2008 Editors’ prizes nonfiction winner
Pentimento
Susan Leigh Tomlinson
I teach my students that anyone can draw and mostly I’m telling the truth. Painting and sketching are nothing but tricks, like those of a magician. Once you know the secret, you can pull a rabbit out of nearly any hat. With drawing, everything is composed of simple, basic shapes: a circle, a triangle, a rectangle. You sketch a couple of circles, connect them with a few lines, smooth things over a bit, maybe add some shading and, presto, you’ve got a bird or a wildflower. It works nearly every time. Once in awhile—and this why it isn’t entirely true—I run across a student who really can’t be taught how to render a subject well, even with tricks, but that occurs less often than you might think. I’ve never quite figured out why it happens—maybe it’s an inability to see the underlying form, maybe it’s unwillingness. Whatever the reason, the student never learns. Most, however, pick it up quickly once they know the secrets. They learn to relax and not rush the effort and the next thing they know, they’ve created something that not only looks like a bird, it looks like “art.”
They aren’t really making art, of course—even without getting into the messy discussion of what art is, all art takes talent (maybe genius, whatever that is)—and, based on past history, most students who wander into the courses I teach just aren’t going to have it. Still, they’re making something that is relatively pleasing to the eye, something that in turn pleases them. It becomes more than a mere diagram; it becomes a relationship with the thing they have sketched.
This last part—the relationship with the subject—is the reason I make my students learn to draw. Many are cranky about it at first, mainly because at some point in their lives they got the idea it was something they couldn’t do well, and nobody likes to fail at the things they try. So they approach the exercises with some fear and grumbling, but by and by this ceases as they begin to see their skills grow. Some even profess, albeit grudgingly, to be enjoying themselves. What I see, besides better sketches, is that they’ve slowed down long enough to really study a wildflower or bird. Instead of taking a cursory glance just long enough to identify it, they’ve had to examine the subject in detail. This is especially important, because here, in Lubbock and on the Southern High Plains—the butt-end of the hardscrabble, wind-scoured Texas pan-handle—the landscape and its inhabitants are subtle. That is to say, it is not a place that is going to smack you upside the head with its beauty. As such, it invites ignorance. Drawing forces students to look harder at their surroundings, however. It keeps them from missing the thing that is right in front of them.
And overlooking or dismissing this landscape is what many of us tend to do here, largely because it is hard to find anything worth looking at. The Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado called this place El Llano Estacado. There’s been some argument about what he meant by that, exactly, since the translation is a bit fuzzy. The word estacado, the source of the fuzziness, has been translated for many years as “staked,” but the meaning of this is itself unclear, since no one knows to what stakes the name might be referring. The tall stalks of the ubiquitous yucca plants? Directional markers left by Coronado’s men? It’s a puzzle, and the expedition left us no clues.
More recently it has been pointed out that estacado might also mean “palisaded,” a translation that readily fits what a traveler sees as he approaches the eastern edge of the Llano. On top of the Llano, which is a broad plateau—a massive, 37,000-square-mile tabletop of sediment that sprawls across parts of Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma—the view is uniformly flat, monotonous and uninspiring. But on coming to the eastern edge, what strikes the fancy of the traveler is the escarpment, the sharply eroded cliffs that drop suddenly 300 feet or more down to the plains below, as if, as one author suggests, one were perched atop the walls of a fortress. It is the only notable topographic relief from flatness for miles, and seen this way the translation makes sense. But either way, staked or palisaded, Coronado saw the Llano more poetically than most. A neighbor of mine, who coincidentally also happens to be from Spain, more recently arrived at her own name for this scrub prairie plateau: La Pura Nada.
The pure nothing.
It is spring, and we are just coming out of the ugliest stretch of the year here on the Llano. In winter the broomweed and Russian thistle are dead and gray and cover the ground like a crusty scab, and the mesquite has lost its lace of leaves, leaving its skinny, buck-naked branches all dark and twisted. I’ve never been sure what an old crone is supposed to look like, but something tells me the image is probably like mesquite in winter.
Where the Llano doesn’t appear like this, it is most likely to be covered in cotton stubble—the remnant, scorched-red stalks of chemically defoliated and mechanically stripped plants, left in the field over the winter in order to keep the dust down during windstorms. A winter cotton field looks not unlike the stunned and tattered victim of a bomb blast.
