Texas Plains Quotes

She dug in her backpack, found her cell phone, and checked for coverage. It was kind of lame in Morganville, truthfully, out in the middle of the prarie, in the middle of Texas, which was about as middle of nowhere as it was possible to get unless you wanted to go to Mongolia or something.... Claire started dialing numbers. The first person told her that they'd already found somebody.... The second one sounded like a weird old guy. The third one was a weird old lady. The fourth one... well, the fourth one was just plain weird.

Now we were on the great Texas plain and, as Dean said, "You drive and drive and you're still in Texas tomorrow night.

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.

Lubbock, Amarillo, and Wichita Falls are the three principal cities of the Texas plains cities that I find uniformly graceless and unattractive. In summer they are dry and hot, and winter cold, dusty, and windswept; the population is rigidly conformist on the surface and seethes underneath with Imperfectly suppressed malice.

Much of Texas took its prohibition seriously. Not Dalhart. It took its whiskey seriously, in part because some of the finest corn liquor in America was coming out of the High Plains.

Worse, Lee felt isolated. In Texas he skipped meals with others to avoid “uninteresting men,” wishing he was back by his campfire on the plains eating his meals alone.211 He avoided sharing quarters and found that he “would infinitely prefer my tent to my-self.”212 In a group he felt more alone than out on the prairie, and that “my pleasure is derived from my own thoughts.

Connie Madison Parker, age 36, on Merchandise: "You got to put your goods on display, babe. Otherwise, not only will the boys ignore you but—an' trust me on this, my sister's flat as you—we're talkin' the Great Plains of East Texas — no landmarks — one day you'll look down and have no wares at all. What'll you do then?

In Texas there’s so much space words have a way Of getting lost in the silence before they’re spoken So people hang on a long time to what they have to say; And when they say it the silence is not broken, But it absorbs the words and slowly gives them Over to miles of white-gold plains and grey-green hills, And they are part of that silence that outlives them.

The committee had been baffled by Bee. She had no fingerprints on record. The Committee believed her to be either Florence White, a plain and friendless girl who had disappeared from a steam laundry in Cohoes, New York, or Darlene Simpkins, a plain and friendless girl who had last been seen accepting a ride with a swarthy stranger in Brownsville, Texas.

I scrubbed in the water while Ellie Mae chased a jackrabbit that was wandering on the shore. She nearly caught the rabbit, but the rabbit called for reinforcements. Soon nearly eighty rabbits emerged from the brush and began chasing my dog across the Texas plains. These were not rabbits like we have in Florida. Some of these were carrying tomahawks, and a few were on horseback.

Across the immense plain of night lay the first Texas town, Dalhart, which I'd crossed in 1947. It lay glimmering on the dark floor of the earth, fifty miles away. The land by moonlight was all mesquites and wastes. On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty, she mellowed and rolled, til the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows-and still we rolled.

HOUSTON, TEXAS, IS A CULTURE DISH of urban sprawl, a baffling and stultifying and astonishing congeries of good taste, bad taste and no taste scattered across five hundred square miles of flat Gulf coastal plains.

He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education and, even more amazing, no superiority complex since he had succeeded despite that lack. He would say often, "I been to school three years in my life. In Slaten, Texas, times was hard, and I had to help my daddy on the farm." No recriminations lay hidden under the plain statement, nor was there boasting when he said, "If I'm living a little better now, it's because I treats everybody right.

The mythic American character is made up of the virtues of fairness, self-reliance, toughness, and honesty. Those virtues are generally stuffed into a six-foot-tall, dark-haired, can-do kind of guy who is at once a family man, attractive to strange women, carefree, stable, realistic, and whimsical. in the lore of America, that man lives on the Great Plains. he's from Texas, Dodge City, Cheyenne, the Dakotas, or somewhere in Montana. In fact, the seedbed of this American character, from the days of de Tocqueville through Andrew Jackson, Wyattt Earp, Pony Express riders, pioneers, and cowboys to modern caricatures played by actors such as Tom Mix, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne has aways been the frontier. It's a place with plenty of room to roam, great sunsets, clear lines between right and wrong, and lots of horses. It's also a place that does not exist and never has. The truth is that there has never been much fairness out here.

The Forty-fifth Division was originally made up largely of men from Oklahoma and West Texas. I didn’t realize how different certain parts of our country are from others until I saw those men set off in a frame, as it were, in a strange, faraway place. The men of Oklahoma are drawling and soft-spoken. They are not smart alecks. Something of the purity of the soil seems to be in them. Even their cussing is simpler and more profound than the torrential obscenities of Eastern city men. An Oklahoman of the plains is straight and direct. He is slow to criticize and hard to anger, but once he is convinced of the wrong of something, brother, watch out. Those

This story takes place on stolen land. While Sorrowland is set in a United States with a speculative and amorphous shape, the geography and settings explored are based on areas traditionally stewarded by the Tonkawa, Caddo Nation, and Lipan Apache in what are colonially known as Central and East Texas, as well as on lands historically, inhabited by various Plains nations with shifting territories, including the Apsáalooke/Crow, Oceti Sakowin/Sioux, and Arapaho, in what settlers have designated Wyoming and Montana. No story of the so-called United States is complete without an understanding of its foundation on genocide and dislocation, nor without acknowledgment of the Indigenous people still here fighting the ongoing occupation.

