Gas Prospectors Exploit Public Lands
The sign at the edge of town makes you wonder what a sorehead up in the dry, windblown heart of New Mexico's San Juan basin might be sore about. Other signs that compete for attention along the same mile of highway provide a possible hint: WILLIAMS EXPLORATION AND PRODUCTION, DESERT POWER, SIERRA CHEMICALS, XTO ENERGY, UNDERGROUND SPECIALISTS, and on they go. A drilling derrick four stories tall looms above the sprawl of pipe and machinery at Aztec Well Servicing. These businesses, being so numerous, must belong to the friendlies.
If anybody in Aztec qualifies as a sorehead, Tweeti Blancett and her husband Linn would have to top the list. At first impulse, you might not take someone named Tweeti seriously, but that would be a mistake. Tweeti, whose blond hair spills from beneath her cowboy hat, ran George W. Bush's campaign in San Juan County in 2000, and she has similarly headed various of Republican Senator Pete Domenici's re-election efforts. Tweeti herself has served in New Mexico's House of Representatives. She is affable, energetic, capable, and extremely persistent. And because of what coal bed methane has done to her land, she is a certifiable sorehead.
Her duties last Memorial Day helped remind her what she is sore about. She took three "huge" tubs of flowers to the Aztec cemetery, and "it nearly wasn't enough." The cemetery lies at the end of a little ridge that used to be lonely, but nowadays so-called ranch houses crowd the hills around it. Downslope to the west run the Animas River and the ever-droning highway to Durango. Off to the north, jagged peaks in Colorado etch a blue horizon. Tweeti and Linn have buried two sons in the cemetery, lost to accident and illness, and there are lots of other Blancetts to keep them company: Myrtle, M. Linn and Violet, Robert Linn, Matilda, Edward, Marcellus, Golda, George L., and Caddie, to name a few. Inside the gate under an old cedar lie Moses and Lucinda, born in 1833 and 1834, respectively. There are also kin from the four families who came with the Blancetts to the San Juan country in the 1870s, even before it was legal for whites to settle, and into whose lines the Blancetts married. Altogether, Tweeti distributed her flowers among six generations of relatives.
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