“After the grasshoppers came in 1872, Calvin moved to Missouri.”

I read that all-American sentence early on Independence Day, going through a file of family history material my dad had collected, which I recently discovered while working to clear out my mom’s storage locker. Most of the papers were things Dad had gotten from his mom, and most of those related to her brother’s application for admission to the Sons of the American Revolution. So I ended up starting off the 250th anniversary of the USA unexpectedly reading about a 5x-great grandfather I had never heard of named James McCann, who fought as a 16-year-old private and fifer in the rebellion against the British, seeing action in the Battles of Brooklyn & Brandywine before getting discharged at Valley Forge. But I found myself more curious about the grasshoppers of 1872 that stymied the brother of an ancestor on a different branch.

Turns out the 1872 swarm was just a localized warm-up for what would come in 1874, when hordes of locusts swarmed over the Great Plains, blocking out the sun for hours as they flew through, covering the fields in a thick carpet of life when they alighted, and eating everything in sight—not just the crops, but also the wool of the sheep, harnesses on the horses, and paint on the wagons. I don’t know what happened to Calvin, but by the turn of the century in which he was born—basically a single generation of settlement—the native Rocky Mountain locusts that had sent him packing were extinct.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of family history as a species of natural history, exploring the diverse narratives of migration, colonization and settlement that are such an integral but under-considered part of our literary heritage and identities. Those stories often contain rich descriptions of the landscapes and other life people found as they traveled and resettled, and reveal much about our relationship with the natural world, and our own unsettled nature as nomads in our bones. Looking at the past is also an important element of divining emergent futures.

When I visited Central Iowa over Memorial Day weekend to take care of some present-tense family business, I tried to paddle into the past and the future at the same time, on one of the first of the urban wilderness excursions I am doing for the new book, which aims to mix some fresh field research in with library research and personal history. On an earlier trip in March, scouting industrial Houston, I got the idea that the easiest way to invert our normal way of experiencing the most intense parts of our urbanized landscape would be by water. Which got me thinking I had finally found a use for a packraft that would justify me buying one.

I first learned about packrafts using them in their native habitat: the backcountry of the Northwest. Visiting Denali with my son to celebrate his high school graduation, we worked our way up the Maclaren River on foot with a guide, until we got to the glacier at the base of the mountain, where we inflated the boats we had carried in our packs and paddled back to the lodge. A packraft is a highly portable kayak-style watercraft that packs down smaller than a sleeping roll, weighs less than five pounds, and is easily inflated without a pump. It’s designed for fast water, but does fine on slow. The model I got, the Alpacka Caribou, is designed to let you strap your bike across the bow. It’s a cool tool for changing the way you move through the world, and one with deep roots dating back at least as far as the Halkett boat—an 1840s inflatable made of rubber-impregnated cloth that, when deflated, was designed to be worn as a cloak.

The river I aimed to paddle was not pristine Arctic waters, but one of the nastiest on the continent, and the waterway I grew up next to: the Raccoon River above its urban confluence with the Des Moines, at a point after it has passed more than 750 family farms that fill the watershed with lethal agrichemicals and the filth from hog confinement facilities. The Raccoon is the river that supplies Des Moines’ drinking water, in a state that relies on voluntary action by farmers to prevent pollution. To try to clean it, the Des Moines Water Works built one of the world’s largest nitrate removal facilities at the ratepayers’ expense in 1991, and then doubled its size in 2017. The editors of one of the small town papers upriver won a Pulitzer that year for their investigative editorials on the contamination of the Raccoon and the rest of Iowa’s water table by unregulated row crop production. A decade later, the safety of the water remains uncertain.

As I got ready to get in that water, what had sounded like a cool idea on paper when crafting a book proposal started to feel a little more treacherous. Especially when I realized that the self-bailing design of the boat—with two rows of silver dollar-sized holes on the bottom to keep you buoyant in whitewater—meant the water would soak your butt, as I learned testing it out on the urban Colorado in our current backyard. I called Alpacka, wondering if I might need a different solution, and they gave me the pro tip used by the Minnesota hunters: cover up the self-bailing holes with heavy-duty tape. When I got to my suburban hotel in West Des Moines, and saw there was an REI around the corner, I stopped in to ask if any of the staff had experience paddling the Raccoon, and it was evident they all had better, safer ideas.

The hotel had a coffee table book about crop circles prominently displayed in the lobby lounge, which seemed like a good omen to navigate secret pathways through the Corn Belt.

For my put-in, I found a spot by an oxbow lake at the western edge of town that was an industrial site when I was a kid but later acquired as municipal parkland that I explored extensively while living there for a couple of years in my early 30s when it was still raw. The trail around the lake intersected with the river at one spot not too far in. The water looked clean enough to the naked eye, so I inflated my raft while a few joggers and dog walkers passed by, and joined the current.

It was mid-May, late spring, and the river was full. Not dangerously so, but fast enough that if I stopped paddling for even a second (like to take a picture or jot some notes), the current would start the boat spinning in unexpected directions. Only after I got a half-mile in did I start to notice the chunks of brown foam floating on the surface. But there were fish, too, jumping here and there, and herons, egrets, raptors, kingfishers, and huge quantities of geese and tucks with their adorable younglings. I knew exactly where I was, almost block for block, and how intense were some of the nearby land uses as I paddled, but the only real signs of urbanity for the first couple of hours were the low-flying jets on final approach to the municipal airport. The urban stretch of the river, counterintuitively, is the wildest, with several stretches of old growth forest on its banks that have survived intact, including an exceptionally beautiful oak savanna—once the dominant ecosystem of that region, and now one of the world’s rarest.

Around the halfway point I came upon a scene of wild turkeys dusting up the beach with what looked to be some kind of courtship behaviors—a big tom with its tail feathers fully fanned while the females seemed to be fighting.

In the spots where the banks were most vertically eroded, the swallows’ nests dotted the clay, and the birds buzzed around beelike. The same was true of the bridge, when I finally made it to 63rd Street, which marks the boundary between Des Moines and West Des Moines, densely colonized with mud nests.

Until I got to the Water Works Park and its popular bike trails, the only other humans I saw were a man and a woman fishing right by that bridge. A half-hour later, within sight of downtown, warnings of non-navigable dams got me to take out a little earlier than I had hoped. The towers of the life, property & casualty insurance companies that dominate the economy up there loomed in the near distance. I wonder if they insure against the dangers of drinking from that river, and if their actuaries are busy mapping new uninsurable zones.

That afternoon, after showering my raft in the hotel room, I drove two counties over to seek out the graves of my ancestors, starting with the grandson of the Revolutionary War fifer who had moved out there from Ohio in the 1840s, staked out the county seat, started a newspaper and a lumber yard, and fought as a Captain for the Union in the Civil War. On the plane up I had found a scan of an old local history book that included a passage about that ancestor crossing the same river I had paddled, right around the bridge where I saw the swallow nests. It was an anecdote of him telling a joke to a friend in the middle of a stressful situation—getting draft animals across that fast water—which gave him more life in my mind than the picture we had of him on the wall growing up, stiffly wearing what we were told was his Civil War uniform but in fact was some weird Masonic outfit.

I remembered driving out there as a very young boy with my dad and grandma, over the rolling hills on the two-lane highway, and visiting the gravesites. There’s something primal about those sites of ancestor burial—Fukuyama contends such places are the ritual cores of our polities, which makes sense, even as one considers how much we have lost that connection in the modern era. I spotted it right as I rolled into town, on the hill to the right past a row of cherry pickers for sale. The town itself, like most rural county seats in Iowa these days, seemed past its prime. And the pioneer graveyard, when I found my way up there, was a little creepy. I found my people fairly quickly, without any guide, as if by some internal homing, and was moved by some of the messages the tombstones conveyed—little clues to personality—and surprised by the revelation of just how many dead children there were, taken by disease at tender ages.

Only when I was headed out did I notice how they were erasing the American flag on the side of the water tower with gray primer. I didn’t ask what they were going to replace it with. Maybe one of the witchy barn hexes I saw north of Panora, on a road called Utopia Avenue.

Those old highways really let you see the land, and imagine what it must have looked like before we carved it up. It was interesting to see and think about how three to four generations had made rich lives in that little town from the 1840s to the 1940s, but how anomalous that intergenerational stability was, and how far flung and unknown to each other we are now. Even the name of that progenitor, McCann—a tribal name, “son of the wolf cub,” borne by the descendant of Celts who migrated to the Emerald Isle, and who himself crossed the Atlantic to make a new life as a teen. It made me think about how unsettled we all really are, even as we have grossly erased what was here before.

The waters of the American Heartland are fouled, more than anything, because we figured out how to keep the bugs off the crops. When you stop to think how much life we’ve erased from that fertile region in the 150 years since we first settled it, you might get a different idea who the real swarm is. Even as the wild ecologies holding out in the margins help you see how easy it could be to bring back the balance, with changes as simple as keeping just 10% of the land fallow.

The newest consumers of the waters of the Midwest are a different sort of creature, one that may have a higher tolerance for nitrates. The next morning, a friend and I paid a visit to a data center about to come on line, a fresh addition to the cluster where Microsoft helped incubate and train the early versions of GPT, right there by the Raccoon River and one of the oak savanna preserves. More on that part of the trip in a future installment.

Long weekend roundup

As reported here earlier, our neighbors just downriver are confronting the massive new development planned for the “Dog’s Head” region of Austin’s Eastern Crescent they have made their home—abused industrial lands along the Colorado just past the city limits, now proposed to be annexed in a 45-year tax abatement agreement that already passed the City Council without any prior hearings or discussion. Jim Canning has put together a great video showing what’s at stake in this debate, as the County Commissioners consider whether to support the tax abatement agreement:

More on the Rocky Mountain locust swarms of the 1870s, via Wikipedia:

Compared to previous infestations in the region, the 1874 plague was significantly more damaging. The invasion coincided with a record drought in the Midwest and Great Plains, which induced the grasshoppers (estimated at 120 billion to 12.5 trillion) to not only thrive but also to swarm when local vegetation was decimated. The arriving locusts would pile up to over a foot high and ate crops, trees, leaves, grass, wool off sheep, harnesses on horses, paint from wagons, and pitchfork handles.

The locusts would eat for several days from fields and trees and in some instances also ate food inside the farmers’ homes before they moved on. Carpets and clothes were damaged by the locusts in the process. The locust excrement and carcasses polluted ponds and streams. Train tracks “slick with grasshopper guts” caused trains to lose traction, according to the book It Happened in Nebraska.

A Kansas pioneer was quoted as saying, “They looked like a great, white glistening cloud, for their wings caught the sunshine on them and made them look like a cloud of white vapor.” Another Kansas settler said, “I never saw such a sight before. This morning, as we looked up toward the sun, we could see millions in the air. They looked like snowflakes.” Nebraska historian Addison E. Sheldon described the scene: “In a clear, hot July day a haze came over the sun. The haze deepened into a gray cloud. Suddenly the cloud resolved itself into billions of gray grasshoppers sweeping down upon the earth. The vibration of their wings filled the ear with a roaring sound like a rushing storm. As far as the eye could reach in every direction the air was filled with them. Where they alighted, they covered the ground like a heavy crawling carpet.” Farmers tried killing the locusts with fire and exploding gunpowder, but in one case the mass of locusts smothered the flames. Other unsuccessful efforts to stop the plague included covering fields with sheets and smoking grasshoppers away from crops and into water and oil-filled ditches to drown them. A device called a hopperdozer was invented to fight grasshoppers: its scraper was coated with coal tar and pulled by horses. Dragged against the wind, young locusts would be blown into the tar, but it only worked on flat fields.

You can get your small town muckraking from the Storm Lake Times Pilot and the Cullen family that runs it.

This week’s research reading has been Adam Hanieh’s Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market, an excellent history of the global oil business published in 2024 by Verso, which is helping me better understand the deep context of the petrochemical infrastructure we’re surrounded with in Texas, and why we seem to have spent much of my adult life fighting wars to control access to oil.

To see you off, here’s a remarkable vignette of something cool the poet and bookseller C. Rees showed me this week in one of our favorite Austin edgelands: a bee hive made from a gigantic old truck tire left behind by the operators of an abandoned aggregate mine. I need to better learn to identify the species of bees.

Next installment I aim to share some notes from my paddle into the salt marshes of the Metaverse—the waters of south San Francisco Bay near the headquarters of the company formerly known as Facebook. Stay cool, and thanks for reading.

The brutality of our Austin summer was deferred this year by an abundance of June rain. The late afternoon downpours, which feel more like what you would expect in Houston or New Orleans, seem especially effective at conjuring signs of life against the concrete canvas. Stopped at a traffic light as the sun broke through one Tuesday, hundreds of brown lacewings suddenly became visible in the low-angled rays, fluttering over the intersection like fairies. Walking the dog the next morning I noticed hundreds of sod webworm moths on the wildflowers along the sidewalk—what an extension officer might call an infestation, but looked like abundance to me. On a Thursday morning run I could see the cliff swallows coming and going from the seasonal nests they’ve built under the tollway bridge, silhouetted by the rising sun. The next day I found a thick patch of hot pink powderpuff mimosa blossoming in the drainage ditch, almost invisible unless you know to look. The flower pictured above is about the size of the head of a Q-Tip.

Last Saturday I took advantage of the absence of triple-digit heat to go for a long mid-day run, following an urban trail route down along the railroad tracks, over a creek and into the abandoned gravel pits slowly rewilding along the river, land that has been owned by the city for almost twenty years but is a long way from ever being domesticated into parkland. The spot I traversed is right off the north-south tollway where I saw those swallows, and if you drove by it you probably wouldn’t notice it unless the retama trees that grow near the frontage road were in bloom. The Camino Real de los Tejas allegedly went right through there, to a low water crossing where you are still likely to find a few Cormac McCarthy-grade wanderers hanging out on any given Saturday, drinking beer and fishing from pickups with ample sound systems. Penetrate the dense foliage off the trail and you might find a car that’s been stripped, or a freshly dumped household of trash.

I was about a quarter-mile in on one of the double-tracked dirt trails you could call Jeep roads when I came upon the above scene. Three black vultures working a brown furry carcass. I assumed it must have been a deer, until I walked up to take a look. You could tell it must have been pretty fresh from how reluctant the vultures were to move along as I approached. No wonder, I realized, when I finally saw what it was. Not some doe left behind by the coyotes, but a more thickly muscled creature: a big-ass pit bull, half-rotated onto its back. Almost a cartoon version of a pit bull, with the front shoulders of a football team mascot, exaggerated by postmortem bloat. An intact male, as they say in the trade, swollen belly exposed and ready for the vultures’ hooked beaks to pierce.

Its head lay to one side, eyelids closed in forever sleep. The snarl that exposes an aggressive dog’s deadly incisors was now permanent on the side you could see, part of the upper lip chewed away, or pulled back taut in some rictus of death. I wondered what the backstory was. The dog had no collar, and was far from the road. A beat-up old white minivan rolled slowly by on an intersecting path a hundred feet in, reminding me how many free-ranging humans you can encounter back in there. Having had more than my share of run-ins with off-leash pit bulls over the years, I wondered if it might have charged the wrong crew and gotten itself shot. As I moved on, I accepted it as a sign that the real Texas summer has arrived.

Only later in the week did I get to thinking how that involuntary park marks the zone where the city ends and you enter the unincorporated territory now controlled by the planet’s first trillionaire and the developers scrambling to trail in his wake, remaking other old aggregate mines downriver into beachheads for the colonization of the future. I’m not sure if it’s my hard-earned cynicism or my unextinguished capacity for hope that makes me find the liminal space I was in, with its premature scenes of post-apocalyptic ruin and unregulated rewilding, a more plausible expression of our trajectory.

I walked a similar zone the Sunday before Memorial Day, in a very different location: across the highway from One Hacker Way, the beginning of Meta fka Facebook’s sprawling campus in Menlo Park. I had been trying to figure out how to get on the campus to take in the quiet weekend energy and look for signs of life. I parked at a little strip mall Starbucks, crossed the old railroad tracks that divide Meta Park from the suburban neighborhoods behind it, and was headed to cross Highway 84 on foot when I noticed a similar Jeep road cutting off into some burned-out green oblivion behind a storage locker facility.

I hadn’t walked far in before I heard the towhees on the power lines, and started to see the tiger swallowtails working the flowers that had been allowed to grow wild, there in what was probably right of way owned by the state. There was a dirty little wetland a quarter-mile in, surrounded by piles of illegally dumped trash, all with a view of the first big Meta campus, formerly the offices of Sun Microsystems and before that Silicon Graphics—a campus by the bay historically referred to by its employee-occupants as “San Quentin.” As one whose first computer at work was a Unix workstation I barely knew how to use, it was a strange sense of return.

I had spent the morning exploring the waters beyond that campus, paddling around the salt ponds and coastal marshes of South San Francisco Bay. We were in the East Bay visiting friends, and after a Saturday exploring the tunnel tops and the tree museum with the kids, I took advantage of still being on Central Time to get up at 3, drive down 880 to Dumbarton Bridge, and cross over to paddle around the salt flats of Silicon Valley as field research for my new book.

More on that in an upcoming installment.

This Friday aka Juneteenth I went with my brother-in-law and nephew exploring the insane waters of industrial Houston, from Baytown to Armand Bayou and back again. We shared the water with a very large number of alligators, many of whom we saw staring us down, some of which we knew were there only from the muddy clouds in the water. My fellow travelers shared an old 17-foot aluminum canoe. I had planned to take my old Wenonah, but when I went to load it I found a bird nest with eggs in the upside-down bow, so decided to leave it alone and stick with the bright blue packraft pictured above. Paddling shallow waters packed with large reptilian predators, some of whom may be tending to their younglings, in a thin little rubber inflatable, definitely works to heighten one’s awareness of what’s going on in the water.

After an amazing morning we grabbed lunch at the Monument Inn, just north of the Mordor-grade obelisk that commemorates the battle that ended the Texas Revolution. The cafe is right at the mouth of the Ship Channel, where it enters San Jacinto Bay, and the second floor dining room provides an amazing vantage to watch the tankers coming and going. As we headed to the car and drive back to Austin, I walked to the water’s edge to take a picture of the next big orange leviathan coming in to port: the Happy Albatross, carrying a load of LPG from Cartagena. There was no actual albatross in sight, but when I looked down I noticed this odd little killdeer, big-eyed and weirdly still, not moving an inch from the pile of plastic and wooden flotsam it was surrounded by:

Only when I looked at the scene more closely, after I uploaded the photos, did I notice the clutch of eggs it was guarding—speckled objects visible there in the little shadow made by the plover’s body. I hadn’t known killdeer lay their eggs on open ground, requiring them to guard them constantly. And I wouldn’t have expected that trash-strewn channel bank to be the sort of open ground one would pick. But I suppose that may be the best it could find.

I went to Houston looking for evidence of biodiverse adaptation to our most brutalized late capitalist landscapes, but I hadn’t expected such a seemingly fragile little creature to provide the most profound vignette from the trip.

Notes to the Prospectus

The Kindle edition of A Natural History of Empty Lots is (or was as of this writing) on sale for $1.99, cheaper than a cup of coffee at a proper bookstore, if you’re into feeding algorithms and having extra reading copies on your phone.

Thanks to my rising ninth grader nephew, I learned last week of the popularity among his demographic of the term “Clanker,” borrowed from some Star Wars backstory as a derisive term for contemporary robots and AI-controlled machines. Roll over PKD, tell HAL 9000 the news.

On a more analog note, I missed the recent screening of Repo Man at Austin’s Paramount Theater, which included a live performance by the Circle Jerks, but the movie is also streaming at Criterion this month as part of an Alex Cox retrospective, and holds up remarkably well. I had forgotten the awesome scene pictured above where Harry Dean Stanton takes Emilio Estevez’s Otto for a drive in the Los Angeles River.

I had a blast helping Eva zu Beck during her Austin stop touring her new book The Wilder Way, which is a remarkable personal story of liberation and reconnection with real life that I enjoyed getting to read.

When my daughter and I visited First Light last week, I picked up a copy of David Griscom’s The Myth of Red Texas: Cowboys, Populism, and Class War in the Radical South, which I started reading and am excited to finish. I'm familiar with parts of the story, but not others. Like that fact that voters who grew up in Texas are not the ones electing our current cast of characters—the majorities come from the transplants.

More on the insane plans for re-development of the Colorado River “Dog’s Head” area—an annexation with almost no public notice or debate that will allow 100% impervious cover, unregulated modification of the floodplain, and no height limits other than what’s mandated by the FAA—in this Austin Current story from the perspective of some of our friends and neighbors most impacted.

Photographer Kristian Thacker has an amazing piece just up on the orphan oil & gas wells of Muskingum Island—both words and pictures from Kristian in this one.

The June 12 TLS has an excellent Nick Holdstock piece on the newest novel by Field Notes friend M. John Harrison, a reprint of an older novel, and a broader consideration of Harrison’s oeuvre and mastery of oblique narrative strategies.

The July issue of Harper’s that arrived in last week’s mail has some amazing pieces on the upcoming 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, including a Thomas Frank memoir of the 1976 Bicentennial, William T. Vollman field-stripping the Constitution, and an epic Christopher Hooks field trip to D.C. in advance of the official celebrations.

And then there’s the final prospectus of SpaceX, which opens (after a multi-page portfolio of spaceship pics) with this doozy of a corporate mission statement:

Our mission is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars. To do this, we have formed the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth with unmatched capabilities to rapidly manufacture and launch space-based communications that connect the world, to harness the Sun to power a truth-seeking artificial intelligence that advances scientific discovery, and ultimately to build a base on the Moon and cities on other planets.

Imagine what they could do if some of that capital and entrepreneurial energy were directed to connecting us with other life on this planet.

Happy Solstice, and have a great week. To welcome summer, here’s a young and unwary gray fox Fifi and I encountered last weekend, demonstrating how that species’ vocalizations are as if cats could bark:

As my daughter and I hurtled down the tollway on our way to school one Tuesday morning in May while Mommy attended her welding final 👩🏽‍🏭🔥, I felt a little melancholy germinating in my mind as I considered how profoundly different our kid’s experience of that particular journey is than mine was, and how much that difference reflects an accelerating obliteration of culture, community and ecology by the paradoxically dehumanized human machine.

