Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

20 years of traveling 7 miles at the edge of town
November 22, 2006

For the last 20 years, on most mornings and evenings, I travel back and forth to the Sibley Nature Center by traveling up Fairgrounds Road from my home on County Road 130, two miles south of Interstate 20, and then turning off on Wadley Avenue. The human ecology of the road is interesting. Several people walk to work along the road. The ones that plod along with their head down are not seen for long. One man strode confidently along and did not miss a day for several years. Aluminum can collectors are a constant. One gentleman with long white hair appeared monthly for over a decade. At Fairgrounds and Cloverdale vendors of farm products and handicrafts often set up their displays.

Little development has occurred along the road, except south of the Interstate where several oilfield related business have flourished in the last ten years. In recent years low-income housing has been built near a “new” city park, and the old cola-distribution center has become a plant nursery. The burrito place near the gin has been a grand success, while several small cafes opened and closed at the junction of Fairgrounds and the Garden City Hiway before the building was finally razed.

Fairgrounds is a main artery into town. Only one location has produced car wrecks. Where Fairgrounds becomes FM 715, on the south side of Interstate 20, at least a dozen accidents have occurred. Folks that exit the Interstate and come from the southeast bounce along Fairgrounds, and thousands of folks use it as part of their “go to school” and “go to work” routine. Sections of the road are always rough, despite almost yearly maintenance. School busses stack up behind big truck rigs headed to resupply stores along Wadley and Scharbauer Drive. Because it is only two lanes along the tank battery, traffic can be stacked up for a half-mile at the railroad crossing. I have had to wait for as many as six light changes when in the tail end of such a traffic jam.

That’s when I get to examine in detail the flora and fauna along the road. Every spring I thrill to the glorious patches of purple Phacelia along the security fence that surrounds Midland’s landmark oil storage tank “herd.” The sight of the tank field upon returning home after a trip is always gives me a warm fuzzy – I love those tanks! In the wetter years the wildflowers can be spectacular – not only the Phacelia, but sometimes great swaths of Indian blanket or honey daisy. Pink evening primrose fills Scharbauer Draw every spring, and the electrical power relay station is full of honey daisy during the same time.

On the ballast of the railroad adventitious “weeds” have appeared after their seeds fell from passing trains. Just south of the railroad is a drainage canal that is filled with black locust trees (and other tree species including Siberian elm). I have stopped and examined the ditch to find crawdads living in the almost constant water (reputedly the water comes from pumps in the basement of downtown buildings.) The trees are often full of the blackbirds, starlings, and pigeons that visit the County Livestock Sale Barn.

The tank farm has been a prairie dog preserve for decades. Every Audubon Society Christmas Bird Count I go to the tank farm to find one of the wintering male burrowing owls. For the last two years a luecanistic (almost albino, but with normally colored eyes and some brownish streaking) male burrowing owl has been present. When out-of-town birders drop by the Sibley Nature Center to find out where to find burrowing owls for their life lists, I always send them to the tank farm, and the prairie dogs provide plenty of entertainment while the birders search for their target bird.

Because it is a prairie dog preserve, hawks are almost always present. During the summer Swainson’s nawks (and sometimes Harris’s hawks) nest in the Siberian elms that naturalized in Midland Draw near the firefighting training tower. During the winter red-tailed and ferruginous hawks take over the prairie-dog hunting job, while harriers course for mice. On the cell phone tower near Washington Elementary a golden eagle roosted every winter night for almost a decade. Prairie dogs are a golden eagle’s favored prey.

Down near County Road 130 I often spot Sandhill Cranes during the winter. One of the farm fields just to the east is always planted with feed grains, so it is often the first stop for the cranes leaving their night-time roost at the salt lake on the road to Midkiff. What a glorious way to begin the drive to work – watching hundreds of cranes in waves of lines slowly descending against the colorful sunrise sky (and winter sunrises are spectacular more often than not.)

When I head home after an evening program at the Sibley Center I sometimes see other mammals – mostly coyotes, but a few foxes, and once, even a bobcat. Several times a flattened rattlesnake carcass has been present, but surprisingly, little other roadkill appears – not even cat and dog carcasses along the stretch of housing near Scharbauer Draw. The prairie dogs at the tank farm almost never become roadkill, but for several years a colony at the electrical power relay station lost a resident almost every month. After a wreck occurred because of a motorist swerving to miss one, the maintenance crew for the relay station eliminated them.

“Ghosts” are along the road, too. For years, where Fairgrounds and Hiway 80 meet, the Midland Fairgrounds brought the best rodeo cowboys to town. Riding stables were once located there, too, and many Midlanders now reaching retirement age learned to ride there. On the other side of the railroad a small patch of “cane” marks the location of a long-gone farmhouse. When I cross Scharbauer Draw during a rainstorm the flooding waters in the ditch bring to mind an old story I was told about a cattle herd bedded down along the draw one night. The water came up so fast most of the cowboys lost their bedding because they had been in town “wetting their gullets” and did not realize what was happening.

I might drive the same road every day, but there is always change and always something new to see.