God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  We passed a young Hispanic family sitting in the shade of a stand of juniper. There were two jumpy boys under the age of five. Their lovely young mother had the kind of merry eyes that disappear when she smiles. She pulled back a scarf to show us the baby she was nursing. When we parted, Roberta said, “I’m not going to complain anymore.”

  Farther up the trail, a group of bird-watchers had their binoculars focused on some finches in the bushes. They were hard-core and proud of it. We compared notes about what they had seen. I said the only bird we had spotted not on their list was a silky-flycatcher.

  “That wasn’t a silky-flycatcher you saw, it was a black-tailed gnatcatcher,” one of the women insisted, invoking her authority as a member of the Audubon Society in Williamson County.

  “Well, it was small and black and had a very prominent crest,” I said.

  “They don’t have crests,” she said, not giving an inch.

  * * *

  THE PATH ABRUPTLY BECAME steep, the temperature dropped, and rocks on the trail were moist and slippery. Then we came to the end, a rock face two hundred feet high, with black stains where water leaked down onto the clay-colored boulders below.

  On the way back to camp we had an argument about the color of the Mexican jays we saw along the trail, flitting into the oaks and catching the sun like stained glass. Roberta suggested they were turquoise, fully aware that we have never agreed on what color that is. I thought they were azure. “No, the sky is azure,” she said. I’m at a disadvantage where names of colors are concerned. As a little girl, Roberta treasured her box of sixty-four Prang crayons, and she remembers all the shades. She finally decided the jays were “iridescent teal.”

  Back at camp, I boiled a pot of water on our camp stove and poured it into a dehydrated backpacker meal—lasagna—as well as a tasty apple crisp. We drank wine and watched the mesas bleed into the evening sky. Just before dark, a black-billed cuckoo perched on an agave stalk and joined the concert of mountain chickadees. The Big Dipper came into view above the horizon. It wasn’t even seven o’clock and it felt ridiculous to go to bed, but it was dark and getting cold. We climbed into the tent and zipped it shut. We had brought along wool hats and long johns, so we were warm enough, but I had forgotten how hard the ground could be.

  In the middle of the night, I had the unwelcome realization that I would have to take a crap. I grabbed a flashlight and unzipped the door as quietly as possible, then crawled outside. The mountains in front of me were etched in black against the starry backdrop. There was no moon. The Dipper had risen almost directly overhead. A satellite traced its slender arc against the constellations. There was a physical sense of being pressed down by the starlight, as if it had weight, a gravitational force. Even without the flashlight I could see a path through the prickly pear into a nearby ravine.

  My father once told me that he had a religious experience while taking a crap beside a trout stream. He was not the kind of man to talk about bodily functions, and I was so surprised I failed to ask what the revelation was. I so wish he had told me. Martin Luther, who was obsessed with scatology, recorded that he had been on the toilet when he received one of the central inspirations of Protestantism, that salvation is achieved through faith alone. It was then that he was “born again.” I have never had such a moment, but under these stars revelation once again seemed possible. In every generation until mine, most of humanity lived with the night sky. As people began moving into cities and using more illumination, the sky gradually disappeared. There must be a corresponding loss of wonder without the stars to remind us where we stand in creation.

  When I got back to the tent, Roberta was awake, and she stuck her head out to look at the sky. “Oh, my God!” she said.

  At dawn, there were two jackrabbits sitting in our campsite. They loped off a couple of yards and continued to stare at me, seeming to pass some ironic commentary between the two of them. Roberta emerged when the coffee was ready—Starbucks Instant, a miraculous improvement on the boiled grounds of olden days. We broke camp and headed down to Rio Grande Village, at the southeastern border of the park.

  There, we hiked up a promontory and stared across the river at the little Mexican village of Boquillas, with its adobe houses in sherbet colors, “like Candy Land,” Roberta observed. You used to be able to take a boat across for lunch, but since 9/11 you need a passport to return, and we’d forgotten ours.

