Tumbleweed of Contradictions: A Memoir

By Roxie Powell

No one has lived a life like Roxie Powell--and if you dont believe it, all you need to do is read his memoir: Tumbleweed of Contradictions.

Born in Kansas toward the end of the Dust Bowl period on the high plains, he was raised in western Kansas and the high mountains of Colorado. His father taught him to look out to the horizon and then beyond, and he did just that, working on a cruise ship that took him all over the world.

While hes had different loves throughout his life, the constant one has been writing, and he recalls his interactions with literary giants such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and other leading figures of the counterculture movement.

He was a rodeo cowboy in the West. He drove race cars everywhere, including Grand Prix tracks in Europe. Neal Cassady admired Powells racing skills. Powell penned one of Allen Ginsbergs favorite books of poetry--a collection of verse totally unlike anything that came before it or since. And more and more. This is a book well-wrought for sure!
--W. K. Stratton, author of Chasing the Rodeo and Ranchero Ford/Dying in Red Dirt Country and co-author of
Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jul 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781480833197

Roxie Powell

Roxie Powell grew up in western Kansas and Colorado and lived in Hawaii before moving to the Eastern seaboard of the United States. After being a widower for fourteen years, he found the ultimate love of his life, Ann. He’s the author of several other books.

Book preview

PART ONE—TUMBLEWEED TUMBLING

Paratyphoid Fever and Dust Storms—1935

60457.png Dr. Mennahan turned from my father toward my mother and asked if she had a mirror in her purse. She reached in her purse and handed him the small rectangle. Dr. Mennahan took the mirror and handed it to my father. Use this, he said. Put it across the baby’s mouth and leave it for a while. When you pick it up, see if it has collected moisture. If it has, the baby is still alive. With that, he left.

My parents had gambled, and like gamblers the world over, had won some and then lost. Since my mother had nearly died giving birth to my brother John twelve years before, they had followed the advice of their obstetrician, who wanted her to have this baby at Wesley Hospital in Wichita. At that time, she was told that she could have no more children because of a pelvic anomaly. Ten years after that news, she was given another examination. She was informed that she had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving another birth. They had hoped for a girl, but they got a boy. They named him Roxie after my father. This birth turned out to be normal and uneventful. One nurse even described the baby as fat and roly-poly. Everything about his birth was uneventful—until eighteen hours later.

When the hospital notified the state health department that they had a case of typhoid in the obstetrics ward at Wesley Hospital, the authorities thought it was a hoax. There had been no such instance since the tragedy of Typhoid Mary forty years earlier. It turned out that Mary had been a carrier of the disease and had no symptoms herself, and a similar situation had just repeated itself here.

No one was happy in the obstetrics ward at Wesley Hospital that summer. In the first week of July 1935, of the twenty-three babies born, fourteen had come down with paratyphoid fever, and eight of those had perished. As I had contracted it first, it was said that I had it the worst. Before the disease had run its course, four more babies died. Curiously, four of the babies who survived had all been cared for by the same pediatrician, Dr. Mennahan. In my case, my parents could not hold me in their arms without upsetting my stomach. This necessitated carrying me around on a large pillow held at a forty-five-degree angle. My mother, my brother, and my father all had what we called pillow duty for upward of a year.

Looking back, it seems to me that their firstborn son, John, was everything I was not. Mother may have nearly died having him, but he was healthy and happy from the very start. Mother said he had such a strong spine that when you picked him up, he lay straight across your arms. This was not the case with me; Mother compared me to a mushy teddy bear when held. Yes, I was soft, but I was also difficult. Nothing was easy for me or those around me, whether it was my lack of cooperation or my singular, headstrong behavior.

My parents returned with me to Ulysses in southwestern Kansas, which was still in the throes of the cataclysmic dust storm period. The previous ten years (1925–1935) had been years of terrible drought, followed by huge dust storms coming up from Oklahoma, western Kansas, and eastern Colorado. It was said that there were even storms coming from Nebraska. The dust covered everything. It also seeped into everything, even into watches. No house could be sealed from the dust. It was often dark, even in the middle of the day. This was the Dust Bowl.

Farmers were beyond desperate; they were now numb from the Depression (which had begun for them in 1930) followed by the unceasing assault of the devastation and losses suffered during the dust storms themselves. The farm community was weakened by many deaths from dust lung, especially in the very young and the very old. Whole farms were covered by dust that banked up to the tops of windows and sealed doors.

