Inland, Dreaming of Waves

And she's off!

One of my goals on this trip was to seem some of the tiny museums in Kansas, but I managed only one: the Prairie Museum of Arts and Culture in Colby, Kansas.

I tried to see the High Plains Museum in Goodland, but it was closed, because it was Sunday, or permanently, I couldn't tell. I did go see the giant copy of one of Van Gogh's sunflower paintings, though. Here it is.

I also took pictures of some of the farming buildings in Goodland. I like their looks.

The Prairie Museum, I discovered, was both inside and outside. I also remembered, upon entering it, that I had been there before, though I couldn't remember when.

First I paid, then I toured the outside buildings, and then I sped through the collection in the main building. My favorite building was the schoolhouse. The desk could hold two people; so you couldn't sit alone. There was a large wood-burning stove. I wished it had been my schoolhouse. I also liked the house—it was nicely decorated. It had a display about rabbit drives. In the mid-1930s Kansas was plagued by hordes of black-tailed jackrabbits, so the town would hold hunting drives to keep the population down.

The 1930s were also the decade of the Dust Bowl and the beginning of the golden age of comics. Hey, maybe Superman would put the soil back together, eh?

The most impressive building was the Cooper Barn. I walked up to it and pulled the door out sharply, expecting it to open, but it didn't. Finally, after a lot of banging around, it occurred to me that the doors might slide, but when I tried to slide them, they didn't budge. I had to drag a staff member out with me to get them to open the doors, and she commented that it looked like part of the door had been broken. I wondered if I had broken it when I was trying to open it like a regular door. That would be so typically Beth.

It was very windy.

It was a Sunday, so the museum closed at 5. After I had my fill of the outside, I went into the Kuska Gallery, pausing to enjoy the way the building had been built into the land, almost like the sod house on the property, and to pet the hungry cat that I was not allowed to let in.

The gallery had all kinds of crap, or treasures, depending on your point of view. The woman who had collected most of it, Nellie McVey Kuska, was a local monument, and apparently pushy and a bit of a klepto. She had the most amazing collection of dolls. More black Barbies than I've ever seen, a few Japanese dolls, dolls with porcelain faces. It was overwhelming the 30 or so minutes I spent on it. It was also amazing.

Past Colby, I listened to KHAZ radio (The Haze) for a while and enjoyed the country sound. I meant to go to the Oil Patch Museum in Russell, and maybe another one, but didn't have time.

South of Russell, on my way to Cheyenne Bottoms and my campground, I passed tons and tons of similar oil rigs: blue with red heads. They were as beautiful as an oil rig can be, but I kept whizzing by them, thinking, "Should I take a picture?" Highway 281 is a really nice drive. I recommend it.

Now I'm sitting in an unimproved campground on NE 60 Road, north of Great Bend, KS. I wanted to get here before dark and bird at Cheyenne Bottoms, but I got here just as the sun was going down and set up my sleeping bag in the back of my truck. It wasn't cold when I arrived, but it's getting colder and slightly breezier by the minute. There are strange noises from the trees and bushes near the creek, or whatever it is. I feel a little bit like I'm in the Blair Witch Project. Some strange bird—perhaps an owl? I hope so—is calling now.

Now that call was loud.

I can't see much beyond my feet because the combination of my computer and the lantern lights only the inside of the truck back. But I'm going to keep working because I don't think I can go to sleep.

I'm looking forward to birding Cheyenne Bottoms in the morning.

Now back to Women and Peace.

OK, now there's something that sounds like a cat. And probably it is just a cat, a house cat. But I'm going to shut myself in the back of the truck just the same. Are there bobcats in Kansas? I'm quite sure there aren't any mountain lions.

I'm a wuss. Just think if I were backpacking somewhere and had nothing between me and nature but a tent. Or worse yet, had to sleep on the ground. Though that seems like a bad idea in a place like Colorado, where there are lions and bears around.

It's 10:30 and time for bed. The wind is getting quite strong.

posted by Price of Silence @ 9:41 PM 1 comments

Birding and Driving. Yes, that will be the story for two weeks

Ate pineapple for breakfast. Saw a cardinal and a downy woodpecker.

Noted the mileage: 85104

Birded Cheyenne Bottoms this morning. Saw about 30 birds, including American coots displaying their white butt sacs. Didn't go all the way around the auto tour but enjoyed watching the shovelers and redheads and ruddy ducks and yellow-headed blackbirds especially.

Great Bend and McPherson, KS, remind me of Grand Junction—the buildings in the downtown look similar. Great Bend had “Please Go Away” tours company. Later I saw Marmie's Ford and Kiowa Kitchen, a Mexican restaurant, and Rickabaugh's Auto Market. Many of the towns in KS have a list of churches on the entrance to the town. I wonder if that's some kind of code. A lot of them also seem to have automotive businesses along the main highway—no surprise there.

On the way east on 56 (parts are on the Santa Fe Trail), saw lots and lots of turkey vultures but very few hawks. There were even three turkey vultures circling over what looked like an abandoned barn at the intersection of 2 highways. I wasn't fast enough to get a picture. I wish I had gone and looked in the barn to see what birds were in it—the place looked like no one lived there.

In McPherson, I went to Java John's and got a latte and biscotti. I talked quite a bit to the woman who made my coffee and the man there. He said the town had about 13,000 people. She said she was from a really really small town in Indiana. I was reading an article in a magazine that mentioned Lake of Fire, an abortion documentary by Tony Kaye.

There are a number of signs like this one throughout Kansas (I later saw one in New Mexico too.) Central Kansas is as flat as the San Luis Valley in parts—much of it used to be wetlands. Then you get into the Flint Hills. There were cuts in the road where swallows were nesting, but I didn't stop. At one point I stopped to take pictures of a fire some farmer had lit in a field. I crossed the highway, but I don't think the shot was any better from that side than from the other side.

It took about 5 or 6 hours to get to KC, and I didn't arrive until 4. Russ was at Dor's house repairing a towel rack for Dorothy.

