The cliff swallows have returned to Madroño Ranch. They’ve expanded their housing development under the western eave of the Main House to several eastern eaves, one of which we can see from inside the house. We watched them build their nests, swooping down to the creek in droves and hovering, beating their wings like oversized butterflies, then soaring back to the house, landing under the eave with grace and precision, using their tails as props as they constructed—with no hands!—their elegant gourd-shaped mud nests.

Then we watched their babies poke their heads out of the nests’ mouths, opening their own mouths for food, their ever-busy, ever-graceful parents helping rid the air of the countless blood-hungry insects the recent rains have brought. I now know that the insides of these nests are also carefully padded with grass, having found a fallen nest on the porch last Tuesday morning. Also in the fallen nest were five tiny, almost featherless hatchlings, dead, and one eggshell, still improbably intact; it was so fragile that it disintegrated as I tried to pick it up. They hadn’t had time to crush their first homes before their second home crashed to the floor. The disoriented parents flew back and forth, but as I sat on the porch that morning it seemed they’d submitted to the new reality and moved on.

The swallows are a nuisance; they leave a significant mess under their nests. But I love them for their athleticism and the magical moment in mornings and evenings when they fly in mesmerizing patterns from nest to air and back and out and back again. If you sit on the kitchen stoop or stand in the driveway, you can feel as if you are the nucleus of an atom, part of something coherent and powerful, as if their trajectories were weaving some kind of electrically charged nest around you. And then you go back inside and they seem to do their chittering, beautiful work without you just fine. You weren’t the center after all, as pleasing as the illusion was.

One day during our recent trip to Big Bend National Park, we left the cool, dry air of the Chisos Basin and drove down to the Hot Springs Historic District by the Rio Grande. As we drove through the relentless desert, with not a tree to be seen, I realized that the innumerable yellow splotches I was seeing weren’t blooms from the recent rain but yuccas killed by the drought—how, I wondered, could there be a drought in the desert? The air-conditioned car suddenly felt as fragile as an eggshell.

By the time we got to the historic district, it was 95 degrees and humid, and the idea of sitting in the hot springs had lost much of its appeal; besides, they were closed due to the rains. It wasn’t quite a wash, though; we got to see the post office/store and barracks-style rooms built by J. O. Langford, a Mississippian who moved there sight unseen as a homesteader in 1909, with his pregnant wife and eighteen-month-old daughter, planning to turn the hot springs into a business. He had heard about them as he was seeking a cure for malaria in the high, dry air of Alpine, Texas. Several people had already tried to claim the place through the Homestead Act of 1862, though none had been able to meet the requirements, which included a minimum of three years residence on the property. A west Texas old-timer is reputed to have discouraged Langford: “Nothing down there but rattlesnakes and bandit Mexicans. And it’s too far away—that damned country promises more and gives less than any other place I saw.” It was an eleven-day journey from Alpine, the nearest town (now about a three-hour drive). The Langfords held out until 1912 and left, not returning until 1927. In 1942 Langford sold the property for inclusion in the new Big Bend National Park.

What were they thinking? Floods, drought, implacable sun, virtually no trees, snakes, bandits, two young children, loneliness as relentless as the sun. And yet they made some kind of living—enough to build the post office/store, the modest set of rooms for visitors, and a bathhouse (now gone) at the springs.

The next day we drove to the other end of the park to Lajitas, one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been. The road to Lajitas winds through an even fiercer landscape than the one to the hot springs, if that’s possible—the soil toasted a lunar white, virtually nothing growing. We went through Terlingua, the dusty former quicksilver mining center, now the self-proclaimed Chili Capital of the World. Another ten miles toward great looming cliffs and we found ourselves in what could have been the set of an old western, but for the lush grass at the golf resort.

