Meanwhile, Back on the Ranch ...

CRAWFORD, Texas —  McLennan County, where Gov. George W. Bush purchased a 1,600-acre ranch last summer, is generous country.

There’s a bounty of sky. Its excellent school system lavishes kids with attention. Even a cup of chicken soup at the Coffee Station, the lone restaurant in Bush’s neighborhood, is served in a bowl. Judging from the “Gore--get over it!” stickers in Coffee Station’s glass counter, residents are generous, too, with support for Bush.

No wonder he keeps heading home to the ranch.

Far away from here, running mate Dick Cheney and assorted gaunt-looking aides handle the election drama occupying everyone else. Bush, however, has ducked back to the ranch four times since the election, staying a total of nine days. His most recent migration, campaign aide Karen Hughes told reporters, was prompted by demonstrators outside the governor’s mansion who “started to get on [his] nerves.”

In recent days, the governor who made his sartorial mark campaigning in cowboy boots and good suits seemingly has graduated to full-time Ranch Casual. As Cheney jets back and forth to Washington, grimly parrying reporters’ questions and commenting on every twist of the vote count, Bush emerges only rarely. Often as not, he’s wearing jeans and a wind breaker, strolling the scrub on his new retreat about 30 minutes from Waco.

“It’s a hide-out, for one thing,” says Bruce Buchanan, a government professor at the University of Texas. “It’s a long ways off. It’s a place he finds relaxing, because he doesn’t like the hurly-burly as much as, for example, Al Gore.”

Ranch ownership is a long, potent tradition for Texas politicians, most vividly recalled in Lyndon Johnson’s ranch near his boyhood home in the Hill Country west of Austin. The mystique may date back as far as swashbuckling 19th century politician Sam Houston, who lived for years in the wild with a band of Cherokees.

“Texas politicians looove to have ranches,” says Leon Hale, a Houston Chronicle columnist who writes about the state’s legend and folklore. “I think it’s because it brands them as people of the land--and of the people.”

But if Bush’s rough-hewn sanctuary fits that tradition, it also reveals his own idiosyncrasies: a craving for comfort and an ease in milieus not normally linked with him--like, in this case, a hard-core environmental preserve.

Even before the 2000 election turned into a telenovela, Bush had made it clear home was where he marshaled his vigor. Throughout the campaign, he good-naturedly grumped about missing his bed and his pillow. Bush, Americans learned during the race, likes to be near his family and his dog Spot, and as far as possible from drawn-out, 18-hour work days.

Two hours from the capital, his canyon-carved haven is designed to pamper those longings. Though it lies a handy 20 minutes from Ft. Hood, the three-bedroom ranch house he’s completing on land estimated to be worth at least $1 million reportedly has only network TV, no cable. Crawford, with 700 souls, lies about seven miles off, offering nothing but the Coffee Station and high school football for diversion.

Though the Bushes share their property with 200 head of cattle cared for by a foreman, they have said they intend to devote the land to preserving wild grasses and other native plants.

Only two amenities, Bush has told reporters, were non-negotiable--a first-rate shower and a king-size bed. His disdain for excess apparently predates his job as governor. When the family lived in Houston, Laura Bush tooled around the family’s tony neighborhood in a van; when they moved to the governor’s mansion in 1995, the Bushes told a newspaper their two girls would share a room.

Today, the family’s taste still veers toward the Spartan. Though they own steers, they reportedly vetoed the twins’ request for a horse.

Weekend rancher though Bush may be, the place’s entrance betrays none of the glitz that, in boom times, is a dead giveaway for city Texans.

“While the gate to a modern working ranch may be little more than two cedar king posts flanking a cattle guard, a city slicker’s pint-size country place . . . may boast massive rock pillars supporting a 20-foot wrought-iron fence,” writer Terry Toler explained in a 1983 Texas Monthly essay. The Bush ranch sports a modest metal gate with no distinguishing features.

Behind the gate, though, lies a project not only untraditional on a Texas ranch, but downright surprising for a governor whose state includes the nation’s most polluted city and assures extensive legal protections to heavy industry.

Bush and his wife, Laura, are taking extraordinary measures, to make their ranch eco-friendly.

“He’s interested in the wildlife; he’s interested in the birds,” Texas Secretary of State Elton Bomer, a Bush friend, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “It’s his slice of nature that he’s trying to protect.”

Far from the public eye, the governor weathers brisk mid-Texas breezes with warmth absorbed from solar-energy panels. Three hundred feet under the Earth, pipes pour naturally warmed water into a system that heats the house in cold months and cools it in summer. Once used, water from the kitchen, showers and toilets will all be recycled for irrigation.

Both systems complement an elaborate design by architect David Heymann, an associate architecture dean at the University of Texas, who was chosen by Laura Bush for his skill creating houses that mesh and harness sunlight and breeze.

And the architecture’s not all. The governor has even signed onto a federal conservation agreement that pledges protection for hundreds of acres of trees that attract an endangered bird, the golden cheeked warbler. Six years ago, in the heat of campaigning, Bush hectored his rival, former Gov. Ann Richards, for her efforts to help the federal government protect the same bird. Today, seeking some shade from another campaign inferno, Bush seems to be liking the idea of sanctuary more and more.