"Red River near Waurika," 5 x 7 140 lb Fabriano Artistico extra white cold press paper

The Red River is not a particularly striking  nor deep  river, nor is its valley, especially the farther west you go in its 1,306 miles before it empties into the Mississippi in Louisiana. 
Its history and stories are deep however, going back before Europeans invaded, and the valley upstream is more of a flood plain than river. 
There are days, especially late in summer or drought when you can walk across those stretches, or camp out on the sand banks, run trot lines and watch time flow by. But in rainy seasons, it can, and has, taken out highway bridges.
Downstream the bluffs get taller and greener, and Texoma Dam forms a huge lake, a testament to the power of the uncontrolled river.  Before it trickles away in the Llano Estacado of Texas, it gets redder--and its name, from the red soil it carries during  flood time. 
I've lived near it in southern Oklahoma for 12 years, and seen its seasons--fond memories, and there is beauty in its moods and scenery.
Why all this? Today's #WorldWatercolorMonth  prompt was "Favorite Song." I get kidded a lot by friends because one of my favorite songs is "Red River Valley." It's so Western, so nostalgic, so about lost love. The fiddle music, the western yearning echo with me, taking me back  years.
First recorded in 1925, "Red River Valley," about the border between Texas and Oklahoma, was first title as "Cowboy Love Song" in 1925 by Carl T. Sprague, one of the first cowboy singers from Texas. 
Many have sung it, and my favorites are Marty Robbins, Michael Martin Murphey or Connie Francis. 
So today's watercolor, Red River near Waurika, Oklahoma.

From this valley they say you are leaving
We shall miss your bright eyes and sweet smile
For you take with you all of the sunshine
That has brightened our pathway a while

Then come sit by my side if you love me
Do not hasten to bid me adieu
Just remember the Red River Valley
And the cowboy that's loved you so true

For a long time, my darlin', I've waited
For the sweet words you never would say
Now at last all my fond hopes have vanished
For they say that you're going away

Then come sit by my side if you love me
Do not hasten to bid me adieu
Just remember the Red River Valley
And the cowboy that's loved you so true

Come go with me. Here's Michael Martin Murphey:

The colors of Oklahoma spring

"Southern Oklahoma Springtime," 8 x 10 watercolor, 140 lb. cold press paper

Driving into southern Oklahoma in spring is always an adventure in color for me. The farther south you get, the more green, the more color.

Every Mothers' Day, I see this as I drive down to the Waurika Cemetery to plant flowers at my Mom's grave.

I drive alone, in silence, eyes and ears and imagination open to the landscape, to the colors, to the memories of when we lived in that area.

Long ago, I learned that. Having lived in the northern midwest, in Iowa, you pay more attention to the seasons than here, and appreciate the changes. When we'd drive south to visit family in spring of those years, you could see the landscape green up before your eyes, the father south you went.

You just have to look, to enjoy the rural views, the wide open spaces. The trip to Mom's grave takes time for me to adjust to, so it's been three days since I painted.

But today it came, almost spontaneously. A bright sunshiny day, meant more color just when I needed it. I remember the green fields, the full trees, the hay bales, and especially the wildflowers along the roadsides. And of course, the skies are alive with clouds, and colors too.

Today is a gloomy pandemic day, and that means we need more color than ever. Thus today's landscape, opening my senses to the colors of creation.

Mother's Day coffee, and flowers

Flowers for Mom

I sat down on the grass and had a cup of coffee with my Mother Sunday.
After making my annual Mothers' Day pilgrimage to see her, planting real flowers on her grave stone, washing it off, I got out my thermos, poured a cup, and we talked.
For as long as I knew her, she had always loved coffee, and now that's she's been dead 40 years, it just seemed the natural thing to do.

