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The theme of this guest-edited issue of Desert Candleis “a sense of place” — our instinct to bond with land, history, culture and family. The “why” of our longing for such deep attachments always eludes a full accounting. Even so, the impact ofthese intimate attachments on identity — on who we most deeply feel ourselves to be — often powers the personal stories we yearn to tell and love to hear.
Catherine Rainwater deftly recounts anthropologist Kay Sutherland’s intense personal and professional connection to the mysterious ancient rock art preserved at Hueco Tanks Historical State Park. Kay herself felt something of the Jornada Mogollon peoples’ sense of place commemorated in this art from a lost world we can now only imagine.
Like the innkeeper’s son in Stephen Crane’s The Blue Hotel who believes in a still farther legendary “out west,” as a teenager Don Graham imagined an exciting Far West Texas quite different from his cotton-defined Carrollton home-town. No matter how familiar a place is to us, however, it can retain a mysteriousness that continues to stir our imagination. As Andrew Stuart discloses, such is the case with the peculiar name of the Chisos Mountains. Dan Flores knows firsthand about the inexplicable mysteriousness of an attachment to a particular landscape. A Louisianan transplant, Flores confesses to an acquired lifelong addiction to the badlands, which for him are a state of mind as much as a physical place.
Georgia Tuxbury’s short story, quaintly reminiscent of Collier’s fiction at mid-century, highlights a West Texas wife who cherishes the surprising rightness of her marriage — a mysterious perfect match she does not need to understand. Nor does Patricia Kerns need to analyze her partial reprise of Henry David Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond. Abandoning contemporary luxuries, Kerns has undertaken in the Big Bend area what she calls a “crazy idea” — the shaping of her home and her daily life with her “own two hands.” And, as the photo-essay in this issue suggests, how could we celebrate a Far West Texas senseof place without including cacti? The variations on a theme expressed by these marvelous plants, so perfectly adapted to their setting, parallel the myriad ways that people dream of feeling physically and emotionally at home in their surroundings.
Bill Scheick
Guest Editor