188 The Meadow West Texas Moonrise John Ballantine Two Ansel Adams posters stand behind my basement desk— moonrise over West Texas gravestones, and aspens standing tall, stripped bare as they fall into the coming winter. The pale moon waning over a West Texas railway town takes me back to November 1971 after my six-month 4-F deferment following college graduation. I was twenty-two and there were still 250,000 US troops in Vietnam as Kissinger began his secret peace negotiations in Paris—what is the accepted shape of the table?—while the Washington Post and New York Times published the Pentagon papers. In a West Texas town, I poked at the turkey loaf lying on my plate as Bob Wren, a family professor friend, kept talking. Thanksgiving in the Sad Rock Café with the waitress from Petrified Forest—she read François Villon on the flat roof as the sun set—who explained that there were no turkeys out here on the dry plains of West Texas. Just oil rigs, leftover strangers, water stops for the steam engine drawn from the wooden towers, maybe a locomotive change, and all-day breakfasts for the crew. The food in Paris was better. But turkey loaf was just a touch above bologna, even if sausage and scrambled eggs were the house favorite. Still, turkey on Thanksgiving with soft string beans, swirled potatoes covered with something resembling gravy, and a red pepper, not cranberry sauce, to the side would do. Bob Wren blurted out a paragraph between bites about all the English authors I did not understand, particularly Milton. Why was I with Bob in West Texas, almost two hundred miles from Big Bend National Park? Maybe when we hiked along the Rio Grande, his words would trail off. His nervousness over what, I don’t know. I was the one to be nervous as the Newark,
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