The Zombie Deer of the Coronavirus Apocalypse

I think it’s safe to say that for everyone things seem a bit out of whack during this coronavirus apocalypse, even for things not directly related to the disease. Maintaining family harmony, deciding what to do to get out of the house, and even choosing what to buy to eat all present new challenges. Sometimes it can even seem as though the natural order of things is out of balance.

And then there was today. Beside the lake, beneath the trees, lay a young fawn curled up and waiting for its mother. This by itself is not usual. Does will often leave their fawns for most of the day, returning periodically to nurse their fawns for only a few minutes at a time. Since fawns have no scent and do not move much, they are more protected from predators than if they stayed with their mothers. After snapping a quick video of the fawn, I went about my business of putting the kids to bed and then hanging out at the dock with my fishing poles while working out on my gymnastic rings.

Well after dark, I hear the sound of what seems to be a child’s cry and then see a dark shape materialize on the dock slowly heading toward me. I look closely—the fawn emerges, headed straight for me.

Um. I default to my typical reaction when pursued by small animals in the wild. I flee. Chances are that when something small is chasing you, it’s rabid. In all my years of hiking and outdoors experience, this has happened only once with a rabid fox. Plus, it’s dark, I just escaped parental duties after putting the kids to bed, and I’m not ready to adopt another child, however temporary. The dock is not wide, but I manage to sneak past the fawn by swinging over the water while hanging onto a pole and escaping down the gangplank. I walked up the lawn hoping to coax it back onto terra firma.

SPLASH. As I watch and wheedle, the clumsy child falls into the water. Now my attempt at scientific detachment toward it evaporates as I fear the fawn may drown. I race back, turning on my phone flashlight. Black night, brown water receding into black night-water. Nothing. But I can hear it wailing. I find it has swum under the dock and is treading water by the steep concrete embankment the constitutes the lake shoreline here. If I don’t help it, it’s going to be a drowned fawn in a few minutes after its energy gives out. While one should never touch a fawn lest the human scent put off its mother, in this case I had no choice. I put my hand under its wet belly, lifted it out of the water, and set it down onto the lawn. It weighed next to nothing. Then I killed it, skinned it, and had its tender meat for dinner the next day.

I wish. As it scampered into the night, finally getting the hint that I did NOT wish to be its parent, my heart beat with a strange paternal instinct antithetical for a predator to feel toward its prey. With the natural order so out of whack, the fight to finish my workout and the desire to fish to feed my (human) family seeped out of me, and I threw in the towel for the night. Chalk it up to the weirdness that is 2020. Maybe tomorrow will be normal.

Spring of the Yellow Rose

Today was our first client trip post-coronavirus! We drank from the outdoors eagerly, even greedily, as thirsty travelers do when they finally arrive at a spring of water. Due to the cooler, moister April, many flowers are still on full display. This trip was special for many reasons. First, it was one of our clients’ first time horseback riding, and we’d like to thank our partner Eagle Eye Ranch for their great partnership in taking us out. Second, we noted an abundance of yellow and occasionally orange prickly pear cactus flowers. These “yellow roses of Texas” will mature into prickly pears, also known as tunas, that have a sweet, succulent fruit that tastes a cross between a watermelon and a cucumber. The skies were unusually clear today, with puffy cumulus clouds just out of reach. Raptors rode the thermals high above us. A final distinctive was the protocol we had to employ for the first time. When traveling in high-traffic areas, we wore masks and gloves while riding; disinfected our hands regularly; and changed clothes as we transitioned from horseback riding to hiking to avoid contamination from other riders using the same tack. But not even coronavirus could still the magic of the spring of the yellow cactus rose.

Hello Friends!

Texas State Parks are open again starting 20 April! We are excited to get back into our outing tempo. However, there are some restrictions in place (by the Park Authorities):

- Visitors are required to wear face coverings
- Visitors are required to maintain a six-foot distance from individuals outside their party
- Gatherings of groups larger than five (5) are prohibited.

Don’t worry, we can tackle these restrictions in true Texas style. Face coverings—what could be more Texan than a cowboy’s bandana? As for the six foot distance from other individuals, we have a lot of activities that can cooperatively (competitively?) keep individuals at bay—scavenger hunts and…horseback riding! And finally, keeping groups smaller than 6 makes for a well-oiled posse.

One other fact to mention is that we can still provide meals and snacks. Since COVID-19 (by conservative estimates) can last up to 72 hours on some surfaces, we’ll make up the meals and snacks in bags, quarantine them in a cool spot for 72 hours, and deliver them at the beginning of the trip. Problem solved!

Looking forward to getting back outdoors during this time of coronavirus! Just give us a call or email! (trailblazer@texaswildwest.live, 703-798-8453)

Spring Forage

Since coronavirus has caused some food shortages in the grocery stores here in east Texas, I thought it a good time to teach my kids some of the spring greens that they can forage. While they can already identify dandelion leaves and mint in their lawn at home in DFW, I took them to an empty lot in east Texas near a lake house where we were rather enjoying our quarantine. We found bull thistle, the root of which is edible, but alas had no gloves with which to pull it up and snap off the edible tuber. We also found purple verbena, the leaves of which are edible, and a new species I hadn’t seen before, Drummond’s onion. I later learned that the pretty flowers have a stalk which is edible, and the root system supposedly has a small onion bulb. I shall have to investigate another time. And finally, we found wood sorrel (Oxalis) in abundance. My kids didn’t care for its sharp, tangy flavor, which is a bit of a surprise for such humble ground cover that resembles clover. I liked it but knew not to eat in abundance due to its mild toxicity. It is the natural source of the active ingredient of warfarin, the anticoagulant (and rat poison).

It’s just as important to know what not to eat! My daughter picked Texas Toadflax because of its attractive although droopy purple flowers. The plant’s name, however, gives hint to its toxicity. As a caution, make sure you know what you eat when you forage and to know what the look-alikes might be. Happy foraging!

Drummond’s Onion

The Trail of Life

Sometimes we need to relearn the most basic of things in a new environment. Have you ever noticed how new hikers or trail runners tend to focus on the ground or the trail ahead of them when they walk or run? This is a common tendency for those just taking up trails as they are logically trying not to fall. The problem is, this can become a habit. When concentrating on what’s directly ahead of you, you tend to miss the flora and fauna in the middle range around you and the vistas in the far distance. What to do? You don’t want to fall, after all, by taking your eyes off the path.

Similar to the way an experienced driver learns to sweep his eyes over the rearview and sideview mirrors while taking in the view ahead, so an experienced outdoorsman trains his eyes to continuously monitor the near, middle, and far distances, in that order and repeating those sweeps continuously. First, the hiker looks at the trail ahead, observing jutting roots and rocks. Then he commits the path to short-term memory to lift eyes to the middle distance. When observing the middle distance, one looks for interesting plants and, more importantly wildlife. There are two ways to visually process the middle distance. First, by looking for movement, and second to look for shapes. Watching for movement comes more easily but by looking for shapes and irregularity in lighting, we might find a partially obscured deer or panther frozen in posture, looking out at us from between branches. Finally, we look at far distance, for the soul-stirring vistas for which we came, or to see a thunderhead building up rapidly where just moments ago was nothing but blue sky. This situational awareness often determines the larger outcome of our travels.

The path of life is like a hiking trip. If we keep our eyes myopically focused on the day-to-day and week-to-week march of our jobs, we may miss tactical opportunities or even strategic calls in our life’s work. If we are too driven by our daily agenda to—for example—go to a conference, we may miss networking opportunities or awareness of technology that would help us do better at our current jobs. We may fail to realize that it is time to transition to a different career path or seek promotion. At a strategic level, we need to assess whether where we are is truly where we’re supposed to be. But while we take in the tactical and strategic views, we can’t let dreams be our master lest we forget to advance our day-to-day work that makes such dreams possible. And so, before too long, we should lower our gaze to the “trail” to map out and stride into our next steps in the path of life.

Western Hill Country Magic

The Western Hill Country is magical.  There’s no other way to describe it.  It starts as soon as you leave Glen Rose and take 281 south.  The land rises and the “mountains” begin.  They are low mountains, but they are comparable to the Appalachians, and they continue across the Edwards Plateau almost until Mexico.  Cowboy culture is still very much alive, and a recent trip included “rustling” of longhorns, dawn hikes, and late morning trail rides before the 100 degree heat of the afternoon.  Prairie and cottontails give way to scrubby mountains and jackrabbits.  The earth becomes a fine, white dust in the direct sunlight as water becomes more scarce the closer one gets to the Chihuahuan Desert.  One lays up memories to sustain oneself through the weeks in the city.  Come on out and ride with us.   

The Comanche Trail

You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges.  I do not want them.  I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun.  I want to die there and not within walls.  I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas.  I have hunted and lived over that country.  I lived like my fathers before and like them I lived happily…. —excerpted from John Graves’s Goodbye to a River

The Comanche trail defines human habitation in West Texas.  Their route extended from their villages in southern Colorado, Kansas, western Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle south through Big Spring, TX.  From Big Spring, the trail forked with the western forks going through the iconic Persimmon Gap in Big Bend National Park, where the current National Park entrance exists today, and Presidio, Texas, which has been a Spanish-American settlement since 1682.  From the Rio Grande, the routes fanned out into raiding trails deep into Mexico. 

The Comanches, or “The People,” as they called themselves—as if there were no others—were the Vikings of the Great Plains.  Like the Vikings, they were brutal to those outside of their tribe and even to those outside their clans.  Also like the Vikings who build the innovative oared longboat that enabled their expeditions to the Mediterranean, the Volga heartlands, and the New World, the Comanches were innovators, a previously bipedal branch of the hunter-gatherer Soshone tribe.  When they met the horse, introduced to them in the late 1600s, they adapted to this new form of transport and became equine experts of the plains, using the horse to chase the buffalo and dominate an empire that stretched from Kansas to deep within Mexico.  Even at their height, they numbered only a few thousand, but their reach was vast and they dominated powerful but less mobile tribes. 

Here at Texas Wild West, we follow the progression of these “Vikings of the Plains” along their raiding paths.  Our hiking trips increase with difficulty the further we travel toward Big Bend Country from the DFW area, just as the danger, exhilaration, and plunder increased for the Comanches the further they ranged from their summer base camps.  At TWW, we also approximately follow the Comanche War Trail from close to the Red River down to Mexico.  We hope that we can learn from these ancient, daring people how to be versatile masters of their domain and to savor the natural beautify of it as they once did. 

Preparation

Experts say that the ideal vacation length is ten days because it takes about a week to unwind and dissociate from the rhythms of everyday life. That process, however, can be augmented and the resulting vacation experience enhanced by anticipation of the vacation. We can anticipate vacation by packing for it, talking to others about it, or just daydreaming about it.

I’m preparing for an expedition in the Guadalupe Mountains, and while I don’t have time or space for hard-core preparation, I’m am taking taking anticipatory steps. I’ve camped out twice this past couple weeks in the backyard, once as the temperatures dipped to 26 degrees; the other 40-degree night I slept in just the sleeping bag. The purpose is twofold: firstly to accustom the body to the hard ground and chill air and secondly to kick the tires, as it were, on my gear. It’s important to know one’s limits and the tolerances of the equipment. Additionally, I went hiking with a friend in a local park with two hills of 25-foot elevation. Twenty laps on one hill and twenty on the other with 20 lbs of dumbbells in a weighted pack was good preparatory exercise for the shoulders, knees, and ankles and yielded 1,000 feet total elevation gain in the space of an hour. Now I’m planning my kit and looking at the trails.

In the weeks and days leading up to the trip, I’ll be psyching myself up for that 19 mile loop in the actual mountains. There will be five miles of bushwhacking (i.e., no trail). There will be awesome sights few have seen, and the pain of the ascent will etch the vistas into my memory. But my mind will be ready because of the preparation, the anticipation. The anticipation itself will enable me to capture more of the experience.

What are you preparing for today?

New Beginnings--a New Year and a New Venture!

The heavens proclaim the glory of God.

The skies display his craftsmanship.

This Biblical passage resonates with me, especially under the big Texas sky. The sky is an analogy for how limited and minuscule we are, both in relation to the sky itself and to its Creator. We cannot help but acknowledge this perspective on a visceral level, even if only in our subconscious. And this awe leads to an element often missing in modern life, that of wonder.

I start this blog and the Texas Wild West business with the hope of reintroducing children and parents to the wonder of the natural world. From wonder spring a number of secondary impulses—among them creativity, gratitude, and self-discovery. As my six-year-old said, “Being in nature, you can do more things, like throw sticks [in the stream], and run around, and dig, and nobody seems to mind.” With this freedom comes responsibility: we need to know how to conduct ourselves safely in the wild. In our increasingly mechanized, plasticized, socialized, and “modernized” world, these lost arts and knowledge need to be passed on to the next generation. To this purpose also I set Texas Wild West.

More fundamentally, the purpose of TWW is to take families outside. We want to foster shared experience, creativity in relationships, and bonding between parents and children. We tailor the location, activities, and atmosphere for our families. Try us out!