Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Cripple Chronicles Reach Manure Straits of Guymon, OK

By Carol Mell, 3-29-07

	Big D's Cafe in Hardesty, Oklahoma serves up the kind of no-lean hamburgers we used to eat without guilt. They sure know how to cook a cow in the Oklahoma Panhandle.

I’ve called these the Cripple Chronicles because I had to make the trip to the Will Roger’s Writers Conference in Oklahoma City in the boot and on crutches. That’s why all my pictures from this trip are taken while hanging out the car window like a slobbery dog.

Two weeks before traveling through the Oklahoma Panhandle, better known as No Man’s Land, we tried to make a reservation at one of the three motels in just about the only town, Guymon. Rooms in the two nicer motels were booked.

I wondered what might be filling up the town in March so I looked up their town website and calendar. It was too early in the year for the Antique Tractor Pull, Happy Squares Square Dance, Top of Texas Quilt Sock Hop, Five State Iron Thunder Poker Run or the Elks Steak Dinner Fundraiser.

When we got the last room at the Super 8, I asked what was keeping Guymon hopping.

“They are building a Super Wal-Mart,” the lady answered. “We’re all full up with construction workers.”

We’d already driven several hours through the flatest country I’d ever seen. I had a bad moment when I realized we wouldn’t be coming on any more mountains, that flat was all around. I felt a little naked, exposed, like a rabbit let loose under a hawk’s eye without a burrow. Out here on the plains God could see everything I’d ever done.

In Guymon I wasn’t comforted when we turned a corner at the Pentecostal Bible Holiness Church. That didn’t sound like a friendly place but a place where the congregation takes a personal responsibility for burning off the chaff from the wheat.

“Yep,” Wayne said, “we’re in the heart of Bible Belt country.”

It’s a good thing that the nearest airport is just over the border in Liberal, Kansas, I said. Just in case a Democrat needs airlifting out of the territory.

Guymon is growing. It wasn’t only the motels that were as booked up as Nazareth at Christmas. The roads were bustling with trucks and construction was evident all along the main drag.
We had to cross the tracks to reach the Super 8 Motel, just past the Panhandle Implement store with a herd of John Deere tractors parked out front.

We pulled up and rolled down the windows. The powerful smell of manure almost overwhelmed us.

“Maybe it is all those cattle trucks parked at the Black Cat Certified Scale and Truck Stop across the road,” I offered optimistically.

We were soon to find out that Guymon boasts three cattle feed lots. If you’ve ever been downwind of one of these operations where they fatten up the calfs in small pens before slaughter then you know the power of the cow. In my experience they are usually located miles from nowhere but since in No Man’s Land everyplace is miles from nowhere they must have figured they might just as well locate three feed lots near transportation.

Wayne was worried we wouldn’t sleep for the smell. I was worried we wouldn’t sleep for the noise of cattle tracks clattering over the tracks or trains running 50 feet past our window. I needn’t have worried though, the budget fan on the budget air conditioning in our room was as loud as a dentist’s drill. At least it was constant.

As the sun set behind the grain elevator we tucked into a couple of whiskys and thought about dinner.

“I saw a restaurant called Caktus Pete’s but the spelling makes me nervous,” I said. “There was a steak place but

I’m not sure it was open. Looked like half the sign was shot off with a shot gun.”
We headed back across the tracks to a restaurant owned by Lebanese Oklahomans. On the walls we found our first barbed wire display. We would soon discover that barbed wire was a popular decorative element all over the panhandle.
On the menu we found the usual steak variations with this exception:

“Shish K’Bob (all meat, no vegetables to fuss with)”

It was delicious though I wouldn’t have minded some skewered vegetables.

Well, they probably have to cater to the locals I thought but when the young waiter (a member of the family)came over to clear our plates he said. That’s good huh, just the way we eat it.

“But you do add vegetables when you make it, right?”

“Eeuww,” he said, crinkling his nose. I guess the later immigrant generations are more Oklahoman than Lebanese and like their meat unadulterated.

The next day at a hole in the wall called Big D’s Cafe we had the best hamburger we’d tasted in years. Judging by the patrons that rolled in about lunchtime, their broad bums overlapping the edges of their seats, I’d guess no one fusses with lean meat around here either. Just beef, buns and fries.

A vegetarian would starve in the Panhandle where iceberg lettuce, pickles and ketchup were the only non-meat items on any menu.

They sure no how to cook a cow though. You have to give them that. I guess it’s a compensation for the smell they have to live with night and day.

Tune in next time for an account of the No Man’s Land Museum where we learned that all that barbed wire was not so healthy for those pioneers after all.

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