There’s a 5,000-pound ghost hovering over Austin’s Lady Bird Lake, the remains of a 35-foot cedar elm painted white and hoisted onto a shaft sunk into the water. Entitled Thirst, this collaborative project memorializes the estimated 301 million trees in Texas that have died in the current drought.

It’s a haunting sight, this desiccated tree with its roots hovering just above the water that would have kept it alive. Looking at it and its reflection in the water, I couldn’t help but wonder about ghosts, who seem to reside in that gap between sustenance and death. When you can’t see the space that Thirst creates, the space between the roots reaching for the water and the water itself, it’s easy to forget that it exists when the roots are underground as well: that gap, that amazing gap across which roots somehow get the nutrients they need to grow—or don’t. The floating tree gives room to investigate that ghost-thick space in more-than-literal ways as well, a seasonally appropriate exploration as Halloween rolls its perky little way across our neighborhood.

When Martin and I were in California last month, we went hiking through the area of the Mount Vision fire, which burned 12,000 acres of the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1995. Hundreds of charred trees—most of them Bishop pines—still stood in testament to the devastation of the fire, riding like gray ghosts on the backs of the hills galloping into the ocean.

Despite the reminder they provided of pain and loss, I was struck by their place in the busy landscape. Woodpeckers, warblers, chickadees, hawks, and coyly hidden singers flew in and around the old ghosts, nesting, feeding, resting. Some of the dead trees had melted into mulch, providing cribs for numerous other species. I read later that Bishop pine cones, which grow in tight thick clusters on the parent pine’s branches, won’t release and open except with intense heat.

Something about the scene reminded me of an afternoon I spent years ago walking through a predominantly Mexican cemetery on the west side of San Antonio, probably about this time of year, just before the Day of the Dead. Families were picnicking among the grave markers, many of which bore photos of the dead. Many of the dead were long gone and couldn’t possibly have known in life some of the generations gathered there, and yet there were balloons and fresh flowers and toddlers all bouncing through the scene. It was the first time I had seen this intentional, comfortable coexistence of the living and the dead, a reaching across the gap that usually separates them, and something lively was released.

It’s easy to romanticize that gap, to say that it’s just a Ouija board’s journey from one side to the other, or to deny that any interpenetration across it is possible. One thing I know about the gap is that it’s often delivered in a placenta of suffering.

Martin and I also just finished reading Goodbye to a River by John Graves, who died on July 31 of this year. Born in 1920 and raised in the Fort Worth area, Graves left Texas as a young man and returned in 1957 to take care of his ill father. In November of that year, when he heard that the Brazos River, the site of many adventures in his youth, was to be dammed, he decided to canoe and camp along the part of the river that he had known the best, between Possum Kingdom Lake and Lake Whitney, a trip of 200 or so miles that took about three weeks. He wrote not only about his adventures with “the passenger,” the dachshund pup that accompanied him, but also about the history of the river and its people. Graves had no patience for the myth of the noble “Anglo-Ams” (as he called the white settlers) who ousted the savage native Americans; his respect for the Comanche nation (“The People”) and other indigenous tribes was unfashionable at the time. His respect for the river and its environs was equally unusual at a time when the natural world shared the same degraded status as the Native American.

At the same time, Graves was respectful of the Anglo-Ams whom he called “the old ones.” He had a particular fondness for Charles Goodnight, one of the namesakes of the famed Goodnight-Loving Trail, whose ranch Graves passed on his journey. Graves wrote of Goodnight, “He was a tough and bright and honorable man in tough not usually honorable times, and had respect and a kind of love for the Indians even when he fought them,” which was often. Graves tells a tale so haunting about Goodnight and The People that I think it must float, almost visible, around that bend of the Brazos, whether it happened or not.

Many years after the buffalo herds—and the Comanche way of life—had been effectively extinguished, a group of reservation Comanches rode their “gaunt ponies” to see Goodnight. Goodnight and his wife had rounded up the last stragglers of the southern bison herd, the seedbed from which the current Texas state herd has grown. Goodnight knew some of the older men; he had fought them and then gone to visit them in on the reservation in Oklahoma to reminisce. They had come to ask him to give them a buffalo bull, to which, according to Graves, the crusty old rancher responded, “Hell, no.”

They may or may not have asked again, but in the end, after camping patiently for several days in his yard and on his porch, much to the amusement of Goodnight’s curious cowhands, the Comanches left with a bull, Goodnight “maybe deriving a sour satisfaction from thinking about the trouble they’d have getting it back to Oklahoma.”

But they didn’t take it to Oklahoma. “They ran it before them and killed it with arrows and lances in the old way, the way of the arrogant centuries. They sat on their horses and looked down at it for a while, sadly, and in silence, and then left it there dead and rode away, and Old Man Goodnight watched them go, sadly too.”

