Tim's Tales from the Road
Tim's Tales from the Road
US highway 54 stretches against the western high plains almost as if they were one big exhale from God. I suppose these flat expanses came about through exhaustion, a divine result of all the effort that went into creating the Rocky Mountains. The good Lord just needed a break, something easy for those talented hands of creation to mindlessly work. As creation saw form and the flats laid themselves over the high reaches as if they were some sort of blow down, the Lord worked his way east. The high plains came to be. One part afterthought, and two parts launching pad for wind. But, in the end they had their purpose and they became the good Lord's gift to cattlemen. While the plains are deceptive in their uniformity and boring topography, they have their place.
A good storyteller uses the occasional pause in their dialogue to add emphasis. Those silences bring the audience back to the main point and in the brief quiet separating dialogue, the chaos is filtered into manageable size. Those hesitations in speech bring clarity, reflection and definition to those who are ready to listen.
When God paused it was physical. The Great Plains are not passive. They force hesitation, reconsideration, and taking stock of what has come before. The effect is intentional: Laying out all flat and expansive, God forced creation to pause as well. Standing silent, surveying the vast prairies, with only the ever present wind to carry the Creator's words, it seems as if the Great plains were created specifically to get our attention. Through boredom and a lack of distraction the world becomes focused on space. God slows us down and adds a little meditation and understanding to the world. A pause in the creator's speech directed specifically towards a most complicated creation: Humanity.
I figure its only fitting that a highway like US 54 would get assigned to such a place. She runs a good imitation of a diagonal out of Tucumcarri, NM, across the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, and finally settling down, the road gets to getting across Kansas. The old highway never strays far from her El Paso roots. She is mostly lonely with small towns every 50 miles and even smaller, blink and you miss 'em, little hole-in-the-wall stops. Populated with a grain elevator, a couple rail crossings and not much else save the roaring Union Pacific freights splitting fence lines on shiny moonlit rails. The mile long freight trains turn the wind into a second place runner-up for loudest, just 'roaring through award' as the rhythmic clack-clack sound echoes off the grain elevators. The hollow, lonely sound is accompanied by the far off whistles of the engines announcing the approach of the next rail crossing already far away.
Some drivers can't seem to say much that’s good about old highway 54, instead these boys just roll quietly through, never finding any notion to comment on her definition of straight stretch, how sparse her traffic is, or why anyone would want to get dispatched this God forsaken way. Or a driver can be twisted like yours truly and fall in love with the old 54. Either opinion is just as sane. Or insane, if you call thinking about the merits of various highways and routings a waste in time. If it pleases you, I guess I'd just as soon answer to the latter. Sometimes insanity provides clarity.
I've often considered old 54 and the mysteries of her high flatlands and those golden wheat fields that carry waves just as sure as any ocean. Up here, where the thunderheads build in the summer and play leapfrog with dry lines and humidity, she is kin to wide open and nothingness. 'Here' is where everything a wanderlust crazed soul could ever hope to find in a highway resides. Craving the need for room or to feel just as free as the tumbleweeds getting caught up in the radiator grill while competing for eye space on a bug crusted windshield? Studio 54 is your draw. Your ticket to ride. Her blue skies are true blue and sometimes under starry nights it actually seems some dreams might come true
"She's good therapy," I once overheard a bull hauler tell his ‘backdoor’ as they rolled hard through a December moon. The comment seemed appropriate to describe the old road.
Sometimes a hand needs to let the blacktop take some emotion out of him when its been too long since home time or dispatch seems to have hot traded your needs in on everyone else's. Wide open spaces were made to absorb craziness and since those white and yellow lines sure don't seem to take in the wind as a boarder, they might as well take in someone who can howl just as fine. Howl like tires meeting the still warm blacktop. Howl like the winds breaking through a half-cracked window. Or howl like the pit in a man's stomach when all the silence of that wide-open nothingness starts getting to him. Like I said, that road and those high windy plains are like one big pause button and if a person isn't careful all that space can make you human.
Not surprisingly, U.S. 54’s designation by the state of Kansas as the official "Yellow Brick Road" is the main tourist draw for Liberal, Kansas. Here Red Slippers, Red River valleys and the red blood that flows out of the meatpacking plants all hail from the same streets. The city includes countless feedlots and grain elevators and is home to thousands of Hispanic immigrants. It is also home to Dorothy's actual house from the Wizard of OZ fame. Liberal resembles a giant, made for T. V. foster home to everyone that has always wanted a 'home' or sought one to go back to. The town is, in every sense, ‘home on the range’ in A, for Americana, flat.
