A PERFECT PLACE FOR A WASTE DUMP : That’s What Dusty Little Kinney County, Texas, Seemed to Be. But When Outsiders Proposed Storing Radioactive Material There, Its Ranchers and Housewives Went Into Battle Armed With Bake Sales, Tamale Cook-Offs and Righteous Indignation.

LOOKING BACK, EVEN THE MOST CONTENTIOUS folks in Kinney County, a remote, mesquite-studded reach of southwest Texas, now agree on one point: If you wrote a checklist of what a fellow should do to make himself welcome, Charles Salsman followed it to the letter.

He rented a home and moved his family into Brackettville, the county seat. He took to waving greetings at all his neighbors. He paid calls to the bankers, the small-business merchants, the local civic leaders. He made the circuit of Sunday church services. He bought the grand champion hog at the county’s livestock show auction one year, the grand champion steer the next year. He contributed to the Little League, the Firemen’s Assn., the high school’s “Project Graduation.” He donated $250 toward a scholarship for the newly crowned Miss Kinney County.

Even more to the point, he made no secret of his intention to build, on about 1,440 acres of flat, parched ranchland 10 miles south of Brackettville, the state’s first permanent disposal site for industrial waste known as NORM--naturally occurring radioactive material.

His was no cover-of-night operation: Salsman, a vibrant, well-spoken 37-year-old out of El Paso and San Antonio, with a bachelor’s degree in geology and a master’s in business administration, staged a series of community meetings, bringing along a slide show and a public relations expert. He talked about “environmental precautions” and a “broadened tax base.” He left a copy of his six-volume license application in the local library for all to read. He mailed out newsletters--printed on recycled paper--that provided updates and explanations. “By telling the truth, we hope everyone will be able to make a decision based on factual, accurate information and less on emotion,” he explained.

For a time, it looked as if Salsman might pull it off. Signals of support were heard from a local banker, a county administrator, a preacher. But then came the questions.

Why, some started asking, did Salsman always use the word “waste facility” instead of “dump”? Why did he have to keep saying, “Let me educate you”? Why, for that matter, did he always show up at meetings in faded blue jeans, snap-button Western shirts and scuffed brown leather boots?

“Real down-home country, trying to be a homeboy,” says Lisa Conoly, a young mother of two and organist at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, whose family four generations ago built the first house in Kinney County. “When you’re from here, though, you can tell.”

“He looked so different up at the Austin hearings in his $800 Hickey Freemans,” says Madge Belcher, whose family settled in Kinney County in 1850. “I’ve gotten to hate that term, ‘Let me educate you,’ more than anything. I have a college degree. I did not come to town on a load of cabbage.”

In the end, it just didn’t work. What Salsman hoped would be a successful effort at enlightened waste-dump siting has, instead, become a bitter and unresolved collision between two quite different worlds. The blunt-spoken goat and sheep ranchers of southwest Texas have not taken terribly well to Salsman’s smoothly executed public relations campaign. The intrusion of an outsider, in fact, has transformed Kinney County, galvanizing and uniting a disparate group of people who hadn’t been the least active in public affairs before.

Such confrontations are not uncommon these days. The battle in Kinney County is just one example of the high-stakes, carefully orchestrated campaigns now unfolding throughout the country, particularly in poor, obscure regions such as this barren arm of Texas that borders Mexico. As pressures grow on companies to dispose safely of an ever-widening list of industrial wastes, so does the economic and political incentive to find suitable disposal sites. Sparse populations, cheap land, arid climates, non-porous soil, nearby transportation lines and poor, politically powerless communities are what make for suitable sites. All those elements are readily available around Kinney County. So land agents regularly can be found these days poking through county records in the marginal communities of the Rio Grande district. Behind them come men such as Charles Salsman, carting newsletters and slide machines, eager to tell their story to local citizens.

