Park and Parcel
Texas Observer
BY JOE NICK PATOSKI
April 7, 2006
Last summer, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department commissioners contemplated selling off 46,000 acres of Big Bend Ranch State Park, the largest state park in Texas, to John Poindexter, the Houston businessman who owns the nearby Cibolo Creek Ranch luxury resort. The proposed sale, endorsed by TPWD staff, was pretty much business as usual for the department, where selling parkland, transferring state parks to counties and cities, and downgrading state parks to “wildlife management areas” are all in a day’s work. But when news leaked out that a chunk of the 299,000-acre state ranch on the Rio Grande was up for grabs, a sudden public outcry led the parks commissioners to reject the proposal-unanimously.
In this instance, advocates for parks made their voices heard. Yet, the underlying problems with the state’s management of public resources didn’t go away.
Within three months of the almost fire sale at Big Bend Ranch, Texas Parks and Wildlife was so short on cash that 73 jobs were eliminated. The new Government Canyon State Natural Area, 16 miles from downtown San Antonio, is closed on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays and limited to day use only. The Devil’s River State Natural Area is open only four days a week as well. The Resaca de la Palma World Birding Center in Brownsville, scheduled to open in two years, has neither a staff nor a budget. The north shore of Choke Canyon State Park has been closed, along with the park’s swimming pool. The San Jacinto Monument is shuttered due to building and fire code violations and antiquated elevators. After the Parks and Wildlife ferry to Matagorda Island State Park burned in 2003, ferry service to the island was ended and last October the state park was declared a state wildlife management area. The agency could no longer afford to operate the barrier island as a state park.
Other properties were handed off. Lake Houston State Park is now operated by the city of Houston, Lubbock Lakes was transferred to Texas Tech, and Kerrville-Schreiner State Park is now the property of Kerrville. Reimer’s Ranch, the newest showcase park in the Austin area, is operated by the county, not the state. New local parks such as Blue Hole in Wimberley, the new city park in Hondo, and Dick Nichols Park in Austin were funded by matching grants from TPWD to get established. That grant fund was $17 million two years ago. Today, it is $5 million. One agency official went so far as to dis restroom facilities at Goose Island and Galveston Island state parks as “Third World.”
But the surest sign that things aren’t so hunky dory is the more frequent violation of Parks and Wildlife’s unwritten commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of the Legislature.” Normally, Parks & Wildlife personnel have been known as quiet creatures, meek and mild as birders. They’d rather walk on eggshells than complain about funding. Otherwise, vindictive legislators might give them even less. But here was Walt Dabney, the director of state parks for Texas Parks and Wildlife, on a December speaking tour in Cooper, Giddings, and other communities affected by parks cutbacks, explaining to the people of Palestine why the Texas State Railroad was eliminating roundtrip departures from Palestine, costing the town considerable tourist dollars. There was no other option, he insisted. “We have stretched the budget as far as we can by using [prisoner] and community service labor in addition to park camp hosts.”
Joining Dabney in Palestine was Parks and Wildlife Commissioner John Parker, who bluntly told the gathering, “The problem lies with the Texas Legislature.” A month later, speaking at Bastrop State Park to the annual meeting of the nonprofit group Texans for State Parks, Parks and Wildlife Commission Chairman Joseph Fitzsimons and Commissioner Parker offered advice on how to inform legislators of the dire financial straits of the state’s parks. Executive Director Bob Cook used his “At Issue” column in Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine to make clear the agency was low on funds and its infrastructure was failing. With a little investment, he said, parks could deliver great returns.
If only those sentiments echoed across the great divide.
Studies conducted by Texas A&M, Texas Tech, the State of Texas, and the Texas Parks Coalition over the past eight years have all reached the same conclusion: The majority of Texans consider parks an important measure of quality of life and are willing to pay more taxes for more green space. Yet the leaders of Texas act as though they’ve never heard of such studies. And the gap between what the public wants and what its politicians deliver is growing wider.
It’s hard enough managing a parks system under that kind of guidance, especially when the definition of a park includes a 26-mile steam railroad, a mountain tramway, a 100-year-old battleship, and several 19th century mansions and restored frontier forts. But when increased operating expenses eat up $8 million of the budget in four years and then the Lege lops $2 million more from an already anemic $51 million budget, the duct tape begins to loosen.
No one forced Walt Dabney to accept the task of running the parks division of Texas Parks and Wildlife. As a 30-year veteran of the National Park Service, he didn’t need the gig. Lately though, he’s started to wonder about his decision, he admitted recently in his office at Parks and Wildlife headquarters in southeast Austin. “I came here seven years ago, rebuilt the staff, got rid of what little deadwood there was, [and] we’re in our third session of training park superintendents. We’ve got lots of good things going on, but I walked into a system that was totally underfunded. We got to ’06 and we ran out of rope.”
Dabney said the average age of a vehicle in the parks fleet is 10 years old. “We’ve replaced four vehicles out of a fleet of 900 over the last four years,” he said. “We’re lucky to get hand-me-downs from game wardens with only 120,000 miles on them. We’re thrilled, because we’d be walking otherwise.” Watching the budget get pared back puts Dabney in a “no more Mr. Nice Guy” mood. “Texas isn’t taking care of what it’s got, we’re not adding anything new, and we’re going backwards in a state that is growing so fast.” He wasn’t even looking over his shoulder to see who was listening. “I don’t think the rank-and-file senator or representative really knew how bad this was,” he added.
The buck, indeed, stops at the statehouse, where the prevalent attitude toward state parks in Texas seems to be: You want open space? Then work hard, get rich, and get a 10,000-acre spread of your own. Over the past 10 years, the Lege has commissioned several studies as part of its planning for 21st century growth. The findings have been studiously ignored. Former state representative Rob Junell (D-San Angelo), who held the purse strings to the TPWD budget as chair of the House Appropriations Committee, tried to sit on the 2001 study conducted by Dr. David Schmidly and Texas Tech that suggested Texas ought to acquire 1.4 million acres of new state park land and 500,000 acres of local parks inside the Dallas-Houston-San Antonio urban triangle within the next 30 years.
The response from then-TPWD Commission Chair Katharine Armstrong–yes, the now-famous member of the Dick Cheney-Harry Whittington hunting party–was dismissive. “We are not going to launch into a great big acquisition campaign,” Armstrong told the Austin American-Statesman. “If I could wave my magic wand and realize everything in the Texas Tech study, perhaps I would. My goals have to be tempered by reality. We don’t have the resources to do that.” Instead, Parks and Wildlife launched the Land and Water Strategic Plan, calling for four new parks of 5,000 acres each or more inside the urban triangle. Five years into that 10-year plan, the project has yet to be funded.
Some legislators do fight for their local parks because they understand the economic impact of parks on surrounding communities, but no Texas legislator has emerged as a champion of parks across the state. Perhaps lawmakers just haven’t felt enough pressure. Park users may number in the millions, but as a special interest group they could take a few tips from Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse or Mothers Against Drunk Driving. “I’d hardly ever see park advocates at the commissioner meetings until the Big Bend Ranch flap,” Joseph Fitzsimons said. “Hunting and fishing advocates show up in big numbers and let you know where they stand on issues.”
The way Parks and Wildlife is structured contributes to the problem, starting with the nine commissioners who oversee the agency. They may be interested in conservation but most are privileged enough to spend their quality time outdoors on private ranches or farms. Typically there are only one or two commissioners who are strong advocates for parks in the tradition of Mickey Burleson, Nacho Garza, Tim Hixon, Terry Hershey, and Bob Armstrong.
Fitzsimons and Parker have assumed that role on the current commission. But rarely has there been a commissioner appointed specifically to look after parks first, rather than wildlife. It has been that way ever since the State Parks Board and the Texas Game and Fish Commission were merged into Texas Parks and Wildlife in 1963 by Governor John Connally in the name of a streamlined bureaucracy. The current structure is unlikely to change.
The two divisions are on different footing. The wildlife budget comes from Fund Nine, a federal excise tax on guns and gear and from hunting and fishing licenses. The parks budget is tied to a state sales tax on sporting goods. Unlike the Fund Nine monies, which the Lege can’t raid or cap because it is a federal tax, the state tax proceeds for parks are capped by the Legislature at $32 million, considerably less than the $100 million the tax currently generates. The balance goes into general revenue.
Texas ranks 49th in per-capita spending on parks among the 50 states (thank God for Mississippi). Even Arkansas has passed Texas by upgrading its system to meet current and future demands through a quarter-cent sales tax earmarked for parks. Walt Dabney tells a story about friends from up north who used to come and spend the winter in Texas state parks. “Now they just make day trips into Texas because they’re spending the winter staying in Arkansas state parks. Their parks are in better shape than ours are.”
