The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  As I see the lands outside this island of the Prade Ranch change and disappear, I want to dive deeper. Whether it’s cowardly or not, or heroic or not, I don’t know; all I can say for sure is that it’s true: I want more and more to go into the deep harbor of the woods, the constancy of the woods, and of my family’s history: to use these things as a source of strength to take with me, in my own changes, as I move into the future, bending, changing.

  Is this how it is for a species that senses it is going extinct? Is there a feeling of loneliness, or unease, each morning, upon awakening?

  ***

  Crawling through the cedars—intent upon knowing every square foot of this place, the way Grandfather did, and knowing full well it would take me all of my life, as it did him—crawling through the agarita, the mesquite, the mountain juniper, and the oak jungles—I saw firsthand what Grandfather had told me about niches, that everything has its place in the world, that it was all wired, in his words, “tighter than a tick,” that it was all “a goddam glorious functioning miracle, a goddam triumph.”

  The endangered golden-cheeked warblers coming up from Mexico every March, and nesting only in the old-growth cedars, because once cedars get big, their bark begins to peel off in shaggy strips, like long, sweet-smelling feathers. Building their nests in the forks and crotches of these stout old trees. Everyone knows an old cedar forest is thicker and cooler and stiller than any other kind. Birdsong carries clearer in there. It’s a symphony back in there, even in the middle of the day.

  The niches Grandfather spoke of—I saw them. The warblers nesting in tree forks at least three feet above the ground, where their vivid bursts of song can travel best, and where they can be seen by one another, in their golden brilliance, even among all the camouflage.

  And below that three-foot level reside the vireos—the black-capped vireo and the zebra-looking black-and-white warbler. They lay only a few eggs on the precarious lower branches. Deer and other lithe mammals rarely bump into the nests, rarely even see them, but the bruising cloddish ways of livestock—cows staggering through the cedars where they don’t belong in the first place—it should be bison, out on the grasslands, but that is another story—and the bark-stripping all-consuming ways of goats—have conspired to knock vireo eggs from their nests; but a niche is a niche, and still these brave little zebra birds go about their lives with integrity, flying to the very’ tops of trees to sing and mate, but living down at the very lowest level of the old-growth junipers, so that in my crawling travels I would often come face to face with the bright eyes of a mother vireo on her nest, and I would back away, would crawl off in another direction...

  These are rare birds! I didn’t know how rare they were when I was growing up. I didn’t understand that we were an island of wildness, and that the very soul of the earth resided beneath our feet, and among the cedar boughs, and in our lungs. I didn’t understand then that the wilderness clung to us, depended on us.

  I thought I could crawl forever, and never run out of mystery, never leave the marvel. I felt like I was on fire, aflame with hunger, and I had to know it all, learn it all. Father knew all the roads in the county, all the back lanes and farms and ranches, where everybody lived and what they did—but Grandfather, and to a lesser degree, Old Chubb, knew every inch of a much smaller place. They knew the individual trees where the birds nested, year after year. They knew individual stones, individual animals. Although my father loved the land, he loved it in a pastoral way, a gentle way.

  I wanted to love it in the fierce way, like Grandfather and Chubb, who knew everything about a small ten-thousand-acre island, and who were fluent in the language of birds.

  ***

  Some days I feel unassailable. The warblers are endangered, the vireos are declining; the jaguar is gone, and the wolf and the buffalo; Grandfather is gone, as is Old Chubb. Father lives in Fredericksburg, no longer able to bear the bigness of the country alone, and even Omar is gone, up north, way north, like some storm-tossed petrel. Only Mother and I remain. The garden has gone wild. The radio has remained silent since the day Father left. Trumpet vine has swarmed Old Chubb’s stone cabin, so much so that you couldn’t get in through the door, now; hummingbirds swarm it, in the early summer, delighting in the stone house’s nectar. All his old maps are still tacked to the walls inside, though his ever-present glowing light bulb has long since burned out.

