Photos by Voni Glaves
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| Primary Voting is happening now. Vote Early and Often. |
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| Debbie knows the way to a goat's heart is FRITOS and Milk! |
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| Paul interview the candidates. |
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| While Mom keeps a lookout, the candidates plot strategy |
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| Milk Break |
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| Annabell is leading by a tiny margin. |
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| Time to go back to work . . . |
Journey to the Edge of Texas
Chapter 2--Poetic Derivative
A
relative's life resembles mine in the written word and in mental
faults. Either it wasn't known or the family didn't talk about it at
the time I first entered the hospital. From what I learned at a panel
discussion of doctors, it would have helped in the diagnosis of my
illness.
As it
was explained to me, the initial psychosis of a manic depressive or a
schizophrenic looks similar. A psychiatrist will have something to go
on in differentiating the two in the patient if informed of such
illness among his relatives.
I would
learn years later that I was first called a schizophrenic, which
could account for my not getting treatment for manic depression for a
decade. Yes, it might have helped, though the drugs that did weren't
around.
But
even today my genetic interest focuses on Kenneth. Uncle Kenneth. On
the paternal side. Leatherwood.
I
participated in his eulogy and did not recognize his closeness. I
quoted him:
"The
sadness of farewell is good,
"It
speaks of love divine."
He
wrote poetry as a pastime, as did his father (my grandfather). I
never bothered to take up the habit, but when the first piece of this
memoir was compared to poetry, I became more attentive. Here was
linkage that swallowed the duels with demons that we had both
inherited, the two-edged sword of our genetic makeup.
As
river guide Bones would say when talking about the little isolated
mountain ranges below the Rocky Mountains, "They are like little
chips off the great block." And so were we.
Maybe
all along I did reserve a special place for my uncle. In the shared
illness of manic depression. I once in a delusion thought of him as
Walt Disney. I was playing a record from a 1958 visit to the
Disneyland theme park and imagined Kenneth, not Disney, was
moderating the tour from the puff of a steam locomotive out of the
station to the adventures of a river jungle. This was a strange
twist, because a favorite uncle on the maternal side had flown me to
the then-new fantasyland.
Uncle
Kenneth's medical history pains me. He did not have the benefit of
most psychiatric drugs, not even lithium, for most of his nights, and
the terror (I will call it that, for that is what delusions usually
are, contrary to some learned thought that we patients are enjoying
them)--the terror increased with age. I first became aware of his
problem when my dad was called late Christmas Eve to retrieve his
brother from a country jailhouse near the Trinity River. It wasn't
that he was violent, more that he was "out of his head" and
a danger driving. No rural hospital was nearby to treat him, so the
small jail became a safe haven--as it would for me in one of my later
episodes in Oklahoma.
When my
family got Uncle Kenneth the next day, I took the wheel of his car,
and he climbed in beside me. He splashed on a cheap cologne to mask
the smell of days on the road without a bath. I made reference to the
fact that he should be in a hospital. "Butch, that doesn't
become you," he said, irritated. He had, until then called me
Butch with fondness.
Uncle
Kenneth would not have benefited from the rudimentary drugs available
then, even if he would have taken them, which he would not. He damned
all drugs and doctors, would not take medicine, and certainly would
not have stood for the laboratory tests that go with lithium.
Why
was he crisscrossing the state? He was looking for an old girl
friend, he said. I could relate later, having stomped through Phoenix
and swamping The New York Times on
similar quests. In Kenneth's instance (which took place in the early
eighties) the lost love dated back to the Depression. He didn't
mention his wife of forty years, left alone and apprehensive that
particular Christmas.
In
finer moments Uncle Kenneth penned poems that, as I said at his
graveside service, revealed his values, his religion, and his
reverence toward others. Several were read.
"Enduring,"
he called this one:
...And
I met so many people
Who
like me were searching too,
And
we climbed upon a steeple
Just
to watch for folks like you.
Thus
my patience was rewarded,
And
the end reward I gained;
I
no longer was retarded--
My
happiness no longer feigned.
I
had found a thing enduring;
It
would never have an end;
It
would have the power of curing:
I
had found myself a friend.
