Remember, we thought of wilderness as a cruel taskmaster? This is the age of loss, not the age of defeat.
An old woman tending a creek told me: "A place is a story happening many times." And how well do you know this story? Can you tell the age of its turtles, can you count drops in its underground rivers, can you name its birds, its grasses, its poisons?
The only thing I really know is what I can put into words.
The story of this place is written in its stones and trees, in the shapes of its hills, in the sediment of the bottom of its lakes.
Close your eyes. We are in the city, but for a moment, it is gone - we think and sing country. The highway is a river, the faraway rumbling of engines is powerless to reach us here, turning into the sound of water.
Here and now, but also eons ago, surrounded by the great inland sea that stretched all the way from Louisiana to the Arctic, the water spirits laughing at the notion of borders, state lines, and dams.
The great inland sea - gone, but giving its blood - more precious than the black gold it left us too - fresh water, trapped deep underground. A jealously guarded secret hidden beneath the feet of thirsty travelers and sodbusters.
Here and now, but also 10,000 years ago when a large family camped in the safety of a ledge by night, and made pelt scrapers and axes out of sharp nodules of chert, grey and shiny as if always wet, in the soft, crumbling limestone of these hills.
Here and then, with men and women whose footprint on this soil was light and gentle - for they treaded upon what was sacred to them, until the sculls of their horses and buffalo piled high on the Great Plains.
Here and now, but also on the border with Oklahoma, in the late home of Quanah Parker, its star-spangled roof and balustrade caved in and rotting, encircled by fences and posted signs, as if they could keep the spirits away. The world tried to catch the last chief of Kwahadi Comanches but it could not.
Here and now, but also hundreds of miles away to the east, where in 1925, Trinity river ran red with blood and offal from the slaughterhouses - a mythical river of death. A River of life for another city, just like ours, Houston
Here and now, and hundreds of miles to the west, in Fort Stockton, where rice grows on the edge of the desert, while the springs run dry for over a century.
Here and now, but also in the autumn of 1932, when you could tell where the dust came from by its color - yellow from within Texas, red dust from Oklahoma and black dust from Kansas, covering everything, seeping inside through the invisible cracks, powdering your sheets, your skin, and hair, so you grew decades old overnight.
Here and now, but also with your feet firmly planted on the rich soil along the Colorado river, it’s orchards and stories gone forever under the waters of Lake Travis on September 1940. Here in the land where once, all lakes were rivers: wild, beautiful, and often deadly. Now, when the tamed waters of Colorado just barely make it to Matagorda bay wetlands and its cranes, herons, and egrets, its pelicans, plovers and spoonbills.
Here and now, but also on a porch of a little house on what was left of the prairie, escaping the heat of many a summer it never rained.
Now or never because 7 women in the 1970s thought that this story needed to be told many, many times again, so that new historians and cartographers would be minted on the trails of Austin’s first wilderness preserve.
Here and now, where riverbeds are drying and the swimming pools glimmer, where the lawns remain green while sheep strip the land dry of the last stalks holding moisture.
Here and now, where every drop of water has been counted and is under control, so we don’t have to think about it once it flows from the tap. To a future we cannot control.
Here and now, but also alone and bewildered, surrounded by raging water on the other side of the world - for when El Niña brings the drought to the Southwest, violent showers and floods drench Australia and Indonesia.
Here and now, but also thousands of miles away, in the land ravaged by an unjust war, Ukraine, walking over the dusty blue shells exposed by the receding waters of Danube delta lakes - Yalpug, Kagul, Kugurluy and Kitay. I have seen them filled to the brink, taming with fish and birds, and through me, you are seeing them too.
Everything is illuminated and interconnected when you have a moment to close your eyes, feel the sun, the wind, and the moisture on your skin, and wonder what journeys they took to get here.
And yet, this is the age of loss, not the age of defeat. The age for all things to settle and combine into understanding. So give your soul to the smallest bird of this forest. And even when you walk out of the brush onto asphalt, only a part of you will be gone. You will remain - in the grasses, you touched and their names. In the bark of live oaks and mountain laurels that have seen the longest drought of the century come and go like an old friend, who stayed for way too long, but will be back again, no matter what. You will remain in the flow of the creek, in the delicate leaves of maidenhair ferns that live and die by it, in the roots stretching through the stony caliche which dreams of being an ancient ocean.
And when you are home, in the evening, do not put a lock on your garden gates. Darkness opens it up every night, not as a thief, but as a rightful owner, returning after years of wandering on the seas.
