My daily activities have settled into a bit of a delayed writing schedule. For example, I arrived in Hereford on the afternoon of May 16, got signed in to a motel, took a little nap to rest after several hours of driving, went out to explore the town and have dinner, then read a bit about aliens (the book I purchased at the UFO store in Roswell), and sleep. There was no time to write. In the morning I got up, meditated, worked on my email traffic, wrote about what happened two days before at Boswell. This all took took so long that I missed the complementary breakfast, and I was back on the road arriving at Altus Oklahoma on the afternoon of the 17th. It is now the morning of the 18th and I am writing about Hereford on the 16th.

I suppose this is more information than you want, but I have gotten some comments questioning the difference between the dates in the title versus the posted dates. The reason is that I want to be out of a location before I write about my experiences there to make sure that nothing noteworthy is missed. My next opportunity to write about a location is two days after my arrival. And then of course there are those days that I just don’t get around to writing at all. By the way, it has been pointed out to me that there is no way to write to me, or make comments on the postings. Apparently that is correct, those options used to be available but I see that they disappeared – I have no idea when or how. I also don’t know how to fix the web site to allow for that, I created the site but have long ago forgotten how to fix it. You can always drop me a line at my email address of charles_hoes@hoes-eng.com if you have something to say or a question.

Today, May 18, is my birthday. I think I have now officially tipped into “old” at 76. I have close friends that are many years older than me that don’t act “old” – so I realize that for some lucky souls being “old” is a matter of opinion, I seem to be one of those lucky ones and don’t believe it. I do recognize however that for another groups of people their bodies might be starting to force a different opinion upon them, and they have to act old- or perhaps they actually die like my wife did so unexpectedly. Life’s a bitch as they say. In any case, at 76 I don’t think I can continue the fantasy that I have unlimited time to do things, and put off important tasks until later. Later just might not ever come. Of course that was always the case, and I knew it, but acted in many ways as if I am immortal. I find I am now spending some time trying to to figure out those things that seem most important to accomplish so I can put my time and attention there, rather than just twiddle away the days thinking that there will be plenty of time in the future. Of course, that doesn’t imply that there is anything wrong with twiddling away the days as long as that is an intentional activity – inaction, leisure, having fun and just doing nothing are all fine options. I just don’t want to accidentally use up my allotted time because of not paying attention.

The drive from Boswell to Hereford was an uneventful, 75 miles and hour trip across the high plains of northern Texas. Hour after hour of more of the same, until it changed. As I neared Hereford I began to notice large black blotches on the otherwise uniform light brown of the grasses and low bushes. The blotches were big BIG, apparently miles across. As I approached they stated to gain some definition and I could tell that they were cattle, my guess is that they were black angus – packed into the giant pens of several big feed lots. As I was driving next to the feed lots I could see some extra details. The cattle appeared to be able to have five or six feet of space between each other, standing on dark (almost black) ground covered in manure – not a green thing in sight. The large feed lot enclosures were crossed fenced, forming many smaller pens holding perhaps 500 animals each (I didn’t count, so that is just a wild guess). I couldn’t help but think about the plight of these animals confined for their entire life. Here and there were piles of manure with one or two steers standing on top getting a better view of their world. The smell was surprisingly mild, even when I finally got down wind of the enclosures. Not pleasant, but certainly tolerable.

I took a little time to drive around town (Hereford has a population of approximately 30,000 people) to see if I could find “the town.” I found that the two intersecting freeways turned into four lane, 30 mph roads with a scattering of businesses on each side. There was an old, dilapidated mall on one of the roads, and businesses similar to that found at my motel on the other. Most of the businesses were open and still doing business, it was clearly not a ghost town in the making. My impression was that it is a busy place that is treated more like a factory than a home. I had the uncomfortable feeling of being inside of some sort of giant, inhuman machine rather than being in a community. The spaces outside of the “business” areas were largely filled with nice, neat homes, schools and churches.

After getting settled into my small, but functional, motel room I went searching for a place to have a drink with locals, and a place for dinner. The big sign in the parking lot for the “Great Wall Buffet” gave a pretty good clue about that option – it was closed, boarded up, and falling apart. Just down the street I noticed a sign for a BBQ place. Being in Texas I thought I should at least try BBQ once on my trip. The door was open, but once inside it was clearly not operating. However, there was a lady sitting in a glassed in booth in the middle of the entrance to the restaurant – she was running a small business of cashing payroll checks inside of the larger business of the restaurant. Weird! She said that the restaurant was closed for a few days, but was still in business. When I asked her for a place with local food she suggested two steak houses, one that served alcohol and one that didn’t. I picked the one that did.

