Big Bend Inspires

It has been nearly two decades since my friend Vince first suggested I accompany him to far West Texas to see Big Bend National Park. Last week, I finally went.

Over the last 18 years, while I dithered, my uncles and cousins and my father have all made the journey west to the Chihuahuan Desert. Vince has made the thousand-mile trip more than two dozen times; that's about the equivalent of driving entirely around the earth.

In deference to my editor at RoadTripAmerica.com, which will publish a story on this trip next summer, I'll limit this blog entry to just the highlights.

It was hot. No kidding, the desert in mid-July is baking. The highest temperatures we recorded during four days were right around 116 degrees Fahrenheit. Higher elevations, in the Chisos Mountains for instance, can be 20 degrees cooler.

Despite the heat, even the lowlands never felt terribly uncomfortable. I'd have to dig to find the formula to figure out heat indices, but I'm guessing that 100 degrees in muggy old Austin may feel worse than 116 at the Croton Spring campground.

Turns out July and August are great wildlife viewing months, since these are the months when the park gets most of it's annual 12 inches or so of rain. The park, as one ranger told me, was "fat."

While we never got rained on there, we did see rainshowers off in the distance, and many of the washes and dry creeks in the park held evidence of recent runoff. There were even pools of standing water in some stream beds.

Millipedes were everywhere, and -- after dark -- so were tarantulas. Leopard frogs dove for safety in the tinajas as we hiked past, and red-spotted toads wandered the tarmac at night. We spotted the park's two largest lizards -- a colorful male western collared lizard and a delightfully polka-dotted longnosed leopard lizard. The leopard lizard was nearly 15 inches long.

I was entranced by the canyon towhees and Mexican jays, birds we don't often see in Central Texas. The large ravens -- I couldn't tell if they were common ravens or Chihuahuan ravens -- seemed as curious about us as we were about them.

Javelinas, jackrabbits, cottontails and kangaroo rats -- the last are fearless nocturnal visitors I know from Padre Island National Seashore -- were abundant.

In the desert, three species of ceniza bloomed. This is the plant that we've always called "purple sage" or "sageb(r)ush," but of course it's not at a salvia at all. Creosote bushes were blooming in yellow, as was esparanza, or trumpet flower. With the exception of a few strawberry pitayas, the cactuses were mostly bloomless.

Big Bend National Park encompasses about 1,100 square miles of desert, alpine and riparian habitat. It's the 15th-largest of the national parks but in 2007 ranked 138th in number of visitors among the National Park Service's 360 units. Padre Island National Seashore, by comparison, receives about twice as many visitors (more than 600,000) in a year than does Big Bend.

The park also is a geology buff's paradise; a cheerfully jumbled monument of metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary rocks in a rainbow of colors. There are bears, too, and mountain lions, and pictographs and petroglyphs.

But mostly Big Bend is vast, largely empty of people. It's one of the very few places left in Texas where one can camp under the stars and not see an electric light from horizon to horizon.

I find that spirit-expanding emptiness inspiring.

Yeah, I know it's lame

That I haven't written anything here in ages ... been busy, ya know?

There are two new posts up at my other blog, Abilene Trail Chronicles, and scads of photos up at www.AaronReedPhoto.com, and I'm going paddling soon.

Really. I am.

Fossickers

Fossicking is a term found in Cornwall and Australia referring to prospecting. This can be for gold, precious stones, fossils, etc. by sifting through a prospective area. In Australian English, the term has an extended use meaning to "rummage". The term has been argued to come from Cornish. -- Wikipedia

Last week Tam and Patrick and I trouped down to the AGMS building on Burnet Lane for the monthly meeting of the Paleontological Society of Austin. I can barely say "paleontological," (seven syllables, count 'em), so I just call it "the paleo club."

Sometimes they refer to themselves as "dirt diggers."

We paid a whopping $20 for a family membership, and I think -- between the featured presentation and the expert IDs of some oddball specimens -- we got our money's worth the first meeting.

Good people. No surprise since, as my buddy Vince says, you can tell a lot about someone by how they feel about rocks. I was pleased to see Paul Hammerschmidt, a TPWD coastal fisheries biologist, there. Paul and I -- along with his son and some other folks -- went rock-hopping together at South Padre Island during the Texas Clipper sinking event. Nice guy with the kind of all-encompassing curiosity and enthusiasm that I identify with the very best scientists in any field.

Vince's office-neighbor Bill Kidd was there as well -- he and his wife are regulars -- as was Vince himself, with two of his daughters.

I heard the term "fossicking" for the first time twice in one night, from two different people. I like it; to my ears, it has overtones of "frolic" and ... well, it's just a fun word.

That was back in ... January, at our Twelfth Night party. Aimee, my cousin Geoff's geologist wife, gleefully sang out the word when I showed her some recent find. She had picked it up while fossicking in Australia.

Later in the evening, my friend Dub, also a geologist by trade, said: "Man, you guys have really been doing some fossicking ..."

Dub arrived after Aimee and Geoff left for the evening, and brought with him a housewarming gift of a beautifully cleaned and preserved exogyra ponderosa. It's the single best housewarming gift anyone has ever given us, and sits on the mantle now.

On the way home last Tuesday, Patrick broke a short silence with: "Daddy, that was fun!" It probably didn't harm his appraisal of the event that he left with a box full of give-away fossils (including some small ammonites and some very cool gastropods ... er, snails).

