Michelle

This past excursion to the Nature Center went a little differently than they had before. We arrived and knew Dr. Williams to be absent from the center that day, and per our instructions made our way to our section of trailhead. As we surveyed the trail for debris, and wondering how far back was too far back to cut the privet, we heard Cameron approaching. After making it back to collect some tools, we headed back onto the trail with a guide named Michelle. Michelle explained we did not normally see her at the center because Tuesday was normally her day off, but she had attended a wedding the week before and needed to make up a work day. It turned out that Michelle’s workday turned into our lucky day.

As we walked, Michelle began to ask us what we had learned about the flora and fauna around the center, and on the trail. I believe she assumed we were a bit more knowledgeable about our surroundings, maybe thinking we were working with an environmental science class or a botany class. Upon discovering our relative ignorance, Michelle started talking to us about every plant and fungi we could see as we walked along the trail, speaking as if she were reading directly out of a botanical encyclopedia.

We walked beneath Post Oak, Live Oak, and Hackberry tree. Michelle would reach up and pluck  a leaf from two adjacent trees, showing us not only the shape and color, but encouraging us to feel the differences in texture between the two leaves before telling our group of a use that ancient Americans native to Texas had for the tree and its exceptionally hardwood. She pointed out several types of fungi, including Turkeytail Fungi, which she seemed particularly enthralled with, pointing out the hemispherical growths on sticks or logs a number of times along the trail.

As we talked about privet and its status as an invasive species in North Central Texas, Michelle began to discuss the history of the area, and how humans affected how the Nature Center looks today. She began by differentiating the two types of native terrain in NCT: native woodland and native grassland. Before the arrival of large amounts of settlers, native NCT would have looked like a vast grass plain, but significantly pockmarked with outcroppings of trees and thicker woodland around rivers, streams, lakes, and underground aquifers. The grassland would be or the blue shortstem variety, which fed the herds of buffalo and white tail deer native to the area.

Michelle told us to look at the trees in the Nature Center on our trail, instructing us first to focus on their size. Mostly in our section of woodland there were a few very large post oaks, surrounded by younger hackberry, mulberry, and live oak trees. “Most of these trees around here can’t possibly be older than 50 years, and even these post oaks might not have been around for as long as 150” Michelle told us. She explained that, as Texas was populated with frontiersmen and pioneers, and Joseph Greeley’s barbed invention began to subdivide Texas into ranches and farms, the woodland on the property would have been cut down for use and to free up the land. The post oaks we saw around us that day would be the only trees not cut down in this period in Texas, which explained their relative age and size when compared to the other trees in the forest. Interestingly enough, Michelle pointed to the other trees in the forest and said she believed that these had begun their growth around the start of the conservation movement in Texas, and much of the growth of the plants and ecosystem around us had not begun until the establishment of the nature center itself. The gowth of new trees again changed the entire ecosystem, as the new plants began the buildup of leaf litter on the forest floor, attracting different types of animals and changing, again, the ecosystem of the area.

Thinking about the process that brought the center to where it is today, it is difficult to think of the center as “wilderness”. If “wilderness” is “self-willed” land, then how can the Nature Center be wilderness? It is the way it is as the direct result of human interaction with the land. Perhaps we ought to view it as a “more wild” park, but if this is the definition of wilderness there are truly few wild places left on the planet that have not been overly changed by human intention.