Story, carried over from photo page
Well it all started simply enough. We needed to visit a few friends and family so we planned a two-week trip that would take us from southwest Texas to southeastern Oklahoma back across Oklahoma then into the Texas panhandle and across to western New Mexico.
The stop in southeastern Oklahoma was the worst and beginning of our troubles. There is a little town there that an old high school classmate had settled in and we had been asked to visit with her. I contacted her by phone and she said, “Don’t know of any campgrounds but there must be some this is a big outdoors place, fishing, hunting, four wheeling are what we live for.”
I started an Internet search that lasted two weeks trying to find something, anything, in or near this little town. I found one phone number but that was all. I called. The woman on the phone said “Why sure we have a campground, it’s just past the bridge down by the creek next to our little antique shop.” Hey, sounded good to me so we booked a slot for two nights that would give us one whole day to visit with the old friend.
The trip was planned for the spring of the year, thinking we would see lots of wild flowers along the way but forgetting that storm season is also at that time of year. We set out and visited with two friends along the way and were having a great time until we got to “that place”. No one in the town knew of the campground but one person did happen to live on the road that was part of the address so we found our way there. The folks in town were really nice and informed us that they had been under storm warnings for the past week and expected to be for at least two more weeks.
Driving down the road looking for the campground we noticed that the general nature of this section of country was one of middleclass farmettes; you know the little 10 to 20 ache hobby farms so many folks are into, until we crossed the bridge. There it was the red barn we had been told to look for. It was nothing like what we had envisioned. Instead of the “red barn” one thinks of when thinking pleasant thoughts this barn was red because the tin it was made from was rusted. We never saw the inside of the barn but what was setting around outside was junk, old cars, cook stoves, iceboxes that had not worked in the past three decades nor never would again! Not antiques. The creek had a sand mining operation going and there were two trailers parked there that looked like the ideal setting for a “Texas Chain Saw” movie.
Being a simple country boy, I thought that it could be worse and most likely was just a poor farm family trying to make something work so we pulled in. It was sunset and we did not know of anywhere else to stay anyway so it was here or nowhere. The best site was on a little rise that was almost level, only about a 10% grade. I started to back into it and two men drove up. One, the older one, asks if he could park the trailer for me so I allowed him to. While he was parking the TM the younger of the two men and I started talking. I told him we were looking for my old classmate. (At this point I should point out that her grandparents who were an old pioneer farming family who was highly respected in the little community where I grew up raised her.) He said something along the lines of “Yea, I know her, she makes the best shine I ever tasted! Sh**, she is well known in these parts. Yuk, Yuk, Yuk.”
This should have been enough to make us leave but as I said we had no place else to go.
The men left saying we could pay Monday morning. We ate and settled in for a night of TV between efforts to phone the classmate. Just about dark thirty we heard a loud motor, shouting and just general ruckus making going on outside. I went out wondering what was going on and a young man shouted at me asking where so and so was. I told him I did not know so and so and that we had just pulled in. He said so and so had stole his dog and he was going to shoot his rusty a** and that I had better tell so and so or he would shoot my rusty a**!
As a result we spent the night holding shotguns. Thank God nothing else happened that night and the next day is another story but it does not get any better.
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