by Laura Bush
The announcement of an exploratory committee was, we both knew, the same as an official declaration. As George himself said, only "a giant thud, a huge yawn," or the discovery that "it was my mother they were interested in" could derail his presidential train.
I sat beside George, smiling. But I had been late to sign on to his decision to run. Politics had turned ugly during his dad's 1992 race with Bill Clinton. I had watched political opponents and the media draw the most hideous caricatures of George H. W. Bush until I barely recognized my own father-in-law. I believed in my George, I love him, and I knew he would be a great president. It was the process in which I had far less faith.
My escape and at moments my salvation from this particular trail was to come in the form of nearly sixteen hundred acres of blackland prairie in an extended finger of the Texas Hill Country, a ranch near a town named Crawford.
My childhood fantasies of El Paso ranchland had matured into a dream of a quiet frame house on the banks of the Guadalupe or the Medina River, where a slow, gradual lawn dipped down to gurgling river waters or a meandering feeder creek. I imagined children or grandchildren playing in its currents and the soft rustle of branches from clusters of sturdy cypress trees rooted to its banks.
In late February of 1998, George and I went to look at a plot of land in north-central Texas, almost dead center between Austin and Dallas. It was flat tall-grass prairie, the bits of flinty range where generations of farmers and ranchers had eked out life with their livestock. The soil had been plowed generations ago and sowed with rich feed grasses, like kleingrass and coastal Bermuda, a spiky green blend that spreads in dense mats across the ground. Ten acres are enough to graze a full-grown cow in the high summer. All around us as we drove, the land stretched out, not frying-pan flat like Midland, but with subtle dips and rises. Uncounted millennia of natural events, from torrential floods to crippling droughts and fast-moving fires, and the migration of ancient bison, were silently recorded along its contours and folds. Amid the fields and pastures, there were fence lines and tree breaks and a healthy breeze, but nothing to distinguish this spot from thousands of other working farms and ranches across the Texas landscape.
Then George drove me in. In the back, the grassland abruptly sheared away into seven box canyons, their walls covered in steep limestone worn down from water and ancient geological upheaval. Thousands of years of erosion had left jutting bits of giant rock, some of which the rain, sun, and wind have chiseled away, until their features resemble the noses, eyes, and lips of Easter Island's silent Moai figures. Here, instead of gazing out upon an island, with the white-capped Pacific at their back, they stand watch over the brush and fallen branches. Below, when there is rain, the creek water runs. In centuries past, the Tonkawa Indian warriors rested and watered their horses in this part of the Bosque River and horse thieves hid their bounty along the winding canyon bottoms.
This back edge was what old-time ranchers call "sorry land," uncleared, untamed, a tangle of brambles and overhanging limbs. Much of it was impassable. We could only hike to the top ledge and look down. It was rugged and stark. For George, it was love at first sight. I was far less smitten.
Two months later, the following April, I was driving with Regan and the rest of my Austin garden club to an event in Fort Worth. We were heading up Interstate 35, and the land alongside was swollen with green grass shoots and carpeted with bluebonnets and other wildflowers, bright and plump from drenching spring rains. As I watched the grasses and the flowers bend in the wind, I realized that this was exactly the section of Texas where the Crawford ranch was, and that the blooming land was beautiful. We had money from the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball team. I called George from the car and said, "Let's buy it."
By August, the land was ours. Scattered around the front half of the sixteen hundred acres were a small 1940s farmhouse, which faced two diesel storage tanks and a tractor shed; a livestock barn; and a few other outbuildings. It was a working ranch; the same family had raised livestock on that spot for four generations, coming out to stake and settle when this part of Texas was still a place that drew jostling wagon trains and weary pioneers. From its rear windows, the ranch's little farmhouse overlooked the grassland and the herd. The same work boots had crossed its threshold at dawn and again at dusk year after year.
