April 20, 2021

The Talley expedition took I-25 out of Socorro, NM headed north. First small town we come to is Escondida, NM (population 47), not to be confused with the Escondido, CA megapolis (population 150,000). San Acacia is next, deserted now, but once a prominent railroad town. The Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge lies just to the west of San Acacia, with plateaus, woodlands, prairie & desert, and the Rio Grande flowing through its center. The endangered southwestern willow flycatcher migrates to the refuge from Mexico and Central America from May to September.

Then comes Bernardo (population 10 people and 40 horses). Bernardo has an  RV park and Horse Motel, where visiting horses can gather to discuss the price of grain and other important horse matters. In Bernardo, we turn east onto Route #60  and glide through Scholle (population 0), Abo (population 0), Mountainair (population 928), Willard (population 253), Lucy (population 0) , Negra (population 0) and Encino (population 65).

Laguna Del Pero

Just east of Willard, we travel through the Estancia Basin, a closed depression between the Manzano Mountains to the west and the lower Pedernal Hills to the east, a depression which formed in the Pleistocene epoch , from 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the world’s most recent period of glaciation. So there was a lot of water around from glacial melt to the north of the basin. Thus a series of lakes formed and filled with pure salt.  The lakes dried up and left vast salt flats, which native peoples mined for who knows how long. The Laguna Del Pero is such a lake. Very little water but tons of salt.

 

Ghost Towns

The Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad (AT&SF) founded towns along NM Highway 60 between Scholle and Encino. The railroad built water stops and depots along the route and encouraged settlement by sponsoring emigrant trains, a quicker method of transporting settlers and their belongings and livestock across the country. Railroad authorities told the settlers if they just came and plowed the land the rains would come and they would all get rich. Boy, was that a crock.

On a 62-mile stretch of the highway are five ghost towns that were once bustling communities. But once the boom times went bust, these towns faded back into the landscape. Little remains of Scholle, Abo, Lucy, and Negra. While not technically a ghost town, Encino nonetheless continues to lose population. Only 65 souls currently live there, and they are very thirsty.

Today, much of New Mexico’s rural areas are dotted with adobe ruins, dilapidated homesteads, crumbling foundations, and rusty vehicles. Mining towns died when the gold and silver ran out, farm towns passed away when the rain stopped, and other locations lost population as the railroad downsized.

After Encino comes Vaughn (population 400), Pastura (population 23), and then Santa Rosa (population 3,000). Santa Rosa sits on porous limestone bedrock with many natural sinkhole lakes, an anomaly in the dry desert climate in these parts. The sinkholes fill with water and connect with one another by a network of underground, water-filled tunnels. This probably explains why this community survived while so many in the region did not. The famous Pecos River flows through Santa Rosa.

Montoya is next, an unincorporated New Mexico community with zero people living there today. The national Register of Historic Places lists “Richardson’s Store” in Montoya. G. W. Richardson started the store in 1908. It thrived through the 1920s. 1930s, and 1940s on the now famous old route #66. I-40 came through and people went so fast on it in their rat race to get somewhere in record time they stopped stopping. Montoya declined and with it the store. Remember to “get your kicks on Route #66”.

Tucumcari

Tucumcari lies next in the distance where 6,000 people live including several “Little Feet” fans who just cannot quite get out of town.

“…… I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that’s ever been made
Driven the back roads
So I wouldn’t get weighed
And if you give me weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign
I’ll be willin’… to be movin’…..”

From Tucumcari we head east on Route #54 and see many prong-horned antelope along the way. Just south of Logan (population 1,042) we cross the Canada River. Nara Vista (population 30) is next in line, just west of the border between New Mexico and Texas. We learn about excellent free camping at Lake Meredith National Wildlife Refuge close by. Seeing a very big body of water in the dry country would be a refreshing thing indeed.

