Fierce winds off the current drouth swept all of the caliche topping from the county road going to the ranch in white, dusty swirls to pay the dry demon’s toll. After the last winter rain, an under berth of black mud dried into big clods and deep ruts held the truck to 20 mile per hour speeds on sunny days. A wisp of dew turned the pace to a slow, cautious crawl, making staying out of the barrow ditch a challenge.
At the end of the Drouth in 1957, the Big Boss’s Mexican mules pulled pickups and automobiles stuck in the mud to dry ground on the same roadway. The flood line from "Seep Draw" backed a lot farther up the road than travelers remembered. One of the cowboys living at the north line camp on the 09 Ranch kept trying to make his old car swim. During every big cloudburst, we knew Mac was going to try to cross "Seep" at just the right time to drown the motor on his jitney, yet not deep enough to wash down the draw.
One of the times I drove the mules over to rescue Mac, Mrs. Mac stuck her head out the window and said, "Looks like we are up the old creek without a paddle, don’t it, Monte?" (Old is the polished version.) The high school kid hooking the chain on Mac’s bumper from the wagon bed while I held the mules in two feet of rushing water dropped the chain tied to the wagon’s axle and fell over backwards in a rib-shaking fit of laughter. I lost my grip on the wet lines. The mules hit the traces and plunged ahead, ready to jerk the car from the floodwater. And Mrs. Mac made a cackling sound, endorsing the show by holding her daughter up to watch us fighting to control the mules up the muddy creek bank.
Other neighbors slid off in the ditches. Most ranch rolling stock dated back to the beginning of the weather failure in 1951. They were tough old crates, clutch-driven, and prone to ball mud up under the heavy steel fenders so tight the wheels locked. One salient feature, however, about our four-legged, iron-rimmed, wood-spoke wrecker service was that no one offered to pay us. In those days, people were comfortable helping each other.
Today four ranches have offered the county free caliche to fix the road, continuing the custom of neighborliness. One slight problem that we can’t solve is that the Commissioner’s Court set the speed limit on the lane a few years back at 45 miles per hour. The maximum speed, wet or dry, is 25 miles per hour on the better stretches of the road. Congressman Pete Gallegos at Alpine proposes to raise the speed limit in a bill before the current session of the Texas Legislature to 75 miles per hour. Thus, on County Road 131, if Mr. Gallegos’ bill passes, we will be driving 50 miles per hour slower than the state law and 20 miles an hour below the County Court’s limit.
Mr. Gallegos says he supports an increase in the speed limit in the wide expanses of his Big Bend district because his constituents in Presidio must drive 150 miles to reach a Walmart store. His position explains the urgency of the eastbound traffic going through the ranch to Angelo. All those folks whizzing past us driving sheep in the pasture along 67 aren’t as we supposed on 911 calls, or answering a national emergency, but are fulfilling a speed-directed mission to reach Walmart on the west side of San Angelo.
But back to the county road, the neighborhood is generous to donate caliche and water for road work. Oil companies pay $2 upward a yard for materials to build roads and equipment sites. However, as long as I’ve known about the public road policy, my family gave from the pits open along the right-of-way. Being so charitable, in fact, had a deep impression on a previous commissioner. Our open-handed policy impressed him so much that he joined in and dumped several hundred yards of our caliche over in the oilfield for private use. Took awhile to catch on why the fossil fuel miners radiated such warm smiles at the coffee house. I thought maybe it was because of my bow ties, or maybe my shirttail was out.
Been a big jump in time and custom since Mac and Mrs. Mac used to drive off in Seep Draw to go to town, especially to be rescued by a mule team. Holding the clock on the Walmart trips at 75 plus is going to take a steady hand. If Mr. Gallegos' bill passes, just the jet stream off the highway traffic will be enough to knock us sheepherders aside.
February 8, 2001