Stalkers, cherubs and settlers

No. 155

The day after my sixtieth birthday, I found a cherub down in the swamp behind our block. It had no arms or legs, and a couple of snails were sucking on its head, but it was still a beautiful relic to stumble upon faintly glistening in the channel—a 150-year-old porcelain bust lying on the bottom of a river that mostly brings the plastic trash of our damaged culture.

That I found it while showing a documentary film crew around, in the first few minutes of our first outing, made it even more implausible. But you couldn’t plant such a thing, because you would never even imagine it. A relic from a less disposable era, maybe the only manufactured toy of some settler child who lived around here when that spot we were walking was near one of the main low-water crossings of the Chisholm Trail.

The filmmakers had asked to come along on some urban nature walks with me, and visit places featured in my forthcoming book. So the first morning we started simply, and walked down the street to see the heron rookery—one of the many weird wonders around here that are hard to photograph for the same reasons that they are hard to find, hiding in plain sight in ways that evade our gaze. For at least seven years, a half-dozen nested pairs of great blue herons have bred their young in a tall sycamore growing from an island in the urban river, behind an old warehouse built on an older landfill, maybe a hundred yards from a major vehicular thoroughfare. The heronry is plainly visible from the street now that the warehouse has been torn down, but none of the hordes of folks who come around to patronize the nearby bars and restaurants taking over these formerly industrial streets ever seem to notice.

The colony has been expanding in the last couple of summers, as the younger birds stake out perches in other trees along this stretch of unexpectedly secluded floodplain, and as they’ve nested closer to our home I’ve learned some of the more curious and conversational variants of their songs. This time we got closer to their main tree than I’ve ever managed before on foot, by walking in the river around the edge of the island instead of on it, but it still seemed beyond reach. It got me thinking about how good wild animals are at locating the negative space we leave for them to live in the margins of our dominion, and wondering how many of the spots one sees in the nature documentaries that define our sense of the 21st century wilderness are similarly surrounded by human impact.

The second morning they wanted to see some spots in which that impact was more immediately evident, so we met under the highway bridge to explore the feral zones hidden in the shadows of the overpasses. Another low-water crossing, on one route of the Camino Real de los Tejas, if you can believe the interpretive markers left by the regional mobility authority as self-parodic mitigant for their brutalization of the landscape. We had planned to check out the ruins of the old dairy plant, but I spotted a trail in the other direction that I hadn’t walked in years, and suggested we head up there.

The only sign of wildlife at the trailhead was Cookie Monster, laying in the Bermuda grass like he had been up all night at one of the improvised electronic music festivals folks sometimes convene under the concrete spans of the highway.

The trail got wild almost immediately, tracing a narrow path into the woods along a high bluff on the north bank. We spotted a yellow-crowned night heron chilling in the shadows, unbothered by our presence, and could see and hear the more abundant life down in the shallows where the river widens below the bridge. We kept walking a good ways, even as I could sense my companions were growing wary of where it was I was taking them, and the folk horror vibe creeped up. After a while the trail turned from the woods into a clearing, and continued on past rows of late wildflowers thick with butterflies and dragonflies, and a few harvester ant colonies. The sun was fully risen by then, and you could feel it.

Just as I could tell they were ready to suggest we turn around, we found the place I had been hoping to find. The mountain of asphalt, one of the gnarliest industrial sites I have ever seen, where the landscape is shaped by decades of primitive environmental abuse that it’s hard to believe was ever allowed in any city, especially within a hundred yards of the river. We stood at the mouth of a vast pit, a bowl in the earth covered with excess concrete emptied from trucks that had completed their runs. On the other side rose the mound, similarly made from unused industrial materials, the kind used to build roads and roofs. At the bottom of the bowl, a lake had grown, and all through the scene, signs of nature’s reclamation were evident, including thick stands of native grasses somehow taking root through the concrete at the skanky water’s edge.

Maybe a little too far into Tarkovsky Park for my visitors, as the handful of plants did little to counter the deadness that was in the air, amplified by the wilting heat. As the planes flew over on final approach to the nearby airport, we talked about the planned redevelopment of that seemingly irremediable site into a new urbanist wonderland, and other permutations of the future you can sense in such a place. And then we could all feel the compulsion to get out of there.

When we finally walked back to the other side of the bridge and checked out the expansive field behind the old dairy plant, which hasn’t even been abandoned for a year as it awaits its own redevelopment, the scene felt dangerous in a different way. A couple of extras from a Cormac McCarthy novel were hanging out behind the factory in their trucks, resting after a long night salvaging the unsecured site. One of them had a dog that started barking when we stepped out of the woods, and the sight of us and our cameras got them to drive off, the first one smiling and cracking a joke as he navigated his overloaded pickup across the bumpy ground.

When the second guy passed in his ancient green Blazer, we got a closer look at his dog, which looked like a cross between a pit bull and a Rottweiler, poking its snout out of the cracked rear window. The gate was locked, but they drove right through the truck-sized hole that had been cut from the chain link. And then we noticed the treasure they had abandoned—a gigantic chunk of steel harvested from deep inside the plant, somehow leveraged onto a trailer with long wire rope, but then stuck in a rut as they tried to pull it through another hole in the fence.

