West Texas Vocab

As someone who's moved from place to place almost more times than I can count, I'm always on the lookout for regional slang/dialect. I thought I'd share some of the new vocabulary words I've learned now that I've been in West Texas for a year.

Ditch chicken. This one made me laugh uncontrollably. Picture below. You might know it as a ring-necked pheasant in more normal parts of the country.

Speedgoat. Pronghorn. It's not a goat (or an antelope) but it's pretty dang fast - the fastest land mammal in North America, able to reach speeds of up to 55 mph.

Three pronghorn does. Photo taken from a plane during 2014 pronghorn surveys

Norther. Cold front. They always come from the north.

Bull bat. Common nighthawk, a bird in the order Caprimulgiformes that comes out in the evenings, has weird gangly wings that make a funny sound when the bird dive-bombs bugs, and is nearly impossible not to hit when driving down the highway at night.

Turdfloater. Heavy rain, heavy enough to pool in the roads and pastures and, well, move the cow turds around.

Vinegaroon. This horrifying creature:

not my photo, not my man-hands

...which is apparently some kind of arachnid related to scorpions. Also known as whipscorpions, vinegaroons are not venomous, fortunately (though they're still horrifying and I hope I never actually see one).

Summer. March - November.

Breeze. Any wind speed less than 30 mph.

Hurricane. Glorious, wonderful source of rain. Wait, they're bad for some people?

That's it for now. Pop quiz tomorrow.

Everything Here Wants To Kill Me

Welcome to the desert.

I live in West Texas, in a town I like to call the Worst Place in America. I won't name names. Really, though, there aren't a whole lot of towns out here, so you can probably guess.

It was hard to move here, I'll admit. I lived in a crappy hotel for a week before I found my apartment, a place where dead cockroaches and the stale scent of old carpet greeted me when I walked in, and the door doesn't fit on the hinge properly and lets all manner of creepy-crawlies invade. But there was nowhere else to go. The booming oil and gas industry claimed all the housing (and then made it so I pay twice what I should in rent).

Plastic bags and other trash clings to everything and flutters when the wind blows (which is all the time). The number of gas stations per capita is absurdly high because my town is the only thing on the Interstate for miles and miles in either direction. The sound of the tractor-trailers roars all day long. As for a social scene for 20-somethings, or the prospect of meeting the Man of My Dreams, well, neither of those things exist.

As they like to say of Alaska, the odds are good but the goods are odd. 

Why didn't I just hop back into my moving van and drive straight back to Austin, you ask? Well, because all that was waiting for me there was my old job as a barista at Starbucks, making minimum wage (with a Master's degree under my belt, I might add).

I came here for my career. I promised myself I'd stay a year.

And now I have. (Which, incidentally, makes it the longest I've stayed at the same job if you don't count graduate school, which took 23 months.)

I made sacrifices, sure. I got used to things I thought I'd never get used to.

Big Bend National Park

  I used to think I had to live near water; now I no longer shake my fist in anger when the storm that's been building on the horizon all day, growing ever closer hour by hour and wafting the scent of rain and the sound of thunder into town, magically disappears on the edge as if repelled by the Worst Place in the World-ness of this city. Even God doesn't want to touch this place, I always think, with bitterness. But I've gotten used to it.

I got used to the cockroaches. I cut a water bottle in half and keep it on the table to scoop up the dead ones in the summer. I plug the sinks at night. I can't stand the crunch when I squish the live ones, so I've perfected my aim for throwing heavy things at them.

I got used to the spider living under my pantry. He might be highly venomous; I have no idea. He eats flies and mosquitoes and for that I'm grateful. I even wrote a story about him (or her).

I got used to the way everything out here wants to kill me. To pulling mesquite and goatshead thorns out of my foam sandals every thirty seconds. To watching the ground before my feet when I jog so I don't step on a rattlesnake. To becoming crepuscular in my outdoor habits so the summer heat doesn't scald me. And for watching my back when I'm near the border.

I even got used to the seclusion. I got used to spending all my free time watching Netflix, writing, and playing my guitar. I got in touch with my inner introvert, channeling all the bitterness and self-loathing I fear from loneliness into my fingers, and purging all of it in my rare moments of socialization with coworkers, so that they never even suspect it.

I got used to the desert.

Funny thing is, I grew up in it: Mesa, Arizona, suburb of Phoenix, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert with its endemic saguaro cacti. I never remembered hating it. Why would I? I had nothing to compare it to. It was only when I went off to college in the Northwest, and worked jobs in Colorado and Yellowstone and later the Ozark hills of Missouri, that I realized what I was missing.

Rain. Snow. Creeks. Trees. Shade.

I vowed I could never again live without them. Like Tolkien's lost Elves who have never seen the sea, but feel it in their blood, the forest was in mine. It always had been. And once I saw it, I knew I could never go back. It was a cruel fate that found me hopping from job to job for the next twelve years, only to land right back in the ecosystem I had vowed never to return to, with its heat and thorns and fangs and venom.

