Sunday morning the flood of 1936 crested. Spot came close to drowning from jumping into Spring Creek to retrieve a floating stock mistaken for a decoy. Spot was a strong swimmer. Boys and dogs had to be to survive in the 1930s.

Aside and apart from Mr. Greenspan's alterations, banking took a big turn at Mertzon the first of the year. A flyer announced that canceled checks are no longer going to be returned in our monthly statements. A lot sadder news has hit around jugs than where checks landed. The fate of a canceled check compares to a chicken fighter worrying whether his dead rooster had a red comb or black comb. I can't ever recall holding my breath to look at a canceled check, but my memory is plenty current over mind-stunning reactions to the final balance in the lower right-hand column.

The biggest loss from the old banking days, however, was the scrolled brass bars in front of the tellers' cages. I liked to lean against the top bar on renewal days to cool my forehead. The height was perfect, as I was always up on my tiptoes in all finance centers. In those desperate times of the dry 50s, the executive officer of the Mertzon bank sat at the front desk by the front door, scowling at every prospective and active loan customer with a passion unmatched since his Scottish ancestors deplored the profligate nature of the English monarchy. His infallible guideline for loaned money was, "A paid-up loan is the only loan worth a damn." All he held sacred in the way of paper was a deposit slip, or a thick sheaf of bills on his side of the desk.

Bank examiners were never around in those days, but I wouldn't have known as banks aren't big hangouts for customers surviving on renewals and hope. I felt examined enough after renewing my paper without attending a formal federal examination. However, might have been an agent by now and then to compare the old jugkeeper's hold to John D. Rockefeller's equity in Standard Oil. No other reason I can think of for an examiner inspecting his loans. Questioning his accounts would have been the same as degrading the dignity of President Washington's picture on a dollar bill.

Glib pundits nowadays call bankruptcy "the B word." Lost dough is called "a shortfall." No explanation is made of "shortfall" as to whether you hit full force on your head or glance off a shoulder. It's doubtful whether the oldtime banking policies would have stimulated the economy, but you can bet your nubbin we had more to worry about than our canceled checks. Perhaps it was a case of being in good hands without appreciating it.

February 21, 2002

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February 14, 2002

Takes one hour longer for me to drive from Mertzon to Austin than five years ago. Distances are the same. Occasional detours make small differences in time. Speed limits through the small towns on the way are no different. The commuter traffic from all points leading to and from the Capitol city causes the time loss.

Country people overreact to traffic. Mertzon's last traffic jam was after the big hail storm six years ago drew sightseers from San Angelo. Wool capital citizens jammed the streets, checking, I suppose, to see if any Mertzon folks felled by the concussion of the stones might be still lying in their front yards.

At the ranch, the county road carries heavy traffic during deer season. An influx of rolling stock equal to a big city auto show covers the roadways in bright new pickups towing combat-colored hunting wagons. Night before opening day, care must be taken not to tailgate the red caps, as sudden stops for liquid refreshments are common. A good guideline is if you can see the bolts on the rifles in the rack through the rear window, you are following too close. More from superstition than actual danger, I always pass hunters on the side where the butt end of the racked guns rest, as recoil in no way compares to the firepower of a 30-06.

Once I am in Austin, directions aren't a problem. Four of my children live there. If I stick to main thoroughfares, I'll hit one of their neighborhoods. In the days when my sons concentrated around the University, they were harder to find, but the target was larger as more of the family lived in Austin then. Also, I wasn't so far out of touch as I am today. Counting the Capitol grounds and the campus, besides the UT tower and the Capitol dome, all of six buildings look familiar today. To be shown around, I learned 20 years ago that my sons don't care to hear where old Dad took his first ride in a taxicab or saw Governor-elect James Allred help his wife from a limousine on inauguration day in 1946.

Restaurants keep opening and closing, too. I start in a big way eating in new places my guides recommend. Individual preferences hit a wide range. Two of my grandsons, for example, insist on having breakfast after church in a delicatessen open 24 hours of the day. The joint stays full of students eating chicken livers on white crackers and pastrami on dark rye in an aura awash with the odor of garlic and malt.

Others prefer the high-classed dining room of the Four Seasons Hotel on Town Lake for breakfast. "Short Stack" at the Four Seasons doesn't apply to pancakes. "Short Stack" at the Four Seasons means your dough is going to come up way short after you pay the tab. However, hobnobbing with ladies and gentlemen paying 400 bucks a night for a room is more enriching than hanging out at an all-night deli full of broke college kids and footsore waitresses.

Another choice, this time for lunch, was a new Cuban place on South Lamar called "La Habana." No number was listed in the phone book. The directions were: "Go past the 'Broken Spoke' dance hall and make a sharp right after the funeral home." Better directions are: "Go until you see a little dump of an Austin cafe on South Lamar, painted bright green and brighter blue, surrounded by small red cars and old vans painted in arcane 'hippy' colors. Then pull over."

The special was roast pork loin on fried plantains for the bread. (Be reminded, please, plantains are second cousin to a banana.) Any time I eat a dish as new as fried plantains, I tighten my belt, straighten my glasses, and be sure my chair aligns with the table. Seems to help adjust to the new taste to start on target. Helps, also, to look unconcerned as the palate begins to force the new food back onto your tongue.

Great grandfather Noelke came by wagon from the West to make passenger rail connections at Georgetown, 30 miles north of Austin. My stepfather's grandfather fought off an Indian attack on one of his trips to meet the train at Georgetown, an attack severe enough that his guest from Kentucky hid under a tarpaulin in the wagon bed. The thought hit, creeping along bumper-locked on a freeway, of checking on the rail service from Georgetown to Austin to shorten the last leg of the trip. Reducing the fuel burned idling the engine waiting to move and ending the roaming charge on the cell phone calling in late should offset the cost of a railroad ticket.

One change, I noted, was that the spicy Cuban food caused me to honk the horn more and drive faster in traffic. Brought a big relief to be able to join the flow of the Austin drivers instead of being intimidated by a town filled with smooth cheeks.

February 14, 2002

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February 7, 2002

We tested our bulls on the fifth of January. Inventoried three fertile low birthweight sires to put on the heifers the same day. Three days later, one ox headed south over three fences onto our neighbor on a sightseeing trip. In the same sequence, one of his pasture mates was disqualified because of his weight and weakness of his hind legs, leaving us short two bulls.

Problems developed so fast, I penned the overweight bull too late one evening to chance driving him to the headquarters, thinking also that a night in jail might make him stay home. Next morning, my helper loaded him in the trailer for a ride back to the bull pasture. On the following day, he was back weighting down heifers in a dangerous way.

Took the two of us to pen the bull a second time. Once we were able to talk, we tried to figure how the rogue learned the way from the bull pasture to the south side of the ranch riding in a trailer. All we could decide was that he was looking out the sides of the trailer watching for landmarks.

Once on a hair goat outfit in Central Texas, a horse tuner claimed his bay two year-old was so smart he learned to pen goats standing in the trailer, watching his kids putting the goats in the shed at night. Must have saved "Bay Boy" for "shedding" goats, because all the time we were working the Boss's cattle pastured on the place, the old colt never stepped out of the trailer. As much I remember those times, the cowboy probably learned his skills watching from a trailer, too, as on every calf thrown, he lost his hold on the hind leg about the time I was leaning over with my knife.

Our neighbor Alfredo brought the traveling bull home. He's a high powered Angus bull rated as low birthweight and high yearling weight on his EPD. My brother raised him, so I know the information is correct. However, checking his pedigree showed his paternal grandfather was a bull called "Distant Horizon" and his maternal side went back to "Gypsy Gal," a line bred prodigy of "Tail Light" and "Dusty Trail." Transfer records showed "Distant Horizon" and "Gypsy Gal" had been residents of several parts of the state.

After I added the number of times we'd trailed the grandson down, I decided that as bad as fences are today, I'd better not chance adding such a transitory bloodline to my herd, or I'd have cattle migrating into Mexico. Also, packer bulls were selling on a strong market. I opted for the sale ring. I sure didn't want to risk him breaking his leg jumping a fence as the animal rights people restrict the sale of bulls hopping on three legs. Guided by a deep love of animals, I suppose, "the rightists" think it is more humane for a broken-legged animal to suffer a slow death on the prairie than be salvaged for food in a packing plant.

Faced with having only one bull left to breed the heifers, I called the head of the agriculture department at the University in San Angelo for help to find heifer bulls. "The college's sale isn't until March," he said. But he offered to help find bulls, and did. He's a plenty savvy hombre. While he was on the wire, I asked him if there was any chance of creating an EPD rating for fence breaking and jumping characteristics. I seemed to lose him. The gap between the soil and the classroom is always a wide one.

The breeder the professor found having heifer bulls was an old time Angus cowman off the Caprock close to Lamesa, Texas. Driving into the ranch, the lay of the land showed to be a big country. The outside fence on the highway looked bull-proof. Corrals by the side of the road were normal height. I watched fencelines for pushed up water gaps and broken top wires driving to the house. I didn't want to take any chances of introducing a new bloodline of fence-hurdling cattle.

After picking two bulls, the seller said the bulls were from farther north in the Texas Panhandle. I flinched, but held ground. Fog was thick above the Caprock where I had just come. I figured if I could drive fast enough through the fog, the bulls would lose their sense of direction. I'd had all the homing pigeon oxen I wanted.

So I refused an invitation for lunch. Every time I stopped to check my tires on the way back, I punched the bulls around facing backward in the trailer. Before I turn the bulls out, I am going to brand the new prospects my Grandfather Noelke's trail brand. Also, we need to close in the sides of the trailer. Most of all, we need a change of luck…

February 7, 2002

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January 31, 2002

A friend who teaches at the University in San Angelo brought back a jar of sorghum molasses from Tennessee as a New Year's present. First time "sorghum" had been around the ranch in six decades. Brought back the smell of wood smoke from a cook stove. Brought back sorghum molasses spread on cornbread, which is "cawnbread" in our idiom.

One year during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Mertzon's supply of sorghum molasses came from across Spring Creek at Mr.James's mill. After the sun warmed his wooden barrels, the thick black syrup dribbled from the small bung into gallon jugs. Money changed hands, but I don't know how much coin. The coffee can for a cash register hung on a tree limb. Customers helped themselves. No sales tax, store license, or health certificate was needed to run the business.

The friend also brought a plastic sack of pulled pork barbecue with three jars of sauce for support. "Folks in Tennessee," he says, "scorn beef." African Americans in particular slur beef by calling it "cow." On one long-ago Christmas, he remembered his father taking him by a family party of farmers centered on butchering 21 hogs.

I couldn't imagine killing 21 head of hogs, but I sure don't have any trouble remembering killing five or six head. At the old ranch, the Big Boss fed barrows every summer to be ready to kill after the first heavy frost. Big brutes, all two of us cowboys and a couple of cooks could turn in a steel barrel filled with scalding ash water and drag onto a rock floor to be scraped. We stood for hours at a makeshift cutting table, cranking a sausage mill, wiping the black pepper and sage fumes from our eyes on our shirt cuffs. The heads had to be scraped just so for tamales and a concoction called "head cheese. And worst of all, the ground meat weighed to be sure the proportions were correct for the sausage.

But unlike other ranch work, we had plenty of company. The Big Boss considered 30 people a small party. He was more comfortable with a guest list, say, in the low 60s or perhaps over into 70 head. Once we started stuffing the sausages, the cooks quit to bake bread and fry big skillets of meat and potatoes.

On stage, the Big Boss drew a circle of chairs to hear his stories. For the benefit of all, he'd say: "See that boy over there cutting up meat? He's Monte, my oldest son. Can dance the 'Cotton Eyed Joe' like a minstrel player, juggle beer cans and shoot marbles on sloping ground, but he must have obtained his sense of balance from a brown bear as he can't ride a swinging gate to a turn, much less stay on a bucking horse." (In those days, cowboys who couldn't ride wild horses were a disgrace.)

Wasn't any way for me to shrink out of sight cutting up hog meat, or taking my turn cranking the grinder in the edge of the bunkhouse yard. After he'd take a drag off his cigar, he'd continue, "I am so unlucky it could be raining soup outside and all I'd have was a fork. Got another boy younger than Monte, named Walter. He doesn't want to do anything except study and go to school. Last spring instead of coming home to help halter break my colts, he took an exam to go to law school. Fine by gawd thing. Thirty by gawd head of colts to break and him wanting to study law."

Hog killing nights meant a raucous party. The butchering crew stayed to the side, so weary we looked as pitiful as the five hogs' heads staring at us from a cutting board. After we peeled off the last bacon slabs to hang in the smokehouse, we watched from afar as washtubs full of ice surrounded and covered 200 cans of the best St. Louis beer. We listened to the banjo player and the guitarist tune for the opening reel. Felt the music heighten the pitch of the crowd. Heard the timid and shy ones inspired by beverage alcohol howl and holler on the moonlighted scene. Saw booted feet and dainty slippers kick high off the concrete floor to the furious stroke of the pick against the strings of the banjo and guitar. And stood as left out as a hobo at the meeting of a brotherhood of railroad men.

My partners, dispossessed of the bunkhouse, rolled their beds under a brush arbor back of the barn. Next day, the last of the guests and all of the sausage and pork chops left for town. The cooks degreased the kitchen and wrapped the remainder of the meat for the freezer. The ones of us left at the ranch watched the cars depart for the city in flurries of dust to cross the big draw for town, validating Jose's name for the ranch — "El rancho de las colas de luz," or "the ranch of the taillights."

 

January 17, 2002

The long range forecast for the New Year from the San Angelo Weather Bureau was promising. The dew point calculators and chill factor prophets say: "Weather in the Edwards Plateau (the shortgrass country) will be much the same as last year." Bound to have been good news that the weather wasn't going to be worse than last year to herders rattling across the frost-bit pastures, radios turned high enough to hear above the bawling hollow horns trailing along behind the feed wagons for handouts reaching far back into the past year.

I tried to broach the forecast before Christmas at lunch at the table of gentlemen I meet every Tuesday in Angelo. I deserved to be exempted from the 10-minute limit floor rule, as I had brought each of the seven members a pound of bacon from the Mertzon Locker Plant. Those painful years in grade school taught deep compassion for forgotten souls, sitting in a hard seat on the back row of the classroom, watching the Christmas tree program end without so much as hearing my name. Driving in from the ranch, the thought hit that a pound of bacon was not much, but might be the only gift those old rascals would receive on Christmas.

I wasn't the only person having the same idea. The Senator's wife sent a piece of white divinity in the shape of a Christmas bell for each of us. She's a lovely lady, big of heart, willing to forgive and forget — a trait she learned no doubt on the long campaign trails of the Senator's 14 years of service. We were right about the paucity of presents, too. Once meetings resumed after the New Year, no shiny belt buckles or bright patterned neckties graced the tables. Effusive greetings were sent via the Senator to his wife far beyond the size of her gift, leaving the impression Christmas had humbled the group by the hard truth that going around grumbling about taxes and haggling over interest rates can't be wiped away the last 10 days of the year.

But to go back to the beginning, the forecast was unfavorable for the city and the ranchers. In 2001, the Middle Concho and the South Concho rivers flooded one time each enough to reach the municipal reservoirs. Right through the big picture window of our lunch spot overlooking the golf course, sprinklers sprayed huge volumes of water. Down the street, the big Country Club Estate homes used thousands of gallons of water irrigating the St. Augustine turf and floating water lilies in the fish ponds. Closest thing I'd heard to water conservation in all of Angelo was a College Hills lady at the checkout counter of the grocery store buying bottled water for her dog to protect her pooch's breath from smelling like chlorine at his birthday party.

Now keep this straight: those Angelo citizens are plenty sharp. After Christmas, I started setting up doctor and dental appointments for January. I'd ring up the clinic. The receptionist would answer, "Dr. Carsner's Office." She'd sound exactly like Mrs. Boatwright who has worked for the doctor so long. Minutes later, I'd dial Dr. Makin's office, and hear his assistant, Mrs. Smith's voice came on the wire same as usual. Come to find out, both offices were closed. The answering services were such skilled actresses that the operators were impersonating the voice of the regular help. Gave patients the impression Dr. Carner and Dr. Makin were hard at work. Hard at work relieving the misery of man, instead of languishing in a high-priced resort eating Swiss chocolates and sunbathing by a big pool in the custom most of the town's healers and tooth grinders follow for the holidays.

Good thing there's no tote board flashing the odds of rain to the herders and farmers betting on a wet spring. The Extension Service in San Angelo was quoted in the article predicting this year's weather as being tired of hearing about the two years of drouth. Out west of Mertzon, heading on across the Pecos River, quite a number of us are weary, too, of the past 14 years of weather failures. But all the help we can spare our city brethren is to buck up and face the prospects of a dry camp. For if the meteorologists are right, two floods this spring will not be enough to make the water reach to all the lawns and gardens of the bustling city, not to mention the golf courses, cemeteries and swimming pools.

