Great Plains (16 page)

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Other people:

A guy working in a wheat storage yard in Limon, Colorado. He was standing in the doorway of a warehouse, with wheat spilling out around his ankles. Above him, wheat poured from a long pipe-on-wheels into the back of a grain truck. I watched him work for a while. Then I asked him what the pipe-on-wheels was called. He said, “A grain auger.” He chinned himself on the side of the truck and looked in to see how full it was. He told me, “A grain auger is like a conveyor, only it uses a screw instead of a belt. We're moving wheat from this warehouse to that elevator. We just loaded out all the wheat in that elevator. That'n holds 280,000 bushels. This warehouse holds 250,000. Right now, wheat is $2.60 a bushel. So, in here we got between half and three-quarters of a million dollars' worth of wheat. This is hard red number-one wheat. This'll go to a bakery. Some of this wheat is five years old, some is six years old, some is eight years old. Some is even older—Russian grain-embargo wheat that we didn't sell to Russia back when Carter was President. If you watch it carefully, wheat will keep indefinitely. The way we watch it is we have temperature sensors that go down into the wheat, and we make sure the temperature at this time of year stays right at forty to fifty degrees. When it goes above that, you know you're getting rot or insects.” He turned and waded back into the wheat and chopped at it with a shovel.

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A table of coffee drinkers in a Colorado cafe. They were wearing Cenex caps, khaki work shirts, black rubber boots. One guy had a T-shirt that said, “Peter Marshall Golf Classic.” Another guy was leaning back in his chair and swatting here and there with a flyswatter.

“I just got done shingling the doghouse roof. I'm exhausted.”

“Did you see here in the papers where Billy Dawson
—thwap!—
well, he wasn't angry, but I guess you could say he didn't like it too much that these people were goin' through his pasture and litterin' and so forth. Seems to me we never used to think a thing about people goin' through our pasture, lookin' for arrowheads or just walkin'. Jake, did you ever think you shouldn't go into somebody's pasture, or did you ever think if you didn't ask they might get mad?”

“Noooooh! Why, I'd just walk in and—”

“It's these damn antelope hunters. I don't mind feeding the antelope half as much as I mind the damage those antelope hunters do.”

“You know, I went to Meet the Teams at the high school last night and I really enjoyed myself. I hadn't had a chance to see the new band uniforms. My, they are nice.”

“Seems to me we didn't ever have to worry about people abusin' our pastures until all these
—thwap!—
Texans came in here with their big hats and their belt buckles—”

“—And the suitcase farmers. They'd come in and plow up a bunch of ground and when it didn't rain they'd pack up and leave the dust to blow on the rest of us.”

“Hey, Dad? Dad?
Dad!
”

“Yeah?”

“My gum's pretty good.”

“—all these Texas farmers that moved in here in the forties and started plowin' up the prairie and borrowin' money—”

“I was just talking to Stancil down at the bank and he said they aren't lending money for hay. Of course, right now that's what everybody needs to buy. So I suppose that means that they just aren't lending money, period.”

“—these big farmers that came in from out of state and started borrowin' money—a $5,000 tractor, a $25,000 combine, a $125,000 house—and then any time it went a couple years without rain they'd be cryin for the government to help, and they're still doin' it today [
thwap!
].”

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In the West of the Pecos Museum, in Pecos, Texas, I met a woman named Phyllis. She showed me the bullet holes in the windowsill, the floor, and the door of what used to be a saloon before the museum took over. She said, “Of course, there were other shootings in here besides just the famous ones. There used to be some pretty raunchy characters come in this saloon. There was an old sheriff here named Louis Roberson, and if they got too raunchy for him, why, he shot 'em. Most people know Pecos as a cowboy town. They also know us for our cantaloupes. The sun and soil here grow the sweetest, best cantaloupes in the world. Used to be, farmers all around Pecos raised cantaloupes and shipped 'em out on the Southern Pacific to California or back East. Then about fifteen years ago everybody's wells just started to dry up. All the well water came from the Ogallala Aquifer, which is a big natural reservoir that's been there underground for millions of years. It stretches from here up through the Texas panhandle to Kansas all the way up to South Dakota. Farmers and ranchers all over who used that water had to sell out—they couldn't afford new wells, or they couldn't afford the power to pump up from so deep. There's not nearly as many cantaloupe farms here there used to be, and the creek beds are dry most of the year. Some people say now that the Ogallala Aquifer may be coming back up, that it's not so bad as we thought. But here in the old Orient Hotel courtyard there's an artesian well that used to have enough pressure to pump up to the third floor. I don't believe we'll ever see that again.”

