On a few small acres in the hill country of central Texas, we live by watching, feeling, and waiting. Together, we come to know by loving and love best when we care enough to understand. Our Loves: limestone, leaf-vein, scales, feathers, friends, and all their shifting reflections in the waters of a small Creek.
Along the Creek or up on the Hillside after a small rain, all waters attract us. And along the way, vines and spines and the skeletons of cacti lure us by any means necessary. But the yellow in that Golden-eye is unavoidable this year--along our county lanes, across the limestone hillsides, behind the house. I'm glad I cannot escape it.
Prickly pear skeleton
Above we have proof of the strength of a simple morning glory vine when determined to encircle yucca.
I remember when I first learned about the cochineal insect years ago because it was one of those events that represents a fundamental shift in the way a person's eyes open to the unknown-known. We had seen prickly pear cactus pads since the earliest days of childhood, and though most of them had the obvious fuzzy white fungus-looking stuff growing on them, I had never thought that I was seeing it. I didn't think that that I wasn't seeing it--I just didn't think that I was seeing it. We often cannot see what we've been seeing until we know what it is we are seeing. But I cannot see cactus of Opuntia, the genus of paddle cactus that include our common prickly pears which bloom here at the end of April and beginning of May, without seeing the cochineal. (Similarly, our friend Harlin says that people often can't see the beauty of a thing unless someone tells them that the thing can be considered beautiful. We'll continue this idea soon enough, but first a few more words about small insects and a thorny cactus, neither of which will rank high on lists of anything beautiful.)
Very likely Texas Prickly Pear (Opuntia lindheimeri)
Within the flower of Opuntia, we see the green stigma of the pistil
surrounded by numerous yellow-white anthers of the stamen.
Cochineal farming using tiny baskets called Zapotec nests in which
the female insects live until they come out onto the cactus pads to
mate with males. When they are about three months old, they are gathered
up by hand and smushed to make the valuable dye. 70,000 insects make a pound of dye.
The fruit of these prickly pears tastes like watermelon to me. In Mexico the fruit is called tuna.
Mexico's coat of arms minus any cochineal insect.
On a similar subject, I thought my guts were going to explode either out my mouth or ass last week. That's after I ate part of a beautifully poisonous berry under The Oak. First, here it is.
Solanum triquetrum
One has to know that this plant and its tiny red fruit do look something like the famous chili pequin that is of the genus Capsicum in the Solanaceae family. This is the famous nightshade family of plants, containing many poisonous plants or plant parts. Potatoes, tomatoes, chilis, etc. I wanted so badly for the fruit to be spicy hot. But when I got the thing in my mouth, I knew instantly it wasn't what I wanted it to be. Spitting and mouth-rinsing perhaps helped, but for several hours thereafter, I began to get hints at why it might be called nightshade. The nausea and dizziness passed, and I was able to enjoy an evening of cold beer and grilled food around a fire and with good friends. Fireflies and creek sounds resumed their lovely act. Now, we could go on about some "lesson" in look-alikes or how we so desperately want something to be what we want it to be and how poisonous this behavior turns out sometimes. But we won't go there.
It’s middle April, and according to a quick estimate, the fifteen hundred fortieth Sunday morning since I quit going to church and started spending my holy day of the week outside among the marsh birds, wildflowers, creeks, grasses, and pines. Still, whatever my thoughts now are concerning religion, one thing is for sure: Sunday mornings are sacred. I’ve occasionally tried working or watching television on a Sunday morning, but I cannot. Even agnostics know what sin is.
So I drove down to The Creek for some sunshine, water, and wind. I love wind in the morning. Not a “breeze,” but a wind (breezes are for Romantic poems—real air is a wind). Grass-stem and horse-mane wave to its prompting. The presence of morning wind is one of about ten ways I can know I’m really alive.
