While reading the recently published Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, by Emma Marris, I found myself simultaneously cheering and exclaiming with a steely squint: Hey! Real conservationists can’t think this! You’re just giving ammunition for them to lob back at us. Slippery slope turns to avalanche turns into apocalypse! Who the heck to do you think you are?

Now that I’ve finished the book, I’ve decided to go back to applauding Marris for her cheerful heterodoxy and passionately common-sensical approach to conservation issues in the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I began reading with no problems. In the first chapter she says,

Nature is almost everywhere. But wherever it is, there is one thing it is not: pristine. In 2011 there is no pristine wilderness on planet Earth…. [Humans are] running the whole Earth, whether we admit it or not. To run it consciously and effectively, we must admit our role and even embrace it. We must temper our romantic notions of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended to by us.

So far so good. Recent climate change and the cascade of new realities resulting from it are clear to virtually every scientist and conservation-minded person on the planet. (Insert punchline about Texans and their three-term governor here.) She explains that environmental sciences, especially in the United States, use a baseline, a reference point which, in formulating conservation goals tends to assume an ideal time of pristine, stable wilderness to which nature itself yearns to return, hearkening to a time before the destabilizing pressures of human occupancy. We fouled nature up, so it’s our ethical duty to restore it to its original, Edenic state.

But then she makes things really messy. From what point do we date human occupancy for the sake of conservation goals? And where? Many scientists assume that the time before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas is the time to which we must reset the clock. This is the baseline that many conservation-minded Americans (like me) also assume, most likely unquestioningly (like me). (One of the reasons I call myself a utopian—i.e., not a realist—is my hope, expressed in an earlier post, that human stewardship, particularly by ranchers, might at some point not be the worst thing that ever happened to the Earth.) First of all, religious fundamentalists aren’t the only ones to believe that the Garden of Eden existed as a historical reality. The idea that there has ever been a stable, self-perpetuating ecosystem is problematic:

We are a short-lived species with a notoriously bad grasp of timescales longer than a few of our own generations. But from the point of view of a geologist or a paleontologist, ecosystems are in a constant dance, as their components compete, react, evolve, migrate, and form new communities. Geologic upheaval, evolution, climactic cycles, fire, storms, and population dynamics see to it that nature is always changing.

Nor do scientists always know what any particular ecosystem actually looked like at any pre-baseline time. Nor does the Edenic model take into account the fact that many native peoples had purposeful management systems before the arrival of Europeans. Finally, this baseline is also increasingly impossible to achieve, either through restoration or management practices, because the pressures of climate change and population growth have made turning back the clock about as feasible as stuffing a sixteen-year-old boy into the shoes he wore when he was eight. It isn’t going to happen, especially if he didn’t actually have any shoes when he was eight.

The pristine wilderness toward which so many conservationists aspire is, in fact, an American construction that came into being along with Yellowstone National Park and the science of the nineteenth century, which saw nature as essentially balanced, static, unchanging in its equilibrium. Contemporary environmental sciences clearly demonstrate that the natural world—before human “interference”—never stood still for long. Some of the most revered natural phenomena—old growth forests, for example—can be the result of climactic anomalies, like long wet spells that interrupted wildfires cycles. And what do we do about issues like the mountain goats at Yellowstone, which are now beloved by tourists, but were introduced from several hundred miles away in the 1940s for hunting purposes?

Well, I can cope with the reality that the Wizard of Oz is actually working levers behind a curtain, even as I’d like to be able to ignore him. But one of the unexpected revelations of that unveiling really hooked me under the ribs: the chapter entitled “Learning to Love Exotic Species.” I have often moaned and groaned about the non-native fauna—the fallow, axis, and sika deer, the feral hogs, and the various other oddities—that wander through Madroño Ranch and compete for food with the natives, especially in this drought time. I’m also a member of an advisory board to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the mission of which is “to increase the sustainable use and conservation of native wildflowers, plants and landscapes.” I recently sat in on an excellent and nuanced presentation on invasive species by Damon Waitt, the director of the center’s Native Plant Information Network. I know as surely as I know that north is up and south is down that natives are good and that invasives are bad. But Marris upends the poles and says, think again. Non-natives can be not only not malevolent but actively useful. While some exotic species (a term she prefers to “invasives”) are “rowdy nuisances” that need active and emphatic controlling, there are far more “shy foreigners” who work for the good of their new ecosystems. In fact, there are human-managed—that is, artificial—landscapes filled with exotic species that outperform their “natural” cousins, if performance is measured by biodiversity and provisions of services to all inhabitants and not just humans.

