President Gives Tour of Crawford Ranch
Sun Aug 14, 2005 20:37
64.140.158.21
President Gives Tour of Crawford Ranch
Remarks by the President During Tour of the President's Ranch
Prarie Chapel Ranch
Crawford, Texas
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/08/20010825-2.html
[SNIP]
Q Have you been hunting them?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I'm not going to hunt the turkeys.
Q The pigeons? Do you hunt the pigeons?
THE PRESIDENT: No, we don't have any pigeons -- yes, the doves.
Q The doves, I mean.
THE PRESIDENT: Dove season is September 1st.
Q Oh, it's not the season. Okay.
THE PRESIDENT: I won't be here. Plus, we don't have that many doves yet. We usually don't get a lot of doves until there is a cold front pushing them south. I hunted last year up here.
Q That was the day you grilled up the doves, right?
THE PRESIDENT: Did what --
Q -- the doves --
THE PRESIDENT: With the bacon and the jalapeno?
Q Yes, we had a bet.
THE PRESIDENT: Did you eat them?
Q I had a bet with an AP reporter that we couldn't get it on the wire.
THE PRESIDENT: Did you get it on the wire?
Q Oh, yeah.
THE PRESIDENT: The broad leaf tree that was a little yellow there is a sycamore tree which are pretty unusual, and they grow in the creeks.
See the size of these cedar elms here? They are magnificent trees.
Q Quite the arborist --
THE PRESIDENT: I am. Tree man.
Q Tree man. (Laughter.)
Q Were you always a tree man?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I wasn't. I like trees, but I have come to appreciate them a lot and I'm guarding them jealously against water suckers like cedars.
Here's the creek, obviously now dry. But it will give you a sense of what it's like. And for most of the year this year, water was running over the crossing.
And again, the broad leaf trees in the middle are the sycamores. That is an ash. That is a willow of some kind, see that in the middle there? And then you've got oaks and pecans, so you have four or five different types of trees along here. These are pecans. That's a sycamore and that's a huge pecan tree.
Q Do you get rattlesnakes on the property?
THE PRESIDENT: I haven't seen any, but have seen cottonmouths, which are poisonous water snakes. We found them in the creek. I actually had a man come up in here into some of the canyons where we suspect there's rattlesnakes. And he's a rattlesnake hunter. And he's a local guy.
And what they do is they come up and stake it and spray diesel fuel up in the hole and drug the snakes and extract them.
Q For what?
THE PRESIDENT: To get rid of them. And they use them to suck the venom -- to milk them to get the venom as an antidote.
Q Have any of your guests gotten poison ivy or snake bites or anything like that from walking around?
THE PRESIDENT: Not yet.
Q But you're hoping some day?
THE PRESIDENT: I hope they're not.
Q Just kidding.
THE PRESIDENT: Put the doctor to use.
Here is one of our places that have held water.
Q Oh, yes.
THE PRESIDENT: We've got a couple of them on this place like this and anyway the creek goes for a while. And this will give you a sense of the cliffs up there. See up there?
This property -- this part of the ranch goes another -- the trail goes another three-quarters mile and then we go another probably quarter mile beyond that, but there's no road. This will give you a sense of the cliffs right here. We own to the top of these cliffs.
Q Wow. Look at the buzzards on the top.
THE PRESIDENT: They're watching us.
Q Guarding your border.
THE PRESIDENT: Making sure. First the red stag and then --
Q A few reporters?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. (Laughter.)
Q How many miles does this dirt road snake through here, do you know?
THE PRESIDENT: David, I'm not even sure. I should measure them. I paid for them.
Here's another one of the canyons. It's got a stair-step to it, a very long, gradual stair-step.
Q I think that's the one you showed us the first time.
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, it was.
Q You said there were seven?
THE PRESIDENT: Seven, yes.
Q How many different properties did you look at before buying this one, or was this love at first sight?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, this was -- it was for me, actually. We had seen some -- we had seen a lot of property in Texas, you know. And a guy said, you know, we ought to look in this area of Texas. He had bought a ranch in Gatesville, which is right up the road. And we went and looked at his place and he said, oh, by the way, you ought to come and see this Engelbrecht ranch. And we came over here and I thought it was fabulous.
