Out of The Ashes

The worst fire ever to blaze across Texas could not consume the spirit of the panhandle’s ranch communities, nor wither the passion of the cowboy faithful who rallied to the cause. part ii in a two-parter
read part I

by John R. Erickson
photographs by Bobby Horecka, Texas farm bureau

THE FIRST WEEK IN April, I received an email from Michael Martin Murphey. He was trying to put together two benefit concerts to raise money for the victims of the Panhandle wildfires, the largest fires in Texas history.

He had organized a private benefit on Good Friday and a big public concert the next day. He had gotten commitments from several performers, including Don Edwards, Red Steagall, and Baxter Black. Would I be willing to help? I said I would be honored to participate—unless the Canadian River valley was on fire again, and if that happened, I would be trying to protect my home and ranch.

This was not idle speculation. The one inch of moisture that had finally killed the big fires in March had been sucked away by relentless southwest winds, and suddenly the Panhandle found itself in danger again. In early April, a fire broke out in the northeast part of Amarillo and destroyed 14 homes.

Another fire swept through ranch country north of Amarillo and burned 50,000 acres. Still another burned 22,000 acres in Lipscomb County, just ten miles east of my ranch. The nightmare continued. On Good Friday, the 14th of April, I made the 100-mile drive to Amarillo. On the south side of the Canadian River, north of Pampa, I drove through a 20-mile stretch of burned ranch land on highway 70.

That poor barren country was being flogged and mocked by the same kind of wind that had driven the original fires on March 13. An ugly haze of dust and ash filled the air. The liturgy of the Easter season dealt with those same themes: flogging, mockery, suffering, and cruelty.

The missing element was resurrection and that wouldn’t come until we got some substantial rain. I drove past two men who were working near the highway, repairing a stretch of burned fence on Joe Hutchison’s Bridle Bit ranch. I knew Joe and had worked a few brandings with him. He was skilled with a horse and a rope, a hard-working man who had built up a cattle operation in Roberts and Gray Counties. I had heard that he lost 20 sections of grass to the fires, 12,800 acres, and now he was working daylight to dark to keep his cattle fed with round bales and cake, while trying to rebuild his fences. The Friday night program was held in the back yard of Dr. Keith Bjork’s home in the north part of Amarillo.

I was one of the first performers to arrive and made my way to the spacious back yard, where several men were setting up microphones and speakers. Michael Martin Murphey was standing near the swimming pool and we exchanged greetings. “ Murph,” as his friends called him, had organized the Friday night benefit to raise money for volunteer fire departments in little towns across the Panhandle. They had been fighting fires for a month. Their men were exhausted and their budgets depleted. It was a worthy cause—as I knew very well since, without their efforts, I might have been homeless.

Red Steagall
RED STEAGALL ARRIVED around 5:30. I hadn't seen him in years and he appeared not to have aged at all, except that his once-red beard had turned snow-white. He had the same proud stature and the same piercing gaze, smoky blue eyes that cut right through the surface and went to things deeper. Later, when he sang about ranch people and the West, his voice still had the crack of conviction. His years of performing had not diminished his affection for the land and the people who worked it, sentiments he expressed so well in his songs, poems, books, and syndicated radio program.

While Red and I were talking, I glanced toward the western horizon (a habit that had become deeply ingrained in recent weeks) and saw a white ghost of smoke rising in the sky, a grassfire to the west of the city. I nudged Red and said, "Look at that." He squinted toward the smoke and for a few moments we both pondered this nasty little irony, watching a grassfire at a grassfire benefit concert. After a period of silence, Red said, "We've interfered with nature's plan, haven't we? Fire is nature's way of cleansing herself but we get in the way." That fire served as a reminder that until we received some rain, there was no safe haven in the Texas Panhandle. City people probably didn't feel the threat, but anyone who had seen the March fires up close could imagine what they might do if they ever got into those tightly-packed suburban neighborhoods on the west side of Amarillo.

