BY C.M. MAYO — June 6, 2022 UPDATE: This blog was then entitled Madam Mayo (2006-2022).
This blog posts on Mondays. In 2022 first Mondays of the month are for Texas Books, posts in which I share with you some of the more unusual and interesting books in the Texas Bibliothek, that is, my working library. > For the archive of all Texas-related posts click here. P.S. Listen in any time to the related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project.
The end of March 2022 marks the 16th anniversary of this blog, after which point, until further notice, I will be posting approximately two Mondays a month. The posts on Texas Books, the writing workshop, my own work, and a Q & A with another writer, will continue, each posting every other month and, as ever, when there is a fifth Monday in a given month, a newsletter.
OUR LOST BORDER Edited by Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso Arte Público Press, Houston, Texas Trade paperback $19.95, March 30, 2013 ISBN: 978-1-55885-752-0
Review by C.M. Mayo originally published in Literal, 2013
Lurid television, newspaper stories, and cliché-ridden movies about Mexico abound in English; rare is any writing that plumbs to meaningful depths or attempts to explore its complexities. And so, out of a concatenation of ignorance, presumption and prejudice, those North Americans who read only English have been deprived of the stories that would help them see the Spanish-speaking peoples and cultures right next door, and even within the United States itself, and the tragedies daily unfolding because of or, at the very least kindled by, the voracious North American appetite for drugs. For this reason, Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence, a treasure trove of one dozen personal essays, deserves to be celebrated, read, and discussed in every community in North America.
Not a book about Mexico or narcotrafficking per se, Our Lost Border is meant, in the words of its editors, Chicano writers Sarah Cortez and Sergio Troncoso, “to bear witness,” to share what it has been like to live and travel in this region of Mexico’s many regions, and what has been lost.
Snaking from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, the 2,000 mile-long U.S,-Mexico border is more than a fence or river or line on a map of arid wastelands; it is the home of a third culture or, rather, conglomeration of unique and hybrid cultures that are, in the words of the editors, “a living experience, at once both vital and energizing, sometimes full of thorny contradictions, sometimes replete with grace-filled opportunities.”
In “A World Between Two Worlds,” Troncoso asks, “what if in your lifetime you witness a culture and a way of life that has been lost?” And with finesse of the accomplished novelist that he is, Troncoso shows us how it was in his childhood, crossing easily from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez: family suppers at Ciros Taquería near the cathedral; visits to his godmother, Doña Romita, who had a stall in the mercado and who gave him an onyx chess set; getting his hair cut by “Nati” at Los Hermanos Mesa… Then, suddenly, came the carjackings, kidnappings, shootings, extorsions. For Troncoso, as for so many others fronterizos, the loss can be measured not only in numbers— homicides, restaurants closed, houses abandoned— but also in the painful pinching off of opportunities to segue from one culture and language with such ease, as when he was a child, for that had opened up his sense of possibility, creativity, and clear-sightedness, allowed him develop a practical fluidity, what he calls a “border mentality”— not to judge people, not to accept the presumptions of the hinterlands, whether of the U.S. or Mexico, but “to find out for yourself what would work and what would not.”
For many years along the border, and in some parts of the interior, drug violence was a long-festering problem. It began to veer out of control in the mid-1990s; by the mid-2000s it had become acute, metastasising beyond the drug trade itself into kidnapping, extorsion and other crimes. Short on money and training— in part a result of a series of fiscal crises beginning in the early 1970s— the Mexican police had proven ineffective, easily outgunned or bribed. Shortly after he took office in late 2006, President Felipe Calderón unleashed the armed forces in an all-out war against the cartels and that was when the violence along the border erupted as the narco gangs fought pitched battles not only against the army, marines, and federal and local police, but also and especially, and in grotesquely gory incidents, each other. Some of the worst fighting concentrated in the border state of Tamaulipas in its major city, Tampico, which is a several hours’ drive south of the border with Texas, but a major port for cocaine transhipments.
In the opening essay, “The Widest of Borders,” Mexican writer Liliana V. Blum provides a Who’s Who of the narco-gangs, from the Gulf Cartel, which got its start with liquor smuggling during Prohibition, to its off-shoot, the Zetas, which formed around a nucleus of Mexican Army special forces deserters in 1999, then joined the Beltrán Leyva Brothers, blood enemies of the Sinaloa Cartel. Fine a writer as she is, Blum’s experiences, which included having to drive her car through the sticky blood of a mass murder scene on the way home from her daughter’s school, make discouraging reading.
In “Selling Tita’s House,” Texas writer Mari Cristina Cigarroa recounts her family’s visits and Christmases to her grandparents’ elegant and beloved mansion in Nuevo Laredo. But then, with soldiers in fatigues patrolling the streets, Nuevo Laredo seemed “more like an occupied city during a war.” Chillingly, she writes, “I awoke to the reality that cartels controlled Nuevo Laredo the day I could no longer visit the family’s ranch on the outskirts of the city.”
The strongest and most shocking essay is journalist Diego Osorno’s “The Battle for Ciudad Mier,” about a town shattered in the war between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel for Tampaulipas.
I have hope for Mexico for, as as an American citizen who has lived in Mexico’s capital and traveled and written about its astonishingly varied history, literature, and varied regions for over two decades, I know its greatness, its achievements, its resilience, and creativity. But in his foreword, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith rightly chides, “The United States needs to wake up.”
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
My writing assistants advise me that winter is coming. It’s chicken soup time, they say, pumpkin time, cozy all the time– except when it’s time for the walk!
This finds us still working on the next Marfa Mondays podcast. I’m almost finished transcribing a fascinating 4 hour interview recorded in the Cactus Capital of Texas, which I’ll be editing down to a listenable 45 minutes (or thereabouts). Stay tuned. Meanwhile, with the peculiarities of the past in mind, herewith, a book review from the archive:
Thomas M. Settles’ John Bankhead Magruder: A Military Reappraisal
Originally published on this blog and my Maximilian-Carlota Research Blog (sharing research on Mexico’s Second Empire / French Intervention), February 15, 2011
As the subtitle indicates, most of Thomas M. Settles’ splendid biography of John Bankhead Magruder (1807 – 1871) is dedicated to a detailed examination of his role in the U.S. Civil War, specifically, his audacious if nonetheless inevitably doomed defense of Richmond, and later, Galveston. Though this part of the narrative does not have direct bearing on Mexican history, it informs the portrait of an unusually flamboyant Confederate who, in defeat, looked south to a future in Maximilian’s Mexican Empire.
Based on three decades of archival research, this biography must have been a titanic task, for Magruder left no diary and many of his most important papers were lost in a San Francisco fire. Worse, he was much maligned during his lifetime, victim of both malicious gossip from his Confederate rivals and less than sympathetic Federals– just the sort of thing to send a biographer down blind alleys. In addition, there were misunderstandings, as when earlier historians, in recounting what appeared to be a less-than honorable leave-taking from Washington DC at the start of the Civil War, confounded Magruder with a relative.
General John Bankhead Magruder was, as Settles convincingly argues– backing every point with what sometimes seems a forest of footnotes– a Civil War general whose tactical ingenuity and tenacity are deserving of far greater respect than he has been accorded. Most of the book details his early military career, from West Point to a garrison duty and recruiting at various army posts from the Carolinas to Maine, until, with the invasion of Mexico in the late 1840s, his fortuntes took a radical turn. Along with many of the men who would later play major roles in the U.S. Civil War– Grant, Lee, and McClellan, among them– Magruder distinguished himself in several major battles against the Mexicans. (Magruder’s artillery was, in fact, the first to fire upon Chapultepec Castle.) Following the U.S.-Mexican War, Magruder served in California, where in Los Angeles, briefly, he ran a saloon.
