The Time of My Life (19 page)

I would be building a 188-m.p.h. sports plane from plans and kits. I would be creating fancy graphics for my own videotape extravaganzas. I would be commuting to the office on a bicycle. I would be erecting lattices around the patio and a colonial cupola on the roof. I would be weaving a hammock out of cotton rope. I would be building a chain-driven replica of a classic touring car that would draw crowds when my kids pedaled it down the sidewalk.

Popular Mechanics
hasn't changed much. The New Achievers are doing pretty much what the Old Achievers were doing when my subscription ran out and I lost track of them.

But I've learned too much about myself during all those years to even fantasize about such projects now. I know I'll never be “the man who can make things work.”

I'll never see a pretty offshore oil driller, either.

May, 1980

Seeing Butch Again

S
OMEWHERE IN MY
ARCHIVES
is a photograph of Butch Mikel that I took in a college dormitory in 1955. He's wearing a cowboy hat and strumming a guitar. The set of his mouth suggests that he was singing, which he often did.

It's the sort of picture you run into while rummaging in a file cabinet or a box of papers, looking for something else, and every time I would come across it I would wonder whatever happened to old Butch. I hadn't seen or heard from him in twenty-four years.

Well, he phoned the other day and asked if I was the same guy he used to know. I said yes, and we agreed to meet at a bar after work a few days later and tell each other what we had done with the years.

In the interim, I began to wonder whether I
was
the same guy he knew. I was a skinny, crew-cut kid back then, only a few weeks out of the hills. I was living the lives of a Big City newcomer and a collegian and a cub reporter all rolled into one. I was still wet behind the ears in all departments and dating a baton twirler.

Twenty-four is a lot of years. I had taken a couple of turns around the block during that time. I couldn't think of much I still had in common with the kid Butch knew, except the skinniness.

And I wondered how much Butch had changed.

He was a New Mexico “kicker” who refused to give up his boots and hat when he came to the city, and I remembered him as hot-tempered and something of a hell-raiser. My most vivid memory of him was the time he drank a fifth of yellow tequila all by himself and the monumental case of stomach cramps he got from the experience. I've always thought Manuel Palacios and I should have been awarded some sort of life-saving merit badge for walking Butch up and down the dirt road behind the dorm most of that night, trying to straighten out his kinks, but the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross never contacted us.

Butch left school about a year later and went back up to Jal to work for El Paso Natural Gas. I saw him on TV several months later, pickin' and singin', and so far as I knew, he was still out in the desert somewhere, working on a rig or whatever he did for EPNG.

That's the way memory is. It freezes people the way they were when we last saw them, and we expect them to be the same when we run into them again eons later, like that mammoth the Russians found under the ice. I've had that experience often enough to know that nobody remains the same, though, and I expected to have to sit at the bar a few minutes, wondering which of the other customers was my good buddy of yesteryear.

But I recognized Butch as soon as I walked in, even though the place was fairly dark. He was still as short and stocky as he was in that old photograph. He wasn't wearing the hat, but he had a pair of sunglasses pushed back on his head and still wore the boots. He hadn't run to fat and still had all his hair. The gray in it looked pretty distinguished. So did the few wrinkles around his eyes. “Hey,” I thought, “maybe I ain't as old as I feel like.”

We ordered a couple of beers and sat down at a table. “I don't drink the hard stuff anymore,” he said. “It still makes me crazy.” And right away, we started remembering that night with the tequila.

That brought back other memories of Manuel and Arlen Green and Bob Hughes and Bill Downing and Pepe de la Fuente and Frank Hsu and a host of other rowdies we used to run with, and a Thanksgiving weekend when I took Butch to my hometown and introduced him to my pretty sister, and the good club steaks we used to get at the Alcazar in Juarez for just a dollar. When we ran out of friends and started remembering frat rats and beauty queens whose names we could no longer bring to the surface, Butch said, “You always wanted to write, didn't you? Even back in those days.”

“Yeah,” I said, “And you always wanted to ride in rodeos.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but they're old-timer rodeos now. So tell me what you've been doing for the past quarter-century.”

