There and back again: a geobiography

We recently led a seminar on Madroño Ranch as part of the annual Summer Literary Festival at Gemini Ink, a writing center in San Antonio. The theme of this year’s festival was “What Would Nature Do?” and in our seminar we read and discussed works by Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Michael Pollan, Ellen Davis, Lewis Hyde, and Mary Oliver. We also asked the participants to write a brief “geobiography” (as “A Native Hill” is described in the collection The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry), a statement of how they consider themselves rooted in a particular place. Here’s a slightly modified version of what I wrote:

I am a native of the Bay Area, a place that everyone thinks is among the most beautiful in the world. I was born in San Francisco and grew up in Marin County, just to the north of the city across the Golden Gate Bridge; I lived amid the winding hillside lanes and towering redwood and eucalyptus trees of Mill Valley, beneath Mount Tamalpais, until I was eighteen, when I went off to college in Massachusetts. There I met the woman I would marry, a native Texan, as I recounted in an earlier post; she had a job lined up in San Antonio after graduation, I followed her there, and I never lived in California again.

Why did I so thoughtlessly, even eagerly, put California behind me when I left home? In part, I realize in retrospect, I was hoping to escape some not particularly unusual or interesting adolescent angst and family tensions, and to redefine myself as a brighter, happier person in a new setting, among strangers. (I say nothing of the futility of such an effort; I was young and foolish.) Massachusetts, and then Texas, seemed like blessed opportunities, and I clutched at them desperately.

Only… almost despite myself, I continued to count as my closest friends two men I had known almost since birth. Brad and I met in kindergarten; Hans came a few years later. The three of us went all the way through elementary and high school together, and all three of us headed east to college, Brad to Harvard and Hans to Yale. (Both, I hear, pretty good schools.)

After college, I ended up in Texas, while Brad and Hans returned to California, to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively. Last year we all turned fifty, and Brad decided we should celebrate the milestone together. So, after much back-and-forthing (all three of us are married with children, with all the scheduling complications that implies), we arranged to meet in San Francisco in March and spend a day in Marin hiking along the California Coastal Trail, six miles from Tennessee Valley to Muir Beach and back again.

It was a beautiful day, we had a wonderful time, and we agreed to make this little reunion an annual event. This year, again, we gathered in March and spent the day hiking in Marin, this time at Pierce Point Ranch on the northern end of Point Reyes National Seashore. Next year we may meet in L.A., in deference to Brad; the year after that, perhaps we’ll meet in Texas.

One of the wonderful gifts this time with Brad and Hans has given me is the opportunity to reconsider my relationship to California. My father was something of an outdoorsman, and when I was a child we went camping and hiking in Marin County, in the Sierras, and even up the coast to Oregon and Washington. For various reasons, I never really enjoyed these trips as much as I should have—or so I thought. But hiking to Muir Beach and at Point Reyes with Brad and Hans forced me to confront an unexpected and long-suppressed truth: I loved this land, and felt comfortable in it in a way I still don’t in Texas, even though Texas is now home. I gloried in half-remembered vistas, in the way the glittering ocean and the crepuscular redwood forests and the rolling dairy farms butted up against each other; in the cypress and eucalyptus and madrone and laurel and manzanita, and in the blooming flowers whose names I’d never learned; in the cool, salty air; in the fog banks drifting in over the Pacific.

I felt as if a long-shut door in my head had been wrenched open again, and I could look out, for the first time in years, onto the bright green hills of a place I’d forgotten, or almost forgotten—a place I knew at once, with an almost literally breathtaking shock of recognition. I now realize that, having grown up amid such gentle but dramatic beauty (the suggestive, if erroneous, local legend has it that Tamalpais means “Sleeping Lady”), I came to believe that the world is an essentially beneficent place, and that the land is an unfailing source of pleasure and comfort. (I might have reached a different set of conclusions had I grown up in, say, Orla, Texas, or Barrow, Alaska.)

