Odyssey End
THE ODYSSEY WAS STILL THE BOOK WITHIN. If I had been as wise as prize-winning author John Steinbeck, I would have known that the journey would end earlier than anticipated. He said before visiting Texas and the Deep South that his search for America "had been like a full dinner of many courses, set before a starving man. At first he tries to eat all of everything, but as the meal progresses he finds he must forgo some things to keep his appetite and his taste buds functioning."
For whatever reason, maybe my familiarity from living in Houston—and loving it—I visited the cities and moved on, finding in the rural landscape a refreshing texture.
The tremendous beauty of the coastal region is not immediately apparent, I mused. Just as mountains were considered impediments to travel before artists and writers awakened us to their aesthetic quality, so the flat marshes and shallow bays pass monotonously before the untrained eye. It helps to read about the birds, grasses, and other life in those estuaries where such dining delicacies as shrimp mature rapidly and blue crabs thrive. You then possess something with which to contemplate the richness of the land. And it is rich. Roy Bedicheck, the state's foremost nature writer, said the Texas coast is a storehouse of natural wealth unparalleled elsewhere in the world in so little space. He noted the commingling of such natural elements as oil and gas, farmlands, harbors, climate, and the fishing industry.
And in the Coastal Bend, down near Corpus Christi, I found dreamers from the cities immersed in a space adventure. Others had dreamed there as well.
A HANDFUL OF TEXANS successfully launched the first space shot unsupported by government funds. This plucky band took its rocket, plopped it down next to a cattle tank amid yellow-blooming partridge peas and sunflowers, and let her fly. The launch has got to be the most remarkable accomplishment of man on the Coastal Bend of Texas—a spectacular statement in support of rugged individualism, free enterprise, and self reliance.
When that thirty-seven-foot encasement of solid fuel streaked skyward, it seemed to assure the world of space services as common as the cargo of water.
The private launch was from Matagorda Island, a thirty-four-mile-long barrier island inaccessible by land vehicle. Barrier islands such as Matagorda stretch in a chain from Maine to Texas, They are the longest and best-developed string in the world, protecting the mainland and lagoons from direct wave attack by the sea. The earliest of Texas explorers passed Matagorda. Alonso de Kneda charted the coastline carved by the Gulf of Mexico in 1519 while looking for a water passage to India for Spain.
At the time of the launch in 1982, Matagorda Island was owned by three parties. The federal government possessed two-fifths, the state two-fifths, and Toddie Lee Wynne the remaining fifth. Wynne, eighty-four, was the principal investor in Space Services Inc. of America (SSI), which fired the rocket. He died just hours before he was to witness the liftoff from his ranch.
The region had trappings of a major space port. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson Causeways crossed nearby bays. Those U.S. presidents, of course, led the nation's quest for the moon. And with signs at shops in the nearby town of Rockport cheering the private launch, it didn't take much imagination to think of it as Rocketport.
Early on the afternoon of September 8, an international press gathered for a briefing at a Rockport motel. The launch had been postponed. This information was relayed by satellite from Matagorda. The voice was that of Donald K. "Deke" Slayton, one of the original astronauts and the pilot of the first international manned mission. "We're not sure exactly where the problem is," he said. "There's suspicion that it may be an instrumentation-type problem. Our master plan is to charge along toward a 10 o'clock launch tomorrow and hope we find our problem before the sun goes down."
With the designers of the platform, software, and telemetry at the site, the launch team pressed on. At 3 p.m. Slayton reported, "We're a little smarter than we were last time I talked to you. We've at least got our problem pinned down to two things. It's either our connector into the platform or a cable." So they put a new platform in and were checking the cable. "And if it all shakes out, why we're about ready to go in the morning."
At 6 p.m. final checks for control of the payload continued. Other equipment tested out. Work remaining included mounting the gyro package, refilling a control system with gas, and recharging the battery. "We have a reasonably high degree of confidence that it is all going to flow," Slayton said. Meteorologists forecast isolated thunderstorms, making the shot indefinite for the two-hour launch window the next day. The Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi needed the range the following day, Friday. Weekend weather predictions were "lousy." A tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico threatened to become a hurricane.
The Texas coast experiences some of the severest of hurricanes in September. The greatest natural disaster in U.S history occurred when one decimated Galveston on September 8-9,1900. Six thousand lives were lost.
The private space shot lacked the hordes of spectators that show up at NASA launches. Still, 230 guests and 88 reporters sailed on the vessels Wharf Cat and Scat Cat for the island before dawn on Thursday, September 9. The fishing boats are normally berthed in Port Aransas. Another 44 members of the media flew out by helicopter. The spectators waited under a green and white tent, breakfasting on boiled shrimp and fruit, about a mile from the rocket, which stood on the southern tip of Matagorda. Scientists monitored the countdown in portable buildings between the tent and rocket. Flags flew at half mast in honor of Wynne. One of the launch-pad engineers, Hal Geise, used a felt-tipped pen to inscribe this message on the skin of the rocket: "God bless you, Toddie Lee Wynne."
Cowboys interrupted their morning routine. They parked Star Brand Cattle Co. pickups on a rise near the tent. Rear-window racks carried rifles. Two horses saddled for work, Smokey and Diablo, would witness the launch. This was appropriate. The test launch was called Conestoga I. It took its name from the oxen- and mule-drawn covered wagons that transported pioneering Americans to the West in the mid-nineteenth century. A historian viewed those wagon trains as "free enterprise at its rawest."
