Saddle Up Partner

12/23/22

We pulled up to the La Quinta Inn in Wichita Falls, Texas at 11:30pm, after the 2 hour drive from the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Frost had developed on the car windows and there were patches of ice on the ground. The parking lot was full, so we drove around to the auxiliary lot nearby, where we parked next to a Rolls-Royce and a set of three running industrial cherry pickers. 

Outside the temperature was a crisp 5 degrees Fahrenheit with a wind chill. North Texas December was in full force. No ocean to keep the air warm, no rainfall to turn into snow. Leaves had fallen and grass had died. The landscape was endlessly large, endlessly brown, and endlessly cold. I stepped out of the car and took a deep breath, creating a cloud which was promptly swept away by the wind. 

We ran around to the front of the building, clutching our luggage with bare hands numbing rapidly. Clouds of gasses poured out of exhaust ports on the side of the building. Walking through the front door, I felt like Han Solo getting pulled out of carbonite. The difference was that here, I was not greeted by Carrie Fisher in her prime, but by a gruff older man with wispy hair and a gray beard sagging down to his gut.

“California…” he said, looking suspiciously at my dad’s license. “Long way away.”

“Yep.”

We had two rooms, one for my brother Evan and I, and another for my parents. They were on opposite sides of the third floor, so we parted ways at the elevator. The floor of our room was littered with white paint chips that filled the room with the comfortable aroma of an auto body shop. The window in my parents room had been left open, meaning the temperature had equalized with the frozen outside. They had been given the wheelchair accessible room, which just meant the entryway was twice as wide and there was a chair in the shower. There were two TVs, one on the wall and one laid face down on a table smaller than it.

I went to bed around 1am under two thin sheets; no blankets in sight. At 2:30, when my sleep medication had worn off and my mind started wandering around, I got up and sat in the chair in front of the window. The blocks alternated between homes and fields and the storm drain in the road had iced over. Sitting there felt like watching the end of the world. A version of middle America that was neither glorious nor truly desolate. 

“It’s a great place to be from,” my dad said. “Quiet, safe, it’s not a first choice, but it works.”

“But would you ever want to live here again?”

I imagined myself trying to survive at Wichita Falls High School in 1987. This is not the kind of place that is kind to LGBT people, or anyone else with a desire to be educated and liberal. I would have had to shelve my homosexuality until college, and by then it would probably be too late. A broken nose would’ve been a relative constant.

I thought about Dad and his brother Will standing outside of the town museum waiting to be picked up by their mother with tornado sirens wailing all around them, echoing through a terrified city. I pictured them with my grandparents sitting in their car as their garage was swept away around them. That was right before their divorce. 1979. My dad was 8.

“No,” he said, “not unless I had to.”

That, to me, was the only conceivable reason to ever live here. If you want a small town experience, you choose a place with twenty thousand people. If you want a city, it’s two hundred thousand minimum. The only industry that’s ever been here is the one that built it, oil, and all the oil barons left as soon as technology would allow. Their houses are still here, occupying entire blocks with fenced in lawns and falsely colonial architecture, but most of them have been given away to churches or serve duty as rarely visited second homes. There’s no real industry, but also no farms; there’s a university, but it’s not a college town; too small to be lively, not small enough to be quaint.

5 of the 7 members of my family who had lived here left at first opportunity. My dad, his brother, and his two half-siblings all left for college and my dad’s mom moved to Connecticut after the divorce, taking her children with her. The only reason my grandfather stayed was because of his second wife, Beth. She had lived here her whole life, leaving only once to attend college in Waco and medical school in Houston. She only returned to be closer to her mother. She set up a surgical practice in town and by the time all of her family had either moved away or died, its roots had dug in too deep. They bought a house together and raised Dad and Will from their return in high school through to adulthood. They had another set of kids in the 1990’s, more than twenty years after my dad was born. When they moved to a larger house up the road, they made the final decision that they were going to die there. 20 years have passed, and their lives are going exactly to plan. 

The next morning, Grandma Beth picked us up at the hotel and drove us back to their house. 

“See that over there?” she said, pulling through the intersection of Midwestern and Taft. “That’s one of those new coffee places. Collective, it’s called. I went there once or twice to meet with people. It’s owned by the son of the owner of the hospital. There’s another one around here called Frank and Joes. They’ve got two locations, one in the plaza and one right by the hospital.”

The hospital? The? There’s only one?

I stopped by Collective later that morning. It is on the site of what looks to be a former gas station, with a single, lonely building sat behind a large concrete rectangle being held up by two posts, all painted a dull shade of white. Across the street from Collective sat Midwestern State University, supposedly the only public liberal arts school in Texas, which I suspected was the primary reason for the shop’s existence. Grandpa said the Congressional District that housed Wichita Falls was the most Republican in the country, and the only precinct that ever went blue was the one where MSU held the majority of the land. 

