It was 2011, near the end of a long drought and shortly after the Lost Pines Fire in Bastrop destroyed my favorite forest.
Fun Fun Fun Fest had just moved to Auditorium Shores in Austin and the lineup looked pretty good. My concert buddy and I turned up with a list of bands we wanted to see.
I was still excited about Occupy Wall Street around that time, even though the movement seemed to be fading. I didn’t participate beyond checking out the “Occupation” at Austin City Hall, but still I wondered, was this about to be “the revolution”?
So we show up at the festival and everyone is wearing bandanas over their faces like a bunch of insurgents. I was like, oh shit. OWS is getting its second wind. Maybe I underestimated them.
Just then a gust of wind caught me in the face and I got a mouthful of dirt. Summer had killed all the grass along Auditorium Shores. Every time the wind blew it was like getting sandblasted in the face.
The dust was so bad my friend’s allergies flared up and he had to bail partway through.
I saw some good shows despite the dust. I was impressed with how far Budos Band had come since I saw them the first time. Love that Ethiopian world funk. Saw Grimes before she dated Elon.
Not bad. Witch house, I guess you’d call it. Public Enemy put on a hell of a show. I waited for them to mention OWS, but they never did. Kool Keith cracked me up. For some reason I got more out of the rappers.
I still kinda wish I’d gone to the Danzig show. My buddy got to see Glenn Danzig throw his jealous fit because Slayer had a bigger stage, the one where he drove off and left his band. That would’ve been entertaining.
No complaints. Instead I saw Public Enemy who were as badass as I hoped they would be. I wondered if they might mention OWS, but it seemed like a pretty white movement… They didn’t mention it.
I kept waiting for a sign that police truncheons and infighting hadn’t killed OWS yet.
Eventually I figured Henry Rollins was a radical guy as well as a great storyteller. If he didn’t bring up OWS, then that was it. No revolution. At least not yet…
Divided cities are an interesting phenomenon. You have cities that grow and merge, and cities that split apart, usually because of politics. They differ in their level of connectedness.
For a while we had East and West Berlin, with a wall in between. Until the 1870s Budapest, Hungary was Buda and Pest, with the Danube River in between.
In America, we have a lot of “twin” cities. In Texas we have the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and Midland-Odessa.
Usually one of the cities in a “twin” relationship is more working class than the other, but when you come down to it, they’re still American. American culture, American social norms.
In The City and the City, China Miéville writes about fictitious cities Besz and Ul Qoma. The cities are physically adjacent – they have many “cross-hatched” regions – but their societies are kept strictly separated. This, despite the fact that they share streets, highways and railways,
By mutual agreement of Besz and Ul Qoma, a mysterious entity called Breach keeps citizens from mingling and interacting, on pain of arrest or worse. And you never know if Breach is watching.
The City and the City is a murder mystery that develops into an interesting study of society and law. A body is found in a crosshatched area. Did the crime occur in Besz or Ul Qoma and did anybody “breach”?
And could there be a mysterious third city flying under the radar?
Citizens of both cities have to be trained from childhood to purposely ignore any person or thing not of their city. Citizens learn to “unsee” (and even unsmell!) anything that doesn’t belong in their city. There are unificationist groups in both cities, but they are treated as radicals and suppressed.
It’s crazy when you think about it, how much the concept of a border depends on belief. There may be a fence or a wall or a line on a map, but the earth doesn’t care. It’s people who make borders happen.
I enjoyed the murder mystery and protagonist Tyador’s detective work, but the conceptual stuff was especially interesting. Enforcing a border via psychology.
Unseeing. Pretending you didn’t see to the point that for practical purposes you didn’t. Is that really possible?
It got me thinking of anti-memes – objects, creatures and phenomena that use forgettability as camouflage. qntm’s novel There Is No Antimemetics Division, takes that concept to ridiculous and extremes, but “anti-memetic” does seem to be a thing. Can you describe the last panhandler you saw while driving? Probably not. I can’t.
