March 21, 2009 - Seminole Canyon State Park - Comstock Texas

This place was damn hard to find. Four miles of open range with cattle guards and then eight miles of gravel. And in spite of this the campsite is well populated for such ‘primitive’ facilities – all due no doubt to ‘spring break’. And I am not happy about this – i.e having fellow campers – oh, I’m such a grouch. And all along the border security is a major stimulant to the economy. Each little town has its Border Guard encampment – hundreds of white vehicles with green strips – there is a lot of wear and tear roaming around though the desert – I wonder why the US auto industry is still hurting. And at night small aircraft with spot lights fly along the border. Ever so often there is a vehicle check – men in green come out with dogs and check you out. Random spot checks would be more effective, but this is what you get when you have a large infrastructure. I think Homeland Security is all designed for peace of mind.- but it sure is a godsend for the local economies. Ask not what Homeland Security can do for you but what you can do for Homeland Security. I smiled and asked how far to Seminole Canyon? And he was polite and replied nine miles ahead.

And it occurs to me if now we have Homeland Security do we need a Department of Defense? You know it used to be called the Department of War but since we no longer have wars maybe is should be called the Department of Offense (don't they say the best defense is an offence?)

For the kind of people who take everything that happens seriously would be nauseated if they should assume that not every event had a good cause – Robert Musil




The ones leafing are elms, those are the pecans (they have deep tap roots and are tolerant of water. Now the hackberries, lets see if I can spot one, oh yes overthere, have roots that radiate out and root when it floods. This one is budding out but that doesn’t mean anything. We’ll probably lose it too.

But do we really need anything more to be sorry about / wouldn’t it be extra, as all pains is extra – Frank O’Hara

Some progress at last
Camp can be set up
Without getting pooped
Feet can be seen
Where belly used
To protrude
The news has not been
Heard in weeks
Have you heard, the news
Oh boy!

For some reason news papers are not the laboratories and experimental stations of the mind that they could be, to the public’s benefit, but usually only its warehouses and stock exchanges – Robert Musil

Crawford Texas

There were eight new trucks
If they had been of local ranchers
They all would have been white
If they had been those of the Secret Service
They all would have been black

We care too little about what is happening and too much about to whom, when, and where it’s happening, so tat it is not the essence of what happens that matters to us but only the plot – Robert Musil

For over five millennia, aboriginal artists recorded elaborate scenes upon the limestone canvas of canyons and rock shelters in an area defined by the lower courses of the Pecos and Devil's rivers and their confluences with the Rio Grande. The Rock Art Foundation exists to promote the conservation and study of the Native American rock art in the Lower Pecos region of Southwest Texas. A three mile hike (six round trip) hike takes you to an overlook above the Rio Grande. Across the way in the Seminole Canyon flooded by the Armistd Reservior is Panther Cave. You can barely make out a fifteen foot long panther done in red pigment. Below the visitor’s center in the Fate Bell Shelter with many pictographs and a few petrographs – accessible only on guided tours.

There is a strange phenomena that happens in art including the Pecos Cave art – over time it then to become abstract, then the culture disappears and eventually hundreds or even a thousand years later a whole ned more realistic style is seen. Now I am not say that abstraction causes the deterioration of culture, but maybe it is indicative of the final stages of a culture. Tomorrow its off to The Big Bend. (yes everything is big in Texas).

March 19, 2009 - Seminole Canyon State Park – Comstock TX

March 19, 2009 - Seminole Canyon State Park – Comstock TX


I have almost survived spring break in Texas – it’s not the sex, drugs and rock n’roll (and that would be alcohol and country here in Texas anyway - and of course pick up trucks) of teenage angst. No in Texas the public schools let out for a week and everyone goes on vacation (much like they do in France in August when everyone heads for the seasjpres) and everyone heads for the Hill Country (or at least those who don’t have summer homes on the lake or can afford a Disneyland package plan). Grandma and grandpa take the kids in their RV to the state parks. Mom and dad and all the kids and the dog pack-up the pick up truck and head for the hills. It lasts for two consecutive weeks – some schools one week some the other. And they say that in the summer you have to reserve a Hill Country camping site months in advance.

I sort of like the notion
Of no place to retreat
There being nothing to fall
      Back to (upon)
But I detest the concept
Of not having any choice

Every generation treats the life into which it is born as firmly established, except for those few things it is interested in changing. This is practical, but its wrong. The world can be changed in all directions at any moment or at least in any direction it chooses – Robert Musil

If I start putting stuff away
I won’t stop until it is done with
And then I will be gone because
That is the way with stuff

Other’s are stowing away their stuff
I can hear doors slamming. I take off
My coat. It is still chilly but the sun
Feels good on my exposed skin

I have stowed away most of my stuff
All but the tent, the cot and the camp chair
I work off my frustration by giving the
Mattress forty plunges on the air pump



Garner State Park, Concan Tx

Seminole Canyon State Park – Comstock TX

But now I'm out of the Hills and into the Chihuahuan Desert. I hiked to an overview of the Rio Grande. Across the river lies Mexico. And it’s peaceful here without all the kids and the family gatherings. Back to just me and the RVers and you know how well we all get along. But the smell of the desert in spring is sweet. And I heard some kid complaining of how it stunk (poor little ignorant bastards)

Babies in repeating have not very many different kinds of ways of doing it in them but growing old men and women in repeating show the kind of men, the kind of women that is in them – Gertrude Stein


And I forget how fast the sun can go down in the desert. There is an orange glow in the West and the rest of the sky is denim blue and I can’t see the keyboard and am unable to continue typing. They have wi-fi here in the park and I have a site with ammenities (I had no choice).

March 13, 2009 – Lost Maples State Park – Vanderpool TX

Another of those gray cold drizzly days – trying to keep dry – trying to keep warm – and not doing either very well. This is ‘modern camping’ so I have electricity and I sit in truck typing this, plugged in to the box (a little electric heater would be nice – but what’s the chance of needing it again, and it would only be something else to have to carry around, and besides the fan of the computer puts out a little heat but not enough). The burn ban signs were removed early this morning – but there is no dry kindling, and what would you do with a fire in the rain anyway – of the two its better to keep dry.

Knowledge is a mode of conduct, a passion. At bottom, an impressible mode of conduct like dipsomania, sex mania, homicidal mania, the compulsion to know2 forms its own character that is off-balance – Roert Musil

I hiked up the Sabinal River along the Lost Maples trail – so of like the cottonwood oasis in Outlaw Jossie Wales (with Clint Eastwood – saw it on TV the day before I left Kansas City), only maples, and hickory, and pecan in the midst of cedar and sagebrush. The Hills Country of Texas is far from deserted – where everyone from Austin or San Antonio want a summer home or wants to retire to.

As snowbirds flock to the Rio Grande, Texans flock to the Hill Country. Every little country town has been turned into a tourist designation – antique stores, curio shops, real estate offices – something for everyone. Say one thing for this weather it keeps them away. This is the end of the first week of spring break, one more to go – and if it weren’t for the weather – there would be wall-to-wall people here. After next week and until Memorial Day I should have it mostly to myself and I hope, good weather too.

Everything fades fades changes dies when it’s meddled with / If only things weren’t so vulnerable – Frank O’Hara

Two bright red cardinals pecking in the grass
Under the emergent white blossoms of a pear tree
And the sun turns from yellow to orange
Upon the silver lake

Catch those trout – they stocked them in December. Catch them before summer as they will all die in the heat. People from up north say they’re real good. I haven’t had any myself. It is starting to get dark and there is no place in Texas that I can light a fire.

Here is where ‘P’ stands
For ‘Primitive’ like Picasso
And this is the passion is
And this is were the tribal
Dance would have been held
If it were not for the burn ban

Let them watch satellite TV
Up on the hill in their mortgagedRecreational vehicles
Let the have cake and eat it too

We live in a time of passage. It may go on like this until the end of the planet if we don’t learn to tackle our deepest problems better than we have so far – Robert Musil

March 12, 2009 - Fredricksburg Texas – Java Ranch

If there was a choice between being wet or being cold, I’d rather be cold. But there is usually no choice and I got both. By the time I had decamped at Enchanted Rock there were only about three other campers left and they had their equipment all spread out in the restroom drying. I never got as wet as that, but what do you do when it rains for 36 hours straight and there is the possibility of two more days of it wherever I shall go next. When you miserable enough you can sleep a lot, which is a blessing. Now it is better, not the weather, but me – I did laundry this morning, dried my sleeping bag and my shoes and have clean clothes. But the weather – no prospects of sun for another three days and highs in the mid forties maybe even up into the low fifties. Next stop Lost Maples.

