Diary – 30 August 2003

San Andreas Bay

Back from a flying visit to friendly, overheated Britain, we begin the annual migration north. Like thousands of other Texans, we are escaping our terrible weather. Some of us go to Maine, others to Oregon. My wife, Linda, and I go to northern California. It’s a radical change of political climate, too, and we have to cross a desert or two to get there. The drive from Texas to California can still stir romantic chords: hundreds of miles of semi-desert relieved by an occasional distant butte. This She Wore a Yellow Ribbon territory was once commanded by fierce Apache tribes, like the Chiricahua, who gave us Cochise and Geronimo. It’s easy to understand the terror in which those masters of strategy were held as they became pretty much the last fighting nation to go down before encroaching settlers and a cavalry consisting largely of Irish conscripts enforcing American rule with a genocidal ferocity which the Apache respected.