The door to the New Moon flew open like it had been kicked open. A big man followed a dusty gust of cool air in. The weathered-skin, squinted eyes, and bow to his legs told me he lived on the outside. This man was a cowboy.
He wore a white cowboy hat, leather vest, worn jeans, and cowboy boots with some sort of metal on the bottom that made them pop like gunshots when he walked. He spit to his right, then turned to the left to study a nervous couple of Ward-izens.
No one made a sound. Until, with a sour look on his face, the big man announced with disgust: “Lost my donkey.”
That really happened, more or less. Except for the spitting part. The cowboy was our very own Big Springs cowboy, Ed Sanchez.
And no, Ed hadn’t really lost his donkey, it was down on the family ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico, where he was born and bred, and Ted Turner was his neighbor. He made some money down there, even as a kid. “My calf money sent me to college for a year.”
College was Cooke County Junior College, close to Stephenville, Texas, the self-proclaimed Cowboy Capital of the World. Rodeo professionals tend to come out of Stephenville, and Ed had an eye toward that. But between schoolwork and partying, there wasn’t time.
Instead, he became a pipefitter welder. He spent his career in Denver. A union man. In 2005 he and his wife Sandy moved to Big Springs.
Like a lot of us, Ed came to love Ned’s Transfer Station. In those days it was run by a man named Fred, a legend in these parts. Ed used to bring him burritos, “and one day Fred just came out and said ‘I need you to come work with me.’” Ed started on April 16, 2014.
“I covered Tuesdays, Fred’s day off. Other days I’d come in, make sure everything was all right. I always looked forward to it. It was the one place I enjoyed going to work.”
Working with Fred was interesting. “When Fred was mad, he was mad at everyone. One day I told him, Fred, if you don’t want me around I can leave. This is my fun job, we should be laughing, not arguing.” Fred agreed. “He loved me, I loved him, we worked together well.”
The Transfer Station is a great place to work. The socializing, the gossip, the treasures that get thrown away. It has its moments. Ed remembers when “a couple elderly gentlemen pulled up in this old Toyota. They parked at the gate and got out. Then I saw that their whole dash was covered in weed. I shouted, ‘You can’t bring that stuff in here!’ One of them answered, ‘We’re not bringing it here, we’re running our errands while this stuff dries.’” Ed was so surprised, he took their trash and didn’t even charge them.
Ed left the station last month. “I retired because I reached the age of 68, I didn’t want to have to be some place. Plus Sandy got an illness, she spends part of her time in treatment in LA. I go back and forth a lot. She’s getting good treatment, but she’s got a lot to deal with.”
Now Ed divides his time between his home in Ned, his wife Sandy in LA, and the family ranch in Cimarron, “we still cowboy there.” After all, he’s got to keep an eye on that donkey.