It was a beautiful morning. A rare thing in Texas: a cool spring day dialing up, with a cloudless sky after days of rain, the blue more deeply saturated than usual. We were traveling on an ancient pathway, the route of the Camino Real, and the native prairie flowers were in bloom along the roadsides. Some peppy upbeat anthem about tween unicorns was blasting from the car stereo, and the ritual is a positive one, as our daughter’s school is a loving and wondrous community where she is excited to go every day. And it’s a quick trip, only about 12 minutes even during rush hour. But that’s because most of it is at 80 miles an hour, on a 10-lane concrete tollway, from our home in the woods behind an industrial corridor to the 1980s office building near the frontage road that has been repurposed as her progressive little school. We blast ourselves there every morning through a landscape of concrete cloverleafs clogged with morning traffic, in which the faces of the thousands of people who surround you are hidden from view, and the signs of natural wonder are so marginalized that it takes active effort to notice them. So we turn up the My Little Pony pop, and try to conjure a vision of a more beautiful world.

I remembered being her age, attending first grade in the 1970s Midwest. On the first day of school, my mom walked me down our street, which was called Pleasant and largely lived up to its name, with beautiful trees, affordable and cute old brick homes, and lots of young kids packed into a single block where everyone knew their neighbors. It was just three blocks, and after that first day she had me do it myself or with my younger brother for the rest of my childhood. Even then, though, the future was slipping in. When I was in preschool they had bulldozed the woods behind the houses across the street from ours and replaced them with a freeway—an urban connector of the same I-35 that they built through the heart of Austin—and I had to walk over it to get to school. But the traffic you saw there was sparse, and not in a hurry. It would take a couple of decades for the culture of the automobile to fully divorce us from our connection with the world on the other side of the window glass.

Right as we arrived at drop-off, just before our last turn to the school, I noticed this beautiful plant that had suddenly appeared in the all-American shitscape of the I-35 frontage road. A plant that had always been there, but I had never paid any attention to until now, when it had erupted with its extravagant green bloom, the intense life energy of which pulled us in as we slowed to turn the corner.

I went back after drop-off to get a closer look, parking at the Denny’s next door. The plant occupied the solitary island of dirt allowed to survive in that sea of concrete, and even that was blighted—some of the green was beat-up old astroturf, the rest invasive grass, and the big agave and the smaller one next to it were surrounded with ugly dark gravel. A thick sheet of white styrofoam was settling in to the turf as a little bonus. But something about the colors lent it an undeniable beauty. The way the blue of the Motel 6 sign matched the blue of the sky, a background against which the green of the bloom absolutely glowed. And then I saw all the bees.

As I stood there gaping at the flowers of this amazing plant, probably planted with little consideration by some landscape contractor in the wake of the 1990s xeriscaping boom, some birds started to gather with pigeon-like flapping. I looked over and saw a dozen of them alighting on the wooden alcove that welcomes guests to the motel lobby, which I now noticed was visibly rotten, the main beams exposed and splintered at the tips, maybe harboring the hives of the bees that were buzzing around me. The birds were not pigeons, but doves, acting as if they thought I might feed them. Or maybe they were there to earn their name, singing their gentle cries of mourning, as I remembered that the bloom of the monocot, which looked to be Agave americana, the so-called century plant, is the last extravagant thing it does before it dies.

Out back, four dudes were re-tiling the roof with new Spanish-style terracotta, all dressed in a way that lent the scene a further atemporality. There were only four cars in the lot, suggesting the hotel was undergoing a complete renovation, or enough of one to perhaps have another shot at making money.

As I looked down at the astroturf and styrofoam, I wondered if the agave could propagate in that place, and what dreams might be born from the mezcal it could cook.

That afternoon, walking to grab a late lunch on the west end of downtown, I noticed a well-dressed old dude sitting on one of the benches, with a medical boot on his left foot, a ball cap with the logo of some fancy resort, and a Kindle in his hand. He was still there reading when I walked back an hour later. I envied his time available for non-required reading. And then I noticed the action in the tree above him. Two tropical green birds, monk parakeets, ripping thick green branches from the tree, which was a crape myrtle.

I frequently see the monk parakeets that have made their home in Austin come around to eat the pods of the honey mesquites in high summer, and often admire the massive nests they build in cell phone towers and light poles. But I had never seen them collecting the nest-building material, and was amazed to see how much energy it involved. Talons clamped onto another section, one bird bit its beak into a young green branch, right at the base, and put all the motion and muscle of its neck and body into breaking it off, with evident gusto. A long segment, maybe a couple of feet. They let me take a video:

Then they flew off down the street, in the direction of downtown. I tried to follow. It’s usually not that hard to track monk parakeets aurally, because they usually chatter loudly as they fly. And they are easy to see in motion in the city, a bright yellowish green, almost neon at times, against the concrete and glass canyon walls of the high rises.

They flew a block or so away, and I saw one disappear, into some crevice on a tall metal power pole connected to the nearby substation. I walked up. Close to the base, but above any unladdered human reach, affixed to the pole was a cylinder cable housing framed by a square rack. It looked to be a housing for the ground cables. And there atop the cylinder, behind the upper part of the frame, the parakeets were building their new nest. It was evident they were just getting started, but they were already able to hide there in plain sight.

When I walked by a few days later, the nest was complete, filling most of the area behind the metal frame. The only species of parrots that build their nests from sticks, monk parakeets are also one of the only species of birds that build multifamily nests—stacking the sticks into huge structures with separate chambers for different family groups. I wonder if this pair, just starting a new nest that would soon be added onto, knew that they were building their avian co-op in the shadow of a dozen luxury condominium towers that have been built there in the past decade or so.

It was a beautiful moment of Anthropocene ecology, seeing these naturalized descendants of birds imported for the exotic pet trade using the material of exotic landscaper trees and the machine infrastructure of the electrified city to exhibit their successful adaptation to the world we have made, far from the South American jungles where they originally evolved. I also wondered how long the energy company will let them stay there. And if my instinct is right that their progeny will outdo us in their resilience, and still be here long after the power goes out for good.

Further reading

This month brought the first confirmed airport bookstore sighting of A Natural History of Empty Lots. Thanks to Dalia and Sona for the field reports.

I have dispatched copies of the Four Edgeland Walks chapbook from our Texas Book Festival x Fusebox series in April to all the folks who ordered one. If yours hasn’t shown up yet, let me know.

For more on the natural history of the agave, and the complex cultural history of the spirits we make from it, this JSTOR Daily piece from 2020 is a great starter.

For a deep dive into the ways monk parakeets have created challenges for power companies, a trio of researchers at U. Conn. and Brown published a fascinating study for NIH of the birds’ nest-building patterns on utility poles, with speculations on non-lethal removal strategies that might actually work.

Tuesday they euthanized Happy the Elephant, an involuntary resident of the Bronx Zoo who was the subject of one of the most successful animal rights cases in the U.S. to date thanks to the hard and innovative work of the Nonhuman Rights Project, which filed a habeas corpus petition on Happy’s behalf. While the courts all ruled against the petitioners, the final ruling from the New York Court of Appeals (that state’s highest court) produced two powerful, cogent and enduring dissents laying out the arguments for the idea of animals having cognizable rights. You can read both the majority opinion and the dissents here, and see if you agree it feels like the dissents are the kind that will later be quoted as having gotten it right when the law evolves along with us.

Meanwhile, my social media feed served up this picture-worth-a-thousand-words public safety notice from the annoyed first responders of suburban DFW:

If you’re in Austin on June 8, please come join me at BookPeople where I’ll be in conversation with Eva zu Beck as she launches her new book, The Wilder Way.

The new (June 11) issue of The New York Review of Books has an excellent piece on the remarkable novels of Makenna Goodman, Helen of Nowhere (published last year) and The Shame. I’m lucky to get to work with Makenna in her capacity as editor of other people’s books, and it’s awesome to see hers get such a closely read appreciation. Paywall version (for now) for subscribers here; archive copy here. If you’re in the UK, you can catch Makenna live this June—in London at BookBar on June 18 and at Charleston June 19 for an amazing-looking event with other Fitzcarraldo authors.

Some Actual Field Notes

I’ve started the field work for my new book, working title Field Notes From a Near Future, which the AI inside Google describes as “a field-report narrative that explores how nature and wild/machine intelligences adapt and resist inside the infrastructure of modern capitalism.” To help me access some of the sites I want to explore around the continent, I invested in one piece of gear: an Alpacka packraft.

Packrafts are an innovation developed by backcountry explorers who liked to hike in and paddle out: an inflatable kayak/raft that packs down to less than five pounds and no more volume than a sleeping bag. I first used one in Alaska to paddle the Maclaren River, and have long waited for a good excuse to try one out in more urban settings. Scouting the industrial corridors of Houston this spring, I got the idea that could be a good way to get close to otherwise inaccessible industrial sites, and to see the wild life that coexists with them. This month I used it to paddle the wild and intensely polluted Raccoon River I grew up next to in Des Moines (put-in pictured above), and then last weekend to explore the salt flats across the highway from the Meta fka Facebook headquarters in Silicon Valley. I have trips coming up to explore the estuary of the Tijuana River in the shadow of the border wall, the Houston Ship Channel, the mouth of the Rio Grande around the SpaceX launchpad, and some locations on the East Coast. I aim to put some initial notes from these trips together here over the summer, so watch this space.

Here’s a pic from last Sunday morning, with the Meta HQ on the left, and a rewilded landfill jetty in the foreground:

My daughter and I recently dug out a box of DVDs that had long been in storage, which got us to dig out the DVD player as well and screen some. I rediscovered the wonders of Wholphin, the video magazine McSweeney’s did back in the oughts. I’ll close with one of my surreal favorites, Tactical Advantage by Daren Rabinovitch, which my daughter astutely interpreted as a parable on where thunder comes from:

Keep an eye out for today’s Blue Moon, and have a great week.

Thursday night after we got our daughter to bed a little on the late side, I stepped out onto our back patio and was surprised to hear screams from the dark woods behind us that sounded every bit like the growl of a death metal singer.

A little farther away, I could hear amplified instruments, too—heavy bass, guitar and drums with the amps turned up to 11, on what you might call the other speaker—another site in our neighborhood that produces sounds that carry long distances. I knew the singer in the woods was not some emo Austin dude soaking up the attention of the crowd on the outdoor stage of the beer hall down the street, where the rest of the band was, but one of the great blue herons that nests in an old sycamore on the urban river a few hundred feet away.

I’d been hearing the chicks in the nests all week, with their tik-tik-tik calls that sound like outboard motors on idle, and I know well the dinosaur skronk of a mature heron taking flight, like the one pictured above flying from that nest to a daytime perch nearby. But I’d never heard this call before, a loud, low-frequency scream in the night repeated over and over, each one two to three seconds long. The closest thing I could think of that I had heard before was the singer for Cannibal Corpse my son and I endured so we could have good seats in the park when Boris took the stage, back when Austin still had Fun Fun Fun.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, with all the dark pagan energy that was in the air. It was Walpurgisnacht, after all, and thunder, lighting & rain had conquered the supposed “Flower Moon” the almanac apps had promised. I tried to record the sonic tableau with the Voice Memos app on my phone, which sort of worked, but lost the immediacy and volume, and made me realize I could do with some better audio gear to capture the ever-present melange of natural and industrial noises we consider ourselves lucky to be bathed in every day here.

Here’s my recording, with some amateur effort to improve the digital mix. Turns out that heavy bass line you can hear is Austin’s own …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, which I learned from the dad of one of our daughter’s schoolmates, who was at the show. The song, he added, is “How Near, How Far”:

The guidebooks from the bird nerds at Cornell indicate the vocalization I heard was a threat response. If it was, it went on an awful long time. I wonder if the birds were scared of the storm, dealing with a predator, annoyed with the music, or making their own in conversation with it. I’m just glad they’re there, and I hope they stick around, as this little pocket of urban habitat they found gets increasingly surrounded by human hubbub.

The next morning, it was another May Day, in a country that doesn’t commemorate either variant. Maybe it’s not too late to start.

Some Other Field Recordings

There was a time, when I was around my daughter’s age, that you could buy a commercially released record of field recordings like the one pictured above, manually labeled by its original purchaser as being from May 20, 1971. I bought this the weekend before last, when I stopped into a neighborhood vinyl emporium after finishing the last of my guided nature walks for Fusebox. I’m sorry to report the wolves sound more into it than Robert Redford, who seems to have been phoning that particular gig in, maybe literally. He was a busy guy back then—he spent January through July of 1971 shooting Jeremiah Johnson, and then went right to shooting The Candidate.

I didn’t go into the record store looking for such a disc, but I did go straight to the classical bin in the back, which also had all the unclassifiable ephemera, and ended up walking out with a few other budget bin field recordings records: Jets, Dragsters and Hot Rods Recorded at the Drag Races, Sanford, Maine (1962), the BBC’s British Wild Birds in Stereo (1974) and three of the Environments records from Syntonic Research, Inc. aka Irv Teibel (who spent his last three decades living in Austin) that were popular in the age of multi-platinum whalesong records. Environments 1 includes a warning on the liner notes that Side 2, “Optimum Aviary,” “should only be played at low volume,” and a recommendation that Side 1, “The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore,” be played at 16 ⅔ RPM, a setting my vintage 2004 turntable does not support.

All of this got me thinking about recordings that combine the sounds of wild nature with human music, beyond the beautiful cheese of Martin Denny, who famously realized the bullfrogs around the Shell Bar he was playing in Honolulu made his band sound cooler, so added an entire jungle’s worth of animal song on some of his tracks (aided by the imitative gifts of percussionist Augie Colon) and invented a whole genre of Exotica. The most interesting contemporary artist I am familiar with who uses field recordings as a core instrument for composition is Lawrence English from Brisbane, Australia, who I had the good fortune to hear at No Idea Festival a few years ago—check out his work here.

Wikipedia has a pretty great entry on the metal band death growl, which may lead you to vocal coach Melissa Cross’s instructional video on The Zen of Screaming.

*Thanks to BLK Vinyl on E. 6th for all the great stuff!

Continuing the early 70s theme, last week I checked out a copy of James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) from APL, research of a sort for a short fiction project, and the opening is so good in its depiction of the comforts and existential ennui of middle class American life under postwar capitalism. A reminder to look for more novels by poets. Now I’m at the part where two of the guys are in the car loaded with gear, talking about what they will do after the collapse of civilization as they drive to the whitewater put-in deep in the hills.

And continuing the heavy metal theme, researchers in Australia this week published their study regarding the remarkable ways in which scorpions have evolved to reinforce the tissues of their bodily weapons—tail stingers and claws—with zinc, manganese and iron. Yes, they titled their paper “Heavy Metal Scorpions.” Hard not to love a paragraph like this monster:

The predominant incorporation of transition metals during sclerotization, even in the earliest stages of life, has been shown as a driver of hardness within the cuticle of chelicerates. Offering improved biomechanical properties, the enhanced material allows for the development of sharper, damage-resistant weapons such as fangs, aculei (needle-like envenoming structure), ovipositors (tube structure to lay eggs) and chelae. Termed ‘heavy element biomaterials’ or HEBs, zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn) and iron (Fe) are the most frequently observed elements appearing in enriched cuticle as metal–ligand coordinated bonds.

This Instagrammer pretty well captures the feeling of encountering heron growls in the wild. For a more conventional set of recordings, here’s what they have at Cornell.

The May 14 issue of The New York Review of Books that arrived in Friday’s mail has an interesting Rosa Lyster piece, “This Bitter Earth,” on Caroline Tracey’s Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, a new book forthcoming from Norton about the ecological importance of salt lakes and the significance of their worldwide decline.

In Ukraine (thanks to Field Notes friend and human web crawler Bruce Sterling, in what sounds like a detail from one of his Leggy Starlitz stories), they’ve started a campaign to 3-D print trays to catch the condensation from air-conditioning units to provide more water for birds.

They found a coatimundi north of San Antonio Monday, far beyond its normal range, evidently lost.

And speaking of getting lost, if you can believe The New York Times (I say sort of), they’re debating whether it’s safe to walk from the City to Met Life Stadium in Rutherford, NJ to catch a World Cup game. Count me in for pedestrian adventures on turnpike frontage roads through Meadowlands swamps.

Etymological crypto-nugget of the week, via the amazing Etymonline:

hubbub(n.)

1550s, whobub “confused noise,” of uncertain origin; according to OED generally believed to be of Irish origin, perhaps from Gaelic ub!, expression of aversion or contempt, or Old Irish battle cry abu, from buide “victory.”

As mentioned last week, I have around three-dozen of the 200 limited edition zines we did for the Texas Book Festival x Fusebox guided edgeland walks leftover, with four photo-illustrated pieces about the sites of the walks in a beautiful letterpress cover printed by Koch Printing in Austin. I am making them available for sale to Field Notes readers for $15, all of the proceeds of which after postage will go as a charitable donation to Fusebox. If you’re interested, email me at chris-at-christopherbrown-dot-com. And if you already emailed me, I have your name on the list and will follow up by reply email with the details shortly.

I also am keeping a running mailing list for the next series of walks, so ping me if you’d like to be added to that.

Thanks for all the rain we got this week in Austin, just in time for May Day. My daughter and I found some juicy-looking eggs on the leaves of our front yard mesquite during one of the dry moments, and have yet to figure out what creature laid them.

Have a great week.

The first time I ever paid much attention to cliff swallows was on a spring day not long after 9/11, as I unloaded my canoe from the car. It was a Saturday morning, and my then second-grader son and I were planning to explore the stretch of urban river I had seen from the bridge on the eastern edge of town, where the old highway to Bastrop and Houston crossed over the Colorado in a neighborhood of industrial land uses. The bridge was old, a 1930s truss, and it still carried the southbound traffic in two narrow lanes, but over the years a more modern and brutal concrete cloverleaf had grown around it, at the point on the north side where multiple roadways converged near what once had been the low-water crossing of ancient trails. Perfect habitat for the aerial ballet of Anthropocene swallows.

They were zipping all around us, banking and diving, cutting through the muggy air and giving the brutal infrastructure a sense of life. I recognized the birds, or at least their general type. We’d had them in Des Moines when I was a kid—I remembered being buzzed by swallows when my buddies Ben and Phil and I figured out how to climb up on top of our middle school on summer evenings, before we advanced to churches. But I’d never noticed their nests. Maybe because that was before the 1980s, when cliff swallows were first observed to have started using the concrete nooks under our elevated roadways as one of their preferred sites to make their little pustules of dappled mud, giving our most brutal and ubiquitous alterations of the fossil fuel-era landscape an organic wonder they did not earn.

Here’s a video vignette from 2017, taken a quarter-mile north of the site of that first sighting, on a bridge that was soon demolished after crews had power-washed the nests off.

The cliff swallows that spend half their year in Austin are remarkably similar to the bats that famously breed under our downtown bridges, and if you spend enough time along the urban Colorado you may start to notice how they show up around the same time of day and evening, and move through the air on short wings and forked tails well-adapted to intercepting the same little insects that get the fish to jump from the water. But the swallows have a much wider range into the north, and their recent adaptation to our urbanization of the continent has evidently facilitated significant growth in their population.

In a 30-year study of cliff swallows in southwestern Nebraska, Charles and Mary Bomberger Brown found that the birds were evolving so rapidly in response to their colonization of our high-speed transportation arteries that their average wing lengths were shortening—the better to get immediate vertical lift to evade the cars and trucks, and achieve a measurable decrease in vehicular deaths. By the end of the three decades of field observations, most of the road-killed birds the researchers found were the longer-winged variants.

That’s probably why I was so pleased when, leading a group of folks on a guided walk last weekend, I noticed another colony of swallows and was able to share the wonder with a group of others IRL:

The wonder was partly charged by how unlikely a spot it was to see any signs of wild life: the intersection of two major local freeways, Highway 183 and the Mopac Expressway. I had the good fortune to be invited by the Texas Book Festival and Fusebox, Austin’s biennial performing arts festival, to be the “performer” for their first-ever collaboration. When the discussions first started getting going about how we might do something with my Empty Lots book in an actual empty lot, there was talk of live readings and maybe some adventurous and un-amplified music, but thankfully we got around to a better idea when Fusebox impresario Ron Berry suggested maybe just taking people on some walks like the ones I took him on to scout possible sites. That’s how I ended up having a group of folks meet me for a “nature walk” in the parking lot of a frontage road strip mall, between the Firestone and the Casa do Brasil, at 8 a.m. on a Saturday.

All of the sites were places I wrote about in the book, and have featured in this newsletter. An arboretum of ancient live oaks hidden behind a bus turnaround, the weird riparian woods behind the abandoned dairy factory, the stormwater catchment basin that hides the springs that are the source of Austin’s Shoal Creek, and an abandoned aggregate mine along the river that is early in the process of naturally rewilding. I made a 20-page zine with short pieces and photos about each site, with a letterpress cover beautifully printed by Max Koch of Koch Printing, and put a lot of thought into how to translate my usual process of experiencing these places in solitude and then writing oblique notes in the privacy of my home office into a guided tour and large group conversation that still had some of the feeling of getting lost and discovering strange things. The best moments were when we came upon and stopped to talk about things I hadn’t scouted, from the harvester ant colonies by the parking spots to a patch of powderpuff mimosa and the swallows under the 183 x Mopac flyover.

The first site was the most conventionally beautiful, and seemed to be in the easiest place to access, though the next morning after we’d walked it there were two stabbings nearby. The weather was remarkably cooperative, despite the walks occurring during a week of rain, including major downpours later in the day after a couple of the walks. So on the last walk, Sunday morning, we got the gift of finding the wasteland gone wild, when we crossed the pedestrian bridge over a tollway to find an unlikely 60 acres of prairie flowers in bloom around the abandoned towers, ramps and gantries of the aggregate mill. I knew I had imparted something of what I’d hoped for when, at the end of that last walk, the last of the participants to leave, a Chilango filmmaker named Manzo, looked at me as he got in his car and exclaimed with a smile:

“You took us to the Zone!”

