The Last Refuge
It’s no wonder the brother of the Unabomber suspect came to the desert near Terlingua to disappear; for years renegades and recluses have found their way to this forgotten corner of Texas.
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Mandalas on computers? Collie sees a wheel in everything, except, perhaps, Ted Kaczynski, a lone arrow shot in a futile violent arc. “Now I suppose they’ll kill him,” she says with a grimace. “They will be releasing into the astroplane a brilliant destructive astrospark that will lodge itself into the cranium of some drunken dolt. That’s what happens with the death penalty.”
Collie returns to the hubcap, which I pay her $75 for. She accepts the money with grace. “This is the way it always happens,” she tells me. “I really sell just by luck. It’s magic. Like you coming by today.”
And that is my first but by no means last glimpse of Terlingua’s screwball magic.
BY MIDAFTERNOON THE PORCH BENCH OF the Terlingua Trading Company is occupied by the usual loiterers. Mike, a sinewy bongo player with Ray-Bans and sandals, is cutting a local fellow’s matted hair. Betty, who works at Terlingua-based Far Flung Adventures, smirks at me from underneath her gimme cap. (She dropped out of Texas Monthly a dozen years ago; I’m not there yet.) Spider is nursing a Budweiser and bragging about the concrete gargoyle he crafted this morning. Big Al, a prodigiously gutted retired merchant seaman with a short black ponytail and a tufted white beard, tends lovingly to the three dusty canines on the porch. When people call out, “How’s it goin’, Big Al?” he convincingly booms, “Always great. Always great.” I’m stuck with the embarrassing memory of having once been afraid of Big Al, before I knew about his gentle way with animals and the miniature desert golf course he constructed out by his trailer.
Whole afternoons pass this way in Terlingua. Every couple of minutes a car sputters by—as opposed to fifteen years ago, I’m often told, when two or three hours would pass without the sighting of a vehicle. As recently as 1970, not a soul lived in the ghost town. Five years later, there were 6 residents; by 1980, maybe 50. Today the population estimates run in the 150 to 250 neighborhood. (With all the drifters, an exact count is impossible.) Among the recent signs that the Apocalypse is upon Terlingua: A high school and a bank are being built; fiber optic telephone lines are ready for installation; and one of the gas stations in Study Butte, four miles east of the ghost town, now has an automated-teller machine. Elsewhere in West Texas, the natives are praying for rain, but in Terlingua I’ve heard people applaud the four-year drought. “It’s keeping the growth at bay,” one of the locals told me with a perfectly straight face.
The ghost town suffers for a perfect villain. Area rancher Rex Ivey, who bought the whole town with his son Bill in the eighties, drives around the region dispensing to dogs slabs of meat from a tray in the trunk of his car. Forty-year-old Bill pays the ghost town’s entire water bill and has thus far resisted the capitalist impulse to transform his empire into a theme park. The trendmongers don’t last long here. As one Terlinguan dryly observes, “We’ve all had a good laugh at the New Agers who come here with their crystals and leave with a whopping sunburn.” Terlingua’s version of a yuppie is Mimi Webb-Miller, the late John Tower’s niece and a casting director for prime-time national television commercials, whose newly built faux ruin in the ghost town would not look out of place in Santa Fe. Mimi spent most of the previous decade as legendary Ojinaga drug lord Pablo Acosta’s publicist and confidante. Her Toyota 4-Runner looks a little bit out of place among the town’s shabby buses and pickups, but she does one hell of a job plowing it across the Rio Grande into Mexico. “Mimi,” chuckles one longtime Terlinguan, “is a master of versatility.” She can stay.
“There’s gonna be more humans—it’s a reality and I’m resigned to it,” says Paul Wiggins as he sits in the workshop where he makes belts, six miles north of the ghost town. “I’m sure there were Indians living peacefully in the Chisos who looked down one day and said, ‘Oh, shit, here come the Comanches.’ I don’t like whiners. There’s still a kind of halo around Terlingua. I was driving with my two boys the other night, and you could see all these campfires in the distance. I told my sons, ‘Take note: What you’re seeing all around you is pretty unique.’”
