The Time of My Life

by Bryan Woolley

  Gordon McLendon had prepared us for Herbert Kokernot, who did more for kids growing up in West Texas in the early Fifties than Santa Claus ever could.

  Mr. Kokernot is a rich rancher who loves baseball, and baseball teams were about as scarce in West Texas then—and again now, thanks to TV—as opera companies. So Mr. Kokernot assembled a bunch of high school coaches, college kids, gas pump jockeys, and ranch hands, organized a semiprofessional team out of them, named them the Alpine Cowboys, and pitted them against any foe he could find—Air Force teams from Lackland and Goodfellow, the House of David, other semipros such as the Big Lake Oilers, anybody who had a bus and could find Alpine.

  Then he built himself a baseball stadium and named it Kokernot Field. It was modeled after Chicago’s Wrigley Field, then the classiest park in the major leagues. Some major leaguers even said that Mr. Kokernot’s field, with its high stone walls decorated with steel baseballs and the rancher’s 06 cattle brand, was superior to any of the big-time arenas. And they knew, because they played there.

  Baseball teams traveled by train then, and Mr. Kokernot somehow (maybe by standing on the track and waving) would persuade a couple of big-league teams to stop in Alpine on their way back east from their California spring training camps.

  Christmas was nothing compared to it. Schools from Odessa almost to El Paso would declare a holiday and fill their buses with boys, each happily burdened with a dollar bill for pop and peanuts and a fielder’s glove with which he expected to capture an official major-league foul ball. Our buses moved along the narrow highways like yellow insects caught in some inexplicable migratory urge, headed toward Al pine and the Biggest Day of the Year, always sunny, always noisy, always perfect.

  Mr. Kokernot also made sure that the Cubs, the White Sox, the Browns, the Pirates didn’t dismiss our day as just another exhibition game in another tank town. He offered incentives—one hundred dollars to the pitcher for each man he struck out, fifty dollars to the fielders for each put-out, a thousand dollars per home run. That was big money, even for major leaguers, in those days, and our heroes always gave their all.

  I witnessed three of those games. Nellie Fox had the biggest chaw I’ve ever seen. Satchel Paige—an aging black man with twice the regulation number of joints and angles to his body and a windmill windup that seemed to consume whole minutes—struck out every man he faced in his two or three innings. An easy fly bounced out of Ralph Kiner’s glove. The images blend and change in my memory like the glass chips in a kaleidoscope, and I don’t remember who won any of them.

  It doesn’t matter. It was heaven, and the right people were there. And I’ll drink a toast to Mr. McLendon, to Mr. Kokernot, to them all, on Saturday, when summer comes.

  April, 1978

  How It Was, Is, and Will Be

  MEXICANS AND TEXANS have lived side by side for a long time, sometimes nastily, sometimes cordially. Texans used to be Mexicans, and now a lot of Mexicans are Texans, and the Rio Grande has always been the place where friends, relatives, and enemies from both sides get together to talk, drink beer, and fight.

  Left alone, Mexicans and Texans have always been able to settle their own disputes and problems, some times over a little spilled blood, sometimes not. And they’ve always thought of their problems as family problems, meaning they’re nobody else’s business.

  Lately, though, Mexicans and Texans have become a topic of conversation in Washington and other places Up North. That bothers me, because when Yankees start talking about the border, it usually means things are about to get gummed up.

  I think the labor unions were the first to take up Mexicans as a topic of conversation this time. That was when Big Labor noticed it was competing with brown people with no union buttons for a lot of jobs Up North. Wetbacks—or “undocumented aliens” as they’re called in government nicey-nice—had been working in Texas and the rest of the Southwest for a century, but it was when they went Up North that they became a National Problem.

  They were a problem because they were Taking Jobs Away From Americans, it was said. But the people who employed them said no, they were taking jobs that Americans didn’t want, and if the Mexicans didn’t do them, nobody would. Besides, the employers said, the Mexicans delivered a day’s work for a day’s pay, and they liked that.

