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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There’s no contempt in David Sleeper’s voice. He has the low-tech life he wants. Before I leave, David tells me that I’m welcome to stay over anytime I like. It’s the fifth or sixth such invitation I’ve received during my weeklong stay in Terlingua, despite the prevailing sentiment that my article cannot possibly do the town any good. A cynic might regard Terlingua’s spirit of communal generosity as a practical matter of desert survival. But they damn sure don’t have to extend it to outsiders.
“We don’t have much, but if you ever stay with us, you’ll never go hungry,” says Janelle as she offers me a peanut butter and jelly tortilla. Her offer is particularly moving because she, her husband, Jeff, and their three children live significantly below the poverty line. Their furniture consists largely of wooden slabs set on top of buckets filled with dry food. They drink what little caught rainwater is left from last September’s brief downpour. Their do-it-yourself Terlingua Ranch residence, though clean and orderly, has the appearance of a wooden cave. Paul Wiggins calls them homesteaders.
Jeff dropped out of the Army just after the tragic Kent State shooting in 1970 and wandered all the way to Terlingua. Back then, the ghost town was an abandoned pile of rubble. Fourteen years later, he and Janelle became the parents of the first child born in the ghost town since 1943. Jeff has been here longer than almost anyone and freely exercises his right to de nounce what has become of the town. “The people who move here today say they’re sick of the corporate world,” he drawls, “but it’s already in their system. They can’t live back-to-nature the way we do. They come for the scene and not for the scenery. And now they’re turning it into Terlingua Fe.”
Then his words grow harsher, more sweeping. The skinny man with the handlebar mustache leans forward in his chair and says emphatically, “The way this country is now, if you’re not a part of yuppie culture, you’re either in poverty or you’re a criminal. And mark my words, this country will pay.” A darkness seems to leak into the unelectrified, unmechanized home. “The Unabomber tried to make the country pay,” I begin, but Jeff cuts me off, snapping, “How many of their agents have murdered innocents as business-as-usual?”
Janelle, who still carries the figure of the ballerina she once was but whose dark and wind-creased face personifies the desert life, chimes in, “I teach our children that they, the government, are the dangerous ones. They bred the Unabomber. He’s like the counter-CIA. What he fought against is still the governing force. And everyone who came to Terlingua is at least subconsciously trying to escape that beast.”
That applied to David Kaczynski, who was content with escape, rather than retaliation; it applied, at least until 1978, to his brother. How much bitterness and despair did it take to turn an escapist into a Unabomber? Jeff and Janelle have each other, and they have the Terlingua community, but something else diffuses their hostility toward the outside world, and Jeff volunteers what it is: “I still have hope,” he says calmly. “I still have faith that we’ll work things out on this planet. Otherwise I wouldn’t have brought three kids into the world.”
The youngest of the three is asleep on the family bed. The other two are in school. The eldest son, says Janelle, wants to study rocket aviation. Eventually he’ll be leaving the desert, going off to a university. The homesteaders tell me they’re okay with that. I notice the mandala on their wall. The little home is buttressed with hope.
PROPRIETOR ANGIE DEAN OPENS THE doors to the Starlight at five every afternoon, and one by one the Terlinguans shuffle in. Ken Barnes, the town’s venerated self-taught paleontologist, strides up to the bar in his straw hat and holds out the day’s find of dinosaur bones, which are passed around the bar to grunts of admiration. Laurie arrives fresh from the Chihuahuan town of Creel, her truck loaded with Mexican craftwork that she will sell to the trading company. One of the evening’s musicians begins tuning his mandolin. By ten after five, every barstool is taken.
One of the occupants is Spider, who must have just gotten paid, since Angie doesn’t give him a line of credit—unlike the trading company, where Spider owes $36, and the Study Butte Store, where he is $125 in arrears. “The way I see it,” he tells me, “I’ve got to get paid two or three hundred dollars every week, because I like to drink a lot of beer and dip a lot of snuff.”
When I carefully ask him if he thinks he’s an alcoholic, Spider doesn’t miss a beat. “I know I am! Hell. Four DWIs, disorderly conduct. I don’t deny it.”