Hartley Feed Lot

From Nara Vista we travel toward Hartley, Tx (population 540 people and 73,000 head of cattle). Workers hold cattle in the Hartley Feed Lot nearby. The cattle have little room to roam about and generally spend their days walking around in their own waste. No way to live in my opinion, even if you are a dumb bovine. I am not sure there is such a thing as a dumb bovine. When I look into a cow’s eyes I see the same kind of awareness I see in my dog’s eyes. I know folks back in Virginia who raise cattle and they will tell you their cows have individual personalities, are playful, and intelligent.

The Hartley Feeder is one of eleven such facilities owned my Five Rivers Cattle, nine concentrated in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and one in Arizona and one in Idaho. The total capacity of all these feedlots taken together is over 900,000 animals. The company website says that management is “focused on being good stewards to our environment”. It goes on to say that they take “a proactive stance to dust control, manure management, runoff control, and nutrient management”.

The web site does not go into detail about how the company manages waste however. Seventy-three thousand cattle confined in a limited space sure do make a lot of it. Most of these facilities are sited on flat, arid areas near rivers in the West and Midwest, which certainly helps to maintain the waste in a semi-dry state. But these same areas are prone to violent summer thunderstorms, which can put down lots of rain in a short time. In these events the feed lots may turn into noxious slurries.  My bet is that a lot of that waste ends up in the nearest waterbody.

Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas

From Hartley we move on the Texas metropolis of Dumas with 14,000 souls, who from time to time, drink large quantities of local beer and Balcones Texas Single Malt Whiskey and sing, “I’m a Ding Dong Daddy From Dumas”. Phil Baxter (a native Texan who lived for a time in Dumas) and Carl Moore composed this ditty in 1920.

“…..I’m a ding dong daddy from Dumas, and you oughtta see me do my stuff

Why, I’m a clean cut fella from Hohner’s Corner, Ooh, you oughtta see me strut”.

Lake Meredith National Wildlife Refuge

After learning about that very important pearl of Texas history we drive over the mostly flat High Plains of Texas, where one can see forever.  Onward toward the 44,978 acre Lake Meredith National Recreation Area for a respite from the road, anxious to see a big water body in this dry country. The Sanford Dam creates Lake Meredith and the Canadian River feeds it.

Onward we continue among low mesas, buttes, and hills; the Canadian Breaks as they are called. Then we transition into colorful red and white rock sedimentary sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone formations deposited approximately 260 million years ago.  That long ago the Texas Panhandle laid near the equator, thanks to the continental plates wondering about on deep currents in the Earth’s hot, fluid mantle. And the plates are still wondering around. Wait long enough and my charming hometown Staunton will be a tropical paradise.

 

But wait, where is the lake? Onward we go searching for it, which should not be so hard to find. All the way to our Lake Meredith campsite we go, which Google Maps shows ought to be right on the shores of the lake – but no lake, just more marvelous sedimentary landscape dotted with white boulders that have tumbled down the slopes, red-rock side canyons and deposits of the colorful dolomite.

A beautiful campsite it was. We had two neighbors for the night. It was still cold. Sawyer’s water froze, but we were snug as 3 bugs in a rug with the furnace roaring in our mighty Aliner camper.

Tomorrow, onward to Goodwell, Oklahoma and more adventures.

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April 21, 2021

After thawing out we left our very nice Lake Meredith campsite and drove north on Plumtree Road toward Farm Road # 1913. We took a detour onto another road that from the map looked like it ran down to the lake. At the end we came upon a very well constructed and wide concrete boat ramp and large parking lot for  boats and trailers. The only thing missing was a lake. We looked across the Canadian River flood plain all the way to the other side. Still no lake. Weird indeed.

 

Stacy Mitchell

On the way out, we pass three guys repairing a cattle guard.  One of them waves and flashes a peace sign. Haven’t seen one of those lately. So I decided we ought to talk to that guy. And that is how we met the clear-eyed , smiling, Stacy Mitchell, a happy sort with a magnificent flowing white beard.