We talked about my brother and I,  about her grandkids all grown up now, by name, and about her great-grandchildren, who she never got to meet.
The hot coffee was more delicious than ever in the warm sunshine. The faint memories of having coffee with her came back. I wish I'd spent more time drinking coffee with her though.
I've lost track of how many years I've brought flowers to her grave in the Waurika, Oklahoma, cemetery, 120 miles from my home, and it occurred to me  that there will come a time when I'm no longer able to make that trip. 
So I told her that this fall, God willing, I'm going to come down and plant some daffodil bulbs that will come up every spring, after I'm gone. 
But when I come back, we'll have another cup of coffee.

Mother's Day Flowers

"For Mom," Mother's Day Card, 5 x 7 watercolor card, inspired by a Linda Riddle painting

Bring your mother flowers this week.
I will this Sunday, driving down to the Waurika, OK, cemetery, as I have for many years, to plant real flowers on her grave.
Forty years ago she died this summer, just two months after I'd taken her to Scott White in Temple, Texas, and they found nothing wrong. She spent the last month of her life in the Duncan hospital, most of it in a coma.
I've written about this before, though it's been a couple of years.

My annual journey is my tradition, to wash the grave stone, a chance to talk to her, to remember, to reflect, to plant real flowers. I know she's not there, but it doesn't matter. It's a reunion. 
This year seems more important than ever, for some reason. Especially now, in the midst of pandemic craziness, I want to focus on love and kindness, and beauty, and she helps me. That's why there are flowers, flowers she deserves. And thus today's little watercolor card.
Bring your mother flowers this week.
Mother's Day Reunion

Memorial Day discoveries and stories--III

An unexpected veteran's grave

A flash of red, white and blue caught my eye in the cemetery in Waurika, Oklahoma, on Mothers Day,  raising my curiosity.
Every year I drive to the windswept hill and plant real flowers on my Mother's grave. Then after talking with her, I wander among the graves, recognizing the names of many people I knew when we owned the Waurika News-Democrat from 1974 to 1986. It's a bit of time travel for me, spurring memories, and a sense of mortality that increases every year.
This year, as I was driving back through part of the cemetery, I saw this singular flag on a gravestone, stopped and walked over to it, wondering, asking questions.
I'd never heard of Harvey N. McMurtry who died in 1924, and I'm used to finding Civil War vets' graves in rural cemeteries in Oklahoma, but was a surprise. 
It's pretty easy these days to search for Union Civil War veterans' histories when you know what unit they served in, as with Reese Hildreth in the Oakwood Cemetery I wrote about earlier today. 
I managed to find material on the Second Texas Cavalry thanks to Texas records, but no mention of his name or the roster. The officers are listed, but not the enlisted men. I did find an Ancestry.com link for a Harvey Newton McMurtry, born 1838 which I bet is him, with unknown death date and names of his parents. Nothing else. Stories. Questions.
As a Southerner, I have often wondered what it had been like to have survived that war, to have lost, and then lived for years afterward. He lived a long time after The War and for someone born in the 1830s. 
Here is someone who may actually have been born in The Republic of Texas, then became a citizen of the United States in 1845, and then a citizen of the Confederate States of America. 
So many questions.  Most of all, what were his emotions and stories, through the years? How did he feel, cope, adapt, to having been defeated?Did he regain his U.S. citizenship? How did he end up in Oklahoma? What did he do for a living? What about family? Had he owned slaves? Who decorates his grave? Is he in anyway related to the families of the writer Larry McMurtry of Archer City, Texas, which isn't that far away?
I did find out that Confederate Memorial Day is in late April, commemorating the surrender of the last troops. So perhaps that flag was placed then, and was still there early in May. 
I am aware that that flag is politically incorrect these days, and I resent that racist and hate groups have turned it into a symbol of their demented minds. Sgt. McMurtry deserved better than that. (By the way, that is not the Stars and Bars, the national flag of the Confederacy. It is the battle flag, but no matter.) 
But on this Memorial Day, this veteran also deserves a flag on his grave.
Sgt. McMurtry was well traveled. The rest of this, in his honor, is from the fascinating story of his unit, copyright material from The Texas State Historical Association, by Brett J. Derbes, 2011.