According to Paul, “The grace of Terlingua is that in this whole soup no one is dominant.” But particular respect is reserved for a few—among them Collie and Paul, who share a survivor’s pride that is refreshingly devoid of sanctimony. Like the hubcap artist, Paul is an American original, which cuts both ways: His place in a cookie-cutter world is not so easily found. With a sharp chin and nose, skinny legs tucked into black stretch pants, and a voice that seems never far from laughter, Paul Wiggins could be a leprechaun exiled to the desert. He grew up in Chicago, where the sixties counterculture got him only so far. “The hippies protested against the war and did drugs, neither of which I did very effectively,” he says. “But the third thing they did, which I did find attractive, was get back to the land.”
Before doing so, he worked for Brown and Root—“Which was this great masculine company,” Paul says—in the architecture and engineering department. In the seventies he brought his skills to the desert and found construction work wherever he could. He was back to the land, all right, and, he recalls, “I wasn’t making enough money to start my car. Now with more people moving here, there’s more building to be done, more people to buy my belts. I’m not struggling anymore.”
By that, he means struggling financially. Paul is no longer married, but asceticism doesn’t suit him. As he talks about loneliness, he finds himself suddenly talking about the Unabomber suspect. “The whole thing with Ted Kaczynski,” Paul says, “has reminded me that human hearts have a hard time growing when we’re alone.” Last year, I’m told, Paul left Terlingua to be with a woman in Houston. It is painful to contemplate the image of this gentle soul trying to hack it in the big city, but Paul wanted his heart to grow and so he gave it his best shot. It wasn’t long before he returned. One is better for trying, perhaps—though I’m reminded of the haunting words of another desert veteran: “You live in Terlingua and you become unrehabilitatable.”
PAUL WIGGINS NEEDS THE COMMUNITY. he needs the Starlight Theatre, the ghost town’s dazzling food and beverage oasis; he needs the dances and the campfire parties. But the Terlingua area has its genuine recluses, like Judy, also known as Suitcase Sally, the middle-aged and deeply tanned woman in sunglasses who rides with her few worldly possessions on the back of a burro and sleeps at night on the side of the road. She is “like art,” says Paul with admiration, a desert apparition who says nothing when I greet her in Study Butte and nothing when I greet her two days later and fifty miles west on RR 170, in Redford. Whatever churns within her, Suitcase Sally keeps utterly to herself.
But the Terlingua desert has seen its sad disasters, like Emil, the polite but fatally conflicted nuclear physicist who drank himself to death in his trailer. It has seen Howard, who shot at passing aircraft and claimed a kinship to Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, and it still sees an individual who once served time for a sex offense and now sits by the roadside claiming he is God. Even in Terlingua, not every misfit can be made to fit. All the same, says Paul Wiggins, “It amused me to hear a reporter on the BBC shortwave making such a point about the Unabomber living without electricity or running water and connecting that to his eccentric, violent nature. I can’t speak for Ted Kaczynski’s neck of the woods. But my experience is that the desert eats violent people.”
Between the sad cases and the romanticized Suitcase Sallys, there are the unclassifiables, anomalous desert species like the Rabbit Lady, who lived in a car and herded her rabbits with a stick before relocating, incredibly, to comparatively yuppified Alpine. No one knew what to make of the Rabbit Lady, and in a different way, ambivalence seems to be the consensus appraisal of David Sleeper, the fortyish owner of a ranch less than ten miles west of Lajitas. He has been a desert presence for two decades, leading spiritual canyoneering expeditions, raising cattle on the other side of the river, and more recently, breeding mules on his solar-powered ranch. His independent life commands a certain respect from Terlinguans, but a shared history is no guarantee of affection, and somewhere along the way, the locals found themselves withholding their embrace of David Sleeper.
It works both ways. “I’ve had my hermit’s license for years,” he tells me with a quiet grin. David has no use for the Terlingua porch life; only on occasion does he make the trek into the ghost town. Though he strikes me as bright and even charming in a bashful way, it is clear that he feels most comfortable around his twenty beasts. “Give them a lot of respect, and they’ll give it back,” he says as his fingers caress the neck of one of his mules. “But they won’t give a stupid person the time of day.”
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