A Life Flight helicopter from Houston set down at the launch site in case a medical emergency required transport to a hospital. "Three minutes, thirty seconds, and counting. The mission director has just confirmed that the roadblocks are up, the ground safety is operational, and the telemetry is ready to go." Thus Sallie Chafer, thirty-two, the resonant voice of Conestoga I, alerted viewers. "One minute, forty seconds, and counting. We have started the telemetry recorder. There will be a hold for two minutes at T minus one minute fifteen seconds. The mission director and the weather officer confirm that all FAA requirements are met, the weather is good, and all conditions are go for launch."
The countdown halted and then resumed for nineteen seconds before another hold was ordered for evaluation of the telemetry system. The count backed up a bit, resumed.
"This is Conestoga Launch Control. We are now at T minus fifty seconds and counting. The vehicle is now on internal power. The attitude control system and booster control system timer has been started. ... T minus thirty seconds and counting. The control unit has been activated, ten, nine, eight (and all the spectators picked up the countdown) seven, six, five, four, three, two, one ... ignition!"
"We see ignition. It's flying!" shouted a radio announcer. And indeed it was. Gathering velocity, but without a boom, the rocket climbed, trailing a brilliant yellow flame and white smoke. The crowd cheered wildly. The white spear poked no holes in clouds, because there were none. It seemed to arc toward the sun. At sixty-three seconds into the flight the engine shut down. A forty-mile tail of smoke rippled and curled over the Gulf of Mexico. The rocket was no longer visible.
"T plus two minutes and Conestoga I is now in space."
The crowd cheered, smiled broadly.
"We're coming up on T plus five minutes nine seconds. The vehicle should be at apogee (its farthest point from earth), at 195.9 miles altitude, 160.6 miles down range."
The 505-pound payload included roughly forty gallons of water. It was released and crystallized shortly after the descent began. The rocket reentered the atmosphere at 259.4 miles down range and at 51.3 miles altitude. And confirmation of Conestoga Fs splashdown came after ten minutes forty seconds of flight. It was a quick $2.5 million adventure.
The man of the hour was David Hannah, Jr., toasted at the site with champagne and the focus of network television news and analysis. He founded SSI in 1981. A real estate developer in Houston, he had read a magazine article about space on a business trip six years earlier that changed his life. He and other investors pooled $1.2 million for an unsuccessful attempt to launch a liquid-fuel rocket the first summer. It blew up on the pad.
This successful firing demonstrated SSI's ability to organize, fund, and develop privately owned launch vehicles and sites. It advanced cooperation between the firm and government agencies including the Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission, State Department, and National Aeronautics & Space Administration. The thirty-one-member field team and management acquired operating experience. Engineering tests showed vehicle design integrity, the ability to separate stages and payload, and orbital insertion capability. The performance of guidance, navigational, and control systems was checked.
Hannah has proved himself a man of vision. By Texas standards he is not superrich. Yet he tried and achieved what the state's billionaires have not. And in the long run he might also grow very rich. As Wynne, a man born in the last century who was helping lead the way into the next, once said, "I'll bet we make more money with this than that thing out there [an offshore oil rig]." The respected British newspaper Financial Times called Texas "a promised land in which the ideals of rugged individualism, free enterprise, and self reliance still exist in their purest, and at times their harshest, form ... There is nothing defensive, mean-spirited, or ultimately even conservative about the way that Texans embrace the spirit of capitalism. They do not regard capitalism primarily as a system for conserving their wealth and power. Rather it is a framework for risking wealth in the quest for further aggrandizement." Hannah possesses the ideals the Times recognized—the frontier spirit Americans cherish.
THE YEAR BEFORE the realization of the private space launch, two biologists, Steve Labuda of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service and Ernie Kuyt of the Canadian Wildlife Service, became the first to track the migration of whooping cranes. The big birds, which number about 120 in natural habitat and in captivity, spend the winter in the marsh of a peninsula overlooking Matagorda Island.
Bedicheck, the naturalist, said the marshes are so extensive that they literally swallow up features. "Even the great blue heron and the American egret, two of this coast's largest waders, shrink almost into insignificance, while individuals of lesser species dwindle down to mere dots." He looked for something to complete the picture, something commensurate with the background and at home in the marsh. He found what was missing when he saw a family of whooping cranes. "Here is a double completion, for bird and marsh emphasize and enliven each other ... Nothing less than such a marsh can frame a whooping crane; nothing less than a whooping crane is adequate for such a marsh."
The cranes literally stand head and shoulders above other birds. Measuring fifty inches high, they are the tallest birds in North America. Wings span seven feet from black tip to black tip. The adults sport red faces, the youngsters rust heads.
When the scientists began following the whoopers in 1981, fire had just swept 80 percent of their summer nesting range in Canada's Wood Buffalo National Park. Feeding ponds in the park, which straddles the border between Alberta province and the Northwest Territories, also were drying up during a drought. The threat of malnutrition apparently restricted births that year to three.
In mid-September one of the chicks and its parents started south to Texas. They interrupted their travel to fatten up for the 2,600-mile journey in the wheat and barley fields of Saskatchewan. A farmer delighted in his feathered guests fluttering between field and pond for eighteen days. Then one hop proved fatal. The chick, knocked off course by a wind shift, hit a power line. Rushed by plane to a veterinary clinic, it died six days later. The parents continued their flight south.
