The inactive gridiron,
located in the south Texas town of Asherton, unexpectedly became part of my
busy itinerary more by accident than be design. Finding the trash strewn lot
more eerie than ominous, I spent three afternoon hours that I really didn’t
have simply walking back and forth from one overgrown scrub brush end zone to
the other. On a day that the 3 pm temperature reached 107 degrees, I could only
wonder the assessment being drawn by the half a dozen occupants of a public
housing complex across the street were compiling about this strange gringo with
the out of state license plates. What could I have possibly found so
fascinating about this 120 yard by 55 yard eyesore?
My stopping in the small south Texas town of Asherton,
population 386, on that hot, late summer afternoon in 2011, can be filed as
another of those random acts that determine the path our lives follow. I was an
hour north of the southern-most stop on my Highway 83 journey, Laredo, TX. The
gas gauge said you will not make it to the trail’s head without one more pit
stop. My middle aged bladder agreed. Having no high school listed in the State
of Texas Public Educational Directory, Asherton was not on my itinerary for
that day's stops. I wanted to get to Laredo, snap a quick photo of the Public
School Football Stadium, then get back on the road north and make San Antonio
before night fall.
The area of south Texas I was traveling through that day,
from the Hill Country in the land of Lyndon Johnson to the boarder territory of
the Rio Grande, is steeped in romantic sounding names that conjure up images in
the mind’s eye of the classic Old West. I had started the day in Menard,
crossed the West Brazos, the Rio Grande, the Colorado, had lunch in Rim Rock
and bought gas in Sweetwater. In reality, the landscape is as barren and as
unattractive as any I have ever traveled through. The level of poverty is
striking, the small towns in the area riddled with trash and populated by many
structures, although inhabited, in various stages of collapse. It is an area
that appears to the traveler to be overcome with despair. The farther south I
drove the day, the worse it got. Asherton, as I pulled off or Highway 83,
looked like a village from a third world nation, with no obvious redemptive
values or civic reason for its survival. And it was just plain hot that day. I
was in no mood to spend any more time than was needed to fill the car’s tank
and to empty my bladder.
As I exited the metal building that housed both the
station’s attendant and a public restroom fitting in its lack of cleanliness to
blend nicely with the rest of the community, I came face to face with a stooped
old man entering the same door I was attempting to exit through. We were not
going to both fit. “Too damn hot to be in such a big hurry,” he said. We stood
with his nose level to my sternum. The man’s appearance also blended nicely with
the local scenery. The only noteworthy trait I picked up on was his skin;
white. He was the only non-Hispanic I saw in the store or gathered around
pickup trucks in the parking lot. I stepped back into the store to let him
pass, although he really didn’t give me an option.
“Always this hot,” I asked, avoiding that awkward silence
that settles in when dealing with someone, no matter how slight or short the
duration of contact; that you would rather avoid. “Shit no,” he said. I waited
for a qualification, such as “worse last week,” but none was forth coming. I
moved towards the gas pump and my refueled vehicle. “I got a brother in
Missouri,” he called after me. He must have noticed my license plates. I
turned back to face him. “But I can’t stand the bastard. Hell, he might be dead
for all I know. Married to a bitch and I can’t stand her either.”
I have a real weakness for the
belligerent and the profane. Their “kiss my ass” attitude and lack of pretense
to genuflect to any type of acceptable social norms, stokes my rebellious
furnace and raises my inquisitive antenna. Janis sang all those years ago that
freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, and this gentleman was
as free as the hot South Texas wind that whipped through his disheveled mane of
thick white hair. I had a new friend.
Elmer was his name. I would guess his longevity to be
somewhere around his 8th decade. I leaned against the car and he joined me.
“Where do kids here go to school,” I asked. “ Bus em up to Carrizo Springs,” a
town I had just passed through 10 miles north on Highway 83. “Closed the high
school here about 10 years ago,” he continued, “and this place been going
down the shitter ever since.”
Elmer had my attention, any thoughts of making San Antonio
by night fall, forgotten.
He may have not known it, but from my sociological based
analysis of the rural High Plains, Elmer was right on. It was not long into my
journey on Highway 83 that I had learned a truism that my new friend in his own
crude way had reaffirmed: American communities, urban, suburban and rural, are
defined by their local public schools. Let the school die and the town will
follow. Bus the communities’ young to a nearby bigger school and soon the town
square will be empty of all but the weeds of neglect, store front windows
boarded up and doors locked.
