# 127 Iraan City Park Met the McMullans Iraan, Texas

Out in west Texas there a town called Iraan. During the early oil boom days Ira married Ann and started a small town.

We saw a place called Iraan in Texas on freecamp.net and it wasn't free but it was like $14. It was a dump but was a nice resting spot. We went to church the next morning and there was some colorful couple there at Sunday school. Their names were Kenny and Glenda McMullan. They were just quite charismatic and shortly we started realizing that they were Rodeo people. One of the hints was Glender had a bronco rider belt buckle about the size of a grapefruit on her sequin white pants and they both wore cowboy hats even while sleeping. I thought it was odd that they talked a lot about their dead son who was a rodeo star but killed in a crash by a DUI driver. I mean if my son ever got killed I may talk about him after he's dead too but with them, it was every 5 minutes. After church, we suggested having lunch with them. At lunch, Kenny kept on insisting that we should come up to the ranch and see God's country. As the bill came they just got up and went out to the car and never offered to split the cost of lunch. I figured if you asked them if they want to join you for lunch it’s a date. I was a little surprised as I didn’t know these west Texas lunch rules.

We figured it might be cool as they were so unusual. I followed him in his rear sagging 1970 lead sled Cadillac onto the house. Their house was six miles up the road. When you turn in off the highway it’s rutted out a dirt road for a mile till you get to the house they lived in. We saw in every direction 90 years of collected stuff. They had a large amount of acreage and they had several houses. Some were never finished and some seemed to be for storage. The original home place one was kind of a barn where all of this stuff was stored from the rodeo days. Trophies and memorabilia from the deceased rodeo son.

We were told to hang in the living room for a while until they located their daughter Mecca. Apparently, it was her job to give us a descriptive tour of her dead brother's accomplishments over at the trophy room. It seemed she had dolled up with a red and white shirt and a little blush on her cheeks. It almost seemed like, Mecca get over there we got a live one. Mecca was pretty and maybe 28 and later I would realize she’s surviving more than thriving. After high school and always in her brother's shadow It seemed like staying on the land was hard but going anywhere else was harder. She told us all about her brother Kenny jr. and showed us his saddle on display. We were like ok thanks but we didn’t even mean to get on this tour but we were patient and polite.

Dad said you folks ought to leave that trailer park and come here to Gods Country for a few days. I said I’ll think about it. I had made some offhand comment about how I was in the electrician and they said oh my god you were sent to us. I was talking to him Mecca about her house back in the back. She described how she had not had proper power for about a year and a half. I told her I'd be glad to look at it and I took India back to the RV. I went on back with my electrical tools to be helpful with the electrical and Savannah came along. When we got there she and Mecca went to go fed the horses.

I figured what the heck and we went back to the RV place and checked out and moved to the McMullan Ranch for a week or so. We brought the RV down by the saddle trophy house because there was water and electric there.

Sometimes in the morning, we would go out and there would be 10 cows or so in front of the RV. It was kind of cool

I had mentioned to Kenny I would fix an electrical problem over at Mecca's house as rent.

The next day I rode around with Kenny and he showed me all his treasures and with that comes lots of stories.

He said they are on 1,000 acres of which they have grazing rights. He said they don’t own any of it but they’re allowed to use it by the federal land bureau.

I started realizing they were land-rich cash-poor. and after I got to talking to the father a little bit and it seems like the bank owns everything. They are rags to riches to rags story. When Kenny jr. died they received a 400,000 settlement. They spent most of it on a perimeter fence, fire trucks and old boats, and used golf carts Now they’re broke again. Glenda likes to buy horses and I'm sure she's got plenty of them for free when people needed her to adopt them. They all graze freely about and there are 40 or 50 of them. They still need hay and water and such but nature provides a lot of their needs. They also raise calves to be sent off to feedlots, which I detest.

He said things are fine but it's just a day-to-day struggle. Their property is upside down to the point where they are bank-owned but they still have grazing rights. They do have a really large collection of stuff everything from old fire engines to 1945 deuce and a half trucks up to 18 wheelers. It's just a very large estate with a lot of stuff. I tried to teach Mecca how to create an eBay store and possibly move some of this stuff. They could probably do pretty well by moving some items and creating a little income. I hope she follows through.

