keely – Page 38 – State of Wilderness

Katy Sunset

We went for a walk tonight – my boys, my dogs, and I. We went for a super-secret walk, in a place no one could find us. We went for a walk in a place we weren’t supposed to drive to, but we did it anyway.

The dogs went for a swim tonight. The water was a little shallow, maybe a little scummy. It is possible there was an alligator, we found out later. We let them swim anyway.

My little son, I’ve been wondering about him. About six months ago, we had to put down a family dog that had been with our family for fourteen years, which is twice the sum of little son’s years. The whole sum of little son’s life had taken place beside this dog. Yet, when we came out of the vet’s office after saying goodbye, we had a moment that I have pondered over these months since.

The older son and I were bawling our eyes out, and this little one tried that with us for a minute or so, and then just opened his eyes and looked at us. “Do we have to cry about this?”, he said. We both looked at him in astonishment. “No,” I said, “you don’t have to.” Then in unison, my older son and I both added, “but we want to!” and kept on bawling while this little son just sat up, relieved.

I have wondered about what this means since then. J says it is just normal, he is a seven year old boy, they don’t always understand or are in touch with their emotions at this age. One of my best friends, though, suggested that it is not normal not to cry after losing a family pet, and suggested he might be a sociopath. “A sociopath?” I asked. “Oh, don’t worry…not all sociopaths are murderers!” she tried to reassure me. She said it was just a disorder where people did not have empathy for others and only cared about themselves.

I tried watching him for this, but I wasn’t sure. I mean, he IS seven – there are times he cares about himself. But he also does seem to care for others, and he especially enjoys the pets at the house.

As we were walking, the dogs came running down a hill, and there was a bird walking around on the path. The bird was making a lot of noise, but didn’t fly away as the dogs ran past it. The Lab jumped in the water, but the Aussie stopped to check out the bird and considered mouthing it for a minute. I told him to leave it alone, and he did.

Then my young son came running down the hill towards the bird on the path. “Be careful of that bird,” I said to him, “I think it is hurt.”

“I know, Mom,” he said gently. He just wanted to look at it. “It has a broken wing,” he observed. He watched it run up the hill, towards the comfort of overhanging brush.

“I feel bad for that bird,” he said, turning back towards me.

And then I knew that there was nothing wrong with him. That he was just a normal seven year old boy. Maybe he didn’t experience his emotions the same way that day with Rascal, but he was capable of caring about others.

I asked him about that day with Rascal, why he didn’t cry. “I just didn’t understand why were crying over that,” he said. “Were you sad?” Yes, he had been sad, he said, but it made sense. Rascal was hurt, and then he wasn’t hurting anymore. He misses him, but it made sense.

Now, my Aussie, who had spent the whole sum of his life as well (except for a few months as a pup) next to Rascal, also had been adjusting to life without his dog brother. The Lab as well had lost her life partner, our other Lab, last fall. The past six months, we’ve seen their relationship dynamic changing.

At this moment, it was sinking in to the Aussie that the Lab, as well as two of his people, were on the other side of the retention pond. As much as he didn’t like swimming, and had resisted thus far on the walk, he finally couldn’t stand the separation from her, and jumped in to swim towards her. She saw him, and jumped in to and swam out to him.

They met in the middle, nosed each other, and then she swam with him back to the side where J and my older son were, being his moral support for his swimming fears. It was the sweetest thing. I tried to get a picture, but all you can see here is the sun setting.

The sun setting on the sweetest thing you couldn’t see; a bird escaping to live another day, a boy who really was just a boy, and two dogs who’ve learned to love and support each other after their respective partners have passed away.

Environmental Issues: Keystone XL

There’s been some talk about the Keystone pipeline, and I have been thinking about it some more since the recent train oil spill in Quebec. I think there is some misinformation out there about the addition to the Keystone Pipeline.

I was going to write a big long story about it to clarify the facts, but I like this version better than anything I would write about it, so you can check it out if you want.

http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/tag/keystone-xl-pipeline/

These are my opinions on it right now:

1) I am not thrilled with the “eminent domain” issues. It concerns me that land can just be grabbed from private citizens for “the greater good” of putting a pipeline in that not everyone wants.

2) Ultimately having quicker access to the refineries is not going to bring down the price at the pump for gasoline. Oil goes to a great number of things, gasoline only being a small part of that.

3) The oil that will be flowing in the pipeline is not “American” oil, we don’t have rights to it. It is Canadian oil, being sold to China. They are paying us for the ease of transportation and right of way.

4) It will provide 20,000 more jobs, for the short term. There will be a small amount of long-term jobs added to the US economy as a result, mostly down in Texas refineries. This is good for Houston, so I won’t complain.

5) The “tar-sands” issue is a little tricky. I have worries about environmental effects. The pipeline addition will add 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon pollution to the atmosphere during its 50-year lifespan. However, if the pipeline doesn’t go through, it’s not like it will stop the production or flow of this “tar-sands” oil. There is already approval and movement towards a pipeline being built running east to west in Canada. They don’t need us, necessarily – the oil will still get refined, this way or that way. Or, if the oil cannot be refined, it would be replaced in the world market by oil from Venezuela, which is even “dirtier”, but who, as a country, is not as friendly with the US.

6) I worry about the safety of the pipelines long-term, about spills and leaks into the ecosystem. However, leaks and spills can come from trucks and trains carrying the oil from one place to another, just as well as (if not more often) than it can come from a defect in a pipeline carrying it from one place to another.

7) I think the solution eventually is for us to kick the oil habit, but that is not going to happen over the this generation, or the next. We have a long way to go before we can become independent of oil as an energy source.

Here is a map of the proposed new route. The current Keystone Pipeline is the purple solid line. The dotted blue is the Keystone XL proposed route, and the yellow and brown are the additional paths to be added later.

Right now the government has postponed making a decision on this until 2014. I am not actually that hopeful that the environmentalists will win, although they are my “dog in this fight”. The environmentalists won before, with Nixon and the Trans-Atlantic pipeline in Alaska, in 1970-1972, but Nixon and the governmental seat found a way to get around them and build that darn pipeline anyway. That is probably what will happen again. We’ll see as this momentum continues to build.

I haven’t had much to write about/felt like writing on here lately. We’ve been busy at home with kids and school and sports. Hopefully soon I will have some more outdoor adventures to write about.

Hill Country Highways, Episode 4: For the Birds

We had a single purpose when we went to Burnet, a single purpose that had morphed into other diversions but was our sole motivation for our journey. So here it was, Sunday morning, and it was time for the main event.
Only, things weren’t going well right from the start. There was an incident with the screen door at the place we were renting. There was an incident involving the wine that almost cost us the entire bottle. We had no breakfast with us, because what I brought for Saturday was not enough, and so we had eaten Sundays ration as well. There were some other personal issues. J said we should have just gone back to bed and started the day over. Plus, we were a little behind schedule if we wanted to find a place to have breakfast along the way.
Turns out there is NO breakfast along the way to where we were going, just thirty minutes of road and farm houses along the dried out banks of Lake Buchanan. Several properties for sale. We finally decided to bite the bullet and dine at the overly-priced but very good buffet at the Canyon of the Eagles Resort. This resort was just a couple miles up the road from our main destination, the Vanishing Texas River Boat Cruise.
On occasional Sundays, this boat line offers a special trip for bird lovers called the “Freedom Flight”. A San Antonio raptor rehabilitation service comes out with birds they have nursed back to health that are ready to be returned to the wild. For each bird, a person on the cruise is picked to be the one to hold the bird before it takes its farewell flight. We were very excited about this, being fans of the birds of prey.
I should have known something was up when I observed there were so few cars in the parking lot at check in time. When we went inside, there was some tension going on, and the employee behind the counter was frantically on the phone trying to figure out how to resolve the issue. A few ladies inside gave me the run down: basically, there was some kind of “emergency out of town trip” by the cruise line operator, and so the Freedom Flight had been rescheduled for NEXT Sunday. Turns out there was an email sent out July 22 that served as notification. J and I searched my email to find it, and he saw what I saw when I had gotten the email – it appeared to be a confirmation of the cruise I already knew I had reserved. It wasn’t unless you clicked on the link in the email to view your tickets that one could see that the original date was crossed out, and the new date subbed in.
Man, we were disappointed. We had spent a considerable amount of time and money to get to this point, only for this big let-down. We weren’t going to be able to afford to spend those same resources the following weekend. So, we did the only thing we could to get our minds off this: geocache all the way home.

We picked a scenic route home that took us through the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge. I didn’t even know about this place, but I am glad I do now. This gazebo was the site of a virtual geocache, and while we were there, I read this sign that shared some interesting information about the preservation work going on at this NWR.
There are two birds that depend on this ecosystem for survival, the golden-cheeked warbler and the black-capped vireo. There is this other bird, the brown-headed cowbird, who is a nest parasite. The cowbirds will take over the nests of the vireos, puncturing their eggs and knocking them out of the nest, replacing the vireo’s eggs with eggs of their own. The eggs will hatch, much to the surprise of the vireo, who is now taking care of babies that look suspiciously unlike her. At the refuge, the rangers try to manage this by building traps for the cowbirds – a big aviary, much bigger than even the feral hog traps that you see at parks in Texas. There is some information here on the different trapping methods and how to become certified to trap these birds by the TPWD.
The cowbird has been increasing in prevalence and dramatically altering the number of songbirds that make it to maturity in this day and age. The reason has to do with agricultural practices of people. The cowbird used to follow the buffalo herds and therefore move through an area, but now with livestock penned up in pastures, the cowbirds stick around. By the 1980s, they were preying on black-capped vireo nests at a rate of 90%. Since the inception of the trapping program, the parasitism was reduced to less than 10% by 1999. I am very fascinated by this example of how humans altered the behavior of a species, and how we have managed to turn that around in a positive direction.
The drive was also quite pleasant. I was able to drink a little of the salvaged (and now frosty) wine. All we were missing were some Willie Nelson CDs (or any CDs – neither of us had any music along with us, and I think we could only get a country station in now and then). We drove south from Bertram to the Highland Lakes area north of Austin via the Cow Creek Road, and saw nary a car or another person along the way. We stopped a few times. We were able to shelve our disappointment and enjoy the trip.

