TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Midge Erskine (ME)
INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT) and David Weisman (DW)
DATE: March 27, 2001
LOCATION: Midland, Texas
TRANSCRIBERS: Robin Johnson
REELS: 2133 and 2134

Please note that the video includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings. Numbers correlate with the time codes on the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise.

DT: My name is David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas and we’re in Midland, Texas and it is March 27th, year 2001. And we have the good chance to be visiting with Midge Erskine who has been involved in a number of issues from bird rehabilitation to involvement with the oil and gas industry to general good government work. I wanted to thank you for taking the time to tell us about the interests and your work. Thanks very much.
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ME: You’re welcome.
DT: We often like to start these interviews with a little story about your childhood and whether there might have been some influences from your early years that gave you some interest in conservation and the outdoors.
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ME: I was ra—born and raised on a farm, actually born in the farmhouse back in Pennsylvania near Eerie and sixty—almost sixty-seven years ago. And having been raised on a farm, I think that may have stimulated my interest. I went to a one-room country school, which I was lucky and then went on to college and picked up a degree in both geology and biology. But for years and years, I was extremely shy and it’s such a surprise to everyone I’m, you know, such a fighter and so outgoing now.
DT: Were there times when you were growing up on the farm when you had animals that you collected from the wild or for livestock, or was there exposure to animals?
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ME: There was some exposure but we didn’t kill things, we tried to preserve things. And I think that’s where some of my interest came from. I really don’t know.
DT: And in your education in college, the technical background in biology and geology, do you think that was an influence?
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ME: No, I re—I think when—now that you’re asking me, I think most of my influence came because of my husband after I got married. He was always interested in birds and he had been a falconer and because of his ability then to set bones and knew how to take care of birds, it became my job after—when he was—we would receive a lot of birds that ha—would have broken wings and people would want to help them and he was able to do that. And as the numbers got larger, he would be out of town, I would have to learn how to take care of them. And I think that’s where that interest then more developed was because of my husband. I’m married to a saint.
DT: Could you tell us a little about the practice of falconry that your husband was involved in?
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ME: Okay, when he was involved it was more of a sport and there wasn’t all the illegal trading and everything that’s going on today. Today, we have too many people that are illegally participating in it and they’re actually—they don’t have the background or the knowledge and they don’t spend enough time. You have to spend hours with those birds, people aren’t doing it today and it’s a mistreatment really of the birds.
DT: So there’s a sort of black market in falcons?
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ME: Oh it’s a big black market—big black market. When—years ago in I guess this was about in the ‘70s—early ‘70s when we were still camping on Padre Island, we would be turning in the people that were illegally trapping of the peregrines because at that time it was—they could get about twenty-five thousand dollars a bird. And so that was a big business at that time.
DT: How would they trap them?
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ME: On the beach. You use a pigeon and you put a noo—a vest on the pigeon with a lot of little filaments, nooses and the peregrine would swoop down and get it and then get caught and then you had that pigeon tethered and that’s how they would get them.
DT: And what would they do with the falcon once they caught it?
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ME: Well they would normally sell them and we had a—there was a group of guys working down there that was actually supposed to be doing work for the University of Texas and they were actually also trading in peregrines.
DT: Would they sell them to people here in the country or foreigners?
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ME: Yes or over—overseas, yeah. A lot of the—early on in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, a number of the people that were in rehabilitation work also were trading in peregrines and got caught. But the temptation was always so great for a lot of people because of the high amount of money.
DT: Well speaking of rehabilitation, could you talk a little bit more about how you got started in that?
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ME: Well—well I got started because of my husband being able to set the bones and we slowly got started and as people knew we were—could take care of the birds, they would bring more and more and so we just really got into it huge. And I was covering an area of thirty-five thousand square miles. At one time I was the only rehabber out in west Texas and it became an overwhelming, you know, night and day operation. We’d handle hundreds of birds at a time and…
DT: Could you talk about some of the surgery and bone setting and how that’s done.
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ME: Well we did it just by feel and you just feel it, I mean, I don’t know how to explain—you feel it and put the bones back together if possible.
DT: And you put splints or casts or…
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ME: Well what we did was then we would tape the wing in place and on legs, Woody would make—that’s my husband, he would make a special cast for each leg because every bird was different, the size wise and everything and then they had to be able to use that leg to some extent so that it wouldn’t atrophy. And on owls you had to put a—a little sponge or cotton in there to hold it open a certain amount because otherwise it would atrophy so—but every bird was different. And the same way with mammals that…
DT: Most the injured birds that came in, why were they harmed, what damages?
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ME: Well—and in hawks—hawks, eagles, and owls and those were shot. We—what used to happen a lot was when daylight saving time would go on, we had a so-called sport here in west Texas called telephone hunting. And people would go out and drive up and down the roads and shoot the birds that were on the poles or on the wires and we’d get a lot of those birds in. But the two—the first two weeks of daylight saving time, you know, I knew right away—even if I didn’t go by the radio or clock, I knew had started because we’d get in all these hawks and owls.
DT: Most of this was just for entertainment or were some of these people who felt like the raptors were taking their livestock?
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ME: No, this was just entertainment. The—once the football games came on in the spring—they had football on television in the spring, that stopped then we didn’t have anymore of that telephone hunting. It’s very interesting.
DT: Did you ever have a chance to meet some of the people who would shoot these birds or understand what was going through their minds?
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ME: No, I re—no I really didn’t. It would be the other people that would bring it in and be all upset when they’d bring them in.
DT: Can you tell about your experience meeting some of these folks that have brought in an injured bird.
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ME: One of the very interesting things I learned, drug dealers are probably the most conscientious when it comes to welfare of birds and I think it’s because they know what they’re doing to people. And so we had a lot of drug dealers that would bring birds because of that and they’d be very upset about it. But we handled—I handled like twenty-one different species of owls, I mean I handled almost all the owls there were in the United States, they type, because here in west Texas, we winter a tremendous number of species of birds. And because of the area I covered I handled many, many types of birds, probably the largest number for any rehabber.
DT: Was there something equivalent to a spring fall out where these birds would be coming back from Mexico and they’d get a big influx of them?
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ME: Mi—du—migration, uh huh, you have about a month and a half, two months of migration and this—they came through that way. And then in the summer time I’d handle a lot of baby birds. And we handled, oh because of hailstorms and such, we would get in big influxes. Or one year when we had the temperature went up over 116 degrees, I mean, even the airplanes didn’t fly, everything was grounded here, and all these baby birds were coming out of the nest because the parents couldn’t fly up to feed them. And they were getting hot and they would come tumbling out of the nest and people were picking them up. And I had, oh, I had over two hundred and some babies at one time of all these different species.
DT: With injuries or just they didn’t have their mother?
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ME: They didn’t have the mother and people were picking them up because of the heat.
DT: Was there heat stroke or what was the injury?
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ME: Well at that time yes, and they would be dehydrated and—and we would just put them in boxes and feed them and change and, you know, it was oh, that…
DT: And what were you feeding all of these animals?
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ME: Well because we had so many different species and baby birds you almost constantly feed them, that I would make up several diets and then we would just go through. We’d put the birds in big boxes—paper boxes with paper on the bottom and we would just—the—they were in there by size because that was the only thing we could do. And so the—because the diet would be so different for some of them that we would just go through and feed everything one diet at one time and the next time we’d feed them the next one and so that they would get everything that they needed. But it was really a horror at that time because the young high school kids that would come in and help me, they’d say, uh, is all you’re doing is cleaning up, you know, you’re feeding and it come—you put it in one end and it comes out the other end. And it really—it’s time consuming work. People don’t realize and then—because we would have baby mammals at the same time.
DT: So it wasn’t just birds you had.
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ME: No we—we handled babies as far as mammals and because of that, then I’d get up for a two o’clock feeding and four o’clock feeding and so you just, you know, really were deprived of sleep and eat. My poor husband I—I said I was married to a saint. I never cooked at that time. If he wanted to eat, you know he’d fix me something and I’d eat while I was taking care of things because it really becomes hectic at that time.
DT: What other kinds of mammals were you caring for?
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ME: We ha—we had a lot of baby fawns because people stupidly took them. We had raccoons and rabbits and possums and, I can’t even remember now, whatever was out here we would get, armadillos, javelinas, all kinds of things.
DT: Were there any unusual species and rarer species that you ever came across?
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ME: Okay, the two things that I got that were rare, one was I got a bunch of baby alligators and that was because some stupid person went to Louisiana and got a bunch of baby alligators thinking he was going to raise them in his stock pond out here and I ended up with a bunch of baby alligators. And so the Texas Parks ferried them on down back to the coast. And then the other thing I had was a—a injured whooping crane that was shot.
DT: How was it injured, how did that come in?
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ME: Well it was shot but because of the political atmosphere, they ignored the shot wound and when the bird came tumbling down out of the sky it broke the keel and so…
DT: The keel, what is that?
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ME: The—that’s the breastbone. Anyway then they ended up saying it died because of that. Well that added to the injury but it had been shot.
DT: In speaking of that bird dying, what was the mortality like? Did you have some success…
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ME: We had—we had tremendous success, it would be depending on the wound, where it was.
DT: Did you have to treat these birds and animals with antibiotics or other kinds of drugs?