He was on a visit to Europe when recalled to Washington DC in 1861, only a month before his native state of Virginia seceded. He had not wanted to leave the U.S. Army, but as “he could not fight against his own people,” he resigned, calling it “the most unhappy moment of my life.” He walked across the Potomac, offered his services to the Confederacy and, in short order, was reporting to Robert E. Lee.
Settle’s treatment of Magruder’s return to Mexico in 1865, in the final chapter, “Postwar Odyssey,” is a relatively brief one; nonetheless, it is an important contribution to understanding the nature and role of the ex-Confederates in Maximilian’s government.
At the end of the U.S. Civil War, General Magruder was one of several thousand ex-Confederates who pulled up stakes for Mexico. In 1865 the French Imperial Army, considered the greatest in the world, occupied most, if not all of Mexican territory, while the ex Archduke of Austria, Maximilian, a direct descendant of the King of Spain during the Conquest, reigned as Emperor. Though by the late summer and fall of 1865, when the ex-Confederates began arriving en masse, the French occupation was beginning to fray at the edges, Maximilian and his consort, Carlota, still presided over a court and elaborate palace balls and other festivities that were, to Americans at that time, considered the height of glamor. In the words of journalist William V. Wells, this was the “high noon” of the empire, when it was impossible for many to even imagine the catastrophe that would, in only a matter of months, befall the “cactus throne.”
Some ex-Confederates came to Mexico because they could not bear living in a defeated South, others, because they had expected to participate in a dynamic plantation economy under the French-backed Maximilian (who, to entice the ex-Confederate colonists, proclaimed slavery legal in Mexico). But others, such as General Magruder, simply felt pushed out. As Settles writes:
“It must have been extremely difficult for so proud a man as John Bankhead Magruder to have signed the articles surrendering the Trans-Mississippi Department. But when the Federals began arresting and imprisoning high Confederate officials, he resolutely refused to submit to such personal humiliation. He was not eligible for the amnesty proclaimed by President Lincoln on December 8, 1863, or that proclaimed by Andrew Johnson on May 29, 1865”
Although I had spent several years researching Mexico’s Second Empire under Maximilian for my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, until recently, I was flummoxed as to the background of the author of the exceedingly rare English language memoir, Sketches of the Last Year of the Empire, Henry R. Magruder. It turns out he was the son of General John Bankhead Magruder and I now know, from Settles’ biography, that father and son did not arrive in Mexico via the same route. General Magruder came down overland from Houston with General Shelby, while his wife, son Henry, and unmarried daughter, Kate Elizabeth, arrived via Veracruz, for they had come from Florence, Italy, where they had been residing for some years.
As Settles explains:
“[B]ecause of the hardships of travel, uncomfortable living conditions, and extremes of climate found in the remote locales where magruder was stationed during his military career, [Mrs Magruder] found it more practical to live and raise her children in the comforts of Baltimore, where she could stay closer to family business interests. She remained there until 1850 when, as a consequence of [daughter] Isabella’s ill health, she took her children to Europe. Mrs Magruder had relatives in Germany, but she moved to Italy, living briefly in Rome, then in Florence.”
From Texas, not yet reunited with his family, Magruder headed straight down to Monterrey and then to Mexico City, arriving in the summer of 1865.
Writes Settles:
“Magruder checked into a room on the first floor of the fashionable Iturbide Hotel, and there he received several distinguished visitors, including Matthew Fontaine Maury and his old friend Marshal Francois-Achille Bazaine, now in command of the imperial forces in Mexico. He also met with the British minister to Mexico, Sir Peter Campbell Scarlett, whose nephew, Lord Abinger, had married Magruder’s niece, Helen Magruder, in Montreal several years earlier.”
It appeared Magruder felt as at home as an American could be in Mexico City. He bought himself a new wardrobe, “‘a cut-a-way suit of salt and pepper color, with a tall dove-colored hat and patent leather boots,’ and then went to the palace of Montezuma [the Imperial Palace], which Scott’s army had victoriously occupied eighteen years earlier.”
Soon after a successful interview with Maximilian and Carlota, Magruder, now a naturalized Mexican citizen, was appointed head of Maximilian’s Land Office of Colonization. The idea was to establish colonies along the main route inland from Veracruz to Mexico City, on land Juarez (under the Republic) had expropriated from the Church.
Settles covers the rapid collapse of the scheme along with Maximilian’s government, and Magruder’s return to the U.S. In 1867– surprisingly, for memories of the Civil War remained fresh— he attempted to set up a law office in New York City. His family had returned to Italy, but he remained in the U.S. to work the lecture circuit with a crowd-pleasing talk on Maximilian and Carlota. He was on that tour when, in a Houston hotel in 1871 he died of a stroke.
What’s a Texas pecan pie for dieters? It’s the same as the normal pie– loads of pecans, butter, and sugar– but it’s a tiny pie. And I happen to have the perfect tiny Texas pie dish for it– a work of art by Alpine, Texas-based ceramic artist Judy Howell Freeman. It’s one of the loveliest pie dishes I have ever seen. My photo does not do it justice.
C.M. MAYO’S TEXAS PECAN PIE FOR DIETERS (For a standard-sized pie, double this recipe)
Butter Crust: 1 1/4 cup flour 1 tablespoon sugar dash of salt 1/2 cup butter cut into itty bits 3 tablespoons ice water >>Mix it all up! Squoosh it and roll it until it forms a ball; then roll it flat (like a thick little frisbee); then wrap it in plastic or pastry paper and park it in the fridge for at least an hour.
Pie Filling: 2 eggs, beaten 1/4 cup sugar pat of butter (about what you would use to generously butter a roll) 1/2 cup honey (raw– otherwise don’t bother, just get the corn syrup) 1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, ginger 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper (YES DO IT!) dash of salt a couple of handfuls of pecans >>Mix it all up, except for the pecans
>>Roll out the dough and fit to a greased tiny pie pan. Do not leave extra crust around the rim; this is a diet pie! >>Fill ‘er up. Drop the pecans on top. Arrange pecan pieces artistically if you feel so moved. >>Bake pie @ 350 F = (approximately 175 C) for about 45 minutes >>Then cover the pie pan with a lid or foil, and continue baking until a toothpick comes out clean of the pie’s center (takes probably another 30 to 45 minutes). >>Remove from oven and let it set for about 45 minutes. >>To slice, use an extra sharp knife.
(If you do not allow it to cool and if you use a dull knife it will end up on the plate looking like a slobby cobbler.)
Eat this whole pie and you can shovel snow in Siberia in your birthday suit for about two hours! It is meant to serve 4 to 6 people, a tiny slice each. Do not add ice cream!
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Back in January of this year (2019) I started migrating selected posts from the old blogger platform to this page, www.madam-mayo.com, which is self-hosted WordPress. So far, so swimmingly, as I continue work on the Far West Texas book and related Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project. You can now find not all but a generous number of the Texas posts here, among them, this review of James McWilliams’ The Pecan.
BOOK REVIEW by C.M. Mayo Originally published on Madam Mayo blog, July 5, 2015
Crisply entertaining and chock-full of crunchy
research by a food historian, this apparently delicious little book on
America’s native nut— (and isn’t the cover charming?)— is a horror
story.
It opens, as the darkest do, with a sunny scene of innocence.
