A few years ago, a friend of John’s bought a copy as a Christmas gift for a grandson of the great Comanche chief, Quanah Parker. John inscribed it to the man, “whose valiant people made my people know they had been in a hell of a fight.”
“The old man cried,” John says. “You make a Comanche cry, you’ve done something.”
The Comanches were much in John’s thoughts during his Brazos journey, for it was along the Brazos that some of the bloodiest collisions between the merciless “lords of the South Plains” and the equally pitiless Anglo-Celtic invaders had taken place.
The Comanches, John would write in Goodbye to a River, “ate up the seed corn and the brood stock that were furnished them, converted their tools to arrowheads and battle axes, and on horseback drifted in and out of their reservation pretty much at will. The great Comanche Trail, ancestral route of thievery and rapine, lay near…. Buffalo…still teemed on the plains to the west. Two centuries of sweet wild tradition urged the Comanche to follow them, to ride and hunt and fight. Hand mirrors and hoes and occasional begged whiskey and strings of colored beads and the stink of a mule’s behind were not a fair trade for that.”
Their white enemies, on the other hand, “were the cutting edge of a people whetted sharp to go places, to wear things out and move on, to take over and to use and to discard. It is doubtful that any of the people in history whetted in that way…have wanted to dwell much in their minds on the humanity of the people in their path, on abstract justice. If they had, they wouldn’t have been able to go where they went.”
By the time he finished writing his book, John had found not only his voice but the themes that would occupy him for the rest of his career. They would be the land itself, and “the kind of people that a hard, dry country produces.”
When he was home about a year, John married Jane, and they lived on a rented country place outside Fort Worth. But John was struck by what he describes as “the incipient disease of the land,” the desire to own his own piece of ground. “I had never managed to purge myself of the simple yeoman notion,” he would write, “that grass and crops and trees and livestock and wild things and water mattered somehow supremely, that you were not whole unless you had a stake in them, a daily knowledge of them.”
A particular spot down in Somervell County had stuck in his thoughts. “A friend of mine started building up a ranch in pieces down here in 1947,” he says. “I’d come down with him, camping, and sometimes I’d come down by myself and wander around. In some of that wandering around, I happened onto this place. It was just old, beat-up, used-up land. But it was remote and private, and that was the main thing.”
He bought one overgrazed homestead and later added another, giving him almost 400 acres of eroded, cedar-infested limestone hills—some of the land that the Anglo-Celts had conquered and quickly worn out—with a beautiful creek, close enough to Glen Rose to be convenient, but far enough from the town and the highways. He began building a small stone house on a limestone ledge beside some live oak trees.
“I just intended it as sort of a hunting and weekend cabin,” he says. “Jane wasn’t interested in the place. She seemed rather indifferent. But about the time I got the cabin built and some of the land cleared of cedar, she decided she wanted to move down here.”
As he became more involved in the labor of the land, John found that the focus of his own purpose was changing. The learning of what he calls “yeoman skills”—the clearing of cedar, the building of fences, plowing, the tending of cattle, the enlargement of his house, the construction of outbuildings—began to fascinate him and give him more pleasure than he had imagined possible.
When he and Jane became parents—two daughters, Helen and Sally, were born within the first four years of their marriage—Jane had quit her job at Neiman Marcus. And John’s class at TCU met only once a week. So “Hard Scrabble,” as he called the place, became the center of their lives, and John evolved into what he jokingly calls a “squireen,” a small-time country gentleman.
He quit teaching in 1965. He worked for a while as a writer-consultant with the U.S. Department of the Interior, but for more than 25 years now he has made his living as a free-lance writer and farmer. He has raised some crops and some cattle, but the most valuable harvest that Hard Scrabble has yielded is the writing John has done about the place and his life on it.
In 1974—14 years after Goodbye to a River—he published his second book, which he named after his farm. Hard Scrabble, he wrote, “is not the account of a triumphant return to the land, a rustic success story, but mainly a rumination over what a certain restricted and unmagnificent patch of the earth’s surface has meant to me, and occasionally over what it may mean in wider terms.”