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ME: Uh hm, but you’re very careful because birds are very sen—sensitive and especially the more endangered, that’s why they’re endangered, like a peregrine or something. Some of these birds, you’d have to be very careful what you give them because they will die just even from handling, from shock or some of the medication will kill them.
DT: Did you have to dress in some way so that you didn’t seem threatening?
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ME: No, we—we were—we didn’t handle them that much. The only thing we had to be very careful of is in—when you’re raising baby birds not to imprint them so that they think that you’re the parent and that was the one big thing.
DT: How did you avoid doing that?
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ME: One of the things was they were always exposed to adult birds or we tried to expose them to adult birds.
DT: Did you keep some injured birds around as sort of surrogate parents?
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ME: We had—well—bu—there was always so many birds that we were handling that yes, and then we—we were allowed—I had some educational birds. I used to go around for about a hundred miles around, I would go into the schools and do free programs and so I had those birds. The one funny story, we had an owl that someone had illegally had and it was—they didn’t feed it properly so it had rickets and its legs were bowed and it could not be released back out in the wild. And I used to take that into the schools and we used to—the children named it Bubo for the scientific name and we always said “him” and it laid an egg. And it died after that, it was about eight years old but it—the bone structure because of the porous bones of the rickets it had, it didn’t survive after that egg laying so—but I—I would get a lot of birds. The—out here because of the oil field activity and the nest being so low, people took hawks and owls because the baby owl is
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so cute and they would take them out of the nest not knowing how to feed them. And the birds would end up with their legs like this with the feet back of their head because of the rickets, they were so bowed. Well there really isn’t anything you can do with a—with a bird like that, you’d have to destroy it. But if they were just crooked, that—a lot of times they could survive in the wild with better nutrition and after having kept them for a length of time so that they could learn how to kill with that type of foot and everything.
DT: Can you talk a little bit about how you might have given these birds therapy and training and so you could release them?
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ME: Well I—no on some birds we actually had to do physical therapy where you work on the legs, you know bend the legs and—or the wings when they were really ricketed and you were trying to do something at that time. But mostly, once you took them out of the bandages, then they were in big flight cages outside and they learned to, you know, reuse their wings. There isn’t much…
DT: Can you describe what these flight cages looked like?
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ME: The whole back yard was filled with cages. They were different sizes for the birds, they were just screened or netted. The last ones are about twelve feet tall. Most of them were ten feet by something, I can’t remember. The eagle cage was like forty feet by thirty feet and about ten feet high. The one thing I—there was two things I did that other rehabbers later in the state picked up. One was if you’re going to train a—the hawk or an owl how to catch live food before they can be released. Well what I would do is I would trap the mice and then I’d stick them in the freezer until they got very cold so that they could just move and then I’d put them and the bird could catch them. And as they got better, I didn’t get them as quite as cold so that they would learn how to do it. Most of the rehabbers would put it in a big container like a—a child’s swimming pool or
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something. Well that way the bird didn’t have a real good training because it was in a cont—a contained area but by putting them in the freezer, it was much better. And then the other thing I did for—we got a tremendous amount of fly catchers and those birds, the parents feed them once they’re out of the nest, the parents are still feeding them and they feed them actually in flight at first when they’re first flying. Well the birds have to learn how to catch or they’re going to starve. And I had this—at first we used a big tent and we’d put a light in so that the bugs would come in at night, the moths and everything would come into the tent. And then in the daytime the birds were able to catch these flying insects and it would be the same kype—type of training. So it worked out real well. But it was interesting, I—I’ve—I know I handled over a hundred different species of birds.
DT: Well speaking of that, what’s the scale of operation, how many birds do you had at any given time?
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ME: After a hailstorm or something I’d have maybe five hundred birds at one time.
DT: And you had interns helping you?
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ME: Later on, at that time—it—it was awful hard to get somebody to come and help because they don’t want to clean up after—people have this wonderful idea of, you know, I’m going to be out there handling this hawk or this owl and you don’t handle these birds. And that’s what people didn’t realize and they didn’t want to clean up the mess. You know, you’re always cleaning up.
DT: I guess Florence Nightingale changed bedpans too.
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ME: Yes, that’s the very same thing and people don’t look at that side of it. And then a lot of people didn’t like to, you know, cut up the rabbits—we’d get a lot of rabbits, thank God the people would bring me in these, you know, the meat because meat was the tremendous expense.
DT: How did you pay for all of this?
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ME: We did it ourself and—but once we got well-known then people would bring things in to us which was really good. And I did a lot of butchering, I mean, the animal control or game wardens would bring me these dead things and I’d butcher them. And one of the game wardens showed me how to literally butcher a bloated animal without getting into it. I’ve done horses, you know, just everything for the meat. We had big freezers that we’d put this meat in and like all the road kills, we’d go out and pick up fresh road kills of rabbits and we would put them in the freezer because of ticks and stuff. And you’d keep them in for three or four days and then we’d bring them out and cut them up if they were big and feed them to the animals. People didn’t like to do that. But I remember the
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first big horse we killed. We did it—my house sits a hundred feet back off the street and we have a lot of trees and this was in the fall of the year I believe. Anyway we were out there, this huge horse, and we were cutting, you know, cutting it up to fit and someone drove into the driveway. They wanted to know where somebody lived, they were out of town guests and—and I—what—what did they think, all this blood. But, you know, you had to be very innovative in order to survive because there was no federal or state help in doing this.
DT: And you taught yourself how to do this? Were there other bird rehabbers that you talked to?
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ME: No at—no at that time I did a lot of reading. I was very fortunate, I had a set of bird books of—of Bent that were put out by the Smithsonian back in the ‘20s and it had tremendous—all the diets. And I was able then to know what the natural diet was and be able to work out something for the birds. And when mammals, I would just ask some of the old game wardens and they would tell me on a lot of things. So they were very helpful.
DT: Is there a network of bird rehab people that you work with?
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ME: Well there—there is now but at that time there wasn’t anyone.
DT: What time was this when you began?
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ME: Well I started in ’70 and there wasn’t really a network until way into the late ‘80s before there was a network of doing that.
DT: I understood that you’ve been recognized as a very good bird rehabilitationist.
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ME: That’s kind of somebody to say that.
DT: Well that other people I guess didn’t have such a good reputation. I was wondering if you could say what distinguishes a good one from a bad one?
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ME: Honesty is number one. I can’t tell you how many times I had people approach me if they could get a hawk or feathers, the—there’s a big trade—illegal trade in feathers and especially eagle feathers. And I would have the—I remember once a federal game warden, I didn’t know who it was, he came up and—and wanted to know if I had any eagle feathers. And I said no but if you’d leave me your name and address, you know, a phone number, I’ll let you know. And then he started laughing because he—it was a federal game warden, just—they would check to see if you were honest because you could make big money, you know, if you were dishonest in trading. We had—there was a rehabber in Dallas Fort Worth area that did that. He was illegally—but he was—he was
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actually trading outside the United States. He would send birds outside the United States and the—at that time you could get, let’s see, seventy-five thousand for a gyrfalcon and so there was big trading. And that’s where a lot of the rehabbers, what happened to a lot of them is—is that they got—the other funny thing is so many of the rehabbers are women. And I never realized why there were women doing that and one thing is that they have the time and the other thing is my—after I was doing most of the bird work and my husband wasn’t doing that much, I realized that, I told him one day we had, ah, too many young birds that were having to be force fed that had come in and it takes two or
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three days for some birds to learn to eat, you know, without being force fed. And like on a hawk or an owl I just wrap them up in a towel and then—and I’d hold them like this against my chest and open up and, you know, push in. And then I realized that women were better at this because they had breasts and you just stick the bird in between and, you know, do it. But that was something I didn’t realize.
DT: And those birds that did recover, where did they usually go, what would you do with them?
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ME: Okay, I was—I was extremely fortunate in—for my mammals and my birds, the big birds, that we had a rancher here. He’s dead now but the Glass Ranch, George Glass, would allow us to take everything out there and release it. And he had a very protected ranch. And the fawns that I raised, I raised a lot of fawns, well those really can’t be put back into the wild because they are too used to people and they went out on his ranch and were used as breeding stock then for—they set up a herd out there. And that was—and because I got them from such a wide area of the state, there—there was a lot of new gene pools there and so it worked out. I—I was extremely fortunate with some of the ranchers here, they were very cooperative.
DT: What would you do with the animals that died?
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ME: Okay, we buried them unless it was—I didn’t handle adults, what I handled was babies when it came to mammals. And on birds the—if it was a good specimen, it had to go back—the government or the game warden came—federal game warden came and picked them up and it would either go to a university or some place like that. And the carcasses that weren’t really any good, we just buried them.
DT: This may be a segue to another topic I know you’ve been involved in. Did you collect some birds that had been contaminated with oil?
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ME: Oh how—how I got involved in all that. We went—one year we decided we were just going to go out and get away and went out walking. We drove out to an area by—near Andrews, Texas where we hadn’t been before, we wanted to look at a certain formation that was out there. And we happened to hear the sand hill cranes and looked up and there was a whooping crane with them. And we followed the whooping crane and it went to another lake, Lake Wayland, where the oil companies were dumping oil into this lake, what they call the BS, the bottom sediment out of the tanks which was oil and salt water. And that’s how I first got started in the oil situation and the birds.