Without the cotton stubble, the dust blows free in the spring, regardless of how much—or little—rainfall we’ve had. Even with it, though, there are a few days when the wind gets up that the air fills with a dense, choking brown fog. It used to be worse. When Earl Butz was Secretary of Agriculture in the 70s, he dismissed the idea of a soil bank as wasteful and ordered farmers to plow “fencerow to fencerow.” They did just that, and every afternoon when the winds came, the disturbed earth rose as a giant red wall and moved across the land like an apocalyptic visitation.
Sometimes, if we’re lucky, foolishness is short-lived. Such was the case with Mr. Butz’s misguided ideas about “un-used” land, and so the soil bank is back, resurrected as the Conservation Reserve Program, and now a brown blow only happens a couple of days out of the year. For people like me who have been around these parts awhile, when it comes it is like a memento mori—a memory of death, wrapped in warning. But for others who have never seen anything like it, a West Texas dust storm can feel like the end of the world.
It is these dusty, weedy and disheartening tableaus that people picture in their heads when they think of Lubbock and the plains on which it is built. Considering that this is their view of the place, I can allow that it’s no wonder that they fail to see it as poetically as Coronado.
I bring my classes out here to Lubbock Lake Landmark, an archeological park that documents nearly continual human habitation and use, beginning with the Clovis Period, nearly 12,000 years ago. Ancient cultures were drawn to the Lubbock Lake site for its reliable source of water, since it sits on a meander of Yellow House Draw, a tributary of the venerable Brazos River. (It is erosion from Brazos tributaries like Yellow House that create the eastern escarpment of the Llano.) Yellow House Draw itself remains today, but the water does not—it dried up in the 1930s, probably owing to both gradual, long-term changes in climate and increased agricultural use. The rest of the weedy, dusty plains notwithstanding, aesthetically, this landscape here is… not too terrible. The people in charge of the park are trying to restore it to the prairie it might have been when the terrible Coronado and his conquistadores first trekked across the Llano with their sleek horses and they’ve had moderate success, enough at least so that you can do some mental squinting and get the idea.
I bring the students here to give them something to paint and draw for a course I teach on the concepts of “landscape.” Students sign up for it by the bucketful, thinking that they’re going to get the chance to paint some pretty pictures. Sadly, this invariably turns out not to be the case, since this scratchy arroyo is the closest thing within 100 miles to what passes for the traditional notion of a paintable portrait of the land, and for the purpose of pretty pictures, it is about as featureless as a brown paper sack. There are no mountains, no hills, no clear flowing streams. There are few trees.
What vegetation exists, besides the aforementioned broom-weed/Russian thistle/mesquite/cotton quartet, are stubby buttons of sun-bleached grasses and some rather unassuming wildflowers. In its natural state—never mind the brutalized cotton-fucked condition in which the plains exist now—this is a short-grass/mixed-grass prairie, a space that is the divide between the elegance of the tall-grass prairie to the north and east and the stark beauty of the desert to the west. Aesthetically, it is a metaphor unto itself for something that is not one thing or the other, but the bland space between. It is the impatient wait at the stoplight, the silent elevator ride between floors.
I know I said that painting and drawing are nothing but magician’s tricks, but you try painting that. Try painting a traditional portrait of a land that has no topographic relief, no trees, no water. I have lived here a long time, and I am a painter, and I am telling you, it can’t be done. I confess to sometimes feeling despair about this. Joni Mitchell once called herself a painter derailed by circumstance. Well, fine, then I am a painter derailed by landscape. There are only so many interpretations of a view like this that one can paint before it becomes the same image, over and over again, like a form of insanity. It is a flat line across an empty canvas. La Pura Nada.
How do I teach my students to paint this if I can’t even see it myself?
I’m sitting in the shade of a sun shelter at the Landmark watching some students. Unlike my course that focuses on the concepts of landscape (which can include anything from a truck stop to a cemetery to mountain wilderness), the one these students are in is about learning to read nature like a text. There is drawing in this curriculum, too, but it is primarily for the purpose of identification and study of flora and fauna.
