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)

There must be a story behind the sign at the front gate of the Stonewall Community Cemetery—I mean, who digs a new grave in a cemetery without permission?—but I don’t know it. Even though I wrote the entry on Stonewall for the New Handbook of Texas almost twenty years ago, I never saw the sign until last fall, because I’d never taken the time to go out there and poke around the town. (Even then, I only did so at the urging of our friend Dennis Fagan, a terrific photographer who’s been documenting the town’s annual Peach JAMboree for thirty years now.)

Stonewall, a town of some 470 people on the Pedernales River in Gillespie County and the self-proclaimed “Peach Capital of Texas,” marks the halfway point of the two-and-a-half-hour drive between Austin and Madroño Ranch. It’s one of the places we usually speed through without stopping on our way to or from the ranch, a wide spot in the road between Johnson City and Fredericksburg.

I suspect that is most people’s experience of Stonewall. Some may stop for gas, or to buy peaches at one of the numerous roadside stands, but the average driver who whizzes past on Highway 290 is too intent on reaching Austin or Fredericksburg to think much about Stonewall. If the town registers on his or her consciousness at all, it is as an annoyance, because the speed limit drops from 70 to 55 miles per hour there.

The chamber of commerce, having somewhat arbitrarily selected 1860 as the date of the town’s founding, will celebrate Stonewall’s sesquicentennial this year, but many accounts date the town’s birth to some time around 1870. That’s when Israel Nunez, a Jewish transplant from the state of Georgia, established a stagecoach stop a couple of miles south of the current town. Initially Major Nunez, as he was known, collected mail for the scattered local settlers from passengers traveling between San Marcos, Blanco, and points west, but by 1875 the local population had increased to the point that an actual post office was established there, and Nunez insisted it be called Stonewall, after Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, under whom he’d served during the War of Northern Aggression.

Or so the story went. The reality, it appears, was slightly different. Israel Moses Nunez, born in Florida in 1838, was the third child and oldest surviving son of Raphael J. Moses, Confederate general James Longstreet’s chief supply officer and a pioneer of the commercial peach industry in Georgia—an interesting historical note, that, given the future importance of peaches to Stonewall.

Raphael changed his son’s surname to Nunez to perpetuate the family’s Sephardic heritage; “Major” turns out to have been Israel’s childhood nickname, rather than his military rank. In 1906, his younger brother recalled, “When we moved to Columbus [Georgia] in 1849, Israel had on his first pair of boots and he was so proud of them and strutted so up and down the deck showing them off that all the passengers nicknamed him the ‘Major,’ a name which has curiously held on to him the balance of his life.” (Perhaps coincidentally, major was also the rank his father held in the Confederate army.)

Moreover, Israel never actually served under Jackson. He didn’t enlist as a private in William W. Parker’s Virginia artillery battalion until December 1863—a full seven months after Stonewall was cut down by “friendly fire” at Chancellorsville. Israel did serve in the trenches during the siege of Petersburg, but he was back home in Georgia when the war ended. Sometime thereafter he and his wife Anna Marie, who bore him eleven children between 1860 and 1883, moved from Columbus to what was then considered western Texas.

Of course, whether or not he actually served under Jackson, there’s no reason he shouldn’t have named his new home after the Confederate hero. As for the persistence of the nickname “Major,” well, perhaps he didn’t go out of his way to correct those who assumed he’d attained that rank in the Confederate army, but then the post-Civil War years saw a fair amount of romantic historical revisionism. He and his family moved to Austin in 1890, and he died fifteen years later. Israel and Anna Marie Nunez are buried in one of the Jewish sections of Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery.

In 1924, when Highway 290 was completed between Austin and Fredericksburg, Stonewall hosted the official celebration. Thirty-three years later, the highway was moved four hundred yards to the south, and several businesses followed it. Most people who know Stonewall from the establishments along Highway 290—peach stands like Burg’s Corner, Gold Orchards, Vogel Orchards; restaurants like Lindig’s Café and the One Stop diner; vineyards like Becker, Grape Creek, and Woodrose—might not even realize that the town also boasts a number of establishments aimed primarily at the town’s inhabitants rather than tourists: the Trinity Lutheran, St. Francis Xavier Catholic, and Stonewall Baptist churches; Nielsen Automotive, Stonewall Body Shop, and Eckert and Son Used Auto Parts; the Stonewall Smokehouse; Weinheimer and Son general merchandise; Stonewall Mutual Farm Insurance; the Stonewall Volunteer Fire Department; Stonewall Head Start; Gordon’s Welding; J. Bolton and Associates wholesale furniture; Vogel Tractors.

Similarly, my Handbook of Texas entry on Stonewall, while more or less accurate as far as it goes, doesn’t come close to giving the flavor of the place. Nowhere in it do you learn that the locals are trying desperately to keep the peach industry going in the face of terrible and persistent drought; that they’re facing pressure to quit growing peaches in favor of grapes, that pernicious totem of yuppie agritourism; that as the memory of local boy LBJ fades further into the past, the number of visitors to the nearby Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park keeps dwindling. What’s missing from that entry, in other words, is the real human drama you can find in Stonewall right now, every day, if you just know where and how to dig.

What we’re reading
Heather: Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See
Martin: Spike Carlsen, A Splintered History of Wood: Belt Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers, and Baseball Bats