That story is not without its valid points. Balancing industry’s needs, community sentiment and environmental concerns is a tricky business. Federal and state agencies are becoming increasingly stringent about what waste must be properly disposed of, even while many regions grow more and more reluctant to allow dump sites in their back yards. Government agencies want centralized disposal sites that they can easily monitor. The counties of southwest Texas desperately need new jobs and widened tax bases.

“We are fulfilling and addressing a real need,” Salsman says. “This is good for everyone. We are part of the solution, not the problem.”

But that’s not how most of the 2,500 inhabitants of Kinney County look at the matter. How they look at the matter is that a bunch of outsiders intend to make a lot of money by using their back yard as a dumping ground for radioactive waste produced in far-off places. Theirs is a call for moral justice as much as an argument about the environment or economics.

“They brought in their picture machine,” recalls J.B. Herndon, the grizzled 80-year-old mayor of Spofford, a hamlet of 67 people located just half a mile east of the proposed dump site. “They showed me cattle grazing on top of a dump. When they got through, they asked me what I thought. I says, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I think. If we produced that stuff, if this were our waste, good. But we didn’t produce it. We have a clean county. So it’s no good.’ ”

WHEN THE NOTION FIRST CAME TO SALSMAN IN 1987, IT SEEMED SO obvious.

Conoco Inc. was shutting down its uranium mill “tailings pond” in South Texas’ Karnes County, where it had been letting other companies dump uranium tailings and other radioactive byproducts ever since Conoco’s own giant uranium mine operation, the Conquista Project, closed in 1982. Salsman, who’d served as a mining engineer at the Conquista Project before heading to Nevada to work gold mines, knew full well that a facility in Tooele County, Utah, was the only other authorized disposal site in the entire country accepting certain of these radioactive byproducts. For that matter, the Utah facility was also the only site authorized to accept NORM.

Such materials, which include residue from pipes used in oil and gas operations, are naturally radioactive but become more concentrated through industrial processing. Because the levels of radiation are minimal compared to nuclear or low-level radioactive waste, the potential danger in these materials has only recently been recognized. They generally aren’t regulated at all, and often are dumped or stored without precaution.

Salsman, though, knew that federal and state agencies--including Texas--were starting to focus on NORM and to draft regulations. The vision was tantalizing: Salsman could open one of the few byproducts and NORM storage facilities in the country, just as states were insisting that companies get rid of the stuff. He could corner an enormous market. The potential profits were staggering.

Just how staggering is hard to say. Clearly, waste management is a growth industry, for new federal and state rules in the 1990s will close hundreds of outmoded disposal sites even while greatly broadening what materials must be safely disposed of. Estimates around Kinney County that Salsman could reap $20 million a year in profits, or $500 million by selling a licensed plant, may be just talk--Salsman won’t reveal his projections--but an attorney who has had access to Salsman’s figures reports that he was “absolutely floored” at what he saw. “As a business investment, it’s a good ‘un,” says James Saunders, who represents a group of Kinney County residents.

In 1987, Salsman formed a company called Texcor Industries and eventually rounded up support from what he describes as “private investors.” Then he started studying a map of Texas.

Salsman didn’t want land full of people or water or earthquake fault lines or minerals or permeable soil. He didn’t want land where there was significant agricultural production. He didn’t want land without major rail and highway access. He didn’t want land with national parks or historic sites or known endangered species.

Plenty of people in southwest Texas believe that there was one other thing Salsman didn’t want--a community with political stroke.

Whether that’s true or not, this much is certain: After all the eliminating and calculating, after all the testing of soil and studying of aquifer maps, Salsman’s finger landed on Kinney County.

More precisely, his finger landed on the southern portion of Kinney County south of Highway 90.

More precisely still, his finger landed on a 440-acre plot owned by one P.H. Coates IV.

