"Live Oaks"
Monday, September 13, 2004 River Bluff Ranch 10:00am about 80°
A mid-summer morning. I am standing at one of the cattle gates along the edge of River Bluff Ranch, west of Weatherford. I have come here again to visit one of my favorite stands of live oaks, as I have done for more than twenty-five years. Last year, I drew these trees late in the season, after the cows had cropped the undersides, eating everything they could reach. This year, I will paint them in their fullness, nearly touching the ground.
From this gate, the pasture rises gently toward its rim where it falls sharply away, yielding to the ridges behind it. Far off, a pair of metal roofs on a distantly neighboring ranch, glint in the sun and sparkle through the haze.
The live oaks stand in a ring some thirty feet across and look at first like a single being. On the day that I was given permission to walk among them for the first time, I was surprised when I counted twenty individual trees. At their center, where I imagine a great mother tree must have stood generations ago, the ground is bare and dark and holds the hoof prints of cows and tracks of other animals that regularly seek refuge here. In the tender grasses that grow beneath the lower branches, tufts of fur and occasional feathers can be found. Often, the feathers stand on end in the grass from having spun down through the upper branches. Whole families of Scissor-tailed Flycatchers nest there. I also found a scattering of bones where a coyote or some other predator dined in secret.
I guess these trees to be at least seventy-five years old, and I am awed by their endurance. They have withstood decades of storm and hail and heat and drought. Their trunks reach outward and upward and convey a sense of lift and expansion. Today, I notice that the trunks are heavier and thicker than I depicted in my first drawings. They appear almost black in the dense shade of the great dome of leaves, which is itself a symphony of deep and middle greens, sparkling here and there where the sun reflects from their glossy surfaces. The lower branches reach downward and outward, further connecting with the earth beneath them.
Below the trees and to the right, cows that moved off when I first approached are now comfortably grazing again, with the exception of one that watches warily from a distance. I’ll paint her, tiny and far away with her ears so alert.
"Justin Barn"
July 2003 Near Fort Worth mid-day about 95°
The day is hot and still. Dust hangs in the air behind the cattle trucks that head toward Fort Worth on the road behind me. In the distance, I hear the slow, steady pock-pock-pock of a single pump jack, see sawing away as it draws oil deep out of the dry ground. There is no gate here, only a seldom used chain that’s been wrapped around its post and locked to itself at one end.
It’s now early afternoon and the high summer sun washes down sharply across the metal door of the shed and beats down on the roof. Most of the grass here is sun-bleached and pale yellow and has gone to seed. The rest of it has been cut, raked, baled, and hauled off to market, or perhaps put up inside this small shed.
As I walk around through the grass that awaits cutting, grasshoppers leap and fly past my face. Between the clumps of grass, the earth shows through with deep, wide cracks. When the wind comes up, the grass sings in a softness like the sound of water—ironic to me in this arid place.
Behind the barn, in the scrub oaks and hackberries, cicadas drone. In the open pastures around this place, a few cows graze, paying no attention to the heat. Later, they will look for shade.
"Empty Now"
Abandoned barn Haslet & Avondale Road North of Fort Worth
There are no trucks or tractors here now. No horses or cows to be tended. No hay in the expansive loft. No one to carry on the daily business or ranching or farming. Instead, only stillness and quiet.
No one is here to tell me when or how or why this place came to be abandoned and overgrown. This loud and curious wren cannot. The low swooping Barn Swallows cannot. That high circling hawk cannot. Nor can the cows grazing in the neighboring pasture. They all go on about their business, leaving me to ponder on my own.
And while I will not ascribe human qualities to a barn, I would like to know what it has seen since its beginning, which I would guess to be a century ago. What of the people? What commerce? What struggles to succeed? And where did they go, those who cleared this place, built, settled, and endured?
The barn’s roofline makes me think of a mother hen leaning low with outstretched wings to gather her scattered chicks. But what is gathered now? I think, too, about the forces of weather that peeled back the corrugated metal roof in places at the middle and along its trailing edge, exposing the timbers beneath, some of which are just now beginning to break down and surrender to the elements.
I think of the forces of time—of the changes that have happened during the barns long existence. Of the cattle drives, two great world wars, the great depression, the rapid development of machinery and the automobile, and the flight of many from the quiet of the countryside to the promise of the bustling modern city. There are too many things to know. And the barn keeps its secrets.
"Brazos Fall"
Thanksgiving Day 2004 behind Allen’s On the River geese high overhead 66 °
Thanksgiving Day, and the Brazos runs shallow and so slowly. From a hundred yards away, back up at the house, come the smells of turkey and dressing, vegetables cooking, and pies, pungent and spicy. And talking and laughter and music.
But here on the river, there is quiet mostly and music of a different kind. I hear the light touchings of bare branches in the breezes and the whisperings of dry grasses. Just then, I heard the collar bells of the dogs working goats across the river. And high above me, geese wheeling and reforming in their uneven vees as they wing southward, their voices clear, but growing fainter as they move further from my sight.
Now I become aware of the trickling and gurgling of the river as it slips over the rocks and through the counter currents. When the wind changes, I get a faint waft of piñon smoke form the chiminea at the house, mixing in with the smells of the land and the river’s own scent, not fishy, but curiously alive. The fish are here, hiding, but I’ve been watching two of them in an eddy behind a line of rocks that just out from the river’s far bank. They wait patiently for their dinner in the slow-moving current.