My students are spread out below me, in the wide arroyo of Yellow House Draw. They’re working on a practice final, for which they have to use map coordinates to find a flagged object, such as a wildflower, shrub or animal sign. Once they locate their subject, they have to sketch and describe it and make any notes that might be necessary for identification (if they don’t already know what it is). Later, they will take their drawings and notes home for further research so that they can create a page for a field guide.
I watch them through my binoculars as they pace off the distances. The surveyor’s flags are yellow, almost the same color as the flowers of the bladderpod that cover the draw like spilled paint, so they’re hard to pick out unless you get within 10 or 20 feet. Even so, some walk, unerringly, straight to the flags. Others hesitate, consulting their compasses and maps before moving forward a few steps and hesitating again. Soon enough, though, I can see that they’ve all found their spots and have settled down to sketch. I lean back against a post and set my binoculars down on the concrete pad, satisfied that my chicks are all in their nests.
Scott, who is in charge of managing the rangeland at the Landmark, sees me and stops working. He climbs down from the skid steer he is driving and walks over to where I’m sitting. He nods a hello and I respond in kind. Scott doesn’t seem to spend a whole lot of time chatting aimlessly with people he doesn’t know well, and that includes me, so after this exchange we both turn our heads to look out over the draw in a slightly awkward but not unfriendly silence. Abundant fall and spring rains this year have encouraged an uncommonly healthy bloom of bladderpod and other favorites, like chocolate flower and blue flax. Piles of dead mesquite are scattered across the arroyo, dark and pox-like against this thick blanket of color.
“I hear y’all are planning a burn to get rid of the piles,” I say by way of making conversation. I’m still looking out at my students when I say it, but I hear Scott shift his feet. He is a lanky, slow-moving man who wears a cowboy hat like he was born to it, which in some sense he was, since he comes from a ranching background. His manner is also slightly formal, with a touch of archaic politeness that causes him to speak with an almost maddening deliberation, as if he is rolling each of his words around in his head like beads before he hands them over, one by one, for your own inspection. If you had to come up with a stereotypical image of an authentic cowboy, Scott would be your man. But he’s the real thing, a walking anachronism. Even on his cell phone—that iconic concession to the modern age—the ring tone is a Marty Robbins tune.
“Oh yes.” Scott finally says. “That’s true. Sometime at the end of this month, if the weather permits and the wind gets down.”
“Well, it will look great,” I say. “People will be able to come out here and see what this place must have looked like a hundred years ago. There’s nowhere else around here where they can do that.”
He gives a short, surprised laugh as he considers this. “Why yes,” he finally says. “That’s so.”
There is another thoughtful pause and then, “There will be scars for a long time yet.”
He is talking about scars from the burn, of course, but it occurs to me when he says it that it is true about this landscape in general. The hard work that he and other Landmark employ-ees have done here is slowly bringing the prairie back, and what is spread out before us is like an image coming into focus after many years of being hidden.
If you were to go solely on appearance, Scott seems an unlikely environmentalist. In fact, he looks just like what he is: a rangeland worker who would be out of place in the landscapes many environmentalists like to congregate, like Boulder, perhaps, or Berkeley, or even Austin—places with pretty views and plenty of other like-minded people. But he fits in just fine right here, a plain man on a plain landscape. He doesn’t wear the latest hipster outdoor clothing, opting instead for Wranglers and a straw cowboy hat creased in an old-fashioned shape. His feet are not shod in trendy Keen water sandals, as mine are, but in the kind of work boots called “packers” that are favored by many westerners for serious outdoor labor. When he talks, his bottom teeth show flecks of chewing tobacco.
I don’t know what his position is on global warming or alternative fuels or how he votes. We don’t have those kinds of conversations—as I said, we don’t do a lot of chatting. But I do know this about him: On the day before, when a teaching colleague, Jordan, and I were out planting the surveyor’s flags to get ready for the practice final, Scott stopped his work on the skid steer to show us where he always finds the earliest blooming snapdragons. And sure enough, there against a backdrop of hard-baked caliche, a single snapdragon was just starting to flower.
“Suppose to be a big blow tomorrow,” I say. The weather reports have been full of warnings about gusts up to 50 miles per hour, with blowing dust. When the wind gets high enough, the dust blows in spite of the Conservation Reserve Program and other soil-conservation measures.
“Yes.” He then says, in his slow-talking way, “The dust wouldn’t be so bad if the rest of it looked like this, though.” Meaning, if the farmland were all turned back into prairie. It would seem that in spite of his background, or perhaps because of it, Scott’s preference for “fencerow to fencerow” is that of prairie over plow.
We sit in friendly silence and watch the students working at learning about wildflowers and jackrabbit sign and other secrets of the prairie. I know from experience that many of them are also learning to love this place, whether they are aware of it or not. Some come from landscapes very different from here—Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, St. Paul—and the landscape of the Llano had been something of a shock at first. But other students have felt the same way and, at the end of the three or four years it took to get through our program, they came to see beyond first impressions.
And somewhere in there, shock turned into a fierce affection.
I am always pleased by this, but a little baffled by and superstitious about it. It is like magic, and I am afraid that if I think too hard about the way they come to love the Llano, it will cease to ever happen again.
One by one they finish their notes and drawings and wander up to the sun shelter. Soon enough a small band of us is sitting together, waiting for the others. Talk turns briefly to a Bullock’s oriole’s nest, hanging from a tree nearby. After that, all of us, Scott, the students and I, lapse into a companionable silence, content to look out over the plains, listening to the wind roll in.
It’s limiting that paintings are only a visual medium. Even if you might be able to invoke the other senses—like the touch of warmth from the sun or the moisture from rain—you can’t actually include these as part of the package. No matter how well it might be rendered or how finely tuned your imagination, you can’t truly taste salt spray in a painting. If we could paint the other senses, however, this would be an undeniably beautiful place. The sweet smell of the chocolate flower, the sound of the Cassin’s sparrows as they skylark, a trace of cool air—these are carried by the wind up the hill to where we sit. But it is the sound of the wind in the grasses that appeals most to me. It’s like overhearing a gently animated conversation between an old married couple, still fond of each other in spite of it all. I eavesdrop shamelessly.
Sometimes, when I’m daydreaming, I can conjure up this image in my head: I’m walking down a caliche road, dust kicking up around my feet, my destination unknown. On either side of me are broad fields of yellowed prairie grasses, buzzing softly in the wind, like they are chock full of bees.
My fanciful thought is that this movement of wind in yellow grasses, this animated conversation, is what I will see and hear in the last instant before I die. Or I should say more accurately, this peace-giving scene is what I hope to see just before I die. Almost dying is something with which I’ve had some experience, and if the past is any indication, what I can expect is that my last thought is much more likely to be rather mundane, something along the lines of, “Hunh. Well. That’s it then.”
That this scene, this buzzing conversation on the prairie, is the last thing I want to experience before I toddle off into the Great Empty is telling, however. Wouldn’t you think I’d pick someplace with a “view”? Someplace with mountains or trees? Maybe a burbling brook? Or a lovely seascape?
And where did this come from, this picture with the yellow grasses? Certainly not from around here. Not from this empty, brutalized landscape.
“Pentimento” is an old painter’s term and it’s meant to describe a mistake. As paints age, they can fade and become transparent, exposing what lies beneath. Often what’s revealed is simply the initial, roughly sketched structure, the bones of the final painting. But sometimes it’s an altogether different, finished work that hides there. Perhaps this strange, recurring image is the Llano’s pentimento. Perhaps what lies beneath is a different landscape, a view, and we need only look past the obfuscating surface to see the underlying glory.
Maybe. It’s a lovely thought, anyway. And normally this is the place where I would have an epiphany of sorts and come to realize that the beauty is indeed there, but hidden. But if you’ll permit me, I’m going to swing a little wide of the standard paean to the comeliness of nature. Because except for the brief moments I see this pentimento and I can convince myself that this landscape is visually pleasing, the rest of the time I have to own up to the bald-faced truth: The place I call home is, by most standards, butt-ugly. That fact simply will not go away, no matter how hard I try to stuff it in a Sunday suit and take it to the dance.
