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Following the megafauna herd. Felling the megafauna herd. Breeding the megafauna herd. Following the megafauna herd. Felling the megafauna herd. 777 Ranch, Hondo Texas.

In the winter of 2012 it was decided that we would embark upon a Western Expedition, to arise from our office chairs and to survey for ourselves the biology and geology of west Texas. Armed with our binoculars, star charts, hand lenses, and a copy of The Roadside Geology of Texas, we traversed what may be one of the rawest landscapes in the country, as well as one of the most biologically diverse states.

December 26, 2012: Arrival

“Hello and welcome to Alamo Rental Car my

name is Ashley how may I assist y’all today?”

“A truck rental. One week!”

“Excellent. And will you be staying

within the Houston metropolitan region?”

Ashley’s fingers flutter on the keyboard.

“No, definitely not.”

“And may I ask where y’all a-be travelling

this week?”

West. West, toward ancient oceans, underground volcanoes, endless Wal-Mart, desert wasteland, beginning of time….

Ashley’s fingers become silent. Without taking her eyes off of us she reached under the counter and produces a small deck of cards. Wordlessly, she deals a precise arrangement.

She studies the cards. Finally she speaks:

“Barosaurus, Lambosaurus, Triceratops, Triceratops. Ordinarily I’d read the double triceratops as a pair of compact sedans, but in y’all’s case I will interpret them as the conjoined twins—the fifteen-passenger van.”

She pauses, formulating her analysis.

“A white Ford E-350. Y’all probably gonna thinks it’s too dang big, but you’ll fill it with jugs of water, cases of beer, hiking boots, collections of suspected fossils. Y’all probably gonna think it’s too white, too obvious, but in the open glowin sky it gon disappear.”

We take it.

Frontier?

We drove like maniacs in our enormous van from Houston to the Hill Country, past San Antonio. It was night and we saw nothing but lights.

But were it daytime, if the landscape were not obliterated by an endless procession of electricity, if it were 150 million years ago, we would be floating in a warm, shallow marine sea. Our bodies would be tickled by the bodies of tiny crustaceans; in 150 million years, in 2012, these guys will rule the world. But right now they are floating around, shimmering, dying, and sinking to the ocean floor. Their bodies will be covered by thousands of feet of sediment in the Gulf of Mexico. Salt domes pushing upwards through this sediment create a Crock-Pot structure, within which the temperatures are hot enough to cook these hydrocarbons and transform them to oil. In 2012 these little ones will be kings.

We reach our campsite at 3am, it’s cold as a well-digger’s ass. In the morning, the ranger drives up to our campsite with the most shiteating grin: “Woo-ee! I’ll bet y’all folks damn near froze yerselves!”

And, although we slept on top of volcanoes, that was very true.

80 million years ago, the Hill Country was a shallow marine shelf of limestone, created from the shells of sea organisms. Fractures broke this crust and hot lava from the earth’s mantle rose through these cracks; ash deposits and lava then extended above the sea floor and created a hill-like topography. When the lava cooled, reefs developed, and these volcanic hills were coated with beach rocks, clay, and limestone. As the sea subsided during the Cretaceous Period, the limestone eroded away, revealing an undulating landscape of volcanic rock, where we sat now, shivering and eating salty oatmeal.

Travel through space and time, 777 Ranch.

777 Ranch / Hunting in Time

In Hondo, we tour 777 Ranch. This is not a traditional ranch, but a new breed of wildlife

estate which is revolutionizing the economic and ecological landscape of Texas—the exotic game ranch. With over sixty breeds of African mammals, this assisted migration includes Cape buffalo, gazelle, nyala, sable, springbok, giraffe, rhino, and zebra. Less of a geographical perversion than a temporal reversion—pre-Ice Age Texas was not unlike the African savannah, home to the large mega-fauna that characterized the Pleistocene epoch and that encouraged the hunter-gatherer to colonize the Americas. The exotic game ranch is an industry dedicated not to hunting in space, but to hunting in time.

We arrive to 777 Ranch bleary and 15 percent hungover. We were late, we said we were from New York—strike one, strike two—Steve looks us up and down as we climb into his jeep. It was not a jeep this thing was a Vehicle: no windows, no windshield, camo paint job, definitely no fucking seat belts. We bounce down the gravel road, the first twenty-foot tall gate announces: BOTSWANA.

in the ’30s and ’40s, the initial breed-stock was brought in for zoos and circuses. What happened is they
started breeding and got more and more animals; they started releasing them on these ranches. And never gave it much of a thought, they just had these animals and kind of let them go.
[777 Ranch began as] an exotic Whitetail hunting operation initially, but we’ve introduced a conservation element as well. We’ve got sixty-one different species
of animals here on the ranch from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. The ranch is 8100 acres, which is not small by Texas standards, but not huge by Texas standards either.

And now we’re in Africa; we’re on fucking safari. Steve is warming up to us. He likes

our questions; by some act of God we’re not coming off as New York Assholes. Gazelles watch us with full, orphan eyes. Here they are, the descendants of vaudeville circuses and roadside petting zoos, marooned a world away in West Texas.

