Bourdain saw beauty, heritage in West Texas, if not peace for himself
MARATHON — It’s been almost a week since CNN ran the “Parts Unknown” episode featuring Anthony Bourdain’s visit to far West Texas. I can’t get it out of my mind.
Except for sort of a retrospective show this weekend, his culinary-cultural adventures in far-flung towns and Big Bendarea ranches mark the end. Ten weeks after his March visit, the chef, writer and Emmy-winning TV personality hanged himself in a hotel room in Strasbourg, France. He was 61.
Regular readers may recall a “Native Texan” column earlier this year reporting on Bourdain’s West Texas visit, although you had to catch my broad hints to know who he was. I didn’t identify him by name (“Is a ‘Very Big Star’ visiting Marathon a portent?”).
I was on hand when he showed up at Marathon’s famed Gage Hotel that sunny Sunday afternoon, but I promised his hotel hosts I wouldn’t reveal he had been there until the show aired. They worried that if I wrote something that offended him, he might cut the segment made inside the Gage’s rustic White Buffalo Bar. For the column, he became a Very Big Star, “who swooped into town, sampled local culinary offerings on camera and then, before word spread about the visitation, vanished like the mysterious Marfa Lights.”
I remember Bourdain standing outside the hotel after the show had wrapped. Wearing jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, the slender, gray-haired man looked tired, haggard. We were told he’d been dining, drinking and enjoying the music at a West Texas ranch into the wee hours of the night. We were requested not to engage him in conversation or take photos or ask for an autograph. We were told he was exhausted. He looked it, for sure.
I’m glad to have the show to remember him by, not the mental image of an exhausted, perhaps troubled man standing on the sidewalk of a small Texas town. Watching the West Texas episode of “Parts Unknown,” you realize that Bourdain was a genius of sorts. Just as he did in Houston when he hung out at Burns Original BBQ in Acres Homes and at Himalaya, he captured the rich concoction of people, history and community that makes a place as unique and unforgettable as a lovingly prepared stew. Maybe it’s something a perceptive outsider does best.
A bicultural theme — not to mention a river — runs through the West Texas episode. Bourdain’s first stop is the 70,000acre Means Ranch, near Van
Horn, in business since 1884. He sits at a long outdoor table with family members and cowhands, Mexican and Anglo, and enjoys fresh cabrito, deep-fried jalapenos and jalapeno-cheese grits, as well as buttermilk biscuits. Everyday life on the ranch is just as bicultural as the everyday menu.
“I learned to talk Spanish nearly before I learned English,” an Anglo cowboy tells him.
Bourdain rides the West Texas range awkwardly, like a city boy, a feather in his black cowboy hat. He watches a fresh-faced young schoolgirl show him how it’s really done, as she exhibits her world-class riding skills in the ranch corral. She tells him she’ll graduate from high school, go to college and then law school and come right back to the land that’s been in her family for four generations.
In Marfa, he enjoys sumptuous breakfast tacos at the local Stripes convenience store. “In the mornings, everybody’s here,” a local justice of the peace tells him.
That evening, he saunters into the Lost Horse Saloon, where a grizzled cowboy named Ty Mitchell is the proprietor. Wearing a black hat and a black patch over his right eye, with a handlebar mustache and a furrowed scar running down his left cheek, Mitchell looks like the quintessential bad man from a Roy Rogers Saturday matinee. (He’s also a part-time actor married to a German romance novelist.)
“Every cowboy has a dream of owning a saloon,” he tells Bourdain as a baby goat gingerly picks its way through the crowded bar and a young woman with short hair and well-worn boots sings and plays guitar on a small stage. “There’s so many cultures that come through here — hipsters, blue-collar city workers — and I wanted everybody to be able to have a good time. There ain’t gonna be but one intimidating sumbitch in my bar, and that’s me.”
Bourdain asks about the proposed border wall. Mitchell tells him a wall would be a mark of disrespect. “Loyalty is a big thing in Texas,” he drawls, “and you ain’t gonna build a fence between me and my loyal friends.”
In Marathon, Bourdain sat at a table in the White Buffalo Bar surrounded by “extras” sitting nearby and at the bar itself. Their instructions, as I recall that day, were to be quiet as they ate and drank and pretended to socialize.
Beneath the massive whitebuffalo head jutting from the wall as if it’s listening in on the conversation, Bourdain talks to Roger Hodge, a Del Rio native, New York editor and author of a recent book called “Texas Blood: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands.”
“The story of Texas gets a little too polished. People forget that,” Hodge tells him. “It was a conquest.” (Some of the extras told me later they took issue with what they heard Hodge telling Bourdain during the hourlong conversation, but, of course, they had to keep quiet.)
Bourdain also enjoyed a ribeye steak, cooked rare, as he talked. He ate the whole thing, Gage manager Carol Peterson noticed. Afterward, he thanked the entire kitchen staff and shook the hand of executive chef Joe Rodriguez, before wandering outside to smoke a cigarette.
In Presidio, the camera follows Molly Ferguson as she pedals her bicycle through town and over the international bridge into Ojinaga. There, she hops on the back of her boyfriend’s bright red motorcycle, and the two end up at a restaurant called El Mexico de Ayer, overlooking the Christmas Mountains. With Bourdain, the couple share a meal with the mayor of Presidio, who’s also the young woman’s father, and with a longtime friend, a former Ojinaga mayor.
“Here we’re all family,” Mayor John Ferguson says, even as the young man tells Bourdain he’s never seen Molly’s house across the river. U.S. immigration officials in El Paso denied his application for a visitor’s permit.
Bourdain’s West Texas adventure comes to an end with a float trip through the magnificent Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park, the trip capped off after a dip in the river by an evening meal of steak with green onions, grilled corn, tortillas and beans. “Thank you,” he tells his river guides, “for showing me this amazing, amazing, ludicrously amazing place.”
Staring up at the 1,500-foot limestone canyon, the narrow river between nature’s majestic walls bifurcating two nations, he’s still wondering about manmade walls. “I’ve been to a few places where they do have a wall,” he muses to his companions. “Few things are uglier or are more of an indication of an utter failure of otherwise smart people to figure (expletive) out.”
We last see Bourdain sitting cross-legged in green grass on the Texas bank of the Rio Grande. Only the gentle noise of briskly flowing water intrudes. Alone, staring across the river into Mexico, he seems a million miles away.