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

Fleeing the oppressive heat and drought of Texas for a few days, Heather and I spent last night at gorgeous Temple Farm, in Dutchess County, New York, with our dear friends Nigel and Julia Widdowson, proprietors of the Red Devon Market Bar and Restaurant (where, incidentally, I had one of the best burgers of my life for dinner last night). Julia is the daughter of the late Ed Harte, the longtime publisher of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times and an old family friend, who passed away on May 18. Though he was born in Missouri and lived much of his later life in New York, I will always think of him as an exemplary Texan.

Ed was a delightful man: sharp as a whip, altruistic, and funny as hell. (I will always remember his delighted cackle when something amused him.) He and his brother built the family company (Harte-Hanks Communications) into a Texas media giant in the 1960s and 1970s, but his interests ranged far beyond the business world: he was an early and ardent conservationist, and for many years he wrote a column for the Caller-Times on Mexican politics.

After I posted a link to his obituary on my Facebook page with the comment, “We lost a good one yesterday,” a couple of people asked who else I would put on my all-time list of Texas greats. Since we haven’t run one of these lists for a while, I thought this might be an appropriate time to revive that great (?) tradition. And what better time to commemorate some of the coolest Texans than the beginning of what promises to be a long, hot, dry summer?

A few observations: I tried to strike a balance between living and dead Texans, and male and female. I really wanted to include my late mother-in-law, Jessica Hobby Catto, but ultimately decided that doing so would leave me open to charges of subjectivism, even though I truly believe she belongs on there. Finally, my list is overwhelmingly Caucasian, for which I can only plead ignorance, not prejudice, and perhaps the lingering effects of societal racism.

The late Doug Sahm sang that “You just can’t live in Texas if you don’t have a lot of soul,” and each of these folks, in his or her own way, was blessed with an extra helping of soul. Every one of them epitomizes grace, thoughtfulness, and quiet (well, maybe characterizing Molly Ivins and Ann Richards as “quiet” is a bit of a stretch) intelligence. These are not, I fear, qualities commonly associated with Texans, at least by non-Texans, who tend to see all Texans as loud-mouthed, ignorant, and crass vulgarians. (Such Texans are still thick on the ground, of course, as anyone who follows the political scene can attest.) Here, then, are ten Texans whose lives and actions prove that civilized life is indeed possible in the Lone Star State.

John Graves: Author and rancher, gentle godfather of Texas environmentalism.
Ed Harte: Newspaper publisher, ardent conservationist, and civic-minded philanthropist.
Molly Ivins: Hilariously sharp-tongued liberal gadfly and journalist.
Lady Bird Johnson: Poised and gracious First Lady, and an early and extremely influential environmentalist.
Barbara Jordan: Mesmerizing and unforgettable speaker, pioneering legislator and civil rights leader.
Tom Mason: Longtime head of the Lower Colorado River Authority, a conscientious man of rare integrity and a true and dedicated public servant.
Bill Moyers: A veteran of the LBJ administration, later a thoughtful presence on radio and television.
Willie Nelson: Legendary singer and pothead.
Naomi Shihab Nye: Talented and thoughtful poet, dedicated to advancing the causes of literature and education, devoted to the cause of peace.
Ann Richards: Irresistibly salty governor and feminist icon.

Not a bad list, if I say so myself, but I’m sure I’ve overlooked some obvious choices. Any other nominations?

What we’re reading
Heather: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (almost done!)
Martin: Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds

Confession: I consider myself a loyal son of alma mater, but I usually just skim the quarterly Williams Alumni Review before tossing it into the recycling pile. A story in the June issue, however, caught my eye. “The Literary Environment,” by Denise DiFulco, is about the director of the college’s Center for Environmental Studies (CES), a Spanish professor named, confusingly, Jennifer French.

The article notes that a lot of people have asked French how a Spanish professor came to be named the director of the CES. The answer involves her first book, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (2005), which examined early twentieth century Latin American literary responses to European economic hegemony in the region. Or something like that. Explains French, “Often those writers, including Horacio Quiroga and José Eustasio Rivera, made central to their narratives the deleterious effects of agriculture and other industries.”

Sadly, I know next to nothing about Latin American literature, and I’d never heard of Quiroga or Rivera, but another quotation from the article really struck me: “At their best, environmental history, philosophy, religion, literary studies, and the like engage the underlying assumptions of environmental policy and environmental science.”

