Residents Of The Piney South: The Loblolly Pine

Sometimes a tree is just considered a weed with a trunk.  In much of the South, pines are considered to be simply background material, stuff that grows in the way of development and agriculture.  A friend I met back in college, a Carolinian in fact, told me that pines were sometimes even considered to be more than just a weed but a real nuisance.  "They don't take too well to storms and hurricanes, and leave a tangled, sap-filled mess to clean up".  Pines are nothing if not sap-filled, but I hardly considered that to be problematic.  After all, they are just as ubiquitous in Ontario as they are in the Carolinas and we go out of our way, occasional tornado or violent microburst aside, to pay vast sums of money to get mature ones in our landscape if they are not already present.  In mostly deciduous SE Michigan and NW Ohio, nearly every public works landscaping project includes at least shelter-belts of pine, usually Scotch (Pinus Sylvestris) or Austrian/Black (Pinus Nigra) but often the native reds and whites.  Mile after mile of I-75 is lined in such a way up in these parts.

I-75 in Georgia or I-95 anywhere south of central Virginia look like such a landscaping project put into years of growth, and a nearly solid wall of Loblolly Pines (Pinus Taeda) screen off the northern tourists and other thru-travelers from the local world.  Janisse Ray even insisted that this was their purpose in her masterpiece Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.  Janisse, you see, loves all the spires of her native forests down in Georgia, but just as I have a particular weakness and reverence for the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus), so does Janisse look upon the noble Longleaf Pine (Pinus Palustris) with grand esteem.  To her, is the Loblolly a seemingly unworthy also-ran that has filled a niche that the Longleaf once dominated?  Without a doubt, she considers it an important and lovely tree, but it is just in so many ways ordinary and second-fiddle to the monarch that was once the Longleaf.  This is not to say that Loblolly Pines are bad trees, just that they are an unfortunate sign of the times wherein entire ecosystems have been disrupted and trees such as this one find a place in an ever-changing world made by humans that lets such highly adaptable species thrive.  The Loblolly is one such tree.

The Lobolly, you see, does not mind getting its feet wet, unlike most other pines.  It can tolerate being at the margin of a swamp better than most of its genus, even while it can handle the harsh, alkaline conditions of an abandoned clay-soil farm field baking in the sun.  Surprisingly, it does not take well to the pure prairie environments found scattered in the South, notably the eastern extensions of the central prairies into the Louisiana coastal plains and the Black Belt, an arching area of prairie (that can now be seen on physical maps as a dense concentration of farmland) stretching across central Mississippi and Alabama.  Like most established prairies, the incredible roots of the grasses and forbs have contributed to the formation of a rich, dark mineral soil.  Likewise, rich soils can be found in the Mississippi valley, an area which forms a significant gap between the eastern and western portions of the Southern forests.  While the Loblolly does tolerate getting its feet wet, it does not like them soaked.  Such land is instead reserved for incredible stands of tupelo, cypress, cottonwoods, and willows (along with the lovely Red Maple <Acer Rubrum>).  In short, we can see that it dislikes certain ecological extremities and even in its very broad choice of tolerable situation is still... average.  Simply put, the Loblolly is a common tree that you will find across much of the South, from Texas clear to southern New Jersey. 

That's the direction I became inspired by when writing this post.  You see, I have so very few specimen pictures of the Loblolly because of how "common" they really are.  Most of my shots incorporate the sentiments of how they get viewed by Southerners, as background scenery behind modern development.

There they are, filling up the backdrop in Santee, SC, just off of Loblolly-framed I-95.  I witnessed very few trees, except maybe old survivors that were big enough to not be considered "weeds", used in a landscape around homes or businesses.  That honor instead went to cold hardy palms (like that lovely Pindo Palm, Butia Capitata) and magnolias fighting with crepe myrtles for places of honor on the front yard.

