Month: February 2022

Fear of want

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Early on the morning after payday my mother and I would load an old cooler into our old station wagon and drive to town for groceries. Early to beat the heat as the station wagon did not have air conditioning. Early to beat the crowds. I was never part of the planning process, but there was always a plan. Round steak was 23 cents off at this store. Canned goods were always cheaper at that store. The trick was to be early enough to buy the dry goods first and go to the store with the best sale on meat last, but still early enough the cheap meat was not sold out. If times were good.

If times were bad, it didn’t matter how cheap the meat, it was out of reach. During those times, we sometimes lucky to have a bit of venison or rabbit in the freezer, but sometimes there wasn’t even that.

White label generics from the early 1980s. Jewel Grocery advertisement materials.

In the fresh produce section, we would get potatoes and onions and iceberg lettuce. Sometimes a prepackaged bag of the smallest red (un)delicious apples, but usually not. If we had a garden that year, then we wouldn’t get much else. Either we had some fresh produce in season, or my mother had canned what we didn’t eat when it was in season.  The dry goods were from the center aisles, and everything came in white labels. These were not the Hill Country Fair or Signature or Great Value store brands. These were the true generics. No brands, just a description in black ink on white paper. CORN FLAKES. TEA. COFFEE. GREEN BEANS. I want to say they ate the same as the name brand, and some things did. Flour is flour. Sugar is sugar. But the tea was wretched and metallic tasting. We would sacrifice other things to buy Lusianne tea. Whenever I saw generic tea in the house, I knew we were in a bad way. Even worse if there was none. I thought my best friend was rich since he lived in a doublewide and his sandwiches had more than one piece of meat that came from a brightly colored package with a brand name.

These white label products were introduced during the high inflation of the 1970s, and according to the New York Times in 1986 [right], they were already falling out of favor. I can’t speak to national trends, but in 1986, we were still buying them out of need, not favor.

USDA commodity pork. Photo: Flickr user Nikol Lohr, courtesy of Creative Commons license

Sometimes we were on welfare, other times not. The food stamps were brightly colored compared to cash, and I didn’t understand why my mother was ashamed to use them. I thought they looked neat. The commodities were hit and miss. Powdered milk is okay in cereal. The cheese and butter were so good it is still a meme today. The canned pork and beef were not good. A layer of fat and grease over chunks of tough meat that was both bland and horrible tasting all at once. My mother could make it palatable only in tamales, though she tried many different things. Despite that, I’m still thankful for the USDA commodity program. It was still better than the few times that supper was a few beans, bread and drippings though.

In the late 80s we had the dubious good fortune of my father getting injured at work enough that it required neck surgery. Money and food got really tight for a long time after he couldn’t work, but then we got the settlement. Ten thousand dollars isn’t much for a couple fused vertebrae, but suddenly a trip to town sometimes meant a bag of 39 cent party tacos and burritos instead of “shut up, we’ll eat at home.”

Commercial about generics in the 1980s.

It wasn’t a lot of money, and it didn’t last long. But for all my father’s failings, he did one thing that has always stuck with me. We built floor to ceiling, wall to wall shelves and filled them with flats and cases of nonperishable food. Cans of corn, green beans, baked beans, ranch style beans, fruit cocktail, cases of every flavor of ramen soup, sardines, Vienna sausages, crackers, buckets of pickles, sacks of flour, sugar, and dried beans and sacks of rice filled the shelves. We also bought cases of store brand soda: cola, lemon-lime, root beer, orange, grape, and even some Dr Pepper. Then we filled a deep freezer with half a beef from the butcher shop. I can’t remember how long that pantry lasted, but we ate well for a long while.

Looking back at what we bought, I recognize how some readers would shudder at the choices. No one thinks of Vienna sausages, ramen soup, or grape soda when the phrases “food security” or “healthy” are mentioned. It also speaks to the mindset of long-term poverty: thinking of the next meal often makes thinking of the long-term costs impossible. Nevertheless, there was a stretch of time where I don’t remember being hungry, and I remember the sense of safety looking at those shelves brought. There was also a feeling of splurging to have a carbonated beverage.