During the dust-storm period, the basement of our church in Ulysses had been turned into a hospital. Sheets were dunked in a tub of water and hung around beds to catch the dust until they turned black (or red, if the latest storm had come up from Oklahoma). Many died. Doctors say my brother has only 30 percent of his lung capacity due to dust. When I was quite small, I remember my mother and brother bustling about the house trying to seal up windows and doors in anticipation of a roller that had been seen coming up from the southwest. Staying cooped up in the house, I remember that the floor lamp in the living room looked like a candle looming in the haze as dust filled the room, despite their attempts to seal the house.

During this period, every able-bodied person, whether male or female, was expected to contribute to the efforts to hold the land from blowing, which carried away the newly planted wheat and maize before it had a chance to germinate and develop roots.

All the men who had not left for California or gone back east to wetter climates were expected to drive tractors pulling plows or one-ways to keep turning the ground to minimize the dust. Dad was enlisted along with the other men to keep turning the soil. I’m sure he secretly jumped at the opportunity. At one time, Dad (while still working as a minister) was farming in 12 different sections of Grant County, in order to keep what was left of the land from blowing to Nebraska. To my knowledge, this was the first time Dad came into possession of land that was his own. This land was not leased or rented: it was his own.

So many people were moving out and away that the land had become nearly worthless. Anyone who could work it could buy it for little or nothing, and Dad did both. He also earned a degree of respect among the farmers by his hard work with little promise of success. He worked the land, only to experience the pain of pulling his hand up through a head of wheat to find nothing more than a few shrunken kernels in his palm. This was the inevitable reward for a year’s work. No wonder many packed up and left for California, the so-called land of milk and honey.

Dad’s outfit had at least four tractors going twenty-four hours a day. My brother worked on one of them, even with terrible hay fever. Mother kept four young girls on constant duty while she cooked for 20 to 25 men three times a day, including late into the night. The tractors were outfitted with lights on their fenders to see the bare outline of furrows.

In the fall of 1938, when I was three years old, we moved to Liberal, Kansas, just a few miles north of the Oklahoma panhandle. The dust storms still threatened, and I remember walking into the street and seeing a big roller come toward us from the west. Mother shooed me into the house. Once again the house became dark in the middle of the day as it filled with dust. If you could see the sun, it was a gray disk behind thick, smoky clouds.

When my brother (who was 12 years older than me) was in his senior year of high school, someone suggested that he apply to Duke University for a scholarship as the son of a Methodist minister. At that time, Duke was still an active Methodist school. This scholarship enabled my brother to go east for his undergraduate studies.

By the time my brother was at Duke (1940), most families were just beginning to recover from the dust storm period. Still, no one had any money. The bank in Ulysses, which had closed suddenly in 1932 and left many in the community high and dry, had finally reopened. Tramps and hobos still came by our house in Liberal on a weekly basis. We came to know some of them pretty well. There were Holy Job, Sam, and Joe, who did yard chores for Mother. These men often sat on the back steps as they ate their dinners. Sam came during winter and would stay a week or more at a time. He had a cot right next to the furnace in the basement. Once when a tornado came near the edge of town, Holy Job refused to stay in the house. He was nervous and wanted to see the twister before it came too close.

Growing up as a preacher’s kid with the name Roxie in small towns in western Kansas left its mark on me. I was always put to the test in each new school. Usually the school bully was egged on to confront me over some small infraction. Either I fought him or faced a future in which I was considered to be a pantywaist. So I learned how to fight—and fight well. I do believe the combination of my name and status as a preacher’s kid stimulated in me the desire to prove myself as a male in a male-dominated world.

I’ve often wondered if other preacher’s kids felt the pressure and unwanted attention that resulted from their dad’s Sunday sermons. Year after year, I sat down in front on a pew at the First Methodist Church in whatever town we happened to be assigned to and listened while my dad told the story of my typhoid fever and near death. People in the congregation would sometimes turn and look at me with either compassion or disgust—I never quite figured out which.

Whenever Dr. Mennahan’s name was uttered in our home it was done so with particular reverence. To my parents, he had wrought a miracle. Of all things I would not wish upon a child, being a miracle child would top the list.

