’ROUEND the BEND
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW HEMPHILL, THE EAST TEXAS TOWN NEAR TOLEDO BEND RESERVOIR ON THE TEXASLOUISIANA BORDER, THEN YOU NEED TO KNOW PENNIE FERGUSON.
Her friends call her the Janis Joplin of Hemphill, and with her skein of red gray hair tied high, husky laugh, and quick wit, I can see why. A self-described “ninja,” Pennie leveraged her position on the board of the local hospital to bring better EMS services to Sabine County. She runs the Hemphill Daily News and More online newspaper and the Fishermen’s Village lodge where photographer Kenny Braun and I are staying. She’s also a volunteer firefighter. “I get so crazy, girl,” she says, “but I can’t stop.”
We meet Pennie in early February at her lodge about 2 miles from the Texas-Louisiana border on State Highway 21, the two-lane road that crosses into Louisiana and follows the ancient Camino Real, the roadway of the Spaniards in the 1700s and the Caddo people before that. Within minutes, Pennie loads us into her truck for a drive over to Louisiana on the Pendleton Bridge, a narrow concrete engineering feat built in the late 1960s when the Sabine River Authority dammed the river and gave birth to this mammoth lake. With overcast skies above, the water today is a flat gray expanse stretching endlessly north and south. We pass a small green highway sign just off the Texas shore that simply says “Sabine River,’’ a reminder that the river channel is still there, invisible to us now.
PENNIE, CAPTAIN; WE MIGHT BUMP INTO A BIGFOOT, OR EVEN THE LOCH NESS MONSTER.
