Journey To The Desert's Edge, Part 10

Note: this is the tenth in a series of occasionally appearing entries focusing on deserts in general and the drylands of West Texas in particular

“At the foot of the Panhandle lies the vast western portion of Texas, an area of the state that epitomizes the isolation and beauty of the American desert.  From the edge of the metropolitan area of El Paso, the West Texas desert stretches over four hundred miles (640 km) into the heart of the state.”-- Gary Reyes, Texas, Mallard Press, New York, 1991

Defining deserts is a tricky endeavor and defining their boundaries can be even trickier business…

Readers of previous columns in this series about the dry country remember we have settled on a fairly simple definition for a desert-- an area where the potential water loss through evapotranspiration significantly (and consistently) exceeds that area’s precipitation.  Most scientists who study deserts agree on this definition…



The Chihuahuan Desert, broadly outlined in this map, is both
North America's largest and most biologically diverse desert.
It is also one of the continent's least explored wilderness areas.

We’ve also discussed the lack of universal scholarly agreement as to what “significantly exceeds” means.  In 1937, H C Trumble provided empirical answers to part of this dispute by demonstrating water need for a month exceeds water supply when computed evaporation is more than three times precipitation.  His work, cited over a decade later by C W Thornthwaite in a landmark analysis of climate, dealt only in facts and not in the nuances of language.  Thus, scholars continue to debate exactly what makes a desert a desert…

Does a region become a desert when this “three times precipitation” threshold is met-- or must the area be even more arid?  If it must be even drier, at what point is the land desert dry-- when computed evaporation is five times the precipitation, nine times the precipitation, twenty times?  Just what does “significantly exceeds” mean ...

One school of thought embraces a very wide stretch of country as desert and includes all of Wladimir Koeppen’s “B” series of dry climates.  Another school excludes those areas Koeppen defined as steppes but includes ones he called deserts.  (A problem with this approach is that Tucson, Arizona, and most of the Big Bend area of Texas would be among the places not considered deserts-- an omission that most visitors or residents of these areas might strenuously dispute.)… 

Near the author's home in western Tom Green County

Some scholars also say there are no true deserts in North America.  They limit deserts to exceedingly arid regions like the Sahara of northern Africa and the Atacama in Chile.  The latter may be the driest place on Earth.  Researchers believe parts of this vast desolation haven’t received measurable rainfall for four hundred years.  Average annual precipitation for the Atacama as a whole hovers around an estimated 0.004 inches.  Placing that figure in perspective, it could be somewhere around the year 2263 before we add a single inch to this desert’s sparse total…

A majority of laymen (and probably most scientists) say there are deserts in the United States.  There’s also general agreement four large areas-- the Mojave, the Sonoran, the Chihuahuan, and the Great Basin-- can be so designated.  Fixing their boundaries is a difficult and probably impossible task though…

Rough outlines of deserts have been established by studying plants native to a region.  The same can be said for other ecosystems such as grasslands or rain forests.  When Wladimir Koeppen first conceived the notion for developing a world-wide classification scheme, he drew upon both his training as a botanist and his childhood travels to botanically diverse regions through the Russian empire to create the broad outlines of his system. Later, as Peggy Larson commented in a study of the southwestern deserts, the botanist Forrest Shreve took this same understanding that plants define the natural character of an area and used it to decode the landscape of “the North American desert into four individual deserts… based on their distinctive vegetation”…



Ocotillo, Fouquieria splendens, as photographed by the author.
For more photographs of this fascinating desert shrub, visit the
Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower at the link provided in the text.

Shreve, who became director of Desert Investigations in 1928 for the Carnegie Institute, published his desert boundary outlines in a 1942 Botanical Review article.  Since then, subsequent researchers have either confirmed his descriptions, contracted the territory included in them, or expanded the areas he considered to be desert based on factors they consider relevant...

The largest disagreements over the boundaries of any desert focus on North America’s easternmost desert.  Mountain ranges basically limit the maximum possible boundaries for three of our four deserts.  But, for the Chihuahuan, those boundaries are ill-defined products of heat, wind, and potential evapotranspiration rates of dry west Texas plains.  Complicating the problem is the fact these boundaries more likely lie in places more resembling short grass prairies dotted with xeric shrubs than in the harsh landscapes known to us from cowboy movies...