DT: What did you see at this lake?
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ME: Well there was dead birds and there was oil all over the—much of the lake and what happens is the birds can’t tell the difference between oil and water and they would come down and land. One night there was a whole flock, seven or eight hundred ducks that had landed on this lake and the oil slick moved and that was end of the ducks.
DT: What’s the effect of the oil on a bird?
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ME: Well if it’s in the wintertime and there’s a lot of it, what happens then is hypothermia and they die. If it’s just a small amount of oil and they’re a nesting bird, that oil gets on the egg and the egg doesn’t hatch. Just—and one drop of oil on an egg is enough to kill the egg. So there was a lot of ramif…
DT: [inaudible]
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ME: Uh huh, yeah, there’s a lot of ramifications of this and the—just of the ducks population, we were losing over a million just ducks here in west Texas a year because of the oil field. At one time, every oil pump jack had a pit next to it. That was before they had unitized the fields and so every on—everything had a pit and the birds would see this because we’re desert, or semi-desert area, the birds would think this was water and they would come down to that. The game warden—federal game warden and I, Rob Lee, we went down to a big pit by Rankin and I had been down there the two or three days before with a reporter and there were something like fifteen great blue herons just dead on top of this big pit. And I called and so when he got into town, he and I went down there and it was hot as hell. The oil was so hot that it would just burn your hands and they had
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cleaned out—the oil company had come in and cleaned out one of the pits and there was a pile about this high and it was almost all bones, millions and millions of birds in there. And we I think…
DT: Like in La Brea tar pits?
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ME: Exactly, this—exactly what it was and there were numerous of these pits and then they drained on into the Pecos River, that was a big problem.
DT: Could you back up a little bit? You said that during the winter that some of these birds would die of hyperthermia. Why would that happen?
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ME: Because of the oil. See the bird—and the bird can’t—the insula—the insulation is actually when they fluff or they—they have an airspace in between and that’s what keeps a bird warm or cool and it doesn’t work like that if the—if the feathers are oiled.
DT: So oil interferes with the ability of the feathers to fluff out, they can’t preen or what happens?
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ME: To keep—yes—to keep—any—anything. I mean, sometimes they’ll—they would be a just a black, glob of oil. I was going to a railroad commission hearing and I was taking—when all this was happening and I was going through the airport and I was taking some of these oiled ducks with me, they were—had been frozen in the freezer and I had them in a carry-on, one of these little carry-on canvas bags with ice stuffed in there, frozen bottles of ice. And the—when it went through the machine, you know, their x-ray machine, the lady looked at me, looked back in there, looked at me and looked back in there, and never said a word and I never said a word and we went on through. But oh it—it was a horror story out here and nobody wanted to do anything about it and it took
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twelve years before we got anything really done. The Texas Parks and Wildlife really couldn’t do anything because of the politics here in Texas. And we had to get the Fish and Wildlife in and they sent an agent in. But then studies have to be done and oh, one of the people that worked for Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico started a study there. And then we were doing studies here in west Texas and once it showed that this was a great killing area for birds, U.S. Fish and Wildlife could then say, you’re illegally taking birds under the Migratory Treaty Act. And so they gave the oil companies so many months or, well I think is was like a year and a half to go ahead and get netting put over the tanks and the pits or get rid of the pits.
DT: Can you give us an idea of the time frame when you first found out about this and when you got people’s attention and when you got a regulatory response?
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ME: Well the—to ge—by the time we got the regulatory response it was twelve years.
DT: And what year was that?
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ME: That was already in the ‘80s. I started in I think was ’76 was when I first started on that. And I got nowhere at first and then I was able finally I got Defenders of Wildlife sent a reporter out here and they did a big article showing the oiled birds and the lakes. And that got some attention there in Washington and then we—they—a year later, they followed up with another story and when that happened then U.S. Fish and Wildlife and EPA, everybody was—had to step in do something because they were knowingly allowing contamination in the lakes and in the waters like the Colorado River, the Pecos River. These rivers were being heavily contaminated because oil companies were literally dumping into the rivers. And railroad commission wouldn’t do anything, the Upper Colorado River Authority ignored the whole problem and it just took time. But
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here we lost all our friends in Texas, you know, in Midland that—because I was bucking the big oil companies and everybody here worked for oil companies. So we just lost all our friends, had to make new friends.
DT: What would they tell you?
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ME: I shouldn’t be doing that.
DT: Because?
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ME: Because you don’t say or, you know, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
DT: They didn’t question that what you said was true?
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ME: See because a lot of the oil field people would bring me the birds that they’d find out there. And I could never say anything because it was their job see, so they would have—we’d have to protect them.
DT: Were these people frightened that their jobs might be taken away or be demoted?
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ME: Oh yes—oh yes, yeah—yeah, they—they would lose their jobs.
DT: Were there instances where that happened?
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ME: Yes.
DT: Can you tell about some of the repercussions?
0:36:24 – 2133
ME: Well, that—that’s why we lost all our friends is because they knew I was so actively working on this. And once Defenders did their articles then we got like articles, Dallas paper did one, New York Times did one, LA Times did one, and that put enough pressure on to get something done and it focused that bad attention on the oil industry and especially here in Midland and that was a no no.
DT: Why do you think they were so resistant, I mean it sounds like the bird netting may be fifty, sixty bucks, I heard once, not an expensive thing?
0:37:07 – 2133
ME: Well at that time remember every pump jack had a—a pit by it. And that was overwhelming an expense but once they unitized a field then you didn’t have these pits and it was cheaper for them to do it.
DT: Can you explain to people outside the oil industry what unitizing means?
0:37:29 – 2133
ME: Oh unitizing is that a pump jack can work—they’re computerized now I—I think that’s—and one pump jack will pump so long and then the next one will go because you can only pull so much oil out of the field and they time the jacks in their pumping.
DT: So fewer jacks break…
0:37:52 – 2133
ME: Well the same but they’re not running all the time and they now are all connected with pipes and so you don’t have those individual pits that you had.
DT: I see they use tanks now or…
0:38:05 – 2133
ME: Well there’s some tanks, yeah, it all goes and then it goes into a central area. Um hm. And at—they—even now they aren’t maintaining all the netting on the tanks because I’ve turned them in, I—I still am doing that. We have a company now that’s drilling just right along the city limits on I-20 and I turned them in. The—they’re going to pay a big fine because they had this pit that all these ducks were getting into about three months ago. And the people—we have to be very careful because we have to protect some jobs. But…
DT: How do you do that?
0:38:49 – 2133
ME: Well, they—they call me and I—I’m the one that talks to the federal game warden and we—I take the blame for it or federal game warden takes the blame for it and that way people are—no one knows who turns it in.
DT: It seems very brave of you.
0:39:08 – 2133
ME: Pardon?
DT: It seems very brave of you.
0:39:11 – 2133
ME: Well somebody’s got to do it.
DT: Do you fear repercussions beyond the social sort of stigma?
0:39:15 – 2133
ME: Oh yeah, we—we—we’ve had a lot, yeah.
DT: What sort of stuff?
0:39:19 – 2133
ME: Threats, life threats and things like that.
DT: What do people tell you?
0:39:23 – 2133
ME: Well my life has been threatened several times but, you know, it’s something you learn to live with.
DW: Do you get like a brick through the window in the middle of the night or…
0:39:35 – 2133
ME: Well my dog was poisoned because I—I—I was told that if I would testify at an EPA hearing, something would happen and they poisoned my dog. We had a fire, our house is bugged, my phone is bugged.
DT: Even now?
0:39:55 – 2133
ME: Even now, yeah, my phone is bugged.
DT: How come do you think?
0:40:00 – 2133
ME: Well I don’t—I’m not—it has to be federally. One of the things, because see I turn in drug dealers, that’s a no no out here. I had—one Friday night at 10:30, I had tried to recall a friend, we were talking at 10, we were talking, we had this terrible noise on the phone and so I tried to call her back at 10:30 and the noise was still there and so this was Friday night. Saturday morning at 9:00, there was the telephone repairman to come fix my phone, we hadn’t reported it, neither had the person I was talking to. So, it’s—it’s something we learn to live with.
DT: Do you think the attitude of the oil operators or the community at large is changing or do you think people are still real resistant?
0:40:53 – 2133
ME: People are resistant but yet I got tremendous support from the oil companies because I was always honest. Like when PETA [People for the Ethnical Treatment of Animals] was two or three years ago, they had this big spread in their magazine saying that all these birds were killed in heater treaters up in the Four Corners area.
DT: What are heater treaters?
0:41:12 – 2133
ME: It’s one of the things in the oil field that where a lot of heat is a gas, it’s a separator unit. And I looked at that picture and I called the federal game warden and I said, that’s a set up, you know, the—the—you wouldn’t get these specimens that looked like they came out of a museum, you know, I mean these were perfect specimens. I said, if they were in the heater treater, they’d be charred. I mean, you’d have nothing, they’d be burned up. And then when PETA called me to want me to participate in a rally, you know, against a oil company, I called the oil company and I said this is a set up. So I—I was always honest with the oil companies and because of that, they did give me support though they fought me, they did support me because I was honest.
