keely – Page 57 – State of Wilderness

Nature Fest

Yesterday we attending a great annual Nature Fest that I recommend anyone in the area who reads this to check out next year. It is completely free, which will blow your mind when you witness all they have to offer, particularly for children, and yet through t shirt sales and donations, they are raising money for one of our favorite causes, the Katy Conservancy. In the past few years, they have raised over $17,000 for this organization.

The event is in Cypress, Texas, and you can get more information here: http://www.bridgeland.com/events/nature-fest. I found out about it from reading one of the local magazines, and we had anticipated going for about a month prior.By the time we got there, since we were held up due to soccer games and school band semi-commitments, we were all starving. I had read about these food trucks that would be there, and was interested in one I had see mention of around town: Bernie’s Burger

Bus. http://www.berniesburgerbus.com/. I am a burger aficionado, and Bernie’s did not disappoint, although it was terribly expensive compared to fast food ($39 something to feed the four of us, without drinks).

After that, we mosied along, checking out the nature exhibits by Texas Wildlife Rehabilitation Coalition (http://www.twrc-houston.org/), local grown honey and plant suppliers before stopping to talk to an ambassador for the Houston Canine Frisbee Disc Club http://www.houstonfrisbeedogs.com/webportal/About.aspx. We got there a little late to see the demo but did watch them goof around with their dogs and talk to that one fella who gave us some good information. Mostly we were interested in where he got his dog mini-pool.

Afterwards, we watched the duck races, which was interesting, although the kids got bored about halfway through. The kids got to ride a mini-train, race through inflatables, and play a game of laser tag, all which was free. There were also pony rides, a camel ride, and a Living History Treasure Tour, which we did not do. There was something called Armadillo races, although when we stopped by, the armadillos were not racing and were a little stressed. Kaleb got to hold one and get a picture, though.

We had brought our kites because the map showed a kite flying area and we have been enjoying these kites this past week. When the Birds of Prey demo came on in the afternoon, the boys were too excited and not interested to sit through it, so I set them up with their kites meanwhile in this area, which was right behind and to the side of the stage. I didn’t catch who put on this demonstration, and I was a little disappointed that between the kids and my being thirsty, and the lines being somewhat cumbersome to get a drink, I probably missed at least a quarter to a half of the show. The birds this man had brought included a red tailed hawk, an eagle owl like the one we saw from Earthquest, and three different kids of vultures, including the (rarely seen in these types of demos) king vulture.

After this, we were all ready to go. On the way out, we saw this “ent”, or a man wearing a tree costume, which delighted everyone. We also found a geocache in the area before walking back to our cars. As we were leaving, J and I both remembered we really wanted to buy one of the t shirts to support KPC, so he dropped me by the corner to run back to the booth, buy the shirts, and come back, and then we found a few more geocaches on our way home.

If you love the outdoors, or mostly if you love family festivals, I highly recommend watching for this festival next year and checking it out. You cant beat the value – some of the activities were just as fun and educational as what you would see at the livestock show portion of HLSR, only at no cost. I think it is awesome they had such good support base that they were able to charge nothing for all that we participated in. We would definitely attend this again.

FOR THE BIRDS

In honor of James Aubudon‘s birthday, I wanted to tell readers about exciting birdingevents that have been going on around town the past month. April is the month that sees the most birding traffic here in South Texas. This is when migratory birds are at their peak. To showcase this, several events go on at various places in the Gulf Coast region. We were lucky enough to have time to check out two of them.

The first was FeatherFest, a weekend of birding activities centered around Galveston. We only checked out the festivities on the last afternoon, but there are a multitude of activities from Thursday night to Sunday afternoon of this festival, which is hosted out of a headquarters in the Strand District. The event is free to the public, but almost all the activities have a fee associated with them – at least the activities that require leaving the headquarters location and going out to actually go find birds. You can find more information here at http://www.galvestonfeatherfest.com/.

We wanted specifically to check out the Birds of Prey demonstration, since we are kind of like Birds of Prey groupies. Each demonstration we have been to this year has been put on by a different group, which is good because we have gotten to see a greater variety of birds. The Sky Kings were the hosts today, and they put on a nice show right outside the headquarters. We also checked out the exhibits inside the building. We left the event soon after because the little ones wanted to go to the beach, and we also wanted a chance to go geocaching and off road exploring in the San Luis Pass area, but next year we want to spend some more time, and possibly money, checking out what this festival has to offer.