Graves watched ghosts all the way down the river, recalling tales of “the old ones” and their children, tales of murderous feuds and crude bravery and epic misuse of the land. Reflecting on the bloody, violent stories, he wrote facetiously: “Were there, you ask, no edifying events along the Brazos?… Didn’t sober, useful, decent people build for themselves sober, useful decent lives, and lead us, soberly, usefully, decently up through the years to that cultural peak upon which we now find ourselves standing?”

Well, yes, he says, but “neither a land nor a people ever starts over clean.” Both land and people inherit what has come before. Both leap over the amazing gap that separates one moment from the next and yet binds them together. A people’s progenitors “stand behind its elbow, and not only the sober gentle ones. Most of all, maybe, the old hairy direct primitives whose dialect lingers in its mouth, whose murderous legend tones its dreams, whose oversimple thinking infects its attitudes toward bombs and foreigners and rockets to the moon.”

Because he was willing to engage with ghosts—especially the hairy, scary, foul-mouthed ones—John Graves’s voice is still audible somewhere in the gap between the floating tree and the river, through the interstices that link the living and the dead. Within those interstices, something lively is released—though released in the fires of suffering. No wonder we don’t like ghosts. But, oddly, they can tie us to a place, a history, and to each other, so long as we have time to tell their stories in that space between the river and the roots. It’s those interstices that allow for the development of unexpected and fruitful connections.

What we’re reading
Heather: Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Martin: Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

“It is true, I came as near as is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself….” (Henry David Thoreau)

I spent last weekend in the company of six heavily armed women at Madroño Ranch.

Don’t worry; we’re not training up a secret army of Sarah Palin clones. No, these Hill Country Dianas were attending “Hunting School for Women,” our first ethical hunting workshop of the new season. Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club decided to limit the enrollment to six rather than the usual eight, since five of the six were first-timers and he wanted to make sure they received as close to a one-on-one experience with a guide as possible.

The weekend was a huge success, at least from our perspective, and while I know I shouldn’t make sweeping generalizations based on such a small sample size, I couldn’t help concluding that most women are more likely to “get” the whole ethical hunting thing, and more willing to listen and learn, than most men. (Of course, if I simply substituted “inexperienced hunters” for “women” and “experienced hunters” for “men,” that statement would be equally true; perhaps the most important factor in making this school so successful was the fact that five out of the six attendees were novices, not that all six were women.) For whatever reason, though, the weekend was as far removed as possible from the boys’-night-out mentality that prevails in some hunting circles, for which we’re grateful.

The ringer in the group was our dear friend Valerie, an experienced hunter and a regular customer of Jesse’s at the Sustainable Food Center’s Saturday morning farmers’ market in downtown Austin. In addition to her hunting expertise, Valerie brought a wicked sense of humor to the proceedings; she was the one who affixed the full-page PETA ad of Sir Paul McCartney proudly proclaiming his vegetarianism to the Madroño Ranch refrigerator, just below the inspirational magnet pictured above.

Helping Jesse and the multitalented Tink Pinkard make sure everything ran smoothly were Morgan Angelone, the phenomenal Dai Due “camp chef”; our daughter Elizabeth, the assistant chef; Jeremy Nobles and Josh Randolph, the trusty guides; and our son Tito, the assistant guide.

As if that weren’t enough of a hunting vibe, we also had two residents at the ranch: Jackson Landers, a hunter/author from Virginia, and Helena Svedberg, a student of environmental filmmaking at American University who is filming him for her master’s project.

It was, in other words, a fairly bloodthirsty group. But as Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, told the guests, we provide an opportunity for them to hunt; we do not, and cannot, promise them that they will kill, or even see, an animal. In the event, five of the six guests did register kills from our blinds, and all six went home with coolers full of venison and/or hog meat.

All in all, then, we’re happily counting Hunting School for Women as a win. But coming on the heels of our second bison “harvest,” it has us (again) thinking long and hard about our somewhat vexed attitude toward meat eating.

Now, I take a back seat to no one in my appreciation of meat. Morgan’s bison burgers (a Friday night hunting school tradition), Jesse’s charcuterie, Ben Willcott’s pork Milanese at Texas French Bread—these are among my very favorite things to eat. And we happily accepted Valerie’s invitation to come over for dinner once she’s turned the 130-pound feral hog she shot into pork curry or some other delectable dish. But neither Heather nor I is a hunter; the only animal I’ve ever shot was an obviously deranged raccoon, presumably rabid, that we encountered staggering along the road at the ranch at midday on a scorching summer day several years ago.

In other words, while we certainly hope to make enough money from the sale of our bison meat to help support our residency program, and while we understand the need to control the deer and hog populations not just for the sake of a balanced ecosystem at the ranch, but for the good of the animals themselves (no one likes to see the starving individuals that result from overpopulation), we are a little, um, squeamish about doing the deed ourselves. Instead we are, in effect, allowing Jesse and Tink and Robert and the hunting school guests to do our dirty work. Does this make us hypocrites? Wouldn’t it be more honest for us to take rifle in hand and take care of this business ourselves?