DT: Do you find a difference in dealing with the majors versus the independents?
0:42:11 – 2133
ME: Not really, no, no. The independents didn’t have the money or didn’t want to spend the money on netting and they still don’t. And the—the majors had to do it. They were more forced to do it because of bad publicity.
DT: And are there some sites that are neither independent nor major but is orphan sites now?
0:42:35 – 2133
ME: Oh there are a lot of those, there are a lot of those.
DT: And how do you deal with those? How do those get netted and tanked or (?)?
0:42:42 – 2133
ME: Well no—normally—they are no longer producing. Once they’re abandoned, they aren’t producing so…
DT: And the pits eventually dry up?
0:42:49 – 2133
ME: They eventually dry up, yeah. And now because of the downturn in the economy over since, you know, in the ‘80s the ranchers and farmers are now putting more pressure on the oil companies to clean up their act and that makes a big difference.
DT: I understood that there was some litigation recently against Mitchell, is that one of the instances that you’re talking about?
0:43:20 – 2133
ME: No. That was not one, I don’t think I turned them in.
DT: But it’s an example where one of the landowners objects to contamination on the surface.
0:43:26 – 2133
ME: Yeah, exac—yes—yes, yeah. But see at—at the very first, they could not really do anything. Out here if you—if you’re a farmer, you don’t have your mineral rights. Normally the rancher, if it’s a working ranch, they have the mineral rights but if there’s not mineral rights on that then it normally goes into farming because they have to make some money off of that land.
DT: I see so the two have been severed at some point, the surface rights and the mineral rights.
0:43:55 – 2133
ME: They’ve been sep—way back when, yes, way back when and that’s another big problem out here. And the—for many, many years, oil was king and there was no way you could put pressure on and nobody wanted to buck big oil. None of the environmental groups when I first started they said, you know, they wouldn’t buck big oil and so they wouldn’t. Audubon finally came, Dede Armentrout was—she was the one that came in to help us and she was excellent because of all but Sierra Club, none of the other organizations here would do anything because they were not going to buck big oil.
DT: Can you give us an example of making a call to one of these groups and the sort of reaction you would get?
0:44:39 – 2133
ME: Well, you want us to finish?
DT: Yeah, let’s finish…
0:44:46 – 2133
ME: I had been a member of even the Sierra Club and I asked them for help, they would not give help. I contacted twenty-one different environmental groups and they did not want to buck big oil because too many of the people donated to them. Plus the fact that most of your organizations will only get involved in something that they know they’re going to win and they didn’t think that they were going to win this. And I was dumb enough…
DT: They just thought the odds were against them.
0:45:19 – 2133
ME: Yeah and I was just dumb enough and pig-headed enough that I was going to continue because I was out here and I saw what was happening. I saw the great loss of wildlife out here. And the other thing is with that combination of dumping and of the open pits and everything, you have water contamination and, you know, water out here is really precious but nobody cared about it. And as a consequence then, we got tremendous amount of groundwater contamination, both with chemicals and with salt water.
DT: And how would that happen?
0:45:53 – 2133
ME: Well if you’re dumping into a lake or dumping into the river, you know, it all ends up down in the back of some dam and it becomes very contaminated. They’re now—they blame it so much on naturally occurring salts but it isn’t. I mean, you—you can just watch a river, you know, and the dumping in it and I’d fly the Colorado River and you could see all these pits along the river that would just dump in there but the Upper Colorado River wouldn’t—wouldn’t—would not buck. Well as long as Mr. Ivy was the head of the Upper Colorado River, he would not do anything on that. They even allowed…
DT: Is this the Upper Colorado River Authority?
0:46:33 – 2133
ME: Upper Colorado River Authority, yes. And they literally allowed drilling like at Lake Thomas, right in the lake, they allowed the drilling, you know, and…
DT: Drill platforms out on the lake?
0:46:45 – 2133
ME: Yeah, I mean, and that was Snyder’s drinking water but there was—the Railroad Commission and the Natural Resources Commission, they would not enforce any rules or regulations. And no matter how hard you tried or pictures or anything, they would say, you know, oh it’s not there, it doesn’t exist.
DW: Was it because they were on like the take, I mean is there…
0:47:13 – 2133
ME: Yes. In the oil field, we would know on railroad commission inspectors or some, if they had brand new boots on you know that they were, they didn’t get those on their paycheck. We—now the head of our department out here, our railroad commission department is getting leases and that’s illegal. But, you know, all the way from the railroad commissioners, three guys on top, all the way down, it’s—it’s corrupt and it’s not going to change, there’s too much money. It’s like the drugs, there’s just too much money involved.
DT: It’s not just that they feel sympathetic to their colleagues in the regulated industry but that there’s money that changes hands.
0:47:53 – 2133
ME: Yeah. I had someone here who was a friend of mine, the company he worked for, he and his boss went into the railroad commission office here in Midland and they actually gave the guy money. And I wanted him to say something about it but he’d lose his job. That—that’s another thing…
DT: [inaudible]
0:48:17 – 2133
ME: Yeah, and—and the thing is people had to protect their jobs. And so no one would talk, no one would give affidavits, no one would really talk. The—you know, I’d learn all this from the people but they would—couldn’t lose their jobs.
DT: Can you give us some examples say when you would go to the railroad commission, either to a local office or to headquarters in Austin, what sort of reaction you would get when you would say there are these problems and I have them documented, would you send out an inspector, what would they say?
0:48:49 – 2133
ME: Oh, nothing exists. Last year when I turned in a—okay I turned this into the Natural Resources Commission and this is the city of Midland they’re over watering where they’re putting out their sewage water and it was literally coming out of the hill and going into the draw which then feeds into one of the lakes. A man went out there and said he didn’t see anything wrong, there was nothing going on out there. And I kept telling him, we argued on the phone for about an hour. I told him I had been out there the day before and I had on videotape this water just seeping, you know, just sheeting out of the side of the hill. And we were in a drought, we hadn’t had any rain for like three or
0:49:32 – 2133
four months. Well he didn’t see it. I said, you had to have seen it, it was right there by the road, I mean, you know. Well finally he admits he’d go back out there but there was nothing, you know. I mean, the Railroad Commission and the Natural Resources Commission, this was the problem is you could have it on film and they said it didn’t exist. You could have photographs of it and it didn’t exist. And as long as we have state agencies that won’t enforce the rules and regulations we have, then we’re lost.
DT: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the federal agents that have helped you, I know Robert Lee has been very helpful to you.
0:50:16 – 2133
ME: Be—before Robert Lee we had Dick Endrus and then he ended up being a head of well the east coast someplace. He had a terrible time here because they were so mean to—to him and his family when he was here.
(misc.)
DT: We were talking about some of the pressure that’s put on some of the federal agents, can you specify?
0:50:48 – 2133
ME: Oh, Rob Lee, I don’t know how much pressure he’s had but I do know that when he, in the panhandle when he went to look at some of the oil pits at a facility, he and the state game warden got roughed up shall we say. And they had to call in the Sheriff’s Department to come and help them because they were being beaten up.
DT: Is this the story about when they were surrounded by a number of workers?
0:51:18 – 2133
ME: Uh huh, yes, yeah this—this is the story.
DT: Tell me more about it.
0:51:22 – 2133
ME: I don’t know too much about it but I do know that he—Rob was hit. The oil workers ganged up on him and they were in a facility where they could have really been injured. And they quickly radioed for help and the Sheriff’s Department came out there and then the FBI took over the investigation because it was a federal employee but then everything was just kind of all covered over. This is what always happens, I mean…
DT: Can you talk a little bit about how things were sort of obfuscated, there is a newspaper here, there are television stations. What is the role of the press in trying to track this?
0:52:05 – 2133
ME: The—okay, the press in west Texas didn’t do anything. We—when I did get some articles put in the Midland paper very early on it happened to be that the publisher wasn’t here, he was on vacation or something and the reporter lost his job. That’s very common out here. If a reporter writes a story and happens to sneak it in then he’ll lose his job. It’s very common. And we don’t have freedom of the press here and the TV stations will not do anything if the newspaper won’t publish it. And the—the stories are changed and, you know, there was really nothing going on here according to the press, this—this didn’t occur.
DT: And the press’ reluctance to cover these stories is because of what?
0:52:51 – 2133
ME: Advertisement. I know, in my case, with rehabilitation when the city came after me because they wanted my land, one of the big car companies that advertises on television called the television companies and told them that if they gave me any decent press, they would withdraw their ads from them. So, I mean, this is—it happens when you have isolated or small towns, this is common, it’s—it’s just not here.
DT: Well could you go a little farther talking about your property and some of the difficulties you’ve had with the city.
0:53:35 – 2133
ME: Well, the city had written me in to two ordinances, one for rehabilitation and the other one for my sanctuary, I’m on almost five acres.
DT: What do you mean by written in?
0:53:50 – 2133
ME: Well I’m—I’m—I was written into an ordinance, my—my facility was covered in an ordinance.