“Hello to you” Stacy chirped.

“Hello back at you,” I replied.

After some pleasantries, I got down to business.  “Where the hell is the lake?”,  I asked in befuddlement.

Stacy let out a raucous guffaw and launched into an explanation. “Ha, ha, the lake never filled. The designers and builders thought it would but it never did.” He went on to say that it did not help that up-river in New Mexico folks built a couple of other dams that trapped a lot of the water that would have made it to the Sanford Dam. So much for cooperation and coordination.

 

There is actually a lake, a reservoir of sorts, but a much smaller one than that anticipated. As of May this year, the lake’s capacity is at 35% of its total capacity of 500,000 acre-ft. In the water management world, water is measured in acre-feet.  One acre-foot equals about 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover an acre of land, one foot deep.

Drought has ravaged western lands for decades and it is not getting any better, which partially explains the low water in Lake Meredith. Well actually, it fully explains it.

Stacy has been working in this big country for forty years. mostly for the gas company. He has a cheerful way about him. A pleasure to speak with. Thanks to him now we know about Lake Meredith.

Water in the West

Not to get too deep into the subject of water out west but Lake Meredith illustrates how complicated water regulation can be in this drought prone land.  The essential question is who gets what? Authorities of the Canadian River Compact manage the water to make sure each state using Canadian River water gets a “fair” allocation, a condition hard to meet even in good years. Drought really complicates matters.

The states of New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and the federal government are parties to the compact. Accordingly, New Mexico can hold 200,000 acre-feet in Ute Lake before it has to release water to Texas. Texas also can hold only 500,000 acre-feet in Lake Meredith before it has to release water to Oklahoma. Oklahoma in turn, must release a certain amount of water for “down stream” users.

Other watersheds and their rivers and tributary systems out west are similarly managed in a “chain-like” linage of dams and reservoirs. Most western states face the same dilemma. How do you supply water to a growing western population, for agriculture, industry, drinking, and recreation? The answer is, ultimately, you don’t.

 

 

The American Dust Bowl in a Nutshell

We take out leave from Stacy and travel back roads to Texhoma, Oklahoma (population 1,000), named appropriately as it rests on the Texas – Oklahoma border, half in each respective state. The on to Goodwell, Oklahoma (population 1,500), to study up on another fascinating American Story. Goodwell is the home of Panhandle State University and also of the No Man’s Land Museum, that has knowledge of the American Dust Bowl, or as some call it, the “Dirty Thirties”.

In the 1930s severe drought visited the American Midwest and Great Plains in three waves, 1934, 1936, and 1939–1940. This region is no stranger to drought, never has been, and will always be, until the American Tectonic Plate decides to migrate to the equator and take on a tropical countenance.

Before the settling of this country by Anglo-Saxon peoples, there were no “dust bowls”. Well okay, maybe a occasional localized dust storm, but never a calamity like that of the 1930s.

The real cause of the Dust Bowl had to do with people back east. Charlatans, with dollar signs in their eyes, encouraged thousands of immigrants to pour into these lands and settle. With dollar signs in their eyes. They convinced the settlers to plow the land deep, and the rains would come, which they did not. Instead the wind came, an ever present hot, steady wind. The American government played a crucial role in facilitating this ruse by removing those pesky indigenous peoples who had roamed these parts for thousands of years, paving the way to happiness and wealth for the settlers.

Plowing the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the decade prior to the 1930s displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds.

Farmers started using small gasoline tractors and combine harvesters which allowed them to converted even more arid grassland to cultivated cropland, grassland that typically got no more than 10 inches of precipitation per year. The unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds people called “black blizzards”. The clouds traveled cross country, reaching as far as New York City and Washington, D.C., and many other places. Houses filled up with dust. Eventually, the drought and erosion affected 100,000,000 acres centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and touched adjacent sections of New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas.