It wasn't too long ago that I met up with a young man who was making strange and familiar eye contact with me in a Topeka, Kansas Barnes and Noble Bookstore. As he watched me looking through the books in the store, he asked me if I was from Topeka. I shook my head no. I told him that I was from Washington and he looked down disappointed and said, "You're lucky. There's nothing here."
How strange that he used the word 'nothing' to describe Kansas. I looked at him. "Nothing," I asked? He nodded and explained that he was from Manhattan, NY. A former member of the circuit party scene, he was youthful, handsome, and his style was definitely not Topeka. The way he wore his tee-shirt spoke loud volumes about his attention to his body. He didn't blend in with the farmers whom I had just seen next door at the Walmart. He began to confess the purpose for his Topeka address.
"I am a Chelsea boy or circuit boy or, well, whatever. Or at least I was." Explaining the reason he was in Topeka seemed embarrassing to him and he seemed to be trying to compensate for his presence there. He kept looking away as he spoke and I listened as I sipped a hot coffee. His days in the scene were addictive and the parties took their toll. Too many drugs and endless sex brought his life to a crashing halt. Deeply in trouble, his family sent him to Topeka to get clean and sober. Successfully completing his treatment, he returned to the scene and immediately got back into the same ruts. Now once again back in Topeka, it seemed to be the only place where he could keep on the straight and narrow.
There's nothing here. The words echoed in my mind and as I looked at him as he spoke in the coffee house telling me about his life. I didn't say anything in return but listened and learned. Nothing he did when he was out of Kansas seemed to provide a lot of answers in his quest for sanity. But from his perspective and through his eyes, he couldn't see it — not the sobriety, the peace of mind or the lack of complying with an endlessly changing and sensually compelling scene. To him, Kansas remained nothing more in his mind than being about nothing. Yet, it was the only place he had found where he could stay sober.
Finally I gave him my take on the state. "I have been everywhere in this country and Kansas is one of my favorite places. Sure it's slow and you have to be really open to finding her unique culture. Actually seeing it for what it is. But trust me, there is only one Kansas and it's like nowhere else. Her culture, well, some say it's nothing. They say 'there's nothing there'. Some just don't see it. But, it's there all right. It’s at county fairs and John Deere dealerships during harvest. Culture isn't just Manhattan. Kansas isn't about catching your eye. She is subtle and you have to take some time to get to know her. She isn't about change. She is about staying put and figuring out what that means. It's not that there isn't anything here…its just that it doesn't tackle you and run you down like some run away truck."
The yellow brick road is one of Little Red Ride 'em Good's favorite runs. The Lady in Red, seems to know every inch of the road, as she should. At times we have lived for weeks on 54 as we ran back to back freight from Topeka to LA. Often pulling those God forsaken death traps on ice, doubles, the rear pups would sway back and forth and nothing could be done to stop them from doing that ‘do-see-do’ dance that is every driver's nightmare. Buffeted by blizzard winds in the winter and tornadoes the rest of the year, the road rash left on a man’s headlights scared eyelids testify that the highway is so straight and so exposed that it doesn't shield its occupants from anything. Whether it's the forces of nature, or the forces somersaulting in one's own mind.
The roads less traveled are always the fondest ones. Somewhere between Liberal and Pratt, Kansas lies a quiet little Western town and a quiet little storefront. For years I have passed that store and tried to glimpse inside to see what I could see. Slowing down and idling at a crawl through town, I'd crane my neck to get a feel for the store's contents. The storefront, bookmarked in my imagination, was simply the place with the wagon wheel porch swing out front. A place on my list of things to see, but somehow I'd never made it. I'd never seen inside. I always figured I stop in "someday." Last December, a week before Christmas on a cold, flurry spittin' day, I finally did.
Parking the Red KW a block down the highway, I walked into the deserted store. The proprietor was standing behind the counter and her warm smile greeted me like the smell of hot coffee lifts up a cold soul on a winter day. I said some howdy do's and she did like wise. She was a nice looking lady with frizzy hair and she wore western apparel in the standard wrangler tradition. We got to talking' and in one of those moments where strangers meet and they know they like each other, we hit it off.
