The spiritual sons of the mountain men were the men of the next wave – the skin-and-scoot market hunters, the cut and get out lumbermen, the cattle barons whose herds grazed the plains bare. Stuart Udall, The Quiet Crisis As a boy growing up in Texas, I was constantly confronted by the collision of the […]
Tag Archives: community
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. Loren Eiseley My family spent a lot of time in the water. My dad was a college swim star, and my uncle would have gone to the 1940 Olympics if it hadn’t been for Hitler. We swam and fished and generally fooled around […]
We never really knew whose idea it was, but once pronounced, it caught on like wildfire. My father and his sometime hunting buddy, Harry, figured that if they concentrated their efforts over the entire hunting season, they could shoot enough big ducks for a really fancy duck dinner. North Texas is on the Central Flyway […]
There is pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more … LORD BYRON, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage It’s evident from even a cursory review of Facebook […]
“There is more life in dead trees than there is in living ones.” Old Ecologists’ Aphorism, quoted in Feral by George Monbiot The mouse lay in the middle of the trail, desiccated and flat. It didn’t appear to be eaten; it was relatively intact. The ants weren’t finding much to drag away, so it just […]
The Naturalist’s Axiom: You can’t do just one thing. Law of Successful Tinkering: Save all the parts. Corollary: Save the instructions. Roderick Nash The brown head was just visible above the ripples in the water. We watched it cross the tank (what we called a farm pond) and disappear into the weeds at the […]
“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.” A.A. Milne “But these are weeds,” Melanie exclaimed, “We pull these up in our yard.” “Yes, but this isn’t your yard.” Paul noted kindly, looking out over the prairie. We were collecting native plant seeds on the former Rocky Flats Nuclear Plant site to […]
“It is not enough to know what you are fighting against: you must also know what you are fighting for.” George Monbiot, Feral “Well,” he replied to my question, “If I had lived back then I’d probably have died before I was ten.” I thought a minute, then he pulled off his glasses. My father […]
My grandmother taught ‘voice’ in a small town in Texas. As I understand it, ‘voice’ was how you controlled your singing, which probably meant taking the Texas out of the singer’s voice. When we visited her, we had to stay outside when she was giving lessons, and not be disruptive. Someone, usually some teenage girl […]
Lying on top of the bird feeder, it appeared to send an ominous message to the small birds that routinely feed there. It was nearly as large as some of the smaller birds, and seemed placed to establish dominance, like wolves marking their territory. It reminded me of the turkey scat my dad used to […]
Writes of Nature 