Thirty-five years later and I am as free from want as I have ever been. I live in a rundown house in a run-down neighborhood, and I drive a rundown truck paid for on a biologist’s salary. But I feel free. I’m not as careful with my money as I should be, but I can buy the foods I want, and the cupboard is always full. I have more books than shelves. I never lie in bed dreading going to work in the morning.

I’ve never been on welfare as an adult.

But I remember that feeling of want.

The feeling of want that comes with being poor isn’t that bit of want you feel between leaving the gym and when supper is ready to eat. It is long. It is constant. It is days, weeks, months of being surrounded by things you can’t have, or worse, that you could buy and be satisfied for a meal and then not have three meals near the end of the month. If you have not been food insecure for a stretch of time, you do not know that feeling, even if you think you can understand it. You’ll see those who least understand it railing against welfare programs, claiming they saw a welfare queen with a cartful of expensive foods while having never felt the morale boost of fresh beef after a month of none, or giving their kid a candy bar after having to say no for the longest time. These people will finish up their rant by saying that people would rather be on welfare than work, even though 75% of people on welfare are either currently working or start working within a year of being on welfare. Even if the welfare queen lies were true —they largely are not— I would still gladly support spending more money on assistance programs. I remember real hunger, and I remember eating after being truly hungry.

At the start of the pandemic people were panic buying food and toilet paper for no reason, some of these people were the first time faced with the experience of walking into a store and not being able to buy what they wanted. It was a temporary situation created through senseless panic, but I am somewhat glad some people got a little taste of unrequited want. For once their privilege doesn’t automatically exclude them from a part of the human experience they would rather not face. I am not idealistic enough to think they’ll learn a lesson from this, but I am satisfied they got the experience.

Before you get angry at my use of the word “privilege”, take a moment to understand what it means. To paraphrase Reggie Shuford, privilege does not mean your life hasn’t been difficult; it just means it may not have been difficult because of your race, socio-economic status, gender, etc.

At the start of the pandemic people were panic buying food and toilet paper for no reason, some of these people were the first time faced with the experience of walking into a store and not being able to buy what they wanted. It was a temporary situation created through senseless panic, but I am somewhat glad some people got a little taste of unrequited want. For once their privilege doesn’t automatically exclude them from a part of the human experience they would rather not face. I am not idealistic enough to think they’ll learn a lesson from this, but I am satisfied they got the experience.

Looking at empty shelves where the beans, rice, and ramen once were, I can also understand the feeling of safety now felt by those bought them out of panic, even I realize the senselessness of it.

At a glance, this story may not strictly fit the Dry Country criteria, but the bones of dryland poverty are there, and I chose to include it anyway. If any of this saddens or angers you, either because you are sad/angry that our neighbors are going hungry or because you are sad/angry that people are eating free at the taxpayer’s expense, here is a solution: While that emotion is still fresh, donate to your local food bank. Help a family not be hungry/not need government assistance. Consider it a gift, or even an investment on the possibility of someone getting out of poverty enough to write you sentimental stories you read on social media.

Snyder, TX 1998

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During the summer of ’98 I worked west of Snyder in the shadow of the southern high plains. I would glance up from the ditch I was digging to see the palisades of the Llano Estacado, wondering if I would ever get the chance to explore them. I don’t remember if I even knew the words for that country yet. Llano Estacado. Staked Plains, Palisade Plains, Southern High Plains, the Caprock. I just knew I had a hunger to see them. I would drive north, through Lubbock to Plainview to see my high school love at her college, and though my mind wasn’t on the landscape on the way up, I would always fall in love with it on the way home.