Where those eastern boundaries might be can be seen on the map of Texas shown at the end of this essay…

First, we should explain what the map shows…

Colors are used to denote the presence of various plants in the map.  Counties shaded in brown contain populations of Agave lechuguilla and/or Flourensia cernua, populations documented on range maps developed and maintained by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and/ or the Biota of North America Program (BONAP).  One should note that range maps are not always complete.  The reader will notice that Irion County, between Tom Green County and Reagan County, lacks a USDA or BONAP documented population of Flourensia cernua.  But such a population does exist...
 

Spindly tarbush, Flourensia cernua, like Agave lechuguilla roughly

outlines the borders of the Chihuahuan Desert in the United States

Red counties have USDA or BONAP documented populations of Larrea tridentata, a widely distributed desert shrub, but lack similar records for either Agave lechuguilla or Flourensia cernua having been found inside the county.  Yellow means Condalia ericoides is present with no documented populations of the three other plant species.  Gray documents Tiquilia canescens...

Note: Readers who are interested in learning more about the plants briefly mentioned above and discussed in the following paragraphs are encouraged visit the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center of Austin, Texas at https://www.wildflower.org/explore/.  The site contains descriptive information as well as photographs for more than 7000 native species.

Now, we need to explain what the map means…

Botanists like Shreve consider certain plants as unique to certain regions-- giant Saguaro cacti belong to the Sonoran Desert and the oddly shaped Joshua Tree yucca to the Mojave…

Unfortunately for those who love majestic desert beauty, two plants used to define the Chihuahuan don’t tower above arid landscapes as magnificently as do their cousins in the drylands of the west… 

But tarbush (Flourensia cernua) and lechuguilla (Agave lechuguilla) are like the Joshua Tree and the Saguaro in needing a hard land with poor soil, sporadic rains, and month after month of searing heat if they hope to flourish…



Saltbush, Atriplex canescens, seen here at the San Angelo State Park in Texas,
is one of the most widely distributed xeric shrubs in North America and is not
unique to any specific desert region.

Related to century plants but generally more compact in size, lechuguilla enjoys a bit of notoriety as the source of tequila. Sharp tipped leaves, slender and spiny enough to impale a man unlucky enough to fall on it, give the plant another common name-- shin dagger.  Like other agaves, it may take twenty-five years for lechuguilla to flower.  When it finally does, it shoots a spectacular plume of tiny blooms skyward from the center of the plant and then dies.  The life span of any lechuguilla is tied to the amount of rain it receives and the soil in which it lives-- the wetter the weather and the richer the soil, the sooner the plant dies…

Counties in red may lack documented populations of lechuguilla or tarbush but they do provide a home to creosote bush.  Known to scientists as Larrea tridentata, creosote bush often grows in association with tarbush in the desert country of Texas and New Mexico and southeastern Arizona.  Both are short spindly shrubs with tiny leaves.  Both exude odors highly reminiscent of petroleum-derived products.  Both thrive on alluvial soils derived from limestone.  But creosote bush can be found in more places than tarbush-- it and a tall wand-like plant with flaming red flowers known as ocotillo vie for the title of most widely distributed plant found in the “hot” deserts of North America…

(As the reader may suspect, creosote bush and ocotillo also grow, more often than not, in the brown counties where lechuguilla and tarbush can be found.  This association is strongest in the barren Trans-Pecos where almost every county is home to all four plant species.)

In the western Concho Valley of Texas, the association of these four species becomes sporadic.  Only lechuguilla has been found east of the San Angelo area.  Creosote bush makes limited appearances outside Reagan and Crockett counties and is difficult to find.  A Mesquite-Juniper-Creosote-Live Oak brush community can be found in southern Tom Green County but the numbers of Mesquite, Juniper, and Live Oak are far greater than the number of creosote bushes.  Texas Handbook Online articles anecdotally note the shrub's presence in the countryside near San Angelo, particularly around the hardscrabble country surrounding the Devil’s Courthouse Peak, known to most folk in the area as Devil’s Mountain, but one will find more Desert Sumac (Rhus microphylla) or White Brush (Aloysia gratissima) in a region that is also home to giant yuccas ... 



Javelina bush, Condalia ericoides, growing near the somewhat misnamed
Water Valley settlement in western Tom Green County.  Other photographs
of this plant, including some by the author, can be found at the Lady Bird
Johnson Wildflower Center website by visiting the link provided elsewhere in
this blog.