Tens of thousands of poverty-stricken families who were unable to pay mortgages or grow crops abandoned their farms. Many of these were called “Okies” because so many of them came from Oklahoma. They migrated to California and other states to find that the Great Depression had rendered economic conditions there little better than those they had left. Californians vilified and marginalized the Okies. Not a pretty part of the American story.

The Dust Bowl – A Family Story

After our visit to the Dust Bowl Museum, we traveled on to Guymon, OK (population 12,000), where cattle feedlots, corporate pork farms, and natural gas production dominate with wind energy production and transmission recently diversifying landowners’ farms. Then on to Hardesty, OK (population 212) where the Dust Bowl story gets personal.

Hardesty is the childhood home of my first wife, Cheryl and brothers and sisters, Loret, Luan, Phil and Steve, and their parents Bess and Jim Randles. Bess’s family came to the Oklahoma Territory from Missouri; Jim’s from Tennessee, prior to Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

In their early years in the Oklahoma Territory Bess’s family lived in a dugout home, then a sod house and finally a cement block home before she married Jim.

In this region lumber was a rarity then. But the native prairies supplied sod, which because of the deep roots of the native grass, held together for a time. Settlers could cut the sod up into “bricks” and build shelters. Pioneers like Bess’s family built sod houses in which to live until they could amass lumber and other materials to build proper houses.

Bess and Jim began a life together on the Great Plains in perilous times. During the Great Depression of 1929 to 1933, Jim was lucky indeed to have a job with the railroad, when so many did not have jobs. Being a frugal and smart man, and married to a very smart woman, he and Bess saved their money and bought land at a time when many Oklahomans were abandoning their farms. They dry-land farmed to make a living, a kinder way to treat the land.

A Family Visit

On this very day, April 21, 2021, Emily and I and Tom Sawyer are headed to Hardesty and the Randles’ farm to visit Bess and her youngest daughter, Loret. This coming September, Bess will be 107 years old. In her lifetime she has made 106 (working on 107) orbits around the sun, a sun that supplied her and Jim the energy to farm this hot, dry Oklahoma land for so many years. That would be 9,853,315,542 miles that Bess has traveled around the sun in her lifetime. MORE THAN MOST IN THIS NECK OF THE WOODS.

We had a lovely visit with Bess and Loret in the very farm house where Cheryl and her siblings grew up. Bess was engaging and funny as usual.

“Bess, I can’t believe you and Lorette are still living here, in this very same place”, I exclaimed in wonderment.

“Well, what did you believe, that the house had blown down!”, she replied with a twinkle in her eye.

Gene Howell Wildlife Management Area

 

Gene Howell Wildlife Management Area

After that grand visit with Bess we headed east on 412 to unincorporated Bryan’s Corner and turned south onto 183 to Perryton, TX (population 10,000), then ever onward to Canadian, TX (population 2,500), with the Canadian River nearby. Archeologists say the trails along the Canadian River in the area are older than recorded history. How do they know that?

They do know that Francisco Coronado came through in 1541 in a vain search for the gold of the Seven Cities of Cibola. Here is a little pearl for you. A part of the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away was filmed in Canadian.

From Canadian we head east to the 5,394 acre Gene Howell Wildlife Management Area where we camp free and alone in a cottonwood grove, with sand plum, fragrant sumac and hackberry embellishing the scene.  Many wild species call this place home including Bobwhite quail, scaled quail, lesser prairie-chicken, white-tailed deer, mule deer, coyote, bobcat, black-tailed jackrabbit, raccoon, eastern cottontail, black-tailed prairie dog, feral hog, burrowing owl, Mississippi kite, Texas horned lizard, and mourning dove.

If that does not get your wildlife juices going, the Texas wildlife biologists have thrown in prairie rattlesnakes, and western massasauga rattlesnakes for good measure.

 

Tomorrow, ever eastward on a journey to our home in Virginia.

