At 7:59 this morning north winds heaved into here suddenly with another arctic blast, displacing the muggy pre-front oppression. The wind channeled down the small Canyon as it bends in front of us, laying near-flat last year’s dried grasses and small willows and poverty weed along The Creek. These plants tended horizontal southward to my right, yet plants up here on the wooden deck of the house barely showed leaf movement, such is the route of northerly winds.
At 8:09 we saw two ospreys working the winds between us and the opposite bluffs. They’d hang in the gray air like toy kites, head into the gusts, body sloped downward, but remaining nearly still in the air. Then they’d retract their disproportionately long wings, bending them in toward their bodies, and fall sloping downward, only then to extend the wings and let the wind pull them quickly backwards and downstream. They’d rise again, circle over the house, and pull out of view behind us. Hopefully this year they’ll stay the season. In 2013 I saw one osprey on October 4. In 2012, twice: October 6 and 12. Before that, we had at least one regularly for longer periods. Of course, I hope these two find a reason to stay.
The “Norther” and the two ospreys suggest movement of the Great Seasonal Swap in which That leaves us and This joins us. One plant blooms while another beside it withers. One bird migrates north while another migrates south. Vulture eggs are laid up on the stoney ledges across The Creek, skin colors deepen under wet scales, cold-blooded stirrings awaken coiled bodies, purple buds expand and crack, familiar constellations appear now earlier or later, tree shadows find new angles of repose, last year’s live oak leaves fall and are replaced on the Great Tree in the yard, oxygen levels in the water slowly decrease, spider webs hang heavier around the porch light. Yesterday was shirtless and dusty sweat; this morning we were back in woolen sweaters while near-freezing rain continues to fall.
All things change, and even the nature of their change changes. Last year this time we were seeing white larkspur on the east end to the orchard, but I haven’t seen any this year. This winter has dropped us more freezing hours than previous years have. Even the dayflowers, Linheimer Texana, and the mountain laurel were blooming last year long before this year. Last week, about the only blooming plants up the hillside were the verbena, yellow wood sorrel, and hen bit.
(We’ve said it on this blog before, but our friends tend to minimize the extent to which the days of our seasons are different from one another, resulting in the common expression that Central Texas either doesn’t have seasons or to the superficial observations such as, “nothing is blooming now” when what is meant is that the Texas bluebonnets are not in full swing. Old news there.)
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Last week I fertilized and pruned the peach trees which are just starting to show pink blossoms. Yesterday I fertilized the Hundred-Foot row of blackberries as they are setting out new green leaves. And also yesterday I planted another peach tree and another fig tree just at the bottom of the hillside between the house and the chickens. The plan is to try to grow fruit in a different soil, given that the loose sand of the orchard hasn’t proven to be very effective in the way of producing fruit or vegetables. This new soil completely surprised me, however. I knew that it was generally blacker and much more full with organic matter that falls and washes down the hillside. It lacks the really loose and fine sand of the ground between the house and the Stone Field. That’s mostly soil that was washed into the area by floods, and it contains little if any organic material. But as I was digging the second of four holes yesterday, I quickly came upon a light-colored clay, unlike any soil I’ve yet seen on this property. Take a hand full and squeeze it. It holds together with the moist imprint of your clinched fingers. No other soil on the place could even come close to doing that. It’s slightly higher than the sandy soil, so the obvious implication is that flood waters rarely have reached that high, and when they did (every five hundred or so years), the current was too slow to have carried sediment. So we’ll see what it does for these new trees.
Also during the last couple weeks I made encouraging progress on the greenhouse: completing the two raised beds; installing an exhaust fan (on a separate thermostat); tightening and securing the plastic to the side rails via “wiggle wire”; and planting spinach, beets, onion sets, broccoli, and mustard greens. Because this is an experiment, I will be mixing in not only different varieties but also planting a mix of warm and cool crops to see what happens in this new indoor environment. The sandy soil has been amended with dirt from the base of the hill (black stuff composed almost entirely of aged oak leaves) and two pickup truck loads of bought compost. Inside the human-house, a flat of pimento peppers and ancho chills are still sporting their first leaves, and another flat of tomatoes are upwards to five inches tall under the grow lights. One afternoon last week when the outside temperature was about eighty degrees, the inside temperature of the greenhouse was one hundred. We are already working on constructing a “water wall” as an evaporative cooler. If we can’t keep the temperatures down to a manageable degree this spring and summer, then that will be part of the experiment as well.
(For more progress on the Greenhouse, please return to the "End of January" entry.)
Temperatures. We've pointed it out before, but here's a chart that tends toward a visual explanation of what we experience when Austin shows 36 degrees, Marble Falls 33 degrees, the top of the Hill 30 degrees, and down here at The Creek 28 degrees.
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The Creek remains fish-free except for a few minnows in the shallower sections. Nothing at all was seen in the Pool. I cannot imagine what is going on. The water is somewhat turbid in an algae-green sort of way, but because we haven’t had recent rains, I’m skeptical about natural causes. My plan is to hike up The Creek for several miles, trespassing as I go, to see if I can find any activity to explain the situation. If you know neighbors upstream of me or if you are friends with the Law, please remain quiet just for a few more days. Thanks.
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The 1950 Fields Medal in Mathematics, Atle Selberg, wrote that “it’s very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right.” The statement suggests a useful way of explaining the bulk of intellectual and religious history—which, of course, spearheads the rest of history: its wars, persecutions, politics, education, and family life. Ideas, especially when they are few in a man’s brain, become sacred things. Their supposed antecedents may or may not have their place in a real universe, but their idea will fix solidly to the walls of a mind with such foolish adhesion that the rest of the mind sometimes can show little other activity than the wasted effort to justify that fixed idea. Science is the human effort to avoid the fixed idea. It’s the effort to expunge any notion that we must collect any sort of data to justify the ideas we had before we entered the laboratory or the field. Science is unlike other kinds of thinking primarily in that it moves in an opposite direction. Where science will attempt to begin with the world as it’s given to us and then move towards the theoretically “fixed idea” that best describes the world, all other thinking generally begins with the fixed idea and recklessly sets out to defend it by citing as evidence any shifting shadow on the cave wall.
Down here along The Creek we are less concerned with the history of fundamentalist thinking as it’s made manifest in our politics of discrimination or our wars of unbridled nationalism. But it’s hard not to hear the prejudices of our friends up the hill, down the road, and in the town. Our townsfolk are good, common people with common prejudices, unimpassioned enough to be dangerous.
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