Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

Cripple Chronicles Find No Coffee in Goodwell, Oklahoma

By Carol Mell, 4-10-07

	Goodwell, Oklahoma has some big houses like this one that tell of prosperous days long gone. Notice the bench made of horseshoes next to the appliance on the porch. That little thing with horns in the foreground is for practicing roping.

My husband Wayne is the pastor of two churches so during Easter Season we are buried with Jesus for a while. After Easter we wriggle out from under the burdens of the high holy holiday and get back to normal, exhausted but alive.

So, now I resume my Cripple Chronicles.

The sole reason we drove over the Oklahoma Panhandle in March, what appealed to me most, was experiencing a place called, “No Man’s Land.” Having spent my summers in a ghost town in Eastern Oregon I know that there is more going on than meets the eye in those places the world forgets.

I made up my mind to see the “No Man’s Land Museum” in Goodwell, Oklahoma, ten minutes south of Guymon, the hub of cattle feedlots and chicken processing. I was to learn later from a food writer at the conference in Oklahoma City, Sherrel Jones who grew up in Guymon, that around 16,000 chickens are dispatched at one plant there daily. Another is soon to be built. We like to eat the chicken and beef but prefer to forget about how they passed from the living to our plates.

That explains the large number of Spanish speaking people and businesses we found across the tracks and south of town, in some ways the busiest part of the city. When I was a reporter on the Arizona border, feedlot and meat processing plants from all over the country used to come down through the state labor department to hire crews of Mexicans. Mexican field workers called it working in “la refrigeradora,” the refrigerator because they work in gigantic coolers.

“I don’t care how much they pay,” one farm worker told me, “I couldn’t stand to work all day in the cold. I’d probably get sick and die of the chill.”

As these were government-sponsored employers we might assume that everyone was legal. The way the laws of the United States work, employers are required to witness documentation and keep those records in their files. They hired people with documents. Thing is, on the other side of the border workers could go to any of a number of “abogados” or lawyers and get the documents they needed, a couple of sets just in case. As long as no one from the U.S. checked those documents, and they almost never did, the deal suited everyone. That explains why the best music in Guymon is Ranchero and Corrido. 

As I said, Guymon is the kind of place we prefer to forget.

We drove ten minutes south down to Goodwell, through flat and endless views broken only by oil drills with their big lazy heads bobbing, just like those glass perpetual-motion birds perched on the side of a drinking glass.

I had noticed broken trees in Guymon but when we got to Goodwell, home of the Oklahoma Panhandle State University and little more, the little grid of streets was lined with broken trees. Branches as big as an elephant’s leg were snapped off and lying around like battle casualties. I wondered about tornados, trying to recall just where those recent tornados reported on the evening news had been. The sky was angry looking, too, and I thought, “it would be just our luck to get caught in a tornado when I can’t even run with this danged boot.”

The museum wasn’t open yet so we decided to find a coffee shop. We drove around looking for a business district but only found a Main Street that looked like it had been abandoned years before. Goodwell has a few large houses and I noticed that the grass was painted green around some of them.

“They must have trouble with water,” I said to Wayne. “I heard of people painting their lawns green in Santa Fe a few years back.”

Still looking for coffee, we stopped a student running in flip flops across campus. He was the only living soul we had seen in Goodwell.

“Coffee shop?” he asked. He looked baffled. “I don’t think so, he answered. “No coffee shops here. I think you can buy coffee at the student union over there,” he said pointing to a square brick building.
I would have to straggle along in my boot on crutches for one block to reach it.

“No coffee shops?” I said to Wayne after the kid hurried off. “Can you imagine a university campus without a coffee shop?”

“This hardly qualifies as a university,” he said. He should know, Wayne once taught history at Wayne State University in the County and Town of Wayne, Nebraska. I think he was having flashbacks.

Then, I realized that those poor students didn’t have anyplace to buy beer either. As I said before, a vegetarian would starve in Guymon but in Goodwell everyone would starve without a car to take you to town and a grocery store. 

We gave up on coffee and went back to the museum and parked in front by a line of broken trees waiting for someone to open the doors. “I hope they have a wheel chair,” I said.

Well, on Humbug Mountain you’re danged if you do and danged if you don’t but if you come back next time I’ll tell you about the real lesson of the No Man’s Museum—how to destroy an ecosystem without hardly trying.

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