Well, yes. Honestly, I don’t think I have a huge problem with the general concept of killing a feral hog, or even a deer, though I’ve been warned about the dreaded Bambi effect. (The bison, I confess, are a different story; they are so big, so magnificent, so valuable, that I’d be intimidated if I were the one required to shoot them.) What bothers me is the possibility that I might not be a sufficiently good shot, despite the numbers of beer cans and paper targets I’ve blasted over the years; I would agonize over the possibility that, due to my incompetence, the animal might not die instantly.

Of course I also understand that for us hunting would be a luxury, as it is for many enthusiastic hunters, and not a necessity; we are lucky to have other people who kill and process our food before we buy and cook and eat it. Moreover, not everyone can, or should, be a hunter; a healthy human ecology requires diversity and balance—vegetarians and vegans as well as carnivores; urban hipsters and rural rednecks; multinational corporations (well regulated, please!) and corner stores; butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. There should be room at the table for all.

That said, however, I believe firmly that every carnivore should, at some level, confront the meaning of meat: the death, blood, evisceration, and butchering that are inextricable parts of the process by which this chop or that sausage ends up on our dinner table. We’ve seen that process up close and personal during bison harvests and hunting schools at the ranch, and at the processing facility in Utopia that turns our bison carcasses into stew meat and steaks. But we haven’t actually pulled the trigger or wielded the knife ourselves—not yet, anyway. Perhaps we never will. But I hope we will always be uneasy about that fact, and thankful for the animals whose flesh we eat, and for those who allow us to do so.

What we’re reading
Heather: The Sun
Martin: Anthony Trollope, The Warden

Sometimes this whole harebrained Madroño Ranch scheme of ours seems to manifest a distinctly split personality. Last week, for example, we experienced, vividly and in close conjunction, two contradictory extremes, one exhilarating, the other sobering. The resulting psychic whiplash has left our heads spinning, or at least wobbling.

At the annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities in Chicago, which I mentioned in my previous post, we listened to and learned from and socialized with some of the brightest and most creative people we’ve met in years and, incidentally, enjoyed for the first time some of the charms of that great American city. We also got to spend some quality time with our youngest, Thea, who flew up from Kenyon College for a couple of days. Finally, as a bonus, Heather, that notorious insomniac, slept better than she had in months. Our stay in the City of the Big Shoulders left us feeling upbeat and energized, determined to come back to Texas and implement a whole new bunch of exciting ideas—some of them shamelessly stolen from others, a few of them original.

Yeah, all that was great and all, but who am I kidding? The true highlight of our Chicago experience boils down to two magical words: pork and belly. We managed to have pork belly for dinner three nights in a row. First, on Thursday night, Heather and I had dinner at Mercat a la Planxa, a glitzy tapas place right across the street from our hotel. The restaurant was glitzy, crowded, and noisy—three qualities that normally would send us screaming back out onto the street—but we got the last two seats at the bar, crowded up against the vast mirrored wall, and a sympathetic and well-informed bartender took great and gentle care of us. We ordered, and enjoyed, a number of different plates, but our favorite was definitely the tocino con cidra: pork belly in apple cider glaze with a Granny Smith and black truffle slaw on the side. Wow!

Thea arrived on Friday, and that night we went with our friend Meredith, who lives in Chicago, and five other out-of-towners to Big Star, a very hip (and very crowded) taco joint in Wicker Park. We were told there would be a 45-minute wait for a booth big enough to accommodate our group, so we adjourned to an outside picnic table at their carry-out operation next door. After a few minutes of sitting in the chilly Chicago fall air, we decided to order a taco apiece, just to, you know, tide ourselves over. Naturally, several of us opted for the taco de panza, with braised pork belly, guajillo sauce, queso fresco, onion, and cilantro. Wow!

After the first round of tacos, we waited a while longer, until we started getting cold again, and then we ordered another round of tacos. After 45 minutes, our table still wasn’t ready, and we three Texans had had enough of the cold, so Heather, Thea, and I got a cab back to the hotel. (Apparently we made the right choice: Meredith reported the next day that once they finally got a booth, it turned out to be the noisiest, rowdiest night she’d ever experienced at Big Star.)

And then on Saturday night we played hooky from the conference and opted for a family dinner, so Heather and I decided to take Thea to Mercat, where we once again had the tocino con cidra, among other dishes, thus completing our Pork Belly Tour of Chicago.

On Sunday morning, while Thea headed out to meet a couple of Kenyon friends, Heather and I had brunch at Eleven City Diner, a massive operation on South Wabash that a friend had assured us would offer an authentic Jewish deli experience. After a half hour wait for a table, we chowed down on massive sandwiches (a Reuben for Heather, brisket for me), followed by the shared indulgence of a thick slab of apple pie à la mode. Wow!

