God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(4)

Texas has practically no laws regulating exotic animals. After a herd of nilgai antelope was released on the King Ranch in 1930, every rancher felt compelled to own a few zebras, or camels, kangaroos, gazelles, maybe a rhinoceros. Hunters decided to breed Russian boars with the feral hogs that are a remnant of the Spanish colonization, and now we’ve got more than two million of these beasts, each weighing twice as much as a white-tailed deer, with tusks like bayonets, tearing up fences and pastureland and mowing down crops, even eating the seed corn out of the ground before it sprouts. They can run twenty-five miles per hour and smell odors seven miles away.

But at least they’re not tigers. The Humane Society of the United States estimates that there are more tigers living in captivity in Texas than the three thousand that are thought to be living in the wild. Some are kept as pets in backyards. During the floods in East Texas in 2016, a tiger escaped in Conroe still wearing its collar and leash. When my wife, Roberta, was teaching kindergarten, she would go to a state teacher supply center to get classroom materials, and one of the options was to check out a few Madagascar hissing cockroaches to amuse the children. That’s all we need.



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WHAT I KNOW about Steve:

He was born Michael Stephen McLaughlin, but his father, a fighter pilot who had won the Distinguished Flying Cross in the Second World War, died in a crash six months before he was born. Steve’s name was changed when his mother remarried, so he became Stephen Michael Harrigan. Or else Michael Stephen Harrigan. It’s one way on his driver’s license and the other on his passport. He’s not sure himself what his legal name is.

Steve has always been set in his ways. When he was a boy, a pretty girl gave him a rock, and he kept it in his pocket for two years. One time when we were on another bike ride, Steve confessed that he has difficulty changing gears because his personality is so inflexible.

He’s a serial sneezer—I have counted up to fourteen in a row—and he has impressive dexterity, being able to snap all his fingers, and peel an orange with a spoon. He is a somnambulist, who occasionally walks in his sleep, and once even showered and dressed without waking up. He has been known to latch his hotel room door to keep himself from wandering into the hallway in his underwear.

He fathered three adorable daughters and evidently has no Y chromosomes.

He suffers from a crippling civility and is constitutionally unable to enter a door before anyone else. His niceness sometimes gets him into trouble, but it goes along with his chivalry. Once he saw a woman being manhandled on the street and he sprung to her defense, whereupon her boyfriend beat him up while she told him to mind his own business.

He goes to the movies at least twice a week, even those known to be awful, which he will sometimes defend because “it succeeds on its own terms” or some such inarguable formulation. He hates clowns and mimes, which scream phoniness to him, but he’s soft on pests, like rats and snakes, because they can’t help being what they are.

Nothing depresses him like good news. He’s always worried about money, but tell him he’s won the lottery and he’ll sink into a funk, imagining all the things that will inevitably go wrong. He claims he’s not a pessimist; he’s just anxious about being taken in by dreamy illusions. When we got our first movie contract, he glumly observed, “This could be the worst thing that ever happened to us.”

Steve still has his old interior lineman frame, but he’s bald and his beard is going white. In fashion, he inclines toward survivalist gear. He divides the world into those who are ready to flee into the hills on a moment’s notice and those who are liable to find themselves, like Pierre in War and Peace, trapped on the field of battle in a swallowtail coat—to Steve, the most frightening passage in all of literature.

As it happens, Steve and I were born in the same hospital in Oklahoma City, and lived at the same time in Abilene, Texas. Steve’s stepfather was an oilman, which brought his family to Texas. We didn’t meet until I moved to Austin in 1980 to work for Texas Monthly magazine, where Steve was a staff writer. Living such parallel lives, we were destined to get together eventually.



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THE WRIGHTS CAME to Texas through a terrible error of judgment. My great-grandfather Edwin Wright was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, one of the most charming and historic villages in all of the United Kingdom. The 1861 British census lists his occupation as “castrator.” Why he left is a mystery no one has ever solved. He immigrated to America around the time of the Civil War, lived for several years in Buffalo, where he had an uncle, and filed for citizenship in 1868. We think he went from there to Minnesota, possibly to practice his craft on the local sheep. By then he had a family. Kansas was open for homesteading, and Edwin decided to try his luck there. It was then that he made his colossal mistake.

With no history as a farmer, Edwin brought with him a wooden moldboard plow. We believe he bought it in Buffalo. This was, already, ancient technology, long since replaced by steel, but when my great-grandfather and his family stepped off the train in central Kansas, he was faced with a choice. On one side of the tracks was blackland prairie, which his wooden plow couldn’t turn, and on the other side was sandy soil, not much denser than a beach. That’s where Edwin Wright made his claim, in the heart of what became the Dust Bowl.

Generations of Wrights were ruined by that cursed decision. My father, John Donald Wright, the youngest of five children, was the only one of his siblings to escape. He worked his way through college and law school, then spent seven years at war, in Europe and Korea. Disgusted with the law, he decided to become a banker, which is how we got to Texas. Daddy was a vice president of Citizens National Bank in Abilene at the same time that Steve’s stepfather had his office downtown. We wondered if they might have had coffee together.