Another whooping crane family, meanwhile, departed from the Nyarling River in the most northern nesting area. It, too, laid over several days in the grain stubble fields. Snow showers moved in. The whoopers took off in earnest. Powerful travelers, even with young, untried wings, they cover up to 470 miles in ten hours. In flight they spread their wings and spiral upward on vertical air currents. At peak altitude they tuck their wings a little and start long downward glides. Not until dusk, when thermal activity ceases, do they flap their wings as ducks and geese do. Flapping, as you might guess, drains more energy. And it was thirty days after leaving the Canadian sanctuary that the family of cranes from the Nyarling River arrived on the Texas coast. They sprinted to the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, on an early November morning, with the father shrilly trumpeting, "Ker-loo! Ker-lee-oo!"
Some people feel we overspend on a bird likely to become extinct anyway. To them it is a case of when to pull the plug. But they are as nearsighted as the man who thought the joint U.S.-Canadian tracking team was trying to ambush a small herd of prized pronghorns.
The demise of the whooping crane would rob us not only of majesty but also of inspiration to endure adversity. A beautiful creature who spans a vast gulf between the ages of ice and space can soar with our souls.
A SHORT WAY DOWN the Texas coast, where the live oaks grow grotesque in salty breezes, George Ware Fulton had a wonderful window on the changing world of ships. A cattleman, he had participated in the transition from sail to steam by organizing a scheduled steamship service. And in old age he could witness steam's coming of age from the third-floor, corner bay window of a mansion study to which he retreated in an active household.
Fulton called the mansion Oakhurst. He and wife Harriet endowed their home with exceptional taste and innovations after building it on a small knoll next to Aransas Bay in 1874-77. Amid its splendor, they entertained lavishly. The couple was already advanced in age—Fulton was sixty-four—with four grown children. One grand occasion in the house was their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1890. Ideas for the architecture and furnishings were brought from the East Coast. The mansard roof was typical of French Second Empire architecture. Renaissance Revival furniture of walnut stood on richly colored Axminster and Brussels carpets, and chandeliers hung from high ceilings. The dining table was set with Gorham silver. Archways, nine-foot passages between rooms in place of standard doors, were trimmed in cypress and walnut, the stairs in ash. Tiles from Minton, the maker of fine English china, were laid in the foyer. A Victorian garden and conservatory were filled with roses, lilies, pansies, crepe myrtle, hibiscus, and rare foliage imported from Africa and the East Indies.
The mechanical ingenuity in the mansion far exceeded the standard for conveniences in Fulton's day. A basement furnace circulated air through ducts to decorative fireplaces on three floors—an early method of central heating. The warm air also flowed to a clothes dryer in the laundry. Hot water ran in tubs, cold moved through larder troughs to preserve milk and vegetables. A carbide gas plant fueled the chandeliers.
Today, the splendor of Oakhurst has been restored by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Known as Fulton Mansion State Historic Structure, it sits in the town of Fulton, three miles north of Rockport. Tours introduce visitors to the style and mores of the era.
Should you visit, you may learn:
The Fultons literally rolled out the carpets for the fall social season. The carpets were very expensive. To protect them from the heat, dust, and insects, servants would roll up and store them in summer. Woven on twenty-eight-inch looms, the strips of carpet were hand-sewn together, a practice the park service repeated in restoration.
The sitting room was used by Harriet Fulton to entertain her grandchildren and to sew. Lace was her specialty as an accomplished seamstress. A piece of her work is in the dining room.
The couple only indulged in one closet, in the master bedroom, because some governments in those days taxed a house according to the number of rooms. A closet was considered a room. Even that closet didn't have hangers. Clothes were stacked or hung on pegs.
The Fultons had six servants. Researchers believe they were quite intelligent, because in one of her letters Harriet complained they were using too much kerosene reading at night.
When George stopped shipping his cattle on the hoof and just sent hides and tallow from his packing plant, the carcasses went into the bay. The odor borne on sea breezes permeated the family's clothing, necessitating disinfectant in the wash.
The children were potty-trained at three months.
"There isn't anything else in Texas like [the mansion]," said June Secrist, the park superintendent who guided the restoration. "It's decked, not framed. That's one reason it doesn't go anywhere during a hurricane. The things that went into this house that you don't see are the amazing things."
Ships from New Orleans brought huge quantities of pine planks. The one-to-five-inch boards were stacked and spiked on top of each other to make solid walls and floors. Steel rails, the kind used for train tracks, reinforced the house. Shells, not gravel, became aggregate in the concrete foundation and as soundproofing for the floors.
After departing the house, one may drive north along the bay on scenic Fulton Beach Road and reflect about the cultural heritage the park service has so meticulously preserved with revenue from cigarette taxes. In the restoration, the researchers even unearthed nursery receipts to decide what plants to put in the conservatory. And they buried a myth. It was previously thought that George Fulton was related to Robert Fulton, the first successful operator of a steamship in 1807. Genealogists found no link between the two other than their shared interest in steamships.
A natural beauty endures from Fulton's time. The striking deformities of live oaks grace mansion grounds and beach road alike. Breezes off the bay have leaned trunks inland. Salt spray has stunted limbs to windward, while branches to leeward appear to compensate by growing unusually long. On the drive at sunset, the trees embrace a mood of the past.
As MUCH AS ANYONE, Charles Morgan, who pioneered in commercial steam navigation, put Houston and Indianola on the Texas map. Hurricanes, the bane of both, took the latter port away.
Morgan dominated Gulf of Mexico shipping in the 1800s. He dreamed of a steamship and railroad network linking the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and Latin America. Working toward this goal, the New Yorker tried to connect the port of Indianola on the middle Texas coast with a railroad leading west. The track never pushed beyond Cuero just sixty miles northwest. His venture was halted by the financial panic of 1873, waning government interest, and a deadly hurricane in 1875.