The Coates plot of land was once part of an 8,200-acre ranch assembled by Coates’ great-grandfather at the turn of the century and later expanded by his granddaddy, Joe York Sr. The Coates plot was where the York family once raised cattle, sheep and goats, and where hunters once stalked white-tailed deer and game birds. The Coates plot, though, was now staggering under the burden of a $250,000 lien.

“I had to sell,” Coates told a reporter last year. “The bank was about to eat me up.”

DESCRIPTIONS OF KINNEY COUNTY VARY, DEPENDING ON WHO IS doing the talking.

“Weed-eaten” and “mesquite-studded” and “dusty” are phrases not infrequently employed by outsiders, and this is understandable, for the land is not lush and the towns have seen better days. Fifty years ago, Spofford was a bustling railroad center for livestock and 5th Cavalry soldiers stationed at nearby Ft. Clark, a 3,600-acre frontier post established in 1852 to guard the San Antonio-El Paso road. Now Spofford is almost a ghost town, composed mainly of small frame houses, mobile homes, dogs, chickens and mesquite. There are no businesses of any sort. The annual budget totals $12,000. Up the road, about 1,860 citizens live in Brackettville, which originally developed as a supply village for Ft. Clark but lost much of its economic steam when the fort was closed in 1946.

This is not a booming region. The population of Kinney County is the same as it was in 1950, some 29% live below the federal poverty level, and there are no manufacturing jobs at all. Tourists and deer and game-bird hunters pump some money into the economy, and a privately owned resort and retirement community of 1,600, built on the site of the Ft. Clark military reservation, offers some promise of growth. But what people in Kinney County mainly do is run livestock--goats and sheep and cattle.

All the same, the region does not look particularly desolate to those who live there. Many have roots going back four or five generations, and can talk about a great-granddaddy who built the home in which they now live, or a distant relative who fought at the Alamo, or a grandfather who “came over” from Mexico, fording the Rio Grande to start a new life. Their lives before Salsman arrived had a certain fixed rhythm. Deborah Trant liked to hunt for arrowheads, tend her garden and ride along when her husband, Bret, checked the ranch his family has operated for four generations. Lisa Conoly, a former Brackettville High homecoming queen, enjoyed practicing the organ over at the church and cooking lunch for her husband, Stan. Social life meant tea parties and dinners at friends’ homes and shopping trips to Del Rio or Uvalde. Making sure the livestock had enough water and food was about the most pressing concern for most people.

“I ran my ranch,” says Madge Belcher, a 45-year-old divorcee. “Rode around my pastures, looked at my stock, made notes for the boys, kept things organized. I’d keep an eye out for how many deer I’m seeing. I’d watch to see whether the turkeys are there or gone. I’d look to see if I’ve got any quail. I’d check my watering troughs. Just a real country life.”

It was while sitting in the beauty parlor over in Brackettville that Belcher first heard the news. The woman in the next chair was talking about a town meeting. Something about plans to build a radioactive waste dump right down the road. “I jumped straight up and went to call my daddy,” Belcher recalls.

BY THE TIME CHARLES SALSMAN SHOWED UP IN KINNEY COUNTY in the summer of 1988, he had done some studying on how communities responded to the notion of waste dumps. So it was not entirely by chance that a public relations expert and former Conoco colleague, George Borkorny, was at his side whenever he appeared at meetings in Kinney County. Salsman and Borkorny went first to the groups most likely to embrace them, such as the Lions Club, the Chamber of Commerce and the bankers.

There, and in guest editorials in local newspapers and their own newsletter, “N.O.R.M. News,” they spun out the lure: 75 temporary jobs during the $7.3-million construction; 25 full-time jobs with a $550,000 payroll once they were operating; annual purchases of goods and services from area merchants of more than $100,000; an annual $111,000 property tax payment, upping the county’s take by 9%; and a $100,000 annual contribution to a foundation that would finance civic improvement projects.

