Dawn

Roaring down US 83 in the early morning darkness, I was feeling so grown up and responsible. Recently I had got my driver’s license at the age of fourteen and I was on a mission. I was driving a war surplus army command car. It was something like a big jeep, but it had a loud and noisy truck engine. It was a two-seater with a canvas top like a convertible. There were no doors, just openings in the side to get into the vehicle. It was a four-wheel drive rugged vehicle that the infantry officers used in the European battles of World War II. It was designed to go where there were no roads and in any kind of weather.

The work crews had arrived at my dad’s warehouses before daylight to load up the trucks and pickups. Since I didn’t have much to load up and was anxious to go, my dad let me start early. So, I was the first of the crew to leave Uvalde, Texas, that morning on the way to Laredo, Texas. My dad, A. B. Carlisle, and his business partner, John Nance Garner, had bought a bunch of the buildings at the Laredo Air Force Base. Their intention was to demolish the buildings to get the lumber and building materials to resell.

After about an hour on the road, the sky over to the east began to glow with colors. When I was doing this painting of a colorful sky before sunup, it brought back the memories of that morning when I was all alone in that army command car roaring down that lonely highway on an adventure to work during the summer in Laredo.

I arrived in Laredo about noon and stopped at a filling station to get gas. I remember that the thermometer inside the filling station was at 107 degrees. After working most of the summer there, my dad said he wanted me to go back to Uvalde and start selling the lumber. He had made arrangements with a trucker named Tom Bell, from up in the hill country north of Uvalde, to haul the lumber for him. This trucker was hauling cedar post to sell to the ranchers in South Texas. On his return trips, he would come by Laredo and take a load of lumber to Uvalde.

One hot morning toward the end of summer in August, after Tom’s big truck had been loaded up with lumber, I can distantly remember watching my dad talking to Tom. It went something like this. “Tom, I want my boy over there to ride back to Uvalde with you. I want you to promise me that you won’t drink any beer on the way back.” He assured my dad that he wouldn’t touch a drop so I climbed up into that big truck and we rumbled off. Tom looked like the movie star Clark Gable with a lot of the same personality.

Just north of Laredo, he pulled the truck into a gravel parking lot in front of a local beer joint. He said he would be back in a few minutes. In a little bit, he returned with a paper sack full of ice cold beer. He walked up to my side of the cab and said “son, do you think you can drive this rig?”. I was now fifteen, so I responded that of course I could. So, I moved over to the driver’s side and Tom and his beer got in on the passenger side. He gave me a five minute lecture on how to shift through the twenty seven forward gears and how the brakes worked and what to do if the load on the trailer shifted. Tom opened his first beer, I put the truck in low gear, and we were off.

Everything went pretty good on that open rolling brush country until we got to the Nueces River canyon about seven miles south of Uvalde. At that time the highway bridge had washed away in a flood and the new bridge had not yet been constructed. The temporary road snaked down into the canyon and crossed the river on a low-water bridge just above the water level. The highway going up the other side went back and forth up to the top edge of the canyon on the north side.

Going down into the canyon, I learned how to keep the speed of the truck under control by gearing down. Tom, who by now was feeling no pain while empting that sack of beer, was very complimentary of my driving skill since I had ruined only one of his forward gears. Getting that big truck up the other side of the canyon was now my challenge. Gearing down to one of lowest gears, we crawled that big truck up out of that canyon. Those hair-pin turns were a problem for me, but finally we topped out on the level plain on the north side.

As I shifted through the gears to get the truck back up to speed, we could see the water tower in Uvalde about seven miles away. I will never forget Tom’s comment. He said “son, if we never get there, we can always say we got close enough to see it”.