And it is beauty that we value, not the lack of it. I’m no different from anyone else in this. It takes grit to love an ugly landscape. Some days I feel I have it, some days I don’t. What is love anyway but a relationship that has its ups and downs? What is it but commitment? Real love, in a sense, transcends the simple emotions that are the result of aesthetic appeal. It has to, or the first time a spouse or child was less than beautiful or likeable (and it’s going to happen) we’d walk away.
Maybe it is more accurate to say that I don’t always find the Llano especially attractive, but I have decided to love it. And God help me, a place this ugly needs someone to love it.
That’s the other side of the story, isn’t it? Suppose I did live in a place that was easy to love? It might even have that mountain range or seascape or burbling brook. I could look out my window every morning, sip my tea, and say, “My, isn’t nature a pip?” That would be a very nice life. I will not lie to you, if someone offered me the opportunity this very minute, I’d be hard pressed to turn my back on it.
It is easy—natural, even—to desire that which is beautiful. Beauty takes hardly any grit a’tall. But the unlovely place is like the odd girl in the schoolyard, with the bad haircut and the wrong clothes, to whom nobody talks. Perhaps it is a measure of character to choose to overlook these shortcomings. Perhaps we would be surprised at what we find beneath the surface. Perhaps I am sympathetic to the unlovely landscape because I was that girl in the schoolyard. I know what it feels like to be overlooked. I know what a mistake it is.
Blake calls early Sunday morning. “Weather’s look-ing good,” he says. “It’s on.”
Blake works at the Landmark with Scott. I’ve had a nodding acquaintance with him ever since I started going to the Landmark on a regular basis. Recently, however, he started a pet project there of constructing a native plants garden, and because gardening and prairie plants are both subjects that interest me, I volunteered my help. There’s nothing like digging in the dirt to build friendships, so I’ve gotten to know him a little better this spring. Like Scott, he is quiet and sometimes difficult to read, but, also like Scott, he appears to have strong feelings about the land here. The other day I ran into him out at the Landmark before my class. I mentioned the burn and wrangled myself an invitation to observe. Blake, in turn, promised to call when the weather conditions were right.
I hop on my bike and ride to the Landmark. It’s an unnatural, nearly windless day, which makes for easy riding. It is also cool and uncharacteristically humid. Each of these conditions are critical factors in doing the sort of brush burn they’ve got planned. Little or no wind is required, since high winds can carry sparks and flames where you don’t want them to go—and do it in a hurry. In the case of this burn, if there is any wind at all, it needs to be blowing from the southeast, so that if the fire does get out of control, it will travel across uninhabited cotton fields instead of any nearby structures. Today’s almost imperceptible breeze is coming from that direction. The high relative humidity, too, is good. At 60 percent humidity or above, for example, short grasses—like buffalo grass or blue grama—will not burn easily, even if you want them to, which greatly reduces the likelihood that the fire will spread beyond the brush pile. And finally, if the day is cool like this, well, it’s just a lot easier for the crew to tolerate the temperatures of the fire.
Blake and Scott are both suited up in crisp, lemon-yellow Nomex coveralls and standing near a gate that opens onto the trail around the park. Perched atop Scott’s head is a cream-colored straw cowboy hat as big as a Thanksgiving platter. Two fire marshals from the university are also there, chatting with them. Everyone looks relaxed and calm, as if this is just another work day, which seems remarkable to me, given that we are about to start lighting many extremely large bonfires in the middle of open grassland. Fire, I have generally observed, makes some people excitable—and not just because they may or may not be latent firebugs (as I suspect I am). My repressed predilection for fire is not why I’m here, however. Getting rid of the mesquite is like stripping away an ugly layer of paint. I’m curious to see what lies beneath.
The operation goes quickly and smoothly. Scott and another worker use drip torches to light the brush. A drip torch is a small tank with a handle, which, when upended, drips lighted kerosene at a steady rate through a long snout and, frankly, it looks like a lot of fun to use. Using the drip torch strikes me as the cherry job on a burn—one that would certainly appeal to anyone who ever played with a magnifying glass and combustible tinder as a ten-year-old—but there is no evidence that Scott or the other worker seem especially manic about the application of fire to what amounts to an outsized clot of fuel. Blake has the more grown-up job, which is to drive between the burning brush piles checking the containment of the fire and spot-monitoring the weather conditions with a small, hand-held instrument. He’s in an off-road utility vehicle that looks a lot like a golf cart, only beefier. On the front fender, in large, peeling letters, is the word “Mule,” which seems like a good name for a prairie beast of burden, even if it’s modern and mechanical. In the rear cargo bed there is a water tank and hose, in case the fire tries to spread. Before long, there are large knots of fire all across the arroyo. The flames leap 20 or 30 feet high, shimmering like tangerine gelatin. Set against the backdrop of bright green vegetation and a turquoise sky, it’s all very merry-looking. The mood of the workers, however, remains notably sober and business-like.
The mesquite is so dry and burns so hot that it takes a pile 30 feet across and five feet high only 30 minutes to be reduced to ashes and embers. By the time all the piles have been lit—around 70 of them, in an area that is a mile long and a quarter mile wide—the first ones are nothing more than a patch of white dust, ringed by a thin ribbon of blackened broomweed and grass. Exactly true to plan, the fire spreads no more than this. It is so precise that it is almost as if a circle had been spray-painted around each brush pile as a visual instruction: Burn this far and no farther.
I bounce from place to place, taking photos and writing notes in my little black journal, sometimes from the hillside so I can see the big picture, sometimes right behind one of the workers using the drip torch, close to the point of ignition. From time to time, Blake drives over to explain some nuance of what is happening. He is anxious to have me learn something about the process, partly because he knows I’m curious, but mostly because he’s passionate about the necessity of the prescribed burn and it’s hard for him to keep this enthusiasm contained. Plus, he’d appreciate it if people knew there’s a world of difference between a burn done right and a burn gone wrong.
Fire is as natural and vital to a healthy prairie ecosystem as the grass it burns. For example, some seeds require it for generation—without it, there are prairie plants that will lie dormant in the soil for decades. Also, as any homeowner with a lawn will tell you, trees are the enemies of grass because of the shade they cast and the water they drink. A good fire thins out saplings and clears the way for the sunlight prairie grasses need. As for the grasses themselves, the foundation on which the prairie ecosystem is built, they are cleverly adapted to take advantage of fire, since their meristem—the part of the plant from which growth occurs—is below the soil, out of harm’s way. This means that even if the plant burns all the way to the ground, it will probably come back as soon as the first good rain rolls around. What is more, it will come back to a more grass-friendly environment.
It is part of the human inclination to suppress fire, especially when the things we’ve built are threatened, and it has taken Scott and Blake two years to get the permit for this burn. It hasn’t helped that some so-called prescribed burns—performed by people who either didn’t know what they were doing or did know but went ahead despite less than optimal conditions—have gotten out of control and destroyed property. The May 2000 “controlled” burn in Los Alamos is one famous example of this, in which high winds caused the fire to spread rapidly and with devastating consequences. In that unfortunate fire more than 400 families lost their homes, and the total cost of property damage has been estimated at $1 billion. Needless to say, this fiasco did little to promote the concept of fire as good for the environment.
The Landmark may be prairie, but it is university property and sits just inside the city limits. It is surrounded by a major highway and a municipal loop, a couple of cotton farms and a complex of softball fields. A fire that gets out of control here might not cost billions, but it would be no small thing. As a consequence, the city and university have been cautious about giving permission.
In the meantime, this burn is proceeding perfectly. Scott’s and Blake’s obsessive attention to detail is paying off. The collective heat of the all the burning piles is such that I can feel its warmth even when the closest fire is more than 50 feet away. It is not an uncomfortable sensation. The studied competence and sobriety with which the workers approach the lighting of the fires is done with all the gravitas of a church ritual. I half expect incense to rise from the burning brush, accompanied by choral music.
It takes only two hours, and the mesquite is gone. I cross the draw between smoldering circles of ash to where Blake and Scott sit in the Mule, their coveralls still looking fresh as pins. Debra, who works inside the Landmark’s interpretive center and has been monitoring the weather conditions by computer, takes a breather from the virtual world and comes out to take a gander at the real one. Though there was never any hint that any of them were worried about the burn, there is a palpable air of relief about the group.
Blake calls out to me as I near, “You want some water?” He holds up a bottle, beaded with condensation. He and Scott are drinking from their own bottles.
I shake my head and say, “It went really well today, didn’t it?”
Scott nods and says in his slow way, “We are… elated.”
He allows himself a modest smile of satisfaction. The four of us look out over the draw, now a smooth, gently textured swath of green and yellow. It is a fine sight.
Pentimento, literally translated from its Italian root, means repentance or correction.
A few days later I ride out to the Landmark again, this time to pick up the flags from the students’ final. It’s a beautiful, clear day, and we’ve had some rain. Everywhere things are green and blooming, the vegetation so thick and uncharacteristically lush that at first I don’t see the burn scars. When I do spot them, they look surprisingly natural, as if they are just another part of the landscape.
I park my bike and walk off trail. Each flag must be located from memory, and it isn’t always easy to pick them out in the thick vegetation. For some, I have to retrace my steps several times, worried about leaving one behind, even though the odds are slim to none that a visitor to the Landmark will ever stumble across one and have a “wilderness” experience ruined. My path takes me down into the arroyo, then up along the west ridge. When I reach the sun shelter that was the center point of the exercise, I take a break and pull out a granola bar and notebook, settling down on the ground, leaning against one of the shelter’s posts and facing east, overlooking the arroyo.
In the distance, farther on down the trail, I can see the Mule speeding like gangbusters toward a pack of schoolchildren who’ve wandered off the path into a ditch, where they are scrambling up and down the easily eroded banks, throwing rocks, and committing god-knows-what other kinds of un-supervised damage. The Mule pulls up alongside the group and Blake hops out. A quick scolding, then he sends them on down the path to find their missing teacher. The scene reminds me of a story Blake told me recently, one in which the roles were reversed and he got a talking-to by a visitor.
He and Scott were in a seldom-used part of the park on the north end, repairing a barbed wire fence. They’d taken the Mule and driven it off trail, parking it on an old dirt road next to the break in the fence so they could have their tools close at hand. The area in which they were working is mostly full of non-native plants, like kochias, Russian thistle, non-native mustards—even the historic prairie earth is covered by a meter of topsoil that has blown in from nearby cotton fields—and it’s one place he and Scott have talked about as a candidate for restoration.
“Guy said he was a naturalist,” Blake recalled. “Probably took one look at our ‘gimme caps’ and thought we were not environmentalists.” He was referring, of course, to the baseball style caps given out as advertisement, and around here they are likely to sport logos for tractors or seed companies. Blake has a John Deere cap that he was probably wearing at the time.
He continued, “Anyway, he started chewing us out for driving over such a ‘sensitive landscape.’” Blake used his fingers to make quotation marks around the words.
“I tried to explain that the plants there weren’t even natives, but he didn’t want to listen to anything I had to say. The guy ought to at least learn the local plants before he goes off.”
We were eating barbecue at a local place as he was telling me this story. Blake paused here and ate some brisket. I could see he was still thinking about it. Then, clearly wanting to be generous, he spoke again. “You know, though, I probably would have done the same thing when I was his age. I remember I used to go off half-cocked about stuff like that. But I didn’t know as much about prairie restoration then, either.”
I realized that I knew the man he was talking about—someone passing through, from one of those places with a beautiful view—and I told Blake my impression was that the person in question was in his mid-30s or so.
“Oh.” Blake looked puzzled. He paused and then shrugged thoughtfully, “I thought he was younger.”
I finish my snack, pack up my notebook and walk down the trail to meet up with them, pausing along the way to gather up the last flag. Once I get there and we’ve exchanged hellos, I ask Scott point blank, “Do you like doing this sort of work? Managing a prairie, I mean?”
“Hell, yes,” he says emphatically and flashes a rare grin.
Blake laughs at Scott’s reply and climbs out of the utility vehicle. He grabs a handful of buffalo grass seed out of a sack in the Mule’s cargo bed and walks over to one of the burn scars to scatter it. This time next year there could be a stand of short grass there, and this place will look even more like the prairie it once was. It will still be flat, but it also might be a little easier to see the underlying form—the bones—of the Llano. It might even be a paintable view. La pura nada becomes repentance.
Blake slings his hand out and lets the grass seed fly.