Mostly, however, I realize how much I took for granted, and how unbelievably lucky I was (and am). Over the years I’ve wasted a lot of time and energy in attempting to deny or at least rewrite my past, but now I feel as though I’ve been given a second chance to connect, to learn this land—not as the place I live, perhaps, but as the place I’m from, the place that formed me.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Kathryn Stockett, The Help
Martin: Dan O’Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch

Made for you and me: thoughts on private property

Last week I went to Woody Creek, Colorado, to visit my father, sister, and brother and their posses. Among the many pleasures I find at the family place are my early morning walks up a trail that runs behind my sister and brother-in-law’s house through Bureau of Land Management land. Known locally as the Buns of Steel Trail, it gallops up a southwest-facing slope dotted with scrub oak and sage. The soil is so red (colorado in Spanish) that if you wear white socks, you may be sure that they’ll never be white again, even after repeated washings. From varying elevations, you can watch the entire Roaring Fork Valley unroll below you and note the stately procession of the valley’s grand guardians, from the hulking Sawatch Range in the east to the ethereal Elk Mountains to the south to the comfortable bulk of Mount Sopris to the southwest and down to the gentler terrain (relatively speaking) toward Glenwood Springs. Because of bears, it’s wise to walk with dogs or other noisemakers, but your heart can be stopped just as effectively by a flushed grouse as by the appearance of a bear. Sometimes you walk through waist-high lupines, which can give a Texan a complex; even in a fabulous spring you can’t walk in bluebonnets, first cousins to mountain lupines, any higher than your shins.

I came to the familiar circle of scrub oaks where I usually look down on my father’s and sister’s houses about a thousand feet below and then, delighted with the world, turn to go back down. Just imagine the oceanic depths of my outrage when I saw a sign that said “For Sale: Cabin Site." For SALE? Whose foul idea of a joke was this? This wasn’t private property: it was communal, open to all who would admire it and dream away the hidden bears.

My sister set me straight: we have been trespassing all these years, the fence marking the boundary of BLM land having fallen into disrepair several dozen yards before the turn-around spot. The dirt road next to the turn-around spot wanders for miles through the back country and is accessible to the public, but the relatively new owners of the land around the road (including the cabin site) regularly patrol it to be sure that what few walkers there are don't step off the public way onto their private property.

Still incensed the next evening as the dogs and I took our postprandial constitutional, I encountered a young man on a four-wheeler driving onto our property, which is at the end of Little Woody Creek Road. “Can I help you?” I asked. “Oh, no, ma’am,” he said politely. “I’m just going to check my water. I do it twice a day.” My eyebrows at my hairline, I said, perhaps not quite as politely, “YOUR water?" “Yes, ma’am,” he said complacently.

I almost slugged him. In the politest, most Christian way, of course.

My sister explained (do you detect a pattern here?): Colorado’s water laws are so Byzantine and obtuse that they make those in Texas, shockingly, look almost reasonable. (In Colorado, whichever property has the oldest claim to the water controls it, regardless of how many times that property has changed hands.) But water laws aren’t really germane here. What I was struck by—and almost struck out in defense of—is my sense of what constitutes private property, especially when it comes to land that I love. I was furious to find that A) land I thought was communal was, in fact, privately owned (and NOT by my family); and B) land I thought was privately owned (by my family) was, in some respects, communal.

Having recently moved Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World to the top of my nonfiction top-ten list, I can’t ignore the profound complications of ownership, especially of something like land, which clearly comes to humanity as gift. We did not make it, and yet somehow we (some very few of us) have come to claim it as our own—initially, at least, through arrogance and (often violent) appropriation. This makes me sad and uneasy, because I love the land that my family and I “own.” And I hate those quotation marks, but I think they’re a useful discipline for any landowner.