The early limited expressions of support that followed--”This plant is a solution, not a problem,” “This Godforsaken country will never be good for anything else”--were heartfelt and understandable. “These are economically disadvantaged people,” says Lisa Conoly. “It is hard to resist. If you’ve got a sick kid and don’t have money and someone will pay, you don’t care who he is.” But when Salsman moved on from the civic groups and began meeting with the ranchers and landowners, the mood turned.

One meeting was held at the Catholic church, another at the Methodist church, a third at the Spofford city hall--which, as it happens, is located in the home of Mayor J.B. Herndon and his wife, Tootsie, a mountainous woman with a booming voice, huge dangling earrings, five glittering rings and a gem-encrusted watch that looks as if it weighs five pounds. In these settings, folks weren’t sitting at tables across from Salsman, leafing through projections about tax-base increases. They were leaning against walls with arms folded or walking the hallways, hands shoved in their pockets.

Standing before them, introducing himself as a “geologist,” Salsman would gamely show his slides and start educating.

There’s only a minute amount of radioactivity in NORM, he’d say. Background sources such as the sun, water, food and housing emit greater radiation. The storage trenches will have five independent barriers to protect against leaks, for a facility that’s not even burying liquid waste, in a region where wells have been drilled 1,700 feet without finding water.

Somewhere along the line, Salsman would get out his Geiger counter. You drive a car? he’d ask. Have a color TV? Turn the lights on? Eat groceries from the store? Use fertilizer? Then you benefit from NORM. Here he’d pause to run the Geiger counter over an oil-field pipe, a red brick, a Coleman lantern mantle. The machine would buzz and whir. “We all benefit, we all contribute to the problem. So we should be part of the resolution,” he’d continue. “There’s nothing wrong with this project. It’s good for the community, good for the environment. We’re doing more to clean up the environment than anyone.”

In truth, it’s hard to judge Salsman’s claims, for regulators know little about NORM’s risks. A preliminary U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analysis drafted last May suggests that diffuse NORM presents little hazard to most people, but that some NORM sources, particularly if used or disposed of improperly, could increase the risk of cancer and produce other adverse health effects.

Citing such uncertain reports at the town meetings helped Salsman not at all. When he finished his presentations, he’d get mostly silence. At the meeting in J.B. and Tootsie’s home, one fellow kept rolling a ball to one of the dogs, as he’d been doing throughout the talk.

“It’s important that everyone who has a question about this project be given an opportunity to have all their questions answered,” Salsman would prod.

“What will you do if people oppose you?” someone at J.B.’s house finally asked.

“We’ll pack up and leave,” Salsman replied.

When J.B. asked who in Spofford approved of this dump--the whole town being present--no one raised a hand.

“Well, sir,” J.B. told Salsman, “I guess you got your answer.”

For a time after that, a good number of people in Kinney County truly believed that Salsman was going to leave. No one would stand up at a big meeting and lie, after all. No one, for that matter, would come in where he wasn’t wanted and try to make money off the misfortune of others. “My daddy says if a man’s word isn’t any good, he isn’t any good,” Tootsie Herndon took to advising her neighbors.

The organizing began only when people in Kinney County realized that Salsman was staying.

MADGE BELCHER SEIZED THE LEAD. EVEN BEFORE THE TEXCOR battle began, she was a force of nature, careening around town in her filthy white Bronco and her cowboy boots and her long, flowing granny dresses, calling out “Bless your heart” to half the people she passed. After growing up on a ranch, she’d gone off to college and worked as branch manager at an Austin savings and loan, but following her second divorce she’d come home, in the summer of ‘87, to help keep the books at her daddy’s ranch and care for a sick aunt. When that aunt died, she’d inherited a ranch of her own.

Most mornings, Belcher rises alone at 5 a.m. to read her Bible, pray and write in her journal. In the weeks after Salsman’s arrival, her thoughts during these early hours more than once turned to the newcomer in town.

Maybe Charles Salsman truly believes the dump will be OK, but I know human nature, she told herself. When there’s a possibility of making millions, you can justify anything.