We talked of schools andjobs and marriages and divorces and remarriages. He told me of his wanderings in New Mexico and West Texas and as far afield as South Carolina, and I countered with my adventures in Massachusetts and Missouri and Oklahoma and Alabama and Kentucky. We spoke of sons, and how proud we are of them. Eventually we made a U-turn and went back to the farther past, when we were young and knew each other.

“Ah, those were the days,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “but I wouldn't want to repeat any of them.”

He was right. Wanting your youth back, I decided, is a whole lot sadder than losing it.

May, 1980

How Much an Inch of Rain Is Worth

A
FELLOW
WHO
RUNS
a small farming and ranching operation near Marfa told me the other day that a one-inch rain would be worth forty thousand dollars to him if it fell within the next two weeks. If it fell after that, it wouldn't be worth much of anything, he said, because his cattle already would be sold and his crops already burned up.

On the off chance that rain might come, the man's two teen-age sons were sleeping days and tending the crops at night—a routine they had established to avoid being killed by the sun in their bell pepper fields. In a week or so they will find out whether their efforts were worth forty thousand dollars or nothing.

That forty-thousand-dollar figure puts Texas' current killer drought into a truer perspective than the estimated loss figures reported by government officials and the news media, I think. When State Agriculture Commissioner Reagan Brown tells President Carter that Texas agriculture losses are approaching two billion dollars, the president may be impressed, but the figure doesn't mean much to most of us. Nobody but the federal government and the Hunt brothers knows how much money two billion dollars is. The figure slides through the ordinary mind without grabbing onto anything, like the number of miles to the sun. An hour after we read it, we can't remember whether it was two billion or four billion or seven billion. It was just a big, incomprehensible number, similar to estimates of the amount said to be wasted by the federal bureaucracy every month or two.

Most people have some idea how much forty thousand dollars is, though, and what it can buy and what it means to a family of six who have worked for it all year and have counted on getting it and probably won't get it because the rain waited too long to fall or didn't fall at all.

It's such modest figures that have so many rural Texans frightened and dredging up old memories of the long, horrible 1950s, when the rain fell on neither the just nor the unjust in Texas and huge regions of the state began to resemble Saudi Arabia.

A lot of family ranches and farms disappeared down the gullets of the big agribusiness corporations during that decade, and a lot of young people who had hoped to spend their lives on their own land, growing beef and pork and vegetables and grain as their forefathers had done, migrated to the cities to manufacture and sell underarm deodorants and Frisbees and aluminum siding for somebody else.

After a generation or two away from the farm, we tend to forget the true significance of rain. When it's hot in Dallas, we spend more time in the air-conditioning and worry about the electric bill. When it doesn't rain, we water the lawn more often and worry about the water bill. When a Fort Stockton rancher tells a TV reporter that he's selling his cattle at a loss because the grass is gone and he can't afford to buy feed for them, we think, “Too bad for him.” When the farmers of Dilley, the self-styled “Watermelon Capital of the World,” report that there will be no Dilley watermelons this summer because they've burned up in the fields, we think, “I'm glad I'm not a watermelon farmer.” When we drive through the Davis Mountains, which should be green at this time of year, and see that the grass is short and the color of sand and that thousands of acres of even
that
meager forage have been blackened by fires set by rainless lightning and careless tourists, we complain that the scenery isn't as pretty as it's supposed to be.

Although many will never recognize it for what it is, the real meaning of this drought will creep into the city sooner or later. It's already creeping, here and there. It wasn't entirely because of inflation that a friend of mine paid five dollars at the Dallas farmer's market the other day for a watermelon just big enough to feed three. It was because it didn't rain at Dilley. And next fall, when there's a shortage of beef and the price of hamburger goes up, it'll be because it didn't rain in South and West Texas.

Then the city folks who manufacture cars and appliances and clothing and sporting goods will notice that they're selling less than they hoped to, and they'll lay off some of their employees. And they'll cuss the government or the banks or somebody else for their bad year. But it'll be because it didn't rain in time, or enough, or at all.