When I got back to hot, scruffy, sweaty Texas from cool, elegant Colorado, I found a book waiting for me: Ellen Davis’s Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. (Insert punch line here.) In the book’s first line, Davis writes: “Agrarianism is a way of thinking and ordering life in community that is based on the health of the land and living creatures.” Those may not sound like fighting words, but they are. Davis claims that the Bible is grounded in agrarian thought and practice, in which possession of the land—Israel—is dependent “upon proper use and care of land in community.” The great irony is that America, steeped in the parallels between its own westward expansion and the Hebrews’ crossing the Jordan to the Promised Land, has completely missed the point by ignoring the holiness of the land given (and received by its first residents) as unmitigated gift. Buying and selling land for rapacious personal profit, poisoning it, cutting down ancient trees in order to build highways, polluting waters, killing for sport, abusing the animals given for nourishment, leaving the land for dead – these behaviors were and still should be open to emphatic prophetic censure as clear violations of the spirit in which the Earth’s tenants were given such gifts, and clear invitations for divine retribution that included (and still includes) such weapons as whirlwinds, drought, flood, and famine.

In his introduction to Davis’s book, Wendell Berry writes, “We have been given the earth to live, not on, but with and from, and only on the condition that we care properly for it. We did not make it, and we know little about it. In fact, we don’t, and will never, know enough about it to make our survival sure or our lives carefree. Our relation to our land will always remain, to a certain extent, mysterious. Therefore, our use of it must be determined more by reverence and humility, by local memory and affection, than by the knowledge we now call ‘objective’ or ‘scientific.’ Above all, we must not damage it permanently or compromise its natural means of sustaining itself.”

As seriously as I take Wendell Berry, Ellen Davis, and the Bible, though, I can’t ignore that very noisy part of me that wanted to deck that polite young man on “our” property checking on “his” water. The part of me that understands ownership as power isn’t going to disappear in a puff of high-mindedness. Nor am I sure it should; I don’t know of any compellingly desirable alternative to private land ownership as it currently exists. The government? Don’t think so. The Church, whatever that is? Ditto. Communal ownership? Only if I have my own bathroom. And while well-thought-out policies are a necessary component of land stewardship, they can’t force the conversion experience that moves our relationship with the land from that of owner and chattel to that of respectful, fruitful, loving partnership. How do we become married to the land?

By this point in most of my blog posts, I’ve managed to tie myself into emotional knots: dear God, there’s no way out of whichever mess I’ve decided needs fixing this week. So this is the time I usually go outside and stew about it. And I’ll start pulling weeds and notice a volunteer melon plant spilling its way out of the pile of compost I forgot to spread. And I’ll see one of the crowd of long-armed sunflowers fluttering and waving under a dozen investigative goldfinches so bright they look like flowers themselves. And I’ll watch the power plays at the hummingbird feeders, and listen to the mockingbirds make fun of the wrens. I’ll find that damn grasshopper that’s been eating my basil. (We shall say no more of him.) I’ll find a really cool-looking bug I haven’t seen before, or maybe shriek a little shriek when I come upon one of those terrifying large and harmless (oh, sure) yellow garden spiders. I’ll hear a chuck-will’s-widow emphatically tuning up in the draw behind our house. And I’ll tell someone how much I love “my” garden, how lucky I am, how lucky we are to live on this earth. Isn’t that how converts are made?

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Ellen Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible
Martin: Tom Killion and Gary Snyder, Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints

The literary environment (with apologies to the Williams Alumni Review)

Confession: I consider myself a loyal son of alma mater, but I usually just skim the quarterly Williams Alumni Review before tossing it into the recycling pile. A story in the June issue, however, caught my eye. “The Literary Environment,” by Denise DiFulco, is about the director of the college’s Center for Environmental Studies (CES), a Spanish professor named, confusingly, Jennifer French.

The article notes that a lot of people have asked French how a Spanish professor came to be named the director of the CES. The answer involves her first book, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (2005), which examined early twentieth century Latin American literary responses to European economic hegemony in the region. Or something like that. Explains French, “Often those writers, including Horacio Quiroga and José Eustasio Rivera, made central to their narratives the deleterious effects of agriculture and other industries.”

Sadly, I know next to nothing about Latin American literature, and I’d never heard of Quiroga or Rivera, but another quotation from the article really struck me: “At their best, environmental history, philosophy, religion, literary studies, and the like engage the underlying assumptions of environmental policy and environmental science.”

