Inland, Dreaming of Waves

Am I really that way?

Saturday, April 21, 2007

If my mother were still alive, today would be her eighty-first birthday. She's been dead now since December 21, 1992.

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.

Here is a magical place on the walking trail at Attwater.

posted by Price of Silence @ 9:49 PM