| (In which the editor reflects upon his perambulations and peregrinations) |
| He was right, you know. You must be born againand again and again, ad infinitum, or at least ad cemeterium. Those who aren't periodically reborn are like the snake who fails to shed his skin and is eventually squeezed to death by the narrowness of his old confines. Archer Fullingim, the ex-editor of The Kountze News, is a professed born-again Big Thicketite. Periodically he flings himself off into the wilderness of the Big Thicket and splashes around in Village Creek and wades through bay galls and pin-oak flats, and the Holy Ghost of the Big Thicket (and elsewhere, of course) takes a Pentecostal possession of him. He is born again and he talks in tongues that are almost as strange as some of his brass-collar-Democrat ravings. He rolls holily in the Thicket grasses and leaves, and he shakes and quakes through spasms of love and communion until he sheds his old, city skin and is born again to a new identification with the Thicket and the Great Spirit that it is a part of. Then he goes contentedly back into town to grow gourds and make mayhaw jelly, agitate the political conservatives of Hardin County, and wait for his next call to the wilderness. |
| Driving around Texas looking at gates and windmills and adobe houses was an experience for me similar to Archer's periodic assumption of the Holy Ghost of the Big Thicket. I have a visceral need to make seasonal pilgrimages about the state, to touch it and taste it and smell it, to see that the sage and prairie grass and the water that flows through the sandy creek beds and the winds that blow through the rock hills are still there. And they always are, no matter what the season. The leaves wither and fall or they turn glassy greenthe water freezes in the stock ponds, or spills over under the watchful eye of a dragonfly, or settles down to a warm brown as the cows chug down the mud slope to drinkand nothing really changes. Archer's Holy Ghost is there too, in different, ever shifting shapes perhaps but always blessing the earth with its presence. It broods with warm breast and ah ! bright wings over Texas (and, granted, elsewhere) and when you are close enough to it you feel that you can almost wrap the good earth around you like a great soft steer hide and feel its love and comfort. |
| I camped one night in the Palo Duro and awoke the next morning swallowed by a fog which filled the canyon so thick you could see it move, and every boulder and tourist and roadrunner became an ingredient in the thick, grey soup. I spent a bright night with a sweet moon behind a cotton gin on the Trinity and watched an old mammy coon and her young'un stroll by about a nickel's flip away. The old mammy waddled on down into the cotton rows barely acknowledging my presence, while the coon-child skipped and nosed the air and looked back over his shoulder. "Hey, Mama, I think there was somebody in that sleeping bag !" I trespassed one night in the mesquite and tall grass north of Ozona and figured I was about to get my plough cleaned by the ranch foreman, who relented and took me where the grass was shorter and less combustible, and who later, around midnight, rousted me out to help him fix a float valve on a water trough in the next pasture. |
|
