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.

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.