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.”
This blog posts every Monday. Starting this year, every fourth Monday, except when not, is a Q & A with another writer. This week not.
As you dear, faithful, writerly readers know, I have been at work on the Far West Texas book. One of the individuals who appears and reappears throughout the narrative is Lt. John Bigelow, Jr. An officer in the Tenth U.S. Cavalry in the late 19th century, Bigelow had an illustrious father and his own impressive body of work in military strategy and tactics, in many ways anticipating the industrial-level wars of the twentieth century. So, having done a small Himalaya of reading on those Bigelows and the Tenth Cavalry, last fall at the conference at the Center for Big Bend Studies, I presented a paper on Lt. Bigelow, expecting to polish it up into publishable form lickety-split. Ha! It’s still not finished, but at least the draft is, and I submitted it. Wish me luck.
In the meantime, herewith, a few lessons learned
about working with a working library.
I’m several decades and several published books
down the pike now that I pause here, en blog, to confess that I never
fully appreciated what was involved with writing a book that necessitated a
working library. I just sort of accumulated whatever books I needed, or thought
I might need, willynilly, clearing bookshelf space, catch as catch can. Things
got rather pile-y, shall we say, and sometimes I wasted good working mornings
just hunting for things. I never fully appreciated how unwieldly some of
these working libraries can grow– and grow as, in many cases, they rightfully
must.
Some of my working libraries took up only a few
shelves, for example, the reading for my anthology Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary
Companion. The one for my Baja California book, Miraculous Air, took
up an entire wall, floor to ceiling, and the working library for my novel on
Mexico’s Second Empire almost twice as much space. Ditto my recent
book on Madero and
metaphysical religion. And… drumroll… most especially the
one I am using now on Far West Texas. The Texasbibliothek, as I call it, now
hogs and camels and elephants and Macktrucks an entire room.
You may wonder, why can’t I just borrow books from
my local library? Answer, Part I: I don’t have a relevant library nearby. Part
II: When I am writing I often need to have several different books at-hand;
many libraries will not lend out so many books at once, nor bring out so many
volumes to a reading room. (But yes, I have consulted books in libraries, and
in archival collections.) As I worked on that Baja California book, the Second
Empire novel, and the one on the Mexican Revolution, I often had five or ten or
even as many as, say, fifteen books open on my desk… such is the
Kuddelmuddel of my process.
So… for the types of books I was and am writing, this means having a budget– a realistic budget– for buying books. University press hardcovers can be, ouch. To save money, many a time I bought an ex-library edition off of www.abebooks.com— which for used books is, in my experience, more reliable than amazon or ebay. And for collectible editions, I would advise steering way clear of amazon and ebay because all sorts of sellers on there have no clue what a first edition is or how to accurately describe a book’s condition. Again, abebooks.com is good and better yet sellers who are members in good standing of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. An occupational danger is that you can get a jones for collecting, and start buying first editions. But that’s another blog post. I used to buy Italian shoes, let me put it that way.
As for organizing these working libraries, I posted previously about that here. Indeed, I got this current working library, my Texasbibliothek, into such superb shape that, as I was pulling out various titles for this paper on Lt. Bigelow, I had a little fiesta of self-congratulation every single time.
And reshelving the books? Something I do now with this Texasbibliothek that I have never done before– and I am shaking my head that it had not occurred to me sooner– is to tuck into each book a bookmark with its category.
UPDATE: See my November 11, 2019 post “A Working Library” for more about using bookmarks. My technique has advanced!
Making individual bookmarks with the categories
noted might seem more trouble than it’s worth, but the challenge is, many books
could go into more than one category, and if I have to remember or decide anew
which one it is each time I reshelve it, well…. then… unshelved books tend
to start piling up and sprawling into big, giant, King-Kong-scale
Kuddelmuddel!
Decluttering? Indeed I do declutter. However, for some subjects, as in these working libraries, the collections in themselves have significant cultural / scholarly value; they should not be broken up. One day I will find them a good home.
This year I’ve been posting a Q & A with a
fellow writer on the fourth Monday of the month, and while I have every
intention of continuing to do so, this Monday instead herewith some notes on
the epic novel by the artist who, back in 2001, passed over to the Great
Beyond: Tom Lea.
“It is part and parcel of your culture and I
think you should cherish it,” says Italian art historian
Luciano Cheles of the surprisingly little-known works of El Paso, Texas painter
and writer Tom Lea. And encouraging that is precisely what Adair Margo has been
doing with great verve for the past many years with the website and educational
programs of the Tom Lea
Institute. I had the immense privilege of attending Margo’s talk
about Tom Lea at the Bullock Museum in Austin back on October 15, 2015. (And by
felicitous happenstance, I sat next to Luciano Cheles.) More about that anon.
Here is the must-see 5 minute video with what
Cheles has to say about Lea’s artwork:
For more on Lea’s and The
Wonderful Country’s place in the canon, see Marcia Hatfield Daudistel’s
majestic anthology, Literary El Paso
(TCU Press, 2009).
WILDEST WEST EL PASO
This post is prompted by my work-in-progress about Far West Texas (…stay tuned for more podcasts…) At long, belated last I have tackled Tom Lea’s epic historical novel of El Paso.
I am happy to report that The Wonderful Country is wonderful indeed, a masterpiece not only of works set in El Paso, but in the genre of the Western, and indeed in all of American fiction.
