FREE RANGE: FOOD, NATURE, PLACE, AND MORE

A mother’s legacy

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Heather

The first sparks for the idea of Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment were kindled about a year ago in conversations with my mother, Jessica Hobby Catto. She has listened carefully and thoughtfully to my sometimes wildly utopian ideas, offering hard-earned practical advice and persistent encouragement.

Her death on September 30 has left me so stunned that I’m having trouble relegating her to the past tense. I am struggling to stay in the present perfect, which refuses to point to a specific time, preferring instead to drift between the present and the past. This grammatical eddy allows me to dawdle a little longer before I face a present and future without her. At the same time, I know that at Madroño her spirit is always present, always past, always future.

My mother’s love for the outdoors shaped my life. The first house I remember was on a bluff north of the San Antonio airport, terrain that didn’t qualify as even remotely suburban at the time. Since my three siblings and I arrived within six years of each other, my mother must have deemed it a survival strategy to push us out of doors as much as possible. We had no immediate neighbors and spent our time pretending to be lost in the woods, investigating the draws and seasonal creeks that occasionally flooded and kept us home from school, and sliding down the cliff (strictly forbidden) to visit the nearest neighbors who rewarded us with butterscotch candies. The gravel road on which we lived was rural enough that people felt comfortable dumping trash on it. Every few months my mother would send us to drag a large trash can and pick up the trash on the road that we could pick up: we were permitted to leave the large appliances and dead livestock. Her point was—and is—clear: some human interactions with the landscape are unacceptable.

She also taught me that love of place is a perfectly reasonable principle by which to order a life. Converted to the Church of High Altitudes at Cimarroncita Ranch Camp in New Mexico, she began proselytizing to her children in the mid-1960s when we began annual summer treks to Aspen, Colorado. In the requisite station wagon filled with pillows, the reek of Panhandle oil and cattle, and squabbling children, we always stopped at the top of then-unpaved Independence Pass (12,000-plus feet above sea level) to play in the snow.

Aspen then had one paved street, one stop sign, a drug store with a soda fountain, and two fine old movie theaters. What more did we need? On days we didn’t hike, my mother shooed us outside to play in the puddles if it was raining or to climb up nearby Aspen Mountain with raincoats or pieces of cardboard upon which we would slide back down the meadow grasses. When my father’s career took us away from Texas and to other interesting venues, Colorado was the place we always returned to, my mother’s spiritual center. Despite her peripatetic life, she had a profound love of the Roaring Fork River valley, its smells and flowers, its imperious weather changes, the varieties of its wildness. These never ceased to sustain her, and she in turn worked to sustain them through her involvement with various environmental causes, particularly land conservation.

When she was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer in 2007, my parents began spending more time at their San Antonio home to be near the doctors she most trusted. Since she had long since given her heart and energy to Colorado, I was worried that she would feel unmoored during her time in San Antonio, adding to the discomforts of treatment. As we talked about ways in which she could stay connected to the conservation world she loved, especially in a state like Texas that so dearly values its private property rights, the idea of creating a gathering place for people passionate about nurturing the natural world was born.

I know I will eventually move out of the strange timelessness that hovers around times of death, but never completely. Despite her preference for the mountains, she saw the beauties of the Texas Hill Country and bought the original piece of what has become Madroño Ranch more than fifteen years ago. The blessings she bestowed on me—awareness of human limits, love of place, the place itself—are with me as long as I am here to receive them.

What we’re reading
Heather: Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
Martin: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Posted in Nature | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Bigfoot Wallace

Posted on October 9, 2009 by Martin

Wallace Creek, which flows through Madroño Ranch, is named for Bigfoot Wallace, the legendary nineteenth-century Texas Ranger and Indian fighter who received a grant of 320 acres about five miles north of Medina in 1849. Wallace was celebrated as “the Daniel Boone of Texas,” and the stories of his exploits are plenteous and colorful. Some of them may even be true. Here’s a brief sampling:

William A. A. (Bigfoot) Wallace

William A. A. Wallace (1817-1899) weighed 13 pounds at the time of his birth in Virginia. He came west in 1837 to avenge the deaths of his older brother and cousin, who had been killed in the Goliad Massacre fighting against Mexico in the Texas Revolution; alas, the Battle of San Jacinto occurred before he left home, ending the conflict and eliminating, at least temporarily, his opportunity to “take pay out of the Mexicans.” When the schooner on which he sailed from New Orleans was caught in a violent storm, Wallace was the only person aboard, including the crew, who was not prostrated by seasickness; when they reached Galveston, he was the only one who did not have to be carried ashore.

In 1839, he unexpectedly came face to face with a Waco warrior on a narrow path on Austin’s Mount Bonnell. Without taking time to aim, Wallace fired the rifle he had been carrying and the warrior, mortally wounded, fell off the cliff and into the Colorado River.

In 1842, Wallace volunteered for the ill-fated Somervell and Mier expeditions into Mexico; he was captured and survived a stint in the notorious Perote Prison. After returning to Texas, he joined the Texas Rangers and fought in the Mexican War.

Wallace was the first man to carry the mail from San Antonio to El Paso. Once, having been forced to walk many miles after losing his mules to Indians, he stopped at the first house he came to and ate 27 eggs before heading on into El Paso for a full meal.

Are all these stories true? Probably not. J. Frank Dobie wrote that “Wallace was as honest as daylight but liked to stretch the blanket and embroider his stories”—and Dobie certainly knew a bit about blanket-stretching. In the end, though, the factuality of the stories is immaterial. To quote the editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “This is the West, sir. When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Austin American-Statesman comics (it’s been a tough week)
Martin: E. O. Wilson, Naturalist

Posted in Place | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

By shank’s mare across England

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Martin

Last month Martin and his friend Bruce spent two weeks backpacking across northern England. Here’s his report:

Bruce, who’s been going to the U.K. every summer for several decades, is a veteran country walker; he’s done the famous Wainwright Coast-to-Coast walk and numerous other routes in England and Scotland. This time, however, we followed (more or less) a relatively new alternate route, set forth by a fellow named David Maughan in his 1997 book On Foot from Coast to Coast: The North of England Way, that took us from Ravenglass on the Irish Sea to Scarborough on the North Sea.

We covered 200 miles in two weeks, which works out to an average of just over 14 miles a day, though there was one three-day stretch when we totaled about 60 miles. We brought only what would fit in our packs, and made our way using Maughan’s book, various Ordnance Survey maps, and compasses. We only got lost a few times, and never terribly badly.

There are, however, limits to our masochism; we decided we were much too old to camp out, and whereas Maughan designed his route to bring the walker to a different youth hostel each night, Bruce rejiggered our itinerary to take us from inn to inn instead. (Well, we did spend one night at the Windermere Youth Hostel in Troutbeck, but it was surprisingly upscale—not at all like the hostels I remember from when I was, um, a youth.)

We both kept journals, but the impressions have already begun to blur: was it in Ainderby Quernhow or Cold Kirby that the village cats came and greeted us? Did we walk through the grounds of Jervaulx Abbey or Rievaulx Abbey? Was it Lowgill Viaduct or Dent Head Viaduct where I took that picture of Bruce walking under the archway? Was it the market square in Masham or Helmsley that was festooned with flowers?

Despite the tricks and lapses of middle-aged memory, however, I know the parts of England that we traversed in a way that I don’t know, say, Pflugerville or Round Rock, even though they’re just up the interstate from us in Austin. Having to make your way on foot, step by laborious step, forces you to pay attention to the land and the sky and the flora and fauna around you. I certainly don’t pretend to be an expert on the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales, but I do feel connected to them in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise have experienced.