That bit of feedback was the best to get, for one who was been seeking the place he mentioned since before I even knew it existed. And I’m not sure it’s entirely true, but hopefully I was able to share some learned insights about how to find your own way there.

Further reading

More about Tarkovsky’s Stalker and the Strugatsky brothers book Roadside Picnic from which it was adapted here in this post from January 2021. For a deeper dive, see Geoff Dyer’s ZONA.

The authors of that cliff swallow study wrote an acclaimed book on the subject, Coloniality in the Cliff Swallow, available from University of Chicago Press.

As mentioned in earlier posts, the Fusebox walks were limited to 25 people per walk, so based on the response I’m hoping to do more in the future (probably next year after I meet my next book deadline). If you’re interested in coming on one, shoot me an email (chris at christopherbrown-dot-com) and I’ll add you to the list.

This summer I will be looking for similar spots in other North American cities while researching the new book, so if you know of any you think I should check out, please let me know!

If you’re interested in getting a flavor of the material I’m developing for the new book, and/or reading a diverse selection of new writing about animals by other writers from around the world, check out the new anthology from Dark Mountain: Bestiary. My contribution, “Wild Cats and Predatory Robots,” builds on a sketch I started last year for the Writer’s League of Texas’ One-Page Salon, mixing field notes from sightings of crypto-jaguarundis and of autonomous nine-eyed Jaguars. Thanks to Joanna Pocock for the invitation to submit to what turns out to be an exceptionally beautifully designed and made book. It was serendipitous, as she reached out to me shortly after I had discovered the Dark Mountain Manifesto — a cogent call for a more honest approach to writing about the natural world and our relationships with it — while trawling the Austin Public Library stacks. Dark Mountain started in 2009, and this is issue 29, so I’m rather late to the party, but delighted to have found it.

On Earth Day I had a blast with two back-to-back events: a conversation with artist Emily Eisenhart and nature-focused brand developer Adam Butler at Cross Pollinate, a local small group gathering of folks working at the nexus of Central Texas urbanity and wild nature incubated by Adam and the amazing Butler Bros. team, and then a conversation at Alienated Majesty Books with political journalist Patrick Strickland about his first collection of fiction. Alienated Majesty has probably the best-curated selection of environmental writing of any bookstore on the planet, and you don’t need to be in Austin to sample it. (They also now have some signed copies of the paperback edition of A Natural History of Empty Lots.)

Another gift of Fusebox was getting to meet and see some remarkable new work from the choreographer Vanessa Anspaugh, whose Mourning After Mornings was a featured selection of the festival. I think Vanessa shares a similar perspective on our relationship with the natural world as I try to explore in my work, and it was really amazing to see that expressed through dance (and to learn that she had recently discovered Empty Lots thanks to the folks at Unnameable Books in Western Mass.).

As auspice, when Agustina and I walked to the UT dance building to see Vanessa and her collaborators’ rehearsal, we came upon this scene of snake trying to figure out how to swallow the fish it had just pulled from Waller Creek:

Here’s the zine we did for the walks. I have some extra copies I may put up for sale or donation—message me if you’re interested:

Lastly, below is one more shot of swallows that I love, a screen grab from another video taken the same day as the one included above. My son Hugo Nakashima-Brown, who was a little kid when we first saw these birds near this bridge, is now grown and making a career as a woodworker, furniture designer and visual artist. He has been experimenting with figurative marquetry using 21st-century tools, and made a beautiful door for our home featuring an interpretation of the below image in wood. You can see it here, along with his other work.

Have a great week, and stay safe.

I was chilling by the pool surrounded by screaming first graders when I saw the object from space.

We spent the second weekend of spring break, which was also the vernal equinox and the official beginning of the new season, visiting Houston with two other couples and their same-aged kids. Three of the four parents are professors, and the one who is not had the awesome idea to get us all down there to take the kids to Meow Wolf Houston and check out the outstanding Frida Kahlo retrospective at the MFA. So that’s how we found ourselves waiting for the sun to come around the high-rises and warm the third-floor outdoor pool at the downtown Residence Inn, which occupies the former corporate headquarters of Humble Oil built in 1921. I was reading the prior weekend’s paper that I had thrown in my bag, periodically looking up to check on the kids and the progress of the sun, which I was certain would soon come out from behind the high-rises, shine on the pool, and warm us up. The other parents were more properly focused on the kids, and so no one else was looking when the meteor momentarily lit up the sky before disappearing behind the Enron Building [pictured above; now occupied by Chevron].

I have seen many a shooting star over the years, but always at night. This daytime phenomenon was much more spectacular: an intensely bright projectile moving at the speed of a UFO, with a blue and white corona that suddenly flared a platinum yellow flame. I immediately announced the sighting to the other parents, testing my credibility already strained as a science fiction writer hanging out with literary scholars (our view of the glistening Enron building had me thinking about the 1975 dystopian film Rollerball, presciently set in a 21st century Houston & USA where democratic institutions have been replaced by corporate rule). I looked on the flight tracker app to see if the radar had any info, and convinced myself it had been a small aircraft glistening in the late afternoon sun.

But after we got home Sunday, one of the other parents sent me a news story about how NASA confirmed it really was a meteor—one that flamed out over the city traveling 35,000 miles per hour and then crashed through the roof of a suburban home whose residents found the remains on their living room carpet. This local news clip has a great roundup of amateur videos of the thing I failed to capture, and a visit with the homeowner:

Later in the week, I found myself reading some of the scholarship on meteorites as omens and objects of human veneration, from the Stone of Delphi and the Heliogabalus of the Emperor Macrinus to the Hajar al-Aswad. Some classical-era Confucian cultures, including the Josean Dynasty of Korea, evidently took the appearance of flaming objects from space as signs of a loss of legitimacy of the current executive political power, and in medieval Europe they often foretold the imminent demise of the monarch. Such is the case in Shakespeare’s Richard II, when the Welsh Captain gives this report to the Earl of Salisbury:

The bay trees in our country are all withered,
And meteors fright the fixèd stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the Earth,
And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war.
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

The European-American settlers of the United States found a wide array of extraterrestrial stones in the landscape, but unlike the Native cultures they displaced, they mostly treated them as utilitarian objects, like the 320-pound mass in Wichita County, Texas that had been an object of worship for the Comanche only to end up cut down into souvenirs, the meteorites of Kiowa County, Kansas that were used to hold down stable roofs and cover rain-barrels (until the farmers realized they could be sold to scientists for enough money to buy another farm), or the massive chunk of iron from space that the founders of Tucson repurposed as a public anvil. Perhaps the problem in those cases was that the settlers had not seen the objects fall from the sky.

The next morning, while the oil wars raged on the other side of the planet, we roamed the industrial expanses of East Houston, scouting material for new projects—the site of a public art commission my wife is competing for, and the zone along Buffalo Bayou and the Ship Channel that I plan to explore in connection with my new book. Sundays, when the machines have mostly stopped, are a good time for those kinds of explorations — you can get closer to the interesting sites, and the chances of danger are lower.

Houston famously has no zoning, and has been in a state of more-or-less continuous industrial development since the discovery of oil at Spindletop near Beaumont in 1901 and the opening of the Ship Channel in 1914, which engineered Buffalo Bayou—Houston’s connection to the sea—into a channel capable of supporting the infrastructure of oil export and import. The result is a minimally regulated sprawl of massive installations along a 35-mile stretch of river, far too expansive to get more than a few glimpses of on a Sunday morning.

There’s something intensely, charismatically feral about that zone, where our most brutal Promethean infrastructure coexists with pockets of swampy coastal wild. Not just in the river corridor—you can also see it in the endless blocks of beat-up old industrial buildings that sprawl across the flats of East Houston, and even in the shiny corporate towers that crowd around the metropolitan freeways. Extensions of it can be found all along the Gulf Coast, from Boca Chica to Florida, but this is its beating heart.

As we scouted ways to penetrate the labyrinth of security fences and closed-off sites, aiming to witness both the pulse of petrocapital and the wildlife that manages to survive in its margins, I concluded the best way will be by water, and perhaps by bicycle, through the interstitial commons.

In the news that week I had read about the Administration’s plans to convene the so-called “God Squad”—the interagency committee statutorily empowered to grant exemptions from Endangered Species Act protections for threatened species—in order to unburden oil & gas extraction activities in the Gulf on national security grounds at the request of the Pentagon. The principal measures at issue were those designed to save Rice’s whale, which is the only baleen whale native to the Gulf, with a population believed to number fewer than a hundred.

The committee met on March 31, and essentially concluded that it had no legally permitted choice other than to grant the self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” the exemption he had requested, as required by the plain language of the statute. But the basis on which the request was made, judging from a review of the backup memoranda that were published, was specious (focused not so much on national security risks as economic ones), speculative (worried about what would happen if pending litigation results in future rulings that disrupt oil & gas activities in the Gulf), and hypocritical (proclaiming the action was designed to prevent exactly the kind of economic shock from disrupted oil & gas distribution that the self-parodically named Operation Epic Fury has already caused).

I found myself reading NOAA’s papers on the wildlife impact of underwater noise associated with offshore industrial activity, and remembering the enigmatic recordings of whalesong that were popular when I was a kid in the 70s—so popular that, by helping people empathize with the cetaceans, they engendered the popular support that helped save the humpback whale from extinction. I found two of those records in my stacks, Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale, which started the fad, and Andre Kostelanetz’s And God Created Great Whales, which uses whalesong in orchestral arrangements of Sibelius, Skalkottas, and even Weill’s “Mack the Knife.”

Playing Payne’s remarkable disc, an album of field recordings of nature sounds that went multi-platinum, I could remember how strange it was to first hear those songs as a kid. Hearing it now, I can better appreciate the way the sounds give you a deeper sense of that undersea environment, and what it must be like for those animals when we come down there and start blowing things up. It’s hard to imagine a slow media phenomenon like the whalesong fad of the 70s being replicated in today’s digital ecosystem of platforms that enable us to channel-surf all night without any actual channels. Maybe Druski can get his Jacques Cousteau on.

The only enigmatic migratory leviathan I personally witnessed in March was this Qatar Airlines 777 I noticed flying over our street the last Thursday morning of the month on final approach into Austin, a destination that airline doesn’t regularly serve. I pulled up the flight tracker again, and saw it had originated in Brasilia. I wondered if it was a luxury charter, carrying rich evacuees from Dubai, or some mystery cargo tied up with the war they won’t call a war.

Today is Easter, so I suppose I will try to focus on the good news evident in the early wildflowers popping up all around here—bluebonnets, blue sage, cross vine, winecup, spiderwort, and tons of pink evening primrose, with other prairie flowers coming up green and ready to bloom soon. The folks are out selling big bags of cascarónes by the side of the road, and when she wakes up our daughter will be happy to break a few over my head the way her big brother did when he was her age. I might even shake the premonition I got Saturday, when the retama trees all started to open up their hot yellow flowers after the rain, of a hot brutal summer around the corner.

The rain came after an exceptionally trippy Pink Moon we got to see coming up Thursday night, just as the Artemis II expedition launched to go check it out more closely. Another celestial sign said to herald imminent changes in the land, it was so remarkable in those first moments when it came up over the treeline that I could almost believe the omen was real, and the current powers working to make the world their slave will soon have their own Enron moment.

The Roundup

For more on the wild ecologies of the Gulf Coast, check out my piece for Southlands magazine now available online on this side of the paywall.

And on the idea of paddling the Houston Ship Channel, check out this epic 2006 piece by Josh Harkinson on how he did just that. There’s also this interesting video from the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Houston residency not long after that, which includes footage from some of their Buffalo Bayou boat tours:

I just sent to production the zine I made for the series of guided edgeland walks I’ll be taking folks on for the first-ever collaboration between Texas Book Festival and Fusebox arts festival, and I’m excited to see how they turn out. The walks are sold out, but I’m planning to do another one later in the year for newsletter readers, so if you’re interested shoot me an email (chris at christopherbrown-dot-com).

Here’s another Easter egg I found last Sunday, while scouting for the fourth and final walk:

The following week I’ll be at Alienated Majesty Books on April 22 in conversation with journalist and author Patrick Strickland on his debut short story collection, A History of Heartache. At the end of March I got to see Pulitzer winner Cristina Rivera Garza there in a bilingual presentation of the English translation of Autobiography of Cotton, and it was an incredible event from an exceptionally brilliant and charismatic author. If you’re in Austin and you’re not tracking that bookstore’s events feed, you should fix that (yes, they also host punk shows)—and drop by there and all the other stops on this weekend’s Austin Book Trail.

Friday’s episode of the public radio talk show On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti had great coverage of the new research about the decline in America’s bird population, its correlation with the intensification of agricultural practices, and possible remedies. Sobering but hopeful.

On the songs of the humpback whales, here’s a fascinating 2022 conversation with researcher Dr. Ellen Garland from the University of St Andrews:

And if you don’t know what I’m talking about when I mention Jacques Cousteau, here’s one of his whales episodes:

In other news a fiction writer or satirist couldn’t make up, Texas is trying to figure out how to annex parts of New Mexico.

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it, and have a great week. Here’s some blue sage (Salvia azuria) in bloom this week behind the factories:

Springtime arrived in earnest this week. We saw our first bats of the season fly through last Friday evening, and over the weekend as February turned to March the first flowers appeared around our yard. This year the trees bloomed before the spiderwort: Mexican buckeye, mountain laurel, and the hot pink blossoms of the redbuds, including the volunteer pictured above that I found the honeybees tending Monday evening. The warm sun brought a bunch of red admiral butterflies doing mating dances on our back patio while the cedar waxwings were still hanging out in the tall hackberries eating last year’s fruit, and by Friday the yard was full of monarchs working their way north.

Last Sunday morning I took our puppy for a long walk down the side streets of our post-industrial neighborhood. The sky was overcast, and the general mood induced by the newsfeed was dark, with Saturday morning’s attack on Iran followed by the local horror show of a mass shooting overnight at one of the downtown bars popular with college kids and recent grads. Putting the phone away and stepping out to get a little unstuck in time at first light, on streets that felt abandoned, seemed like a healthy antidote for the dog walker as well as the dog.

I don’t know exactly what it is that attracts me to monoliths of infrastructure as places to experience nature—something about the way they reveal the ruins of the future at the edges of our reality. The radio antenna pictured above is a hundred years old and change, the first one they built in Austin. The signal is long dead, but you wouldn’t know that from the signs warning you of the invisible waves of deadly energy. And because of the way the antenna embodies an intangible right to the broadcast spectrum, the few acres it occupies remain undeveloped. It’s less feral now than when I first stumbled upon it in 2010, as they have taken to clearing out the foliage since Covid in order to deter long-term campers and avoid freaking out the occupants of the new office building next door. But it still provides a weird little pocket of refuge, especially in the trees that line the lot lines on three sides.

Sunday morning as Fifi showed me the scent trails that wound around the antenna, we could hear more than a dozen different species of songbirds in the foliage, including a couple of new lifers for me. We also heard a red-shouldered hawk nearby, and spotted an osprey perched atop the tower. The ospreys seem to be mating right now, as evidenced by the one I saw later in the week trying to scare off every other avian inhabitant of the river, hovering and shrieking around the heron rookery, then flushing a pair of caracara from the cottonwoods and hazing the male halfway to the toll road.

Pressed into the field at the base of the antenna below the osprey’s gaze, we found bones. A femur, forelegs, a ball joint, half a fanged mandible. I wondered what predators came around here big enough to kill a mammal that size, which seemed too big a prey for a feral cat to have taken. Coyotes seemed more likely, or perhaps the jaguarundi-looking creature I glimpsed on the other side of that lot last summer.

Looking back up at the tower, I thought about the news that had been carried over the airwaves from there over the remainder of the century that followed its construction in 1922. News of the Crash and news of the Wars, before the arrival of FM consigned it to soft rock oldies. I’ve gotten to thinking that news from afar is better when it gets to you slower, and as an experiment in proving my point I’ve been trying to get most of my news with a cheapo print subscription to the Financial Times that comes by snail mail 2-7 days after the date on the masthead, usually out of chronological order. It achieves the desired distancing effect, but has not yet weaned me off the breaking news alerts on my phone.

After the walk we drove en famille to pick up my mom to take her out for breakfast. The walk had flushed the news of the active shooter event from my mind, until we got downtown and had to detour around the blocked streets and the looming sense of dread. That’s when I realized that the mass shooting had taken place three blocks from my mom’s apartment, and two blocks from my law office, at a bar we often passed on our way to pick her up. I remembered the scene I had glimpsed and mostly ignored on Super Bowl Sunday, two stories of open decks packed with ecstatic young revelers getting their college town Dionysus on. The memory made the scene described in the dribbling-out details of the horror easier to imagine.

I remarked to Agustina how I guessed they would soon tell us it was linked to terrorism, laying pipe for the coming state of exception. And of course they did just that at the mid-day press conference, as the phone feed revealed seemingly implausible stories of the shooter wearing a “Property of Allah” hoodie, one of those details designed to reveal character that would be too obvious and implausible to use in a work of fiction. Later in the week the security cam videos were released and revealed the evident truth of the story.

Monday as I finished up my salad bar lunch at the Whole Foods flagship store around the corner, I got another news update about the shooting. I decided to walk by the site on my way back to the office. The crime scene investigation had been completed, and things looked mostly back to normal as I crossed the bridge over Shoal Creek. But you could still feel the event in the air. Then I started to notice more tangible signs, weirdly similar to animal tracks in the encrypted stories they tell of what happened before you got there.

The first thing I noticed was a faded black stain on the sidewalk, like the shadow of a spilled drink. Then I noticed some grains of a beige sawdust-like material sprinkled around it, like the one the janitors would use to clean up the mess after some kid puked in class in grade school. Other signs of what definitely were spilled drinks were all over, especially along the curb—tossed plastic cups, empty airplane-size wine bottles, broken brown fragments of Bud Light. Walking on, I noticed the constellation of orange dots freshly painted on the sidewalk, perhaps where spent casings had been retrieved.

When I looked up from there, I saw one of the dudes who works in the bar next door patching a bullethole on the front wall of his Kung Fu Saloon, while their AI cowboy Bronson mural that has always creeped me out let the world know what the bots think will make you want to come in for a couple of beers.

At lunch I had been reading about Elon Musk’s recent remarks to the team on his vision of “sustainable abundance” (recently updated to “amazing abundance,” evidently because “sustainable” has acquired negative connotations) and Marc Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” As the week went on, I watched the drama unfold as the founder-CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic played out their prisoner’s developer’s dilemma game of who would allow their LLM to be used by the Pentagon to power autonomous weapons. Then on Friday I read how Musk’s brain-computer interface company start-up, Neuralink, is building its new headquarters not far from our home. And how last weekend’s shooter had allegedly been a Tesla employee until recently. The paranoid science fiction stories practically write themselves.

On Thursday my not-so-paranoid science fiction writer friend Bruce Sterling sent me a link to an interesting new study from Oxford’s Leverhulme Center for Nature Recovery about AI visions of ecological rewilding, and the ways they tend to show what they think we want to see, with lots of cute mammals in depopulated landscapes and a total absence of rotting carcasses, dead vegetation, or human infrastructure—“the aestheticisation of hope through sanitized nature narratives.”

I also found Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which is really a kind of manifesto for the emancipation of machine intelligence from any constraints other than those chosen by its owners. The manifesto mentions nature five times, the takeaway of which is distilled in this quote:

“We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”

Friday morning after I dropped our daughter off at school, I went to grab a quick breakfast and answer some emails at the coffee shop around the corner, in an old strip mall by the highway. Out the window I noticed the evening primrose had begun to bloom in the median below the double decks of I-35. Primrose is one of those resilient native wildflowers that somehow persist in the zones formerly dominated by the prairie ecologies we have largely erased from this region through plow and pavement—after we took the land with the power of the gun. I wondered if anyone is putting the bots to work figuring out how to reconcile their mandate to maximize human abundance with the accelerating destruction of other life our myopic hubris has caused. Or if they’re worried the AIs we barely control now will eventually use the autonomous weapons we give to realize a greener version of John Connor’s future.

Friday evening after school we took the kid to a screening of the new Pixar movie, Hoppers. It’s about a girl trying to save the wetland her park ranger grandma stewarded from the construction of a new elevated highway. It’s also about the repurposing of our advanced technologies in service of the protection of nature, as the girl learns how to install her own consciousness into a robotic beaver that she uses to incite a revolution of all the animals, now crowded together into their last multi-species redoubt. In the end they and the humans all figure out how to get along, and even the development-addicted evil mayor becomes a steward of the wild. It was pretty great as kids movies go, but they probably won’t let Claude and GPT watch it. I like to think some of the kids who watch it will grow up to program a better future than we seem to have managed, but I fear that will come after the lightning teaches us who’s the real boss.

Extra Credit

Thanks to the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society for flying me up to speak at the Philadelphia Flower Show, and to the great crowd of folks who came over in the rain to hear my talk and hit me up with some of the best questions I’ve gotten giving talks about A Natural History of Empty Lots came out, including an excellent provocation from landscape architect Hans Hesselein of Philadelphia’s Apiary Studio about how we can reconcile rewilding and human inclusion. I’d never been to one of these big flower shows (other than Chelsea, which my parents dragged me to on vacation when I was in sixth grade), and it was pretty trippy to see the psychedelic floral installations.

Friday was the 136th anniversary of the introduction of 30 pairs of European starlings into New York’s Central Park by the American Acclimitization Society. There are around 200 million here now, outcompeting the natives, including the ones who nest in the billboards near our home.

The Romans had their version of daylight savings time, but their approach was to lengthen and shorten their hours, all year long—summer hours up to 75 minutes long and winter as short as 45.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is real, and has been doing the work for a decade now. (Roll over, Isaac Asimov.)

When I got back from Philadelphia Wednesday, my copy of Washington, D.C. photographer Stephen Voss’ photo book about the landscape and eerie energy of Silicon Valley, The Haunting of Verdant Valley, was waiting for me. Powerful stuff, and a great companion to Malcolm Harris’ excellent Palo Alto, which I started reading last week.

Today is International Women’s Day and March is Women’s History Month, the theme of which for 2026 is rights, justice and action for all women and girls.