There are four access points for the public to the NWR, and two of those have hiking trails: Doeskin Ranch and Warbler Vista. It was a little hot during midday for a long hike, but we did explore a little. We also hit a small section of a “power trail” of geocaches very close to the Warbler Vista entrance. After a while of this, we were too hot to continue and decided to just come on home.
But, we will be back. We have to at least return to Burnet in the fall – I managed to get our tickets exchanged for a different date later this year. So the trails of the hill country will have to wait until then. It might even be better then, because the bald eagles will be nesting during that time.

So goodbye Burnet, Balcones, birds, and the hill country – we will be back soon!

Hill Country Highways: Burn it, Durn it! Episode 3, in which we visit the caves

One does not simply walk into Longhorn Caverns.

There is a locked gate.
In order to get in, you have your choice to pay the $12 or so per adult for the general tour, or pay upwards of $45-70 for the Wild Cave Tour, which is about twice as long and involves going through the small passages that most people might not be interested in slogging through. They also offer a Geology Tour.
We decided on the standard tour, and were greeted by a tour guide named Ashton, or something like that, and joined a pack of about twenty people. It was late in the afternoon, and we were a little too exhausted to deal with the bumping of bodies all around us, so we kept trying to stay to the front of the pack for the tour. The guide was somewhat entertaining, full of corny jokes that he had probably told a gazillion times.
The history of the place is what I found to be the most interesting. First, the caves were used by Comanches, who prob ably discovered the caves about 400 years before anyone else. The Comanches were not necessarily the most easy going of the Native American tribes. When the settlers moved into the area, the Comanches started stealing women away and then holding them for hostage here in the cave. Sometimes, if the ransom was paid, the girl was actually released to the family, but sometimes not. One story that our guide relayed that I found very compelling was that of a 18 year old girl held hostage, who was the daughter of a wealthy land owner. Her father called in the Texas Rangers to rescue her. While about three hundred Comanches waited with the girl in what is known as the “Indian Council Room”, thinking they were going to get either a ransom, or in a scrap with equal numbers of Rangers, three brave Texas Rangers slid down ropes in another entrance, sneaked into the room, got the girl, and got her out, before the Comanches realized it. One of those Rangers later ended up marrying this young girl, who was about half his age, and they ended up settling in Burnet.
The caves were also used as a hideout for outlaw Sam Bass and his crew of bandits.
Later, the caves were privately owned by one D.G Sherrard, who ran a speakeasy in the cave during the prohibition era. Patrons could come and have a nice meal in the Council room. There was a bandstand not far from the main room where people could dance. Our tour guide pointed out where the bathroom was for the Speakeasy, and also an area where patrons would sit up on the rock formations inside the cave to have their pictures taken.
During the Great Depression, Sherrard sold the cave and surrounding land to the state of Texas. Soon after, during the New Deal era, Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps spent seven years getting the caves ready for visitors and turning it into a park. There were some areas of the cave that have calcite crystals that sparkle, and apparently the CCC boys thought when they first discovered this that they were looking at diamonds. Imagine their disappointment when they found out they wouldn’t be rich after all.
This cave is one of only two caves in the United States that was formed by river water, and not by geological processes. As a result, it does not have the typical stalactite and stalagmite formations of most caves, but has sort of a smooth, rippled appearance. It was very beautiful in many spots inside the cave. The lighting that was installed in 2012, which replaced the lighting installed by the CCC, was designed to display some of these striking features. The cave has great acoustics, and lately the park has been capitalizing on that by having concerts in there. The cave is also available for private events, and some weddings have taken place inside the cave. Also, supposedly the cave is haunted, and there is a society that gives Ghost Tours of the caverns late at night.
Our tour ended up running a little longer than the hour and twenty minutes that were originally scheduled. There were some slow people in our group that held us up. There were also some annoying people. J and I got to the point where we could not WAIT to get out of the cave, because the people were driving us nuts. Lack of body sense, too many children with little supervision, loud talkers, camera-stoppers and entire pathway-walkers. Good grief.
Inside the cave, there is an answer for an earthcache. Along the trail system outside the cave, there are a few more caches. We found one, which was a fun ammo can, but at four pm, it was too hot to contemplate doing more. So, we made our way back to the Willow Point Resort, figured out how to go to the lake for a swim in the slowly-disappearing Lake Buchanan (the drought has not been kind to this lake), grilled some killer steak fajitas, and relaxed in wait for our next adventure.