There surely is no other piece of land in Texas that has been described in such detail as John’s place. He describes its terrain, in the middle of what he calls the “Tonkawa Nation,” the dinosaurs who left their tracks along the Paluxy River not far beyond his fences, the prehistoric peoples and their Indian descendants who ate mussels from White Bluff Creek, the cattlemen and farmers whose wrongheaded practices stripped the soil of its power and tore the soil itself from its limestone bedrock, the cedar choppers who made their living from cutting the pestiferous trees and selling them for fence posts, the natural plant and animal life of the place, the local hunters of foxes and coons, the poachers of deer and wild turkeys and, of course, the pleasures and frustrations of his own efforts to restore the land and make it productive again.
As in Goodbye to a River, his ruminations, as he calls them, move beyond his immediate surroundings to Man everywhere and in every time and his relationship to land and the rest of the natural world.
In 1977, John began writing a series of wise, often humorous essays for Texas Monthly about such rustic matters as illegal Mexican laborers, goats, bees, dogs, chickens, weather and the users of chewing tobacco and snuff. In 1980, John collected them into a book called From a Limestone Ledge.
In it John acknowledges that his toil on Hard Scrabble hasn’t yielded all that he once hoped it would, and that advancing age makes it unlikely all his dreams will be realized. But he faces the truth serenely: “Let there now be contemplation, you tell yourself, contemplation and some placid enjoyment, even if the damned place is still not in shape.”
And in Self-Portrait, with Birds, he realizes that the most significant accomplishment of his labor has been not on the land, but in his own attunement with nature. “… I am relieved and grateful in this later time,” he wrote, “to find that the best thing I’ve acquired in these battered, cedar-clad limestone hills has been not the mastery of yeoman skills, … but simple awareness of natural rhythms and ways while living on the land through the seasons’ cycle, year by year.”
John has published many magazine articles and essays over the years, and a few highly regarded short stories, but it’s for this “Brazos Trilogy”—Goodbye to a River, Hard Scrabble, and From a Limestone Ledge—that his name will endure.
Sometimes, he says, three books seem a too-small work for 30 years, but his regret doesn’t last long. “I don’t think I’d do anything differently,” he says. “I keep telling myself that if the place hadn’t occupied so much of my time, I would have been more productive, worked more on my writing, but I doubt it. The place became a passion. I didn’t think of it as hard work. I loved it all. Except maybe digging the postholes.”
The girls are grown and gone. Helen lives in New York now, Sally in Utah. Jane, who went back to work at Neiman Marcus after her daughters left home, has retired. John, approaching his 72nd birthday, has ended his 25 years of labor on the land. He hasn’t worked a field in five years. The cedar is taking over again.
“The main thing this place has given me,” he says, “is a sense of how everything works together. From the microbes in the soil, to the plants that grow in the soil, to the animals that eat the plants, to the animals that eat the animals, to us. Without really having to depend on it myself, I’ve le
arned what dependence on the land means. And I think of that as reality. I’m unable to think of our present civilization as real. The reality to me is what has always been. What works. And the reality is disappearing fast.”
The nuclear power plant that has been built just across Glen Rose from Hard Scrabble has changed the economy of once-poor Somervell County. They’re building a golf course not far from John’s place. Much of the land is owned now by newcomers. But with them, some of the wild animals are beginning to prosper again. “People born in the city, they tend to be a little bit gentler in their attitude toward wildlife,” John says. “The original bunch around here, they were hard up, and anything you could eat, they were going to eat it.”
He quietly applauds efforts to save endangered species and wilderness and the environment, but he doesn’t use his writing to grind those axes. “I grow a little weary of polemics,” he says. “It’s kind of like sentimentality. It has always tainted my work when I’ve tried to get involved. And it has a built-in impermanence to it. You’ve got a cause, and you’re fighting for it, and you’re putting your writing into its service, and if you win, the writing is obsolete, and if you lose, it’s obsolete.
“I decided a long time ago that to be an activist you’ve got to be optimistic, because you’ve got to believe something can be done. And there seldom has been anything done.”
