AT AGE 65, I moved from behemoth Houston to the tiny and usually peaceful Terlingua in far West Texas, at the western edge of Big Bend National Park and 10 miles from the Mexican border. If stress were my foe, this appeared a healthy bastion away from mental illness.
How wrong I was. Within the first eight years, to 2014, I succumbed to another three manic episodes. The lifetime count had climbed so high I had to guess--about 20. However, the latter episode was fought on a different turf. I was not hospitalized, and my doctor, Dr. Terry Rustin, treated me by way of a television hookup from his office in Houston to Alpine, a small college town 80 miles north of Terlingua.
Rustin fought the monster by increasing my dose of Risperdal and seeing me by appointment. He believed hospitalization was a last resort for a bipolar patient.
In an email message later, he listed three reasons for hospitalization: 1) If the patient were of immediate danger to self or others; 2) if there were a psychosis that renders the patient unable to manage in society; and 3) if there were a danger of rapid deterioration due to mania or depression that cannot be managed as an outpatient.
Unfortunately, my treatment did not harness all wild activity. I was able to get a bank loan of $6,000 to put Terlingua musicians in big city venues. I also started a magazine blog. Both ventures folded when I came back to reality.
Still, there had been successes in Terlingua when my mind was clear. I wrote and published a book, Carlton Leatherwood's Big Bend People, featuring some 60 people. Mike Perry, publisher of the online Alpine Daily Planet, was the instigator, adding me to his staff to write a column on those folks. Earlier, I wrote another, skinnier book, Why Terlingua.
Dori Ramsay, of Terlingua, pointed to those successes as proof for loved ones that they can fight against mania and win. Voni Glaves, another "local," said amen. And with many more of my friends in the community, there was resolution to take the illness in stride, often offering help during crisis "because you are my friend and I care."
After the last episode, there were residual feelings. I no longer had the hope that there would not be another, and I had lost the drive to write.
But for my caring friends, one in particular, and my doctor, I might not have continued to write. To them I owe my world.
A final look at Risperdal: Generic is now available for less than $15 a month.
In the message from Rustin, an MD who is a consultant in internal medicine, addiction medicine, and psychiatry, he listed discoveries about the manic depressive illness in the past 20 years. That is the period of time after expert witnesses addressed the illness in my discrimination trial.
Here are the findings:
1) Bipolar disorder is a biological condition and is not caused by childhood experiences, parental behavior, or other life experiences;
2) Bipolar disorder has a 35% heritable component and is present in 3% of the general population;
3) Individuals with bipolar disorder are more likely than others to be creative, artistic, musical, literary, and dramatic (this supports earlier findings);
4) Individuals with bipolar disorder have a high rate of substance abuse and addiction, independent of their bipolar disorder--about 40 percent;
5) Bipolar patients stabilize when they follow an orderly, consistent regimen--sleep, eat, work on a schedule;
6) Exercise benefits patients when they are depressed;
7) According to some studies, suicide is the number one cause of death in bipolar patients;
8) When using substances, bipolar patients tend to use mood-congruent drugs rather than mood stabilizing drugs. That is, they may say they are using drugs/alcohol to control their mood, but that is not correct. When manic, they use stimulants (cocaine, tobacco, coffee, amphetamines) which enhance their manic mood. When depressed, they use depressants (alcohol, marijuana, Xanax) which further depress their mood. So, the drugs they use exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, their mood.
Throughout this memoir I have included my writing, and now is no exception. I will borrow two features from the people book, though the selections are like choosing from your children. But they illustrate the decency and intellect I have found in a community that I hope is the terminus of my moves.
Here is one of the interviews from the book:
Pardon me, but I thought until today that every drop of religious water or wine had been wrung out of our schools. It is revelation to find that is not so.
Pardon me, if my blame of misunderstanding is heaped on the extreme right or those who speak that political wing's language. Maybe, just maybe, those who speak out are an uncontrolled fringe.
But I have not been in a classroom for 50 years, and so as those years rolled by I perceived that God was dead to young ears. That was the uproar I heard.
Then along came Martha Stafford, an English teacher for all four grades of high school in Terlingua Common School District's small education halls. She had played the lead, Miss Amelia Evans, in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe a few years back, and I had a small part in that Last Minute Low Budget Productions play. Our paths rarely crossed after that.