Her store, one of three she runs, is full of all things Western. Some would label her merchandise "cowboy kitch" without a second thought. Almost as if china with barbed wire patterns and pictures of western images are nothing more than "OH isn’t that JUUUUUSSSTTT adorable!" articles one decorates with. Something to collect. To the ‘kitch’ clan, Cowboy china doesn't represent anything of heritage or lineage. Nor is it a tradition to look back on, pointing to a different way of life in which one could be proud. Their grandparents never ate off hand made plates at the back of chuck wagons and if they did, today's consumers are ashamed to acknowledge such histories. Instead the china is fashionable because this year cowboy stuff is "in". Next year, the barbed wire adorned plates will be replaced. New serving pieces with forest nymphs frolicking among dolphins will appear placed over authentic handmade seaweed place mats woven by Burmese Tribal shaman.
For many tourists the merchandise is merely cute stuff, going in and out of style. Something they brought back from 'those quaint folks in Dodge on our trip West last year.' Lord help the soul who actually knows someone who had to eat on dirty, handmade plates in the middle of blizzard. Announce such things and the conversation at the dinner party comes to a stop. Folks quit chewing their food and stare in silence. "Really?" They ask in polite shock and speculation runs wild on who invited such company to the party.
We want our western images cleaned up and we want 'em sanitized "American Cowboy" style. Marlboro men riding pretty horses against clean Montana skies and please pass the steak marinated in a raspberry plum, wild game glaze. These days our cowboys have had at least two showers in the last hour. They've only shot at bad guys and never had a racist word touch their lips. They've never run into a Nevada cat house with the pickup truck left still running outside 'cause its just gonna be a quickie. Nor would they ever chew, smoke or drink anything that could be confused as illegal during prohibition. These are the days of family values cowboys with fish emblems next to the NRA stickers in the back window of a Chevy 3/4 ton.
If that isn't enough, we can celebrate our new respectability with cowboy china service for eight served at Focus on the Family Fundraisers down in ‘the Springs’. Service which is dishwasher safe, dinner party safe, conversationally safe, and most importantly, living room safe. Today tradition becomes kitch and now proud but imperfect histories rest sterile on table service plates made for 'the new west' dinner parties, chatty conversation and for vegetarian take out. Hold the dirt, the cussing, family secrets, and most importantly, unfamiliar animals frying in bacon fat please.
But, as I stood next to the proprietor of the store, I knew that she was an original. The store remained empty the entire hour and a half I was there. In the quiet of the late December afternoon while winter gray streamed in from the window facing the highway, I felt silhouetted by the in between hollows of her narrative. Out of the way and nestled into the nooks and crannies of the store were treasures. Everything reminded me of someone I knew or a horse that I had once owned. Alone with the woman, as she picked up item after item and told me of its significance, I found myself reverent almost as if we’d mounted up for some sort of quiet trail ride. Following her around the store, nothing she did was about selling merchandise. I wasn’t just a customer but a guest and that meant thumbing through photo albums and sharing the histories of the main drag of a small midwestern town. As I walked around the store and held different weavings and looked at the artistic work of her mother who had known and painted great Native American chiefs, I felt her stories touching my hands. I felt the fabric of life and history sinking in and chilling the skeptic and warming the heart. I was walking through the curtains of another’s time and reading the results of lives drawn before and after. There wasn't any standing ovation at the end of these performances, just a certain calm. A pause. The place was moving in its stillness.
She asked where I was from and I told her of the Pend Oreille Country whose sole function seems to be guarding the Idaho Panhandle and Northwestern Montana from the inhabitants of 'the coast'. A code word that mountain bred inlanders use that silently means "the other side". Seattle. Portland. Vancouver BC. 'Not from here'. Because here is their definition of a No Man's Land where there are No Stoplights, No Starbucks, and sometimes no indoor plumbing. A place where the snow lies deep and the northern lights sometimes dance wicked games around the moon. A place which seems untouched by stock splits and gentrification. A place we fear might someday become there. The dreaded Coast.
We talked of Tamaracks that line creek beds in the southwest and of the tall autumn Tamaracks that rise straight up and turn brilliant yellow and orange in my neck of the woods. We looked at art that reminded us of our different experiences on life's trails where dirty souls and dirty laundry could never be sufficiently explained. The stains remained a testament to times spent more under the mud than above it. Unable to explain how we got so dirty to ourselves never mind explaining it to someone else. Our highest moments balancing and contrasting with our lower ones, all showcased in the context of Western Art and spoken among perfect strangers who felt as if they'd known each other for a long time.