Gather as many educational, societal and economical school
consolidation experts as you can fit in your hat of demigods, then let them
spout their expert findings, plan their innovative strategies for rural renewal
and disaggregate their data to their little bureaucratic heart’s desire; bottom
line is: lose the school, lose the town. Drive Highway 83 back and forth
between Mexico and Canada, as I have multiple times, and your eyes will hammer
home to your brain a simple truth of the economic reality of dying High Plains
communities: every dead town I passed through contained a dead school.
Many other small towns along Highway 83 are even worse off,
having not survived, fallen into the state of a ghost town. Despite that most
are no longer even listed on a map, I still on my travels passed through their
decayed remains, municipal roadkill, a rotting carcass on the side of the road.
The crumbling buildings tell the story of a community that for whatever reason,
did not adjust its sails to the changing economical winds. Now mere memories
-deserted and forgotten - boarded up buildings that once housed a living
community. It is sad even to a stranger like me, passing through at 65 miles
per hour. The demise of each town and the broken dreams that accompany any
failed community, I am sure, would make a good book in itself. However, is
anyone left to tell the tale?
In almost every one of these deserted hamlets I
encountered, I could identify the building that once was the community school.
I would speculate that the section of the “schoolhouse” that is two stories
tall was the gymnasium. I imagined years of basketball games played on frigid
January Friday nights when two small prairie towns packed it to the rafters,
necessitating the opening of the windows, just to cool the place down. From the
banker to the town drunk, everyone was there to witness the drama and the
heroics of the local team, a respite for one night a week to the drudgery of life
in a lonely prairie town. And I wonder what happened to the trophies, earned by
sweat and blood and once displayed with such pride, won on those long-ago cold
winter nights?
I asked Elmer to tell me about the days of public education
in Asherton, Texas.
Surprisingly, to me at least, Elmer proved to be an
excellent civic spokesman for the town of Asherton, TX. He was knowledgeable
and passionately proud of “the only damn place I have ever lived, only damn
place I have ever wanted to call home and damn proud this is where they are
going to bury my poor ass, someday, and that someday is probably pretty soon.”
Doomsday humor aside, he was, he stated proudly, an Asherton
lifer.
“Dad did what he could,” Elmer said, after we had retreated
from the boiling afternoon sun of the parking lot and relocated to a wooden
bench on the side of the store, where we could rest our backs against a shady
east wall of the metal building. “It was hard back in those days,” said.
“It has always been hard around here. I was the youngest of six, three girls
and three boys, when Mother died. I was four years old, but I have good
memories of my mother. I remember her being sick, but not much else about her
death. In those days, out here in the poor lands, people just died. Nobody
really questioned why. We just buried ‘em and life went on. Probably, if I had
to guess, it was the cancer, but who knows for sure. She here one day, gone
forever the next. She just got sick and died.”
Still a young man, Elmer’s father remarried and sired a
second family, once again three boys and three girls.” I guess six was his
lucky number,” Elmer said. “I had six sisters and five brothers, all born right
here in Asherton. Two - a brother and a sister from my mom -died before I was
even born. I couldn’t even tell you, their names. Once again, back in those
days, death was pretty common and often happened really quick, especially with
little kids. I am sure mom and dad mourned for them. But what are you going to
do? There were lots of others to feed and money scarce around here, so you had
to get up and go on. People now days are always complaining about this or that;
the government, the weather, bills to pay. All I knew growing up was hard
times. We were the poorest of the poor; the Depression then the War; that was
my childhood. Still, I remember those days with good memories. We didn’t know
any better, I guess.”
“The other nine (siblings),” Elmer continued with the litany
of his family history, “Are scattered to the wind. Some of them I couldn’t tell
you if they (are) alive or not. Everybody just went their own way. Dad died
back in 1978 and my stepmom passed within a year of that, right here in
Asherton,” enunciating the name of his hometown with a prideful
emphasis. My new friend, I was to learn, had a sharp memory for dates and
historical sequences.
I set off on my journey with the knowledge that challenges
for 21st century small towns along US Highway 83 are numerous and enormous. The
national media has hammered home that point to our national conscious. I found
the problem to be not overstated. Many rural hamlets along America’s 50-yard
line could be labeled as still functional, but barely. Asherton fit this perception
like a glove. A faint pulse was still present, pumping a minimum amount of
oxygen into the few operating businesses that were still open. But it was
obvious that a slow and irreversible death was occurring. Government social
service programs in the dying rural towns on Highway 83 can at times appear to
be nothing more than a hospice for terminally ill communities, making those
left behind as comfortable as possible, as they wait for the inevitable
end. Asherton, TX belongs on this civic terminal list, hanging on, barely,
in critical condition.