Clustered along river bottoms in what would one day become Texas, groves
of pecan trees rained down their bounty for wildlife and indigenous
peoples. For centuries, pecans were their superfood, dense with calories
and nutrition. In the 16th century, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the
conquistador who shipwrecked en route to Florida and wandered
west, found the Guadalupe River “a river of nuts”— although he had no
word for them but “walnut.” The name “pecan” dates from the late 18th
century.
Those are not pecan trees at Monticello.
The pecan did not do well further north. Thomas Jefferson planted
some 200 pecan trees in Monticello; none survive. Where nuts were
wanted, European walnut varieties proved more popular and versatile, so
the pecan was left to do what it had always done, thrive in its wild
state along river bottoms, mainly in what is today Texas. Notes
McWilliams, “unlike any other fruit-bearing tree in the age of
cultivation, the pecan managed to evade the cultivating hand of man for
centuries after humans began exploiting it for food.”
Yum!
In the nineteenth century, as ranching and cash crops such as cotton,
corn and wheat spread across the South and Midwest, many pecan trees
disappeared; nonetheless, a large number of pecan groves survived,
especially in Texas, because they clung to riverbanks and bottoms, and
proved able to survive a flood other crops could not.
Farmers found wild pecans not only delicious as snacks for
themselves, but good pig feed, and bags of them, easily gathered, could
be sold in new markets in San Antonio, Galveston, and New Orleans. In
the second half of the 19th century, Texas took the lead in pecan
production, but not from formal orchards; for the most part, farmers
gathered wild pecans.
How to sell more pecans? The market wanted uniformity, thin shells,
and dense nut meats. Even the most magnificent pecan tree’s seed,
however, would not “come true,” that is, bring forth a tree producing
equivalent quality nuts. The solution was grafting. As early as 1822 one
Abner Landrum detailed his own successful experiments with pecan
grafting in the American Farmer. It seems no farmer bothered to
emulate that experiment. The market for pecans was still marginal and,
as McWilliams ventures, “it was simply more macho to run a ranch with
cattle than to turn that land over to pecans.”
The Big House at Oak Alley Plantation
In the mid-century 19th century, in the Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana,
a slave gardener named Antoine successfully grafted an orchard of more
than 100 fabulously productive pecan trees. Decades later, the
plantation’s new German owner, Herbert Bonzano, brought the nuts of
those grafted pecans to Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exposition. And
thus, like so many other fruits before it, the pecan was at last, if
slowly, on the road to industrial production— a road, like that to Hell,
paved with good intentions.
the pecan was at last, if slowly, on the road to industrial production— a road, like that to Hell, paved with good intentions.
For a time, farmers relied on wild pecans, resisting experts’ advice
to graft pecans, perhaps out of innate conservatism and a reluctance to
becoming dependent on nurserymen. Attitudes soon changed. After a series
of insect plagues in the last three decades of the 19th century
decimated major cash crops, the USDA championed chemical insecticides
that, “lo and behold, worked.” Writes McWilliams, “The USDA was no
oracle, but as pecan farmers recognized, history showed it could make
life much easier for those who tilled the soil for a living. So long as
they would listen.” Listen they did.
The 20th century brought increasing industrialization in pecan
production. After World War I, writes McWilliams, “pecan trees were
becoming carefully managed commodities rather than natural aspects of
the southern landscape.” As for shelling, an important source of
employment in San Antonio in the 30s, after some labor unrest, this was
given over to machines.
In World War II the U.S. government gave the pecan industry a push,
promoting the nuts as nutritious replacements for meat; and after
imposing price ceilings to help promote consumer demand, buying up
millions of pounds of surplus pecans (many fed to schoolchildren). By
the late 1940s, pecans were no longer holiday treats or just for
pralines, they were in everything from cakes to cookies to pies, even
salads. McWilliams: “The aristocrat of nuts had become a commoner.”
McWilliams brings the pecan through the rest of its 20th century
history with mail order, frozen foods, processed foods, chain
restaurants, granola, and ice cream; its oil extracted for lubricants in
clocks and guns, its wood milled for basketball court flooring, its
shells collected for mulch, barbecue chips, plywood, pesticides, and
more. By 2011, when the author tours a Texan pecan farm, he is stuck
with dark wonder:
“First, the entire
operation is a streamlined model of mechanization. Vehicles designed to
fit snugly between seemingly endless rows of perfectly aligned pecan
trees spray pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides; they lay mulch,
prune trees, apply fertilizer, and harvest nuts. Other machines disk the
soil and smooth the turf between the trees so that fallen nuts do not
elude harvest. At times helicopters are even brought in for the purpose
of keeping frost from icing the nuts. Propane cannons are on hand to
scare off crows. It occurred to me as we drove from orchard to orchard
that there was nothing ‘natural’ about a contemporary pecan orchard.I was looking at a factory in the field.”
Oh, but it gets stranger. The money isn’t so much in the pecans as it is in shipping trees from the nursery to China. In 2001, Chinese did not have a word for pecan. Today pecans are a popular health food in China, available everywhere from airports to gas stations. It seems a question of time before the Chinese outstrip the U.S. in pecan production.
The future of the pecan, a “chemically saturated activity,” whether in the U.S. or China or elsewhere, looks grim. Arsenals of insecticides are increasingly necessary to combat aphids, beetles, weevils and more. These chemicals also threaten bees and other pollinators (and without them, our food supply as we know it may collapse). Plant diseases are also becoming increasingly resistant to chemical assault. The soil degrades. At some point— perhaps when China has become the top producer; perhaps when some insect or fungus has wiped out enough orchards; or in the wake of some ecological or economic jolt— it may become unprofitable to continue producing pecans in the U.S., the grafted and chemically attended ones for the mass market, that is.
What then will have become of the now few stands of wild pecans? The good intentions of many decades—ye olde single-minded “economic development”— have brought this once thriving wild nut tree to a state of such fragility that, concludes McWilliams, “we may well lose yet another natural thread to the past.”
Of late American readers have been well served by a veritable cottage industry of works about the Roman Republic and Empire, and their respective falls, and various aspects thereof, and what lessons we, with our republic (or empire, as some would have it), purportedly at the precipice of analogous fiscal, ecological, military, social and/or political Seneca Cliffs, might learn from them. History may not repeat itself any more than we can wade into the same river twice, but, of course, we can step into rivers that look more than a sight familiar. Sometimes a nicely behaved river—let’s dub it the Goth Swan—turns of a sudden into a drowning horror. Indeed, a close reading of Roman history does suggest, in blurriest outlines, some analogies with contemporary trends and conundrums. But there are perhaps more valuable insights to be parsed from our own little-known and, relatively speaking, recent history.
In West of the Revolution, Claudio Saunt, a noted scholar of early American and Native American history, spotlights nine places and formative events of 1776 that rarely raise a blip on the radar of even the most well-educated Americans. As Saunt writes in his introduction, “The American Revolution so dominates our understanding of the continent’s early history that only four digits—1776—are enough to evoke images of periwigs, quill pens, and yellowing copies of the Declaration of Independence.”
Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River by Patrick Dearen University of Oklahoma Press, 2016
When I closed the cover of Patrick Dearen’s Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River it was with both gratitude and the unsettling sense of having arrived into new territory— raw, rich, appalling—in my understanding of Far West Texas. This is no minor thing to acknowledge; for some years now I have been at work on a book about that very region.
But first, for those who don’t have a jones for, shall we say, Wild Westerie, why bring Far West Texas into the cross hairs? And why give a hoededo about its skinny river so salty, to quote one of Dearen’s informants, that “a snake wouldn’t drink it”?