He would succeed later in Houston, where he dredged a ship channel at the city's request and acquired a railroad to join it to the hinterland. His transportation hookup shaped the economic development of Texas.
Morgan raised Houston's fortunes at the expense of Galveston. He did it for the same reason he earlier diverted his steamships from Port Lavaca to Indianola. Both Galveston and Port Lavaca had increased wharves fees. They wouldn't bend. So Morgan switched ports.
Indianola drew attention as the eastern end of the shortest land route to California. U.S. Army officers such as Robert E. Lee passed through town on their way to frontier outposts. Supplies followed as did contingents of animals unusual in numbers and kind. One shipment brought 2,000 horses. Camels used in a military experiment arrived in 1856.
The first mighty hurricane struck a bustling Indianola on Sept. 16, 1875. Gas lights flickered in hundreds of homes and in stores on the evening preceding the storm. Wealthy guests from upstate discussed the Civil War and Reconstruction at a bar in the Casimir House, an elegant hotel. Carts and wagons jammed the streets around Calhoun County Courthouse, where a sensational murder trial had recessed.
During the night, rain squalls and frothy waves lashed the town as the ride of Matagorda Bay rose. The sea rushed through the streets, floating a schooner into the telegraph office and isolating the community. As the storm built, houses drifted off their foundations. People on roofs and doors bobbed out across the flooded prairie.
Winds peaked at 150 miles per hour after midnight the second night. Then suddenly, the sea reversed itself and raced back into the bay with hapless people and buildings. Three hundred died. Some 75 percent of the buildings disappeared.
A second slammed into Indianola in 1886, wiping out with wind and water and an accompanying fire what little the earlier storm had left. The county relocated its courthouse to Port Lavaca.
Indianola's lifespan was forty-three years, having begun when Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels led German immigrants ashore in 1844 to await development of a settlement in the Hill Country. But, like an unpolished shell that conceals beauty, this port site has little to show for its rich years of history.
Weekend houses on stilts and several beer-and-pool stops punctuate the narrow strip along the beach from the eastern tip of the townsite at Powder Horn Bayou to the western reaches known as Indian Point or Old Town. A chunk of granite at the eroded location of the courthouse and a cistern supposedly belong to the past. In the center of a cluster of covered picnic tables, a twenty-two-foot pink granite statue of the French explorer Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who came this way in 1685, provides a resting place for seagulls.
Farther inland, a cemetery is the only recognizable remains of the town. The few headstones emphasize the multiple deaths within families during plagues. Yellow fever, a disease caused by a virus transmitted by mosquitoes, raged up and down the Texas coast then. The year 1867 is chiseled on many headstones in the old cemetery. It was known in Indianola as the Year of Death. A couple of markers rise at graves of victims in the 1875 hurricane.
Grabbing at even the most naive expectations, my hopes rose when I came across Brown's Bait Stand & Cabins. The business was located where Brown's Addition had been in the 1850s. John Henry Brown, who developed the addition into Indianola's business and cultural center, had published the town's first newspaper and later served as a state legislator and mayor of Dallas. Unfortunately, no one anywhere near the bait stand claimed relation to or had even heard of John Brown and his addition.
THE BIGGEST FISH STORY told in Port Aransas, the Mustang Island village in the Coastal Bend, concerns not the length of a fish but a single scale mounted on the lobby wall of the Tarpon Inn. The story began the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt anchored his yacht Potomac nearby in the Gulf of Mexico with the 1,850-ton destroyer Moffett a short distance away.
Roosevelt had arrived on May 2, 1937, to troll for silver longs, or tarpons, which then migrated along the shore in huge schools. As is customary today, it was a working vacation. Shortly after arriving, he signed a broadened neutrality bill. It had been flown to Galveston from Washington. After two seaplanes ferrying dispatches to the president dragged anchor and collided in rough water, the bill was rushed the 200 miles by automobile and taken by small boat to the Potomac.
Port Aransas was a beer-guzzling little fishing village in those days—with its burgeoning skyline of condominiums nearly a half-century away. The famous people attracted to try their skill with the fighting tarpon stayed at the two-story Tarpon Inn. W. R. "Bill" Ellis, the owner when Roosevelt visited the area, enjoys reliving the golden years of 1925-40.
Clyde Beatty, the great circus animal trainer, slept in one of the inn's rooms with his pet lion. "Yes, he did. He absolutely did," Ellis said. "It was a cub—seventy-five to one hundred pounds. He had it, I think, in Room 30 on the first floor. I told the maid not to go in the room because there was a lion in there.
"The Tarpon Inn was a social meeting place for the United States," Ellis said. "Anybody who had a well-known guest, they would bring them here. We've had, all kinds of politicians, a half-dozen movie stars. I've seen some tremendous poker games in there."
"University presidents from Iowa, Kansas and Missouri came down," Ellis said. "We would accuse them of using Phi Beta Kappa keys to fish for tarpon ... [The attendants] would remember the idiosyncrasies of guests. I think it was Duncan Hines [a restaurant critic] who liked ice cream on corn flakes."
When Ellis was helping make arrangements for Roosevelt, he tried to backstop for bad weather. An alternate plan was to take the president offshore snapper fishing in a large boat. A Fort Worth man berthed a sixty-foot yacht in Port Aransas, and it was considered seaworthy and very good for snapper fishing. So Ellis called the man and said, "Jack, in the event the weather is bad we'd need something for backup for fishing here. Can we use your boat for Roosevelt?" The man replied, "Hell, no."
That pre-arrival incident not withstanding, FDR received a royal Texas welcome when Gov. James V. Allred landed in a plane on the beach and then boarded the presidential yacht a few hundred yards offshore.
There is controversy over who later guided the president in catching his first tarpon, but Ellis said emphatically, "Don Parley was the guide. He ran the boat. It was Don Parley's boat that they were fishing from." Don agrees. Other accounts ascribe the honor to Don's uncle, the late Barney Parley.
After Roosevelt landed his first tarpon, a ninety pounder, in a twenty-six-minute battle, the presidential party cruised down to Port Isabel to try its luck. They lowered a runabout and later pulled alongside a shrimp trawler. Barney Parley was along again. In his memoirs he says he told the shrimpers his group wanted some fine Texas shrimp. The trawler crew started shoveling shrimp into the runabout. "The President was sitting there," Barney said, "shrimp in his lap, and all around him grinning."
By the time Roosevelt returned to Port Aransas, the press had caught up. He trolled in a choppy sea south of the South Jetty, a news conference imminent. "Barney, I'm hooked on a rock," he said. Barney read it differently. So did the boatman, Ted Matthews. The line trailed too far from the jetties to hook on rock. Matthews increased boat speed. The President came back hard. "A few seconds later a large tarpon exploded high in the air, the rod in a half circle and the reel singing," Barney said. The fish made a long run and another jump and stayed on. "We fought that tarpon (in front of the press) for an hour and twenty minutes, finally gaffing him near the lighthouse, a distance of more than two miles."
The manuscript of Barney Parley's fish stories is owned by James Atwill, an attorney who, at the time of my visit, owned and lived at the Tarpon Inn. He had remodeled some of the rooms and refurbished the restaurant behind the inn. Atwill had also added a historic touch to the inn, a place on top where he retreated to gaze out to sea. Some of the earliest homes in the area, including that of settler John G. Mercer about a 100 years ago, were topped with a pilot lookout. Fathers and sons served as bar pilots, guiding schooners and steamers through treacherous sandbars in Aransas Pass. They perched on the lookouts awaiting gun or flag signals from ships for help.
Dredging and modern navigation lights ultimately eliminated the need for those lookouts. The fishing that lured Roosevelt has changed, too. Guide Don Parley's career began in 1925, the start of the resort's heyday. "Oh, we used to catch a lot of tarpon," he said. "When a good spell of weather came like it is now, the mackerel were out there by the millions. And tarpon, too. Just around the jetties. Nowadays the weather can get just perfect. And there's no mackerel out there and no tarpon either."
Dr. Henry Hildebrand, a marine biologist in Corpus Christi, talks of years when 2,000 tarpon were caught at Port Aransas. "Our tarpon would come up each spring, accumulate, and go back in the fall," he said. "They would stay around in the passes till some would distribute back in the bays. And we have changed these bays and rivers so much that I don't believe the habitat is here anymore.
Early anglers found that a tarpon's leaping power makes it a catch requiring skill and perseverance. Only salmon can better the eight-foot jump. Scales measure more than two inches in diameter. The record tarpon caught on the Texas coast, more than seven feet long, weighed 210 pounds.
Tarpon still arrive after hurricanes. Hildebrand suspects it has to do with food. Boats game fishing for sailfish and white-and-blue marlin still operate out of Port Aransas. "Oh, the marlin, that's a great fish," Don Parley said, "and they're catching them, too. And the sail-fish. They fish 100 miles offshore. Don't think anything at all of going 100 miles out, some of 'em 150. We didn't even know they were out there."
One more point about President Roosevelt's day at Port Aransas: There is no discernible controversy outside former inn owner Bill Ellis' business office over the claim that the President stayed at the Tarpon Inn. Hurricane Junction, a history of Port Aransas, notes the walls of the Tarpon Inn lobby have long been covered with signed scales from tarpon caught by guests, the latter status a requirement. A historical marker on the front lawn refers to Roosevelt as a patron. Every travel piece written over the years for newspapers, magazines, and guidebooks states Roosevelt stayed at the Tarpon Inn.
But a lot of people failed to ask Ellis. "He never touched foot on the shoreline," Ellis said. He did dock in Turtle Cove at Port Aransas, and he did autograph a scale from a tarpon to hang in the inn. But for the history books, Roosevelt never slept at the Tarpon Inn.
The inn itself marked its 100th anniversary some time ago. The original was built in 1886 on another site, and the main building in 1925. And the illustrious comings and goings of the hostelry, shelter to victims of hurricanes and famous guests, can withstand the truth along with the storms.
MY JOURNEY ALSO TOOK a nostalgic curve through East Texas. When I was growing up, my father sold drilling muds and chemicals, moving his family throughout the Texas oil fields before settling in Beaumont, the site of the first major oil gusher. The oil well, the Lucas discovery well in the Spindletop field, had roared in January 10, 1901. Along the way, driller Curt Hamill needed to flush out the cuttings. He drove cattle into a nearby pond, and their milling-about produced the mud that, when pumped into the well, would bring up the cuttings. My dad didn't know his job, by then much more sophisticated, had developed almost in the backyard of our family home.
As I drove north through the pine forests, I searched out the first steel oil tanks and toured the East Texas Oil Museum at Kilgore, not far from where I had started school. My mother, with me along as a child, had stopped at roadside stands for produce. Now I sought fresh tomatoes, beans, and squash at farmers' markets in Lufkin and Tyler. Later I picked blueberries in an open field. An employee at a small restaurant in Jefferson was kind enough to wash and serve them with ice cream. And it is to Jefferson that I bring fellow travelers who long to taste the nostalgia for a simpler life during Texas's Victorian period.
