Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

Dinosaur tracks east of Fort Stockton and Sotol Liquor
November 26, 2003

About 11 miles east of Fort Stockton on U.S. Highway 67/385 is a roadside park with a picnic table. A person can walk a couple hundred yards up the draw to see dinosaur tracks, which are protected (mostly) by a large welded cage. When Deborah and I were there with the grandkid in August, some kids had crawled underneath one side of it. They and their parents soon drifted away, made uncomfortable by our protestations. Deborah and I set up a geocache in the area, and later moseyed on.

This fall, when I drove up to check on the geocache, nobody was there. I walked up to the geocache site and made sure it was still in good shape, and meandered through the brush identifying wildflowers blooming in response to the fall rains. A person has to be careful walking -- as I examined a bare leg with a stripe of blood from coming too close to one, I heard a screeching of tires. When I returned to the roadside park, a man was standing at the side of his vehicle, punching buttons on a cell phone. As I neared him, I recognized him as a petroleum engineer whom I had met a couple of times in various civic groups where we had chatted about his childhood in the Presidio area.

He greeted me and then told me he had hit some debris on the road that had caused two tires to be punctured. He held up his cellphone and said, " I don't have two spares, and the blankety-blank cell phone batteries are dead!" I loaned him my jack so we could get both tires off in a hurry, then ran him on into Fort Stockton where he got the tires patched up. During the hour it took to get back to his car we chatted about the state of the oil business, some of the civic group activities of the past, and then as before, stories about his childhood. He also told me he had been to Ojinaga to take care of some final details of his recently deceased grandfather's estate. After we got his tires back on, he pull out a plain quart bottle from a box on the back seat and offered me a drink of sotol in thanks for my help.

"I had sotol once -- when I was camping up in the Deadhorse Mountains in Big Bend. A friend from Terlingua had brought it over, and man, that stuff tasted like kerosene." I did not ask him how he got it across the border, nor anything about where it was being made -- on the border, one does not ask such questions. The laws of both countries create a shadow economy that some people can maneuver through adroitly. Sotol is border moonshine. Medicinal sotol is still made by curanderas, too, by soaking herbs in pots of sotol and then straining the plant material out.

"This doesn't. My grandfather was a friend of the late Don Alberto Flotte, a third generation sotolero known as the best of the area. He passed on his knowledge, and this is a product of a protégé. This is 20 degrees sotol, the famous sotol of Chihuahua. It is a matter of knowing when to quit the distillation process -- some sotoleros continue distilling the mash to get more product to make more money -- but like everything, there is an art to it."

Tequila is similar in taste to sotol, but his sotol had a richer and more full-blown essence. It was just a bit stronger than a good Scotch. I had to agree with him -- that this was far better than what I had tasted before. I asked him to tell me more about the art of the sotolero. He answered, "My grandfather took me out several times to Don Alberto's "vinata" when I was a teenager."

"To some degree, its production is an act of cultural preservation. The Apaches and the Jumanos produced a fermented but not distilled sotol alcohol. The Spanish soldiers came and married the local women. They and their sons began distilling the product for its greater strength. It is a long and arduous task, to produce good quality sotol. You find a good stand of sotol near a good source of firewood and set up camp. First you whack the plants out of the ground and prune off all the stickery leaves. About 20 burro loads of these sotol heads will fill one rock-lined oven. At the base is a fire that heats a layer of rocks above, then 300-400 sotol heads are thrown on, covered by shredded yucca , and finally about a foot of soil. During the 24 hours the sotol heads are cooked, water is poured in down to the heads to keep them moist, so they do not get scorched."

"The next day, the heads are shredded and mashed, then placed in pailas (fermenting vats). The juice, pulp, and some water are allowed to ferment for about three days. The mass turns a dark amber color. After the first day, the sotoleros tromp around in the pailas like winestompers, squeezing more juice out and keeping the mass mixed. When it smells like rotting apples, it is ready to distill. Large copper kettles (peroles) are heated by a fire, and a pipote (condenser) is sealed to the top of the perol. A copper serpentina (tube) carries the steam through a concrete tank full of cooling water. The product from the first distillation is bitter, so the liquid is placed back in the perol and distilled again. The sotolero tests this product, catching a few drops in cuernitos (cups made from the tip of cowhorns.) By observing the number of bubbles at the edge of the liquid, and how quickly they disappear, the sotolero judges the quality."

Draining my jigger (a coffee cup from the dash of my truck) of sotol, I complimented the quality of the sotol, and thanked him for the story, and we went our separate ways.