The river seems secretive now, but still she offers resonances with a spirit beyond my senses, and mysteries, too, cumulative and particular. Sometimes, I wonder if I should even want to know why it is that I am so drawn to this particular time on the river, this seemingly dead time when even the colors are mute—all umbers and siennas and dusty browns with touches of Naples yellow.
I know that even now, where I stand, things are changing beneath my feet, and Winter will come, and then Spring, bringing with it growing warmth and a fresh new world. For now, maybe it’s enough on this Thanksgiving day that I do just that—just feel it and be thankful for it all.
d the river’s own scent, not fishy, but curiously alive. The fish are here, hiding, but I’ve been watching two of them in an eddy behind a line of rocks that just out from the river’s far bank. They wait patiently for their dinner in the slow-moving current.
The river seems secretive now, but still she offers resonances with a spirit beyond my senses, and mysteries, too, cumulative and particular. Sometimes, I wonder if I should even want to know why it is that I am so drawn to this particular time on the river, this seemingly dead time when even the colors are mute—all umbers and siennas and dusty browns with touches of Naples yellow.
I know that even now, where I stand, things are changing beneath my feet, and Winter will come, and then Spring, bringing with it growing warmth and a fresh new world. For now, maybe it’s enough on this Thanksgiving day that I do just that—just feel it and be thankful for it all.
From Scott's Early Diaries
First Night On The Brazos
The first time I canoed the Brazos, I was “almost thirteen.” It was late Spring and the river was running well enough that we did not have to spend much time wading through the shallows or dragging our boats over the rocks. Eight canoes in all, we put in early in the morning below a bridge on a farm-to-market road not far from Glen Rose. I had been paired with one of the senior scouts, and because I had no experience, sat in the front while the older boy did the skillful work of guiding us through the river’s twists and bends. My position in the canoe left me free to wander mentally and visually and to write a few notes. I was in a kind of trance with the quiet magic of it all.
The river was alive. Not just with hawks and buzzards and cardinals and kingfishers and mockingbirds and swifts and wrens, all of which held my attention and all of which I noted in the small pad I carried in my shirt pocket. And not only with the fish of many kinds. We saw a gar easily the length of my leg as it drifted alongside us, just below the surface, and several trophy-sized bass, taunting us as they jumped high out of the water and then disappeared. And not with the many turtles and snakes, which were there, but kept their distance. The river itself seemed to me to have a pulse of its own that was tangible, palpable.
I had not yet learned its rhythms, I was a newcomer, but I could feel the surge or it. And not just the flow of the water—there was something else that carried me. At the same time, I remember thinking that I should pitch in and how zealously I applied myself to paddling as strongly as I could, working much too hard as I tried to pull my own weight. I paid for that naïve gesture with blisters that were probably predictable to the others, but were nonetheless a surprise to me. I wore them as a badge of honor and hid my pain.
In the late afternoon, we stopped and pitched camp on private land that belonged to the family of one of our adult leaders. It was a quiet place among old oaks in what I would later learn was an oxbow, a deep bend where the river doubled back in a wide loop, nearly touching itself. Across from us was a modest working ranch with several dozen cows and calves. Heaven!
I had been on a few camping trips and made an effort to be self-sufficient. So after we set up camp, I went about cooking my dinner over a small fire a few yards from the end of my tent. The other boys laughed because I always cooked scrambled eggs and Ranch Style Beans. I didn’t mind the boys’ laughter; I was happy. I stayed so close to my fires on those outings that afterward, my mother would insist that I undress on the back porch before coming into the house, my clothes were so saturated with smoke. If I noticed the smell, I can no longer remember.
But I do remember that those fires were elemental and that they touched something deep in me, as certainly happened that first night on the Brazos. In the evening, as the sky grew dark, we gathered by the main campfire to plan the next day, to sing songs, and listen to stories and tall tales. Later we drifted off to our tents one-by-one. The coals of the cookfire at the end of my tent were still glowing and quickly flamed back into life when I laid a few small pieces of wood on them. As became a habit with me, I stared into the flames of that little fire for as long as I could stay awake. In the distance, a Chuck-will’s-widow called its own name from time to time. Closer still, an owl hooted from a nearby oak, sending shivers up the spines of the youngest boys.
As I watched the fire, something happened. Like the river, a fire has a life of its own, and I had been caught up in listening to the crack and pop and hiss of steam escaping from the burning wood, and in watching tiny sparks rise in to the clear and deep night sky, partly lost in the smoke. As I watched them, the sparks seemed to merge with the stars, and the smoke became part of the faint and cloudy presence of the Milky Way. It may not have seemed like much to others, but at nearly thirteen, and at a time when I could not have expressed it in words, I had the clear realization that everything was connected in a great circle—the Great Hoop, some of my Native American teachers would later call it. I had a knowing that night, that sparks and stars were essentially the same; and that smoke, in a real way, was no different from the stardust of some great nebula. I don’t remember drifting off, but I never went into my tent; instead, I curled up in my sleeping bag near the fire, and slept peacefully beneath the shining blanket of stars.
Just before sunup, I awakened to mist hanging on the now more slowly moving river. The circle was revealing itself again—mist and river, sparks and stars, smoke and Milky Way—all connected in a single wondering moment. As I pondered, the rancher across the river began honking the horn of his battered pickup, calling his cows. The cows, always ready to be fed, answered him with loud, insistent bellows as they ran to meet him. It was time for their breakfast and it was time for mine.
And after that, it was time to break camp and be back on the river.