The following weekend found us at San Bernard Wildlife Refuge for the Migration Celebration. We had first heard about this event at the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, and were most excited about the idea about exploring the refuge on the marsh buggy rides. However, all the spaces on the marsh buggies were taken by the time we got through the line on the Sunday afternoon that we went. Instead, we took an auto van tour of Moccasin Pond, each of us equipped with binoculars, while a bird guide pointed out different species and passed back an Ipad with information looked up when we had questions.

Before the auto fan tour, J went on a nature photography workshop they offered, and my sons and I participated in the “Junior Naturalist Passport” program they had, where you got stamps in a booklet by doing different educational activities for children. The kids sifted through a pond, petted snakes, learned about alligators, touched crabs and starfish, and netted insects then looked at them under a microscope. We looked at the winners of the photo contest they have each year. I can’t believe the amount of committed volunteers they had, and the wealth of information that was given out entirely free. The commitment to outdoor education was strong here.

There was also a Birds of Prey demonstration here, put on by Earthquest. I liked this one probably the best of all the ones we have seen this past year, because of the wealth of inspirational environmental information presented. They are not there just to demonstrate their falconry, but rather as ambassadors and educators of an ethic they would like to impress upon all those they encounter. J got some great photos of the very interesting birds they had with them for displays of flight and majesty, like the Eurasian Eagle Owl, the Andean Condor, and the Peregrine Falcon, whose speed in flight is unsurpassed.

Both of these events were only about an hour or two outside of Houston. Other events were also being offered around the South Texas region, like in Corpus Christi the same weekend as the Migration Celebration.

It’s springtime in Texas, and birds are all around us, gathering up fuel for the winter journey, nesting and rearing their young, singing and eating and flashing wings through the forest. Go find them! And I hope next year you have a chance to check out these two events I mentioned. We’ll be there!

NATURAL BEAUTY

I’ve often contemplated the function of beauty. In my past musings, I have dreamed beauty away as inconsequential, a passing fancy, a temporary state that exists simply as a basis of initial attraction. I didn’t want to believe in the meaning of beauty, because to say that it has purpose, and then to admit that it has gone, is to say that the motivation fades as well. I want my love to be like Shakespeare envisioned, one whose strength does not diminish, though “rosy lips and cheeks within [Time’s] bending sickle’s compass come”. If love, and our motivation to both give and receive it, is based mostly on aesthetics, then it can’t stand the test of time.

I had this friend who was an artist to some degree. He talked about the perfect girl as being someone who might not be exactly perfect, but who would be so beautiful that any of her imperfections could be forgiven. I am not sure if that is too tall of an order to fill. Our debate on this led to no agreed upon conclusions, and when our friendship took a walk, I wanted to continue to stand on my side of the fence about it.

That was some years ago, and I was still convinced of my stance, up until the other night. I was running at night in my new neighborhood, something I have been doing regularly now, although not nearly enough to stop the midlife growth of girth. I looked up from the sidewalk and a sight caught my breath in my throat, and caused a feeling inside me. A want, a desire, an exultant joy, an imagined bliss. It was no mere mortal that turned my eye, but the sight of the water falling across the water from the fountain in the middle of a lake across the street, the little bridge that crossed into a neighborhood with landscape lights shining on well designed front yard gardens and smartly painted front doors.

I have been getting to know that area in nighttime explorations, and I know that inside those streets, there is a little misty hill that has a strange path leading up to a sundial with uniquely carved stones in it. I love to go to this place, but I only allow myself the pleasure as a reward for working really hard on my tedious little two mile route around the house. Mostly because when I go out there, I lose track of time, and spend longer than I have on a weeknight wandering past the huge houses in the dark, houses with art delicately balanced on high vaulted walls that can be seen from tall windows from the street.

And I know now, I know when I see this view of the lake and the bridge from this vantage point on my weekday route, I know the true function of beauty. And I see and hear examples to fit my new theory all over the place.

It is to inspire.

And perhaps my friend was right, we can’t remove beauty from the equation. And sometimes she is the reason why we fight. Ask Helen of Troy, whose alleged beauty was the catalyst for wars and “launched a thousand ships”. But the other day I was watching, for not the first time, Ken Burn’s “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”, and it made me think of how compelling natural beauty is, and how much it drives our desire to protect it as well.

When we see a beautiful landscape stretched out in front of us, we are often overwhelmed with awe. The thought of some of these places disappearing under the wave of human and industrial expansion is frightening. There are many heroes I would like to highlight later who let this beauty, and the diversity inherent in it, be enough to drive them to continue to fight for them their whole lives.