Ninety-eight was a hot, dry year leading into yet another drought. If you’ve read many of these, you’ve probably noticed drought seems to be a constant presence in my life. Seems like half my life as been a drought. The average temperature for the airport nearest our jobsite during June 1998 was 100.9. The highest temperature we recorded on the jobsite weather station was 110.3, and we spent a week where the high each day was at least 104. Since there was no shade on this jobsite, we spent the first week building an open sided barn over the office trailer with enough room for us to eat lunch in the shade and to suffer our mandatory daily safety meeting.

The drum from this truck could be seen on the side of US-84 in Snyder for about 15 years after this.

The job was an underground electric project for a new Exxon CO2 recovery plant. At this job, we had a safety officer whose job was to share with us urban legends such as how we should all drive with our sun visors down in our vehicles, as that someone once got decapitated from a sun visor. This was all while concrete trucks were flipping over in the ditches. He made great use of the only shade for miles to corner us. Later, our holy roller job superintendent hired his Pentecostal preacher to manage the tool room, and he too enjoyed the captive audience for the opportunity to convert the heathen. Besides the morning safety meeting and lunch time, we were also required to assemble at the shade 15 minutes prior to quitting time to ensure everyone made it off the jobsite safely, and to get one last dose of safety and salvation before going back to the motel for the night. It didn’t matter if we were all there and accounted for at 5:15, we were required to sit there, submitting to our lectures until 5:30.

This isn’t about the system though. You already know about it from your own life, but I had to make you understand how we were held hostage three times a day while everyone was hot and tired.

One day, two new guys transferred in from a different jobsite. Brothers, Gregg and Billy were not a lot alike. Gregg was a fantastic electrician, and really sharp. Billy… was really strong. Dumber than a box of wet hair, but really strong. If you gave him a shovel, and a simple, very clearly defined task, he was fine. If you gave him a shovel and two tasks there would be trouble. He was friendly, gregarious, and a hard worker, but there was one problem with Billy.
Billy never shut up. He would talk to you about anything, and would sing (badly) old country songs, Pentecostal hymns, and shitty pop songs in his thick Alabama accent. Within a month, the Mexican concrete crew built a little arbor with some brush and a tarp, and started cooking their lunch on a disco under it to avoid Billy. When Billy followed them, asking if they’d like him to sing a song, Guillermo asked, “Do you know Chata, Billy?”
“Dunno,” Billy replied, “Is it a Spanish song?”
“ No, it’s ‘Chata fuck up, Billy! “

Billy went back to eating lunch under the main shade. I began eating lunch and taking a nap lying in the red dust under my backhoe, which I parked farther away than before. During our evening preaching/safety/Billy fest, I began to forget to take my ear plugs out.

Just the same, Billy was one of the first to show me that I have something to learn from everyone from the world.

When payday came around, Gregg and Billy did not have checks. Apparently, the company accidently sent them to another jobsite out of state. The superintendent tried to calm Billy by saying they would mail him his check, and it would be there in a couple days. Billy just shook his head and stormed into the toolroom, where the preacher had just organized the incoming tools. Billy began tossing drills, saws, and laser levels outside into a pile. The preacher was frantic, as was the superintendent.

“Billy! You have to sign those tools out! You can’t just use them without signing them out!”
“Billy! Calm down! We’ll mail you the check I said!” Billy didn’t even look up from his task, “I didn’t mail you no work, so you better not be mailing me no check. These are my new tools. Paid for them working this week.”

The superintendent went back to the office trailer and later came out with a handwritten check.

Dry Country

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December.

A long time ago I gave up construction and ranch work because I thought I needed to settle down with some steady work. Something without rain days or drought. So, following the advice of a friend, I signed up to be a prison guard. All you need to know about that job is that I spent a lot of time thinking about country I had seen and other country I hoped to see. I would spend my days off driving around looking at country, and wondering if a steady job was worth my soul.

I was climbing into the truck after getting gas when I saw a tall, thin man walking down the street with a decent, but heavily loaded external frame pack and a stuff sack in his arms. I offered him a ride, he threw all his stuff into the bed of the truck, and off we went.