These days most literary readers, and especially those out on the coasts, tend to turn their noses up at Westerns. Dear curious and adventurous reader, if that describes you, be assured that to overlook reading The Wonderful Country is to miss out on something very fine in U.S. literary heritage. The Wonderful Country was popular in its day, back in the 1950s, but it is not a typical commercial novel; it has a high order of literary quality; morever, its treatment of Mexicans and Mexico is unusually knowing and sensitive. (What would I know about that? Start here and here; my books are all here).
Set in post-Civil War El Paso, that is, the
latter part of the nineteenth century, the first days of the railroad and the
last of the free-roaming Apache, and published in the pre-Civil Rights era,
Lea’s The Wonderful Country forthrightly portrays many of the still
painful tensions in the border region. While he writes with an unusually open
heart and mind, Lea is scrupulous in rendering accurate period detail. The
“N” word appears! (In the mouth of a character.) There is no lack of
roastin’ ‘n stabbin’ n’ shootin’ n’ scalpin’ and our hero is the son of a
Confederate from Missouri. Vegetarians and those with flea-trigger hot-buttons,
be forewarned.
From the catalog copy, TCU Press, 2002:
“Tom Lea’s The Wonderful Country opens as mejicano pistolero Martín Bredi is returning to El Puerto [El Paso] after a fourteen-year absence. Bredi carries a gun for the Chihuahuan war lord Cipriano Castro and is on Castro’s business in Texas. Bredi fears he will be arrested for murder once he is back across the Rio Grande. Fourteen years earlier– shortly after the end of the Civil War–when he was the boy Martin Brady, he killed the man who murdered his father and fled to Mexico where he became Martín Bredi.
“Back in Texas, other misfortunes occur to Brady. First he breaks a leg; then he falls in love with a married woman while recuperating; and, finally, to right another wrong, he kills a man.
“When Brady / Bredi returns to Mexico, the Castros distrust him as an American, and Martin is in the intolerable position of being not a man of two countries but a man without a country.
“The Wonderful Country is marvelous in its depiction of life along the Texas/Mexico border of a century-and-a-half ago. Lea brings to life a time that was wild, a time when Texas and Mexico were being settled and tamed. Lea knows the desert region of his birth as well as anyone who has ever written about El Paso and the great nation that borders it to the south.”
NOTES ON THE TCU PRESS EDITION WITH AN AFTERWORD
BY JOHN O. WEST
You should be able to scare up a first edition
over on www.abebooks.com,
and power to you if you want to shell out the clams for a fine first with
intact dustjacket and an autograph. The copy I read is the paperback
reprint of 2002 available from TCU Press (and most online
booksellers) which includes afterword by John O. West, a noted US-Mexico border
scholar. For West’s afterword I would recommend the TCU Press paperback as your
best buy (unless your main goal, buck for buck, is to beat the stock market).
As far as I know, all editions include the
elegant and evocative drawings Lea made to head each chapter.
John O. West argues, and I concur:
“The story of Martin Brady is that of Thomas Wolf’s You Can’t Go Home Again, of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; the setting in the desert Southwest gives it particular realism, but the theme makes it speak beyond the region where it grew.”
West also provides some illuminating background
on the inspirations for the novel. My additional notes below.
NOTES ON THE PLACE, THE PEOPLE, AND THE EVENTS
THAT INSPIRED THE NOVEL, PLUS SOME RELATED RECENT WORKS & WEBSITES
Tom Lea’s “El Puerto” is based on El Paso; Fort Jefflin, clearly inspired by Fort Bliss.
El Paso pioneer W.W. Mill’s memoir Forty Years at El Paso, 1858-1898 was Tom Lea’s major inspiration. A first edition is pricey! But it is out-of-copyright now so you can read a digitalized edition for free online.
W. H. Timmons’ El Paso: A
Borderlands History (Texas Western Press, 1990). Back in the
1960s, Timmons served as Chairman of the History Department at the University
of Texas El Paso.
Fort Bliss actually moved around the El Paso region
quite a bit in the 19th century, but you can visit the current Fort Bliss,
which has an adobe museum and a modern museum– the latter perhaps of most
interest for WWII aficionados. The historic parade grounds, surrounded by
stately houses for senior officers, are well worth a visit.
Some of the characters in The Wonderful
Country are inspired by (or mighty similar to) some real people, among
them:
Both the U.S. Army and the Mexican Army went after the Apaches, and in some instances, U.S. forces chased Apaches into Mexico. In general such US Army forays seem to have been welcomed by the Mexicans, but communications in these remote areas were dicey and resentments still very raw after the US-Mexican War. Many historians writing in English about border history have not had the wherewithall to research Spanish language sources, and vice versa, so there is some low-hanging fruit here for those historians with cross-border cultural and language skills. The Apaches also have something to say about it. One recent biography of note is Kathleen P. Chamberlain’s Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).
The hero of The Wonderful Country becomes
a Texas Ranger. A crucial source for Lea, writing back in the 1950s, was James
B. Gillett’s 1921 memoir, Six Years with
the Texas Rangers: 1875-1881, from which Lea takes the epigraph and
his title:
“Oh, how I wish I had the power to describe
the wonderful country as I saw it then.”
> Check out Gilett’s page at
the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, Texas. Gillett
ranched south of Alpine and upon moving to Marfa helped found the West Texas
Historical Association. He died in 1937 and is buried in Marfa.
