Michener, James A. (106 page)

Alpine stands at an altitude of 4,485 feet, blizzardlike in winter, ninety degrees in summer, and its charm lies in its successful preservation of old-time ways. It serves as the seat of Brewster County, an almost unpopulated area about the size of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined, and is surrounded by ranches of staggering size.

'Out here, ma'am,' said the tour driver, 'we never state the size in acres. It's sections. The Baker Ranch you're asking about, it has fifty-five sections, that's better'n thirty-five thousand acres. Middlin' size, I'd say, because it takes a hundred and fifty acres of that barren land to feed one unit ... A unit, ma'am, is a cow and a calf, with hopefully another calf on the way. So the Bakers, they cain't run but two hundred-odd cows on their ranch, and that's why we classify it middlin'.'

Ransom Rusk had provided the planes to fly us to Alpine, and

as we drove from the little airport we saw two signs which prepared us for what was to be one of our best sessions:

REAL OIL PAINTINGS $3.50 AND UP

THIS MOTEL IS RUN BY HONEST NATIVE-BORN TEXANS

Our meetings were to be held at Sul Ross University, a handsome collection of red-brick buildings perched on the side of a hill, and there a real surprise awaited us, for we were met by a short, white-haired, sparkling-eyed man in his sixties whose face positively glowed with enthusiasm: 'I'm Professor Mark Berninghaus, Texas history, and we'll pile right into these two ranch wagons.' He would drive the lead car, he said, which the Task Force members would share. Then he introduced us to a young man of imposing build wearing a big Stetson: This is Texas Ranger Cletus Macnab, and if you know your frontier history, you'll remember that one of his ancestors was the legendary Ranger Otto Macnab. And another was the equally famous Oscar Macnab, also a Ranger.'

Macnab, a handsome young fellow in a pearl-gray whipcord suit, bowed to us but did not remove his hat. To the girl from SMU who had arranged this session he said: 'StafFll ride with me,' and to the rest of us he said: Tve provided maps of the region we'll be traveling,' and with that, we headed south along Route 69 to the twin border towns of Polk on the American side and Carlota on the Mexican. It was a journey of eighty miles through absolutely empty land—not even a filling station—but one which, under the loving tutelage of Professor Berninghaus, provided us with an intimate glimpse of a Texas that few visitors ever get to see.

'I want you to notice the vegetation, and how it changes as we drop down to the Rio Grande, two thousand feet lower in elevation.' Then he began an instruction which was shared by intercom with the staff in the following car: 'Look at the bleakness of land, only one shrub to an area the size of a football field.' When we studied the barren earth we saw at first only a reddish, rocky soil, but as our eyes grew accustomed to the vast empty space and the arching blue sky, cloudless and perfect, we began to see lone bushlike plants clinging to the arid earth. They were dark green and had many narrow leaves that branched out like untended hair, forming beautiful globes: 'Sotol, one of the major plants of our barren plains. Remember how green it is, because later I'll provide you with a surprise.'

Imperceptibly the landscape changed—worsened, in my opin-

ion—until we were in the heart of a real desert, but not the sandy kind featured in Grade B movies: 'We call this the Chihuahuan Desert, eight hundred miles, maybe, north and south, two hundred east to west. And here we have one of its characteristic plants.' He pointed to a remarkable growth, a tall, reedy plant composed of forty or fifty slender whips, each bearing at its tip a cluster of brilliant red flowerlets. The ocotillo, which looked as if it had been thrown together helter-skelter, was appropriate to its bleak surroundings, for only a plant so thin, so conservative of water, could have survived here.

'Look!' Miss Cobb cried as we descended into a protected valley. 'What can that be 7 ' It was an imposing plant of the desert, a low-growing cluster of heavy brownish leaves, quite undistinguished, except that from its middle rose a thick stem high in the air, topped by clusters of beautiful gold-white flowers that seemed to fill the blue sky.

'A special yucca,' Berninghaus said over his intercom. 'But hold your applause till we climb out of this depression. Because then you're going to see what many never see. A forest of yucca . . . many species . . . beautiful.'