Dor and Dad and Don and Matt and Russ and I went to Jack Stack's BBQ. I had burnt ends but they weren't burnt enough. I was expecting something like french fries, really crunchy and carcinogenic on the outside and soft and squishy with fat on the inside. I don't really like BBQ all that much, I guess.

I asked Matt where I could find information about Shannon and other 1930s political bosses in KC, and he suggested some unusual sources—which I guess he must have read himself—the Payne papers in the Black Archives at the Main Library on 18^th street; a dissertation on Shannon at Downtown Public Library—5^th floor, mostly letters; and stuff on Pendergast at the Truman Library. Matt said a book writen by a KC Star editor was biased because it was written to make Truman lose the election (in 1948?).

Then we went home and hung out as we always do, talking about the past. Russ looked at a road atlas. I asked him how many states he had been to, and he said “Ten.” I showed Dad where I was going to go on the road atlases. Matt walked around and outside the house. Donald told stories about all the people he knew. He met someone he knew at Jack Stacks and said, “Hi, Grandpa.” Apparently the man's son knew Matt in college or sometime.

At the end of the night, I showed Dad the information I had on my grandfather Marvin's service in WWI and suggested I could write to the Defense Department and get papers, if there were any. I told Dad I thought part of Marvin's life would make a good story. He got a funny look on his face and said all the kids thought Marvin was a "blowhard." He said he'd never taken him seriously, but as he got older, people would tell him about all the things Marvin had done for them. As a minor political boss, Marvin could hand out favors or food or coal and get people to support the Southside Democrats.

posted by Price of Silence @ 10:06 PM 0 comments

OK!

I have a campsite with a view of the river/Keystone Lake. It's very cool. There are showers here—for the RV crowd, I imagine, but us campers can enjoy them too.

It was raining when I put up the tent. I didn't feel like sleeping in the truck, though. It's been nice to sit here in my tent and work, though my hamstrings are really cramping from all the driving and then this extended sitting in a rather awkward position (in my blue camp chair, holding a laptop).

Last night I stayed at Dorothy’s house. She had bought me two bouquets of roses, shrimp cocktail, strawberries, and I don’t know what else. Dor said she wanted to put a chocolate on my pillow, but she wasn’t able to get one.

Her roommate had done some work on the house and rearranged the living room. I liked the new arrangement and the wood floors. The schnauzer was as hyper as ever, but he is really a nice dog. I like the way all her neighbors have chain link fences. You can see into everyone’s yard (and kitchen, if you really want to. Of course, I would never use my birding binoculars for such nefarious purposes).

After I got all packed, which takes a while, what with binoculars, scope, tripod, dry food, cooler food, road atlases, piles of papers I picked up along the way or will need, clothes, and any camping gear I brought in the house, I drove to my friend Cathy’s house. She is the person I’ve been friends with longest, since middle school sometime.

She made me coffee and an English muffin and we sat in her house and talked about mutual friends and family and her kids. Cathy was babysitting three children until the end of the school year to pay for new blinds for her kitchen (it has a lot of windows). Her oldest daughter took them to the park so we could be alone for a while. While they were at the park, they collected things in white paper bags and then came back and drew them. Then we played Mr. Potato Head while sitting on child-sized chairs in Cathy’s basement. Another friend of hers came over.

I learned something about myself today and about Cathy. Cathy takes care of everyone and seems to like it. She doesn't seem to be oppressed by it—I guess she's willing to say no when she has to. I felt so happy being around her and being gently mocked by her. Especially when she said, “I hate people,” when I was complaining about all the unmannerly river rafters on the Colorado River last Labor Day. I wonder if I swore in front of her three “little people” or was being too vehement for them. When I was leaving I felt sad and wanted to spend more time with her.

Cathy told me to go to the Arboretum, but when I was trying to find Highway 69, I couldn't get to it, so I just took 169 instead. It was amusing driving past one closed entrance ramp and taking a detour that led me to 169. I decided that meant I wasn't supposed to go to the Arboretum, so I just went straight down the highway.

There seem to be a lot of memorial highways in this part of the world: Martin Luther King Highway and Pearl Harbor Memorial Highway.

On the way to Oklahoma I saw “Miss Molly’s Cottage,” which I took a picture of for Cathy, and a sign for Greeley, Kansas (there’s a Greeley in Colorado northeast of Boulder). At Big Hill Creek, as I sped toward the bridge, a great blue heron soared over the road and down the creek. It was so graceful.

In Coffeyville, KS, I stopped at the Brown Mansion, which was supposed to be a tourist information center, but it was closed.

Finally I saw a sign that says, “Leaving Kansas” and then another that says “Entering Cherokee Nation.” I had always wondered why I couldn’t find any Indian reservations on the Oklahoma map, when it used to be Indian Territory. Thanks to this postcard, I know: it’s all Indian reservation, Except for a few areas, apparently.

And what is a Cherokee Outlet, anyway?

I couldn’t find the private campground I was looking for at the intersection of Highways 169 and 412, so I pulled over and looked at the atlas. That’s how I found this campground, and I’m really glad I did. I am just about the only camper, but there are lots of RVs. A man came around and collected my $8 fee.

The roads in Oklahoma, and especially Tulsa, seemed quite neglected. Big cracks and potholes. I don’t know if it’s the weather or the budget, but they need to do some major road repair.

posted by Price of Silence @ 10:41 PM 0 comments

A little culture

Then I toured two collections: Enduring Spirit: Native American Artistic Traditions and the American West. At the beginning of the Indian art section, a placard stated that 12,000 Indians served in World War I, hence Congress’s passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. (I’ll bet it wasn’t until the 1960s that they got to vote much.) American Indians have the highest rate of war service of any group in the United States.

I saw ledger paintings on buffalo hide (one by Virginia Stroud), beadwork, and a collection of masks from Central America in a hallway. I wrote that a painting titled Mother and Daughter by Solomon McCombs (Creek) was “just beautiful.” But I can’t see it in my head anymore. I’m going to try to find a reproduction of it in a book. Those are the pieces I remember, though I know there were lots of sculptures and paintings.

