Texas Wants You Anyway

I was pretty far from the road when I heard someone coming up. Revving and grinding and carrying on. They got pretty close to where I was parked and then the noise stopped. I couldn't see them, but it made me a little nervous. Were they trying to park in my spot? The snow was deep and I was afraid that if they tried to pull in there they'd hit me or something.

After another ten minutes of climbing around, I'd rimmed out. Couldn't go up, couldn't go down. I went back the way I'd come and tried another route, but had no luck. The sun was down, so I decided to call it a day. When I got back to the road, there was no one in sight. But there were no new tracks in the snow, either. Whoever had been there had gone back down when they got to the Chev. I wondered why.

On my way out, I watched their tracks. They were obviously struggling. In and out of the ditch, and a lot of footprints. Finally, I saw them. The young lady was on the road and the guy was driving . . . sort of. They were gangsters. Hat backwards, hoodies, tattoos, cigarettes. They were also stuck. I pulled up and got out. They had a two-wheel drive sport ute (rear wheel), a little dog in a sweater, and nothing else. No coats, no hats, no gloves, no boots, no shovels. Nothing. At least they were wearing pants and shoes.

I offered to pull them out. They took me up on it. The guy pointed to his license plate. Texas. "I've never driven in the snow," he said. (I hate to do this to Lyle Lovett, another Texan, but at this point in the story, I have to steal one of his lines: "As if I couldn't tell." Actually, that might be the second line of his that I've stolen for this post.)

It took me a few minutes to get hooked up to them, to pull them back onto the road, and to make sure they were straightened away. During that time, they talked a lot. They told me about how they had planned to move to Utah. And so on. But, by the end of the monologue (duologue?), the young lady, through a haze of cigarette smoke, concluded that, "We're going back to Texas. We're not cut out for this."