Who:
Frederick Gehlbach
Messages from the Wild author
Where:
Central, TX
At 6:30 this morning I sit in darkness on my patio, substituting ears and nose for eyes. I am serenaded by a male screech owl's descending trills, echoed by a dispersing youngster. As the elder soloist moves away, perch to perch, singing, heading downhill toward the creek, my attention shifts to clicking Mediterranean geckos, truly vocal nocturnal lizards, and to junipers, locally called cedars, in woodland above the creekbottom forest.
Cedar's pleasant, pungent odor typifies a cedar break, or brake, both names applied by Anglo pioneers because their woodland was an abrupt shift in the prairie landscape and a barrier to traveling on horseback or horse-drawn wagon. Unblended into this scented musical is the noisy prelude to rush hour traffic on the divided four-lane highway a mile upwind, and barking dogs touched off in succession by joggers passing fenced yards.
My newspaper is thrown by an adult from a truck that wheels through the cul-de-sac, and I remember with nostalgia my growing-up days of delivering newspapers by bicycle. A neighboring physician leaves for the hospital, beckoned by an ambulance siren. Essence of just-cut yard grass mixes with aroma of fertilizer laced with biocide -- not so sweet! This mix of natural and unnatural history shifts strongly to the unnatural, as the human workday takes over.