This is when I began to ask the “just who does she think she is” question with my arms akimbo, which is when I realized it wasn’t my scientific, based-on-facts knowledge that was being challenged (it doesn’t take much); rather, it was my own self-identity as a conservation-minded layperson. I was adhering to an orthodoxy I hadn’t realized I subscribed to. I learned at my mother’s knee that any orthodoxy’s tires need a good kicking before you buy. I had climbed into this orthodoxy (a Prius, naturally) without doing so and found that I might be stuck on the side of the road with a flat.

In Marris’s rambunctious garden, however, the side of the road might not be a bad place to be stuck. If it were managed for biodiversity, for beauty, and as a part of a much larger ecosystem—as a stop for migratory butterflies, for example—a stranded motorist might enjoy the wait for help. We’re so used to thinking of “nature” as something outsized and grand and hard to get to that we frequently forget that it’s quite literally underfoot or falling on our sleeves as we walk along a city sidewalk. While it’s not entirely within our control, there are more ways for human being to engage in a fruitful relationship with nature than we currently allow ourselves to imagine.

Marris’s call for biodiversity everywhere—in industrial sites, apparent wastelands, back yards, hybrid ecosystems developed for economic gain—made me realize that unexamined orthodoxy often leads to monoculture, be it agricultural, social, political, intellectual, or spiritual. In industrial agriculture, monocultures rely heavily on pesticides, ridding crops of insects that in a healthy polyculture can be absorbed into the system (sometimes requiring intensive human labor). In the national discussion about immigration, there seems to be a sector demanding social monoculture, using terms that sound very much like the prejudice in environmental circles against “invasive” species. The extremes in both political parties are demanding that their candidates spray any bipartisan thoughts with herbicide. When she first messed with my assumptions, I mentally doused Marris’s proprosals, hoping the threat to my preconceptions would go away. Despite the huge short-term returns of monoculture (in my case, the sure knowledge that I was right), the reality of radically diminished liveliness looms just past the identical crop rows. Re-wilding monocultures of the mind, the heart, and the land—acknowledging that there is no single solution to any complex problem—sounds like a critical strategy in the face of what sometimes feels like a threatening future. According to Marris, it’s our duty to manage nature, but it’s a duty leading to pleasure, beauty, and liveliness. As she urges, “Let the rambunctious gardening begin.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
Martin: H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Greeks and Trojans, Christians and Muslims, Jews and Arabs, Serbs and Croats, Tutsis and Hutus—the collision of cultures is rarely, if ever, a pleasant sight. The protracted and bloody war between the Plains Indians, especially the Comanches, and the white settlers of Texas is among the most horrifying of all, marked by unimaginable violence and cynical deception on both sides. But even in the cruelest conflicts there can be people who exemplify honor and integrity. Such an exemplar was the quixotic Robert Simpson Neighbors, one of the most intriguing, foolhardy, and tragically heroic figures in nineteenth-century Texas.

Thanks to S. C. Gwynne’s excellent new book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, Neighbors (pictured above) has been on my mind again. (Several years ago I actually thought I might try to write a biography of him, but eventually the impulse passed.) I guess I’ve always had a soft spot for those who try, against all odds, to do the right thing, and Neighbors certainly qualifies.

Born in Virginia in 1815, he was orphaned at the age of four and raised by a guardian. He arrived in Texas in 1836, after a couple of years in Louisiana, and from 1839 to 1841 served as assistant quartermaster and acting quartermaster of the army of the Republic of Texas. He served under John Hays during the Mexican War and was taken prisoner in San Antonio by Gen. Adrián Woll in 1842. After his release in 1844, he became the republic’s agent to the Lipan Apaches and Tonkawas; in 1847, after Texas became part of the United States, Neighbors received a federal appointment as Texas commissioner of Indian affairs

This was not an easy position. As Mike Campbell, the dean of Texas historians, notes in his magisterial Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State, the federal government was virtually powerless to stop white settlers from occupying land ostensibly belonging to the Indians, because Texas, uniquely among the United States, retained ownership of its public lands when it joined the union; thus, federal law did not apply on the lands where the Indians lived, and the state seemed unable or unwilling to keep land-hungry white settlers from trespassing. As the Penateka Comanche chief Buffalo Hump told Neighbors, with some asperity, “For a long time a great many [white] people have been passing through my country; they kill all the game and burn the country, and trouble me very much.” Neighbors noted in March 1848 that this persistent trespassing “must necessarily and inevitably lead to serious difficulty.”

Moreover, Neighbors’ distaste for violence was out of step with public sentiment. He tried to negotiate the return of Cynthia Ann Parker, the most celebrated Indian captive of them all (and the mother of Quanah Parker), but the Comanches rebuffed his efforts; Neighbors reported to his superiors in Washington that “I am assured by the friendly Comanche chiefs that I would have to use force to induce the party that has her to give her up.” (Cynthia Ann was unwillingly returned to white civilization in 1860, when Texas Rangers under Sul Ross accidentally captured her during a raid on a Comanche encampment on a tributary of the Pease River in north Texas.)

