FYI:
The Transcendental Texan

Spiritually dry” is the phrase my friend uses to describe an uninspired state of being. It’s the kind of phrase you might expect from a native of east Texas, where it typically rains fifty inches a year. In drought, the pines and grasses get brittle and crunchy. Crops fail, and cattle starve. Wildlife goes underground. For a person from such a place, spiritually dry means the soul is undernourished. What the yogis call the voice of God dwindles from the gentle roar in your ears of the river of your blood to a whisper like feet scraping through dusty pine litter. Spirit is what you seek but can’t find, a drop of cool water on a drought-stricken prairie.

The year 2006 was a wet one, but I wasn’t exactly drenched in spirit on Easter Sunday as I sat chewing a bagel with my wife, my daughter, and her boyfriend at a Houston breakfast spot. In Easters past I might have gone to early church and felt the thrill of the sunrise as I listened to a bad sermon from a second-string pastor. But this year, we’re visiting our daughter in the big city, living on her schedule and negotiating a new kind of holiday. Sunrise long gone, finishing up the midmorning coffee and juice, we decide to go for a hike. I’d read about a state park south of town called Brazos Bend. It doesn’t look like much on the map, but it’s the closest new place we might try. The sun has gotten warm enough to make the glass-enclosed breakfast room uncomfortable, so the air feels good as we step into the cramped parking lot of the busy street, seventy degrees or so with a light breeze.

As we emerge from the ugly industrial district onto the flat coastal plain, the widening space has a hopeful feel. Some new housing developments give way to the truly rural—groups of house trailers and little frame farmhouses on acres that will soon be planted in corn, sorghum, and cotton. About a half hour later, in the flood plain of the Brazos River, we locate the state park. A roughly painted sign with a picture of an alligator stands in the shade beneath a few low oaks hung with Spanish moss.

The hint of alligators raises my expectations from the low level I had cautiously maintained, though I hear a voice inside warning against full excitement. I’ve been to enough state parks in swampy places to know that the usual sighting of gators amounts to a binoculared argument over whether the thing you’re looking at is a gator, a turtle, or a log. If you want to see them close, go to an alligator farm.

We park the car in a sunny lot, grab enough water for the short walk on the trail we find on the map given to us at the gate. A mile and a half or two at the most, the trail circles one of several lakes in the park, some maintained by levees, some created by the periodic flooding of the Brazos. I see a flight of cormorants rise over the lake and feel a lift inside.

Before catching the trail, we check out a little fishing dock on the lake. Leaning over the rail, I look right into the eye of an eight-foot gator lolling in the water a foot away from the dock. Heart racing, I give the hurry-over-here hand sign to my companions, worried that the big creature will sink out of sight before they see it. But no. The gator yawns and surfaces fully to circle lazily around the edge of the dock as daughter snaps pictures and boyfriend stands marveling. He’s never seen wildlife up close except in the zoo or on Animal Planet, a favorite show of his. Looking up, I catch sight of some color on an island in the distance and find a small flock of roseate spoonbills in the binoculars. I give the glasses to him so he can look. “We’ll see them better if we walk to the other side,” I say, and he’s on his way. “You can hang on to the binoculars,” I say to his back.

The trail takes us through a small stand of mixed woods. The insects are coming out, and some unidentifiable forms, larval or just plain strange, roll in the dust and buzz curiously through the grasses along the trail’s edge. We soon find ourselves walking on a raised trail with swampy water on either side.

I borrow my binoculars back and in one look see a glossy ibis sitting side by side with a white ibis. One is preening in my left eyepiece and the other fishing in my right. By the time we cover two hundred yards we’ve seen three different kinds of herons, two species of egrets in addition to ibises, spoonbills, cormorants, and the black-bellied whistling ducks with their crazy pink feet. Everything with wings is flying and flapping, quacking and calling in a swirl of sound and motion. Every wind that stirs the coolish water seems to raise new life into being. Bass make minnows splash at the lake’s edges. Turtles and toads and frogs crawl and leap off logs and muddy banks. Their prints join the ones left by nocturnal creatures—rats, raccoons, night herons—in the malleable mud flats.

A little boy with a Spanish accent comes running up to his grandparents and parents on the trail behind us. “A big one walked right across the path,” he yells, “an alligator!” Grandpa laughs while mama grabs a handful of shirtsleeve. Two more children ahead of us point to the creek running left of the pathway. “There, there,” they shout. We look over in time to see a pair of gators swimming by, going upstream, jaws parting occasionally to scoop up an easy meal of fish or tadpoles. A little farther, we stand with other walkers watching a big gator trapping good-sized fish in a tiny cove. He uses his body to block their exit, and when he feels them swim beside his head, he opens his mouth and turns it sideways to snap them up. “That gator is fishing,” says an old man to one of the kids. The boyfriend looks at me. “Awesome.”

Further around the trail a snaky protrusion from the lake proves to be the neck and long-beaked head of an anhinga, a kind of customized cormorant native to the southern swamps, known locally as the water turkey. It swims half-submerged, using its wings to propel through the water. Later, as we linger at the end of the trail, we see it sitting heraldically on a water-rooted cypress, spreading its wings in the sun to dry.

We separate for a while as we come to the end of the trail, and I find myself alone, sitting on the stump of a big cottonwood, pondering the wetland. People picnic in the distance, flights of birds rise from the water and settle down again, the wind stirs the surface. Sun shining on my face, I close my eyes and feel the river roaring in my blood. The tomb of winter has opened its door.

skrevet af Naren559 kl. 12:59 pm (EST) den Mar 27, 2008

thinandlight,
After having explored many of the I Ching authors, I find Blofeld's the most "user friendly".From your library, I would say that you would fit in with extentialism more comatibly with your "seeking".

skrevet af Naren559 kl. 4:12 pm (EST) den Mar 26, 2008

Just found your library, and I'm enjoying myself immensely browsing along the shelves. Neat profile by the way.
R

skrevet af reuchlin kl. 11:18 am (EST) den Sep 26, 2007

Check out John Blofeld.
Om tat sat

skrevet af Naren559 kl. 6:56 am (EST) den May 15, 2007

What did you think about Tommaso Landolfi's book? And why did it appeal to you?

Allen

skrevet af agrimm kl. 3:25 pm (EST) den Apr 5, 2007

Glad to see we both regard William Gass so highly.

skrevet af jamy kl. 9:53 am (EST) den Oct 15, 2006

You've got a nice library there. Loved the photos in your flickr account. You've got a nice eye for abstract imagery. Happy cataloging.

skrevet af coffeezombie kl. 8:13 pm (EST) den Sep 1, 2006