Speaker 1: Okay, Dan Hostage, thanks for thanks for coming on the
Crime Pace podcast. I've been hearing your name for years
now through people like Michael Easton and Adam Black Talk.
You know, i'd ask Eason, where'd you get this fucking
rare Texas plant? You'd always say, Oh, Dan Hostage, you
were growing a lot of rare shit, really rare species
from around here. So I it's an honor to finally
meet you and hear everything you have to say. And
you're also kind of a historian of the state of
Texas as well, are you not.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'd say i'd be an amateur.
Speaker 1: Right, we're sitting in a library of books. So yeah,
So how did you end up here? And how'd you
get into native how'd you get into the native place?
Speaker 2: Oh? I have been growing trees since I can my
earliest memories. My mother used to say, every coffee can
for me, I punch holes in the bottom. And as
we moved around, I collected seats of trees and grew
them out and planted them in the lawn. For instance,
from when I from where I moved from Connecticut to here,
And you should see the dogwood I planted in nineteen
sixty eight. When I last looked at it in two
thousand and two, it had about a fourteen inch trunk
and was thirty five feet tall.
Speaker 1: So you've been into this stuff forever since you were
a kid.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and drewid I don't know if I got the
full suite of jeans.
Speaker 1: Were you playing with bugs and stuff as a kid?
Like we butterflas looking.
Speaker 3: At the.
Speaker 2: Oh, and it's really amphibians, you know, But that's when
we used to have things like salamanders, which I mean
I had salamanders here when I first moved you. You
could go pop the rocks over here and find salamon.
Speaker 1: So you live, you live in San Marcus.
Speaker 2: You live in Hayes County.
Speaker 1: You live in Hayes County basically on the eastern Agiana
Edwards Plateau. And you've seen this area go through a
yeahing change. You've been here forty years.
Speaker 2: I moved your here in eighty six.
Speaker 1: Yeah, from Connecticut.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I was in grad school in Austin, yeah,
eighty So.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that really is so what happened? What was it?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: I mean, what is like? How did this when did
the development really start here? Because there's massive development, there's suburbs.
We stayed at this airbnb. This's fucking last time I'll
ever do this. We stayed a room in an airbnb.
This lady converted a room in this suburban community. It
looked like the kind of place that would be built
on top of, you know, after they demolish a place
that you were and I would love to go, you know,
and like, look after they demolish it, they put up
one of these fucking hideous, depressing communities the right exactly, yeah, right,
it's just that developers get rich quick scheme. It's depressing
the being.
Speaker 2: Population.
Speaker 1: The whole time I'm there, I'm like, cut down.
Speaker 2: On chemical use when you can, when you know, if
you need a lawnmower, you can you know, mow your
alam with a waiting or eighteen minutes on a Saturday morning. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The old time I was there, I was like, what
was here even like ten years ago, you know.
Speaker 2: But now it's been been real uh, both educational and
extremely disheartening depressing to to fall watch what has happened.
Like I said, when I moved here, I had that
those black and yellow tiger Salomon though one of the
coolest things that I was constantly pulling out of my
pool where the box tortoise. And then after a few
years here they started showing up with puncture wounds. So
I bought a couple of little kiddie pools and I
would set them in there in the shade with water.
Speaker 1: Well was getting them dogs or dogs as.
Speaker 2: People moved in with their dogs, and they couldn't kill them,
but because their backs were so arched, they'd have four
puncture wounds in it. So I bought one hundred grams
of stripped of mycin. And a friend of mine owned
a restaurant, so he had the kitchen staff save all
of the oh iners of the you know, the ends
of the onions and carrots and that, all that sort
of stuff, and I would sprinkle the striped of micin
on it and feed them. And there were times I
had ten or twelve of them, and I'd let them go,
and sure enough, three months five months later they'd be back.
I could see where their wounds had healed, and now
here were fresh ones. So I got a triangular file,
started marking nicking their shells on the rim which doesn't regrow,
and got a little book out and a little system,
and some of these things went through my hands as
many as five times Jesus Christ. And then by nineteen
ninety four they were utterly gone.
Speaker 1: They were all gone.
Speaker 2: You've seen one since kills on the road. Not a
salamander out here since then. First plant I saw it
disappear from here was around all these you have the
open areas of the grass and cactus, and then you
have these so called mots of the cedar trees with
the oaks and so forth. Around those months was a
lugume Keasha Texana fernicacia.
Speaker 1: Beautiful little yeah.
Speaker 2: It just rained every one of these months around here,
and the right time of the year there'd be these
beautiful little powderpuff pink flowers on it. Well, my description
of colors is bad.
Speaker 1: I have oh yeah, yeah, Well I wonder what it
is now, because they just disappear.
Speaker 2: They're utterly gone. I've not seen one eighteen inches.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now down where I work at Sex, they're a weed.
I don't know why. There's so many in this field
that have made it, especially that field was used to
grow corn for years, but there are so many there.
They just come up spontaneously everywhere.
Speaker 1: I don't have this suit, but that used to be
more common here and now.
Speaker 2: It's utterly you cannot find it out here. So many
things have disappeared out here. But I was going to
say nineteen ninety. In year two thousand, the Edwards Plateau
went through its first real noticeable extinction event, which was
all of our cool wildflowers, basically all wildflowers that were
not members of the sunflower family and just super weedy
things like gay Lardia and Rudbeckia, and even there now
down to a few percent of what they are. The
other ones, things like the petsamens and wine cups, the
really showy stuff. One of the biggest losses was the bluebelt.
I tell I grew some bluebells at Simex my first
year there. The people that were freaking out.
Speaker 1: Beautiful you stoma, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. You know bluebill motors over here, in bluebell
ice cream and bluebell plumbia, and this, I mean, this
is this is a blue belt. You got blue ball
that's our state, you know flower, but this is and
I've got books over here that people are worrying about
them disappearing. It must have been so common in the
twenties and thirties too. I mean just everywhere. People there
are warning that your grandchildren are not going to know
what this plant is if we don't conserve this.
Speaker 1: So you've seen massive change in the forty years you've been.
Speaker 2: I used to see fields around Brownham of bluebells that
were sixty eighty acres solid bluebells.
Speaker 1: What change has happened? Because you said you're really into old,
old history, what changes happened the last one hundred that
have happened?
Speaker 2: Okay, so that was ninety nine, two thousand, and you know,
the this was the big topic of discussion in all
of the talks given it, like the Native Plant Society
and so forth, and you know, they got a committee
together lobby tech dot to stop these basic practices. It's
my belief looking at it at this over the years
that this was the really big this was the first
sign of the huge outbreak and jumping the deer population.
M M yeah, and everywhere here, No, they're almost nothing
compared to most of my friends have given up their
deer leases because you can't shoot one anymore. Why well
there isn't. We'll get to that. That comes late, that
comes soon.
Speaker 1: One six months ago literally ran luckily was I go.
Speaker 2: I tried for twenty five years. Every time I saw one,
I would go off the road and chase it down
the fence line to run it over. I've been investigated
twice by Parks and Wildlife for out of season shooting.
Speaker 1: Why because on your property or where?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I used to go out every night the first
twenty five years I lived here. I'd go out at
eleven and about two thirty and try to shoot sixty.
Speaker 1: And why is the population out of control? Because the
pretters have been wiped out.
Speaker 2: Around Yes, primarily, But what's happened, Well, we're gonna skipping ahead,
but what has happened with her, in my opinion, with
the whitetail deer? And this is why the economics will
show very clearly here now as people start, you'll see
all these hotels and stuff closing in places like Bandera
in Currville from the No, what's the point of going, honey,
if you're gonna shoot a deer that you get sixteen
pounds of meat off of and you get one shot,
you know, over three days of waking up at four
thirty in the morning and sending in a frozen, blind,
deadly still you know, Oh, well, it's gonna pay a
thousand bucks to do this, But it's sort of peaked
in the early about two thousand and five. At the
same time the deer population, now, I have not seen
a dead deer between my house and the edge of
town in two years. There was the first twenty five
years I lived here, there would be two to six
dead deer every time you.
Speaker 1: So what happened to them?
Speaker 2: They have destroyed their food source. So hoigh have crack
All moved in to town? You would not believe. I mean,
you've been at Michael's house. You've seen the mule deer
coming up. I mean walking across the college campus to
try to eat the stalks on is a gosdit.
Speaker 1: The population everything away, well, they dwarfed.
Speaker 2: Now most people don't know this, but in the thirties
in Texas natural history, okay, well, first week we destroyed
the end of the long the tall Grass Prairie was
destroyed during the thirty strout and at that point in
time we extincted the turkey and the white tailed deer
in Texas. Now, the turkey that was prominent in the
bulk of Texas was the Rio grand turkey. Now it
was replaced in the bulk of its range. You'll only
see the Rio grand Turkey near the near the Rio
Grande er in for West Texas. Oh wow, shit, okay,
all of our deer in Turkey. We did a deal
with the state of Virginia and in Rockbridge County. And
I found this out hitch hiking when the head of
the George Washington National Force picked me up and we drove.
I was hitch hiking for three hours and he was said, oh,
let me no, you're from Texas and you're in the
natural history. Well, let me tell you something most people
don't know that they entered in a breeding program with
Virginia because Virginia, our county was deemed to have the
best white tailed deer and turkeys and everything.
Speaker 1: From Texas had to import it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and at diversity was important. And this done on
chromosome banding and variations.
Speaker 1: Well what what what happened?
Speaker 2: The state of Texas paid, sent some people up paid
the Virginians set up a compound in Rockbridge County where
for years they developed. They bred many many turkey and
deer which were released in like nineteen fifty I believe
to fifty two. I'm these are those dates are guests.
Speaker 1: So Dan, would you say that that improper land management
has been a fucking thing here for a while.
Speaker 2: It's part of our state constitution. Ship for being in
Texas is change it. And it doesn't mean just on
the surface. I mean what is our what is Texas's
biggest export ben for the last seventy years, arrogance, air pollution.
Speaker 1: I'm fucking around just bizzing off all the Texans.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but no, honestly, if you really look at it
of what we kick out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, pollution from what just all the oil wells and
oil drilling or what.
Speaker 2: You better go down to the Gulf coast.
Speaker 1: All right, all that yeah, chemical cancer, rally, plastic I'm familiar. Right, Yeah,
Well I want to talk Okay, let's talk about the
Edwards Platello. Let's come back to this, because this was
you you were saying before the juniper woodland what every
one calls cedar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is cedar.
Speaker 1: I mean you that wasn't the way it was three
hundred But three hundred years ago to Hill country didn't look.
Speaker 2: Look at all like this. No, it was prairie. It
was tall grass.
Speaker 1: And prairie just over fire suppression and over grazing.
Speaker 2: Or over grazing. Now the interesting thing is is we've
now found out that under a lot of these old
cedar breaks, the big bluestame is sat quiescent as rhizomes.
For over one hundred years.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was on West It ten out of San Antonio,
about twelve fifteen miles out this old ranching family that
had made tons of money selling the ranch off piece
by piece to developers. I was. They took the last
twenty acres or something of it, and a friend of
mine became its director, really nice guy, and he called
me up one danced, get strapp what you do and
getting your car, get your camera, come down and see this.
You won't believe it. What they had done was they
had very limited funding so to build all the fences
they needed and the wheelchair ramps and so forth, because
all they were given was like the old dog trot
cabin and the twelve acres or whatever it was. Oh
this is on the me think on the south side
of eye ted, like I said, just outside the sixteen.
Speaker 1: So they caught all the seer because they needed.
Speaker 2: To use well, they took they had this. They had
a photo of the dog trot cabin from like nineteen
oh six. And you can see on the steep hillside
behind it like this three to six foot tall junipers. Hm.
And they decided to clear all of that and take
the lumber and use it for the fencing.
Speaker 1: And yeah. So when they did that.
Speaker 2: And they did that over a few weeks, they had
a set of reins and the entire hill side where
they had cut the cedar out was eighteen inches two
feet tall. I saw the stand of big bluestone.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's why I've never seen big bluestons in central
texas well.
Speaker 2: It's if you cut these a lot of these now,
if you cut them and it rains, so.
Speaker 1: It was prairie, so burning burning, and then just like
that's what kept all the juniper base. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very flammable. And the cool and the weird
thing about the juniper is it's the only one of
our trees that doesn't really come back from the base.
If you pick all the needles by hand off of
a mature cedar tree, it can't come back.
Speaker 1: It dies.
Speaker 2: They won't put new leaves out like another tree would.
It dies.
Speaker 1: So where did they exist before? Just in these little
islands and vegetation amidst the prairie.
Speaker 2: Or there's been a lot of mistaxonomy on the I
may get in a lot of trouble by this, doctor Adams,
if you're still around, forgive me, but the ash juniper
is really the eastern juniper is just a western race,
and there's named out of in the Ozona area as
another species. It's not. These are just this was all
chemical taxonomy done in the seventies with GC gastro chromatography.
Speaker 1: So it's a western ecotype. Yeah, it's a gana, Yeah
it is.
Speaker 2: There's no we were told in grad school east of
the if it's east of our thirty five, it's the
eastern cedar. If it's west of thirty five, it's the ash.
Speaker 1: Is there DNA sequences on it? You know?
Speaker 2: No, I don't.
Speaker 1: Probably that's interesting.
Speaker 2: I have a high disdain for the use as it's
currently being done genetic taxonomy. You don't take a handful
of genes, some of which you don't even know what
they do. You don't do just sequence these and then
compare them, uh to you know, I mean, plants have
so many more functional genes weeni ass vertebrates.
Speaker 1: Hopefully hopefully, hopefully full geno become the thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've got to be a full geno. Mean, you've
got to.
Speaker 1: Do But I'm but I'm interested in this landscape. I mean,
this just rapid landscape. And that all plays into the
history of this state.
Speaker 2: There was a couple other political things that happened at
the at the nineteenth just before the Great Drought of
the thirties, which had to do with the Mexican workers
being allowed to stay and bring their wives and then
have children, which became citizens and so forth, and the
electrification of the Hill country had traumatic change.
Speaker 1: We were talking about this before and this is and
you were kind of implying that the modern day fixation
on the border and all the xenophobic shit, despite whatever
take is, it goes back away, it goes, it goes
they're going to take over.
Speaker 2: It goes back to Jim Bowie, a daughter of the
Veramendi family. You know, he married a greaser. Basically was
the is how somebody forgive me any I don't want
to upset anyone out there.
Speaker 1: That was That was the old school slang derogatory term for.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it's I I I really I love the
citizens of Mexico as a whole.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no one's gonna no, one's gonna miss no't worry.
We know, we know you're on the level. But but but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's been a very very persistent and very
deeply ingrained Uh. And it's it's it's still still present.
And uh and and the dude, what is it? What
are we generation eleven?
Speaker 1: All this ship with Ken Pax then and his because
he just filed the suit people registering legal citizens to vote,
registering legally, he's suing people for registering legal the United
States citizens developed this fucking pig. But this goes so,
this goes back aways. I mean, this is so this
used to be Mexico. And then a good.
Speaker 2: Example is Wan Sagaine. Look at what happened to him,
the guy the town of Sagenes named after the Sagein
family wasn't very prominent Wan sagein oh Okay. In the
Texas Revolution, right, he unlike most of the Mexicans, he
sided with the Anglos. And what did he get for it?
Within ten years of the success of the rebellion, he's
had to be exiled. Under the tremendous hatred now that's
being put on the remaining Hispanics.
Speaker 1: When is this eighteen fifties, eighteen.
Speaker 2: Sixties, eighteen, late eighteen forties.
Speaker 1: When was the okay? So when was when when did
Texas steel Mexico? Basically what year.
Speaker 2: The eighteen thirty when did Okay, there's two to two
changing their pnds. Mid eighteen thirties, the Texas Revolution which
was a year and a half, two years thirty four
to thirty six. And then there was the Texas American
War which was eighteen forty six, and that dragged on.
Speaker 1: Texas American War. What was it?
Speaker 2: That was when we took New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2: When they and then we bought a little bit more
so we could run a railroad. The gats in person.
Speaker 1: And when did Texas join the Union? Because they eighteen
forty eight, they applied first, and.
Speaker 2: Well they went back and forth.
Speaker 1: They applied in eighteen thirty.
Speaker 2: It is a game that went back and for.
Speaker 1: They applied in eighteen thirties, they got rejected, and then
they applied again in the eighteen forties. But they were
broke right.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it was in the end it turned out
to be a big trade where we gave up all
our claims of Colorado and Wyoming and set the panhandle
top of the panhandle is the line agreed that you know,
Santa Fe was not part of Texas even though it
was on the you know how you named the Convention
of Rivers like you're looking downstream the right bank, your
right hand, the left bank. Well, i've heard it was
on the left bank, so it was therefore part of Texas.
Speaker 1: I've heard before that there used to be more public
land in Texas, but Texas sold it off because it
was broke, and that was how it traded.
Speaker 2: It was broke after the war million acres, so these
people to build a capitol.
Speaker 1: But how did they get to the situation today? And
I know you were saying varying things about this, Why
did we get to the situation that they were only
one point six percent of the fucking land here is publicly.
Speaker 2: Access as they traded the surface rights off, large portions
of the mineral rights, which at the time were thought
to be next to worthless. We're given to the innascent
university systems when they were set up, and then, of course,
much to the chagrin of the people who lived out there,
who you know, your mineral rights do not go with
your property right. So go buy your.
Speaker 1: Property and that will surprise a lot of people that
don't live here. You can own land and not own
the mineral.
Speaker 2: Rights to buy my pipeline right, anybody can come in
for my property here for nine time.
Speaker 1: Not anybody, but whoever owns the mineral rights can come in.
They have to pay you, but they can come in
and just start drilling.
Speaker 2: And they can do. Yeah, it's pretty brutal what they
can I'm saying. Man, Well, I've had some friends that
had a turbine lift station put two hundred feet from
their house.
Speaker 1: Jesus.
Speaker 2: Was basically the sound of a jet engine roaring twenty
four hours a day with people coming and going through.
Speaker 1: Again. Did they get paid or what? No, they didn't
get paid. I thought they have to pay you theys.
Speaker 2: No, this was just the pipeline. They weren't taking anything.
They would just put twin sixteen inch pipelines pipes on
their property. This was just the station, the power to
rotar keep everything moving.
Speaker 1: Jesus.
Speaker 2: Yes, their property value into nothing. They couldn't stand it
after a few months and destroyed.
Speaker 1: Their so much freedom, so much freedom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, look you know, if you want to smell the
mooneum next to a nunnery rock on, Yeah, knock yourself out.
It's all good.
Speaker 1: But how do we get to the point where like
the public can't appreciate except for a few crumbs of
paid access habitat, where the public can't enjoy the fucking
land or the plants and animals that live here.
Speaker 2: There's always been in Western Texas, there's always been a
very strong love hate relationship. People would, you know, kill
one of their neighbors over a few acres of dust,
and then at the same time they turn around and go,
why am I living in this spiny hell hole where
everything's either spine any poisonous or just you know, how
to eat you.
Speaker 1: I love it. It's funny what some people think of it.
But yeah, I know it's yeah, but you're.
Speaker 2: Talking about what I was talking about earlier, about that
the old adage that no no real textan is born here. Yeah,
that's that is really why that's still ingrained. Let's get
back to that.
Speaker 1: Okay, why would you said that used to be the same?
Why was that? Because it still is still If you
were born here, you were Mexican or what what is that.
Speaker 2: Yes, that was the original. Yes, because if you were
born here like eighteen fifty five or before, Yeah, you were,
you were you were a Mexican.
Speaker 1: Right, because that's who he stole it from.
Speaker 2: Now we yah, they were the land owners and had
been here for you know, looking San antin know Bear
County sixteen eighties, you know, and then you know, for
Sidio and the churches.
Speaker 1: I just, you know what fucking drives me nuts. And
I hear this ship all the time from these fucking meatheads.
He's empty headed nitwits, always a man, you know, always
being like, don't come here, don't move here, go back
to where you came from, you know, and.
Speaker 2: Blah blah, I came here.
Speaker 1: Where the fuck did you come from? You you you
only moved here when you're the fucking rangers made it
safe enough by extra painting the command there, cowboy. You know,
once the comanches were taken care of and you.
Speaker 2: Felt they were late comers of Texas, they only came in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they wiped out the apaches. I mean this, this
fucking state has been a sight of and violence centuries.
Speaker 2: Dynamic population changes.
Speaker 1: Right right, dynamic. It's a nice euphemism, but seriously, you
know that. You know that's saying don't come here with
your years ago.
Speaker 2: Were that because a lot of people came here and
looked around and said, you know, basically.
Speaker 1: Screw this.
Speaker 2: Between an Indian behind every tree, that's the lacy dog. Okay,
between that and there's no money, you gotta barter everything.
Oh there's no schools, there's no then, not even at
a paved road, no railroads.
Speaker 1: It just didn't have the right attitude. I love, I
loved the fucking limestone here, the limestone and the missions.
Speaker 2: That's where that ethos comes from. That if you come
here and see this and you embrace it, then you
really are a Texan. Otherwise you leave me, get the
hell out of here. And this is now. This has
been extended in a way in rural Texas, particularly the
under popular the central and western portions of Texas. The
phenomenon of the young people that are born on these
you know, two square mile or two hundred and sixty
square mile ranches that are in a family trust, and
they go to college and the last thing they want
to do is come back and run that ranch or
even live there, not have to work, and just live
off of the oil and gas royalties. No, no, they
can now handle Austin. Before they all you know, it
used to be New Orleans, Lewis. Now you know then
it was you know, in the fifties it would be
Dallas and Houston. Now it's it's Austin. It becomes acceptable
to live. I can live here. There's enough culture and
cool enough shit to buy. But the old timers that
sort of thing, you know, you got to love your land,
and those people, the ones that really continue to hold
that and has become part of their mental DNA. Those
are the people who really have well run ranches that
aren't infested with green sprangle top taking everything over. Instead
of this, you know, embracing like you know, throwing hundreds
of pounds of coastal Bermuda seed outable light aircraft to
increase your pasturage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's sort of crazy shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, instead of you, you know, you went and you
killed this most of you know what was once six
feet tall in the most high protein, nutritious palable g
u You could have you killed that over five generations,
and now you're coming back with a ship from.
Speaker 1: All the native grass, you know, a rich diversity of
native grass species. Yeah, we have you know, Dan, I'm
gonna have to go ahead and make the observation once
again that ship for brained land management has been a
stelle works.
Speaker 2: It's actually one of those for centuries centuries terms in
this state is it's you know, it's not land management.
It's land exploitation. Exploitation, it's not land managed.
Speaker 1: There's no appreciation, there's no appreciation of respect.
Speaker 2: There's a group I'm not going to say by name
because I've been at odds with them and they they
hate me so much they will not let me on
there on any property they control because I have great
you know, accuse them of perpetuating this and enshrining this
is is doing the right things. This is like yeah,
that's that that that's shoot the last of our waning
waterfowl and feel good and buy a stamp that has
a duck on it. You know. It's hey, this is
not this is not right thinking.
Speaker 1: But the thing that spray, the thing that drives me
nuts though, is like, and my friend Kyle's always talking
about his Native Habitat project. He's in Alabama, and he's
the thing that that strikes me is it's not that
hard to do right for the Native animals and life
around you. You plant the native plants, you learn about it,
you see what they like, you reflect on it. But
there's there's so little of that here well because and
the problem is is there's so little paying attention to it.
Speaker 2: I don't know about East Texas, but I can tell
you on the Edwards Plateau that we have brought in
such an unholy assemblage of such aggressive non native plants
that it is virtually impossible now to do a revegetation.
Speaker 1: Like is really the fucking what does a privet? This
really fucked things up.
Speaker 2: Well, privileged time has come. It's ending. No, the privetage
time is you'll see it in your life. I probably
won't in mind, maybe if I hang on twenty years,
but twenty years from no privet other than coming up
in people's backyards. Now the privet unbelievably, this is a
great story of evolution that I saw ten twelve years
ago right at Peace Park in Austin, working for this
very wealthy just doing a little land appraisal of this
four acres she had right on Shoal Creek. I looked
over and looked at this nice spring set and it
was just covered in what I thought, initially, goddamn MFN lagustrum.
And finally, after working in the sun for an hour
and a half and trying to physically show this woman
that the way she wanted to do this was not possible,
was not going to work, and she was just thrown
away a lot of good money. And you get over it.
You know, use a herbicide properly.
Speaker 1: Uh you're trying to remove by hand or what?
Speaker 2: It was this invasive Asian, very showy, weedy fine that
the male piggy acy that goes underground puts unbelievably. I mean,
for every pound of start it has above ground, she
got five below ground. You are kid, If you think
you're gonna get a bunch of college students to pull
up this quarter acre of it, all that's going to
happen to get every step that comes up, Oh no,
they dug down and you know, pulled it.
Speaker 1: I said, now already one second, just hold hold up
one Okay, So back to the lugustrium.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're working in this yard off of Peace Park,
which is Shoal Creek running down the heart of Austin.
And I walked over to get a little to go
over and look at this spring that was surrounded by
what I thought was solid laugustri and lo and behold
the Carolina cherry. Oh nice, which I'll never forget. The
first day of grad school, we go out walk around
with the doctor Turner, who's now deceased, and he all
of a sudden yes, yeah, in a fit of anger
and cursing, goes up to this landscape that was just
planted in the last few days, grabs this fifteen gallon,
eight foot tall inch and a half Carolina cherry, pulls
it out of the ground, starts kicking the side of
the root balls, picking it up and shaking it.
Speaker 1: Off. It.
Speaker 2: No, it's native to Texas. Oh yeah, it's all over
East Texas. But he's like these goddamn fu shiptheads in
the goddamn.
Speaker 1: He can't grow here.
Speaker 2: He's gonna have assis soil. Look he's look there. That
one was planted last year. It only had every leaf on.
It is yellow. The few leaves that are running, it'll
be dead in a month. They've been doing this for
thirty years. I've been at war with these guys, so
now as soon as they plan them, I just pull
them out and kill them. That can you ain't my
tenure for that whem. So they're really stuck in my head,
especially when I started a native plant nursery, because I
was like, man, we have so few evergreens. That's something
a lot of people never come to ground.
Speaker 1: What about the lagustrium?
Speaker 2: Is this?
Speaker 1: Okay? This is all later?
Speaker 2: So I'm down there chow cream, and I go back
to look at this spring in this grotto that the
spring's coming out of, and I look and it's no,
it's half Carolina cherry and half look astrom. They look
very similar at sixty feet, especially with my poor eyesight. Well,
they were in seat. So I grabbed a bunch. I
came back, put them through the cycle in the fridge
for three months in per light, and so forth plan
them out. I took a hundred of them and put
them in pure Collegian one gallus. They grew two feet
in the first year, green and solid. They had been
here yep, in thee hundred years, one hundred and twenty years.
People kept bringing them out of Houston nurseries. They got selected.
They have heavy selection pressure. I now have got I'm
so happy my trees that I planted from that population
at Sex now have thousands of seeds on them. I'm
going to collect them here in about.
Speaker 1: Because you don't get acid soil in that anywhere this.
Speaker 2: Occasion you get circumnutral. But there is acid soil. Yeah,
you know, you get at You can make any almost
any soil acid if you maintain it wet long enough.
Life does not like alkaline pH and it will slowly.
It's got to be maintained with if it drives real, yes,
it just needs water and time.
Speaker 1: Well, we'll make When did you fall in love with
the floor here though? Like when I was in grad
school and what were you going to grad.
Speaker 2: School for plant chemistry? Yeah? I went to a small
college in Virginia, Washington and Lee. I was tricked into,
i think as they wanted to get me out of
being a natural history major. This is funny because one
of the people at CMX, one of them took a
few hours on the internet to find out that so
few people after like I told them, like, oh yeah,
after like nineteen hundred, very few people got a degree
in this. But you know, civil war, that's what everybody
You either got a degree in philosophy or natural science,
natural history.
Speaker 1: Okay, so plant chemistry. So you were you were a chemist.
Speaker 2: Basically you knew, Oh well that's what I was going
to be my major at Washington and Lee, and I
took the placement test. I got pulled into the Dean
of student's office like that afternoon, and there's like five
of the people from you know, physics, biology and geology
and math, and they're like, oh, hey, this is not
going to fly being a major in chemistry. And I said,
well why not? And they said, well, we have nothing
to teach you. All you have to do to graduate
is take two three credit courses you placed out of
everything so to fulfill your degree in chemistry. So you'd
just be sitting around here getting really drunk and taking
your passing your two courses to finish your degree. And
we don't like that. So we've been thinking. We talked
about it. We think you since you tested out so
well and everything else, and you had great math aptitude
even though you say you don't like it, but you're
really good at it, why don't you know you should
be a natural history major. Well, I didn't realize when
I said sure, sign me up, that that meant I
was majoring in chemistry, biology, astronomy, mathematics, I've got five
semesters of calculus, Jesus fuck, and one semester.
Speaker 1: Of the When is this what were you in college?
This is late sixties, This.
Speaker 2: Was seventy five graduated classes seventy nine.
Speaker 1: So but you were a chemist too, And this is
I have to ask, were you ever we ever involved
in making wells?
Speaker 2: Were legal? Yeah? Legal because there was a cut off
what was it eighty five.
Speaker 1: Eighty six, like compounds like MD or MD.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, those were fairly easily made, you know, but yeah,
and then they were legal at the time.
Speaker 1: Were they being used for therapy at that No, not
at that time.
Speaker 2: It was just really it was it was obviously I
never liked them. I've never I've always apported almost all
them fedements. Uh uh, you know they are me only Yeah,
only used for fedaments for long car drives, for public safety.
Speaker 1: I mean, I got I am eight years sober. I
was never into narcotics really, but psychedelics I found to
be helpful for certain things.
Speaker 2: Oh no, it drove me crazy as a child. And
it was only in the fifth grade when I realized
that everybody didn't have a brain like mine that remembered
everything exactly as it happened, and it got me in
a lot of trouble. And I said, no, that is
not what you said, sir. You said, then she said,
then my mother said, then I said, then you said, like, no,
that's not how I remember. Well, that's not maybe how
you remember it, sir, but that's how it happened.
Speaker 1: So back then people were mostly using these compounds for record.
Speaker 2: There was very loch. Yeah, I mean to destroy my
crystally memory, which was a source of endless conflict with
the adults around me, particularly above me. It took considerable
determining chronic use of hallucinogens to finally destroy that part
of my brain. Thank god, because now I can forget things.
Speaker 1: Like mescaline analogs or what were you mostly d Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's probably pretty easy to make. I was, oh, well once,
you know, for a chemist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, for instance, when I when
I graduated from college, I took a few months off
and went by myself and did a tour of Egypt
and Greece backpacking, and I got picked up by three
guys in a VW van and we started talking and
after a couple hours they admitted to me that they
they had to do it every two years, take the
van and go down and with a bunch of cash
and go to all the pharmacies in Greece and by
one hundred here, two hundred there of these like two
milligram rogotamine tablets of Jesus that they would take back
to their bar.
Speaker 1: Is that basically acid?
Speaker 2: What is that's the core?
Speaker 1: The precursor?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then they have to sit down and make diethylamine.
You know, get some dry ice and acetone and make
it and condense it because it oils. I don't know,
I don't have a working mix in front of it,
and it boils it. You know.
Speaker 1: So you met some gression acid cooks basically yeah, these
these these were Swiss. Oh Swiss.
Speaker 2: They were making LSD. So they said, yeah, we make
you know, twenty five forty grams and sell it in
one gram you know ampules ready? Ye? I mean I said,
oh that makes it? Yeah, that makes me thousands?
Speaker 1: And what was there god being sold for?
Speaker 2: Like? What was I used to you? Until I had
a fall which fixed it? I got in a fight
in college which caused me to have migraines.
Speaker 1: Okay falls here.
Speaker 2: Actually it was a tree. That tree back of there,
that giant like a fifteen inch limb off that live
oak in a windstorm broke and fell and whapped me
on the back of the head. It's one of the
two toes of my life. I've been knocked unconscious. Hey,
the benefit I got I haven't had a migraine.
Speaker 1: Seid the migraines out of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it rearranged whatever it happened in that fight in
my neck, pinching the the nerves.
Speaker 1: So how did you get into plant chemistry that? Like,
why did you pick that? You were already in the nature.
Speaker 2: I was always fascinated by alkaloids. Yeah. The alkaloid structures
are just so chemically beautiful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and these are almostly these are mostly I mean
most alkaloids are are synthesized by the plant to keep
things from meeting.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the anti feed absolutely And.
Speaker 1: There is there any other use for them within plant cells? Really?
Or is it mostly just that thereby.
Speaker 2: It's but you know, as a you know, it's an
arms race. It's really a wonderful example of an arms race.
Plant group develops this this group of alkaloids, and then
something learns to exploit it, and then something learns to
exploit the exploiter of the plant.
Speaker 1: I didn't. I didn't know there were specifict beetles until
recently there were what specifist beetles, like beetles that specialize
on a certain of course post plant.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 1: I just know what you just think of butterflies and
months I didn't. It's wild to me. I mean, I'm
just getting into entomology. I'm obviously not a fucking bug guy,
but I'm you know, yeah, with my daughter, I dabble
now because she's really into bugs. She's for she fucking
loves looking at bugs. So it's like, you know, my my,
I live.
Speaker 2: You need to get you need to spend a few
holes and get hurt. This is the young one. Yeah,
you get spent, get you got it?
Speaker 1: You can we got that ten pounds home native North
American insects or a guy to North American insects.
Speaker 2: I'll show you. You want to get her one of these? Yeah,
because I used to take it up to my son
elementary school and the kids went that was worked off
them over bugs so fast that when they were looking
at a cockroach or firing in on its back at
three hundred magnification they were just like that is you
weren't getting that is so cool? Yeah, that's beautiful.
Speaker 1: Look, that's such a good gateway for kids to get
into nature and get them away for all of his classes,
the shopping death cult. So when okay, so we're all
over the place now, but I want to go back
to this. So the Edwards Plateau, when did you really
see because from basically from Dallas south to San Antonio
maybe some blank spots in between, it's just an endless
It's the ugliest landscape I've seen along I thirty five.
It's just showing parking.
Speaker 2: Lots you've never driven from, which never.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, I can think of a couple other hideous places, like, hey,
America is really good at creating some of the ugliest
landscapes in the first world. I'm not going to argue
with you there, but that this is this would definitely
be top five hious, especially and it looked like it
was so gorgeous. I mean, the Balcone's fucking escarpment. Man,
this is cretaceous limestone has been uplifted like a staircase
of high school and you watched it go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what's my first real experience.
Speaker 1: With it and so many endemic plants. There's so many
plants that only grow on the Edwards Plateau and people
will never well.
Speaker 2: That was one of the things that I decided, you know,
to focus a lot of the nursery stalk on was there,
because it really is a meeting of.
Speaker 1: Nobody grows the ship you were growing, right, it's a
meeting of Mexico with Appalachia. It's where the content dries
out from east to west. It's right on the hundreds
of any in the west, there's already on limestone. I
think a lot of people don't realize it's like and
I learned this in the Mojave Desert of California, where
it's mostly volcanic, but then you've got these islands of limestone,
and when you would get to the limestone, boom, You've
got a whole different fucking flora. There's a couple of
plants that you'll still see on the limestone that you know.
Speaker 2: The degreemism when it was pointed out to me in
the Hill Country that it was the highest degree of
endemism of any landlock.
Speaker 1: It's nuts. It's so cool and you can grow up
in San Antonio. You can grow up in the suburbs
of San Marcos or fucking Austin and never know any
of the cool ship that grows here and never know what.
Speaker 2: It's a little bit late to know because it's mostly gone. Yeah,
I mean, you've just seen, like when I'm when I
moved here, all of these rivers in the hill country
right now, we could have gone into the truck were
dripping up to they were flowing, and on one side
you usually get a cliff on one side and then
a shallow rise on the other. On the side of
the shallow fucker would be Gorris, three foot tall, ten
foot wide. They just went a.
Speaker 1: Spiritually soothing That's what I need. That's what I need.
Be after I met looking at a fucking Chick fil
A sign in the parking lot of a wallfart or something,
you know, I was, I was a Casey Williams.
Speaker 2: Wist the cardinal flowers with the millions of the humming
birds I met, I would see that would really yeah
when it when it covered every side of one of
the river, sometimes both sides, but then you'd see ten
thousand hummingbirds of three species. Jesus busing Jesus Christ. And
if we got going too sabinall was it the con
can The only place I've ever seen into sycanthus in
the wild. There used to be a twenty acre field
of into sycanthus eight feet tall species. The only one
that's here. Oh no, it's there's that one perublo that
I've got.
Speaker 1: So anybody listening, they can't they see. It's a really
cool fucking shrub with these beautiful flowers, really unique flowers.
Speaker 2: And it's you know, obviously hummingbird pollinated. See only time
I ever saw hummingbirds not doing the rapid when ringing flooded,
flying like a regular bird, and you could walk out
into them and they'd post about four to six feet
away from you. But all you had to do was
stand still for thirty seconds, and they blew you off,
and they would go back to flapping their wings like
a regular bird and lazily skidding from branch to branch,
drenching themselves in the nectar from the billions of orange
and red flowers in the acres of them in front
of you. But that all disappeared overnight in a flood
in the nineties. It's one of the damnest things I've
ever seen on the Seveinol. There's a little town called
Concin that you had a few cuts, like cottages on
the sabinall there was a small dam and all these
cottages on it. People would go out and rent, and
it was all washed away in this flood.