Neighbors, a Democrat, lost his federal job after the Whig Zachary Taylor was elected president in 1848, but was reappointed when Franklin Pierce reclaimed the White House for the Democrats four years later. (In the meantime, Neighbors found time to lead an expedition that established a trail between San Antonio and El Paso, part of which was later used by the Butterfield Overland Mail; organize El Paso County; marry Elizabeth Ann Mays in Seguin; and serve in the state legislature.)

Neighbors was thus part of the vast machinery that slowly but inexorably (and often violently and duplicitously) squeezed the Indians off their ancestral lands, clearing the way for white occupation of the American west. But Neighbors was different from most of his fellow Indian agents: he treated the Indians with respect, and stubbornly defended them against the accusations, frequently fabricated, of land-hungry settlers who coveted the land set aside for reservations.

Needless to say, this was not a popular stand in Texas, and Neighbors made many enemies among his fellow whites. In the mid-1850s, he decided that the only way to end the escalating tensions and violence was to establish reservations beyond the existing line of settlement. He finally succeeded in getting Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to authorize the establishment of two reservations on the upper Brazos. Neighbors hoped to convince the previously nomadic Indians to settle down and become farmers—a shockingly misguided, if not downright stupid, notion, and one that was clearly doomed to failure. As it was, less than five hundred of the Penateka Comanches (only about a third of the band’s entire population) moved onto the Clear Fork Reservation, at Camp Cooper in Throckmorton County. About a thousand other Indians, mostly Caddos and Wichitas, moved onto the Brazos Reservation, south of Fort Belknap in Young County.

And then, of course, the line of white settlement, moving inexorably westward, reached the upper Brazos, with predictable results. Whites who coveted the land began blaming the reservation Indians for the depredations committed by those who had refused to move onto the reservations. The loathsome John R. Baylor, who had been fired as an agent on the Clear Fork Reservation after feuding with Neighbors, became the editor of a virulently anti-Indian newspaper called The White Man and pledged himself to exterminating the Indians; toward that end, he called for, and even organized, violence against the reservation Indians. While acknowledging that the residents of the Brazos and Clear Fork reservations were more sinned against than sinning, the government finally concluded that enough was enough, and decided to end the experiment.

In the summer of 1859, therefore, Neighbors supervised the removal of all 1,500 residents of the Brazos and Clear Fork reservations to a new reservation on the Washita River in Indian Territory. (Among the contractors involved in this trek was the San Antonio freighter James Duff, soon to become a notorious figure in the Hill Country, as I wrote in an earlier post.) In August, after leading his charges across the Red River, Neighbors wrote to his wife that he had left “the land of the Philistines.” Upon his return to Fort Belknap a little over a month later he was murdered, shot in the back by Edward Cornett, a man he didn’t even know but who apparently despised his conciliatory attitude toward the Indians. In The Texas Rangers, Walter Prescott Webb reported the story that a group of Texas Rangers, outraged by Neighbors’ assassination, “went after Ed Cornett, and brought him to justice without the aid of judge or jury.”

I suspect that Neighbors himself, a man of honor and principle who believed wholeheartedly in the sanctity of the law, would not have approved. He seems to have been one of those ostentatiously virtuous men who manage to alienate and offend their fellows while living unimpeachable lives; perhaps the rest of us simply can’t stand being reminded how far short of the mark we fall. In fact, Neighbors may have had more than a whiff of self-righteousness about him. In Empire of the Summer Moon, Gwynne says that Neighbors’ behavior as Indian agent was characterized by “earnest and well-meaning naïveté,” as opposed to the “pure hypocrisy” of many of his peers, which sounds like fairly faint praise. By attempting to stand in the way of Manifest Destiny, trying to turn the Penateka Comanches into farmers, and expecting the government to live up to the terms of its own treaties, Neighbors may have revealed himself as a fool. But we will never stop needing such fools, men and women who are unafraid to speak truth to power even at the risk of their lives, and God help us if they ever disappear entirely.

Jeez. I promise I’ll try to find something a little cheerier to write about next time.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent
Martin: S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

Our usual route from Austin to Madroño Ranch takes us through Johnson City to Fredericksburg via Highway 290, and then down Highway 16 through Kerrville to the turnoff opposite the Medina Children’s Home. Every time I pass the sign for Turtle Creek, an unremarkable little stream just past the turnoff for FM 1273, about five miles south of Kerrville, I am reminded of one of the bloodiest and most controversial episodes in the extraordinarily bloody and controversial history of the state: the battle of the Nueces, labeled “The Blackest Crime in Texas Warfare” by the Dallas Morning News almost seventy years later.

