Texas: In Search of Iran

 

Texas 1979

In Search of Iran

The final leg of our journey back to Massachusetts included a stopover at a ranch in Texas owned by the parents of one of Simon’s university friends. I understood that cattle breeding was their business and that they were very rich. I was not surprised to learn about thriving beef industry. Never in my life, back home, could I imagine that people had a capacity to consume the amount of meat that Americans consumed. In my family we barely ate five kilos of meat a year but then I am talking about the notorious stagnation years and food shortages in the USSR. In the US, watching people devour steaks that could hardly fit on their large plates made me think that they could easily consume a cow in one week. And there I was travelling to the beef land, nervous about how much of a cow I would be expected to eat.

Drifting through the empty deserts of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas once again set me in a depressive mood. I had already experienced something similar when we entered the Badlands a couple of months earlier. The terrain was alien and hostile and it felt like we were lost in an ocean of sand and grit with no other human soul in sight for miles. Only an occasional gigantic lorry would emerge like a sinister mirage somewhere on the horizon. We had a long way to go. Those were big states and much desert to cover with no campsites to stop for the night. We slept by the roadside. That experience was unnerving. I struggled to sleep, listening to the strange noises of the night desert. To avoid being roasted alive by the desert sun under the tin roof of our VW bus we had to get up really early. While meandering in that god-forsaken land we encountered many side roads that did not seem to appear on the map. God knows where they all led to! Simon had been warned that to approach the ranch we would need to take one of those unnamed roads from a small town called Iran. But finding Iran in Texas proved to be no mean feat. Getting lost and panicking about the petrol tank running dry, we finally came out to a main road with a sign pointing to Odessa. I became overwhelmed by emotions on seeing a name so familiar and only wished that if we took the road to Odessa, we’d arrive at the Black Sea town of my homeland.

‘Let’s get some help,’ Simon suggested.

‘How?!’ My nerves were raw and I was on the verge of bursting out in hysterics.

‘Odessa is on the map. There must be cars on that road. We can stop one and ask for directions to Iran. Someone must know.’

‘And what if they don’t?’ I began to suspect that the whole thing about Iran was a practical joke. It was 1979 after all, the year of the Iranian revolution.

‘In the worst-case scenario,’ Simon said, ‘we will just go to Odessa (which was still a considerable distance away), get petrol and drive back to Massachusetts.’

The first vehicle we stopped was a lorry. The driver, in the usual cowboy hat, listened to us carefully, scratched his chin, and then apologetically said he’d never heard of the place called Iran. As there was not much traffic on that road, we had to wait for a long time for the next vehicle to appear. We managed to stop two more cars with not much success. One driver gave us a funny look, shook his head and drove off without saying a word. God knows what he thought about us, two foreigners, stuck in the depths of the United States and asking about Iran.

Another driver we stopped seemed to have appreciated our question and said, ‘Go east and once you cross the Atlantic head for the Straits of Gibraltar. It’s not far from there.’

As the car drove off Simon observed, ‘Not the local Texan type.’

‘He is probably from Odessa,’ I remarked meaning Odessa on the Black Sea where the best jokes come from. But I was not in the mood for jokes.

When we were about to give up, a battered pick-up truck emerged from the hot warped air. The driver stopped, heard us, and gave us a very encouraging broad grin.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘You are not saying it right. You should say Iraan. The place is called Iraan. And he slowly spelled it out, ‘E-Y-E-re-AN’.

Then he explained, ‘The place was founded by a brother and a sister, Ira and Ann, and it is after them that they named the town.’ As our luck would have it, that was exactly where he was heading to and he invited us to follow him. 

After a short drive, we eventually left the desert and entered a dry grassland. We soon saw a small green oasis in the distance which turned out to be a tiny town by the name of Iraan. From there we had no problem finding the ranch and were greeted by Charlie, Simon’s friend, and his parents. The house was relatively modest, a single storey timber structure with the obligatory porch. The outer timber looked tired, scorched by the hot sun. As we walked in, I noticed how simple the interior was. The sitting room was furnished in an old-fashioned manner, containing furniture not dissimilar to that of my grandmother’s, of the post-war era. Perhaps they were not all that rich after all, the thought crossed my mind. The colour of the furnishings and the wallpaper was in beige-brown tones, matching the hue of the dry grassland. Charlie’s parents appeared to be an odd couple and completely out of place in the middle of Texan desert. Ranch owners in my imagination had to look like the cowboys you see in Hollywood movies, but here I met a couple who did not even look like they enjoyed cowboy movies. Both were rather thin, the father looking more like a bank clerk than a ranch owner, and the mother to my astonishment turned out to be a vegetarian. No slabs of beef for her, I thought.

That day, for their evening meal, which they had early, the mother had prepared some broccoli dish. I remember it very well because it was the tastiest vegetarian dish I had ever had. Over the meal her husband told us that she was a real virtuoso when it came to her vegetarian dishes and then reassured us that we would have a chance to taste their hamburgers sometime on that visit, with their ranch manager whom they were expecting to drop by that evening.

Our host proved me wrong with regard to my doubts about his interest in beef rearing. Over the course of the evening, he gave us a long lecture on the American cattle breeding industry, covering the most and least successful cattle breeding grounds, the types of beef raised in various regions, the rare breeds, the quality of meat, and the best cuts of beef for steaks and hamburgers.

After a couple of hours of chatting and drinking, a large man with a pronounced belly and the compulsory cowboy hat entered the house. We were introduced. The man was the ranch manager who invited us there and then to visit his ranch hut. We eagerly accepted the invitation, left the parents to their evening drinks, and followed the ranch manager in the parent’s pick-up truck. After driving through a dusty moonlit monotonous terrain, we eventually stopped by a small hut in the middle of nowhere. The manager explained that it was his ranch abode but he had a family home not far and he also had a team of ranch workers, most living in Iraan. He lit a campfire and we sat around it till very late at night listening to his cowboy stories. The man was a fantastic storyteller. The stories he narrated were fascinating, often gripping, unlike the master’s lecture on the best cuts of meat. We sat engrossed in his tales. The night was balmy, the heat had subsided, and an enormous moon hung above us, as if also listening to the cowboy stories. The atmosphere was spellbinding and strangely familiar. My family had a small plot of land not far from my hometown in the Caucasus where we cultivated potatoes, sunflowers for oil, pumpkins and a small assortment of other vegetables. I remember, when I was very young, we used to stay there overnight and sleep under an open sky. Our shed was too small to provide bedding. The night sky and the scent of the air in the Texan desert reminded me of those nights in the Caucasus and I felt homesick and lonely.