The Haxtun-Fleming Herald - What can we reason but from what we know? -Alexander Pope

You may have heard of the Midas Touch. It does not refer to mufflers, rather the fable of a man whose touch turned everything into gold. Lesser known is another fable I created to describe my luck at a point in my life years ago. It’s called the Reverse Midas Touch. Everything I touched turned into a mixture of hay and water put through a horse.

During my late teenage years and early 20s I seemed to possess the first recorded case of this phenomenon. It seemed to follow me wherever I went. Another way to explain was that I seemed to be suffering from a near terminal case of stupid. Slowly, in later years I began to notice a few things. If you change the oil in your pickup more often than even numbered years, it won’t leave you stranded along the side of the road. A good farrier and a roping horse that works well seem to be somehow connected. The list of basic truths goes on and on. It just took me a while to discover them because of .. stupid. Eventually, I was able to put the Reverse Midas Touch behind me. The cure was just hurry up and get older. Now a new “touch” seems to have raised it’s ugly head. I call it the “Poof Touch.”

This particular “touch” is sneakier than the others. It has been following me around a long time but I just noticed it recently. The “Poof Touch” works like this. Things I touch disappear. Here today, then “poof,” gone tomorrow. These are not little things. Not the keys I had this morning but can’t find this afternoon. No sir. I”m talking big items. Houses, schools, barns, even entire ranches. They’ve been disappearing for years after I’d had something to do with them. Let me explain.

I was born on a ranch just east of Boulder in an extremely sturdy cement block house. Years after moving away I had the opportunity to drive by it. Rather, I drove by where the ranch and the house should have been. You guessed it. Poof. They were gone, replaced by a shopping mall. Several miles away I had attended a two room school. “Poof” had beaten me there, too. Gone.

“OK,” I thought, “This is a big city now. That’s what happens.”

Just to re-assure myself I drove 60 miles north to the sight of my former high school. The small building had housed about 100 students. It was gone, replaced by a much bigger building with probably five times the students in two or three grades. “Poof” got me again.

“Get a hold of yourself,” I thought. “We’re not talking psychic phenomenon. We’re talking progress. Go home. Everything will be all right.” On the way back to our ranch the road goes by a small place Sue and I owned when we were first married. Our first year we built a pretty big barn, complete with railroad ties for timbers, a hay loft for many tons of hay and a high, steel, hipped roof. A real barn. Not one of those sissy, pre-fab, up in a week imitations. There are barns like this in nearly every rural community. Many are decades old and still standing straight and proud. Ours would be known a hundred years from now as “the old Hodgson barn.” It would become a landmark.

One fateful day, on my way home from town, I glanced over towards “the old Hodgson barn” as I always did. It was gone. Sometime in the past few days it had caught fire and burned to the ground. While most barns last several lifetimes, ours hadn’t made it 20 years. It was then ”The Poof Touch” finally made itself visible. It had been following me around my entire life, erasing things I had touched.

As with all things in life, though, a person has to find the silver lining in every cloud. There are a couple of land developers in town who must wonder why, after several years of cussing and ignoring them, I stop daily to shake their hands and pat them on the back ... several times. If I’m going to have the “Poof Touch” follow me around, I might as well put it to good use.