Texas

by James A. Michener

  At this point Rusk interrupted: ‘What positive values are you advocating?’ and the man replied: ‘Those which made Texas great. Loyalty, religion, patriotism, justice, opportunity, daring.’

  As he recited these virtues, most of which I endorsed, I saw these three earnest visitors in a different light. They were striving to hold back the tides of change which threatened to engulf them. They really did long to recover the simpler life of 1844 and find refuge in its rural patterns, its heroic willingness to defend its principles, its dedication to a more disciplined society. I understood their feelings, for all men in all ages have such yearnings.

  When we broke for a belated lunch, Miss Cobb, a descendant of Democratic senators, asked the speakers: ‘By what route did you become Republicans? Surely, your parents were Democrats.’

  The Abilene woman laughed uneasily: ‘My father knew only one Republican family. A renegade who joined that party so that the Republican administration in Washington could nominate him postmaster. Father would cross the street to avoid speaking to the scoundrel.’ The Corpus Christi man said: ‘You mustn’t get into that with children. Our families were all Democrats. Nobody thought of being anything else before the 1928 election, when they had to vote Republican to fight Al Smith and his boozing ways.’

  Smiling amiably, the San Angelo man said: ‘If you do have to explain it, why not use the old joke? Man asked a rancher in the Fort Stockton area: “Caleb, your six boys are all good Democrats, I hope?” and Caleb said: “Yep, all but Elmer. He learned to read.” But I agree with the others. Best to omit the whole question.’

  I said: ‘You seem to be recommending that we omit a good deal of Texas history,’ and the dour Corpus Christi man said: ‘A good history is characterized by what’s left out.’

  I said I’d appreciate an example, and he was more than equal to the occasion: ‘In the decades after the great storm of 1900 that destroyed Galveston, loyal citizens rebuilt the city, pretty much as you see it here today. But with their enormous losses and few businesses to take up the slack, how could they earn money? They turned the city into a vast amusement area—houses of ill repute, gambling, gaudy saloons. Men from my city …’

  ‘And mine, too,’ the San Angelo man chimed in. ‘They came here to raise hell in Galveston. Wildest city in America, they boasted.’

  ‘Do we need to include that in a book for children?’ the Corpus Christi man asked, and I had to reply ‘No,’ and he smiled icily: ‘There is much that can be profitably omitted.’

  At our lunch I wanted to make peace with our vigorous critics and said: ‘I’m sure I speak for our entire Task Force when I say that while we must disagree with certain of your positions, we support many of them. Like you, we feel that modern children are pressured to grow up too fast. We deplore drugs. We champion private property. We agree that too often the negative aspects of our society are stressed. And we subscribe to Texas patriotism.’

  ‘What don’t you agree with?’ the Corpus Christi man challenged, and I answered him as forthrightly as I could: ‘We think women have played an important role in all aspects of Texas life. We think Mexicans are here to stay. We think Texas should be proud of its multinational origins. And we are not monolithic. Rusk and Quimper are strong Republicans; Miss Cobb and Garza, equally strong Democrats.’

  ‘What about you?’ the San Angelo man asked amiably, and I said: ‘I’m like the old judge in Texarkana during a heated local election who was asked which candidate he supported: “They’re both fine men. Eminently eligible for the big post, they think. Haven’t made up my mind yet, but when I do I’m gonna be damned bitter about it.” ’

  Dr. Clay started his presentation on Texas weather with three astonishing slides: ‘Here you see the Clay residence in Wichita Falls at seven-oh-nine in the evening of the tenth of April 1979. That’s me looking up in the sky. This second slide, taken by a neighbor across the street, shows what we were staring at.’

  It was an awesome photograph, widely reproduced later, for it showed in perfect detail the structure of a great tornado just about to strike: ‘Note three things. The enormous black cloud aloft, big enough to cover a county. The clearly defined circular tunnel dropping toward the ground. And the snout of the destroying cloud, trailing along behind like the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner.’

  When Clay started to move to the next slide, Rusk stopped him: ‘Why does the snout trail?’

