Listapalooza: top ten songs about Texas

Hi, buckaroos. We’ve got something different for you today.

Every so often, when we’ve either run out of original things to say or are just feeling too damn lazy to write a “real” post, we plan to use this space to put forth a “top five” or “top ten” list. (This was Martin’s idea; Heather says he has obviously taken Nick Hornby’s brilliant High Fidelity, in which the narrator is an inveterate list-maker, way too seriously.)

These lists are, obviously, completely subjective and by no means intended to be definitive; they merely reflect our personal tastes and thus will probably reveal more than we really want you to know about us. They’re just supposed to be fun. (Remember fun?) At the very least, we hope they’ll serve as a jumping-off point for conversation.

So, without further ado, here’s the first list, of our ten favorite songs about Texas, in alphabetical order by artist. We certainly don’t claim that these are the best songs about Texas, or the most evocative; they’re simply our favorites. Given the richness of the state’s musical heritage, it was extremely difficult to narrow the list to only ten, and you’ll note the absence of such legendary performers as Willie Nelson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Lydia Mendoza, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, ZZ Top, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Rodney Crowell, Alejandro Escovedo, Johnny Winter, Guy Clark, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and many, many others who are arguably at least as deserving of mention as those listed below. To which we respond, with all due sincerity and humility, “So sue us!”

The Austin Lounge Lizards, “The Golden Triangle”

The Flatlanders, “Dallas”

Waylon Jennings, “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)”

Robert Earl Keen, “The Front Porch Song”

Lyle Lovett, “Walk Through the Bottomland”

James McMurtry, “Levelland”

The Sir Douglas Quintet, “At the Crossroads”
Ernest Tubb, “Waltz Across Texas”

Jerry Jeff Walker, “London Homesick Blues”
Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, “New San Antonio Rose”

—Martin

What we’re reading

Heather: Woody Tasch, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered

Martin: Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews

Dreaming time

In the mission statement for Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment (“Inspired by the rhythms of the Texas Hill Country, Madroño Ranch offers writers focused on nature and the environment a source and resource for work and rest, solitude and communion”), the inclusion of the word “rest” is no accident. Here’s why:

Joel Salatin, a farmer in Virginia, has developed a philosophy and practicum of farming that is simple and radically countercultural: use the needs and desires of the land, the plants, and the animals to direct farming decisions. As a consequence, his Polyface Farm is not only phenomenally productive, it annually increases the amount of chemical-free topsoil on the land and allows its animals to lead comfortable, healthy, chemical-free lives.

Here’s the real point of interest: the farm consists of about 550 contiguous acres, and Salatin and his family intensively farm only about 100 acres. The rest is “unused” forest; his pigs do forage for acorns there, and some of the trees are selectively milled, but about 80 percent of his land is apparently ignored.

This unused land is considered wasted by conventional farming standards, which would have Salatin cut down the forest and expand his operation, but he’s convinced that the productivity of his actively farmed land requires all those unused acres. They provide the ecological ballast for his doughty craft, helping reduce evaporation in the fields, providing wind breaks, permitting the existence of a complexity of interaction between flora and fauna that supports the entire operation.

Salatin’s insistence on the need for this apparently unproductive forest seems to have a parallel in the rhythms of sleeping and waking and the perception in our culture that sleep is time wasted, time that could be used “productively.” While some people seem to have a genetic mutation that allows them to sleep less than the general population and still function well, most of us become significantly less productive, not more, when we try to cut back on our sleep. Studies show that people become psychotic when deprived of uninterrupted sleep over extended periods; forced wakefulness is a well-known torture technique. (Any college student can tell you this.) Even so, our out-of-kilter culture continues its assault on this maddeningly “unproductive” necessity.

Just as they need to eat, to work, to worship, people—and maybe all creatures—need time dedicated not just to sleeping, but to dreaming as well. People whose sleep is subtly interrupted at the dream phase eventually develop the symptoms of those denied all sleep. (I don’t think I'm making this up.) Dreaming time, like Salatin’s untouched acreage, is necessary to the health and integrity of individual organisms and their ecosystems. I’ve come to think of the planet’s shrinking wilderness as its dreaming time. The list of activities or places declared unproductive by the market culture has grown significantly during my lifetime: time to cook, to play (if you aren’t a child, and sometimes if you are), to make music or art (if you’re not an expert), to observe a sabbath, to allow plants and animals to grow at their own pace, to make money that benefits whole communities rather than just a few individuals. By consciously using the word “rest” in our mission statement, we want to mount the ramparts and defend the borders of dreaming time.

