keely – Page 59 – State of Wilderness

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!

Lake Jackson: Gulf Coast Bird Observatory and Wilderness Park

This past weekend, we attended a bird banding workshop at the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory location in Lake Jackson. These bird bandings are held every third Saturday from 8 am to noon and are open to the public. I personally was interested in being able to identify more birds. We were also interested in using his new binoculars to sight more birds, and hoping there might be a raptor or bird of prey being banded.

We showed up for the bird banding fairly late – ten am as opposed to eight, because we were having trouble getting up, but we still got to see quite a few birds. This time of the year, there were primarily cardinals. The cardinal is such a handsome bird, but apparently they are very fiesty. The male volunteer who does the bird banding, Robert Lookingbill, was getting nipped several times by their beaks. He also had a bit of bird magic about it, seeming to “hyptonize” the birds with a wag of his finger, to the delight of the onlookers who were trying to get pictures.

During the bird banding, this man would gently remove the birds from the sacks they were hanging in and check to see if they already had a band. If they did, he read the number off to his “scribe”, his wife Kay. They are both licensed bird banders and research associates at GCBO. If the bird was not banded, he placed one on them. I admire his dexterity because this is harder than it sounds. Then he performed an examination of the animal, during which he verbalized his findings to Kay, who was logging them in a tablet. They looked at the condition of the wings, measured them, blew a straw across the bird’s chest to get a visual assessment of body fat, and weighed the birds. This gives them good data to look at migration patterns of birds relative to their body condition. Bird banding has been going on at this location for five years now, so Kay and Robert have amassed a good deal of data for the US Fish and Wildlife Service that this workshop both supports and is supported by.

In the two hours we were there observing, we saw about ten different species of birds being banded. Most of them were cardinals, but there were also several species of very small birds, some of which the crowd ooh-ed and ahh-ed over, such as this Golden Crowned Kinglet. J an dI both got to hold a bird before setting it free after the banding, and I got to hold a tiny hummingbird in my hand before it took off. We all took a walk over to see the mist screens they use to catch the birds before bagging them and bringing them over.

Towards the end of our visit, we ran into a very friendly volunteer, Claudia I think her name was, who showed us how to get to the observatory overlook by walking with us. She taught us a lot about the history of this site, the work they do there, their conservation and fundraising efforts, and other great places to view birds. She also told us about native plant species that you could plant in your yard to attract hummingbirds and butterflies. She walked us over to a location where some of these were planted and put some seed pods in my hand, as well as pointing out the different species, such as Katy Ruellia, Turks hat, yellow bells, and shrimp plants. We walked a little further down a trail by the office headquarters and observed the screen nets.

I had packed a picnic lunch for after, and loaded waypoints for nearby geocaches into the GPS unit. We met his parents beforehand and they followed us down here to watch the bird banding as well, and they were still game for enjoying some time outdoors when the workshop was over, so we all went next door to the Wilderness Park. This is 300 acres of pristine woodlands located on the other side of the Brazos River. We went for about a three mile round trip hike there and picked up ten new geocache finds. His parents were with us for about half of the caches before turning back; after they left, we picked more rugged routes and faster tempos, although we still were strolling leisurely enough to enjoy the vistas and take photos of our favorite views. I highly recommend this place as a good location to escape into nature, although as with most natural adventures, use your sense of caution – we saw a huge snake entering our path as we were on our way out of the path. We didn’t see other wild animals but we saw plenty of sign of them, animal prints in the mud and scat indicating the presence of feral hogs, deer, raccoon, possum, and possibly bobcat and alligator.

Later, I will go into more detail about the conservation efforts of GCBO and the different birds we learned about. Mostly I wanted to share our experience of this area in hopes it might inspire you to take a trip out there and experience it as well. This is a place where nature reigns supreme in the midst of an urban environment, and I hope to find more places like this to share with you.

Katy Prairie Conservancy

On an unusually cold Saturday morning, we went out for a drive along Katy’s back roads to explore the Katy Prairie Conservancy sites. Our primary mission was birding related. He had just gotten a new pair of nice binoculars for his birthday, and lately we’ve become more interested in the birds.

Well, he’s always been interested in the birds, since I have known him, but mostly his interest was in hawks and falcons. Today, his objective was to see an eagle. I, though, have never been interested in birds before him. In fact, I rarely even noticed them. I feel like I must have spent my life looking at the ground, or panning in front of me, but never really looked to the sky. Oh, what I had been missing! Now I am all excited and enthusiastic about learning the names of all these creatures. And what a difference the binoculars make!

I had first learned about the Katy Prairie Conservancy during the Outdoor Fest at Discovery Green last fall that I have mentioned here before. I had held on to a pamphlet about their mission with the intention of venturing out here someday. Then he suggested we check it out early one morning, try to get there around sunrise to catch some birds, find some geocaches, take some waypoints of places to see birds at, and so off we went.

The Katy Prairie itself used to stretch from downtown Houston to the Brazos River. As the Houston metropolitan area spread, and the west side of town was developed more rapidly, the prairie has begun to disappear. However, this land was home to 300 species of birds, 300 species of wildflowers and other plants, and around 100 species of other kinds of wildlife. Without a plan for protection, all of this would soon disappear, and the Katy Prairie would be swallowed up into oblivion. In 1992, the Katy Prairie Conservancy was formed as a nonprofit entity intent on saving this bit of wilderness in our urban environment. Their mission is to preserve 50,000 contiguous acres on the prairie, To date, they have protected 18,000 acres towards this goal.

This day, we stopped at three sites along the map provided by the website: the Wildlife Viewing Platform, Barn Owl Woods/Nelson Farms, and Warren Ranch South. These sites are marked on the map you can find here. These locations, as you can see from the map, are right next to each other along the same road. If you want to explore this yourself, you will have to approach from the west end of Sharp, as there is some construction going on right where the Cypress Creek crosses Sharp Rd, and the road is not only closed right now, but there is a gaping crevasse in it.

We didn’t see our eagle this morning, but we did find some geocaches along these roads, including one right at the platform, and we had a good time looking at the birds through the binoculars and trying to identify them. I was watching one for a while that we spent all day trying to identify from various sources, unable to come to agreement until we realized we were talking about two different birds we had seen that morning. I was able to find out what it was, I think, by a nudge from another geocacher that I contacted who is an experienced birder and pointed me to this list the Katy Prairie Conservancy has up on its website. From there I was able to narrow the choices by comparing pictures and migration habits. I am currently convinced the bird I was looking at was an ash-throated flycatcher.

We plan on going back out to mark coordinates of places along this area to view birds and sharpen our skills at identifying them. Next time we go out, I am bringing a sketch pad and map pencils so it is easier to remember exactly what I saw for later remembering, until we get a really good field guide. I am excited about our new interest in birding, and thankful that this town has an organization like KPC actively preserving our wilderness so that future generations, both human and bird alike, can continue to enjoy it.