Speaker 1: I was with Casey Williams two weeks going to Sam
Marco's over here and ask them why is the Because
the water color is like blue, It's like this beautiful blue,
and it's because of the limestone geologies, because of the
bicarbonate in the water. I didn't know that. I mean
that fucking blew my mind. I mean, it looks noticeably
different from.
Speaker 2: I can't confirm that.
Speaker 1: I looked it up. It's legit, so you get that
in limestone geology. But it was. It was great. I
mean again, it just strikes me how beautiful and intoxicatingly
fucking cool.
Speaker 2: Oh it was so crazy. Yeah, I mean we finally
there's finally some water in the rivers. But they had
been pretty much dry the last one.
Speaker 1: So when did the really big sport of development happen
the last ten years, last twenty, Like.
Speaker 2: What well, there was It's been several phases in the seventies.
You had like the colonization of Lake Travis. You had
like the several Lake Way and Lago Vista and all
those developments.
Speaker 1: There's still going out there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh, you know when I was in grad school,
go out to Hippy Hollow and that was when you
drove across the dam, which you can't do now because
of security reasons. But when you look down the downstream side,
there was no one road structure, man made structure that
you could see. And now there must be what twenty
five and.
Speaker 1: There's nothing protecting it. There's nothing protecting This is another
thing that I think is unique too. It's like when
everything's private, everything can be sold. I'm not saying public
land can't be sold, but a lot of public land
in areas in the West, like in Novat or whatever,
if it can be sold off for fucking mining for whatever,
but to be sold off for development that would be
that would be earlier.
Speaker 2: I should have made you this clear to you. When
Texas became a state, one of the provisos was that
we retained all of our public land. There were no
right federal lands in Texas till we dumped those two
National forests in East Texas on them. After logging them.
Speaker 1: They're still owned by Texas, but Texas sold a lot
of it too.
Speaker 2: Well, we we dumped those on the federal government because
it cost us too much money to maintain them. As
a fire.
Speaker 1: All of Texas's owned public land, it's mostly sold off.
Speaker 2: Well, there never was any public land. Well, it was
Texas land. It was never a federal land. You don't understand.
The difference is legally apparently between Bureau of Land Management
land that's sacred. You've got to go through Washington, right.
Speaker 1: Right, that's federal land, national forests, federal land.
Speaker 2: If it's state land, well it can be bought and
sold at the women of who's ever an elected office.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, and that's what happened, and that.
Speaker 2: Happens in every state. It's just most states don't own Texas.
Speaker 1: Land.
Speaker 2: It didn't come in as a state owning outright. I
mean ninety percent of their total if where footage was
owned by the state.
Speaker 1: If you look at a map of public lands in
the west, once you get west of Texas, everything there's huge.
Speaker 2: It's huge because it was from the Republic of Mexico
and it was all federal land.
Speaker 1: And it was never but it was never sold to people.
It was never privatized.
Speaker 2: It was and I guess it's still people trying to
do that all.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, of course, of course.
Speaker 2: You know they started chipping in with a great grazing rights,
with logging rights, with mineral rights. You know, they've been
chipping with people in Texas.
Speaker 1: That's what drives me nuts. It's like, man, you don't
people who grew up here don't know what it's like
to just be like, you want to go look at
that mountain. Let's just fucking go. Let's see what's growing
on there. And then where are we going to sleep?
Speaker 2: Then?
Speaker 1: I don't know. How about that mountain over there? Just
roll in the back of the truck. You could just
sleep there. I was going to fuck.
Speaker 2: Was that was real? Something?
Speaker 1: I really?
Speaker 2: I knew that when I moved here.
Speaker 1: And you mentioned that the people and they're like, well,
ifever they was public, it will just be people out
there and they fucked up, and well people could just
trash it. But I don't really see that too much.
And private landowners can trash land too. I see private
landowners bulldozing creeks, clearing whole fuck, wiping out in danger.
Speaker 2: Filled the cave with four generations of a used appliances,
and they're rather than pay twenty private, like.
Speaker 1: Private landowners are inherently gonna protect them if you get
someone who's good and knows what they're doing. But most
people are fucking morons, you know, it's just true. I'm
not being mean. Most people are dumb and they don't care.
They're lazy and they're lazy and so they don't give
a fuck. I mean, so many private landowners you meet
don't know what's on their land. That's okay, I'll go
check out your land before you do a survey. Oh,
we're having dog What is she mad about somebody out there?
Oh no, they're just she's her asses getting too close
to her face. I think it's a right we're having
dog drama here. Anyway, So how did we? But how
did we get to this situation? Though?
Speaker 2: That was all part of the annexation treaty when we
became a state.
Speaker 1: And Texas insistent on keeping its own well, well what
what what?
Speaker 2: What? The bottom line was we were some ten million.
Speaker 1: Or so in debt from the war with Mexico, right,
so we traded off.
Speaker 2: Like I said before, Texas claimed everything on the left
bank on the Rio Grande left bank and then all
the way up into Wyoming, you know, good portion of
Colorado and into Wyoming. We traded that land that was
had Santa Fe on it, for instance, Pueblo, Colorado, Denver.
You know, we traded to our existing borders. Now that's
why they're nice and straight up there in the Panhanton. Yeah, okay,
we traded off those millions of acres. We kept our lands,
no federal lands at all. They had the federal government
had to come by land from Texas. From Texas to
put the military basis on. Some people donated it because
for commercial reasons because now they may be the ones
to sell beef to the thing because their ranch was
so huge, you know, and so forth. But we traded
that off, that land off to our present borders for
the assumption of all of our debts. And then we
got some cash on top of that. I think I
think I can look take me a few minutes to
look through your I think we got like another five
ten million bucks from the United States to give a
sort of a working budget because we had nothing. That
was part of the annexation treaty was that was the
big trade ten million for all of this. We keep
our lands, and you give us some cash on top
after assuming our debts, you give us some cash on top.
Speaker 1: But it's it's yeah, it's the situation of publicland here
is nuts. But anyway, but all right, well I want
to I want to move on to plants, because you've
got a wealth of experience with many of the native
plants here that a few other people do, and you've
grown a ship a ton of them. We were talking
about growing, you know, going to get pinus from OTAs seed,
all these cool I mean, it could the Edwards Plateau.
When you start moving west you get into Chihuahua Desert,
and then at the higher elevations you've got a lot
of the cool sky island flora too, like the pines
and the weird oaks and these things that have been
isolated because they're you know, they've been isolated. There are islands,
biological islands that have been isolated, you know, in an
ocean of lowland, like.
Speaker 2: The great scene out for you where the ocean fills
up and there are no islands.
Speaker 1: It's all right, right, but but so like with you
were talking about circus, what is a Mexicana Mexicana. Yeah,
where's Thatchro And we tell everybody about that.
Speaker 2: What is it that Terrell County.
Speaker 1: Now this is a red bud though it's like a
weird Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's got a smaller leaf. It's it's definitely the leaves
of her suit. They've got a real gray green look
to They're forty feet tall.
Speaker 1: They live long, noh, yeah they can.
Speaker 2: They get six eight inch even larger trunks on them.
Live at least on the ones on there's four of
them on Highway ninety, twenty six miles west of the
heart of the little town of Sanderson. They're on the
south side of State Highway ninety. They stick out like
a sore thum, particularly in the spring when they're blooming.
They were dug up and placed there in the nineteen
fifties and they're still there.
Speaker 1: From where the ranch south of it, I believe. But
you can get good seat of them, Yeah you can,
but not much.
Speaker 2: I had to go out the brukags or so bad
on them. I would generally go out when they had
a good after a good bloom and seed set to
keep the broukade down. I used to go spend you know,
one hundred bucks on orthene with brookids. That's a specialized,
very large group of little beetles that bore into the
sides of lugumes and other seeds. Oh god, it's a
huge group. Yeah. That's when you open and you see
the little round holes on the side of the golden
white tree ugu and the seed is empty. Yeah, yeah,
because that's it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, black brush seeds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those are brookides and there's some of the things
they need to get flour. Yeah, very huge group, multiple families.
They affect very very serious economic pests to agriculture. But
I would have to go out after they were polling it,
because I don't want to waste a bunch of insects.
But I would have to go out with one hundred
dollars worth of orthene as much water as I could
get in five gallon buckets with tops in my truck.
So where I learned to go to the doughnuts and
get their four gallon buckets with the tops for a
dollar apiece and fill the back of my truck and
go out there and pour that orthene mixed up with
water around that just so that when the orchids tried
to eat them, brukts tried to eat them. They has died.
Speaker 1: And then I get you know, how would you make
sure you'd get the brookits Tho, where would you put the.
Speaker 2: It's taken up by the roots, so you pour. Oh,
they came out with the nails.
Speaker 1: But isn't it that poisoning the flowers too?
Speaker 2: No, that's what I said. You've got to wait till
the flowers drop before you do it, right.
Speaker 1: But it's a systemic though, so it's getting Yeah, but.
Speaker 2: It's only there for it's morphine only the last three weeks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so you got to go out and you
know the chemistry.
Speaker 2: Several times and say when do they come out? Right? Now,
you got the neonicotinoids, which lasts ninety days, and it's
really easy to go out and just you know.
Speaker 1: So neo niks aren't super long. Last thing ninety days
is still a fuck done. But I mean it's not
like it's going to be in the plant forever. It's
obviously being metabolized out or what No.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's metic.
Speaker 1: So if someone's treating cacti for them because they've got scale,
it'll eventually be metabolized out and it's they'll be harmless
the pollinators after a certain.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, okay, nothing forever. There's no money in making.
Speaker 1: Last forever, which we're all thinking repidly now.
Speaker 2: And kind and anybody that does chemistry with fluorine deserves
what they get chemical companies.
Speaker 1: That's fucking insane. The p fast thing. Did you know
about that? I mean, were you aware of that? Know
about that?
Speaker 2: What's the deal?
Speaker 1: Why'd they put in everything? I don't understand if it's
just for like non stick, there was a lot of
money in it. Non stick. What are the benefits of
using it? It's non stick, It's like teflon.
Speaker 2: Fucking well, that's one of the is my understanding. The
big poisonings from that, or from the fire extinguishers use
as a fire flame.
Speaker 1: Reaching fucking The ladies used to work in the factories
would just say, oh, we would sometimes come home with
the teflon flu. They called it the teflon flu. You're
getting fucking poisoned with your employer.
Speaker 2: You know, those are usually applied in chambers. It's not
like you's like a sprayed.
Speaker 1: On, right, But how did this ship get everywhere? I
don't want to go too far off with this, but
I'm interesting, since I'm talking to a chemist.
Speaker 2: The bulk of the PFASs that has entered where the
water table was either from the manufacturer of those base
compounds used in making the pants, but the vast majority
of it, from my understanding of it, is from its
use as a fire retarget, mostly like airports. God Jesus Christ, Yeah,
for putting airplane fires out, putting fires out in a
chemical plant.
Speaker 1: So it's in fire extinguishers for sure.
Speaker 2: No, they're yeah, like if you're in the air Force, Yeah,
you got thirty million goddamn dollar plane, you don't go
spray with water because you're going to describe this stuff
on it. It puts it out and doesn't damage all
that electronic circuitry and cause us.
Speaker 1: Well, why does fluorine last for so long?
Speaker 2: Because fluorine is the most chemically active element. It is
seven electrons orbiting seven protons and a few neutrons, and
it wants that last electron so bad. The protons are
so close to filling that last shell in that SP
six orbital, that last open spot it wants. It's so bad.
You move down to the next element, chlorine, Well, it's
still pretty damn reactive right up there with oxygen. But
it's got a whole nother you know, I don't know
what another twelve you know, electrons to dampen the pull
from the positive the protons in the core. You know,
it's and it's much you know, that space is much
bigger by the way. It's not even every time you
add a new shell, they're not the same with That's
why when you get up in the heavier metals, the
transition metals, they're all about the same diameter because you
got your into the d shells and they don't get
all the way filled as you put s's you know
in the S six so on.
Speaker 1: So fluorines are really it's really reacted.
Speaker 2: Yes, and that's be thankful that in the earth crust
it is mostly bound up this calcium fluoride and it's
not a lot of other minerals there with fluorine. But
tell you we're doing a terrible, terrible thing. And I'm
glad I get to say this. I hope this reaches
a lot of people. You recycle every piece of aluminum
you can, because the people that manufacture aluminium will they
use carbon anodes or electrodes and that cry like the
bath of the molten box site with the calcium fluoride
the fluor spar and because they won't coat those with
platinum or palladium, that carbon is reacting with the fluorine
and putting carbon hexafluoride into the atmosphere, which is not
only the most potent greenhouse gas, No, it destroys the
ozone layers like thousands of ozone molecules. A second one
molecule of carbon hexafluoride does destroys them. In the high atmosphere.
Oh no, And we were putting eighty tons or so
a year into the atmosphere in the mid seventies. We're
probably putting a couple hundred tons in. But there's going
to come a point soon where it will allow so
much you the light in to the surface that it's
going to have an extremely.
Speaker 1: Why is this not regulated at all? And why is
no one raising alarm bells about it?
Speaker 2: There have been alarm bells raised there, and the lobby
is very powerful. They could simply do, like yep, pladium
or platinum. They could probably just coat the electrodes with it.
They don't have to do like.
Speaker 1: That, and that's used in the manufacture of aluminum cans.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah. The only way you break it down you
melt it with the flox the calcium fluoride, and that
carbon from the electrode reacts with the fluorine and what's
this death gas out so potent greenhouse gas and the
ultimate ozone.
Speaker 1: Would be a sin to regulate business. We can't do
that in Texas the right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, but it's very varies, you really, it's it
should be a public duty to use his little make
his little new.
Speaker 1: And where I live, they still throw out a loom
when them cans. There's no fucking recycling. It's so backwards,
it's it's so shiit for brain, it's crazy, head up
the ass.
Speaker 2: As far as I read that article the Letter to
Nature back in the late nineties and looked into it,
I was so utterly terrified. Who is a guy that
worked for Reynolds or al co It was in their
chemistry department, wrote in saying, hey man, this has got
to be addressed by the UN. They've got to have
legislation because another fifty years of this we may make
life on earth and there's no way to destroy it.
You can you cannot destroy this compound with heat.
Speaker 1: Then the O zone disappear in the fucking k T extinction,
and that's what led to the.
Speaker 2: I'm sure with all that all that ejecta put it.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was Permian I forget great, So we've been
here before. It'll be fine. That's what they say about
climate change. It's happened before watching it happen.
Speaker 2: As I was saying, I saw empty, I saw the
flourish disappear at two thousand. Then I saw the birds.
The birds here have changed seven times in the time
I lived here there and now I used to have
so many birds here. I remember my last wife. She
complained about the birds waking or up every morning. They
were so Now you wait, wake up in the morning,
you don't you hear maybe one bird two rs. You
got to go outside and stand around and listen and walk.
Speaker 1: My habitat has been destroyed round here.
Speaker 2: Or there's nothing left for them to eat. You see
anything out there with this bird friendly? Now? Yeah? No,
even the hummingbirds. You only see them at feeders.
Speaker 1: That's crazy, that's nuts. Yeah, my yard is lit up
with life. But that's because I've got all natives, and
I've got it on irrigation too. So I mean, at
this point, I'm like, I use irrigation because I want
to call out.
Speaker 2: I know a lot of the birds I had here
were because.
Speaker 1: And I've got so many things depending on my yard
now that if I were to turn off that irrigation
and let it just go, you know, Dorman during a drought,
it would fucking you know.
Speaker 2: Closing the nursery had a very doletorious effect on the bird.
Speaker 1: How long did you run a nursery.
Speaker 2: For nineteen eighty six till what is this twenty two?
Speaker 1: And you were growing everything you could. It was Madrone nursery.
That was one thing Texas Madrones.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but they won't make it that glo global global warming.
It's too drop, too hot because you've got a couples. Yeah,
there's a thermal barrier to their to their existence. What
is it?
Speaker 1: They just don't like it a.
Speaker 2: Once their roots get above in the mid seventies, Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so that limestone insulates their roots to a point.
Speaker 2: Now the high altitude and it's at night, it's it's
the night temperatures, it seems to be really they can
take the one hundred and ten during the day, it's
the it's the temperatures.
Speaker 1: Got to go up in elevation.
Speaker 2: I know from playing especially with a gentleman from Houston,
a very nice guy that came for a summer or tune.
Play to them with me that you know, you can
grow them and get a few up at scraggly one gallons,
but you'll only get one out of one hundred of
those to live ten years.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: But there they're just I mean, when I think of
the thirty five years whatever I've been here and the drones,
how many have disappeared It used to be around here
on the hilltops and stuff. I mean, we're down to
a few percent of what was here just twenty five
years ago.
Speaker 1: Is there anyone keeping track of this stuff? Because that's
that's yeah.
Speaker 2: Harry Gilbert out of ut published a paper on the
insect loss a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: I just think it just sounds like there's so much
ahead in the sand behavior here.
Speaker 2: No, it's not heading the sand. Its eyes on the phone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well.
Speaker 2: Literally, its eyes on the phone. People don't kids don't
look at the window anymore.
Speaker 1: Well, there's nowhere to go in Texas now too. You
gotta fucking driver where you're trapped in a car, there's
no public land. That especially doesn't.
Speaker 2: Real movieens on the back of the seats and your
kids can.
Speaker 1: Watcht toast right. But I think that's one of the
most depressing things about this state is there's I mean,
there's streets with no sidewalks. There's fucking it's so hard
to get and no one wants to walk on a
sidewalk next to a fucking eight lane road anyway with
fifty six.
Speaker 2: Half people throw beer bottles at you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, there's no I mean, that's why the public
land thing is really essential to a healthy fucking life,
being able to go take a fucking walk and enjoy
something beautiful and fucking the way things have been for
millions of years before.
Speaker 2: You better get a time machine and go talk to
Steven F. Austin.
Speaker 1: Oh well yeah, either or you could go. You could
go to the future too after everything collapses, because this
is this ship.
Speaker 2: Is that long coming, it's coming, It's coming to your county.
Speaker 1: Everything is fine. I don't know what you're talking about.
It's fine.
Speaker 2: I know.
Speaker 1: I saw this fucking lovely I don't know who did it.
Some graffiti arts in San Antonio. They made these weed
pasted Ted Cruz and like the full leather daddy bear
uniform with the whip and ship, and it was so
fucking perfect. It was so great, man. I was like,
I wanted to make shirts out of that. But uh, yeah,
there's a there's a lot of celciopaths here in politics. Okay,
Well anyway, so so message, I want to talk about
this whole region from the like the Western Iwards plateau
of the transition to Chuahwa Desert because there's so many
cool plants. The Pinus ramota. You said there's circle carpus
to what circle carpus species is that Montanas? Yeah? Okay,
so Rose family, right, Yeah, which I knew out west,
but I didn't think out here, right. And Pinus ramoto,
which is opinion pine, which.
