Posted on 08/14/2005 9:36:45 AM PDT by tgslTakoma
Camp Casey is becoming very organized, with how-to signs placed about. Ann Wright said, "That's what we are trying to do."
Let me read you the schedule posted on a tree: "9:15 camp meeting; 10 a.m. inter-faith service, 10:30 a.m., "Food-Not-Bombs Breakfast at Peace House," and....
"Wait! Someone is firing a gun. (pause). He fired it into the air about five times. He appears to be a local inside the fence line on private property. Now he has thrown what looks like a shotgun into the front seat of a pickup, and he's stomping off out of sight. I wonder where he went.
"Now he's coming back out. I'm out here standing on the road. He's got a no parking sign in his hand, walking toward his fence. I'm going to go try to talk to him. I've got to hang up."
(three minutes later)
I went over and talked to the man. He is Larry Mattlage, who says he is on his property and just posted a no-parking sign.
"We're going to start doing our war and it's going to be underneath the law," he told me. "Whatever it takes. So y'all go find another place to do whatever you do. 'Cause this is our front yard and back yard."
I asked, "Do you mean the protestors?"
Wait.....now there's some Secret Service and cops. I'm going to get closer to hear what they're saying. People in bullet-proof vests are here now. Two Secret Service agents are now walking up his driveway towards his house, with Mr. Mattlage. A member of the Sheriff's Department has arrived. Mr. Mattlage is waving his arms now. All of them are now walking back this way.
Now they are between the lane and the house. He's at the fence now. Let me record what they are saying. I'll call right back.
Editor's Note: Permission is granted to reprint the information and photographs appearing in this feature about Cindy Sheehan's visit to Crawford and activities at The Peace House. Attribution would be appreciated. — W. Leon Smith, publisher, The Lone Star Iconoclast
But in TX shouldn't the bull racks be runnin up and down that road??
No ones going postal
The man stated he would fight "under the law" not even within it. I think he is well within the law, otherwise he'd be in custody now.
You read the score wrong. Kent State was a shutout for the 1st game in the series, but the damage allowed the lefties to win the penant.
My boy!!
Senior editor Pamela Colloff talks about George W. Bush and this month's cover story, "Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch."
texasmonthly.com: Who came up with the idea for you to go to Crawford and cover the president? Was this something that has been in the works for a long time?
Pamela Colloff: The editor of the magazine, Evan Smith, thought it would be interesting to send me up to Crawford for the month of August. At the time, I think we both assumed that I would be able to interview President Bush and/or visit the ranch. Once we realized this was not going to happen, the challenge that I had as a writer was to figure out how to tell the story when its main character was almost always out of sight.
snip
texasmonthly.com: Was this your first time to go to Crawford? If so, was it what you were expecting?
PC: I had never been to Crawford before August. I was surprised at how tiny it was. The other thing that surprised me was that the landscape was very plain and stark. It looked nothing like the Hill Country. A lot of reporters were a little baffled as to why Bush had bought in this area (except that it was very cheap). Until I visited Larry Mattlage's ranch and saw the prettier part of western McLennan County, I didn't get it. As you drive into Crawford, it's very, very flat and it's very brown—not unlike Midland.
snip
People in Crawford were kind to me. Within a minute of meeting Larry Mattlage, he leaned down to examine my tires and told me that I was about to get a flat. (I'd been driving around in 100 degree heat on bald tires, one of which had a screw stuck in it—something I'd been too preoccupied to notice.) Larry patched up my tire and sent me to a garage in Waco that fixed my car. That's not usually how an interview begins!
******
Larry Mattlage, who owns the farm across the road from where Sheehan and her supporters are encamped, was not pleased by the new visitors, who hung protest signs in the trees. Sitting on his parked tractor across the road, Mattlage said he supported the right to protest but that the demonstrators should not be allowed to stay for prolonged periods.
"In the morning I usually wake up and see the morning sun," he said. "Now I wake up to stuff hanging in trees."
Blamm, cli-click, Blamm, cli-click, Blamm, cli-click
Nice one
Glad to see one of America's young people out having a good time in the outdoors.
I grew up 35 mi from Kent and saw it all.
The kids attacked the guard. It could have been much worse.
Kids were stockpiling dixiecups full uf redimix concrete and pelting the guard from dorm windows.
One of the dead girls was from 5 mi of my home.