The spiny and twisted javelina bush can be found in Irion County, at one time part of Tom Green County.  Known to the botanical world as Condalia ericoides, javelina bush has a distribution much akin to that of tarbush and can be found growing in all counties west of the Pecos.  It is one of the many dry country species that the biologist Vernon Bailey noted as growing near San Angelo when he passed through the Concho Valley in May, 1899.  He described the area as a “genuinely arid region…with great stretches of smooth surfaces with only short grasses and little desert plants…(and) a scattered growth of small mesquites”…

One of those little desert plants mentioned by Bailey is Tiquilia canescens. Commonly known as “dog ear” due to the shape of its small, grayish leaves, this sub-shrub strays but very little outside desert regions.  Its presence, marked in gray on the map, is an indicator of land which receives erratic rainfall rapidly lost to wind and sun…

This map with color-shaded counties leaves us with much to ponder and topics to be explored in detail at a later date…

It suggests a large portion of Texas is exceptionally and naturally dry.  Detailed climate studies confirm that roughly 80% of the Lone Star State can be described as subhumid, semi-arid, or arid.  This implies very real challenges to both agricultural activities and human populations heavily dependent on water for survival, challenges highlighted and made more urgent by the proximity of large cities kissing the desert’s edge-- cities like Austin in Travis County and San Antonio in Bexar County…

  

THE MARKETPLACE

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Easier still: browse the Louis R Nugent gallery at Fine Art America and choose from nearly 300 ideas for home and office decor or holiday and birthday cards for yourself or special someones who deserve something extraordinary.  Individual cards cost less than $5.  Wall prints from $22.

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Louis Nugent: Desert Voodoo

Follow and Like Louis R Nugent Photography on Facebook @ louisnugent22.

Fine Art America now features painting, drawings, and photographs by forty-five artists who celebrate majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and flora and fauna scattered across the vast emptiness called West Texas.

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html

CREDITS

Note: Information for this essay was obtained primarily through readily available sources such as Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica except as noted:  Forrest Shreve and desert boundaries from The Deserts of the Southwest by Peggy Larson (Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1977); biographical information about Forrest Shreve from http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/chronob/SHRE1878.htm; Flourensia cernua and Agave lechuguilla as indicator plants of Chihuahuan Desert region from Deserts by James A MacMahon (Knopfm New York, 1997) and Trees and Shrubs of the Trans-Pecos and Adjacent Regions by A Michael Powell (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998) plant distribution data from range maps developed by the United States Department of Agriculture and the Biota of North America Program; information about creosote-juniper-live oak plant association from Distribution, Natural History, And Biogeographic Relations On The Edwards Plateau Of Texas by Jim Goetze (doctoral dissertation, Texas Tech University, 1995); Vernon Bailey quotes from Texas Natural History: A Century of Change by David J Schmidley (Texas Tech University Press, Lubbock, 2002) All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: map of Chihuahuan Desert region from the Centennial Museum, University of Texas at El Paso; blank county level map used to outline Texas desert species distribution from United States Census Bureau; all other illustrations by Louis R Nugent

The Beat Goes On

"I dig rock and roll music/I could really get it on in that scene/I think I could say something if you know what I mean/But if I really say it, the radio won't play it/Unless I lay it between the lines"-- I Dig Rock and Roll Music, Paul Stookey, Jim Mason, Dave Dixon, 1967

Some mornings a song sneaks into your head and just won't go away...

Today, that wicked melody come to bedevil me would be "I Dig Rock and Roll Music", a slightly offbeat tune recorded in 1967 by the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary.  The group had been performing together for roughly six years when they took the song into the studio.  PPM was a put-together group, assembled by Albert Grossman, a Chicago-born music act manager who went on to shepherd careers for Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, and Janis Joplin...



Peter, Paul, and Mary

 

Readers who've heard the song know that I Dig Rock and Roll Music is not rock and roll and not really folk.  It touches the ear more as an homage to Beat Poets and the smoky jazz clubs these renegade rhymers were alleged to frequent by their champions...

"Beatnik", of course, is the word that comes to mind when we think Beat Movement.  The term was coined early in April 1958 by a San Francisco newspaper columnist, Herb Caen, who also popularized "hippie" a decade or so later when he tried to describe the practitioners of another Bay Area lifestyle that aging squares like him couldn’t quite dig or wrap their heads around.  Beats, incidentally, didn't like being called beatniks.  For them, it came across as sounding pejorative...



