Waco

Essay

The Athens of Billy Joe Shaver

‘You may all go to Hell — I will go to Waco’ – D. Crockett, kinda

Dr. Pepper and a dunk in the geyser will cure what ails you — unless you’re a Baptist

“A little country town lost in the immensity of the Texas prairie” was what the inventor, science-fiction writer, and chicken farmer Milo Hastings once called Waco. For most of my life, that’s how America has seen my hometown, as a byword for small-town parochialism and the televised death-by-government gunfire of David Koresh. But wind the clock back to the 1890s, and you’ll see Waco billed not only as “Six Shooter Junction” but also “The Athens of Texas.” There is a strange double nature to Waco, at one moment bursting at the seams with cosmopolitan ambition and at another recoiling into isolation. Waco is the great forgotten American city, a stage on which the American Drama has played out for almost 200 years and the Human Drama thousands of years before that. Some nights it’s a tragedy, other nights a comedy. Fresh off the train following Gettysburg, my great-great-great-grandfather John Sligh was deployed in northern Georgia at the Battle of Chickamauga. At his side were his …

Memoir

The Cabin

A father’s gift commands obedience in the here and now, and thereafter

There’s a cougar under the deck

My father takes the form of a bear and wrecks my dubious inheritance

By Walter Kirn

Before my father even built it, he told me the cabin would be mine someday. It was an old trick of his: serving himself in the present in such a way that his action could be construed as a future service to me, thereby obligating me to him. In this case, he would gain a second home, a wilderness cabin in Montana where he could retire from practicing patent law to hunt and fish and learn to paint and so on, and I would someday inherit whatever was left of it while being compelled in the meantime to visit him there a lot and eat the game birds and venison he killed and help with seasonal chores such as dragging lawn sprinklers onto the roof as a late-summer fire-prevention measure. I would have done these things anyway, probably, being a good son who lived nearby, but the prospect of his eventual generosity meant I would have to do them on his schedule, promptly, without adjustment or complaint. The cabin took him almost a year to build. From the outside, it had a British cottage theme …

Waco

The Cabin

On Foot: My Pilgrimage