Before you hear the story about the wildest ride I ever saw, some close competition for the title needs to be eliminated. Withdrawn is the race three brothers matched in new cars in the 1920s from Barnhart to Angelo to end in a dead heat of sparks, oil smoke, and melting pistons and rings. Comes up too, the buggy races two San Angelo bankers ran up Chadbourne Street in the 1890s, starting at the Arc Light Saloon every banking day at noon to end at their homes. Also, the time over at Sherwood when a kid’s kite tail fell across Fred Sanders’ burro’s back deserves a place, even if only to recall how poor old crippled Fred stayed on until the stampede ended.
But there’s one more that stands out ahead of all those rides. The story opens in the hard winter of 1956 on the east bank of the Pecos River. It was the winter a passport cowboy named Jose Aguirre and myself drove 90 miles back and forth from the old ranch looking after the Boss’s cattle pastured on a big, wide draw running into the Pecos. As the winter wore on and wore on some more, Jose and I were going "forth" more than we were coming "back." The cattle ranged in two 13-section pastures dotted with oil wells.
Oil companies in those days housed the employees in camps on the ranches. For company, Jose, myself and the Boss’s black cattle had 10 families, 10 milk cows, 30 or 40 kids, 10 chicken yards, and about 400 tons of rusty cable and corroded pipe to pick our way through on the trails. All of the wells leaked from the sulfur-caked pumpjacks. Unfenced salt water pits seeped down the banks of the draw in vapid streams. Jose took one bad fall from riding onto a quail trap before we learned our way.
The brightest part of the winter came with the opening of the Mule Train Lounge at the junction of the road turning to the ranch. On one of the occasions when we stopped at the Mule Train, I met a couple of brothers I hadn’t seen since they left to go to the service in World War II. Rare breeds these two guys, they ran a junkyard and welding shop on the way back to the ranch. The bartender liked the two also, even though they only bought a beer now and then to use as a chaser.
The oldest brother held their small bankroll. The youngest said, "Bud is my banker. He buys two bottles of vodka every morning and divides 'em exactly equal." (Before you judge this case, remember a lot of war veterans left part of themselves overseas, never to be recovered.)
After Christmas, the cattle really went to pieces chasing the oil company traffic from one end of the huge pastures to the farther fence. Jose and I began working out the weaker cows to haul back to the ranch. We kept overloading the trailer until we broke a spring late one evening. The trailer was old. The only hope of replacement was our friends’ junkyard.
Once we found the place, we had an awful time keeping the loaded trailer level enough on the jack to replace the spring. Just as we finished, a city guy walked up and asked if this was the place that had a wrecker. Bud answered, "No, but I have a winch truck powerful enough to derail a boxcar."
My job completed, I settled my bill. I headed east without hearing any more except the fellow saying, "No thank you, I’ll ride in my car." Thirty minutes down the road, a red winch truck swerved by towing a new white Ford sedan dangling from a chain on an A-frame with the front wheels three feet above the road. The car held a driver grasping an inactive steering wheel with every ounce of force left in his body. As they passed, the brother on the right side threw a vodka bottle out his window. The helpless chap, tied hard and fast to what he’s bound to have thought was his death wagon, cut his sky-bound wheels deep to the left, Jose gasped, and I fought to keep the trailer from shimmying off into the ditch in the slipstream.
We chugged along, building up enough speed downhill to climb the next rise. Thirty minutes or an hour later, the old red truck came blaring back toward us, protecting its flanks with a large chain swinging from an A-frame severe enough to cause the taillights to shadow in the evening darkness. The city guy was never heard from again. But wherever the cruel old world sent him, I'll bet he never again hired a winch truck to tow him back to town.
March 8, 2001