“… most ranchers and farmers in the West care as much for the health of their land, air, and water as any member of the Sierra Club.” (Mark Dowie)

This was the second September in a row in which we decamped for two weeks to Point Reyes Station, California. The town, with a population of about 350, is in western Marin County, an hour north of San Francisco; it lies at the foot of Tomales Bay, which separates the Point Reyes peninsula from the mainland, and is a gateway to the Point Reyes National Seashore, some 70,000 acres of pristine beaches, rocky cliffs, historic dairy farms, redwood and eucalyptus trees, and tule elk. It is one of the most beautiful parts of a beautiful state, popular with hikers, kayakers, campers, horseback riders, and mountain bikers.

Point Reyes Station is also a foodie mecca, even by the rarefied standards of northern California. The nationally renowned Cowgirl Creamery is based here; the Saturday morning farmers’ market at Toby’s Feed Barn bears witness to the stunning variety and fertility of the surrounding farms and ranches; and the town features several fine restaurants, including Osteria Stellina, and a variety of enticing nearby dining options, including Saltwater, in nearby Inverness, and the renowned Hog Island Oysters, a few miles up Highway 1 on the eastern shore of the bay.

Natural beauty and agricultural plenty, plus a temperate climate: Point Reyes has it all. Even though Tomales Bay actually rests atop the dreaded San Andreas Fault, which means that there’s an excellent chance that it’s ground zero for the Next Big One, this may well be as close as we can get to an earthly paradise. All of which is by way of trying to put the controversy surrounding the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, which harvests more than a third of the state’s oysters, in some kind of context.

People have been harvesting oysters commercially in the waters of Drakes Estero, an estuary on the southern edge of the Point Reyes peninsula, for more than a century; President Kennedy signed the bill creating the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1962, and ten years later the government paid the Johnson Oyster Company nearly $80,000 for the property for inclusion in the park, offering the company a forty-year nonrenewable permit to continue operating.

In 1976, Congress passed a law designating the 2,500 acres of tidelands and submerged land of Drakes Estero as a marine wilderness effective upon the termination of that permit. In 2004, the Johnsons sold out to the Lunny family, longtime local cattle ranchers, who continued operating as the Drakes Bay Oyster Company; apparently the Lunnys assumed that the government would let them continue harvesting oysters in the estuary past 2012, even though the government told them that “no new permit will be issued.”

In November 2012, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar formally announced that he was allowing the permit to expire, though various court orders allowed the company to keep operating. Last week, however, a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. District Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the federal government was within its authority in terminating the permit. The next step is uncertain, though the company will probably seek a hearing before the full court.

The case has become something of a cause célèbre in normally mellow Marin. While the Interior Department tries to do what’s right from a national perspective, fulfilling a Congressional directive and following the letter of the law, Point Reyes Station and the surrounding rural areas are thick with hand-painted blue-and-white signs begging “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm”—hardly surprising, I suppose, given the fact that the Lunny family has been here for a century, and the general antipathy toward Big Government among small farmers and ranchers. Supporters of the company have even started a Website, SaveOurShellfish.com, which is full of populist fervor, arguing that the feds “are illegally denying Californians their rights to shellfish cultivation in Drake’s [sic] Estero” and urging people to “Join us in standing up for the People’s right to this remarkable food source!”

The company’s own Website makes much of the Lunnys’ commitment to environmentally sound practices. Its mission statement reads, in part, “All of our growing, post harvest and delivery practices are built around sound and sustainable agricultural practices with ecological responsibility and a long-standing attitude of stewardship for the land and sea that we farm.” A number of local restaurants and farm bureaus have weighed in on the company’s side. The legendary Alice Waters of Chez Panisse noted the importance of “a community of scores of local farmers and ranchers, such as the Lunnys, whose dedication to sustainable aquaculture and agriculture assures the restaurant a steady supply of fresh and pure ingredients.”

Meanwhile, critics of the Lunnys argue that they have not always lived up to their lofty claims. The California Coastal Commission charged the company with “illegal coastal development, violation of harbor seal protection measures, and failure to control significant amounts of its plastic pollution.” Various environmental groups have arrayed themselves on the government’s side. Neal Desai of the National Parks Conservation Association said that the decision “affirms that our national parks will be safe from privatization schemes, and that special places like Drakes Estero will rise above attempts to hijack America’s wilderness.” A Huffington Post story noted that the Washington nonprofit providing the company with pro bono legal representation had ties to the arch-conservative Koch brothers and was a front for the nationwide effort to open public lands to private exploitation.

It is impossible for an outsider like me to know what to make of all this; the controversy quickly becomes a morass of he said, she said charges and countercharges. Without knowing the details of the situation or the principals involved it is impossible to tell where the objective truth lies, if there is such a thing—which is, I grant you, a pretty big if. It seems, however, that each side has come to believe the worst about the other.

When I was a kid growing up in Mill Valley, Marin County was a byword for a laid-back lifestyle. Beads, patchouli, incense, peacock feathers, and—I admit it—large quantities of high-quality dope were part of the equation, as was one of the highest per-capita incomes in the country, and while it has always been easy to make fun of “Mellow Marin” (see Cyra McFadden’s The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County, for example), many people here seem genuinely committed to living in gentle harmony with each other and with Mother Nature.

Mark Dowie is an environmental journalist who lives on the western shore of Tomales Bay. In the latest issue of the West Marin Review, he writes: “I remain an environmentalist. I believe we all are at heart. But I’m a hybrid, a fence-sitter, observed with caution by ranchers and Greens alike. I’ve lost a few friends on both sides of that fence.”

He adds, “The science of land stewardship is still unfolding and it’s hard to know what’s right. But it seems clear that one right thing is communication. Close, patient, and honest dialogue between ranchers and enviros will make great strides toward right-stewardship and toward consensus in the land disputes that plague the West. Those conversations are often best had around kitchen tables.”

Given the apparent intransigence, suspicion, and bitterness on both sides, the opponents in this controversy aren’t close to sitting down at the kitchen table together; hell, they’re not even in the same building, figuratively. (Literally, it’s a different story: a block from the house we rented is a 114-year-old former livery stable with one of those blue-and-white “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm” signs on the wall facing Third Street, and in that building is the office of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, which supports the decision to close the company down.)

Perhaps I’m being childish, but I can’t help wishing, with Dowie, that the locavores and the environmentalists could find common ground. This is a special and beautiful place, and it shouldn’t be that hard to agree on the need to keep it that way. But right now “Mellow Marin” seems a little less mellow, a little more like the rest of the world, and that’s a shame.

What we’re reading
Heather: Andrea Barrett, Servants of the Map
Martin: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

For all of my whingeing about the difficulties of adjusting to life in Texas, even after thirty years here, I know I’ve had it pretty easy, especially compared to the nineteenth-century settlers who endured almost unimaginable hardships while trying to claw a tenuous living out of the deceptively thin Hill Country topsoil. For one thing, I speak the same language (more or less) as the natives. For another thing, those natives aren’t actively trying to kill me—well, with the exception of the occasional jackass in a pickup speeding down MoPac. Finally, and arguably most important of all, I live here after the invention of air conditioning.