The Hipster and The Square who "Gets It":
Bob Dylan and Albert Grossman

When Caen got around to marrying "beat" with "sputnik", the Beats had been around for a good decade.  The writer Jack Kerouac used the phrase Beat Generation while talking to novelist John Clellon Holmes in 1948 as he searched for a quick way to describe the way he and his friends viewed the world.  It was an odd comment-- "beat" in the slang of the late 1940s meant a shabby lowlife who didn't quiet make the grade as a serious criminal: a two-bit hustler, a strung out drug addict, a punk who smashes store windows and makes off with cheap display case merchandise...

 

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen enjoys a visit with
director Alfred Hitchcock during the filming of The Birds

Jack Kerouac saw himself and his fellow Beats as something else entirely.  He wrote In "Aftermath: The Philosophy of a Beat Generation" that he and they were "characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead window of our civilization"...

It's an interesting literary reference for Kerouac to make.  Long before Franz Kafka-- the solitary lawyer who worked for an insurance firm-- wrote melancholy tales about men who turn into cockroaches and find themselves no longer belonging to a world of normal men, Herman Melville penned his account of a clerk employed by a Wall Street attorney who specializes in recording deeds and mortgages.  Bartleby at first seems an ideal worker.  Then, one day the scrivener becomes less productive, eventually transforming into an almost motionless fixture in the office where he once worked.  Attempts to elicit explanations for this odd behavior are met with a simple reply:  "I would prefer not to"...

 

Jack Kerouac: Beat Catholic Mesmerized by Buddhism

Kerouac left this earthly plane in 1969 at the age of 47, so we are unlikely to know just what he meant by the Bartleby metaphor.  On the surface, it is a strange comparison.  Bartleby seems more amoeba than man, a depressive who fills his employer with both loathing and pity.  Jack Kerouac and pals had much more personality than Mr Melville's lowly ledger-scribbler.  The autobiographical On The Road fictionalizes Kerouac as Sal Paradise and friend Neal Cassady as Dean Moriarty as they travel across America from East Coast to West Coast.  There's boozing, womanizing, reefer smoking, gambling, and back alley fighting enough to last poor Bartleby a dozen lifetimes...

The real Sal Paradise was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, a town known for being the Cradle of the Industrial Revolution in America, thanks to the textile mills surrounding it from the 1820s onward.  Jack's dad was the son of a potato farmer who descended from the minor French nobility.  This decline in status and family fortune was never lost on Kerouac who was involuntarily-- but honorably discharged-- from the Army after a few weeks of military service due to signs of schizophrenia.  After that, he signed on to work as a commercial sailor in the Merchant Marine... 

 


Lowell, Massachusetts

By the time Jack Kerouac came into the world in 1922, his Lowell was knee deep in steep economic decline.  Manufacturers tripped on their own feet, almost trampling themselves, as they rushed across the Mason Dixon line to find cheap labor and tax breaks down South.  The Great Depression had turned Lowell, according to a 1931 Harper's Magazine article, a "depressed industrial desert"...

A devout Catholic from his childhood until his death, Kerouac offered other comments about what Beat really meant.  He told an audience at Hunter College in New York in 1958 that "I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son to it."  Jack's search for deeper meanings weren’t confined to the faith of his youth-- a personal dialogue with Buddhism peeked briefly through his remarks as he went on to speculate "the universe... is one vast sea of compassion, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty".  On another occasion, Kerouac complained critics didn't "get" On The Road was actually the story of two Catholic guys in search of God who found Him "in the sky and on Market Street San Francisco" and understood "the Godhood of God is forever Established and must really never be talked about"...

 


Signet Paperback edition of Kerouac's masterpiece

Buddhist thought heavily influenced other Beats, Allen Ginsberg being one of the most prominent...

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926 on the third day of June.  His father, Louis, taught in public high schools and labeled himself a poet.  His mother, Naomi, suffered from a never properly diagnosed psychological issue and labeled herself a Communist.  Young Allen labeled himself an atheist by the time he turned 14 but was never able to fully distance himself from his Hebraic roots.  When Naomi died in 1956, there were fewer than ten adult Jewish males in attendance at her funeral and the Kaddish prayer was not recited due to the lack of a minyan.  This bothered Ginsberg greatly and his poem Kaddish (written between 1957 and 1959) became, at one and the same time, a memorial to his troubled mother, a manifesto of his estrangement from his heritage, and a masterpiece of Beat literature...

