On prairie fires and cowdogs
ROBERTS COUNTY — It’s not as if the Lone Star State’s best-known canine was unaware of prairie fires. In Hank the Cowdog Book 51, “The Case of the Blazing Sky,” the floppy-eared selfappointed “head of ranch security” finds himself facing “a roaring, leaping, hissing monster of a prairie fire that sent a spray of sparks shooting up into the dark sky.”
For Hank’s creator, imagining a fire is one thing; seeing a roiling black cloud of smoke top the canyon wall and head your way is something else entirely, as author John Erickson and his wife, Kris, discovered three weeks ago, when a “roaring monster” blazed across more than a million acres in the Panhandle and nearby Oklahoma and Kansas. (See last week’s column.) The fire killed six people and thousands of cattle, burned up grass and forage and destroyed homes and property, including the Ericksons’.
The couple has lived since 1993 on a ranch in the ruggedly beautiful Canadian River Valley in the upper reaches of the Panhandle. Seven miles from the nearest neighbor, the M-Cross Ranch is at the base of the Caprock, the 100-foot-high, nearly 200-mile-long escarpment that marks the upthrust of the Llano Estacado. The trail to the
ranch is gouged out of the face of the escarpment.
The March 6 fire destroyed their ranch house, John’s writing studio, a bunkhouse for guests, signed copies of books by writers he admires, two unpublished novels he wrote in the 1970s — “That may have been a blessing to the world,” he said — as well as a performance banjo worth $7,000. The fire also claimed Kris’ quilting materials and sewing machine, along with dozens of quilts and scrapbooks and things she wanted to pass on to her grandchildren. John managed to grab his laptop computer and Kris her mandolin, but not much else before they drove out of the canyon just ahead of the flames.
Most of their 120 cattle survived, as well as five of their six horses. Dixie, their beloved blue heeler, didn’t. She was a smart dog, John said. She liked to sit on the front porch of the ranch house and survey her domain. He suspects she was sitting on that porch when the roof collapsed.
When I spent an afternoon with John on a beastly hot day last week — 99 degrees in March? — Kris had not been able to bring herself to visit the ranch, now a wasteland of gray ash and blackened tree trunks. Of John, a friend of his told me, “I think he’s still in a little bit of shock.”
Neither house nor beer
In well-worn Wrangler jeans and blue work shirt that had belonged to a deceased Perryton man — donated by the Ericksons’ church, they were the only clothes he owned last week — John took a call from a friend. Phone to his ear, he stood on a bare patch of earth where the family home had been a few days earlier. “I’d invite you to come up to the house and have a beer,” he told his caller, “but I don’t have any house, or beer.”
We climbed into his well-used ATV and with two lively dogs on the back bench drove into what had been an old-growth forest of aromatic cedar bordering spring-fed Picket Ranch Creek. The blackened trunks of “the dark enchanted forest” (Hank’s description) were so big, they probably had been growing, and avoiding fires, for more than a century. We watched ashdusted Lena, a blue heeler, and Daisy, a yellow Lab, splashing around in the creek. “I’d come up here and sit in my lawn chair and write in my journal,” John said. “That journal’s gone up in smoke.”
A small-town boy from Perryton, the 73-year-old rancher/writer graduated from UT-Austin and spent two years at Harvard Divinity School, anticipating life as a minister. Although he came to realize he’d never be a Harvard man or a minister, he finds solace in his faith. He and Kris are avid supporters of Christian home-schooling, sing in their Methodist Church choir and often do Hankinspired readings and musical performances for church gatherings. I wasn’t surprised when he brought up a biblical reference to illuminate what he and his wife are experiencing.
“The fires snatched away what we thought we had,” he wrote in an e-mail a couple of days ago, “and has left us pondering that great line from Job: ‘Naked I came into this world and naked I will leave it.’” In what he calls “an odd twist of irony,” all the family Bibles burned up, as well.
Although he quit riding horses a few years ago, John has been a cowboy for most of his adult life — a good one, Lipscomb rancher Lance Bussard told me. “He knows where to be and what to do.”
He took a fiction-writing course at Harvard and began writing short stories in 1967, while still working as a cowboy and a ranch manager. “For 15 years,” he told writer Kay Ellington in a recent interview, “I wrote four hours a day and sent out manuscripts. I attended writers’ conferences and talked to editors. Nothing worked.”
In 1982, he and Kris started Maverick Books, their Perryton-based publishing house. It was an act of desperation, he says. Sixty-nine Hank books and 9 million copies later, he’s six ahead of schedule and continues to enjoy his hero’s adventures and misadventures. Once he gets going on a story, he looks forward to where goodnatured, mistake-prone Hank will take him.
The Ericksons happened upon the ranch in 1990, six thousand rough, canyon-covered acres for sale in an isolated river valley. “Once I saw it, I couldn’t let it go,” he told me. “It’s one of those places that only comes up once in a lifetime.”
Despite what happened, John considers himself fortunate. Years ago he found his place, found his purpose, thanks in large part to an imaginary dog. “That sense of belonging somewhere, to soil, grass, animals and a human community, has become an important ingredient in the Hank stories,” he said. “They tell about people and dogs who belong to one place on this globe.”
‘Part of my job’
Until the fire, John adhered to a routine that hadn’t varied much in 50 years: get up about 4 in the morning, make himself a cup of coffee and write from 5:30 to 9:30 before switching over to ranch chores. Now that his studio is gone, he’s still putting in the four hours, in the Maverick Books warehouse. With insurance, he and Kris are hoping to get the house rebuilt in about a year.
These days, he’s writing about the fire. “It’s the kind of event that needs to be remembered,” he said. “It’s part of my job. I don’t know whether it’ll be a book or a long essay.”
Nathan Dahlstrom, a Lubbock teacher/writer/ cowboy, had this to say about the man he considers his mentor: “He’s had six generations of hard-knock farming and ranching in West Texas, so he’s from pretty rough stock. I think he’s going to be all right.”
Dahlstrom reminded me of something else, something John had mentioned. Long before mankind came along to complicate the ecology of the llano estacado, fires had a cleansing effect on the prairie. Life begins again.
Hank a few years back had his own way of putting it: “It’s always darker before it gets any darker.”