Central Texas is dotted with German settlements dating from the mid-nineteenth century: Fredericksburg, Boerne, New Braunfels, Comfort, Sisterdale, and many more. The German settlers—more than 7,000 of them came between 1844 and 1847 alone—were a diverse group, according to the late Terry Jordan, arguably the leading scholar of European immigration to Texas: “They included peasant farmers and intellectuals; Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists; Prussians, Saxons, Hessians, and Alsatians; abolitionists and slaveowners; farmers and townsfolk; frugal, honest folk and ax murderers.”

Perhaps. But while some German Texans, including prominent journalists such as Ferdinand Lindheimer, defended slavery, and others, like August Buchel, served in the Confederate army, the popular image was, and is, of a relatively liberal, well-educated, and homogeneous group who opposed slavery and secession and remained stubbornly pro-Union. In 1854, at the annual Staats-Sängerfest (state singing festival) in San Antonio, the delegates adopted a resolution condemning the “peculiar institution,” and in 1857, as I noted in an earlier post, Frederick Law Olmsted applauded the abolitionist sentiments he found among the denizens of the Hill Country. It should come as no surprise, then, that many who supported secession and the Confederacy were suspicious of the insular, “radical” immigrants of central Texas.

To make matters worse, some of the more outspoken German Texans organized the Union Loyal League in June 1861, and by March 1862 they were openly celebrating Union victories and had organized a battalion of three well-armed militia companies, with Fritz Tegener, a Prussian emigré who owned a sawmill near Hunt and served as Kerr County treasurer, as major and commander. The militia was supposedly meant to protect the Hill Country from Indians and outlaws in the absence of Federal troops, but its presence, understandably, made the Confederate authorities nervous. Confederate general Hamilton P. Bee, commander of the Western Sub-district of Texas, sent Capt. James Duff, a former San Antonio freighter and founder of an irregular force called Duff’s Partisan Rangers, to take control of the area.

Duff, who declared martial law in July 1862, was later nicknamed “the Butcher of Fredericksburg” for his harsh actions as provost marshal; one historian, writing a century after the fact, noted that “his arrests and depredations on the citizens of these counties seem unjustifiable,” though others say that accounts of his cruelty were a “myth.”

At any rate, an atmosphere of fear, distrust, and confusion had settled over the Hill Country by August 1, when a group of about eighty men, most of them German Texans, met on Turtle Creek, just a few miles north of Madroño Ranch. Sixty-one of them, with Tegener in charge, decided that their best bet was to flee Texas until the hostilities died down—in retrospect, a tragic miscalculation. They determined to try to reach Mexico by riding west to the mouth of the Devils River on the Rio Grande (the site of present-day Amistad Reservoir) and then crossing into Mexico, but Duff learned of their plans and sent Lt. Colin D. McRae, with ninety-four mounted troopers, in pursuit.

The unsuspecting Germans made little effort to cover their tracks, and McRae and his men easily traced them across the Medina and Frio rivers before catching up to them on the afternoon of August 9 on the West Fork of the Nueces River in northeastern Kinney County. A few of Tegener’s men had reported seeing unidentified riders behind them, but the commander dismissed their reports and told the group to make camp in a grassy clearing on the west bank of the river.

The precise details of what happened next are lost to time, but the following seems to be the most commonly accepted version. McRae and his men attacked before dawn of the following day. Around twenty-five of the Unionists abandoned the fight almost immediately and managed to slip through the Confederate lines in the darkness and confusion. McRae’s troops killed nineteen of the remaining Unionists and captured nine others who had been wounded; Tegener himself was wounded, but managed to escape. Shockingly, the Confederates executed the nine wounded prisoners a few hours after the skirmish, shooting them in the head as they lay face-down and defenseless on the ground. As a final indignity, McRae’s men left the bodies of their victims unburied, “prey to the buzzards and coyotes.” The Confederate casualties included two killed and eighteen wounded, McRae among them.

And what of the surviving Unionists, you ask? Eight were killed on October 18, when another Confederate force attacked them as they attempted to cross into Mexico; nine others died in other battles. One man, August Hoffmann, reportedly made his way back to Gillespie County, where he remained in hiding, living on “pear fruit and bear grass,” until the spring of 1863. Tegener himself survived, though legend has it that during his long absence from Texas his wife, assuming he had been killed in the attack, married another man. Haha—awkward! Apparently it all worked out, though, as Tegener himself eventually remarried and went on to become a state legislator and justice of the peace in Travis County.

