By Carlton Leatherwood
It's about the mania.
It's about old age.
This magazine blog was born in my 20-something episode of mania a couple of months ago. It wasn't a solitary thought--and it wasn't all bad. I began donating my copies of the New York Times to the Terlingua School library. A plan for the town's musicians to appear in large venues in Texas cities was hatched.
But these are mostly beyond my everyday scope.
Absent the mania, I would have known the online magazine would demand more than a single writer. I would have known the idea for our talented musicians would call for sponsors with money far beyond my small bank account.
However, the Times contribution to the school is doable. I am approaching 73, and since Terlingua seems the only compassionate and loving place for my sometimes inappropriate and insulting behavior, I hope to stay a good many years.
Voni Glaves, the editor and contributor of photo essays to the Big Bend Times, has agreed to discontinue the magazine with one exception. She wants to publish the rest of my memoir. I agree with that. It only requires that I write a final chapter on my years in Terlingua--and it may be the best of my life's work. I couldn't remember where it ended, and so I read the current final chapter. I went wow, I want to go back and read it all.
The doctor did not hospitalize me during this mania. I want to get the reason for that in the ending. Past hospitalizations are noteworthy because of the dedicated employees in state institutions. As I was about to leave one, I asked an attendant if it were hard dealing with crazy people all the time. She said no, but take her mother and cousins at home. Now that's crazy. These are all real people. Another attendant, as tall as a basketball player, had worked the late night shift so he could take care of his daughter through her growing up years.
A friend and I have decided the three episodes in Terlingua, one every two or three years, were caused by the success of my two books and women. I don't know what the doctor will think of that. But I've got two good women friends who don't want romance and have seen me through episodes, so maybe that will suffice. I would like the memoir published as a book; there's time to deal with that.
The editor of the memoir was James Vowell of Los Angeles. We lost contact during one of my manic episodes and when he was diagnosed with brain disease.
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So, the plan going forward is to publish a Chapter of the Book a week.
I think you'll be looking forward to that as much as I.
Voni Glaves, Editor
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Photo Essay
By Voni Glaves
Spring in Big Bend is about the People too
About the Rocket Fuel Party and the St. Patrick's Day Parade
And more . . .
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Pena Knows Roots, Mules
He was just like John Wayne says the grandson who heard him tell stories around a fire after a big meal, about an extremely large family dating in the Big Bend to the 1800s.
And Romaldo Pena, the grandson, shares his own tale of mules with a trail crew in his cherished mountains.
"My grandfather on my dad's side was my hero," Pena said as clouds swathed his and wife Jennifer's mountain-side home. "He was tall, wore boots and a hat, and had a horse. He would go outside to smoke and drink coffee after a big meal. And he would tell stories for hours. This is how I got to hear those stories, and I loved to hear them."
According to Antonio Pena, the grandfather, Romaldo's great great grandfather was a Native American who was captured as a child by settlers in Redford. He was taken in by a Joe Bostillos. When the child became a man, he married and was the father of Romaldo's great grandmother.
The great grandfather was born in Lajitas in 1893.
"Of my grandfather's siblings, Antonio was the only one who would talk about it. And so he talked about us being part of Native Americans. With me it didn't matter. I know where my roots come from. It was kinda neat to know that from my grandfather."
On Pena's maternal side of the family, his grandmother came from Belton.
"She came down here with my great grandfather, who worked in the Terlingua mines," Pena said. "My grandfather came from Mexico and left that country when he was 14 because of the revolution.
"I've heard from several of my family that he and one of his siblings were in town to get supplies and when they came back to the house, the federalise had killed the family because they were helping Pancho Villa. What my grandfather told my uncle was that when he was a boy of 8 or 9 he had shined Pancho Villa's boots and that my great grandfather and Pancho Villa were friends."
Pena told of the large size of his family, that on his dad's side there are 38 first cousins and on his mom's it is about the same.
