Beautiful green prairie right in the summer Albuquerque Rio Grande Valley, right? Actually, it’s just a fallow field not plowed this year grown up thick with invasive weeds, nothing natural

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.

There’s no moon out, it’s very dark, about 2 degrees above zero, and I just came back from an after work couple-mile walk up a frozen dirt track out into the empty, silent, rolling prairie. Emptied prairie. Such wide open land, stretching to as far as you can see, but… The life shot; no fire next time.

Everybody knows the dark isn’t really dark; you just have to get used to it. I am very used to disappearing into the dark. My feet plant themselves lightly into the ground, so only the closest animals (survivors who live in the dirt, may they stay blessed) will know of my passing.

The countless stars. Mass across the black sky.

I have walked this Earth for thousands and thousands of years beneath the hot sun or cold wind and the bright or dark sky, and still never a day or night is the same.

My exhaustion level is much recovered from the point it was a couple weeks ago.

I walked up and down the frozen grass hills beneath the sky of stars, alternately thinking about our work up here on the Rez, or the ’bout-to-go national Ecological Health Movement, or the silence and emptiness around me. Making my way up a larger hill, at the top I let my head fall back to stare up at the stars. Directly overhead they seemed to have exploded outward, like from a single giant star themselves, with billions of others faint like glowing yellow dust in the black behind.

Our slaughter of countless souls across the world. People and animals. Our tiny, stricken, beautiful planet. Hundreds if not thousands of years of not acting right; of defining ourselves by ignorant mindless violence. Our crushing, murderous behavior as if a fuck you to God and Earth’s abundance and beauty. The damn shame of this ragged, emptied (dreams died in the bloody snow) Oglala prairie. Our emptiness.

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.

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.

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.

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.