Guest Post

Since I've been too *cough* busy to post lately, I thought I'd post some of the disordered thoughts of fellow raconteur, curmudgeon, and local (Enterprise) legend, Mr. Richard Clay Adams:

Stashed within the bunkhouse behind the House of Adams on the old RCA Ranch, is an ever-growing collection of TV and movie westerns, running the gamut from Dothan’s Johnny Mack Brown to “Fury, The Story of a Horse and a Boy Who Loved Him.”
In many of the programs, that always return viewers to yesteryear, is the underlying assumption that the code of the west is something all Baby Boomer saddle pals continue observing on either side of the Mighty Mississip.
For any tenderfoots, that code, of course, is to “shoot first and ask questions later,” which is what's about to happen here in the City of Progress.
If you haven’t been around these parts lately or if you don’t drive your cattle on two of our biggest trails, Boll Weevil Circle and Rucker Boulevard from sunup to sundown, you may not realize the days of yore have returned.
A cowpoke moseying along either of these trails can never let his guard down nowadays, as they’s too many squatters here, staking claims on what was once prime buffaler hunting grounds for 1950s cowboys and Indians.
It’s easy to identify some of the sod-busters who’ve come here from lands near the state of sunshine whose buckboards are adorned with tags beginning with “34.”
Now come drovers from the west with “23” on their tags, looking for a grubstake; and there's another swarming horde of desperadoes looking to settle in what would now be called “New Mexico,” had someone not beaten us to it many moons before the sons of Montezuma followed the boll weevil, fire ants, and coyotes to this “Land Between Two Rivers” we call Enterprise.
These Mexican renegades travel in what white eyes would call “posses,” if their groups of 12-20 weren’t all riding in sway-backed covered wagons with license plates starting with “6.”
But it’s not any of these desperadoes who put the rage into “The Red Rage,” a temperamental little Dodge (City) Dakota buggy whose daily chores include rounding up grandson Lane “Deadeye”Marler, 11.5, so he can get his lessons from his school marm and do his chores thereby earning his keep.
Whenever we approach one of those right-turn, merging trails connecting Rucker Boulevard to Boll Weevil Circle (and vice-versa) and/or any other pass on the 11-mile BollWweevil Circle, some city dude, probably from back east, keeps his mount a’runnin’ in a maneuver known locally as “Ride ’em Cowboy.”
You’ve likely seen these settlers who, for example, might be coming in from Dothan headed toward their farmstead in Valley Stream aiming to keep from being dry-gulched on the trail.
They’ll grab the reins of their Mustangs, look over their left shoulder, pucker their butt cheeks to better grab a'holt of the saddle leather, likely of fine Corinthian vintage, and “kick” their steed into high gear to put you in the ditch so's he can beat you to the next traffic light before sundown.
Starting later today, the Red Rage Rider will be packin’ leather. From now on, the Code of the West IS back in force.
From here on out podnah, it’s time to “slap leather” and “swap some lead” with these yahoos, and then ride off into the sunset as they ask, “who was that masked man?”