Beauty in our surroundings is much like beauty in a human form. It compels us to protect it, move to keep it around, and forgive its harshness and imperfections.

TEXAS CHALLENGE 2011

We’ve been anticipating this year’s Texas Challenge for a long time now. Last year was my brother’s first time to participate in this type of format for geocaching, and it fed right into his competitive nature. His local region did not have a team of their own last year, so he played for our team, SouthEast Texas. Since then, the cachers in the Corpus Christi area united under the banner of the South Texas team and made it their mission to come back this year and be a serious contendor in the field against North and Central Texas, as well as our team and possibly West Texas, if they decided to show up this year.

Our team was still wound up over our victory in San Angelo last year, and we also wanted to win, although we had sort of gotten used to losing. Plus, we were the hosts this year, which meant a lot of planning from those who normally would be involved in the hunting process. You can’t do both. This time, it was on our home turf so to speak, and hosted in the town of my brother’s alma mater, so he was excited about the logistics. Several text messages and emails were exchanged making plans, which curiously did no good because we weren’t organized until up to the last month, even with a year to prepare.

During the midst of all this planning, my father’s probably-terminal illness had been getting progressively worse. The medication does not have the same effects that it used to. With my mother’s prodding I am sure, he had begun to take the steps to having an operation on his brain that has a good chance of slowing down the progression of symptoms. Somewhere along the way in discussions, he was invited to camp with us for the evening, and attend the Challenge with us. The original plan was for him to join my brother in the competition on their bikes. In the last minute strategy meetings before the event, though, on both the South and SE region sides, the terrain was discussed, and how it would play out in biking. My brother and I both thought at this point the biking portion sounded too tough for my father, whose primary symptom is a loss of muscle coordination, so in a series of texts to follow, it was determined that my dad would hike with me, and this would free my brother up to bike more rugged terrain.So it was that Friday night, the company around our campsite included my brother, my dad, my children, my handsome darling boyfriend, another couple we have been spending some time geocaching with lately (Chris and Shelley), their teenage daughter, and this friend of my brother’s that helped us last year and then helped him form their own team, David. We brought some wood – the origin of the firewood is a story for another day, really- and made a fire this evening, and we all roasted some marshmellows, made smores, and stayed up too late talking, some with beers to keep them company as well.

My brother and J had actually gotten up here the night before, as well as David. We had made the camping reservation, and yet when J left to go pick up the kids and I from another fellow geocacher’s house who graciously allowed us to park our extra car at her house close to the park, my brother and David had hung up their South Texas banner across our picnic shelter, claiming our camp as belonging to their team. Things got a little more interesting when our hunt team leader asked if we could use our camping shelter as home base to prepare our team and act as headquarters during the competition. Turns out South Texas had the same idea. So, we decided to share. And that is how in the morning of the competition, we had about one hundred and fifty cachers, give or take, wandering in, most wearing pink bandanas to signify they were with the SouthEast team, and a smaller number wearing yellow banners advertising their allegiance to the South region.

If the Texas Challenge is foreign to you, this is how it works. Numerous temporary geocaches have been hidden all over the designated park, and the different teams have four hours to find as many as they can. Each one holds a certain point value, based on the difficulty of the find and the terrain it is located in. Each cache has a corresponding number on a paper scorecard which is punched with a hole punch that you find in the cache itself, each one bearing a different design for verification purposes. The cards HAVE to be turned in before the event officially ends, at which point the scores are tallied, and then averaged among the number of cachers competing to determine the winning region. There are three ammo boxes given to the top three teams, each being painted either gold, silver, or bronze. The team that wins the coveted golden ammo can gets bragging rights for the next year. This contest is in its ninth year of existence, and this is my fourth time to attend.

Because my dad was potentially going to slow down the hiking, and because J wanted to get out there and try to score as much as possible, we had decided to split up and for him to go by bike. Also, we had my dad’s canoe with us, which was a competitive advantage, but only two adults could ride in the canoe at once.

When the contest begins, the team leader is given the thumb drive with the file on it that has the locations of the caches and the first aid stations. Then there is the tedious process of loading those waypoints on to everyone’s GPS units. J always gets roped into being actively involved in this process, being that he is like the technology expert. This day, my dad and I left on our canoe when the contest started, right after getting our waypoints, but J was held up for almost the whole first hour of the competition dealing with a particularly tricky GPS unit that no one had software for.