After some rocky times in her youth and two marriages gone bad, Belcher’s take on human nature, particularly men’s, was not all that favorable. It was bad enough, in fact, to tempt her to turn inward, to seek insulation from the world. And yet, she was just so tired of people being mistreated and stepped on because of money. Some things are right, some things are wrong. Always will be. When you victimize people for your own gain, that’s wrong. Always will be. Belcher figured she ought to do something.

Soon her group was 1,400 strong and had an official name--CARE, Community Against Radioactive Environments. They were quite a diverse mix: crusty goat and sheep ranchers, Spanish-speaking laborers, military retirees, soft-spoken housewives, newly kindled feminists, liberals and conservatives. Together, they hired San Antonio lawyer Jim Saunders. To pay him, they sold goats, held bake sales, ran tamale cook-offs. (“I have owned more goats this year,” Saunders says. “I may be one of the largest goat owners in Texas.”) To broaden their coalition, they forged alliances with 13 surrounding agencies and communities, including Ciudad Acuna, across the Rio Grande in Mexico. To get their way, they began filing lawsuits, lobbying in Austin, bearing witness at state hearings.

Most visibly, they began speaking out, many for the first time in their lives: Who could say the dump would be safe? they demanded. Liners can leak, land can fissure, runoffs can contaminate ground water. Trucks and railroad cars full of waste can spill, leak and wreck. The wind can carry pollution. What about my children?

The core of the argument from people in Kinney County, though, has as much to do with questions of justice as with matters of science and economics. Is it fair to write off one group of human beings in favor of another? Is it right to sacrifice the welfare of a few for the benefit of many? These are the battle cries that most fundamentally drive the aroused campaign against Texcor.

Why bring someone else’s waste to Kinney County, which doesn’t produce any of its own? How can you drop a dead-end industry on a clean, unpolluted region? We don’t make the mess; Kinney County is one of only three or four Texas counties without oil and gas operations or smokestack industries or mines. Why not store the waste where it’s produced? How can you write us off in favor of others?

“Who’s going to want to come down here?” asks ranch manager Alex Solis, whose family has lived in Kinney County for five generations, ever since his grandfather came over from Mexico at the turn of the century. “Just by saying goats are from Spofford will be a stigma. When guys from Houston say, ‘Let’s go hunting,’ they don’t want to hunt next to a radioactive dump.”

As compelling as such concerns are, though, the truth is, they have little to do with a licensing process concerned mainly with technical requirements and clear proof of health hazards. Evidence of ground-water contamination (something hard to establish) means a good deal more to the regulators than calls for moral justice or fears about falling property values. From time to time, Saunders, the CARE attorney, tries to explain this to his clients, usually to no avail. Instead, the community’s comments grow ever more belligerent. When Tootsie Herndon shakes her earrings, pounds a table and thunders, “String ‘em up, that’s what we ought to do, string ‘em up,” it sounds as if she surely means it.

Given this mood, those few who initially favored Texcor have largely retreated into silence. To the delight of local gossips, though, two who still speak out are Tootsie Herndon’s own brother and sister-in-law. “Your article would make a buzzard puke,” the sister-in-law, Jonnie Salmon, wrote to the editor of the Del Rio News Herald after that paper ran a skeptical piece about Salsman. J.B. Herndon fired back with his own letter: “Charles Salsman is now hiding behind a woman’s skirts to perform his dirty work.” Tootsie Herndon followed with her own letter: “We could swallow ‘buzzard puke’ better than a radioactive dump.”

Clearly, having Salsman in their midst, day in and day out, has set almost everyone’s nerves on edge. His public professions of Christianity--”Christ is the center of my life; if it’s not right, I don’t do it”--do not sit well with people who attend church regularly without talking about it much. Nor do his insistently friendly waves of greeting to his neighbors.

