So after this I found myself doubling down and did The Worst Hard Time, which has been in my list for a while. It's not the book I expected - it's the saga of the dumb fucking rednecks too stupid to leave the goddamn dustbowl after things turned utterly to shit. The book does a merry job of shitting on all the people who took free land in the '20s and then bailed when Hoover destroyed grain prices while also canonizing all the people who took free land in the '10s and were too stupid to leave. Nonetheless, I knew my peepz, who have always been white trash, were likely those dumb okies who bailed on shitsville in "no man's land" in what was called "the great american desert" before the marketers came. Fortunately I have a long-ass lineage prepared by one of my grandfather's cousins that takes things way back. I got it when my grandfather, grandmother and uncle all croaked within three days of each other back in 2012. I didn't realize how far back it went until I started digging in last week, though - whoever did the lineage managed to trace things back to Texas in 1824. As in, born in Texas twelve years before the Republic of Texas. As in, born in Texas 23 years before it became a state. Which, when you look at family names, means I'm not meaningless white trash going back generations. It means I'm bloody Old 300. Speaking as someone who has long reviled those water-stealing, queso-eating, landyacht-driving cornfed rednecks known as Texans, this is difficult for me. Of course, as a buddy pointed out, Texas is where we went for fun, and the women were hot, and despite the fact that we had to traverse 12 hours of cows we fuckin' had a rippin' time and I should get over myself. Kind of a weird experience when on the one hand, there are Wikipedia pages about your ancestors and on the other hand, there's also this: Probably my great uncle. Hard to say. Died at 7. Apparently my grandfather paid for a tombstone for his little brother back in the '50s so this one might be misidentified. Which gets you digging into the more recent ancestral home and how everyone got blown out of there by the drought in the '50s. “I don’t know if it’s going to help,” he laughs. “But it can’t hurt.” If only someone had thought of that earlier. Driving across a field, Billy Bob points to a fence alongside the pasture. Several years back, he was digging a new fencepost hole there when he hit a metal wire. He dug further, only to uncover a whole other fence underneath his own, buried by dirt blown off the plowed fields that once surrounded Claunch. And then you dig further and you realize that your ancestral home is a mere 40 miles downwind of the Trinity nuclear test site. My dad's family were there back then. Didn't leave until '49 or so. And they're long-lived people and ain't nobody on that side have anything even vaguely resembling cancer, so that's interesting. So I guess on the one hand I'm wrapping my head around blue-blood Texas heritage. And on the other hand, I'm wrapping my head around my daughter and I being mutants. I guess that's what getting old is - realizing that the geneology you've been avoiding all your goddamn life is actually pretty interesting.
Billy Bob’s ranch used to be called Rancho Secate. But when a friend told him that secate was Spanish for “dry,” a dangerous name for a ranch, Billy Bob removed the letter E from the foot-high letters on his sign, cut off the prongs, and re-welded them into an A. Now the name of his spread, Rancho Sacate, means “grass ranch.”
People from the region still talk of cows that turned white after the explosion and were then shown off at local fairs as curiosities to ponder over. But it’s cancer that may be the longest-lasting local legacy of Trinity, and while a group calling themselves the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium has spent years fighting for recognition and compensation, it could be too late for Claunch, whose population is now under 10, the old-timers gone, their families scattered long ago. It's a strange and unsettling footnote in the history of the little town of pinto beans and singing conventions.