After fires devastate Panhandle, fellow Texans come to the rescue
LIPSCOMB — “It’s been a wild 2017,” Willis Smith was telling me last Sunday as we waited for a cowboy church service to begin at the Wolf Creek Heritage Museum. Smith, county judge of Lipscomb County since 1987, had in mind, first, a Jan. 15 ice storm that left area farmers and ranchers without power for 12 days. That storm may have been costly and inconvenient to residents of one of the most sparsely settled regions of the state, but it was mere prelude to what happened a few days ago.
At least three wildfires fanned by 70-mph winds swept across nearly a million acres in six Panhandle counties and in nearby Oklahoma and Kansas. Six people, including four Texans, lost their lives. Ranchers have lost thousands of cattle, not to mention grass and forage for those that survived. People have lost their homes, their belongings, their family treasures, “all those things you’ve worked so hard for,” cowboy preacher Frank Johnson reminded his impromptu congregation of about 40. ( Johnson, a truck driver from Dekalb in northeast Texas, had arrived in Lipscomb a few days earlier with donated hay, fence
posts and barbed wire.)
Tiny sprigs of green grass already are thrusting up through mile after mile of ugly gray ash blanketing the fields, pastures and rugged ravines, but the burned-out houses, downed fences and pastures bereft of cattle are mute evidence of the enormous task ahead. “It’ll be a long time before we recover,” Laurie Brown, longtime editor of the Canadian Record, told me.
As a newspaper guy, I was embarrassed to tell my old friend I had barely heard about the fire, the third-largest in Texas history, but she’s used to fellow Texans ignoring her part of the state. Canadian, the Hemphill County seat, is in the far northeast corner of the Panhandle; Lipscomb County is the farthest east of the top tier of counties. The nearest town of any size is not Amarillo to the south, but Liberal, Kansas.
Smith said he got a call the other day from Gov. Greg Abbott offering the state’s assistance, the first time he’s heard from a Texas governor during his 30 years in office. Abbott declared a state of disaster in six counties, including Lipscomb.
‘The perfect storm’
The fires started when power lines, perhaps weakened by the ice storm, brushed against each other, and sparks ignited the dry vegetation below. The Panhandle, like most of Texas, has had ample rain the past couple of seasons, so brush was thicker than usual. A dry winter, low humidity, high winds and unseasonably hot weather — 99 degrees last weekend — created what Smith described as “the perfect storm.”
Small volunteer fire departments that usually come to the aid of each other were battling their own fires. Local firefighters worked 36 hours at a stretch, until the Texas A&M Fire Service sent in crews from around the state.
“We’ve been ranching since the turn of the last century, but we’d never lost cattle to fire,” said Lance Bussard, 61. This time, more than 60 of his cattle were incinerated.
“Everything these days is just more extreme,” he said.
Bussard’s wife Tanja arrived in the Panhandle from the Black Forest region of Germany in 2003. She was photographing cowboys in the American West for her university dissertation. “I was just so impressed and touched by the people here,” she said a few days ago. Plus, she met Lance, who guessed the blond young woman was an insurance agent when she walked through the doors of the Alamo Saloon, Lipscomb’s one and only drinking establishment (now owned by the Bussards).
Tanja Bussard said that when she and her husband saw the billowing, black smoke some distance away, they thought they had time to herd their cattle to a bare spot of ground and drive to Canadian to pick up their son Ben, 7, who had gone home with friends after school.
“We never dreamed it was going to be that monstrous, that big, that fast,” she said. It was midafternoon, and she was on foot herding cattle when embers began falling around her and a wave of heat nearly knocked her down. “You lose your orientation,” she said. “You have seconds to think and then you panic. I just lay down, and then I saw two headlights coming toward me through the smoke. It was Lance.”
Heavy losses
Jackie and Garlon Rogers were in Amarillo, where Garlon’s 86-yearold brother Billy was scheduled for surgery the next day. When they got word that the fire, faster even than fleeing deer, had jumped the Canadian River and was threatening their place, they decided they had to
drive back. They ended up losing acres of grass, miles of fencing (at probably $10,000 a mile to replace) and an old tractor that was Garlon’s favorite. “I’ve had it since ’84,” he told me over dinner with Canadian friends last Sunday night. “I kept it up, in good shape. It meant a lot to me.”
Garlon also lost his big brother while he and Jackie were home battling the fire. He died a day after surgery. “We partnered for about 40 years,” Garlon said.
Jackie took me aside. “With all this going on, Garlon just hasn’t had time to grieve,” she said.
Everyone I talked to this week had a story to tell. Everyone I talked to wanted me to know they were fine, that they were well aware others were less fortunate.
They were thinking of a young couple who were overcome while rounding up cattle near the little town of McLean. Cody Crockett was 20, Sydney Wallace, 23. Their fresh faces still smile on Facebook. Their bodies and that of a friend, Sloan Everett, 35, were found close to one another.
They were thinking of 25-year-old Cade Koch, who worked at a lumberyard in Canadian and whose wife, Sierra, is expecting their first child. Rushing home to be with his desperately worried wife 25 miles away in Lipscomb, he drove his pickup around a highway barrier and was overwhelmed by the flames. “He was known for being shy and having a sweet spirit,” his Canadian Record obituary read.
“People here are not used to asking for help, expecting help,” Tanja Bussard said. “If something goes wrong, you fix it and go on.”
Scorched livestock
These days, they’re having to get used to it. Truckloads of donated hay, pallets of barbed wire and thousands of new T-posts are arriving from around the state, as well as financial contributions from around the nation. Ranchers from West Texas and beyond laid aside their own work and showed up to load cattle and truck them to pasture elsewhere. They loaded carcasses and hauled them off to the nearest packing plant. They doctored the survivors’ burned hooves and ears, the scorched udders of heifers unable to feed newborn calves.
Maelie Womack, 12, drove up with her mother Chloe and two friends from Seminole, 300 miles southwest of Canadian, to help Steve and Linda Rader replace miles of fencing. (The Womacks and the Raders had never met.) After a day and a half of hard work, the visitors drove to Houston, where Maelie was showing her pig at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.
Don’t be reluctant to accept the help of others, preacher Johnson urged his congregants last Sunday. “It’s a blessing to the helper,” he reminded them.
The preacher prayed for rain. Rain to wash away the ashes, to cover the scorched earth. He prayed for a bumper crop of grass, for mother cows to have calves. He prayed for the land to heal, for broken hearts to heal.
And the people said amen.