(The Texas Rangers made up a more heterogeneous
group than some too easily conclude. See also the 2014 book by historian
Cynthia Leal Massey, Death of a Texas
Ranger. An interview with Massey is here.)
TENTH UNITED STATES CAVALRY
Marcos Kinevan’s superb (of partial) biography of Lt. John Bigelow, Jr. of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry in Texas
The Wonderful Country has
a number of characters who serve in the Tenth U.S.
Cavalry. The Tenth was famed for its African American
“Buffalo” soldiers, and its exploits in fighting Indians, especially in
Texas and then Arizona.
Less famous, but undeservedly so, is Lt. John Bigelow, Jr., who is the subject of a forthcoming paper I presented at last year’s Center for Big Bend Studies Conference. His younger brother, Poultney Bigelow, who published his series of articles on trailing the Apaches, was a great friend of artist Frederic Remington who illustrated many of the articles. Their father, John Bigelow, was an accomplished editor (at one point editing the New York Times), he served as President Lincoln’s ambassador to France, and had much to do with the founding of the Republican Party, the New York Public Library, the Panama Canal, and promoting Swedenborgianism. Bigelow, Sr also entertained literary celebrities including Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. My paper explores some of the family’s rich and varied social and political connections, John Bigelow Jr’s reports for Poultney’s magazine, his role as a nexus between the Eastern establishment and the West, and his importance as a military intellectual who anticipated the profound changes to come in 20th century warfare.
NOTES ON THE 1959 MOVIE “THE WONDERFUL
COUNTRY” BASED ON THE NOVEL
… Reminds me of that old
joke about the goats out browsing on a hill in Hollywood. They find the can
with the reel of film, they kick it open, and they start munching… The one
goat says to other, well, whaddya think? The other goat chews some more.
“Eh,” the goat says, “I liked the novel better.”
One of the African American “Buffalo
soldiers” is played by baseball star Satchel Paige. Tom Lea himself has a
cameo as the barber, Peebles.
“Writing is a kind of burden to me, which painting is not. I sweat and stew and fight painting, but I am not overwhelmed… by problems like I was with writing. I taught myself to write and never had any kind of a mentor or formal course… I taught myself to write by reading, reading good stuff.”
On The Wonderful Country:
“…I wanted to do something that ad been on my mind since I was a kid: Write about this borderland and the people on both sides of the river.”
“When traveling down in Mexico I never carried anything more than a little notebook because I was trying to train myself to hear rather than to see. I was trying so hard to be a good writer, you know… The hardest chapter in that book was where Martin goes with Joe Wakefield across the river in the springtime. I was trying to tell how much this fellow felt about both sides of the river. I remember I struggled and struggled for some way to express springtime and I settled it by saying, ‘A mockingbird sang on a budded cottonwood’ or something like that. I had to watch myself about using the big word. I always chose the shortest way if it could say exactly what I wanted.”
“A gust of wind sished sand against the one small windowpane.” (p.16)
“They ate in the light of tallow dips, a dozen men in soggy leather, laughing and chewing, with the rain sounding on the roof, and cold drops leaking through.” (p.250)
“Slowly, under the winking high stars, they came to where they saw beyond the paleness of the sand the darkness of the brush that lined the river, and they rode toward it. They worked across a dry flat of alkali white in the starlight, with the hooves scuffling the crust in the windless silence. ” (p.306)
FURTHER MISC NOTES
From Tom Lea Month 2012, Nick Houser on Lea’s Cabeza de Vaca picture:
In my opinion, Lea’s masterwork is his 1938 mural
“The Pass
of the North” which is in El Paso Historic Federal Courthouse
Building.
NOTES ON HIS FAMILY
Lea’s father was Tom Lea
(1877-1945), who served as mayor of El Paso during the Mexican
Revolution. (Alas, many Mexicans and Mexican Americans do not remember Mayor
Lea fondly; this is
one reason why.)
File this post under Future Reminder to Take My
Own Advice, and if some or all of these ideas also work for you, gentle reader,
verily I say unto you: Wunderbar!
Late last September, having finally rearranged
and set up my working library in my new office in Mexico City– the work in
question being a book on Far
West Texas— I had to pack it all back up again and ship it
across the Atlantic. (Why? Well, that’s a novel I’m not going to write, both
literally and figuratively).
Now that I’ve got my Texas books resettled on
their second set of new shelves in less than six months, I’m ready to take on
2018! But whew, I’ve got biceps after this job for a Hercules. The
thirty-eight boxes of books comprising what I now call the Texas Bibliothek– I
have landed in German-speaking Switzerland– arrived in mid-January. And a
couple weeks later, every tome and paperback and pamphlet and back-issue of Cenizo Journal
is in place, and I can carry my bike over head! I could scoop up and toss
dessicated Christmas trees, small donkeys and their Schmutzlis
out windows, too, should I take a notion!
ON ORGANIZING (AND TWICE MOVING) A WORKING LIBRARY: Ten Lessons Learned of Late with the Texas Bibliothek
1. Organize the books by topic– not as a
librarian would recommend, but as your working writer’s mind finds most
apt.
Ideas About Texas (Some, Anyway…)
After all, you’re the one who will be using these
books, not the general public. And even in a fairly substantial working
library, such as this one, there are not enough books to justify the
bothernation of cataloging and labeling each and every title.