The arrival of cotton growers in most cases displaced the indigenous inhabitants. In the antebellum decades, native peoples who had inhabited the cotton-growing territories of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi had been pushed farther west. Now pressure resumed. In October 1865, the Kiowa and Comanche were forced to give up land in central Texas, west Kansas, and eastern New Mexico—land that was turned, among other things, into cotton plantations. Shortly thereafter, many of the Texas plains Indians were pushed into reservations in Oklahoma, and so were the last southwestern Indians during the Red River War of 1874 and 1875, thereby freeing up further land for cotton growing.28 Yet Oklahoma ultimately provided little protection for these Native Americans. By the 1880s, the old Oklahoma and Indian territories came under pressure from white settlers who hoped to displace the native population from the most fertile lands.

He was a simple man who had no inferiority complex about his lack of education and, even more amazing, no superiority complex because he had succeeded despite that lack. He would say often, "I been to school three years in my life. In Slaten, Texas, times was hard, and I had to help my daddy on the farm." No recriminations lay hidden under the plain statement, nor was there boasting when he said, "If I'm living a little better now, it's because I treats everybody right.

I think Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has done terrible damage to the state and to the nation. Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America—the South, the West, the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between the rural areas and the cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, Kansas and Louisiana more dysfunctional, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future.

Think of Chicago as a piece of music, perhaps,” he continued. “In it you can hear the thousands of years of people living here and fishing and hunting, and then bullets and axes, and the whine of machinery, and the bellowing of cattle, and the shriek of railroads, and the thud of fists and staves and crowbars, and a hundred languages, a thousand dialects. And the murmur of the lake like a basso undertone. Ships and storms, snow and fire. To the north the vast dark forests, and everywhere else around the city rolling fields of farms, and all roads leading to Chicago, which rises from the plains like Oz, glowing with light and fire at night, drawing people to it from around the world. A roaring city, gunfire and applause and thunder. Gleaming but made of bone and stone. Bitter cold and melting hot and clotheslines hung in the alleys and porches like the webbing of countless spiders. A city without illusions but with vaulting imaginations and expectations. A city of burning energies on the shore of a huge northern sea. An American city, with all the violence and humor and grace and greed of this particular powerful adolescent country. Perhaps the American city—no other city in the nation is as big and central and grown up from the very soil. Chicago was never ruled by Spain or England or France or Russia or Texas, it shares no ocean with other countries, it is no mere regional captain, like Cincinnati or Nashville; it is itself, all brawn and greed and song, brilliant and venal, almost a small nation, sprawling and vulgar and foul and beautiful, cold and cruel and wonderful. Its music is the blues, of course. Sad and uplifting at once, elevating and haunting at the same time. You sing so that you do not weep. You have no choice but to sing. So you raise up your voice and sing of love and woe, and soon another voice joins in, and you sing together, for a while, for a time, perhaps a brief time, but perhaps not.…

Seeking a contrast to the government action they called socialism, southern Democrats after the Civil War celebrated the American cowboy, who began to drive cattle from the border of Texas and Mexico north across the plains to army posts and railheads in 1866. In their view, cowboys were real Americans who wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone. The Democratic press mythologized these cowboys as white men (in fact, a third of the cowboys were men of color) who worked hard for a day’s pay independent of the government—although the government bought the cattle, funded the railroads, and fought Indigenous Americans who pushed back against the railroads—all the while fighting off warriors, Mexicans, and rustlers who were trying to stop them.[

And now the solider toiled upward through an extremely steep ascent over rock outcroppings and ravines. At the top, they saw something few white men had ever seen: the preternaturally flat expanse of the high plains, covered only with short buffalo grass. 'As far as the eye could reach,' wrote Carter, 'not an object of any kind or living thing was in sight. It stretched out before us- one uninterrupted plain, only to be compared with the ocean in its vastness.' The scene was terrifying even for men with experience of the plains. 'This is a terrible country,' railroad worker Arthur Ferguson had written a few years earlier, 'the stillness, wildness, and desolation of which is awful... Not a tree to be seen... and it seemed as if the solitude had been eternal.