With all this meat on our minds and in our bellies, then, we flew back to Austin on Sunday night, only to haul ourselves out of bed at 4 a.m. Monday morning to drive to the ranch in time for our second bison “harvest.” This time we took three animals, under the watchful eyes of the state inspector and an observer from Animal Welfare Approved, from which we’re seeking certification. This harvest wasn’t quite as shocking as our first one, in January, but it was still a stark reminder that the meat we sell (and eat) is, at bottom, inextricably bound up with death.

Robert was the man with the rifle, but his daughter Ashlie, his friend Other Robert, and Other Robert’s son Travis were also there to assist. It was a beautiful morning, and the bison had thoughtfully assembled just where we needed and wanted them. Robert lined up all the necessary vehicles: the big new ranch truck, the refrigerated trailer, and the bulldozer with which he would hoist the carcasses off the ground to be bled and then into the trailer.

Robert’s an expert shot, and we’d been through this before, but it’s still a pretty nerve-wracking experience just to watch, let alone be the one pulling the trigger. The responsibility is immense; no one wants these magnificent animals to suffer, so each shot (one per animal) must be precisely aimed. On top of that, Robert had the pressure of having the state inspector and the AWA observer watching carefully—not to mention us, his employers. But he was, as always, up to the task: three times the rifle cracked, and three times one of the great creatures toppled instantly into the dust. It’s a sight that still disconcerts us, and I pray it always will.

Loading the dead bison for the trip to the processing plant is always a challenge, but after some sweating and cursing (mostly by Travis, who had to stand inside the freezing trailer and wrestle them into position) we succeeded. Robert, Other Robert, Ashlie, and Travis piled into the truck, and Heather and I followed them the thirty-odd miles into Utopia.

After our first harvest, the old ranch truck overheated while pulling the trailer up the hill on Highway 337 between Medina and Utopia; Robert poured water from a nearby creek into the leaking radiator with an empty whiskey bottle that someone had thoughtfully tossed onto the roadside, then nursed the truck the rest of the way into Utopia. This time, thank goodness, the new, considerably más macho truck handled the even heavier load (three animals instead of two) without even breaking a sweat.

Once in Utopia, however, Robert, Other Robert, Travis, and I, along with a couple of the Mercantile workers, were perspiring heavily by the time we literally wrestled the enormous carcasses off the truck, onto the small loading dock, and then through the tiny door (a regular door, not a garage door) into the plant. It was bloody, dirty, nauseating work, but after several hours we had all three bison inside, and Robert had their three pelts loaded into the trailer for the return trip to the ranch.

This is a busy time for us: we’ve got several hundred pounds of frozen packaged meat to sell; we’re looking forward to the arrival of two more residents on Sunday; and our next “hunting school,” this one for women only, begins a week from today. But I expect the events of last week—the optimistic inspiration of the conference in Chicago and the bloody reality of the bison harvest at the ranch—will stay with us for a while.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God
Martin: Denise Markonish (ed.), Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

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

We’re now into our third year of blogging; today marks the 106th consecutive Friday that we’ve published a new installment of our musings, including three guest posts, one by each of our kids. (We hope they’ll write more.) Today’s post, however, will be our last for a few weeks, as Heather and I have voted unanimously to grant ourselves a brief sabbatical.

By the time you read this, I will have departed for another backpacking trip across northern England with my friend Bruce Bennett; our itinerary will take us some 200 miles in two weeks, from Ravenglass on the Irish Sea to Lindisfarne (Holy Island) on the North Sea. While I’m gone, Heather is hoping to hole up and work on a book project on which she’s collaborating with her fabulously talented sister, Isa Catto Shaw. For the next few weeks, then, neither of us will be producing a weekly blog post.

Duke Ellington once said, “I don’t need time, what I need is a deadline,” words that have become a sort of mantra for our blogging selves. Some weeks the ideas and words just seem to come pouring out; other weeks coming up with a thousand (more or less) coherent (more or less) words on any topic feels like heavy lifting indeed. In either case, putting together a new post every other week has been a revealing and useful discipline for each of us. I believe that our writing has sharpened under pressure (I think of Louis Howe’s advice to Eleanor Roosevelt on public speaking: “Have something you want to say, say it, and sit down”), and that we have both found resources within ourselves of which we had no previous inkling; the surfacing of these unexpected ideas and connections has been a great and unexpected pleasure. I also believe that our collaboration has been a great boon to our marriage, especially as our nest has emptied, and that each of us has discovered new ways to delight in and complement the other.

With all due respect to the Duke, though, time—more specifically, time off—is exactly what we’ve decided to grant ourselves (and you) as we all stagger toward the end of this awful summer of record-setting heat and drought.