With Jane and Hodge, their 10-year-old English sheepdog, and a half-dozen steers grazing in the yard, John quietly is living the squireen’s life at last, walking his ground, tinkering with his boat, tying flies and indulging his passion for fishing—in his creek, in lakes, in stock tanks, on frequent trips to Florida and the sea off Key West—sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. He corresponds with a few writers and attends an occasional literary gathering. Rarely, he agrees to a lecture or a reading. He scoffs at the reverence in which he’s held by other writers and readers. “If you live long enough,” he says, “you become an institution.”
He has some essays and articles in the works, and lately has been thinking of returning to the form he practiced more than 30 years ago, before Goodbye to a River reshaped his future.
“I’d like to write a short novel built around salt-water fishing,” he says, “but I haven’t figured out exactly how. The trouble with fishing—or any uneconomic passion—is that you get to thinking it matters for its own sake, and it doesn’t. If you can’t make it matter in human terms, you haven’t done anything.
“And I don’t have the urgency about writing that I once had, where it was just digging at me, you know, and I would start feeling bad if I hadn’t written in a while.”
As for the river, John’s goodbye wasn’t final after all. Only one of the five dams that were to be constructed along the Brazos ever got built. During the Carter years, the federal government cut back considerably its funding for such projects. Furthermore, the Brazos water was found to be too salty for use as a municipal or industrial supply.
“I never took the whole trip again,” John says. “But for about 20 years after I wrote the book, I would go out on the river. I still go, just for day trips, during the sand bass run in late winter. I’m getting a little stiff for a canoe. After an hour or two, I get kind of cramped up.”
And though the river isn’t gone, it’s no longer the wild place that John and his puppy saw 35 years ago. “There are vacation homes all along the banks now,” he says, “and people everywhere. I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘You ruined the Brazos. You brought all those damn people down here.’ Well, they’re there. I don’t think I did it, though.”
“What is, is,” he wrote in his book. “What was, was. If you’re lucky, what was may also be a part of what is. Not that they often let it be so, now.”
June 1992
THE $65,000 FISH STORY
I’ve always been a lousy fisherman. I try it from time to time, but I’ve never been able to set my mind to really learn the wily ways of the creatures of the deep and how to catch them. Still, there’s an element of luck in the catching of fish, and when one of them has a $65,000 prize tag attached to it… why not give it a shot? Somebody hits the multimillion-dollar jackpot on the Las Vegas slot machine. Somebody wins the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. Somebody who doesn’t know what he’s doing could get lucky in the Lake Texoma Crappiethon.
HE HAD A DREAM, RAY ZIPPER SAID. “USE A JIG AND PUT A MINNOW on it,” the dream told him, “and the fish will come.”
“A lot of times I go to sleep with a problem on my mind, and I’ll wake up with the answer,” Ray said. “I didn’t know I had fish on my mind that night, but I guess I did.”
He wasn’t the only one. All along the shore, from Marietta to Denison, from Tishomingo to Pottsboro, fish were on many minds, for the two-month-long 1990 Lake Texoma Crappiethon was under way. Lurking under the surface of the water, prowling beneath the docks and boathouses, gliding among the branches of drowned trees, resting in the lee of rocky bluffs were 2,196 crappie wearing numbered tags, waiting to bring fortune, fame and happiness to whoever caught them.
Out there somewhere was “Big Bad Buck.” He was worth $1,000 to the fisherman who nabbed him, and worth $6,000 if he should be caught with a Buck’s Rod from B ‘n’ M Pole Co. “Bait-A-Hole Betsy” was out there, too. Her prize value would jump from $500 to $1,500 if the angler was using Bait-A-Hole bait from Triangle Products, Inc., at the time of the catch. And “Fintastic Voyager,” whose value would jump from $1,000 to $6,000 if his catcher’s boat happened to be equipped with a Delco Voyager battery.
