Neighbors were all around us in the country, but meeting them required some effort, especially since the county we lived in had only 25,000 people in it, most of whom seemed to be related by blood or marriage or both. We found that the best way to meet people was to join one of the organizations that most of the folks living in the area belonged to. When we lived in the burbs my wife was a member of the local chapter of a club run by the state extension service for women who live in rural or suburban areas. While she retained that membership, she also joined the local chapter in the area near our country place. Her hope was that the local club would offer opportunities to socialize with some of the other women in the area. That's the way it worked in the club in the burbs. She soon found, however, that the women in the country chapter of the club stuck to business at club meetings. Since most of them were related to each other, they did their socializing on their own time and they rarely included newcomers in that activity.
It didn't take long for us to discover that one of the best organizations to join for folks who want to meet their neighbors in the country is the volunteer fire department. Our VFD was always shorthanded and welcomed any new members, especially those who were willing to take calls at any time of the day or night. We first joined as sort of provisional members who mostly just contribute money to keep the fire department running. Before long, though, we were full-fledged members. I went out on fire calls and helped with the maintenance of the fire station and equipment and my old girl eventually became the department's secretary. This gave us a good opportunity to socialize because there were quite a few VFD members whose families hadn't lived in the area for five or six generations and, being outsiders themselves, they accepted us into the community.
Our fire department was a pretty poor one in several ways. We didn't have much money for equipment so the trucks and gear we had were mostly hand-me-downs from more prosperous fire departments. Some of our stuff worked and some of it we worked on in an attempt to get it to work. In addition, many of the VFD members had jobs in town, so if a fire sprang up in the daytime, there weren't many folks available to fight it. Those who showed up for daytime fires were either full time farmers or ranchers or older retired folks like my wife and me. There were very few respondents so both men and women went out on fire calls.
Nearly all of the fires that we fought were grass fires. That seemed like a simple thing to me when I first joined the VFD, but on my very first fire call I found out that grass fires can be very dangerous if you don't know what you are doing. We only had a couple of working water trucks so the first two people that got to the fire station drove out on the first truck. The next two took the second truck, and everyone else drove their own vehicle to the site of the fire. I was one of those tail end Charlies on the first fire that I helped to fight. It was a grass fire in a large pasture. When I got there I could only see one of the trucks out in the field. The smoke was too thick to see the other one. I pulled a shovel out of my pickup and ran across the field toward the firetruck. Before I got there the wind shifted and the fire cut me off from the truck. Fortunately there was a lot of burned out area to one side of me and I was able to reach it before the fire reached me. Before long I was able to make it to the truck, which was spraying water on the fire while a group of folks tried to dig a firebreak to keep the fire from spreading to another field nearby. We were all heads down digging when someone yelled that the wind had shifted again. All we could see was smoke and flames in all directions. So we all jumped on the truck and the driver tried to get us and the truck to safety. There were some pretty scary times before she managed to find a path that would get us beyond the flames without broiling the entire crew in the process, but she did it and we all survived to spend the next two hours containing the blaze and saving a house and barn that were in the path. After the fire was more or less out we spent another forty-five minutes putting out spot fires that sprang up from smoldering cow dung. Yep, it works just like you see in the old cowboy movies. The Indians burned buffalo chips because they make really good fuel and when you have a grass fire in a pasture where cows have been converting grass into cow patties all summer... well, you get the picture.
Another organization that we joined was the local chapter of the state wildlife association. The basic idea here was that you would set aside some of your land as natural habitat for native plants and animals so that they wouldn't be pushed off the land. We only had a few acres, but one of the creeks on our property cut us off from about two acres along the back during wet weather, so we hadn't done anything with that part of the property and it had gone back to nature all on its own. We figured that that qualified us to join the wildlife association. Except for attending meetings every month or so, the only wildlife association activity I engaged in was the annual deer count. The objective was to see whether the county deer population was holding steady. Since deer generally don't like to be out in broad daylight, the deer count was done at night. On the appointed evening about twenty of us met up at the VFD and piled into two pickups to cruise the back roads of our part of the county, shining flashlights into the fields and counting deer. It was a hot, dusty and moonless fall evening. We hadn't had any rain for weeks and there was a burn ban in effect. Ranchers and farmers often burn brush piles or even entire fields in order to clear them for planting hay or other crops. During a drought, however, outdoor burning is banned. Well, except for barbecues, of course. This is Texas we're talking about, after all.