He
received inspiration from nature.
A
trip to Aspen leaves you gasping.
And
the ski life finds you grasping,
Not
alone the chair you ride in,
But
the God we all abide in;
Grasping
that His work tremendous,
Huge,
colossal and stupendous,
Dwarf
the human mind's conception
of
God's glorious reception
...We
are micro-organisms;
It
is He who made the chasms,
It
is He who made it all;
From
His grace let us not fall.
Dr.
Robert Hirschfeld, the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at
the University of Texas at Galveston, was asked, "Does this
illness strike creative people such as writers, entertainers, and
musicians?"
His
answer, at my federal health discrimination trial against The
Houston Post was, "There's an
increased frequency of bipolar illness (the modern term for manic
depression) in such people."
"Why
is that?" Steve Petrou, my attorney, asked. "Why does it
target some of those creative people?"
"People
who are creative go beyond the bounds of the more normal conformity
in terms of thinking and in terms of behavior, and there are some
psychiatric illnesses where that happens and certainly bipolar
illness is one of those.
"The
problem is when it gets completely out of hand, these peple are not
productive. ...Kay Jamison recently wrote about the lives of a number
of people (who) had bipolar illness. ...Many of these artists or
composers would have very productive periods until it got frankly
manic in which case--or would be depressed in which case--they were
not productive at all."
(Kay
R. Jamison's book is Touched With Fire:
Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic.)
Uncle
Kenneth suffered severe brain damage when he drove in front of an
eighteen-wheel truck while manic. He regained only limited
recognition during long years in a nursing home and died in 1998. He
had written effusively in a narrative poem of family history and of a
rosebush planted by his pioneer grandmother in 1882:
Now
in comfort I look westward
As
my evening shadows lengthen,
And
I venture forth one pleading;
I
will walk my way in comfort,
Soothed,
serene, and witbout anguish,
If
you promise me but only
I'll
be buried in Lampasas,
In
the Oak Hill Cemetery,
Where
grows the Rose of Life Eternal,
There
lives the Rosebush Everlasting.
It was
a promise kept.
Carlton Leatherwood's America:Texas Prepared Me for This Journey
to See Our Country
In
the 1980s I got close and personal to Texas. Now begins a similar
pilgrimage to see America. Our state took an untold number of forays
to grasp even a modicum of understanding of my rich heritage. Today,
look back with me to those golden years, especially the time spent in
the Big Bend.
Here
is what I said in an unpublished book:
If
I were as wise as prize-winning author John Steinbeck, I would have
known that this journey--the compilation of a book called "The
Other Side of Texas"--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."
My
journey started innocently enough. Friends up in New England wanted
to travel in Texas as I had done in their part of the country. I
wasn't sure what to show them, however, so I looked around. Taking
them to see an oatmeal sculpture of an armadillo holding a bottle of
Lone Star beer didn't seem right. Too much of an overstatement of
state chic. I went on to search for subtler pleasures.
I
found excitement in an armadillo on the loose in the lush woodland of
East Texas. I discovered that the only wild flock of one of the
rarest birds on earth, the whooping crane, is the superlative reason
for visiting the Coastal Bend of Texas. (More than 400 of the roughly
540 other species of birds in the state also live or migrate there.)
For some visitors to the state, in fact, birding may surpass all
other attractions; national authority Roger Tory Peterson says Texas
boasts the greatest variety in the country, with California a distant
second.
The
tremendous beauty of the coastal region is not immediately apparent.
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
rapidlly and blue crabs thrive. You then possess something with which
to contemplate the richness of the land. And it is rich. Roy
Bedichek, a nature writer, said the Texas coast is a storehouse of
natural wealth unparallelled 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.
The
more I travelled the more I got to know the people of Texas. One of
my favorites was a consummate storyteller by the name of Hallie
Stillwell, who had a ranch in the Big Bend region of West Texas. On a
wintry day in 1985 she spoke in possibly the only sunny spot in the
state. A massive snowstorm had blanketed the desert and many other
areas with ice crystals. The occasion, however, was appropriate
enough--the Cookie Chilloff at Terlingua, a spoof of the more
publicized Chili Cookoff.
