A Haiku for March

Banksia, blooming;
Warblers courting in its leaves;
Yet I am so tired.

Attention, Please

We were supposed to go birding this morning, but we can't find the binoculars.

I've been looking for them off and on for a few months now. We've looked in all the backpacks, the car, the cedar chests, the sideboard, the toy box, all the closets, the larger desk drawers, both wardrobes, and the sewing box. The only reason we haven't looked in every cupboard and cabinet in the house is that I took everything out of all the ones in the kitchen during Kitchen Sanitation Month, and the binoculars have been missing since before then. I think we've both been assuming up to now that, when I looked for them, I was suffering that peculiar form of blindness that prevents one from seeing what one is looking for even when it's right there, and that as soon as my husband went looking for them, he'd find them in a place where I'd looked a dozen times. But no, he's as stumped and frustrated as I am.

I've even asked the fairies to bring them back more than once, since this is obviously one of their practical jokes, but this normally foolproof method has so far been ineffective. At this point, we're resigned. We'll find them, by accident, either in a place it's impossible for them to be, or in a perfectly logical one where we've both looked many times, eventually. And it turns out to be too windy for good birding today, anyhow.

So how, the fellow birdwatchers out there are asking, does one go about losing something as vital to daily life as binoculars?

Well, it's a three stage process. First, you go through a period of Health Crap during which you can't go birding without making yourself ill. (That part where you're walking and leaning backward trying to keep the bird in sight long enough to get its fieldmarks before it flies off? Impossible to do when your gyroscope is out.) Second, you become accustomed to thinking of yourself as an invalid and stop trying. Third, you stop paying attention.

You don't actually need Steps One and Two. Step Three is enough.

Once, in an e-mail exchange with Elaine Marie Alphin, I mentioned casually that Identity was her big theme, and made a comment about the way all the characters in Simon Says are simultaneously three-dimensional characters in their own right, and fragments of the same person - specifically, the same creative artist. She told me I was the first person ever to notice that. I can't believe I was the first, though I probably was the first to ever mention it to her. I can easily believe that most people aren't paying close enough attention to catch everything that's going on in that marvelous, difficult, painfully insightful book.

My premiere playtester's recent reports on Widespot have been full of wonderful little details of gameplay, like this one: I put a doll that looks like a voodoo doll into the house and Candy and Lana talk to each other through it whenever they get into a fight... the loser seeking out the winner with the doll (and only that doll). There's a message there, and it ain't exactly a subtle one. She's always noticing things like that. Other people are talking about their sim weddings, engagements, adulteries, promotions, progress in their businesses, and whatnot, and she's repeating stuff like that which make her characters feel twice as alive as anybody else's.

Everything is better when you pay attention.

We should all do it more.

Happy Christmas, y'all.

The Bird in my Hand

Yesterday Health Crap descended and it would have been a waste of a day except...

...Bruce stood in the hallway penetrating my misery with deep-throated yowls, quite unlike his normal crying, until I got up to see what was the matter and why he didn't just come in and harass me.

And found him with a hummingbird in his mouth.

Yes, you read that right. Bruce, who hasn't a clue how to hunt anything more intelligent than a jingle ball, had caught the fastest bird on two wings. And he had no idea whatsoever what to do with it, so he'd brought it to me, presumably to make me feel better. (He is our resident doctor, after all, though his usual treatments are bedrest,purring, and acupuncture.) So I told him he was a bad cat and carefully took it away from him.

It was a juvenile, judging by the downy bits and the lack of any distinctive throat bar. Except for the rapid pulsing of the powerful little heart, I would have thought it was dead, with its wings held out stiff and fragile as a dragonfly's, it's feet curled up in a bed of downy feathers, and its eyes squeezed shut. I carried it out the back door and set it on the porch rail, where it balanced on its stomach, still frozen. I was afraid it might be too terrified, or have taken too much damage to those stiff little wings, to take off, so I turned away, wondering what I had that might make a nectar container suitable for an incapacitated hummingbird.

And when I turned back again, it was gone as if it had never been.

A real blogger would've taken a picture, but hey, a real blogger would have a digital camera by now.

Even Vegetables are Growing All the Time

Spring is very frustrating to me - perfect weather for so many things, but not for my head. I'm all right if I have a project lined up to work on, as I can write sitting down; but starting a project is right out.

I can, however, open up the hatches and let in anything and everything that happens by to add to the compost bin of my mind and rot down into something that feeds a story later. I can't grow my own peas, but I can shell farmer's market peas on the back steps and watch the birds and cats. I can't go birdwatching, but I can turn on a blue heron cam. I can't learn new things very well (fly front zippers are hard enough when I can tell up from down), but I can pace myself through established things and make tank tops and even conduct small cooking experiments. And I can't solve major mysteries, but I can work out how many queries were sent in the crack between the last back-up and the computer crash. (One. And I even know who it was to!)

Next spring, however, I need to have a project lined up. It's never too early to plan these things.

Out of the House, Out of my Head

I drove out to Cibolo Nature Center this morning to take a class preparatory to monitoring a heron rookery. I was a bit late because it's ages since I've been out there and the directions on the website leave something to be desired (it's Business 87 you want), but this should be something I can do and I'm glad I went.

The trouble with getting on top of the house and yard is that the attempt to do so doesn't get me out of the actual house, to which I've been pretty chained since the renovation started. The Sims game was not guiltless, but it was not the whole problem, either. Mere bodily stagnation, surrounded by the same stimuli all day, made the attention ruts hard to get out of. Ironically, by paying attention to herons, it becomes easier to focus on re-organizing the non-fiction.

Jeans may be a harder proposition. The trouble with sewing is, it's not intrinsically interesting to me. I got into it for the practical reason that stores don't stock clothes that fit me. Ever. I believe the last time my figure was fashionable was about 1489; and I'm not talking weight, but weight distribution. Clothes didn't fit when I was a size 10, either. But I'll get to the point I can do it again, now that the brain muscles are getting back into shape for dealing with things outside my own head.

Anyway, a number of questions were asked today by the crowd of volunteers that could not be answered. The data we assemble will be referenced for decades to come by people trying to answer the questions we asked this morning.

This is why volunteers to monitor heron rookeries, and work in archeological sites and labs, and transcribe historical documents, and take species censuses, and sift road cuts for fossils, and track thousands of datapoints in thousands of fields, are needed. Funds are limited. The world is infinite. We don't know - all kinds of things that we ought to know. That would be cool to know. That are vastly important to know, if the last hominid species on earth is going to survive with any kind of quality of life.

And this sort of activity is exactly what we need when we feel stuck in a rut, unable to go forward. Something to shake us up, enable us to be useful, and connect with reality independent of our own habits, egos, and priorities.

I'm not one of those people who goes around volunteering all the time. I generally have an agenda; and sooner or later I'll have to shut myself up in my head again in order to get the next book written (because there's always a next book to be written, even on days when I'm positive I'll never sell another one - that's got nothing to do with whether I write or not). I'm not even a particularly good volunteer when I do it, certainly not the one who becomes the expert in any one thing. But something always needs to be cleaned, hauled, or held, so I'm not often useless, though it's arguable I get more good out of my volunteerism than anybody else.

But I can live with that.

Idea Garage Sale: An Invasive Species

I was on the balcony writing when I heard that deep-throated ventriloquist "meow" cats use when their mouths are full, and out came Thai with a mouthful of bird.

Thai is a lousy hunter, so it wasn't dead. I know some people say when a cat brings you live prey that they want you to play with it and learn to hunt for yourself, but I assure you, Thai doesn't know how to kill things. So I would have had no choice but to take it from her, even if it had been a house sparrow, which honestly I'd as soon she killed as not. But it wasn't. I think it was a juvenile Carolina Wren, though it had an eye ring instead of an eye streak and the tail was missing. It was so small, and the beak was a wren beak, and the breast feathers were yellow.

Thus began the great pursuit. Of course I didn't succeed in taking it from her. She let it go before I could, and then I was running interference to keep her from catching it again and it was hopping and flying frantically, until it wound up in the bedroom between the wardrobe and the built-in bookshelves. So I shut Thai out on the balcony and tried to drag it out with a towel, but no dice. But the wardrobe is in an alcove created by the bookcases being built around a disused but not filled-in door to the study. So I went around to the study (having to shut Bruce out of that room and the bedroom, which is a more elaborate process than it sounds like), moved the full bookcase, and opened the door.

Now, I had been feeling lousy and moreover this was during the period when the desktop computer wasn't functioning and we were still trying dodge after dodge to bring it back. The wren had all kinds of dusty holes and corners in which to hide, and took advantage of them all, while I couldn't google "animal rescue" or "How do I get a scared wren out of my study?" But, being the old-fashioned kind of person I am, I had the phone book and a landline, and I used them.

Most of the animal rescue places weren't answering their phones for one reason or another, but I finally got one, where a woman told me to darken the room, open a window, and leave it alone for awhile so it could find its way out. I told her I wasn't sure it could fly. It was fluttering around about the height of the baseboards and had no tail. She said in that case when it tried to get out the window I should put it in a box and bring it over.

The study is not that easy a room to darken. I tried to hang a towel over the windows in the balcony doors, but it didn't work well. The wren had settled down behind the filing cabinets, which is near the corner with the open window, so I built a crude pen out of file boxes and stuff that could be set flush to the floor and were taller than the wren's demonstrated flight capacity. Concerned that she was probably overheated and lacking any other bait, I set a shallow dish of water in the middle, shut the connecting door, fetched an indignant Thai off the balcony through the bedroom, shut her and Bruce both outside, and had lunch.

After lunch, I came back up in time to see the wren perch on the water dish, fly from there to the window, and fly away.

So I swept the study (the doorway was filthy) and put everything back where it belonged. Thai snubbed me all day, making a point of being near me so I could see her doing it.

If you don't automatically think "picture book" after all that, you should reconsider whether writing for children is your true calling. The situation is accessible to small children, the action is visual and potentially funny, rife with ways to delineate in art and text the soft-hearted, muddle-headed, messy householder and the desperate but resourceful young wren who doesn't trust her, and it ends with a punch line. Depending on the emphasis chosen, you could imply morals about keeping your workspace tidy, courage and resource in the face of danger, or even training your cat not to hunt. Make the householder a dog to whom the visiting cat has brought a live bird as a present, to make up a quarrel (she says!) and you've got a Beatrix Potterish anthropomorphic social farce.

That's the obvious use. But why stop with the obvious? Especially when the obvious is a format I've never been much into. I never even read them much, advancing to chapter books as soon as feasible, and you may not have noticed this, but my wordcounts tend to run high for a picture book.

Couldn't I also use an anecdote like this as an anchor for an article for a nature magazine? As part of a work of non-fiction on urban wildlife and how to deal responsibly with the intersection of human residence with the animal world? Raccoons and possums in the attic, skunks under the shed, squirrels on the bird feeder, mice in the compost heap - I've got them all. Can I write about them? Could it be a fable? A cartoon short subject script? (Nope, not getting into scripting, either!)