Texas is one of the most powerful economic and political entities in not only the United States but the Americas. At the same time, “Texas” is so hammered out into tinfoil-thin clichés of popular culture (and many of those informed by warmed-over 19th century war propaganda and Madison Avenue-concocted boosterism), that we have the illusion we know Texas, when in fact it enfolds concatenations of undeservedly obscure histories, stupendenous beauty, and the lumpiest of paradoxes. If Texas—and I mean the real one, not the confection of Marion Morrison aka John Wayne, et al—is still in many ways terra incognita, its “iconic” far west, profoundly moreso. What delineates Far West Texas from the rest of Texas is precisely that skinny, salty river. And a most peculiar body of water it is.
THE PECOS AND THE TRANS-PECOS
In Texas, to set foot on the western shore of the Pecos is to enter the Other Texas, the fritter-shaped, South Carolina-sized chunk of the Lone Star State also known as the Trans-Pecos.
No, Far West Texas / Trans-Pecos does not include Lubbock. Nor San Antonio. Nor South Texas, nor the Panhandle. Nor Austin, nor Dallas. Nor Midland, nor Odessa.
The southwestern border of Far West Texas is the Rio Grande, the border with Mexico; to the north, it shares a stretch along the 32nd parallel of salt fields and the Guadalupe Mountains with the state of New Mexico; and at its extreme west, the Trans-Pecos elbows into New Mexico at El Paso.
With the exception of El Paso, and the miniscule cowtown and artist-cum-hipster magnet of Marfa, few if any towns of the Trans-Pecos can raise an eyebrow of recognition outside the region.
The distances in the Trans-Pecos are stunning, never mind those to get out there from anywhere else in Texas. From the state capital in Austin, a straight shot west on Interstate 10 at the speed limit, no stops, gets you to the Pecos River near Iraan in a shoulder-stiffening four hours and twenty minutes. But the Pecos doesn’t look like much at that point—there’s a tiny sign—the highway sinks down pylons for a moment. Sneeze and you’ll miss it. You won’t catch the Pecos in your rearview mirror, either.
However, if from Austin you are game to drive four hours and thirty minutes southwest into the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, nearing the U.S.-Mexico border past Comstock you could rumble onto the high bridge over a wide and sparkling Pecos, a feat of engineering spanning a bright-walled gorge so spectacular it justifies that marathon of a drive.
And how’s this for an inkling of the scale of the Trans-Pecos itself: To drive from El Paso back to that Pecos River crossing near Iraan, 308 miles, would take at least four hours. El Paso actually lies closer to San Diego, California, on the Pacific Ocean, than to Houston on the Gulf of Mexico. (I Googled that so you don’t have to.)
West of the Pecos Texas becomes less southern, more western and more Hispanic, and drier—although there are notable ciénegas, or oases. In places the landscape rolls on as flat as a tortilla; but in others, especially around the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, the landscape turns so lasciviously volcanic it might belong to another planet.
Even as the Texians and the Mexicans contested the farmlands that became the Republic of Texas (and thereafter the state of Texas), and even as the Confederates drove out the soldiers of the Union, and in turn, a victorious Union imposed Reconstruction, in effect, the remote Trans-Pecos remained part of greater Apachería and Comanchería. (That said, the Comanches did not settle in the Trans-Pecos; they passed through it on the so-called Comanche Trail—more aptly, network of trails—to raid in Mexico.) Spanish mapmakers were not far wrong to label the area the Despoblado, or Empty Quarter. The few Spanish, then Mexican, then other explorers who survived their forays into the Trans-Pecos did not have pleasant stories to tell. And so many straggled up to the bitter waters of the Pecos hoping for refreshment for themselves and their livestock only to find death. (Horse lovers should avoid reading the 1858 report of Waterman Lily Ormsby, the first through-passenger on the Butterfield Overland Mail westbound stage. Suffice to say, Ormsby mentions beating the parched and exhausted animals with rocks.)
The impetus for the U.S. government to remove the indigenous peoples—the brutal Indian Wars—and bring this merciless territory into Texas was simply this: to get to California, it had to be crossed.
A few pioneers saw opportunities in Far West Texas. In this twenty-first century some of their enterprises are still ongoing, but the Trans-Pecos is littered with ghost towns, abandoned farms, ranches, mines, and here and there at lonely cross-roads, and even on the main thoroughfares of surviving towns—Fort Stockton, Marathon, Sierra Blanca, Valentine, Van Horn, among others—there are ruins, some boarded up, most not, of houses, motels, cafés, grocery stores, and gas stations. There are many reasons for these eyesores, but a persistent one is the decline in the quantity and quality of water. All over the Trans-Pecos springs and seeps have been disappearing. As for its rivers, after the Rio Grande, the Pecos is the most important, and of all the rivers in the American West, the Pecos is one of the bitterest, most abused, and most fragile. Writes Dearen, “the Pecos is under seige by problems so vast and varied that resolutions are challenging if not impossible.”
You might assume, as I once did, that given all the movies and novels from Zane Grey’s West of the Pecos to Dearen’s own To Hell or the Pecos, the Pecos would be a well-examined river. More to the point, while there is a library’s worth of nonfiction on the Trans-Pecos—from scholarly tomes on the Paleolithic hunters, to the Spanish conquistadors, to memoirs of cowpokes and modern-day naturalists, and Dearen’s earlier works, including the invaluable history Crossing Rio Pecos— astonishingly, Bitter Waters, published in 2016, is the first book-length environmental history of the whole of this river.
THE PECOS AND THE PERMIAN BASIN
Fed by snow, rain, and freshwater springs, the Pecos gushes down from its headwaters in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains southeast towards Texas, but before it reaches the stateline it runs into the Permian Basin. For the most part a desolation dotted with mesquites and pumpjacks, the Permian Basin is the remains of what was, some 250 to 300 million years ago, an inland sea. Layers upon layers of its ancient salts cover over yet deeper layers of the fossilized remains of marine organisms—petroleum. Only a western swath of the Permian Basin lies within the Trans-Pecos; the great amoeba-shaped body of it spreads north and east into New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle, and almost as far as central Texas. Oil rigs started popping up in the Permian Basin in the 1920s; today the Permian Basin’s industrial center is the twin cities of Midland and Odessa, about an hour’s drive east of the Pecos River.
It bears underlining that, as Dearen writes, “[s]ince time immemorial, the Pecos and its tributaries have washed across a dead sea bottom and carried away its salts.” Literally, every day, for millions of years, brine springs have been pumping tons upon tons of salts into the Pecos.
But the saltiness varies. Dearen explains that as the Pecos winds though Texas it also drains other watersheds, and freshwater springs feed into it from the Davis Mountains. About two-thirds of its way from the top of the Trans-Pecos to its mouth at the Rio Grande, the Pecos receives yet more infusions of fresh water from creeks and springs originating in the Glass Mountains. It also receives infusions of agricultural run-off and debris, and a litany of other challenges—but this is to get ahead of the story.
“STUPID AND UNINTERESTING”
As a baseline, what was the condition of the Pecos before our time?