The gift of time, and of quiet and nourishment, is exactly what we hope our residents receive from us, and pass on, in the form of creative writing, thinking, art, to a wider audience. Madroño Ranch, this beautiful place that we have come to occupy through no particular merit of our own, has been a gift of great richness to us and our family. How could we respond except by trying to share it with others? Lewis Hyde, in The Gift, writes that “when the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant.” This belief is the true underpinning of what we’re about at the ranch.

When we started this blog, in September 2009, Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing, Art, and the Environment existed mostly in our heads; at that point we didn’t even have a real Web site. Since then, and most particularly in the last eight months, we’ve made astonishing progress.

Since we harvested our first two bison in late January, we’ve managed to sell virtually all the meat—close to 600 pounds!—and have seen our herd increase to forty-three animals. We’ve also hosted six wonderful residents, with four more scheduled to arrive in the next few months, and a series of ethical hunting and fishing “schools” which have been featured in Texas Monthly and mentioned in the New York Times.

The residents who have graced us with their presence so far are an extraordinary group: Melissa Gaskill, a science and travel writer from Austin; Stacy Sakoulas, a painter from Austin; Juli Berwald, an oceanographer from Austin; Julia Clarke, a professor of paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin; Sasha West, a poet from Austin; and Jenny Browne, a poet from San Antonio. We’ve enjoyed getting to know each of them, and admire their work tremendously. But you may have noticed that all six are of the female persuasion, and based in Central Texas. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we’d love to figure out how to broaden our pool of applicants to include writers and artists from other parts of Texas (and beyond!), and also perhaps the occasional male. (Though two of the four upcoming residents are men, and one of them lives in Virginia.)

And we (by which, of course, I mostly mean our ranch manager, the amazing Robert Selement) also need to arrange our next bison harvest, and finish out the Hunters’ Cabins where residents will stay, and install the rainwater catchment tanks at the Main House, and figure out what to do about the invasive pond weed that is threatening to choke the lake, and plant the vegetable garden and orchard, and (most important of all) figure out how to make it rain, and and and….

In other words, we still have a great deal of work to do before we can declare Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing, Art, and the Environment a success—before, in Lewis Hyde’s terms, the gift is fully in motion. We hope and expect to return from this sabbatical refreshed and inspired, but until then Free Range will be on hiatus. We hope that you, Faithful Reader, will understand and excuse this interruption, and will return once we’re back up and running again, presumably in late September.

In the meantime, many thanks for reading, and we’ll see you in a few weeks!

What we’re reading
Heather: T. C. Boyle, When the Killing’s Done
Martin: H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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!)

Martin’s post last week describing the first slaughter (and I use the word “slaughter” advisedly) in our new endeavor as purveyors of bison meat elicited a comment that urged us to consider the ethical fault line (presumably) running through every conscience, that unsteady place where we find ourselves rationalizing our actions to ourselves or to whatever audience our imaginations conjure up.

Martin tried to make his/our unease clear with the post’s title: Bloody Hands. So I’m wondering once again about the ethics of carnivorocity, as visible and treacherous a fault line as abortion, euthanasia, gun control, climate change, or cloning: when you stand on one side of the fault line, it’s easy to think that the earth itself will justify you when it opens up and swallows the dummies over there, proving that you were on the right side, at which point you can stop worrying all the time, for heaven’s sake, and go on your merry way without thinking about the issue ever again.

As usual, diving into the conversations available on the internet just sucked me deeper into the murk. A defense is available for every possible position and offered with wildly varying degrees of civility: meat-eaters supporting vegans and trashing vegetarians; meat-eaters sneering at any thought of self-restriction; vegetarians and vegans calling meat-eaters all sorts of names; vegetarians acknowledging that some meat-eating is environmentally acceptable; meat-eaters acknowledging that American meat production and consumption is for the most part grotesque. What’s a utopian-minded bison rancher to think?

Serendipity, as usual, is my guide: in chasing internet rabbits down their holes, I found a momentary resting place in a review of Maggie Kozel’s book The Color of Atmosphere: One Doctor’s Journey In and Out of Medicine. After describing a flummoxing patient she had as a second-year medical student, Kozel said, “[I] devoured the answers without asking the right questions.”

Of course, if you’re obsessive the way I am, then you’ll immediately begin worrying about what the right questions are, as in, if I’m “right” then others must be “wrong.” One of the hallmarks of the debate about meat-eating and its impact on the environment or the individual soul is the array of statistics and science that each side has amassed to prove the objective superiority of its argument. I’ve been persuaded by both sides and neither side, depending on the time of day, what I’ve just read, the weather, my most recent meal, and/or the health of my family, among other random criteria.