It's not like they can do anything they want with it the land but they have a fairly long leash.

In many ways I got a warm fuzzy feeling cut it kind of reminded me of my uncle Lee as he has so much stuff.

As I walked around, I saw old fire engines, golf carts, boats, scrap metal, and timber. There were lots of abandoned cars and trucks and even an 18 wheeler engine cab. Everything and anything and one time he bought out an old hardware store and he had all kinds of pieces in parts of plumbing stuff and nuts and bolts.

I got started trying to figure out the electrical problem. One thing I noticed when I got back to Mecca's place is that she likes cats or can't say no to strays. Needless to say, they do breed and I think that is hard enough to keep one litter box straight but when you got 30 cats is kind of hard to even keep any of it straight. I noticed there was kind of a mountain lion-type funk when I walked in meaning the cats kind of gotten out of hand and sometimes they pee in the corner don't tell anybody. It’s all tile floor so I suppose she brings in the garden hose once a month and hoses it all down. It was pretty rough so I put Vicks vapor rub in my nose and kept moving forward. Sometimes with electrical work, you try to focus on the problem and don't think about the conditions. I might think I’m better but there was the grace of God go I. The smell would knock you down. This made me worry she wasn’t hitting on all cylinders. She apologized for the smell but that makes it seem like it’s something that’s out of her control. It was weird.

I checked a few things and kind of determine that most likely she had lost one leg of the 240 volts. or 10 acres worth of stuff.

I was suspecting one of the power leads was shorted out. I had seen this problem in my past. I checked your panel box it was full of mud daubers but that wasn't the problem. I cleared the mud out and the meter showed she wasn't getting both hot to both phases. The breaker was in bad shape and I bypassed it with just some of the equipment I brought from Wilmington. The problem I found causes half the breakers in the panel not to work. If it's intermittent sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This leads to the customer saying it works unless I turn the stove on. It has nothing to do with the stove it’s just weird and intermittent. I was very pleased with myself and they were too.

I would have to install a new main breaker at some point but this would be fine for a few days.

It was completely humanitarian I had no interest in charging them but that's how the stay became extended. at some point, I suggested maybe Savannah might be a ranch hand they seem receptive for a while.

I think some of the favors I was doing was pre-paying for their generosity.

When I was doing electrical this and that Savannah went off in a truck and rode around the ranch and kind of learned about cows and horses. When she was the age to get a driver's license she was too nervous to drive. I thought maybe if she drives out in the country she might relax a bit. Savanah’s been helping out for a few days as a ranch hand with Mecca. I think it would do her some good to stay on the ranch for a while and mature and grow up a little, but we'll see. Mecca seems to be acting as a mentor.

One day she came up after working with Mecca and she had been driving the truck all over the ranch and she was smiling ear to ear.

We had lunch the next day at the senior center. Apparently, they went here every day to eat as it was a throw-down meal for like 2.50 a person.

It might be worth saying that the whole Iraan thing started as a place to crash for two nights and ended up being something like 2 weeks’ worth of visiting off and on. They were nice people I can't say anything bad about them. I would have to say that they are kind of overextended in their ways. One time the Dad said we'll just basically always made do by staying in debt.

I did notice a clash of values and I kind of kept my mouth shut, because they were the host. I figured since I staying for free, I would keep my political views to myself for a while. They are as bright red Republican Trump as you can get Obama haters. Were the opposite sort of moderate liberal Democrats so I kind of just kept that to myself for a while because it would just get weird. They were times whenever Dad would come out and say something straight off the Fox News & I would just have to kind of bite my lip. I responded it all I would blow my cover has an embedded secret agent Democrat in Republican behind the lines sort of war zone.

One negative thing I would offer was the Dad started acting like a snake oil salesman one afternoon. He wanted to know if I wanted to buy some kind of foreign currency. Apparently, a buddy got a hold of some when Saddam Hussain was captured. I could smell that he was trying to get me to invest some money with some get-rich-quick scheme. I had to drop that like a hot rock and get him to stop talking. I knew it was getting close to time to go after that.

Sometimes we would go to the library got some internet. Pretty soon we headed on out and I told him that I would get in touch after we get done with the Big Bend. I mentioned maybe someday in the future Savannah might come out for a week or month to work as a ranch hand. He said we could talk about it and he would mention it to Mecca.