“It’s the one glimmer of hope ‘round here,” he said. “You could be at Central Mississippi University, and still the faculty, students, they’d be liberal.”

The inside was painted a rich blue, with wooden furniture haphazardly strewn about. The single front room was split in half by a small protrusion of wall that went about a quarter of the way across on either side. In one half of the room, there were the white women, holding their to-go lattes and discussing their failing children and adulterous neighbors. On the other side, were the hipsters. They had long-ish hair and circular glasses, all wearing flannels and beanies in various states of blue, and with facial hair in various states of disrepair. The hipster side included the bar and the employees, all of college age, chatting with fellow students sitting nearby.

I sat in the center. 

Soon after I arrived, an older man dressed in a cowboy hat, leather boots, and several colors of denim came in. He ordered and sat down in a long, laid back chair placed along one of the protruding walls with a pair of guitars hanging in offset positions. I imagined he would be the kind of person to scoff at a place like this, the kind to go only to save his wife the pain of getting out of the pickup truck and walking through the 10 degree weather for “one of them fancy espressos that cost me ‘smuch as ten pounds a chick feed down at the Walmart in Decatur.” 

“Why you gotta get this California crap?” I imagined him saying as he pulled into the parking lot. “I can make ya coffee in the perc at home that’s just as good, and that way you don’t gotta drive all the way inta town to get it!”

The spurs on his shoes clinked and clacked as he walked in. He sat down in his chair and immediately pulled out his phone and started scrolling through the news. He would go through the list of articles, stopping occasionally to read a headline, and even more rarely to open it. Looking through the photos, never getting past the first few paragraphs, he was acting like what my version of him would think of as “these damn kids”. The only real difference between him and the kids his kin despised was the method of scrolling. Having lost the necessary dexterity in his thumbs, he chose his pointer finger’s second knuckle. 

My version wouldn’t be reading the news in the first place. Nothing in this world could be more important to him than the stories in the first half hour of Tucker Carlson. Wife tells him ‘bout what the church ladies are saying down at the IHOP, but that’s just the ladies gossip. Why she always ’truding in on the neighbors business, I don’t never know, but it keeps her nice and busy since the kids done up n move away to the city, tryna make somethin’ special outta themselves. 

He continued his scroll even after his drink was delivered. On a little wooden tray on the table in front of him sat a short glass of ice water and a cortado, a strong espresso drink made with a double shot and an equal amount of steamed milk. There was a lovely little rosette drawn in foam on top, and when sipping he took care not to damage it.

How dare you, I thought. How dare you ruin my stereotypes. I was having so much fun.

Another guy came in: a kid, no more than 22. He looked like the attractive son of the farmer in a coming of age movie where a young girl realizes that cow shit smells better than industrial waste. He ordered, in a hushed, almost embarrassed tone, an iced chai. 

“With almond milk…”

“What kind of milk?”

“Almond.”

“Oat?”

“No… almond.”

“Ah, almond.” 

An almond milk iced chai with that look could only mean one thing. Tall, but not more than 5’11”, platform cowboy boots, a fleece university jacket, and a whiff of blonde hair flying out over his forehead, this man was a member of the Closet Homosexuals of Farm Country. The sequel to the movie would involve a reluctant, sad attempt at procreative sex, followed by a painful coming out scene overdone with tears and feelings of betrayal, and ending with him finding himself, probably in the city, with an equally twinky boy toy. 

My confusion kept me welded to my seat for some time. At one point in the past, this was a gas station, providing beer, Slim Jims, and dollar gas to pickup trucks whose only off-road experience occurred when their inebriated drivers sent them into an embankment. Now, it was a place where wine moms, cowboys, and hipsters were able to set aside their differences and, if not break bread, then at least share airspace. 

That is what most places in Wichita Falls had seemingly been forced to become, a middle ground. No truck drivin’, Christ believin’ cowboy wants to see a 20 years old bearded atheist college student in line at what was supposed to be their Walmart, and no 20 year old bearded atheist college student wants to see middle aged helicopter parents taking walks through their campus with their child on a harness leash, and yet they all had to find some way to live together.

It had warmed a little bit by the time I finally picked myself up and walked outside; still below freezing, but now it felt more like a warning than a punishment.

Fine, it said, you can walk through here, but only for a minute. And if you sit on that concrete wall you’ll find yourself down a testicle.

When I got home, I found Dad, Evan, and Grandpa sitting in the living room with a football game on mute in the background. Grandpa had some of the worst hearing I had ever come across. He was a medical officer in Vietnam, and the rather constant stream of gunfire and explosions had taken their toll on his eardrums.

“One of the guys I was with was a Lieutenant in the Air Force,” he told me, “and at one point he turned over to me and said ‘Do you see that mountain at 3 o’clock?’ I said yes, and he said ‘Well keep looking at it cause it’s gonna be gone in about fifteen seconds.’ And sure enough, fifteen seconds later, kaboom. Never saw the B-52, never heard anything, just kabluey.”

“Why did they blow up the mountain?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “because there were Viet Cong on it.”

I was hoping for an answer about strategic disarmament or the logistics of moving a MASH unit, but no. Instead I got the heartiest belly-chuckle an old man can muster. His stories of Vietnam were the kind that don’t often get told. When his draft card came, he had just graduated from medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. He was never on the front lines of fighting, he didn’t sleep like Forrest Gump or Bubba, backs together, trying to keep their hair and feet out of the mud. He was an officer, always near enough the front lines to get the wounded to his hospital, but never near enough to become one of them.

A number of years ago, he had attempted to show me his slide deck of photos he had gathered from the war. He divided it into two sections: the nice one, and the not-so-nice one. First came the nice one. Vietnam is a beautiful country, especially nice when experienced through photos. That way you can get all of the glory of the mountains and forests without the buckets of unevaporated sweat.

Imagery of modern wars in Afghanistan or Syria or Iraq always involves a lot of beige camo and bulletproof grab. Here, there are no such luxuries. Soldiers and officers were shown in green button-down shirts with neckties of varying lengths and degrees of silliness. As far as I could tell, the longer and less silly your necktie, the more important you were.

Next came the not-so-nice half of the slide deck. Here we saw the fighting from his perspective: the damaged organs of enlisted men. The photos were gruesomely horrible and disturbing to look at; what one would see if, rather than conducting a carefully performed operation in a proper hospital, you simply made an enormous rectangular cut-out in the abdomen using a pair of garden scissors, removed the bullets and shrapnel with your bare hands, then used a sewing machine from Jo-Ann Fabrics to stitch everything back up again. The soldiers that came out of this were alive and thankful to be so, but they probably wouldn’t stay that way. If you could still walk and point a gun, you were sent back out into the jungle, now as an even easier target.

What got me while we were going through all these photos was the way they had been taken: close up, intimate shots of blood and guts, often including the hands of doctors and nurses. It was my understanding that the only people allowed in the operating room were those directly assisting the surgeries, but here there was somebody else. Somebody had to walk through a room full of the almost dead and point a camera at their splayed out bodies and the surgeons trying with all their might to put them back together.

“Say cheese!” 

I was in the 4th grade when he brought all of this out for family viewing, so I only made it past the first few slides of the second section before getting up and walking to my room, slowly, scanning the hardwood floors for landmines.

That was all at my house in California. I didn’t visit Wichita Falls for the first time until I was 12 years old. My family went for Thanksgiving, along with Dad’s half siblings Wesley and Neel. We were all sitting around in the living room one morning when my grandfather walked in.

“Do y’all want to go out to lunch today?” he asked.

My dad looked around at all of us. “I mean… sure! Why not?”

Grandpa stared at him blankly for a moment. “Do you want to go out to-“

“Yes, Dad,” he yelled across the room at him. “Yes we would.”

By now, his hearing had deteriorated to the point of requiring the use of bulky hearing aids in order to understand the person sitting right next to him. He could’ve gotten stronger ones, but he never bothered. When I asked about it, my dad told me “it’s not just about the ability to hear, it’s about the desire to.”

“Oh,” I said, “so he just doesn’t care?”

“No, no, it’s… it’s just that he’s old now and… well… you’ll… well…”

I don’t think he ever quite managed to finish the sentence.

Evan was in the midst of a phase of visiting every single fast food restaurant he could find. We didn’t have an Arby’s anywhere near us in California, so, on our way to lunch, we stopped one, just for Evan and his curly fries.

“Eating on our way to go eat,” said Neel, “I feel very American right now.”

“Do you want one or not?”

“Yes, please,” he said, as he reached up from the way-back.

We got on the highway and started heading first for the north side of town, then out of it. When Wichita Falls had completely faded and all that sat in front of us was a flat sea of beige, my mom leaded forward and tapped Grandpa on the shoulder.

“Dick?” she asked, “Are you sure this is the right way?”

He gave her a puzzled look. “Yes,” he said, “of course.”

“Don’t worry, Bonnie,” my grandmother reassured her, “we know where we’re going.”

My ears always pricked up when I heard Mom call him “Dick”. Obviously, she isn’t insulting him. Dick is just a nickname for Richard, and given that he is the third in a line of five Richards and the two other remaining ones were both in the car with him, it makes sense that something be come up with to tell them apart. Dick was a fairly common nickname in his generation, anyway. Think Dick Cheney, Dick Nixon, Dick Van Dyke, or the fantastically named Scottish accordionist Dick Black.

Mom leaned back in her seat and stared out the window. “Okay.”

After some time had passed, she perked up again. “Steven?” she said, leaning over and pointing out the window at a large sign.

I leaned over and squinted at it. “Does that sign say Oklahoma on it?”

“Yes it does,” Grandma said, as if it was of no consequence. 

In my mind, the amount of time that had elapsed between getting in the car at their house in Texas and entering Oklahoma was at least an hour, but in reality the two are separated by only about 15 miles. Nevertheless, the restaurant we were allegedly heading towards had been described to us as “local” and, call me a city-slicker if you’d like, I expect the boundaries of what can be described as local to not extend past the state line.

My mom leaned forward and gave Grandpa another tap on the shoulder. “Umm,” she began, “are we getting close?”

He turned his back on the road and looked at her. “No,” he said.

Grandma leaned back. “We’re not quite half way there yet,” she said.

“But we’re not in the same state that we started in.”

“Be patient, Bonnie.”

“This is fun,” I said. “I’ve never been to Oklahoma.”

Evan looked up. “It looks the same as Texas.”

Out the window sat nothing but miles of farmland: upturned dirt from the harvest months earlier and rouge patches of grasses struggling to live in the lifeless soils. It was, I’d come to learn, an incredible picture of middle America. Nearby roads had been given short alphanumeric strings rather than actual names. We passed a casino, a church, a gas station, all sitting out on their own. Every other car on the highway was a pickup truck, some battered and bruised from 15 years of farm duties and others pristinely waxed, the enormous penis-enhancing pride of their owners. The vastness of the land looked endless. I could almost understand how the early immigrants to the region had come to see natural resources and land as replaceable. After traveling through thousands of miles of just this, how could one think that it wouldn’t just go on forever? The flatness of it all contributed greatly to this feeling. Looking out at the horizon you could almost see the curvature of the Earth. Still, a hill would have been nice.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Well,” said Grandma, ”do you see that mountain over there?”

She pointed at a small speck on the horizon. “That’s a mountain?”

“We’re very far away, be patient. We’ll get there.”

We turned off the highway towards a town called Medicine Park, the mountain growing as it came fully into view. It stuck prominently out amongst the otherwise flat landscape, but still to my eyes it couldn’t have been more just than a little hill.

“Mountain?” I asked again.

“Yes, dear. Mountain.”

“Alright,” said Grandpa, “you guys ready?”

“Are we at the restaurant?” Dad asked.

“No,” he said, “we’re at the mountain.”

“When are we going to the restaurant?”

“After we go up the mountain.”

“Hold on, wait a minute. We’ve been in this car for more than an hour. We were hungry when we got in, right?”

We all agreed.

“So why are we going to a mountain?”

“I thought that’s what we were gonna do, go to the mountain then go to lunch.”

“Dad, no,” he said, “we can go to the mountain after, we’re all hungry.”

He hadn’t mentioned the mountain to any of us at any point beforehand. Perhaps he told himself and thought that was good enough.

We pulled down a small, unnecessarily wiggly road and parked outside a small, yellow building with red lettering on the side reading “Meers Store and Restaurant: Home of the World Famous Meers Burger”. On the inside, right beside the door, was a sign declaring that bun and patty prices had gone up. “Thanks, Obama,” it read. The walls were covered in conservative calling-cards: Don’t Tread On Me flags, Support the Troops banners, framed photos of Reagan and Bush, 9/11 memorabilia. The menu was peppered with pictures of giant portions and sunburned white people, with bylines of right-wing opinions about burgers and beer.

“NEW LAW!!” the means proclaimed, “NO MORE BEER AT MEERS!! Over educated, under informed politicians make stupid laws!”

Presumably, that meant the local government had decided that liquor licenses would be a good idea, and Meers’ application had been denied.

The “World Famous” Meers Burger, as it turned out, was something large enough to fill a nine-inch pie tin. Neel, being the only one of us brave enough to tackle 3 days worth of food in a half hour, got one, and, when it arrived, looked upon it with the adoration and excitement of a father looking upon his newborn child. Despite the proclamation on the menu, Grandpa managed to order a Budweiser, which he followed with a second. I asked for a Diet Coke and was offered, instead, a Diet RC.

On the way back, we turned up the slit road that led us to the top of Mount Scott; three miles of concentric circles ending in a parking lot at the peak. I walked out to the edge of the lot to stand on a large rock. Looking out at the endlessness that lay before me, I could only think one thing: How the hell are they calling this little mound of dirt a mountain?