My Favorite Place
Texas is vast, but its appeal is intimate. Out of patriotic duty, we admire its size and sweep, but our most treasured places are likely to have a more human scale. These spots might be public domain showplaces—monuments, vistas, idyllic Hill Country towns—or they might be simply the scene of some private epiphany, homely or peculiar places that we would never have noticed if they had not somehow left their mark on us. The Texans on the following pages have left their own mark on the state, but for all of them there remains that one unforgettable place whose mystery never fades.
James A. Michener
The Unlikely Paradise of Presidio
I am convinced that whoever surveyed West Texas in the early days marked off some of the longest miles in the world, just to get the job done in a hurry. Today those lonely miles link scattered townships and settlements in a harsh terrain that became the breeding ground of the Texas cowboy and more recently the wildcat oilman. Nowhere do those endless miles unfold more dramatically than in the fabled Big Bend country south of Marfa, Alpine, and Marathon.
The area first enchanted me in the thirties when I motored down a tortuous dirt road that meandered some sixty miles or so from Marfa to the Rio Grande. Today that same road is graded and paved but still impressive, and as before it ends at my favorite place in all Texas, the old Spanish settlement of Presidio. Since that first visit more than fifty years ago I have returned many times, most recently when doing intensive research for my novel Texas.
I remember Presidio for several reasons, not least when I listen to the nation’s weather reports: “For the third day in a row the highest temperature in the nation was recorded at Presidio, Texas.” When I hear such a report, I see again the dusty main street burning in the sun.
Presidio is the unadorned meeting place of two great nations, not much used as a crossing place by tourists, not blessed by any significant shared commercial enterprise, not favored as a highway linking our two countries, though there is a rail link on the Ojinaga side of the river to take the intrepid traveler on a breathtaking train ride all the way to the Gulf of California. Presidio is but one more in the string of meager communities along the Rio Grande. Ruidosa, Candelaria, Lajitas, Terlingua, all of them Spanish-named except for lonely Redford, all of them in a mind-set that faces south to Mexico and Chihuahua, not north to Lubbock or Midland or Dallas.
Yet of all those river places Presidio is significant because it is a U.S. border crossing, a fact that was forever engraved on my mind the day a Texas law enforcement officer drove me across the river for a face-to-face meeting with the local Mexican crime boss in Ojinaga. Guided by a series of unwritten understandings, these two men kept crime within acceptable tolerances on both sides of their border area. It was strange to watch an acknowledged Mexican outlaw and a pragmatic American lawman discussing how to handle half a dozen local crimes ranging from horse stealing to murder. It was the modern equivalent of the law west of the Pecos meted out by Judge Roy Bean, and I was assured it still worked. “I get more help from that crook than I can ever count on from a grand-jury investigation,” the American lawman vouched. “I get more crimes resolved through an understanding with him than I ever could with a posse of armed men at my side.” The meeting was one of the highlights of many research trips along the river bend.
And so Presidio bakes on, a small frontier town of no pretension except when viewed from the poverty-scarred streets of its sister town Ojinaga. From that desolate place, in these years of enormous hardship on the Mexican side, Presidio must look like the gateway to paradise. James A. Michener, the author of Texas, is now completing a novel about the Caribbean.
Bud Shrake
Buttercup Mountain
Most of my favorite places in Texas have been shut down or paved in the past few years, but there is still one spot where I can slip off to on an afternoon and slide into dream time. It is a wooden swing on top of Buttercup Mountain about a mile from the town square in Wimberley. The swing hangs from an oak tree. The view is across Money Hole Flat and the Blanco River to the high purple ridge known as the Devil’s Backbone. Sitting there, listening to my dogs chasing the scent of ghosts in the woods, I am reminded of the quote from Ford Madox Ford that Billie Lee Brammer used to open his novel The Gay Place: “Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and coolness?” Substitute oaks and junipers for olive leaves, and this is an apt description of how I feel in my swing on Buttercup.
The swing was a gift from Pete and Jody Gent. They chose the location near an unexplored Indian mound that is alive with spirits, and they selected the view that is open to rich sunsets with hawks cruising in the clouds above the valley. It is a place to go when the world is too much with me. And to prompt my mind to give itself a rest, they carved into the back of the swing seat four words of consolation and reassurance.
The words are: “So far, so bueno.” Bud Shrake is a novelist and screenwriter who lives in Austin.
John Graves
The Solace of Salt Water
You head there at the earliest hint of day in a shoal-draft boat, slicing cool salt air and steering at first by green and red blinks from the Intracoastal’s markers, and then, as night pales and you leave the big channel behind, by noting familiar gas wells and wrecks and pilings. When the water shallows you kill the motor and tilt it up, letting the boat drift quietly onto the flat. With luck there is not yet a breeze, and for an hour or two as the sun rises red through mists you will have a blessed calm that allows your fly rod to roll line out straight and true and makes visible on the flat’s smooth surface the swirls and wakes of creatures you hope are redfish, the game species most apt to forage in such thin water.
Sometimes that’s what they are, and if you do things right, you take one or two or more. But if, as often, you don’t, it matters little because of the place itself, the flat. Marsh-fringed, it is maybe a mile long and a few hundred yards across at its widest, mainly shallow and wadable though in spots deepish or mushy underfoot. It isn’t wilderness. West beyond a marsh and some spoil-bank islands ships and tugs growl along the Intracoastal, and in a big nearby bay shrimpers and workboats and sportfishing craft crisscross once another’s wakes. On a gulfward barrier island large houses stand beside dredged channels full of cabin cruisers and in summer distantly emit the sounds of music and children.
Yet these things serve merely to frame the flat, to emphasize what it is. Fishing is easier elsewhere, and people are seldom close by. Wading on firm sand or velvet turtle grass or crisp shells, stalking swirls, you watch your sliding feet and the things that scoot before them—crabs, small rays, tiny fish….Mullet leap. Birds big and little wheel crying above you or eye you from the marshes and sandbars, in autumn hundreds of them, of dozens on dozens of species. You fish along slowly, loving it, but loving the place even more. What the flat is, is peace. John Graves, a contributing editor for Texas Monthly, has written mainly about rural and natural concerns.
Tommy Lee Jones
Two Workplaces
It would have to be a tie between our ranch in San Saba County and my study in our house in San Antonio. The ranch is well into the San Saba Hills. There’s a lot of limestone rocks—more of them exposed in this century than should be because of overgrazing. Because of that we have a lot of nuisance brush, but there’s a lot of good rich grass too. We raise Brangus cattle—they’re good mothers, they hustle, and they’re disease-resistant. My favorite place on the ranch is near an old windmill where we’ve just built new work pens. The windmill is a Chicago Aermotor with bullet holes in the blades. It needs work right now, and my favorite parts of the ranch are always the ones that need the most attention.
My study in San Antonio is where my favorite books are. It has a vaulted ceiling, painted burgundy, and its walls are made of limestone blocks. I do a lot of work in this study. Movie scripts, plays, and current fiction come and go across an old wooden table while the shelves hold biographies of actors and directors and a good selection of works on the history, theory, and practice of theatre, motion pictures, and television. There’s a complete set of Shakespeare, the Rowse edition, that Joe Papp gave me, and an old set of the Harvard Classics. Then there’s an odd old set of Victor Hugo and strangely enough a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911. Look up any little country, and they describe it by telling how to invade it.
I’ve got a lot of veterinary books, books by Dobie, and books on birds. In this room I also have my grandfather’s shotgun, a bronze of a javelina hiding behind some prickly pear, and an oil painting of a crane in flight.
My Library