My dad and I’s strategy of taking the canoe originally panned out for us very well, because we were able to get a cache find on the water, which was a high terrain and therefore high scored cache. However, once we beached the canoe and got out on land, my plans for us to excel this day began to unravel. We wasted about 45 minutes of the first hour looking for three caches we could not find (granted one of them is what they call an “evil hide” and the other was a 4/5 on Difficulty/Terrain, which may as well be called an evil hide). We also had to cross the spillway that I show in this first picture. After that, we began hiking down the Chinquapin trail, we started actually making some finds, getting about a dozen in about two hours or so of hiking around. The last hour, regettably, we wasted a lot of time just trying to get back to the lodge from where we were, and walking along the road, find just a couple of caches in that time. I think we could have gotten more if I had thought to call home base and have someone come get us and take us to another trailhead to get to another cluster, but I was not thinking too well at this point about where we could go next to maximize our finds. We were really tired and wore out by that point.

After the scorecards are turned in, there is typically a bbq lunch and then later on a casual party. We had decided to skip the bbq and bring our own lunch, and our afternoon was spent kind of traipsing back and forth from our campsite to the lodge to make appearances at the events, let the kids play on the playground, and visit with our friends. We were there at the lodge for the official announcement of the winners. South Tx claimed the golden ammo can in a triumph of victory, having a small but dedicated team desirous of winning this year. North got the silver, Cen-Tex the bronze, and our team got nothing this year but pats on the back for hosting. Next year we’ll have to make a comeback.

The highlights of my weekend were some of the casual moments spent in this day, before and after the competition: laughing over breakfast with J over some conversation we have been having since the origin of our relationship over a year ago, some musings I had while the kids were playing on the playground as I looked out over Lake Raven and watched the wind make the tops of the trees dance, and of course the revealing of Texas DreamWeaver’s ingenious stunt during the evening event, which involved a Bingo game where everyone was a winner. Later there was another campfire, more smores and marshmellows, roasting weenies, and then snuggling into our double sleeping bag that I got J for Christmas (so we could sleep together in the same bag when we go camping, something we have done four times already this year and hopefully many more to come).

The morning after the Challenge typically begins with a pancake breakfast and ends with a CITO event. If you aren’t familiar, a CITO event is where we gather to pick up trash and make sure we leave a place better than how we found it. I had decided to do our CITO much like we did the Challenge, but substitute the company of my boys for that of my dad. This idea was born from K’s requests for a canoe ride, and because I highly suspected my father had chunked a plastic bottle into the woods during the Challenge the day before. So we rowed the canoe across the water, beached it, hiked the Chinquapin trail, then rowed back. We could not find the bottle of my dad’s that had mysteriously disappeared from his hands, but we did find several other plastic bottles and about half a bag of trash or less by the time we were done, including the stuff we found along the way in the parking lot.

Now, we made it all the way across the water and back, a one mile round trip, without capsizing the canoe, so I was pretty happy about that. However, as we pulled up to the boat launch, I realized my camera was missing. It was a cheap disposable camera that I had, but I wanted the pictures I had been taking off of it all weekend. I had just had it in my hands before we prepared to beach the canoe, and so it had fallen out of my pocket not too far out. I looked around, and then saw it not six feet out in the water, resting on some swampy lilypad area. I gave my cellphone to my son and took off my shoes, preparing to wade to it, but the water was too deep for wading. So I took the canoe out by myself, and as soon as I reached for the camera, I realized it was off balance and, poof!, I was in the water.

So, I got my camera back, but I was soaking wet now. The boys were on the shore laughing hysterically as I swam back, pulling the canoe with me. This explains why my pictures look psychedelic – they did turn out, luckily, but the film had gotten wet and warped.

Then I had to change clothes. I had one clean shirt but I had to wear two day old dirty jeans, and no underwear, for the rest of our journey. We cached our way out of the park, then did a little bit of caching around the Sam Houston statue, running into fellow geocachers at every stop. After a misguided lunch in Huntsville, we set out for home, with stops for dogs along the way back. We were pretty tired and it took us a while to get back in gear after this, but luckily I had taken the next day off work to help with that.

Next year my oldest boy says he wants to do the Challenge with us, and not stay back at the Camp Lil Cacher program they put on every year to watch the children while their parents participate in the event. Last year was J and I’s first challenge together, but we were just starting out together and were somewhat distracted by infatuation. I am hoping next year the two of us will get a chance to work together and score up some high points, so AJ might be in for a tougher ride than he thinks, but we will just have to see!