"The Tonic of Wildness"

My connection to Palo Duro Canyon is so deeply embedded that I cannot remember the first time I was there.  It must have been early in life; I recall playing in a picnic area when I was no more than four years old, and about the same age I first rode the Sad Monkey Railroad, a miniature train ride that was part history and geology lesson, part amusement park ride, part hokum.



Postcard image of the Sad Monkey Railroad in its heyday

Riding the Sad Monkey was always fun, and it was an experience I repeated well into adulthood.  Unfortunately, the train stopped running in the 1980s, and the only signs that it was ever there are the ghost patterns of the rail bed that now serve as horseback riding trails.

Outlines of the Sad Monkey rail bed

I snapped the photo above a few years ago when my old hiking buddy Rick, my wife Susan, and I were spending a weekend in the canyon.  We were standing on a table rock overlooking the amphitheater where the summer musical Texas is performed.  The rock is also at the end of a hiking trail that traces the route workers used when the state park was developed in the 1930s.  That's when the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built the roads, picnic areas, and stone buildings in the park.

The point just beyond the table rock 
is the top of the Sad Monkey formation.

It's been almost three decades since I lived in the Texas Panhandle.  That's where Palo Duro Canyon is located—twelve miles east of the city of Canyon.  I still visit the canyon when I travel to see family and friends in Amarillo, and it pleases me to see that the park is still being developed.  The CCC Trail is one of the most recent additions.  The legendary Red Spicer, a great supporter of the canyon, reestablished the trail in 2006, a few years before he died.  Susan, Rick, and I were fortunate enough to meet Red one August morning when he was hard at work, pickax in hand.

Red Spicer working on the CCC Trail

It's the trails, the hiking, and the exploration of new territory that have always appealed to me.  From the time I was a kid, I always enjoyed striking out into new territory, and the CCC Trail is one of those great places to explore.



Rick and me hiking a section of the CCC Trail

The most challenging trail in the canyon doesn't have a name, but it runs from the sixth water crossing (the park road cuts across the Prairie Dog fork of the Red River) to the western rim of the canyon.  Rick and I dubbed it the Mesquite Park Trail for the flatland above the canyon that we explored for several months, searching for a rock formation called the Kneeling Camel.  For an extended chronicle of that and additional Palo Duro Canyon adventures, read my other blog, Gecko Hill.

The rim below Mesquite Park

The most famous trail in the canyon is the one that leads to the Lighthouse and a lesser-known formation called Castle Rock.  It's an open, mostly unshaded trail that gets brutally hot in the summer, but it leads to a spectacular payoff, a dramatic view of those two imposing hoodoos, columns of sedimentary rock with capstones.

Castle Peak and the Lighthouse

I first hiked the Lighthouse Trail when I was a teenager, and I have revisited it many times in the intervening years.  When we were in graduate school at West Texas State University, Rick and I organized a Saturday morning hike to the Lighthouse, led by one of our favorite English professors, Dr. Russell Sparling.  When we reached the end of the trail, he read aloud from Walden, by Henry David Thoreau.  It included this famous passage: "We need the tonic of wildness ....  At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."

This "tonic of wildness" has always appealed to me—the sense of nature untamed, of human beings' fragile hold on this earth.  Strangely, I take comfort in recognizing my own insignificance in the grand scale of nature.

The Lighthouse, as seen from the western side

Readjusting the View

One of the first posts I wrote for this blog was about my father. I titled it "Adjusting the View" to reflect the shifting but ultimately elusive perspectives I had of a man I saw only sporadically in my childhood, a man I barely knew. I later wrote about my mother's struggle with Alzheimer's disease and how her illness changed the dynamics of our relationship. More than a year later, she is still fighting a myriad of ailments, but her decline has grown more pronounced. As one parent continues to slip away, another unexpectedly reappeared in the lives of my brothers and me.

Last summer I saw my biological father for the first time in almost thirty years. There is a strange kismet in the way all of us reconnected, but the details of how it happened don't really matter. The important thing is that my father and I reestablished ties and now have a much stronger relationship and a better understanding of each other.

When my brothers and I met at our dad's house last summer, I was reminded of just how adventurous a life he has led. An avid outdoorsman, he recounted his many trips to Mexico, where he used to spearfish, and weeks-long treks to remote islands in the Gulf of California, ventures he undertook by himself. He told us about Blue Hole, New Mexico, where he taught SCUBA diving.

