My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere Read Online Free PDF Page A

atrium. It was a beastly day, and the gurgling sound of the water was so pleasant that we lingered for a bit; Witte said that people often came to the Clay-Desta Center just to be near the fountain. The idea of going to an office building to be near water seemed so peculiar that I asked whether there was a more natural source around. “Sure there is,” Witte said. “In fact, we’re in the middle of the finest fishing and hunting in the whole Southwest.” Once Witte was satisfied by the look of shock on my face, he grinned. “Drive five hours in any direction and you’ll find great fishing and hunting and boating,” he said. “We’re right in the middle of it. It’s just that none of it’s here.” The second time I heard the joke—from a real estate broker, as I recall—I pretended to fall for it out of politeness; the third time someone—a lawyer—tried it on me, I delivered the punch line myself.
    The first day I was in Midland, I stopped in an antiques store to see what passed for an antique in West Texas, which had pretty much been unpopulated until the 1920s. I dug through old copies of Sunset magazine and empty Avon perfume bottles while the only other customer, a heavy, red-faced woman, talked to the store clerk. “The president made a lot of people mad,” the customer was saying, and I turned to listen.
    “A lot of presidents do,” the clerk replied.
    “Well, he shouldn’t have been in a convertible,” the customer went on. “That was a big mistake. But, okay, let’s forget about the convertible, even. My feeling is that JFK was a goner no matter what.”
    I had come to Midland expecting that everyone would be talking about the presidential campaign, but it was the dead of summer and little was stirring; there were no local discussions of whether Midland might become the next Hope, Arkansas, or whether there would be house tours of Bush’s former residences. It wasn’t for lack of partisanship: Another local joke is to say that you can name more than ten Democrats in town. It was just that the Bush candidacy seemed predestined and expected, a natural ascendancy. While I was in Midland, the big news stories were that one of the longest horizontal wells ever drilled in the area had been completed, reaching from its starting point, near Interstate 20, to a spot twelve thousand feet below the Midland Kmart; that the Midland RockHounds had beat the Tulsa Drillers, 4–3, putting them back at the .500 mark for the season; and that oil prices were creeping up to thirty dollars a barrel.
    Midland is such a small city and the Bushes are so woven into it that most people seem to have had some contact with them—lived down the street from them, or belonged to the same country club, or known Laura Bush when she was a girl. The Bush family first moved to Midland in 1950, when a lot of East Coast entrepreneurs were coming to Texas and looking for oil. It was a great moment to be punching holes in the Permian Basin: Within nine years, George H. W. Bush had made his fortune and moved the family to Houston. In the mid-seventies, when George W. Bush came back to Midland and founded Arbusto Oil, it was still a good time to be in the business. But only half of Arbusto’s wells hit oil or gas; eventually, the company faltered and merged with another dying company, which was then bought out by Harken Energy, and Bush moved to Washington, D.C. Virtually every oilman I met remembered George W. from his Arbusto days. The comment I heard from most of them was,”George W. was the nicest young man you ever will meet. Just the nicest. But, you know, he never did earn a dime.”
     
     
     
    I WAS HOT the whole time I was in Midland and dying to see anything green. When I could bear the heat, I walked around the deserted downtown, or through the neighborhood called Old Town Midland, or to the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum, Library, and Hall of Fame, over by the interstate. Everything seemed bleached and lifeless.