Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2019 i The Texas Observer

A Global Warming BY MOLLY IVINS, 1995 THE GIST: Molly Ivins reported that, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change was caused by human activity, “our numskull pals in Congress are heading militantly in the wrong direction,” slashing funding for scientific research and rolling back environmental protections. “As they say at Alcoholics Anonymous, denial is not just a river in Egypt,” she wrote. THE UPDATE: Denial of climate change has reached an all-time low. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which categorizes Americans according to their belief in global warming, six in 10 Americans are alarmed or concerned about the issue. In Texas, 74 percent of registered voters said in 2019 that the U.S. government should be doing something about climate change, according to a University…

On the evening of December 28, 2014, Kourtney Bogan got an urgent call from her younger brother in Clarksville, a rural town of 3,200 bordering Oklahoma in far northeast Texas. Their mother, Gayla Bogan, who’d been fighting a respiratory infection over Christmas, was in bad shape. Kourtney jumped in her car and drove over. “When I got there, she was gasping for air, like she couldn’t breathe or something was blocking her airway,” Kourtney said. “I was panicking. She kept saying that she couldn’t breathe.” Kourtney and her brother, Bristian, tried sitting Gayla upright in a chair, but it didn’t help. A minute later, she became “nonresponsive,” Kourtney said. She called 911. Within five minutes, an ambulance had arrived at the house, and workers loaded Gayla into the vehicle. They…

Respect is a luxury in a place where dignity is so often denied. I FELT MY BLOOD PRESSURE RISING, HEARD MY heartbeat in my ears, and tasted my mouth drying out as the heavy jail door slammed shut behind me. It was my first time in 4J2, a maximum-security women’s pod in the Harris County Jail. The stale air pulsed with the sound of women talking, metal clanging, and a TV blaring. The pod was divided into a large open area with a staircase in the center, a few metal tables bolted to the floor, and 24 single-woman cells lining the walls. Each cell contained a low cot, a shower, a toilet, a small nightstand, and a few personal belongings. The guard on duty was encased in a glass booth…

DAYS AFTER A MAN DROVE THROUGH MIDLAND AND Odessa, shooting an AR-15-style rifle out his window at bystanders and killing seven people, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick issued what was seen as a potentially monumental breakthrough in the state’s gridlocked politics around guns. The staunch conservative came out in support of expanding mandatory background checks in private sales of guns between strangers, a loophole that the shooter exploited to get his rifle after failing a federal background check years before. “Someone in the Republican Party has to take the lead on this,” Patrick said. As the conservative leader of the state Senate, he was “willing to take an arrow.” The mass shooting in the Permian Basin came just four weeks after a white supremacist reportedly drove from suburban Dallas to an…

“Rational hope is the most important thing that we can give each other.” KATHARINE HAYHOE LOVES TALKING TO HER UBER drivers—it’s one way she practices finding common ground on climate change with just about anyone. A Texas Tech professor and accomplished atmospheric scientist, Hayhoe was the lead author on the last three National Climate Assessments and served as a reviewer on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But she’s perhaps best known as a science communicator who connects the dots between a warming world and how we live here and now. The science is not that complicated, she says—the fundamentals of how burning oil and gas warms the planet have been well understood since the 1850s. It’s our complicated and contradictory response to this existential threat that keeps…

Inside a tiny frontier hospital at the Texas Panhandle’s southern boundary, Judy Borpon is hunched over the same gas stovetop that she’s cooked on for the past 47 years. This summer morning, Borpon is right on schedule: She’s simmering hamburger steaks, grabbing canned green beans from the pantry, and whipping up a bowl of powdered mashed potatoes for the few remaining folks on the local Meals on Wheels program. “I don’t want to brag, but I’m known for my rolls,” she says. Borpon apologizes for not making a batch today. There’s just hardly anyone around to eat them anymore. Borpon used to be one of two cooks at Chillicothe Hospital, a health care hub in this town of about 700 people, an hour northwest of Wichita Falls. For years, the…

“There’s still appeal there, there’s still value there, but it isn’t the new and exciting thing.” A BOILERPLATE BUSINESS NEWS HEADline triggered my nostalgia trip: “Luby’s sheds more restaurants as sales decline in the third quarter,” the Houston Chronicle reported. The beloved cafeteria chain—my beloved cafeteria chain, Texas’ beloved cafeteria chain, the nation’s very first cafeteria chain—is beleaguered. Restaurants are a hard business, or at least that’s the old industry wisdom bandied about by even the most casual diners like myself. And still, to hear of Luby’s suffering was a tough Jell-O cube to swallow. The Texas-based company was founded in 1947—well, actually, longer ago if you count the cafeterias of its progenitor, Harry Luby, but I’ll leave the arcane Texas history quibbles to the more obnoxiously knowledgeable of our…

I visited the Broken Wheel Ranch Project in the North Texas town of Bonham, where veterans struggling with PTSD can experience equine therapy. Mel Mincey, a former Veterans Affairs nurse and lifelong horse enthusiast, opened the ranch in 2010. As many as 30 percent of veterans experience PTSD, and an emerging body of research suggests that equine therapy can be a powerful healing tool. Dozens of veterans come to the ranch each year to build trust and confidence by caring for and riding the horses. “A lot of the horses that are donated, they're broken and they come out here, and they heal,” said army veteran Jack Brown, pictured here. “And in the process of them healing, they heal us … And so this is my spot. This is where…

Rural health care is in crisis around the country, but Texas is suffering the most. At least 20 small-town hospitals have closed since 2013. More than one-fifth of Texas’ 254 counties have only one doctor or none at all. State lawmakers have the tools to slow or reverse the trend, but they’ve mostly neglected to use them. The result? Without nearby medical services, many of Texas’ rural residents end up traveling hours for care—and because of this, people are dying. ¶ Towns are too. Rural communities need health care in order to attract businesses and create jobs. But newly graduated doctors are often averse to working in tiny, down-on-their-luck communities. No doctors means no hospitals, and no hospitals means few businesses. The vicious cycle goes on. ¶ Much has been…

Yolanda Narvaez knew something was very wrong when she heard the crackling in her neck—“Like when you put milk in Rice Krispies.” Yolanda was working the cotton fields just outside Memphis, a small town in the Texas Panhandle, when it happened. It was 2001, and her job was to navigate the claustrophobic paths between rows of cotton, checking traps for boll weevils—beetles that feed on the plants and are one of the state’s most destructive agricultural pests. Rain had poured down the night before, making a mess of the fields. Driving a pickup and looking sideways out the window for weevils, Yolanda didn’t see that the path in front of her had been washed out. The truck’s front end plunged, lifting Yolanda in the driver’s seat and whipping her head…

The winning entry in our ninth annual short story contest is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Alan Sincic’s “Dear Mr. Gottlieb” is written in an absurdist, stream-of-consciousness style that has shades of Hunter S. Thompson and James Joyce—but a voice all its own. Based extremely loosely on the format of a job application, the piece is a funny, nonsensical satire of corporate life. ¶ It’s a fitting selection by this year’s guest judge, Fernando A. Flores. Flores’ work is also gleefully strange: His most recent book, Tears of the Trufflepig, is a borderland dystopia featuring bioengineered animals in neon colors. When asked what he looks for in a short story, he said, “The ones that stay with me take some kind of risk, strive for something greater, unknown, undefined, and…