FREE RANGE: FOOD, NATURE, PLACE, AND MORE

Singing in the dark

Posted on December 17, 2010 by Heather

The relentless sunshine of the current weather here in Austin might make those in the Midwest or on the East Coast sigh with envy. A photo on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times shows an Ohio man ineffectually fending off the great whorls of snow around him with an umbrella. His head is bent, his shoulders hunched, his attention presumably forced inward. Strangely, as I bask in the sunshine, I’m the one who’s a little envious.

Not of the cold, certainly—I start getting chilly when the temperature drops below eighty degrees. But what I see in the picture is someone forced by the world to withdraw his attention from it, to shift his focus inward, even if it’s just to check in and notice that he’s cold. He won’t be able to stay out for long; he must retreat inside.

In one of her typically wonderful blogs, our friend Joy recently wrote an homage to darkness, to the gestational, inward gaze of the season of Advent. The punch line is, of course, that great discipline is required to move inside at this time of year, when a blizzard of parties, shopping, and end-of-year scrambling—or of loneliness and loss—assaults us. Frequently, we just sit out there in the cold, not realizing that we can go inside. Another friend of mine, prone to good works, told me that when she was pregnant and people called asking her to do something, she would look at her waxing belly and say, “Sorry, I’m busy,” and then go back to sitting quietly. Even as we attend to the frenetic tempo of this singular season, something beckons us, at least occasionally, to go inside and sit, maybe in the dark.

And what awaits us inside, in the dark? Well, any child can you tell that: scary stuff! Chupacabras (that’s one in the picture at the top of this page, by the way)! Things with too many legs and too many teeth and not enough eyes! With too much hair or not enough, with horns and scales and long dirty nails! The list of monsters gets less imaginative but no less scary as we get older: past humiliations and failures, anxieties about money, relationships, reputation, health, death. All those things wait for us in the dark. (Of course, sometimes they wait for us in broad daylight as well.)

But that’s not all that waits there. Wendell Berry, my favorite grumpy sage, has advice on how to get by the monsters:

I go among the trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie asleep in their places
where I left them, like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Those things we fear, according to Berry, have their own songs if we sit still and listen for them. In this particular collection of poems, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997, the forest is his place of Sunday worship, where he brings his deepest questions and listens to the forest’s exhalations, to the words made of branch rustle and river rush and birdsong, iterations of the original Word spoken by God in the beginning. Berry is not alone when what he is afraid of approaches him; he’s in the midst of a community he knows intimately.

This kind of trope can dissolve into rank sentimentality and cruelty when those in the midst of the light and bustle use it to admonish those sitting in the sight of what they fear to buck up. But Berry’s language in this collection is rooted in an ancient warrant for the practice of sitting in the company of chaos and darkness: when, as God began creating, God shared space with the tohu-bohu, the formless void, with the darkness, and with the deep. Through them came the words: Let there be. And what came to be was good. It sang.

The fears don’t have the last word in the poem: Here’s the final verse:

After days of labor,
Mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the tree moves.

Only after he labors and rests from his labors, after he sits quietly and listens to the songs of what fears him and what he himself fears, does Berry hear his own song. Only then is he able to join the singing already in progress, a singing that harmonizes with a wider reality (the turning of the day) and the immediate reality (the moving of the trees).

Whether or not you’re observing Advent, the deepening shadows of the season encourage most of us to move inside and prepare ourselves for this inexorable guest, darkness. Some of us will cook, some of us will shop, some of us will wrestle with monsters and despair, some will not pause from our labors or notice anything at all. If possible, go sit quietly among the bare trees. Or sit hospitably at home with whatever invisible reality is leavening within you and tell everyone you’re busy. Then go find your community and sing.

What we’re reading
Heather: C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Martin: John le Carré, Our Kind of Traitor

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Meat and unmediated experience: Deer School at Madroño Ranch

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Martin

At lunch the other day, a friend opined that too much of what we all think and see and hear—and, yes, eat—passes through various filters (the media, agribusiness) before it reaches us; even our air is conditioned, he added, though I have to say I’m okay with that, at least in the summer. But his larger point is one that’s been in the back of my mind (and take it from me, there’s lots of room in there) for some time.

Unmediated experiences seem increasingly hard to find. We have lost an awareness of the connection between our actions and their consequences, especially when it comes to food, especially when it comes to meat; it’s easy to avoid the stark truth that some creature was slaughtered, blood was shed, so that we might buy shrink-wrapped chunks of meat in the supermarket. The thoughtful (and splendidly named) English chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall writes in his River Cottage Meat Book that “the human act of killing animals for food, once familiar to most of society, has now become so shameful that those who condone it—by eating meat every day—are entirely protected from thinking about it. Food animals are killed and their meat is cut up and packaged far from human eyes. By the time meat reaches the consumer, the animal origins have been all but obliterated.”

Conveniently, this last weekend presented us with an opportunity to escape the shrink-wrap bubble in the form of “Deer School,” a hunting/butchering/cooking extravaganza at Madroño Ranch. Watching the skinned, eviscerated, and decapitated carcass of a 120-pound buck being carved up on your kitchen counter definitely qualifies as an unmediated experience.

The man doing the carving was Austin’s incomparable Maestro of Meat, Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due, and his audience, in addition to Heather and me, included six hunters—four experienced, two newbies, united in their love of food and dedication to the principles of ethical hunting—who had paid to spend a long weekend at the ranch. Four of them live in or around Austin, but we also had a couple who drove all the way from Michigan (!), sleeping in their Little Guy trailer all the way.

In return for their money, the guests were taken on three guided hunts (the guides were Jesse, his omnicompetent buddy Tink Pinkard, and, after poor Robert, our ranch manager, was felled by a kidney stone on Saturday morning, our son Tito) and then instructed in how to make efficient use of whatever animals they shot. They also ate a series of truly spectacular meals prepared by the indefatigable chef Morgan Dishman-Angelone, who works with Jesse.

Their collective haul included five deer and several hogs, though Robert shot the buck Jesse used for his demonstration the day before the guests arrived. As we all gathered in the kitchen to watch Jesse at work on the carcass, I was reminded of Rembrandt’s famous painting “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.” A grisly spectacle, but also fascinating, and Jesse’s obvious care and skill were mesmerizing.

True confession: I am not a hunter, though I am an enthusiastic carnivore and have done a good bit of fishing in my time; the only mammal I have ever knowingly killed was an obviously diseased raccoon who was staggering around in the middle of a hot summer day at the ranch several years ago. But we live in a meat-centric state (the Republic of Barbecue, anyone?), and I have come to realize the distance between my life and the realities of blood and bone that hunters and farmers and ranchers confront on a daily basis.