 

January 17, 2002

Before jet airplanes flew travelers across the country, the main contacts visitors had with Texas were memories of being stationed in a dull army post during World War Two, or perhaps a dreary confinement in the medical complex in Houston. Two important attractions come to mind that made a change: Big Bend Park and the River Walk in San Antonio.

Only faint recollections remain of the ranches lost to the park. But from a Christmas holiday in San Antonio, I remember a muddy little stream awash in trash, only noteworthy at flood stage and favored by hombres needing a place to hide. Now it's a river crossed by arched stone bridges, aglow with strings of colored lights hanging from tall cypress trees, and navigated by excursion boats.

My annual holiday developed after a travel magazine mentioned that hotel rates become favorable in San Antonio the week prior to Christmas. "Favorable" means a 66 percent discount off a $270 rack rate at a full service hotel, or 90 bucks a night for a double room decorated as soft and luxuriously as a velvet velour pillow. Added is a glassed breakfast porch facing a courtyard shaded by oak trees and dotted with preening white peafowl and exotic plumed pheasants. Looking out the big glass window on a December morning is a long ways from catching your reflection in the cracked ice covering a water trough on a winter morning out west.

This past season, friends invited me to a benefit dance. Hard to go off and leave the ranch with bitterweed poison threatening the sheep from early snow and a trap of first-calf heifers making up a straggling herd of two head defying gestation limits to ruin a holiday. But the very best advice on preventing aging in Modern Maturity magazine says folks who foxtrot and do the Mexican polkas on regular engagements can remain agile and alert far beyond expectations. Just the dips and turns of ballroom dancing free the body and mind to better guide a wobbly old ewe through a gate, or flex the fingers to slip on obstetrical chains in the birthing of calves.

And what a dance it was in the grand ballroom of the Hyatt on La Soya Street. Corridors filled with fancy folks. Host and hostess as handsome as dons and princesses in formal blacks, flowing organdies, and swirling silks and satins crowded the dance floor. (The benefit was for Hospice of San Antonio.) Sitting with such influential people as the chairman of the music committee, I stayed limber rising from my chair to bow and nod to passing dignitaries. The modern band, "The Chickadee Eight From Decatur," refused to play soft music, but did relent and do one waltz the old saxophone player hummed over and over until the others caught the beat.

Next day, my friend and I met our hosts for lunch at the liberty Bar on East Josephine. The Liberty Bar is a decrepit eating spot of shiplap lumber close to splintering and collapsing from age. The food draws such a crowd that the city placed one-hour parking limits for blocks around. Worried us some until I remembered that unless San Antonio had changed, no one connected to City Hall knew how many minutes made an hour, much less how to time a parking spot.

After lunch we went to an art exhibit at the McNay Museum. The show featured a 58-piece collection on loan from Smith College on Corot to Picasso. The college's curator was a mighty slick operator. He invested a lot of the museum's dough on unfinished canvases by such famous artists as Paul Cezzane at huge savings and a big increment in value.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped by a used bookstore housed in a building as ancient as the Liberty Bar. Hard to say if the structure holds up the books, or the books prop up the building. My first selection was a green colored book faded by time. On the fly leaf in flowing thick script was the inscription: "Ida Aldwell, Sonora, Texas, 1916." Open at hand was a memory of a ranching family my whole clan knew and liked.

I leaned closer to the shelves holding Miss Ida's book to air. No one was around. Writers of the 20s and 30s, the likes of Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and Lardner, lined the near wall. The books began to beckon, to pull: "Take me home with you," they seemed to say. I turned away, as I knew many more books added to the ranch house and my walls would sag as bad as the bookstore and the Liberty.

Might have been the house creaking causing motion to pulse from the musty books. I slid Miss Ida's book back in place. Limited myself to a dozen copies and waited for my friend in the car.

 

---

January 10, 2002

Over the holidays, I made the cut cooking for sons and grandsons accompanied by guests famished from 20-degree mornings perched in deer blinds.

I made the cut by cooking for a group quick to drop the subject of points and antlers and fast to grade backstrap and chili meat for five seasons past. Carnivores ... big eaters. Hombres full of life and vigor. Ready to cast off the office tedium and the classroom routine for boned hindquarter chops sizzling in a skillet and toasted sourdough biscuits buttered to peak cholesterol in the purest state.

The biscuits gave me a big advantage – a big lead. Takes three sizes of cutters starting at a petite two-inch one, graduating to a three-inch, and hitting the big time in a fruit juice can with the bottom removed. The largest biscuits are called "rodeo biscuits", as they resemble the rugged disregard for personal health of the bucking chutes and the big arenas. Split and buttered, a rodeo biscuit generates enough calories converted to btu's to fuel a marathon runner's torch to the final lap.

Under such intense table conditions, I used a point system to score the teenagers. Rodeo biscuits counted three points or three times more than the regular size biscuits. A full bowl of Mexican pork stew (Psole rojo) was 15 points. Cookies dunked in whole milk scored the same as the stew. The overall limit of 60 points per meal had to raised to 75 points to cover leftover turkey sandwiches. One-inch slices of white meat stuffed between two whole rodeo biscuits moistened with sweet cream butter shot the score on up fast.

We kept running out of milk. The closest store is at Barnhart, 18 miles away. On one run my son Ben made the mistake of allowing the boys to open the milk jug as they crossed the railroad tracks leaving town. By the time he turned off the highway on the county road, he said half the bottle was emptied, or 60 points scored. He considered going back to the store for Kool Aid or soda water to use as a chaser to save milk, but figured by then they'd need another gallon of milk at over five bucks a pop, so he dropped the idea.

On Christmas Day, my sister brought two guests and one of her employees (a nurse) to dinner. I didn't recognize the visitors at first. After starting cooking the 18th of December, my vision only reached the width of a double sink and the depth of the oven of a 36-inch gas stove. Outdoor recreation had been putting out the trash. A side trip meant going down to the barn to feed the horses.

She rolled out the door of her van, scolding me for not bringing the 800-pound steel ramp we use to load wool from the barn to roll her wheelchair through the front door. She was having a hard time fussing as my boys were wishing her a Merry Christmas, giving her big kisses and hugs as nephews do to appease grouchy aunts. Nobody was paying attention to me. I'd been in the kitchen so long slow roasting a 10-pound chuck of beef that the bright sunlight glistened like walking into a snow field from a darkroom.

Blinded by the glare, I kept shaking my head and blinking my eyes. "Old Auntie" re-addressed the ramp problem by saying, "I hope in the New Year my brother will have time to move the ramp down from the barn." Since it was obvious we couldn't speak direct, I said, "I hope my sister can afford to pay five dollars a trip on my ramp in the New Year, because that's going to be the charge." The nurse gasped, then caught our smiles.

The old saying is that cold weather improves people's appetites. Had a cold spell hit, it would have wiped out my pantry and put Barnhart on short inventory. The morning the boys left, I put a gallon jug of holiday crackers in the front seat of the pickup. The last I heard was, "Granddad, how many points are crackers?"

 

May 5, 2001

Weather failure and brokenhearted ranchers kept whittling on the sheep flocks in the shortgrass country until the dry demon and poor spirits left few woolies to lose. On the trails north and west of Highway 67 between Mertzon and Barnhart where thousands of woolies once ranged, coyote and bobcat signs obliterate the tracks of the thin stocking of mother ewes. Empty feed sacks blowing up against the highway fences outnumber the sheep.

Only thing scarcer than sheep is an audience willing to listen to our story. No men left around to reminisce of rounding up sheep for two weeks to supply a 20-man shearing crew working from dawn to dusk. Hard put to find a listener to stay through a tale of the day a crew loaded 29 boxcar loads of lambs at Barnhart without gaining on the sheep pouring into the long "OB trap" reaching from Ozona to the railhead. Might last a round of coffee telling of Russell Hays losing 10,000 feeder lambs in the Kansas blizzard without ever having to change bankers to stay in the game.

Slim chance, but possibly a few graybeards may remember the Owens brothers from San Saba contracting so many lambs one fall that they leased an outfit on Spring Creek joining the old ranch as unsuited for fattening winter lambs as locating a skating rink in Death Valley. Joined in the hard times, the cowboy looking after the sheep asked Kelly Owens for a $5 a month raise at Christmas. Mr. Owens answered, "Boy, not right now; but if frost doesn't kill the peaches next spring at San Saba, I'll bring you a bushel basket full."

Sad part is that my sheep story continues. Forty-eight hours ago at this writing, I unsaddled a Mexico bred dun horse to conclude my lamb marking exercise. "Two days marking and two changes each day in the cast" was the featured subject. First day, a three-man ground crew built portable corrals while four of us took to the air on horseback to gather the sheep from the cedar bushes. The next day, the ground forces increased to six persons by adding a son and three grandkids, and promoting one Musquiz Coahuila issue to the saddlehorn squad, which had decreased to three mounted men. (Two of the previous day's riders quit to go to a team roping in Sterling City.)

The next numbers are larger, yet easier to understand. We marked a 98 percent lamb crop on the highway and 88 percent up on the Divide. (Once a hundred percent-plus was average for the shortgrass country.) The big surprise was how so many bobcats assisted by so many eagles feasting on such a small herd left that many lambs alive.

The area ratio of bobcat and eagle to ewe and lamb factored over a 30-day lambing season showed a 63 percent crop on March 10th. However, one of the biggest unknowns in predicting percentages nowadays is the effect daylight savings time has on the production of lambs and calves. Scoff if you will, but the time change throws rams off schedule in the late fall. Bulls even sound different bellowing in the spring after the time moves forward an hour. Where the time remains static in Arizona, or across the border into Mexico, herders can count on the traditional old signs of clear moonlit nights meaning full harvest and coyote hair building up in the sagebrush as a crop failure. Ever since daylight savings time started in the 1970s we have noticed a decrease in our crops. The effect on humans has been impossible to evaluate because the males disappear after 5 p.m. to golf courses or fishing holes to bank their extra time. And the females spend their extra hour ferrying kids to more music lessons and longer baseball games. So in the end, the total sum of hours saved actually means a loss of one hour's sleep a night or a minus 180 hours of rest for the six-month period.

I regret the loss of interest in sheep herding. Talking is the only thing I do that's constant. I sure can't mark lambs as fast as I did years ago. Also, there's not much use in telling a young cowboy that I regret riding without toe fenders on my stirrups, so I could remove them to make my saddle lighter when I throw it on my horse. Explaining such a statement to a stout young buck is especially difficult when he's using a set of aluminum stirrups to improve the speed of his dismount in a roping arena.

But it's good to eat dinner in the pasture to remember those guys of yore who were so much fun. Best, I suppose, to write a new script and hope to find an audience willing to listen ...

May 5, 2001

May 10, 2001

The story opens in the 1960s, the early 1960s, after the country restocked from the bad drouth of the previous decade. One thing for sure, every outfit worked full force that spring. On top of flood water washing down every erect fencepost in the flats, a screwworm epidemic raged across all of the shortgrass country.

Old hands who thought of roping as an arena sport found themselves racing down brushy canyons, casting manila or nylon loops in fast-fading openings on short pieces of smooth ground. The theme of those long ago days was, "a catch is a catch," meaning if you caught a lamb or a calf by a foot, forget the glory and cherish the conquest.

On one of those early mornings, the light came on in the empty bunkhouse before the horses were fed. When I passed by going to the barn, a cowboy named Chief walked out on the front porch. He said, "Monte, me and Ivan got through down at Live Oak ahead of time. We are going to help you until the work starts." He coughed a dry smoker's hack. "We had a little string of bad luck down at the beer joint between Ozona and Sonora. Our stay outlasted our paychecks."

The "little string of bad luck" took two days to heal. On the third morning, we rode along smoking, riding full face into a dawn breaking into an orange and purple horizon. The time had come as it always does for the day man to tell all the gossip from other ranches, however, this time the story was worthwhile. (I better explain that Chief had to be the spokesman as Ivan had taken a bad fall that spring and was too sore to do much talking.)

Chief rode up between us. He said, "We weren't fired down at Live Oak. We left because of a life-threatening incident. Come into dinner one day, and the cook started shooting at us with a 30-30 rifle before we reached the big draw in front of the headquarters. Too drunk to take a fine bead, or he could of killed all of us at that range. Kept us hiding down on the draw until he shot all the cartridges in the house."

Chief allowed the drama to set in. Rolled a cigarette and took a deep drag, collapsing the paper the way he always smoked. The story continued once he had the cigarette burning: "Me and Ivan rode up to the house first, us being the oldest. I shore hated to go inside, but once we did, we found the cook sprawled on the kitchen floor still as a dried cow hide. He was lying on and among a bunch of spent 30-30 cartridges. We were so hungry, we stepped around the body on the floor while we warmed up the half-cooked bread and overcooked beans. The youngest kid, Little Joe, said he'd like to scalp the cook to sell the pelt at the Ozona wool house. Me and Ivan had to remind him we were in charge." (Chief or Ivan never mentioned a boss. Judging from the behavior of the indisposed cook, the boss was gone.)

Again Chief paused to build suspense. To play my role, I asked, "Then what happened?"

"Well," Chief said, "Me and Ivan and Little Joe packed that sharpshooter of a drunk cook out to the big round trough in the horse lot and bedded him right easy in the water and moss. 'Jim Scout' brung the cook's bedroll and put it on his belly. The cook moaned as we propped his head against the rim of the trough."

Before we separated, Chief said, "the way me and Ivan knew to bring him to shore was when the tadpoles started rising to the surface gasping for air. We weren't as worried about that sapsucker of a cook as much as we were of suffocating all those tadpoles."

No records exist on how many days we worked before the spring work started for real. Draws flooding from Barnhart cut the ranch in half. Hard rains kept us wet for over a month. Ivan's padded saddle, the first he ever rode, soaked up the first three inches. Chief kept us laughing, clucking to an old pony to get him to go down one more slick trail. He'd say, "Puddle on along, Rusty. You jist stumble on flat ground. You're sure-footed as a preacher on these mud banks."

Chances are fair Ivan and Chief made Angelo without too long a string of bad luck. Hard not to yearn for one more spring working with a couple of cowboys who furnished the entertainment wherever they worked ...

May 10, 2001

May 17, 2001

Thunder showers appear to be covering wide areas of the shortgrass country this spring. Short of having enough reporters to be on hand at every post office in every small outpost and every stockyard and auction barn, the pattern is impossible to trace.

"Human over-call" also has to be considered. Takes a practiced mind to catch such nuances as the common ploy, "I poured an inch from my gauge," assuring that if the inch fails to come close to passing, his gauge is to blame. Another trick is to open by admitting you may not have dumped all the bugs out after the last rains, or an even smarter move to say, "I only measured a half-inch, but it sure looked like more on the south side of the pasture."

Also, on the 22-mile drive from the ranch to Mertzon, four or five different bands of showers may pass across the roadway on the same afternoon, leaving water standing in the ruts in one part and the dust unsettled in the next stretch. A Mexican cowboy and I are the only permanent residents in the neighborhood. We are in charge of reporting high water and grass fires for the whole Divide.

We share rain gauge measurements among other neighbors, but not with the same enthusiasm reserved for our private exchange of coyote signs and eagle sightings. Alfredo and I don't trust outsiders. We are mighty suspicious of folks who live close to doctor offices and grocery stores. We don't understand hombres renting movies every night and eating all the popcorn they want whenever the whim hits them.

But I can swear, on the 4th and 5th of May over three inches fell up here on top. Saturday morning the thunder and lightning boomed and crashed so severe, part of the ceiling in my living room fell into the drip pan catching the leak in the roof. The impact of the ceiling tiles splashed water up onto the coffee table, causing drops of newsprint ink to drip off the edge and give the beige rug a charcoal tinge.

The house damage didn't bother me. Restored by the merciful deluge of a heavy rain, I felt so good I waited on the telephone to go back to working so I could call Zurich to have a Swiss bank account ready for next fall's lamb and calf receipts. Compared to the 11 years of dry weather, three ceiling blocks lying lopsided in and on a drip pan had the same impact as a plait working loose in a show horse's tail would at the end of a big parade.

Once the phone worked, Alfredo reported two inches. He also thought the gaps were up on Devil's River draw as the small draws weren't running off his outfit. Sounded fishy to find a Mexican cowboy at the ranch on Cinco de Mayo. The oldtime shearing and roundup crews used to take off to the Border in such force that the major wool house in San Angelo started having a party for ranchers to distract us from the delay. Helped make the herders more sympathetic with the hands on the morning after if we celebrated the "Cinco," too.

As a lark one time over at the Goat Whiskers' ranch spring shearing, we told Filomenio Jiminez to be sure to strain the milk before he put it in the refrigerator as we were going to be gone to the horse races at Del Rio the 5th of May. The most gifted artist to ever do a painting of the agonies of the Heavenly Father's son could not have reproduced the sadness on Filomenio's face.

