Recently I noticed that a friend on Facebook encouraged (forced) her child to watch the real “True Grit” with the real cowboy, John Wayne, before the youngster would be allowed to see the remake of “True Grit.” While I am thinking about it, “Hey Hollywood, have you really run out of ideas … really?”
I digress …
But speaking of “True Grit” … Let’s play trivia … no wait … Jeopardy! I’ll take “Famous Lines” for $100. What did John Wayne call pretty much everyone else in the cast of that movie?
“What would be ‘Pilgrim?'”
Ding, ding, ding.
“Fill your hands” you sons-a-biotches … LOL.
(Hey, did you know John Wayne said “Pilgrim” 23 times in an earlier film, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,”?)
I digress … again.
I suppose I am in a cowboy state of mind. Oh … and back to the word of the day, “pilgrim.” Last week I made one of my bi-annual pilgrimages back to what I say is “The Real Texas” … the Amarillo area, and Vega more specifically … home of The Ping Wind Farm. (It is also known as Dry Gulch …)
Every year I slip away from the family get together and actually go “off the grid” for a bit, away from The Internet and away from pretty much every other human on the planet. (Okay, I may have sent a few tweets from the iPhone.) Our farm is secluded, with no neighbors for miles. I bask in the solitude … cherish the sound of the wind … scratch and sniff the soil … shoot guns … and pick around in the family trash pile from three generations.
Of course I shoot cameras too, like the Nikon D7000 I am reviewing … Lucky for a few deer that my camera — not my gun — was loaded when I saw them. I was in a creative mode, and I was headed for the windmill when I saw the deer. Ha … I often joke that in that part of the world, for a painting or a photo to be “art,” there must be a windmill.
Well … rest assured we have a couple of the old style windmills, and I have shot those many a time (with the Nikon) although hooligans seem to like to shoot our windmills with bullets … On the latest trip to the farm, I tried some new windmill art. I grabbed up my iPhone, and recorded the sound of the old, rusty windmill. The wind was barely blowing — a rarity — thus the windmill was barely pumping. As the silver blades crept around in a circle, the orange-stained, wooden sucker rod went up and down, disappearing inside the open pipe, headed toward the water well below. The slow moving gear, rubbing against the deep, deep pipe made a long, beautiful, lonely, vibrating sound resonating from the “voice box” of the aquifer below. I swear, when I closed my eyes it was easy to imagine the back and forth motion of the sucker rod being just like a bow gently stroking a string of a violin … and it made a similar, but more haunting chord.
Ha … there’s your farmboy windmill art for the day. (I have the recording to prove it, btw.)
So … anywho, (as my friend Randy says, and I do too since the last visit to Vega) …
The previous visit to Vega was in August. So, this part of the blog has been simmering for a while. Like most years, in August, I enjoyed the annual barbecue and reunion in Vega — The Oldham County Round Up. I ate enough barbecue to kill Sasquatch.
Quick observation … this annual reunion and the community are ingrained in me from my childhood, but no doubt, having been away for years … shall we say, I probably have a different perspective on the event than those who live in the town. For example, I had to wonder if anyone else in the crowd recognized or appreciated the absurdity that the 20-piece marching band from the town, stopped in the parade, turned to face the hundreds of farmers and cowboys gathered on the courthouse lawn … and then to the best of their abilities, the tiny band belted out Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” (much like every other band in the country played this year, I am sure) … but for me … quite the surreal moment.
During the weekend celebration I talked to old friends at a school reunion … and I did something I had never done before, in all my years spent living in or visiting Vega.
I camped out.
Well, yes, I have camped in national parks and state parks in Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, Utah, Colorado, etc., etc. But I had never camped on my own family’s farm. Why not?, I asked.
Camping at the Ping Wind Farm — one of the best decisions ever. The farm consists of a couple of sections of land … has two large playa lakes, and basically is in the bottom of a long, gradual decline in elevation … for miles in every direction, nothing by beautifully flat, upward sloping horizon — an unbelievable canvass for sunrises and sunsets … with nothing but farmland between the viewer and the pastel colors. And on the night I sat up my tent, there were huge … HUGE thunderclouds swelling off in the distance, right at sundown. The lightshow was beyond words, yet the storms never dared to cross over Dry Gulch … leaving me dry and amazed at the beauty — “not skeerd.” I thought it couldn’t get more wonderful … when later that night I saw the most defined, clear shooting star … ever. I was stargazing in a portion of the sky — actually looking for satellites that are sometimes visible to the naked eye — when a meteorite fired up exactly where I was looking … like a flaming smore in the sky, I tell yah.