I found a nice steakhouse about a 1/2 mile down the main drag from my motel. It was pretty much like steak houses anywhere, a large room full of tables and a separate lounge area with a bar, some tables and a couple of booths. The bar had three people sitting at it and a couple of tables were filled with men talking and obviously enjoying some time at the end of their working day. I sat at the bar, between a young (20’s something) girl and a middle aged man (named “Frank” for the purposes of this story). One of the men at a nearby table caught my attention because he was wearing sparkling clean, ironed, worn, western wear. A crisply pressed shirt, ironed Levi’s, a clean (expensive) cowboy hat – and big spurs. The clean, pressed clothes and big hat marked him as “management” to me, but the spurs confused me. “Management” usually works in offices and rides around in pickups, and walks around – neither of which demand spurs.

Losing all control of my mind, I leaned over to the young lady and asked her what the deal with the spurs was (I should have known better)- I was curious about what sort of job the guy does that requires spurs, why does he wear them in the restaurant or are they just for show? Her response was to loudly holler to the guy with the spurs, saying something along the lines of, “Hey Jim, this fella wants to know why you are wearing spurs.” Holy cow, that was subtle! So now I was thrown into another really uncomfortable situation. Jim just looked at me quizzically, but didn’t say a word. Everyone in the bar heard that question and it became silent for a bit until Frank, sitting a couple of stools down from me said, “He is a cowboy.” That took the heat out of the moment and everyone went back to whatever they were doing.

I then said that I knew he was a cowboy, I could tell by his clothes, his hat, and his spurs – but my question was “why do they need cowboys here?”. I told him I saw the stock yards, but it didn’t look like they would need horses for that sort of operation. Frank then told me that it is still necessary to use horses to move the cattle around in the yard, it is still a very important job. That got us onto a very interesting conversation.

I quizzed Frank about whether or not he grew up there, which he didn’t. He grew up in California, went to school there and decided to move to Texas, landing in Hereford a few years ago. He said it was the best move of his life – Hereford is a very good place for business. It turned out that Frank is the owner of the restaurant, and of a very large, expensive hotel just behind the restaurant. The restaurant had been built by a well-to-do cattleman as a gift to his wife who just wanted to own such a place. She didn’t have a clue about how to manage it, so it quickly went broke and they had a bit of a “fire sale” to get out of it – which is where Frank came into the picture. He found it was an amazing deal, bought it and turned it into a success, soon taking over the hotel in similar fashion.

Frank explained that the county is very rich, with amazingly profitable businesses everywhere. He said there are something like 40,000 people in the county (30,000 in town and the rest scattered around),but did an annual business of 14 billion dollars! That is about $300,000 for each man, woman and child in the county. He said that almost everyone that was doing anything were multimillionaires, and some billionaires.

On hearing that I scrunched up my face, saying it sure didn’t look like that. He laughed and told me it is their little secret. They purposefully keep it like that. Their houses are nice, but not pretentious (which I had already observed) and all of wealth of the area in terms of agricultural production (with the exception of the feed lots) was far from the roads where it is not visible to the casual observer, such as myself. I asked about the crops, suggesting that perhaps it was for growing feed for the lots. He laughed and agreed, but then said they grow just about everything. He listed off a long list of crops (which I promptly forgot), and said that a big part of their business is growing seeds because they are so isolated that there are no other varieties to cross breed with the ones they are growing. The market for the seeds is global, my guess is that many of the seed companies near Davis California use this area to produce the seeds that they develop in the many greenhouses located near the University of California, Davis which is known worldwide for its expertise in crop development.

It turned out that my initial impression of it being a dull, dirty, kind of nasty place to live was totally wrong – in fact, perhaps that was a ruse to ensure that they are left alone, left to making their fortunes in their own way without much intervention. Franks said that as long as they have water and ground it is a gold mine. It reminded me a little bit of Coober Pedy in Australia. The main source of income in Coober Pedy is opal mining, highly prized valuable opals. All of the opal business is transacted with cash, with suitcases full of cash from Asian customers. Because of the high risk of getting robbed when carrying millions of dollars around in a suitcase, they hide in plain sight. They purchase expensive, fancy cars and strip the bodies off, replacing the bodies with beat up old ones – so they look just like “desert rat” vehicles, but run like new. All of the housing, their clothes, the way of life centers around being rich but looking poor. All except for their underground houses (literally underground) that few outsiders get to see. Hereford seems to be taking a similar approach.

This discussion really made me start to wonder just how much of what I having been seeing is real, and how much is a cover – a ruse to be allowed to do what they want because nobody really knows what that is. I wonder how deeply this ruse goes, if it exists at all.