Magic

A good friend and fine fisherman who has just entered an MFA program in creative writing in deep South Texas sent this the other day:

"But he couldn’t keep away from the Valley. He would run like a hooked fish until the drag of his dying cells tired him out, and the Valley reeled him in."

It's a quote from a William S. Burroughs book, and nearly perfectly evokes the taut and persistent connection I feel to the low country of my childhood.

A couple of weekends ago, Tamara and I made a dash for the coast during a spell of warmer weather. Sunny skies and temperatures in the low 70s greated us at Padre Island National Seashore. We took the long, sandy trail south -- down island to the tip of the park.

The details of the trip, and the memories it brought back for me, can be found at RoadTripAmerica.com beginning Feb. 1.

The trip Tam and I took this month is one I've made probably more than 100 times. The first of those is beyond my recall, in my earliest childhood. They followed hard on the heels of my parents' courting, and of father-son trips in which my dad was the junior partner.

Padre Island held an almost mystical significance for my grandfather.

A child of the prairie, Grandpa must have felt at home in the wide-open emptiness of Padre Island. And, of course, there were fish there. The fish are what drew him to the Texas Gulf coast to begin with.

Grandpa cheered the acquisition of a large part of the island by the National Park Service. After he died in 1978, my father found a poem among his dad's papers. It begins like this: A dear old uncle left to me/A wondrous, beautiful legacy ... and chronicles some of the joys -- and history -- of the island.

The last lines of the poem go like this:

And now that my race is nearly run,
I can turn my face to the setting sun.
Knowing the battle has been won,
This spot will be left for you, my son ...

That your children and theirs forevermore
May build castles of sand on that golden shore.

Grandpa believed that the island was timeless, and changeless. The National Park Service advertises it that way:

Because the National Seashore endeavors to preserve Padre Island in its natural state, visiting the island is very much like stepping back into the past. With few exceptions, visitors can now see Padre Island as it has existed throughout most of its history and how it is described in the few extant descriptions by the early explorers.

In one sense, it is; the towering condominium developments of the extreme northern and southern ends of the island are nowhere in evidence here. Neither are cell phone towers, hot showers, fast food drive-thrus or any of the hundreds of other appertenances of "civilization."

But oil and gas exploration continues, mostly behind the dune line. The Sierra Club campaigned for a federal buyout of the island's mineral rights from the state of Texas and was flatly told "no" by Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson.

"We get a better deal for developing the resource over time than we do from some arbitrary buyout," Patterson said in 2004.

In 2006, Patterson leased submerged land off the southern end of the park for what could be the nation's largest wind farm. Spanning 40,000 acres of state land, 500 of the turbines would generate enough electricity to power 125,000 homes.

Worries about the turbines are many, and include their impact on migratory birds (the site is in the middle of the Central Flyway, and Padre Island is the first landfall for many birds who have made a long Gulf crossing). And at 400 feet tall, the turbines won't exactly be unobtrusive.

"Those who are concerned about view sheds shouldn't have a problem," Patterson said. "There's nobody there to look at it."

By that logic, Yellowstone would be a pretty good place for an open-pit mine, wouldn't it?

To be fair, the land commissioner is required by law to maximize revenue from public lands. The money funds things like schools, and Texas schools need that subsidy.

Wind farms are an interesting problem for environmentalists. On the one hand, they produce clean energy with virtually no carbon emissions. On the other hand they're not so good for flying critters -- though the danger they pose may be overstated, in some cases -- and they're really, really big.

And, for the size of it's footprint, the proposed Padre Island project would generate only a little more energy (about 20 Megawatts) than a single General Electric H-series combined-cycle gas turbine, which could be fueled with the abundant natural gas found beneath the Texas coast.

The wind farm off Padre Island may or may not go forward after meeting stiff opposition from the Lower Laguna Madre Foundation, among others. On the other side of the bay, a battle over wind power is raging between two South Texas giants who have long been important conservationists: the powerful Kenedy Foundation and the iconic King Ranch.

The foundation wants wind turbines on its ranch; the King Ranch says "not in our (very large) back yard."

It's an odd sort of fight that sometimes leaves sincere conservationists and environmentalists wrong-footed. I'm all for clean, low-emission energy generation. But I equally value the dwindling number of places in this state where I can turn 360 degrees and not see some looming human artifact.

So, on the one hand, there is something timeless about the island. But it also changes, all the time. Barrier islands are organic structures and grow and shrink and migrate ... washovers carve new passes and channels, dunes drift and cover them.

The swirl of longshore currents and pinch eddies that wash Padre Island's shores bring with them an ever-changing array of flotsam and jetsom: fishing floats, logs, buoys, hardhats, bottles, televisions and plastic; lots and lots of plastic.

The island's function as a sump for the Gulf's trash was noted as early as the 16th century, when Spanish surveyors noted the jumble of lship's lumber, gun carriages and other detritus strewn across the island's shores.

It's no surprise, then, that even after more than three decades of trips down island, there's still something new to see.

During our trip a couple of weeks ago, the novelty was a bloom of the dinoflaggelate Noctiluca scintillans, also called "seasparkle." In the light of day, the bloom looked like orange paint poured thick on the water. In the dark of night, the organisms blazed neon blue as waves tumbled them across the sandbars fronting the island.

My friend Brandon in Fort Worth saw a picture and said: "That's not Noctiluca, that's magic!"

I couldn't agree more.

[Third photo from the bottom is a shot of the Laguna Madre from the back of PINS, courtesy of that crazy Viking, Kendal Larson.]