After George won his reelection race for Texas governor in November of 1998, with 68 percent of the vote statewide, I started work on the modest six-room house, painting the clapboard siding green, updating the small kitchen, and refurbishing the three tiny bedrooms. Later, on another part of the property, away from the grazing lands and closer to the steep canyons, we planned to build a real ranch house with a two-bedroom guesthouse alongside, but until that house became a reality, we needed a livable home where we could stay.
Then my eyes turned to the grassland. In 1999, as George was weighing his presidential run, I embarked on a prairie restoration. I found a native-grass expert, Michael Williams, and we began by planting native grasses along a strip at the edge of the old cattle watering hole that we were making into a small lake. The wild and rangy grasses took, so we searched for other spots where we could expand the grassland. We planted on a rise above the pond, and in early 2001 we turned our attention to a vacant pasture. Michael devised a plan of plowing up the nonnative grasses. Then in spots we sprayed the fallow soil with small bits of herbicide to kill a few stubborn sprigs of coastal Bermuda and Johnson grass whose roots clung to the soil even after the plow's metal blades had sliced and scored the earth. Finally, after four years of plowing and spraying, only the loamy ground remained. Michael seeded the land with native seeds from a tiny remnant of an intact prairie. We covered forty acres with seed, and in our final year of seeding, 2007, the rains came, fifty-six inches of them. The grasses took, and the prairie returned. We then began adding another forty acres of native prairie grassland. Susan Rieff, head of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, has noted that our little project is the largest private, completely native prairie restoration in all of Texas. I feel a twinge of sadness when I think of the millions of acres across West Texas that were once alive with tall prairie. Big bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass have vanished from the landscape as thoroughly as the thundering buffalo herds.
The rhythm of a national campaign is the rhythm of the air, of planes pulling away from the ground as everything below recedes. Our first official flight of the 2000 presidential campaign was a June 1999 trip to Iowa. We left the Austin airport on a TWA charter plane that had been christened Great Expectations.
We touched down in Cedar Rapids and headed for a country barbecue, past the rolling farmland turned emerald and gold by the sun and dotted with old, white-painted farmhouses and red barns pressed against their stout silos of grain. In countless small ways, the iconic images that we have of so many regions of the nation are in fact true; rural Iowa is on certain afternoons a Grant Wood painting come to life, the layers of landscape, the geometric curves of the hills, the thin slices of valley, all resting against the flat backdrop of blue sky.
In a presidential campaign, the candidates, their spouses, and their staffs come to know three states--Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina--with surprising intimacy, because of the early primaries and caucuses and the amount of time and resources devoted to each of those states. I soon recognized the corners of the rectangular grid streets of Des Moines and the glittering lights of its suspension bridge, which straddles a river where the Moingonas Indians once built burial mounds for their dead. George and I and our staff came to know the tangy taste of Iowa pork barbecue, as opposed to the spicy taste of Texas beef, and we could smell the sweet corn ripening in the fields. Although Des Moines was founded as a fort, Iowa for generations has been a largely pacifist state, without major military bases, unlike Colorado or Texas or Virginia or even California, which have vast military installations and defense industries. Like their land, the people are plainspoken and direct, solid in the questions that they
ask and the stories that they tell. And, as I had during George's ancient race for Congress across West Texas, I loved listening to their stories. The difference now was that the clock was tighter; there was always another event, another school visit, or another speech. When I was on the road, I lived under the shadow of the schedule--arrivals, handshakes, greetings, remarks, questions and answers, and the quick dashes to the local airport as we headed on to the next stop and town. That tapestry formed the outlines of our days.