Pena has worked for the National Park Service for 16 years, joining a trail crew after being in the oil field. Born in Alpine, he had spent the first 15 years of his life in the park, at Castolon.
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| Pena loves feeding birds |
"The reason I came back to the Big Bend was that I missed the mountains," he explained. He said that he loves what he is doing now, working on roads. But the mule team of the trail crew was an interesting juncture.
"I was around horses when I was little because my grandfather had a farm in Redford. On the trail crew you have the workers, the work leaders, and then the packer, who is the guy that tends the mules that take the supplies and equipment up. And so I hit it off with the packer right away because I liked animals.
"He started teaching me how to pack, and I became the assistant packer when he was not around."
Back in 2003, Pena was working at Rio Grande Village. A ranger called and said he needed a packer, that he had a fatality on the South Rim. So Pena went up there and helped pack out the body. He had been taught sling loads, diamond hitches--all kind of hitches to move things.
Why mules instead of horses?
"Mules are a lot better for this part of the country," Pena said. "They are a lot tougher."
Pena worked with a trail crew and then became a packer/worker. "Nowadays, everybody learns how to pack," he said. "Some people get scared of animals. There's people that can do it; there's people that can't."
A pack string is mules all tied together. There is a lead rope and then off the pack saddles is what is called a pig tail, a piece of twine. You tie the lead rope onto that so that the mules don't step on each other. If something goes wrong, the mule can break that pig tail so he can get away from harms way.
"I've only had two or three wrecks," Pena said. "Sometimes when you are going up the trail hikers want to touch a mule when it is going by, and sometimes it will cause a mule to jump off the trail. Or sometimes you will go through an area where there is a mountain lion or bear, and the mules will smell them and get really nervous. The best thing to do to eliminate that is to get a little bit of Vicks and rub that inside their noses so that all they are smelling is Vicks.
"When you're going along the trail," he continued, "you have trees, so when you have the mules tied off from each other, if they get themselves around a tree, that can be disastrous. They pull, and it can break the neck of the one with the lead rope.
"Or branches that are sharp can poke into a mule. If you have a hurt mule, you are going to have to start carrying the load for it. You try to take care of them.
"Back then we had two really good mules, Du and Nedle. We used to get a green mule and tie him up front. And we would put Du in the middle because he knew what was going on. When you put a green mule in the middle, they try to go around because they don't know what is going on. Du would bite or kick at them. The older mules will show the younger mules what to do. When I packed that person out, I took Du along because he's gentle, he's calm, he doesn't get excited. He knows the trails."
There are eight mules now.
"In the past we had people who did not know what they were doing ending up hurting mules. There was one person who was going up Pinnacles. If you go around switchbacks, you have to go slow around them, and that's the time to look and see if the mule's load rides good, or going up the trail, that's the time to see if a rock's caught in a hoof. The mule will have a limp to it.
"She was not paying attention, and she came around the switchbacks really fast and dragged one over the side. You have to have patience. After awhile in that job, you know the animals, the animals know you. The packer that is there now is a hellish little packer."
I asked if Jennifer, who is from Dallas, had taken him to the city?
Romaldo had this reply:
"Oh, yes, she has really changed the way I see things. When she told me we were going to New York City for four days, I was not too thrilled. Back East is a little crowded. But our room was on the 17th floor, and I could see Central Park. And Jane Brown, who lives in Terlingua, was our guide. I fell in love with New York."
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Journey to the Edge of Texas
A Memoir of Love, Travel, Natural Beauty, Writing, and One Man's Victory Over Manic Depression
Chapter 5--Girl Crazy
By Carlton LeatherwoodThe 1980s got worse and better at the same time. While I explored Texas unsuspecting of the repetitive, vicious nature of my disease, I found a winning combination in female companionship. Some of it was romance.
Mind you, I was in my 40s. The decades before didn't compare, nor have they compared since.
It was a golden dawn, chocolate on chocolate, diamonds forever.
