Generations and Other True Stories

by Bryan Woolley

  “And the Trans-Pecos has the greatest share of endangered species per square mile of any area of Texas,” adds Mr. Love.

  In August 1988, not long after her husband died, Kack Espy got a letter from the Department of the Interior. “This letter,” it read, “is to inform you that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering listing the Little Aguja pondweed as endangered…. We believe that with the understanding and cooperation of private landowners, we can prevent some unnecessary harm to this species, perhaps even prevent its demise.”

  “I had never heard of the Endangered Species Act or the pondweed,” Mrs. Espy says. “So I just kept the letter. It didn’t seem to require an answer.”

  Early in 1989, she received a call from Mr. Love, who told her that, indeed, the Little Aguja pondweed had been listed as an endangered species. The Fish and Wildlife Service apparently had made its decision on the basis of a specimen that an undergraduate student from Alpine’s Sul Ross State University had obtained from Aguja Creek in Little Aguja Canyon by trespassing onto Mrs. Espy’s Jeff Davis County ranch.

  “I got in contact with my lawyer, who is in Fort Worth, and we worked with the Heritage Association for a year about the pondweed,” Mrs. Espy says. “It cost me between eight thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars in legal fees.”

  They had to invoke the federal Freedom of Information Act to get the Department of the Interior to release information about its decision, and Mrs. Espy became involved in a lengthy correspondence with the department.

  “Their letters were always quite courteous,” she says, “but they also were quite vague. They said my responsibility for the pondweed would be very limited, but they also said in several letters that cattle would endanger it. They might eat it or their manure might affect it. Well, cattle have been using that pasture for a century at least, and if the pondweed is still there, they haven’t bothered it, have they?”

  Mrs. Espy invited Dr. Barton Warnock, retired Sul Ross botany professor and the acknowledged authority on Trans-Pecos flora, to come to the ranch and search along Aguja Creek for the pondweed. “We crawled up and down that creek,” she says. “Dr. Warnock found a species of pondweed, but it wasn’t the one that had been listed. He couldn’t find it anywhere.”

  As the Endangered Species Act provides, Mrs. Espy and the Heritage Association requested a public hearing of the pondweed question. One was scheduled for July 17, 1990, in Fort Davis. But in June she received another letter from the Interior Department.

  “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently received information that the pondweed specimen collected on your property by a Sul Ross State University student was misidentified as Little Aguja pondweed (Potamogeton clystocarpus). This error was brought to our attention by this former student and has since been verified by our botanical experts.”

  “The pondweed wasn’t there,” Mrs. Espy says. “But there was no concern about the trouble I had to go through to protect my property. There was no apology for my having to spend all that money. They probably thought we would call off the hearing, but we went ahead with it. We were very prepared in every way. They sent people from Albuquerque, I believe it was, but they said they had no authority to answer any of our questions.”

  The turnout was almost as large as for the earlier national park hearing. “That little assembly building in Fort Davis was bulging at the seams,” Mr. Love says.

  Although Mrs. Espy won her fight, the Fish and Wildlife Service went ahead and declared the Little Aguja pondweed an endangered species, and said it was present in Aguja Creek on a ranch owned by the Buffalo Trails Council of the Boy Scouts, just upstream from Mrs. Espy’s place.

  Later, she learned that under the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service has no authority to restrict the use of land to protect rare plants—something that the Fish and Wildlife Service never told her. But as a result of her fight, many ranchers who previously had welcomed scientists and students onto their land to study its geology, botany, zoology, and archaeology have shut their gates to such visitors and now prosecute trespassers.

  Recently a number of ranchers rescinded permission they had given the army to come onto their land to improve roads used by the Border Patrol to fight smugglers of drugs and aliens. The reason: A rancher discovered a vehicle full of scientists on his land, sent there by the Corps of Engineers.

  “The Army had to get an environmental assessment of what it was going to be doing,” Mr. Love says. “So it brought those people in to do surveys. Well, the [ranch] people who gave them access granted it patriotically. But they didn’t know they were opening themselves to having those people investigating their land.”

  Since the Little Aguja pondweed incident, the Fish and Wildlife Service hasn’t bothered the Trans-Pecos much, Mr. Love says. He believes the Heritage Association is responsible for the respite. “The pondweed debate told the service that the folks out here are not going to allow themselves to be regulated without stirring up a little sandstorm,” he says.

  The Heritage Association’s perceived enemy now is the Nature Conservancy, a private wildlife conservation group funded largely by corporations. The conservancy works for the conservation of rare species of plants and animals in all fifty states and in thirty-four other countries. It often buys land on which rare species occur, and recently purchased two small tracts in Jeff Davis County. The Heritage Association regards it as “nothing but a giant federal real estate agent,” according to Mr. Frank.

  “Over 90 percent of the land the conservancy has bought in Texas is now in government hands,” he says. “The National Park Service and other federal agencies use it to acquire land when it would be controversial for them to try to get it themselves.”

  Last summer, the conservancy brought a group of its large donors to the Trans-Pecos to show them the Davis Mountains. Some members of the Heritage Association greeted them with signs on their ranch fences: “Private Property Yes, Nature Conservancy No.”