Filomenio was 65 years old. He'd worked on this side of the Big River for 30 years. He'd never thought of a gringo being so irresponsible as to leave his ranch during shearing. He was so upset, he walked over to the highway after work and caught the bus to Angelo. Ten days elapsed before Filomenio had to strain any cow's milk. Old man Whiskers stormed around threatening to fire him without a hearing, but by the time he got back to the ranch, Whiskers' hind legs hurt so bad from squatting down to milk that he never said a word.

Been so long since we had any help from the other side of the River, I don't know whether Mexican cowboys still celebrate the Cinco and 16th of September like they once did. Alfredo and I are plenty close, but all we discuss is business. If the rains keep coming on and stock lose their devotion to sacked goods and pickup tailgates, we are going to need a bunch of Filomenio's kind to work our country. Be my guess, too, that'd we'd be a lot easier to work for than we were in the old days ...

May 17, 2001

May 24, 2001

At the end of March, the Sentimental Journey big band played for the Hangar dance at Kerrville. The theme was music of the World War II era. For the program, the 18-piece orchestra dressed in Air Force summer uniforms to play on handsome instruments from the Glen Miller band. 1940-model cars set the stage in front of the hangar. At the corner of the building, two vintage airplanes, 60 years old, supported the scene.

Sprinkled about the floor, gray-bearded veterans wore their old uniforms, displaying rank and decorations. Wives costumed in high heels, hats and veils enhanced the atmosphere. Under the spell of music and lyrics written for a generation paced by short furloughs and long terms of overseas duty, each of the couples seemed cast for a movie or short story.

The theme, as I said, began as the "Music of the World War II Era." The dance, however, became "a dance of rekindled love." Couples the morning before unable to settle the issues on the side column of the morning paper locked in embraces as torrid as the aftermath of a high school hay ride. Wives pained by the ravages of stiffened joints tilted their chins upward to stare into retired officers' eyes in heats of passion long past season. In a reverie of short courtships and hasty wartime marriages, they glided across the floor wrapped in each other's arms as if a troop train was leaving Kerrville in the morning to meet the ship going overseas.

Another distinct group of dancers, the new age swing dancers, joined the crowd. It was a group old enough to be away from home on a Saturday night but too young to buy beer. In boundless energy, the smooth cheeks swung out and into deep dips, crossing and re-crossing the dance floor to a fierce beat other dancers failed to hear.

Swing dancers also wear an interpretation of the fashions of the 1940s. Boys wore two-tone black and white shoes and dark gray snap-brimmed hats. The most dramatic of the girls' costumes was an exact replica of the poster image of a 1940s nurse, including the pert white, red-crossed cap and navy blue cape draped over her shoulders.

I moved around to different tables. Conversations went like this: "Those songs take 60 years off my life." Or "See that guy, he flew 55 missions over Europe." Or "My husband took a year getting home after the war from the Philippines. Don't let him get started on General McArthur."

At one spot, a big table of youngsters from San Antonio mingled in expected poses of girls sitting on boys' laps to the unexpected of a girl reading a textbook. The difference in ages between the "vets" and the "swingers" must have been 50 years. Each age group sat apart, amazed, I'm sure, at the other group's energy.

Twice, maybe three times, ghosts of the past flashed by studying the kids' faces. One old song, I Can't Get Started With You, set off long-ago memories. A dream returned of a raven-haired beauty, dressed in a white evening gown perfumed by all the sweetness of a gardenia corsage, standing on the floor of a hotel ballroom, holding up her arms to a red-headed country boy so shy he danced stilted-legged as a sandhill crane. (Most of my early dancing was in the lottery style dance, "The Paul Jones." I was 23 years old before I had the nerve to ask a strange girl to dance.)

Stricken by Hoagie Carmicheal's Stardust, a girl's laugh brought back a shot of a long-ago college dance. The notes of this Stardust melody were at first thought to be impossible to play by musicians of the day. But on that fateful night even the soft cheeks became subdued by the trumpeter's deep plea for love as Mr. Carmicheal's ballad once again brought the dancers under an amorous spell.

About 11 o'clock, the heroes and smart alec kids became tiresome. Only war stories I had to tell were of shining about a hundred pair of horse soldiers' boots the time the calvary camped on Spring Creek, and when my Cub Scout pack gathered waste paper one winter for the cause. The politest of company isn't interested in shoeshine boy and rag picker's stories.

Too, the kids were taking up too much space showing off and spinning like whirling dervishes. The gushy stuff by the husbands and wives was also beginning to wear on my nerves. If they felt like clutching each other and giving off those adoring looks on the floor, they needed to save that mush for their 75th wedding anniversary photographs.

The next day I was wishing I could find an emergency room to treat the "charley horses" in my hind legs. The good part of recovery, however, was driving along tapping a dance song on the steering wheel, wondering whether a song will ever be written more romantic than a Stardust melody.

May 24, 2001

May 31, 2001

Fero Mex, the Mexican railway company, bought the line going through the old ranch last year from the Southern Orient Railroad and the State of Texas. The service comes out of Mexico from the Pacific port of Topolobampo via Presidio, Texas. But I am not going to trace the connections as today I only have to worry about crossing the 65-foot right-of-way in a pickup to go to Mertzon and once or twice a year to drive our heifer calves back and forth between the Divide and the highway.

After the Santa Fe sold to the Southern Orient, crossing the new operator's tracks became as polite as finding a seat at a finishing school graduation. Engineers on the S.O. stopped back far enough from the crossing to allow the calves to cross. Had the old-time Santa Fe hands shown that much courtesy in the 75 years the family dealt with their offices, we'd have suspected infiltration in the railroad brotherhood by outside parties, like maybe communists or government agents. Those old soreheads delighted in releasing the air on the engine's brakes next to a shipping pen full of fresh-weaned calves or a corral of brush-spoiled cows skittish as mustang colts.

All the ranch's product — the wool, the lambs, and the calves — rode the rails until the mid-1950s. We loaded a few shipments after dark. Many times we shipped in driving rain, blinding the men and soaking chaps and hat brims into a collapsed mess of sodden leather and felt. The best part of loading cattle on the rails was that the entire procedure up to the floor of the loading chute was on horses. Railroad gate latches reached saddlehorn high. Armed with a long punch pole, a rider could break up a mill of calves or peck an old sulky cow on the horns until her head instead of her rump pointed toward Fort Worth.

Before my time, the Remount Service also congregated hundreds of horses to ship from Noelke Switch every year. In the more distant past, Grandfather Noelke received all of his groceries, feed and ranch supplies on a dock attached to his warehouse. So every time I rode across the tracks, a strong attachment generated from those grounds. Much of the excitement of spring and fall roundups ended in sliding the final rickety car door closed for the section foreman to seal and writing down the boxcar numbers to bill at the depot.

The other day when I was going to San Angelo, a bright red Fero Mex engine opened the new era pulling a short string of coal cars. The engine parked at an intersection between Mertzon and Tankersley. On a one-way traffic line, the train doesn't have to use a siding. No one was about. Peggy and Bob Steger live right across the tracks. I figured maybe the engineer and brakeman stopped over to spend the night with the Stegers.

For my own amusement the rest of the trip, I practiced a skit reporting right-of-way fires in Spanish to Ciudad Juarez. First efforts went like this:

My end: "Bueno. Es la officina del Fero Mex?"

Office: "Si senor, como servimos, Usted?"

My end: "Hay un fuego en la servidumbre de paso en medio de Barnhart y Mertzon."

Office: "Un que?"

My End: "Uno fuego. Un cadron fuego. 'Effe-ooo-gee-oh.' En medio de B-a-r-n-h-a-r-t y M-e-r-t-z-o-n, Texas."

Office: "Donde esta Barnhart?"

My end: "Barnhart es diez y ocho mias de Big Lake, Texas. Y dos cien cincuenta mias de Ojinaga, Mexico. Gosh-a-mighty, the wind's getting up: Lady, call your boss!"

Office: "The boss is playing golf at the Country Club course in El Paso this afternoon. Would you like his cell phone number, Sir? I feel sure he'd like to hear about the fire between B-a-r-n-h-a-r-t and M-e-r-t-z-o-n, Texas."

After I played with the idea awhile, I remembered the indifference the Santa Fe section crew showed about setting big piles of timbers on fire in high March winds. Those old gray and white-capped spooks laughed about a train dragging an ancient car through the ranch, throwing sparks from the brake bands, committing serial arson without ever slacking off the throttle. I think I reported once of the train wreck that dumped a car of coal due north of the headquarters. If I did, I'm still the hero who bribed the section crew with enough Spanish goats to keep them from starting a fire that would have smoldered all winter in a noxious cloud of soot potent enough to choke the furnaces of the foundries of U.S. Steel.

Maybe Fero Mex will be as easy to deal with as the Southern Orient. I am not going to test the new company on who has the right of way on crossing cattle until we are better acquainted. However they behave, it's going to be a strain on my Spanish to report emergencies.

May 31, 2001

June 7, 2001

Before the old ranch was divided, the White Mill pasture held a jinx on cowboys. Ropes and hats were lost and never found. Riders strayed off the drive onto neighboring ranches, confused by a big brushy draw that looked the same on the north and south ends of the pasture.

Steady hands grew weary from tracking down strayed punchers new on the job. The task was harder if the cowboy wandered into the ranch to the south of us as the neighbor's pasture was 10 sections of cedar brush served by one windmill and one road system. However, we were bound by a code to never go off and leave an unaccounted horseman in the pasture.

A one-man search party going back to cover 15 square miles on a tired horse could be mighty discouraging. If you can call it a "plan," we'd ride the high points, yell and whistle and wave our hats, hoping for the sound or sight of a man or his horse. The honor roll is too long to bring up the names of the lost and found. Just leave it this way: we solved every case, including part credit for a dude a neighbor headed 12 miles off the south boundary.

After my boys started taking part in the drive, I stayed in agony until the last one showed up at the gate. On one occasion, John Noelke's horse either fell on a slick ledge rock or threw him off way south of the White windmill four miles from our starting point. Instead of heading north to the ranch, this idiot piece of tail and mane of a bronc hit the south fence.

We found John real easy walking down a trail. He descends from famous walking stock. In my horse-tuning days, I passed a 14-mile hiking merit badge every week. But we kept waiting and watching for his horse to come in looking for the house or the other horses. It was dark by the time Jose came leading the fool into the ranch. (John had ridden in behind the saddle of one of his brothers.) Next weekend John's saddle disappeared off the rack. (I've told you this part before, but will do better this time.) When his rig returned, his brothers had tacked a plate on the horn reading: "Forward to John Noelke, Zip code 76941." I missed the ceremony held to dedicate the plaque. I understand his brothers told him if he kept losing his horse and saddle, he'd need a return address.

The story came back the other day while I was waiting to meet a guy on a ranch close to Barnhart. Across the fence, 15 or 20 big, black, "humpy" cows became curious of the strange pickup invading their grounds. In the right ear, the cows wore a big tan eartag labeled with black marker ink. Under the magnification of 7 X 35 binoculars, I read the following: "Ike & Amelio Hamstrum (Maybe), Box 446, Midkiff, TX (Possibly) 76____."

Every time an ear came in focus, the subject would throw her head too high to read the tag, or wheel around ready to flee from this strange man peering through field glasses. So I couldn't ascertain if a day and night telephone number was listed, also. My conclusion was that the owners trusted the mail more than the wire service. In other days, the Mertzon post office led the district as a receiving point for mail order baby chicks, but I don't ever remember anyone mailing a cow brute. With all that information on the eartag, I overlooked the brands, except I know they weren't fresh branded or native cattle.

A month before, I helped recapture one our Angus heifers running in a neighbor's herd of Brahman cross cows about the caliber and projected speed of the postmarked cattle. The foreman of the Diamond A's out in New Mexico once told me the only way to head a Brangus cow in the forest was to run fast enough to be in the lead of her. When we jumped the neighbor's cows and our heifer, I cut across and gained an advantage until I came to long slab of slick rock leading into a solid mesquite thicket.

If I'd been sorting the mail, the only way I could have read the forwarding address was on the tailhead of those flop-eared race cattle. After I lost them, I thought I heard brush crashing, but it turned out to be "Dun Boy" and me trying to catch our wind. Took two more hours of hard riding to work the heifer out of such bad company. Before we reached the house, I thought I heard a replay of John Noelke trying to teach Jose the words to a Bob Dylan song. However, working in the high winds of spring can cause a man's imagination to run wild, especially when he's exhausted from a cow hunt.

June 7, 2001

June 7, 2001

Before the old ranch was divided, the White Mill pasture held a jinx on cowboys. Ropes and hats were lost and never found. Riders strayed off the drive onto neighboring ranches, confused by a big brushy draw that looked the same on the north and south ends of the pasture.

Steady hands grew weary from tracking down strayed punchers new on the job. The task was harder if the cowboy wandered into the ranch to the south of us as the neighbor's pasture was 10 sections of cedar brush served by one windmill and one road system. However, we were bound by a code to never go off and leave an unaccounted horseman in the pasture.

A one-man search party going back to cover 15 square miles on a tired horse could be mighty discouraging. If you can call it a "plan," we'd ride the high points, yell and whistle and wave our hats, hoping for the sound or sight of a man or his horse. The honor roll is too long to bring up the names of the lost and found. Just leave it this way: we solved every case, including part credit for a dude a neighbor headed 12 miles off the south boundary.

After my boys started taking part in the drive, I stayed in agony until the last one showed up at the gate. On one occasion, John Noelke's horse either fell on a slick ledge rock or threw him off way south of the White windmill four miles from our starting point. Instead of heading north to the ranch, this idiot piece of tail and mane of a bronc hit the south fence.

We found John real easy walking down a trail. He descends from famous walking stock. In my horse-tuning days, I passed a 14-mile hiking merit badge every week. But we kept waiting and watching for his horse to come in looking for the house or the other horses. It was dark by the time Jose came leading the fool into the ranch. (John had ridden in behind the saddle of one of his brothers.) Next weekend John's saddle disappeared off the rack. (I've told you this part before, but will do better this time.) When his rig returned, his brothers had tacked a plate on the horn reading: "Forward to John Noelke, Zip code 76941." I missed the ceremony held to dedicate the plaque. I understand his brothers told him if he kept losing his horse and saddle, he'd need a return address.

The story came back the other day while I was waiting to meet a guy on a ranch close to Barnhart. Across the fence, 15 or 20 big, black, "humpy" cows became curious of the strange pickup invading their grounds. In the right ear, the cows wore a big tan eartag labeled with black marker ink. Under the magnification of 7 X 35 binoculars, I read the following: "Ike & Amelio Hamstrum (Maybe), Box 446, Midkiff, TX (Possibly) 76____."

Every time an ear came in focus, the subject would throw her head too high to read the tag, or wheel around ready to flee from this strange man peering through field glasses. So I couldn't ascertain if a day and night telephone number was listed, also. My conclusion was that the owners trusted the mail more than the wire service. In other days, the Mertzon post office led the district as a receiving point for mail order baby chicks, but I don't ever remember anyone mailing a cow brute. With all that information on the eartag, I overlooked the brands, except I know they weren't fresh branded or native cattle.

A month before, I helped recapture one our Angus heifers running in a neighbor's herd of Brahman cross cows about the caliber and projected speed of the postmarked cattle. The foreman of the Diamond A's out in New Mexico once told me the only way to head a Brangus cow in the forest was to run fast enough to be in the lead of her. When we jumped the neighbor's cows and our heifer, I cut across and gained an advantage until I came to long slab of slick rock leading into a solid mesquite thicket.

If I'd been sorting the mail, the only way I could have read the forwarding address was on the tailhead of those flop-eared race cattle. After I lost them, I thought I heard brush crashing, but it turned out to be "Dun Boy" and me trying to catch our wind. Took two more hours of hard riding to work the heifer out of such bad company. Before we reached the house, I thought I heard a replay of John Noelke trying to teach Jose the words to a Bob Dylan song. However, working in the high winds of spring can cause a man's imagination to run wild, especially when he's exhausted from a cow hunt.

June 7, 2001

June 14, 2001

Two weeks ago from this writing, Truett Smith, a leading San Angelo attorney, died at home after spending the weekend in the country. He was hooked up with a big stable of fixers and arrangers down at the Central National Bank building. Partners in his firm reached back to 1960. All parties concerned, the deceased, the gray-whiskered, and the smooth cheeks alike, rank as very nimble minds in the courtroom and the field of settlement and compromises.

However, I am not telling this so you can go out in the morning and match a big fight with Exxon/Mobil, or challenge Wells Fargo Bank to a battle, then run to Mr. Smith's firm for protection. I am telling you this so I can pass on the advice Truett gave many a hothead: "Fights are a lot easier to start than they are to stop."

First time I met him over in the backyard at a party in the l950s, he didn't act like he minded a fight. He was engaged in a furious badminton match. He smashed the feather bird in and over the net. He fit right in as the host, a trial lawyer too, played every game from bridge to dominoes to mumble peg with the passion of a sword fighter.

