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August 10, 2001
A CounterPunch
Journey
From New Orleans
to Midland, Texas
By Alexander Cockburn
I love scrubby old state highways, warm
with commercial life. Highway 90 runs from Florida through Alabama
and Louisiana, then on across Texas. I got onto it at Mobile
and trundled westward into New Orleans, in time to go along and
pay my respects to John Sinclair, formerly of the MC5 and now
one of the city's prime musical figures, notably on his radio
show. The night I got into town Sinclair was presiding over a
benefit at the House of Blues, on Decatur St. for for Coco Robicheaux
to whom some disaster has befallen. Robicheaux was wearing a
bright purple suit. Sinclair is tall and has a goatee beard,
which juts out, a bit like Don Quixote.
Sinclair told the crowd that
a year earlier he and his wife had been grateful recipients of
the proceeds of a similar benefit. Later he told me that the
Coco Robicheaux benefit was the third in a recent series of "fire
recovery events", starting with Eddie Bo's fire in what
Sinclair  thought
to be 1999. "Jerry Brock, my wife Penny and some other people
organized a benefit for Eddie and his sister Veronica which brought
a lot of people together and helped raise money so Eddie could
get back on his feet. Then our own house burned up in January
2000 while we were out of town and we would have been completely
devastated if Jerry Brock and Bill Taylor hadn't quickly put
together a benefit concert at the House of Blues with music
by Eddie Bo, Snooks Eaglin [one of my favorites], Deacon John,
Wild Magnolias, Treme Brass Band, Jon Cleary, Kermit Ruffins
& the Barbecue Swingers, James Andrews, John Mooney, Coco
Robicheaux and others. The show raised $12,500 at the door and
another $7,500 in donations and sales of donated items that night,
which allowed us to replace all our equipment, furniture and
household essentials and get back on our feet after the fire.
"Then Coco's apartment
caught fire just before JazzFest this year and Dell Long put
together this benefit at the House of Blues to help him recover.
The musicians in New Orleans also play at benefits for people
who need help with their medical bills and other catastrophes,
and generally everybody helps take care of each other when trouble
strikes. There are very few of us in the New Orleans musical
community who have any resources outside of what we're hustling
up to get through the week or the present month. Few have insurance
of any kind, let alone medical or fire insurance, so there's
what I call the "people's insurance" when your friends
get together and raise money to help you out. It's a beautiful
thing."
It is indeed. I listened for
a while, then went off to the Hotel Richelieu, and listened to
a couple of new arrivals speculating on the career of the wily
cardinal. I've never had time to explore the bayou country south
west of New Orleans and resolved to spend a day doing that. 90
took me west towards the turn off to Abbeville. Encouraged by
its sign I stopped at a roadside café, Badeaux's in Des
Allemands, Louisiana. For its soups the menu featured crab stew,
shrimp stew, seafood gumbo and chicken and sausage gumbo, all
at 5.50 the bowl or 3.50 for a cup. Plus soft shell crab when
in season for $10.95.
Heartened by seafood gumbo
and softshell crab and a bill under $20 I continued along 14
and soon saw a pick-up, with a sign saying "live crab at
4pm". A jolly Cajun fisherman showed me two boxes, "big
ones in the right go for $7 and the smaller ones $4". I
asked for three large ones, figuring I could boil them up in
my motel room on an electric plate stowed in the Plymouth Belvedere
for just such purposes. "That'll be $2", said the
fisherman, looking a bit scornful. It turns out it's $7 a dozen.
So I bought $10 and cooked them in my room in the Sunrise Motel
on 90 on the edge of Lake Charles, letting them cool overnight
and keeping them in my Coleman ice chest for dinner the next
evening.
But that last night in Louisiana
I had crawfish etouffe in a diner at Creole, which is the intersection
of 82 and 27. This was after a beautiful back road drive through
sugar cane, sudden surprising vistas of shipyards, more can,
endless bayous, with the sun tilting down over the vast panorama
of wetlands. Foodwise, America's highways are improving. I only
had one really inedible meal between Landrum, S.C. and Petrolia,
a horrible experience of supposedly Mexican food in Truth or
Consequences, N.M. In that place in Creole, everything turned
out right. Amidst Cajun oil riggers or fishermen belching and
cursing over their Budweisers I had a great plate of crawfish
in peppery rice for $10 and got back on the road with an optimistic
outlook on the human condition. I stopped in the Sunrise Motel
and fell asleep amidst the fragrance of the boiled crabs.
In Columbus, Texas, Jerry Mikeska's
Bar-B-Q, sign announces SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT BARBQ MAKES ONE WEAK.
In the old days that probably would have read Makes A Man Weak.
Not any more; and there were plenty of sisters chowing down.
Mikeska's walls were profuse with the relicts of innumerable
hunting excursions: mountain sheep, bear, moose, deer, bobcat.
Mr Mikeska himself, elderly and formally attired, moved from
table to table, thanking the truckers, commuters and tourists
for coming by. Old world courtesy and we all felt the better
for it. I like Texas barbecue; not overstated.
I headed northwest again, planning
to spend the night in Abilene but suddenly saw a sign for Midland,
and resolved to pay my respects to the childhood home of George
W. Bush, not least memorable as the place where he later lived
with his bride, the divine Laura.
