in the Big Bend of Texas
 |
| Mormon Tea (Thanks reader!) |
 |
| Ocotillo preparing a flame |
 |
| The sweetest aroma of the tricolor |
 |
| A Yucca and two more teasing |
 |
| Buds on a Prickly Pear |
 |
| Leaves first and then RED roses |
 |
| Mesquite leaves are the Definitive Sign of Spring |
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The
Coffee Cup: Jim Keaveny
Has
a Romance With Ecuador
For
a musician who loves to travel, the country was a God send--talented
musicians to back him up, cheap hotel rooms, and extravagant lunches.
Jim Keaveny, so good vocally and on guitar and harmonica, has just
returned from more than a month in Ecuador.
"I
have always wanted to spend a lot of time in South America," he
said as we sat on the balcony of High Sierra. "I want to live
down there to be honest. I just like seeing new places after being
too long in one place."
He
played two solo gigs, "but the second night I made so many
friends, and they said tomorrow night we're doing an open jam, and
you should come in.
"It
turns out they were very talented guys, one on drum and guitar, and
the other on guitar, bass, and drum. They invited me up to play for
an hour. They backed me, and we had a great time. And the bass
player's wife came up and sang.
"They
just jumped in and played my songs perfectly. It was unbelievable."
Where
did you stay?
"Mostly
in hotel rooms," Jim answered. "If you do a little
shopping, you can find really nice rooms with your own bathroom for
roughly $10 a night.
"I
stayed in Puerto Lopez eight days in a row. For $8 a night, I was on
the third floor of a beautiful place, very friendly people running
it, two blocks from the beach, and a maid cleaning my room every day.
There was a balcony on one side and a patio on the other."
Lunch
is the big meal daily. "It always comes with juice and soup,"
Jim said, "lasts as long as three or four hours, and costs $2 or
$3."
"I'm
thinking of snowbirding down there," he said, "spending the
winters. The winters are nice here, but the wind starts to annoy me.
That's one thing about Ecuador, there's never any wind. They are
right on the equator, and there is no turbulence. You get nice sea
breezes, but you don't get high winds."
The
last time we had talked Jim was planning another CD. Have you worked
on that? I asked.
"Funny
you asked because I have been working on it all day," the
Terlingua musician replied. "I've got the material. I'm planning
to go do the first session in the studio in one or two months."
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Carlton
Leatherwood's Texas:
Kneeskern
dresses way down
Artist
and writer Mark Kneeskern says the easy thing about most of his
creative work is he just lets it tell him what to do. Surely it was a
strange creative voice inside his head that laid out his costume for
the opening of his Sixth Annual Funky Junk art show at the Starlight
Theatre last Saturday.
The
themed outfit was dreadlocks (long braids of hair) and mud.
"I
started walking around in the desert looking for material,"
Kneeskern said, "and I wasn't finding much. Then I remembered I
had burlap coffee bags from a coffee shop up in Colorado."
He
needed to cover his body somehow, but he didn't want anything on his
upper body because it was hot.
"So
I made a skirt, a tribal skirt," the artisan of the weird
explained. "It was like an African kilt. I was thinking tribal
since the show is funky junk. I told people they could come as white
trash or tribal trash. I went for the tribal trash."
He
cut the bags up.
"It
was like dreadlocks, and I started tying all these dreadlock things
to my hair with twine. So I had all these crazy things hanging off my
head. My hair was getting all tangled up. But I had to cover the top
of my head because it didn't match the dreadlocks. I thought mud."
To
him that was perfect. To him it was fun to play with mud anyway,
cover yourself with mud.
"Whenever
you get the chance as an adult, you feel like a kid again,"
Kneeskern said. "So I started splattering myself with mud. It
fit right in with the dreadlocks."
He
slept that night with all that mud on him.
"We
don't have a shower, and I didn't want to start dumping water on my
head. I had been partying quite hard--we always have a great time
opening night. I crashed out in my mud and dreadlocks right next to
Shannon (Carter).
