The Cold Days of Summer - Episode 5
Drew revisits the scene of A matter of Color and a harsh spring storm provides a moment for Drew's dad to teach a lesson.
Previously in Episode 4 of The Cold Days of Summer the family pushes the memories of Star away and Drew learns two important lessons in school.
A matter of color, part 2
I was eight years old when I learned what happened to me when I was six at the convenience store on the corner of 42nd and Everglade. Even though we had moved to the south side of town every once in a while we returned to the north side of town.
In my and Elizabeth’s opinion the best reason to go to the north side was Sherwood Park and particularly Prairie Pete Park. Most parks in Odessa had swings, slides and things to climb on. Prairie Pete Park added imagination to the standard things in a kid’s park. You could climb on a gigantic piece of Swiss cheese, with holes and mini-slides all over that you could climb up, over and through. A gigantic spider web of chain link was next to an equally gigantic spider made of concrete and pipe. You could climb on the web and the spider and the bravest climbed high on the spider web. A grounded pirate ship was my favorite thing there, made of perforated sheet metal, you could climb down in the hold, up on the mast, spin the ship’s wheel and sail with the wind. Across the park, near the northwest corner was an old B-42 bomber where young pilots and paratroopers fought over and over World War II. But for me, the part I loved the most was Prairie Dog Town. I could watch them chase each other and bark for hours.
Not near often enough Mom would take Elizabeth and me to Sherwood Park. We would want to stay all day, but never had the strength or endurance to last more than a morning. By noon we would be hot, exhausted, hungry and thirsty. Most times Mom would bring a picnic lunch of sandwiches, chips and kool-aid. On this day she didn’t. She decided to give us a treat and stopped at that same convenience store on 42nd and Everglade. I guess she had forgotten what had happened there years before. I hadn’t. The three of us went in together. We walked over to where the cool drinks were kept and Mom told me I could pick out any drink I wanted. I chose a Mountain Dew. Then we walked over to the chips aisle. Elizabeth grabbed a bag of potato chips and I snagged a bag of Fritos. We walked up to the counter where I saw the sign that had confused me. The last time I was in this store all I could read was “We .. the .. to .. .. to ..” Today I could read all of the words and the words were “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”
Mom didn’t tell me what spic meant when I was six years old but I had learned what it meant since then. Now that I knew what the words on the sign were, I put both pieces together. The son-of-a-bitch thought I was a spic and he didn't serve spics.
Okay, before we go much further with this story you need to know something about my family. For some reason, I do not know why, we weren't prejudiced. My parent's weren't and because of them, neither were Elizabeth or me. While my Dad might use the most colorful language in the world, and believe me, I learned a great deal of vocabulary from him, I never heard him use a racist word. He truly didn't care what color a person's skin was or what kind of God or gods a person believed in or didn't believe in. He could work with anyone and that's why blacks and Hispanics were often assigned to his work crews, everyone knew he would work with anyone as long as they worked. The only kinds of people my Dad was prejudiced against were the lazy and ignorant. If you weren't willing to work hard, my dad had a problem with you. Which means there were times in our life, my Dad had a problem with me. It's not that I'm lazy, but I always look for an easier way to get the work done. But what would really piss my Dad off was choosing to be ignorant. A person who didn't choose to learn and improve themselves was a person my Dad had no patience with. Luckily my desire to always find an easier way was often based on a desire to find a better way, so that would occasionally get me off Dad's shit list, not always, but occasionally.
So I wasn't upset that I had been called a spic, no, I was upset because of the ignorant hatred that man and this store believed in.
I had lost my thirst and appetite, at least for anything in that store. I walked away from the counter and was putting my drink and snack back when my Mom asked me what I was doing. I must have been possessed because I did something I sure didn’t plan on doing. I looked at her, then pointed at the sign and said “that God damn sign.”
On a normal day I would have been in a lot of trouble for saying that. The color in her face washed away in embarrassment and shock at what I had said. She looked back at the counter and the man behind it. I think she was ready to apologize when she saw the sign and realized where she was. With Elizabeth holding her hand my Mom walked up to the counter, placed the potato chips on the counter and said “We’ll take our business elsewhere.” Then she said “Come on, Drew.” I did, still dreading the moment when sanity returned and I would pay for what I had said.
We got in the car, and were driving down the road before my Mom spoke. “Drew, what you said was wrong, and you should never use that kind of language, but I understand why you did and I think I would have done the same thing.”