If you have more than 50 books and if you do not
organize them in some reasonably reasonable way, why don’t you just open your
front door and let your dogs wander out and then you can go looking for them on
the freeway at four a.m., that might be more fun!
2. If any category has more than 30-40 books,
create a new subcategory.
Because trying to keep books in alphabetic order,
whether by author or by title, makes me feel dehydrated, RRRRRR.
3. Label categories of books with large,
easy-to-read lettering.
Because if you’re a working writer, like me you’re probably near-sighted…
Funny how book designers always have such unique
ideas about colors and font sizes and typefaces…. In other words, I don’t
want to have to look at the visual clutter of those spines to try to figure out
what this bunch is about; I let that BIG FAT LABEL tell me.
If you do not want to make labels, why don’t you
peel the labels off all the jars and cans in your pantry, mix ’em up, and then
try to find which one is the dog food and which one the canned pumpkin? That
would be a mile more hilarious.
4. When moving, before touching anything,
take photos of the whole shebang.
I do not have early onset dementia, but boy
howdy, moving house sometimes makes me feel as if I do. (Did I used to have a
working library? Was I working on a book? What day is it? Is Ikea still open?)
5. Then, before even touching those books, take a tape measure and write down the inches of shelf space required for each and every category.
I suspect that these things are in cahoots with pens and umbrellas.
A tape measure!
I realize this may sound very OCD.
But three moves ago, it did not occur to me to do
this with my working collection on Mexico’s Second Empire / French
Intervention, for my then recently-published book, The Last Prince
of the Mexican Empire. In the rush of moving
I allowed the moving company crew to pack the books,
willynilly-fefifo-rama-chillydilly, and then, on arrival, lacking space, never
mind bookshelf space, and so having to leave that particular library in a
half-unpacked, unsorted chaos, for the next few years more correspondence and
related research was bottlenecked than I want to think about. (That library now
has its home in Mexico City– that would be another blog post.)
The main thing is, you want to be certain you
actually have the bookshelf space you need plus ample wiggle room for
each category before you start packing– and then double
check the available bookshelf space again before you start unpacking.
And never, ever let anyone else pack them.
Sounds obvious. Alas, for me, three moves ago, it
was not.
6. Save those neatly made shelf labels to
reattach to the new shelves, and also label– with mammoth, easy-to-read
fonts– each and every box.
Geology, Energy, Box 1 corresponded to category 40, requiring 17 inches of shelf space.
7. Number each box, e.g., 1 of 32; 2 of 32, etc.
These can be cross-referenced with the master
list of categories, which has the measurements.
8. Don’t be stingy with boxes!!
For moving books I prefer the so-called banker’s boxes
with punch-out holes for handles. Banker’s boxes are large enough to take a
heaping helping of books, and the handles make them easy to carry, however the
weight of a book-filled banker’s box remains within the range of what I, a
50-something female whose daily mainly workout consists of walking two pugs,
and, la-de-da, whatever biking and yoga, can easily haul up or down a staircase.
Yes, you could snag a batch of free boxes at the
grocery store, and yes, you probably could, as I certainly could, lift bigger
boxes with double the number of books in them– and most men can haul a stack
of two or even three bigger boxes at a time. However, whatever the upper-body
strength you have and shape you are in, when you are moving house, unless you
for some reason enjoy showering hundreds of dollars on, say, your
chiropractor’s vacation home, lifting huge, ultra-heavy, and unwieldy boxes is
penny wise and dollar dumb. Ox dumb.
Goodie for me, I learned this lesson three moves
ago, and I had an excellent chiropractor.
9. Take photos of the boxes, labels included.
Because you never know! Seems I have good moving
juju. Knock on wood for next time!
On reshelving day, gather together before commencing:
Papertowels
Cleaning spray for the shelves (they will be dusty)
If you are missing any one of these items, you will probably have to interrupt whatever you are doing to go get it, and then in, say, the kitchen, because you have Moving on the Brain, you will be distracted by some zombie command from the dusty ethers such as, I must now go to Ikea to buy garbage bags and whatnotsy whatnots…
#
Meanwhile, dagnabbit, people just won’t stop writing books on Texas!! Two more, post-move, essential additions to the Texas Bibliothek:
Wish me luck, gentle reader. I aim to finish my book on Far West Texas this year. By the way, I host an associated 24 podcast series, “Marfa Mondays,” which is woefully behind schedule because of these moves, but soon to resume. I invite you to listen in anytime to the 20 podcasts posted so far.
P.S. Using the free blogger platform, I also
maintain an online working
library of out-of-copyright (now in the public domain, mainly linked to
archive.org) Texas books— books which I could not or did not want
to attempt to purchase but would like to be able to consult at my
leisure. It includes a number of titles that might appear bizarrely out of
place (one is on Massachusetts, for example)– but after all, this is not for
the general public, but a working library in service of my book in-progress. I
mention this because perhaps you might find it of use to create such an online
library for your own purposes.
P.P.S. For those wondering, what is my take on
ebooks? First of all, I delightedly sell
them! And yes, I have bought some, and as far as the Texas
book research goes, when I need a book urgently and/or the paper edition is
unavailable or expensive, I have been known to download a Kindle or four– or,
as above-mentioned, download out-of-copyright books for free from www.archive.org and similar sites. I
appreciate that convenience, and also the ease with which I can search within a
text for a word or phrase. Nonetheless, on balance, I find ebooks decidedly
inferior to paper. Morever, I doubt that my electronic libraries will outlive me
in any meaningful way, while I expect that my working libraries of hardcovers
and paperbacks, including some rare
editions, may serve other researchers well beyond the horizon of my
lifetime.