Then I followed Beverly Drymon’s recommendation to tour the Vista Room (“It’s the most beautiful view in Oklahoma”). It is indeed an impressive view, though my camera couldn’t do it justice. While there, I looked at prints from Mark Catesby’s collection, A Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahamas. I believe one of the paintings was of a passenger pigeon, which went extinct in 1914. It’s not bad-looking for a pigeon.

I remember more of the paintings from the American West collection, which bothers me a little. Perhaps I’ve seen paintings by those artists in the past. For example, The Hungry Moon by Frederic Remington had a greenish tone I liked. Another one I noted was Midnight Scouting Party. He was famous for his paintings of night scenes. In addition, Remington did illustrations for magazines, which he painted in black and white oils. I’d never heard of that before.

The paintings by Thomas Moran seemed awfully familiar, until I read the description of his development as an artist—he studied Turner’s works in England. So it was his use of light that reminded me of Turner. I liked Shoshone Falls.

Gilcrease boasts an impressive collection of George Catlin’s paintings of Indians and the West. I thought his style rather primitive, but I liked it. In his lifetime, Catlin had great trouble interesting anyone in his paintings—I think nineteenth-century Americans wished that Indians would disappear. He toured with his paintings in Europe, but ultimately he died in debt. Now, his paintings constitute a valuable record.

I came across one painting that made me wish I could teleport my father-in-law to the museum. Titled Meat’s Not Meat Till It’s in the Pan, it showed a frustrated hunter gazing down a cliff to the bighorn sheep that fell just out of his reach on a ledge: http://www.earthstores.com/gilcreasemuseumshop/. (You’ll have to click on “Prints” and and then "Poster Prints" and then scroll down to find the title. There’s a Remington print on the same page.)

After leaving the museum, I followed Beverly’s directions (mostly—I took the wrong road once and had to double back) to the “Riverwalk.” It disappointed me; it was nothing more nor less than strip malls along a parkway along a park along the Arkansas River. I was expecting lots of funky shops and maybe some areas planted with native species, as they did along the Platte River in Denver. Along the road, in the median, stood signs saying, “Up with Trees: In memory of …” Finally I figured out that Up with Trees was a cancer center and the signs celebrated survivors. I did some copyediting at Starbucks and then went to the park, which was nice. And the Arkansas River seems like a proper river to me, not these narrow, shallow things we have in Colorado. All in all, I like Tulsa. Someday I'll spend more time here.

Then I headed south on Highway 75 to Dallas. When it branched off to the left, I didn’t notice and ended up on the Indian Nation Turnpike. There signs warned, “Do Not Drive into Smoke.” At 4:19 pm, I smelled smoke; it was 666 miles since I’d left Cheyenne Bottoms in central Kansas. I crossed Muddy Boggy River near Atoka and Clear Boggy Creek. I called Aunt Pat and told her I’d be late. Later I stopped in Durant to pee at a gas station, which included a Burger King, gas, convenience store, and Choctaw Casino.

In Texas, the roadsides were blooming with Indian paintbrush and a purple flower. These flowers look like Mexican evening primrose. Some of the medians and roadsides were a riot of colors.

I didn’t get to my aunt’s house until about 7, and she had a nice dinner waiting for me, Cornish hens and stuffing and rice. It was very thoughtful of her.

posted by Price of Silence @ 10:08 PM 0 comments

Coming to an Understanding

The room she gave me had a treadmill on it, upturned on one end. Pat had been using it to exercise, but her foot has been bothering her lately because of a congenital problem her doctors just discovered—an extra bone and extra tendon in her foot. It makes it difficult for her to walk. She was worried that I might stumble into the treadmill in the middle of the night, but I didn’t.

In the morning we decided to visit the Dallas World Aquarium in downtown Dallas. It was a bit of a challenge getting there, since I’d never been to Dallas before. We had a close call merging onto one highway—we had to sit in the white-striped triangle between highways until the traffic opened enough to let us in.

But then we moseyed into downtown, parked behind the museum, and walked almost all the way around to find the entrance. So my impression of downtown Dallas comes from parking at the aquarium and looking at the buildings around it.

The DWA is actually many things to all its visitors. It’s not just a bunch of bored fish pacing water in a tank. To start with, you go up to the third floor and descend through the rainforest, walking slowly down and around a waterfall. We saw monkeys and toucans, vampire bats and spotted stingrays along the way. I think there were also some (black?) swans. There were many, many schoolchildren who shrieked a lot. By the time we got down by the River (shades of Chris Farley; actually it was supposed to represent the Orinoco River in the Amazon), we were happy to sit down and watch the female diver feeding lettuce to the Antillean manatees and little cubes to the turtles and catfish.

When we had finished with the rainforest, we viewed the small exhibits in the Aquarium section. There were a number of wall tanks with amazing varieties and colors of coral, jellyfish, leafy seadragons, angelfish, grouper, morays, you name it. It made me want to go diving again. We were tired by then, and I’ll bet Aunt Pat’s foot was hurting, though she didn’t admit it, so we had lunch at the café. By this time we had meandered through the museum back to the parking lot side, but we weren’t ready to leave.

There were still two tunnels to walk through. I don’t remember the Continental Shelf tunnel all that well, but there were some beautiful spotted blue rays. Lots of fish. We visited the black-footed penguins briefly, but they weren’t doing much.

Then it was on to Mundo Maya. It began with snakes—I wish they’d had a snake-handling station—and led us into a tunnel through a cenote. That was amazing. (A cenote is a deep sinkhole filled mostly with freshwater and found in the Yucatan. Some of them feature intricate cave systems, and many of them flow out to the sea. They were the only source of freshwater for the Mayans, other than rainwater. The Mayan word was dzonot; cenote is the Spanish version of it. The Mayans thought of them also as passages to the underworld.) I’m not sure how DWA managed to get three different tanks in one building. Think of the structural support! We sat on the benches, along with millions of teenagers (don’t know where all the elementary students went; maybe they all grew up too fast and decided to hang out in that tunnel until they found true love), and watched sharks and rays float over us. I took some pictures of Aunt Pat that I really liked.