Laura was a little worried that it would be hard to access the really beautiful parts of the ranch. And I told her, I would build the roads necessary to make sure all of us could get down there easily. And it took a couple of months. And then another buyer came in and they didn't honor the deal.
There's the house. See how it sits in those trees? The guy did a fabulous job of -- and it's facing south so it picks up a lot of the southerly breeze. I'll take you --
Q This is manmade, this lake?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I made it. I paid for it. Obviously, with no rain, it evaporates. And we've had some good rains.
There are pumps over there. We keep it pumped because when it does rain, it fills up that little island and we don't want to kill those oaks.
But it's stocked. I bought a little bass boat. It's stocked --
Q Very little.
THE PRESIDENT: It is. It's perfect for that size lake.
It's stocked with a lot of bait fish and I put in 600 fingerlings. So we started -- didn't put any big bass in to begin with. And I've caught nearly a pound in size.
This will give you a sense for the place. The place on the left there is the guesthouse. Bedrooms, sitting room. And then on the right, you can see, it's kind of sectioned. And in between -- there's three sections and in between each section there is what they call a dog trot which is a screened-in porch built to capture the southerly breezes.
And the porch you see out there, we sit out there in the evening. As you can see the chairs lined up there, looking east, so the sun is not in our eyes. And there is a beautiful fireplace there that we use in the winter.
This is the -- right here is an old hand house that we've refurbished. And now one half of it is a gymnasium, free weights and exercise machines, and the other half is a room --
Q I've got to ask, do you drive from there to there to work out, or do you walk?
THE PRESIDENT: Actually, I walked yesterday when I went to lift weights. But I've got a little golf cart.
This is the Secret Service. They're building this. And the doublewide will leave. This is their command post. And they were kind enough to ask, you know, whether or not -- you know, what kind of design would be helpful to make it blend in. We helped, obviously, put it in that mott of oaks so it doesn't stand out too much.
We own over to that fence line there. So we go from here about a mile that way, and from here about a half mile that way, maybe a little more. And then that's our western fence line.
Q Was that your white pickup truck outside the house?
THE PRESIDENT: No. That is Kenneth Engelbrecht's, which I use.
Q The Secret Service is not nervous about you driving?
THE PRESIDENT: I haven't hit anything yet. But this is the one place I drive.
I built this little pond over here. Actually, it's got more water than it looks. And that's a fun -- fun little place to go fly fish. One of my favorite things to do is when it cools -- it never cools off. When the sun starts going down, I walk the dogs over there and they'll play around in the water.
We planted all these oaks along here, and this is going to be spectacular, as you can see, the walkway.
I don't think we'll be able to get around. By the way, one of Laura's projects is going to interest you. This is buffalo grass, which is the native grass. And she's planted buffalo grass here and we're trying to restore -- starting with the land between the house and the lake, including front and back yard, restore all this country to its native -- native grasses. And one of the A&M guys was an expert on native grass as well. And we've got a man out here from the local area that is a wildflower and native grass expert. The dam has got native grass on it.
And the idea is to have these grasses that will be able to sustain themselves, particularly in the hot -- in the heat, all around particularly the house and as far as you can see around the house. They are not good for, you know, cattle necessarily, although they could be.
Q Otherwise, do you have a sprinkler system?
THE PRESIDENT: We do have a sprinkler system. The roof drains off into a gravel -- see the gravel in front of the guest house there? That's a gravel collector that drains into a cistern. And we water the trees and the yard.
Obviously, if there's no rain, like we've had recently, then we are on city water and we water at night. We're not using much water now because the grass has pretty well taken hold.
The guy laid this house in these oaks and did, we think, a beautiful job of placing it in the landscape. There's native rock on the house. It's a pretty good size house.
Q It's modest size.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. It's modest, but it's pretty good size. I mean, the tall ceilings. You can't see how tall the ceilings are, because the perspective is different because of how it sits in the trees, but it's perfect for us.
