Desert Creatures Ruby Hansen Murray (bio) El Paso is unrelenting sunlight, rough sand, sparkling mica in the rock wall behind our flat roof house, the clank of skates on concrete and my bony knees. Historians say the desert was infested with rattlesnakes beside the Sierra de los Mansos, renamed the Franklin Mountains, where Fort Bliss was established to protect settlers from Mexicans and Indians. An adobe and red tile hospital at Fort Bliss is named for William Beaumont, a doctor in the War of 1812, who saved a patient with a gut wound. Beaumont arrived within seconds, and the man survived. The wound healed but stayed open, so Beaumont experimented on him for years, studying hydrochloric acid and intestinal health. The hospital expanded in World War II, expanded again and again. The commanding officers in medical units wearing desert camo and sand-colored T-shirts are clean, well-groomed, pleasant-looking. In military language, I am a beneficiary. The institutions that took care of me, of our family, have a stable personnel structure, reasonable compensation, retirement, and medical care. The military institutions that took care of us are based on killing, evil technologies, and global machinations. The desert around El Paso is laced with artillery and gunnery ranges, explosives, and armored tanks as if these lead to lasting solutions. My father is not the man posing beside a tank, not the tyrant flipping quarters on our bunks. My father used other weapons. We lived in Japan and France, both on and off military posts, longer than we lived in the States. My brothers and sister were born abroad. Our time overseas was a continuation of my parents' lives during and after World War II. My mother was a civilian working for the military in Berlin, my father a quartermaster. My father studied geology in college. A quiet Osage man, a reader, he planned to buy a house near Fort Bliss where he'd be close enough to visit his brothers in the Osage and his sisters in Colorado. He liked the heat, had grown up in Denver, gone hiking and exploring in the mountains. He wanted to live in the desert, but I don't know how he felt about living in a bicultural, bilingual environment. He never spoke Spanish. El Paso was the threshold between our military and civilian lives. Despite the starkness of the desert, the purple blue mountains felt like home. It was the last expansive place we lived before the cloying Texas version of Middle America pressed in, but still, our time in El Paso was tense. My mother was concerned about the path her husband, then in his mid-forties, intended. My father took accounting classes, though his commitment was tenuous. He was beading in those years. We visited Carlsbad Caverns with its cavalcade of bats at dusk. The large underground spaces were like the caves in Arkansas and Missouri the Osages visited, drawing and painting our cosmology high on the walls. We went to Juarez, to an old Catholic mission, and I realized how much of American context is unspoken. Some evenings, we sat in the backyard under the stars while he sang about a miner [End Page 75] and his daughter, his deep voice gliding through "ruby lips above the water, blowing bubbles soft and fine." We left El Paso when my father was recruited for the civil service in San Antonio, where thousands of soldiers and pilots trained for Vietnam. Driving from the spiky western tip of Texas across the Chihuahuan desert toward San Antonio in the humid center of the state, we came upon a box turtle crossing the road. In Oklahoma, where my father was born, Terrapene ornata ornata is common. I see them crossing the gray two-lane roads winding up and down through Basin and Range over the limestone escarpments flush with fossil fuel. Maybe that's why he let us pick up the turtle. It rode with us in a cardboard box, the four of us with the turtle on the bench seat of a station wagon. We had begged for a dog, but we had to wait because, my father explained, it wouldn't be right...
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Jan 12, 2021
Priyanshu Aman + 1
Open Access