In other words, I don’t think science and statistics by themselves allow us to ask the right questions, since apparently convincing evidence can be found to shore up either side. Eating is one of those human activities rich with multiple levels of meaning; expecting questions directed at a specific level to adequately address the full range is a little like expecting a monoculture to support the diversity a polyculture allows. Although science poses some vitally important questions when it examines the issue of meat-eating, the nature of its inquiry must ignore other equally pressing but less quantifiable questions, such as, what conditions allow a multi-species community to flourish? Does eating meat (by humans) contribute or detract from our community’s flourishment (a word coined by our friend Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison)?

I hear the howls of protest even before I finish typing this sentence: how do you measure flourishment? Who decides the standards? Invalid! Too subjective! Well, yes. That’s what makes this a fault-line issue: it addresses the limits of our humanity and so necessarily includes subjective experience. To be honest, I don’t know how to measure flourishment; I suspect you just know it when you see it. And when you see it, you’re moved to describe it, knowing that the urge will be frustrated to at least some degree because flourishment, like all fruit, is the result of such a complex interaction of elements in space and time that any description will be incomplete. And of course it’s not a steady state; it waxes and wanes as circumstances change and sometimes double back on themselves.

In this context, the question of whether meat-eating is ethical can be answered unequivocally: it depends. One of the preconditions for flourishment is a sense of justice, a perspective that includes but also rises above the immediate tit-for-tat concerns of fairness. The scope of justice includes not just humanity but the earth itself—and perhaps the cosmos. It unrolls over the course of history, recognizing that particular injustices sometimes take generations, centuries, or millennia to wither, even with the powerful witness and effort of prophets and their followers. As I said in an earlier post, it may be that vegetarians and vegans are living forward into a time where justice is more fully realized. At the same time, issues of fairness and justice press at us every moment in this world where the lion and the lamb cannot yet lie down together, where predators are a vital part of an ecosystem that has developed in sync with domesticated animals.

Can meat be produced and consumed in a way that encourages justice and, hence, flourishment? I think it can. There are multiple instances of communities and societies that eat meat and live within that delicate balance that looks to the long-term well-being and dignity of the system as a whole, places like Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, although there are many, many others. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.) There are multiple instances of communities and cultures flourishing without eating meat, most notably for the purposes of this post the Hindu cultures whose vegetarian cuisines I eat with great pleasure. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.)

Likewise, there are communities and cultures that eat meat without flourishing, including most of the industrialized world, where concern for short-term profits and their consequent incitement of unrestrained appetite smother any hope of flourishment under mountains of animal excrement and anguish. Those places that encourage us (in the industrialized world) to measure the value of food in one way only—cheap is best—smother flourishment. Food is at the center of family, of community, of myth, of life. To reduce its essence to a single component is to denature its multivalent nutritional value.

Back to the ethical fault line, that place we stand uneasily, knowing that we may be swallowed: may those of us who recognize the fault line join hands—bloody or not—across the chasm and help each other seek the firmer footing of justice as our foundation. Flourishment will surely follow.

What we’re reading
Heather: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (still!)
Martin: Rodney Crowell, Chinaberry Sidewalks

The very first fruits (though “fruits” hardly seems the right word) of our very first bison harvest are ready to sell, but getting to this point has been a long and sometimes frustrating process. The last stages of that process were both harrowing and, in a dark way, fascinating; squeamish sorts may want to stop reading here. “Meat is murder,” the Smiths sang in 1985, and whether or not you agree with them, it is undeniably a bloody business.

The harvest took place on Monday, January 24. We’d been both dreading and looking forward to it, and planning for it, for months; Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, had ingeniously cobbled together a refrigerated trailer to haul the dead animals to Mercantile Meat, in Utopia, to be turned into packages of meat, and we had long since chosen the two young bulls, the bison equivalent of obnoxious adolescents, who would be the first to go. Despite all the planning, though, the reality of assuming responsibility for the death of so large and magnificent an animal was more than a little intimidating.

Early on that beautifully clear but chilly Monday morning Heather and I drove up to the flat near Robert’s house, where the herd had gathered. There we met Robert, Meat Inspector Mike, and Robert’s buddies Robert (whom I will henceforth call Other Robert) and Keith (whom I will henceforth call Not Robert), who were there to assist. We all gathered in a circle while Heather read a prayer she’d written for the occasion, which I suspect disconcerted several of those present. Then Robert, Meat Inspector Mike, and Not Robert climbed into Robert’s Chevy Tahoe with Robert’s .270 rifle while Other Robert, Heather, and I kept a safe distance.

A few minutes later, it was over. Two rifle shots shattered the stillness of the morning, and after each, even before we’d finished flinching, 1,500 pounds of bison was dead on the ground. This was the moment we’d been waiting for, and fearing, and the magnificence and sorrow of it were overwhelming. Both deaths were instantaneous and humbling, and strangely intimate; all the world seemed somehow to have narrowed to this short stretch of dirt road; other places, other people, were unimaginable. Robert, Other Robert, and Not Robert worked quickly and efficiently to bleed the first carcass and load it into the trailer, and we turned our attention to the second.

At this point things got really interesting. We knew that bison tend not to scatter when they hear gunfire or see one of their number fall; in fact, frequently the other members of the herd gather around the victim, curious about what has happened to him or her, or perhaps paying their last respects, before getting back to business as usual. But this time, the head bull went over to the second carcass and repeatedly butted and pawed at it, determined to revive his fallen comrade.

This was a problem, since we were not particularly interested in arguing with nearly a ton of angry bison. By yelling and waving, we convinced him to back off a few feet, just far enough so that we could go to work on the carcass, but Robert kept one eye on the angry bull (and on Heather, who had appointed herself the designated angry-bull-shooer). He glared at us throughout the process, but kept his distance.

With both carcasses safely inside the trailer, which had been set to minus-ten degrees, Robert, Other Robert, and Not Robert climbed into the cab of Robert’s pickup and our little caravan set off for Utopia, some thirty miles away.

All had gone about as smoothly as we could have hoped to this point, but we encountered some metaphorical bumps on the road to Utopia. As Robert’s pickup was hauling the laden trailer up FM 337 west of Medina, smoke started pouring out from under the hood: a blown radiator fitting. They limped to the top of the hill, where they found a couple of empty whiskey bottles at the side of the road and, after coasting down the other side, filled them with water from Mill Creek which they poured into the overheated radiator.

Thankfully, the truck made it the rest of the way into Utopia—a little later than we’d planned, true, but it made it. After Robert backed the trailer up to the tiny loading dock we had to drag the dead bison out of the trailer, across the loading dock, and through the tiny door and into the plant—not an easy undertaking, and one which required the combined efforts of Robert, Not Robert, Other Robert, and me, as well as Joe, the owner, and a couple of plant employees. When we were done, I had blood on my hands literally as well as figuratively.

After all our efforts to honor and respect the death of the bison, the way in which they entered the plant seemed disrespectful and undignified. But necessity is a mother, as we say at our house, and it was a tremendous relief finally to have them there.

When we got back to the ranch, we were still a little stunned by the morning’s events. It had already been a long day, and we were still a little unnerved by the magnitude of what we had seen and done (or, more accurately, caused to be done). And we know we still have a lot of work ahead of us; actually figuring out how to sell several hundred pounds of bison meat is way out of our comfort zone. (We’re hoping to sell all of it wholesale, and only in the Bandera/Kerr County area.) But we feel like we’ve taken a major step.

After witnessing a bison harvest at our friend Hugh’s ranch several years ago, Heather wrote a poem called “Sacrifice.” The details are necessarily different, but it still captures some of what we felt:

Perhaps subsequent harvests at Madroño Ranch will become more or less routine; doubtless we’ll have a better idea of what to expect, and be somewhat better prepared. (We may even buy a more powerful pickup, one that can pull the trailer to Utopia without overheating.) But I pray we never completely lose the profound sense of awe and, yes, sorrow that attended this first harvest. May we never lose the full awareness of what we do and have done. May we remain humbly thankful for the life—and death—of these magnificent animals. May I always remember the blood on my hands.

What we’re reading
Heather: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Martin: Roy Bedichek, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist

Recently, like many Americans, I’ve been thinking about the issue of guns in civil society. The tragic shooting in Tucson certainly focused attention on the topic, as did a story on National Public Radio that identified the United States as the source of most of the guns being used by cartels in the Mexican drug wars, a story that aired days before we visited friends whose ranch is just a few miles from the Rio Grande. But other, more personal circumstances also got me thinking, like the three different episodes of gun violence, or the threat of gun violence, occurred during the past semester on the college campuses (2,000 miles apart) where two of our children are students. And all this happened before our first bison harvest at Madroño Ranch this past Monday, in which two 1,500-pound animals were felled by single shots from a .270 rifle.

Full disclosure: I don’t own a gun myself, although we have a gun safe well stocked with rifles and shotguns at the ranch. (They mostly belong to our son.) My grandfather taught me to shoot with a pellet gun, an activity which he oversaw carefully and I enjoyed mightily. I still take pleasure in target practice and found, the one time I tried it, that shooting skeet was a fine way to while away an afternoon. I don’t hunt and don’t expect that I ever will, although I have no objection to ethical hunting. I’ve thought that it might be wise to have a pistol when I wander around the ranch, in case one of the dogs riles up a pack of feral hogs and brings them back to me. My fear of shooting my own dog is sharper than my fear of rampaging pigs, however, and I remain pistol-less.

While there’s been no change in the number of guns I own, my thinking about guns has changed considerably over the last few years, to wit: I’ve concluded that there’s a difference between urban guns and rural guns. (Yes, yes, hold your applause.) A gun is a necessary tool on a ranch or farm. I’m very grateful that Robert, the ranch’s redoubtable manager, is an excellent shot. If the bulls we harvested this week felt any pain, it was less than momentary; they were dead quite literally within a couple of seconds.

And then there’s the issue of self-defense. A friend recently told me about an encounter he’d had on his remote South Texas ranch with an armed and heavily tattooed non-English-speaking trespasser he suspected of being a member of the fearsome MS-13 gang. My friend didn’t have a firearm at hand, but fortunately, after a tense exchange, the trespasser left. “I’ve never felt so naked,” my friend said. I understand: I, too, would have wanted some clothing in that situation.

And yet, and yet… we recently saw and thoroughly enjoyed the Coen brothers’ adaptation of True Grit. That is, Martin saw it; I had my hands over my eyes during several violent scenes. Even so, I loved the movie. At the same time, I made a new connection: imbedded in the myth of the American West is the image of the lone gunman, meting out swift and violent justice. No amount of regulation is going to smother the breathe from that compelling image.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for intelligent gun control. I’ve never felt so naked as the day that a student opened fire on the UT Austin campus a block from the room where our son Tito was in class. But I emphatically would not have felt more clothed if, as a bill passed by the Texas Senate in 2009 proposed, his fellow students been permitted to carry concealed handguns. Guns do not belong on campuses. Or in the hands of the mentally ill. Anyone who wants to own a gun has a responsibility to register, and law enforcement agencies should be able to trace every gun to its owner. Anyone who wants to buy an automatic or semi-automatic weapon should have to jump through a lot more hoops than a weekend hunter does. Gun shows should be heavily regulated. But the image of that lone, justice-seeking gunman is more powerful than any regulation. Did I walk out of True Grit disgusted by its glorification of violence? Of course not: I loved it, even as I was distressed by some of it. The story is part of my identity as a westerner, as a Texan.

On Wednesday, as I was wrestling with this post, Martin received a membership solicitation from the NRA. I suspect that the trigger for this unlikely offer must be the fact that he recently purchased from Amazon.com a copy of Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting, the introduction of which was written by a visiting professor of environmental perception at Dartmouth College—not exactly a rip-roarin’ shoot-’em-up. If I’m correct, the NRA’s tracking mechanisms qualify as spooky at best, and maybe terrifying, but also revelatory of a mentality that refuses to see any kind of subtlety or gradation of perception.

Here’s the opening salvo of that membership solicitation: “Your constitutional right to own a gun is under attack by hundreds of anti-gun politicians, global gun ban diplomats at the U.N., militant anti-hunting extremists, radical billionaires and the freedom-hating Hollywood elite.”

The letter consistently associates freedom with gun ownership; restricting gun ownership equals restricting personal freedom. “Remember: the NRA is the one firewall that stands between our Second Amendment rights and those who would take our freedoms away.” Freedom, in this view, has nothing to do with national service, with love of country and fellow-citizens, with restraint or knowledge or self-discipline.

I visited the NRA website and found it even more appalling than its fear-mongering letter. Of the assault in Tucson, it says: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this senseless tragedy, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, and their families during this difficult time. We join the rest of the country in praying for the quick recovery of those injured.” There was no condemnation of the gunman who perpetrated the senseless tragedy. There was no call for self-examination. There was no exhortation to the faithful to adhere to any code of responsibility or ethics. I found nothing that encouraged gun-owner restraint or training, or an acknowledgment of the enormous social responsibility that comes with owning a gun.

I did find a persistent paranoia that encourages NRA members and sympathizers to view strangers as threatening and potentially aggressive. I did find—even as someone with a sympathetic view of some gun use—a willful and destructive distortion of that figure so many Americans love: Rooster Cogburn, the courageous gunman who takes the law into his own hands and then rides off into the empty landscape. Many of us love Rooster, yes, but his place is in the mythic past, not in the increasingly urban present.

I know and respect—and even love—individual members of the NRA; my grandfather was one of them. I went to its site in hopes of finding something to change my mind about gun control. But I left loathing the rhetoric the NRA has adopted in recent years. (In this regard, I highly recommend Jill Lepore’s excellent article “The Commandments,” about the way various groups, including the NRA, have sought to interpret the Constitution, in the January 17 issue of The New Yorker, and thank our daughter Elizabeth for bringing it to my attention.) To encourage people to think that their fellow citizens are their enemies is surely to unravel the careful work of the Constitution, which recognizes the precarious balance inherent in a federalist system, a balance requiring trust, self-restraint, and mutual good will among its participants. So while calls for legislation are important in curbing American’s extravagant gun violence, they aren’t enough: we need to call the NRA’s violent distortions of the Constitution to account. Maybe guns don’t kill people: maybe it’s NRA rhetoric that kills people.

What we’re reading
Heather: Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ
Martin: Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

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