Elegy Oh destiny of Borges to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world or across that single and solitary sea of diverse names, to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the two Cordobas, of Colombia and of Texas, to have returned at the end of changing generations to the ancient lands of his forebears, to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they mixed their blood, to have wandered through the red and tranquil labyrinth of London, to have grown old in so many mirrors, to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues, to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias, atlases, to have seen the things that men see, death, the sluggish dawn, the plains, and the delicate stars, and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires a face that does not want you to remember it. Oh destiny of Borges, perhaps no stranger than your own.

Trip Advisor: Travel America with Haiku [Texas] Grackles roosting, sentinels on miles of phone line. Don't Mess with Texas. Austin rush hour, "Go down Mopac. You don't wanna mess with I-35." Athens, Texas, Blackeyed Pea Capital of the World. Yup, just another shithole. Killeen, Texas, Kill City, Boyz from Fort Hood. Spending every paycheck. Texas A&M;, Aggies football, the wired 12th man. Too lazy to plant in the Spring. Fredericksburg, Texas. Polka Capital of Texas but I could swear I saw Hitler there. Ft. Worth, Texas, Where the West Begins and a great place to leave. San Antonio, Texas, Fiesta! Alamo City! Northstar Mall! I've been to better tourist traps. Dallas, Texas, D-Town, City of Hate. Don't miss the Galleria. Lubbock, Texas, Oil wells, Hub of the Plains. Stinks like an armpit. Waco, Texas, The Buckle of the Bible Belt. Lossen it up a notch. Neck dragon tattoo, piercings, purple haired kindergarten teacher. Keep Austin weird.

To Anita Pollitzer Canyon, Texas 11 September 1916 Tonight I walked into the sunset — to mail some letters — the whole sky — and there is so much of it out here — was just blazing — and grey blue clouds were rioting all through the hotness of it — and the ugly little buildings and windmills looked great against it. But some way or other I didn't seem to like the redness much so after I mailed the letters I walked home — and kept on walking — The Eastern sky was all grey blue — bunches of clouds — different kinds of clouds — sticking around everywhere and the whole thing — lit up — first in one place — then in another with flashes of lightning — sometimes just sheet lightning — and sometimes sheet lightning with a sharp bright zigzag flashing across it —. I walked out past the last house — past the last locust tree — and sat on the fence for a long time — looking — just looking at the lightning — you see there was nothing but sky and flat prairie land — land that seems more like the ocean than anything else I know — There was a wonderful moon — Well I just sat there and had a great time all by myself — Not even many night noises — just the wind — I wondered what you are doing — It is absurd the way I love this country — Then when I came back — it was funny — roads just shoot across blocks anywhere — all the houses looked alike — and I almost got lost — I had to laugh at myself — I couldnt tell which house was home — I am loving the plains more than ever it seems — and the SKY — Anita you have never seen SKY — it is wonderful — Pat.

Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five thousand extras and sixty airplanes in some scenes—an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan—the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa—and stunt fliers were used for the more dangerous scenes. Wellman asked a lot of his airmen. One pilot was killed, another broke his neck, and several more sustained other serious injuries. Wellman did some of the more dangerous stunt flying himself. All this gave the movie’s aerial scenes a realism and immediacy that many found almost literally breathtaking. Wellman captured features of flight that had never been caught on film before—the shadows of planes moving across the earth, the sensation of flying through drifting smoke, the stately fall of bombs, and the destructive puffs of impact that follow. Even the land-bound scenes were filmed with a thoughtfulness and originality that set Wings apart. To bring the viewer into a Parisian nightclub, Wellman used a boom shot in which the camera traveled through the room just above table height, skimming over drinks and between revelers, before arriving at the table of Arlen and Rogers. It is an entrancing shot even now, but it was rivetingly novel in 1927. “Wings,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt simply in The New Yorker in 1971, “is truly beautiful.” Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman, however, wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.

The Second Middle Passage was the central event in the lives of African-American people between the American Revolution and slavery's final demise in December 1865. Whether slaves were themselves marched across the continent or were afraid that they, their families, or their friends would be, the massive deportation traumatized black people, both slave and free. Like some great, inescapable incubus, the colossal transfer cast a shadow over all aspects of black life, leaving no part unaffected. It fueled a series of plantation revolutions - cotton across the immense expanse of the Lower South, sugar in the lower Mississippi Valley, hemp in the upper valley - that created new, powerful slave societies. Although the magnitude of the changes and the vastness of the area effected - from the hills of Appalachia to the Texas plains - encouraged an extraordinary variety of social formations, no corner escaped the experience of the staple-producing plantation. Its presence resonated outside the region, eroding slavery on the seaboard South to such an extent that some portions of the Upper South - most prominently the border slave states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri - devolved from slave societies into societies with slaves. Finally, it accelerated the North's evolution from a society with slaves to a free society.

The Ogallala Aquifer covers a vast expanse of the US high plains from Nebraska to Texas; we’re currently depleting it at nine times its recharge rate (a depletion ratio of 9). Other aquifers in the world are faring even worse. The depletion ratio is 27 for the Western Mexico Aquifer, 48 for the Northern Arabian Aquifer, and a whopping 54 for the Upper Ganges Aquifer, which provides water for Northern India and Pakistan, including the subcontinent’s wheat belt.

At age sixty-five, Cabeza de Vaca, the first white man to have journeyed into Texas and across its vast plains, died. Texas, a state which would always honor the brave, had its first true hero.

Again, in 1844-'45 the measures taken for the annexation of Texas evoked remonstrances, accompanied by threats of a dissolution of the Union from the Northeastern States. The Legislature of Massachusetts, in 1844, adopted a resolution, declaring, in behalf of that State, that "the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, faithful to the compact between the people of the United States, according to the plain meaning and intent in which it was understood by them, is sincerely anxious for its preservation; but that it is determined, as it doubts not the other States are, to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth"; and that "the project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of the Union.

If it hadn’t been for Mexicans, the South Texas Anglos would never have learned how to cope right with longhorn cattle. If it hadn’t been for Texans, nobody else on the Great Plains would have learned how, either.

In his paper, Dr Davis referred to the infamous 1980 Cash-Landrum UFO case, covered earlier in this book, where the Landrum family reported a massive diamond-shaped UFO hovering over their car in the road near Dayton, Texas. As well as the trio reporting terrible burns from what experts declared was ionising radiation, one of the weirdest claims in the Cash-Landrum sighting was that they said they saw 23 helicopters, including massive CH-47 Chinooks, closely following the object. The US military denied any of its choppers were in the air nearby that night, and 23 of them in one place does sound implausible. Dr Davis’s paper gave an explanation – that the helicopters were ‘mimicry techniques employed for the manipulation of human consciousness to induce the various manifestations of “absurd” interactions or scenery associated with the UFO encounter. This in combination with the mimicry of man-made aircrafts’ (helicopters) aggregate features were prominent in the Cash-Landrum UFO case’. There is no explanation for how Dr Davis reached this conclusion. No known science describes the capacity to manipulate human consciousness to induce hallucinations as described. Modern science would say it was science fiction. However, an answer may lie in extraordinary PowerPoint slides we know now were prepared for a briefing of senior officials at the US Department of Defence, detailed online by The Mind Sublime. The individual behind that site told me he found the intriguing PowerPoint slides in early August 2018 while he was trawling through former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Christopher Mellon’s personal website.4 (This was shortly after The New York Times had revealed the existence of the previously secret Pentagon UAP investigation program.) The Mind Sublime researcher screenshotted his discovery to prove the slides came from Mellon’s website, and, importantly, because the document was stated to be a PowerPoint for a briefing of the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence. Perhaps it was these slides that prompted Senator Harry Reid to ask the Department of Defence for Special Access Program protection for the investigation – because what the slides said was momentous. If the unredacted slides accurately reflect the Defence Department’s knowledge of the UAP phenomenon, they are explosive. They reveal how the Pentagon’s UAP investigation unit advised the Defence Department not only that the mysterious craft were a ‘game changer’ but that the US military was powerless against them.5 One of the slides, headed ‘AATIP Preliminary Assessments’, shows that Elizondo’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program privately advised the Defence Department that ‘Preliminary evidence indicates that the United States is incapable of defending itself towards some of those technologies . . . The nature of these technologies and the fact that the United States has no countermeasures is considered Highly Sensitive’.6 The document, prepared for the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence, pushed for further investigation ‘in order to determine the full scope of the threat and their capabilities to be either exploited or defeated’.

We lived in an old broken down school bus down by the beach in south Texas. My dad used to live with us when I was little but he left long ago. Momma said he was like that movie, High Plains Drifter.

them entertained and supplied with a surfeit of horseflesh. But none to really worry about. Their source of food and sustenance, the buffalo, roamed the plains in record numbers and still ranged into every corner of Comancheria. The tribe’s low birth rates virtually guaranteed that their nomadic life following buffalo herds was infinitely sustainable. Their world was thus suspended in what seemed to be a perfect equilibrium, a balance of earth and wind and sun and sky that would endure forever. An empire under the bright summer moon. For those who witnessed the change at a very intimate and personal level, including Cynthia Ann and her husband, the speed with which that ideal world was dismantled must have seemed scarcely believable. She herself, the daughter of pioneers who were hammering violently at the age-old Comanche barrier that had defeated all other comers, now adopted into a culture that was beginning to die, was the emblem of the change. Somehow she and her husband, Peta Nocona, survived the cataclysm. As nomads, they moved constantly. One imagines her on one of these migrations, on horseback, moving slowly across the open grassy plain with hundreds of others, warriors in the vanguard, toward a wide, hazy horizon that would have looked to white men like unalloyed emptiness. There were the long trains of heavily packed mules and horses and the ubiquitous Comanche dogs. There were horses dragging travois that carried the huge tent poles and piled buffalo hides and scored the earth as they went along—perfectly parallel lines drawn on the prairie, merging and vanishing into the pale-blue Texas sky. All trailed by the enormous horse remuda, the source of their wealth. It must have been something to behold. Cynthia Ann lived a hard life. Women did all of the brutally hard work, including most of the work that went into moving camp. They did it from dawn till dark, led brief difficult lives, and did not complain about it; they did everything except hunt and fight. Her camp locations show just how far she roamed. Pah-hah-yuco’s camps were found in 1843 north of the Red River and south of modern-day Lawton, Oklahoma, on Cache Creek (the encampment was on a creek bank on the open prairie and stretched for half a mile).25 In 1844 he was camped on the Salt Plains of present-day north-central Oklahoma, on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River,26 well north of the Washita, where Williams found him in 1846. In 1847 his band was spotted a hundred miles north of Austin, in rolling, lightly timbered prairie, camped in a village of one hundred fifty lodges,27 and again that same year in a village in the limestone hills and mesas west of Austin. She was identified as being with the Tennawish band in 1847, who often camped with the Penateka (with whom Pah-hah-yuco was often