It’s unique in the sense that now we are actually sending animals back to the country they are initially from. We’ve sent Nubian Ibex and Arabian Orex back to Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. South Texas is kind of an ideal environment for this kind of operation. It replicates much of what you would find in Africa, which is where my background is, and so the African animals do very well in this kind of environment. We continue to get larger, and add more animals all the time.

We roll up to a loose pack of very bizarre, very ugly animals. They are eating and shitting. They regard us blankly. Steve lets the truck idle.

Those are Pére David’s, the large animals on the left there. They originally came from China. They’re extinct in the wild. There was a very small number of them back in the 1860s, and a French Jesuit missionary father brought several pairs to France because he thought they were a very unique animal. Unfortunately, there was a rebellion in the late 1880s that killed the remaining wild ones in China, but fortunately they are here. They got a long tail like a Kangaroo or some damn thing like that and then they got that Mule face and in the summertime all they do is lay in the mud. They lay with just the nose sticking out they’ll lay for hours on end. They have very elongated feet, kind of a unique animal but they are literally extinct in the wild. Our ranch hasn’t, but other ranches have sent them back to China, to repopulate back there.

By now Steve loves us. He is regaling us with his glory days in Africa, the evidence of which is proudly displayed on the walls of the 777 Ranch Lodge—photos of Steve with a dead cheetah, Steve with a dead wildebeest, Steve with many dead gazelles, Steve with a goddamn dead elephant. He’s telling us about how “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective II” was filmed “virtually entirely” right here on the ranch. He is gesturing. He stops the truck and we get out to observe a dazzle of zebras.

A unique facet to that law [the Endangered Species Act] is that if the animal is extinct in the wild,
like those Pére David, which there are only five or six-hundred of them in the world, there are no regulations. The idiocy of the Endangered Species Act is that if it is extinct in the wild then there is no regulation, you can do whatever you want with them, we could sell them for hamburger if we wanted to.

We catch a few more wandering creatures, wildebeest, and blackbuck deer. Back at the lodge, a time hunter is eating lunch with his two kids. They are drenched in RealTree camo, it’s like a goddamn pile of leaves eating potato salad. On Steve’s recommendation we eat lunch at Heavy’s, the barbeque joint in “town.” The food is totally insane, as are the photocopied pleas pinned to the wall imploring the American public to impeach Barack Hussein Obama.

Welcome to the Wind Boom

For months Colleen has been reliving her childhood.

“Just endless oil wells. And gazelles, gazelles leaping all around and oil derricks bobbing endlessly, big dumb birds, as seen from a car window where I am mindlessly fighting in the backseat with my sister. That is what Texas is like. Machines everywhere.”

But there are no oil wells. Well, there are a few, paralyzed, rusting. Colleen is speechless as these ghosts drift by.

And suddenly—

Here they are, on the ridge, a fucking army, worked to the max. But they are not oil derricks, they are … wind turbines.

“What is up with this hippy shit?”

But it’s the same, I guess? The mechanized landscape is present, but it’s no longer 1989, it is 2012—2013 almost—it’s the Wind Boom, and here’s an endless line of wind turbines cutting the air and wired to Los Angeles or some other distant metropolis. It’s almost 2013 and this asshole in a Ford F-250 is cutting us off and telling us “Love It Or Leave It” and soon we’ll be in the Fort Stockton Wal-Mart which is a desperate place, threaded with teenagers in velour sweatpants who are presumably all meth addicts. Ian will buy fuel for the camp stove and Colleen will buy a polar fleece blanket printed with Little Baby Jesus for $3.99 and a thirty rack of Coors Light.

Under endless stars we are laughing uncomfortably about Fort Stockton.

Big Bend National Park

By morning we’re back in our element, we’re buying local raw honey and a bottle of port and straw hats in Study Butte, the little trading post as we enter Big Bend. Joel is taking hearty swallows of Pepto-Bismol in the parking lot.

loiter among dioramas of previous epochs, the ancient players eating, fighting, and courting. Finally it is our turn to speak with the ranger. We sit down opposite Patricia Rodriquez. Spread out in front of her is:

– a large map

– a list of rules

– a stack of paper permits

– a small deck of cards

“Good afternoon folks, is this your first visit to Big Bend National Park?”

We establish that yes, it is; no, we did not have a campsite preference, and no, we did not have any loaded firearms.

Patricia nods at our responses and deals a hand:

“Let’s see, upright Dilophosaurus, very good. Hmmm…. reversed Diplodocus….”

She purses her lips.

“Reversed Diplodocus will send you south—to the margins of rock shelves, the thrusting of cultures. Desolate it may seem, but make no mistake the realm to which you are bound has experienced prolonged tumults unimaginable in your wildest apocalyptic fantasy.”

TWISTED SHOE CAMPSITE. The words are written on our permit with precise lettering.

We are on the moon. We are 35 percent hungover and we’re on the fucking moon.