“He’s like trying to force you to accept him,” Lisa Conoly reports. “I don’t want to wave back. All I can think of is, ‘He’s trying to kill my children.’ So I kind of nod and duck my head.”

Tootsie Herndon’s response is not nearly as polite: “He irritates me, waving all friendly,” she says. “He did it at the public springs when I was swimming. ‘Why don’t you kiss my a- -,’ I said. He knows I don’t want him waving at me.”

NOT UNTIL PEOPLE IN KINNEY COUNTY BEGAN SEEKING ALLIANCES beyond their own boundaries did they realize theirs was not a singular predicament. They just had to study a map of West Texas to see the evidence: A low-level radioactive dump site proposed for Ft. Hancock, 40 miles southeast of El Paso; a deep injection well for toxic waste at Ft. Stockton; a hazardous waste dump in McMullen County. Del Rio, a town of 35,000 about 30 miles west of Brackettville, was getting squeezed from both sides. Besides the Spofford project brewing on its east flank, a hazardous waste dump was being proposed near Dryden, 60 miles to the northwest, by ChemWaste, a subsidiary of colossal Waste Management Inc.

The common links were hard not to notice. They were particularly hard not to notice once some people in Kinney County came across a 1984 report prepared for the California Waste Management Board by the Los Angeles consulting firm Cerrell Associates. This study, widely distributed throughout the waste management industry, provided a profile of communities least likely to resist siting of projects such as waste dumps. The portrait--older, rural, less educated, low income, Catholic, farmer--seemed to describe the southwest Texas region perfectly. “Everyone looking for land in this area comes through this office,” says James Crumley, the local soil and conservation district agent in Brackettville. “They look at our map. I’m thinking as they do this, they’re not planning to bring Kansas City steers down here. It’s obvious. They’ve got a formula, a profile of what they’re looking for. These are agents, repping people looking for dump sites. We’ve had 10 or so approaches in the past three years.”

It was also hard for people in Kinney County not to notice that the language and the tactics used at these other proposed sites echoed Salsman’s. Every developer had a public relations expert and a hearty attitude. “Armed with accurate information, ChemWaste management is confident that you will be comfortable with the facility,” ChemWaste’s public relations coordinator, Bryan Kidder, told residents around Dryden. “We want the community to know everything so there are no unanswered questions.”

If the tactics, language and targets have common links, though, so does the complexity underlying these confrontations. The truth is, in the worlds of Texas government and industry, a good many people not only want these waste sites--they need them.

Texas, after all, is the nation’s leading producer of hazardous and NORM waste, and other states are growing increasingly testy about being its dumping ground. The absence of suitable NORM disposal sites outside the one in Utah means companies are storing the waste on their own property, or even dumping it haphazardly in ponds, open land or the Mississippi River. Those unconcerned about the environmental harm still worry about the legal liability. Ever since the EPA last May started circulating its “preliminary risk assessment” of NORM, and states such as Texas began considering regulating its disposal, Charles Salsman has been receiving a flurry of vague phone calls. “No one is willing to admit having the byproducts,” he says. “To get rid of it acknowledges that you have it, which is a liability. So they say, ‘I represent someone who might have something. . . .’ ”

Against this backdrop, it was not entirely surprising when a bill aimed at restricting sites such as Texcor’s died in a Texas legislative committee last April.

Nor was it entirely surprising when the Texas Department of Health’s Bureau of Radiation Control that same month concluded, in an inch-thick environmental assessment, that Texcor’s project “would not be detrimental to the public health and safety or have significant adverse impacts on the environment.”

Nor was it entirely surprising when the Texas health department on May 2 formally recommended the licensing of Texcor’s facility.

“By law, we are obligated to recommend that a license be approved if the applicant meets all the necessary criteria and regulations,” explains Ruth McBerney, director of the radiation bureau’s licensing, regulation and standards division. “We are not allowed to use local opposition as a reason to deny the license.”