We were introduced after the players had knocked all the feathers off the bird. I asked Truett if he played lawn tennis, too. He replied, "Nah, I don't like games where the first bounce is still fair." His style sure suited my location, as about that time, herders west of Mertzon weren't around the tennis set.

The same year, he and the host's son came dove hunting at the ranch. The week before he had tried a case in fall court in the ranch's county. The jury didn't know him. Worst of all, he didn't know the jurors or the judge, so he'd gotten his wish about bounces. To offer an opportunity to increase his exposure to country justice on his first dove hunt, we fell out at the first gate to chase a covey of out of season quail. When we returned to the car, he was holding his hands over his ears. His first words were, "I lost my hearing in the war because of gunfire. Now I am going to lose my law license for hearing gunfire in a hostile venue." (In those days, we were the raw product of provincial upbringing. We knew a game warden resided in San Angelo, but didn't know why.)

Until I heard Truett's eulogy, I was unaware he was a war hero. I knew he was a great patriot. On the night of the third of July in 1951, we fished in a rented 14-foot aluminum boat on Angelo's North Concho Lake. The lake was a wide pond, two feet deep, stocked in white bass. On this holiday occasion, fishermen covered the surface in small boats rigged to fish at night by lanterns. Mired in a reed bed, inspired by Truett's knowledge of the Constitution, we began to deliver Fourth of July declamations. He possessed a terrific advantage, knowing such words as "henceforth" and "hitherto." (Note, ships or skiffs capsized or in danger, elevate man to oratorical heights. i.e. THE BOY STOOD ON THE BURNING DECK.)

Past midnight, our boat became further aground. Unaware of the transmission of our voices on the water, we had driven so many fishermen ashore that removing the displacements of all those boats had lowered the water level of the small lake. All we had left for illumination was our faltering lantern. Spirited by adversity and charged with optimism, Smith stood up and exclaimed, "Hark, the skies have darkened, the water level dropped, and soon our boat will be filled in fishes!"

The last occasion I had to tell those stories was in the Methodist Church at Truett's funeral. I drew the number five spot following two judges, a son-in-law, and a member of the law firm. No, number six spot, because the minister opened and closed the ceremony.

The only position any worse than following a slate of legal spellbinders, speaking to row upon row of the same ilk, would have been trying to speak in between handing out programs after the funeral. Glancing over my shoulder, a dozen fixers stared down on us, thinking how much better job they could do eulogizing Truett. Straight on, I faced the preacher's disapproving stare for taking from his time. (Understand right here, "talkers" don't like other "talkers." We cherish the rarest breed of man, "the listeners.")

Just because the judges were accustomed to having their way didn't mean they needed top billing. The son-in-law deserved his time, but the preacher would have cut five minutes off each ending. But in the throes of competition for the limelight, I remembered one last part of the legacy of Truett Smith: "Always charm your adversaries."

Stunned by the loss, I left the church thinking of those words...

June 14, 2001

June 21, 2001

The big difference with a recent landing in Pittsburgh was that the string of cabs lined by the departure lane numbered six units instead of the six dozen in other cases. Everything else was familiar. The identical beat-up white cab and same truculent driver I'd had at Austin International eight hours before wheeled up to the curb, ready to go careening off to a strange city for 30 miles and 30 bucks worth of my life.

The seat springs hit my upper posterior in the exact spot the desperate piece of Austin junk had located my tailbone. The driver stared ahead just like the previous fellow, glaring into the headlights as if a fare invaded his innermost privacy. Tires sang the same muted melody strumming on slick tread. And the screech of the brake bands heralded the introduction of a Texas freewheeling style to the Pennsylvania roadway.

Once we passed through a tunnel under Mount Washington, a startling vista opened onto a city of long arched bridges and shaded orange street lights. Arched bridges crossing the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers to come together downtown to head the Ohio River; street lights to illuminate the 88 neighborhoods making up Pittsburgh. (I am going on ahead as the cab driver is a mute. If you depended on him, you wouldn't know the difference between Benson, Arizona and Baltimore, Maryland.)

Off the slope of Mount Washington, we crossed the Monongahela on a bridge built by the designer of the Golden Gate. Upstream where steel mills once crowded the riverbanks, a "hot metal bridge" made to cross molten ore spanned the river. A grim reminder of an industry once sending shifts of 8000 to 10,000 smut-faced men struggling toward soot-coated homes to pass by the largest concentration of saloons on the North American continent. (For sure, you know by now that I'm talking, not a street-weary cabby.)

The couple running the bed and breakfast left the room keys in the mailbox as agreed. After an old sister in a Houston "B and B" pulled a deuce of clubs trick rusty enough to make a Bluebeard blush, I haven't been so trusting, or as keen on innkeepers. She ran my credit card through for two nights, then had the water turned off at daylight the second morning. She hands down holds first prize for early checkout procedures and ranks high among the modern-day buccaneers of the bayou country.

Took a three flight descent to reach a big bedroom joined by a small sitting room furnished with a dark cherry wood desk and a brown leather arm chair. The water was still hot, the towels clean and tasteful. The 40-degree drop in temperature from Texas chilled the room. I crawled into a bed based on the most marvelous rubber mattress ever to be on any road.

The next morning I bounded out the door, only to be faced by three steep flights of stairs. However, by going down slow, I regained my composure in time to meet two tables of guests and the innkeeper. Rested from the night's sleep, needing to talk, I opened by telling how the jumbo grasshoppers at the ranch were walking so spraddle-legged from beggar's lice burrs building up between the hind legs and the body that the stress caused the hoppers to expectorate as clear as a glacier melt.

Must have been a poor sampling of Californians. Seemed dull compared to the ones we used to watch on the TV, like Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. I wanted to add about ol' "Peanut" Dawson opening his mouth at the wrong moment in the back of a pickup in time to swallow a "jumbo", but the crowd dispersed before I finished the story. ("Peanut" claimed a "jumbo" tasted the same as a chew of "Day's Work" tobacco.)

After breakfast, the innkeeper agreed to drive me over to the museum district. He further provided an umbrella, a borrowed umbrella being the only kind I have ever carried. While I waited in the parlor, I practiced in front of a long beveled mirror twirling the canopy and refreshing my memory of the proper etiquette for opening and carrying an umbrella.

"A gentleman always points the spear toward his body in charging pedestrian traffic," the book said at home. "To prevent an indiscreet accident, (a goose?) the spear is pointed to his body, or toward the sidewalk upon following a lady mounting a coach, a bus, or subway." Further on the directions read, "In the event the impact of collision causes the gentleman to be stabbed by his umbrella, he should apologize for the inconvenience, then remove himself to privacy to extricate the spear."

The innkeeper guided much better than the cab driver. By mid-morning he had given a detailed tour and located the correct bus stops. For the rest of the trip, he picked me up numerous times. So the indignity of being taken by the Houston swindler faded away. I remained and remain a staunch supporter of bed and breakfast inns.

June 21, 2001

June 14, 2001

A special art exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Fine Arts on "Light" directed my attention to Pittsburgh. One of my friends spotted the show on TV.

After the prickly pear blooms in the spring in the shortgrass country, we have to wait a year before more color comes into our lives. We do have an abundance of light, especially after daylight savings time puts us to work during the hottest part of the day. Also, it doesn't take much excitement to dazzle a ranch-bound herder dependent on picking frijole beans and feeding the sourdough starter for after-six entertainment. Eating free hot dogs at the opening of a Piggly Wiggly store can be a lot of fun after being stranded on a ranch all spring.

Joined by a friend to see the show, we spent hours wandering through cases displaying marvels ranging from the huge reflecting mirrors used in old lighthouses to paintings by Van Gogh and Monet selected to demonstrate the artists' uses of light. Standing in one case was the first microscope — man's first opportunity to see minute mysterious things. (The 17th century sounds like the right period.)

Underneath a Van Gogh painting of a spectacular sunset was the following notation: "Our vision adjusts 30 minutes before darkness in what is called the 'Punkinge Shift.' Blues become more intense. Van Gogh anticipates the change by making his horizon an azure red hot sky." Stilled in front of the painting, a string of events in Van Gogh's life flit by: "Poor beyond belief. Supported by a brother — his only supporter. Confined and reconfined to sanitariums. A madman capable of disfiguring himself."

Waves of chattering school kids tore through the room, breaking my reverie. Quiet returns and I back away from the painting searching a revelation of man's mystery. I chose an answer: Vincent Van Gogh was a raving genius of such high plane, he painted in a visual precise sky adjusted to the very minute his sun reached the horizon. (If my conclusion sounds stuffy or wrong, take up aerobic exercises interspersed with sessions of playing Mah Jong until it frees your spirit.)

Please imagine the brain waves firing in Van Gogh's tortured skull. The masses of electrons exploding in his chamber of creativity under a mop of red hair as inflamed as his mind. I thought: Perhaps the keeper needs to be confined and the madman set free to write his script to music, paint his canvas to hue, and plaster his clay to form. (Same prescription as above.)

More students poured through the hall, forcing a retreat to a tall window looking over a rainswept terrace onto the street.

Rain fell so hard the pigeons' seat dissolved in a white stream washing cigarette butts down the red tile steps. In the background, red and black umbrellas sheltered pedestrians rushing to catch green and tan buses. Yellow school buses parked waiting as the teachers made a head count of restless charges performing monkey island routines. I hoped they weren't short a stray as the halls still echoed from the aftermath of boisterous students.

I returned to the room hanging the Van Gogh. A professor lectured on the horizontal brush strokes of the Van Gogh holding light. My right hearing aid began to clang; the left one, as it often does, answered by squealing from a low battery. Loss of audio reception helped authenticate my nods to the lady's critique. I didn't mind not hearing as I figured the last "horizontal brush strokes" she'd brushed were on her first doll house.

The Carnegies and the Mellons left a lot of dough to build and maintain the fine museums and centers of learning in Pittsburgh. Making libraries and culture available for the public might have been part of the planting of the seeds of discontent among the steel workers' families. I've explained before how many more cowboys we had in the days of small town pool halls that distracted boys from school. I regret to this day not giving cue sticks for junior high graduation presents.

I sure wasn't going to criticize Andrew Carnegie in his hometown. But I was plenty tired of folks over east of Angelo at Ballinger bragging about their Carnegie Library cut stone edifice. The last time a big showoff asked why Mertzon didn't have a Carnegie library, I shot right back that people in Mertzon don't need a library like some little jerkwater burgs east of Angelo.

At five o'clock, the security guards started motioning us outside in the rain the way cattle are kicked off the bottom deck of a truck. Two pay phones later, I caught a ride to the bed and breakfast. The rain grew heavier. I don't know whether my vision changed 30 minutes before darkness, but I sure learned a lot about the limits of an umbrella in a downpour ...

June 14, 2001

July 5, 2001

Attractions in Pittsburgh covered a wide range of art, nature, and sports. Over across the Allegenhy River from downtown, there was the new baseball park, the Carnegie Science center, the National Aviary, and the Andy Warhol Art Museum. Concentrated in the museum district was the Phipps Conservatory, the Carnegie Museum of Fine Art, the Natural History Museum and a 42-story building called the Cathedral of Learning on University of Pittsburgh campus.

On further from the museums was the mansion and the Frick Art Museum left to the city by the Henry Clay Frick family. I tried to write from the second story of the home, but the guide kept scolding me for lagging behind the rest of her group of rubbernecks. She would have made a good strike breaker for the steel and coke industries Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Frick ran in 1890s. The way she bossed the group around she'd have been an excellent prospect to summon the Pinkerton Agency to wallop the union organizers between their ears with billy clubs, or maybe whack a tourist today for stepping out of line in a hallway.

All I was doing was looking out the window of Mr. Frick's study to capture his thoughts on being a millionaire at age 25. By capturing the image, I was going to be prepared for our first big windfall to know ahead how to adapt to gracious rooms called a "study," or a "parlor." Then after we passed on, Mertzon, or Barnhart could cash in on the tourist trade, leading folks through our grand homes and splendid gardens.

But the way this old sister kept tight herding us, we moved too fast to catch the feel for such gentle surroundings. I perked up at the mention of a private train downtown. I sure needed a lift. However, the private line operated in the old days to take the Fricks' rich neighbors like George Westinghouse or Andrew Carnegie downtown to deposit more money in the Mellons' jug. Other errands may have been to give the Pinkertons the high sign to bop a few odd workers in the noggin with pick handles for going around committing such indignities as coughing black soot in public, or bumping into doors from having seared eyeballs after handling hot steel.

The tour ended in a closed porch to listen to a carved player piano play music as clear as a symphony orchestra's score. "Mr. Frick," the guide said, "fooled his guests into thinking a live orchestra was playing in the next room, the music sounded so sharp." I didn't dare tell her that old man George Foster down on the Kickapoo east of Angelo controlled his lifelong insomnia listening to piano roll music.

The biggest question was how we were going to reach downtown. As hard as the rain fell, the Grace Steamship Lines seemed the best prospect. But two blocks out the door, we stepped into a cab. For a guy pictured on his license to play a role in an Ellis Island movie, the cabby drove as if he'd been raised in a submarine. The clearest shot he had at the street was the short moment the wiper blade peaked on the windshield. He blanked on the Andy Warhol Museum destination, however, until I recalled Mr. Warhol's family name was "Warhola."

The museum is the largest collection of private art in the world. Five hundred pieces of work hang there. "Pop Art" fits in dim focus for a subject raised on Will James and Charles Russell's drawings, but Mr. Warhol and I were born in the same year, 1928. Although he died in 1988, I felt a strong attachment to such a famous man born of my generation. Not many of us better woolie and hollow horn herders want to trade places with any man. Nevertheless, having the national press and movie actresses fawning over your painting a tomato soup can is bound to beat having your brand burned on a piece of paneling at the community center in Mertzon as a final legacy. Also, I am pretty sure having Marilyn Monroe to model beats photographing a 4-H Club kid and his champion lamb for a weekly newspaper.

So I paid homage to Mr. Warhol even though my appreciation of a room full of silver-colored helium balloons portraying clouds was marred by a guard occupied with keeping the balloons in the right place. One of the collages touched on old Pittsburgh, a rowdy town of tough steel workers. A card announced, "Edward Xique, Black Eye Specialist — Black Eyes Painted." In an age of boisterous saloons and industrial unrest, a black eye painter must have done a lively trade.

On the nights of plays and concerts, velour cushions felt soft and dry after roaming the museums and racing around trying for rides off the wet sidewalks. But one episode generated the energy for the next event. Old man George Foster wouldn't have needed his player piano to sleep after a day like that ..

July 5, 2001

July 12, 2001

North from Pittsburgh, Route 79 goes straight toward Lake Erie. It is different than leaving Philadelphia, because no suburbia sprawls outside the city limits. Five miles from downtown, maybe less, the country opens into forest and hills, high verdant hills and tall conifer trees.

Erie is a day trip for many visitors, but my friend is a serious bird watcher. She needs time to explore the natural and avian attraction of a region. I also like to putter around on hiking trails watching the birds and the watchers. Bird watchers pack a lot more money than herders. I keep hoping to be standing on a trail at the right moment to have the head of Audubon tap me on the shoulder and say: "Excuse me, sir, but you sound like you're from Texas. Would you by any chance know of a spot in West Texas where our organization might set a base camp?"

Admittedly, thinking a bitterweed sheep operation will attract bird lovers to see Chihuahua Ravens pull dead wool for nest liners all winter and the red-headed vultures feast on the rest of the carcasses all summer is a long shot. But our betting on green cow hides and lamb pelts coming back is not a proposition the handicappers in Las Vegas care to book on the "go" side.

Unlike other trips, however, my part was business-oriented. Study these facts first: Lake Erie is the next to the smallest of the Great Lakes, being 57 miles wide at the widest point and 240 miles long at the apex. But the depth was the kicker in my deal. Lake Erie is the shallowest of the five lakes, averaging 62 feet in depth and only 210 feet in the deepest part. Being so shallow causes serious navigating problems from ground swells. (Ground swells are deep rolling waves of water off distant storms.) Sunken ships cover the bottom of the lake, weighed down with rich iron ore. Hulls filled to brimming in rich treasures from the sailors' sea chests rest in the deep. And big windfalls of antiques lie waiting in the captains' quarters.

At the wharf, an observation tower 187 feet high made a perfect stand to survey the deal. I blew two dollars for an elevator ticket instead of climbing to the top. I figured once I found backers to salvage the ships, they wouldn't want me weakened from climbing 200 stairsteps. The reflection on the water plus the depth of the harbor made sighting wrecks from the tower impossible. However, over on the starboard side of the tower (note my natural adoption of nautical terms), a rusty old tub rocked up against the docks. The elevator operator said, "The ship is being converted to a restaurant." Right off I began to figure how many "Captain Dan Catfish House" franchises we could outfit in sunken ships on the shores of the Great Lakes.

