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.

It’s weird traveling through dense brush and trees along a hidden creek then coming out into uplands, and then realizing the entire thing was once a cotton farm, scalped bare. When you know what native prairie should like, and go searching the green countryside south of Dallas to find yourself surrounded by weeds and invasive species — an eerie artificial jungle aside from the elm and hackberry trees and some creekside flowers — you get a grasp of how much was lost. It was funny; we got excited to find a three scattered individual plants of big bluestem grass whose seeds somehow happened to remain in the soil. The Blackland Prairie upon which Dallas Town built was once 12 million acres in size; now just a few scattered parcels of a couple hundred or less acres here and there remain.

Gregory Joseph’s extended family has a long history in the area. They happen to live a few miles outside of town to the west in the country. The majority of black families live on the east side of Corsicana, and have deep roots dating back to the days of cotton. Some still live in shotgun houses. Folks there have been asking about the possibility of starting a Plains Youth InterACTION chapter in Corsicana maybe next year. The story of people on the land continues.

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!

I’m sitting just inside the open front porch door in this old two story house turned daycare turned GPRC headquarters… and it just occurred to me that if the tornado comes this way, I really have no where to go. There are no ditches out front.

Maybe I will crawl in with the water heater at the center of the building?

Ok… the closest siren just came on, its wailing sound waves seeming to roll toward me over the city like… well waves, because of the gusting, driving wind and rain…

Maybe I should close this laptop… I’m imagining when this city used to just be wide open tallgrass prairie…

Can’t beat spring in Texas!

It’s occurred to me that out here in Flyover Country, even in 2007, we’re still mythologized by our weather and landscape. One example: tornadoes both thrill and terrify folk– at the same time.