Coming to the Tallgrass

My obsession with the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve began with a book, William Least Heat-Moon's comprehensive naturalist / historic exploration of Chase County, Kansas, PrairyErth: A Deep Map. Chase County is where the Tallgrass Prairie was eventually established in 1996, just four years after the book was published. It chronicles the author's multi-year experience of walking every foot of the county and reflecting on the cultural and ecological importance of the great American prairie. After my friend and colleague Jeff Clayton introduced me to PrairyErth, I knew that I had to visit the site.

I also knew that to do justice to the experience, I would have to immerse myself in the exploration, so my wife Susan and I spent four days at the Tallgrass Prairie NP, exploring more than thirteen miles of trails at different times of the day. The most magical time to explore is sunset. Not only do the sounds of the prairie come alive—with birds, insects, and the ceaseless southern wind—but also, the terraced Flint Hills reveal their contours in the low-angled light and shadows.

There are so many facts about the Tallgrass Prairie that stand out. It is immense in size, encompassing more than 10,000 acres, and it contains a substantial herd of American bison—more than 100 head, all of them contained in a 1,000-acre enclosure called the Windmill Pasture, surrounded by an electric fence and accessible via three gates that connect to separate pastures.

The highlight of our visit was hiking among the bison, always at a respectable distance, all the while sensing always the animals' presence. From the moment we entered the Windmill Pasture, we knew to be alert to our surroundings. The signs posted on the gates warned us to be vigilant and to give wide berth to the animals.

Fortunately, the bison we needed to be most careful to avoid—three dozen or so cows and calves—were grazing below the ridge where we were hiking more than a mile away. However, there were a dozen or so bulls behind and ahead of us the trail that cuts through the pasture, and even keeping 100 yards away from them, Susan and I got a strong sense of their size and power. We first spotted them by dust clouds in the distance, signs that bulls were wallowing in the dirt, and we also spotted tufts of wool evident on the trail.

Our encounter with the bison came at the end of a half-day hike over high ridges and through bottomlands, and this leg of the hike stretched a mile and a half across the Windmill Pasture. Although we took dozens of photos, the images fail to capture the intensity of the experience or the commanding size of the bulls. Susan, as is typical during such adventures, was hesitant to leave the pasture.

Our hikes through the prairie covered a surprisingly diverse landscape ... but we had to look closely at the ground to see the most striking details. Even though Central Kansas experienced an especially dry summer this year, the wildflowers were in full bloom. There were different species of milkweed but none as commanding as the large Prairie Milkweed variety (Asclepias sullivantii), its large clusters of flowers always covered with bees and butterflies, sometimes with three of more species feeding on a single cluster.

Befitting the low profile of prairie, the trail markers were low to the ground, some of them merely brown painted cinderblocks with nothing more than the trail name stenciled across them.

And running through some sections of the Preserve were remnants of the limestone fences that were built in the 1800s when Anglo settlers established homesteads.

The Tallgrass Prairie NP is bisected by Highway 177, which runs north to south between pastures. Adjacent to the two-lane highway is a Visitor Center and several buildings that were part of Spring Hill Ranch House, a three-story limestone building that reflects the grandeur of the 1880s, the period it was built.

The Tallgrass Prairie NP represents a unique partnership between the Nature Conservancy, which owns the land, and the National Park Service, which is responsible for maintaining the site and providing interpretive support (through historic and cultural programs, tours, and ecological information, all of which is provided by interpretive rangers). Among the several buildings that were once part of the Spring Hill Farm and Stock Ranch is the Lower Fox Creek School, a classic one-room school that is so iconic that many visitors mistakenly believe they are visiting a reproduction, not an authentic 19th century structure.

I have visited dozens of National Parks across the United States, from the majestic Rocky Mountain NP to the mesmerizing Arches NP to the mysterious Mesa Verde, but there is something special about the Tallgrass Prairie NP. Perhaps it captures the romantic notion of American expansiveness, or maybe reminds visitors of what disappeared with the Plains Indians and the bison, or maybe people sense the value of its fragile ecosystems. Whatever the reasons, it provided me with one of the most profound experiences I have had in traveling across this incredibly diverse country. It also possesses seasonal subtleties that will undoubtedly call me back to explore the prairie in fall, winter, and spring.