Here’s Fearnley-Whittingstall again: “As I pull the trigger and… the beast tumbles, I feel the gap between me and the quarry, which a moment ago seemed unreachable, closed in an instant.” I think this is really the point of ethical hunting, responsible carnivorism, and eating meat in general: the realization that we, consumer and consumed alike, are part of the same system, much as we might try to deny it. Thus, in a funny way, a hunter—a responsible one, at least—rather than treating the animal he or she kills as an objectified and separate Other, is more likely to understand the profound interconnectedness that binds us all together.

Jesse and Morgan took virtually every piece of meat off that buck and used it for an extraordinary multicourse dinner that night. “We’re going to punish you,” Jesse warned us facetiously, and he wasn’t kidding: six courses, including venison tartare (pictured above, just prior to final assembly), venison paté with Jesse’s own coarse-grained mustard, braised venison flanks stuffed with chorizo, liver with mashed potatoes and apples, venison cutlets with grilled marinated radicchio, and, for dessert, Morgan’s signature Basque cake—salty-sweet crusted cake around a pastry crème center with candied persimmons and apples. It was an unforgettable meal, and left everyone—even Tito!—sated, at least temporarily: the next morning we had breakfast tacos with barbacoa made from the deer’s shanks and neck meat, which had been simmering in a crockpot overnight. Under the circumstances, “holy cow” hardly seems like the right expression, but you get the picture: we ate incredibly well, and that one buck provided enough meat to feed thirteen people twice, with quite a bit left over; thanks to Jesse, we’re looking forward to enjoying even more of it when we go out again over New Year’s, by which time I should be almost ready to think about eating meat again.

And who knows—maybe the next time we host Deer School at Madroño (and we do hope there will be a next time) I’ll sign up myself. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that I was about as unconscious a carnivore as there was on the planet, and I’m in as much need of unmediated experience as the next guy. I’m not going to start refusing to eat anything I haven’t actually killed myself; that would be impractical, to say the least. But I do believe that hunting and butchering a deer or other animal for one’s own consumption is probably a useful exercise, and that the world might be better off if every unconscious carnivore were forced to undertake it at least once. A fuller awareness of the cost of satisfying our appetites cannot, I think, be a bad thing.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (still!)
Martin: Charles M. Robinson III, Bad Hand: A Biography of General Ranald S. Mackenzie

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Hosts, guests, and strangers: thoughts on hospitality

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Heather

The season of hospitality is upon us, with all its pleasures and burdens. Known in the Christian tradition as Advent, it focuses on the need for preparation, both for the very intimate event of a baby’s birth and for the cosmic birth of a new order. One of my favorite images for the season, if I’m remembering rightly, comes from a series of woodcuts made by a northern Renaissance nun. In it, she imagines herself as a housewife, preparing for the coming company of the Child and the Judge by cleaning the house of her heart: dusting, sweeping, washing, polishing. The images refuse any pretensions to profound theology or high art; they are reassuringly earth-bound and homey. If you pay attention, you can almost smell the baking bread.

“Hospitality” is one of those words whose meaning has changed over the years. In our current culture, it often refers to an industry directed toward travelers or those in need who are expected to pay for its services. If hospitality isn’t a primarily economic exchange, it usually refers to the opening of home and hearth to friends, family, and associates.

In ancient times (or in places that still hew to ancient ways), hospitality wasn’t a service or an option; it was a necessity and a moral imperative. Before the development of institutional hospitality (hospitals, hospices, hostels), vulnerable individuals outside of the normal network of social relations—travelers, refugees, the sick, pilgrims, orphans, widows—were able to rely, at least for a while, on a code of hospitality that brought shame to those who were able and refused to engage it. Christine Pohl, professor of Christian social ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary, writes: “In a number of ancient civilizations, hospitality was viewed as a pillar on which all other morality rested: it encompassed ‘the good.’”

Curiously, the words “host” and “guest” are closely related etymologically, if they don’t actually come from the same source. Even more interestingly, “guest” shares an etymological bed with “enemy,” rooted in the notion of “stranger.” The idea that any of us might move from providing hospitality to needing it—to and from strangers—gives the word a kind of trinitarian energy that caroms from the poles of host to guest to stranger/enemy until the parts are indistinguishable from the whole. I don’t usually feel that charge when I check into a motel, but I think the hospitable artist nun knew that she was a part of that energy, as hostess opening her heart to the Child; as guest and sojourner on the earth; as stranger before the greatest mystery.

One of the reasons I’m thinking about hospitality, aside from the advent of Advent, is that today we’ll welcome seven guests, whom we have never met, to Madroño for the weekend. They’ll be attending “Deer School,” the brainchild of Jesse Griffiths, chef, butcher, and proprietor (with his wife Tamara Mayfield) of the Dai Due supper club and butcher shop. Deer School will include several guided hunts followed by instructions on how to field-dress and use the animal from nose to tail, followed by some really fine eating.

While I’ve been thinking recently about what it means to be a good host (new sheets and shower curtains), I’m also thinking about my role as guest, sojourner, stranger, enemy; after all, they are intimately connected. In last week’s Thanksgiving post, Martin wrote about the hospitable nature of the feast: “On Thanksgiving the acts of preparing, serving, and eating become consciously sacramental; the cook(s) giving, the guest(s) receiving, in a spirit of gratitude that can, sadly, be all too rare at other times of the year….” As one of the cooks this year, I was less attuned to what I was giving than to what had been given to me: the gorgeous vegetables from local farms, the fresh turkey from our over-subscribed friends Jim and Kay Richardson, and the freshly shot and skinned half-hog that unceremoniously appeared on the kitchen counter (and then spent eight hours roasting in a pit) after my brother, his son, our son, and Robert, the redoubtable ranch manager, went hunting early Thursday morning. The astonishing abundance and hospitality of the land was quite literally overwhelming: half a 150-plus-pound sow is a lot of meat.

I’m blundering onto mushy and possibly treacherous literary territory here, I know: Mother Earth nourishing her offspring, big hugs all around. But I’m increasingly grateful for the bounty of the place and hope the same for those who come here seeking community, solitude, rest, refreshment, and, yes, fresh deer meat. We call Madroño Ranch ours by some weird cosmic accident; the more we know it, the more we know that it belongs to itself or to something even broader, wider, more generous. What we hope now is to avoid being the nightmare guest/enemy, the one who comes and overstays his or her welcome within twenty minutes, who demands foods you don’t have, strews clothes all over the house, leaves trash and dirty dishes in the guest room, noisily stays up late, assumes you’ll do all the laundry, and never says please or thank you. Who seems to think he or she owns the place.

