Quitters' Paradise
(Page 5 of 7)
September/October 1996
Robert Draper, Texas Monthly (www.texasmonthly.com)
'We don't have much, but if you stay with us, you'll never go hungry,' says Janelle Brady as she offers me a peanut butter and jelly tortilla. Her offer is particularly moving because she, her husband, Jeff, and their three children live significantly below the poverty line. Their furniture consists largely of wooden slabs set on top of buckets filled with dry food. They drink what little rainwater is left from what they caught during last September's brief downpour. Their do-it-yourself Terlingua Ranch residence, though clean and orderly, has the appearance of a wooden cave. Paul Wiggins calls them homesteaders.
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Jeff dropped out of the army just after the tragic Kent State shooting in 1970 and wandered all the way to Terlingua. Back then, the town was an abandoned pile of rubble. Fourteen years later, he and Janelle became the parents of the first child born in the town since 1943. Jeff has been here longer than almost anyone and freely exercises his right to denounce what has become of the town. 'The people who move here today say they're sick of the corporate world,' he drawls, 'but it's already in their system. They can't live back-to-nature the way we do. They come for the scene and not for the scenery. And now they're turning it into Terlingua Fe.'
The skinny man with the handlebar mustache leans forward in his chair, and his words grow harsher, more sweeping. 'The way this country is now, if you're not a part of yuppie culture, you're either in poverty or you're a criminal. And mark my words, this country will pay.' Darkness seems to leak into the unelectrified, unmechanized home. 'The Unabomber tried to make the country pay,' I begin, but Jeff cuts me off, snapping, 'How many of their agents have murdered innocents as business-as-usual?'
Janelle, who still carries the figure of the ballerina she once was but whose dark and wind-creased face personifies the desert life, chimes in, 'I teach our children that they, the government, are the dangerous ones. They bred the Unabomber. He's like the counter-CIA. What he fought against is still the governing force. And everyone who came to Terlingua is at least subconsciously trying to escape that beast.'
That applied to David Kaczynski, who was content with escape, rather than retaliation; it applied, at least until the first letter bombs in 1978, to the Unabomber. How much bitterness and despair did it take to turn an escapist into a killer? Jeff and Janelle have each other, and they have the Terlingua community, but something else diffuses their hostility toward the outside world, and Jeff volunteers what it is: 'I still have hope,' he says calmly. 'I still have faith that we'll work things out on this planet. Otherwise I wouldn't have brought these kids into the world.'
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