Dragonflies and Chigger Bites

Aside from the occasional Pilates and swimming class, it's been almost twenty years since I was a student, sitting in a classroom, notebook open, pen in hand. That changed two weeks ago when I began training to become a Texas Master Naturalist. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I had never heard of the program until five years ago.  That's when I met a Master Naturalist for the first time. I don't remember her name, but she led my wife Susan and me on a tour of Bright Leaf Preserve, a pristine 200-acre section of wilderness smack dab in the middle of Austin.  

The Master Naturalist I Met at Bright Leaf

I noticed her name tag, which identified her as Master Naturalist, and asked her what that meant. She told me about the training she completed and the mission of the program, which, according to the TMN website, is as follows: "To develop a corps of well-informed volunteers to provide education, outreach, and service dedicated to the beneficial management of natural resources and natural areas within their communities."  

Bright Leaf Preserve

Since that day, I have considered completing the training myself but pushed it off as one of those projects I would pursue in retirement, which is still several years off. In the last year Susan and I have done some volunteer work in Exploration Green, a 200-acre piece of land much closer to home, a park in Clear Lake. We have spent a few Saturdays working in the park's tree nursery, re-potting trees, weeding, and hooking up water lines to the saplings. It was there that I met another Master Naturalist, actually a trainee, who was completing volunteer hours. Forty are required before one earns certification, and an additional forty must be completed every year, along with eight hours of advanced training, to renew certification.

Posing with Other Volunteers in Exploration Green

I finally had the inspiration to begin training myself, so for twelve weeks I will attend weekly Tuesday evening classes and all-day weekend field trips to various natural sites in and around Houston, as a member of the Gulf Coast chapter of the Texas Master Naturalist program. I have already begun work on a class project, removing invasive plants, mostly dewberry brambles, from a reestablished native prairie in Hermann Park. That's where the chiggers come in. That first Saturday I was unprepared for them (despite the fact that we were warned to take precautions) and within a few hours was covered in chigger bites. Next time I will know better.

Equipment for Removing Dewberries

This Saturday my classmates and I are heading north to W. Goodrich Jones State Forest for our first field trip. We will spend the day studying forest ecosystems and entomology, and if we're lucky, we'll get to spot a red cockaded woodpecker. We have already learned about ecological concepts, Bayou Land Conservancy (an organization that does remarkable work preserving waterways north of Houston), and urbanization.

Course Curriculum

The six-inch binder my fellow trainees and I received the first night of training contains the course curriculum. It's a daunting packet of material, but I am eager to absorb as much of it as I can. The dragonfly on my name tag reminds me of the first time I saw the insignia that Saturday morning in Austin. The volunteer who led us on the tour proudly displayed her collection of dragonfly pins, which represented her years of service as a Texas Master Naturalist. Within a year I intend to earn my own dragonfly.

Ruins of Brownwood

Imagining Brownwood (This and all other photographs by Jerry Hamby)

The Baytown Nature Center sprang to life in 1994 out of the rubble of the old Brownwood subdivision. That is when work began on restoring marshes on the 500-acre peninsula, an extraordinary project that turned a dangerous eyesore into a sanctuary for hundreds of species of birds. But that is a story I will save for another day. Right now I am returning to Brownwood ... or what remains of it more than thirty years after it ceased be a community.

Boat launch ruins and dead tree—Crystal Bay

Surrounded by three bays—Burnet, Crystal, and Scott—Brownwood thrived for two decades, taking off in the 1940s as Humble Oil executives built homes along the Houston Ship Channel. Brownwood's fortunes declined, however, when Hurricane Carla slammed ashore more than 100 miles down the coast at Port O'Connor on September 11, 1961. The Houston metropolitan area, which includes the city of Baytown, was on the "dirty" or wet side of the Category 5 hurricane, and Brownwood sustained a ten-foot storm surge. The community was devastated and never fully recovered.