The next development was on a hike to the tip of the Presque Peninsula. (The French say press-kill and the folks on Erie say press-qual.) We followed a dim trail the lighthouse keeper used in the old days to bring in supplies on the calm waters of the bay. We trudged in fine sand, creeping up on a big turtle laying eggs in the dunes and flushing yellow warblers from thickets.

A park sign said the seven mile long peninsula has gained 67 acres on the tip since the first survey in 1900. The increase is easily traced by observing the staggering height of the cottonwood trees from tall ones down to saplings. (Am I being clear? The sand keeps being dumped by the currents around the tip, making the peninsula longer.) The lake is 6,300,000 acres in size. Good thing I took that walk. We are going to have an adjustment in price and acreage if we are going to be furnishing the sand washing aground to make more park lands.

Erie, the town, is sure to support any venture from salvaging rusty ore cargo to pirating on the Main. Foreign competition in ore and steel cut way back on the port's business years ago. One old wrecked fishing boat still operates on the lake. The names or extent of the catch are not posted. Rough fish, I think, have ruined the fishing trade, but I don't imagine having every oriental guy who can toss a net in the ocean selling fish helped the matter.

To date I haven't run title on the lake. The only contract I know who has enough dough to buy the lake, including the Canadian province we'll need to protect the shoreline, is away from his telephone a lot and must not carry a cell phone. We need to be ready by the thaw next spring. I've already spotted an old boy at Barnhart with a powerful enough winch to start yanking those valuable treasures from the bottom of the lake…

July 12, 2001

July 19, 2001

Pennsylvania sign painters do good work until time comes to setting the arrow. Signs going to the summit of "Lookout Peak" point toward the dropoff at "Angel Falls." At $35 to half-sole a pair of boots and the same amount of dough to top off a gas tank, the cheapest way to get around the state is to hire a guide. Just be sure he's not connected to the state's highway department, or you may be added to the missing person file.

To find the highway from Erie back to Pittsburgh going through small towns, we first needed directions to leave Erie. A lady overhearing my request in a drugstore offered to lead us from town, saying: "It's only four miles over 127." Made me ashamed to remember all the lost truck drivers and wandering fossil fuel miners I'd sent off from the ranch bearing curt directions. (Mother always cooked breakfast for strays when she lived at the ranch.)

Once on the right highway, we kept the map open to be sure to pinpoint a 45,000-acre state park. We passed the park gate twice before an old boy running a front-end loader told us the entrance sign stood under a grove of chinaberry trees. Parked next to the sign saying, "One mile to covered bridge and waterfall," we unloaded in a light rain down a trail leading to the sound of rushing water. The trail wound across round stepping stones covered in lichen and coated in mud, perfect for a sprained hind leg or a knocked-down hip. At the eight-tenths of a mile sign, we turned back in a heavier rain. Two miles down the road, we crossed the covered bridge below a waterfall. The park sign at a fork pointed "5 miles to Highway 127." By making a U-turn, we backtracked four miles to Highway 127.

The next destination was the Cook Forest Virgin Timber Area. I wasn't worried about finding the forest as the white pines and poplars are virgin growth, three to four feet in diameter and 200 feet tall. My partner, however, chose to stop at a park office for oral directions. She picked the right ranger. At the end of a mile walk, we stood spellbound in a stand of giant pines and poplars thought to reach back to the drouth of 1644. (No surprise to a shortgrasser that a drouth would be remembered for 367 years.)

We ate our lunch on a fallen log from a once-crashing summer storm. Piliated woodpeckers, hidden but distinct in presence, tapped a staccato of "Woody Woodpecker" tunes interrupting the sound of far-off rapids. Black barred yellow chipmunks waited for crumbs. The sterile ground lay deep in layers of cones and needles. Lying on my back looking up, using the triangulation shadow method from the Boy Scout manual to measure the height of a tree, I calculated the tallest pine to be 200 feet, or approximately seven times taller than the tallest tree in the shortgrass country. Doesn't really matter, because if we were to plant a white pine tree, the scrub mesquites would choke it out before it was five feet tall.

Leaving the forest, the rent car's day rate ended and switched to an hourly charge. At 26 bucks every 60 minutes, we set a straight course to the Pittsburgh car rental agency, arriving in time to be swept off the sidewalks by throngs of baseball fans headed for the stadium.

We'd seen our first big league ballgame earlier in the week. The most exciting part of the game was watching the fans eat foot-long hotdogs. Hotdogs cost 35 cents an inch, or $4.20 each. If every one of the 26,000 ticketholders ate a hot dog, and each one contained 30 percent beef, the legal amount to call a hot dog a beef hot dog, we were in on 7200 feet of the action, or six ounces of beef times 7200. (I can't give the answer to 7200 x 6 without outside help.)

After I saw how much Pittsburgh baseball fans like hotdogs, I brought the couple running the bed and breakfast where we stayed before going to Erie, a package of hotdogs from a special packer in Erie as a present. They are called "Smith Frankfurters," and Mr. Smith hasn't learned to stuff 70 percent oatmeal into his sausages. But had I known our former hosts planned to farm us out to another "B and B" upon return, I'd have saved my hotdog money to buy a quart of milk to dissolve the sugar on the stale sweet rolls served for breakfast at the new place. No one, however, has ever claimed half the people can outsmart the travel game even half of the time. Next trip, I'll hold off on the presents until I can calculate the rewards.

July 19, 2001

July 26, 2001

Once in a dream, a cowboy foresaw "The Day of Grand Reckoning," the day all the bad cooks would be gathered and strangled by their own apron strings. His dream brushed reality the spring the Big Boss under a desperate recruitment brought "Good Eye" Jenkins to cook at the old ranch.

"Good Eye" descended from a jungle tribe that burns hardwood trees to make charcoal and cherishes the charred roots for food. "Good Eye's" chuck stayed at the tedious level before a gas flame turns matter to ash in every single kitchen episode excluding one fateful morning when he reversed his procedure by toasting the Boss' bread without turning on the oven.

The rest of the crew consisted of good hands willing to work. But on the third day of Good Eye's cooking, Saint Francis of Assisi would have had a hard time raising morale. A rider named Austin something-or-the-other left the house riding an old dummy named Charlie, as clumsy a piece of horseflesh as ever to grow a witch knot in his tail. In fact, had Charlie had a witch knot in his tail, which he didn't, the weight would have thrown him off balance.

Austin had drawn Charlie several times before. He was a seasoned hand, knew the slick ledge rocks on the east side as well as any of us. I was astounded to see him riding off with his rope tied hard and fast to the horn with not so much as a leather string for a neck rope. Talkative kid named "Pritchet" saved me the responsibility of reminding Austin how dangerous it was to ride ol' stumbling Charlie with one more hazard to hang to in the form of 36-thread manila loop. Austin never looked up. He replied, "Kid Pritchet, it'd be a merciful death to be dragged by ol' Charlie compared to that halfwit cook starving us to death."

A long time later, I started becoming serious about my cooking. Had to, living so far from a café and all the ranch cooks drawing big money cooking for deer camps. Cooks are like book lovers. We get to know each other. Wasn't long until the articles I wrote about food drew responses from readers who like to eat. Soon I was 35 cookbooks into the game and adding inventory every time I passed close to a book store. But last week, I received the biggest surprise of my new avocation. A guy from Central Texas sent a packet titled "Cowboy Recipes of Old."

I enclose the one named Lenora's Cowboy Stew for free:

Saute 1½ pounds of hamburger meat, add three or four cubed potatoes, add one chopped onion, and add one can of ranch beans. (She doesn't say, but I imagine it's a good idea to open the beans beforehand to allow the metallic aroma of the canned chili powder to dissipate in a ventilated kitchen.) Still stunned at the suggestion of hamburger meat as the base of the stew, I decided if I couldn't cook myself out of this mess, I'd write my way free. After awhile I came up with a concession in the form of a poem.

A Salute to Lenora and Her Cowboy Stew:

(Saute one and one half pounds of hamburger meat)
Lenora, as you see by the evidence above,
Hated cowboys,
Good ones and bad ones alike.
Her skillet and her stovetop
Were her weapons of choice:
Her code was the slower the kill, the better the bait.

(Add three or four cubed potatoes and one chopped onion)
If Lenora had been a black widow spider,
Her web would have sagged from her prey.
If Lenora had been a lighthouse keeper,
The fleet would have washed up on the shoals.
And if Lenora had led wagon trains west,
California would still belong to Mexico

(Add one can of ranch beans)
But as you can see from above,
Lenora hated cowboys,
Good ones and bad ones alike.
She sent many a puncher to flounce in his bed.
The ones able to survive lost hair and front teeth.
The ones left standing fled from her reach.

"Good Eye" Jenkins passed, so we heard, from a fall on the ice south of San Antonio, 200 miles below the frost line. Must have been an ice cube, as Good Eye always spilled more than he saved. Jose found old Charlie dead coming off the trail in the Round Hill trap. Whatever killed Charlie doesn't matter, but if he went to Heaven, the angels had better learn to kick both feet from the stirrups plenty fast.

July 26, 2001

August 2, 2001

In the late 1890s, my maternal grandfather freighted hay across the 09 Divide from Sherwood to Ozona by mules and wagon. Backhaul was dry mesquite wood to fuel the stoves in Sherwood. Included in his freighting days was the story of how this unfenced land burned off every summer from lightning storms. How the swags and flats teemed with prairie dog towns so void of mesquites, he carried wood underneath his wagon bed for part of the trip.

Forty years later, my family moved here to ranch a country of open prairie land. Only difference in the fire hazard was the other seasons also began to have grass fires. Men in huge numbers came from the small towns in pickups carrying barrels of water to wet burlap sacks and fight racing infernos threatening to burn our world. There were no livestock sprayers or volunteer fire departments. Nothing mechanical except the big red engines in San Angelo styled to fight house fires. We heard of, but never saw, a fire truck a big cow outfit owned on the west side of Irion County.

I remember once a burned strip three miles wide and eight miles long cut a north-south swath through the ranch. All summer long, we crossed the blackened earth to reach the other side of the ranch on ground as blistering hot as a planet's surface, mounted on old ponies drenched in a charcoal streaked sweat.

In the 1940s war years, the Air Force leased bombing sites over a wide scope of the Divide and onto the lands in the breaks. Student bombardiers dropped bombs on and off targets. As reported before, the fires really became serious during night time training missions using flares on parachutes to float and land miles away from the ranges. For the first time in my memory, a huge livestock loss occurred over east of the ranch. The size and number escapes recollection. I do know the bank foreclosed because Congress was so long approving the victim's claims.

But the most recent fire in June was caused by jumbo grasshoppers instead of lightning. Jumbos have taken the country. Stripped the leaves off all the plants mother left in the yard, climbed the telephone aerial pole and ate the insulation off the wires, and blocked the railroad crossing with piles of slick brown carcasses falling from the trains' cow catcher and pickup grille guards.

The arsonists, however, were the ones with beggar lice burrs built up between their bodies and hind legs. Every time one jumps, the burr striking against the sealed side of the hopper's body sparks and flickers the way the oldtime lamplighter's trail flared in the coming of nightfall. At night, the front yard sparkles like fireflies once lighted the scene. By midnight, the show ends in a lingering odor of burned beggar lice reminiscent of the smell from fireworks displays. Wonder the whole countryside isn't aflame with hundreds of six-legged pilot lights hopping in the dry fodder.

Living in the midst of this disaster has made me an expert in grasshopper behavior. Jumbo grasshoppers' favorite food is jumbo grasshoppers, dead or alive. Black beetles join the chain by scavenging the scraps of dead grasshopper left over by the cannibals. Beetles, however, don't last long eating grasshoppers. Stomach cramps set in, battering the insect's thick shell from within in a rumbling turmoil of indigestion. They also lock into a ball to fight an unnatural urge to jump caused by eating raw grasshopper parts. Ground squirrels on the J.L. Tankersley ranch east of Mertzon bite the heads off jumbos, so Mr. Tankersley claims. However, he says about the time you start depending on a ground squirrel to behead a grasshopper, he'll catch a glimpse of his shadow and hesitate too long to capture his prey.

The telephone man brought out a box of low-powered .22 shells the other day to drop the hoppers before they reach the aerial wire. Called "Aguilla's" from Mexico, the only audible sound is the firing pin striking the shell. Under such siege, silence is important. Hundreds of rounds can be fired without the grasshoppers locating the sniper. I was afraid to start shooting for fear I'd lose control and start blasting away at beetles, or moving shadows. (In shooting coupled grasshoppers, aim for the top hopper. Grasshoppers mate for life. Kill one at the right moment and the mate dies from grief.)

The fire they started roasted plenty of hoppers and caused a lot of black beetles to scorch their feet rushing in too fast to feed on the dead. We have had too much misery without a swarm of fire bugs adding to the dry weather. Sixteen grasshoppers rested on the back screen this morning, basking in the sun under a cloudless day. Wonder how much more sign it's going to take for us to know it's time to give ground.

August 2, 2001

August 9, 2001

Grandfather Noelke attended the first convention of the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers Association in 1915 at Del Rio. Del Rio was a fitting place for him to be joining sheepmen. His chance to own land came from herding his ewes on the free range between Devil's River and the Pecos River valley above Del Rio.

No trace remains of how he reached the first convention. He lived by then in the ranch's present location. If he took grandmother along and his three children, a good guess is a horse and buggy. I do know my 90-odd year-old cousin ranching down on the river drove him to later conventions in San Antonio after the advent of the automobile.

Optimists already warned the last convention might be near. Doomsayers fretted it was not only the last convention, but dangerous to attend in case the Customs office decided to deport us along with our old ewes going to Mexico. The collection of dues had changed from an automatic deduction on wool sales to a per-head levy copied from the hollow horn organization. It is set up to work on an honor system, and the memory returns how accurate the old system of collecting ad valorem taxes worked on the rendition of livestock. We were lighter stocked in Irion County then than we ever have been before or since.

In spite of having to cut across country on farm to market roads part of the way to reach Interstate 10, I was able to make the 160-mile drive to Kerrville without too much discomfort. Big thing on my mind was 330 head of solidmouth ewes I needed to sell stacked up in a 1000-acre pasture of dry stubble down on the highway. The only result from two weeks of advertising and stopping complete strangers on the road to make an offer was from a guy in Illinois who wanted to remind me of jump-starting my pickup one time at a truck stop in Central Texas. Made me feel worse, as I had to admit the old pickup was still hard to start.

Timing, I knew, had to be right at the convention to score. I left early, hoping to meet a prospect before the committee on marketing of lambs and wool read the annual eulogy to producers. I was so keyed up I stopped by the bus station in Junction to see if the ticket agent knew of a buyer for 330 solidmouth ewes. He acted like he didn't know how to tooth a sheep. Lots of those Junction cowboys used to raise good Angora goats, but I guess he wasn't part of the crew that sorted off the old nannies.

At the hotel, only one man in a white Panama hat dressed as a herder. He was quite cordial until I asked if he wanted to buy my ewes. His face filled in disbelief at such a preposterous idea. Then I remembered he had, among many of the world's treasures, a racing stable of fine-blooded running horses. We both kept clearing our throats. I was sure he was glad, as I was, when his wife called him over to the desk.

By nightfall, I thought of going home. After working the reception held by chemical companies, I was so downcast I accepted an invitation to eat at the Dairy Queen next door. A trainee took our orders, guided by a girl a year or so older. I had never eaten at Dairy Queen. Took several attempts to order a hamburger and lemonade from a kid inexperienced at coding "Belt Busters" and "Double Belt Busters."

By the time the girl punched the right keys, my companions were already unwrapping a big bun full of cold meat and cheeses and an anemic-looking taco. Just as I sat down, an old boy at the next table licked the lid of his salad dressing cup. At the same moment, the teacher slid my order on the table, punctuated by: "Anything else?"

I said, "Yes, am I going to have to lick the lid on this mustard cup like that fellow over there?" Adding I sure didn't like straight mustard. She snapped back that her job was to train employees, not customers. Before I explained that this was my first time to eat in a Dairy Queen, she wheeled and returned to schooling the kid on the computer.

At this writing, I am back at the ranch waiting for a truck to ship the ewes to Mexico via the Angelo market. Eight head watered before we penned the herd this morning. However, they have been drenched for stomach worms enough times with straight San Angelo water to be accustomed to the smell. So when they hit town they'll take on a water fill. I did my best to prolong their lives for two more years, but the curse of the weather and diminishing demand laid way for the killing block

August 9, 2001

August 18, 2001

Making the trip from San Angelo to Hartford, Connecticut means finding the right concourse in Dallas/Fort Worth to change planes, then allowing the swarms of passengers to sweep you to the correct gate. The wobbling wheels of the roll-on bags set the cadence for the last frantic lap to recover the time lost by the commuter's flight from San Angelo finding a parking place on the tarmac.