Though it is located in far Northeast Texas, almost as far north as Dallas, Jefferson served as a major port during the mid-1800s. John Nance, a modern boatman, guided me over the route steamships navigated to and from bustling docks, coming several hundred miles up river from New Orleans.
On a rainy fall day, he and I set out in a little wooden boat from Jefferson Landing, near the old turning basin on Big Cypress Bayou. As many as ten ships could dock there before it was filled in for construction of railroad and highway bridges. "This was almost always a one-way street for those river boats coming up here," he said, quieting the motor. "There was no place to pass for this last stretch, and they would have horseback riders coordinating river traffic."
We passed a crumbling stone building. "This magazine was built during the Civil War to store gunpowder away from town," Nance said. "There were once three of them spaced far apart in case one blew up. The other two were torn down for the brick in them."
Sweetgums on the banks brightened the overcast day with yellows, reds, and purples. Cypress had a reddish tint. During the steamboat era, paddle wheelers made their way up and down this waterway. Some carried passengers and light freight. The Mittie Stephens (a passenger ship on which more than sixty died when it burned and sank in 1869) was a side-wheeler about sixty feet wide. It was used during the Civil War as a supply boat. It could cover the 730 miles from Jefferson to New Orleans in six days.
"The cotton boats were a lot slower," the guide said. "The biggest one that came through Jefferson was 265 feet long. It carried out 4,500 bales of cotton."
After passing an inlet to Caddo Lake State Park, we entered the cark channels of Caddo Lake, fifteen miles from Jefferson. The unusual, shallow lake has thick stands of cypress draped with Spanish moss and acres of lily pads on its surface. A labyrinth of dredged channels crisscross it. The natives call the aquatic plants, which blossom in July and August, "yanquapin." They were identified from photographs as water lilies and lotus by an employee at Lilypons Water Gardens in Brookshire, near Houston.
Traffic to Jefferson ended abruptly in 1873 when the Army Corps of Engineers blew up a natural log and mud barrier on the Red River. The Great Raft had stretched more than 100 miles. When the Corps succeeded after years of trying, the depth of the lake and bayou was lowered by drainage to a shallowness unfit for larger riverboats. Other areas, including the port at Shreveport, benefited.
Nance and I concluded our excursion on his favorite shortcut, Pirch Gap. "I think someone misspelled it," he said. Brooding trees in the narrow passage changed an already dark day into night.
A half century after the port of Jefferson's demise, another venture boomed on Caddo Lake because of prohibition: moonshine liquor. Wyatte Moore, who remembers those days, lived at nearby Karnack, the childhood home of Lady Bird Johnson.
"In 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression, I had been married about five years," Moore said as he reminisced in his living room. "We moved out on the south shore of Caddo Lake, and I built an old rough house. I stayed there fifteen years and eked out a living."
Besides hauling wood with a horse and wagon, "I fished, built boats, killed ducks and sold them, made whiskey, worked in the oil field, farmed a little, had hogs in the woods, and kept a couple of milk cows.
"Well, about '35 and '33 we had children," Moore said. "I hadn't made much liquor. I tried to get by without it. But I had old friends who kinda believed in me and insisted I might as well. Everybody else nearly was. I proceeded, and for about eight or nine years I kept a still going practically all the time."
He paddled up to 3 00 pounds of supplies and whiskey in a sixteen-foot boat, narrow and sharp on both ends. "I could paddle out in the lake where there were so-called islands," he said. "They weren't islands, but they were thick timbers up to 50 feet high and water through them about two-feet deep. And I had a platform.
"I had a low platform and then I had kind of an upstairs so when the high water came I could move higher," he said. "At one time I had a kerosene-burning, fifty-five-gallon drum up there, and I would fire it up and go on. I would hunt ducks and even go to town and watch them trying the other moonshiners at the courthouse while my still was still cookin' along."
Later, he enlarged capacity with a 110-gallon drum he fired with wood on a portable platform just off the bank. "Sometimes people came on a horse or a mule for liquor," he said. "I would take their mule or horse and ride down through some sorghum and out in the lake to the still to fill up the jugs. I mostly sold to doctors, lawyers, judges, preachers, and professional people who wanted a pretty good grade of liquor."
Did he ever get caught?
"The game warden was after me for fishing, hunting ducks, and selling them. The sheriff and revenuers were supposed to be after me for the still," he said. "I was nice to them. I'd give the game warden whiskey and the sheriff fish. I didn't feel like it was ethical to give the sheriff whiskey and the game warden fish ... I got by ..."
WATER PLAYS THE MUSIC throughout Texas—and under. It has created numerous caves in the easily soluble limestone.
The best of the seven open to the public is roughly seventy-five miles west of the usually recognized limits of the Hill Country. Caverns of Sonora near Sonora has been variously described as Ali Baba's treasure cave and "the most indescribably beautiful cavern in the world."
I toured it with Jack Burch, a developer and partner in its operation. "The tourist gets lost with the crystal patterns," he said. "He's overwhelmed, like he was inside a snowbank. If we had only one little spot like this at the entrance, people would say 'oh, oh' and photograph that one spot. But they come in here and they see it everywhere and they won't even take a picture. Why take a picture of a sand dune when you're in the middle of the Sahara Desert?"
