The Time of My Life (23 page)

“Isn't it silly?” my lady said. “I lived here so long and never went out there.” Chris and Jerry said it was odd they hadn't made the trip before, either. I said it was about time I had seen the Statue of Liberty, too. People are always asking me if I've seen it, and I was tired of saying no.

The boat was so crowded and so many of the people were speaking in foreign tongues that it wasn't hard to imagine myself an immigrant, catching my first glimpse of Lady Liberty after the long voyage across the Atlantic, about to set foot on American soil at nearby Ellis Island. The power of the fantasy grew as the boat neared Liberty Island and made a turn around the statue that showed us her right side and her back, views never seen on postcards. My mind teemed with images of poor, tired, huddled masses, crowding to the railings and portholes of their ships, drinking in this magnificent sight, yearning to be free. Lady Liberty, I thought, mother of exiles. I was proud to be an American.

When the boat docked we rushed, touristlike, to ward the entrance in the base of the statue. We pushed and shoved with the rest, trying to get into the elevator that was taking people to the top of the statue. The National Park Service ranger announced there would be a thirty-minute wait for the elevator. However, he said, the stairs were available. It was a ten-story climb to the observation platform at Lady Liberty's feet, he said, plus the winding stairs up the 151-foot statue to Lady Liberty's crown. Chris and Jerry, being young, chose to climb. My lady and I chose to forget the whole thing.

We had just begun our browse through the Museum of Immigration on the lower level when the announcement blared over the public address system: “Please leave the building immediately!” requested the woman, trying not to sound hysterical. “The building is being evacuated! Please proceed in an orderly fashion to the dock area and remain there! The building is being temporarily closed!”

My lady and I proceeded in orderly fashion and asked several fellow evacuees what the hell was going on. Nobody knew, so my lady made her own surmises. “There's probably panic on the stairway!” she said. “My boys are being trampled! It's probably terrorists! They're going to blow up the statue! They're probably taking hostages!”

I clucked reassuringly. But when the rangers locked the doors, Chris and Jerry hadn't emerged. “Oh, my God!” my lady said. I offered to go look for them among the mob of refugees on the dock. I found them. Nobody had told us the statue has a back door.

By the time we boarded the ferryboat that came to rescue us, helicopters were circling the statue. The FBI and the Coast Guard, we learned later. I kept my eye on Lady Liberty, expecting machine gun fire or an explosion or maybe an Iranian flag. Except for a few seagulls, the island looked deserted.

“After all these years, I finally visit the Statue of Liberty, and this happens,” my lady said.

“A lot of people visit the Statue of Liberty,” I said, “but how many get evacuated from it? We've participated in a bit of history.”

However, it didn't make the TV news. The
Post
and the
Daily News
ignored it. Only the
Times
considered it fit to print. Just another whispering voice on the phone, it said. More than 950 evacuated. No bomb found. It happens maybe ten times a year.

So now I've visited the Statue of Liberty. Next time, I'll just stay on the subway, thank you, and study the graffiti.

December, 1980

Needless Worry about Snowless Christmases

N
ORTH
TEXAS
WEATHERMEN
are predicting Dallas won't have a white Christmas. Their prediction made headlines in Monday's paper, but as news it ranks with “Dog Bites Man” and “Catholic Named Pope.” Since 1898, when somebody started keeping official weather records for the area, Dallas has had only one white Christmas. That was in 1926, and the snow had melted by noon.

But year after year, newspapers and radio and TV stations keep on reporting that Dallas will have yet another unwhite Christmas. In my opinion, their reporting of such nonnews does nothing but worry a lot of children, and I wish they would cut it out.

I was lucky when I was a little kid. I began life on a Central Texas farm that Franklin Roosevelt hadn't yet wired for electricity. Our radio was supposed to run on batteries, but it never did, and TV hadn't been invented. If we subscribed to a newspaper, my parents never told me what it said.