When I would take the time, as I sometimes did, to stop and
talk to the few old timers still hanging out in these depressed towns, my
simple inquiry as to local history will almost always unleash a stream of
community pride, based on “how things used to be.” Tales of famous sons who
moved away and made good or the undefeated 1948 high school football team-
“line outweighed Kansas State’s line that year” – or the town doctor who worked
until the day he died at 93 years of age, or how many troop trains use to pass
through and stop each day during the war; all told with a pride that defies the
downtrodden current state of a once thriving community.
I asked Elmer about the history of public education in
Asherton. “Graduated here myself,” he said. “Class of 1948, I was a Trojan.”
Why did the school close, I asked. “Not enough kids, not enough money, too many
damn Mexicans, it was a lot of things. Young families don’t want to live here.
No work. The ones that are here ain’t worth squat. Mostly get by on
unemployment and whatever they can steal. But as you can see,” he motioned in a
wide circle with his right hand, “ain’t much around here worth stealing.”
So, what did they do with the old school, I asked. “It is
still standing. Up that street,” he pointed to a gravel road that ran up a
slight hill to the east. And the football field, I pushed on with my nosiness?
“Still there, but what a mess. Some guy bought it right after the school closed
and was going to put government housing in, but somehow that didn’t work and
now it just sits there.”
"Jump in,” I said, motioning toward my now fully fueled
car.
“Did you follow the football team,” I inquired as we drove
the half mile to the eastern edge of town and what had been for 71 years -from
1927 to 1998 - the home field of the Asherton Trojans. I was soon to learn,
what a dumb question I had just asked.
The Light poles still stood erect and straight, although it
had been almost 15 years since they had illuminated any games. Other than the
wooden poles, which upon close inspection were visible form the downhill path
of Highway 83, the rest of the former stadium had the sad look of civic
abandonment. If not for the necessary amenities of the sport that still stood:
the scarred goal posts, the rusting scoreboard, the collapsing grandstand which
supported a rotting press box, and at the former stadium’s entrance, a
combination concession stand and public restroom with one wall already collapsed
and a second not far behind; I would have never guessed that the sagebrush
covered lot we now stood on had for over 70 years been the sacred battle ground
for the Friday night warriors of Asherton High Schools. Above the iron wrought
passage that spectators would pass through upon entering the stadium was a
weathered but still readable sign: Trojan Pride.
Highway 83, as a north-south passage, has none of the up and
down topography one finds as they travel the nations’ cross country east/west
routes. The elevation from the Canadian border to the Mexican border remains
constant – flat as a pancake. As I would travel Highway 83, I could always spot
the next community on the horizon by two common landmarks rising above the
level land line; the town grain elevator and the lights on the high school
football field.
When passing through towns that had lost their public
schools; normally swallowed up by a consolidation with a larger neighboring
district, the former school buildings still stood and was easy to recognize.
Sometimes abandoned, but most often they had been sold and converted to private
use. It became my habit to stop and pay my respects to the former anchor of a
once thriving community. I compiled a list; often accompanied by a photo I
would take with my digital camera, a sort of morbid death mask tribute to
commemorate the soul of ghost town public education. I found former schools
filling roles of antique shops, senior center apartments, community centers,
private homes; and in one sad case, a shelter for hogs.
But nowhere, until Asherton, did I find an abandoned
football field that stood exactly as it had been left after the final whistle
of the last game, now subjected to neglect and the elements of time. It was a
sad sight, even for a stranger like me, as if a loved one had died 15 years
prior, left to lie where they had fallen, never given a respectful and proper
burial. Trojan Stadium was a field lost in time, as if the lights were simply
turned off after the last game ever played on this now rotting gridiron, a
33-28 Trojan triumph over Medina. Elmer told me as we stood in the west end
zone under the goal posts looking out to the scoreboard, “It was like everyone
just went home after the last game (in November 1998), expecting to be back
next year.” But next year never came.
“We really didn’t see it coming,” he told me of the school’s
closing. “I am really kind of glad we didn’t. I never had to go through coming
up here and knowing this was the end. I loved this team. Most years we were
bad, a lot of those years, worse than bad. But I never gave up. I always knew
there would be another day and every once in a while, we would reach up and
surprise everyone. That is what we lived for. It gave us hope and not winning
much all those years made when we did win sweet. But it is like I told you
about how poor we were growing up. We never had much, but we didn’t know any
better, so we never expected much. No, we never knew it was the end of the
school, and that is the way it should be. I would rather go out hit by a truck
than lying around knowing I was dying and nothing I could do but watch myself
wither away.”
