No One Asked Me But…
by Dr. Larry Moses
Published March 4, 2009
No one asked me but… I have just waltzed across Texas. Actually I ate my way across Texas. Unless you have made the trip across southern Texas, you don’t realize what an accomplishment this is. Exit 425 on Interstate 10 is just the mid-way point. You could lay two Nevada’s top to top and barely cover Texas east to west. There is actually an exit 875 on I10. We traveled right at 4,000 miles in the three weeks we were away and nearly two thousand of those miles were in Texas.
Our first stop was an overnighter with a high school classmate of my wife’s in Scottsdale, Arizona. The ladies renewed a childhood friendship with some great memories and a long walk in the Arizona desert.
Our next stop was in Roswell, New Mexico where we spent Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning with Casey Vander Dussen and his family.
Those in the valley will remember Casey as member of the State Championship football team along with Shane Hickman who now teaches at Moapa Valley High School. Casey moved into the valley his junior year in high school when his family took over the management of the Hidden Valley Dairy. The Vander Dussen’s are Dutch dairymen. In the Dairy business that says it all.
Casey lived with us his senior year as his family moved to the Carson City area. Casey now owns a Dairy outside Roswell and is involved in a number of business ventures with his father and father-in-law in the Roswell area.
Casey and his wife Amy are the proud parents of an infant daughter named Delaney. Amy’s father is a Dutch dairy man so the tradition is carried on.
One of the most interesting moments of the entire trip was the day Casey and Amy took us to the famous John Chisum ranch Amy’s father had purchased. This was a place where men like Billy the Kid congregated during the Lincoln County wars. Many of the original houses are still standing and we were able to enter the old barn where many of the participants of the famous struggle for power in New Mexico hung out.
My vacation to Texas was interrupted by a five day stay in New Orleans attending classes and a national convention for the power board. While in New Orleans a number of culinary adventures took place. I ate such culinary delights as octopus, alligator, crawdads, and oysters. All were new for me and none will become a steady part of my diet. One might think one would out-grow peer pressure but no; I succumbed to the fact that others thought I should partake.
The calamari was similar to eating breaded rubber bands. The alligator was really not bad. I had it deep fried and in sausage. Both were eatable once I forgot it came from a large lizard.
Crawdads are way too much work for so little food and it merely reinforced my belief that local favorite foods are so only because there is nothing else available to eat. While the locals tell you that it is great there is no way I can believe they would eat crawdads if lobster was available.
The most challenging was the oysters. For years people have been encouraging me to try oysters and I have always replied “I don’t want to eat anything that looks like it was sneezed out of the nose of a buffalo.” This time I decided that if I could not keep it down I would just have to stand the embarrassment of losing my lunch in front of fifteen people I knew and a whole lot of people I did not know. Taking the first oyster off the shell with the ridiculously small fork they provide I was surprise that there was little flavor and the slimy look did not translate itself in the texture of the food as it was consumed. I ate three more and my entire appetite for oysters has been taken care of for the rest of my life. They still don’t look like anything a person should eat.
But most of my time was spent with my sister-in-law and her husband on their horse ranch in Bellville, Texas. I spent most of my days traveling with Bill as he went about his business as a ferrier. While Bill worked shoeing horses I sat in the truck and read or slept. I finished two books by columnist Andy Rooney and fantasized that someday I too could write that well.
Probably the most interesting thing to come from hanging out with Bill and his friends was the realization that they were not all that concerned about the day to day operations of the American government. Their major concern is making it through the day.
We old retired people have too much time to sit around and watch CNN and FoxNews. We begin to think that becoming concerned with the national budget crisis allows us to have some effect on it. These day to day businessmen are much more concerned about having work tomorrow than who is picked as Secretary of the Treasury.
One of the most significant moments along this line was an evening when we had finished dinner and were sitting around the table and I very indignantly stated “I never thought I would ever have to hear a President of the United States say that Americans will no longer condone the use of torture.”
Before I could elaborate further, Bill who is usually quiet in discussions of this nature, said in his slow Texan drawl “How do you define torture?”
I stuttered and stammered for a minute for it never dawned on me that I would have to define torture before I could rail against it. I thought maybe I could get away with Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography, “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it.” But he wasn’t buying that argument not because he condoned torture, but that the issue was irrelevant to keeping the mortgage paid and food on the table. For these Texans, the federal government was a whole lot like hemorrhoids. If they came down and then go right back up they are an irritant, but if they came down and stay they are a real pain in the butt. We could only hope that Nevada might like to emulate Texas a whole lot more than our neighbor to the west.
The evenings we spent around a fire pit in the back yard with Bill with his evening beer, Belva her wine and Jean and I with our diet cokes just seem to make everything right with the world. I could almost forget that fifty percent of the value of the stock I have counted on for retirement is gone. With no TV to remind me of how bad off I am, I once again began to feel how fortunate I am to live in America. We could use a whole lot more fire pits in American back yards and a whole lot less talk radio hosts and TV commentators with their own agendas of doom and gloom.
Thought of the week…The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
-Tom Clancy