Although Lajitas has been a modestly populated and popular river crossing for centuries, it didn’t get weird until the 1970s, when a Houston businessman bought and poured $100 million into it, building an airstrip for small jets, an 18-hole golf course, 92 luxury rooms, and an upscale restaurant. Not surprisingly, the place went bankrupt, but another optimistic Texas businessman bought it for $13.5 million or thereabouts. When we were there a few weeks ago, admittedly the beginning of the low summer season, the place was virtually empty. The cliffs continued to loom, and despite obviously steady watering, the golf course was beginning to turn brown under the imperious sun. The high in Lajitas yesterday was 104 degrees. What are they thinking?

On the one hand, I admire the moxie of these people who go into the vast west Texas landscape thinking they will somehow outsmart it, or at least wrest a modest living from it. On the other, I’ve become aware of the necessity in every life for submission to some other force. In Big Bend country, most people would find that force pretty hard to ignore. To quote Flannery O’Connor, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.”

In recent months I’ve found that the power of Love is as startling as the force of nature. When I found that my life was as fragile as a nestling’s egg, disintegrating as I tried to pick up its shattered pieces, something appeared, an unexpected padding, to help me into a new life. The realities of death and illness, grief and anger—the possibility that this new home will fall—never stop looming. But over time the steady swooping kindnesses have built an improbable nest in which I have been, for now (and what else is there?), protected.

Despite years of thinking and reading and analyzing, I’ve been overwhelmed by the steadiness of Love’s flow, as powerful as the wind and water eroding the west Texas vastness and almost as impersonal, a force that needs an outlet, that seeks to move where it is not. I’ve stood in the midst of the swallows’ enfolding flight and seen that it continues when I step out of it.

It’s almost harder to submit to Love because it is personal: if I were to try to return gift for gift, prayer for prayer, I would run out of time long before finishing. (Also, I would have to learn how to knit, equally unlikely.) I get why those ornery people think they can vanquish the forces of nature—Texans have fashioned themselves as the most stubborn of the stubborn. For a while I drove myself crazy when I tried and failed to respond individually to every kindness. What was I thinking? I’ve discovered recently that people I don’t know are praying for me. How can I possibly pay that back? I can’t. What can I do instead? Say uncle. Throw up my hands. Submit, give thanks as often as possible, bring some beauty into the world.

And be cautious about buying west Texas real estate in the expectation of a quick return.

What we’re reading
Heather: Joy Harjo, A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales
Martin: Gary Giddins, Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams—The Early Years, 1903–1940

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

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!)

Our friend John Burnett recently returned from a trip to Japan, one of a handful of places he’d never been in a long career as a reporter for NPR. As a specialist in the American Southwest and Latin America, he was surprised to find that both Japan and its people utterly enchanted him. When I asked him what had so appealed to him, he thought for a minute and said that “random acts of gratuitous beauty” won his heart, sending me a photo (above) of a gratuitously beautiful manhole cover to explain what he meant.

That phrase rang in my mind: gratuitous beauty. As I left Madroño Ranch the other day, I saw a pair of painted buntings chasing bugs right by a lesser goldfinch perched on a purple thistle as a redwing blackbird sang its cheerily cacophonous song from a nearby walnut tree. I had already spent part of the morning walking and had spotted birds ranging from the drabbest to the showiest: from Tennessee warblers to yellow warblers, from blue-gray gnatcatchers to indigo buntings, from shy green herons to lark sparrows to summer tanagers—and these were just the beginning of the list. It was just a little show-offy. Gratuitous.

I wondered about the extravagance of this display, especially of the males with their vivid breeding plumage. Surely they become more visible to predators as well as to potential mates as they brighten up. Apparently the trade-off is worth it, evolutionarily speaking. Being bearers of such beauty trumps the risk of being eaten.

Of course, wondering if beauty has evolutionary value isn’t very scientific. We take for granted that beauty lies in the subjective, not the objective, realm; beauty is culturally conditioned, notoriously hard to measure or pin down. We tend to think of it as a value-added category, not as a necessity for life, an evolutionary necessity every bit as muscular as the competition for survival of the fittest.

