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

Nothing says summer like record-setting heat and drought—nothing, that is, except possibly the Beach Boys.

As this apparently endless summer drags on (and on, and on), I thought it might be fun to do a top-ten list of all-time favorite summer songs.

This post, our 104th, means that we’ve been churning out a new blog every Friday morning for two full years. Two years! We’re proud of that consistency. Some weeks, however, the pressure to produce a profound, thoughtful, beautifully crafted essay is just too much, especially when my brain feels like it might actually be boiling inside my skull. Those are the weeks we publish one of our top-ten lists, and this week was definitely one of those weeks. So, rather than trying to fight it, I decided instead to just go with that summer vibe.

Some of the ten songs listed in chronological order below are sort of mindless-bopping-around fun and others are sort of wistful-awareness-of-time-passing fun. Most of them are from the Sixties, when I was growing up; all of them, at least to me, are intensely evocative, summoning memories of the tinny sound of transistor radios and the unctuous smell of suntan lotion. Of course, nothing is as subjective as personal taste, and I’m sure you have your own personal sonic Proustian madeleines. I’d love to hear about them.

Martha and the Vandellas, “Dancing in the Street” (1964). This churning Motown classic gained unwanted (and unwarranted) notoriety in the wake of the riots of the mid- and late 1960s, when some interpreted it as a call to violent action.

The Beach Boys, “Caroline No” (1966). As I said above, you just can’t do a top-ten summer songs list without the Beach Boys. I can’t stand their early stuff, but I’ve always been a sucker for this sad and dreamy number, from Pet Sounds.

The Rascals, “Groovin’” (1967). Blue-eyed Afro-Cuban soul, a near-perfect car radio song. I feel so relaxed!

The Rolling Stones, “Street Fighting Man” (1968). Anyone wondering why the Stones were seen as a threat to civilized society should just listen to this. Even if you can’t understand the cynical lyrics, the music fairly hums with menace.

Stevie Wonder, “My Cherie Amour” (1969). In my childhood memories, this exuberant love song is always playing on someone’s car radio. It came out when Stevie was still a teenager!

Crosby Stills and Nash, “Marrakesh Express” (1969). Duuuuuude. The hippified first single from CS&N’s debut album. Do I smell patchouli?

Malo, “Suavecito” (1972). A flawless confection (sort of “Groovin,’” part two) of Latin percussion, brass, and rock.

War, “Low Rider” (1975). A sly and irresistible blast of harmonica-fueled fun from East L.A. that blends funk and Latin influences into a paean to slow cruising—remember, this came out shortly after the 1973 gas crisis.

Don Henley, “The Boys of Summer” (1984). Classic over-the-top Eighties pop, with lots of electronics and huge drums. God help me, I still love it.

Kat Edmonson, “Summertime” (2009). You didn’t really think you’d get out of here without a version of this Gershwin classic, did you?

What we’re reading
Heather: Amanda Eyre Ward, Close Your Eyes
Martin: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

This summer in Central Texas has been extraordinary even by our hellish standards. Yesterday the official state climatologist (did you even know we had one of those?), John Nielsen-Gammon, reported that July 2011 was the hottest month in Texas since we began keeping records in 1895. The historical average of days per year with triple-digit temperatures at Camp Mabry, just up the hill from our house in Austin, is 12; two years ago we fell one short of the record of 69, set in 1925. But yesterday marked the fifty-first day this year (and the nineteenth in a row) at or above 100, and the 107 recorded at Camp Mabry was a record high for the date. Since we are just barely into August, I’d say we have an excellent chance of finally breaking that 69-day record this year. Go team!

Even more distressing than the heat, though, is the drought. (Was it really only last September that heavy rains drenched most of the state?) Yesterday Nielsen-Gammon announced that we are now in the midst of our worst one-year drought ever, though yesterday was also the day that the Austin American-Statesman ran a story with the headline “Current drought pales in comparison with 1950s ‘drought of record,’” which was apparently supposed to be reassuring.

The story, by Farzad Mashhood, argues that the 1947–57 drought in Texas, which one state official called “the most costly and one of the most devastating droughts in 600 years,” was worse than our current drought. Robert Mace, the deputy executive administrator of the Texas Water Development Board, told Mashhood, “The drought we’re in is severe, but it ain’t your grandpa’s drought.”

I guess this too is supposed to make us feel better, but Mashhood goes on to note that the current drought “has surpassed the 1950s drought in two of three key areas,” and that the period from October 2010 through June 2011, during which 10.97 inches of rain fell at Camp Mabry, as opposed to the average 25.53 inches, is the driest on record. And then, toward the end of the story, Mashhood tosses in this little gem: “There’s no way to tell how long this drought will last, but meteorologists are seeing signs that another La Niña is building and are predicting another dry year in 2012.”

I think that’s the one that really got me. How the hell can you write almost 1,200 words arguing that the 1947–57 drought was worse when you don’t know how long the current drought will last?

Even if the experts are wrong about next year, the long-term prognosis is grim. According to the Texas Drought Project, “climatologists who have studied both the history and the computer models on Texas rainfall have concluded that the state is headed for a very long period—possibly marked in hundreds of years—wherein rainfall continues to decrease, and more of the state becomes desert-like….”

Having read Tim Egan’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, I am not particularly excited about the prospect of desertification. In his remarkable book Egan quotes Hugh Hammond Bennett, the iconoclastic soil conservation pioneer, who believed that “we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized.”

A few years later another far-sighted thinker, Aldo Leopold, wrote at the very beginning of his seminal A Sand County Almanac, one of the Ur-texts of American conservation, that

We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect…. That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.

Of course we’ve learned a lot about soil conservation, and conservation in general, in the decades since Bennett and Leopold issued their gloomy pronouncements. But have we really changed our essential attitude toward the land? Treating the land (and water, and air) with love and respect may be “an extension of ethics,” as Leopold wrote, but it is also a precondition of our survival. As the artist Mark Dion put it:

We have a test ahead of us, in terms of our relationship to the natural world. If we pass the test we get to keep the planet.

One of my favorite bits of Texas trivia involves C. W. Post, the Michigan cereal manufacturer who gave the world Post Toasties and Grape-Nuts. In 1906, hoping to start a Utopian farming community in Texas, he bought 225,000 acres in Garza and Lynn counties and established the town of Post City, now known as Post, the seat of Garza County.

Beginning in 1910, having noticed that rain was a scarce but precious commodity on the High Plains, Post embarked on a long and costly experiment which involved setting up firing stations along the Caprock and detonating dynamite charges at carefully measured intervals for several hours at a time. Four years and thousands of dollars later, Post, who had suffered two nervous breakdowns as a young man and who was in declining health, finally gave up. In May 1914, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Santa Barbara, California.

I’ve been thinking about Post, and also about Robert St. George Dyrenforth (who used explosive balloons and artillery in an unsuccessful attempt to bring rain to Midland in 1891), as this hot, dry, punishing summer drags on. Their efforts testify to the importance of rain, and to the credulity of humankind, especially where something we want and need so badly is involved. A century later, we scoff at the “concussion theory” of weather modification, as we do at the earlier belief that “rain follows the plow.”

Then again, desperate times call for desperate measures. If the experts are right about La Niña, you may soon be hearing a series of loud booms echoing from the Madroño hills.

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Doria Russell, Doc
Martin: Amanda Eyre Ward, Close Your Eyes