1 think we watched with a sense of disbelief, for we could not associate this tremendous desert with beauty as we were accustomed to know it, but as we reached the crest of a small rise we saw spreading off to our right a vision of Texas that would never be erased; it was so different, so grandiose that it seemed to represent the state in its original form before intrusions like Houston and Dallas.

It was a small forest of three kinds of yucca: the noble ones we'd already seen, a more beautiful version called Spanish Dagger, and a veritable tree with sturdy jagged trunk, a cluster of leaves well above the ground, and a glorious collection of white flowers rising high into the air. The sight was so compelling that several of us in the lead car said: 'Let's stop!' And when we looked back we saw that Ranger Macnab had already done so in order that his young passengers might see these splendid plants.

They had a strange effect on me. I compared them to the delicate garden flowers I'd known when a student in England, and with the carefully cultivated flowers in Geneva. Obviously they were flowers, but big and brutal and self-protective against the rainless wind. Compared to the pansy or the tulip, they were gross; one handful of their heavy blooms at the end of a stalk seemed larger than a garden of English flowers or a bed of Boston blooms. They were frightening in the awkwardness of their limbs, unkempt in the way their trunks shed, and when Miss Cobb insisted upon

leaving our ranch wagon to inspect one of the nearer yuccas, she quickly returned, for a rattlesnake lay coiled at its base.

How beautiful they were, those yuccas of the Chihuahuan Desert, how Texan. As we moved past their tremendous forms we carried with us a new understanding of the West, that bleak and barren land which offered so many hidden rewards.

But now we were descending to regions with a much different vegetation, and Berninghaus assured us: 'Flowers that look like flowers. See down there.'

He was pointing to one of the strangest flowers I had ever seen or, rather, to a cluster of some hundred individual flowers congregated into a round cactuslike globe more than four feet in diameter. When I looked closely I saw that each plant forming the globe had powerful thorns that interlocked with those of other plants to make the globe impenetrable. These proved that the thing was a cactus, but the blizzard of delicate purple flowers proved that it was also a luxuriant bouquet. However, the real surprise was to come: 'In the autumn each of these flowers produces a spiny fruit, brilliant red in color. When you peel away the skin you find a delicious treat. Tastes like strawberries.'

'What's it called?' one of the students in the rear asked, and Berninghaus said: 'Strawberry cactus.'

And then, at the lower levels, we came upon the plant that affected me most deeply; I saw it first alongside the road, a low gray woody bush with tiny five-thorned leaves. I took it for a weed, but Berninghaus said: 'Let's stop and inspect it.' He broke off a branch to show that the interior wood was one of the most vivid yellows in nature: 'The Indians prized it for coloring their blankets,' and I supposed that this completed the story, but he continued: 'It's one of our best shrubs, quite precious, really.'

'What's it called?' I asked, and he said: 'Cenizo, but some spell it with a final a. Its more effective name, Barometer Bush.'

'Why?'

'If we pass a spot that's had some recent rain, you'll see why,' and before long we came to such a place, and there a stretch of cenizo had burst into soft, gentle gray-purple flowers. They were like miniature lilacs beside some Illinois farmhouse, or dusty asters in a Pennsylvania field; they spoke of home and evening firesides. As I looked down at them, imagining how joyously they must have been greeted by Indians who sought their brilliant dye, I felt as if Texas had somehow reached out to embrace me, to protect me from the barrenness of this western land, and I could understand how Berninghaus had come here fresh from his doctorate at Chicago and decided after one week that this would be his home for

Just as 1 was beginning to feel sentimental about the plant, Berninghaus threw in one of those obiter dicta which can make travel with a scholar so rewarding: 'This is the flower, of course, which made Zane Grey immortal. But imagine how flat his title would have sounded had he called the plant by its proper Spanish name, Riders of the Purple Cenizo. '

Now the talk turned to what Texans seemed to like best— numbers of staggering dimension: 'We're threading along the great Ramsdale Ranch, six hundred thousand acres.' Or, 'Over there, reaching twenty miles, is the FalstafT Ranch, nearly as big as Rhode Island and filled with deer and javelinas and mountain lions.' But when I asked who owned these ranches, I was in variably-told: 'Fellow from Houston who struck it big in oil,' and I began to realize that no matter how far one traveled from the oil fields of Texas, the pervasive power of petroleum remained.

When we stopped for cold drinks at Polk, the forlorn American settlement, Ranger iMacnab informed us: 'We'll cross into Carlota so you can see what a Mexican border town can sometimes be, but I must in fairness warn you that there'll be other settlements of larger size which are much better. This one is pathetic'

When we saw it, we agreed. Four times as large as Polk, it was a hundred times more desolate. It was as if the centuries had hesitated, waiting for some revolutionary invasion to burn down the walls. The fabulous wealth of Mexico had not penetrated here, and the streets were mean and forbidding. Adobe houses crumbled and open sewers went untended. Stores were adorned with broken bottles and old cars rusted at the crossroads. The railway station had lost its tiles and the policemen guarding it wore outmoded and tattered uniforms.

Carlota, named in honor of a European empress who had gone mad as her husband tried to govern Mexico, wasted in the blazing sunlight, and we were content to go back across the bridge to Polk. At first sight we had not rated the American town favorably, but now it seemed a beacon of civilization. Ransom Rusk, who had shown in previous meetings that he disapproved of Mexican ways and also of Mexicans living in Texas, said as we left Carlota: 'Now I can understand why they want to slip into the United States. I would if I had to live over there.'

Our two ranch wagons now headed northwest along the Rio Grande, passing an adobe fort long vacated and the dusty town of Presidio, famed for its appalling summer temperatures. Television viewers grew familiar with the refrain: 'Hottest spot in the nation today, Presidio, Texas, 114 degrees Fahrenheit.'

Then we passed through empty land leading to nowhere, and when we paused to drink from our thermos I asked: 'Where are we going now?' the staff members smiled, and Berninghaus said: 'We've a few more surprises for you.'

I could not imagine what this forbidding land could hold as a surprise, but at the end of the paved road, in what must have been one of the loneliest and gloomiest sections of Texas, we came upon a minute village, Ruidosa, with six houses and a crumbling low Spanish mission, the Sacred Heart, built like a fort and now mold-ering in the desert sun. When I saw it I said over the intercom: 'At our first meeting the governor said we were to probe into every nook and cranny of the state. This is one of the crannies.'

It still retained its roof, though probably not for much longer, and its facade was sturdy, with a wooden entrance that must often have been barricaded when the Apache attacked. It was an honorable relic, testifying to the courage of the missionaries who had stubbornly tried to pacify this part of Texas.

For me the most rewarding segment of the trip now began, for our cars skirted the mission ruins to pick up a trail which appeared on none of our maps. It wound its way due north for eighteen miles along the Rio Grande, so that whenever we looked to our left we saw the mountains of Mexico. Over the intercom we heard our young woman from SxMU ask Ranger Macnab: 'Tell us the truth. Does this trail lead anywhere, or is this a kidnapping?' and he replied: 'We're heading for the end of the world.'

When we stopped we found ourselves in the adobe village of Candelaria, where the pretensions of Texas and the United States ended, for this was one of the loneliest and most inaccessible settlements along the southern border, with people living much as they had in the previous century.

But to me it was compelling, a view of Texas that few ever saw, and my heart beat faster when Berninghaus said: 'Imagine, an international border, and from here, for more than a hundred miles, nothing.' But what delighted our staff was the fact that when we strolled down to the Rio Grande, that river with the magical name, it was so narrow and shallow that a tattered rope-and-wire suspension bridge sufficed to cross it. And as we looked, a pantalooned workman from Mexico carrying a battered gasoline tin with handles came across its swaying planks to purchase some commodity in Candelaria.

'Behold the commerce of great empires!' Berninghaus cried, and we stood silent, confused by the hugeness of Texas and the meanness of its historic river. I think we were all gratified when Berninghaus explained the anomaly: 'We Americans in New Mex-

ico and Texas take so much water out of the Rio Grande for irrigation that if this little stream were allowed to run toward the Gulf in this condition, it would simply disappear. But at a spot near Presidio, a large Mexican river joins up, the Rio Conchos. So the fabled Rio Grande, which we admire so much downstream, should more accurately be called the Conchos. It's mostly Mexican.'

Then came a clatter from the town, and he said: 'I think they've arrived,' and when we returned to our cars we found that students from Sul Ross had brought a picnic lunch for us and had spread it on blankets under a tree.