'The Fifty-Year Texas Road Trip'

 Randy Mallory’s The Fifty-Year Texas Road Trip is a record of a place I know.

Mallory’s first job out of college was with a magazine for customers of rural power co-ops. He did stories, which included photographs, of a lot of places that are off the main highways.

Mallory spent decades as a writer and photographer. When he donated his archive to the University of North Texas, the university’s press decided to publish a book.

I’m looking and reading slowly, with delight.

I come back to this question often: We all look at the world. Why is it that some people see so much more than others?

It’s a theoretical question, but Mallory has a practical answer.

Mallory says that, at the beginning of his career, he went to a seminar to improve his photographic skills. He took to heart a bit of advice: When you go to an assignment, make it a point to look for something specific. Wherever he went, Mallory looked for brooms.

When you are looking for something specific, you tend to see things you might otherwise have missed.

• Source: Randy Mallory, The Fifty-Year Texas Road Trip; Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2025.

Nostalgia

 Scott Russell Sanders points out that the Greek roots of the word nostalgia mean return pain. He says the pain is from the longing to return, rather than the return itself.

Longing to return home is one way of relating to a place. It struck me as an odd place to start an inquiry into a sense of place, but Sanders makes an interesting point.

 

The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 as a medical term, to provide an equivalent for the German word for homesickness.

 

The word started out describing a condition that might require treatment. There’s truth in that, I think.

We can have such grief over the loss of the old home that we can’t do much with the home we’re in.

• Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 14.

Becoming an inhabitant

 One of the themes of this collection of notes is a sense of place. I’m interested in how some people develop a sense of being part of a place while others seem to have lost it.

The essayist Scott Russell Sanders said that when he thinks of the cosmos, it seems more like a mind than a collection of material objects.

His line came back to me when I went fishing. I first went to an enormous store, which had myriad material objects, including some fishing lures I wanted. When I got to the river, it didn’t feel like big collection of objects. It seemed less like a store than a home — a place to live that was big enough for countless plants and animals, including me.

Sanders said we have a longing to be at home. He said:

 

I aspire to become an inhabitant, one who knows and honors the land.

 

I like that word inhabitant. I like thinking of the cosmos as a place to live — not just a place to conduct some business.

• Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. xiii.

An unsolved case

 I found the shell of a musk turtle, Sternotherus odoratus. The occupant was gone. The black, 4-inch shell was as clean as a museum specimen. Not a trace of the victim.

Musk turtles don’t usually wander far from water, and the shell was 60 yards from a pond. I suspected foul play.

I love British murder mysteries, and I tried to find some clues.

The shell was on a hill where the ground was hard. I found no tracks.

I checked the shell for talon marks, suspecting the red-tailed hawks that nest near the pond. Not a scratch.

I checked for odors, since skunks prey on turtles. Nothing.

My last guess: a raccoon. But it was just an evidence-free guess. I simply couldn’t think of any other animal that might have left the shell so clean.

On television, the detectives always crack the case. But the mysteries I stumble across in the woods often remain mysteries.

A notion about learning

 Epicurus wrote an epitome of his system of thought about the natural world.

His system was complicated, and he prepared a summary for students. He explained that he thought it was important for a person who was learning to keep the overall system in mind. He kept returning to the basic principles. 

 

For a comprehensive view is often required, the details but seldom.

 

Epicurus was talking about the way we learn about the natural world, a subject he called physics. It seems to me his maxim might apply to just about any subject.

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II, pp. 566-7.

Juneteenth

 Juneteenth is the day slavery ended in the United States.

The main rebel army surrendered in Virginia in April 1865. It took a while to mop up the smaller rebel units. It took a couple of months for the Union Army to get to Texas, a backwater of the war. For enslaved people, the nightmare of slavery didn’t end until the soldiers arrived.

On June 19, 1865, general orders were read in Galveston proclaiming that the enslaved people were henceforth and forever free. The news set off celebrations across Texas.

If there had been states further removed from the war’s center, slavery would have endured a little longer. But Texas was the end of the line. Texas was where the nightmare ended.

The heartbreaking part of the story is that other nightmares followed. The nightmare of the Jim Crow Era ended during my lifetime with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.

The heartbreaking part of that story is that we now have a government that is bent on undermining the principle of equal rights.

I celebrate Juneteenth to remind myself that the nightmare of slavery ended on this day. I also remind myself that, while this country seems to have a capacity to generate new nightmares, it also has the capacity to end them. Good people always stand against injustice.

A garden on a boulder

 We stopped to rest by a boulder at Panola Mountain. It was about the size of a car and was covered with lichens and mosses. It seemed to me that nature had created a small Japanese garden on a bare chunk of granite in the Georgia Piedmont.

A better naturalist would have been able to identify every species. Most were primitive forms, but I saw two little trees growing out of crevices: a winged elm, Ulmus alata, and a sweetgum, Liquidambar styraciflua. 

The winged elm has seed in a papery case called a samara that is adapted to fly on the wind. The sweetgum puts its seeds in spiky balls that roll down the slopes until each finds a crevice. There is no level ground in the Piedmont, and sweetgum balls find every crevice. We have sweetgums growing out of joints in sidewalks.