 In fact, aside from the photo of your typical "it was too big to just yank out" Loblolly back a few posts ago, this is the only canopy or crown shot I have of them!  I regret this, as a stand of Loblollies (and do they ever make fine stands, just like the Red Pines do up north) is a wonderful wall of green, a wall which I remember fondly as a child welcoming me to a South that otherwise felt so very distant from my far north.  I always tried to squint deeper into those dense growths along I-95 and wonder what the forest was like inside them.  Even at that age I figured that this was not a natural situation, that there had to be more in the forest besides a single giant plantation of one tree.  For the life of me though, even as common as they were, they were a tree that seemed to outweigh all the other elements of the landscape.  Only after a half day of Loblolly wonder would I notice the subtle changes that happened in Georgia as Saw Palmettos (Serenoa Repens) started carpeting the understory and Slash Pines (Pinus Elliottii) started to take over, especially into Florida.  The bigger needle globes of the Slash Pines were part of the very different world of the Deep South and Florida, not a Red Pine look alike that the Loblollies were.  The Loblolly fit perfectly into a Canadian child's image of what the South looks like: the same as the north, but with even more pines, palm trees, and a night time that was as hot as a Northern day time, complete with some buzzing outdoor light illuminating this mysterious pine that grew even in such a hot land. 

I was too young to imagine that things had not always been this way.  This is not to say that I had no imagination or that I knew not what a wilderness was (I grew up in one), but that I was simply ignorant of the fact that the Loblolly would have been truly an "also ran" back in the days when the Longleaf was king of the forest and savanna.  The settlers who followed the First Born would have seen that very different world of an incredible arboreal diversity, with towering pines stretching forth above grasses and flowers stretching as far as the eye could see, kept open by the same agent of nature that made lower Michigan, Ohio, and Southern Ontario into a natural park of oak openings, fire.  I imagine, as Janisse Ray does of a South long past, settlers living among these giants, every bit as transfixed upon them as... a child doing the same thing when confronted by the inheritor pine, the Loblolly.  Maybe it is not, after all, such a common tree as it is a survivor and a triumph of nature trying to cope with human development.  I consider the Loblolly to be an arboreal emblem of the modern natural South, in which nature still manages to rebound like, well, a weed!  Even in farm country down there you can't help but run across a tree every few hundred feet, and often enough it will be a Loblolly.  In truth, I have never seen the ancestral forest with my own eyes, and I can only imagine the grandeur of the Longleaf Savanna.  The Loblolly, though, has managed to welcome me home every time I have come back to this land of the South, which holds such an irresistible lure to a botanist who is still a child at heart. 

A part of me wonders what life was like where this tree held its own once against the broad rule of the Longleaf.  Perhaps places like Jamestown, places where the continent started to forever change into the modern land it has become, are places where one can still find a forest of curiosities otherwise stepped quickly past by human advancement.  Here maybe can be seen not some oak or pine parkland that provided an irresistible lure to colonial settlement, but a needle carpeted half-forest, half-opening maze of strange trees that grew beyond the landings of mushy cypress forest infested with mosquitoes.  Would the first Virginians have tried to press on toward higher ground capable of more agricultural wonders and either ignored or found inconvenient the odd forest that was too open to give good shade, yet to thick to plop a house on?  What would they have made of this place come winter when even the leafy shrubs beneath the pines would refuse to surrender their greenery, like the Red Bay (Persea Borbonia) or the Loblolly Bay (Gordonia Lasianthus)? 

Both of these delightful messes were captured at Historic Jamestowne, in the drier center of the swampy hook of land that John Smith and company tried to give Virginia a decent go at.

Were such forests taken in by the colonists like the Red Pine forests of wonderful blueberry (Vaccinium Augustifolium) and Wintergreen (Gaultheria Procumbens) understory of an otherwise grand White Pine dominated North, which together with the more open Jack Pine (Pinus Banksiana) openings on sand and granite (depending on what side of Lake Huron you would find them on), and considered second fiddle and scrubish by their northern settling counterparts (compared to the valuable timberlands of the White Pine supercanopy forest)?  We may never know.  After all, we don't even notice the trees around us these days...

But what about that Longleaf?

"I Don't Understand You": A History Of Linguistic Diversity In Colonial North America: Part One, Mexico.

Aside from the multitudes of languages and language families that existed among the First Born before colonization, popular imagination tends to view North America as being divided between a Spanish south, English center, and French north which has been largely confined to modern Quebec.  In fact, there was a decent concentration of Dutch, Swedish, Russian, German, Gaelic, and even Greek speakers who settled the continent alongside the "big three".  This resulted, along with settlement patterns and military control of territories, in a severe disruption of communication in what was otherwise a complex network of trade corridors and relatively stable alliance set-ups that could ultimately bring people, goods, and ideas from one ocean to another.  Whereas Geronimo and his Apaches found themselves imprisoned in Florida in a different world, looking at a Gulf of Mexico and sweating in the humidity, something they could not even imagine from living in their distant Arizona, the Apaches a few hundred years before would have been decently informed about and may have even seen on some trade or military expeditions.  Colonization resulted in the continent becoming very compartmentalized, ironically an issue which affects politics in relation to language in the present day.

Let's explore who came and what happened piece by piece.  First we can take a look at New Spain.

This portrait of San Bartholome de Las Casas hangs, suprisingly, in the Senate wing of the United States Capitol Building.  More on this man below.

Spanish colonization did not take over everything from San Francisco to Cape Horn overnight.  The Caribbean islands were the first lands in which settlement and language dispersal happened, with the Spanish making their first concentrated and serious colonization efforts in Cuba after having made minor settlements in Columbia and Venezuela.  The Spanish desire for conquest was primarily fueled by lusting after gold and riches, but colonization was based off of taking advantage of trade with interior peoples and establishing a foothold for Roman Catholicism in the New World. 

While on the surface, the spread of the Spanish language would seem to be a practical way of standardizing trade and commerce and making conversion to a new faith much easier, such cultural domination happened only gradually.  Missionaries trained themselves to speak various languages and traders simply relied on existing trade networks and set-ups.  Part of this was due to the work of one man, San Bartholome de Las Casas.  Simply put, Las Casas was disgusted by what he saw as the brutal conquest that Spain was participating in against the people living with him, admittedly as his own slaves, in an exciting New World where he pledged to make a life of freedom and prosperity.  His viewpoints were hard to keep to himself, and he eventually spearheaded efforts to protect the native population of Mexico from cultural annihilation.  Together with the effects that Malinche had previously had on softening the heart of Hernando Cortez, this meant that Spanish colonization started to become a much more complicated affair than just mere conquest.

Missionary efforts were helped quite a lot by this mutual exploration, though sometimes they resulted in Catholicism simply being absorbed into existing religious practices.   Due to this and other reasons, Spanish efforts did start to turn toward cultural dominance.  Spanish did not become imposed on the populace of New Spain until 1696, but legislated cultural transformation became policy throughout the 18th century, and missionary efforts which went along with military expeditions into the northern frontiers of Alta California, Tejas, and the Rio Grande valley followed this policy, especially after the Jesuits were expelled from all Spanish dominions.  While the Franciscans who followed them were not particularly fond of cultural domination, they followed the law in spreading the take-over of Spanish language and customs.  Mexican independence, followed by strong native democratic participation in the new nation, eventually resulted in a reversal of imperialistic cultural and linguistic directives.

Thus the Spanish language has not completely replaced common usage of indigenous languages in Mexico even in the present day.  While most if nearly all non-Spanish speakers in Mexico are functionally bilingual, the majority of pre-conquest languages have survived with enough speakers around to keep them alive.  The Mexican government, in fact, recognizes 68 languages in addition to Spanish as national languages, complete with all the legal rights for those language users shared by Spanish users.  This has been law since 1917.

Native culture has indeed remained dominant in some areas of southern Mexico, and Mexican culture would not be the same without them, to say nothing of how it would be without heavy infusions from the languages of those cultures into Spanish. While efforts to diversify and protect different languages have met with, let's be honest and say completely racist efforts of suppression in the United States and Canada, Mexico simply has such an inter-mixed population that such a thing would be unthinkable there.  The same cannot be said for the rest of Latin America, but that is another story for a different day, and beyond the scope of this blog, at least for now.

Next post we travel 2,300 miles northward to New France and see what happened with French in the New World.

Rhododendrons And The Potency Of Native America

I often spend a lot of time on this blog touting the benefits and perhaps even superiority of native plants.  This is not to say that I think imports and exotics don't have their place; where would we be without wheat, rice, etc?  My house garden is actually quite full of foreign and distantly native things like western lupines and sagebrush, southern trees, that and I really have a thing going for portulacas and rare hostas, and... of course I just adore Rhododendrons.  Truth be told, they are a "distant native" here too.  Michigan has only one species of a native Rhododendron, Rhododendron Groenlandicum, which is found mostly in the northern reaches of the state where bogs are a regular feature of the landscape.  The species that I have elaborated on last week are all Appalachian beauties that come close only as near as Ohio.

Maybe at one point they were more widespread, however, and perhaps crusaded against in a mad dash by the people of our continent to cultivate and develop every last inch of land they could find.  This sort of thing has happened to many of our regional botanical gems, including mangroves in Florida, Longleaf Pines (Pinus Palustris) throughout the southeastern United States, so many prairie plants in the interior of the continent, cactus and sagebrush species in the west, and everywhere, the towering trees that had caused reluctant second born North Americans to stay in their experimental colonies.

Believe it or not, until the industrial way of the world got well underway in the later part of the nineteenth century, complete with great lumps of immigrants to power the factories and mills, the main commercial attraction of these shores would be the vegetation.  Rough winters and ideological uncertainties were harsh selling points for Europeans thinking about having a go at a venture in Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, and Quebec.  Mexico and Cuba long had a stronger advantage over such places in terms of climactic desirability, even after the allure of potential easy gold had dimmed to mere cantina discussions over the old days of legends and legendary explorers.  But in all of these places, a rather incredible, and tough, world that was nearly unspoiled lay before astonished Europeans.  For the English and Dutch, and far more so the French, the economic attraction of these unspoiled lands was great.  One of the stars of the show were the pines, conifers that seemed to be an inexhaustible resource of legendary, yet living, proportions.

The trees made the colonies possible.  They allowed for ships to be built for large Spanish fleets to defend the interests of a nation where the domestic supply of forest was growing very thin.  They allowed the Puritans of New England to sustain a colony founded on ideological grounds by selling their lumber into the great circle of trade between them, England (who sought out ships of her own), Africa, and the Caribbean.  They made for wonderful habitat for the fur bearers pursued by the French who traveled as far as the western mountains on canoes made by their unsurpassed timber.  More so than any of this, though, the trees and plants were unlike anything they had seen back in a depleted mother land.  Once the initial economic foundations had been laid and the New World took on a separate life of its own, the colonies stopped being viewed as a savage frontier.  The vegetation of the continent started becoming every bit as desirable and aesthetically pleasing as it was already quite valuable for utility.  The gardens of Europe were getting more formal, more refined, and needed new sources of excitement to be dressed up into the realm of the exotic.

Enter then both the old aristocracy and the new upstarts with names such as Washington and Monticello.  Like most good aristocrats, they loved beauty but preferred to pass on the work to subordinates.  Their carefully cultivated plant museums were stocked and maintained by botanists both domestic and imported.  Men such as John Fraser, Francois Andre Mirchaux, and many others before and after them glided into the western frontiers of the dark forests and found and returned with amazing plants for the rich gardens.  North American flora became a very hot commodity, but this it remained, a mere commodity.  The founding fathers and founding scientists took pride in the powerful, seemingly indestructible vegetation that was as much responsible for creating a mysterious and seemingly dangerous frontier as any of the native peoples helped to produce.  For the most part, though, they were absorbed in the economic value of these home grown things.

