Drought

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I drove through the empti­ness that is the end­less­ness of South Texas:
see for­ever and noth­ing at the same time, as the joke goes.

Hav­ing grown up here, I have earned the right to say it as I see it, or at least to relay what the pho­to­graph shows. The inte­rior towns, Sin­ton, Taft, Bishop, Mathis, and oth­ers were dying when I lived here two decades ago. After twenty more years of neglect and two years of sear­ing drought they look like the dry­ing husks of the cicadas I keep expect­ing to come hail­ing through the skies like Valkyries. The abun­dance of flat land robs its inhab­i­tants of fru­gal­ity. If a per­son wants a new busi­ness, a new build­ing is built. The busi­ness fails, build­ing is left empty. The towns shuck their skins and a new main street, under a dif­fer­ent name, evolves like a snake grow­ing a new body at right angles to the old one. Old Down­town rusts, its meters freeze up, and cars park for free in Old Down­town. Christ­mas orna­ments are dragged out and screwed in to the old side­walks. The newer parts of town do not hold civic cel­e­bra­tions. Mostly though, the towns are about dead. The grain ele­va­tors are quiet, the cot­ton fields are brit­tle and dusty.

I was dri­ving to see my brother out­side of Beeville. I didn’t see him. I got to the front door and turned back. I walked back to my car, took a pic­ture of the fence, deleted it, and drove away. His pod has a sca­bies infec­tion at the moment, appar­ently. Even the most strict prison lock­down for poor fund­ing or for fight­ing can­not keep vis­it­ing rights away, but infec­tious dis­eases can. I cried in the car, think­ing of him in there, me out here. The dis­ap­point­ment that paints the walls in there (I have vis­ited before) ampli­fied in my imag­i­na­tion of him lying there, scratch­ing, mis­er­able and miss­ing a hug from me, just on the other side of the fence. For­ever and noth­ing out here, noth­ing for­ever in there.

So I make pic­tures on the way home, make art when it hurts. This hurts. Being closer, see­ing the ridicu­lous barbed wire, being around the cyn­i­cal and simul­ta­ne­ously list­less guards, it all dri­ves the hurt in to me in a more iso­lated, sin­gu­lar way, like a nail is dri­ven. They, the guards, are paid to keep it imper­sonal and to not con­nect and to make prison what it is, iso­la­tion: the worst poi­son humans tol­er­ate, until they don’t.

As I get closer to the Gulf again and the smell of the salt gains on the smell of the dust, I let the tide of it draw me out. I walk out to the end of Indian Point pier and make pic­tures of empty water. Unlike the dead fields, empty water is full of hope and all of life. In my heart I under­stand my work for today is this: toss my love for my brother out on that water, yes, like bread, and I am waiting.