"I
like to talk about our old citizens, our old cowboys," Stillwell
said. "One I like to tell about is Aaron Green. We always
called him Noisy. He lived on the east side of the Chisos Mountains
at a place called Dugout. One time he was asked what he did at a
dance. He said he took the school teacher. That's all he said.
"The
next day somebody asked the school teacher if Noisy said anything. It
was a twenty-mile ride horseback down there and twenty-mile ride
back. They danced all night. The teacher said, 'Oh, yeah, Noisy
talked quite a bit." She said as they rode down he said, 'You
see that owl sitting over in the tree?' The next day as they came
back, he said, 'Ain't it got big eyes.'"
"Another
tale is on Lou Buttrill and John Henderson," Stillwell
continued. "Lou and the neighbors were having this roundup, and
in those days all of the ranchers gathered together and worked their
cattle from one outfit.
"Lou
happened to have charge of this one. This early morning they were
roping out the mounts for each cowboy, so Lou said to John, 'I want
you to ride Old Don.' John said, 'I don't want to ride Old Don; he's
the worst pitching horse in this country.' Lou said, 'Why old Don
hasn't pitched in a year.'
"So
John said, 'Okay, I'll ride him.' He saddled him up and when he did
Old Don just let him have the awfullest pitching that ever was. John
was one of the best riders in the country, and he rode him all right.
After the horse settled down and they were driving the cattle, John
rode up to Lou and said, 'I thought you told me Old Don hadn't
pitched in a year.' Lou said, 'He ain't been rode in a year.'"
By
the time I got to the Hill Country, aptly called the heartland of
Texas, the simple meal of travel I was preparing for my out-of-state
friends had turned into a feast. To the courses of natural history
and people I had added a third dimension, physical activity.
I
had decided I would immerse them in two extremes of the spectrum of
water excursions. We would raft the beautiful desert canyons of the
Rio Grande and frolic in old-fashioned swimming holes in the hills
that an 1854 traveler, the famous landscape designer Frederick Law
Olmsted, described thus: "For sunny beauty of scenery and
luxuriance of soil, it stands quite unsurpassed in my experience, and
I believe no region of equal extent in the world can show equal
attractions."
I
could have sandwiched in any number of other activities, including
ranch life or more resort-oriented diversions such as tennis. Or a
blend of both: If the laid-back life of a ranch had appeal, but a
person's game was tennis, not horses and cattle, John Newcombe's
Tennis Ranch awaited us. The instruction in a five-day package at
Newk's is not laid-back, but life after the courts moves at a slower
pace in and around a fine old rock ranch home on a hill blanketed
with acorns in the fall. And any time you sit down to a meal, you sit
down with people who have one thing in common: they love tennis.
I
was relaxing in the whirlpool after a particularly tough day and
asked a group of Oklahoma women who come every year why they put out
so much energy. It couldn't be for all the Gatorade and oranges a
person wants at breaks on the courts. No, one told me, "It's
three hours less than I iron a week."
Newcombe,
an Australian who was singles champion at Wibledon in 1967, 1970,
and 1971 and the U.S. Open in 1973, bought the ranch with Graeme
Mozeley and Clarence Mabry, who coached a string of world-class
players at Trinity University in San Antonio for twenty years. The
Aussie flavor is found at the bar in Foster's beer. The brew comes in
a container the size of an oil can.
I
started bumping into things cosmopolitan at Newk's. That shouldn't
have surprised me, since Texas, like the whole United States, is a
melting pot. Some 30 cultural and ethnic groups settled it. And at
the tennis ranch in late afternoon teenagers with skins of varied
hues filled up many of the courts.
I
bumped into all sorts of cutural artifacts more often associated with
cities before I finished visiting the isolated parts of Texas. I ran
into the name of Monet in the desert of the Big Bend. At the ghost
town of Terlingua I heard song about Isla Mujeres, an island
destinatin of Houston yachtsmen across the Gulf of Mexico. And at the
tiny classical music oasis of Round Top east of the Hill Country I
learned to appreciate Schubert.