The Second Texas Cavalry was  organized in May 1861 as the Second Texas Mounted Rifles,   reorganized in April 1862 with the same officers and enlisted men. 

It originally consisted of 1,200 men from 18 counties, mostly in East Texas.  It always served west of the Mississippi and briefly  attached to Sibley's army that invaded New Mexico. It  served in Galveston and Houston and then Western Louisiana before returning to Texas in 1863. 

By late 1862  it consisted of 752 men, and by mid-1864 it had only 167.  In March 1865 the regiment consisted of 150 men who served at San Antonio.

Sgt. McMurtry and his comrades fought in many places in Texas, New Mexico (including the defeat in Glorieta Pass outside of Santa Fe),  and Louisiana. They were "dismounted" in March 1865 and gradually disbanded in May as many of  the men fled across the Rio Grande into Mexico. The unit officially surrendered at Galveston on June 2, 1865, almost two months after Lee at Appomattox.

Mother's Day journey--A Mother's Day hug

"I don't know who you are, but you look like you could use a mother's hug," she said, walking toward me.

I had no idea who she was, but I managed an astounded smile, and hugged the gray-haired woman in the middle of the Waurika cemetery.

I was there on Mother's Day, talking to Mom. It had been a long time since we'd talked and I had lots to say and questions to ask and things to think about. I was having trouble saying good-bye. It had been years since she died, and my visits to the cemetery have been few.

I was watching the grave when I noticed the car drive up the side road on the cemetery, and turn down the gravel lane where I was parked in front of Mom's grave. I know lots of people's names in the cemetery and in the town, a mile and a half to the east, so I thought it might be someone I knew from years ago when I owned the newspaper there.

The tires crunched up the gravel and the car stopped just a few feet behind mine. When she got out, I thought she looked familiar, but I was wrong. By the way she was dressed in a stylish pantsuit, I think she'd been to church.

She smiled when I said I was just talking, and after reaching up to hug me, a perfect stranger, we introduced ourselves.

She was from Ryan, 10 miles south, and she'd been out to the cemetery to visit her parents' graves, and was on the way to Oklahoma City to see her children.

Her hug is one of the most remarkable things that has ever happened to me. Things like that don't happen in cities, and I doubt they happen in a lot of states--but they do in Jefferson County, Oklahoma, and I'll guess in rural Oklahoma.

It was one of those days of omens or spiritual symbols or angels, I suppose. The low clouds come charging up out of Texas in ragged, single files, like the longhorns on the old Chisholm Trail, fresh from crossing the Red River over a century ago. The south wind blew the prairie grasses just like the cattle moving up through the green spring pastures. The first herd of the season wouldn't raise much dust on such a cool day, with the sunlight breaking through the ranks of clouds. You can hear the wind in the grass, in the flowers on the ranks of graves, in the cedars in the old part of the cemetery.

From the cemetery hill you can see the town hovering along the Beaver Creek bottom. Most buildings and houses are hidden by trees, except for water towers and new houses shimmering in humidity on the windswept prairies on the other side. 

In the trees and on the gravestones, mockingbirds and meadowlarks sing. It's a day to talk to yourself, or the occupant of a lonely grave. 

Some things fade with years, but the person sticks in memory 

 

You can hear eternity in a graveyard. Besides the birds and the wind, the only sound is the passing traffic on the nearby highway. Out here you can hear the tires before you see the cars--that's the sound of time passing. But time seems to end in the cemetery. The wind is timeless, and the bird song is present tense. From somewhere a cock crows and a dog barks--more symbols, more messages. A red-tailed hawk silently lofts itself into the wind from a power pole a half mile away, and high in the air a buzzard circles on widespread wings, life and death together.

I plant small potted red pansies on her grave, and go get water to soak the peat moss. They will wither and die in a few days under the wind and sun of southern Oklahoma, but they are real, alive, better than the faded plastic flowers I see nearby. Some memories wither, but others are forever. The water runs out onto Mom's gravestone, and I scrub it clean, and stand back to talk some more.

The breeze begins to evaporate the water on the flat gravestone. But I notice that the moisture retreats to the indented letters of Mom's name and the dates of her life. Water in the indentations and the face of the stone around them dries the slowest, highlighting the barest facts of a life. 

Some things fade with the years, memories come and go, but the person sticks in your memory, who she is, what she means to you. Even the dates dry out before the name, and that's right. The years don't matter near as much as who the person is. The essentials in our hearts don't dry up.

I was watching the moisture when the kind woman drove up. As she got ready to leave, I told her to be careful, and to love those kids. She smiled. I know her kids love her.

As she drove off, I looked back at the grave, and the letters of Mom's name were still moist. I bend over to kiss the grave. Now I could say, “Goodbye.” I wish I could hug you again.

Mother's Day journey--what the gravestone doesn't tell you...

My tires will crunch across the gravel lane at the Waurika, Oklahoma,  cemetery this Sunday, this Mothers’ Day.

Every year I drive down to plant some flowers, to remember, to talk to Mom.

The south wind sweeps up the prairie hill west of the little town, full of memories, especially memories of the last years of her life.

It comes up out of Texas, across the nearby Red River, like she did to live with us years ago, Francis Faye Culp Clark.

Today her gravestone is almost 40 years old, and it records her name and the years of her life. But that is, was, not her.

But it cannot record the life she lived, this child of East Texas, one of four sisters and two brothers, now all dead. The girl who played high school basketball at South park High School in Beaumont, the girl who got the good job with Ma Bell, and who helped the rest of the family through the Depression, the girl who gave baby brother 25 cents a day for school lunch. It can’t record her marriage and the birth of two sons and the joy of holding and raising them. It can’t record the pride in their successes, the tears in their failures. It can’t record her love for grandchildren.  It can’t record her strength in divorce, nor her sense of humor and most of all, it can't record her unselfishness. Nor her faith in the face of death.

And I can’t either, except from too few memories, and looking back through black and white snapshots, and from stories my brothr and cousins have told me.

But I can imagine more now, as I watch my daughter—who looks remarkably like her grandmother--holding and feeding and cuddling and talking to and disciplining her daughters and son. I see the eye contact, the touch, the strongest bond on earth, and I learn what I experienced—what every fortunate son and daughter experienced—before they could remember, but not before they could know deep in their souls.

I saw the same bond recently when a tall, 60-something  man slowly led his frail mother, by the arm,  into a restaurant to have dinner with her, listening to her chat away.

I wish I could do the same, but I can’t. But I will do the best I can, and drive up to Mom’s grave, and tell her I miss her, and I love her.

I hope you can talk to your mother, face to face this Mothers’ Day. Don’t wait until it’s too late.  

 ++

Tomorrow--A Mother's Day Hug

Years and memories lost

Memories lost, computer digitally altered painting

Travel the back roads in rural Oklahoma, or anywhere for that matter, and you find relics, memories and lives long gone as the years past.
Just as this year is passing, there will be relics, and memories lost.
This is the third version of this image. The first was a black and white photograph on Tri-X film on a wintry day in Jefferson County, Oklahoma, north west of Waurika, long ago.
The second is below, an 11 by 13 watercolor, on 300# d'Arches paper.
Versions are like the memories and years...always changing, and sometimes lost, but still brief records of a few instants.

Iowa--where the tall corn--and more grows

I get misty when I think of Iowa.
This was my rant today on Facebook, in the wake of the presidential caucuses:
  "I am really getting tired of all the high techy, big city snobmedia and pundits looking down on their noses and making fun of the Iowa caucuses. Excuse me--they don't fit in your pigeonhole so you can stereotype the people as hicks and the system as archaic? Hey, they use pencil and paper, they get together civilly, vote in a true democracy where every vote counts, and dare to do it differently than any place else in America. You gotta problem with that? If American politicians and the system make a bigger deal of it than perhaps it should be, it's your fault. Iowans are glad you're gone. And besides, you ougtta have to come up here and suffer the winters if you're gonna be so uppity. They can handle it, if you can't."
Pardon me, but it's personal.
Three of my four children were born in that state, and my fourth child, and his family now live in Dubuque, on the northeast side, and "caucused" yesterday. Proud I am.

