August 8, 2002

My son from Connecticut, John, flew home twice this summer to attend to a commission for a sculpture over in San Angelo. The subject of the work is Saint Angela, the namesake of the city. A second figure is Angela de La Garza, the wife of the original grantee of the land to build the city and also a namesake for the town.

The whole project has been a hardship on my part. He stayed several days each visit, but he was so preoccupied that he didn't help us once at the ranch. June is a busy month. We sprayed the cattle twice for a new drouth-resistant fungus that causes the cows to look like severe cases of lice infection. Been a big help to his old daddy if he'd stayed around to gather and doctor the cattle instead spending all his time over at the art museum in San Angelo.

Folks over in Angelo were making a big splash of the sculpture, how the two figures are going to be bronze one and a half times life-size, or nine or ten feet tall, standing in front of the new visitors' center on the river. I wasn't so carried away. At Mertzon, we have a native stone monument commemorating war veterans and a granite slab with a bronze plaque honoring the Dove Creek Indian Battle in front of the courthouse right by a tall flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes and the banner of the State of Texas. The Mertzon work is unsigned, yet whoever the artist was, he probably stayed in touch with his dad during the sculpting in case the old man needed to work his cattle, doctor his sheep or haul hay.

In the first place, sculptors should stay home — have a sense of place. The famous Michelangelo was a homebody. Pope Julius II had to threaten the Lord Mayor of Florence with excommunication for all of Florence to get Michelangelo to come do the murals in the Sistine Chapel. Means Michelangelo put his hometown above the very Vatican City of the Diocese of Rome. Had the Lord Mayor not knuckled under, Michelangelo might have had time to do another beautiful piece like his David.

At the unveiling of the model on the big night my son was chosen to do the sculpture, over and over all I heard was: "I just can't believe he's your son." Hand it to Wool Capitol citizens, there's no fooling those hombres. They know ranchers. Know the only speck of color that ever comes into ranch life is a piece of red marking chalk to stripe an old ewe's back. Know further the only exposure to color and light in our past is the swirling front of a nickelodeon in a cowboy joint, where art appreciation refines slow — real slow.

But I didn't expect any town person to appreciate how much I contributed to his being prepared to be an artist. Artists need retreats. Several summers, I allowed him to live at the line camp in complete solitude. Gave him the chance to appreciate nature, to sleep out on the back porch and eat his lunch in the pasture. Also, Goat Whiskers the Younger deserves credit for shaping his life. Whiskers introduced him to the ring of a steel crowbar resounding against flint rock. Showed him the freedom of taking the outside swing on dozens of pre-daylight roundups. And best of all, kept him in the country on weekends, away from the wasteful frivolity of the cities.

One of the reporters for the Angelo daily asked me what schooling or training influenced his career the most. I told him old Cecil Parks on the Whiskers ranch taught him more about gathering stock and throwing a quiet, quick loop at the correct moment than all the days he spent working in my sheep-scattering episodes. The fellow looked puzzled. I explained that unless a hand learns the right move at the right time, he can be more trouble than help around livestock. Hard to tell a city fellow how much time it takes to learn to be a cowboy.

One night sitting in the front yard at the ranch, he admitted how different his brothers in Austin had become. How back when they dug rock holes for Goat Whisker's highway fence, they never hurt each other's feelings. "Sometimes," he said, "we'd become plenty upset over hitting rock six inches below the ground instead of 12. But as far as tender feelings, our backs and palms ached too bad to add a hurt." (The fence they built for Whiskers stills stands over where I join his horse trap.)

He's returning in the fall for more art business. I wrote him a postcard telling him that if he came a little earlier, we needed to wean the calves and ship the old cows. Be a good chance to reattach to the spirit of the land. Pope Julius sure knew how to deal with artists. Maybe I'm using too soft a glove.

August 8, 2002

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