BALE OF COTTON
I was driving south from Amarillo, Texas. Amarillo was just south of the wide Red River.
I was starting just such of there, having crossed the river just north and west of there. And driving down and down those STEPS as I was told later, down that long straight road.. up to Amarillo and then?| |
I spent the night in a nice university town near Lubbock. It was nice and friendly in that university town.
In the glorious morning I again headed straight south towRD BIG SPRING.. The land down there was getting real flat and I saw tase vast fields with little spindly plants which I thought might be spinach trees. I stopped at a rest stop just north of Lamesa and stretched my legs and walked around. It was early December. I was there and thence and I bent down to get a good look, and " Oh, My Lord", "that weren't snow". There were these little brown speckles in that white fluffy stuff - that there were Cotton. I froze and then my thought came, "This boy from Brookline, Massachusetts ain't never bending down and licking" up that stuff." "No, never.." Then being an engineering student in my college classes years ago, I thought or surmised "that cotton don't weigh anything. There's no resistance". Those poor folk spending years or decades picking up cotton that has no weight, it makes you nuts, crazy. 12 or 18 hours a day bending and picking up nothing, you can just fall down, just go crazy.
Then as I drove further down the highway, I started seeing large white stacks the size of a small SUV, (sport utility vehicle). There in the fields approaching Lamesa. That little Oasis town. And, that knowing the liquor biz, I was these small barn-like tin or steel building with a open front and no windows with faded signs reading "Gin". "That was a cotton gin, not a liquor factory." And those white slightly grey stacks in the fields were bales of Cotton. [Heavenly]] Heavy they must be.
You spend days picking cotton and then lifting a ton of it.
The best part was driving south there it was in Lamesa, that white and red sign, "DQ". A Dairy Queen shop of Mr. Warren BUffett. I missed the highway turn-off and as those highway builders out southwest Texas and Oklahoma added, was The Loop. (Maybe it was Pres. George W.'s Blessing.) I turned off at the Loop and went back up through the center of that dusty center of that town and back on the federal-state highway and slowed and took the exit and again, "Oh, my God", the exit let my off directly the entrance to the DQ parking lot for my blessed grilled chicken sandwich Mr.
Then south and faster and faster and a short rest, and then a right turn down and down to great MIDLAND, TEXAS, the hometown of the Bush family. And a few divine days there in Midland with them real Texas oilmen and others, nice down home folk. By my good fortune, I found the old Oilmen's office building with that cozy breakfast nook there where those sharp South West Texas oil executives (Oilmen) ate and talked, and just where I ate my pancakes with syrup (checks or cash only, Thank You Dear.