My son and daughter-in-law's home takes 30 minutes to get to from the airport. Thirty minutes of road time in Connecticut covers a lot of space. The State is 71 miles across at the widest point; 200 miles deep in the longest part. Land mass is 5540 square miles. (I read the atlas in spare moments. Started the habit writing themes in the fifth grade.) In comparison, driving from the ranch to San Angelo goes through three counties with an aggregate of more than 5000 square miles.

One of the wonderful features of the creaky 1779 inn where I stayed was listening to the rapids of the Farmington River way into the night. Fly fisherman abound around the inn. Until the maids turned the mattress over on my bed, I beat the fishermen up in the morning. A historical lump arched my back so severely that I walked the way zombies walked in the old-time movies. On top of the innkeepers' spreading ghost stories to bring in business, I had a serious anti-social hurdle to overcome lumbering around like Frankenstein.

Right over a bridge from the inn is Riverton, a small village centered on Hitchcock Furniture, an old custom manufacturer taking advantage of the hardwoods in the forests. Way back, Riverton was called "Hitchcockville," but I imagine some sorehead objected to the inference of living in a company town. Every morning on my walk, I peered in the cavernous display windows of the factory at dim outlines of carved wood tables and delicate colonial style dining room chairs.

Every morning, I drove down to my son's place before the factory opened. The last sign leaving the village was a red-lettered one reading, "Great Big Sale – Huge Close Out." At the sight, I'd start drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, trying to work off the passion to buy more furniture.

However, I needed to consider the future of the new granddaughter I was there to see. She was a month old. As beautiful as she is, she's destined to have rich suitors. The furniture in my paternal grandparents' house came from New England. Might have been from the Hitchcock factory. But as classy a lady as she will be, refined taste and such, she won't like the old stuff at the ranch. The people she'll be dating won't want to sit on rickety oak chairs in pressed linen trousers, or drag their English tailored coat sleeves on a rough-hewn dining table.

On the ground at my son's house, I concentrated on lecturing how to burp a baby and divert a diaper crisis instead of buying furniture. Burping is all I remember about helping raise the kids. After I'd walked three babies 30 miles back and forth across a 12x12 nursery from midnight feeding into the daylight hours, I began a search for a cure for wind colic. I discovered that holding the infant lying on my lap, facing my left when elevated to sitting position, at the same movement bringing the right-hand fingers extended under the left lower rib will relieve the most desperate case of colic known to the world of frightened and weary parents. (A baby blue whale gains 300 pounds a day on his mother's rich milk. The furious surfacing of the mother whale is connected to the exasperation of motherhood, ie. colic.)

If my recommendation so much as rated a nod, the signal slipped by unnoticed. I was a month too late to give advice on diapers, too. (Used to take six dozen per issue at the ranch before we had an automatic washing machine.) A bachelor down the road named Walter some-such had already convinced my son that cotton diapers are environmentally sound. But I shot that goofy idea to bits. Imagine what a 10-day New England blizzard means to wash day stranded in rooftop snow banks with an overflowing diaper pail. I knew I would have to compromise on the disposing of disposable diapers. But I had to answer to that objection. Just make a compost pile in the back yard of disposable diapers to mulch and fertilize next spring's organic garden, protected by a natural insecticide.

I guess I was wrong from the start thinking they wanted me to come for a visit as a consultant. I suppose they will accept a baby present if it's recycled furniture. Things will change when she's older. As smart as she'll be, she'll catch on that her granddad knows more than "old rusty diaper pail Walter."

August 18, 2001

August 23, 2001

Fellow we visited one night on the Connecticut trip said under the original charter of the English colonies, the state's boundaries reached the Pacific Ocean. He asked if I knew of similar cases. Only one I was able to think of was the hard winter Goat Whiskers the Younger free ranged his steers over at the Switch in the railroad right of way. However, Whiskers got a rain before he drifted his cattle as far as the terminus of the rails down on the Pacific coast of Mexico.

My host was becoming uneasy over the overpopulation of his state of some 550 people per square mile. However, the morning before, one of my son's horse magazines claimed Connecticut had the largest horse numbers in the U.S., or 10 head to the square mile. As much of the land surface is in roads and forests, not to mention houses and driveways, might be a good time to make a claim on the Midwest. Sounded like they already had enough horses and people to stock the country from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River.

Along with being the biggest horsemen in the nation, the advertisers are the most optimistic in the world, I think. Weaning colts by "Old Ferris Wheel" out of "Miss Corn Dodger" were priced at $3500. Been a long time since the Boss sold his weaning colts from registered stock, but using those asking prices, filly colts were up $3490 a head since we quit the business 35 years ago.

Mentioning horses was the only way to divert my son's attention from his new daughter. He is the boy I told you who bought the old Arizona saddle from Porter's Saddler off a feed store rack in New England. The one who awakens every morning and goes to bed every night homesick for the ranch. As a teaser to lure him home, I told him if he and his family would move back to the ranch, we could hire Frutuso Montemayor to build a brush arbor for his daughter to play under just like the one he had at the old ranch as a kid. While I was holding her on my shoulder later, I whispered in her ear to go along with her Mom and Dad until she was ready to come to Texas to live with her Grandpa. As high priced as horses are in Connecticut, considering her connections, we could make a pretty strong team green breaking colts to sell to her Yankee cousins.

For a Sunday outing, we loaded up the baby basket, car seat, and a diaper bag to go to a fair at Goshen, Connecticut. One percent of the population is left in agriculture. The size of the fairgrounds go back to the old days. Out of the 50 head of sheep on exhibition, I recognized one breed, the Suffolk. Right out the door from the swine show, a big food booth was selling barbecued spareribs fast as the ribs left the grill, showing what the pungent odor of meat and herbs smoking does to the city folks' movements. At the milk goat exhibit, I thought how deprived a people are who never taste kid goat roasted on mesquite coals the way Jose cooked cabrito at the ranch. Took my turn holding the baby so she could sense she'd never be hungry as long as her old Granddad had a trap to run a few Spanish nannies and enough strength in his hands to peel the backstrap from a whitetail deer.

Best part of the fair was taking her to see her first circus. Not many 30 day-old babies are offered such a treat as an old-time family circus of trained poodle dogs pushing baby carriages and daredevil high wire acts 10 feet off the ground. One improvement is that circus costumes seem modest now that women wear skimpy shorts and halters in public. In the days when dress collars hit an inch below milady's Adam's apple and hemlines fell 12 inches below her knees, a blonde headed trick rider in glittering gold tights made 15 year-old boys blush from ringside onto the midway. I'll have to remember to tell her when she's older that on circus days in Mertzon, the only ones in town who wanted us boys to join the circus more than the were the mothers. To this day, I still flinch at the sound of a screen door latch clicking shut behind me.

We were plenty tired after the fair. I am glad I didn't expand on Whisker's cattle ranging to the ocean. He'd of never passed Barnhart without the town dogs causing a stampede. Next move down here is going to be mailing an old saddle blanket to my son to transport a familiar smell from home. Indians talked in parables and signs. It's still a good way to reach us white eyes…

August 23, 2001

August 30, 2001

In last week's post, six photographs arrived of the Big Boss carousing with his old cronies. "Better forgotten and lost shots" must be in season. On the same day, my first cousin surfaced a nightclub photo of her husband way back before they were married in the 50s. He was in a rigged pose with his right arm clutching the shoulder of a smoldering black-headed girl.

"Rigged pose" remains an appropriate and definitive phrase, as a dim resemblance of myself appeared in the background over a big table of contemporaries. The picture was the work of a skilled forger able to switch images around on film and attach my cousin's husband's face to the actual person embracing this exotic raven-haired beauty. By further trick and alteration I cannot explain, he also placed my image behind the dominant scene of young revelers hiding whiskey bottles under the chairs and beer bottles below the tabletop.

My cousin shoved the picture in front of me at a lunch spot. The photograph was such a shock, I said, "Gosh-a-mighty, who is that black-headed dish?" Her husband was no help. He had passed through the Mexican food buffet. He kept rolling and unrolling his tamale in the shuck like he was going to pack a lunch. About that time I was wishing for four tamale shucks to stick in my big mouth.

After recovering, I agreed it was a clever forgery, that it couldn't be us as we were at church camp in Kerrville the date of the photograph.

"The camp," I explained, "was on the Guadalupe River 160 miles from Angelo honkytonks, or a day's travel for us on the bus. Furthermore, the camp would never have opened a Sunday service without our being on the front row."

Satisfied, or I was at least, I opened the envelope I'd received in the morning post marked "Photographs — Do Not Bend," to show her pictures of the "Big Boss." He was her big favorite in the family. I thought maybe seeing these pictures would divert her attention from the phony nightclub shot. But the sight of the Boss doing the "Cotton Eyed Joe" and a ringer or two more swinging a gal on his arm intensified the scene. A long time has passed since I've had a wife, but my instincts said the best thing to do was eat a small salad and excuse myself.

Once back at the ranch, I wrote a grandson a letter to warn him to destroy all prints and negatives of his summer trip to Europe. On a good run, he listens to 10 percent of my advice. (The danger point for ignoring elders is five percent, as they might mention an allowance increase or a rescue provision for a traffic ticket.) The best way to catch a teenager's attention, I've found, is to flash the picture of General Grant on a 50-dollar bill. The way to approach this lad, however, is to mention books. Then in a swift move insert: "Stop for red lights after midnight on Saturday night", or "Take out girls wearing green eye shadow in the winter months and save the fair skins for spring." (If you don't understand the last advice, please go on to the next paragraph.)
The way I'd messed up at lunch brought on more of a confessing mood than a preaching humor. I went into detail about how long I'd known my cousin's husband. Lamented bringing along the photographs of the Big Boss doing the "Cotton Eyed Joe" and the "Hey Mom-ma, Mom-ma There's Turkey in the Straw." Told him the only advice the Big Boss ever gave me was not to ever steal a bicycle in Hong Kong. Reminded him I'd been to Hong Kong two times, and it was still a sound idea not to steal bicycles over there. (See how smoothly I slipped that in.)

I don't know why things run in cycles. Other families treasure pictures of old Grandpa glaring from an oval frame, hiding his mouth with a big black bushy beard and his chest with a narrow-breasted suit and a string tie dangling from a shirt collar. The grannies pose in a lace shawl draped over a high-collared dress with all the kids gathered around, so posterity can find Uncle Herbert, Aunt Louise, and Dad. But, oh no, poor old cousin-in-law and I have to be tormented by some phony two-bit trick photographer's idea of a joke.

There's a dance in Kerrville on the 25th of August. While I'm in town, I am going to check the camp's archives. I'll show that scandalmonger he or she can't tarnish our reputation. Next time at lunch I'll be the one flashing the evidence and I sure won't have any of the Boss's past history to distract from the hearing.

August 30, 2001

August 30, 2001

In last week's post, six photographs arrived of the Big Boss carousing with his old cronies. "Better forgotten and lost shots" must be in season. On the same day, my first cousin surfaced a nightclub photo of her husband way back before they were married in the 50s. He was in a rigged pose with his right arm clutching the shoulder of a smoldering black-headed girl.

"Rigged pose" remains an appropriate and definitive phrase, as a dim resemblance of myself appeared in the background over a big table of contemporaries. The picture was the work of a skilled forger able to switch images around on film and attach my cousin's husband's face to the actual person embracing this exotic raven-haired beauty. By further trick and alteration I cannot explain, he also placed my image behind the dominant scene of young revelers hiding whiskey bottles under the chairs and beer bottles below the tabletop.

My cousin shoved the picture in front of me at a lunch spot. The photograph was such a shock, I said, "Gosh-a-mighty, who is that black-headed dish?" Her husband was no help. He had passed through the Mexican food buffet. He kept rolling and unrolling his tamale in the shuck like he was going to pack a lunch. About that time I was wishing for four tamale shucks to stick in my big mouth.

After recovering, I agreed it was a clever forgery, that it couldn't be us as we were at church camp in Kerrville the date of the photograph.

"The camp," I explained, "was on the Guadalupe River 160 miles from Angelo honkytonks, or a day's travel for us on the bus. Furthermore, the camp would never have opened a Sunday service without our being on the front row."

Satisfied, or I was at least, I opened the envelope I'd received in the morning post marked "Photographs — Do Not Bend," to show her pictures of the "Big Boss." He was her big favorite in the family. I thought maybe seeing these pictures would divert her attention from the phony nightclub shot. But the sight of the Boss doing the "Cotton Eyed Joe" and a ringer or two more swinging a gal on his arm intensified the scene. A long time has passed since I've had a wife, but my instincts said the best thing to do was eat a small salad and excuse myself.

Once back at the ranch, I wrote a grandson a letter to warn him to destroy all prints and negatives of his summer trip to Europe. On a good run, he listens to 10 percent of my advice. (The danger point for ignoring elders is five percent, as they might mention an allowance increase or a rescue provision for a traffic ticket.) The best way to catch a teenager's attention, I've found, is to flash the picture of General Grant on a 50-dollar bill. The way to approach this lad, however, is to mention books. Then in a swift move insert: "Stop for red lights after midnight on Saturday night", or "Take out girls wearing green eye shadow in the winter months and save the fair skins for spring." (If you don't understand the last advice, please go on to the next paragraph.)
The way I'd messed up at lunch brought on more of a confessing mood than a preaching humor. I went into detail about how long I'd known my cousin's husband. Lamented bringing along the photographs of the Big Boss doing the "Cotton Eyed Joe" and the "Hey Mom-ma, Mom-ma There's Turkey in the Straw." Told him the only advice the Big Boss ever gave me was not to ever steal a bicycle in Hong Kong. Reminded him I'd been to Hong Kong two times, and it was still a sound idea not to steal bicycles over there. (See how smoothly I slipped that in.)

I don't know why things run in cycles. Other families treasure pictures of old Grandpa glaring from an oval frame, hiding his mouth with a big black bushy beard and his chest with a narrow-breasted suit and a string tie dangling from a shirt collar. The grannies pose in a lace shawl draped over a high-collared dress with all the kids gathered around, so posterity can find Uncle Herbert, Aunt Louise, and Dad. But, oh no, poor old cousin-in-law and I have to be tormented by some phony two-bit trick photographer's idea of a joke.

There's a dance in Kerrville on the 25th of August. While I'm in town, I am going to check the camp's archives. I'll show that scandalmonger he or she can't tarnish our reputation. Next time at lunch I'll be the one flashing the evidence and I sure won't have any of the Boss's past history to distract from the hearing.

August 30, 2001

September 6, 2001

Oak trees divide the lanes approaching Mertzon from the south and west. Visitors locate the small ranch and oil town by the oaks in the middle of the highway. Enhanced by the Highway Department's addition of a curbed lawn and shade trees, the approach resembles an entrance to a country estate, or a country club.

The exit on to San Angelo, however, is equally spectacular. Savala's concrete tank works on the right features pinto-colored goats climbing on wrecked cars. Hamilton's flea market stands at full inventory a block on the left. Down the road, a real estate lady and her husband live up under the shade of a huge oak tree adjoining the now defunct horse and mule pens. "Defunct," I suspect, because the fellow running the place was so much more honest and dependable than his product. (Horse traders the world over are scorned for being dishonest. Be advised there is no beast breathing as full of surprises as a horse, especially one changing owners.)

On Saturday evenings driving in from the west, I pass the ruins of the Oak Grove Café, a spot where folks danced every weekend in the 1940s. Rolling into town, the site is vacant where the Boyd's Super Exxon Service of a tin garage once rattled in the wind, offering shade to a few prominent young men, long on time and short on a suitable watering spot. Next to Boyd's lot is the Mertzon Locker Plant in the "Doc" Sorrel's pool hall building. "Doc" really let the community down, dying without leaving his pool hall in an irrevocable trust.

In town, I try to visualize how the near-empty main street, locked in a somnolence only interrupted by the bells ringing on the self-service gas pumps, looks to high school graduates spending a last summer home. Wonder if they think, as we once thought, that city folks live in perpetual excitement and constant diversion. Stationed at my town house near the school, the smooth cheeks rumble by in sport cars and black pickups, mufflers drumming the mating call of the machine age, severing the final cord to class and grounds. I flinch as a motorcycles roars through the stop sign on the corner, carrying a rider without a helmet the exact age of my boys when they once did wheelies on dirt bikes in the city park.

A long ago vigil comes back of an intensive care waiting room, watching parents and grandparents sitting numbed by grief and racked with guilt. Stunned to an inner silence while tubes gurgled in the body of a teenager — their teenager — clinging to life by the thinnest thread from a rollover with a Corvette or a Harley Davidson. ("Make good grades and Mamaw and me will buy you a hulk of steel more deadly than a rocket launcher or a torpedo tube.")

Then the drive home at night, furious at the sputter of every motorbike peeling away from the intersections, defying concussion and collision, they rider wearing a baseball cap to deflect concrete or steel. Driving and cursing every sports car for thundering through speed zones, running red lights, sound waves pulsing with booming music played by a driver slumped on one door in complete disregard for personal or community safety. Next, to cringe at the thought of being as out of step and old fashioned as a Mennonite farmer harnessing a black horse to a black buggy to go to town for supplies.