Many of those Hill Country settlers were German immigrants, and they and their descendants have played a prominent role in the region’s history over the last century and a half. I learned something about them when I started working at the Texas State Historical Association back in the mid-1980s, as my initial assignment was writing entries on Gillespie County for the Handbook of Texas.

I knew little to nothing of Texas history at the time, but I had always enjoyed our occasional day trips to the charming little town of Fredericksburg—people actually spoke German in the shops and restaurants!—and leaped at the opportunity to learn more about it. Perhaps inevitably, the more I learned, the more fascinated I became.

Here’s the one-paragraph version: In the mid-1840s, the Adelsverein, an organization founded by a group of German nobles to promote colonization in Texas, shipped over more than 7,000 settlers, most of them peasants. The first Europeans in what is now Gillespie County arrived in 1846, when a group of 120 German settlers led by John O. Meusebach established Fredericksburg on Barons Creek and Town Creek, near the Pedernales River. The little community thrived and became the county seat when the legislature created Gillespie County in 1848. Two years later, the population of the town had grown to almost a thousand; in that same year, three-quarters of the 1,235 whites in Gillespie County were of foreign extraction, almost all of them German.

Though little remembered today, surely one of the most remarkable was Christian Althaus, one of the first doctors in Fredericksburg. (The first was Wilhelm Keidel.) While I myself didn’t write the Handbook entry on Althaus—that honor fell to the Barbara Donalson Althaus, who obviously had a more personal connection with her subject—I’m cribbing from it shamelessly in this post.

Johann Christian Althaus was born in Erndtebrück, Westphalia, and served as a medic in the Prussian army before emigrating to Texas. He sailed from Antwerp, Belgium, on the York, arriving in Indianola in 1846 and making his way to Fredericksburg by the time town lots were distributed the following year. Also in 1847, he married a fellow immigrant, Anna Maria Elisabetha (Elizabeth) Behrens; they eventually had seven children. Initially, doctoring seems to have been at best a part-time occupation for Althaus; he also worked as a saddle-maker and as an Indian agent at Fort Martin Scott, two miles east of town, though in the 1850 census he was listed as a carpenter.

Althaus seems, like many of his fellow German settlers, to have cultivated a friendly relationship with the local Indians. He was one of the signers of the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty, which virtually eliminated fears of Indian attacks, and he eventually learned several Indian dialects. He treated Indians as well as whites in his medical practice, following the advice of an Indian friend who advised him to “be friendly and never pull a gun.” (This still strikes me as good advice in most circumstances.)

After ten years in Fredericksburg, Althaus determined to try his hand at ranching. He and the family moved to Cave Creek, several miles northeast of town, where he built a two-room stone house on top of a spring in which he kept his medicines cool. (The house, still standing in modified form on Koennecke-Eckhardt Road, off Ranch Road 1631, is now part of the Historic American Buildings Survey of the Library of Congress.) Althaus, like many of his fellow Germans, opposed the “peculiar institution” of slavery and secession—an unpopular stance with many of their fellow Texans, and contributed to the legendary insularity of the Hill Country Germans—but helped organize the home guard and served as a county commissioner during the Civil War.

And all this time he was practicing medicine, too, as Barbara Donalson Althaus wrote in her Handbook entry:

He served as a community doctor until the 1880s, and his practice of medicine was carried on under many difficulties. Medical instruments were scarce; before Althaus amputated a crushed arm, he had to have the operating instrument (now at Pioneer Museum, Fredericksburg) made by a local blacksmith. He used locally grown herbs, roots, and bark to make his own medicines. When the government sent him to Bandera to treat diphtheria patients, he used medicine he made from honey, almond juice, and the bark of the blackjack tree. Thirty-four out of thirty-five people survived. Elizabeth Althaus not only raised seven children but also ran a makeshift hospital, orphanage, and shelter for wayfarers in their home. In addition she tended the farm during her husband’s trips, which sometimes lasted for weeks.

Althaus farmed and ranched and operated a dairy on the Cave Creek property until the 1880s, when he moved a few miles east. In 1883 he was among the founders of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Cave Creek, which calls itself “the oldest rural church in Gillespie County,” and volunteered to help haul the lumber used to build the church from Austin, seventy-five miles away. (At this time he was in his sixties, remember.) He died in 1915, at the age of ninety-four, and was buried beside the church he helped establish.

All in all, a life worthy of remembrance and even celebration, I’m sure you’ll agree. And a life that puts my own in useful perspective. The high in Austin today will be in the mid-90s, but I’m typing this while sitting in a comfortable chair in our well-cooled house; when I sweat, it’s usually because I choose to, either by walking Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound up and down the surrounding hills in the morning, or by going to a nearby gym. The food we eat is plentiful and healthful, almost exclusively grown by local farmers; Heather is fixing a breakfast of home-made polenta (made with cornmeal from Boggy Creek Farm) topped by a poached egg from our happy Madroño Ranch hens. I’m getting over a summer cold, after several days of pounding decongestants and expectorants.

Do I wish I were living in nineteenth-century Texas? No and hell no. But I do wish that I had had the opportunity to meet people like Christian (and Elizabeth) Althaus in person. I know I could learn much from their courage and perseverance and goodness.

What we’re reading
Heather: Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds
Martin: Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (still!)

The Chisos Basin, the bowl in which the lodge sits, is more than a mile above sea level. The only break in the surrounding ring of volcanic mountains is the Window, a triangular notch through which one can see the Chihuahuan desert thousands of feet below, and, on clear nights, the lights of Study Butte and Terlingua, some fifteen miles away. (That’s it in the photo above.) It’s no accident that the dining room at the lodge, and many of the guest rooms, look out over the Window; it is mesmerizing.

We spent the cool, sunny mornings hiking the Lost Mine and Laguna Meadows trails, which begin in the basin. On Friday afternoon we drove down to the Hot Springs Historic District and Rio Grande Village, and on Saturday afternoon we drove down to Terlingua and then on to Lajitas. We saw various flycatchers, Western and summer tanagers, Mexican jays, canyon towhees, a Say’s phoebe, a blue grosbeak, a Western kingbird, a black-footed ferret, and several rabbits, in addition to a disgruntled-looking coyote padding along the road in Rio Grande Village; we saw centuries-old pictographs and petroglyphs at Hot Springs. We ate dinner at the truly surreal Lajitas Golf Resort and Spa, at which an episode of the reality TV show Ammo and Attitude was being filmed. (No, we’d never heard of it either.)

All of this felt like pure gift to Heather and me, given the events of the last six months, which as most of you know have been hard ones for us. At the beginning of December Heather learned that the source of the pain in her left hip that had been bothering her for a couple of months was in fact a stage 4 cancer that had already metastasized to the bones in her pelvis and spine. Then her father, whose own health had been declining since the death of her mother two years ago, died a week before Christmas.

Heather’s cancer is still officially of unknown origin, though molecular analysis indicated a 90 percent probability that it was breast cancer—despite the fact that years of mammograms and, more recently, a battery of tests and scans had found no tumor.

