Late Covid American Sojourn: Day 16
Before we left the Texas Hill Country, I went on a breakfast errand, for butter and jam. I drove to the Stage Stop gas station and found some Fredericksburg craft preserves, but no butter. “You’d have to drive into town,” the clerk told me. “Walmart.” I didn’t want to go to Walmart. “Well you can go a bit further, to the Dollar General,” she said. She called over her shoulder, to the clerk in the back. “Or does Dollar Tree also have butter?” she asked.
“I hardly ever shop at the Dollar Tree,” the woman responded. “I just to go to Dollar General.”
I noticed the HELP WANTED sign at the register. “How much does the job pay?” I asked. With my scraggly beard and long hair flowing out of a Big Bend National Park hat, I may have looked like a candidate.
“I think he starts them at 12 dollars an hour,” the clerk replied. I pumped my gas, checked the tires, oil and coolant, and drove to the Dollar Tree. It was closed. So I tucked away my anti-Walmart values and went in for butter. A couple of forlorn greeters, including a man who could have been 80, stood next to a double row of grocery carts, looking confused in their reflective vests, ready with their disinfectant.
“Do you know where I can find the butter?” I asked the old man.
“Well, you have to go,” he said, slowly pointing into the store, then pausing. “It’s…”
I waited. “It’s…uhh. It’s…all the way back, against the wall.”
My little butter odyssey provided a small glimpse into the marginal economy we’d been encountering, all the way from rural Florida to west Texas. Not only have we seen many more dollar stores than groceries, but we’ve passed innumerable dollar store semitrucks. We are in an American dollar-store economy, catering to those on the margins, making 12 bucks an hour, working as convenience store clerks, fast-food or donut shop workers, Walmart greeters.
All of this marginal existence stands alongside the rough, hard-bitten image of the cowboy, the rancher, the oil roughneck, the lawman — fundamental elements of Trump country and the mythology of independence and stoic, (and in Fredericksburg, Germanic) silent strength.
At the edge of Fredericksburg, marked by a tall stone tower, stands the Texas Ranger Heritage Museum, epitomizing the image of rough, Texas-style justice.
“Much has been written about the Texas Ranger and his iconic Badge,” the Museum proclaims. “But it was always more than just a story about a Ranger with a Badge. It is today and always was the ‘Story Behind the Badge’ and the Moral Character exhibited by those who wore it then and still wear it today. Those Character Traits have defined and continue to define the best Men and Women in Law Enforcement as well as all those who value character, ethics and good citizenship in our communities….The Heritage Center includes the Rangers Tower, standing apart as a beacon for learning, a salute to good citizenship…”
Aside from the Many Capital Letters, these words are notable in the extreme for what they omit.
In the early 20th Century, “vigilante lynch mobs and extrajudicial murders by the Texas Rangers took hundreds of lives,” wrote David Dorado Romo in the Texas Observer, after the El Paso Massacre of 2019. “The 1918 massacre at Porvenir, where Texas Rangers marched 15 boys and men out of town and shot them in cold blood, was one of many acts of state-sanctioned terrorism against people of Mexican origin along the Rio Grande Valley during the early 20th century.”
“The popular image of the elite law-enforcement organization known as the Texas Rangers has long been derived from television fantasies and historical myth,” adds Michael Sandlin in another Observer piece. “The Rangers are often depicted as infallible noble guardians of public order…” On the contrary, he writes in his review a book by Monica Muñoz Martinez, the Texas Rangers were “a state-sponsored terror squad directed to secure white racial hegemony along the Texas-Mexico border.”
The mythology of the Texas Rangers and the official erasure of its violent history work in tandem with the self-image of rough independence in ranch country here, with all those red Trump signs still standing. This is a tribal matter, in many respects. A set of values selected from the mythology of the past carried forward into the present.
Yesterday in a comment to my post, the Reverend Steve Holton wrote: “I’d love to know from your trip through Trump country what might be the ties that bind, or be reknitted…”
It’s a great question, Steve, and I don’t have an answer. But given how deeply anti-Black and anti-brown sentiments play here, given the fuel the Rangers mythology gives to Trumpism, and how deeply knitted all this is into the very landscape of Texas, and despite my long-standing belief that bringing facts to the people can change hearts and minds, in this case, I’m not optimistic.
We left the Hill Country, pointing east toward New Mexico. Gradually the hills turned to plains, the cypress and laurel to scrub oak and pine, the rivers to narrow creeks, and then, dry washes. We were in the flat, dry, dull yellow plains, now cattle fenced in for miles, and soon, the derricks, wells, loose pipe, pumpjacks and endless trailer mancamps of the oil patch. And more than anything, dozens of flares burning off gas at their drilling sites: the torches of oil country, stinking the air. From Ft. Stockton, we cut north along U.S. 285, toward Midland and Odessa, in the heart of the Oil Patch.
At Pecos, a memory four decades old came back: Breaking down in an old Datsun on our way to the Mardi Gras in 1977. The engine “threw a rod” — punching a hole into the engine block, rendering the car useless. We left the car at Jesse Jenkins Shade Tree Automotive and slunk home to Flagstaff in a Greyhound. I never saw the car again; nor did Jesse send me a dime.
We passed the West of the Pecos Museum, another keeper of the tough west. And we were crossing its modern version, mythology mixed with reality: the rough independence of the oil roughneck, working hard manual labor, drilling wells, fitting pipe, keeping the lifeblood of the oil patch flowing. Living in the long rows of trailers on dusty patches of parched land, in the mancamps for ten days on, ten days off.
The landscape continued for hours. We got behind slow trucks, biding our time alongside double yellow lines. Finally, we crossed into New Mexico, our long drive nearly finished. Finally, we arrived at our little home in a quiet Carlsbad neighborhood. Now it’s Tucson, dinner with friends, and home to Los Angeles.
Late Covid American Sojourn: Day 15
Late Covid American Sojourn: Day 17
For all current installments of Late Covid American Sojourn, click here.
