A holy fool in “the land of the Philistines”

Greeks and Trojans, Christians and Muslims, Jews and Arabs, Serbs and Croats, Tutsis and Hutus—the collision of cultures is rarely, if ever, a pleasant sight. The protracted and bloody war between the Plains Indians, especially the Comanches, and the white settlers of Texas is among the most horrifying of all, marked by unimaginable violence and cynical deception on both sides. But even in the cruelest conflicts there can be people who exemplify honor and integrity. Such an exemplar was the quixotic Robert Simpson Neighbors, one of the most intriguing, foolhardy, and tragically heroic figures in nineteenth-century Texas.

Thanks to S. C. Gwynne’s excellent new book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, Neighbors (pictured above) has been on my mind again. (Several years ago I actually thought I might try to write a biography of him, but eventually the impulse passed.) I guess I’ve always had a soft spot for those who try, against all odds, to do the right thing, and Neighbors certainly qualifies.

Born in Virginia in 1815, he was orphaned at the age of four and raised by a guardian. He arrived in Texas in 1836, after a couple of years in Louisiana, and from 1839 to 1841 served as assistant quartermaster and acting quartermaster of the army of the Republic of Texas. He served under John Hays during the Mexican War and was taken prisoner in San Antonio by Gen. Adrián Woll in 1842. After his release in 1844, he became the republic’s agent to the Lipan Apaches and Tonkawas; in 1847, after Texas became part of the United States, Neighbors received a federal appointment as Texas commissioner of Indian affairs.

This was not an easy position. As Mike Campbell, the dean of Texas historians, notes in his magisterial Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State, the federal government was virtually powerless to stop white settlers from occupying land ostensibly belonging to the Indians, because Texas, uniquely among the United States, retained ownership of its public lands when it joined the union; thus, federal law did not apply on the lands where the Indians lived, and the state seemed unable or unwilling to keep land-hungry white settlers from trespassing. As the Penateka Comanche chief Buffalo Hump told Neighbors, with some asperity, “For a long time a great many [white] people have been passing through my country; they kill all the game and burn the country, and trouble me very much.” Neighbors noted in March 1848 that this persistent trespassing “must necessarily and inevitably lead to serious difficulty.”

Moreover, Neighbors’ distaste for violence was out of step with public sentiment. He tried to negotiate the return of Cynthia Ann Parker, the most celebrated Indian captive of them all (and the mother of Quanah Parker), but the Comanches rebuffed his efforts; Neighbors reported to his superiors in Washington that “I am assured by the friendly Comanche chiefs that I would have to use force to induce the party that has her to give her up.” (Cynthia Ann was unwillingly returned to white civilization in 1860, when Texas Rangers under Sul Ross accidentally captured her during a raid on a Comanche encampment on a tributary of the Pease River in north Texas.)

Neighbors, a Democrat, lost his federal job after the Whig Zachary Taylor was elected president in 1848, but was reappointed when Franklin Pierce reclaimed the White House for the Democrats four years later. (In the meantime, Neighbors found time to lead an expedition that established a trail between San Antonio and El Paso, part of which was later used by the Butterfield Overland Mail; organize El Paso County; marry Elizabeth Ann Mays in Seguin; and serve in the state legislature.)

Neighbors was thus part of the vast machinery that slowly but inexorably (and often violently and duplicitously) squeezed the Indians off their ancestral lands, clearing the way for white occupation of the American west. But Neighbors was different from most of his fellow Indian agents: he treated the Indians with respect, and stubbornly defended them against the accusations, frequently fabricated, of land-hungry settlers who coveted the land set aside for reservations.

Needless to say, this was not a popular stand in Texas, and Neighbors made many enemies among his fellow whites. In the mid-1850s, he decided that the only way to end the escalating tensions and violence was to establish reservations beyond the existing line of settlement. He finally succeeded in getting Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to authorize the establishment of two reservations on the upper Brazos. Neighbors hoped to convince the previously nomadic Indians to settle down and become farmers—a shockingly misguided, if not downright stupid, notion, and one that was clearly doomed to failure. As it was, less than five hundred of the Penateka Comanches (only about a third of the band’s entire population) moved onto the Clear Fork Reservation, at Camp Cooper in Throckmorton County. About a thousand other Indians, mostly Caddos and Wichitas, moved onto the Brazos Reservation, south of Fort Belknap in Young County.

And then, of course, the line of white settlement, moving inexorably westward, reached the upper Brazos, with predictable results. Whites who coveted the land began blaming the reservation Indians for the depredations committed by those who had refused to move onto the reservations. The loathsome John R. Baylor, who had been fired as an agent on the Clear Fork Reservation after feuding with Neighbors, became the editor of a virulently anti-Indian newspaper called The White Man and pledged himself to exterminating the Indians; toward that end, he called for, and even organized, violence against the reservation Indians. While acknowledging that the residents of the Brazos and Clear Fork reservations were more sinned against than sinning, the government finally concluded that enough was enough, and decided to end the experiment.