  David Braun, vice president and state director of the Nature Conservancy of Texas, led the tour. He says the Heritage Association’s fear of his organization is unjustified and based on a lack of understanding of its mission.

  “Our work in the United States is to locate places where those rare things still exist and in some way set up protected wildlife refuges,” he says. “In Texas, about half the land we work on is owned by private landowners, and we cooperate with them and act as an adviser to them. We have about three hundred thousand acres in that status. The private landowner joins what we call the Texas Land Steward Society, a purely voluntary, cooperative organization. A number of Trans-Pecos landowners belong to it. And, yes, sometimes we buy properties. In Texas, we own about forty-four thousand acres in two different reserves. Almost every piece of land we buy will have rare plants, animals or ecosystems on it. We use them as educational and research sites. And, yes, the third leg of our work is to help the park agencies like the National Park Service and Texas Parks and Wildlife and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acquire reserves.”

  Those agencies often don’t have the money to acquire land when it comes on the market. They need someone to buy it and hold it for them until they can get money appropriated by Congress or the Texas Legislature. “So we’ll buy something and hold it sometimes as long as five years,” Mr. Braun says. “We owned Enchanted Rock State Park for seven years before the state was able to get an appropriation and buy it from us. We’re a close partner of the public lands organizations, whether federal or state or local. I’m not ashamed of that. In fact, I’m proud of it.”

  But the 90 percent figure that the Heritage Association cites is a distortion of the conservancy’s record, he says. It was calculated in the late 1980s, when the conservancy was given a ranch in Brewster County, with the understanding that the conservancy would give it to the Big Bend National Park, which it did.

  “Since that time, we’ve bought twenty-five thousand acres in Texas, which we’re keeping ourselves,”
Mr. Braun says. “In the spectrum of environmental groups, we’re considered off the chart on the conservative side. Our membership is mainly business people who are very conservative politically and economically. It’s just as likely that we would sell to a private landowner as to a government agency. If we can get a private landowner to buy a piece of property, and we know that person is committed to conservation, that’s our first choice, because they don’t have hoards of visitors coming in as the Park Service does.”

  Nor is the Nature Conservancy interested in buying up the Trans-Pecos, neither for itself nor for the federal or state governments, he says. “I don’t think we particularly need any more parks in West Texas. What we’re trying to do is assemble some of the land at the very highest elevations of the Davis Mountains. There are very rare ecosystems up there. Plants found nowhere else in the world. When those ranches go on the market, we want to be in a position to buy some of that high land and just leave it alone. We want to make sure it never gets developed. For those few thousand acres at the top of that mountain that have those rare plants, we don’t need a lot of people hiking around up there. We would prefer to manage that ourselves.”

  But some people in the Trans-Pecos fear the Nature Conservancy, he says, because they’re threatened by the modern world that at last is intruding upon theirs, and the conservancy is one of the more visible intruders.

  “What they’re really afraid of is a change in their lifestyle. But what we’re doing is similar to what they would like to do themselves. They would like to see things remain the same. We’re much in agreement with that. We would like to see things in West Texas remain as close as possible to the way they are right now. I think the vocal ones—and I think they’re a minority of the people—aren’t willing to accept that there’s going to be change in the Trans-Pecos. They haven’t thought about what might be good change vs. bad change, and they aren’t willing to talk about it. But changes are coming. You sit up on Mount Livermore now and you look out, and there are those damn drug balloons hanging all over Marfa—sophisticated radar watching for drug planes to go over. And you look in the other direction and there’s a resort with hundreds of little trailers and cabins going in. You feel like you’re in a wilderness until you really look, and there are all those weird things coming in.”

  In his office at the Jeff Davis County Courthouse, Judge Dillard is studying a large map of the county that hangs on the wall. “This is a very special place,” he says. “What happens to it is at stake right now.”

  He points at large tracts of land on the map. “Here we’ve got a pipe salesman. Here we’ve got a lumber salesman. Here we’ve got a Dos Equis beer salesman from Mexico. All big absentee owners. These are the kinds of guys who are owning this country now. Who knows what they’re going to do with it? The old ranching families are in the fourth generation. They’re beginning to break up. As they do, either a wealthy person like these men buys the land, or the conservancy—a group of wealthy persons—or they become five-acre ‘ranchettes.’ Well. What’s best for the country?”

  January 1994

  Water, whether river, lake or creek or sea, puts me in a meditative mood. Even my condo swimming pool does. Although I’m an awful swimmer, I hurry home from work every day during the long, hot Dallas summers to loll in its water, chlorined and filtered as it is, and muse.

  The Reflecting Pool

  The brats who were shooting each other with water guns as big as bazookas finally have gone to their supper. So has their gold-chained dad, who expatiated loudly on which Wall Street stocks he considers good and which not so good, while his vacant-eyed wife or girlfriend rubbed coconut goop into her sun-parched hide and Neil Diamond caterwauled through the radio beside her.

  I haven’t seen them at the pool before. Maybe they’re new in the condo. Or somebody’s guests. Or maybe they sneaked in from the street for a dip, as people sometimes do, pretending to be residents. That would explain the noisy speechifying about stocks. Trespassers often overact, pretending to belong.

