It has been hot, as expected in Texas summer, which means I have spent a good deal of time inside. Air conditioning is a marvelous invention. I’m not entirely certain I’d be living (or alive) in Texas without it; however, it is confining to the point of claustrophobia – the walls, the hum, the artificial feeling of the air.
The barrage of significant national news has added to my sense of anxiety. I have always been a news and political junkie, and as such, I have never been able to get enough. I find the events of the past month or so fascinating and consequential, and I feel compelled to watch and listen to and follow it all.
But one morning a few days ago, I was ready to say “enough” and I went in search of some little corner of the natural world that has been untouched by civilization. I came close enough, perhaps as close as one can get in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.
What is now North Texas was quickly named by white travelers and settlers as The Cross Timbers, after the great swaths of irregularly alternating prairies and woodlands. As the continents formed and shifted and great seas ebbed and flowed, the Cross Timbers Ecological Region was deposited with a variety of soils, which are in part reflected by the highly varied original landscape. The land was both bounteous and treacherous, and while it was difficult to cross, for the resilient and industrious who stayed it was land suited to both agriculture and livestock.
The land has been worked hard, settled densely, dammed and tilled and grazed and otherwise vastly changed since; but if you travel far enough out of the most populous urban areas, you can still get a sense of what it was like. Alternatively, if you dive deep enough, you can still find pockets of what the land looked like two hundred and more years ago.
I found such a delightful little pocket north of Dallas, in Denton County. The Clear Creek Natural Heritage Center is almost 3,000 acres of Army Corps of Engineer land, leased by the City of Denton. The CCNHC was “originally established to protect and restore rare bottom land and upland prairie ecosystems.” Their contemporary mission is “to inspire environmental citizenship through an understanding of the natural heritage of north central Texas by providing nature experiences, education and research programs, and conservation and restoration projects.”
The city operates and maintains the space, which includes some parking areas at access points, mountain bike trails and walking trails through a variety of environments.
I found my own happy place of quiet and rest on a bench along a well-maintained primitive path through a patch of prairie. The buzz and hum of air conditioning was briefly replaced by the buzz of cicadas and the hum of the wings of many busy birds, mostly swallows and flycatchers. There were a few bright flowers, but mostly the colors were muted golds and greens with the blue haze of woodlands across the large meadow. While at a distance the plant life looks like mostly grasses, up close it is a great tangle of innumerable different varieties. This small pocket of prairie, seen close up, is a contemplative experience.
It was just the antidote to too much civilization. When civilization came upon me, it was in the form of a multi-generational family, the children chattering and asking questions and picking up rocks and sticks and showing them proudly to parents and grandparents. It made me remember that most of the traveling that was done through this region for millennia was on foot, and after that for a few centuries occasionally on horseback. Even when European settlers came, most of the immigrants walked beside the wagons. It is a very different view than from the top of a hill or mesa looking down over the Cross Timbers or in the Hill Country, or on the long, vast views of the Rolling Plains surrounding Abilene.
There is a very good reason Texans wear straw hats, and I had left mine in the car. It was time to find shelter, and air conditioning. I’d had a short but instructive break in a week full of modern life with news that won’t stop. I will have to remember that sometimes the best wandering involves looking more closely, rather than traveling widely.
