In West Texas: The Great Mesquite Wars

By LANCE MORROW

Mesquite is a brush, a shrub, a tree, an infestation and a tremendous thirst.

It sends down roots as deep as 40 feet; it sucks up the earth's moisture as if it were drinking through a straw. During the great drought of the 1950s, hardly a shower fell on Tom Green County for eight years; only the mesquite lived well. Mesquite resembles an otherwise handsome tree afflicted by terrible arthritis, but it possesses a sort of peasant vitality. It is a vigorous, complacent survivor, an efficient brute of evolution, like the shark.

The ranchers in West Texas do not exactly like to talk about mesquite; to do so is a little like discussing roaches with a New Yorker. But in some ways, mesquite controls and defines the landscape. Because it exerts such exorbitant claims upon a starkly limited water supply, mesquite (in conspiracy with prickly pear, cedar and other heavy drinkers) dictates what will flourish and what will wither; it decides whether the cattle and sheep will have enough range grass to grow fat upon. Water and brush run certain segments of the West Texas economy in an almost embarrassingly thorough way. Sisyphus rolled a boulder; a rancher in West Texas, tempted to reflect on the existential futility of life (and that must happen now and then), can contemplate his mesquite.

In West Texas, nature still needs a good deal of subduing. Man and nature tend to be a little rough with each other. The weather runs to perverse extremes; droughts have a way of ending abruptly in floods. Nature bangs around sometimes giving melodramatic and even lunatic performances. Now, in winter, the temperature will rise to 70DEG F or so one day, and the next, the wind will swivel around out of Canada to bring down a "blue Norther," a deep, dry blast of almost metaphysical cold. "There's nothing between here and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence," they tell themselves in that Texas way that can lend defiant self-congratulation to the disastrous or the unavoidable. "And the fence blew down."

The ranchers of West Texas are (on their own terms) practicing environmentalists. But one should not, as a rule, attempt to discuss ideological ecology with a man throwing rocks at a rattlesnake. In the ranchers' world, there are still good guys and bad guys in an older sense. Mesquite tends to be a bad guy. The rancher enjoys with his mesquite roughly the relationship that Wile E. Coyote maintains with the Road Runner in the children's cartoon; the rancher will try anything short of nuclear weapons to conquer mesquite. He even talks about it in vaguely military terms.

Hal Edward Noelke whumps out across his 18,000-acre ranch in his Bell bubble helicopter. "This mesquite," he shouts above the rotor clatter, "is a very competent adversary." Noelke can run his eye across the vast dun-brown landscape (gentle hills, a sweep of mesas off toward the horizon), and although the land is comparatively featureless to a stranger, Noelke can tell precisely what campaigns he waged in what year upon what stands of mesquite.

Some stretches of Tom Green County look like the Argonne Forest after a month of shelling: dead black mesquite trees, torn out of the ground, lie in a vast twisted litter. Vultures like to sit in sinister profile upon the dead trees; they give the scene an eerie stylized hellishness. This particular mesquite has been the victim of chaining and spraying: crop-dusting planes swoop in low over the range and spray a chemical called TORDON 225E onto the mesquite. A year or more later, a pair of bulldozers about a hundred yards apart make their way across the same area dragging an enormous ship's anchor chain between them.

Other, more expensive tactics are root plowing (a Caterpillar dragging a flat steel blade cuts off the roots beneath the surface) and tree dozing (a crawler tractor with a tree bit on the front uproots each tree). Tree dozing worked so well on John Cargile's ranch at Arden, Texas, that whole stretches of his range are innocent of mesquite. The land gives an impression of splendid cleanliness. A creek flows not far from the ranch house--a sweet luxury in a dry country. Cargile and his wife Ta will take a guest there for a picnic on a moonlit evening, and there is something almost profligate in the sound of the water flowing at one's feet. In this part of the world, a pastoral scene is difficult and expensive to create.

Some ranchers are returning to a technique that was used by the Indians who followed their buffalo across the land for centuries before Hal Noelke's great-great-grandfather, R.F. Tankersley, became the first white man to settle in the area, in 1864. They are attacking the mesquite with fire: bulldozing fire guards and then setting a careful blaze when the wind is right to take down an entire pasture of mesquite at one time.

A much repeated piece of West Texas lore has it that mesquite traveled up from Mexico a century or two ago in the droppings of pack animals. This seems to be false, an effort possibly to blame the noxious plant on foreign influences (a Mexican might point out that in Texas, it was the Anglos who were the foreigners). Mesquite evidently is a native, but drought and overgrazing of the land apparently have encouraged it to spread until it has become an epidemic. Years ago, the Indians of the Southwest lived happily with the stuff. They used mesquite for fuel, shade, food (cakes made from the mesquite bean) and even diapers, fashioned from the bark.

Monte Noelke, a rancher and another of Tankersley's great-great-grandchildren, is a raconteur with Homeric talents and the family's sidelong sense of humor. Monte has decided that he ought to start a business transplanting mesquite trees and selling them as immense houseplants to people in New Jersey.

That is a sly job on the dudes back East. The odd thing is that some West Texans have adopted the mesquite tree as a member of the family. They actually plant them in their front yards. For all the violence of the relationship out on the working ranch, many people in San Angelo, the capital of the Texas "Big Country," have discovered that the mesquite tree is, if viewed by itself, in a certain light, capable of a surprising and almost Japanese loveliness. In sunlight, it offers a porous, feathering shade. Arriving in front of an expensive house in San Angelo, the mesquite completes a curious transition--from being a pest on the ranch to being a kind of artifact, an authenticating item of regional culture. Andy Warhol may have been working with the same general principle when he moved soup cans into art museums.

God knows the ranchers of West Texas would love to see mesquite miraculously transformed into a luxuriant carpet of range grass as deep as a pickup's fenders. On the other hand, they show for it sometimes a curious tenderness. "Mesquite is very lovely in the spring," Monte Noelke admits; its light greenish blossoms are the West Texan's confirmation that winter is really over.

Mesquite is part of the rancher's somewhat hard-bitten order of things. Its roots go deep. But they do not delve nearly as deep as the oilman's drill bits go, in another West Texas order of things, boring into the earth for money. It is sometimes a morally uncomfortable coexistence--the business of running cattle and sheep on the surface of the range vs. the business of taking oil from deep beneath it.

The range is filled with a sweet silence; it is broken only by a thin whistle of wind in mesquite and the oddly haunting sound, a crumpling tinny flex of metal, that an Aermotor windmill vane makes randomly in the tremendous spaces. But out in the middle of nowhere the rancher will come upon an oil "location" that he has leased to drillers. The work is deafening, unclean and, of course, extremely profitable. Oilworkers seem weirdly surly and uncommunicative for this part of the country, like punk rockers, Ahab's harpooners, aliens. The chemical "slush" from the hole in the ground gushes up into a loathesome open pit lined with a sort of Hefty bag.

The rancher shakes his head. "A cattleman's word is as good as his bond. But the oilman thinks that breaking his word is smart business. He even admires it." One catches, yet again, a faintly elegiac note, the hint of mourning for a more chivalrous, manly order that is collapsing. Raising beef in a nation terrified of cholesterol does not always retain either its profit or its romance. The rancher wonders (as he has for a generation or two) if the endangered species is not the man who rides the horse. --By Lance Morrow

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