In the summer of 1859, therefore, Neighbors supervised the removal of all 1,500 residents of the Brazos and Clear Fork reservations to a new reservation on the Washita River in Indian Territory. (Among the contractors involved in this trek was the San Antonio freighter James Duff, soon to become a notorious figure in the Hill Country, as I wrote in an earlier post.) In August, after leading his charges across the Red River, Neighbors wrote to his wife that he had left “the land of the Philistines.” Upon his return to Fort Belknap a little over a month later he was murdered, shot in the back by Edward Cornett, a man he didn’t even know but who apparently despised his conciliatory attitude toward the Indians. In The Texas Rangers, Walter Prescott Webb reported the story that a group of Texas Rangers, outraged by Neighbors’ assassination, “went after Ed Cornett, and brought him to justice without the aid of judge or jury.”

I suspect that Neighbors himself, a man of honor and principle who believed wholeheartedly in the sanctity of the law, would not have approved. He seems to have been one of those ostentatiously virtuous men who manage to alienate and offend their fellows while living unimpeachable lives; perhaps the rest of us simply can’t stand being reminded how far short of the mark we fall. In fact, Neighbors may have had more than a whiff of self-righteousness about him. In Empire of the Summer Moon, Gwynne says that Neighbors’ behavior as Indian agent was characterized by “earnest and well-meaning naïveté,” as opposed to the “pure hypocrisy” of many of his peers, which sounds like fairly faint praise. By attempting to stand in the way of Manifest Destiny, trying to turn the Penateka Comanches into farmers, and expecting the government to live up to the terms of its own treaties, Neighbors may have revealed himself as a fool. But we will never stop needing such fools, men and women who are unafraid to speak truth to power even at the risk of their lives, and God help us if they ever disappear entirely.

Jeez. I promise I’ll try to find something a little cheerier to write about next time.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent
Martin: S. C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

“Sit. Stay. Stay! I said STAY, dammit!”

Despite the temptation to give myself over to ululations for the natural world in light of the recent midterm elections, I will be brave and strong. In fact, I’ll look to our dogs for clues about how to move ahead in confounding times with good cheer, if not always with a lot of grace, and perhaps with only an occasional low moan or two.

In an earlier post, I considered the change my walking pace has undergone over the years. What has remained constant is the presence of dogs on these rambles. When I’m in Colorado, I usually borrow dogs from my sister or my father. (Walking with my mother’s dogs was often a little demoralizing; she worried aloud that bears and mountain lions might attack them, but she never expressed any anxiety for me.) At Madroño, I’ve walked with a long line of brave and stupid dogs who’ve both saved me from and almost led me to some gruesome fates.

The first was sweet Daisy, a lovely golden retriever/English setter mix and the mildest of dogs—until she was on the ranch, where she became Trained Assassin Daisy, Scourge of Armadillos! I had never known that armadillos had much to say until I watched Daisy in hot pursuit of one at the north end of the property; speedier than it looked, it made a loud whirring noise, as if it were wearing a propeller beanie. Daisy missed that one, but she got lots of others. We decided that she loved them because they were “crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside.”

One Thanksgiving Day at the ranch, we were all—parents, siblings, children, dogs, friends—walking up the steep hill above the lake when Daisy proudly came galloping up to us with what she must have thought was an unusually hairy armadillo in her mouth. She was delighted until she dropped it at our feet and found that much of it remained in her mouth. (It was, of course, a porcupine.)

Sweet as she was, she allowed us to pull out many of the hundreds of spines in her snout, under her tongue, in her gums, etc., but the job proved to be too much for us. Even though it was a holiday, we tracked down a laconic vet in Hunt who said he wasn’t doing anything but watching football, so sure, bring her on in. When they had gotten Daisy anesthetized and yanked out the remaining spines, Martin said to the vet, “Well, I bet most dogs only make this mistake once, right?” The vet cocked an eyebrow and said, “You’d be surprised.” Thank heavens we haven’t been surprised since then.

A few years later, we found a black puppy with a broken back leg at the gate who turned out to be Phoebe, our now-blind life-guide, about whom Martin wrote admiringly a few weeks ago. Phoebe has been a wonderful walking companion, although one of her chief virtues—steadiness—may very well stem from the fact that her eyesight was never very good; maybe she just didn’t see all those armadillos and porcupines and deer. She did notice snakes, however, and helpfully made little sideways hops to notify me that I should step elsewhere.

But even the admirable Phoebe occasionally caused me dismay. Aside from her tragic and annoying moans whenever I stopped to listen for and look at birds, Phoebe proved to be susceptible to wayward influences like, for example, our next dog, Honey. One day, a couple of months after Daisy died, I was at our neighborhood pharmacy in Austin. A couple of local kids who worked there had brought in a dog they’d found on the downtown hike and bike trail, skittish and covered with fleas. Their mothers had told them to find it another home. I looked and saw a fluff-bomb with an absurdly curling tail who might have had chow and/or golden retriever and/or some mountain dog in her, and maybe a little Ewok too. The kids noticed that I couldn’t take my eyes off her and asked, “Do you want her?” “Yes,” I said, helplessly smitten. Martin said something else, which I can’t repeat here, when I returned home with toothpaste, shampoo, and a new dog, but Honey was irresistible.