Much of the rest of Mundo Maya was similar to the Rainforest section. But at the end is a temple with stone jaguars and real ones (unfortunately, they didn’t come out that day). I always have mixed feelings about cats in zoos. When I see them, I yearn for them, but I also want them to be in a much larger space—or free. Someday, I hope, zoos will be an artifact of our past. But I fear that with global warming, we’ll actually end up with biospheres as the only places some species can survive.

I took many pictures of the flamingos in this exhibit, as well as the cenote from above. At the beginning of this section we sat, surrounded by the tunnel/cenote and the creatures that lived in it. Now we looked down into it, watching them from above.

We found it somewhat easier to get out of downtown than into it. Then we went back to Aunt Pat’s and she fixed me dinner again.

Later that night, her son and my cousin Chris came over. He’s younger than I am, and I can’t remember ever meeting him before, though I assume I did. I didn’t get to see Kim, Pat’s daughter—she’s getting married again and was spending time with her in-laws. Chris does landscaping work and is in great shape from all the work he does. Like me, he’s not much of a talker, so sometimes the conversation lapsed.

That night, I had only the second flying dream I ever remember. I don’t know who was carrying me. I also dreamed about my cat, Rufus.

The next day, I did a little copyediting at Pat’s house. As I was working, I was struck by this question: What story about myself do I want known? And I realized that what I want known about myself was that I became a writer, it wasn’t what I expected, and I came to terms with it. Now I’m ready to take another shot at it, from a different angle.

What story about yourself do you want known?

Another thing I realized at Aunt Pat’s: I was reading Jonathan Alter’s article on having cancer (in Time or Newsweek), and I recognized the anxiety he described. I had a much milder form of it when I had my repetitive motion injury. And it got me the label hysterical patient from the surgeon I was seeing at the time.

Around noon, I headed down I-35 to Austin. That was the most hellatious driving of the trip—four hours of two lanes, bounded closely on either side by concrete walls, and everybody going 55 or 60 miles an hour.

posted by Price of Silence @ 11:54 AM 0 comments

Driving me batty

When I contacted Matt and Rachel about visiting them on this trip, the only thing I asked for was to go see the bats in Austin, the ones that fly out of the famous bridge at dusk. I was supposed to arrive by 4 in the afternoon,, but I was late. Every day so far on this trip, getting where I want to go has taken me longer than I have anticipated. I think it’s because I’m optimistic—“Oh, sure, that drive will only take 4 hours!” So as soon as I arrived at their house in some impenetrable suburb of Austin (thank God for Mapquest), we had to pile into Rachel’s car and drive off to meet Matt for dinner. I had just enough time to bring my stuff in and dump it in their living room. Then it was off to a restaurant, where I had catfish toes, Elliott had a corn dog, and I don’t remember what anyone else had.

I think it was at the restaurant that Lorien began to warm up to me. She has a very serious demeanor, and that can be a little intimidating in an 18-month-old—the way they stare at you without any pretence. I can’t remember what I was doing—throwing up my arms or something stupid. But she seemed to like it.

Then we rearranged ourselves, with Kristina going in Matt’s car and Elliott, rather unhappily, staying with us. But he made up for it by shouting “Daddy’s car!” every time he saw it ahead of us. When we got so far behind that we couldn’t see Matt’s car, Elliott became worried. We drove up over some mountain that had really nice houses on it on the way to downtown Austin and the Colorado River (another Colorado River—what is it doing in Texas anyway?).

I think it was on this drive that Rachel and I got into a conversation about the Virginia Tech shooter and all the things I had read about him. According to one article, he was mocked in some of his grade school classes and told to go back to where he came from. I mentioned that to Rachel and she said something like, “So does that justify his shooting 30 people?” I was startled by the vehemence of her reply and said that I thought a teacher should not have allowed, let alone encouraged, his classmates to talk to him that way. But if I’d been thinking deeply about the subject, I would have said that this latest shooting is just another example of how we seem to have lost the ability to care for each other. There were people who were worried about that boy and trying to intervene, but no one went quite far enough.

I’m not trying to blame the professors and administrators at Virginia Tech—but have you noticed how many people like him slip through the cracks lately and hurt someone? Like the man in Colorado a few years back who kidnapped his children. His wife had a restraining order against him, but when she went to the police, they didn’t take her seriously, and her husband had enough time to kill his children and himself. Years later the Supreme Court ruled that the police were not liable for the deaths, despite the restraining order. At times I think, “Why can’t these people just kill themselves and leave the rest of us out of it?” But it would be so much better if we could reach them first.

All this makes me feel that there is something seriously wrong with my country. I felt the same way when I saw the bodies floating in the streets after Katrina. We all seem to know something is wrong, but we don’t seem to be trying, in any serious way, to fix these problems.

So that was my train of thought when we drove into downtown Austin and parked at the Hyatt. There was construction at the hotel, so we took a circuitous route, down a steep incline, to get to the path by the river. Rachel was pushing the stroller, and I was supposed to be holding Elliott’s hand as we went down the hill. His little legs could deal with the slope, however, and he started running down the hill. I lost my grip on his hand and before I could regain it, he had done a somersault onto the sidewalk, somehow (miraculously) not splitting open his head on the stone wall that edged it. He even popped up and said, “I’m OK!” as if he didn’t want us to worry.

So I’m not sure if it was a sweet craving on my part or guilt that made me buy everyone ice cream when we arrived at Capital Cruises. I had a chocolate inside crunch, Rachel had something else crunchy, Elliott had a red-and yellow popsicle, and Kristina had the bubblegum one. Then Matt paid everybody’s fare and we got onto the boat.

It was an open boat with about 20 to 30 black plastic chairs arranged in rows. At the back there was a metal bat canopy. It was breezy, so I was glad I had brought a jacket. We cruised up and down the river until it got dark, and then we passed under the bridge and waited, along with several other boats of various sizes.

