BUSH
AT PEACE
you involved with nature. And we
built a lot of trails here, and in so
doing preserved the land, made
the land better.”
Bush is also playing a lot of golf,
and will often golf and bike in the
same day. He has, quite famously,
taken up painting. He told CBS
News’ Charlie Rose that he paints
almost every day for two to three
hours. He told me he has been
reading Dan Brown’s Inferno (“It
was a vacation book. Just ripped
through it,” he said), as well as a
recently released book on Calvin
Coolidge by historian Amity Shlaes, who is currently working at
the Bush Institute.
And on the day that we rode 30
miles, he went back to his ranch
house and “took a good nap” before hosting the 13 vets for dinner.
“Felt like a million bucks,”
he said.
Things are much quieter in
Crawford, too. The Crawford Coffee Station and the Yellow Rose
souvenir shop across the street
(“Bush gifts,” “Western gifts,” as
well as guns and ammo sold there)
were both hubs of activity when
Bush was president. Now both
shops are closed.
The back roads to Bush’s ranch,
after you pass Waco, go on for
HUFFINGTON
06.16.13
“I believe strongly that the
decisions I made were the
right decisions, you know?”
some time, cutting through miles
of open farmland. It feels like the
middle of nowhere, because it is. I
had hitched a ride with a Warrior
100K volunteer, Jack Sparkes, on
the ride’s first day. In the predawn
twilight, he steered his truck
through the one-stoplight downtown and off Route 317.
A firefly veered toward the
windshield as we rounded a bend.
A few minutes later, we drove past
the triangle of grass where antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan had
protested against Bush after her
son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan,
was killed in action outside Baghdad, Iraq, in 2004.
The memory of Sheehan’s protest was as fresh as anything else
that made Crawford hop whenever
Bush vacationed here during his
eight-year presidency. Sparkes
mentioned it, as did McKinnon
when I rode past the spot with
him the next day.
And for Bush himself, the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan remain fresh
memories. They were, of course, the
reason he was hosting the ride.