And you see straight ahead is the screened-in porch there, and then the darker windows there, those are screened-in porches as well. And the girls' two bedrooms are on this end, Laura and I are in the middle. And what we call the great room, which is a combination sitting room and dining room, is right there.
Q On the end by where the Adirondack chairs are on the porch?
THE PRESIDENT: Right. And then this is the guest house and the garage.
Q Do you expect Putin to stay in this guest house?
THE PRESIDENT: I don't know what we are going to do. We haven't figured that out yet. It's going to be --
Q It's pretty close, if you're right there.
THE PRESIDENT: I would love Putin to stay there. He can go down to the governor's house. I don't know what we're going to do. You can imagine, it's going to be a mass scramble of who gets to stay on the property and where everybody else will stay. We haven't figured out the logistics. We're still working on the Mexican state dinner. (Laughter.)
* * * * *
Q You mean you're going to sneak out to Ohio without telling us?
THE PRESIDENT: Your question didn't get much news yesterday on the -- or did it -- on the conference.
Q Did you expect it to?
THE PRESIDENT: No, not really.
Q They took notice in New York and overseas.
THE PRESIDENT: Did they? Good. What did they say?
Q You saw the U.N. human rights woman, Robinson --
Q Yes, she said again she'd go.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, she ought to clean up the language. It's discriminatory, it seems like to us. And -- yes, maybe they will.
Q So this is environmentally friendly --
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, very much so for a couple of reasons. One, it's got a natural water collection devices all around it, and it's got a heater and cooling system that takes water and circulates it and transfers the cold water to the heat and the heated water to the cold, because the ground temperature -- the subterranean temperature stays constant.
So it's the same type of system that Vice President Gore put in the vice presidential house, which I didn't realize, but he did.
Q Those aren't solar panels on the roof, it just looks --
THE PRESIDENT: No, no, no, no. No, those aren't solar panels. That technology isn't quite worked out.
But even more efficient, however, is the transference of heat and cool as a result of circulating water below the -- it's called thermal heating and cooling -- okay.
Thank you all for coming. We'll see you.
Q Thank you. Thank you so much.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you for coming. I'm glad you're here. David, Action Jackson, thanks.
Okay, we'll see you all.
END
==========================
10:15 a.m.
SHOTS FIRED!
Deborah Mathews reporting for The Iconoclast.
Camp Casey is becoming very organized, with how-to signs placed about. Ann Wright said, "That's what we are trying to do."
Let me read you the schedule posted on a tree: "9:15 camp meeting; 10 a.m. inter-faith service, 10:30 a.m., "Food-Not-Bombs Breakfast at Peace House," and....
"Wait! Someone is firing a gun. (pause). He fired it into the air about five times. He appears to be a local inside the fence line on private property. Now he has thrown what looks like a shotgun into the front seat of a pickup, and he's stomping off out of sight. I wonder where he went.
"Now he's coming back out. I'm out here standing on the road. He's got a no parking sign in his hand, walking toward his fence. I'm going to go try to talk to him. I've got to hang up."
(three minutes later)
I went over and talked to the man. He is Larry Mattlage, who says he is on his property and just posted a no-parking sign.
"We're going to start doing our war and it's going to be underneath the law," he told me. "Whatever it takes. So y'all go find another place to do whatever you do. 'Cause this is our front yard and back yard."
I asked, "Do you mean the protestors?"
Wait.....now there's some Secret Service and cops. I'm going to get closer to hear what they're saying. People in bullet-proof vests are here now. Two Secret Service agents are now walking up his driveway towards his house, with Mr. Mattlage. A member of the Sheriff's Department has arrived. Mr. Mattlage is waving his arms now. All of them are now walking back this way.
Now they are between the lane and the house. He's at the fence now. Let me record what they are saying. I'll call right back.
2:45 p.m.
The audio tapes of the conversation with landowner Larry Mattlage have now been transcribed and are in text below the photos near the bottom of this page. The recordings are uploaded as mp3 files below.
