The Saga of Turdy Miles by T. V. Swaford

No sooner had the car thumped over the body lying in the sandy rut in the West Texas desert, than someone yelled, “Hey . . . wasn’t that Turdy we just ran over?”

“I believe it was,” came the whiskey-slurred reply from someone in the back of the car.

“Whoa . . . lemme see,” said the driver, backing up. Once again -- thumpity-bumpity, rising-falling -- until the car’s headlights illuminated the body lying in the sandy rut.

“Yup . . . that’s Turdy . . . “ said the driver.

“And that’s how we found Turdy Miles,” T. V. smiled.

T. V. was T. V. Swaford, a pencil thin West Texan who made his living operating a core drilling rig. A rig like this is a large truck that carries a mini oil well boom that can bore holes several hundred feet deep. Dynamite is loaded into the hole and detonated while a nearby seismograph crew records the results, which can lead to the discovery of oil.

Back in the middle 1950’s, the hunt for oil came to Western Nebraska as oil companies broadened their search for this resource, and with it came T. V. Swafford, the driller for whom I worked one hot summer somewhere around 1955 in and around McCook, NE, my home town.

T. V. was a short, thin man of about 30, with sharply angled and tanned face. He had pale blue eyes and a raspy Texas drawl that barely hid the smile in his voice. It was as though he had a joke he was dying to tell, and that’s how, one hot afternoon, I heard the saga of how Turdy Miles, a driller’s helper from West Texas, got lost, run over twice, and finally found again one drunken Saturday night in the Texas desert.

T.V. and I had just finished drilling a hole. We were waiting for the seismograph crew. Normally, we would move on to the next hole, but we were down in the Republican River Valley where the earth is mostly sand. There was a possibility that the hole would collapse if we pulled out and left. Better to keep it open so we wouldn’t have to drill it again.

It was nearing the end of the work week, which got T. V. to thinking about his bachelor days as a driller down in Texas. He was gassing about how little there was to do on Saturday nights in those small Texas towns.

“We’d get a bottle or two, and drive out into the desert where we couldn’t hurt anyone,” he said.

“We kind of knew our way around,” T. V. said, “so we headed out on one those two-rut roads.” T.V. said they had been driving and drinking for about an hour when Turdy announced that he had to relieve himself.

“So, we let him out,” T.V. chuckled.

But, Turdy was gone a little too long . . . long enough that his half-plastered buddies forgot he was not in the car. Whoever was driving slowly drove away, leaving Turdy behind in the big, dark desert.

“We rode around for half an hour or so, talking and drinking,” T. V. said, until someone asked where was Turdy?

It got real quiet, T.V. recalled, and then, we all started hootin’ and laughing.

“The only problem was that we weren’t sure which of those little spider web roads we were on when we let Turdy out.

“On top of that, everyone was pretty drunk. As we rode along, looking for Turdy, we all forgot what we were looking for.” Talk wandered to many subjects, none of which were about the lost man.

“What we did was put the car in first gear so it would just creep along,” T. V. explained. “That way, the driver could talk and drink with the rest of us. Every once in awhile, he’d correct his course to keep us in the ruts.”

It turns out that Turdy, assuming his crew would return for him, had laid down in the road (and promptly fell asleep) so not to be missed when they came back for him.

And thus, the abrupt jostling and humpty-bumpty when the creeping car rolled over the sleeping Turdy Miles -- twice.

“My God,” I said, “what happened to Turdy?”

“Oh, he was alright,” T. V. laughed. “We picked him up, dusted him off, walked him around for a minute or two, put him in the car and rode him around for awhile. He was okay . . . he was fine.”

Richard Budig was born in 1936 and grew up in McCook. Shortly after his discharge from the U.S. Air Force in the early 1960s, he worked for a short time at the McCook Gazette. He later worked for several newspapers, freelanced to various newspapers and magazines and owned and operated an advertising agency. He also operated pawnshops, first in Lincoln, then Omaha, for 25 years. For years, he’s been writing stories about growing up in McCook and is now sharing them with the Gazette.