In the chapter “The River That Was,” Dearen provides an overview of pre-twentieth-century human encounters with the Pecos, from early peoples (some of whom, close to its source in present-day New Mexico, used its waters for irrigation), to the Spanish explorers who encountered it south of those brine feeder springs and so dubbed it the Salado (Salty River) and later the Puerco (Pig-Like). When mid-nineteenth century U.S. Army personnel encountered the “Puerco,” their reports soon began calling it the snappier-sounding “Pecos,” but they they too disdained it. Dearen quotes Second Lieutenant William F. Smith, echoing others, calling it “muddy, swift and narrow.” U.S.-Mexico boundary commissioner John Russell Bartlett, coming upon it in 1850, called its waters “brackish.” Wherever they drank from the Pecos, men and animals tended to suffer from gastrointestinal upset. In the desert, diarrhea could kill. Bartlett added: “Miserable grass.” One youthful explorer of the 1850s summed it up: “A more stupid and uninteresting river cannot be imagined.”
The first survey and and scientific study of the Pecos in the Trans-Pecos was not made until 1854, under Captain John Pope, whose mission was to find a route for the railroad to California. Pope identified areas for potential for irrigiation in the fertile lands north of the 32nd parallel, above the brine springs, in present-day New Mexico. But little could be done until after the Civil War and the conclusion of the Indian Wars.
In Texas, as early as the 1870s in the relatively less salty stretch below the town of Pecos to present-day Iraan, entrepreneurs began to divert water from the Pecos for irrigation. By the late 1880s farming commenced when the Pioneer Canal Company began to dig extensive ditches, reservoirs and small dams. These early efforts to farm in this northeastern corner of the Trans-Pecos were repeatedly wiped out in flash floods.
In 1907 a visionary rancher named T.A. Ezell decided that what Texas needed was a mega-dam on the Pecos. It would be called Red Bluff, and it would be built nearly three decades later, in the depths of the Great Depression. By that time, the banks of the Pecos River had been utterly transformed, infested by saltcedars.
THE PECOS DAMMED
In the twentieth century the Pecos River underwent a series of dramatic changes that have left it severely compromised and increasingly fragile. Apart from the saltcedars, these largely resulted from three major dams: Red Bluff (near the border with New Mexico, built in 1936); Imperial (between the farm towns of Grandfalls, Imperial and Pecos, 1912); and Amistad (on the U.S.-Mexico border, 1969). Asserts Dearen, “Repeatedly, knowledgable observers point to the damming of the Pecos as transformational.”
Of course, the benefits of dams are substantial: they can provide water for irrigation, municipal needs, hydroelectric power, recreation, and they can help control floods, a vital concern in the Trans-Pecos, where rainfall, however rare, tends to generate devastating flash floods. (Second-order benefits may include higher asset prices, more employment, and, going to the third-order, greater fiscal revenues.)
But dams and reservoirs have ecological impacts, not all of them foreseen at the time of their construction. Above all, they tend to promote salinity. And in the already bitter Pecos, increased salinity quickly became a problem.
In Red Buff, beginning in the 1980s, blooms of golden alga began to appear. Golden alga is an invasive, possibly from England. As Dearen details in his chapter “A Fiend Unleashed,” golden alga attacks fish in two ways: its toxin affects their gills, and it depresses the levels of dissolved oxygen in the water. The fish kills at Red Bluff were so severe that for a time, Texas Parks and Wildlife closed it to fishing.
Decreased flow in the Pecos has also contributed to higher salinity. Some of this decrease can be explained by the proliferation of groundwater pumps and other irrigation wells. Farming in New Mexico draws away much of the water that might otherwise flow down into Texas (and Dearen provides lengthy discussion of the disputes). In the Trans-Pecos in the neighborhood of Imperial, twentieth century irrigation works set off a boomlet in cotton, alfalfa, vegetable and fruit farming. By the 1960s, however, with the water table down and the quality of the soil eroded, farming went into decline. (Area farms still grow the famed sweet Pecos cantaloupe, though in ever-smaller quantities).
Then there are the questions of long-term drought and climate change, which Dearen addresses briefly in quotes from residents offering their personal observations, as well as from experts. The outlook appears grim.
RECLAMATION AND ROCK ART
My two quibbles about Bitter Waters both have to with the context for these dams.
First, the discussion of issues at-hand and scope for future policy for the Pecos River would have been better grounded by an introduction, however brief, to Reclamation. For the uninitiated, The Reclamation Act of 1902 created the juggernaut first called the Reclamation Service, later the Bureau of Reclamation. Its mission is to promote development in the Western states with water projects such as dams, powerplants, and canals, and to undertake water management and water conservation. According to its official website, www.usbr.gov, the Bureau of Reclamation has constructed over 600 dams and reservoirs, including Hoover Dam, and is today the largest wholesaler of water and the second largest producer of hydroelectric power in the United States. To quote Patricia Limerick in The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, Reclamation “put the national government in the center of the control and development of water, the West’s key resource.” The political and environmental implications have been monumental, as Reclamation’s dams, to quote Limerick again, “have changed Western rivers into giant plumbing systems.” In short, it would be impossible to understate Reclamation’s influence over the economics and environment of the West—including that of the Trans-Pecos.
Second, Bitter Waters makes no mention of the rock art of the Lower Pecos, an unparalleled cultural legacy, some of it many thousands of years old, an important portion of which was inundated by the Amistad Reservoir. The rock art sites that survive are imperiled by the rise in humidity, slight as it may seem in the desert air, from that same reservoir. The most spectacular of these sites is White Shaman, so named for its central headless white anthropomorph, which sprawls across the back wall of a rock shelter—from which one can glimpse the high bridge over the Pecos. I refer interested readers to Harry J. Schafer’s anthology, Painters in Prehistory: Archaeology and Art of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, and Carolyn E. Boyd’s works, including The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative in the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos. The latter, published in late 2016, makes a brilliant argument that White Shaman tells the story of creation, and hence it should be considered the oldest surviving “book” in North America.
INVASION OF THE SALTCEDARS
Among the most fascinating and valuable contributions of Bitter Waters is the history of the arrival of the saltcedars and subsequent attempts to eradicate them. Also known as the tamarisk, this “tree to admire and loathe,” as Dearen calls it, arrived in Far West Texas in 1886 on the wagon of one C.E. Buchholz, his idea being that saltcedars could help protect against floods. Two years later, the Pioneer Canal Company imported a second species of saltcedar from California. Native to the Levant and Central Asia, the scraggly-looking saltcedars quickly infested the Pecos. Thickets of them also cropped up along the Rio Grande, and indeed everywhere else there might be water. The list of environmental impacts includes displaced alamos (the stately native willow trees); degraded habitat for various species of birds, fish, grasses; and—ironically—a reduction of the Pecos’ ability to channel flood waters, leaving large zones in greater danger of flooding.
Bureau of Reclamation experts believed that saltcedars both raised the Pecos River’s salinity and reduced its flow. In the early 1960s the bureau launched a massive eradication campaign that, in the Trans-Pecos alone, covered 21,000 acres. Writes Dearen, “Amid soaring early expectations for a significant increase in the river’s base flow, something strange happened—nothing happened.”
In the following decades, after the construction of Red Bluff and Amistad Reservoirs, both of which increased the Pecos’ salinity, experts still took it on faith that saltcedars were displacing staggering quantities of water. Dearen quotes one expert claiming that a single large saltcedar could take up two hundred gallons a day. Ergo, so it seemed at the time, eradicating the saltcedars “had the potential to improve both the quality and vitalty of the Pecos.”
In several campaigns beginning in 1999 Red Bluff District authorities dispatched helicopters to dump Arsenal, a herbicide, on some 12,766 acres. But again, the river’s flow did not respond. One of numerous theories to account for this was that the destruction of the canopy promoted algae. Certainly algae had become a problem. In any event, the saltcedars returned, and worse: in torrential rain in 2014, the still unburned debris of those thousands of poisoned-to-death trees swept down the upper Texas stretch of the Pecos, causing half a million dollars’ worth of damage to croplands and infrastructure.
The widely quoted assertion that a single saltcedar could suck up two hundred gallons a day? That was pulled out of someone’s Stetson. As for saltcedars contributing to the Pecos’ salinity, Dearen notes a 2008 study that showed that saltcedars were not, after all, significant.
Nonetheless, a more exotic scheme to attack the saltcedar was afoot. In its Old World native habitat, the saltcedars had insect predators… As I read Dearen’s account of a U.S. government entomologist importing leaf beetles in his land-luggage, I could not help but envision this as the opening scene in a tragicomic novel.
To date, a number of different species of saltcedar munching beetles have been released on the Pecos. Jury’s out.
AN ESSENTIAL FOUNDATION
In his preface Dearen expresses the hope that Bitter Waters might “provide an essential foundation for the next generation of endeavors and policies.” Unquestionably it does, and its detailed maps and photographs help bring an amply-documented narrative into especially crisp focus.
But Bitter Waters also represents a stellar contribution to the literature on the Trans-Pecos itself, and as such, to the environmental history of Texas and the Southwest, for the Pecos River is fundamental to understanding the region in all its many facets, not only ecological, but also cultural, economic, geological, historical, and political.
And more: in the microcosm of this environmental history of the Pecos River, we may more clearly perceive the macro-catastrophe of our planet’s degradation, and, in my view, its three powerful motors: First, what economists call “the tragedy of the commons”—in the absence of well-specified and enforced limits, we to tend to overexploit shared resources; second, ye olde Road to Hell, that is, the one paved with good intentions—interventions that did not anticipate systemic consequences; and third, the advent of the oil industry, for without oil to fuel agriculture, construction, and transportation, such rapacious demands upon this bitter river, and projects to manage it, would never have been viable.
I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.
Crisply entertaining and chock-full of crunchy research by a food historian, this apparently delicious little book on America’s native nut— (and isn’t the cover charming?)— is a horror story.
It opens, as the darkest do, with a sunny scene of innocence. Clustered along river bottoms in what would one day become Texas, groves of pecan trees rained down their bounty for wildlife and indigenous peoples. For centuries, pecans were their superfood, dense with calories and nutrition. In the 16th century, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the conquistador who shipwrecked en route to Florida and wandered west, found the Guadalupe River “a river of nuts”— although he had no word for them but “walnut.” The name “pecan” dates from the late 18th century.
Those are not pecan trees at Monticello.
The pecan did not do well further north. Thomas Jefferson planted some 200 pecan trees in Monticello; none survive. Where nuts were wanted, European walnut varieties proved more popular and versatile, so the pecan was left to do what it had always done, thrive in its wild state along river bottoms, mainly in what is today Texas. Notes McWilliams, “unlike any other fruit-bearing tree in the age of cultivation, the pecan managed to evade the cultivating hand of man for centuries after humans began exploiting it for food.”
Yum!
In the nineteenth century, as ranching and cash crops such as cotton, corn and wheat spread across the South and Midwest, many pecan trees disappeared; nonetheless, a large number of pecan groves survived, especially in Texas, because they clung to riverbanks and bottoms, and proved able to survive a flood other crops could not.
Farmers found wild pecans not only delicious as snacks for themselves, but good pig feed, and bags of them, easily gathered, could be sold in new markets in San Antonio, Galveston, and New Orleans. In the second half of the 19th century, Texas took the lead in pecan production, but not from formal orchards; for the most part, farmers gathered wild pecans.
How to sell more pecans? The market wanted uniformity, thin shells, and dense nut meats. Even the most magnificent pecan tree’s seed, however, would not “come true,” that is, bring forth a tree producing equivalent quality nuts. The solution was grafting. As early as 1822 one Abner Landrum detailed his own successful experiments with pecan grafting in the American Farmer. It seems no farmer bothered to emulate that experiment. The market for pecans was still marginal and, as McWilliams ventures, “it was simply more macho to run a ranch with cattle than to turn that land over to pecans.”
The Big House at Oak Alley Plantation
In the mid-century 19th century, in the Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, a slave gardener named Antoine successfully grafted an orchard of more than 100 fabulously productive pecan trees. Decades later, the plantation’s new German owner, Herbert Bonzano, brought the nuts of those grafted pecans to Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exposition. And thus, like so many other fruits before it, the pecan was at last, if slowly, on the road to industrial production— a road, like that to Hell, paved with good intentions.
For a time, farmers relied on wild pecans, resisting experts’ advice to graft pecans, perhaps out of innate conservatism and a reluctance to becoming dependent on nurserymen. Attitudes soon changed. After a series of insect plagues in the last three decades of the 19th century decimated major cash crops, the USDA championed chemical insecticides that, “lo and behold, worked.” Writes McWilliams, “The USDA was no oracle, but as pecan farmers recognized, history showed it could make life much easier for those who tilled the soil for a living. So long as they would listen.” Listen they did.
The 20th century brought increasing industrialization in pecan production. After World War I, writes McWilliams, “pecan trees were becoming carefully managed commodities rather than natural aspects of the southern landscape.” As for shelling, an important source of employment in San Antonio in the 30s, after some labor unrest, this was given over to machines.
In World War II the U.S. government gave the pecan industry a push, promoting the nuts as nutritious replacements for meat; and after imposing price ceilings to help promote consumer demand, buying up millions of pounds of surplus pecans (many fed to schoolchildren). By the late 1940s, pecans were no longer holiday treats or just for pralines, they were in everything from cakes to cookies to pies, even salads. McWilliams: “The aristocrat of nuts had become a commoner.”
McWilliams brings the pecan through the rest of its 20th century history with mail order, frozen foods, processed foods, chain restaurants, granola, and ice cream; its oil extracted for lubricants in clocks and guns, its wood milled for basketball court flooring, its shells collected for mulch, barbecue chips, plywood, pesticides, and more. By 2011, when the author tours a Texan pecan farm, he is stuck with dark wonder:
“First, the entire operation is a streamlined model of mechanization. Vehicles designed to fit snugly between seemingly endless rows of perfectly aligned pecan trees spray pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides; they lay mulch, prune trees, apply fertilizer, and harvest nuts. Other machines disk the soil and smooth the turf between the trees so that fallen nuts do not elude harvest. At times helicopters are even brought in for the purpose of keeping frost from icing the nuts. Propane cannons are on hand to scare off crows. It occurred to me as we drove from orchard to orchard that there was nothing ‘natural’ about a contemporary pecan orchard.I was looking at a factory in the field.”
Oh, but it gets stranger. The money isn’t so much in the pecans as it is in shipping trees from the nursery to China. In 2001, Chinese did not have a word for pecan. Today pecans are a popular health food in China, available everywhere from airports to gas stations. It seems a question of time before the Chinese outstrip the U.S. in pecan production.
The future of the pecan, a “chemically saturated activity,” whether in the U.S. or China or elsewhere, looks grim. Arsenals of insecticides are increasingly necessary to combat aphids, beetles, weevils and more. These chemicals also threaten bees and other pollinators (and without them, our food supply as we know it may collapse). Plant diseases are also becoming increasingly resistant to chemical assault. The soil degrades. At some point— perhaps when China has become the top producer; perhaps when some insect or fungus has wiped out enough orchards; or in the wake of some ecological or economic jolt— it may become unprofitable to continue producing pecans in the U.S., the grafted and chemically attended ones for the mass market, that is.
