story

Colors

/ Rowdy / 4 Comments

I.

Ezekiel —though he only thought of himself as “Zeke”— was a quiet and serious ten-year-old who was excited to learn he was allowed a free ride into the country once a day.  Zeke lived exactly one mile from his elementary school, which meant he was allowed to ride the school bus. He usually walked to school, but one rainy day he took the bus for the first time, and learned a secret: Though his house was the closest drop off from the school on the bus route, the driver drove the morning route one direction and the afternoon route in the opposite direction. This meant Zeke’s ride was either five minutes or nearly two hours.

The bus’s route made a large loop south of town, past the cotton and wheat fields, down into the canyon with its hardwood trees. In the fall, the flameleaf sumacs would be a riot of yellow, orange, and red against the dark green of the junipers on the slopes. In winter, the green of the winter wheat on the red dirt always fascinated Zeke. By the time spring came, he was always ready for the agarita, sand plum and cottonwood blossoms. Zeke spent the seasons watching a march of new colors as each plant bloomed, matured, and died. The late afternoon sun always felt good on his face through the window.

Halfway through the year, the bus driver would flip the route, which made Zeke’s house the first pickup in the morning, and Zeke would sometimes awake in the dark to be able to see the sunrise from the edge of the canyon. Some of the country he knew, remembering sitting next to his father on the bench seat of the blade as he maintained the county roads, at least before his father got fired for being drunk and unreliable. Some of the other country was new to Zeke, and he drank up the scenery like a man dying of thirst.

 He nearly got banned from the bus system when he decided to see a different bit of country by getting on a different bus. He planned on riding the full loop and then walking home from the bus barn. It was a pretty ride through country Zeke had not seen before, but it was the one route where the driver parked the bus at home, since he lived at the end of the route in the middle of the country. Zeke was surprised when the driver shut down the bus at a house in the middle of nowhere, as was the driver when he heard Zeke call from the back of the bus. The driver’s surprise quickly turned to anger as Zeke explained the situation, and the driver cursed not so under his breath all the way back to town.

The next day Zeke was called out of class to a meeting with the bus driver, bus barn supervisor, and Mr. Adams, the principal. Mr. Adams gestured for Zeke to sit down and began,
“Zeke, we couldn’t get ahold of your parents to be here. Do you know where they’re at?”

“No sir, but I guess my dad is at work, and my mom might be out mowing yards to help with bill money,” Zeke replied. Mr. Adams and the bus barn supervisor exchanged glances, and Mr. Adams continued,

“Well, I don’t guess we need them here for this anyway. Son, the bus system isn’t your personal tour guide service. Mr. Kemp had to spend expensive gas and his personal time to drive you back into town, and then all that time and gas to get back home to his own family. It wasn’t fair to him for you to decide to take a joy ride, and he’d like to see you kicked off the bus schedule since you live so close to school anyway.”

Zeke was panicked. He had already learned to not give the world tears when he could help it, but Zeke couldn’t stop the burning feeling coming into his eyes. He blinked a dozen times, swallowed, and sobbed, “Please, please don’t do that. I didn’t know the busses didn’t all go back to the barn. I just wanted to see the country. I like it out there. Please.”

Mr. Adams sighed, looked at his watch, and then to the other adults, “I don’t think we can kick him off the bus, based on the home situation. I’ll find something appropriate to settle this once I get ahold of his parents; y’all go on back to work while Zeke and I try to get his mom on the phone.”

After the others had left, Mr. Adams said to Zeke, “I don’t care if you take the long way home every day. I understand, I grew up out that way. I don’t even care if you take one of the other busses every now and then. I’ll fix it with the bus supervisor. But let the driver know before you get on, and don’t ever get on Mr. Kemp’s bus again, or we will ban you from the busses.

When the story made the rounds at school later in the day, a classmate called him stupid, poor, and lazy for wanting to sit on a bus all afternoon or get up so early when he could just walk home in a few minutes, and even more so for getting on the wrong bus.  Even if there had been something worth going home to, getting a free ride once a day into the country seemed too good to pass up.] 

