Texas Wildfires - A Firefighter's Perspective

By Stephanie Teskers

In the past week alone over 1 million Texas acres have been burned by wildfires. The Lone Star State is experiencing a record drought, and 98% of Texas is currently under a burn ban. Not only are thousands of residents statewide threatened with the loss of their homes, but the wildfires have put an incredible demand on firefighters. I interviewed Fire Chief Charles Young of Salado in Bell County about how fire departments have been impacted and how prepared they are for this emergency situation. What I learned got me thinking about starting a crusade on behalf of Texas firefighters.

Chief Young said that we're subject to fires in any given minute. If people will be careful to take the burn ban seriously and obey the law, we may get lucky. Last week a man, disregarding the ban, was burning some trash. The fire spread and engulfed a garage and some cedar trees before being extinguished, but it could have been much worse.

I asked how their volunteer fire department prepares when there's a burn ban. He said they make sure the equipment is ready, back-up supplies are handy, and there's plenty of water and Gatorade. Spare tires for the fire trucks are frequently needed because of the heavy rocks and cedars in the area. One of the biggest concerns is the fact that the department is made up strictly of volunteers. It's a guessing game how many firefighters will be available at any given time because fulltime work often takes them outside of the city. More volunteers are always needed; be aware that the volunteer firefighters are responsible to pay for their own equipment.

Salado Volunteer Fire Department has been asked to help put out the raging wildfires in West Texas. But as is true with many volunteer fire departments, Salado doesn't have the resources to provide assistance, even if Chief Young thought the tires could make the trip. There were two recent local firefighting calls, and the cost of fuel was upwards of $400. In fact, fuel costs are a worrisome drain on the limited resources of Salado Volunteer Fire Department and other small town departments.

In the course of my conversation with Chief Young, it became clear that many fire departments are underfunded and in need of financial support. In early April the annual Salado Smokin' Spokes bike ride raises money for the fire department, but this year's good efforts weren't even enough to cover insurance. A few other minor fundraising efforts throughout the year also help, along with helpful funding from generous individuals and city government.

So here we are facing the loss of homes and even cities in Texas, but firefighters in many cases don't have the equipment or financial support to handle the demands. It's an all-around tragedy of epic proportions.

But it wouldn't be fair to our brave, devoted firefighters to mention all of these negatives without pointing out what important work they do. Firefighters risk their lives every time they respond to an emergency call. And fighting wildfires is one of the more treacherous situations these heroes face.

Walking for Autism Awareness

We try to get out and about on weekends, since I seem to spend a great deal of time during the working week, chained to a hot computer, working on an editing job, or my next book, or composing entries for various blogs. Sometimes it's an event related to my books, but mostly it's something interesting going on, somewhere in San Antonio - or within an easy commute.

Last Saturday, it was the seventh annual Walk for Autism, which my daughter had gotten involved with, through a high school friend, whose' son is autistic. We're in the habit of walking anyway, what with the dog and all - and so, why not get a bit of the daily required exercise by popping down to the AT&T Center on a Saturday morning and getting a little bit involved in the community? Although as it turned out we didn't have to get there all that early, since the walk didn't actually launch until 8:30. Still - arriving at a quarter past seven did get us an excellent parking place, and a chance to walk around and take pictures of some of the other early arrivals . . . alas, the batteries in the camera were drained past any ghost of recovery, so I'll have to wait next time to get a picture of the classic 1940s SAFD hook and ladder truck.

I did get a picture of the small and horrendously over-excited dachshund who was running around, underneath people's feet and eluding every effort at capture . . . that is, until he went to pick a fight with another small dog, and my daughter and I captured him. He didn't have a collar on him, and we couldn't see that anyone else was chasing after him. We took him to the DJ, who looked at him with an expression of horror and said, "I don't want a dog . . ." and I answered, "Well, I don't either - but he belongs to someone. Just announce that he's been found, and is here."

Almost before the announcement was out of his mouth, two women came rushing up to the DJ booth, breathless with relief, and one of them with a leash and empty collar in her hand. "He just got so excited," she said, "He slipped right out of his collar!" That was about the fastest stray-dog retrieval we had ever managed - about a minute and a half, from capture to recovery.