Elmer was an encyclopedia of local lore. The Trojans were
first organized into a football team back in 1927, then proceeded to lose every
game played that first season. The total number of contests that inaugural year
has been subject for debate over the years, Elmer told me, but he put the tally
at somewhere between two and five. The winless year proved to be a beam of
light illuminating what the future held for the Trojans of Asherton High.
The first official football win for the Trojans came the
next season, 1928, a 28-0 whitewash of Carrizo Spring, the neighboring bully 10
miles to the north, who, ironically, at the turn of the millennium would cannibalize
through forced consolidation the Asherton Public Schools.
The football teams of Asherton had never been very
successful, Elmer said, “but people got used to it. But when we did win,
knowing how much we had to overcome, it made the wins just that much sweeter. I
never gave up on the team until the very end. From the time I could get myself
to the field, on fall Friday night’s, I was here. We had lots of
disappointments (from the best my research could gather, over the 70 plus years
Asherton fielded a football team, the Trojans were victorious less than 1/3 of
the time), but we also had our moments, for sure.”
As Elmer had been pointed out, Asherton was never known for
winning football. Between 1967 and 1972, Elmer remembered clearly, the team had
a 40 plus game winless streak. “At the time it might have been a state record.
But we never gave up and I was here for every game. Then we finally got a coach
in here that would stay for a while, who believed in the poor kids from this
poor little school. That is all we needed, someone to work and say we can. As I
said, my daddy raised 10 kids on starvation wages through a depression and a
war, but he always found a way because he had no choice, he had nowhere else to
go. That is the attitude we had here in the 70’s and we stood proud, the
Trojans did, they surely did. For years neighbors beat on us like a stepchild,
but for one good run, in the 70’s, we did the beating.”
Between 1974 and 1979, the Asherton Trojans struck pay dirt,
six consecutive winning seasons; with two seven games back to back finishes, in
1974 and 1975. Records, although sketchy at best, document only two other
seasons with winning records over a seventy-year stretch, a 4-3-2 mark in 1934
and one last surge of accomplishment, a 7-2 record in 1992. The football well
then ran terminally dry as the Trojans won only 6 games over the next seven
years, until the plug was pulled for good after the 1998 season.
Why was it so difficult to win here, I asked?
"We don’t win often in Asherton because we don’t have
the tools to win. Look around, would you want to live here? Bet you would not
have even stopped if you hadn’t needed gas, now would you,” Elmer said with a
mocking twitch of his head? I silently noted that, when discussing the Trojans,
he had changed the tense from the past to the present.
But what about that good run in the 70” s, I asked, steering
the conversation away from the general condition of the town and back to the
specifics of Asherton Trojan football. “Fool’s gold,” was his response. “We
caught lightening in the bottle, we finally got some breaks, and everything
fell into place. We got a good coach, we had a few kids with some ability
coming through, whose moms and dads had the goods to give, that always helps,
and wanted to see their sons do well and they put their money where their
mouths were. It was a good time. There was pride around here those years. Place
wasn’t so gloomy, and the kids started achieving, not just in football, but in
all kinds of things up at the school. But it wasn’t going to last. I knew it
when we were going through it, but I didn’t let that distract me, I just
enjoyed the hell out of it because it was a long time coming.”
I asked how he felt about his personal status. “Am I happy?
Am I sad? Who knows,” Elmer confessed. “I just live the best I can. I don’t
need much. Never been married, have no kids that I know of. Do I wish I had
kids? It’s dumb to think that way. How would I know? I never had any. You can’t
miss what you don’t have and that’s a pretty good way to survive in a shit hole
like this place.”
Why, I asked, would he defend his hometown with such passion
and eloquence just prior to labeling Asherton a “shit hole?” “Look
around,” he countered. “It is a shit hole. Look, I didn’t ask to be put here.
It just happened. It was like when we still had the football team, if I wanted
to go to the games, I had to go to Asherton games, crappy team or not, I
had no choice.”
Elmer had adopted a philosophy of survival; you simply play
the cards life deals you, don’t expect too much and you will never be
disappointed; just hang in there and take life as it comes. Perhaps necessary
for survival in an environment as harsh as the South Texas Plains, but
certainly not romantic, certainly not the sentiment we like to consider as the
lore of our culture; for sure Elmer was certainly not the feel good type
character I like to write about .