When the bats came out, they looked like streams of pepper, except that they were spiraling up instead of drifting down. They just kept going and going. I kept trying to get a picture of them with Todd’s camera, but I didn’t really succeed. (Here are the bats coming out of their roosting spots in the bridge.)

Finally, frustrated, I stopped because I felt I was missing the show by looking at it through a tiny lens. I watched the bats as we moved slowly back to the dock. We found a much easier way to get back to the car and went back to Matt and Rachel’s house, where we had snacks before bed. Then I spent time on the Internet, looking up other places in Texas to visit. I couldn’t get to sleep right away because some people across the street were talking loudly.

posted by Price of Silence @ 9:34 PM 0 comments

Am I really that way?

I had planned to work some this morning, but I wasn’t interested, so finally I went downstairs. Rachel was cleaning up after breakfast. I was embarrassed that I hadn’t come down earlier, but I sat down and ate the breakfast burrito fixings she had saved for me. Then I played with the kids a little while, which was fun. With some help from Rachel and Kristina, I relearned how to play hide and seek. They had to coach me to say “Ready or not, here I come.”

Afterward I wondered if I had ever played that game as a child. I remember playing with Ellen and Kathy, two girls who lived down 70th Street, and a Christina or Kristin, whose family’s dog was stolen. I remember going to Friedson’s and Nuway’s for chocolate cokes. I remember hanging out with my brothers and going to the Jewish Community Center to swim and going to Lake Tapawingo on summer holidays. I remember walking down the street to Holmes Park by myself and going on the teeter-totter with my siblings. When I was 5 or 6 I got a big bump on my head from falling off one of those. I remember pulling a piece of grass out of a robin’s throat. But I don’t remember playing hide and seek.

While we were playing hide and seek and Kristina was drawing on the step and showing me her computer games, Matt was working on the shed that Ernie and Betty helped him put up earlier in the year. He was walking around on the roof with a power drill, as calm as you please. I would have been scared by the height. After a while I went inside and loaded up the truck. All the things—food, suitcase, scope, binoculars—that I had hauled in the night before, I hauled outside now, with help from the kids.

I let Kristina and Elliott stand on the back door of the truck for a little while, but then I made them get down. I had visions of them falling off. I said goodbye to everyone and headed down Highway 71 to La Grange and Columbus, where I stopped to photograph some gnarly trees and cattle egrets. I tried to get a picture of a bunch of swallows drinking from a pool in the dirt road, but as I approached, they flew away and wouldn’t come back to the watering hole while my truck was still near it. I got a little lost in Columbus and ended up circling the city a couple of times, but finally I meandered down the Eagle Lake and 3013 road, which led to my second birding destination on the trip, Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge. On the way in, I saw a crested caracara.

Attwater’s Prairie Chicken is the rarest PC in the country. It is a Texas variant of the Great Prairie Chicken. There is also a Lesser Prairie Chicken. The Heath Hen, an Eastern species, went extinct in the 1800s, I believe.

I had no illusions I would see it. (But I did see these tracks. Can anyone identify them for me?) For one, I was going birding at 2 in the afternoon in central Texas. Only a tourist would go outside in that and walk around, wearing jeans and carrying a 12-pound scope. Birds, which have more sense, are hunkering down the grass, where it’s cooler. For another, wildlife refuge auto tour roads are often not the best places to see birds, especially secretive ones. If I had really wanted to see the bird, I would have had to go with an experienced local birder.

But I had a great time walking on the trail near the headquarters, although I did wonder at times if I had gotten lost. I took a picture of my scope while walking this trail. I’ve had it for only a few months, and I still fear that I’m going to leave it somewhere—say, out in the field in the middle of Texas. And then what would my husband do?

After I finished the trail, I did the auto tour route. It had lots of lovely wetlands with all sorts of wading birds, including the American bittern that I flushed from a few feet away. That really made my day, since I hadn't seen one for years. It also made me feed a little guilty and incompetent--I was sure a better birder would have noticed the bird before it flew. I also saw a fulvous whistling duck, still at the back of a pond.

Finally, I tore myself away from the refuge and headed back up to Highway 10. Somewhere along the way, I stopped to photograph the flowers along the highway. I was wearing slip-ons, and I did wonder what lurked beneath all that matted grass, but I urged myself on. Just as I'd clicked one picture of the white poppy, I felt a series of sharp pains on my foot. Yes, you guessed it--ant attack! I really should have more sense.

After I limped back to the truck, I found my way around Houston and arrived in Winnie, Texas, about 9 o’clock. I was so tired. I hadn’t counted on getting there that late, but that’s what hours of birding will do to you. I hauled all my stuff up to the Quality Inn and decompressed, too tired to work or do just about anything.

Have you ever noticed that cheap hotels have names that express the opposite of what they are? The hotel room was serviceable, but not what I would call “quality.” And Econo Lodge is hardly the cheapest hotel around. Oh, well, what else could I expect in that neck of the woods? If I’d wanted a nice hotel, I’d have had to stay somewhere closer to Houston.

posted by Price of Silence @ 9:49 PM 0 comments

Let the serious birding begin

I’m writing this on June 18, 2007, six weeks after I returned from my trip. This trip log is taking forever to complete.

Now is when the serious birding begins on this trip. All the family visits are over, until I see my husband on Friday. It’s nothing but birds, birds, birds, from here on out.

And driving. And not much work, given how little I’ve managed so far.

I slept in a little this morning, ate the continental breakfast, and went to the Market Basket in Winnie to stock up on some food. I took my own grocery bags into the store, as I do in Broomfield, and when I handed them to the checker, he looked at me as if I had five heads. I guess people don’t bring their own bags in Texas. And then they put the milk next to Dorothy’s birthday card, which got it damp.

I headed south on Highway 124 from Winnie and drove tentatively around High Island until I found the entrance to Boy Scout Woods. I took my scope in but soon enough decided that I didn’t need it there. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of the place—but more on that later.

Boy Scout Woods is located about a mile from the Gulf of Mexico on the Upper Texas Coast. It’s not too far from Beaumont, where my husband was born, or from Louisiana. I had originally planned to go to New Orleans on this trip and then west along the coast to High Island, but I decided to concentrate on the Texas Coast instead and go to New Orleans some other time.