  ‘Aerodynamics. It lingers upon the ground it’s destroying.’

  He then showed us the most remarkable slide of the three: ‘This is the Clay residence one minute after the tornado struck.’ No upright part of the former house was visible; it was a total destruction, with even the heavy bathtub ripped away and gone.

  ‘How could the man with the camera take such a picture?’ Rusk asked, and Miss Cobb wanted to know: ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘That’s the mystery of a tornado. Its path of destruction is as neatly defined as a line drawn with a pencil. On our side of the street, total wipe-out. Where the photographer was standing … merely a big wind.’

  ‘Yes, but where were you?’ Miss Cobb persisted.

  ‘Just before it struck, the man with the camera shouted: “Lewis! Over here!” He could see where the pencil line was heading.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ Quimper said, but Clay corrected him: ‘No, the miracle was that the tornado lifted not only the bathtub from our wreckage but also my mother. Carried her right along with the tub and deposited them both as gently as you please a quarter of a mile away.’

  Then, with a series of beautifully drawn meteorological slides, he instructed us on the genesis of the tornadoes which each year struck Texas so violently: ‘Four conditions are required before a tornado is spawned. A cold front sweeps in from the Rockies in the west. It hits low-level moist air from the Gulf. Now, this happens maybe ninety times a year and accounts for normal storms of no significance. But sometimes a third factor intrudes. Very dry air rushing north from Mexico. When it hits the front, which is already agitated, severe thunderstorms result, but rarely anything worse. However, if the fourth air mass moves in, a majestic jet stream at thirty thousand feet, it’s as if a cap were clamped down over the entire system. Then tornadoes breed and tear loose and do the damage you saw at Wichita Falls.’

  ‘How bad was that damage?’ Quimper asked, and Clay said: ‘It smashed a path eight miles long, a mile and a half wide. Four hundred million dollars in destruction, forty-two dead, several hundred with major injuries.’

  In rapid fire he sped through a series of stunning photographs, throwing statistics at us as he went: ‘Most Texas tornados strike in May. We get a steady average of a hundred and thirty-two per year, and they produce a yearly average of thirteen deaths. Most tornadoes we ever had in one day, a hundred and fifteen shockers on a September afternoon in 1967. The funnel rotates counterclockwise and can travel over the ground at thirty-five miles an hour, almost always in a southwest-to-northeast direction, and with a funnel wind velocity of up to three hundred miles an hour.’

  Numbed by the violent force of the pictures and words, we had no questions, but he added two interesting facts: ‘Yes, what you’ve heard is true. A Texas tornado can have winds powerful enough to drive a straw flying through the air right through a one-inch plank. And there really is such a thing as Tornado Alley. It runs from Abilene northeast through Larkin and Wichita Falls.’ Looking directly at Ransom Rusk, who lived in that middle town, he said: ‘Statistics are overwhelming. Most dangerous place to be during a tornado is an automobile. The wind picks it up, finds it too heavy, dashes it to the ground. Best place?’ He flashed his third slide, the one showing the destruction of his own house: ‘Pick your spot. But if you have a tornado cellar, use it.’

  The next two hours were compelling, for he gave a similar analysis of the great hurricanes that spawned off the coast of Africa and came whipping across the Atlantic into the Gulf of Mexico, and we sat appalled as he showed us what had happened to Galveston on 8 Sep
tember 1900: ‘Worst natural disaster ever to strike America. Entire city smitten. Whole areas erased by a fearful storm surge that threw twelve feet of water inland. Up to eight thousand lives lost in one night.’

  One remarkable series of shots taken by four different photographers on a single March day in 1983 showed Amarillo in a snow-and-sleet storm at 29° Fahrenheit, Abilene in the middle of a huge dust storm at 48°, Austin at the beginning of a blue norther at 91° and Brownsville in the midst of an intolerable heat wave at 103°. ‘From northwest to southeast, a range of seventy-four degrees. I wonder how many mainland states can match that kind of wild variation?’