We all know places where that’s exactly what has happened; for me, one such place is the stretch of Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin, which Martin and I drove last Sunday morning, and which is almost completely lined with outlet malls, chain stores, fast-food franchises, and other such marks of our collective thoughtlessness. Somehow, we’ve managed to promote the idea, especially in the American West and particularly in Texas, that among the rights accruing to property owners is the right to destroy or devalue their property in the name of short-term economic gain. In fact, destroying property may be seen as the ultimate proof of ownership.

I struggled in an earlier post with the idea of land ownership, and I struggle with it still. All land came as a gift at some point. Not literally to its current owner, perhaps, but the land still bears the trace of its giftedness somewhere on that deed. In this season when we prepare for the arrival of guests, giving the gift of hospitality, or head somewhere hoping to be good guests, bringing gifts of thanks, it can be easy to forget that we are also always empty-handed strangers, constantly looking for a wider hospitality than we are ever able to offer or sometimes even to know that we need. We’re only a week past Thanksgiving; this is as good a time as any to thank the land that sustains us. Without it, we can never fill a house with the smells of baking bread and roasting meat—or any of the other things that sustain us.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (still)
Martin: Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

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Most memorable meals, take three: giving thanks

Posted on November 26, 2010 by Martin

“There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.” (M. F. K. Fisher)

The day after Thanksgiving, when we’re all still riding that tryptophan high, seems like an appropriate time to resume our occasional series of posts on our most memorable meals.

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, in part because it’s all about the eating with none of the anxiety that gift-giving can inspire. And I love all that traditional Thanksgiving food: the turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, biscuits, pumpkin pie….

This year, however, Heather announced that we would be forgoing the traditional turkey in favor of one of Madroño’s many wild hogs roasted in a pit—though after that announcement occasioned howls of outrage from daughter Lizzie, Heather crumbled and bought a turkey after all, just for the sake of peace in the family.

Whatever. Thanksgiving is at least as much about the side dishes (dressing, potatoes, biscuits, vegetables) and desserts (pies—oh, my Lord, the pies!) as it is about the turkey. Rest assured that no one in our house went hungry yesterday—that’s an artist’s rendering of us in the picture above, by the way—though I confess that I’m glad to have the turkey, to indulge my annual quest for the Platonic ideal of the turkey sandwich. (We did bury half a pig in coals on Thanksgiving afternoon, however, and dug it up at 10 o’clock last night; looks like we’ll be snacking on turkey and pig sandwiches for a while.)

Even more than it is about the food, though (and you’ll just have to trust me on this), Thanksgiving is actually about the fellowship. It seems to be the one major national holiday when there’s no anxiety about gift-giving, piety, or political correctness to distract or annoy us. We come together around the table with family and friends, and sometimes even with strangers, and we share food and drink and maybe a little football talk, and then we stagger off to the floor or sofa or even bed to lie down and groan for a while, and then we get up and try to sneak back in for maybe just one more little piece of pie…. Okay, okay, maybe it really is all about the food.

But on Thanksgiving that food takes on a deeper symbolic value than it does for most of the rest of the year; on Thanksgiving that quotation above from Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is truer than ever. On Thanksgiving the acts of preparing, serving, and eating become consciously sacramental; the cook(s) giving, the guest(s) receiving, in a spirit of gratitude that can, sadly, be all too rare at other times of the year, when the exigencies of jobs, schoolwork, the finals of Dancing with the Stars, and other responsibilities make the preparation and consumption of food little more than an afterthought. (TV Dinners, anyone?)

Indeed, the thoughtful and conscious preparation and consumption of food was one of the prime inspirations for what we hope to accomplish at Madroño Ranch: gathering bright, creative people together around the table for nourishment both physical and intellectual. You could almost say that we hope to make every meal at Madroño a sort of Thanksgiving dinner, except that some of us would quickly weigh 300 pounds.

But you’re wondering when I’m finally going to get to that memorable meal, aren’t you? Okay, here it comes. It was a Thanksgiving during college. As I wrote in a previous post, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area but went to college in western Massachusetts. In those days, largely for financial reasons, I made the long flight to and from home only for Christmas break (which usually meant spending endless hours in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport as winter snows played havoc with flight schedules) and summer vacation.

One of my college classmates was a “townie”; his family lived and worked on a farm several miles from campus, and he invited several of us who weren’t going home for the holiday to Thanksgiving dinner with them.

Honestly, after thirty-two years, I don’t actually remember what we ate that night. It was sturdy, simple farmhouse fare, and I’m pretty sure it included all the usual suspects: turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, and mashed potatoes, and probably yams, and peas with pearl onions, and no doubt there was pie—pumpkin and perhaps several others—for dessert. I don’t even remember how many of us gathered around that well-laden farmhouse table; I think there must have been about a dozen, what with the family and us temporary orphans.

But I do remember the feeling of being thought of, and taken care of. The warmth of knowing that, while I might be thousands of miles from home, I was still welcome at someone’s table. Every Thanksgiving dinner, when people gather with loved ones, or with strangers, to enjoy the abundance of nature transmogrified by the loving care of heat and spice and assembly, is a homecoming in miniature. At that farmhouse in Williamstown I was, if only temporarily, a part of a family again.

I hope I had the good grace to send a thank-you note to my friend’s mother, but I was a callow and self-centered college student, and I suspect I didn’t. This belated acknowledgment hardly makes up for my youthful lack of manners, but Mrs. Burdick, if you’re out there, I want you to know that your generosity made an indelible impression on me, even if I didn’t properly acknowledge it at the time. I will never be able to give thanks enough for that wonderful meal, or for your kindness in inviting us to share it.

 

What we’re reading
Heather: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (again!)
Martin: Marissa Guggiana, Primal Cuts: Cooking with America’s Best Butchers

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Faith, bureaucracy, and sheep: thoughts on changing one’s mind

Posted on November 19, 2010 by Heather

In my last post, I decided to postpone my public ululations over the recent elections. As I’ve spent the last week or so in an apparently endless struggle to get the Madroño Ranch bison label approved by the Texas Department of State Health Services, my ululative impulse has caught in my throat. Maybe Republicans and Tea Partiers are right.

I mean, what difference can it possibly make whether the net weight of the package appears on the bottom third of the label (as required), the middle third, or (gasp) even the upper third? And don’t get me started on the “approved” list of cuts, a list whose existence we discovered only after we’d submitted the label, and which has driven our obsessively copy-editing family mad with its redundancies and omissions. Our “Boneless hump roast” was not on the list and so was nixed, but we’re fine if we say “Bison Roast (Hump).” Generously, the state allows both “Bison for Stew” and “Bison Stew Meat.”

It’s enough to make me think Very Ungenerous Thoughts about the government’s regulatory role in business or about authority in general.