In the midst of 100 percent humidity we surveyed uncommon coral patterns on stalagmites, Texas-size "popcorn," and a unique butterfly constructed of helictites. Helictites are irregular and branching stalactites. "It's the only known butterfly in the world," Burch said. "It is actually two helictites that just accidentally grew side by side. With excess water coming through a central canal, minerals were deposited on the outside of it, and as the water was pulled by gravity on the underside, a drapery pattern became wings. These helictites are pure calcite. If they were broken it would sound like glass breaking. I would give them a million years to grow a foot, and we've got them three feet long and still growing."
I was already convinced of the important role of water in caves when Burch and I met. But my understanding was muddy. We sat and talked. He said I was about 50 percent right when I noted caverns are really ancient passages of springs. "Caves do not have to have flowing water," he said. "They are mostly dissolved by solution. You have water that is high enough in carbon dioxide to start the chemical reaction. It will dissolve by releasing more carbon dioxide stored in the limestone itself. Springs are definitely associated with caves in limestone country."
Sometimes they do erode the caverns? I asked. "Oh yeah, oh yeah," he said. "And you can get alkaline water that's oversaturated so that instead of dissolving it is going to deposit. That's how you get a stalagmite, for instance. You can have both solutions at the same time. That's why I say you are at least 50 percent right."
Carbon dioxide is very common in water. In solution it becomes carbonic acid, a weak, colorless acid. Rotting organic material such as leaves and grass produce it. "It's nothing super," Burch said. "This Coke has a lot more in it than our drinking water does. ( But in hushed tones) it don't take much."
Caverns of Sonora captures the magical movements of the water symphony played in Texas. "Water has all in the world to do with caverns," Burch said. "You couldn't get a cave without water."
You CAN GO BACK IN TIME. There's a range as to how far back, from Texas caverns to the geologic ages of Utah, the final destination of this odyssey. I have also learned you can go back in time while skiing on the south side of the Matterhorn, in Cervinia, Italy, and hiking with a backpack in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.
Then again, you cannot go back in time. You cannot be the man or woman you were a decade before. For me, hand tremors have robbed me of such trade skills as note-taking and slow-speed photography. I have found a slower method for writing, not in a long-shot a guarantee of income. I can still produce books from transcripts of taped interviews. But that's another story.
Steven Spielberg was a piker on the subject of the past in Back to the Future. With a trip through Utah, anyone can turn a car into a time machine good for 250 million exhilarating years. The premier attraction of Utah, after the fine snow for skiers has receded up the mountains, is its wondrous abyss of time open for exploration.
From the roadside, an immense and colorful canvas of layered cliffs, spires, and arches—the scenic rock of many geologic ages— awakens the senses to the power of time through erosion. But you'll have to get out of the car to reach an emotional peak. "... You can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus," writes Southwest author Edward Abbey.
As if to accommodate the author's suggestion, hiking trails easy enough for senior travelers and families toting infants weave through some of the most stunning geologic sights in Utah's national parks. Horses for hire and whitewater river rafts jack up the excitement.
It is as hard as rock to muster enthusiasm for the underlying reason for those magnificent earthen formations in southeast Utah. Certainly, you don't need to know why to appreciate the numerous national and state parks scattered westward from Moab, a recreation base for the region some 1,225 road miles from Houston but with gateway airports at Salt Lake City, Utah (239 miles) and Grand Junction, Colorado. (108 miles).
A simple one-mile hike to Delicate Arch in Arches National Park on the outskirts of Moab may alone make the trip worthwhile. It is an exquisite rock sculpture. Abbey, who pondered its significance in two seasons as a ranger at Arches, which he found to be the most beautiful place on earth, eloquently describes the arch in Desert Solitaire:
"A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us—like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness—that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures."
Delicate Arch does not stand alone in inspiration. More than 200 catalogued arches in this park range in size from a three-foot opening, the minimum considered an arch, to a 291-foot span. The 70,000-acre preserve boasts the greatest density of natural arches in the world.
The rocks, or deposited sediments, of Arches reveal 200 million years of geologic history. The arches themselves were carved in Entrada sandstone, a wind-formed layer about 145 million years old colored salmon, white, and red. Erosion exposed and then began working on it two million years ago. The abrasive action was helped along by earlier cracking of the earth in an uplift. The many parallel fractures were widened, leaving narrow walls, or fins, of sandstone.
The rock is composed of quartz sand cemented together by calcium. The mildly acidic nature of water from rain and snow dissolves that calcium just as it does the limestone in Texas Hill Country caverns. Because the calcium is unevenly distributed, parts of the fins are more easily weathered, washed away, or popped off when the water freezes and expands behind flakes. The erosive forces eventually form holes, or arches, in some of the fins.
There remains, however, yet another major influence in this chain of events—the dominant geologic reason for the lay of the land— which has generated widespread enthusiasm among geologists for this part of the Colorado Plateau, a major topographical division of Utah. That element is salt.
Eons ago a 10,000-square-mile area in the region experienced subsidence just as we have had around Houston in recent years. That vanished depression has been named the Paradox Basin. In its time saltwater from an adjacent sea flowed in and then evaporated, leaving the salt. Erosion from the highlands that rim the basin later covered the salt.
Dr. Richard Mattox, professor emeritus of geology at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, said in a telephone interview that the Paradox Basin consists of an average 3,500 feet of salt, with the Salt Valley in Arches National Park sitting atop about 20,000 feet of salt.
"All those big, long valleys, Moab Valley and the valley in Arches, those are all anticlines that this salt created. They are just big folds that have later been faulted and downdropped."