But back to one Saturday. I shut off the water and walked up to the front of the school. Found I was looking through the same eyes that looked at the same tan cut stone school building all those years ago. Same eyes seasoned by 56 summers, but a different projector and film in place. I couldn't say I still didn't yearn to make a touchdown or hit a home run, but I was over wanting to go to Hollywood, or be in the rodeo at Madison Square Garden.

My last direct contact with the school was a graduation announcement followed by a wedding invitation from a kid who mowed my yard his junior year. Along with a $50 check, I wrote that if that was too much to come by and mow part of the yard. If fifty wasn't enough, I'd come by and mow his yard until we were even. He hasn't answered. I remember him being more interested in playing tennis than written work. He might have stopped by the courts for a few sets and forgotten our deal.

Until way in the night the throb of motors coasting through the stop signs by the house interrupt the stillness of the country town. I hope the bills on the caps turned backwards will protect the active little rascals. I am thankful mine are grown and through doing motorcycle tricks in the park…

September 13, 2001

Recent newspaper articles claim San Angelo is in better shape nowadays for water than during the dry 50s.

The city mains are hooked up to three new lakes, holding a whopping 15-month supply of water. Lakes — one, at least — have gained from August rains, increasing the margin. The ideal scenario would be to draw down on the current supply, then have a big flood fill the basins with fresh water.

I haven't tested a glass since the run-off, but the last time I was served water in a café, the lemon juice the waiter squeezed in the glass turned the contents a milky color, indicating an aging in body and flavor.

Forty or 50 thousand more people live within the city limits, or about double the population of the 50s drouth. As I reported before, after a city passes 90,000, the rate of expiration increases the humidity in the atmosphere, making a city need less water. The best evidence is that the outdoor March rodeo and stock show in San Angelo, once known for raging, blinding dust storms, now performs in front of fans packed indoors, breathing over snowcones and soda water. Fogs float up in the dome of the building. Caretakers know to expect early morning dews on the wet sand in the arena.

Small towns lack this advantage. Until Mertzon had eight inches of rain last month, oak trees 300 years old wilted in the heat. Boot and saddle leather cracked from dryness. Seven or eight hundred souls aren't enough to fog up the windshield of a Volkswagen, much less change the atmosphere of three square miles of townsite.

Nevertheless, one morning as I was walking by the Mertzon coffeehouse, the glass door looked overcast. On closer inspection, the haze turned out to be from fumes off the tobacco the local windmill man, "Possum" Martin, rolls into cigarettes. Oldtime windmill men, going back to the days of climbing towers and working on greasy tables, developed a bellows-powered lung action to keep a cigarette lit in high winds. "Possum" has a pulling unit nowadays, but he still draws on a cigarette the way sailors took a drag on their pipes riding the masts of a sailing ship on the high seas. So I just happened to pass by as he expelled a huge cloud of smoke, moistened by the saliva seal of the cigarette paper. (The only smoke-free area the cafe has is the parking lot.)

For sure, Mertzon wasn't hurt as bad by the drouth this time as before. The payroll at the Conoco gas plant and the various jobs serving oil wells changed the picture. By 1955, about all the traffic through town were salesmen checking by in hopes of an order. The main activity at the lumberyard was sweeping out every morning and locking up in the evening. Down at the wool house, the manager and the warehouseman loaded feed the year around, advancing credit to customers on wool clips that had dropped from thousands of fleeces to the hundreds or less.

I didn't borrow money from the Mertzon bank in those days. The main pin at the bank sat at a desk up front, defending the jug's capital with a threatening scowl tempered by his Scotch ancestry. Took all my emotional and most of my physical strength to face the jugkeepers over at the San Angelo National Bank. Old man J.J. Mathew, the vice president in charge of my notes, kept his desk so enshrouded in cigar smoke that for years thereafter, I'd tremble at the downdraft off a stogie. By the time the rain came in 1957, however, due to the tenacity of us better tenders of hooves and horns, we had pulled the entire banking community from Fort Worth to El Paso on into New Mexico down into equities that'd make a lottery player think he was holding an upper hand.

Now that it's raining around, I feel more comfortable stopping by to drink free coffee at the Mertzon bank. Instead of a scowling Scotchman buffering the trade, smiling officers wave from polished desks and chipper tellers and alert receptionists greet customers. If I recognize a pickup out front belonging to one of my contemporaries, I go on to the ranch. I like a fresh audience. No use going in to remind the youngsters that the bank ought to be loaning money on livestock instead of cars and bass boats if every gray-whiskered hombre in town is going to preach the same sermon.

Newscasters and scribes enjoy free rein comparing the drouth of the 50s to the one starting in 1992, as witnesses are about gone from the first one. The weather has been dry so long, we don't want to be tricked by a few thunderstorms. Doesn't matter which drouth is worse, unless you are going to organize a debating team. I just wish this one would officially end before there's no question of it being the worst dry spell in history.

September 20, 2001

From 1961 until Stanley Frank died in 1994, I wrote him a letter every Saturday morning that changed into this column. This thought caught me by surprise one evening after dark on a solitary ride horseback.

Dear Stanley, as hard as you tried editing all my stuff all those years, datelines and places keep disappearing tonight. Doesn't matter where you are or where I am, come Saturday morning, the deadline falls to send you a column. After you passed on, I felt like nine-tenths of my audience disappeared and all my ambition.

However, forget the rule of time and place for once, Stanley. It's unimportant where the imagery hits at the moment, except the mountains are tall ones streaked in purple and orange-tinged dawn. Maybe it's a flashback from the trip we made to the Martin ranch close to Magdalena. The alkali flats are changing to a cream color splotched by rusty sandstone among the lone tufts of burro grass. I am holding a headstall hanging in the notch of my right thumb and grasping the reins in my left hand. A Mexican cowboy pens the horses. He looks like I think Catarino looked in his younger days on your step-dad's outfit, bringing in all those Aldwell and Johnson bay black mane and tail Thoroughbreds, bucking and crowding through the gate.

Is "Cato" gone, too? Last time I saw him was on the coyote drive on the Rocker B — 10, maybe 15 years ago. After we'd unsaddled, we were so delighted to see each other that we rode into the headquarters on a jeep shod with foam rubber tires. The jeep bucked so much and the wind was so high, we had to shout to hear each other. Wish we could have spent the afternoon together, but "Cato" had to be back at Barnhart for his grandson's birthday party. If he is around, (and I'll try to do the same here,) ask him if he remembers the spring we made so many before daylight and after dark trips the 90 miles to the Sonora ranch that the old red-headed kid of a cowboy Cal hired from East Texas fell asleep on the milk stool one night.

Yes, I know you never approved of my wandering off the subject. But in the opening scene, the horse wrangler smiles and says "buenos dias," shaving 50 years off the script. He looks like "Cato" did sitting up straight in the saddle on "Flagman." The young boys standing around wearing knee high leggings they call "chinks" could be the boys we knew who used to wear "batwings" or "shotguns," but they aren't. We all face the corral and the kicking and back-biting turmoil of a band of loose horses. One thought stays the same, Stanley. The hidden one, you know the one: "Gawd, I hope they don't cut me that fierce brute of a sorrel, blaze face of a sapsucker." But they don't and they won't cut a graybeard a snuffy horse.

Had I known the privileges of gray hair, I'd have dyed my whiskers 40 years ago. Remember how we laughed about a charter pilot at El Paso who tinted his hair to look older. The pilot you hired to fly us across the Sierras to Hermosillo, Mexico, the first year you flew a twin-engine plane? His name was Art Butterfield.

In those days people had names easy to remember. Sometime or another, folks became hard to place. Maybe the government is to blame for identifying everybody by social security numbers. It's sure aggravating to know a ranch's brand, but not be able to find the owner's name in the phone book. To make more complications, telephone numbers are printed nowadays so an "eight" looks like a "three." When Mrs. Barfield ran the switchboard at Barnhart, I bet there weren't five wrong numbers rang a year over her system, and all five of those wrong numbers were probably the times she visited her sister and left her husband Bud running the office.

Before a horse was ever roped, the scene changed from imagination to the reality of riding down the east fence of the Devil's River pasture at dusk. My pony is a Mexican citizen branded "MR" on his left hip and named "Shineman." He knows to follow the deer trail skirting the crumbly dirt by the playa lakes as darkness dims our sight. He knows also we have one rocky crossing to make. Knows we have to pick our way through the rocks as we can't chance the rotten ground of the lake bed. As we reach the rocks, Stanley, I kick my feet loose in the stirrups and sing "Crawdad Hole" the way I sang the time you flew us home dodging those big thunderheads on the Plains.

Once over the rocks, we reach good ground. One hundred frames of the past flicker by in the now darkness. I know I am going to write you soon. By the way, I saw old what's-his-name the other day at the barbershop, the hotshot who used to shoot pool at the Elks Club. Fellow at the grocery store from Water Valley looked familiar, but seemed to have a different wife than the one we knew. You sure got us in and out of a lot of jams. I hope you'll forgive me for not keeping the times or the places straight. Asi no mas, Monte...

September 27, 2001

Going north and west from the shortgrass country toward New Mexico, each year more landmarks disappear. Hard to spot a familiar gate, or a faded sign lettered in branding paint, tearing along on a four-lane highway at 70 miles per hour. Difficult to pick up the monument on a hill old man so-and-so erected after World War One to honor "the Cause," or where mister such-and-such and his wife built a red stone ranch house walled two feet think, reinforced with tempered steel and special mortar.

Also, so much land lies sub-divided and plowed into fields that ranch history lies desecrated by red and blue buntings strung on slanted ropes and blighted by greasy tractor sheds and long rows of cropland. Now and then, a county lane brings back long-ago bull buying expeditions, or dropping off a mare of the Boss's to be bred.

But verbalizing such a litany is hard to transmit surrounded by racing Volkswagens sending a lube oil haze to the skies, and clattering diesel rigs smoking the road with soot.

When greatest of great-grandfathers rode northwest from Angelo to the Llano Estacado in the 1870s to buy cattle from his friend Charles Goodnight, he might have passed a few homesteaders' garden plots of broken ground, but he sure didn't see any sub-divisions. We only have record of one trip, left by one of his daughters. She wrote: "Daddy said on the way up to Mr. Goodnight's, a drifter stopped at his camp for supper. Next morning, the fellow robbed his saddlebags while he cooked breakfast. Then he said the drifter's horse kept setting back tailed to a pack mule, but he wanted to find water before he turned the old pony loose." She concluded by writing, "Daddy wasn't much of a talker. Was kind to horses, and unforgiving of his enemies."

On my trip to New Mexico a week ago, I was short on new stories or a fresh audience. My traveling partner had already heard 10 times how Highway 87 paralleled a big Indian trail up the North Concho River. She knew the greatest of great-grandfather story as well as I did. Closest I came to new material was a quote from my old pal Horace Kelton's recent letter of a cowboy fishing a rusty Colt six-shooter from a dug well on his grandfather's ranch. I saved the tale to tell as we passed by his grandpa's old headquarters at Broome, Texas between Water Valley and Sterling City.

My opening showed a flair for drama. "You can't see the well from the road. (See how this builds interest? What well?) Trees also cover the tracks the stagecoach once made up this long valley, attracting Robin Hood bandits to prey on the booty of the trade."

Hoping to spur her attention, I continued: "But one morning, Horace wrote, a cowboy fished a pearl-handled, silver-plated Colt from a dug well on the far hill. (A slight embellishment here to seed the idea that the pistol may have belonged to the infamous Old Mexico bandido, Marietta.) Caused quite a stir around the headquarters as the Broomes were still mighty sensitive to such evidence from a number of familial indiscretions committed back in Mississippi during the Reconstruction Era of the late 1860's. ("Bushwhacking Yankees" omitted to protect the guilty.)

At that time, however, Grandfather Broome passed on a code of the West that was to serve his grandson Horace through a long career as a Western novelist. He told him, "Boy, leave some questions alone."

I slowed down in case she wanted to go back for a better look at the hill. However, even breathing by a face covered with a newspaper is the worst rating a roadway guide can receive.

Given the chance, I could have shown her where Horace and his Uncle George Broome spilled a herd of weaned calves crossing the highway. I never was sure, but I always thought I knew the pasture where Horace's horse fell, ending his cowboy career in a broken back. One part I am certain of is that his Uncle George stayed mighty sore at Horace for letting his horse fall and break the tree in a good R.J. Andrews saddle.

Reports continue to spread of oral historians taping oldtimers' tales. Out at Mertzon all that's ever taped is on recording machines hooked to a telephone. For the rest of the day, we played mystery book tapes. Next time Horace comes home from Costa Rica, I am going to request a revised description of the six-shooter the cowboy found in his grandpa's well. The closest Marietta ever raided was 900 miles south of Water Valley, but he might have made a vueltathrough there just to see the scenery and dropped his pistol while mirroring his handsome reflection in the water well.

, October 4, 2001

From the ranch to Cloudcroft, New Mexico, the elevation ascends from 2550 feet to 9000 feet above sea level. Ground travel time runs seven to eight hours. The time change from Mountain to Central shows a one-hour loss.

The most dramatic ascent is after coming off the plains into the flatlands of New Mexico at 3000 feet to make the final climb to Cloudcroft. Until the highway was built in early 1940, a rail spur brought all the freight and passengers up the steep slope of the mountain range. Lowland families of style and means fled the hotter climates to the luxurious railroad hotel on the summit.

Dim recollections remain of a great uncle and his wife in Fort Worth spending the summer in Cloudcroft in the 1930s. He made all his dough practicing medicine. However, the rest of the family, all Depression-strapped herders, realized he belonged to the upper class after a niece visited and reported the good doctor and his spouse kept cats inside their two-story brick home. We knew then we had a rich uncle. In all the shortgrass country, the only cats living under cover were tabbies lucky enough to find a hole underneath the house.

She claimed the doctor's cats ate liver from the butcher shop, but we didn't believe "Ol Unc" or anyone else had that much money.

Once the Cloudcroft highway was built, it took a few years for truckers to learn not to dive the steep roads without cooled brakes. Nothing special, however, has to be done to the carburetors of automobiles. I do have to pocket my hearing aids, or the sudden change in altitude will pop them out every time I swallow. Women experience difficulty applying makeup for awhile. The thin mountain air causes such severe inflating and deflating of the lungs in flatlanders that panting to catch their breaths, putting rouge on milady's cheeks or dabbing lipstick on her quivering lips is like trying to draw a brand on a humpy cow in an open chute.

The best way to explain the difference is by comparing girls who summer in the mountains to visitors. I ate breakfast the first morning in a six-stool restaurant presided over by a blonde, green eye-shadowed, red-rouged lady wearing black lipstick coordinated with her shoes and mesh stockings. Over at a table against the wall, a younger lady just in from Dallas complexion-matched the pattern of her hot cakes. You couldn't tell whether she was looking at the pancakes or just her reflection in the plate.

At dinner, a double for the waitress seated us in the dining room of the old railroad hotel. She patronized the same beautician as the other lady, unless there were two bottles of peroxide and an extra palette of face paints in Cloudcroft. Seated about were fashionable ladies decked in white pearls and coifed in ash gray hair touching dark black dresses. Under candlelight, shadows concealed cosmetic success or failure.

Subdued piano music enhanced an aura of romance more potent than a fullblown case of "moonlight lunacy." Young men, in particular, leaned as far over the linen-covered tables as torsos permitted, gazing into their table mate's eyes with a passion as blinding as a double-stitched eyepatch and as hot as the tip of a soldering iron. I wanted to warn those lads that the misty eyed look in the girls' eyes might be from the mountain air fogging their contacts, but gaining a lovesick man's attention runs 75 to one against success, and the odds increase 10 points every hour until daybreak.

The fellow renting the cabins said his business was off 30 percent this summer. He claimed that about the time people became resigned to high gasoline prices, an arsonist set a forest fire 30 miles from town and spooked off more folks. The only mention of the black bear menace was the night he mapped a foot trail to climb up to the hotel. "Saves six miles of driving: just don't stumble onto a bear." The Roswell newspaper the day before reported a ninety year-old woman being killed by a black bear, so I turned down his gas-saving tip in favor of a ride around the lighted highway.

The descent back to the lower country is marked by directions and distances to escape routes for trucks without brakes. Small orchards and guest ranches dot the few smooth places in the canyons. Vistas from the road give the full flavor of New Mexico looking across a vast desert of white sand to a horizon of craggy purple mountains. I wondered how "Uncle" and "Auntie" felt riding the railroad spur the first leg going home to Fort Worth so many decades ago. Funny no one in the family ever mentioned what happened to them or their house full of cats.

October 11, 2001

To reach Santa Fe from Cloudcroft, we looped down south to Las Cruces to avoid detours, then headed north. The loop itself is quite a detour of 80 New Mexico miles plus an excess of 1000 to 1500 feet per mile to cover dips and compensate for the gales of wind rocking the car off course.

