Editor’s Note: The (sort of) annual Word Off, Terlingua’s writers’ invitational, happened again this year on January 28. Performers ad-libbed or read original stories and poems on the stage at the Starlight Theater. With the authors’ permissions, we have re-printed here some of our favorite pieces from this year’s literary event.

FINAL ROADTRIP

by Sally Martín

January 31st marked the first year anniversary of Paco’s and my last road trip together. I took him to the ranch where we started together and buried him under a tree.

I wanted to leave a tribute to his life with him but there was no room in the hole for his lifejacket, a mountain bike, a saddle…

Paco traveled untold miles with me: Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico. He’d rafted the Rio Grande, the Salmon and the Arkansas, snapping at the splashes in the rapids. As we hunted Morels in the Seven Devils Mountain Range I would hear him barking in the mist. I didn’t always know where Paco was, but he always knew where I was. He’d follow my bike anywhere, sometimes so closely that he’d get mud all over his face.

While I was guiding horse trips in Idaho he would lope along until he got tired and then much to the tourists’ amusement, ride in the saddle with me. My Paco is in countless photos with different guests sitting in the saddle on my horse’s back. He also made a great, lazy “shop dog” when we worked on bikes and sold river equipment in Riggins, Idaho.

There was a long while when home meant where Paco and I were. Many times that was in my truck, Ruby. Often we would be driving down the highway with no idea of where we’d end up. Paco lived with me in tents, travel trailers and many good friends’ houses. As long as he had a pile of my dirty clothes to sleep on he seemed content that I was there with him even if I had to go out.

He’d warned me of bears, killed mice and one time pulled a rattlesnake out of the bushes with his teeth. He also chewed the seat off my bike and a hole in my couch, had terrible breath…and a propensity for investigating skunks a little too closely.

He wasn’t always obedient; like the fateful day when my boyfriend Nathan told him to stay home. Paco saw Ruby later and ran after her trying to cross Terlingua Creek Bridge. He got hit. I don’t think he ever knew what happened. Thankfully his death was quick. Nathan brought him home and I held my dog on our porch and told him over and over what a good boy he was. It was the first time I got to pet him for more than a few minutes. He was always too busy. Nathan tried to get me to cover him up and come inside but I just wasn’t ready not to ever see his face again.

I loaded his still body onto the front seat next to me and Ruby and I bore him home. Ruby’s power steering was out, the tires are shot and the oil needed changing, but you can hardly go to the Quick Lube with a dead dog in your front seat. I put my hand on his shoulder and talked to him and cried all of the six hours to the ranch. I can’t tell you how proud I was to be the one with whom Paco spent his life and proud to be the one to put him to rest. It was an honor to take him there.

This time Paco lay still when I reached the gate of the ranch. He’d always raced Ruby and me to the house before. The jackrabbits were safe and the cattle un-harassed this once. He wasn’t staring out of the window making sure nothing got me. I miss that too. No matter how alpha Paco took me to be, he never stopped trying to protect me. He was strong and brave and fearless. I know that’s why his muzzle was so gray.

It was dark when I got to the house so I laid Paco out in the front room and lit candles for him. His fur was shiny and his neck still looked strong but I could see my Paco wasn’t really there anymore. I still couldn’t bear to cover his face.

I woke up to sleet and dug a grave for him under three oak trees on the east side of the house. Digging a grave is therapeutic let me tell you. I cursed the world while I threw that pick into the rocks in the ground.

One of the things that makes losing Paco especially difficult for me is that I have a hard time committing to anything. But I had committed to Paco. I stood in the breeder’s yard for almost two hours trying to decide if I could have another being in my life for years. When I decided “yes” I meant it. Every plan I made from that point forward included Paco. He was my constant. I knew that wherever I was, whatever I was doing and with whom, Paco would be there too.

I fully planned to help him when he was older and ease him into his “not so active” years. I still can’t believe he’s not here. He’s still in my life only now he’s in the ground under the heaviest rocks I could carry. I miss my friend. I still hear his tags and glimpse him out of the corner of my eye sometimes.

I was able to cover Paco’s face in his blankets and put him in that hole only because I want to imagine the happy Paco running next to Ruby or riding shotgun looking through the windshield towards our next adventure.

Sally Martín (pictured) is a resident of Terlingua who has the distinction of having a single-digit post office box number.

