Let’s face it: we are not culturally conditioned to look kindly upon constraints. Every day bombards us with messages urging us to maximize our enjoyments, super-size our servings, and prolong our erections. Limitations, we’re told, are for losers.

I, on the other hand, believe firmly that sometimes, under certain circumstances, constraints can actually foster, rather than curtail, creativity; ingenuity can flourish in unexpected ways, in all sorts of compromised settings. I absorbed this lesson during my time as a “county writer” for the Texas State Historical Association’s New Handbook of Texas, beginning in the mid-1980s, during which I suspect I learned at least as much about the craft of writing as I did as an undergraduate English major or in grad school.

As a county writer, my job entailed researching and writing all the entries associated with a given county for a massive revision of the original Handbook of Texas, a historical encyclopedia/biographical dictionary originally published in two volumes in 1952 under the aegis of Walter Prescott Webb, with a supplemental third volume appearing in 1976. The greatly expanded New Handbook, published in six volumes in 1996, required a veritable army of contributors—more than 3,000 in all—some volunteers and some, like me, paid staff, to crank out the roughly 24,000 entries. (Since going online in 1999, the Handbook has grown to more than 25,000 entries.)

On the face of it, few jobs could have less to do with creative writing. Yet trying to shape an occasionally jumbled pile of historical data, hearsay, and legend into a coherent, even compelling, and above all brief (sometimes just two or three sentences) narrative was an irresistible and, I believe, inherently creative challenge, even if I didn’t always succeed; many of the entries I had to write, such as those on small watercourses or hills or towns that had dried up and blown away, were simply too short and/or uninteresting. Here, for example, in its entirety, is my entry on a stream called Town Creek:

Town Creek rises a mile north of Fredericksburg in central Gillespie County (at 30°19′ N, 98°52′ W). Intermittent in its upper reaches, the stream follows a southerly course for 3½ miles to its mouth on Barons Creek in Fredericksburg (at 30°16′ N, 98°52′ W). Rising in the hills of the Edwards Plateau, Town Creek crosses flat to rolling terrain surfaced by shallow loamy and clayey soils; vegetation consists primarily of open stands of live oak, Ashe juniper, and mesquite, and grasses.

Doesn’t exactly set the heart racing, does it? Yet every so often I would find some nugget of information that could add a little color to a highly compressed and otherwise drab recitation of facts, and I took an inordinate pride in trying to craft the most apparently unpromising entry into something that would reward the careful reader with a graceful turn of phrase or an unexpectedly poignant or amusing incident. Here are just a few, drawn from various biographical entries I wrote: After the jazz pianist Peck Kelley quit the music business due to deteriorating eyesight, “he reportedly spent hours practicing at home on a stringless, silent piano so as not to disturb his neighbors.” German immigrant Johann Klingelhoefer “was elected chief justice of Gillespie County in 1850 but had to give up the office when his opponent, Mormon leader Lyman Wight, pointed out that Klingelhoefer was not yet an American citizen.” The West Texas rancher and congressman Claude Hudspeth, on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, once referred to the president of our neighbor to the south as “that spineless cactus of Mexico.”

If I had to pick one favorite among the hundreds of entries I wrote, though, it might be the one on actor Tom Mix. Mix probably didn’t belong in the Handbook of Texas at all; despite his claims to have been born on a ranch on the Rio Grande and to have served as a Texas Ranger and with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the battle of San Juan Hill, he was in fact an army deserter from Pennsylvania. He was the most celebrated Western silent-movie star in early Hollywood, but he was virtually forgotten with the advent of talkies. After almost a thousand words, my entry on him ends as follows:

Mix died on October 12, 1940, when his Cord automobile overturned on a highway near Florence, Arizona; he was driving to California to discuss a return to the movies. His principal baggage reportedly consisted of three snow-white Stetson hats.

I couldn’t say with certainty that the story of the white Stetsons was true, but it was simply too good to pass up, and it provided a perfect way to punctuate the downward trajectory of Mix’s life. In this entry, and in many others, I was merely following the advice of the newspaper editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”), though I tried always to leave myself a little wiggle room—hence the use of “reportedly” in the excerpt above. (I was also a big fan of “apparently,” “presumably,” “allegedly,” and similar conditional constructions.)

This is all a pretty high-falutin’ way of talking about what was on some level hackwork, but I think that even the humblest piece of writing can benefit from, and manifest, a careful devotion to craft. As George Orwell, a particular literary hero for the simplicity and clarity of his writing, once said, “So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.” (That would have made a pretty good motto for us county writers, right down to the emphasis on the surface of the earth; we probably had to write more entries on physical features—creeks and mountains and such—than any other type.)

We’re never more creative or more fully human than when we acknowledge and work within our limitations, be they imposed externally or internally. Our aspirations can be infinite, but actual achievement usually requires a pragmatic acceptance of the finite. And, of course, a judicious use of conditionals.

What we’re reading
Heather: Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird’s Daughter
Martin: Vincent Virga, Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations

For all of my whingeing about the difficulties of adjusting to life in Texas, even after thirty years here, I know I’ve had it pretty easy, especially compared to the nineteenth-century settlers who endured almost unimaginable hardships while trying to claw a tenuous living out of the deceptively thin Hill Country topsoil. For one thing, I speak the same language (more or less) as the natives. For another thing, those natives aren’t actively trying to kill me—well, with the exception of the occasional jackass in a pickup speeding down MoPac. Finally, and arguably most important of all, I live here after the invention of air conditioning.

Many of those Hill Country settlers were German immigrants, and they and their descendants have played a prominent role in the region’s history over the last century and a half. I learned something about them when I started working at the Texas State Historical Association back in the mid-1980s, as my initial assignment was writing entries on Gillespie County for the Handbook of Texas.

I knew little to nothing of Texas history at the time, but I had always enjoyed our occasional day trips to the charming little town of Fredericksburg—people actually spoke German in the shops and restaurants!—and leaped at the opportunity to learn more about it. Perhaps inevitably, the more I learned, the more fascinated I became.

Here’s the one-paragraph version: In the mid-1840s, the Adelsverein, an organization founded by a group of German nobles to promote colonization in Texas, shipped over more than 7,000 settlers, most of them peasants. The first Europeans in what is now Gillespie County arrived in 1846, when a group of 120 German settlers led by John O. Meusebach established Fredericksburg on Barons Creek and Town Creek, near the Pedernales River. The little community thrived and became the county seat when the legislature created Gillespie County in 1848. Two years later, the population of the town had grown to almost a thousand; in that same year, three-quarters of the 1,235 whites in Gillespie County were of foreign extraction, almost all of them German.

Though little remembered today, surely one of the most remarkable was Christian Althaus, one of the first doctors in Fredericksburg. (The first was Wilhelm Keidel.) While I myself didn’t write the Handbook entry on Althaus—that honor fell to the Barbara Donalson Althaus, who obviously had a more personal connection with her subject—I’m cribbing from it shamelessly in this post.

Johann Christian Althaus was born in Erndtebrück, Westphalia, and served as a medic in the Prussian army before emigrating to Texas. He sailed from Antwerp, Belgium, on the York, arriving in Indianola in 1846 and making his way to Fredericksburg by the time town lots were distributed the following year. Also in 1847, he married a fellow immigrant, Anna Maria Elisabetha (Elizabeth) Behrens; they eventually had seven children. Initially, doctoring seems to have been at best a part-time occupation for Althaus; he also worked as a saddle-maker and as an Indian agent at Fort Martin Scott, two miles east of town, though in the 1850 census he was listed as a carpenter.

Althaus seems, like many of his fellow German settlers, to have cultivated a friendly relationship with the local Indians. He was one of the signers of the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty, which virtually eliminated fears of Indian attacks, and he eventually learned several Indian dialects. He treated Indians as well as whites in his medical practice, following the advice of an Indian friend who advised him to “be friendly and never pull a gun.” (This still strikes me as good advice in most circumstances.)