The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the interruption of events in favor of stable structures – Michel Foucault

ONE is forever
DIScovering WHAT
A muddle ONE has made
Of any UNDERstanding
If at ALL
But ONE just has to KNOW
To muddle TROUGH
Doesn’t ONE

 The first night there was a youth church group from Beaumont – listening to the youth minister from across the camp late into the night. I much prefer the Bout Scouts – Troop 999 from Broken Arrow at Robbers Cave there to repel down the cliffs (they wore themselves out during the day). Church youth are always so full of spirit and it constantly gushing forth. Anyway that night's thunder storm dorve all the noisy ones away – they got on their buses and left. Both of my neighbors got thoroughly soaked and were gone by morning and last night the storm drove even more of them back towards their homes. But I have no home so I stayed.

Conservatism is alien to the very nature of Capitalism whose love of life and growth is perpetual change – Whittaker Chambers

Yes Enchanted Rock is sort of like Ayres Rock, properly called Uluru. It is the second larges granite monadnock in the United States. But when the granite gets wet it can be very slippery. There were a few times that I had to get down on my butt and scoot.

Homage to John Updike

Yet that lady yonder reads
The latest dead author’s
Greatest – “Rabbit RUN”,
Not his most recent
The best of an ouveur
Seems to come so early
It is a homage not the inquisitive
Mind a tune to the greatest hits

She has not progressed far
And probably never well
A eulogy should be like an
Epitaph – brief. She stops
To put on more lip gloss
Florescent greens and blues
A hummingbird perched in her hair
As she fingers her throat
Shades to cut the glare
Of our most recent dead
Literati

 Reason is a torture, whose subject is the agent – Michel Foucault

Now that I have gotten cleaned up and have dry clothing and bedding it is time to head back into the wilderness - how unfortunate it is that I am unable to send my missive from there - Missives from the Wilderness. But still my tent is all wet and covered with leaves that adhire to its damp surface and one of the poles is split and my emergency repairs is coming undone and there is another two days of this lousey weather. Adieu.

March 10, 2009 – Fredricksburgh Texas – Java Ranch Bar & Café

Fredricksburgh Texas – Java Ranch Bar and Café


I'm on my way to Enchanted Rock (I gather it's sort of like the American version of Ayres Rock). It’s drizzling – they sure need that ran and the cool weather is nice – it's the local consensus around here. But one small drizzly gray day will not eliminate the burn bans. I came into town for gasoline and an opportunity to sign onto the Internet (do you have Wi-Fi?) and I recharge my mobile phone and since its after noon, I can buy some wine (no alcohol before noon on Sunday). In Lampasas they set by Black Box of Merlot aside – can’t sell you that yet (it was only 9AM). Liquor laws are one of the few remaining means by which local authorities can exercise jurisdiction without Federal interference (and as a result they can be mighty peculiar).

In Lukenback with Willie and the Boys. Yes, its just down the road a piece (no more than a few houses and a sign) and I passed through Crawford (have you forgotten it so soon) on the way to Mother Neff. There was one ranch with ten pickup trucks parked in front – only gentleman ranchers (a polite way of saying someone who pretends to ranch) drive such colorful pickups (working vehicles in Texas are always white) but since none of them were black (the ubiquitous color of the Secret Service) it was probably not the Bush Ranch. I didn’t bother to stop and enquire

Life with its tricks has a zest that Utopia would never have – Frank O’Hara

I sort of like the notion
Of no place to retreat to
There being nothing to
Fall back to
But I detest the idea
Of not having a choice

Mother Neff State Park, Moody Texas

Colorado Bend State Park, Bend Texas

Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, Fredricksburgh Texas

Man as the quintessence of his possibilities, potential man, the unwritten poem of his existence, confronts man as recorded fact, as reality, as character – Robert Musil

The time that you get up
And the time you get
    Your first cup
When all the birds are
     Chirping
And you want to yell
     Shut up!
Well, that is now
And the pot has just
     Begun to perk

Oh Rodney!, dese wounds ve have inflicted on each odder are a bound! – Greta Garbo

Well I must be moving on. Gotta set up camp. Transition back to the primitive.

March 4, 2009 - Meridian Texas

And it is such lovely poetry one composes at night at the campfire in the cold, drinking wine with the stars overhead – it’s offically nighttime when you can count a dozen stars in addition to Venus

A conventional measuring stick is no more than an artificial language, a symbol – M I Finley

First green – winter wheat fields near Iola Kansas just peaking out of the earth
First daffodil – Beggs, Oklahoma
First forsythia – Okmulgee Oklahoma
First leafing trees – Wilburton Oklahoma
First roadrunner – Tishomingo Oklahoma
First redbud – Weatherford Texas
Last freezing night (so far) – Dinosaur Valley State Park, Glen Rose, Texas

 When lads are left in shell-holes dying slow, / With nothing but blank sky and wounds that ache, / Moaning for water till they know / It's night, and then it's not worth while to wake!) – Siegfried Sassoon

They were talking of some one they all  knew., Sedan Kansas is such a small town and everyone knows everyone. He had just bought a new oil truck – it has a stainless steel tank. "What do you do?"  they asked the stranger. "Run cattle up near Valentine Nebraska, he replied.  . What about yourself?" "The same", was the laconic reply. Then he add the qualifier, "Yearlings". The topic turned to burning. Calves like the young green shoots not the old dry stuff from the previous year. They won’t put on weight on that stuff. "You notify the sheriff?" "We’re supposed to but I never have." " Have someone do your burn?" "No pretty much do it ourselves." "Get together for a burn?" "Some of the bigger ranchers do." " How much do grazing rights go for here?" " Fifteen an acre last year. Probably be about twelve this [year]" ". How many acres you figure it takes per calf." " About eight." A lot of these men who fattened cattle, also took on anything profitable that they could fine. It's too risky and capital intensive to rely just on cattle.  The Sheriff down here says he runs cattle on the side. "Do the burn here", I had asked. "Some of the bigger ones do. But there is a burn ban on now" – there are only about ten counties in the whole state of Texas where there was currently  not a burn ban  – none of them were where I was going (no campfires at night, no sitting around drinking wine, and coming up with poetry that was too good to write down).

The right wing in America is stuck with the paradox of holding a philosophy of ‘conserving’ an actual order it dos not want to conserve – Garry Wills

The sun rises to meet the contrail
Of the Houston to Denver morning flight
There’s a burn ban in effect that covers
Most of the state – charcoal is ok

So there’s nothing to do when it gets
Dark but to climb into the sack and
Read with an LED spot strapped onto the forehead
This is the first night in five that it is not
Expected to freeze – two inches of ice is not nice
The only warmth is holding a ceramic mug
Of hot coffee cupped in
The palms of gloved hands
There shall be no escaping this burn ban
Until the Spring rains come
Moving on will not improve the situation
Five hundred dollar fine and double that
If you gathered the firewood in the
                 Park

The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the Human body – Thomas Jefferson

On the back of the card Joe had written in the name of a poet that they had talked of at the party he had attended the previous night. All members of the English department at the University and they had been talking about him (this poet whose name was on the back of the card that Joe held in his hand) - perhaps our greatest living American poet, they had been proclaiming. Ever hear of him, Joe asks slyly figuring that he was one up on me. Oh yes, I replied. One of my favorite Midwestern poets. I had just two nights before been telling him of my fondness of Midwestern poets and my theory that landscape and climate and the environment in which a poet was raised had a major impact on his poetry. But Joe was not accepting that – great poetry transcends all particularities was his line (and by great poetry he meant that those whot had been canonized - I don't have time to read everyting, he proclaimed). He was taken aback that I  had heard of B H Fairchild but that I had even read several of his volumes and could critique his work (not that I believed he was our greatest living American poet – there are poets with whom you connects and there are ones you struggle with and then there are many that are just downright bad – but to rank them no thanks, that’s an academic’s responsibility - he gets paid to do that) caused him to back off his attack as if he had encountered a maggot infested corpse.

Those who labor the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue – Thomas Jefferson

I ask for a tent site, meaning no electrify or water. No water only ment that  you may have to walk a hundred feet to get to a spigot.  "Oh, you want a primitive site" as if they were addressing a headhunter from the New Guinea jungle with bird of paradise feathers in my hair and wearing a loincloth if that. "No" I say "I want and energy efficient site (green if you must)".  It is always the best organized special interest that seems to have command of the language – Our war on terror or pro-life – in this case its the Family Motor Coach Association – modern camping my ass.