As antidote for that apocalyptic Thursday, we spent our last morning exploring a more pleasant spot—an arboretum of ancient oaks on the opposite side of the river, hidden behind an old community center at the end of the bus line. It was hot, but the vegetation was lush, thick with red tasajillo bulbs and yellow coreopsis blooms along the trail, and the shade more substantial. We hadn’t gone far from the road when we found a mature but not huge oak. When we stepped under its canopy, we could all feel the change in the energy, almost as if we had stepped through a portal into some different reality. A little pocket of the world of faerie, bleeding through into our blighted realm.

We walked on, to where the really big oaks are, three trees that evidence the kind of growth that comes slow, over the course of centuries somehow holding out in the same spot. On one, the one that’s bent like a signal oak, we found a cluster of hundreds of daddy longlegs hiding on the shady backside, which some scientists speculate they do to create their own higher moisture microclimate. And then on the last one, we found the crook through which you can see the cranes and high rises of the cyber city, buildings that demonstrate how Capital has obtained the means of its own self-expression. An atemporal contrast that made us wonder which side was the future, and which the past.

The following weekend, my wife and daughter and I made the trek to Iowa to help my mom finish the move out of her country home of 30 years to come down here to live with us. It was a hard trip, as it always is, made harder this time by a cancelled flight that left us stranded overnight at DFW without access to our checked luggage. So we got a room at the hotel attached to Terminal D, made a rideshare run to the nearest Target for swimsuits, and spent a Sunday afternoon swimming on a rooftop surrounded by runways in every direction. One of the better unplanned staycations we’ve had. Who knew family fun could be so Ballardian.

We got to Mom’s place not long after the movers had showed up, loading boxes that had been packed the week before. Mom’s generous local friends were there, and had been helping her daily over the preceding weeks. The next day I went back down to finish the clean-up, doing my best to erase signs of prior habitation. The last task was to try to remove the stains my dad’s unturned bottles of Decatur County Red had left on the basement floors. They proved thick and sticky, almost like coagulated blood. I searched the cleaned-out house for some kind of thin metal to scrape them from the concrete, and found the plaque from one of my late brother’s old golf trophies that had been left on a shelf, engraved with the achievement of second place in the 1982 Father-Son Tournament. It did the job, even as it made me bleed, and felt about right as a layered and sweaty goodbye.

When we got back to Austin I planned to show my mom that cherub I had found in the river the week before. How it was stamped on the back with the place of its origin, Germany, same as her. I wondered how long it had been settled in the river before I found it. And then I got to thinking about that word, “settle.” An old word with common roots in English and German that encodes the idea of the cessation of motion, of coming to rest, as when that sediment settled on the river bottom, when the walker stops and sits, when the family makes a permanent home in a place they have found. A state that may last a long time, but is never permanent, whether you’re a heron or a human.

This morning when I got up early to try to finish this post, after my usual Saturday afternoon slot for doing so was taken up by a friend’s memorial, I encountered a mama wolf spider at our back door, with her babies on her back. I managed to notice her even though she was in a very dark spot, and could see from the outlines of her shadow that she had her new babies on her back. The first time I saw such a thing, in the light of a bathroom I was preparing to use, I caused the babies to scatter all over the kitchen. This time I was able to give them space, and even get her to cooperate for a family picture.

The path out of the settler’s way of seeing the world that most of us are colonized with is a long one, but sometimes you can manage to feel like you are on the way there. You might even come to accept that it is okay to feel a little bit unsettled, as a member of a species that was made to always be ready to walk on to the next camp, and learn to live in the world.

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Further Reading and Listening

My author’s stack of review copies of A Natural History of Empty Lots arrived at the same time as my Canadian documentarian friends, and I learned from the covers, in the funny way the publishing process sometimes works, that the publication date has been moved up a month, to September 17, which is a good thing. The design by Hillary Caudle (cover) and Sara Isasi (interior) is beautiful, and I feel really fortunate to be working with such a great team at Timber Press and Hachette. I can’t wait to see the finished hardcovers, which should arrive in six weeks or so. And I’m delighted to share the news that I’ll be narrating the audio version of the book.

My related print version of this newsletter, available to folks who preorder the book and email me at chris@christopherbrown.com, should be coming in a few weeks.

The book also got a new blurb, from the British author M. John Harrison:

“Instantly hypnotic, A Natural History of Empty Lots invites you to see the ‘waste’ spaces of the Anthropocene for what they are: a resource that contains more than itself. Christopher Brown is a complete and literate denizen of these zones. His calm, clever writing shows a real care for the natural world, and a real feel for the deep worth of the brownfield liminal.”

Harrison is a master of writing about edgeland landscapes and the wonder they harbor, and the U.S. edition of his amazing 2023 “anti-memoir” Wish I Was Here is forthcoming September 3 from Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press.

My prior collaboration with documentarian Brett Gaylor and his cinematographer colleague Eva Brownstein was also for audio—on Necessary Tomorrows, a series about optimistic futures that Brett directed as a podcast for Doha Debates and distributed through Al Jazeera, and for which he also shot some amazing film footage for a version in production. You can check out the documentary version of the podcast I helped with about “The Rights of Nature” here, or the related fiction episode I scripted, “The Last Impala,” which were together a featured selection at last year’s Tribeca Fest.

The screenshots included in this post are by Eva Brownstein, from the footage she shot here June 11-14.

Yesterday’s memorial for the Austin writer Howard Waldrop was beautiful, especially for the way so many of the speakers talked about the way Howard, who never made any money except what could be earned from writing short stories of the fantastic, defined his own measure of success. If you haven’t encountered Howard and his work before, this Texas Standard piece from January is a good place to start.

Stay cool and have a great week.