  I noticed a couple staring into the water under a boardwalk that spanned a marsh. “Rio Grande perch,” the husband said, pointing to a pair of striking greenish-gray fish with bright cream-colored spots. “It’s the only cichlid native to Texas.” He was a petroleum engineer but had studied freshwater marine biology as an undergraduate at Texas Tech. The female perch had swept out a circular nest in the mud with her tail, while the male was diligently patrolling the perimeter. These perch mate for life, which is rare in the animal kingdom—among the few examples are prairie voles, sandhill cranes, macaroni penguins, black vultures, and pot-bellied seahorses. The list is pretty short. It raises the question of whether love exists outside of human society, or is it just a comfortable habit that some creatures fall into.

  We ate lunch under an impressive stand of palms, beside the remnants of an old health camp. We had changed into swimsuits to soak in the old hot springs on the very edge of the river. There used to be a bathhouse here, but now only the foundation remains. It felt good to get clean after camping and hiking. The hazel-colored Rio Grande beside us had been refreshed by waters from the Rio Conchos, which flows through the Mexican state of Chihuahua. I could easily have tossed a pebble into Mexico. I got out of the hot bath and slipped into the river, which was swift and bracing.

  * * *

  THE DREAM OF WALLING OFF Mexico has a long history. “The United States Government intends to build a high fence of nearly a thousand miles along the Rio Grande in Texas to keep the ‘wetbacks’ out, the Mexican workers,” Donald Judd wrote in 1992, in one of his fanciful rants.

  It already has huge balloons to watch the drug business. Having learned from this scale and inflation, they plan to inflate a tent over Texas so that the military planes can fly in peace. The noxious gases of the sewage sent from New York to Texas will keep the tent inflated…The map of Texas has an interesting shape and is a symbol so that a vast bulbous tent shaped like Texas will look impressive as you fly toward it, more so than the Dallas skyline. It can be air-conditioned too. There will have to be an orifice for the Dallas Fort Worth Airport, an eye of Texas.

  I worry that the Trump administration might start building the wall in Big Bend simply because the federal government already owns the land. One evening we had hiked through Santa Elena Canyon on the other side of the park, where the walls on the Mexican side rise to 1,500 feet, and the light at sunset reminded me of the heroic western paintings of Albert Bierstadt. I tried to envision a wall down the center of the river. It seemed like a prison for nature.

  It’s true that undocumented immigrants cross over in Big Bend; in 2016, the Border Patrol picked up 6,366 people who it believed had entered the country illegally in the park sector, and seized 16 pounds of cocaine along with nearly 42,000 pounds of marijuana. These are very small figures compared with those for other sectors along the border, but they are not negligible. When Roberta and I were choosing campsites, there were some at the very tip of the bend in the river that had been off-limits because of the illegal traffic across the border. They had suddenly become available because the authorities considered them safe, now that enforcement had become so much stronger, proving that there are ways of policing the border without defacing one of the most beautiful parts of the state.

  When we came out of the water, we ran into Jesse Manciaz and Peter Owen, members of the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe. Jesse had a medicine-man pouch and a necklace of bear claws around his neck. There was an eagle feather in his hatband, indicating his status as a warrior (he�
�s a Vietnam veteran). Peter wore a snappy little porkpie hat.

  “We’re meeting people to talk about the wall,” Jesse told me, explaining that their tribe inhabited both sides of the river. They were used to crossing freely. Now they were threatened with partition. He said it was hard to get the message across. “People think there are no more Indians in Texas,” Jesse complained.

  Peter suggested that was because Mexican Americans don’t know who they are. “They’re actually Indians.”

  There were some ancient pictographs on the cliff face above us. It was a mystery how they got there. They were impossible to reach without twenty-foot ladders. West Texas is full of such inscrutable emblems. Some are thousands of years old; some of the more recent ones show the arrival of the conquistadors. You can sometimes make out buffalo and snakes and recognizable animals, but the ones we were looking at were symbols and enigmatic figures. Roberta thought she discerned an owl. “The owl has always been a messenger,” Jesse said. But through our field glasses we could see that there was some projection from the body of the creature. “Maybe a phallus,” Peter conjectured. “A lot of these were painted as puberty rituals.” He mentioned another pictograph just outside the park with a phallus that appears to enter a vagina when the light is right. “It’s life, you know.” I was thinking that teenagers have the same preoccupations no matter where they stand in history.