  Texans had never seen Mexicans as much of a problem. The problem was the feds. Sometimes the feds would want the Mexicans to apply for a card which said it was okay with the government for Mexicans to work in Texas from time to time, for a little while. Some wetbacks would get the cards and become braceros, and others wouldn’t bother with the cards and would remain wetbacks. Most of their employers didn’t care whether they had cards or not.

  Then the government decided it didn’t want Mexicans working here anymore, so it took away the cards, believing this would keep the Mexicans in Mexico. But the Mexicans still needed jobs, and Texas still needed laborers, and both kept getting what they wanted.

  Without the cards, though, the Mexicans were outlaws. They had to keep a sharp eye out for the Border Patrol. The people who employed them were not outlaws, since it wasn’t illegal to hire a Mexican, but only illegal for a Mexican to have a job.

  This was okay with unscrupulous employers, of course. They could pay the wetbacks as little as they wanted to and treat them any way they wanted to, and if the Mexicans kicked, well, they could be threatened with the Border Patrol. There was always a meeker wetback to take the place of the obstreperous one.

  The situation made almost everybody else unhappy, though. The unions were unhappy because Mexicans were still getting jobs. Honest laborers were unhappy to be fugitives. The Mexican government and Mexican-Americans were unhappy because human beings of their own race and culture were being treated like slaves. Scrupulous employers were unhappy because the Border Patrol kept seizing their workers. The only happy people were the smugglers, who collected money from wetbacks wanting help to cross the Rio Grande and more money from employers wanting laborers.

  President Carter knows a National Problem when he sees one, so he decided to Do Something About It. The first thing he did was Crack Down. The Border Patrol arrested Mexicans all over the place, and the crops rotted in Texas fields because there was nobody to harvest them. The Border Patrol, being a government agency, said it could arrest even more Mexicans if it had More Money, and Mr. Carter said it could have more, come next budget. Meanwhile, however, how about a fence, a sort of “Tortilla Curtain,” to keep the Mexicans on their side of the river?

  The government was surprised to learn that neither the Mexicans nor the Texans liked that idea. There’s something disgusting about a fence between two free peoples, they said, and it wouldn’t work, anyway.

  Well, Mr. Carter didn’t give More Money to the Border Patrol, and didn’t build the “Tortilla Curtain,” maybe because he found out that Mexico has oil and gas.

  The Mexicans and the Texans figured the oil and gas would be good for everybody. For Mexico it would mean money and jobs. Development of the Mexican fields with Texas technology would mean that more Mexicans could stay at home. Those who still needed American jobs could stay in the South-west, where they were welcome, instead of going Up North and becoming a National Problem. For the gringos the Mexican fields would become a reliable supply of petroleum in a friendly nation close to us, tree from Arab politics and leaking tankers.

  But Texas oil and gas has become a National Problem Up North, too. And when the Mexicans started acting like Texans, talking about getting paid for their oil and gas, Mr. Carter lost interest in it and told them to go peddle it elsewhere. An uppity Texas is bad enough without an uppity Mexico next door, I guess.

  Sometimes I think we borderers have become the new Inscrutables, now that the Chinese are no longer a National Problem. Washington understands neither Texas nor Mexico—and never will, so long as it thinks of us only in terms of oil-rich yahoos and “undocumented aliens” with a river running between. There’s a lot more to us than that
.

  Maybe it’s the river that confuses Washington. The government sees it as a boundary dividing two nations, when it’s really a thread binding the two halves of a single culture.

  The National Problems on the border might be handled with more compassion and understanding if the president and Congress read fewer document reports and more poetry. They might try Howard McCord, an El Paso-born gringo poet, who wrote:

  I was born a Mexican in space

  but not in time, as the Bostonian

  is born an Englishman in space

  but not in time. The land is Mexico,

  the border is a delusion of the whites.

  The sand belongs to both sides of the river;

  it blows back and forth, back and forth.

  Everybody born in the drainage of the Rio Grande

  is an Indian or a Mexican.

  Or they could move the border northward to the Red, a shorter, less complicated river.