The common people of the era were much more concerned with clearing out and selling the pine forests and rhododendron thickets they came across.  To them, the most valuable plants were not ones that could provide for grand specimens in huge gardens, but rather apple trees which could produce safely drinkable cider and fruit or cash crops such as cotton and tobacco.  The great pines were amazing, but considered commonplace and inexhaustible.  The rhododendrons and other such non-lumber plants were just a mess to get out of the way of room meant for fields.  The small gardens which took up residence near domestic quarters were filled with familiar garden plants often imported from Europe, planted in an attempt to push off the frontier and create some sense of "civilized" tranquility.  The frontier moved on, eventually, but the wilderness which created it in the first place would slowly grow back; any glace at a map to this day will still show grand areas of green surrounded by cultivated miles upon miles, and this of course would be Appalachia. 

Well over a century would have to pass before people started thinking of the local plants as symbolic of what a truly different world North America had remained to exist as.  As economic opportunities shifted from into diverse fields of opportunity beyond natural resource extraction, and especially as the emotionally detached Enlightenment thinkers and encyclopedic intellectuals faded into memory during the Romantic ascension of the nineteenth century, North Americans started valuing their landscape on a different level.  North American art became dominated at certain stages by naturalist painters who thrilled in dramatic landscapes.  People trying to find a renewal of the spirit by departing noisy, polluted city life sought to try and conserve the land, its vegetation, and animals first in societies, then in zoos, and finally in reserves and parks. 

The damage had long since been done, however, and things such as rhododendrons, cacti, grasses, and even pines were reduced in territory to land that was considered less desirable for cultivation and development.  In short, there might have been a time where rhododendrons would have spread throughout Ontario and Michigan, cacti would have been common as far east as dunes lapped at by Lake Champlain, and an Eastern White Pine putting up a brave, if stunted, front on the tallgrass prairie of Nebraska would not have been entirely unthinkable.  The damage is still being done!  One is hard pressed to find people in the south planting, let alone remembering, their amazing Longleaf Pines.  The last sanctuary of the rhododendrons is being shaved away as mountain tops are entirely removed to get at a wimpy little layer of coal within.  Ranchers and home owners in Texas and Oklahoma still drag chains on their land to rip out anything resembling a cactus.  Nature, especially here in the demanding New World, however, has ways of showing just how tough and devil-may-care our plants, like our people, can be:

Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina.

Same as above

Great Smokey Mountains National Park, North Carolina side.

That's right.  Barely any soil to speak of except that made by otherwise beautiful and delicate Rhododendrons.  This is a New World which does not give up without a fight!

Thanks to all my viewers for taking a stop here on the blog and making this the most viewed month ever.  I'm glad to see that the spirit of exploration and a desire for learning can still be found in an age of reality television.

GAAHHH! TORNADO!

Two years ago I was passing through Joplin, Missouri.  Only a month had passed since the town was almost entirely destroyed by an F-5 tornado.  Like most people everywhere else, I was nothing but full of sympathy for what had happened to the people there, but like most people, I also let the event slip into the back of my mind as the weeks went on.  I was very sharply reminded about what had happened; most hotels in the area were either closed, packed full of relief workers and displaced locals, or no longer standing.  What had seemed like a convenient stopping place for the night on a long trip from California to Michigan turned into a reminder that we live on a continent that is very, very naturally destructive.  Overhead information signs directed a ton of relief workers into action, with an entire exit off of I-44 dedicated just to outside assistance entering what was left of the city.  I took no pictures of what little could be seen from the interstate, which was horrific.  Trees, buildings, everything... flattened. 

So how does the sort of thing happen, how did people in the past deal with it, what should we do about it, etc?  I figured I would wait to post anything about tornadoes until the media hysteria had died down regarding the recent Oklahoma disasters, but seeing as how I just encountered a weak tornado of my own a few days ago, now seemed to be as good a time as any.  Tornadoes, more than most natural disasters, seem to make people rubber-neck and dive into as much information on the matter as possible.  The press, therefore, jump all over the tragedies involved as fast as they can and a lot of rapid speech and decrying of the fury of nature runs out of the mouths of many a reporter.  For the most part, though, they get their facts straight. 

Tornadoes are the result of colliding air masses within a larger storm system causing a bunch of air to rapidly rotate.  The winds that result within really powerful tornadoes, such as the one which hit Joplin, are among the most powerful winds on our planet, making hurricanes seem mild in comparison.  Hurricanes, in fact, can spawn multiple tornadoes within them, something which happens often in the Carolinas and Georgia when the storms make landfall there.  While one imagines a tornado to suck everything out of existence, its damaging effects are actually the result of the rotating winds knocking around debris which can include entire houses, trees, and trucks.  Nevertheless, as I can confirm from personal experience, one does feel as if one is being sucked off the ground into the blue, or rather gray and lightning illuminated yonder. 

(Before anyone asks, this happened on I-80, at the only tollbooths in Illinois for I-80.  The car I was in was lifted a few feet off the ground before it was thankfully plunked back down just a foot or so in front of where it lifted off.  Yes, I thought I was going to die.  I have also been within a few hundred feet of an F-5 tornado at the corner of where Nebraska and Colorado meet near Ogallala, Nebraska, and more recently a small rope tornado near Whitmore Lake, Michigan.) 

So why do they happen so often here?  You know that bit about air masses doing a dance?  It just so happens that North America is one of the most chaotic battlegrounds for air masses coming in contact with one another.  In the north we have Hudson Bay, which together with our large continental mass (oceans tend to moderate temperatures, dry land tends to let them go nuts in one direction or another) extends cold air masses much closer to the equator than anywhere else on earth.  Frosts have been reported as far south as Tampico, Mexico, clearly in the tropics.  During the last ice age, the frigid Hudson kept pumping out glacial masses of ice that extended closer to the equator than any other non-alpine location on the planet.  In the other corner, the Gulf of Mexico is a heat and humidity factory wherein the great global ocean thermal conveyer belt (say that five times fast) suddenly turns from deep and cold to shallow and hot.  It produces the Gulf Stream which tends to make Europe a pleasant place in terms of temperature moderation.  It also gives the eastern part of our continent our amazing forests and plentiful water.  It also gives us summer days where we can practically watch the paint peel off of the walls because everything is so damn sticky. 

Now, put the two of these together and we get amazing storms.  Make the already very different layers of the atmosphere dance with even greater surface extremes between those larger air masses and we get our destructive tornadoes.  Sure, they get them in Europe now and then, they get them in China (where they have a scaled down version of our hot-cold fight between Siberia and the South China Sea), they get them in the tropics, and they even get them on top of mountains, but nowhere near the intensity and frequency with which they happen in central North America.  Oklahoma is the worst place to be for this sort of thing.  A small part of the state's southeastern corner has a climate and landscape very similar to the rest of the classic "South", complete with palmettos and bald cypresses.  The middle of the state is a rapid transition between forested east and dry open plains, so much so that the space of a few miles can actually turn from big sky country into "hey, where did these trees pop up from?", and that big sky country out west is really dry compared to the eastern side. Winter time can feature decent 50's near Arkansas to sub-zero chills in the panhandle.

Texas panhandle, near the Oklahoma border, US 83 southbound. 

I-44 between near Oklahoma City, not much over 100 miles east and a very different world.

As a result, the winds tend to dance a lot in Oklahoma.  The process does happen just as violently, however, in the rest of the area of the great meeting of air masses.  Though not nearly as frequent, tornadoes are a good possibility during the summer storm system all the way up in Ontario and Pennsylvania.  The Ohio and Tennessee river valleys, full of rolling, wooded landscapes, are hardly what people think of as a prime tornado region, and yet the get tornadoes that can sometimes stay on the ground for well over a hundred miles. 

So good grief, we say, and why do people live there, we ask?  People have lived there for over 10,000 years actually.  The practice of living was a bit different, mind you.  The Pawnees, Osage, and other prairie peoples tended to be a bit more mobile than modern prairie people tend to be.  The main reason for this was a food culture based on the plentiful game of the prairies and one in which the drier region could not necessarily be counted on to offer the same bounty as the corn and squash fields back east could.  Even in the lush climate times of the middle ages, when peoples in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southern Great Lakes were building sizable cities with elaborate earth works and farming quite a bit, the plains peoples kept on following the buffalo.  Why?  Probably because a giant hand would come out of the sky and flatten everything in sight.  The Lakota, who originally hailed from Minnesota and northwestern Ontario, abandoned their more permanent settlements when they got chased onto the plains hundreds of years ago by the Ojibwe.  This didn't last forever, of course.  The second born came from the east and started planting permanent settlements.  I often wonder if the first Euro-Americans would have stayed had there been F-5 tornadoes in Jamestown or Quebec...

Initially settlers built half-buried, sod topped houses.  They were easier to make without having to haul in wood from the east, tended to be cooler, and in some cases even afforded a little bit more protection from the violent storms of the great big open sky.  The early prairie pioneers were a tough sort of folk, and many would-be Kansans and Nebraskans turned away screaming when they had to deal with the rugged life on the plains.  Some went back east, many just passed through to places with more promise like California.  Eventually, however (this is the WHY do people live there now bit), improved plows made farming a simpler affair, the legendary tough tallgrass sod being broken by the steel hand of Mr. John Deere.  Free land through the homestead act made the region increasingly attractive, and, well, money talks.  There are cities there now, rather large ones, and economic opportunities keep calling people away from the unemployment of the rust belt. That aside, the area is incredibly beautiful.  Long, open sightlines and a grand drama of the sky, which as you can see in the Texas picture above, is often far more inviting than it is discouraging. 

People tended to bring with them the comforts of home when the wild west became a bit less wild.  Wood frame houses sprang up, and planted trees made little towns feel more like the beloved Virginia or New York that had been left behind.  Yes, storms and drought came along to spook people, but many stayed and some even returned when they became complacent and forgetful.  Like I noted, it took less than a month for Joplin to sit in the back of my mind.  I dare say that is pretty average for people who don't get affected by tornadoes, and I have actually been intimate with three.  Besides, some towns have been around for quite some time and managed to either survive or not see large scale destruction.

Elk City, Oklahoma, main street.  Many of these buildings are from the early twentieth century and look like they have made it OK.

 People recover.  People rebuild.  Plains people and (true) Midwesterners are built from tough stock, so the saying goes.  What can we do about them, or better put, what we can we do in such regions to better handle the big wind?  As any southern Floridian can tell you, wood does not cut it in the face of powerful forces.  While Miami is turning just as wood frame and vinyl sided as the rest of the country, the historical trend for building to resist hurricanes down there was concrete construction.  Sure, an F5 is an F5, but concrete can handle way more than fragile wood can.  In the meantime, donate to the Red Cross to help those who got a pretty potent reminder that we are not always in charge of the world around us.  Better yet, donate in a month's time when the need will still be great and the money flood will slow to a trickle because we all forget about what happened. 

And again, yes, tornadoes are terrifying to be in, and yet also strangely beautiful.  That's how I feel about them anyway.

What's So great About Texas?

Before we return to a look at Detroit, I feel that the following link is an excellent introduction to the better bits of somewhere a bit to the south that also receives its fair share of stereotypes.

50 Sure Signs That Texas Is Actually Utopia

I always figured utopia was Northern Ontario, but...

Think about Texas.  Texas is often viewed by the Right in this country as the grand paradise of conservatism and reasonable taxes, legislation, and decent moral culture.  Conversely, it is often viewed by the Left as a backward land of revisionist education, gunslingers, racists, and country music.  Texas is often viewed by all as either a desert that is boiling hot or an open range home to many cowboys.  Texas has a little of all of this, but it is actually one of the most diverse places on the continent, both in terms of its human and natural environments.  A land where South meets West meets Plains meets Mexico is almost guaranteed to produce very special people and landscapes, sort of like... Detroit, where we shall return to next post.

A special thanks to a friend in Wichita Falls for sharing this with me.

Canadian, Texas

Yes there really is such a place.  The town of Canadian sits above the Canadian river in the Texas Panhandle.  While it did not really stand out anymore so than most other panhandle towns, its more of an oasis than the other ones can be.

The Canadian River, like the other exotic rivers (a river which stays wet and runs throughout the year in an otherwise dry area, like the Nile through the Sahara) of the Great Plains, is something of a welcome refreshment along much of its course.  It carves out a bit deeper of a valley than do the Arkansas, Platte, etc.  The result is an exciting sudden change from rather desert like surroundings...

All pictures in this post were taken along southbound US 83.  The "mountains" in the distance are actually part of the valley edge, and the green immediately beneath/in front of them would be the verdant vegetation of the river bottomland.

...into something remarkably lush.

What a messy window!

The town, in fact, is self-called the "oasis of the Texas panhandle".

The name Canadian probably has little to do with the namesake northern lands quite some distance away, but rather more so to do with an English corruption of the Spanish word cañada (which is nearly cognate with our word canyon) which translates as glen, valley, or, you guessed it, canyon.  The Texas panhandle has many such features, including the more famous Palo Duro Canyon.  Of course, the romantic French-Canadians among us might think it an homage to times past when this was frontier territory marking the boundary between New Spain, later Mexico, and New France, later Canada.  Yes, the summers might be brutal compared to anywhere in Quebec, but there were still once beavers in the river swimming alongside the armadillos and plaid-shirted lumbermen wooing terrified Tejan debutantes.  Alas...

State Borders

The European mindset that a river makes for a fine border has provided many of the state borders and shapes that mark the political map as of 2012.  Some other borders are marked by mountain ranges and high ridge lines.  In many cases though, straight lines were drawn over nearly every kind of terrain imaginable.  Nature can provide for a demarcation along the boundaries designated by political decisions where land-use policies are significantly different on either sides of the line.  Farms often suddenly give way to forests, for instance.  Out west, along the long, straight borders, one pretty much needs a sign and a few planted trees to know that a boundary has been crossed.

As you can see, there is a whole lot of nothing ahead in Texas, just as in the reverse direction, there is not much that breaks the vista in Oklahoma's panhandle.  This was taken along US-83 at the line between the two states.  The signs along the major interstates are often a bit more dramatic than a simple notification and subsequent "welcome to" sign that is seen here, and roadside attractions will tend to cash in on the change of  jurisdiction.  Along the back-roads like this, though, the differences are often superficial at best.  Border regions, unless they are hotly contested, usually have an ambivalent situation about them, little pockets of transition between cultures and landscapes that are often quite diverse and fascinating.

Parks in the News: Big Bend Declared a "Dark Sky Park".

As if I needed any more reasons to go here!

http://earthsky.org/earth/big-bend-national-park-designated-as-an-international-dark-sky-park?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+earthskyblog+%28EarthSky+Blog%29

I guess this means the park has won out its battles against nearby development.  While I am normally in favor of having commercial support for our parks, much of Trans-Pecos Texas is unsuitable for it, and quite frankly, sometimes wilderness preservation needs to tell the almighty dollar to step back.  From the sounds of it, the local communities are in agreement.

One of my biggest disappointments in spending the night near Capitol Reef last summer was that my (isolated) hotel had tons of outdoor lighting that ruined the experience.  Hopefully the same will not hold true for Big Bend, and the designation lives up to its name.

For those wondering, Big Bend National Park is basically the showcase park for the Chihuahuan Desert, the largest North American desert.  While it lacks an impressive signature plant like the Mojave's Joshua tree or the Sonoran's Saguaro cactus, the Chihuahuan desert has an incredible biodiversity befitting its position between the more tropical parts of Mexico, the Rocky mountains, the Great Plains, the Gulf coastal plain, and the nearby Sonoran desert.  The park has had sightings of everything from White-tailed deer to Jaguars.  For those more interested in greener climes, the Chisos mountains rise in the center of the park and have unique plants and trees growing on them.

Take a look a the news link for some pictures, even if you don't read the article.