  On the way back to the parking area, we ran into another birding couple. I mentioned to them the dilemma faced by the Indians who would be divided by the wall. “People think America is supposed to be some big open country and everybody can do as they please,” the husband said irritably. His wife added, “I don’t see what’s wrong with it as long as it’s on their side of the river.”

  We drove to Del Rio and got in just after dark. Already, the stars had been erased from the sky. We went to dinner at Manuel’s Steakhouse. The Academy Awards were being broadcast on a giant TV. Then we went back to the Hampton Inn. It felt good to be in a bed again. In the morning, I turned over and reached for Roberta’s breast. I could feel her heart pulsing in my hand.

  FOURTEEN

  Among the Confederates

  In the last week of July, Roberta and I, along with Steve and his wife, Sue Ellen, went over to the state cemetery to pick out our plots. It’s off East Seventh Street in Austin, in what used to be a blue-collar Latino neighborhood but has become increasingly upscale, with bars and restaurants giving the hipsters plenty of opportunity to contemplate their mortality.

  There had been rain the night before, and the grass was vivid and glistening. We rode around in a golf cart, sizing up the real estate. On Monument Hill, only one gravesite had been selected, now occupied by Eugene Cernan, a former NASA astronaut who was the last man on the moon. I interviewed him once; he told me that he had written his daughter’s initials—TDC, for Teresa Dawn Cernan—in the moon dust. He also uttered the last words on the moon, as he fired up the lander vehicle to rejoin the orbiter: “Okay, let’s get this mother out of here.” Cernan wanted to be on top of the Monument Hill so he could be as close to the moon as possible.

  Nearby is the grave of another explorer, the French sailor found in the wreck of the La Belle, the only remnant of the disastrous 1686 expedition of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. The ship, with the sailor’s skeleton intact, had been hidden in the silt of Matagorda Bay for three hundred years when archaeologists discovered it, along with a pewter cup inscribed “C. Barange”—perhaps the sailor’s name. Among the war memorials is one to the “Nine Men of Praha,” in memory of the soldiers from a little Texas town who died in the Second World War, all the young men in that village.

  On top of Republic Hill is a statue of Stephen F. Austin, the founder of Texas, who also brought slavery into the colony, dooming his creation to so much iniquity and turmoil. Clustered around Austin’s grave are assorted governors and politicians. George W. Bush will be the first president buried here, when his turn arrives, as well as Rick Perry and Dan Patrick. There’s Robert McAlpin Williamson, “Three Legged Willie,” who had a wooden leg but still managed to fight in the Battle of San Jacinto and later serve in the Republic’s congress. Dan Moody is here, the youngest governor in Texas history; he broke the back of the Ku Klux Klan, which was a dominant force in Texas in the 1920s. As attorney general, Moody also brought down the corrupt governor James E. Ferguson, and his wife, Miriam, who had succeeded him in office—our first woman governor. She made a place for herself in Texas lore when she campaigned against bilingual education, allegedly exclaiming, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for the schoolchildren of Texas.” In the indiscriminate society of the graveyard, Ma and Pa Ferguson lie almost head to heel with Dan Moody.

  I accept that my life has already been lived. It has been a provincial life in many ways, intersecting only occasionally with history and the people who made it. I’ve always chosen to remain a step away from the center of the action, which for me would have been in the bustle of Manhattan or the corridors of power in Washington or the bungalows of Hollywood studios. They are all lives that beckoned to me. Each of them might have been more fulfilling than the one I chose. Instead, I’ve lived in a culture that is still raw, not fully formed, standing on the margins but also growing in influence, dangerous and magnificent in its potential. I have been close enough to those beguiling alternative lives to drink in the perfume of temptation. And yet, some maybe cowardly instinct whispered to me that if I accepted the offer to live elsewhere, I would be someone other than myself. My life might have been larger, but it would have been counterfeit.

