Published: August 11, 2008 12:49 am      

Taking a trip to Bandera

This past weekend Amber and I took a trip out to Bandera to visit her Auntie Jean and Uncle Jess Beal, and it was a wonderful visit.

Jess is a retired veterinarian who practiced in Houston for decades before allowing that what he really wanted to do was leave that sweet madness behind and retreat to his hilltop home, which is as splendid a perch as anyone could ever hope for.

It overlooks a valley surrounded by hills, every bit as impressive in its grandeur as Segovia, which I have written so much about and celebrated in a book titled “The Segovia Chronicles.” The view from their back deck is simply breathtaking.

Jess, who over the years made five trips to Africa, was also a big-game hunter, whose exploits have been featured in a number of magazines and books. He has all kinds of heads and hides and feet (as in elephant) scattered throughout the house, trophies he brought back during the days before PC inanities and insanities declared such accomplishments sins against humanity, the earth, the universe, and God. Cape buffalo, leopard, you name it. (I kept thinking about my lone Aoudad head on the living room wall and what I’d give to hang a thirty-six-inch beam Axis up there to keep it company.)

You may ask, “Why the hell would you celebrate such trophies as anything other than man’s determination to visit extinction upon every living creature he cannot dominate and call his own?”

I’ll tell you why: Long after poachers and the exploiters and the natural order of this world have annihilated those species in the name of profit and left their bones bleaching in the sun, men like Jess Beal can point to the faces looking down at them and say, “I remember them when they were wild and free, and what I have done to preserve them is no more than man has always done in oil or stone or words or photographs to preserve the astonishing beauty of this world.

I was one-on-one with them. It was a kind of love no one can understand who has not been there. It was, and it is, a kind of love that will never die.”

Succinctly put, Jess Beal is an artist who has captured more fully than most the essence of his subjects. But for him, those splendid heads he has on his wall would now be buried and forgotten in the dust of those African plains, their horns and hair and eyes (artificial, yeah, but damned sure realistic enough to make you feel that they’re staring at you) forever removed from our memory of their magnificence.

“Oh, but he killed them before their time,” the PC folk would day. “He took away their freedom, their marvelous lives on the plain.”

Yep. That he did. He snuffed them out a few hours or days or months or weeks before their time. Nature is unkind, folks. Nature is never merciful. Nature cares nothing for art, and what She preserves in sand or clay or stone She does not preserve for us. Nature cares nothing for beauty. If we find the beauty there, fine, but She did not intend it.

Whatever you may think of men like Jess Beal, who stalked and killed their beautiful prey, consider this: They have preserved for our awe and admiration creatures we might never look on face-to-face except in the stark confines of a zoo, where their lives are farther removed from that natural world of freedom as those of the heads hanging on Jess’s wall.

At least when they were taken, these creatures left the world they were born into and had ever known, and they did not suffer for it. Far from being denounced and denigrated, Jess Beal and others of his ilk should be lauded as artists who, more than most, lost themselves in the world they sought to preserve.

But enough of this. The elegant and charming Auntie Jean served us a simply scrumptious shrimp salad for lunch, after which we sat around talking about all kinds of things, though Jess and I ended up discussing guns we have owned and loved. Guns are a lot like women: beautiful and worthy of all the care and love we can give them, but dangerous if not treated properly.

Their dog Buddy, who delighted in having new folks in the house to impress, was a real pleasure to be around until he discovered that we were going out for dinner without him, whereupon he developed an impenetrable pout, which he probably maintained until we returned.

I could see him bouncing like a spring-loaded toy when we pulled into the carport.

We spent the rest of the evening talking bout family and dogs and guns. You know . . . .

So here’s to Jess and Jean Beal, beautiful people that they are. Long may ye live upon your mountain top, accompanied by creatures as wondrously real as those Noah herded aboard his ark

and far less trouble to care for . . . .



Paul Ruffin may be reached c/o English Department, Box 2146, SHSU, Huntsville, TX 77341-2146, e-mail eng_pdr@shsu.edu.