  February, 1979

  A Love Song and Its Sorry End

  MAYBE IT WAS Roy Acuff singing “Wa bash Cannonball.” Or Hank Williams wailing “The Pan-American.” Or Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys sweating through “Orange Blossom Special.” Or Johnny Cash growling out “Rock Island Line.”

  Maybe it was the names of the trains. Sunset Limited. Super Chief. Hummingbird. Twentieth-Century Limited. Panama Limited. South Wind.

  Maybe it was the place where I grew up—a town so small that we had to drive twenty-one miles to hear a train whistle.

  Whatever it was that created the images in my mind, trains used to mean romance and adventure to me. A sense of Going Places—the same sense that moved Roy and Hank and Bill and Johnny to sing about them, I guess. No matter how tacky or isolated our little Southern burgs were, we knew there was a Big World out yonder at the end of the shining tracks. All we needed was the price of a ticket and the guts to leave.

  I worked all summer once, in my high school days, to save enough money to go court a girl in Carrizo Springs. (If you can find Fort Davis and Carrizo Springs on a Texas map, you’ll wonder how we ever met in the first place, but that’s another story. Having met her, I couldn’t endure the whole summer without her. I would have pined away.) Since no train moved between my town and my beloved, even in those days, I went by bus. But on the return trip I was stranded in Del Rio by a flood that wiped out the Pecos High Bridge. The only alternative to spending the rest of my life in his town, the bus station man told me, was to catch the Sunset Limited to Alpine, which I did.

  Rail travel already was beyond its glory days, I guess, but the train was full and reasonably clean. Everything seemed to be working, and porters were hawking newspapers, pillows, and food in the aisles. The cowboy sitting beside me (returning to his range animal husbandry and rodeo classes at Sul Ross, I learned) and I squandered our last thirty cents on a sack of plums, which we shared with a little boy who kept peering around his seat at our hats.

  It was just a trip across the desert with a carload of crying babies. But when I stepped off that train in Al pine, I knew something important had happened to me. I had left Fort Davis only a few days before as just another country kid but returned as a man of the world. I had ridden one of the great ones, the Sunset Limited itself. I had been places. And whenever Roy or Hank sang about trains thenceforth, I nodded knowingly. Yessir. Nothing like a good train for going places.

  The growth of the airlines and interstates, the failure of the Pecos to flood the High Bridge again, and the general decline of railroad service combined to keep me off the trains for almost twenty years, during which I fathered two sons. Then in 1971, Amtrak was created. “Ah,” I said, “I’ll do my patriotic duty and keep the passenger trains alive. I’ll give my boys the thrill of the rails while it’s still possible. I’ll take them to Alpine on the Sunset Limited.”

  Well, we were living in Louisville, Kentucky, at the time, and no train that connected with the Sunset rolled through there. The nearest boarding point was Fulton, Kentucky, about two hundred miles away on the Mississippi River. I drove the family there in the middle of the night to catch the train at 1:30 A.M. We left our car in the care of a friend and walked to the station—a ghost from some Western movie, surrounded by high weeds, lighted by one dim bulb, and devoid of life. The kids, afraid of the gloomy shadows and mysterious noises, cried until 3 A.M., when the train arrived.

  Settling my cranky brood into the crowded coach at last, I asked the porter to bring some pillows. He told me he had none. We journeyed southward through rain, subsisting on Amtrak’s soggy sandwiches. The boys begged to go back home. I told them we were having an adventure. I told them to pretend we were refugees of the Russian Revolution, fleeing the Red Army across Siberia. We were so late arriving in New Orleans that the Sunset Limited had departed west ward without us.

  The kids enjoyed the city’s historic sites the first time we toured them, but not the second and the third. They kept asking when we were going to Granny’s. I told them the Sunset was a real train and worth the wait and to shut up.

  “See how shiny it is!” I cried as we boarded. “See how big the cars are! Built for long distances, just as they were when your daddy was a boy! You’re going to enjoy this train!”