Speaker 2: Of course is everybody appears in Koela.
Speaker 1: So you get Pinus embroides and Pinus ramota. I've seen
Pinus romota.
Speaker 2: Well, you don't only get embroiders when you're really out like.
Speaker 1: Fort David Davis. No, it's not what's up there by
McDonald observatories. That's Embroide's or ramota.
Speaker 2: I thought you had to go all the way out
to like El Paso to pick those up.
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know, I just saw I just just
picking pinions seeds and nearing a McDonald observatory.
Speaker 2: And Davis and then that I think symbroids and edulous
are now the same. Okay, Yeah, I can never understand
why they were called two species. But I'm not into conifers,
you knows.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, but what were so when you were collecting,
When you're going to collect these seeds, what is it for?
Is it for a restoration project or just for yourself
or what were going.
Speaker 2: To grown out? As one gowns to be giveaway on
these arboriday things. Yeah, it's part of my gig.
Speaker 1: And they'll survive.
Speaker 2: And I've seen I'll never forget I gave some. I
met this couple in the ninety six ninety seven. I
gave her too little one gallons, eight inches tall, ten years.
One of those things was over twenty feet tall with
a five inch trunk, making tons opinions. The other one
never did as well. It's it's oh, they're both doing
very very well.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: She's like she lives in u north uh, just northwest
of the heart of downtown San Antonio, right at Kulibra
in I ten across the street.
Speaker 1: From that bread baks o grow in downtown San Antonio.
Speaker 2: I mean, they're they look fabulous, she said. You know
the first you know, I can't see who's sold the
house or new in the neighborhood. When I'm out in
the yard, somebody walking by and go, my god, what pine.
I don't know you could grow upon here? Those are
so gorgeous and what they make edible seeds? Oh no here?
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, So many times I'd learned about the plants
in this state. Then I'm like, why is nobody growing?
Speaker 2: You know, I tried to get the state in the
state back. Oh. I was going to think early nineties,
put out these thirty million dollars in loans to develop
a Christmas tree nursery system because we were losing all
this money, you know, like sixty five million dollars a
year to Oregon in Washington for these cut dead pines
that people were, you know, having to put out New
Year's on in the front yards to be collected ground up.
And it's a good idea. But when I went and
talked to them, I said, look, you need to do
the pinus remote, our native one, which is tolerant of
all different different soils. Is you have to have ons. Yeah,
and you know it can take irrigation and doesn't really
need it, but we'll do a lot better with it.
You can make an edible fruit, which is really cool.
It's really you know, triangular, you know, conical in shape.
Us no pruning any of this scene in and it's
native and we brought it to the edge of extinction.
You know, we owe it to this plant to spread
it back because that was a dominant plan here during
the ice age in the Hill country. Hill Country was
dominant pinion Jennifer in the ice age ice ages. So
you know, instead they put it all into afghampies, which
Jesus Christ they lost. I remember, like four years later,
I got a call from them, the people in parts
of my life. They said, hey, we wanted to let
you know that, Wow, you were right, and we've seized
like four of these people that borrowed like four million bucks,
you know, six million bucks, and we're having an auction
and want to let you know that there'd be these
greenhouses and all this sort of stuff. And I said, whoa, whoa, wait,
nobody is gonna buy a greenhouse. This costs more to
take it down then it does to buy a new
one and have it dropped off. And the plastic and
it never makes it. You're gonna have to buy new,
especially the flat hard plastic. The tarps, Yeah, if you're
careful and roll them up, you can put them out.
I'd do it every year for I'd buy one year
tarp and get eight years out of it because I'd
only have it up for three four months and was
very careful with it. Put it in the shade with
a oh pay tarp over it in the summer. But
I remember they were doing this up at Waco, one
of the big ways, the biggest one. I think they
had seven million. They loaned and they called me back
and they were like, un not only did like you said,
nobody came, we lost, We got nothing back. The only
thing we got any money back was on like the
skidloader Bobcats. Yeah, yeah, from from the loan default on
it and then already proved the single Christmas tree is
thirty million.
Speaker 1: Bucks thrown away growing these things.
Speaker 2: No, No, I did have my neighbor. Only good that
ever came out of it was I ran the date
again and my neighbor's daughter got the second place science
Fair project in the State award, which was like a
two thousand dollars. Uh. Her science Fair project was the
use of this the pinion pine is as a as.
Speaker 1: A native tomorrow. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you'll see it.
Speaker 1: You'll like Camp Wood, you said, Yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 2: What is where the camels were originally from? Indianola?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what was the story behind that?
Speaker 2: Well, when Jeff Davis was before the Civil War, was
head of the War Department, and we were tired of
the uh you know, oh, so he was out here.
Speaker 1: That wasn't just some weird racist dog whistle name in
a fucking county after the guy. He was actually out here.
Speaker 2: No, he was Secretary of Defense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, all right.
Speaker 2: He personally approve of the project of taking these I
think six Arab men and both types of camels here,
landing them at Indianola and taking them out through camp
across Texas and taking them out seeing how long they
could go without water, what they could eat, how much
they could carry. It's great. They worked so well. I
mean there were camels for years after they abandoned the
project and let them go in West Texas. Yeah, they
went all over West Texas into New Mexico. Wow.
Speaker 1: What happened to them.
Speaker 2: Honey down, grab for circuses and ship like that. Yeah,
there's money in them humps.
Speaker 1: So what are some of your other other notable plants
that need more attention in this area, like Edwards plateau.
Everything needs attention, I mean super rare ones that are
just why the fuck is this not?
Speaker 2: I mean, why don't focus on the super rare ones
because they're not supporting much in the way of it.
Part of I think, and said doctor Gilbert agreed with
me that part of this giant, massive, very quick extinction
of our insects down to a few percent of what
they were just six seven years ago, it's because of
the loss of all of our wildflowers that all these
penstemens and wine cups and all these everything else. I mean,
for every maximilian sunflower you see now, there used to
be fifty or one hundred of them. There used to
be a feet tall instead of a little three foot
tall scragg.
Speaker 1: And the cause is just habitat loss and a lot
of brain and a fucking lawn too. There's a lot
of fuck Pexans love their lawns.
Speaker 2: Well, we dropped the water table that's evaporated, and that
causes all sorts of things.
Speaker 1: From pissing just pissing water away on a lawn.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's grom more cotton.
Speaker 1: It's fucking in the cotton toil. Yeah, but I mean
at least the condon of there's a practical use they're
using every with a lawn. You're not doing anything, there's
no what the fuck. It's just for looks, just because
your neighbor has thee You're.
Speaker 2: Paying people who are immigrants to cut them, and then
think of all of the chemical pollution you're causing the
maintenance of them from I mean, I'm terrified that they
sell the pre emergence over the counter.
Speaker 1: What are those the pre emergent orbsides?
Speaker 2: Yeah, what is that?
Speaker 1: Exactly?
Speaker 2: Diethel tell you emits. They inhibit the formation of the
spindle protein that pulls the two sets of chromosomes apart
during mitosis. You don't think that's carcinogenic. You know what
the definition of cancer is, by the way, to sell
an abnormal number of chromosomes. So what happens when you
screw up the protein the rope that pulls the chromosomes apart.
Speaker 1: And they're using this We've.
Speaker 2: Been using it for thirty years in the nursery industry
now throwing it on your lawn because when a seed germinates,
you have rapid cell division, it kills them. Jesus, But
you ask yourself, what happens is the concentration drops to
where it's not one hundred percent lethal? Now you just
rationally thinking you would start to be generating cells with
abnormal numbers of chromosomes. Oh god, yeah, and you let
your kids and your dogs run around in that that
enters are drinking water.
Speaker 1: What is the compound again? What is the name di
ethyl tall you emids Jesus Christ, I'm sure you could
go down a home deepont and get it right now. Huh, absolutely, Yeah.
Speaker 2: A new class was brought out a few years ago.
I haven't been able to find out how it works.
Speaker 1: Tall you amids tall you amids amis.
Speaker 2: A m I d E s die ethyl d I
E t h y l tall t O l u
A m I d E.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: I got real good at doing this for customers, spelling things. Yeah, yeah,
it's pretty crazy. They're common granulars, or you can buy
liquid forms, but uh, the granulers spread them out on
top of your pots or on your lawn and water
hit some deaconses the granular the stuffs are basically very
viscous liquids vapor pressure.
Speaker 1: It doesn't hurt.
Speaker 2: They vaporize and the vapor seeps into the soil, so
anything in the top centimeter, And.
Speaker 1: It doesn't hurt plants that are already growing. It just
prevents the new seeds from Germany.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, don't ever use it on transplants because root
cap is growing quickly. Right, Yeah, I'll destroy the root system.
But yeah, if you're already present in the soil and working,
you're fine as yourselves last quite a while in plants.
God knows what it does to people, but I'm sure
the EPA would.
Speaker 1: And you know, regulously, I think like the airbnbs State
and last night in the suburbs and this beautiful suburban community,
beautiful as I wretch and puke in my own mouth.
But I just I look at that and I'm just
what the fuck, Like this is this whole this whole system,
this whole value system is just poisoned from them.
Speaker 2: Toposness. Anything that's a carbon containing molecule, if it exhibits
very vivid, bright color, that's your first morning. It's a carcinogen.
Why is that because of the electron race track, the
resonance of the electrons in a aromatic ring system. Somebody
gave me a bottle of that one of the most
popular DIETHYLLL tallio amid type pre emergent. It's the only
I mean, it's a brilliant fluorescent orange and sunlight, just
staggering color. See, the only thing I've seen that will
soak into polypropylene and stick for years.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: I don't know what I'm going to do with that
bottle of it when.
Speaker 1: I move here.
Speaker 2: You know, maybe they'll take it at one of these chemical.
Speaker 1: Why did they give it to them? Because they did.
Speaker 2: We're scared to use it, and I told them how
it worked, so I just can't throw it in the
trash now that you've told me this.
Speaker 1: It's just nuts that none of this stuff is regulated.
I mean dub regulated. It's regulated, right, but I mean
it should be illegal.
Speaker 2: It should be well, no reason, there's already so so
much tolerance to it. Uh, tolerance developed pretty quickly. And uh,
and that a lot of weeds it didn't control well
at all. It did save a lot of labor the
first few years there's still a lot of but you know,
once again, people just you know, put out ten times.
Speaker 1: So weeds don't grow in your grass.
Speaker 2: Well, in the nursery it was first, but now it's
like when it went over the counter to people for
their lawns and stuff. I thought that was just one
of the craziest things I've seen.
Speaker 1: There's a chemical that's a potent carcinogen that's found in
almost all oats unless they're organic, that's administered to them
to get them to grow straight so they're easier to harvest.
I guess I just I read an article on news
scientists and three months ago and it came it was
it only started mass used after twenty eighteen, after Trump deregulated.
Speaker 2: Good because I stopped eating.
Speaker 1: Just get organic.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, we'll get me get yours from Scotland.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about Wait, let's talk about some more plant
species though, because I got someone who like.
Speaker 2: I mean, well, there's a lot more Kotinas in the
Hill Country after the Blanco flood.
Speaker 1: All on private property or where of course, But rivers
are your rivers are supposed to be public?
Speaker 2: No in Texas, No, not the ones in the Hill Country. No,
you better read your treaty of bloody. I thought, I
thought this was no This stuff the Seven Rivers treated
in the Guadalupe Hildalgo treaty is under Spanish law, not
English water law. And in Spanish law you own the
bottom of the river. You don't own the water in it,
but you on the bottom of the river. So if
you're you can go down that river in a kayak.
But the second you brush a tree branch, or your
bottom of your canoe or your paddle hits the Iraq,
you are guilty of trespass.
Speaker 1: That's the religion here. The fucking trespassing is like a
literal religion.
Speaker 2: And it's a shame of the change in the law
that even I mean, we had ten years or so ago.
A guy down on the Guadalupe Ba got very angry
at some people who were canoeing and had just pulled
up and were sitting down in lawn chairs. And the
old man told him, you know, to get the hell out,
and they basically told him to fuck off that because
there is a curlage of the floodplain. This is still
is very really unsettled in law and in actual use.
But he an argument ensued the guy went and got
his shotgun and ended up killing one of them. You
get I think, you know, twelve years or something, a
seventy year old man.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think I think anytime though, anytime you
give a human being and you tell him this is
that we're territorial monkeys, right, And this happens all the time.
Like I'll be walking on a thoroughfare next.
Speaker 2: To somebody's property. What is forbidden you must have? Right? Well?
Speaker 1: What they just get paranoid this And that's the thing
that's real in Texas too, is this constant era of
paranoid and suspicion about are you on my land? If
I'm walking next to someone's land not touching it, I
always get the landowner coming out. I just want to see,
you know. And I can't say I blame them. I mean,
if I we have one hundred and forty five acres
of thorn scrub habitat in South Texas that we're preserving,
but I was walking around there and saw someone on
I want to know what they're doing too, you know.
But it's just it's this constant thing. I mean, you
don't deal with it, and everything is.
Speaker 2: I learned to use that from you know, that was
one of the few things I feel fortunate. I was
basically brought up, as I said, in a cocktail party,
where I learned to engage strangers win their trust. And
that's how I've gone on more land. That I've wanted
to do was doing exactly. Said to just part my
truck and walk along and get up by their gate,
and sure enough they come. And there's only been a
few times that it was that the owner wasn't there.
It was the manager and he was like, I'm in
there on vacation in France. I mean I could call
them on their iridium phone, but they really.
Speaker 1: See you said you got stopped. You were trying to
collect cursus, Yeah, the Mexican. Yeah, what what happened there?
Where was that?
Speaker 2: North of that was in Terrell County about fifteen ten
to fifteen miles north of Sanderson on the road to
Fort Stockton, And.
Speaker 1: So what happened? You were out there collecting seed? How'd
you get on the land? I mean, did you parked
and went through the fence? But did you know someone
that owned You're just like now, the UFAs.
Speaker 2: Driver had seen that was a plant head and had
seen them flowering in the ravine and told Michael that, hey,
go up, and so we drove up there they are, yeah,
and so my partner went on one side. I went
on the other. Uh.
Speaker 1: And what happened? And then the guy, the landowner came
out and come and.
Speaker 2: With his neighbor came out with their shotguns and uh
uh german shepherd on a leash and threatened us.
Speaker 1: And could you settle the guy down after a few
minutes or was he all worked up or what?
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was all worked up. But we were just
very obliging. And I kept saying, please call the police.
But as I said, sir, I'm just trying to be
really nice about this. I said, you can search me,
you can search my car, you can look where. And
I said, you don't. You don't own your property in Texas.
I have a right I've observed.
Speaker 1: So this is gone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so when the when the sheriff's deputy gets here,
that you're the one that's gonna be.
Speaker 1: So this is going to confuse people. You don't own
your property in Texas here, So the implication is it's
on lease, like you're technically leasing it from.
Speaker 2: No, you have a contract with your county for the
payment of your taxes. In these services will be provided
to you for the legal use of your enjoyment of
your of the property within the meats and bounds of
your land.
Speaker 1: But then your your children can inherit it from you,
though you can, they don't.
Speaker 2: They don't inherit the land. They inherit the boundaries to
do legally recreate and you know, make money or graze whatever.
As long as it's legal, you get to do it
on your land. And that's your deal with your county
when you so called by land in Texas.
Speaker 1: And you can find this in your deed or a
deed of title or no, you.
Speaker 2: Find it in your Texas law statues. So everybody out there,
I don't know what volume it is in Vernon's Texas
codes annotating VERD I have. I was when you went
out for a few minutes. I opened this and I
was just like, oh, I should just I'm going to
loan this to you, and you're going to have so
much fun with that. You just give it back to Michael.
Now you put that in your bathroom. Much total you're
gonna spend so no it is, you will just.
Speaker 1: Be pounding of animals by sheriff were constable.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what happened on this I got to shoot
my neighbor's cows.
Speaker 1: Okay, because his cows were coming onto your property.
Speaker 2: This eight hundred and sixty acres next to me. The
lease ran out on it, and a new guy came
and leased it. He put longhorns out there. He went
through that fence just.
Speaker 1: As you said that one forty three died zero three
three injury to trespassing animal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I called my sheriff office the three times
they came out.
Speaker 1: Hey, oh no, they're opening that door.
Speaker 2: Lough.
Speaker 1: That's good. We got to get some America. You cracked
that door open a little bit more so did you
end up shooting his cows or what?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah. It was so funny because the DPS officer,
it was like he was like a real a lieutenant. Okay,
they're gonna be good archie girls. Oh. He said, please, Dan,
when you do this, please, I beg you. I've got
to see this. I've gotten to know sky. I just
wasn't fence. Yes, And I went through the legal process
to where after the third time, the fourth time, the
animals were my property. Now to me to do with
as I please. So I took one of the many
deer carcasses I had and experimented and found out that
number eight shot, if it were lead, would go through.
But lead shot, you can shoot an animal, You can
carry lead bullet for life with no da damage to you.
But steal one piece of iron in your body and
you're dead. That's why bacteria invade your body. By the way,
that's what an infection is. It's bacteria coming for iron.
That's what they want from you is iron free iron,
solubilized iron, not locked up as an insoluble oxide in
rock or as a sulfide in pyrite. So but number
six steel shot went right through the pelt and went
in about a half a centimeter five millimeters so, and
it was very hard to find steel shot back.
Speaker 1: Then this is getting gruesome, man, This is like a
fucking Cormick McCarthy novel.
Speaker 2: So, okay, So I was racing home in my Mustang
at eighty five and I passed a sheriff's step and
I thought, oh shit, I'm finally going to get a
ticket on this run. You know, I've never been ticket
in on this road. Okay, And as I pulled in
the driveway. There were already two cop cars there.
Speaker 1: After you. Did you shoot this guy's camera one?
Speaker 2: Oh, no, this is before him. Yeah, because one of
the neighbors had already called it in, and everybody wanted
in law enforcement, wanted to see what was going to
happen when I did this.
Speaker 1: So I went in and you told the cops you
were going to shoot this student.
Speaker 2: I had eight DPS troopers, like twelve Sheriff's deputies and
a couple of San Marcos cops all standing on that
front porch of mine.
Speaker 1: And you told the guy you were going to shoot
his com Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, and I did. And I'll never forget the look
on their faces when I popped off too rounds out
of my old twenty gage into that I didn't had
no idea a longhorn could run that fast. It was incredible.
And then the the I think he was a captain
in the DPS, he started laughing so hard he couldn't
breathe he was, and then when he finally was able
to catch his breath, he was like, oh damn, so
what a nice touch, And that honey said the ranch
was back to the southeast. I sent him off to
the northwest.
Speaker 1: So what does landowner though, Well, he paid over.
Speaker 2: Eighteen hundred dollars to get these pieces of steel taken
out of these animals that were only worth a couple
hundred bucks apiece, and now had we're worth about fifty
bucks apiece. Because he was you could only really get
money for the pelts off of them. The meat so stringy,
and he got so many tickets because I drove them.
I might pellets. Drove them eight miles down the road,
Oh wow, and there were fortunately there were no collisions
with cars. No. It took thirty ille aliens being employed
as ranch hands. Two. It took them three days to
round them all up and get them back on the property.
And then the next day there were thirty five to
fifty people out there fixing that damn fence, so they
never got out again.
Speaker 1: You say, this dude is probably so he was hiring.
That's something.
Speaker 2: He came over and apologize.
Speaker 1: I said, you did.
Speaker 2: He was a drugstore cowboy from Houston, a thirty two,
from a really rich family. He said, well, you did
teach me a lesson. I will admit I'm not angry.
I should have. It's clearly obvious to me that I
should have fixed the fence, and I'm glad nobody got hurt.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, okay, but bringing it back to this, uh,
this interaction with the rancher whose land you were trespassing
on when you were collecting Mexican red wed seed, what
ended up happening in there?
Speaker 2: I did? The cherished deputy said, I'd broken no laws.
I was free to go. But did I? I was
not trespassing. I had observed curtilage, so I was not trusted.
I was not doing anything illegal.
Speaker 1: You know, on somebody's lands, certain distance, certain distance.
Speaker 2: Away from any building that could be deemed habitable by
a human being, and then that's like three hundred and
fifty feet or something. Oh, then there's the other sort
of any structure you're supposed to stay that looks like
it could be used as anything like a chicken Cooper,
pigsty anything like that, you got to stay like three
hundred and fifty feet away. So it's like six six
fifty for a habitable three fifty for any sort of Would.
Speaker 1: You tell the cop that that Texas law allows for that?
Speaker 2: Oh he knew it. No, he knew it. You can go.
Speaker 1: You can go on someone land as long as you
stayed and you.
Speaker 2: Don't, you cannot commit a take, and you can't damage.
Speaker 1: The fence, meaning that could be a you can't take
an arrowhead.
Speaker 2: You can't dig a plant up, you can't cut a christmast.
Speaker 1: What about seed that.
Speaker 2: My lawyer and I and then I talked to the
lawyers at a Person of wild Life long ago about this,
and they said that it was their opinion that there
was nothing they could find in the law cases that
had run through Texas, so there's no precedent for this.
But if the rancher could produce a receipt that in
the past he had sold seed to someone from that plant, that, yes,
that would be considered a take. So we were after
the red buds, so he would have had to have
found somebody who would have a cancel check and the
rancher had a receipt for that date or around that
date for selling the red to that guy.
Speaker 1: But if it wasn't something he had already sold and
capitalized that because it's if people are interested, because I'm
skeptical of this is this is this? If this is legit?
Where can people read more about it? Where would it
be right here? And this this vernon well, you're.
Speaker 2: Going to have to find the appropriate volume, which is
going to be a I imagine on Google or if
you call them up and asked him and said, hey,
what volume in Texas in your Texas Laws series?
Speaker 1: Would would?
Speaker 2: Would? Would would? Trust.
Speaker 1: I hope someone out there looks into this, because I
find this so hard to believe right now that I'm
so crazy in West texts. I so want it to
be true. And this is a guy in the Davis
Davis area, fourth Davis area that just started taking what
was it you noticed the surveys.
Speaker 2: Were we're off with the GP at dawn of GPS.
Speaker 1: And he went out there and realized that this flame.
Speaker 2: And caused this terrible confusion of property and who owns
what on the of Mount Livermore. Yeah, and got a
large chunk off the side of Mount Livermore for his arm,
basically for his time and trouble.
Speaker 1: And so the cop let you go that day.
Speaker 2: He was like, thank you so much for not making
me arrest these guys. I mean it really would have been.
Speaker 1: Really arrest the lands.
Speaker 2: Two of them. Yeah, and uh, threatening with a firearm.
That's yes, if you point a gun at someone in Texas,
you're supposed to pull the trigger, by the way, So.
Speaker 1: What did these guys, how'd that go with them?
Speaker 2: That was just it?
Speaker 1: Or what I mean? I imagine that pretty intensed?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, when the when the cop took his handcuffs
out and said, please don't make me use these probably
is it.
Speaker 1: The new puppy or what.
Speaker 2: There? Okay, porkers, here is a puppy on your side.
Speaker 1: Okay, sitting back down after a much needed break, We're
not done yet. Well, fucking I'll go another hour if
you want. Okay, So I forget where we were, But
I wanted to talk about the Texas Rangers because some
really gnarly shit went down here, especially in the southern part.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the southern part is far away.
Speaker 1: Nineteen hundred twenties, you were saying in the north this
was just oh or just a law enforcement In the
south there basically guestopo running people off their land eighteen
fifty through nineteen twenties. Well, La Matanza where I live,
which was a massacre against Mexican Americans, happened in the
fucking nineteen ten through the twenties. I mean, just straight
up robbing people of their land. What the fuck? How
I mean this shit's been covered up. A lot of
people don't even know a lot of people where I
grew up, don't even know where I live now, I
don't even know about it.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, there's a really sad aspect of the
Hanno culture is that there's no need to learn something
if it's not of a tremendous practical value to you.
And that's everything from swint to learning how to swim,
to the basic history of how you got where you
are and uh, and why you're you're you're stock at
where you are. So that that's just a really a
sort of a strange cultural bias, uh, that they haven't
in many regards. I mean we I guess every culture
has their own, but there's well.
Speaker 1: There's a huge history of angle O repression, yes see.
And it's fucking ridiculous. I mean this, you know, friends
of mine who weren't taught Spanish. Uh, you know, and
really what Mexican is, it's Spanish and indigenous, and some
people are more Spanish, some people are more indigenous. Hold on,
we got dog drama going on. Okay, We're just gonna
have to you know, can you please stop that?
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 1: Excuse me? You're cute, but that's fucking so. So you've
got this the Spanish and Indigenous heritage, and there's this
like renunciation almost that I see. I mean, I've lived
in Mexican neighborhoods my whole life, have grown up around
Mexican my whole life. And there's you know, other neighborhoods
like Tucson, Oakland, fucking brightly painted houses, streets named after
Caesar Chavez. In the valley, it's the same. It's beije.
Everyone's trying to have a long no. I mean the
fucking murals there. It's ninety nine percent of Mexican American
and murals are for fucking white dudes that have been
dead for one hundred years. It's the most. It's so
it's like living in the matrix. It's so fucking weird
to me. It's what the kids today would call it
hasn't been decolonized. But I kind of hate that word
because it's just it's been overused. It's a fucking buzz word.
It's stupid. It's anyway. Yeah, I get why people use it,
but this is just straight up, I mean, it's it's
so weird. But then you learn about la Matanza and
you're like, oh, there was like serious repercussions for speaking Spanish,
for being too brown for any of this shit. What's
up with when did this really start? What's your awareness?
Speaker 2: I mean this, you know, when you start reading the
colonial history of Spain, you can see they had these
these class divisions based on your skin color, right, and
you still get that in Mexico. Oh yeah, and and
then you not only did you have that, you had
a whole other set of class divisions on your racial heritage.
I mean, why is it at the top.
Speaker 1: It's just biologically illiterate to biologically illiterate, that's what I
That's what really are. It's so fucking dumb, like alleles
the code for melon in production, not knowing you know
what melanin is and why there's different vary variations of
it and using that that just divide and you know,
and it's a territorial chimp like territorial pissings.
Speaker 2: I worked for twenty five plus years. I got a
green card for an illiterate uh Mexican from the Guanauato area,
couldn't read a right. Try to send him to the
church school to read. He just like and like I said.
He was like, look, if the Good Lord meant me
to read and be able to read, I'd be able
to read. But it has no use to me. And
I was like, who is this. This is my coworker
for twenty five years, Javier Cervantes, great worker, nice guy.
He could take an engine apart, being even though he
was illiterate, didn't understand anti physical phenomenon. He could take
a car apart and put it back together. I watched
him take his engine out of a Ford F one
hundred out, take the heads apart, replace some rings, put
it back together, have it back in the bolted to
the frame, and running by sundown the same day. I mean,
right right, very clever person in many ways, but at
the same time, he would never I could not get
him to learn to swim, even in the swimming pool
where he could demontrable standing had.
Speaker 1: But going back to the Latians and what the rangers
were doing down there, where did this come from? Where
did it start? Who did the order come from?
Speaker 2: Like the straight up well started right right after the revolution,
and it was basically It's my opinion for my readings
is this was basically brought in an attitude that was
brought into Texas by the flood of emigrants shortly after
the Anglos, primarily from the what I would call Dixie. Yeah, yeah,
the States. They carried a lot of that sort of
racial attitudes on skin speak, skin pigmentation with them, And
I don't know, I guess it was just a source
of power to them, making maybe making them feel better
about their own lives. But it was. It's not present
in the original settlers.
Speaker 1: Here, right, But but you see that still today, these
all these weird this these frustrations about demographic change and
this weird paranoia.
Speaker 2: You know, that's the state ways a resurgence of it,
from Corpus Christie all the way down to Browns.
Speaker 1: Ken Paxton, you know, filing lawsuits against you know, a
voter registration orgs in San Antonio and like they're registered,
they're they're registering legal citizens to vote and legal immigrants
can't vote. Like they're doing something entirely within the bonds
of the law. You fucking pig creep. Why not you
know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Like, it's no, it's it's it's it's it's my cannot
wrap my head around why people would act that way.
Speaker 1: But but still I mean, tracing this history is just wow.
I mean, I want to talk about plants too, but
this ship is just it's the cultural situation in Texas
obviously affects the plant the situation of the plants too,
of the things that live here.
Speaker 2: You know, oh absolutely, I think you know. This has
been one of the one of the most brutal things
about the ecology of the Hill Country is being destroyed
by people who never live there. They've never owned property there.
They at best they went out on a deer, a
drunken deer hunting a weekend. Other than that, they just
joined in with a bunch of friends that had some
money and put together a development and Godello south side
of Blanco and took a square mile and walked off
with a few hundred thousand dollars each.
Speaker 1: But these developments are going up and there's no talk
about water shortages or the fucking insane he waves that
are forecast for the next few decades.
Speaker 2: Bernie. I'd be very curious to see what happens to
Bernie in twenty five here where is Bernie? That is
west of San Antonio, about twenty five miles.
Speaker 1: Not to mention when you pave everything because it's all driving.
It's like a death cult of being trapped in an automobile,
you know, which not to mention the metabolic.
Speaker 2: Diseases that now. Bernie was quintessential hill country cowboy town
right up to nineteen eighty and between it and the
northern edge of San Antonio a subdivision came in and
based on a golf course. Originally it swelled to thousands
of houses. I'm trying to think, is it fair Oaks sometime?
Speaker 1: Remember a fucking golf course?
Speaker 2: Golf course and Bernie. Now I go through Bernie, you know,
every four months, and every time I go through, it's
stretched on its east side another half mile three quarters.
Speaker 1: The biggest strip and offence, thinny golfers out there, but
it's not a real sport.
Speaker 2: In Botany, in the Bondany Department, we always we had
a movement where we tried to talk to people who
are putting golf courses in to use him as a
botanic gardens in Refusia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for the cooler.
Speaker 2: Species that there's is it all coexists? It would all
make it look nicer and so forth. And strangely they
never got with was the Barton Creek.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the people that golf don't give generally golf. They
don't care, you know. But anyway, actually I know a
couple of guys that golf that are all right.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: One's actually immigration attorney. Good dude, you know, a good
immigration attorney, that kind of im. But but uh, you know,
it's by and large it's a you know, it's a
demographic thing, the golfer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, thankfully it's it's it's shrunk in the in
the last decade, twenty.
Speaker 1: Years, God has it. When I worked at the railroad,
there were guys that were trying to golf. What the
fuck you doing, man, what are you doing? Really, go
fucking go to a boxing gym, do something. The fuck
is this? You put on your fucking stupid pants and
your shoes and little in.
Speaker 2: A lot of ways, it's got a lot of the aspects.
It takes you out of the house and away from
your wife and children for four hours, six hours.
Speaker 1: So just go into a boxing gym.
Speaker 2: You know, we're going to fucking that spouse knows right
where you are.
Speaker 1: But anyway, all right, well so I forget well over
the place.
Speaker 2: So you let's talk.
Speaker 1: You've been to Mexico many.
Speaker 2: Oh God, that was that was one of the best
out of the bout department. We would check out a
vehicle every summer, every winter go down. Three to five
of us go down for two to three weeks. Uh,
you know, especially the northeastern part. I mean we we
would occasionally like drive to Presidio, cross over to uh
Chihuahua and take the ferry to the tip of bah
cover up Baha.
Speaker 1: That's great about I think that's a good way though, too,
to experience the North American condent because you realize these
stupid fucking geopolitical boundaries. It's the same plants, it's the
same life forms, and it slowly changes. You get different
ecotypes as you go south to Tropha Dioeca grows the
way the fuck down in correct.
Speaker 2: What's really amazing to me. And Michael Easton got to
see this for himself the one place he's finally been
went over the border shirtless Grand size. I mean from
like Big Bend to the mouth of the Rio Grand.
When you get over the river, it changes radically.
Speaker 1: It doesn't, it doesn't it all, it doesn't know.
Speaker 2: As Michael was like, I can't believe this on you know,
eleven miles or whatever, from the Rio grand But half
of the plants that are there are not nade over
found in the US.
Speaker 1: That's true, There's there's many plants abruptly stuff. It's yeah,
it's but there's many plants that go right south too, and.
Speaker 2: Ski right Coberline. I mean, come on.
Speaker 1: But also, as you start to go south, you're not
just going south, you're just going down a latitude, going
up in elevation. The entire in the entirety of central
Mexico is at five thousand feet.
Speaker 2: Very very What makes it so botanically rich. Mexico is
probably as well as was at least when I was
in grad school, to probably have more species of plants
than any other country was the fact that you have
these innumerable isolated mountain ranges, the sky stopping you know,
starting out at the base altitude of you know, three
thousand and four thousands, the.
Speaker 1: Sky elevation going up to ten twelve, and they act
like refugee because as the climate changes, saying the place
to see these organisms can move up, the plants can be.
Speaker 2: Dropping up Orizaba. And fortunately the little weenie truck I
had went up two miles past all the other cars
that had died from lack of oxygen. Mine was still running.
Everybody was a few people up there were like, I
can't you got supplemental air going into that. No, that
thing's still running at this else. Oh god, I think
we got that thing up to thirteen five hundred. It
was a little Nissan four cylinder Wieni truck. Yeah, and
uh yeah, that was my Mulei trip when I got
this fabulous colection of Muhlenbergi, a species which was nicely found,
the one that the oh what was that couple at
a University of Arizona system. They spent their life doing
his husband and wife doing a Muhlenbergie and there was
only one tax on they had never seen. And I
came back with it and got it into cultivation of
Muelenbergie a lepto Europe And they were like, man, can
you tell us? They when they found out I found it,
they called me and I said where do you live?
And they said we were retired in Tucson. And I said,
get your pen and paper, I'll give you exact directions.
They were in their eighties. They called me back twelve days.
Speaker 1: Did you ever go to l CLO?
Speaker 2: Oh Rancho Cielo.
Speaker 1: Yeah, four or five times.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was there time I went on, which was,
oh god, they destroyed all the forest around it. You
could drive up to it. Now, I was just what
they destroyed, all the mountain sides on the old Pan
American Highway down to uh uh you know you turn off,
was it, Gomez faria.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to get out there.
Speaker 2: But on the main highway, the Pan American Highway down
there these mountain sides that had remained intact forever. Just
in the six years since I was there last, they
were completely denuded and replaced. People were growing sugar cane
on the sides of mountains that the slope was fifty
sixty degree. What insanity was this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, such a rich area too, such a fucking ri
Oh yeah, I mean just stand hoopia, that cool orchid,
that epiphetic orchid that blooms from the bottom those huge
cave systems. It's all karst line stone up there.
Speaker 2: Yeahs oh yeah, that was the Now you talk about
Rancho Cielo, which that's that's gone now. But the first
time I went to Rancho Colo you had to walk
like nine miles from parking your car. Now, that was
when Gomez Farias was you know sixty eighty people. It's
where the electric line stopped at a little tienda when
you pay the guy five bucks to watch your car
for the week. You were going to be up there.
Speaker 1: And this is in the eighties or what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you walked early eighties. You walked from Gomez
Faria through this guy's avocado ranch which was just destroyed
in the frieze of eighty three, and then you went
up the mountain. And when you climbed up that mountain,
you finally got to the top and literally leaning over
with your hands on the ground, crying, and all of
a sudden you pop up over the lip. I still
have dreams about.
Speaker 1: The Deca Tropis, you know, the one that rutas you were.
Speaker 2: Talking about thee Yeah, hit this forest of totacarpus that
were five to eight feet across at breast height. There
were one hundred and fifty.
Speaker 1: And you're saying that's all gone now.
Speaker 2: Yep, they turned it all into orae grapes.
Speaker 1: Jesus.
Speaker 2: I had a permit to bring orchids across I bring
I was limited to twelve, but I would walk on
my way back through there and grab my twelve that
would all be the size of a trash can.
Speaker 1: This deca tropis bicolor of routasi. It's a really cool
It looks like a sue mac or something. It was
just you know, pinnate leaves, but russety undersides. It's got
the indumentum on the underside.
Speaker 2: On the actual with the bocarneos, I mean, all the
cool plants on the on that walk up, but there
was a potacarpus force. It's in my dreams because there's
nothing underneath it. Yeah, other than some eight ten foot
tall tree ferns and the branches that had blown out
that were just festooned with bromeliads and orchids laying there
with got or two running around eating the.
Speaker 1: Orchids cut down for fucking dover.
Speaker 2: Oh they cut it all down there, all all gone
in turn. They why then the world they didn't sell
that stuff to the Japanese for a fortune instead of
literally I remember sitting in gold mis Foras, which then
was like over ten thousand people in ninety six. There
were people just sitting there taking staves of that, splitting
them up into eighth inch thick, six inch across, like
you make a basket. They were making orange. They were
making crates for vegetables out of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was like, how can you take that beautiful and
valuable off of a several hundred year old tree to
make orange crates vegetable crates? I mean you could be
selling that thing for days?
Speaker 1: When did you stop going to Mexico?
Speaker 2: Like what? The last trip I went down was two
thousand and one and I just went went down through Monterey,
went down to that Horsetail Falls National Park, drove the
backway to Sawtello, which was really an incredible drive. I
really me a lesson about things that we think are rare,
like the Bohinia and Jesta and Pistachia Mexicana. There was
square miles there was nothing but a thicket of that.
Speaker 1: That's the one that they called Texas Texas. Yeah, but
it's all on Mexiconian right, And.
