Generations and Other True Stories (10 page)

“That family of birds was a young male and female that I had watched as young chicks growing up,” he says. “They paired off, and they came down. She was an extremely young crane, only four years old. And she had successfully bred and brought her chick all the way down here. People called them ‘Ted's family' They were
my
birds. So my friends and I had a memorial service for her. It went nationwide on the television news. It brought a very large awareness to the public and to hunters that it is time to pay attention to what they are shooting. It's gotten to the point where if we don't do something strong…. ”

Captain Appell and his family—his daughter Deanna also holds a captain's license and sometimes commands the boat—are cleaning up the
Skimmer
, preparing for the beginning of their new season. “I have a contract with the cranes,” he says. “And they'll be here soon.”

Few of his passengers, he says, will be casual tourists, just looking for entertainment. “They'll be serious people, involved in conservation and wildlife matters. In the last ten or fifteen years, I've seen an enormous change in people's attitudes toward these things. A lot more people are getting involved in their environment and are more aware of what they've got around them.”

And just up the coast on the refuge, Captain Appell's friend Tom Stehn and his crew are mowing around the water holes the cranes will use, so bobcats can't hide near them, and burning the tall grass in the oak brush and upland areas of the reserve, so the cranes can more easily find the acorns on the ground.

It's early yet, but they're on their way, and Mr. Stehn says he already has “whooper fever.” His eyes keep drifting upward in search of the first flash of long white wings.

“About twenty minutes before they start their migration,” he says, “they suddenly become very alert. They start milling around. They preen. They straighten all their feathers. There's an energy in the air. The male tips his head and looks up into the sky. Then they line up, and the male will take those running steps and lift off into the wind. And the others will follow.”

November 1993

One day Mary Lynn Sharp, the daughter of my first grade teacher, phoned me. She told me that my teacher, Mrs. Miller—or “Miss Gertrude,” as we called her—was living in Dallas, not far from my neighborhood. I had seen neither Mrs. Miller nor Mary Lynn since 1945
.

I went to Mrs. Miller's house one afternoon, and the three of us talked about the long-ago lives we spent together in a place that has almost disappeared
.

A few months later, Mrs. Miller died
.

Mrs. Miller

Mrs. Gertrude Miller gives me a big hug. She says she wouldn't have recognized me if she hadn't known I was coming. I'm not surprised. We last saw each other in 1945. I was seven years old then.

I would recognize her anywhere, I tell her. I think I would. She has aged, too, from forty-three to ninety-one, but she still smiles the same smile, still laughs the same laugh. And her voice…“I've forgotten so many of the children,” she says, “but I sure do remember you.” Do you forget the voice of your first teacher?

Fifty years ago last fall I enrolled in Mrs. Miller's first grade class. I rode to school that day with my grandmother, who was a teacher, too, and a friend of Mrs. Miller's. In my lap lay a wooden box that contained my school supplies: scissors, two yellow pencils, a jar of white paste, a box of Crayolas. All new. Pristine. I also had a new Big Chief writing tablet with a picture of an Indian on its cover, and a green lunch box containing a thermos of milk, two sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, a red apple, and a Hershey bar.

My grandmother was telling me what to expect when we reached the school—a gloomy two-story stone building on a hill at the edge of Carlton, about eighty miles southwest of Fort Worth—and how I was to behave when I got there.

Mrs. Miller greeted me at her classroom door. She smiled and bent to my level to talk to me. I knew her already. Her husband, Steve, was pastor of the Baptist church, which my grandmother and I attended. The younger of her two stepdaughters, Mary Lynn, was starting the first grade with me that day. She also was in my Sunday School class. I was jealous of her because she could color within the lines and I couldn't.

It was Mary Lynn who called me, all these years later. Mrs. Miller was living in Dallas, not far from me, and would love to see me, she said.

So here we are, the three of us, in Mrs. Miller's living room, looking through a stack of first-grade school pictures, trying to remember names for the young faces in them.

Mrs. Miller talks of her friend, my grandmother. She remembers rooming with her one summer in Denton, where they were taking some college courses, trying to accumulate semester hours toward their degrees, as so many teachers did back then. My grandmother had been teaching since she was seventeen. Maybe Mrs. Miller had, too. “The place where we stayed was so hot,” she says. “One night we took our mattresses out and put them under some trees in the backyard so we could sleep. But the moon was shining so brightly that I couldn't sleep. I opened my umbrella to shade me.”

She says she and my grandmother chaperoned a busload of kids who came up to Dallas for the great Texas Centennial celebration in 1936. “The school children massed on the football field at the Cotton Bowl to sing
Texas, Our Texas
,” she says. “It was so hot. Kids were fainting all around. None of our kids fainted, though.”

She speaks of my grandfather, the deputy sheriff who was shot to death by robbers in a Carlton street one snowy night just before Christmas in 1932, and Jim Pierce, the posse member who made the robbers think his flashlight was a gun and arrested them with it. “I remember that just like it was yesterday,” she says. “Those were hard times, I tell you. Scary times.”

As the afternoon slips away we talk of other times, of the time we spent together in the stone schoolhouse. Of cold mornings when the janitors would pour coal into the huge black stove in our room until it glowed red. Of the wooden privies—one for the girls, one for the boys—that stood at opposite corners of the school ground. Of the piano that Mrs. Miller played, and our “rhythm band” sessions when we banged on wooden blocks, sticks, and metal triangles. Of the patriotic posters that hung in our hallways in those World War II days, and the savings stamps we bought and pasted in little books. When a book was full, we traded it in for a twenty-five-dollar war bond to help our boys overseas.

“I have a memory of you standing by a chart at the front of the room,” I say. “It has the letters of the alphabet on it. You're teaching us the sound of the letter B. ‘Bu, bu, bu,' you say. And then you say, ‘Remember seeing your father, when he gets to the end of the row in the field? He picks up the water jug and takes a drink out of it. What sound does the water make as it comes out of the jug? “Bu, bu, bu.” '

“Phonics,” Mrs. Miller says. “It was new then. Uncle Bob McDaniel, he was a carpenter there in town. A fine man. He and his wife had their grandson to raise. They called him Sonny Boy. He was smart as a whip. And Uncle Bob made a complaint to the superintendent, Mr. Huffman, that Sonny Boy didn't have a book to bring home at night. Well, I didn't give my pupils a book until they knew how to read. They learned the alphabet, and how to sound out words on the chart, then I would give them a book. Mr. Huffman told Uncle Bob, ‘Well, you just go up there and visit someday.' So Uncle Bob and his wife came and sat in on my class. Little Sonny Boy's hand kept going up. He was smart as could be. They went home just elated. That was a new way of teaching to them. Phonics was the new way of doing in those days.”

Mary Lynn and I remember the first book she gave us.
We Look and See
. About Dick, Jane, Baby Sally, Mother, Father, Spot the dog, Puff the cat, and Tim the teddy bear. I read the whole thing aloud to my grandmother that night.

We laugh, the three of us, remembering the school that closed so many years ago, in the little farm town that has almost disappeared. “We had so many kids in those days,” Mrs. Miller says. “We were just swamped.”

Two years after I enrolled in Mrs. Miller's first grade, my family moved away from Carlton. So did the Millers. But on this afternoon, the place and all its people are alive again.

“The Lord has been so good to me, to let me live this long and have the friends I've had,” Mrs. Miller says. “I go to bed some nights, Bryan, and I can't shut my mind off. Things will come up that I remember…a family will come to mind, and I'll think, ‘How many were in that family? What were their names?' And I'll start naming them off. And there'll be one whose name I can't remember, and I'll think about it and think about it. And after a while the name will come into my mind, and I can go to sleep.”

January 1994

In a time when more and more people are spending their lives flipping burgers and staring into computer video monitors for a wage, it warms the soul to know a man who has a great job, knows it and loves it. To wander the mountains and deserts of the Trans-Pecos with Benny Simpson is like accompanying a child into a huge toy store. The joy generated is the next best thing to being young again
.

The Plant Hunter

Benny Simpson is driving a rented van along one of the emptier roads in Texas, somewhere between Hallie Stillwell's ranch and the Mexican village of La Linda, in the magnificent desolation of the Big Bend. Suddenly he stomps the brakes, slams the van into reverse, and speeds backward up the hill he has just passed. He swerves onto the shoulder, cuts the engine, jumps from the van, and scrambles up the steep, rocky slope.

A tourist, if one should pass, might think him a rancher, searching for a sick calf, perhaps. Ruddy face. Faded jeans tucked into the tops of scuffed brown boots. White hair held down by a sweat-stained straw hat that looks as if it were trampled by a herd of wild burros.

But Benny stands reverently before a bush with grayish leaves. It's a cenizo called violet silverleaf, about as high as his knees and not much wider than his hat. Tiny flowers the hue of Elizabeth Taylor's eyes adorn the bush and lay a sweet, wild aroma into the still desert air.

“Isn't that a beauty?” Benny exclaims, unlimbering his camera. “Boy! Isn't it a knockout?”

He turns to his companions, who have struggled up the slope behind him.
“Leucophyllum candidum
! I tell you, I am admiring this! This is
nice
!”

Cenizo is a common shrub in the Big Bend and some other areas of West Texas. Its vivid blooms are one of the blessings that rain brings to these arid parts. Whenever a good rain falls, the cenizo will follow a few days later with its splendid little flowers, no matter the time of year.

The hillside where Benny and his friends are standing is almost covered with the gray bushes, their dominance broken only here and there by stands of cactus and sotol and greasewood. Normally after a rain, the slope would be robed in the violet blossoms of
Leucophyllum candidum
and the rosier hues of its close relative,
Leucophyllum frutenscens
. Sometimes their flowers last for a week or ten days before they fall. Other times, a heavy wind will wipe them out in a day. On this day, nearly all the bushes are bare of blossoms. Only a few others bear any flowers at all, and this one alone is in full flower.

“Odd,” Benny says. “Maybe the others already have bloomed and gone. Maybe we just caught the tail end of it.”

Or maybe the perfect glory of this one bush is the answer to some prayer that Benny has been muttering under his breath for the past two days while he and his companions trudged up mountainsides, canyons, and dry creek beds in search of desert flora in bloom.

He had heard that Far West Texas had just had a wet season. He has brought his five companions—most of whom have never been in the Big Bend before—from Dallas and College Station, expecting to show them the mountains and the desert in their glory.

But not as many plants are flowering as he hoped to find. The Big Bend is always a gamble, he has told his friends as he maneuvered the van across the barrens. You never know what you're going to find, and you can see only what's there.

Now he's vindicated. He leads his friends back down the slope to the van and climbs in behind the wheel. “Good!” he says. “Now you know I'm not a complete blathering idiot!”

One perfect
Leucophyllum candidum
.

It's enough to make a six hundred-mile journey worthwhile.

Benny has worked at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station on Coit Road in Dallas since 1954, when he arrived from Texas Tech with a brand new B.S. degree. The station was called the Texas Research Foundation in those days. It was a private research center, located in a tiny farming town called Renner and funded by downtown Dallas businessmen. “Back then, agriculture was important to Dallas,” Benny says. “Now it couldn't care less.”

In 1972 the Texas Research Foundation donated its land and buildings to Texas A&M University and became a part of the university's vast research and extension system.

Although some scientists there still study such conventional agricultural subjects as cotton and grain, the focus of much of the station's work has evolved along with the countryside around it. While Renner has been swallowed up into Far North Dallas and the ever-advancing bedroom sprawl has surrounded the station's fields and barns, it has become a nationally renowned center for the study of urban agriculture—the plants that live among us in our yards and parks and along our streets.

Benny's official titles there are “research scientist” and “ornamental horticulturist.” He calls himself “plant hunter,” and he could be called “crusader” as well, for he's a man with a cause.

“One thing that Texas doesn't have and never has had and never will have is enough water,” he says. “Someday we're going to be in the same fix as California and Arizona. People don't want to face up to that, but it's a fact. It's going to happen. So it's getting to be important that we save as much water as we can, and grow the kind of plants that can survive on very little when they have to.”