  But an eerie sense of deja vu crept over me when we entered our car. Surely it was the same car I had rid den in my youth. The crying babies were there. A cowboy—perhaps my seatmate of yore, but horribly aged and sickly—sagged in a ragged seat, swigging from a bottle in a brown paper sack. The vendors were gone, but I had been there before, I knew, ten million miles ago. Under one of those seats, I knew, lay my plum pits.

  Our ride was an adventure, all right. The kitchen broke down at breakfast time. “It happens all the time,” the waiter said. The restroom door jammed shut with my children inside. While I listened to their bleating, the man who pried at the latch with the screwdriver said, “Happens almost every trip.” The air conditioning collapsed in the desert, where the train was creeping at thirty miles per hour because of the track’s decrepit condition. “Always dies about here,” the porter said.

  Now the Department of Transportation says it wants to discontinue Texas’ other two trains—the Lone Star and the Inter-American—but keep the Sunset Limited. Some people are upset about that, and I am, too.

  Why keep the Sunset? Why keep Amtrak? They just ruin all the train songs.

  February, 1979

  February Hath Not What It Takes Nor Reason to Be

  I HATE FEBRUARY.

  The weather can sometimes be rotten in January, and sometimes in December, but Christmas and New Year’s and the spirit they generate make them bearable, even fun. Winter is still young and interesting, and the football season is moving toward its various climaxes. January is nearly finished before all the championships are won and the mellifluous voices of Howard Cosell and Curt Gowdy fade from the living room.

  March is windy, of course, and Lubbock and Amarillo and Odessa pass brownly through Dallas toward Louisiana or wherever they spend the spring. But the trees are budding, too, signaling the end of winter, and there are kites. The holiest days of Christianity and Judaism are at the turning of the seasons, their symbols competing and coexisting with the cheerful remnants of pagan fertility rites.

  April and May are the tornado season, but their beauty makes their danger hard to hold in the mind. Baseball, man’s most magnificent public pastime, becomes official in April and competes with love for the young man’s fancy. The sap of everything living is in full flow in April and May.

  In June, the schools close and the swimming pools open. New graduates go forth to make their fortunes, and the reedy voices of their younger peers pipe of freedom in the backyard, in the parks, in the streets. Cutoffs and tank tops emblazoned with a million funky messages—the natural uniform of the young— are everywhere. Already, limbs are darkening and hair is lightening in the sun.

  Yeah, July and August are hot. But the fun and fireworks of Independence Day, the
hope that maybe the Rangers will finally win the pennant this year, hotdogs with the kids at Flagpole Hill, margaritas on the patio, sun tan oil and the pool and the air-conditioning in house and car pull us through. And there’s the vacation, too, when we go to the beach or some cooler clime and talk about how glad we are not to be in Dallas.

  September is full of expectation. We begin to realize it’s not going to be a hundred degrees forever. A new school year and a new football season are beginning, and we start dreaming of the Cowboys in the Super Bowl again and hoping this will be the year that TCU will win a game or two, while baseball speeds toward the World Series, maybe with the Rangers still in contention.

  And October. The beautiful gem for which the rest of the year is only the setting, filled with crystal light, the perfect mixture of warm sunshine and cool breeze, and nature’s colors both bright and somber, alive with festivals and crowned by Halloween, a holiday intended only for meaningless fun. And November, in good years, is an extension of October, a blessing unto itself, a mellow month perfect for Thanksgiving, good food and good feeling, the beginning of the holiday season.

  But February. What good can be said of foul February?

  Although it’s the tail end of winter, and the sun comes out occasionally, February somehow convinces us that winter will never end. The sun’s flirtations notwithstanding, we feel in our bones that gray is the sky’s natural color, that the ground will always be wet or muddy or icy, that creeping and skidding are what driving is about, that the car will always be dirty, the kids will always have colds, and, when we’re far from home, the airports will always be closed. The weather forecasts are always wrong, unless they’re unfavorable. The only comfort we receive from February weather is the knowledge that it’s probably worse somewhere else.