With my productive work days averaging about four hours long lately, I'm not going to divert any energy into developing this idea in any of those formats. I need to focus on Len, and keeping the existing projects in the mail, and keeping the house and yard from smothering in neglect. It's not impossible I will use this someday.

In the meantime, having put it into a blog post, which is using it after a fashion, I can forget about it for awhile.

Natural History Across Time

You can't just research one thing at a time. It's not possible.

I spent yesterday at the Castroville Public Library looking at the local history reference materials in the break room next to the hamster. I started with Medina County History, Vol. I (Vol. II is still in production) and am going through systematically, skimming for certain dates and types of data. In an aside in the article on Freemasonry, Mr. Yancy Russell informed me that the town of Quihi was named after the "white-necked Mexican eagle," by which I presumed he meant the caracara, and wondered who called it a quihi. In the Quihi article by Josie Rothe Finger, she claims that the area supported a large number of distinctive birds. "Popularly known as the Mexican eagle, it was a large brown bird with white feathers on tail and tips of wings." The Indians called it Keechee. The Mexicans spelled this "Quichi." The Germans who founded the town chopped out the c when they came to spell it.

Although I wouldn't have used either description (as far as I'm concerned, the caracara is the bird of prey it's easy to confuse with the black-crowned night heron), when I compare the combined descriptions to the caracara, I find that the field marks are accurate as far as they go. They omit the red face and dark crest, but at any distance, and especially when flying, the white throat, tail, and wingtips ("white at all four corners", per Peterson) are diagnostic. So I have added to my vocabulary of regional bird monikers, and note the reliability of old-timers describing nature without optics or field guides.

Then I ate my lunch outside in the arbor behind the building, and read A Texas Pioneer, by August Santleben. Santleben has only one chapter on the Civil War, but his account of his postwar life hauling freight between Texas and Mexico is intrinsically interesting. Here I read the following description of the fauna of Mesa de Vidaurri in northern Mexico:

Cinnamon and common black bears, tigers, panthers, and Mexican lions were common and dangerous; other animals also were numerous, including the mountain sheep of Mexico that have immense horns that serve to protect them when forced by danger to jump down precipices. On such occasions their bodies and limbs are drawn into a lump and they fall without injury on their enormous curved horns, which throw them a somersault before landing them on their feet.

Oooookay.

Santleben doesn't claim to have witnessed this astonishing feat, and to be fair animals are adapted to their environments in so many surprising ways that this means of descending a hill can be placed in a context so as to look plausible. I can even imagine somebody once seeing a bighorn come a cropper and, by freak accident, somersault on his horns and depart without injury. But I can't help thinking somebody, probably one of the locals, was drawing the longbow for Santleben's benefit.

The cinnamon bear, as you probably know, is a color morph or a subspecies (depending on whether you're a lumper or a splitter) of the American black bear. The word "tiger" used by an English speaker in the Southwestern US or in Mexico usually refers to the jaguar, colloquially called "el tigre." The terms "panther" and "Mexican lion" are used interchangeably in America, along with painter, puma, cougar, catamount, sneak cat, mountain devil (screamer, or demon), king cat, and a few dozen other names, for that wonderfully successful American big cat, felis concolor. The difference in nomenclature may, or may not, indicate recognition of two different subspecies with overlapping territory in the region. Another possibility is that the tendency to call melanistic spotted cats "panthers" dates back to the 19th century, and use of the term indicates a population of black jaguars on the mesa.

This sort of confusion is only to be expected, and gets worse the closer the source is to the Old Country. In Castroville, Texas 1844-1899, Illustrated by 3 Pioneer Families, the Pichots, Pingevotes, & Ihnkens, Yvonne Chandler Ludwig remarks on the odd creatures the earliest Castro Colonists, fresh off the boat from Alsace, claim to have seen in the western Texas prairie: tigers (jaguars), lobsters (crawdads, I expect), "golden-necked starlings" (an interesting puzzle, that - yellow-breasted chat? One of the orioles? A yellow-headed blackbird way further east then he is nowadays?), and cobras (don't look at me; I got nothing). People don't like being around things with no names, and if nobody's around to tell them "oh, that's a thrush" they'll take a salient feature and slap a description or a familiar name on it, creating the American "robin" on the basis of a red breast and confusing future generations of Americans reading British-illustrated editions of The Secret Garden.

This is the kind of thing you have to be aware of when you're a researcher. It's part of the interest. A little distracting, sure. But who knows what dramatic uses I might have for a melanistic jaguar in a story someday? When I might need a character with a vast supply of prank stories he can use to bait tourists? Where I might run across the reference that solves the "golden-necked starling" mystery? A little distraction is good for you.

(She says, having not gotten halfway through transcribing her notes. Back to work.)

Location Scout #2: Medina County

Almost as soon as I get past the shadow of the I-35 heading south and west of downtown I begin to feel the sky opening up into the South Texas plain. It's hard to judge how far west the city extended in the days I'm thinking of. It's tempting to cut off the town at the present interstate highways running down either side of it, 10/35 on the west and 37 on the east. Mauermann's map encourages me to do so, extending only as far as Pecan in the east and with Laredo the last named street to the west; but since historically these areas are the "black" and "Mexican" parts of town, respectively, and since numerous important sites are indicated off the edges of the map, I'm disinclined to take it at face value. The area west of San Fernando, per one source, was called "Laredito" during the relevant period; and west of Laredo Mauermann shows two distinct streets (modern Santa Rosa and San Saba, I think), numerous tracks, clusters of buildings, the "Dutch windmill," and the plain where Gen. Sheridan reviewed troops. My 1852 plat map also lays out much of the area inside modern Loop 410, with small townlots not giving way to larger lots till west of Alazan Creek. My impression is that the town became less townlike and more villagelike out this way, and that I should mentally replace the present lively cultural life represented by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and the giant votive candle with an equally lively suburban life of market gardens, jacales, and a working class that (if we may believe all the accounts of nightly fandangos from this period) also knew how to party hard.

