April 19, 2004 More rain fell on South Texas, ensuring that I could burn more dead wood without concern. So I uprooted a small, forlorn deceased tree, and pruned goner branches from plums & pecans, and just as I was about to light my assembled brush pile I was hailed from across the fence by our previously unknown neighbor. He introduced himself as Emilio Flores (yes, a descendant of the original Canary Island Floreses who gave their name to this ville). Emilio carves scrimshaw, rehabilitates items retrieved from estate sales, and creates jewelry. He brought out a few lovely pieces for my perusal, and we enjoyed a pleasant chat underneath the big oak's spreading branches until dusk's approach demanded that the fire be lit and tended to.

Other fires were lit in Sonoma, literally and figuratively, in particular the jathara agnis (digestive fires) of those of us who crowded into Bette Timm's welcoming home and dinner table. While there I and a fellow southerner attended a screening of the new screen version of The Alamo, that tale of heroism that is the Texan Epic of Gilgamesh, Iliad, Kalevala, Beowulf, Chanson de Roland, and Elder Edda all rolled into one. While the Sixties effort to immortalize Texas's birth struggle in celluloid, starring John Wayne, brazenly puffed new life into long-cultivated Alamo myths, this new version cheerfully deconstructs these legends. The older account, of larger-than-life men who gather heroically to make the supreme sacrifice to make the world safe for westward expansion, makes way for a truer-to-life story of flawed men drawn by fate to make a stand that they had not intended to have to make. They also comment wryly on themselves; at one point, for example, we see William Barrett Travis, who commanded the doomed garrison, divorcing his wife, and sending his son to live with a foster family while he heads off to war. When later Jim Bowie (whose eponymous knife seems modeled on a meat cleaver) invites Travis to share a drink, the latter retorts, "I may desert pregnant women, visit prostitutes, and gamble, but I draw the line at drinking."

Aside from Dennis Quaid (whose Sam Houston seems plagued by a particularly irritable bowel) most of the cast do credit to their roles, in particular Jason Patric (as Bowie). But the best portrayal is delivered by Billy Bob Thornton as Davy Crockett, whose frontiersman legend got him elected to Congress but prevented his escape from the debacle. Drawn to Texas by Houston's promise of free land, Crockett arrived thinking the fighting was already over and, though dismayed to learn otherwise, he realized that now that he was there everyone's eye was on him (including the eyes of some of the Mexican soldiers), and that his very fame precluded a quiet exit one night over the wall. Accepting his fate bravely if reluctantly, his example inspired the tiny band of fighters to the end. The episode in which Crocket plays his fiddle to calm the men may have been as fictional as the incident in which he shot an epaulet off Santa Anna's shoulder; but both events reflect something of the aplomb which he spent his final days. You done good, Davy!

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