“Where you headed?”

“I was trying to get downtown, there is a shelter I slept at last year.”

“Salvation Army?”

“Yeah, that’s it, Seems like the shelter is on one side of the road, and the store on the other. Last time they gave me a green ticket and I walked across the street and they gave me a coat. That was before I got out to Colorado City and found work on the cotton harvest. I’m hoping something like that will work out this year.”

“Where you coming from?”

“East Texas, Had been working for a feller out there off and on for 26 years now. Good guy to know, hard man to work for. I’ve done quit him four times now, and I think this’ll be the last. Rowdy, what do you do for a living?’

I told him about the prison and the dirt work and the ranch work, and how I order them in my mind. Seems like enough people jabbing at you with sharp sticks will make the easiest job feel like the worst. He told me about meeting another correctional officer out in Colorado City, and how he had ended up there last winter.
“Rowdy, I quit that ol’ boy last year and started out west thinking I could find something to do, but nothing turned up, and so I kept walking west. In the middle of all that walking I got ahold of a bottle of whiskey. I got thinking that if nothing came up for me, I’d just keep on ‘til I got to those badlands where I-10 and I-20 come together, then I’d sit down with my bottle and spend a few days figuring out what the hell to do. You know that country out that way?”

We talked about the Davis Mountains, and as always, I enjoyed the way “Balmorhea” felt on my tongue. He nodded his head when I mentioned it, and went on with his story,

“Well, it took me a little longer than that one bottle to get out there. This lady picked me up outside of Sweetwater; she was taking her son-in-law to work out there at that prison in Colorado City. She knew of a man that needed a hand, so I spent a while out there running a modulator and a boll buggy. Afterwards he threw me a little more work disking and ripping, and brush hogging. Helped his other hands build some fence, couple of tanks, and a windmill. It was good work, just not enough of it to go around for us all, especially for a sixty-year-old man in the middle of a bunch of young men with families to feed.
” I got out to them badlands this last spring. Finally figured that I’d knowed that ol’ boy in east Texas for a good long time now, and maybe I could stand working for him again, so headed back east. ” He paused for a block or so, “Dry country out there.”

“Dry country just about anywhere seems like.”

As we pulled up to the front of the Salvation Army building we shook hands and he spent a few moments asking directions for things around town, and what the country was like south of Abilene. Unlike most people I offer rides to, Sheldon never asked for money; Hell, he didn’t even ask for the ride.

He went inside, and I pulled back onto Butternut with the sour-sweet smell of his sweat still in the truck; wondering why I felt envious of a man who is going to sleep in a homeless shelter that night.

Homesteads

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I.
Ray’s little spread was a few miles from mine in that patch of sand shinnery country in Jones county. Like many Texans of his age, Ray grew up on a ranch, left to make a living, and then returned to the land for the lifestyle when he could afford it. He would graze a little wheat in the winter, cut and sell hay in the summer. His wife had a little kitchen garden and chickens in the yard. The last dry winter I ran goats, it was his hay that kept them fed. I remember leaning against my truck, talking about nothing with him while we watched the early December sunset through his post oaks. It was one of those small moments that brimmed with perfectness.

. . .

A couple years later, my goats were sold, I was busy juggling full time school and work schedules, and I hadn’t talked to Ray in months. Coming home from town, I came around a curve on FM 600 to find a car wheels up in the ditch. Mrs. Oliver, one of my coworkers from the prison, was kneeling a dozen yards from the wreck doing CPR on someone. As I ran up, I could see it was Ray’s wife. Ray was still hanging upside down in the car, his door bent, and seat belt jammed. Mrs. Oliver and I traded out between CPR and lying under the back of the car, trying to keep Ray calm through the shattered rear window. He kept asking about his wife and for a knife to cut himself free from the belt. We lied to him about not having a knife to keep him immobilized until help could arrive to cut the car open and stabilize his hurt neck. We also lied to him about his wife, saying we were working on her, and that she was alive. We were working on her, but after being ejected from the car when it rolled, there was no resistance when I pressed on her chest and her lips were cool on mine as I tried to breathe my life into her. We kept it up until the helicopter landed, but Mrs. Oliver and I both knew before we heard the news that night what the outcome would be.

