Storage Lockers of the Sacred Grove
No. 156
Thursday morning I found the Ace of Swords lying there in a burnt out patch of Bermuda grass just outside the steel fence that secures the storage locker I had rented to put all my mom’s stuff that won’t fit into her new condo. Just a fragment of the card—the hand without the fingers, the ball of the hilt, some distant mountains—as if the revelatory breakthrough the card apparently portends, if you can believe the clickbait sites where such interpretive guidance is now most easily available, would only be partial.
I was sitting next to my car taking a break as the early morning sun started to dial up the heat, drinking an iced coffee while Dalton and Jacob from Iowa City got started unloading my dead brother’s insane record collection and the endless boxes of books, and taking in just where it was that I was, at the northeast corner of a complex of three windowless warehouse buildings lined with identical orange garage doors. The most notable thing to Jacob, a college student from a little town outside Des Moines, was the Cybertruck parked outside the fence in front of a cross fit gym to the west, which I realized was the building where my friend Ben used to have his vintage Mercedes repair shop before he sold it to fund his retirement. It was only when I looked to the south that I remembered how Hugo and I had our first encounter with an urban coyote back there, on the other side of that fence, 16 years ago.
The area just west of downtown Austin was still a little feral back than, a zone where the urban infrastructure of the mid-twentieth century—including the passenger train station, the main power plant, and a water treatment facility—had all been mostly abandoned. Plans were underway for their redevelopment into a late capitalist wonderland, but indefinitely stalled by the Financial Crisis. We dug the resulting entropy, and liked to explore the corridor along the old Missouri-Pacific tracks, where a narrow mile of interstitial woods was allowed to grow in the floodplain of the nearby river, dotted with old warehouses intermittently occupied by weird businesses, and opportunities for the uncanny abounded, especially at twilight. I had been reading a lot about urban coyotes back then, fascinated by the studies in Chicago, but bumping into one crossing the tracks, stopping for a momentary Alien vs. Predator stare-down, dialed up the real.
Driving over to meet the Iowa boys at a quarter after 6 Thursday morning, I noted how the storage locker was right by the site of the Treaty Oak—a 600-year-old tree so crowded by development now that I had never really noticed it until a couple of years ago when I was researching important local trees, and realized I had walked and driven by it hundreds of times. Reading the story of how it had been the victim of an attempted arboricide in the late 80s, by some jerk who injected it with massive quantities of Velpar and killed half the canopy that had caused the tree to be declared the finest specimen in North America, I felt somewhat excused. If you get of your car and walk up to it, you see how it has been reduced to the status of a landscaper tree, in the parking lot of a commercial strip behind a hair salon, surrounded by Amazon-Whole Foods facilities and across from an AT&T store, its atemporal majesty drowned out by consumerist noise.
If you go all the way in, and step under its canopy, you can still feel some of its power. But then you read how there were thirteen other trees of similar vintage when the Anglo-Texans first established their colonial settlement here, enough ancient live oaks to constitute a grove. They called it the Council Oaks because that’s where they said the different tribes of Indigenous peoples would meet to parley, but one can imagine it had far greater cultural significance to the Comanche, Tonkawa, Lipan, Wichita and others than any of the settlers who ultimately pushed them out could hope to parse. The sites of sacred groves blighted by development are all over our cities, hiding in plain sight.
Treaty Oak, the last survivor of this grove, is where Stephen F. Austin is said to have agreed with the local tribes on where the western boundary would be that would contain the new settlement he had established. You have to read Fehrenbach’s history of the Lone Star state to appreciate how much our namesake embodied the spirit of the American developer, and how the primal desire to exercise power over the natural world was what drove him, even more than the accumulation of wealth that resulted:
“Somewhere along the line, Austin lost interest in his personal fortune and developed an obsession to ‘redeem Texas from its wilderness state by means of the plow alone, in spreading over it North American population, enterprise, and intelligence.’ What his Mexican colleagues, totally lacking in such instincts, could never comprehend was his sincere and boundless joy at the destruction of the wilderness. Each crashing tree along the [river] gave Austin pleasure; each mud-paved town hammered together in the middle of nowhere instilled in him a sense of destiny fulfilled.”
Earlier in the week, cooling down after a mid-day run into that zone behind the storage locker, I admired the stand of crape myrtles in bloom around the Amtrak station, a short block from the Treaty Oak. A tree whose fuchsia blossoms, one learns over time, appear at the same time as the peak summer heat, a heat that feels more intense every year. When I got closer, I was surprised by how little life their fresh blooms attracted—I know how many bees and butterflies there are around there, including on the earlier-blooming wildflowers that cover the adjacent hill. I had forgotten that our official state shrub is an exotic, native to China and Korea. And I wondered if it might ultimately be better adapted to the overheated milieu we have made, an exemplar of the immanent transecology that characterizes our environmental moment.