Some of these thoughts are just moans, like the ones our dog Phoebe the Fabulous used to make when she was forced to stop on our walks while I looked at birds. Oh, the personal inconvenience! But the issue of authority has, in fact, been in my thoughts recently, to wit: when does authority cease to be authoritative? What makes us change our minds? What would make me stop being a “liberal” (if that’s what I am) and become a Republican, or even join the Tea Party? I’m not talking here about repressive political authority, but rather those internalized authorities to which we bow without really being aware that we’ve made a choice.

In thinking about my own track record when it comes to mind-changing, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not primarily a rational process, as we often presume. Rather, it’s a supra-rational affair, requiring the willingness and discipline (and perhaps the talent) necessary to learn a new language.

Here’s what I mean: I used to think that all Christians were most likely not just fools—an identity St. Paul claimed—but idiots. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority began to fill the airwaves when I was about fifteen or sixteen. Not having had much contact with self-professed Christians at that point, my exposure to this most vocal sector of Christians forced me to conclude that I could never be one of them. From what I could infer, they were anti-intellectual, judgmental, and close-minded. Their rhetoric made me think that Christianity represented everything I had been taught to turn away from. (Especially the “judgmental” part.)

Imagine my chagrin when, after a series of unexpected and absurd events, I came to be enrolled as a student at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest (now known simply as the Seminary of the Southwest). My habitual place of study was a nearby coffee shop. As I studied, I made sure that any books that had the words “God,” “Church,” or “Jesus” (especially “Jesus”—such an embarrassment) on the cover or spine were face-down and turned to the wall. I didn’t want to be mistaken for one of “them,” one of those stupid sheep who followed an anti-intellectual, judgmental, and close-minded shepherd. Authority. Whatever.

I learned during my years at the seminary—and during my years as a practicing Christian since then—that I had been mistaken in my first ideas about Christianity. I had to change my mind, and, consequently, my self-identity—an anxiety-provoking and disorienting business. This doesn’t mean that I like all Christians. Or even most of them. When I started at seminary, knowing nothing, I had expected to find a bunch of Bad Thinking I could counter and correct.

What I discovered instead was that my initial premise was wrong. I found out that practicing a religion is not the same thing as signing a lease, requiring you to follow a bunch of rules or else be kicked out. Rather, I found that practicing a religion is more like wrestling with a new language. There is a grammar to learn, there are rules to follow. But unless you immerse yourself in it, unless you try to speak it yourself with native speakers—even if you have a lousy accent—you will be just another Ugly American, unaware of your own foolishness.

Having become reasonably fluent in Christianity, I’m trying to learn at least something about the other languages around me. As I learn more about Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, I don’t become less fluent in my own language; rather, I understand it more profoundly. I understand its distinctiveness and thus its limitations. I understand something of its fraught interactions with other religions and have learned the uneasy need for shame and humility. I try not to speak slowly and loudly in my own language when speaking to non-native speakers and hope they will do the same for me. In my limited experience, I’ve found hospitality, not hostility, whenever we try, in our different tongues, to speak with each other.

And so I wait to hear yet again from the inspector at the meat processing plant about the newest version of our label. I know that he’s pleased about the results of the recent election, as are most of my Hill Country neighbors. I’m pushing this metaphor past its limits, but in order to be a good neighbor myself, I may have to have to learn a little bit of a new language. To understand myself better, I may have to be willing to change my mind.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
Martin: S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (still)

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A holy fool in “the land of the Philistines”

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Martin

Greeks and Trojans, Christians and Muslims, Jews and Arabs, Serbs and Croats, Tutsis and Hutus—the collision of cultures is rarely, if ever, a pleasant sight. The protracted and bloody war between the Plains Indians, especially the Comanches, and the white settlers of Texas is among the most horrifying of all, marked by unimaginable violence and cynical deception on both sides. But even in the cruelest conflicts there can be people who exemplify honor and integrity. Such an exemplar was the quixotic Robert Simpson Neighbors, one of the most intriguing, foolhardy, and tragically heroic figures in nineteenth-century Texas.

Thanks to S. C. Gwynne’s excellent new book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, Neighbors (pictured above) has been on my mind again. (Several years ago I actually thought I might try to write a biography of him, but eventually the impulse passed.) I guess I’ve always had a soft spot for those who try, against all odds, to do the right thing, and Neighbors certainly qualifies.

Born in Virginia in 1815, he was orphaned at the age of four and raised by a guardian. He arrived in Texas in 1836, after a couple of years in Louisiana, and from 1839 to 1841 served as assistant quartermaster and acting quartermaster of the army of the Republic of Texas. He served under John Hays during the Mexican War and was taken prisoner in San Antonio by Gen. Adrián Woll in 1842. After his release in 1844, he became the republic’s agent to the Lipan Apaches and Tonkawas; in 1847, after Texas became part of the United States, Neighbors received a federal appointment as Texas commissioner of Indian affairs

This was not an easy position. As Mike Campbell, the dean of Texas historians, notes in his magisterial Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State, the federal government was virtually powerless to stop white settlers from occupying land ostensibly belonging to the Indians, because Texas, uniquely among the United States, retained ownership of its public lands when it joined the union; thus, federal law did not apply on the lands where the Indians lived, and the state seemed unable or unwilling to keep land-hungry white settlers from trespassing. As the Penateka Comanche chief Buffalo Hump told Neighbors, with some asperity, “For a long time a great many [white] people have been passing through my country; they kill all the game and burn the country, and trouble me very much.” Neighbors noted in March 1848 that this persistent trespassing “must necessarily and inevitably lead to serious difficulty.”

Moreover, Neighbors’ distaste for violence was out of step with public sentiment. He tried to negotiate the return of Cynthia Ann Parker, the most celebrated Indian captive of them all (and the mother of Quanah Parker), but the Comanches rebuffed his efforts; Neighbors reported to his superiors in Washington that “I am assured by the friendly Comanche chiefs that I would have to use force to induce the party that has her to give her up.” (Cynthia Ann was unwillingly returned to white civilization in 1860, when Texas Rangers under Sul Ross accidentally captured her during a raid on a Comanche encampment on a tributary of the Pease River in north Texas.)

Neighbors, a Democrat, lost his federal job after the Whig Zachary Taylor was elected president in 1848, but was reappointed when Franklin Pierce reclaimed the White House for the Democrats four years later. (In the meantime, Neighbors found time to lead an expedition that established a trail between San Antonio and El Paso, part of which was later used by the Butterfield Overland Mail; organize El Paso County; marry Elizabeth Ann Mays in Seguin; and serve in the state legislature.)

Neighbors was thus part of the vast machinery that slowly but inexorably (and often violently and duplicitously) squeezed the Indians off their ancestral lands, clearing the way for white occupation of the American west. But Neighbors was different from most of his fellow Indian agents: he treated the Indians with respect, and stubbornly defended them against the accusations, frequently fabricated, of land-hungry settlers who coveted the land set aside for reservations.