Exactly! I thought. This is a view that resonates profoundly with Heather and me—we are, after all, both English majors—and when we eventually begin accepting environmental writers for residencies at Madroño Ranch, we hope to cast as wide a net as possible.

Say the words "environmental writer" and I suspect that most people think of folks like Bill McKibben or William Cronon or Michael Pollan or David Quammen (all of whom happen to be heroes of ours): essayists or historians with a biological or agricultural bent. They, and many others like them, are among the most important writers we have, and we would be thrilled—thrilled—to have them, or their peers, as residents at Madroño. But we also hope to attract novelists and poets and philosophers and theologians and playwrights and screenwriters and memoirists and perhaps even (what the heck) bloggers—pretty much anyone who’s thinking and writing in creative ways about the land and those who have their being on it, and how they affect each other.

Think of the fiction of Wendell Berry, who (much as William Faulkner did in Mississippi) has created a complex and compelling imaginary landscape in Kentucky. (Apparently the American South is particularly suited to this sort of exercise.) Think of the novels of Willa Cather—Death Comes for the Archbishop is still my favorite—and Wallace Stegner, which depict the varied experiences of humans confronted with the vast spaces of the American West. Think of the poetry of Mary Oliver, in which the animal and vegetal and geological is a constant, almost sentient presence, and W. S. Merwin, described in the New York Times as “a fierce critic of the ecological damage humans have wrought.” Think of the economic writings of Paul Hawken and Woody Tasch, critiques of modern industrial capitalism’s obsession with short-term, bottom-line profit at the expense of just about everything else. Heck, think of David Winner’s odd little book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football—one of my personal favorites—in which he examines how landscape has affected the style of soccer played in the Netherlands.

Closer to home, think of the gracious and elegant memoirs of John Graves and Roy Bedichek, two of the foundational texts of the environmental movement in Texas; or the beginning of The Path to Power, the first volume of Robert Caro’s epic three-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, which is still the best short history of the Texas Hill Country I’ve ever read; or even Witold Rybczynski’s magisterial biography of Frederick Law Olmsted—not a Texan, but an astute observer of the state—which is a wonderful narrative summary of nineteenth-century American thought about nature in urban and suburban settings. Each of these works, I believe, has something original and important to say about community in America, community in this case defined as (to crib shamelessly from Pollan’s website) “the places where nature and culture intersect.”

We’d be pretty surprised to receive applications from Faulkner, Cather, Stegner, or Bedichek, since they're, well, dead. But would the rest of them want to come to Madroño Ranch? Well, why not? We hope that the offer of beautiful and rugged surroundings, free from distraction, in which to ponder and dream and focus and unfocus (and eat well, of course; let’s not forget eating well) and bounce ideas off peers, will prove irresistible. Are we aiming high? Of course; but if you don’t aim high, you’ll just keep hitting the ground, right? Who knows—maybe Jennifer French herself will want to come. According to the article, she’s already working on her next book, a study of how memories of the War of the Triple Alliance (fought between Paraguay and the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay from 1864 to 1870) have influenced attitudes toward land use in Paraguay. Wouldn’t that be cool?

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Laurie King, Touchstone
Martin: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (still)

The gift economy

Martin’s last post about our entertainingly (or so we hope) ill-prepared entry into the marketplace has got me thinking. (Martin says the most terrifying words in the world are “Honey, I’ve been thinking...” when they come out of my mouth. Reader, beware!)

In preparing for the seminar we’re going to lead at the Gemini Ink Summer Lit Fest in San Antonio next month, I’ve been rereading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. The description of our seminar asks all the Big Questions about our hopes and plans for Madroño Ranch. I’m not sure what prompted me to look at The Gift again, but whatever it was, it was, well, a gift; Hyde beautifully untangles many of the ideas knotted in my head about those hopes and plans.

He begins by identifying the two distinct economies in which a work of art exists: the market economy and the gift economy. While a work of art can exist without a market, it cannot exist without a gift. Harlequin Romances, for example, follow guidelines set by market research and sell very well. But are they works of art? Probably not. While writing one requires a certain level of competence, a Harlequin Romance probably doesn’t have a foot, or heaving bosom, in the gift economy.

