It can get downright unneighborly
CRAWFORD, Texas – Melissa Harrison thought she was just being neighborly when she let a group of antiwar activists hold a news conference on her property. Then her father, who lives just down the road, began calling her Hanoi Jane.
Even in Crawford, which prides itself on its laid-back lifestyle and friendly people, the good-neighbor thing has its limits.
“It was more than I bargained for,” said Harrison, 35. “I was embarrassed.”
As the town nearest to President Bush’s ranch has gone from being a media outpost to an antiwar encampment, frictions between outsiders and locals have begun to intensify.
A man from nearby Waco drove to the protest camp in his pickup truck and deliberately ran over small crosses planted along the road to honor the Iraq war dead. Larry Northern, 46, was arrested and charged with criminal mischief.
A sheep rancher whose property is across the road fired a shotgun in the air to protest the protests. Some residents have called on the county commission to do something.
On Tuesday, activist leaders agreed to move “Camp Casey,” the roadside tent camp they set up last Saturday about two miles from President Bush’s Prairie Chapel Ranch, to another spot even closer to the ranch.
“It makes it easier on the neighbors,” acknowledged one organizer, who requested anonymity because of tensions with the community’s 705 permanent inhabitants.
The activists said they had made arrangements to move the camp to private property. They said they would continue their vigil until Bush either meets with Cindy Sheehan, the Californian whose son Casey was killed in Iraq last year, or returns to Washington early next month.
Sheehan and her supporters tried to downplay the friction.
“We are trying to be really good neighbors,” Sheehan told reporters. “We have cooperated with everybody. The neighbors here don’t have any issues with our right to be here. They just have an issue with our physical presence.”
Yet as the standoff passed the 10-day mark, it appeared that it was beginning to grate on some citizens who initially expressed support for Sheehan’s decision to pitch her tent near the Bush spread.
Some said it had amplified the community’s continuing ambivalence about the throngs of out-of-town visitors, security personnel, reporters and camera crews that inundate Crawford every time the president spends time at his ranch.
Sharon Nelson, who has lived in Crawford for 34 years, said her husband, Keith, gets aggravated when he’s in a hurry to drive to his cattle pen on the other side of town and gets slowed down by all the presidential traffic. But that’s a minor inconvenience, she said, and the Nelsons are pleased that the proximity of the Bush ranch has revitalized what was once a dying farm town.
Kathryn Bost, who placed her age somewhere north of 80, counted herself among a minority of residents who sometimes find fault with the president. “Most of the people in Crawford think he’s next to God,” she said. “I’m just not one of them.”