You can see why George Bush
doesn't believe in global warming. Growing up in west Texas'
summers he doubtless believes it can never get any hotter. It
was 101 F at 8.30 pm as I stopped to ask directions to motel
row from the inhabitants of a Dairy Queen, two girls on an outing
from Odessa (the grimier oil town down the interstate a few miles)
and a solitary Goth in traditional black garb.
I liked Midland, even though
I couldn't find the intersection where Farm Road 868 crosses
State Highway 349, where the 17-year old Laura in her late model
Chevy ran a stop sign and struck the 1962 Corvair sedan of her
17-year old friend Michael Douglas, killing him on the spot.
Since Laura is the nation's
First Librarian I thought it only right to visit Midland's library
and was looking for it when I passed a building labeled Museum
of the South West  and
stopped for a look. The first room had Audubon's prints of Texas
animals from his last book, Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America,
published between 1845 and 1848. He died three years later. They
are marvelous, and some of them, such as the ocelot and jaguar
(now extinct in Texas), so lively looking that you'd swear Audubon
had sketched them from life. But by that time in his life Audubon
rarely moved from his house on the Hudson, to which specimens
arrived in various stages of putrefaction, sometimes pickled
in rum.
Next to the Audubon room was
dashing exhibits by young artists from the Wirral peninsula,
in north west England, also by the London-born Indian twin sisters
Amrit and Rabindra Kaur Singh, whose wonderful use of the Indian
miniature tradition to portray in the Indian immigrant experience
in the UK was arousing approving comment from Midlanders. The
visitors' book unanimously sparkled with "exquisite",
"beautiful" and, from Chris Adam, "fantastic show!
The best to be seen here in years. I wish more of the locals
understood it." I bought a Wirral beach scene photographed
by Geraldine Hughes and went on my way, wondering why Midland
and Wirral, of all places, are sister cities. Maybe a Midland
fan of Gerry and the Pacemakers, since Wirral is the place you
get to from Liverpool when you ferry across the Mersey.
There are two splendid special
collections in the Midland library, devoted to genealogy and
petroleum. In a break from poring over Roemer's Texas I chatted
with the curator of these collections, to be told that Laura
Bush, nee Welch, had worked as a librarian in Austin. In Midland
she'd been a teacher. I've heard vulgar gossip about Laura's
racy twenties before she settled down, and I thought there perhaps
a tinge of disapproval in the voices of two ladies in the genealogy
section when they discussed local history with me and made mention
of "the Welch girl".
I rounded out the Midland visit
with an excursion to the truly tremendous Permian Basin Petroleum
Museum on Interstate 20, which does for hydrocarbons what the
Uffizi does for the art of Renaissance Italy. The museum's entry
is framed by two oil pumps, like triumphal gryphons. Here is
to be found the famous map by O.C. Harper, done in 1924 and reckoned
to be one of the most outstanding feats of reconnaissance geology
in history. Harper accurately deduced the whereabouts of the
vast oil resources of the Permian basin of west Texas and eastern
New Mexico. A year later other geologists, scouts and land speculators
were rushing to Midland and soon, as an oilman later recalled
in a news story of the 1950s displayed in the museum, "had
married all but a few of the single girls who had finished high
school and a few who had not. Whirlwind courtships of two weeks
to a month prior to the wedding were not uncommon. The few remaining
eligible single young girls had but to decide with whom and how
many dates they would have each evening. The young women were
outnumbered about six to one by the single young men." By
1928 just one oil field, the 1,100 foot-deep Yates, was rated
as having a daily production potential of 2.2 million barrels
a day, just under the daily national consumption at that time
of 2.6 million a day.
George Bush arrived in 1948,
later recalling that "We all just wanted to make a lot of
money quick." The time I interviewed her back in 1980 I
thought Barbara Bush one of the meaner women I'd met in a long
time, and looking at the photos in the oil museum you could say
why she might have been bitter. To ship out from the East Coast
first to broiling, oil-sodden Odessa and then in 1950 to broiling,
oil-sodden Midland must have been a jarring experience. George
SR never did make a big pile out of oil and neither did George
W. who spent the Fifties in Midland as a boy and returned there
between 1975 and 1986 to try to make his pile.
The oilmen clearly had the
time of their lives setting up the Petroleum Museum. At last,
the opportunity to set the record straight, without any persnicketty
interference from the enviro crowd. There's heroic art of oil
exploration and extraction by Tom Lovell and (better in my opinion)
Frank Gervasi and John Scott. There's a majestic reproduction
of an entire coral reef of the sort harboring oil thousands of
feet below our feet. There are drill bits and tableaux of all
the good things oil brings. Outside there's the largest collection
of old drilling rigs in the world.
It was hard to tear myself away, but the placed closed and I
drove down the interstate to seedy and depressed looking Odessa
which one year edged Miami to become Murder Capital of the USA.
The notorious aggressions of a slice of Odessa's citizenry probably
accounts for the fact that nearby, more prosperous and classy
Midland county is Texas's rape capital on a pr capita basis,
according to Ms Betty Dickerson of the Midland Rape Crisis Center.
So much for the timeless values Bush claims to have imbibed in
West Texas. Leaving Odessa I passed a sign for the Harvest Time
Church: "Jesus Knows That Life Can Be Hard As Nails",
then, to the right, black on gold and red, the more urgent, "ETERNITY,
IT'S HELL WITHOUT JESUS". CP
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