Hyde develops a theory of the gift, which of course has multiple levels of significance. Its economy is marked by three related obligations: to give, to accept, and to reciprocate. Gift exchange is what one early theorist called a “‘total social phenomenon’—one whose transactions are at once economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythological.” Gift exchange is an issue in medical ethics as well, especially with reference to organ transplants: what is the status of body parts? Is it appropriate to commodify what has traditionally been regarded as a gift? What are the consequences when something moves from the gift economy to the market economy—when worth and value are confused?

Hyde cites the case of the Ford Pinto, a car that had a tendency to spill gas in low-speed collisions, a defect that killed at least 500 people. An easy fix for this defect existed, but after a cost-benefit analysis which valued a human life at $200,000, Ford decided that the costs of fixing the Pinto exceeded the benefits. While the decision may have made sense from a market perspective, it ignored the fact that most of us participate in another economy as well, one in which the gift of life cannot be assigned a dollar value.

One of the marks of a gift is that it is always in motion, transferred from one individual or community to another. It must be consumed (i.e., eaten, immolated, thrown into the sea) or given away; otherwise, it ceases to become a gift and becomes mere property. A true gift is the antithesis of personal property. Hyde says that “a gift is consumed when it moves from one hand to another with no assurance of return.... A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis; you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.” Gift economies generally operate in relatively small communities like families, brotherhoods, or tribes; market economies tend to emerge at the limits of gift economies as a means of negotiating with outsiders. While my truncated description makes gift economies sound primitive, they aren’t; Hyde cites the (ideally) unrestricted flow of ideas within the scientific community as an example. When ideas become remunerative for an individual or a portion of the community instead of free to the entire community, the gift economy dries up and the spirit of the group evaporates. The gift of ideas ceases to move.

Gift economies foment community; market economies fragment it—another iteration of the endless wrestling match between the Many and the One. One of the great benefits of a market economy—freedom from bondage—has significant limits. Where “the market alone rules, and particularly where its benefits derive from the conversion of gift property to commodities, the fruits of exchange are lost. At that point commerce becomes correctly associated with the fragmentation of community and the suppression of liveliness, fertility, and social feeling. For where we maintain no institutions of positive reciprocity, we find ourselves unable to... enter gracefully into nature, unable to draw community from the mass, and, finally, unable to receive, contribute toward, and pass along the collective treasures we refer to as culture and tradition.”

So here's what I’ve been thinking, honey: industrialized nations have converted the gift properties of nature into commodities. Any aboriginal people could have told us that disaster would ensue as a result of buying and selling what was pure gift, something not earned but given to us in abundance that the gift economy demands we pass on to our children in its original abundance.

I’ve also been rereading Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, in which he quotes the journals of the early American artist, writer, and wanderer George Catlin. Riding north to the Missouri River, Catlin found a campsite “in one of the most lovely little valleys I ever saw, and even far more beautiful than could be imagined by mortal man... an enchanting little lawn of five or six acres, on the banks of a cool and rippling stream, that was alive with fish; and every now and then, a fine brood of ducks, just old enough for delicious food and too unsophisticated to avoid an easy and simple death. This little lawn was surrounded by bunches and copses of the most picturesque foliage, consisting of leafy bois d’arcs and elms, spreading their huge branches as if in offering protection to the rounded groups of cherry and plum branches that supported festoons of grapevines with the purple clusters that hung in the most tempting manner over the green carpet that was everywhere decked out with wild flowers of all tints and various sizes, from the modest sunflowers, with their thousand tall and droopy heads, to the lilies that stood, and the violets that crept beneath them.... The wild deer were repeatedly rising from their quiet lairs, and bounding out and over the graceful swells of the prairies which hemmed it in.” McKibben comments, “If this passage had a little number at the start of each sentence, it could be Genesis....”