And, I might add, there’s something indescribably wonderful about limping into a pub late in the afternoon, after many hard miles of walking, and sitting down to a cool pint of Black Sheep ale or Strongbow cider. I drink a fair amount of beer here in Texas—it’s about the best way I know to beat the heat of a Texas summer—but during our time in England, we felt like we’d really earned it.

What we’re reading
Heather: William Boyd, Restless
Martin: James Montague, When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone

Posted in Place | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Listapalooza: top ten songs about Texas

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Martin

Jerry Jeff Walker, Viva Terlingua

Hi, buckaroos. We’ve got something different for you today.

Every so often, when we’ve either run out of original things to say or are just feeling too damn lazy to write a “real” post, we plan to use this space to put forth a “top five” or “top ten” list. (This was Martin’s idea; Heather says he has obviously taken Nick Hornby’s brilliant High Fidelity, in which the narrator is an inveterate list-maker, way too seriously.)

These lists are, obviously, completely subjective and by no means intended to be definitive; they merely reflect our personal tastes and thus will probably reveal more than we really want you to know about us. They’re just supposed to be fun. (Remember fun?) At the very least, we hope they’ll serve as a jumping-off point for conversation.

So, without further ado, here’s the first list, of our ten favorite songs about Texas, in alphabetical order by artist. We certainly don’t claim that these are the best songs about Texas, or the most evocative; they’re simply our favorites. Given the richness of the state’s musical heritage, it was extremely difficult to narrow the list to only ten, and you’ll note the absence of such legendary performers as Willie Nelson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Lydia Mendoza, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, ZZ Top, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Rodney Crowell, Alejandro Escovedo, Johnny Winter, Guy Clark, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and many, many others who are arguably at least as deserving of mention as those listed below. To which we respond, with all due sincerity and humility, “So sue us!”

The Austin Lounge Lizards, “The Golden Triangle”
The Flatlanders, “Dallas”
Waylon Jennings, “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)”
Robert Earl Keen, “The Front Porch Song”
Lyle Lovett, “Walk Through the Bottomland”
James McMurtry, “Levelland”
The Sir Douglas Quintet, “At the Crossroads”
Ernest Tubb, “Waltz Across Texas”
Jerry Jeff Walker, “London Homesick Blues”
Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, “New San Antonio Rose”

What we’re reading
Heather: Woody Tasch, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered
Martin: Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews

Posted in More | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Dreaming time

Posted on September 18, 2009 by Heather

rainbow and mist over Wallace Creek, November 2008
In the mission statement for Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment (“Inspired by the rhythms of the Texas Hill Country, Madroño Ranch offers writers focused on nature and the environment a source and resource for work and rest, solitude and communion”), the inclusion of the word “rest” is no accident. Here’s why:

Joel Salatin, a farmer in Virginia, has developed a philosophy and practicum of farming that is simple and radically countercultural: use the needs and desires of the land, the plants, and the animals to direct farming decisions. As a consequence, his Polyface Farm is not only phenomenally productive, it annually increases the amount of chemical-free topsoil on the land and allows its animals to lead comfortable, healthy, chemical-free lives.

Here’s the real point of interest: the farm consists of about 550 contiguous acres, and Salatin and his family intensively farm only about 100 acres. The rest is “unused” forest; his pigs do forage for acorns there, and some of the trees are selectively milled, but about 80 percent of his land is apparently ignored.

This unused land is considered wasted by conventional farming standards, which would have Salatin cut down the forest and expand his operation, but he’s convinced that the productivity of his actively farmed land requires all those unused acres. They provide the ecological ballast for his doughty craft, helping reduce evaporation in the fields, providing wind breaks, permitting the existence of a complexity of interaction between flora and fauna that supports the entire operation.