However, I knew all about Santa Claus. I knew he lived at the North Pole with Mrs. Claus and a lot of elves. I knew that the residents of that strange community toiled all year, making toys for good little boys and girls the world over, and that on Christmas Eve, while children slumbered, Santa emptied his warehouse into a sleigh, hitched up his eight reindeer, and made his deliveries. Upon arrival at the residence of a good little boy or girl, Santa would park his sleigh on the roof, slide down the chimney, and lay gifts under the tree.

There were a few problems with this simple scheme, but my mother explained them all. Times were hard, she said, and Santa probably wouldn't give me all the toys I had asked for in my letter to him, but I would get some of them. Also, World War II was on, and Santa was helping in the war effort like everybody else. So I would receive nothing made of metal or rubber, but I shouldn't worry because the elves had done their best with the only material they had, which was wood.

Another problem was Santa's mode of entry. We had a chimney, but no fireplace. Our chimney opened into a stovepipe, which descended into the wood-burning stove in the living room. If Santa slid down that chimney, he would be in for a big surprise and maybe even some danger. A Santa stuck in a stovepipe wasn't likely to be in a generous mood when he got out.

But my mother explained that Santa had been delivering gifts to that particular house for years and years and was familiar with its chimney. Santa always came into our house through the front door, like everybody else.

Another problem was snow. I knew the upper half of the United States usually was covered with snow at Christmas, and that Santa would have no trouble delivering gifts to the kids up North. But I was in Central Texas, where it rarely snowed at all, and never at Christmas.

A neighbor's kid had told me his father had explained that Santa customarily parked his sleigh at the edge of the southernmost snow and continued his journey to Texas by airplane. Being a crack pilot, he had no trouble landing in our pastures in the dark.

I didn't believe that story. If Santa owned an airplane, I reasoned, he would have donated it to the war effort. If he were a crack pilot, he would be flying B-29S for the Army Air Corps.

My mother agreed that the neighbor's kid was misinformed. Santa always came to Texas by sleigh and reindeer, she insisted, and always landed on the roof, just as he did up North. Since Santa's sleigh travels through the air, the fact that there's no snow on the ground is of no consequence whatsoever. All Santa needs, she said, is snow on the roof. And snow always appears on whatever roof Santa is about to land on, she said, no matter what part of the country it's in. In Texas, of course, the snow melts away before dawn.

In those days, Christmas was a magic time, and Santa Claus was a wonderfully mysterious figure. The only kids who had ever seen him, so far as I knew, were the children in
The Night Before Christmas
, whose narrative of their experience was my main source of information about the jolly old elf. My mother said those kids were lucky, because Santa is very shy and has been known to bypass houses where children are staying awake in hopes of catching a glimpse of him.

Because Christmas was magic, it was easy to believe everything my mother told me—including that business about the snow on the roof—and I went to bed on Christmas Eve with visions of apples and oranges and English walnuts dancing in my head.

But what if some wise guy of a weatherman had been able to penetrate our rural isolation and inform me there would be no white Christmas, not even for a little while, not even on our rooftop? I wouldn't have been able to fall asleep and might have worried myself sick.

Times have changed, though, so maybe I'm being too hard on the weathermen. Maybe Dallas children don't share my primitive fear of a no-snow Christmas. After all, Santa Claus has been in town since Halloween.

December,198O

Friendly Enforcers of an Unfriendly Law

Y
EAH
,
I'M
FOR
conserving fuel. Yeah, I'm for safety on the highways and saving lives. I would no sooner speak against these civic and social virtues than I would make ugly cracks about home, flag, and mother. But I still don't think 55 m.p.h. is a sensible speed limit for every damn highway in the land.

In this matter I'm in fervent agreement with President Reagan, who's from the West and recognizes that driving in Texas and Utah and Wyoming isn't like driving in the District of Columbia and New Jersey and Vermont. A fellow could
walk
from Rhode Island to Maine faster than he could drive from Dallas to El Paso at 55 m.p.h., but has Congress ordered Easterners to rid themselves of cars in the interest of conservation and safety? Of course not.