DT: Specifically…
0:53:57 – 133
ME: …specifically. And what the city then got around, they said because my name wasn’t on there. Well you can’t put personal names in an ordinance so—but because my property, the way it’s situated, it ties up eleven acres from being developed. My almost five and then the other acreage and they thought that they would get me out of there first by telling me I could not have my native vegetation. In Midland we have an ordinance that says you cannot have naturally growing trees and shrubs over two feet tall until the girth gets ten inches and then you—grasses and things they can’t be over eighteen inches tall. And the city then went to enforce it on me and that was because someone at that
0:54:52 – 2133
time had illegally bought—bought the only piece of property next to me. And it was—it was a government house and under low-income first time home owner which they weren’t. And they wanted to get rid of me and get my property and they got a city councilman to go along with them. For three years the city said, oh you know, he didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, the guy that got the property. And then he got one of the city councilmen to go in with him in this development. They had to—by ’93 they had the blueprints all made up for the eleven-acre development. And the city came and said I couldn’t have my vegetation. And then it just snowballed from there. And we went in for a hearing on it, or a city council meeting and they illegally voted that I couldn’t do my bird rehab. Well that wasn’t even on the agenda but in this town, you know, the city council does a lot of things that aren’t legal and then get away with it and they did that.
0:55:48 – 2133
But the townspeople turned out in mass. I mean, we had like five hundred people came to the meeting, they had to move it over to the Civic Center because there was so many people turning—were supporting me. But it didn’t matter. Be—because of them wanting to develop the property so they said I couldn’t do rehab any longer.
DT: Can you mention a little bit about how the community has supported you and in what ways?
0:56:16 – 2133
ME: Well the community liked the work I did and I did a tremendous amount of educational work. I went into the schools and did free programs, I never charged for the programs. And I did a tremendous amount of programs every year in the schools.
DT: What did the program involve?
0:56:33 – 2133
ME: Well I had a number of birds that I would take in and I would show the kids, you know, some of the wildlife that was here in the area and also try to instill on them that you don’t hurt these birds. And I’d never taken anything that was really good, you know, I mean, like the owl was ricketed and I’d have—I had a hawk that was ricketed and part of a wing missing and things like that so that they could see what was happening to these birds. And they’d—would become more involved in the environment because of that when they saw how things were being treated. If you take wonderful specimens and show it in—to the children, especially out here, they would want one. But if you showed them what man was doing to these creatures, then they really felt sorry for it.
DT: What sort of reaction and interest do the kids have in what you were showing them?
0:57:37 – 2133
ME: Well, you know now, twenty years later, I get these people that are parents and everything saying, oh yes, I remember when you came to my school and I’m trying to teach my children this. And so the fallout was really great.
DT: And the kids were generally pretty sympathetic?
0:57:57 – 2133
ME: Yes—yes—yes, children are, as long as you don’t take something that’s really cute because then they want it.
DT: And as they grow up they become less sympathetic because they have other things that threaten them?
0:58:12 – 2133
ME: Or the jobs, if their job is threatened then they be—you know, then that’s a bad thing to, they have to be more careful because of their jobs. But now so much of the—many of those people are gone. So—but I still get—those kids are the ones that are now as parents bringing me birds to see if I can do something for them. And then I either tell them, you know, we fix them up or tell them what’s wrong with it and how to feed them. If it’s something that, oh a dove or something that I know that they can handle and release we do that. Otherwise they’re having to send them up to Lubbock because that’s the closest rehab.
DW: So I was just curious about the role of being in Midland and you’re the nice bird lady but you’re like the bad anti-industry lady, do they balance, do they weigh you on the scales of justice in this town as a result?
0:59:06 – 2133
ME: Well it—I—I honestly don’t know that and you’d have to ask somebody else about that one if, you know, everybody knows me as the bird lady. And now they know, you know, that I’m now doing a lot of filming and attending public meetings and trying to get something changed here in our crooked government. But the—the reason we actually lost the ability to rehab was that was the payback on the oil industry, you know, for all the work I had done. And everybody thought I would just move out of town and continue doing the work and I didn’t. And, you know, I figured I was—at that time, I was already sixty-six or something and—sixty-five and I thought well, you know, I’m all—actually getting too old because that was a twenty-four hour a day job to do and I could do something else.
DT: Tell me about the something else that you’re doing.
[End Reel #133]
DT: We were talking earlier on the last tape about your taking retirement from your old work of being a bird rehab person and that you’ve gone on to a new kind of career. Can you talk a little bit about that?
0:01:33 – 2134
ME: Okay well I—I was literally railroaded and sold out by my attorney and all that type stuff and I thought, I’m not going to allow this to happen to other people. And the only way you can really do anything is get it on videotape. So back in ’97, I got a video camera and I went in and started videotaping the city council and all the other public meetings. And it’s—was something that they didn’t like but because of the open records and legally I can go in and videotape as long as I don’t take up any space and am in the way. And so I stand in a little corner and—and do my taping and it’s been very interesting because I get all these people on lies. Like the railroad commissioner, Charles Matthews, last spring when they had—the Natural Resources Committee had a hearing
0:02:32 – 2134
out here to (?) hearing out here. He stated that there has been—never has a oil well contaminated, you know, leaked and contaminated anything, the groundwater, none in the state. And, you know, I mean, that was an outright lie. I did a letter to the editor of the Dallas paper and got no reaction from it when I stated this because I had it on videotape. Nobody comes back when you say that you’ve got this on videotape. Then they just want to forget all about it. But the corruption that goes on because Midland has had such high income for years because of the oil and so you have great corruption here because of that money. And you have the very low income and then the high income with all this money. And they’re able to buy off, except you don’t use that term, you use gratuities, so the great gratuities go to the judges, to the railroad commission, you know,
0:03:37 – 2134
to the Natural Resources Commission. You see all this and now it’s easier to track through the court houses because normally what they get is royalties. And in oil fields or in wells and stuff and, you know, you ought to see some of our representatives, they become very, very wealthy on account of this. But you can now track these things at the courthouse. And I do a lot of work at the courthouse tracking, following the money trails. And it’s very, very interesting to see these money trails. Now there’s a lot of it being done in othe—under other peoples names, you have to know all the children, there’s a lot of information you have to gather in order to follow these money trails but it’s there.
DT: What is the quid pro quo that’s expected?
0:04:32 – 2134
ME: You don’t have to obey laws, that simple, they look the other way. You know, I went out to a well that they had drilled—that was drilled that they pulled the casing out, the surface casing, well you don’t do that because that’s water protection. So what happens then everything comes up through there and it just literally contaminates. We have a lot of really bad contamination out here. Midland literally has, I think, seven or eight sites that should be superfund sites but everybody’s just ignoring them here. We had a—a big landfill right on the edge of a draw that even the city dumped into and all these hazardous chemicals were there. You can look at the frogs that are in the water there and they’re all deformed and there’s a lot of deformities there. And the Natural Resources Committee said, oh there’s nothing wrong there.
DT: Is the concern that it would cost too much to clean it up or it’s bad publicity for the community or what’s…
0:05:36 – 2134
ME: Both. In Midland you—there’s never anything negative said about Midland, you know. We don’t talk about our crime rate or our rape rates or anything here because we’re this perfectly nice wonderful city. And so we don’t put anything negative in about Midland and there’s a—you have rape when it’s not—when the public doesn’t know that there’s a lot of rapes going on, then you have more rapes because the women and girls aren’t more aware. And so they don’t—they aren’t careful enough. And it’s the same way when the water commission comes out and says, oh your water is safe and you know it isn’t, you know, because you’ve had tests done some place else. We had a testing lab here that would call the oil company and tell them that, you know, somebody brought in a water sample. And then they would falsify the water sample when they gave it back to the person because it would be contaminated. There’s a lot of that that’s going on.
DT: What sort of contaminants are in the water?
0:06:44 – 2134
ME: Well you—when you—from the oil fields you get everything, you get fungicides, you get pesticides, you get all kinds of lethal chemicals, arsenic, you get everything in the water.
DT: Why are there fungicides…
0:06:56 – 2134
ME: The—they have—they have to put fungicides down the well, a lot of that stuff they have to put down the well.
DT: It keeps it from building up?
0:07:02 – 2134
ME: Yes, well and also bacteria that would eat up the oil down there. And then like in Odessa where they had a superfund cleanup sight of chromium, both railroad commission and water commission knowingly allowed that green cleanup water to go down into a well where the casing was out at six hundred feet and everybody’s water wells in the area turned green. And they said, oh we don’t know what’s happening, you know, it’s your pipes and they said we’ve got PCV pipes. And—and then so then they end up saying you’ve got all these dead snakes down in there, that’s what turned your water green and they did nothing about it.
DW: Things like this falsification of lab reports the one thing that made the (?) boxes of documents that were all marked confidential that they get a hold of, how are you able to—like you say, you showed the video and they ignore it but can you—do you or can you get their own words on paper and turn them against them?
0:08:06 – 2134
ME: No, the trouble is you can’t get into courts here. The—the case where I’m talking about there in Odessa, when the attorney came here to railroad commission and asked for documentation on the wells in that area, because there’s hundreds of wells there, they had one little manila folder they gave him, that’s all documentation they have. Well that was the head of the office and he was called out. The lawyer sat down on a little chair and was reading this document and the guy got called out so he went back to the desk and asked the ladies that were left there, was there more documentation? They came out with a dolly filled with boxes of documentation.
DT: Oh you mean those records.