—Heather

What we’re reading

Heather: Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

Martin: David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football

The wonder and power of water...

... in a time of drought are, oddly, matched only in times of flood. The Texas Hill Country is in the grip of a drought unparalleled at least since the 1950s. This drought has been so fierce that cattle going to drink at their accustomed (and empty) tanks have found themselves mired in mud so viscous and vicious that they are unable to extricate themselves from it. Even if ranchers find the cattle before they die of dehydration, they’re often as helpless as the foundered cows, unable to do anything but shoot them to relieve their misery.

While at Madroño we’ve been surveying parched rangeland and dropping water tables with dismay, we still have what now is revealed to be the astonishing gift of running water. At the far northwest corner of the property, our intrepid ranch manager Robert Selement and his gang of “coolies”—comprised mostly of his own children—have been cleaning out what we call the trout ponds, which have been choked with silt and vegetation for several decades.

The trout ponds are three dammed pools, each about 70 feet long and five to eight feet deep, which spill over at the end into Slippery Creek, which snakes its way southward down the valley until it flows into Wallace Creek. The water for Slippery Creek comes straight out of the rocks and is mostly routed through a series of lovingly crafted stone holding pens built in the 1970s and intended for raising brown trout.

As it emerges from its heavily shaded, ferny grotto, the water is astonishingly cold, cold enough to make you gasp if you have the nerve to sit in it. By the time it becomes shallow Slippery Creek, it’s pleasantly cool—to anyone but a trout, that is; the breeding venture petered out pretty quickly. (Much to their mutual surprise, our son Tito managed to pull a trout out of Wallace Creek about ten years ago, but that was the last one we’ve seen.)

But the beautiful stone work, the soothing sound of falling water, and the rich coolness remain. During this wretchedly hot summer, Robert keeps his workers going by working elsewhere during the (relatively) cool mornings and saving work at the trout ponds for the worst of the afternoon’s heat (hence, “coolies”). Several of the cracks in the rock that usually leak water are dry now, making the small, steady flow that rises from underground even more remarkable, its apparently modest output sustaining the life and well-being of countless creatures and plants. What a blessing!

N.B. We wrote and scheduled this post several weeks ago, anticipating Martin the Macho Tech Man’s absence as he marches across northern England. So I think we have actually caused the rain that’s been falling steadily for the last few days—sort of like leaving your car windows open. The drought is not yet broken, but it is certainly bent.

—Heather

What we’re reading

Heather: Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

Martin: Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader

The naming of writing centers

There are a lot of questions that will need to be answered before Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment becomes a reality. Among the more unexpectedly troubling was, what to call the dang thing?

Heather decided fairly early on that she didn’t want to use the word “retreat,” since it implied withdrawal and isolation, and we hoped that our program would in fact interact with and benefit the local community in some as-yet-undetermined fashion. She also decided she didn’t want to use the word “sustainability,” because it smacked of trendiness, even though sustainability is one of the things we hope the center will be all about.

We tried to think of a name that might convey something of our hopes and expectations for the place. One early candidate was the Companis Center, from the Latin source (meaning “with bread”) of the English word companion; another was the Tavola Center, tavola being the Italian word for table; a third was the Nexus Center, since we hoped it would be a place where different ways of thinking would come together, but we concluded that all of those sounded too much like office buildings.

Ultimately, we decided that the most sensible and easiest thing to do would be to stick with the name by which we already knew the place—Madroño Ranch—and add a “subtitle” that would (we hoped) explain what it was intended to be. (And yes, that is a photo of one of our madrone trees at the beginning of this post.)

So far, so good. Except that when we sat down and tried to come up with that subtitle, we found ourselves stuck again. It turns out that the naming of writing centers, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, is a difficult matter. All sorts of possibilities, most of them silly, suggested themselves—for example, Madroño Ranch: Next Door to Utopia (a reference to the fact that our closest neighbor is Kinky Friedman’s utterly wonderful Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch) and my personal favorite, Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writin’ and Wranglin’. We finally settled on Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment as the simplest and clearest alternative. Now doesn’t that sound like the kind of place at which you brilliant literary types would like to come spend some time?

—Martin

What we’re reading

Heather: Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Martin: David Maughan, On Foot from Coast to Coast: The North of England Way