And the funny thing is, I kind of like it. Took me a year to realize it.

I may have traded Sonora for Chihuahua, saguaro for lechugilla, but it's much the same. There's something magical about a place that's so hostile that everything in it will kill to protect its niche, the niche it worked so hard to find. There's something magical about the way the red rocks glow after the sun sets, and every living creature awakens and moves where before you would swear there was nothing. There's magic in the smell of the rain because it is so scarce, magic that no one who has not suffered through drought could ever appreciate.

All the pictures on this blog post were taken by me, on and off the job right here in the Trans-Pecos. Once you get past the dryness, the heat, and the cockroaches, it's a pretty amazing place.

Maybe the desert is in my blood, too. 

Inspiration

The way we look at the world around us is, I think, what sets writers apart from non-writers - or, I should say, what sets creative people apart from non-creative people.

I'm a wildlife biologist, so I have to do a lot of wildlife biology things. This week, it's been dove banding - catching white-winged and mourning doves in wire traps and sticking unique metal bands around their legs, so that if they're hunted during dove season, we can (hopefully) retrieve those bands and learn more about where the doves go. 

paths of mourning doves
from banding to retrieval sites

I set my traps in a blasted, dusty parcel of land about ten miles outside of town. It's overrun with feral swine and invader brush species, and looks nothing like the rippling grassland of yore, the beautiful habitat West Texas used to have before naive ranchers showed up with their sheep and goats and ruined it. 

Every morning I drive to the sites, flip over the wire traps, bait them, and then sit around for 30-60 minutes waiting for the doves to get caught. Lately, I've been combining this waiting-around time with exercise time - I love to jog, and there's nowhere to jog in my town except a little park with a 1-mile loop that, frankly, gets boring very quickly.

So I put on my running shoes, sunscreen, and sunglasses, and take off down the dusty desert road. 

In the morning, before the blazing sun reaches its full potential, or when it gets lost in the banks of clouds that usually hover on the horizon, jogging in the desert is glorious. Even in such an "ugly" habitat. Giant tarantulas bask in the middle of the road, roadrunners and jackrabbits dart across my path, and dung beetles roll their putrid prizes through the ruts, cleaning up after the Mexican fighting cattle that I hope not to run into. 

And as I jog past, appreciating them, my mind starts to swirl with language so I can get home and write it all down. 

I wonder if I would feel this level of appreciation if I weren't a writer.

And if I would feel the same sense of futility about expressing how I feel about what I see - like seeing a beautiful sunset and trying to paint it, knowing the painting will never be able to communicate what I want it to. 

I've had a long-standing theory that this is the reason musicians, writers, and actors have a tendency to descend into drug and alcohol problems. There's a certain amount of "mental risk" that's part of being a creative person. Creative people think differently - they allow themselves to wonder "what if", allow themselves to sink into other worlds, and to feel things about their own world that non-creative people have no patience for. 

On the one hand, that kind of sensual experience is bound to screw with our brains; spending so much time in a wonderful, exciting, adventure-filled world of our creation, and then having to go back to reality, can eat a person alive. Falling so deep into imagination can affect our real relationships and instill a sense of dissatisfaction that infiltrates every aspect of daily life. And like the artist trying to paint that beautiful sunset, we face the judgment, the uncertainty, the terror, that we'll fail in our task of communicating what we think is of the utmost importance.

But on the other hand, the joy and satisfaction we feel when we're painting, or writing, or whaling on that guitar - entrenched in those worlds, in our imaginations - can be well worth it.

Take music, for example. I love being able to hear a song and let it just fill me with something indescribable, even if it leaves me, on the other side, emotionally wrecked. Why did it leave me emotionally wrecked? I don't know...that violin part at the end, or the crescendo guitar riff in the instrumental break or the...melody thing at 3:27. 

But talk about going from sky-high to rock-bottom in the space of a single song. It's a dangerous line to toe.

Yet I think I am extremely fortunate to be able to experience that kind of emotional depth. I always feel sorry for people who don't "get" music; they're probably happier but damn, at what a cost! It's the same feeling I get when I read certain books or watch certain movies. I'm never able to pinpoint exactly what part messed me up so much. I like to think it's because that's what art is supposed to do - communicate something of the world, or of the artist, in a deeper way than language ever can. Expose a piece of a human being's soul that you can't see in any other way, a piece they're desperate to show you.

I want to be able to communicate my awe when I jog in the desert. In my short story Ten Toes (which I'm currently trying to publish), I want to communicate the destructive effects of violence in a way that sticks with you. In The Great Divide, I want you to see my love for the wilderness and understand the fear that keeps me up at night that it's going to disappear. I want to show you. I need to. 

Creating art leaves bits of the soul behind, sure. And all that soul-leaving can't be good for a person. But thank God creative people risk their sanities to do these things.