But then in its truest form, Western art isn't about clean. It's about messy. It's about dirt and wild and things going terribly wrong. Our art and our traditions speak volumes about good intention and terrible outcomes and about the best of the worst. Our wide opened skies hold terrible secrets and they sometimes come stampeding out of the corrals at the worst possible times. I know of secrets. She did too.
"That jacket has seen better days." She said.
I looked down at my David James arena jacket that no longer had an operational zipper. It was stained beyond cleaning from the previous winter's endless times spent bent over tires almost as large as I, wrestling with chains and slush and sand. Wet dirty spray running down my back and soaking first my flannels and then my Calvin's. "Nothing coming between me and my Calvin's" but a case of frostbite and wet slush. I spent the entire winter wrapped up in the rusted, dirty iron chains that supposedly give traction and keeps freight rolling. As she looked at my jacket shaking her head a nightmare from the previous week came roaring back at me out of my mind. I think I grinned and she looked at me puzzled….
"Look Honey, what you want me to do? I AIN'T getting your jacket clean. Its just too…" the young smartly dressed African American woman behind the West Memphis Arkansas dry cleaning counter held up the jacket examining it…at arms length. "Its just too messy. What you been doing in this baby? You been rolling in a cow pen or what?" She held the jacket away from her and stared at me. "Its nasty!"
I looked back at her sheepishly "It ain't nasty. It's just dirty. It's my favorite jacket. You have to try to get it clean. Swear, It ain't nothing nasty. Its just dirt."
"What kinda’ DIRT you talkin’ about? I ain't never seen this color of dirt before." She thrust the jacket back at me with pouty teenaged revulsion.
"Its just dirt dirt,. Mountain dirt. Trucker dirt. Maybe some rust in there too. I drive truck. Can you please try to get my jacket clean?"
"Ummmm hmmmm'", she moaned, her racing nails sparkling and purple painted lips pursing around the syllables. "I bet this IS mountain dirt. You lying to me baby or what. I ain't ever seen no mountain dirt look like this. Where you from baby?"
"Washington State", I answered.
"Sure you is baby." She was leaning over the counter twirling my jacket and smiling at me. I wasn't sure what to say.
"No I is, I mean, am," I said.
"When you need it baby?" she asked.
"Tomorrow" I said.
"Tomorrow?" She said raising her gold speckled eyebrows.
"Yes Tomorrow. I am only here until tomorrow. My truck is broke down. I won't be back here for months…"
"Charlennnnneeeee!!!!" She screamed gospel style behind her to someone out of my sight that was working in the back.
"Whattttttt?" Came the equally loud reply.
"Come here baby….He wants this back tomorrow. You better see it…" she leaned back over the counter and kept twirling my jacket at an arm's length. She was still smiling and I was visualizing asking her things that men who aren't from Mars should never ask women who've spent too much time on Venus.
"Girl why you always botherin' me. You know I got things I gotta be doin'." A huge woman appeared and waddled toward the counter grabbing my twirling jacket from the teenager. She looked it over and then looked at me. She looked at the jacket again. Then she smiled at me some sort of a wicked, 'gotcha' smile. "Baby that’s nasty. What you been doing in that?"
They both stood there, waiting for me to answer, chewing gum, and occasionally snapping it between gold capped teeth.
Grabbing the jacket I said a futile, " never mind!" and rushed out of the store.
I felt self-conscience as the proprietor of the Western store looked at my jacket closer and then looked up at me shaking her head. "How DID you get that jacket so dirty?" she asked. "Did you get hung up and drug by a cow or a horse?"
At least she and I were on the same page. "Nope, its just from trucking, So far no one seems to think they can get it clean" I answered. I visualized the dry cleaning ladies from the week before and wondered if I should just torch the formerly sacred thing.
"Follow me, I got something in back you might like." I followed her into the back of the store and she showed me an oil skin duster jacket. The material was rigid and heavy and inside, the flannel lined jacket looked warm. I tried it on and buttoned it up.
"It will repel water for up to 18 hours and it won't show dirt. I'll sell it to you at my cost." She was standing back, studying me. "It looks good on you."
"I don't have any enough cash on me to buy it. I doubt there is an ATM machine in town…" I never finished the sentence. She interrupted me.
"I'll take a check. I trust you. You need the jacket. It's December. That one you got won't even zip."
I looked at the jacket in the mirror and she upped the ante. "I'll sell you a matching hat for ten bucks."
