Generations and Other True Stories (33 page)

“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
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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
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Our House

My family bought the house from George Grierson, the son of Benjamin Grierson, 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.

Because it was so large and so many children lived in it, our house became a sort of community center for the other kids of the town. Even when we weren't there, they felt free to drop by, sit on our screened-in front porch and read the comic books we kept in a box by the swing. They came to our house to play baseball in the backyard, to spin tops, shoot marbles, play jacks, roller skate on the sidewalk, learn canasta, listen to football games on the radio, play poker for matchsticks, play dolls, play guns, fix bicycles, build forts and playhouses. Sometimes one or two of them would stay for supper. Sometimes they would spend the night, or the whole weekend.

Since I, the eldest, was nine when we moved in, and Sherry, the youngest, was only two, these activities continued for many years. And by the time the last of us was married and gone, the whole noisy whirl had been started all over again by the first arrivals of the new generation.

During the forty-seven years since we moved in, five generations of my family have lived or visited there. For all those years, it has been a house filled with love and laughter, and, from time to time, grief and pain. The memories of Christmases, family reunions, birthday parties, high school graduations, weddings, and the ordinary events of living that are contained within its walls are beyond number. And wherever the rest of us have lived, and however many years we've been gone, we've always thought of that house as home, as the headquarters of our family.

So when I drove a rental car out of the Midland airport a few weeks ago and pointed it toward the Davis Mountains, I already was feeling that emptiness in the pit of my stomach, that heaviness in the chest that makes one sigh. Our home had been sold. My mother had lived alone in the place for nine years and had decided, at age seventy-seven, that it was time to move into a smaller, more easily maintained house closer to her now middle-aged children, all of whom had drifted east of the Pecos.

A week earlier, she had held a yard sale so huge that she had hired professionals from Fort Stockton to run it. Hundreds of customers from scores of miles around hauled off truckloads of furniture, kitchen appliances, souvenirs of my mother's travels—including more than eight hundred coffee mugs—and just stuff that accumulates naturally in a large house if you live in it for half a century.