Showdown at Maverick Ranch
Henry Cisneros and the state’s highway boosters were determined to bull-doze a loop through the pristine Hill Country near san Antonio. Now, all that stands in the way is three sisters and five generations of Texas history.
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IN THE FACE OF SUCH OPPOSITION, the highway department is softening up—at least externally. Responding to growing dismay over 211, district engineer Richard Lockhart says that even though the department will not necessarily seek federal matching funds for its work on 211—a process that would require it to meet very specific environmental guidelines—it will compile all the qualifying impact statements and honor the federal statutes on the stretch affecting the Maverick Ranch.
Internally, however, the department has the same old attitude about the Fenstermakers. About one week after the meeting at Myfe Moore’s, I spent a day with David Otwell, the San Antonio district’s public affairs officer. Together, we drove all over the back roads of northwest Bexar County. As we stopped in front of the Maverick Ranch gate, he chuckled at the marker of an organization called Defenders of Wildlife. “Is that all you have to do to be a wildlife refuge?” he asked. “Put up a sign?”
Nor was he terribly impressed, as we pulled away, with the ranch’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places. “I mean, who grants it? Do they actually come out and inspect the place and see what you’ve got? Or do you just send in an application and get a coupon back in the mail?”
“They” are the federally funded National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the certification procedure is rigorous. In any case, because the department has not sought federal highway funds for 211, no law prevents the state from condemning such a place. Neither does pressure from other state agencies. San Antonian T. R. Fehrenbach, the chair of the Texas Historical Commission, signed a resolution in January 1990 imploring the department to find a route around the Maverick Ranch. But the document has no binding authority.
As we drove, Otwell mentioned Ray Smith, whom he called “a self-styled preservationist.” I didn’t let on that I’d already interviewed him. A building contractor, Smith belongs to the avocational Southern Texas Archaeological Association; he monitors construction projects as a steward for the state archaeologist. On the seven-mile segment of 211 ending at 16, Smith told me he had found five archaeological features that the department’s contractors had illegally blasted or bulldozed through. They were burned-rock middens—strategic watering sites where successive bands and tribes had camped and cooked for centuries. One site, Smith said, was strewn across two acres.
“Burnt rock!” Otwell said. He dug his elbow into my arm. “Do we really need to save every place where some Indian took a shit?”
A WEEK LATER, I RETURNED to San Antonio to see Richard Lockhart. Otwell sat in on our meeting. The mood was relaxed until the end, when I raised two still-sensitive questions about the department’s conduct.
The first, I said, dealt with strategy. A source with detailed knowledge of the San Antonio district office had told me that it is a common negotiating ploy to draw a route straight toward the home of a landowner. “Don’t like that route?” my source had said, explaining the procedure. “Then how about this one a little farther down?” Along the proposed extension of 211, the Fenstermakers, James Bowman, and Myfe Moore had complained of variations on that theme.
“No, sir,” said Lockhart strongly. “That is not a tactic. I deny that.”
It was clear that he wasn’t going to give ground, so I moved on to the second question: environmental neglect. I handed Lockhart a copy of an interoffice memorandum supplied by my source. Dated November 20, 1989, the memo from design engineer John Kight to Richard Lockhart described Kight’s reaction to the barren scrape of land at the juncture of 211 and 16. Otwell hadn’t seen the memo, but citing internal policy, he had denied my request for an interview with Kight, which turned out to be a smart move. If neither Otwell nor Lockhart was having second thoughts about 211, it seemed that Kight was.
Kight’s memo read in part: “In defiance to the plans and specifications and with total contempt to our natural environmental heritage; we have raped, pillaged, and utterly destroyed a God given treasure of natural beauty in our trees and landscape. It is both disgusting and distressing to witness this type of contemptuous attitudes that we, as caretakers of the land, display towards our natural resources, our neighbors, the public trust and the irreplaceable beauty of age old trees.”
Lockhart was silent as he read.
“Granted,” I said, “he’s talking just about trees. But if the crews are doing that to trees, what are they doing to water? What are they doing to archaeological sites?”
“I feel,” Lockhart said, “that this is an emotional reaction to one incident. It’s not a wholesale condemnation of our procedures. The point of land he’s talking about is very rugged terrain. If you know anything about live oak trees and rock, you know the root system is very shallow and fragile. Our plan called for selected undergrowth clearing. But because of the terrain, a hell of a lot of trees got knocked down that shouldn’t have. A bulldozer hits a rock, catches a root, and accidentally knocks things down. I discussed it with my construction engineer and resident engineer and said, ‘Let’s be damn careful this doesn’t happen again.’
“I don’t disagree, in general, that the department has been portrayed as having a black eye in terms of heavy-handedness and, in some areas, disregard for the environment. Some of those accusations have been unfounded. Some have been genuine attempts by those concerned with the environment to make the department more responsive. And there’s a concerted effort to be more responsive. Not that we weren’t before.”
SO WHERE DO THINGS STAND? at the south end of 211, the Texas Research Park is showing signs of real life. It has curbs, fire hydrants, wildflower landscaping, street signs for Lambda and Omicron drives, and a single building: The UT Institute for Biotechnology. In 1991 the institute lured a world-renowned Taiwanese scientist, Wen-Hwa Lee, away from the University of California at San Diego. In laboratory experiments, Lee isolated a protein that suppresses the growth of human cancer cells. Unfortunately, humans suffer severe allergic reactions to the protein. Lee was excited about coming to San Antonio because he’ll work closely with the esteemed Daniel D. Von Hoff, of the Cancer Therapy and Research Center, which is associated with the UT Health Science Center. Von Hoff’s field is cancer drugs. His team could help Lee’s team find a way to make the protein safe for application.
The Cancer Therapy and Research Center will occupy the next building on the park site. The Institute for Drug Development will follow. McDermott’s insurance company, USAA, has promised a $6.6 million research grant to IDD. The only strings, Von Hoff says, are that the institute must try to cut the average discovery-to-approval time of cancer drugs from fourteen to seven years—and also create local jobs. Somehow, finding cures for horrid diseases ought to be motivation enough, yet it’s not. The driving force of the research park is economic development. The mantra of today’s politicians is job creation.
But as long as cancer is the focus of the bioresearch, there won’t be many jobs anytime soon. “There’s not enough money in it,” Von Hoff says. “The big pharmaceutical companies put their chips on drugs that treat chronic conditions like ulcers or hypertension or depression. Cancer drugs make people well, or pretty soon they die. Either way, it’s a short-term payback.”
AS FOR THE FENSTERMAKERS—Well, they press on. The engineers could finish the first eighteen and a half miles of 211 by 1995. Then, perhaps, they’ll build the next fourteen. The process creeps along with no indication that the highway department has decided to spare the Maverick Ranch or any other property. Still, the engineers say they’re looking at several possible routes. The segment north of 16 might fall victim to the endangered species controversy that snags development throughout much of the Hill Country. Or it might keep right on coming.
Back on the ranch, Bebe seems to have kept up her level of energy. She continues to drive her pickup as aggressively as she organizes neighbors. Riding in the bed one afternoon last summer, Mary Fenstermaker and I bounced, hung on the sides, and ducked the slap and claw of limbs and foliage. Our jeans and the black-and-white face of Sue, their mongrel Border collie, were splotched yellow with pollen from a bumper crop of the wildflowers called Mexican hats. The dog entertained herself by leaping and snapping at the low-hanging branches. “Sue, quit,” Mary said with a smile. “Sometimes she gets too firm a bite and tips herself right out of the truck.”
Bebe’s tour that day included a plunge through brush to the stony mouth of Lost Dog Spring. “Last time I went down in there,” Bebe said, squinting into the fissure, “some rattlesnakes sent me right back out.” We walked through the stone ruins of holding pens and stood beside a deep, clear pool where the sisters used to swim and wade their horses.
Mary’s limestone cottage sits on a nearby rise, near a stone barn with nooks for nesting chickens, a stone root cellar, a stone smokehouse, and a contoured fortress wall around the compound that today would stop a tank. This is her haven—where she makes her peace with the passing years. Among the songbirds, with the dog cooling her belly in the creek, the thought of dynamited hillsides and advancing earthmovers as big as houses seems more absurd than obscene.
“They’re not going to do it,” Mary says. “They just can’t.”
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