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In Turkey, Texas, I met a woman named Mrs. Homer Lang. Turkey is in north Texas, just below the panhandle, and it was the hometown of country-music star Bob Wills, the King of Western Swing. Turkey's schools closed in 1973, when its district consolidated with nearby Quitaque, and today a few classrooms of the empty school building hold the Bob Wills Museum. Mrs. Lang was minding the museum, and knitting. She told me, “Just look all you want to. Then sign the register.” I saw the original sheet music of the Bob Wills classic, “Stay a Little Longer,” and a photo of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys standing next to a giant loaf of Playboy bread, and a suit that once belonged to Bob Wills, and a photo of Bob Wills's horse, Punkin. No one had signed the register for eight days. Mrs. Lang said, “Nobody calls me Mrs. Lang except people tryin' to sell me something over the telephone. Most everybody around Turkey calls me Aint Zona. I never did know Bob Wills, myself. I've seen him when I was a girl. Now, Homer—my husband, he died three years ago this April—Homer knew him real well. He used to cut Homer's hair. Bob Wills went to Amarillo and took a six-week course in barbering and then he come back here and worked at Floyce Ham's barbershop in town. He was playin' dances in Turkey when he was twelve. I never did go to dances when I was a girl, and when I got old I didn't start. My mother always said you could make harm out of anything. Now, Homer did go. They used to clear out space next to the M System store and people would come from all around. The road was lined car-to-car plumb up to the hilltop. These days, everything in Turkey closes up on a Saturday night. My second son? He was the overseer on the roads? He always believed Turkey would come back on the map someday. Turkey used to have three hardware stores, three banks, three drugstores, three cafes, three lumberyards. Now there's houses empty, with the yards all gone back to shinnery—shinnery, that's sandpiles, weeds, bushes, land not good for nothin'. I worked twenty years in a cafe in town. We didn't have no radio, no television. Homer went to Fort Worth to enlist for World War I and they turned him back. They said they had already signed the Ar-
miss
-tice. My kids was pretty good-size before I ever got a refrigerator and they was up great big before I ever got an air conditioner. I was raised up a Democrat, but they ain't no party now. I still vote straight Democratic ticket. Lyndon Johnson, they say he was wrong with Vietnam, and I don't know about none of that, but he was for the poor people. I took a trip back East two years ago and I went to New York—that's the dirtiest place I was ever in, but then I didn't go down but one street—and then I went to Washington, D.C. I seen a lot of things. I saw the machine they set down on the moon. I saw the biggest bakery in the world. I saw Reagan's apartment. I was never much for having people do for me, but they took me special through Mrs. Reagan's kitchen. It was solid chrome. I don't believe you should set down and study on yourself. I've made seventy-five quilts in the last three years. I knit lap robes like this here. I lack about 125 of making fourteen thousand pies. Last night I made apricot and apple. My daughter's mother-in-law, she's a member of Church of Christ, she told me, ‘Zona, the world is comin' to an end.' That was two years ago now. She talks to my granddaughter, and my granddaughter came to me and said, ‘Mawmaw was prophesyin' that the world is comin' to an end.' I told her, ‘I don't believe so, but it don't matter if it is. You're gonna set on your own bottom before the Lord no matter what.' We don't none of us know what's comin'. We don't have no
i
-dee.”

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The radio:

Maybe, when you're driving on the plains, you'll tune in Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys singing “Bring It on Down to My House, Honey (Ain't Nobody Home but Me).” Maybe you'll hear Roy Acuff doing “The Fireball Mail.” Maybe you'll hear “Reckless Love and Bold Adventure,” by Rose Maddox, or “Courtin' in the Rain,” by T. Texas Tyler, or “Hang the Key on the Bunkhouse Door,” by Wilf Carter, or “Cypress Grove Blues,” by Doc Watson, or “All of the Monkeys Ain't in the Zoo,” by Tommy Collins, or “I'm a Natural Born Gamblin' Man,” by Merle Travis, or “You Don't Know What Lonesome Is,” by the Sons of the Pioneers (“I've got all the lone-someness that the common law allows / You don't know what lonesome is 'til you get to herdin' cows”). Maybe you'll hear a good bluegrass song, like “Blue-Eyed Darlin',” by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, that comes at you like a truckload of turkey gobblers. Or maybe a scary song, like “The Rubber Room,” by Porter Wagoner, or a funny song, like “We Didn't Sink the
Bismarck,
” by Homer and Jethro, or a talking song, like “To a Sleeping Beauty,” by Jimmy Dean.