As it turned out, the team that my daughter was part of was sponsored by the SAPD, and she got a very nice dark blue tee shirt out if it, she made the re-acquaintance of her school friend, and her son, who walked very happily between us. There were other people who had brought dogs, and had dressed up their strollers and wagons, or made signs for their team members to carry - so, off from the starting gate, lead by a half a dozen bikers . . . and cheered by cheerleaders, all four and a half thousand of us - parents, grandparents, friends, kids, dogs, teachers and volunteers.

The two-mile walk route was just routed through the AT&T Center grounds . . . and I'm not even sure it was really two miles. Jeanne and I could have made another lap or two, just to get a good workout in. They were having a go getting this walk into the Guinness Book of World Records, for the number of walkers participating - I certainly hope we made it. And even if not, we did have a good time. And that was my weekend - yours?

Bottled Easter Basket

Having as we do a monthly Red Hat Ladies in San Antonio event where we are expected to razzle-dazzle the other members with our skill and creativity when it comes to doing a token gift, my daughter and I have gotten very, very good at creating something out of nothing . . . well, almost nothing. Last month, though - we did get a little carried away with the Texas-themed basket, so we vowed this month to keep it simple and fairly inexpensive.

The theme of the gift this month is Easter . . . and my daughter thought up a new and interesting variation on an Easter basket. Last month at the New Braunfels Saturday farmer's market, she sampled pickled quail eggs for the very first time. It used to be that pickling hardboiled eggs was a way to preserve them for long periods of time without refrigeration. You don't often see pickled eggs any more, except maybe in the more high-end delicatessens . . . so my daughter had never even tasted one before. She thought the pickled hard-boiled quail egg tasted like rubbery pickled something. It's kind of like eating snails; once is enough, just to say that you did it. But anyway, the vision of pickled eggs stuck in her mind, and merged with the vision of Easter eggs . . . and produced the Bottled Easter Basket!

We started with two large glass jars, which had once held dill pickles and marinated artichoke hearts, in the 32-ounce size, or the Sam's Club quantity. We save them, to use in storing bulk quantities of macaroni and things, although they often have to be put through the dishwasher over, and over, until the smell of the pickling brine is completely banished. We already had a half a bag of green cellophane grass, left over from something or other, and some rolls of pastel ribbon that, IIRC, were in a bag of sewing notions that my daughter bought at a yard sale for a dollar or so.

For the main contents of the Easter Basket in a bottle, my daughter and I hit the local Dollar Store. For a whole ten dollars or so, we came away with three packages of plastic Easter eggs, five bags of foil-wrapped chocolates, a packet of Easter-egg shaped suckers, and a bag of gummy Easter eggs in individual wrappers. From the Hancock Fabrics outlet - a short length of pastel madras-patterned cotton, although I would have preferred a calico print with Easter eggs, or chicks or rabbits printed on it.

Assembly - a snap. The longest and most tedious task was filling every one of the plastic eggs with the chocolates. Then, pad the bottom of each jar with cellophane grass, carefully stack the filled eggs inside, fitting in the suckers and the little packets of gummy eggs in the interstices. We put the lids on the jars, and cut two rounds of fabric with pinking shears, and secured the fabric with a length of ribbon - and there you go: Bottled Easter Basket. It's original, anyway - and recycles the glass jars!

Along the Salado Greenway

So when we first went walking with the dog along the Salado Greenway from Hardberger Park a couple of weeks ago - that was about the first time that the very existence of the Salado Greenway percolated into our awareness. A neighbor had told us of the paved and graded trail from McAllister Park, and we had noticed the new trail-head when we took the dog to the dog park there. And looking down into the creek-bed from Nacogdoches road, as we crossed over Salado Creek . . . we had also noticed the boardwalk that ran the whole length of the creek, as far as could be seen from the road in the brief time that it took to drive over the bridge at 40 miles per hours. To our pleased surprise, we discovered that a leg of the Salado Greenway ran from McAllister Park, round in back of the San Antonio Airport.

To drive between those two points by road - along the Wurzbach Parkway and down Nacogdoches - they seem very far apart. But following the paved and curving trail, that wended a leisurely way beside and through the dry creek bed, it seemed hardly any distance at all. We found ourselves at the Ladybird Johnson trailhead after what seemed no more than a brisk and pleasant walk across a high grassy ridge, under the railway bridge that serves the line that runs parallel to Wetmore Road, and all along the boardwalk.