After ten years in Fredericksburg, Althaus determined to try his hand at ranching. He and the family moved to Cave Creek, several miles northeast of town, where he built a two-room stone house on top of a spring in which he kept his medicines cool. (The house, still standing in modified form on Koennecke-Eckhardt Road, off Ranch Road 1631, is now part of the Historic American Buildings Survey of the Library of Congress.) Althaus, like many of his fellow Germans, opposed the “peculiar institution” of slavery and secession—an unpopular stance with many of their fellow Texans, and contributed to the legendary insularity of the Hill Country Germans—but helped organize the home guard and served as a county commissioner during the Civil War.

And all this time he was practicing medicine, too, as Barbara Donalson Althaus wrote in her Handbook entry:

He served as a community doctor until the 1880s, and his practice of medicine was carried on under many difficulties. Medical instruments were scarce; before Althaus amputated a crushed arm, he had to have the operating instrument (now at Pioneer Museum, Fredericksburg) made by a local blacksmith. He used locally grown herbs, roots, and bark to make his own medicines. When the government sent him to Bandera to treat diphtheria patients, he used medicine he made from honey, almond juice, and the bark of the blackjack tree. Thirty-four out of thirty-five people survived. Elizabeth Althaus not only raised seven children but also ran a makeshift hospital, orphanage, and shelter for wayfarers in their home. In addition she tended the farm during her husband’s trips, which sometimes lasted for weeks.

Althaus farmed and ranched and operated a dairy on the Cave Creek property until the 1880s, when he moved a few miles east. In 1883 he was among the founders of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Cave Creek, which calls itself “the oldest rural church in Gillespie County,” and volunteered to help haul the lumber used to build the church from Austin, seventy-five miles away. (At this time he was in his sixties, remember.) He died in 1915, at the age of ninety-four, and was buried beside the church he helped establish.

All in all, a life worthy of remembrance and even celebration, I’m sure you’ll agree. And a life that puts my own in useful perspective. The high in Austin today will be in the mid-90s, but I’m typing this while sitting in a comfortable chair in our well-cooled house; when I sweat, it’s usually because I choose to, either by walking Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound up and down the surrounding hills in the morning, or by going to a nearby gym. The food we eat is plentiful and healthful, almost exclusively grown by local farmers; Heather is fixing a breakfast of home-made polenta (made with cornmeal from Boggy Creek Farm) topped by a poached egg from our happy Madroño Ranch hens. I’m getting over a summer cold, after several days of pounding decongestants and expectorants.

Do I wish I were living in nineteenth-century Texas? No and hell no. But I do wish that I had had the opportunity to meet people like Christian (and Elizabeth) Althaus in person. I know I could learn much from their courage and perseverance and goodness.

What we’re reading
Heather: Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds
Martin: Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (still!)

Only connect! (E. M. Forster)

The world is getting smaller, we are told. New technologies are bringing what used to be distant, unknown, and unattainable, to our desktops and telephones; we can communicate instantly with people on different continents, sharing documents, photos, texts, songs, whatever. Even, God help us, Tweets.

Our world here in Austin has also grown smaller, but in a very different sense. It sometimes seems that hardly a week goes by without some unsuspected connection revealing itself, much to our surprise and pleasure.

For example, Heather mentioned in a previous post how in 2005, at the Sustainable Food Center’s Sunset Valley farmers’ market, she suddenly realized that the man at the Thunder Heart Bison stand, from whom she’d been buying bison meat for several years, was Hugh Fitzsimons, whose grandparents lived across the street from her grandparents in San Antonio, and with whom she’d attended St. Luke’s Episcopal School in San Antonio.

And this: many years ago, during one of my early midlife crises, I decided that I’d had enough of the word trade and quit my job at the Texas State Historical Association to try my hand as an artist. I rented a studio at a complex on Guadalupe Street between 17th and 18th Streets, moved in my easel and drafting table and paints and brushes and pencils, and waited for inspiration to strike. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited some more.

