My grandmother was telling me what to expect when we reached the school—a gloomy two-story stone building on a hill at the edge of Carlton, about eighty miles southwest of Fort Worth—and how I was to behave when I got there.
Mrs. Miller greeted me at her classroom door. She smiled and bent to my level to talk to me. I knew her already. Her husband, Steve, was pastor of the Baptist church, which my grandmother and I attended. The younger of her two stepdaughters, Mary Lynn, was starting the first grade with me that day. She also was in my Sunday School class. I was jealous of her because she could color within the lines and I couldn’t.
It was Mary Lynn who called me, all these years later. Mrs. Miller was living in Dallas, not far from me, and would love to see me, she said.
So here we are, the three of us, in Mrs. Miller’s living room, looking through a stack of first-grade school pictures, trying to remember names for the young faces in them.
Mrs. Miller talks of her friend, my grandmother. She remembers rooming with her one summer in Denton, where they were taking some college courses, trying to accumulate semester hours toward their degrees, as so many teachers did back then. My grandmother had been teaching since she was seventeen. Maybe Mrs. Miller had, too. “The place where we stayed was so hot,” she says. “One night we took our mattresses out and put them under some trees in the backyard so we could sleep. But the moon was shining so brightly that I couldn’t sleep. I opened my umbrella to shade me.”
She says she and my grandmother chaperoned a busload of kids who came up to Dallas for the great Texas Centennial celebration in 1936. “The school children massed on the football field at the Cotton Bowl to sing Texas, Our Texas,” she says. “It was so hot. Kids were fainting all around. None of our kids fainted, though.”
She speaks of my grandfather, the deputy sheriff who was shot to death by robbers in a Carlton street one snowy night just before Christmas in 1932, and Jim Pierce, the posse member who made the robbers think his flashlight was a gun and arrested them with it. “I remember that just like it was yesterday,” she says. “Those were hard times, I tell you. Scary times.”
As the afternoon slips away we talk of other times, of the time we spent together in the stone schoolhouse. Of cold mornings when the janitors would pour coal into the huge black stove in our room until it glowed red. Of the wooden privies—one for the girls, one for the boys—that stood at opposite corners of the school ground. Of the piano that Mrs. Miller played, and our “rhythm band” sessions when we banged on wooden blocks, sticks, and metal triangles. Of the patriotic posters that hung in our hallways in those World War II days, and the savings stamps we bought and pasted in little books. When a book was full, we traded it in for a twenty-five-dollar war bond to help our boys overseas.
“I have a memory of you standing by a chart at the front of the room,” I say. “It has the letters of the alphabet on it. You’re teaching us the sound of the letter B. ‘Bu, bu, bu,’ you say. And then you say, ‘Remember seeing your father, when he gets to the end of the row in the field? He picks up the water jug and takes a drink out of it. What sound does the water make as it comes out of the jug? “Bu, bu, bu.” ’
“Phonics,” Mrs. Miller says. “It was new then. Uncle Bob McDaniel, he was a carpenter there in town. A fine man. He and his wife had their grandson to raise. They called him Sonny Boy. He was smart as a whip. And Uncle Bob made a complaint to the superintendent, Mr. Huffman, that Sonny Boy didn’t have a book to bring home at night. Well, I didn’t give my pupils a book until they knew how to read. They learned the alphabet, and how to sound out words on the chart, then I would give them a book. Mr. Huffman told Uncle Bob, ‘Well, you just go up there and visit someday.’ So Uncle Bob and his wife came and sat in on my class. Little Sonny Boy’s hand kept going up. He was smart as could be. They went home just elated. That was a new way of teaching to them. Phonics was the new way of doing in those days.”
Mary Lynn and I remember the first book she gave us. We Look and See. About Dick, Jane, Baby Sally, Mother, Father, Spot the dog, Puff the cat, and Tim the teddy bear. I read the whole thing aloud to my grandmother that night.
We laugh, the three of us, remembering the school that closed so many years ago, in the little farm town that has almost disappeared. “We had so many kids in those days,” Mrs. Miller says. “We were just swamped.”
Two years after I enrolled in Mrs. Miller’s first grade, my family moved away from Carlton. So did the Millers. But on this afternoon, the place and all its people are alive again.
“The Lord has been so good to me, to let me live this long and have the friends I’ve had,” Mrs. Miller says. “I go to bed some nights, Bryan, and I can’t shut my mind off. Things will come up that I remember…a family will come to mind, and I’ll think, ‘How many were in that family? What were their names?’ And I’ll start naming them off. And there’ll be one whose name I can’t remember, and I’ll think about it and think about it. And after a while the name will come into my mind, and I can go to sleep.”
January 1994
In a time when more and more people are spending their lives flipping burgers and staring into computer video monitors for a wage, it warms the soul to know a man who has a great job, knows it and loves it. To wander the mountains and deserts of the Trans-Pecos with Benny Simpson is like accompanying a child into a huge toy store. The joy generated is the next best thing to being young again.
The Plant Hunter
Benny Simpson is driving a rented van along one of the emptier roads in Texas, somewhere between Hallie Stillwell’s ranch and the Mexican village of La Linda, in the magnificent desolation of the Big Bend. Suddenly he stomps the brakes, slams the van into reverse, and speeds backward up the hill he has just passed. He swerves onto the shoulder, cuts the engine, jumps from the van, and scrambles up the steep, rocky slope.
A tourist, if one should pass, might think him a rancher, searching for a sick calf, perhaps. Ruddy face. Faded jeans tucked into the tops of scuffed brown boots. White hair held down by a sweat-stained straw hat that looks as if it were trampled by a herd of wild burros.
But Benny stands reverently before a bush with grayish leaves. It’s a cenizo called violet silverleaf, about as high as his knees and not much wider than his hat. Tiny flowers the hue of Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes adorn the bush and lay a sweet, wild aroma into the still desert air.
“Isn’t that a beauty?” Benny exclaims, unlimbering his camera. “Boy! Isn’t it a knockout?”
He turns to his companions, who have struggled up the slope behind him. “Leucophyllum candidum! I tell you, I am admiring this! This is nice!”
Cenizo is a common shrub in the Big Bend and some other areas of West Texas. Its vivid blooms are one of the blessings that rain brings to these arid parts. Whenever a good rain falls, the cenizo will follow a few days later with its splendid little flowers, no matter the time of year.
The hillside where Benny and his friends are standing is almost covered with the gray bushes, their dominance broken only here and there by stands of cactus and sotol and greasewood. Normally after a rain, the slope would be robed in the violet blossoms of Leucophyllum candidum and the rosier hues of its close relative, Leucophyllum frutenscens. Sometimes their flowers last for a week or ten days before they fall. Other times, a heavy wind will wipe them out in a day. On this day, nearly all the bushes are bare of blossoms. Only a few others bear any flowers at all, and this one alone is in full flower.
“Odd,” Benny says. “Maybe the others already have bloomed and gone. Maybe we just caught the tail end of it.”
Or maybe the perfect glory of this one bush is the answer to some prayer that Benny has been muttering under his breath for the past two days while he and his companions trudged up mountainsides, canyons, and dry creek beds in search of desert flora in bloom.
He had heard that Far West Texas had just had a wet season. He has brought his five companions—most of whom have never been in the Big Bend before—fr
om Dallas and College Station, expecting to show them the mountains and the desert in their glory.
But not as many plants are flowering as he hoped to find. The Big Bend is always a gamble, he has told his friends as he maneuvered the van across the barrens. You never know what you’re going to find, and you can see only what’s there.
Now he’s vindicated. He leads his friends back down the slope to the van and climbs in behind the wheel. “Good!” he says. “Now you know I’m not a complete blathering idiot!”
One perfect Leucophyllum candidum.
It’s enough to make a six hundred-mile journey worthwhile.
Benny has worked at the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station on Coit Road in Dallas since 1954, when he arrived from Texas Tech with a brand new B.S. degree. The station was called the Texas Research Foundation in those days. It was a private research center, located in a tiny farming town called Renner and funded by downtown Dallas businessmen. “Back then, agriculture was important to Dallas,” Benny says. “Now it couldn’t care less.”
In 1972 the Texas Research Foundation donated its land and buildings to Texas A&M University and became a part of the university’s vast research and extension system.
Although some scientists there still study such conventional agricultural subjects as cotton and grain, the focus of much of the station’s work has evolved along with the countryside around it. While Renner has been swallowed up into Far North Dallas and the ever-advancing bedroom sprawl has surrounded the station’s fields and barns, it has become a nationally renowned center for the study of urban agriculture—the plants that live among us in our yards and parks and along our streets.
Benny’s official titles there are “research scientist” and “ornamental horticulturist.” He calls himself “plant hunter,” and he could be called “crusader” as well, for he’s a man with a cause.
“One thing that Texas doesn’t have and never has had and never will have is enough water,” he says. “Someday we’re going to be in the same fix as California and Arizona. People don’t want to face up to that, but it’s a fact. It’s going to happen. So it’s getting to be important that we save as much water as we can, and grow the kind of plants that can survive on very little when they have to.”
Unfortunately, whatever knowledge Californians and Arizonans have accumulated about plants that will thrive in their arid climates is of no use to North Central Texas. California’s is a Mediterranean climate in which rain falls in the wintertime and not in the summer. Arizona is warmer than North Texas. Anything brought from there is likely to freeze in the winter.
Most plants from the northern and eastern parts of the United States don’t do well in Dallas, either, because they come from acid soils. Many of them also can’t take the hot summers.
“Where we need to look for plants for Dallas is in Iraq and Turkey and that Russian country next to Turkey and the pampas of Argentina and Paraguay, but we don’t get along with any of those people,” Benny says. “Everybody wants to go to Mexico and look for plants, and that’s all right for Houston and Brownsville, but not many of them are going to work here in Dallas.”
So for twenty years Benny has roamed his native Texas, searching out wild trees and shrubs that not only are beautiful but also might be able to grow in the waxy black soil of North Central Texas and survive the extremes of heat and cold that torture so many plants here.
Even that hunt hasn’t been easy.
“I spend a little time in South Texas, just to keep from being ignorant of what’s there,” Benny says. “But by the time I get to San Antone, I’m just kind of kidding myself about anything I bring back to Dallas, because winter’s going to get it. I spend a little time in East Texas, but within thirty miles of Dallas I start hitting acid soil, and our soil here is highly calcareous. It has a high limestone content. Although I think the wax myrtles I brought back from East Texas are going to grow in this old black soil, most of the things that grow there just will not make it here.”
Of the five thousand plants that are native to Texas, he says, maybe twenty-five hundred are worth looking at as possible domestic landscape ornamentals.
“But the really good ones, I doubt if you’re talking more than 250 to 300 species.”
And most of those will come from regions of the state where most residents of the Dallas area have never gone and have thought of as barren—the far reaches of the Panhandle plains and the deserts and mountains of the Trans-Pecos.
“Most of the stuff I bring back is from the Rolling Plains, the Caprock Escarpment, the Glass Mountains, the Apaches, the Del Nortes, and the Guadalupes,” he says, “because they grow in limestone.”
Benny finds the best specimens he can—often at the end of a lonely ten- or twelve-mile hike up some remote canyon—and brings cuttings or seeds from them back to Dallas. He plants them at the experiment station to see if they can take the Dallas weather and soils and water. If one flourishes and shows promise of looking pretty in somebody’s yard, he’ll try to propagate it. And if it propagates easily, he’ll release it to the nursery trade and try to persuade nursery owners to propagate it themselves and offer it for sale to the public and to professional landscapes.