consider what I do poetry. I don’t need to prove I’m a poet in every line, and I’m not afraid to speak plainly in my songs. Not everything needs to be metaphor, and I don’t need lofty words. But it is my obligation as a poet to be faithful to the verse. I write what I know. I write what I see.” “Guy

[Taos is] a high, wise, sage-covered plain. In the evening, with the sun at your back, it looks like an ocean, like water. The color up there is different . . . the blue-green of the sage and mountains, the wildflowers in bloom. It's a different kind of color from any I'd ever seen---there's nothing like that in north Texas or even in Colorado. And it's not just the color that attracted me either The world is so wide up there, so big.

Western Texas was just flat road amid the dusty plains as far as the eye could see. Alexander was driving and smoking; he had turned off the radio so he could hear Tatiana better—but she had stopped speaking. She was sitting on the passenger side with her eyes closed. She had been telling him and Anthony soothing stories of some of her pranks in Luga. There were few stories Alexander liked better than of her child self in that village by the river. Is she asleep? He glances at her, squeezed in around herself in a floral pink wrap dress that comes down to a V in her chest. Her glistening, slightly tender, coral nectar mouth reminds him of things, stirs him up a little. He checks to see what Anthony is doing—the boy is lying down facing away, playing with his toy soldiers. Alexander reaches over and cups a palmful of her breast, and she instantly opens her eyes and checks for Anthony. “What?” she whispers, and no sooner does she whisper than Anthony turns around, and Alexander takes his hand away, an aching prickle of desire mixed with frustration all swollen behind his eyes and in his loins.

In 1971, the Bureau of Reclamation released a plan to divert six million acre-feet from the lower Mississippi River and create a river in reverse, pumping the water up a staircase of reservoirs to the high plains in order to save the irrigation economy of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, utterly dependent on groundwater, from collapse.

Hey,” I said, panting, “next time you find out that a major crime syndicate wants to take over Vegas, maybe let me know before I go to the city where they live? Send me a letter, maybe? Send up some smoke signals?” “Wait, what?” Nicky said. “The Outfit came after you in Texas?” “In Chicago, Nicky. Where the job is. The job you set me up for.

Love just plain hurts sometimes, but we can’t let that stop us from loving. Love is the only thing in the world that really matters.

Cade?" He twisted in his saddle and looked at her questioningly. "What did you mean when you said we were married?" "You accepted my horse, didn't you?" He nodded at the huge gray she rode even now. "You invited me into your house and brought me a dowry of two mustangs. My father approved. That is all that is necessary." His satisfied tone raised her anger. "You know that isn't all that is necessary!" Cade shrugged and walked his mount through a particularly narrow strip between trees. "We can go to town and sign the alcalde's book, if you like. There are no priests. I would take you to San Antonio and a church, but your rebels are probably already there trying to blow holes in the city with their cannon. What more would you have me do?" "You could have at least asked me," Lily answered spitefully. He was too close to truth for comfort. Marriages were a haphazard thing in this country. She would have preferred San Antonio, but after taking Goliad, the rebels were undoubtedly marching to the next city. She didn't want a church that much. But she would have liked to have been asked and to have had her father and son present. She didn't feel in the least married. "If I'm married, what is my name? Mrs. Cade?" He tilted his head as if to consider the notion. "Probably not. It might be easiest if you call yourself Senora de Suela. That's my grandfather's name." "Do you have an Indian name?" "Just my birth name. I did not stay with the tribe long enough to give myself an adult name. My father is Lipan and does not have a family name." "What is your birth name?" They had reached the grassy plain, and Cade could turn and watch her now. Lily supposed the flicker in his eyes could be called amusement. She had never seen him laugh, and rarely did he smile, but she was beginning to understand some of his expressions. Or lack of them. "My father called me something that translates roughly as 'Mighty Quiver.' I never asked him what he was thinking about at the time. My mother called me Luis Philippe, after her father. Do you prefer either of those?" A grin quirked Lily's mouth. Mighty Quiver. She could just imagine a screaming baby boy being called that. She suspected his father had a sense of humor even if Cade did not. He was definitely not a Luis Philippe. She shook her head in reply. "Where does Cade come from?" "The Spanish word for music, cadenza. They thought they insulted me, but they were unaware of the other poor names I had to choose from." Lily didn't want to ask who "they" were or why they would wish to insult him for his love of music. She knew absolutely nothing about this man. "Cade suits you," she answered decisively. "And de Suela?" He lifted his eyebrows questioningly. "Or shall I give myself an adult name now? No one will know the difference." Lily considered this briefly, then shook her head. "I think that is your decision." "De Suela is an old and respected name. I will stay with it, then." Lily de Suela. Considering the state of current affairs, a Mexican name wasn't any better than an Indian one, but she wasn't even certain that either belonged to her. Lily supposed if a child came of their night together, she would be glad of a name for it, but she couldn't reconcile herself to the position of wife just yet. She was just now learning to be herself again. She