Not very far at all, and very pleasant on a Sunday morning; there were other people, hard-core runners, and bikers, and people with their families - on bicycles, or with dogs, or with bicycles and dogs, too. And sometimes, the dogs were even riding on the bicycles; in a carrier on the back of the bike or the bike's rider. It's probably the very best way to do the Salado Creekway trail with a small dog, especially on a warm day. After a bit, small dogs start to lag and give their owners the most tragic, bewildered looks: Why are you heartless humans torturing me this way? I believe the small-dog definition of a good walk is a five-minute walk around the block, not a prolonged doggie death-march of several miles.

At that point, we discovered that the very same trail went even farther - from Ladybird Johnson Park, all the way down to 410 to the new Tobin Park, just across the highway from the entrance to Los Patios. Last Sunday, we resolved to walk that leg of the trail . . . and oh, what a lovely excursion that turned out to be. Who could have guessed about how much hidden wilderness there is, right within metropolitan San Antonio - deep green forests of oak trees, oak and poplar and things that I don't even know the names of, although there are pictures of them as well as a helpful list of wildlife that might be encountered at each of the trailheads.

The Ladybird Johnson-Tobin leg is shaded pretty thickly most of the way along - and marvel of marvels, there are only a few stretches where you may actually see buildings - the tops of very tall ones, appearing above the woods, and the backsides of a couple of metal-siding structures along Nacogdoches Road . . . but otherwise, the road . . . er - the pathway goes ever on and an . . . until you get to 410 and have to find the secret passageway underneath the 410 to Tobin Park and to continue. One of our big future planned excursions is to walk all the way - from McAllister to the Southside. Of course, some of that way has yet to be built, but we'll be ready and fit when it is.

A Wedding in the Old Country

No, of course I did not get up hours before the crack of dawn on Friday to watch the royal wedding. I wouldn't get up at four o'clock in the morning for my own wedding. But we did watch the highlights Friday evening when the BBC news wrapped up with the highlights. Just as a personal observation, it all seemed rather nice and tasteful, modest, even . . . with the exception of whichever one of Fergie's daughters was wearing the a hat with a two-foot tall bow on it, towering over her head, and half an inch of black eye-shadow around her eyes.

I guess no one had the nerve to say, "Young lady, take off that ridiculous hat, and here's some cold cream and a wash-cloth - you are not going out of this palace, looking like a cross between a Carmen Miranda and a raccoon!" Ornamenting the stone garden of Westminster with lines of real trees in leaf was very pleasing - and again, modest and understated. And the bride's dress looked for all the world like the one my mother wore when she and my father married in 1953 - the long-sleeve and high-neck bodice of lace overlaying a satin skirt and short train. Hoping that this trend for modest elegance and understatement will set a trend in bridal fashions in the near future - but this may take at least a season or two.

Anyway, we did celebrate, by going to the Bit of Britain tea-shop on Jones Maltsburger around mid-day for their day-of-the-wedding bash; they were going to have a block party - which was actually laid out on tables, underneath the oak trees at the side of their new digs. Bit of Britain used to be known as British Sensations, when it was out in an old house in Bracken Village. Now it is housed on the ground floor of a Colonial-style brick block - very much more convenient to people longing for a taste of things like Bovril, pickled onions, McVittie's biscuits, bangers and HP sauce - many of which are now on sale in a mini-grocery, while the serious tea-consumption goes on in two other dining areas.

But on Friday, it was all happening outdoors, where fortunately, it was the perfect day for it. A fresh breeze, a convivial gathering . . . and a real tea, the kind made from PG Tips, and served hot and with milk and sugar, accompanied by cucumber sandwiches, egg-salad sandwiches - all freshly made that morning - and traditional British wedding-cake, which is actually more like what we would know as fruitcake, with citron and currents, topped with a layer of marzipan. The tea kept coming, and so did the guests, many of whom felt obliged to wear garden-party hats.

The proper way to make tea, by the way - is to use a strong-flavored loose tea from India, a teaspoon+ of tea for each serving plus one more one for the pot, water that has just come onto the boil - and to warm the pot with a splash of boiling water, first. Then pour out that splash of water, add the tea, and fill up the rest of the pot with boiling water. Steep for about five minutes, and serve with milk and sugar. The morning drink of the gods, and what sustained an empire. All clear? Good. Maybe sometime soon, I should explain the rules of cricket . . .

