ranch

Homesteads

/ Rowdy / 1 Comment

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.

Memory from another dry winter

/ Rowdy / Leave a comment
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)