Campaigning for office is like running a marathon, day after day. You wake in darkness and sleep when the local news anchors are just signing off. You sleep in motels and hotel chains, on a hard pillow one night and a soft one the next. Or you sleep upright on the plane itself. Your life is packed between the two sides of a suitcase. Bar Bush once spoke to a group of Motel 6 owners and told them that people think she has Ritz-Carlton written all over her, but in fact, she's spent far more nights in a Motel 6. To be on the trail requires tremendous physical and emotional stamina and energy. It helps to have solid, robust health, which is what I have. George and his father have their athleticism to carry them through; Bar also has extraordinary stamina. Even the press sometimes has it easier than the candidates. If a reporter catches the flu, he or she can hop off the trail for a day or two to recover. But not the candidate. If George or I got that same flu, we couldn't get off; we had to keep traveling to every event. I think even now of the senior Bushes standing next to Kitty Dukakis, wife of Michael Dukakis, who ran against Gampy in 1988, and how she always seemed so frail and wan.
This constant life on the road meant that I missed things too. I missed Barbara and Jenna's high school senior homecoming ceremony. At halftime, during the big school football game, Barbara was going to be crowned homecoming queen, but she didn't know it. Austin High had called me that afternoon to tell me in secret, so that I could be there. Instead, we were heading for the airport. The only person I told was George's personal aide and our dear friend, Israel "Izzy" Hernandez, who had been with George and our family since 1992. Izzy tried to get her to dress up, but Barbara went off to the game wearing flip-flops.
But we always came home. Not simply to the Governor's Mansion, which was temporary, but to the land of Prairie Chapel Ranch, which we named for the tiny, historic chapel down the road. (George's first suggestion had been the Lazy L. Ranch.) In 1999, on the recommendation of my friend Deedie Rose, George and I selected David Heymann, associate dean of the undergraduate architecture school at the University of Texas at Austin, to design what would become our new ranch house. On Saturdays, we drove out with David and walked the property, imagining. David's gift was siting a home where it would have the best views, the best breezes, the best flood of sunlight. One afternoon we paused in view of the cattle tank, the low, flooded spot where the ranchers had watered their herd, the same damp place that we wanted to dig out to build a little lake for fishing. Along a small rise stood a cluster of large, old live oaks and cedar elms. There was just enough space to situate the house in the middle of those gnarled trees. And we did. We lost only one small tree, which we tried to move, but its roots had spread wide and shallow over the limestone shelf that lies hidden underneath the soil. In David's vision, every window of the house would frame a live oak or a cedar elm.
Then came the design. On our visits, David would hammer stakes into the ground. We would stand and imagine each room and feel the ruffle of the wind. The house itself is split, in the style of old Texas ranch houses, with a breezeway--or what they used to call a dogtrot--running through the center. When early Texans built a house, they would have a covered porch open to the breeze, so they could work there in the heat of the day, with the prevailing winds drawing through to provide some cool.
Our own entry hall has wide screens to capture the wind, and doors that open into the living room to usher through the breeze. I wanted the house to be low and to fit into the landscape. It was only when the house was nearly finished that my friend Peggy Weiss came to look at it and observed that what we'd built looked "like a Midland house." And it was, only a single story and following the ground, just like the houses Daddy used to build.
It was never designed to be a big house. It's less than four thousand square feet, with three bedrooms, one for us, one for Barbara, and one for Jenna. There's a small library, a sitting room off the girls' bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room and dining room combined. We wanted the house not simply to fit into the landscape but to be of the landscape, so we used Lueders limestone from a quarry that was about forty miles away, and we chose the top and bottom pieces of the quarry cuts, the ones with streaks of color. Those are considered the discard pieces because most builders want only the creamy white centers. But the leftovers are feathered with warm streaks of ocher and rose and look like the burnished tips of prairie grasses. We used a local builder called Heritage Homestead for everything. When we wanted a cantilevered porch roof without columns that would obscure the view, they knew just how to engineer it.
Because water and power are always precious and scarce on the range, we also built the house to conserve whatever we could. A sloping metal roof of galvanized tin shunts rainwater into a giant underground cistern to irrigate the property. Even the water from our showers is recycled and saved. Our heat is geothermal, from pipes dug three hundred feet into the ground, where the temperature is a constant sixty-seven degrees. We have a heat pump to circulate the water, warming it in the winter, cooling it in the summer, when it comes from the sun-baked ground. The floors are poured concrete or wide plank wood, and we did not build a single stair. We want to live at that ranch when we are in our walkers and our wheelchairs, should that day ever come.
As the presidential primary season unfolded in 2000, slab was being poured and walls were taking form. We were building for the rest of our lives.
I had what some might consider an advantage: George and I had been in national campaigns before, four of them in total, two vice presidential, two presidential. We had leapfrogged up the Mississippi River, from New Orleans to St. Louis to Dubuque, over the course of three weekends. I had stood for hours at rallies and conventions, I knew the feel of sitting on hastily arranged hotel banquet chairs for a speech or the echoey roar of a civic center auditorium, or the slick treads of school gymnasiums, their gleaming, varnished floors itching not for political events but for basketball. But all those years, I had always managed to duck the spotlight as a daughter-in-law. Now this was our race, to win or lose. I frequently traveled with George, but I also made some swings of my own, including up to Michigan in the already chilly mid-November weather. I visited an elementary school, then walked around the quaint Bavarian-style town of Frankenmuth, with its half-timber architecture, home to the world's largest Christmas store, and saw the struggling industrial city of Saginaw. That night, the sky lit up with a meteor shower, and Andi Ball and I and my DPS agents gathered up blankets and lay out on the ground beneath the chill sky to catch a glimpse of the distant sparks of falling stars.
It was in Michigan again that I lost my contact lenses in my hotel room before a speech and spent what seemed like an hour blindly crawling around on my knees, feeling the rough carpet for the hard plastic case. At last, Andi located them behind the chest, where they had slipped during the night. After that, we started carrying spares.
When George won in Iowa, we packed up and headed for a bruising campaign amid the snows of New Hampshire, where we made lifelong friends. We had a core group who trekked to every rally. Some had known Gampy when he was running, but many were just our friends, like Senator Judd Gregg and his wife, Kathy. Senator John McCain won the New Hampshire contest, but the next morning, we were in South Carolina, shaking hands and asking for votes.
I was in Providence, Rhode Island, in March when the Star tabloid published a story about the 1963 car crash. The car accident was not a secret; all of my old friends knew about it, as did just about all of Midland. But up to now, it had been part of my private life. Excep
t that there is no private life for a presidential candidate or his or her spouse. Now the accident was fodder for the national media, and for several days reporters hollered questions at me wherever I went. But then the next piece of news pushed my past out of the headlines. My life veered from rallies, school visits, and speeches to the angst of two teenage daughters trying to decide on which college to go to. Barbara selected Yale, in part because she would be the fourth generation of the Bush family, and the first female, to attend. Jenna had her heart set on the University of Texas at Austin. As she told me when she went to visit a North Carolina school, "I wish I could make myself go here, but I can't." She was overjoyed when her acceptance letter came from Austin.
They were graduating high school with a father who was the governor and who was now the Republican presidential nominee. We had traded our Texas Department of Public Safety detail for Secret Service. We drove in motorcades with flashing lights and sirens, traffic shunted to one side. Days and weeks collapsed into a blur, rather like the towns and countryside we passed, moving at warp speed outside the window. Our advance team, the small group of people who manage each campaign stop, would be on the road for months at a time, traveling across the country to preview and organize the events, speeches, and rallies. They did laundry in local Laundromats, and when the seasons changed, their families boxed up and shipped a fresh set of clothes.
In the late summer, George invited Dick Cheney to the ranch. Dick had been a longtime Wyoming congressman and Gampy's secretary of defense during the Gulf War. George liked Dick's thoughtful, measured demeanor and had asked Dick to head up his vice presidential search. I had long liked and admired his wife, Lynne, who had overseen the National Endowment for the Humanities and is an accomplished scholar and author in her own right.