We allowed the media to twist what happened in that incident and yes they won BIG.
That was prior to the internet
"I BET OL' GEORGE HATES all this nonsense," said his neighbor, Larry Mattlage, on my last day in Crawford. Larry has never met the president, but his proximity to George W. Bush means that he thinks about the man a great deal. As we talked, Larry leaned on a cedar fence post, squinting in the noonday sun, and pointed out landmarks on the Bush ranch, three quarters of a mile away. On the northernmost side of the ranch ran the Middle Bosque River: a stream of gin-clear water that threaded its way through the prairie grass, past thick stands of cedar elm and burr oak. Farther west was the original ranch house—just a gray blur through Larry's binoculars—and a fleet of Secret Service vehicles. Out of sight behind a rocky ridgeline lay the scenery that makes this western corner of McLennan County so starkly beautiful: the box canyons, limestone bluffs, caves, and slow-moving creeks that dot the ranch's two and a half square miles. "I bet George Bush would love to just get in his pickup and drive around his land and clear his mind," Larry said. "He can't ever be by himself, and that's a terrible burden for anyone to bear. A man needs a little freedom."
The 59-year-old rancher wore an old blue baseball cap pulled down over his eyes; his shaggy salt-and-pepper hair fell against his neck, which was tanned and creased from the sun. A recent divorcé, he lives alone with his old and half-blind dog, Dan, who is bewildered by the F-16s and Blackhawk helicopters that now fly overhead. "It's like a ground war over here," Larry said with a chuckle. His ranch, like the president's, is on Prairie Chapel Road, the main artery that runs through Crawford's farmland and ranchland. Families of German extraction have worked the land along this road since the Civil War and mostly keep to themselves. "People out here want to be left alone," Larry said. "We'd rather be scooping manure out of a barn than going to a fancy social event in Waco." Larry remembers barn raisings and long days picking cotton and relatives who whispered in German. "We'd work our tails off in the fields in the day, and we'd practice football at night, and then we'd cool off in Tonk Creek," he said. "It was like Mayberry. Everyone knew your parents. Everyone watched after everyone. The night watchman in town had a key to the drugstore. He'd let us in for ice cream after we went swimming, and we'd leave our money on the cash register."
Staring out toward the Bush ranch, Larry explained that before Bush bought the ranch it had been a hog farm. Nowadays, Larry finds himself feeling nostalgic for the time when the hogs made the air more pungent. "Sometimes I wish I could still smell those hogs and hear them squealing instead of listening to all those F-16s," Larry said, breaking into a grin. "Don't get me wrong; the Bushes are fine folks. It's not about George Bush. It's about what comes with him." Larry ticked off a long list of grievances: Secret Service roadblocks on Prairie Chapel Road where he was asked to show identification, property taxes that have become so high that he worries he will have no legacy to pass on to his sons. He and his neighbors are concerned about a proposed new road, to be constructed so that the presidential motorcade will not have to slow down for curves; if built, it would bisect Larry's ranch and several other ranches. Most of all, he is angry that Secret Service agents speed past him each day without having the common courtesy to wave. "Country people drive slow," he said. "We're used to pulling over to the side of the road and visiting. But if you wave at the Secret Service, they think, 'What's his problem?' It used to be you knew everybody when you drove by. Now everyone's a stranger."
Larry wanted to give me a tour of his ranch, so we talked in his pickup, lurching down rutted dirt roads. "No one used to talk about politics around here," he said, steering past Black Angus cattle that lay napping in the shade. "Family feuds have started over all this. You used to be just a neighbor. Now you're a Republican neighbor or a Democratic neighbor. It's taken away the closeness of the community." He pondered this for a moment as he drove, and sighed. "I'll make some people mad for saying this, but I'll tell you what really ticks me off. Bush portrays this as his hometown, and it ain't. He just barreled in here." We kept driving, past cedar thickets and a pasture studded with blooming prickly pear cactus. As we made our way down meandering cow paths, Larry expressed his hope that Bush will take more of an interest in conservation and using natural energy now that he has shown an affinity for the land. "God owns all this," Larry said. "We're just caretakers who are here on this earth for a little while." We had reached his favorite spot, along the banks of Bluff Creek, a peaceful place shaded by hackberries and horse apple trees. The dry creek bed ran past a white limestone bluff, where the ground was littered with the old arrowheads of Tonkawa Indians who had once camped there.