20 million years ago the North American plate began sliding over the Pacific plate, forming the Rocky Mountains. This activity collides with the ancient underground Ouacita mountain range in the vicinity what is now Big Bend. This force elevates the Ouacitas, which begin eroding into piles of sandstone and limestone. More than anything else, Big Bend is a landscape of piles.

We walk around the piles; we climb to the top of them for the view of further piles; we slide down them. We buy a laminated plant identification guide from the ranger station at Panther Junction and identify the plants, all twenty-six species. We get out of the van and bounce around. We collect animal skeletons to affix to the van. We’re on the moon.

And the moon ends. On the other side of a shallow stream, so narrow that with a running start you can leap across, screened by a quivering stand of phragmites, is Mexico. It’s just, right there. The landscape is so indifferent to it, it’s just like the moon, but it has a name—we’ve named it—its name is Mexico.

And now we’re in the shallow stream. We’re leapfrogging on stones, we’re slipping into the water, we’re swearing, we’re stuck in the mud. There’s no one for miles; no one cares we’re in Mexico. After our triumph of transgression, banality follows. It’s getting dark and we retreat across the wasteland to America; Lidu will prepare Chinese-Cuban food for dinner.

What is the extended history of a place that is characterized by its blankness? What is the reality of geologic time for us, who have assigned ourselves the ridiculous title of “Landscape Architects”? To understand your total world conception is but one frame of Empire? That mountains will rise and fall, seas will fill and empty, I’m standing in Wal-Mart selecting ethically-correct dish soap: what even matters? That this vastness you are projecting all of your critical theory upon, which has been deemed so fragile, has been underwater, exploded in the air, built up, and broken down. That you are standing on the fucking ocean floor and meanwhile there’s a burn ban in effect because of a two year drought and you can’t even have a goddamn campfire on your goddamn camping trip, so instead you just sip whiskey and catch the obscured gestures of your companions laughing heartily in the thin and opaque air.

We depart Big Bend the morning of New Years Eve. The day is radiant and clear, spirits are high; we leave behind a few inches of Jameson in the bear box at Twisted Shoe backcountry campsite as an offering to fellow astronauts. We are returning to Earth.

IQ: “Good afternoon officer.”

BORDER PATROL OFFICER: “Hello Sir, may I please see your driver’s license?”

IQ: “Yes sir.”

BORDER PATROL OFFICER: “How many people are in your vehicle sir?”

IQ: “Six.”

BORDER PATROL OFFICER: “Is everyone in your vehicle a United States citizen?”

IQ: “Yes sir.”

BORDER PATROL OFFICER: “Are you sure?”

IQ: “Yes sir.”

BORDER PATROL OFFICER: “Do you know everyone in the vehicle sir?”

IQ: “Yes sir, we’re all friends from New York.”

BORDER PATROL OFFICER: “Do you mind if I take a look inside of your vehicle sir?”

US: “No sir.”

Border Patrol Officer walks around the van and opens the side door

BORDER PATROL OFFICER: “Is everyone in here United States citizens?”

COLLECTIVELY: “Yes sir.”

BORDER PATROL OFFICER: “Alright, y’all have a nice day.”

Marfa

By lunchtime we reach Marfa.

“Are we in fucking Bushwick?”

Marfa is crawling with hipsters, who, as it turns out, are mostly from New York. True, we also live in New York, but we have been roughing it for Chrissakes. We have been camping in the backcountry and pooping in holes for the past six days. We have been cold and eaten lunches consisting entirely of deer jerky and we’ve been inside multiple Wal-Marts. We are conducting research for a project. Who do these girls straight out of Chelsea with their booties and sequined shorts and oversized sweaters think they are?

Pleasantly outraged, we find our campsite and pitch our tents and crack beers and make grilled cheese sandwiches and by five o’clock it seems like a good idea to find a bar. We end up at a roadhouse we saw on the way in, which miraculously is filled with actual cowboys in felted winter hats. After many rounds of Shiner Bock, the New Yorkers are now arriving, and soon we’re all taking shots of mescal and wishing Ian happy birthday and dancing to a lame DJ. Midnight comes and goes, the bar is closing, and word circulates:

“Yo, the party’s at Dairy Queen.”

Ok, well, this sounds bizarre, but suitably yokel. There is a parade from the bar to Dairy Queen.

The party is not in the Dairy Queen, but in a house directly behind it. And in attendance is every single person we encountered in town that day: the New York graphic designers, the cowboys, the gallery girls, the Mexican dudes, the random middle-aged people, the guy who was walking his dog. An old-time band of crusty traveler kids play the washboard outside; inside it’s all projections and electronic music. It’s this amazing collection of people that you naturally assume would hate each other. And maybe they do. But fuck it, it’s New Years; it’s 2013 and everyone is too busy partying at the edge of the earth—too busy dancing on an ancient ocean floor—to care.

In the morning we pack the van for the eight-hour drive to Austin. We are 200 percent hungover. Brilliant desert sunlight caresses the Donald Judd sculpture that I’m leaning against, imagining its footing detail, puking my guts out.

FIeld Transmissions from West Texas

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