Even in Houston, winter can be cold, and I wanted to go south. Also, I wanted one more time to see places where I had lived for a few years as a child.  Thorpe is up for anything that gets him behind the wheel and out on the road.  So off we went south, as far as Trump’s folly of a fence would allow.  Here are some impressions and meditations along the way.

1.  Highway 59

On this sunny Tuesday in February, trucks and cars heading south on Highway 59 slow and stop as the road narrows to one lane. The joy of movement is frustrated; I imagine that everyone feels stymied, as I do.  I sit resigned to wait, even letting a truck merge in front of me, in sympathy for the driver.  But I am numbed, like T.S. Eliot’s patient anesthetized upon a table, ready for the long wait in traffic.

Then, on the right side of the road, from a shallow indentation I didn’t even know was there, a movement of white catches my eye.  Wings slowly work their way up.  A white egret is choosing the hard way, over the truck in front of me.  Struggling to gain enough lift, the bird becomes horizontal and swings to the left out of sight.

Does anyone else see its beauty and feel its momentary grace?

2. Goliad  

A few miles out of the little town of Goliad lies a battlefield where musket balls and bones are still buried.  This is the site where the Mexican general Santa Ana ordered the execution of rebellious Texians wounded in the battle and captured as prisoners.  The massacre, as it is known, fueled the revenge taken later at the Battle of San Jacinto, where Santa Ana was defeated and Texian independence from Mexico secured.

Every child in 1950’s seventh-grade Texas History schoolrooms learned about the Battle of Goliad, and I, at least, cringed at the Mexicans’ evil.   There were no Mexican students in my classroom to present their side of the story, if they even knew it or felt brave enough to speak.  Recent historical scholarship has argued that the Texians were motivated not just by love of liberty but to continue practicing slavery, which had been outlawed by the new Mexican Constitution. 

On the Goliad battlefield, a white pavilion was erected for the 1936 centennial of Texas independence.  Inside are pictures on the walls showing rows of people out to celebrate.  Not a brown face is to be seen, and in the nearby town of Goliad hardly a white face is to be seen

3. Robstown

My Aunt Jewel lived here and I want to find her house on Baker Street.  It was long and narrow, next to a field where, at age 12, I used to hike into the brush with cousins Drew and Lynn, ages 14 and 11.  Canteen on my back, I was in boy-world.  I think I find the house, but, of course, the field is no longer there. 

Aunt Jewel was loving toward me, but Puritanical in general. She and her sister, Aunt Uda Fay, prohibited their aged, deaf father from playing dominoes in the downtown game hall, one of his few pleasures.  He played dominoes like a champ, but the respectable ladies of the town disapproved of such disreputable places. 

I want to see the domino hall, but as we drive at the edge of what remains of a downtown, all I see are empty, decaying buildings.   Along the perimeter back to the highway I see nothing but third-world shacks.    There is no sign of much money coming into Robstown, or at least of money being spread out to very many people.  That is the story in all the little towns we pass through in South Texas, but I don’t remember such dereliction and decrepitude when I lived in Corpus Christi and Harlingen.

In all these towns, public schools with well-kept grounds are the best-looking buildings.  Is that reason enough to hope?

4. Victoria

Founded in 1824 by the Mexican empresario Martin De Leon, the town was named for the first President of the Republic of Mexico, Guadalupe Victoria.  After Texians defeated Santa Ana and the Mexican Army at the Battle of San Jacinto, the Anglo settlers of Victoria drove out the Mexican residents.  No doubt the Anglos felt justified.  The clash of cultures has only gradually eased.  Even as a child, I knew that Anglos were on top.  Now, however, as we drive around Victoria and on into the Valley, we see signs for candidates in the upcoming primary election, all with Hispanic names. 

5. Corpus Christi

Driving in from the northwest, Thorpe and I pass refinery row before coming upon the beauty of Corpus Christi Bay.  Although fewer refineries and chemical plants lined Hwy. 77 when I lived here as a kid in the 1950’s, even then I resented the ugliness of the approach.  With the political awakening of my college years in Austin, I resented oil companies in general.  Now, as I burn the gasoline pumped from the ground and refined by these companies, I know I am complicit.  But I can still resent ugliness.  Or maybe my definition of beauty is too narrow.  At least, as a kid riding at night in the back seat of the family car, I found the lights beautiful.  But not as beautiful as Ocean Drive along the bay. 

When Alonso Alvarez de Pineda’s ship rounded a bend in the coastline in 1519 it happened to be the feast day of Corpus Christi.  Presumably a religious man, he named the bay Corpus Christi, claiming territory by naming it.  Karankawa Indians were already here, but they cannot be found by name today.  That didn’t matter much, when I thought about it as a kid, because they were supposed to be cannibals, an allegation now discredited by historians and anthropologists.  I also didn’t question then the social order that placed Mexicans, perhaps descendents of Pineda’s men, as second-class.  In my ignorance of history, I thought it was their fault because so many were poor. 

The Texas legislature still would keep today’s children ignorant, by banning the complexities of Texas and United States history from being taught.   My seventh-grade, one-sided version of history once again would prevail.

6. South Padre Island

Approaching the island from Port Isabel, we see condos, most twenty stories or so high, spreading along the Gulf of Mexico.  A long and narrow strip of sand dunes covered with grasses and succulents, South Padre is not protected from such commerce.  North of Matagorda Channel, the island is protected as a national seashore.  But I am not complaining; sleeping in an air-conditioned bedroom after a day on the beach is what my body would prefer.  So do a lot of white retirees with enough money to splurge on hotels and meals of fresh fish.  I couldn’t help noticing—we all looked alike.

7. Border Wall

So much has been written about the border wall, Thorpe and I wanted to see it for ourselves.  Our preconceived notion was that it is Trump’s Folly.  As my Republican brother-in-law quipped early on, “Build the wall, someone will build a taller ladder.”  Driving along Hwy. 281 from the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, we are sometimes as close as thirty feet away.  At one point the tall, metal fence snakes behind a cluster of new brick houses only to end where the houses do.  Even bordering fields, the fence starts and stops.  It reminds me of the Maginot Line bordering France from Belgium.  When the Germans wanted to invade, they simply drove the tanks around.  Folly and more.

8. Home

And so we end our wander, for me a trip back in time.  As a kid I didn’t know the word feudal, but still understood an economic structure of rich and poor with little in between.  At the Santa Ana Wild Life Refuge, a photograph showed a large group of Anglos clustered beside a train.  The text explains that between 1910 and 1927, property developer C.W. Swallow brought trainloads of potential Anglo buyers into the Lower Rio Grande Valley.  These were the people who built orchards and large farms and eventually formed the power structure of the region when I lived there.    That has changed, but poverty remains.  Old South Texas has not aged well.  And new South Texas seems to consist mostly of franchise and national chain commerce with thick rows of billboards screaming for attention.

But in Victoria, Kingsville, Corpus Christi, and Brownsville we saw branches of the University of Houston, Texas A & M, and The University of Texas, as well as older colleges such as the lovely Southmost College in Brownsville.  On these campuses mostly Hispanic students were walking to class.  They looked young, healthy, and hopeful.  I put my hopes for the future of the region on them. 

On August 7, Denver suffered from the most polluted air of any city in the world.  Mountain ranges to the west and even the downtown skyline were visible only in hazy smudges.  Around the freeways signs warned “Air unhealthy for sensitive groups” and advised “Combine your trips.”  Somehow it seemed too late:  combining trips seemed like urging children to hide under their schools desks in case of a nuclear attack.  And yet, like thousands of other tourists in the Colorado mountains, Thorpe and I were not combining our trips.   We had made the long trip, all the way from Texas, burning carbon as fast as we could.  

We had driven from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Denver a few days earlier, along US highway 285.   The road cut norththrough the San Juan valley west of the eastern range of the Rocky Mountains.  Santa Fe, too, had been smoky, obscuring the Jemez, Sangre de Cristo, and Sandia Mountains.  We blamed our air on the fires in California and Oregon, with their drought,careless campers and irresponsible electric companies.  It was somebody else’s fire, though for a couple of days Santa Fe had had its own small fire, in the mountains a bit north out of town.  We could see the black plume rising through a smoky haze and worried that it might spread.  Albeit sympathetic to the suffering others were enduring, we felt somewhat immune, for the moment.

As we drove through thinly populated northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, the air cleared, and we once again could feel wrapped in the beauty of distant mountains.  This is what we came all the way from the flat Gulf Coast to experience:  awe, a sense of the sublime, our human smallness. It seemed like ourright to have nature on beautiful display:  green forests, blue skies, range after purple mountain range in the distance. The last time we made this drive to Colorado it was at night, the darkness obscuring all but the glittering lights in the hills and towns.  It was winter; the air was cold, clear, and pure.  

This time, in August, as we approached Breckenridge, we could see the sprawl of condos squatting on every available space like a cancerous metastasis.  In the distance, cars backed up for blocks at every traffic light, and pedestrians swarmed around shops and restaurants like hungry insects.  But here we were,ourselves among the swarming, hungry insects, eager to feast on mountain experience.  We were disappointed at the quality of the feast on offer—at this moment only heat, smoke, and crowds.  Afternoon sun through the smoky haze felt oppressive. The contrast with memories of Breckenridge a decade ago exacerbated our grief. Knowing we were better off than the poor people in California and Oregon didn’t make us feel better.  Where was the clear, cool, crystalline air, slightly scented with pine?  The vistas of purple mountains’ majesty?  Too many of us!  The knowledge that we were part of the us only increasedthe moral bind we felt at traveling in the first place.  

In order to travel and burn so much carbon we had had to make a moral disconnect between our individual actions and collective responsibility. We said to ourselves that we wanted this trip; that we deserved it after the Covid year of not seeing friends and family; that our actions were a small part of the carbon load.  But we knew that what individually may be of little consequence, collectively is disastrous.  We also knew we were abrogating personal responsibility.  And yet:  with  my 80thbirthday looming in a few months, I was determined to make this one, possibly last trip to the mountains.  

I felt grief at the loss of natural beauty, anger at the heedless tourists around me, anger at myself, anger at human nature in our selfishness and greed.  How much more angry will our grandchildren be at us?  Will they know clear mountain air and the sight of range on range in the distance?

Grief, anger, action.  That is apparently the emotional progression.  Grief and anger are the easy part, action less so.  It takes an act of faith to do what we “little people” can do:  marching, conserving (albeit never enough), writing letters, giving money to environmental organizations.  Once again the tension between the individual and the collective comes into play.  Individually we can seem powerless, yet collectively we are unstoppable.  

But how to arouse the collective?  What will it take?  I have a friend who some might call a climate-change fanatic.  He manages to bring most conversations around to climate change.  He rides his bike wherever he can, probably hasn’t bought a new shirt in 20 years, keeps up-to-date on the latest science.  Climate change is his life.  He is like the prophets of the Old Testament warning of doom.  He is right, but like the prophets, he probably has few friends.  People avoid long conversationswith him.  I cannot follow his example.  

A decade ago I read Jane Jacobs’ Dark Age Ahead and thought it exaggerated in its predictions. Now I am not so sure. A dark age doesn’t come at once, Jacobs explains, but incrementally, with a thousand unkind cuts. Now we see smoky mountain air, parts of the Louisiana coast in ruins from several hurricanes and shrinking in population, billions spent on disaster mitigation. With future rises in sea level, there will likely be no Miami, no New York city. And what goes away with them? Education, the arts, life reduced to survival mode? It feels as if I am living at the end of a golden age and helpless to preserve it. So I grieve, feel angry, resolve to take more action, hope for enough charging stations to travel in an electric car. Will I burn carbon next year to go to the mountains? That question is hard to answer.

On Earth Day I watched the PBS special on Greta Thunberg from the comfort of my sofa—an irony-inducing admission.  Rather than marching, there I sat, using electricity.  But irony and carbon-footprint guilt aside, watching this physically frail-looking but adamantine, morally tough young child-woman was astonishing.  She is, simply put, a secular saint. 

She fits the common definition of a saint as a person of exceptional virtue, here in the ecological, rather than the religious, sense.  She consumes as little as possible, buys food as carefully as possible, travels using as little carbon as possible.  One scene showed Greta ruefully picking up a new pair of pants she received for Christmas.  She said she didn’t want any new clothes.  How many eighteen-year-olds would say the same?  To use another common part of the definition of sainthood, she is the leader of a movement.  Sitting alone in front of the Swedish Parliament at age fifteen, she sparked thousands of young people to join her.  Now she meets with world leaders.  And, like many religious saints, she suffers for her cause.  With her Asperger’s syndrome, marching in crowds is painful.  But she persists.  The word saint is often used loosely, but to describe Greta, it is real.

As she talked simply and clearly about the science of climate change, I squirmed.  Yes, I bundle my errands to minimize driving, but I flew to Mexico in March to see family and will fly again to Buffalo, New York, for a wedding.  I don’t buy plastic bags, but do get take-out food in plastic containers.   In 2020 I did not march in Earth Day demonstrations because of fear of Covid-19; this year I didn’t even think to check for one.  Knowing I cannot meet Greta’s standards, I nevertheless share her worry and grief for the earth.  I am left to live with tensions and contradictions.

Recently, Discover magazine came in the mail, with an article on saving the earth titled “What You Can Do (That Really Works).”  Simply put, what really works is what you do best, for one, and, for two, what can have the most influence.  Using words is what I do.  Hence, I am using this occasional blog, “Out on a Limb,” to explore what to do if sainthood is not for me, or for you.  Worry is wasted energy; action is productive.  Rather than just stressing about each plastic take-out container, for example, I can take my own container to a restaurant for left-overs.   Maybe others will be influenced to do the same.  I can someday drive an electric car, because that might influence neighbors and friends.  I can pressure officials for more charging stations.  I can resist the impulse to buy a new dress for that wedding in Buffalo. 

These things—and many more—I can do, even if I cannot be a Greta Thunberg.  But, for me, she remains a shining example of the ideals of integrity and strength.  May she prevail.

In 1997, when news came of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, I was sitting in the chair of a beauty shop getting my hair dyed.    An arriving patron walked through the door breathlessly and announced, “I just heard on the news that Diana got killed in a car crash in Paris.”  She didn’t have to say which Diana; the single name was enough.  The room erupted in shocked gasps and horror, as if a friend had died.  I, too, was shocked and horrified, but not to the extent of everyone else.  I thought, without the nerve to say, “But she’s not real.”   To me, her death was like that of a character in a story, of an image on a television screen.  I had read how she touched people and also found her appealing, but she did not seem like a person.  Clearly, the other patrons saw her as real as someone they had just had dinner with. 

I have often been mystified by this fascination with celebrities.  In fact, I may be the only person who has never seen the Kardashians on television, but only on tabloid and magazine covers at grocery store check-outs.   I am clueless about their appeal.  This lack of interest goes back a long way, to when I was in eighth grade and riding the school bus.  With our hormones newly turned on, we girls used to read movie magazines and giggle on the way to school.  I could giggle with the best of them for a little while, especially about the gorgeous Tab Hunter, but then got tired of it.  I thought it all a little sad, in fact, knowing as I did that Tab Hunter was never going to take me out on a date, even if I had been allowed to go.  I wanted a real, gorgeous boy to take me out on a real date.   

Yet now I find myself watching, even binging, on season four of The Crown, on Netflix.  The talented Emma Corrin brings Diana to life in a way that newsreels and television clips of her activities never did at the time.  Her inner life was never evident, at least not to me.   As interpreted in “The Crown,” however, Diana is a complex human being, full of contradictions, alive.  She even becomes more than real, archetypically real, like the fairy-tales of the Princess locked in the tower, or Cinderella abused by a wicked step-mother, or Little Red Riding Hood sent out into the dangerous woods.  She is trapped in the maw of the royal family, who are determined that Charles marry and start producing an heir and a spare, and trapped, as well, by the Spencer family, who are looking after their own interests.   She is the young innocent caught up in the net of corruption and her own fairy-tale illusions.  At an immature eighteen, what girl would not want to marry a prince?  Probably me, too. 

The genius of “The Crown” is to show Diana not only as an archetype but also as a real teenage girl, quickly disillusioned but unable to escape, and then as a real woman caught in a miserable marriage, with her husband attached to another woman.  The series shows all the players caught up in a system larger than themselves, required to keep the monarchy going at great cost to their deepest feelings.  There is something of Greek tragedy, and superb theatre, in the role that all the characters, even the celebrity and monarchy-besotted public, are fated to play in a chain of events that can only end badly.   

So now I join the rest of the world in fascination with Diana.  But I can let the current Tab Hunters and the self-promoting Kardashians remain as celebrity images, flat and unreal.  

Part 1, Inside the Circle

Until it’s not, trouble is abstract.  The suffering caused by Covid-19, the sickness and death, the loss of jobs and evictions, can seem just pictures on a screen or in a newspaper unless they affect those we know personally.  In my immediate world, however, the circles of pain are closing in, and they are not abstract.  Chemeka, one of the young mothers I worked with in a support program at Project Row Houses, has Covid-19; so do her three children and her parents.  Anna, a woman who does housework for us, has Covid-19.  The wife of Gary, our handyman, is out of work because many of his tools were recently stolen.  Billie, my exercise instructor, is also out of work because the community center where she taught her classes is closed.  Ahmed, a refugee from Ethiopia with a family, helped by some of us from our church, has been out of work for months and may soon lose essential benefits and thus his apartment.  Our friends Joy and Charlie are reported to have three family members with Covid-19.  Bette, my sister, was diagnosed with breast cancer about a month ago; Mark, her husband was told last Friday he has three heart arteries that are 100% blocked.  Both have surgery this week.  Sue, my step-mother, is locked in a retirement home and sees relatives only through her window.  Never before could I have listed so many people in my circle who are suffering.  And yet my circle is better off than so many others.  

The good news is that I see circles of community enfold these people.  Volunteers who worked with Chemeka at Project Row Houses take food and supplies to her front porch.  Anna’s clients pay her when she can’t come to work; Gary’s clients advance him money; Billie’s students pay her to come to their houses for socially-distanced and masked classes.  My husband, Thorpe, monitors Ahmed’s situation, and others are ready to contribute money.  The bonds of community are holding these circles together.

The suffering outside my circle can still feel abstract, albeit frightening and horrific.  The scale of distant suffering is so immense it can deaden the emotions.  Because any efforts I make at ameliorating this suffering can seem miniscule, I have to work at remaining hopeful.  Because cultivating human sympathy for those not close to me is a spiritual discipline, I turn to nature for renewal.  I need only look out my study window.

Part 2, The Other Side of the Window

The branches of the oak tree outside my study window at some point struck out on their own years ago, tentatively at first, at barely a five-degree angle, then more bravely, taking more chances, at greater angles out from the stable, growing trunk.  A few daredevils even arched downward to escape the shade of an overhanging full-leafed branch.  Then, free in the light, they sprouted branches that audaciously sent up even smaller ones that thickened the space with leaves. 

A few feet away, the magnolia tree, planted a decade earlier, couldn’t match the rapid growth of the oak and settled for life in its shadow.  The magnolia reached up mostly at its tip and grew only a little taller each year.  Yet it still managed to flower, showing its rival for the light the spectacular possibilities within limits.

Underneath them both grows a ground cover of Asian jasmine in a crowded thicket of green, revealing the tenacity of the down-to-earth.  Like the towering oak, it, too, is a bit of a bully, crowding out the Lilies of the Nile that used to dominate the circle around the base of the oak tree.  Now the lilies struggle and thin a bit more each year.  But Raul, the plant-whisperer, heard their distress, and dug up clumps of lilies to start a new colony in the nearby, sunnier flower bed.  There lilies grow and flower like adolescents showing their muscles to aging parents. 

Near the lilies is the hero of them all, a plant I don’t even know the name of.  It grows in lush clumps around the city, an immigrant from Asia no doubt.  I have admired it for years in Hermann Park’s Japanese Garden and within the grounds of the Menil Museum.  One day a year ago Thorpe and I were walking in our neighborhood when I spotted a big mound of this plant in a flower bed in the front of a house.  I rang the doorbell and asked the woman if she knew the name of the plant.  She did not, but generously offered to dig me up a bit of it.  There were two plants in the clump of dirt she gave us.  Thorpe and I took them home, then planted and watered them day after day.  But the trauma of movement and the July sun were too much for them.  Before long, they looked dead.

Summer finally gave way to fall and then to periodic winter cold snaps.  The flower bed mostly remained ignored.  When I did walk out to see how the plants were faring, occasionally I noticed with some guilt the lifeless brown remains of the plants I had hopefully put in the ground, probably in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In subtropical Houston, plants sometimes bud out and flower as early as late January:  first the Japanese magnolias with pink flowers on leafless branches, then redbuds in February, with Mexican plums competing for attention.  Then azaleas steal the show for multiple weeks, and just as they fade, hawthorn and amaryllis provide the joy of more color.  So there was enough drama to pull me outside daily to observe the show.  One day I noticed the smallest of small green shoots coming up from the dead remains of one of the unfortunate plants from the last July.  Glory, halleluiah, I thought, and named the little shoot Resurrection.  My daily inspections seemed like pilgrimages, and Resurrection rewarded me with inches of growth, new stems and leaves that spread out day by day.  Its companion didn’t make it, however, but remained under the new layers of mulch and grass clippings, still decomposing as food for worms.

So the struggle for life continues outside my study window:  the strong and the weak find victory or defeat, life or death.  Taken in at one glance, it all seems static and fixed.  However, over time it is anything but.  I might be unaware of this struggle, were it not for Covid-19, rushing from rehearsal to meeting to lunch engagement or volunteer work, controlled by an appointment book and a to-do list.  Now I am free to wander the garden, look out the study window, and notice the drama. 

In the midst of the disintegration and suffering raging outside the boundaries of this garden, as the world transitions to a different age, I am too immersed to see which new patterns will emerge.  I can only sense that some institutions, national myths, and cultural norms are changing.  Like my oak, magnolia, and Asian jasmine, there are the strong and the weak, the bullying and the struggling.  But somewhere I hope there is also a Resurrection determined to sprout anew and spread its fresh, green leaves. May those now suffering near and far find the same resilience.