I looked at her and she looked at me. "Ok, Ok," I said. "Sold".
I went back out to the truck and got my checkbook and grabbed some pictures of the ranch. When I returned to the store she was at the counter and while she rang up the sale I asked her if she still rode. She put down the receipt book and laughed. "Funny you should ask," she said. For the next fortyfive minutes, I stood in front of her at the counter. As the bull haulers and the freight wagons rolled by outside her western studio on highway 54, she told me of falling in love and leaving her own large cattle family and marrying into another. She spoke lovingly about working cows and fall gathering, hunting for strays and how the Red River valleys were some of the prettiest river valleys she'd ever rode. She also spoke of the Canadian River and of Oklahoma's Panhandle and of 'cow people' verses 'farm people'. The conversation got quieter and this stranger standing in front of her learned about marriages and well placed hopes and crashing dreams.
"You know, Its so amazing that the person I once loved most I could also someday hate the most," She paused in mid sentence. "I couldn't even see my own damn horses for four months cause the bastard put a consent decree on me keeping me from getting near 'em."
I could only imagine that in a county as sparsely populated as this one, that folks had probably had a good bit to talk about when their marriage disintegrated. From the bits and pieces of history she shared neither of them went about their break up quietly and as the courts settled up the spoils of their small but well provisioned forces, the locals knew as much about the two of them as they did each other. When everything was final and she was back on her own, she started her life over. She wasn't a one to give up and quit. This was her country as much as it was his. And when she got back up in the saddle, she did it in the same county as her ex.
Telling me of the wild risks and the foolishness of launching her stores while simultaneously leaving the wreckage of her marriage behind, her narration changed course. As I listened, leaning over the counter, I learned about the strength of this western plains woman. Independence and true grit aren’t just traits unique to the women I’ve known of the Front Range country. She wore the same qualities on her spirit and they shone bright in her eyes.
She told me pained tales about her horses. Recounting the tragic events that threatened her four legged family members, she told of horses who were bitten by rattlesnakes and who got hung up in cattle guards. I grimaced as she remembered the ordeals she single handedly endured. Legs broke open and hell fire times loading wounded and drugged up animals into horse trailers. Her quiet voice cracked as she whispered about wondering if either she, or her horses, would survive the trips to the animal hospitals. She halfheartedly joked of her personal financing of the veterinarian programs at both the Oklahoma and Colorado State Universities' Large Animal 'Vet.' Programs. Bemoaning that in the process she racked up an impressive collection of five figure bills. All of this, done in an attempt to put her beloved animals back together again, and, to put her own life together again. This time alone.
"What doesn’t kill us, makes us… ", and she paused, looking out over the highway, "well its supposed to make us stronger. We'll just have to see about that…"
The truck waited warm and inviting when I finally left her store and walked back down Main Street. The wind kicked up by the cattle haulers sent shivers down my back as they passed. But the new jacket was warm and it comforted my skin. I thought about the lady who owned the store and about the journeys of life set up for viewing in her humble studio against a lonely Kansas highway. A last stand in her corner of the world and a place for outsiders to have a look inside. A warm store set up just so and if the visitor was lucky and was willing to listen, they might not only see what she had to sell but get a vision as to some unanswered hidden mysteries put towards learning life's harder lessons. In that studio, on old 54, a stranger might find more than a new jacket. Learning as I did, amongst her western treasures, carefully laid out, next to this saddle blanket or that sculpture that there was something more genuine than mere physical objects. Kindness towards a cold stranger and a willingness to share is worth far more. And as I thought of my own failed relationships and of the ones that have survived, I humbly thanked God for the luck of the draw that pulled Dallas out of the chute, bringing us together. And I couldn't help but think of the Topeka circuit boy's words as they rang off the empty storefronts and seemed to dance in the dust and spittin' snow flurries. "There's nothing here."
Nothing at all except the rich traditions and the ruined ones. Nothing except the sum of some failed relationships and maybe the triumphs of others. Nothing except the roaring freights and the wind waves blowing across the wheat and the summers of carefree, shirtless boys riding into town for the county fair in old beat up pick up trucks happy and content with the news of a good harvest. Nothing except the fact that as much as life changes that there will always be highways running through central Kansas. Highways where the dance of life is a little simpler and the people honestly lay their lives out for strangers who are just passing through. Strangers who only have a moment to glance at what is offered in a western studio on old 54. But strangers who would like to stay a little longer because what they find there is so damn fulfilling.
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