Pablo Who? (a version of this article appeared in DECELERATION)

The new guy poured Karo tinged with black over my head and it dripped into my beard. It stuck there. Crude oil. At the pipeline construction site across Highway 67 five others from camp wore gas masks and held banners. It took DPS less than three minutes to show. The sheriff showed in ten followed by the Border Patrol and a Texas Ranger. They read our FB posts.

Richard Mark Glover

We pulled off the stunt, then the new guy bellows, “See, no arrests.” He’d assured us it was a non-arrestable event. We let him orchestrate it. Now, I studied his face and tried not to use his high-amped confidence against him. We’re all brothers and sisters here united in the fight against corporate greed.

The post-protest crowd laughed, smiled easily, the drum beating in victory while a group of cops led by a thin deputy with Sheriff written across his T-shirt walked toward us. They stopped in front of Pete Hefflin.

Pete has been with Two Rivers Camp since it opened in late December. He was an elder of the Society of Native Nations, the Big Bend Defense Coalition’s partner at camp. Steely-eyed, sure, tough, with a menacing scar etched on his neck. He was in charge of camp security and had sent at least seven packing for various infractions including smoking weed at our drug-free, alcohol-free camp.

He led sunrise ceremonies and sang. His guttural hoops sparked the little bit of Quachita in me. Many of the men in camp looked up to him as a leader. I was one of them. He and I agreed: whoever died first, the other would sing at the funeral.

The questioning went on. Too long. Something was wrong. Then the deputies handcuffed Pete Hefflin.

Four women from camp, trained in these situations, swarmed Pete and the arrest party. “What’s the charge? Why’s he being arrested?” They demanded. The camp cook yelled, “Come on. Get outta here. Lets go!” One of the women turned to the cook and shot him the bird.

We piled in the van and headed to the checkpoint following the paddy-wagon. The sheriff suspected an out-of-state warrant and would finger-print Pete Hefflin there. The checkpoint had not been good to us. The dog always seemed to smell something. The week before a Border Patrolman told me, as he rifled through my Toyota, that the dogs were trained to “sniff out illegal drugs and odors from human beings.” Check the latter.

The driver shouted, “Anybody else got a warrant?” We stopped at 169, a mile before the check point and eight of us got out and into the res-truck. We headed back to camp, while the van and the rent-a-car with the new guy and the cook drove on.

I checked the gauge – less than an eighth. I let out seven in the middle of nowhere, U-turned back to Marfa, and gasoline. Luck through the checkpoint, then the new guy and the cook stood waving beside the rent-a-car on the side of the road. I picked them up and we all went to re-fuel.

Clouds streaked the sky. Black Karo hardened in my beard. I pumped gas, that which we are against. I want it in the tank—fast. Dave, the former mayor of Marfa slows, rolls down his window, gestures. I shout out, “Don’t ask!” Then: “Performance Art – Highway 67.”

We made it back to camp. Sullen. Unsure. The cook says he wants to talk and sequestered me to the side. “Those women are spies, infiltrators!”

I listened.

“It’s me or them,” he said. 

I didn’t want to lose him. He’s the cook and I like him, but this time he’s wrong.

“Any word from Marfa?” I asked nobody in particular.

Then the news.

Pete Hefflin is not Pete Hefflin. He is Pablo Gutierrez. A rap sheet a mile long—but as Pete Hefflin, clean in Texas for the last 12 years.

I believe in redemption. I believe in Pete Hefflin. Pablo Who?

Review; Bedouin band - "Tinariwen" (a version of this appeared in the Big Bend Sentinel 2011)

Taureg energy metered over the Capri stage last Thursday night in Marfa as the motor coach traveling Bedoiun band “Tinariwen” pumped the sound of a different desert into the West Texas air. Surreal, at times you expected the six man band to drop their electric guitars, pull off their kufeyas and reveal L.A. smiles, but the music, strange and bent was too far out to be a charade.

They call it “Desert Blues” but you didn’t hear a turn-around, no 12 bars to rely on for your dance rhythm – this was different, like 11 beats to a measure if anybody was counting. At times there was a riff you might nail, Almond Bros? Stevie Ray Vaughn? – But like a North African sirocco it was gone with the wind into the strange.

A consciousness mulled in their beat – distinct from much American hip-swaying, sex-drive pump. Tinariwen’s was blue nights, blue stars, but not the blues we know – happy, sad and hypnotic at times. Hands at their side, they received their praise with apparent aplomb but their eyes told us “it is good.” Steel balls on ceramic occasionally feathered the beat in a wavy motif and the bass player charmed some songs with a one-two that captured a sitar like buzz, perhaps a root that checked their music in the dry white Sahara.

In Mali, the founder of the band, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib witnessed his Taureg rebel father’s execution in 1963 after a failed coup d’tat. The family fled to the vast expanse of the open desert sojourning in the shadow of sand dunes, along ancient camel-hoofed trade routes south of the Atlas Mountains. Refugee camps sprung up in southern Libya as Taureg clans and others from neighboring countries took advantage of Muammar al-Gaddafi’s apparent generosity. The band members met in these camps in 1979 and soon became known as “Kel Tinariwen” a Tamashek phrase meaning “Desert Boys”. Playing Tuareg and Arab pop at the refugee camps, they began to explore “chaabi” protest music of Morocco, Algerian pop-rai and later Presley, Santana, Led Zepplin, Boney M, Marley and Hendrix. They gained international recognition in 2000, won Germany’s prestigious Praetorius Music Award in 2008 and have toured and released a number of CD’s including their latest “Tassili”.

Outside the gabion-walled Capri courtyard a slick motor coach await these Bedouin musicians. The Tuareg tour on. Other great music towns beacon outside the desert: New Orleans, Atlanta, London