Quality-of-life factors, such as parks and amenities, are second only to an educated work force as the top criteria companies use when evaluating locations, Dabney said. In 2001, when Dallas-Fort Worth was one of three finalists for Boeing’s new corporate headquarters, DFW and Texas offered more tax breaks and incentives than Chicago and Illinois did. But Boeing ended up going to Chicago, which includes 87,000 acres of open space, parks, and forests in Cook County in its quality-of-life portfolio. Instead of increasing funding of parks to make Texas more attractive, Texas leaders responded with cutbacks. Dabney says that’s a dumb way to operate a government, especially if you’re trying to operate it like a business. “Tourism is the second or third component of the Texas economy and parks are the biggest component of the tourism segment,” he said. “If you’re not taking care of that, that’s bad economics.”
“What we’ve been doing is very parochial,” admitted Fitzsimons. “It’s ad hoc. There’s still not a plan to say how are we going to acquire new land, how are we going to tie the demand and the constituency to the service. The fish and wildlife constituency stay drilled into the department on a daily basis, from the squirrel hunters to the catfishermen to the bowhunters. They know their money [from hunting and fishing licenses] is going to the fish and wildlife division. They’re making sure they’re represented. But when you buy a canoe or a kayak or a mountain bike, you don’t have any expectations the sales tax from that is going to a place where you can use it. The sporting goods tax is a joke. It’s essentially GR [general revenue]. The sales of paddle craft have quintupled in the past 10 years. But I don’t have any more kayak trails to offer.”
The state of affairs has become so sorry that several wise men were recruited by Fitzsimons–a San Antonio attorney whose family owns extensive ranchland around Carrizo Springs–for a state parks advisory board. Among them are John Montford, who pushed through the sporting goods sales tax when he was a state senator; Andrew Sansom, the executive director of Parks and Wildlife under Governors Clements, Richards, Bush, and briefly, Perry; and George Bristol, a longtime fundraiser and advisor to the former Senator Lloyd Bentsen, who also sits on the board of the Texas Retailers Association and heads the Texas Parks Coalition. Bristol is pushing to lift the cap on the sporting goods sales tax and protect it from future raids and freezes. “If this Legislature, individually and collectively, says they believe in user taxes and user fees, and does not honor those user fees–I don’t care if it’s toll roads, parks, or what–then they got a real problem of honesty with the people of Texas,” Bristol said.
Bristol also said he was encouraged hearing Dabney and Fitzsimons speaking out. “Walter and Joseph and their predecessors get very goosy. They don’t want to talk money. They can say they need things but they wouldn’t touch money on a bet because they are fearful it looks like aggrandizement and empire-building, and they know when they go to the Legislature they’re going to get their asses handed to them. My advice to them is, "Boys, you’ve already had your ass handed to you. You might as well get up there and fight back."
Of all the returning wise men, none casts the long shadow that Bob Armstrong does. The former legislator, General Land commissioner, Parks and Wildlife commissioner, environmental advisor to Ann Richards, and one time assistant secretary of the interior is the only conservationist to have a queso dip named after him at Matt’s El Rancho restaurant in Austin. Armstrong should be resting on his laurels for swinging the deal that made the Anderson Ranch into Big Bend Ranch State Park. “I had thought after doing my duty to get Big Bend Ranch made a park for Texas, I’d go home and do something else,” he said. But he could no longer ignore the current parks crisis. “I’m back to look out for the ranch.”
It’s time, Armstrong said, that Texas suck it up and look forward. “We’ve got precious few parks and we’re going to grow immeasurably over the next 20 years,” he said. At the same time, he pointed out, “The average parks user isn’t on the commission, but there ought to be somebody there looking out for parks.”
Armstrong said he didn’t take umbrage at the commissioners for considering the sale of a piece of the Big Bend Ranch. He knew the circumstances too well. “When you’re out of money, you begin to do strange things,” Armstrong chuckled. “This is an example of people that are struggling to get what they want from the staff and here was a chance that maybe they could sell off a little bit of land and do some good things on the other parts.”
But he wasn’t buying that rationale either. “I sent a letter to the commissioners [after the Big Bend Ranch dust-up]. I said something like this should be considered not for what your problem is, but from what generations in the future are going to be saddled with. Your decision should be based on generations from now. This is such a small part of the budget–0.0007 percent–that to not upgrade our parks is just plain bad business. I don’t want there to be any kind of cap on the sporting goods tax. Parks should get the money it was intended to get so it can do things like repair the Matagorda Island ferry.”
Losing Boeing to Chicago should have been a wakeup call. The state should have gone on a green-space binge. Money alone won’t seal the deal. Compared to the Trans Texas Corridor, the Texas Water Plan, and all the multibillion-dollar big-ticket items being dreamed up to plan for future growth, a Texas 2050 park plan costs chump change, with guaranteed returns. If the current $35 million annual budget throws off $1.2 billion to local economies, as the number crunchers claim, think what a $500 million upgrade would throw off.
The solutions are simple. Raise the cap on the sporting goods tax from $35 million to $85 million, as Rep. Harvey Hilderbran (R-Kerrville) has proposed. Better yet, eliminate the cap on the sporting goods tax altogether, as Armstrong suggests. Make it an honest user tax. Last year’s take of more than $100 million is more than enough to operate the parks division and to launch a program to buy more parkland for future generations. And the governor would do well to occasionally appoint a member to the Parks and Wildlife Commission who is a parks-first advocate. If nothing else, that would bring a different point of view to the table.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Commissioner Joseph Fitzsimons dared to dream, wondering aloud if instead of selling off part of the biggest park in the state system, “why can’t we have a deal with John Poindexter in reverse–give him and his Cibolo Creek guests [direct] access, like we give that B&B by the Hill Country State Natural Area? Is it too crazy to say why shouldn’t we have it all?” Fitzsimons was right. We should have it all. But he knew as well as anyone that it was too crazy to take seriously. Bob Armstrong was reminded of that when he said, “People tell me I’m a communist when I talk about the need for Texans to have open space.”
“The people of Texas have to decide what they want for a park system,” Walt Dabney said. Visualize the people telling their legislators. Visualize Rick Perry using parks as part of his campaign, as he did back when he ran for lieutenant governor and used the Franklin Mountains State Park as a backdrop. Visualize any statewide candidate weaving a statewide parks plan into his or her stump speech. If that ever happened, Texas’s wide open spaces might be more a reality than a myth to the 25 million Texans who don’t own a ranch or a farm.
Keeping Up With Jones
Keeping Up With Jones
AARP The Magazine
BY JOE NICK PATOSKI
July & August 2006
Fluffy, hot biscuits, fresh out of the oven and smothered with redeye gravy, with a thick slab of smoked ham on the side, are a great start to any day. But the biscuits and gravy I am eyeing are hardly standard fare. They are the signature menu item at the Loveless Cafe in Nashville, the ultimate comfort food in my ultimate comfort city. After 30 years of visiting Nashville, I have finally arrived at the home of the gods–a white clapboard cafe attached to what once was a motel way out on the edge of town by the Natchez Trace. I am on the verge of understanding just why an ideal day in Music City USA begins here.
Yet as pleasing to the eye and mouthwatering as the biscuits and redeye gravy may be, I am not able to clean my plate. I seem to have developed a mild case of the nerves. Chalk up my condition to the anticipation of meeting my tour guide. If you’re going to see Nashville right, there is no better way to experience it than with George Jones, the King of Country Music, leading the way.
George Jones has spent most of his adult life in recording studios around Nashville singing classic cheatin’ songs in a powerful wail, from between clenched teeth, that would give Pavarotti pause. His record–or records–speaks volumes: 166 hit singles, from “White Lightning,” “Golden Ring,” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today” to “(We’re Not) The Jet Set,” “High Tech Redneck,” and “I Don’t Need Your Rockin’ Chair.” Enshrined in the Country Music Hall of Fame, he is one of a select few country stars to receive the National Medal of Arts.
As soon as I spy him driving into the Loveless parking lot behind the wheel of a Ford van with his wife, Nancy, riding shotgun and his two most trusted backup singers and longtime pals, Sheri Copeland and Barry Smith, in back, I apologize to the waitress for the half-finished plate. “George Jones just ruined my appetite,” I tell her, smiling sweetly.
The NO SHOW personalized license plate on the van is a joking reference to his proclivity for missing gigs back when he was just as famous for his wild ways as he was for his music. He’s able to laugh at that reputation now. Newfound sobriety and a renewed work ethic following a near-fatal car accident–while driving drunk and talking on a cell phone in 1999–have energized him. These days he doesn’t just show up; he plays for half an hour longer.
At 74, The Possum, as he is known, could easily be resting on his laurels and letting his catalog, including his latest album, George Jones: Hits I Missed…And One I Didn’t, do the talking. Instead, he’s on the road every weekend (nearly 100 shows last year) and spends much of his downtime as he did the previous day, laying down tracks in the studio with young gun Blake Shelton and old-school honky-tonker John Anderson, as well as working on a collaborative venture with his fellow living legend Merle Haggard. And he still manages to squeeze in time to show off the real-deal version of his hometown to a visitor who thinks he’s seen it all. Within minutes of shaking hands, George has me confessing to a limited familiarity with Nashville.
