In ‘A Rock Between Two Rivers,’ fracking disrupts way of life
Aday and a half ’s walk from the Rio Grande, not far from what was once the agricultural oasis of Carrizo Springs, deep in Dimmit County, lies the extensive San Pedro Ranch.
Hugh Fitzsimons’ grandfather bought it with profits from the sale of shares of stock he bought while working at Spindletop for the Texas Co., later known as Texaco.
On May 6, 1955, Fitzsimons writes in this extraordinary memoir, his grandfather lifted a pearl-handled Colt .45 “to his right temple and with one squeeze of the trigger ended his life.”
Why did this man, who had achieved so much, end his life?
Fitzsimons writes that his mother told him, “Your grandfather was so disappointed in the way the ranch was being handled he took his own life.”
It was an action with profound consequences, both for his family and for the land that is their grandfather’s legacy.
“I didn’t hear that shot, but I’ve felt the aftershock all my life,” Fitzsimons writes.
Thus begins this thirdgeneration rancher’s wideranging and captivating survey of a complex map of territory that is simultaneously physical and familial, political, emotional and, yes, spiritual.
“A Rock Between Two Rivers” is at once the story of Fitzsimons’ life on the ranch, where in boyhood he learned to hunt, fish, ride and love the land and the people who worked it; and a tale of the transformation of the land, and his family, by oil, money, water, drought and fracking.
Fitzsimons introduces his family story with a little history of the land once known as South Texas’ “Winter Garden” for the thriving agricultural community that grew up around Carrizo Springs in the early 20th century, thanks to an abundance of clear, clean water flowing from its aquifers—until over-pumping and land speculators brought it all to an end.
It is an important frame of reference for Fitzsimons’ own story, and that of the ranch. As everyone in South Texas knows — or should know — water, and the periodic lack of it, determines everything for anyone seeking to grow anything, from cattle to cities.
In his spare, elegant style, Fitzsimons leads his reader into the warp and woof of his tale by beautifully describing the ranch land and the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers — which it lies between — and their history as byways for armies, smugglers and Indians along the old Camino Real.
He also charms with recollections of boyhood adventures on the ranch, finding arrowheads and other flint tools in abundance, landing his first catfish, riding early in the morning with the ranch hands to find strays, discovering secret places of power from which he drew strength.
All of that is but an appetizer, though, to the meat of this book, where Fitzsimons recounts his determination to make a life on the land as a rancher raising grass-fed bison, and how that decision put him on a collision course with his own family.
At the heart of that conflict lie both oil and water, for under his father’s administration the family already had benefited greatly from finding an abundance of black gold under the soil.
With the advent of fracking, though, and Fitzsimons’ mother’s deathbed assignment of control of the mineral rights to his brother, the demands for water for hydraulic fracturing on the San Pedro Ranch, and indeed for fracking operations throughout South Texas, grew exponentially.
At home, that meant that water Fitzsimons needed for his bison was being removed from the ground faster than it could be replaced, and he couldn’t do anything about it.
Moreover, he writes, atmosphere-warming methane, flaming away all day and night from the wells, laced with other carcinogenic compounds, was making ordinary breathing impossible for himself, his family and his workers.
Fitzsimons really hits his stride in this part of the book, pounding out, in hardhitting prose, the ways his growing realization of the profound environmental damage wrought by fracking impelled him to engage and fight in the political arena, both at the statewide level and locally.
He ran as a Democrat for commissioner of agriculture in 2014.
In his memoir, Fitzsimons is brutally honest about how he was completely unprepared for the campaign and how devastating his defeat was, psychologically and emotionally.
Yet he also describes how he eventually won a seat as a director of the Wintergarden Groundwater Conservation District, where he now has a voice in the administration of water in his region.
Fitzsimons concludes with a powerfully moving series of reflections on the responsibilities South Texans have to find ways to make fracking, now a part of our way of life, more environmentally responsible — and on the new meaning his life has taken on now that he has a grandson, Leo, still a tyke.
“I am here for Leo,” he writes. “I want my ranch to be here for him as well.”