The encounter on the Nueces almost immediately became what historian Stanley S. McGowen called “one of the state’s most controversial and contentious historiographical events.” The Handbook of Texas notes that “Confederates regard[ed] it as a military action against insurrectionists while many German Hill Country residents viewed the event as a massacre.” Regardless of which side you’re on, it was a terrible thing. In 1865, the families of the men killed on the Nueces gathered their bones and finally interred them at Comfort, where a monument was dedicated on the battle’s fourth anniversary, in 1866. The Treue der Union (Loyal to the Union) monument, pictured above, still stands in Comfort, and historians still debate how best to describe what happened to that group of fearful men who met on humble Turtle Creek on an August day almost 150 years ago.

What we’re reading
Heather: Philipp Meyer, American Rust
Martin: C. J. Chivers, The Gun

We spent last weekend at Madroño with Shawn and Susanne Harrington of Asterisk Group, who are designing a visual identity for the ranch suitable for use on business cards, website, food labels, letterhead, gimme caps, T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, etc.

Since so much of what we hope to make Madroño stand for is based on a very specific sense of the place and its unique qualities, we wanted to give Shawn and Susanne (and their son Oliver) a tour of the ranch. They especially wanted to get a first-hand look at the buffies, thinking that they’d be an ideal image for the ranch, but unfortunately, as far as the Harrington family is concerned, the Madroño bison remains a mythical beast, more rumor than reality.

It was a gray and drizzly Sunday morning when Robert Selement, our trusty ranch manager, came by and picked us up in his big ol’ pickup. Robert may love showing the place off even more than we do, and Shawn and Susanne oohed and aahed in all the right places, even though the misty weather meant that we had to imagine the normally breathtaking views from up top.

The high point of the tour, of course, was to be a close-up view of the bison, complete with newborn calf (or perhaps calves, as several of the cows seemed to be on the verge of dropping babies). So imagine our chagrin when, after driving all over the ranch for two hours, we failed to get even a single glimpse of them.

You might think it would be hard to lose a herd of thirty or so critters, each weighing in at a thousand pounds or more, even on a place as big as Madroño, but, as Robert said with some asperity, “We’ve got buffalo poop, buffalo hair [where they’d rubbed up against convenient tree branches], and buffalo tracks, but no buffalo.”

Bison are interesting animals. With a dearth of natural predators, they once roamed the North American prairies in untold millions, and were vital sources of food and other necessities for the Plains Indians. Then the railroads started building across the continent, and the real slaughter began. One of the notable things about bison is that they don’t run away when they hear a gunshot or see one of their fellows fall. Instead, they tend to wander over and nose the corpse of their fallen comrade, in a manner that can seem uncomfortably close to mourning.

This, of course, is one of the reasons they were almost eradicated by nineteenth-century buffalo hunters, but it most assuredly does not mean that they are in any way tame. In fact, they retain a distinct whiff of wildness, even on a ranch; a sublime atavism shines from their dark eyes. When we were in New York last month, we met a rancher from Pennsylvania at the Union Square Greenmarket who told us, astonishingly, that he invites school kids on field trips to wade into the midst of his herds and pat his bison. Just the thought of that made all the hair on our heads stand straight up. (It was quite a sight.)

As if their immense size and somewhat, er, unpredictable temperament weren’t sufficient encouragement to treat bison with a healthy respect, they’re also astonishingly fast and agile. They can jump into the bed of a pickup (or so we’re told; fortunately, we haven’t yet seen that firsthand), or across a cattle guard, or over a four-foot fence (when, that is, they don’t elect simply to go through it). They can work up a substantial head of steam—up to thirty-five miles an hour, in fact, which is faster than even Robert’s trusty pickup can go on Madroño’s steep and rocky roads—and they can move as fast backward as they do forward, which is why they’re sometimes used to train cutting horses. And, as we learned last weekend, they have apparently evolved the ability to turn invisible when they want to.

Shawn and Susanne were pretty good sports about it, and Oliver just wanted to play with an old ammeter that was rattling around in the back of the truck. (It’s hard to predict these things with any certainty, but Oliver at age five seems bound for a career as an electrical engineer.) But I know Robert was concerned; the fence that can keep bison in when they want to go out has yet to be invented, and we feared that they might have decided to pay a social call on the neighbors. Again.

This is always an awkward situation, not least because you can’t really compel bison to do something they don’t want to do—like, for instance, return to your property. Fortunately Robert has conditioned them to respond to the rattling of a bag of feed cubes, and can usually tempt them back from wherever they’ve strayed with the promise of treats. But having several tons of ornery meat invade the place next door is not exactly the way to foster neighborly feelings. (In March the foreman of a West Texas ranch shot fifty-one bison that had gotten loose on his property from the place next door. The fact that the place next door was a hunting ranch, and the bison would otherwise have ended up as little more than targets in a shooting gallery for rich Texans, didn’t make the story any less shocking.)

Fortunately, our neighbors have thus far responded with patience and good cheer, even when the bison cornered a herd of their terrified cattle—it must have looked a little like a scene from one of those old Westerns in which a gang of outlaws menaces some frontier town.

By the time we had to leave, late Sunday afternoon, Robert still hadn’t tracked them down. We lamely told Shawn and Susanne that we hoped they’d come back another time to see the buffies (who finally turned up above the trout ponds, safe and sound and on our side of the fence; I’m quite sure that if bison could snicker, they were snickering at us). I mean, they couldn’t possibly pull that disappearing act twice in a row, could they?

Well, could they?

What we’re reading
Heather: Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
Martin: Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

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

A Very Long Time Ago, my mother brought home a Peter Max-style poster with this quotation from Henry David Thoreau: “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” Each time we moved, its reappearance was an indication that I was home again despite the bewildering newness of my surroundings. Thanks to this poster, I associated “wilderness” with “home.”

During our recent and ongoing Thoreau binge, I discovered, disconcertingly, that the poster has it wrong. The quotation comes from Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” initially delivered as a (very long) lecture in 1851 and published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862. “I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and Culture merely civil,” he begins. Walking is civilized humanity’s entrée into nature, but Thoreau’s notion of walking is highly particular: “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering….” For Thoreau, to walk in nature was to be a pilgrim, a “sainte-terrer,” simultaneously seeking the holy land and already graced: “It requires a direct dispensation from heaven to become a walker.” Clearly, according to Thoreau, hoofing it to the neighborhood grocery store to pick up a loaf of bread does not qualify as walking.

Nor does walking have anything to do with exercise or taking a break. Walking requires attention. “[I]t is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit…. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is; I am out of my senses.” Rather, he says, “you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.” (That’s a joke, I think, but even if it’s not, it ties in nicely with Martin’s post from last week.)

Thoreau found that his preferred direction for a walk was almost always southwestward. “It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient Wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon…. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.” There is something specifically American in his way of walking, and he predicts that walks through the American landscape will form the American soul: “I trust that we shall be more imaginative; that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher and more ethereal, as our sky—our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains—our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas.”

He has nothing against civilization, culture, education, the arts, but he felt that they all rely on something unexpected: “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”

Here is where this Thoreauvian saunter has led us, gentle reader—back to that poster. In Wildness, not wilderness, is the preservation of the world.

I think the distinction is enormously important. “Wilderness” implies an external state; “wildness” is as easily internal as external. Thoreau didn’t want to erase human culture; rather, he sensed that it required wildness, both psychic and physical, in order to flourish.

In one of those beneficent coincidences, I put down Thoreau’s essay a couple of Sundays ago and discovered an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “Is There an Ecological Unconscious?” The article described a somewhat inchoate field of study in which a clear link is made between human mental health and the health of wild nature. Glenn Albrecht, a philosopher and professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, has coined the term “solastagia” to designate “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault… a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.” A growing number of psychologists agree with Albrecht’s assertion that there is a direct connection between environmental degradation and mental illness. One of them calls not just for intact ecosystems that include large predators but for a “re-wilding of the psyche,” a term perhaps more appealing to poets and transcendentalists than to funders of academic research.

It’s an interesting proposition. What does a re-wilded psyche look like? In his book Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind, David Quammen muses on the merits of what he calls “alpha predators,” among them lions, grizzly bears, Nile crocodiles, reticulated pythons, and white sharks. He considers mythical creatures as well, particularly Leviathan as he appears in the book of Job. In examining this uncomfortable perspective on humanity as meal instead of master, Quammen wants us to consider the crucial role this perspective has played “in shaping the way we humans construe our place in the natural world.” In short, it’s important for us to know ourselves as part, not masters, of the food chain. Why? For the same reason God beats Job over the head with questions about Leviathan: who can tame such a furious beast? Can Job? Duh, no. The man-eaters remind us of the life-promoting necessity of humility. As dangerous as they are, the destruction of man-eaters, or even their relegation to zoos, would be more dangerous: we might thus be further encouraged to behave as if we were masters of the universe—a time-tested guarantee for misrule if there ever was one.

A human psyche that resonates with, or trembles at, the roars of actual alpha predators is likely to be awake in a particular way, awake to its own contingency. (If you haven’t read Mary Oliver’s “Alligator Poem,” now is definitely the time to do so.) Years ago, walking in the back reaches of Madroño Ranch, Martin and I heard the unmistakeable scream of a mountain lion. I’ve never reentered that canyon—especially when I’m alone—without taking a deep breath.

So back to the misquotation. As much as I love that old poster, and as vital as I think wilderness is, I think Thoreau got it right. Without access to wildness, without knowing the necessity of bowing before it, we cease to be fully human. And if we can’t fully inhabit our humanity, what home is left for us?