"Iowa, where the tall corn grows."

My wonderful wife Neysa and I  moved from Oklahoma to Hawarden, in Northwest Iowa on the South Dakota border by the Big Sioux River to teach high school English many years ago, following friends, "establishing" a church, renting a Seventh Day Adventist church, driving to Sioux City and Sioux Falls every once in a while.

I never saw so much green, so much great rolling rich dark glacial farmland, America's Mesopotamia, nestled between two great rivers...full of life, corn, soybeans,  tempered by brutal winters, but with great solid people who valued education and hard work. In northwest Iowa our first son was born, Vance Conrad. Story below.

From there we went to Iowa City to get a graduate degree in journalism, and then to southwest Iowa to be an editor of a semi-weekly paper, the Herald-Journal, in Clarinda, Iowa, where our second son, Travis Austin, and our daughter, Dallas Page, was born.

Then we moved back to Oklahoma to be near family, worked at the Duncan Banner and bought into the Waurika News-Democrat, where our fourth child, Derrick Rogers was born.

Since then there has been happiness and sadness, successes and failures, but Iowa remains, deeply a part of all of us. I can go on and on about its influences in our lives. I understand why it is the original "American Heartland."

Misty-- from an earlier post:

"We headed east over the rolling hills of northwest Iowa  years ago.

"The rising sun turned the mist from the corn golden, as we sped up and down the hills in a light green Volkswagen to the hospital 30 miles away in LeMars. My wife's contractions had started before daybreak, and we left the house shortly after 5 a.m.
"'Come in here, you're responsible for this,' said the red headed doctor O'Toole, handing me a gown and mask, and about noon, a baby boy was born.
"Those memories are still real, and I know his mother remembers even more, because mothers remember more than fathers do, including  more about the births of our other three children. 

Iowan

"Years have passed and there have been lots of ups and downs since then for all of us. But we're blessed with our children and grandchildren. That boy is now M/Sgt. Vance C. Clark, USAF... ."

Our  other Iowans--

A chilly night 

Third time is a charm

My Iowans, Derrick and Naomi, ready to caucus!

 

 

A year ago, time and mortality

At Dad's grave long ago

A year ago, I posted this, and cousin John Clark reminded me of it on Facebook today. Click this link:  Time and Mortality continue. 
This was obviously before 1975, probably in 1974, when she died, and is now buried in Oakwood cemetery in Whitesboro, Texas. We lived in Waurika, Ok. She outlived her husband John Worden Reasor--1886-1967 by eight years. 
Her first husband, Erle Thweat Clark, was our grandfather, parents to Terrence, Lewis, Rex, Mike and Champ Clark, parents of about 16 of us cousins, scattered to the winds. Dad and Erle are buried side by side in Fairlawn Cemetery in Comanche, Ok., the town where Dad and his brothers were born.

My newspaper died, but not the smells, the memories

Waurika's red brick streets

Memories have two edges, and the recent death of the Waurika News-Democrat brought them back, things long forgotten or repressed. Yes there is nostalgia and smiles for the good ones, but also regrets and tears for the tragedies and "might have beens." There's no use living in the past, but it's good to be reminded of where you've been, of who you are deep down.
The late great science fiction writer Ray Bradbury said that everything that happens to you becomes compost that will eventually bring forth something new.
Waurika added a lot of compost to our family's lives--we would not be who we are today without those dozen years of memories.  They  cobble unevenly like tires over the red brick streets of Waurika.
We bought into the  News-Democrat because we knew there was promise there. Waurika Lake was a-building; the town seemed to be growing; we were young and dreaming of owning our own newspaper; there was a good church; pretty good schools; friendly people. 