As songwriter Jim Stafford put it, “I took a trip and never left the farm,” … sort of.
I had so much fun, I vowed to camp there every year, christening the event The Blowing Man — an impromptu festival mixing the name of the bohemian Burning Man (annual event in the Nevada desert) with the prevailing conditions on the Ping Farm. So, next year, second Saturday in August … pack up your tent, your bongos, your bicycle … and maybe a side arm to ward off rattlesnakes.
On that August trip, I also linked up with my (aforementioned) old friend Randy.
He invited me to another Oldham County first … for me anyway. He took me on a guided tour of some private ranchland north of Vega, along the rustic/amazing/beautiful Canadian River area.
In a four-wheel drive, we sped along dusty ranch trails, climbing hills with rocks for roads, crossing gullies and creek beds … There were so many historical sites … I can’t remember all of them … adobe sheep herding camps … ancient petroglyphs … cowboy graffiti from the previous century … and even one of the legendary hideouts of Billy The Kid … now there’s some history.
Most cherished from the trip, I scaled a mesa called “Arrowhead Peak” … climbing much faster than the prediction of my colleague and basketball teammate from decades before, I might add. The peak is said to have spiritual significance or magic to the area’s more native peoples … a sense of respect and awe shared by the cowboys and arrowhead collectors who have climbed it since. I honored that tradition … for the most part … ha … until a different sort of nature called my name high atop … anywho …
You can read more on the area in “The Prehistory of Texas” by Timothy K. Perttula at:
As awesome and inspiring as the tour was … you know what? The best part was catching up with an old friend … a teammate … a fellow basketball player who once knew what I was going to do with the ball before I did it … and vice versa. Too old and fat to prove it to anyone else now — we retold our favorite tales of the other’s exploits on and off the court … or field of play … or whatever.
Randy remembered glimpses of my high school glory days that I thought no one else ever noticed, much less recalled. To my delight, he retold the story (with polite exaggeration for added effect) of one of the best Texas Panhandle basketball players ever trying to dunk over me … he had two or three inches on me in height … but, in Randy’s words, I “stuffed him.” I ain’t gonna lie …
I told Randy of a vivid memory I had about a basketball game in Hart, Texas where he was “on fire” or “in the zone” as they say. How Texas is this? Both teams that night were The Longhorns … Anything he threw up that night was going into the hoop. He probably scored 24 or 25 points that night … but I will say 30 to exaggerate politely. Lots of his shots were “nothing but net.” Several seemed to roll around the rim before his mojo sucked them down for another two points, that night. But the shot that sticks with me … Randy shot one from the side or the corner … It hit the rim and instead of bouncing away … it bounced up … high above the rim and then bounced on the top of the glass backboard. (If you follow basketball you know that the shot becomes a dead ball if it touches the backboard and falls over toward the out of bounds line …) This shot bounced off the rim, bounced off the top of the backboard and then went in. He simply could not miss.
Together we tag-teamed another story — each filling in parts of the memory — of how NBA legend Maurice Cheeks, then a WTSU basketball star, stopped us and complimented us on our play when we won the Amarillo basketball tournament. Glory days … LOL
We went on and on … But, I won’t.
Anywho …
Flashback to Christmas Day on the farm … 2010 … Merrily, I wondered around the playa lakes, unearthed family artifacts, horded rusty junk, recorded weird sounds (including the report of my 9mm piece) and shot photo after photo. And, no deer lost their lives in the making of this blog. Noteworthy finds in the junk pile, now added to the balcony at the world headquarters of PingWi-Fi.com … a rusty bicycle frame (perhaps the first I rode as a child) … yet another antique electric fence charger and a rusty disc from a one-way plow that might just become a part of my next fire pit.
Happy Holidays!
Know what I sayin?
