Spoken from the Heart (26 page)

Even though George was the governor of the second largest state in the nation, I had considerable freedom as his wife. And there was a great normalcy to my life in Austin. A couple of nights after dinner, Regan and Billy and I would walk over to stand at Antone's to listen to Bobby "Blue" Bland, just as we'd always done. Many mornings, I would walk south on Colorado Street and around Austin's Town Lake (now renamed for Lady Bird Johnson) with my friend Nancy Weiss. I stood in line alone for coffee in the Capitol cafeteria or for stamps at the post office, and when people caught sight of my DPS detail in the statehouse, they swiveled their heads about, looking for the famous person who must be somewhere about the room. Barbara and Jenna love to tell the story of the time we were standing in a checkout line at Walmart in Athens, Texas, near our little weekend getaway lake house, and a woman kept staring at me. Finally, she said, "I think I know you," and I replied, "I'm Laura Bush," as if, the girls liked to point out, of course she would know who I was. Her answer was "No, guess not."

Even our family life held on to normalcy. The four of us ate dinner together most nights, and George routinely helped the girls type and proofread their term papers. When ninth grade came, Barbara and Jenna opted to go to Austin's large, downtown public high school.

The second year of George's term was also the year of George's and my fiftieth birthdays. I've never liked surprises. I was so shocked by a surprise wedding shower in Austin that it was at least a half hour before I could actually begin to enjoy the party. But George loves them. So I planned a surprise birthday party for him at the Governor's Mansion. I invited his childhood friends, school friends from Andover and Yale, friends from Midland, the familiar and the long-lost. The morning of the party, George and I set out to pick up the girls from Camp Longhorn. When we got home, he could see the tent and the tables going up on the lawn, so I handed him the party invitation, but I didn't say who was coming. We celebrated under the stars with heaps of dripping barbecue, and lots of toasts. Then the lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock, stood up. Bob, a Democrat, toasted George as "the man who will be the next president of the United States." It was July of 1996. George hadn't even been reelected governor. But by the following year, talk had turned to the presidency.

I waited before I weighed in, because I knew both sides of what that decision would entail.

In 1993, George H. W. Bush had been invited to Kuwait to be thanked by the nation for liberating them from Saddam Hussein. He and Barbara invited Marvin and Neil Bush, as well as Jeb's wife, Columba, and me to go along. On the way home from Kuwait, we stopped in France to see President Francois Mitterrand, who escorted us all through the recently opened Euro Disney, the Disneyland of Europe, a far cry from my California visit after a night spent in a sparse roadside motel. This time too I had "siblings." We rode on Space Mountain; we tried the famous rides and attractions. But at one point during the afternoon, I was walking ahead with Marvin and Neil, and I turned around. Behind us was the threesome of Gampy, Ganny, and Mitterrand. But they seemed larger than life, the way celebrities, when one sees them in person, look like the animation of a thousand paparazzi stills. In that instant, Gampy, Ganny, and Mitterrand appeared as fantastical as movie stars ambling through Euro Disney. And they were every bit as recognizable.

While as the years lengthened, their prominence might dim, but they would still never sit in a restaurant or a cafe or an airline seat and pass unrecognized. There was no chance for them to be anonymous again.

One Hundred and Thirty-two Rooms

With Spot and Barney at the White House.
(White House photo)

The Governor's Mansion in Austin has a small lawn and simple gardens. The place itself is hemmed in by a cross-section of city streets, pinning it to its urban spot amid blocks of stone office fronts and the slow progression of glinting high-rises. On the morning of March 2, 1999, a state staffer placed two white metal lawn chairs in the garden, and others hung a small rope to hold back the crush of television cameras, photographers, and reporters who had come to hear George announce that he was forming an exploratory committee to consider making a presidential run. The press corps is often referred to as a gaggle, as in a "gaggle of geese," but that hardly conveys the strange divide between the press and the "principal." What most video images and stills never capture is the sight of the candidate on one side and the crush of the media on the other, with their voice recorders, boom mikes, and cameras poised to capture his every movement and his every word.

The announcement of an exploratory committee was, we both knew, the same as an official declaration. As George himself said, only "a giant thud, a huge yawn," or the discovery that "it was my mother they were interested in" could derail his presidential train.

I sat beside George, smiling. But I had been late to sign on to his decision to run. Politics had turned ugly during his dad's 1992 race with Bill Clinton. I had watched political opponents and the media draw the most hideous caricatures of George H. W. Bush until I barely recognized my own father-in-law. I believed in my George, I love him, and I knew he would be a great president. It was the process in which I had far less faith.

My escape and at moments my salvation from this particular trail was to come in the form of nearly sixteen hundred acres of blackland prairie in an extended finger of the Texas Hill Country, a ranch near a town named Crawford.