  He spoke also of the famous blue norther, which had amazed Texans since the days of Cabeza de Vaca: ‘These phenomenal drops in temperature can occur during any month of the year, but of course they’re most spectacular during the summer months, when the sudden drop is conspicuous, but the daddy of all blue northers hit the third of February in 1899. Temperature at noon in many parts of the state, a hundred and one. Temperature not long thereafter, minus three, a preposterous drop of a hundred and four degrees.’

  But what interested me even more was his statistics on Texas droughts: ‘Every decade we get a major jolt, worst ever in those bad years 1953 to 1957. Much worse than the so-called Dust Bowl years. We really suffered, and the law of probability assures us that one of these days we’ll suffer again.’

  Clay was a man of great common sense. After decades of studying Texas weather, he had come to see the state as a mammoth battleground over which and on which the elements waged incessant war, with powerful effect upon the people who occupied that ground: ‘No human being would settle here, with our incredibly hot summers and our violent storms from the heavens and the sea, if he did not relish the struggle and feel that with courage he could survive. What other state has tornadoes and hurricanes that kill more than sixty people year after year? And blue northers and drought and hundred-degree days for two whole months?’ He looked at me, and knowing one of my preoccupations, added: ‘And a constant drop in its aquifers? This is heroic land and it demands heroic people.’

  THE CENSUS OF 1900 ILLUSTRATED A BASIC FACT ABOUT TEXAS: IT was still a rural state, for out of its population of 3,048,710, only 17.1 percent was classified as urban, and even this was misleading because the scrawniest settlement was rated urban if it had more than 2,500.

  The biggest city was still San Antonio, with a population of 53,321, much of it German, for the Hispanics who would later give the city its character accounted at this time for not more than 10 percent of the total. Houston was the next largest city, with a population of 44,633, and Dallas was third, with 42,638. Future cities like Amarillo and Lubbock, which would later figure prominently in Texas history, were not cities at all, the former with only 1,442 inhabitants, the latter with a mere 112.

  But it was essentially in such small towns that the character of the state was developing, and three were of special interest. The first, of course, was the frontier town of Larkin in the west, with a population of 388. The second was that charming agricultural town with the elfin name, Waxahachie, in the north-central area, just south of Dallas; it had a population of 4,215. And the third was the fascinating little Hispanic town of Bravo, about as far south as one could go in Texas. It stood on the north bank of the Rio Grande in an area where irrigation would turn what had once been unwieldy brushland into one of the most concentrated farming areas in America. Bravo, with a population of 389, guarded the American end of a small bridge over the river; Escandón, a somewhat larger town, marked the Mexican end.

  As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the town of Larkin, the seat of Larkin County, found itself embroiled in an intellectual argument which preoccupied a good many other communities: When did the new century begin?

  Tradition, accepted modes of expression and popular opinion all agreed that at midnight on 31 December 1899 an old century would die, with a new one beginning a minute later. To any practical mind, even the name of the new year, 1900, indicated that a new system of counting had begun, and to argue otherwise was ridiculous: ‘Any man with horse sense can see it’s a new century, elsen why would they of given it a new name?’

  Yet Earnshaw Rusk, like many thinking men and women across the state, knew that the twentieth century could not possibly begin until 31 December 1900; logic, history and mathematics all proved they were correct, but these zealots had a difficult time persuading their fellow citizens to delay celebrating until the proper date. ‘Damn fools like Earnshaw cain’t tell their ear from their elbow,’ said one zealot. ‘Any idiot knows the new century begins like we say, and I’m gonna be ringin’ that church bell come New Year’s Eve and Jim Bob Loomis is gonna be lightin’ the fire.’

  Rusk found such plans an insult to intelligence. ‘Tell me,’ he asked Jim Bob, ‘now I want you to just tell me, how many years in a century?’ He had stopped using the Quaker thee in public.

  ‘A hunnert,’ Jim Bob said.

  ‘At the time of Christ, when this all began, was there ever a year zero?’

  ‘Not that I heerd of.’

  ‘So the first century must have begun with the year 1.’

  ‘I think it did.’

  ‘So when we reached the year 99, how many years had the first century had?’

  ‘Sounds like ninety-nine.’