There seems, however, to be a growing body of evidence suggesting that evolutionary success depends on much more than tooth and claw; it also requires cooperation and nurture. Although this may sound like a squishy sentimental left-wing sort of idea that comes out of liberal academia, there’s even a conservative who thinks the idea has merit: this week in the New York Times, David Brooks reviewed a number of recently published books about the human imperative to collaborate. The most important thing about the research, he says, is this:

For decades, people tried to devise a rigorous “scientific” system to analyze behavior that would be divorced from morality. But if cooperation permeates our nature, then so does morality, and there is no escaping ethics, emotion and religion in our quest to understand who we are and how we got this way.

I would raise Brooks’s bet on morality as a critical evolutionary component by claiming that we, individually and as a species, also need beauty in our lives only just slightly less than we need to breathe, eat, sleep, and procreate.

One of the reasons I think this is my consistent experience of finding human-created beauty in the most poverty-stricken and dire of circumstances. In the 1970s, my family lived in El Salvador, and we had the good fortune to travel extensively through Guatemala as well. Even as a young teenager in the iron grip of self-involvement, I was struck by the beauty of the textiles and artwork we encountered in the most poverty-ridden parts of those countries. I still have huipiles I bought almost forty years ago and am still enchanted by their colors and intricate designs. If survival were a matter only of competition, what could be the point of this time-consuming and ancient art? What is the point of any art? Why do we go to all that trouble when we could expend our energy in more apparently efficient survival strategies like decimating our enemies?

I think that one of the reasons we value, and even seem to require, beauty in our lives is that we long ago learned that the natural world values beauty, and we all know that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. (I don’t really understand what that means, but it has the unmistakable ring of authority, doesn’t it?) I recently found an engrossing book issued by Trinity University Press: Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, edited by Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson. It’s a collection of essays asserting the moral imperative to protect the corpus of the earth at least as carefully as we would care for any of the technological or financial assets around which we organize our individual and corporate lives. The essays are by poets and scientists, presidents and farmers, professors and religious leaders.

The title of one essay in particular, by Stephen R. Kellert, a professor emeritus at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, caught my attention: “For the Love and Beauty of Nature.” He contends that modern humans have “lost their bearings as biological beings, as just another animal and species in the firmament of creation.” In fact, we often measure our “progress” almost directly by our alienation from our biological roots. This is true even of many of those scientists and activists whose work is environmentally directed, says Kellert; their focus on technological, policy, and econometric issues often further exacerbates this alienation, inadvertently accelerating our rush to destruction.

We preserve what we love. When an empty home burns down, people risk their lives to save old photographs. Of course, some people will try to save objects with monetary value, but in our private lives we often value what is useless in the eyes of the world. We save the things that have meaning for us, that we think are beautiful, the things to which we have intense emotional and spiritual connections. Even if environmentalists implement all of the policy currently deemed necessary to save the world, its preservation would not be assured. We have to love the world in order to preserve it. Without that entirely subjective component in the mix, lovers of technology and objective measurement can save nothing except technology.

Our cultural devaluation of the pivotal role of subjective experience in the flourishing of culture is highly visible right now. What do we chose to cut out of federal, state, and local educational budgets? The first things to go are those that value what we deem to be training in subjectivity, in the appreciation of beauty: the arts. In the move to become more efficient and streamlined, however, we teach our children (and ourselves) to undervalue the most powerful forces that will drive their movement through the economic, technological, public world: love. We will value and save what we love, and we love what we think is beautiful. Do any preservation societies rally when big-box Wal-Marts get pulled down?

Aldo Leopold, one of the twentieth century’s most fervent and judicious conservationists, developed what he called a “land ethic,” which he considered to be a moral imperative and not a luxury to be applied only in times of economic well-being.

An ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to the land presupposes the existence of some mental image of the land as a biotic mechanism. [By this I think he means “a living reality.”] We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in…. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity… and beauty of the biotic enterprise. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

We have ceased to love the natural world because so many of us no longer know it subjectively, emotionally, viscerally. Too many of us don’t know its intricacy and beauty, its drama and miraculous precision, its redundant abundance and efficiency. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: when we know—really know—the beauty of nature, we know our own beauty and thus will be saved. Teaching our children and reminding ourselves to love what is beautiful in nature is a move toward long-term survival. We love what is beautiful and preserve and nurture what we love. Gratuitous beauty as evolutionary stratagem: that’s science I can finally understand.

What we’re reading
Heather: David Orr, Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry
Martin: Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur (still)

Yum! This week has afforded me yet another in a long—seemingly infinite, in fact—series of opportunities to eat crow. Heather and I returned yesterday from a visit to our friends Hugh and Sarah Fitzsimons’ Shape Ranch, outside Carrizo Springs.

As regular readers know, Hugh and Sarah have loomed large in our efforts to get Madroño Ranch off the ground. Hugh, the dueño of Thunder Heart Bison, is our guru in all things bison; in fact, we bought our original herd of twelve animals (which has now tripled in size) from him three years ago.

But our connections with Hugh and Sarah go back much farther than that. Heather had been buying their meat at the farmers’ market for several years before picking up one of the business cards Hugh happened to set out at his booth one day. When she saw his name, something clicked.

“Did your grandmother live on Argyle Avenue?” she asked him.

Startled, Hugh affirmed that she did, and within a very short time he and Heather had determined that their grandparents had lived across the street from each other in Alamo Heights; that Heather had enjoyed many a snack of milk and cookies in Hugh’s grandmother’s kitchen; and that Heather was “Uncle Henry’s” granddaughter (“uncle” in this case being a term of friendship rather than kinship). They hadn’t seen each other for about forty years, but that shared history was the basis of a new friendship.

Furthermore, Sarah‘s brother sings in the choir at our church in Austin, and, as if all that weren’t enough, we subsequently discovered that our daughter Elizabeth and Hugh and Sarah’s daughter Evelyn were not just cabin mates, but actually shared a bunk during a summer at Camp Mystic, many years ago.

The connections, in other words, are various and deep. But even though Heather had been down to Shape Ranch several times to observe Hugh’s bison operation, this week’s visit was my first. Heather had told me that the place was gorgeous, but Heather is after all a native Texan and therefore not to be trusted on such matters.

Now, you have to understand that Carrizo Springs is in South Texas. Flat, scrubby, harsh South Texas, of course, couldn’t be more different from the hilly, wooded, green Central Texas Hill Country which is home to Madroño Ranch. Never mind that most of my experience of them has been restricted to what you can see from a car at seventy miles an hour; as far as I’m concerned, flat places like the central California valleys, the Midwestern corn belt, and, yes, South Texas are to be avoided, or at least passed through as rapidly as possible en route to hillier, and ergo prettier and more interesting, places: the Bay Area, the Sierra Nevada, the Rockies, and the Hill Country.

On Wednesday afternoon, the landscape grew steadily flatter as we made our way from Madroño down to Carrizo Springs via Medina, Utopia, Sabinal, Uvalde, La Pryor, and Crystal City, and all my old prejudices were kicking in, but I was prepared to be a good sport about it, for Hugh and Sarah’s sake.

We drove south out of Carrizo Springs on FM 186 and, a few miles after the pavement gave out, turned in at their front gate, and I began to taste that familiar corvine tang in my mouth. The land was not in fact perfectly flat, but softly undulating, yielding sudden and unexpected vistas. And it was undeniably scrubby, but the winter mesquite and sage and rust-colored seacoast bluestem and purple, pink, and yellow prickly pear were undeniably lovely.