What we’re reading
Heather: John Pipkin, Woodsburner: A Novel
Martin: Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr., Lincoln, Life-Size

On our recent trip to snowy Massachusetts, as Heather told you last week, we carved out time for a pilgrimage to Walden Pond, just south of Concord, the very wellspring of American conservationism. Walden Pond, of course, is where that notorious crank Henry David Thoreau lived alone for two years in a tiny cabin he built himself on land owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, an experience recounted in his seminal Walden; or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854.

Off the top of my head, I can think of no book or author more misunderstood, then or now. Even Emerson missed the point; in his eulogy of Thoreau, the Sage of Concord said that his protégé’s lack of ambition meant that, “instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party.” To this day, many dismiss Thoreau as either a misanthropic hermit or a parasitic hypocrite.

In fact, while he may indeed have been a little weird, and stubborn as hell, he was far more humane, even charming, than common opinion would have you believe. And, far from lacking ambition, he intended his book to be a revolutionary manifesto, pointing to an entirely new way of thinking amid the hustle and bustle of industrializing, materialistic nineteenth-century America. In Walden he seeks “to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” Robert Sullivan calls the book (appropriately, given its context) “a machine, a device intended to charge and change the reader, rather than incite a withdrawal from society,” and this is an important point. Thoreau wanted to change the world, not ignore it. His cabin was, as he noted, only a mile and a half from the middle of Concord, and the world was constantly impinging on him, in the form of curious friends, wandering woodcutters, runaway slaves, errant fishermen, and, perhaps most obtrusive of all, the nearby railroad. That’s why I love my photo of Walden Pond at the top of this post: you can see the beauty of the woods, but you can also see the contrail of a plane passing overhead, a reminder that this place is not in fact as removed from the world as it might seem.

I think Thoreau would have appreciated the juxtaposition. He was profoundly countercultural, but always engaged. His advice in Walden is not to retreat from the distractions of modern life, but to confront them and face them down. He was a profoundly patriotic man—I do not believe it was a coincidence that he moved into his cabin on July 4—and he deplored the degenerate materialism of his time; his residence beside the pond, and the book that resulted from it, were intended to remind his countrymen of the first principles of the nation’s founding fathers.

If you haven’t actually read Walden, I highly recommend it. I was assigned it in high school, but found it so impenetrably, unutterably dull that I can’t recall if I ever made it past the first page. I picked it up again recently and found it startlingly lively, occasionally maddening, and often hilarious. Why did no one ever tell me that Thoreau was so funny?

For example, early in the book’s first chapter, rather unpromisingly entitled “Economy,” he disarmingly admits that much of what is to follow is self-centered, pointing out that “I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well.”

And here he is on his neighbors’ reluctance to venture out to Walden Pond at night: “I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.”

And then there’s this, possibly my favorite passage in the book, on the disadvantages of living in a cabin:

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head.

And yet, despite the flashes of shrewd New England wit (and as the critic and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch noted, “He meant his jokes and was never more serious than when he was being funny”), I cannot think of Thoreau without a tinge of sadness. He must have been, in many ways, an exasperating and difficult man, but I suspect he never really understood why other people found him so. He tried courageously to say exactly what he meant, and believed sincerely that what he said could help make the world a better and happier place, if people would just pay attention. Alas, they didn’t; Thoreau’s writings were notoriously poor sellers during his lifetime, and Walden took five years to sell out its first printing of two thousand copies.

In his 1842 lecture “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson admitted that “we have yet no man who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels’ food; who, trusting to his sentiments, found life made of miracles; who, working for universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how; and yet it was done by his own hands.”

Thoreau began his sojourn at Walden Pond three years later, and if he didn’t quite fulfill his mentor’s absurdly tall order—after all, his mother still brought him food and did his laundry, and he dined frequently with the Emersons—he probably came as close as anyone, before or since. “In the long run men hit only what they aim at,” he wrote in Walden. “Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.” American literature has known few better marksmen.

What we’re reading
Heather: Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
Martin: Robert Sullivan, The Thoreau You Don’t Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant

One of the things that we hope will characterize Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment is a strong sense of place. It’s right there, implicitly and explicitly, in our mission and vision statements, just off to your right.

But how does one develop a sense of place? One answer, at least in part, and for those of us of a certain age, has been by reading the local newspaper. But the newspaper as we know it seems to be going the way of the 8-track and the VHS tape. Increasingly, people opt to get their news in a way that doesn’t leave ink smudges on their hands, or require drying in the oven on rainy mornings. In other words, they’re reading the “paper” online.

In “Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper,” in the November issue of Harper’s, Richard Rodriguez examines the decline of his (and my) hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the historical importance of the newspaper in American life.

The press, Rodriguez argues, was the indicator and bestower of civic stature: “It was the pride and the function of the American newspaper in the nineteenth century to declare the forming congregation of buildings and services a city—a place busy enough or populated enough to have news.” In addition, the rise of the newspaper was a sign of the small-d democratic nature of American culture, “a vestige of the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new country imagined it could read and write itself into existence.”

But, for many, the newspaper seems to have outlived its usefulness. The Atlantic Monthly’s Megan McArdle, in an online (of course) column titled “The Media Death Spiral,” writes, “The circulation figures for the top 25 dailies in the U.S. are out, and they’re horrifying. The median decline is well into the teens; only the Wall Street Journal gained (very slightly).”

She adds, “I think we’re witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it. The economics just aren’t there.”

Those of us who read the Austin American-Statesman have noted the signs already: a shrinking paper, meaning fewer ads and less revenue; the anorexic classifieds (a victim of craigslist) tacked onto the back of the Life and Arts section; the business and metro sections combined.

Why should we care whether or not the Statesman survives? According to Rodriguez, “When a newspaper dies in America, it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed. If the San Francisco Chronicle is near death… it is because San Francisco’s sense of itself as a city is perishing.”

Does he exaggerate? Maybe. But once the newspapers are gone, he asks, “who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with ‘I.’”

Rodriguez quotes a friend of his, a journalist from India: “If I think of what many of my friends and I read these days, it is still a newspaper, but it is clipped and forwarded in bits and pieces on email—a story from the New York Times, a piece from Salon, a blog from the Huffington Post, something from the Times of India, from YouTube. It is like a giant newspaper being assembled at all hours, from every corner of the world, still with news but no roots in a place. Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore.”

That statement really bothers me, for a couple of reasons. I can understand the appeal of what Philip Meyer, a student of the industry, calls “the demassification of the media”; in the bottom-up model of journalism, each consumer is free to pick and choose the information he or she deems most valuable, rather than being forced to rely on the judgment of a corporate editor. What could be more democratic?

But such a model does come with a cost. As Meyer writes in his book The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, “If we’re all attending to different messages, our capacity to understand one another is diminished.”

And what about that speculation from Rodriguez’s friend, “Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore”? Perhaps not. But I don’t want to live in a world where people no longer feel connected to the land and the people around them. In a society that has traditionally viewed “light[ing] out for the territory,” in the words of that old newspaperman Mark Twain, as the solution to every problem, how do we convince folks that they have a stake in, and a responsibility to, their surroundings? As strip malls and chain stores and fast-food outlets and cookie-cutter housing developments and, yes, the internet make every place more like every other place, how are we supposed to know or care where we are?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I think we better find one. People who feel strongly connected to their surroundings, urban or rural or in between, feel that the place is theirs; they know it, feel it, eat it, sleep it, and live it. They’re also more likely to take care of it. I certainly hope that the things that make Madroño Ranch special to us—the hills, the water, the rocks, the trees—will outlive us, and our children, and our children’s children, and we intend to do all we can to make sure they do.

What we’re reading
Heather: Mary Oliver (ed.), The Best American Essays 2009
Martin: Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

William A. A. Wallace (1817-1899) weighed 13 pounds at the time of his birth in Virginia. He came west in 1837 to avenge the deaths of his older brother and cousin, who had been killed in the Goliad Massacre fighting against Mexico in the Texas Revolution; alas, the Battle of San Jacinto occurred before he left home, ending the conflict and eliminating, at least temporarily, his opportunity to “take pay out of the Mexicans.” When the schooner on which he sailed from New Orleans was caught in a violent storm, Wallace was the only person aboard, including the crew, who was not prostrated by seasickness; when they reached Galveston, he was the only one who did not have to be carried ashore.

In 1839, he unexpectedly came face to face with a Waco warrior on a narrow path on Austin’s Mount Bonnell. Without taking time to aim, Wallace fired the rifle he had been carrying and the warrior, mortally wounded, fell off the cliff and into the Colorado River.

In 1842, Wallace volunteered for the ill-fated Somervell and Mier expeditions into Mexico; he was captured and survived a stint in the notorious Perote Prison. After returning to Texas, he joined the Texas Rangers and fought in the Mexican War.

Wallace was the first man to carry the mail from San Antonio to El Paso. Once, having been forced to walk many miles after losing his mules to Indians, he stopped at the first house he came to and ate 27 eggs before heading on into El Paso for a full meal.

Are all these stories true? Probably not. J. Frank Dobie wrote that “Wallace was as honest as daylight but liked to stretch the blanket and embroider his stories”—and Dobie certainly knew a bit about blanket-stretching. In the end, though, the factuality of the stories is immaterial. To quote the editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “This is the West, sir. When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Austin American-Statesman comics (it’s been a tough week)
Martin: E. O. Wilson, Naturalist