Welcome to Midland: Halfway Between Desperation and Despair

This is another sad, woeful little town in the middle of nowhere. Midland has a gas station-convenience store-casino-bar out on the highway and a bar-restaurant downtown over near the grain depot and railroad stop. The sole motel closed down a bit ago, and there is no grocery store anymore either.

We stayed in an apartment in a small complex financed by the USDA that is used by itinerant workers and is managed by the folks at the gas station.

I went down the hill to check out JT’s and walked into another world.

Len was sitting outside struggling to light a cigarette against the same wind I fought coming uphill into town. He looked to be in his mid-30s and must weigh pretty near 300 pounds. While it is a fact that Len does not have his top two front teeth, he was a most companionable conversationalist and I had a good time talking with him.

Len and his older brother and another younger guy deliver hay around the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska. They’ve gotten to know a slew of ranchers over the years and branched out into the car crushing business. I am sorry I did not see how this is done, but Len told me that they have some sort of crushing thing that they take around to the ranches where they get the hay because the ranchers always have some old rusting cars that Len and the boys can crush and haul off to a scrap metal yard.

I told him about what Roger and I were doing, and his curious and engaged amazement was touching. He knew he was in bad health and that he would never be able to do what we are doing but he was interested in it and openly wondered what it would be like to be able to do it. Such a journey was a physical frontier well past Len’s ability, but he was intrigued all the same.

We got to talking in the bar, and he insisted on buying me a beer, which turned out to be a Bud Select (which is what, exactly?) because that’s what was cold. Len has kidney stones and gout and must be a prime candidate for diabetes. He controls the gout through diet and told me that eating berries is particularly effective – so much so that he often eats cherry pie filling right out of the can. He’s engaged to a local woman who’s been married three or four times before, and the marriage would be Len’s third and he allows as to how the odds are probably against them.

Len’s crew showed up, and they left, which is how I got to chatting with Kathy, Tammy’s mom, who was tending bar. I learned JT’s originally stood for Jay and Tammy, but they split up (it was her second marriage) so now it’s Just Tammy’s.

Tammy has two kids from each of her marriages and her eighteen-year-old has a little girl so Tammy is a grandmother. They all live with Kathy because once the gas station got a liquor license and started up hot food and drink, business at JT’s, which is off the highway, has fallen off pretty hard.

Later, Roger and I went to JT’s for dinner and I got the chicken breast and “wildass hash browns.”

I will not discuss the wine that we drank nor mention how long the opened bottle had been in the refrigerator; Roger and I have proved capable of more things than you have dreamt Horatio.

In the flesh, Tammy proved to be about the weariest-looking young grandma I’ve ever seen. We tried to engage her and draw her into a little conversation but there was nothing doing. Aside from Kathy, a couple of Tammy’s kids and Cassie, her granddaughter, we were the only ones on the other side of the bar.

This was the brightest thing I saw in the whole town.