But before I even arrived at Church, I passed through scenes from a world that little resembles any sort of Paradise. Three miles from our house, I drove up on a twenty-something year old man hiking into town and not quite walking the white line. A car would approach him, and he'd stumble down the ditch slope like a drunk and then back up to the edge of pavement. I turned around and picked him up. He just needed a ride into town, but along the way was hoping to find sufficient numbers of used cigarettes to resuscitate. Once he was sitting on the seat beside me, I recognized him as the former patient I treated one day. I had just left the emergency room in our ambulance when I saw what appeared to be a manikin lying in the weeds on the shoulder of the highway. We turned the ambulance around and found the poor fellow just coming out of a seizure and still wearing the white wristband he had been issued in the emergency earlier in the morning.
After I dropped him off at the nearest convenience store, I drove past the laundry with the fat man sitting outside on a little plastic chair.
And past the metal barn where the double-amputee sits every day with his parked wheel chair in the open doorway.
And closer to The Creek, past the site where another of my patients met his end because his car collided with a power pole at a bend in the road. An officer's green spray paint remains on the pavement, marking the position of a vehicle.
And past the broken carcass of a white-tailed deer with two hopping buzzards at its side.
And past the little home of another patient who had overdosed one morning. As we were wheeling her across the yard on a stretcher, she screaming and we struggling to keep the cot upright in a cluttered yard, I noticed the woman's young daughter standing silent and lost on her own front porch.
This is what you pass by on the way to The Creek. It's not a paradise on a different road, though. The same road leads us to the carcass and to the creek.
Down at The Creek, between Pond and Pool by shallow waters, we watched these tiny bugs on the surface. Scores of them circled around and around like so many disoriented Sufi dancers. It would be easy ignore or mistake them for small flies from the vantage point of five feet above.
The family Veliidae includes riffle bugs and small water striders. What we are looking at above appears to be a riffle bug. And as always, if anybody sees a need to change the identification of this insect, please let us know.
"Rhagovelia obesa is commonly found in groups varying from 5 to 100. Both nymphs and adults have been observed to swarm in this way usually close to the banks of streams. When disturbed, such swarms tend to disperse, but reassociate later. Such swarming behavior is more pronounced in the nymphal stages.
"Rhagovelia swims by means of a tuft of hairs spread fanwise under the water surface (Coker et al. 1936). Bueno (1907) states that they swim underwater readily especially at night. Bacon (1956) noted that individuals swimming underwater were near death. "According to Bacon (1956) Rhagovelia feeds on small insects and crustaceans trapped at the surface of the water, and on larger insects under laboratory conditions. We have found no record in the literature of the feeding habits of Rhagovelia under field conditions."
Ribbon snakes like this one enjoy a semi-aquatic life, feeding mainly on the cricket frog population of The Creek's banks. Last week, Rita caught sight of this small snake consuming one of the frogs. Unhinged jaws become a necessity when it wants to swallow an animal that's bigger than the snake's head.
This white-flowering plant (Hedge Parsley--Torilis arvensis?) that grows now beside the transplanted roses appears to belong to the Apiaceae family, the one that includes other of our favorite species such anise, caraway, carrot (domestic and wild), celery, chervil, coriander/cilantro, cumin, dill, fennel, hemlock, lovage, Queen Anne's Lace, and parsley. Pretty soon, this plant's white flowers will give way to fruiting structures that resemble Velcro seeds attaching at any opportunity to socks and dogs' ears.
Seed pods quickly replacing white yucca flowers
The first of yellow prickly pear cacti flowers. Near the top of Whitman's Rough.
These are the beautifully eroded limestone boulders at the top of the hill.
Carbon dioxide in the air turns into carbonic acid after it dissolves in rain water. And because limestone is basic, the acid in the water can create such other-worldly shapes as these. When the rain water settles onto one spot of boulder and is allowed to chew away at stone, it can form flat pools like the one above. For limestone like this to be dissolved, the following sequence of reactions takes place:
H2O + CO2 → H2CO3
CaCO3 → Ca2+ + CO32–
CO32– + H2CO3 → 2 HCO3–
CaCO3 + H2CO3 → Ca2+ + 2 HCO3–
Mustang Grapes (Vitis mustangensis) just beginning to fill out. These vines are sprawling out on top of short walnut trees out in The Stone Field near The Creek.
Turkey vulture riding thermal lifts above the sandstone bluff.
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