If folks in Kinney County weren’t surprised by this turn of events, though, they surely were agitated. That much of the health department’s environmental assessment relied on information gleaned from Texcor’s application, along with only a brief on-site inspection, did not escape their attention.

“I tell you, I don’t think much of that health department,” says Alex Solis, who once worked as a ranch hand on the land he now manages. “Maybe they have four years of college and do good with books, but when they get out in the country, they don’t know. They tried to drive a Suburban through a stock pond that I row across. I know I can’t cross water in a motor vehicle.”

Solis pauses to shake his head and think on the matter.

“This was middle of summer, pretty hot. One old boy was about 280 pounds. Pretty round. Clearly he’s sat at a desk a long time. He walked a mile to ask me for help. I went to pull him out. I gave the second guy a chain. He walks out in the water, hooks it to that nice chrome bumper. I tell him, someone will be mad when I yank that bumper off. Better hook it to the frame instead.”

Solis pushes his straw hat to the back of his head.

“He was a little skinny fella. He probably had a four-year degree too.”

THE COUNTY’S FIRST CHANCE TO challenge Salsman and the state licensing procedure came in the form of a public hearing held last June 11. The days preceding this hearing were filled with the type of gestures from Salsman that had, over the months, increasingly come to irritate people in Kinney County.

On June 6, Salsman quite pointedly ran bold ads in the local papers, inviting applications for job-seekers and bids from subcontractors for work that offered paid vacations, medical insurance, retirement plans and salaries ranging from $12,000 to $50,000. All this would come, Texcor made it clear, only “if and when a permit is granted.” Then, just two days before the hearing, a grinning Salsman showed up in a front-page newspaper photo, standing next to a local banker, each of them handing $500 checks to the director of the local high school’s “Project Graduation.”

The 800 citizens who filled the Brackettville civic center at 9 a.m. on June 11 included representatives of all sorts of groups, agencies and regions--Kickapoo Indians, Del Rio, Val Verde County, Eagle Pass, CARE, Brackettville, Ciudad Acuna, the National Park Service, the soil and water conservation district. Despite aroused feelings, the only hint of disorder--a ripple of mumbling soon squelched by the hearing examiner--came when a solitary pro-Texcor citizen, James (Sonny) Harrison, rose, soft-spoken and halting, to say, “We need to be a part of the solution to the problem that we are a part of.” That moment, though, was easily overshadowed by the highlight of the meeting--the image of Tootsie Herndon, incongruously clad in form-fitting blue jeans, rising with all her girth, arms outstretched, to present Salsman with an American flag.

“This flag came back from Korea on my dead brother’s casket,” she thundered. “He fought and died for our freedom here. If you put this dump in, you take away our freedom. If you’re taking away all I have, you might as well have this flag, too.”

The crowd rose en masse to applaud as Tootsie reclaimed her seat. Everyone, that is, but Salsman. “That was not her brother’s flag,” he said later. “When her brother died, the flag had 48 stars. This one had 50.”

By the time he made that comment, three years into his Kinney County sojourn, Salsman had started to lose some of his genial polish. His open eagerness for everyone to “know the facts” had sharpened into a more edgy, argumentative mood. “This is just a small, vocal minority opposing us,” he insists these days. “That’s why we never left. I’m a landowner. Why should I be kept from developing my land? I don’t object to their stockyard.”

Tootsie Herndon’s flag did not prove to be Salsman’s most troublesome exposure to local politicking in Kinney County, however. That moment came along more recently, when certain members of the York family decided to lay claim to easements across the property that Texcor had bought from their cousin, P.H. Coates. These easements allow the Yorks access to mines of caliche, a crushed limestone gravel used in road building, but as Salsman and his lawyers understand it, the caliche long ago was mined out, the easements abandoned.

