Tag Archives: West Texas Interlude

Rough Draft of West Texas Interlude

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I have nothing profound to say, but I know there are a few people who keep up with my happenings mainly through this blog, so I must say it:

West Texas Interlude is now a completed rough draft. The first chapter needs some major reworking, and the word’s still out on what kind of help the last three chapters might need. But overall, I’m very satisfied with how the first go-round of writing went. Before I’m to the point of sending out the first draft promised as a reward to Kickstarter backers, I need to do some serious formatting, and I need to add in the photography — but the bulk of the work has been done, and I have a 267-page rough draft. It’s an amazing feeling.

Thank you to everyone who helped get me to this point!

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Oregon Trail and a Change of Plans

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After my friend Jen and I stayed in a yurt at Ft Stevens State Park in Oregon in April, I had the idea to try out another couple of state parks with yurts as a writing retreat while working on West Texas Interlude. Yurts are a perfect way to camp and write — they have locks on the door, so I feel safe camping by myself and being all solitary and writerly, and they have electricity, so I can plug in my laptop. Perfect.

They’re so perfect, they’re extremely popular and booked out months in advance. So, when I got around to looking for places to stay and write this summer, my options were limited. Very limited. I had two dates available in June at two parks, or I could wait until October. I quickly booked the June dates.

And so, on Tuesday morning I set out for Wallowa Lake in northeastern Oregon — Oregon’s “dry side,” the half of the state that, unlike Portland and the coast, gets lots of sun and little precipitation. Except when I set off, it was pouring rain in Kennewick — and it poured on me all the way to the Blue Mountains, where the rain changed to snow. Snow on June 5.

No worries, I thought, I’ll just make my first stop of the trip, and surely it will clear up and I’ll be able to enjoy the Wallowa Mountains and Wallowa Lake this afternoon and tomorrow in a less rainy/snowy/cloudy haze.

That first stop was the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center outside Baker City, a fantastic little visitor center that I highly recommend if you’re ever in northeastern Oregon. They accept the National Parks Annual Pass, which was the main reason I went out of my way to see it on this trip — why not drive a little further if you don’t have to pay the $8 entrance fee?

at the top of Flagstaff Hill

I do, however, recommend not going on a day with high winds and rain, so that you can walk the 2 mile path from the interpretive center on Flagstaff Hill down to the ruts from the Oregon Trail. Just standing at the top of the hill to take a couple of photos of covered wagons was miserable for me — the hood of my rain jacket alternately flew over my eyes and threatened to strangle me, or it violently jerked me backwards. As much as I wanted to make the walk, I was too chicken/lazy/reasonable to do it.

view of the location of old Oregon Trail ruts, from the top of Flagstaff Hill

A few facts I learned at the interpretive center: One out of every ten people who started the trail died along the way. That adds up to one grave for every 80 yards of the 2,000 mile trail. The “prairie schooner” style wagons had a wagon bed 4 feet by 10 feet in size — that’s the same size as one of the raised garden beds at Quinault Community Garden (pretty big for a garden bed, small for a vehicle that holds all your earthly possessions). Some single men skipped the wagon and oxen all together and just walked the trail to Oregon, pushing their belongings in a wheel barrow. For 2,000 miles. That is a heart bent on emigrating.

By the time I finished up at the Oregon Trail and made my way back to La Grande and the turn-off to Wallowa Lake, the forecast hadn’t cleared up like I’d so optimistically assumed it would. Thick clouds still surrounded the mountains, and the online reports still called for a flood watch on the Grande Ronde River until late that afternoon. Snow and rain showers would continue through the night — the snow would be at levels above 4,500 feet, and the campground where I’d booked my yurt was at 4,600 feet. So much for the dry side of Oregon.

As much as I would love to say I’d camped in the snow in June, I’d already had enough driving on slick roads with busily flip-flopping windshield wipers for one day, and I didn’t relish giving up the interstate for a 2-lane mountain road for the next hour and a half in those conditions. Not for an overnight trip where I wouldn’t even see the mountains because of all the clouds and fog surrounding me. I headed for home (back through the snow in the Blues) and will try again next week for a writing retreat at a yurt in Bend, Oregon.

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Other People’s Thoughts: Bosque County Romance

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When I first moved to Yunnan in 2000, my cousin sent with me a two-CD album of cover songs by Lyle Lovett for the purpose, she said, of reminding me of Texas. Step Inside This House became my “homesick music” over the next decade in China. The album lives and breathes home for me. If you’re not familiar with it, you should change that. Each of the songs is poetry in the form of words and guitar. I regularly included selections from the album on my playlist when I worked at Mountain Cafe — it just made me happy, in a simple way, to be in tropical Xishuangbanna, palm trees overhead and fruity drink in hand, to hear Lyle singing “Texas River Song” or mentioning places like Waco or Abilene.

