COWBOYS AND CRACK

We woke up today to more of the same.  The musical “Oklahoma” got it right with that “where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain” refrain.  That might be the least of our worries.  Severe weather due this week, bad enough that the local t.v. stations are advertising their emergency service where they’ll text you with warnings of tornados, severe hail, etc.  Yikes.  Give me California earthquake anxiety any day.

Not wanting to risk getting blown clean off the scoot, we unhooked and drove the rig over to the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.  This is a very neat museum that we raced through on our last trip here a year ago.  It’s well worth spending a day, and there’s more than enough to keep you interested.  The current special display was all about guitars and they had some absolute beauties from Gibson and Fender, as well as other makers.  Nice history of the instrument as well.  Did you know the ukulele craze towards the end of the 19th century was largely responsible for saving the Gibson company and sparking new interest in the guitar?  Thank Hawaii for today’s picking and strumming.

They have some great dioramas:

displays (besides hats, barbed wire, boots, spurs, guns galore, clothing, etc.)

They didn’t allow photos of the extensive art collection, but they had a wonderful collections of contemporary and period western artists like Russell, Remington, etc.  Great stuff.  There’s also a trip down memory lane with a room paying tribute to the celluloid and videotape cowboys.  Everyone from William S. Hart to Clint Eastwood with, of course, a huge section devoted to John Wayne.  As you would imagine, he’s somewhat more idolized here than, say, on the coasts.

Oh yes, the crack.  Referring to the windshield, not the stuff.  Tried the do-it-yourself fix today with a kit bought at Wal-mart.  Some sort of epoxy resin that has to be applied in the shade to the crack, worked into it by pushing the glass on either side, then plastering clear plastic covers over the goop.  When you’ve supposedly squoze the air from the crack and replaced it with the epoxy (say, WHAT?  Squeeze the windshield?), you maneuver the vehicle so that the crack is exposed to the U.V. rays from direct sunlight.  Well, all I’ve got to say is don’t try this at high noon with a Class C RV.  For the uninitiated, those are the ones with the bed area that hangs out over the cab and windshield and . . . blocks the sun.  We were in the remote parking lot at the Museum, so I drove all over trying to get some light on the thing.  No dice.  Parked it facing SW and went back to the Museum for the afternoon.  When we came out the sun was lower, and I could back down a slight hill so we were nose up.  The sun just barely reached the crack, so we let it sit there and cook.  Now we’re back at the RV park, peeled off the plastic, and    there’s    still    a     crack.

The only thing to do is to head for the County Line BBQ Restaurant, gorge down on a ton of meat, draft beer, and a mountainous brownie-ice cream-kahlua concoction.  Gustatory solace.

We’re headed into more remote territory in western Arkansas, so we most likely will be off the internet grid for a while.  Now, just where is the nearest storm shelter?