Out of state motorists observe the speed limits. The locals, however, drive the way they drove 30 years ago in the days of racing across the desert on narrow roads, pressing the accelerator so hard that bugs splattering on the windshield splashed into the right-of-way. (One reporter covering New Mexico for the Livestock Weekly used to slow down to 75 for towns to hold an average of 90 on the straight-aways.)

Station wagons filled with kids need the most sympathy. Billboards stand too far apart to catch attention. Aren't any roadside desert animals to break the monotony. The coyotes have killed off the jackrabbits and antelopes. After boys are on the verge of becoming punch drunk from fighting, funny books and car games expire before the combatants have rested. (The best remedy for scuffling among brothers is before departing cut a strip of one-inch tape long enough to tie each boy's elbow to his rib cage. Ninety percent of the inter-sibling battles start from one boy elbowing his seat mate.)

At Las Cruces, we headed north on Interstate 25 toward Santa Fe. My partner drove and I scanned the mountains, aiming my mind's eye to the San Andreas Range. On the other side of the mountains, I was afraid to look across the White Sands Missile Range. I'm unsure, but I think a herder was accused of being nosy, glassing the missile site for wolves a federal agency allegedly released without holding a local hearing. (I never have used allegedlybefore. How well do you think the word replaces the truth that the "Feds" did turn wolves onto the White Sands?)

But I was studying the San Andreas Mountains hoping to see the pass where the western writer Eugene Manlove Rhodes ranched and was buried. In case you missed reading him, he wrote short stories and magazine serials for The Saturday Evening Post in the 1930s. He'd been a cowboy — a horse wrangler on a big New Mexico outfit at 14. One story is that he saved soap coupons to buy his first saddle. Another version is he that saved the coupons from cigarette papers discarded around camp and the bunkhouse to order books. I prefer the latter image of Mr. Rhodes shaded up, herding the remuda, and reading English literature.

I already knew the country from Mr. Rhodes' vivid description in the "Paso Por Aqui" story. I thought once I spotted the two old windmills the hero took as a mark to locate an Indian road, dodge a posse and save the strength of his horse, Miel. Last I'd heard, his stories were collectors' items. One more fleeting thought of Mr. Rhodes returned while passing by a small town below Albuquerque. It was from J. Frank Dobie's tribute to him: "His sense of justice was so strong, he refused to ever return to one New Mexico town after a man was stomped to death in front of the post office."

Fiesta Weekend was on in Santa Fe, yet rooms at the inn where we stayed off an obscure side street were empty. (Note, this was before the September 11 tragedy.) The Spanish family running the place blamed an over-expansion of hotels and the addition of lodging out at the casino the Indians own north of town. It was a shock to check in and find the parking garage empty.

The city certainly was full. Down the narrow sidewalk passing the inn, young men in black coats covering white shirts escorted beautiful girls wearing their first dancing shoes. All were in a rush to join the swirling crowds of street dancers and to later be refreshed in the food booths. We made a stab at circling the plaza, but it doesn't take much of a crowd to turn back a citizen of Mertzon. The only free space was around the blue-coated policemen guarding the blocked streets. Well, there was plenty of room by a bar right outside the barrier, hosting a blaring hard rock band and harboring a dozen or more motorcycles parked on the front lot.

Road fatigue combined with altitude sickness forestalled making the bishop's Sunday morning parade to the cathedral, the only part of the Fiesta dignified enough for a graybeard. I thought I'd recovered until I tried to revive the fire in the fireplace and discovered I didn't have the wind to spark a flame. I was strong enough by lunch to sit in the garden behind the inn and look at

Santa Fe must be the right elevation to encourage man to spend his money. Adobe brick houses the Spanish once built for a handful of reales, using mud and Indian slaves, cost several hundred thousand dollars today and use a plaster nowhere near as durable. The owners of the inn where we stayed spent a million dollars years ago, razing their grandfather's small store to make room on the property for 15 units and a new kitchen and dining room.

As I reported once, each sibling takes a day each week to cook breakfast for the guests and supervises the cleaning of the hostelry. Concha, the mother, spends her mornings talking to the customers in the breakfast room. As a young girl in the 20s, she worked as an elevator operator at La Fonda Hotel, then one of the most popular hotels in New Mexico, if not the Southwest. The experience broadened her education, being removed from a strict Spanish home and church regimen to meeting celebrities ranging from Hollywood actors to state officials.

Please allow me to relate a sequence Concha and I had on one of those mornings. I had read the results of a poll in the morning paper showing that 60 percent of the Hispanic people and 40 percent of the Angelos didn't think they were doing enough to care for aging parents. My dilemma was not the percentages, but to find the answer as to what was enough to look after aging parents. Concha explained, holding the palm of her hand on her heart, "The Spanish people have carino, meaning love and affection toward the old. But where families once only had to buy Grandma one pair of shoes a year and a little flour and beans, today she takes off on a cruise in the Caribbean, hunting for a boyfriend." (Concha had just returned from California, using a wheelchair like a rick-shaw to change planes.)

She continued, "Once the sons stayed home and turned their salary over to Mom and Dad. The only time they left was to fight a war. Nowadays, men go everywhere."

She wasn't indicting her son at that moment; he was cooking my breakfast in the kitchen. I had already completed my business with one of her daughters the morning before. Last year when I was passing through town, she crawled under my pickup and wired a thick rubber shield off a rear wheel. She used twice too much wire. At the first mud hole, clods hung up against the bed, making a scratchy racket so loud I couldn't hear my cell phone.

However, I caught her at a bad time for a scolding. Lupe, the maid, had given notice that she had to start staying home to look after her mother, leaving Concha's daughter Heniretta, my mechanic, to not only juggle the pots and pans in the kitchen, but clean the rooms and do the laundry. Lupe came by telling all of us goodbye. (I'd met her before. She held the rubber shield in place while Heniretta tied the wire.) From the second floor, I watched Lupe hurl her cap and apron in the closet of the utility room. Saw her park the vacuum cleaner in a final thrust of locking the handle with the same determination ranch wives used to stomp cup towels and kick the cat out the kitchen door.

I prevailed upon Lupe to stay until my visit ended to make up my bed as my hands were too stiff and frail to smooth the covers, my back too weak to sweep or vacuum, or haul wood for the fireplace. "And with no fire in the fireplace, Lupe, you of all people know how dangerous it is for us viejos to be chilled in the mountain air."

Tears formed in her dark, beautiful eyes. The poll showed a 60 to 40 chance in my favor of gaining her sympathy. But the polls must have been too narrow. Lupe was determined to knock off for Fiesta Weekend to start home care. She answered in such rapid Spanish that I only caught the part to go soak my hands in warm Epsom salts to make my fingers limber enough to make my bed.

The rest of the day was awful. Walking across the capital grounds, a big pinecone used my shoulder to deflect the velocity of 35 feet of free fall. The crisp outdoor restaurant off the square was closed. The substitute selection at a hotel dining room was as dull as a hospital stay. Further provocation came from a sign in the lobby: "Join us for Afternoon Tea and Sherry." I was so downcast over Lupe's defection, I left a note on my business card declining not only this afternoon's tea, but all future invitations. I wasn't about to have tea in a franchise hotel lobby, trimmed in plastic doodads and fake flowers.

By evening, the crisp mountain air revived my spirits. Things look better. The bed was made up. Concha and her clan had overcome the disaster.

October 18, 2001

Out of Santa Fe heading northwest to Colorado, we chose a longer route to go by the artist Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch. First, however, you need to know, or be reminded, that New Mexico people take the rules they make more seriously than federal or state law. For example, in Abique, the closest town to O'Keeffe's ranch, there's an ominous sign forbidding photographs within the village limits. Abique sits under cottonwood branches, enveloped in a historic aura of Spanish architecture, framing the most photogenic temptations to test.

The sign, however, means the sheriff, the judge and the jury live here in the form of one person. Furthermore, the First Amendment ended when we passed over the cattle guard at the village boundaries, along with the other 26 amendments in tow. I know in Coyote, New Mexico, the site of the famous moonlight photograph of a cemetery by Ansel Adams, the residents put visitors to flight before cameras are loaded, focused, or unpacked.

Miss O'Keeffe's seven and one-half acres were the right size outfit for an artist to run. Her vista, however, captured endless miles of the light and color of the Southwest. The folks running the place, the Presbyterian Church, encourage all the arts. Dormitories and cafeteria support week-long writing and painting workshops. The bulletin board announced day trips to Santa Fe ending at the opera. The relaxed atmosphere was reinforced by volunteers harvesting apples and tidying up around the grounds.

The strange part was the paucity of Georgia O'Keeffe's painting and no reference to the location of her ranch or ranch house. Why was it named Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch Museum, then? One guess is that the 3100 acres open to the public belonging to the Presbyterian Church landlocks the Ghost Ranch either by survey or a case number in district court. But I couldn't find any evidence of where the O'Keeffe ranch was, or who controlled it. I looked around the museum for information, like a map or photograph. We ask a lady in the office the location. She gave a vague reply. Vague enough to make dropping the subject seem to be the best idea.

Back on the road, we ate lunch at a roadside park, looking toward the canyons and washes and peaks of Miss O'Keeffe's canvas conceptions. Clouds floated over yellow, pebble-strewn earth, exposing the jagged rocks and woven crevices cut in cliff walls. A scene too vast to use binoculars. A scene to well captured by Miss O'Keeffe's paints and brushes to behold by an amateur.

Onto Colorado, I navigated on a course so true, the feat would have made Galileo think he was shooting off a falling star. I made every turn correctly, used the right turn signals, stopped in time for stop signs, dodged shards of tire on the road, gave buzzards space to take flight, and observed the speed limit to a tenth of a mile precision. Then upon arrival in Mancos, Colorado, for the night, I got lost in a place not much larger than Mertzon while looking for the only three-story house in town.

The lady running the bed and breakfast caused the error. In her sales talk, she said, "Your room overlooks Mesa Verde National Park six miles away." Monitoring the odometer every five-tenths of a mile, I turned off at a bed and breakfast sign six miles from Mesa Verde National Park on a road so rough it's notched the blade of a road grader.

After a tense debate over directions, my partner suggested she drive awhile, suggesting perhaps I was too tired to stay under the wheel. I was too tired, but I wasn't out of ideas. Back in Mancos, I asked her to ask a lady jogging the way to the bed and breakfast, using sound reasoning that in a burg as small as Mancos a jogger had to lap town 10 times to get any exercise. The big black and tan looking pooch on her leash must have been a seeing eye dog. She said she hadn't noticed a three-story house in Mancos. Was I sure it wasn't in Cortez?

After a few more blocks we turned to go back to the highway and drove right up to the B and B. The owner was an ex airline hostess. She uses air miles to locate Mesa Verde instead of ground distances. She must have served in the first class cabin, as she brought out a very fine glass of wine for my partner much superior to the raw vintage kitchen brands offered by most innkeepers. As a last thought before taking a nap, I figured maybe the people at O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch Museum might be related to the lady jogger some way. Could be they never have noticed the location of the Ghost Ranch.

October 25, 2001

On the Colorado part of the trip, we reached the gate to Mesa Verde National Park moments before opening time. The ranger held us up for two minutes to pass. I'd raced to be early to beat the Winnebago caravans climbing the lofty roads. Causes dizzy spells to follow along behind a mishmash of bumper stickers plastered on the back of a bus, especially if a wheel on an upside-down bicycle is spinning on a bumper rack.

Gatekeepers at national parks must be assigned the post to work their dyspepsia off on the public. Seemed the ranger checking my pass and handing over a folder of directions wore the same expression of contempt on a turnip-colored face fitted under a Boy Scout hat as the one working the entrance of Padre Island National Park in Texas last spring. (Symptoms of dyspepsia are lips powdered in Roll-Aids and a purple tinge to the skin.)

Once we arrived at the visitor's center, the reception was the opposite. Park Service people worked the long lines as patiently and courteously as a street-side ministry. All the rangers from the center to the ones leading folks to the ruins took time to answer questions. Careful, precise directions are critical when dealing with the many foreign visitors, as the trails are steep and ascend through narrow crevices difficult to pass.

Unaware, I became a bad example without saying a word. Before we descended to the ruins in a huge cave several hundred feet below, the ranger warned people suffering physical impairments, coronary or weight problems, or wearing improper footwear to consider the difficulty of the tour. I stood away from the group in a "U" shaped overlook bordered by a rock wall. I'd already concluded in the days the Ansazis lived in the caves, stout Indians, fat Indians and old Indians alike climbed the same wall on handholds cut in the rocks. I figured if I watched my footing on the ladders and double-gripped the staircase banisters, I could descend without mishap. However, the shocking part was the way graybeards and grannies kept collecting over the "U" next to me. Realize I am not a born, unborn, natural or unnatural leader. But when I caught on, the thought hit mighty hard, "These folks think if a gray-whiskered fellow like him passes muster, we can make it down to base and back on top without ever missing a stair or slipping on a ladder rung."

Not knowing what to do on such short notice, I turned, put my hands on the waist-high rock wall, leaned over, and began to do false pushups to flex the way kids stretch before running. Distance concealed my lungs pumping the mountain air so hard the intake rolled my tongue back and the outgo flattened it as flat as pressed banana peel. At the signal "Let's go," I rose up and down on my toes a few counts and fell into last place.

Historians and archeologists combined ruined the story of why the Anasazis abandoned the adobe brick pueblos in 1300. Thirty years ago the rangers spoke of the big mystery of why they left the canyons, implying bloody massacres or a pitched battled down the canyon of flying flint projectiles shot by marksmen with deadly aim. Later, much later, a professor circulated a theory that the Anazas, or "the ancient ones," were the Mayas in Mexico. I liked the imagery of the tribes leaving the canyon to migrate way down into Mexico to build new cities and huge temples and tall pyramids to bury the chiefs and priests. A jungle scene of throbbing drums and beautiful virgins sacrificed on a flaming pyre to appease gods so omnipotent that thunder stilled in their presence.

Leave it to the busybody excavators to spoil the drama. The rangers now say that in 1276 a drouth hit for 26 years. Crops of corn and beans failed; the domesticated wild turkeys, not only a source of food but clothing, perished from starvation. By 1300, the people left to assimilate with the Hopis. A few are thought to have migrated to Canon de Chelly in Arizona.

Some mystery that one. Crooked up no doubt by a bunch of busybody professors encouraging students to sift cave dust for bones to carbon date eras and episodes as if the Indians used Gregorian calendars to keep time. Our ranger missed his chance, using one measly sentence to dismiss a stunner: "fecal specimens showed cannibalism occurred." What an opportunity to claim the Anasazis were dreaded by all the tribes of the desert for being so fierce they ate human flesh.

Well, scientists ruin stories digging up facts and storytellers handle facts in the lightness and rhythm a cricket composes his song. I completed the climb without help. I stayed around for recognition from my contemporaries, but they filed by without the slightest notice.

November 1, 2001

Took 20 years of using one of the respected travel guides to discover the publisher charges the restaurants and lodgings to be listed in the book. Listings, I was slow to learn, were mighty scarce in towns where innkeepers balked at paying a fee, or the better hamburger and chili joints preferred tacking a sign on a fencepost to spending a fancy price for a slot in a travel book.

My copy showed if we didn't book a room at the one motel in Chinle, Arizona, our next stop from Colorado, the only other choice might be a hogan on the surrounding Navaho Reservation. The afternoon before in Mesa Verde, a busy signal was the closest connection I reached to the Park Service headquarters. The rangers preside over 84,000 acres of the Canyon de Chelly Monument lying within the Navajo nation. Operating in such a big way, I figured the "stiff brims" would know the lodges. But after dialing 32 digits a try, I decided instead of chancing living among the Indians, it'd be best to brave the universal perfumed soap of all motels that make the bath towels and wash cloths smell the way Aunt Tillie's sachets used to flavor her cedar chest.

On the way, we played the Tony Hillerman book tapes based on and around the reservation. Mr. Hillerman's tales portray fearless desert-raised Navajo policemen stalking mean and malicious criminals in backgrounds haunted by witch lore and spirited conflicts between white-eye officials and the locals. In an interview, Mr. Hillerman admitted the Navajos laugh at his versions of their legends. Nevertheless, tearing across the endless miles of desert, his fiction and fancy, plus the familiar landmarks of his stories, add human drama to a vast empty land.

And drama continued into Chinle. After the first intersection in the center of town, highway-savvy red cattle grazed on the right side of the street. Two dark-skinned cowboy looking fellows crossed in front of us, headed toward the cows as oblivious to the racing park and school traffic as the black ravens swooping down among the cows. The cows and the ravens remained alert. Before traffic permitted turning into the motel, however, the two men collapsed against a rock ledge to share a gallon jug in a brown sack. "So much" is the only phrase to apply for federal law prohibiting alcoholic beverages on the reservation. Worst of all, "so much" also fits the over a century old antiquated Indian policy.

First thing after unpacking, I hung the towels and pillowcases