The Cowboy Way

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I never quite understood the appeal of the cowboy, when it came to the whole western-frontier-nostalgia-gestalt, even after coming to live in Texas and write whole books about the frontier, and Texas. How did that frontier archetype manage to sweep all others before it, in dime novels, movies and television shows... given that the classic "cowboy" functioned only in a very specific time period - for about twenty-five years after the Civil War. Even though the Western cattle industry seemed to be co-located with spectacular scenery, and the frontier as it was offered all kinds of interesting story lines, many of them guaranteed to thrill urban, eastern wage slaves living blamelessly dull lives.

One has to wonder - for the cowboy was a hired hand. They were young and performing wage labor as hard (or harder) than any store clerk or factory laborer, tending to semi-wild cattle - of all domesticated animals only very slightly brighter than sheep. And - not to put too much of a fine point on it - herding cattle, even on horseback was unskilled labor in the 19th century. It was grueling, low-paying labor, most often seasonable; most intelligent and ambitious young sparks didn't do it for a month longer than they needed to. It was the sort of work done these days by high-school kids and illegal aliens, and only until something better came along.

One wonders, especially when there were so many other epic adventurers available to hang hero-worship upon. What about the mountain men, living on their wits, alone among the variously tempered tribes of the Great Basin? The miners in the various gold and silver booms worked just as hard at pretty mucky drudgery, for themselves or for their employers, and what about the wagon-train emigrants, setting out with their whole families along a two-thousand mile road through the empty lands? Stage drivers and teamsters were much more likely to have encounters with the lawless element, and hostile Indians. Why did one particular line of work would inspire a century of dime novels, movies and television shows?

How did all that glamour and mythic stature come to sprout from acres of Western cow pies? I can take some guesses; the popular press fairly exploded after the Civil War, creating a demand for tales of frontier adventure. I wonder if the attraction for the cowboy thing wasn't based on a melding of one particular archetype - and a certain cultural folkway. The archetype was that of the independent horseman, the chevalier, the knight - able to go farther and travel faster than a person on foot. There was always a predilection in the West to look up to the man on a horse, to see them as beings a bit freer, a little more independent. The cowboy might be a paid laborer, but in comparison to man working in a factory, much more independent in the framing of his work day and much less supervised. And as was noted in such lively yet strangely scholarly tomes as "Cracker Culture", the Scotch-Irish-Celtic-Borderer folkway which formed a substantial layer of our cultural bedrock favored herding barely domesticated animals rather than intensive cultivation. Better a free life, out of doors and on horseback, rather than plodding along behind a plough, or stuck behind a workbench - even if it didn't pay very much at all. That's my semi-scientific guess - what's yours?

The Black Swan Inn and the Battle of Salado

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So, this was a place that we found by accident, on our last weekend walk, doing another leg of the Salado Creek Greenway- the portion from Tobin Park south, following the line of the nearly-dry creek south from 410, past the Oakwell stables, through a light forest of oak trees, interspersed here and there with pecan trees. There are - as in some of the other legs of the Salad Greenway - a very few places where one can actually see buildings or rooftops through the trees, but those places are rare. If it wasn't for the hum of traffic, now and again, or an airplane flying over from the airport, you could think you were miles and miles from the city. I'm surprised there isn't even more people on these trails on weekends.

The bottom end of this trail, though, petered out at Rittiman Road - no more delightful green glades . . . but before it did, it paralleled Holbrook Road for a good few blocks - a little more out in the broad sunshine than would be comfortable if the morning had been any hotter - but there on Holbrook Road, I spotted a historical marker, and went across the median and the roadway to read: Holy smoke, this was the site of the Battle of Salado, another one of those donnybrooks between Santa Anna and the rebellious Texans. Briefly told, in 1842, Santa Anna sent an army commanded by one of his top generals to retake San Antonio . . . which they did, completely by surprise, capturing every Anglo male who had come for the district court: judges, lawyers, prosecutor, court clerk, litigants, defendants and all.

Fortunately, the local Ranger captain, John Coffee Hayes and his men were not among those captured; they were free in the greenwood, at their camp along the Salado, north of town - and sent for help at once. When it came, led by Matthew "Old Paint" Caldwell from Gonzales, they did not attack San Antonio directly. The greater portion of his volunteers dug in along the creek . . . and Jack Hays and a dozen others rode into San Antonio - to the very plaza of the ruined Alamo mission, and provoked a good portion of Woll's force, over a thousand - into chasing after them.

Hays' Rangers stayed just ahead of them all the way, during what must have been a heart-poundingly tense gallop. Lured out into the open prairie, Woll had the advantage of numbers, and artillery - but not the dense cover along Salado Creek that the Texian sharp-shooters were accustomed to fight from. Woll took horrendous casualties for a day, before deciding to declare it a victory and return to San Antonio. It would have been an unvarnished triumph for Caldwell and his volunteers, save that a company of Texian volunteers arriving too late for the battle ran into Woll's rear guard and were nearly wiped out. That was the Dawson Massacre and the stone marker for that is two miles away, on the Austin Highway.

There was a tall white house, on the rise behind the stone marker - and one of the other walkers that we met explained that it was Victoria's Black Swan Inn, very possibly the most haunted building in San Antonio - although the Menger Hotel is likely a close second. So that was our wonderful discovery for this weekend . . . oh, and there are thickets of blackberry bushes along part of the creekway trail paralleling Holbrook Road. We are so coming back in long pants and long-sleeved shirts next time.

Statement by Gov. Rick Perry on Federal Judge Overturning Ban of Prayer at Texas High School Graduation

Cityscapes

Through the good offices of one of our Red Hat friends, my daughter has been working as a back-up delivery driver for Edible Arrangements on Blancofor the last couple of years, on those holiday periods when the rush of orders for arrangements of fruit cunningly cut up to resemble leaves and flowers in a suitable container overwhelms the regular delivery drivers. Mothers' Day, Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years are peak times for this kind of thing, for which the main requirement seems to be a well-developed sense of responsibility, possession of a driver's license and a vehicle with a well-functioning air conditioning system. A good GPS unit helps also. Blondie has had a great deal of fun with filling in as a driver. She has also amassed a huge repertoire of short-cuts, and encyclopedic knowledge of areas - housing developments, neighborhoods, office buildings and industrial areas - that normally we would have known nothing of, save for driving past. Who would have known, for instance, that there are a great many industrial parks north of the airport, between San Pedro/281? Or there is a development out Eisenhower road called Camelot, with all the names of the streets taken from Arthurian legends. Or that the hills begin to stack up, almost as soon as one gets north of 1604 . . . But I digress . . . The friend who referred us to this is a realtor, and so - curiously enough - was one of the other drivers. It's a wonderful way to keep tabs on the city, generally . . . and to see bits and pieces of San Antonio that are normally out of one's routine.

This year, my daughter roped me into driving - well, one of us driving, and the other helping stage and pack the deliveries, and match them to the appropriate delivery tickets. That was the original scheme, but as it turned out, we both were driving - she the refrigerated delivery van, and me in her Montero, in the back of which one can fit nine arrangements and so many helium-filled balloons that being able to use the rear-view mirror is impossible. So, clipboard, extra pens, delivery ticket and a nice little Google map print out of each delivery . . . unfortunately for me, no GPS. Fortunately for me, having been driving for decades before their invention and subsequent ubiquity, I'm good with maps. And I was delivering within in the north-east quadrant, which I knew fairly well from having commuted to various jobs.

So, I spent three days bouncing around the north-east and Stone Oak, like a maddened ping-pong ball, unloading yellow-insulated carriers from the back of the Montero - and with luck, not re-loading them. It's actually kind of a nice deal, being able to see the recipient's faces at getting surprise gift like that, especially if they were not expecting it at all. One of the things that I was reminded of - the same thing that struck me when we walked the Salado Greenway - was how compact San Antonio really is. In some places, the tiny plain 1950's Levittown-style tract house with a dusty front yard fenced in chain-link, is fifteen minutes drive from the 1930's architect-designed Spanish Colonial style mansion, shaded by hundred-year old oak trees and swathed around with a velvety green lawn. Doing deliveries like that is instructive: from a gated community to the ghetto in nearly the blink of an eye . . . but no matter what the address, the recipients were just as pleased to be remembered for Mother's Day. So that's how I spent Mother's Day weekend - what about you?

Usama Bin Laden is DEAD

Navy Seals followed the code of honor, courage, and commitment. Thank you Navy Seals!

Hours after President Obama announced that Usama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, the Al Qaeda leader's body is buried at sea, prompting Americans to celebrate the good news a block from Ground Zero

FBI updates its Most Wanted list by stamping 'deceased' over bin Laden picture.