0:08:51 – 2134
ME: And water commission, they had kept two different sets of records when they were in Odessa. The guy that was a head of it, he kept to different sets of records, one was just perfectly everything was okay and then he had another set of records that he had that were the true records but you couldn’t get a hold of them. These are the things that happen here and there’s no way to get a hold of them. And you can’t sue because you can’t get an honest judge or an honest attorney here to handle anything. If you get an out of area attorney, the judges aren’t going to work on, I mean, help you with your case or
0:09:31 – 2134
allow you to win. And I know in one case, the foreman of the jury told the jury that they could not find that oil company guilty. They had to say they were innocent on a case because everybody worked—almost everybody worked for an oil company or they had a family member that worked for an oil company and they would lose their jobs. It’s just that simple. So, you know, as long as we have the justice system being so dishonest and the law enforcement, you know, the regulatory agencies not doing anything, then it’s pretty hopeless because people won’t speak up. And there’s very few of us that will literally speak out because of the ramifications of it.
DT: Do you think that the injustice is pretty general or do you think it’s focused more on the less powerful part of the community, the blacks, the Hispanics, the poor, or is there an environmental justice aspect to this?
0:10:37 – 2134
ME: Well in Midland we—the minorities, most of their jobs when it was a booming town, they worked out in the oil field, there was the rough necks, or they worked for people who were influential and they would lose their job. I mean, you know, it’s just cut and dry here.
DW: What would it take to get those people to realize they are working for these jobs but they’re killing themselves at the same time? Has there been any attempt at a sort of grass roots organizing where they explain it’s your money or your life in a sense?
0:11:15 – 2134
ME: It—it—they tried that big lawsuit in Odessa where they had a hundred families, it was a class action lawsuit and…
DT: This was (?)?
0:11:26 – 2134
ME: No, this was another one but that whole situation there is—is terrible. But this was where the chromium water was and all that stuff, okay, and the petrochemical complex, their water, that lethal water from the petrochemical complex was being used to put down the oil wells. They were injecting that down in the oil wells. And so then—and also the city sewage water. All this was going down in there and I happened, you know, by the grace of God, found a print up that had come from a conference in back in ‘56 in LA. And the—I—when I opened it, lo and behold the engineer from petrochemical complex was stating how wonderful was this water and what the program was they had for that. That was only existing copy we could find in the United States was the one I happened to have and I found it at a book sale. Anyway, everybody denied that this had ever gone on. And the people then that worked on this and knew it went on, they would talk but they wouldn’t talk publicly and they wouldn’t give affidavits. Then when they got enough of information, it took I can’t remember how many years, they got a law firm, Upchurch’s law firm out of Amarillo and they sold them out, they went to trial here without even
0:13:00 – 2134
notifying the people that the—they had gone to trial. They took a apparently a ten million dollar payoff and people got nothing from it and they got off scott-free. And th—this happened in June when they did the case and in September, the people called me and asked me if I would go to the courthouse and find out was it even filed. Well, it had been filed and done with, you know, the months beforehand. But this is the type of stuff that goes on here and people aren’t aware of it.
DT: The people who have been left high and dry, so to speak, or been abandoned by their attorneys…
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ME: They’re dying, cancer.
DT: I’m wondering, are they sick, moved away?
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ME: Mo—most—most of all these in these hundred families, every family has cancer. And I know the one family there’s three people left, I mean, they—they’re all dying of rare cancers.
DT: What do they suspect the cause is?
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ME: It—well it’s the pollution and for years the doctors, a lot of people when they would bathe in the water they get this rash, it was caused by the chemicals, the doctors would never tell them what was causing this rash.
DT: So the medical community was…
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ME: Medical community was right along with it. Yes, that’s—that’s been a big problem is the medical community.
DT: Many of these doctors are plant doctors or are they independent physicians?
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ME: No—no, these—these—these are city—these are independent—independent doctors. I mean, you—you can’t literally believe it, you said you saw the Bill Moyer show. I did not see that but probably he didn’t even touch the tip of the iceberg on his show for what’s going on here. They—they have denied, you know, I mean, we have in black and white the chemicals that are being dumped, we have all this information. You can show it to them and they deny it.
DT: They physicians.
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ME: Well, everybody does, they deny it that this goes on.
DT: You don’t get any special treatment from a physician who’s taken the Hippocratic oath and has the schooling to understand these things.
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ME: They just deny.
DT: Tell us about the deformities in…
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ME: In birds? Yes, okay. Midland uses—per acre, they use the most pesticides in the state inside the city, both the city on the parks and the people. And what I would see was the baby birds were all being poisoned in the nest or the deformities, would have the cross beaks you know, and the—no wing or, you know, piece of a wing. This part of the wing would be attached up here or no leg or, you know, part of a leg. But all these deformities that happened because of high use of chemicals here and nobody cared. That—that’s—that’s what so bad is when you try to tell people that they’re doing this to themselves like, I’ll give you a perfect example about what I’m talking about. We have a pond here on A Street, a—a city pond and they went in—in and dug it deeper because it always had water and even when we were in a drought because the sewage pipes are leaking into this pond and the city knew about it for twenty years, they’ve never fixed their—their sewage lines. And they have this pond that I went with a bacteriologist from
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Midland College and we tested the water. We couldn’t test for viruses but there was everything there, I mean it was a soup of terrible bacterias. And we couldn’t do anything about it. And they’d take the Girl Scouts and the Campfire Girls and Boy Scouts, they’d take them out there on canoes and have them tip over and come back, you know, and there’s gaillardia in that water. There’s all this stuff and you see people take their little kids down there and, you know, I just cringe and I—but the city will do nothing about it. And these kids, within two or three days of when they’re touching the dirt there, you know, the mud or because the ducks and everything, they get diarrhea and other problems and nobody says anything about it. The doctors, you know, don’t put any pressure on the city, hey clean up that act.
DW: Does any help come from Washington D.C., and by that I mean EPA officials at the national level who are not affected by your local election and politics, kind of the way you get FBI in from Washington and supposedly they’re impartial to the local things because they’re going to leave and fly home when it’s over. Do they bring an impartial way of…
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ME: No. Okay, now I’ll give you two examples. The Dallas EPA office is probably the most corrupt in the United States. I had an attorney friend who went to a seminar in Kansas City and he was so enthused of what they were doing that he wanted to join the EPA. And then his company—oil company sent him to the same seminar in Dallas and at that seminar, they were telling the companies how to get around the EPA regulations and this has been a big problem. Now when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, they had a case of aerial hunting which is a common thing out here. They literally had to bring in attorneys from Washington to take that case here because of the corruption here.
DT: What is aerial hunting?
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ME: Oh, shooting out of the airplanes. I mean they—the—the…
DT: What do they shoot?
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ME: …hawks and owls and everything and game. And they—the people actually put an ad in the newspaper advertising aerial hunting, you know, all illegal. But that’s the problem is you—well I’ll give you an example. The community development block funds, which are government funds that are given to communities, Midland is illegally using these funds. And I documented everything with legal papers out of the courthouse and with pictures and everything and I sent it to HUD in Fort Worth. They wrote back and asked me what my problem was. And my sen—the two senators from Texas and my representatives, they all said there’s corruption in all these programs, what do you want us to do about it? You know, nobody will do anything to stop it and, you know, so if you—no matter what you have corruption in, nobody wants to take a stand because you—it’s very unpopular to take a stand.
DT: Speaking of how difficult it has been for you, what sort of advice do you give to other people about how they can make a difference in their community?
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ME: Well, you need to make a difference and you know I have that web site, truthmidlandtx.com and I put on there that, if you’re silent, you’re adding to that corruption, you have to speak out. But if you do speak out, everything comes down on you, you know. Because of my speaking out, we’re a hundred thousand dollars in debt because of this.
DT: Would you do it again?
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ME: Yes. I—but now I know a little better and I’d do it better but I was doing it as a novice and, you know, age and—and what you learn along the way. And there are methods one could use by a little bit more knowledge that you could get a little bit more done. But I’ve been extremely lucky in that and I—I’ve kind of had the knack that I would do the right thing at the right time just, you know, the blessing of God or something that I—I’m still here.
DT: Do you have advice for the next generation who hopefully will be wiser and better than all of us?
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ME: Well if we—the—the next generation—it’s kind of bad, you probably don’t know that—you don’t put anything in your microwave oven except glass because any—anything that’s not glass is absorbed into the food. And, in women, it causes breast cancer and that’s why we have a high rate of breast cancer, okay. But when the study was done, nothing has ever been said about the study and people aren’t aware of this. So we are dying younger and younger. And by having always being exposed to small amounts of chemicals does more damage in the long run because it causes genetic problems. And we—we have shorter and shorter life terms. You know, people my age are probably the last group that will live for a long time because we don’t—we don’t have the genetic problems or as much of the chemicals in our body. But the doctors
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today, there’s acceptable level of chemical—of pesticides in your body now, there’s a level that they say is acceptable. Well, you know, I don’t think there’s any acceptable level but we’re seeing more and more rare cancers, we’re seeing more and more of all these problems. And we’re—we’re seeing more babies now, you know, born with all kinds of genetic problems. Well that’s due, the chromosome problems due to the exposure of the chemicals either in the womb or in the very young ages. So I don’t know what the future’s going to be for people but we need to do something.