There was “Candy Man,” worth $25,000 if caught with Crappie Candy bait. And “Crab Claw Clem,” worth $40,000 if his captor had a Crab Claw anchor in his boat. And “Kmart Kid,” whose captor would be rewarded with $5,000 worth of Kmart merchandise. And “Mighty Minn Kota,” worth $40,000 if the angler was using a Minn Kota trolling motor. And 45 other big-money fish. And 2,143 small-fry fish worth $25 each.
And there was “Tangle-Free Tom,” the uppermost fish on many minds, the crappie most worthy of a fisherman’s dream. His captor would win $5,000, no matter what kind of tackle he used. His value would rise to a dizzying $65,000 should he be caught on a Johnson Country Mile Spin open-faced reel, made by Johnson Fishing, Inc., the Crappiethon’s main sponsor.
He was out there somewhere.
But Ray’s dream wasn’t of any particular fish. After he awoke, he couldn’t remember whether the fish in his dream was even wearing a tag.
Ray had paid his $6 entry fee and got his official Crappiethon badge, but the tournament didn’t occupy his thoughts much. He lives within a rock-throw of the lake and goes fishing almost every good-weather day, whether there’s a tournament or not. But if a fish that he caught should happen to have a tag on it… well, it would be fine.
The morning that Ray awoke from his dream didn’t promise to be a good one for fishing. “The lake was so foggy I couldn’t see the water,” he said. But he took his boat out and, sitting there in the fog, decided to put his dream to the test. “It seemed like it made sense,” he said. “Putting a live minnow on it should make the jig more lively. So I figured I would give it a whirl.”
Before long, he had caught four fish. Then he made the strike of his life.
He caught “Kmart Kid.” Suddenly he was entitled to $5,000 worth of Kmart stuff.
When I was about six years old, my grandmother took me fishing on a creek near our house. I caught a perch, and my grandmother cooked it for my supper. But we moved to arid West Texas not long after that, and I didn’t get much more fishing experience growing up. Just a few catfish caught on trotlines and juglines in the Rio Grande.
I’ve gone bay fishing on party boats at Port Aransas and South Padre Island, but never caught anything but croakers and stingrays. And when my sons were small, we used to go down to Lake Whitney and throw a few lines off Soldier’s Bluff and then fly a kite or throw a Frisbee. Sometimes we would catch a fish or two, but it was always an embarrassment to me tha
t I didn’t possess any decent fishing lore to pass on to my boys. I suspected this was a major flaw in a father.
So when Ray invited me to go crappie fishing with him, I had a decision to make: Did I want to display my ignorance in front of a guy who had just caught a $5,000 fish in the fog?
I told Ray I would just watch.
Ray and his wife, Bea, live in a cabin on Preston Peninsula, a few miles north of Pottsboro. He’s an X-ray technician and she’s an emergency-room nurse. They both work weekends and are off the rest of the week, so they get to fish while Texoma is empty of boaters and water-skiers.
As I drove up the peninsula, I started thinking: What if I were in the boat with Ray and he had an extra rod and I decided that just for the hell of it I would put a line in the water? And what if I caught Tangle-Free Tom and didn’t have a Crappiethon badge?
It had happened to a couple of guys already. One fellow caught “Humm Dinger,” a $1,000 fish, but hadn’t bought a badge and missed out on the prize. Another caught “Fintastic Voyager,” then hid him while he hustled off to buy a badge. Half an hour later, he turned in the fish to claim his $1,000 prize. Crappiethon officials, suspicious of such extraordinary luck, demanded that he take a lie detector test, as they had a right to do under the rules of the tournament. He flunked.
I stopped at a tackle shop and bought a badge.
“Need anything else?” asked the man behind the counter.
“Uh, no,” I said.
The day was cold and cloudy. It wasn’t raining but it had rained for several days previously. The ground was saturated. The lake was high and muddy. Ray had a new trolling motor on his boat, and a new fish finder with a television screen that showed not only where the fish were, but also the depth and temperature of the water, the speed the boat was moving and the distance Ray had traveled since he left his boathouse. Compliments of Kmart. Including gifts to his wife, his children and his grandchildren, he guessed he had spent half of his $5,000 prize so far.
The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories Page 9