As anounced in the last post of 2017, in 2018 I will be posting on Mondays on the following schedule:
First and third Mondays of the month: New writing / news / podcasts; Second Monday: For the writing workshop; Fourth Monday: Cyberflanerie and/or Q & A with another writer, poet, and/or translator; Fifth Monday, when applicable: Whatever strikes my gong.
It’s a hazard in rare book nerderie: the ephemera bug bit me! I’m just back from the Center for Big Bend Studies Conference at Sul Ross State University in Alpine (Far West Texas), where I presented on “John Bigelow, Jr.,” about which a longer post is forthcoming, but in the meantime, fresh from that book fair with its bodacious selection of ephemera, herewith, thanks to Galvan Creek Postcards, a few additions to my burgeoning collection of Texas postcards from the era of WWI and the Mexican Revolution:
“ARMY MANEUVERS ON THE MEXICAN BORDER”
Postmark:
MARFA, TEX
OCT 10
2PM
1916
TEXT:
hellow Jack
how are you I am fine & dandy.
Well I rec your letter
OK but I am still in the war
Well regards to all Your friend LB [?]
Jack Hendrix
Medicine Mound
Tex
“BORDER DUTY ON THE RIO GRANDE” (REVERSE BLANK)
“MOUNTED SCOUTS; THE WAGON TRAIN”
Postmark:
EL PASO, TEX
AUG 30
1916
TEXT:
Will write a latter lato
[? ? ?]
El Paso Texas
August 29, 1916
Dear Burt:
Rec you letter
and was glad to hear
from you they have everything
in the stores down here that
they have have in Mass but they have a
lot of Mexican things here that they
dont have in Mass we had Gov inspection
this morning but i passed alright the
[?] R F D got excellent love to all
Albert
Mrs Elmer Loving
Palmer Road
Halifax
Mass
“BOYS IN KAKHI GUARDING THE RIO GRANDE”
“W.H. HORNE CO. EL PASO, TEX. U.S. CAVALRY DRILL”
“FORT BLISS, TEXAS”
POSTMARK:
PHARR, TEX
SEPT 20
1916
Sept 19 ’16
Dear Mother:
Am feeling fine
and as hard as a
rock and brown
as an Indian. Just
3 months ago tonight
we were called out
Remember? How
is every thing and
every one? L.A.B.
P.S. My favorite rare book dealer blog is Greg Gibson’s Bookman’s Log. Watch out, these rare book and emphemera guys are dangerous. If he ever scares up a Manhattan clipper ship card…
About a century ago, after the fall of Francisco I. Madero’s government in 1913, with the ensuing struggle between the Huertistas and Carrancistas, and the chaos along the US-Mexico border (in part fomented by German agents, hoping to keep the U.S. Army otherwise occupied during WWI), the U.S. Army set up a number of camps there. On ebay, my sister found these postcards, probably sent by a soldier stationed near El Paso, dated October 26, 1916.
One of the postcards shows an address in Alliance, Ohio, a town noted for its Feline Historical Museum. Thank you, Google.
Here is another GIF, this one of some cartridges I picked up– by invitation, I hasten to emphasize– on private property right by the Rio Grande about 20 minutes’ drive down a dirt road from Presidio, Texas. Seriously, these are cartridges from the time of the Mexican Revolution (probably from target practice); they were just lying on the ground. That is how isolated a place it still is.
Cartridge circa 1916, from near Presidio, TX
One last GIF: An overcast day on the otherwise spectacular Hot Springs Historic Trail in the Big Bend National Park. The river is the Rio Grande, the border with Mexico. At sunset the mountains turn the most otherwordly sherbet-pink. Imagine this scene with a wall through it– your tax dollars down the hole for a perfectly pointless aesthetic and ecological atrocity. (I shall now take a deep breath.)
Hot Springs Historic Trail, Big Bend National Park, Far West Texas. (Don’t watch this GIF unless you are part Viking, it will make you seasick).
Not shown in my video: the guy hiking a few minutes ahead of me on this trail wore a T-shirt that said TEXAS GUN SAFETY TIP #1: GET ONE. Well, it ain’t California. Excuse me, I need to go crunch my granola.
“Each year, more than two million visitors enjoy the attractions of the Western Hill Country, with Uvalde as its portal, and the lower Pecos River canyonlands, which stretch roughly along US 90 from Brackettville, through Del Rio, and on to the west. Amistad National Recreation Area, the Judge Roy Bean Visitors’ Center and Botanical Garden, Seminole Canyon State Park, and the Briscoe-Garner Museum in Uvalde, along with ghost towns, ancient rock art, sweeping vistas, and unique flora and fauna, are just a few of the features that make this distinctive section of the Lone Star State an enticing destination.
“Now, veteran writer, blogger, and educator Mary S. Black serves up the best of this region’s special adventures and secret treasures. From the Frio to Del Rio is chock-full of helpful maps, colorful photography, and tips on where to stay, what to do, and how to get there. In addition there are details for 10 scenic routes, 3 historic forts and 7 state parks and other recreation areas.”
MARY S. BLACK: I think what inspired me was the land itself, and the history. The Lower Pecos Canyonlands are not well known by most people, but the landscape is incredibly majestic and unexpected. You can be driving 70 miles per hour down the highway through the desert, when, wham, a huge canyon veers off to the left like a sudden tear in the earth.