. . .

Ray came home from the hospital a couple weeks later to an empty bed and a new home health care aid. He lived in the house for a while, but his fields remained empty, and I rarely saw him off the porch after that. Eventually he moved to live with his children in town, and a year or two later Ray was dead. His kids eventually sold Ray’s place.

II.

The plains are littered with abandoned houses from Abilene through to Saskatoon. Driving through the extant ruins of homesteads on the plains, you’ll find a falling down house, or a stone chimney surrounded by a few trees with a few deer or a covey of quail staring out from the kochia and Russian thistle that choke out all native vegetation. If you relax your eyes a little, you can see the memories of kids running through the now rusted and torn screen door, laundry on fallen down lines, and the gleaming red paint on the tractor that’s not moved since before you were born.

If your interests turn to that sort of thing, you begin trying to guess when each place was abandoned. Tiny satellite dishes from the 21st century or large satellite dishes from the 80s, large television antennae hanging on a roof, or even better, a radio aerial strung between the house and an outbuilding tell part of the story. Steel or wood windmills tell another part of it. Wind chargers that look like a car alternator with a fan attached really dial in the timeline. If you’re bold enough to stop and stand amid the memories and dreams of others, glancing at the discarded bottles and trash tell you even more of the story. Smooth bottom glass bottles that never rode a conveyor belt puts you back before the 1950s; no seams on the bottle lips pushes it back before the 1920s. Kicking old oil cans out of the ground lets you see printing protected from the sun. Looking out over the prairie while listening to the wind, you see the promise and allure of living in that beautiful country and hurt a little for the family that had to leave it.

If you can narrow down the “when,” you can hazard a broad guess to the “why” the homestead was abandoned. Some look livable, having not been too many years since the kids took part in the rural to urban drain, the parents or grandparents dying or retiring to town. Other homesteads are fading back into the prairie, the victim of the Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980s, the late 80s drought, the drought in the ‘50s, the drought and dust bowl of the 30s, the drought in the 1880s. Those are the just ones we can still see. Countless dugouts are long gone. We also know the Wichita and other tribes, even including Puebloans, farmed on the great plains, and it is thought droughts between 1200 – 1400 AD are what pushed the plains cultures to be the hunters we think of today. The bones of those native homesteads are out there too, they’re just more difficult to see.

The plains are covered with these reminders that is possible to work hard every day, pour your heart and self into a dream, make no large mistakes according to the thinking of your time, but still fail. The rain didn’t fall when it should have. The markets crashing a world away from your homestead, and your banker’s poor choice ruined both him and you. Cancer steals the best years of your life while the medical-insurance system steals your savings and your family’s future earnings. Swerving to avoid a truck in your lane kills your wife, lames you, and leaves you to die slowly from broken dreams. None of this is an excuse to not try, to not work hard, or to not strive for self-sufficiency. But, it should be a reminder to reach out instead of looking down when others are watching the weeds grow up through their dreams.

Featured

In Plain Sight: An introduction

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Lubbock is so flat you can watch your dog run away for three days.
– Unknown

Jokes about how flat Lubbock and the Llano Estacado are likely began before television and radio; however, the memeifcation of them have allowed people to dismiss the region out of hand. Any time something becomes a meme the truth is sacrificed, and this is true for Lubbock and the plains. Make no mistake, I am not claiming the plains are the mountains, but I do claim it is too easy to dismiss the beauty of something once it becomes a meme.