Growing up, my brothers and I shared much tamer weekend adventures with our dad, camping and fishing at the lakes of the Texas Panhandle and eastern New Mexico, hiking in Palo Duro Canyon, and riding motorcycles along the Canadian River. Those experiences shaped my love of nature, and it was a joy to talk about the dozens of places we have explored—and continue to explore—as adults. I marvel at how similar my dad and I are—in interests, tastes, and sense of humor—despite our limited contact. We talked about our love of northern New Mexico, particularly the mountains near Santa Fe.

We also talked about family history and the paths our lives have taken in the thirty years since we last spoke. Spending a few days at my dad's house, I saw dozens of objects that I had forgotten about, including an old trunk from Germany, carved wooden figures, and a cuckoo clock. This latter item I didn't notice until I heard it chime, but it immediately took me back to the many times I had heard it as child, awakening on Sunday morning, knowing it would soon be time to return to my routine life at home and another week at school.

The older I get, the more I appreciate how precious time is and how quickly it passes. Last May when I told some of my friends about the upcoming reunion, one of them asked if I intended to inquire about what had caused the estrangement, and another thought I should get an apology. I neither expected nor wanted an apology and knew there was nothing to be gained in asking questions about the past; my suspicion is that there are no easy answers about what happened.

The only time that really matters is now—this moment typing away at a keyboard, listening to Debussy in the background, watching the cold January rain hit my window. In this moment I am thinking about the father I once lost, then found, about the last time I saw him, which was less than a week ago, and about the next time I see him, which, no doubt, will be sooner than I can imagine.

Are You My Son?

In one of my favorite photographs, my mother is standing in front of a 1960s-model Kelvinator, wearing a black evening dress, a large corsage pinned to her collar. "Dressed to the nines" is how she would describe herself. Strangely, she is balancing a plate of butter and three eggs in her right hand. I have no idea what she intends to do with them, but there is something beautifully incongruous about the image. I'm fairly certain she and my father were about to leave the house to attend a Beta Sigma Phi Sweetheart Ball, probably the year she was nominated as her chapter's sweetheart.

I'd like to think those eggs were for my two brothers and me, that she was helping us prepare supper. My mother taught me many valuable lessons when I was growing up—how to scramble eggs, for instance. My brothers and I were latchkey kids. Because my mother worked full time for as long as I can remember, she ensured that we could take care of ourselves.

She also taught me how to play cards. Not content with Go Fish or Old Maid, she started me with Crazy Eights and then moved on to Hearts, Spades, Gin Rummy, and Canasta. She wanted to make it worth her time, after all, and she wasn't about to go easy on me. Once after complaining about losing several hands in a row, I asked why she never let me win. "What good would that do you?" she responded.

She won for a simple reason: she memorized every card as it was played. My mom is as smart as a whip (one of her favorite phrases), and even as she approaches the age of eighty (sorry for divulging that detail, Mom), her long-term memory is remarkable. Last month while I sat beside her hospital bed (as she was recovering from knee surgery), a clip from the 1958 film Auntie Mame flitted across the TV screen in the corner of the room. "That's Rosalind Russell," my mom noted. I pulled up the Internet Movie Database on my phone to verify her claim. She was right, of course.

It's not that I would normally doubt my mother's veracity—she used to remind me that she was always right—but these days she would be the first to admit otherwise. For the past few years my mother has suffered from Alzheimer's disease, and it has progressed most noticeably in the last six months.

Millions of people struggle with the disease, and even more friends and family members struggle with the effects. I have watched others deal with dementia, but there is something poignant and sobering about witnessing your own mother slipping away. During a recent physical therapy session, someone introduced me to her doctor as her youngest son. My mother, who was sitting in a wheelchair in front of me, turned around and asked, "Are you my son?" After reassuring her that I was indeed her son, she reached up to hug and kiss me.

For a long time my mom has confused me with her grandsons, and she has not remembered my birthday for the past two years, so it didn't surprise me to hear her ask who I was. Yet this incident continues to stick with me … and not just in a negative way. There is something sweet about the way my mother continually lives in the present. In some ways she is much more aware of the details around her than the rest of us. When she was in the hospital, for instance, she picked up on snippets of conversation outside her room and tried to connect what she heard with where she thought she was, her own home. And when she goes on a car ride, she is mesmerized by the clouds sliding past the window. "Aren't they beautiful?" she asks, as if seeing the sky for the first time. It doesn't matter that she will marvel again at the clouds five minutes later or that she will rediscover her youngest son every time I come to visit. Her emotional response is always keen, always fresh.

I wonder how she processes memories. Do those snippets of knowledge—names of film stars, rules for playing bridge—commingle with details of life experiences? Does she remember being the young mother self-consciously posing in front of a clothesline? Could she recall where she was living at the time or who gave her the wristwatch she is wearing? I think I know the answers to these questions, but I'm still curious to understand her thought processes.

