Amazon Spacelords of the El Paso Salt War

No. 157

At daybreak Saturday morning a coyote loped across the road right in front of us, as the border blimp first became visible. The animal looked healthy, thick coat shimmering, that quicksilver that all coyotes have dialed up by the headlights and refracted twilight. Not too big, maybe a little young, likely headed home from the prowl. A creature that moves through the fences we build to partition the land and try to make it our exclusive domain. When I wonder how much animals like that understand the language of our engineered interventions in the environment, I think they must have a pretty good idea, even as they choose to disregard them. They may not perceive the electronic eyes of the Tethered Aerostat Radar System staring down from above, but that’s probably okay, as TARS is not looking for wildlife.

I remembered the first time I saw one of those dirigibles, on another trip with my son out to the Marfa Sector, in the years when the War on Terror had begun to bleed into the war on drugs redux, and the floating avionics platforms that had been refined for base protection in Afghanistan and Iraq got redeployed back home. Those things draw the human eye, just like kites, and in the right light you can see them from miles away. Weirdly peaceful, for a technology of war, because of the way they do nothing but float and watch. Pointed south, scanning the landscape for low-flying aircraft and movement on the ground. The guys with the guns come later, after the alert goes out.

Detail of a photo on the wall in Building 98, of a different kind of installation

The night before I read the first few chapters of a book about the Magonistas I had picked up that afternoon at the amazing Marfa Book Co., a cultural oasis in the Chihuahuan desert that disappeared for a few years after its original location was razed for redevelopment and is back in some ways stronger than ever, in an old house right off the main road. It was the first time in more than two decades of trips to the Big Bend that I really appreciated how invested the region was and is in the weirdly tangled economics of border conflict and commerce.

The old armories that now house Donald Judd’s permanent installations had their origins at the dawn of the twentieth century enforcing what had previously been a rather permeable border, while every storekeeper from El Paso to Ozona minted greenbacks selling rifles, and sometimes machine guns, to the revolutionaries who would bring stolen cattle across the border, sell them (tariff-free) to local ranchers, and get store credit to cash in with the local outfitter for guns & ammo. The last mounted U.S. cavalry was based there at the fort in Marfa, dispatched to keep the violence on the other side of the river, and help suppress any authentically emancipatory political economy on either side. Now there’s a Border Patrol base next door, with the best paying jobs in the county, patrolling a 100-mile deep DMZ that tries to maintain the perimeter through 21st century electronic omniscience.

After the first couple of times they stop you without probable cause to see who you are and what you’re up to, you get used to it. We drove on, following that old route slowly tracking the course of the river until it turns straight north to Van Horn and the road to the Guadalupe Mountains, tracking through a wide plain between the ridgelines of a Permian reef. The path the Anglo-Texans followed to chase the Mescalero Apache to their last redoubt, when the region was finally and definitively cleared of its former inhabitants to make room for us.

The desolation and temporal dislocation you feel when you pass through that ancient and seemingly empty track is intense, especially in the early morning. Until thirty miles or so in, when the sign for Blue Origin reminds you that 340,000 acres of that plain are now occupied by a spaceport funded with the proceeds of the cannibalization of the book business. Look past the sign, with its feather logo commemorating the perfection of flight, and you can just make out the launch gantries in the distance.

A few miles after that, driving north, you come upon the residential quarters: Figure 2 Ranch, where the homestead of an old Texas Ranger who led the last major battle against the Apaches just south of there has been updated with a sprawling contemporary home, curious new utility buildings, and an observatory that is the first thing you notice as you approach.

We took note, looking up the backstory as we drove on, and learning that you can now digest the information from the historical markers through your phone, without having to even slow down.

Hugo and I had been to the Guadalupes once before, when he was in high school and we liked to head off on spring break road trips without a specific destination in mind, improvising our routes and avoiding major highways. We climbed Guadalupe Peak on that trip, the highest point in Texas, and when we reached the summit we found a marker engraved with the corporate logo of American Airlines. But that didn’t impact the otherwise spectacular view in every direction, of a majestic western basin of high desert and green forest that seemed pretty well-conserved.

When we passed the sign that told us we were now on Mountain Time, and found the park headquarters just as it opened, a chalkboard placard advised the heat index would hit 100F, and it would be dangerous to be out past 10 a.m. (We had considered heading down to Big Bend, until we saw the park was warning of temperatures as high as 130F in some sections.) So we elected to explore McKittrick Canyon, a long walk that follows the gently ascending grade of a creek up into the eastern face of the mountains. I had heard how beautiful that gorge is in the changing colors of autumn, but it was also exceptionally vivid at the peak of a wet summer, lush with an intermix of agaves, Texas madrones, mystical oaks and highland conifers, and thick with animal life— butterflies and lizards, hawks and snakes, and ubiquitous mammal sign.