There really was not much at home for Zeke to hurry for. A rundown trailer with holes in the floor and daylight between the windowsill and the wall of his room. Depending on the season, it was either cooler or warmer on the bus anyway.  When Zeke’s father was actually working, he would be gone until dark. If he had recently dragged up from a job, he would be at his desk in his “office.” The desk was simply a piece of old plywood laid across two surplus filing cabinets in the corner of the living room. There was a particle board divider to hide his father from most of the room. He would spend hours at the makeshift desk, watching a tiny television, or using a legal pad to dream into ink the life he wished he had instead of being a drunk disabled vet with a wife and kid he really didn’t have much interest in. When his father had company over, he would sit outside the “office” in Zeke’s mother’s chair, and tell his friends lies to continue dreaming the life he would rather have had. Once Zeke had found an old, ragged pronghorn shoulder mount laying by a dumpster and dragged it home. The next day, his father hung it on the living room wall in the rundown trailer. The next weekend he was telling his friends he killed it “years ago up in panhandle” and had finally brought it out of storage. Zeke indignantly piped up to tell them it was his, found fair and square, but before Zeke could say more than a word, his father ordered him out of the room to get everyone another beer.  Zeke’s mother might either be doing side jobs or in her bedroom, lost in her thoughts. Zeke was never really sure what those thoughts were, but they usually made his mom sad.

So, it didn’t really matter if Zeke got home at 3:30 or 5:30. No one really noticed. At least not most days.

II.

The fad at the time was game called thief. Zeke was never sure how it started, but if one student was going to borrow a piece of paper from another, he would say, “Hey, let me steal a piece of paper from you.” Later it became a series of pranks where one kid would steal another kid’s pencil and then later give it back. It was started by the cool kids, the popular kids, the kids whose families were slightly richer than the rest. Then one day in science class, Johnny Allen and Brett Farmer asked Zeke to try to steal Jennifer’s box of crayons. Jennifer was Johnny’s fraternal twin, and they never missed an opportunity to get something over on the other. Zeke was excited to finally be a part of something, and he eagerly agreed. Zeke watched Jennifer got up to go sharpen her pencil, and he carefully slid the crayon box out of her desk. The crayon box was Crayola brand. One of the big boxes with 120 crayons with the sharpener in the back. Colors like burnt sienna, shamrock, cornflower; it felt heavy in Zeke’s hands as he slipped it into his backpack next to his Ben Franklin 8 pack of dull colored crayons.

Zeke thought the plan was to later give Jennifer’s crayons to Johnny, but there was never an opportunity to hand them off. So it came to pass that at the end of the day, Zeke was sitting in his homeroom when the crayons still in his bag when the guidance counselor came in and whispered Mrs. Reagan’s ear. Mrs. Reagan stood up and said, “Okay, class, someone has stolen something, and we need to find out where it is. We’re going to go through your bags and then we’re going to search your lockers. After that, you’re free to go for the day.”

 Zeke panicked, and just knew they were talking about him. As they began searching the bags, Zeke was able to slip to his locker located on the far wall and slip the crayons into his locker. After they finished searching bags, they began on the lockers, and likewise, while the guidance counselor and Mrs. Reagan were busy with other lockers, he was able to slide the crayons out of the locker and into his bag. The teacher and guidance counselor were clearly stymied. They knew they’d find it in that room, but they released everybody, and Zeke pedaled his bike home scared and unsure what had just happened. It was supposed to be a game. He knew he had no business with those expensive crayons, and he knew he would never be able to explain things. So, Zeke dumped them in a wooded area behind his house before coming home. At home, his mother was waiting at the door.

“Zeke, let me see your bag.”

Zeke handed the bag over. He wondered if he had ever really been part of the prank, or if had been the subject of it as his mother searched through his bag and came up dry. She excused herself into the living room to make a phone call and told Zeke to go to his room.

 The next day, another fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Purslane called Zeke aside, and interviewed him,

“Zeke, I know you stole those crayons. And you’re going tell me where they are. I know you’re guilty, and you will not eat lunch in this school until I get those crayons.”

Even at ten, it wasn’t lost upon Zeke that Mrs. Purslane was Johnny and Jennifer’s aunt. He thought about trying to explain that it was just a game and that something went wrong, but he could tell Mrs. Purslane was not interested. So finally, he admitted he had stolen the crayons. He tried to explain what happened, and indeed, Mrs. Purslane was not interested in listening to him. More calls were made, and Zeke was released to go home to retrieve the crayons. Spring in Texas is hot, and that year was dry like most years. The crayons had melted and ruined in the sun. Zeke’s father, who couldn’t afford to buy crayons of that style for his own son, was forced to spend money on those crayons for somebody else’s kid. It also wasn’t lost on Zeke that though there was never money for the good school supplies, there was always money for the bar tab.

Zeke’s father was furious. He tore into Zeke with a belt screaming,

“You little thief, You dirty little thief!”

