God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  I later heard that his wife dropped the charges.

  * * *

  SOUTH OF MARFA IS the road to Big Bend, one of the least-visited national parks in the country, and also one of the most glorious. On the way, there is a pleasant resort, Cibolo Creek Ranch, built around several old forts inside the crater of an extinct volcano. Roberta and I once stayed there in the off-season, midsummer, and spent our time chasing hummingbirds and the adorable vermilion flycatcher. In more temperate weather, the ranch has served as a getaway for celebrities, including Mick Jagger, Tommy Lee Jones, and Bruce Willis. In February 2016, an Austrian hunting society, the all-male International Order of St. Hubertus, named after the patron saint of hunters, gathered there. Among them was seventy-nine-year-old Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, who was found dead in bed one morning. Scarcely an hour after his death was announced, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said that he would refuse to confirm any nominee to the Court that President Obama put forward. It seemed to me that the country had just taken another big step in the direction of Texas.

  Big Bend was the site of one of my most satisfying journalistic triumphs. I had come here in the early 1980s with Wann Langston Jr., a cranky old professor of vertebrate paleontology at UT. I was very fond of Wann, although his students were plainly afraid of him. I traveled around the state with him and a group of his doctoral candidates looking at bone beds and fossil deposits in Cretaceous limestone for an article I was writing about prehistoric Texas. Up near Glen Rose, we stopped at a cow pasture where, in 1947, Wann, then a young graduate student himself, had found a variety of dinosaur bones. It’s a rich area for paleontologists. The dinosaur tracks you see in the American Museum of Natural History in New York were excavated from the nearby Paluxy River. According to Wann’s field notes, the bones he noticed so long ago were located near a petrified stump, but he had come back three times over the years and had never been able to locate the bones or the stump.

  We all fanned out. I’m not good at finding things. It’s a skill that requires looking past the surface of normality for the little inconsistency. One of the sharp-eyed students finally discerned the petrified stump, which appeared at first to be simply a mass of shattered rock but on closer examination was revealed to be exquisitely faceted, like a cubist painting.

  Suddenly one of the students cried “Hallelujah!” and we all raced over. A rancher had recently driven a bulldozer through the scrub oaks to make a road, and in the roots of the upturned trees, like giant radishes, were dinosaur bones. Once you recognized them, they seemed to be everywhere, on the hillside and in the creek bed. It was a thrilling day.

  When we got to Big Bend on that trip, Langston was joined by several other distinguished paleontologists from the university who were looking for remains of the Texas pterosaur, a huge flying reptile. Langston was famous for his “eye for bone,” but we had spent a long, hot day with nothing but sunburn to show for it. We finally regrouped on a knobby hilltop. I was standing in a circle with the finest paleontologists in the state. I asked Wann to tell me again exactly what we were looking for. “Well, it looks like a rock, but it’s striated,” he said.

  “Like this?” I said, picking up an object that was literally at his feet.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “That’s the knee bone of a hadrosaur.”

  “Would it go with this?” I said, picking up another object that completed the rest of the knee.

  I know it’s not earthshaking.

  * * *

  ROBERTA AND I STOPPED in Presidio to pick up some burritos, which we ate at Fort Leaton, amid bare mesquite trees and the lethal-looking Texas buckthorn. West Texas is dotted with old military garrisons that were established to advance white settlement in Indian country. Fort Leaton was actually a trading post, belonging to an infamous scalp hunter named Benjamin Leaton. After acquiring the property in 1848, he began selling weapons to the Apaches and Comanches in exchange for settler cattle that he arranged for them to steal. Such were some of our noble pioneers who conquered the West.

  At the time Leaton bought the “fort,” it was on the bank of the Rio Grande, which is now a mile away—another problem with building a wall along the Texas border, which is defined by the deepest channel of the river.