So with Hyde and McKibben in the front of my mind, I was stunned to read of Judge Feldman’s recent injunction against President Obama’s moratorium on offshore drilling, which just proves that I live in a lovely little bubble along with fairies and elves and a herd of unicorns. I do not argue against the fact of the market economy any more than I argue against the changing seasons. Nor do I argue against the gravity of depriving tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents of economic stability. But those who value the treasures of the Gulf through a market-driven cost-benefit analysis need to remember that they’re operating in a gift economy as well, and that there will be an audit.

Back to Gemini Ink and Madroño’s mission. We hope that Madroño will operate in a way that recognizes the beauty and necessity of both markets; after all, I’m out there hawking the virtues of bison meat. But I hope that in producing that meat we recognize the gift of abundance it brings us, that we honor that gift, and that we pass it on to our children and to the community in and around the ranch.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
Martin: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability

Adventures in Business-Land

This week, during a solo trip to Madroño, Heather spent much of her time knocking on doors in Kerrville, Bandera, Medina, Tarpley, and vicinity, hoping to convince chefs and restaurateurs to buy locally raised, grass-fed bison meat from the ranch. Our initial herd of fifteen animals has grown to thirty-six, including a couple of young males who have already, by their obstreperous behavior, nominated themselves as the first to be harvested this fall.

I’m not particularly objective, of course, but I think she could make a pretty compelling case to those potential customers. To wit:

• Bison meat generally has more protein, iron, and nutrients than beef or chicken;
• Bison meat is lower in fat and calories than beef or chicken;
• Our bison spend their lives ranging freely on Madroño’s 1,500 acres, and never set foot on feedlots;
• Our bison are never injected with or fed growth hormones, steroids, or any other supplements;
• To ensure the quality of the meat and reduce stress on the animals, our bison will be field-harvested on site under the supervision of a licensed inspector from the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Another point we hope to emphasize is that, since we’re a small-scale, local operation, our customers will also be our neighbors, which means we’ll be accountable and responsive to them in a way that Big Agriculture isn’t. It also means that every penny our customers spend on our meat will stay right here in Central Texas.

Our hope is that the sale of bison meat, eggs, and produce from Madroño will (eventually) provide significant financial support for the residential center for environmental writers we hope to open at the ranch. We know there’s a growing market in Austin for fresh, local, sustainably raised food, but we’re not planning to sell in Austin—too complicated and expensive logistically, plus we wouldn’t want to compete with our friend and mentor Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison—so we’re hoping to find a comparable demand in the area right around Madroño. (And based on Heather’s schmoozing this week, the early returns are encouraging.)

Make no mistake, though: going into business—especially the business of turning a creature into a commodity—presents all kinds of challenges for a couple of recovering English majors. Virtually all of my adult work experience has been in the nonprofit sector; shifting to something that is explicitly designed to make money, no matter how noble we believe the cause to be, is a bit of a shock. (A couple of years ago we were told that the mother of one of our daughter’s schoolmates referred to us as “just a couple of old hippies.” She did not intend it as a compliment.) As entrepreneurs, we are babes in the woods.

I imagine our first bison harvest will be quite an adventure, as will the processing and distribution that will follow. We’re already moving out of our comfort zone—I’m pretty sure Heather never imagined herself as a salesperson—and confronting a couple thousand pounds of dead buffalo will move us even farther into unknown territory. I mean, business plans? Financial projections? Balance sheets? Puh-lease!


Of course, it’s probably good for us complacent old hippies to be forced out of our comfort zones occasionally; we just have to hope that we don’t make a total cock-up of it.

On the other hand, maybe we don’t want to get too caught up in this whole mercantile thing. I’ve been reading Ian L. McHarg’s influential book Design with Nature, originally published in 1969. McHarg, an expatriate Scot who pioneered the field of environmental planning in the United States, writes witheringly of the prevailing view in his adopted homeland: “Neither love nor compassion, health nor beauty, dignity nor freedom, grace nor delight are important unless they can be priced. If they are non-price benefits or costs they are relegated to inconsequence. The economic model proceeds inexorably towards its self-fulfillment of more and more despoliation, uglification and inhibition to life, all in the name of progress – yet, paradoxically, the components which the model excludes are the most important human ambitions and accomplishments and the requirements for survival.”