“This is not a sentimental place,” Elmer told me. “If you
are a dreamer, you don’t live here. I play the Power Ball (which on this day
was up to record 274 million dollars), but if I ever win, what would l do with
all the money? It would be a full-time job just trying to spend it all. I would
buy a couple of bottles and couple of women and just sit in the shade. I got a
Mex buddy here in town and I kid him all the time that (when I win) I am going
to buy him a classic El Camino, a low rider,” he said with a soft laugh. “After
that, I don’t know what I would do with the rest. Wouldn’t be worth the hassle
of hearing from all my long-lost brothers and sisters,” he said, with not a
hint of sarcasm.
I asked about his mode of transportation. “Don’t have a
car,” he said matter-of-factly. “Don’t need one; I just walk wherever I need to
go. Use to have a license and that Judge over in Carrizo keep taking it from
me, so finally I said, ‘why don’t you just keep it.’ You see, I have been known
over the years to drink a bit.”
We were now back in my car, headed west down the hill and
back to the Highway 83 convenience store where we had met. I asked if he had
ever thought of leaving Asherton, as all nine of his surviving siblings had
done. “And go where? I have lived other places for short periods on account of
work,” Elmer shared. “I have driven a truck and I have done a lot of
construction work. I have a way with mechanics, fixing cars and stuff, but I
don’t like being shut up in a garage all the time. I did live in the Dakota’s
one winter. Let me tell you it took me two years to get the chill out of my
bones. Dakota winter, no thank you. This body was not made for the cold. For
some reason, I have always been drawn back to Asherton.”
How do you survive, what do you live on, I asked? “Don’t
need much,” Elmer said. “Life would be a lot easier (for some) if they ever
figured that out. Two fifty-pound bags of potatoes, 10 pounds of bacon and a
couple of big cans of coffee will get me through the winter. I get a check each
month and it really is more than I need.”
“I live back across the highway on the first farm-to-market
road on the right,” he offered, without my prompting. “Go back about a mile and
a half and you will see a shack on the left. (That has) been my home going on
over 35 years now. First, I did some work for the old lady that owned the farm
out there in return for the house. She died way back, and I just stayed. Not a
farm anymore and legally I don’t own one square inch of the place. I don’t know
who pays the taxes. I guess her kids. Nobody has told me to leave and until
they do, it is where I intend to stay. Figure squatter’s rights are worth
something. Besides, if you ever saw the place, you’d understand ain’t a
whole lot of developers lining up to evict me.”
On the surface and evaluated against the American dream,
Elmer’s lot in life - and perhaps analogized to Asherton as well - would
be judged by most as a failure. He has not a legal claim or right to even one
square inch of the worn-out old building he has called home for over three
decades. The philosopher in him had been unleashed and was now rolling. “Think
about this, how much money is spent by people today trying to lose weight? Back
when I was growing up, we would have thought that was the craziest thing we had
ever heard of. Our worry was getting enough to eat just to stay alive. The
thought of getting fat was only a dream. Want to lose weight, don’t make so
much money.”
“I like to read, lots of different types of stories. I don’t
watch TV. On a cold winter night, no one on the planet, not the richest man in
the biggest of mansions, sleeps as warm, as dry or as safe as I do, cozy in the
wood burning warmth of my wooden shack. It is the one place on this earth that
I feel connected, content in a life that many do not understand. But I do.”
There is wisdom and a sense of inter peace in giving one’s
life a complete self-evaluation. “When I am true to myself,” he continued, “I
must admit, I feel blessed to have my ‘home,’ even as only a squatter, It
is not much, most would call it at best, a shack.”
Often, happiness can sneak in through a door you didn't know
you left open. It was clear that Elmer viewed his hometown like a well-worn but
time proven lover; the years having not diminished his true loyalty or
connection to this crumbling community. In many ways the Asherton Trojans still
lived in the body and soul of this broken old man, a self-proclaimed Asherton
“lifer.”
We were parked in the convenience store lot. “Laredo not
getting any closer,” he said, reminding me of my original destination.
“Can I take you home,” I asked.
“Nope.”
Elmer was out of my car and headed back to the coolness of
the store’s AC.
The chance potential encounters along Highway 83 are mind
boggling, lending credence to my hypothesis, as I said in the beginning, that
we live in a much more random world than we like to acknowledge. Life is really
nothing more than one big crap shoot. If I would have had that piece of pie
that day in Sweetwater at lunch, as I had contemplated, then I would have been
10 minutes later stopping in Asherton for gas, thus never exposed to the “Ghost”
of the Asherton Trojans.
I made a right out of the gravel lot and headed again south
on Highway 83, my estimated time of arrival in Laredo now pushed back by three
hours of time well spent; with a full tank of gas far from the only accrued
value of my Asherton lay over.
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