The Time of My Life Read Free Page B

preference), which has a small, tombstonelike Confederate monument in the center and was surrounded in those days by the courthouse, the Gulf station, the drugstore, the Limpia Hotel, the Union Mercantile, and Harry Jarratt’s Motorport, a garage.
    They would set up a big blackboard on the drug-store porch, and at sundown the whole town would gather in the square. The women and old men would stay in their cars and chat with their neighbors through the windows. The young men would tell jokes and smoke and whittle. The teenagers would neck in the tall Johnson grass beside the Union, and the youngsters would pester them and play hide-and-seek among the cars.
    There were no presidential candidates on the ballot, but it didn’t matter. Everyone knew how Texas would vote in that one later. Except for FDR’s fireside chats and Harry Truman’s whistle-stop train, which stopped briefly in Marfa, only twenty-one miles away, the president of the United States was as remote from our lives as the king of Siam, anyway U.S. senators were almost as aloof—except for once when Lyndon Johnson flew over the town in a helicopter and landed in a pasture, to which we children rode in the backs of pickups, more eager to inspect the senator’s strange aircraft than to hear his speech. And congressmen, governors and lesser state officials were strangers who breezed through the town every year or so to buy coffee at Louie’s Cafe and lecture high school assemblies on good citizenship and the glories of the American Way.
    There were so few votes in those vast West Texas spaces that candidates seldom considered it worth the gas to come get them.
    But the county races—sheriff, judge, clerk, and treasurer—those were the offices we understood and dealt with in the courthouse on the square. And competition for them was as intense and bitterly personal as only small-town politics can be, sometimes creat ing ill feeling that would divide the county into factions for years.
    As the night drifted its unhurried way, the arrival of the ballot boxes from Limpia or the X Ranch or New Town or Valentine would be greeted with cheers and the honking of automobile horns and a surge of the crowd to the blackboard as the count was tallied beside the names of the candidates.
    It didn’t take long to count the votes. There were only three or four hundred of them. And if an election official didn’t develop car trouble on the long mountain road from Valentine or the X, the voters could go to bed early, knowing who won; the winners could sleep the sweet sleep of the triumphant, and the losers would rail against the Fates or scheme toward another year.
    Nobody outside the borders of Jeff Davis County knew or cared what happened there, and so far as I know, no candidate ever elected there has pursued a political career even as far as Austin. Certainly none has been mighty or counseled the mighty. But those cool summer evenings are still my mind’s picture of democracy in action.
    I would like to think that it is better now, with Cronkite and Severeid and Moyers and Brinkley and Chancellor and Reasoner and Walters and their legions feeding it to us blow-by-blow in our darkened rooms, telling us who won before the votes are counted. But even in Jeff Davis County nobody can lean through the car window and argue with them.
    I think we have lost something in the trade.
    November, 1976

His Town Is His Monument
    I N MY MOST VIVID memory of Barry Scobee, he is scrambling up the steep slope of Dolores Mountain, outside Fort Davis, Texas, to take a panoramic picture of the town with the ancient camera he is cradling with such care.
    I was only seventeen years old that day, but it never occurred to me that he was almost seventy. I would have been surprised if he had told me, for I had known him most of my life and he never seemed to change. The source of his youth and energy, I assumed, was inexhaustible.
    During that climb, he was