In January, she began a regimen of four chemotherapy infusions, one every three weeks, combined with monthly infusions of Zometa, a bone strengthener developed to treat osteoporosis. At times we wondered if the treatments were worse than the disease; the chemo affected her palate to such an extent that few if any foods tasted good, and the Zometa brought on agonizing flu-like symptoms: aches, joint pain, fatigue.

Heather lost about twenty-five pounds, much of it muscle; she had always been an athlete, and the ensuing weakness, which affected her posture and her gait, was in some ways much harder to take than the loss of her beautiful hair, much as she hated that obvious and public signifier of illness. (After her hair had started to fall out, she had me shave her head, which I must say was not a duty I had ever imagined performing on my wife; after I finished the job, we joked that if she just got a few tattoos and piercings, she’d be indistinguishable from much of the rest of the population of Austin.)

Perhaps the most tiresome thing about Heather’s illness—aside from the physical effects, of course—was how boring it was. We found ourselves utterly unable to focus on anything except her illness. Events in the world outside us passed virtually unnoticed; we found ourselves unable to concentrate on anything—writing, reading, you name it—beyond the reality of illness and treatment. We were locked in the dark house of her cancer, and we couldn’t even imagine the world outside.

After her fourth chemo infusion in March, she got a break of five weeks before returning to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for testing and evaluation. At Anderson she had a PET scan which failed to find even a single lesion; she was, unbelievably, completely cancer free.

It was as if all the doors and windows of the house in which we’d been shut suddenly flew open, and we could see the sky and trees and streets and people outside. Our trip to Big Bend marked our first tentative steps back into the beautiful, messed-up, complicated world.

The Window is mesmerizing. Like any gap in any wall, any break in any symmetrical pattern, it naturally drew our eyes; we always want to see beyond our immediate surroundings, to see behind the curtain. For us, emerging from the claustrophobia of Heather’s illness, the view from the Window was a symbol of the vastness, the wholeness, that we had been unable to imagine during these last six months. But of course it was there all along, waiting patiently for us to lift our heads and look.

What we’re reading
Heather: Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil
Martin: Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

The Windy City. Hog Butcher for the World. City of the Big Shoulders. The Second City. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and Harry Caray’s “Holy cow!” Richard Daley and Mike Ditka. Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Frank Lloyd Wright and Al Capone. “Let’s play two!” and the Chicago Seven. Grain elevators and packing houses and railroad yards and skyscrapers.

That’s right, Heather and I are in windy, chilly (well, at least by Texas standards) Chicago, where we’re attending the annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities. The Alliance, based in Providence, Rhode Island, is a membership association of more than a thousand residency programs across the country and internationally, ranging from well-established giants of the field like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo to tiny, brand-new programs like, uh, Madroño Ranch.

Chicago is an iconic and quintessentially American city, despite (or perhaps because of) its myriad immigrant communities. Lacking the coastal location (though that is one big frickin’ lake!) and consequent internationalist perspective of, say, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, it is perhaps the most quintessentially American of all our great cities; famously, it was the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the accidental arrival in the Bahamas of a crackpot Italian mariner in the service of the Spanish monarchy who thought he had found southeastern Asia.

We’ve been looking forward to this conference for months, for several reasons: first, having attended several previous Alliance conferences, we knew it would be a fruitful and inspiring gathering, one that would leave us charged up and full of new ideas for Madroño Ranch; second, our younger daughter is flying up from Kenyon College in Ohio to spend a couple of nights with us in the city; and third, despite its undeniable greatness, neither Heather nor I had ever been to Chicago, unless you count the many hours I spent stuck at O’Hare Airport during my college years trying to travel from Albany to San Francisco or vice versa over the Christmas holiday break. Now that we’re finally here, we’re enjoying being in a real big city (sorry, Austin), at least for a little while, though we’re trying hard not to look like country bumpkins while we’re here.

The conference has also afforded us the chance to reconnect with other members of our peculiar little tribe who have quickly become dear and trusted friends: Caitlin Strokosch, the apparently inexhaustible executive director of the Alliance; Meredith Winer, a printmaker whose TRANSIT Residency is part of a rich cultural mix in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood; Liz Engelman, who divides her time between directing the Tofte Lake Center at Norm’s Fish Camp in Minnesota and working as the alumnae relations coordinator for Hedgebrook, on Washington’s Whidbey Island, when she’s not working as a freelance dramaturg; and Brad and Amanda Kik, founders and directors of the extremely cool Institute for Sustainable Living, Art & Natural Design (ISLAND) in rural Michigan, whose mission (“connecting people with nature, art, and community”) obviously resonates strongly with what we hope to achieve at Madroño Ranch. (At Brad’s request, I brought him a bottle of Balcones Distilling’s Baby Blue corn whisky, which is apparently unavailable in Bellaire, Michigan; we’re returning to Austin with two handsome blaze-orange ISLAND caps in return.)

The conference itself is an irresistible (to us, at least; maybe you have to be an art-residency nerd to appreciate it fully) combination of practicality and pleasure. The schedule is packed—packed, I tell you—with fun and thought-provoking stuff. Austin’s own delightful Sara Hickman performed at the opening reception on Wednesday night. (The proceeds from her new compilation CD, The Best of Times, benefit the Theatre Action Project, where both of our daughters have worked.) The keynote speakers include Alex Kotlowitz, author of the bestselling There Are No Children Here and coproducer of the new documentary The Interrupters; Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway; and Audrey Niffenegger, visual artist and author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. The breakout sessions to which we particularly looked forward included “Engaging Local Communities: Artist Residencies and the Relevance of Place”; “Earned Revenue and Artist Residencies”; “Supporting a Creative Practice: Solitude, Solidarity, and Social Engagement”; “Taking Stock: Outcome, Assessment, and Measuring the Unmeasurable”; and “Where Art Meets Earth: Integrating Arts, Ecology, and Communities,” led by our buddy Brad.

During the past couple of weeks we sometimes wondered whether we could really afford the time to come to Chicago, especially since it meant missing the Texas Book Festival, one of our favorite annual events in Austin, and since, after flying back to Austin Sunday night, we’re going to have to be on the road at 5 a.m. on Monday morning to make it out to the ranch in time for our second bison harvest. But we’re glad we came. We couldn’t pass up the chance to visit with and learn from old friends and new—not to mention the chance to see Thea, and to explore a new and fascinating city.

What we’re reading
Heather: Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
Martin: Denise Markonish (ed.), Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

This is a bird-and-bison-intensive kitchen sink of a blog post; even Martin’s most focused editorial ministrations will be of no avail in trying to flush out some kind of narrative thread. To lend it at least an illusion of coherence, I decided to title it “Field notes from Madroño Ranch.”

* * *

Every April the barn swallows and purple martins return to the ranch; the barn swallows tend to congregate at the Lake House, and the purple martins tend to congregate at the Main House. They all inhabit the fabulous mud nests constructed by the swallows: how do they do they build these elegant constructions with no hands? Under one of the eaves of the Main House there are probably sixty or seventy condo units, many currently filled with fledgling martins and swallows. The business of feeding all these babies keeps the parents very, very busy, swooping their great athletic loops in search of insects.

