Part 7 (1/2)

I had, I suppose, an affinity for difficult causes. I made Texas's Department of Family and Protective Services one of my issues, working to support the caseworkers who investigate child abuse and neglect, who rise at 2:00 a.m. to answer a police phone call telling them a child or a family of children must be removed from their home. I had begun working with CPS when we lived in Dallas, helping with the Adopt-A-Caseworker program through an organization called Community Partners, which was started by several of my friends. Caseworkers would literally have children in their arms as they tried to find clothing, food, medicine, diapers, anything that a child removed from a house might need. Many of the caseworkers, who earned meager salaries, were spending their own money to buy these necessities. In Dallas, we started a Rainbow Room, a true haven inside the CPS building, where caseworkers could find anything from clothing to car seats, coloring books, and crayons, whatever they needed to a.s.sist families in dire financial straits and children who had been left dirty, hungry, and horribly neglected. The room was a welcoming place, furnished by the Dallas-based Container Store, which put up bright Elfa shelves and bins.

In Austin, I helped establish Rainbow Rooms statewide. I remember meeting one caseworker in Jefferson County, a woman named Dana Stamps, who had removed an abused boy from his home on his sixth birthday. Toys from the Rainbow Room became his only gifts, pajamas, underwear, and a set of clothes his only clean things to wear.

Some months after George became governor, an El Paso writer named Robert Skimin made an appointment to see me in my office. He told me that he had attended a state book festival in Kentucky and that he had always wanted Texas to have its own book festival, adding, ”You would be the perfect person to start it, since you were a librarian.” I was intrigued, and I called my friend Regan Gammon to ask her what she thought. She loved the idea and immediately had a suggestion about who should help organize it, Mary Margaret Farabee. I started making calls. We gathered a committee of book lovers and authors. We asked to hold the book festival inside the Capitol, where only legislative business was allowed, and we got permission. To sell our authors' books, we erected enormous tents on the streets outside, with authors signing their books and cas.h.i.+ers ringing up whatever was sold. Any monies we raised were to be donated to Texas public libraries. And authors wanted to come. Larry McMurtry, of Lonesome Dove Lonesome Dove fame, told a story about how his hometown of Archer City, Texas, did not have a public library, until he helped start one with some of his book profits. The playwright Larry L.

King said that when he was growing up poor in Midland, the public library had saved him. His childhood forays into the works of Mark Twain had led him to dream of telling stories rather than roughnecking it in the oil fields.

But even after all the authors said yes, I was anxious. Weeks before the event, I lay awake at night and worried: what if the weather turned bad, what if the encampment of white tents blew over? The same weekend, Austin was hosting a beer festival and a gun and knife show. One newspaper article quoted an ”unnamed” author as saying, ”Great. Everyone'll be drunk and armed.” I was worried that no one would come.

We hosted a reception for the festival's black-tie gala at the mansion, with all the writers, including Kinky Friedman, who came in his big black hat and big black coat, and chewed on a matted cigar. The next morning, television crews arrived at daybreak to start broadcasting promotional interviews for the festival, and when George walked downstairs, Kinky was there again, wearing his same undertakeresque attire, even with the same cigar clenched between his teeth, talking to the camera. George was convinced that Kinky had spent the night stretched over the silk-upholstered settee in the living room.

The festival opened in the House Chamber, and then the authors fanned out to read in various committee rooms around the Capitol. Outside the House Chamber, as the events were getting under way, a jackhammer was ripping up the ground. I flagged down someone to tell the construction crew to stop, but then I began to worry about all the other things we had forgotten. My head started to pound, and I slipped back across the street to the Governor's Mansion and got into bed. I was sure the whole festival was going to be a bust and people would leave as soon as they had arrived. Regan and another friend of mine, Pam Nelson, came over to the house and found me. They excitedly told me, ”The festival is going great. Come back.” So I got up, redressed, and raced back across to the Capitol. It was standing room only to listen to the authors in the committee rooms, and there were long lines in the tents. I bought the books of the authors who weren't selling many copies and walked around. Over the weekend, nearly fifteen thousand people came to the first annual Texas Book Festival. In its first fourteen seasons, the festival has given over $2.3 million to Texas libraries.

