Weather Ahead

My drive today takes me through Big Spring, Texas, “the heart of the West Texas Playland,” as they used to call it when I went through USAF Pilot Training here at Webb AFB in 1967. They called it that because it is 300 miles north to Amarillo, 300 east to Dallas, 300 south to San Antonio, and 300 west to El Paso. Guess they didn’t want us young lieutenants getting into too much trouble. It didn’t work, though; we found plenty right there in Big Spring, where the “girls” were either in high school or 30-year-old divorcees. There wasn’t much in between.

I get off the interstate, which bypassed town even in the old days, and slowly cruise 5th Street, the one-way westbound half of the main drag going east and west. The town looks pretty old and tired. At the west side of town, I find the road that used to be the main road into the air base. The right side of the road is a federal correctional facility (prison) and behind that I see the old hangars and runways. Besides the prison, they have used some of the area for an industrial park. On the left side of the road I come upon what used to be the Officers’ Club. The awning, which covers the front entrance, steps down, and walkway to the street, is still the same…except now it bears the current label, “Senior Center.” How appropriate!

I drive 6th Street, the eastbound counterpart back to the center of town to start north. I’m tempted to go cruise the rest of the eastbound strip, or go south for a ways on Gregg Street (Hwy 87), which is the north-south main street. Would I be able to find the two or three old drive-ins where my friend Tom and I used to cruise in his Chevy convertible or my Corvette? We’d pull up next to a couple of high school girls in another car at one of these burger joints and Tom would say hi and then ask them, with a straight face, “if they had relations in Big Spring?”

But no, we’re older and wiser now, so I turn north on Gregg toward Roswell, NM, and clear my mind as I once more get up to speed past the open expanse of red, freshly plowed fields. The driving is pleasant over two-lane highway heading northwest, and then I turn due west in Brownfield, Texas, where the “downtown” is paved in red brick. By this time, it’s gotten quite cloudy and the wind is kicking up a bit. The radio is reporting some serious tornado damage last Friday in New Mexico. I change to the weather band to hear that NOAA is issuing storm warnings for southeastern NM and west TX, including a prediction for “small” funnel clouds and hail. Yippee. I haven’t had a real wind challenge in DD yet, and I’m wondering what Texas hail would do to us. Ain’t no overpasses out here to hide under!

Well, staying in the now, it starts raining and this is really the first time I’ve used my windshield wipers on this trip. They do the wiping okay, but there are tiny washer fluid hoses up the wiper arms and the little spray tips clipped at the center of the wipers keep popping off. I stop several times to put them back in place, adjusting the hose positioning each time, but as soon as I hit the next band of rain and twist the switch, off they come again. Finally, a couple of miles short of my distant cousin Susan’s house, I just pull the hoses back short so the last four inches with the spray tips won’t flop around in the wind. I don’t need the washer function anyway while it’s raining.

As I mentioned, Susan and I are related; it is not much of a stretch. Her mother’s father is my father’s mother’s twin brother. Got that? Susan is a genealogy expert and she clarifies that second cousin is precisely our relationship. When I was about 13, I went with her family (her mother, father, and younger brother Bobby) on a summer driving trip to Montana to stay with my Great Uncle Hobart and Aunt Grace (Susan’s grandparents) on their farm/ranch. We kids had a ball, helping milk the cow, gather the eggs, and checking the fences in Hobart’s old pickup truck. There was cold running water from a pipe in the kitchen, but the outhouse was 25 yards out back and the shower was under the water tank next to the windmill in the front yard out next to the dirt road. We shot a rattlesnake one day and, begrudgingly, Aunt Grace fried it up for dinner that night. Tastes just like chicken, right?

After 50 years, it is a real treat to meet Susan again, and her husband Ron came out to help me get DD situated next to the house. We sit around and catch up on what all’s happened over all the years and soon Susan has a delicious dinner on the table. Both Susan and Ron work at Eastern New Mexico University in Roswell and are accustomed to a very early get-up, so we adjourn at a reasonable hour. However, Susan has arranged for tomorrow off, so I will get to pick her brain (and her computer data files) for more family info in the morning.