Essays
Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado
The Texon scar
July 21, 2004
A few weeks back I went to the Texon Scar. I was a guest of the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ Environmental Study Group and served as a “botanical reference,” discussing halophytic (salt-loving) plants. The Texon Scar occurred when saltwater produced by oil drilling and production spilled out and ruined eleven square miles of west Texas pastureland. The swath of bare soil is visible from space. From 1923 until the 1960s the saltwater discharge continued. Some of the scar has begun to heal naturally, but still 6 square miles of land are still bare.
If you travel U.S. Highway 67 from Rankin to Big Lake, the scar is visible for several miles either side of the ghost town of Texon. On the north edge of Texon is the site of the very first well of the Big Lake oilfield – the Santa Rita #1. A visit to the Petroleum Museum will satiate one’s curiosity about the details of the discovery and development of the oilfield. A visit to Texon is somewhat eerie – old streets “tunneling” through dense thickets of mesquite, old concrete sidewalks, building foundations, and old metal street signs. Only a few buildings remain – two houses of which one was still inhabited until a few years ago, and one oil company field station.
The University of Texas Lands Office, the United States Natural Resource Conservation Service, and Marathon Oil initiated a project in 1989 to revegetate the Texon Scar. 125,000 feet of underground drainage conduit, sumps, sump pumps, and pipeline were installed, in an attempt to leach the salts from a half square mile of the Scar. The soil is underlaid with caliche, so after rains the soil is saturated, causing the “perched water table” created by the forty years of saltwater runoff to rise to near the soil surface. This maintains salt concentrations in the soil three times as salty as the ocean. Plants do not grow in such conditions.
The revegetation site was selected for easy access (oil field roads) and to inhibit the blinding dust storms that occur when the west Texas wind is howling. Traffic on the highway slows to a crawl during such a storm. In some areas of the Scar, the winds of past years have eroded several feet of topsoil, leaving mesquite roots projecting 2-4 feet above the soil surface. The sumps were designed to drain the upper four to five feet of the perched water table and pump the water to saltwater disposal wells. During the project over millions of gallons of saltwater were removed, but the sumps no longer are working because the disposal wells are now utilized to capacity for normal oilfield operations.
In the area of the sump field a number of halophytic plant species were tested, and since the project effectively ended, other halophytic plants have colonized the area. There are strips of green that were not there before, and the duststorms are not quite as blinding!
The site is an “unusual” tourist attraction – mostly visited by people interested in oil field history and folks that “once-upon-a-time” lived in Texon, or worked in the Big Lake field. Some of the engineers that I accompanied had a sense of place that bordered on the “mythical.” They stopped at the old minor-league baseball diamond (where only the dugouts remain) and other sites, talking about long-ago days in an effort to visualize what life must have been like in those pre-television, pre-airconditioning days.
When not called upon for botanical and ecological interpretation, my focus wandered. I observed insect and bird life, as well as the plant life. We were lucky, for our visit happened during a cool day, a few days after substantial rains fell in the area – in fact, the big playa (Big Lake) south of the town of Big Lake had a square mile of water up to three feet deep that day. (We visited the lake after lunch in town.) I looked for signs of the effects of the rain.
The salt cedar bushes that covered some of the sump area were blooming. When salt cedar has blooms, insects are busy nectaring. Although salt cedar is detested as a water-sucking, soil-contaminating pest, its attraction to insects can be awe-inspiring. I was amazed that despite the surrounding bare-ground wasteland, insects did find the bushes. In casual observation I noted several species of butterflies, even more species of bees, syrphid flies, predatory robber flies, and dragonfly tenerals (“teenagers” not yet ready to breed.) Orb weaver spiders left their webs up during that cloudy day, and one web had two dragonflies, two butterflies, and three grasshoppers, all carefully wrapped and secured to salt cedar branches for future dining. The spider itself had a distended abdomen, so it had been feasting after the rain.
The University of Texas Lands representatives of the project, Doc Weathers and Ken Moore, had planted inland saltgrass in one test plot. Over the years it has increased, and as a natural turf grass less than 3 inches tall at maturity, its presence stimulated us to a discussion of its potential use as a lawn grass. Mr. Moore told us his lawn at Big Lake was saltgrass, and had been saltgrass when he bought the place. What old timer in Big Lake had been as bold and creative as to observe the grass and decide it had potential for a lawn? A unique west Texas horticultural development, that is for sure – and just maybe someday other folks will pursue the idea. The rains had given the saltgrass a bright chartreuse glow.
In one of the salt cedar thickets I spotted two of my favorite birds of west Texas – and two of the most colorful birds of the area, as well. Blue Grosbeaks – all deep blue with rusty red shoulders, and Painted Buntings of red, yellow, blue, and green, added bright spots of color to the thicket. Their syrupy songs could be heard in other thickets. Salt cedars normally are somewhat sterile habitats, so their presence was surprising. Both are grass seed eaters, so they must have been flying to the edge of the Scar for the bulk of their meals. The isolated thickets must be too small and remote to draw many predators. That raised the question in my mind – did those little birds demonstrate reasoning by choosing such nesting sites? Were their songs celebrations of joy over the rain?
In a field where the mesquite roots were exposed, the group fell into a discussion about using the mesquite crowns for interesting coffee table legs and other “decorating” ideas. We yanked on some of the stumps, and despite the fact that the wood was possibly 75 years old, it remained hard and unyielding – which made us wonder if the salt in the water had somehow helped preserve it. Who knows, someday you may be able to buy “Texon driftwood furniture” at upscale “Western stores.” At the end of the day, Gil Van Deventer, the organizer of the field trip, opened up a couple of coolers and gave everybody one homebrew to take home – made with water from a well near Texon. For over twenty years he has been brewing batches of beer with select waters from across the state.
I love it when folks are creative with what is around them and “make lemonade when given lemons!” Salt grass lawns, mesquite root coffee tables, and Texon beer – what fine examples of rasquache!