Anyway, I was going somewhere with this, and that's Castroville. The Old Castroville Road loses its identity and merges with U.S. Hwy. 90 at Callaghan Road, within site of Wilford Hall, the tallest portion of Lackland AFB, and it doesn't take long after that to feel that you've "left town." The south side doesn't sprawl nearly as much as the north side (which is a shame, because there's less aquifer to interfere with out there) and though technically you're not out of town till you pass 1604, functionally the border is still 410. This is rolling prairie, not rolling hills, and its beauties require a more trained and subtle eye willing to see a good long way. I like it, myself. The flowers were overwhelmingly yellow and the sky was overwhelmingly blue.

Although technically Castroville was an information stop to get local maps and information to assist me in getting as close as possible to the old Mormon settlement shown on my mid-19th-century county map, I spent a lot more time there than I meant to. Medina County presents a more diffuse historical presence to the visitor than Bandera did - not that local history isn't being done, or that tourist interest is not sought, but that it has no central depository and no single figure that automatically draws the eye. The online presence is negligible, and has no central building. I've received no reply from the first e-mail I sent and the Chamber of Commerce had no contact information to give me. The historical walking tour is on my List of Things to Do, and if I spent too long at Koenig Park blame the barred owls (two of them!) that all by themselves made the day worthwhile. The librarian with the son in Mico and the Chamber of Commerce maps agreed that getting around the west side of Lake Medina was not practical, but were a big help in sorting out what series of county roads to follow.

To approximate the route to the Mormon settlement, take 471 north from Castroville. This is open prairie, with a fringe of hills cutting off the far distance to the west. At Rio Medina, turn west to cross the river on 2676. This bend is shown clearly on the 19th-century map and I presume the river at this point is fordable, but the bridge feels so high above the river and I had already spent so much more time than I intended that I didn't get a good look at. I did not stop in Rio Medina on the way up; and on the way back the "lady who knows," Bonnie Jaks, wasn't at the general store, so I'm still not sure whether Len would meet any real people on her way through here; however, I'll find out.

The Medina River at this point is a boundary line - once across it, you're in the Hill Country. Turn north again at the first right turn you come to. This is CR 271 and will be your lifeline. The road is narrow, with a marge of wildflowers - Indian blanket mostly right now - and then cedar/live oak scrub with some mesquite. The open sky prairie is gone, and I'm afraid I didn't see as much as Len did, because Moby, unlike Len's faithful steed Bean, cannot be trusted not to go off the road while I'm figuring out what the understory plants are. If you want to stop you generally have to block a gate across a private drive or road or crush some wildflowers. The road winds more than it appears to on the map; and Mico is less obvious.

When the dam was constructed in 1912, it drowned not only the Mormon Settlement, but the road to it. As near as I can tell, present-day 151 was the Castroville Road down from Bandera; it vanishes on the north side of the lake now into a maze of private roads. Its nearest heirs on the south side of the lake are the complex, twisty network of 260, 264, and 271. In 1936, a historical marker for the settlement, under the name of "Mountain Valley" (not to be confused with modern Mountain Valley Ranch) was erected on the dam; however, Homeland Security has closed the dam and you can't see even the historical marker anymore. Although the marker claims the settlement was abandoned in 1858, I've seen other information indicating that it had people in it who needed relocating in 1912. The nice Mr. Wilburn I ran across in front of the Mico Volunteer Fire Department gave me the phone number of the man organizing the centenniel, so maybe I'll be able to find out! (Their web page calendar is blank, but their fund raising barbeque is Saturday, May 8th, so if you're in the neighborhood, consider showing up.)

I began to feel discouraged poking around back there. I ate lunch in a turnaround on CR 271 because all the lakefront recreational areas on the south side of the lake are privately owned. I only had $16 on me, and entrance fees based on the assumption that you and a carful of kids are going to hike, boat, fish, swim, picnic, and generally raise cain on the property all afternoon were too rich for my blood. What started out as a massive irrigation project has turned into a recreation lake and a flash point for property rights and public access disputes.

I don't blame the proprietors for my lowered mood. Everyone I spoke to was as friendly and helpful as I could wish. This isn't like the hotels on South Padre Island cutting the locals out of beachfront for the sake of rich tourists; or even the gated community syndrome of rich folks buying up all the pretty and shutting the riffraff out, though such people exist. Locals trying to support a rural lifestyle by making rural pursuits available to citydwellers would be fools to charge less than they can get or make exceptions for researchers who just need a quiet spot to eat trail mix and make notes on floral and faunal assemblages. The only state park on the lake is in Lakehills, on the Bandera County side of the lake, and as state parks go it's nothing to write home about, at least not when the water's down and, as I was, you're too tired to explore properly. (There was supposed to be a $10 use fee even there, but I didn't see anybody to pay, so I didn't.)