These canyons were inhabited by human beings for thousands of years. They lived off the land and made paintings on the canyon walls that illustrate their gods and belief systems. Over 300 of these paintings still exist, and you can visit some of them. They are a treasure of human culture, and I hope more people will learn to value them as something important for us to save. The people who settled this area historically were a diverse bunch with a lot of gumption. Do people know that word anymore? I guess in modern language, we might say they had a lot of guts.
C.M. MAYO: In your view, what is the most underrated place in this region?
Las Moras Springs
MARY S. BLACK: If I have to pick only
one, I’ll say Las Moras Springs Pool at Ft. Clark in
Brackettville. I’m always looking for great swimming holes.
Las Moras Springs Pool is the third largest spring-fed swimming pool in Texas.
Crystal clear water at a year-round temperature of about 70 degrees comes into
the pool from a strongly flowing spring, yet very few people swim there because
they don’t know how to get access.
The pool is located on Ft. Clark, and old U.S. Army
fort originally built in 1849. You can get a day-pass for $5.00 at the guard
house to enter the fort, enjoy the pool or play golf on either of two gold
courses, and look at all the old stone buildings that remain from when the
place was an active Army fort. There is also a really interesting museum there
that is open on Saturdays.
C.M. MAYO: Which is your favorite place?
MARY S. BLACK: Hands down, the White
Shaman Preserve. The best studied of all the ancient murals is located there.
This is a polychrome painting about 25 feet long and 13 feet high done on
a rock wall overlooking the Pecos River. This painting tells a story about
creation and how the sun was born, according to Dr. Carolyn Boyd. You can visit
the preserve on Saturdays at noon if you make a
reservation online through the Witte Museum. Tours are
two-three hours long, and require a fairly strenuous hike down a canyon to a
rockshelter, then back up. But to be up there, to see the mural up close
and in person, to look out over the river and imagine the people who made this
painting, can change your whole perspective. It’s that powerful.
C.M. MAYO: Your favorite seasonal or annual event?
MARY S. BLACK: I have two: autumn color
near Lost Maples State Natural Area near Vanderpool, and tubing in the cold
Frio river in summer. Both are unique experiences in Texas and shouldn’t be
missed. An isolated stand of bigtooth maple turns orange and red in Sabinal
Canyon in late November. And swimming in the Frio at Garner State Park is
like heaven on a hot day.
C.M. MAYO: What surprised you in researching this book?
MARY S. BLACK: How fascinating the area
really is. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. The region
has seven state parks and natural areas, nine ghost towns, three historic Army
forts, and many scenic drives. But the coolest part was reading about all the
crazy things that have happened there, like train robberies and early airplane
adventures. And Indian battles. When settlers from the US and Mexico
started coming in after the Civil War, the native Apaches and Comanches were
fighting for their lives. And of course the U.S. Army was trying to drive them
out. It gets complicated, but there were many interesting people involved in
all this, like the Black Seminole Indian Scouts at Ft. Clark, and others. One
of the first settlers in the Nueces River valley was a woman named Jerusha
Sanchez, who came in the 1860s. Later a widow named Elizabeth Hill and her
three sons also pioneered in the area. Blacks, women, immigrants from Italy,
Mexico, Germany, and other places, and Native Americans made the history what
it is.
C.M. MAYO: You offer an excellent bibliography for further reading. If you could recommend only three of these books, which would they be?
MARY S. BLACK: Hmm, they are so
different, let me see. First I think Carolyn Boyd’s new book, which is
called simply The White Shaman
Mural, just published by University of Texas Press in 2016.
She details her 25 years of research on the painting in this book and explains
how she cracked the code on what it means, an amazing accomplishment.
Then I nominate Judge Roy Bean
Country by Jack Skiles, published in 1996, which is a
compilation of local stories of life in the Lower Pecos. The Skiles family has
been ranching in the area for over 75 years and can tell stories about mountain
lions and smugglers that will make you faint.
Finally, one I found fascinating was The Newton Boys: Portrait of an Outlaw Gang by Willis and Joe Newton as told to Claude Stanush, published in 1994. It tells how they became train robbers and learned to blow bank safes with nitroglycerin, which they did in Texas and the Midwest all through the 1920s. By the time they were captured, they had stolen more money than all other outlaws at the time combined.
P.S. As artist-in-residence I will be giving a free travel and nature writing workshop at the Guadalupe Mountains National Park over this Memorial Day weekend, details to be announced shortly on my events page.
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.
This finds me working
on the
book on Far West Texas, and about to resume the Marfa Mondays podcasts (20
podcasts posted so far, 4 more to go, listen in anytime). I just
posted a brief video of my visit last November to see, among other wonders and
curiosities, a most extraordinary and controversial statue at the El Paso
International Airport.
Because of the way it is placed, directly behind a grove of extra-fluffy trees,
and at the entrance where most drivers, speeding in, are on the lookout for
signs, such as rental car return, departures, arrivals or parking, I
daresay few passersby would even notice the statue. I myself drove by it more
times that I would like to admit before I realized it was there.