This tree was planted in a yard across the street from Boy Scout Woods. It’s an Audubon sanctuary in the middle of an old subdivision. There were indigo buntings in the tree, dark blue against red, and lots of Inca doves flying around.

When I walked in the gate to Boy Scout Woods, I passed a hummingbird garden on my right and a trail on my left. Straight ahead was a kiosk and the viewing stands. I paid $5 to get a day pass for High Island bird sanctuaries and bought “A Birder’s Checklist of the Upper Texas Coast.” Then I sat down on the first level of the viewing stands. A helpful volunteer gave me a mat to sit on, observing that I probably didn’t want to get purple mulberry stains on my pants (the dreaded mulberry butt). I stared hard at the trees, hoping a bird would appear, but none did. A man and woman sitting behind me, higher up in the stands, whispered to each other about the birds they saw. “That’s a white-eyed vireo,” the woman said smugly. I surreptitiously whipped out my bird book and looked up white-eyed vireo, which I had never seen before. I even more subtly looked for the bird, moving only my eyes and tensing every muscle in my neck to keep my head still—but the stands fronted on a meadow surrounded by trees. Too many branches to scan for tiny, fast-moving birds. Still no bird in sight.

I could feel a birder’s inferiority complex coming on, so I got up and began migrating myself. For a moment I thought I might have been transported to Lothlorien as imagined by Peter Jackson and John Howe: Every path I walked on took me past a tall, skinny birder wearing a solemn, beatific expression. “A purple martin,” murmured one with a British accent, nodding toward a dark streak across the sky. “A ruby-throated hummingbird,” said another sotto voce. And all the while I kept hearing loud birdsong that everyone else seemed to be ignoring. Later I figured out that very loud bird was a northern cardinal—and I was so relieved that I hadn’t inquired about the song. How embarrassing it would have been to admit not knowing the song of a common eastern bird!

But, wait. I’m a westerner. Why do I have to recognize the song of a cardinal? Even if I do love them. Even if my mother used to feed them raisins on our patio in Kansas City. I’m always happy to see them on the rare occasions that I do, but apparently I don’t remember their song.

In between swatting at mosquitoes, which my natural bug repellant from Hawaii seemed to be attracting (it must be the kukui nut oil), and trying to figure out which path I was following on the rather cryptic map, I managed to find my way along the boardwalk to the Cathedral and sit down. Finally I was rewarded with a sighting of a scarlet tanager, another bright red bird, thanks to a woman with a very long lens who was looking for less common birds to photograph. “I’ve got hundreds [of scarlet tanagers],” she said, explaining why she wasn't bothering to take a picture. I tried to imagine being that good with a camera and an 18-inch lens. It sounded like a fine project for my retirement, but this woman was my age, if not younger.

In time, I wandered out to the slough, where there was a shaded area. I leaned against the railing and eavesdropped on conversations. There was plenty of activity there, both bird (purple gallinule and common moorhen, one chasing the other) and human (photographers, couples, friends). I dared to ask and volunteered to tell others where the birds were. I was beginning to loosen up. As I walked back I spotted a brown thrasher in a tree. It’s funny, when you bird in a new place, how you discover birds display all kinds of different behaviors. I had always thought of brown thrashers as ground birds because that’s where I’d seen them in Colorado. I guess it’s like the title of that book, Wherever You Go, There You Are. I kept bumping up against my assumptions everywhere I went.

As I was watching the thrasher, a couple came up behind me and joined in. I started talking to them and asked them about something—some bird, probably. The man laughed and said he usually birded with his brother, who knew everything, and he was just waiting for his brother to get here so he could identify all the birds for him.

For some time now, I had been trying to find Prothonotary Pond. I wandered around in the woods until I came to a turnstile, which at least was easy to find on the map but was pretty much the opposite of where I wanted to go. I found the mosquito center of the universe (a common occurrence on this trip) and finally stumbled upon the pond and sat down on a log. It was another case of birders sitting around reverently, whispering to each other (so different from Boulder Bird Club trips at Walden Ponds, where very few people bother to be quiet), and an occasional photographer standing and maneuvering gear. I saw a yellow warbler and a green heron, but no namesake warbler. I moseyed back to the kiosk, bought a T-shirt and some postcards, and rested in the Hummingbird Garden, where I watched a ladder-backed woodpecker probe the trees. And then it was on to Smith Oaks Sanctuary.

To be honest, Smith Oaks felt like a breeze, or a least a relief, after the last few hours. I parked and immediately fell in with a group of birders and photographers staring intently at an island of shrubs in the parking loop. They gossiped about sightings of painted buntings, but meanwhile they were occupied with indigo buntings, scarlet and summer tanagers, red-eyed vireos, and rose-breasted grosbeaks, three of which were new life birds for me.

But the real fun began when I reached Clay Bottom Pond. I got some good use out of my new scope at the Rookery there. The great egrets’ young had fledged, so they were fun to watch at close range, especially the ones teetering around just above the alligators. I saw anhinga for the first time, which are large black birds with white streaks on the wings, as well as neotropic cormorants. But it was the tricolored herons who put on the best show, flying in and out of their nests and displaying their white bellies, blue backs, and yellow tails. There were boat-tailed grackles there as well, and luckily for me, the Gulf Coast birds have dark eyes. I’m not sure I could have distinguished them from great-tailed grackles otherwise.

I think the riggings on Noah’s Ark must have looked like the trees on the islands on Clay Bottom Pond—covered with winged life forms.

Finally I tore myself away from Heron Island and followed the path toward the least tern colony. After walking a while on what looked like a deer trail through the woods—and wondering if alligators could make it up the bank—I gave up on the least terns and walked along Smith Pond and toward the Oak Motte. (A motte, for those who don’t know, like me, is a mound or hill. I can’t say I remember the oaks here being on a hill. Hmm.) That British birder I had seen earlier passed me, probably still seeing five times as many birds as I was, and I felt intimidated anew.