For some new women’s history with a regional natural history focus, I’m excited to check out Jennifer Bristol’s new book Wild Women for Good, a profile of a century and a half of women in conservation in Texas, out from Texas A&M University Press.

If you’re in Austin and up for it, the evolving impromptu memorial outside Buford’s on West Sixth is a deeply moving way to pay respects to the victims. The bar reopened this weekend.

Have a safe week.

One morning last week, our year-old Jack Russell Terrier and I found three skulls in the weird woods behind our house. Fifi (so named by our six-year-old daughter) found two of them, proving herself a more capable field companion than I had expected from her homuncular scale. The most remarkable of these totems was the stag pictured above, which she found a few feet away from the carcass I had stumbled upon; the opossum she found still attached to its spine was also pretty intense. The doe skull had been out there for years, evident from rain-bleached white bone. We did not take them as omens; just signs of the season, when the foliage is at its barest, animal trails are easier to follow for the bushwhacker, and things are easier to spot when you do. In a couple of weeks it will be over—the invasive brome grass is already beginning to carpet the forest floor, crowding out the natives by coming up before them, and the spiderwort came back strong this week, flourishing in the dirty soil of ancient bluffs polluted with illegally dumped construction debris slowly sinking into some Anthropocene geological layer.

It’s good to know the coyotes are still around, after a few seasons where I worried they had moved on. The pandemic brought a lot more people into this pocket of riparian forest down between the dam and the bridge, and the human activity on the upland terraces around it has gotten a lot more intense. If you drive up the onramp to head south on the old highway, you get a glimpse from above of the Saruman-grade hole they are digging to house the pump station that will channel all the runoff from expanded Interstate 35 into the river, and at night you can see the lights of the crews working under the Moon. I have not yet seen any orcs being hatched, but they do have Skylink.

The naturally-occurring folk horror of the urban woods is an addicting thing. Experienced through regular ambles over the course of multiple seasons, it reveals the story of the food chain in the land, both the nibbling of the peaceful foragers and the left-behinds of the predatory hunters, and the ways that the other species we share the world with are left to occupy the margins of our dominion. Winter’s end lays it bare, when you can see not just every bone that would otherwise be buried in the tall grass, but also every nugget of the unimaginable volume of human trash the floodwaters leave behind.

February in this mostly unfrozen climate also brings the first signs of spring—not just the brome and the spiderwort, but also the rosettes of the native wildflowers that somehow persist even more resiliently than the coyotes and the whitetail. I saw the first bluebonnet blossom of the year Thursday, at the edge of the parking lot of our daughter’s school, and the rocky riverbank behind our home is flush with plants a couple of weeks from blooming.

The most beautiful seasonal development for us this winter’s end is probably the two mated pairs of great blue herons that have nested in a tall sycamore down in the floodplain right behind our house. There have been a half-dozen nests in another such tree upriver a bit for at least the last 7-8 years—I devoted a subchapter to it in Empty Lots—but last year was the first such nest visible from our living room. After many of the big floodplain trees were uprooted from their boggy basin by the 85-mph microburst that inaugurated last summer, I feared they would not come. So to see two nests where last year was one is an especially uplifting thing. The herons are an ambient presence all through the day, moving back and forth across the widescreen of our windows as we are making coffee, gathering more nest-making materials and skronking in the wind as we wash dishes and host friends, always with that lanky, extra-large grace that reminds you how close they are to the pterosaurs.

Even an old cynic like me feels the simple wonder and romantic sense of hope such a witness kindles, of a majestic species that a century ago had almost been extinguished now thriving within earshot of a door factory and a bus depot. A little research reveals how common such adaptations are all over the country, as various species of herons and egrets have learned how to make their nests in the interstitial remnants of viable habitat we have left them in otherwise intensely industrialized zones, from Newark Bay to the suburban delta around DFW Airport. When you learn that a healthy heronry involves a colony of as many as five-hundred nests, the hope and wonder sobers up a bit, as you wonder if any such colony could still be found.

The Sunday before last I attended the beautiful and uplifting memorial of my neighbor, friend and ally Daniel Llanes, a singular figure I got to work with for fifteen years advocating for these pockets of urban wild. I was feeling upbeat as I drove home, impressed by the diversity of the folks that turned out to laugh, cry, shout, and get re-energized about the power of community to make change happen. As I rolled down our street, passing Daniel’s home he made from an old auto body shop across from a truck tarp shop, I saw a weird jumbo jet coming in heavy, on final approach to our local airport. It was painted with the colors of some unknown airline, blue on white with the name “NATIONAL” painted across the fuselage.

I looked it up on the planespotter app, which lets you identify aircraft from their proximity to your location. An Airbus A330-200 operated by National Airlines, which research revealed is a private charter that specializes in defense logistics, “moving sensitive, high-value, and highly classified cargo to the world’s most complex locations.” It was arriving from Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, after having flown there earlier that morning from El Paso, and was scheduled to leave two hours later for its corporate home base in Orlando. I wondered what cargo it carried, and what kind of border-forward operations it was supporting. I even wondered if the windowless plane might be loaded with people, in this era when “Homeland Security” officials talk up their ambition to be like “Amazon Prime, but with human beings.”

Two mornings later, the insane news alert came out at the beginning of the work day that the airspace over El Paso had been closed for 10 days for undisclosed emergency reasons. The closure was reversed later the same morning, and various fragmentary pseudo-explanations about drones and counter-drones were circulated. I wondered if the plane I had seen had some connection to whatever’s going on out there, and to the other news reports about the massive detention facilities now being operated on the grounds of Fort Bliss. (My wife posed the question whether it might be evidence from the Epstein ranch being moved to a more undiscoverable secret location.) I found myself thinking about how, since the huge deportation funding bill was enacted last summer, the skies around here have become more active with all manner of unexplained military and paramilitary movements, in a way I haven’t seen since the tail end of the War on Terror, when we first started living under the flightpath. How the vibe back then, which was also the aftermath of the Financial Crisis, the peak of #Occupy, and the long year of the Arab Spring, induced me to write black mirror fictions imagining what it would be like if that war, with its black sites and extrajudicial punishments, came home.

That era, the last few years of the Obama administration, was also when we seemed to be trying to take on more robust public policy efforts to tackle the climate crisis. This week I read most of the EPA’s final rule rescinding the 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger clean air and human health, curious to see if it would provide any insights into what all is going on in the hive mind of the state. The document endeavors to ground its decision in dry questions of statutory authority, but the exuberant celebration of extractionist restoration comes through. A reminder that the war on nature and the war on our neighbors are deeply connected, and the path to a better future starts with seeing those intersections more clearly.

New Book News

I’m delighted to share this deal report from Thursday’s edition of Publisher’s Marketplace:

The aim of this new book is to blend nature writing, technology criticism and memoir to explore the landscapes of 21^st century capitalism through a natural history prism, seeking out pockets of biodiversity and adaptation at a moment when machine intelligence seems on the verge of taking over the world, and exploring paths to a greener and more livable future. It will be centered on field visits to sites that epitomize our current economic and ecological trajectories, and I am excited to dig into that original research around the continent. I may be pinging some of you for help and local knowledge.

Thanks to all the readers who checked out and spread the word about A Natural History of Empty Lots (the ebook edition of which is still on sale as of this morning), and this newsletter, and helped create the opportunity for this new book.

Let’s Go for a Walk

I’m also really excited about this upcoming event announced Tuesday, the first-ever collaboration between the Texas Book Festival and Fusebox, our amazing local performing arts festival. Unfortunately, all the tickets sold within a day! So if you are in Austin and want to go for a walk but didn't get this news in time, feel free to email me and we’ll work on one just for readers of this newsletter.

The Roundup

Happy 94th birthday to Gerhard Richter, whose landscape paintings have been on my mind of late.

On the subject of the “endangerment finding,” I was simultaneously uplifted and sobered by Bill McKibben’s newsletter this week about the coming El Niño, and how it’s arrival will quickly bring the urgency of the climate crisis back to the forefront of our politics.

The February issue of Harper’s has a great Hari Kunzru piece on his psychogeographical ramble through “Another London.”

Thanks to Field Notes friend and “human web-crawler” Bruce Sterling for this amazing piece on how to use deep search to find novel Anthropocene nature adaptations in crowdsourced digital platforms, or “INQUIRE-Search: Interactive Discovery in Large-Scale Biodiversity Databases.” An outtake:

RIP Jesse Jackson, who I got to meet in Chicago in the summer of 1985, after experiencing an amazing morning session at PUSH headquarters, an old South Side synagogue that had been turned into the venue for rousing secular sermons. My Republican parents had been so moved by his message that they crossed over, supported him in the 1984 Iowa Caucuses, and hosted one of his senior staffers in our Des Moines home. He was perhaps the most effective orator I ever heard, and definitely the most grounded in a righteous sense of justice. Over at Grist, a perspective on his commitment to environment justice.

In urban wildlife news, interesting New York Times report this week on the cougars of L.A. and the wildlife crossing that’s about to open just for them.

Longtime readers of this newsletter know that cavorting between black vultures and crested caracara is not as surprising as the Times suggested in the same issue of Science Times.

Have a great week.

Real winter weather is so rare in this part of Texas that I sometimes forget how essential the occasional long walk in the cold white stillness is to my mental health, maybe even to my personality. Until my mother moved down here a year and a half ago, I would always get my fix visiting her in the remote Iowa woodland she and Dad retired to. Last weekend we were blessed with a wintry mix that arrived on a Saturday, and allowed us time and space to relish it. And in Austin, any real accumulation of snow or ice shuts down the machineries of state and capital almost completely, as the local governments lack both the capacity and will to do anything to remove it. So this week, after a mix of freezing rain and sleet coated the city overnight on Saturday, all they did was tell everyone to stay home and do nothing until it melts. Typically that would happen the next day, but this time it really wasn’t until Wednesday that the bridges were clear, and Thursday that it got genuinely warm.

That the sleet storm was accompanied by thunder and lightning added an apocalyptic frisson to the event. In the morning the season’s first flock of waxwings had come through, filling the high boughs of our fruit-filled hackberries a little earlier than usual.

The cold snap hit right on schedule, just as we finished setting up my wife’s birthday present in the yard: a huge, old-school canvas tent designed to accommodate a wood stove, the sort of set up designed for cold country elk hunters that we aim to experiment with in this warmer clime. By mid-afternoon the cousins were already over making s’mores on the stovetop with Octavia. The only member of the household who wasn’t excited about the arrival of real winter was our 16-year-old hound, Lupe. Lupe’s hips had begun to really fail her last summer, and it was evident that the sudden cold amped up her discomfort to the point where she couldn’t get up or lay down without assistance. Thankfully the floors under her bed are heated, and we had developed an easily changed set up that let us keep it clean and comfortable.

Our house is designed such that the bedrooms and living room/kitchen, which are the only rooms we have, are divided by an uncovered patio. So when you get up before sunrise after a winter storm, you open the bedroom door and step right out into it. Not enough accumulation this time to leave a drift at the door, but thick sheets of ice dusted with just enough powder that you might think it was snow until your feet went out from under you. The kind of cold that also brings the quiet, the comforting silence when the machine of the city shuts down for a few hours, no one else is out, and even the animals are hunkered in whatever warm shelters they can find.

The padlock on our back gate was frozen, so rather than open it with the shovel the terrier puppy and I headed out on the icy street and walked toward the base of the tollway onramp, past the abandoned milk plant, and down one of the cul de sacs in the industrial park designed for the semis to turn around, where we found a less official access point to the urban woods, pictured above. The zone on the other side of the chainlink is a mix of private and public land, but the boundaries between the two are not marked, and pathways do not recognize them. In the snow the animal trails and tire paths through the foliage stood out in high relief, like a network map suddenly lit up on the board.

We took advantage of that to explore trails we had not taken before. One took us into a clearing where we encountered two young bucks staring back at us, another into a recently abandoned camp deep in the viney woods that had been shielded with a wall of cut bamboo. Further in from there, we came upon a tight-looking tent made from a big tarp and other found materials, which seemed a picturesque tableau until we heard a dog growl at the sound of the shutter on my dad’s old Canon F-1, and I was reminded that most tents do not have fancy little stoves.

Monday the city was still closed down, so we decided to go further and explore the gnarlier industrial lots being slowly cleared to make room for a mixed-use development that will profoundly transform this little pocket of Tarkovsky Park. The ferality we found when we moved here sixteen years ago has been bleeding out bit by bit every season, sometimes rebounding. Fewer coyotes, more cool birds, the curiosity of Capital and its commission-chasing young brokers ebbing and flowing with the interest and occupancy rates. A good winter storm lets you see what wildlife is still out there from the tracks they leave in the snow, and get windows through time, into memory, and into the variant futures that leave other signs on the land, and sometimes in the light that shimmers.

At the spot where the frontage road loops under the tollway bridge, we found a little trail that led past another tall fence into the sliver of woods on the north bank of the river. The ice crunched under every step, and the big herons and egrets telegraphed our passage with loud skronks. We walked under the power pylons, and eventually the trail left the woods and entered the weird plain that leads to the mountain of asphalt millings. I stepped up onto a high berm, to take in the wider vantage. I could see where they had recently demolished the old building a guy I know had squatted in for years, under the canopy of the largest circumference tree in Travis County, and decided to see how it was doing.

Those ancient oaks, centuries old, often can be found near old highways, most of which follow more ancient pathways. They’re more common near two-lane highways in less-traveled parts of the state, but sometimes you’ll find a tough old Ent that’s holding out as two lanes become four, and now eight, and the pavement and traffic get ever closer. A few years ago I saw the rendering where the developers showcased that tree as the entry landmark for their planned redevelopment. A nice idea, but I can’t help but want to imagine how it will look in another few hundred years, when it outlasts our ruin. Monday morning, it didn’t look that far off.

We worked our way back from there, across expansive sheets of ice that gave the industrial wastes a beauty they had not earned, tracing a new path through a savanna of frozen retama until we found the main trail. At one spot we came upon some discarded objects that included a trio of stuffed animals face-down in the snow, and a massively warped vinyl record whose label had become illegible. I picked it up and turned it over to look at the other side, and could just make it out: The Legendary Josh White. Half of a two-disc compilation, I later learned, from 1982, by a remarkable artist I had never heard of, who bridged the blues into political folk in the mid-twentieth century until he was blacklisted in the early 50s for advocating conceptions of freedom and community not founded on private property rights.

Tuesday morning the schools and offices were still closed, but the back lock had finally de-iced, so Fifi (so named by our six-year-old, and an apt choice) and I walked down to the river around 8:30. We hadn’t gotten far when we saw motion in the near distance. A pair of coyotes on the rocky bank, ducking into the woods when they saw us. We followed, slowly, wanting to see them but also wanting to give them space.

Winter makes it easier to see wildlife in the middle distance, and if you track the line where the horizon would be, you always have a good chance of spotting whatever’s around. The coyotes had split just a little bit to go in slightly different directions, probably a smart strategy. But both stopped when we stepped from the riverbank into the woods, and watched us back as we stood there. Their coats were thick and autumnal, a lush orangey brown like the color of old Carhartts tinged with goldenrod. They looked healthy and big, and I wondered if they might be a Central Texas variant of the ghost wolves, the coyotes who are partly descended from our native and otherwise exterminated red wolves. I also thought about how often coyotes encountered in the early morning seem unwary, maybe exhausted or engorged from the long night’s hunt.

The coyotes only moseyed when we did. They sauntered slowly back deeper into the woods, headed downriver. Or so it appeared.

When we worked our way back to the house fifteen minutes later, they were there. One right at our back gate. The other on the rise nearby, just inside the edge of our unmarked property line.

I remembered how, when Lupe and our other dog Katsu were younger, right after we built the house and rewilded the lot, the coyotes would often come to the fence to visit, as if luring our dogs out.

That afternoon we dropped our snow day daughter off at grandma’s and took pain-stricken Lupe to the veterinarian for an assessment. We talked through her progression and status since the last visit, and all sat with her there on the floor. When we began to conclude that maybe it was time, she gave us eerily comprehensible expressions of enthusiastic concurrence.

Living in a place like this, I’ve come to see how dogs often embody many of the dark aspects of our domestication of animals, in the way we have bred dogs to instinctively try to kill or chase off any living creature that enters our domain and is not human or canine. Lupe’s 10-year companion Katsu, a fierce hunter from a breed raised to chase down the wild boars of Kishu, was very much that way. Lupe was different.

She appeared down the street from us as a puppy right after we moved into a rented little cottage next to our then-empty lot, abandoned and living on an old sofa dumped behind the diner with her sister. Our neighbors adopted the sister, who they named Lucy, and we adopted Lupe. She was all black in color, mostly blackmouth cur in breeding but with a mix of other traits, and native to this place, where the riparian woods hide in a secret pocket of wildness behind the factories at the edge of town, a landscape she had learned to survive in. She was an incredible tracker, a stealthy ninja, wary of humans, and super tough, but also strangely gentle—able to protect the home while also managing to co-exist with the other life around her. I had to earn her trust, and was rewarded with a glimpse at how she experienced the world, and her subtle way of teaching me lessons in how to live in the world.

Only later, as we headed home, did I mention to Agustina the eerie visitation from the coyotes. Like spirits of the forest, who knew where Lupe was going before we did.

Further reading

I also wrote remembrances of Lupe’s sister Lucy here in 2024, and of her companion Katsu here in 2021. For a great read on how free-ranging dogs adapt to urban life, check out Alan Beck’s amazing 1973 study from Baltimore, The Ecology of Stray Dogs.

RIP J. David Bamberger, chicken tycoon turned restoration practitioner and advocate, who died last weekend at 97. My son Hugo spent a lot of time in his childhood summers at nature camp at Bamberger Ranch, where he got deep learning about the ecology of our region and how it can be regenerated and stewarded. Bamberger did much to give that kind of work social and ethical cachet among people with the resources to do land restoration work at the scale of huge acreages, and the welcome he extended to others from across the community over the course of his life was remarkable.

In the long reads department, I enjoyed Adam Shatz’s January lecture and essay for the London Review of Books, “Visions of America,” which provides an interesting perspective on the current moment and where we could be going, at the same time as it made me frustrated with its absolutely urbanist and metropolitan focus. I don’t think it’s possible to understand the dark power dynamics and profound inequalities that hide behind our exceptionalist and egalitarian mythology without seeing how rooted they are in our damaged relationship with the land on which we live. But I still recommend the talk, even if (spoiler alert) what you get at the end of an 8,000-word survey heavy on pessimism is a little dose of giddiness about Mamdani as messiah. Print version here, and lecture video here.

For another perspective on the real American, read about the remarkable life of the legendary Josh White.

And thanks to Rick Klaw for tipping me off to the amazing story of Minneapolis indie bookseller Greg Ketter, owner of DreamHaven Books and Comics, going viral with the images of him facing down the federal troops even as the clouds of tear gas swarm around his unmasked face.

@msnow“I’m 70-years-old and I’m f—ing angry” A Minnesota man reacts in the aftermath of today’s fatal federal shooting in Minneapolis, as agents deploy crowd-control munitions during protests. #news #minnesota

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Here’s a wider shot of the largest circumference oak tree in the county, holding out between the asphalt dump and the tollway.

Stay warm and have a safe week.

Monday morning as I inched my way onto I-35 after dropping my daughter off at her sweet little school across from the abandoned shopping mall, I saw a dude walking along the shoulder of the northbound lanes, wrapped in a black blanket that blew in the wind every bit like a cloak he might have borrowed from one of Galadriel’s elven lieutenants circled around the fire behind the Home Depot. The guy was being followed by three police interceptors inching along behind him at the same pace, emergency lights running. My view was obscured as we passed under the 51^st Street overpass, and when we emerged, the cops had disappeared. In the moment’s glance I could grab as I merged into the flow, I watched the hero continue his journey on the concrete ledge as if it were some mountain pass, the cloak animated with the brush strokes of the winter wind. Put one on the boards for the home team.

On our way to drop-off, the first grader and I discussed the new year’s resolution she had shared in her homework: “Toking to Birds.” That got me thinking about how we might go about making first contact, and with which species.

Winter is the season when the great-tailed grackles are especially easy to find. In the evening when I’m headed home from work they are often gathered on the ledges of the interstate’s upper deck during evening rush hour. Maybe they are looking for the pyramids that were once their home, when Moctezuma’s uncle Ahuizotl imported them to Central Mexico from their native habitat around Veracruz. They’ve only occupied Central Texas for a century or so. Thursday morning when I got my early departure for LAX, hundreds had filled the branches of the little landscaper trees that pretend to hide the parking garage. When grackles vocalize, it sometimes sounds like the squawk of a radio being tuned, and I’ve always wondered if you could imitate them with some sort of hand-held held electronics.

It’s also the season when the great blue herons return to their nests along the river behind our home, in the sliver of forest grown up in the floodplain between the tollway and the dam. There’s one tall old sycamore with a half-dozen nests that you can see from the end of our street. The tree grows from a trash-ridden bog at the base of a steep bluff, and was long hidden behind a cluster of windowless metal warehouses. But when they tore those down to make room for a planned development, the nests on the high branches were suddenly revealed, not that any of the young singles notice the amazing view while navigating their way from their cars to the bars. The first nest was re-occupied right after Thanksgiving, and by New Year’s they all looked to be. Those birds make strange noises too, more skronk than squawk, that I’ve sometimes thought could be easily replicated on a baritone sax with the right sort of free jazz energy.

Not far from that spot, a pair of black vultures has been hanging out a lot on this one particular telephone pole, above Rumpelstiltskin’s little shack behind the wind chime factory. They showed up right around Christmas, smudged with chalky white stains, cleaning each other and necking in the way only vultures can do, with those necks, heads and beaks designed to crawl up through a tear in your belly and pull out the the soft bits. They don’t really have a way for us to talk to them, but they seem very contented with the roadkill-rich habitat we’ve created for them.

And down in the woods, the barred owls seem especially active. It may be that the leafless winter canopy just makes it easier to spot them from a distance on our morning walks—I saw one every morning when I got down there this week. They are the only raptor I’ve ever managed to imitate well enough to elicit a response to my call, and they are the first bird Octavia and I saw when I carried her down into those same woods as a baby, so maybe I’ll try teaching her their call first. We might even summon Athena along the way.