 Zeke tried to explain to his father, but again, the adults were all past the age of silly childhood games. And it wasn’t any surprise to anyone that a white trash poor kid would try to steal the best crayons from a member of one of the good families in town. It wasn’t even a surprise to the white trash’s father.

Zeke was given the punishment of staying after school each day until he filled ten five-gallon buckets full of rocks from the dry and dusty playground.


On the first day, Zeke began filling his bucket, but even at 10 years old, He could feel the injustice of things. While he knew he had stolen those crayons, he also knew that it was supposed to be just a game. He had never intended to keep them, but based on nothing but Johnny or Brett’s word, Zeke was convicted in the eyes of everyone. Zeke had never tasted this amount of unfairness before, and it was bitter his mouth. So, Zeke began to mill around the playground, kicking at rocks instead of picking them up. Finally at five in the afternoon, the principal, Mr. Adams, came out and saw Zeke had but part of one of ten buckets filled up.

“Zeke, you’re not going get out of this. We’ll continue as long as it takes. Come back tomorrow and you’ll start again.”

 This went on for the rest of the week, Zeke picking up a few rocks, and sitting out in the sun until it was time for the principal to go home. Finally, on the next Friday, after two weeks, Mr. Adams came out around half past four to where Zeke was sitting on the sidewalk and sat down next to Zeke. He eyed the greenish-blue buckle shaped bruise peeking out from the child’s shirt, over his kidney.

“You get that bruise paying for other kid’s crayons?”

“Sir?”

“Zeke, did your daddy give you that bruise for stealing those crayons?”
Zeke knew better than to go telling the truth, even if it was what he wanted to do,

“No sir, I was playing with my belt and accidently hit myself.”

Mr. Adams doubted Zeke had a belt buckle bigger than his fist, but all he could do was to sigh.

“Son, you owe us 10 buckets of rocks. I can’t get you out of this one You’ll pay us 10 buckets of rocks. Why won’t you pick ’em up?”

Zeke tried to explain what happened with the prank, and Mr. Adams actually listened. He thought about it for a while, chewing on the corner of his mustache.

“Zeke, that doesn’t change the fact you still owe us 10 buckets of rocks. I understand the unfairness of it all though. Come on, let’s you and I get these rocks picked up so you can get home.”

The rest of the afternoon, and nearly to dark, the principal of the school and Zeke collected ten buckets of rocks and dumped them in a pile by the fourth-grade door. It didn’t make it right, but it somewhat balanced Zeke’s first taste of the facts of a small town with a tiny bit of understanding. And he never forgot either.

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

/ 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

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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)

No longer a young man

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II.

You rise in the dark in your rent house and turn off the air conditioner because you cannot abide the tyranny of noise in the morning. Greek yoghurt for breakfast to help you digestion, Ice in the water jug, a pickle in the lunch bucket, a naproxen for the chronic pain, and out to the truck to get to the field.

Later, sometime between false and real dawn, you lean against the bed of your work truck, enjoying the cool of the metal, looking up at Orion in the sky. An audiobook talks quietly from the phone in your pocket while you put together your telemetry equipment. As Orion fades away, you can begin to see the prairie surrounding you. Picking up a signal on the receiver, you start walking across the range. The signal is weak, so you hike up the canyon, homing in on the animal on which you put a radio collar months ago. As you walk, you see the plants, unconsciously naming them as you go. Helianthus, Ziziphus, curtipendula, Prosopis. Sunflower, lotebush, sideoats, mesquite. Where they are and how they are arranged tell you a story about the history of the place. You often think about how little you have changed while not realizing how many more names you have for your world, how much more the landscape tells you than it did before.  You reach where the canyon rises up to become the caprock, and the light on your equipment tells you the GPS data on your study animal has downloaded to your tablet. Another set of data points from which you’ll tell the world how prairie wildlife uses the landscape.

Since you are so close, you pick a deer trail and climb the escarpment, leaving the rolling plains for the llano estacado. By the time you reach the top, your sweat is salt and the wind hot and coarse across it. Catching your breath at the top, you look out across the dryland cotton that comes to the edge of the caprock. There’s Amaranthus along the edge and towards the field’s center. Amaranths. Pigweed. Carless weed. Wildlife food in a sea of fiber and ecological desert. Native and noxious. You wonder how many miles you walked chopping cotton back then compared to how many miles you hike doing wildlife biology now?

