Quitters' Paradise
(Page 3 of 7)
September/October 1996
Robert Draper, Texas Monthly (www.texasmonthly.com)
The town suffers for a perfect villain. Rancher Rex Ivey, who bought the whole town with his son Bill in the '80s, drives around dispensing slabs of meat to dogs from a tray in the trunk of his car. Forty-year-old Bill pays the town's water bill and has thus far resisted the capitalist impulse to transform his empire into a theme park. The trendmongers don't last long here. As one Terlinguan observes dryly, 'We've all had a good laugh at the New Agers who come here with their crystals and leave with a whopping sunburn.' Terlingua's version of a yuppie is Mimi Webb-Miller, the late congressman John Tower's niece and a casting director for prime-time national television commercials, whose newly built faux ruin would not look out of place in Santa Fe. Mimi spent most of the previous decade as legendary Mexican drug lord Pablo Acosta's publicist and confidante. Her Toyota 4-Runner looks a little bit out of place among the town's shabby buses and pickups, but she does one hell of a job plowing it across the Rio Grande into Mexico. 'Mimi,' chuckles one longtime Terlinguan, 'is a master of versatility.' She can stay.
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There's gonna be more humans--it's a reality and I'm resigned to it,' says Paul Wiggins as he sits in the workshop where he makes belts, six miles north of town. 'There's still a kind of halo around Terlingua. I was driving with my two boys the other night, and you could see all these campfires in the distance. I told my sons, `Take note: What you're seeing all around you is pretty unique.''
According to Paul, 'The grace of Terlingua is that in this whole soup no one is dominant.' But particular respect is reserved for a few--among them Collie and Paul, who share a survivor's pride that is refreshingly devoid of sanctimony. Like the hubcap artist, Paul, 48, is an American original, which cuts both ways: His place in a cookie-cutter world is not so easily found. With a sharp chin and nose, skinny legs tucked into black stretch pants, and a voice that seems never far from laughter, he could be a leprechaun exiled to the desert. He grew up in Houston and studied architecture at Rice University, where the '60s counterculture got him only so far. 'The hippies protested against the war and did drugs, neither of which I did very effectively,' he says. 'But the third thing they did, which I did find attractive, was get back to the land.'
First he worked for developers Brown and Root in the architecture and engineering department. In the '70s he brought his skills to the desert and found construction work wherever he could. He was back to the land, all right, and he recalls that 'I wasn't making enough money to start my car. Now with more people moving here, there's more building to be done, more people to buy my belts. I'm not struggling anymore.'
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