Lon Morris Hiking Club
The Lon Morris Hiking Club no longer exists.
But then neither does the college that sponsored it.
Established in 1854, Lon Morris College was the oldest existing two-year college in Texas until bankruptcy forced it to close in 2012. I attended the Jacksonville, Texas school in the late 1980’s and, as I’m fond of joking, earned about a semester’s worth of credits in two years’ time. There were a lot of reasons I wasn’t successful at LMC but living the Hemingwayesque lifestyle of how I thought all writers were supposed to live was perhaps the biggest of them. My friends Todd and Mike also enjoyed living such a lifestyle, one that included drinking way too much, smoking far too many cigars, and spending time in the outdoors rather than working.
Trust me. I’m completely different now.
One of my friends’ and my favorite activities was hiking. We used to hit the local trails, make our own path around Lake Jacksonville, and sojourn to the many state parks and National Forests that the East Texas Piney Woods had to offer. But hiking cost money. It required cash for gas, park entrance fees, snacks, and the aforementioned celebratory beers and cigars. After a night of enjoying the latter two of these we hatched a plan to have the school pay for most of our hiking endeavors.
We found that most clubs on campus were funded, at least partially, by the college. And in order to have a club all you needed was sponsor. With this knowledge in hand, we approached the guy that ran the cafeteria. Dave (not his real name) was an odd character who had a poster of himself brandishing an M-16 rifle behind his desk. “That’s when I stepped off the plane down in the Virgin Islands. Hurricane hit. Everyone went crazy. I got my gun, hired a couple mercs, charted a plane, and went down there to get my daughter off the island safe,” Dave explained of the picture. Dave could do things like hire mercenaries and charter flights when he owned a chain of restaurants in Houston. After he developed a drug habit and went bankrupt – not so much. Thus, he ran a cafeteria for a two-year college of less than 350 students in deep East Texas.
Dave said he’d be glad to sponsor our club of three members. “Sure man. Whatever ya’ll need.” We told him we could use some supplies for our next hiking trip. He agreed, called the local Piggly Wiggly, and told them to let them add The LMC Hiking Club to the charge account. We hit the grocery store immediately after and stocked up on beef jerky, sunscreen, Gatorade, pork rinds, insect repellant, and some film (Yes, cameras used film back then). And had Jacksonville not been in a dry county, we probably would have charged some beer as well. Cigars were out of the question as they only sold cigarettes, snuff, and chewing tobacco. We retuned from our all-day Saturday hike to tell Dave about the trip and to thank him for the supplies. He responded with, “Y’all only went out for one day? Why not camp? The cafeteria’s got your supplies covered.”
The next weekend we hit the pig store and came away with steak, potatoes, charcoal, lighter fluid, eggs, bacon, cheese, salsa, and the like. We went camping, hiked, and had a fun weekend away from campus. When Dave asked us what our three-member club was going to do for spring break, we told him we were going kayaking for four days. Dave responded by telling us to “have fun stocking up at the Piggly.” We did.
Unfortunately, that was our last supply run as when we returned from our bacchanalian time on the river, Dave pulled the plug on our sponsorship. It turns out that he had been charging more than just our supplies to the college. He had been charging most of his lifestyle to the cafeteria, had been caught, and was about to get fired. The LMC Hiking club was no more.
Officially anyway.
This piece first appeared in the Fredericksburg Standard.
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