Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
(Page 4 of 4)
DURING HIS MONTH IN CRAWFORD, President Bush did not visit the Coffee Station or attend church services or stop on Main Street to shake hands. He did visit a community barbecue that the White House organized to thank local volunteers, but I was not included in the pool that day. The closest I ever came to seeing Bush on his ranch was watching footage that a friend at CBS News sent me of the president giving a one-time tour of his land in August 2001.
On the videotape, Bush talks to reporters in the dappled light beneath a stand of hackberry trees, looking as relaxed and at ease before the cameras as he has ever been. The videotape was shot seventeen days before September 11, when the burdens of the presidency were not weighing as heavily on his shoulders. Bush is dressed in black jeans, a gray Crawford Volunteer Fire Department T-shirt, and a white Stetson. Around him, reporters jot notes, photographers snap pictures, and cameramen angle for a view as he takes a chain saw to an old tree and carves it into firewood. "If you want the details, that was a dead hackberry: h-a-c-k . . ." Bush calls out to reporters, mindful that his every move is being recorded for posterity. Even in these woods, Bush is surrounded by a sizable security detail; Secret Service agents encircle him as he chops wood, while a doctor and a nurse wait on hand, as they do wherever he goes. Try as he might to escape the strictures of his position, he never can; he is as much a captive of the presidency as Crawford is. "This is one of the few places where I can actually walk outside my front door and say, 'I think I'm going to go walk for two hours,'" he tells reporters. "And although I'm not totally alone, I can walk wherever I want to walk. And I can't do that in Washington."
A week after Bush returned to the White House, I returned to Crawford. Main Street was deserted when I drove into town on a Friday evening, the only sound the faraway cheers that drifted from the high school football stadium. Most of the town was watching the Crawford Pirates trounce the Riesel Indians. In the bleachers, parents and grandparents sat together, rooting for the home team; kids sipped Big Reds and ate homemade vanilla ice cream, which their mothers had prepared before the game; cheerleaders with sun-bleached hair turned cartwheels and beamed at the crowd; the high school band's brass section blasted "We Will Rock You"; teenage boys slouched against their pickups in the parking lot and flirted with Riesel girls; two volunteer police officers kept watch. After a running back—whose name was actually J. R. Ewing—helped steer Crawford to victory, 41-12, I made my way to the high school cafeteria for the "fifth quarter," a snack for football players and students that local churches provide after home games. Perry Chapel was sponsoring the fifth quarter that night, and Mayor Campbell stood in the cafeteria, pouring Kool-Aid into plastic cups.
By the time the football players arrived, it was past eleven, and Campbell looked tired after a long week. He receives no salary as mayor, and so he pastors two churches—Perry Chapel and one in Waco—to make ends meet. His biggest problem at the moment was finding the money in the town's tiny budget to replace its one police car, a twelve-year-old Crown Victoria; its windows would not roll down, its air conditioning was broken, and its only ventilation came through a large hole in the floorboard. The mayor and I talked while he served up nachos to a long line of ruddy-cheeked football players, who strutted around the cafeteria like young warriors. The president was gone, but the headaches that accompanied him were not; Campbell explained that four thousand adherents of Falun Gong, a persecuted Chinese sect, had just filed for permission to demonstrate when Bush hosts Chinese president Jiang Zemin at the ranch this fall. The protesters would outnumber the town's residents almost six to one. "We're back to normal," Campbell said with a weary smile, handing off another plate of nachos to a sweaty Crawford Pirate. "For a little while."
"I BET OL' GEORGE HATES all this nonsense," said his neighbor, Larry Mattlage, on my last day in Crawford. Larry has never met the president, but his proximity to George W. Bush means that he thinks about the man a great deal. As we talked, Larry leaned on a cedar fence post, squinting in the noonday sun, and pointed out landmarks on the Bush ranch, three quarters of a mile away. On the northernmost side of the ranch ran the Middle Bosque River: a stream of gin-clear water that threaded its way through the prairie grass, past thick stands of cedar elm and burr oak. Farther west was the original ranch house—just a gray blur through Larry's binoculars—and a fleet of Secret Service vehicles. Out of sight behind a rocky ridgeline lay the scenery that makes this western corner of McLennan County so starkly beautiful: the box canyons, limestone bluffs, caves, and slow-moving creeks that dot the ranch's two and a half square miles. "I bet George Bush would love to just get in his pickup and drive around his land and clear his mind," Larry said. "He can't ever be by himself, and that's a terrible burden for anyone to bear. A man needs a little freedom."
The 59-year-old rancher wore an old blue baseball cap pulled down over his eyes; his shaggy salt-and-pepper hair fell against his neck, which was tanned and creased from the sun. A recent divorcé, he lives alone with his old and half-blind dog, Dan, who is bewildered by the F-16s and Blackhawk helicopters that now fly overhead. "It's like a ground war over here," Larry said with a chuckle. His ranch, like the president's, is on Prairie Chapel Road, the main artery that runs through Crawford's farmland and ranchland. Families of German extraction have worked the land along this road since the Civil War and mostly keep to themselves. "People out here want to be left alone," Larry said. "We'd rather be scooping manure out of a barn than going to a fancy social event in Waco." Larry remembers barn raisings and long days picking cotton and relatives who whispered in German. "We'd work our tails off in the fields in the day, and we'd practice football at night, and then we'd cool off in Tonk Creek," he said. "It was like Mayberry. Everyone knew your parents. Everyone watched after everyone. The night watchman in town had a key to the drugstore. He'd let us in for ice cream after we went swimming, and we'd leave our money on the cash register."
Staring out toward the Bush ranch, Larry explained that before Bush bought the ranch it had been a hog farm. Nowadays, Larry finds himself feeling nostalgic for the time when the hogs made the air more pungent. "Sometimes I wish I could still smell those hogs and hear them squealing instead of listening to all those F-16s," Larry said, breaking into a grin. "Don't get me wrong; the Bushes are fine folks. It's not about George Bush. It's about what comes with him." Larry ticked off a long list of grievances: Secret Service roadblocks on Prairie Chapel Road where he was asked to show identification, property taxes that have become so high that he worries he will have no legacy to pass on to his sons. He and his neighbors are concerned about a proposed new road, to be constructed so that the presidential motorcade will not have to slow down for curves; if built, it would bisect Larry's ranch and several other ranches. Most of all, he is angry that Secret Service agents speed past him each day without having the common courtesy to wave. "Country people drive slow," he said. "We're used to pulling over to the side of the road and visiting. But if you wave at the Secret Service, they think, 'What's his problem?' It used to be you knew everybody when you drove by. Now everyone's a stranger."
Larry wanted to give me a tour of his ranch, so we talked in his pickup, lurching down rutted dirt roads. "No one used to talk about politics around here," he said, steering past Black Angus cattle that lay napping in the shade. "Family feuds have started over all this. You used to be just a neighbor. Now you're a Republican neighbor or a Democratic neighbor. It's taken away the closeness of the community." He pondered this for a moment as he drove, and sighed. "I'll make some people mad for saying this, but I'll tell you what really ticks me off. Bush portrays this as his hometown, and it ain't. He just barreled in here." We kept driving, past cedar thickets and a pasture studded with blooming prickly pear cactus. As we made our way down meandering cow paths, Larry expressed his hope that Bush will take more of an interest in conservation and using natural energy now that he has shown an affinity for the land. "God owns all this," Larry said. "We're just caretakers who are here on this earth for a little while." We had reached his favorite spot, along the banks of Bluff Creek, a peaceful place shaded by hackberries and horse apple trees. The dry creek bed ran past a white limestone bluff, where the ground was littered with the old arrowheads of Tonkawa Indians who had once camped there.
