Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

Girvin
May 19, 2004

The mid-afternoon heat waves melted the air so it seemed that I was looking through old glass. King Mountain, to the east, was only a blob – I could not make out the tall windmills of the wind farm on its top. Woodward Mountain, to my south, seemed to be in focus, but if I gazed at it steadily I thought I could see the rocks pulsate. Sweat dripped down my face, channeled by the lowest edge of my hat band – and I had the hat pulled down low over my nose.

There was not a twitch of wind, other than the radiating and rising reflected heat coming from the ground. A thermometer on the ground would have registered 150 degrees F, if not more. My feet were so wet with sweat that they would slip and slide within my sandals when I took a few squishy steps. I moved to the largest mesquite between the cemetery and the old railroad, where I hoped its scant shade would be cooler on my skin as well as the ground. I stood inside the mesquite, my head poking out.

Within sight was an old red brick schoolhouse, still used as a community center by the area ranchers and farmers. I could see other old buildings, standing empty, on their motionless way to rubble. I could not see the Social Club on the U.S. Highway to the south for the view was blocked by other mesquites. I could see the flag of the “new” little one-room post office along the highway. It hung limp. A pumpjack in the old White and Baker Ranch shipping trap waited – everything was waiting – not with patience, but stoic endurance.

When the blast furnace of summer heat is turned on high, nothing moves. I could not hear anything – I suppose the little mesquite cicadas were whining, but I have not spent the money yet for a hearing aid. I should, for I can not hear buzztail serpents anymore, either. They would be underground in badger holes, waiting for night’s coolness, being not nearly as foolish as I.

Seventy-five years ago the scene would have been lively. The power plant on the other side of the river would have been new. Over a hundred students would have been in the new schoolhouse. On the other side of the river would have been dozens of oil rigs, and the dust plumes kicked up by speeding black Fords would have delineated the network of oilfield roads. The Brown and Tharp field near me was not discovered until the 1950s.

Ninety-three years ago, I would have heard the “bellering” of thousands of cattle. For a few years the railroad’s terminus would have been in sight, the dreams of Arthur Stillwell on hold as he raised more money for his Kansas City to Topalabampo Railroad – an early version of La Entrada al Pacifico. Cowboys would have filled the new town (began in 1911) for each spring and fall shipping season.

A hundred and fifty years ago the river valley to the north would have been filled with grass chest deep to a horse. (Alkali sacaton and giant sacaton are huge tussock grasses – the first reaches four feet and the second reaches ten feet in height.) The river, its course looping back and forth on itself the length of the valley, overflowed its banks every year, after spring snowmelt far to the north. Henry Skillman, Deidrich Dutchover and Bigfoot Wallace, riding the first mail stage west, could have stopped and dug up huge old mesquite roots for firewood if they had not been in a hurry.

Even forty years later, in the 1890s, early day ranchers could fill a wagon with mesquite roots without once making the team move. The old roots were as big as a man’s leg – sometime long ago the valley must have been a grand mesquite bosque. Shrub mesquite and creosote bush (greasewood) fill the valley now, and in many places the ground is bare, as a result of alkali irrigation water out of the river. Tobosa grass, only 8 inches tall, is now the dominant grass, although alkali sacaton is still present. (The river turned salty after dams were built upriver, and the flow diminished by 75 percent, its water now used by farmers in the state to the north.)

From the 1880s to the early 1900s, the surrounding countryside was the domain of a few huge open-range cattle operations. After the passage of the Four Section Land Act, the range was fenced and the operations became smaller. A number of the ranches along the river became well known for the fine horses they raised and sold to the military before the mechanization of the army after World War One.

In the 1950s Billy Sol Estes bought up all but one of the area farms started by the pioneers and broke more land until 5,000 acres were under cultivation. Sixty men and their families lived on his Ag-Inc. (Agriculture Incorporated) land. Over a hundred braceros were brought in for every cotton-picking season. A dairy operation milked as many as thirteen hundred cows, and stainless steel tanker trucks hauled milk as far away as Midland, 80 miles away. Billy Sol started the first large pecan orchard in west Texas, too. When Billy Sol was sent to prison for selling non-existent fertilizer, the operation subsequently sold several times, and has been recently known as Sun Valley Farms.

All of that history simmered in my brain as I stood in the mesquite. I also thought about Eddie Mae Woodward, a wonderful storytelling ranchwoman, whose house was on the other side of Woodward Mountain to my south. In the 2002 Permian Historical Annual she wrote a history of this location. In fact, the paper of a copy of the annual was crinkling up in the heat of the cab of my little truck at that very moment. Looking at the old graves near me, and because my brain was getting a bit addled by the heat, I started “hallucinating aurally,” imagining the voices of the people buried there, telling me their versions of Mrs. Woodward’s stories.

The reflective heat rising out of the ground became the pioneers’ voices, and somehow I became cooler. Sweat no longer dripped from my nose. My skin no longer prickled and itched or felt like it was being scorched. Old-time cowboys call it “being inside the heat,” those times when the heat ceases being an oppressive and omnipresent force, and is completely forgotten. It is also when the heat dries sweat as soon as it forms, and the skin actually becomes cooler. It feels wonderful, but if it goes on too long, the beginning symptoms of heatstroke make a person slightly light-headed and a tiny bit woozy and dizzy.

I stood listening to the voices until I heard the wail of a steam locomotive’s whistle. That snapped me back – soon a diesel locomotive’s horn will resound here again, but – oh, lordy, it was time to crank the truck’s AC up full-blast and hold a cold soda-pop can to the back of my neck!