Salatin’s insistence on the need for this apparently unproductive forest seems to have a parallel in the rhythms of sleeping and waking and the perception in our culture that sleep is time wasted, time that could be used “productively.” While some people seem to have a genetic mutation that allows them to sleep less than the general population and still function well, most of us become significantly less productive, not more, when we try to cut back on our sleep. Studies show that people become psychotic when deprived of uninterrupted sleep over extended periods; forced wakefulness is a well-known torture technique. (Any college student can tell you this.) Even so, our out-of-kilter culture continues its assault on this maddeningly “unproductive” necessity.

Just as they need to eat, to work, to worship, people—and maybe all creatures—need time dedicated not just to sleeping, but to dreaming as well. People whose sleep is subtly interrupted at the dream phase eventually develop the symptoms of those denied all sleep. (I don’t think I’m making this up.) Dreaming time, like Salatin’s untouched acreage, is necessary to the health and integrity of individual organisms and their ecosystems. I’ve come to think of the planet’s shrinking wilderness as its dreaming time. The list of activities or places declared unproductive by the market culture has grown significantly during my lifetime: time to cook, to play (if you aren’t a child, and sometimes if you are), to make music or art (if you’re not an expert), to observe a sabbath, to allow plants and animals to grow at their own pace, to make money that benefits whole communities rather than just a few individuals. By consciously using the word “rest” in our mission statement, we want to mount the ramparts and defend the borders of dreaming time.

What we’re reading
Heather: Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith
Martin: David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

Posted in More | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The wonder and power of water…

Posted on September 13, 2009 by Heather

… in a time of drought are, oddly, matched only in times of flood. The Texas Hill Country is in the grip of a drought unparalleled at least since the 1950s. This drought has been so fierce that cattle going to drink at their accustomed (and empty) tanks have found themselves mired in mud so viscous and vicious that they are unable to extricate themselves from it. Even if ranchers find the cattle before they die of dehydration, they’re often as helpless as the foundered cows, unable to do anything but shoot them to relieve their misery.

happy bullfrog in Slippery Creek, August 2009
While at Madroño we’ve been surveying parched rangeland and dropping water tables with dismay, we still have what now is revealed to be the astonishing gift of running water. At the far northwest corner of the property, our intrepid ranch manager Robert Selement and his gang of “coolies”—comprised mostly of his own children—have been cleaning out what we call the trout ponds, which have been choked with silt and vegetation for several decades.

Heather Kohout at the trout ponds, August 2009
The trout ponds are three dammed pools, each about 70 feet long and five to eight feet deep, which spill over at the end into Slippery Creek, which snakes its way southward down the valley until it flows into Wallace Creek. The water for Slippery Creek comes straight out of the rocks and is mostly routed through a series of lovingly crafted stone holding pens built in the 1970s and intended for raising brown trout.

As it emerges from its heavily shaded, ferny grotto, the water is astonishingly cold, cold enough to make you gasp if you have the nerve to sit in it. By the time it becomes shallow Slippery Creek, it’s pleasantly cool—to anyone but a trout, that is; the breeding venture petered out pretty quickly. (Much to their mutual surprise, our son Tito managed to pull a trout out of Wallace Creek about ten years ago, but that was the last one we’ve seen.)

But the beautiful stone work, the soothing sound of falling water, and the rich coolness remain. During this wretchedly hot summer, Robert keeps his workers going by working elsewhere during the (relatively) cool mornings and saving work at the trout ponds for the worst of the afternoon’s heat (hence, “coolies”). Several of the cracks in the rock that usually leak water are dry now, making the small, steady flow that rises from underground even more remarkable, its apparently modest output sustaining the life and well-being of countless creatures and plants. What a blessing!

N.B. We wrote and scheduled this post several weeks ago, anticipating Martin the Macho Tech Man’s absence as he marches across northern England. So I think we have actually caused the rain that’s been falling steadily for the last few days—sort of like leaving your car windows open. The drought is not yet broken, but it is certainly bent.

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems
Martin: Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

Posted in Place | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The naming of writing centers

Posted on September 4, 2009 by Martin


There are a lot of questions that will need to be answered before Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment becomes a reality. Among the more unexpectedly troubling was, what to call the dang thing?