I actually forgot an entire city. I was talking about twin cities and totally forgot that El Paso, where I live is exactly such a city, or half-city. The Rio Grande officially separates El Paso from Juarez, as well as U.S. from Mexico. But the real separation is cultural.
Borders are imaginary until you make them solid, but still in the most important ways, they’re imaginary. Before it was part of the U.S., Texas has been territory of Spain, France, Mexico, itself, the Confederacy and the territory of various native American peoples.
Who will claim it in 1,000 years? It won’t be more than a claim. The earth doesn’t care about lines on maps.
Lajitas was a good place to camp back then, when you wanted to do West Texas stuff in the Big Bend area. But back then there weren’t that many people around. There were times when it felt like you had the whole desert to yourself.
I spent a number of weekends there, so the memories get jumbled together, but I miss that era that will never come again. Back in the ’80s when the border was (mostly) chill.
I remember hanging out in front of the old Trading Post at sunset with my uncle and his friends. There were bullet holes in the ouside wall, from Pancho Villa’s men, so they told us.
There was a pool table outside. Not very level, but you could play when the store was closed. I remember somebody put on the Willie Nelson version of “Pancho and Lefty,” which felt like a perfect way to close a day.
The area got to feel like a neighborhood after a while. Distances are relative. On the River Road was “Big Hill.” Just a yellow highway department sign really, but we made it a proper name.
You made sure to see “DOM,” letters scraped into a cliff face during the filming of Fandango, my favorite Kevin Costner movie.
There was a place on the side of the road where you could get out and look down at the Rio Grande, waaaaay down. You might go to La Kiva restaurant in Terlingua – still remember the bones of a “Penisaurus Erectus” embedded in the wall.
There was a village across the river in Mexico where you could pay a few bucks and a man with arms like tree trunks would row you across, where you could eat dinner at Garcia’s. In an adobe building with no running water. The food was delicious.
There was a blonde teenager they called Panchita who spent most of her time on the Mexican side in a little curio shop with no customers, listening to corridos and rancheras on the radio.
When I read Terrence Poppa’s Drug Lord, Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin I wondered if Panchita might’ve been the daughter of an American lady mentioned in the book.
From what I was told, Lajitas and the village were basically connected. Tourists went to dinner in Mexico. Families from the village would cross the river sometimes just for something to do, like watch bootleg American movies before the copyright cops put a stop to it.
Los Tigres Del Norte – El Zorro De Ojinaga (The Fox of Ojinaga). A corrido about the drug kingpin who ruled much of the trade of marijuana and cocaine between Mexico and the US before the advent of the cartels.
The barker in front of the club called out with heavy reverb, “El B29-nine nine nine… Beeg surprise tonight-night-night…”
There was a big surprise all right, but not the one he meant. This was in the ‘80s, while I was on break from college. My first and last visit to Boys Town.
My uncle and a couple of his friends had invited me to go whitewater rafting on the Rio Grande, back when it had water.
After a long drive through West Texas, we arrived at our campsite in Lajitas on a Friday afternoon. We had some time on our hands and decided to go out for dinner, so we headed to the international bridge in Presidio.
We figured we would eat dinner at the train station in OJ, then check out Boys Town.
OJ was our nickname for Ojinaga. Boys Town was what everybody called the red light district. OJ’s red light district wasn’t as famous as the one in Acuña, but it had an anything goes reputation.
Going to Mexico was easy in the 80s. No passport, no fussing about walls. My uncle didn’t want to take his truck across, so we caught a ride from a resident on his way home for the evening.
We tapped the side of his pickup and he signaled for us to hop in the back. Common courtesy back then. He drove us to the checkpoint. From there, we walked to the end of the bridge where we found a taxi waiting.
He drove us to the train station, and agreed to return in an hour and take us to Boys Town. We finished dinner early and thought, why not catch a ride from the taxi parked out front? A taxi is a taxi, right?