The last utility pole in Brownwood, Crow Road (photographed July 2016)

Over the next twenty-two years, a series of storms inundated Brownwood as the peninsula continued to subside, the result of decades of excessive groundwater extraction. In the end, the elevation of Brownwood dropped by ten feet. In August 1983 Hurricane Alicia sealed the neighborhood's fate as utilities were cut off and more than 300 residential properties were condemned. Those actions set in motion a series of lawsuits and property buyouts. 

By the early 1990s, most of the houses had been torn down and the debris cleared, but almost thirty years later, there are still plenty of signs of Brownwood's past; you just have to know where to look for them. The easiest place to start is on the shoreline.

Tracey's Seine Sampling Boardwalk

Just past the Brownwood Education Pavilion (the highest point in the Nature Center), Crow Road is blocked by a gate, but there is a small parking area on the right-hand side of the road. Leave your car there and, after walking around the gate, cross a bridge. Immediately to the right is Tracey's Seine Sampling Boardwalk. (In case you are curious, seining is a method of collecting aquatic samples using a large seine net or a smaller handheld net.) As you cross the boardwalk, look for signs of wildlife below it; you just might see a group of blue crabs scurrying in the sand.

Basket flowers and bumblebees

At the end of the boardwalk, the path narrows as it heads toward Crystal Bay. When I was there this summer, basket flowers, some as high as six feet, were buzzing with bumblebees. When you get to the bay, walk along the shore among the riprap and broken concrete slabs, but be careful—the surfaces are slick and uneven. Ten to fifteen feet from the land, you will also see the concrete foundation for a boathouse.

Boathouse ruins

The best time to explore the shoreline is during low tide, especially after a cold front has blown through and pushed the water out of the Ship Channel into Galveston Bay. Low tide provides greater access to the beach and a better chance of discovering hidden objects, such as broken cups and saucers, otherwise buried in the sand.

Shell, brick fragment, and crockery on Wooster Point

One of my favorite spots in the Nature Center is Wooster Point, where Crow Road / Bayshore Drive meets Mapleton Avenue. A short path leads to the point and a covered picnic area. Next to the structure is a footprint of a house, its pink ceramic tile still glued to the bathroom floor. It must have looked stylish in its heyday of the 1950s. Its geometry of squares and tiles still mesmerizes.

House foundation, Wooster Point

You have to use your imagination to see what used to lie beyond Wooster Point as the ground sloped toward Scott Bay. Wooster Cemetery was a small family graveyard associated with the original community of Wooster (established in 1892). The first burial, for ten-year-old Martin Elmar Wooster, occurred in 1894, and the last person buried there (in 1969) was the poetically named Edna Sjolander, who died at age forty-three. As subsidence took its toll on Brownwood, the cemetery slowly slipped underwater. Most of the graves were relocated, and by 1980 the cemetery had disappeared and only empty crypts were visible at low tide.

My colleague Georgeann standing on riprap at Wooster Point

On a trip to the Nature Center this summer, my colleague Georgeann and I investigated Wooster Point. In the photograph above, she stands with her back to what used to be Wooster Cemetery. The stretch of land in the distance, rising eight feet above the channel, is the southern section of Goat Island, which was partially reconstructed in 2003-2004.

Georgeann and I were doing reconnaissance for a Lee College Honors class, the Human Condition, that we team-teach. For a unit entitled "How Do We Connect with Nature?" we have scheduled a field trip to the Nature Center, where our students will learn about and consider the historical, cultural, and environmental impacts on Brownwood and the Baytown Nature Center.

Brownwood Education Pavilion, looking toward the San Jacinto Monument

To continue your tour, reverse your route past the Education Pavilion, down Crow Road. If you want to explore the Children's Nature Discovery Area and the public fishing piers, take a left where the road forks on Bayshore Drive. Turn right at the fork to see the most spectacular ruins of Brownwood, the first of which is easy to miss. Look for a dirt road leading to a popular fishing spot on Burnet Bay. Buried in the weeds on the left is the outline of a swimming pool.

