Chapter 1

My life sucked, but what did I care? Sure, I'd just lost my job at Lone Star Steel but so had six thousand other steelworkers and I had a sort of leg up on them. Four months before my wife had kicked my sorry ass out and since then I'd been living in my camper trailer in a trailer park in Lone Star, the town, not the state though the town was in the state. Got it now?

Due to a not so lucky break on my part I had asked for my two weeks vacation to come at just the right time. I'd been on vacation when the pink slips started turning up and had time to overhaul the engine in my 1976 Chevy half ton four wheel drive pickup. It didn't help in the long run since I got the layoff notice the first day I showed up after my vacation but it helped plenty in the short run. Somehow the right hand hadn't known what the left hand was doing in the layoff scheme of things and they'd sent home most of the shipping department right off the bat. It meant that even thought they were still making a few thousand tons of oil field tubular goods a day they'd already sent home the ones who cleared the mill exits after the pipe was made. In other words, all the men who hadn't been laid off in shipping yet were doing double shifts every time the white hats could talk them into it.

Well, seeing the handwriting on the wall I took every shift they'd let me work. My last two checks ended up being my last four because all they would put on a paycheck was fifteen hundred dollars and both my last two were more than over that limit. They ended up calling a bunch of the laid of shipping guys back to work since even with all the doubles we were working we couldn't keep up. Naturally, with the long term outlook in mind we didn't maintain our usual breakneck pace and even though we had enough hands to take care of the normal job they were trying to get out all the product they could right at the last.

Most of us couldn't understand what was happening anyway. Oil was still costing more than it ever had and drilling was still going on in a big way. The oil field tubular goods we were supposed to be making and shipping were still needed and by all reports they were bringing more money than they ever had. Some of our union representatives let us know this was a last ditch effort by the company to break the union. It wasn't gong to happen. Men had been killed the last time they tried it back in 1967, but what the hell, the ones running the show had short memories. It was likely a few of them would have to die before they all got the message again. Oh well, I wasn't going to be any part of any of that.

I was actually making more money now than I ever had. The double shift every time I showed up for work was doing most of that, but my hobby of buying and selling firearms was helping out too. I let it be known that I would try to move any firearm any steelworker needed to turn into cash and I spent all the spare time I had cleaning them up and taking them to gun sales to turn them into cash for my x buddies. I even managed to turn a profit on every gun I sold and I bought a few of them for myself and paid top dollar for the ones I did. By and by I got a pink slip too though and I packed my things to take a real vacation.

A friend of mine had learned a trick just lately and so I'd learned it too. He'd tried it with a camping trailer and his boat but I didn't need to haul a boat anywhere since I had a Zodiac inflatable that served my boating needs just fine. I bought a 24 foot box van type trailer and installed a trailer hitch on the back of it. I did quite a bit of trying it out and when I got my pink slip I hooked the box van to my pickup. Loaded my big custom made meat smoker into the box van along with everything else I thought I could possibly need and hooked my small camper trailer to the back of the string. I got stopped and field inspected by three highway patrolmen before I was sure my cobbled together set of doubles was legal.

My first stop when I headed out was at Brown's Tire Shop in my hometown, Atlanta, Texas. I bought eight Monster Mudder tires for my pickup and eight aluminum wheels for them. I knew I was being a little anal buying twice as many tires as I could even mount on the truck but I just had a feeling I might need them. I loaded up on Wolf Brand Chili without beans and Ranch Style beans. The beans were canned in Ft. Worth Texas and I just loved 'em. I even bought the largest refrigerator I could find and put it in my box van along with a small chest type freezer. It didn't even take much fooling around to get 115 volts out of the pickup's alternator to run them on. I also bought a small Honda dynamo to do the trick if I needed to take them out of the trailer sometime

Of course I put all new tires on both trailers too. I'd always hated flat tires and I did all I could to stay away from them. I spent the next day installing a one hundred and fifty gallon fuel tank in the bed of my pickup. It fit right up in the front of the bed and the only reason it took so long to get it in place was because I had to remove the camper shell I'd just installed and I had some serious fucking around getting the filler tube extended outside the camper shell. I also had to run extensions for the two vent holes in the tank outside the shell. I didn't want everything I put in the pickup bed to end up smelling like gas, not to mention letting gas fumes build up in the shell. That was a recipe for turning a camper shell into a fuel vapor bomb and I didn't want to be hauling anything that might explode.