The thought of whole towns burning had never entered my mind before the spring of 2006, but now it had become a frightening possibility. Downstate, fires had wiped out the little towns of Ringold and Cross Plains, and our fires in March had come very close to engulfing several small towns in the eastern Panhandle. The Amarillo Fire Department must have responded quickly to the blaze we were watching, and in 30 minutes most of the smoke had dissipated, much to the relief of those of us who were watching. It wouldn't have been funny, evacuating our fire benefit because of a fire.

Don Edwards
DON EDWARDS AND HIS WIFE arrived around six o'clock. I had met Don at the National Cowboy Symposium in Lubbock . oh, 15 years ago, and had seen him at the cowboy poetry gathering at Elko a few years later. Don was one of the nicest men you could imagine, the same person onstage or off: quiet, gentle, modest, witty, and as honest as an old pair of boots. I watched as he greeted friends in the crowd, his face partly concealed beneath the white hat that had become his trademark. It was a distinctive lid with its round, flat brim, a shape that wouldn't have functioned well in our Panhandle wind.

It wasn't a prairie cowboy's hat, but by George, it was a Don Edwards hat. Don did things his own way, hats and music too. Early on, he got attached to songs that most folks forgot after Bill Haley and the Comets introduced rock-n-roll around 1956. I don't know where Don was in 1956, but I doubt that he was listening to Bill Haley and the Comets. I would guess he was off in some quiet corner, his ear cocked toward a scratchy little record player spinning 78 RPM records of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Sons of the Pioneers, Eddy Arnold, and Marty Robbins, and I can imagine how he looked-angelic, innocent, sparkling blue eyes on a little boy's face. He still had the blue eyes and the little boy's face, but also a crown of white hair to add perspective.

Don went his own way in the music business, singing cowboy songs, and found an audience in busy, noisy modern America. He was widely respected in his field and probably booked as many gigs as he wanted. I was happy to learn that he had bought a place outside of Hico, Texas-every cowboy's dream, owning his own place beyond the lights of town. Don wasn't a "star" in the usual sense of the word, and neither were the rest of us. Murph and Red had gotten close enough to the big lights to feel their heat, but gave it up and went back to quieter places. Like Don, they steered their own course, taking the music they loved to the people they cared about. That's why they were here in Amarillo, raising money for firefighters and burned-out ranchers, instead of attending a cocktail party in Nashville or Los Angeles. I was proud to be with them.

The Saturday Concert
I STAYED THE NIGHT AT THE Ambassador Hotel, at ten stories, one of the tallest buildings in Amarillo. When I awoke Saturday morning, I noticed an odd sound outside the sealed windows. The wind was blowing again, hard. I leaped out of bed and went to the window and scanned across the sleeping city, looking for smoke. I saw none and felt relieved, but the presence of that strong southwest wind insured that I would be thinking of little else during the day. I had left my wife, mother-in-law, and two grandchildren at the ranch, on a day when the wolf was howling for fresh meat.

The Saturday concert was to be held at Amarillo's new Performing Arts Center and it had been sold out for days. I arrived around ten and ran into a couple of friends from Lipscomb County, J.W. Beeson and R.J. Vandygriff, who were also on the program. It didn't take long for our conversation to turn to the fires, and I learned that both men had been involved in fighting the big fires in March, across the river from my place. They told some harrowing tales about racing their fire truck through the flames, and both still had burns to show for it. Beeson had driven over to Amarillo that morning and I asked if he'd seen any smoke on the way. He nodded. "Looked like there was a big one down around Wheeler.

NEIGHBORHOODS WERE BEING EVACUATED... DURING THE CONCERT

Some of the boys on our fire department had tickets to the concert but they decided they'd better stay home, with this wind." The concert got started at 1:45, with the introduction of dignitaries and honored guests, including representatives from Farm Bureau who had helped coordinate the fund-raising efforts. MMM opened the show with the Amarillo Symphony. They did several songs, then "Wildfire," perhaps the song for which he is best known. That day, the song's title had an eerie resonance for an audience of Panhandle folks who had learned a lot more about wildfires than they ever wanted to know. Another macabre twist occurred backstage when a tight-lipped man hung up his cell phone and muttered, "Good lord, they're evacuating neighborhoods in southwest Amarillo because of wildfires!" He wasn't joking. They really were.