Needless to say, this was not a popular stand in Texas, and Neighbors made many enemies among his fellow whites. In the mid-1850s, he decided that the only way to end the escalating tensions and violence was to establish reservations beyond the existing line of settlement. He finally succeeded in getting Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to authorize the establishment of two reservations on the upper Brazos. Neighbors hoped to convince the previously nomadic Indians to settle down and become farmers—a shockingly misguided, if not downright stupid, notion, and one that was clearly doomed to failure. As it was, less than five hundred of the Penateka Comanches (only about a third of the band’s entire population) moved onto the Clear Fork Reservation, at Camp Cooper in Throckmorton County. About a thousand other Indians, mostly Caddos and Wichitas, moved onto the Brazos Reservation, south of Fort Belknap in Young County.

And then, of course, the line of white settlement, moving inexorably westward, reached the upper Brazos, with predictable results. Whites who coveted the land began blaming the reservation Indians for the depredations committed by those who had refused to move onto the reservations. The loathsome John R. Baylor, who had been fired as an agent on the Clear Fork Reservation after feuding with Neighbors, became the editor of a virulently anti-Indian newspaper called The White Man and pledged himself to exterminating the Indians; toward that end, he called for, and even organized, violence against the reservation Indians. While acknowledging that the residents of the Brazos and Clear Fork reservations were more sinned against than sinning, the government finally concluded that enough was enough, and decided to end the experiment.

In the summer of 1859, therefore, Neighbors supervised the removal of all 1,500 residents of the Brazos and Clear Fork reservations to a new reservation on the Washita River in Indian Territory. (Among the contractors involved in this trek was the San Antonio freighter James Duff, soon to become a notorious figure in the Hill Country, as I wrote in an earlier post.) In August, after leading his charges across the Red River, Neighbors wrote to his wife that he had left “the land of the Philistines.” Upon his return to Fort Belknap a little over a month later he was murdered, shot in the back by Edward Cornett, a man he didn’t even know but who apparently despised his conciliatory attitude toward the Indians. In The Texas Rangers, Walter Prescott Webb reported the story that a group of Texas Rangers, outraged by Neighbors’ assassination, “went after Ed Cornett, and brought him to justice without the aid of judge or jury.”

I suspect that Neighbors himself, a man of honor and principle who believed wholeheartedly in the sanctity of the law, would not have approved. He seems to have been one of those ostentatiously virtuous men who manage to alienate and offend their fellows while living unimpeachable lives; perhaps the rest of us simply can’t stand being reminded how far short of the mark we fall. In fact, Neighbors may have had more than a whiff of self-righteousness about him. In Empire of the Summer Moon, Gwynne says that Neighbors’ behavior as Indian agent was characterized by “earnest and well-meaning naïveté,” as opposed to the “pure hypocrisy” of many of his peers, which sounds like fairly faint praise. By attempting to stand in the way of Manifest Destiny, trying to turn the Penateka Comanches into farmers, and expecting the government to live up to the terms of its own treaties, Neighbors may have revealed himself as a fool. But we will never stop needing such fools, men and women who are unafraid to speak truth to power even at the risk of their lives, and God help us if they ever disappear entirely.

Jeez. I promise I’ll try to find something a little cheerier to write about next time.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent
Martin: S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

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“Sit. Stay. Stay! I said STAY, dammit!”

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Heather

Despite the temptation to give myself over to ululations for the natural world in light of the recent midterm elections, I will be brave and strong. In fact, I’ll look to our dogs for clues about how to move ahead in confounding times with good cheer, if not always with a lot of grace, and perhaps with only an occasional low moan or two.

In an earlier post, I considered the change my walking pace has undergone over the years. What has remained constant is the presence of dogs on these rambles. When I’m in Colorado, I usually borrow dogs from my sister or my father. (Walking with my mother’s dogs was often a little demoralizing; she worried aloud that bears and mountain lions might attack them, but she never expressed any anxiety for me.) At Madroño, I’ve walked with a long line of brave and stupid dogs who’ve both saved me from and almost led me to some gruesome fates.

The first was sweet Daisy, a lovely golden retriever/English setter mix and the mildest of dogs—until she was on the ranch, where she became Trained Assassin Daisy, Scourge of Armadillos! I had never known that armadillos had much to say until I watched Daisy in hot pursuit of one at the north end of the property; speedier than it looked, it made a loud whirring noise, as if it were wearing a propeller beanie. Daisy missed that one, but she got lots of others. We decided that she loved them because they were “crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside.”

One Thanksgiving Day at the ranch, we were all—parents, siblings, children, dogs, friends—walking up the steep hill above the lake when Daisy proudly came galloping up to us with what she must have thought was an unusually hairy armadillo in her mouth. She was delighted until she dropped it at our feet and found that much of it remained in her mouth. (It was, of course, a porcupine.)

Sweet as she was, she allowed us to pull out many of the hundreds of spines in her snout, under her tongue, in her gums, etc., but the job proved to be too much for us. Even though it was a holiday, we tracked down a laconic vet in Hunt who said he wasn’t doing anything but watching football, so sure, bring her on in. When they had gotten Daisy anesthetized and yanked out the remaining spines, Martin said to the vet, “Well, I bet most dogs only make this mistake once, right?” The vet cocked an eyebrow and said, “You’d be surprised.” Thank heavens we haven’t been surprised since then.

A few years later, we found a black puppy with a broken back leg at the gate who turned out to be Phoebe, our now-blind life-guide, about whom Martin wrote admiringly a few weeks ago. Phoebe has been a wonderful walking companion, although one of her chief virtues—steadiness—may very well stem from the fact that her eyesight was never very good; maybe she just didn’t see all those armadillos and porcupines and deer. She did notice snakes, however, and helpfully made little sideways hops to notify me that I should step elsewhere.

But even the admirable Phoebe occasionally caused me dismay. Aside from her tragic and annoying moans whenever I stopped to listen for and look at birds, Phoebe proved to be susceptible to wayward influences like, for example, our next dog, Honey. One day, a couple of months after Daisy died, I was at our neighborhood pharmacy in Austin. A couple of local kids who worked there had brought in a dog they’d found on the downtown hike and bike trail, skittish and covered with fleas. Their mothers had told them to find it another home. I looked and saw a fluff-bomb with an absurdly curling tail who might have had chow and/or golden retriever and/or some mountain dog in her, and maybe a little Ewok too. The kids noticed that I couldn’t take my eyes off her and asked, “Do you want her?” “Yes,” I said, helplessly smitten. Martin said something else, which I can’t repeat here, when I returned home with toothpaste, shampoo, and a new dog, but Honey was irresistible.

