Fort Worth Weekly
Second Thought: Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Humankind at the Light Switch
At winter solstice and water’s edge, can we come back from the dark?

By JARID MANOS

The ocean is a prairie with its life underground and a perfect disguise above. About 18,000 short years ago, before the glaciers and continental ice sheets melted and the seas rose 400 feet, the Texas coastline was a hundred miles farther out. Standing at the water’s edge on Galveston Island, I look out to sea, imagining the beach not here, but out there, the tallgrass prairie stretching to fill the distance. Who lies beneath those waters? Buffalo, antelope, mammoths, wolves… and what people, what tribes? We’ll never know.

It’s the winter solstice again, and I haven’t written in a year. In my “Last Christmas in Como” column, I wrote that I had gotten over that strange flea-bitten illness. Little did I know what storm was approaching. By mid-January, I was on my deathbed. It was like my muscles were being torn off my chest in a meatgrinder, and a jackhammer ramming up into my skull. Uncontrollable shivering ruled the day, massive sweats the night. Down to 157 pounds, this once-robust athlete could barely move or breathe. Three times I felt myself start to go. But somehow, I held on. If I hadn’t been vegan and super-healthy beforehand, would I have made it?

In early spring, Kaiden, my 9-year-old son, and I went to Galveston, a place that represents the best of life to me. It’s also the place of Texas’ original conception, where in 1528 the Moorish slave Esteban and his shipwrecked conquistador masters staggered ashore into the virgin prairie wilderness. Assisted by this first blackman, the hapless conquistadors had to become part of the local prairie and its Indian cultures, rather than forcing the land and people to adapt beneath them. It was a brief opportunity, lost now, to forge a civilization based on empathy, equality, and understanding.

Dusk in early spring shimmers the Gulf sky platinum-blue, as warm, windy days and cool nights battle over the awakening land. With the waves tossing and restless, Kaiden and I, shivering a little, carefully barefooted into the glowing sand dunes crawling with low, lush plant life. We couldn’t resist climbing the seemingly prehistoric tree trunk washed ashore long ago — two humans still cool with being monkeys. Suddenly Kaiden froze, his hand reaching back to touch his skinny daddy. I looked where he did — a withered man sprawled face down in the sand up against the trunk. Clothes rumpled. Dead man.

We re-focused. Just rumpled clothes. The man was gone.

When Kaiden and I watched Ice Age 2 on DVD, I commented that the mammoth, saber-toothed tiger, and others were extinct. “Not because of us!” he blurted. His need to believe that we’re not responsible for all death struck me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, unfortunately, it’s likely that humans had a hand in those extinctions too. Overkill by increasingly technological humans unable to see and restrain the cumulative impact of their actions, coupled with burgeoning climate change, appears to have been too much for the old animal nations and the reason we don’t have American elephants, cheetahs, giant sloths, mammoths, and many others today.

The average daily temperature of Venus is 867 degrees. Earth’s is 59. A main difference between the two is that most of Venus’ carbon is stored in its atmosphere. Earth’s has been stored underground, in the form of dead plants and animals millions of years old. Over the last couple hundred years, we’ve been working industriously to change this.

The approaching solstice is the darkest day of the year, but it makes me think of the returning of the light. Standing between darkness and light, I cannot stop thinking why we shouldn’t all turn our heads to the solar star that powers all life. It would mean common sense and renewal beyond spiritual.

The Gulf of Mexico has always been a growling, toothy ocean, promising no certainty, not really a paradise or a vacation, even though its once-Eden coast represented not only conception but fertility, where the prairie met the sea. Two halves of a whole. She seduces and scares me, has drawn me into her my whole life.

And I can’t help myself. Standing at her edge lately, I feel an underlying panic. Might as well be leaning over the lip of her open mouth. Galveston is only three feet above sea level. The barrier islands of Galveston, Matagorda, and Padre are only 5,000 years old. Katrina was just a taste.

I’m 174 pounds now. Hitting the gym like the ninja I used to be. I’m afraid of getting sick again, especially in the cold. My lungs seem permanently scarred. I don’t know exactly when the last of the mysterious illness passed out of me. But I know that body and Earth and rebirth are all intertwined. And fever is all around us. I pray pray pray that we are strong and smart enough to fight it off while there is still time. Every child should get to experience the type of days outside that Kaiden has.

It’s always night by the time Kaiden and I leave the beach. At the last moment we find ourselves at water’s edge, the waves out there baring their white teeth. In darkness we squat, pressing our palms into the wet sand. Or fall face down, arms spread, nostrils flaring as the water slips between skin and sand, tries to peel us off, bring us in. The black sky shines with other stars, living things bump into one another out in the deep, near our faces below-ground an unseen crab blows a bubble up a tiny air tube (who knows his thoughts in complete underground darkness?) and we give thanks to God and Earth (and Woman Water) for this day, as another wave rushes in, grabs at us, before we can pull away.