"Wildfire" was a great song when MMM first recorded it and it was just as fine when he performed it with the Amarillo Symphony. It began with a peculiar riff on the piano-very nice but not exactly Western or "cowboy." Murphey told me that he borrowed it from the Russian composer, Aleksandr Scriabin, and today it was being played by a very accomplished concert pianist named John Bayless, who grew up in the Panhandle town of Borger. The fire that came close to burning my ranch in March started on a ranch near Borger. Murphey, Bayless, and the Amarillo Symphony made beautiful music and the crowd loved them, but backstage, the people who were managing the concert began to fret that the show was already running long and might go on for five or six hours.

Still to go: Don Edwards, a group called Palo Duro, R.J. Vandygriff, Mike Siler, J.W. Beeson, Richard Bowden and Lucky Boyd, me, Baxter Black, Red Steagall, then the finale number with everyone on stage to sing "Home on the Range." I saw Paul Sadler III, Murphey's road manager, and told him that he could take me off of the program, if my 15 minutes would help him keep to the schedule. He said no, but if I could cut my time down to ten minutes, that would help. I didn't tell Paul, but I would have been glad to give up my spot. I found it hard to think about anything but the fire danger outside. I paced and prowled until, around four o'clock, I went out and did a ten-minute reading from one of the Hank the Cowdog books. I took a bow and hurried offstage. There, in the half-darkness, I saw Baxter Black, as trim as an eel, wearing a smile beneath his splendid mustache and waiting his turn to perform.

Baxter Black
BAXTER AND I HAD BEEN FRIENDS since the early '80s, when we met at a Western Writers of America convention. In those days, cowboy poetry was still in its infancy, and most Americans, including me, had grown comfortable with the notion that poetry was a dead literary form, exterminated by English professors who had stripped it of meter, rhyme, joy, and anything else you might want to find in a poem. Then along came Baxter who had spent his college days studying bovine anatomy instead of depressing literature. He started writing poetry that came from the heart and sold his self-published books to an audience that was beginning to suspect that poetry wasn't as dead as we had thought.

At the time he entertained at the WWA luncheon, I had never heard of him, but after watching him perform his satirical poem "A Vegetarian's Nightmare," I didn't forget him. Baxter was a brilliant performer, even back then. He didn't just read a poem; he performed it, acted it out-stalking back and forth in front of the audience, rolling on the floor, gasping in the voice of a tomato about to be sliced in half, and even climbing up on top of one of the banquet tables. The effect on the audience was electric. People couldn't believe what they were hearing and seeing! First they were stunned, then they responded with raucous laughter and thunderous applause. After Baxter sat down, one of the long-time WWA members, a fervent vegetarian, was so outraged, she stood up and delivered a rebuttal. Old Baxter just grinned. And here he was in Amarillo to help raise money for folks who had taken a beating from the fires. He had come all the way from Arizona to help. Red had come from Ft. Worth, Boyd and Bowden from East Texas, Don Edwards from Hico, MMM from New Mexico. It was a noble thing for them to do, exactly the sort of thing citizens of the West have always done. and the people who produced that evening's news of the world didn't notice. They seldom do.

Easter
I didn't stay for Baxter's performance or the rest of the concert, but jumped into my pickup and headed back to Roberts County. All the way, I scanned the horizon for smoke and didn't relax until I drove into Picket Canyon and found that my house was still standing. We had made it through another day. Sunday morning, Kris and I attended the Easter service at our church in Perryton, which included a ritual called the Flowering of the Cross. Every member of the congregation walked to the front and placed a fresh flower on a bare cross, transforming it into an object of breathtaking beauty, a symbol of hope and rebirth. Our ravaged country in the Panhandle would have to wait for rebirth, but we still had hope. It lived in our poetry, in our music and stories, in our churches and gatherings, and in the quiet heroism of our people. And in our faith that, one of these days, it would rain again and grass would come.

read part I

John R. Erickson maintains a website at www.hankthecowdog.com. Additional bio information on the author is available on the site.

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