Instead, a senseless hardship has been imposed on citizens of the wide-open spaces by congressmen and senators who rarely do their own driving at all, and never endure the nerve-frazzling monotony of a long journey on barren interstates, and therefore believe a speed limit that's okay for New England is just as swell for the Southwest.

The only thing that has made the 55 m.p.h. farce endurable is the generally tolerant attitude of Southwestern law officers in the enforcement of it. Until recently, if a motorist remained more or less in the vicinity of the speed limit, Texan and New Mexican officers would leave him alone. But Washington frowns on such common sense, and the Department of Transportation has railed against us as a region of bandits and scofflaws and has threatened to punish us. “Drive like Rhode Islanders,” the bureaucrats screech, “or we'll get even with you! We won't give you any more of your tax money back to build highways with!”

So the Department of Public Safety and local law officers have had to go out and arrest a lot more Tex-ans in hope that the feds will return enough of our money to maintain the interstate system, which is the only form of surface transportation we have left, the feds having taken away nearly all our trains.

Despite their increased workload, the DPS patrolmen and the justices of the peace to whose courts they direct erring motorists still maintain the high standard of courtesy for which they're famous. I had an opportunity to be the object of that courtesy just the other day.

It was just a few miles west of Weatherford. The day was crisp and sunny, and Interstate 20 was dry and smooth. Traffic was light, so light that I saw Officer Vandygriff's car in my mirror when he was still half a mile behind. Something (perhaps his revolving blue lights) told me that he wanted to chat with me. I pulled over, and sure enough, Officer Van-

He handed me my ticket. “Just call the judge within ten days. His phone number's on the ticket. He'll tell you what to do.”

Officer Vandygriff was so nice, I wished I had time to stay for a cup of coffee. But my sister-in-law's lunch was on the table. “You be careful, Lowell,” he said when I got out of the car.

Yesterday I called Justice of the Peace Glen Dens-more in Weatherford and told him about my conversation with Officer Vandygriff.

“You want to plead guilty?” he asked.

“How much would that cost me?” I asked.

“Including court costs, $36.50,” he said.

“Yeah, I'll plead guilty.”

“Okay, just make out a check to Parker County and mail it to the address the officer gave you.”

“That's all?”

“Yep, that's all.”

I hope Congress will listen to Reagan and make speed limits the business of the states again, the way they used to be. But meanwhile, it's nice to know there are so many courteous folks along Interstate 20.

January, 1981

They Had Better Leave Well Enough Alone

T
HE
PEOPLE
of the Davis and Chisos mountains of Far West Texas have always figured the perfect government would be no government at all, and they've come closer to perfection than anybody. You would have to look long and hard through the canyons and arroyos of that blessed place before you would find anything resembling your typical bureaucrat.

Fort Davis, the seat of Jeff Davis County and the oldest town in the area, never even bothered to incorporate itself, because when you incorporate a town you have to elect a mayor and a city council and whatnot, and that can lead to all kinds of trouble.

But some of the folks in neighboring Brewster County are bucking tradition and demanding more government, not less. They're complaining of “taxation without representation” and are threatening to secede from Brewster and build their own courthouse, elect their own sheriff and clerk and judge and treasurer, and adorn themselves with all the trappings of big-time county government.

For those who have never been West of the Pecos, a few facts might make the situation a little more understandable.

Brewster is the largest of Texas' 254 counties. Its area is 6,204 square miles—roughly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. All the land is either mountains or desert, nearly all of it magnificent. The southern tip of Brewster County, down on the Rio Grande, is occupied by Big Bend National Park. The rest of the county is occupied by about seven thousand people and tens of thousands of cattle, sheep, goats, and various wild critters. About six thousand of the people live in Alpine, the county seat, and a few hundred live in Marathon, the gateway to the park. The rest—ranchers, rockhounds, desert rats, dreamy prospectors, smugglers, and lost tourists— are scattered hither and yon.