She was also, alas, flightier than Phoebe. Once, after the kids and our friend Charles and I had scrambled up a beautiful and nearly inaccessible draw at the ranch, we came upon a herd of aoudads, who were as surprised to see us as we were to see them. Honey got a young aoudad in her sights and went after it, determined to tear its throat out, despite the shrieks and rocks we hurled at her. She backed the youngster into a fence while its mother threatened to eviscerate her with her great curling horns. Charles gallantly gave up his belt to get our darling murderous fluff-bomb under control, as Phoebe valiantly barked encouragement from a safe distance.

Another time, one of my favorite emergency-backup children and I went walking with Phoebe and Honey. We were in the canyon where we had once found a pair of rusted iron bedsteads and a rusted cast-iron Dutch oven, just poking around to see what other inexplicable but suggestive oddities we might find, when we heard a series of distinctively coyotic yips in the dense woods around us. In an instant, the dogs were gone, gone, gone. Despite our most beguiling efforts, Phoebe and Honey yodeled their way up to the top of the draw, and then Dave and I heard something else: snorts. Hogs. The woods were so thick we couldn’t see them, but we could hear them. Lots of them. Close by. Oh, great, I thought. How am I going to explain to my best friend that her sweet gangly son was carved up by feral hogs because my idiot dogs went gallivanting off to be eaten by a pack of coyotes? We all made it back to the house safely, but Phoebe’s irresponsible behavior still galls me.

And then another time, the dogs and I were out by ourselves when they, officers of ranch security, uncovered a plot by a couple dozen sows and piglets to disrupt our walk. Much barkage. Much squealing. Much inelegant scrambling by Someone to get into a tree and above tusk-level. Much hilarity in the kitchen after our return to think about Someone sitting in a scruffy little scrub oak for half an hour wondering if the dogs were still alive and if the pigs were really gone. Phoebe got a really scalding series of lectures for that lapse.

Generally speaking, though, Honey and Phoebe were fine walking companions. When Honey died of cancer a few years ago, we realized that she had been acting as Phoebe’s seeing-eye dog, because Phoebe’s deteriorating eyesight meant she was quite literally lost without her. Phoebe’s ranch rambles have ended, but Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound has become my new companion and is presenting all sorts of interesting challenges.

While she doesn’t seem to have Daisy’s and Honey’s ferocious streak (except, sadly, when it comes to chickens), she has a hair-trigger chase reflex and is speedy enough to catch a deer, as we learned to our amazement a few years ago (fortunately, once she finally cornered it in the angle of a fence, she seemed content just to lie there panting and stare at it), or anything else that roams the ranch. (She’s learned to ignore the bison, a fine survival strategy; despite their awkward-appearing bulkiness, bison are plenty quick themselves, and they definitely don’t like dogs.) I’ve started using a shock collar on her, to discourage her from rocketing off after hogs; I heard not too long ago about a woman whose dogs took off after a bunch of hogs, who then turned on the dogs, who then ran back to their mom, who ended up with sixty stitches in her leg from the pursuing porkers. Fortunately, Chula is a total wienie when it comes to pain, and the early results with the shock collar have been promising.

The adventures, clearly, will continue.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
Martin: Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island

"The Blackest Crime in Texas Warfare"

Our usual route from Austin to Madroño Ranch takes us through Johnson City to Fredericksburg via Highway 290, and then down Highway 16 through Kerrville to the turnoff opposite the Medina Children’s Home. Every time I pass the sign for Turtle Creek, an unremarkable little stream just past the turnoff for FM 1273, about five miles south of Kerrville, I am reminded of one of the bloodiest and most controversial episodes in the extraordinarily bloody and controversial history of the state: the battle of the Nueces, labeled “The Blackest Crime in Texas Warfare” by the Dallas Morning News almost seventy years later.

Central Texas is dotted with German settlements dating from the mid-nineteenth century: Fredericksburg, Boerne, New Braunfels, Comfort, Sisterdale, and many more. The German settlers—more than 7,000 of them came between 1844 and 1847 alone—were a diverse group, according to the late Terry Jordan, arguably the leading scholar of European immigration to Texas: “They included peasant farmers and intellectuals; Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists; Prussians, Saxons, Hessians, and Alsatians; abolitionists and slaveowners; farmers and townsfolk; frugal, honest folk and ax murderers.”

Perhaps. But while some German Texans, including prominent journalists such as Ferdinand Lindheimer, defended slavery, and others, like August Buchel, served in the Confederate army, the popular image was, and is, of a relatively liberal, well-educated, and homogeneous group who opposed slavery and secession and remained stubbornly pro-Union. In 1854, at the annual Staats-Sängerfest (state singing festival) in San Antonio, the delegates adopted a resolution condemning the “peculiar institution,” and in 1857, as I noted in an earlier post, Frederick Law Olmsted applauded the abolitionist sentiments he found among the denizens of the Hill Country. It should come as no surprise, then, that many who supported secession and the Confederacy were suspicious of the insular, “radical” immigrants of central Texas.