I still see vivid glimpses of my mom the way I've always known her—a sly, mischievous, and playful gal (another of her favorite words). What's different now is that those qualities appear in sudden but fleeting bursts—in a facial expression, a non sequitur, or the sound of her laughter. And her expressions are often exaggerated. She sometimes imitates people, almost mockingly, mirroring what she sees because original expression doesn't come as easily as it once did. Such moments are filled with raw, unfiltered emotion.

As the mother I've known all these years slips away from me, I've been thinking a lot about person she was long before I came into her life. I can almost step into another of my favorite photos. She is walking down Polk Street in downtown Amarillo, holding the hand of her grandfather (her beloved Dapta). She squints in the bright winter sun.  She is wearing a Betty Boop jacket with a leopard print collar, and a matching felt beret rests jauntily on her head. There she is, a little girl in white boots, clutching a tiny zippered bag. She is out on a stroll between two world wars—her entire life ahead of her—without a care in the world.

Adjusting the View

This is how I remember my father—he is standing next to a 1950s-model car with my mother, who, in turn, is holding my oldest brother.  The image is blurry, but I can tell that they're all squinting in the bright sunlight.  They appear to be heading out on or returning from a summer picnic.  My parents were nineteen years old at the time, and their faces beam with joy and optimism, neither of which held up, given that the marriage unraveled within ten years. 

Of course, I don't really remember my father this way at all.  Since my parents separated before I turned three, I have no memories of living with him, but this image is fixed in my mind because of the snapshot, a relic I discovered as an adult while rummaging through my mother's cedar chest, looking for new details about the family history.  Until I was in my thirties, my mom revealed very little about the years she lived with my dad, not wanting to taint my relationship with him or to sugarcoat things either.  Theirs was an unhappy marriage, and over the years I have gotten only glimpses of what it must have been like.

So the blurry image is especially appropriate.  Growing up, my two older brothers and I would occasionally spend weekends with my dad, going on camping or fishing trips or hanging out at his modern split-level house with his second wife (who was always sweet and welcoming).  But even as a child, I never really got to know him.  I liked him.  He struck me as a guy who was really, really cool—in all respects.  He was hip, good looking, and smart, and he was emotionally detached.  He was also a charmer, a quality that stood out in some of the old photos from my mother's cedar chest.  One picture, in particular, always amused me.  It was taken at a costume party.  A leggy young woman (not my mother) is sitting on my dad's lap, and she's wearing mismatched knee socks.  He's smiling bigger than I've ever seen him smile, and his glasses reflect the camera's flash so you can't see his eyes.

That detail about the glasses is revealing.  In all the years I visited my dad, he invariably wore sunglasses, even indoors.  I once asked my oldest brother why that was, to which he replied, "Because he has no eyes."  We both laughed but we knew it was true—not literally, of course—but our father never made eye contact, never connected with us.  He rarely expressed any emotions, good or bad.  He was simply there.  Admittedly, it was an awkward arrangement for all of us.  He was our part-time dad, but we were his part-time kids, and he probably never knew how best to relate to us.

I last saw my father twenty-eight years ago when I was in my mid-twenties.  I had just gotten married and had taken my wife to meet him.  After that visit I decided to let my dad call if he wanted to talk or get together.  He never did.

So here I am, sorting through a box full of old photographs.  Two pictures stand out because they were taken by my dad.  The first was snapped a year or two after my parents got married.

What's striking is how young and pretty my mother looks, and she must have looked equally beautiful to my dad.  There's also something disorienting about the image.  My mother has never been what you would call a lover of the great outdoors, but there she is standing at the base of a mountain in Colorado or New Mexico, doing her best to enjoy the kind of experience my dad most certainly loved, a fishing trip.  She's even wearing waders, perhaps for the first and last time.

The other photo my dad snapped was taken at Christmas, the last one we all shared under the same roof.  My cousin, my brothers, and I are sitting on the floor after the presents have been opened.  My oldest brother is wearing a shiny new pair of cowboy boots and has a transistor radio pressed to his ear. That's me pressing my bare feet against my other brother's new boots.

What stands out most is the hi-fi set behind us.  That stereo was my dad's pride and joy (he was quite the audiophile, especially when it came to his jazz records), and when he moved into his new house not long after this photo was taken, he devoted a room to his stereo.  Don't ask me how I know he is the one who snapped the photo.  I suppose it could have been my mother, but there's something about the blank looks on our faces that tells me our father was on the other side of that Polaroid camera, one knee on the floor, left eye shut, right eye pressed against the viewfinder.

Wetlands and Tallgrass—Discovering the Majesty of the Prairie

Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve—Chase County, Kansas

Until four years ago, I knew very little about prairies. I imagined them (if I thought of them at all) as open fields, little more than pastures. Since I studied French in high school and college, I knew that the word prairie meant meadow, but that word fails to capture the unique beauty or vastness of the North American prairie, which once stretched from northern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

Sheldon Lake State Park and Environmental Learning Center

Four years ago I visited Sheldon Lake State Park, a restored wetland prairie northeast of Houston, Texas. Had I not been attending a field trip for Texas Master Naturalist (TMN) training, it is unlikely that I would have ever gone to Sheldon Lake. What I saw, however, opened my eyes to a series of ecosystems that sustain all manner of birds, mammals, butterflies, bees, and other animals. That four-hour experience redefined my view of the natural world that surrounded me.

Texas is divided into ten ecoregions, including the Gulf Coast Prairies and marshes. If you include coastal Louisiana, this section of prairies once covered six million acres, but after almost 200 years of farming, ranching, and urban development, less than one percent of the original coastal prairie exists today. Those precious pockets of undisturbed prairies are called remnants, and I have been fortunate to visit several of them.

Jaime González holds a Brunner's stick mantis (Brunneria borealis)

The Katy Prairie, east of Houston, is one of the largest preserved prairies in Texas (actually a series of prairies), and it was in the Tucker Easement prairie remnant that my fellow TMN trainees and I learned about many of the insects that inhabit a prairie ecosystem, including the Brunner's stick mantis pictured above. One of the unusual details I discovered is the fact that all members of this species are female, reproducing through parthenogenesis or asexual reproduction. Jaime González, who is now Houston Urban Conservation Programs Manager for the Nature Conservancy in Texas, led us on the daylong trip to three sections of the Katy Prairie.

Padre Island National Seashore 

Every year I discover new prairies. Last October at the annual meeting of Texas Master Naturalists, I spent half a day at Padre Island National Seashore, exploring dunes, grasslands, and mudflats. Closer to home, I made a few trips to the Lawther–Deer Park Prairie Preserve, a fifty-acre easement surrounded by suburban subdivision housing on three sides and a cemetery on the fourth. Most of my time there was spent collecting seeds. This relatively small prairie is home to more than 300 species of plants and animals.

Touring the Deer Park Prairie with Lee College Honors students

I have also visited the Nash Prairie Preserve, a 400-acre remnant south of Brazos Bend State Park. This tract of land, once part of the KNG Ranch, was protected as a hay field and is now protected by the Nature Conservancy. The Nash provides essential habitat for more than 120 species of birds alone. I have visited the Nash at three different times of year, and each trip reveals different aspects of the landscape, some subtle and others dramatic, like the green snake beautifully draped across wildflowers in the photo below.

Snake and wildflowers below the moon and above the Nash

On one visit to the Nash, I knelt in the grass and was instantly surrounded by dragonflies, one of which landed on my arm and stayed long enough for a photograph. In addition to being delicate and beautiful insects, dragonflies are an indicator species, providing a glimpse into the health of an ecosystem. The more dragonflies there are, the more robust and diverse the environment. That is one reason they are the icon of the Texas Master Naturalist program.

Dragonfly at the Nash (photo by Brian Schrock)

Then, there are butterflies, another insect that is central to the food web of any healthy prairie. I took the photo below at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve—in Chase County, Kansas—this summer. The butterflies, including a large pearl crescent (Phyciodes tharos) on the right-hand side, are drinking nectar from the blooms of a prairie milkweed (Asclepias sullivantii).

butterflies and prairie milkweed, Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve

My visit to the Tallgrass Prairie lasted four days and included a hike through a bison pasture. I also toured a nineteenth century ranch house and one-room school house (pictured below). Those adventures will be recounted in a separate blog post. Stay tuned.

Lower Fox Creek School, Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve

Notes from the Prairie

Knotroot bristlegrass, Hermann Park

Looking out my backdoor, I see a maple tree towering twenty-five feet overhead. In the front yard there are two mismatched oaks and two loblolly pine trees, and similar pairings are planted in almost every yard in my Houston subdivision. Were it possible to travel back in time 200 years, the landscape in my neighborhood would look very different. For one, the only trees visible for miles around would be those few growing along the bayous. For another I would be standing in an open prairie. Needless to say, it is human beings who are responsible for bringing this urban forest to the gulf coast prairie.

Of course, I can't go back in time any more than I can turn back the clock on the changes we have brought to the landscape. However, we can mitigate the damages, and in pockets across Harris County, volunteers have done just that by restoring prairies in Deer Park, Katy, and Armand Bayou Nature Center. There are also prairie pockets near the Museum District in Houston.

As part of my training to become a Texas Master Naturalist, I have worked at Project Blazing Star, three prairie pockets in Hermann Park. Named for three species of wildflowers, the restored prairies require constant maintenance.

Bracketed blazing star (Liatris bracteata)

Prairie blazing star (Liatris bracteata)

My work at Project Blazing Star has been two-fold, removing invasive species and defining the edges of the largest prairie. The former has required a lot of work by hand, digging at the roots of dewberries or isolating the invasive growth inside buckets (for herbicide spraying), and the latter has involved laying a heavy layer of mulch along the edge of the prairie (to protect it. It's not the most glamorous work, but it is richly rewarding and is vital to maintaining the fragile ecosystem.

Invasive dewberries

You may be asking yourself why it matters, why the prairies need to be restored. The answer is complicated. In part, the restoration means a return to natural form, a return to the ecosystems that were in place long before humans altered the landscape. There are plants, insects, and animals that have come back as native plant species are reintroduced. Those living things play vital roles in keeping the ecosystem in working order, providing food, shelter, nesting sites.

A fellow intern mulching the prairie edge

In a larger sense, natural ecosystems help to maintain the health of larger systems. Those prairie grasses create deep root systems that break up and aerate the soil, helping the earth better absorb excess water during a flood. Ultimately, there are other practical reasons we need to protect and nurture our environment. Our self-preservation, as well as that of our children, depends on our being good stewards of the earth. The resources we often take for granted are finite.

A Master Naturalist and an intern identifying plants

There's an ethical dimension as well. We share this planet with all living creatures, and as Vandana Shiva notes, as "members of the Earth family, our first and highest duty is to take care of Mother Earth … "(167). Shiva elaborates that "'Earth rights' refers first and foremost to the rights of Mother Earth and our corresponding duties and responsibilities to defend those rights" (167).  Just as we have the right to live and thrive, so do the life forms that surround us.

Common boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum)

Works Cited

Shiva, Vandana. "Earth Rights." Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World." Ed. Martin Keogh. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010. 166-69. Print.

They Can't Take That Away

This morning my wife Susan and I were returning home from a trip to Austin. We were listening for the first time to Bob Schneider's new CD Burden of Proof, which we bought this weekend at Waterloo Records, my favorite music store. Somewhere between Austin and Bastrop, a song called "John Lennon" popped up. It was only then that I remembered that today was December 8th, the 33rd anniversary of Lennon's death.

December 8th, 1980, is one of the worst days in my memory. I was a senior theatre major at West Texas State University, and that night I was typing the final draft of a creative writing class final project, a one-act play entitled The River Knows (an allusion to a song by another dead rock star, Jim Morrison). My project was due in two days, but I had to stop for the night. Between phone calls from several friends, who wanted to commiserate, and the inability to focus on my work, I delayed typing until the next day.

Kevin was the first to call. We were best friends in high school but went our separate ways after graduation. We shared a common love for all kinds of music, the Beatles' most of all.  Kevin had been watching Monday Night Football when Howard Cosell announced the sad news that Lennon had been killed outside the Dakota apartment building in New York City, his wife Yoko Ono by his side.  I was relieved to receive the news from an old friend. It gave us a chance to reminisce, to share in our grief, our sense of disbelief.

Every year since then, as December 8th approaches, I become keenly aware of this horrible anniversary, but in recent years it often takes something to jar the memory loose on the actual date—a song on the radio, a headline in the newspaper. It might be a sign of my age and the increasingly elusive nature of remembering things, but I think it's more than that. There's only so much grieving I can stand to bear over something as senseless as the murder of an artist … by a fan, no less. The mind still refuses to comprehend, refuses to accept.

Then, there's the music. As the years recede and more and more musical icons of my youth die—including George Harrison, who's been gone for twelve years now—the music is still there, is still a vital part of my life. Last month, for instance, a new collection of Beatles recordings was released, the second volume of BBC performances, On Air—Live at the BBC, Volume 2. As soon as I listened to the CDs, I was taken back to my youth and was reminded of the intense energy of the the Beatles' early music.

Back to Bob Schneider—the song that started me on this post begins and ends with the following lines: "I don't care what they say / we'll love forever today / they can't take that away." The song is remarkably upbeat, and it felt good for once to observe Lennon's passing in such a positive way. All day I have played the song repeatedly, and the lyrics will continue to reverberate in my head as I settle down to sleep tonight.

Thank you, Bob. Thank you, John.