A miracle child senses that he is different, getting special attention. The miracle child reads the facial expression of her parents and accepts as the norm the constant excuses for bad behavior. Ultimately, the miracle child comes to expect as his due special treatment in all things. The fact that the rest of the world fails to conform to these expectations is a constant source of frustration and challenge. Such a virtually spoiled child is likely to be slow to grow up, especially when it comes to taking responsibility. In my case, you might say, retarded.

Not long after my fifth birthday, I was taken by my mother for my last visit to Dr. Mennahan. Once I was in the examination room, two nurses started removing my clothes. Because of a humiliating incident that had occurred the summer before in Colorado, I refused to cooperate. The nurses were bigger and stronger than I, but that really made no difference. I simply exploded and bit both nurses on their hands. Dr. Mennahan and my mother were called, and in front of the nurses he began removing my clothes. I then spit in the face of Dr. Mennahan. He left the room. My mother was totally embarrassed. She called my father on the telephone. My father arrived and he could do nothing with me. I scrambled away from him and ran into the waiting room and hid behind a chair. They had little choice but to take me home. My father was angry and I knew I might get a razor strapping.

For my father, an orphan, acceptance by authority figures, such as doctors or lawyers or anyone with a title was of utmost importance. He was born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, about thirty miles south of Lexington. His mother had died when he was three. The two older children were farmed out to relatives. Dad was sent to live with a bachelor uncle, working for his keep from age six onwards. He was known by one name only, Ruff. When he was 18, he ignored the warnings of his friends and walked up the hill to the small white church where he heard music. It was the music that got him to the rail and so he was saved.

After selling religious books on trains and door-to-door for a year, he was sent by the church to Enterprise, Florida to complete the eighth grade. Up to that time, he had finished only the third grade. That he later obtained college and graduate school degrees was more than a small miracle, which he attributed wholly to God and the authorities. To balk at authorities or to say no to such a person as Dr. Mennahan was inconceivable to him.

Other than his love of God and the forgiveness of Jesus, what drove my father in life was the dream of one day owning land. He spoke about looking out to the horizon and then beyond. He dreamed of owning such land. When he finally did, he took me to the top of a high butte in Baca County, Colorado and pointed in a direction. You see, son, that’s our land, as far as you can see in that direction. I looked. It was brown, dull and featureless, and had no color or character to which I could assign the slightest interest. Yes, Dad, I said.

He was determined to be a man among men, as he put it. To that end, he sought to associate with the men at the barber shop, at cattle auctions, and at car and truck dealerships. His fervent hope was to bring the men who made things happen into the church and give them some responsibility. All else would follow.

Yet, on a daily basis, he worked only with women. Dad trusted women to be competent, although he was from another century when women were seen as objects to be venerated, and he treated Mother somewhat paternalistically. This was, at least partially, the result of the large difference in their ages. Mother, who felt the need to escape the almost constant invidious comparison with her sister, married my father at age 18 when Dad was in his 30s. I believe the age difference underlay his inability to see her become a mature and responsible matron. To him my mother always remained a child, especially when it came to finances. Mother had her own checkbook and wrote checks for many reasons, including purely emotional ones. The problem was that Dad never let her know how much money was in the bank. She chafed at this. It is no wonder she never learned to handle money. And I followed slavishly in her footsteps.

My own concept of feminine attractiveness no doubt had its origins in the model of my father. Dad’s greatest accolade concerning feminine pulchritude was to say a woman was handsome. I never heard him use the word beautiful when it came to describing a woman. He clearly liked women and evinced a constant respect for their abilities. I never heard him utter a statement that suggested he felt that they should be limited in any way as regards careers or anything else.

He was exceptionally forward-thinking for a Methodist minister in those years and often ran afoul of the ultra-conservatives who are present in any congregation. They complained that he had too many youth activities. They complained that he was too ambitious in his desire to build new churches. He built three during his ministry. One is still known as the Cathedral of the Plains. But his hallmark was always youth. Dad loved youth. Clearly this was because he never had any youth himself. He never tired of pointing out to the assembled that they should examine what they were working for and recognize that if the youth are neglected, the future they are working for will come to naught.

The first of what my parents deemed my precocious tendencies occurred just as I turned five. My brother’s 1937 Ford V-8 coupe was parked in front of the house. On his way to school, he noticed that one of the back tires was flat. Dad probably said that they would tend to that later. He went off to school. Mother was at a meeting next door at the church.

