A sense of place

 Yesterday’s note on Gilbert White might need some explanation. He helped me understand a sense of place.

Scott Russell Sanders said this: “Children who can identify a brand of sneakers from fifty yards away can learn to identify trees and bushes, flowers and mushrooms.”

Follow his train of thought: We can identify pop tunes after the first three notes and we can recite dialog from movies. Do we know the names of the plants and animals that make up the place we call home? Can we identify the stars overhead?

There’s a difference between knowing something casually and being familiar with it, almost intimate. We are familiar with movies, TV shows and tunes but we often walk past natural wonders without seeing anything.

We are a people who read memes. We connect with them, but not with nature.

Sanders’s point is that anyone can learn. Children learn.

But there’s a pace to this kind of learning. You can learn some things quickly, but places are complicated, and seeing the complex connections between geography, climate, plants and animals takes time.

The first time I got on the trail along Zarzamora Creek north of Commerce Street Bridge, almost everything I did and thought was wrong. The map told me, erroneously, that I was on Apache Creek. Worse, I was caught up in the usual kind fog — pleased to be outdoors, but not really focused on what I was seeing. It was just a trail. I was going up a creek.

Later, it hit me how much I missed. I was aware that I had crossed some footbridges. But how many? Three or four? Actually six.

The first, going north from Commerce Street Bridge, is about 80 yards away. The second is about 80 yards farther. They drain the parking lots of Lago Vista, an apartment complex of five, three-story buildings. The creek, which runs north-south at that point, bends westward before you get to the third footbridge, which is at the edge of the complex. It’s at the complex’s boundary with KIPP School. The bend continues along the school property until you get to the fourth footbridge, which marks the edge of the school and the end of the bend. The creek runs west from there.

Because of the bend, you can’t see Bridge 3 from 5, though they are only 135 yards apart. The fourth bridge is on Matyear Street. A short walk used to take you to the Jerk Shack, a cinderblock kitchen with wonderful Jamaican food.

It’s another 200 yards to the fifth bridge, on Hulz Street, and another 200 to the 6th. Then another 200 or so to The Circle, a turnaround near the trailhead on General McMullen Boulevard. When I first walked the trail, that was its end.

Gradually, that sense of place formed in my mind. The form of the place gradually became clearer, more specific, more concrete.

So now, the beautiful stand of tall grass with the 2-foot-long seed heads is not just along a trail through a pretty park. It’s a stand of giant reeds, and it’s about 20 yards northeast of Footbridge No. 2.

The waterway branches between the third and fourth bridge. The main channel, which is Zarzamora Creek although it’s mismarked on some maps, continues west. Apache Creek, which was erroneously thought to be the greater body of water and so gives its name to the waterway below the forks, joins it from the northwest.

Just southeast of the forks is the Bandera Channel, once a little feeder creek, now sadly a ditch for flood control. It joins the watershed from the east.

Slowly, this stretch of Zarzamora Creek has become a place for me. I’ve come to think that a place becomes a place if you’re familiar with it. 

• Sources: The book I was discussing is Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne; Penguin Group USA, 1977. The quotation from Scott Russell Sanders is from Writing from the Center; Indiana University Press, 1997.