jumpingfish

Bastrop State Park is gone. Close to a thousand homes are gone. People have died. As of this afternoon, they only had the fire partially contained. This is really, really bad.

On Tuesday I drove to Houston which normally takes me thru Bastrop. The photo above is a view of the city as you come in from the west. Highway 71 descends from this spot down to the Colorado River and then up out of the valley on the far side. That rise is visible as trees in the distance. And over that hill is Bastrop State Park.

That park was my first introduction to Central Texas back in 1979. Alan was driving four of us to Austin from our summer jobs in Houston, and he told us about Bastrop and the park and about Lost Pines, about how this island stand of Loblollies was an isolated remnant of a great forest that covered this area long ago.

On Tuesday, of course, the highway was closed. So I bypassed Bastrop west and south of the fire, taking the two legs of a triangle instead of the hypotenuse.

The wind was blowing out of the north and pushed the plume across my route.

I entered the smoke near Lockhart as I was driving south. 15 miles later, in Luling, I turned east on Interstate 10 and only then entered the plume in earnest. Visibility was drivable, but the smoke was thick, and my windows were shut. At 65 mph, it took me 30 minutes to emerge on the other side of the plume.

Enough to make a grown man cry.

photo credit: Unknown. Sent to me by a friend. Don’t know where he got it.

The front and back doors are open. A cool 85 degree morning breeze is blowing thru the living room—but not for long.  The sun is rising above the trees in the east, and the temperature is climbing quickly as the shade is disappears.  We’ll be shutting the doors soon.

The Hummingbirds have been frisky.  They like hanging out here, because we have red-blossomed Turk’s Cap and purplish-blossomed Desert Willow. There are Cardinals visiting the water in the back. Wrens are calling from somewhere in the distance. And I saw a Titmouse in the Monterey Oak in the front, hopping from branch to branch, hiding in the green glow of the tree’s leaves.

There has been no benefit to us from tropical storm Lee in the Gulf.  People we know in Houston barely got a drop, the deluge in Louisiana notwithstanding.  The Pine trees are dying down there from lack of rain.

Here, I’d say Austin is going to lose 10% of our trees. The sad thing is that people seem to think that trees never need help. So as we drive thru the neighborhoods, we can see many homes that have clearly watered their trees at all, and we’ve only had two (brief) rains since last fall. A lot of those trees are going to die.

A neighbor down the street just lost an ancient Live Oak in their front yard.  Unlike many other homes, they’ve evidently been watering theirs, although to tell you the truth, it might be that they just water their grass—which is not enough for the trees, as the grass can steal every drop.  This week, we go into Stage 3 water restrictions, so we can only water our thirsty trees (heck with the grass) once a week.

Our baby trees are getting a lot of attention. We watch them closely—the Monterey and Lacey Oaks, the Texas Redbud and Persimmon, the Possumhaw. But our Ash trees (the weed trees we’ve always known were going to die “soon”) might be gone before even we imagined, and we’re not ready for that.  The Ash in the front protects us from the onslaught of afternoon sun, now that the rental house across the street has completely lost all three of their trees which used to give us shade in the last two hours of the day.  And the Ash in the back protects us in the morning.  There are Cedar Elms poised to take over from that Ash in the back, but they’re at least 10 years from giving an equivalent duration of shade.  So I’ve taken to watering them all—something I never imagined we’d need to do.

And the winds (which is the only effect we got from Lee) have been fierce. Branches are falling out of trees. We’re under a red flag warning. And there are fires again, in Steiner Ranch northwest of Austin and in Bastrop.  The fair and industrious Trudy went to the Humane Society late last night, because the entire Bastrop Humane Society was being evacuated due to an approaching fire.  A friend of hers approaching Bastrop from Houston last night said the horizon was an inferno.

Looking for the four horsemen.

In the morning they come. Before the sun climbs over the roof of the house. While the cool 82 degrees of morning remain. Before the heat begins to bake the dust. They come for a drink.

First come the Lesser Goldfinches. They perch on the Coneflowers and pick at the dry seed heads and flit around in the underbrush near to where we’ve set the water out. They drink in staccato bursts of nervousness, afraid of anything that moves, gone at a moment’s notice.

And then the Sparrows come. In a swarm they come, a dozen or so this morning. As the line of the shadow of the roof was beginning to move across what used to be lawn. They roll in the bark and the dust. The splash in the water. They chase each other. And then in a flash they’re all gone.

And then the Bluejays and Mockingbirds come. The sun is climbing higher now, and the yard is growing hot. They perch in the branches of the Monterey Oak and the Lacey Oak and gaze longingly at the water in the pans on the ground. And they fly down one at a time, following some kind of avian pecking order. And then they’re gone.

And finally there are the Mourning Doves. They strut around, pecking at the leaves, guzzling the water. And when they fly off, their wing stripes flash whitely.

“I haven’t seen any Grackles, lately,” I said to Trudy. “Have you?”

“Well yes,” she said.

But we couldn’t remember when, and whereas a couple months ago it seemed that we had nothing but Grackles, I confess that their absence makes me smile.

They must have succumbed to the heat. It’s not charitable of me to say this, but I confess I’m not sad to think it.

“You decided to work on the hottest day?” John asked.

I didn’t know it was the hottest day, but there was no doubt it was toasty. I set down the wheelbarrow.

“How hot did it get?” I asked.

“110.”

That was yesterday. Today it got up to 112. As the sun set behind the trees in the west and Trudy and I made our way to the elementary school to do some gardening, the air outside was was still like a blast furnace.

“It’s going to break this week,” Trudy says.

Sure. And what about a little rain?

Someday.

As the hot air wraps around me and the dog sniffs at a bush, I stand on the sidewalk looking up at the evening sky and see a red star.

It’s the first one I see. Darkness has fallen all around me, but the sky retains just enough of the passed day that there’s only this one star.

Star light, star bright.

I look around while the dog continues his investigations. There are no clouds in the sky. The rest of the stars will be coming out soon. I quickly look down, not wanting them to come out just yet.

It got up to 107 today. The sixty-fifth day in a row above 100. We’re four days away from the record. And the reservoirs are now running dry west of Ft. Worth.

I stop to talk to James on the corner. He has been watering the trees his daughters and I planted just as this hot, dry weather turns fierce.

“How have you been,” he asks. He knows it’s a relevant question for me.

“Fine,” I say. “I am in Houston a lot. How have you been?”

He says that he’s applying for a job with a company that preps rooms before the installation of big medical scanners. It’ll take him on the road, but he has no choice. The market for painting and drywall work has dried up here, and it’s been a difficult summer for his family. His wife is working hard hours at a pharmacy, and his daughters are in elementary and high school. It’s a hard time for him to be away, but it will be steady work.

We shake hands, and he walks me half way down the block to say goodbye.

The sky is black now, lit up by stars. Cygnus is flying across the heavens high in the southern sky. That one red star now has plenty of company.