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.

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)