Jeff's Blog: Life, Death, And Heroes

Life and death are balanced on the edge of a razor.
- Homer, Iliad

Few jobs are as tough as county sheriff.

That's especially true in a growing county like ours, still rural in part but on the fringe of a major urban area. We're not big enough to have the full bench of bureaucratic and professional support. But we're big enough � close enough � to have nearly the full range of big-city problems.

My friend, former sheriff Don Montague, told me he never realized how bad the pressure was until he was out of office for a while. When it was no longer there he finally understood how much weight had been pressing on him. It played havoc with his health.

Friday night we lost Don Montague's replacement. Allen Bridges suffered what appears to have been a massive heart attack at home and died.

Bridges was appointed to replace Montague when he retired mid-term. He then won an election to fill out the end of that term. Just a few weeks ago he won election to his first full term. He was only 63.

I don't know that the job contributed to his death. I just know he felt the stress. He talked about how tough the election process is. When we saw each other at a recent Saturday event, we swapped stories about never-ending commitments and crazy schedules, the way office-holders do, the way so many of us from all walks of life do these days.

We were from different political parties, with somewhat different world views, but our disagreements were never personal. In fact, we usually agreed on the practical solutions to work-a-day problems; we worked well together and liked each other.

Together, we were part of a small group that cobbled budget and personnel solutions for the sheriff's office this summer and fall. Both of us tended to be more interested in common ground than ideological in-fighting. A sheriff is a lawman, a peace officer, but also � and this cuts both ways, but is on the whole a good thing, I think, a key to the job � a sheriff is a politician. That's a misunderstood word in the modern lexicon. For me it is "someone involved in influencing public decision making," someone called on to balance the governance of private want and public need, public good and private ambition (or vice versa, for that matter).

Routinely, our professional and political spheres overlapped. Just a few weeks ago we snuck into the back at a public event to sip lemonade and talk about the 24-7 nature of law enforcement, and politics � about the added pressure of being true to yourself and the job in a political setting: the balancing act of treating friends and enemies fairly, of trying to rise above the petty; the constant scrutiny; about how much time and energy gets sucked away from the big stuff by a relative few chest-thumpers intent on pushing (often) trivial issues.

(The trick, of course, is to remember that sometimes in the heat of events you're wrong about which issues are trivial.)

We talked about the twin desires I hear expressed by many people in public office � a love for the job and the chance it offers to make a difference, to leave a mark; and the temptation to get out, to chuck all the folderal, to rest. With great conviction, he told me how much he enjoyed his family and grandkids, how he was looking forward to spending more time with them now that the election was over.

In Allen Bridges' work, we talk about heroes who fall in the line of duty. Sheriff Bridges didn't take a bullet. He didn't die taking a crazy chance.

What he did was make small sacrifices to public service, over and over, until the cumulative effect was huge. After decades on the Austin police force, he came to Hays County to get up every day and put in long hours running a big, unwieldy department, a jail, a SWAT team, an academy, on-call weekends and nights � determined to make a difference in the community's life, working to keep his "troops," as he called them, equipped, working to keep people who never knew him safe. He showed up every day and did his job.

It's not the kind of heroism the cowboy movies celebrate. But it's a kind of heroism just the same.

Few jobs are as tough, few jobs are as mythic, as Texas county sheriff. In the coming weeks, I'll have to think how to choose a new sheriff. It will be our job on Commissioners Court to appoint someone to fill in for the term that Allen Bridges won so recently and now can't fill.

But for now the thought is not for the bridges we'll build to a new administration, but of foundations laid by a Bridges now taken from us. We lost a good cop on Friday night. We lost a good colleague, family man, and politician � a good person.

He will be mourned and missed � an epitaph for all of us to aspire to.