  When I say that only Mother and I remain, I do not mean that she remains unchanging, frozen in sweet time in her limestone cave, suspended in her paused youth, her gentle grace. She’s changing... she’s growing, too. She turns with the earth. She is still learning things. Some nights she circles back past our empty house, comes very close. And I still walk in the Nueces some nights, my bare feet feeling for the old wagon grooves, though not as often as I did as a child, when I was trying so desperately, without saying it, to show Omar that she was still here.

  The call of a mourning dove can still surprise her at dawn. The fluttering of a poorwill still makes her turn her head.

  I remember a gentle day in the early spring on the back porch, with everyone else in town. Mother and I were mending clothes. For some reason we had not yet put our feeders out, but the hummingbirds came to visit that day anyway, a flock of them, blue-throated and the exquisitely rare Costa hummingbirds—a long, long way from home. We were mending, among other things, Chubb’s faded red workshirt and Omar’s bright red trousers, and the little hummingbirds swarmed us. The Costas were an easy five hundred miles off course: and how could they have known we would be mending and knitting red that morning?

  The blue-throateds hovered, too, watching us work. The color on their throat was exactly the color of the sky they had flown through to get here. They buzzed all around us, humming, and when I say I feel unassailable it is a feeling like the one I had that day, the notion that the hummingbirds had unseen threads in their long needle-like bills, and were flying around and around us, tying my Mother and I, my family and I, up with invisible silky grace, tighter and tighter, until our history, our past, is protected forever.

  ***

  Chubb, out in the garden, wavy-looking in the summer’s shimmering heat, so that he seemed to be half-man and half-tree, growing up out of the rich hoe-furrowed earth. Grandfather taking him a thermos of ice water: walking out across those furrows until his legs also disappeared in the heat waves, and he too seemed to become half-man and half-tree.

  ***

  To see the songbirds, Grandfather would imitate the daytime sound of a screech owl, their mortal enemy. I would crouch in the cedars with him with my binoculars and watch as he cupped his hands to his mouth and made the ghostly, feathery whirring sound deep in his throat, a sound like that of the bird itself taking flight. Every bird in the woods would begin to scold us, would gather as a force and come flying toward us from all directions, seeking to harass Grandfather, the screech owl. Colored birds swarmed around us like bits of bright cloth thrown to the wind—like glitter, like dreams.

  ***

  Chubb had a 1949 black Cadillac, which we all used to ride to Mexico in, once every several months. (After the car stopped running and our family began to disintegrate, Chubb still held on to the car: kept it propped up on blocks outside his cabin, and washed and waxed it every few weeks, even as birds and dirt daubers built nests in the engine and mice invaded the upholstery—washing it even after he was too old to carry a bucket of water up from the river, keeping the exterior bright and shiny even as the tires rotted off, even after the bobcat had her kittens in the back seat—Chubb washing it, as if believing that by keeping up its outward appearance, the rods and rings and pistons and valves and ten thousand other invisible little parts, little marvels, might someday decide to heal themselves and function once again...)

  But back when it was running, we’d pile in and drop the top—Grandfather in front, and Mother and Father and me, and later Omar, in the back. We’d rumble down the back roads without a map, and sometimes we wouldn’t
even stick to the roads, but would turn down dry washes, empty or barely trickling creek beds, and in this huge glossy black rumbling high-finned goggle-eyed witch of a car, we’d belly-drag and frame-skid our way to Mexico, sometimes just driving across wide open country, a plume of dust behind us for miles.

  When we came to a fence, Father usually knew whose fence it was, and where a gate or gap might be, and even where the key was hidden—“Under the white stone beneath the third fence post on the left,” he’d instruct me, and I’d leap out and go open the gate, and then always close it behind me, after the coal black rocket ship of a car had nosed on through—and in that manner, on our trips to Mexico, we’d come down out of the wild blue mountains and strike out across the desert, stopping for a picnic or to patch a flat tire, and then making our border crossing over the bridge at Del Rio.

  And although my father and mother were not big drinkers, they would always stop at some cantina, farther into Mexico, and would sit with Grandfather and Chubb and sip a margarita or two, prudence, while Grandfather and Chubb tossed the margaritas down, wild, until even I could see that their whole bodies were aflame, lit as bright as candles, and I would play out in front of the cantina, would sit on the wooden porch and read or play with dolls or just look out at the hot buzzing sky, and the shimmering heat of the prairie, surrounded by hummingbirds that whirred all around me, and I’d feel my skin beginning to parch, would think about the cool clear depths of the Nueces, and would go back inside and ask for a glass of water...

  We’d stay that first night with Chubb’s parents and brothers and sisters, a huge extended family of perhaps twenty or more. Chubb would bring them some money each time, and the back of the Cadillac would be loaded with venison, beef, corn, peas, and heads of lettuce—whatever bounty the Prade Ranch county had been supplying us, at that time of year—and there was the smell of flour tortillas frying dry on the woodstove, the sound of chickens, and I’d play with children I saw only a few times each year, and whose language I could barely speak, but whose names I will remember to the grave: Ramon, Estrella, Maria, Cristobal... I was a stranger, an outsider, a mountain girl having come in over their border, having come in from out of the wild, and they accepted me without ever being able to speak my language...

  In the morning we would pile in the Cadillac and turn west, heading through the agricultural villages, and into the true country. Chubb was navigating now, and for all we knew we might not have been a day’s journey from home, but ten thousand days’, or a lifetime. What we were looking for ostensibly was painted buntings, but I knew even then—for I could feel the excitement, the candle-flame of it myself, too—that it was also nothing but a reason to get out and stretch, to migrate to new country—to drink a cold beer in the hot sun, to see new things, to get lost, to shrug off domesticity and the numbness of the predictable, the numbness of knowledge...

  All of the little villages throughout Mexico sold painted buntings back then, incredibly vivid songbirds that Audubon called our most colorful North American bird. The men in Mexico trapped them, keeping the vivid males and releasing the lemon-lime females. They kept the males in little wire cages to take to the cities and sell, not so much for the males’ year-round songs (a pleasant warbling whistle alternating single- and double-phrases with watery trills), but for the sheer turn-your-head color: a bold blue head, a blood red underside, and, like a dinner jacket, an emerald green coat over the back and wings. Not a speck of white or even brown anywhere on the bird: all exploding, brilliant color.

  We’d buy these lonely panting birds in their wire cages for pennies—birds and cages together. We’d stack the cages in the huge trunk of Chubb’s Cadillac and take off for the next village, jouncing down the rutted roads. We’d drive until the trunk was full, and then camp by a little stream or river. We’d let the birds go, one at a time, and then throw the cages in the river, where, I imagine, fish now live in them. Grandfather wanted to band some of the buntings to see if they ever turned up at Prade Ranch, but Chubb said that they were too beautiful to band. I’ll bet that over the years we must have thrown a thousand cages into that river.

  Mother and Father lying in the grass on a blanket, listening to coyotes, and watching two grown men and a child release those brilliant birds. Throwing the tinny cages into the water then, like throwing rice at a wedding.

  ***

  One of the best things my father ever did for this county, other than protecting the Prade Ranch, was to work against the Catfish Man. Grandfather wanted to go down to Bexar County where the Catfish Man lived and “knock some living sense into him”—and if that didn’t work, wanted to “pull his heart out from between his ribs and cat it, right there in front of him”—but Father said that there would be unacceptable complications to either of those two solutions, and that “legal or political recourse might be more effective.” Whenever Father talked that way, Grandfather would just look at him for a moment and then would stare at Mother, quite obviously trying to see what she saw in him, and wondering where he’d raised her wrong, wondering why she hadn’t married someone like himself... Mother would just laugh and Father would smile too, knowing he wasn’t like Grandfather, but that it didn’t matter, that he, Father, was lucky in that he could be any way he wanted to be and Mother would still love him. (His head in her lap, down there in Mexico by the river, lying on the picnic blanket while red-winged blackbirds trilled in the cattails and the world slipped away...)

  Water, of course, is why the birds are here, why everything is here in this magical spot, this seam of natural history where all the borders come together: where the Texas Oak-Juniper Hill County has its final mountainous fling, where the Chihuahuan desert from the West finally ends, where the Gulf Coastal Plain begins, stretching far to the south, to Mexico, and all the way to the ocean—and where the Great Plains, coming down from the north, also finally end. We have eight times the diversity of other places in the West because we are at the edge of all four of those zones. Unlike any other place on earth, perhaps, this is where it all comes together.

  What the Catfish Man was doing was stealing water from our county—from Father’s county. I mean only to speak of my natural history, and of the natural history of Prade Ranch, not the natural history of man in the West. But a little background is necessary. And unlike anyone else in our family (except perhaps now for Omar the lawyer—Omar in Philadelphia), Father was the only one who could live among the natural history of the birds—the pipits and the cranes, the owls and the oaks—and yet also move comfortably among the unnatural ways of man.

  Perhaps, back in the woods, the wild things think, or sense, or believe that there are still a few sanctuaries, a few harbors, where they can stay insulated from the ways of man. And Prade Ranch would have to be one of those places. But in 1958, the dry year, Father noticed that people’s springs were running dry, where they had never before paused in their ability to yield water, and that even the gorgeous green shimmering depths of the Nueces had dropped several inches, leaving crusty brown algal fuzz on the cliff walls. Some of the shoals in the river shone bone white, like the bleached hip of an old skeleton-cow’s pelvis.

  The mystery of life beneath this land (in the manner that I believe my mother is the mystery of life above it), is an underground river, the Edwards Aquifer, two hundred miles long and twenty-five miles wide. It’s not just interstitial water locked in pore spaces, like other aquifers; this aquifer is a river. It flows.

  It passes beneath this land, below our feet, giving rise to the grand carnival of life, to the secrets of things (the great oaks’ roots reach the deepest, striving to be tickled by the river, but even the shallow grasses and flowers are nourished by it). But because it is an underground river, flowing south, it continues to the edge of what is called the Edwards Plateau, to where the plateau ends in a fault line running through the middle of the state—a fault line called the Balcones Escarpment.

  The cities lie along the Escarpment—most notably, Austin and San Antonio
. Millions of people use that water, and they don’t give it back. Even in 1959, we were running out of water up here, because of increased usage in the faraway cities. But because it was all happening underground, no one could understand it, or even believed it. Certainly the politicians didn’t. In 1959, Father was the only one who understood. He made dozens of long trips to San Antonio and Austin to meet with the county commissioners, trying to get them to regulate the water’s usage.

  “You’re taking away our water,” he’d tell them tactfully, but bluntly. “You don’t understand: we’re all hooked together. It’s all related.”

  How they must have hooted at him, at this clodhopper, this county agent who had come from a hundred miles out in the country, out from the desert, to tell them they were taking his water!

  “Your pumpage exceeds recharge,” he’d explain, laying out a map of where he perceived the underground river was, based on natural artesian water wells in his, and surrounding counties—mysterious, perhaps holy places where cold clear water gushed up out of the earth, out of caves, and out of seams between rock formations—indieating that some mysterious force was rushing past, rushing just beneath the surface, and rushing south, downdip.

  I am sure that those commissioners, and those assistants-to-the-commissioners, intent only on getting the most, the absolute most they could get out of the land before checking into the sweet hereafter, called him a hayseed, a bumpkin, a hobbledehoy. I’m sure they accused his Real County neighbors—Krauts and wetbacks, I could hear them saying, ignorant Krauts and wetbacks—of running too many cattle, and drilling too many wells. And there were too many cattle. But there were too many people, too—hundreds of thousands, and then millions—and they were using a million times more water than were the cattle, or the ranchers up in the hills.