Namaste’

April 22, 2021

From the Gene Howell Wildlife Management Area we headed through a series of Texas and Oklahoma hamlets,  Higgins, TX (population 400), Shattuck, OK (population 356) with its Windmill Museum and Jim’s Metal Art Museum. Jim is long dead, but his work survives him.

 

 

 

Then on to Gage, OK (population 400), Fargo, OK (population 364), and Woodward, OK (population 13,000).  Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes occupied the area around Woodward long before European-American settlers established the town in 1887. The United States government removed the Indians and opened up the area to European-American settlement in the Land Run of 1893.

Sod Houses

On we fly through Moreland, OK (population 1,200), next the unincorporated village of Orienta, where we cross the famous Cimarron River, the on to Cleo Springs (population 326) and finally, to bring the sod house story full circle, to the Sod House Museum near Aline (population 200).

Yes there is a Sod House Museum stuck out here in Oklahoma grassland country. And we went there, to be greeted by the very cheery Lucy, a museum volunteer, who was just waiting for a couple of unsuspecting tourists upon whom to pounce and educate about this particular sod house, the only surviving one in Oklahoma that was built by settlers. She was very good at telling the story and we were very willing to hear it.

Settler Marshall McCully built this sod house in 1894 and lived in it for 12 years until they were able to collect enough lumber from “back east” to build a proper frame house. Today, thanks to the Oklahoma Historical Society and scores of historians and volunteers, the local community was able to secure funding to keep the original structure. They were even lucky enough to get funding to actually build a building over and around the sod house to protect it from the elements. That building holds many relics of the pioneer day in this region including many from the McCully sod abode.

 

Visitors to the museum can walk through the McCully two room sod house and imagine how these people lived. The impressive display of housewares, farm tools and other “necessaries” of everyday life at the museum certainly help one’s imagination.

 

 

The one-hundred and six year old Bess Randles, my first mother-in-law, lived in a sod house with her Tennessee family. Think about that. What a life she and her family and Mr. and Mrs. McCully had in this harsh Oklahoma country in the beginning of the twentieth century. What hardships they must have endured. Frigid winters, hot, dry, windy summers. Working hard to get crops in the ground. But they prevailed, raised families, and prospered. An American story.

 

Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge

On we fly, through Jet (213),  with the sprawling 32,000 acre Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge a few miles north. In 1930 Herbert Hoover established this refuge to protect habitat for about 312 bird species and 30 mammal species. This refuge consists of salt flats, open water, marshes, woods, grasslands, and croplands. It is s a resting and breeding ground for migratory waterfowl. It is critical habitat for the endangered whooping crane. Lucky visitors see these mostly during fall migration. It is also home to endangered least terns, threatened snowy plovers, threatened bald eagles, and peregrine falcons. Large populations of American white pelicans migrate through between August and September, staying on the Great Salt Plains Reservoir. I have seen them there.

Nearby, one can dig for selenite crystals and even find some with hourglass looking inclusions, apparently only found here.

Onward we press, through Nash (204) and Pond Creek (856) where we cross the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River, which a few miles back spilled out of Salt Plains. In Pond Creek we pass by Greasy Steve’s, a very famous restaurant indeed. Every year Greasy Steve sponsors an “eat out” festival where people come from far and wide, get fired up on local beer, whiskey, and weed and see who can eat the most  grilled “calf balls”. You heard me – calf balls.

 

 

Tall Grass Prairie and Pawhuska

Next, further east is Lamont (400), then Tonkawa (3,200) and then Ponca City (32,000) where one can visit the Pioneer Woman’s Museum.

Just east of Ponca City, we cross the Arkansas River and travel to Burbank (population 100), then to Pawhuska (population 3,481).

Pawhuska is loaded with relics that preserve a sense of its Native American culture. Photos, tribal objects and artwork at the Osage Nation Museum trace the history of the area’s Osage people. A wood-planked Swinging Bridge hangs over Bird Creek. A trail connects the fish-filled Bluestem Lake to scenic Bluestem Falls.