By
this time I was yearning to add to the book the intellectual pursuits
of the cities, where the dreamers lead campaigns for great
symphonies, theaters, and libraries and plan America's charges into
space. But I had gorged too much for one journey. The taste buds
weren't responding. And probably a publisher wouldn't to such a
gluttonous volume. My friends would have to settle for the grand
architecture of Houston on the way from the airport.
My
journey also took a nostalgic curve through East Texas, as good trips
sometimes do. 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.
On
my trip, I drove north through the pine forests, 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 out fresh tomatoes, beans, and squash at farmers' markets in
Lufkin and Tyler. Later a friend and 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 the Victorian period.
Texas
is all things to all people. The mix of cultures has created a breed
of people not unlike the longhorns, the tough cattle of crossed
ancestry that also developed on this land. We Texans share the
resourcefulness of the Dutch, the industry of Germans, the colorful
dress of the Spanish, and the indomitable spirit of the British. To
survive, many have to have the same toughness of the cattle. Survive,
and thrive, they do.
The
Coffee Cup: Artist Lori Griffin
To
Open a Show With Lots of Texture
"ANEW,"
the art show of Lori Griffin, opens Monday at Earth and Fire Imports
Gallery in Terlingua and runs through March 16.
It
is a show of series, one inspired by a book about West Texas
creatures that the the artist is writiing for her two-year-old
grandson.
There
will be four pieces of the West Texas Predator Series in the show.
Other series include Tree Folk and Colorful Crosses.
"But
as always, there are functional pieces," Lori said. "And I
believe that everyone should be able to afford art, so the prices
range from $10 to $800. The art is unique and intended for both kids
and adults to enjoy."
She
said there is lots of texture.
"Every
piece is made using upcycling," she explained. "I take
"old" materials to make "new" art. Making
upcycling art requires combining methods and techniques. It is
challenging and time consuming, and draws on ones imagination.
"The
end result is funky collage art," she concluded. "I love
making it!"
The
Earth and Fire gallery is in Ghost Town.
The
artist's reception for the Out with the Old--In with the New show of
textured art is Monday from 4 to 7 p.m.
Oh,
and that lucky grandson is named Logan.
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| Rush Warren and Frac on top of Tres Cuevas |
From
the top of Tres Cuevas Mountain, you can see forever, but at the
lower elevation, where frac'ing is discussed, the view is not so
clear.
I
accepted the invitation of Rush Warren to visit him at Lone Star
Ranch, near the base of the mountain. It is his and wife Penni's
home. The ranch is north of Lajitas International Airport and is
named after Lone Star Mine, which is located on the top and back side
of Tres Cuevas Mountain.
Rush
says the original mining town of Terlingua was here. It is his
understanding that 3,000 to 5,000 people inhabited the town around
1900. Several ruins still stand, including the Terlingua Jail and a
machine shop.
Rush
is president of Warren Acquisition, Inc., whose business is oil and
gas exploration. He had told me that frac'ing in oil and gas fields
dated to the 1970's. With documentary movies like "Gasland,"
which portrayed gas coming out of water faucets being ignited and a
story last week headlining "Big Oil, Bad Air: Fracking the Eagle
Ford Shale of South Texas," I wanted to get an oilman's opinion.
We
had exchanged email on the subject, and Rush sent me an article by
the Geological Society of America (GSA) that it said was a primer for
the general public and journalists. Rush gave the article a solid "A"
and nearly an "A plus." To begin the Big Bend Times ongoing
coverage of the issue, I will quote liberally from the write-up.
Rush
does take exception with the article's use of the word fracking
instead
of frac'ing.
Incidentally, he named his labrador retriever Frac more than nine
years ago.
As
we were seated on his sofa, the area oilman and neighbor stood by
this email assertion:
"I
hear of people claiming to be environmentalists banging the war drums
of environmental concerns of frac'ing, which for some reason they
call 'fracking.' I have yet to actually hear of anything that has
actually happened as a direct result of frac'ing.
"I
have heard them attempt to claim that it causes earthquakes and water
quality issues, among other disasters in an attempt to scare gullible
people, but facts backing their stories are lacking. It is
interesting that even though we have been using huge frac jobs since
the 1970's that all of a sudden now it causes earthquakes.