The dust blew all over the Great Plains, but the worst and most persistent storms were in parts of five states—southern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, and northeastern New Mexico.

There is a difference between expecting autocracy and accepting autocracy. It is necessary to expect it so that you can plan how you will fight. But the battle lines change, and you often end up changing with them, no matter how hard you try to resist. It is impossible not to change inside when children are snatched from their parents and held in concentration camps at the Texas border; when there is a sociopathic commander in chief with a nuke fetish threatening the world at whim; when the American government operates against the American people in collaboration with hostile states; and when you learn that men carried out horrific acts for decades without repercussions.

I meant I’m used to wild places. I’m from one. Little tiny town in Texas in the middle of nowhere where the sky is so blue it’s blinding and the plains stretch out into forever

Finally, the Comanche sweep into the Texas plains may have been a response to a changing commercial geography. The expulsion of their Taovaya allies from the Arkansas to the Red River in the 1750s under Osage pressure prompted French traders to refocus their operations from the Arkansas channel to the lower Red River, where an important trading satellite, Fort St. Jean Baptiste aux Natchitoches, had been established in 1716. This sudden shift in commercial gravity must have been a strong incentive for Comanches

across the Staked Plains to Ft. Sumner,

stock runnin’ on the plains south of the Platte all the way

When visitors came to the fine state of Texas, they expected a dry, rolling plain studded with longhorn cattle, oil derricks, and an occasional cowboy in a huge hat. According to them, that plain had only one type of weather: scorching. That wasn’t true at all. In fact, we had two types, drought and flood.

The cartel wars in Juarez made it the most dangerous city in the world between 2008 and 2012, even worse than Baghdad. More than 10,000 people were slain during that period. When Monica and I visited, Juarez was experiencing another killing spree, with nearly a hundred murders in October alone. Throughout Mexico, the homicide rate had surged to 18 percent over the previous year. Everyone on both sides of the river was on edge. Downtown Juarez was desolate. Monica pointed out the pink crosses on the lampposts. Since the 1990s, hundreds of Juarez women, most of the teenagers, have been kidnapped, many of them in plain sight on the streets where we were standing. Some of their bodies have turned up in mass graves. Each of the crosses on the lampposts represents one of the missing women.

The Green Hornet was one of radio’s bestknown and most distinctive juvenile adventure shows. With its companion shows, The Lone Ranger and Challenge of the Yukon, it was fed to the network by its originating station, WXYZ, and was distinguished by its use of classical music for themes and bridges between dramatic acts. It was not by chance that Britt Reid, the hero, had all the earmarks of a modern-day Lone Ranger. Faithful listeners would remember that the Ranger’s family name had been Reid: that the lone Texas Ranger who survived the ambush of the treacherous Butch Cavendish gang, long ago in the West, was in reality John Reid, who would don his mask and ride the plains astride his great white horse, Silver, and accompanied by his faithful Indian friend, Tonto, punishing rustlers and restoring the reputations, freedom, ranches, and livelihoods of the God-fearing, the oppressed and the wrongly accused.

I decided to drive straight to Tijuana to make a slow, uninterrupted traverse of the entire frontera, a road trip from west to east, San Ysidro, California, to Brownsville, Texas, which was also Tijuana to Matamoros, zigzagging from the United States to Mexico and back, from one border town to the other.

When you look at it one way, a man don’t amount to a pin-point. But I’m more of a man when I’m out here on the plains. Seems like I can stand up on my hind legs and look God in the face man to man, you might say, and He understands me, and I understand Him.” Letty felt vaguely shocked at what she thought might be irreverence. “I think you can find God best in a church,” she said with prim shyness. “I ain’t sayin’ you can’t find Him there. He must come there sometimes, anyways, to show He appreciates the trouble folks go to fix a place for Him. But I have an idea He’s kind o’ notionate, like me - gets fidgety if you try to pin Him in a house too long.

