There's no such thing as 'away'.

"How did all this get here?" he asked me. 

The "here" was Lady Bird Lake and the "this" was litter.  Yard after yard of it, along the banks of Austin's urban lake (technically, an impoundment of Texas' Colorado River).

This man had hauled his double seater kayak and his young son down to where Shoal Creek meets the lake early last Saturday morning.  He was answering a call from Keep Austin Beautiful to help pick up trash in the water and on land where Shoal Creek enters the lake.  This morning, he was the only one on the water, but about 20 people answered the call on land.  After only two hours, we had piled up twenty-three bags of trash which the City hauled away.  To add to the landfill.






I answered his question haltingly and inelegantly, since I'd never been asked that question before.  Now, days later, my smart response can be summed up elegantly as "what starts on land doesn't stay on land".  The City's Watershed Protection Department has said it even better with this wonderful "Trash Travels" sign that was just a few feet down the path from where I stood.

Land sheds what's on it.  Wind, rain, the daily shuffle of life, move things around.  Mostly, 'around' means 'down' (because gravity).  And 'down' in a watershed means down stream.

An inch a day of movement for a burger bag blown away into the next clump of grass in the park. 

More than twenty blocks of movement in an hour for a cigarette butt (its plastic foam four and a half years old, having lost its paper skin just days into its journey).  It finds itself in the floodplain and is carried away by rising waters from 24th street, where the student flicked it away on the way to class.

Three month's worth of leaking oil, scarring an otherwise pristine blacktop driveway, get rained away.  The oil molecules do not mix with the rain drops.  Their hydrophobic panic pushes them every which way, but there's no escaping the storm drain three driveways away.

Like a bathtub drain, the storm drain does its work clearing rain water as quickly as possible from the street, then through pipes that empty directly into the nearest creek.  Here's how KXAN told the story recently:

The storm drain carries more than rain water.  The burger bag, the butt, the oil, hijacked, are forced to go along for the ride.  Down the slope of the park, down the floodplain, down the driveway, down the drain, down the creek.

Then down to the lake, where, last Saturday morning, a concerned father on a kayak wonders while reaching for the butt.  (By now, the bag has shredded into small, waterlogged pieces.  The oil has sheened on the surface.  Both are beyond his grabber tool's ambitions.)

Still at home that morning, the homeowner awakens to a gift - a pristine black top driveway, courtesy of last night's rain storm.  'The world is clean again!' they post, while inhaling the good wet smells of the morning. 'The storm took the oil away!'

But by now, you, the reader, know there is no such thing.

What's that Wriggling Thing in my pond?

This weekend, as soon as it had warmed up enough, I ventured out to spend a few minutes by my pond.  And immediately squealed as I spotted a five inch long white thing wriggling near the surface.  Something totally new!

It resembled a blond eyelash (albeit a really long one).  And it took me a few minutes to figure out which end was in charge, since neither end seemed to boast any traditional head organs that I could see.  It didn't seem in a particular hurry, which is good, because it was not an efficient wriggler.  I watched it until it wriggled down and was obscured under the fountain water.

I wanted to make sure it wouldn't harm my fish.  And sure enough, they're safe.  It's a horsehair worm.  The invertebrates attracted to my pond are their hosts.  Like dragonfly nymphs.  Sigh.  The circle of life continues.

Read all about 'em here.

Dry Creek Inventory Study #1

I’m not a professional writer and that means, among other things, that I haven't developed My Voice when I write. Often, for lack of a definite plan, I mimic the style of the latest person I’ve read. So with this post, y’all get to see me try to approach Joseph Jones' laid back Texas style from his Life on Waller Creek (1982). 

I learned about this history of Austin from Dr. Kevin Anderson, currently heading up the Center for Environmental Research program at the Hornsby Bend Biosolids Plant run by the City.  Yes, he deals with your shit on a daily basis.  But on a monthly basis, he presents a first-rate lunchtime lecture series, which I've had the pleasure of experiencing since last May.  He hauls books to every lecture, so we can touch and feel his recommendations for further edification. Alas, they are only samples to whet our appetite, so I had to wait until the good folks at the Austin Public Library put a hold on a copy just for me. (It was my first Hold request, and it felt like Christmas to see my name on the bright yellow Hold tag.)

Jones' history of Austin is punctutated with italicized sections of an unconventional, occasionally irreverent, and often meandering "Inventory" of Waller Creek.  I was quickly enamoured of this storytelling technique, and knew I had to try it myself, with an Inventory of Dry Creek, a more modest Colorado River tributary a few watersheds north of Waller, passing over, in order, Shoal Creek, Taylor Sloughs South and North, and Johnson Creek.  

To begin with, an "Inventory" it isn't.  Not in the sense of a list made to help you assess where you stand on the availability of certain items important to you.  Rather, it's a stream-of-consciousness list of things, ideas, descriptions, and impressions each separated by wide ellipses.  I found myself taking those dots on the page as direction to pause and form a crisp mental image of the inventory item, or reflect on an opinion the Creek raised in Jones, and how well it has stood the test of time since the early 80s.  

To create my Inventory of Dry Creek, I gave myself one hour and 100 yards along the south/east bank, within 300 yards of it emptying into Lake Austin (the current impoundment of the Colorado River at this location). The Dry Creek watershed is now firmly nestled, if one may use so genteel a word, inside Austin's urban core.  Yet a good deal of it's banks have been spared development by a combination of factors, including finding itself in an affluent neighborhood with folks who desire (and have the means to fulfill their desire) for large, private yards backing up to the creek, as well as a pair of sisters who are in some level of compassionate collusion with a nearby Nature Preserve to keep Dry Creek in a more or less natural state on the land they own.  It is on the sisters' land I find myself with the great fortune of living on, and being welcome to walk upon.

In alignment with Jones' overall Inventory approach, I intentionally varied the scale and subject matter of my observations and musings.  I offer them up here:

A communications plaque. The plastic words on top read "Remove this part to see FCC information."  Looks like someone did just that, at some point.  Removed, and then put aside, discarded or forgotten. Or perhaps it was flung away from a nearby habitation out of disagreement with what the FCC had to tell them.  

On this fine sunny day, an abandoned dock and empty chairs beckoned. The oak had not 'made it', as they say, most likely the work of a recent flood event. And now the surviving ligustrum is lording it over her dead self. I swept some of her leaves off the chair to have a short sit in the sun.

I sat long enough to identify the soft rustling in the cattails on the small island opposite the dock as the cafeteria plan of a tiny bird. If he was catching half as many insects as he was flushing, I’d say he was well on his way to a full belly.

Sometimes vines can tell time. This one tells me that this fishing rod has been here, undisturbed, since at least last summer. This vine also tells a tale of local fish mouths that are whole and un-ripped.

The layers of our garbage are so old that they already appear to be uncovering from in between rock layers. 

While just a few feet above those rusty carcasses, the newest layer has arrived, spring-like, in a blaze of royal purple. Such treatment of the poor personal trampoline speaks to the growing obesity of our citizens, perhaps? I doubt anyone will go bouncing into Graceland on that. 

Though what have we here? Just across the creek, someone is making a more vigorous specimen bounce them into the water. A vigorous bounce likely to produce a state of grace, I’m sure.  How I’d love to be invited to experience that grace, in warmer times ahead.

As I turn to proceed along my 100 yards, I flush a king fisher further downstream. I’d like to think it’s the same, or kin to, the one I’ve seen the last five years here. 

Oh joy. Oh agony. The source of cedar fever is beautiful until you know what you’re looking at. What the reader can't see is the wad of tissues in my pockets - one pocket of fresh, the other of used.  And the frequent snotty interruptions to my observing, picture taking, and writing.

I’ve lived here for five years and this is the first time I’ve seen one of these chairs move an inch. Since one has decided, or has had it decided for him, to do a 180 and rudely face away from the creek, I must sit, and see what new view it provides. 

Oh my, is that an Escarpment black cherry? It’s top half, with its brilliant white bark, speaks to that lineage at first.   And it appears to have been grafted rather inexpertly onto a dark, rough oak trunk. A rude half breed? Before I submit an embarrassing iNaturalist Observation, a more careful analysis reveals it's all oak.  (But still, that rough beast of an interruption in growth is startling.)

A particularly violent sneeze hijacks me (and the 'used' pocket gets more crowded).  It also flushed three ducks who complained just as loudly back to me. 

Souvenirs from the essentials of life: water, water with, I'm sure, essential electrolytes added, oil, a celebration of motherhood (the balloon reads "Happy Mother's Day"), and footwear from the goddess Nike. 

I reached the end of my allotted yardage at this cedar which had decided to trinitize itself early in life. Three roads diverged in this wood, but there was a farm house near, and it was time for me to turn back.  

And so ends this inaugural Inventory.  Perhaps you'll find some use, or at least entertainment, out of it.

Life Never Stops Trying

Life doesn't always thrive.  It doesn't always succeed.  In fact, most of the time it fails.  But it never stops trying.  Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.  The urban landscape is a new one, and a challenging one, but a landscape none-the-less.

I found a few urban landscape pioneers, some succeeding more than others, under the 360 bridge at Spicewood Springs Road. 

 

I don't know what these abandoned holes were originally for, but they filled with soil, and now life is trying them out.  And the plant below is exploring the place where concrete and asphalt don't quite meet.

 

This one just got lucky.  It has an edge over plants where tires are more likely to tread.  I find myself rooting for it.  (No pun intended.)

But sometimes, you're just in the wrong place.  Men come and kill you, without even seeing you.  It's important to know where the underground sewer line is.

Even when concrete has filled a hole with a column, there is a crack in everything.  That's how the life gets in.

Radical Acceptance in the Choir Loft and in the Creek Bed

In high school, my father was my choir master on Sunday mornings at the Kenyon College chapel.  He was a serious musician and serious church musician, conferring at length with the minister to choose music that supported the sermon and the liturgy in the ecclesiastical calendar.  He loved the traditional, conservative tunes (after all, he was a classically trained organist), but he also sought to bring the new in - from hippie students strumming guitars with modern folk or rock tunes, to dissident new classical work by music professors.  Everything was welcome.  Everything belonged. That went for his all-volunteer choir members as well.  

Many a choir master is outcome-oriented; wanting to praise God with only the most beautiful, very well-rehearsed sounds possible.  That requires selective service from his congregation - auditioning people, accepting some, not accepting others, even supplementing with singers outside the congregation if need be (lend me a tenor!).  And it required mandatory Thursday night choir practice.  If you didn't rehearse it, you can't sing it Sunday morning.  You don't belong with us.  That kind of choir master is focused on the audience's - the congregation's - experience.  The purpose of the choir is to produce something beautiful for everyone else to listen to.

My father was not that kind of choir master.  He practiced what he termed 'radical acceptance'.  Anyone was welcome to volunteer to sing in the choir.  You could show up at any time, and he'd do his best to accommodate you.  And we'd offer up to God and the congregation whatever we had to offer.  This was our offering to God, and we invited the congregation to listen in.  We weren't there to fulfill the congregation's beauty expectations.


I attended Dr. Kevin Anderson's Lunchtime Lectures this year with his take on Nature in the City.  I found his approach to how to view non-human life in urban areas to be deliberately provocative.  My deliberatively vague description is an attempt to convey his approach - one of, shall I say, 'radical acceptance'.  A re-imagining, a re-setting of our expectations and judgements about the natural world that interacts with our cities.  (And indeed, even seeing urban areas as part of the natural world, albeit a new and radically different part.) 

