My Page: Carol Mell
Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
The Skeleton in my Closet Wears Mink
“One day all this will be yours,” Grandma once said, sweeping her saggy arm before rows and rows of china teacups and saucers.
I was speechless.
No one I knew in the whole wide western world drank tea except Grandma, her twin sister and their lilac-powdered friends, ladies with silver curls who ate cucumber sandwiches and kept their lace hankies ironed.
After Grandma’s death, the teacups were sold but my brothers sent me her mink stole. I was living on the Navajo Reservation, hardly opera or theater country.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Randall Reeder Channels Will Rogers At Writer’s Conference
The Will Rogers Writers Workshop in Oklahoma City last March asked two questions—First what makes for publishable and second, what makes for sales? For writers who just want to write, these ugly questions keep popping up like a rat in the bathtub.
For lack of a good sales pitch and the will to use it, I paid attention to the Will Rogers impersonators, a popular gig in the Sooner state where you’ll even find Rogers memorials in bathroom stalls. Those folks know how to sell their native son.
Randall Reeder has channeled Rogers for a decade. He wore a crumpled hat, saddlebag and rope over his shoulder and was the spitting image of the Rogers I’d seen in a biography by Richard Ketchum.
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Follow the Dirt Road In Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
More Cripple Chronicles of Barbed Wire and the End of a River
A good part of the No Man's Land Museum in Goodwell, Oklahoma is dedicated to the gadgetry of pioneers, homesteaders, early ranchers and townspeople, everything from wringer washer machines, cash registers, quilts and toilets to grinders, planers and pistols. Wayne loves the television set in an oak frame with a perfectly round green screen. I like the "Humidicrib," an early day incubator.
Just past the two-headed calf, the stuffed pet skunk and the cinnamon foal we find and exhibit that explains a lot about the area. This room had a county fair feel with newspaper articles pinned to corkboards, one showing an angry black cloud of Dust Bowl dirt roiling up like a tidal wave about to swallow a row of neat, white bungalows.
So, the Dust Bowl started with that very same barbed wire so prominently displayed throughout the Panhandle. If the people of Virginia Tech want the story to be about the victims and not the shooter, Panhandlers want the museum to be about the ones who stayed. The ones who left can get their own museum.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Cripple Chronicles Find No Coffee in Goodwell, Oklahoma
Still looking for coffee, we stopped a student running in flip flops across the Oklahoma Panhandle University 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.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Inner Clowning Around Is Hard Work
What a surreal scene; a sad clown who wants to be happy, a stern clown teacher, a circle of serious people in ridiculous clothes (I like the guy in the pink feather boa and red bikini) in front of the kibble shelves surrounded by a bunch of dogs and one kitten furiously bawling in their cages.
On his turn up, the guy in the red skivvies asks, "Where is my back thing?"
Clowning instructor Colleen Creegan says, "If you are going to talk, take off your nose."
She doesn't give anybody a break. Talking in your regular voice with your red nose on is a clear violation of the strict clowning code. When your nose is on you are "in clown."
"A breakthrough allows an actor to see how far he can go," says Creegan. "Then you will react and have the true moment. A breakthrough normally involves crying and wanting to kill the teacher."
She's lucky only rubber guns are allowed in class.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Cripple Chronicles Reach Manure Straits of Guymon, OK
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 out there called 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.
We pulled up to the Super 8 and rolled down the windows. The powerful smell of manure almost overwhelmed us.
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
The Cripple Chronicles Fall Into a Speed Trap
I had planned to drive myself to Oklahoma City for the Will Rogers Writers Conference but my right foot was impounded in the boot once again (see my blog for 1-16-07 below.) Today, I got permission from Wayne, my husband and driver on this series of entries that I’ve dubbed, "The Cripple Chronicles," to tell all you travelers in Northeast New Mexico about a certain speed trap we discovered in a small canyon between Eagle Nest and Cimarron.
We were just beginning to get that nice, free feeling when you are driving out of town and leaving your stressful life behind for a few days.
The only worry that was hanging in the air was could we really afford to send my freelance butt to a writer’s conference?
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Eavesdropping in Cimarron, New Mexico_thumb.jpg)
The Spanish word Cimarron meant “wild,” and was a word they used for fugitives, runaway slaves and wild animals. You won't find a sleepier town than Cimarron, New Mexico today.
Wayne and I wander through the lobby of the St. James Hotel, past the bar into the empty diner at one end. Locals who know better use the wooden screen door on the side.
The place fills up at lunchtime so that all five tables are busy. Three ladies celebrating a birthday come in with us. I am the worst eavesdropper ever so I get right to work listening in to their conversation. To me, three ladies and a birthday is more entertaining than a television in a sports bar.
“The trouble with turning 49,” the one in the yellow jacket says, “is that no one believes you. They think you’re really in your fifties but just trying to fake it. So, I’m not telling anyone how old I am.”
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Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain
Off Humbug Mountain and Over to Cimarron, New Mexico
Still in the mountains, we stopped for lunch in Cimarron, New Mexico about 60 miles from Taos. Like so many Western towns, Cimarron has more history than future. History is about all the 850 souls there have to trade. Most of them work out of town.
Locals say a notorious gunman, Clay Allison, danced naked on the bar. The day we were there a workman was putting in a nice wood floor around that bar. I tried to imagine the naked gunman but all I got was a couple of white haired ladies having lunch. Nowadays, the hotel advertises peace and quiet.
A broken tombstone tells how Cimarron’s first Reverend, F.J. Tolby was assassinated, shot in the back according to Blankenhorn, in 1875. “Lo matarás” is carved out in Spanish on that stone which puzzles me because of the future tense, “You will be murdered.”
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