Overgrown swimming pool

Beyond the pool, hidden in a tall stand of trees on the southern side, is a house foundation. Crawl through the thicket (how can you resist?) and you will find a rough green flooring affixed to the concrete slab, presumably to provide a textured surface for walking around the pool.

Foundation and original flooring

One of the gentle ironies of the Baytown Nature Center is the juxtaposition of nature and civilization. When I visited this summer, wildflowers were in full bloom, often sprouting among the ruins, as was the case with the basket flower in the photograph below.

Basket flower among house ruins

The shoreline is completely open as you leave the ruins and continue walking north along Burnet Bay. A hundred yards or so up the beach, you will see a concrete structure. You may not recognize what it is at first, but you are looking at another swimming pool but from an unexpected vantage point. The bottom edge of the pool rises more than six feet above the ground. Imagine the grassy lawn that used to extend twenty or more yards to the waterfront. This is the best visual lesson in subsidence and beach erosion the Nature Center has to offer. Where my wife Susan is standing in the photograph below, the far edge of the pool is a full foot above her head.

Susan below the edge of a swimming pool

This swimming pool may be easier to spot on your initial drive from the visitor center. As Brownwood Drive crosses the water and curves left onto Bayshore Drive, look to the right toward the bay. The pool appears to jut upward and is filled with shrubs and mature trees. The concrete encasement must have provided just the right soil conditions, protecting the trees from the brackish water of Burnet Bay.

The pool as seen from Bayshore Drive

Take a shallow dip in the pool and you will enjoy the most extraordinary view of the bay.

A dip in the pool

Running your hands over the cool blue ceramic tile, you will notice that someone, strangely (dangerously), thought this was a good place to do a little target practice.

Target practice

After soaking in the pool, head back to your car and drive toward the main entrance of the Nature Center. Just before Brownwood Drive makes a sharp left-hand turn, you will see a large sign on the right for the Golden Bloom Pond Trail. This is my favorite hike in the Nature Center. The trail takes you through the woods and bends around the eastern edge of Cypress Pond before making a sharp turn to the left. A long boardwalk returns you to continue the direction you started, back to a wooded trail that runs along the eastern side of the Nature Center, heading south to Scott Bay. On your left is a chain-link fence, and through it you can see a neighborhood that survived the devastation of Carla, Alicia, and dozens of named and unnamed storms. You are walking along an edge, a zone between ecoregions. You are walking on the dividing line between houses that were deemed habitable and those that were condemned.

End of the trail—the path to Scott Bay Overlook

The trail ends at Scott Bay Overlook, a relatively high point on the peninsula, which explains why one neighborhood continued to exist (at least for now) while another sank into history. The overlook offers a stunning view of the bay. Sitting on a covered bench, you can see the Fred Hartman Bridge in the distance. Feeling the sea breeze and looking up into the branches of an enormous shade tree, you might wonder how the tragedy of Brownwood ever came to be.

Sunflower at land's end

Walk down to the shore and enjoy, once again, the beautiful wildflowers. Just beyond them are more slabs of concrete and a more substantial bulwark made up of encased steel beams. They are there to protect the shoreline, to hold back the tide. The next time a major storm strikes the Gulf of Mexico and Galveston Bay, however, you can be sure the storm surge will rise above the riprap and steel and wreak havoc on this small peninsula yet again.

Industrial riprap on Scott Bay

During my last visit to the Baytown Nature Center, I found a partial brick in the water off Wooster Point. Only half the lettering remained, but the whole brick was originally stamped with the following words: "ACME BRICK CO. EVERLAST." That last one is the most important one and should give each of us pause.

A potent reminder of human folly

In my next installment I will consider the signs of Brownwood and the Baytown Nature Center and the stories they tell.

