September Autumn
Afternoon temperatures have remained at 98 or 99 degrees for the high, with this being one of the hottest and driest of Septembers. But the spring in the Pond keeps the waters there full, and so The Creek this downhill side of the spring alive.
Tonkawa, Lipan Apaches, Mescalero Apaches, Comanches. And then all those people before them without a title today. This stretch of The Creek undoubtedly was known to many of them. And when I walked slowly from one whitened stone to the next, I kept looking east to my left and into the darkened hillside, thick of brush, tree, boulder, and shadow. I knew that had I lived at just about any time before the past hundred and fifty years or so, I might have thought about my naked vulnerability. Had I been a Lipan Apache, a white farmer of the Texas Republic, a lost Spaniard explorer, or anyone living in the age before recorded history, I certainly would have walked with a heightened imagination for what could happen to my muscle, bone, and gut should a chert-tipped shaft fly unannounced out of those leafy shadows. The truth is that I live in a time when the odds of my dying at the hand of another human being is lower than ever before, with the odds of any one of us being murdered increasing the further back in time we go. Ambush. From their hiding place in those bushes and trees. It's a sweet juxtaposition of thoughts: evening reflections in a quiet Creek, and a dirty arrow splintering into my pelvis, infecting me with pain and germ.
Tonkawa, Lipan Apaches, Mescalero Apaches, Comanches. And then all those people before them without a title today. This stretch of The Creek undoubtedly was known to many of them. And when I walked slowly from one whitened stone to the next, I kept looking east to my left and into the darkened hillside, thick of brush, tree, boulder, and shadow. I knew that had I lived at just about any time before the past hundred and fifty years or so, I might have thought about my naked vulnerability. Had I been a Lipan Apache, a white farmer of the Texas Republic, a lost Spaniard explorer, or anyone living in the age before recorded history, I certainly would have walked with a heightened imagination for what could happen to my muscle, bone, and gut should a chert-tipped shaft fly unannounced out of those leafy shadows. The truth is that I live in a time when the odds of my dying at the hand of another human being is lower than ever before, with the odds of any one of us being murdered increasing the further back in time we go. Ambush. From their hiding place in those bushes and trees. It's a sweet juxtaposition of thoughts: evening reflections in a quiet Creek, and a dirty arrow splintering into my pelvis, infecting me with pain and germ.
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| Barely enough flow. |
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| Probably the Tall Goldenrod (Solidago altissima) |
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| Inland sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) |
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| Cardinal Flower (Lobelia cardinalis) |
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| Sesbania herbacea |
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| Americana Water Willow (Justicia americana) |
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| And here's the 1871 painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti entitled "Water Willow." It's placed here just to show how uninspiring the painting is compared even to the crappy iPhone photo version of the real thing. So it goes. |
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| Poverty Weed, New Deal Weed or Roosevelt Weed (Baccharis neglecta) [Planted in the middle states during the Dust Bowl to help vegetate waste spaces. ] |
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| Mud Cracks (also called desiccation cracks) |
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| Coon tracks. |
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| Can't say anything more about sycamores. |
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| Palafoxia |
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| Wood-shadows to the left. |