  Roberta and I hiked an ancient riverbed called the Closed Canyon Trail, in the state park next to Big Bend. As it happens, this trail is the setting for the final scene of Rick Linklater’s film Boyhood. The lead character, Mason, has grown up and heads off to Sul Ross University in Alpine. He meets a girl. They hike the Closed Canyon, under towering stone walls that twist one way and another, so that you can never see far ahead, like life itself. You know that they are falling in love and they are leaving their childhood behind.

  Roberta and I had a similar romance. We met in college, at Tulane University, in an archaeology class. I was interested in her the moment she walked in—late to class, unapologetic, wearing a purple dress with a scarf at her neck, her chestnut hair tied in a bun. Miss Murphy. That was fifty years ago.

  She grew up in Mobile, Alabama. Her father was a doctor. They lived in a clapboard country house on an estuary called Dog River. She used to sit on the dock and catch brim for breakfast. Both her parents were alcoholics, and the most responsible member of the household was the maid, Rosena Lipscomb, who lived on a bean farm farther up the river. Rosena used to row to work until the alligators got too troublesome.

  Roberta’s father, Dr. Murphy, was a genteel racist, like so many of his station, but Rosena was the person who really raised Roberta. It was the central contradiction of her life. The civil rights movement was just beginning. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking the bus boycott in 1955, and thrusting a young pastor in that city, Martin Luther King Jr., into leadership. Many of the signal events in the movement—the Freedom Riders, the March on Montgomery, the Birmingham church bombing, the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma—took place in Alabama, and formed a backdrop for Roberta’s childhood.

  She went to Murphy High School, named after her grandfather who had been superintendent of schools. In 1963, she was an Azalea Trail Maid, which got her photograph on the front page of the Mobile newspapers twice that year. The first picture was a group shot with Governor George Wallace, who is clearly flirting with her. The second was on November 22, in the afternoon paper. The headline says “Pres. Kennedy Is Shot,” with a brief story—six paragraphs—but the photo is of Roberta and another Azalea Maid who are said to be vying to be queen of the festival. It’s the much longer article.

  We were married in Athens, Greece, where Roberta had studied during a year abroad, and we lived our first years together in Cairo, where we taught at the American University. There were no diplomatic relations between the United States and Egypt at the time, so we were thrown in among an eccentric group of expats—about the only Americans in the entire country—teaching adolescents only a few years younger than we were. Those first two years of marriage in Cairo were some of the most pleasant days in our lifetime together, except for the absence of air-conditioning.

  We spent the next decade looking for home. For six months, we lived in a little A-frame lake house in Quitman, Texas, about two hours east of Dallas, that my parents owned. We grew vegetables; Roberta made cobblers out of the blackberries on the fence line; I caught bass and catfish in the lake. This was during the Euell Gibbons craze. Roberta had read his book Stalking the Wild Asparagus, which exalted the pleasure of foraging for food, and she loved to prowl through the pastures for various weeds, some of which were poisonous if eaten in the wrong season. She always told me they were dandelions. In the evening we’d eat on the deck and watch the sunset as flying squirrels soared between the pin oaks. They’re nocturnal and terribly timid. It’s said that if you corner one, it will die of fright.

  I was writing about my experiences in Egypt, in what
I expected would be my first article for The New Yorker. I styled it “Letter from Cairo.” The day I finished it, I walked out to the road, raised the red flag on the Rural Free Delivery mailbox, and sent the manuscript off, along with my dreams of instant acclaim. Somehow, the manuscript went from the mailbox in East Texas to editor William Shawn’s office in Manhattan, and back again, in what seemed like a single day. There was a card enclosed, the first of many I would receive from various magazines, politely rejecting the article I’d spent months writing. At the bottom, in a neat hand, was a single word: “Sorry.”

  We lived briefly in Durham, North Carolina, where Roberta worked in the Duke library, sorting books in Greek and Latin (she was a classics major), then for a couple of years in Nashville, where I wrote for The Race Relations Reporter and Roberta worked as a bookseller; and then seven long years in Atlanta, where I freelanced and she sold books. We never felt that we had landed and wondered if there was any place that was somehow right for us.