On the fourth day I rested and since it ended up being a Thursday I rested until Monday morning before I headed out for Midland Texas. I wanted to spend a little quality time on the Llano Estacado, more commonly mistakenly called the staked plains. I can't tell you why I wanted to go and see so much flatland with nothing but grass but I did want to so I did.

When I got there I found out Spanish conquistador Francisco Coronado, the first European to traverse this "sea of grass" in 1541, hit the nail on the head when he described it as follows: "I reached some plains so vast, that I did not find their limit anywhere I went, although I travelled over them for more than 300 leagues ... with no more land marks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea ... there was not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by."

I'd heard about them before and I even read about them in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llano_Estacado but I was born and raised in East Texas and a hard head was some of my standard equipment. When I made it there wasn't so much to see after all except grass and flatland. I made a stab at getting to the good part by traveling up Highway 349 but by the time I made it to Highway 176 I turned left and headed for Andrews Texas. About six PM I found a roadside park and pulled in to spend the night.

There was nothing to see that I hadn't seen already, as in all the grass and flatland in the world. Still, I decided to get into the spirit of things so I broke out a bag of charcoal and made a cooking fire in one of the little "fireplaces on a post" the Texas Highway Department had provided in the rest area. I broiled a thick New York strip steak and warmed up a can of Ranch Style beans, washed it down with two of my Lone Star longnecks and spread my airbed and sleeping bag out on the ground and went to bed.

I just thought I'd been sleepy until I lay down and looked up at the sky. With no light coming from anywhere but the sky and no moon out this night I got my first real look at the night sky and the stars in their multitude. If you've never been anywhere its completely dark you probably can't understand what I mean but I was spellbound by the night sky. I'd been watching it for nearly an hour when I saw what I first thought was a shooting star. It came from nowhere but the sky and it was traveling mighty fast when I got the feeling it was headed right for me. By the time I was convinced it was coming directly at me it was too late to do anything but shit or go blind. I shut my eyes, pulled the covers up over my head, and prayed.

Seconds later when it hit it must have been nearby because the ground beneath me shook. I could even feel the shock easily through my airbed. When I got the nerve to open my eyes and pull down the covers I was confused at first and the more I thought about things the more confused I was. The Llano Estacado was gone.

I know what you're thinking. How in the hell did I know it was gone? I knew because my roadside park was gone. Even the little fireplace on a pole was gone. I was in a Yellow Pine forest. Not only that but my pickup and my two trailers had come along with me. Even though it was pitch dark I got up out of my bed, found my good flashlight, and had to have a look around. I went to my pickup first and turned on the headlights. The highway was gone too but there was what seemed like a grass trail right in front of the pickup. It didn't look like a road since there were no tracks in it or even any worn down path. It was as if the multitude of trees around me just hadn't happened to grow in the trail. Plenty of them had grown around me though or at least I'd been set down inside where plenty of them had grown.

Looking around me I could even see the shinning of several sets of animal eyes looking back at me from the forest. I changed my mind at once about sleeping outside, gathered up my airbed and the covers I'd brought outside and went back inside my camper trailer for the night. There was no way I was sleeping outside in dense woods without even a camp fire and I didn't want to try scaring up firewoood in the dark.

When I went to bed again I had doubts about being able to sleep but I dropped right off to sawing logs. I could wait for daylight to check things out more carefully.

I woke at six AM, showered and dressed. I was so nervous over the goings on last night I didn't even cook breakfast, I had to go outside and take a look. Shit, it was snowing outside and there were four wolves snooping around. I went back inside, picked up my Marlin 336c in 35 Remmington and went back outside to cash in the wolves. I still don't understand why all of them didn't run off after the first shot but they didn't. They just all turned toward me, the noisemaker, and bared their teeth. What would you do, I shot all three of the others. With that little detail taken care of I hit the ground and took a walk around my camper, box trailer, and pickup. I didn't see anything but big pines and plenty of pine needles.

I sure as hell didn't have any idea where I was now and I doubted I'd find out a damned thing until I went somewhere so I fucked around and hooked my mini train back together and headed out over the grassy trail in front of me. I traveled about a mile before my trail joined what I could loosely call a road. It wasn't paved by a long shot but it was worn down and I could see tracks in it, but they didn't look like they'd been made by automobile tires. I was just guessing so I headed north on this new road. I didn't see a damned thing besides trees for miles until I finally came to a railroad crossing and a little town. Damned if it didn't have a sign naming it as Bivins Texas.