George Bush steps from one wet rock up onto another. "It gets even better over here," he promises, poking a boot into the mud for balance. We're climbing on a line of small boulders that form a joint down the middle of a gully as if they'd been rolled there like dice. "I'm gonna put a wooden walkway of some kind in here," he says, dodging a vine. Bush can look as if he's clanging around in a blue suit, but he doesn't look lost on the ranch in the Marlboro Man getup: worn black jeans, a blue work shirt and a mustard-colored barn jacket with stains and a corduroy collar. The breast reads: GEORGE W. BUSH, GOVERNOR.
Most politicians try to impress people by showing how smart, how engaged and how busy they are. Bush does the opposite. He likes to be underestimated, likes to pretend you're telling him something he didn't already know. And he likes to be seen as unflappable. No problem is too tough that it can't be licked with a little of the common sense that rules on his 1,600-acre property in Crawford, Texas. If that means people think he's not quite as clever as all these city folks he has working for him, all the better.
So part of this outing at the darkest moment of the 36-day postelection battle with Al Gore is almost a country-boy ruse. Of course he wants us to see him here. This ranch, which he bought just a year ago, is a rich Texas symbol of achievement--what kids from the Midland dream of having. And it wasn't handed down. That ranch is all that he sees himself to be: rugged, real and thoroughly Texan. But Bush's persona at the ranch is also more than an act. He seems at peace in this place where he knows each tree and hollow.
A secret service agent slips as he tries to keep up. Bush's wife Laura stopped following a while ago, but her husband yells out anyway, "Be careful, Bushie." She calls him by the same nickname. "We're going to clear over there this afternoon," he says, pointing to a thicket of spindly cedar. Along the way he tries to stoke the suspense without giving the secret away. Bush wants us to discover whatever it is he's leading us to the way he did. "Wait till you see this," he breathes out. The seam we've been following winds us around an outcropping of rock, and suddenly we're at the base of a limestone cavity. It rises up 60 ft., the color of butter-pecan ice cream, shaped as if the scoop has just scored it. Down the middle falls a modest line of water. Somehow the splash can only now be heard as we stand next to its blue-green pool. Bush calls this the amphitheater.
"I took Jenna out here," says Bush of one of his twin daughters. "Because when we bought the ranch she was like, 'Why?'" Bush knows a lot of others have been wondering the same thing. In photo ops the only part of the Crawford ranch the world can see makes it look like one of those dry, generic planets that are always beamed down to on Star Trek. This place in central Texas, just 23 miles southwest of Waco, is Bush's sanctuary. Nearly every weekend of the campaign he came here; he prepared for debates in its two-room cottage, and he has spent the major part of the postelection period out in its dusty acres, away from the fishbowl of the Texas Governor's Mansion. Why does he come here? What does he do here?