Texas Hitchhiker
.
.
.
You know how it is when you're walking into a strong wind, and you're leaning into it, partly supported by the wind, so you'd fall forward if the wind stopped? That's how this guy looked, as though he were leaning into a 50-knot gale coming from the West, with his thumb pressed against the wind. It was the most active pose I've ever seen for standing still and thumbing a ride. There was no sign of where he might have come from or where his previous ride had left him off, out there in the middle of the Texas scrub. And he was barefoot besides. We stopped and gave him a lift.
In the 60's men didn't wear earrings. Maybe pirates, in pictures in books. This guy was probably the first man I saw who wore an earring, a big gold loop in one ear. “It makes life easier when people need to find me,” he said. “I'm a navigator for fishing boats, so if someone needs to talk to the navigator, people will just say, 'look for the guy with the earring.'”
Texas is big enough to have lots of sections. There's a maritime culture along the Gulf coast, lush well-watered farmland in the east, and a lot of Southwestern desert starting somewhere around Austin and going west from there.
Oil well somewhere in Texas, I guess
This was the desert part. Jimmy Seals had already hitched a heck of a ways from the nearest fishing port.
Of course I have no way of checking on this, but our passenger claimed to be a world record holder: longest treading water, when a fishing boat once sank under him.
Buzzy and I stopped at a tourist attraction, the Caverns of Sonora.
Inside the Caverns of Sonora
We weren't going to treat Jimmy to admission, and he didn't want to pay, so we parted company there. He had pretty clear plans, though. He knew exactly which shoe store in Amarillo he was heading for to get a good pair of Frye cowboy boots.
Maybe the same day, we passed the LBJ ranch, home of then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson. We had heard the phrase “LBJ Ranch” on the news as often as you've heard "whitewater", so we had to stop and take a picture. I don't know how much farther it was to the secret service perimeter, but nobody stopped Buzzy from sitting on the gate. Yes, darn right we were wearing straw hats at that point.
We were on two-lane roads all the way across Texas, but most of them were wide, smooth, and straight. The exception was the road near the Rio Grande west of El Paso; it was narrow, windy and had some hills so steep we weren't sure the Falcon could handle them. I particularly liked the way the Texas highway department managed stop signs. On the straight, flat roads the speed limit was 75, I think, and every now and then you would get to a sign “Stop 2 miles, speed limit 65.” I would take my foot off the gas, and just about when the car had slowed to 65 there would be another sign, “Stop 1 1/2 miles, speed limit 60.” It was perfect. All you had to do was take your foot off the gas at the first warning, and you would be close to the legal speed at all times, and would coast to a stop just at the stop sign.