Under Texas Skies

Strange, sad things happen a lot in a town founded solely to sell beer in dry Dawson County. So people here raised their eyebrows but otherwise made little of the stiff pieces of a $10 bill floating in the sky and waddling in the dust the morning of Feb. 1.

Then they learned the space shuttle Columbia had been lost. They flicked the pieces into an envelope, just in case.

“Maybe the $10 came from there,” Israel Ybanez, who incorporated this town in 1983, says, pointing to the sky. “But I don’t really know. It’s probably nothing. Still, you shouldn’t touch it. They say not to touch it. Besides, this money might belong to an astronaut.”

Columbia was just about where Ybanez was pointing when NASA lost contact, splitting a pale-blue sky that like almost everything around seems faded by the sun. It was 207,135 feet above Los Ybanez, population 68, which was established under a state law that allows wet towns in dry counties.

The shuttle probably had begun to shed its protective ceramic tiles farther west. And no one yet knows the precise timing of the breakup. The Columbia was going 12,500 miles per hour.

But stories, and trips, need a beginning and an end. Los Ybanez, then, seems a proper place to start a winding 641-mile trip following the path of the dying Columbia, and a story about the people along the route. Although debris has been found farther east, Hemphill, a town on the far side of the state where the nose cone and partial remains of astronauts have been found, seems a proper place to end.

“Goodbye,” Ybanez says.

Any trip across Texas benefits from music by Texans. Heading east out of Los Ybanez, a Buddy Holly song comes on the radio. The Lubbock native died in a plane crash 44 years ago Monday, and his hometown radio stations are paying tribute.

“Ah, you say you’re gonna leave / You know it’s a lie / ‘Cause that’ll be the day / When I die.”

The shuttle was pointed 57 degrees toward the heavens when NASA lost contact. Those astronauts who could see out the windows could only have seen stars.

Had they been able to look down they’d have seen West Texas, a flat, dry land of cotton fields, irrigation fights and people with hard hands. West Texas is not known for its beauty. From above, though, it is a sight to see, a quilt of farm fields colored milky brown, dark, swirling umber, gray-green -- complicated, thick hues of the kind painters struggle for years to mix.

Past the town of Snyder, where a hitchhiker acknowledges the crash with small American and Texas flags, past Gail, where a sheriff’s deputy is taking a lunch break from a thus-far fruitless search for debris, a little pink shack slumps in the red dirt.

Villegos Store is watched over by a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, as is its proprietor, Raquel Villegos, her husband, their chickens, turkeys, cockatiels, parakeets, dogs and cats.

“We have a lot of cats,” Villegos says in Spanish, “because we have a lot of rats.”

Only the animals were awake when the shuttle passed overhead, some eight seconds after crossing over Los Ybanez. Villegos Store used to do good business before the “stoop” laborers were chased off by mechanical cotton-pickers and the government hoisted the building and moved it back from Highway 84. Today there is little for sale except sodas and pickles, and little for Villegos to do except sew and pray. “I pray a lot. For the astronauts now, too.”

Bits of cotton lost during last year’s harvest cling to the tumbleweeds and prickly pear and pile up against barns. They create a white boundary around the irrigated green grass at Roscoe Cemetery. Flying at about 208 miles a minute, the shuttle took only a couple of seconds to travel from Villegos Store to Roscoe, 14 miles southeast. No one here, it seems, came out to watch the shuttle pass. The orbiter was coming apart, but few if any West Texans knew it. It would take another minute before people reported hearing a terrific roar and sonic booms about 8:01 a.m.

‘Just Imagine’

Heading into central Texas, the terrain changes. Hills rise up. Mesquite and Eastern red cedars take the place of the tumbleweed. The sky is a darker, thinner blue, embellished today with high cirrus clouds. In Buffalo Gap, a former Black Hawk helicopter mechanic talks about the Columbia, about spaceflight.

“I’ve flown in helicopters a lot, and it’s awesome,” says Michael Watson. “Just imagine flying in space.”

Watson got out of the Tennessee National Guard last year, but he’s trying to reenlist. Civilian life, “it’s just different.”

“A long time forgotten / Are dreams that just fell by the way / And the good life he promised / Ain’t what she’s living today.”

A deejay in Abilene is spinning Willie Nelson’s “Good Hearted Woman.”

At a place called Cedar Gap, population 25, Joe Brooker empties bags of day-old bread and hamburger buns into troughs. His 15 cattle love the stuff so much he has to stay out of their way or be trampled. The bread is good for them, but the main reason he provides this treat is so, come slaughter day, his cattle will rush to the pens for bread and he won’t have to go round them up.

It is here in Cedar Gap, 350 miles northeast of the shuttle tracking room at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, that the task for investigators becomes clear. Hot chunks from a burning spaceship could be anywhere, in the man-made pond with the kiddie slide just up the road, in the untended hayfields and forests, in the impenetrable thickets of thorny mesquite.

When Brooker climbed on his tractor two days after the crash to get a wheat field ready for spring planting, he paid attention to the ground.

“I plowed all out there, but I didn’t find nothing, no pieces,” he says. He touches the brim of his cowboy hat, pulls out a cigarette, and changes the topic. “Look at that little heifer. She looks just like her mother.”

Nothing yet found, but people are looking, in Potosi, where Jay Emerson is coaching his 13-year-old daughter, Ashlyn, on the finest points of barrel racing. Nothing in Okin or Rising Star.

NASA has not confirmed any debris found west of Fort Worth is indeed from the shuttle. Outside Carbon and Gorman, an hour and a half east of Potosi, a hundred miles southwest of Fort Worth, investigators removed objects from two sites. If they are shuttle pieces, they are the westernmost finds yet.