  If they’re residents, I hope they won’t make a habit of coming to the pool at this hour, or remaining until the sun has sunk behind units 199 and 200, as they have today.

  At twilight, the pool is mine. This has been so for eleven summers, and my ritual seldom varies, except when weather precludes a trip to the pool altogether.

  I arrive home from work with the heat of July in my hair and clothes and weariness in my bones. I change into swimsuit and T-shirt, grab a towel, a book, and an ice-tea tumbler filled with ice, water, and a generous slug of bourbon. I march to the pool, arrange a deck chair and a small table in the place where I always sit, under a live oak at the southeast corner, then ease down the steps into the cool water and wallow like a hippopotamus.

  Sometimes Isabel, my wife, joins me, and we stand in the water, discussing the events of the day, office gossip, what came in the mail, the books we’re reading, and the latest brilliant thing that Ace has done that proves his intellectual superiority to all other cats. Then Isabel, a serious swimmer, ends the talk and begins her laps.

  Having learned to swim in a West Texas stock tank of a diameter smaller than the width of this pool, I don’t do laps. Did I say “swim”? It’s far too generous a word for the splashing I do. I don’t “swim” in the presence of others. Not even my wife.

  When my skin begins to wrinkle, I climb into the deck chair and sip my bourbon and read. A Kinky Friedman mystery. A novel about Robert Falcon Scott and his men dying in Antarctica. An article about Texas Rangers in The Southwestern Historical Quarterly. Cormac McCarthy’s latest masterpiece. A history of the Mexican Revolution. And then wallow again.

  Sometimes Isabel doesn’t come or leaves early, and the pool is left to me and the cats. The longhaired black-and white one. The big tabby. The young black adolescent. They live in the units around the pool. The tabby may be a stray. Making their rounds, they spot me, halt, recognize me—“Oh. Only him.”—and move on. Sometimes the black one comes over and says hello.

  The birds are changing shifts by now. The day feeders roost in the trees, quarreling over which limb belongs to whom, and the night feeders are swooping out in search of bugs.

  This is when the twilight thoughts come, long thoughts that slide into the mind only when the world is silent and the light failing, the kind of mental wandering that our ancestors called “reflection.” It’s an informal kind of meditation that people used to do as a matter of course during the quiet of their sewing or plowing, before technology trained us to crave moving color constantly before our eyes and constant noise in our ears, entertainment substituting for thought and memory.

  The ghosts of my dead grandmother and my murdered stepson come to me sometimes, always smiling, laughing, enjoying some story or thing in the world. Images of my sons and my remaining stepson come, too, sometimes as they are now, sometimes younger. I marvel at their courage and humor, having to be young men in a world that was so thoroughly ruined before it was handed to them. “Here is your oyster, my sons. Try not to let it kill you.”

  And I remember friends I’ve enjoyed, and those I’ve lost to accident, heart attack, murder, suicide, AIDS, cancer, war. Quite a crowd. The world was no picnic ground for them, either. Maybe it never has been, for anybody.

  My twilight thoughts often are intimations of mortality, but they aren’t somber and I don’t fear them. These memories enlarge my life as surely as the books I read. They make me aware of the sweetness of this fleeting, present moment. I am one with the birds, the trees, the cats, the very water in which I’m standing as the twilight dims, leaving the world to darkness and to me.

  July 1994

  In 1993, my mother sold the old adobe house in Fort Davis where I and my brothers and sisters grew up. It was the practical thing to do. My mother was growing old and living alone, far from her children, who had moved away long ago.

  Our House

  My family bought the house from George Grierson, the son of Benjamin Grier
son, a famous Union general in the Civil War and the commander of the Buffalo Soldiers who served at the fort on the other side of Sleeping Lion Mountain.

  The general had been dead for thirty-five years, but at least one of the soldiers who had served under him still lived in the town. So did a number of the men and women who had moved their families and herds into the lush Davis Mountains during the three decades following the fall of the Confederacy. In 1946, Fort Davis was still very close to its frontier beginnings.

  The general’s son was a gruff and highly eccentric old bachelor. He lived in only two rooms of the sprawling adobe, which an Englishman named Gleim had built during the 1890s. A dozen or so other rooms stood vacant, and Mr. Grierson had had all the electric wiring removed from the house because, he said, the wires made a noise that made him nervous. He had also removed all the vegetation—every tree, every shrub, every blade of grass, every weed—from the huge lot on which the house stood. We never learned the reason for this.

  Oddities notwithstanding, Mr. Grierson had a kind heart. He hadn’t intended to sell his home, but a friend told him that a young mother and a grandmother needed a house big enough to accommodate themselves and five children, so he agreed to let us have his. We bought it, and he moved to a smaller house on the other side of town.

  The old adobe was the perfect place for us, just two blocks from the courthouse for my mother, who had been elected clerk of Jeff Davis County that summer, and about the same distance from the school where my grandmother taught and Linda, Dick, and I studied. (The younger kids, Mike and Sherry, would join us there later.) It was just across a fence from the Baptist Church, which we all attended, and in the middle of a neighborhood teeming with children.