Rise and Shine
“I don’t know all the history of this place,” George says, smiling shyly, as he surveys the Loveless lobby within arm’s reach of the autographed glossy photo of George and Nancy on the wall of country music stars behind the register. That’s understandable, because the Loveless opened its doors in 1951, four years before George hit town as a wet-behind-the-ears kid from the Big Thicket of southeast Texas by way of Beaumont. But he does know the Loveless is his kind of place. “We used to come out here all the time with different people back in the ’60s, for the biscuits, the ham, for a little bit of everything,” he says, patting his ample belly–food is one of the renewed pleasures following his renouncement of vices. “It’s just a good homey atmosphere, real country.”
Many of his fellow diners at the Loveless happen to be huge George Jones fans.
So it shouldn’t be too surprising that many of his fellow diners happen to be huge George Jones fans. Before he and Nancy can finish their breakfast, fans are lined up with pen and paper in hand for an autograph. George obliges each and every one. One older man wearing a gimme cap wants to talk literature when he recognizes the familiar face.
“Hey there!” he shouts, grinning excitedly. “You don’t know me, but I just read your book "I Lived to Tell It All". You were the wildest, man!”
George manages a sheepish chuckle. “I ain’t supposed to be here, I tell you that.”
“I related to a lot of that,” the fan tells him. “I’m a survivor, too.” Gimme Cap bought the autobiography because he wanted to get to know George before he saw him for the first time at a recent concert at the Ryman Auditorium. The fan couldn’t have picked a better place. No one knows that better than George. The Mother Church of Country Music just so happens to be the next stop on his Nashville tour itinerary.
Tapping Toes and Tapping Roots
The Ryman opened in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle and hosted the Grand Ole Opry during its glory years, from 1943 until 1974, when the Opry moved to the suburbs. The venerable red-brick structure fell into disuse for almost 20 years before it was revived as Nashville’s finest all-purpose concert venue, even hosting the Grand Ole Opry again every now and then. “The Ryman is second only to the Mormon Tabernacle in natural acoustics,” Nancy Jones points out.
Her husband is beaming at the building when we pull into the parking lot. “It’s my favorite place to play,” George says. He’s considerably more relaxed now than he was way back when he was riding his first hit, “Why Baby Why,” and he was very, very scared.
“George Morgan and Little Jimmy Dickens were standing off to the side, talking to me,” he explains, walking into the sacred space after signing an autograph for a little girl in a wheelchair at the entrance. He remembers becoming especially nervous when the stagehands informed him he couldn’t play guitar because he wasn’t a member of the local musicians’ union. “Hell, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my hands,” he recalls. “I was already shaking. When they told me that, I like to had a heart attack. Ernest Tubb was on stage singing, and right when he finished his song, they called me, and I said, ‘I just can’t go out there. I don’t have anything to do with my hands.’ As bad as I wanted to be on the Opry for the first time, I didn’t want to if I had to go out there like that. Dickens or Morgan–one of ’em, I can’t remember which–throwed their guitar over my shoulder and said, ‘We’ll take responsibility. You go ahead.’ So I did. It worked out.”
It sure did.
Deep in the Heart of Nashville
In a blink, George ducks out a side door of the Ryman, walks down a set of stairs, and crosses the alley into the rear entrance of an establishment identified as Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. It is a route he’s taken many times, along with a number of country stars, back in the days when the Opry was in residence at the Ryman.
“We used to slide through the back door, have a beer or something,” George mentions as he walks briskly through the darkened bar, prompting heads to turn and cries of “George!” to erupt. This time, though, he’s just passing through, heading straight for the front door and Broadway, Nashville’s main drag. He’s not much on honky-tonks these days, and if he’s going to drink, it will be George Jones’s White Lightning bottled water, thank you very much.
On Broadway he surveys the streetscape like a proprietor. Tootsie’s is only one of several honky-tonks on the block, along with Robert’s Western World, the Bluegrass Inn, Second Fiddle, and Nashville Crossroads. These bars with stages are the most reliable venues for visitors to hear real live country music in its element. The storied Ernest Tubb Record Shop and some bar-bars are also on the street. Hatch Show Print, whose vintage posters are my favorite Nashville souvenirs, is one block down. The Nashville Arena and the Country Music Hall of Fame are one block up. It takes less than a minute for a crowd to materialize once George hits the pavement, smiling a smile that telegraphs he made his peace with celebrity long ago.
Pickin’ ‘n’ Grinnin’
George beelines down the block, ducking into a storefront on the corner. The sign above the entrance reads Gruhn Guitars. “Gruhn is the place in Nashville for guitars,” George says as he gazes around twelve thousand square feet of vintage guitars like a kid in a candy shop. Within seconds, he plops on a stool, picks up an instrument, and commences to make sweet harmonies with his backup singers, Sheri Copeland and Barry Smith, running through “How Beautiful Heaven Must Be,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Keep on the Sunny Side,” and “I’ll Fly Away,” his voice hitting the notes as no one else can. Each pause between songs is met by a rousing round of applause from the growing audience that has followed him into the store. He is clearly in his element. When he stumbles on the lyrics of one of his own songs, “We’re Gonna Hold On,” he jokes to the gathering, “I didn’t write the song by myself. The other guy knows the rest of it.”
George wraps up the miniconcert after glancing at his watch. It’s time to go. There’s more to see.
Stars Crossed Paths
“Shooter!”
As George sneaks out the back entrance of Gruhn Guitars to his waiting van (he knows all the hidey-holes in Nashville), he is surprised by Shooter Jennings and a camera crew making a pilot for a reality show starring Jennings for the CMT network. George has known the son of the late Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter since Shooter was a baby (“He was raised pretty good by his mama, I tell you”) and delivered a resounding endorsement at the beginning of Jennings’s debut album.
The two musicians hug, smile, and catch up while another crowd gathers, joined by a Gray Line tour bus that screeches to a halt when the driver notices the sidewalk rendezvous. George and Shooter revert to a dialect familiar to those in the “bidness.”
“How long you gonna be in town?”
“We play the Gaylord Friday.”
“Friday? I have to go to work myself Thursday. I’ll be back in Sunday; maybe you can come see us. I’d love to take y’all out. Give me a call. You got my number?”
“Yeah, I got your number. I was nervous to call because everyone else is [calling].”
“What are you nervous about? You got you a hit going. Well, we’ll catch you later. See you Sunday, I hope.”
As Shooter and entourage depart, more fans move in for autographs, including a bearded fan with a dog.
“Hey, Buddy, say hi to George Jones!” the fan with the canine says.
Judging from how its tail is wagging, the shepherd’s a huge George Jones fan, too.
“Now I know what ol’ Hank Williams went through,” George murmurs as he struggles up the stairs into the side entrance of the Ryman and heads back to the dressing room to gather his gear. He’s peopled out and clearly looking forward to our last stop–his buddy, Manuel the tailor, whose shop near Music Row is one destination few out-of-towners are aware of.
If they only knew.
Dressed to Thrill
Manuel Cuevas is hardly just any tailor. He’s the Picasso of Nashville clothiers, whose flamboyant, sparkly stage creations have adorned the figures of Dwight Yoakam, Trisha Yearwood, Johnny Cash, the Rolling Stones, Linda Ronstadt, and Bob Dylan, among others. Two of Elvis’s white rhinestone jumpsuits were Manuel originals.
Manuel Cuevas is the Picasso of Nashville clothiers. Two of Elvis’s white rhinestone jumpsuits were Manuel originals.
Manuel and George have known each other since before either was a Nashville fixture, back when Manuel was working in Los Angeles for his father-in-law, Nudie Cohn. Cohn was creator of the Nudie suit (think Liberace decked in western wear), once a staple of every country star’s wardrobe. When he moved to Nashville in 1989, Manuel became the new Nudie, the gaudy rhinestone-and-spangle standard for every aspiring country music star.
“Manuel’s the only one to get it right the way we like it. He knows my taste. I’ll give him an idea–usually it’s just a little embroidery or something, or a rope on the sleeve–and he runs with it. It doesn’t take but a week or ten days to get Manuel to make me something,” George says as he emerges from the dressing room clad in a stylish denim outfit.
“Looks good,” he opines while Manuel fusses with the waist.
“I never fit him, ever. Nothing ever fits. I haven’t made him a good suit in 45 years,” the cherubic Manuel gripes, elbowing George as he measures him. Theirs is a relationship so familiar that every conversation is peppered with insults. “He has me make five pair of jeans every week. You know what that is? That’s a nightmare!”
George gives as good as he gets. “You know me, I’ll never put no pressure on you. This jacket don’t fit right. Nothing fits right. How come you never get anything right?”
“Everything is the wrong thing, every day is the wrong day,” mocks Manuel. “When you start complaining, that’s a sign it’s good.”
While they’re joshing, Nancy and Sheri and Barry are working the racks, and before you know it, they’re looking like stars, too, as they emerge from the dressing room, decked out in jackets that start at around $2,500.
Taking Stock
In the midst of the couture chaos, George pauses and reflects upon the observation that he seems to be enjoying himself. “Well, I am,” he says. “I’ve had another chance on life. When I quit smoking, I started gaining weight, and it’s all in my belly,” he explains, patting it. “I can hit high notes now I couldn’t hit when I was 20.”
Then, no more drinking, no more doping?
“Nooo. I wouldn’t give you a dime for a toddy or a beer,” he says with a sense of finality. “And I quit on my own, with the help of the Good Lord and my wife. I drank for over 50 years. I did it all. But I had her there helping me. She didn’t give up on me. She stayed by my side when I was really needing her. It paid off for both of us.”
After one final pose–in which he strikes an “It’s Not Unusual” profile after Manuel says “Tom Jones” –George Jones calls it a day and heads for the van one last time, walking out arm in arm with Nancy. He needs the downtime because there’s more music to be made tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that, until he can’t. That’s George Jones’s idea of being a senior. Slowing down is okay. Retirement is out of the question. And from all appearances, he’s liking it just fine.
The Boys with the Bands
The Boys with the Bands
The Texas Observer
BY JOE NICK PATOSKI
March 10, 2006
For the past 19 winters, Roland Swenson, Nick Barbaro, and Louis Black have spent their Friday afternoons plotting and planning South By Southwest, a cool idea they came up with based on getting a bunch of bands and music people together. That cool idea has grown into the biggest music convention in the world, a film festival, and an interactive conference. For two weeks every March, Austin becomes the center of the Alternative universe, with 10,000 registered participants and another 10,000 with similar bents hanging around. In observance of SXSW’s 20th year, the three founders talked about what it looks like from the inside looking out after all these years. Excerpts follow:
Texas Observer: Do people ever come up and ask What is South by Southwest?
Nick Barbaro: I can’t remember the last time that happened.
Swenson: When I was in Sydney [Australia] we went to the Aquarium and the girl who did one of those green screen things where they put you on a photo–we were on a boat with a shark attacking us–she saw my jacket and she knew what SXSW was. She went on at length about how excited she was.
Black: I’ll be at dinner with my sister in California and I’m talking about it and the waitress will come over and start talking about her South By experience.
Swenson: And then they bring their CD.
Barbaro: I can’t really remember the last time that happened to me. What I would tell them is, it’s a music festival and something like 1,400 bands play in clubs all around Austin and music business people come and talk music business.
Black: …and a film festival and interactive conference.
Barbaro: There’s that, too.
TO: Why did you start this?
Swenson: There was already some momentum to do something like this. The New Music Seminar guys [in New York, agreed to put on a satellite festival in Austin before backing out] At that point, I went and told Nick and Louis, this could be big.
TO: Why do it now?
Black: It’s the most fun I have all year.
Barbaro: How could we stop? I’m not sure how that would work.
Swenson: I still have a kid to put through college.
TO: How has it changed?
Black: There were 200 bands the first year, and 1,400 registrants. There will be 1,400 bands this year, and 10,000 registrants. No movies were screened the first year because there wasn’t a film festival. This year there are 90 movies. No bloggers attended the first year. We’ll probably have 1,000 this year.
Barbaro: There wasn’t even an Internet the first year.
Swenson: We didn’t have a fax machine or desktop publishing or cellphones. Reagan was president…
TO: Is there a secret to growing a business like this?
Black: Tenacity. We all really believe in this. It’s the perfect model for the post-record company world of music where the biggest labels are only interested in a very limited number of acts, so it really works for musicians.
Swenson: I think it has more to do with Austin and the fact that when people traveled here from New York or Los Angeles, suddenly they didn’t have their secretaries with them and suddenly they could talk to people, and they liked it.
Black: At Sundance, they’re not on the streets that much. They’re at private parties and private houses. You come to Austin during SXSW and those people are on the street. Two years ago, I saw five of the top film distributors walking out of the convention center to go eat barbecue. These guys had come up together, but that was probably the first time they relaxed and enjoyed each other in a long time. They certainly didn’t do it at Sundance. It’s Austin, Austin, Austin.
Swenson: This was designed for people who don’t live in New York, LA or Nashville. That’s who we initially targeted. Because it worked, people from those cities started coming too.
TO: Now the town is full of people from New York, LA, and Nashville.
Swenson: And London and Tokyo and Sydney…
Barbaro: And Houston and Kansas City and weird places. I first thought this was going to be a success when we heard a group of bookers and managers from Houston had gotten together for the first time here. They had never met each other in Houston.
TO: Any particular memories about that first year?
Black: The first morning Roland called me at home. He woke me up and said, “It’s gonna happen today.” I said, “What?” He said, “It’s today, Louis.” I said, “Yes, it is,” and I went back to sleep.
Swenson: I was very, very afraid.
Barbaro: Stubbs [the late barbecue maestro CB Stubblefield] turned up at the softball game with a trailer load of barbecue meat and no serving utensils. So he served meals to everyone at the tournament with his hands-beans, everything. He had big hands.
TO: What was the worst part of the first year?
Swenson: For me, it was this fear that okay, we’ve convinced all these people to travel here for this thing and what if they get here and they’re like, “Is this all? You got me here for this?” So, when they all got here and seemed to be having a good time, that was a tremendous relief. I had been having dreams where I’d be at the event and people would be going, “There he is! He’s the one! Get him!”
Barbaro: We really did go into it not knowing whether people would show up and whether they would have interests here when they did. So, when both of those things happened, it was all good.
Black: It was a period of time when I was psychotically depressed anyway, so it was the third or fourth year when I suddenly realized people loved this event, and they loved coming here.
TO: What was the best part about last year?
Swenson: You know, we don’t get to go to SXSW.
Black: I love watching the people who come. That’s mostly what we get to do. I just watch the faces of the people-the Scandinavians who look like they’ve died and gone to heaven, or the Japanese who are just trying to figure it out.
TO: Who are your favorite foreigners?
Black: The Uzbeks.
Swenson: We’re more famous in England than we are in the States.
TO: What are the biggest customer complaints?
Black: It’s really a drag when you’re dealing with a lot of people who want to get into something and you can’t let ’em all in it. I get fascist about it which makes it worse, but it really is a drag. You want to get everybody in. That’s why you’re doing this. The idea is not exclusion. We are not New York doormen. They wrote negative criticism about me one year on a forum about how I shouldn’t be allowed to work doors.
Swenson: There were always times when you couldn’t get in somewhere. It’s the nature of the beast. If we’re gonna do shows in these relatively small clubs and we’re gonna put out acts people want to see, then they’re gonna fill up, we can’t get around that. So what we try to do is just keep having lots and lots of shows so there’s always some place you can get in. The people who have the most fun are the ones who, if they go somewhere and can’t get in, go somewhere else. It’s the ones who stand in line for an hour and a half that get really mad [as JNP and family did last year waiting to see the Kaiser Chiefs and getting in too late]. We’ve gotten better anticipating and managing it, matching up the artist with the right size venue when we can. Frequently, it’s the artists that demand to play a place that’s too small because they want a line down the street, they want a sea out front.
Black: Sometimes they want to play a small room just because they figure it’s South By Southwest and they feel like playing a small room, and they love the line down the street. That’s part of what you’re here for, to get that buzz going.
Black: The thing most misunderstood about SXSW is that the emphasis is always on the event working as well as it can for as many people as it can. It’s never on making money. I don’t expect anybody to believe it, but it’s one of the things that makes it a pleasure.
Barbaro: I’ve got this down to where I don’t really do much during the event. I have hours where I have to sit around and wait for things to go wrong, but they don’t. Nothing ever goes wrong.
Black: You’re saying that chain mail vest you made is nothing?
Barbaro: I did have time to make a chain mail vest two years ago during the event. I go to see at least a couple movies each year and music. If the period leading up to the event were more restful then I’d feel more, more rested for going to events during it, but the lead up period is actually more work and more stressful than during the event.
TO: What do we have to look forward to this year?
Black: All the people who love music are coming back again; it’s no longer the Internet millionaires. One of the weird things that we’ve come to realize is that SXSW Interactive is a hot event. It’s the only one where I go online to read about what’s going on. I know a lot of bloggers come, a lot of next generation media people who aren’t interested in money, but in ideas.
Swenson: We’re beyond podcasting now into I don’t know what. One of the reasons we added the film and the interactive events was that entertainment is coming from those sources. The new music business is less about companies and more about artists. It’s one of the reasons we’ve grown. We’ve always had a broad base of participation. It wasn’t just about major labels or just about indie labels or just about artists or bookers or whatever. Now, artists have so many more options than they did when we first started.
Black: The evolution of technology is allowing new and different kinds of films to be made. You can make films cheaper. So people making films are younger. We always felt that docs and narratives are equal. I don’t think that we were even conscious about how different that was. I think that it was our organic training, treating docs as seriously as we did narratives. One of the real pleasures of this has been that most of the things we did because we thought they were the right things to do have turned out to be good for business.
TO: You still like each other?
Swenson: We fought a lot back in our early days. But it was over stuff that we thought was important. It was never about our personalities. Well, maybe, I don’t know.
Black: It’s been the dynamic of a marriage but there’s no sex. It took us a while.
Barbaro: It took 10 years for print media to win the softball tournament.
TO: Are you surprised how it’s turned out?
Swenson: People always say I bet you never thought it would be this big, but I did. I guess that doesn’t sound very modest. I always knew the idea was good. And it’s not even my idea. But once we got the first one under our belt, we said, okay, we got this down. We know now that we just can’t take anything for granted. I don’t take it for granted that there will be SXSW after this year. It doesn’t necessarily have to happen.
Black: I never dreamed that it could become what it is. I don’t think Nick did. But Roland did. He got what it was and how it was going to work. He always kept seeing ahead. We [Nick and I] were catching up. Roland was always the one who knew where we needed to go next.
TO: That’s the tricky part with growing a concept. You don’t usually find the same people in place this far down the line, especially considering how it has grown.
Swenson: We all complement each other. I had been involved in a lot of stuff that was good or cool, but that didn’t work out. Nick and Louis taught me how to be a businessman in the creative world, which is not easy. They had done it. They launched the Chronicle. They knew what you had to do to make that work, how to balance the integrity with making it financially feasible, which you have to do in any kind of creative endeavor.
Black: We all learn from each other. Sometimes we did it gracefully and sometimes not gracefully. But the bottom line is, we did it, even when were pissed at each other. Nick was the inspiration, the leader, I think we’re more equal now, but for the longest time and in many ways, he’s been the most anonymous of all. Nick taught Roland and I about money and the right way to do things, which was Nick’s way.
Swenson: It still is.
Barbaro: It’s unusual to see the same management in place after something has been going for 20 years. The tendency is to sell out to a conglomerate. But we can’t think of anything we’d rather be doing. There’s nowhere else to go, why sell out?
TO: When do you start work on ’07?
Black: We started two years ago.
Swenson: It takes about six weeks to mop up afterwards, pay all the bills, settle the lawsuits, then we spend a lot of time talking about what happened and what we want to do different or new. In June we start putting together the first brochures and then we start taking bands and films in August.
TO: This all sounds very interesting, but what I really want to know is, Is it too late to get a CD to you?
Joe Nick Patoski used to discuss the music business with Roland Swenson in the parking lot of Raul’s Club when both managed new wave bands in the late 1970s. He later shared office space with Nick Barbaro and Louis Black and the Austin Chronicle. He has attended every year of South By Southwest and does the play-by-play with Kevin Connor of the championship game of the softball tournament.
Back in Black
Back in Black
Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine
BY JOE NICK PATOSKI
February 2006
With or without a stocking program, the black bear is returning to East Texas.
It’s usually little more than a footprint in moist soil or a dark blur darting across a dense green forest, leaves rustling and branches cracking in its wake. Some sightings are more specific: a mammal as big as a person, only heavier, that can stand up like a human and run like a deer. A few reports in recent years are quite detailed, like the one in February 2005, on Interstate 10, one-fourth of a mile west of the official Texas welcome center in Orange, when traffic screeched to a halt as a bear rambled around the highway median. Or the regular sightings at an RV park on the Louisiana side of Toledo Bend Reservoir. None should be too surprising — since the subject at hand pays less attention to state lines than people do.
All of them bear witness, as it were, to the obvious:
Black bear are coming back to East Texas.
“What we’re seeing here is a regional bear expansion,” Nathan Garner declares matter-of-factly. An affable bear of a fellow (more black bear than grizzly, actually), Garner is the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s regional wildlife director for East Texas, overseeing a staff of 60 covering 57 counties. He also knows a few things about bears. His interest began as a child growing up in the Houston area and continued as a college student pursuing a biology degree at the University of Houston, then at the University of Montana, where he worked on a border grizzly project under Charles (Mr. Bear) Jonkel. His graduate studies at Virginia Tech included tracking 47 black bears around the Appalachian Mountains.
The black bear is afraid. By nature, they’re less aggressive because they didn’t have to be aggressive to survive as a species. They survived by retreating or climbing.
He can tell you that black bear can actually be brown, red or even blond, stand 5 to 6 feet tall and weigh up to 400 pounds, that they’ll eat anything and that they are not aggressive towards humans. “Grizzlies will charge when trapped,” Garner says. “The black bear is afraid.” Unless you get between a mother and her cubs, that is. Black bear coexist with deer. “By nature, they’re less aggressive because they didn’t have to be aggressive to survive as a species. They survived by retreating or climbing.”
Garner will also tell you that Bud Bracken of Honey Island had 305 bear hides when he stopped hunting and that, while the last native Ursus americanus in the state may have been shot in Polk County almost 50 years ago, 47 verified sightings throughout the Pineywoods, the Big Thicket and along the Sabine River since 1977, as well as hundreds more anecdotal sightings, have been recorded since.
To prove how ripe East Texas is for the American black bear (Ursus americanus americanus) and its subspecies cousin, Ursus americanus luteolus, the Louisiana black bear that historically roamed East Texas, Garner takes me on a tour of a couple hundred miles’ worth of bear habitat in the central and southern Pineywoods.
Even as black bear were being hunted out of Texas, Garner explains, recovery programs in adjacent states were underway. Beginning in 1958, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission moved 254 bears into the Ouachita and Ozark mountains from Minnesota and the Canadian province of Manitoba, the most successful restoration of a large carnivore population in the U.S. One hundred sixty-one black bear from Minnesota were moved into Louisiana between 1964 and 1967 to bolster the few hundred Louisiana black bear remaining. The ban on hunting bear in Texas in 1987, and regionally in 1992, when the Louisiana black bear was listed as threatened by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service under the Endangered Species Act, further bolstered bear numbers to the point of expanding their range as close as a few miles north of the Red River in McCurtain County in southeast Oklahoma and along the Sulphur and Sabine rivers. A permanent black bear population is just a matter of time.
The bigger question is, Will Texans greet the bears with open arms or loaded ones?
Garner is responsible for coming up with the answer. He’s invested four years heading the committee that recently completed the East Texas Black Bear Conservation and Management Plan, 2005 – 2015. Now he’s spearheading the ETBB task force and still keeping options open for the most controversial element of the plan — relocating 30 females with cubs to sites in East Texas under TPWD oversight.
The migration of black bears into a former habitat is viewed as a positive indicator for the ecosystem by black bear advocates, who see long-term benefits in increased eco-tourism.
As a biologist, Garner sees the obvious benefits in bringing back wildlife to its former native habitat. But as an administrator, he understands too well the wariness some humans have warming up to the idea. “How dare you put my child at risk?” one mother challenged him at a public meeting. For that reason, Garner makes clear that the relocation idea will move forward “only if there is strong support.” If public sentiment stands against TPWD helping to establish colonies, the project won’t happen.
But in one sense it doesn’t matter, because black bear are coming anyway.
Surprisingly, public reaction has been largely positive. Pollsters from Michigan State University surveyed 3,000 Texas households and 485 people who showed up at 10 town meetings that TPWD conducted around East Texas. The results were illuminating. The majority of those attending the public meetings supported the return of black bear to East Texas, and 70 percent of the written comments by mail were positive. The largest turnout was the 108 people who showed up in Kountze, in the heart of the Big Thicket. Meetings in Texarkana and Beaumont attracted the fewest. The greatest opposition was voiced by residents living near the Big Thicket preserves. Garner is not satisfied. “I want 75 percent,” he says.
A significant element of the East Texas bear plan is the mix of public and private stakeholders. Representatives from the Big Thicket Association, a landowners group from Newton County, the Texas Department of Transportation, Temple-Inland Corporation, the East Texas Beekeepers Association and the Alabama-Coushatta nation all had a seat at the table alongside various state, federal and NGO entities. The value of the partnership becomes evident when Garner veers south, then west of Lufkin to South Boggy Slough, where Don Dietz lives. Dietz is a biologist for Temple-Inland Corporation, the timber products giant that controls more than 1.2 million acres of East Texas woodlands, including South Boggy Slough.
Healthy black bear habitat translates into healthy forests, as far as Temple-Inland is concerned, Dietz explains, as we drive past clear-cut pine plantations, conservation forests of hardwoods that will never be touched and SMZs, the streamside management zones that provide critical riparian habitat for wildlife on the move, including black bear.
“We would not be for the bear if we thought it would negatively impact how we manage our timber,” Dietz states frankly. “Temple-Inland wants to make money off timber. As it is, biodiversity is in our best interest. We have seven bald eagle nests on T-I property in Texas.”
Dietz points out how selectively clear-cut land encourages growth of sedges, grasses and berries for bear to feed on in early spring. Pine plantations provide trees for denning and loafing. Mixed forests provide berries through summer. Hardwood bottoms in the SMZs provide downed woody debris full of grubs and other insects for bears to eat and drop the nuts to satisfy black bears’ dietary needs in the fall. If TPWD’s relocation program gets the green light, Temple-Inland has committed to hosting release sites in several locations, according to Dietz. Bear in the woods are good for the land and good for business. “They’re coming,” Dietz says. “I had dinner with a guy two weeks ago in San Augustine County who’s seen a bear twice in the past few weeks.”
“That’s 20,000 acres of the best black bear habitat in East Texas,” Garner says as he drives away. “That habitat offers bears everything they need. The Neches River corridor is the keystone. When I drive through the country, I think bear will do better on managed lands because they’re managed for diversity.”
Somewhere around the Angelina National Forest, he turns from the main highway and promptly gets lost on a network of unmarked back roads surrounded by forests and woodlands. “There’s groceries and cover in there,” Garner says, squinting into an impenetrable thicket. “It’s the roads that present the problem,” he says, changing direction again, “because roads bring people.”
The majority of those attending public meetings supported the return of black bear to East Texas, and 70 percent of the written comments by mail were positive.
Many roads also lead to hunting club cabins tucked in the backwoods, which is one asset Garner hopes to tap into. Hunters get back in the deepest woods, so they’re likelier to ID bears. Their cabins are also destined to be bear magnets if the clubs don’t take measures to properly store and dispose of garbage. Communicating with hunting clubs now will save a lot of hassles in the future, Garner believes.
The nuisance factor looms large. Black bear may be shy and prone to run, but they adapt quickly to humans. Garbage cans, raiding of deer feeders, bee hives and stock pens are all potential problems. As omnivores, black bear have been known to occasionally dine on small animals, be they wildlife, livestock or house pets. If measures aren’t taken to keep garbage lids secure, pet food out of reach, wildlife feeders monitored and so forth, bad stuff can happen.
What seems relegated to the past is human hostility towards bears. Some folks are still inclined to regard them as pests and vermin that should be eradicated, such as realtor Fuzzy Harmon, who told the Lone Star Eagle weekly of Marshall, “It makes about as much sense to spend money on bears as it does to stock Lake O’The Pines with piranha.” (For the record, piranhas are not native to East Texas; black bear are.) But Harmon’s sentiment is clearly in the minority.
“We’re never going to change those folks,” Garner admits. “There are people against this who are antigovernment and still mad about the Big Thicket,” portions of which were declared a national wildlife refuge, he acknowledges. “But I didn’t walk away from any town meeting discouraged.”
Garner’s patience with such concerns and fears, warranted or not, reflects one blueprint he’s followed while articulating Texas policy, the Black Bear Conservation Committee plan initiated in 1990 to promote the recovery of the Louisiana black bear. The Baton Rouge-based BBCC, whose members include Garner, Dietz, TPWD’s Ricky Maxey and several other East Texans, oversees the successful bear recovery programs in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma, while raising public awareness and putting in place a plan for dealing with bears that cause damage, in concert with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the Louisiana Fish & Game Commission.
In Jasper, at the TPWD offices, Garner hands me off to district wildlife biologist Gary Calkins. Calkins knows the southern hot zone of potential bear habitat along the Sabine and Neches river corridors well enough to fret about the area’s future.
“Bottomland hardwood forest is the most diverse ecosystem in East Texas,” he says. “It’s home to 500 vertebrates and 1,150 plant species, but 75 percent of these forests have been lost since settlement.” More loss, he fears, is just around the corner. While Temple-Inland remains a dominant presence, Calkins has observed other large timber companies such as International Paper and Louisiana Pacific selling off tracts to forest investment companies (among them, Harvard University) more interested in short-term profit than long-term conservation plans. “Some are pretty good stewards,” Calkins allows. “But others have no interest in biodiversity. They want to cut and get out. The northern part of East Texas has already gone through these growing pains. Here in the southern end, we had it made for awhile.” But with the short-term profit mentality moving in, he says, “all of it is at risk.”
Perception issues are less worrisome. He’s heard the comment, “My kids are going to be at the bus stop and the bears are going to eat them,” a dozen times.
“I try to explain that I’m more concerned about the neighbor’s dog running loose that’s going to hurt their kids.”
While cruising through a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers campground on the western shores of Lake B.A. Steinhagen between Jasper and Woodville, Garner surveys trashcans and camp sites that may have to be retrofitted. He breaks into a “Hey, Yogi” voice, assuming the cartoon character Boo Boo Bear spying a “pic-a-nic basket.” Garner is trying to emphasize the need for humans to dissuade bear.
I’m sold.
Having had close-up encounters with black bear in Minnesota, in the Mexican state of Coahuila and at many zoos, I have been persuaded by Garner’s tour that East Texas is primo bear habitat, as long as the people of East Texas let it be. But I am also impatient enough to hope public support will materialize for a restocking program that will bring them back sooner rather than later.
- See A Bear?
- Call TPWD. One of the bear plan’s goals is to resolve human-bear conflicts. If you see a bear, or have a bear problem, call your TPWD game warden or wildlife biologist or the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department at (800) 792-1112 or at regional offices in Tyler (903) 566-1626, San Antonio (830) 569-8700, Kerrville (830) 896-2500 and Alpine (432) 837-2051
- Don’t feed the bears. Period.
- What if a bear approaches?
- Don’t panic, don’t shoot and don’t approach. Don’t run, either, says the TPWD Black Bears in Texas brochure. Back away slowly, with arms overhead to increase the size of your appearance, talk firmly and in a low pitched voice. If a bear stands on its hind legs, it is not preparing to attack. It’s trying to see, hear and smell you. If a bear is in a tree, leave it alone. It’s afraid. And NEVER approach a bear cub.
Westside Bears: an Unlikely Success Story
In the late 1980s, black bears from the northern state of Coahuila, Mexico, began migrating across the Rio Grande into the Trans-Pecos region, returning to a home range that had been unoccupied for nearly 50 years. The recolonization movement was a natural process, surprising many wildlife experts.
“If you look at all of Texas, the eastern two-thirds of the state had the best habitat, precipitation, vegetation and ecological system for bears,” says David Holdermann, a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department endangered resources specialist who lives in Alpine. “The Trans-Pecos, ironically, has one of the lesser natural carry capacities to support bears.”
But the black bears (Ursus americanus) continued to migrate — driven perhaps by scarcity of food, drought or some natural instinct that told them there were richer resources, remote mountains and sparse human population to the north.
Holdermann says his best guess is that there are now around 80 black bear in the Trans-Pecos, primarily in the southern sections of Brewster, Terrell and Val Verde counties — some of the state’s most remote, inaccessible terrain.
Of that figure, the breeding population probably numbers around 30 to 40 bears, says Holdermann. Extensive state and federally funded research in the past decade has focused on determining the extent of recolonization, including monitoring bears’ movements through radio collaring, habitat analysis and field studies of bear sightings and bear depredations.
A biological key driving the bear recolonization process is the philopatric factor, which means a female black bear will allow her female offspring to remain on her home range. However, male offspring are forced to disperse outside the mother’s home range.
“Because of this pattern,” says Holdermann, “males will range farther outward, searching for a new home range with mates. Consequently, what we see is a slow, incremental expansion by females into new areas. Males are generally finding everything they need to expand except suitable females.” Male black bears may range over a 100-square-mile area.
The resident breeding black bear population is believed to occupy an area covering the Chisos Mountains in the center of Big Bend National Park, the Dead Horse Mountains and the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area (near the eastern edge of the park), the Del Norte Mountains (south of Alpine), the Davis Mountains (near Fort Davis) and the Guadalupe Mountains (south of the New Mexico border). Bear sightings, usually involving males, have also occurred in other areas of West Texas, but far less frequently.
The primary black bear breeding habitat in the Trans-Pecos is the Chisos Mountains.
Raymond Skiles Jr., the chief wildlife biologist in Big Bend National Park, estimates the current number of female black bears in the park to be around 15. The figure is down from a peak female population of around 30 bears in 2000, although Skiles believes the number is now increasing again.
“We had a precipitous decline starting around 2000 – 2001, following a failure in the food supply because of drought conditions,” says Skiles.
Even though black bears appear to be in a new recolonizing phase, he warns, “The population isn’t safe and secure here. We don’t know now how many bears are breeding females. It’s a very tenuous existence. We need a couple of good years to get that breeding population back up.”
Since 1987, Skiles has devoted a large portion of his time to studying black bears and devising programs and methods to lessen the chance of conflict between bears and park visitors.
“We’ve had to go through an immense change to adapt to the bears,” he says. Changes include an extensive public education program, the creation of bear-proof trash containers and food-storage lockers for campers, bear-proof landfill operations for waste disposal and the development of a bear management and research team. The work has paid off: no major incidents involving bear-human encounters have occurred in the park.
TPWD wildlife specialist Holdermann recalls an example of male bear migration that occurred in Alpine in June 2003, when a young, mature black bear was found wandering in the downtown area. Holderman received an emergency call at his home about 1 a.m. He loaded a dart rifle with Telazol, an immobilizing chemical that interrupts an animal’s nerve transmission system.
“We darted it in one shot and it took five minutes to be immobilized and drop from the tree,” he recalled. Nicknamed the “Courthouse Bear,” it was fitted with a radio collar and transported and released in the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area — all within five hours. In a few months, the bear had migrated 75 miles north to the Del Norte Mountains, about 15 miles south of Alpine, where it remained until radio contact was lost earlier this year.
Public opinion on bear recolonization is narrowly divided, according to a recent TPWD-sponsored survey. A questionnaire mailed to 1,100 landowners in nine Trans-Pecos counties who own at least one section of land received a 42 percent return response. Black bear recolonization was not favored by 46 percent, favored by 40 percent and not answered by 14 percent.
Holderman notes that the TPWD approach to the recolonization process is not proactive. The recolonization has occurred naturally. The state’s primary role has been to monitor the process, gather research data, attempt to minimize threats of bear-human contact and educate the public.
The migration of black bears into a former habitat is viewed as a positive indicator for the ecosystem by black bear advocates, who see long-term benefits in increased eco-tourism and the return of a sense of “wildness” to the region.
Private landowners are an important part of any natural recolonization process, Holdermann notes, since 96 percent of the bears’ range is on private property.
“Once we’ve fully characterized how landowners feel about the black bear population, at that point we need to step back and ask what it means to the future of the bear population,” he says.
“The negative attitude toward black bears reflects a strong pattern that has grown from the frontier experience — it generally extends to all large predators. It’s a legitimate point for people to be concerned about property. The development of a successful bear strategy will have to include those private property interests, as well as the creation of a viable black bear habitat.”
[Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine]
Desolate Majesty
[see also Big
Bend Field Notes]
Desolate Majesty: Preserving beauty without borders
National Geographic
BY JOE NICK PATOSKI
February 2007
Straddling
Texas and Mexico, the Big Bend region is high in biodiversity and low
in footprints. It’s a place so untamed that if something doesn’t bite,
stick, or sting, it’s probably a rock.
|
Photograph by Jack |
 |
You know you have arrived in the heart of the Chihuahuan Desert when
it feels as if you have fallen off the edge of the Earth and into the
rabbit hole. Nothing is as it appears. Moths are the size of hummingbirds.
Are those twin pillars of black igneous rock (a landmark known as Mule
Ear Peaks) ten miles (16 kilometers) away or fifty (80 kilometers)? Visibility
reaches more than a hundred miles (160 kilometers) on a clear day, and
since there are few roads or buildings to use as milestones, distance
is difficult to judge. A jackrabbit runs so fast across the hardpan that
its hind legs stretch ahead of its front ones, like in a cartoon. A black
bear rambles through high desert canyons, picking its way through the
yucca and prickly pear, oblivious to the fact that it seems out of place
in this landscape. But that’s OK. No one is around to notice.
Legend says that after God created the rest of the world, he dumped the
leftovers into this giant sandbox. The devil is supposed to be sealed
up in a cave on the south bank of the Río Bravo del Norte (known
on the U.S. side as the Rio Grande), except when he escapes on a swing
hung between nearby mountains. This is a place where water runs uphill,
where rainbows have to wait for rain. The line between myth and reality
blurs. Stare long enough at the Chisos Mountains or the Sierra del Carmen,
the two mountain ranges, known as sky islands, that anchor the territory,
and they levitate above the plain. And you haven’t had a drop of tequila.
But you are under the influence of something stronger. Try inhaling the
scent of creosote bushes after it rains and not feel light-headed. It
is a powerful aphrodisiac. Walk across 80 miles (130 kilometers) of low
and high desert, as I have, and an appreciation develops for what others
might dismiss as a moonscape. Without trees or shrubs to get in the way,
the view is unobstructed: 500 million years of geologic turmoil and erosion
is laid bare over miles of fine sand, gravel, rocky rubble, spongy bentonite,
lava spewed from volcanic eruptions.
The vast Chihuahuan Desert has long been known as El Despoblado, the land
of no people. The name remains accurate today: The wildlife population
still exceeds the human one. But in this part of the desert, on both sides
of the border between Texas and Mexico, another name is taking hold: El
Carmen–Big Bend Transboundary Megacorridor, a label only a conservationist
could love. It is two and a half million acres (one million hectares)
of one of the most biologically diverse desert regions in the world–the
largest block of protected land in the Chihuahuan Desert.
The idea of preserving this place started with a dream. In the 1930s advocates
in both Texas and Mexico wanted to create an international peace park.
That idea never took off, but what is emerging in its place is far larger
and more ambitious. On most maps, the megacorridor is blank space, the
only mark a squiggly line for the river that doubles as an international
boundary. It is dominated by six separate chunks of protected land that
hang off the Rio Grande like clothes whipping around a clothesline. On
the Mexico side, it includes the Cañón de Santa Elena in the
state of Chihuahua and the Maderas del Carmen in the state of Coahuila.
On the Texas side, two state protected areas flank Big Bend, a U.S. national
park named for the sharp curve where the Rio Grande’s southeasterly flow
takes an abrupt turn to the north, like a car swerving to avoid an armadillo.
The sixth piece is a ribbon of land on the U.S. side of the river itself.
From the air, the region is distinguished by huge cracks, crags, wrinkles,
and crevices, apparently devoid of life. On the ground, it is no more
welcoming. The temperature can reach over a hundred degrees (38ºC)
on a summer day and sink below freezing on a winter night. The wind can
blow 50 miles (80 kilometers) an hour for days on end. We are talking
rough country. Civilization is far away, no matter what direction you
came from. The remoteness is intimidating. Bad things happen. That can
mean a rattlesnake bite, a scorpion sting, a stealth hit by an assassin
bug. You might get stabbed by a spiny tip when you stumble into a low
lechuguilla cactus, or scraped by the branches of a catclaw, or impaled
by a horse crippler cactus. As locals say, if something doesn’t bite,
stick, or jab, it’s probably a rock.
Beneath their armor, some plants possess valuable food or medicine. Take
the sotol, a succulent with swordlike leaves and serrated edges, which
proliferates on the high Chihuahuan Desert. Its bulbs, when baked underground
for 48 hours as the ancients did, taste like steamed artichoke. The same
bulbs, properly fermented into moonshine, pack a wallop similar to tequila.
There is always the chance you’ll die of thirst. The You Can Die possibilities
are endless, which keeps some visitors–350,000 a year to Big Bend National
Park–from coming back. Those who do return are left to ponder the remarkable
grit of the hardy few who have managed to survive in this spare, unforgiving
environment. Not to mention the roadrunners and kangaroo rats, so adapted
to the arid climate they don’t even need to drink.
Contradictions come naturally here. The landscape is 90 percent desert
yet erupts into cliffs 1,500 feet (460 meters) high and mountains above
8,900 feet (2,700 meters). These skyscrapers are home to penthouse residents
such as bigtooth maples, quaking aspens, and Douglas firs. They soak up
water snagged from the clouds–up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) of rain
a year–while their neighbors on the desert floor must make do with less
than 10 inches (25 centimeters). When it does rain, mostly during the
summer “monsoons” from July through September, spindly ocotillos sprout
leaves and spew flaming red shoots from the tips of their woody spines.
Stalks of yucca burst with huge bouquets of tough, creamy white blossoms
as big as ladling spoons. The candelabras that emerge from the heart of
agaves sag heavily with radiant yellow blooms. This whole lot of nothing
is full of life.
As tough as it looks, the Chihuahuan Desert is a fragile place. Few humans
have stepped here, but footprints fall heavily in the desert. Since the
1800s, the region has been mined, logged, hunted, and overgrazed. Now
it is being allowed to heal its wounds, helped along by governments, corporations,
and individuals on both sides of the border. In 1944, Big Bend National
Park was established, and a joint park with Mexico was envisioned. But
it wasn’t until 1994 that the Mexican government designated more than
a million acres (405,000 hectares) as the Cañón de Santa Elena
and the Maderas del Carmen Flora and Fauna Protection Areas. In 1999,
a cement company arrived on the scene, not to pave paradise but to preserve
it. Cemex, the Mexican cementmaker with operations in 50 countries, has
purchased hundreds of thousands of acres along the border to set aside
for preservation.
This is a different model of conservation. Mexico lacks the funds to purchase
land for parks or wildlife habitat, a situation becoming increasingly
common in the United States. So on the Mexico side of the corridor, much
of the protected land is privately owned. Mining has been allowed to continue.
Rather than removing the 5,000 ranchers and farmers living within the
protected areas, as U.S. national parks historically have done, conservationists
are teaching them why it’s in their interest to protect the land. The
goal is to give residents a sense of stewardship that national parks do
not. “You have to understand, the concept of wilderness doesn’t presently
exist in Mexico,” says Patricio Robles Gil, an environmentalist and architect
of the partnership with Cemex. “In Spanish, we don’t have a word for wilderness.
This is all new, but it could be the model beyond a national park.”
After a long day working in the desert, a group of conservationists gathers
for a dinner of steaks and tortillas at the Cemex reserve’s main lodge.
There is talk of the future. Already, a couple of adjacent areas are being
proposed to join the two protected areas on the Mexican side. They discuss
reintroducing the grizzly bear, the Mexican gray wolf, and bison–all
believed to have been native to the area. Anywhere else, such talk would
be dismissed as a fairy tale. In the Transboundary Megacorridor, such
dreams seem possible.
And why not? The desert bighorn sheep has been reestablished, as has the
pronghorn antelope. Decades ago, only a few remaining black bears could
be found tucked away in the isolated mountain ranges of Coahuila. A group
of Mexican ranchers decided to quit hunting bears and start protecting
them instead. Now you see black bears on the Texas side of the river again.
Wildlife pays no attention to international boundaries.
To its true believers, the megacorridor is the whole world boiled down
to its essence. It is “pure raw,” says a conservationist who has fallen
under its spell, one of the last places on the North American continent
where wild trumps humanity, and one of the only spots where wilderness
is actually expanding instead of contracting. At a time when most of the
Earth’s stories focus on what is being lost, that is a contradiction worth
celebrating.
Subscribe to National
Geographic magazine.
see also Big
Bend Field Notes
Big Bend Field Notes
[see also Desolate Majesty: Preserving beauty without borders]
Big Bend Field Notes
National Geographic
BY JOE NICK PATOSKI
February 2007
The author jumps over a watery passage in the Chihuahuan Desert. Two and a half million acres (one million hectares) of this desert straddle the Texas-Mexico border in a block of protected land known as El Carmen–Big Bend Transboundary Megacorridor. The area is one of the most biologically diverse desert regions in the world, so Patoski had to watch his step. As the locals say, if something doesn’t bite, stick, or jab, it’s probably a rock.
|
Photograph by Jack W. Dykinga |
 |
Best
While researching this story, I joined five other people and walked across the bend in the Big Bend, a six-day, 80-mile (130 kilometers) hike. That may have been the most physically difficult trek I’ve ever attempted. It was certainly the first time I’d ever done extended overnight backpacking. My lower back ached for weeks afterward.
Eight months later, I’d forgotten the pain and–for the first time ever–soloed in a canoe through 60 miles (100 kilometers) of the lower canyons of the Rio Grande. The lower back acted up for a while after that, too, but in a good way. Both experiences underscored the efforts one endures in search of the kind of solitude many seek but few ever realize, regardless of lower back pain.
Worst
“If you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes; it’ll change.” That old homily about Texas weather popped into my head after I dodged the bullet that photographer Jack Dykinga and Mexican environmentalist Patricio Robles Gil took.
After spending a couple days in Big Bend National Park, plotting and planning our adventures and camping out near Old Ore Road, I headed back to civilization while Jack and Patricio prepared to paddle Santa Elena and Mariscal canyons, two of the three major canyons on the Rio Grande within the boundaries of the national park.
When I left them on a Saturday morning, the skies were clear, and the temperatures had already climbed to around 70 degrees (20°C). It looked like it was going to be a warm and sunny early spring day. But I hadn’t driven more than an hour when the winds started whipping up out of the north and dust kicked up on the horizon. By the time I reached Fort Stockton, about 120 miles (190 kilometers) north of the park, the temperature had dropped to the upper 40s.
I talked to Jack a week later to ask about his trip through the canyons. “It was the trip from hell,” he said wearily. Once the winds began to blow, they didn’t quit for a week, with some gusts exceeding 65 miles (105 kilometers) an hour. More than once, their canoe was blown away from their campsite. Jack’s sniffles turned into a full-blown case of the flu, and he passed it on to Patricio. I waited until he was finally done with his complaints. “Welcome to the Big Bend,” I replied.
Quirkiest
The Cemex preserve in the Sierra Del Carmen, is 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Boquillas Crossing on the Rio Grande, as the crow flies. Driving there on rough dirt roads used to take a little more than two hours, once you paid a boatman two dollars to row you across to Mexico in his dinged-up Mexican johnboat. It was a funky way to travel, made more adventurous knowing there was no customs or immigration on the Mexican or the U.S. side (although U.S. Border Patrol highway checkpoints and Mexican military stops manned by bored uniformed teenagers toting automatic weapons loomed farther in the interior). This was too middle-of-nowhere to justify permanent posts. Then September 11, 2001, happened, and everything about the Borderlands changed–including traditional means of crossing the river.
A drive between those same two points now takes at least ten hours. Heightened border security put an end to the freelance ferry tradition. In the past, almost all ferry passengers were tourists from Big Bend National Park bound for Boquillas del Carmen, a primitive village of 300 about a mile from the river, whose residents largely supported themselves selling food, drink, quartz, overnight accommodations, walking sticks, quilts, and trinkets to the visitors. Now the village is slowly depopulating; half of the people have already left.
In the high country of the sierra, I found another Boquillas resident, David, one of the boatmen who used to row visitors across the Rio. These days, he tends to a tricked-out log cabin lodge the Cemex corporation has built overlooking a dammed-up stretch of a clear-running creek. He’s glad to have a job, he said. On weekends, he can go home to Boquillas. It could be worse, David added. Other locals who still call Boquillas home work in Musquiz, another 50 miles (80 kilometers) distant, and many there return home but once a month.
see also Desolate Majesty: Preserving beauty without borders
[National Geographic magazine]
Willie Nelson: An Epic Life
Willie Nelson: An Epic Life | Why I wrote this
book
Read my MVP Q&A
with Mickey Raphael. You can read a chapter from the book. [
Chapter 1,
2, 3
]
Order Willie
Nelson: An Epic Life from Amazon here.
Read REVIEWS here.
Celebrate
Willie Nelson’s 75th birthday
with Joe Nick Patoski
WILLIE NELSON: AN EPIC LIFE
In stores April 21st, 2008
The realization Texans are different from everybody else hit me about
an hour after I’d first set foot on Texas soil. I was only two years old
but I distinctly remember my father picking up my mother, my sister and
me at the Greater Fort Worth International Airport and driving us to our
new home in Fort Worth, stopping along the way at the Big Apple Barbecue
on Highway 183. The waitresses talked funny and the smoked beef brisket
covered in barbecue sauce we were served tasted like nothing I’d experienced,
vaguely familiar and strange and exotic all once. Even as the hot spices
set fire to my lips and the inside of my mouth, I immediately wanted more.
I’ve been trying to figure out Texas and Texans ever since. Fifty two
years later, I realized the answer had been right in front of me for most
of my life. There were vague memories of the smiling friendly face flickering
on Channel 11 singing songs live from Panther Hall on the Cowtown Jamboree
and on Ernest Tubb’s show in a voice that could have only come from Texas.
I grew familiar with the songs by listening KCUL, the Country & Western
radio station, although versions of “Hello Walls” and “Crazy” by other
people were Top 40 hits in Fort Worth. The first interview came in 1973
for Zoo World magazine. After thirty five years of writing about him and
many others, I can now safely say no single public person living in the
20th or 21st century defines Texas or Texans better than Willie Hugh Nelson.
Texans by nature are independent, free-thinkers, open, outgoing and friendly.
Iconoclasts, they respect tradition but are not beholden to it. Whether
it’s God or sin, they tend to embrace excess. The good ones have a whole
lot of heart. They are creatures of geography, exuding a sense of place.
They reflect their climate and sometimes are a little crazy from the heat.
They are wanderers and explorers, keen to improvise, curious enough to
discover They are loud and boisterous when they need to be. They seem
to go out of their way to make friends with strangers. They are great
storytellers and some of the most distinctive music makers on earth. You
know Texas music when you hear it, just like you know Willie’s music.
A certain red headed stranger was once said to say, “Don’t let the truth
get in the way of a good story.” I tried my best to ignore that sage advice
once I took on this project. On the back side, all I can say is that getting
all the facts straight while piecing together the history of a culture
considered too low, too sordid, and too wild to be worth documenting in
print was no sure thing. Many characters were too busy living life to
the fullest, sometimes under the influence of alcohol, nicotine, Dexedrine,
Black Mollies, marijuana, boredom, and being caught up in the adage, “If
you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there” to remember the trivial
details of time and place. Then there were those who were inclined to
con for the pure sport of it.
Fortunately, my subject was accommodating and open – exactly the person
I’ve always thought him to be. He’s the story. I’m just the teller.
Copyright © 2008 Joe Nick Patoski
*****
- Read Joe Nick’s MVP
Q&A with Mickey Raphael. - You can read a chapter from the book. [ Chapter
1, 2,
3 ] - Order Willie
Nelson: An Epic Life from Amazon here.
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