The swallows have constructed one nest on a tin light fixture on the ceiling of the breezeway outside the Main House front door. Every summer I have to train myself not to turn that light on when I head to the garage or down to the Chicken Palace at night, since it panics the nest’s inhabitants. This year’s fledglings will probably be gone by the time you read this; they’ve already learned to fly from and return to the nest, and their three bulky adolescent bodies fill the sturdy little construction to overflowing. Last week, a little late putting the chickens up in the evening, I headed down to the Palace with a flashlight and thought to look up at our nesting guests. Both of the parents were draped across the top, like a too-big feathery lid on a small pot, protecting their babies from night dangers and getting a little rest after chasing mosquitoes all day for their wide-mouthed brood. I know anthropomorphism is out of fashion, but it was a sweet, intimate scene.

* * *

As we near the end of the bison calving season, we’ve had eight calves on the ground so far and are hoping for two more. Unfortunately, one calf has died, and we don’t know why. Robert and Tito (who’s working at the ranch until the beginning of the second summer session at UT) noticed something unusual about the calf’s head after it was born but couldn’t get close enough to see what the anomaly was, and it died within a week of its birth. When we went to the spot where it died, to see if we could find any clues as to the cause of death, nothing was left except for some pelvic bones, a couple of vertebrae, and one tiny hoof. The scavengers had done their job quickly and efficiently.

The other calves seem to be thriving, despite the drought. Like almost all babies, they’re awfully cute: biscuit-colored and about fifty to sixty pounds at birth. That sounds big until you see them milling around the pickup with the grownups at cube-feeding time, a ritual that seems particularly important now that there’s so little grass. We saw one little guy come out of the melee with a very bloody nose, perhaps from a well-placed kick from a larger relative (even bison have their pecking order). It was a pathetic sight, but he seemed to recover by the following day.

Bison will eat just about any vegetable matter in a drought, unlike their more finicky bovine cousins. Our friend Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison told me recently that their herd has been eating a lot of mesquite beans and cactus. I’m not sure what ours are eating to keep themselves going; I hope it’s cedar, at least as an hors d’oeuvre.

* * *

We’ve had a steady stream of guests and residents at the ranch recently, several of whom have been enthusiastic bird-watchers, which is a real boon for me. One morning our friend Brian Miller and I went out to see who we could find flitting around. Brian, admitting that he prefers his birds to be showy, particularly hoped to see some painted buntings. It was very windy, which made for a quiet morning, bird-wise, although we got some impressive clattering from a pair of belted kingfishers and an unusually good goggle at a golden-cheeked warbler. As we stood on a little bluff above a creek whose banks are crowded with sycamores, I saw Brian peer at something through his binoculars. It was an indigo bunting so blue—ranging from mountain gentian blue at the head to almost turquoise around the tail—that Brian thought at first that it was a piece of plastic stuck up in the tree. Too blue to be true—sounds like a country song! We definitely got our show.

* * *

The cows we think are still pregnant have that fully stuffed look, especially when they’re lying down. The mama who lost her calf now has her yearling nosing at her udder again, so all the mature cows are feeling pretty protective—one of the several things that worried us about releasing the new bull into the herd. We brought him onto the ranch almost a month ago, and he’s been acclimating in the retention pen, a high-fenced area that incorporates about thirty acres. T. D., the incumbent bull, has been hanging out by the retention pen gate for weeks, rolling and kicking dust through the fence at the newcomer and then settling his great bulk where the new guy could see him. The cows have been checking him out as well. Bubba and Dixie, the llamas, who are full-time residents of the pens, looked down their long noses at the hulking arrival and kept their distance.

We’d been speculating about what would happen when we finally let the new bull (whom we’ve tentatively named T. A.) out, which we did last Sunday afternoon. He and T. D. are about the same size, but T. A. seems to be taller at the hump, with a bigger head, although he’s slimmer than T. D., who’s built like a tank. We envisioned a clash of titans and worried about blood and guts and trampled calves and crazed mama bison and ripped-up fencing; I prudently planted myself on the roof of my car (see photo above), in case things really got out of hand.

Turns out we needn’t have worried. T. D. was nowhere in sight when we opened the gate, and the first thing T. A. did after moseying out of the pen was to wander over to some nearby cedar and sycamore saplings and maul them with his horns, just to show them who was boss. Then he set off up the hill, leaving us to follow helplessly in the pickup, wondering how long it would take him to break through the wimpy fencing that separates us from our neighbors. After he abruptly veered off the road and into the underbrush (how can something that big just vanish?), we headed back down for a brief break from the scorching dry heat.

An hour or so later, we found him near the top and managed to direct him back down the hill and into the creek, where the cows finally spotted him. T. D. was lurking in the underbrush above the creek and, to our surprise, made no move to confront him. The new guy kept his tail up and hooked as the cows investigated him, although judging by his sniff-and-grin, chop-licking expression he was clearly pleased to be in the midst of so much shapely feminine flesh.

When T. D. finally emerged, it was clear that there wasn’t going to be a showdown: T. A. had so intimidated him that T. D. wouldn’t even meet his gaze. Each time the new guy approached, tail up, T. D. walked away. Each time T. A. pawed the dust or rolled, T. D. turned his back. We were all a little embarrassed for him. But breeding season is coming up: maybe the fight is yet to come.

* * *

For Martin’s birthday last Saturday, we engaged the expertise of Tink Pinkard, fly-fishing guide and teacher extraordinaire. With unflagging patience, he coaxed us into finally feeling the load of the line as it unfurled over our heads and allowed us to imagine that we were starting to get it. On Sunday morning we quit the creekside to putter around the lake in Tink’s doughty (and slightly leaky) johnboat. We actually caught a number of sunfish and a nice little bass, but mostly we caught sight of what a really beautiful cast looks like. Watching Tink with a rod in his hand was like watching a particularly eloquent sign-language speaker when you only know the alphabet; his movements were powerful, fluent, efficient. I want to talk like that.

Now I have another outlet, beyond bird-watching and rowing, for my capacity to hyper-focus. I was hoping that fly-fishing and bird-watching would be less mutually exclusive than rowing and bird-watching, but, alas, my hopes were dashed. Each time I allowed a passing bird to distract me in mid-cast, my line snarled, wrapping around itself, the rod, and, occasionally, me. I briefly worried that I might get so tangled that I would end up casting myself out of the boat and into the water. Many long-time Madroñoites have caught glimpses of The Thing, the enormous… what? fish? dinosaur? that occasionally rises from the murky depths of the lake, so I’m determined to stay focused on the casting. At least until the green kingfisher reported by one of the residents shows up again.

What we’re reading
Heather: Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages
Martin: Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (still!)

Oh, I don’t deny the existence of all that land between the Pacific and the Mississippi—there’s a reason St. Paul and Memphis aren’t oceanfront cities, right?—but I’m talking about the popular conception, the mental image, that most of us (especially us Texans) carry of what it means to be a westerner, to inhabit those arid lands between roughly the 100th and 120th meridians.