 

Allen Ginsberg, Beat Jew mesmerized by Buddhism, reads from
Howl to fans who were in diapers when he wrote the poem

Ginsberg ultimately embraced Buddhism, perhaps attracted by its teaching that there is no individual self or soul independent of the rest of the Universe.  Or the Eightfold Path may have been a useful guide for navigating the challenges of this lifetime.  We find the beginning of wisdom in viewing reality as it is, Lord Buddha taught us, and not seeing it as it appears to be...

[Another part of Allen Ginsberg's spiritual quest was a journey into Hindu thought, most particularly a cult associated with the Lord Krishna who is an incarnation of Vishnu, the Preserver, the highest aspect of God and the essence of all things created.  Common to both Hinduism and Buddhism is the concept of Maya, or Illusion.  For those consumed by a search for higher truth, the goal becomes to see beyond Maya and to understand there is no distinction between individual self and the Universe, that consciousness and physical matter are one reality.]

 

Albert Grossman's wife, Sally, languidly shares an album
cover with her husband's rebellious young client

Esoteric concepts rarely make for best-sellers nor do they generally appeal to the mass market movie-maker.  When the Beat Movement found its way into bookstores and theaters, the public got Beatniks who smoked dope, indulged in casual sex, listened to jazz played by black musicians, stood on stages as they muttered incoherent poetry to other stoned beatniks who snapped fingers to keep time with the bass player thumping away behind the alleged poet.  Beatniks wore berets and turtleneck sweaters or striped shirts and raggedy jeans (male) or tights (female)...

Similar misperceptions distorted the hippie movement which blossomed from the middle 1960s into the early 1970s.  Hippies endured another plague: young people who wanted to look cool without actually being cool...

 


Beatniks listening to jazz music in their smoke-filled lair

Moviemakers churned out hippie exploitation flicks with titles like The Trip, Hallucination Generation, and Love-Ins to cash in on the money cow.  Long-haired lads, high on marijuana and LSD, hopped from bed to bed, sharing them with willing nymphomaniacs, whenever they weren't plotting a federal courthouse bombing... 

The counterculture played along with the mainstream culture's stereotypes by gobbling up underground "comix" that emphasized sex, drugs, and rock and roll... 

[The undergrounds were generally depressingly misogynous and presented women as not much more than willing or uncooperative receptacles for sperm.  There were other disturbing qualities in these subterranean funnies: graphic depictions of dismemberment and mutilations and an irrational hatred for authority in any form.  In many ways, the Comix were a marriage of the grisly 1950s EC Comics and the 1930s Tijuana Bibles, eight-page comics banned in most states their explicit depictions of sex.  Readers without experience in reading underground comix probably shouldn't feel cheated.]

 

Woodstock: Trying to find The Garden

American pop culture still reverberates with echoes of the Hippie era:   the Woodstock music festival, the critically acclaimed film Easy Rider, the musical Hair celebrating the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.  This is the way we, as a culture, want to remember psychedelic days and the rock scene... 

Nugget, a quality publication for gentlemen, introduced its readers to bottomless beatnik
Dione Garret in April, 1960

The title of Mr Geis' novel says it all

 

Hippie values (or at least the perception of them) crept into other entertainment of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Sex was usually the selling point.  The avant-garde revue, Oh! Calcutta!, examined changing sexual values but failed to gather love from critics at newspapers like the New York Times.  A rough draft for one of Calcutta's sketches came courtesy of the pen of Beatle John Lennon.  Another who gave his talents to the revue included playwright Samuel Beckett of Waiting for Godot fame.  Arbiters of public taste found Calcutta's humor sophomoric but said its oft nude cast was quite attractive.  In my view, despite my personal desire to be contrary and automatically disagree with critics, this is probably a fairly accurate description...   

Hippies took their name from black slang-- "hip" meaning to be up-to-date and in-the-know.  Some linguists trace hip to hepikat, a word from West Africa's Wolof language that translates to "one who has his eyes open".  Hepikat eventually became the jazz world's hepcat (or hipster) who communicated through slang, enjoyed cannabis now and then, didn't take the world seriously (except when it came to his music), made sarcastic wisecracks, and enjoyed his sex without being chained to a wedding ring...