Speaker 2: You know, died out collecting that when I first started
along Sycamore Creek there there by the Seminole Canyon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what is that population still there?
Speaker 2: You know? The damnedest thing is uh ye, I wouldn't
think so, no, But I can tell you something really weird.
I figured out where the spot was in San Antonio.
I had a great guess where that spot spot. There's
in the trees, shrubs and woody vines of the Southwest.
There's a mention that on the outskirts of San Antonio
is a population. And when I really got to know
San Antonio, I knew that had to be. Just on
the Trinity University side of Hilda Brand.
Speaker 1: There was a wild population.
Speaker 2: And I knew that had to be the site, just
from my gut feeling from the weird it's all all
the vegetation there has gone now. But when I first
saw that in the early eighties, I said, this has
to have been because that would have been the edge
of San Antonio. And sure enough, at the backgarden years later,
somebody brought they were clearing out their grandfathers O Jesus,
and they brought in several shoe boxes of black and
white photos. And that was an amateur.
Speaker 1: Botanist decades earlier.
Speaker 2: Yeah, photos of the population of the Pistachio and labor
Hilda Brand Avenue, just east of Trinity Camp.
Speaker 1: And they weren't planted.
Speaker 2: They were. Now there's some Steve and my partner are
going down. This was ten years ago. Eight years ago
we drove down to Broadway where those rare bookstores are.
There's a half priced book store and across the street
chievers rare books, and they hadn't opened. So we walked
over across this There was a bridge over this sequia
into the edge of the park. We got thirty feet
into that park and I looked down. There was a
wild two foot tall seedling of Mexican pistache sitting there.
But everbird was coming and crossing back. Is still extant,
still eating those things in Mexico and shitting the seeds
out on its migratory rialty. I was. It stopped my heart.
I stopped step and had to explain to him these
significances that were only a mile away, when.
Speaker 1: You can tell it apart from Chinese pistache, You can't.
Speaker 2: Not in the seed, but as soon as they sprout
you can tell them the board, as I learned the
hard way. He brought me, Uh, three gallons.
Speaker 1: That's another plan. Why is somebody not growing those by
the hundreds and trying.
Speaker 2: To back because the con root rock gets them and
they're dead and it's a slow, horrible ack.
Speaker 1: Really, yeah, that's why you can't grow them in landscape.
Me here. What about the tree and lang tree at
that roy Bean visitors.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those were dug up and I did a lot
of work with with the brothers.
Speaker 1: The let's tell everybody about Texas pistache is anacrdier say
it's the true pistache.
Speaker 2: Yes, and you can't graft it. There was a bunch
of Arabs and there some Davis in the Davis Mountain
bought some landing grafted the.
Speaker 1: But there, but there was a population that got flooded
out right when hir.
Speaker 2: And those were dug up and are placed in that
lang tree.
Speaker 1: Uh, but there's only one I know there's six of
them there.
Speaker 2: There were, I mean they were gorgeous. They looked like
white birds.
Speaker 1: But they're susceptible to an invasive root rod.
Speaker 2: They get Wait what is that? Was it a fusarium?
It's a it's a non sexually reproducing I believe, uh, pithium.
So it's everywhere on the Blackland prairie. And the bummer
with it is it gets moved around on cars and
your feet and you can't plan anything here. It gets
a lot of things that are in the rose Acey family.
Speaker 1: But it nukes introduced.
Speaker 2: I believe it's Its origin is unknown. I believe it's
one of these apple mixic. It doesn't have real sex.
It just vegetatively reproduces or and makes the uh uh
non uh sexual spores. But it's horrible, horrible. All the
tax all the taxonomy changed when I learned all this
in the eighties.
Speaker 1: Folks got this is it's a brutal and there's no
there's no resistance to it.
Speaker 2: No. The only thing you can do with the use
of aliette will stave it off of what aliet aluminum thos.
Speaker 1: But that's probably less of a concern. This fungus is
in the drop down.
Speaker 2: There, not in it, but in cultivation, and in cultivation
in this area it's death. There's no way around it. It.
Oh yeah, I had a couple lights sold like forty two.
They put a hedge of them to block their neighbor. Oh,
they were like, they were so happy. The first ten
twelve years they got twelve feet tall evergreen. You couldn't
even see their security light through them. Then they called
me and I came over and I was like, oh,
cotton root rock just died over Martindale. No, no, no,
they don't die. The leaves just all fall off, and
then a few come out and they stay and then
they turn orange, and then they fall off. Then it
goes back a little bit more and a few more form.
It's a very slow depth, very brutal to watch.
Speaker 1: But anyway, going back to you know plants that have
a little bit of an occurrence in Texas and then
a much broader distribution in Mexico, like junipers flacci for instance,
you only really where do you get that? That's only
in the.
Speaker 2: Then get that in the Big Ben Park and there's
few and far between, and it's very difficult to do
from seed. It comes well from cutting.
Speaker 1: What's what's hard about the seed?
Speaker 2: Just they well, I've just had the first time I
literally illegally grabbed a handful of the drows. I brought
them back. I got two hundred of them up literally
from it. I had like my park on it was
cold as hell. I shoved a few in my pocket,
brought them home.
Speaker 1: What the hell?
Speaker 2: They all came up then, making a concerted effort. I
got nothing. Then I tried it from cuttings.
Speaker 1: How they do growing? I mean they were, oh they did.
Speaker 2: Look at the one in my front yard.
Speaker 1: They just died. Yeah, I mean it's a truck, this
big got it.
Speaker 2: I have no idea and this is so, but this
is There's been so much tree death the last three
years Antexas. Since that winter with the ice and sleep. Yeah, boy,
the oak wilt has marched on my property six hundred
feet plus, taken out numerous thousand year old plus oaks,
went under the road and has now made it to
the other side. I live on one of the original
thirteen sites found with oak wilt, and it didn't move
at all for thirty one years till that winter.
Speaker 1: With the ice.
Speaker 2: And that was because of the ice and the sleet
catching on the juniper boughs and that pulled down the
oak branches and shattered them lunchitudinely. And then as it
all melton came up and then we had it warmed
up quickly and was an extraordinarily cloudy, cool, humid two months.
The only time I've ever seen those damn little fungus
beetles where you could actually go up and see them,
almost like a haze. They're so tiny, fluttering around the branches.
Speaker 1: What you know, like a plant like juniper's flash that
I've been growing. That you just had sporadic german as.
It was just hard to you try to give her
ellig acid.
Speaker 2: Or I tried. I've never really had much effect on
any of the new plants with ga he then I've
got one through three in viles, and I never had
much of an effect, if any with that. The best
effect that I've had, Like for pessimens, you use the
stone polishers, those sturdy dollars drums. He put some blasting
sand in it. Throw your pensimen seeds on rather it
run for twelve hours, take it out, Pour that deep
purple water off, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Speaker 1: The need arazen really.
Speaker 2: Yes, until it stops coming out deep purple. When it
stops coming out deep.
Speaker 1: Purple, them off real well. And then the other option,
I guess is so them and just forget about them
and be fine with them popping kobeas.
Speaker 2: Don't come up. Then. I don't know what it is
about that plan? Were you?
Speaker 1: Did you grow prudence text thing at all? Well?
Speaker 2: I can't because my water's alkaline, and it's got to
be in pure sand. He's got to be in that
sugar sand. Yeah, at least, God, why someone doesn't hybridize
that back into peaches. If you've ever eaten one of
the fruits of this delicious, unbelievable, delicious, like a whole peach.
Speaker 1: What is prunnu to flora?
Speaker 2: Like I got it here? It has nothing, it's dry, it's.
Speaker 1: Already it's a dry It's like an almond or something.
Speaker 2: It's very tiny, little alm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, prunas.
Speaker 2: We got one up outside of my bedroom. You can
look at. It's not in it. It's not as terribly
uncommon as we think.
Speaker 1: It's just it's so Texan law. Yeah, yeah, Texan is amazing. Yeah,
I've got a couple in my yard. I got a
couple that just germinated, but they take a while.
Speaker 2: There's a huge, nice population on Interstate thirty seven that's
very accessible.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
Speaker 2: It just goes south from San Antonio and you'll go
about twenty miles and there will be a picnic area.
Speaker 1: Oh right, the.
Speaker 2: Area.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's bulldozed for a lot of it.
Speaker 2: Then, well it's fortunately there's still some of it. It's
not in the media. It's you got to go across
the meeting. You got to run across the northbound lane
and on the on the east side, they're thirty individuals.
No ship as big around as that Iroquois wild rice basket.
It's splint sieve there to twice that die.
Speaker 1: It's amazing.
Speaker 2: But the mummers you got to go. You've got to
go as soon as the fruit for them. They don't
have to go net the hell out of there because
it's so hard to get fruit off of them because
the animals are on it so fast. Yeah, it's the
same thing like the Morse microphill of the little leaf mulberry.
You've got to tarp that is that good?
Speaker 1: That's got a good fruit.
Speaker 2: No, but so it does something to birds because they'll
kill for it. They eat it before it ever ripens.
Speaker 1: So it's good if you want to get it for
for wildlife. Yeah, have you You hadn't seen that Liatris Carazana,
that one I sent you pictures of yesterday.
Speaker 2: You know what I thought about that? And I looked
it up. I believe I've seen that in far East Texas.
Speaker 1: Really. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: That's a tall one.
Speaker 1: No, it's like two or three feet that might be bridges.
Bridges looks like that.
Speaker 2: There's a well friend of mine, Peter Leus, showed me
several late leatress in East Texas. Yeah, and they had
that more washed out. They weren't that brilliant purple like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah that thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's there's some of those general you know
you're seeing you just you know, think of them of
always being in dry. No Lina is one. You start
looking at the floor of like Dixie, there's a bunch
of no Linas spread out through it. Mississippi, Alabama.
Speaker 1: Really wow, Yeah, you're like what, Yeah, No Lina's here. Yeah.
Do you do you have do you have any hope
for I mean, Texas has lost so much of its
flora and it's so off most people's radar? Do you
have hope and like native plant gardening and any kind
of restoration in the fucking people learning to hate lawns?
I mean I get a little now, you know.
Speaker 2: I really did if you'd ask me that question in
nineteen ninety eight, Yes, because as I used to tell
people who wanted me to pay for advertising, I would
laugh and say, I don't need any ever. All I
need is the people is we'll got their windows in
March in April, and they'll they'll find me out if
they've moved here. They'll go, No, why would I use
something else that is incredible. I just saw a thousand
penceman Kobe is mixed in with two species of wine cup,
and you know, it doesn't get much better than that.
But that's all gone. Now you see two or three
pensaman kobe is. There's nothing and the cell phones. People
are glued to their phones. They're not looking out the window.
They they they don't even want to drive anymore. They
want to turn some machine on, take an app while
their car drives, while they pollute the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's going to work long term.
Speaker 2: No, I think that liability issues.
Speaker 1: I wonder. I wonder where. I wonder where the car
culture is going to go because it's such a miserab
way to live, and you know people, I talk to
all these people, and you'll see this on social media pages.
Like I was. I was miserable in the US. I
was working too much. I was trapped in a car.
I moved to Europe. I could walk everywhere, take public
transit every day. Was a different adventure. I lost fucking
fifteen pounds immediately because I wasn't trapped sitting down all
the time. I think at some point people are going
to catch on this is fucked.
Speaker 2: This is a fun I had hopes in the eighties
and nineties. I really you know, knew guy running for
mayor of Austin, and I told him to run on
two platforms. This was just as they ever learned they
were going to close Muller Airport. And I said to missive,
you run on two issues. You're going to use the
old Muller Airport as the next Hollywood. You got like
fifty sixty acres your flat land with prairie and trees
and all those big buildings to fix airplanes. You got
all for sound stages. And wouldn't you rather be stuck
in traffic next to Sandra Bullock or Brad Pitt then
you know some yeehaw from Georgetown.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't care about it.
Speaker 2: And and then the other thing is we need to start,
you know, a subway under the metro area in the
limestone and then pop up like it's swater lane and
hit the open rails on the top.
Speaker 1: If you try to do, if you try to do
in Texas, they think it was a globalist takeover. There'd
be so many people that thought it was some sort
of conspiratory people.
Speaker 2: I can't go to Austin anymore. It's too too, it's
just too disturbing. I can't I can't burn some.
Speaker 1: Twenty five year old kid making six figures designing apps
for a fucking fun like a fucking smart.
Speaker 2: Shut growing up, wanting to aspiring to be an influencer.
Speaker 1: Everything's expensive as fun though too. That's the thing about
Austin that's nuts is you're getting ribbed. And I understand
they're shaking down these fucking techy kids, so they're shaking
down you too. Everything's a rip off. I just got
a ninety five dollars parking ticket. I'm not going to
pay for taking my little girl to go, you know,
watch the bats. Uh And it was like a private
company that's doing the parking now too, which is an automatic, Like,
oh you don't have to pay that fuck them, but uh,
you know, I don't know. It's just they Austin's fucking weird.
Not trying to get to negative.
Speaker 2: Everybody says in Austin in the good old days, you know.
And I remember going to Austin in the seventies, and
you know, when the it was it was a fun
play right here, you know, and so forth, and it
lasted up until the early eighties. But by the time
I moved here in eighty five eighty six, the you know,
were the only rush hour problems we had in Austin
up until the mid eighties. Was it was it ten
after three to three thirty when the mothers were going
and picking their kids up at school. That was the
only time the interstate locked up. Yeah, and it was
only for fifteen twenty minutes. Now it's just a It
starts in Kyle and goes through Georgetown.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, everyone's trapped driving again. There's no alternative.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know where I'll go when I sell
my nineteen acres here, but.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know. Mexico might be an ISO.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I have to live with someplace that has
a semblance of law.
Speaker 1: Yeah that might. I mean, yeah, that's true. But you
never you never know, you never know how things might
change there. I mean, we'll see how the fucking US,
the US might be added for a lack of lawyers.
Who knows, man, you get like civil unrest, all the
hyper partisan divisions here there.
Speaker 2: You know, it's i'd say, enough to make you buy
a gun.
Speaker 1: So that's how the oligarchs get everybody off their back.
You get people fighting each other over dumb shit and anyway, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I'm really overall, I'm extremely pessimistic about the ecological future
of central UH and UH Texas. I'm not terribly worried
about far West Texas. East Texas I think is probably
going to be pretty much determined by the future of Houston,
which I think is very dubious due to its low altitude.
Speaker 1: It's going to get increasing water.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think people are finally going to have to
say I can't do business here anymore. It's a great
place to refine oil because you can wash all your
stuff out to see, you know, every August, see in
the gates and let the drums float away, right, Yeah,
just have the cruise go out and spray them with
pant removers.
Speaker 1: So about West Texas, you have to worry about West No,
this boutique goes out there, you know.
Speaker 2: But that's uh Well, the biggest, my biggest probably West
Texas has been the Tilingua area that's getting and we
all after those tear ter Lingual ranches years ago. But
to see how many people have actually moved out, get.
Speaker 1: Your bona fide desert experience. They just feel so at
home in the desert, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, come down and try that bacon heat and uh,
don't worry about those guys with those sacks over their
shoulders walking.
Speaker 1: Or the lack of water, yes, the lack of water
and so incredibly dressed a lot of.
Speaker 2: Law enforcement, but they're not interested in you because you
belong here. They don't have time to cuff the guy,
you know, breaking into your head.
Speaker 1: I mean they're still fucking with people out there west
the Sierra Blanca and harassing people. We're here. Someone was
getting They're still busting people for weed and some where
was it man I Presidio Countie.
Speaker 2: I think well, I mean out their law enforcement is
primarily federal, so well, I don't have a choice. They
want to keep their job.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but wasting time on I mean, come on, man,
there was no there was a sheriff. There was a
sheriff at Serra Blanca that was fucking with people for
for we they used to be a really hot border
inspection or cut you know, border patrol checkpoint, just busting
people for wheed. All these like Willie Nelson got busted
there or you know, whatever the fuck. I just waste
the time. But it's it's weird. Man. I don't know,
I don't know where things are going to go. But
I'm again, I'm just I'm so interested in the plants here,
and there's so many cool species.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a shame, as I've told Michael again, Anyhare,
it's a shame you weren't Michael wasn't into this before
two thousand, when the wildflowers were still the last last
vestige of them were holding on. You need to read
through some of these diaries I've got from the eighteen
fifties and eighteen eighties about oh my god, this is
like the smell the collars. It just goes on as
far as the eye can say.
Speaker 1: I mean, you get that in get that in California
where there's a good amount of public lands protected Carrizo
playing National monuments.
Speaker 2: Out.
Speaker 1: But uh, that's that's again, that's again the public private
land thing. And you tell people about it like I
pot I made a post on social media. But is
it pissed off some of these empty headed nitwits who
had never all generally men from Texas, who had never
known anything different, who were just what's wrong? We are
you good starting land? I'm not against owning land at all.
It's you don't understand how abnormal it is for ninety
nine percent of a state's land to be locked up
and inaccessible to the people that fucking live I defending
the people are the.
Speaker 2: History of the way Texas came into the Union. We
are the only state that came that was an independent country. Yeah, beforehand,
and that's just.
Speaker 1: You know that was but not even that long. It
wasn't even an independent country that long. It was for
like twenty I mean it was between eighteen thirty seven to.
Speaker 2: Eighteen forty eight, eighteen forty No, that was brought in
eighteen forty six.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, so shit, even nineteen years. It was a
country for nine years.
Speaker 2: So all this and Anson Jones, our last president, killed himself.
Speaker 1: Shortly nine years is the blink of an eye. And
these people talk about, you know this, we're an independent country,
my ass. You guys do it from the fucking Mexican you.
Speaker 2: Know they you know what the what England and France
were interested about us for?
Speaker 1: What was that? Oh?
Speaker 2: I have to find the passage for you. This was
before they were we were formally recognized. The emissary from
France sees his u twin from Britain. They're on the
Brasses River and one's on one side and one's on
the other, and they see one another in a way
get up, and of course the Brasses was a real
river then. So one of them is a good swimmer.
He takes his clothes off, ties up and it's you know,
swims across, but it's just clean. Drys Off puts his
clothes back on. They're like, what the hell are you doing?
You know what we're doing here, like you tis. They
were here to look at how many live oak trees
there were. Why because live oak was what was used
and is still used for the keel of all wooden
hulled boats, because it is so strong and so flexed.
So and as both of them said, there's no point
in either of us walking another foot upstream. This supply
because most people don't know this, but by like the
eighteen twenties, we'd exhausted all the big oak trees on
the eastern seaboard that weren't like, you know, framing somebody's
mansion sort of shit. They were no longer you know,
an abundant resource. And as the two emissaries said it,
that's pretty much right the same letter back to our
governments that this is pointless. There is an inexhaustible supply
of live oak in Texas all alone, to supply the
navies of the world for all time. Yes, it's more
here than could possibly be used.
