Traveling the Emerald Highway

Two days ago, I started on a month long sojourn that will take me from TX to Maine, then west to Michigan and home again to TX.  Helping a daughter move to Maine is the main excuse (no pun intended) behind this, but the chance to visit scores of old friends and favorite places is what is extending this to a month long voyage.

 After a constant drumbeat on the news about how serious drought is throughout the nation, I fully expected to just see fields of fried grass, crispy crops and a general beige blight from sea to shining sea.

 So, imagine my surprise, when my first day’s trip, crossing TX from San Antonio to Texarkana, was more like a trip through New England in early June.  The grass was growing lush and green in the pastures, streams and ponds topped off with water and a beautiful blue lake on either side of Rte 30, seemingly full, shore to shore.  Not what I expected. 

In Arkansas, a state featured nightly on our news with images of cracked earth, cattle at auction, and corn the size of those little ears found in Chinese stir fry, the highway was also bordered with green, waist-high grass, flowers (looked like the marsh mallows of Cape Cod) filling the ditches.  More puzzlement on my part.  Either, I was just, amazingly, following the one strip of land in both states untouched by the drought, or, and I think this might be the case, the 3” of rain we received in TX earlier this week, perhaps had drenched this area too.

And to me, the amazing part of that, is how quickly, how almost chameleon-like, the scenery can go from mostly brown, back to a dazzling green in such a short time.  You really have to hand it to chlorophyll.  One moment, dormant and shutting down, then, wham!, water arrives, heat and sunlight show up, and “Houston, we have a go” and all hands are on deck, so to speak, mixing those ingredients that suffuse the plant with a green glow of healthy chlorophyll again. The rejuvenating spirit of nature, it never ceases to astound me.  Again, I am not a card-carrying botanist, but I do believe that is the simple explanation for why this trip has been so lovely so far.  Rain has preceded me and greened up the earth just in time for me to pass through.  It brings to mind the Verna Aardema ,wonderful children’s story “Bring the Rain to Kapiti Plain” 

“The big, black, cloud all heavy with rain, that shadowed the ground on Kapiti plain…

to green up the grass, all brown and dead that needed the rain from the cloud overhead”

And so it has.

Now, I am in TN, momentarily sidelined by a car whose alternator chose the outskirts of Nashville to die in, so an extra day added while I wait for repairs and, what happened last night?  Another 3” of rain fell in a wild storm that probably would have washed away my “little red wagon” had I been plowing through it, so it’s probably for the best that I was forced to stop. 

Yet, wherever I go, even the area surrounding a Motel 6, there are interesting things to be seen.  I can’t believe it, but right over the door next to my room is a family of barn swallows, babies all crowding the nest and looking as though they would spill out at any moment.  My guess is this is the second brood of the season.  Good for them.

  An early walk with the dog through a nearby field for sale, showed the red, red, earth of clay that is present here, with a Grand-Canyon-like ravine created by the gush of rain rushing through it last night.  I am back to east coast plants of Queen Anne’s Lace and Chicory, absent from the TX landscape but lining the roads here; dragonflies and swallows snapping up early morning insects. Lovely. 

Now, if the mechanic would just call and say all is well, I could be on my way through this, the state of song and ballad, admittedly, the “greenest state in the land of the free” and on to see my grandchildren!

 Let the journey continue!  And may green highways lead me home to my blue ocean again.