Not so, assert the York relatives. One of those relatives is Tim Ward, the county judge of Kinney County. “Our cousin wrote us a nice letter, asking for a release,” Ward says, leaning back in his high-backed office chair and rolling out his West Texas twang with more than a little pleasure. “We wrote back a nice letter saying no, we need our easements.” To underscore that point, “Little Joe” York Jr. drove a backhoe out to the fields one midnight to do a little caliche mining.

When the matter came to a hearing in Brackettville in October, the presiding judge turned out to be George Thurman, whose grandfather had worked as a foreman on the York ranch. Just the right judge for the job, some in Kinney County pointed out. After all, in order to reach his own ranch, Judge Thurman has to drive over an easement that runs through Madge Belcher’s front yard.

“I was thinking of putting out a sign in front saying, ‘Judge, this is an easement,’ ” Belcher told people just before the hearing began.

It wasn’t necessary. After Little Joe--who with his thick neck, barrel chest and red, bulbous face looks like raw country but is in fact a slyly sophisticated special reserve Texas Ranger--sat up on the witness stand one morning muttering about his blocked access, he and Tim Ward and the others won hands down. The judge said they could keep using their easements until the lawsuit was resolved.

Salsman, wanting no more of Judge Thurman, promptly asked for a jury trial, which is pending. His veneer now just about worn through, he looked as if he might burst when asked about the easement hearing. “Read the pleadings,” he snapped. “I’m not going to say anything about that. Talk to my attorney. Do you think I’d do all this if we didn’t own the land free and clear?”

Others were feeling more sanguine. Hey, Belcher started thinking. Some men aren’t so bad after all. Human nature isn’t so bad. There are a lot of good people out there. Said Saunders, the CARE attorney: “If we win this easement thing, it could really shut them down.”

MAYBE SO, MAYBE NOT.

The power of public sentiment, after all, tends to get more tangible the more it is connected to money and lobbying forces, and here the people of Kinney County have a ways to go. Texcor so far has spent between $2 million and $3 million, while CARE has spent all of $150,000, a third of that kicked in personally by Madge Belcher. “There’s only so many tamales and goats you can muster for sale in little Kinney County,” she points out.

There is also that driving, difficult issue at the core of all the waste site battles now under way or imminent across the country. There’s just no denying that states everywhere have a growing need for storage facilities, and aren’t likely to allow them where lots of people live. States are going to allow them in places such as Spofford.

Whether Kinney County can block that pattern during the protracted public hearing process now under way remains to be seen. So far, by raising questions about jurisdiction and fault lines and ground-water data, and by stuffing Little Joe York Jr. into a suit and hauling him up to Austin to testify once more about easements, they’ve at best managed to create delays. On the one hand, state Sen. Judith Zaffirni, who represents Kinney County, says: “I cannot see the developers prevailing now. We will keep throwing up obstacles.” On the other hand, Susan Tennison, a lawyer for the state health department, says: “Public comment is an intangible, and I do not know how much weight the hearing examiner will place on that.”

However the confrontation turns out, it appears certain that the arrival of Charles Salsman in Kinney County in the spring of 1988 will have a lasting impact on those who live there. People still drive through their pastures and collect arrowheads and practice on the church organ, but a certain insulation has been stripped away. The world beyond them has intruded, and brought lessons.

“I’ve learned not to feel guilty for saying anything negative about someone else,” says Lisa Conoly.

“I learned to get up and fight, and not trust politicians to help us,” says Tootsie Herndon.

“I learned there’s a lot of crooked, mean people out there,” says Alex Solis.

That these were lessons her community needed to learn is, for Madge Belcher, among the most striking revelations of all to come out of the Texcor battle.

“How naive we were,” she says as she bounces her Bronco along the road from Brackettville to Spofford, on her way to yet another town meeting. “When they said they’d leave if we opposed them, we actually believed them. Can you believe that?”

Belcher lets loose a hearty whoop of wonder and appreciation. “Bless our hearts,” she says. “We were real naive little puppies three years ago.”