Exactly! I thought. This is a view that resonates profoundly with Heather and me—we are, after all, both English majors—and when we eventually begin accepting environmental writers for residencies at Madroño Ranch, we hope to cast as wide a net as possible.

Say the words “environmental writer” and I suspect that most people think of folks like Bill McKibben or William Cronon or Michael Pollan or David Quammen (all of whom happen to be heroes of ours): essayists or historians with a biological or agricultural bent. They, and many others like them, are among the most important writers we have, and we would be thrilled—thrilled—to have them, or their peers, as residents at Madroño. But we also hope to attract novelists and poets and philosophers and theologians and playwrights and screenwriters and memoirists and perhaps even (what the heck) bloggers—pretty much anyone who’s thinking and writing in creative ways about the land and those who have their being on it, and how they affect each other.

Think of the fiction of Wendell Berry, who (much as William Faulkner did in Mississippi) has created a complex and compelling imaginary landscape in Kentucky. (Apparently the American South is particularly suited to this sort of exercise.) Think of the novels of Willa Cather—Death Comes for the Archbishop is still my favorite—and Wallace Stegner, which depict the varied experiences of humans confronted with the vast spaces of the American West. Think of the poetry of Mary Oliver, in which the animal and vegetal and geological is a constant, almost sentient presence, and W. S. Merwin, described in the New York Times as “a fierce critic of the ecological damage humans have wrought.” Think of the economic writings of Paul Hawken and Woody Tasch, critiques of modern industrial capitalism’s obsession with short-term, bottom-line profit at the expense of just about everything else. Heck, think of David Winner’s odd little book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football—one of my personal favorites—in which he examines how landscape has affected the style of soccer played in the Netherlands.

Closer to home, think of the gracious and elegant memoirs of John Graves and Roy Bedichek, two of the foundational texts of the environmental movement in Texas; or the beginning of The Path to Power, the first volume of Robert Caro’s epic three-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, which is still the best short history of the Texas Hill Country I’ve ever read; or even Witold Rybczynski’s magisterial biography of Frederick Law Olmsted—not a Texan, but an astute observer of the state—which is a wonderful narrative summary of nineteenth-century American thought about nature in urban and suburban settings. Each of these works, I believe, has something original and important to say about community in America, community in this case defined as (to crib shamelessly from Pollan’s website) “the places where nature and culture intersect.”

We’d be pretty surprised to receive applications from Faulkner, Cather, Stegner, or Bedichek, since they’re, well, dead. But would the rest of them want to come to Madroño Ranch? Well, why not? We hope that the offer of beautiful and rugged surroundings, free from distraction, in which to ponder and dream and focus and unfocus (and eat well, of course; let’s not forget eating well) and bounce ideas off peers, will prove irresistible. Are we aiming high? Of course; but if you don’t aim high, you’ll just keep hitting the ground, right? Who knows—maybe Jennifer French herself will want to come. According to the article, she’s already working on her next book, a study of how memories of the War of the Triple Alliance (fought between Paraguay and the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay from 1864 to 1870) have influenced attitudes toward land use in Paraguay. Wouldn’t that be cool?

What we’re reading
Heather: Laurie King, Touchstone
Martin: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (still)

Time for the next installment in our much-anticipated series of lists (our first two were on our top ten songs about Texas and our top ten books on the environment)! This time, we thought we’d offer up our ten favorite books, both fiction and nonfiction, about the Lone Star State.

Roy Bedichek, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist
Sarah Bird, The Mommy Club
H. G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
Billy Lee Brammer, The Gay Place
Oscar Casares, Brownsville: Stories
John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative
Stephen Harrigan, The Gates of the Alamo
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas; or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier

All right, all you Lone Star literati, let us have it. What classics have we missed and/or forgotten?

What we’re reading
Heather: Shelley Silbert, M. Gay Chanler, and Gary Paul Nabhan (eds.), Five Ways to Value the Working Landscapes of the West
Martin: West Marin Review: A Literary and Visual Arts Journal

And now for the next installment in our internationally celebrated series of lists… and what could be more appropriate from the proprietors of a place called Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment than a list (in alphabetical order by author) of our ten favorite books about the environment?

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative
Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability
Mary Oliver, What Do We Know: Poems and Prose Poems
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods

Of course, we’re struck by the many wonderful and influential books we had to leave out to get down to ten, and we’d love to know your favorites. Let the arguments begin!

What we’re reading
Heather: Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me: A True Story
Martin: Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey&#8212and Even Iraq&#8212Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport