Keeping Texas Wild

Texas certainly has its redeeming moments. For every gurgling F-150 on a five-lane freeway, there seems to be an occasion like last night's, which found me sitting at the point just after sunset.

Savoring my first moments of solitude after the week's busy return to teaching, I am the lone human spectator at Lake Livingston's daily festival of dusktime beauty. A great blue heron flaps casually by. How long did it take, I wonder, to find that perfect height for flight, with wingtips stopping just millimeters above the glassy surface, giving the eyes the best possible look at what's beneath? A low, ringing croak, a rush of water on spindly feet, and it is now a rigid stalk in the shallows. Prey will not be hard for it to find. Despite the current cold spell (it might dip into the twenties tonight – gasp!), the fish are jumping like midsummer, questing with a splash for their own meals. Meanwhile, above my head comes a surprising hiss of air as a squadron of coots b-lines towards destination unknown. Marvelous sounds. There are dogs barking and trucks' muffled roars from across the lake, but for now, the choruses human and non-human strike a peaceful balance.

It's hard to imagine anything but peace prevailing in this moment, with the eyes treated to comparable wonders as the ears. The Western horizon soft and orange as a ripe peach, its light painted across the mirror of water before fading to violet and blue-black in the East. Jupiter and Venus are already standing proudly in the cooling sky, portending the kind of clear, winter night that makes Minnesotans smile and Texans gawk.

The planetary reflections bring Thoreau to mind, and Professor Mike Kowalewski, whose favorite moment of Walden came on a night like this one. Fishing under a blanket of stars, the transcendentalist loses the boundary between sky and water, starlight and reflection, descending into the depths of his own mind, “haunted by waters,” as Norman Maclean would later write in A River Runs Through It.

Myself, I'm just content soaking in the beauty around me. Of course, it's a one-sided view I'm taking tonight. I'm allowing myself a few minutes in that “sunset raving” trap that nature writers shun like a poison these days. But why not? There's a pyre-like brushfire blazing a few hundred yards away, burning the piney corpses of the summer's historic drought. There's that roar of trucks across the lake reminding me this is no wilderness. Why not celebrate the waning beauty that's still in front of me?

Water often seems to inspire optimism, especially now that the drought has passed and Lake Livingston is filling back up. After all, it's a lot harder to clearcut a lake for a stripmall than a forest. And while there is no real, protected wilderness at hand, its scrappy cousin, wildness, is filling my nostrils with vigor.

It's official: if I get Texas plates on my car, I'll pay the extra $30 to Parks & Wildlife for the ones that bear a Horned Lizard and the words “Keep Texas Wild.” I can't think of a more important phrase to take with me through this rugged and resilient place.

I'd be honored for the Silver Bullet to wear this plate.