Perspectives on Nature

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We left I-20 at Big Spring and took the narrow State Highway 176 through Andrews, Texas toward Eunice, New Mexico. We drove through miles of oil fields in the most inhospitable west Texas land I had ever seen. I wish that I had more appreciation for this kind of arid terrain, but the sight of it just makes me long to be somewhere else. Like where? Well, since I’m only wishing, how about Yosemite Valley? I would love to feel the spray of its towering waterfalls and walk through its lush green meadows beside the cold and swift-running Merced River. I would even settle for some green watery place in east Texas. I guess that arid places like this scorched land sitting atop the Permian Basin remind me too much of the struggle to survive, and the foul smell coming from hundreds of oil wells makes it worse. You can’t touch half of the vegetation without getting stabbed, and the place is crawling with scorpions, lizards, and rattlesnakes.

My aversion to the desert must be rooted in my childhood. I grew up in the Mississippi Delta near Helena, Arkansas, where we enjoyed an abundance of rainfall and the shade of trees too large to wrap your arms around. There was even an abundance of water under the ground. The Weeping willow flourished in our yard with no need for irrigation, and I can still recall the time I dug a two-foot deep hole in the ground, and it began to fill up with water from below. On many Spring days during high water on the Mississippi River, I would wade half a mile down a flooded gravel road to visit my friend who lived in a houseboat near the mouth of the St. Francis River. Although I have lived over forty years of my adult life in Texas, that Delta boy has never left me. So, I still don’t react very well to being transplanted to the desert. Dallas is dry enough.

One evening not too long ago at a friend’s party, the topic of travel came up, and I began to disrespect the desert in the presence of a woman who, unknown to me, had recently moved to Texas and was missing her beloved home in the Arizona desert. She politely disagreed with me, and then she charmed the group with her long description of the beauty of the Sonoran Desert landscape that surrounded her home. Her eyes glowed as she told why she preferred the desert to any other place on Earth. Her personal perspective pointed out the subjective nature of beauty, and it reminded me that you have to look more deeply into natural things with an open and informed mind to be able to appreciate the beauty of a place that would otherwise repel you. With the right experience, knowledge, and perspective, perhaps even I could fall in love with such a place.

My friend’s bright perspective on the Sonoran Desert still left me far from falling in love with the arid setting of this oil field, but I was nevertheless able to look around and appreciate the fact that life of all kinds was thriving here. In fact, this area is still considered grassland and not technically a desert. There were even some cattle peacefully grazing on whatever thin strands of grass the dry land provided. In this austere setting, I would have expected the cows to look like something from a Georgia O’Keefe painting, but incredibly they actually had a decent amount of meat on their bones. There were but few cattle compared to the vast numbers of oil wells and acres of land, confirming that oil is the money crop here. The scene reminded me of an old friend from the oil patch of Breckenridge, Texas, who used to say of the stinking oilfields, “That’s the smell of money!”

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