Of course, McHarg is hardly the first thinker to decry a fixation on financial gain. In the sixth century BCE, Lao-Tzu put the same sentiment somewhat more pithily: “Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench.” In a similar vein, I Timothy tells us that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” (I Timothy is also the source of the phrase “filthy lucre,” by the way.) Jesus himself reminds us, in Matthew’s gospel, that “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”

And yet, and yet... we live in a fallen world, and money is an intrinsic part of it. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but money itself is not necessarily evil. (Or, as Peter J. Gomes writes in The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, “Wealth is not a sin, but it is a problem.”) The trick, obviously, is to learn money; to use it; to see it as a means to an end, not an end in itself. I mean, why can’t Madroño become an example of enlightened capitalism, a model of a countercultural way of thinking about commerce—a way that emphasizes the small-scale, local, sustainable long term, instead of the bigger-is-better, metastatic, smash-and-grab short term? I think we’ve all seen enough of the latter way of thinking, and its consequences, to last us a good while.

Of course, it’s easy for me to preach self-righteously about the corrupting dangers of the profit motive; we’re unlikely to make enough money selling bison to threaten the state of our souls. Indeed, just breaking even seems like an ambitious goal right now. I'm sure we’ll be writing more about Heather and Martin’s Adventures in Business-Land in the weeks and months to come. In the meantime, pray for us – and our bank account.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Richard Powers, The Echo Maker
Martin: Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (still)

Home with the armadillo: a love letter to Texas

Recently we and our three kids went to Martin’s native San Francisco to help celebrate his father’s eighty-fifth birthday. The five of us spent an afternoon walking along the cliffs of Point Reyes National Seashore, where the ground was springy, the wind was fierce, and in some spots along the trail we pushed through wildflowers up to our shoulders. Hawks wheeled through the cloudless sky, elk sunned in the lees of the cliffs, and the ocean’s shining hide swelled and stretched like the flanks of a well-groomed, self-satisfied, and very large cat. At one point, our son Tito turned to us and said incredulously, “You mean we had a choice between this and Texas?”

Yes, well. Despite Martin’s entertaining recent post on how he has come to terms with living in Texas, he has spent much of his time in the Lone Star State not entirely convinced that civilized life is possible here—certainly not from May to October, and frequently not after elections. I grew up spending summers in Colorado, where despising Texans is a competitive sport, and as a teenager and young adult I also got to spend time in places of unsurpassed beauty such as the highlands of Guatemala, the Swiss Alps, the Masai Mara, Paris, and the Canadian Rockies. And yet I love Texas and can’t imagine living anywhere else. Time for that apologia, son.

Some of my love of Texas is just an old bad habit. Many fine writers have noted how people stubbornly cling to the smells and sounds of their childhood, sensations that undermine the idea that time moves only into the future. Much of my first decade was spent in the then-unbroken woods just north of the San Antonio airport. The uncanny whinny of the screech owl, the languid moan of the mourning dove, the overpowering sweetness of mountain laurel at Easter, the loneliness of the north wind on a clear winter day: each time I experience these now I’m reminded that the girl who was gripped by them forty years ago is still inside me. She isn’t gone, despite all appearances to the contrary.

There’s more to it than nostalgia, though. Texas tells stories about itself, some of them true. While I know that many find this self-conscious tale-telling irritating—maybe even pathological—I find it sort of comforting. So maybe we actually lost the battle of the Alamo. So maybe the Texas Rangers weren’t a bunch of ethically ripped superheroes. So maybe every cowboy doesn’t have the soul of a poet. But there seems to be a (nearly) conscious yearning for the power of myth to work among us with these stories. Of course, there are stories Texans tell about themselves that I loathe: bigger is better, we should each of us be our own posse, it’s manly to kill animals with automatic weapons and spurn the meat—but this is a place that recognizes the power of stories to shape reality.