Speaker 1: So that they were just in a lumber excursion. I
boke in particular lumber scout.
Speaker 2: You know, you see a lot of our trees just
be flighting a this. But the Texas per Simmons, they
used to be like this big round and it had
this center part. It was this brilliant, beautiful evance.
Speaker 1: Those can get three.
Speaker 2: It takes a long time. Unfortunately, when the lithographs came
out for newspapers, it was found that that wood was
the best for making the print for the photographs, and
it only took ten years.
Speaker 1: Can you see all growth of Texas simon anywhere?
Speaker 2: Everything was so valuable. Everyone was cut down. That showed
that dark wood down to like you know, if it
had an inch of it down it went.
Speaker 1: It's like where all of our.
Speaker 2: Acinacious went. The Aconasia, the narrow leaf one was one
of our most abundant wildflowers up until the turn of
the you know, eighteen ninety five to nineteen oh five
when it was touted as a herbal remedy for the
flu and so forth. It was bush. Yeah, totally bullshit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it doesn't do anything, but the.
Speaker 2: Kids were getting paid, and you know, a few pennies
for every dry pound they brought in, so they were
just went out in all their spare time ripping it up.
Speaker 1: The horn lizards are gone. Did you see what you were?
You see?
Speaker 2: Oh that was I moved here. It was a year
after the horn lizards disappeared. I moved here. I had
harvest ramp mounts everywhere. Within ten years. I had one
left that I carefully guarded over here, and I used
to go out.
Speaker 1: We wiped my fire ants soon.
Speaker 2: You know, the fire ant people came here at the
US survey, Yeah, they were it. Well. I don't know
how you'll take this, but congratulations, you have the highest
fiery intensity anywhere we've measured in the United States. I
had over twenty two five hundred pounds an acre. There
was a mound like every other every two square feet.
The first three years I lived here, you couldn't leave
any food out for more than ten twelve minutes, otherwise
there'd be a three inch column of ants coming in
through the window and a three inch column going out
with stuff holding it up in their jaws, and you
just instinctively developed this reflex that when you felt that
soft ground, you just jumped. And as I tell people
that we're moving here, yeah, it's the first ten fifteen
thousand stings settle body after that, and you'll kind of
get used to them.
Speaker 1: But they wiped out a lot of the harvesters.
Speaker 2: You know. Oh yeah, And I don't know why they
haven't come back. I see them because you know, you
see more of them as you go west. But it
makes no sense because.
Speaker 1: That was there was horn lizards everywhere, and.
Speaker 2: There were horn lizards everywhere in Texas and that was
what they ate. That was their favorite fixation food with
harvester ants. But I just think it was the gradual
disappearance of the bulk of our flora that just deprived
them enough food sources throughout the season to maintain an
orderly uh life, because you know, we used to have
the other thing that moves plants, and the leaf cutting
ants were horrific here, just horrific. But between the droughts
really get to the horn no, but they would really
cause damage and nurseries and people's lawns and so forth.
But you know, they would almost always build their nests
along like dry creeks, long linear nests.
Speaker 1: They're native though, I mean.
Speaker 2: Department of Texas. Department of used to recommend you going
up with a piece of rebar poking a hole in
their nest and then pouring in like four ounces of
dichloro methane and that every.
Speaker 1: Pretty text get killed. Yeah, that's crazy. Along the waterways
just poisoning. So what would that do to the water
right into themison heavy gas?
Speaker 2: I mean, you know it'll boil it ninety two degrees.
Speaker 1: Or what Again, the state is just nuts with the
fucking the land management and the completely ecologically illiterate.
Speaker 2: Just when we had that flood in ninety eight, I
remarked to myself as I was flooded out of my
house for a few nights, that every rancher in this
part of the country has just used this as an excuse.
They just went and opened all their shed doors and
let that rising water carry and it took the tops
off of all those containers. They didn't even know what
the hell was in them anymore. And just see you
see you in the Gulf of Mexico. It's gonna get
there anyway. I made comments to a bunch of these
old ranchers I know, and they kind of would look
down and then smile and go, yeah, I'm one of them. Boy,
it was great. I got rid of so many years
of using motor oil, all sorts of weird sexticis and
stuff they were legally shipped to possess.
Speaker 1: So fuck, I just so fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not paying twenty thousand bucks to have this
incinerated and potential legal action for having chlorin. I just
took the top off and threw it in the I
was standing knee deep in water.
Speaker 1: Do you think, I mean, do you why is no
why has no one really been growing any of these
rare plants? Here? No market promoting them market and people
don't know that. It's people don't know about it because
they can't see it yet.
Speaker 2: That see, now, that's what which a gun goes back.
Speaker 1: To not being able to access the.
Speaker 2: Fucking My business had finally really got in really a
real business by ninety eight. I mean I had, you know,
nurseries calling and buying them. You have fifty of these
one hundred of those this and that grasses had finally
taken off. I was getting large orders from tex Doc
to these golf courses, to the developers for the gates
and stuff. And then when the wildflowers disappeared, it just just.
Speaker 1: Because people couldn't see it anymore.
Speaker 2: Yep as I used to you know, that's what you know.
I remember my motto being keeping Texas looking like Texas.
That was kind of like, I better find a new motto.
That doesn't work in shift. It doesn't.
Speaker 1: They don't even know what Texas looks like anymore.
Speaker 2: It's thank god, it looks like the green sprangle tops.
Time has come, though, I'm starty, what is that greenp.
Speaker 1: Leptochlorus studio that invasive grass or what?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was brought in probably I'm thinking nineteen oh
six on the King Ranch down in their entry point
on baff And Bay. It hunkered down there for thirty
thirty five years and slowly moved out because it was
uncommon on our roadsides when I was in grad school
in the early eighties, but by nineteen ninety five it
was ubiquitous, and by two thousand and five, when you
looked out the interstate from Georgetown to San Antonio in October,
it was covering ninety percent plus of all the fields
in front of these cement planetss. It does look beautiful
and mass. It'd be three feet tall and had this
purplish cast to the seed had blown in the wind,
but now and it would just come in it killed everything.
Speaker 1: In its When did buffalo come in? And why well, those.
Speaker 2: Grasses came in very early and pretty much you know,
it's never really been able to stick. Well, hey, you'll
find it. Surprisingly surprisingly it had a gross burning made
it up to like three rivers, but it's pretty much
been sporadic.
Speaker 1: There who keeps it down?
Speaker 2: A freeze?
Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, a freeze.
Speaker 2: But boy, down in South Teestas, it still is a
but you got that. I'll never forget. I was with
a friend from Arizona and he saw that was a
guinea grass.
Speaker 1: Shade.
Speaker 2: I thought he was going to have it literally die.
He was so angry, he couldn't breathe was he was
like a stop.
Speaker 1: Because he knew what the last kame looked like before,
Like I know what this does. I can't believe because
he knew what it looked like before.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he said, I've seen what this is done. To Arizona.
Oh my god, what idiot brought it?
Speaker 1: Why? Why does the ranching industry plant this non native
ship when there's so many native grasses that it's just
ship was a.
Speaker 2: King Ranch seat and this woman came in. She wanted
fifty pounds of King Ranch blue snow and the people
there home. But what is it?
Speaker 1: What's the name of that?
Speaker 2: Is that?
Speaker 1: A y?
Speaker 2: No? No, no, oh God, you hadn't asked me. I
could have told you at the top of him, I'll
look it up. It's not God as the guys kind
of looked at me and like you want to go ahead?
Will disappear for a minute, Dan, And I was like, ma'am,
I really don't think you want to grow that. She said, oh,
it does so well. I said, yes, it does, but
it's non native. It's invasive, and it's very very poor
grace for your animals. So unless you're trying to prevent
some sloughing off of some you know, land into a
river creek, when I can suggest a bunch of other
grasses that are native, they will do a much better
job than that. But I wouldn't put that out for hey, grace,
it's it's it's not it's nowhere a good idea?
Speaker 1: What is What are some good native grasses?
Speaker 2: They well, the best was what was what brought people?
And it's replete in all of the immigrant guides from
the eighteen thirties to the Civil Wars. What they used
to call mesquite grass, which is the uh oh, it's
in that m god. See, I just don't talk bodny anymore.
Speaker 1: Curlys is it?
Speaker 2: Well? They know it's uh God, you still see it.
It's still here. It's not interpolgan. What is it? Oh?
I left all those books at my house. Oh, it's
a huge uh. It forms these these stolens. I remember growing.
I grew an it goes. Let me tell you. I
grew one hundred one gallon once from scene and inside
of eight weeks the stolens were up to twenty feet
from the center of those pots, and every six inches
they rooted out through hilarium.
Speaker 1: No, that's that.
Speaker 2: That's a desert. Ye, that's uncommon here you find that's
that You want to go to alpine for that?
Speaker 1: Oh that's curly misky. Yeah, I can't think of that.
Speaker 2: Damn it. Where is mike?
Speaker 1: What are some other good native grasses? Though?
Speaker 2: That? I mean well, you know, is a king of
West Texas and that used to be very common here.
And that's nice because that comes up fast, it takes
it's preadapted for our droughty summers. Very very gracillis. Yeah,
very very good grass. Unfortunately, you know, you should read
the book. You should read that guy's but the naturalist
in the eighteen forties and fifties who talks about the
introduction of Bermuda grass. You should read his thoughts on that.
But he was so excited he went out and collected
seats and grew like a few acres of it in
the animals. Yeah, and the animals went crazy and super nutritiously.
Hes like, man, this is the grass for a year
and yeah, and he talks with a bunch of people.
You know, apparently came in through South Carolina where they
were grown grass sixty years ago, and first occurrence in
Texas was from this county two years ago.
Speaker 1: It's just so weird to me that in a state
was that's a rich grass species.
Speaker 2: Horseshoes, oh, and even ornamental plants. I mean, that was
one of the other things that starting a native plant nursery.
We have so many beautiful small ornamental trees that can
take ten I remember when I got my weeping red bud.
Another one was that they were trying to patent from
New Jersey. They were like, oh, well, yours won't grow
up here, and I said, mine will take twenty five
below with standing on its head, no tip damage, no nothing.
Oh listen, no, no, no, you just need to look
back to the eighteen twenties. Tell you you read the
literature from like the Fall of the Alamo. It was
routinely snowing here in April, all the way past San Antonio.
Speaker 1: Why do you think there's been so such a history
of ecological illiteracy and disregard in this state.
Speaker 2: The lack of value of education in the state has
always been. It has always been a very strong feature
that the feeling that if you can read and write
and you simple arithmetic, that is it other than that
you're just an egghead. And even even all yeah, no,
it has been, yes, it has been. Yes.
Speaker 1: Do you want to read it's in the idiocracy basically,
it's been in Yeah. And if you're if you're going
to be the state, I'm not trying to ship talk
the state too much, but you got to be honest, look.
Speaker 2: At our look at the heroes of the revolution. You know, Travis,
he was a syphilitic womanizer who probably would have died
of any He had every venereal disease known to man
at the time of his death at the Have you
ever read his diary? Oh, he numbers all the women,
he lays. I mean, they don't go two three pages
with slept with the innkeeper number one fifty six. It's
it's but you know, if you were going to learn anything,
the only things that you were worth learning any math
for was either banking or surveyor. And the only reason
to learn to be able to really read something and
speak well. It was either be a lawyer or or
a politician. Education, no passion for the world, just knowledge
for knowledge's sake. Was was was, and it really took
you know, it's certainly still a large part of our
thought process. But for especially the rural Textans. This is
but even with the examples of like Texas instruments in
front of us, I mean, the people who invented the
transistor semiconductor, I mean, it's still I mean, I would
doubt one out of one hundred Texans could tell you
that the the solid state age was born in North Dallas.
Speaker 1: Education the only point of education was a pathway income.
Speaker 2: And anything else was just a waste of your time,
because you could be out plowing a field or sharing
a sheep or catching some fish or yeah. Absolutely, just nope.
That's what turned the divide between the Germans who came
here in the eighteen forties and the Anglos around them.
That's that's why that Gulf was.
Speaker 1: So Tell me about that. What's the Germans I suppose
were somewhat intellectual or at.
Speaker 2: Least value they enjoy things.
Speaker 1: Like where music, whereas the people who had migrated from
Dixie were.
Speaker 2: But let's get drunk in galaid. Yeah, and the people
from Germany were, well, let's have a dinner together and
talk and then my daughter will play the piano and
her two sisters will sing. And uh.
Speaker 1: When was the big German migration here?
Speaker 2: Well, there was. There was this pseudo organized one in
the which I had always thought was in a tempt
for Germany to colonize Texas, Take Texas, and it turned
out it really was. There was. Finally, ten fifteen years ago,
some papers appeared from the Adams of Ryans.
Speaker 1: It was like eighteen fifties, that a lot of them
came on like eighteen forty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was, but it was just too late, it was.
That was why they blew it off with them. They
got her. They realized it was too late. The people
here were so forced at statehood and it was so
imminent that there would be no chance that the Germany
could grab a foothold here that yeah, you do better
to buy tom alipus or something from the Mexican You
got as good a chance of doing that, which is zero.
So that was finally shown to be the heart of
these backers, you know, because they just drugged their feet
so long and getting it together and then did such
a poor job executing it that it turned out to
be the death of I don't know how many thousands
of their citizens. Bones were littering the beaches of Indianola
and the walk up to New brothels.
Speaker 1: Just absolutely indian where's Indianola?
Speaker 2: Well it's gone now. It had suffered too massive hurricanes
like nine years apart, and eighteen seventy six, and like
nine years before that, I mean they were The second
one was just oh my god, I mean there were
bodies found twenty five miles inland that were washed up
that far. Who was grubbed off who? He was a
German geologist who came here for about two years.
Speaker 1: What was his first name, Ferdinand? Ferdinand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've got his diary right here if you want
to look at it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'll take a look letter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I grab it.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, I'll think after the podcast.
Speaker 2: I've got most of the Lenheimer's writing. There's one other
guy that was really a fascinating guy in the eighteen
fifty forties fifties. He was Liscom. He came I think
that was like a Dutch, you know, North German descent,
and he just was an all around naturalists, really into
insects and secondarily botany. But he lived around Cat Springs
south of Brenham, and he unfortunately he was an ardent Southerner,
you know, firm believer in slavery and so forth, and
was so angry by the loss of the Confederacy he
moved to Mexico. This is Gideon and Lincicom.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, l I n cee u N.
Speaker 2: I've got hit his biography from his ancestors, and then
a really beautiful book that's taken from his diaries. That's
got some real insight into early Texas.
Speaker 1: He was from eighteen sixty five to the early eighteen nineties,
more Germans arrived in Texas than during the thirty years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna say there were a lot of Yeah,
it was really later in the eight to that period
that they all came into that southeast, you know, Flatonio, Schulenberg, Brenham.
Speaker 1: So most of the Anglos here at that time were
either coming from Germany or coming from the southeast Southeast mostly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, it's funny. The little town I went to school
in where Washington and Lee was Lexington. Right across the
street from the house I rented was a birthplace of
Bigfoot Wallace. Who's that one of our famous early pioneer
Scout Indian fighters trackers.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you knew this, whether he was
he an asshole or what.
Speaker 2: He didn't like Indians.
Speaker 1: Probably kind of an asshole. He said, he tell me
about the old white guy from that.
Speaker 2: A very famous story about him in a chief placido
right here on the springs at Sam Marcus.
Speaker 1: I didn't tell you sometime, but.
Speaker 2: The little college I went to, Sam Houston's father had
to take like seven years off for the reveruge service
in the Revolutionary War, and then went back to finish
his final senior year. And Sam Houston was born like
nine miles eleven miles from campus timber Ridge, I think
is the name is where Lexington, Virginia, Rockbridge County, Okay, Yeah, yeah,
so Virginia and the little county of Rockbridge, which has
had very few people in it. It was, however, one
of the first gateways to the west. This was like
right along before the Cumberland Pass that was where you
went into the interior was gho Should Pass, which is
where the Morey River cut through.
Speaker 1: The allegation do you know much about the Native history
and Native American history? Apaches were going back and what
do you think those?
Speaker 2: What are those all? Those? Right? Oh?
Speaker 1: I see the Edwards Curtis, Oh, Kathleen Duvall Native Nations.
Speaker 2: Look at those five whole look at those.
Speaker 1: Look at those Texas, India, India.
Speaker 2: Pick one of those out and look at it.
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ, this looks good. The history of Texas well,
I want to talk about that a little bit. We'll
do another twenty minutes or something that we'll finish up.
But what do you I mean from here west who
were the dominant tribes.
Speaker 2: Well in the fifteen fifties, I mean when the first
Spanish came in Escalante, all those people, it was Espejo
that say, you would they would have seen the Humanos
out here west to here. Yeah, the Tonk was here,
the Kronk was on the coast. The command of the
Comanches were non players. They were up in Kansas yea,
and northwest of there you had Kai was but you
had oce Age up in the like uh eastern Oklahoma,
and you had Pawnees to the west of them. Kai
was down on the Red River. Then you had that
big you know Waco of course. Yeah, I mean was
a huge agricultural Indian.
Speaker 1: Who was living here in the Edwards Plateau.
Speaker 2: Tonk was uh humano humano first? Uh tonk was it all?
It's it's just what time period because what happened. Actually,
that's like the Humanos which are this very little known.
We only know like from this one it was one seventeen,
this one Indian that traded with the UH very out northeast.
Most Spanish outposts just on the rio ground.
Speaker 1: Uh, do you know anything about how they treated the land.
Speaker 2: They burnt it every year, pretty much hunted a lot
of agriculturists. You look at the whole, uh, you know,
the big the people that gave the state the name. Oh.
They built these very large grass like moundhouses, farmed pumpkins, melons, beans, corn,
got firearms from the French, horses from the plains Indians. Unfortunately,
they winked out really quick disease they got they bore
the brunt from the French coming down the Mississippi. Everybody
getting pushed out of the southeast United States towards them
because they were occupying northeast Texas, southeast Oklahoma, and then
northern Louisiana and southeast Arkansas. Wasn't their name escaping me?
This is what terrible Getting old. Don't get old, but
that got in your mouth when you're forty. They they
were fairly civilized people. I mean they they were pretty mellow.
Speaker 1: Super warring.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, they they only you know, if you will
with you, but.
Speaker 1: Led than the people that we're coming plus and.
Speaker 2: We will trade for horses and weapons, and we're not
big into slavery, will tolerate it, but we're not, you know,
going slave raiding and that sort of stuff. But there
were you know, nakodo Actually that's where the words you know,
where nakodocius and nagetos natosis comes from means like paw,
paul and pater out of their language.
Speaker 1: It must have been a pleasant place to live back then.
Speaker 2: And really, well, you know, I'm glad I don't get jiggers.
If you get jiggers, I can't imagine how hell.
Speaker 1: That's probably why they were burning kidding me, that's why
I would.
Speaker 2: I've never had a chigger in my life. They don't
touch me.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm sure they do. You don't react to
their Yeah, no, they don't touch me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I never got chiggers when I lived that west because
there's there there you go to humid sand habitats or wherever.
Speaker 2: And yeah, they used to be ubiquitous. Yeah, I mean
you couldn't walk from the nursery to the house without
getting sugar. So what happened they disappeared in this last
ten years.
Speaker 1: Because their food source is gone. Whatever they were eating.
Speaker 2: Us come in and wipe the rabbits out in the
last ten years. They're just now starting to come back.
Speaker 1: What are chigger's main food sources? It lizards or rabbits
or what.
Speaker 2: No, it's whatever mammals around. They hit your skin, they
chew a hole in they put dies of enzymes in it.
They're go and they stop. They sit for like a day.
Then they turn around, they eat the predigested stuff that
they chewed up. They fall to the ground and go
through another end star and do that a couple of
times and do it again.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're horrible, Yeah they are. They look terrible. I
mean I've seen them on somebody from human native plants
at ut is grat Oh you want sitting there. Everybody
else has got these huge purple bands.
Speaker 3: You need a microscope to see the ah, you can
barely see them, but it takes like your immune system
a few minutes after they burrowed into.
Speaker 2: Oh, by the way, you do know how when you've
been out in poison ivy Ville, how to make sure
you don't get poison. I it's so simple, so cheap,
that the next time you're in a good nursery, go
up to the shelf and buy spend your seven bucks
by the five pound bag of the stuff called copperas
ferris sulfate coppers. When you get home, take a couple
heaping tablespoons of that in a gallon of warm water.
Dissolve it. Dissolve right up. Take that bucket with a
cloth into your shower, Stand in your shower bath, get
that wet. Just rub your whole body with it.
Speaker 1: What does it do to the oil?
Speaker 2: It takes the urushawl and it breaks a double bond
and reduce to something that does nothing to you.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: One of these labs was gonna try to patent it
and put it out.
Speaker 1: But the bomber is ferris sulfate isn't toxic.
Speaker 2: It's not not no, no, no no. The only bomber
is you got to do it within like ninety minutes
two hours because the solution at four hours, it reacts
with the atmospheric oxygen and becomes ferric sulfate, which precipitates
at the bottom, and you're left with like yellowish looks
like pale urine and this red rust at the bottom.
Speaker 1: Like kepin during the Great Oxygenation Event two point three
billion years ago.
Speaker 2: Right, coppers will instantly destroy the the poisonous compound present
and poison oak, poison ivy and all. Yeah, it's instantaneous.
All you gotta do is rub it on you and
then rinse it off and you will never get poison
ivy again.
Speaker 1: You don't need that fifteen dollars bottle of technw you just.
Speaker 2: No see they were got to, but they realize that
it was just once people look because they have to
put the ingredient down. It's just fair of sulfate color.
Speaker 1: Get it so cheap.
Speaker 2: It'll be like, why am I spending four bucks for
this when I buy five, you know, for a gram
of this, when I can buy five pounds of it
for seven bucks.
Speaker 1: It's good to know because like a third of the
plants in that family produce you russio too, So.
Speaker 2: It's a prudent thing to do. It's very I have
to wallow in it. I'm so chemically inert.
Speaker 1: You don't react to it.
Speaker 2: No reacting. Well, I've reacted in my entire life maybe
five times. Wow, crazy, which is crazy when you think
of all the stuff I've do, how much time I've
lived outside camping, living in places like Connecticut, Virginia, Alabama.
Speaker 1: What did you you know quite a bit about the
Sylvium species? Here my dissertation, what do you know about
Sylvium malboflorum, And.
Speaker 2: Really that's so, that's the one of the real oddball
players in the group. It's obviously closely related to liciniatum,
and probably is there's a derivative of this. It's dwarf
stature with it's only white flowered species. It's range on
that west edge of the Blackland Prairie and then into
the hill country. That population in Mason that Michael told
me about just blew me away.
Speaker 1: Well, what is that.
Speaker 2: There's a huge population of a Sylphi malbfloor Mason. Where's Mason?
It's the Highway eighty seven north from Fredericksburg.
Speaker 1: Why the white flowers? What do you think that what's
selected for?
Speaker 2: I don't know. Good one. Everything else is yellow. It's
a neat group of planets. Funny. The other reason, oh
fucked over, dude.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: When I started doing my dissertation on that, I had
seven guys from the Texas Stockman's Association uppere in my
lab at ut asking me to collect as many pounds
of seed of Licinianum as I could and they would
pay me to grow it out, because they had now
realized in nineteen eighty two that that was the only
reason they still on their land was because they had
thousands and thousands and thousands of those on their land
during the fifties drought. Because you know how big the
tap boots get on.
Speaker 1: Those Oh yeah, the fucking massive.
Speaker 2: I bet there's a report probably like deep too.
Speaker 1: No, they don't go deep, they go wild.
Speaker 2: You don't even close. I can show you in the
literature a guy at the University of Eyewall. He took
three the football players that were on probation. He got
them out and made them. He went and found the
biggest one he could in his area. This was in
the thirties. They started digging it out on one side. First,
they dug the crown out. It was like three feet
four inches across. They started digging down one side. He
had to stop them at thirty two feet because he
was afraid of the side collapsing in and varying.
Speaker 1: It went down thirty two feet with no taper, just
still thick.
Speaker 2: As hell, still three feet four inches.
Speaker 1: So that three foot tall plant that you.
Speaker 2: See, Oh no, I've seen them eighteenth feet tall.
Speaker 1: You've seen Sylphium albaflorum.
Speaker 2: No non albaform. Yeah, and I've never seen a cross
between the two. Never, right, And the people at the
University of Ohio had a whole sit of different chromosomes
because they're so close that they're like because we have
strong barriers.
Speaker 1: From doing so how what what strong barriers between the.
Speaker 2: This often happens post hybridization. To avoid disappearing, you put up,
I have to give you these two books to read.
Speaker 1: You you need to read those two Let me let
me pause this. I gotta take a league anyway. So
you you said you did a dissertation on the genus Sylphium. Wow,
did you do you know about that weird one in
western Arkansas. It's like a laciniatum fucking variety, the.
Speaker 2: Intifida that's a hybrid between compositum and the city on them.
That's an interesting plan. Yeah, But there was one found
up in Ohio that's only found in one creek and
it's a few individuals. There's one that's in southern Alabama
that's that's in a endangered species, but that one's only
found in like ninety six. Then there's that really rare
one that's just south of Suwannee campus where's the buggy
Top cave right on the Woodstad Well. It's in just
above the Alabama border in Tennessee. I mean it's three miles.
There's three caves and it lives right at the mouth
of them and out it's in that limestone and that
heavily caved out area. Beautiful part of the Maybe that's
where I should retire. Oh, that's a beautiful part of
And the damnedest thing is you leave that spot, you
drive about six miles and you see all these signs
like road disappears from views fifteen miles an hour. When
you come off of the Cumberland Planteau, it is like
a mile long, forty five thirty degree drop. I mean,
you've got shifted down to second, switch your feet. But
the coolest thing is when you get to the bottom,
you just go to the right to the west to
Decalbot County. Their eyes a two hundred square mile maybe more.
I didn't explore the boundaries of it. I couldn't believe
it when I saw it. This is Alabama. It's mature
tall grass prairie. There's a selfium less sending on them there.
That's where it's really hybridizing with terra benthanaceum on one
side and canposit them on the end. That is one
of my you know that was that was that industry
in the eighteenth.
Speaker 1: They can live hundred years easily.
Speaker 2: They can live for three hundred and fifty. I would
think really that was an industry in that after the
Civil War to like nineteen fifteen. People would take the
leaves or like this big the smaller leaves and iron
them flat and then put two or three coats of
shell act on them, and then your husband would be
carving little handles with like two rivets. They were used
as fans start looking in front of them. You'll see
them everywhere in that period. Yeah, but they're just the
ones about.
Speaker 1: Like this big what is it like a plastic or
something like a fucking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, real sillac the stuff from koshaneel.
Speaker 1: Oh, I don't know what. I don't know what that is.
What is it.
Speaker 2: What we used before? It's the excresia of the koshaneel
in set. Yeah, we get the die from it on
one hand, and then we get what's called schillac, which
is what you put on violins and find furniture. What
we used to protect furniture.
Speaker 1: Before we came.
Speaker 2: Now it's like polyurethane. It's what we used. You still
use it. Get it you buy it. I have a
cannv it in here somewhere.
Speaker 1: I mean, why would they get it off? These these mites,
these coaches we.
Speaker 2: Use take a basin and you set it below and
you take like this toothbrush like thing and you scrape
the insects off, and then you put them in a
sieve and you pour straight one hundred percent grand alcohol over.
Then you filter that. Then you evaporated and break it
up into little crystals. And that's.
Speaker 1: Beautiful stuff.
Speaker 2: It's expensive. I bought some. God, it was so hard
to get. I've got a look.
Speaker 1: Why did you pick sylphium for your dissertation?
Speaker 2: Because I wanted to. I was so pissed at all
these fuck head grad students that were flying all over
the place getting sick of shit, uh, never finishing a project. Yeah,
because it was gonna let me see the heartland of America.
Speaker 1: How many species the genus do you know?
Speaker 2: Well, at the time I dropped it, now James Conkle
Small put.
Speaker 1: It in like one hundred and three, one hundred and
three species.
Speaker 2: Well this was the master divider. Yeah. No, there's like
thirteen species in it, two two one genus, two sub
general and then one the subgenus licinioa. There's just no
no other subgroups in that. That's all there. The other
one has two in it two two sub two sections.
So you have two subgenera, one with one secsion, the
other of two sessions.
Speaker 1: In my text, what's the Alabama one? Moor's it's there's
a there's a rare one in Alabama, mores rousing, weeed.
What is the species on that?
Speaker 2: Is? That was a name that was invalid for something,
but no, there was that. There's that one that's from
that's right on the border.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, mari I am o h r yeah, great,
fucking I think.
Speaker 2: That's just a form of integrafolium, which is now what radula?
Speaker 1: Yeah maybe no, they're still integrifoiume out there.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, I'm saying that's just a oh.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah yeah, what is well.
Speaker 2: There's an invalid form of it in Southeast Texas of integrafolium.
What was it? Oh? Terrible, terrible. The only thing interesting
about it, it's flavanoid profile was so so utterly bear bone.
Oh that's in a separated really well, the two subgeneras
separated really well. All the flaminoid chemistry. One Querston City.
I mean, and like we're talking like five percent of
the dry matter of the leaf material is quer satan alone.
Then it has three or four other very simple flavor
and oleslav. It's one of the most common of all flavonoids.
It's what comes out of oak leaves, hence the name.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2: You want to borrow my spectroscopy and chemistry of the
flavoroits by my professor Tom Version. That's all right, and
then uh terping wise, there was nothing outstanding.
Speaker 1: Or cool, but it made they all make that thick.
Speaker 2: I tell you, I thought it was going to get
busted in Kansas when a state trooper, and now they
protect their wildflowers. When I wrote, I had to write
every state to get permission to collect. Every state politely
sent me a letter back saying thank you very much.
This letter is to inform you you have the permission
of our interior apartment or whatever parts of online to
collect specimens for your dissertation and lab analysis. Thank you
for your consideration and asking us what does Kansas send back?
We'll be looking for you and we find you on
the state in our state collecting any wildflower specimens you
will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
We have enclosed the law for your consideration and to
see that you will be spending some quality jail time
with us, along with a hefty fine. Kansas, Yeah, a
wildflower state. I don't know, but so I was very
like on the QT. God, damn, I'm in the middle.
Speaker 1: Where hide the president?
Speaker 2: Here comes a state trooper. Oh my god, I am
going I'm going to have to call my brother was
married to.
Speaker 1: They don't want to search you for drugs. This is
like the seventies.
Speaker 2: I look, I'd learned my lesson at w L and
I'm gonna have to call my father in law, the chancellor.
My brother was married to the chancellor's daughter. They used
to live. We're our neighbors in Dallas. He was gonna
make me the youngest major chancellor or president of a university.
Said I'm gonna have you won by by the time
you're thirty two. You'll see you Thank you for this
crazy fuck nice guy, at least to me. The shit
he did for me was I but he's like, you
having car trouble And I said no, sir, and he
was kind of like, well, what do you doing? Your
I said, I was collecting specimens for my dissertation, sir,
And he goes, oh, or.
Speaker 1: Are you working?
Speaker 2: I said, this group here. He said, I don't know
anything about plants. I said, oh, mister genus Sylphium, you
have really about the best representation of species of any state. Uh.
And I was collecting some of this rootstock, uh for
because I the anatomy of mine. I mean, I made
slides and there's a bunch of microscopic ship that separated
the groups, which is better than the chemical.
Speaker 1: Shit, I'll say.
Speaker 2: But I finally looked at him and and he was like,
you mean that's underground under this. I said, yeah, you
should see what happens when you cut out. Because I
had to take a pickaxe and heat it up to
red hot, bend it out, grind the sides off, get
it really thin, and put this you could shave with
the edge I put on it. You dig that rude out,
which and I did it for him, and he was, oh,
my god, let me get my camera. You're gonna do it,
Please do another one for him.
Speaker 1: What it looked like just like a hog leg going down.
Speaker 2: Appeared to be a small plant. It had this weird orange,
just kind of coark color. On the outside. It was fissured,
and the fissures had this odd orange coloration too. But
when you had to you learn quick to stand back.
You take that thing, stand back and take that pitch
for me of that picking do it to the side.
So when but it would squirk like twelve jets of
that syrupy sap like eight feet up in the air.
And if it got on you, well havent helped you.
As I found that one of its uses by the
American Indian was as a glue. If they made a
chewing gum out of it, they'd spread it out and
keep putting lay after layer and now all terrabinthanasium. Yeah,
that whole way. That was the big thing between the
two subgenera. One subgenera had those giant tap roots and
then the others just typical composite roots. You got these
rhizomes go two inches, makes a head comes up, then
two more come out two inches, there's a head comes
up and you get a root structure. You know, this
big across it's ferce stuff. The other one had these
unbelievable artisifers, some of them on the bigger ones. They
were this big across. You'd see you could put a
barbecue skewer through them. They were so big. Yeah, yeah,
uh I did that first one from me. He was,
Oh my god, that was so unbelievable.
Speaker 1: Let me get my camera.
Speaker 2: Would you mind doing another one? Nobody's ever gone to
believe me. Yeah, And you're helping me dig it across
and he's like, like all set up, and you know
it's a nikon in what speech should I have it?
And it moves pretty fast, I'm guessing looks like, you know,
fifteen miles an hour. It's certainly faster than gravity. Though.
Speaker 1: You know, what's the maximum root depth on some of them?
Speaker 2: No one knows. No one's been able, No one has
been ever gone to the bottom of when any of
the big ones.
Speaker 1: That's wild man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, that story that guy from Missouri or Iowa. Uh,
thirty two feet with no tape and I mean three
four inches across. I mean that's this big across. I
would imagine the lacticiafers in that where's big around as
your thumb.
Speaker 1: The whole root was three feet.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, like a bigger than like three telephone poles
end to end. I mean, so I decided it was
like a tree this big around, Yeah, like a three
foot yes, which is the climax in my opinion. As
I wrote, I believe this to be the pinnacle of
plains evolution. This thing runs from south central South Texas
all the way up to the Canada border, through Michigan, Minnesota,
over almost South Dakota comes or in South Dakota, all
the way down up until the mountains, and then it
reappears sporadically. I found it. It Eurekas brings Arkansas off
the mountains.
Speaker 1: This thing is basically an underground tree.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, it's just a tree that's adapted to living underground.
So don't burn.
Speaker 1: What about Albert Floram? How big to the roots that
he knows?
Speaker 2: They're weird? And that's the only one that has colored
sap sap on It is red weird?
Speaker 1: What the fuck?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: How big? What do the roots look like? They don't
go that deep and.
Speaker 2: There's often three, occasionally as many as five coming off
from a central point and they'll get that, but they're short,
they're only they're like a carrot.
Speaker 1: Do you have photos of the lacini Adam route?
Speaker 2: That's no, that was in nineteen thirty four, that guy
did that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh no, that's that's insane man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh but I can. Oh but as I tell
you these this Cattleman's Association came up and said that
was the only thing that saved our ranch. It took
that drought. It took five years. Every time we boked it,
we let our cows in. They'd eat the leaves and
move them to another pasture. Those leaves can't come and back.
We laid the leaves in that session. We move them
back with cattle. They see most ultimate cattle food. They
destroy it. You cannot cattle Exac's why it's gone now.
Speaker 1: That fucking bison. Well all with bison probably nawing. And
that's probably why I have developed a huge underground tampero. Nah.
Speaker 2: Possibly hear the burning. Yeah, but at any rate, uh,
it's it isn't a very interesting plant. The Indians, I said,
use it as a cement, as a chewing gum. They
use it as an adhesive for arrowheads and pottery.
Speaker 1: Do you get around here anymore? And it's mostly you
know this.
Speaker 2: Is what this is what Kelly. It's one of the
reasons I took it because when it first, said Billy
Turrs said, you have to think about Sylphie went right
over to your burying, started pulling cheese. They were all
from my old neighborhood in Dallas. I mean literally a
quarter mile from where our house in Dallas was all.
He'll be all up, they'll get to Flint. It was.
You had to go thirty forty miles north of Dallas
to see one, but then it was thick between there
and the Red River. I went two years ago. I
couldn't find one in the North Tech. It's gone pretty
much from death. It was all over the hill every
fucking county in the Hill Country boasted. There were fifty
sixty specimens in every county in the Hill Country. Bandera County.
Speaker 1: Wow. How far west did it go?
Speaker 2: Hill Country? Rock Spring? About rock Spring that's here now?
Farther north? No, it went right up to the Colorado Wader. Wow.
Speaker 1: And it was just cattle and habitat loss that did.
Speaker 2: Animal habitat change cattle?
Speaker 1: Jesus man, you've seen in the forty it's such.
Speaker 2: Such a gorge. You should have seen the big ones.
The leaves on the big ones were the size of
this table.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I've never seen.
Speaker 2: I mean, you've seen Terra Methanasian with this leave yeah,
space monster. But the big listeny atims now I the
one thing that really got me. And I even bought
a fucking compass and looked, and I could never see
how anybody could construe that plant as aligning it's leaf margins.
Speaker 1: No, I never, I never. That's just better off not
using common names most of the time, you know, unless
it's the case where it's way.
Speaker 2: That thing isn't anyway fucking magnetic declination.
Speaker 1: Well that's that's three hours. I guess we'll end it there. Man,
thanks a lot for doing this and talk to you forever. Yeah, well,
let's just just do another one then. So all right, everybody,
uh Dan says, everybody, have a good rest of your day.
Go fuck yourselup.