My childhood fantasies of El Paso ranchland had matured into a dream of a quiet frame house on the banks of the Guadalupe or the Medina River, where a slow, gradual lawn dipped down to gurgling river waters or a meandering feeder creek. I imagined children or grandchildren playing in its currents and the soft rustle of branches from clusters of sturdy cypress trees rooted to its banks.

In late February of 1998, George and I went to look at a plot of land in north-central Texas, almost dead center between Austin and Dallas. It was flat tall-grass prairie, the bits of flinty range where generations of farmers and ranchers had eked out life with their livestock. The soil had been plowed generations ago and sowed with rich feed grasses, like kleingrass and coastal Bermuda, a spiky green blend that spreads in dense mats across the ground. Ten acres are enough to graze a full-grown cow in the high summer. All around us as we drove, the land stretched out, not frying-pan flat like Midland, but with subtle dips and rises. Uncounted millennia of natural events, from torrential floods to crippling droughts and fast-moving fires, and the migration of ancient bison, were silently recorded along its contours and folds. Amid the fields and pastures, there were fence lines and tree breaks and a healthy breeze, but nothing to distinguish this spot from thousands of other working farms and ranches across the Texas landscape.

Then George drove me in. In the back, the grassland abruptly sheared away into seven box canyons, their walls covered in steep limestone worn down from water and ancient geological upheaval. Thousands of years of erosion had left jutting bits of giant rock, some of which the rain, sun, and wind have chiseled away, until their features resemble the noses, eyes, and lips of Easter Island's silent Moai figures. Here, instead of gazing out upon an island, with the white-capped Pacific at their back, they stand watch over the brush and fallen branches. Below, when there is rain, the creek water runs. In centuries past, the Tonkawa Indian warriors rested and watered their horses in this part of the Bosque River and horse thieves hid their bounty along the winding canyon bottoms.

This back edge was what old-time ranchers call "sorry land," uncleared, untamed, a tangle of brambles and overhanging limbs. Much of it was impassable. We could only hike to the top ledge and look down. It was rugged and stark. For George, it was love at first sight. I was far less smitten.

Two months later, the following April, I was driving with Regan and the rest of my Austin garden club to an event in Fort Worth. We were heading up Interstate 35, and the land alongside was swollen with green grass shoots and carpeted with bluebonnets and other wildflowers, bright and plump from drenching spring rains. As I watched the grasses and the flowers bend in the wind, I realized that this was exactly the section of Texas where the Crawford ranch was, and that the blooming land was beautiful. We had money from the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball team. I called George from the car and said, "Let's buy it."

By August, the land was ours. Scattered around the front half of the sixteen hundred acres were a small 1940s farmhouse, which faced two diesel storage tanks and a tractor shed; a livestock barn; and a few other outbuildings. It was a working ranch; the same family had raised livestock on that spot for four generations, coming out to stake and settle when this part of Texas was still a place that drew jostling wagon trains and weary pioneers. From its rear windows, the ranch's little farmhouse overlooked the grassland and the herd. The same work boots had crossed its threshold at dawn and again at dusk year after year.

After George won his reelection race for Texas governor in November of 1998, with 68 percent of the vote statewide, I started work on the modest six-room house, painting the clapboard siding green, updating the small kitchen, and refurbishing the three tiny bedrooms. Later, on another part of the property, away from the grazing lands and closer to the steep canyons, we planned to build a real ranch house with a two-bedroom guesthouse alongside, but until that house became a reality, we needed a livable home where we could stay.

Then my eyes turned to the grassland. In 1999, as George was weighing his presidential run, I embarked on a prairie restoration. I found a native-grass expert, Michael Williams, and we began by planting native grasses along a strip at the edge of the old cattle watering hole that we were making into a small lake. The wild and rangy grasses took, so we searched for other spots where we could expand the grassland. We planted on a rise above the pond, and in early 2001 we turned our attention to a vacant pasture. Michael devised a plan of plowing up the nonnative grasses. Then in spots we sprayed the fallow soil with small bits of herbicide to kill a few stubborn sprigs of coastal Bermuda and Johnson grass whose roots clung to the soil even after the plow's metal blades had sliced and scored the earth. Finally, after four years of plowing and spraying, only the loamy ground remained. Michael seeded the land with native seeds from a tiny remnant of an intact prairie. We covered forty acres with seed, and in our final year of seeding, 2007, the rains came, fifty-six inches of them. The grasses took, and the prairie returned. We then began adding another forty acres of native prairie grassland. Susan Rieff, head of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, has noted that our little project is the largest private, completely native prairie restoration in all of Texas. I feel a twinge of sadness when I think of the millions of acres across West Texas that were once alive with tall prairie. Big bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass have vanished from the landscape as thoroughly as the thundering buffalo herds.