Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

Notrees to Kermit to Wink to Andrews
June 15, 2005

“We haven’t taken Lila the dog for a drive for a long time,” Deborah told me. “Where can we go?”

We quickly decided on a ramble through the sand dune country just west of the Llano Estacado, out SH 158 to where it joins SH 302 through Notrees to Kermit. After a brief detour to Wink, we drove up SH 115 to Andrews, down US Highway 87 to FM 1788 and back home. As usual, Deborah drove, and I recorded wildflower species we found blooming (including trees, shrubs, and grasses.) We found 112 species on our four-hour drive.

Lila (pronounced Leela) is now big enough to be able to see out the window when she sits up. She is a wonderful dog – she doesn’t bark and she does not fidget when riding in the car. As the first dog ever for me to have as a family pet, I have been blessed. She has learned the necessary simple commands well, too. She definitely considers Deborah her favorite, but she loves to walk with me.

We stopped at the roadcut just west of Notrees to walk. In Notrees a homeowner has a fine drought-hardy landscape, with paths leading among the Bird of Paradise and Torrey Yucca and other species. Lila stayed at our heels as we walked along the roadcut – she probably would have done so even without a leash, for she was scared of the cars zooming past. The gravelly and rocky soil of the Mescalero Escarpment (the western edge of the Llano Estacado) creates a specific ecosystem that separates the sandy soils further west from the top of the Llano to the east. We had already found 65 species of plants in bloom by the time we walked, and we added another 13 in a hundred yards of ambling.

For example, littleleaf sumac is found there. In June, its berries are turning red. Migrating songbirds, such as grosbeaks and tanagers stop to fill up as they move north. The berries are tasty to humans as well. If a person picks 50 berries and drops them in a gallon of boiling water, tasty lemonade results. We also found Dutchman’s breeches with its weird pantaloon-shaped seedpods, and alongside another of my favorite rocky soil plants grew – innocence. Innocence is two inches tall, with narrow leaves, and tiny white star shaped flowers that fade pink in the hot sun.

Those two plants are nostalgia-inducing “benchmarks” I always look for when in that habitat. Looking for certain plants in their proper habitat is like expecting a visit from old friends – it makes me feel happy when I spot them, and I get a little bounce in my step and feel like whistling a happy tune! On the Llano Estacado itself, it can be found what few rocky slopes are present along the draws and in caliche pits. Finding them in caliche pits always begs the question “How in the world did they get there? What bird accidentally carries their seed in their feathers?”

Bill Bentley took a photograph of a microwave radio tower near that same location, and submitted it to the online photo contest cosponsored by the Sibley Nature Center and the Midland Reporter Telegram. Bill’s radio tower does play a role in local ecology – sometimes birds die after hitting such tall towers while migrating at night.

As soon as we arrived at the sanddunes white flowers awed us. Sand carrot, white evening primrose, prickly poppy, white buena mujer, white bull nettle, white fish poison dogbane, big flowered white lazy daisy, and white horsemint poked through the shinnery oak en masse. I had never seen that much sand carrot (its genus name is Hinckleyana) or as much white horsemint. So many of the dune plants are white-flowered, probably because so much light is reflected from the sand. Blue flowers are often found in shade, since that is the most prevalent wavelength of light in shade. We did find the yellow blooming paper flower and red gaillardia, but they were often in the tighter soils between the dunes.

The bull nettle and the fish poison dogbane are much more common further east in Texas. Like the Dutchman breeches found in caliche pits, the question of why they are present boggles the mind. The bull thistle has edible fruit, although its leaves leave angry red welts on a person’s skin. Indians might have brought it long ago. And although small pools of water can be found in the dunes (along with willows and cottonwoods), no fish reside in that water, so why would have anybody introduced it? Did the Indians poison the waterholes with it when pursued by enemies?

We ate lunch at a drive-in burger place. Both of us emotionally connected to the nostalgic “summer afternoon at a small town drive-in” atmosphere. The heat waves made the brilliant red trumpet-vine blooms shimmer. Vacant lots were full of weeds and grasses of an intense dark green color. The only thing missing was the shrill whine of cicadas – we just do not have as many as we used to, before the cicada wasp came to west Texas in 1980. The cicadas themselves came with the Siberian Elm trees in the 1920’s – Siberian Elms were the first species given away in a government sponsored program. The cicada nymphs rode to west Texas in the soil of those long-ago seedlings. In the 1960’s Mississippi Kites (beautiful gray/silver hawks) arrived to eat the cicadas, but they were too shy to do a thorough job.

I could not remember ever having been to Wink. The only part of downtown left has the Roy Orbison museum (which added to the theme of nostalgia for the day,) and right next to it is a fine old brick building all boarded up. We assumed it was an old bank, but we were out of range for our Sprint phones, so we could not access the Internet without racking up roaming charges. The old school buildings had some pretty tile work on the exterior – 80 years ago people built things they hoped would last through generations of use, taking an extra measure of pride in their craftsmanship.

On the way to Andrews, we let Lila run on the sand. She did not like it at first – when she tried to climb up a dune, the sand slid back, so she stood and stared at it for a minute or two. I climbed on, and she followed, and once we were on the packed sand of the crest, her mood brightened – she became her normal inquisitive self. She became very active, constantly moving, and belatedly we realized that the sand might be burning her footpads.

In Andrews we had to stop and check out the old caliche house a block north of Broadway. It has a new green metal roof. I keep promising myself to research the story of the house – who built it from caliche boulders, and when? Now I need to know the story of its restoration, which preserves a little bit of west Texas history. Restoration is a form of nostalgia, too. I’ve got to get back to Andrews!