Life Without Government
Bill Keller
NYT
BASTROP, Texas
For a reality check on Governor Rick Perry’s mission of minimalist government, I took a drive to Bastrop County the other day. Once rural, the county has burgeoned into an outlying Austin bedroom community, a patchwork of subdivisions plowed deep into pretty forests of loblolly pine. Formerly pretty, I should say. A summer of parching drought, the hottest and driest on record, turned those forests to tinder, and on Labor Day weekend high winds lashed a few stray sparks into the worst wildfires in Texas history. The inferno here raced across an area 20 by 30 miles, and left 1,500 families homeless.
The fires were finally tamed a couple of weeks ago, but the day I drove out from Austin for a look at the remains, a flare-up incinerated another 1,000 acres. A visibly weary road foreman for the county, Andy Baker, took me around some of the devastation.
“I still can’t believe it, and I’ve been dealing with it over a month,” he said as we wove through a development called Tahitian Village, along roads with names intended to convey a tropical paradise: Mauna Loa, Akaloa, Kipahulu. We passed house after house burnt down to stubble, thickets of blackened pine spindles, husks of incinerated cars and the occasional charred swing set or septic tank.
Here and there, a house had been spared, a dubious mercy: the good news is, you still have a house. The bad news is, it’s all by itself in a vast ashtray.
(More here.)
NYT
BASTROP, Texas
For a reality check on Governor Rick Perry’s mission of minimalist government, I took a drive to Bastrop County the other day. Once rural, the county has burgeoned into an outlying Austin bedroom community, a patchwork of subdivisions plowed deep into pretty forests of loblolly pine. Formerly pretty, I should say. A summer of parching drought, the hottest and driest on record, turned those forests to tinder, and on Labor Day weekend high winds lashed a few stray sparks into the worst wildfires in Texas history. The inferno here raced across an area 20 by 30 miles, and left 1,500 families homeless.
The fires were finally tamed a couple of weeks ago, but the day I drove out from Austin for a look at the remains, a flare-up incinerated another 1,000 acres. A visibly weary road foreman for the county, Andy Baker, took me around some of the devastation.
“I still can’t believe it, and I’ve been dealing with it over a month,” he said as we wove through a development called Tahitian Village, along roads with names intended to convey a tropical paradise: Mauna Loa, Akaloa, Kipahulu. We passed house after house burnt down to stubble, thickets of blackened pine spindles, husks of incinerated cars and the occasional charred swing set or septic tank.
Here and there, a house had been spared, a dubious mercy: the good news is, you still have a house. The bad news is, it’s all by itself in a vast ashtray.
(More here.)
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