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Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.

Jarid Manos’ book, Ghetto Plainsman, has just been released by Temba House Press.

Fort Worth Weekly
Second Thought: Wednesday, December 20, 2006
A Como Farewell

By JARID MANOS

And so, after all these years, it’s my last Christmas in Como.

This 100-year-old neighborhood, built as a servant city on the virgin prairie back when wolves still howled along the streetcar route to wealthy, new Arlington Heights, endures. Homeboy Liquors changed its name but is still the same store, people still lie in the gutter every once in a while, and the sign for Edmondson’s Chicken never lights up all the way. There’s a continuity in that.

A month ago, I looked around and thought: “We ain’t hit the apocalypse yet.” And I realized that, in many ways, while I preached health and hope for the future to everyone else, I had been living my life with private unease and uncertainty.

My job, the one I created for myself seven years ago when we founded Great Plains Restoration Council, is all about healing ourselves through healing our Earth, our prairie, and teaching all kinds of kids about it. In a sense, my job is believing in the future, acting now, and helping others do the same.

But doing that involves daily understanding that, if enough good people do nothing, we may not make it because of burgeoning ecological and social collapse, a possibility that is still all too real.

And so for years, I’ve let the horror and sorrow of the world privately inhabit me. In a way, I never let myself out of the war zone. The violence that people do to each other mirrors the violence they do to the Earth. I’m a writer, but maybe I’d begun to think: What good is art if society is going to collapse? As a stone-cold soldier in a world gone mad, always working to open the door into that elusive green and peaceful future, I lost some of my own balance.

I’ve been trying to break out of this cycle and get settled, without feeling like I’m selling out. It’s difficult, with the massive amount of service I need to do. But my son and his mother, who live in Houston, have taught me to love on a level I never knew existed. I’ve decided to renew my commitment to life, to literature — to the future.

My ass’ll probably be a hood rat ’til the day I die, but I’m ’bout to become a first-time homebuyer across town. Brand-new house — I won’t know what to do with myself.

With all the world’s problems, I never paid any attention to my own living conditions before now. Survived on a small salary, lived in, uhhh, spare quarters, knew I still lived like a king compared to folk in Darfur or Baghdad or a thousand other places.

Even though I keep a clean, vegetarian household, my collapsing old house got progressively worse. There were periodic outbreaks of fleas (from all the squirming alley cats outside?), the last time which gave me some weird five-week disease where my muscles felt like they were being torn off my bones. Rats ran across the wires at night. Giant cockroaches dragged their twitching bodies out of the shower drain like that dead woman in The Ring. The place never had heat or A/C. In the summer I shut the hot water completely off, didn’t buy bananas because they liquefied before sundown, left shampoo bottles open so they wouldn’t explode. On frigid winter nights, the ghetto fireplace (stovetop burners) kept things from freezing. And something lives below the bathtub, under the house near the water heater. At first I thought he was a bear, but of course all the bears in North Texas were killed off long ago. He bangs the pipes, coughs, and sneezes. Got big shoulders. I’ve gotten used to his company. Only in the last few weeks has he started snarling, a low, fang-dripping rumble. I’ve finally decided he’s a chupacabra.

I died very early on in life from all the hatred and ugliness, then for a long time burned in a strange netherworld of thug callousness and super-sensitivity. For the last seven years I’ve worked 60- to 80-hour weeks building our ecological health movement to the breakthrough point. Now we’re seeing exhilarating successes on the ground and in our communities, we just got a major grant, and I’ve got a book coming out shortly. The publicity that the New York PR firm is planning is a li’l scary. (After all, my dream job used to be a baggage handler at the airport). These days feel like those first few moments before stepping off a cliff.

It’s a time of transitions. Whether we admit it or not, we all know it’s do-or-die time. We’ve got less than 20 years to turn things around or face worldwide consequences of collapsing water and food supplies, irreparable ecological damage, and all the societal upheaval that comes with those disasters.

As for Como, the chicken that used to tease the chained dog is long gone. I never see the crack lady anymore, with her exotic dress of newspapers and head wrap fashioned from a girdle. The abandoned 1910-era house with its 1970s Christmas lights recently burned down to the prairie dirt it was built on. The dog fighters still dump their dead pit bulls down in Death Gulch by the lake, where ranging sunflowers turn their faces to the sun and where one day water (an ancient underground spring?) cracked through the asphalt, burbling and sparkling. My 2003 string of green Christmas lights still hangs forgotten from the scrawny front-yard mesquite tree. The prairie winds blow warm up from Mexico, for now, rattling my old house by its ears. Chupacabra sneezes and snarls and bangs the pipes. It’s dark and late, this Solstice moment before the returning of the light. Crickets sing outside, until the next arctic front pushes back.

Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.

Fort Worth Weekly
Second Thought: Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Sacrement of the Trinity Original Article

By JARID MANOS

Crickets swell, lush autumn night, silence buffering me as soon as I shut the car door, even with University Drive a few hundred yards away … . Across the Trinity, our night city glowed, reflection shimmering in the slow-moving river.

Peaceful, I sat on the curb and buckled up my blades. And realized, pausing for a moment, that few city things are as old-time familiar as sitting on a curb.

And then I was speed-skating south under the I-30 overpass and the subsequent train trestle, the heaving behemoth clacking metronomic above, creaking the supports. My anticipation rose. Only a couple more miles ’til one of Fort Worth’s remaining promised lands, that long stretch of wild trail along the Clear Fork of the Trinity River between Bryant Irvin and Hulen. It was almost 11 p.m., but still hot enough in mid-October that I slipped out of my shirt, jamming it into the waistband of my jeans where it fluttered like a white flag. If anybody was around to look, all they’d see was the white flag, the rest of me melted away. But first they’d have to see.

Heading west, I dipped under two more bridges. A couple of bicyclists passed me. And then, beyond the giant Hulen bridge, I shot past the arching orange glow of the railyard and finally into the darkest stretch. Stars and planets opened in the sky. Cloaking me were a few miles of wild, near-virgin savannah prairie between the river and the tracks. Egrets and hawks and wild turkeys roosted in the scattered, heat-twisted, thorny trees that give our Texas prairie an otherworldly sub-tropical look. Armadillos poked and jittered in the grasses. Down below, the river rippled, clean water over rock-strewn grassy braids. A great blue heron shadow-sailed over my head like a pterodactyl, squawking once at the surprise of me, and canted down to land feet-first in the shallows where he would hunt the fat little fishes, loaves of bread to him, that rushed past his stick legs. Many times late at night I’ve come out here, a shadow bathed in moonglow, nearly lulled to sleep in the rough grass by the murmurings, gurglings, and whispers of all the birds and animals, a sleeping gypsy visited by or visiting them, right here in the city.

Lights bobbed ahead, and I skated up on the cluster of people, their bikes strewn in the ditch and path. On this moonless night, people were using their helmet-mounted lamps or cell phones to illuminate a slight Mexican guy, Javier, lying face down in the grass like a shot deer. Two of his friends knelt over the young ciclista, stroking his head, praying to La Virgen … Por favor, nuestra Señora…. Another guy was wobbling around on his feet with an apple rapidly growing out of his face. Someone else was in a heated argument with the 911 operator, trying repeatedly to explain where we were and how to get here. A white guy with bright blue headlamp and blue spandex shorts knelt on Javier’s other side. “Don’t call me sir,” he said. “We’re all in this together, OK buddy? I’m a doctor. I just don’t want you to move.”

“It hurts,” Javier gasped into the grass. He was still in the arm-squashed, torso-compacted position he’d landed in, and it was clear that was magnifying the pain of the collision. The doctor pinched one smooth brown leg, and Javier made a small noise that sounded like “yes.” The doctor asked him to try to move his feet. Javier seemed to strain; a little twitch resulted. The arguing on the phone behind us continued. Three different people tried to give directions. We were at the farthest point from road access. “God, it’s like we’re in the middle of West Texas!” the doctor said. “That’s why we come out here,” said one of the others.

The murmured praying started again. I pulled my shirt on and sat in the grass, arms over knees. Little any of us could do but wait now. Beyond our little circle of activity, we were swallowed by the code-talkings of millions of crickets that seemed to pillow the silence rather than erase it. The city plans to blast a tollway through here and bulldoze the rest for condos. There’s a 1,000-year-old Indian camp hidden here.

Just as three somewhat out-of-shape medics arrived dripping in sweat, having run the two miles or so from Bryant Irvin, a helicopter was finally dispatched. We could see it taking off in the distance from a hospital district roof, brighter than Mars, and in two minutes it was here in a roaring diesel whirlwind of dust, noise and light, executing an impressive landing on the levee’s narrow concrete path, like a dragonfly. In a blur, we got Javier strapped onto the board and turned over; they rushed him into the copter. It blasted off again, choking fumes and dust settling like a fog.

I thought of La Señora, the Virgin Mary, appearing in December 1531 to a Catholic Indian peasant in Mexico near a hill where the Aztecs worshipped their fertility goddess. Soon it would be December and the Christmas season again. I thought of the riverine cottonwood back here, its double trunks parted like a sacred woman’s opening, and whose leaves never stop rustling, even in a dead calm. So few places left for sleep … birth … renewal.

Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.

Fort Worth Weekly
Second Thought: Wednesday, October 5, 2005
Between Concrete and Prairie The old connections in nature still pulse — if more feebly.

By JARID MANOS

I guess it’s not really a moonbow because it forms a complete circle, but the word sounds good. Maybe if rainbows ended in the sky instead of the ground they’d be complete circles too. But this gauzy giant white halo that appears around the full moon a couple of nights a year stops me in my tracks, makes my head momentarily fall back. The moon’s halo reminds me of something, maybe primeval and ancient. Then, just as quickly, if I’m in Fort Worth, caught up in the city rat race, that feeling slips away before I can grasp it. And I shut the car door or haul up some youth health forms and grant applications or remember 17 phone calls or community meetings I gotta make before I read today’s latest e-mail listserv dispatches of eco-doom and horror. And it’s just the moon up there again. (But with that rare halo.) No time.

I often have that feeling of slipping between worlds. One sacred and one where I’m just standing by roaring traffic.

On one of those days that slips between cool and hot, the tiger-striped, silvery green cat, not yet full-grown, was sitting on his haunches, staring down at the concrete of the street, swinging his head back and forth. At first I thought he was excited by a running bug, but then, of course, no bug runs back and forth like that. Hit by a car? I approached him diagonally so as not to alarm him, the sun above glowing a diaphanous hole through the gauzy, slightly overcast afternoon sky. Coming back from Spiral Diner to our headquarters, cutting through battered old Southside blocks not yet redeveloped, I’d really only been thinking about the big puffy vegan chocolate chip cookie in my jacket pocket. The cat was so gaunt his shoulder blades and hips were hatchets beneath the draped robe of his strangely still-lustrous pelt. I squatted like a good old Arab man ready to chat, eyes poring over him, searching for blood in his nostrils, ears, corners of his mouth. But I saw nothing. He didn’t notice me.

I lied to him. “You be aiight.” As if struck by some distant memory his head fell back and rolled on his shoulders, and I glimpsed the green globes of his eyes: pierced yet dilated. But then his head dropped forward and hung again like a spent sunflower, mouth open, fangs showing.

I suddenly had the feeling that I should do something — maybe say a prayer? Yeah, he was just a street cat. But how many times had people said the same thing ’bout me? Squatting there, with my soles planted flat into the concrete, trying to concentrate, the gauzy situation tempting my mind to drift, I had a fleeting sense of the original buffalo grass prairie beneath us. Were those massive sod tangles of roots still down there, below all this, from so long ago, old and dead, but still in the capped darkness of the soil there?

Sometimes I wonder what lies beneath the pavement of our skulls. When the tsunami hit the Indian Ocean last Christmas, causing such massive loss of life, one startling anecdote slipped out of the suffering aftermath. Most of the native wildlife survived, quickly traveling to higher ground, having somehow known the killing waves were coming. And so did the most island-remote, least-contacted indigenous tribes of people. That little fact is likely the story of the century. What do we really know?

I know one thing: Back before all this roaring metal and noise, back when everything was quiet and connected, there was something different going on here, and likely all over the world, from the deepest oceans to the darkest forests to the swooning prairies. And it told its stories through whispers that you didn’t have to listen to hear. What’s seen as supernatural today was the normal and natural then. And even now, beneath the noise, beneath my own pavement, I still run into tatters of that. Me, I’ve always had this gut feeling that the Sun is the eye-lens of God. Original Fire. And everything original in life is connected to That.

Well, I’d better go, I thought to the cat, preparing to stand. The cat jerked himself up on stiff legs, head rolling into the sun, his neck unable to hold it up. His head fell over toward me. Again I saw the globes of his eyes. Momentarily the dilation shifted or slipped. He saw me, maybe for the first time, and in that second I saw the severe mental concentration of those about to die.

Back before domestic cats were even here, Plains Indian people used to build mysterious circles of buffalo skulls out on the prairie, and they glowed like ghostly halos in the moonlight. It spooked the settlers as they stepped out of the woods and into the open West.

The cat wobbled 10 stiff paces down the gutter, tried to place one paw up onto the curb, and fell over on his side, legs straight out.

Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.

Fort Worth Weekly
Second Thought: Wednesday, October 5, 2005
Katrina West It may take a lifetime for New Orleans transplants to adjust.

By JARID MANOS

Here in Fort Worth, “Where the West Begins,” I felt melancholic watching the airlift of New Orleans’ mostly poor, mostly black folks to far-flung cities in the American West.

Hurricane Katrina and the breached levees left folks who lived below sea level with nothing. Now accidental voyageurs, many didn’t find out where they were going until mid-flight. In a moment, their clustered world of old neighborhoods, bayous, moss-laden trees, year-round rains and constant humidity, crawfish, hip-hop, jazz, and zydeco, where just about everybody was black, or at least brown Creole, was replaced with high-elevation landscapes of soaring vistas, blue skies, dry thin air, few if any trees, and people who look, act, think, and talk nothing like them. Most will never return to N’awlins. Years ago I met folks in Louisiana who knew all their ancestors nearly 200 years, back into slavery, none of whom had ever left a 50-mile radius.

The open road, the new beginning on a stark, arid landscape, is the enduring mythology of the American West. But that road has flattened many who did not expect the West’s loneliness, culture clashes, and environmental exploitation.

In Albuquerque, The New York Times found an evacuee, grandmother Desiree Thompson. “This place is really strange to me,” she said. “The air is different. My nose feels all dry.”

In a Utah National Guard camp on a sagebrush plateau south of Salt Lake City, another evacuee wondered, “Am I the only guy around here with dreadlocks?” Hurricane victims at local Fort Worth shelters where friends and I have been working feel culturally a little closer to home, through similar “Dirty South” hip-hop music and culture. But still, I’ve heard some of them express dismay at our hot yellow burning sun. “I thought New Orleans was hot,” whistled one guy as he placed a white cotton towel over his sweating head, as if trying to duck from such a big bright sky. To me, the saturated blue light and puffy white prairie clouds looked soothing. I mean, it was only 96 degrees, not the anvil sky of the Further West.

For myself, I know I’ve tried to call home both my normal ghetto life and the outback West, and that West still beckons, even while it promises as much frustration, anger, potential violence, and isolation as it promises 60-mile views, grassland canyons, riverbeds, sandstone rocks to climb, and sudden moments of pole-axing silence that might suddenly bring you closer to God. “There’s no place like home,” fabled Dorothy of western Kansas once said. But the West may never be “home” in the conventional sense because it’s an aching place, an unsettled-stomach kind of place, too close still to the recent history of racial conquest and suppression of the wild, and too perpetually wrought up in social conflict. It is no mistake that barbed wire has become the emblematic icon, or should I say irony, of the promise of freedom in our American West.

Maybe contradictions are the true essence of the West: freedom and claustrophobia, hopes and dashed dreams, beauty and devastation, welcome arms and disemboweling intolerance, an open road that sometimes becomes the end of the road. Each New Orleans evacuee will have her or his new story. For better or worse, most will stay, set up new lives.

Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, is a sixth-generation Mormon who lives in Salt Lake and loves her West fiercely, yet still hasn’t come to terms with its dark underlining. She said, “How do we find refuge in change? … Having lived in Utah all of my life, I can tell you that in many ways I know of no place more lonely, no place more unfamiliar. When I talk about how it is both a blessing and a burden to have those kinds of roots, it can be terribly isolating, because when you are so familiar, you know the shadow. … But I still love it. And that is the richness, the texture.”

I’ve been thousands of miles into the West. As I read the recent accounts of the New Westerners, this son-of-an-immigrant mixed-race porch monkey feels himself simultaneously longing for and dreading the Further West. Close in, or further out, our West’s problems and promises are something I’ve not yet been able to reconcile.

The Times closed its article with a photo of a young boy on the Utah Guard base alone in a large swimming pool. His arms are pushed forward in the clean water, as if about to swim. It is near twilight; the last of the evening’s sunlight glows on his coppery face. The pool is an aquamarine blue matching the thin, arid evening sky, and miles away the Wasatch Mountains rise, glowing also. You can feel the dry air, the night chill approaching. The wispy summer desert clouds are high up and a little see-through, and match the white pearl circles of his fingernails.

Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.

Fort Worth Weekly
Second Thought: Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Of Wolves and Words Why use beautiful animals as a metaphor for evils wrought by humankind?

By JARID MANOS

I appreciated the Weekly’s recent cover story exposing unscrupulous mortgage lenders, but I have to take issue with the title “Wolves in Small Print.” Western civilization has had a hysterical fear of wolves for over a thousand years, projecting onto them all kinds of superstitions, phobias, and bad press, rooted in Western man’s inability to feel comfortable with himself and his inability to see himself as part of the Earth rather than stomping on top of it. Wolves have been killed on sight throughout history. Even now, in Alaska a state-sponsored private air force is blasting wolves from fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.

In Western Europe, the continent was wiped clean of all but a small handful of wolves. Settlers arriving in North America brought the same trembling fears and wars on wildlife with them. In the New England colonies, Cotton Mather quaked about “the waste and howling wilderness.” Bounties were issued for the scalps of dead wolves and Indians (because Indian people were considered a form of wolves and not actually human). The plague of hatred swept westward across the continent, paralleling the rise in popularity of folk stories about the big bad wolf, wolves in sheep’s clothing, and Little Red Riding Hood’s poor ol’ grandma supposedly getting her ass eaten by a wolf in one big (“what a big mouth you have!”) gulp. (Wolves will never be Fifi the poodle, and certainly they have the capacity to take humans as prey, but to date there hasn’t been a single recorded case of a healthy wild wolf killing a person in North America.)

As the natural prey of wolves — first deer, and then, further west, buffalo —were wiped out by market hunters, in desperation the wolves turned to the domestic livestock by then ravaging the landscape. The popular phrase “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” might read better as “a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” because wolves are the native, pure, and natural part of the landscape. It’s the sheep and cattle that are the alien invaders.

A final, epic showdown ensued. Chunks of poisoned meat were scattered indiscriminately across the American West, setting off waves of death in the food chain and killing millions of animals and birds. At the same time, government agents and ranchers mounted an all-out offensive to shoot, trap, and den (the process of hooking pups out of dens and smashing their skulls) the remaining wolves. Out in the Texas Panhandle, an eerie gathering of some 3,000 wolves, something never seen before or since, began an exodus northwestward into New Mexico and dispersed, fleeing their End Times. Wolves caught in traps were often burned alive, or pulled apart by two horses whipped in opposite directions, or dragged to their deaths. Barry Lopez, in Of Wolves And Men, writes: “And sometimes, I think, because the killing is so righteously pursued and yet so entirely with conscience, killing wolves has to do with murder.”

Today, Texas’ 167 million acres don’t shelter a single wolf, though we once had red wolves in the south and east, Great Plains buffalo wolves throughout the state, and Mexican (or Lobo) wolves around the Big Bend area. In Fort Worth, when workers were running the streetcar out to the new bourgeois settlement of Arlington Heights, cooling its engines with the waters of Lake Como, wolves were often heard howling somewhere out there in the yellow prairie grass, under the cover of darkness.

Wolves are extremely complex, sensitive, intelligent animals. They are also native. How about us? When will we become “native” to this land? How we as people use language reflects upon us as a culture.

Maybe 50 years from now, long after the 20,000-acre Fort Worth Prairie Park that my organization is working toward has been created and ecologically connected through viable corridors to other protected lands further to the west, folks living in the shining eco-city of Fort Worth will have a gleam in their eye about the western wilderness at their doorstep and know they can at last truthfully call themselves home to this land:

Baby, can you get the kids and meet me at the SolaRail station after work? I heard that a family of wolves — with three pups — was seen out on Limestone Ridge, near Mary’s Creek, right near where we saw that burst of hummingbirds last year. Our boots and water bottles are still in the HV, but let’s take the Rail. It lets us off a mile from the trailhead. We can refill up at the creek. … You know, at lunch today I was thinking about how back at the turn of the century they couldn’t even drink from the creeks or rivers, or anything. Damn, that must’ve been an ugly time. I can’t imagine it.

Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.

Fort Worth Weekly
Second Thought: Wednesday, December 24, 2004
The Lights of Como

By JARID MANOS

Como at Christmas is still a wifebeater kind of place. Meaning the kind of white undershirt tank tops that ’hood dudes wear as regular gear on warm days. Hanes or FTL, worn close-fitting, with loose jeans, and maybe a ballcap, skully, or kangol, and thin silver or gold chain.

I’m used to being a center of the cops’ (unwarranted) attention, but my neighbors across the street override me. I slip in and out mostly unnoticed. One afternoon, in her big white bra and big orange panties, the woman from over there lay flat on her back in the gutter, arms spread wide like she was about to make a concrete angel, legs up on the weedy Westside curb. “I’ma call the po-lice!” she yelled, shaking her head side to side. Her big-n-tall dark-skinned dude, potbelly stretching his wifebeater out, screamed down at her. “Bitch, get in the house right now!” “I’ma call the po-lice!” she screamed. “Get in the house,” he yelled.

He took a tire iron and began bashing in the windows of his Cadillac. First the windshield, then the side windows, then the back. Glass sparkled up like soda in a tv commercial. When she finally got up, he lumbered in ahead of her and slammed the door in her face. She banged. “Let me in!” Pounding. Silence.

She went back and lay down in the gutter and began shaking her head from side to side again, arms out, crying. “I’ma call the po-lice!” One of my block’s stray dogs gingerly walked past her, sniffing, but giving her moving head a wide berth. Somebody called the police. As they came, she got up, and her dude let her in. And wouldn’t let the police in.

Each night in Como more families put up their Christmas lights. Some hang simple “icicle lights,” while others string long lines of pure white lights together into elaborate winter scenes set in snowless Texas front yards of weeds, dirt, and buffalo grass, outlining shapes of animals, Christmas trees, and huddled figures. Still others create a carnival of multi-colored, brightly blinking, head-hurting lights covering their entire house and yard — especially the families recently arrived from Mexico, families who are gradually browning up Como. Brown/black integration is happening in every dirt-poor, still-rough ’hood in the West.

Our long-glowing prairie twilights and icy blue nights at this time of year connect us to drier lands further west. So many stars become visible in the winter-clean air and low humidity that I can see the Seven Sisters, the high-up little cluster that whispers through Plains Indian cosmology. With the winds regularly swinging from north to south, cold to warm, and back, ruled by winds we are, it’s hard not to want to reach for more, but that “more” — at that moment when the twilight seems to penetrate most — seems outside of this life. At times like this, when I was little, I’d get so exhausted that I thought I’d go to sleep and wake up the next day as an old man, my black hair turned white, and with a big, long, coarse white beard.

In a handful of houses, there’s activity all night long, cars coming and going. Cops also come periodically. Their blue-red-white strobe lights flash the block. After a late day at work, I slipped past them onto my dark porch, old insecurities about fitting some police profile still making me want to be inconspicuous. My shadow on the wall stopped me. In the flashing lights it was dancing, shifting side-to-side, rhythm on the old white-painted wooden boards. A sudden gust of wind exhaled through, shaking the few scraggly Texas trees and pushing over the long, winter-dried prairie grass in the vacant lot next door.

The following afternoon, dragging himself up my block, a hunched-over, bearded old man I’ve never seen before came dragging a big hunk of chain-link fence. It sounded like chains being dragged over the pavement, and I absolutely could not take that sound. An ashy old black man from Como, dragging chains. Pushing toward the end of a year and into a baby new one.

I have a scrawny-ass mesquite tree in my front yard. Right now its bare branches are shaking in a strong warm south wind hushing over us from Mexico. I walked to Walgreen’s and bought me a string of green lights for $3.99 and strung its top like a crown. It’s my Como Christmas tree. When the winds blow on a cold or warm prairie winter night, I feel so restless and flushed, I get excited. The green is for Earth, and I know somewhere up over the horizon we will have good, good news.

Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.

Fort Worth Weekly
Second Thought: Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Cloud City Sifting 9/11 memories through the sieve of time and culture.

By JARID MANOS

I’m still a primitive monkey. I don’t like loud noises. I also don’t find recreation in throwing myself off cliffs, out of planes, or through twisting, upside-down loops of crazy-ass rides at Six Flags Over Texas. Why would I? Although, if I’m to be honest and share too much information, when I was a little mug I was sure I’d eventually check out with a high dive at sunset or twilight from the top of a building, even a five- or six-story one. I’ve always had excellent form.

“It was sickening,” my homeboy Priestly said recently after riding the new vertical Superman thing at Six Flags. “Never had my stomach do that before. It was like I was falling up.”

Me, I’ve always stayed outside the fence. Riding the bike trail past Six Flags in Denver two years ago this October, I slowed and cocked my head at the screams. People were happily throwing themselves into violent freefalls, secured to high-crane wires or roller-coaster bucket seats. Another Colorado High Plains summer was humming into the richness of a warm early fall. Sun-baked prairie grasses along the Platte River glistened. Momentarily, there was no sense of a nation stricken.

You discover the real story of something through its small details.

The young guy in the Associated Press photo diving headfirst from Tower One still had his backpack on. In New York City, people often wear small backpacks to work, making easier the subway ride and city blocks walked. He appeared to be a brother, with urban hiking boots and a jacket, casually dressed for his office job. He was not screaming; he seemed calm upside down, arms at his side. But he’d just dived into his death’s freefall, an act totally without hope. Moments earlier, just arrived at the office, his concerns may have been a blueberry muffin and orange juice, or trying to switch Tuesday-morning-commute thoughts from his girl to his job.

A majority of the thousands killed were in their 20s, 30s and 40s; over 80 nationalities worked in the Twin Towers. People high up said they used to watch storms below them. This plainsman ended up in NYC for a couple of years. Once I went to the top, with a fellow criminal named Camron. The sprawling metropolis looked “like something was really going on down there.” Sensory overload. We only knew the city from its underbelly streets, looking up.

When a hurricane would creep up the coast, uptown ‘hood rats joked about the towers snapping off and falling into New Jersey. I’ve been surprised to hear that some architects thought the Twin Towers were ugly. Despite my younger disdain for civilization, I was privately awed with their silver sleekness and stature. They didn’t just provide an instant compass point south when emerging from a maze of subway stairs. Although I’m a primitive monkey about technology, I imagined the towers anchoring a “Cloud City” of futuristic possibilities, like those in Calvin’s sci-fi films.

I’d stream down into Central Park from Harlem, cross the creeks and wooded gorges of the North Woods, and emerge onto a large grassy field, its open space, sky and bike trails reminding me of out West, or of Hiawatha stepping from his primeval forest onto the prairies. But to the south, a many-spired skyline rose, the World Trade Center at the island’s tip looming above all else. At twilight, skyscraper lights would slink on, and jetliners high above the curve of the Earth would flash an orange reflection of the setting sun while down here it was almost dark. “The twilight is the crack between the worlds,” Yaqui sorcerer don Juan once remarked.

After the attacks, faces on tv exclaimed, “How could it happen here?” I thought instead, “How dare they — in the name of God — kill all those innocent people?” As if they were the U.S. Army and settlers on the Great Plains in the 1800s, or Columbus and the Hispanic conquistadors, or the colonial mid-Atlantic slave traders. Terror did happen here. Before.

On Sept. 11, my friend Kanae, who lives across the East River in Brooklyn, looked up and saw her sky filled with pieces of paper falling like charred white doves. In Denver, as I watched the tv replays of the second jetliner exploding into the second tower and heard the freefall, end-of-the-world spectator screams off camera, I noticed a pigeon flapping away across the top of the tv screen, startled.

Maybe city pigeons — formerly called rock doves and imported from England — are still birds of peace. After all, they’ve been around guns for hundreds of years now. Loud bangs are bad.

Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.

Fort Worth Weekly
Second Thought: Wednesday, April 24, 2003
Deserts All Around Us There’s a lot blowin’ in the wind these days, but not many answers.

By JARID MANOS

Only on the plains or the open ocean or the desert will the winds blow 25 to 30 mph for three days straight. Sometimes it seems the sky is all we have left. Spirit is the ultimate wilderness. I imagine what Fort Worth was like before they planted all these damn trees, back when it was prairie-oak savannah, playing out westward into a treeless, grassy plain rising with tawny, lithe life, free of the hate, cattle, and bristling wires that conquer it now.

Still … in that sky, moments of unbearable beauty. … Prairie afternoon yellow and blue light, orange sunsets at city’s end blazing over the great grassland sea, powerful, towering white cumulus clouds boiling into the sky like something cataclysmic, their upper reaches cast in evening pastels from a sun dropping us off into darkness, reminding us how small we are.

Walking west down Camp Bowie to the gym into late afternoon sunlight, I felt myself creating a narrow pathway involving just me and sky, shutting out roaring cars and trucks, and people honking at me for four or five different reasons. From newspaper vending boxes, front-page pictures of the Fort Worth and Dallas papers showed false clouds rising as “coalition” forces bombed Babylon. The fake clouds were back-dropped by black walls of oil-fire smoke looking as severe as one of our Plains thunderstorms approaching. In those pictures, at the horizon was what at first looked like a window of orange light from a setting sun, but was really the flare of burning buildings. On my way home, I bought USA Today. A color picture, almost Dali-esque, anchored the front page — a little girl in a puffy white dress fleeing, her face stretched in terror, her pigtail blowing sideways in the desert wind, stark figures of traditionally dressed Iraqis joining her, black smoke behind them billowing. …

In my ’hood, a big gray fox got splattered bolting across Horne Street. He’d come up the rangy, green, overgrown alley leading down to the Lake Como area that’s rich in urban wildlife and urban snakebite (used syringes). Splayed on the pavement, tongue sticking out, his upchucked blood mingled with the oil on the road, destined to run into the creek and lake.

In my house, National Public Radio briefly crackled with the news of burned, blackened civilians. I read the newspaper as I roasted a fat jalapeño, preparing to roll it up in a warm wheat wrap with tahina and mashed banana. The pepper’s skin blistered, bubbled, blackened. My kitchen smelled like Albuquerque in October, Hatch chile time, 600 miles west across the prairie sea.

In many ways, times feel like 1991, only somehow worse; 1991 on drugs. On my streets, women are openly hooking again, in numbers not seen for a long time. On a Southside corner near my work, a girl looking like Lil’ Kim in a pressed blonde wig waved her high-held hand like a hankie at cars going by. She looked high-class compared to girls in Como, some who don’t have shoes.

After my meal, mouth and throat blazing sweet-hot, I went back out. The spring south winds had blown hard for three days and nights straight. It was dark and the streets were nearly empty of pedestrians because, well, it’s Como. Dirt and litter blew up the hill. The blood-oil smear around the fox’s mouth and tongue was streetlight-shining. A barefoot woman in a dull pink dress appeared out of the sandstorm of a road construction site and began walking toward me, clutching her tiny purse to her chest.

I shook my head as she mouthed something. The wind blew her words away. Stepping upwind of me, she tried to strike a pose. She had good hair, her own, shoulder-length, and held it out of her face with one hand. Her dress battered between her legs.

“Only five dollars, bruthaman,” she said. “I ain’t broke luck yet tonight.”

“Baby, where your shoes,” I said, my tongue breathing hhhot.

I continued walking, thinking that in the Bush Un-Economy, women will swallow for five dollars. I ended up going back to her, wordlessly handing her the lousy peso in my wallet, then disappeared.

In USA Today, readers had commented on a picture of a soldier carrying a shell-shocked, injured Iraqi boy whose bare ass hung out. One reader celebrated that this picture “explains … why so many Americans support this war.”

But who literally bombed the pants off the little boy to begin with?

What’s wrong with this picture?
Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.