"... I love to lie and listen to the music of the wind strumming a sagebrush guitar. And over yonder hill the moon is climbing …”
Excerpt from song: Along the Navajo Trail
Visionary. Strong. Independent. These words conjure images of individuals who pioneer new worlds. Far West Texas is settled by these kinds of people, and a few of their stories emerge in this issue of the Desert Candle. The Prologue from One Ranger gives a glimpse inside an era in Texas and the page-turning Memoir of one Texas Ranger, Joaquin Jackson. Denise Chavez’ El Inglés Tan Bonito chronicles her grandmother’s far-reaching journey into an English speaking world.
In the modern maze of high-tech living midst traffic and noise - within and without - some may pause to consider and even to pursue a more simple way of life. ‘Simple’, for some, means solitude and time for reflection; less talk and more reality; less material goods and more value; less indoor hours and more outdoor experiences; less complicated relationships and more instinctive ones. Bill Hanrahan tells of his leap into a new way of life in A Connecticut Yankee in Jeff Davis’ Fort.
Yet, this sparsely populated Big Bend region stretched over 22,000 square miles of desert and mountain terrain, and offering ‘simple’living, is connected to theworld via public radio (www.MarfaPublicRadio.org see Tom Michael’s article), telephone, fax, internet, satellite and cable TV. It hosts one of the largest telescopes on planet earth, monitoring galaxies beyond. Rebecca Johnson and staff tell of this wonder, McDonald Observatory, while Bernie Zelazny sketches the canopy in The Big Bend Sky – Past and Present.
Creative impulses seem to emanate from the soil itself in Simone Swan’s The Merry Pranks of Scholarly Mud Freaks, and its qualifier, Dwelling Inside/Outside the Cultural Body by Surpik Angelini.
The Candle’s featured artists this spring areWestern painter Wayne Baize from Fort Davis (front cover art) profiled by KayEllis, and poet Professor Nelson Sager posturing Shakespearian sonnets in Wild West vernacular.
Get to know some of our diverse Folks of Far WestTexas as Bob Miles introduces a few, and reminisce with us an earlier mode of travel via James Bunnell’s Pinto Canyon.
Interesting book reviews, folklore and a Far West Texas Quiz are a standard treat of the Desert Candle, now entering its second year of publication.
Kay Taylor Burnett
Editor
Download the entire Spring 2005 issue in PDF format from the "attachment" link below. (Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 or greater.)