He laughs and returns to his Budweiser. The talkative, compact-looking man in the gimme cap and sunglasses is Terlingua’s latest project. Spider has been here five years, and it is fair to say that he did not arrive brimming with communal spirit. After being tossed out of the Army in 1970 for brawling with his fellow soldiers—“I was a loner, and when the others picked on me, I’d go crazy on ’em,” he says—the Vietnam vet spent the next twenty years roaming in South Texas and south of the border, never spending more than a couple of months in one place. He acquired the spider tattoos on his arms and neck from an artist in Ciudad Acuña, but the nickname came first, given to him around the time he got into a brawl in Del Rio. When a former brother-in-law purchased a few acres just behind the ghost town in 1991, Spider got in on the deal and settled down in an old camper parked in the rubble of Terlingua.
But, as one of the locals puts it, “It took him two years to arrive here mentally.” Spider agrees: “I was still angry when I got here. My first year, I punched out one guy and threatened to kill another.” Terlinguans were aghast; a loner-monster was in their midst. Then Angie Dean stepped in. Observing Spider’s skill as a concrete pourer, the Starlight owner asked him one day if he would design a sign for her establishment’s restrooms. Spider did so, using metal spikes for the lettering, and a concrete artist was born.
Nowadays he makes dinosaurs for Big Al’s miniature golf course and busts of the Virgin Mary to sell across the border. The savage beast is soothed. “I got the monkey off my back,” he says proudly, though, he confesses, “Three weeks ago I nearly beat up a guy. He showed up from out of state, and immediately he starts hassling me. I told him to stay away, but he wouldn’t.”
Spider takes a gulp of his Budweiser, then says, “But I held back. And eventually somebody else beat him up pretty good, and he split. See, because I waited, now it ain’t on my conscience. I feel at peace.”
The cackle that follows suggests, “Stay tuned.” But no one is worried about Spider anymore. He has his first home, his first mailbox, in twenty years, and though all those years of marginal living trigger the occasional compulsion to withdraw (at which time he typically sleeps in the cave on his property), Spider is usually among the first to claim a spot on the trading company porch every afternoon. In Terlingua, he has at last found a place where he belongs.
When I asked people how far Terlingua’s communal boundaries extended, they directed me a dozen miles past the ghost town, past Collie Ryan’s school bus, across the Rio Grande, and into the Mexican village of Paso de Lajitas. Somewhere beyond the village lived Feather. Repeatedly her name had been invoked during my stay: Feather was Terlingua at its purest, a committed recluse, her energies focused exclusively on survival and painting and the four daughters she raised on Mexican soil. Her house, like so many others I had seen, was a dubious jumble of wood, plaster, and sotol but tidy and not without a primitive artistic flair. On the bed by the front door rested a naked infant, along with a Mexican woman in her nineties whose brother, I would later be told, once rode with Pancho Villa.
Feather herself was an understated presence, weathered but otherwise of indiscernible age, slight of build with short dark hair and equally dark eyes that greeted her uninvited guest with quiet wariness. She poured me a cup of red herbal tea, and we sat next to the tiny kitchen—where, it did not surprise me to discover, one of Collie Ryan’s mandalas hung on a wall. In a measured, oddly accented voice, Feather told me that she was born in Ireland but spent most of her childhood in India. As to how she got to where we now sat, Feather replied with a soft laugh and shook her head. “I’ve been all over,” she then murmured.
Once she warmed to me, Feather showed off her well-kept garden, her chickens and horses, her well, and the little studio where she had spent the morning painting a portrait commissioned by a government official in Ojinaga. By the time we returned to the house, her daughter Talgar was in the kitchen peeling avocados and the elderly woman was kneading tortilla dough.
When Feather asked why I was writing about Terlingua, I mentioned the Unabomber. She cocked her head slightly. “I don’t know who that is,” she said, adding, “I don’t read the papers.”
I began to describe the saga of Ted Kaczynski: the primitive cabin in the middle of nowhere, his aggressive rejection of all things technological, his scornful manifesto. Feather’s deep eyes were alight; she was smiling, nodding, on the brink of exuberance—until I came to the ugly punch line, whereupon her peasantlike face clouded over.
Terlingua’s matron saint considered it all for only a moment. Then she grinned. “The guy had a few screws loose,” she said. I nodded and got up to leave, but Feather wouldn’t hear of it—not until I accepted a burrito fresh from her little kitchen, something to fortify me for the journey home.
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