"Frac'ing
may be new news to them, but oil people have known about fracs for
decades. These stories are created to instill fear in the people in
order to promote a political agenda against the use of hydrocarbons
in general."
According
to the GSA report, hydraulic fracturing, also called frac'ing, is a
technological process used in the development of natural gas and oil
resources. Used commercially since the 1940s, it has only relatively
recently been used to extract gas and oil from shales and other tight
reserves. Development of lower cost, more effective fracturing
fluids, with horizontal well drilling and subsurface imaging, created
a technological breakthrough that is largely responsible for the
increase in domestic production of shale gas in the last few years
and longer for tight gas.
Continued
use of hydralic fracturing can be expected, given projections of
future shale gas and tight gas contributions to total U.S. gas
production, unless it is banned or replaced by other technologies.
Hydraulic fracturing has expanded oil and gas development to new
areas of the United States and internationally, including Canada,
Australia, and Argentina. In contrast, some governments have limited
the use of it. For example, South Africa only recently lifted a
moratorium, New York State has a moratorium, and France has banned
its use.
Hydraulic fracturing has become
a highly contentious public policy issue because of concerns about
the environmental and health effects of its use. What are the
environmental risks? What are the health risks from the chemicals
injected into the ground? Will it take away water needed for food
production and cities? Does it trigger earthquakes? Does expansion of
this technology for fossil fuels mean a decreased commitment to
renewable energy technology?
Oil
and natural gas, which are hydrocarbons, reside in the pore spaces
between grains of rock (called reservoir rock) in the subsurface. If
geologic conditions are favorable, hydrocarbons flow freely from
reservoir rocks to oil and gas wells. Production from these rocks is
traditionally referred to as "conventional" hydrocarbon
reserves. However, in some rocks, hydrocarbons are trapped within
microscopic pore space in the rock. This is especially true in
fine-grained rocks, such as shales, that have very small and poorly
connected pore spaces not conducive to the free flow of liquid or gas
(called low-permeability rocks).
Natural gas that occurs in the
pore spaces of shale is called shale gas. Some sandstones and
carbonate rocks (such as limestone) with similarly low permeability
are often referred to as "tight" formations. Geologists
have long known that large quantities of oil and natural gas occur in
formations like these (often referred to as tight oil or gas).
Hydraulic fracturing can enhance the permeability of these rocks to a
point where oil and gas can economically be extracted.
Frac'ing
is a technique used to stimulate production of oil and gas after a
well has been drilled. It consists of injecting a mixture of water,
sand, and chemical additives through a well drilled into an oil- or
gas-bearing rock formation under high but controlled pressure. The
process is designed to create small cracks within (and thus fracture)
the formation and propagate those fractures to a desired distance
from the well bore by controlling the rate, pressure, and timing of
fluid injection. Engineers use pressure and fluid characteristics to
restrict those fractures to the target reservoir rock, typically
limited to a distance of a few hundred feet from the well. Proppant
(sand or sometimes other inert material, such as ceramic beads) is
carried into the newly formed fractures to keep them open after the
pressure is released and allow fluids (generally hydrocarbons) that
were trapped in the rock to flow through the fractures more
efficiently.
Some
of the water/chemical/proppant fracturing fluids remain in the
subsurface. Some of this fluid mixture (called flowback water)
returns to the surface, often along with oil, natural gas, and water
that was already naturally present in the producing formation. The
natural formation water is known as produced water and much of it is
highly sailine. The hydrocarbons are separated from the returned
fluid at the surface, and the flowback and produced water is
collected in tanks or lined pits. Handling and disposal of returned
fluids has historically been part of all oil and gas drilling
operations, and is not exclusive to wells that have been
hydraulically fractured. Similarly, proper well construction is an
essential component of all well-completion operations, not only wells
that involve hydraulic fracturing. Well completion and construction,
along with fluid disposal, are inherent to oil and gas development.
.jpg) |
| Desolate machine shop |
.jpg) |
| Terlingua Jail |
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