The next year, the University of Texas Humanities Research Center loaned the book festival its priceless copy of the Gutenberg Bible to be displayed under special gla.s.s inside the Capitol's Seal Court. Late on Sunday afternoon, as the festival was drawing to a close, I was walking through a balcony above. For an instant, I looked down. Three uniformed Texas DPS officers were cl.u.s.tered around the display, bent over the Gutenberg's pages. In the middle of Texas, they could gaze upon the first book to be printed on a printing press in Europe, the book that took reading out of the finely articulated, hand-copied vellum of high-walled monasteries and began to make it a democratic pleasure.

Even though George was the governor of the second largest state in the nation, I had considerable freedom as his wife. And there was a great normalcy to my life in Austin. A couple of nights after dinner, Regan and Billy and I would walk over to stand at Antone's to listen to Bobby ”Blue” Bland, just as we'd always done. Many mornings, I would walk south on Colorado Street and around Austin's Town Lake (now renamed for Lady Bird Johnson) with my friend Nancy Weiss. I stood in line alone for coffee in the Capitol cafeteria or for stamps at the post office, and when people caught sight of my DPS detail in the statehouse, they swiveled their heads about, looking for the famous person who must be somewhere about the room. Barbara and Jenna love to tell the story of the time we were standing in a checkout line at Walmart in Athens, Texas, near our little weekend getaway lake house, and a woman kept staring at me. Finally, she said, ”I think I know you,” and I replied, ”I'm Laura Bush,” as if, the girls liked to point out, of course she would know who I was. Her answer was ”No, guess not.”

Even our family life held on to normalcy. The four of us ate dinner together most nights, and George routinely helped the girls type and proofread their term papers. When ninth grade came, Barbara and Jenna opted to go to Austin's large, downtown public high school.

The second year of George's term was also the year of George's and my fiftieth

birthdays. I've never liked surprises. I was so shocked by a surprise wedding shower in Austin that it was at least a half hour before I could actually begin to enjoy the party. But George loves them. So I planned a surprise birthday party for him at the Governor's Mansion. I invited his childhood friends, school friends from Andover and Yale, friends from Midland, the familiar and the long-lost. The morning of the party, George and I set out to pick up the girls from Camp Longhorn. When we got home, he could see the tent and the tables going up on the lawn, so I handed him the party invitation, but I didn't say who was coming. We celebrated under the stars with heaps of dripping barbecue, and lots of toasts. Then the lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock, stood up. Bob, a Democrat, toasted George as ”the man who will be the next president of the United States.” It was July of 1996. George hadn't even been reelected governor. But by the following year, talk had turned to the presidency.

I waited before I weighed in, because I knew both sides of what that decision would entail.

In 1993, George H. W. Bush had been invited to Kuwait to be thanked by the nation for liberating them from Saddam Hussein. He and Barbara invited Marvin and Neil Bush, as well as Jeb's wife, Columba, and me to go along. On the way home from Kuwait, we stopped in France to see President Francois Mitterrand, who escorted us all through the recently opened Euro Disney, the Disneyland of Europe, a far cry from my California visit after a night spent in a spa.r.s.e roadside motel. This time too I had ”siblings.” We rode on s.p.a.ce Mountain; we tried the famous rides and attractions. But at one point during the afternoon, I was walking ahead with Marvin and Neil, and I turned around. Behind us was the threesome of Gampy, Ganny, and Mitterrand. But they seemed larger than life, the way celebrities, when one sees them in person, look like the animation of a thousand paparazzi stills. In that instant, Gampy, Ganny, and Mitterrand appeared as fantastical as movie stars ambling through Euro Disney. And they were every bit as recognizable.

While as the years lengthened, their prominence might dim, but they would still never sit in a restaurant or a cafe or an airline seat and pa.s.s unrecognized. There was no chance for them to be anonymous again.

One Hundred and Thirty-two Rooms With Spot and Barney at the White House.

(White House photo) The Governor's Mansion in Austin has a small lawn and simple gardens. The place itself is hemmed in by a cross-section of city streets, pinning it to its urban spot amid blocks of stone office fronts and the slow progression of glinting high-rises. On the morning of March 2, 1999, a state staffer placed two white metal lawn chairs in the garden, and others hung a small rope to hold back the crush of television cameras, photographers, and reporters who had come to hear George announce that he was forming an exploratory committee to consider making a presidential run. The press corps is often referred to as a gaggle, as in a ”gaggle of geese,” but that hardly conveys the strange divide between the press and the ”princ.i.p.al.” What most video images and stills never capture is the sight of the candidate on one side and the crush of the media on the other, with their voice recorders, boom mikes, and cameras poised to capture his every movement and his every word.

