Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

Lubbock Lake Landmark
August 11, 2004

“I am past the weepy stage, but I’m still female and a mother – I don’t really want my son to go to Iraq. I know he is one of those people with a sincere and reverent sense of duty to his country. He wants to be a DPS trooper when he gets out of the army.” Dixie Hooper paused. “Right now, I am mad… his troop is going because his lieutenant colonel wants to be colonel and volunteered his command to go, and he notified everybody with a letter saying ‘congratulations, you’ve won an all expenses paid trip to the sunny Middle East!’”

Ms. Hooper, an intern at Ft. McKavett State Historical Park, and a candidate for an upper-level degree in Museum Education from Texas Tech, had been showing Sue Shore, education director of the Lubbock Lake Landmark Preserve, and me her work for her practicum. She was developing a “teaching trunk” for the private Fort Chadbourne Foundation. Garland and Lana Richards, the owners of the land at Fort Chadbourne, had sponsored the work as part of her degree requirements. Fort Chadbourne is of special interest to her, for she was raised at Oak Creek Reservoir, just to the north of the fort. At Fort McKavett she organizes stored artifacts and documents for later interpretation, as well as performs routine maintenance chores.

As we visited before finally headed home after one of Ms. Shore’s teacher training seminars, Mississippi Kites soared and circled over the huge old Siberian Elms in Yellowhouse Draw outside of the classroom at the Lubbock Lake Landmark Preserve. Occasionally one swept past the window, only 20 feet from us, and in their talons we spotted grasshoppers and cicadas. One of the beautiful silver hawks lit upon the cast metal statue of a short-faced bear. Ms. Shore said the hawks at times also perched on the other statues of Ice Age megafauna near the public parking lot of the facility as well.

The Lubbock Lake Landmark Preserve is open from 9-5 Tuesday to Saturday and 1-5 on Sunday, with extended hours in the summer. The Center and Preserve is just north of Texas Tech, on the north side of the loop freeway at Indiana Street. For information on their programs, phone 806-742-1116. Four miles of trails and a great interpretative display of the site’s archaeology are reason enough to visit. One room has changing exhibits, and its present exhibit identifies and illustrates the archaeological sites that can be attributed to pastores (sheepherders from New Mexico, the first settlers of the Panhandle.)

This winter Ms. Shore is promoting a visiting lecturer series, as well as their annual fall family festival on cultural Llano Estacado history and spring family festival on environmental Llano Estacado history. Despite the Llano Estacado chapter of the Audubon Society having a trail and a small interpretative building at Buffalo Lakes Park east of Lubbock, the Landmark does more about introducing kids and adults to the totality of the environment of the Llano Estacado. Ms. Shore also gives a number of teacher training seminars (the reason we were there), and classes for kids.
The Lubbock Lake Landmark is unique in being a public archaeological site. In the summer, people, mostly graduate students, come from all over the world to serve as volunteers for the research. Anybody over 13 can participate, however, providing they can agree to work at least 60 hours. The site’s worldwide reputation rests upon the fact that evidence can be found of 12,000 (continuous) years of human interaction with the landscape at that site. The Museum at Texas Tech administers the site, although the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department funded most of the cost of the building.

Research started at the site in the 1930s. In the 1940s, former Midlander Glen Evans, the assistant to E.H. Sellards, the first major Llano Estacado archaeologist, developed some of the now basic techniques of recording a site. His field notes are the best of the time. Evans, educated as a geologist, also was one of the first to study the Odessa Meteor Crater. Eunice Barkes, Midland’s own archaeologist, also worked at the Lubbock Lake Landmark. Public drop-in visitors can observe the summer-time archaeological excavations, and the crew chiefs are happy to explain the “going-ons.” This year’s excavation is in the wrap-up stage.

The four person full-time and two person part-time staff directs the archaeological research and interacts with the public. 12,000 visitors come through the doors in an average year – and roughly half are school children who mostly come from the smaller towns within 100 miles of Lubbock. Roughly 150 programs are presented each year, including six teacher training seminars, including one that lasts a week in the summer.

The training seminar that I attended was an introduction to an analytical tool to critique various curricula for its “environmental education” value. Too often environmental education focuses only on garbage and recycling. When it extends to the natural world, it often studies biomes far from the location of the student receiving the information – more kids learn about tropical forests and marine mammals than they learn about their own local ecosystems. We also critiqued the tool, identifying its biases. As a storyteller, I had to point out its expectation that the curricula to be analyzed relied on rote presentation techniques and information-regurgitation testing that begins with detail and slowly works toward a “big picture,” but lauded its emphasis on the importance of hands-on investigation.

The conversation during the seminar wandered in many different directions, both during the presentation time, and socially, during meals provided for by the grant money for the seminar. Besides Ms. Hooper and I, public school teachers from Lubbock, Merkel, and Amarillo had signed up. We discussed the collaborative nature of the university’s programs with state and private agencies and the network of grant funding sources that promotes those relationships, for example. Looking out over some of the 300+ acres of the Lubbock Lake Landmark, the subject of the goals and philosophy of environmental restoration surfaced. Recently the facility has been reducing the numbers of mesquite and inventorying the flora as part of a project to build a wildflower observation trail, partially funded by Lubbock’s Junior League.

And, as teachers do when they gather, we discussed learning styles and teaching styles. One of the teachers from Merkel taught art. For fifteen years a safety analysis officer in industrial and nuclear facilities, she talked about how art is an absorptive and slow-paced teaching method for almost any subject that allows a multi-faceted presentation. When she gives a project on a specific subject, she and her students converse about the material so that the finished images reflect the result of that learning or research stage.

Daytrips to interact with other regional members of one’s profession are yet another way to get to know the perspectives of people living in different places within West Texas.