The sense that we had stepped through a portal at the same time as we had left the network coverage zone was confirmed when we found our way down a side path to an abandoned stone house, looked through a glass window at a secret list maintained by an absent keeper, and found ourselves reminded of the room the journey leads to at the end of Stalker.

On our way back south in the mid-afternoon, we decided to check out the salt flats we had seen from Guadalupe Peak a dozen years before, even if we didn’t have time to fully penetrate them. So we picked a spot on the map and headed that way, turning onto a busier road west of the park. And quickly arrived at a historical marker commemorating the El Paso Salt War. Which was not really a war, but popular uprising, a potently cinematic rebellion, and one that we had never even heard of. Which, when we read more about it later, seemed like that’s probably just how they want it.

A storm was gathering over the mountains as soon as we left them, and when we got out of the car, we could see the rain drenching the high peaks, there on the horizon line beyond the expanse of the salt flats. Seeing that mix of geographies, you could see how the flats are really lakes. Lakes that it’s said mostly had water at the time the Anglo-American settlers arrived, along with an ever-replenishing supply of salt, providing a bountiful natural resource for wildlife and humans.

The Spanish conquerors of Mexico had used that salt as an essential ingredient in the process they used to mine silver in the mountains to the south, on the other side of the Rio Bravo. Before the Civil War, the main permanent human settlement in the region was in the valley around what’s now El Paso, whose inhabitants treated the resources of those salt lakes as a community asset shared by all, a right enshrined in Spanish colonial and then Mexican law, and exercised by means of a road that connected the community directly to the flats.

After the Civil War, more Anglo settlers arrived in the region, the Texas Constitution was amended to allow individuals to stake claims for mineral rights, and a power struggle quickly developed over whether ownership of the resource could be controlled by one man, a politically savvy settler named Charles Howard who in 1877 filed a claim for the salt lakes and all of its contents.

The Tejano community resisted this assertion of monopoly power. When two of them threatened to collect a wagonload of salt without paying, Howard dispatched the sheriff and sought an injunction. The community took up arms in response, arresting the jurist and seizing Howard until he paid a large bond and relinquished his rights to the salt in writing. Howard left for New Mexico, but briefly returned to shoot and kill one of his rival community leaders, the one who supported the idea of the salt lakes remaining the commons. In response, the longtime locals revolted, shutting down the county government the minority Anglo settlers dominated and replacing it with community juntas.

The governor dispatched the Texas Rangers, and a truce was negotiated. It didn’t last long. Howard soon returned with the Ranger detachment. The locals responded with armed force, and after a two-day siege sheltered in the town church the Rangers surrendered. The rebels executed Howard and two of the Rangers, disarmed the others, and sent the survivors away. But their revolutionary restoration of community autonomy was short-lived. The federal government dispatched a company of Buffalo Soldiers to re-establish Fort Bliss, and political and economic control over the region was secured as El Paso grew into a major city and center of military land power.

Driving back south, the weird irrigated pecan orchards and farms we saw here and there across that arid landscape made more sense, fed by water sucked from the aquifers that sit under those lakes and deserts, beneficiaries of Texas’ variant of the rule of capture. We pulled over in front of the Blue Origin entrance, trying to get some decent pictures and see what we could see, but the private security presence deterred us.

In the week that followed, I found myself thinking back on the research I did a decade ago on the commercial space business, when I had the idea of writing about it. I attended SpaceCom in Houston, a convention devoted to exporting the Chamber of Commerce philosophy of taxpayer-funded private development into other parts of the solar system. I read the business plans and prospectuses of the asteroid mining start-ups. And I went to the law library and learned the answers to questions like Who Owns the Moon?

The jurisprudential answer was no one: by treaties negotiated during the original space race, the spacefaring nations agreed to treat the realm outside the atmosphere as the commons. At least until 2015, when the U.S. government seized on a loophole, and adopted a new federal statute asserting that, while no one can own real property on another planetary body, they can assert property rights in minerals they extract from there. And you didn't need to be a science fiction writer to see that whoever got there first would be well-positioned to make their own rules. Which they would probably tell you is a good thing, because they will be able to use their wealth and technological drive to save humanity, now that we’ve trashed this planet.