The iconic red brick Rock Island depot, now the library, from the caboose

So here are some of the piecemeal memories that jumped back into my consciousness when I learned the paper had been killed. The old red brick building at 117 W. Broadway with large windows open to let some circulation int0 the high metal ceiling's dusty interior. 
Only one room was air conditioned for the new offset typesetter, with old type tray racks converted to pasteup stands.
Out front was a huge counter, behind which were shelves of office supplies.  Don Morrison had a typewriter and a typewriter table out there for his "office," where he wrote most of the news and his weekly column, "Keynotes."
That was the front shop. Behind a divider that rose halfway to the ceiling was the majority of the building--the "backshop" where the old newspaper press had once been before the conversion. The press pit was filled with sand. That's where we spent many Thursdays and Fridays after the paper was "out," running  the offset Chief 15 and Heidelberg letterpress job presses, printing jobs for merchants and the county, school and city--much of what today would be done on a copier machine.

The red brick newspaper building at 117 W. Broadway

Most of all I remember the smells--a combination of dust, years, stacks of printing paper of different sizes, ink, presswash and lead type and the heat of a still functioning Linotype, the standby letterpress typesetter where "hot metal" was literal.
When I walk into  the "backshop" of almost any small newspaper, or a print shop, I'm immediately back home, yet I can't describe that smell. I've asked for years what the smell of printers' ink and presswash and paper smells like, and nobody has been able to tell me. Usually, you can compare the smell of something to something else. I'm stumped.  
You can add the smells of the darkroom too. Developer, photoflo, hypo, fixer, film. The News-Democrat's darkroom was in the back of the building, where I spent many hours developing film and printing photographs, or using a vertical camera to make negatives for offset printing jobs.
Next to the darkroom in one corner was the toilet, partitioned off  with a wooden stall, and outside a big ceramic double sink, with scrubbers and grit to try to clean your hands from the ink  on your hands from offset job printing, and trays for washing photos. It was almost impossible to get the ink out of the grains of your finger tips and from under your nails. I think it's still there, deep inside me.
In the other corner was the old caster room, where the "hellbox" had been to remelt the used metal type for the Linotype. Now it was home to decades of yellowing copies of the newspaper, bound by year, termites and time eating away at the brittle pages. That smell is also distinctive.
The once vacant red brick Rock Island depot  is now the town library. The once active red brick News-Democrat building is now vacant. Red brick streets cobble many more memories to come.

My paper died--II, history

The News-Democrat, after we closed the big windows for air conditioning, carrying my design for the flag as a sgin

1972. I came to Duncan, Oklahoma, to work for the Duncan Banner, because Harrington Wimberly would pay me close to what I was making in Clarinda, Iowa, at the Herald Journal. I think I got $165 a week. 
I was  hired as "area editor," which meant I traveled the rural areas around Duncan where the Banner had circulation in Stephens,  Grady, and Jefferson Counties. Rush Springs, Marlow, Bray, Central, Velma-Alma, Comanche--where my Dad was born, Addington, Waurika, Hastings, Sugden, Ryan and Terral.
We--my wife Neysa and I, with three small children, Vance, Travis and Dallas--came back to family territory with the dream of eventually  owning a weekly newspaper.
That's how I met Don Morrison, his sister Mary Lacy Snider and her husband Brick, at the Waurika News-Democrat in the sweltering summer of 1972.  I was building sources for stories, and knew somehow, that weekly newspapers knew more about their towns than anyone else.
It was an old brick building, on brick streets. Only one room was air-conditioned, because the new Compugraphic-I required it, the paper recently "converted"  to offset printing from hot metal. The Duncan Banner still was letterpress...and a few years earlier at the University of Iowa I'd learned to run a Linotype--which was still in the backshop of the News-Democrat for "job work," an important part of a country weekly's income, on Thursdays and Fridays after the paper was "out."
I think that helped endear me to Don. I think, years later, he saw something of himself, in a "young journalist," as he said in a column.

My newspaper died--I

I had the "stuffing" knocked out of me.

Our last issue--address label to our son Vance, a student at Lubbock Christian

So much so that it's taken me this long to overcome avoiding writing about it.
I'm still recovering, as a matter of fact, after learning of the death of "my" paper, the Waurika News-Democrat at the first of this month.
I was surprised that after all these years--29 to the month after we sold it--I was so raw for my 12 years there.
John Dunn's poetry comes to mind: "No man is an island…any man's death diminishes
me." Any newspaper's death does the same.   I am always sad when a newspaper fails, and I know what a paper means to a town. But this made it very personal.

Clark, with the Don Morrison School of Journalism

The notes and thoughts have been piling up, and it's helped that I wrote a little about it in The Oklahoma Publisher this month. And now  folks in Waurika have started a new newspaper, The Waurika News Journal. It's backed by people I have know a long time, and the editor, Curtis Plant, graduated with my son Travis.
Curtis asked me to write a monthly column for them, and so I put one together, named "Coffee with Clark," from this blog, and  the descendant of my long ago column "Trail  Talk." It appeared this week, 29 years after I quit writing the other one.

That got me started, breaking the logjam of emotions and thoughts. I've also heard from old newspaper friends like Ray Lokey in Tishomingo, Gloria Trotter at Tecumseh,  Ken Chaffin of Healdton and Barbara Walter at Hennessey, Nell Largent of Waurika and others. A weekly newspaper guy in Minnesota wrote about it, and changing my old opinion about broadcast news, the old and new paper even made the television evening news twice on KSWO.
So my excuses are past, the roadblock has been removed.
I go back to Waurika every Mother's Day and plant flowers at Mom's grave, and then drive down those red brick streets, past the old paper office, through the neighborhoods, remembering raising a family there. It can be depressing, as the town has dwindled some. More telling are all the names I know on gravestones in the cemetery.

We gave these away as subscription promotions. 

Still, I want to share some of those memories...they are so much a part of who I am. In fact, those dozen years in Waurika may have been more formative in my life than any since, including raising four wonderful children. That's where I graduated from the Don Morrison school of journalism. Waurika is the closest I have to a home town, having grown up in a city.
Those thoughts and images are brewing in my coffee pot and in future posts. Ironically, when talking about this blog--billed above as an old-fashioned newspaper column, a good friend said to me once, "You've got your newspaper back."
Lots of stories to come--backshops, cut and paste, darkrooms, selling advertising, and more--a salute to the Waurika News-Democrat, the town's oldest business.

And where is your campsite?

Woodsmoke and morning coffee in the Manzanos--5 by 7 watercolor, 300 # d'Arches,

Woodsmoke is responsible for this.
Smelling the aroma of a pinon fire the other night on my back porch made me realize how long it has been since I was camping.
The answer is too long...actually March of 2012 at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Alone, after visiting my uncle Mike in Santa Fe. My sleeping bag was good to almost 0 degrees. I still almost froze to death, but the time alone was medicine.
"I need to go camping," I said to myself the other night. That's what's missing. Yes, I'm too old to sleep on the ground anymore, and camping is often uncomfortable, but there's something essential missing if you don't endure it.

Camping in Chaco Canyon

Camping puts you in touch with eternal values I think. It certainly puts you in touch with Abraham, who spent his nomadic life "pitching his tent." Our Plains Indians knew those values. When you're in a tent, or under the open sky, you know how small and impermanent you and everything else is. How much a part of a bigger Nature you are--wildlife, landscapes. How big the universe is. How unimportant time is. How you don't "own" anything but are "just a-passing through." You learn to appreciate warmth, food, your surroundings, the stars, other people.  We are all immigrants, nomads.
I started thinking about all the places I've camped. It's a long list, and the memories are filled with family, friends, loved ones. The times that stand out most tend to be when not everything went perfectly, and of special places visited.
One of the best memories of camping there or anywhere is having to roll out of the sleeping bag in the cold morning, see your breath fogging in the air, shiver,  fire up the Coleman stove to start coffee, and try to stir last night's campfire into life for warmth.
Where is your campsite? Your favorite? The memories?

My brother and an "Army" cot in the Manzanos, 1955

My first memories of camping including sleeping on "army cots," canvas stretched over wooden frames in the Manzano Mountains southeast of Albuquerque. We were building a cabin up there, and my brother and I would either sleep in a big center pole canvas tent, or outside under the stars. As pre-teens my friends and I would often "camp out" on the lawn outside our house on Sandia Base.

Mom and our tent at the Grand Canyon, 1954

 I also remember camping near the south rim of the Grand Canyon on a family vacation with Uncle Mike along, using that big green tent. Later as a teen, my friends and I made a fishing camping trip to Fenton Lake in the Jemez wilderness in New Mexico. I also camped with my best friend in a tent,  his family in a trailer,  near the Pecos River, with a danger of black bears. 
My two favorites are in New Mexico--several times at Chaco Canyon and Jack's Creek in the Pecos Wilderness. Chaco because its 25 miles off a paved road, because the Anasazi still inhabit the 1,000-year-old ruins. I've been there alone and with family. It's traveling back in time, human and geological, and your imagination runs wild. You can see time here--in the stars wheeling overhead, or the yip of coyotes in the early morning, or in the shadows climbing the sandstone cliffs early or late in the days. Mostly it's quiet.
Jack's Creek is at the end of the road  above 9,000 feet, near the headwaters of the Pecos River. There are aspen and fir, and a trailhead into the Pecos Wilderness. My family and I camped there several times, either in a tent, or in a Coleman popup tent trailer we had.  
Great memories.

Where else have I camped? Many of my memories involve that pop-up trailer and cherished family memories, but not all.

• New Mexico--near Cloudcroft, in a pouring rain storm. Chama, near  the tracks of the Cumbres and Toltec steam locomotive. Conchas Lake. Story Lake. Coyote Creek. In Taos canyon. At Tesuque Creek  campground, above 10,000 feet near Santa Fe. In the Manzano mountains.
• Texas--Big Bend National Park, where we were afraid the wind would blow away our popup trailer. And outside Amarillo, downwind from a feedlot.
• Alone in the Arkansas Ozarks.
• One windy campground in western Kansas.
• Wyoming--in the Wind River Mountains, in Yellowstone, and in the Tetons, where our van was broken into, and they stole our medicine bag, thinking it was my wife's purse.
• Utah, in the Wasatch mountains.
• Montana, on the Canadian border--third favorite spot, and it would be first if it were more frequent and closer--Glacier National Park, with family, and also, the last time, with son Trav.
• Pennsylvania, just 20 miles from Gettysburg.
• Maine--near Portland.
• Vermont, on the banks of the Connecticut River, where  we found a graveyard with dates back in the 1600s.
• Oh, Oklahoma? Not much. Maybe at Waurika Lake. Definitely with the pop-up trailer on a sand bar southwest of Waurika on the Red River with men friends, running trot lines and having a good time, just a few feet from the south shore, which is Texas.

Another great memory of camping is at the close of day. Tent's up, sleeping bag unrolled inside. Coleman stove is cooking some chili, and I've started a fire. The flames send up the  woodsmoke, and as the day darkens and the stars come out, the embers glow like little universes. Night sounds of insects or wildlife break the silence. You can sit and stare into the fire, drink coffee or something else, think, and smell the woodsmoke.
Or more recently, with best friend  Mark Hanebutt at the now extinct (sold and bulldozed for an expensive cookie-cutter housing development} at Melo's, a small private lake and campground on OKC's far nw-side...an evening of sparse food and drink, laughter around a fire, woodsmoke , and sleeping in a tent, no matter the glow of metro lights to the southeast. Precious, connection with what matters.
It's past time to go camping.