Texas west of Pecos

Press, 11 May 1984, Page 14

Texas west of Pecos

“We pioneered this place in 1935,” says Sammie Bramblett, standing in the dusty backyard of her blufftop ranch, looking across the broad Rio Grande valley toward Mexico.

“At age 74 she lives alone at the end of the longest dead-end road in all Texas,” writes Griffin Smith. He stood in her backyard and observed: “There was no other human habitation as far as the eye could see.”

To reach the nearest grocery store, Mrs Bramblett must drive 86 miles round-trip. And her ranch still has no telephone. A two-way radio is rigged so that incoming calls make the car horn blow. i

Smith asked her if she was ever afraid. “I’ve got a pistol, and I know how. to use it,” she replied.

In Texas west of the Pecos River, lots of people have pistols, and they know how to use them. Smith spent several weeks exploring the huge area, and found it to be “among the last truly idiosyncratic parts of the United States, and its people ... a tough, oldfashioned breed, secure in their convictions and self-sufficient in their ways, delighted to be left alone.”

In order to seek out dozens of “people for whom solitude is the basic fact of life,” he manoeuvred his four-wheel-drive vehicle through canyons, mountains, and desert flats.

“Spanish explorers called it the

despoblado — the unpopulated place,” Smith writes. “Texans who speak today of the Trans-Pecos or, more loosely, the Big Bend country, mean this same rugged quarter. Though it embraces nine counties and part of a tenth, together the size of South Carolina, it is home to just 55,000 inhabitants, excluding El Paso.” Drawing on his experiences in the region, Smith found: © “Candelaria ... is so small that the church celebrates Mass only every other week.”

@ “The search for water is the one abiding constant of life ... When torrents come, water runs off with wasteful havoc. The proud Pecos highway bridge near Langtry was 15 metres above the river, but a half a metre downpour one night in 1954 obliterated it beneath a 26-metre-high wall of water. In the Trans-Pecos, fortune smiles with bared teeth.”

© “Fort Davis ... is the highest town in Texas at 1493 metres: conservative, chilly, a bit straitlaced. The court house has turnstiles to prevent stray cattle from wandering off the street and into the halls of justice.”

© “In 1859, John Butterfield’s stage travelled from the Pecos River to El Paso in 55 hours. Now sleek buses cover the same distance in less than six. But travellers still stop for fuel and refreshment at Van Horn, the only town of consequence for 280 kilometres on Interstate 10.”

@ “Mexican-American influence is on the rise. Six counties now have Hispanic majorities. But the ethnic transformation is less a matter of numbers than of participation — social, political, and economic — by people who once stayed on the periphery.” The ghost town of Terlingua, Smith writes, has been described as “the fartherest you can go without getting anywhere.” Smith drove that distance to visit the annual “Wick Fowler Memorial World Championship Chili Cook-off.” For two days each November, a

“portable village” sprouts in the desert. At what he calls the “mardi gras of the country and western ,

set,” Smith joined 8000 other spectators:

“There were people dressed as chili peppers, as monks, as locomotives. There were bouncy women dressed as Dallas Cowboys and bearded men in brassieres as their cheerleaders. There was the Best Little Chili House in Texas. And from many of the simmering cauldrons the smells were, well, disturbing. Was it chili, or was it herbicide?”

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