I find this approach to ultimately be a message of hope, of belongingness, of rightness.  I hear it saying "Let's look - let's just look - at the nature that is here in our city.  Let's describe what we see without judgement, without fear, without sadness, without beauty, without purpose." 

I've been spending time on the banks of Shoal Creek, and I thought I'd practice this approach, and spend the last warm sunny day before winter began just looking at the nature in the creek by the new (and awesome) Austin Public Library.  My goal was to simply assign a 'managed' or 'unmanaged' title to things I saw.  One could also say 'planned/unplanned' 'planted/volunteer' or 'intentional/unintentional'.  I was determined not to get angry at the trash in the river, or feel sorry for the creatures trying(!) to live there.  I let those trying judgments go, and simply looked.  Here's what I saw.

We are looking north up Shoal Creek from under the Cesar Chavez bridge.  The library is to our left, a bare rubble construction site on our right.  The new arched 2nd street bridge spans the creek. 

The constructed rock walls have plantings of mostly, if not all, natives.  The plantings shift from neat and formal garden arrangements on top, to more haphazard and 'natural' looking as they descend to the creek bed.  The creek bed then remains as it has been.  It's a flow from left to right and top to bottom of very managed, to looking like it's not managed, to unmanaged.  Note that many of the same kinds of plants which are planted in the rock wall are also growing in the unmanaged areas.

On the far bank, the plants are unmanaged, though the large liveoak is protected from the construction area with border fencing. 

There's another tree inside the construction area that's protected, though unintentionally so.  The electricity station for their construction needs is an island of life inside the fence.  Plants grow in every space possible under the electric boxes, and a tree has shot up.  No one's paying attention to it.  The liveoak, we know, we intend to keep safe and alive.  The electric tree and her entourage will not share that fate.  Same goes for the yellow flowers exploding just inside the construction fence.


It's common to see animals in the creek.  This afternoon, I saw a bird, looking like the first of three pieces of white trash, fishing the rapids, and a cormorant dive-fishing in one of the deeper pools.  I also saw turtles sunning themselves on a natural limestone ledge next to a concrete sewer entrance.  Hold up; that's not a natural limestone ledge - that's spread concrete.

The mix of managed and unmanaged was clear on the hillside beyond the rock walls.  The giant old pecan in the background now shares space with a newly-planted cypress tree (now brown till the Spring).

I tried not to feel or judge as I looked at this urban landscape.  To start - and end - with just looking at what is.  But it was awfully hard to not feel sad for the bird wading through trash to find a fish, all the while enduring the constant construction noise.  And not to judge the planting choices made, or rue the future demise of another lovely cypress tree that was obviously not in the 'right' place, or wonder why in the world no one had cut down an invasive non-native yet. 

It was freeing to simply look at all the life in front of me, living their afternoon in the city, in the glorious sun.  Everyone offering up to God what they had to offer.

Hiking with Geeks

Geekdom was in all its glory on the trail at Bright Leaf Preserve this Sunday.  About fifteen Hiking with Geeks members came out on a chilly morning to experience nature and "detox" from technology (according to their website).

It was a chilly wait for everyone to show up, then more standing around as we all introduced ourselves and how we geek.  After someone said they'd be warmer if we could start hiking, I kept the hike introduction short, and Bill Dodd, Phillip Russell, and I led them into the hills. 

I wanted to plunge their senses into the life around them.

We crushed blue ashe juniper berries in our fingers and smelled the scent of Christmas from the aromatic resin.  We deliberated over what "edible" meant.  These berries aren't poisonous, and they are technically edible, but I don't suggest eating one.  (Since juniper is an evergreen, these juicy berries are technically cones, as in pine cones.  But that's a technicality I usually don't bring up.)  It is closely related to the juniper species that lends it's flavoring to gin, and people always find that a fun bit to know.

I did invite them to taste the tart red berries (actual berries, not cones) of the evergreen sumac.  Someone spotted the small hairs covering each berry, and how large the seed was compared to the thin film of very tart fruit covering it.  One guy mused it would take 400,000 berries to make a pie.  'Bout right, I'd say.  With 400,000 cups of sugar added.  A woman who hadn't brought water with her rued the inability to wash that tartness out of her mouth.  (See?  You should always bring water with you when you hike - you never know when, or why, you'll need it.)

We held gorilla snot in our hands.  Not every group of hikers is lucky enough.  Just a few days after a heavy rain (and a night and morning of SNOW!) these normally crispy black colonies of single-cell cyanobacteria called nostoc had swelled with all the water they had absorbed, and started to photosynthesize.  That meant a green, gushy mess in our palms.  To their surprise, this stuff is edible - you can even buy it at health food stores. 




We inevitably came across some scat (poop) on the trail.  Someone challenged the group to pick up some coyote scat.  "It has a nutty aroma" they joked.  This sample showed how omnivorous a coyote can be.  The end part, with it's characteristic "twist" as the last bit comes out, was a mass of grey hairs (most likely squirrel)  But before that, this one had eaten some berries of some sort, with the large seeds making it out the other end.  I figure those who ate the evergreen sumac seeds might see the same thing, if they cared to look closely enough the next day.

The original owner of Bright Leaf, Georgia B. Lucas, was a cat lover.  Many people find this the single most interesting thing about the place.  In fact, this was the single fact that one local wildlife manager that I met knew about the place. 

One of the hikers was here this morning because of the cats.  She had been told about the preserve and it's cat story at a neighbor's yard sale the day before.  Unfortunately, she was anxious to see the cats, and I had to let her down that this was a bit of history, and not a feature of today's hike.  When Ms. Lucas died in the mid 90's, her existing cats were taken care of and lived out their natural lives.  Phillip told us he had had the pleasure of knowing the last cat - a grey long-hair named Fluffy.  I like to joke that Fluffy turned into the grey concrete cat statue overlooking the driveway.

Sometimes, plunging your senses into something means taking stimulation away from you.  We enjoyed thirty seconds of silence in a valley that's tucked away enough from the human world, that sometimes, like this morning, you get lucky and can't hear the traffic on 2222 or Mopac, or a leaf blower or lawn mower or construction, or a plane, or a bird, or even wind through the trees.  Nothing but the forest being. 

Finally, we had a rare treat for any hike, but especially for one so large and talkative.  Someone spotted a buck to our left, and we stopped the group and tried to be quiet and see.  A second buck was spotted, but both of them decided very quickly to high tail it (literally) out of there.  Serves me right to be so certain when I told them we wouldn't see deer with such a noisy group.  The world outside is full of surprises.  And I like it that way.

Bright Leaves on a Dark Morning

   Most people would have chosen yesterday, with its warm temperature, sunshine and vivid blue sky, to capture the brilliant colors of the changing leaves here on Mt. Lucas.  I chose to take advantage of the weather by paddling on Dry Creek and Lake Austin, taking in the last of the season's dragonflies, and disturbing a great blue heron, numerous ducks, and an osprey.

So this morning, I thought I'd take those pictures I never got to yesterday, even if they aren't quite as brilliant, with today's cold rainy grey.  They were their own rays of sunshine, and the water helped boost the colors.

A few Cedar Elm leaves.

A foot-high (Balcones) Escarpment black cherry.  This tree is endemic to the Escarpment, meaning it lives here and only here.  It's also considered rare. This little one is the daughter of a large one that grows in my yard.  May she grow many more daughters!

This pearl milkweed vine was very happy this summer,
climbing about 15 feet up using an American Elm. 
It has kept its leaves, even as the tree shed its own.

And of course, the lovely reds of a young, three-foot high oak
bordering my driveway.  I nurtured her after the 2011 drought,
and she had grown two feet since then, but s/he and I soon
will have to negotiate access to sun with access to driveway.

Lastly, the completely accurately named Flame Leaf Sumac. 
This one came to me as a volunteer in an abandoned pot
where a non-native big box plant had died.  Sometimes it pays to procrastinate.