Desert Living by the Numbers

by George Covington

(Editor’s Note: George Covington is an attorney, photographer and writer living in Alpine, Texas. Between 1989 and 1993 he was Special Assistant for Disability Policy for the Vice President of the United States. He is the author of PHOTO HERO, A Satire of Photography, available through your local bookstore or on line from Amazon.com or Borders.com or bn.com.)

“What the heck is a blind guy going to do in the middle of a desert?” a close friend demanded. “You can’t see well enough to drive, and they don’t have public transportation out there. What are you going to do, get a seeing-eye armadillo?”

With less than five percent vision, I explained, changing the blurry canyons of New York for the blurry canyons of West Texas wasn’t much of a stretch.

“If you survive it will only be because you were born with more guts than brains,” was my friend’s parting shot.

I am not certain of the accuracy of my friend’s statement, but I was born legally blind and I have always had more guts than eyesight. It was time to go home to Texas.

After 20 years in Washington, D.C. and two years in Manhattan, I moved to tiny Alpine, in the High Chihuahuan Desert of Far West Texas. Because of comments such as, “Have you lost your mind?” and, “It’s a woman, isn’t it?” I sent the following letter to more than a hundred friends:

I am now living in beautiful downtown Alpine, Texas. Of course, living anywhere in Alpine is living a few blocks from downtown. Alpine is located in Brewster County, which is roughly the size of Connecticut with a chunk of Rhode Island thrown in, but with a population of only 8,866. A few vital statistics:

1. The population consists of 58% Anglos, 1.6% African Americans, 43% Hispanics, and 1.8% others.
2. Alpine has an elevation of 4,600 feet, is nestled between mountains and mesas, and is high desert country. It has 5,600 people, a small university, 20 art spaces, and a calendar chock full of social and cultural events.
3. The scorpions are the size of skateboards, and the tarantulas are often mistaken for very fuzzy watermelons.
4. And the rattlesnakes are taken for granted.
5. The jackrabbits are carnivorous and can compete with horses at certain rodeos.
6. The women are all highly intelligent and beautiful, and the men all look like they have been kicked in the face by a bucking bronco, and have the intelligence that would mandate.
7. Through my living room window, I can photograph two mountains, a twin peak, and a mesa.
8. We are 150 miles from the nearest airport, but Amtrak and Greyhound serve us well (when they can get past the scorpions, tarantulas, and rabid jackrabbits; the rattlesnakes only go after 18-wheelers).
9. My apartment is adjacent to Sul Ross State University, which has 1,200 students.
10. NYC in my e-mail address no longer stands for New York City but now stands for Navajo, Yucca, and Comanche.
11. Local gourmet food — road kill. I love it here.

After looking over my list, several of my local friends assure me that rattlesnakes won’t go after 18-wheelers when parked mobile homes are such “easy pickins.”

To my old Texas friends, who were as startled to see me move back as my East Coast friends were to see me leave, I explained, “Alpine has the best chicken-fried steak, Tex-Mex cooking, and the most beautiful women in Texas.” They readily accepted this explanation.

The real reason I moved to Alpine is that the people who live best in Manhattan are the very poor and the very rich. I was headed toward the former; also I was looking for a place where I could write, photograph, and walk from one end of town to another in only a few minutes. While there are six million stories in the Naked City, there are a million stories in Alpine and Brewster County.

Some may think, “How dull!” These are people who have never attended a Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a rattlesnake roundup, a fire ant festival, a chili cooking contest, or an international black-eyed pea cook-off.

I quickly learned that macho is still big in Texas. It can manifest itself in a number of ways:

1. My first day as a resident in Alpine, I was told by an acquaintance that his hat brim was wider than mine.
2. I also discovered that macho is determined by how high you have to step into a pickup (the truck should be big enough so that your chin touches your knee when you try to enter the truck’s cab).
3. The importance of the size of the truck’s bed cannot be over-stressed; the bed should be proportional to the number of dogs riding in it.
4. The gun rack is real and should contain a large-caliber rifle (.22-caliber is just for wimps).
5. A “real man” will have a belt buckle the size of a pie plate (the local university lets students choose between a senior ring and a large belt buckle).
6. A real macho type will eat a chicken fried steak that covers half the table, a cauldron of chili, then pop down a few jalapeno peppers and claim to have never heard of the term “heartburn.”
7. Macho types are seen at the Crystal Bar, not at a salad bar. Salad bars are intended for women and rabbits.
8. Real Machos are not seen during deer hunting season because their full energy is spent trying to kill Bambi through a foggy haze created by consuming a case of beer.

Don’t get me wrong, West Texans have a great sense of humor. We have to because of the country we live in. Rain, water, and drought jokes are an important part of daily life. I once asked a local how much rain Alpine received a year and was told, “We get sixteen inches a year, which doesn’t sound like much unless you’re here the day we get it.” My first week in Alpine, parts of the town were under six feet of water because of a sudden mountain rainstorm. Two days later there was no standing water. The first seven months of that year we received almost no rain and record high temperatures. The jokes going around included, “I saw two mesquite trees fighting over a dog” and, “We had to take down the barbed wire fence to get a breeze.”

West Texas ranchers are big on private property rights. Right now they are battling the United States Air Force and the German Luftwaffe to prevent low altitude training runs over their ranches (300 feet at 500 miles per hour). In the rugged country around Alpine it is difficult to find your cows on the best of days. And some of these ranchers remember being buzzed by the Germans during World War II. Many ask why the Germans need to train over high desert country when there is no high desert country in Germany. Do they plan to retake North Africa?

There are similarities between my old home in New York City and Alpine:

1. The residents of both cities are not afraid of a guy walking down the street with a white stick, although the people in Alpine thought it was a pool cue.
2. They both live in harsh but beautiful environments.
3. Both are filled with eccentrics.
4. They are both filled with people I’ve come to love.