One of the stories told over and over in multiple variations is the power and variety of the land itself. One of my favorite signs is on Interstate 10 at the Louisiana-Texas state line. It reads something like this: Beaumont, 20 miles; El Paso, 937 miles. While I have lived only in Central Texas—in some ways the easiest part of the state to love—I’ve learned to respect and admire many of the landscapes between the ends, from east to west and from north to south. I make no claims to anything but the cursory knowledge that comes from road trips involving grumpy children – me and my siblings years ago, and more recently our own children. My parents drove us to Colorado every summer through the Panhandle; Martin and I chose instead to make our annual pilgrimage by way of Fort Stockton and then north through the Pecos wilderness. One hot summer day the gas tank light came on when we were halfway through the hundred inhospitable miles between Pecos and Loving, New Mexico. The prospect of running out of gas here at midday with a dog and several children concentrated the mind wonderfully and caused me to sweat through my clothes despite the car’s air conditioning. (We managed to make it to the next filling station.) We passed by multiple examples of the land’s indifference to human striving: we often threatened to abandon our squabbling children in Orla, an oil ghost town baked into dusty submission, if they didn’t behave. (It didn't help.)

We always planned our route back to Austin through Balmorhea and Fort Davis and, inevitably, a thrashing summer thunderstorm would force us off the highway—or so we assumed, since we couldn’t even see the highway through the mud on the windshield. But before the storm hit, you could see the Guadalupe Mountains to the west, and when we made it to Marfa and the high grasslands, we—well, some of us—were exhilarated by the wind and the shadows, by the pitilessness and delicacy of the Chinati Mountains.

At the other end of the spectrum, I love the featurelessness of the south Texas brush country, an admittedly perverse passion. In March, the mesquite bloom neon green. At least as many things will sting, bite, or poison you as won’t. As our friend and mentor Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison says, there are two seasons in south Texas: January and summer. At the rare watering holes, there are birds of remarkable beauty: green jays and hooded orioles and American widgeons. Once in April, on my way back from Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass, I drove through a migration of yellow sulphur butterflies that extended for dozens of miles. When I got back to Austin, probably a dozen people pointed out the grotesque beauty of my Suburban’s grille, which had become an extravagant collage of dead butterflies.

I’m leaving a lot of verses out of my Texas love song, but the last verse here has to be the one about the Hill Country. Loving the Colorado Rockies as much as I love any landscape, I’ve been trained to seek out views, to climb and pant and strain and exult upon reaching the summit. Well, the Hill Country upends that paradigm. Once you make it to the top of the hill—at least at Madroño—the landscape sinks into an unexpected anonymity. The personality of the Hill Country is in its draws and canyons, the intimate interstitial places where oaks and pecans crowd together, and great slabs of limestone create undulating walls and pools, and ferns and cedar sage grow with the demure confidence of cloistered beauty. In February, the draws ring with the slurred chatter of hundreds of intoxicated robins and waxwings. The draws also snarl with the movements of feral hogs, coyotes, and mountain lions, and vibrate with the possibility of rattlesnakes on sunny shelves, the clatter of unseen hooves in caves and cedar brakes, and the songs of maddeningly invisible birds that suddenly move, shine, and disappear again before they can be named. The draws protect and expose, invite and terrify. You want stories? You’ll find them here.

So, son, I’ll be happy to spend time in California, especially in August, even if the locals make fun of how I talk and where I’m from. But I’ll always want to come home.

—Heather

What we're reading

Heather: Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality
Martin: Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature

Listapalooza: top ten Texas movies

Yup, another one of those crazy lists. This time we thought we’d offer our ten favorite movies about (or set in, or somehow related to) Texas. Pass the popcorn, and turn off that damn cell phone!

Dancer, Texas Pop. 81
Giant
The Last Picture Show
Lone Star
Lonesome Dove (yes, we know it was originally a TV miniseries, but give us a break!)
No Country for Old Men
The Searchers
Tender Mercies
Terms of Endearment
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Bonus movie trivia: The iconic silent Western star Tom Mix, who claimed in his autobiography that he was born and raised on a ranch on the Rio Grande, was actually a native of Pennsylvania who never lived in Texas, though governor James Allred named him an honorary Texas Ranger in 1935.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Martin: David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon