Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

Lajitas
April 14, 2004

“Big Bend residents live in a no-man’s land. It is not the United States, nor is it Mexico. The Border Patrol have inspection stations near Alpine and Marfa. After a traveler heading north enjoys watching the drug dogs work, then, and only then, is he or she actually back in the U.S.” Or so say the river-runners, musicians, and other assorted reactionary dropouts of the region. They love to put on airs of being outlaws, full of Luddite anti-technology hubris. It is tough, scrambling to make a living on the border, and many live in houses without running water, rented for less than a hundred dollars a month. Many tourists are attracted to the “hanging out on the porch” Terlingua “outlaw” attitude.

Lajitas is 10 miles to the west of Terlingua. The town seventeen miles south of Lajitas across the river – San Carlos – was the home of folks that could not get along with the Spanish soldiers at the presidios along the river in the 1700’s. Terlingua gets its name from “Tres Lenguas,” meaning the three languages used here for a hundred years or more – Spanish, Apache, and Comanche. San Carlos kept its reputation as a place outside the law through the Villa years (until the early 1920s) – Chico Cano was the regional “jefe de los banditos” then.

A few years ago Multimillionaire Steve Smith bought the town of Lajitas from Houston developer Walter Mischer for $4.5 million, and has spent $70 million (give or take a few million) in creating a luxury resort for the truly rich. He employs over 200 people, making the resort one of the largest employers in Brewster County.

Golf club memberships are pricy and vacation homes cost six figures. To stay the night in the hotel rooms a person has to pay several hundred dollars, and at the two restaurants a cheap meal costs 75 bucks. Jets as large as a 737 can land at the new airport, but he will send a LearJet anywhere in the U.S. to pick up guests if they do not have their own. I have heard the place called “La Hideous” by folks that are repulsed by the resort’s conspicuous extravagance. Dotcom billionaires and oil millionaires, rock stars, athletes, movie stars and real estate tycoons live a life unimaginable by most folks.

Before the closing of the border after 9/11, many of the workers that work the upscale Lajitas Resort lived in the town across the river, Paso Lajitas, used to wade across the river every day to come to work. Their families now live in Ojinaga and they commute the 60 miles to work, or they moved to this side of the river. The little shops and restaurants on “el otro lado” that gave this area a special charm have all closed up, and now there are few folks left in Paso Lajitas. Some of the alternative lifestyle “outlaws” now work for the resort and are becoming more middle-class and plan on building homes with indoor bathrooms and running water.

During an evening when I was in Terlingua in early April, a visitor (I did not catch his name) to Dave Long’s compound at the “248” (a collection of once abandoned one room rock huts without running water)- got worked up in a rabid froth. “Smith will use up all of the water in the Santa Elena aquifer sooner or later, and wring the last drops out of the Rio Bravo del Norte (the Rio Grande) if allowed. The Rio Nuevo project and the dreams of T. Boone Pickens are similar delusions. How many dollars must be spent before they realize it makes no sense? Once the water is gone there will be no water left for anybody --” he threw up his hands, and then pointed with both index fingers as he said, “What they are doing is criminal!” After he ranted and raved for 15 minutes, he got back in his truck to go catch bats or skunks or whatever it was he was researching.

Dave Long is the naturalist interpreter at the Texas Parks and Wildlife’s Barton Warnock Center. His residence is an off hours Grand Central for visiting scientific researchers. Anthropologists, sociologists, bat experts, snake experts, botanists and others are invited to share Laughing Dave’s blackbean burritos, Clivus Multrum outhouse, five-gallon shower house and are often given a place to throw their bedrolls on the ground.

During a tour of the Arboretum at the Warnock Center the next morning during a Texas Parks and Wildlife sponsored seminar, Joe Sirotnak, Big Bend National Park’s botanist/ecologist, spurred us into a discussion of the ecohistory of the region. On the banks of the Rio Grande a person can see retama, salt cedar, Bermuda grass, and tree tobacco everywhere. All four plants were imports to the region over the last 300 years. One of the plants brought to the Lajitas Resort when it was owned by Walter Mischer was buffelgrass, and it, too, has begun spreading into the landscape.

Mr. Smith has spent an incredible amount of money on the landscaping of the resort since he bought the place. The resort’s flower and shrub beds are becoming a show place of drought adaptive plant horticulture. Mr. Sirotnak was concerned that some of more recently introduced species would adapt to the Chihuahuan Desert. “We try to remove exotics on the national park property. I do not feel as strongly about plants from the Sonoran or Mojave deserts being used as ornamentals, for the ecological niches they utilize are already filled with natives.”

He continued, “What about things from other countries? Buffelgrass is from Sub-Sahara Africa, for example, and what it has the potential to do is to give groundcover between the shrubs. This will increase wildfires that will kill the native shrubs. In the west non-native Cheatgrass has caused some serious changes. Wildfires fueled by the cheatgrass are diminishing the saguaros of Arizona and the sagebrush of the Great Basin. Part of my job is to begin the reestablishment of grass in the valley of Tornillo Creek, but with native grass.”

Until the 1930s Tornillo Creek had year-around water and cottonwoods, as well as good grasslands. Two major factors are attributed to its decline – the drought of that decade, and overgrazing by the landowners as they waited for the national park to be created. Now, except for the last mile (at best), there is no running water, and no cottonwoods, and no grass. The valley is now shrubland or (in places) has no vegetation at all.

Society and landscape are both in a state of flux. Who knows what the future will bring?