A couple years after we saw that coyote behind the storage locker, we moved east to an area that was, and has remained to this day, a lot like that zone where the wild canid roamed—an edgeland of brownfields and abandoned industrial sites. While we worked to rehabilitate the empty lot we had bought, we lived in a rented cottage next door, across the street from a bigger lot with a little warehouse and a field filled with signs harvested from demolished businesses. Every night, all through 2010 and into 2011, it got busy as the staging area of young people fighting for change—activists who had dedicated themselves to the #Occupy movement, and seemed like they were making some headway in calling attention to the depth of economic injustice that the neoliberal reforms of the preceding three decades had allowed to flourish.
That was also the time of the Arab Spring, and revolutionary uprisings around the globe. I got to wondering what it would take for that kind of thing to happen here. What it would be like if those #Occupy kids got their Sandinista on. I ended up writing a whole novel that played that scenario out, complete with a telegenic CEO-President damaged by an assassination attempt and charging the machine of state power and colonial plunder with his personal appetite and rage. Maybe because I was also working on an ecological restoration project while I figured out the book, I concluded my original counterfactual was fantasy—real social and economic injustice could only ever be achieved by a deeper reckoning with the damaged relationship with the land that underlies all our inequality and exploitation of each other. And that what our culture consecrates as the right of revolt we celebrate every July is really the opposite—a celebration of the freedom of the Stephen F. Austins among us to exercise dominion over other life, including each other, and calling it prosperity.
As I walked out in the dark early this morning to write this, resolved to evade the political news and try to synthesize some meaning from a stressful and chaotic week, I heard the hoot of an owl close by, in an old white sycamore that stands right at the double dead-end behind the door factory, where a chainlink fence demarcates the spot where the pavement ends and the urban forest begins. I usually only hear owls deeper in those woods, but it was crazy early, 4:30 a.m. on a Sunday, and I know that spot is a good perch for an airborne night predator—a spot where foxes and other creatures of the field sneak through after dark to go hunt the rodents who live off our food trash. I unlocked our gate and walked out to see if I could see it. I heard a second call, but then it went quiet.
I figured it must have flown off. The owls know how dangerous we are, with eyes that are the planet’s most effective targeting system, and appetites to match.
Reading Roundup
I was delighted Friday to see that Michelle Nijhuis, author of the amazing Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in the Age of Extinction and one of our best contemporary writers on nature, conservation and how to find our way to a greener future, has just started a newsletter on this platform. And her first post digs into the report in this week’s NYT about SpaceX’s impact on the wildlife surrounding the Boca Chica launch facility, as well as some of the work we’ve been doing here. Check it out, and please consider subscribing:
On the subject of barred owls, Michelle’s post also included a fascinating link to an Isobel Whitcomb piece at Atmos on the problems barred owls have become in areas where they are not native.
For more on the Treaty Oak, check out this short history at KUT.
When I refer to my late brother Alex’s record collection as insane, I mean it’s the kind of record collection Vice felt compelled to interview him about. The interview also encodes a great memoir of life and culture downtown in the late 80s and early 90s. Don’t worry, it won’t be in storage for long (and it’s not for sale).
The NYT this week published its big list of the 100 best books of the first 25 years of the 21st century, based on polling of more than 500 writers and critics. It was interesting to see the results (I have read 18 of the 100). The Austin writer and bookseller Fernando Flores had a compelling ephemeral post about how lacking in courage the list was. What struck me was how only two of the books, by my count, were focused on the natural world—Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Richard Powers’ The Overstory. A reminder of how the adoration of the human self runs through our literary culture, and may be part of the problem when it comes to our current crises.
Thanks to Field Notes reader and friend Paul Martz for letting me know that the folks at Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers just released Without Brakes, Fingers Crossed, an anthology of 13 multi-genre stories around the theme of Colorado’s Changing Climate. It includes “The Tamarisk Hunter” by the amazing Paolo Bacigalupi. Proceeds benefit RMFW, a Colorado non-profit.
The review copies of my forthcoming book A Natural History of Empty Lots are starting to show up out in the wild, and you can see some of the early reactions here. Watch this space for news about tour calendar and some forthcoming related content. The print version of this newsletter for folks who preorder the book is in process—if you’d like to get in on that, please email me at chris@christopherbrown.com.
In other news, the summer tanager is back, for the third year in a row.
Stay cool and have a safe week. Field Notes will likely be off next week, as I expect to be in the field.
The quote regarding Stephen F Austin: '...his sincere and boundless joy at the destruction of the wilderness', encapsulates my lifelong, central bugbear. It's because I know that Christopher Brown *knows*, that I can handle thinking about these things, like I'm outsourcing my emotional processing :) Over the years of enjoying these Field Notes I've come to realise that's just one its attractions for me.
The tangager photo is icing on the cake of this tasty update and it makes me eager to receive my pre-ordered copy of your forthcoming book. Your writing makes me feel as though I'm walking with you through these Austin spaces. A tattered tarot card offering prescience.