To make matters worse, some of the more outspoken German Texans organized the Union Loyal League in June 1861, and by March 1862 they were openly celebrating Union victories and had organized a battalion of three well-armed militia companies, with Fritz Tegener, a Prussian emigré who owned a sawmill near Hunt and served as Kerr County treasurer, as major and commander. The militia was supposedly meant to protect the Hill Country from Indians and outlaws in the absence of Federal troops, but its presence, understandably, made the Confederate authorities nervous. Confederate general Hamilton P. Bee, commander of the Western Sub-district of Texas, sent Capt. James Duff, a former San Antonio freighter and founder of an irregular force called Duff’s Partisan Rangers, to take control of the area.

Duff, who declared martial law in July 1862, was later nicknamed “the Butcher of Fredericksburg” for his harsh actions as provost marshal; one historian, writing a century after the fact, noted that “his arrests and depredations on the citizens of these counties seem unjustifiable,” though others say that accounts of his cruelty were a “myth.”

At any rate, an atmosphere of fear, distrust, and confusion had settled over the Hill Country by August 1, when a group of about eighty men, most of them German Texans, met on Turtle Creek, just a few miles north of Madroño Ranch. Sixty-one of them, with Tegener in charge, decided that their best bet was to flee Texas until the hostilities died down—in retrospect, a tragic miscalculation. They determined to try to reach Mexico by riding west to the mouth of the Devils River on the Rio Grande (the site of present-day Amistad Reservoir) and then crossing into Mexico, but Duff learned of their plans and sent Lt. Colin D. McRae, with ninety-four mounted troopers, in pursuit.

The unsuspecting Germans made little effort to cover their tracks, and McRae and his men easily traced them across the Medina and Frio rivers before catching up to them on the afternoon of August 9 on the West Fork of the Nueces River in northeastern Kinney County. A few of Tegener’s men had reported seeing unidentified riders behind them, but the commander dismissed their reports and told the group to make camp in a grassy clearing on the west bank of the river.

The precise details of what happened next are lost to time, but the following seems to be the most commonly accepted version. McRae and his men attacked before dawn of the following day. Around twenty-five of the Unionists abandoned the fight almost immediately and managed to slip through the Confederate lines in the darkness and confusion. McRae’s troops killed nineteen of the remaining Unionists and captured nine others who had been wounded; Tegener himself was wounded, but managed to escape. Shockingly, the Confederates executed the nine wounded prisoners a few hours after the skirmish, shooting them in the head as they lay face-down and defenseless on the ground. As a final indignity, McRae’s men left the bodies of their victims unburied, “prey to the buzzards and coyotes.” The Confederate casualties included two killed and eighteen wounded, McRae among them.

And what of the surviving Unionists, you ask? Eight were killed on October 18, when another Confederate force attacked them as they attempted to cross into Mexico; nine others died in other battles. One man, August Hoffmann, reportedly made his way back to Gillespie County, where he remained in hiding, living on “pear fruit and bear grass,” until the spring of 1863. Tegener himself survived, though legend has it that during his long absence from Texas his wife, assuming he had been killed in the attack, married another man. Haha—awkward! Apparently it all worked out, though, as Tegener himself eventually remarried and went on to become a state legislator and justice of the peace in Travis County.

The encounter on the Nueces almost immediately became what historian Stanley S. McGowen called “one of the state’s most controversial and contentious historiographical events.” The Handbook of Texas notes that “Confederates regard[ed] it as a military action against insurrectionists while many German Hill Country residents viewed the event as a massacre.” Regardless of which side you’re on, it was a terrible thing. In 1865, the families of the men killed on the Nueces gathered their bones and finally interred them at Comfort, where a monument was dedicated on the battle’s fourth anniversary, in 1866. The Treue der Union (Loyal to the Union) monument, pictured above, still stands in Comfort, and historians still debate how best to describe what happened to that group of fearful men who met on humble Turtle Creek on an August day almost 150 years ago.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Philipp Meyer, American Rust
Martin: C. J. Chivers, The Gun

Barbers, bison meat, and the invisible hand

I was back in my shiny new persona as salesperson last week, driving out to all the dude ranches around Bandera in hopes of scaring up a market for the hundreds and hundreds of pounds of bison meat we will soon have for sale. Reaction was generally favorable, despite the fact that I didn’t have some basic information at hand, like the prices we’ll be charging.

Aside from feeling like a dummy, a phony, and a bat-brained loony, I had fun. First, there’s very little that I enjoy more than looking at other people’s property. Second, I got to drive down some Hill Country roads I hadn’t been on before and go through the Hill Country State Natural Area, a secluded 5,000-plus-acre park dappled with beautiful blooming grasses and gayflowers, stands of hardwoods, and shining creeks. The third fun thing was getting out and meeting people—not a pleasure my usually introverted self would have anticipated. Our pattern when we go to Madroño has been to get there and dig in, not coming out unless we need something really important, like the newspaper or beer or ice cream or antihistamines. Now, for the first time, we’re starting to meet our neighbors. We’re starting—just barely—to find our way into the community.