What then will have become of the now few stands of wild pecans? The good intentions of many decades—ye olde single-minded “economic development”— have brought this once thriving wild nut tree to a state of such fragility that, concludes McWilliams, “we may well lose yet another natural thread to the past.”
So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love By Cal Newport Grand Central Publishing, 2012 ISBN: 978-1455528042
My heart sank when I opened the box from amazon.com. Why had I bought a hardcover edition of what surely must be airport-bookstore-biz-section fluffo? (When I indulge in fluffo it’s the cheaper Kindle editions— and only for perusing on airplanes, hair salons, and the like). But lo, Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You turns out to be both an unusually insightful and practical book. It’s addressed to younger readers, from wannabe movie actors to disgruntled cubicle workers to maybe-biologists-maybe-astrophysicists, but of course I read it as the 50-something literary writer that I am. I’ve “made it” as a writer, I guess you could say, if only because I’m still at it after having published several books, and every once in a while I get the breeze-at-my-back of a glowing review or an award or an invitation to speak. And I’ve taught creative writing workshops for over a decade, so I’ve had many a conversation with beginning writers who want to “follow their passion.” In sum, I hereby throw the weight, such as it may be, of my career and experience behind Cal Newport’s Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion.
Rule #1: Don’t Follow Your Passion
That may sound strange, for I am passionate about what I do. In a sentence: passion isn’t enough because it will never be enough. (And as any writer, or any artist, passionate about their work can tell you, some days are just head-banging torture.) When beginning writers say they have passion for writing, methinks what they really have passion for is their idea of being a writer, which is as different as the first date with the dorm hottie from celebrating a 30th wedding anniversary.
So if it isn’t necessarily following your passion, what describes “great work”? According to Newport, it involves creativity; it has impact; and you’re in control.
Hmm… sounds like writing.
Rule #2: Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You
Newport argues that “the craftsman mindset is the foundation for creating work you love.” Certainly that has been true for me. I could retail a hundred stories of beginning writers who couldn’t weather their first workshop. They come in with the notion that you have talent or you don’t, so they’re resentful, even deeply angry when the workshop leader and other students don’t shower their manuscript with lotus petals of praise, and they’re quick to conclude: I don’t have talent, I give up. They don’t think: I need to get some skills in the craft of writing. Ah, how rare that is. And the impulse is one of generosity. Writes Newport:
“Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people people approach their working lives.”
(Which, I guess, is why most people begrudge their boss / customers the minimum and spend the balance of their days in the Gulag Architelevisiono.)
Newport continues:
“[The craftsman mindset] asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is ‘just right.’ and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career… you need to earn it— and the process won’t be easy.”
Newport then provides a checklist of jobs to avoid: Those that do not provide opportunities to develop rare and valuable skills (e.g., working on a frozen foods packing plant’s conveyor belt isn’t going to cut it); those that provide a good or service you think is bad for the world; those where you have to work with people you really don’t like.
That still leaves a wide open world, for many. The point is, if you’re fortunate enough to have a choice in where and with whom you work, and you want to find work you love, choose the job that enables you to develop a rare and valuable skill, and then— this is crucial—proceed to actually do that. To do that, you have to develop the five habits of the craftsman.
Here is where I began to sit up straight and make use of my highlighter.
Newport’s Step 1, “Decide What Capital Market You’re In,” “winner-take-all” or “auction,” was something I hadn’t thought about before. (He is using the term “capital” to include “human capital.”) In my own case, writer of literary books, it seems to me that I’m not in as narrow a market as the television scriptwriter (“winner take all,” i.e., the script is all), but close. So what I need to do is write the best book I can write. (Why blog? Because I want to clarify my own thinking, and to share that with you, dear writerly reader.)
Two points Newport makes here: if you’re not uncomfortable, you’re probably not developing your skills, and you need patience. In my experience, yes, developing skills is sometimes toe-curling and yes, you need patience, shipping containers full of it. (And boy howdy am I lucky that my first efforts at literary writing date from well before the advent of the Internet.)
Rule #3 Turn Down a Promotion
Newport asserts, and I agree, that:
“Giving people more control over what they do and how they do it increases their happiness, engagement, and sense of fulfillment.”
So if you want to love your work, first get good at what you do, then think about getting control over what you do.
But watch out for traps. First, taking control too soon, when one doesn’t have adequate skill, may be unsustainable (Ye olde “don’t quit your day job to write a first novel.”) And second, if you really do have valuable skills, you will be sure to encounter resistance to your leaving or at least loosening the leash (from an employer, an agent, an editor). Your employer may promote you— not into a better job for you in terms of developing your skills and control over your time, but ye olde “golden handcuffs.”
In developing this argument, Newport devotes a chapter to what he calls “The Law of Financial Viability,” all common-sense advice for most college graduates and anyone else who needs to make regular debt payments. My one quibble with this book is here: Many people considering a new career are middle-aged or retired, and for some of them— a minority to be sure, but an important one— the financial viability of any given enterprise is not so crucial an issue. They can afford to take a year to write a novel, or open a yoga studio, or what-have-you; but this doesn’t mean they want to remain at the level of a hobbyist. Furthermore, what the market pays is sometimes a poor indicator of meaningful value, and especially in the arts and politics, the best lead with vision, rather than follow the pennies and dimes and dollars and expense account steak dinners. The book would have been far stronger had it considered this demographic as well.
As for myself, before turning to writing, I had a career as an economist specializing in international and development finance. As I am sure you can imagine, dear reader, in saying adios to that for the life of a literary writer, I made some elephantine trade-offs. That said, I did not proceed until I’d already published two books on finance plus an award-winning book as a literary writer. And that said, if I could do it again, I’d do it again because, as the Estate Lady says, “the hearse doesn’t have a trailer hitch.”
Rule #4 Think Big, Act Small
Newport argues that “a unifying mission in your working life can be a source of great satisfaction,” and he illustrates with the case of Pardis Sabeti, a happy and successful Harvard professor of evolutionary biology whose mission is “to rid the world of its most ancient and deadly diseases.”
As for finding big ideas, Newport introduces the concept of “the adjacent possible” and the caveat: you cannot recognize the adjacent possible until you get to the cutting edge of your field. Writes Newport:
“If life transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it’s not commonplace; it’s instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard— the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives.”
Newport details each step of Professor Sabeti’s career, and how she focused on her training and only after achieving a high level in her field did she identify her defining mission.
That resonated with me. My mission? To bring my readers to richer levels of understanding and an awakened sense of curiosity and wonder. Sounds simple, but only after writing several books could I articulate that so concisely. And I know the big doesn’t happen without the small. As far as writing a book goes, it’s one word, one sentence, one paragraph at a time. And sometimes— forklift in the industrial quantities of patience— after weeks of work, one has to discard the draft to start over. It might also mean reading and reading and reading and reading and… whew… more reading, not only about the subject, but the craft itself, which includes, of course, the essential task of reading other books in the same genre, not as a passive consumer, but actively, as a craftsman.
Wrapping up this fourth rule, Newport offers a last chapter on marketing. He argues that
“[f]or a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.”
He illustrates with “rock star” computer programer Giles Bowkett who realized that “the best way to market yourself as a programmer is to create remarkable open-source software.” So he did. For Professor Sabeti, the venue was prestigious scientific journals— so she published. (Speaking of venues, this is the main reason why, for many authors, self-publishing turns into such a disappointment.)