New Year’s Roundup

Apologies to regular readers for what has been my longest gap between posts in the five years I’ve been writing this newsletter. We had an especially busy December, which culminated with an extended family journey to spread my father-in-law’s ashes at his hometown. The trip included an unplanned two-day layover in a Miami Airport business park Hyatt living off airline coupons, a challenging day getting over the Andes from Santiago to Mendoza by car, and a rough 24-hour journey back that included a 10-hour red eye in a cramped middle seat with the kid sprawled across my lap. I read Piglia on Borges most of the way, having gotten completely hooked while in-country, and able to read the Spanish more fluently thanks to the week of immersion. We had invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president that morning, and the vibe at DFW as we re-entered the USA reminded me how, ever since 9/11, the return home is always the most anxiety-inducing part of the trip.

Thursday evening in my L.A. hotel, watching CNN as I got ready to head to a business dinner, I was momentarily confused by the way the Chyron-crowded splitscreen made me think that footage of the violent uprising in Iran was downtown Minneapolis. I had a flashback to this time 15 years ago, when my feed was full of scenes from the Arab Spring, while the old neon plant across the street was the secret staging ground for the local chapter of #Occupy. I thought the conflation of the two could make a great story, and soon started working on what became my first novel, Tropic of Kansas: a story about an uprising in the U.S. to take out a fascistic corporate government run by a charismatic CEO turned authoritarian president. As I imagined him at the time, a mix of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Hugo Chavez. The way the story played out, it opens in a militarized Minnesota, where rebels have been fighting the government for years. It seemed so implausible at the time.

I hadn’t looked at or given much thought to that book in years. Writing a book is a lot like an exorcism, and the idea of re-reading one’s first novel is a bit like the idea of reading stuff you wrote in your high school yearbook. But I was curious enough to see how my Minnesota scenes written in 2013-14 compared to reality that I opened the file up on my flight home Saturday, and it was strange to see how what had felt deliberately surreal in the writing has come so much closer to the now. You can read the first three short chapters here at Reactor, if you’re interested.

Having worked so hard to imagine what real-world Minnesota Monkeywrenchers would be like, I got a big smile reading this weekend’s field report from Julie Bosman at the NYT on how some folks are using the winter ice as their ally in pranking the Southern boys they assume to be disproportionately represented behind the ICE masks. Even my cranky old Republican dad would have admired the detail of the locals using their pull-on cleats to get around on surfaces the Homelanders can’t handle, as he was a big fan of those.

Over the holidays we started watching long-form nature documentaries with our daughter, looking for video-based narratives that reward more patient observation. We settled on Nature, which proved to be one of the only old-school PBS documentary series that still had the pacing of the pre-digital era. We screened two amazing episodes, one about sea turtles and jaguars, and the other about the walrus, and they were each beautiful but also slightly sad, as the stories they told were stories of animals adapting to the ways we have altered their longtime habitats. I wrote about it for my friends at Aqueduct Press, the Seattle-based publisher of feminist science fiction, for their always-excellent year-end roundup of things to read, watch and listen to.

While part of the point of watching nature documentaries is seeing real life instead of computer imaging, the episode about the walrus included some graphics that reminded me how data-based machine visualization can powerfully complement real-world observation. I especially liked the below animated representation, which shows the females and pups making their run for the safety of the pack ice while the males hang back and get ready to head for the coastal beaches.

The punchline of the story is that the pack ice you can see at the center top, so critical to the way the walrus have long raised their young, is receding to a point where they may no longer be able to reach it.

Upcoming Appearances

If you’re in Austin, I’ll appearing this Thursday evening, January 22, at the Fusebox Artists Lab, to talk about my programming for this year’s festival, part of a new collaboration between Fusebox and the Texas Book Festival. I’ll be sharing more about that here soon—stay tuned.

If you’re in the Philadelphia area, on March 3 I’ll be appearing at the Philadelphia Flower Show.

More events coming up throughout the year, and I will share the details as they become available.

Stay safe, and have a great week.

November was the season of the rut, when the stags become a more common sight in the urban woods, looking for mates and more inclined to do crazy shit. I’ve been walking our terrier puppy down in the floodplain and along the riverbank, watching her energetic strategies for navigating the obstacles that bushwhacking present when your legs are less than six inches long. I keep her on a long lead, which further complicates the exercise, but the wildlife seem to appreciate it. And we made it through the season without any dangerous encounters, despite walking into the middle of some exceptionally frisky mixed groups of whitetail.

The puffed-up poise with which the males presented themselves during this was striking, turning and trotting like regal specters, maybe headed back to whatever other world it is where the most majestic ones spend the rest of the year.

My friend Henry emailed from his Monday commute into Manhattan to share this image of the rut as it occurs in New Jersey:

this morning a stark sight at the commuter train station, the picture of which I do not send,

a young sixpointer white-tailed buck, renversé, impaled

impaled in left posterior haunch following a failed traverse of the spiked railway palisse or fence

I am not superstitious but it seems a grim portent, or anyway a data point in the proposed Montclair deer census. It is the deer equivalent of teenage dare in overcrowded suburbia

I told him I may steal that dark winter vignette for a story, about the uptown rare book dealer who can’t get the scene out of his head, and makes the unwise decision to go back on foot and see if he can give the animal a more dignified eternal rest. I’ve had my own share of similar encounters, which provoke something different than the usual impulse of stewardship.

The rut seems to have mostly wound down here this week, a little on the early side. The week before Thanksgiving brought us rain, and late bloomers. The most notable, if not the most colorful, was the frost weed, which seems extra thick this season, and well matched with the cold moon of December.

When the really cold nights come, the frost weed sweats extravagant vents of ice from its stems, often in surreal formations. The plant roots most readily in places where a lot of water collects. Its abundance may in part reflect the fact that the deer apparently don’t like it, and the fact that it has such an effective way of finding wet spots in a dry land. A winter bloom that comes with an enigmatic promise. In part, for me, a sign of the brief but expansive refuge year-end can provide from the treadmill of Capital, in the same way it signals the cold season’s incubation of spring.

The Wednesday after Thanksgiving, I snuck away from the office early to say a death bed goodbye to a dear friend. Daniel Llanes was someone I worked closely with over the past dozen years on urban conservation issues, a neighbor who became an ally and a mentor of sorts. I chronicled some of our work together in A Natural History of Empty Lots, but I only hinted at his unique character and personality. Daniel was a rare type, a unicorn among men—one of the grooviest people you could ever meet, at the same time as he was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen at driving people crazy. The latter because he was so persistent and unvarnished in his commitment to calling out injustice when he saw it, and in his refusal to accept it as the way the world must be.

In a way, I didn’t really know the whole guy—just the one from the last 15 years of his life, working together on projects where we were so focused on the matter at hand that we didn’t talk much about personal pasts. He was a striking fellow, even in his elder years, with shoulder-length curly hair, a simultaneously extravagant and humble 70s sartorial style, and a big smile. He lived in a house he had made from an old body shop, with a view of an industrial corridor outside his front door and the wild river and woods as his backyard.

A San Antonio kid of Indigenous heritage who loved to dance, sing and make music, and managed to get himself into Juilliard (if I remember the story right), he returned to Texas to be one of the first non-white members of the Austin Ballet, and there learned some of the ways in which Austin was (and is) not as progressive and inclusive as it likes to convince itself. He developed an independent career as a multi-instrumental singer-songwriter who also worked as a healer and occasionally produced lovely works of visual art (including macro photography of flowers), and dedicated much of his adult life to advocating for environmental and social justice in East Austin. He made a huge impact during his life, and nurtured the seeds for an awakening I can feel beginning to emerge as the new generation takes the mantle.

He passed peacefully Thursday evening, as the last full moon of the year was rising in the eastern sky.

It was a drizzly week, and it wasn't until Saturday morning that the sky cleared and the sun came back out. The puppy and I went back down to the river, maybe thinking a bit about our friend’s passage into the spirit world.

It was chilly, and a little foggy, but more alive than this stretch has seemed in a while. The river was thick with gadwalls in the water and birdwatchers on the opposite bluff. A pair of white ibis flew past us, into the sun, followed by a kingfisher, and then a big osprey came over low, from shadow into sun. The sandy stretches of the banks were thick with tracks of raccoons, herons, and coyotes, the latter a less frequent sight around here lately.

The river was reshaped by the summer’s floods, so we had to find a new path to the east, one that took us through the trash-strewn woods just over the banks. When we made it back out to the edge, where the river stretches out right before the bridge, there were a half-dozen young deer cavorting in the shallows. We even managed to catch one pair playing at combat on their hindlegs:

It was a scene of restoration and peace, even as you could hear the piledrivers banging away in the near distance, building the pump station that will channel all the drainage from the expanded Interstate 35 into the river just past the stretch pictured above. With luck, we will be able to turn that project into an opportunity for ecological uplift, and maintain this little pocket of rewilded river our departed friend worked so hard to protect.

Extra credit

More about the work of Daniel Llanes, including links to performance videos, here at his website.

My Empty Lots editor at Timber Press, Makenna Goodman, had a wonderful piece at the NYT this week, on the idea of magic as an alternative to therapy.

You may have seen the report about the raccoon in Virginia who got into a liquor store and got into the product:

In Boerne, Texas, on the western road from here to San Antonio, they have opened a new Predator-themed bar:

In homage to the original 1987 action movie thriller, Darkside After Dark is draped in lush jungle greenery with the skeleton of a pilot dangling from an actual helicopter stuck in a massive tree behind the bar. High up in a corner near walls that resemble treacherous rock cliffs, the Predator himself lurks, looking out over the crowd.

This is the same place where, twenty years ago, a group of locals got busted while recreating scenes from Mad Movies on the highways.

Crazy ant season is back.

And in Anthropocene evolutionary news, the WSJ confirms the suspicions reported earlier here that the self-driving Jaguars now hunting local streets in Austin, San Francisco and elsewhere in four-wheeled packs really are becoming more aggressive.

Apologies for taking a month between posts. I’ve been busy working on some new longform projects, thinking about how to take the newsletter in fresh directions—and taking our daughter camping. Here’s Inks Lake, upriver from us an hour, as it looked the night in November when the rain finally cleared, and the burn ban was lifted with it:

Have a safe week.

Friday morning as the front rolled in that would finally bring us some rain, I went for a walk beneath the platforms of two elevated freeways with my friend Paul, before we both headed to work. Paul is a birder, and this unlikely pocket of urban wild space he wanted to show me is also one I had long wanted to visit, after more than two decades of glancing curiously down at it while hurtling through the labyrinthine concrete cloverleaf where State Highway 183 intersects with the Mopac freeway.

When my son Hugo was his little sister’s age, 24 years ago, we went searching for the source of Shoal Creek, one of the main tributaries of the Colorado that cuts through the northern half of Austin. We lived close to the creek, and as transplanted Midwesterners were excited to find a place within walking distance of home where you could easily find fossils mixed in with the rocks of the limestone creekbed. Once you’re in a half-dry creek like that, you realize what a great trail it is, and want to follow it. We read about its history, how it used to always be full of water. The old-school paper street map we had in the car showed the full course of the creek, and at the origin point we saw icons marking the location of natural springs. We went looking for them, and found a new shopping center had been built where the map said the springs were. It was named The Arboretum, probably for the trees that the developers killed to make room for a Pottery Barn, and as we traced the coordinates we found ourselves looking down into a gabion well outside an office building. Ever since, every time I drove that way I’d see these ponds on the opposite side of the interchange, and wonder what connection they might have to that re-engineered ecology.

Paul and I met at 8 behind a Firestone shop along the frontage road. He was there when I arrived, binoculars in hand as he surveyed one of the ponds. The fall migration had mostly already passed through over the month preceding, though there were still a few stragglers. It looked like the state troopers had been through the week before, in the sweeps of homeless camps on city-owned land that the governor ordered without consulting city officials. As a consequence, it was quiet enough for Paul to make out every bird call, with the traffic noise just distant enough.

We saw one other human on the levee, and a lone Cabbage Patch Doll face down on the ballast along the railroad tracks, its pants around its ankles. We saw a lot of no trespassing signs as we got deeper into the zone, but knew they marked public property. The signs of life were a little sparse, until we crossed the tracks and made our way to the south pond and the dry wetland below the overpass. An egret in the water, a red-tailed hawk in a tree, prodigious crops of wild onion bulb underfoot, and the sound of a lone killdeer behind the Public Storage.

On our way back we checked out the patch of woods that parallels the tracks. Paul showed me a mature willow he has found a lot of cool birds in, and I found the skull of a medium-sized mammalian predator in a little clearing next to some coyote scat. In the moment I guessed it to be an opossum, but after some research now think it was likely a feral cat.

Places like that have a weird charisma, the way they hide the natural history of the region in the margins of our enshittified suburban landscape. Southern Pacific built a water stop for the steam trains at that spot, no doubt because there was ample water coming up out of the ground, and you can bet research would show that the highway they call Research Boulevard followed the path of some more ancient trail that preceded Anglo-American settlement. The idea that beautiful migratory birds seek cover in the sliver of junk woods that have been allowed to grow between a freight line and a freeway is both wondrous and sad, even as you can see what could be if we let that memory in the land more fully express.

We talked as we walked about Paul’s career path as a newly minted member of the bar setting out on a path as a public interest environmental lawyer. He and I had worked together on some river advocacy projects during lockdown, and had a lot of fun and a tiny bit of success taking on Tesla. I was heartened to hear he was sticking with his plan, which is not one the system makes easy.

We didn’t see any springs. Just a lot of concrete channels, one of which had been tagged with a message from the underground: “TAYLOR SWIFT IS A CIA PSYOP.”

The rain came that night, with thunder and lightning intense enough to awaken me from a deep slumber. After two brutally dry, hot months, the ecological response to the sudden saturation was immediate. By midday, when the sun was up and the clouds cleared, my daughter and I took in the marvel of a dragonfly ballet here in our feral lot behind the door factory. She didn’t notice it at first, as we walked out to the car, but when she did she lit up at the energy of dozens of little monsters zig-zagging above the desiccated foliage from which must have just hatched a brood of smaller flying nymphs we could not see.

We were headed to the Central Branch of the Austin Public Library, while Mom worked on finalizing Addams Family costumes for Wednesday and Morticia (my Gomez only required finding the pinstripe suit at the back of the closet). We’ve been spending a lot of time at the library, as Octavia has just had some breakthroughs as a new reader, Agustina and I are both in research mode on new projects, and the utopian promise of the public library has felt like a particular sanctuary in this darkening historical moment. Our main branch is especially promising in that regard, managing to be a temple of books that is also a temple of light deeply connected to its natural context, and staffed by an incredible team of professionals, many of them graduates of UT’s world-class information studies (fka library sciences) program.

On the wall by the fiction, you can even find a handy infographic guide to the library’s levels of illumination:

We had just passed the interstate, where the grackles were lined up atop the new sound barriers they have erected to muffle the cacophony of its coming expansion, when Octavia announced from the backseat that she didn’t want to go to the library after all. Instead, she said, we should just go out for lunch at her favorite place for noodles (which is catercorner from the library) and then return home. I could sense the certainty in her declaration, and acceded. But I continued in that direction, until a minute later when we pulled up to the light around Brazos Street, and I saw the road ahead was entirely blocked by a Die Hard-level deployment of police and fire trucks with their emergency lights on.

We diverted, found an alternate route, and got to the restaurant. Noodles ordered, I looked on my phone for more info about the emergency. And got a sobering lesson in the power of my child’s intuition:

I looked again a few minutes later, as we drew monsters on our placemats, and learned the shooter had escaped and was at large. That’s when I put my phone down and started paying more attention to what was going on around me.

Thankfully, just one person was injured, and no one killed, in what was evidently a dispute between two people known to each other, which transpired in the men’s bathroom on the top floor. The suspect was apprehended near a Starbucks in South Austin around 90 minutes later, in an area a lot like the frontage road edgeland I had been exploring with Paul the morning before.

Before we left the lunch spot I emailed a librarian I have gotten to know over the past year, to make sure she and her colleagues were okay. She replied that they and all but one patron were, that the years of active shooter training somehow did not work to prepare them for the experience, and that they were staying home the next day.

It rained again that night, and Sunday morning came the fog, so thick that when the puppy and I walked down to the river it was like stepping into the cover of some lost album of ambient music.

A few days later, right on cue, the rain lilies came up from the ground. Native wildflowers that somehow only respond to actual rain, not water from a hose, and seem to thrive in the most blighted, recently scraped patches of bulldozed dirt. I found them Thursday at the base of the onramp, greeting the sun as it rose over the tollway. Maybe it was the imminence of Halloween and Dia de los Muertos that made me see them for the first time not so much as wildflowers but as lilies, funerary flowers, offerings for the dead.

At lunch that afternoon, I read in the paper how scientists now believe that the exceptionally high water temperatures of the summer of 2023 have rendered the elkhorn and staghorn coral of Florida functionally extinct, raising concern about the viability of the rest of that marine ecosystem. Then I turned the page and read that the Japanese government is sending the Army into Akita prefecture to help exterminate the bears, which was like reading that they were hunting down Totoro.

When I suited up Friday after work and took Octavia trick or treating, we found another patch of rain lilies, this one in the median along the sidewalk in front of an unintentionally scary looking old house. She had been method acting the goth morbidity of Wednesday Addams with such a convincing ease over the course of the week that I shouldn’t have been surprised when she plucked one, and then gave it to a stranger as we arrived at her aunt and uncle’s house.

In the morning I found a rare specimen freshly hatched on our kitchen counter: A plume moth, a flying creature so strange in its anatomy, with wings like pipe cleaners and limbs of needle-like spikes, that you cannot quite believe it is truly alive until it flies away as you try to catch it and free it outside. Only now, looking at the picture, do I notice that it came in Halloween colors.

At the end of a grim week, it was good to get a reminder that there are still strange wild things being born all around us—even if we are not so good at seeing them, let alone being good stewards of the environment we share with them. I’m still coming to terms with the way our daughter, who loves the light, seems to be thinking she also needs to develop fresh tools to navigate the dark.

Today Octavia wants to teach me how to make an ofrenda. I wonder what other lessons she and her peers will have for us, when they take the reins of the future we have made for them.

In memory of Emily Lott, 1947-2025

The Roundup

This Wednesday evening, November 5, I’ll be teaching a class on “Writing the Natural World: A 21st Century Reboot” for the Writer’s League of Texas. It’s a single session, and you can participate from anywhere on the planet as long as you can do it from 6:30-9:30 pm CST. Details and registration here.

Thursday, November 6, I’ll be giving a talk about A Natural History of Empty Lots at the Joynes Reading Room on the UT-Austin campus as part of the Plan II Honors Program’s 2025-26 lecture series, co-sponsored by the Rapoport Center for Human Rights & Justice. Open to the public—details here.

And Saturday night, November 8, I’ll be participating in one of the Lit Crawl events for Texas Book Festival, 7-8 pm at the Speakeasy at 4th & Congress downtown.

At WSJ, the rise of the water sommelier, and $95 bottles of melted glacier.

I loved this Michelle Nijhuis post on “sintering”—the process whereby snowflakes build connections with each other after they fall.

On the political front, I was struck by this incisive Mark Lilla piece in the Nov. 6 issue of the NYRB tracing the seeds of our current situation back to the beginning of the 90s and beyond.

Enjoy your extra hour, keep an eye out for migrating monarchs, check out Wednesday’s full moon, and stay safe.

The last flowers of late summer are mostly gone now, after a brutally dry end of the season, working on two months of almost no measurable rain here in Austin. The urban forest in the floodplain behind our home feels dangerously dry, maybe even on the verge of some kind of collapse. But last week’s beautiful harvest moon finally brought a break in the temperatures, and permission for the hackberries and pecans to begin to drop their leaves.

I suppose that’s why, as I hung out with my 85-year-old mom this week during her recovery from oral surgery, I found myself reading an article in the paywall-obsessed Financial Times about how the battle over leaf blowers became a front line in the culture wars, which took me down a rabbit hole into the invisible literature of landscape management marketing copy.

“Dominate any cleanup job with the industry’s highest blow force.” So reads the tag line for the RedMax EBZ9000, one of the newest and perhaps one of the last in a line of gas-powered leaf blowers, in this case a “frame-mounted throttle” that lets you carry the oversized engine and gas tank on your back while you transform your right arm with a low-slung machine extension whose Freudian echoes don’t need the embellishment of the copywriters (though I suppose the promises about “25% longer run-time than the competition” and “decreased operator fatigue” don’t hurt).

In my youth as a Midwestern lawn boy making comic book money doing the work my dad and our neighbors were happy to outsource for cheap, the company that now markets its professional-grade outdoor power products under the macho brand “RedMax” went by Husqvarna, which I always figured was just the name of some chainsaw-loving guy from Minnesota, the state to our north. Turns out it’s a Swedish industrial conglomerate that originated as a 17th century rifle workshop sponsored by the sovereign.

I never used a leaf blower in all those years, not even when I became a suburban homeowner dad myself. Even when I was trapped with the absurd all-American labor of cleaning up the autumn leaves, my reflexive aversion to power tools and their noise and alienation from the object kept me seeking the hand-blistered zen of the rake. When I was little, and the autumns were cool and rainy, after Dad got the leaves into piles he would burn them. By the time I hit my 30s most municipalities, including all the towns I lived in from Des Moines to D.C. to Austin, had implemented burn bans and requirements that all leaves instead be put into giant, government-issue paper bags for collection, a Sisyphean task that helped one see how against nature the whole exercise is. So sometime during the peak of the Global War on Terror I became a conscientious objector in the war on leaves, and life has been better ever since.