The announcement of an exploratory committee was, we both knew, the same as an official declaration. As George himself said, only ”a giant thud, a huge yawn,” or the discovery that ”it was my mother they were interested in” could derail his presidential train.

I sat beside George, smiling. But I had been late to sign on to his decision to run.

Politics had turned ugly during his dad's 1992 race with Bill Clinton. I had watched political opponents and the media draw the most hideous caricatures of George H. W.

Bush until I barely recognized my own father-in-law. I believed in my George, I love him, and I knew he would be a great president. It was the process in which I had far less faith.

My escape and at moments my salvation from this particular trail was to come in the form of nearly sixteen hundred acres of blackland prairie in an extended finger of the Texas Hill Country, a ranch near a town named Crawford.

My childhood fantasies of El Paso ranchland had matured into a dream of a quiet frame house on the banks of the Guadalupe or the Medina River, where a slow, gradual lawn dipped down to gurgling river waters or a meandering feeder creek. I imagined children or grandchildren playing in its currents and the soft rustle of branches from cl.u.s.ters of st.u.r.dy cypress trees rooted to its banks.

In late February of 1998, George and I went to look at a plot of land in northcentral Texas, almost dead center between Austin and Dallas. It was flat tall-gra.s.s prairie, the bits of flinty range where generations of farmers and ranchers had eked out life with their livestock. The soil had been plowed generations ago and sowed with rich feed gra.s.ses, like kleingra.s.s and coastal Bermuda, a spiky green blend that spreads in dense mats across the ground. Ten acres are enough to graze a full-grown cow in the high summer. All around us as we drove, the land stretched out, not frying-pan flat like Midland, but with subtle dips and rises. Uncounted millennia of natural events, from torrential floods to crippling droughts and fast-moving fires, and the migration of ancient bison, were silently recorded along its contours and folds. Amid the fields and pastures, there were fence lines and tree breaks and a healthy breeze, but nothing to distinguish this spot from thousands of other working farms and ranches across the Texas landscape.

Then George drove me in. In the back, the gra.s.sland abruptly sheared away into seven box canyons, their walls covered in steep limestone worn down from water and ancient geological upheaval. Thousands of years of erosion had left jutting bits of giant rock, some of which the rain, sun, and wind have chiseled away, until their features resemble the noses, eyes, and lips of Easter Island's silent Moai figures. Here, instead of gazing out upon an island, with the white-capped Pacific at their back, they stand watch over the brush and fallen branches. Below, when there is rain, the creek water runs. In centuries past, the Tonkawa Indian warriors rested and watered their horses in this part of the Bosque River and horse thieves hid their bounty along the winding canyon bottoms.

This back edge was what old-time ranchers call ”sorry land,” uncleared, untamed, a tangle of brambles and overhanging limbs. Much of it was impa.s.sable. We could only hike to the top ledge and look down. It was rugged and stark. For George, it was love at first sight. I was far less smitten.

Two months later, the following April, I was driving with Regan and the rest of my Austin garden club to an event in Fort Worth. We were heading up Interstate 35, and the land alongside was swollen with green gra.s.s shoots and carpeted with bluebonnets and other wildflowers, bright and plump from drenching spring rains. As I watched the gra.s.ses and the flowers bend in the wind, I realized that this was exactly the section of Texas where the Crawford ranch was, and that the blooming land was beautiful. We had money from the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball team. I called George from the car and said, ”Let's buy it.”

By August, the land was ours. Scattered around the front half of the sixteen hundred acres were a small 1940s farmhouse, which faced two diesel storage tanks and a tractor shed; a livestock barn; and a few other outbuildings. It was a working ranch; the same family had raised livestock on that spot for four generations, coming out to stake and settle when this part of Texas was still a place that drew jostling wagon trains and weary pioneers. From its rear windows, the ranch's little farmhouse overlooked the gra.s.sland and the herd. The same work boots had crossed its threshold at dawn and again at dusk year after year.