With city names like Levelland, Plainview, and Plains it is difficult to argue that the area isn’t flat. But, we are a land of canyons, draws, and over 20,000 playas — shallow lakes, some perennial, most ephemeral— which create the illusion that one can see everything, when in fact much is hidden from view. Those who never venture off the highway often overlook what the country truly looks like.

I argue that on foot is superior to even a bicycle, but Hemingway’s preference does make for a good compromise between seeing the country as it really is and seeing a lot of it. In either case, too few people have the time or energy to walk or bike the Llano Estacado. So, my hope is this serialization of one of my book projects, In Plain Sight, will let others find the beauty of the plains not mentioned in the memes.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them… Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
— Ernest Hemingway

Full moon over Lubbock and Yellow House Draw

A benefit of this series over the eventual print book is the ability to include video and links to more information.

Memory from another dry winter

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An old scan of an old photo from an old camera in the hands of a young guy who didn’t know any better.

A lifetime ago (or maybe it was just two or three careers ago) I was a dozer operator on a ranch down where the Rolling Plains wrap around the Edwards Plateau. Another dry, warm winter at the start of a drought, just like this dry winter. It was crap pay, but the country was pretty, so I spent the winter as the only human for a score of miles. Some things never change.

Back then the government was going in half for ranchers to grub mesquite and juniper out from drainages for “drought control.” So, I’d park my truck before dawn and spend the day crawling down creeks and up canyons, plucking brush from the ground. At sunset, I would walk back to the truck. All winter I leap frogged my way through pastures, a section at a time. I’d leave my hours written on a scrap of paper on the dash of my truck, and my boss would leave my paycheck in the same place. I think I went nearly two months without talking to anyone but the waitress at the truckstop. I was both really happy and really lonesome.

I got paid by the hour meter on the dozer, so it didn’t cost the rancher anything if I shut the dozer down to hike to the top of a hill just to see the view, or to squat next to a hole, hoping to see what dug it. I made some good trades for my free time that winter.

I wrote 50 stories in my head that winter, and never wrote them down. I skinny dipped in a stock tank, and spent the rest of the day shivering because a warm, dry winter isn’t necessarily warm enough for that. I got caught on top of the mesa in a thunder snowstorm in the only precipitation event that winter, lightning crashing down while snow drifted. I spent two hours watching a black vulture because it was the first one I had seen in that part of the state. I discovered an abandoned board and batten house buried in an overgrown live oak motte a mile from the nearest road. I danced naked on the cab of my dozer, my then brown beard and other bits flapping in the late afternoon light.

I once used the dozer to jumpstart my ragged old ford truck with two pieces of baling wire, bending them to not touch anything between the two batteries. The wires glowed cherry in the darkness, and then melted. I twisted another wire around the first and tried again. And then again. It took several tries, and all the wire I could scavenge, but I didn’t have to walk the 10 miles to the highway. At least not that night.

Self portrait in the reflection of a dozer door, sometime in 2002 or 2003.

At the end of the job, the owner, Bob, offered to keep me on full time. “Rowdy, I couldn’t pay you what I’m paying you now, but I’d give you a house to sleep in, and teach you to farm if you wanted to stick around and work for me.”

I was hungry to get back to digging ditch making “real money,” so I turned him down. I wonder sometimes where I’d be if I’d taken him up on it. I knew how to make a hand, but I didn’t know how to stick back then, so I would have hung on a while until I got bored of moving cows or plowing, and then I would have drifted on to the next thing. But, it would have been good for a while. I would have still found my way to the prairie. My entire life has led me here.

It was those thoughts in my head tonight leaving the ranch when I came upon the dozer operator who has been building a rig location on the ranch my field site is located at. The hood was up on his ragged old ford truck. Dead battery. I didn’t ask him if he had spent a long lunch listening to the radio, or if it had been an old battery. I knew which mine had been 18 years ago this month.

I jumped him off with my work truck, and he looked puzzled when I said, “There’ll still be quail for you to chase in twenty years” before I drove off.

(2/8/2018)