Word: ranchers
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...ranchers of West Texas are (on their own terms) practicing environmentalists. But one should not, as a rule, attempt to discuss ideological ecology with a man throwing rocks at a rattlesnake. In the ranchers' world, there are still good guys and bad guys in an older sense. Mesquite tends to be a bad guy. The rancher enjoys with his mesquite roughly the relationship that Wile E. Coyote maintains with the Road Runner in the children's cartoon; the rancher will try anything short of nuclear weapons to conquer mesquite. He even talks about it in vaguely military terms...
Monte Noelke, a rancher and another of Tankersley's great-great-grandchildren, is a raconteur with Homeric talents and the family's sidelong sense of humor. Monte has decided that he ought to start a business transplanting mesquite trees and selling them as immense houseplants to people in New Jersey...
Mesquite is part of the rancher's somewhat hard-bitten order of things. Its roots go deep. But they do not delve nearly as deep as the oilman's drill bits go, in another West Texas order of things, boring into the earth for money. It is sometimes a morally uncomfortable coexistence-the business of running cattle and sheep on the surface of the range vs. the business of taking oil from deep beneath...
...range is filled with a sweet silence; it is broken only by a thin whistle of wind in mesquite and the oddly haunting sound, a crumpling tinny flex of metal, that an Aermotor windmill vane makes randomly in the tremendous spaces. But out in the middle of nowhere the rancher will come upon an oil "location" that he has leased to drillers. The work is deafening, unclean and, of course, extremely profitable. Oilworkers seem weirdly surly and uncommunicative for this part of the country, like punk rockers, Ahab's harpooners, aliens. The chemical "slush" from the hole...
...rancher shakes his head. "A cattleman's word is as good as his bond. But the oilman thinks that breaking his word is smart business. He even admires it." One catches, yet again, a faintly elegiac note, the hint of mourning for a more chivalrous, manly order that is collapsing. Raising beef in a nation terrified of cholesterol does not always retain either its profit or its romance. The rancher wonders (as he has for a generation or two) if the endangered species is not the man who rides the horse. -By Lance Morrow