Note: this is the seventh in a series of occasionally appearing entries focusing on deserts in general and the drylands of West Texas in particular
One particular desert lover's interest in the dry country can be traced to a specific time and place. It would be a rainy summer day in the mid-1960s in Alexandria, Louisiana when he came across The Southwest by Herbert S. Zim. The paperback with a crisp, glossy cover was part of the Golden Nature Guides published by Simon and Schuster...
Dr Zim was both author and editor of this mini look at the dry country. He'd taken a job redacting the series of Golden books in 1947 and began writing many of the titles two years later. It was work he loved-- he was a science educator by trade and nature and he wanted every kid in the world to love the world of nature like he did...
Herbert S Zim's American Southwest was a terribly exotic place to a young lad who was poking around in a hobby shop on Lee Street, looking for plastic movie monster models made by a company in Aurora, Illinois...
 |
| Scenic routes, Natural Wonders... |
Peering out through a car window, what did our young desert aficionado see? Central Louisiana had many lakes, rivers, bayous, and tall pine forests where dried red pine needles crackled under foot as he tromped through the woods. There were cotton fields and alligators and honeysuckles on the vine with that sweet scent which reminded him of death...
But the Southwest? It was a different world defined by vast skies and sparse plants and mile after mile of open country. Where in the Deep South did you find mesas and buttes? Navajos or Apaches? Gila monsters and horned toads? Cacti reaching up to touch heaven and cowboys bent on raising hell?...
If you were a kid growing up in the Fifties and Sixties and had to write a school report about reptiles or rocks or stars or bugs, you could go to the encyclopedia or you could go to Herbert S Zim. He was usually the better choice. The man had a gift for taking complicated subjects and explaining them simply. Plus there were lots of pictures for attention deficit disorder types...
 |
| A prehistoric battle of titanic creatures, courtesy of Herbert S Zim and Fossils, his guide to ancient wonders |
Zim was born in 1909, the same year that my father came into the world. He was raised in New York City and Santa Barbara, according to his obituary in the New York Times, and married twice. His first wife was an anthropologist who predeceased him by almost fourteen years. He had a PhD from Columbia and a brother named Milton. And he was the man who penned the first book in which I saw mention of a dusty West Texas town called San Angelo...
Many years later and many miles away from Alexandria, a child's wide-eyed interest in deserts became a middle-aged man's passion for understanding the natural history of the dry country around San Angelo...
 |
| Herbert S Zim |
In part, that desire may have had something to do with the nature of Alexandria and San Angelo. Each is relatively isolated and distant from the largest population centers of their states. Neither can be described as big cities, although residents in nearby small communities consider them such. Both burgs sit on borderlands defined by rivers little known outside their respective states of Louisiana and Texas...
Geographically, Alexandria sits between the Protestant North and Catholic South of the Bayou State. Its citizens have only recently permitted themselves to openly admit the region's Creole and Cajun cultural influences by holding an annual Mardi Gras intended to snag tourist dollars. But, true to the dour soul of North Louisiana and its less than ten thousand year old soil, it is advertised as a family friendly celebration...
 |
| Alexandria, Louisiana Mardi Gras: no nudity filled bachanals |
San Angeloans share a similar uneasy relationship with the dry country. Its presence is officially acknowledged. The Chamber of Commerce web site says the city sits at 1900 feet on the northern boundary of the Chihuahuan Desert. It is one thing to proclaim your town an oasis as do the good merchants of San Angelo. But admitting the heat and aridity of the surrounding countryside is another. Potential visitors and relocating businesses are promptly advised that, while the temperatures do reach the 100s in the summer, low humidity keeps the "heat index" down...
 |
| Half a mile down the road in West Texas |
Other authoritative sources do the same to minimize the desert stretching for hundreds of miles to the west and south of the city. Angelo State University informs web surfers that "two major biomes, as defined by Aldrich (1967) are present in the Concho Valley." These are Pinyon-Juniper Woodlands and Mesquite-Grasslands. Representatives of a third biome, Desert Scrub, enter the region from the southwest. This particular page goes on to list a "few representative" Desert Scrub species that can be found on area rangeland: catclaw, creosote bush, white brush, and guajillo...
