Editor’s note: This column originally ran in the Nov. 18, 2010 issue of Flag Live.
I confess, the natural disasters Flagstaff has experienced in the last year have honed my survival instincts. With Nov. 2 looming on the horizon I interpreted the low tea-colored clouds as an impending landslide of poor judgment and I headed toward the Mexican border before they closed it. Desperate to breathe air untainted by negative campaign ads I rolled down the blacktop toward Baja California. I fully intended to park myself in a folding chair at the edge of the lapping water and spend my time trying to identify shore birds by their shadows on the sand while I drank cold beverages and let the waves heal my ragged nerves.
I wind through the smoke trees, mesquite and palo verde entering San Felipe from the north and spot an ancient DC Caterpillar tractor of early 1950s vintage. It looks like it’s still in regular use. It’s a perfect match for the one that adorned my father’s watch fob when I was a kid. In the 1940s he drove a road grader for the Texas highway department, scraping endless miles across the dusty prairies.
I see they’ve graded the road to Cantu Cove from the ballfield as far as the Escuela Technica in preparation for paving. I wonder who got paid off for this edge-of-town road to get paved in such hard times. I have mixed emotions about this. I won’t miss the kidney pounding washboard stretches or the rock stair step that forced me into the other lane on the blind hill. But will I be going too fast on this new surface to see east through the notch toward Birds*** Island where the full moon rises? These last rough miles have always signaled a spiritual as well as a physical shifting and slowing down.
Aunt Odela was married to a pro rodeo rider named Jeff Green when she was a young nurse in Fort Worth after the first war. He was something, I heard—rode the broncs. They were both too independent for the long haul. She spent most of her life with J.E. “June” Whalin. Uncle June had sold a litter of pigs on the farm in Lexington, Ky., to buy a bus ticket to join brother Kermit in Fort Worth where he was working as a barber. June found work at Typewriter Supply and he and Kermit played together as the Whalin Brothers Fiddle Band on WBAP Radio and for local dances. At the station they met another young fiddler named Bob Wills.
Bob was serving a brief stint with a seminal band called the Lightcrust Doughboys. This was the house band for the Burris Flour Milling Co. During the daytime the boys loaded trucks, pushed brooms and attended mandatory practices. Their broadcasts on local radio promoting Playboy Flour were very popular. W. Lee O’Daniels, the general manager of the mill, was their announcer and a natural ham—writing songs about mother and reading listener mail. Bob quit the Lightcrust Doughboys and he formed a new band which included my uncles called the Texas Playboys. Hopelessly hooked on stardom, W. Lee left Burris Mill and started marketing his own brand of Hillbilly Flour promoted by W. Lee O’Daniels’ Hillbilly Boys. When Bob took his band to Tulsa my uncles stayed in Fort Worth and Uncle Kermit joined the Hillbilly Boys. “Pappy Lee” O’Daniels parlayed his notoriety gained as frontman for the Lightcrust Doughboys and then the Hillbilly Boys into two terms as the governor of Texas. Upon his election he appointed Uncle Kermit Barber Inspector of the State of Texas. He was a wonderfully inept corrupt governor. His last official act was to sign an appointment to the Naval Academy for a young Ross Perot.
Lee owned a ranch west of our little town of Aledo and daddy said locals always knew when he was going to visit the ranch because the state highway crew would be instructed to grade the gravel road—all 17 miles from Route 30 to the governor’s gate.
Past the school I rejoin the old road surface—packed sand studded with sharp edged granite. The ocotillo lean over the edges from both sides and frame an osprey bound for its nest with a fish in its talons. I slow to a bone-rattling pace that reminds my temporary bridge that Wednesday I can take advantage of a third-world country’s affordable dental system. I crest the last rise and there’s my beloved cove, like a disk of turquoise worn smooth by caring hands, waiting at the end of the road.