I looked at the tire flat on the street, got out the jack and placed it beneath the rear axle and started turning the handle to lift the jack. Once the tire was nearly off the ground I took the lug wrench and unloosed the five lug nuts and somehow wiggled the tire off the axle wheel. Next, I rolled the tire three blocks downtown to the garage and told the men to fix the tire. Once fixed, I had them put it on the bill, which they did without question. Then I rolled the tire back three blocks and put it back on the car and tightened the lug nuts. However, when I began to unscrew the jack once the tire was on the ground, I couldn’t get the jack out from beneath the car, so I left it there. At dinner I told Mother that I couldn’t get the jack out from under the car. My brother went out to look and came back and asked Dad if he had changed the tire. I said I did. They had trouble believing that a barely five-year-old could have done that. The men at the garage told them I had rolled the tire down as good as you pleased, even if I was only a little higher than the tire. When it came to mechanical things, I never had the slightest lack of confidence. This did not spill over into any other areas, however.

Going to Hell for Picking Locks—1941

60457.png Sometime between age five and eight was definitely when I went to hell. The reason I went to hell was that I knew it was wrong for me to keep getting into anything that was locked, but I just had to do it. I have no idea how I learned to pick locks. Perhaps it was similar to small kids nowadays who fiddle with computers, and somehow figure out how to do things we elders find thoroughly inscrutable. I did love mechanical things and locks are mechanical, interestingly so. Once someone pointed out a skeleton key to me and mentioned that it could unlock most locks, I was entranced. Why could a skeleton key unlock locks which were made for special keys? And, if skeleton keys could unlock regular door locks, other locks must have a way to be opened despite having no authorized key. So, I fiddled with various instruments, probing inside the lock, until it opened and gradually I got a feeling for the weight of the tumblers inside a lock and knew where to put the pressure.

Once the owners realized that their door had been opened, they would occasionally place a hasp and padlock on the door. This was much more difficult and I could no longer fabricate a pick-lock key from a skeleton key which could open it. I had to resort to careful examination of the lock and go inside with a straightened end of a wire spring. Almost always I could get the lock opened. If not, I had to find another way in to the locked area, which I believe I always did. It wasn’t that I wanted anything particular inside. It was just that because it was locked and they had tried their best to keep others out, I was determined to get in. As simple as that. But there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to hell. The neighbors complained about some thief or burglar in the neighborhood, and even my parents were sometimes concerned. Especially my dad, since there were numerous doors, cases and cabinets in the church that had formerly always been locked that somehow came unlocked.

It had long been established that I had a knack when it came to things mechanical. There were so many instances of my taking things apart and then putting them back together, which included clocks, radios, a Mixmaster, and carburetors. Never tell a five-year-old like me that the truck parked in the driveway belongs to him if what you mean is that when the truck is sold, you plan to buy college insurance with the money. That truck will soon be in parts. Years later at a job, after I had gotten into a co-worker’s file cabinet because she had locked her keys inside, which I had done for several others in the building, an acquaintance took me aside and said, You know, Roxie, if I were you, I’d be very careful doing that for folks. Someday something really valuable is going to be missing and they’re going to go right at you for it—don’t think they won’t. And that was the last time I got into a desk or a file cabinet or unlocked an office door.

Not only had I gone to hell by the third grade, but I almost flunked that year because of my poor arithmetic. So my parents placed me with a tutor to learn addition and subtraction. My tutor was a retired teacher, and she seemed quite old and rigid to me. We sat at a card table in a bedroom on the second floor of her old house and did the drills. She would hold up cards, and I would give the answer. When I made a mistake, she would respond in a very authoritarian, finger-pointing way. She reminded me of my aunt. So, I responded by throwing the cards on the floor and then turning the card table over on her. She called my father. He came to take me home. I tried to get away, but he was stronger. He pulled me down the stairs, literally one step at a time, as I held onto each rung of the stair banister, until he pried me off. At home I was shut in my bedroom. So, I went out the window, onto the porch roof and jumped off, despite being on the second floor.

On this day, I went to one of my hideouts, a secret place in the basement of a church about two blocks down the street. I had left a rear window in a storage room with the hasp open and climbed in and finally went to sleep on the floor of the ladies’ restroom. Hours later after dark, I returned home. Both my parents were glad to see me and little was said about the incident subsequently.