PENGUINS IN LOVE

by Alan Tennant

Last night I went to see “March of the Penguins.” No drug wars, spaceships, special effects. My kind of film, but before the lights went down, a lady in front of me was on her cell phone. “Know how much I hate birds? Well, Harold’s dragged me to this penguins movie!”

Everybody told her to be quiet.

The show opened: parent penguins began to court. Beautifully. Even – there is no other word – lovingly. It was the most moving thing I’ve watched in years. And that’s not just because I lead wildlife tours all over the world: Luc Jacquet’s gorgeous documentary has been among the most riveting movies of the summer – outperforming, on a per-screen basis, blockbusters like “War of the Worlds,” “Fantastic Four,” and “Batman Begins.”

The reason why Jacquet’s flightless heroes are soaring, however, has the media all in a flap.

That’s partly because, unlike most movies, this one is actually about something. About us, really, though what we see are birds: plump, black and white marine torpedoes that, away from their home in the sea struggle to survive out on the open ice. There, in the 70-mile-long pilgrimages they make to and from their breeding grounds, sacrificing half their 50-lb. body weight to protect each solitary egg from deadly wind-chill, these steadfast beings demonstrate genuine courage. Hope.

Probably even love.

“In the harshest place on earth,” reads the film’s tag line, “love finds a way.” But therein lies the rub.

“Emperor penguins are not brave or resolute or moved by romance and commitment” wrote Lisa Schwartzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. Reviews in Newsweek and the New York Times said pretty much the same thing.

But wait. Of course emperor penguins are moved by commitment. Think they would ever attempt, on their stubby, toddler’s legs, anything resembling those blizzard-swept Dr. Zhivago marches... without commitment? Can you imagine that they’d really come all the way back to their mates and young would even exist as a species – without vast selflessness?  Without devotion to family so strong that it stills every instinctual voice of self preservation that shouts Stay in the sea, stupid! Near food. It’s crazy to stand out there in seventy below. To protect, what, an egg?

I know, I know. In high school biology I, too, learned that birds operate mostly on instinct. But that’s old Conventional Wisdom. Even among scientists, almost nobody buys that politically correct B.F.

Skinner determinism anymore. What we now recognize is that everything we are – every single thing – has parallel antecedents in the eons-old parade of life that preceded us. Antecedents that include not only our physical make-up, but virtually all of human psychology – which means that every bit of what we feel is derived from the broad biological base of emotions that we share with every other sentient being.

Including love, though that notion irks some among us. But is it really probable that we alone are the sole originators of devotion? Have been chosen as the single living thing able to claim love as our exclusive domain?

The issue reminds me of those sober 19th century debates in which frock-coated gentleman scientists pondered whether tribal peoples actually possessed fully human concepts of musical tone or linguistic structure, inasmuch as none of them had composed a Fifth Symphony or written a Paradise Lost.

Today, the same prejudice is held against animals. Especially birds. Consider birdsong, bird migration. Whatever leads us to think we’re the only beings capable of creating a symphony? Able to commit to a single mate for life, risk everything to return to our distant place of birth?

Devote our lives to something larger than ourselves?

Some of that emotional power is what people see in Pale Male and Lola*. It’s what the high rise-living peregrines George and Gracie mean to their fans in Pasadena. And it’s what draws rapt audiences to the falcon cams trained on the domestic lives of skyscraper-nesting peregrines in a dozen US cities.

And it is what I found, once, in a little Cessna, following a female tundra falcon north with the spring – a story told in On The Wing: To The Edge Of The Earth With The Peregrine Falcon. From the day our receiver first picked up a telemetry signal from Amelia – named, of course, for Amelia Earhart – she became the small, guiding angel whose journey ruled my life and that of my pilot, George Vose. Ruled us because of the magnitude of what she was doing, entirely alone, setting off from Texas fueled only by hope and her mortal determination to reach some cliff-side ledge a third of the planet away in arctic Alaska.

It was the place, or near the place, where she herself was born, and as Vose and I flew up the Rockies in her wake, every day we saw with what determination Amelia would launch her bullet shaped torso into the wind, locked onto a trajectory aimed not only at her faraway North Slope birthplace... but one carrying her toward a reunion with her mate.