Ghosts of Brownwood

A recent visit to the Baytown Nature Center
(Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by Jerry Hamby)

Twenty-five years ago, one of my colleagues at Lee College, a journalism instructor named Susan, led me on a driving tour of the old Brownwood subdivision, located on a 500-acre peninsula that juts into the Houston Ship Channel, which, in turn, feeds into Galveston Bay. Surrounded by three bays—Burnet, Crystal, and Scott—Brownwood has a storied past, beginning with the stately homes of Humble Oil executives who lived there in the 1940s and ending in 1983 with the devastation of Hurricane Alicia (and her eleven-foot storm surge), after which all residents were forced to leave permanently when the City of Baytown prohibited reconstruction and cut off water and electricity.

Brownwood in 1989, six years after Alicia

My first visit to Brownwood took place eight years after Alicia, by which time most of the homes had been bought and leveled. This was the same year that Baytown residents approved a $300,000 bond initiative to create wetland restoration, a project that ultimately led to the establishment of the Baytown Nature Center. A comparison of two Google Earth satellite images tells the story of Brownwood more succinctly than the dozens of newspaper narratives recounted by residents who survived several major weather events, beginning with hurricane Carla in 1961. (I discovered the two photos on the blog site Google Earth Time Machine, maintained by my good friend Brian Schrock; I direct readers there to learn more about topics related to geology and geography.)

Brownwood in 1953

The 1953 image shows what the peninsula looked like before Brownwood experienced its most extensive subsidence (the ground dropped a total of ten feet between the early 1900s and the 1980s, eight and a half feet of which dropped in the final forty years). Note how the western and southern shores of the peninsula were protected by a land barrier known as Goat Island (so named because goats grazed there after the land bridge connected to the mainland disappeared). As a side note, Goat Island was partially restored (in two segments) in 2003-2004 when the Ship Channel was widened and deepened and the dredged soil (millions of cubic acres) was moved by the Port of Houston and the U.S. Corps of Engineers on top of the original land mass. 

The topic of subsidence is complicated and fascinating, but in short, during the twentieth century the greater Houston metropolitan area sank between four and ten feet due to unrestrained extraction of groundwater (as well as oil and gas), which is now regulated to limit further subsidence. For more information on the history of Brownwood and the events that led to its demise, I suggest checking out the extensive website Houston Wet: A Sprawl Ecology. Be forewarned: you will spend a good two to three hours reading the text and scrolling through dozens of photographs, at the end of which you will have a rich appreciation for this aspect of Houston history and the downside of human enterprise. The story of Brownwood is, at its heart, a story of hubris, of lessons ignored.

Tropical storm aftermath, circa 1976 (chron.com)

When I visited Brownwood in 1991, more than 350 houses had been razed and the rubble removed. The driving tour I took with Susan was limited to "Perimeter Road," what used to be Bayshore Drive and Mapleton Avenue. In the aftermath of Carla and repeated episodes of flooding, city officials had raised the road seven feet, creating a combination dike and escape route, but the engineers based their measurements on pre-subsidence benchmarks, so the road was more than a foot too low, and it failed at keeping the water out. 

When Susan and I explored the area on foot in 1991, what I could see peeking through the overgrown vegetation were a few dozen houses, in some instances only the rooftops, that dotted a blighted landscape. I learned many years later that these structures belonged to the holdouts, the roughly three percent of residents who refused to sell their property. The Baytown Nature Center has existed since 1994 when work on the Brownwood Marsh Restoration project began. To this day there are pockets in the Nature Center that belong to former residents who refused to sell their property. Some people did not believe they were being offered fair market value for their homes while others held out on principle, fighting to the very end all attempts to dislodge them from their property. 

Boardwalk on the Golden Bloom Pond Trail, crossing a former street (July 2016)

Today there are no elevated structures, but you can still find footprints of human development—house foundations, boat docks, bulkheads, and swimming pools. Most of the streets are still visible, if overgrown, as trails take you through a variety of landscapes. If you explore the shoreline at low tide, you will find broken bricks, sections of brick walls, and shards of crockery among the riprap and oyster shells.

