Uncle Dick's Outhouse

My father’s older brother, “Uncle Dick”, had a cattle ranch on the plains of West Texas, where my family spent all our vacations until I went away to college.

After a long, boring all-day drive from Fort Worth, we would pass through the aptly named town of Lamesa, which Texans pronounce “la ME sa.” In Spanish, “la mesa” means “the table”, and the town is surrounded by land as flat as a tabletop. We would head west through an empty landscape with a clear view of the horizon, surrounding us like the edge of a giant, shallow soup bowl. After fourteen miles without seeing a single human habitation. we came to the second road on the left and turned into the dirt track which led three more miles to Uncle Dick’s ranch house.

Uncle Dick was twelve years older than Daddy. My father was still a child when his brother bought this land in West Texas, where land was cheap. As a teenager Daddy spent one summer helping on the ranch. He remembered eating nothing but oatmeal during the months of hard work on that dry, sandy land. After that, Daddy never ate another bowl of oatmeal the rest of his long life.

By the time I remember going to the ranch, we ate well on steaks and homemade buttermilk biscuits. Times were better – but not much. When Uncle Dick had a good year selling cattle, he bought more land. As an old man he counted his holdings in square miles.

My brother Lyle loved going to Uncle Dick’s.. Besides scattered cattle standing like boulders amid cactus and sage brush (Uncle Dick called it “shinery” because it grew only as high as his shins), Uncle Dick raised horses. When Lyle was nine years old, he ran away from home, headed for Uncle Dick’s, when a man who had picked up the little hitchhiker called Daddy from Mineral Wells, and Daddy went to pick his son up. When Lyle grew into a teenager, Uncle Dick gave him a pony. Of course, we could not keep a horse at our house in Fort Worth; he only got to ride Sonny Boy on our annual vacations at the ranch. As an adult, Lyle worked a day job selling Acme bricks but continued his passion for horses. He and his wife Jane bred quarter horses.

I hated going to Uncle Dick’s. When contractors started building “ranch houses” in the 1950's, they did not have in mind the place where Uncle Dick and his wife called home. It was a five-room frame house with window frames so flimsy that the sand blew right in, coating every inch of floor, tables, and bedding. As the old song goes, “The sand from Amarillo lay on my pillow.” No electricity, in the evening we dined by the light of smelly kerosene lanterns. To wash dishes Aunt Verna carried buckets from the windmill and heated water on a wood stove. Worst of all, no indoor plumbing. What I hated most was going to the outhouse.

Uncle Dick’s place was north of Midland, where the Bushes and other promoters became rich on the oil wells in the Permian Basin. In the 1950's men came around and offered Uncle Dick money for “drilling rights” to his land. By that time Uncle Dick had lots of land on this sandy, barren desert. He would not sell, but he signed leases. As far as I know, no oil wells were drilled. From leasing alone, as an old man Uncle Dick became rich.

He and his second wife moved into Lamesa. (Poor Aunt Verna died, still carrying water from the windmill.) He was in his mid-70's when he built a new brick house. Instead of a lawn, he planted the front yard in rose bushes. Behind his fine new house, he had a brick outhouse, complete with modern plumbing, but completely separate from the main house. Uncle Dick said, “I’ve been going to the outhouse all my life, and I’m too old to change now.”