But the image we all hold of the rugged, independent loner is largely a myth. It’s an important myth, no question, and one that has exerted a powerful pull on the American imagination for well over a century; cultural icons such as Bill Cody, Teddy Roosevelt, Owen Wister, Frederick Jackson Turner, Frederick Remington, Charlie Russell, Zane Grey, Tom Mix, John Ford, John Wayne, Gene Autry, Louis L’Amour, Roy Rogers, Clint Eastwood, Larry McMurtry, Robert Duvall, Cormac McCarthy, and Jeff Bridges have all contributed to or partaken of it (or both). Many of us, especially in Texas, like to imagine ourselves as squint-eyed, leathery cowboys (or, depending on your gender, cowgirls) living freely under the vast western skies, far from the corrupting influences of cities and corporations and government bureaucrats. That’s why so many of us still drive steroidal pickup trucks and wear cowboy hats and boots, even though we live in cities.

This myth has also, I believe, been a dangerous and tragically destructive one, because it has allowed us to confuse selfishness with self-reliance, and place individual liberties and property rights above collective obligations.

The result has been a century and a half of ecological exploitation and devastation: overgrazing, strip mining, erosion, aquifer depletion, clear-cutting, fracking, and so on. “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons,” wrote Garrett Hardin (a native Texan!) in his famous essay “The Tragedy of the Commons.” “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.” According to Hardin, multiple individuals, each acting independently and rationally, will inevitably destroy a shared resource—which, in a nutshell, is pretty much the story of the settlement and development of the American West. As historian H. W. Brands points out in his American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900: “Individualism had sufficed to develop the East, but individualism would fail in the West.”

One of the first to see this truth about the West was the one-armed Civil War hero John Wesley Powell, who in 1869 led the first expedition to float the Colorado River (the other Colorado River, as far as Texans are concerned) through the Grand Canyon.

Powell’s exploits are among the most spectacular, and quintessentially western, in American history. And yet the man himself saw clearly—more clearly than many who have come after him—that the ecological realities of the region meant that the type of individualistic culture that prevailed in the well-watered East would be a catastrophe in the West.

In his 1876 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, Powell argued that settlement of the American West required a sort of enlightened communalism in apportioning the land and water; specifically, “the residents should have the right to make their own regulations for the division of the lands, the use of the water for irrigation and for watering the stock, and for the pasturage of the lands in common or in severalty.” Individualism (as manifested in dammed streams and fenced rangeland) would lead irrevocably to disaster. Mark Reisner summarized Powell’s views in Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water: “Powell was advocating cooperation, reason, science, an equitable sharing of the natural wealth, and—implicitly if not explicitly—a return to the Jeffersonian ideal.”

But the government ignored Powell’s pleas for new policies adapted to the peculiar conditions of the West in favor of Business As Usual, and the Jeffersonian ideal—a republic of smallholders, the proverbial yeoman farmers, free from the domination and corruption of big-city corporations—morphed into the grotesque belief that every individual has the right to exploit and devastate his or her own land regardless of the long-term effect on it, or on his or her neighbors, however defined.

The final irony of the myth of Western individualism is that many of the region’s defining characteristics—the long stretches of interstate highway, the massive hydroelectric dams, the vast national parklands—are in fact the product of collective action, as manifested in the kind of Big Government that cynical politicians like to condemn. The traditional western insistence on private property rights and individual liberties thus flies in the face of historical fact; is, perhaps, a reaction to it. Most of those cowboys whose rugged independence we so admire? Well, they were actually working for enormous corporations. Here’s Brands again:

To a far greater degree than in the East, settlement in the West reflected the influence of corporations and other institutions of capitalism…. Westerners were rugged individualists chiefly in their dreams (and the dreams of their Eastern and foreign admirers); in real life they were likely to draw paychecks for digging in corporate mines, plowing corporate fields, or chasing corporate cattle.

In his 1992 essay “Coming into the Watershed,” the Beat poet, Zen Buddhist, and environmental activist Gary Snyder makes the same point:

Many a would-be westerner is a rugged individualist in rhetoric only, and will scream up a storm if taken too far from the government tit…. [M]uch of the agriculture and ranching of the West exists by virtue of a complicated and very expensive sort of government welfare: big dams and water plans.

Well, yippee ki-yay. If the myth of the old West is useless, not to say downright pernicious, then we need to envision a new West: a West where courage and determination manifest themselves in generosity, innovation, stewardship, and the acknowledgment of limits both personal and ecological—a West, in other words, like the one envisioned by John Wesley Powell, marked by “cooperation, reason, science, an equitable sharing of the natural wealth.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages
Martin: Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (still)

As regular readers of this blog know, we believe firmly in the pleasures—and, even more, the importance—of cultivating the kind of deep knowledge of people and landmarks and events, present and past, that only comes with long residence in a particular locale. Neither Heather nor I is a native Austinite, but we’ve lived here almost thirty years; and while the city has changed and grown dramatically during that time (not always in ways we’d wish), most of the time I can convince myself that I have a pretty good sense of it.

In reality, however, there are plenty of places in Austin where I feel, well, out of place. My knowledge of the city has been largely restricted to just a few neighborhoods: West Austin and Tarrytown, the UT campus, downtown, South Congress. Though I drove a Meals on Wheels route in and around the Rosewood neighborhood for many years, and though two of our kids now live east of Interstate 35, most of the traditionally African American East Side remains a blank spot on my mental map of Austin. I can still discover pockets of mystery and surprise within the city, places of unexpected incongruities and collisions.

I discovered one such place a few years ago while driving my Meals on Wheels route. In recent years, young white families and individuals have been moving east of the interstate in search of affordable real estate. As a result, the East Side has become hip: sort of the local equivalent of Brooklyn. But there are still parts of the East Side that have resisted gentrification, that still look much the way I imagine they did fifty or more years ago. Among them was the home of a Hispanic family, at least three generations living in what I can only describe as Third World squalor, right there about a mile from the proud dome of the State Capitol. Most of the paint had long since peeled off the exterior of their house, and the floor had great holes open to the dirt underneath; I could detect no air conditioning and no heat, but no matter the temperature the air in there had the same sour smell of hopelessness. And yet this was not the Third World at all; almost literally next door were newly renovated bungalows and spiffy new condos with Vespas or Priuses parked in front. The juxtaposition was utterly breathtaking, and utterly heartbreaking.

I discovered another such place, considerably less depressing, just a few days ago, when my friend Richard convinced me to join him and our mutual friend Dick at the Little Elmore Reed Blues Band’s weekly gig at TC’s Lounge on Monday night. The band was scheduled to go on at 10, so Richard suggested we meet at our church (rock and roll, baby!) at 9; he would drive Dick and me over to the club, since neither of us had been there before, and he even promised to leave after the first set so we’d be home by midnight.

Austin likes to bill itself as “The Live Music Capital of the World,” which has always struck me as a wee bit pretentious, though the city does support a rich and thriving musical culture. Among the legendary local musical assets, both current and departed, are performers like Willie Nelson, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Alejandro Escovedo, Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Asleep at the Wheel; venues like Antone’s, the Armadillo World Headquarters, the Continental Club, the Cactus Café, Threadgill’s, and the Vulcan Gas Company; and the annual South by Southwest conference and ACL Music Festival. But this musical bounty is largely wasted on Heather and me.

Oh, we attended a modest number of shows over the last thirty years (I more than she, given her aversions to loud noise, smoke, and crowds), but more recently, as middle age has crept up on us—or, more accurately, leaped upon us unexpectedly, howling like a banshee—we’ve left the live music to the younger crowd and the occasional eccentric friend like Richard. I think the last show we saw featured Los Lobos and a reunited True Believers at Antone’s. It was amazing: amazing because we love both those bands, amazing because it was perhaps the loudest concert we’ve ever attended, and amazing because we couldn’t believe that the guy puking copiously into the garbage can next to us managed to stay more or less upright for so long. What fun!

In part as a result of such experiences, I’ve spent years turning Richard down when he asks me to come out with him to hear music. I always feel guilty about saying no, though, so when he told me about this outing, I took a deep breath and said yes—I’m still not sure why. But once I said yes, I was fully committed; I even took an afternoon nap, as Richard suggested. (My usual bedtime is 10 p.m., and things can get pretty ugly the next morning if I’m up much later than that, as our dogs and cats expect us to be up and moving by or before 6 a.m.)

TC’s Lounge is an unprepossessing (perhaps “ramshackle” would be a better word) spot on Webberville Road. It serves beer and setups, though most of the crowd bring their own bottles of harder stuff. The Little Elmore Reed Blues Band’s Myspace page describes it as “the last real old school blues dive remaining in Austin” and adds,

Bands work for love and tips. There’s no air conditioning and heat is provided by the mass of human bodies. There’s not a level surface in the place and when the joint gets to rockin’ you can actually feel the building move. It’s perfect.

The dirt parking lot was still mostly empty when we arrived. We paid the five-dollar cover charge and grabbed three seats at a table near the front; I soon discovered that my jeans were virtually glued to the metal folding chair by some sticky substance I hadn’t noticed before sitting down. (A part of me really wanted to know it was, but another part of me really didn’t want to know.) Dick bought the first round: club soda for Richard, who’s a teetotaler, and beers for the rest of us.

Soon the room began to fill up with young hipsters (I was the youngest of our trio, and we three senile delinquents substantially raised the median age), and eventually the members of the band straggled in. The regular lineup includes founder Mark Hays (a veteran of the Gary P. Nunn, Smokin’ Joe Kubek, and Guy Forsyth bands, among many others) on drums; Pat Whitefield (a founding member of the T-Birds and a member of the first house band at Antone’s) on bass; Willie Pipkin (South Austin Jug Band) and Mike Keller (Marcia Ball, Double Trouble, the T-Birds) on guitar; and Katrina refugee Dale Spalding (Snooks Eaglin, Canned Heat) on vocals and harp. It turned out that Keller was absent tonight, but Eve Monsees, a young guitar-slinger, sat in for him. Whitefield stopped by our table to shake Richard’s hand, and I took the opportunity to tell him that our mutual friend George Jones (no, not that George Jones) had asked me to say hello.

The music was great; these guys know their stuff, no doubt about it. They played a few originals, but mostly covers of the great old blues and R&B classics like Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell,” Little Walter’s “My Babe,” and the Falcons’ “You’re So Fine.” The dance floor filled up almost immediately: there were a few couples doing some serious swing dancing, and also a lot of really, really drunk people attempting what Dick delicately called “vertical copulation.” I was particularly amused by one young gent, somewhat the worse for wear, who was dancing with a statuesque young woman, in somewhat better shape; his hands kept sliding south of the border, so to speak, and every time they did she’d patiently reach back and move them back up to a more acceptable latitude. Dick pointed out an attractive blonde who drained most of a bottle of Woodford Reserve bourbon straight from the bottle during the first set, and during the break, as were leaving, I noticed another young woman, in a red and white cocktail dress, wandering the parking lot swigging from a bottle of red wine. The air was a thick fug of amplified music, sweat, booze, and lust. This, I realized, is probably as close as most of us in this predominantly white crowd would ever come to the kind of legendary Mississippi Delta juke joint so beloved of scholars and fans in search of the “authentic” blues.

Two well-dressed young women, one blonde and one brunette, came and sat down at the next table; a slightly older, but even more beautiful, woman soon joined them. Eventually, the blonde stood up and asked Richard (the only unmarried member of our trio) to dance, and when the first set ended he went and sat with them. At this point Dick and I wondered if we should start thinking about alternate means of transportation, but with a concerted effort we were able to drag him away from those Jezebels. (No, no, Richard, no need to thank us; that’s what friends are for.) I finally made it home, bleeding only slightly from the ears, by about 12:15.

A couple of days later, Dick commented, “Well, that was just great, from a musical standpoint, an ambience (pardon the expression) standpoint, and especially a people-watching (girl-watching) standpoint. I’m up for going back.”

Me, too, Dick. Even though Tuesday morning was kind of rough, I suspect it does a body good to wander off the map every once in a while. Just please don’t tell Richard I said so.

What we’re reading
Heather: Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn
Martin: Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur

West Texas has been much on my mind recently, in part because Heather and I drove down to San Marcos a couple of weeks ago for a panel discussion marking the opening of an exhibition entitled Big Bend: Land of the Texas Imagination at Texas State University. And then last week came the news of the devastating Rock House fire that ravaged Fort Davis, which I followed on the Marfa Public Radio website.

Shocking and shameful admission: Heather and I have never been to Big Bend National Park. Oh, we’ve been to (and through) west Texas—far west Texas, I mean; the part of the state west of the Pecos River, pinched between Mexico to the south and New Mexico to the north, but maybe excluding El Paso, which is after all sort of a city—many times, and I even became a sort of long-distance expert on the region during my tenure at the Texas State Historical Association—more on that below—but that embarrassing gap in our knowledge remains.

The Trans-Pecos, for all its stunning beauty, can seem a place of natural indifference, if not outright hostility, to humankind. In Pecos, Terrell, Reeves, Brewster, Jeff Davis, Culberson, Presidio, Hudspeth, and El Paso counties, the towns are few and far between, and always seem just a little, what shall we say, conditional. The dried-up remains of Orla, on Highway 285 between Pecos and Carlsbad, New Mexico, make the point hauntingly and emphatically, as does the Rock House fire: people can live out here, but not easily, and not for very long.

Yet even here, unexpected signs of civilization can spring up out of nowhere. My earliest experience of the Trans-Pecos came thirty years ago as Heather and I were driving from San Francisco back to San Antonio, the last leg of our epic road trip the summer after we graduated from college. We were driving through the vast emptiness of Terrell County on Highway 90. I was behind the wheel, with my foot to the floor of Heather’s little Toyota Tercel, as we swept around a long downhill curve, when a state trooper’s car suddenly appeared on the shoulder, radar gun pointed straight at us.

“Oh, shucks!” I exclaimed, or words to that effect, as I slammed on the brakes in an attempt to bring us back under, or at least close to, the speed limit—honestly, who obeys the speed limit out there?—but it was too late. He flagged us down and instructed us to follow him on into Sanderson, where he took us to the justice of the peace’s house.

We entered through the kitchen door, and the J.P., who turned out to be a very friendly woman, seated us at her kitchen table and served us lemonade, charged me some nominal fine (the trooper had rather sportingly knocked about ten miles an hour off the ticket), and sent us on our way with a cheery warning about all the other speed traps between Sanderson and San Antonio. All in all, it was about as pleasant an experience as paying a speeding ticket could possibly be—and we made it the rest of the 275 miles to San Antonio without receiving another ticket.

My next memorable experience of the Trans-Pecos came years later, on a family trip to Colorado, when we stopped for the night in Fort Stockton at the end of a long, exhausting day of driving. We checked into the first motel we saw (one of those generic places with a big central atrium), smuggled Phoebe the dog into the room (I believe I carried her under my jacket), and, too tired and dazed to uphold our usual standards, Heather and I told the kids they could watch TV and have fried chicken for dinner. (For years thereafter, whenever the subject of a family vacation came up, the kids would say, “Let’s go back to Fort Stockton!”) Again, an unexpected outpost of civilization—high culture! haute cuisine!—in the midst of America Deserta.

This trip took place at just about the time when, while working for the Texas State Historical Association, I was given the assignment of writing many of the entries on the Trans-Pecos for the New Handbook of Texas. I still remember some of the remarkable things I learned in the course of my research:

• No matter where or how long you drive in the Trans-Pecos, you will inevitably come to a highway sign that says “El Paso: 330 miles.”
• The population of Jeff Davis County increased an astonishing 300 percent between 1950 and 1970—from two to six.
• The legendary swimming pool at Balmorhea State Park, in Reeves County, is home to a rare species of freshwater man-eating shark.
• The Marfa lights are actually an elaborate practical joke left behind by the crew of the classic Texas epic Giant after they finished filming on location in 1955.
• Marathon, in Brewster County, was the site of a battle between the Comanches and the Athenians in 490 BCE. The upset victory by the visiting Athenians (the Comanches had been favored by two touchdowns) marked the beginning of the rise of classical Greek civilization.

Three years ago, Heather and our daughters and I spent Easter weekend in the Trans-Pecos. The weather was unseasonably cold (Lizzie, on spring break from her Massachusetts college, was outraged; she had imagined a week of tropical languor after the rigors of a New England winter, and instead spent most of the trip shivering in 35-degree temperatures), but we had a wonderful time. Among the highlights were a “star party” at the McDonald Observatory outside Fort Davis and a drive down Ranch Road 2810 into the Chinati Mountains southwest of Marfa. Imagining what it would be like to be stuck out there with multiple flat tires and no cell phone reception, we chickened out and turned back before we made it all the way to the river, but it lived up to our friend Bob Ayres’s recommendation as possibly the most beautiful drive in Texas.

I offer all of the above to explain why I considered myself something of an expert on the Trans-Pecos when we went to the panel discussion at Texas State last week. Moderated by Jake Silverstein, the editor of Texas Monthly and a former reporter for Marfa’s Big Bend Sentinel, the panel included local writer Joe Nick Patoski and his collaborator on the handsome University of Texas Press book Big Bend National Park, the photographer Laurence Parent, author in his own right of Death in Big Bend: Real Stories of Death and Rescue in Big Bend National Park; Barbara “Barney” Nelson, an English professor at Sul Ross State and the editor of God’s Country or Devil’s Playground: The Best Nature Writing from the Big Bend of Texas; and Marcos Paredes, a legendary ranger who recently retired after twenty years at Big Bend National Park. How could these people possibly know more about the region than I?

All kidding aside, the discussion was lively and informative and marked by the panelists’ obvious mutual respect and love of west Texas. Each of the panelists presented a strong case for the significance and beauty of the Big Bend and the Trans-Pecos. Patoski argued that any meaningful discussion of the area has to include the portions of Mexico just across the Rio Grande as well; the river, he noted, is less a barrier dividing Texas from Mexico than a force that draws the two sides together. (Isn’t that a lovely way to think about the border?) Parent movingly recalled his mother and father impressing upon him at an early age the importance of our national parks. Nelson and Paredes spoke eloquently of the need to protect Big Bend from the sort of crass tourist-industry commercialization that has grown up around—and marred—so many other national parks.

Together, all four painted an irresistible picture of this, the remotest and most mysterious part of the state, and merely strengthened our resolve: someday soon—maybe this fall?—we’re going to make it to Big Bend. And then we’ll celebrate with a big bucket of fried chicken.

What we’re reading
Heather: George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (still!)
Martin: James S. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend (still!)

I was surprised, while reading Rebecca Solnit’s fascinating Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, to realize that I probably know substantially more about the history of Texas than I do about the history of my native San Francisco.

Of course, this realization should hardly have come as a surprise. After all, I’ve lived in Texas for more than half my life, whereas I left California at age seventeen, for college, and never moved back. Moreover, I spent more than half of my time in Texas working for the Texas State Historical Association, mostly researching and writing local history.

Still, it was a little bit of a shock. Despite my recent purchase of a spiffy pair of Lucchese boots, I still frequently think of myself as a Californian, not a Texan. Texas is where I live, but California is where I’m from, and that can be a significant difference. Especially in the South (and Texas is in many ways as much a part of the South as of the West), where you’re from—your “people,” your frame of reference—is still as important as who you are. But while I retain vivid, detailed mental and sensory images of San Francisco and the Bay Area—the sights, the sounds, the smells, and, yes, the tastes—I don’t really know how and why they came to be. In Texas, on the other hand, I learned a lot of the stories before learning the places they explain.

Solnit’s book presents both foreground imagery and background narrative. It is a series of maps and essays which manifest unexpected symmetries or contradictions: “Monarchs and Queens,” which simultaneously maps butterfly populations and sites significant in the history of the city’s queer population; “Poison/Palate” (above), which juxtaposes some of the Bay Area’s leading “foodie” establishments (Chez Panisse, Niman Ranch, etc.) with nearby mercury mines, oil refineries, chemical plants, and other sources of toxic pollution; and so on.

In reading and looking at this beautiful book—and it really is beautiful—I have learned a lot of local history, and also experienced that rush of nostalgia that accompanies any return, be it literal or literary, to your homeland. Just seeing the names on the maps, the extant and (especially) the long gone—Playland at the Beach! the Surf Theater! Winterland! Zim’s!—brought on a shiver of memory worthy of a Proustian madeleine. As Solnit writes, “the longer you live here, the more you live with a map that no longer matches the actual terrain.” She notes that the residents of Managua, Nicaragua, long after an earthquake that destroyed much of the city, “gave directions by saying things like, ‘Turn left where the tree used to be.’”

Similarly, my San Francisco is a palimpsest, an accretion of layers and memories, things and people living and dead, real and fictional—Emperor Norton and Sam Spade, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Harry Callahan, and countless others. All of them were and are integral parts of where I’m from.

But that very notion of being from someplace is somewhat vexed. Locals say “I’m from here” all the time, but to me saying you’re from someplace usually implies motion, absence, a sense that you’re no longer there—that you’ve left it behind. In the United States, we have traditionally defined ourselves as an entire nation of people who are from somewhere else. My mother was born in Italy and my father in Brazil (though his parents were born in Scotland and Austria), which makes me about as American as you can get. After all, even the so-called Native Americans who were here before European contact originally came from somewhere else, presumably across the Beringian land bridge in pursuit of mammoth and bison.

In a fundamental sense, then, ours is a culture built on the sense of limitless opportunity awaiting us just beyond the horizon, just over that next rise. We have never stayed put, geographically or socioeconomically: the Louisiana Purchase, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, the California Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the Dust Bowl all pushed or pulled the new nation westward, across the continent, and we still seem to believe that, if we really make a hash of things where we are now, we can always pick up and move on to some uninhabited place (traditionally further west) where we can start fresh.

And some astonishing transformations did indeed take place out on that peripatetic frontier: a poor boy from Kentucky by way of Indiana and Illinois turned into Abraham Lincoln, an itinerant river pilot and printer’s apprentice from Missouri headed west and turned into Mark Twain, and so on. Even after Frederick Jackson Turner famously proclaimed the end of the frontier in 1893, our restlessness did not cease. In the twentieth century, the promise of economic opportunity and escape from Jim Crow drove the great migration of African Americans from the South to the north and west. Our current president, a son of Kansas and Kenya who was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, is merely the most recent testament to the persistent power of the American notion of mobility, whether upward or westward.

Back to the Left Coast. In Infinite City, Solnit writes, “A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place; it compounds many versions without quite reconciling them, though some cross over to live in multiple worlds—in Chinatown or queer space, in a drug underworld or a university community, in a church’s sphere or a hospital’s intersections.” This is inarguably true of San Francisco, or for that matter any city; I would only add that it is no less true of a farm, a rural village, or any place that has borne the prints of generations of human existence. Like, say, Madroño Ranch.

All maps, even ones as imaginative and beautiful as the ones in Infinite City, are by definition reductive. They represent reality in two dimensions; we experience it in (at least) three. Maps, in other words, lack depth, and depth is what makes us and our world real. We don’t inhabit places flatly (though we certainly inhabit plenty of flat places!), but in depth, both geographical and temporal.

That depth is what we hope to gain personally at Madroño Ranch and also encourage in others, but we know we cannot simply will it into being. It grows and accumulates over time, and with care and effort; it is, in fact, a kind of rote learning, going over the same ground again and again, literally and metaphorically, until you have worn a track into the surface. John Muir noted that “Most people are on the world, not in it”; one of our hopes, now that our Austin nest is empty and we’re at the ranch more often, is that we can gradually learn to live and move in, not just on, this small part of the planet.

This is why Heather has grown increasingly ambivalent about travel; the world is full of fascinating places, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of our own. We hope it’s not (or not just) provincialism, but we want to be here.

What we’re reading
Heather: Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Martin: Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

Cowboy boots are on my mind today. And (heh) on my feet.

Of course cowboy boots come with so much symbolic weight it’s a wonder I can even walk in them. The cowboy is the most iconic, romantic, heroic figure in American history. Lean, laconic, and independent, he represents the way we like to imagine ourselves: tough as nails, self-reliant, unafraid of violence but guided always by a rigid code of honor. Owen Wister and Zane Grey helped establish the archetype, and Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Audie Murphy, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, among many others, elaborated it for generations of children (and adults) on screens both large and small. In an increasingly urbanized society the image of the cowboy may seem quaint and anachronistic, but it can still exert a powerful pull.

All of which only partially explains why I just bought myself a pair of Luccheses—NV1503s in waxed and burnished olive leather, if you must know, as in the photo above—and why that’s such an unlikely thing for me to have done. Allow me to explain:

I have traditionally had a sort of ambivalent attitude toward cowboy boots. I have tended to associate them more with a certain kind of urban Texan—plump, loud, razor-cut hair, wearing pressed jeans and a white shirt, driving a too-big pickup—than with the rugged individualist of the bygone frontier. And then of course there’s that whole unfortunate association with a certain professional football team based in Dallas.

Moreover, my feet are famous throughout the tri-county area for their extraordinary width and flatness. They are the Great Plains of footdom. My footprints resemble the round tracks of a hippo rather than the delicately scalloped tracks of most humans.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that I have a long and often painful history with cowboy boots. I bought my first pair in London, of all places, at a very trendy boutique on Chelsea’s Kings Road, during our honeymoon many years ago. (I know, I know: what kind of idiot travels from Texas to England to buy cowboy boots? All I can say in my defense is that Heather had just bought a pair, and I didn’t want to be left out. Also, I was young and foolish.) They were a sort of honey-colored suede, with white stitching, lethally pointed toes, and rakishly undercut heels. They were also one size too small, and way too narrow. The shopkeeper—a pox upon his cynical soul—assured me that they would stretch, which was of course utter nonsense. I probably wore them no more than twice, each time suffering horribly while they were on and requiring a great deal of assistance to peel them off my swollen feet, before finally coming to my senses and giving them away.

A few years later Heather’s parents gave me a pair of boots for Christmas. They were made of thick reddish-brown leather, completely devoid of decorative stitching, with squarish toes instead of the classic pointy ones—in other words, they weren’t really cowboy boots at all. They were, however, the correct size. I wore them a few times, usually at Christmas parties and the like, before deciding that they were just too heavy to wear much in Texas.

But these new Luccheses fit my astoundingly wide, flat feet right out of the box, and they are lightweight enough to make me think I might be able to wear them comfortably even when the temperature is above freezing. Moreover, they are quite dazzlingly beautiful: fairly restrained, as cowboy boots go, with decorative contrast stitching on the shaft and more subtle stitching on the insteps, though the toes are sharply pointed.

How often will I actually wear them? I have no idea; I may ultimately conclude that they make me look more like this guy than this guy. Also, we seem to be moving into spring, and my usual warm-weather wardrobe involves shorts, a T-shirt, and Birkenstocks, with a Hawaiian shirt and sneakers for more formal occasions. Still, I like looking at them in my closet, and it’s nice knowing they’re there if and when I need them.

The bottom line is that these boots are a symbol of my willingness to take on the trappings of my time and place. We live in Texas, and we own a ranch; we are Westerners, in other words, and we yearn to partake of the best of that heritage. I’ve made no secret of my loathing for many aspects of contemporary Texas (just ask Heather). Wearing cowboy boots is a step—a small step, perhaps, but a significant one—in my long journey toward acceptance and acknowledgment of who and where I am. This is my life, and these, believe it or not, are my boots.

Next on my shopping list: a Nudie’s suit!

What we’re reading
Heather: William H. Eddy, The Other Side of the World: Essays on Mind and Nature
Martin: Philipp Meyer, American Rust