Today when I was coming back from the river he finally heard me walking to my house and said loud enough to hear (he has this way where he “wakes” up his head as he turns to look upat you, as if he’s momentarily shaking away deepest thoughts and consternation) “What’s up Mr. Jarid.”

Sometimes there are 6 or 8 kids over there, I can never keep count. The little girls aren’t even six yet but they’re all sassy, with their hair in pigtails and feet in pink flip flops and little hands on their hips. The grandma does so much to help out all her grandkids (it’s her house and they stay with her a lot of the time). She works the graveyard shift at a fast food joint flipping burgers. But even though there are other kids over there, little Patrick on the porch always seems inwardly so alone. Lorenzo and me are gon try to get him into GPRC’s Youth InterACTION program.

But tonight, the second shot and the piercing ricochet of the bullet off the pole and then off a metal warehouse sent me ducking down the side of the levee to the water’s edge. Never saw the shooter. I was northeast of town — could’ve been somebody pulled off the freeway. I accidentally scared a big fat beaver who went flying/tumbling into the river likely screaming Bloody Mary Mother of Jesus in beaver language as he hit the water, slapping it hard with his tail sending a geyser up and his own loud crack out into the night before he disappeared below the surface.

The random attacks… like when walking to the store in a non-minority neighborhood and people speeding by in their cars throwing bottles out the window at me. At 50 mph they are powerful lords over me. Or in Lubbock they throw rocks from inside their apartment gates at night (sometimes even hiding in the bushes to do so.)

When you’re under fire, your flesh feels very vulnerable. I can imagine what a dove feels like on September 1st.

Glad no bullet capped me though. Even as I had to walk horizontally along the steep bank pronating my right foot unnaturally against my ankle in order to keep moving and putting distance between me and the shooter, I thought: damn what a stupid waste it would’ve been if my ass was suddenly shot cold after all these years of work, getting this movement really set and going, and I hadn’t completed any of the really big work yet. Wonder if the stray dogs woulda ate on me before anybody found me– likely a couple days.

—
My prayers to all the people who died recently from all the violent storms (cyclone in Myanmar — 100,000 people dead with many more threatened by lack of aid and medicine) and Sichuan province earthquake in China 10,000 dead, as well as almost 100 people from over 800 tornadoes in the US already this spring.

(The larger death numbers numb. Can you imagine how reeling the US would be if 10,000 people died in a single event. Americans have to realize it is just as catastrophic to Burmese folks or to the ethnic Han Chinese, Chinese Tibetans, and Hui Muslim Chinese.

I saw one Internet news post that one of the concerns against building the gargantuan (and ecologically and socially disastrous) Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River was that the massive weight of the reservoir might exacerbate an earthquake’s trigger point. Don’t know about any of this, but the headline on Huffington Post tonight is THE ANGRY EARTH, and lots of posters are commenting about we humans ultimately being little more than fleas on a dog’s back.

What matters is that people get the help they need now, in their time of massive suffering. Burma appears to have its own “Brownie” purposely doing “a heckuva job.”

I beat it heading east down across the Trinity River, with the storm looming larger and larger over my shoulder and the winds picking up. It’s funny how you can skate down a steep hill and have to push to get down because of the winds, when normally during calm you’re sort of putting your life into your hands going close to 30 mph at that grade.

Ten minutes after I got to my house it caught up to me and started pounding with big hail stones. I’m in a new house, and for the first time ever it has a garage but I found out I didnt know how to open the damn thing since I’d never used it. I finally figured it out and ran out to get my car with all them big hail stones pounding me in the back of my skull and my shoulders, but i got the car inside. Least now I now how to open the garage door.

The other, even bigger success is we just got Texas Parks and Wildlife to finally agree to take the first steps toward freedom and clemency for the surviving imprisoned native Texas buffalo (not that they ever did anything wrong except want to be left alone to roam, but that is another story). Imprisoned are 63 individual animals with ancient, purebred lineage, all that is left from the 4 million member herd, stuck in a 330 acre cage and losing their ancestral herd culture and behavior, not to mention going crazy from the confinement. The fact that the old hook-and-bullet agency, now headed by a new E.D., Carter Smith, is ready to partner with GPRC on landscape-scale protections and acknowledges the value of GPRC’s work to blend social work with ecological recovery and protections shows major progress for Texas

As for the buffalo, those big beautiful black animals who have suffered so much, at least one family group (for starters) will soon have thousands of wild acres to stretch their legs and souls and heartbeats again after they are released into a first portion of our new 12,000 acre Cynthia Ann Parker Wilderness preserve, which is about 200 miles northwest of Fort Worth. We’re partnering with Foard County and Pease Rivers Partners. We expect to be able to expand in size. This work is a step toward something much bigger, not just in additional acreage but cross-culturally among people, from rural and urban, people of many different colors, cultures, ages and communities coming together for some good hard work and exciting progress. And this summer, our hood kids and our rez kids will meet out there for the Youth Summit!

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.

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.