Essays

Moseying: Outdoor Recreation Activities

Searching for the ghost forest of the breaks
October 30, 2002

The Haley Library is a time machine best entered alone with imagination ports wide open. The most comprehensive local portal to the history, geography, and sociology of the Llano Estacado and its surroundings, its value is vastly unappreciated. I visit the Haley Library several hours each week, notebook and pencil in hand. Without fail, I find wonderful stories that enrich my connection with the Llano Estacado, our home bio-region. One story is all it takes to start a cascade of jitter-bugging mental play.

Have you ever heard of the Dead Mesquite Forest? I had not – but listen to this! At the Haley Library I learned that Charlie Goodnight, Sul Ross, and other early defenders of the settlements were the first Anglos to traverse it. The memoirs of one of the early settlers of the area report that an elderly Tonkawa claimed the ghost forest was there when he was young. For at least eighty years, millions of large dead mesquites filled various wide draws just east of the Llano Estacado from Roscoe north to Spur, then east to Haskell and back down to Anson.

The trees were skeletons, ten to fifteen feet tall, with stubs of branches grotesquely angling up. Fire did not kill the trees, for no charcoal limned the limbs. Drought might have done the job, but it would have to have been far worse than our present nine-year drought – our mesquites have only just begun to suffer. So what killed the mesquites?

I have seen other large mesquites mysteriously die. At the Gone Native Arboretum, the edge of the property has a low swale that stands in water after a violent thunderstorm. In the rainy 1980s ice-cream grasses filled the low area. During the torrential rains of the summer of 1986 the largest trees died. I have seen large groups of other species die simultaneously, too. On the Holistic Resource Management Institute’s ranch south of Ozona, twenty-five-year-old junipers died during the summer of 1997 along a deep level-bottomed draw. Ten inches of rain fell that August, and within two months ten thousand trees were brown. I theorize a fungal or bacterial pathogen is to blame for both.

I love mysteries such as the “Ghost Forest of the Breaks.” The day I discovered the information, I told Deborah about it after work while sitting in the garden, enjoying the cool, fall evening. “This is one of those mythological stories, just aching for a non-rational explanation,” she said. “Ever heard of the Lubbock Lights? Sometimes there is a glow to the east of that town, and I’m not talking about ‘emanations’ from the feed lot. And you know most of the “breaks country” is very thinly populated. Haven’t you ever wondered why?”

“You’re saying some sort of psychic force is at work out there?” Deborah and I both love to read the mythologies of other cultures. I like Native American stories, while she loves Celtic legends, being third-generation Irish-American. The stories of both cultural groups are full of magical twists and turns. Both sets of stories feature pantheons of “gods, totems, and spirits.”

“Well, not ‘psychic’ exactly -- could just be the result of a fly-by by....” Deborah has been after me to take her to the Alien Museum in Roswell. The modern folklore of aliens is a societal mythology which is organically and cooperatively created by countless storytellers around the world. We Americans love our aliens. Hundreds of folks in the United States are able to make a living writing books, television shows, and movies about them.

Then I offered my own story. “Well, the Ghost Forest of the Breaks could be the result of a curse that Ipa uttered after the nine-day battle at Wichita Falls back in 1720. You know, when the Comanches obliterated most of the “Querechos”, who later became the Ipa-nde (Lipan Apaches.) They would have wished horrible things on their conquerors. Maybe he was a powerful shaman that knew a way to kill mesquites.”

“But, why would he want to kill the trees? A fly-by makes infinitely more sense!” Deborah stood up, giggling and shivering. The sun had gone down as we talked. Before she started back to the house, she said, “When we go to Post for Old Mill Trade Days, let’s ask Zoe (Merriman Kirkpatrick) if she knows anything about the Ghost Forest -- hopefully she’ll be at her booth. I’d love to have a piece of that wood.” The Ghost Forest of the Breaks was cut down in the 1880’s and 1890’s for fence posts. Some of them might still be standing, up on a dry, steep rocky or clay hill on some ranch – maybe even Zoe’s. Mesquite wood takes a while to rot.

Holy-moly, Pat McDaniel! You run a dangerous place. It causes brain-fevers in women-folk, and flights of imagination that end up changing the near future for those afflicted. Deborah and I have yet another quixotic quest!