Now that I’m back in the States, the songs from Step Inside This House continue to make my regular playlist. I wrote on the blog last August how “West Texas Highway” and “Ballad of the Snow Leopard and the Tanqueray Cowboy” were part of my soundtrack as I looked through my grandparents’ photos and schemed about putting together a book on West Texas. Not long after, that book began taking more definite shape, and I continue to turn to those songs for writing inspiration. As I interviewed my grandparents earlier this year, they would often have the satellite on their TV turned to the honky tonk radio channel, and many of the songs from Step Inside This House would come up, though in their original recordings, rather than in Lyle’s versions — those songs literally became a soundtrack to the book, as my voice recorder picked up the music in the background while we conducted our interviews. Then, when I spent a few extra days in the Fort Davis area after Pat and Randy headed home from our road trip in March, I mainly chose these CDs as my playlist for my solo drives.

And now, as I’m 50+ pages into the writing of the first draft of West Texas Interlude, I come to the part of the story where Bob D and Ann (my grandparents) tell of how they got married at ages 20 and 18, set off in their car for the desert, and started raising a family in the dust and drought of 1950s West Texas. How could I not think of “Bosque County Romance,” the third song in Steven Fromholz’s “Texas Trilogy” that opens the second disk of Step Inside This House? Change the names Billy and Mary to Bob and Ann, and it sounds so similar to stories I’ve heard from my grandparents. It’s a beautiful song, with Alison Krauss singing harmony.

The song is a story of love built on more than passing emotion, built on a life lived together working in the same direction. It’s the same story of love I see in my grandparents — it’s one of many things I’ve learned and seen in them that I aspire to as well.

I’d love to embed a video of it here, but alas, I could not find one. Here are a few of the lyrics instead:

Mary Martin was a schoolgirl

Just seventeen or so

When she married Billy Archer

About fourteen years ago

Not even out of high school

Folks said it wouldn’t last

But when you grow up in the country

You grow up mighty fast

 

They married in a hurry

In March before school was out

Folks said that she was pregnant,

“Just wait and you’ll find out.”

It came about that winter

One gray November morn

The first of many more to come

A baby boy was born…

 

Now Billy kept what cattle

His daddy could afford

Bouncing across the cactus

In a 1950 Ford

The cows were sick and skinny

And the weeds was all that grew

But Billy kept the place alive

The only thing he knew

 

And Mary cooked the supper

And Mary scrubbed the clothes

And Mary busted horses

And blew the baby’s nose

And Mary and a shotgun

Kept the rattlesnakes away

How she kept on smiling

No one one could ever say…

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Writing about Family

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Writing about family members is a terrifying venture.

I have spent the past 2 1/2 weeks asking my grandparents questions about their lives, recording their answers — while hovering near my grandmother as she sliced brisket to put in the freezer, while sitting on the ottoman at my grandfather’s feet as he flipped through photos on my iPad and recalled the locations and stories belonging to the images. I have attempted to piece together the equipment and techniques involved in land surveying as described by my father and grandfather, men who have known the ins and outs of the profession for decades, to the point that they no longer remember what is common knowledge to mankind and what is only known to surveyors. I don’t even know what it is I don’t know, and I have struggled at times to come up with interview questions. But now I’ve learned what a theodolite is, what a bearing is, how to turn an angle, how to identify a monument or find a corner, and next I will sort out the best way to describe it in the context of West Texas Interlude.

I have 15 hours of recordings from the first research trip and am daunted by the prospect of piecing together the information that belongs to each town, each photo. How will I decide which photos to include, which stories to write, which stories to summarize and which to elaborate upon? How will I organize it all? Which towns will I need to skim over and which ones will require intensive research? Should I focus more on the vacation spots featured in the photos, or on the little towns where the family may have lived for only a few weeks at a time?

But more daunting than any of that — the technical aspects and the artistic decisions — is the prospect of writing a story whose main characters are ones I sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with every year. Ones who held me as an infant. Ones whose opinion and good favor I value more than just about anyone in the world. They are trusting me with their stories, and I will strive to do my best to write them well. I long to approach the stories and the background research with an objective mind, but I cannot deny that my own memories and impressions, my own point of view as a Henderson, color the picture that I lay out on paper. And since I’ve said from the beginning that the book will be a collection of Bob and Ann’s photos and stories combined with my own experience visiting the places they lived, I think it’s OK to allow my impressions to color the process. Still, I tremble at the thought of trying to capture the character of my family on paper, fearful of what they will think of my words, of what I include and what I leave out.

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Pictographs at Paint Rock, TX

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For a period of a few weeks in late 1956, my grandparents lived in San Angelo, Texas, while my grandfather worked on survey sites in the surrounding area. One of his jobs was near the little town of Paint Rock, 32 miles to the east. The survey crew heard about Indian pictographs on a ranch near town, so one day they shut down early to take the tour of the bluff with 1,000-year-old paintings.

When I went camping with friends in West Texas last fall, I asked my grandfather which places he recommended I visit. Paint Rock was at the top of the list. On that trip, though, we ran out of time to drive in that direction, and we missed seeing the pictographs. I decided to make Paint Rock a priority for this first research trip for West Texas Interlude.

I’m planning to write a section on this trip for the book, so I won’t include everything about it here, but I wanted to show a few photos.

Permian period bluff, with pictographs along the top

Visitors have been coming to see the pictographs since the 1800s, but it wasn’t until 1996 that archeo-astronomers realized many of the paintings are sun markers — nomads had turned the bluff into a huge solar calendar. Sunlight comes from different directions in the sky at different times of the year, and the nomads would return from their migrations at Solstice and Equinox to carry out rituals at the bluff.

Click the photo for a larger view of the pictograph.

In the photo above, you can see a sun, five weapons, two birds in flight, and several moons. We visited around mid-day on November 19, and our guide pointed out that the line between sunlight and shadow across the last moon suggests the amount of time left until Winter Solstice on December 22.

sun dagger in turtle pictograph

The above pictograph is a turtle (the symbol of patience) with a sun on his shell. At mid-day on Winter Solstice, the sun dagger will point directly to the center of the turtle. Again, we were here at mid-day only a month from Solstice on our November 19 visit, so the dagger was close, but not quite in the center.

When I told my grandfather last week that I was planning a trip to Paint Rock, he was quite pleased that I would get to see the pictographs. During their years in West Texas, he really enjoyed walking through the vast desert, whether on the job or off, looking for old Indian camps and artifacts. He didn’t make any photos at Paint Rock, however, and I’m really looking forward to visiting him again this week, showing him my photos, and filling him in on the 1996 discovery that the pictographs are a sun calendar.

I would call the first West Texas trip retracing the family’s footsteps a success! The project is well underway, and it truly is exciting to be able to work on this book.

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Boonsville, TX

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cemetery, community center, and fire department -- that's pretty much all there is to see in Boonsville

The photos are matted, preliminary reading is underway, and now it’s time to head to Texas for the first research trip for my work-in-progress, West Texas Interlude. If you haven’t heard about it already, it is a nonfiction book, a collection of photos and stories from one family (my family)’s adventure living in the desert in 1950s West Texas.

The first stage of in-person research will take place in North Texas at my grandparents’ place. My voice recorder is primed and ready for the interviews. I plan to stay with my grandparents as much as I can during this 2 1/2 weeks in Texas, and I have pages of interview questions all set for them, along with maps and the set of 800+ photos to look through. There’s a ton of work to be done, needless to say. I hope to come away from this research trip with a detailed chronological timeline of the towns where the family lived in the 50s, as well as an idea of how to plan the itinerary for the West Texas road trip in early 2012 — and maybe even a general outline of the book itself. We’ll see. Maybe that’s a bit ambitious at this point, but I’d love it if I could at least get a better idea of how to organize the material I want to include (that is, how to interweave the elements of stories and photos from the 50s, background info on West Texas towns, and my present day experience on this upcoming road trip).

A few people have asked if I’ll be blogging while I’m in Texas this month, and I honestly don’t know how that will look at this point. I would love to post updates on the research, but I’m not sure how feasible it will be. Partly because I want to focus as much as I can on getting the most out of this trip, both with the research and with visiting family over Thanksgiving, and I don’t want blogging to take away from that. And partly because I don’t know what the internet situation will be for the majority of my trip.

Actually, I do know. My grandparents have dial-up internet on an old, old, old computer that I know would only frustrate me to try to use, so I’m not going to even consider that as an option. Their place, the No Money (0$) Ranch, is a few miles outside of Boonsville, Texas, population 52. The next closest towns of any size are Springtown (pop. 2062), Bridgeport (pop. 4309), Jacksboro (pop. 4533), or Decatur (pop. 5201) all about 15 to 25 miles away from the Boonsville Volunteer Fire Department — the only location in the vicinity of No Money that Google Maps recognizes, including the town of Boonsville itself. I’m guessing one of those towns might have a coffee shop with wi-fi, but that’s quite a ways to drive to check email and post blogs. Good thing gas is cheaper in Texas than in Washington.

I’ll check in as much as I can and am excited to see where this research takes me and my book.

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Kickstarter Launch for West Texas Interlude

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driving into Austin, 1950s

Today is launch day!

I have just one month — 31 days — to reach my fundraising goal for the Kickstarter campaign for my nonfiction book West Texas Interlude. This is such an exhilirating time for me — I’m really excited about working on West Texas Interlude, about all the research and work involved, and I truly believe it’s a worthwhile book that many people will enjoy and that will preserve a slice of history from West Texas in the 1950s. It is especially exhilirating to take on this project with the support of others. I do not work in isolation, and that is such a comforting thought.

How can you be a part of making West Texas Interlude happen? (I know you’re dying to ask.)

Help spread the word to others who might be interested — people who like history, who like vintage photography, who are interested in West Texas, who think the 1950s was a fascinating period of time, who just enjoy a well-told story. Would you be willing to send an email with a link to the Kickstarter campaign to a friend who you genuinely think would be interested in reading West Texas Interlude?

And if you are one of those people interested in history, photography, West Texas in the 1950s, or a well-told story, would you be willing to visit my campaign site and support the project, in return for a digital copy of the finished book?

Thank you for your love and support! Let’s see how this turns out at the end of 31 days…

To support the campaign to research and write West Texas Interlude, click here.

To read more about Kickstarter, click here.

To read more about the concept of West Texas Interlude, click here.

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