Heather decided fairly early on that she didn’t want to use the word “retreat,” since it implied withdrawal and isolation, and we hoped that our program would in fact interact with and benefit the local community in some as-yet-undetermined fashion. She also decided she didn’t want to use the word “sustainability,” because it smacked of trendiness, even though sustainability is one of the things we hope the center will be all about.

We tried to think of a name that might convey something of our hopes and expectations for the place. One early candidate was the Companis Center, from the Latin source (meaning “with bread”) of the English word companion; another was the Tavola Center, tavola being the Italian word for table; a third was the Nexus Center, since we hoped it would be a place where different ways of thinking would come together, but we concluded that all of those sounded too much like office buildings.

Ultimately, we decided that the most sensible and easiest thing to do would be to stick with the name by which we already knew the place—Madroño Ranch—and add a “subtitle” that would (we hoped) explain what it was intended to be. (And yes, that is a photo of one of our madrone trees at the beginning of this post.)

So far, so good. Except that when we sat down and tried to come up with that subtitle, we found ourselves stuck again. It turns out that the naming of writing centers, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, is a difficult matter. All sorts of possibilities, most of them silly, suggested themselves—for example, Madroño Ranch: Next Door to Utopia (a reference to the fact that our closest neighbor is Kinky Friedman’s utterly wonderful Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch) and my personal favorite, Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writin’ and Wranglin’. We finally settled on Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment as the simplest and clearest alternative. Now doesn’t that sound like the kind of place at which you brilliant literary types would like to come spend some time?

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Martin: David Maughan, On Foot from Coast to Coast: The North of England Way

Posted in Place | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

It’s magic!

Posted on August 28, 2009 by Heather


It sometimes feels like the process of turning Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment from dream to reality is like trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat. What in heaven’s name do we know about bison? Chickens? Land management? Writers’ residencies? Off-the-grid architecture? Running a business? We’ve spent our adult lives raising children, writing, editing, and teaching. There’s a whole lot of nothing between where we’ve been and where we’re going.

But, like magic, remarkable people have appeared and pulled ideas and answers out of what looks to us like empty space. Some of them we’ve known for years; some we’ve met recently. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most magical of them:

There’s no way we could even contemplate this project without the enthusiasm, hard work, raucous good humor, and skills of Robert Selement, the manager of Madroño Ranch; his wife Sherry; and their children Ashlie, Brittany, and Greg. Robert can fix or build anything. Sherry can grow, cook, and take care of anything—witness their yard full of orphaned fawns, abandoned ducks, stray geese, random peafowl, countless dogs and cats, and other vagrant species too numerous to mention. Not only do Ashlie and Brittany do the heavy labor, they do it fashionably, and nobody knows the ranch better than Greg—just ask him!

Hugh Fitzsimons is the dueño of Thunder Heart Bison and a childhood acquaintance of mine whom I reencountered four years ago at the Sunset Valley Farmers Market. Hugh supplied us with our initial herd and has patiently schooled us in the ornery ways of bison, graciously fielded numerous panicked phone calls, and hospitably allowed us to invite ourselves to his South Texas ranch to see his fascinating and humane operation in action. Larry Butler and Carol Ann Sayle of Austin’s amazing Boggy Creek Farm have also been inspirational figures, as well as providers of wonderful produce and models for our own chicken-wrangling efforts.

Glee Ingram and Anne Province spent a weekend at the ranch with me hashing out the mission statement. Glee runs Growing Designs Inc., a landscaping firm in Austin, and is also the founder of Greenbelt Guardians, who lovingly care for Austin’s Barton Creek Greenbelt; her experience with the complex interactions of Hill Country landscapes and the built environment has been hugely influential. Annie is the vice president of the Academy of Oriental Medicine at Austin; she has an M.B.A. from Texas A&M and a master’s in religion from the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, and was for many years an administrator at St. Edward’s University, where she still teaches. Her business background has been invaluable to a couple of liberal-artsy flakes like us.

The inimitable Steven Tomlinson, professor at the Acton School of Business and award-winning playwright, graciously allowed us to pick his brain and ask all kinds of stupid questions over breakfast at the Kerbey Lane Café. Jim Magnuson, head of the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, was an early and unflaggingly enthusiastic fan of the idea. Divit Tripathi came out to the ranch and shared his expertise on site planning (and chickens). S. Kirk Walsh, the moving spirit behind the Austin Bat Cave, and her husband, filmmaker and writer Michael Dolan, also came out to the ranch and offered a writer’s perspective on what we were up to. Pliny Fisk, cofounder of Austin’s Center for Maximum Building Potential, and architect Logan Wagner offered inspiration in thinking of how the built environment at Madroño might mesh with the center’s mission and vision.

Caitlin Strokosch, Russ Smith, and the gang at the Alliance of Artists Communities continue to be an invaluable resource for us and many others hoping to turn similar dreams into reality. Peter Barnes of the Mesa Refuge in California and Jalene Case of the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon graciously gave us tours of their wonderful facilities and answered more of our seemingly endless supply of stupid questions.

All of these people have brought unexpected and wonderful things to our metaphorical table. It should go without saying that without their expertise, encouragement, and time, we wouldn’t have gotten even this far—but it’s worth saying anyway.

What we’re reading
Heather: Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science
Martin: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Posted in More | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Welcome…

Posted on August 17, 2009 by Martin

… to our little corner of the blogosphere! We hope to use this space to start spreading the word about Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment, which currently exists only in our imaginations, and to share our thoughts about writing, the local/sustainable food scene, the beauty of Central Texas, and whatever else crosses our fervid little minds. (We also plan to tell you What we’re reading at the end of each post.)

First, the introductions. We’re Heather and Martin Kohout, we’re married (to each other), and we live most of the time in Austin, Texas. We also own about 1,500 acres near Medina, about two and a half hours west of Austin. Madroño Ranch, named for the madrone trees that grow there, is wild, rough, steep, and rocky, but also blessed with abundant water (a rarity in the Texas Hill Country).

bison at Madrono Ranch
We’ve got a small herd of bison, whose meat we hope to begin distributing locally next spring, and a flock of chickens, whose eggs ditto. Recently, however, Heather decided that we needed to find a way to make Madroño less of a private plaything and more of a public resource. In seeking a way to combine our interests in nature, literature (we’re both writers of a sort), and the local/sustainable food scene, we came up with the idea for Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment. We hope it will be a place for writers to work and think free from the distractions and importunities of everyday life, but also to come together and share ideas, conversation, fellowship, and food—all of them fresh and healthy—around the table. We hope our mission and vision statements give a rough idea of what we’re about.

Our mission:
Inspired by the rhythms of the Texas Hill Country, Madroño Ranch offers writers focused on nature and the environment a source and resource for work and rest, solitude and communion.

Our vision:
Believing in the intelligence and elegance of nature, we envision a world in which creative thinkers devise and articulate ways of aligning human commerce and consciousness more closely with the environment that nourishes and sustains us. Madroño Ranch supports this vision by bringing people together to work, eat, converse, and rest in a setting that resonates with the rhythms of the land, water, and sky. The operations and activities of Madroño Ranch will be economically self-sustaining, to the greatest degree possible, and will exemplify balanced respect for and awareness of community and place.

We’re a long way from making this dream a reality, however, and our learning curve is steep. We hope this blog will be a good first step. We hope you enjoy it and keep coming back for news about the center as well as our random thoughts about writing, food, the environment, and other topics near and dear to our hearts. We also look forward to reading your comments and beginning what we trust will be a mutually rewarding conversation.

What we’re reading
Posted in More | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments