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State Parks High on my Overnight Travel Stops

Posted in Lakes, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 6, 2011| 4 Comments »

White Oak lake State Park: A place to sit a while and watch the clouds roll by. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Travels With Maggie

Arkansas has 52 state parks, 26 of which have facilities to accommodate RVs.

I know because finding state parks along my route is part of my regular trip-planning routine. If it were possible, I would spend all my on-the-road nights at state parks rather than commercial ones.

These public campgrounds are usually less expensive, have larger sites, and almost always come with a view and trails that Maggie and I can hike.

Hollyhocks growing near the Wonder House at Queen Wilhelmina State Park in Arkansas. -- Photo by Pat Bean

Two of my favorite Arkansas campgrounds are White Oak Lake and Queen Wilhelmina. The first is located just 20 miles away from Camden, where I will start my travels for the year next week. I’ve visited it a couple of times but never stayed overnight because of its close proximity.

In a perfect traveling world – well the one that I prefer – I travel about 150 miles than camp for two to three days so I can become more personally acquainted with a landscape.

Queen Wilhelmina, meanwhile, is almost exactly 150 miles from my daughter’s home. I came upon it a few years back when I was driving the Talamina Scenic Byway between Arkansas and Oklahoma.

The park, located high on a ridge in the Ouachita Mountains was too inviting to pass by. I decided to stop for the night, although I had only traveled 20 miles this day.  Five days later I finally left to continue my journey.

This time around I’m planning to spend my first night on the road at yet another Arkansas State Park. Stay tuned and I’ll tell you all about it next week.

“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” William Least Heat Moon, “Blue Highways”

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Secret Garden and Chaos Both World Realities

Posted in Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , on April 5, 2011| 1 Comment »

 

Every garden should have a pond -- Photos by Pat Bean

“Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.” — Frances Hodgson Burnett

Travels With Maggie

News in the world today is not good. Anybody who doesn’t know this is suffering from reality disorder.

We may soon be eating radioactive fish. There are shooting wars aplenty including gang wars in our own country. We’re suffering from loss of freedoms because of terrorist threats, and from corporate greed that’s making the rich richer and the poor poorer. We have a melting ice cap, diminishing wetlands and rain forests, and politicians running amok all over the globe.

The purple tulips

How does a person stay sane amidst all the chaos? It’s not easy.

The red turtle

As a former journalist who was deeply embedded in world affairs for 37 years, I spent the first six months in retirement rarely reading a newspaper. It was a nice reprieve.

But I’ve now returned to my morning dose of worldly events, and because it’s still one of this country’s few newspapers that doesn’t believe Britney Spears, Charlie Sheen or Lindsey Lohan’s shenanigans belong on its front page, the online version of the New York Times is my first newspaper-with-coffee choice of information these days.

Belle in the meadow -- Photo by Pat Bean

What I read rarely cheers me up. But I have an antidote, my morning walk with Maggie, where I let Mother Nature’s reality convince me there is still hope for the world. For the past week the walk has simply been around my daughter’s five-acres of land in Camden, Arkansas.

The view includes my daughter’s “Secret Garden,” which is still under construction. And yes, it is named after the book of the same name by Frances Hodgson Burnett written in 1910. It was one of my favorite books as a child, and one each of my children also read and loved.

If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s still in print and you can even download it for free on your Kindle. Meanwhile here are a few of the peaceful sights Maggie and I have been seeing this past week.

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Newly Hatched Bald Eagles Wow my Soul

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , , on April 4, 2011| 4 Comments »

A pair of bald eagles, injured in the wild, that are living out their lives at the Brevard Zoo in Florida. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.” — Carl Sandburg

Just for Today

Ever since I counted 149 eagles wintering at the Farmington Bay Wildlife Management Area in Northern Utah, I’ve been a bit blase when spotting a lone bald eagle. Of course I still look for this symbol of our American heritage, and even experience a shiver or two when I do see one flying overhead or sitting atop a tall tree.

I appreciate the sightings all the more  because of this great bird’s comeback from near extinction with the passage of the Endangered Species Act and the banning of DDT.

This morning, however, the adrenalin-pumping thrill of eagle watching was back, thanks to a live, streaming video cam in Iowa that I watched on my computer here in Arkansas. The cam is aimed at a 1.5 ton eagle nest, 80 feet up in a cottonwood tree on the bank of Trout Run Creek at the Decorah Fish Hatchery. The large nest is being attended by a coupled pair of eagles.

When I first looked, all I saw was one of the adults sitting on the nest, on what I had read were three eggs. When next I looked, one of the adult eagles was gently feeding two chicks while the third egg was still unhatched. Reading a bit more, I learned that the first chick hatched Saturday, and the second yesterday. Perhaps the third will hatch today. The pair successfully fledged three chicks in 2010.

Great blue herons at Farmington Bay in Northern Utah, where I once counted 149 bald eagles on a February day. -- Photo by Pat Bean

As I write this, the eagle is now back sitting on her chicks to keep them warm. What appears to be a healthy breeze is ruffling the feathers of the adult eagle.

 You can hear the wind blowing, the creek babbling, the chicks peeping and just now the honk of geese flying somewhere overhead.

I plan to keep the feed to the site open on my computer today. Perhaps you would like to join me for the show. http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles

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Morning Brings a Ruby-Throated Hummer to My RV Window

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , on April 3, 2011| 2 Comments »

Male ruby-throated hummingbird on guard duty. -- Photo by Joe Schneid

“Two birds disputed about a kernel, when a third swooped down and carried it off.” Proverb from the Congo.

Travels With Maggie

I usually start my morning with the first hint of gray coloring over the ebony of the night. It’s as if my body stirs with the announcement that the golden globe creeping up from the eastern horizon might bring with it a spectacular sunrise.

This morning in Camden, however, the sun was hiding behind an overcast sky. Instead Mother Nature graced me with a different gift. As I lay abed, thinking about which of the things on my to-do list I would tackle first, a hummingbird landed on the nectar feeder I had put out yesterday, carefully placing it so I could easily see any winged visitors from my RV window.

While all the bird presented to me in the dim morning light was its dark profile, I knew it was probably one of the two ruby-throated hummingbirds that I had watched play king of the nectar feeder the day before. Identifying hummingbird species in Arkansas is a snap for anyone – if it’s anything other than a ruby-throated, it’s a rare bird sighting.

Female ruby-throated hummingbird. -- Photo by Joe Schneid

As I had watched the two scrappers find the nectar feeder within minutes of my hanging it up, the pair had been a blur of whirring wings performing a territorial dance. As soon as one would land on the red lip of the feeder, the other would come zinging down at it.

This morning, my lone, dawn visitor sat still as a bittern stretching its long neck in the weeds to camouflage itself. About every 30 seconds or so, the hummer would dip its thin bill down into the feeder to sip up nectar. It was warming up its fragile body from the cool night – raising its resting 250-per-minute heart rate back up to its daytime rhythm of about 1,200 heart beats a minute.

Such numbers fascinate me, as does the fact that this tiny dynamo weighs less than half an ounce , beats its wings over 50 times a second and can hover and fly in any direction, including upside down.

Meanwhile, I wondered where the second hummer from yesterday was this morning, perhaps at the duplicate feeder hanging from my daughter’s patio roof on the other side of her property. I suspect ed that once they had refueled, they might resume their territorial game.

I can’t wait for the show to begin. But in the meantime I have a to-do list to tackle.

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Memories of My Grandmother’s Home Improve With Time

Posted in Journeys, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , on March 31, 2011| 4 Comments »

I remember sitting on these back steps eating praline candy my grandmother made from pecans I had picked up off the ground. I ate so much I got deathly sick and have never liked praline candy since. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.” — Cesare Pavese

Journeys

When I was three years old, my grandfather died. My father took it as an invitation to move our family of three into my grandmother’s house. We stayed there for eight years, moving only after my grandmother died.

Those years weren’t a happy time in my life. My mother and grandmother did not get along; and my father was a good-timing Charlie who left the house early, came home late and almost always gambled his paycheck away.

My life was squeezed between the petty bickering of my mother and grandmother, and my mother’s shrill voice berating my father when he was home. My dad never fought back, and because of this I erroneously considered him the hero and my mother the villain of the family.

Into this chaos came two younger brothers demanding my mother’s attention, and making me feel even more unwanted and unloved. It was with great glee when I could put this past behind me, although of course, as we humans so often do, I created another kind of chaos for my own children.

Mostly dead now, this large tree in the neighbor's yard was an ideal one for climbing, and I spent many an hour nestled among its branches. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I’m not sure why, but this time when I was visiting Dallas, I had a deep-seated urge to find the home of my youth, the one in which my grandmother taught me how to cook, the one where my mother sewed me a beautiful blue flowered dress from a flower sack, the one where I had a faithful canine companion named Blackie, and the one that had a large swing set in the backyard on which I played circus trapeze artist.

My oldest daughter drove, and together we found my grandmother’s house, where it still languishes, dilapidated and condemned, in the small Dallas suburb of Fruitdale.

Of course there are differences. There is no lush gardenia bush, whose fragrance still haunts me, beside the front door. Two houses now sit where my mother had attended a large vegetable garden. And houses now stood in the large cornfield across the street, from which I remember my dad sneaking into at night to bring home a few ears for supper.

I suddenly remembered how we all laughed, even my mother, as we ate old Miss Hallie’s corn slathered with homemade butter. Strange, I thought, what a difference 50 years had made in the memories that now seemed important.

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Drive Through Downtown Dallas Sharpens the Mind

Posted in Journeys, Nature, Travel, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 30, 2011| 5 Comments »

Dallas: Crossing through the middle of it in rush-hour traffic stimulates the brain cells. -- Dallas skyline photo courtesy of Wikipedia

Ashes to ashes. Dust to rust. Oil those brains. Before they rust. — From A. Nonny Mouse Writes Again by J. Prelutsky

Working crossword puzzles and riding roller coasters are both supposed to be good for the brain. The first one stimulates the thinking muscles and the second one provides a quick shot of adrenalin to jolt the brain awake.

Even though it's essential to keep one's eyes on the road, one still can't help noticing Texas' famous bluebonnets growing wild alongside Dallas' many freeways. -- Photo by Pat Bean

I came up with another way to enrich those little gray cells yesterday. I drove my RV from my oldest daughter’s home in Rowlett to Irving to have lunch with my grandson. Irving, by the way, is the real home of the Dallas Cowboys.

The round-trip journey took me through the heart of downtown Dallas, beneath underpasses and overpasses stacked up to five lanes high, and across seven lanes of one-way traffic near where Interstate 30 and Interstate 35E meet up. I entered 35’s bumper-to-bumper traffic in the right lane and exited, just a few miles down the road, from the far left lane.

The trip had to have exercised and jolted my brain enough to erase at least the couple of years I aged on the cross-town journey.

Strangely, however, I don’t mind the occasional road trip like this. Such an experience lets me know I can still cope with the modern world. It also makes me appreciate all that much more the rural, little-traveled scenic byways I carefully select for most of my travels.

What gave my soul another delight this time was that the shoulders of the busy freeways were often alive with patches of bluebonnets.  They were the first I’ve seen this season.

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You Don’t Have to Ride a Horse to Be a Cowgirl

Posted in Journeys, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , on March 28, 2011| 5 Comments »

Cowgirl wall of faces -- Photo by Pat Bean

“Cowgirl is an attitude … A pioneer spirit, a special American brand of courage. The cowgirl faces life head on, lives by her own lights, and makes no excuses … A cowgirl might be a rancher, or a barrel racer, or a bull rider, or an actress. But she’s just as likely to be a checker at the local Winn Dixie, a full-time mother, a banker, an attorney, or an astronaut.” — Dale Evans

Journeys

They call it Cowtown USA. I’m talking about Fort Worth, Dallas’ next door neighbor. It was my home for a couple of years back in the late 1970s, when I was a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

A bronze of Sacagawea graces the entrance to the Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth. -- Photo by Pat Bean

A job with such a big-city newspaper was the dream of many journalists, including mine. I

Pink symbol of the cowgirl spirit. -- Photo by Pat Bean

loved the hectic pace and getting to cover everything from murders and a bigoted sheriff to a visiting circus and former President Richard Nixon after his resignation.

It was a heady time in my life. But I gave it all up in 1980 to accept a job at a smaller paper in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. Mother Nature’s call to my soul was louder than skyscrapers, bright city lights and an opportunity to rise to the top of my profession.

I thought about this choice yesterday when my daughter and I visited the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth. This is a place dedicated to women with strong ties to the land, even if they don’t excel at riding wild horses.

It’s a place that celebrates the pioneering spirit of the women who helped settle this nation, of movie-star, rhinestone cowgirls who showed young girls they could do anything they wanted to do, and of the tough cowgirl spirit of the women who went up against the guys and scored: Annie Oakley, who could out-shoot the men, and Sandra Day O’Connor who began life on a cattle ranch and ended up being a Supreme Court Justice.

I was a bit taken back, however by the museum’s current special exhibit. “The Apron Chronicles.” The show highlights, through their aprons, the hard-working lives and recollections of a diverse group of strong American women and a few men. .

Interestingly, I told my daughter afterward, that early in my life I had made the decision to never wear an apron. And I never did, even though I never shirked from cleaning and cooking and raising my children pretty much single-handed.

An apron was a symbol for me that women belonged at home in the kitchen. And while I actually love cooking, I knew the world had more to offer me than a cutting board and an oven.

And I was right.

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Cedar Hill State Park: Mother Nature’s Big City Home

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , on March 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Worthy of a Georgia O'Keeffe painting. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether want to or not.” Georgia O’Keeffe

Just for Today

Mother Nature has her secret treasures, even in big cities.

For example, I spent five years looking in prime birding habitat for a brown creeper, which although illusive isn’t rare. I finally found it just three blocks away from my oldest daughter’s Dallas suburb home.

The Dallas Metroplex is also full of small parks, like the one just off Miller Road in Rowlett, where there’s a small pond, and where I got my grandson, David, first interested in birding. As we started off on a trail that would lead us behind backyards to the edge of Lake Ray Hubbard, we came upon a red-shouldered hawk just as it caught a mouse.

Orange is such a cheerful color. Don't you agree? -- Photo by Pat Bean

Boys being boys, he found that quite exciting – actually so did I.

But purple makes the heart sing.

For a bit more of Mother Nature when I’m in the Dallas area, I escape to nearby Cedar Hill State Park, where I volunteered for a few months as campground host a couple of years back.

 It was here that I saw my first painted bunting and my first yellow-billed cuckoo – and watched as a rainy winter gave way to a colorful spring.

I thought this morning, which is going to turn into a busy day, might be the perfect opportunity to share a bit of the park’s color with you. Then I can go exploring with my daughter, Deborah, in search of more big city sights.

We’re celebrating her birthday a couple of days late by going out on the town. I’ll probably tell you all about it soon.

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Memory: A Trickster That Isn’t Always Truthful

Posted in Birds, Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , on March 26, 2011| 4 Comments »

Freshly sprouted blossoms shout out their spring song. -- Photo by Pat Bean

“It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment – but who can be sure the Imagination is not the torch-bearer? Lord Byron

Travels With Maggie

“Spring is bursting out all over!”

The song lyrics played joyously through my head this morning as I took my dog, Maggie, outside to do her business. The trees were budding, the dandelions were sprouting, a cool breeze stirred my hair, the squirrels were chattering and the birds were twittering.

Back at my desk in front of my computer, I was curious as to what musical from my past had been the inspiration for the song. I suspected it was “Oklahoma “but wasn’t quite sure.

Will I remember that it was a yellow-eyed great-tailed grackle I saw this morning, or will memory rename the bird a Brewer's blackbird? -- Photo by Pat Bean

I Binged, which is what I do instead of Googling, and discovered my memory had tricked me twice. The actually lyrics are “June is bursting out all over,” and the musical in which the song was featured is “Carousel.”

Memory is such an unreliable source.

This fact was made extremely plain to me when my children, now all grown and most with children of their own, began recalling past incidents in their childhood. Although all five of them may have experienced the same thing at the same time, each of their stories were different. More startling was that none of the tales fit my own memories of the events.

How could this possibly be? I still don’t know the answer, although I’ve learned a lot about human nature since the differing stories began being shared.

These memory quirks we all seem to share, however, have increased my appreciation for being a writer. Blogging daily in a public forum, which I have been doing since the first of the year, has become a way of making my life more tangible, to the point that sometimes things don’t seem real until I write them down.

And what was real this morning was that spring, not June, was bursting out all over.

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Kalachandji’s: Where One Can Feed Stomach and Soul

Posted in Nature, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 25, 2011| 4 Comments »

A stained-glass peacock adorns a side panel at the entrance to Kalachandji's.

Towers of the Hare Krishna Temple overlook an East Dallas neighborhood. -- Photos by Pat Bean

 

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” Maya Angelou

Eating Out

While I’m most comfortable and peaceful surrounded by Mother Nature’s awesome bounties of streams, lakes, trees, mountains, gorges, and fields of grasses and wildflowers where birds, butterflies and larger wildlife find refuge, I occasionally enjoy a few days stay in a large city.

Such skyscraper metroplexes offer awesome museums to visit, live performances to attend, dozens of art galleries to pursue and intriguing new places to eat.

A tree in the center of the open-sky courtyard restaurant helped me feel as if Mother Nature was enjoying the meal, too. -- Photo by Pat Bean

The one big city I visit most is Dallas. It’s where I was born, and where my oldest daughter and oldest grandson both live. I came here specifically this time to see the grandson, David, get married, but spending time with my daughter, Deborah, and Shanna, her daughter and my granddaughter who came up from Argentina for her brother’s big event, has been a big bonus.

Shanna inherited my love of travel and exploring new things in life. So when she asked if I was: “Up to a temple visit and then a vegetarian dinner,” the answer was a quick yes, even though I had no idea where she would be taking me.

It was to a modest, sometimes rundown, section of East Dallas, where the Sri Sri Radha Kalachandji Mandi Hare Krishna Temple’s tall towers overlook an ethic neighborhood of East Indians.

I was fascinated.

The first thing we did on entering the building was to go to a back room where we took off our shoes. Shanna was familiar with the place from her earlier Dallas yoga study days. We then went into a large, long room with a glossy wood floor and a stage full of Indian gods. A monk was leading a few devotees in chanting as they stared ahead at the stage, or as one young man did, danced to the chanting. Shanna and I sat on a side bench and watched and listened as the room slowly began to fill.

My granddaughter, Shanna, getting ready to chow down. -- Photo by Pat Bean

The women who came into the room were all dressed in colorful saris, while the men’s clothing ranged from pajama looking outfits to a just-got-off-from work American business look. One woman carried a small child and beside her walked a sweet-faced imp of a girl, perhaps 4, who came over and played high-fives with us. We smiled at the mother to let her know that the child was not bothering us.

A bit later, when our stomachs started protesting, we retrieved our shoes and went across the hallway to Kalachandji’s, This small, buffet style, eating place inside the Hare Krishna Temple was voted the best vegetarian restaurant in Dallas in 2010.

I have to admit healthy food never tasted so good, and the rice pudding with which I ended the meal was heavenly. And since we ate our meal in a courtyard open to a sky with a tree in the middle, I even felt Mother Nature’s presence a little bit.

Life is good.

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