Eventually, I came to my senses and went back to the TSHA, hat in hand, and managed to get back on the payroll, and my life returned to what passes for normal around here. But several years ago Heather met a fellow rower, Kevin Barry, and his wife Barbara; we had long since become good friends with them when we learned, quite by chance, that Kevin, a newspaper publisher by trade, had once owned a studio complex in Austin. On Guadalupe Street. Between 17th and 18th Streets.

Here’s another one: last year we met the young novelist Philipp Meyer and his wife Alex at the Austin home of our friend Jim Magnuson, the head of the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. We very much enjoyed chatting with Philipp, the author of American Rust and a Dobie Paisano Fellow, and some time later he invited us to a party at Paisano Ranch. Then we found out that he had been asked to write a feature for Texas Monthly on Hog School at Madroño Ranch; that article appears in the magazine’s August issue.

Then there’s this: last May we met Elizabeth Burnett, who works in development for Williams College, and she asked about other Williams alumni in Austin. I mentioned the novelist Amanda Eyre Ward, whom I’d met several years ago, and Elizabeth gasped: it turned out that she and Amanda were not only classmates at Williams, but fellow graduates of the M.F.A. writing program at the University of Montana.

Shortly after we met Elizabeth, our friend Becca Cody suggested that her friend Juli Berwald, a freelance science writer in Austin, might be an excellent candidate for a residency at Madroño Ranch. We corresponded with Juli, and among her references was (of course) Amanda Eyre Ward. Another connection! Juli suggested her friend Julia Clarke, a paleontology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, as another potential resident; after corresponding with Julia, we quickly agreed that she was a slam dunk, but it wasn’t until we finally met her in person that we determined that she and I are both graduates of the Branson School in Ross, California. Last month Juli and Julia spent a couple of weeks at Madroño Ranch, and, acting on a suggestion by Elizabeth Burnett, we’re going to host a gathering of local Williams and Amherst alumni on August 10 at which Amanda will discuss her new book, Close Your Eyes, with Juli serving as the M.C.

Here’s the best one, though. Six years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Rita, Lucy Nazro, the head of St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, asked us if we’d be willing to put up a young man named Tom Mehaffy, a student at Monsignor Kelly High School in Beaumont, who’d been displaced by the storm. Of course we agreed—you just don’t say no to Lucy Nazro—and so for several days we had the pleasure of hosting an extremely pleasant and polite young man.

Flash forward to one night several months ago, when we ran into our pal Tink Pinkard and his wife Leah with Jeremy and Alison Barnwell at Fabi and Rosi, one of our favorite Austin restaurants. That night Tink introduced us to Elizabeth Winslow, who co-owns Farmhouse Delivery, a cooperative CSA here in Austin, and who, coincidentally, also happened to be dining at Fabi and Rosi. (Tink works for Farmhouse Delivery when he’s not out fishing or hunting.)

We had been hoping to get to know Elizabeth better, especially since our older daughter started working at Farmhouse Delivery a few weeks ago, and had finally managed to make a date for her to come over and have a drink at our house in Austin last week. Then we got an apologetic email from her saying that she’d have to reschedule, due to an unexpected visit from her father and younger brother.

A few days later we got another email from Elizabeth with the subject line, “OK, so here is something REALLY crazy!” In it she wrote that last Monday, the day she had planned to come over to our house, as she and her father and brother were driving out to Lake Travis, they were recalling relocating to Austin from their native Beaumont in the wake of Rita. Elizabeth asked her brother, “What was the name of the family you stayed with?” Sure enough, Elizabeth turns out to be Tom Mehaffy’s older sister. What are the odds?

I don’t know what, if anything, all these coincidences and connections mean. Perhaps they’re simply an indication that we move in extremely claustrophobic social circles. But I find them fascinating, and inexplicably enjoyable. One of the persistent complaints about twenty-first-century life is the anonymity, the sense of isolation, of being alone in an enormous crowd. We long for connection, for that sense of being known by someone else; we want to feel that we are part of a community.

