A Conversation with Dan Hosage

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