Why would anyone save a crank quibble with this summary of Concho Valley biomes? Let us look at what the author has to say before stomping our feet in academic tantrum. In commenting on the Mesquite-Grassland biome, the writer lists mesquite, agarita, lotebush, and prickly pear cactus as being common. Grasses are described as "short grasses" with one of the listed species being Hilaria mutica aka tobosa grass. Another of those listed is Aristida purpurea...
Aldrich's Mesquite-Grassland, or at least its Concho Valley incarnation, sounds a lot like what contemporary students of the subject call degraded desert grassland...
 |
| Desert grassland: Tobosa and Mesquite |
Hilaria mutica (now renamed Pleuraphis mutica) rarely grows outside of Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas. It is, simply put, a desert grass. Other grasses on the ASU list of Mesquite-Grassland species prefer dry environments. Some, like Aristida purpurea, can be found on short grass prairies as well as desert grasslands. Others, including Bouteloua breviseta, have distributions limited almost entirely to the Chihuahuan Desert region...
[Those readers inclined to rangeland agronomy as a hobby will realize that grasses, in general, have wider distribution patterns than do most shrubs or forbs. What we now call desert grasslands belong to southwestern Texas, southern and central New Mexico, and much of southern and central Arizona. The soils of desert grasslands (like other southwestern desert soils) tend to be light colored at the surface due to a lack of organic content and they rest on hard layers of insufficiently leached salts and chemicals known as caliche.]
If the grasslands near San Angelo are desert grasslands (and not merely an extension of shortgrass prairie country), the outer edges of the Chihuahuan Desert reach into the Concho Valley. We can support our argument by considering local shrubs and succulents. The woody plants listed as characteristic of Aldrich's Mesquite-Grassland biome are primarily desert plants even though some, like mesquite, extend into central and southeastern Texas...
 |
| Walter Prescott Webb |
Personally, I tend to see Texas desert country as the area west of the 100th meridian and south of the 32nd parallel with a dogleg northwestward toward Midland and Lubbock. This is the part of the state where potential evapotranspiration rates are at least three times greater than average yearly precipitation...
Distribution maps for our Mesquite-Grassland shrubs, however, make a good case for the boundaries of Dryland Texas actually extending closer to the 98th meridian. While I would enjoy taking credit for attaching significance to this particular imaginary map line, historian Walter Prescott Webb beat me to the punch in 1931 when he published The Great Plains...
 |
| In his 1931 book, Walter Prescott Webb argued the lack of timber and water beyond the 98th meridian forced a change in the technology and culture of Anglo-Americans |
This University of Texas scholar, spent nine years mulling over the question of why it took Americans, ever a restless lot, as long as it did to settle the Great Plains between the Rockies and eastern seaboard. He eventually concluded this vast level land, by lacking trees and abundant rainfall or water sources, was a natural force outside the cultural experience of Anglo-Americans living near the Atlantic Ocean...
Webb argued this unfamiliar environment also forced profound adaptations to traditional American lifestyles before the Plains could be settled: timber-based homes on in Virginia became sod huts in Kansas, cattle ranching in the Texas Panhandle required huge tracts of land as opposed to a few grass-rich acres constantly renewed by frequent rain in Louisiana, etc. The new and desolate environment demanded a new technology to make its settlement possible: barbed wire fences, windmills, revolvers...
Still, the question asked earlier remains: why do West Texans minimize the presence of the desert?..
Praying for rain is a staple of religious practice in the Concho Valley and Trans-Pecos. Local businesses attempt to outdo each other in demonstrating their piety in this regard. One area clergyman goes so far as to refer to the area's natural aridity as a demon...