Crockery among oyster shells on the beach

On a recent trip to the Nature Center, I discovered the last utility pole in Brownwood, cut off at the ground and left on one of those overgrown roads. The electrical cable disappears into the overgrowth, and the pole lies on the ground, reminders of that tentative connection between civilization and wilderness.

The last utility pole—Crow Road

One of my greatest regrets about that first trip to Brownwood is the fact that I didn't take a camera. In those pre-digital days, I reserved 35-mm film for vacations and family gatherings. These days I might take hundreds of photos in a single day, so I have done a more thorough job of documenting return trips to Brownwood. In my next post I will share my most recent discoveries, including a pair of swimming pools, two of the many ghosts of Brownwood.

Looking south onto Scott Bay and the Fred Hartman Bridge

Talking Trash

Twice a week blue Republic Services trucks sweep through my neighborhood to collect garbage.  Even though I live within the city limits of Houston, my homeowners association decided years ago to contract this service through a private company.  The thinking was that the city's curbside containers were large and unsightly, so our trash has to be bagged.  There are a lot of problems with this arrangement, not the least of which is the fact that my neighbors and I miss out on curbside recycling.

A typical bag of trash we generate in one week

I have issues with this "wasteful" practice, but rather than dwell on those complaints, I want instead to focus on what I do to compensate.  Because everyone's trash bags are in plain sight, I can easily tell how much waste my neighbors generate.  Most households put out one or two bags twice a week.  In contrast, my wife Susan and I put out, at most, one bag per week.  So what do we throw away?  I  recently emptied the contents onto a blue tarp, and the photo below tells the story.

A peek inside the bag

Most of our trash consists of plastic that cannot be recycled—unlabeled bags and packages and the occasional polystyrene foam or other item that our local recycling center does not accept.  We also throw away cotton swabs and balls, and on the rare occasion that we eat meat, we toss out the scraps.  In the photo above there is a small packet of fish skin.  What you will rarely see are napkins or facial tissues.  Some time ago we stopped using both, opting for cloth napkins and handkerchiefs instead, and the few paper towels we use find their way to the compost heap (more about that later).  If you look closely, you will also see a blue bag of cat waste.  The litter we use is made from bio-degradable wheat, and we scoop to minimize how much goes into the landfill. 

A month's worth of plastic, waiting to be recycled

The key to limiting our garbage is separating items for recycling.  We sort plastic, metal, glass, paper, and cardboard into bins that are stored in our garage, and once a month we take those items to a recycling center a few miles from our house.

A month's worth of recycling

On the second Saturday of every month, a company is on-site to collect e-cycling materials: electrical wire, batteries, printers, and other electronics.  We also used to collect old motor oil and take it to an area service station, but because we now have a manually-operated reel mower, there is no oil to dispose of.

The recycling center at Ellington Field

We find ways to repurpose some objects that might normally be recycled.  A few years ago, for instance, we took empty wine bottles and created borders for two vegetable garden beds in our backyard.

Wine bottle edging—that's Swiss chard
growing in the background.

Another way we minimize our waste is through composting.  Fruit and vegetable peels and cores, teabags, coffee grounds, and table scraps—all get tossed into a compost bucket that sits on the kitchen counter, and every few days I pour the contents in one of our three compost bins.

A bucketful of vegetable scraps and egg shells

Composting takes the notion of recycling to whole new level.  All of that discarded plant material (along with egg shells, paper towels, and our neighbors' bags of raked leaves) finds its way back into the life cycle in the form of nutrient-rich organic soil or "black gold."

One of three compost bins, brimming
with nutrient-rich organic matter

"Home-cooked" compost enriches our vegetable garden much more effectively than anything we can buy—and it doesn't cost a dime.  Our heirloom tomatoes especially appreciate this extra boost of nutrients.

Cone flowers and homegrown
heirloom tomatoes

I am not naive enough to think that the little bit of recycling Susan and I do will save the planet, but I am well past the point of thinking in those terms.  All I can do is maintain my own tiny part of the universe and encourage others to do the same.