I was pleased to see her helping out at the altar for the Episcopalian Christmas Eve service in the Lajitas chapel. And I knew from her invitation to a Sarah Palin white trash party that she had an outspoken political side.
However, it was only a few days ago that she landed on all fours on the back of a social media zealot.
"If teachers can't teach anything related to the Bible," she responded to him, "how can they teach Beowulf, King Arthur, William Blake, Grendel, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson. . . (way too many to list here)."
Well, I wanted to know more about the modern classroom, and she said she would love to visit. So a meeting was arranged for Easter afternoon. Again she had helped at the altar for what she called a High Church service, which she said they didn't normally do. Father Mel, retired minister from Redford, "had me ringing bells which I rang at the wrong time, and we had the wrong lesson to read, and so there was a lot of stopping and starting and Father Mel whispering instructions. . . a very patient man."
That sounded like a refreshing effort akin to students giving their all to a one-act play, which she also directs. And did I forget to say she is librarian at the school and is coordinator of academic contests in the University Interscholastic League?
Enough background. Here's the serious part of this discussion, the age of enlightenment in my later years.
"So much of literature is biblical allegories," Stafford said. "With Beowulf the monster is Grendel. Well, he's a descendant of Cain. If the kids don't know Cain and Abel, then they don't undertand he has been an outcast his entire life.
"It goes on throughout literature, and when I first started teaching in 1985, you just had to say Cain and Abel, or the Great Flood, and all the kids knew it. A lot of that I think was growing up in small towns where everybody went to church every Sunday.
"Now that has changed; kids don't go to church. And so they don't have these basic stories, and so as a teacher you have to give them the background, and nine times out of ten, it's biblical. Otherwise, they are not going to understand the importance of 12 men with Beowulf, and one betrayed him, and these type of things.
"You have to explain it all to kids. And so when people talk about you don't mention God or Christianity or any of that sort of thing in school, they're wrong. They are just flat out wrong."
She added that, of course, there is a lot of literature without any kind of biblical reference.
"My faith and spirituality have grown in great bounds," she said, "but I don't bring my personal belief system into the classroom. Society has changed.
"I don't think it means that we've become godless at all," she said. "I don't think parents put the emphasis on biblical stories that they used to. Maybe we are a more literate society so that there are other examples to draw from than just the Bible. That's way beyond what I know."
There is a saying among teachers, she said: As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in school.
Stafford has stayed close to home, except for a sojourn to Montana. She is a Marfa native and went to Sul Ross State University.
There were a couple of quick questions left, and short answers.
Is there a Bible in the library?
"Yes, there is, in the religion section, the 200s.
Is there a Koran?
"I do believe we have a Koran."
And yet another interview:
The primary focus of my interview was on my guest's silver smithing, but when he surprised me by saying he owned three AR-15s, that sharpened my attention. Those rifles had come to the front in the gun control issue, otherwise this gun-leery person wouldn't have known about them.
The pronouncement wasn't shrill, so I was at ease but wondering. It followed the question which was something like, "What do you do in your spare time when you aren't working with silver?" And the answer was, "I'm a rifle shooter."
Then I asked Paul Wiggins, "Do you have an AR-15?" And he was a straight shooter.
At home I did a little research on the rifle and called Wiggins back. "They must be different," I said, "different manufacturers or variations."
"They are chambered differently, he answered. "One is for sport, and two are for competition. I'm not a survivalist nor do I fear a tyrannical government. Life is very sweet."
But Wiggins' tenure along the Rio Grande precedes competitive shooting, to a score of years with silver and to fun times in the '80s when a hot bath came in a barrel and when beers were drunk around campfires, not in bars.
He had lived at Redford in the 1970s, and that changed suddenly, and he found himself on the road.
"I was doing bead work in Santa Fe, and I met a man who suggested that knowing how to work silver would be a great addition to my bead work," he said. "He was right, and I had wanted to do some buckles and hardware for my belts, and he convinced me to look into it."
In '84, Wiggins moved to Terlingua Ranch and began to work with silver.
"I really did my first piece in '92, the first piece that I was proud of," he said, "the first piece that I knew was a product, a star concho. And I did several belts early on, when silver wasn't so expensive, and sold them right here to my friends."