And eventually the scholars and the government statisticians will discover that the number of family farmers and ranchers—the group of independent gamblers and entrepreneurs who used to be called “the backbone of the nation”—is dwindling even faster than before, that more of the country's land has fallen into fewer hands, that there are more people working for fewer bosses, that more of the nation's wealth—including its economic and political power— is possessed by fewer owners.

“Give us rain,” the old Texans used to say, “and it don't matter who's in the White House.”

They knew what was really important, even in an election year.

July, 1980

On Burros and Gentle Understanding

M
Y
FEELINGS
ARE
HURT
. Not only was I not appointed head honcho of the great burro roundup, I wasn't even invited to participate. The so-called elite corps of cowboys chosen for the job sneaked off to the Grand Canyon without me.

It's the fault of the Fund for Animals folks, probably. They're the people who came up with the idea of rounding up the Grand Canyon's wild burros and putting them up for adoption after federal officials said the beasts were depriving other wildlife of food and were tearing up the scenic grandeur of the place. The feds were planning to shoot the burros, which sounds like a pretty good idea to anyone who has known a burro personally. And adopting a burro— especially a wild one—makes about as much sense as planting a mesquite or a loco weed in your front yard.

But on the off chance that a future generation might find some redeeming social value in wild burros, I was willing to offer my expertise to the Fund for Animals for a reasonable fee so that the work would be done properly. Instead, the fund gave the bossing job to Dave Ericsson, another Texan whose only credentials are that he's a former world champion bronc rider and has captured about seventeen hundred wild burros throughout the Southwest during the past two summers. The rest of the crew probably is even more amateurish.

And no wonder. Cia Hobbs, press liaison for the Fund for Animals, says Ericsson and his crew were chosen for their “gentleness.” “The absolute most primary concern, because the burros are not accustomed to man, is to handle them in such a way that they are not frightened,” said Ms. Hobbs. She also praised Ericsson for his “fantastically gentle understanding” of the critters.

I believe Ms. Hobbs has confused burros with bunny rabbits. No wild burro of my acquaintance ever possessed such a sensitive, easily damaged psyche.

And I knew several. Wild burros wandered the streets of Fort Davis when I was a boy, and Jimmie Granger and George Medley and I used to round them up on Saturdays for our rodeos on the Grangers' vacant lot. Lacking the helicopters and other fancy equipment that Ericsson and his amateurs are using, we never managed to capture more than two out of the herd of five or six on any given Saturday, but our rodeos featured only one event—bareback bronc riding—and two burros were sufficient to provide as many cracked heads, cut knees, and bruised rumps as we needed.

The two who stick in my mind like grassburrs are the beasts we named Dynamite and Lightning. We captured them more often than the others because, I suspect, they had grown fond of damaging small boys. After we had chased the herd a mile or two up some dusty road, trying to lasso the burros with our cotton ropes, Dynamite and Lightning would give each other a wink and just stop and wait for us to loop them and lead them to the Grangers' lot. Once inside the arena, we would fashion Dynamite's lead rope into a makeshift hackamore and slip it over his nose, and the first daredevil would climb aboard.

We used Dynamite for the preliminary competition because he was a slow starter. While the tense rider sat astride him, the other rodeo hands would shake tin cans filled with rocks and whack Dynamite with yucca poles. Once Jimmie even set off a firecracker under his belly. Dynamite, however, never moved until he was ready, and sometimes ten or fifteen minutes would pass without so much as a twitch.

Meanwhile, the rider would be getting restless, because Dynamite was famous for his backbone, which resembled a picket fence. Straddling it for fifteen minutes was pure torture, and sooner or later the rider would have to raise his rump off the sharp vertebrae to ease the pain. At that moment, Dynamite's hind hooves would fly skyward, and the rider would sail between the burro's ears into the dust. To top off the indignity, Dynamite would bare his long, yellow teeth and loose the most derisive bray ever to insult the ears of man.