We struck up a friendship with Driver Two, who I’ll call Roberto. He didn’t speak English, but my uncle’s friend Mando translated. He had a lot to say about Boys Town and how the girls there all liked white meat.
After a surprisingly long ride, we arrived at a collection of bars and clubs. He dropped us off and agreed to come back in a couple of hours.
The first bar was quiet and nearly empty. We chatted with the lady at the bar, who had a really cool bracelet made from old Pesos.
About half a beer later, a man burst in the door and tapped Mando on the back, hard. Taxi driver Number One had found us and he was pissed! Behind him was a cop with some kind of assault rifle.
“You made me come all the way back to the train station and you weren’t there,” he said in Spanish. “You’re paying my fare!”
Mando relayed the message. No arguments from us. We didn’t even bother to count. We just grabbed whatever bills we had and put them in his hand till he went away.
Lesson learned. Wait for your taxi.
We weren’t ready when Roberto came to get us. Mexico partied late! The strip clubs weren’t even open. He said he’d find us on his next trip out.
We looked for a more happening bar and figured, why not see a strip show? We weren’t there for the brothels. The barker at B29 Cabaret got our attention. What was the big surprise?
It was dark inside. My uncle and his buddies found a table and ordered a round of Dos Equis for themselves and a bottle of Coke for me.
Then an inebriated man at another table motioned for me to come over. Why me and for what? I was nervous as hell, but I went.
All he did was stick out his hand and say, “Americano.” He apparently liked the look of me and wanted to shake hands with an American. That memory really stuck with me.
Several beers and Cokes later, Roberto turned up. We still weren’t ready. He’d made several runs to OJ and back, but we still hadn’t seen a show. They were trying to find out how much beer they could sell us.
We invited Roberto to sit at our table and bought him a beer. He settled in and had several. He’d picked up enough fares for the night and was there to party.
After a while he got up and hollered. “Bring out the girls!” he said in Spanish. “These gringos want to see a show!”
And was there ever a show. Three girls came out and danced on the stage, then came out on the floor, between the tables, including ours. I’m sure I was blushing.
I thought they were cute, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as expected. I could tell they didn’t want to be there. They wouldn’t look you in the eye.
Then Spanish classical music began playing and out came a tall woman in a fancy dress and headdress. She wore a lot of makeup and had long, false eyelashes.
She held up a fan and performed a classical dance, demure, but flirty.
Then the DJ put on something with a beat. She thrusted her pelvis and gave all the drunks the come-on. She lifted her dress and did something with her high-heeled shoe. I saw a lot of tongue.
Then ta da! She tore off her top, took off her wig and took a bow. She was a he. My uncle and his buddies’ mouths were hanging open.
They were older than me and had their beer goggles on. I’d been drinking Cokes all night. I thought he was a woman, but too old for me and wearing too much makeup.
I just thought, huh. I guess that was the “beeg surprise.”
There were no more girls, but the night was far from over. A conjunto band started up. Mexican men wearing oversized cowboy hats and buckles danced with their wives (or girlfriends more likely). Roberto got up and spoke to the band.
We were all exhausted except Roberto. He was into the music. “I’m waiting to hear my song, then we can go,” he said. I was about to fall asleep.
All of a sudden, “Crash!” A man threw a metal chair in the center of the room, cursed in Spanish and stomped out and nearly slammed the door off its hinges.
I thought “Oh shit! Which way is north? Am I gonna have to walk to the border? What if he comes back in with a gun and starts blasting?”
But apparently that was par for the course at the B29. The band played another song and folks went back to their cervezas.
“We can go now,” Roberto said with a grin. He and the band had given us the REAL surprise.
He filled us in on the way back to OJ. The federales has just killed the local druglord in a shootout. The man who threw the chair was the druglord’s brother.
Roberto recognized him and thought it would be great fun to request a corrido about the shootout. Roberto wasn’t afraid of much apparently.
Incidentally, I read Druglord: Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin, by Terrence Poppa in the ‘90s and learned a few things about that night. The druglord who got shot had to be Pablo Acosta, who turns up in the Netflix show Narcos Mexico.
I haven’t found anything about Pablo having a brother, so maybe the guy meant compadre or associate. I don’t know who the band was, but the song was almost certainly “El Zorro de Ojinaga,” made famous by Los Tigres Del Norte.
Not sure what the cab driver’s deal was or why the chair thrower was so pissed. The song makes Acosta a tragic hero as far as I can tell. I reckon he must have had enemies though. Maybe it was just a case of “too soon.”
Ken Roberts, author of The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing, talks about his encounter with a pair of Cedar Chopper kids on Bull Creek, when he realized there were people in Austin with a totally different culture.
I grew up in the Texas Hill Country in the ’70s and I want to talk about the Cedar Choppers. I’ve been reading a really interesting book about their history, The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing, by Ken Roberts.
I’ve already learned some interesting things. Like for instance, you’d think with that drawl and being in the South, that the Cedar Choppers would’ve been all in for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
In fact, they were just as divided as everyone else. Roberts writes about an outfit headed by Dick Preece (1833-1906) that refused to fight for the Confederacy. “For two years they used the hollows and caves of Bull Creek to wage guerilla warfare against the Confederate home guard, calling themselves the Mountain Eagles.”
Not something I expected.
Hallie Mae Preece singing ballads for John and Alan Lomax in 1937. She was part of an old Cedar Chopper family from the Bull Creek area outside of Austin.
I recognize most of the last names in the book. I wasn’t a Cedar Chopper, but in a way they were my people. They were part of the mix, always around. I had some as friends. Grandpa, who was a medic in WWII, used to go into the hills when they had emergencies.
They’re the people who cut the cedar posts that fenced the West. Same people as in Appalachia, but at the end of the migration. They got to the limestone hills of the Edwards Plateau and never wanted to leave.
Until the economy made them.
Alexa Dee Crooks sings Little Blossom, a song that made it to Central Texas through Appalachia, all the way from the British Isles.Read her description under the video. Interesting stuff.
They provided wood and charcoal that powered Austin, Texas as it modernized. They made some of the best whiskey during Prohibition. They got to hunt and fish and live next to clear running streams. The Ashe Juniper kept them afloat during the Great Depression when so many others were going broke.
Gene Landrum – No Beer In Here, Cedar Chopper blues recorded in Boerne, Texas, in 1978.
Now their former territory has been nearly wiped out by urbanization. I get sad every time I drive in the outskirts of Austin and see the exclusive neighborhoods on Lake Travis, pretending to be “Tuscan.”
The people who live there think they have everything, but the Cedar Choppers were richer if you ask me. Eventually that rocky, almost worthless farmland, became “scenic” and worth a fortune and the Cedar Choppers had to move to town. Everyone lost.
An unnamed storyteller relates the tale of a loudmouth who made the unwise decision to pull a knife on a cedar chopper.
A lot of the reason I miss the Cedar Choppers is the very thing some people hated about ’em: how they could and would beat the ever lovin’ shit out of you if you disrespected them. I respect their cussedness.
Because people in town did disrespect them, a lot. And it wasn’t right.
They had the fiercest honor culture you ever heard of. If you were in the know, you didn’t fuck with them. Great friends, terrible enemies.
We had legends about them.
There was the one about the Cedar Chopper driving in the outskirts of Austin with a load of posts who decided to stop and let his kids buy Cokes. When the kids came out and said the man refused to serve them, he went in with a chainsaw and sawed the counter in half and said, “Now sell my kids a Coke.”
How do you not respect that?
They’ve owned the term at this point, but when I was a kid, calling someone a Cedar Chopper would get you in a fight. A lot of townies looked down on them, but if you were smart, you minded your manners.
Granny used to equate forgetting to comb your hair with “going out looking like a Cedar Chopper.” I think that was projection. She grew up a whole lot like a Cedar Chopper on the headwaters of the Guadalupe, and didn’t get treated very well when her family moved to town.
I actually owe my life to one Cedar Chopper neighbor who my mom said looked like she could whip a bear with a stick.
She caught me and my friends trying to crawl into a “cave” in front of her house where the ground had collapsed over the new sewer line. She saw what we were doing and said, “Oh no you ain’t!” and closed up the hole with a pickaxe.
We were so pissed. “Why doesn’t she mind her own business?” But that would have been the end of me. She also annoyed me and my siblings by making us share our candy with her kids. Different ideas about property it seems like. In the hills, squabbles over candy were probably a matter of cousin vs. cousin.
I also remember her park ranger husband shared a watermelon with me once on their front doorstep. I was just some kid on the street. They were different than us, but good people.
It’s true that I’ve been dealing with joint and muscle pains that make it hard to write, but that’s not the real reason I haven’t posted much over the last few weeks.
Truth is, I’ve been constipated. Mentally constipated.
I’ve been trying to express some complicated thoughts that are just not coming together. As a matter of fact I have been writing. I just haven’t been finishing. I get two thirds of the way through a post and realize I’m stuck.
There is a general theme: What to keep, what to discard? I come from the country. I had a connection to the land once. I shared the religion and politics of the people in rural Texas and the broader South. Today, I very much do not.
I’m educated, progressive, “cultured.” I live in the city. I thought I had left it all behind. But something in me doesn’t let me forget. I think of old songs and get a lump in my throat. I dream of the hills, the wildlife, the cattle. The stories I was told. I remember Trivial Pursuit with my favorite preacher. I remember the old farmers and their wives’ casseroles.
How to explain to the people I identify with most today why I still care about those people? People whose politics threaten their very existence? Those who are being targeted by reactionary politics have every right to be angry.
I just can’t help thinking it would be a mistake to let it all go. That culture made me who I am. There has to be something of value. Some wisdom that can be extracted.
I’m still mildly constipated, but deep down I’m still working on the problem. Those thoughts want out. It’ll happen sooner or later.
View from a trail in Franklin Mountains State Park – Blooming yucca, with a nice view of West El Paso in the background.
After scrolling through my rectangle of doom, I had to get out of the house and the backyard would not do.
I’ve been a city dweller for years now, but I grew up in the country. Concrete, asphalt and technology make me weary. Sometimes I just have to get my nature on.
This one I couldn’t identify and Google Lens was no help. If anyone knows, please share.
Greater Earless Lizard
El Paso is built around Franklin Mountains State Park, a beautiful tract of West Texas desert.
I’ve loved the desert ever since my Boy Scout troop took us to Big Bend National Park in 7th grade.
The trail kicked my out of shape ass, but I found some of my favorite desert plants as well as a few I didn’t recognize. Also lost a race to a lizard. I wasn’t much of a challenge.
Featherplume (aka Dalea Formosa)
Southwestern Barrel Cactus in bloom.
Blackfoot Daisies
Sotol – kinda looks like a yucca, but it’s related to the Agave and they make a delicious spirit out of it.
Creosote Bush – I love these plants. When it rains in the desert, the air fills with their perfume. To me it smells like ozone.
Ocotillo – I saw some in the Franklin Mountains, but they weren’t in bloom.
After my landlord died, things changed at the ranch. His widow was nice enough. But she had a business in town and wasn’t around much. The grown daughter began handling the ranch’s affairs.
And it seemed that she didn’t like me much. More attitude than before. I suspected it was because she was friends with the people who ran the competing paper. Anyway, she started to come across like a bit of a bully.
Little indignities reminded me where I stood. Like when the pool man who was on drugs loaded up everything of value he could find and pawned it. Power tools, lawn equipment, electronics – and my bicycle. And I wasn’t allowed to have friends over…
The sheriff’s department found everything, including my bike, at a pawn shop. The owners and the “important renters” in another outbuilding got their valuables back. Guess who didn’t get his bike back? The Sheriff’s Office was “going to get back to me,” then quit returning my calls.
Or when the “important” renters decided my place was quaint and they wanted it. Didn’t matter what I wanted, because they had more money and got their last name from the founder of a Texas county.
The daughter moved into the ranch house and I had to pack up all my stuff and move into the outbuilding where she’d been living.
First night I got eaten up by fleas. Took two bug bombs. She’d left the place dirty and hadn’t moved anything out. That pissed me off. I decided not to clean the place I’d been renting until she cleaned hers, but she never did.
Instead she gossiped about how messy I was till I got wind of it. I called her and said my name was on the lease. If she had a problem she could call me. By then I didn’t care. I was already looking for another place.
I managed to score a garage apartment from former co-worker and it was sayonara rich bitch!
The new pad had its own flaws, but the landlords left me alone. All they asked for was the rent. I liked renting from the upper middle class much better.
The landlord was rich, and not really a rancher – he wanted a ranch you could mow with a riding lawnmower – but he had a few goats. He was a cool guy in his way. He also had terminal prostate cancer.
He was kind of arrogant as you might expect, but he was cool in his way. He and I used to talk a lot. He was a retired engineer who had designed some kind of a bomb that helped us win WWII.
We worked out a deal where I could pay less rent if I cleaned the bugs off his Cessna and lopped off cedar trees. Turned out to be a mistake. It was subtle, but I noticed that he and his family became a little more condescending.
I told them I was getting too busy at the paper to do those chores, so I would pay the full amount again. That seemed to fix the problem. I knew they still thought they were better than me, but they pretended harder.
Once, the landlord took me up in his Cessna. That was pretty cool. We went to a little private airport where he met for coffee with his rich friends. I did not like his friends.
A few of them shook my hand until my landlord said I was his tenant – and the next guy gave me the old yank the hand back “I’m not shaking your dirty hand!” move. I noticed. How I remained a Republican for so long after that is beyond me. What interests did we have in common?
But I still believed in Ronald Reagan and I didn’t know what else to be yet.
I still went to the landlord’s office to pay the rent sometimes. I enjoyed his WWII stories. I didn’t enjoy all his opinions, but he helped win the war, plus he was dying of cancer, so I said nothing.
Anyway, I missed the old man and missed our chats after he was gone. Especially since I’d gotten busy at work and his passing caught me off guard. Cancer doesn’t wait till you have a moment.
There were a few other issues with the place I lived as a young sports reporter aside from the “Monkey Bluto” water pump, but overall I liked the place. I liked where it was. Not too far from town, but far enough.
At first.
There was a lot of traffic in the mornings, but not too too much. This was in a rapidly suburbanizing area, but there was some nature left. I liked the color green.
Then the old family Horizon I was driving blew a head gasket. Totaled. I had to ride my mountain bike to work and back every morning for weeks.
Cars piled up behind me an honked. They all hated me, especially on hills I could barely get up, and they passed inches away from me. Nearly pissed myself more than once.
I was like, people have mercy! I’m an out of shape guy! I hate bikes on the highway too but my car broke! I’m working on it please don’t kill me!
The ride home was more enjoyable, but it also had risks. Speeding down steep hills with the wind in my hair was exhilarating. It almost made up for how much it hurt pedaling uphill.
But one day a white-tailed deer walked out in the road and wouldn’t budge.
It just stood in the road staring at me like “what the hell are you?” I thought God if I hit this deer I could break every bone in my body and it would still be hilarious. The worst.
I tried to think of what to do as I got closer and closer. Then I yelled, “Beep! Beep! I’m a car!” And it jumped. That’s right, I’m a car, bitch!
Family helped me get a Pontiac LeMans that smelled like cigarettes and had a colony of ants in the back seat I could never get rid of.
And I liked it just fine. I was lucky to have it. Anything to not be cursed, honked at and maybe run over, or killed by the local wildlife.
You must be logged in to post a comment.