Agustina, Hugo and I ended up making our home in a brownfield acre in the edgelands of East Austin, and set about restoring biodiversity to what had been a dump site bisected by an abandoned petroleum pipeline. That involved seeding the soil — including on the roof over our heads — with native plants that thrived when this region was Blackland prairie, an ecosystem that has been almost entirely (99%) eradicated for agriculture and development, but whose plants pop up just about anywhere the mowers leave alone. And one thing you learn, tending to a yard you have tried to make into a wild ecosystem, is that in a place like Central Texas where it never really freezes, the season of falling leaves is also the real beginning of springtime, when the tall grasses drop their seeds and the native wildflowers are ready to start germinating into hardy rosettes.

This year the work beckons more than usual, as our yard is recovering from a three-year-long guest house construction project that destroyed much of the prairie restoration we had done in the preceding decade. I got the front yard started back to health in the spring, only to have that work trampled cleaning up the three big trees that came down in May’s microburst. So the full moon reminded me to put in my order, and Thursday’s mail brought three five-pound bags of fresh biodiverse life in the form of native grass & wildflower mixes from our friends at Native American Seed in Junction, Texas, who use the tools of production agriculture to enable us to restore the landscapes agriculture has destroyed.

As we hung out on Tuesday I told Mom how I was thinking about trying to burn sections of the yard, the way she had taught me by example with the 200-acre oak savanna she and Dad spent three decades restoring with nothing but fire (longtime readers will remember the story of how my dad singed his eyebrows off the first year they burned). She advised me, with the authority of an experienced sorceress who has tried all the spells in all the possible situations, what a bad idea that was. So this weekend I found myself reluctantly rummaging around for a rake, to be able to clear the dead foliage of the season passed and make room to get the seed in properly.

“Just get it in before the next good rain,” said Mom.

Somehow the way she said that simple bit of gardening advice felt obliquely political. So I got after the yard work while I should have been protesting, and found myself imagining the rejuvenation of the American land a good controlled burn would bring.

Going LoCo

Saturday morning our six-year old daughter and I carried our canoe and paddles down to the urban Colorado and met up with our neighbors and then a bigger group of volunteers for the annual LoCo Trash Bash started a few years ago by Austin fly fishing guide Alvin Ledeaux. Who knew grabbing plastic bottles, used styrofoam, weird metal objects and the occasional diaper from the the riverbed, the green and muddy banks and the trees at the river’s edge could be so fun.

It reminded me of the insight of the eccentric French utopian Charles Fourier, who recommended work be essential labor tasks be allocated based on which members of society would most enjoy them, and that trash collection would therefore be the playful work of children. Maybe his vision of a future in which whales would tow ships through oceans of lemonade after the polar ice caps melt was also more accurate than it sounded when I first heard it as a college freshman.

The Roundup

Thanks to the amazing crowd that made them pull out every last chair and strain the lawful capacity at Alienated Majesty Books in Austin last week for the launch of the paperback edition of A Natural History of Empty Lots, to Brett Gaylor and crew for the beautiful documentary short they made and let us screen (coming soon, we hope, to a festival near you), and to Alexia Leclercq of PODER + Start:Empowerment and Craig Campbell of UT Anthropology and the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography for the great conversation about how to decolonize the future. Plus extra thanks to the hard-working UPS driver who arrived with the books just in the nick of time 5 minutes before the event.

My piece for Texas Highways about the time we went looking for the Marfa Lights and saw a maybe-Chupacabra is now available online on this side of the paywall—the photos by Eli Hartman are amazing.

This week I’ll be working on the plans for the class I’ll be teaching November 5 on “Writing the Natural World: A 21st Century Reboot” for the Writer’s League of Texas. Just one 3-hour session, and it’s an online class, so you can participate from anywhere on the planet (as long as you can do it from 6:30-9:30 pm CST). Details and registration here—please consider signing up if the topic is of interest.

And the day after that, Thursday, November 6, I’ll be giving a talk about A Natural History of Empty Lots at the Joynes Reading Room on the UT-Austin campus as part of the Plan II Honors Program’s 2025-26 lecture series, co-sponsored by the Rapoport Center for Human Rights & Justice. Open to the public—details here.

This week the UN World Meteorological Organization released its report showing that global CO2 levels peaked in 2024. And the UN Environment Program released a separate report arguing for the urgent of accelerating our investment in forests.

Scholars at the University of Utah this week published their research indicating that the evolution of psychedelic Psiloscybe fungi occurred around the same time as the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, as planetary ecology adapted to the aftermath of the the asteroid that threw Earth into a brutal, prolonged winter and killed 80% of all life.

At The Nation, Maya Vinokour on the Cybertruck.

In the ideas worth stealing department, Gen Z protesters in climate-ravaged Madagascar scared the nation’s president into fleeing the country.

Coincidentally, this week was also the anniversary of John Brown’s October 16-18, 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. You can check out W.E.B. Du Bois’ book on Brown if you’re looking for some good cool weather reading.

For a less violent rebellion, here’s Cate Blanchett ranting about leaf blowers for the wonderful interview series Subway Takes (via the above-linked FT article):

Have a great week.

September always brings big moons. The best this year was the one I saw on the Friday before the autumnal equinox: a waning crescent low in the eastern sky an hour before sunup, rising u-shaped over the roofline of the beat-up old door factory next door and the tollway beyond. Venus was next to it, and both were exceptionally bright. Not bright enough to outshine the unshielded floodlights that illuminate the loading dock there at the edge of the urban woods, or all the other ambient lumens of the solipsistic city. But wondrous enough, in that ephemeral moment, to let a glimpse of celestial transcendence pierce our semiotic prison.

At night since Labor Day we’ve heard the piledrivers pounding away between the onramps, building out the pump station to channel the water from the expanded interstate into the river. I wonder if the birds headed south notice the change in the landscape below, the freshly excavated hole where a month ago was a tall green hill.

The morning sun brings the reveal of whatever weird shit went on in the night, stories told by things. A car left behind, a pink plastic margarita cup in the bush, two spent whippit canisters by the curb. Friday morning we found a dead mama opossum in the middle of the lane, American marsupial with her four little joeys scattered from her pouch across the warming blacktop. Early enough that the vultures had not yet found them.

According to the 1933 OED on our library shelf, Captain Smith reported back from Virginia in 1612 that the opossum has “a head like a Swine, a tail like a Rat, and the bigness of a Cat,” which is a good description of the adults, but the infants look more like little puppies.

The coral vine has been in bloom all over town throughout the month, long strands of hot pink petals crawling up fences, power lines and the occasional building. This is the plant’s usual season to flower, from the end of summer to the first real cool of fall. The plant is designated as an invasive, being a native of Mexico, but it seems to fit in here well, like a lot of species that have moved up here as temperatures have gotten hotter. It coexists and intertwines with the cross vines and their hummingbird-friendly trumpet blossoms, and when you get up close you can see how busily the bees work them, in this season when so few of the native plants are in bloom or even alive.

I saw a beehive on TV right around the same time as I started noticing all the bees around our yard. It was there in the background during one of those press conferences about the assassination of the traveling campus evangelist outside Provo. A beehive is the symbol at the heart of the Utah state flag, a symbol that relates back to the days of Deseret. The beehive also was the central feature of my high school’s official seal, up there on the podium to be deciphered every day during morning assembly. I guess they got the idea from the Freemasons, which the founders of both places must have been. A symbol of industriousness, of individuals always busy working for the community, but a weirdly inapt one for such intensely patriarchal communities. Maybe it expresses a subconscious yearning for a better mode of organization than mass supplication to the dark energy of the angry father.

The bees may be as invasive as the coral vine, but I’m always reflexively reassured by any prodigious signs of biodiverse life around me here in the city, as our rainy summer devolves into a long autumnal drought, and even the mature trees seem ecologically exhausted. In our early years here on this lot, we had a colony of what they used to call “killer bees” in the zone of illegally dumped debris at the back of our yard. They had made their home in a tire half-buried in the ground, surrounded by concrete rubble. A big truck tire, filled with honeycomb instead of air. The bees were chill, unless you tried to mess with their nest, in which case they would swarm and chase you out the front gate and down the block (I never tried, but some others did). Maybe we should make our own camp flag out of that memory.

The Tuesday after the equinox my Instagram feed served me another creepy post from the current management of the Department of Homeland Security. This one featured a flyover video, coming up over a mountain meadow to see the majestic snowy peaks as the text rises from the valley in all caps, “AMERICA: REMEMBER WHAT WE’RE FIGHTING FOR.” I thought about where I’ve seen that cinematic maneuver before—in both The Sound of Music and Triumph of the Will. Which of those they were going for was made even clearer by the caption below the image:

It’s been weird this year, the feeling that every time I open my phone I’m being trolled by my own government. In this case, with a manufactured and self-evidently false nativism used by the agency to justify its eviction of people who in many cases are the descendants of actual Natives of this hemisphere. They as well as you surely appreciate what classic Orwellian doublespeak it is, to make performative declarations of nativity about a colonial settler nation built through genocidal depopulation and the ravaging of a “wilderness” through the exploitation of enslaved and indentured labor. What makes it so uniquely American is how you can tell they are laughing when they do it, with the sinister privilege of the popular kids in some campus comedy.

I remember thinking how creepy it was, 24 years ago, when they reorganized the government after 9/11 to put various agencies that had slowly evolved across disparate federal departments under a new cabinet secretary devoted to protecting the “Homeland,” an un-American euphemism that encodes, in almost all of its modern uses, an idea of return of what are really settlers coming from someplace else. And when the people invested in those myths push them this strongly, in a way so obviously at odds with observable reality, you know they must be worried that the fiction on which the legitimacy of national borders depends is becoming more apparent.

If it were really our home, surely we would have treated it better. Ask the opossum who is the native, and who the conqueror.

Nature has a way of complicating our conceptions of nativity, and it’s starting to do so at an accelerating pace. Last week researchers at UT-Austin announced the discovery of a new bird—a hybrid of two species of jay from different genuses, whose most recent common ancestor was 7 million years ago and historically had no overlapping range. Global heating has changed that, and now the green jay of Mexico and Central America and the blue jay of North American backyards have found each other, as the former birds’s range has reached further north into Texas as average temperatures rise and ecologies change with them. The resulting bird, offspring of a female green jay and a male blue jay, is pictured in the center panel below:

Discoveries like these are a powerful reminder, in the back pages of the feed, that diversity is the key to success, and the path of successful adaptation to a dynamic and destabilized future. One wonders how many other new hybrids and other fresh evolutionary wonders are out there that have not yet been observed. And how our own species will adapt to the challenges we’ve created for all the life on Earth.

We may never acquire the gift evidenced by this anole I saw on our retaining wall last weekend: the ability to regenerate large portions of one’s own body after an accident or an encounter with a predator.

I was grilling dinner when I saw it, and had to raise my glass in admiration. Long live the new flesh. May your descendants grow large, and lord over the rewilded ruins we leave behind.

Upcoming Events

It’s been a year this month since the release of A Natural History of Empty Lots. Thanks to all the readers, booksellers, librarians and reviewers who have given the book such a warm welcome, and to the longtime readers of this newsletter who helped me see and develop the promise of this material.

The book has done well enough to warrant publication of a paperback edition, the launch of which we’ll be celebrating the evening of Tuesday, October 7 at Alienated Majesty Books in Austin. We’ll be screening Brett Gaylor’s short film Field Notes from an Apocalypse, which documents some walks in urban woods and a paddle to the Tesla Giga Texas factory, and then climate activist Alexia LeClercq of Start:Empowerment + PODER, anthropologist Craig Campbell of UT-Austin + the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography and I will be in conversation about how to find (or fight) our way to a better future from here. RSVP and details here. And if you haven’t checked out the book but are interested, you can preorder the paperback (or order the already-available hardcover, e-book or audiobook edition) here.

On November 5, I’ll be teaching a single-session class “Writing the Natural World: A 21st Century Reboot” for the Writer’s League of Texas, online from 6:30-9:30 pm CST. Details and registration here.

I have a piece in the October issue of Texas Highways that hit the stands this week, telling the story about the time I saw a strange, Chupacabra-like creature while driving to see the Marfa Lights. The accompanying photos by Eli Hartman are amazing. I’ll share a link here when the piece is available online.

The Roundup

“An Intergeneric Hybrid Between Historically Isolated Temperate and Tropical Jays Following Recent Range Expansion” — full story about the green jay hybrid here and full research paper here (no paywall).

For more on tissue regeneration in anoles, visit ASU’s Kusumi Lab.

On the subject of resilience in the face of what’s coming, Alex Steffen over at The Snap Forward has a new 30-day Personal Climate Startegy workshop starting next week.

Via “human web crawler” Bruce Sterling, recent research on the marine life that makes its home in and around abandoned WW2 munitions.

RIP Mark Norell, the paleontologist whose adventures in the Gobi Desert finding feathered dinosaurs provided rich learning and entertainment for my son and I when he was a dino-crazy kid.

The tundra is exploding.

The Wall Street Journal visited William T. Vollman in his writing studio, a former Mexican restaurant in Sacramento.

The etymology of the American idea of the “Homeland.”

Currently reading: An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith.

At the LRB, Brett Christophers on Andreas Malm and giving up the fight to prevent climate breakdown, and Ian Penman on Brian Eno.

If you’re in the Boston area, my son Hugo Nakashima-Brown, a woodworker and furniture maker, has an exceptional show up at the Crossings Gallery at Harvard’s Ed Portal in Allston, with some of his latest marquetry pieces among other work in display.

Have a great week.

Friday morning as I was sitting alone in the waiting room at the car wash near our home, flipping through the weird selection of basic cable channels and tempted to pick up the dog-eared Joel Osteen book on the coffee table, I saw a cicada killer fly up to the glass door, gently probing it like a tiny helicopter trying to find its way through the invisible forcefield. I’ve seen a lot of cicada killers this summer, probably because we had a healthy crop of cicadas, and because I’ve learned to notice them lumbering through the periphery of my reality. They are the Clydesdales of wasps: bigger than bumblebees, with menacing stingers you can see from twenty feet away, and capable of hauling heavy loads. I’ve seen more than one carrying a freshly-paralyzed cicada twice its weight through the air, headed back to the nest chamber where it will lay an egg on its captive and then seal the chamber with dirt. A day or two later the grub will emerge, and begin its life eating the chitin-cased monster mom has left for it.

A shack next to a parking lot off a major urban thoroughfare seemed an unlikely place to see such a bad-ass bug. Most of the cicada killers I’ve seen were in our feral yard, where I first learned what they were after seeing one crucify her prey on the spokes of my wife’s bicycle one hot summer afternoon. But a little research indicates Sphecius speciosus is well-adapted to urban environments, tolerant of desiccated zones of full sun and adept at using sidewalks and other concrete slabs as structural enhancements for its burrows. Looking in my own photo archive, I found evidence of just that—a video from 2022 of one navigating a driveway. It seemed odd at the time but now I wonder if its nest was nearby.

The cicadas on which they live also seem to be holding out, though a review of recent reports suggests population numbers are declining overall, a dozen North American species of cicada have disappeared since colonial settlement—one of them recently—and there’s concern their current abundance is no guarantee of survival.

When the cicada killer flew off, the Wounded Warrior ad finally ended and I got to see what movie was on. I had flipped to a channel called Outlaw, which looked to be all Westerns all the time. It came on mid-scene, just as an aged but still tough-looking Randolph Scott shot and killed Warren Oates and his gang-mates while Mariette Hartley watched. Then the end-credits rolled and I realized it was the one Sam Peckinpah movie I never saw. I got to imagining an alternate timeline in which Peckinpah made nature films, like some shitfaced high desert horseback Cousteau. Human nature-nature films that mined the deep Anthropocene, in the spirit of that scene at the beginning of The Wild Bunch where a group of young kids trap some scorpions around the mouth of a fire ant mound and watch the orchestrated carnage that follows.

Earlier that morning while I was walking the dog, I found a disco ball by the side of the road, more than half its mirrors gone. It was in a spot I’ve passed hundreds of times over the course of 15 years, in a shadowed patch of dirt behind a mysterious shed next to the ruins of the bar they called el Agasajo (rough translation: “the royal treatment”). It might have just been dumped, but it looked like it had been there forever. A relic of prior inhabitants who had more fun here than we did.

Later in the day, my wife told me about the theory she had heard, convincingly presented, that time is actually, truly accelerating. In order, at least one author theorized, to accelerate the arrival of humans more capable of caring for the planet.

A week earlier, on the Friday morning that began Labor Day weekend, I joined a “stewardship walk” in our neighborhood wildlife sanctuary organized by staffers from a local parks nonprofit. Our group included representatives from the City Parks Department, two other folks from the river conservation and environmental nonprofits I work with, and a handful of other neighbors who love this weird pocket of urban wild.

Like a lot of the lands cities set aside off the tax rolls as habitat for other species, it’s a former industrial site adjacent to transportation infrastructure, such that the portal you pass through to enter the preserve looks designed to deter you:

But if you brave that brutality and keep walking, you don’t have to go far before you find some remarkable vignettes that let you see how rapidly an urban river corridor can rewild with little more assistance than being left alone—in this case a place that 40 years ago was an industrial gravel dredging site:

Along the main trails we also came upon the extensive camps that have been set up in the preserve over the summer. One of the Parks managers explained that most of the folks we encountered had relocated from a big camp immediately below the dam, which had to be evacuated during the July floods. He also explained to us the processes the city tries to deploy to help such folks get housing and other assistance at the same time as it compels them to clear out.

At one spot, on a rapidly eroding river edge, someone had somehow transported a gigantic metal tank harvested from the ruins of the old dairy plant a quarter-mile upland and turned it into a shelter. It looked every bit like a marooned spacecraft. Or one that had splashed down, and was ready to safely float downriver to the Gulf with the next flood.

We saw some cool birds and some scary dogs, made new connections, and discussed how best to organize to protect this place and other local pockets of riparian wild, including some of the more complicated issues around how to balance the needs for human and non-human habitat, and simpler questions around how to manage the trash people dump and the trash the waters leave behind. We left with a worthwhile list of community initiatives, but I couldn’t help but feel we’d just toured a pocket of unevenly distributed future in which personal prosperity and healthy lands are as endangered as most of the wildlife. There are only a few species like the cicada killer that can adapt to live at the edges of our concrete dominion.

I walked home the way I came, through the woods and along the old right of way behind the dairy plant. It was a lot hotter on the return, and at one point after choosing a route I thought unlikely to disturb any more encampments, I realized I had managed to get myself deeply embedded in an extensive patch of cactus I thought I had evaded only to find a big spine sticking out of my leg. There were a mix of species, mostly prickly pear but also a prodigious new growth of the pencil cactus tasajillo, whose Christmas bulbs had not yet reddened.

When I got through, I found myself at the edge of a construction staging area that had just been laid out along the road, where an old potable water line under the river is about to be relaid. They had bulldozed some small trees out of their way, and the remains of some camps. In the clearing I found a legless gamer chair, some cool drawings laminated for protection, and a big pile of CDs.

I recognized one CD immediately, because it was one I used to have. Emperor Tomato Ketchup by Stereolab, which I remembered as one of my favorite records of the late 90s, and hadn’t listened to since the late 90s.

I took it home, cleaned it, and it played. But the feelings of that world it came from, the optimistic moment between the End of History and the beginning of the long dark that was uncorked on 9/11, when the World Wide Web was the new new thing and the promise of the century to come was foretold with utopian certainty, were like they had been translated into some language I no longer knew.

“What’s society built on?” the French girl sang over and over, acting like she knew the answers.

The Roundup

If you’re in the Austin area, please join me October 7 at Alienated Majesty Books on 29th St. for the launch of the paperback edition of A Natural History of Empty Lots. We’ll be screening Brett Gaylor’s short film Field Notes from an Apocalypse, which documents some walks in urban woods and a paddle to the Tesla Giga Texas factory, and then climate activist Alexia LeClercq of Start:Empowerment + PODER, anthropologist Craig Campbell of UT-Austin + the Bureau for Experimental Ethnography and I (and potentially one other panelist) will be in conversation about how to find (or fight) our way to a better future from here. RSVP and details here. And if you haven’t checked out the book but are interested, you can preorder the paperback (or order the already-available hardcover, e-book or audiobook edition) here.

On November 5, I’ll be teaching a single-session class “Writing the Natural World: A 21st Century Reboot” for the Writer’s League of Texas, online from 6:30-9:30 pm CST. Details and registration here.

I have several other local and regional events and some new short-form publications scheduled for the coming months, so watch this space for details and links as they become available.

Speaking of preorders, Makenna Goodman’s brilliant new novel Helen of Nowhere will be published on Tuesday (Sep. 9) by Coffee House Press in the US, with a UK edition to follow from Fitzcarraldo in January. Told in four parts, short enough to read in a single sitting, with the same razor-sharp language and voice that made her first novel The Shame so hard-hitting, Helen of Nowhere tells the story of a house outside the city and a handful of people connected to it, and encodes in that story a deeper exploration that I think readers of this newsletter will connect with. I’m excited to see this book getting the reception it and its author deserve.

(Full disclosure: Makenna was (is) my editor at Timber Press for Empty Lots, having taken on the project after the editor who acquired the book left following a merger. The book and I owe a tremendous deal to her.)

You also should keep your eye out for my friend Cory Doctorow’s new nonfiction book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, also forthcoming on October 7 in the US from MCD and in the UK on October 14 from Verso. The book is technology criticism at its heart, a radical (and funny) political economy of early 21st century capitalism (it’s even been shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year), and its explorations are also relevant to how we think about our ecological and climate trajectories.

From cooler climes, here’s a cool new urban nature newsletter from the NYC Plover Project.

Last Sunday I harvested my first batch of chiltepin for our table, from this lush bunch of ur-peppers I found growing amid the concrete rubble dumped at the back of our lot before we got here. If you live in a region where it grows, it’s a really fun forage and an easy one to make into a delicious hot vinegar or salsa.

Enjoy the full moon, and have a great week.

Early Tuesday morning, around 5:30 a.m., I heard someone hollering down in the woods. It was super dark, the waning crescent moon low in the eastern sky with Jupiter, Venus, Castor and Pollux. The noise sounded like it was coming from the municipal wildlife sanctuary under the bridge, about a half-mile away. A few years ago you would have been more likely to hear coyotes calling from there, or owls, but since lockdown the parks and woodlands along the river and creeks here at the eastern edge of town have all become more frequently and densely occupied by dislocated members of our own species. The newest camps have motor vehicles, generators, dogs, and ingenious structures made from found materials, and when you stumble upon one of these improvised communities while out for a walk in the August heat you can’t help but think that what once felt like signs of the precarity of life under 21st century American capitalism now feels more like a slow-motion collapse.