WHOA! Now that's some thick-cut bacon!" "Oh my gosh! Look! The top of it is gleaming! Just looking at it is making me hungry..." "Wait a minute. If he's copying the transfer student, then the meat he's using should be oxtail, right? So why is he bringing out bacon?" If he's adding bacon to beef stew, there's only one thing it could be. A GARNISH! THE BACON IS MEANT TO BE A SIDE DISH TO THE STEW. Yukihira's recipe is the type that calls for straining the demi-glace sauce at the end to give it a smooth texture. That means its only official ingredients are the meat and the sauce, making for a very plain dish. Garnishes of some sort are a necessity! Beef simmered in red wine- the French dish thought to be the predecessor to beef stew- always comes with at least a handful of garnishes. The traditional garnishes are croutons, glazed pearl onions, sautéed mushrooms... ... and bacon! Then that means... he's going to take that thick, juicy bacon and add it to the stew?!" "Now he's sautéing those extra-thick slices of bacon in butter! He's being just as efficient and delicate as always." "Man, the smell of that bacon is so good! It's smoky, yet still somehow mellow..." "What kind of wood chips did he use to give it that kind of scent?" "You wanna know what I used? Easy. It's mesquite." "Mess-keet?" "Have you heard of it?" "It's a small tree used for smoking that's native to Mexico and the Southern U.S. You'll hardly find it used anywhere in Japan though." "Ibusaki!" Mesquite is one of the most popular kinds of wood chips in Texas, the heartland of barbecues and grilling. Because of its sharp scent, it's mostly used in small quantities for smoking particularly rough cuts of meat, giving them a golden sheen. "But I didn't stop there! I added a secret weapon to my curing compound- Muscovado sugar! I sweetened my curing compound with Muscovado, sage, nutmeg, basil and other spices, letting the bacon marinate for a week! It will have boosted the umami of the bacon ten times over!

The next morning, Carley was nervous about both wolves encountering people. He made the decision to recapture them and place them back in their pens. The men shot cracker shells at Margie, hoping to push her back across the marsh to Bulls Island, but she hunkered down in the woods under deep leafy cover. The team set traps, hoping to catch her quickly, but their activity pushed her closer to U.S. Highway 17, which she crossed and moved to the northwest. It appeared she was on a beeline for the Francis Marion National Forest. On December 22, Carley decided to shoot her with a tranquilizer dart. If that didn’t work out, he’d just plain shoot her the next day. Luckily, a gunner in a Bell JetRanger helicopter lodged a dart in Margie’s back end by 1:00 P.M., saving Carley from having to make a fatal decision. By 3:00 P.M., she was back in her pen on Bulls Island, groggy but alive. The incident marked the first time in the lower forty-eight states that a live wolf was shot with a tranquilizer dart from a helicopter. (It worked so well that Carley began renting helicopters to flush and dart wild canids in the inaccessible marshes and swamps that neither horses nor boats could help his team penetrate in Louisiana and Texas.) The next afternoon, they caught Buddy, too. He had returned to Bulls Island, likely in search of Margie. With both wolves safely in their pen, Carley quipped to his team that the wolves were in better shape than their keepers. He and Dorsett were flat tuckered out. Though everyone laughed at his joke, Carley felt they all looked at him askance. They knew he had been prepared to shoot Margie. “Although it was ‘we’ who decided the statements [to shoot escaped wolves] should be made and adhered to,” Carley wrote in a field report on the incident, “in looking around after the recapture of the wolves, I had the distinct uncomfortable feeling of abandonment, and that ‘we’ had suddenly narrowed to ‘I.

It is never certain for her that the wolves will answer each Wednesday. I wonder for a moment why they do. Surely they know that these are just a bunch of humans trying to speak wolf. Surely they smell us, a group of sixty people cloaked in lotions, colognes, insecticides, and deodorant - announcing our odiferous presence to an animal whose world is ordered by scent - standing in the woods a mere few hundred yards away. Surely they heard our engines as we arrived. Surely they could hear that our pitch is off, that we are an imitation. Yet they accept this and play along. Why? Wolves, it turns out, will howl to a variety of stimuli, including the sirens of emergency responder vehicles. In the late 1960s, when researchers discovered that the red wolf was nose-diving into extinction, they played electronic sirens in southeastern Texas coastal marshes and plains to elicit howls from wild canids. From the howls, they made probable identifications of red wolves and possible hybrids. Coyote vocalizations often have a series of broken yips and barns and emanate at a comparatively higher frequency, whereas red wolves will howl at lower frequencies that start “deep and mournful” but may break off into yapping like a coyote, according to a report authored in 1972 by two trappers, Glynn Riley and Roy McBride, who were employed by the federal government. Early surveyors noted, too, that the red wolves were more likely to howl in good weather and less likely to respond in rainy or overcast weather. Confined to their facility, perhaps the red wolves of Sandy Ridge howl to humans because it gives them a way to communicate with living beings outside their fence. Who knows: maybe they are simply telling us to bugger off and go away. Or, as frightened as they are of seeing a human, perhaps howling to a group of them on a dark night is more palatable since they do not have to look at us or be gawked at in turn. Perhaps howling is a way of reaching out on their own terms, in their own language, through which they can proclaim their space and their place on the land - their way of saying, “Even though I’m in here, behind this fence, I own this place.” Or maybe they just want to remind us that this land had been theirs for millennia before we invaded and claimed it. In the dark of night, I fantasize that their howls are calling out: “All this was ours. This was ours.