Here’s my 3 minute video:
My video mentions “The Last Conquistador,” a magnificent documentary about this statue and the controversy. Watch the trailer:
POV Interactive offers the first clip of “The Last Conquistador” documentary:
For “Behind the Lens POV PBS”
Cristina Ibarra and John Valadez Talk about the Juan de Oñate Sculpture:
I’ll give the sculptor, John Sherrill Houser, the last word, quoting him from the documentary:
“Here it is, look at this and think about it, good and bad, the whole thing. The history.”
Shelley Armitage, author of Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place
The week before last, I posted a brief but glowing note about Shelley Armitage’sWalking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place. This week I am delighted to share with you the author’s answers to my questions about her lyrical and illuminating memoir of growing up in and later returning to explore the area around Vega, Texas. Vega sits on the Llano Estacado about half way between the eastern New Mexico / Texas border and the Texas Panhandle city of Amarillo. [Click here to see Vega, Texas on the map.]
As you will see, some of my questions are with my students in mind (I teach literary travel writing and creative nonfiction), while others are apropos of my abiding interest in Texas (my own work-in-progress is on Far West Texas— next door, as it were, to the Llano Estacado). Whether you are interested in writing travel and personal memoir or learning about this unique yet little known place, I think you will find what Shelley Armitage has to say at once fascinating and informative.
C.M. MAYO: You have had a very distinguished career as an academic. What prompted you to switch to writing in this more literary and personal genre?
Walking the Llano by Shelley Armitage
SHELLEY ARMITAGE: I haven’t really switched but shifted my focus. I’ve tried in all my previous books to write well and evocatively and they all required research and imagination as a foundation. I never believed that scholarly writing couldn’t be readable, even possess literary qualities. But it’s true that because I was an academic I was always steered away from personal/creative writing, something I wanted to do from a young age on.
As I mention in the book, an elementary school friend and I wrote a novel together, a kind of mystery using local characters. When I was young I also admired the writing in National Geographic though I had no idea how to prepare myself to write such. Now as a retiree, I have time (though shortened!!) to explore what I’ve always yearned to do, though I still struggle to write things that are personal; I am more comfortable as a participant/observer.
C.M. MAYO: In your acknowledgements you mention the Taos Writers Conference and the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico “where the book found a second life.” Can you talk about Taos and the book’s evolution?
Animal, Mineral, Radical, by BK Lauren
SHELLEY ARMITAGE: Taos is a special place in terms of environment and history–and many other things. So being in Taos (high desert, mountains, verdant valley) combined with focus on writing was special. I was fortunate to study with BK Loren, a novelist and essayist, at the writers’ conference. She gave me permission, through her suggestions and assignments–though not related to the memoir– to work with narrative in fresh ways.
I came to think about time in terms of what
memory does with it, not something chronological. I spent lots of time in the
Taos area hiking, just exploring the art scene, talking with other artists
(particularly at the Wurlitzer Foundation). I’ve always found hanging out with
other creative people, not writers, to be very stimulating and fun. Ditto
looking at art, attending musical events, etc.
At the Wurlitzer I was able to get a rough draft.
A couple of years later when I studied with BK, I went home and started
again.
C.M. MAYO: Which writers and works would you say have most influenced you in writing Walking the Llano? You mention Southwest poet Peggy Pond Church and Southwest writer Mary Austin, as well as contemporary writers, including Rudolfo Anaya, Patricia Hampl, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Barry Lopez’s writers retreat. Can you talk about some of these influences?
Bones Incandescent: The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church, edited with essays by Shelley Armitage
Austin I knew from research I’ve done on women in the West, once (and maybe still) an incredibly under-researched and represented woman of Western writing and history.
Both women were extremely talented and independent but also faced assumptions about women’s “place” at the time and credibility as writers. Austin did claim the tag feminist, though Church denied it. I think I saw in their talent and their battles something of myself. After all, when I received my Ph.D in 1983, someone in the English Department actually asked me if I intended to get a job with it.
The same perhaps ironically is true for Silko and Anaya, both writers whom I’ve taught with great enthusiasm and deep appreciation, both ground-breaking writers in a time when writers of color had a difficult time getting published. I don’t mean to politicize their work but simply to point out their contribution to establishing a canon of work not available for my generation when we were students.
Rudy also writes about the llano and Leslie will forever be influential for writing Ceremony and most recently her memoir.
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Patricia Hampl I’ve never met, unfortunately, but her memoirs are among the best in the genre, in my opinion. She is a seamless writer, moving among time periods, places, memories. A beautiful storyteller.
And Barry Lopez who led a writer’s retreat, the first I ever attended, is a well-known “nature” writer. I like best his short stories which I’ve also written about. Though I am writing creative nonfiction, each of these writers has impressed me through their use of so-called fictional elements. That can be the beauty of nonfiction. These elements can make a memoir sing.
C.M. MAYO: Do you have any favorite literary travel / creative nonfiction books / writers?
SHELLEY ARMITAGE: I really don’t have any favorites. I read lots of contemporary fiction (much of it immigrant writers or international writers in translation) and am drawn to books like Sally Mann’s recent autobiography in which she uses photographs.
I’ve written a lot on photography and find thinking about photos as connected to creating memorable but subtle images in writing. As a critic I’ve written some essays speculating on how photography connects with story, such as one on the photographs of Eudora Welty, called “The Eye and the Story.”
C.M. MAYO: Any favorite Texan books / writers?
SHELLEY ARMITAGE: I really haven’t kept up with “Texas” writers as such. I don’t think about writers in this category. Frankly, I tried to talk University of Oklahoma Press out of using the word Texas in my subtitle of Walking. For me, the book was about a geographic area, not a state.