This was the early part of World War II (War). Boeing, Beech, Cessna, Swallow, and Stearman aircraft companies were operating twenty-four hours a day in Wichita where my family was living at the time. Boeing and Cessna had started building gliders and they desperately needed glider pilots. The old Harry Street School was commandeered as an instructional venue for glider pilots-to-be. The classrooms were full of manuals concerning everything to do with flying, including how to read and understand all the instruments used in aircrafts. I easily went through the door of the old school and picked the locks of the classrooms and found these manuals. These I took. Before long, I had memorized every page in most of the manuals. I knew all about angle of attack and the ins and outs of how to calibrate an altimeter, as well as the use of tabs and ailerons. Those manuals continued to be an important part of my reading life for several years.

Six years later, after going up with my flying instructor for two lessons he told me, There is nothing more I can teach you. The first time we did a stall, there was a split moment when I felt uncertain. It felt as though the cables on an elevator had snapped and we were free falling. Almost instantly I relaxed, waited for my airspeed to reach 130 mph and pulled back on the stick, hard. Back on the ground, after I had made an acceptable but not perfect landing, the instructor said: You already know how to fly and you’re a natural pilot.

All because of those manuals. I’m sorry I had to go to hell and the government had to replace those manuals. So be it. All I ever wanted to be was a pilot. Then, at age thirteen, they put me in glasses because of nearsightedness, and I truly thought my life had come to an end. After that, nothing was the same again.

Growing Up in High Mountains—1940-42

60457.png Because my mother suffered severely from hay fever, brought on by Russian Thistles, which most of us know as tumbleweeds, we went to Colorado early every summer. Dad stayed home to deal with the drunks, the suicides, marriage breakups, heartrending illnesses, poor wheat crops, and the heat. Mother and I were up at 8,848 feet in the crisp, clear air of Colorado, redolent of pine and aspen.

It was here, at Cuchara, that my life began to take form. Mother and I climbed Grant’s Peak once or twice each summer, while I was still under 10. Later, Dick Jameson and I camped up the Dodgeton Creek branch and climbed the West Spanish Peak and others. Climbing at altitude presents a challenge to all, whether from the flatlands or the mountains. No one escapes the complete and total depletion of energy, strength, and oxygen that you experience. One moment you feel you could run right to the top of the mountain, and then a dozen steps later you are flat to the side of the mountain gasping for air and slightly dizzy. Two to three minutes later, you feel you could run to the top—then after fourteen steps you collapse to the cold rocks beneath your feet and pray that somehow you’ll recover. And you do and do it again and again until chance against chance you see sky behind the horizon ahead.

It was also at Cuchara, at age five, that two older boys removed my clothes and hung them in a nearby Aspen tree, leaving me naked in the dusty roadway, calling after them, You dirty doo doos, and You dirty tin cans! And it was there that I learned the advantage to be had by forgetting your self-conscious vanity in order to survive. I stopped a car loaded with a family and asked the man for help to get my clothes down from the tree. He did so and started to drive away. But, since I couldn’t negotiate the strap over the shoulder of my bib overalls, I had to call them back to have him hand me my strap. It was demeaning, even to a five-year-old. I could hear the daughters snickering in the back of the car. They continued on until they disappeared in the dust. From the experience, however, I determined first that I would learn some real cuss words and secondly that I would always stand up to bullies. And I believe I always have—despite my inherent fearfulness. This experience was still fresh in my mind when I was taken for my last visit to Dr. Mennahan.

Cuchara, Colorado was originally a church camp until it was sold to Charley Powell (no direct relation to me) sometime before 1920. Soon the beautiful valley at 8,800 feet of altitude began attracting families from Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Before the days of air conditioning, the only relief from summer heat was the mountains. Cuchara, high in the Southern Colorado mountains, could often be reached in a day’s drive.

Both my mother and father loved hiking in the high mountains. My father often told a story about Colorado that enthralled me as a small child. He told about driving up in the mountains high enough so that you could look down on the clouds below. This excited me. And on my first trip across Trail Ridge Road as a four-year-old, I was able to look down and see the clouds below. This prospect, which to me seemed only possible in the mountains, was among my earliest memories.

A few years after the War, Speed Reeves, the owner of a local bus line in Kansas, began replacing his older buses with newer models, so he decided to give Dad one of the highway buses for the church. As a result, Dad brought twenty-five high school girls out to Cuchara the summer I turned twelve and for several years afterwards. We set up camp with the girls near an area called the Cross Roads, which was over 9,000 feet high. Our tents were along the Cucharas River from which the large valley stretching out below was named.