Quitters' Paradise
(Page 4 of 7)
September/October 1996
Robert Draper, Texas Monthly (www.texasmonthly.com)
By that, he means struggling financially. Paul is no longer married and his sons live elsewhere, but asceticism doesn't suit him. Last year, I'm told, Paul left Terlingua to be with a woman in Houston. It is painful to contemplate the image of this gentle soul trying to hack it in the big city, but Paul wanted his heart to grow and so he gave it his best shot. It wasn't long before he returned. One is better for trying, perhaps--though I'm reminded of the haunting words of another desert veteran: 'You live in Terlingua, and you become unrehabilitatable.'
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Paul needs the community. He needs the Starlight Theatre, the town's dazzling food and beverage oasis. He needs the dances and the campfire parties. But Terlingua has its genuine recluses, like Judy, also known as Suitcase Sally, a middle-aged and deeply tanned woman in sunglasses who rides with her few worldly possessions on the back of a burro and sleeps by the side of the road. She is 'like art,' says Paul with admiration, a desert apparition who says nothing when I greet her one day in Study Butte and nothing when I greet her two days later and 50 miles west on Ranch Road 170. Whatever churns within her, Suitcase Sally keeps utterly to herself.
But the Terlingua desert has seen its disasters, like Emil, the polite but fatally conflicted nuclear physicist who drank himself to death in his trailer. It has seen Howard, who shot at passing aircraft and claimed kinship to Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, and it still sees an individual who once served time for a sex offense and now sits by the roadside claiming he is God. Even in Terlingua, not every misfit can be made to fit.
Ambivalence seems to be the consensus on David Sleeper, the fortyish owner of a ranch less than 10 miles on the other side of Lajitas. He has been a desert presence for two decades, leading spiritual canyoneering expeditions, raising cattle on the other side of the river, and, more recently, breeding mules on his solar-powered ranch. His independent life commands a certain respect from Terlinguans, but a shared history is no guarantee of affection, and somewhere along the way, the locals found themselves withholding their embrace.
It works both ways. 'I've had my hermit's license for years,' David tells me with a quiet grin. He has no use for the Terlingua porch life, and though he strikes me as bright and even charming in a bashful way, it's clear that he feels most comfortable around his 20 mules. 'Give them a lot of respect, and they'll give it back,' he says as he caresses the neck of one of his beloved animals. 'But they won't give a stupid person the time of day.'
There's no contempt in his voice. He has the low-tech life he wants. Before I leave, he tells me that I'm welcome to stay over anytime. It's the fifth or sixth such invitation I've received during my weeklong stay in Terlingua, despite the prevailing sentiment that my article cannot possibly do the town any good. A cynic might regard the Terlinguans' spirit of communal generosity as a practical matter of desert survival. But they damn sure don't have to extend it to outsiders.
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