Photo by Jessica Lutz
"She
looked over at me this morning and just started laughing--dirt all
over the bed. She was too amused to get mad."
No
one knows what to expect opening night.
Clayton
Drinkard came in with boxes all over his body. He was a box man and
"had a TV set on his head. He does political humor stuff now and
then, so he was a propaganda man. And then a couple of other friends
showed up with all this junk strapped to their bodies. They were
warriors. And then Shannon always does an amazing costume. That's her
high art."
There
were a couple of streakers, too.
"I
was shocked."
Kneeskern
said there's always a bunch of people that dress up for every show.
"That's one of the fun things about it. Some people just like to
make costumes. I'm really happy about people participating in that
way."
And
then there were among all the junk art the huge ponderosa pine logs
which Joe and Sue Rife brought Kneeskern from Steamboat Springs. He
carved them as the the logs told him what to do.
"They
are like totem poles," the artist said, "but they aren't
that tall, maybe five feet or so. I peel the bark off, and then I
start looking at them. The parts that want to be chopped off--they
tell me--I chop them off. Then I start looking for a face.
"It
will always come out. There's the nose. Now where's the eyes, where's
the mouth? As I'm working, it will change. Sometimes it will change
dramatically, do a 180 and there's a better face. And so that is the
art form of carving. It takes a long time. Not as long as writing. It
took so long to do that book."
The
book is "The Last American Hitch-hiker: Tale of Wander,"
published last year. And Kneeskern took a sabbatical from speaking
about his art. "Most people who get my book used to hitch-hike,"
the writer said. "I'm still on a book tour. I'm going to do
talks wherever I go."
Photo by Voni Glaves
He
plans another book. "What I'm going to do is write about buses
and trains. This year I had my broken foot so I ended up riding the
Greyhound, and, of course, I had to write about it, otherwise it
would have been torture and no dividend.
"These
people have all these crazy life stories. It's like hitch-hiking
except you are trapped in a bus. You get stressed out because you
have to make the bus on time, the connections. Whereas when you are
hitch-hiking, you have no idea when your connection is going to come.
"You
have a lot of prisoners on there," he said, "people who
have been in prison, on their way to prison, or should be in prison.
I may be one of them."
As
for shaping those logs, "I use a plain old hatchet," he
said. "But it is funky junk, and where I bring the funky junk in
is the hat. I go out into my junkyard. I have a pretty good junkyard
now. People give me junk all the time. It's like a filing cabinet for
junk.
"I
try all these different hats before I find the right one. It takes
awhile, because they have personalities, you know. Certain hats don't
look right on me or you. I consider them to be real people in a way.
And then I paint them."
Funky
Junk runs through March.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Musical
Benefit, Felts Gifts
Raise
$5,525 To Abet Hunger
The
fortunes for feeding the unfortunate in South Brewster County have
looked up. Mike Drinkard, an advocate with the Family Crisis Center
of the Big Bend, posted the reassuring dollars Tuesday.
The
musical benefit that Pat O'Bryan put together at the Starlight
Theatre Sunday raised $2,860 for those who might go hungry. There
were 360 people in 168 households in that category in February.
The
gifts remembering Glenn Felts reached $2,665.
That's
a total of $5,525, and those that benefit include up to 40 percent
children. The number of households fluctuate monthly. Monthly pledges
at the benefit totaled $1,000.
"There
have been months lately when we didn't have enough food,"
Drinkard said. "With more money, I think we can get more options
and talk to food producers. Maybe we will contact ranchers and see if
they have some cows lying around. We could have meat that way. We're
just looking at different options."
Right
now, the food comes from West Texas Food Bank. The money to buy
it--it is cheap and sometimes free--is donated by individuals and
businesses. The food bank pays for the gas to pick up and deliver it.
"There
used to be a lot more meat, a lot more protein," Drinkard said.
"I look at the food bank list for ordering often, especially
watching for meat to appear. There have been months when there
appears not to be meat anywhere in the world."
He
said the government was to cut back on money going to the United
States Department of Agriculture, and that meant there was going to
be a lot less USDA stuff at the food bank.