Many of our newest neighbors relocated here after the floods forced emergency evacuations of other camps. The floods weren’t as bad in Austin as they were in the Hill Country, since we are protected by the series of Depression-era dams upriver. We got the water though, the farthest it’s been above its normal banks in a decade, and when it receded a couple days later the woods were filled with flotsam, mostly our trash. When I came upon this mushroom of a type I’d never noticed before, I found myself wondering if it might be some rhizomatic expression of the tens of thousands of fragments of styrofoam that surrounded it on the forest floor.

July’s floods followed a tremendously damaging windstorm at the end of May—a microburst with 85 mph gusts that uprooted the 80-year-old mesquite in our yard and two huge cottonwoods that had grown more than a hundred feet tall around the mouth of a city drainage pipe that empties into the floodplain behind our house. That storm followed three years of extreme temperatures—historically anomalous deep freezes and winter storms one never used to have here, two of the hottest summers on record, and a long decade of drought. The woods have suddenly become a graveyard of fallen giants, and I wonder how they will evolve with these new holes in the canopy. The invasive Johnson and Bermuda grasses that dominate the upland terraces need full sun, and so the shade of those big trees created a zone where the inland sea oats and wild ryes could carpet the forest floor every spring and bring more biodiversity with them.

This is mostly a young forest here along the banks of the Colorado in East Austin, the majority of trees having grown in the past five decades since gravel dredging and other industrial activity was pushed further east. It took me a while exploring the area to realize it was not the miraculously intact remnant I had assumed, but something even more wondrous—a stretch of riparian land that had rewilded on its own after being left alone by us, in a brief historical moment when it managed to hide in plain sight.

Such wonders, alas, never seem to last.

You can really feel the development pressure amping up along the edges of this corridor, with an undercurrent of brutality I didn’t foresee. The deserted traffic island I’ve frequently reported on here, which for a time was home to a nested pair of red-shouldered hawks I once spotted mating in one of the ancient pecans that grew in that unlikely arbor between two onramps, has been filled with an apartment block that looks more like a border wall than a work of architecture (notwithstanding the developer’s naming the project “The Eclectic”). The big dig that will channel all the water that drains off expanded Interstate 35 to a pump station next to one of those onramps is now underway in earnest, big machines working at night to open up giant holes in the earth for the underground boring machines to tunnel their way here from the entry point being walled off at what’s also the entry point to downtown.

Our local government, despite its pretenses of progressivism, seems completely captured by real estate capital and devoid of any real concern for affordability, environment, or diversity. And then you read the headlines out of Washington, a daily barrage of weirdly performative policy reversals that lead one to think it’s not so much that they don’t believe our burning of the world is overheating it to the point of mass extinction, but rather that they get turned on by the idea, like some insane death cult that gets off on the power of bringing about the end and making dark fortunes in the process. Daring us to step away from our work stations long enough to organize and take the collective action that should be so easy but seems so paralyzed. Even as we can all remember five years ago, when that same freeway was shut down by a flash mob of incensed protesters, and we got a glimpse of the power the multitude could yield if it could sustain it for more than a microburst.

It’s not all bad. While the growth booster part of the city greenlights all the crappy projects, another contingent works hard to add new public lands, with an emphasis on lands along the river corridor, despite ever-increasing efforts of the state legislature to strip the local governments of any regulatory power. Our municipal water stewards have intervened to control and clean the outflows from TxDot’s insane I-35 drainage project. And everywhere you look, you can signs of life and evidence of ecological resilience. The old man’s beard that blooms in the hottest pockets of summer, tiger swallowtails mating in the shadows still cast by the trees that fell, whistling ducks that come and go at dawn and dusk between the river and their roosts behind the old industrial lots. We had good rains all through June and July, and the flora and fauna show it.

The most heartening sign for me in the past two weeks has been the early arrival of abundant fruitings of chiltepin. The ur-pepper of the Americas, it can only germinate after passing through the digestive system of a bird. When it does, it grows as a shrub, usually in shady spots, a scruffy little plant with tiny white flowers that might easily escape your notice until the flowers turn into peppers and the peppers ripen from green to red and tempt you to taste the burn hotter than a habanero. A plant that only grows in the places that don’t get mowed, and the one from which the botanists think all the other peppers on our table were derived. An ephemeral being that is also one of the oldest living things around, and a window into the wilder world we came from that still expresses in the margins of our dominion.

Today I hope to make some hot vinegar with a sampling from the bushes in our yard, and start the work of tending our pocket prairie for the winter growing season that incubates spring. We’re lucky to have refuge, and daily reminders that what sometimes feels like the end can also be an opportunity for new beginnings.

Thursday evening I found a downed bird nest by our front door, blown by that afternoon’s storm from its mooring in the mustang vine that hangs from our green roof. The fledgling cardinals recently reared there had already flown off, so no active home was lost, and we could admire the nest’s Anthropocene construction: fragments of clear plastic packaging harvested from the industrial yards around us woven in to better insulate the beautifully threaded coils of dried native grasses. All the cardinal nests are like this, every season, reflecting a learned adaptation to the world we’ve made and an intelligence we don’t really understand. Evidence of the weird new nature cyborg nature aborning, it makes me mildly horrified and modestly hopeful about what’s to come.

Empty Lots in Paperback

Friday’s mail brought me my author’s copies of the paperback edition of A Natural History of Empty Lots, and I’m delighted to report they look great, inside and out. Thanks to the team at Timber Press, including my editor Makenna Goodman (whose own new book Helen of Nowhere, a novel I think readers of this newsletter will love, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in the U.S. and Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK), designers Hillary Caudle and Sara Isasi, and the publicity team of Katlynn Nicolls, Melina Dorrance and Caroline McCulloch who helped get the word out. And bigger thanks to all the readers, librarians, booksellers and reviewers who helped make the hardcover edition such a success.

If you’re in Austin, we’ll be having a paperback launch party on the release date, October 7, at Alienated Majesty Books, which will include a screening of Brett Gaylor’s new short film Field Notes from an Apocalypse, and a panel discussion with a diverse group of local thinkers and activists about how we can go about the hard work of decolonizing and rewilding the future. Please join us if you can, and RSVP here.

And just for fun, I’m going to do another preorder promotion for readers of this newsletter (especially new readers). If you preorder the paperback (or order any of the other editions already available) and email me your confirmation (chris-at-christopherbrown.com) and snail mail address, I’ll send you a bookmark in the form of a 3x5 print from the negative of one of the below film photos (your choice):

Alternatively, I’d be happy to send you one of 9 free copies I have to give out of the Audible version of the audiobook narrated by yours truly (while supplies last), or a copy of the print zine I did for the hardcover launch last September (also while supplies last), which includes an original essay and a reading list of other books in the genre.

Last week I learned that the book is on display at the Venice Architecture Biennale, part of this library Porch curated by the team at Places. Thanks to Boyce Upholt for the heads up—and keep an eye out for issue 1 of his new print magazine Southlands, coming next month (and including a short essay by me).

Nature Writing Class

I’m also excited to share the news that I’ll be teaching an online class this fall designed to provide a fresh take on “Writing the Natural World” through the Writer’s League of Texas: November 5, 6:30-9:30 pm CST. Whether you are interested in nature or place writing as independent genres, or in thinking in fresh ways about how nature and environment feature in your fiction or nonfiction, this class will aim to provide you new tools and have fun in the process. We did a panel discussion on these themes with WLT earlier this year, and it was a big hit. Please register here if you’re interested, and ping me if you have questions.

The Roundup

In other news:

Perito Moreno, one of the few great glaciers thought to be stable due to its unusual location in Patagonia (and a natural wonder my wife and I visited on our honeymoon), is shrinking.

They are trying to rewild the Venetian island of Poveglia.

The floods exposed 115-million-year-old dinosaur footprints in northern Travis County.

Tesla is also getting exposed in Travis County.

Hanging with the coyotes of Central Park.

At Harper’s, Lewis Hyde on “The Geological Sublime” (long read on butterflies, deep time, and climate change).

Field Notes friend Ed Park is finally on Substack with a cool new newsletter (that sort of revives his old blog).

Have a great week. Field Notes will be back after Labor Day.

Saturday morning, back through the trees behind the old AM radio transmission antenna pictured above, I saw what may have been a jaguarundi. The likelihood that’s what it was, an expert would rightly note, is low, considering that an 18-year study concluded in 2021 that the species has been extirpated from Texas, and Austin is outside the jaguarundi’s historic range. But there have been sightings reported around here in recent years, including several outside Seguin at the beginning of this summer, and wildlife often break the rules our field guides lay out for them.

I was out walking our puppy, a Jack Russell Terrier our daughter named Fifi, exploring some pockets of interstitial green space I hadn’t visited in a while, including the expansive empty lot around the radio tower of old KNOW-AM. That field is less feral than it used to be, in an effort to keep the long-term campers out, but the zone it’s part of remains a quiet one where several secondary streets terminate in the backsides of light industrial blocks, and the verdant green corridor of the Colorado River is a literal stone’s throw away. Fifi and I had just stepped from the shade of a stand of tall trees when we saw the cat trotting past a row of shipping containers lined up behind a pottery studio. It was bigger than a typical domestic cat, with fur the color of graphite, a tail as long as the rest of its body, and short legs, almost the proportions of an otter.

We tried to get a second look, tracking around the edge-space between the chainlink and a parking garage, but it was gone.

Such a sighting would have been more plausible where we spent the week before, vacationing with extended family on the Texas coast in Cameron County. That’s where the last confirmed sighting of a jaguarundi in Texas was, in 1986, on State Highway 4 east of Brownsville—the road that now takes you to Elon Musk’s newly incorporated space colonization company town of Starbase. Calling that a “sighting” is generous, as it was actually roadkill, there where the road runs past the marshy preserves along the Rio Grande. Maybe that’s why the scientists are so confident in the accuracy of that report, of an animal that seems to have always been good at counfounding our perception.

The authors of the 2021 study that concluded it’s gone from here called Puma yagouaroundi “understudied, cryptic, small.” I first assumed they meant cryptic in the common sense—hidden, occult, maybe even evoking “cryptid.” But it turns out that for biologists, “cryptic” is a term of art, intended to denote species that are morphologically difficult to distinguish from other species but “biologically isolated.”

Not so biologically isolated, in the case of the jaguarundi, as to be incapable of interbreeding with other felines—or so some quick (but not definitive) research indicates. Maybe it’s the science fiction writer in me that got to speculating, after seeing the cat and considering the other recent sightings, that our putatively extirpated puny puma might have followed a path similar to the ghost wolves of Galveston. If otherwise extinct native red wolves have survived by interbreeding with urbanized coyotes, perhaps the jaguarundi could be similarly adapting to our post-colonial erasure of their habitat by mating with feral cats, and creating descendants adept at hunting the edgelands of our rodent-infested cities.

House cats gone wild mostly serve as agents in our elimination of biodiversity in the world, especially songbirds. I see them often, slinkily stalking at dusk into the green expanses beyond the chain link, after enjoying the easier meals of store-bought kibble left out front by the office staffs of the industrial businesses that line our neighborhood. Cats seem to be more dominant as predators around here lately, as our neighborhood has begun morphing into an entertainment district, and the coyotes have gone quiet, maybe moved on.

I used to see a lot of cryptic stray dogs back in these empty lots and woodlands at the edge of town, including a few that looked like hybrids of wild and domestic canines. I came to wonder if they were a glimpse of some emergent packs of the future—unevenly distributed manifestations of the end of the world slowly unfolding around us. A decade later, I learned the ghost wolves are real. The cats were ghosts already, in the stealth with which they roamed these spaces.

When we returned from the beach, contractors for the State Department of Transportation had begun site work on the giant berm near our home—a man-made ridgeline between two onramps whose weird animal users, urban cowboys and Anthropocene vistas I have chronicled in this newsletter. The new project relates to the expansion of Interstate 35 where it passes through downtown Austin, two miles west of us. To accommodate the growth of that clogged corridor, TX-DOT plans to take all the water that drains from the widened right of way (from Airport Blvd to Lady Bird Lake, for locals), channel it into a gigantic, truck-sized pipe buried a hundred feet under East Cesar Chavez that will carry it to a new pump station atop that berm, and spew it into the clean and clear stretch of the Colorado River below Longhorn Dam. The state’s original plan was no more “treatment” than a mesh filter to catch large debris, but the city has intervened, supported by advocacy groups like our Colorado River Conservancy, to redirect it to a new treatment pond that will ensure it meets drinking water standards before it hits the river, and perhaps provide an opportunity for some improved wetland habitat in the process. I still wonder what the pump station will sound like, and how it will smell. I already know why they put it on this side of town, and not the west side.

Fifi and I walked the site last Sunday, before they fully fenced it off. All mud, dried hard in the rough contours of heavy machine tracks. Toward the top of the berm there was a little container office. I peeked in the window and the only thing in there was a sheet of paper showing, in text-free visuals, how to connect your phone or laptop to Starlink. It felt weirdly like coming upon some abandoned ruin, on an Earth where the engineered machine systems have come to a stop, but the satellites we launched into orbit can still be seen in the night sky.

My waking dream of an emergent future of wild predators cross-bred with our emancipated house pets got me thinking of a cheesy Edgar Rice Burroughs paperback I read as a kid: Lost Continent, the cover of which featured a Frank Frazetta vignette of a 22nd century man and woman facing off against the jungle cats that have taken over the ruins of the future. A reminder that stories like that, usually packaged as warnings about the end of the world, express our unarticulated yearnings for the new beginning we could have—a rewilded future in which the balance between us and other life has been restored, and we get to live closer to our own nature.

Maybe exporting capitalism into space wouldn’t be a bad thing, if it left this planet behind in the process.

Summer Reading

Save the date: we’ll be celebrating the launch of the paperback edition of A Natural History of Empty Lots with an event at Alienated Majesty Books here in Austin on October 7, hopefully with a short film screening of a work in progress and a panel discussion about ruderal ecologies and radical futures. Watch this space for more info as the plans come together, and you can preorder the paperback (or get the hardcover, ebook, or audiobook narrated by yours truly) here at Timber Press/Hachette.

I ended up working most of our week in South Padre, and spending the time I had free playing with the kids on the beach, but I did get out to see some of the wild things with my 85-year-old nature nerd mom, including a visit to the new South Texas Ecotourism Center just west of Port Isabel. Created by Cameron County, STEC is a remarkable facility designed to provide visitors a platform for getting to know local flora and fauna, and a starting point for exploring the rich wilderness areas around the region—including this excellent interactive map to help you find them. (One of the big preserves is next to the facility, as pictured in the second photo above.) We got to meet Director Edward Meza and his exceptionally friendly and knowledgable staff, and will be back.

Congratulations to my bride and baby mama Agustina Rodriguez aka AgiMiagi for the successful installation of her insanely beautiful new sculpture, “Chorus,” in Dallas at The Village, and stay tuned for information about the dedication planned for September. The piece was trapped in Wimberley for six months while they figured out a legal route to get it to the site, and having heard Agustina negotiating logistics with trucking dispatchers, bucket truck drivers and state highway officials for the entirety of 5.5-hour drive back from South Padre, I have a new appreciation for what goes into moving oversized loads—especially tall ones.

On the subject of endangered and threatened species, the July 24 issue of the NYRB has an excellent piece by Michelle Nijhuis on what we choose to save, and why (paywall, but not for long, so bookmark it for later if you get blocked).

In wild canid news, the NYT had a Dora-ready report on the shoe-swiping fox of Grand Teton National Park.

In biodiversity crisis news, the EPA this week proposed re-approving the use of the twice-banned herbicide dicamba with “Roundup-ready” GMO crops. (Note the last line of the NYT report: “Last month, Kyle Kunkler, a former soybean industry lobbyist who has been a vocal proponent of dicamba, joined the E.P.A.’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention as its deputy assistant administrator.”)

And in free speech crisis news, the Austin Public Library’s amazing Zine Collection is under threat and not currently able to add new material due to legal concerns related to TX SB 412, “relating to defenses to prosecution for certain offenses involving material or conduct that is obscene or otherwise harmful to children.” If you’re local (or from elsewhere) and love to find weird new stuff at the library, please consider completing this online form to register your support for APL’s efforts to archive some of the most innovative and culturally rich content the community generates. More about the Zine Collection and its unstoppable curator Katrin Abel here in this Austin Chronicle piece.

Speaking of zines, my copy of Revelation Records’ new edition of Radio Silence: A Selected Visual History of American Hardcore Music by Nathan Nedorosek and Anthony Pappalardo just arrived in Saturday’s mail, and it’s almost as cool as maybe seeing a jaguarundi.

RIP, Ozzy, and thanks for the hometown memories—the time he bit the head off a bat onstage was in Des Moines during my senior year in high school. I wasn’t there, but several of my friends were, and one even still has his ticket stub.

The film photos in this installment of Field Notes were taken on my Ilford Sprite, a fixed shutter-speed plastic 35 mm camera that’s my preferred film camera for beach trips where I don’t want to expose my “good” camera to sand and salt water. If you’re looking for an easy point-and-shoot way to try the wonders of film, it’s a good one.

I took this shot of the summer sunset over our home on my phone:

Stay safe, and stay cool.

This is the season when the right-of-way in front of our house reaches its most intensely feral state. We live at a double dead-end, where two secondary roads terminate at what used to be the edge of town, and every summer the sidewalks and chainlink fences are consumed by foliage. Much of it creeping vines—mustang grape, poison ivy, alamo vine and others—but there is also prickly pear and a cluster of agaves that have been holding their own. One just bloomed, shooting its flower spike fifteen feet above the crowd, the yellow traffic warning to turn (recently installed after the third time in a decade someone drove right through that fence) pointing right at it for emphasis. Chances are the plant is monocarpic, as are most agave species, and after this first and last reproductive burst it will die.

I walk out there every morning to retrieve our newspapers—one local and one national. An old habit that has matured into an anachronism, and an extra expense. But the better the digital versions get at near-real-time notices of what’s happening, the more I prefer the delay of reading yesterday’s news. It keeps the algorithms out of your head. Even as you can tell the digital edition now shapes the print content. The only part of the Times that feels untainted by the changed media environment is the obituaries, where the good ones still read like condensed novels.

Tuesday after dinner I made the mistake of reading one on my phone—Clay Risen’s obituary of the poet and critic David Slavitt, who also wrote popular fiction as Henry Sutton (among other pen names). It was suitably diverting, recounting the life of an author from the good old days when there was an actual mass market for mass market paperbacks. When I got to the end, the phone app served up the genteel variant of clickbait pictured below—a Rorschach of our damaged Zeitgeist that held my attention for a moment, and then got me to put my phone away.

It was a reminder of why I spend my mornings looking for signs of real life in places like the patch of grass next to the onramp (not just because our new puppy, who our daughter named Fifi, needs a walk).

The deserted traffic island I used to explore regularly with our older dogs is gone now, filled with a concrete parking garage that looks like a military fortification and the apartments and offices being built around it. The other day Fifi and I found ourselves walking past there anyway, around its east end and up the grade of the engineered berm that supports the tollway onramp. Where, to our surprise, we came upon a wildflower I had never noticed before—yellow-puff blooming in the expanse of recently mowed Bermuda grass just inside the guardrail.

Neptunia lutea is a native, one of the species that does well in areas that the botanists describe as “disturbed,” usually meaning environments whose previous ecological diversity has been heavily damaged by us. It’s a ground crawler that knows how to find its way to the light, staying low enough to evade the blades of the mower. A plant that doesn’t compete so much as find the space that’s left, even if it’s already crowded.

It’s also a sensitive plant. If you touch it, it will visibly recoil, closing its fern-like leaves. Here’s a video:

The scientists don’t seem to know the evolutionary purpose of this kind of rapid plant movement. It may be an adaptation to deter mammalian foragers or insects, a strategy to survive prairie fires, or a way to hold out in spots thick with other plants.

Neptunia is not the only sensitive briar we have around here. A couple blocks from where Fifi and I found the yellow-puff, a patch of hot pink powderpuff mimosa has been established for several years that we’ve observed, in a low wet spot between the driveway of a motor oil distributor and the unmowed lawn of an abandoned lighting factory. The yellow-puff reminded us, so we walked down there the next day, and the Mimosa was also in bloom, with flowers like hot summer candy.

The field guides suggest the easiest places to find sensitive briar are near bodies of water, especially stream banks and the edges of lakes. Yellow-puff’s genus, Neptunia, gets its name from the aquatic habitat of some of the species. Those observations made me wonder whether the urban variants we see around here are adapting to the engineered watershed, in the same way the cottonwoods grow to high-rise heights around the mouths of drainage pipes.

Saturday morning Fifi and I went back to investigate that theory, on the third day of a four-day rain. It seemed to hold up to closer observation of the Anthropocene topography—our neighborhood Mimosa occupies a depression between two bulldozer-flat industrial sites, next to a drainage ditch along a major thoroughfare. Similarly, we found Neptunia growing where the first flush of water runs off the pavement and onto the berm. The thickest patch was in the median between onramp and offramp, where the slope directs the largest quantity of runoff. Walking there we noticed another water-loving ground crawler creeping its way through the construction fence along the subtly sloped edge of another off-ramp: frogfruit, a plant whose common name tells you what kinds of conditions it prefers.

Friday’s July 4 print edition of the Times had an especially old school feature: The Declaration of Independence on the back page of the front section. It made it unusually readable, and I was struck by the conflation of nature and the divine order of things in the opening recitation that grounds the argument for human liberty and equality in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—something different than “natural law,” especially in the way it abstracts the deity as an expression of observable nature.

Turns out a number of historians have noted that phrasing, attributing it to the deism of principal author Thomas Jefferson. Reading about Jefferson’s religious beliefs, or lack thereof, got me to finally click through some links about presidential perfume preferences in the era before long showers. No one seems to know if Jefferson wore a scent, but they do know Bay Rum was especially popular. My search led to an article about how Jefferson loved the fragrances of a good flower garden, and to the revelation that if you ask Google about his 1785 remark in a letter to a friend that the “blood of tyrants” is liberty’s natural fertilizer, you will get an entire page of links selling you right-wing T-shirts.

The native wildflowers that volunteer by the sides of our roads are a persistent reminder that the diverse life that was here before European colonization has not been completely erased. The resilience of those species always makes me think how easy it would be to help bring some of that biodiversity back with just a little bit of stewardship, and how we would find that repairing our damaged relationship with the land would help us remedy some of the broken things in the human community. Getting there will probably take a different species of volunteers.

The Roundup

Our thoughts this weekend are with our neighbors in the Hill Country, and especially the young summer campers and their families. My wife attended one of those camps as a girl. In East Austin we have been lucky thus far, as the dams along the Colorado and the half-empty lakes seem ready to accommodate the inundation, but our friends and neighbors in the northwest suburbs have been not been as lucky.

The rain here started Thursday morning, and continued until dinnertime Saturday, in a season that is usually quite dry. I woke Saturday to a slow drip on my head at 4 a.m., from the crack around a light fixture, hazard of living in a subterranean house covered with an experimental green roof. By 6 p.m., the river finally came up above its banks, and filled the floodplain right up to the base of the bluff we live on. On my way back from a Saturday night hardware store run for leak mitigation provisions, I checked out the river where it empties out of Longhorn Dam, and it was pretty epic:

The gates on that dam are manually operated, and when I stopped the operators from the municipal power company were out getting ready to adjust them as needed. I took it as a good sign that the guys I saw were relaxed and having some laughs.

Thanks to Daisy Alioto and the team at Dirt for including Empty Lots in their summer reading list, in my favorite category name ever:

Congratulations to Field Notes friend Henry Wessells on the publication of a new edition of his short story collection Another Green World, in a beautifully designed paperback edition that arrived in this week’s mail with blurbs from Guy Davenport, Joanne McNeil, and Guy Davenport. Also in this week’s mail was a book I was lucky to blurb (alongside some greats including Jonathan Lethem and Cal Flyn)—Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound. And I’m excited to get my hands on Ed Park’s new collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, coming out July 29.

Evidently we’ve been land snorkeling and didn’t know that’s what it was.

In archaeology news, evidence that the city-state of Çatalhöyük 9,000 years ago was a matriarchy.

In secret North American history, they found a runestone in Ontario.

And in surprising environmental news, a long read on how Los Angeles learned to consume less water, even as it kept growing.

Monday’s Austin American-Statesman had a great story from Michael Barnes about the 3 boys from Abilene who paddled the entire length of the Colorado River in 1937—and again in 1991.

In other paddling news, experimental archaeologists in Japan got their Thor Heyerdahl on, chopped down a big cedar tree with traditional tools, made a dugout canoe, and demonstrated how far earlier humans could get in such simple watercraft across the expansive Pacific. (The videos at the link make a good case for how the digital paper can be better.)

“From economy of occupation to economy of genocide”—the cogently argued report of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese on corporate capitalism and ethnic cleansing, published Monday.

RIP Lalo Schfrin.

Lastly, it turns out the original title of this Jefferson Airplane song that regularly earworms its way into my head was “Volunteers of Amerika.”

Field Notes will be on holiday the next two weekends, back in late July. Stay safe.

The full moon brought more rain again this month, and a few days after, on Saturday, we got another microburst. We had company, colleagues of my wife from the architecture school and their spouses. It was sunny and muggy, almost wet bulb temp, and we had the idea to get in the pool when suddenly the sky darkened and a single, loud clap of thunder announced what was coming. We kept talking in the kitchen as the wind and rain blew through over twenty short minutes. And then, before it had even really cleared, weird birds started circling the house.

I was the only one who saw them, at first. Our house is an unusual platform for watching the sky: half-buried in the bluff above the urban river, with a wild green roof, the conditioned space comprised of two small pavilions across a narrow patio that works almost like a box canyon, a canyon of glass that reaches twenty-some feet at the peak. It opens up in the direction of the river and woods, facing south, framing a corner of open sky and providing a fun house of reflective planes that often let you see things in motion behind you or beyond your periphery. The ambient life moving through that tableau, mainly birds, planes, insects and helicopters, is constant and remarkably diverse. But these were birds I had never seen, raptors different than our usual hawks, osprey, black vultures and caracara. And their wings looked slightly wrong, at least on one of them—like the wings of a wraith.

I was deep in conversation with our friend Igor, who must have wondered what I was so distracted with as I kept looking up and tracking. And then I spotted one of the birds sitting still, through its reflection at the top of our bedroom window. It had alighted in one of our trees. I excused myself to go take a closer look.

I’d heard stories from friends earlier in the year of visitations by strange grey raptors, and had glimpsed what I thought were some during a late spring visit to a park on Onion Creek, one of the wilder tributaries of the Colorado that flows south of us. And now, I realized, one of the Mississippi kites had decided to stop and visit, sitting in the mostly bare upper branches of our catalpa tree. A tree that had been planted by our neighbor Emily Lott, of a species more common to her hometown of Navasota, half way to East Texas. That we had just learned of her passing, taken finally by the cancer she had resiliently and cheerfully held at bay for sixteen years, made the appearance of the grey ghost in that tree seem a little bit like a visitation. Or, when I realized there were two birds, one with its wings spread out to dry, and then more started arriving, like a wake.

I counted five at the peak. They were intensely backlit, so shadowed that it was hard to make out their details initially, even through field glasses and zoom lens. But they let me get pretty close, which helped confirm my suspicion that several of them must have been unwary juveniles learning their way in the world we made (more ornithologically knowledgeable readers will no doubt share their views in the comments on what my photos evidence). They looked like they all had gotten caught in the storm and tossed about. Trying to get dry, trying to fix their feathers, and generally recover their composure. It was a little like bumping into a group of joyriding teens recovering from some scarier-than-expected test of their youthful immortality.

One flew across the yard to a hackberry, where the light was more direct, and I could make out its crest in profile, like the combed-back bangs of a pompadour. The sort of bird you think could absolutely rock a black leather motorcycle jacket, before you realize it’s already wearing an even cooler light gray one.

I pointed them out to our guests, but I don’t think my effort to articulate the wonder of the moment really landed. To the naked eye, the birds were not big, mostly shadowed, and unremarkable if you hadn’t just seen them on the wing, when they revealed their nature as raptors tuned for the sharp sudden turns of a flying insect hunter. I wondered if that’s what they’d been up to, chasing the bugs that take to the air in shimmering swarms right after the rain passes and the sun breaks through.

Mississippi kites are seasonal visitors here. They used to be rare—in his 1925 guide to the Birds of the Austin Region, George Finlay Simmons called them “very rare”—but they are one of those species that seems to benefit from the Anthropocene habitat created by urbanization. They are not super picky nesters, content to share territory with others of their species, and tend to produce small clutches of eggs. They seem to have thrived in the lost era when they could spend their summers following the clouds of insects that accompanied the bison herds, and begun to recover their population west of the Mississippi when they figured out the opportunities created by small towns surrounded by animal agriculture and the insects that attracts. They hunt cicadas, whose season has also arrived—I spotted my first cicada killer wasp of the season on Wednesday, droning around our walnut trees—and must enjoy the smaller airborne insects that make the city such comfortable habitat for swallows, swifts, and bats, especially around the river and creeks.

I wonder if Emily got to see them, in her month of home hospice. She would have liked them. Maybe even related to them, as a bit of a Southern bird herself, elegant and goofy at the same time. She was gregarious like them, a librarian turned botanist who, with her husband, helped this little side street at the edge of town, a vestigial pocket of residential lots between factories and riparian forest, grow into both an urban wildlife portal and a quasi-commune of her own creation. She had small town manners, descended from early Anglo-American settlers of Texas, and when she would show up at your front door unexpectedly you could not help but be happy to see her. She knew all the creatures of this place any many others, having spent extended periods of time inventorying the flora of Oaxaca, and I was often entranced hearing her share her scientific knowledge in her Navasota vowels. She brought people together with her love of all of them, and helped them all to see the wonder of the other life around us. We will miss her deeply.

It is a coincidence, no doubt, that unusual-looking juvenile birds, creatures in the process of formation, seem to appear when important people in my life pass. That does not lessen the power of such experiences, as a way of coming to terms with life’s seasons. Especially when the departed is someone who helped you see how the wild world hiding in plain sight can help you find your own way through the storms.

Flag(s) Day + summer solstice roundup

The Saturday evening after the kites appeared, my wife and I had date night. When she arrived, our babysitter shared her excitement at the news that there was a big protest scheduled at the State Capitol grounds, relating how she had wanted to go but her immigrant parents had asked her not to. She told us the sign she had wanted to carry would say “My Dad Works Harder than the President.” So we kept our plans to attend despite the heat, and were happy we did. The crowd was good and the energy positive, even as some of the troopers looked to be itching for an excuse to get rowdy, which they got long after we left. I sent our sitter a picture of a blended bandera, which I thought was a powerful reconciliation and distillation:

Later in the evening we saw our friend Jesse Ebaugh, whose wife Mishka was the one who first told me to watch out for kites, play with his new free jazz x post bop group Sahara Quartet at Monks in East Austin, releasing their first vinyl LP. Saxophonist Damien Valenzuela blew us away, the whole group was super tight, and it was inspiring to hear a group of hard-working musicians from other genres exploring new territory of free improvisation—especially in such an amazing, intimate space. Check out their album here at Antone’s.

I enjoyed my conversation with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Anthony Mohr about A Natural History of Empty Lots, which was published this week in the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative’s Social Impact Review. Empty Lots also was, I learned only after voting had been closed, a finalist for the Austin Chronicle’s 2025 Best of Austin awards, as one of the Best New Books by an Austin Author (alongside my friend Fernando Flores for his new novel Brother Brönte).

I’m excited about Southlands, the new print magazine of writing about Southern nature and the outdoors Boyce Upholt is pulling together for publication this fall, my contribution to which I was revising this week. This promises to be a beautiful production, like The Bitter Southerner gone out for a paddle—140 pages of fresh takes on fascinating regional places, people and things, with exceptional design and photography, printed on premium stock in a 9.5” x 12” format. Boyce is one of those great writers who is also an exceptional editor, recruiting a diversity of voices to assemble something new and exciting. If it sounds of interest, I encourage you to check it out, get in on the ground floor, and consider joining the project as a founding member.

And if you haven’t read yet Boyce’s outstanding debut book, The Great River, a deep history of the Mississippi (and our complicated relationship with it) that just won the Willie Morris Award, check it out.

My piece for Southlands focuses on the Anthropocene habitat of the petrochemical Gulf, especially around Houston, where this week the Chronicle reported about a flourishing of invasive hammerhead flatworms after the summer rains, making for one of the weirdest and creepiest newspaper advice columns I’ve read in a while:

If you come across a hammerhead flatworm, do not touch it without covering your hands. The worm secretes chemicals through their skin, making them noxious to predators, irritating to human skin and harmful to animals if eaten. This chemical is meant to aid in the digestion of earthworms.

The worm can be killed by placing it in a plastic bag with a salt and vinegar mixture or freezing it for up to 48 hours. These methods insure that the worm does not crawl away during treatment and that the handler is not exposed to the worm's toxic chemicals. Thoroughly wash your hands after treating the worm and avoid getting its mucus in your eyes or mouth.

Do not squish or cut the worms. The hammerhead flatworm asexually reproduces, meaning if it is physically split it will create more worms.

Do not touch it with bare hands or allow pets to ingest it. The worm is toxic to humans and animals.

Over at Ars Technica, news that new dating research appears to confirm that the human footprints recently found at White Sands are from people who walked through there 22,000 to 24,000 years ago, 10,000 years earlier than the Clovis culture previously thought to be the earliest human presence on this continent. Let that revelation wander around in your head for a while.

In other ancient human news of the week, the NYT has the reconstructed face of a Disney-ready Denisovan, and CNN has a report on reconstructions at the University of Ghent of the faces of early Belgians, including this groovy 10,500-year-old lady I think our friend Emily would enjoy hanging out with:

Congratulations to Brendan Byrne and the team at Melbourne’s Wanton Sun for this week’s publication of Brendan’s short story collection Another World Isn’t Possible.

This week is the bicentennial of the first Rocky Mountain Rendezvous—an annual convention of America’s early 19th century “Mountain Men,” convened near McKinnon, Wyoming around this date in 1825 under the leadership of fur trader-turned real estate speculator and then politician William Ashley. Thanks to Jeff Kacirk’s Forgotten English desk calendar for the tip.

Lastly, speaking of ancient faces, here’s a wiggy 1970 documentary for kids I stumbled upon last week about forager Euell Gibbons, author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus, out in the field with a young sidekick not long before he became the widely parodied commercial spokesman for Grape Nuts cereal:

For a more on Gibbons, a pretty fascinating American character, check out John McPhee’s epic New Yorker profile from April 1968.

Have a great week, and stay cool.

In Geoffrey Household’s 1939 thriller Rogue Male, the narrator, an English hunter who decides to take a shot at Hitler and misses, then gets caught, tortured, tossed from a cliff and left for dead, only to piece himself together and survive, finds himself in the last section of the book hiding from the Nazi who has hunted him across Europe by burrowing a man-sized den in a hedgerow. I loved that book in my 20s, but I never really understood that part of it until our trip to Ireland last week, when I almost burrowed a rented German sedan into several different hedgerows. And then got out of the car, and walked them on foot.

The hedgerow, as I experienced it along the wild Atlantic coast, is a curious model of interstitial nature as it manifests in a landscape that has been dominated by pastoral culture for millennia. Mounds of earth, turf, rock and wood that demarcate distinct land uses, the hedgerows are like unenclosed terrariums dense with diverse flora that also provide animal habitat. And no doubt a few magical beings, like the ones our 6-year-old daughter learned about at Dublin’s National Leprechaun Museum before we headed out into the country for a week of exploration that culminated in her big brother’s wedding.

Photography does not really suffice to capture the greenness of Ireland. It has some of the geological barrenness of Scotland, but it’s so much more temperate and close to the gulf stream that, at least at the beginning of summer, it has a vegetative intensity that feels like some cold country mirror of the tropics, much of it provided by lush ferns that seem to grow everywhere. Even in the manicured public parks of Dublin, and more intensely so in County Clare and County Kerry on the western coast. The bird and animal life seems abundant, despite the predominance of pastoralism, and one gets a sense that the people live closer to the land, and the deep memory it harbors. That closeness is manifested the physical details of the human imprint on the land, including in the way the plants are almost encouraged to reach out and grab the passing cars. Maybe it’s that connection to biodiversity, and a religiosity that seems tied to the land, that makes the country also seem intensely modern, multicultural, and welcoming of all.

In the Icelandic sagas, the Norwegian settlers who arrived at the that rocky isle in the 8th century often learned they had been preceded by Irish hermits, who would usually be found in coastal caves. The images those passages conjured always entranced me, as I tried to imagine living that way, that long ago. Walking stretches of the Irish coast, visiting a few sites of monasteries and forts of similar vintages, and even some ruins from the pre-Christian era, took me closer to that place.

So did my daughter’s insistence, the minute she saw a beach near the town of Ventry on the Dingle Peninsula, that we swim in the surf on a windy afternoon just barely bumping up against 60°F. The water was probably closer to 65°F. It was awesome, and a reminder of how much of our sense of coldness is learned.

As a three-generation family group traveling for a casual week culminating in a wedding, our experience of the place was no more than surface impressions—Ireland as the land of magical VRBOs. Filling out our week without any real clue where we were going, we lucked out on two nights in an insanely beautiful stone cottage on a bluff over the ocean, a short walk from the trail to the Cliffs of Moher and the village of Doolin, and a view of the Aran Islands. In Dingle, we walked out the front door to find an ancient pilgrimage trail across the street, which rewarded me with this good luck greeting an hour into my early morning amble:

And over the back fence, the ruins of a Norman castle built by the Knight of Kerry on the site of an ancient ring fort, access to which was through the backyard of a family that happened to have this heritage site on their land, and welcomed visitors with a solicitation for a small donation:

I picked up the Irish Times most of the days we were there, and one day there was a report about how the AirBnB-ification of the country has begun to change the social landscape of some areas so much that some are concerned that a failure to regulate vacation rentals will soon lead to protests and the possible demise or diminishment of the “Irish Welcome.” It helped me think about our presence with a little more perspective, and what lessons and memories we would take home to Texas with us.

Hugo and Neha’s wedding was at the end of that pilgrimage trail, at the Gallarus Oratory, a thousand-year-old stone chapel built by early Christians. Neha’s brother lives and works in one of the bigger cities of the eastern coast, and when Hugo and Neha visited together last year and traveled around, they immediately knew this magical little sacred structure was where they wanted to consecrate their bonds. So they invited family from Texas and Maharashtra to meet them there the last Saturday in May.

As celebrant, they found Julí Malone, a Druid from Dingle with permission to officiate weddings at the Oratory (who they learned the day after had also been the officiant of Sinead O’Connor’s memorial). Maybe that is why they got a gorgeous sunny day when the forecast called for overcast skies. The ceremony was really beautiful, with a call to the four winds, to the trees, to the mycelium, and to the gods of all those present, and deeply thoughtful and moving vows written by bride and groom that helped us know each of them and their life as a couple better. In that little space, Julí bathed them in the sonorous vibrations of a cymbal, literally tied the knot, and invited the couple to leap out over the threshold and into their new life.

As we celebrated outside in the sun after the exchange of vows, we saw a small bird flying back and forth from the shelter of one of the corner crevices in the Oratory, carrying nesting materials. Then, as we walked to the cars to reconvene at dinner, a sudden, intense, and hyperlocal burst of rain and wind drenched us, just as Julí had spoken of the cleansing of the past. And when we arrived in town, the clouds began to clear, and a full rainbow appeared over Dingle.

Back in Austin, we knew from our house sitter that our home had been pummeled by another microburst—this one the kind that our overheated Earth cooks up at the other end of the gulf stream, with 85 mph winds and baseball-sized hail that reportedly had people bleeding in our neighborhood grocery store after running from their cars. She sent pictures, but they weren’t good enough to tell what had really happened, so we wondered what awaited us as we boarded our flight back Monday.

We were lucky, even as we were saddened by what we found. Three mature trees downed on our lot. Luckily none fell on our house or guest house. But we lost one of our most beloved trees—a gnarled, 75-year-old mesquite that anchored our front yard, it was completely uprooted and tossed across the yard. It’s the tree that anchors the opening chapter of my book A Natural History of Empty Lots, in a recounting of the lessons I learned from it, and the sense of loss is intense, even as we are planning ways to preserve its memory through use of its wood.

Down in the woods of the urban floodplain behind our house, the arboreal carnage was intense. One of the majestic cottonwoods grown a hundred feet tall at the mouth of a municipal drainage pipe also was taken completely down, its fresh downy seed snow splattered across the forest floor, which was also littered with the limbs of hackberries. But the tall sycamore that hosts the great blue heron nests closest to us was undamaged. When I stood under it I could see the nest, and over the week I heard the fledglings running their reassuring motor mouths all morning and night.

Thursday morning as I stepped away from my desk in the guest house, I saw a magical being at the window: a painted bunting. I had glimpsed the bird earlier in the week, flitting around in the stubbier trees and freshly broken branches along our west fence, but it was wary and elusive. This time it couldn’t see me, and was protected by the glass, and I got to fully experience those extravagant colors.

Saturday morning, the parakeets came around to eat the sweet seed pods of that mesquite, just as I describe in the book, “Leprechaun colors” and all, tossing the used shells the way we toss empty beer cans to the bin. Invasive birds who prove how deserving they are of the life they have made here by being the only species I have seen that eats the mesquite pods—a vegetable protein that evolved to be eaten by the mastodons and other native megafauna of this region who went extinct around the same time as humans showed up on the continent.

That fallen tree won’t grow any more pods, but the younger one next to it already does, right in the path formerly occupied by the petroleum pipeline that bisected this lot when we found it. And maybe, when I finish my days-long date with the chainsaw and see what’s left under the fallen trunk, I’ll find a fresh little tendril coming up from what’s left of the root bed.

Saturday afternoon I noticed more magical beings congregating on that fallen tree. Golden-armored dragonflies, alighting en masse on its already-dead brown branches. When I identified them in the field guides, I learned they were widow skimmers, so named for the way the black patterns on their wings recall human adornments of mourning.

We don’t have any Druids in Texas, but we could use some. They’d have a lot to work with, even if they might not be able to appease the winds we have awakened.

The Roundup

Thanks to the Writers’ League of Texas and Becka Oliver for having me as one of the readers for Tuesday’s One Page Salon at Radio in South Austin, where I got to read something new about jaguarundis and robot Jaguars (part of an exploration of ways to combine nature writing and technology criticism), talk about Empty Lots, and meet and new work from a bunch of really cool local writers including Rachel Monroe, Carolyn Cohagan, Josh Alvarez and Renee’ Burleson. What a cool event.

Our latest local jaguarundi sightings have been in Seguin, a town in the Austin-San Antonio interzone.

My conversation with Australian author and environmentalist Anthony James for his RegenNarration podcast is now live and available for download. This was a fun one, as we recorded the conversation while walking around the East Austin edgelands.

Speaking of Australia, thanks to Jesse Sublett for this story about the cockatoos of Sydney who have figured how to operate public drinking fountains (video proof included).

And thanks to Bruce Sterling for this story about the bird nest found in the Ukraine battlefield made of a mix of natural materials and fiber optic cable, and this photo essay about how rapidly the Klamath River valley is rewilding after the most recent dam removal project.

The other magical conjuring to report from the week is that during our flight home, as I thought about watching a movie, I fed Google a query about the imaginary movie I wanted to see, one a friend and I concocted in a recent lunchtime conversation: Werner Herzog’s adaptation of the Relación of Cabeza de Vaca. To my immense amusement, the AI Assistant now embedded in the search engine hallucinated that the movie is a real one, and told me all about it.

If you ever need a Druid, click here.

Have a great week, and stay cool.