Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

Gyppy and alkaline soil
September 1, 2004

“That’s plumb gyppy country, and dagnab it, the windmills pump gyppy water on the rest of the spread.” “Gyppy’ in “these here parts” means salty and highly alkaline. Gyppy water will send an imbiber running for the bushes or the nearest “Chick Sales” outhouse, as it is a certified cure for constipation. Gyppy soil is light gray to white, and consists of super-fine sediments blown out of a salt lake (playa). It is not the same as gypsum – those alabaster veins running through the red Triassic clays of the “breaks” (the canyons and hills on the east side of the Llano Estacado.) Sweetwater has a big gypsum mine, for example.

If a person drives out to 1788 on the Interstate, and turns south a few miles to the crossing of Monahans Draw, the swale just to the south of the draw is gyppy. As you “tool around” west Texas, you will notice other such sites, and like the area south of Monahans Draw, not always near a visible salt lake. In those cases, it may be that sometime in the geologic past a salt playa did adjoin the gyppy soil, but it has since been buried by “Aeolian deposits” (blow sand, that is.)

A perspicacious observer might notice that the flora is different in gyppy soil. Plants have a “hard time” in alkaline soil – the osmotic differential between soil and plant is reversed – the soil, being saltier, “sucks” water out of plants, simply put. As a result, plants that live in gyppy soils have a different physiology. Halophytic (salt-loving) plants often are succulent – not woody and thorny like cactus and agave, but more turgid and pulpy like moss rose and purslane. Sometimes leaves of halophytic plants exude salts, so a person can see tiny crystals of salt on their leaves (saltbush and saltcedar, for example.) Several of the “endangered” species of plants in west Texas are halophytes. (Gyppy soil makes up less than .1 percent of the land surface of the region, so their proper habitat is rare.)

A number of people have visited such a gyppy soil site because of the story I wrote last winter about the sandhill cranes coming in to a salt lake south of Midland. Nowadays Geocacher Charizard is “tolling” people out near the same location – (she calls it “Middle of Nowhere- Almost”.) Along the road, and in gyppy soil, is a hidden cache you have to use GPS equipment to find.

To get to that area of gyppy soil near a salt lake, go south on Fairgrounds Road, all the way to where it dead ends, then turn left and go a mile or so and turn right on the first paved road. A sign will say the town of Midkiff is down that away “somewheres,” but you are only going a half dozen more miles. On your right will be a large salt playa. That location is one of my favorite places – a great place for sunset-watching. I visit it several times a year to see if specific plants are in bloom.

One such plant is broomrape. Most of the year, it merely looks like a dark stick (3 inches tall and an inch around) poking out of the ground. It is a parasite on a plant I named “bluff daisy” (Haploesthes greggii), although that plant has no petals (ray flowers) like normal daisies. Bluff daisy will sometimes grow in other soils, but it does not seem to live too many years away from the gyppy soils. Broomrape has no leaves and no chlorophyll, but it does have tiny flowers.

Biologist E.O. Wilson wrote “Biophilia,” anthropologist Keith Basso wrote “Wisdom sits in Places,” and folklorist James Griffith wrote “Beliefs in Holy Places.” Among other themes, these three books investigate the relationships people have with their landscape in general, or their relationships with specific locations. Some places have a “power” that keeps pulling people back. This “power” is hard to define, hard to describe, and seems to be the response of the subconscious, the unconscious, or the soul, to that place. I do not know why I like the place of the cranes and broomrape, but I do. When agitated or sad, I go there, and I feel better. I love that place that is “barren, desolate, and the middle of nowhere.” It always helps my outlook on life improve.

Both places mentioned above have plants in common – “gyp nama,” “gyp puccoon,” “wild allysum,” pickleweed, salt cedar, saltbush, annual saltbush, “gyp heliotrope,” inland salt grass – to name a few. Some of the species names above are my own, “made-up” for personal reference. The late Sul Ross professor Dr. Barton Warnock’s three books on Trans-Pecos wildflowers has photographs of each, with his own “made-up” names. It has been 30 years since he published the books, and copies are hard to come by. Dr. Michael Powell, professor emeritus at Sul Ross, has put out a new series of botanical books, but in these the illustrations are line drawings.

Many folks know salt cedar, and some know saltbush, but most of the other species are not part of our “common knowledge.” Very few people live in that habitat – a few folks live in the habitat locally, along “Stink Creek” east of FM1788. “Stink Creek” is the local amateur naturalists’ name for the running waters of Monahans Draw – the tertiary treated sewage of Odessa. Since few people live in gyppy soil, many of the plants do not have “common names.” Common names arise when people see the organisms with regularity. A plant with a common name implies that there is a story to be told about that plant. The story will be about a medicinal or food use, or about some other relationship that people have developed with that plant.

I was recently giving a program to a senior citizens group organized by Casa de Amigos. We were discussing trompillo, popotillo, Maria de Agreda (the blue nun), modern family names that are related to the Jumano Indians (Jaquez and Zubiate), and other stories related to the Llano Estacado. As we were discussing plants, one lady mentioned mariola. I have found mariola in Midland County only once, and to my surprise, I found it in gyppy soil. The plant is more common further south, and grows in rocky soil. I was excited to learn from my guest that the fresh flower heads of mariola (which look like miniature cauliflower) were fun to chew.

Gyppy soil is also the only place I have found one particular species of popotillo – Ephedra trifurca. We have four species of popotillo in the county, and all are used (as another of my guests said) in tea to calm a colicky baby. A Chinese species of ephedra was recently banned from being sold in the “supplement” trade – the herbal medicines in pill form in natural food stores. Our species of popotillo can sometimes be found in grocery stores and botanicas, (as green sticks in small plastic sacks.)

A number of treasures can be found in gyppy soil, and not all are in Charizard’s geocache!