In any case, we crept as silently as we could over dirt roads so narrow that the brush along the road scraped both sides of the truck at the same time. We talked in low voices and tried not to scare the deer. Those that smoked cupped their hands around their cigarettes to try to keep the deer from seeing the glow. Several of the smokers flipped their butts into the road. I asked one of my neighbors if that was a good idea, considering the drought and burn ban. He thought about it a minute and then replied that we probably would be OK because all but two of the people in the truck were VFD members. I pointed out that while that was true, the truck, and its tank of water was back at the station. He said that wouldn't matter because we had enough people and cold drinks to stamp out and drown the fire before it spread, although we might want to run the liquid through our kidneys first. That sounded like a plan to me.
We strained our eyes peering through the brush as we drove deeper and deeper into the bowels of the county. When we thought we had reached a field where we could see well enough to tell if there were deer there, we would quickly turn on a hand-held lantern with a beam about as bright as a landing light. That would stun the deer for a second or two while we all tried to count them. Then we would turn out the light and argue about how many we had seen. As the night wore on and the cooler got emptier we had more and more trouble agreeing on the count, but being country boys, we forged on.
A lot of the people who live in rural areas are there because they don't want any contact with other people. They get really nervous when they see a truck full of suspicious-looking characters driving past their place with no lights on in the dead of night. More than once our deer-stunning arc light revealed a shotgun-toting figure on the front porch. Mostly, though, we ran into dogs. Nearly everyone who lives in the country has at least one. Most people have several. So almost every time we passed a house we were met by baying, barking and growling hounds, pets and guard dogs. Most of them were running loose and many of them chased the truck down the road. We finally decided to call it quits when a monstrous hellhound of undetermined origin managed to get his front legs and a slavering mouthful of ginormous teeth over the tailgate. We had to throw the last of the cooler contents at him to get him to back down. That brought the deer count to an end for another year.
While we got to meet a lot of people through the wildlife association, none of them lived near us. Over time, though we met most of the neighbors who lived on our road. The property on Lester and Twila's side of our place was owned by their daughter, Wanda, and her husband, Jed, who lived a few miles away. We met them through Lester and Twila. Jed and Wanda raised cattle on the acreage next to our place as well as on several other small places around the county. Eventually we came to an agreement with them to let them harvest our front hayfield and run cattle in our creek bottoms and back pasture. They cut a hole in the fence between our property and theirs and strung a hot wire along the top of the near creek bottom to keep the cattle out of the hayfield and our garden and orchard. That allowed us to keep our ag exemption and also relieved us of the burden of maintaining that part of the property and the fence that enclosed it. I liked getting a constant supply of organic fertilizer for the garden, and the grandkids liked feeding ranch cubes to the cattle, but I sort of missed being able to tramp around in the wooded area along the creek bottoms.
We learned pretty quickly that the fence only kept the cattle in the creek bottoms if they really wanted to stay there. It happened that the barbed wire fence between our property and Jed and Wanda's had been constructed with the wire on our side of the posts. That worked OK for keeping cattle on our side of the fence, but one time when the cattle on Jed and Wanda's side decided that the hay in our front field was a lot more tasty than the grass on their side, they just pushed against the wire until the staples popped out and two cows were soon grazing contentedly on our hay and working their way toward the orchard. I managed to repair the fence before any more cattle pushed through, and my wife and son shooed the two errant cows down the field toward the gate in the hot wire so that they could get them into the creek bottom before the rest of the herd made it to the gate. My son was just about to open the gate when both of the cows jumped right over the hot wire. We just stood there with our mouths open. We had had no idea that cows could jump. I just hoped they couldn't fly.