  I would not be home.

  There are friends already here. Bud Shrake, a writer we all loved, lies next to his girlfriend, Ann Richards, the former governor. Ann’s epitaph quotes from her inaugural address in 1991: “Today we have a vision of Texas where opportunity knows no race, no gender, no color—a glimpse of what can happen in government if we simply open the doors and let the people in.” Bud’s epitaph reads, “So Far, So Bueno.”

  We rode down the path, past the white headstone of former Texas legislator Bill Kugle, who wanted all eternity to know “He never voted for Republicans and had little to do with them.” The black granite monument of Barbara Jordan, the first African American Texan elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, simply says, “Patriot.” At the bottom of the hill, in stark, orderly rows, are the graves of two thousand Confederate soldiers. Above them, on a shady hillside, is the memorial to their commanding officer, Albert Sidney Johnston, a hero of the Texas Revolution and one of the greatest Confederate generals, who fell at Shiloh.

  There was a spot near Johnston where we lingered. One could still see Stephen F. Austin on the top of the slope, with his hand reaching out in our direction. I felt a little light-headed. We all came to agreement rather quickly.

  I had made my choice.

  Acknowledgments

  Texas has been well served by the reporters who struggle to hold our political and business leaders accountable. That is especially notable in a time when the press is under assault, and reporters often assailed personally, by the most powerful people in our state and country. I am fortunate to have many friends in the press, a number of whom were vital in the preparation of this book. Mimi Swartz, of Texas Monthly and The New York Times, has been a wise and buoyant counselor, not only for this project but throughout my career. She was an invaluable guide to her adopted city of Houston. Robert Bryce, an author and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, gave me useful guidance on the oil and gas industry. Robert Wilonsky, a city columnist for The Dallas Morning News, reacquainted me with my old hometown. Mónica Ortiz Uribe, a freelance radio reporter, shared her two cities—El Paso and Juárez—with me. Historian Lonn Taylor gave me a useful overview of West Texas. Manny Fernandez, Houston bureau chief for The New York Times, graciously hosted me in the midst of deadlines brought on by Hurricane Harvey. And of course my f
riend Stephen Harrigan is a resource I have been calling upon for nearly forty years.

  Steve and I are two of the foursome that meets for breakfast on Monday mornings, an ongoing conversation that has brought me considerable education and much delight. Many of the ideas I explore in this book were first broached over coffee and pastries with Steve, Gregory Curtis, the former editor of Texas Monthly, and historian H. W. “Bill” Brands.

  In 2009, a new publication started in Texas, one that has done more than any other organization to inform citizens about the politics of our state. John Thornton, a venture capitalist in Austin, along with Evan Smith, then the editor in chief of Texas Monthly, and Ross Ramsey, then the editor and owner of Texas Weekly, joined forces to create an all-digital platform called The Texas Tribune. I don’t know of any other state that has the depth of political coverage that the Tribune has been able to supply in Texas. Certainly, no other state needs it more.

  David Danz’s illustrations wonderfully capture the diversity and spirit of Texas.

  Once again, Jan McInroy cast her scrupulous eye over the copy. When I get a manuscript back from her, I’m always a little abashed at the mob of errors that she has rounded up and placed under grammatical arrest. I am also grateful to my fact-checkers. At The New Yorker, Tammy Kim, Fergus McIntosh, and Rozina Ali checked the article “America’s Future Is Texas” (July 10 and 17, 2017) that gave rise to the current book. David Kortova and Elizabeth Barber checked “A Tale of Three Wells,” which was published in the January 1, 2018, New Yorker as “The Glut Economy.” Emily Gogolak, a New Yorker–trained checker, moved to Austin in time to examine the rest of the manuscript. Welcome to Texas, Emily.