I’ve also been rereading Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself, in which community is a central concern. (The book has easily reaffirmed its place on my top-ten favorite novels list.) So this week “community” seems to be the theme that wants to beat me over the head until I wake up and pay attention.

As you might guess from the subtitle, Jayber Crow concerns a small-town Kentucky barber whose life spans most of the twentieth century. Orphaned at an early age, Jayber is raised by a loving great-aunt and -uncle, who die when he is ten. He is sent to an orphanage and finally, a dozen years later, makes his way back to Port William to become its barber, grave-digger, and church janitor. A philosophical-minded bachelor, Jayber watches the community (that’s a map of the whole fictitious area above) over the course of several wars and the encroachment of highways and agricultural technology. Although he witnesses and endures great suffering, at the end he can say truthfully that his book is about Heaven because of the profound love the community bears for itself and for its place, both temporal and spatial.

In part, this love manifests itself in Port William’s economic life. When Jayber returns to Port William, he finds that the town’s previous barber has left, not being able to support his family on his shop’s limited income. Jayber is immediately taken by an old friend to see the town banker, who in introducing himself says, “I’m glad to know you. I knew your mother’s people.” He offers to loan Jayber the money to buy the old barbershop; Jayber describes the terms of the loan as “fair enough, but very strict in what he would expect of me.”

Jayber adds, “You will appreciate the tenderness of my situation if I remind you that I had managed to live for years without being known to anybody. And that day two men who knew who and where I had come from had looked at me face-on, as I had not been looked at since I was a child.... I felt revealed, as if to buy the shop I had to take off all my clothes.” Going into business requires him to become a part of the community, to care about its constituent parts in order to make his own way in the world.

I had imagined that this community might make Adam Smith, the patron saint of free-market economics, sneer: it lives within the limits of the land’s fertility, repairs what is broken, patches what is torn, and remains deeply suspicious of debt. Its citizens are generous to those in need, recognizing that they cannot prosper individually without prospering corporately. The antihero of the novel, Troy Chattam, is an ambitious young farmer who contemptuously rejects the old-fashioned ways of his father-in-law; Troy’s mantra is “modernize, mechanize, specialize, grow.” He goes into debt to buy new machinery and listens to agribusiness experts who tell him to use every bit of soil on the place: “never let a quarter’s worth of equity stand idle.” He seems to be a firm believer in the “invisible hand,” famously posited by Smith in his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations, which supposedly guides markets to produce the highest quality goods for the lowest price to the benefit of both producers and buyers; this is what we used to call the American way. Like that of the city for which he was named, however, Troy’s is not a story with a happy ending.

But wait—why in heaven’s name is Adam Smith suddenly part of this conversation? Because I, despite my shocking ignorance of economics, just read Adam Gopnik’s fascinating article on Smith in the October 18 issue of The New Yorker. In it Gopnik argues that Smith’s real question “was not the economist’s question, How do we get richer or poorer?, or even the philospher’s question, How should one live? It was the modern question, Darwin’s question: How do you find and make order in a world without God?”

Gopnik is ostensibly reviewing Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, by Nicholas Phillipson, but he is really using Phillipson’s book as a jumping-off point for his own meditations on economics and community. Readers of The Wealth of Nations tend to ignore Smith’s earlier The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but by doing so, according to Gopnik, we “lobotomize our own understanding of modern life, making economics into a stand-alone, statistical quasi-science rather than, as Smith intended, a branch of the humanities.” In order for humanity to live in community, Smith posits the necessity of “an impartial observer who lives within us, and whom we invent to judge our actions.” Without this imaginative capacity, a market economy can’t exist; unless we can put ourselves in the place of our fellows, we can’t imagine what they might need. “For Smith, the plain-seeing Scot,” writes Gopnik, “the market may not have been the most elegant instance of human sympathy, but it’s the most insistent: everybody has skin in this game. It can proceed peaceably only because of those moral sentiments, those imaginary internal judges.”

Unfortunately, those imaginary internal judges recede into the background when producers band together in order to eliminate competition and control prices; according to Phillipson (via Gopnik), Smith believed that “the market moves toward monopoly; it is the job of the philosopher to define, and of the sovereign state to restore, free play.” The market works toward the benefit of all only when it is broadly just—defined (by me) as being in the long-term interests of both producer and consumer. When the scenario Berry imagines in Jayber Crow comes to pass—when economic and business practices fray the fabric of community rather than protect it—then we live in epically tragic times, like those of Troy. When we find communities in economic disarray, then, according to the father of free-market economics, imaginations incapable of sympathy are at the root of the problem.

Of course, this is a pretty self-serving position, since we at Madroño are about to go head-to-head with such giants as H-E-B, who can charge much less for bison meat than we can. But I honestly believe that the long-term health of H-E-B depends on a diverse economic ecosystem in which the building of community—which requires a mutually sympathetic imagination—will rest on the flexible backs of small, dynamic businesses. Which maybe, with the help of our local community, we will become.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself
Martin: Bill Minutaglio, In Search of the Blues: A Journey to the Soul of Black Texas

Of mothers and mountains

I’ve just introduced myself to the pleasures of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. Called the father of wildlife conservation in the United States, Leopold heard in the revving of the great American economic and technological engines the death knell of what he called “the biotic community,” in which humanity is merely a fellow-passenger, not the driver. A Sand County Almanac was published posthumously in 1949; more than sixty years later, Leopold’s ability to see where those engines would take us seems eerily prophetic.

