Quitters' Paradise
(Page 2 of 7)
September/October 1996
Robert Draper, Texas Monthly (www.texasmonthly.com)
A number of Terlinguans live in buses, and Collie seems astonished when I tell her I've never been in such a dwelling. The interior of her bus is surprisingly spacious, no more cramped than a dorm room. Why not live here? There's plenty of daylight, a kerosene lantern for night reading, a grill on the patio, fresh creek water she hauls from the nearby mule ranch. Her built-from-scratch desert sanctuary seems like a mirage--'a piece of artwork I can live in,' as she puts it--but it is hard earned and precariously maintained. The riverside heat is savage, and 'what dust you don't pave, you eat,' she observes. The men in her life have come and gone. A friend has seen her show up in town 'in a lonely blue funk, bitter about America.'
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But Collie has her hubcaps--or, as she prefers, 'my mandalas,' referring to the Hindu wheel of life. They appear on walls all over the Terlingua area, brightly colored and meticulously detailed motifs that express the circular core on which, says Collie, all life is based. 'The circle is everywhere--it's the key to everything,' she says.
I pay her $75 for one of the hubcaps. She accepts the money with grace. 'This is the way it always happens,' she says. 'I really sell just by luck. It's magic. Like you coming by today.'
And that is my first but by no means last glimpse of Terlingua's screwball magic.
By midafternoon the Terlingua Trading Company porch bench is occupied by the usual loiterers. Mike Letvenow, a sinewy bongo player with Ray-Ban sunglasses and sandals, is cutting a local fellow's matted hair. Betty Moore, who works at Terlingua-based Far Flung Adventures, smirks at me from underneath her gimme cap. Spider Cooper is nursing a Budweiser and bragging about the concrete gargoyle he crafted this morning. Big Al Robertson, a retired merchant seaman with a prodigious gut, a short black ponytail, and a tufted white beard, tends lovingly to the three dusty canines on the porch. When people call out 'How's it goin', Big Al?' he booms convincingly, 'Always great. Always great.' I'm stuck with the embarrassing memory of having been afraid of Big Al, before I knew about his gentle way with animals and the miniature desert golf course he constructed out by his trailer.
Whole afternoons pass this way in Terlingua. Every couple of minutes a car sputters by; 15 years ago, I'm told, two or three hours would pass without a vehicle in sight. As recently as 1970, not a soul lived in the town. Five years later, there were six residents; by 1980, maybe 50. Today the population estimates run in the 150 to 250 neighborhood. (With all the drifters, an exact count is impossible.) Among the recent signs that the Apocalypse is upon Terlingua: A high school and a bank are being built; fiber optic telephone lines are ready for installation; and one of the gas stations in Study Butte, four miles east, now has an automated-teller machine. Elsewhere in West Texas, the natives are praying for rain, but in Terlingua I've heard people applaud the four-year drought. 'It's keeping the growth at bay,' one of the locals told me with a perfectly straight face.
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