Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

From Patricia to Andrews -- playas, homeplaces, and fences
January 8, 2003

The mid-September trip I took from Midland to an appointment in Andrews via Patricia was the first time I had ever driven FM 115.The first half dozen miles west of Patricia were in Dawson County -- nearly all cropland or Conservation Reserve Program land. This land was not fenced. The only landscape feature, other than varying degrees of landscaping around farmhouses, was the playas. Until the 1980s farmers often plowed the low swales to gamble on getting a crop in the drier years. In wet years, the playas were sometimes used as a source of irrigation water, and a number were modified with deep trenches at one end to collect the rain. (There also was a theory prevalent at the time that collecting the water in such a way would allow recharge of the Oglalla aquifer.)

During the eighties, when annual rainfall consistently exceeded our average, the playas became forests. Often the dominant woody shrub or tree was the Salt Cedar. According to the most commonly offered stories, Salt Cedars were either brought to Carlsbad, New Mexico in the late 1890s by settlers from the French Mediterranean coast, or by early Spanish settlers along the upper Rio Grande River. Some blame the Soil Conservation Service for bringing it in during the 1930s.

Most of the playas retained water through out the 1980s. When the waterline fell, the Salt Cedars germinated, and by the time the playas completely dried out in 1994 or so, they were completely forested. In some places Seep Willow (or Roosevelt Weed) are as thick as the Salt Cedar. Old timers say that Seep Willow was introduced by the government in the thirties as well. Another species that was featured in the government-sponsored tree planting programs of the thirties, the Siberian Elm, joins the other two rather commonly in present-day playa thickets.

I stopped at one playa that featured a relict from those earlier days. An old Black Willow caught my eye. Black Willows are native to the sand dunes of Kermit, the playas of the Llano Estacado, and the creeks of the “breaks” to the east of the Llano. Until the late 1960s, many playas would have at least one willow, but many were killed and removed when farmers started planting fenceline-to-fenceline with the advent of giant tractors (that now boast air conditioners and sound systems.)

Ringing the edge of this playa, wild sunflowers attracted a dozen goldfinches, at least a hundred Mourning Doves, and three flocks of Lark Buntings. Thirty years ago the Midland Naturalists recorded ten thousand or more Lark Buntings on every local Audobon Society Christmas Count. But not any longer: their numbers in their summer range (the shortgrass prairies of Colorado, Nebraska and the Dakotas) have declined as well.

Two substantial fences caught my eye as I continued on. Houses several miles apart were surrounded by fences built of 4x4’s. Each fence encircled more than an acre of lawn, trees, shrubs and various forms of ornamentation. The construction was identical, so I figured the residents were related and that one of them had gotten “a heck of a deal” when the railroad from Lamesa to Lubbock shut down. The fences were in the classic split-rail style – two crossbeams between uprights.

Another house had a “coyote fence” such as those one sees all over northern New Mexico. Coyote fences are made with cedar poles about the same diameter as an adult’s arm attached side by side with baling wire to two crosspieces. This fence was a little different: it had been attached to a welded drill stem pipe fence, which is common to rural homes in oil country.

I went past two old home places neither of which had a house or barn left. The first had old elms with dozens of younger ones sprinkled “willy-nilly” by chance germination. In the old barn and equipment area, sand had blown in from the surrounding fields which were now in CRP. The small, grassed-over dunes were covered with drifts of sand sage, that lovely soft gray shrub native to our sandy soil.

The other home place was a farm equipment bone yard, with rows upon rows of older equipment lying between half-dead Siberian elms. A person could easily create an impressive farm equipment museum by gathering up all the old implements found between here and Lubbock. The owners of the equipment probably would not allow this, however, for the packrat philosophy of “it has to be good for something” is deeply ingrained.

I crossed the county line into Gaines County, and then a hundred yards further crossed into the ranch country of Andrews County. After looking at other styles of fencing and seeing the quintessential cedar post and four-strand construction of the barbed wire fences another question popped into my mind. Just how old are these cedar posts?

Down near Mustang Spring I had noticed how a rancher had refurbished his fence by pulling the posts out of the ground and swapping the ends of the posts. The old ends were half the diameter they had once been, after decades of slow decay from moisture. I remember C. M. Edwards telling me twenty years ago of the cattle drives of the thirties’ drought. Back then, cattle were driven down the road between the fences, and were turned into rented pastures at night. At the time, I wondered if some of the cedar posts along the road were at least seventy years old. Later I found the answer in Patrick Dearen’s book on Mayer Halff. In it he has pictures of the first fences in west Texas – hundred and twenty-year-old “drift” fences.