After George won his reelection race for Texas governor in November of 1998, with 68 percent of the vote statewide, I started work on the modest six-room house, painting the clapboard siding green, updating the small kitchen, and refurbis.h.i.+ng the three tiny bedrooms. Later, on another part of the property, away from the grazing lands and closer to the steep canyons, we planned to build a real ranch house with a two-bedroom guesthouse alongside, but until that house became a reality, we needed a livable home where we could stay.

Then my eyes turned to the gra.s.sland. In 1999, as George was weighing his presidential run, I embarked on a prairie restoration. I found a native-gra.s.s expert, Michael Williams, and we began by planting native gra.s.ses along a strip at the edge of the old cattle watering hole that we were making into a small lake. The wild and rangy gra.s.ses took, so we searched for other spots where we could expand the gra.s.sland. We planted on a rise above the pond, and in early 2001 we turned our attention to a vacant pasture. Michael devised a plan of plowing up the nonnative gra.s.ses. Then in spots we sprayed the fallow soil with small bits of herbicide to kill a few stubborn sprigs of coastal Bermuda and Johnson gra.s.s whose roots clung to the soil even after the plow's metal

blades had sliced and scored the earth. Finally, after four years of plowing and spraying, only the loamy ground remained. Michael seeded the land with native seeds from a tiny remnant of an intact prairie. We covered forty acres with seed, and in our final year of seeding, 2007, the rains came, fifty-six inches of them. The gra.s.ses took, and the prairie returned. We then began adding another forty acres of native prairie gra.s.sland. Susan Rieff, head of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, has noted that our little project is the largest private, completely native prairie restoration in all of Texas. I feel a twinge of sadness when I think of the millions of acres across West Texas that were once alive with tall prairie. Big bluestem, Indian gra.s.s, and switchgra.s.s have vanished from the landscape as thoroughly as the thundering buffalo herds.

The rhythm of a national campaign is the rhythm of the air, of planes pulling away from the ground as everything below recedes. Our first official flight of the 2000 presidential campaign was a June 1999 trip to Iowa. We left the Austin airport on a TWA charter plane that had been christened Great Expectations.

We touched down in Cedar Rapids and headed for a country barbecue, past the rolling farmland turned emerald and gold by the sun and dotted with old, white-painted farmhouses and red barns pressed against their stout silos of grain. In countless small ways, the iconic images that we have of so many regions of the nation are in fact true; rural Iowa is on certain afternoons a Grant Wood painting come to life, the layers of landscape, the geometric curves of the hills, the thin slices of valley, all resting against the flat backdrop of blue sky.

In a presidential campaign, the candidates, their spouses, and their staffs come to know three states--Iowa, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and South Carolina--with surprising intimacy, because of the early primaries and caucuses and the amount of time and resources devoted to each of those states. I soon recognized the corners of the rectangular grid streets of Des Moines and the glittering lights of its suspension bridge, which straddles a river where the Moingonas Indians once built burial mounds for their dead. George and I and our staff came to know the tangy taste of Iowa pork barbecue, as opposed to the spicy taste of Texas beef, and we could smell the sweet corn ripening in the fields. Although Des Moines was founded as a fort, Iowa for generations has been a largely pacifist state, without major military bases, unlike Colorado or Texas or Virginia or even California, which have vast military installations and defense industries. Like their land, the people are plainspoken and direct, solid in the questions that they ask and the stories that they tell. And, as I had during George's ancient race for Congress across West Texas, I loved listening to their stories. The difference now was that the clock was tighter; there was always another event, another school visit, or another speech. When I was on the road, I lived under the shadow of the schedule--arrivals, handshakes, greetings, remarks, questions and answers, and the quick dashes to the local airport as we headed on to the next stop and town. That tapestry formed the outlines of our days.