More likely, though, what you'll hear is “Hold on to the Night,” by McGuffey Lane; “Hold On Hold Out,” by Jackson Browne; “Hold on to Your Love,” by Neil Young; “Hold on to My Love,” by Jimmy Ruffin; “We're Gonna Hold On,” by George Jones and Tammy Wynette; “Hold On Loosely,” by .38 Special; “Holdin' On to Yesterday,” by Ambrosia; “Holdin' On to the Love I've Got,” by Barbara Mandrell; “Hold On (Don't You Be Sad Tonight, Love Will Be There)” by Gail Davies; “Hold On,” by Santana; “Hand to Hold On to,” by John Cougar-Mellencamp; “Baby, Hold On,” by Eddie Money; “I'll Keep Holdin' On,” by Jim Capaldi; “Hold On, Baby, Hold On,” by Kansas; “Hold on to Your Dreams,” by Billy Thorpe; or “Hold on Tight to Your Dream (
Accroche-toi à Ton Rêve
),” by the Electric Light Orchestra.

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Weather:

On the northern plains, a radio announcer said, “It's going to get pretty windy tonight, so if there's anything you don't want to blow away, you'd better tie it down.” Clouds sped across the sky, and their shadows kept up across every kind of terrain. In 1846, Francis Parkman observed that a herd of buffalo being chased by Indian riders was “like the black shadow of a cloud, passing rapidly over swell after swell of the distant plain.” Next to the road, horses grazed with their tails standing straight out in the wind, and dust devils spun across unplowed ground. Up ahead, in North Dakota, storm clouds came all the way down to the ground like an overhead garage door. Inside the storm, the ceiling was low, and the light was like the North Atlantic's. Fifteen minutes of driving put me back under blue skies again.

In a state park in southern Wyoming, I sat on a low sandstone ridge next to ruts made by travellers on the Oregon Trail. Next to the wide, five-foot-deep rut in the rock made by wagons and oxen is a narrow, three-foot-deep rut made by human feet. About 350,000 people travelled the two-thousand-mile trail from the settlements to the West Coast. About 34,000 died along the way. I watched as a rainstorm moved down the Platte River valley from the northwest. When the rain passed, the limbs of the wet trees were darker and their leaves were greener. By comparing weather descriptions in the daily journal entries of thirty-four travellers on the trail in 1849, one scholar has charted the storms that crossed the plains from April to July of that year.

I drove south into Colorado during the night, and six or more thunderstorms followed me. Any direction I looked, there were flashes—like the Fourth of July in New Jersey seen from an airplane. A flash as far away as the horizon lit for an instant long hallways of clouds. Lightning in the distance straight ahead sent reflections shooting all the way up the tarry wheel tracks on the pavement.

In New Mexico and west Texas, the hard white sky is screwed onto the earth like a lid, and the wind is as hot as a gust from a blow dryer. In Texas, the rate of evaporation makes twenty-two inches of rain there the same as fifteen inches at the Canadian border. Southward, the prairie grasses get more and more sparse; sage, greasewood, prickly pear, and mesquite take over. Mesquite trees have eight-inch thorns, delicate leaves like a locust tree's, and roots which go down 175 feet. Longhorn cattle grazed on mesquite, and dropped the seeds along the way on drives to the north. Today you can trace the old cattle trails from the air by following the mesquite. When mesquite takes over a field, little else will grow. Around each low tree, the earth is brown and bare. I began to see oil wells here and there among the mesquite, and pipelines, and tall, narrow heater-treater tanks. On the far southern plains, the oil towns of Plainview and Midland and Odessa rise like offshore drilling rigs. In prosperous years, the push buttons of local pay telephones are smudged with oily fingerprints, and Laundromats have “Do Not Wash Rig Clothes Here” signs. In bad years, you see a lot of yard-sale signs and plywood windows. Between McCamey and Fort Stockton, Texas, I passed buttes fading up into hazy sky, land as flat as a piece of paper, buzzards jumping up off the shoulder reluctantly, a hawk raising dust with his wingbeats as he chased something around a bush, heat shimmers dancing, and a spider as big as a hand crossing the pavement. In Fort Stockton, I stopped and ate some Mexican food and stayed in a Motel 6 where they charged extra for a key to turn on the television and I saw a flea. The next morning I got in my van and headed back to Montana.