 


Publicity photo from Oh! Calcutta!

It probably comes as no surprise that the beginnings of the Hippie Movement reflect a certain continuity with the Beat Movement.  Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady played important roles in transferring a generational authority from Beats to Hippies.  In fact, Cassady was one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, a communal living troupe which traveled cross-country in a psychedelic-painted school bus, spreading the joys of LSD into the communities of America's hinterlands as they rolled along...

 

[Kesey may be known to some readers as the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, a 1962 novel set in a mental hospital.  This story of ill-fated and rebellious Randle McMurphy formed the basis of a 1975 movie of the same name which won all "Big Five" Oscars-- Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best (Adapted) Screenplay.  Kesey based the tale on his experiences as a night shift attendant at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital where he participated voluntarily in experiments involving hallucinogenic drugs.]

 

Ken Kesey, Merry Pranksters, and a Psychedelic Schoolbus

Like Beats, Hippies found themselves influenced by Eastern thought.  They were part of that 1960s Trinity of Counterculture Headaches that bedeviled the uptight Establishment and its middle-class conformity-- the New Left and the Civil Rights movement, being the other threats to Decency and Good Order.  Married simultaneously to peace, love (both physically and generically spiritual), expanded consciousness (often via drugs), Hippies celebrated Flower Power and formed the vanguard for anti-war movements challenging US involvement in Vietnam...

Critics and philosophers occasionally ponder the dialectic between the counterculture and the established way of doing business.  Media historians analyze the relationship between mass media and misperceptions of subcultures among the greater society.  I suspect a "square" culture of conformists needs its "hip" counterculture more than the latter needs the former if only for a vicarious life of bad behavior...

 


Official Beatniks Of America Beatnik Beret: Real snazzy,
Man, and made of quality wool by real Frenchmen

That being said, a brief essay on a blog fails miserable to capture the complexity of any counterculture movement like that of the Hippies.  The failure is even greater when one has personal memories which cannot be captured with words or pictures.  But it doesn't matter if a blogger grows old or if his beard is long gray... 

The Beat goes on...            

 

Ernie Bushmiller's Sluggo has an epiphany

 

THE MARKETPLACE

The Louis R Nugent gallery at Fine Art America.  Choose from 250+ unique ideas for home and office decor or cards for yourself or a special someone.

http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/

Follow and Like Louis R Nugent Photography on Facebook @ louisnugent22.

Fine Art America also features painting, drawings, and photographs by over thirty painters and photographers who celebrate majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and flora and fauna scattered across the vast emptiness called West Texas.

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html

 

CREDITS

Note: Information for this essay is taken primarily from readily available sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and almanacs.  When other sources are employed they are credited either in the text or as follows:  None. All photographs are taken from Wikipedia or Google Images without source or authorship credits available, except as noted: Peter Paul and Mary from nosurfmusic.com; Bob Dylan and Albert Grossman from johannasvision.com; Bob Dylan album cover with Sally Grossman from CBS Records; Jack Kerouac with cigarette from mibba.com; On The Road cover from Signet Books; Herb Caen and Alfred Hitchcock from The San Francisco Chronicle; Beatniks in their Lair from tucsoncitizen.com; Beatnik Beret advertisement from freerepublic.com; Allen Ginsberg reads from Howl from futureofthebook.org; Bottomless beatnik Dione Garret from Nugget Magazine, April, 1960

On Holiday...

I'm away from the business of researching and writing essays for a bit to observe an annual period of reflection and spiritual renewal and vacation.  Posting updates will be a bit spotty until early November.  Back soon...

A STUNT GONE HORRIBLY AND TERRIBLY AWRY

Over 30,000 people stood on the Texas prairie near Waco in late afternoon sunshine on September 15^th in 1896.  They all had come to witness the disaster that none believed would occur because they had been assured by the wise and educated men of the day that it could not happen.  A few moments after the clock snuck past 5 PM, two 35-ton locomotives, both hauling seven boxcars and each moving at roughly 60 miles per hour, intentionally slammed into each other…

The spectacle was a publicity stunt at the town of Crush, built expressly for the purpose of allowing folks to watch a train crash and a metropolis abandoned immediately after its gruesome purpose had been served.  Two mighty locomotives would meet head on at a terrific speed and suffer only minor damage… 

 