Campaigning for office is like running a marathon, day after day. You wake in darkness and sleep when the local news anchors are just signing off. You sleep in motels and hotel chains, on a hard pillow one night and a soft one the next. Or you sleep upright on the plane itself. Your life is packed between the two sides of a suitcase. Bar Bush once spoke to a group of Motel 6 owners and told them that people think she has Ritz-Carlton written all over her, but in fact, she's spent far more nights in a Motel 6. To be on the trail requires tremendous physical and emotional stamina and energy. It helps to have solid, robust health, which is what I have. George and his father have their athleticism to carry them through; Bar also has extraordinary stamina. Even the press sometimes has it easier than the candidates. If a reporter catches the flu, he or she can hop off the trail for a day or two to recover. But not the candidate. If George or I got that same flu, we couldn't get off; we had to keep traveling to every event. I think even now of the senior Bushes standing next to Kitty Dukakis, wife of Michael Dukakis, who ran against Gampy in 1988, and how she always seemed so frail and wan.

This constant life on the road meant that I missed things too. I missed Barbara and Jenna's high school senior homecoming ceremony. At halftime, during the big school football game, Barbara was going to be crowned homecoming queen, but she didn't know it. Austin High had called me that afternoon to tell me in secret, so that I could be there.

Instead, we were heading for the airport. The only person I told was George's personal aide and our dear friend, Israel ”Izzy” Hernandez, who had been with George and our family since 1992. Izzy tried to get her to dress up, but Barbara went off to the game wearing flip-flops.

But we always came home. Not simply to the Governor's Mansion, which was temporary, but to the land of Prairie Chapel Ranch, which we named for the tiny, historic chapel down the road. (George's first suggestion had been the Lazy L. Ranch.) In 1999, on the recommendation of my friend Deedie Rose, George and I selected David Heymann, a.s.sociate dean of the undergraduate architecture school at the University of Texas at Austin, to design what would become our new ranch house. On Sat.u.r.days, we drove out with David and walked the property, imagining. David's gift was siting a home where it would have the best views, the best breezes, the best flood of sunlight. One afternoon we paused in view of the cattle tank, the low, flooded spot where the ranchers had watered their herd, the same damp place that we wanted to dig out to build a little lake for fis.h.i.+ng. Along a small rise stood a cl.u.s.ter of large, old live oaks and cedar elms.

There was just enough s.p.a.ce to situate the house in the middle of those gnarled trees.

And we did. We lost only one small tree, which we tried to move, but its roots had spread wide and shallow over the limestone shelf that lies hidden underneath the soil. In David's vision, every window of the house would frame a live oak or a cedar elm.

Then came the design. On our visits, David would hammer stakes into the ground.

We would stand and imagine each room and feel the ruffle of the wind. The house itself is split, in the style of old Texas ranch houses, with a breezeway--or what they used to call a dogtrot--running through the center. When early Texans built a house, they would have a covered porch open to the breeze, so they could work there in the heat of the day, with the prevailing winds drawing through to provide some cool.

Our own entry hall has wide screens to capture the wind, and doors that open into the living room to usher through the breeze. I wanted the house to be low and to fit into the landscape. It was only when the house was nearly finished that my friend Peggy Weiss came to look at it and observed that what we'd built looked ”like a Midland house.” And it was, only a single story and following the ground, just like the houses Daddy used to build.

It was never designed to be a big house. It's less than four thousand square feet, with three bedrooms, one for us, one for Barbara, and one for Jenna. There's a small library, a sitting room off the girls' bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room and dining

room combined. We wanted the house not simply to fit into the landscape but to be of the landscape, so we used Lueders limestone from a quarry that was about forty miles away, and we chose the top and bottom pieces of the quarry cuts, the ones with streaks of color.

Those are considered the discard pieces because most builders want only the creamy white centers. But the leftovers are feathered with warm streaks of ocher and rose and look like the burnished tips of prairie gra.s.ses. We used a local builder called Heritage Homestead for everything. When we wanted a cantilevered porch roof without columns that would obscure the view, they knew just how to engineer it.

Because water and power are always precious and scarce on the range, we also built the house to conserve whatever we could. A sloping metal roof of galvanized tin shunts rainwater into a giant underground cistern to irrigate the property. Even the water from our showers is recycled and saved. Our heat is geothermal, from pipes dug three hundred feet into the ground, where the temperature is a constant sixty-seven degrees.

We have a heat pump to circulate the water, warming it in the winter, cooling it in the summer, when it comes from the sun-baked ground. The floors are poured concrete or wide plank wood, and we did not build a single stair. We want to live at that ranch when we are in our walkers and our wheelchairs, should that day ever come.