Our next stop was Whataburger, where I had a cheese burger, fries and a chocolate malt.
You get what you can take
The weather in West Texas can be extreme. The summer days are almost always hot, with bright sun and temperatures reaching the high 90’s and into the 100’s. Odessa is on the edge of a desert so no matter how hot it is during the day, at night the temperature will drop thirty, maybe forty degrees. On some summer days the wind blows, twenty to thirty miles an hour constant, not gusts of twenty to thirty miles an hour, but a constant wind of twenty to thirty miles an hour. When the temperature is near 100 and the wind is blowing off the desert, being outside is like standing in an oven. Even in the shade, there is no relief.
Summer is the longest season of the year, starting as early as April and lasting well into October. I never understood why the first official day of summer is on the longest day of the year. It always seemed wrong, here it is the first day of summer and every day from here on in is shorter? What seemed to make more sense to me is to use the “First day of summer” Icelandic public holiday that falls on the first Thursday after April 18th each year. Things were almost always warm in Odessa by late April with daily highs well into the 80's, if not 90's.
In April early summer is a blessing, a relief from the storms of spring, but in September and October, you’re worn down after five to six months of day after day of ninety degree plus sunny weather. In September and October school is in session, but the air conditioners don’t work and the hardest part of class is when the bell rings and you have to slowly peal your skin, then your shirt off the freshly lacquered chair back you’ve sweated against for the last fifty minutes.
Fall is short, sometimes one month, sometimes two, but it is the prettiest season in West Texas. The temperature drops during the day into the 70’s and 60’s and the air is dry and crisp. It is this kind of weather that high school football was created for. At night, once the sun goes down the temperature drops into the 40’s and 50’s, cool enough to refresh you after the day, but not cold enough to make you dread the night. Everything feels right in the fall and after the hard, long summer, the refreshing coolness of the fall is welcomed by all. If you don’t feel glad to be alive on a fall day in West Texas, well, hell, you’re already dead.
Though there are a few warning blasts in November, Winter usually starts according to the calendar in December, but doesn’t last all that long, often ending in February as Spring roars in. Winter comes to West Texas in two forms, dry and wet, both cold. The dry Winter is harsh, unforgiving and trickily brutal. You wake up in the morning, look outside and you see what looks like a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, nothing but a perfect blue sky. If the insulation and heating in your home is good, you can be fooled by the beauty of the sky. It looks like a perfect Fall or Spring day. Then you walk outside, the temperature is between 15 and 25 degrees, the cold cuts right through everything you have on and it doesn’t take long until fingers and toes become numb. If the wind blows, well, it gets even more fun. Imagine an air temperature of 20 degrees with a constant 20 mile wind coming out of the north. I know, most people can’t, only those who’ve actually experienced it understand what’s it like. The air is cold, dry and harsh. You get sunburn from the sun, windburn from the wind and if you stay out too long without the right clothes you risk getting frostbite from the cold. It’s a hell of a winter, the dry West Texas Winter.
Just for variety, Winter is occasionally wet in West Texas. About once a Winter, snow will fall and for a couple of days the harshness of the desert, of the oil rigs, of the pump jacks is softened by a blanket of snow. Then there’s ice. It comes in from the desert, hidden in fog. When the sun comes in the morning, it shines on a land of ice, and the reflection of the sun off the ice makes the bright land even brighter. The ice fools you, almost like a mirage in the desert, except this time instead of seeing what it isn’t there, you don’t see what’s there. The ice covers the sidewalks and the streets. Every step you take is one step less before you fall. People drive the streets as they would on any other day, that is, until they feel their back wheels slide underneath them and they try to figure out how to come to a stop without causing damage to themselves or others.
I left Spring for last. Spring is a cruel, beautiful bitch. At first, it tempts you. It often shows up in February with a string of brilliant, beautiful warm days, bright sun and, temperatures in the 70’s and 80’s. Then it hits you hard. The first Spring storms roll in, some are dry, some are wet, both are windy.
The dry storms turn the sky brown and the first hint is a rolling brown cloud in the distance and a musty, dusty smell in the air. If you’re on foot or on bike, you race against the storm to shelter, hoping you get inside before the first round of wind and dust catches you. Once the dust storm catches you, you might as well hunker down and ride out the storm. Visibility drops to nothing as everything turns brown. Riding a bike is impossible unless you ride with the wind, but with a constant thirty-five mile an hour wind at your back with gusts up to sixty miles an hour all you’ve become is a danger to yourself, because you can’t stop, you can’t turn, all you can do is ride the wind. Walking is a fool’s errand. With the wind, you can’t stop from running, into the wind you barely can take a step, with a cross-wind you have to constantly tack and turn into the wind to keep from being blown off course.