FULL STORY:
http://198.65.14.85/News/2005/31-40/32news2.htm
===========================
CLICK: "Something's In the Air/But It's Not on the Airwaves"
http://chrisvids.org/airwaves.html
WATCH THIS ONE... WOW!
http://thepoliticalteen.com/video/sheehankeith.wmv
Remarks by the President During Tour of the President's Ranch
Prarie Chapel Ranch
Crawford, Texas
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/08/20010825-2.html
[SNIP]
Q Have you been hunting them?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I'm not going to hunt the turkeys.
Q The pigeons? Do you hunt the pigeons?
THE PRESIDENT: No, we don't have any pigeons -- yes, the doves.
Q The doves, I mean.
THE PRESIDENT: Dove season is September 1st.
Q Oh, it's not the season. Okay.
THE PRESIDENT: I won't be here. Plus, we don't have that many doves yet. We usually don't get a lot of doves until there is a cold front pushing them south. I hunted last year up here.
Q That was the day you grilled up the doves, right?
THE PRESIDENT: Did what --
Q -- the doves --
THE PRESIDENT: With the bacon and the jalapeno?
Q Yes, we had a bet.
THE PRESIDENT: Did you eat them?
Q I had a bet with an AP reporter that we couldn't get it on the wire.
THE PRESIDENT: Did you get it on the wire?
Q Oh, yeah.
THE PRESIDENT: The broad leaf tree that was a little yellow there is a sycamore tree which are pretty unusual, and they grow in the creeks.
See the size of these cedar elms here? They are magnificent trees.
Q Quite the arborist --
THE PRESIDENT: I am. Tree man.
Q Tree man. (Laughter.)
Q Were you always a tree man?
THE PRESIDENT: No, I wasn't. I like trees, but I have come to appreciate them a lot and I'm guarding them jealously against water suckers like cedars.
Here's the creek, obviously now dry. But it will give you a sense of what it's like. And for most of the year this year, water was running over the crossing.
And again, the broad leaf trees in the middle are the sycamores. That is an ash. That is a willow of some kind, see that in the middle there? And then you've got oaks and pecans, so you have four or five different types of trees along here. These are pecans. That's a sycamore and that's a huge pecan tree.
Q Do you get rattlesnakes on the property?
THE PRESIDENT: I haven't seen any, but have seen cottonmouths, which are poisonous water snakes. We found them in the creek. I actually had a man come up in here into some of the canyons where we suspect there's rattlesnakes. And he's a rattlesnake hunter. And he's a local guy.
And what they do is they come up and stake it and spray diesel fuel up in the hole and drug the snakes and extract them.
Q For what?
THE PRESIDENT: To get rid of them. And they use them to suck the venom -- to milk them to get the venom as an antidote.
Q Have any of your guests gotten poison ivy or snake bites or anything like that from walking around?
THE PRESIDENT: Not yet.
Q But you're hoping some day?
THE PRESIDENT: I hope they're not.
Q Just kidding.
THE PRESIDENT: Put the doctor to use.
Here is one of our places that have held water.
Q Oh, yes.
THE PRESIDENT: We've got a couple of them on this place like this and anyway the creek goes for a while. And this will give you a sense of the cliffs up there. See up there?
This property -- this part of the ranch goes another -- the trail goes another three-quarters mile and then we go another probably quarter mile beyond that, but there's no road. This will give you a sense of the cliffs right here. We own to the top of these cliffs.
Q Wow. Look at the buzzards on the top.
THE PRESIDENT: They're watching us.
Q Guarding your border.
THE PRESIDENT: Making sure. First the red stag and then --
Q A few reporters?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. (Laughter.)
Q How many miles does this dirt road snake through here, do you know?
THE PRESIDENT: David, I'm not even sure. I should measure them. I paid for them.
Here's another one of the canyons. It's got a stair-step to it, a very long, gradual stair-step.
Q I think that's the one you showed us the first time.
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, it was.
Q You said there were seven?
THE PRESIDENT: Seven, yes.
Q How many different properties did you look at before buying this one, or was this love at first sight?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, this was -- it was for me, actually. We had seen some -- we had seen a lot of property in Texas, you know. And a guy said, you know, we ought to look in this area of Texas. He had bought a ranch in Gatesville, which is right up the road. And we went and looked at his place and he said, oh, by the way, you ought to come and see this Engelbrecht ranch. And we came over here and I thought it was fabulous.