More often than not, the women were in the Unitarian Church and the Sierra Club, both liberal organizations, both of which contained beliefs that embodied common sense, to borrow from conservatives. Jesus was the son of God as we are all the sons of God. Women and men are equal and play on the same field. The natural world is our sacred trust. Ultimately, I think we saw the environment and God as one.
We dated vigorously. And although the church's minister spoke against sexual freedom, many of these women, and men, exercised it, it being in the days before AIDS made the front pages. It became my last liberation from teen years without parental sex education, that duty passed along to the church. And the church corrupted the meaning of adultery. All sex outside of marriage did not break the Ten Commandments.
Joy.
My companion protested that her friends were spending the summer in Colorado while she vacationed in humid East Texas. I quieted her with a ride on a bicycle built for two in Jefferson, Texas, along with the pursuit of other treasures of a grand scavenger hunt in the region.
The hunt was made possible by two books, The Best of East Texas and The Best of East Texas II, written by Bob Bowman. Although his imprecise directions could be aggravating, they turned a driving tour into a game on a broad scale.
The treasures were both winners and losers, something akin to those discovered in adventure games played on computers. One of the first and easiest discoveries was the East Texas Oil Museum in Kilgore, Texas. The museum's innovative "muddy" boom-town street provided fun insight into what became in the 1930s the largest oil field in the world. The museum was a tribute to Dallas tycoon H. L. Hunt, who made his fortune in the field, and to J. M. "Dad" Joiner, who persevered to drill the discovery well. That well, the Daisy Bradford No. 3, was still pumping.
Country Tavern near Kilgore was the Marfreless watering hole of East Texas. As at the Houston establishment, no sign told what was behind the doors. The secret was truly the best barbecued ribs around. As the guide said, the dark but respectable Gregg County honky-tonk clinged "to the northeast elbow of a highway intersection a few miles west of Kilgore."
Being summer, we headed for the "best swimming hole," called Blue Hole in Angelina County. A turn "less than ten miles out of Zavalla" proved difficult to locate because of the lack of a marker on the U.S. Forest Service road. I don't recall why the directions to cross three wooden bridges and turn right didn't work out, but we ended up stymied by a huge mudhole as did friends who earlier followed the guide. When we finally found the swimming hole, the loud radios of youths on the sandstone cliffs surrounding the two-acre lake forced us to turn the swim into a heads-under-water dunking session.
We could feel we were close to the proverbial treasure chest in Jefferson. We rented bicycles near the Excelsior House, the "best country hotel," and took a leisurely ride through a neighborhood studded with Victorian houses. The Victorian period influenced architecture from 1860 to 1900. One of the best examples from the era in Texas was the House of the Seasons at Jefferson. Athough it retained a Greek Revival floor plan of a columnar front gallery, central hall and balanced rooms, the detail was Victorian. A cupola topped off cornices and round-headed widows. A view of the garden through the cupola's red, green, yellow, and blue glass reminded one of the different seasons. The public could tour the Seasons home and others, including the antebellum Freeman Plantation built in 1850. Slaves worked its 1,000-acre cotton and sugar-cane fields.
"Cotton is where the business was" long after the slaves were gone, said Sam Vaughn, who with his brother Tom owned and operated the T.C. Lindsey & Co. general store at Jonesville, or according to understatement in the guidebook, "a few miles east of Marshall." The store came with a gin.
"The size of a cotton farm (in the first half of the last century) depended on the size of the family," Vaughn said "But the government changed the allotments. A family (that) had a 40-acre cotton allotment and was doing the best they could had it cut to three acres."
The gin processed a record 2,976 bales of coton in 1937. It closed after ginning four bales in 1973.
Cotton had paid the bills for food and supplies of up to 500 families who shopped at the general store, established on the same spot in the mid-1800s. The shelves were still packed with everything from cheese to clothes, and display space held tools such as the Kelly plow (forged in northeast Texas and no longer for sale).
The store on our tour was built in 1922. Sam Vaughn began working there as a bookkeeper in 1928, and bought it ten years later. His brother Tom joined him in 1947. Tom talked of selling out, but he did not wish to chance closing a store special enough to be a part of Disney movies. In a telephone call he got as excited as his brother about the film role of the store, saying the name was changed to Vainer Store when The Long Hot Summer was reshot for television with Jason Robards and Ava Gardner in 1985. The place was more than the "best general store" in East Texas. It was the treasure chest.
At the point where the Rio Grande turns from southeast to northeast is a canyon called Mariscal. This is the decisive turn that gives rise to the name, the Big Bend. River runners simply call it The Bend. Here, in the middle canyon of the park, black rock meets white. Limestone slabs of midnight are followed by intriguing imitations of icebergs. Patterns of reflected light swirl on the opposite wall. Low water furnishes another strange twist to our ten-mile passage through this wonderland. When one of our rafts jammed in the rocky shallows, several vaquera, or Mexican cowboys, came to the rescue. Roping the raft, they pulled it downriver on horseback.
Bones was again my guide this trip. He was appreciative that the woman I shared this outing with could wake up early laughing.
In an afternoon rafting through the canyon we saw goldeneye and bufflehead ducks and yellow-rumped warblers. Leatherstem, a plant used by Indians to stop the flow of blood from wounds, grew in an arroyo. So did a nut-bearing guayacan tree. Beavers had parted Bermuda grass to slide into the river. And man had left his mark on the banks too. A recluse had abandoned icons in a reed hut. Someone else had once operated a wax factory here; its rusty parts remained. Wax makers added the locally abundant candelilla plant to a mixture of water and sulfuric acid to create their product. When the wax floated to the top of the vat, it was scooped off. It went mostly into chewing gum.
The most important consideration when hiking trails beyond the Pecos River boils down to water. People haven't adapted to the desert and abutting country as have two of the most frequently seen creatures on the highways, the roadrunner by day and the jackrabbit by night.
The roadrunner puts the sun to work in energy conservation. It lowers its body temperature in the night chill by as much as seven degrees from a normal 101 degrees. At dawn, the bird suns a patch of back skin by raising its feathers and spreading its wings. The skin acts as a solar panel, increasing the roadrunner's temperature without burning energy. The jackrabbit hops into a depression shaded by a bush and radiates heat skyward from its large ears, thus reducing the use of water by removing body heat. Humans, of course, don't grow big ears, and we don't have lots of feathers. We depend on the evaporation of perspiration to remove excess body heat from exercise and the sun. The water lost through perspiration needs replenishing. You require maintenance of a water level within narrow limits. It is essential for physical and mental efficiency, and ultimately life.
A naturalist advised hikers to drink water even if they aren't thirsty. "Warm temperatures and low humidity can be deceiving," he said. "The reason that 94 degrees at 10 percent humidity feels so comfortable is that perspiration evaporates as quickly as it appears, thus keeping your surface skin temperature cool.. This can result in rapid dehydration in an individual who feels comfortable and thinks that he hasn't even worked up a sweat."
And water out here is scarce. Virtually no streams cross the trails as they do in Colorado or California, where a person can dip a refreshing cup of water almost at will. The situation limits the backpacker. The pack must contain a reservoir, a gallon of water for each person for each day of the trip--a rule of thumb averaging variations in individuals, topography, and climate. A gallon weighs 8.3 pounds. For a three-day trip that adds up to 25 pounds of water for each back. You can see the limitation. The weight makes more than a long weekend uncomfortable and almost unthinkable.
Otherwise, backpacking looks as easy as putting one foot in front of the other repetitiously. Usually, it is. But in my first adversity in the sport, I lost a young woman figuratively--and literally--on a trail in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Worse, she panicked, and we sideswiped disaster.
Later, I would hunt out pages on wilderness survival previously given scant attention in fifteen years of on-and-off backpacking. A surprising number of books about backpacking simply warn against panic. Many ignore the basic procedures that I also ignored which led to trouble. Even the authoritative walker Colin Fletcher admitted to never really giving the matter of survival the thought it seems to deserve.
Fletcher noted that "this kind of 'survival' mostly amounts to 'experience.'" He quoted an adviser on the subject as saying, "What it generally amounts to, anyway, with inexperiened people, is simply not giving in to terror. That's what usually happens: ignorance--then panic ..." My tale of woe illustrates the point. I share it for emphasis and to warn that, as basic as walking is, in rough terrain with a house on your back, there is more to it
The Guadalupe Mountains are, collectively, one of the more rugged places in the state. You can climb to the highest point in Texas, Guadalupe Peak (8,751 feet), and gaze on salt flats a mile below. More of the largest known fossil reef appears here than anywhere else. El Capitan, a 2,000-foot cliff, rises dramatically as you approach the park from the south.
Sara (not her real name) and I averaged 1.3 miles an hour in a late afternoon climb from the car parked at Pine Springs Campground to Pine Top, a primitive campsite up four miles of steep switchbacks. We packed four gallons of water (35 pounds, 4 ounces, including containers) for the 48-hour outing. A two-gallon plastic container of distilled water found at grocery stores fit perfectly in the bottom of a pack. The other water dangled on the outside of both packs in four quart-and-a-half bottles.
My companion had shown commitment to nutrition and readily agreed to draw up the menu. She bagged and labeled each meal. The entrees included lamb curry, sweet and sour pork, and shrimp creole (all freeze dried). In addition, she got ingredients to mix for gorp (a trail snack combining nuts, sunflower seed kernels, raisins, and coconut) and cereal at a health food store. And there was no denying my companion's fitness.
Sara had not backpacked before, only a trial day hike with full pack before the trip. She outdistanced me on the trail the seond day, however, with a drive that approached macho. Thus was born the first mistake. I take it easy, smell the pine-scented air often, and let a less-than-fit body plod along. I ignored rules of the path, which go something like this: Travel at the speed of the slowest, keep each other in sight, plan your route carefully before setting off. But in good weather, on a rocky trail along a dry gully arched with trees, with a bright and physically tough companion, I relaxed the guardian role dictated by my experience. It was not a concious decision, just something felt--the opposite extreme of caution felt with a child. And I lost her. She vanished, and in less than two miles I reached a junction that pointed the way to fear.
We had spoken of having lunch at the Mescalero campsite, mentioned on trail signs, without consulting a map. The junction marker showed it .9 miles in the opposite direction of Bush Mountain, our next campsite. Translated, that's about 1.5 hours out of the way. and that's the first of three reasons I decided my companion didn't head to Mescalero. Almost no one with a pack 25 percent overweight would travel such an extra distance for lunch. Experience on the shakedown hike and planning this one also told me she was adamant against backtracking, and going to Mescalero meant later backtracking to the junction. Finally, she wanted to arrive in camp before dark, by about 4, and that was hardly possible by extending the walk. I headed for Bush Mountain. What was outside of reason for me, though, was not for her. As I later learned in certain terms, Mescalero meant lunch to her, and a junction was no red flag urging her to wait.
And water would play its hand. My companion, alone in wilderness for the first time, had panicked. The couple who "saved" her roughly two hours after she and I parted company had found her peeling prickly pear pads for water. As Sara explained after the ordeal, "I thought I was going to die." She had even reflected on the lack of a will.
In this unexpected situation, I am reminded of the classic tale of Hugh Glass, an early Western fur trapper, who was mauled by a grizzly bear deep in Indian country. One of his two companions was the young and inexperenced Jim Bridger, who became a legendary guide. Glass was unconcious and apparently fatally injured when the other two left with his rifle to protect themselves. He regained his senses and realized he was abandoned. Unable to walk because of his wounds, seething with hatred and a determination to kill his former partners, he crawled to a trading post 200 miles away. Glass lived because of that anger. He later forgave his companions, a gesture not coming my way in the years since the ill wind blew.
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