The salt pushed up the overlying strata because it was lighter than the other rock. "It is just like you take ice and put it in water," Mattox said. "It is going to come up." The resulting upfolds, ridges with a core of salt, are called anticlines. Groundwater dissolved the salt in some and caused their collapse. But others up to thirty miles in length remain today. The trail to Delicate Arch leads up one.
"That is probably the finest area in the world to study those things," Mattox said.
The critical role of salt extends into Canyonlands National Park, less than twenty miles across U.S. Highway 191 from Arches.
In the spectacular triangle of canyons and desert biota between the converging Colorado and Green Rivers in Canyonlands, a new theory—which doesn't dilute in the least the dominant role of salt in the area—concerns a geologic structure called Upheaval Dome. About three miles in diameter, it is a dome with an eroded center in the middle of a ring syncline, a depression where rocks are folded down.
"It was discovered in the 1920s by geologists doing petroleum exploration in the Paradox Basin," said Dr, Eugene Shoemaker, a research geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona. "I had been looking at it for nearly forty years and finally realized what I was looking at."
Three years ago, he advanced a new theory, proposing that Upheaval Dome resulted from an impact crater caused by a small meteorite. He compared the crater to a collapsing hole dug in the ground by man. On the flanks of the hole, rocks slump toward the middle and where they meet, they rise up and form a separate peak. The dome is the central uplift and the structurally detached region surrounding it is the collapsed region.
"The Colorado Plateau has been my geological stamping ground," Shoemaker said in a telephone interview. "So I was cruising along in a taxi just sort of thinking about it after giving a seminar and did the calculation in my head. 'There ought to be an impact structure exposed somewhere on the Colorado Plateau,' I thought. 'Where is it?' And then all of a sudden this dawning realization swept over me: 'Shoemaker, you dope, you've been looking at it all these years.'
"But, you see, there was something missing. I believed [an earlier geologist's] map, and I never should have done it. If it were an impact structure, there should be faults all around the edges."
To prove his calculation, Shoemaker took a graduate student with him to find the faults. "Three miles before we got to the dome," he said, "we looked into a canyon with its beautiful exposures, and there they were. No one had ever bothered to look. I hadn't looked at the outside; I had always looked at the inside."
In coming to grips with how the West was young, a traveler may complement his sightseeing with leisure and meals in Moab, population 5,333. In the 1950s, uranium made it a boomtown. Now, the tourist economy stimulated by the creation of the national parks has built enough small motels and cafes to give its main street the charm of a strip shopping center. A large number of whitewater rafting outfitters book trips from here, and jeeps for rugged tours of the back country may be rented.
If there is anything like seclusion at a national park, and there is, Capitol Reef National Park located 140 miles west of Moab offers it. One of the least visited in the system, it too can awe you with unusual geologic structures, plus introduce the visitor to some downhome richness.
A painter working under a brightly colored umbrella on the desert floor emphasized the artistry of the park. He was at work near an unpaved pioneer wagon road that parallels the soaring, sun-drenched western face of a 100-mile-long landmark of the plateau area. He could draw his strokes from a natural palette of grays, purple, gold, red, green, and browns.
A proper introduction to the landmark wall of rock—a single earthen fold, or monocline, called Waterpocket Fold—is delivered at a small theater in park headquarters. A narrated slide show is presented beneath a window view of a dramatic 1,000-foot bluff on a tributary of the Fremont River, which cuts through the heart of the fold. The names Capitol Reef and Waterpocket Fold assume clarity as you start to fathom this 241,000-acre park's 250-million-year slice of geologic time.
Within a couple of miles of the visitor center grow thousands of fruit trees. They are a remnant, along with a one-room school, of settlers who began arriving on the site of the Fruita community in the late 1870s. For a small charge you may pick cherries, apricots, peaches, pears, apples, and a few nuts in this eighty-acre orchard. The produce starts ripening in June, and various trees bear through October.
Bob Reynolds, the personable superintendent at Capitol Reef National Park, talked to us one evening about the magnificent seclusion of the park, recounting that "day after day people say, 'We had no idea you were here; we were on our way to Bryce [Canyon National Park].' They are just amazed. We now have a road that is a direct shot from Bryce, one of the best known parks. It is a world-class scenic drive, about 100 miles."
That was all we needed to hear. Reynolds met us the next morning before dawn for a twenty-mile drive up State Highway 12 to a 9,200-foot summit in Dixie National Forest. As day broke, we stopped on an overlook to gaze at the horizon about 150 miles east, in the vicinity of the La Sal Mountains. The only distraction was mosquitoes. A rising sun silhouetted the distant peaks, and filtered softly across mountain file after mountain file. The fiery ball emblazoned the clouds, a wide crimson band with a streak of gold. It was intoxicating, and we would soon discover that nature had lost its head as well on this road.
On the homeward descent, after a brief sobering view of a power plant belching smoke over in Arizona, we balked time and again, first at a herd of deep brown elk in a dark green meadow and then at several groups of browsing mule deer moving among the white trunks of aspen.
Coming off the mountain, we ate breakfast at the Sunglow Motel and cafe in the nearby ranching community of Bicknell. It had generally good food, particularly pies that sounded forbidding at first. One of the favorites in a tasting binge was the pickle pie (I swear) topped with whipping cream. If you wished, you could trade one of your own offbeat pie recipes for one of pie maker Cula Ekker's, though she was not sure how the sweet pickle concoction would end up at lower elevations.
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