“There’s one down there,” says retired town judge Ron Skiles, pointing as he drinks his evening coffee at Taylor’s Gas. “Go out here, take a right at Mr. Stevens’ house, and head on that way a bit. There’s another out toward Carbon. Where is that piece by Carbon, Don?”

Skiles had, in the past, watched shuttles crease the sky on their way to safe landings at Cape Canaveral, Fla. “When you see it yourself, it’s just boogie-ing,” he says with excitement, then grows quiet. “Those people were just doing their job. That’s what’s bad. But what, we’re going to forget space is out there?”

Ten miles southeast, near DeLeon, 2-year-old Cory Moreno was on his way to pick pecans when the shuttle passed over. “He’s just 2 and he was looking out the window and saying, ‘Plane smoking, plane smoking,’ ” said his mother, Rosemary Moreno. No one else looked up.

South of town, Harold Hamrick gives $5 haircuts in his frontyard shop, “plain haircuts,” the 70-year-old emphasizes. After 45 years of cutting hair, he retired from a shop in DeLeon a few years back but got so bored he opened up Hamrick’s Barbershop two weeks later.

Shortly before his short-lived retirement, Hamrick learned about the nighttime landing of another shuttle, that the orbiter was supposed to tear like a white meteor all the way to the horizon. “I told some old boys, we better watch that. It might be the most amazing thing we ever see,” Hamrick says. “It was.”

Past Whitney, where the special today at Pub 22 is chili dogs, just beyond Eureka, a beer-truck driver has pulled to the side of the road and is talking on his cell phone as he kicks a piece of metal. It is probably not from the Columbia, he learns, and he climbs back into his truck and drives on.

It takes another hour and a half to cover 50 miles of back roads and arrive in Anderson County, the beginning of the shuttle debris field that stretches for 200 miles. This is where the broken Columbia began coming to earth in a storm, swatches of red insulating blankets raining down, a piece of an aileron, a chunk from the cargo-bay door, dozens of charred white tiles.

There are more than 800 debris sites in Anderson County, some containing several pieces, and hundreds more sites in adjacent Henderson and Cherokee counties.

The search efforts are interrupted briefly this afternoon when a school bus runs over a fire hose and firefighters in Palestine call for police. The fine for running over a fire hose is $800.

Anderson County Sheriff Mike Link is in his office. A big man with a big belt buckle, he doesn’t look tired, though he is. He is polite but short when asked if it’s possible to see some debris.

“You can’t get close anymore. You can’t see anything anyway. It’s all wrapped up in plastic. You can’t even tell what it is.”

Link warms up, though, when asked for details. He is amazed by the enormousness of the task and the disaster, the fact that so many pieces came down in his county, the expertise of the scientists going over the wreckage.

“Most of this stuff, I’d have no idea what it is,” he says. “But those scientists can pick it up, turn it around, and tell you exactly what it is, where on the craft it came from. They built that thing and they know every inch of it.”

“Well, there’s floodin’ down in Texas / All the telephone lines are down / And I’ve been tryin’ to call my baby / Lord and I can’t get a single sound.”

Seventy-seven miles and one hour, 42 minutes later, it is raining and dark in Nacogdoches. It isn’t flooding, but a local station finds Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood” appropriate.

Among the many pieces that fell here was a seared sheet of metal that landed in the parking lot behind a nightclub called The Lumberyard.

As hundreds of people gathered to lay flowers and pray around the wreckage in the hours after the crash, nearly as many queued up for entry to the bar. This is a college town, home to Stephen F. Austin State University, and most were students. It was a Saturday night.

This weekday night, though, is much quieter. A memorial service is minutes from beginning at the university. The bar is nearly empty. So is the parking lot, save for two women and two young girls.

“Astro-marys,” says 6-year-old Haley Colley, holding out a small bunch of yellow alstroemerias. “Flowers.” She tucks them under a tarp that has been placed over the other offerings to protect them from the rain.

Finding Remains

Heading east on Highway 21 for 35 miles, the rain lets up a bit in San Augustine, where hundreds of pieces have been discovered, and ceases in Hemphill, 30 more miles southeast. The churches all have their lights on.

Asked for directions to a cross that one of the locals erected where remains from an astronaut were found, a gas station attendant named Troy says, “Which one? They’re all over the place now.”

Remains had been found at more than 15 sites by week’s end.

Police and National Guardsmen and investigators are driving about the town, red, blue and yellow lights flashing in every direction.

Two people were indicted earlier in the week on charges of stealing pieces of the shuttle, government property. Authorities, seeking pieces of Columbia rather than indictments, announced an amnesty that ended Friday evening.

A man in a cowboy hat climbs down from a pickup outside the Hemphill police station. In a gloved hand he holds a piece of melted circuitry.

“I found this on my property,” he says, “just this afternoon.”

A siren begins wailing and two police cars speed off.

Downtown Hemphill doesn’t seem the place to end a trip along the route of the burning orbiter, two days driving a distance that the Columbia covered in less than three minutes. There are plenty of woods around, winged elms and water oaks, wet possum haw and wax myrtle.

Deep into a forest east of downtown, not far from where a 500-pound piece of the nose cone drove itself into the dirt, the lights and sirens and road noise are gone.

The rain starts again, rain that muddied up surrounding lakes so badly that divers called off their search and surfaced earlier in the day.

There are probably pieces of the shuttle hung up in these post oaks, hidden in the sweet gum.

Maybe the clouds will break and the stars will come out and sprinkle some light. But it keeps raining and stays dark.