Laura was a little worried that it would be hard to access the really beautiful parts of the ranch. And I told her, I would build the roads necessary to make sure all of us could get down there easily. And it took a couple of months. And then another buyer came in and they didn't honor the deal.
There's the house. See how it sits in those trees? The guy did a fabulous job of -- and it's facing south so it picks up a lot of the southerly breeze. I'll take you --
Q This is manmade, this lake?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I made it. I paid for it. Obviously, with no rain, it evaporates. And we've had some good rains.
There are pumps over there. We keep it pumped because when it does rain, it fills up that little island and we don't want to kill those oaks.
But it's stocked. I bought a little bass boat. It's stocked --
Q Very little.
THE PRESIDENT: It is. It's perfect for that size lake.
It's stocked with a lot of bait fish and I put in 600 fingerlings. So we started -- didn't put any big bass in to begin with. And I've caught nearly a pound in size.
This will give you a sense for the place. The place on the left there is the guesthouse. Bedrooms, sitting room. And then on the right, you can see, it's kind of sectioned. And in between -- there's three sections and in between each section there is what they call a dog trot which is a screened-in porch built to capture the southerly breezes.
And the porch you see out there, we sit out there in the evening. As you can see the chairs lined up there, looking east, so the sun is not in our eyes. And there is a beautiful fireplace there that we use in the winter.
This is the -- right here is an old hand house that we've refurbished. And now one half of it is a gymnasium, free weights and exercise machines, and the other half is a room --
Q I've got to ask, do you drive from there to there to work out, or do you walk?
THE PRESIDENT: Actually, I walked yesterday when I went to lift weights. But I've got a little golf cart.
This is the Secret Service. They're building this. And the doublewide will leave. This is their command post. And they were kind enough to ask, you know, whether or not -- you know, what kind of design would be helpful to make it blend in. We helped, obviously, put it in that mott of oaks so it doesn't stand out too much.
We own over to that fence line there. So we go from here about a mile that way, and from here about a half mile that way, maybe a little more. And then that's our western fence line.
Q Was that your white pickup truck outside the house?
THE PRESIDENT: No. That is Kenneth Engelbrecht's, which I use.
Q The Secret Service is not nervous about you driving?
THE PRESIDENT: I haven't hit anything yet. But this is the one place I drive.
I built this little pond over here. Actually, it's got more water than it looks. And that's a fun -- fun little place to go fly fish. One of my favorite things to do is when it cools -- it never cools off. When the sun starts going down, I walk the dogs over there and they'll play around in the water.
We planted all these oaks along here, and this is going to be spectacular, as you can see, the walkway.
I don't think we'll be able to get around. By the way, one of Laura's projects is going to interest you. This is buffalo grass, which is the native grass. And she's planted buffalo grass here and we're trying to restore -- starting with the land between the house and the lake, including front and back yard, restore all this country to its native -- native grasses. And one of the A&M guys was an expert on native grass as well. And we've got a man out here from the local area that is a wildflower and native grass expert. The dam has got native grass on it.
And the idea is to have these grasses that will be able to sustain themselves, particularly in the hot -- in the heat, all around particularly the house and as far as you can see around the house. They are not good for, you know, cattle necessarily, although they could be.
Q Otherwise, do you have a sprinkler system?
THE PRESIDENT: We do have a sprinkler system. The roof drains off into a gravel -- see the gravel in front of the guest house there? That's a gravel collector that drains into a cistern. And we water the trees and the yard.
Obviously, if there's no rain, like we've had recently, then we are on city water and we water at night. We're not using much water now because the grass has pretty well taken hold.
The guy laid this house in these oaks and did, we think, a beautiful job of placing it in the landscape. There's native rock on the house. It's a pretty good size house.
Q It's modest size.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes. It's modest, but it's pretty good size. I mean, the tall ceilings. You can't see how tall the ceilings are, because the perspective is different because of how it sits in the trees, but it's perfect for us.
And you see straight ahead is the screened-in porch there, and then the darker windows there, those are screened-in porches as well. And the girls' two bedrooms are on this end, Laura and I are in the middle. And what we call the great room, which is a combination sitting room and dining room, is right there.