Then there are the tumbleweeds. Take the two words, tumble and weed, slam them together, and you have a good start on the strange concept of a tumbleweed. It starts as a small plant, usually growing as small as a foot to two feet in diameter but sometimes as big as four feet in diameter, nearly round, ball shaped. By the time it becomes a tumbleweed the plant is dead and dry. The wind catches it, breaks it off at the root and the remaining ball shaped dead plant rolls with the wind. Doesn’t sound all that bad, save the plant, like many of the plants in West Texas, has its own defense system, the outside edges of the plant has small thorns. Once you’ve been hit by a tumbleweed, you do your best to avoid them from then on. You’re left with a series of irritating scratches, and often the thorns break the skin and leave little nicks that ooze blood. That’s when you get hit by one, but for whatever reason, a tumbleweed is rarely alone. They travel in packs and more than once I’ve been caught in a windstorm and hit by a herd of tumbleweeds. One time I was scratched from head to toe. Another time, a herd of tumbleweeds caught up to me on my bike. I was riding hard, but the tumbleweeds moved faster and hit my bike hard. They nearly knocked me off my bike. As it was they traveled up and over my bike and me before they blew past me. One last piece of truth about tumbleweeds, in a good dust storm, a herd of tumbleweeds can hit a car and scratch the paint job all to hell. Every insurance agent in West Texas has seen damage claims for scratched up cars due to tumbleweeds.
As fun as a dry Spring storm sounds, they are nothing compared to the wet Spring storms. Odessa is on the southwest tip of Tornado Alley. Funnel clouds are a common sight in Spring.
Wet Spring storms come in hard and fast. The easy ones just bring enough rain to flood the low lying areas of town. The rain comes in hard and fast and there’s not enough time for the water to drain away before pooling up and flooding the streets and some homes. The hard storms bring in wind, lightning and hail.
In the spring of 1968, I was in the fourth grade and Elizabeth was in kindergarten. My Mom had taken a job downtown at a small office to make a little extra money now that both of us were in school. In January, Dad surprised her by bringing home a small, used car for her to drive back and forth to work and take care of errands while Dad was at work. Dad had an old ’59 Chevy pickup truck. Only problem was our house had a one car garage, so Dad, since he left first in the morning, got home last at night and was a gentleman, parked his truck in the driveway, while Mom parked her car in the garage. In Odessa, the sun shines some 300 days a year, but on one of those non-sunny days in the spring of 1968, a thunderstorm moved in over night and with it came hail, the smallest pieces were the size of golf balls, and the biggest near the size of baseballs. My Dad’s truck took the full brunt of the storm. All we could do was watch from the front room as the hail pelted down on my Dad’s truck. Hail cracked the windshield, then two hail balls broke straight through the windshield and landed on the bench seat. Hail dinged the truck cab and bed all over. By the time the storm was over, it looked like someone had attacked my Dad’s truck with a ball peen hammer.
Around 9:30 pm the storm had blown over and it was safe to go outside. My Dad walked all around his truck, looking at each ding. The longest look was for the windshield, now with two holes in it. He opened the driver side door, brushed off the shattered glass and tossed out the two hail balls. He wasn’t pleased about the situation. I watched him carefully, waiting for his anger to explode in a blur of profanity, but all he did was shake his head and sigh. He noticed me watching him and said “Drew, out here in West Texas, you take what you can get. We needed the water, no matter what God damn form it comes in. It’s been too damn dry this past year. It’s a shame the water had to come down in the form of hail, but it will melt.” He looked out over our lawn, dotted with pieces of hail. Up and down the street people came out of their houses to survey the damage. He shook his head again as he spoke softly to himself, not knowing I could over hear him. “Damn insurance won’t cover much of this, probably have to pay for the windshield out of my own pocket and bang out the dents myself.” Then he said louder, this time to me “You take what you can get and we need the water. Things will green up soon enough and we’ll forget this storm.”
He was right. By morning all the hail had melted and by the beginning of the next week he had replaced the windshield and the grass was greening up.
Want to read more? Episode 6 is now available. In Episode 6 Drew explains to his audience that Odessa is not Mayberry and the city experiences the work of a murderer.