“Oh, it’s all very well to talk,” said the Mole, rather pettishly, he being new to a river and riverside life and its ways.

A river, even one as dammed and sluggish as the Colorado in Austin, is a great place to ponder the power of nature, the insignificance of man, and other Very Deep Thoughts. Humans have always loved rivers; our bodies, after all, are 60 to 70 percent water. Rivers connote baptism, cleanness, purity, replenishment, power, life itself. When I stand in or next to running water, I find it impossible not to think about travel, and possibility, and change; the water now passing by me probably began its journey hundreds of miles away, and that journey probably won’t end for more hundreds of miles, in the ocean. Rivers are simultaneously linear and cyclical, a conundrum I find inexplicably pleasing. (And how can a river “empty” into the sea if it’s always full of water?)

When I was a wee lad, my favorite book was The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame’s masterpiece of pastoral Edwardian anthropomorphism, featuring Mole, Rat, Badger, and of course the insufferably self-important Toad. Much of the book concerns itself with life along an unnamed river (presumably the Thames, on the banks of which Grahame passed a happy childhood in the village of Cookham in Berkshire), which appealed to me immensely and perhaps helps explain my subsequent fascination with rivers.

Here are some of my personal favorites: the Rio Grande, the Blanco, the Mississippi, the Hudson, the Columbia, the Arkansas, the Roaring Fork, and the Frying Pan; the Thames and the Derwent; the Tiber and the Arno, into which I scattered my mother’s ashes many years ago.

But the river that is closest to my heart, both physically and emotionally, is the Colorado—the Texas Colorado, I mean. We Austinites take an inordinate pride in our river, even though it’s much the smaller of the two by that name in the American Southwest. Indeed, the Colorado and its various natural and manmade tributaries and manifestations (Barton Springs, Hornsby Bend, Lady Bird Lake, Lake Austin, Lake Travis, et al.) are the true center of the city, more than the Capitol or the University of Texas or even Scholz’s.

People engage in all kinds of activities in and on and beside the river: canoeing, kayaking, rowing, jogging, walking, biking, fishing, and picnicking. (And those are just the legal ones!) Even those who don’t spend a lot of time on or near the water (like me) take comfort in knowing that it’s there.

To return to The Wind in the Willows, I’m definitely more Mole than Rat (or at least Mole early in the book, before he’s learned to love the river). I’ve never been much of a swimmer, and Jaws pretty much put me off the ocean for good.

I’ve never been much for water sports, either, but a couple of months ago Heather (who’s a dedicated rower) and our daughters decided to try stand-up paddling, which has become very trendy in Austin. They had a great time, and Heather and Thea have tried to go once a week since then, but until this week I had stubbornly resisted their invitations to join them. Having missed those initial lessons, I knew how frustrated I’d get when Heather and Thea went skimming on ahead of me, standing gracefully on their boards, while I struggled (and occasionally failed) to keep my balance, legs jittering like a sewing machine as my board bobbed helplessly in their wake.

Perhaps I was addled by the early summer heat, but I finally took the plunge (haha!) on the Fourth of July. Of course the lake was crowded with rowers and canoeists and kayakers and stand-up paddlers, all of whom looked considerably more competent and confident than I. We headed off from the Texas Rowing Center dock and up the river to Red Bud Isle; I paddled out from the dock on my knees, and finally, tentatively, managed to stand up on the board. I fell off a few times, and I never did figure out how to get any speed going—Heather and Thea got up there and back way ahead of me, and on the way back, with the wind hitting me in the face and my arms feeling heavier with every stroke, I felt like I might actually be moving backward (which hardly seemed fair, since I was supposed to be heading downstream). I began to wonder if I would ever actually make it back to the dock on my own, or if they’d have to send a motor launch out to tow me in. When I finally made it back and staggered onto the dock, I tried not to sob openly in relief.

“Are you all right?” Heather asked me.

“Oh, yeah,” I gasped, smiling wanly.

I was, of course, lying. At that moment I wanted to curl up and lie down in an air-conditioned room and never, ever go outside again.

A few days later, however, there I was again, standing knee-deep in the river on the north side of Red Bud Isle, facing Tom Miller Dam, with a fly rod in my sweaty hands. Heather and I had decided to try our hands at fly-fishing without the beneficent guidance of Tink Pinkard. Soon after we set up and started casting I looked over and saw that Heather was taking her rod too far back on her back cast—one of the few observations about anyone’s casting that I’m even halfway competent to make—and, like a dummy, said something about it to her. I regretted opening my mouth even before I’d finished speaking.

She glared at me and said, with some asperity, “Would you like me to tell you what you’re doing wrong too?”

Needless to say, I backed off and shut up. Later she apologized for snapping at me, saying that hearing criticism from men, especially men who were no more competent than she, concerning athletic endeavors was one of her particular bugaboos.

I couldn’t blame her, of course; I probably would have reacted exactly the same way, or worse, had she said something similar to me. But of course she never would; I’m the one afflicted with Male Answer Syndrome, after all.

My faux pas aside, the casting went pretty well, at least for a while, but I had gotten no action on the fly I was using (some kind of tan thing that Tink had given us) and finally decided to switch over to a black woolly bugger. (My friend Bruce, a recent convert to fly-fishing, had been going to Red Bud Isle three nights a week, and said he’d caught several fish on woolly buggers.)

I nipped off the old fly and started to tie on the woolly bugger, but my extremely limited knot-tying skills suddenly deserted me, and I couldn’t for the life of me tuck the end of my leader back through the loop…. I stood there, sweating and cursing silently, for about fifteen minutes, trying to tie that knot, before I gave up, took my rod apart, and went in search of Heather, who’d waded around to the other side of a little point. (Consider the words of Jack Ohman: “If you’ve got short, stubby fingers and wear reading glasses, any relaxation you would normally derive from fly-fishing is completely eliminated when you try to tie on a fly.”) I stood and watched her for a while, looping her fly out with stately, calm casts, and realized that this might be yet another activity at which I might never be as good as she.

On the other hand, I’ve found very little to match the satisfaction to be derived on those rare occasions when it’s all working, when you’re casting beautifully and rhythmically, the rod is loading, the line is singing, the fly is rolling out in a perfect straightening curl. At such golden moments, catching a fish is really beside the point; the esthetics of the experience are paramount, and the rhythm, the Zen calm. You’re in the zone. It may not happen often, but it’s a feeling I want to experience as often as I can. So if you come looking for me over the next few evenings, while Heather’s visiting family in Colorado, you may find me on Red Bud Isle, struggling with knots and trying to unsnarl my line. After all, there are worse ways to spend a punishingly hot summer evening than up to one’s knees in a river.

“And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!”

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Doria Russell, Doc
Martin: Josh Wilker, Cardboard Gods: An American Tale

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!)