Faith is a laudable thing but a person does have to ask why people seem to ignore what grows from the earth around them. Based on personal travels western Concho Valley, I vouch for the presence of creosote bush, catclaw, guajillo and white brush as well as wider-ranging lotebush, prickly pear, mesquite, and agarita. Tobosa grass interrupts the barren spots of ground on my property...
 |
| Religion in West Texas |
I can also say, based on what my own eyes have seen, that the western Concho Valley provides a nice dry home for tarbush, lechuguilla, javelina bush, feather dalea, four-wing saltbush, longleaf ephedra, ocotillo, desert sumac, and soap bush...
This list of xeric shrubs could be expanded to include another forty or fifty woody plants and succulents such as pencil cactus, goatbush, yucca, and allthorn. The presence of some of these plants in an uncultivated state helps us understand the true nature of the land supporting them. Distribution patterns of tarbush, James A MacMahon notes in his book, Deserts, basically outline the boundaries of the Chihuahuan Desert in the United States. Much the same can be said of lechuguilla. Ditto javelina bush...
 |
| Herbert S Zim's American Southwest |
Perhaps, our search for an answer to why there is a simultaneous grudging admission of the presence of the desert and a stubborn refusal to admit the extent of its power on our lives in the Concho Valley lies elsewhere. No one who lives in West Texas denies the country is dry and hard or that water is scarce and rare. But few are those who will suggest continued agricultural activities, particularly farming, may lead to even greater water shortages...
The answer as to why that is may have little to do with science or traditional religion. It may lie in a myth shaped by history and the whims of nature...
 |
| A ceramic Tlatilco style figurine, dating to approximately 1000 BCE, from the collection of Herbert S and Sonia Bleeker Zim |
For the botanically inclined interested in learning more about these plants of the western Concho Valley: catclaw (Acacia greggii), creosote (Larrea tridentata), white brush (Aloysia gratissima), guajillo (Acacia berlandieri), mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa), agarita (Mahonia trifoliata), lotebush (Ziziphus obtusifolia), prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp), tarbush (Flourensia cernua), lechuguilla (Agave lechuguilla), javelina bush (Condalia ericoides), feather dalea (Dalea formosa), four-wing saltbush (Atriplex canescenes), longleaf ephedra (Ephedra trifurca), ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens), desert sumac (Rhus microphylla), soap bush (Guaiacum angustifolium), pencil cactus (Cylindropuntia leptocaulis), goatbush (Castela erecta), yucca (Yucca spp), and allthorn (Koeberlinia spinosa)
LRNARTS MARKETPLACE:
For fine art prints and greeting cards by Louis R Nugent, visit:
Featured this week:
Fine Art America now features West Texas painting, drawings, and photographs by Jeniffer Stapher-Thomas of El Paso, Texas, Paula Loftin of Ada, Oklahoma, Karen Slagle of Amarillo, Texas, Linda Cox of Graham, Texas, Suzanne Girard Theis of Houston, Texas, Judi Bagwell of Greenwell Springs, Louisiana, Karen Boudreaux of Houston, Texas, Joe JAKE Pratt of Kerrville, Texas, David Pike of Lubbock, Texas, Ken Brown Pioneer of Sand Springs, Oklahoma, and Louis R Nugent of San Angelo, Texas at:
This week's featured artist: Judi Bagwell
Fine Arts America now features work celebrating the mysterious and lovely Bayou State and its unique lifestyle:
This week's featured artist: Scott Pellegrin
CREDITS
Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: Pray For Rain from poleshift.ning.com; Tobosa grass from polyploid.com; Herbert S Zim from naturalpatriot.org; Herbert Zim's American Southwest from vintagepbks.com; The Southwest by Herbert S Zim cover and The Great Plains by Walter Prescott Web cover from amazon.com; Alexandria Louisiana Mardi Gras from alexmardigras.com; ceramic Tlatilco Style figurine from Zim collection at Logan Museum of Anthropology, Beloit College; Half A Mile Down The Road in West Texas from Louis R Nugent
No comments:
Post a Comment