Aside from what he says, I love his tone—warm and humble, courteous and scholarly. But what he says is compelling and important. In one essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” he recounts an experience he had as a young man working for the Forest Service in Arizona, at a time when land managers “had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf.” One day, from a “high rimrock,” he and his colleagues spotted a pack of wolves, including some pups, and opened fire. Leopold, having shot a female, climbed down and “reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

Over the years, as he watched the destruction of the wolf population and the subsequent explosion of the deer population and disappearance of the mountain flora, Leopold came to understand the wolves’ vital place in the biotic community. He became a passionate, but never strident, defender of predators and other despised or voiceless members of his tribe, like soil, water, flowers, and mountains.

I’m thinking about the mind of the mountains because last week my sister Isa, my brother John, and I walked into what we consider their heart. We climbed up to Buckskin Pass, our mother’s favorite hike, on the first anniversary of her death. We agreed that one of her greatest gifts to us was a deep, abiding love for wild places, especially those in Colorado, a love she shared with everyone she could. I don’t know if she ever read A Sand County Almanac, but I know that she, too, thought about her response to the inner life of mountains and encouraged us to do likewise.

At the end of “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold writes this: “We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.... A measure of this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”

I was particularly taken with his misquotation of Thoreau; in a previous post I wrestled with my own misquotation of the same line. What Thoreau actually wrote was this: “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” But I love Leopold’s rendering, since the substitution of “salvation” for “preservation” gives the minds of wolves and mountains a distinctly theological dimension. (Coincidentally, I’ve also just discovered Thomas Berry, an ecology-minded priest and writer who proclaimed himself a “geologian.”)

How might the wild minds of the mountains save us? I’m not sure there’s a single answer to that question, especially since the mountains are just as capable of destroying as saving. I remember times during our childhood forced marches when we had to sprint down from above tree line to avoid summer storms that seemed to come out of nowhere, bristling lightning. Even as their come-hither beauty draws me to these high places, their monastic austerity keeps me in my place. My brother John, an alpinist by vocation and avocation, has spent more time dangling in very thin air than most normal people, and he confirms the almost erotic call and implacable heart of the mountains—or at least I feel sure he would if I asked him.

How might the wild minds of the mountains save us? Here’s one answer: in The Solace of Fierce Places: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, Belden C. Lane recounts the parable of an Englishman visiting Tibet some years ago:

Only as the grandeur of the land drew him beyond himself did he begin to discover what he sought. Walking one day toward a remote monastery at Rde-Zong, he was distracted from his quest for spiritual attainment by the play of the sun on stones along the path. “I have no choice,” he protested, “but to be alive to this landscape and light.” Because of this delay, he never arrived at the monastery....

Most compelling to his imagination was the fact that the awesome beauty of this fierce land was in no way conditioned by his own frail presence. It was not there for him.... Hence he declared, “The things that ignore us save us in the end. Their presence awakens silence in us; they restore our courage with the purity of their detachment.” Becoming present to a reality entirely separate from his own world of turmoil strangely set him free.

As John, Isa, and I descended from the emphatic heights, talking about a strangely controversial effort to designate 350,000 nearby acres of national park as a wilderness preserve, John stopped, turning around to look at Isa and me with his mouth wide open, pantomiming astonishment. Wondering what could possibly astonish someone as unflappable as John, I looked down the rocky trail.

A young man with no legs was walking toward us. Yep, walking, on his leather-gloved hands, up a trail that sucked the breath out of people with legs. His concentration was so intense that he was unable to acknowledge our presence. I recognized him as the subject of a story I had read online a few months before. Kevin Michael Connolly, born without legs, is, at age twenty-four, a champion skier, globe-trotting photographer, and charming smart-aleck, if his website is any indication. He’s also the author of a memoir entitled Double Take.

I’ve never been quite as awe-struck by another person as I was in that moment. Once again, I felt very small, amazed by the community—this time the human community—of which I am a part. So many things, people, and circumstances by which I might be saved.

The things that ignore us save us in the end. They allow us to step out of the endless hall of mirrors we usually inhabit and to find ourselves in a relationship with something outside our fears, fantasies, and projections. This was one of our mother’s great gifts: she showed us how we could step outside our defended little selves for a while. She taught us where to find courage when we need it: in this place where we knew ourselves to be small and helpless and yet utterly at home, at least for a few ragged breaths.

—Heather

What we’re reading
Heather: Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Martin: Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic

Lessons from Phoebe

It’s impossible to think about Madroño Ranch without thinking about its critters, both wild and domestic: bison, feral hogs, chickens, wild turkeys, aoudad, deer, geese, snakes, raccoons, porcupines, fish, and dogs.