Texas A&M International

Just the right amount of cumin and oregano, I can tell," he adds, "and with that zing you got the chile peppers right on the button- three-alarm, I'd say." "Plus paprika and Tabasco and guess what? Beer," I inform him. "But wanna know my real secret? A little bit of bitter chocolate." "Chocolate!" he exclaims. "Yep, chocolate." "How much?" he asks real excited. "That's my little secret, Mr. Dewitt," I tease him as I chuckle. "Well, I'll be damned." "I'm so glad it's not too soupy," Mrs. Dewitt says next. "Just thick enough." "Masa harina?" he asks. "My, my, Mr. Dewitt," I try to compliment him, "I can tell you do know your bowl o' red." He finishes up the bowl and lets out this crude laugh. "Don't fix any myself, but I warned you, sister, you're dealing with real chiliheads around this house." "So you've decided you like it without the beans?" I ask. He wipes his mouth on the linen napkin like he's just eaten Russian caviar instead of plain old Texas chili. "Now, I ain't saying that by a long shot, Loretta, 'cause for me chili's not chili without beans. But I got an open mind, and besides, you say you also fix a big pot of pintos on the side?" "Yeah, I do, spiced up with jalapeños." "What else you serve with your chili?" "Anything you want," I tell him in a real confident tone. "Guacamole, coleslaw, rice, tacos, sour cream, red pepper vinegar, and maybe some corn tortillas my Mexican helper makes- just tell me whatcha like.

I'm not tootin' my own horn or anything, but I gotta say the buffet we set up on my dining room table with a blue-checkered cloth and some fresh daisies couldn't have looked more beautiful. Used my large, glazed, tobacco-spit pottery dish for the casserole, and with the crusty, buttered bread crumb topping, it was appetizing enough to be photographed for a food magazine. For the grits, I'd decided to sprinkle extra Parmesan over the top, so they were not only soft and creamy inside but a crispy golden brown outside. The congealed salad I fixed in a glass mold the shape of a pinecone, so when I turned it out on a plain white platter lined with leaves of romaine, the peaches and pecans could be clearly seen suspended in the lemony aspic in an interesting design. This time my hot buttermilk biscuits were as high and fluffy as Mama's, and next to the cloth-lined straw basket I had a big slab of the sweetest local country butter in the state of Texas, which I buy every weekend at the farmers' market out off Eldridge Parkway. We transferred Rosemary's yummy cake to the cut-crystal plate with tiny legs I remember my grandmamma using for birthday parties, and to tell the truth, I wondered how in hell I was gonna get through that lunch without cuttin' myself more than just a sliver of that mouthwatering caramel layer cake.

Texas congressman had called it “an inefficient fourteenth-century solution to a twenty-first-century problem,” which was accurate because, like a medieval wall, it was merely a symbol of exclusion rather than anything practical, and easily climbed over or tunneled under.

I never even put my hand on Jimmy, not even on his arm, after he found out that Gid was his daddy, and that I was still letting Gid and Johnny get in bed with me. Only I wasn’t letting them come, I was wanting them to: Jimmy didn’t know that, or didn’t understand it, but if he had he would have just hated me more. I blame some of Jimmy’s troubles on religion, but I can’t blame them all on it; I have to blame most of them on myself. If I had married Gid instead of Eddie, Jim might have been a happy boy. But if that had happened, Eddie would have killed Gid, or Gid and Johnny would have fell apart, and there might not have even been a Joe. I don’t know that I done very wrong. But I know that Jimmy’s miserable; some of the time I am too. Four men and two boys were what I’d had for a life, and laying there on the cot I could picture every one of them, plain as day. But there wasn’t a one of them I could get my arms around, and right then, that was what I wanted;

Until this moment she'd always appreciated her grandmother's plain speaking, but with a handsome Pinkerton agent sitting two feet away, she had to fight the sudden urge to use her apron as a gag to keep her grandmother from blurting out anything else humiliating.