She was also, alas, flightier than Phoebe. Once, after the kids and our friend Charles and I had scrambled up a beautiful and nearly inaccessible draw at the ranch, we came upon a herd of aoudads, who were as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Honey got a young aoudad in her sights and went after it, determined to tear its throat out, despite the shrieks and rocks we hurled at her. She backed the youngster into a fence while its mother threatened to eviscerate her with her great curling horns. Charles gallantly gave up his belt to get our darling murderous fluff-bomb under control, as Phoebe valiantly barked encouragement from a safe distance.

Another time, one of my favorite emergency-backup children and I went walking with Phoebe and Honey. We were in the canyon where we had once found a pair of rusted iron bedsteads and a rusted cast-iron Dutch oven, just poking around to see what other inexplicable but suggestive oddities we might find, when we heard a series of distinctively coyotic yips in the dense woods around us. In an instant, the dogs were gone, gone, gone. Despite our most beguiling efforts, Phoebe and Honey yodeled their way up to the top of the draw, and then Dave and I heard something else: snorts. Hogs. The woods were so thick we couldn’t see them, but we could hear them. Lots of them. Close by. Oh, great, I thought. How am I going to explain to my best friend that her sweet gangly son was carved up by feral hogs because my idiot dogs went gallivanting off to be eaten by a pack of coyotes? We all made it back to the house safely, but Phoebe’s irresponsible behavior still galls me.

And then another time, the dogs and I were out by ourselves when they, officers of ranch security, uncovered a plot by a couple dozen sows and piglets to disrupt our walk. Much barkage. Much squealing. Much inelegant scrambling by Someone to get into a tree and above tusk level. Much hilarity in the kitchen after our return to think about Someone sitting in a scruffy little scrub oak for half an hour wondering if the dogs were still alive and if the pigs were really gone. Phoebe got a really scalding series of lectures for that lapse.

Generally speaking, though, Honey and Phoebe were fine walking companions. When Honey died of cancer a few years ago, we realized that she had been acting as Phoebe’s seeing-eye dog, because Phoebe’s deteriorating eyesight meant she was quite literally lost without her. Phoebe’s ranch rambles have ended, but Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound has become my new companion and is presenting all sorts of interesting challenges.

While she doesn’t seem to have Daisy’s and Honey’s ferocious streak (except, sadly, when it comes to chickens), she has a hair-trigger chase reflex and is speedy enough to catch a deer, as we learned to our amazement a few years ago (fortunately, once she finally cornered it in the angle of a fence, she seemed content just to lie there panting and stare at it), or anything else that roams the ranch. (She’s learned to ignore the bison, a fine survival strategy; despite their awkward-appearing bulkiness, bison are plenty quick themselves, and they definitely don’t like dogs.) I’ve started using a shock collar on her, to discourage her from rocketing off after hogs; I heard not too long ago about a woman whose dogs took off after a bunch of hogs, who then turned on the dogs, who then ran back to their mom, who ended up with sixty stitches in her leg from the pursuing porkers. Fortunately, Chula is a total wienie when it comes to pain, and the early results with the shock collar have been promising.

The adventures, clearly, will continue.

What we’re reading
Heather:Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
Martin: Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island

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"The Blackest Crime in Texas Warfare"

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Martin

Our usual route from Austin to Madroño Ranch takes us through Johnson City to Fredericksburg via Highway 290, and then down Highway 16 through Kerrville to the turnoff opposite the Medina Children’s Home. Every time I pass the sign for Turtle Creek, an unremarkable little stream just past the turnoff for FM 1273, about five miles south of Kerrville, I am reminded of one of the bloodiest and most controversial episodes in the extraordinarily bloody and controversial history of the state: the battle of the Nueces, labeled “The Blackest Crime in Texas Warfare” by the Dallas Morning News almost seventy years later.

Central Texas is dotted with German settlements dating from the mid-nineteenth century: Fredericksburg, Boerne, New Braunfels, Comfort, Sisterdale, and many more. The German settlers—more than 7,000 of them came between 1844 and 1847 alone—were a diverse group, according to the late Terry Jordan, arguably the leading scholar of European immigration to Texas: “They included peasant farmers and intellectuals; Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists; Prussians, Saxons, Hessians, and Alsatians; abolitionists and slaveowners; farmers and townsfolk; frugal, honest folk and ax murderers.”

Perhaps. But while some German Texans, including prominent journalists such as Ferdinand Lindheimer, defended slavery, and others, like August Buchel, served in the Confederate army, the popular image was, and is, of a relatively liberal, well-educated, and homogeneous group who opposed slavery and secession and remained stubbornly pro-Union. In 1854, at the annual Staats-Sängerfest (state singing festival) in San Antonio, the delegates adopted a resolution condemning the “peculiar institution,” and in 1857, as I noted in an earlier post, Frederick Law Olmsted applauded the abolitionist sentiments he found among the denizens of the Hill Country. It should come as no surprise, then, that many who supported secession and the Confederacy were suspicious of the insular, “radical” immigrants of central Texas.

To make matters worse, some of the more outspoken German Texans organized the Union Loyal League in June 1861, and by March 1862 they were openly celebrating Union victories and had organized a battalion of three well-armed militia companies, with Fritz Tegener, a Prussian emigré who owned a sawmill near Hunt and served as Kerr County treasurer, as major and commander. The militia was supposedly meant to protect the Hill Country from Indians and outlaws in the absence of Federal troops, but its presence, understandably, made the Confederate authorities nervous. Confederate general Hamilton P. Bee, commander of the Western Sub-district of Texas, sent Capt. James Duff, a former San Antonio freighter and founder of an irregular force called Duff’s Partisan Rangers, to take control of the area.

Duff, who declared martial law in July 1862, was later nicknamed “the Butcher of Fredericksburg” for his harsh actions as provost marshal; one historian, writing a century after the fact, noted that “his arrests and depredations on the citizens of these counties seem unjustifiable,” though others say that accounts of his cruelty were a “myth.”

At any rate, an atmosphere of fear, distrust, and confusion had settled over the Hill Country by August 1, when a group of about eighty men, most of them German Texans, met on Turtle Creek, just a few miles north of Madroño Ranch. Sixty-one of them, with Tegener in charge, decided that their best bet was to flee Texas until the hostilities died down—in retrospect, a tragic miscalculation. They determined to try to reach Mexico by riding west to the mouth of the Devils River on the Rio Grande (the site of present-day Amistad Reservoir) and then crossing into Mexico, but Duff learned of their plans and sent Lt. Colin D. McRae, with ninety-four mounted troopers, in pursuit.

The unsuspecting Germans made little effort to cover their tracks, and McRae and his men easily traced them across the Medina and Frio rivers before catching up to them on the afternoon of August 9 on the West Fork of the Nueces River in northeastern Kinney County. A few of Tegener’s men had reported seeing unidentified riders behind them, but the commander dismissed their reports and told the group to make camp in a grassy clearing on the west bank of the river.

The precise details of what happened next are lost to time, but the following seems to be the most commonly accepted version. McRae and his men attacked before dawn of the following day. Around twenty-five of the Unionists abandoned the fight almost immediately and managed to slip through the Confederate lines in the darkness and confusion. McRae’s troops killed nineteen of the remaining Unionists and captured nine others who had been wounded; Tegener himself was wounded, but managed to escape. Shockingly, the Confederates executed the nine wounded prisoners a few hours after the skirmish, shooting them in the head as they lay face-down and defenseless on the ground. As a final indignity, McRae’s men left the bodies of their victims unburied, “prey to the buzzards and coyotes.” The Confederate casualties included two killed and eighteen wounded, McRae among them.

And what of the surviving Unionists, you ask? Eight were killed on October 18, when another Confederate force attacked them as they attempted to cross into Mexico; nine others died in other battles. One man, August Hoffmann, reportedly made his way back to Gillespie County, where he remained in hiding, living on “pear fruit and bear grass,” until the spring of 1863. Tegener himself survived, though legend has it that during his long absence from Texas his wife, assuming he had been killed in the attack, married another man. Haha—awkward! Apparently it all worked out, though, as Tegener himself eventually remarried and went on to become a state legislator and justice of the peace in Travis County.

The encounter on the Nueces almost immediately became what historian Stanley S. McGowen called “one of the state’s most controversial and contentious historiographical events.” The Handbook of Texas notes that “Confederates regard[ed] it as a military action against insurrectionists while many German Hill Country residents viewed the event as a massacre.” Regardless of which side you’re on, it was a terrible thing. In 1865, the families of the men killed on the Nueces gathered their bones and finally interred them at Comfort, where a monument was dedicated on the battle’s fourth anniversary, in 1866. The Treue der Union (Loyal to the Union) monument, pictured above, still stands in Comfort, and historians still debate how best to describe what happened to that group of fearful men who met on humble Turtle Creek on an August day almost 150 years ago.

What we’re reading
Heather: Philipp Meyer, American Rust
Martin: C. J. Chivers, The Gun

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Barbers, bison meat, and the invisible hand

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Heather

I was back in my shiny new persona as salesperson last week, driving out to all the dude ranches around Bandera in hopes of scaring up a market for the hundreds and hundreds of pounds of bison meat we will soon have for sale. Reaction was generally favorable, despite the fact that I didn’t have some basic information at hand, like the prices we’ll be charging.

Aside from feeling like a dummy, a phony, and a bat-brained loony, I had fun. First, there’s very little that I enjoy more than looking at other people’s property. Second, I got to drive down some Hill Country roads I hadn’t been on before and go through the Hill Country State Natural Area, a secluded 5,000-plus-acre park dappled with beautiful blooming grasses and gayflowers, stands of hardwoods, and shining creeks. The third fun thing was getting out and meeting people—not a pleasure my usually introverted self would have anticipated. Our pattern when we go to Madroño has been to get there and dig in, not coming out unless we need something really important, like the newspaper or beer or ice cream or antihistamines. Now, for the first time, we’re starting to meet our neighbors. We’re starting—just barely—to find our way into the community.

I’ve also been rereading Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself, in which community is a central concern. (The book has easily reaffirmed its place on my top-ten favorite novels list.) So this week “community” seems to be the theme that wants to beat me over the head until I wake up and pay attention.

As you might guess from the subtitle, Jayber Crow concerns a small-town Kentucky barber whose life spans most of the twentieth century. Orphaned at an early age, Jayber is raised by a loving great-aunt and -uncle, who die when he is ten. He is sent to an orphanage and finally, a dozen years later, makes his way back to Port William to become its barber, grave-digger, and church janitor. A philosophical-minded bachelor, Jayber watches the community (that’s a map of the whole fictitious area above) over the course of several wars and the encroachment of highways and agricultural technology. Although he witnesses and endures great suffering, at the end he can say truthfully that his book is about Heaven because of the profound love the community bears for itself and for its place, both temporal and spatial.

In part, this love manifests itself in Port William’s economic life. When Jayber returns to Port William, he finds that the town’s previous barber has left, not being able to support his family on his shop’s limited income. Jayber is immediately taken by an old friend to see the town banker, who in introducing himself says, “I’m glad to know you. I knew your mother’s people.” He offers to loan Jayber the money to buy the old barbershop; Jayber describes the terms of the loan as “fair enough, but very strict in what he would expect of me.”

Jayber adds, “You will appreciate the tenderness of my situation if I remind you that I had managed to live for years without being known to anybody. And that day two men who knew who and where I had come from had looked at me face-on, as I had not been looked at since I was a child…. I felt revealed, as if to buy the shop I had to take off all my clothes.” Going into business requires him to become a part of the community, to care about its constituent parts in order to make his own way in the world.

I had imagined that this community might make Adam Smith, the patron saint of free-market economics, sneer: it lives within the limits of the land’s fertility, repairs what is broken, patches what is torn, and remains deeply suspicious of debt. Its citizens are generous to those in need, recognizing that they cannot prosper individually without prospering corporately. The antihero of the novel, Troy Chattam, is an ambitious young farmer who contemptuously rejects the old-fashioned ways of his father-in-law; Troy’s mantra is “modernize, mechanize, specialize, grow.” He goes into debt to buy new machinery and listens to agribusiness experts who tell him to use every bit of soil on the place: “never let a quarter’s worth of equity stand idle.” He seems to be a firm believer in the “invisible hand,” famously posited by Smith in his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations, which supposedly guides markets to produce the highest quality goods for the lowest price to the benefit of both producers and buyers; this is what we used to call the American way. Like that of the city for which he was named, however, Troy’s is not a story with a happy ending.

But wait—why in heaven’s name is Adam Smith suddenly part of this conversation? Because I, despite my shocking ignorance of economics, just read Adam Gopnik’s fascinating article on Smith in the October 18 issue of The New Yorker. In it Gopnik argues that Smith’s real question “was not the economist’s question, How do we get richer or poorer?, or even the philospher’s question, How should one live? It was the modern question, Darwin’s question: How do you find and make order in a world without God?”

Gopnik is ostensibly reviewing Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, by Nicholas Phillipson, but he is really using Phillipson’s book as a jumping-off point for his own meditations on economics and community. Readers of The Wealth of Nations tend to ignore Smith’s earlier The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but by doing so, according to Gopnik, we “lobotomize our own understanding of modern life, making economics into a stand-alone, statistical quasi-science rather than, as Smith intended, a branch of the humanities.” In order for humanity to live in community, Smith posits the necessity of “an impartial observer who lives within us, and whom we invent to judge our actions.” Without this imaginative capacity, a market economy can’t exist; unless we can put ourselves in the place of our fellows, we can’t imagine what they might need. “For Smith, the plain-seeing Scot,” writes Gopnik, “the market may not have been the most elegant instance of human sympathy, but it’s the most insistent: everybody has skin in this game. It can proceed peaceably only because of those moral sentiments, those imaginary internal judges.”

Unfortunately, those imaginary internal judges recede into the background when producers band together in order to eliminate competition and control prices; according to Phillipson (via Gopnik), Smith believed that “the market moves toward monopoly; it is the job of the philosopher to define, and of the sovereign state to restore, free play.” The market works toward the benefit of all only when it is broadly just—defined (by me) as being in the long-term interests of both producer and consumer. When the scenario Berry imagines in Jayber Crow comes to pass—when economic and business practices fray the fabric of community rather than protect it—then we live in epically tragic times, like those of Troy. When we find communities in economic disarray, then, according to the father of free-market economics, imaginations incapable of sympathy are at the root of the problem.

Of course, this is a pretty self-serving position, since we at Madroño are about to go head-to-head with such giants as H-E-B, who can charge much less for bison meat than we can. But I honestly believe that the long-term health of H-E-B depends on a diverse economic ecosystem in which the building of community—which requires a mutually sympathetic imagination—will rest on the flexible backs of small, dynamic businesses. Which maybe, with the help of our local community, we will become.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself
Martin: Bill Minutaglio, In Search of the Blues: A Journey to the Soul of Black Texas

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How not to write a book

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Martin

Some of you may not know that I am officially a Published Author and therefore—let’s face it—kind of a big deal, but it’s true. And I have to confess that I’ve never really gotten over the thrill of seeing my name on a book cover, which is highly, even dangerously, addictive.

I was reminded of my own importance recently when I was asked to moderate a session at this weekend’s Texas Book Festival. The session is called “A Level Playing Field: Texas Baseball in Black and White,” and features two books about race and Our National Pastime: Our White Boy, by Jerry Craft, and Playing in Shadows: Texas and Negro League Baseball, by Rob Fink. Apparently my friend Dick Holland, the former head of the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University, suggested me as a moderator because he recalled that, many years ago, I had written a book about baseball.

What Dick, and the organizers of the book festival, probably didn’t know is that I was quite possibly the most naïve first-time author in the history of the publishing industry. If there was a mistake to be made in the course of writing and selling a manuscript, I probably made it; heck, I probably made some mistakes that hadn’t even existed before. Even today, the full extent of my ignorance fills me with awe.

Now, I’ve been a baseball fan since childhood, but this particular misadventure started about twenty years ago. After that tirelessly self-promoting cretin Pete Rose was busted for gambling, I became obsessed with an early twentieth century major league star named Hal Chase, for reasons that remain obscure; perhaps I read something comparing Rose and Chase, though I honestly can’t recall. Chase was phenomenally talented, handsome, charismatic, and also, apparently, an incorrigible cheat; in fact, he was accused (though never convicted) of helping to arrange the infamous Black Sox scandal. I decided to write an article about him for The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History, the annual journal of the Society for American Baseball Research. In the course of researching and writing the article, I began to think that somebody should write a book about Chase, and I couldn’t think of a single reason why that somebody shouldn’t be me.

In reality, of course, there were plenty of reasons why that somebody shouldn’t be me, including the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about the publishing industry. Did I need an agent, or should I try to sell the manuscript myself? Should I write it on spec, or should I hold off until I found a publisher willing to pony up an advance? In retrospect, the story of how I became a genuine published author is filled with missteps, ineptitude, and, ultimately, blind luck. I offer it up here as a cautionary tale to other would-be authors.

I’m ashamed to admit that it took me almost a decade to produce an actual finished book. In my defense, I was working on it mostly on weekends, since I had a full-time job, a wife, and two young children. In truth, though, the research and writing was the fun part; the hard part was trying to figure out what to do if I ever actually finished the thing. Early on, a dear college friend suggested I seek advice from her sister, a big-time literary agent in New York (she represented A. S. Byatt, among others). I had no illusions that she would want to represent me herself—I was a nobody, and besides, she specialized in fiction—but she said she’d be glad to offer some suggestions if I sent her a sample of my writing. I sent her a draft chapter or two, and she wrote me back to say she really liked them and would like to take me on as her client.

Well, heck, I thought, this writin’ business is easy! I had found myself a real agent right out of the box. Piece of cake.

Meanwhile, I was grinding away on my research. On weekends, I’d head to the Library of Congress, where I spent countless hours cranking through film of daily newspapers. I traveled, at my own expense, to Cooperstown and San Jose and Tucson to conduct research and interviews. In 1994 I even wangled an introduction to Ken Burns, hoping to convince him that Chase should feature prominently in his forthcoming documentary Baseball; he listened patiently, and later very graciously put me in touch with Chase’s granddaughter, who was estranged from the rest of the family.

Probably the best thing I did in the course of my research was put one of those “author seeking information” notices in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Soon thereafter I received a letter from the director of the University of Illinois Press, who said that he had seen my notice and thought my book sounded like one in which they’d be interested; I thanked him and smugly referred him to my big-shot New York agent.

Some time later I got another note from him saying that he had never gotten a response from my agent. Then I realized that she wasn’t responding to my letters and phone calls either.

After a year or so it became clear even to me that she wasn’t actually doing anything on my behalf; I suspect now that she had agreed to take me on as sort of a favor, given the connection with her sister, but (perhaps understandably) I had ended up at the bottom of her list. I finally sent her a polite letter saying that I had decided to end our relationship. (She never answered it.)

So I was back at square one. Illinois was no longer interested, and neither, after an initial flirtation, was Oxford University Press, but I finally found my own way to McFarland and Company, an outfit in North Carolina that published a number of baseball history books. I imagined battling with their editorial staff over word choice and the overall structure of the manuscript, like Tom Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins; instead, they ran exactly what I sent them. They told me that they would publish my book in paperback only, which was mildly disappointing, but I was in no position to argue.

Hal Chase: The Defiant Life and Turbulent Times of Baseball’s Biggest Crook finally appeared in 2001, and as of this writing ranks 1,655,584th in sales on Amazon.com. (Woo hoo!) The nice people at McFarland send me annual royalty checks (typically for about thirty-seven dollars), which allow me to call myself a professional writer. With any luck, I’ll never actually sit down and calculate the amount of money I’ve earned from my book versus the amount of money I spent producing it.

The really scary thing, though, is that I’m sometimes tempted to try it all again. Just this week, while we were having lunch, my son asked me when I was going to write another book, and it got me thinking again about that idea I had several years ago, for a biography of the old R&B singer Chuck Willis….

See? This writing business is just like crack.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself (again!)
Martin: Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (still!)

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