A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed
When I graduated from the Texas Game Warden Academy in April of 1991, I had to get a map to figure out where my assigned duty station was, because in my 24 years of living thus far back then, I had never heard of Willacy County or Raymondville.
I don’t know how the higher-ups made their decisions on where they were gonna send us, but we were given some semblance of input into the process beforehand. Each prospective graduate was given an 8½ x 11 sheet of paper with a map of the State of Texas that showed all 254 counties. We were told to express our preferences regarding duty station assignment however we saw fit.
That piece of paper looked kinda like one of the coloring sheets kids get in kindergarten, so I took a box of crayons and colored out five areas of the state and numbered them in order of where I’d like to go. I thought it looked pretty good when it was done. For my “#1” area, I drew a line straight across from westto- east at San Antonio and colored it red from border- to-border all the way to Brownsville. BINGO – Raymondville fit the bill!
Anyway, lucky for me, fellow graduate Henry Balderamas was going there too. We were close in the Academy – literally. He sat right in front of me in class, and our upstairs dorm rooms were next to each other. The best part was that Henry was a little older and more mature than I was, and he kept me in line.
That continued when we got to Raymondville. I had a hard time initially, mainly because I couldn’t speak Spanish very well. When on patrol, I tried to hide my linguistic handicap by starting off contacts with my best Ricardo Montalban-voice and some memorized Spanish lines before switching to English as quickly as possible. It worked sometimes. When it didn’t, I called Henry. Henry is fluent in Spanish, and that came in handy. One time in the spring of 1992, I caught some fishermen trespassing on the El Sauz Ranch. There were six of them, and not one spoke nary a word of English. I called Henry.
At the time, we both had four-door sedans for patrol vehicles. I was inside the ranch with the trespassers, but Henry drove his patrol car to an outside-the-ranch location where the trespassers had parked. To get there, he had to drive about 300 yards of turnrow in a blackdirt farm field. He parked behind their vehicle and headed my way.
It was getting late in the afternoon. I remember seeing a storm building southeast of us, but I didn’t think much of it. Nobody else did either. Henry served as my interpreter through six tickets for “Fishing Without Landowner Consent”. I asked him if he wanted to write any of them, but he declined.
We walked the trespassers back to their vehicle and sent them on their way. It started to sprinkle. As we talked about what we were gonna do the rest of the day, a decision was made for us. The skies opened up and there commenced a flood of Biblical proportions. It rained so hard that Henry’s car didn’t have a chance. In no time, that field was too thick to paddle and too thin to plow.
Henry gathered up his gear, locked his car and left it there. We ran in the rain back to my car which was parked on a caliche road. We drove out and headed home.
Our trespassers had made it out fine, but it was three days before it was dry enough for us to retrieve Henry’s car. That was 33 years ago, and lucky for me, Henry still keeps me in line from time to time. Yep - a friend in need is a friend indeed.
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