The discouragement was the result of a number of factors - frustration at not being able to peel back the present and see the past underneath; the balance-challenged prairie native's unease at having all her lines of sight cut off by graded roads, hills, and second-growth brush; and my natural afternoon crash. But I realized, sitting at a picnic table and wondering if the relief of getting into the water with the frolicking dogs would be worth the effort of finding a place to change into my suit, that my discouragement is a road into Len's head. She wouldn't be crossing this terrain alone (except for Bean) in the first place if she weren't in deepest black teen-age despair. So I thought about that for awhile, and made notes. Mountain Valley to her would feel like the Valley of Doom. And then, on the wind, the letters blowing into her hand, Di's voice in the silent paper; and the echoing directionless shots, and the vultures circling.

So I headed back the way I had come - it would have been shorter to go up to 16, but that wasn't the point of this trip, and I wanted to stop in Rio Medina. Along a stretch of 271, I had noticed different flowers among the Indian blankets, flowers I haven't seen anywhere else so far, of a deep wine color, and when I started coming to them again I stopped to take a closer look. They're poppy mallow, or wine cups. And as I studied them, and tried to decide if the drive I was blocking was ever used, I heard a deep "chup chup chup" across the road. So I crossed. And there they were. The vultures.

Black vultures, which are expanding their range and I suspect will have to be displaced by turkey vultures in the story. I didn't have my camera on me and they flew off, chup chup chup with their ponderous black wings, but first they told me clear as can be: the body's here, among the winecups. And Len, gathering as many of his daughter's scattered letters as she can, comes out of her own blackness to resume the duties of humanity, hard as they are.

I didn't take a picture because I know how it would turn out, the birds all flown, just an open space in the brush with a mesquite tree. It didn't look like this back then, anyway. Livestock has been run up here; people have tried to make their living off this land; it would have been a more open and a more mature vegetation and I'll have to do the best I can with it. Since that moment of certainty I've been awake half the night working out what problems this site solves and which new ones it creates. But I'm not going to argue with vultures.

Half a mile later a roadrunner let me see him scamper along the roadside. I project my feelings onto nature and give meaning to birds. The barred owls in the morning were a promise; the vultures fulfilled it; and the roadrunner confirmed it. Knowing that the birds didn't notice me and couldn't care less if I ever write a story or not doesn't change that. Meaning is a human construct.

News! Footprints on the Ceiling

A picnicking family in Africa discovered fossil hyena footprints on the ceiling of a cave. The article, oddly, does not address the most urgent question: How did a hyena walk on the ceiling?!
Ancient Animal Tracks found near Nahoon's Bat Cave

Also, woolly mammoth blood reconstituted and found to contain genetic anti-freeze.

And some extremely interesting observational work with albatrosses in Hawai'i keeps coming against human desires for the scientists to observe what ought to happen according to whatever agenda the human has. Why is it so hard for laymen to accept that scientists are observing reality to develop and test notions of how it works, not trying to force a moral judgement onto it? The love that daren't squawk its name.

Location Scout #1: Bandera

Mentally stripping away the changes wrought by the passage of time and the activities of humans is something I'm accustomed to doing by now, but there's no denying it's harder to do while driving than at any other time. So I pulled off onto the shoulder a couple of times, to birdwatch and make copious illegible notes (it'll be all right as long as I transcribe them soon enough) on soil characteristics, the succession of wildflowers, the smell of the air, insects and other fauna, and other things that my characters, picking their way down from the hills on horse and possibly camel-back, will have plenty of time to notice. I'll have to take care to remove some features - starlings and dandelions did not overrun the Texas countryside in 1864 - and add in others - the faunal assemblage would have been far more abundant, with butterflies rising at each step, and more diverse, including mustangs, bears, and panthers - but that's easy enough. The climate has also changed, but both 1863/64 and 2009/10 were unusually cold, long winters, and though we haven't had anything like the spring floods that hit the Hill Country and south Texas in late March 1864, I've been through enough floods to extrapolate.

From San Antonio proper to Helotes, the terrain beneath the asphalt and years of brush spread by domestic livestock and fire suppression is all open, rolling hills, at one time covered with rich nutritious mesquite grass and mottes of live oaks. Past Helotes, the Hill Country starts, high sculpted hills with cedar (as we call ash juniper) clinging to thin soil over limestone, cut by frequent creeks. The air, when you get far enough away from the internal combustion engine, has a distinct aroma, partly a generic "country" smell that anyone from Iowa would recognize, but with a spicy undertone that I don't think is the cedar, but might be. The term "spicy" is used by travel writers of the 19th century, too, so whatever generates it, it is native.

A picnic in Bandera's city park on the Medina River rewarded me with several cypresses plenty old enough to have been there when Len would have been. The bridge swallows in Bandera build rough pebbly nests not at all like the firm clay ones under San Antonio bridges, and I didn't see a single heron. Nor did I see any fish in the river, but one of the decaying cypresses had boards nailed on it that could most parsimoniously be explained as a seat for fishermen, and a dead alligator gar was washed up on a sandbank near the bridge, so I expect that was a function of the time of day.

The Frontier Times Museum has the virtues and the defects of the local museum. Founded as it was by J. Marvin Hunter, Bandera County's most dedicated historian and founding editor/publisher of Frontier Times, it is larger and more coherent than a lot of them, with a purpose-built building erected in 1930. History is literally built-in, with the fossil-studded central fireplace sporting a millwheel cemented into its mantelpiece: the very same millwheel that washed out of a mill on the Pedernales, that Mormon leader Lyman Wight saw in a vision and went out to retrieve. Not only that, but an Indian mano or grinding stone is inserted into the axle hole. Everybody in the county who had anything remotely interesting deposited it at the museum when they couldn't keep it anymore, from taxidermied animals to a huge collection of bells, from a comforter spun, dyed (with elderberries; a beautiful blue in a complex check pattern called "Snail Trail and Cat Track"), and woven at home to a shrunken head; from a Civil War era rag doll to a picture of John Wesley Hardin's corpse.