But such feelings passed as soon as I entered the woods—I had mosquitoes to occupy me. Despite the fact that I was covered from head to toe in both synthetic and natural fabrics, with only hands and face exposed, they still found a way to torture me. I discovered that my birding pants and shirt were thin enough for mosquitoes to penetrate, and they did, so often that as I stood on the path, trying to deal with three warblers flitting through the woods surrounding me, I was twitching from being bitten so often. It’d hard to focus one’s binoculars while twitching. But I was happy to see a black-and-white warbler and a female chestnut-sided warbler. The third got away too quickly, but I remember it had lots of gray on it. So write me and identify it for me, OK? The time of year and location should make it a snap.

Later on I saw a worm-eating warbler, but not the ovenbird (also having a striped head) I was hoping for. Last year there were reports of an ovenbird in Gregory Canyon, but I haven’t seen any on CO-Birds this year. So I still haven’t seen any of those striped skulkers. And there was one last birding puzzle in these woods, a thrush I finally decided must be a hermit thrush, even though I tried hard to make it into a wood thrush. The spotting on its sides seemed to belong to a wood thrush, but I just didn’t see the facial markings of the wood thrush. I guess I’m enough of a perfectionist to need more than one marking to be satisfied—though I’m sure I’ve misidentified many a bird, some of which are probably on my life list.

I was resting on a bench in the woods when a cardinal flew by. It reminded me, again, of how my mother loved them. I could imagine her being a birder—she was methodical enough. In fact, that side of her personality used to drive me crazy at times. So as I sat there, I asked her forgiveness.

By the time I made my way past the rather recently installed drip

and the “world-class oak” (I think it's the tree below, but I could be wrong--there were lots of big oaks there), I was starving. All I’d had for lunch was a banana. I went back to my truck and raided the cooler. Then I drove back to the quality establishment where I was staying and jumped in the pool. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really hot enough, in late April, to stay in the pool for very long.

I finished out the day by eating an early dinner at the cheap Chinese restaurant next door to the hotel.

posted by Price of Silence @ 11:09 AM 1 comments

Where Cabeza de Vaca ...

My second day of birding in the environs of High Island, I headed to Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, one of many strung along the Texas coast. You could spend weeks and not get to them all.

Anahuac is northeast of High Island, on the East Bay. I had to drive right past it to get to High Island the day before.

I was early enough to get this atmospheric photograph. The light was lovely—I wish I had a better camera to capture it.

Then it was on to the visitor’s center, which is tiny, but that doesn’t matter—it’s all about the grounds anyway. And driving. This is Texas, after all. I like the idea of a national wildlife refuge that leads to the sea. Shouldn’t they all?

I spent time near the visitor’s center in the hummingbird garden, but then I headed just a teeny bit down the road and around the corner, looking into the White-Fronted Moist Soil Units, otherwise known as a marsh. They seemed to go on forever. Close in were blue-winged teals, northern shovelers, and long-billed dowitchers (at least, that’s what I called them. They’re more likely to be long-billed because it’s a freshwater marsh, but I’ve never seen long-billed and short-billed together, so what do I know?).

Out in the marsh, I saw some large dark birds, which turned out to be two species of ibis—white-faced and glossy—almost identical in coloring. Now, as I look at the range maps in my Sibley’s guide to birds, I wonder if I really saw the glossy ibis. It’s rare in Texas, evidenced by green dots all along the coast on the map. I do seem to remember a list of birds, posted at the visitor’s center, that included them, but perhaps I’m remembering another spot on my trip. The only noticeable differences can be seen in the coloring around the bill. Yet at the time, looking at them through my scope from a long distance, I was certain I saw both.

Sometimes birding seems like Waiting for Godot. When will that nemesis bird arrive? Would I recognize it if I saw it?

The fun really began after I drove down the road and parked behind some other cars. Aging birders with scopes punctuated the side of the road facing a blackish mudflat, partly flooded. I joined them, feeling young, as I usually do when I’m out birding. (I’m not sure what I’ll do when I’m the same age as most birders, or even older!) After birding long enough at an angle to get sandpiper neck, it occurred to me that I could adjust the head of the scope so that the eyepiece was actually at eye level and I could stand up straight and not grimace in the direction of the birds. I hoped no one noticed my revelation—sometimes my obliviousness to the obvious astounds me.

I felt such joy as I stood there. I had never seen so many sandpipers and plovers in one place. There were certainly enough of them for everyone who was there, and then some. Some bearded man came by and joking accused us of hiding the buff-breasted sandpipers, but there were so many others: black-bellied and semipalmated plovers, black-necked stilts, yellowlegs, willets, whimbrels, Hudsonian and marbled godwits, ruddy turnstones, semipalmated and Western sandpipers.

And that is only a partial list. Birders beside me were calling out “white-rumped sandpiper” and “dunlin” and others. I wished I could see a long-billed curlew, as my father-in-law had when he visited Texas in February, but I had to settle for the whimbrel.

Finally I had to stop. My eyes were giving out from staring at all the small grayish birds scurrying around on the black mud. I cracked my neck as Dana Scully did on one episode of The X-Files and moved on to the willows, where some birders pointed out a nighthawk resting in a tree. Usually I see them flying overhead. (Right now, in August, the nighthawks have been coming out earlier in the evening, even in the late afternoon. Perhaps they’re getting ready to migrate.)

It was the most transcendent birding I’ve ever had.

The ironic thing about Anahuac was that, despite what I said at the beginning of this entry, I did hardly any driving in the refuge. The rest of the day was almost all driving, though, so it more than made up for it.

After Anahuac, I made a snap decision to go back to White Oaks. I just had to see Heron Island and the anhingas again, since I was quite certain I wouldn’t see them (or roseate spoonbills) for a long time. And it was on my way. So off I went, not bothering to pay an entrance fee this time and skirting the picnic tables, where some woman had made me flash my bright orange sticker the day before. (Hey, I bought a $20 T-shirt! And some postcards!) I went to the island and walked through the woods a bit. I visited the trees in the parking lot: still no painted bunting. Damn.

From this point I would be driving a crescent moon, or eyelash, route, along the coast of Texas. Instead of going north to Houston and around, I had followed my father-in-law’s advice and decided to take the ferry from Port Bolivar (pronounced “Ball-i-ver” by the locals), at the end of Bolivar Peninsula, to Galveston Island. On the way I drove through Gilchrist, which was a long necklace of houses on stilts strung along the beach. (In this style; this one is actually from Galveston Island.) They all looked run-down. I wondered if I could actually afford a beach house in Gilchrist and, if so, if I would want to live there. How bad are fire ants, anyway? And the mold? And the cockroaches? Could I live with cockroaches again? And we haven’t even begun to consider hurricanes yet.

After Crystal Beach, which looked considerably more like the stereotype of a beach town than Gilcrist, I came to Rettilon Road and drove to the beach—in fact, I drove onto the beach for the first time in my life. I couldn’t believe how trashed it was. There was a lone trash can with bags piled around it, from the weekend, I guess, and far down to my left a couple barbequed by their truck, attended by a flock of gulls.

I stopped at the barrier that marked the Houston Audubon Society Bolivar Flats Shorebird Sanctuary, but didn’t actually cross over. I watched some tricolored herons on the beach and then got out of the truck to attempt a picture of a laughing gull surrounded by Western and semipalmated sandpipers. (The Westerns had much more red coloration.) All the pipers hopped on one leg, flared their wings straight up, and tucked their bills under their wings. Until I kept creeping closer, that is. In response, they dispersed, staccato-style. I wished then I’d stolen that really big lens from the female photographer at Boy Scout Woods. I felt guilty for disturbing them.

At Port Bolivar, I found my way to the ferry without much difficulty and was one of the forward vehicles. I don’t think I’d been on a ferry since taking one from some port in France to Dover in 1983—and that crossing was quite a bit choppier, as you might imagine. The entire trip took about 20 minutes. Gulls led us the entire way, and their shadows passed over the boat. I went up some incredibly steep steps to the upper deck to see the gray sea and city from there. I was afraid going back down them. When I drove into Galveston, there were gulls on every lamppost (and anything else vertical). I had a desperate craving for a frappucino but couldn’t find a Starbucks to save my life. Isn’t this America, people? You should be able to find any chain at any moment!

I had to settle for a Chillacino at Ben and Jerry’s. It was just fine. I didn’t bother with anything else in Galveston, just kept on driving southwest, the Gulf of Mexico on my left, down Galveston Island. Soon enough I found myself on the Texas Independence Trail. There were beach access signs along the road at intervals, so I took one and
found myself on this beach, with a sign about nesting turtles.

There were many more houses on stilts, a necessary building style on a barrier island. At times when I was driving Galveston to Freeport, I felt as if I must have gotten lost somewhere, the landscape seemed so undeveloped. (Somewhere in the string of islands along the Texas coast is Follets Island, where Cabeza de Vaca and his companions may have been stranded for a while, early in the 1500s. They certainly came this way, on rafts, but there is much debate about where they actually landed. I had no choice but to drive down Follets, since it’s on the way to Freeport.) Signs along Highway 3005 (the road along Galveston Island) stated that it was not a hurricane evacuation route (since it was parallel to the ocean instead of leading away from it). Finally I came to a series of bridges that eventually got me to Freeport (very industrial, not at all beautiful) and on my way to Highway 35. The bridges gave me the willies—they soared up so high (I suppose to get them above storm surges) that I couldn’t see anything in front of me but the road and anything on either side but the drop-off.

The next highway (332) was a hurricane evacuation route. Much to my relief, of course. Somehow I ended up on Highway 2004, though from looking at the map I’m not sure how. Or maybe I just saw a sign for it; anyway, I was sternly warned not to pick up hitchhikers because of the prison nearby. When I reached Brazoria, a sign proclaimed it the “Cradle of Texas.” I found myself noticing signs all throughout Texas—they seemed so much more distinctive than signs in Colorado. But I suppose that’s merely a function of familiarity.

Past Bay City, I crossed the Colorado River again, which flows south from Austin.

My plan was to sleep at Goose Island State Park, which is on the other side of Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. Then tomorrow I would bird Aransas first thing. But I had spent too much time today at Anahuac and White Oaks and couldn’t make it. I found this place to stay in Port Lavaca (The port of the cow). It’s an RV park and bird refuge just past the Formosa Plastics complex at Point Comfort.

I asked a woman sitting in front of her RV if she was the camp host. She said no and told me where to find them. She also asked me where in Colorado I was from and said she had been a camp host at Mesa Verde. I told her my first name and held out my hand for her to shake. She shook my hand but didn’t tell me her name. I’d never had that happen before. When I went in the bathroom and saw my hair sticking out in every direction (hey, it was clean this morning!), I thought I knew why. And, of course, a woman her age should really be the one initiating a handshake.

The camp hosts were more pleasant, although they were also taken aback by my request “to camp in a tent or sleep in my truck.” I asked them if that was an unusual request, and they covered it pretty well. The man took me on his bright green golf cart to show me the tent sites. I picked the one in the corner, away from the road (at least, away from the main road). Then we went back to his site, and I paid him $6 for the site and a $5 deposit for the key to the locked bathroom. He talked about some people who have an “agenda,” referring to homeless people who travel around on their bikes. He mentioned a couple, a man of Spanish and Indian descent and a woman who was “full-blooded Indian.” I wondered how he could tell.

Now I am sitting in the back of my truck, with the end pointing toward the beach. I feel exposed: the bed is open and people keep driving down the road. I need to close up the back and finish Chapter 3 of Anderlini for Lynne Rienner. The wind is so strong it’s rocking the truck a little. I haven’t camped since that lakeside campground in Oklahoma, near Tulsa. I’m looking forward to waking up tomorrow and birding.

I visited quite a few port-o-potties today, at White Oaks, Rettilon Road, and Galveston Beach. (That was a note in my book. Strange, the things that you write down on a road trip.)

Here's another Galveston beach bird.

posted by Price of Silence @ 9:45 AM 3 comments