  I suppose many people live in places they’re not especially attached to, or that they actively hate. Marriages are like that as well. There’s a high level of discontent even in enduring relationships, together with long periods of stagnation and moments of shocking intimacy. You acquire a private library of memories. Arguments are born that last for the rest of your lives among the touchstones of joy and revelation. The commonalities draw you together or suffocate you.

  And then children come.

  Gordon was born in 1976. He weighed more than ten pounds and was delivered by cesarean section. After all the Lamaze classes, I was crestfallen to be ushered out of the delivery room, leaving Roberta alone at the supreme moment of our lives. I remember when my father arrived to see the new baby, and we stood in front of the nursery window, looking at the little creatures with blue or pink bows in their hair. Gordon was the biggest baby in the hospital, I boasted. My father remarked that his first child was also big. I took some pride in knowing that my baby was bigger than his, even though his baby was me.

  We bought our first house in Atlanta, which had been built by the people who owned the brick company. We rented out the top floor while we renovated the bottom. The two of us hung new ceilings and rewired the place. We put in a garden, and I learned how to can. Gordon helped me make tortilla pizzas while Roberta got a master’s degree in early childhood education.

  When I got a job offer from Texas Monthly, we were both ready to leave Atlanta. Within weeks after we moved to Austin, Roberta declared that she never wanted to live anywhere else. We had arrived in a community of writers and artists with lots of young children; we had a sense that we were finally onto something. Roberta and I bought another duplex. At last I had a steady job. Roberta began teaching kindergarten. Life was affordable, if a little provincial. Still, I was restless.

  Our second child, Caroline, was born a year after we moved to Austin. Because Roberta had already had one child delivered by C-section, the protocol was that the next one would have to be as well. Our new obstetrician had a more relaxed policy, and she let me remain in the delivery room. There was a surgical tent set up across Roberta’s belly so we couldn’t see the bloody business below. I was holding Roberta’s hand when the doctor asked, “Larry, would you like to see Roberta’s liver?”

  I certainly would.

  I went around the tent and stared at the long gash in Roberta’s abdomen, and the organs that lay inside. Caroline was there, as yet unborn. I felt a shiver of mortality at the same moment that life was entering the world—a life that shuffled together our genes and those of our ancestors into something unique, something that only we could have made.

  * * *

  LAJITAS IS a little resort town on a low-water crossing of the Rio Grande. Chisos Indians and Apaches used to cross here, until the Comanches ran them off. Now the town is mainly known for its mayor, a goat named Clay Henry. Actually, a succession of goats with the same name have occupied that high office. The current Clay Henry is a black-and-white goat that has been dehorned. The main task of all Clay Henrys is to drink the beers that the tourists buy at the Sunoco station next door to the goat pen. One of Clay Henry’s predecessors was castrated by a disgruntled citizen who objected to his drinking on Sunday.

  While I was there, a group of tourists came over to take a look, and one of them stuck a bottle of beer through the cage. The goat snatched it out of his hand and downed it in a single expert gulp. This happens dozens of times a day. Roberta refused to get out of the car.

  That evening we had dinner with Betty Moore, a former colleague of mine at Texas Monthly. She is a petite blonde with intensely blue eyes. When she was head of production at the magazine, she agreed to make a brochure for a rafting company on the Rio Grande. She returned to Austin, but found herself weeping when she remembered the desert landscape and the sere red mountains on the horizon. Finally, she quit her job, moved to Terlingua, an old mining encampment near the park, and became a river guide. Her move prompted an exodus of other women from the magazine, all of them drawn to this remote, scarcely populated corner of the state. “It’s not the same place I moved to,” Betty complained. “There are just a lot more people.”

  The last census for Terlingua counted fifty-eight residents.