DT: So you think that the next generation is going to be confronted with these tough issues but they are going to be compromised already because of the chemical load that they’re carrying in they genetic (?).
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ME: Yes, they’re already compromised. And until we get people that will stand up and say something, well we saw the thing with the federal law on arsenic, the back off on arsenic. We’re the only country now that doesn’t have ten percent, you know, ten parts per billion. Europe has all put in ten parts per billion. The—the mad cow disease, we still have over seven hundred plants in the United States making animal food as using animal parts that’s being fed to the cattle because if you are a manufacturer but you don’t put antibiotics in the animal food, then you don’t come in under the regulations and so that’s another problem. We have the mad cow disease, a variant of it in the moose and
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deer in seven or eight states now, they’ve known it since ’67, we’ve had people that have died. Nothing is said. The—that disease, we have over three hundred people a year that died according to the CDC records and yet we’re saying we don’t have any deaths here in the United States. So we have major, major problems that are all of a sudden are going to break loose and we are not prepared for them here in the United States.
DT: So how would you prepare for this?
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ME: I would tell them to start looking and really examining what they’re eating and really looking what’s going on in—in the community where they live. Like we have never drunk Midland water. We knew when we first came here because it was salty, we knew that was oil field contamination, we’ve always distilled our own water, we made our own distiller and everything so we distill all our own water. Maybe that’s why I’m still healthy at 67 is because I haven’t put all those chemicals in my body. And we’re very careful and we do raise a garden and things like that.
DT: So you’d advise people to protect themselves?
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ME: They’re going to have to protect themselves and especially if people want to have children, then they’re going to have to be more careful because they have accumulated so many chemicals that they have to start doing something about that or their children are going to born with a lot of problems. Maybe it won’t show up now but because of the genetic—the chromosome damage that is occurring—you have more damage done at low, long-term exposure to chemicals than you do when you have one big exposure and then you recover from that. And it’s that small doses—continuous small doses of long-term that’s really bad.
DW: What keeps you here at it? I’ve been sort of listening to the story of the one-woman crusade. Now in California where I come from it’s gorgeous, I live in a coastal community now, you would want to fight for it. Not to insult the surrounding environment of Midland, but it’s not like you’re protecting a beautiful gorge or a lush green valley here. So I know that would be motivation to want to protect a place because you appreciate the beauty.
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ME: Okay. Every place has a beauty and in a desert or semi-desert area you have the greatest variety of plant life, insect life, mammal life, bird life which people don’t realize. There—there’s real beauty here if people just look. I know…
DT: What kinds of beauty have you seen?
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ME: The p—the—the tremendous number of different plants we have here is just really, and the insects, I mean we have so many different kinds of insects here and…
DT: What kind?
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ME: Oh, I mean, we—we have insects here that haven’t even been named yet there are so many of them here. And then spiders, the number of wonderful spiders we have here and, you know, the other arachnoids that we have here and mammals. And the other thing is because we have this little oasis here we—and people stupidly brought—illegally took animals as pets and then now they’ve gotten out, we now have squirrels in Midland, javelinas are already coming in, we have possums, we have a number of things we never had here before so we have a great diversification. Just on my piece of property, we’ve had three hundred and twenty, like twenty-eight or twenty-nine, maybe more than that, species of birds already, you know, which is just unbelievable for a piece of property right in the middle of town. I’ve had twelve different species of hummingbirds already coming to my, you know, over the years to my hummingbird feeder that we’ve photographed.
DT: And the diversity in the desert is due to what?
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ME: Well because of the lack of competition as such, we’re, you know when—when you have a lot of moisture, then the plants really grow and you don’t have a diversification as much because here everything is spaced and you have more of a diversification because they struggled and developed here.
DT: We often ask people if there’s a special spot that they like to visit. Is there one that you could mention?
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ME: Oh my back lot.
DT: Tell us about it.
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ME: Oh, well when we first moved there it was nothing but bare dirt. And what we did was ye—I had read years before of someone in Arizona, this couple that had some acreage and they just walked and when they walked, they alw—had a stick and they drew where—wherever there was an insect or animal hole, they just made lines for water to go into that hole and so we started doing the same thing. And now, I mean, we’re completely covered with vegetation on our property.
DT: The insects have brought in seeds?
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ME: Well that, the birds have brought in seeds, we have all kinds of things that the birds have brought in but it allowed any moisture then to run down into the ground. And the—the rain on our property other than in the driveway, all the rain that we get soaks into our property, it doesn’t go off. And so we have a great diversification, we have a lot of things there. And because it is an oasis in town we attract a lot of things in there.
DT: Can you describe what it looks like now?
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ME: It’s—the vegeta—last year the city came on my property with a tape measure and a yardstick and measured even my yucca plants that they have to meet the requirements. We have a lot of mesquite that’s into trees now and then we have a lot of fruit and mulberries. I plant things for food for birds. Then we have pistachios and we have a number of trees but it’s—it’s just like a little forest there that we have. And then—then all the wildflowers and every years it’s different because of the amount of water that we get or what the birds bring in. So we see a lot of thi—in October all of a sudden I saw this plant coming up and I went, you know, that really looks like an elderberry and the birds brought in an elderberry. And, you know, I recognized it because it was something I grew up with back east, it makes wonderful pie. And I—I’ve got an elderberry bush now.
DT: So it sounds like a natural land, sort of randomly planted by the animals.
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ME: It’s—it’s a—and we have then circled it with—we have a fence around it now—wood fence and then we’ve put pine trees on the inside of it, evergreen trees so that eventually it’ll be a real nice area.
DT: Sounds like a fine home.
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ME: It—it—it’s different and we—we have—have people who come through our driveway which is—we have a circular driveway and with the house being set back a hundred feet, people think this place is interesting. And so they drive in to look because it’s untypical of the city. And so they find it very attractive to come in there.
DT: Have you found that some of your neighbors have tried to do the same thing?
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ME: No. Peop—you aren’t allowed to here in Midland. And it’s pretty hard to buck the city. Yeah, I mean, you know, as long as—well the city attorney told the councilmen it was okay to vote on their own projects fin—if they have financial interest. And, you know, for years we’ve been fighting this and finally the newspaper, about a month ago, put the law in the paper that if you have a financial interest of fifteen thousand dollars, you can’t vote on it. Well one councilman still did but the other one didn’t. But when I took a bunch of that material two years ago to the District Attorney because the councilman was voting on his projects, the District Attorney wouldn’t touch it. And so with—without having anyone here to go to enforce rules and regulations, it’s pretty hard.
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We’ve had to go, I can’t tell you how many times, to the Attorney General because the city would not even allow me to look at building permits, public records. And if you—you write a letter asking under the open records act for something and I’ll tell you how they work. If you say I want a phonebook, well it should have been telephone book. So if it isn’t exactly—exactly then you don’t get it. They don’t know what you’re talking about. And it’s—it’s really, really hard and the trouble is people aren’t going. We have all these retired people here and nobody goes to these meetings. And a lot of times I’m the only one there and that’s why they get away with things is because nobody goes. And people say, well I can’t make a difference and I keep saying, well if a numbers of them went and they really saw the corruption going on and then start talking about it, there
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would be a difference. But because the news media doesn’t cover anything and so the people don’t really know what’s going on. When I was doing rehab, I would hear all kinds of stories. I’d hear stories about the corrupt courts and, you know, and we had one—one guy came and was telling me his friend, he was on the campaign thing, his friend had filed for, I can’t remember if it was city council or mayor and there was a big piece in the paper. Two weeks later he withdrew. Well I found out the reason he withdrew is the banker called him and told him that if he didn’t withdraw his name, they were going to call in his house loan, all illegal, but they get away with it here. And if you do happen to get on—before when people were working with the oil companies, if you happen to get on city council and you work for an oil company and they didn’t want you on that city council, you’d get transferred. Within a couple of months you were transferred out of town. Then they’d name who they wanted on the city council. I—I mean, it—it’s so corrupt but the—the general public isn’t aware of it because the news media keeps their mouth shut.
DT: Maybe I should keep my mouth shut more often. I would like to ask you if there are things that I haven’t asked you about or things that I’ve sort of misdirected you away from that you’d like to talk about before we close this interview.
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ME: One thing, the game wardens, both federal and state game wardens that I worked with in this area, they were really, really good but they have to buck their bosses also. And that was a major problem that it—it’s, you know, you have sympathetic people even in the oil field you have people that know what’s going on and they’re—they really want to do something but they don’t know what to do. And a lot of them don’t dare do anything and some people who have tried to do something have gotten beaten down, they’ve lost their jobs. I hear this a lot, you know, just bad things happen and it’s pretty hard to fight.
DT: Well let me ask you an open-ended question. Do you have faith in people’s basic good nature or do you think it’s a more Hobbesian kind of world. When you see a city and a whole system it seems so broken. What is your attitude about people in general?