"It is so gorgeous here," Larry said. "Just listen for a minute to the quiet." And so we did. There was no distant rumbling of F-16s or military helicopters—only the wind rustling through the leaves and then a bird calling from far away. Larry turned to me after a long silence and asked, "Am I selfish to want this all to myself?"
http://tinyurl.com/cuuqg
IF they were indeed tresspassing (and all reports indicate they are on the roadside) then the sheriff would have been all too happy to make some arrests. Since that has not happened, I would take it that there has been no tresspassing.
The guy was a stupid jerk to fire off rounds in that situation. No matter what, HE endangered everyone around him, the protestors as well as the Secret Service...
This is surely not right. Whoever maintains the road does so for the purpose of travel, not for people to camp on.
Larry sounds like a standup guy.
Poor loony lefties, though! "He's got a g...g...g...g..GUN!"
Well, so does everyone else in Texas.
Dopey dupes!
The first day or so they were trying to camp in a small triangle piece of property which is privately owned. The land owner had them moved by the LEOs. See post 191 on this tread for a picture of the property I mentioned.
They are now camped on the row between a fence line and the roadway across from the triangle piece of property... or that's my understanding. See post 147 on this thread for a picture of Cindy's tent and others.
You can't kick people off property that doesn't belong to you.
I wonder if Larry needs to fertilize any time soon? That would get those city slickers to get out of his way. Especially if he fertilized with chicken. They would probably have to be hospitilized. lol!
As I see it, the protesters (if that's the word) have already crossed the line.
No, in the interest of accuracy, they were not trespessing.
If anyone had been on his property it would have been a different story. The protestors are getting exactly what they want there.
Larry turned to me after a long silence and asked, "Am I selfish to want this all to myself?"
Larry sounds a bit conflicted but hardly malicious.
Meeting the neighbors
All of this cross talk has put a strain on Prairie Chapel Road, a winding strip of hot asphalt from Crawford eight miles north to the president's ranch. Normally, it's a quiet, though sometimes busy, stretch. But Ms. Sheehan's stay at "Camp Casey" has drawn a crowd and stirred up the neighborhood.
So far, it's been mostly polite, if often frustrating, exchanges among the protesters, the neighbors and the McLennan County sheriff's deputies, sworn to keep the peace.
Wednesday night, Jerriann Mattlage, who lives near the camp said she asked some of the protesters to move their cars parked in the ditch along her pasture. And they did.
"If they feel like doing what they want to do, that's fine," Ms. Mattlage said. "But I don't think this is the place to do it. This is our home out here."
Instead, she suggested the protesters rent space in Crawford or somewhere else with toilets and other facilities for the gathering crowds.
She's sorry about Ms. Sheehan's loss, she said. But she added pointedly: "There's no draft. Nobody has to go to the Army, or the Navy or whatever."
And she said she knows her neighbors are just as annoyed as she is about all the congestion at the fork in the road because "they were all over here, very upset."
Since Ms. Sheehan arrived over the weekend, sheriff's deputies have politely but firmly pushed the protesters off the median triangle of grass into the nearby ditches and sent their cars and trucks down a side road.
Meanwhile, protesters have begun planting small, white crosses in the ditch in honor of military personnel killed in Iraq. And donations have begun flowing in, injecting new life to the Crawford Peace House, founded by Dallas-area activist John Wolf, and financing other costs.
Thursday morning, the deputies showed up at the camp with a pair of health inspectors, who poked around for a while, then left. The protesters have repeatedly warned of imminent arrests, but so far there have been none.
Today, Mr. Bush plans to attend a Republican fundraising lunch at a neighbor's ranch, which could spark some angry salutes should he pass by the protesters. And there was no indication from the White House that he planned to change his schedule, or meet again with Ms. Sheehan.
Mr. Bush met with her and other family members last year at Fort Lewis, Wash., during one of his regular, private gatherings with the families of the fallen. And Ms. Sheehan was quoted afterward in Vacaville's newspaper, The Reporter, saying "we haven't been happy with the way the war has been handled." But she said her family had decided then not to confront the president out of respect.
In later appearances, and particularly lately in Crawford, she's been very strident in her demands to meet again with the president.
"Why did George Bush kill my son?" she asked Thursday. "What was the noble cause that my son died for?"
http://tinyurl.com/9le33
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