Texan Joe Dan Guthrie made his foray into these parts around the first of December. It was on Dec. 1 that I met him standing in a shed with a lot of other male figures in coveralls, all standing, too.

A cold rain fell outside and the sky remained dark all day.

“If Texas was this miserable we’d give it back to Mexico.”

Those were his first words to me as I sidled up next to him, looking around for a place to sit, with no luck.

Joe Dan has become a big name here. There’s a certain crowd he runs with who only have a couple of things to say. 1) Joe Dan’s coming this way one of these days; or 2) Joe Dan’s been gone for a long time now.

The general public can only know him by what he’s left behind. He’s a metal artist and his “Howdy from Valley Falls” sign hangs at the south entrance to the village.

You can’t hire him to make one. He only does his artistry as a gift, otherwise: “It’d be a job.”

If there’s blame to be placed for this hot-weather Texan to be shivering in a rural Jefferson County shed, it lies with Larry Martin. (Cowboy Larry Martin, not the one on the school board.)

Martin likes to hunt and shoot hogs and used to make runs into southern Oklahoma. He took up conversing with a couple of Joe Dan’s neighbors who stopped at a now closed roadhouse near town for some refreshment one day about 10 years ago.

“We’ve got wild hogs in Texas and you’re welcome to shoot some of them,” they told him. “And be sure to look up Joe Dan Guthrie.”

So cowboy Martin and a number of his buddies (some of these guys who are still standing up) headed for Texas, met Joe Dan, and extended an invitation for him and his friends to hunt turkey, pheasant or deer at Valley Falls. Thus started what has come to be known as the “TexiKan Rural Redneck Cultural Exchange Program.”

As we shiver and talk, Uncle Bud is cooking breakfast over a camp stove. That’s Uncle Bud as in Uncle Bud Hayden. He’s the only one sitting down and it’s his unheated house where the guests slept the previous night and it’s in his shed we are standing in now.

I didn’t ask what he was cooking. Maybe it was opossum or muskrat, but I wanted to know why Joe Dan didn’t head for one of our heated restaurants in town where he could sit down.

“The menus never feature armadillo,” he said.

These people, in their own way, practice a pretty high standard of socializing. The gift exchange is a prime example. The metal art is truly a treasure and a number of them are proudly displayed in the community.

The hog hunters sought out Uncle Bud for advice about returning the favor. That’s when Uncle Bud came up with the idea of sending Joe Dan a rock. A big rock.

Actually it was a boulder brought here by the glaciers in the last ice age. It was trucked to Texas on a low-boy. When the boulder arrived, Joe Dan called out for his son: “Jeff, we got a full blown redneck alert!”

It took two front-end loaders and a backhoe to lift the boulder high enough to drive the truck out from under it. It now rests in front of one of the bunkhouses. A sign in front of the rock declares, “Uncle Bud.” It’s a constant reminder of who to blame. A bunch of the hog hunters got their picture taken with the rock and were made famous in the East Texas Journal back in 2004.

Joe Dan is also a linguist of sorts and wanted his new found friends to better understand him when he said “geezerplex,” “How ya’ll” (both singular and plural), “fixin’ to” (gonna), and “creek” instead of “krick.” He gave Martin a dictionary on how to speak Texan but, unable to understand a word of it, he gave it back.

Among those still standing in this shed are Joe Dan’s grandson, Jeff Garrett, and a nephew Dan Benson. They hail from northeast Texas, forest country, and their roots run deep.

Joe Dan’s great-grandparents settled on what was a 6,000-acre spread in 1882. The land is home to an old church built in 1865 and the Colonial House operated by the State Historical Society, built in 1851. The ranch still has cookshacks, bunkhouses, and windmills.

Joe Dan still makes deals with a handshake. He is invested in land, cattle, and chickens. It’s landed him on some boards and commissions and he’s even been forced to put on some airs, wear a tuxedo, and attend a Washington, D.C., banquet on occasion.

Someone got ahold of a picture of Joe Dan in a tux, blew it up and made big “wanted” posters to hang on the cattle guards throughout the ranch. It’s the sort of prank you can pull on a fellow who would rather stand shivering in a shed with a bunch of hog-hunting yahoos.

He’s a true friend.

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