Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing

3. Carol Cullar, “12 Variations on a Theme or Why I Live in West Texas”

41 Chapter 3 Carol Cullar 12 Variations on a Theme or Why I Live in Southwest Texas Carol Cullar is Executive Director of the Rio Bravo Nature Center Foundation, Inc. in Eagle Pass, Texas. She holds the Rio Grande and its preservation/conservation dear to her heart. Both visual artist and writer, her most recent book, Maverick in the Chaparral: the Eagle Pass Poems, focuses on living on La Frontera and 26 years in the Tamaulipan Biotic Province of Southwest Texas. The great-granddaughter of Robert Wilmeth Crossman (poet, inventor, nephew and namesake of the R.W. Crossman who died in the Alamo, US Marshall of the Oklahoma Territory, and cohort of Wyatt Earp), Cullar credits her ancestor’s frontier spirit with her restless dissatisfaction with civilization and her determination to live on the Frontera in Southwest Texas—or it could be pure-dee cussedness that has given her a love of Maverick County. Cullar’s Texas roots run deep, but as a young woman, she took afternoon tea with Generalissimo de Santa Ana’s granddaughter and considers the dispute settled. Afewyearsback,I’djustfinishedinstallingthewoodstoveinthestudio here on the Rio Grande, when my mother gave me her old teakettle, the one she’d started married life with back before the Second World War. The relic added a whimsical touch to the rustic stove, and I planned to fill it to provide needed moisture to the heated air of my inaugural fire. As the first splash of water hit the dusty kettle’s bottom, a pungent 42 aroma sprang up, claiming my senses in one staggering assault. I was enveloped by the odor, thrown back to Western Oklahoma from whence the family roots diverge, where the sandy road threaded across the railroad tracks, south to my grandfather’s farm, where the pear sprang tall by the path to the barnyard, where the earth wrapped us in cotton patches and shelterbelts, far-stretching milo fields, and freshmowed sorghum. A few months later on a trip to Michoacan, I mentioned to a fellow monarch enthusiast my powerful response to that encapsulated odor of my birthplace and learned from her that the French have long known the potent strength of the earth’s essence, given it a name—terroir. What if there were an essential homeplace stitched up in the fibers of our being, locked in our sinews and the molecules of our synapses? Is it only country kids who grew up on the back of a dusty tractor who feel this tie to the earth? Must we have run barefoot a thousand miles through the soil of our youth to pattern that scent into our nature? If we drank the rainwater and the cistern water, bathed in the pumpings from the well, are our molecules not bound together with the rivers and the streams, the vegetables from the garden and the honey garnered from a million blooms? Thus, what brought me here to this ramshackle place on the banks of the Rio Grande a quarter-century ago is irrelevant, but what holds me here is everything. The limestone deposit that lines the new electric teakettle is as much a part of the calcium in my bones as is the pollen in the local huisache honey an integral component of my flesh. And so when the taciturn folks scattered through this threnody of thorns that is the Tamaulipan Biotic Province and Southwest Texas respond to the query of why we have stuck it out here, put down such deep roots, our likely response is,“Well, it grows on ya.” Carol Cullar 43 During those last twenty-six years of my bones’ slow transubstantiation from restless wanderings over most of the continent to the same calcium carbonate bedrock of Southwest Texas’ ancient seabeds, I have journaled in my attempt to capture Maverick County’s terroir and my bondedness with it.What follows are twelve of those meanderings: To stand amid: immersed in scent of roses beneath the doublehelixed coil of forty buzzards sporting en plein aire,is to know one’s self a step upwind of death and mortal to the bone. I know these hills—I’ve drawn their buttes for many a year. Those scarps are stored in the muscles of my fingers, the bones of my wrists. Bone-stored hills, buttes; and in my hand, muscled limestone . In ochre paths, my thighs, making sense of things, tacking it to something of...