Some of those memories are blurry and faded, but you remember the sweat and the waiting and the want. How many rows walked, how miles of ditches dug, how many long nights working a job you hated to get from then to now? You’re unsure, but the math says it took you fifteen years longer to get to college than your classmates. You turn your back and mind to the cotton and past to use the high ground to scan through the other frequencies of your radio collars.

Eventually the first part of the day is over, and you load up in your work truck to head back to the office to analyze your data. The hours spent driving between study sites doesn’t bother you. You live in your head a lot of time, so for hours at a time you compose stories in your head, think about all the jobs you’ve had and the ones you still want, what life was like before college left you stranded in the gulf between your first social circle and what is supposed to be your current one. More and more you think about a tiny shack someplace quiet with no pressing need to be anywhere in the morning but on the porch watching the sun rise. You’re still waiting. For another house in the country, for a job with fewer hours, more time in a tent, less time being in charge. You’ve learned your patterns enough to know you feel more feral at certain times of the year. You no longer quit jobs for the sake of the going. So, you’ll shrug off the urge to go do something different. Back at the office you’ll pour yourself a glass of unsweetened tea, sit down and write what you’ve spent the past years learning. You’ll not stop waiting.

Not today at least.

McDonalds

/ Rowdy / Leave a comment

The homeless people of McDonalds.  Well, the homeless people of my routines. I see some of the same people at the library and the coffeehouse. As I mentioned in another post, when the library and coffee shop are closed on Sunday I sometimes spend hours in a McDonald’s studying.

They come in shifts. Once the shelter kicks some of them out for the day they show up scrubbed and clean. The  first shift comes in and some set up shop alone in a booth or on a stool and others sit together. Those on foot have a bag or two and those in cars and vans have only what they need to charge or use while inside. They are mostly quiet and respectful of others. The employee cleaning the dining room stops and talks to some of the regulars. I never see the loud ones more than a couple of Sundays.

The older man with the trilby and long still dark hair will bring his shave kit inside and when there are not many guests in the store, will slip into the bathroom to wash and shave. Back at his table he will brush his long hair out with a wood handled brush and drink his coffee while his phone charges. If I have a lot of studying to do I will see him leave and come back after dark. Last winter he carried a makeshift walking stick that looked more like a club, but I have not seen it this semester. 

Last income tax season there was a young guy staying in the shelter at night and spinning a sign for the tax place across the street. He had two cell phones. One which did not work and then his current one. He was one of those tragic figures who spent an hour telling his friend about the newest and greatest phone that did everything and was only $800 without a contract, and how if he had it, he would be set. He was telling his friend and any who would listen that he was about to make it. No, really make it big. Besides his DJ work, he was starting his own sign spinning business. Instead of working for the tax place he would contract out to them and several other places that really needed someone to spin signs and needed them to be spun right. I haven’t seen him since before the summer, so maybe he really did make it.

The old man living in the minivan could be mistaken for just another customer if you did not see him get out of his van and if he did not always wear rubber boots and did not carry his laptop in a old and stained insulated walmart grocery bag. He seems to make the rounds of town pretty well. I’ll see him in the library and then the coffeeshop across town. I don’t want to pry, but I am curious about where he parks at night. I have read a bit about living in van (research for when I move to Lubbock) and many people hop from Walmart to Walmart since many welcome overnight parking. Some other van dwellers pick residential streets near houses to avoid the scrutiny of cops. They’ll roll in just before bedtime and then leave before sunrise without moving around too much in the van. Some others get permission to stay at construction sites as a make shift free security service. I would like to ask this particular man about his strategy, but I do not want to pry.

Some of the people work for Labor Ready off and on. Labor Ready is a temp agency which markets on low end labor jobs. They pay every day. It is the more legal form of stopping outside of Home Depot to pick up some help to dig a ditch. I worked for them some in the late 90s. Back then you would have to be at the office by at least 5:30 or earlier, as that the jobs were first come-first serve unless someone was looking for a certain type of skilled worker. The office was a open hall with a dispatcher behind a desk, the smell of bad coffee and rows of chairs. Sleepy men would come in and sit and talk or sleep, waiting for a job. Yesterday you might have swept out a new building, today you might work 12 hours in a cold storage warehouse unloading 80 lbs sacks of peanuts, tomorrow you might spend four hours cleaning out a muddy ditch. Most jobs paid $5.15 a hour. If you did not have the required hard hat, or steel toed boots, the office would rent you a hard hat and rubber boots for $5.00. At the end of the day you would trudge back into the office with your signed time sheet and the dispatcher would print a check for your $35 or perhaps $50 if it was a really long day. Those were the good days. The bad days you spent the gas getting over to the office and wasted half a day waiting for a job that never came. If you were lucky, or at least less unlucky, the bad days were spread out enough so that you could swing by the plasma center to sell plasma.