When we got back to Austin, I walked down to the river to finish off the last roll of film I had loaded in Marfa so I could get it developed. It’s been a wet summer, and the urban Colorado is exceptionally green and full. When I got there I saw the sort of surreal scene that’s strangely common in this zone: a woman in a white dress on the opposite bank, playing a song on her guitar as she walked right into the river, directed by her videographer. I couldn’t hear the song.

Standing there, I remembered how that patch of floodplain under my feet, at the edge of the riparian commons, was once the path the river flowed on a slightly different course, the same way those salt flats are the remnant of a prehistoric sea. And that because of the way the riparian land only became exposed after the territory was first platted, when the river moved its old route became “accreted public land.” Unowned property.

I think often about how rare such a thing is, and how precious. And wonder if there’s a future where we not only keep the richest few from seizing the stars, but begin the slow process of rethinking in fresh ways how we govern our use of the land we share here.

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The Missing Introduction to A Natural History of Empty Lots

My new book A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places will be coming out in less than two months, on September 17, and we’ve been working on some content designed to give an idea of what the book is about before it is available. I’m finishing up the first print version of this newsletter for those of you who asked for it, and now the folks at Timber Press have kindly made available some exclusive material—the introduction to a book that does not have one.

It’s a common convention that works of book-length nonfiction should begin with an introduction. With a lot of nonfiction books, the introduction serves as a distillation of everything that follows. This book breaks that rule (and some others). But we got the idea of imagining a different kind of introduction—the one that got lost along the way. Almost like the sorts of texts one sometimes finds left outside. If that sounds interesting, please click here and check it out.

Austin Launch Event and Upcoming Tour Dates

I’m also delighted to that the book’s official in-person launch event will be on Thursday, September 19, at BookPeople here in Austin, where I will be in conversation with the legendary Austin musician, author and urban naturalist Jesse Sublett. If you’re local, please RSVP for the event here and join us. I promise it will be a blast.

And if you’re not in Austin, watch this space for coming announcements of the rest of the book tour, which will include dates in other Texas cities, the East and West Coasts, and the Midwest.

Audiobook News

Lastly, I’m delighted to share the news that the folks at Hachette Audio have asked me to narrate an audio version of A Natural History of Empty Lots. I’ll be recording it in a couple of weeks, and you can preorder it at all the usual places.

For the print edition, some of the early reader reviews are starting to dribble in and provide independent perspectives on the book, like this one that popped up on Netgalley and Goodreads this week, generously invoking comparisons to both Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey.

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Further Reading (and Listening and Watching)

Last Saturday, the day we drove past Blue Origin, was July 20, 2024—the date that the narrator’s diary begins in Octavia Butler’s remarkable novel The Parable of the Sower. Michiko Kakutani posted about the disturbing parallels between that imagined dystopian future and the one we find ourselves living in, which in turn inspired a wonderful post by Alexander Chee on “The Novel That Tells You How to Survive America.”

For a short history of the Magonistas, read this 2022 New Yorker review of the book I’m reading, Bad Mexicans by Kelly Lyle Hernandez, which won the Bancroft Prize and was long listed for the National Book Award.

If you want to learn more about the Tethered Aerostat Radar System, you can can check out my piece “Borrowed Palantirs” that appeared in the journal of the Americas Society thanks to co-editors Mark Dery and Naief Yehya. (Behind an academic journal paywall, alas, but those with scholarly or library access should be able to read it.) (UPDATE: Paywall-free link here thanks to Bill Nericcio.)

For more on who owns the Moon and related topics, my piece “Capitalists in Space” over at Medium has field notes from SpaceCom, a summary of the law, and a ton of links.

Thanks to Bruce Sterling for the link to this fascinating piece about urban nature in Los Angeles, at The Conversation.

The July 16 edition of the NYT had this great piece by Margaret Renkl on the grasslands of the South and contemporary efforts to conserve and restore them.

And the song I couldn’t hear down by the river was one of the tracks from Amy Annelle’s new album, The Toll, about to be released on August 2. And the director of the video was our friend and neighbor, the talented Annie Gunn. I look forward to seeing their collaboration.

If you were as turned off as we were by the celebrity-drenched opening of this year’s Paris Olympics, consider taking a commercial break to check out Olympic swimmer turned documentarian Alberto Isaac’s beautiful film The Olympics in Mexico, about the 1968 games—available at Criterion along with all the others in their 100 Years of Olympic Films 1912-2012 playlist.

Have a great week.