That’s the selfish little secret behind much of what we’re doing at Madroño Ranch. We’re obviously not getting rich—not yet, anyway—by offering residencies and raising bison, so people sometimes wonder why we bother. My only answer is that getting rich isn’t the only way to measure success (though we wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to it!). Connection, the sense of belonging to a community of smart, kind, interesting, thoughtful people—people like Hugh and Kevin and Philipp and Amanda and Juli and Julia and Tink and Elizabeth—is its own reward.

What we’re reading
Heather: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Martin: Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

West Texas has been much on my mind recently, in part because Heather and I drove down to San Marcos a couple of weeks ago for a panel discussion marking the opening of an exhibition entitled Big Bend: Land of the Texas Imagination at Texas State University. And then last week came the news of the devastating Rock House fire that ravaged Fort Davis, which I followed on the Marfa Public Radio website.

Shocking and shameful admission: Heather and I have never been to Big Bend National Park. Oh, we’ve been to (and through) west Texas—far west Texas, I mean; the part of the state west of the Pecos River, pinched between Mexico to the south and New Mexico to the north, but maybe excluding El Paso, which is after all sort of a city—many times, and I even became a sort of long-distance expert on the region during my tenure at the Texas State Historical Association—more on that below—but that embarrassing gap in our knowledge remains.

The Trans-Pecos, for all its stunning beauty, can seem a place of natural indifference, if not outright hostility, to humankind. In Pecos, Terrell, Reeves, Brewster, Jeff Davis, Culberson, Presidio, Hudspeth, and El Paso counties, the towns are few and far between, and always seem just a little, what shall we say, conditional. The dried-up remains of Orla, on Highway 285 between Pecos and Carlsbad, New Mexico, make the point hauntingly and emphatically, as does the Rock House fire: people can live out here, but not easily, and not for very long.

Yet even here, unexpected signs of civilization can spring up out of nowhere. My earliest experience of the Trans-Pecos came thirty years ago as Heather and I were driving from San Francisco back to San Antonio, the last leg of our epic road trip the summer after we graduated from college. We were driving through the vast emptiness of Terrell County on Highway 90. I was behind the wheel, with my foot to the floor of Heather’s little Toyota Tercel, as we swept around a long downhill curve, when a state trooper’s car suddenly appeared on the shoulder, radar gun pointed straight at us.

“Oh, shucks!” I exclaimed, or words to that effect, as I slammed on the brakes in an attempt to bring us back under, or at least close to, the speed limit—honestly, who obeys the speed limit out there?—but it was too late. He flagged us down and instructed us to follow him on into Sanderson, where he took us to the justice of the peace’s house.

We entered through the kitchen door, and the J.P., who turned out to be a very friendly woman, seated us at her kitchen table and served us lemonade, charged me some nominal fine (the trooper had rather sportingly knocked about ten miles an hour off the ticket), and sent us on our way with a cheery warning about all the other speed traps between Sanderson and San Antonio. All in all, it was about as pleasant an experience as paying a speeding ticket could possibly be—and we made it the rest of the 275 miles to San Antonio without receiving another ticket.

My next memorable experience of the Trans-Pecos came years later, on a family trip to Colorado, when we stopped for the night in Fort Stockton at the end of a long, exhausting day of driving. We checked into the first motel we saw (one of those generic places with a big central atrium), smuggled Phoebe the dog into the room (I believe I carried her under my jacket), and, too tired and dazed to uphold our usual standards, Heather and I told the kids they could watch TV and have fried chicken for dinner. (For years thereafter, whenever the subject of a family vacation came up, the kids would say, “Let’s go back to Fort Stockton!”) Again, an unexpected outpost of civilization—high culture! haute cuisine!—in the midst of America Deserta.

This trip took place at just about the time when, while working for the Texas State Historical Association, I was given the assignment of writing many of the entries on the Trans-Pecos for the New Handbook of Texas. I still remember some of the remarkable things I learned in the course of my research:

• No matter where or how long you drive in the Trans-Pecos, you will inevitably come to a highway sign that says “El Paso: 330 miles.”
• The population of Jeff Davis County increased an astonishing 300 percent between 1950 and 1970—from two to six.
• The legendary swimming pool at Balmorhea State Park, in Reeves County, is home to a rare species of freshwater man-eating shark.
• The Marfa lights are actually an elaborate practical joke left behind by the crew of the classic Texas epic Giant after they finished filming on location in 1955.
• Marathon, in Brewster County, was the site of a battle between the Comanches and the Athenians in 490 BCE. The upset victory by the visiting Athenians (the Comanches had been favored by two touchdowns) marked the beginning of the rise of classical Greek civilization.

Three years ago, Heather and our daughters and I spent Easter weekend in the Trans-Pecos. The weather was unseasonably cold (Lizzie, on spring break from her Massachusetts college, was outraged; she had imagined a week of tropical languor after the rigors of a New England winter, and instead spent most of the trip shivering in 35-degree temperatures), but we had a wonderful time. Among the highlights were a “star party” at the McDonald Observatory outside Fort Davis and a drive down Ranch Road 2810 into the Chinati Mountains southwest of Marfa. Imagining what it would be like to be stuck out there with multiple flat tires and no cell phone reception, we chickened out and turned back before we made it all the way to the river, but it lived up to our friend Bob Ayres’s recommendation as possibly the most beautiful drive in Texas.

I offer all of the above to explain why I considered myself something of an expert on the Trans-Pecos when we went to the panel discussion at Texas State last week. Moderated by Jake Silverstein, the editor of Texas Monthly and a former reporter for Marfa’s Big Bend Sentinel, the panel included local writer Joe Nick Patoski and his collaborator on the handsome University of Texas Press book Big Bend National Park, the photographer Laurence Parent, author in his own right of Death in Big Bend: Real Stories of Death and Rescue in Big Bend National Park; Barbara “Barney” Nelson, an English professor at Sul Ross State and the editor of God’s Country or Devil’s Playground: The Best Nature Writing from the Big Bend of Texas; and Marcos Paredes, a legendary ranger who recently retired after twenty years at Big Bend National Park. How could these people possibly know more about the region than I?

All kidding aside, the discussion was lively and informative and marked by the panelists’ obvious mutual respect and love of west Texas. Each of the panelists presented a strong case for the significance and beauty of the Big Bend and the Trans-Pecos. Patoski argued that any meaningful discussion of the area has to include the portions of Mexico just across the Rio Grande as well; the river, he noted, is less a barrier dividing Texas from Mexico than a force that draws the two sides together. (Isn’t that a lovely way to think about the border?) Parent movingly recalled his mother and father impressing upon him at an early age the importance of our national parks. Nelson and Paredes spoke eloquently of the need to protect Big Bend from the sort of crass tourist-industry commercialization that has grown up around—and marred—so many other national parks.

Together, all four painted an irresistible picture of this, the remotest and most mysterious part of the state, and merely strengthened our resolve: someday soon—maybe this fall?—we’re going to make it to Big Bend. And then we’ll celebrate with a big bucket of fried chicken.

What we’re reading
Heather: George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (still!)
Martin: James S. Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend (still!)

I was surprised, while reading Rebecca Solnit’s fascinating Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, to realize that I probably know substantially more about the history of Texas than I do about the history of my native San Francisco.

Of course, this realization should hardly have come as a surprise. After all, I’ve lived in Texas for more than half my life, whereas I left California at age seventeen, for college, and never moved back. Moreover, I spent more than half of my time in Texas working for the Texas State Historical Association, mostly researching and writing local history.

Still, it was a little bit of a shock. Despite my recent purchase of a spiffy pair of Lucchese boots, I still frequently think of myself as a Californian, not a Texan. Texas is where I live, but California is where I’m from, and that can be a significant difference. Especially in the South (and Texas is in many ways as much a part of the South as of the West), where you’re from—your “people,” your frame of reference—is still as important as who you are. But while I retain vivid, detailed mental and sensory images of San Francisco and the Bay Area—the sights, the sounds, the smells, and, yes, the tastes—I don’t really know how and why they came to be. In Texas, on the other hand, I learned a lot of the stories before learning the places they explain.

Solnit’s book presents both foreground imagery and background narrative. It is a series of maps and essays which manifest unexpected symmetries or contradictions: “Monarchs and Queens,” which simultaneously maps butterfly populations and sites significant in the history of the city’s queer population; “Poison/Palate” (above), which juxtaposes some of the Bay Area’s leading “foodie” establishments (Chez Panisse, Niman Ranch, etc.) with nearby mercury mines, oil refineries, chemical plants, and other sources of toxic pollution; and so on.

In reading and looking at this beautiful book—and it really is beautiful—I have learned a lot of local history, and also experienced that rush of nostalgia that accompanies any return, be it literal or literary, to your homeland. Just seeing the names on the maps, the extant and (especially) the long gone—Playland at the Beach! the Surf Theater! Winterland! Zim’s!—brought on a shiver of memory worthy of a Proustian madeleine. As Solnit writes, “the longer you live here, the more you live with a map that no longer matches the actual terrain.” She notes that the residents of Managua, Nicaragua, long after an earthquake that destroyed much of the city, “gave directions by saying things like, ‘Turn left where the tree used to be.’”

Similarly, my San Francisco is a palimpsest, an accretion of layers and memories, things and people living and dead, real and fictional—Emperor Norton and Sam Spade, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Harry Callahan, and countless others. All of them were and are integral parts of where I’m from.

But that very notion of being from someplace is somewhat vexed. Locals say “I’m from here” all the time, but to me saying you’re from someplace usually implies motion, absence, a sense that you’re no longer there—that you’ve left it behind. In the United States, we have traditionally defined ourselves as an entire nation of people who are from somewhere else. My mother was born in Italy and my father in Brazil (though his parents were born in Scotland and Austria), which makes me about as American as you can get. After all, even the so-called Native Americans who were here before European contact originally came from somewhere else, presumably across the Beringian land bridge in pursuit of mammoth and bison.

In a fundamental sense, then, ours is a culture built on the sense of limitless opportunity awaiting us just beyond the horizon, just over that next rise. We have never stayed put, geographically or socioeconomically: the Louisiana Purchase, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican War, the California Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the Dust Bowl all pushed or pulled the new nation westward, across the continent, and we still seem to believe that, if we really make a hash of things where we are now, we can always pick up and move on to some uninhabited place (traditionally further west) where we can start fresh.

And some astonishing transformations did indeed take place out on that peripatetic frontier: a poor boy from Kentucky by way of Indiana and Illinois turned into Abraham Lincoln, an itinerant river pilot and printer’s apprentice from Missouri headed west and turned into Mark Twain, and so on. Even after Frederick Jackson Turner famously proclaimed the end of the frontier in 1893, our restlessness did not cease. In the twentieth century, the promise of economic opportunity and escape from Jim Crow drove the great migration of African Americans from the South to the north and west. Our current president, a son of Kansas and Kenya who was born in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, is merely the most recent testament to the persistent power of the American notion of mobility, whether upward or westward.

Back to the Left Coast. In Infinite City, Solnit writes, “A city is a particular kind of place, perhaps best described as many worlds in one place; it compounds many versions without quite reconciling them, though some cross over to live in multiple worlds—in Chinatown or queer space, in a drug underworld or a university community, in a church’s sphere or a hospital’s intersections.” This is inarguably true of San Francisco, or for that matter any city; I would only add that it is no less true of a farm, a rural village, or any place that has borne the prints of generations of human existence. Like, say, Madroño Ranch.

All maps, even ones as imaginative and beautiful as the ones in Infinite City, are by definition reductive. They represent reality in two dimensions; we experience it in (at least) three. Maps, in other words, lack depth, and depth is what makes us and our world real. We don’t inhabit places flatly (though we certainly inhabit plenty of flat places!), but in depth, both geographical and temporal.

That depth is what we hope to gain personally at Madroño Ranch and also encourage in others, but we know we cannot simply will it into being. It grows and accumulates over time, and with care and effort; it is, in fact, a kind of rote learning, going over the same ground again and again, literally and metaphorically, until you have worn a track into the surface. John Muir noted that “Most people are on the world, not in it”; one of our hopes, now that our Austin nest is empty and we’re at the ranch more often, is that we can gradually learn to live and move in, not just on, this small part of the planet.

This is why Heather has grown increasingly ambivalent about travel; the world is full of fascinating places, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of our own. We hope it’s not (or not just) provincialism, but we want to be here.

What we’re reading
Heather: Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
Martin: Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

Bandera County, and the field of Texas history, lost a good one when Dorothy “Dot” Ferguson Hatfield passed away in late September at her home in Medina.

Probably not many of you know who she was, but over the last two decades she produced a shelf-full of indispensable books—eighteen in all—on the history and people of Bandera County. I had never heard of her or her books until our ranch manager Robert Selement generously loaned me his personal copies, signed by the author, when he learned I was researching the history of Madroño Ranch and the surrounding area.

Hatfield’s books, which bear titles such as Medina Memories; Medina: Mecca of the Hills; Magical Medina; and Medina, Glory Land, are compilations of interviews with old-timers, recountings of local legends, and other such ephemera, jumbled together in somewhat random order. They are far from scholarly, lacking an index and, often, any attribution by which to gauge their veracity, but full of lively and otherwise unavailable information—such as the tale of Medina’s last cattle drive, in 1941; or of the impromptu local celebration on November 11, 1918, when the Armistice ending World War I was signed in France; or Ida Hatfield’s account of the 1870 raid in which Indians killed her parents, kidnapped her two brothers, and left eight-year-old Ida for dead after piercing her seven times with lances.

I am sorry to say there was a time, while I was a graduate student at UT Austin, when I looked down my nose at such works. I was working toward a master’s degree in American studies, and while that field seemed somewhat less strictly “academic” than, say, English lit or history, I still believed that no work without footnotes and an index was really worth much. Then, in 1986, the Texas State Historical Association, then headquartered on the UT campus, hired me as a part-time writer and researcher on the New Handbook of Texas project.

The NHOT, as we called it, is a six-volume, 6,000-page reference work published in 1996. (It is now available online as well.) It is a sort of combination historical encyclopedia and biographical dictionary, comprising some 25,000 entries on every county, city, town, river, creek, mountain, battle, personality, and profession in or associated with Texas. The NHOT was the culmination of a 14-year project to revise, expand, and update the original two-volume Handbook of Texas, co-edited by the legendary Walter Prescott Webb and published in 1952. (A single supplementary volume appeared in 1976.)

Over the years I wrote several hundred entries for the NHOT on a dizzying variety of topics, including rock and roller Buddy Holly, football star Bobby Layne, Fredericksburg’s Nimitz Hotel, Western swing pioneer Adolph Hofner, the Dallas Stars hockey team, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, Big Bend Ranch State Park, silent movie star Tom Mix, singing cowgirl Dale Evans, and many others. And while I eventually spent about fifteen years on the TSHA staff in a variety of full-time positions, initially I was just one foot soldier in a veritable army of grad students, independent researchers, and freelance writers working on the NHOT.

Most of us relied primarily on the collection of what was then known as the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, now part of UT’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. Among the most valuable resources in that collection were works, many of them much like Hatfield’s, by amateur local historians. I quickly developed a profound appreciation of such folk; they were “on the ground,” so to speak, and knew their communities in a way that no professional academic historian could. While some of the stories were almost certainly exaggerated, if not made up out of whole cloth, and while we often wished the books had a more logical organizational structure, much of what they contained was invaluable information that would otherwise have been lost forever.

Once I meandered through Dot Hatfield’s charming and informative books of Medina history, I had been hoping to meet her; Robert, who knew she had been in poor health, kept urging me not to delay. As usual, Robert was right; she died before I had the opportunity to meet her and tell her how much I enjoyed and appreciated her work. There’s no doubt that it will inform and enrich any future blog posts in which we talk about the history of the area.

What we’re reading
Heather: Ian Falconer, Olivia Helps with Christmas
Martin:Ian McDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties