GUEST COLUMN NUMBER TWO -- DOWN ON THE FARM

My next guest column is also written by a former classmate from Ballinger High School, Glenn Smith. I presumed to title it for him:

SMOKEY AND THE FARM BOYS

"June Hash Curry and Marilyn Moragne have reminisced about how each of them had auto accidents in the 1950s that they miraculously survived. That got me thinking about an incident in 1955 when I should have died but did not. All this has to do with growing up around Ballinger in Runnels County, Texas.

It was a Saturday. My father took my fourteen-year-old nephew, John, and me to a field where he wanted to construct an electric fence so cows could graze on a part of the five foot high sorghum there. We helped him stretch a single strand of new barbed wire which was anchored around a tall, creosoted power line pole about two hundred yards into the field. The wire sloped gradually from where it was tied around the high-line pole about forty inches above ground until it lay flat on the ground about fifty yards from the pole. From there it went to the edge of the field and joined another fence. The next step was to support the wire by attaching it to an insulated pole every ten feet.

John was driving my father's light blue F100 pickup. I was riding a mare named Smokey, trailing a lariat from the saddle horn. My father was at a pile of metal posts about a hundred yards from where the taut wire rested nearly buried in the loose dirt. The plan was for me to drag a post behind the mare from the distant pile to its place along the wire. My nephew's task was to back the pickup into place so my father could stand in its bed and sledge hammer each long post about three feet into the earth.

What happened next makes no sense, but for some reason it happened anyway. I had delivered two posts and was nearly back to the supply pile for a third. John was supremely bored waiting. I was bored myself. Smokey must have been bored also. Suddenly John leaned out of the pickup window and yelled DRAG! He tromped on the accelerator and without rational thought I touched my heels to the mare's flanks. Smokey's ears went flat and she shot forward, all her attention on winning. She beat the truck handily. We were in afterburner mode. No horse ever ran as fast or liked doing it as much as she did at that moment.

Problem was we were headed toward the point where the tightly stretched barbed wire was still about three feet above the dirt. My eye caught a flash of the new wire. Time exploded and went to zero simultaneously. Smoky was upside down in a forward airborne roll. I consciously dropped the reins, pulled my feet from the stirrups. The lights went out.

I came to with my father kneeling over me. I had landed on my head, but Smokey hit the ground a little past where I hit. The wire had stretched impossibly but it did not break. Smokey had deep cuts on her upper shoulders. She stood still, bleeding.

My neck should have been broken. Instead I walked half a mile to the house. My father kept working. Frank Smith didn't leave work for anything.

By usual standards for treating horses, Smokey would have been put down that afternoon. But her owner, John's father, tenderly nursed her back to health. I never rode her again. I could have but didn't feel I had the right. I was ashamed of letting her get hurt for no good reason at all.

(Elm Creek at Ballinger, Texas)

Nearly four years later, Elm Creek (which ran through our farm) got up from strong rains. My dad and mother drove the Ford pickup to the bottom land to move cows to high ground. I was in Abilene at college. My father crossed a ravine that was where Elm Creek had once flowed before it changed course. He got trapped as a wall of water poured down in a torrent about ten feet deep. My mother had never learned to swim and my dad could only dog paddle. He was wearing work boots and overalls and was in the raging water while hanging onto a mesquite sapling. Mom drove as fast as she could and found my brother-in-law. He saddled Smokey, rode hard, plunged the mare into the fast flowing water upstream from where my dad was barely still hanging on. Dad said later that he had decided to turn loose knowing he would drown. As Smokey swam past him—the bank was too steep and too muddy for her to get out—my father grabbed on to the back of the saddle. Smokey swam with him and my brother-in-law downstream, then out to safety.

The spirited mare lived many years after that. She died in her mid-twenties.

I'm not sure what the moral is of these stories. We did things that kids today don’t usually do. But we weren't trying to be daredevils. If anything we were trying to live like the Cleavers, June and Ward and Wally and Beaver. Maybe our happenings got a little closer to the edge some times, but we didn't intend them to. As my father's mother always said of her Texas life, 'we done the best we could with what we had.' We did at that, didn't we?"

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A horse is a horse, a horse of course -- except when it is a means of transportation? Yesterday I laughed out loud when I read the following news item online. This was on Austin's KXAN.com news site, written by Pamela Cosel:

"Is it DWI if you're on a horse?"

"It wasn't necessarily a scene from a movie, but it might have been.

Two men, each dressed in cowboy hats and chaps -- one on a horse, the other riding a donkey -- were arrested for public intoxication on Friday just before 11 p.m. An Austin police officer saw Jose Federico, 33, on a brown mule with white spots, along with Samuel Olivo, Jr., 49, on a horse in Downtown Austin.

The two riders were stopped in the right lane of traffic, according to the arrest affidavit, and cars were having to drive around them. Police said the two men were calling pedestrians off of the sidewalk and into the street to take pictures and pet the animals. This endangered the pedestrians because the street was open to passing vehicles.

APD conducted a sobriety test on the men and determined they were drunk after seeing they had glassy, watery eyes; stumbling, staggering and swaying; couldn't turn properly; fell off the line and had an odor of alcohol about them. Rios said he'd taken antibiotics when asked about drugs, according to the report, and also said he drank two vodka-and-cranberry drinks. (Editor: THIS is a COWBOY'S drink?) The charge was first listed as driving while intoxicated (DWI), but changed to public intoxication, according to APD. Bail was set at $2,000.

It is not known how the animals responded to the hoopla."

I know how I responded .. gales of laughter at the imagery as I read this. I'll bet the animals were embarrassed.

Smile. It makes you feel better and look good!

Peace and love,

Marilyn