A couple of homeless men I knew back then would camp in the alley behind the Labor Ready office since the shelter did not allow drinking, and they would rather sleep outside in January than be preached at about their vices. The dispatcher would try to pair them with me on jobs since I had a truck. So we spent the winter of 97 working together. They would save up some money and get a motel room at the cheapest, gas valves for sink faucets, motel in the area for a few nights here and there. Last time I saw them they were going to hop a train for Arizona.

Today, I do not know how it is at Labor Ready. I suspect it is still enough to keep a cell phone on and to buy a coffee and a couple of $1 chicken sandwiches at McDonalds on Sunday while you wait until the office is open again on Monday.

Change

/ Rowdy / Leave a comment

 We awoke with frost on our backpacks. As we brought the fire back to life our hands shook from the cold. We were both either 11 or 12 and I think it was our first winter camping trip without adults. There was not a budget for store bought kit back then. Our supplies consisted of school backpacks, ragged blankets, and the odd bit of army surplus gear. Next to the fire sat a 10 inch cast iron skillet I had been foolish enough to carry. The night before I spent nearly an entire box of matches getting the fire going. Our last match encouraged me to get it right. We spread out one blanket to lie on and used a couple others for cover. During the night we huddled under the same blankets trying to stay warm while listening to the wind and coyotes and the coals. I remember watching the stars disappearing as the front rolled in.

That morning the clouds were racing overhead. It made me dizzy to look at them for very long. We had nearly packed up camp when we first heard the noise.
 kar-r-r-r- o-o-o
Neither of us knew what it could be. kar-r-r-r- o-o-o  and trumpeting and rattling and almost clinking. We both moved to the west, trying to find the source of the sound. Through a barbed wire fence, over the railroad tracks and through a few more fences we went.
kar-r-r-r- o-o-o
 It seemed the faster we moved the faster the sound moved before us. It was always just beyond the next line of trees or over the next rise. After a while the sound was all around us.
 
kar-r-r-r- o-o-o
kar-r-r-r- o-o-o
kar-r-r-r- o-o-o
 I couldn’t see any tracks. The clouds still raced overhead and we were both a little uneasy. At the Mountains of Madness had kept me up a few weeks before and the story was fresh on my mind and on my arms as goosebumps.
 kar-r-r-r- o-o-o

Suddenly there was a break in the clouds and wherever there was a hole we could see the sky was filled with sandhill cranes. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of cranes going south.

kar-r-r-r- o-o-o.

I remember laughing at the wonder of it all. We walked back to camp both feeling a bit more knowledgeable than before; our uneasiness and ignorance had been forgotten in our victory of discovery. I’ve seen a lot of migrating cranes and geese since, but I’m not sure I have ever seen as many or been as filled with wonder as that cold morning. It was just another experience that bonded us as friends, made us brothers.

I sometimes wonder if he still remembers that morning.

sandhill-1

Story Fragment #1

/ Rowdy / Leave a comment

At 75 I was alone. My wife was dead. My brothers were dead. After retiring from work either all my friends were dead or had drifted away; it happens when you leave a culture. So I went back to school. Majored in trying not to be lonely. I would take a science class or a geography class; last semester I even took a women’s studies class just to be a letch.

I enjoyed everything about it. The campus, the bustle, the learning that I would never use, the excitement and vitality of youth that surrounded me. I was still lonely, but not quite so alone. These kids are no different than the kids when I was young. More toys, more stuff, but the same basic dreams and hopes and angsts and all that you feel when you are feeling for the first time.

I’m still here, but things are starting to change. I forget I’m old. I don’t see my wrinkled face more than once a day and I forget not everyone’s knuckles are torn and bent and scarred. So many of the kids look a lot like kids I went to school with 60 years ago. Sometimes I forget that they are not those friends until I get close and see that they don’t look exactly like them. I know my doctor said to expect my memory to go more and more as things take hold, but it is still eerie.

In the mornings, I park on the far side of the campus and spend the time before class walking around the campus searching for memories that won’t surface anymore. Sometimes I remove my glasses and walk around in my nearsighted and myopic haze. It removes those slight differences between these kids and my friends. As long as I’m careful to not call out to them, I can walk with my schoolmates.