And the birds! Heather is the birder in the family, but even I was amazed by the number and variety of the birds we saw: caracaras and pyrrhuloxias and cardinals and thrashers (both brown and curved-billed) and green jays and white-crowned sparrows and one big blue heron and assorted hawks and kestrels and… well, you get the idea.

After driving several more miles of labyrinthine dirt roads seemingly devoid of physical landmarks, other than the occasional oil pump jack, we somehow arrived at Hugh and Sarah’s house, which is shaded by Arizona ash trees (virtually the only real trees on the place). Hugh and Sarah suggested we dump our bags, grab some beverages, jump in the pickup, and drive up to a picnic table that is their favorite place to watch the sunset. We pulled up and found an amazing 360-degree panorama, with the sun sinking low in the western sky. Sarah told us that when the sun sank low enough, we’d be able to see the mountains of Mexico on the horizon.

Sure enough, as the sky turned tropical-drink orange and pink the mountains came into view. And then, a few minutes later, from the opposite direction, we saw the bright orange full moon rising behind the windmill. Then, to complete the jaw-dropping array of effects, the coyotes—at least two different packs—began serenading us. Clearly, the only thing to do was to return to the house and enjoy dinner and conversation, and still more red wine, around the fire that Hugh built on the back patio.

Yesterday a front blew in, cold and gray and misty, while we were on our morning walk with Hugh and Sarah; the sharp, wet wind made the brunch that followed, of scrambled eggs and sausage and sliced avocado and grapefruit and lots and lots of strong hot coffee, even more welcome. In some ways, with its unnerving, disorienting sameness and plentiful thorns and scarcity of water and shade, this is not a particularly gentle or hospitable land, but yesterday afternoon, when Heather and I finally left to begin the long drive over to I-35 and up to Austin, it felt, just a little, as though we had been expelled from the Garden of Eden. And, believe me, those are not words I ever imagined myself writing about South Texas.

Hey, could I get a side of fries with that order of crow, please?

What we’re reading
Heather: Jon Fasman, The Geographer’s Library
Martin: Suzannah Lessard, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family

Recently we and our three kids went to Martin’s native San Francisco to help celebrate his father’s eighty-fifth birthday. The five of us spent an afternoon walking along the cliffs of Point Reyes National Seashore, where the ground was springy, the wind was fierce, and in some spots along the trail we pushed through wildflowers up to our shoulders. Hawks wheeled through the cloudless sky, elk sunned in the lees of the cliffs, and the ocean’s shining hide swelled and stretched like the flanks of a well-groomed, self-satisfied, and very large cat. At one point, our son Tito turned to us and said incredulously, “You mean we had a choice between this and Texas?”

Yes, well. Despite Martin’s entertaining recent post on how he has come to terms with living in Texas, he has spent much of his time in the Lone Star State not entirely convinced that civilized life is possible here—certainly not from May to October, and frequently not after elections. I grew up spending summers in Colorado, where despising Texans is a competitive sport, and as a teenager and young adult I also got to spend time in places of unsurpassed beauty such as the highlands of Guatemala, the Swiss Alps, the Masai Mara, Paris, and the Canadian Rockies. And yet I love Texas and can’t imagine living anywhere else. Time for that apologia, son.

Some of my love of Texas is just an old bad habit. Many fine writers have noted how people stubbornly cling to the smells and sounds of their childhood, sensations that undermine the idea that time moves only into the future. Much of my first decade was spent in the then-unbroken woods just north of the San Antonio airport. The uncanny whinny of the screech owl, the languid moan of the mourning dove, the overpowering sweetness of mountain laurel at Easter, the loneliness of the north wind on a clear winter day: each time I experience these now I’m reminded that the girl who was gripped by them forty years ago is still inside me. She isn’t gone, despite all appearances to the contrary.