On some days at Madroño, when the wind is exactly right, it’s especially easy to think about dogs, since we can hear the cheerful chorus from Kinky Friedman’s wonderful Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, right next door. We think that Nancy Parker-Simons and Tony Simons, who run the place, may actually be saints, and our kids have always loved visiting them and meeting the dogs they care for so lovingly. But the dog I associate most strongly with Madroño is Phoebe, our elderly black Lab mix.

In some ways Phoebe (pictured above in her younger days) has a better claim to the ranch than any of us, since we suspect she was born near the place. We found her out there twelve years ago, a tiny puppy no more than six weeks old, lying by the side of the road with a broken back leg; we don’t know if someone abandoned her because of the leg, or if she was orphaned first and then injured. Even though we already had all the dog we thought we needed in Daisy, a wonderful golden retriever mix, we brought Phoebe back to Austin with us; she was so small that she spent the trip curled up on a bandana on the back seat. Our vet thought for a time that her broken leg might have to be amputated, but we elected to wait and see, and remarkably it healed almost completely on its own (though now that she’s older it has gotten quite arthritic).

Despite the Dickensian start to her life, Phoebe (or “Little Black Dog,” as we also call her, though she eventually grew to a healthy fifty-five pounds) has proved to be faithful, affectionate, trusting, and resilient in the face of adversity—very like a Dickensian protagonist, come to think of it. When our children were little and we were still doing the family car trip up to Colorado every summer, we used to take her along and smuggle her into whatever motel we happened to be staying in to break up the drive, a bit of skullduggery that always tickled the kids. We also used to stop at a drive-through burger joint and buy her a “plain and dry” hamburger as a special treat, though she was usually too shy to actually eat the thing while we were watching. When we needed to break up the monotony of the long drive, we’d stop at a school playground or public park, and the kids would coax Phoebe up the ladder of the slide; she’d perch at the top, peering down the slide, her brow furrowed, before gallantly sliding down on her bottom. (She even negotiated the twisty slides, though they weren’t her favorites.)

She’s also quite vocal, and her repertoire includes a startling number of grunts, sighs, and groans. When our youngest was taking piano lessons, Phoebe would sit beside her while she practiced and make odd noises—we were never sure if she was complaining or trying to sing along. And when we return home after an absence long or short, we can always get Phoebe to tip her head back and start howling by saying “Hellooooooooo!” in a sort of Julia Child-like voice.

As the kids grew up, we stopped making those long family drives every summer, which I’m sure was a great relief to Phoebe. After Daisy died, we acquired other dogs, all of them mutts (we’re firm believers in hybrid vigor): first Honey, a fluffy light-brown-and-white Bernese mountain dog/chow mix (or so we guessed) who died a couple of years ago, then Chula the Goggle-Eyed Ricochet Hound, whom we imagine to be some sort of hyperkinetic blend of pit bull and whippet. As Phoebe got older, she began to slow down and her eyesight began to fail, and these younger interlopers frequently drove her crazy. Honey used to like to nip at Phoebe’s hindquarters, apparently hoping to goad her into moving faster. Chula is constantly galloping back and forth, sometimes in pursuit of her woobies, sometimes just for the hell of it, often bumping Phoebe on the way by.

Old age is definitely not for the faint of heart. Now that she’s completely blind, her once-brown eyes filmed over with white, Phoebe never seems to know exactly what’s going on, but she bears it all cheerfully, or at least resignedly. She’s memorized the layout of our house, and even though she occasionally bonks snout-first into doors or chairs or table legs, she never seems particularly bothered, even by collisions that make us wince in sympathy. And we warn her loudly every time she approaches steps, whereupon she slows down and feels cautiously ahead with one front paw until she finds the change in floor level.

I know that Phoebe will feature prominently when Heather writes about her adventures tromping around Madroño with dogs, as she promised to do in an earlier post; Phoebe was Heather’s main walking companion for years, since none of the rest of us could keep up with her. The most heartbreaking aspect of Phoebe’s blindness is that we’ve had to start leaving her behind when we go to Madroño, because there are so many things for her to fall off or into out there. When the sad day comes, however, we will scatter her ashes out at the ranch, the place she has always loved best.

As if her bum leg and blindness weren’t curses enough, she’s also been diagnosed with Cushing’s disease, a disorder of the pituitary gland, and thyroid and liver problems. All these conditions mean that she has a lengthy and complicated regimen of medications, so she gets a slice of wienie larded with various pills twice a day. (We also try to slip her a sedative when we sense a storm coming on, since she’s always been panicked by thunder.)

She has borne the indignities and infirmities of old age with unfailing good humor, and remains a fundamentally optimistic soul, always ready to go on walks (greatly curtailed these days, in deference to her general decrepitude); a few months ago, in fact, as I took her on her morning constitutional, one of our neighbors commented on how much Phoebe and I resemble each other, now that we both have a certain amount of frost on the pumpkin, as the saying goes. Her appetite is still robust; she always cleans her bowl at breakfast and dinner, and she loves her twice-daily wienie slices. She puts up with the occasional overflows of affection from various cats, and occasional body slams from the overenthusiastic Chula, without complaining. She still breaks into what we call the Happy Butt Dance whenever we scratch the base of her tail. She is, in short, one of my real role models as I too edge reluctantly but inexorably into senescence.

She’s still a really good dog.

—Martin

What we’re reading
Heather: Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
Martin: Michael Pollan, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

Most memorable meals, take two: a lobster tale

We’re in England and off the grid this week, but we have spared no expense in securing the services of a guest blogger, the lovely and talented Elizabeth Kohout. In this post, the second in what we hope will be an occasional series, Elizabeth relates the chilling tale of her first confrontation with one of New England’s most emblematic (and frightening) foods.

I’ve liked crustaceans (with one notable exception, which I’ll get to later) my entire life.

This initially manifested itself as a deep affection for Sebastian, the crab from the Disney version of The Little Mermaid, possibly because my father does an excellent imitation of him and possibly because he stars in one of the greatest animated sequences of all time. Then, somewhere around third grade, I became the proud owner of a hermit crab, Scout, who liked to clamp herself to my t-shirt while I did homework. This ownership was joyful but brief, as Scout met an ultimately tragic end when a certain mother (who shall remain unnamed) failed to regulate a certain sister (ditto), who thought it would be a great idea to release Scout underneath the stove. We found her shell and her poor, desiccated body (Scout’s, that is, not my sister’s) beneath the stove four or five years later when we moved out of that house.

At this juncture, I began to shift my attention from caring for crustaceans to eating them, a pursuit I have found to be infinitely more rewarding. Our neighbors had an annual mudbug party, in which the entire neighborhood descended on their house to talk, drink coke or beer (depending on one's age), shriek and chase each other around with the live crawfish (not necessarily depending on one's age), supervise the boiling of said crawfish, and eat a possibly unhealthy amount of boiled crawfish. (We also spent a lot of time shooing their enormous dogs away from the food.) Beyond mudbugs, I developed a deep and abiding affection for shrimp (especially from this place), crab cakes, and squid (SQUID!), which I realize is not a crustacean but still falls under the seafood umbrella so I’m including it anyway.

Lobster, however, is a different story. I have a very fraught relationship with lobster. It began when I was quite young and pitched a fit in the grocery store because I wanted to visit the “yobsiss” and my mother wouldn’t comply because she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. Several years of speech therapy later, I was able to say the word “lobster” like a normal person, but no longer had any particular interest in talking about them. Aside from appreciating the lobster cooking scene in Annie Hall, I think it’s safe to say I didn’t really think about lobsters for most of my adolescence. I certainly didn’t encounter many in land-locked Austin, Texas.

But then I went to a fancy liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where, every fall, the dining halls outdo themselves and cook up a really lovely and highly anticipated meal, the Harvest Dinner. We spoiled-rotten students got to dine on seasonal roasted vegetables, local greens, pumpkin and apple pies, and other edible autumnal delights. Oh, and lobster. That’s right, lobster. My freshman year, I queued up with my friends and picked up a ticket to get my lobster. We all went through the buffet line, marveling at the bounty laid out before us; I turned my ticket in to pick up my lobster and my eyes nearly bugged out of my head when one of the dining hall ladies plunked a giant red beast down on my plate. I lugged my laden tray to the table my friends had staked out, and as I sat down I realized that none of them had picked up a lobster. I had absolutely no idea how to eat the strange animal sitting in front of me and was embarrassed to ask, so I decided to play it cool and slowly ate all the food piled around it. Then I got freaked out by its unwavering, empty gaze and put a spinach leaf over its head when I thought no one was looking:

It turns out my friend Lilly was, in fact, not only looking at me but also armed with a camera phone. She burst into hysterical laughter, which then spread around the table, and captured the moment for posterity (see above). Once everyone had stopped laughing with (at?) me, the conversation drifted into lobster-related eating adventures. I tried to look like I, too, had spent my summers in Maine or other parts of the country where eating scary-looking armored animals is totally normal. Finally my friend Noah realized I was way out of my element and patiently coached me through dismantling and devouring the creature. My memory about this part of the meal is mercifully vague: I know that I squirted Noah and at least one other person in the face with lobster juice and that no one told me I was supposed to get melted butter, so once I finally got to the lobster meat, it tasted like mild, meaty salt water—not bad, but not amazing either. I wondered what all the fuss was about.

After dinner, we walked back across campus to our dorm. At some point, I paused for a moment. The sky was velvety and spangled with stars; the air was fresh and cold, and I thought there would probably be frost on the ground when I went to my English class the next morning. Anticipating the crunch of frozen grass underfoot reminded me again of the puzzling meal I’d just eaten. I thought about how odd New England is, how strangers don’t smile if they catch each other’s eye, how trees light up the hillsides with leafy flames, how even the mildest salsa causes people to whimper and fan their mouths, but they think nothing of boiling alive and then eating what essentially amounts to a living dinosaur for dinner. Then I ran to catch up with my friends.

—Elizabeth

What we’re reading
Heather: Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town (again)
Martin: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall