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.

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.