Laura Bush's Midland: What the Flat Land Made

Laura Lane Welch was born in Midland in nineteen forty-six and grew up there. She attended James Bowie Elementary School and Robert E. Lee High School, later known as Midland Lee, the same crosstown rival that the Permian Panthers spent eleven seasons preparing to defeat. She studied education at Southern Methodist University and became a teacher and then a librarian. In nineteen seventy-seven, she was introduced to a man named George W. Bush at a backyard barbecue in Midland. They married the same year.

She has described her childhood in Midland in terms that capture something about what the Permian Basin produces beyond oil. The sky, she has said, is enormous here. The land is flat in a way that makes the horizon seem very far away. Growing up in a landscape without trees or hills or visual interruptions gives you a particular relationship to space and distance. There is nothing to hide behind.

Midland in the nineteen forties and fifties was a small city still sorting out what it would become. The oil economy was producing money and population and aspiration. The schools were segregated, as they were across the South and the segregated Southwest. The class structure that Bissinger would later document in his book about Odessa was visible in Midland too: the oil company offices, the neighborhoods that sorted themselves by income, the cultural certainty that this was a place that rewarded ambition.

Laura Bush became the forty-third First Lady of the United States. Her birthplace, the flat, oil-rich, enormous-sky city of Midland, became the hometown of a First Lady and the boyhood home of a president, which is the kind of coincidence that only makes sense when you understand how concentrated wealth and ambition become in a boom town.