Goodbye to a River by John Graves
I often don’t think of myself being in a state
when I am in Texas but rather in a place which may or may not have
commonalities with other places. That said, I did long ago admire the Texas
book, Say Goodbye to a
River, also the work of Elmer Kelton as a western writer who was a
sage observer of the south plains, and occasionally the work of writers for Texas Monthly.
C.M. MAYO: Not many people outside of Texas have heard of the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains, and yet it is an area bigger than New England and of considerable historical and ecological importance. Why do you think that is? (And how do the people who live there pronounce Llano Estacado?)
SHELLEY ARMITAGE: Sad to say, many Texans neither know the area nor how to pronounce it!!! It is Spanish, so llano is yano, with a soft “a,” and estacado, just as it’s spelled. I think most contemporary folk do not know much about geography, either in the present or historically.
El Llano Estacado: Exploration and Imagiation on the High Plains of Texas and New Mexico, 1536-1860 by John Miller Morris
I’ve found people who know most about the llano
have spent time living within it (or on it?); cowboys, ranchers, local
historians, wildlife biologists, etc. The llano suffers the same fate as most
of the southwest except for the popularized places like Santa Fe: it’s rural,
not sublime (except in some of our eyes), and appears boring unless one can get
off the main highways.
That’s actually not true if you are a lover of
big skies and boundless horizons. It can appear inconsequential if identifying
everything according to urban human life is most important.
And yes, most pronounce it lano.
C.M. MAYO:West Texas, which includes the Llano Estacado and the Far West Texas city of El Paso, where you lived for some years, is very different from the rest of Texas. In a sentence or two, what in your experience are the most substantial differences?
SHELLEY ARMITAGE: In one sense the areas are like ethnic and cultural islands, separated from so-called mainstream Texas both in economics and history. In another sense, in regard to El Paso, there is the everlasting influence of Mexico and Central America.
There’s also not the same commercial influences
overall, that is, of the kind of characteristics Larry McMurtry
might have spoofed. In the west of Texas we are mostly closer to other
countries and state capitols than Austin.
To drive from El Paso to Austin would take 8 hours 29 minutes
To drive from Austin to Vega, Texas would take about 8 hours.
C.M. MAYO: For someone who knows nothing about Texas, but seeks understanding, which would be the top three books you would recommend?
A House of My Own: Stories from My Life by Sandra Cisneros
C.M. MAYO: One of the things I especially appreciated about Walking the Llano is your eye for the detail of the deep past– rock art, arrowheads, potsherds, some many thousands of years old, and how earlier peoples inhabited the landscape not as square feet measured off with a fence, but as a shape. And the Llano Estacado is shaped by draws– what people elsewhere would call a creek bed or an arroyo. The draw you focus on is the Middle Alamosa Creek. Having written this book, your eye for the shape of a landscape– any landscape– must be far sharper. Am I right? If so, can you give an example?
SHELLEY ARMITAGE: Thanks for mentioning this! I have always liked Mary Austin’s comment that to appreciate the desert, you needed “a noticing eye.” The draws that become the Middle Alamosa Creek are my so-called backyard and yet I was amazed to discover what had transpired there. Spending time, listening, looking, being open to discovery I think is important wherever we find ourselves.
Right now I am in the Chihuahuan desert and very
interested in learning more and perhaps writing about it. In Poland, I spent
lots of time walking and looking, going into the forests that bordered
Warsaw.
In fact, I think being conscious of shapes, as
you say, rather than man-made or distinguished borders can awaken us to a
different kind of understanding of how we are part of these environments. It’s
a kind of personal ecology.
I like to look without language, by which I mean
a kind of openness before we name something and thus categorize it.
C.M. MAYO:Popular imagery of Texas often differs immensely from reality, and yet at the same time, in so many instances, stereotypes and reality intertwine, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes ironically, perhaps playfully. For example, the other day I happened to visit the website of the vast La Escalera Ranch and, as I recall, one of the videos was playing the theme song to the movie “Giant.” In Walking the Llano you mention that, a child growing up in Vega, you were “steeped in the cowboy films of my childhood…Dale Evans… Roy Rogers… Then there were Gene Autry and The Lone Ranger, which led to records, sheet music, and magic rings.” Later you write, “In elementary school, I kept writing about the other Wests, as if they were more important than my own.” In this regard, what do you see happening for children in Vega, Texas, and similar places, now?
SHELLEY ARMITAGE: I’d like to think the kids in Vega could revel in the mixture of fact and fantasy in a state and on a llano fairly amazing! And I was hopeful when I had the chance to speak to a 4th grade class at Vega schools about my book. I used a Power Point of some of the photos in the book, but of course in much more gorgeous color.
They responded with great questions about the
flora and fauna mainly, but when I asked if any of them realized this canyon
country existed just north of town, only one little boy said “Ma’am, I
live out on one of those ranches.” Everyone else seemed clueless, happy to
connect the area with something else they knew, but not familiar with it
themselves.
I think their world is more daily defined as Stars Wars or Frozen and of course through that little
object influencing us all, the cell phone. Viewing the world through frames,
television, computer screens, cell phones is no doubt more defining than the
big star their parents put on their houses.
Do they consider themselves “Texans”? I
would guess yes, when the situation calls for it. Still when I was a kid I
think I was more aware of being a westerner than a Texan.