As for his own book, Newport confesses:
“If I had published a book of solid advice for helping recent graduates transition to the job market, you might find this a useful contribution, but probably wouldn’t find yourself whipping out your iPhone and Tweeting its praises. On the other hand, if I publish a book that says ‘follow your passion is bad advice,’ (hopefully) this would compel you to spread the word. That is, the book you’re holding was conceived from the very early stages with the hope of being seen as ‘remarkable.'”
Ah, our modern fame-crazed culture. But one thing I’ve learned as a writer: a good blurb is gold. And word of mouth, though it can’t always be quantified—(that’s another subject)— is better than gold. Yes, Newport nails it.
Newport’s own career is indeed remarkable. The author of a series of best-selling books, including How to Be a High School Superstar and How to Win at College (which I thought excellent and regret not having been able to read back in my day); and the host of the blog Study Hacks: Decoding Patterns of Success, he is also a PhD from MIT, now a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. In the conclusion, itself well worth the price of the book, he recounts how he applied the four lessons to his own career.
I highly recommend So Good They Can’t Ignore You for everyone from teenagers to retirees, in short, anyone looking to spend their days in a long-term commitment to satisfying, meaningful activity. You can call it “work” if you want.
As the subtitle indicates, most of Thomas M. Settles’ splendid biography of John Bankhead Magruder (1807 – 1871) is dedicated to a detailed examination of his role in the U.S. Civil War, specifically, his audacious if nonetheless inevitably doomed defense of Richmond, and later, Galveston. Though this part of the narrative does not have direct bearing on Mexican history, it informs the portrait of an unusually flamboyant Confederate who, in defeat, looked south to a future in Maximilian’s Mexican Empire.
Based on three decades of archival research, this biography must have been a titanic task, for Magruder left no diary and many of his most important papers were lost in a San Francisco fire. Worse, he was much maligned during his lifetime, victim of both malicious gossip from his Confederate rivals and less than sympathetic Federals– just the sort of thing to send a biographer down blind alleys. In addition, there were misunderstandings, as when earlier historians, in recounting what appeared to be a less-than honorable leave-taking from Washington DC at the start of the Civil War, confounded Magruder with a relative.
General John Bankhead Magruder was, as Settles convincingly argues– backing every point with what sometimes seems a forest of footnotes– a Civil War general whose tactical ingenuity and tenacity are deserving of far greater respect than he has been accorded. Most of the book details his early military career, from West Point to a garrison duty and recruiting at various army posts from the Carolinas to Maine, until, with the invasion of Mexico in the late 1840s, his fortuntes took a radical turn. Along with many of the men who would later play major roles in the U.S. Civil War– Grant, Lee, and McClellan, among them– Magruder distinguished himself in several major battles against the Mexicans. (Magruder’s artillery was, in fact, the first to fire upon Chapultepec Castle.) Following the U.S.-Mexican War, Magruder served in California, where in Los Angeles, briefly, he ran a saloon.
He was on a visit to Europe when recalled to Washington DC in 1861, only a month before his native state of Virginia seceded. He had not wanted to leave the U.S. Army, but as “he could not fight against his own people,” he resigned, calling it “the most unhappy moment of my life.” He walked across the Potomac, offered his services to the Confederacy and, in short order, was reporting to Robert E. Lee.
Settle’s treatment of Magruder’s return to Mexico in 1865, in the final chapter, “Postwar Odyssey,” is a relatively brief one; nonetheless, it is an important contribution to understanding the nature and role of the ex-Confederates in Maximilian’s government.
At the end of the U.S. Civil War, General Magruder was one of several thousand ex-Confederates who pulled up stakes for Mexico. In 1865 the French Imperial Army, considered the greatest in the world, occupied most, if not all of Mexican territory, while the ex Archduke of Austria, Maximilian, a direct descendant of the King of Spain during the Conquest, reigned as Emperor. Though by the late summer and fall of 1865, when the ex-Confederates began arriving en masse, the French occupation was beginning to fray at the edges, Maximilian and his consort, Carlota, still presided over a court and elaborate palace balls and other festivities that were, to Americans at that time, considered the height of glamor. In the words of journalist William V. Wells, this was the “high noon” of the empire, when it was impossible for many to even imagine the catastrophe that would, in only a matter of months, befall the “cactus throne.”
Some ex-Confederates came to Mexico because they could not bear living in a defeated South, others, because they had expected to participate in a dynamic plantation economy under the French-backed Maximilian (who, to entice the ex-Confederate colonists, proclaimed slavery legal in Mexico). But others, such as General Magruder, simply felt pushed out. As Settles writes:
“It must have been extremely difficult for so proud a man as John Bankhead Magruder to have signed the articles surrendering the Trans-Mississippi Department. But when the Federals began arresting and imprisoning high Confederate officials, he resolutely refused to submit to such personal humiliation. He was not eligible for the amnesty proclaimed by President Lincoln on December 8, 1863, or that proclaimed by Andrew Johnson on May 29, 1865”
Although I had spent several years researching Mexico’s Second Empire under Maximilian for my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, until recently, I was flummoxed as to the background of the author of the exceedingly rare English language memoir, Sketches of the Last Year of the Empire, Henry R. Magruder. It turns out he was the son of General John Bankhead Magruder and I now know, from Settles’ biography, that father and son did not arrive in Mexico via the same route. General Magruder came down overland from Houston with General Shelby, while his wife, son Henry, and unmarried daughter, Kate Elizabeth, arrived via Veracruz, for they had come from Florence, Italy, where they had been residing for some years. As Settles explains,
“[B]ecause of the hardships of travel, uncomfortable living conditions, and extremes of climate found in the remote locales where magruder was stationed during his military career, [Mrs Magruder] found it more practical to live and raise her children in the comforts of Baltimore, where she could stay closer to family business interests. She remained there until 1850 when, as a consequence of [daughter] Isabella’s ill health, she took her children to Europe. Mrs Magruder had relatives in Germany, but she moved to Italy, living briefly in Rome, then in Florence.”
From Texas, not yet reunited with his family, Magruder headed straight down to Monterrey and then to Mexico City, arriving in the summer of 1865. Writes Settles:
“Magruder checked into a room on the first floor of the fashionable Iturbide Hotel, and there he received several distinguished visitors, including Matthew Fontaine Maury and his old friend Marshal Francois-Achille Bazaine, now in command of the imperial forces in Mexico. He also met with the British minister to Mexico, Sir Peter Campbell Scarlett, whose nephew, Lord Abinger, had married Magruder’s niece, Helen Magruder, in Montreal several years earlier.”
It appeared Magruder felt as at home as an American could be in Mexico City. He bought himself a new wardrobe, “‘a cut-a-way suit of salt and pepper color, with a tall dove-colored hat and patent leather boots,’ and then went to the palace of Montezuma [the Imperial Palace], which Scott’s army had victoriously occupied eighteen years earlier.”
Soon after a successful interview with Maximilian and Carlota, Magruder, now a naturalized Mexican citizen, was appointed head of Maximilian’s Land Office of Colonization. The idea was to establish colonies along the main route inland from Veracruz to Mexico City, on land Juarez (under the Republic) had expropriated from the Church.
Settles covers the rapid collapse of the scheme along with Maximilian’s government, and Magruder’s return to the U.S. In 1867– surprisingly, for memories of the Civil War remained fresh— he attempted to set up a law office in New York City. His family had returned to Italy, but he remained in the U.S. to work the lecture circuit with a crowd-pleasing talk on Maximilian and Carlota. He was on that tour when, in a Houston hotel in 1871 he died of a stroke.
