One can see joy when Bedouin travelers top a mountain of sand and wind their way down to an oasis with date trees, water, and a flat place to set up tents, unroll hand woven rugs, and build small fires in the enormous desert night.
This courtyard is the same, a quiet place to retreat from hot summers, a place where summer winds are deflected by brick walls and critters can’t get inside to eat the roses.
The courtyard has been a work in progress and it changes, like those deserts where yesterday’s path is covered up by last night’s windstorm.
This courtyard has a fountain, flowers, yard decorations, lounge chairs, a Texas state flag, and privacy. It is reminiscent of Cartegena or Cuenca where, behind great wooden doors reinforced with iron bars, there are luxurious compounds where children ride bikes, women hang up clothes on the line, and old men smoke cigars in mid afternoon under the porch when it is too hot to be watching girls in neighborhood cafes.
When I visit Alan’s place, we sit on the front porch and listen to the fountain and recall when we used to visit here during vacation summers and drive a beat up jeep on rutted dirt roads across cattle pasture to fish in stocked cattle tanks. We would try to hit cow patties in the road and laugh as we hit them.
Our grandparent’s farm, a mile due east, has been neglected and was recently buried into the prairie by a bulldozer.
Uninhabited, for years, mice took over the living quarters and it was decided by the new owner that the old homestead couldn’t be rehabbed and wasn’t worth saving.
Alan likes Texas so much he made it his own oasis.
Peace and quiet are to be sought and fought for.
There used to be a small stream here that meandered down the hill and went over the edge of the canyon and fell into a deep dark hole below us.
The land’s owner built himself an observation platform, erected a light pole, and built a water wheel that generated electricity to power the light. The chances were good that no one would be out at night and walk over the cliff and fall into the chasm, but it was a place he could bring guests and have a beer as they watched the water wheel turn, throw rocks into the dark and listen to them splash at the bottom on hot summer nights.
There is no water coming down the hill now so the water wheel is stopped, its blades providing climbing opportunities for vines and weeds. Insect webs reach across the gap between blades and the generator is rusting. The water wheel was built with welded iron arms, bolted wood planks, and pieces cut from old tractor tires. The hub of the wheel is a rim off a car.
On a ranch, people get used to making stuff. It keeps them interested and uses junk that accumulates.
This wheel is a John Currie creation. He and Uncle Hugh always tinkered with junk piled in the corner of a barn or discarded in a pasture filled with weeds, dead brush, and cow chips.
Water wheels are old technology.
They will be resurrected at the next big reset in human history.
Drive In movies, in the fifties, were a popular family outing and also a place where teens, borrowing the family car, could get away and explore birds and bees in the back seat of station wagons.
The latest Hollywood movies were projected onto huge screens and patrons watched from their cars with sound provided by little speakers that hung on a partially rolled down car window. If you got hungry you walked down gravel, between cars, and bought Cokes and popcorn at a cinder block concession stand that had restrooms, tables to sit and eat, promos that told about coming attractions.
At night it was cool and pleasant and if you didn’t like the movie you could watch shooting stars or look for aliens on their way to Washington D.C.. The movie screen was enormous and much better than the little black and white television in your living room.
The 60th anniversary of the Sandell has arrived and the featured movie this Saturday, August 29th, is ” Love Me Tender ” with Elvis.
Deep in Jesus country, Elvis still gets air time. He is remembered as a rock and roll legend, a womanizer, a great entertainer who died middle aged and alone with a drug problem. He sang great gospel, served in the military as a regular enlisted man, and never lost his Southern roots.
Finding an operating drive in movie these days,that still shows movies, is almost as impossible as finding a roll of Kodak film, or a camera that even uses film. Technology is zipping past us more quickly than we can process its need or ethics. Humans being ruled by artificial intelligence is no longer the crazy science fiction we used to think it was. Drones are almost to our front doors delivering packages.
Clarendon is a small Texas town where my father, and his sisters, were raised and went to school. They used to ride a horse to class during the Great Depression.
When Elvis burst on the scene he must have looked, to them, like a madman.
He was a harbinger of things to come.
Snapshots are all I have of the inside of the Goodnight home, taking us back to the late eighteen hundreds and early 1900’s.
Mr. Goodnight died just after the stock market crash of 1929 and he, at 93, was ready to move on, feeling he had lived in the best possible times, much more fortunate than those that went before or those that were coming after.
Rooms in his house have high ceilings, tall windows with individually cut triangular glass panes of thick glass that has ripples and reflects light oddly. It has a downstairs for business, eating, entertaining, socializing. Upstairs is for sleeping, reflection, and repose.
In its day this home was a palace and Mr. Goodnight spared no expense for the comfort of his wife who, at the start of their marriage, lived in a dirt dugout on the prairie waiting for him to make good on his promises to cherish and protect. She was,as you can tell from a short bio on a brochure created for guests, as single minded as her husband and it must have been comfort to him to have a confidante in such a rough and tumble life of men and animals.
The rooms are wallpapered. In the restoration, the woodwork, that had been painted, was stripped and refinished to the way it was when the Goodnight’s lived here. Closets are a new touch because homes of this time period typically had no closets. When the Goodnight’s lived here, they used an outhouse, water was carried in from a well house, lights were powered with whale oil.
There is an out building used by Mrs. Goodnight as a school for cowboy children and as an Infirmary when hired hands got sick.
Dishes on the kitchen table wait for hungry animated ranching people to say a prayer and ” pass biscuits and gravy, please.”
Downstairs, in Mr. Goodnight’s study, there is a fireplace, a buffalo robe on the floor, horned furniture, a couch with a quilt for cold nights.There aren’t many books.
Mr. Goodnight was a rancher.
He didn’t have to read books to know what the world was about.
Not far from Clarendon, Texas is the homestead and ranch headquarters of Charles Goodnight, a pioneer Texas rancher.
In the mid to late 1800’s, he controlled a ranch of over a million acres, had 180 cowboys on his payroll, and was an industry by himself. He was a tough man who lived to be 93, fought Indians and had Indians as long time friends. He experimented with crossbreeding buffalo and Texas longhorns and was responsible, with help from his wife Molly, for saving the short hair buffalo from extinction. He entertained Presidents and panhandlers alike in his dining room and, as a cowboy employee once said , ” when he told you to do something he expected it to be done. ”
His house is on the National Register of Historic Places and was restored with private funds, grants, and donations.
On a small horned couch in the upstairs master bedroom is an open Bible with a pair of reading glasses holding his place in Psalms.
There are temptations and lines to be drawn in accumulating a million acres of land and running men and cattle.
Mr. Goodnight was reputed to be a gruff, stern, no nonsense kind of man. Yet, he was also reputed to be kind and generous with his time, his money and attention to those who wanted to work hard and learn. If he liked you he would do most anything to help you rise on your merits.
My brother Alan tells a story of our Aunt Roberta, my father’s sister, who lived in Clarendon where an old Mr. Goodnight had his city house and spent the last few years of his life. She and a girlfriend used to play jacks on the sidewalk in front of his home and she remembered a nurse coming out with a plate of cookies and telling them they could come anytime to play.
Stern and gruff as he is in his photos and paintings, the man that sent out cookies to two little girls had a heart of gold.
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