Since that time, that's pretty much been Wiggins' livelihood.
Technically, smithing is really forming silver with hammers, and melting and casting. "There's a lot of silver jewelry making," he said, "but there's not many craftsmen doing smithing. I do just enough to say that I do, but I haven't made the classic teapot or done any real vessels. That's really smithing. What Paul Revere did was silver smithing, and now there's some done in the Orient.
"I love to hammer," he added. "I do some forming, but by the time you smith out a silver goblet or a silver plate, it costs a bloody fortune. That's because silver is so expensive."
What have you made recently that you call smithing?
"These bracelets that I do, these heavy cuff bracelets. The Navajo called them filed bracelets," he answered. "They require me to cast a slug, then I hammer it and roll it out, bend it and carve with files, and stamp it. It's real basic smithing.
"I enjoy making chains," he continued. "I love to make chains, and there's not many people doing that."
Wiggins doesn't do much bead work anymore and hasn't made a beaded belt in years.'"I could, I could," he said. "I think about it sometime, getting back to it, but it didn't prove very lucrative for me. I lavish a lot of effort on the beadwork, and the color decisions take time. It's stitching right into the leather."
He used to make more heavy silver belts, but that's not happening so much now because they would cost a fortune--that would be way over a $1,000--"and most of my market here is in the $100-$300 range," he explained. "I'll be doing more overlay silver on brass and copper, at less expense, and it's beautiful."
In that "spare time," the last five or six years Wiggins has been learning to shoot competitive rifle--service rifle and high power.
"I've had a real good time doing that," he said. "I've spent a lot of money on it, and I'm shooting a lot better now. I don't have a lot of company in this. A deputy sheriff is rated high master. He and I always swap ideas."
As for the AR-15s, Wiggins said, "One of them I can't get bullets for, another's at the gunsmith's, and the third one I'm just trying to buy brass and keep it up. The whole shooting fraternity is in dutch right now over politics and the tragedies that have happened, the poor way the NRA has represented itself and the mistakes they made."
Is there midddle ground in gun control? "I believe some things need to change. I believe there is some middle ground," he answered.
"But when you get people who love guns and people who hate guns together, you don't go anywhere. I enjoy shooting, but I don't see any tyrannical government out there, and I'm not a fanatic about the Second Amendment. I think the issues are going to devolve to the states. You can already look at what New York and California have."
Wiggins doesn't think the assault weapons ban is going to get too far but that existing laws are going to be enforced with more vigor and that there are going to be some changes in the idea of private sales.
"I think there is a very quiet majority that is not going to let Congress fool around too much with the basic rights," he said, "and this thing about self-loading rifles is a nightmare to get into.
"We already have perfectly reasonable restrictions on automatic weapons and other specialized military weaons," he emphasized. "I just think the self-loading rifle, its innovation, is the way this is going, is the way rifles are going. I don't think you are going to succeed at prohibiting innovation."
The AR-15 is a semi-automatic rifle that fires a single round each time the trigger is pulled. It is also known as a self-loading rifle, successor to earlier rifles that required manual-cycling of the weapon after each shot, such as the bolt-action rifle.
Wiggins concluded by saying, "The target shooting discipline in America is really coming to be built around the self-loading rifle. The AR-15 has very recently outperformed a very high-tech bolt rifle in a national match, and that's a 200-, 300-, 600-yard shooting line."
And he was philosophical: "Freedom always courts disaster."
But I didn't want to let an "old--timer" get away without hearing more about early baths here. Several people had mentioned Wiggins' early bathing option.
"I haven't done that in many years," he obliged. "I just used to fill a barrel up with water and build a fire under it, then invited my friends to come over for a good soak. It became a little legendary. Some people had a hard time squeezing into a barrel."
Did this take the place of showering at La Kiva in the old days?"
"Oh, those damn showers would give you a shock," he answered. "The coin boxes were all wired, and before they were taken out, it wasn't uncommon to get a little jolt. That was '80, '81.
"There weren't many places to take a bath or shower. We all pretty much roughed it here.
"Didn't have any bars to go to, but had campfires. There really was a time when the only bar was the Lajitas Trading Post. It was the only place to sit down and drink."
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