He would have been a partner that Amelia, like other peregrines, had chosen for life, but at that time, in spring, a partner she would not have seen for eight or nine months. Yet, filled with her memory that male peregrine would have set out, more or less simultaneously, from some tropical refuge far down over the southerly curve of the earth a thousand miles from where Amelia had spent the winter.

Somehow he would have known to dig the long blades of his wings into the air in his own quest for the same small, almost inconceivably distant domestic niche Amelia that also sought – a site where the two of them could already have nested for over a decade, and where they might still come back, long after they had ceased to procreate, to meet again each summer of their final years.

The narcotic thrill of sharing those creatures’ global odyssey was what, week after week, kept Vose and me hanging on to Amelia. It wasn’t, however, because we were attributing to her any anthropomorphic awareness of what she was doing. Instead, it was just that, little by little George and I began to see our own dreams in Amelia’s flight – came to feel the visceral pull her quest for home, to imaginatively share her expected rendezvous with a long-unseen partner. The kind of thing everyone has wished for, yet goals that Amelia made more real –– as real as the ancestral aerie where untold generations of her family could have first opened their eyes to the perpetual glow of sub-polar summer.

That kind of connection with the basics, it seems to me, is what people find so touching about Jacquet’s movie. In its long views of trudging, food-bearing parent penguins, every subway- or freeway-bound, homeward-headed commuter finds a primal perspective of himself. And in the wind-up toy scurry of each of the film’s fuzzy, lucky-to-be-alive penguin chicks, every human family (including the kids who make up a third of Penguin’s viewers) recognizes its youngest, sometimes most adorable member.

And that is a fine, completely OK thing. Much better than, as one reviewer suggests, regarding the Emperors with academic detachment: nothing more nor less than Aptenodytes forsteri.

Nope. That would be as sterile as George and I seeing our Amelia as just another tundra peregrine, her grand purpose but a scholarly footnote tacked onto the established behavioral repertoire of Falco peregrinus.

Not that anybody who sees “March of the Penguins” is likely to do such a thing. At my theater, as the film ran on the stalwart parent penguins eventually prevailed: at last their gray-furred adolescents leapt into the sea on their own, followed by a windswept departing panorama.

The audience broke into applause. Some actually cheered (when was the last time you heard a shopping mall crowd give something – anything – a big hand?) and there, right in the middle of that happy chorus were Harold and his astonished, evidently no longer bird-hating spouse. Clapping like mad.

*Note: Pale Male and Lola are a mated pair of kestrels who live in New York City. For more information, check out this website: www.palemalee.com.

Alan Tennant (below, left, with Tom Gaffaney) is the author of the best selling ON THE WING: To The Edge Of The Earth With The Peregrine Falcon.

EDGE #2: SNAKE 

by Tom Gaffaney

Years ago, a night and a moon somewhere between Valentine and Marfa and a snake crossing the road. Hwy 90, that stretch of West Texas that can be the strangest, the loneliest, and she’s driving oblivious, chattering away in her mind, trying to blot out the voice that’s telling her to turn around, go back. This man she left in Terlingua. But that’s only part of it, and not the part that’s confusing her now.

How the country down there tugs, pulls like an undertow Crazy because there’s nothing down there. Vastness. Emptiness. Yet it’s become this fidget in her mind and she’s driving faster, popping cassettes, thinking El Paso in three hours, drop the rental, a plane, home What she knows. Order. Purposefulness. When she sees this long something. Too late to brake. Queasy thump. And in the rear view this contortion of pain writhes up to the height of a man, triangular head blazing hot red eyes straight at her.

She calls when she reaches Austin, still shaken. The image won’t go away. But still she resists comprehending. That she needs to return. Not for him, but herself. Snakes are like that. Marking entrances.

Snakes are a bunch of things.

Once, Chaco, those ruins of the Anasazi, and a friend who at the time was doing long dances, and she’d brought her drum and we’re sitting the wide stone bench that runs the circle of the great kiva, when she begins to thrum, and I who never, stone sober, began to trance, this huge head emerging, head of a rattler in profile on the other side of the kiva, no sense of the rest of its body, just the head, a portion of its neck, its mouth beginning to open, and now I’m both directly in front and watching it from the other side. Mouth opening wide for me to walk into, which I begin to do.