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ME: Okay. I used to think that people were good and then I see so many people that just lie and it doesn’t bother them. I mean, it doesn’t bother them if they’re killing somebody, you know, by dumping of the chemicals and all this. And Rob Lee was the guy that told me about this. I said, I don’t understand this, don’t they have a conscience? And he said no. He said, people—people don’t have conscience a lot of them. And now I’m seeing this in people here that, oh they’ll come across they’re so caring and good and yet they’re stabbing you in the back by doing illegal things or by dumping chemicals and—and there isn’t much you can do about it because until you have an uncorrupt legal system—I had a
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guy here tell me that his lawyer, he paid the law—opposing lawyer three hundred and—three—three thousand five hundred dollars to win—so he could win his case. And the other lawyer took that much money and the guy won his case. But when you have this type of corruption here, then there’s nothing you—well in my case, my attorney tried to get us to sign an agreement, he—he’s now in Austin. He tried to get us to sign an agreement that he helped write with the city so I could continue rehabbing. Hidden in that agreement was that they could come in and search my house anytime they wanted to without a search warrant and without cause. And we kept—we kept thinking there was
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something wrong in this agreement and we couldn’t figure it out. Finally we got someone out of state, legal help out of state, and she and Woody at the same time realized, hey they can search your house. So when we told the attorney this, he said, oh I didn’t see that. Well by that time I had already gotten a call from somebody that worked at the city and they said, what they’re going to do is plant drugs in your house so they can take your homestead. And this is what they were going to do. And see had we signed that agreement it would have been legal because it was going through a federal court and there wouldn’t have been anything we could have done about it.
DT: It sounds like you’re up against people who play real hardball. How do you keep the courage to continue?
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ME: I don’t know, I really don’t. I think because of the grace of God and I’m married to a saint. You know, my husband is just fantastic and he supports me and I think that’s, you know, the biggest thing. If I didn’t have the support I have from him, I couldn’t have done anything that I’ve done. So, he is…
DT: Pretty generous of you to the rest of the community.
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ME: Well, but I mean—and who’s—if I don’t speak up, most people here won’t speak out. You know, you’ve seen what’s happened to John and his, you know, the business because he’s spoken out. And right now I can afford to do it because they’ve already done so much damage, you know, that, I always think well, you know, I know they can do more but they’ve already done a lot so I—I don’t have that much more to lose.
DT: Do you have anything else you’d like to add?
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ME: I wish that people would read more, to learn more, to look around so that they can actually see what is happening. Do investigations, see what’s literally happening in their community. It wasn’t until the group in Austin put out the use of chemicals that anybody knew that Midland was the highest use of chemicals. I mean, they use, was it three times as amount of chemicals as Dallas uses. That people need to be aware of this stuff and since our paper—I had to call the paper to get them to print that because they didn’t print it and then they didn’t print all of it anyway, the article. But people aren’t aware of what’s going on and they need to be better educated on what is happening and the ramifications of them. We have a cancer center here now and that’s been…
DT: You mean a hospital or a complex?
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ME: Well we—we have a complex here now and that’s because everybody was—we have such high rates of cancer in Midland and Odessa that people were going down to M.D. Anderson and they finally built one here because we have such a high rate of cancer in this area. When it started really peaking, I think it was under Governor Connally, was it Connally or can’t remem—anyway, they—the state quit requiring the health departments to send in the monthly reports on cancer because this was so high and—and it was the oil industry causing it.
DT: Unusual (?)
0:42:40 – 2134
ME: Un—oh, very unusual—very unusual. And so they stopped that and the—the general public isn’t aware of what goes on that the health statistics are no longer being kept on these things. And that—that’s a big problem. People really don’t know what’s going on here because nobody’s informing them of what’s going on here. And that’s really back. In—like in Odessa, and I never pronounce the word correctly, it’s where you wear the bag, colostomies, for the people up to forty years of age, they have the highest rate in Odessa of any place in the nation and that’s due to cancer. And I don’t know what it is here because I’ve not—nobody has told me of it here but these are things that we have here and there—I remember once going to an air board meeting in Odessa. This was way back in the early—sometime in the ‘70s. They got Odessa changed from an
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industrial town to a rural area. And I stood up at that meeting, it was the first public meeting out here I stood up at and I said, have you taken into consideration all the leukemia deaths because they had a huge amount of leukemia in Odessa. And they said, oh yes, we took it into consideration. Well their leukemia deaths were caused because of all these chemicals that are in their drinking water and it’s still going on today. The—you knew of the Huntsman thing. Neil Carmen was the one that got one of the things stopped there, was there’s a school right near that place and they put a monitor on the school. Well the monitor’s supposed to face where the chemicals coming from. They turned and had it facing the other way so they didn’t get anything. And then and under Bush the law has changed that if a—the air board or any of the agencies write up a ticket for violation, that has to go to Austin before they can give it to the company and Austin decides are they going to fine the company or not. So we have no enforcement teeth in our laws left and that’s another big problem, you can’t get anything done because of that.
DT: It’s not for lack of trying…
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ME: No it’s not for lack of trying but it’s—it’s that people aren’t aware of what’s going on here and I don’t know how to, other than word of mouth, how to get—and now with the internet, the web site, to get people aware of what’s happening here. That’s the only real way.
DW: Was there a sprawl thing you wanted to talk about?
DT: Yeah, that was an issue that I think you’ve been involved with to an extent you were in a more rural area in your house.
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ME: I really was never—well there was a lot built up ba—you know, beyond me. In Midland we do something very interesting. We go into an area, you know, where there’s no houses within a half mile or a mile and we build a school, an elementary school so that the developer then can build and make money all around it and this is what they do out here. And in west Texas in the—in the Llano Estacado, because the water goes to the southeast, then everything is built to the northwest because of the sewage flow. And only the minorities live down by the sewage is what it always has amounted to. So in—in—in
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west Texas you’ll see the south and south east side of town is where your minorities are, the poorer area of the town and then the affluent goes to the northwest, which is kind of an interesting happening out here. But—but the—the other thing is that we, here in Midland, we build these—we’ve got a house out here that is thirty-seven thousand square feet. I mean that’s ridiculous, you know, and they air condition—people air condition out here to the nth degree. The—and the—the use of energy is unbelievable out here. And water, the city—the city encourages the use of water because that’s—they use that as a slush fund when they want money to do other things with which the taxpayers aren’t going to allow them to do, then they take it out of this huge reservoir from their water fund.
DT: You’ve touched on a lot of issues from wildlife to water quality to air quality and public health and I’m wondering if there’s one central environmental problem that we’re all going to be needing to confront in the years to come.
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ME: Water. Water’s at a shortage, we’re really short of water and much of our water is contaminated. Bottled water is not safe because, unless it’s distilled water, because the only law governing bot—bottled water is that it can’t have bacteria. And so man—much of our bottled water here is just actually city water and people don’t realize that. There’s no education to people on water and the city, the head of the water department was two years ago, when we were just really in the midst of hot—really hot, dry said we—we have all the water we can afford to buy. They don’t encoura—there’s no encouragement whatsoever of conservation out here. We ha…
DT: Water conservation?
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ME: …water conservation, any kind of conservation, especially water conservation. We have a real shortage of water that no one wants to address and if they don’t start educating the people beforehand, people are not going to willingly conserve when we start really running out of water.
DT: (?) that people understand?
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ME: There really is, you—you have to educate somebody and you have to start educating them, you know, five, six years ahead of time that they need to start thinking of different things for use of water. They—you know, they’re—not waste it, you know, don’t wash your sidewalk off, you know, don’t let the water run, all this type stuff. Don’t plant trees that require water. You ought to see the number of weeping willows and things like that we have out here. I mean, that’s a big water consumers. I’m guilty of pecans, I didn’t know any better when we first moved here and they said pecans are a great tree. And I didn’t open up my book and read first and so we planted pecans.
0:49:57 – 2134
Pecans transpire a hundred gallons a minimum a day in the summer. I have water out so they take a tremendous amount of water. And they don’t like salt water and they don’t like alkaline soil which we have here, you know, but we don’t have anyone here that’s really putting forth conservation in way of living. There are a lot of building materials, you can’t build houses here that really would be…
DT: The building codes doesn’t allow…
0:50:29 – 134
ME: …the building code does not allow a lot of things here. So you can’t use alternate energy here because the building code doesn’t allow it. We don’t have a progressive town as far as the city hall is. They look at how they can make the most money and so they don’t allow a lot of things that needs to be allowed here.
DT: As the oil industry has sort of contracted here and the town is going through some pretty hard economic times, do you think that people’s attitude about efficiency and conservation will change when the money isn’t so easily found?
0:51:05 – 2134
ME: Well last year for the first time, we saw people not watering their yards, or some people, other people are still letting it run down the street. Midland College is a good example of the huge waste of water. They—I think their bill runs over a hundred thousand a year on water. And that’s because they have this lush green yard and trees that don’t belong there either. But we don’t have anyone here in—speaking out in the news media saying we need to conserve. There was a meeting two years ago and we had a professor from UTPB [University of Texas – Permian Basin], from—he was from Egypt and he said the next wars are going to be fought over water, you know, we need to start looking at water. Everybody ignored him. It was still, you know, we have all the water that we can use. We’re very fortunate. We have all the water we need here and that’s what the city people continuously say and they have no—they don’t want us to conserve because that’s their slush fund so…
DT: I hope you continue to speak out. You speak with great intelligence and passion and thanks for taking the time to explain.
End reel #2134
End of interview with Midge Erskine