  “There were only five women in town when I came,” said Betty’s friend Mimi Webb Miller. “And it was pretty lawless back then.” Mimi was a debutante from a prominent family in Wichita Falls, and the niece of former Texas senator John Tower. When she moved to Terlingua, she became the mistress of a notorious drug lord named Pablo Acosta. He was shot down by Mexican authorities in 1987, and Mimi was on the run for several years, with a $40,000 price on her head. “Daddy wasn’t happy about that,” she said.

  Roberta and I were staying at Mimi’s eclectic inn, La Posada Milagro, with bottle trees and blue Christmas lights lining the flagstone paths and doorways all aslant. An old Mobil Oil Pegasus sign leans against a fence. Down the hill is a coffee shop where everybody shows up in the morning, and nearby is the Terlingua Trading Company, with its spacious front porch, where Terlinguans gather in the evening to play music and watch the sunset. “Sometimes you hear the most interesting conversations,” Betty says, “and other times it’s just a bunch of drunks.” There’s a resident guitar on the porch and an impressive assortment of hula hoops. A sign admonishes, No Dogs on the Porch, which seems to be the only rule in town.

  Modern Terlingua, if you can call it that, is embedded in the ruins of the mining village that occupied this place from the late nineteenth century until the 1940s, when the price of quicksilver collapsed. You can see the remains of the former community in the stone walls of the old ghost town. The cemetery is filled with the graves of the Mexican miners, many of whom had fled the revolution across the river only to die of mercury poisoning from the processing of the ore. Others were on the losing end of a gunfight. By and large their graves are simple stacks of rocks with two sticks nailed together in a cross, but you also see the wild artistic impulse that runs through everything in this anarchic society. The ornamental Mexican graves are adorned with beads and candles and artificial flowers. The later Anglo arrivals in the graveyard are less dignified, festooned with flags, totems, sculptures, gimme caps, dolls, mounds of beer bottles, and coins of small denominations.

  * * *

  “YOU GET EXCITED and I get worried,” Roberta observed, as we bounced across the ruts of a jeep road in Big Bend. We had been repeatedly warned about bears, and the evening before we had come upon a mountain lion crossing the road just in front of us. It’s true I was excited.

  I had been thinking about how trusty our old Land Cruiser was. It could climb a mountain if I asked it to. I bought it seventeen years ago and, except for routine maintenance, it has been in the shop for repairs only one single time. I feel very loyal to it. I started thinking about the trustiness of some of my esteemed possessions. My bike. A pair of shoes I’ve had resoled severa
l times. I asked Roberta what her trusty objects were. She mentioned a silver necklace I gave her for Christmas years ago. It seemed we were far apart on definitions. On the other hand, I suppose each of us considers the other trusty, according to our understanding.

  We came finally to our campsite at the foot of Pine Canyon. Before us were the towering red walls of an ancient caldera. It was remote and desolate, but the majesty of the place made us quiet for a while.

  It had been a long time since I’d set up a camp. Memories of many wilderness trips we had taken before, in parks and forests all over the West, came into my mind. Our first camping experience as a family was in Colorado. Gordon and Caroline were ten and five. I had purchased a giant family tent, a dining canopy, a lantern, a Coleman stove, and a folding picnic table, and I hadn’t taken any of them out of the boxes until we arrived at night in Rocky Mountain National Park. Somehow, we set them all up. The next evening, it stormed, and we huddled around the lantern inside the tent playing Chutes and Ladders.

  Now the kids were grown, and Roberta and I had gotten out of the habit of camping. I suppose we’ve been waiting for our grandchildren to get old enough to enjoy spending the night on the ground, with mosquitoes and ticks, when it’s too hot or too cold. I have always believed that memories have to burn a little to make an enduring place in your heart.

  After lunch we hiked into the canyon, through a mile of grassland. Roberta has asthma, the legacy of getting pneumonia three times while she was teaching. Illness is a tax on teachers, especially at the elementary level. She was once chosen Teacher of the Year at her school, but I finally begged her to stop. It was just too hazardous. Now many of her students are grown. She still runs into them in restaurants or grocery stores. She was one of those teachers everybody remembers.