.jpg)
Micheal Drinkard at the FunDraiser (Photo by Voni Glaves)
"The
food bank has a website. It's everything that they have,"
Drinkard explained. "We watch the list and wait to see if there
is enough of any one of the items. So if there is enough of what we
really want, we have to order fast because we competing with agencies
all over West Texas.
"Sunday
they had gotten boneless turkeys, and we needed 41 of the 75 cases.
If I waited until I got to the office Monday, someone in Midland or
elsewhere might have taken all the turkeys, so I ordered that night."
In
a year it could be up to 300 households that use the crisis center's
service. It's not the same 160 households every month.
"In
a typical household, people are working. They just don't make much
money," Drinkard explained. "It's not a bunch of people who
drink every night."
It's
like there are two typical households, he said. We don't see all the
kids, but we see these young families. Then there are a lot of
households that are single, and they are not old, but they are
approaching 60 or older. The average age down in Terlingua is a lot
older than in other places.
"I
would say the south half of the county is 2,000 people,"
Drinkard estimated. "It's about 50-50 Anglo and Hispanic who
need food.
The
crisis center in Terlingua is a small outreach office. It is
primarily there to help people who are victims of crime. There are
volunteers.
"If
you have been a victim of crime--and the crime could have happened
along time ago--what happens to you in childhood sets you up for the
rest of your life," Drinkard said. "Suddenly, you're not
yourself. You're off balance. You need to recover from that.
"It
seems like food can be a big part of that, taking away that worry. I
think if you give somebody food, it will help them hold their head up
and make them more confident, less vulnerable."
The
center serves whoever comes in. "It would seem rude to say 'go
away, you don't fit the client base,'" the advocate said.
"Sometimes somebody is just walking through. They just ended up
here, and they don't have any food. They were going to eat whatever
they found on the side of the road, I guess. So we will give them
some stuff.
"It
will give them the strength to move on. We don't have many resources
here."
As
for donations, if people will write Family Crisis Center, Terlingua,
on their checks, it will end any confusion.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Journey to the Edge of Texas
A Memoir of Love, Travel, Natural Beauty, and One Man's Victory Over Manic Depression
Chapter 3 - Rough Riding
By Carlton Leatherwood Memoir
of Love, Travel, Natural Beauty, Writing, and One Man's Victory Over
Manic Depressio
By
Carlton LeatherwHOUrIt
took men of courage and imagination to settle the rangeland of Texas,
particularly the mountainous desert country farther west. Asa Jones
was such a man. He chose to put a ranch on the edge of the Chihuahuan
Desert, in the Big Bend region.
Faced
with thirsty livestock, he ran pipes down the towering bluffs of the
Lower canyons to the river. "When I put those 300 ewes on the
place," he was quoted, "there was a coyote for every one of
"em, and a bobcat trailing every coyote."
It's
still an isolated, tough place to eke out a living. I was able to get
a sense of Asa Jones's life from the back of a horse provided by Lynn
Carter, operator of Chisos Remuda, the mountain stable in Big Bend
National Park. He had me mount one of the unregistered quarter
horses. He also had a few paints, all accustomed to the high altitude
and rocks. "We pride ourselves in our horses for this type of
operation," he said.
Craig Carter, circa 1985
The
stable nestles in a mile-high basin in the Chisos Mountains, most of
which was once ranchland. The ranchers first worked the Chisos
foothills, but by the late 1920s cattle had overgrazed those
grasslands. Shortly after the herds were moved onto the highlands,
development of the park began. Forty thousand head of stock were
ultimately displaced.
Carter
and his crews conduct guided horse trips through the mountains the
year round, and on a winter day his son Craig rode with me toward the
South Rim, the scenic high point of the park. The trail is a wooded,
fourteen-mile loop with a vantage of seeing 107-miles of the Rio
Grande, including the yawning mouth of Santa Elena Canyon.
Craig
and I talked about his relationship with C. M. "Buck"
Newsome, a former U.S. Border Patrol officer who ran the Chisos
Remuda after leaving his government job. Newsome had hired Craig's
father, and he gave Craig his first pony when the kid was three.
An
aspiring country and western singer at the time of the ride, Craig
borrowed the title of a book by Newsome, Shod
With Iron,
for the name of a song he had written:
Shod
with iron and ready to ride,
trying
to turn the great Rio Grande tide ...
He
rode a big red horse ...
He
was hired to hold back a nation of poor
who
were trying to reach out for a bit more
Now
time has taken its toll, and the story's
beginning
to unfold, the dust has settled
on
the trails he rode, but the memories
and
stories will never grow old.
"About
the only time I was nervous singing a song was when I sang that one
in front of Buck," Craig said. "He never said much about
it. He didn't dislike it, or he would have told me."
Newsome's
job with the Border Patrol was to apprehend, process, and send back
the illegal aliens who cross the river border into Texas, at times
like a tide in the Rio Grande. Said Craig, "You see, if I were
one of them, I'd be coming across, too. Living over there you just
can't get ahead."
We
passed through the Laguna Meadows. This time it was a leisurely trip,
but Craig and a park ranger had once traversed the three-and-a-half
miles of rough terrain in forty minutes--to fight a fire in the
meadows. Our horse crossed the charred area, much of which is still
barren, but stands of luxuriant native grasses have returned in
spots.
Craig
has had other adventures in the park, such as the time park rangers
chased a mountain lion after a boy was mauled. "I went up there
to take them some food and water," he said. "They happened
to tree the cat a little bit after I got there." After the lion
was killed, Craig brought it out on his horse.
The
two of us reached the South Rim about lunchtime. The view was
breathtaking, a panorama stretching for unknowable miles to the
south. In his book Newsome reports the distance estimate of Ventura
Gamboa, a Mexican national who once worked for him: "I asked
Ventura how far we were looking across the river into Mexico. He
said, 'Senor,
como ocho dias a caballa'" ('Sir,
about eight days horseback').
After
eating the chicken Craig had packed for lunch, we took the trail to
Boot Springs, skirting ice-encrusted springwater creeks as we rode.
In April and May this is a gathering spot for birders who want to see
the Colima warblers, which migrate from their wintering grounds in
Mexico to nest in the Chisos. The tiny warbler is but one of the more
than 395 species of birds that have been sighted in the park; no
other National Park Service area contains so many. At the Boot camp
site, all we encountered were a few lively and fat Mexican bluejays.
Just
as the Chisos are as far north as the warblers come, some of the
flora and fauna here can be found nowhere else in the United States.
And vice versa. This is the last outpost of the ponderosa pine (in
Pine Canyon), Arizona cypress and Douglas fir (in Boot Canyon), and
quaking aspens (on 7,835-foot-high Emory Peak).
As
we returned to the stables, we caught a glimpse of a white-tailed
deer--another oddity in the apparent middle of a desert. Deer roam in
these mountains the way they did throughout the lowlands and
highlands when a moister climate prevailed 10,000 years ago. When the
lower elevations dried into desert country, the deer were marooned up
here along with the pinyon pines, junipers, and oaks. That's why, in
the fall, a horseback rider can catch a glimpse of a white-tailed
deer romping through vivid splashes of red and yellow foliage.
The
whole Carter family worked the Chisos Remuda. "As far as the
labor situation, I should have had a house full of kids," the
elder Carter said. He and his wife Cathey had two, Craig and Lynnene.
Craig handled an outpost, the Lajitas Livery, for wagon rides and
campfire cookouts. Lynnene lent a hand at headquarters. Mrs. Carter
grew up in nearby Marathon and couldn't wait to return to this area
after moving away as an adult.
"It's
home, it grabs you," she said. "I love it. I really do. I
got homesick for the mountains. You can turn around two or three
times without bumping into anybody." She reflected a moment and
added, "When it rains you freeze to death in July. If you're out
in it and get wet, I guarantee your lips will be blue. It's that cool
and nice."
Her
advice for park visitors: "You've got to get out and do some
riding and hiking and looking, and not just drive through, to really
appreciate it and see it."
Riding
out of Chisos Remuda wasn't adventurous enough for me, so I contacted
Mimi Webb-Miller, a free-spirited U.S. citizen who ranched near San
Carlos, Mexico. She deserted the big cities of Houston and Dallas for
the love of a different way of life.
"We're
running horseback trips and truck trips for those who would like to
come over into Mexico," she said the first day I saw her. "It's
in the frontier zone, so a visa isn't required. We have a ranch about
eleven miles from Lajitas. We bring people out to the ranch and San
Carlos, which is about seventeen miles in. The horseback trips are
very diverse."
I
fell for her pitch.
Mimi Webb-Miller, circa 1985
As
we jostled inside the Bronco along the backcountry bumpy ranch road,
Webb-Miller explained the nature of her trips. She hosted people at
the ranch and satisfied their fancy, whether in a ride to an
abandoned lead and silver mine or to an old frontier fort, called
presidio. Then there was the view from 10,000-foot mountains.
"I
originally came out to run a river," said the young blonde, who
was on her way to becoming a legend in the Big Bend. "I'm an
outdoor person. I fell in love with the country and came out for my
first vacation as a single female alone--and ended up coming out
about once a month to break the routine of Houston." She moved
to Lajitas and worked in its development and at the Trading Post.
"I
think it takes a tough person to live here," she said
"Aesthetically, there's a beauty here like the beauty I dealt
with when I dealt with art. Life is very simple. It's basically a
matter or existing. but I never seem to have time to do all the stuff
I want to do out here. I like to go fishing, and I still haven't been
fishing. I enjoy ranch life tremendously. Even though I cook on a
woodburning stove and make tortillas, I still enjoy working cattle
and being out on the ranch itself."
Webb-Miller
grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, and attended Southern Methodist
University in Dallas, majoring in art history. She moved to Houston
and started guiding groups through museums and commercial galleries,
transporting them in her own Checker cab.
That
was another time and another place.The day I visited, Webb-Miller was
rolling flour tortillas in the rustic kitchen of her Rancho El
Milagro. Light filtered through a small orchard of quince, figs, and
peaches into the unscreened windows. The place had no electricity. At
night, she said, she burned kerosene lanterns, and thick block walls
combined with the 5,000-foot altitude to keep the room cool. Nor did
her home have running water inside. Instead, she and her friend Meno
Proano had tapped a spring with pipe and a hose. The spring, and
several others, fed a creek that tumbled down a narrow valley. I
follwed it to a forty-foot waterfall that poured into a pool secluded
by dense vegetation.
Back
in the kitchen, Proano joined in the cooking after a day of planting
oats for feed. He rolled out a goat membrane and filled it with
sliced kidney and liver, onions, tomatoes, lime juice, and salt--a
traditional Mexican dish called burronate. It then went into the
Lily-Darling wood stove in the corner of the kitchen to cook for a
later meal. For now we would munch on hot tortillas and feast on the
rest of the goat. A cat purred underfoot as mariachi sang over a car
radio in the background of our conversation.
The
next morning we set out for the ruins of the old lead and silver
mine. There were no easy trails here, sometimes no trails at all, and
cacti slapped our chaps on the entire route across the desert. Oscar
W. Williams, surveyor and Harvard lawyer, wrote a letter about a
similar 1902 ride. He noted his horse was always slipping, sliding,
and lurching on round pebblestones: "I never saw so many round
pebbles, apparently waterworn, anywhere except in the beds of creeks
and rivers. Yet here they lay in the high lands as well as the
low--on the crests of mountains as well as in the hollows of
valleys."
We
trotted in the vicinity of the Comanche War Trail. Running across the
Trans-Pecos region from the northeast to southwest, it split into two
forks in the Big Bend. One fork crossed the Rio Grande near Lajitas
and continued into Mexico through San Carlos. The other crossed
between Santa Elena and Mariscal canyons. Throughout the mid-1800s,
aided by late summer rains that filled water holes, the Comanches
penetrated deep into Mexico by way of the Lajitas route, taking
livestock, housewares, and captives along with them. Slowed by the
pirated herd, they returned with their booty via the other fork,
which was farther from soldiers at Presidio. The bones of cattle that
died en route still litter a trail a mile wide.
Our
ride entered San Carlos Canyon, where we splashed through a
boulder-strewn creek, from which an aqueduct (following canyon
curves) carries water to townspeople. Ranchers have also constructed
small rock huts in the canyon to shade the offspring of their goats.
We were more straightforward in finding respite from the grinding
sun; we found a cool spot under some ferns that grew on an overhang.
After
a lunch of steak and potatoes, we ascended to the rim of a side
canyon--a precipice that tested the sure steps of our horses. High in
the mountains we came to the ruins of a mining community that
Webb-Miller believes once was populated by 5,000 people. The adobe
and stone hulls of long-vacant buildings sprawl up the mountainsides.
As late as the 1950s men labored here, removing, over time, a million
tons of ore (primarily for lead) for American Smelting and Refining
Co.
The
mine did not exist when Williams, the early surveyor, rode to San
Carlos. He had, however, previously discovered another lode native to
the area, the storyteller Natividad Lujan. Lujan was born in San
Carlos where he lived most of his life. A grudge forced him to move
across the river to Texas. He would at times act as guide for
Williams and tell of earlier days by the light of a burning sotol (a
desert lily) where they camped. His grandfather had worn the uniform
of a Spanish soldier and was sent to serve at the San Carlos
presidio, an outpost against the Indians. "Here in San Carlos I
was born and raised among wild Indians, many of whom lived
temporarily in and about the presidio," Lujan said. "When a
tribe was in danger from their enemies, they would ... make a treaty
with our people of San Carlos, in which they would promise to be good
to our people of the town and not to rob or kill any of them, no
matter what they might do to other peoples; and we would for our part
let them live among us.
"The
people of Santa Rosalia used to talk hard about us, because some of
these Indians while they lived with us went in a war-party to that
place, and killed and robbed many of them. But, Senor, we could not
stop them when they started out on the warpath, nor did we know where
they were going ... Thus, many kinds of Indians lived among us. I
remember when at one time there were among us Kiowas, Comanches,
Apaches, Mescaleros, Gilenos, Pananas, and Cionabas."
The
observations and collected stories of Willams were published as a
book, Pioneer
Surveyor, Frontier Lawyer, in
1968. S. D. Myres edited it with annotations.
San
Carlos, with a population of about 2,500, retains much of the layout
and character of Williams's time. Williams had asked for a hotel and
restaurant and found none. There is today one tiny restaurant.
Streets parallel the creek. Stores carry goods necessary to the home,
not the few tourists. A church fronts on a pleasant plaza. The
aqueduct provides a means to water plants and to wash the main
street, which is almost free of vehicle and sign pollution.
The
nearby presidio was built by the Spanish as part of a network to
guard the northern frontier of New Spain. Troops first occupied it in
October 1773. The ruin sits eleven miles southeast of Lajitas on the
east bank of San Carlos Creek. The fortification was located there
under a plan that placed presidios at 120-mile intervals from the
Gulf of California to the Gulf of Mexico. The plan required sites on
unobstructed land with good water and pasture; such restrictions
resulted in seventeen forts being more closely spaced.
The
adobe walls at San Carlos, which rested on a stone foundation, have
melted over time into mounds, but they still outline the presidio's
shape. Rows of rooms for subordiante officers, soldiers, and Indian
scouts backed up to the quadrangular perimeter wall. A chapel was
centered in the northwest side. The main entrance presumably was
midway in the southwest wall. Soldiers took their stations in
diamond-shaped bastions at the north and south corners. A block of
rooms built around a patio and projecting into the central plaza may
have housed the captain.
When
Webb-Miller and I headed back to Rancho El Milagro (and our dinner of
burronate, I had a sense that the day of the horse, the day of the
Spanish, and the day of the Indian isn't that far distant into the
past.
No comments:
Post a Comment