The Stable Performance Cars is proud to support local author, Ben H. English. Ben came to the Big Bend at the age of two, the fifth of six generations of his family to call this enigmatic region home. With his family headquartered at the old Lajitas Trading Post, he worked and lived on ranches and places now little more than forgotten dots on yellowing maps. He attended the one-room schoolhouse at Terlingua, prowled the banks of the Rio Grande, and crisscrossed the surrounding areas time and again on horseback and by foot. This long experience in the Big Bend gives him a unique perspective to capture the essence of the Big Bend.
The Stable carries autographed copies of Ben’s books, and the shipping charges listed below include the cost to ship throughout the continental United States. If you need overseas or combined shipping quotes, give us a call at 432-837-9789.
We hope you will check out his work below.
It was a time before Terlingua Ranch and chili cook-offs, and when you could drive a hundred miles without seeing another vehicle or another person. The year was 1961, and the tides of humanity which ebbed and flowed into the lower reaches of the Big Bend were at their historical nadir. It was a vast, empty land spotted by isolated ranch headquarters, a national park with few visitors, and the many ruins of a past shrouded in legend, lore, and improbable truths. There was no television, no daytime radio, few telephones, and very few people.
Some fifty years later he writes about those many decades ago, as well as the history and legends of this singular land he knows so well. Ben separates fact from fiction and brings the reader into a world that few these days can ever imagine, much less experience. He also writes about the lower Big Bend as it is found now, and what one can still rediscover just over the next rise.
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Kate Blanchard woke up one morning in a dream home she could no longer afford, a young son who needed a man’s influence and not a friend among those who claimed to be prior to her husband’s mysterious disappearance.
About all she could lay claim to was a ramshackle ranch along Terlingua Creek, sitting forlornly in the desolate reaches of the lower Big Bend in Texas. It was the only place left she could go. There she finds a home, and a presence of something strange yet comforting that she can’t fully put her finger on or understand.
With that ethereal presence comes Solomon Zacatecas, a loner with his own past and a knowledge of her land near uncanny in nature. He helps her when no one else can and is honest when no one else will be, but she suspicions that he is not completely so.
Yet her quiet, unassuming neighbor proves to be more than capable in whatever situation arises. That includes when standing alone against those who would take everything else that Kate had, including her life as well as her son’s.
When one opens the pages to this book they step into another world and place, and even on occasions, another time. No matter what you may know about the lower Big Bend or think you know about the lower Big Bend, here are thoughts, maps and photographs that bring together a heretofore unachieved mosaic of this rugged, lonesome land. In effect, Out There is a work that others simply cannot compare to. Whether you might be a first-time visitor or have made many a journey into its more remote environs, there is so much contained within to both see as well as savor. It is a book meant to be read and re-read time and again. If home is where the heart is, even the first few paragraphs leave no doubt as to where the author’s resides. And that is only the beginning.
The time is the eve of the First Gulf War.
The place is an abandoned World War II emergency landing strip for heavy bombers, nestled amid the near countless miles upon miles of wide openness in West Texas.
Here another climatic battle will be fought, while the rest of the world focuses on what would become known as Operation Desert Storm.
But in some ways, the stakes are even higher as men from other places and past conflicts gamble all that they are, and all they ever were, to prevent a catastrophic terrorist attack unthinkable before on an American city.
The key to either side’s success or failure? One old Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress, an enduring symbol from another war and ensuing catastrophe of a different era.
This relic of a not so distant past is named ‘The Uvalde Raider,’ and this is its story.
“I never saw a peace officer ask anyone what their politics were, and then refuse their needs because of the answer. A person’s skin pigment, their last name, the money in their bank account, none of that mattered.
All that mattered was someone needed help and the officer possessed the skills, as well as the burning desire, to provide it.
While only human and as internally flawed and prejudiced as any other; their true nature, their crowning glory in mortal life, is their ability to rise above those flaws and prejudices when called upon.
In a world of hungry, destructive wolves, they are the sheepdog who serves and protects the flock.
They are the heroes among us, and these are some of their stories…”