The grounds of the A&M Research and Extension Center are landscaped with his experiments, and a tour of them on his golf cart offers a botanical atlas of Central and West Texas:
“That dalea there is a ground cover from the Alpine area. This true sage—Salvia gregii—is in the trade now. Those madrone trees were grown from seed from the Hill Country near Medina. That Apache plume is from the Guadalupes. That lantana is from Langtry. Here are several species of the forty-seven oaks that are native to Texas. This big-toothed maple is from the Guadalupes. Have you ever been in McKittrick Canyon when the maples are in color? Awww, man, isn’t that something? American smoke trees from Boerne. The pink, white, and purple cenizos. Shedscale. None of this stuff takes any water. Bitterweed from West Texas. Mexican hat. Black persimmon trees from the Hill Country. Animals just love them. Sabal—this is the closest thing we have to a native palm tree in Texas. Dogweed. Wax myrtles. Spice bush. Walnut. Indian cherry. The seven roses that are native to Texas. Doveweed from the Hill Country. Whitethorn. Four-nerve daisies. Arizona cockroach plant. Hawthorn…. ”
Benny estimates that he has collected and experimented with more than five hundred species of plants during the two decades he has been roaming Texas.
“I used to have a little old white Chevrolet pickup,” he says. “I put 347,000 miles on it, most of it going out to the Big Bend, the Davis Mountains, the Guadalupes. I’m the only one in the state doing this, growing this many plants, going this far to find them. This work isn’t for people who want fast results. Garden clubs come out to the experiment station, and they want to see the greenhouse because they just know they’re going to see pansies blooming and roses blooming. But all I’ve got is a bunch of little old seedlings that don’t show anything yet. No flowers, no nothing. Some of them might not show anything for twenty years. Not many people want to wait.”
So far, Benny has released nine formerly wild species to the nursery trade of Texas and the Southwest as suitable for city landscaping. Five of them are cenizos, relatives of the beautiful gray-leafed shrub he has found on the La Linda road. The others are a mountain sage, a false indigo, and two desert willows.
Texas A&M has trademarked the cenizos as Green Cloud, White Cloud, Silver Cloud, Rain Cloud, and Thunder Cloud; the sage as Mount Emory; the willows as Dark Storm and White Storm; and the false indigo as Dark Lance. Framed pictures of them hang on Benny’s office wall.
“I grew up out on the Rolling Plains right at the foot of the Caprock in Motley County,” he says. “A little place called Northfield. Our place was so small we didn’t call it a ranch. Out there, anybody who didn’t have a very big piece of ground, you didn’t dare say you were a rancher. They’d laugh you out of the country. The old Matador sat on one side of us—800,000 acres—and on the other
side of us was the Mill Iron, which was also several hundred thousand acres. So we just told everybody we were farmers.”
He was born sixty-four years ago. Not such a long lifetime ago, but long enough to have been a different world to grow up in.
“Some things stick in your mind,” he says. “I can remember when I was a little boy, one night a big wad of cowboys slept out on our front lawn, and the next morning before daylight they got up and ate breakfast. That was one of the last cattle drives to Estelline.”
Northfield, which never was much, almost has disappeared. He says, “We lost our school, and then my mother lost her church. She’s Baptist, and they even came out and moved the church house away. My daddy was Campbellite—Church of Christ—and my granddad built the Campbellite church, and they held on a few years longer, and the building is still there, but nobody goes to it because there’s no one there.”
He’s leaning back in his office chair, drinking coffee, just talking. “And then we lost our post office. Our mail’s put in a box on the road, you know. Boy, that hurts. It really does. My mother’s eighty-five. She lives out there all by herself. She says she’s happier there than she would be in town. Man, it’s lonesome country. We’re a long way from anybody. You can look off in the distance and see the Caprock Escarpment and the Quitaque Peaks. When you drive up to them, the Quitaques are just kind of pimples, is all they are. But from one hundred miles off they look like mountains. They’re famous in that country. The only place we had a tree—unless you want to call a little old runty mesquite a tree—was down on the river. Our place is on the North Pease River. In the canyons we had a few little hackberry. But on the river, boy, you’d run into cottonwoods and maybe a maple and some shinnery oaks that would get pretty big. It was like going to another world when we would go down to the river.”
Generations and Other True Stories Page 8