In our 18 months of wandering, we’ve had a few of those cross-country drives, getting from point A to B with overnight stops, where we don’t even unhook the camper.
Invariably, it is on these jaunts when we’d like to have another day to check out an appealing hidden gem. Maybe it’s because we’re eager to get to the end destination and get set up for a longer stay. And we usually have a check-in time on the other end of the road, so our time is limited.
On Valentine’s Day we were in Groesbeck, Texas, waking up to freezing temperatures for the first time in a long time. Our stay on the Gulf Coast was cut short by a couple weeks so we could travel to Lincoln and help our daughter Maya through knee surgery and three weeks of recovery.
It was a complicated trip. We were dropping our camper at a shop in Ft. Worth for minor repairs before taking a plane from Dallas to Lincoln. We needed to be at the shop by 5 that afternoon.
After sunrise we sat on the sunny side of the camper as the temperature climbed out of the 30s. The RV park was ringed by mobile homes, but there was one exception, the tiny steel sided house across the street from us. Its owner, a thin man in his 80s came out and put something in the trunk of his car. We traded good morning greetings, and then the man said he just noticed the people in our spot last week had left.
He drove off in his 1990s white Ford Contour, but we were still sitting there a few minutes later, enjoying the sun, when he returned and pulled up along the street, not more than 20 feet away.
“Aren’t you guys cold?” he said.
We explained that we were from Nebraska, where in February, 45 degrees is T-shirt weather.
“I need to have 80 degrees,” he said.
We talked some more, about the cardinals that were singing in the row of trees behind his house. He watched them from the place he had his morning coffee, he said. We told him about the shorebirds, the gulls and pelicans, that we had been watching on the coast for weeks.
He parked his car and went inside, and we didn’t think much about the encounter until we started cleaning out the fridge. The RV shop had to have the fridge empty and defrosted.
We thought, maybe he’d take the leftover chicken and rice soup and the other stuff off our hands?
So, I headed over to the tiny house and asked. He said sure he’d take the food, and told me his name: Lelton.
“I had a brother named Welton,” he said.
He reminded me of some of the older folks who I had delivered Meals On Wheels back home in David City. I got back to the camper and started bagging up the food.
We emptied the fridge out. Among the leftovers: sweet peppers, the condiments, the little jar of tabasco peppers, and the half bag of collared greens that we didn’t use in the black eyed peas and sausage dish we made the night before. We had tried to cook a few southern dishes.
I brought in the first couple bags and he asked me to set them in his sink until he could move them into his fridge. I got the impression that he was excited to have someone to talk to. He knew he was helping us out by taking the food so it wouldn’t go to waste.
He pointed to the coffee table in the corner where a couple of computer monitors were hooked up and one was linked to an old wall telephone. He wasn’t a computer geek, he explained, but he managed to get Internet telephone for $20 a month using the park’s wi-fi connection.
I arrived with another bag of food, and our conversation moved on.
“I had a job with the railroad. We had a business,” he said. It seemed like he wanted to share the success of his life, and not just his current life, getting by in a tiny house and completely on his own. He revealed that his wife had passed away in 1992.
“When she died, I got depressed and just sold everything,” he said.
His eyes lit up when I told him I had worked a three-year stint on a track section gang for Burlington Northern in Nebraska back in the early 1980s. He had worked 15 years as a truck driver with the Southern Pacific, right there out of his hometown of Groesbeck.
The story: He was working at a local shop, and he and his wife Tina had bought the bar owned by Tina’s mother in nearby Thornton. His mother-in-law's boyfriend worked for Southern Pacific and was in the bar one day when he said: “I need a truck driver.”
Next thing, he was off to railroad safety training and started his days on the track.
We shared a few common memories of working on the track, riding on motor cars and watching out for trains as we worked on the rails.
Lelton spoke with pride of his working life, and it became clear that he knew the meaning of hard work and poverty, too.
He told me he was a year old when his mother divorced his father. She raised eight children. He was 4 years old when he first picked cotton alongside his siblings.
“We camped out at the field so we didn’t miss any work,” he said. “We weren’t dirt farmers. We worked for dirt farmers.”
Later on, he said, he had other jobs in mechanic shops and for the local city street crews before his railroad job came along.
After our fridge was cleared out, we checked the shelves and I found an unopened bag of tortilla chips, the cheap kind. They were going to sit in the camper for about a month before I got back from Nebraska.
“That’s what I buy,” he said, joyfully, when I offered them. “I won’t even have to go buy groceries this week.”
Like I had done hundreds of times in my newspaper career, I was drifting into an interview with a person with an interesting story. I asked him if I could snap his photo. I wanted to remember the scene of his tiny house. He obliged, holding his fridge open and holding a partial bag of crushed walnuts in the other hand.
I had to pull myself away so we could get on the road. With Angie recovering from ankle surgery, she couldn’t do her usual stowing magic in the camper while I only took care of the outside stuff, unhooking the water and sewer and lifting the stabilizers and packing up the pickup.
After I took the photo, I told him I was a former newspaper reporter and editor.
“I thought you said you were a railroader,” he said.
I was, I said, but that was a long time ago.
We made it to the RV shop in Ft. Worth with 20 minutes to spare, but I was wishing I had just a couple more hours to hear Lelton’s tales of the cotton fields and the Southern Pacific.
Looks like we’ll have to roll through Groesbeck again, and maybe Lelton will still be there for a conversation.
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