Q On the end by where the Adirondack chairs are on the porch?
THE PRESIDENT: Right. And then this is the guest house and the garage.
Q Do you expect Putin to stay in this guest house?
THE PRESIDENT: I don't know what we are going to do. We haven't figured that out yet. It's going to be --
Q It's pretty close, if you're right there.
THE PRESIDENT: I would love Putin to stay there. He can go down to the governor's house. I don't know what we're going to do. You can imagine, it's going to be a mass scramble of who gets to stay on the property and where everybody else will stay. We haven't figured out the logistics. We're still working on the Mexican state dinner. (Laughter.)
* * * * *
Q You mean you're going to sneak out to Ohio without telling us?
THE PRESIDENT: Your question didn't get much news yesterday on the -- or did it -- on the conference.
Q Did you expect it to?
THE PRESIDENT: No, not really.
Q They took notice in New York and overseas.
THE PRESIDENT: Did they? Good. What did they say?
Q You saw the U.N. human rights woman, Robinson --
Q Yes, she said again she'd go.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, she ought to clean up the language. It's discriminatory, it seems like to us. And -- yes, maybe they will.
Q So this is environmentally friendly --
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, very much so for a couple of reasons. One, it's got a natural water collection devices all around it, and it's got a heater and cooling system that takes water and circulates it and transfers the cold water to the heat and the heated water to the cold, because the ground temperature -- the subterranean temperature stays constant.
So it's the same type of system that Vice President Gore put in the vice presidential house, which I didn't realize, but he did.
Q Those aren't solar panels on the roof, it just looks --
THE PRESIDENT: No, no, no, no. No, those aren't solar panels. That technology isn't quite worked out.
But even more efficient, however, is the transference of heat and cool as a result of circulating water below the -- it's called thermal heating and cooling -- okay.
Thank you all for coming. We'll see you.
Q Thank you. Thank you so much.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you for coming. I'm glad you're here. David, Action Jackson, thanks.
Okay, we'll see you all.
END
==========================
10:15 a.m.
SHOTS FIRED!
Deborah Mathews reporting for The Iconoclast.
Camp Casey is becoming very organized, with how-to signs placed about. Ann Wright said, "That's what we are trying to do."
Let me read you the schedule posted on a tree: "9:15 camp meeting; 10 a.m. inter-faith service, 10:30 a.m., "Food-Not-Bombs Breakfast at Peace House," and....
"Wait! Someone is firing a gun. (pause). He fired it into the air about five times. He appears to be a local inside the fence line on private property. Now he has thrown what looks like a shotgun into the front seat of a pickup, and he's stomping off out of sight. I wonder where he went.
"Now he's coming back out. I'm out here standing on the road. He's got a no parking sign in his hand, walking toward his fence. I'm going to go try to talk to him. I've got to hang up."
(three minutes later)
I went over and talked to the man. He is Larry Mattlage, who says he is on his property and just posted a no-parking sign.
"We're going to start doing our war and it's going to be underneath the law," he told me. "Whatever it takes. So y'all go find another place to do whatever you do. 'Cause this is our front yard and back yard."
I asked, "Do you mean the protestors?"
Wait.....now there's some Secret Service and cops. I'm going to get closer to hear what they're saying. People in bullet-proof vests are here now. Two Secret Service agents are now walking up his driveway towards his house, with Mr. Mattlage. A member of the Sheriff's Department has arrived. Mr. Mattlage is waving his arms now. All of them are now walking back this way.
Now they are between the lane and the house. He's at the fence now. Let me record what they are saying. I'll call right back.
2:45 p.m.
The audio tapes of the conversation with landowner Larry Mattlage have now been transcribed and are in text below the photos near the bottom of this page. The recordings are uploaded as mp3 files below.
FULL STORY:
http://198.65.14.85/News/2005/31-40/32news2.htm
===========================
CLICK: "Something's In the Air/But It's Not on the Airwaves"
http://chrisvids.org/airwaves.html
WATCH THIS ONE... WOW!
http://thepoliticalteen.com/video/sheehankeith.wmv