The burg was named for William George Crush, a passenger agent for the Katy aka the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railway.  He’d been tasked with promoting and staging this display of engineering prowess.  [Readers who live in the Houston, Texas, area may suspect correctly that one of the suburbs of the nation’s fourth largest city took its name from the MKT nickname.] To gin up crowds, the Katy’s officials charged no admission to witness the collision which would prove the durability of their equipment even in the face of horrific disaster…

The only cost imposed upon witnesses was the train fare required to visit the briefly lived metropolis of Crush-- and that was offered at rock bottom rates.  One could travel from El Paso to the site for only $5, from Waco for pennies on the dollar.  Upon arrival, the thirsty could “wet their whistles” with all the absolutely free “fresh Waco water” they could drink and find shade in tents on loan from the Ringling Brothers circus…

But something went wrong a few moments after the clock snuck past 5 PM in the late afternoon sunshine…

All the technocrats who assured Mr Crush the stunt would be perfectly safe hadn’t told the boilers in the engines of Old Number 999 (painted bright green) and Old Number 1001 (painted bright red) that their meeting would be perfectly safe.  One indestructible boiler decided to prove the 19^th Century’s exuberant faith in Man’s Progress dead wrong by exploding, hurling jagged metal fragments into the crowd at the moment of impact.  At least two people died, many more suffered grievous injury…

One of the witnesses to the disaster (which resulted in Mr Crush’s immediate firing in public and quiet rehiring in private the next day) may have been a young black man, about thirty years of age, born and raised in northeast Texas, then touring the area as a musician.  Historians can’t verify that Scott Joplin-- America’s most famous ragtime composer, best known for The Maple Leaf Rag-- actually witnessed the publicity stunt gone horribly and terribly awry but they can say he did pen a lively little tune about the most famous event in Crush’s brief history, submitting it for a copyright about a month after The Crash…

 

The Great Crush Collision March, performed by Benjamin Loeb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KFmZdBvPYQ

 

 

THE MARKETPLACE

An easy and inexpensive way to build a collection of work by today's finest painters, sculptors, and photographers-- Greeting cards from Fine Art America.  Easier still: just browse the Louis R Nugent gallery at Fine Art America.  Choose from hundreds of unique ideas for home and office decor or holiday and birthday cards for yourself or that special someone.  Individual cards cost less than $5.  Wall prints start at only $22.

http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/

 

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CREDITS

Note: Information for this essay is taken primarily from readily available sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and almanacs.  When other sources are employed they are credited either in the text or as follows:  information about the Crush Crash also taken from the Lone Star Junction website at .http://www.lsjunction.com/facts/crush.htm All photographs are taken from Wikipedia or Google Images without source or authorship credits available, except as noted: None.

West of the 100th Meridian, South of the 32nd Parallel

A Second Rider, Fallen

We tarry with the Blue Riders a bit longer to celebrate the legacy of August Macke.  Not quite a decade younger than his close friend Franz Marc, this son of Westphalia was also the son of a building contractor (and amateur artist) and a farmer’s daughter.  He grew up in Cologne and Bonn.  While still a schoolboy, he became friends with another lad named Walter Gerhardt.  It sometimes happens that one’s friends have beautiful sisters and, as it sometimes happens when friends have lovely siblings, August fell in love with Walter’s sister, the pretty Elisabeth Gerhardt whom he married and whom the War To End All Wars widowed on the battlefields of Champagne not three months after the conflict began…

August, born in cold January winds and dead in September breezes, tell us the meaning behind the enigmatic title, Three Acts-- is it drama of which you wished to speak in broad strokes of color, or is it the beauty of a lovely woman come to the attention of a lover, or perhaps you meant to say to say something about life itself…



The Artist's Wife, 1909



Nude with Coral Necklace, 1911



The Russian Ballet, 1912



Zoological Garden, 1912



Landscape with Cows and Camel, circa 1912



The Sunny Way, 1913



The Milliner's Shop, 1914



View into a Lane, 1914



Three Acts, 1913

 

THE MARKETPLACE

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Louis Nugent: Almost

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Other Fine Art America sites for discriminating collectors:

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/art-inspired-by-art.html

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/all-natural-scenic-landscapes.html

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/4-abstract.html

CREDITS

Note: Information for this essay is taken primarily from readily available sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and almanacs.  When other sources are employed they are credited either in the text or as follows:  None. All photographs are taken from Wikipedia or Google Images without source or authorship credits available, except as noted: None.