To the north, the Nature Conservancy manages the vast Tallgrass Prairie Preserve which is home to bison, deer and coyotes. This is truly an American gem. Rarely visited, one can see herds of American Bison roaming freely on the tall grass prairie and imagine what life for the native peoples who lived and came here must have been like. Kaw, Omaha, Quapaw, Ponca, Kiowa, Comanche, and Osage tribes roamed this land long before Anglo-Saxon settlement.

Osage Hills State Park and The Civilian Conservation Corps

On we travel to our final day’s “resting place”, the Osage Hills State Park, on the western edge of the Ozark Plateau. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built this park in 1935, as it did hundreds of parks in American in the 1930s. It is a favorite camp ground for Emily and me on our travels across this great land.

Franklin D. Roosevelt founded the CCC as part of his “New Deal”. From 1933 until 1942 the Corps gave millions of young men employment on conservation projects during the Great Depression. It probably would have continued were it not for World War II. Many of the young men working for the CCC who did stellar work improving America here join the armed forces to go abroad and protect American democracy and freedom during that time. Many lost their lives in that endeavor. These guys were true American patriots and the CCC story is an American story if there ever was one.

Civilian Conservation Corps workers planted more than three billion trees and constructed trails and shelters in more than 800 parks nationwide during its nine years of existence. The CCC helped to shape the modern national and state park systems we enjoy today.

Congress never authorized the CCC as a permanent agency and other local, state and federal agencies and many private sector businesses now do conservation work, which has created quite a patchwork of effort, sometimes effective, sometimes not.

Steve’s Civilian Infrastructure Corp

In these pandemic times, we are watching a very complicated employment scene play out, with so many unemployed, under-employed. People are frightened about their prospects of getting Covid or having someone they know die from the horrid disease. Many people are evaluating what employment means to them.  Evidence the severe shortage of food service workers. Lots of these people took advantage of the unemployment benefits made available by a reluctant Congress. Suddenly they are getting a steady check, small of course, but steady and probably more than they were making working their fingers to the bone at a restaurant getting paid a paltry sum of 2 to 3 dollars an hour and having to hustle for tips to make a decent wage. Why bother?  People in other “service” jobs are probably thinking the same thing.

Maybe we need another Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) like effort in America.  Lots of people have been talking about the appalling state of American infrastructure.  Maybe we need a Civilian Infrastructure Corps (CIC). An ongoing federal program, like the Peace Corp for example, that would fund workers for say two to four years to work on a variety of local community projects. Of course such a program would cost money. The CCC costed a lot of money in its day. Every dollar spent in that effort returned much more. It saved workers and their families from the ravishes of poverty and gave them a second chance. It brought pride and satisfaction, and hope for a better future. And, spoilers alert, every dollar that got paid quickly recirculated into the economy, not lost in some socialist black whole vortex, as some would have us believe about government “relief” efforts.

We don’t know what the post Covid America is going to look like, but with so many against vaccination, so many against doing those simple things to finally defeat the virus, it might be a weird world we live in for some time to come.  Not too late for the Civilian Infrastructure Corps.

Transition

The vegetation here at Ozark Hills State Park marks a transition from tallgrass and mixed grass prairie back to the deciduous forests in the eastern United States. Here we are beginning to see black jack and post oak, white and red oak, hickories, some short leaf pine.

Osage Hills State Park was once the site of an Osage Indian settlement. It is still a settlement of sorts, I suppose, what with itinerant travelers like us moving through. I like to sit in our campsite, rarely with others around, and imagine what that Osage settlement must have look like, how those indigenous people must have lived.

Tonight we share this campground with two other travelers. It is very cold still. But we are snug in our little house. Early to bed, early to rise. No television for 24 days.

 

Mitakuye Oyasin (To All My Relations)

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Tomorrow, eastward bound for Asheville, North Carolina