Therein, of course, lies the weakness; despite the general Western theme, a lot of "cabinet of curiosities" stuff (dressed fleas), exotic items, and personal-interest collections with little provenance are included. Not everything is labeled, and some of the labeling is inadequate, with "x number of years ago" and "very old" used instead of dates. The large collection of books is all under glass, which is just as well as most of them are falling apart; but that means if the title isn't clear and there's no label, or you can't tell which book a label refers to, you're out of luck. Still, it was possible to get a fair idea of what sort of books the pioneers of Bandera had available - lots of religious tracts, a tiny Iliad, Burns, McGuffey readers, arithmetic books developed in England and printed in New York, Luther Bibles and King James Bibles, Webster's Dictionary, a French book detailing the names, life stories, and associated flowers of each saint for each day of the year.

I saw first-issue Confederate money (I suspect that second issue money never made it as far as Bandera), shinplasters, and one-cent pieces from the 50s, but no Mexican gold or silver older than 1883. Oh, well, I can find books about that. Amasa Clark's camel-hair pillow is on display; so is the shawl which Annie Schickenden wore when she sang for the King and Queen of Prussia, and brought with her when she came to Texas in 1846. Where else would I see those?

I also brought in my Peterson and compared it to a taxidermy display of the birds of Mason County. (I guess there wasn't a Mason County museum when the person who stuffed these died and his grandchildren had to decide what to do with them; or maybe the taxidermist was a friend of Hunter's. You can't think to ask everything!) Now I know regional names for the lesser goldfinch (Mexican canary or Arkansas goldfinch), Bullock's oriole (Texas oriole), kestrel (blue darter sparrowhawk), and summer tanager (redbird). That Mexican canary answers a long-standing question. Wild-caught "canaries" used to be routinely sold in straw cages San Antonio markets, as pets, and I've always wondered what species this might be. So now I know!

Wonderful opportunities lie in the collection, as the staff will tell you. A diary sits in one case, written by some nameless person in New York in 1835-37. It was bought in an antique store in San Antonio in 1916, where it no doubt landed because it mentions the fall of the Alamo. I asked if it had ever been transcribed, and was told no, but not because they don't want it to be! Transcribing is hard, time-consuming work and volunteers can only do so much. If I ever write a story set in that time period, and no one has gotten to it, I may do it myself; until then, I can't spare the time from the rest of my life. She's hoping to lure a graduate student into the job.

The sole staff member on duty that day, whose name I'm afraid I never asked (she never asked mine either, but I don't think that makes us even because I doubt she's blogging about me), was extremely helpful. She took the rag doll, fragile as it was, out of its case to be photographed, and she knew where "the Slide-off" is - the hill where, do what they would, the shingle-makers who founded the town always lost the top of their load when they took their shingles in to San Antonio to sell. She also gave me directions to the oldest building in town, currently under renovation.

Huffmeyer's Store on Main claims to be the oldest, but it wasn't built until 1874, and a block beyond is 11th street, the actual first street in town. I took a picture of a real estate office which claimed to have been built in 1860 and operated as a home, store, school, and first bank in Bandera (banking was illegal in Texas until Reconstruction; this explains much of our economic history); but the oldest building in town stands at the corner of Cypress and 11th. It's a limestone building with a gallery, once covered with a coat of stucco, and currently in the revealing disarray of restoration. It looks to me as though its two rooms were built at two different times - the limestone blocks are different - and with the stucco mostly worn off and windows glassless you can see, even from the street, how the wooden frames were fitted and the windows arranged to catch the breeze. Across the street is a sharp drop-off into a lot full of trees and cedar waxwings; beyond that lot, I almost immediately came to the tourist cottages on the edge of the park where I picnicked. The builder chose the best spot in town - a view of what would have been the ford of the Medina, but well out of the flood plain. Our Texas summers would have been relieved by the position of the house and gallery relative to the prevailing breeze, while the northers would have been closed out with shutters and the thick stuccoed limestone blocks. Who needs central heat and air?

At the library, a beautiful well-designed building, they told me that the historical marker I'd failed to find as I came into town was Polly's Chapel, and it was well off the main road. I had turned back when I drove for a while on a road that got ever narrower, thinking I'd missed the marker and was heading into somebody's ranch; and they said you did feel that way getting there, and to just keep going. So on the way back I tried again.

If I had known in detail what the route was like, I probably wouldn't have gone; and wouldn't that have been a shame? If you are ever in the Bandera vicinity and want to visit Polly's Chapel, you should turn off at the Historical Marker sign, on Privilege Creek Road. Follow Privilege Creek Road, at 30 MPH or less, through all its many lane-and-a-half windings, being prepared to pull over and creep past any of the people who live back there on their way out. Be polite and wait your turn at the narrow bridge over Privilege Creek - watch for killdeer. Drive right on through the cattle guard at the sign that warns: "Loose livestock" and onto the gravel road. If you don't mind the dust you raise (the slower you go the less dust) this is a beautiful stretch of road, parallelling the creek, which at this point is lined on the opposite bank with steep limestone cliffs. The first fork you come to won't confuse you as it will have a sign saying "Polly's Chapel" pointing straight over the ford.

Yes, you will have to drive through Privilege Creek. Don't do this if the water is at all high! Moby has a low undercarriage, but we got through all right. On the other side you'll soon come to another cattle guard, and right past it there's another sign for the Chapel, pointing you to a two-rut road with a slight grade on one side and cedar and live oak scrub all around. If you meet somebody coming out, one of you will have to back up. That's all there is to it.

But the chapel clearing is beautiful and peaceful (except for the sound of destruction equipment beeping and roaring somewhere - the terrible thing is that the country is so beautiful, everybody wants to live there, but they can't live there without dragging the city after them), and the chapel itself is a tiny gem. Policarpo Rodriguez, one of the most interesting men to ever live in Bandera County, built it himself out of limestone blocks after he got religion of the Protestant kind in 1878. The date on the cornerstone is 1882, too late for me; but that's okay. It's in use today, with electricity, an acoustical tile ceiling, picnic tables, and a garden-shed-sized restroom building out back. Lots of tempting trails lead into the live oak/cedar brush, but I restrained myself and did a single circuit of the clearing. Most of the birds eluded me, as they always do in this sort of terrain; but that's all right. The birds are an excuse to go to places like this. One bird I thought was going to be a mocker showed me a head like a chickadee, then vanished, so that's my big birding mystery for the trip.

I saved one shot in the disposable camera (I'd have a digital one by now if I hadn't driven into that light pole) to take the view from the Slide-Off; but when I got there I didn't think it wise to stop. Another time, perhaps. After all, I might not even use this location.

Next week, if all goes well, I'll scout Medina County.

Idea Garage Sale: The Big Birding Trip

What with one thing and another, my husband and I haven't been birding this year, till this morning, when we carried the binoculars and the bird book across town to Elmendorf Lake, where at this time of year if nothing else we're guaranteed to see the egret rookery island in full swing (snowy egrets, cattle egrets, great egrets, little blue herons, and cormorants. Last year there was also a tricolor heron). We also got first-of-the-year sightings for local regulars like coots and yellow-crowned night herons; were teased by warblers; could not be sure of identifying a flycatcher, and found a tree full of cedar waxwings. All of which makes me want to go research a YA book I never plan to write.

Birders have this concept of the Big Defined Period of Time, during which you travel around relentlessly seeing as many different bird species as possible. A Big Day birder or birding group might start by counting the species at your own feeder at the crack of dawn and end by owling fifty miles away at midnight, with a rigorously scheduled round of Best Birding Spots in between. Big Years are huge time and potential money commitments, with a competitive element between individuals, trips to remote areas like the Aleutians to get birds with restricted habitats, and a certain amount of "twitching" (tracking the Rare Bird Alerts and standing ready to drop everything and race to an opportunity). The concept can also be used for scientific work, as Cornell does. But anybody can declare a Big Time Period for themselves just for fun - a Big Hour during migration, a Big Week for your birthday, a Big Month for family vacation.

It's the sort of thing Nancy Drew would do, breaking a record and solving a mystery at the same time. It also provides a viable framework for a journey-of-self-discovery novel. Maybe the protagonist is a birding enthusiast taking the summer between high school and college to backpack around America on a Big Summer, and also to figure out - something. (If this idea appeals to you, be sure and read Kenn Kaufman's Kingbird Highway, telling how he hitchhiked around America birdwatching in the 70s.) Maybe she's got a dedicated birder or ornithologist parent who has pulled her out of school to accompany her on a Big Year, probably in the wake of some big life transition moment like a divorce or beating cancer or something. I even have the beginnings of an elaborate plan for a Big Spring Break trip involving an RV full of Little Old Ladies, and one 17-year-old who is for some reason stuck riding herd on them all because they need someone able-bodied and she's supposed to be looking after her grandmother. The Little Old Ladies (at least three!) are determined to fulfill their plan of birding the entire Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail during migration. You could do something funny and touching with that.

I suppose it's possible this notion will simmer under the surface for a long time until I finally see what I need to see in order to make it work, but I doubt it. That journey-of-self-discovery thing isn't my style. I intended to make one, in adolescence, but I never did; possibly because all those road trips I made as a child took the edge off the fantasy. Traveling isn't romantic to me. It's exhausting and uncomfortable and there's never enough time to look around you. If you're with someone, your enthusiasms never quite mesh, or you get tired at different times, or one of you gets food poisoning; if you're alone, you're - well, you're alone, aren't you?

I have no character for this. I have no firm idea of what the journey is a metaphor for, or how to make the events of it resolve any personal question the protagonist is likely to have. And when I think about it, I quickly start planning, not the book, but the research trip.

That's what I really want to do - the dream of birding every site along all three Coastal Birding trails, camping along the way, during migration, is mine. And I know I'm not up to it. Birding is a crappy hobby for someone with Meniere's disease - all that moving your eyes rapidly to track the Little Brown Jobs through the trees, all that leaning over backward with binoculars at your eyes to trace the flight of the redtail, or maybe red-shouldered, hawk that just went over, all that tramping through brush and swamp and then not being able to renew your snacks at the convenience store on the highway because anything you bought there would have more sodium than you're supposed to have in a day - I'd give it up if I could but I can't so I won't, and I'll never do a Big Anything because I would get so very sick.

Writing a story about something you can't do is a legitimate artistic choice. I write time travel stories because I can't do that; I write about magic because I don't believe in it. But you have to have something in hand besides wish-fulfillment if you want to write a story anybody else can read. Character + conflict = plot. Nobody wants to read my fictional travelogues, not unless I've got something else going on. So until and unless I find the person who belongs in this story, I'm not investing any labor in it.

Which in a way is too bad, because a Big Week Vacation would be a lot more affordable if I could deduct it as research expenses.

Little Lucky Things

The dig was not an exciting place to be this weekend. I got to stay in the field house, which is a lot more comfortable than it was the last time I stayed there in 2007 or 8; it has beds now, the water was working, and I was able to have potatoes, eggs, and tea for breakfast, with plenty of time left to birdwatch my way down to the metal barn before anybody else showed up. I saw mostly little brown jobs, and a black vulture buzzed me. In a field near the road, a flock of groundhugging birds went after the morning insects; probably just grackles, but spectacular in silhouette with the morning sun turning their wings into silver scythes when they took their low, short flights.

The other volunteer who was supposed to be there had car trouble, so it was just me, Nancy Littlefield, and Mike Collins. During the last month, a field school from New Hampshire had cleared phenomenal amounts of dirt; so much that Mike spent a lot of his time clearing the sandy backfill that was packed over the deep pre-Clovis test hole in order to preserve it, so that the sand would again be below the level of the main surface. I was given a unit up high in one corner, in such a cramped position that Nancy suggested I clear it a quadrant at a time. Nancy had a specific unit she wanted to work on, but had to sort out something on another one first, which took her till past two. We all know how that goes. She expected to be there till dark.

Not much conversation went on, though Mike talked about a "dire wolf" jaw dated to 3000 YBP which, when he looked at it, was too small to be even a coyote; and also about coming upon a ten-year-old piece of his online that he couldn't remember writing. Mike and Nancy discussed an arrangement of large rocks over several units at the same level which Mike thought looked like "a prehistoric drainage ditch," probably natural; and Mike examined the two red soils uncovered at different levels, and decided that probably the upper one was the same as the lower one, used as backfill by a commercial archeologist who worked the site earlier last century. I got the northwest quadrant of my unit almost to the desired level, uncovering lots of broken flakes, limestone chunks, and some fragments of bone and bonelike rock; and got maybe a little less bad at using the laser level and mapping. Though my mapping will never be stellar. I was wiped by three, went back to the house, changed into clean clothes, and was about to hit the road when a couple of small yellow birds began to taunt me. I never did figure them out - almost as small as kinglets, but much too bright. I got home around 7.

So was it worth the long drive up from San Antonio - made longer by spring break traffic and having to come back (after finally getting as far as Guadalupe County after an hour and a half!) for my forgotten sleeping bag? Was it worth depriving my husband of the use of the car, falling behind on housework, and being wiped for two days afterward? After all, nothing particular happened.

Well, is it worth going birdwatching on a day when all you see is birds you've seen before in familiar settings? Is it worth gardening on the days when all you do is pull up the same old weeds and water the same plants? What is one meal of leftovers worth, one good morning/have a good day exchange with your spouse or child or parent, a game of Scrabble when no one bingoes or spells the really good words like quiz and axolotl?

Mundane repetition forms the texture of life. We write the stories about the big stuff that stands out from that background; but if all you know is the big moments, you don't know your subject.

Besides, you have to show up for a lot of little stuff in order to be on hand when the big things happen. Jane Yolen once told me that her husband was what is called a "lucky birder;" which meant that he was out with the binoculars every day, rain or shine, seeing the same birds over and over until the rarity came along.

And of what is this not so?

Make Your Own Metaphor

One thing my head cold accomplished: the local birds have gotten used to the suet cake. I was too sick to venture out in the rain for three days in a row, so the peanutbutter and sunflower didn't get renewed, seeds and insects were at a premium, and the suet they had previously shied off from began to look pretty good. Now the sparrows are mobbing the cage feeder even when there's still peanutbutter left. I'll have to buy more of them at a time.

Too bad it's mostly house sparrows, non-native "trash birds" that don't need any help. I want to feed the warblers, wrens, titmice, housefinches, and woodpeckers. But I understand they're on the decline in their native land of Great Britain, so I can't grudge them too hard. (Someone should fund a catch-and-transport program, returning house sparrows to Britain, where they belong.)

There's bound to be some analogy here for writing, or life, or something, but I have a lot of housework to catch up on so I'll leave you to work it out yourselves.

Make Your Own Metaphor

I just saw a warbler on my suet block!

I've been feeding birds for, oh, I don't remember how long. It took awhile for the birds to start coming to my sunflower feeder - I remember leaving little piles of them all over the yard, converging on the feeder. A few years ago I started putting peanutbutter on pine cones imported from my in-law's yard in Georgia. For the first year the peanutbutter would sit there and get rancid until the squirrels found it. Last year I'd occasionally see a bird peck at it but usually it was squirrels and the possum who lives in the attic - it was right outside the dining room window, so we'd see him come down. I was replacing pine cones every day or two because the squirrels would run off with it. I started using a suet block last year, too, but for the longest time no one would eat it.

This winter I hung the pine cone on the oak sapling next to the fence, across the sideyard from the feeder, and it only takes a few hours for it to be stripped of all peanutbutter. So I hung the suet feeder over there, too, and smeared peanutbutter on it to pass the idea along. I'm mostly feeding house sparrows, rock doves, and white-winged doves, alas, but we also have cardinals, jays, titmice, Carolina wrens, and a couple of nondescript little warblers that I can't ID because they don't hang around when their spring plumage comes in. And just now I looked out and one of the warblers was pecking at the suet block!

If you're a birder, you understand; if you're not, you think this is a stupid thing to blog about. So go on and make your own metaphor about the writing life or something. I'm sure there's one to be made. There always is. But I've got to go mop the floor now and then it's back to mailing.