  ‘It was ninety-nine, so the year 100 had nothing special about it. The second century couldn’t have begun until the beginning of 101.’

  Jim Bob pointed a warning finger at the lanky Quaker: ‘You’re talkin’ atheism, and Reverend Hislop warned us against ideas like yourn.’

  For some obscure theological reason that was never spelled out, Reverend Hislop of the Methodist church had taken a strong stand in favor of 1900 as the beginning of the new century, and he had equated opposition to that view as being against the will of God: ‘Every man in his right mind knows that the new century begins when it does, and misguided persons who try to argue otherwise are deluded.’

  When Rusk asked him: ‘All right, how many years were there in the first century?’ the clergyman snapped: ‘One hundred, like anyone knows.’

  ‘And how could that be?’ Rusk pressed. ‘How could thy century begin at year 1 and end at year 99 and still have a hundred years?’ and the reverend replied: ‘Because God willed it that way.’ And that became the general opinion of the community; if God had wanted His first century, when Christianity began, to have only ninety-nine years, it was only a small miracle for Him to make it so.

  As December 1899 ended, the wood for the bonfire at the south end of the former parade ground grew higher and higher, with most families contributing odd pieces to the pile. Jim Bob supervised the throwing on of additional pieces until a ladder was required to reach the top, and then schoolboys took over the task. Ladies from the two major churches, Baptist and Methodist, prepared a nonalcoholic punch, and a band rehearsed a set of marches.

  This irritated Earnshaw, who asked his wife: ‘Emma, how can people fly into the face of fact?’ and she replied: ‘Easy. I sort of like 1900 myself. Obviously the beginning of something new.’

  Such reasoning disgusted her husband, who withdrew to the companionship of seven other men—no women engaged in such nonsense—who remained convinced that their century, at least, would start at midnight on 31 December 1900 and not before. They remained aloof from the celebrations, so they did not hear Reverend Hislop intone the prayer which welcomed the new century for everyone else:

  ‘Almighty God, we put to rest an old century, one which brought the Republic of Texas victory in war and membership in the Federal Union. It brought us anguish during the War Between the States and sore tribulation when the Indians attacked us and niggers tried to run things. But we have won free. We have settled the wilderness and conquered distance. We have a glorious town where unobstructed winds used to howl, and the prospects ahead are infinite and glorious.

  ‘We cannot foresee what this twentieth century will
bring us, but we have good cause to hope that war will be no more, and it is not idle to think that before the century is far gone we shall have a planing mill providing lumber for the many small houses we shall build. Our town is situated so that it must grow, the Boston of the West, with fine churches and perhaps even a college of distinction. I see great accomplishment for this town. Hand in hand with the new century, we shall march to greatness.’

  Either the town or the century was laggard, because the year 1900 was one of drought, dying cattle and frustrated hopes about the planing mill. Banker Weatherby, always eager to advance the commercial prospects of his town and willing to risk his own capital, had put together a consortium of interests that had accumulated a purse of thirteen thousand dollars with which to entice a planing mill to start operations on trees hauled in by the railroad, but in July the venture failed, with the Larkin men losing their shirts. Even Weatherby, a perpetual optimist, was heard to say as he closed the books on this latest failure: ‘If God had wanted a planing mill in this town, He’d have given us trees instead of rattlesnakes.’

  Rusk lost eight hundred dollars on the deal, which caused him to tell Emma: ‘I warned people that 1900 was bound to be a year of ill omen,’ at which she snorted: ‘You talk as crazy as Reverend Hislop.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he says God was in favor of 1900. You argue that nature is against 1900. I don’t see much difference.’

  Emma Rusk, forty-three now, believed in God and supported the Methodist church in a desultory sort of way, but she avoided theological discussion: ‘I think a church is a good thing to have in a town. It civilizes people, especially young people, and it deserves our support. But the mysteries it tries to sell … some of the things that Reverend Hislop preaches … I can do without them.’

  She deplored her husband’s gambling on the mill: ‘We could have given that money to Floyd to help with our two granddaughters. Don’t ever mention a planing mill to me again.’