Essays
Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero
McElroy Ranch and Elmer Kelton
December 11, 2002
When traveling on the Llano Estacado, it helps to know some of the stories of the land. It is good to know some of the history, and something about the plants and animals, too. It also helps to know the literature of the land as well. Otherwise, the flat drabness seems a boring wasteland, a blank slate. Back in September, while hightailing it down the back road between Crane and the old Pegasus Oil Camp on Farm to Market Road 1492, the old McElroy Ranch on one side and Stan Smith’s Buffalo Basin ranch on the other, I remembered the stories my aunt told me about being the cook on the McElroy during World War II.
One of the people that pulled up a chair to feast on her fixings was a bespectacled teenager that liked to read. That kid got famous later. I do not know if she ever talked to him again in later years. Of course, famous is relative. Elmer Kelton does not appear in every issue of People Magazine, nor is he a talking head on CNN, and he has never been on the Today Show either. He is famous to a lot of us west Texans, however, somebody we are “mighty proud of,” and we give copies of his books to newcomers when they ask what it is like to live here.
I pulled off the road and stood at the fence-line awhile, staring off across the tarbrush and creosote bush. My folks went to a roundup on the McElroy back in 1944 and took a series of photographs. When I got home, I looked in the homemade album my dad had made of the visit. It is held together with pieces of plywood that have a ranch scene he etched on it freehand with a wood burning set. The boards are bound together with old pigging strings that break with age. I am glad I have these images of yesteryear, unknown to most folks alive today, and fading more every time an old-timer dies -- dust swirling around the cowboys as they knelt with branding irons in hand, or cowboys gathered under a grove of soapberries while hoo-rawing the visitors with a plate of mountain oysters, and of Elmer perched on a fence-rail as his father Buck roped another steer.
Despite its once dominant role the mythos of the rugged Western individualist is now watered-downed, co-opted, bowdlerized, or just plum forgotten. In west Texas, however, there are still folks that like to read Westerns. I have met quite a few people with complete collections of Louis L'Amour. Folks with complete collections of Elmer Kelton are fewer and that is a crying shame, for he is a far better writer. Mr. Kelton's books cover the Anglo history of Texas in exciting fashion. He writes modern Westerns, too, telling tales of boomtown oil times, of the 1950s drought, and even more recent changes.
Modern publishing is divided into dozens of genres and few receive critical literary merit. Definitions of art have been historically handed down as edicts from the East Coast and we provincials have meekly submitted to them. Admittedly, it might be pride in "one of us," but I am glad Mr. Kelton has received recognition as an author that transcends genre.
Elmer Kelton speaks with the quiet voice of the Llanero. Folks that are tempered by years of drought slowly crushing their livelihoods know the folly of being swayed by the pipedreams and illusions of a fast talker. Drought-toughened folks know that anybody who claims to be a rainmaker is a liar, and that anybody claiming to be able to predict the future is too fond of their own voice. A Llanero uses words sparingly, and believes that when something is said, it should mean something. To those that use this conversational style, people who talk continually easily get lost in circular arguments. On the Llano Estacado it is action that defines a human.
"The Time It Never Rained" is about one sheep rancher's response to the 1950's drought. Despite having only one income stream, he refused what he considered to be misdirected and ineffectual help from the government. Undercurrents of the historical racial conflict between Hispanic and Anglo are presented in counterpoint to the symbiotic intertwining of these cultures within agrarian social structures here in the borderlands. The drought slowly destroys the rancher’s stock operation, yet Charlie Flagg keeps standing up and fighting back. To me he is a tragic hero equal to the protagonist in Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Read "The Time It Never Rained" and listen to the story of Charlie Flagg and you will begin to know the lessons humans can learn on the Llano Estacado.
That day in September, I stood staring off across countryside as dry as the setting in the book. Every twenty years a multi-year drought visits this region. In the 1890s, the 1910s, and the 1930s, people left this region, defeated and broken. In the 1950s people kept coming, because of the development of the area’s rich oil fields. Droughts seem to have lost their power over us as we turn a faucet and cheap water runs out. We spend the water freely, with automatic watering systems coming on every day. Besides, we tell ourselves, the rains will always come again. Now October’s rains have greened up that scene on the McElroy with little wildflower rosettes so thick the ground cannot be seen. With a little bit of winter snow, next spring will be a wildflower year to remember.
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