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.
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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.
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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!
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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."
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!