Just that. As far as it went. Sort of dissolved. Something. One of those moments so bizarrely huge you’re almost embarrassed to take note of them. Didn’t know what to think. And didn’t, for years, when it comes welling back up.

What I’m trying to talk about are thresholds, and what gets you there, which can also be the simplest of things, like looking at an old photo, like that classic one of the miner here just emerging from the topmost ladder of a shaft hole, the burlap sling tied across his forehead. The photo catches him as if he were pausing there, and you feel the long trail of those hundreds and hundreds of feet of dark earth he has just climbed through still clinging to him, the sweat and grunt of ladder to beam to ladder, rising rung by rung, nothing mechanized here, the old way, hauling out the ore one bundle at a time against his back.

It’s like those whales dives when you go deep, deep, then breach and blow, the eyes crazed and bloodshot.

Or I’m back in the Mojave on the cycle, working the whole of it, working it seriously. Rising from a funky bed in a cheap motel on the western edge, 4 am, and I bundle against the cold and shoot straight east, cleaving an endless flatness, a huge stretching-out runway, and everything that black of the predawn dark.

Then ever so slowly, ever so subtly, emergent seas of color, susurrant timpani, up and out, coming on, and now I’m paying particular attention, trying to track the in-betweens. How that blue-black segues to that faintest of violets.

That brightest, sharpest of pinks, fades to what?

I want to grasp the degrees, draw myself in close to presence with the elements, as if it might be a door. But the place it leads – so immediately there, but undefinable – places me nowhere. Leads until not a word or idea remains and all is movement prowing forward, the colors washing through me like ink vats, and changing with them until I know not what.

It’s a moment where one sees as if backwards, a receding drawing you in, like the sucked away shuttering of a subway train. A glimpse as if through a crack. Or that heightening when a greater presence draws nigh, standing the hairs of one’s neck on end.

Like last February after that first sustained stretch of warming, the time when you feel the desert begin to crawl out from under, this huge western diamondback crossing the dirt track near my place as I’m coming in. It stops transfixed in the headlights as 1 hit the brakes. I get out, keeping my distance as it coils, then squat.

Tongue flicking from the coil. Thin moist red forkedness. Amazing how a tongue can speak fear and sex and horror all at once. Herpers in the park tell me there’s a million sensing nodes on it, that it isn’t the eyes but the tongue that leads, that it’s molecules and chemistry perceiving the heat fields, danger, the earth.

Tongue flicking air, trying to make sense now of all the stuff coming off me, the scent of soap from my skin, the mishmash of fabric smells, while its eyes, those dear pale heavy-lidded unblinking eyes, just stare.

It brings me right up against whatever this zone is. Mice and rabbits don’t come close, hawks are nearer, and of course bear and puma can bring it in, but this is like a viewing stand right in front that stays front, opening to a world intense and vibrant in its beauty, scales and skin magnificent, when it flips and it becomes that other, absolutely foreign, cold blooded and pitiless, the horror from which Halloween I, II, and 111 arise.

It’s heat and sex, cold and unearthly. It’s a spirit that would rise and nature as Katrina. And while it’s always a relief just to get close, it’s never quite enough. Can’t quite catch it. The edge all fuzzy alert, the slight jag of vision wavering like a mirage, a tension stretching as if between two worlds Something eludes. Something that keeps bringing me back as if the place were a door leading in.

Tom Gaffaney, long-time resident of South Brewster County, former bookman and river  guide, is nicknamed Roto because he’s always whirling away in his head and breathing heavy exhaust.

FRIENDS

by Mindy Hamlett

Patched, unable to see at all with my left eye, and
only vaguely with my right.
Trains, sounds of a city, stinky air...
Will I see my beloved desert again?
Smell the creosote after a rain?
Blink and clear my vision of sand?

We have gone through a lot, you and I
grown with persistence and perseverance
you nurse me now, we joke about my eyes and your teeth
a new era of wisdom and understanding.

The heat is there – not just the desert
We touch slowly, do I need to see to know you?
Your body sears my mind, I welcome it.
Do you need teeth to kiss me?
My tongue explores the new canyons
We will be fine.
The desert is beautiful.
The silence returns.

A Terlingua resident for over 10 years and  certified massage therapist for 20 years, Mindy Hamlett’s writings have been published in several Dusty Bohemian booklets and read at several Word Offs.