Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

San Angelo State Park in the Summer
July 27, 2005

“The heat is affecting me, sweetie.” Deborah’s face was flushed. “I am loving this walk in riparian habitat, seeing the turtles, seeing the largest rouge plants we’ve ever seen. I love this pecan bosque along the North Concho River. I love “daycamping!” (Deborah and I like to invent words!) “ I think it would be best for us to take a drive in the air-conditioned car, though.” We were in the day use area of the San Angelo State Park along the river – after turning off U.S. Hiway 87 onto FM 2288 and getting our permit at the main entrance of the park, we had returned to the gated road along the south side of the river. A bosque is a tree grove along a river and a term often used in the southwestern U.S.

“I’m getting itchy and uncomfortable, too. My skin is giving off heat – I feel like I am glowing!” I took off my glasses for the “umpty-umpt” time to remove the sweat blobs. Only a handful of other people were in the park that day – a few fishermen sitting motionless, and a retired citizen tending his big Winnebago home on wheels. One young man had been jogging on the dam – the only moving mammalian being. The bison were standing in the shade of the mesquite trees, not even chewing their cud, and half-heartedly flipping their tails at flies. A few prairie dogs stood at the top of their holes, but were not out nibbling on the grass.

Deborah and I gathered up the remains of our picnic while the panting dog slurped up a bowl of water. I added a few notes about our walk on the laptop and shut it down. As we got into the car we grabbed water bottles and then sat gulping it down. Nothing alters the amount of water that is needed to replace water lost in perspiration. Small blood vessels in the skin dilate to radiate heat to the air. This dilation activates sweat glands. Sweating prevents overheating, but if a person loses more than one cup of sweat every hour dehydration occurs. In our arid climate sweat evaporates the minute it reaches the skin. Sweat not only removes water, but salts in the blood as well. Losing sodium and potassium chlorides and lactic acid brings on muscle cramping, headache, and fatigue.

We did not depart immediately. A raincrow (yellow-billed cuckoo) began chuckling from the treetops and a brilliant scarlet tanager perched on a dead pecan branch near the car. As we drank the water, a black swallowtail butterfly fluttered by, and when it lit on the ground, we had to see upon what it was nectaring. We got back out of the car and scared it off of a tubetongue clump. Tubetongue is the larval foodplant for one of little butterfly group known as the “blues.” Tubetongue makes a nice groundcover, and we use it in our “flagstone garden,” the plants poking up between the slabs of stone. It has cute little blue flowers that blossom with every irrigation or rain.

As we began heading back to Midland, we detoured every time something piqued our interest. Summer is a tough time. All spring during our daytrips I have kept a log of the wildflowers blooming. As late as mid-June we could still find 100 species in bloom, but in our two trips in July to the San Angelo area the numbers had dropped to less than 50. (The week before we had gone to the San Angelo Art Museum to see the Retrospective of American Art.) The grasses had turned many shades of tawny pastels – the 3-awn grasses were white, the Johnson grass a burnish gold, while sideoats grama became golden and tobosa grass a pale gray. We had amused ourselves trying to name the shades as we had traveled to San Angelo, and had realized that the exercise had given us a way to avoid perceiving the grasses as a monotone “deadness.” The mesquite and broomweed splotched the landscape with green, while the lote bushes radiated silver-blue. On the hills east of Garden City juniper and live oak created dark green accents. Doveweed and holy sage provided silver highlights.

Three plants demonstrated rapid lush growth, much to our surprise. Two were vines – old man’s beard (which in the fall will be covered with the white seedheads) and false grape that was coronated with pale lime bloom buds. Old man’s beard hangs on to its fluffy seeds well into the winter, and despite several attempts to grow it in our home landscape somehow we have never been blessed with that showy glory. We have plenty of false grape, for it produces dark blue-black berries that birds love and plant for us in willy-nilly fashion. The third plant was gayfeather, sending up its future bloomstalks that will bloom a cheery pink. We have lots of gayfeather in our home landscape, too. Swatches of bright mountain pinks blooming in shallow gravelly soils along the road foreshadowed the future gayfeather blooms.

With the ample rainfall of last fall and winter and early June the pasturelands had become well vegetated for the first time in a number of years. As the landscape dried, however, the lushness had become primed for fire. As we drove we saw four different small plots of land that had been scorched. One 40-acre area near Sterling City was the biggest. Looking at the results of the fire we noticed that prickly pear scorched by fire turned white and crispy. Prickly pear thickets occur wherever west Texas pastureland suffers from overgrazing, and some pastures have remained choked with the cactus for years. We wondered that if despite the danger to fenceposts and structures if controlled and managed fires could help the landowners. It may be that too many seeds remain behind for effective control, so I noted on the laptop to someday examine the published research of the Texas Tech professor that promotes controlled burning.

Summer’s heat and drought brings death, and death brings vultures. In the summer the last bit of green is along the highways, where extra rainwater runoff from the road keeps the soil moist longer. This last bit of green encourages rodents coming to the road to feed, and they often become roadkill, as do their predators. Vultures are ecstatic about the abundance. As we drove, Deborah and I noticed that distance could be measure by vultures. Roughly every four miles we saw another vulture, so we began joking about giving directions to someone – “turn left at the 19th vulture and go two vultures down, and you will find __ .” In the morning mockingbirds provided another measurement of distance – every three-quarters of a mile a male mocker danced on the electric lines. In the late afternoon as we drove home, the shorter increment became measured in western kingbirds.

As we neared the Sterling City Cemetery Deborah saw the figure of a woman between some arbor vitae trees. I had heard her begin to say something before we entered, and after we got to the trees she did tell me about seeing the woman, but then finding that no one was in the cemetery. It may have been an illusion created by heat and its effects on the human physiology, or it might have been a paranormal experience. That was spooky enough, but we found a grave that had been recently opened and the casket removed, which made it spookier! Another mystery arose when we found a simple grave marker that merely read “White Eagle.” We want to know the story of White Eagle! When daytripping, hints to stories unknown always magically appear!