There’s more to it than nostalgia, though. Texas tells stories about itself, some of them true. While I know that many find this self-conscious tale-telling irritating—maybe even pathological—I find it sort of comforting. So maybe we actually lost the battle of the Alamo. So maybe the Texas Rangers weren’t a bunch of ethically ripped superheroes. So maybe every cowboy doesn’t have the soul of a poet. But there seems to be a (nearly) conscious yearning for the power of myth to work among us with these stories. Of course, there are stories Texans tell about themselves that I loathe: bigger is better, we should each of us be our own posse, it’s manly to kill animals with automatic weapons and spurn the meat—but this is a place that recognizes the power of stories to shape reality.

One of the stories told over and over in multiple variations is the power and variety of the land itself. One of my favorite signs is on Interstate 10 at the Louisiana-Texas state line. It reads something like this: Beaumont, 20 miles; El Paso, 937 miles. While I have lived only in Central Texas—in some ways the easiest part of the state to love—I’ve learned to respect and admire many of the landscapes between the ends, from east to west and from north to south. I make no claims to anything but the cursory knowledge that comes from road trips involving grumpy children—me and my siblings years ago, and more recently our own children. My parents drove us to Colorado every summer through the Panhandle; Martin and I chose instead to make our annual pilgrimage by way of Fort Stockton and then north through the Pecos wilderness. One hot summer day the gas tank light came on when we were halfway through the hundred inhospitable miles between Pecos and Loving, New Mexico. The prospect of running out of gas here at midday with a dog and several children concentrated the mind wonderfully and caused me to sweat through my clothes despite the car’s air conditioning. (We managed to make it to the next filling station.) We passed by multiple examples of the land’s indifference to human striving: we often threatened to abandon our squabbling children in Orla, an oil ghost town baked into dusty submission, if they didn’t behave. (It didn’t help.)

We always planned our route back to Austin through Balmorhea and Fort Davis and, inevitably, a thrashing summer thunderstorm would force us off the highway—or so we assumed, since we couldn’t even see the highway through the mud on the windshield. But before the storm hit, you could see the Guadalupe Mountains to the west, and when we made it to Marfa and the high grasslands, we—well, some of us—were exhilarated by the wind and the shadows, by the pitilessness and delicacy of the Chinati Mountains.

At the other end of the spectrum, I love the featurelessness of the south Texas brush country, an admittedly perverse passion. In March, the mesquite bloom neon green. At least as many things will sting, bite, or poison you as won’t. As our friend and mentor Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison says, there are two seasons in South Texas: January and summer. At the rare watering holes, there are birds of remarkable beauty: green jays and hooded orioles and American widgeons. Once in April, on my way back from Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass, I drove through a migration of yellow sulphur butterflies that extended for dozens of miles. When I got back to Austin, probably a dozen people pointed out the grotesque beauty of my Suburban’s grille, which had become an extravagant collage of dead butterflies.

I’m leaving a lot of verses out of my Texas love song, but the last verse here has to be the one about the Hill Country. Loving the Colorado Rockies as much as I love any landscape, I’ve been trained to seek out views, to climb and pant and strain and exult upon reaching the summit. Well, the Hill Country upends that paradigm. Once you make it to the top of the hill—at least at Madroño—the landscape sinks into an unexpected anonymity. The personality of the Hill Country is in its draws and canyons, the intimate interstitial places where oaks and pecans crowd together, and great slabs of limestone create undulating walls and pools, and ferns and cedar sage grow with the demure confidence of cloistered beauty. In February, the draws ring with the slurred chatter of hundreds of intoxicated robins and waxwings. The draws also snarl with the movements of feral hogs, coyotes, and mountain lions, and vibrate with the possibility of rattlesnakes on sunny shelves, the clatter of unseen hooves in caves and cedar brakes, and the songs of maddeningly invisible birds that suddenly move, shine, and disappear again before they can be named. The draws protect and expose, invite and terrify. You want stories? You’ll find them here.

So, son, I’ll be happy to spend time in California, especially in August, even if the locals make fun of how I talk and where I’m from. But I’ll always want to come home.